I am just back from counselling with Julie, and we have both concluded that I was not authentic with you. After our first dance at the Union we walked to your flat because there was no way I was going to take you to mine, and I was already pretending to be all sorts of things I wasn’t. It is hard once you’ve misrepresented yourself. You find you must take the next step to prove to yourself that you’ve not really told a lie. Perhaps you do like Cezanne and kitesurfing, you think. Why wouldn’t you like those things? I pretended I liked James Taylor, and because of one of many momentary teenage misrepresentations I had to listen to him in the car, in the kitchen, and in our bedroom for a decade because I didn’t want to admit that the man you fell in love with does not exist.

Back to our first date: we were walking along Dumbarton Road and you turned your attention to a billboard that offended you – washing powder, I think it was. I pretended to care, and I didn’t. I was seventeen and I liked breasts, yours in particular at that moment, which is why I went further than pretending to care, referencing several sexist advertisements that were outrageous and should be banned.

I kept that up for years, Bella. Just as you pretended you didn’t mind me earning less than you, like you didn’t mind being with a man who put up shelves that fell down again, a man who sometimes wanted a woman to make the first move, a man who sometimes couldn’t get it up, or couldn’t come, who liked pornography, like every other man. I’ve talked to dozens of men in here, and we all feel the same: we had lost our pack out there, believed it a mythical thing, but it is real. We have been hiding in here, thriving in here, all this time. Outside we all feel like nothing – liars, pretending liars. But it’s changing, we will not pretend anymore, we are coming out. I hate James Taylor, Bella. I love advertisements with breasts in them, I love pornography and I love you.

7

Macdowall had performed with such emotion and strength that his talent appeared Shakespearean. The audience throbbed towards explosion. What a bunch of idiots, Mary thought, before she noticed that Holly was standing shoulder to shoulder with her son, who had a look of rapture on his face and was clapping as hard as he possibly could. She caught Holly’s eye, her finger doing the talking for her: You. Get away. From him.

Holly gestured back with her finger: You, then with two: Get fucked.

One day she’d have to kick that girl’s head in.