‘Perfect,’ she said with a mischievous smile.

She chose a Lebanese restaurant in Green Lanes. Over a long, languid feast – sumac-scattered salads, richly spiced dips, lentils and lamb, soft, pillowy pittas, lemony broad beans and delicate rosewater pudding – we talked about family, love, her grandchildren, my parents, Lebanon, London, cooking and eating. I paid the bill and got us a taxi back home just before eleven o’clock and when I opened the door into the hallway, I could hear the jolting orchestra and piercing, jeering chorus of ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’. Angelo’s front door was ajar and when he heard us arrive he bolted out of his flat wearing a white vest and grey tracksuit bottoms. His hair seemed more flyaway and his toffee eyes more bulging than usual.

‘What is this?’ he said, gesturing up at my flat.

‘Hello, Angelo.’

‘Have you been out all night?’ he asked.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘Yes you have, I’ve just seen you come in.’

‘No, we just popped outside. This is Alma, she’s your other neighbour.’

‘When I knock on the door, there is no answer.’

‘That’s because you don’t answer yours whenever I knock, so I thought that was the rule between us now.’

‘Goodnight, dear!’ Alma said as she climbed the stairs.

‘Goodnight, Alma! Thank you for a lovely evening. The music will be off in –’ I checked my watch, 10.56 – ‘four minutes.’

‘Okay, my dear,’ she said.

‘You cannot make noise like this.’

‘Why not? It’s just as loud as the noise you make.’

‘You don’t even want to listen to this,’ he said. ‘You just play it to make me angry.’

‘I do want to listen to it, it’s my favourite album.’ The infantile cries of ‘Dumb Dog’ were tumbling down the stairs. ‘Look, Angelo. I always wanted to be polite to you, I wanted us to get on. I didn’t want to be mates or anything, but I think it’s important to be civil with your neighbours. I tried to be reasonable, I was very patient. But you fucked it, mate. You completely and utterly fucked it.’

‘I play my music because I have no one below me. You have someone below you.’

‘You have someone above you. Then another person on top of that. And whether you like it or not, all three separate households are paying a ridiculous amount of money to live in a carved-up home that was once designed for one family.’

‘What does this mean?’

‘It means we are technically all sharing a house, so we have to be as considerate to each other as possible. And if we can’t do that then we should leave London.’

He shook his head. ‘If you play that sound again, I call the police.’

‘Great. It’ll be off before eleven.’

‘Don’t play it again,’ he said, turning back into his flat.

‘I won’t play it if you don’t play that death metal racket. That feels like a fair deal.’

‘Pathetic,’ he said, before shutting his door.

‘YOU’RE pathetic,’ I shouted after him.

I went upstairs and turned off the music. What I wanted now, more than anything, was an ally. Someone to pick apart the dispute with in a hushed voice. I wanted co-conspiring, giddiness. I wanted to be the couple on the platform at Waterloo station who cheered each other on. The only time I found myself missing Joe romantically is when I thought about what a good teammate he had been when we were together. In every situation, we noticed all the same things. I would never feel as close to him as when we’d both overhear someone in the pub say something particularly moronic and we’d give each other a smile across the table that said: You, me, bed, one a.m. – full debrief commences.

My solitude was like a gemstone. For the most part it was sparkling and resplendent – something I wore with pride. The first time I met with a mortgage adviser, I told him my financial situation: no parental help, no second income from a partner, no pension, no company that permanently employed me, no assets and no family inheritance in my future. ‘So, it’s Nina against the world,’ he said offhandedly as he shuffled through my bank statements. Nina against the world, I’d hear on rotation in my head whenever I needed emboldening. But underneath this diamond of solitude was a sharp point that I occasionally caught with my bare hands, making it feel like a perilous asset rather than a precious one. Perhaps this jagged underside was essential – what made the surface of my aloneness shine so bright. But loneliness, once just sad, had recently started to feel frightening.

Unable to sleep, I turned on my bedside radio and tuned in to a classical music station. ‘Good evening, night owls,’ I heard in a voice as sugary and slow-moving as caramel. ‘Some of you might just be getting into bed, some of you might be well on your way to sleep. Some of you, I know, are just starting your shift at work.’ I recognized her instantly, although she sounded lower and slower than I remembered. ‘Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I send this ultra-relaxing Brahms … straight to you.’ She was the top drive-time radio DJ on the most popular pop station when I was a kid – as famous for her raucous off-air partying as she was for her wacky phone-ins. My dad and I used to listen to her when he drove me to school every morning in his blue Nissan Micra. I stopped listening to the show in my mid-teens, when breakfast pop radio stopped being cool. But I returned to her again years later when I was a student, tuning in daily to her afternoon show on a try-hard indie station that played newly signed, little-known bands. And here I’d found her again, doing a late-night slot on a classical station. How strange, to have her age with me – to be able to mark the decades of my life by her transition through various music genres. Everyone gets old. No one can stay young for ever, even when youth seems such an integral part of who they are. It’s such a simple rule of being human, and yet one I regularly found impossible to grasp. Everyone gets old.

I wondered if Max ever thought of me before he went to sleep. The drifting, floating seconds right before blackout – when thoughts start turning inside out and synapses turn psychedelic – are when I felt his presence most. It felt like I was reaching out to him, waiting to feel his hand touch mine back. I hoped, that night, that I could go meet him somewhere while we were both asleep – that I could speak to him without seeing him, somewhere in the London night sky.

I turned my phone over as soon as I woke up the next morning. There were no new messages.

13

I knocked on the mahogany door next to mine on the long, dark corridor.

‘Come in,’ he croaked. Joe stood in his socks, boxers, shirt and two components of his three-piece navy suit. He fiddled with his tie in the mirror.

‘I don’t want to be cruel on your wedding day,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if you’ve got the legs for that.’

He sighed. ‘They’re in the trouser press. They’re all crumpled and Lucy will lose her shit if she sees creases in them when I walk down the aisle.’

‘Why are they all crumpled? I told you to hang them up when we got here yesterday.’

‘Because,’ he said stroppily, ‘when I got into the room last night I had a shower and got confused and used the trousers as a towel then chucked them on the floor.’

‘You shouldn’t have been chucking a towel on the floor even if it was a towel.’

‘Nina. Please.’

‘I am so glad you’re getting married and someone else can manage your cavalier attitude to towel storage for ever.’

His face looked pale and fragile, like unshelled crab meat, and his eyes were beady and small, making him look even more like a crustacean. We were both very hung-over. The ushers’ dinner had taken place downstairs at the pub the night before and had ended at half three in the morning with all of us doing a cheerleading tower in the car park. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Terrible,’ he replied.

‘Okay, I can expertly make you look and feel incredible, having been a bridesmaid four times already. What can I get you? Face mask? Green juice?’

‘Quarter pounder with cheese.’

‘No, I’m not getting you that, you just had a massive fry-up.’

‘Maybe a cheeky half.’

‘Okay, I think that’s allowed. Hair of the dog,’ I said. I took his trousers out of the press and rehung them correctly. ‘When are the ushers’ photos?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Like, half an hour, I think.’

‘And is there anything else we need to do to get you ready for that?’

‘What would I need to do other than get dressed?’

‘I can’t believe this is what it’s really like on the other side,’ I said. ‘For all these years, I’ve wondered. While all the brides I know have been on juice diets and sunbeds in the run-up to the wedding and have woken up at six a.m. on the morning for hair and make-up, the men have been down the road in a pub getting pissed and eating fried food and having a great time.’

‘Please don’t have a femmo rant on the morning of my wedding.’