I gagged again, spitting into the sink, wiping my mouth. At that moment, I found it hard to envisage them – Jake and Vanessa, Vanessa and Jake – in anything other than the most pornographic set-­ups. I found it almost impossible to see their faces. I could only, if I tried hard, see a graphic close-­up of their sexual organs, one inserted into the other, a basic mechanism, the simplest of actions. Something had happened to my imagination: it had become X-­rated, an adventure in the furthest corners of the Internet, a place where porn adverts stacked like origami paper, a hundred edges framing the place where a penis entered a woman’s mouth and left it, over and over to eternity.

He was not back by ten. I had drunk half a bottle of wine by then, a strong red that tasted more bitter the more I drank. I had taken off my stained dress, found something black and shiny in the back of the wardrobe instead, pulling cloth in fists from the hangers, throwing T-­shirts and skirts on the floor. I knew that, according to movie logic, I should have been emptying Jake’s wardrobe, not my own. But that didn’t appeal: I didn’t want to touch any of his things. I didn’t want to smell her again.

The top note – the perfumed, manufactured part, shampoo, maybe, or deodorant – had an earthy smell, more like a man’s perfume, or something unisex. Something that suggested whisky and cigars and steaming pools of volcanic water plunged into after chopping logs. A man’s good sweat on a tartan shirt, rubbed with fragrant leaves. A camping holiday, without kids. I could see her on this holiday, not me. I saw the way she would sit in the doorway of the tent, with some elegant copy of a classic novel, her legs crossed at the ankle. She would flick her hair, laugh as Jake said something. Under her skirt, under her leggings, she would be as tight as the day she was born. I saw Jake whispering in her ear, telling her how sweet she was, how good she tasted, how much better than me . . .