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handles, pensions and cancer, stunted ambitions and broken dreams. I made sure that she came first; I could have done it with
my eyes closed.

    After we were finished, she looked at me expectantly and rolled over. I held her tightly and she leaned herself back into me. She smelled of sex and shampoo; her breasts heavier
in my hands.
    ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’ve missed you.’
    ‘Me too—’
    She interrupted me with a long, sloppy kiss, which she then abruptly curtailed. She put her hands on my chest and then on my face, like she was piecing me together from scrap.
    ‘But . . . no, this is all wrong,’ she said. ‘Something’s not right. I feel . . . ’ she shivered. ‘I can’t explain it.’ Angela bent down and
kissed me again, experimentally.
    ‘You smell . . . I don’t know, wrong,’ she said, sniffing my skin.
    ‘What, like bad?’
    ‘No. Just not like you.’ She looked puzzled for a moment then glanced at the bedside table.
    ‘Did you quit smoking?’ she said, like it was an accusation. I laughed.
    ‘About five years ago now.’
    ‘Quit? I never thought you’d quit. Not ever.’
    I didn’t like the maddened look in her eyes: she was naked, but not in a good way.
    ‘Well I did.’
    I put my hand to her hip and she looked at me as though I had deceived her.
    ‘Do you still drive that Vauxhall Viva?’ she said.
    ‘It was a Hillman. And that’s long gone. You don’t need a car in London.’
    She pulled up the bedsheets and put her head in her hands.
    ‘I never should have done this,’ she said, ‘it was a terrible, terrible idea.’ She turned her back on me then and made her way to the en suite bathroom. She had cellulite
on her thighs. It was sexy in a way that women just don’t understand.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ I said to the closed door. ‘You spent the whole time we were together bitching about how much I smoked and how bad it was for me and how much it stank,
and now . . .’ She opened the door wearing a white towel. The shower was running.
    ‘Look, Marty,’ she said, picking up her abandoned clothes. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, but the truth is that I’m getting married.’ She smiled, tiredly.
‘Or at least I was thinking about getting married. But then out of nowhere, I started thinking about you. About those years we had. And what I have with Declan, well it’s not like that.
Nothing could be like that. So I had to see. I couldn’t let it just go. Couldn’t let it just disappear into nothing. I hoped that, you know, that it would all just slot back into place,
but . . .’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’re not children any more. In my head, you’re this romantic, childish, impossible boy with all these impossible dreams. But that’s
not you. Not any more. And I can’t bring him back. And even if I could, could you really live like that again?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes I could. And if that’s all it is, I could start again. I could start right now!’
    ‘You know there’s more to it than that.’
    She laughed and closed the bathroom door. As the water fell I imagined her getting married, the flowers in her hair and the string ensemble playing as she walked down the aisle. Her husband a
lunk of a man; his head shaved and looking like a security guard in his hired suit and tails.
    When she came back into the room, Angela was fully dressed, her hair wet at the ends. She picked up her overnight bag.
    ‘I’m sorry, Marty, I just needed to know,’ she said and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
    She shut the door behind her and I went to the window to see her drive away. Across the bypass, a twenty-four-hour supermarket glowed red and blue. I pulled on my jeans and headed out to get
supplies.

The Best Place in Town

David Falmer couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he lost control of John’s stag party; but he knew it was long before the topic of conversation had turned to
hookers. By then it was late, and instead of