‘Where are you from? I know “Baldracca” isn’t a place, you piece of shit.’

‘You liked my joke!’

I scowled.

‘I’m from Parma.’

‘I’ve been there. I went for work a couple of years ago.’

‘You did?’ He looked delighted.

‘Yes, I write about food. I was writing a piece about protected-status food products in Emilia-Romagna. It was about vinegar in Modena and Parmesan cheese and the ham in Parma.’

‘No!’ he said. He excitedly dragged one of his cardboard boxes open and took out one of the long knives. ‘From my mother.’

‘Why?’

‘To make prosciutto.’

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘I thought –’ I brought my head to my knees and breathed into the fuzzy softness of my tracksuit bottoms.

He craned his head to look at me. ‘What?’

‘I thought you were going to kill someone,’ I said, snapping my head back up, my gaze meeting his limpid amber-brown eyes, now wide in shock. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ He shuffled back very slightly, as if I were now the threat.

‘I thought you were a psychopath. I thought you wanted to hurt someone,’ I said, glancing at the packages.

‘No! She sent me this to make prosciutto. She hangs it in our garden. I will hang in the garden here,’ he said, opening the box and showing me the hooks.

‘What’s with the poison?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Poison. It’s to help the meat. Colour the meat?’

‘Cure it,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

‘Poison?’

‘Fuck off,’ I said as we both laughed. ‘I was told that it’s the air in Parma that makes it taste so good. Might not be quite the same in Archway.’

‘Yes,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’ve got a good butcher for you to go to if you need one. For pigs’ legs.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. How long will you hang them for?’

‘A year maybe?’ he said. ‘My mother hangs it for two. I miss it.’

‘Ham?’

‘Home.’

He left shortly afterwards. He kissed me, formally, on both cheeks and we exchanged numbers. I heard the door open to his flat downstairs, then I heard him walking through to his kitchen, whistling as he went. I heard him make himself something to eat as I had a shower, a metre above his head. He did the washing-up and listened to the radio as I brushed my teeth. I fell asleep while he was watching TV. I slept soundly through the night.

19

Lola and I had an emergency code word – penguin. We had employed it just twice in our fifteen-year-long friendship. The first: when she accidentally uploaded a naked photograph of herself to a shared album where all the godparents to a baby called Bertram were meant to post photos of him. The second: when I thought that I’d seen Bruce Willis in a phone shop, but it turned out to be a similar-looking bald man. When I received an emoji of a penguin then a pub location, date and time, I knew there was only one thing she had to tell me: she was engaged.

I pre-emptively ordered a bottle of champagne and waited at the table for her. She arrived – yellow polka-dot halter top, black-and-white stripy shorts, heeled silver clogs and a floppy straw hat on a decidedly unsunny day. She sat down at the round table without hugging me hello and removed her Jackie O sunglasses and hat.

‘Jethro,’ she said.

‘He proposed!’

‘He’s gone.’

The waiter came over and popped the champagne cork ceremoniously. Lola flinched.

‘For you?!’ he said, beside himself with excitement that a customer had finally ordered the champagne.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Fabulous. And are either of you lovely ladies celebrating anything special?’

Lola pressed the heels of her hands into her forehead.

‘No, don’t worry,’ I said, gently prising the bottle off him. ‘I think we can … sort it from here. Thank you so much.’ I put the champagne into the ice bucket and he left.

‘What happened?’

‘Everything was completely normal until a couple of weeks ago. We were having loads of fun, we had some flat viewings lined up for this week, we were really excited about properly moving in together. He’d started talking about marriage.’ She registered the judgement on my face. ‘I know, I know. It seems mad now. Then on the Sunday evening he said he had to pop home to pick up some stuff and then he’d come back to mine. He’d been gone for a few hours so I texted him to check if he was okay – he said he was going to stay there. He said he’d realized that everything had been moving too fast and he needed to “put the brakes on”. I asked him if he knew he was going to say this to me when he left the flat and pretended everything was fine and he said no. But of course he did. He was just avoiding having a difficult conversation.’

‘Then what?’ I said, pouring the champagne, now mocking us.

‘We decided to have a few days of not speaking, have some time to ourselves, think about what we want then meet up to talk.’

‘Have you heard from him?’

‘No. Not for over a week. At first I thought he must just need some more space, which is fine, but he’s not even responding to my messages.’ Her husky-blue eyes filled up with tears and they spilt down her cheeks. She was so desperate to love someone. It seemed like such a simple, singular thing to ask from this life.

A sensation rose inside me – one that had been long-repressed. Something I should have expressed, fully and freely, when Max first disappeared, but instead I had hidden everywhere else, to be a good girl. I had turned it in on myself, to examine all my possible imperfections. I had let it rise like hot air into my brain to analyse and pathologize needlessly. I had allowed it into my heart and let it melt down into something patient and forgiving. I had distributed this feeling into any part of my body so that it wouldn’t escape from my mouth; so that it couldn’t catch the air. That way, no one could accuse me of being intense or deluded or crazy. But it was time to breathe it out like fire. I had no interest in retribution, all I wanted was redress.

‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

‘Clerkenwell.’

‘Right,’ I said, downing the rest of my glass in one. ‘Bring that with you.’ I gestured at the half-bottle of champagne and stood up.

‘We’re not going to his flat.’

‘You’re not, I am.’

‘No, Nina.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Real human people can’t be deleted. We are not living in a dystopian science fiction.’

‘What are you going to say to him?’

‘Everything he needs to hear.’

‘Okay,’ she said, picking up the champagne and taking a swig as we went to the door. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose now.’

Jethro’s flat was in a warehouse that, even from the outside, looked very pleased with its own conversion. The steel Crittall windows looked like big toothy grins that were smugly congratulating each other. I rang the buzzer.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘It’s Nina,’ I said flatly. ‘Nina Dean, Lola’s friend.’

‘Oh.’ The fuzzy white noise indicated he was still on the line. ‘Can I help you with something?’

‘I just need ten minutes to talk to you.’ There was a pause, then the flat, obtrusive beep that let me know he’d let me in. I knew he’d cave – these men cared so little about their actions towards the women they hurt, but so much about what people who knew about those actions might think of them. I held a thumbs-up aloft to Lola, who was sitting on a doorstep a few buildings down with the bottle of champagne.

He opened his front door. ‘Nina, hi, come on in,’ he drawled in a demonstratively unbothered way, exposing his nerves. I scanned his flat, which was filled with the essential props of a try-hard renaissance man. The exposed-brick wall and original tiles of someone interested in heritage, but only of the building he lived in. Framed Pink Floyd albums, a pasta-making machine, linen cushion covers, a neat row of orange Penguin classics, herbal hand soap in an apothecary-style jar that cost ￡38 a bottle. There was an oil painting of a nude woman who was very slightly overweight with very slightly pendulous breasts, which probably made him think he was a feminist. He had bought his entire personality from a cobbled side-road of boutiques in Shoreditch.

‘How are you doing?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘So, you’re alive, then?’

‘Evidently.’

‘Well, as long as you’re alive and well, that’s the important thing.’

He leant against the kitchen cupboard, willing this interaction into something friendly and relaxed. ‘Look, Nina, I get that she’s your friend and you’re doing this because you love her. But what’s happening with me and Lola is really between me and Lola.’

‘But it’s not though, because you’re not talking to her, so it’s happening between Jethro and Jethro. The two most important people in the relationship.’

His mouth opened slightly, then closed. It felt good to catch him out. It was so rare that men like Jethro felt like a woman had the upper hand in a conversation.

‘I needed some space, I haven’t done anything wrong. You don’t understand how intense it’s been. We haven’t had a day apart, I haven’t had a moment to myself to think.’

‘Who pursued who in your relationship?’

He groaned. ‘Me.’

‘And who said “I love you” first?’