I went downstairs and filled a pint glass full of water. The living-room door was shut and the lights were off. Back upstairs, I noticed Mary’s door was still open. I looked through to where her bed was lit by a street light shining through a crack in the curtain. She wasn’t there. I walked in and stood there for a second, looking at the shapes around me and smelling the smell that was her in this house: fabric softener, perfume, damp and exhausts. Things are all right, I told myself. I have books on the shelves, food in the fridge, a roof over my head and clothes to wear, and in Mary’s room there were those memories I avoided, Monica crying on a mattress, my hand on her stomach, my face against her hair doing my best to calm her down. Dark nights when she filled the room with her heat, when I felt mad and afraid of her, afraid she would go, afraid she would stay, afraid there was no going back.

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‌Four

Andrew Lancaster came into the shop the other day. By now I had googled him extensively. I looked hard at his face on book flaps, trying to work out which photo was the most honest, the most recent, which was the oldest man and how much older he might have become since the photo was taken. I watched videos of him calling out audience members at book festivals: ‘Stand up and call me a racist! Have the courage and decency to call me a racist, if you think you can justify it!’; that kind of thing. One of his recurring targets in recent interviews was ‘the infantilised metropolitan Left’ who saw everything in terms of good and evil, and were far too confident of their own virtue. He denied vehemently that he was just an ageing man getting comfy. ‘Have I travelled to the right? No. Have many of the Left travelled towards the stupid, away from the critical, away from nuance and the thorny and the difficult? Certainly.’

‘I didn’t know you were so interested in politics and history,’ said Helen, as I put through a pile of books for me on my discount, which included an old book by Lancaster in which he justified the invasion of Iraq. ‘I hope this new political consciousness isn’t a sign that you’re going to go alt-right on us.’

I resented this comment. And so the next day I didn’t use my staff discount to purchase Lancaster’s quick history of the Russian Revolution, but simply transferred it from the shelves to my bag.