‘And?’

‘Jorge,’ she said with a deep in-breath. ‘Never. Showed. Up.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. She waited there for ten hours.’

‘Did she call him?’

‘Went straight to voicemail.’

‘Went to his flat?’

‘He’d disappeared.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She went back home, tried to beg for forgiveness, explain that she’d temporarily lost her mind. But her husband wouldn’t let her in.’

‘Oh no. Oh no no no.’

‘Yup. Wouldn’t speak to her. He’d even changed the locks.’

‘And the locksmith was probably …’

‘Jorge,’ she nodded. ‘We’ll never know if they ever crossed paths. Or what was said. It’s a question mark that hangs in history.’

‘Where’s Jan now?’

‘She lives on a canal boat,’ she said, with a funereal tone. ‘You’ll see it sometime, next time you go for a run along the towpath. It’s called The Old Maid. There’s a painting of a one-eyed spaniel’s face underneath it. And you can smell it a mile off, because she’s always home-brewing kombucha, says it’s the only thing that makes the nights pass faster.’

‘Surely,’ I said in horror, ‘surely any name but The Old Maid?’

‘She thought it would be funny. I said, “Jan,” I said, “you cannot make your life a joke, you have to start again.” But she wouldn’t listen. I think she’s punishing herself.’

‘That’s so awful.’

‘I know. The locals around her mooring call her “The Sad-eyed Lady of the Lock”.’

‘Really?’

‘Probably,’ she said with a shrug.

‘You’re right,’ I said, clinking her glass. ‘That’s a very, very useful addition to the Schadenfreude Shelf. Thanks, mate.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said, turning the wine bottle upside down, dribbling the last drops into our glasses. My phone, lying face up on the table, pinged. The screen illuminated with a message notification from Max. Lola’s startled eyes locked with mine.

‘Oh my GOD I’m going to be SICK,’ she bellowed. Concerned drinkers on the bench next to ours turned to look at her.

‘She’s fine, don’t worry, she’s just excited.’

Lola grabbed my phone, tapping in the passcode with the familiar intimacy of two women who have spent countless nights together in a pub, showing each other messages. She stared at the screen.

‘Oh fuck, it’s good, it’s really good.’

I grabbed the phone out of her hand.

I just listened to The Edge of Heaven five times in a row and you’re still not out of my system. What have you done to me, Nina George Dean?

4

I couldn’t really remember what Max looked like. My brain had grabbed hold of just four specific details of him. I had spent the week since we’d last seen each other circulating those memories around my mind like four separate plates of canapés at a party. Once I’d had enough of memory platter one, I’d take a bite from memory platter two. When I was satisfied with that, I’d switch to another one and so on and so on. Not only were these four memories just enough to satiate my daydreams, working out exactly why my memory had clung on to the specific vignettes also fascinated me.

Memory number one. The angles of his face as he went in to kiss me. Particularly the strength of his nose, the hoods of his eyelids and the knowing half-smile as his mouth opened slightly right before his lips touched mine.

Memory number two. Very, very specific. There was a point in the evening when we were talking about a female TV chef, and I was saying, both quite tipsily and remorsefully, that I didn’t think her recipes worked. As I was saying it, he said ‘Miaow!’ in a fairly camp way, and half raised his hand like a paw scratching, but decided to not really commit to it when it was already aloft. I could tell that whole thing was a bit mortifying for him, and I think my brain held on to this for a very specific reason, which was to stop the version of Max I would build in my head from becoming too perfect. I needed some bumps and chinks for the sculpture my imagination would make of him. It reminded me that he was real – existing in this realm and completely within my reach.

Memory number three. When Max laughed, the perfect severity of his face was briefly screwed up and discarded, revealing a goofy mouth, swimming eyes and a nose that slightly crinkled at its sides like a cartoon bunny. It was the only trace of the adolescent I could see in him – everything else seemed so entirely formed. When he laughed, I was reminded that he had been a dorky boy in a classroom, a student dressed up in a Hawaiian garland and a teenager in a hoodie watching South Park with a homemade bong in his hand. His laughter was, so far, my only crack of light through the door and into his vulnerability.

Memory number four. The feel of his white cotton T-shirt on his warm body as we danced. His T-shirt was velvety with the fuzz of someone who uses fabric softener. My suspicions of fabric softener use were confirmed when I smelt the dampness of his skin rise through his top, lifting the scent of soapy lavender with it to the air. It was the only slightly synthetic thing about him. It made me think about his domesticity, otherwise so concealed, and picture him in his flat in Clapton on his own, doing chores and sorting things out. I imagined he did his laundry on a Sunday evening, with a Dylan live album playing. I spent some time wondering if he owned a tumble dryer (ultimately decided no) and whether he bought his household items in bulk online (ultimately decided yes, and that his friends were the sort of well-meaning, awkward men who might take the piss out of him for it, exclaiming, ‘You got enough loo roll here, mate?!’ as they opened his bathroom cupboard).

The day after he messaged, when I’d sobered up, I replied. I wanted to just call him, but Lola told me that was tantamount to turning up at his flat unannounced and throwing rocks at his bedroom window. I didn’t understand why a messaging process was still so necessary after you’d already met – it slowed everything down to a frustrating pace. Max’s texting style was quite antiquated in that he liked to address every point I had made in my last message and respond to it – he also usually left four hours between reading my message and replying to it. This meant it took three days of this staggered back and forth chit-chat about what we’d been doing over the week before we even broached the subject of when we would see each other again.

He suggested a walk and a few drinks on Hampstead Heath after work. I was nervous about walking on the Heath – it was where Mum and Dad used to take me at the weekends when we were still living in Mile End and being there could make me feel violent grasps of nostalgia unexpectedly. I thought I was in direct contact with all my memories from this time – the funfair they took me to near the Kentish Town entrance, the dinky tub of strawberry ice cream I ate on a bench outside Kenwood House, as I glanced down at a ladybird crawling up my five-year-old arm. It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own. Sometimes I took a wrong turn on the Heath and ended up in woodland or a field and felt the unique disorientation that comes from involuntary memory, like I was standing in a half-finished watercolour painting of a landscape. Returning to it gave me the same satisfaction as finally remembering a word I’d been searching for, then haunted me with a sinister sense that there were important things I couldn’t remember and never would. Hundreds of black holes in who I was, as bottomless as a night spent drinking tequila.

I walked to the Lido in my navy-blue linen sundress and brown leather sandals, carrying a bag of cheap white wine and overpriced olives. Had it been my way, I would have packed a whole picnic, but Lola advised me that it was best to go low-key at this stage. I hadn’t realized quite how much of early-days dating was pretending to be unbothered, or busy, or not that hungry, or demonstratively ‘low-key’ about everything. I wondered if Max felt the same pressure. I hoped this phase would be over soon so I could ask him about it.

As I approached the brick-wall entrance of the Lido, I saw his instantly recognizable shape. I scanned his face and body, to quickly remind me of the man I’d been inventing for the previous week. I’d forgotten how long his legs were, how wide his shoulders; how cartoonishly masculine his frame – like the silhouette of a superhero drawn by a child with a crayon. He was reading the same book, and he looked up from its pages with the same familiarity he had done when he saw me on our first date.

‘Slow reader,’ he said, gesturing at the paperback as I walked towards him. We hugged, quite awkwardly, and he rubbed my back in a way that made me worry he thought of me as more of a sad friend at the pub after their football team lost, rather than a potential girlfriend.

‘Oh, me too,’ I said. ‘I basically can’t read a book now unless my phone is switched off and in another room.’