I grabbed her bony shoulders and gave her a hug. It was awkward, on her kitchen stool. She pushed back her hair and took another gulp of wine. Her bangles tinkled as they slid down her arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let rip. It’s just such a relief, to say what I feel.’

People don’t, do they, when you’re married? They can analyse your lovers to bits when it doesn’t really matter, but the moment you get married the curtain is lowered and nothing critical is said until the marriage is over, the curtain is lifted, and they’re stumbling over each other to tell you how ghastly your spouse was.

Azra was particularly tense that day, and fell silent after we’d spoken. She obviously felt that even by her standards she’d blurted out too much.

Of course I was buoyed by her criticisms of Greg. But I was also hurt that she hadn’t, even in the most guarded way, hinted at some of this before and offered her support. After all, she’d known the two of us for years.

And, quite honestly, he wasn’t that bad. If he were, she must have thought me an idiot. Azra was a passionate woman and inclined to lash out in all directions, sometimes missing the mark. Maybe her hostility stemmed from Greg’s ambivalent attitude towards her.

I’d long suspected that he found Azra threatening. He’d kept quiet because she was my friend, but sometimes it would slip out. Bit of a ballbreaker, isn’t she? And the way she wangs on about the patriarchy and racial profiling, all that stuff, nobody can get a word in edgeways. Bloody bad manners. I had to agree about the manners, but Azra felt things deeply and didn’t give a toss if that upset people. I’d been the target of this myself, often enough.

Besides, she’d had a tough upbringing. She’d been born in Sunder­land to a single mother, and known real deprivation. In her teens, however, she’d escaped, hitch-hiked south and reinvented herself as Azra, simply because she liked the name. I so admired her courage; in fact, I was a little in awe of her. She was a free spirit, utterly classless, and beholden to nobody. In the circumstances, good manners seemed irrelevant.

I think, too, that Greg was threatened by her bisexuality. I’ve noticed this, with men. They suspect that their dicks aren’t enough to satisfy a woman and that anybody bi must really prefer another female. So where did that leave them? Pretty disposable, that’s where.

But Azra was beyond all that. When I fall in love, that’s the last thing that concerns me. They’re just a person—who gives a fuck?

I gave a fuck. However, I pretended to agree. In truth I found her airy pronouncement a bit pretentious, but she was my soulmate, something Greg had never been, not really. My soulmate and lifesaver.

He’d been gone four months by then. Outside, the sun was sinking. Azra and I had finished the bottle of wine and were taking turns to swab bread around a tub of guacamole. It was eerily warm for January and Azra’s window was open. The smell of kebabs drifted up from Karim’s takeaway. On the nearby rooftop, amongst the satellite dishes and extractor fans, sat a crow. It tilted its head and eyed me speculatively, sizing up my thoughts, before bouncing sideways and flying off.