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night.
    She moved the CD player into her room and, roaring, crying, played Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over,’ incessantly. Every time the last bars of it faded she sobbed even harder and pressed thereplay button. Liv and Katherine counted it twenty-nine times in a row one night. Sometimes she half howled, half sang along with it, getting particular relief from the part where it moved up an octave. ‘It’s
ooooh-ohhhh-verrr
.’ Up an octave. ‘IT’S OOOOH-OHHHH-VERRR!’ The upstairs neighbours talked about calling the police again.
    She had to take another week off work and when she went back her colleagues wished she’d stayed away. Every program she was supposed to have tested was flawed, sending systems crashing all over London. Her department’s workload doubled for a couple of months, their manpower stretched to capacity cleaning up Tara’s messes. She only managed about three hours’ sleep a night and wandered the flat smoking cigarette after cigarette. She lost the ability to function normally. Forgetting to rinse conditioner out of her hair. Going to work on a Saturday and wondering why the building was all locked up. Driving to work, taking the tube home, then thinking her car had been stolen when she couldn’t find it outside her flat the following morning. Taking the lid off a carton of yoghurt, throwing the carton in the bin and staring at the lid, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. In calmer moments, she talked, her knuckles clenched translucent, of evening classes. Pottery, Russian, cake-icing.
    Every week or so, when the pain got too much, she rang him and begged him to meet her. He always did and, naturally, they slept together. Frantic, tearful sex, scratching the clothes off each other, bruising each other with the relief of their familiarity.
    This happened so often she began to think that maybe there was a chance they’d get back together. It was obvious that he was as torn apart by the break-up as she was, that he still loved her.
    Until one night he wouldn’t let her come over.
    ‘Why not?’ she asked. He’d always been keen before.
    She heard him take a breath, and in the pico-second’s pause between the end of that breath and the start of him speaking, she got a very bad feeling. Before he even said it, she knew.
    ‘I’ve met someone else.’
    Tara calmly hung up the phone, got into her car, drove around to Alasdair’s, let herself in with the key she hadn’t yet returned, found him in the kitchen boiling the kettle and, with her forearm, hit him such a blow in the skull that his glasses fell off.
    Before he had a chance to recover, she slapped his head and face repeatedly with the palms of her hands. ‘Bastard,’ she gasped. ‘You bastarding bastard.’ But slapping him wasn’t expending the hatred or stopping her pain quickly enough so she punched him in the stomach, surprised by how weak her arm felt.
    Although it seemed to do the trick all right, she thought dispassionately, as she watched Alasdair choking and retching.
    ‘Ali?’ someone asked, and Tara turned to the kitchen door to see a plump blonde girl standing there.
    ‘What’s going on?’ the girl gasped in horror, as she took in the scene.
    Tara came out of her trance. Pausing only to give Alasdair a violent shove that sent him toppling into her usurper, she left.
    When she got home and told Katherine and Liv what had happened, they couldn’t hide their shock. Too late, they tried to make her feel better about it. ‘The bastard,’ they consoled. ‘Good on you. I hope you broke a couple of ribs.’
    ‘Stop,’ begged Tara. The red mist had evaporated, leavingher sickened and frantic with self-loathing. ‘I beat him up,’ she moaned, rocking backwards and forwards, her face in her hands. ‘Now I’ll never get him back.
    ‘I thought I couldn’t possibly feel worse than I have been for the past seven weeks, four days and…’ she paused to look at her watch ‘… sixteen and a half hours, but I