She cries, kohl streaks her cheeks. It’s New Year’s Eve; he wants to leave her, to celebrate with others, elsewhere.

They fight and he stays away, goes back to his parents’ home in St John’s Wood, to rest, to hide.

When Mehran is with his parents, his father so obviously avoids talking about Marvi that at some point Mehran finds himself mentioning her. His mother hardly speaks without naming Marvi. The few friends he has left – looking back, he will remember no faces, only kind, if disapproving, voices – tell him he’s the giver in an unequal relationship. He responds (and her own words would endorse this) that they are an equal part of that horseshoe pattern, a movement that leads them back and then away, back and then away from each other.

She has told him so many lies – about her marriage, her friends, her plans – that he now doubts his perception of her.

And of himself. Or he sees himself through her eyes.

Sometimes he longs for the clove taste of her mouth, the tea smell of her underarms when she’s hot or aroused. But the tastes and the smells are lost in some broken yesterday. He no longer wants to make love to her. She doesn’t desire him.

When he tries to escape her he feels drained, empty; it takes him days to refill himself. Most often he succumbs to her calls, when she drives his parents half mad by ringing at two in the morning, or when she tells him that if she can’t see him, she’ll over-medicate. He goes back. Because he’s too tired for anything or anyone else. Because he has told her so much about himself that she’s the only one he can share his secrets with, even if she’ll use them as a whip to flay him, rip his skin. Because he’s afraid of emptiness.

He can keep away from her for a day, a week, a fortnight. But then his own ambivalent needs, his loneliness, draw him back.

1989

Another photograph is marked 31 December 1988. It’s of a man in a grey sweater over a black shirt, his hair cropped short. A woman in a thin beige dress, her face pale, her cheekbones prominent, her black hair disordered, sitting on his knee. Their smiles reveal them as the couple from the earlier photograph, but a careful look shows the changes in both. His expression is staged, as if he’s hiding something, a backache, perhaps. His lips stretch to show even white teeth. His hair is thinning. The woman’s smile reveals dark gums; her eyeliner has smudged around her enormous, frightened eyes.