‘Stop it, Lucy, stop it. Just get up,’ I say, smacking her hard on the back. ‘Why aren’t you listening to me? Grab her, Mallika. You are going to have a bath whether you like it or not. It’s not my fault the dogs are dead.’

We manage to get her into the bathroom, standing. I drag the shirt over her head while Mallika holds on to her waist. I’m about to pull the elasticated pyjama bottoms down her legs when she starts to urinate. A thick stream of piss. Standing there, just a few inches from the toilet. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t shout. She just stands there and allows the piss to run between her legs, onto our arms and the bathroom floor. ‘Lucia!’ I shriek. ‘Lucia!’ And then I pin her shoulders to the bathroom wall, and beat her and beat her, while Mallika stands back to watch.

Chapter 19

19

There are moments, even in the most intimate of relationships, when you’re making love with someone and you feel nothing. It happened with Blake three years into our marriage. We were never an overly amorous couple, but in the early days we groped and had sex on stairways and believed in the unity of our bodies. Relationships tarnish, though, and for some, the erosions make them want to return to the body they’ve just hated, to claim it into being theirs again. I was never one for erosions. Once I began to see the dried skin around the elbows and the small hairs sprouting from earlobes, once I began to hold the body’s smell – its own particular reek of dying – the day after day became untenable. With Vik, it had been golden. A giving over. I put my mouth to his and drank.

Now he’s sitting across from me, I feel none of that. I see only a stranger. A boy – short and hairy. Full of ego with nothing to give.

We are in a hotel bar where a glass of wine costs an eighth of Mallika’s monthly salary. It’s a voluble gathering – Praveen, Rohini, Samir, Vik. Praveen is telling us how he’s ready for monogamy. ‘When you’re single it becomes a case of carnality, you know? Like when’s the next one?’

‘You got to keep your shit quiet in this city, dude, otherwise you get fucked.’ This is Vik talking. My young Vik. ‘You need to have your hangouts, your underground places where you do your thing, you got to have your pad.’

‘I don’t want a wife or anything,’ Praveen says. ‘I’m just ready to be in a committed relationship. I’m forty-five, you know? I’m ready.’

‘You’re forty-five!’ Rohini says. ‘I’m impressed, Praveen. I’d have pegged you for younger.’