The waiter came to our table with a grin as wide as a canal. ‘Would you like to hear the specials for this evening?’

‘Can you give us a few minutes?’ Katherine said. He reluctantly nodded and walked away.

‘And actually – yeah, things are dramatic at the moment. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you fancy right now. I’m sorry that I have a terminally ill father and a mother who is clearly not coping. And that I had my heart broken by a man I’ll never see or speak to again. I’m sorry if that’s not quite cashmere-socks-and-pastel-coloured-ceramic-tableware enough for you. But you can’t phase me out of your life because I’m a bit too messy for whatever aesthetic mood board you’re currently living in. That’s not how friendship works.’

‘I don’t think you’re messy, I think there’s just a lot going on.’

‘Yes, there is. And you just can’t be bothered to support me through it?’

‘You don’t get it, Nina!’ she said, raising her voice and eyebrows at unnerving speed. ‘I don’t have the headspace for it! I can’t be that for you any more, that’s what Lola is good for. You’ll understand when you have kids.’

I looked at her, completely unable to access my Katherine memory archive – unable to recall how and why we’d been friends for twenty years. I signalled to the waiter for the bill.

‘I don’t want to have dinner with you. And you certainly don’t want to have dinner with me. I don’t know why we put ourselves through this any more.’

‘I’ve come all the way from Surrey.’

‘YES, I KNOW,’ I barked. ‘No one asked you to fucking live there, Katherine. You’re not seventy. You’re not a conservatory salesman. You’re not a retired Question Time presenter-turned-gardening columnist.’

‘Lots of people have to move out of London, you don’t need to act like it’s some enormous betrayal.’

‘Are you only going to want to be friends with me when I get married and have a kid and own a big house? Is that when you’ll decide you love me again? When I do all the things you’ve done so you can feel like you were right all along?’

Katherine took her jacket off the back of her chair and picked up her handbag. Her face had reddened and she was chewing her top lip with fervour. ‘I’m going. Don’t call me or message me,’ she said, shrugging on her jacket and pulling her hair out from under its collar. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘You haven’t wanted to talk to me in years,’ I said as she stood up from the table and left.

I paid for my wine and left the restaurant. It was early evening on a Saturday night and I didn’t want to go back to the flat and sit alone with my rage and the rage of my terrifying neighbour lurking beneath me. I walked, eastwards, not knowing where I would end up. I walked through the inexplicably busy cypher of Holborn and its countless sandwich shops. I walked past St Paul’s Cathedral with its silvery dome hat like a steel combat helmet, then the Bank of England with its grand Grecian pillars. I walked past the crowds of twenty-something girls in chokers and too much eyeliner smoking outside the basement bars of Aldgate, then the elderly smokers outside the pubs of Stepney Green who wondered why twenty-something girls in chokers were spending so much money to be there. Finally, just under two hours later, I saw the cream-tiled front of Mile End tube station. I made my way by memory to Albyn Square and climbed over the railings into the communal garden, like I had done the last time I saw Max. I sat on the bench cross-legged, my plimsolls tucked underneath my thighs. I could see the door to our basement flat, and the road where Dad’s blue Nissan Micra used to be parked.

‘Love is homesickness,’ I once read in a book. The author’s therapist had told her that the pursuit of love in adulthood is just an expression of missing our mums and dads – that we look for intimacy and romance because we never stop wanting parental security and attention. We simply displace it. My dad was nearly eighty and he was still missing his mother. He’d found a way of concealing it for all of his adult life and now, as the facade of togetherness was being slowly taken apart without his knowledge: the truth. All he wanted was his mum. I would make a strong case for the argument that every adult on this earth is sitting on a bench waiting for their parents to pick them up, whether they know it or not. I think we wait until the day we die.

I remained in the square a little longer, waiting for someone to get me. Waiting for my mum to call me into the flat for tea. Waiting for a Nissan Micra that no longer existed, that would never come to pick me up again. I wondered who lived in our basement flat now. I wondered where the Nissan Micra was – the safety of my childhood. Now scrap metal somewhere.

I looked into the windows on Albyn Square, some of them lit up with scenes of a household – human Punch and Judy shows. A woman worked at a desk, a man poured a kettle in his kitchen. It was just before midnight. It was cold. I was an adult woman with a mortgage, a career and a life full of responsibilities. I was a little girl with a dying dad. And I didn’t know where I wanted to go.

‘I miss home.’

I miss home.

I miss home.

I took the last tube back to Archway. The streets were scattered with groups of human-ravens, drunkenly flapping at each other – squawking as they pecked at polystyrene boxes of grey kebab ribbons and chips cemented together with mayonnaise. I made my way to my street lined with a few recently planted spindly trees surrounded by their circular black railings and budding with baby leaves. There was one directly in view from my kitchen window. Every morning as I drank my coffee I imagined how big it would be by the end of my lifetime.

I approached my building and saw that someone was sitting outside the house on the ground, back slightly hunched, long legs splayed outward. I couldn’t make out the face but I could see they were tall and male and wearing boots. I instinctively knew it was Angelo, and I readied myself for an unpleasant conversation.

But when I got to the front door, I saw someone else. I stood still and took in the sight of him, barely able to believe he was real. There he was.

Max. Smoking a rollie. Sitting on my doorstep.

16

‘Hello,’ he said. I had thought about this exact moment for five months. So many times, the bell had rung and I’d gone to the front door, or I would turn the corner on to my street, and imagine he would be there. In my fantasies, ‘Hello’ is exactly what he’d say first. It had the classic cadence of romcom dialogue – uncomplicated and yet loaded with subtext. One word that stated cool, stylized offhandedness, assuming that all would be forgiven and forgotten. A greeting that marked a new and simple beginning. I couldn’t remember what my answer had been in my many imagined versions of this exchange. If I had been in a romcom, I would have rushed towards him, thrown my arms around his shoulders, kissed him and said nothing but a one-line statement of relieved gratitude like: ‘I knew you’d come back.’ I wouldn’t bother him with my questions, I wouldn’t demand an explanation, I wouldn’t burden him with the facts of his betrayal, I wouldn’t scare him off with my anger.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’

‘I know,’ he said, discarding his rollie and standing up. ‘I want to explain everything.’ He walked towards me.

‘No, no,’ I said, holding my arms out to keep him from coming too close. ‘I want you to tell me where you’ve been.’ He stood still. He looked scared of provoking me. ‘Where have you been, Max? Where the fuck have you been?’

‘I’ve been here.’

‘I thought you’d died.’

‘I know, I can’t imagine how stressful it must have been for you.’

‘What have you been doing here?’

He looked confused, like a schoolboy who’d been hauled into the headmistress’s office and would say anything to stay out of trouble. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘No, HERE, in this city we both live in, for all this time. What have you been doing that meant you couldn’t call me and let me know you’re alive?’

‘I have wanted to, so much. Just because I haven’t called you doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to every day.’

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘I was scared, Nina. I just got so, so scared and so confused.’

‘Scared?’ I said mockingly. ‘And confused?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you think I felt? A man who I’ve shared my life with almost constantly for months – who I trusted, who I was vulnerable with – tells me he loves me then never sees me again. How do you think that made me feel?’

Max shrugged remorsefully. I had never known him this quiet.

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘A little bit fucking scared?’ I said. ‘Really, really fucking confused?’

He nodded and took another step towards me.

‘Can I hold you?’ he asked. ‘I really want to.’