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sort out other urgent problems. No sooner had she finished telling me this than the handset conked out again. Cursing with frustration, I slammed it back in the charger.
    It took two more periods of charging the handset and three more conversations with IT before I was finally told by an exasperated Senior Support guy that he didn’t know the fix to my problem off the top of his head, that there was no one else available at that point in time who could help me, and that I’d just have to log an online request through the “help hub” like everyone else and wait my turn. I shouldn’t, he informed me irritably before he hung up, hold my breath.
    “Fucking dick! ” I swore, chucking the clunky handset aside. It thunked against the sofa cushions uselessly and I dropped my face into my hands, rubbing hard. I’d tried to be charming, I’d tried to be threatening. I’d tried to “do you know who I am?” my way to the top of the queue—nothing had worked.
    Fine. I wasn’t giving up.
    Online request it would be.
    Except…how could I log an online request on the system when I wasn’t in the system?
    “Shit.”
    When in doubt, go to the top. That was what Marley always said.
    I picked up the handset again and called London, demanding to be put through to the Head of IT.
    “Hello, this is Sharon Bell. I can’t come to the phone right now but if you leave a message—”
    “For fuck’s sake!” I yelled and disconnected.
    After fuming for several minutes, I furiously typed a ranty email to Ms Bell about the various failures of her minions to sort out my problem and rounded it off with a demand for an immediate call back. Then I sat back again to wait, glancing at the clock in the corner of my screen and noting with dismay that I’d already spent two and half hours just trying to access the system.
    While I waited for Sharon’s call, I began noodling around on my laptop. I rarely used it—other than to look at porn—but when Ben and I had been together, he used to upload all our pictures and videos into neatly labelled albums. Now I found myself idly scrolling through them.
    Each folder was dated and named: Lakes – October 2010 , Brittany – May 2011 , Freddy’s 25 th  – July 2012 . All Ben. I’d always been too busy to bother with that stuff and you could easily identify when he’d left—the last album was dated September 2013. After that, nothing.
    I clicked on the folder for Christmas 2011—we’d gone to my parents’ that year. It had been the first time Ben and I had spent Christmas together. Before that, we’d gone to our respective families for Christmas, then met up again for a riotous and drunken New Year.
    But that year—I thought hard, brow furrowing—yes, that year, we’d been together and we’d been so excited about it. My sisters and their families had been staying too, so Ben and I had been relegated to my childhood bedroom with its narrow bunk beds. We’d squeezed into the bottom bunk together because back then, having Ben wrapped round me was more important to me than getting a decent night’s sleep. And in the morning, we’d opened our presents to each other in bed, while sipping glasses of Buck’s Fizz.
    The first picture in the album was of Ben, half-naked amongst the rumpled sheets, toasting me with his champagne flute and grinning that absurdly huge smile of his, his pale blond hair all sleep-mussed.
    God, Ben.
    He’d put up with a lot of crap from me before he’d finally gone.
    I swiped through photo after photo. Ben with my mum, me with my dad, my sisters, my nephews and niece. Ben playing Cluedo with my sister and her boys, one hand dipping inside a tub of Quality Street. I paused at a picture of the whole family sitting round the dining table. We all wore listing Christmas hats of purple, gold and silver, and the table was covered in plates and glasses and half-full wine bottles and discarded cracker casings. Everyone was grinning at the camera except Ben and my