Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

“Is it?”

She nodded and asked my name. After I told her there was a silence and we both looked down at the open bottles she held, I taking sideways glances at her, noticing that her body was thin, thinner than mine, slight, boyish, until she looked up at me, saw me looking and held out the nearest bottle.

“You want another beer?” she asked, “it’s better than a can.”

I took the bottle, finding the lightly-coloured liquid inside sweeter and less chemical than the lager. We began to talk, the people surrounding us, the party and the music, the bright light, dying away as she told me how she went to the same university as me, studied art, liked painting and bright colours, action and movement, mentioned Futurism, piquing my interest. In exchange, I told her about my writing, about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Marcel Proust, worried I would sound pretentious, even as I took self-satisfied pride in reeling off their names, but she had not heard of them so could not judge me. She did not read much, or “enough”, she said, but would like to read something of mine some time, if I would show her. Of course I would, I said. She smiled against the rim of her bottle and looked over at two girls a few metres away, who giggled when they saw me looking and turned away. I felt embarrassed suddenly, back in the party, among all the other people, but separate, on the outskirts, with a stranger, an unknown girl who had brought me a beer and started a conversation. I caught a glimpse of Simon through a gap between two people, looking serious as he discussed something, a game probably, judging by who he spoke with, and I felt annoyed, annoyed that Remi should have watched me and spoken to her friends and come over here and sat by me with two beers in her hands and started talking to me. It annoyed me even as I appreciated the gesture, hypocrite that I am, because obviously, drunkenly, she had decided she had a crush on me, on the person sat alone on the sofa across the room of a party, she had said as much, when I made a joke, said that she “liked” me, though she did not, could not, know me, know where I had come from or who my past lovers had been, whether I was single or my girlfriend was absent, what I liked or disliked, whether I drank coffee or preferred cinnamon tea, whether I would rather have come to a party or stayed in tonight, whether I thought verisimilitude was more important in fiction than plot and dramatic event.

There was a break in our conversation, Remi reddened again, I silent, conflicted, looking blankly out across the crowd until I saw a face that was familiar but through several months’ absence had drifted beyond the bounds of immediate recollection, creating a brief pause before a name emerged: Nick. He called to me and came over, asked how I was, looked over at Remi. His hair was longer than when I had last seen it, and dyed black, though he still dressed in the same tight black band t-shirts and skinny-fit black jeans, broken only at his waist by a silver-shining belt buckle shaped like an audio cassette. I asked if he was here with Mike but, no, he said, Mike wasn’t there, they were no longer together but, seeing my face contort into condolence and regret, they were still friends, still hung around together, and it was weeks since they had broken up; they were both over it. I felt Remi’s awkwardness next to me, her sense of alienation, imagined empathetically her desire that I would turn to her and say truthfully, with conviction, “Nick, this is my girlfriend, Remi; Remi, this is Nick,” felt simultaneously still annoyed with her, or with myself, promising myself, as Nick continued to talk, that I would not fall in love with her, not right now, not straight away, not because she had shown some interest in me, whoever she was, adamant because of the beer, for which I had no tolerance, drinking it as rarely as I did, already tipsy and distrustful of my own perceptions, even after only one can and one bottle.

That I might already be falling for her, reciprocating her obvious feelings for the simple act of her coming over and bringing me a beer, disgusted me, but after Nick left, taking with him his great enthusiasm for everything and his overbearing laugh, I continued to talk with her and, as the party began to die down around two, as the hosts began to usher people towards the doors, Simon being lost in the crowd or outside already, Remi’s friends being abandoned or having abandoned her, we collected our coats and walked out together. Perhaps from the shock of the cold night air, or from moving after sitting and talking for so long, Remi suddenly went pale and darted out across the concrete forecourt of the house towards the kerb where she immediately bent over and vomited into a drain. Several people who still lingered in groups, some smoking, others waiting for stragglers still inside, watched the girl with mild interest and surprise, but did not move to help her, perhaps assuming that, because I had been stood with her, I would be the one to go over. When I did she stood and her face flushed, though the bright red of her cheeks was harder to discern in the street-light than the glistening of the watery sick across the bars of the drain cover. I asked if she was alright.

“I am now.” She wiped her mouth with a tissue pulled from her coat pocket, then held out and squinted at strands of her hair to see if they had been caught in the sudden cascade. They shone in the light but appeared to be dry.

“It’s cold,” she said, letting the hair fall back into place and pulling from her pockets some fleece mittens with cats-paw designs on their underside.

“I didn’t think you’d drunken that much,” I said.

She shrugged, “I didn’t eat before I came out,” then she added, quickly, for she had seen her friends come out through the front door, “will you walk me home? It’s not far, just a couple of streets away.” She gestured vaguely in the direction opposite to my house and my mind flashed to the walk home alone, to Simon walking alone also, unless anyone else went that way, then to Don Quixote, to the chivalric knights-errant he idolised, briefly to the characters of my novel, meeting for the first time in a café, spontaneously striking up conversation, embarking so easily, with so little provocation, implausibly even, at the behest of the author, for the convenience of the narrative on the same ‘quest’ together. It must happen, I thought, that people meet at cafés and strike up conversation, just as they do at parties, and that Remi came over and talked to me was proof of that, for which I should thank her.

“Sure,” I said, feeling for my mp3 player and headphones in the inside pocket of my coat. Music, the music of Dashboard Confessional perhaps, who I enjoyed, I told myself, ironically, would be my companion home, while chivalry, ‘being a gentleman’, served as an excuse to walk her home. Remi smiled and introduced me to her friends when they reached us, a blond-haired girl named Alice and the other with dark hair called Helen, who said they were going to a club, did Remi, or both of us, want to come? No, said Remi, she was going home and I would walk her. There was a note of pride in her voice, and the look she shared with Alice was meaningful and private, as if she had said something further telepathically. I watched the two girls leave and looked for Simon but did not see him because, as I discovered later, he had already left.

“Shall we go?” Remi asked.

I turned away from the people outside the house, abandoning my search for Simon and nodded at the girl in the red coat who stood with arms folded against the cold, breath coming in small bursts from between her colourless lips. My hands in my pocket clutching, but not wearing, my leather gloves, we began our walk, in silence, along the monochrome pavement, legs lit up, casting dancing shadows in occasionally passing headlights. I wondered if she understood the thrill of walking down nocturnal streets where the only sound was the distant whoosh of night-time traffic and leaves skittering and stepped-on on the pavement, the thrill of being here rather than anywhere else, at night, moving between amber pools in the darkness, thinking about the people warm and asleep in the passing houses, about the students and workers rowdy in the city centre, drinking, revelling, Helen and Alice gone too, dissatisfied with the party, insatiable, to join them, while Remi and I were neither asleep nor dancing, but here, frosty air on our skin, bodies warm beneath our coats, sharing a silent walk. I could not know what she was thinking, whether she longed only for her bed, in a room I had never seen, if she was too nervous to speak, her confidence and conversation having evaporated with the end of the party, no longer having the people around, her two friends, to support her. Perhaps she still felt sick, I thought as I looked at her nose and saw in her profile a kind of sharp prettiness. I asked her, but she said she felt fine, had “got it all out,” now felt sober and cold. The final word, spoken as she looked at me, as we passed beneath the full glare of a street-light, sounded like an invitation to pull her close and put my arm around her, but I did not.

We passed only two other people on our walk: a man in his twenties with shoulders hunched beneath a black hoodie, who caused me to draw close enough to Remi to brush against her shoulder so he could go by, and an older man, on the other side of a different street, who had a pipe in his mouth and held, at the end of a lead, a darkly-coloured Labrador. To my observation that it seemed late to be walking a dog, Remi smiled and said “this city is full of strange people.” I replied that anywhere you go has strange people. Remi nodded and was silent, ending our brief, meaningless conversation, though with no regret on my part because no longer, now that we had passed who we were, what we did, what we liked, was our conversation forced, instead could come and go as it pleased, comfortably, and was free to be entirely pointless, even if as banal as pointing out that it was late to walk a dog. I supposed we would be friends.

“Here’s my road,” Remi said regretfully as we came onto an even quieter terraced street further away from the main road than the house-party house had been. “I’d invite you in, but my parents will be asleep.”

“Don’t you live with those girls from earlier?” I asked.

“No, I liked my room here too much to leave,” Remi said, leading me now up the path towards a front door overhung with ivy, lowering her voice as if it would rise up through the windows and wake everyone inside. “And I’d rather save on rent and spend the money on art supplies.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Wait here a moment,” she said, disappearing into the dark hallway, fumbling around at a desk for a moment and then returning with a pen in her hand. “I couldn’t find any paper,” she said, “so give me your arm.”

I asked why and she said that she wanted to give me her phone number. When I suggested why not just type it into my phone she giggled, covered her mouth to stifle the sound and said that perhaps she was not as sober as she had thought. I handed her my phone and the keys lit up beneath her jabbing thumb.

“Text me sometime when you’re bored,” she said, handing the phone back to me.

When I had typed in her name and put it back in my pocket, she stepped back out onto her front step, in her socks because she had already kicked her shoes off, and hugged me, tightly, but genuinely, without desperation, so I could feel her arms through my coat, and thanked me for walking her home. I left, mind blank, filled only with the echoing hollow music from my headphones, feeling nothing as I walked, barely thinking about Remi or the night or anything. Back at my own house, through the black metal gate that creaked and the wooden back door that had swollen with the cold, filling the frame so that it caught and protested when pushed open, I found Leo and Simon in the kitchen, both in night-clothes; one in shorts, the other in baggy tartan trousers, both wearing faded t-shirts and flushed with the heat from the radiators. Simon, who leant against the worktop waiting for the kettle to boil, shivered in the blast of cold air from the open door, while I recoiled against the wall of heat.

“It’s hot in here,” I said, squeezing through the doorway into the adjacent living room, past Leo who stood against the frame, noticing, as I pulled off my scarf, let my long coat fall onto the sofa, the wry smile the two of them directed at me, realising that they had been talking. I looked at them quizzically, waiting for an answer.

Leo broke the silence: “I hear you’ve been chatting up girls,” he said.

I pushed past him again, pulled a mug from the shelf and placed it next to Simon’s, dropping, a moment later, a single round teabag into it. Then I leant against the draining-board, opposite and diagonal to Simon, and shrugged. Simon stared attentively at me while Leo pressed the matter, asking who she was, but I said I did not know her. The kettle shook, then clicked, and Simon turned to fill the two mugs.

“You were talking to her for a long time,” he said, looking sideways at me as he swirled the bags around in the darkening liquid, “you must have learned something about her.”

“If you were curious, why didn’t you come over?” I said peevishly. Simon did not answer, instead scooped the limp teabag from his mug and dropped it into the bin, returning the spoon to the counter to allow me to do the same while he reached down to retrieve a bottle of milk from the fridge. I moved over to pick up the spoon and asked him in a less defensive way why he had left so early without telling me. He replied, straightening up and pouring the white liquid into his tea, that it was firstly because he had had the opportunity to walk most of the way home with his friend, and secondly because he had looked over and I was still talking to “that girl”. He passed the milk to me while Leo, bored and impatient, interjected a question about her physical attractiveness.

“She’s more Simon’s type,” I replied, again surprising myself with the defensive tone in my voice. Simon shrugged and sipped his tea. “She was sick after you left,” I volunteered, the ceramic side of my mug hot against my enclosing fingers, wanting again to compensate for the harsh tone that seemed to spring up from the inexplicable and vague annoyance thoughts of Remi created within me. “She threw up in the street, so I walked her home.”

“Did you kiss her?” Leo asked, stretched up now and swinging with his fingertips on the top of the door-frame like a bored child.

“With the taste of sick in her mouth? I already told you I don’t like her.”

Leo shrugged and left, no longer interested in our company, while mine and Simon’s conversation turned briefly to another subject before we each went to our bedrooms. I was tired, and so did not stay up long, but as I lay in bed I thought of Remi’s arms tight around my shoulders, and that brought to my mind my first embrace with Lila, by the creaking black gate on that cold September evening. That had been more than a year before, and had filled me with warmth and optimism, expectation, while Remi’s embrace, genuine as it was, felt insubstantial, inspired in me nothing more than indifference and mild resistance, had been even mildly uncomfortable, squeezing my chest, my lungs, causing me to gasp silently the cutting air. It had barely registered in this gasp how scentless her body was, though I realised now I had noticed only the faintest aroma of shampoo when she pressed against me, no lingering perfume like Lila had worn, no smell of alcohol or clothes or anything, but perhaps that was the cold, blocking up my nose or suppressing all scent so that I could not smell and be repulsed by her vomit on the drain, could observe it detachedly as I now recalled the hug. And yet I wondered why I was thinking about the hug from this girl at all, this girl who I had claimed already to my housemates that I did not like, why I would compare it with my first embrace of Lila, whom I had had strong feelings for at the time. True it did not happen every day that a girl would so blatantly flirt with me, would hug me, but I would not fall in love with her for that, I would not fall in love with her, I was adamant, though it seemed inevitable, and I fell asleep nursing that thought: I would not fall in love with her.

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

“Oh you poor dear,” the woman exclaimed, seeing the blood running from his elbow, his knee, the side of his finger.

The student looked up at her, pale, shaken, saw a woman also pale, with freckles across her nose and straight, reddish-brown hair down past her shoulders, helping to move his bike off his leg. The cardigan she wore was tight around her thin arms. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head?” she asked. “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No,” the student said slowly, stretching and contracting his limbs.

“Are you alright to stand?” the woman asked, helping him up. “Come inside, I’ve got a first aid box.” In the shock of the moment she had forgotten her usual shyness.

The student seemed about to protest but, looking down at the rent in his jeans and the blood seeping into the denim, allowed himself to be lead into the small front yard of the woman’s small terraced house. While he stood there, feeling awkward. a cold numbness that was worse and more mysterious than pain gnawing at his injuries, she went back to pick up his bike and bring it through the gate.

“I think the wheel’s gotten bent,” she said as she brought it through, but he had seen that before she said it. He frowned and she looked regretful as she opened the front door.

She lead him through a short hallway and asked him to take a seat in the living room while she went to fetch her medical box. He perched on the edge of a red settee and plucked a few tissues from a box on the low Ikea coffee table, nervous of dripping blood on the carpet or furniture. Through the window, the weak autumn sun, filtered by the remaining yellowed leaves on the nearest of the trees that lined this street, illuminated a silent sitting room that smelled faintly of furniture polish and pot pourri. In the corner near the window stood an inexpensive, though quite large, flat-screen television, in the opposite corner a tall lamp, in another corner, set into one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, a bookshelf half filled with books and half with DVDs and a few old VHSs. The student did not have time to read the titles of many of these before the woman returned, holding a white plastic box, a beige towel, and a matching flannel that steamed in what the student now realised was the cold air of the room.

The woman sat down next to him, her knees together, turned towards him, the lower half of her legs bent away from him against the front of the sofa. She put the folded towel down on the cushion between them.

“Take your shirt off,” she instructed.

Self-consciously the student slid his arm out through the sleeve, lay the shirt down, bloodied side up, over the arm of the settee, allowed the woman to lift his arm with her slender cool fingers. The warm touch of the flannel against his elbow raised goose-pimples in the surrounding skin. When the woman had dabbed a few times and removed it, an uneven circle of the beige had been stained a watercolour-red. The woman looked up at his face.

“Sorry,” she said, “the house is always cold.”

The student smiled thinly, still looked concerned, said nothing as the woman dried the damp skin with a corner of the towel. This too absorbed some of the redness.

“Oh, don’t worry about these,” she said, “they’re old and I never use them anyway.”

With the blood gone they could both see that the injury was just a scrape; some torn and grazed skin. The woman reached in the box for a pack of sterile gauze padding, tore it open in a quick, neat motion.

“Do you live here alone?” the student asked as she pressed the gauze against his skin, reached for surgical tape and scissors.

She looked up again, surprised at the question, her fingers still clasped lightly around his arm.

“Yes,” she said.

The student thought he detected a sadness, a loneliness, in her eyes, but then felt that, no, it was not located there but seemed to hang permanently around her like a shroud, making her seem older than she was. He worried that the one thing he had said to her had been wrong, so he quickly said,

“Thanks for doing this. I don’t think we even have Elastoplasts at home.”

“Where do you live?”

“A few streets away, near the cemetery.”

The woman put her hand on his wrist and gently bent his arm. The student felt the tape pull tight against his skin, but it did not tear or come away.

“Shall I do your knee or your finger next?” she asked.

The student twisted his hand round to look at the side of his smallest finger. It ached when he flexed it, but did not seem badly cut or damaged.

“I don’t think my finger’s too bad,” he said.

The woman wiped it with another part of the flannel.

“No, it’s not too bad,” she said, “I have a small plaster if you’d like.”

“I think it’s stopped bleeding, it should be alright.”

The woman felt a strong urge to kiss the finger, or the back of his hand, but she resisted.

“Shall we look at your knee then?” she asked.

They both looked down at the bloody patch on the knee. The strangeness of the situation, of being suddenly in this woman’s house, tended by her, had begun to dissolve, but now he felt awkward again. She mustn’t kneel down in front of me, he felt.

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I don’t mind.”

He guessed she was fifteen, at most twenty, years older than him. If she was twenty years older, that would make her twice his age. She seemed sort of faded, he thought, as if she had spent her life in autumn days; like a violet pressed between the pages of a book.

He bent forwards to pull and roll up his jeans. The friction of the denim, soft as it was from years of wear, rubbed against the cut, renewing its pain and smearing the inside of the material with a thin line of red. It would have been easier to just pull them down, but it would have been too awkward to sit there with this stranger in just his t-shirt and shorts.

“It doesn’t look as bad as your elbow,” she said, leaning forwards to inspect it, “bring it up here and I’ll put a pad on it.”

She moved the towel and patted the cushion next to her. He pulled off his shoe, brought his bare knee up next to her and held his shin with clasped hands. Their heads came close together and a curtain of her hair fell forwards, parallel with his knee. She reached up to tuck It behind her ear and continued to dab with the cooling flannel. Neither spoke nor looked at the other while she worked, only at the knee.

“All done.”

He ran his finger over the dressing, felt the strangeness of its unfeeling mass against his skin.

“Thank you,” he said, putting his foot back on the floor.

“It’s a shame about your jeans,” she said.

“Most of my jeans have holes in anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. The tone of the utterance expressed both concern and sympathy.

“I like them that way, in summer they’re cooler than shorts.”

There was a pause, a silence that stretched beyond the small living room, beyond the cold house, right down to either end of the street.

“Do you have any more injuries?” Her voice was quiet.

“I don’t think so, I suppose I –”

She reached up suddenly and stroked the side of his jaw, feeling beneath her fingers the soft stubble.

“Sorry,” she said, drawing her hand back.

He said nothing. She was looking at him, but he could not read her expression.

“You might stay a few minutes more,” she said, almost as a question, “wait a few minutes before you put a strain on the cuts.”

From his silence she assumed acquiescence, and reached up again, this time to his neck. He allowed himself to be pulled towards her, and downwards, until his head rested on her lap. He could see, sideways now, the coffee table, and beyond it the unlit fireplace, and before it the blurred horizon of her knees, and he could smell the scent of her dress; the faintest aroma of cotton and perfume and dust. On the lower shelf of the coffee table lay a DVD case with the title ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and on the top of the coffee table was a paperback he had not noticed before, the underside, or topside, of its splayed pages facing him so that he could see neither its title nor author. The woman began to play with his hair, twisting its short tufts around her finger and then tracing winding patterns through the haphazard strands. She was not so very old, but she felt that she had lived here for a very long time.

“Do you read much?” she asked, “does anyone your age read any more?”

“I read,” he said, “but probably not as much as I should.”

His hands were down by his thighs, his fingers and thumbs moving and twisting against each other. He was tempted to reach up and run his hand along her calf, feel the plastic friction of her tights beneath his palm, reciprocate the familiar way with which she had touched the damaged parts of his body and now played with his hair, but he did not.

“In the book I’m reading,” she began, “a man and a woman make love, and start to fall in love, but the man does not like her hands. Her fingers are too short and fat and inelegant. He says they are ugly, calls them child’s hands. He thinks she’s beautiful, but he can’t help but focus on her hands. It’s a really big deal for him, so big that he calls off the relationship, though it’s not yet explained why it was such a big deal. I don’t know if it will be.”

Her voice was quiet, demure, yet passionate and honest. He could imagine, as he lay there, the warmth of her lap rising up through his cheek, her reading a bed-time story to a child.

“Later on, years later” she continued, “the man finds the woman all wasted in a street in Milan. He broke her heart, ruined her, and she turned to drugs and prostitution. Her skin is all grey , her face is drawn, her eyes are dull; he can’t see the spark of life and love that once was there, only a murky cloud of despair. He’s moved to tears as he kneels down in front of her, and she seems only dimly to recognise him, but he takes her hands and holds them and apologises to her. Then he realises that her hands haven’t changed, they’re still just the same, as he remembered them, and now he thinks they’re beautiful. He kisses them and falls in love with them, and with her, and promises he’ll look after her.”

Outside, the sun had disappeared beyond the roofs of the houses opposite and the breeze had become stiffer, causing the black bag with leaves in it to shudder and crinkle loudly.

“That’s as far as I’ve got,” the woman finished, apologetically. “I suppose it sounds trashy.”

A car drove by the house, its tires creating a wet, sticky sound as they rolled over the fallen leaves.

“I’ve always thought I have nice hands, that they’re my best feature. I used to be able to play the piano.”

In the stress she put on the I, there seemed implicit the statement that no one else had ever said so. The student felt that he should reach up and enclose her fingers within his own and tell her that she did have nice, soft, delicate, feminine hands, but instead he was thinking about something else:

“The other day,” he said, “there was this insect on the glass of our back door, which is the one we use to come in and go out by. I think it was some sort of grasshopper, but it might have been a cricket. It was brilliantly, intensely green. It had long elegant legs. I was a little afraid of it. I wondered what it was doing there, and especially at this time of year, but then I closed the door and thought no more about it.”

He could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but did not turn to look. Her hand was now still, fingers curled against the bone behind his ear.

“The next day I noticed it lying on the doormat inside our kitchen. Someone had trodden on it and it was squashed into the material, its long legs sticking out pathetically. Over the following couple of days I noticed it getting more and more trodden in, and soon it had lost its bright green and become brown with dirt. I don’t suppose anyone else noticed it, or they just ignored it. It’s still there now, looking just the same as a piece of chewing gum stuck to a pavement.”

His words trailed into silence, and then he suddenly sat up and looked at his watch. His hair was flattened on the side he had been lying on, but stuck out where the woman had been playing with it.

“I’d better go,” he said, “I was supposed to have been at my girlfriend’s house by now.”

He pulled his shoe back on. The spell of spontaneous intimacy had been broken. Now he stood, and the woman escorted him to the door, watched as he wheeled his bicycled out the front gate. There was grating sound as the distorted part of the wheel passed the break pads, but the sound was only slight. He mounted the saddle.

“You be careful,” the woman warned.

“Thank you,” the student said.

Their final look into each other’s faces was brief. Twilight suited her, he thought, and she was quite beautiful. He pushed down on his pedal, lifted his other foot from the ground, and began a cautious journey along the pavement. The woman watched him until he disappeared at the end of the street, and then fetched in her broom and dropped the half-empty black bag into the bin. She realised, as she went back into the living room to retrieve the towel and the flannel and her white medical box and switch on a light, that she had never asked his name, nor given hers, but felt that somehow it was better that way. As she bent to pick up the towel she noticed on the coffee-table, next to the tissue box, a few crumpled blood-stained tissues; his blood, discarded like leaves from a tree.

She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.

He stood and dressed. Grey sky. Hot tea. Paint peeled on the garden shed, wind blew leaves, rain hung back warily. Either of the girls (young-adult university students) would do. Neither seemed ideal, in a way just place-holders, diverting if not holding back the waves of sensation, the ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning of each day, until the next crush came along. Did two half-crushes make a whole? Not really. In the same way that an earthworm cut down the middle would continue to squirm, but would be unlikely to limp on alive as either segment.

Another sat down at the table, silhouetted moodily by a free-standing lamp above his head. Her eyes dart away, attention drawn. They have the same coloured hair, the same fancy dress. There is a murmuring in the bar, a warm sway of bodies. The low-lights are cosy, the music rhythmic, far away. She is talking to him. They’re always together. This is before she’s a face half-looked for in a crowd. She will stand soon, light-up eyes flickering , sparkling in the room, their warmth permeating her breath. She’s a firefly drawn like a moth to him, the one beneath the lamp, to them, the people around, to paint, to shiny glittering mechanical things, to soft cotton clothes and fresh-ripe fruits. She’s a mirror too.

A mirror, infinitely detailed: She’d be one of those old-fashioned gold-shining brass-framed mirrors, with black-green tarnish in amongst the deep-set grooves of the sculpted surround. And in her he would see whatever he wanted to see. If she was friendly, if she was taking an interest, if she was painting a picture of him, she fancied him. If she spent all her time with someone else, or even seemed to, then she fancied that someone else. And if she, or anyone else, was too shy to talk to him because they fancied him, then they didn’t fancy him. And how did he feel?

He looked for her in a crowd. He walked to her house the next day, saw the painting, saw her, saw the other, but no others. Alone. The three of them. They talked. The two that were not him told stories in the manner of a couple, with exchanged glances, editing and referencing and confirming each others narratives. They were the characters, they were the themes. Tea was offered and consumed. He was already over any jealousy, he had never committed any feelings anyway, rather, he had let them all be swept away, purged by the wave.

He might be wrong: paintings and light-up eyes, bedrooms and phone numbers. It would take hours to finish that painting. Hours staring at the same face, assessing and recreating every feature with minute detail, with sweeping, bold, confident brush strokes, and timid, delicate dabs of paint. How could you not fall in love with a face like that? Without love, without affection and dedication, the painting would fall lifeless or remain unfinished, like the glimpse caught in a mirror’s shard. Love. Love and dedication. When he wrote he loved every one of his subjects. He loved all his objects too. They were all beautiful and breathing: they had to be, otherwise they would be ugly and stale. The writer, like the artist was polygamous, even if the person wasn’t. She understood.

He left her house. He had judged it time to leave. He didn’t have a toothbrush there. There was a park near where he lived. It would be so nice to have someone to walk through with, he had thought the other day. That had been the first, and so far only time he had been there, having just moved to his new student-house. It had been evening when he had gone. Acute angle low orange bright sunlight, long sharp shadows. A woman read a paper on one of the benches that surrounded an inactive fountain. Further into the park his shadow stretched across a waist-high still-water toy yacht pond with lilies in the corner. Idyllic, somehow as if the park was unchanged since the nineteen-fifties.

There was a miniature railway track too, all criss-crossing metal veins stretching out under gates, behind fences across paths, like ridges of gnarled horse-chestnut leaves. Like abandoned coastal beach huts, faded autumn sun, the cold reflective toy yacht pond and an inactive fountain were indicative of out-of-season entropy. It was beautiful. He had sat by the toy yacht pond, leaning against its waist-high edge, to text his ex-girlfriend. She would have appreciated this park, a walk in this park, arms linked, steps in time, and he wished for someone else to experience it, even second hand, even though he would just have soon as been alone in that park, as he was, or at least alone apart from the woman reading the paper, some dog-walkers, some cyclists, a group of children playing football.

He stood and walked away from the toy yacht pond. There was more park to see and the sun was setting. As he walked he thought of the one he had thought of a few days later in his warm, comfortable morning bed. Could friends, a male and a female, walk like that through a park? Could they walk arm in arm and be nothing more, but maybe be something more, but more likely stay as friends? Perhaps he would ask her sometime. Perhaps there would be times in the coming months when he would walk her home, or they might stop after lessons for a cup of tea or some other hot drink and sit across the table from each other and talk easily, not as couples tell a story but as friends share a joke. Perhaps when they stopped at her door she might wrap her arms around him to say goodbye, or he might stoop a little and she move onto her tip-toes, leaning up for a quick kiss, on the cheek, on the lips.

Even if they both wanted that, it would take time, weeks, months. The sun was setting. There wouldn’t be many more days like this, warm enough to walk late in parks without wrapping up, hurrying steps, breathing misted breath. And that was if they both wanted that, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be with anyone, except at times like then, walking alone in that park, because if he was with someone, then someone else would be experiencing this beautiful, quaint place with him, validating, in a way, his own experience. But what about after, and tomorrow? There were moments he wanted someone, moments he felt unworthy of someone, and moments he was content on his own. The sensations ran together.

He was attracted to the lustre of eyes lit up, like he was to the low autumn sun, and he was attracted to the warmth of another body, in a bed, linked through his arm, but these were sensations and not people. He could afford, as a writer, an artist, to be polygamous with sensations, but as a person, he could not commit, not until he was someone different and less different, to a person, even someone who understood. Would that change when the painting was complete? That was days away, many days and many waves, who could say how he would feel then? Most likely, nothing would change, because the painting, even if she fell in love with it, with those affectionate oil eyes staring back at her, would be a fiction, and not a person. He was the person, and he was in love with his own fictions, just as she was in love with hers.

He left the park. Crowds were made of many people, many bodies, many faces, hers was just one, just as anyone else’s was just one face. If he looked hard enough into a crowd, just as if he looked hard enough into a mirror, or at a person’s actions, he would see whatever he wanted to see, pick out whatever he wanted to pick out. That wouldn’t necessarily be an accurate representation, just an interpretation, and, like a phantom girl in a warm bed or eye-makeup and a fancy dress costume, it would just be a fiction.