He returned, he could not help it, to the part about B.’s penis, its being improbably large. Improbable compared to what? To whose? He thought of the Soho sex shop where they had bought Claire’s vibrator; of the display of toys, mounted and lit like a seventeenth-century armoury. Claire had pointed to one of the dildos, half-laughing, and said, ‘My God, that’s huge’, and a thrill of angry embarrassment had run through him. What she’d said was true: the navy blue dildo was ridiculously, injuriously huge, clearly a fantasy object. But the comment, made carelessly in public, had bothered him nonetheless. It bothered him that it bothered him, and silently he had blamed Claire for this too: for revealing in him a weakness.

He opened the bedside cabinet and took the vibrator out. A thin layer of dust clung to the tacky surface. Behind the vibrator lay a pack of wet wipes in individual sachets, like the sort they dispense on planes after a meal. Almost none of them had been used. He took out one of the wipes – a strong scent of lemons rose from its wetness – and used it to clean the vibrator off. The purple surface glistened; there were depths to it, artificial ones, jewelled somehow. The texture reminded him of the rubbery bouncing balls he’d liked when he was a child.

He switched it on. It shuddered in his hands; the shining bunny-ears shook. Monstrous, too. What a monstrous invention. He knew it wasn’t liberal to think so, but in the moment he did not care. A fury overtook him. He got hold of the vibrator with both hands and began to try and break the shaft in half, as if it were one of those glow-sticks you have to crack to let the light out. Even as he did this, he knew how absurd it was, how pathetically symbolic – but he seemed to know all of it, to be removed so many times from himself that none of the frames would hold, and so he was delivered back to the petty but entirely satisfactory violence he was committing none the wiser, with the shaft bending in his hands: bending, but refusing to break. He had to tuck the ball-end of it, the battery pack, into his armpit to get the leverage. Then it began to give. Not with a theatrical snap, of course – he should not have expected the satisfaction of that – but with a slow, silent disjointing of whatever gave it structure inside its rubber sleeve. The sleeve held the parts in place. You couldn’t even tell it was damaged unless you applied some pressure. He laughed with the broken thing in his hands. Then he put it back where he had found it, and returned the notebook to its hiding place as well.