‘Natasha,’ Lucy says. ‘It’s me, your mother. I’ve been away but I’m back now. We can do anything you like. What would you like to do?’

Natasha gestures at the table. ‘Just have lunch,’ she says.

Lucy joins her and they clink teacups. They eat little pieces of cake from the set. Their conversation can’t be heard by the audience.

As Lucy and Natasha talk, congratulating themselves in low voices, but saying goodbye too, the stage boy moves quietly around them. He is setting up a living-room space. The decor is drab, the wallpaper is ugly and old-fashioned, the lighting is low. He drags on a brown, battered couch and places a television with an aerial in the middle of the room. Lucy and Natasha move into the living-room space. They settle themselves onto the couch. Their faces glow in the blue of the television. Natasha pulls a string and ‘Abortion, A Love Story,’ spelt out in big letters falls over the scene. They sit and watch the television for a few minutes, both of them laughing.

‘I’m not sure,’ Lucy says. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know if I get it.’

The light eventually fades on both girls.

Silence.

Blackout.

Curtain falls.

Track

Track

My boyfriend, the comedian, took pleasure in telling me about rejection – how it came about, how to cope with in a dignified way, how it had dangerous, possibly cancerous elements. He claimed the link between cancer and repeated failure was irrefutable. He had a lot of unusual ideas. ‘Feel that,’ he said, grasping at my hips and thighs, ‘that’s the texture of rejection right there.’

My boyfriend was famous and I wasn’t. When I walked down our tree-lined street in the city, I came back with styrofoam cups of coffee, croissants, souvenirs I considered mailing back to friends. When he walked down the street he returned aggrieved and frustrated by how much people adored him. He sent me out a lot. ‘Get my coffee extra-hot,’ he told me, like I was an assistant. ‘I want it so hot it feels like hell,’ I instructed the barista.

I loved my boyfriend. Our back and forth reminded me of black-and-white films I hadn’t seen. Physically, we were unmatched. On forms, we were in different age brackets: he ticked one box, I ticked another. But we weren’t the sort of people who filled out forms. He could get worked up about stuff he read on the internet and I knew how to make him happy.

‘Here,’ I said, handing him a snow globe containing a miniature Empire State Building, ‘this is for you.’