Wandering around a gallery on a day off I mooched along behind a woman pushing a buggy, thinking of how similar she looked to Monica from behind. I felt so thirsty looking at her, not only for Monica and the woman who resembled her but also for the melancholic feelings she flooded me with, for those memories that were delicious in their painfulness, memories that became harder and harder to reach and which I didn’t want to drift away from more than I had already. I don’t know what I expected to gain from this doomed internal record-keeping. Numbness and forgetting should be coveted. But I still tried to remember as vividly as I could what her skin had felt like next to mine. I wished we had made pornographic videos together; we had not been early adopters of smartphones, or digital cameras. How foolish and smug we had been about avoiding the fads of technology and now I could not summon a picture of her naked in bed. Nothing about the sheets we slept in, the underwear she put on in the morning. I remembered her voice very well, the way it veered from a drawl to the singing brightness of a good student in a good school explaining something she’d learned. We used to speak a lot on the phone. I knew what her voice sounded like in bed, in separate beds, across a line. I could make it speak to me even now.

The woman stopped to lean over the buggy and I sidestepped, and—

‘Monica?’

A miracle. My saviour.

No. It wasn’t her. It never would be.

‌

‌Seventeen

‘Let’s try this again,’ you say. ‘Can you give me some examples of when you don’t feel in control of your anger? You don’t need to say why, just when. Take all the time you need.’

Arguing with Amy, of course. I go from disagreeing with her about something trivial and specific – the exact definition of homeopathy, for instance – to letting her know about everything she does that I think is stupid, pointing out every detail I can think of that might confirm her anxieties about herself. She does this to me too, by the way. And it’s she who starts it.