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between her breasts, and he wanted to fit his thumb to that space, just there.
    When she moved back to the table and her chattering girls, gathering up the strewn detritus of their lunch, his boss Russell saw him watching.
    â€˜Who’s she?’ Russell said too loudly.
    â€˜Just someone I used to know,’ Stephen murmured, turning away to wipe the counter.
    â€˜Bit mumsy, isn’t she?’ said Russell, considering her as she began to push Larry’s stroller up the sloping path, calling to Ella over her shoulder.
    Russell, like most men, would never notice what Stephen found so arousing in Fiona. She was too circumspect, too guardedly dressed, for one thing—Russell liked unambiguous short skirts and bouncy cleavages. But in seeing her again Stephen was undone, just as in their youth, by her direct, mischievous gaze; the sceptical way she listened to him talk, biting her lip a little to keep from smiling. She had a held-back quality, a hiddenness, that to Stephen—along with her slender, strong brown arms, the quick, graceful movement of her smooth calves as she walked—was sexy as hell. An old, old lust sprang up in him.
    On his way out of the zoo that day Stephen paused to watch one of the keepers feeding a hummingbird from his cupped hand. The little bird whirred and hovered, darting in and out to the keeper’s motionless upturned palm. A drab little bird with a black throat, until it moved again and the light struck differently, and for the briefest instant its throat flashed iridescent red, then dulled again. The watchers gasped, waiting for that miniature glory to reveal itself once more, but the colour vanished, the bird cocked its head and moved away. Fiona was like this, Stephen thought then. The ruby-throated hummingbird. If you waited, if you carefully watched, she might show you a glimpse of this gorgeousness, this vividness. And you wanted nothing more than to see it again.
    But two kids , he’d thought, sitting on her deck that afternoon. Let alone the awkwardness of their own siblings’ marital history. Suddenly there by his side Larry reappeared. This time she gripped a scrabbling guinea pig to her chest. ‘Oh,’ Stephen said weakly. Where the hell was Fiona?
    The guinea pig wriggled and struggled in Larry’s little hands, which formed a vice-like band around its body. She gave Stephen the same slightly hostile stare. ‘And what’s this one’s name?’ Stephen said, praying for the guinea pig to calm down, or else escape.
    â€˜Smooth.’
    â€˜And it’s a—’
    â€˜Boy!’ She looked scornfully at Stephen. He nodded; he could feel sweat in his armpits. The guinea pig had stopped struggling now. Perhaps she had killed it. But then it suddenly began again, and Larry bent her head, whispering ‘ Nuh -uh,’ into her chest. Her tone was not cruel, rather that of a firm, patient nurse, but still she squashed the animal’s little body against herself, to calm or disable it.
    The glass door to the house slid open; relief flooded through Stephen at the sound. But when he turned towards it, it was not Fiona striding towards him but Ella, the older girl, who had earlier stood behind her mother when she greeted him at the front door. Ella had changed her clothes from the t-shirt and shorts and now wore a pink floral dress with a bow around the middle. Her blonde hair floated around her head in a knotted staticky halo, as if she had begun to brush it but then lost heart. She did not look at him or speak as she flew past him, seemingly on her way to something important, but paused briefly to fling a plastic heart-shaped bowl on the table. It was filled with compost, fruit and vegetable scraps; some sludgy lumps of watermelon, a bent and bruised parsley stem, shreds of apple skin and banana and other unidentifiable flesh.
    â€˜Ah,’ Stephen called brightly to Ella’s disappearing back, ‘old Smooth will love