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even wanted to see it, well. Perhaps the price looked a little high.
    Dan pushed his seat back, about to make his excuses, get to his feet, go to his room out back, away from them all, to call Claudia, forget about this whole wash of an evening, but Lilah wasn’t finished.
    ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen his film, Jen,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.
    ‘Well, you know, as I said…’
    ‘It’s available on DVD,’ Lilah said cheerfully. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting.’
    ‘Lilah,’ Dan said, ‘let’s just leave this now, OK?’
    ‘No, why? It’s your
masterpiece
. And Jen comes out of it pretty well, doesn’t she? A little fickle, I suppose, a bit flighty…’ The look on Lilah’s face was pure malice. ‘Hopping from one thing to another…’
    ‘Lilah, come on.’
    ‘
I,
on the other hand, come across as a vacuous, drug-addled bitch, don’t I?’
    ‘Jesus, Lilah!’ Dan got to his feet. ‘It’s fiction! Jen’s not in the film, and neither are you.
Fiction
, OK? It even says so at the beginning: all resemblance to personages living or dead, blah, blah, blah.’
    ‘If you say so, Dan,’ Lilah said, a thin smile on her lips, one eyebrow raised. She leaned forward and tapped her cigarette on the edge of his glass, flicking the ash into his wine.
    An hour later he lay on the bed in the barn listening to the sound of the building creaking. The wind was getting up. He shivered despite the warmth of the room, imagining what it must be like to be out in this weather, up on the hills behind the house or in the woods. He slipped off the bed and clambered down the ladder to make sure that the sliding door was locked, trying vainly to push from his mind a hundred horror movie images, things coming in from the cold, looking for warmth, looking for food. He’d always had a somewhat overactive imagination.
    Dan looked at his phone to check the time. It was almost midnight. He was mildly disappointed that he’d no missed calls and no texts, no love notes from Claudia, not even a message asking if he’d got there safely which, when you thought about it, was pretty remiss of her. He had been driving up to the snowy mountains in a fast car, after all. He thought about calling her, but decided that by this time she’d probably be on the plane anyway. And he didn’t want to look needy.
    He had to force himself to play it cool, always had done. He wasn’t very good at it. He thought about his arrival just a few hours earlier, how he’d had all these things in his head that he wanted to say to Jen, to everyone, how he’d wanted to breeze in, nonchalant, clap Andrew on the back and give Lilah a wink and a kiss, and then he’d turned up and there was no one else there and he’d stammered an awkward hello and blushed and not known whether to hug Jen or kiss her, and of course he should have kissed her, but he went for the hug and it was awkward and just… ugh. He could feel his face colouring at the memory.
    And so he overcompensated, as he always had, withdrawn into himself, so when she’d shown him out here to the barn and told him that her dad had died, he didn’t say anything, he barely reacted, he didn’t take her in his arms and give her a kiss as he should have done, as a normal person would, as an old friend would. He just froze up and looked away and, Christ, what must she think?
    He picked up his phone again and rang Claudia’s number. Straight to voicemail, obviously, but then he thought, perhaps she was on the phone when he was calling, perhaps she was dialling him at that very moment, so he rang her again and it went to voicemail again, and now she was going to have two missed calls from him and he was going to look needy.
    The wind shrieked and he jumped. There was no way he was getting to sleep without another drink.

 
     
    Wednesday 21 February 1996
    Hi Dan,
    How’s it going? I can’t believe Norwich is really as terrible as you claim.
    Or perhaps it is, because you can’t