A lamb appeared at the door. He could tell because he had an Amazon Ring™️ camera and he’d got a notification on his phone. How odd, he thought to himself, a lamb, in Islington. He set down the two edge pieces whose compatibility he was just about to check, scraped his chair back over the wooden floor, and made his way down the half-flight of stairs—during which point the bell rang, and he said “Coming!!”—and down the little corridor to the door. He unbolted the bolt and unchained the chain, and twisted the key to the left two times to unlock the lock. It had frozen slightly shut, due to the combination of an unseasonably cold January and a leaky shower extractor pipe from upstairs. He gave it a good bash and a pull and it opened.

“Hello there lamb,” he said, looking down at the meagre-looking animal, “Are you alright?”

“I’m looking for the party,” said the lamb, “Is this Sarah’s house?”

And, a little puzzled, he replied, “Sarah lives next door.” And the lamb said thank you and trotted next door.

You take the path up from the river to the right, past the belvedere. You slow down to a stop, make a quarter-turn clockwise and run your gaze over the sooty stones. They are broken now, and cordoned off with bent metal gates and inelegant tape. You hold your in hands front of your face, as if to dive, but with your palms facing outward instead of inward, and you prize open the tiny gap in the air that serves as the opening to the corridor between now and then, and you climb inside that tunnel and shuffle yourself along and sit and watch. And you lie there on your front in the passage of time, watching yourself and your friends climb onto the roof.

She opened the door to his wardrobe and fumbled for the light switch. She found it nestling behind the sleeve of what felt like a real fur coat. The only thing he’d ever truly dreamed of was a walk-in wardrobe. The other boys would spend days and nights watching the football together and would cheer and leer and elbow and jostle. Meanwhile he’d sit alone, or sometimes with her, cross-legged on the floor, eating cheetos, gaze glued to the screen, the pixels washing his face with greens and pinks and blues, as a cosmo-clutching Carrie explored her sartorial Narnia. The warm fluorescent light of the closet grew brighter as it gained its courage. And she saw, on the racks, in all the coats and sweaters and shirts and tops and pants and leggings and sequins and shoes, all the different versions of him, in all the different combinations, folded away and hanging up on the rails, nestled side by side and on top of each other, like a catalogue of every angle of his soul. A wave of nostalgia and joy and grief flooded her, and all she wanted to do was sit down on the floor, cross-legged, in the middle of it all. And so she did, and she took the fur coat from its rack and cradled it, rubbing its soft arm across her face.

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.