Chapter Three

By the time we’re walking home (my place – Lucinda assures me it’s cozy, which is a euphemism for claustrophobic) I’m struggling to breathe properly.

Excuse the present tense. It helps me relax. Action followed by further action: it means time isn’t still.

It means this, too, will pass.

It means that one day Lucinda will let me graze her thigh with my fingers and one day I won’t mind spending a tenner on a take-away for two because it’ll be a prelude to all kinds of in-bed debauchery that I can’t even begin to contemplate and one day this will be in the past and we will be in the future and one day I won’t sweat every time I face a till.

Please God let this walk be finite.

‘We really ought to vary our routine, you know. This could get staid.’ She walks with a veritable bounce in her step, pleased with herself after having demonstrated her discerning taste by criticising the shop’s entire selection.

She didn’t notice me sweating as I counted out five quid’s worth of twenty p’s and the sales guy grinned like a twat – she didn’t notice him leering at her legs. She was too busy shrieking with delighted disgust at the new releases on display and asking why I don’t get an online account, for fuck’s sake.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘No, you didn’t. What did I just say?’

‘I heard you. I heard you. Something getting staid.’

‘Watching films.’

‘But you’re the one who always suggests it.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She is surprisingly patient. ‘I should be making more of an effort to get us out there. Doing stuff. Going to protests or something.’

I feel slightly sick to my stomach. ‘Protests?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Not necessarily protests, as such. But demonstrations or something. Women’s right to choose, for instance.’

‘They already have it.’

‘I know, but I read somewhere they were trying to add, you know, stipulations to the law. Limitations.’

‘Yeah? Since when do you follow politics?’ I can’t help feeling alarmed. It’s reassuring, hanging out with someone who knows as little about what is going on in the outside world as I do. If that were to change – if anything were to change, I wouldn’t know what to do.

My stomach cramps up. Maybe I’m getting an ulcer.

‘I don’t “follow politics.” But I like to keep abreast of issues that affect me as a woman. You never know when I might get impregnated and need to take – ’ she pauses, looking for the right word, ‘measures.’

My feeling sick is starting to become second nature. Pretty soon my inclination to vomit will become as second-nature as a regularly-occurring itch.

‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it’s not like we have to go demonstrate. We could go, say, to an exhibition? Something about vaginas and uteri and stuff – ’

‘But I don’t want to go to an exhibition about vaginas – ’

‘ – or to a play. That’s what we should do. Go to a play.’

‘About vaginas?’

‘Stan, stop interrupting me. I was saying, a play, not the movies. See real people acting things out.’

‘Mmm.’ Dare I hope she’ll discard the woman blood idea?

‘In fact, forget abortions and fallopian tubes. Let’s get cultured.’

I let myself breathe out. I was right, after all: we are connected by an infinitesimal conglomeration of minute but intensely-charged electric particles, she and I. Where she leaves off, I begin. Where I daren’t tread, she refrains from entering. We are each other’s psychic other half –

‘Plus, think of how many new people we could meet that way. Actors. We could end up mingling with the cast after the show… Or what the director has to say in the question and answer session afterwards… And hear comments from people in the audience, and then if someone said something interesting we could approach them and – ’

I definitely, definitely feel sick.

Let’s face it: she, not we, would approach them. And it would be a man, of course. And he would want her phone number, of course. And then they would meet for coffee and he would be a theatrical genius and an arrogant prat but she wouldn’t see it and would go all bright-eyed when he quoted Pinter or Beckett, probably incorrectly but she wouldn’t notice or, worse, would think it sweet, and pretty soon he’d be inviting her over to look at his signed copy of Night of the Iguana or something and she’d be gushing the way she does when anyone mentions Tennessee Williams and he’d offer her wine and she’d drink it even though she hates wine, only drinks beer, but you can’t be a thesp and drink beer, and then they’d end up fumbling around on his sofa and with my luck he’d have a balcony overlooking the river or something and he would lead her onto it and pensively light a cigarette and look at her deeply and say he wanted to write a play about her.

I am going to die right here, on the pavement in front of Boots and Carphone Warehouse.