‘They wouldn’t be a stranger for very long. Or we could have a friend.’

‘That’s worse. Everyone always falls out and then you can’t get rid of them.’

I swallowed half a taco without chewing the contents, felt it slithering in my gut like something still alive. Scooping guacamole with a fat bubbly chip, I made a point of chewing the next mouthful properly. I tried a different angle. ‘Does it make you feel bad, knowing there are all those apartments along the river sitting empty while sellers and landlords hold out for crazy prices and yet we both work with people who are living in horrible conditions?’

‘They’re not empty for long, not if I do my job properly.’ She twitched her eyebrows, but I no longer felt willing to share her hubris, however droll its expression. ‘Speaking of people we work with, I had an interesting chat with Richard today.’

‘Oh yeah.’ My heart drummed. He couldn’t have discovered Melia’s abuse of her duties, could he? We were always meticulous about leaving our meeting places precisely as we found them.

‘Given that you’ve decided against teacher training, and the coaching sessions and networking events haven’t led to anything concrete—’

‘Yet,’ I interrupted. ‘They’ve been really useful, though. I’m miles ahead of where I was psychologically. Confidencewise.’ I didn’t need Clare spreading the word that poor Vicky Jenkinson was a charlatan or, worse, demanding a refund from her.

‘What I was going to say is there might be an opportunity in lettings soon and I suggested Richard has a chat with you. I know you haven’t got any experience, but nor did Melia when she started and she’s doing fine.’

I spent a moment ordering my objections to this latest proposal. First of all, of course I couldn’t work for my partner alongside my lover. Second, it was one thing to be a ladder’s worth of rungs below one’s partner when in separate professions, but another in the same company. Third, I wasn’t keen on the salesman’s confidence with which Clare had raised the suggestion, as if there could only be one reaction to it and it was the same as her own.

‘No,’ I said.

She selected her next taco. ‘No what?’

‘No, don’t put Richard in that position. It’s not fair. You wouldn’t like it if he asked you to employ his wife.’ Sour cream slopped onto my T-shirt and I smeared it with my fingers.

‘Actually, I’d snap her up, but since she’s an independently wealthy interior designer with clients all over Europe, he’d be unlikely to do that.’ She passed me a square of kitchen roll. ‘The thing is, I already said you’ll call him. I thought we could do a practice interview this weekend.’

It was the face that did it, the casual assumption that I would fall in line: I was suddenly enraged. ‘Clare, I said no. The coaching sessions were a very generous gift, but will you please leave it to me now to sort out my employment and stop acting on my behalf all the time. Have some sensitivity to my feelings!’

As her gaze grew opaque, I tried to examine my own fury, which I could see as well as she did was a wholly ungracious response to an offer of help. Perhaps it was referred pain, a manifestation of my guilt in the wrong location (it should have been in the balls), or perhaps fear – God, had she emailed Vicky with this job idea of hers? Would she soon receive some baffled reply? – but whatever the case I could express only so much moral indignation before my nose grew. Before the gods sided with the innocent and left clues for her to find.

I muttered an apology.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. Her cheeks were stained pink under her makeup. ‘I should have consulted you. I’ll tell Richard you’ve got other plans.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Maybe you’ll share those plans with me some time,’ she added, because she had to have the last word and who the hell was I to deny her that?

I pushed my food from me, no longer hungry.

16

July 2019

Melia and I developed a rhythm to our liaisons, an agenda for our meetings no doubt familiar to anyone conducting an affair: drink and small talk, sex, proper conversation – ‘big talk’, we called it because we were saying all the cute stuff I’d completely forgotten got said in the early days and that Melia loved.

Sometimes the most important things were said as we were dressing, as we were one July evening when something happened outside of the normal routine. The meeting place was a penthouse apartment with smart technology, wide-angle views of the Dome and Canary Wharf erased and magicked at the press of a button, and I would have enjoyed lingering, but Melia had other ideas.

‘You know we were talking about our panic attacks that time? I had such a good idea and I think we should do it right now! It will be good for both of us – like, I don’t know, therapy.’

‘What therapy?’

‘You’ll have to pay, though,’ she continued, merrily. ‘I’m completely broke. My bank card keeps getting rejected, I must have gone over my overdraft limit.’

‘How much will it cost?’ I asked, mindful of my own minimum-wage limitations.

‘We’ll find out. Come on, have you got another half an hour?’

We left the building and walked towards the O2. There was some cool Euro DJ playing and everyone we saw seemed high, naturally or chemically, maybe both. Though we didn’t pass Steve’s building, and in any case I knew from the morning commute that he had a work event this evening, being outside together felt like a much more daring game – and I knew that daring gathered momentum and turned into recklessness.

‘Here we are,’ Melia said. ‘Your claustrophobia, my fear of flying. Two birds with one stone.’

It was the station for the cable car that linked the peninsula with the north side of the river. Nearly a hundred metres above the water, the gondolas were alight against feathered grey cloud. I’d never taken it before, had had no need; I considered those glowing square bulbs to be purely decorative.

‘I thought your great fear was boredom?’ But I could see the fever in her excitement: there was no getting out of this. ‘Do you even know what’s on the other side?’

‘It doesn’t matter because we won’t get off. We’ll come straight back over. They call it the Three-sixty.’

We’d had a bottle of wine together in the apartment and I was just about relaxed enough to pay for the tickets and follow her through the turnstile without protest. Long after the rush hour, it was easy to claim a gondola to ourselves.

‘How long does it take?’

‘Ten minutes there, ten minutes back. So, the point of the therapy is to take our minds off our irrational fears.’ She pressed herself against me, her breath hot as she dropped the words in my ear. ‘What can we do in twenty minutes?’

As the terminal building shrank below us, to my appalled amusement she sank to her knees. ‘Melia.’

Her voice rose from between my legs. ‘What, not your thing?’

‘Cameras,’ I said. ‘Right at this moment, some guy is sitting in front of a bank of monitors watching us.’

She was unzipping me. ‘So what’s he going to do? Stop the thing and zipwire along to arrest us?’