Out of Angela’s class of twenty-six children, there were now only nine remaining. She sometimes passed absent students on the streets, riding or being pushed on scooters by their parents. The kids pretended not to know her. The remaining few spoke a language that was not from this planet, a language Angela couldn’t understand. She distributed safety scissors and said, ‘What’s that?’ loudly, to let them know she was on to them, curtail any uprising against her.

‘It’s good to have work you enjoy,’ her date announced. Angela thought he looked restless, like he was gearing up to make some class of speech.

‘Do you know what sort of man I used to be?’

‘No idea.’

‘I used to be the sort of man who always said, “I just need a break!” But now I’m making money for the first time in my life, selling dating equipment. What do you think of that, eh? You wait twenty years and – BOOM – all the money comes at once.’

‘Money is no good when you’re dead,’ she intoned.

‘I could have a younger girlfriend,’ he said.

Angela could tell he was in the early stages of grief for someone he had never known.

‘You are probably judging me for saying that.’

‘Not at all.’ She saluted him from across the table. ‘It’s a grand historical tradition.’ She paused. ‘Why do you do it anyway? It seems like a base job for a cosmopolitan individual, exploiting people’s loneliness.’

‘Cash,’ he said. He stared past her, to the front door. ‘I have gambling debts.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s probably something to do with my father as well.’

‘The excuse that never dies,’ Angela said. ‘Something something my father. I swear when the world does end, there’s just going to be one man meandering around the scorched earth saying again and again: “I had a bad relationship with my father.”’

‘Are you a feminist?’ he asked abruptly, as if she might be surprised he knew the word.

‘At this stage in my life, I can take it or leave it,’ she replied. She lit a cigarette and watched the smoke swirl up towards the splintered ceiling. Witnessing her defiance, one of the teenagers glared at her through the long bar mirror. She was waiting for her date to mention an ex-wife. She wanted to run into the past and scatter these women like birds.

‘Were you married?’ she asked.

‘I was,’ he said and looked at her in a practised, sheepish way.

Angela shifted in her seat, preparing for her own declaration. She gazed off into space. ‘There’s a time in a woman’s life when everyone she is sleeping with is married, then there’s the extended period of time when she may be married herself, then suddenly everyone she is sleeping with is divorced.’

‘That’s an interesting theory.’

‘It’s just an old saying of my mother’s,’ she shrugged.