‘I’m just about to leave the pub. The guy Brendan was talking to has just left. I thought I should stay in case Brendan returned.’

‘I’m just around the corner, I’ll come and fetch you.’

‘No, it’s alright, Tommy, I’m on my bike, I’ll just—’

He had hung up. I have never left a pub as quickly in my life.

When I got home, Tommy was waiting for me. It was clearly hurting him that I had been in the pub so long on my own. He was unable to find any holes in my explanation, though, and therefore just sulked. The next day he took his anger out on my bicycle and threw it over my balcony.

‘From now on, if you need to go anywhere, then ask me for a fucking lift,’ he shouted as he threw the bike to its demise.

A few days later he brought a bloke home with him who he claimed was a policeman friend. They wanted me to go into fine detail about what had happened in the pub between the carpet salesman guy and Brendan. I repeated my story and, I think, convinced them that the meeting was entirely innocent and that the carpet salesman was just a casual acquaintance of Brendan’s. Tommy was extremely agitated by the fact that I had stayed so long in the pub after Brendan had left. I told him it had taken that long to get carpet guy to reveal that the note was simply a telephone number. Tommy was agitated, and I could tell that he didn’t believe me. Just before he left, he gave me a kiss on the cheek and whispered, ‘You are fucking dead.’ I’d heard it many times before and it had long lost its power to intimidate me. It just made me sad.

Not long after, Gary actually appeared at my front door claiming that he was anxious to return the book I had left in the pub. He made a decent joke about the plastic flowers that I had used to decorate one of the buckled bicycle wheels. I could tell he fancied the pants off me. Those couple of hours we’d spent together in the pub felt like a glimpse into a happier place.

When I flicked through the book later that day, it opened where Gary had folded a page in half. Reading a passage that he had himself recently read made him feel closer to me than when we had stood together on my balcony: