You step through the open door and your foot fails to catch the floor, and as you crumple, with a  yelp, into a long dark fall, you try to readjust and reconstruct, erasing your old expectations and addressing this new reality, and your back twists round and you compensate, raising your right knee to your chest and twisting your neck up and left, further than it wants to go, and it clicks unpleasantly, and you try to remember to breathe in. And as you stabilise, still tumbling down the unlit, wallless chute, you realise that that probably was not the door to the lavatory.

“Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I don’t keep my phone on me. And I was doing something else. And I don’t answer calls unless they’re planned. I’m a busy bee, Kate!”

He started to untangle this in his head as Kate continued talking at him. He’d learned to zone out “…and if it had been winter who knew…” knowing that he could catch little snippets and manage to piece together the conversation, fill in the blanks “…he’s a fucking idiot…” and make a passable case for having actually paid attention to her conversation, which was the same pretty much every time and always as one-sided. And so he untangled his explanation in his head, and recognised that, as much as he genuinely thought it might have been a little bit true, he realised he actually wasn’t a busy bee at all, more of a lazy locust, and was lying both to himself and to Kate. There are the types of people you pick up the phone to, and the types of people you don’t. And Kate was the latter.

You climb the last few branches to reach the top of the canopy. As you poke your head over the crust of the forest, through the membrane of leaves, a light drizzle dampens your cheeks. You angle it upward to let the mist flow over your nose and neck. You see Sarah emerge a few metres away. You turn to face her, you meet eyes, and neither of you says anything, neither with your face nor with your mouth. But you both know. Sarah was always good at knowing. Sometimes you wondered if anyone else really ever knows. The fog and drizzle block anything further than about five metres around you. But you don’t need to see any further than that. You know.

She ran her fingers over the tops of the spines of the clothbound hardbacks on the shelf just below eye level, facing the wall with her front and sandwiching a thick chunk of awkward silence between the two of them. Clara, now that she’d cooled down a little and her anger had transitioned to disdain, through pity, and now to boredom, was waiting for her to say something useful. She began to notice the way she’d gently flicked the tops of the books inward, sort of pinching, but not quite, only half way there, an action for which she realised there was no word in the English language, and it would be hers for the taking should she choose to make one up.

It had been more than a month since he’d seen her in the freezer aisle. He’d by now worked his way through the all the peas and fish fingers and green beans and chips and steak and kidney puddings. And each bite had sent him back there, stood stock still by the potato-based goods and vegetarian kievs, her by the ice cream at the other end. He’d Tippexed over the truth, what good would it have done her, it read, for me to have said hello. But underneath that chalky liquid paper, he knew he’d just been scared.

I saw your face in a Woolworths window. But it wasn’t yours, it was mine, and it was all cracked and covered in shards and discount pens and cheap sweets. Barely worth breaking into. Like one of those new Toblerones. Same sized packet but full of air. I heard you in a traffic jam, stationary and late and covered in soot. I liked that about you, full of oil and passengers and mixtapes. I hope you get there in the end. I tried you on in a Topshop changing room. You were baggy and itchy and not my colour. Or a perfect fit. I put you back on the rail. You were the buffet car and the quiet carriage, everywhere and nowhere, always on schedule but never on time. My chicken goujon, milk of magnesia, can of steam, never what you seem.

“I bet they didn’t teach you that in school.”

“Actually, they did.”

“Really? What kind of school did you go to?

“The kind of school where they teach you to lie.”

“What kind of school teaches you to lie?”

“What did you learn at school? Long division? Split infinitives? We learned the useful stuff. Like how to set a bear trap.”

“Figures,” said the bear.

Every week by Thursday he’d finish the last of his loaf, dipped in hot soup and smothered in butter, as it was by this time too stale to really enjoy any other way. And each Friday morning he’d amble to Reed Street to pick up another, and for a day he’d enjoy it crusty on the outside and soft and warm in the middle, before it gradually grew weary and worn and grey.

Today I washed you off my sheets. Cottons cycle, 3 hours 12 minutes. Hot pink wash syrup, fabric conditioner with ylang ylang. Sweat stains and skin dust and menstrual blood sucked out and washed down the drain. Coffee rings from the Saturday crossword swept away in the vortex. Tear stains swept back out to sea. I’ll dry them by the radiator, 35 degrees. The sheets, not the tears. Tears don’t need radiators. Amy said it best. They don’t even need ylang ylang.

“We’ll go to Italy.”

I paused and made that very specific head movement, where you tilt your neck slightly so your face is pointing just  to the side and below, but you move your eyes up and to the other side, so that you’re still looking at him, and you lift one corner of your mouth, specifically the corner corresponding to the direction that you’ve tilted your head, and you lower your brow and squint your eyes a little. This look usually says something like “Are you sure?” or “Um, I don’t think so!” or “That’s a foolish suggestion unless you very clearly explain otherwise.” So I asked him to explain otherwise.

“What’s in Italy?”

“What’s in Italy? A city made of canals! The collosseum! Pisa. Pizza! Pasta. Mascarpone. Montepulciano! Mozzarella? Gelato, sunshine…”

And then I put on a more symmetrical mask of disdain.

“Yes. Great. Mascarpone is not going to save our marriage, Rob.”