G. was a comedian, or wanted to be. We were both very drunk when we met for the first time in the union and went back to his room. He told me later that he’d already vomited and then continued drinking before we even spoke to each other. I said that was disgusting, and he immediately said that I’d stunk of garlic because I’d been for Chinese with my friends, so we were even. He was very skinny: I must have weighed more than him. We fucked in his narrow single bed, me on top, so hammered our carelessness extended to the sex itself, which we never really finished. We saw each other a handful of times, always with mutual friends, and always ending up in bed, despite the fact that we seemed to hate one another, to have skipped straight to the bitterness of the soon-to-be-no-more. The night he left the union leading a different girl by the hand, right past me, right in front of me, I cried on the shoulder of someone I wanted to call my friend, not because I was surprised, but because I had known it was coming and been unable to stop myself.

Carelessness! David and Claire’s intimacies were now so few and far between that each separate event was etched on him as deeply as an injury: he could at any given moment remember the last time he had seen his girlfriend’s pale, mole-dotted breasts, or touched the softness of her sex. Now, for example, as he knelt beside the bed with the notebook in his hands, he knew absolutely that the last time they made love had been in the Christmas holidays, when they both returned from their respective family visits suffused with the relief that, however much they disappointed one another, at least they weren’t bound by blood. Their arrangements were elective, and in that new appreciation of choice they had gone almost merrily to bed together. He came desperately, triumphantly, and as they collapsed against each other in the high bed he’d trembled with surging healthiness, a sense of having been restored, and a painful, tender hope that perhaps, this time, they might have turned a corner. The feeling had been so strong that he’d let himself get carried away. Huddled under the duvet, in the nest of warmth their efforts had made, he’d said, without thinking, ‘Doesn’t this feel good? Don’t you feel better? I feel so much better’, and instantly she had tensed against him, her back locking up, as if he’d said, ‘See? I told you so!’