3

Tonight, somewhere in a Soho back-street, I'll be staring over cheap French food, an ashtray, a bottle of house white, a candle perhaps, at Becca. Her small, marbly blue eyes. Her pursed little mouth, flashing out the occasional giggle or grin. Her tanned arms. And the top of the path of her cleavage, as tiny as a hint, there in the opening of her red shirt. Always red.

I'll be thinking back six years - me a student, her an accountant - thinking back to the sex we had - to her dressing for work, me dragging her back to my bed, tearing her buttons open, grabbing at her flesh, her neck, her hair, pulling her toward me, on to me, the skirt wrenched up, the pants ripped down, the spanking, the kissing, my cock into her mouth, her cunt onto my face, then the fucking, the quick hard wet brutal basic fucking, and her face, agonized with pleasure, beautiful, as she comes. Then, a glance at the clock. She'll be late. Again. "Fucking hell, Adam. Why push my buttons when I'm going to work? Couldn't you wait?" And, all the times on the arm chair in the lounge. The times against the wall in the hall. All the times that my housemate, working late, never caught us.

I'll be thinking back five and a half years. Me having cooked her a mediocre meal, as best I could. Another random argument out of nowhere. Politics, music, the media? Something or other. (& had she been sacked by then, or not?) I'll be thinking back to Becca leaving half the plate of that pasta. To the look of disgust, dragging down the features of her face, her head below her neck. Silence. "Going to the loo." Off she creeps. I could have just put on the TV. Picked up a book. Opened another lager. But I stormed to the toilet and forced open the door, to shout at her. And there she was, head over the bowl, fingers in her throat, the smell of vomit, her horrified eyes turning toward me...

I'll be thinking back to the years in between then and now. Sex, drunk and occasional and intense and loveless. The stabs at a relationship that stabbed back. Fragments of conversations: How it began when her Father would laugh off her left-wing arguments over dinner. The secret ways of throwing up in silence. How to get rid of the smell. She was thirteen.

Eventually, the counselling. And eventually, declaring herself over it. Happy. And then the weight-gain, the massive weight-gain. And then the job in the Labour party, the guy she met there, all thinning hair and crooked teeth, who cooks for her and writes speeches for somebody or other. Our drifting apart. The occasional emails. And tonight - looking at her again, in a romantic setting, recalling the brutal facts of distant failures, making encouraging noises about gyms, with wine-glasses clinking over vague toasts to the future, but not to the past.