‘I’m confused!’

‘Then I’m getting through to you. I’m on the long road to nowhere in this place. I want to be out there.’ Jessie laughed bitterly. ‘Some would say I already am.’

‘I don’t think you are. I think you’re absolutely amazing.’

She let the compliment wash over her. Maybe she couldn’t take it. Maybe she wasn’t as self-assured as she appeared. Mum used to say that some people had strong personalities but were of weak character – and the two shouldn’t be confused.

‘I’m leaving soon, very soon. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always the little sparrow Edith Piaf to fall back on.’

She belted out a passionately poor imitation of Piaf: ‘No. No regrets …’

‘Shame I’ve got to keep my eye on the road or else I’d be …’

She slid a hand between my thighs, up to my crotch, unzipped my flies, squeezed and rubbed as I opened my legs wider and let out a gratified groan.

She moved the car smoothly into fourth.

Pilgrimage, of sorts, to see my little buddha,

living low beneath my belly in Australia.

Going to trundle over that pregnant swell of earth

and drop in on your family in Sydney, Terry.

Don’t want to go by air, all pie in the sky,

best go by road, prepare for both kinds of welcome.

I was choking mad, you were going to leave.

I did what no mother should have to remember.

Can you hear me, Terry, forgive me, Terry?

Oh, the sight, stench and sizzle of frazzled skin,

the way smoke rose off it, your gasp, my scream,

your punishment, my penance, your disappearance.

19 words last Christmas, not a cheap card neither,

but no love from, no come and visit, no symbolic kiss.

A good wife, you said, first-born child, you said,

twelve years after I’d given you up for dead …

Clerken-well

Jessie’s room

was the cheapest that she could find, and, while she had scrubbed it down upon arrival, it still smelled of must from the wet walls and the withered royal blue carpet, its squillion gold stars made dull with age. It said impermanence – that the person residing within could pack up and leave within the hour.

The room was just wide enough for a lumpy double futon, at the end of which a wrinkled wardrobe stood like a retired Sumo wrestler ready to keel over. Sellotaped on to the scuffed wall was a large map of the world, faded white at its fold lines. Upon it, a black marker pen had shot a wide-arching arrow from London all the way down to Australia.

J An orange glow moves up from my toes, spreading inside me. Sometimes you just know

S I slip off her diaphanous negligee. Oh – my – goddess.

J Devouring me with those eyes of his. Makes me feel deliciously wanton