I was glad to have this excuse to find Amy, something to say if she didn’t want to speak to me, to offer her beyond an apology, a subject to discuss that wasn’t our own disagreements; a tragedy, a dead body. Her disappearance from Facebook was nothing unusual: Amy’s always taking her profile down and putting it back up again, much busier than me in trying to fix her life through industry and decisive measures. She takes her profile offline when she disgusts herself with the time she wastes looking at pictures of ex-boyfriends plummeting into blue lagoons, surveying natural landscapes from on high, wanderers exploring Eastern temples with strong-jawed girls, the type you saw in Chelsea. We both have adventuring conquistadorial ambitions based on appealing to our betters – something we have only ever been good at realising briefly. Amy takes the failure of these liaisons more politically than me. ‘This country is still like a fucking Jane Austen novel. It’s not just that money marries money, but that these people think that this is the moral place for the story to end.’ I didn’t make the mistake of pointing out that this is only really an accurate description of Emma. It’s unwise to quibble with Amy when she is regretting all those minutes she has wasted watching ex-lovers brag about their happiness when she could have been making something or reading a book or cleaning the flat or writing an application to the council for a lease on some disused public toilets that would make the perfect waffle café – all those hours viewing babies with Edwardian names, looking at weddings held in the homes of fading aristocrats, reading discussions in which friends referred to themselves in the third person as Mummy. Oh, she knew she was becoming bitter and that mummies needed to buy into the role they found themselves in, but when she had a child – and now she really meant if, she had to be realistic given her predicament, a single woman in a city that pitied single women in their thirties with the same abstract compassion with which they pitied the animals they ate on their Tinder dates, certified to have been treated kindly right up to the moment they were executed – if she had a child, she would not surrender her subjectivity to the omniscient god of a wipe-clean picture book about an elephant’s trip to an art museum. She would not be so guileless in posting her passive aggression towards the women who were still photographing cocktails on a regular basis, wearing bikinis under turquoise skies, proselytising for the single life, the childless life, heroic women who neglected to take selfies of themselves making the morning commute the wrong way round in smudged make-up and heels but should really have been proud to, and would have been if the world didn’t know men for what they were, which was big fucking pervert babies. One huge benefit of closing her Facebook profile was the way it stopped Tinder from working, and denied her addiction to shopping for men, for the worst men in the world, of whom there must have been hundreds of thousands still left for her to meet in this ugly safari of a city.