‘Michael left me, didn’t he? He went with my father,’ he said in a small voice.

‘You need to get some sleep,’ I said to him. His face crumpled for a moment, and I thought he might be about to cry, but the Valium smoothed the wrinkles away. I picked a tartan picnic blanket up off the floor and laid it carefully down over his body.

‘I wonder where I’ll live in the holidays,’ he said sleepily, his eyes closed.

‘Maybe you, me and Jessica can get a place,’ I said gently. It was my fondest hope.

‘I’d like that.’

I left him lying on his side, cradling his broken face with the sodden tea towel, smiling.

12

OUR CHINESE TAKEAWAY was finished. I dumped the greasy remnants into the bin, a chrome cylinder just inside the kitchen door. I went over to the new stereo in the corner, and put on Orbital without consulting Jessica. The weird music was turned down low. We had crossed over midnight as if it were a dangerous border, and were now in the wide empty desert of the small hours. I began to feel the jetlag of my working routine assert itself, telling me I should have been in bed. With Jessica’s hunger satisfied, her appetite for the past returned. The incident with Alysha, or Mary, seemed to have plunged us into a deeper intimacy. What was the point of pretending with someone who knew that about you? This imbalance of knowledge might have made me feel vulnerable, but where I had lost my advantage through the confession of a taste for prostitutes, Jessica was rapidly losing hers to whisky. I did not know many people who could drink as much as I did without becoming drunk, and certainly none who would admit to it. Jessica, tall and powerful though she was, was still a slight woman, with several stones fewer of flesh to cushion the blow of the booze, and far less practice. More than half the bottle had disappeared down our throats. Her eyes had taken on a merry gleam that was not entirely under her control.

‘I remember the first time we met.’

‘The night of the fight.’

‘You couldn’t stop staring at my tits.’

I bridled. ‘That’s not quite how I remember it . . .’

‘Of course it’s not,’ she said, displaying a private smile. She turned to playing with her shot glass, spinning it around on its rim in mesmerizing circles. ‘You’ll have some romantic version all of your own, and the only tits will be in the paintings on the walls. Am I right?’

‘No. Some of the sculptures have tits too.’

‘Ah. Well, that’s good.’ She meditated for a few moments, then said, ‘Did you know that fight was a fix?’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah. Jamie, Francis, Lisa and that doctor guy. Fuck they made a lot of money. Lisa’s idea. I miss her.’

‘But why? Francis was an amazing fighter!’

‘I think just for the hell of it.’