‘Let’s dance,’ he replied.

We paid one pound each for entry and our hands were stamped with the words THE INSTITUTION in black ink. Initially, I felt self-conscious on the dance floor. Watching how we moved our bodies felt like an audition for the inevitable. I never used to feel anything but total liberation when dancing, but something had changed recently. I was at a wedding of a university friend a few months ago when ‘Love Machine’ by Girls Aloud came on, and all of us rushed to the dance floor. When I looked around the circle of women, the women I’d been dancing with since I was a teenager, I suddenly saw us as completely different people. Lola in her strapless jumpsuit, using a glass of prosecco as a microphone. Meera moving her hips rhythmically around her clutch bag on the floor. We didn’t look free or wild or mysterious, we looked like pissed-up thirty-something women pointing at each other to the beat of the music we grew up with that would now be played at a nostalgia club night.

But the mix of gin, tequila and lust loosened me up enough to shimmy off my inhibitions. We danced for about an hour – sometimes comically, away from each other, with over-the-top moves. Sometimes camply, with Max twirling, spinning and dipping me, much to the chagrin of other revellers on the tightly packed dance floor. Then I heard it. The percussion of George Michael’s bassy donk donk donk donk and finger clicks.

‘THIS SONG!’ I shouted.

‘SO GOOD!’ he replied.

‘IT WAS NUMBER ONE THE DAY I WAS BORN!’

‘WHAT?’

‘IT WAS NUMBER ONE THE DAY I WAS BORN!’ I repeated. ‘IT’S WHY MY MIDDLE NAME IS GEORGE.’

‘NO!’ he bellowed, his eyes wide in disbelief.

‘YES!’ I shouted.

‘I LOVE THAT!’ he shouted back, grabbing me by the waist and pulling me into him. His T-shirt was damp with sweat and he smelt like the warm earth as the air rises after a summer storm. ‘FUCKING WEIRDO.’ He craned his head down towards me in a smile and we kissed. I draped my arms around his neck and he pulled me closer to him, lifting me off the ground.

We left the pub in search of a chippie. As we walked down Archway Road, we were side by side and he moved me so he was standing on the outside of the pavement. I was reminded of how annoyingly delicious these patronizing traditions of heteronormativity could be. Of course, the rational part of my brain wanted to tell him that he was no more capable of receiving the oncoming blow of a crashing car than I was, and his act of supposed chivalry made no sense. But I liked him standing on the outside of the pavement. I liked feeling like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it. It was like good sea salt – just a tiny dash could really bring out the flavour of the date and it was so often delectable.

In the kebab shop, we ordered chips and we drowned our polystyrene containers in burger sauce. We established that we both suffered from condiment anxiety – a fear that the sauce will run out on the walk home. We found a bench, finished our chips, then we kissed some more. The kissing was rigorous and exhaustive – we encompassed every teenage tradition in our medley. There was neck-kissing and dry-humping and ear-nibbling. There were all the things we used to do to make just one thing – kissing – as exciting as possible, before the act of sex distracted us all.

‘Your neck smells of bonfire,’ I said, nuzzling into it.

‘Does it?’

‘Yeah, it smells of burning leaves. I love it.’

‘I built a bonfire a couple of days ago, I must have been wearing these clothes,’ he said.

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I did, near the allotment.’

‘Shut up,’ I said, before kissing him some more.

We walked back up to the pub, now dark and locked up, and he stood by his bicycle, which was chained on the railing outside. He asked how I was getting back (bus) and told me to text him when I got home (another delicious patriarchy seasoning).

He unchained his bike, then turned to face me. ‘I’ve had a lovely night, Nina,’ he said, and held my face in his hands as if it were as unexpected as a pearl in an oyster. ‘And I’m certain I’m going to marry you.’

He declared it quite plainly and without a note of sarcasm or comic hyperbole. He hoisted his bag over his shoulder and mounted his bicycle. ‘Bye.’ He pushed off the pavement and cycled away.

And do you know, for about five minutes as I walked to the bus stop – I believed him.

3

If there’s one visible warning sign that a friendship has become faulty, it’s the point when you realize you only ever want to go to the cinema with them. And not dinner and the cinema – I mean meeting outside the Leicester Square Odeon ten minutes before a specifically late showing of a film, then having a ‘quick catch-up’ during the trailers and an excuse to leave as soon as it’s over because all the pubs are about to close. It is the platonic version of no longer wanting to have sex with your long-term boyfriend. It is the lingering, looming sense that something is no longer working, pervaded by a reluctance to fix it. I had started, for the first time in over twenty years of friendship, longing to only meet Katherine at the cinema ten minutes before a late film began.

But I couldn’t, because Katherine had a toddler and I’d found that trying to get her out of the house was always more of an effort than sitting on the Northern Line for an hour to get to her place near Tooting Broadway. And neutral ground seemed to have become an intimidating place for her – she used every environment as a way of justifying and defending her life to me, when I had never asked for justification nor defence. When she came to my flat, she’d make comments on how she couldn’t own half the things I owned because Olive would break them, as if a set of mismatched whisky tumblers off eBay made my dingy flat a boutique hotel. When we went out for dinner, she’d talk about how she never got to go out for dinner any more and emphasize what a treat it was for her, no longer making it feel like a treat for me. And when we met up for a drink, she’d talk about her ‘former life’ of ‘drinking’ that felt like a ‘distant memory’ as if she were a recovering addict giving an educational talk in schools, rather than a woman who worked in recruitment and enjoyed two-for-one Mojito night at her local.

I walked to the Cotswold green-grey door and rang the bell. Katherine answered, and the smell of used coffee machine pods and an expensive woody candle smell I could instantly and depressingly identify as ‘fig leaf’ wafted out.

‘Thank you so much for coming, my darling!’ she said into my hair as we hugged. ‘This must be so much earlier than you normally wake up on a Saturday. Really appreciate you coming all this way at the crack of dawn.’

‘It’s ten a.m., mate,’ I said, taking off my denim jacket and hanging it up on a hallway hook.

‘No, I know!’ she said. ‘All I meant was, if I didn’t have to wake up so ridiculously early for Olive, I would sleep in every day.’

‘There’s the small matter of my job, though,’ I said pedantically. Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why couldn’t I let her think my childless life allowed me to rise at noon and lie in a warm bath of milk and honey all day while being fanned with dodo feathers?

‘Yes, yes, of course!’ she laughed. I had been in her hallway for less than a minute and was already thinking about the dark, cosy silence of sitting side by side in the cinema for two hours.

We exchanged small talk about the intensity of this August’s heat while she made us coffee, then went into the living room. The components of Katherine’s interiors made up a completed game of middle-class-London-zone-three bingo, but I always loved being there. There was something so reassuring about all the strategically placed low-light lamps and the deep, squishy sofa and the creamy-beige colour palette as easy to digest as a plate of mashed potato or fish fingers. Instead of prints and posters there were photos that charted every step of their relationship: Katherine and Mark when they first started dating, drinking plastic pints of cider at a London day festival. The two of them on the steps of their first rented flat together. Their wedding, their honeymoon, the day Olive was born. There were hardly any photos in my flat. I wondered if this breadcrumb trail of a couple’s history became important when they had a child – a way of tracing back who they were before they became co-wipers of a face and arse. The reassuring evidence was always there on their mantelpiece.