The Star Fraction

4

Catch

‘If you’re interested, you’ll be there.’

The train lurched. Carlisle’s sodium-lit brown buildings began to slide by.

‘What?’ Startled out of a train-induced trance, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed the remark. The man on the opposite side of the so-called Pullman table wore a cloth cap and a jacket of some shiny substance that might once have been corduroy. His faded check shirt looked like a pyjama-top. He’d been drinking with silent determination from a half-bottle of Bell’s all the long afternoon from Euston.

Now he rubbed a brown hand along his jaw, rasping white stubble over sallow skin, and repeated his utterance. I smiled desperately.

‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Very true.’

‘You’ll be there,’ he said. He reached for the bottle, judged its remaining contents by weight and replaced it on the table, then began to roll a cigarette with the other hand. His gaze, sharp with an occasional lapse into bleariness, stayed on me all the while.

‘Where?’ I looked away, flipped open a packet of Silk Cut (my gesture towards healthy living). My reflection flared in a brief virtual image outside the train. The sodden February countryside seeped past.

‘Disnae matter,’ the man said, exhaling smoke and the sour odour of digested whisky. ‘Wherever. Ah kin tell. You’re interested.’ He paused, cocked his head and gave me a cunning look. ‘You’re one a they international socialists. Ah kin tell.’

I smiled again and shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken, I’m –’ I stopped, helpless to explain. I’d spent a week researching in the LSE library and arguing with my father. My head was buzzing with Marxisms.

‘Ach, it’s aw right son,’ he said. ‘Ah ken youse have aw kinds i wee divisions. I dinnae bother about them. You’re an intellectual and Ah’m just a retired working man. But you’re wannay uz.’

With that he opened the bottle, took a sip from it and passed it to me, kindly wiping his hand on his thigh and then around the rim as he did so, to remove any harmful germs.

‘And then what happened?’ Reid asked.

We turned, hunched against the drizzle, into Park Road, past the pseudo-Tudor frontage of the Blythswood Cottage pub and ducked into the doorway of Voltaire & Rousseau, the best second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. I’d run into Reid at lunchtime, after not having seen him for some weeks – partly because I was working hard on my dissertation and partly because Reid was either politically active or out with Annette. In the first month of their relationship I’d once or twice had a few drinks with both of them, but I’d found it too awkward to continue.

‘He fell asleep,’ I laughed. ‘I left the bottle severely alone and woke him up at the Central. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Looked like he didn’t recognise me.’

By this time we were both moving crabwise, heads tilted, systematically scanning the shelves that covered the narrow shop’s walls. First we’d scour the politics and philosophy section, then – if we had any spare cash left – move on to the back room to hit the SF paperbacks. One of the shop’s owners – a tall, tubby, cheerful chap with thin hair and thick glasses – looked up from his book at the till with a smile and a nod. He, I’d decided, must be Rousseau; his gaunt and gloomy partner, Voltaire.

‘Probably an old ILP’er or something,’ Reid muttered, pouncing on a blue Charles H. Kerr & Co. volume of Dietzgen. He blew dust off it and sneezed.

‘One pound fifty!’ he said in a low voice, so that Rousseau couldn’t overhear his delight and guess what a bargain they’d let slip. He twisted back to his search, a read-head moving along the memory-tape of shelves.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘it makes me sick sometimes to think of all those old militants selling off their libraries to eke out their pensions. Or dying, and their kids – God, I can just imagine them, middle-aged, middle-class wankers who’ve always been a bit ashamed of the bodach’s rambling reminiscences – rummaging through his pathetic stuff and finding a shelf of socialist classics and about to heave them on the tip when suddenly the little gleam of a few quid lights up their greedy eyes!’

‘Just as well for us that it does,’ I said, wedging my fingers between two books to ease out a lurking pamphlet. ‘It’s the ones that end up on the tip that I – hey, look at this!’

I didn’t care who overheard. This was almost certainly unique, a living fossil: a wartime Russia Today Society pamphlet called Soviet Millionaires. It hadn’t stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist facade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners.

‘I’ve heard about it from my father,’ I told Reid. ‘But even he’d never had a copy. I’ll send it to him.’

‘Told you!’ Reid grinned down at me from a step-ladder. ‘You’re such an unselfish bastard! That’s what the old bloke saw in you! You’re a hereditary socialist!’

‘Ideology is hereditary?’ I scoffed. ‘And what does that make you?’

‘A grasping kulak, I guess,’ he said happily. ‘Ah, now what about this?’ He opened a book and studied the fly-leaf. ‘Stirner, The Ego and His Own, property of the Glasgow Anarchist Workers’ Circle, 1943. Five pounds.’

I stared up at him, open-mouthed. I didn’t realise I was reaching for it until he pulled it away. ‘Uh-uh. Finders keepers.’

‘It’s of no interest to you,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Reid stepped down the ladder, holding the book like a black Grail in front of my eyes. ‘Young Hegelians, German Ideology and all that. Marxist scholarship.’

‘You’re having me on!’

‘Yes, I am,’ Reid said. ‘But I do have a use for it. I’m going to buy it, and as soon as we get outside I’m going to sell it to you for a tenner.’

No lunches for a fortnight, and back to roll-ups. I could manage that.

‘It’s a deal!’ I almost shouted.

Reid stepped back and scrutinised me.

‘Just testing,’ he said. He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You passed.’

In the grey leaded light of the Union smoking-room, the air thick with the unappetising smell of over-percolated coffee-grounds, we sat in worn leather armchairs and flipped through our acquisitions. I smiled at the twisted dialectics of the wartime apologist, frowned over the laboured wit of the great amoralist. Fascism, communism and anarchism traced their ancestry back to the same Piltdown, the Berlin bars of the 1840s. Give me turn-of-the-century Vienna any day, I thought, its Ringstrasse a particle-accelerator of ideas.

We both sat back at the same moment. Reid toyed with the bamboo holder of the previous day’s Guardian. The MPLA had taken Huambo, not for the last time.

‘How’s Annette?’ I asked with guarded casualness.

‘Fine, as far as I know,’ Reid said. He turned over a page.

‘Not seen her for a bit?’

Reid laid down the paper and leaned forward, looking at me intently. ‘We’ve kind of…I don’t know…fallen out, drifted apart.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’

Reid spread his hands. ‘She’s got a real sharp mind, but she’s the most unpolitical person I’ve ever met. She never reads newspapers. It’s very hard to find things to talk about.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Sounds stupid, I know, but there it is.’

I nodded sympathetically: yes, women are hard to figure out. I was trying to remember the location of the Zoology Department.

I walked up University Avenue, the broad Victorian edifice – Gilmoreghast, as one rag-mag wit had called it – on my left, the Wellsian ’thirties Reading Room on my right. (I hadn’t used it since discovering that everything about it was perfect, except its acoustics, which were those of a whispering-gallery.)

At the top of the hill the pedestrian crossing was at red. I waited for the little green man, and wondered if I shouldn’t turn around right there, and wait until seeing Annette again could be passed off as a casual encounter…

No, I told myself firmly. If you’re interested, you’ll be there. I crossed and continued on down to the junction at the bottom, then left along an internal roadway between massive grey sandstone buildings set among patches of grass with flowerbeds and tall trees. The Zoology Department was another of those ancient buildings, solid as a church and founded on a rock of greater age. Inside, polished wood, tiling, the smell of small-animal droppings. From behind a glass partition a receptionist peered at me incuriously. I decided to be bold and asked him where Annette was working. He glanced at a clock and a timetable and told me.

The laboratory at first appeared to be empty. Then I saw Annette, her back to me, laying down sheets of paper along a bench at the far end. I pushed open the double doors and walked up. She turned at my footsteps, saying:

‘Excuse me, the practical isn’t – Oh, hello Jon.’

Her hair was tied back, her figure hidden in a white lab-coat. Still no less desirable.

‘Hi,’ I said. Her green eyes examined me quizzically.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You suddenly developed an interest in invertebrate anatomy, right?’

She gestured at the bench. I looked down at a round glass dish, half-filled with water, in which a few small sea-urchins lay – or rather, moved, as I saw when I looked closer. Laid out along the benches were sheaves of notes, diagramming the echinoderm’s organs, the nomenclature beautiful and strange: ampulla, pedicellaria, tube-feet, madreporite, radial canal, ring canal, stone canal…

‘Not exactly.’ I fidgeted with sturdy tweezers, laid out like cutlery to break the delicate harmless creatures apart.

‘So what brings you here?’

‘Uh…’ I hesitated. ‘I just wondered if you’d fancy going out for a drink or something.’

Her face reddened slightly.

‘Does this have anything to do with Dave?’

‘No,’ I said, wondering what she was getting at. ‘Only that he told me he wasn’t going out with you any more.’

‘Oh! And when did he tell you that?’

‘About twenty minutes ago,’ I admitted.

She laughed. ‘What took you so long?’

‘I thought jumping up the minute he told me might be a bit insensitive.’

It was as if the implications of my statement were too direct, too blatant. She looked away and glanced back with a half-smile.

‘It’s very nice of you to think of me,’ she said. ‘Lonely and forlorn as I am. I’m not sure I’m ready for such kindness.’

If she could tease, I could tease right back. ‘I don’t expect you to stay that way long.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘no, I haven’t been washing my hair every night!’

‘Losing yourself in the giddy social whirl?’

‘Yep.’

‘So,’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps you can find room in your hectic life for a quiet drink?’

‘Or something.’

‘Or something.’

She smiled, this time dropping her ironic look.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘How about nine o’clock tonight in the Western Bar?’

‘I’ll see you there,’ I said.

The doors banged open and a commotion of students came in.

‘You better go,’ she said. ‘See ya.’

At the door I looked back, and saw her looking up. She smiled and turned away.

I jogged off down the corridor. ‘Yes!’ I told the world, with a jump and an air-punch that startled a few stragglers and narrowly missed an overhead fluorescent light.

The Western was a quiet pub, tarted up with some attempt at appropriate (i.e., cowpoke) decoration. I arrived about ten minutes early and was standing at the bar, half a pint and one smoke down, when Annette walked in just as the TV heralded the nine o’clock news. The barman reached up and flipped channels. (There were three, all controlled by the government).

Her hair was loose (and bouncy, and shiny, and just washed). She wore a mid-calf denim skirt and a black silk blouse under a puffy jacket which she unzipped and shrugged out of as she walked up. I bought her a lager-and-lime and we found a table by the wall.

‘Smoke?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

I lit her cigarette and we looked at each other for a moment. Annette laughed suddenly.

‘This is silly,’ she said. ‘We know each other just enough to skip the ice-breaking chit-chat, but not well enough to know what to say next.’

Sharp mind alright.

‘That’s a good point,’ I said, treading water. ‘Actually I don’t know anything about you, apart from having seen you across a table or a room a few times.’

‘Didn’t Dave talk about me?’ There was an undertone of curiosity to her pretended pique.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Mind you, he did tell me one very important thing about you…’

‘Oh yes?’

‘That you’re not interested in politics.’

‘Is that all? Huh, and there was me thinking he’d be telling you as much about me as I’ve told Sheena about him.’

‘That must be a relief.’

‘Sure is…And he’s wrong about that, too!’ she added.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well, it’s not that I’m not interested. I just don’t like talking about it.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But why?’

‘I grew up in Belfast,’ she said. ‘Left when I was about ten. There’s a saying over there: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” I still have family over there, still visit. The habit sticks.’

‘Even here?’ I glanced around. ‘What’s the problem?’

She leaned forward and spoke in a lowered voice. ‘Half the people in this city have some Irish connection, and a good few of them have very decided views. So it doesn’t do to shoot your mouth off, especially in pubs.’

As Dave tended to do, I thought. Interesting.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not curious. I can’t even tell what I’m sure anybody from around here could: whether you’re a Catholic or a Protestant. Me, I don’t have a religion and I don’t care what flag flies over me or what politicians do so long as they leave me alone.’

‘Which they won’t.’

‘Aye, there’s the rub!’

We both laughed. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you interested in?’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘I like my work,’ she said.

‘So tell me about it.’

And she did, explaining how she didn’t just do the technical stuff but tried to find out about the science behind it. She talked about evolution and population and the future of both, and that got me on to talking about SF, and she admitted to having read some dozens of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels when she was younger (or ‘young’, as she charmingly put it). Before we knew it the bell had rung for last orders.

‘There’s a disco at Joanne’s,’ Annette said. ‘Shall we go there?’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

It wasn’t. We hadn’t been there half an hour when the music stopped and the DJ told everyone to pick up their things and leave quietly. We all knew what that meant: a bomb scare. Annette grabbed my hand with surprising force and hauled me through the crowd, with a ruthless disregard for others that I’d hitherto only seen in the QM bar crush.

We spilled into the street just as somebody authoritative shouted ‘False alarm!’ and the surge moved the other way. Annette stood fast against it. I looked down at her with surprise and saw it wasn’t just the drizzle that was wetting her face. Holding her parka around her shoulders she looked miserable and vulnerable.

‘Don’t you want to go back in?’ I asked.

‘I want to go home,’ she said. I held her parka while she struggled to get it on properly. She grabbed my hand again and started walking fast.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, God. I just remembered the first time I was in a bomb.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to be reassuring, ‘it’s crazy how we’ve got used to bomb scares.’

She glanced up at me with something like pity.

‘I wasn’t in a bomb scare,’ she said witheringly. ‘I was in the blast radius of a bomb. Loyalists hit a loyalist bar. Christ. I could see people screaming, and I couldn’t hear them.’

I didn’t think it would be a good move to ask if many people were hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I squeezed her hand. ‘I didn’t know.’

She stopped, throwing me off-balance. I turned, tottering, to face her. She held her balled fists in front of her as if grasping and shaking by the lapels someone much smaller than myself.

‘Christ!’ she spat. ‘I hate this shit! I hate it so much! We were just going to enjoy ourselves, we all were, and some fucking swine has to ruin it! I blame them for all of it! For the bomb scares and the false alarms and the hoaxes – they wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for the bastards who do the real thing. Ears and feet all over the pavement!’ She closed her eyes, then opened them as if she couldn’t bear what she saw. ‘And Dave used to say we had to listen to the oppressed. Nobody listens to me because I’m not an “oppressed”. I’m a focking prodistant!’ Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, remnant of a caution otherwise thrown to the sodium sky. ‘Fuck them all! Fuck the Pope! Fuck the Queen! Fuck Ireland!’

As suddenly as her outburst had started, it stopped. She rested her fists on my shoulders and looked up at me, dry-eyed. She sniffed.

‘God, you must think I’m crazy,’ she said. ‘You didn’t deserve that.’

I wrapped my arms around her and held her close, taking the opportunity to look around. It must have looked like we we’d been having some kind of fight. This being Glasgow, and she not having used a bottle, nobody was paying us more than the idlest flicker of attention.

‘I’d prefer that to “whatever you say, say nothing”,’ I said. ‘Especially as I agree with what you just said.’

‘You do?’ She pulled back and frowned at me. ‘You mean you don’t believe in anything?’ Her voice was incredulous, hopeful.

Myra’s taunt came back to me: Ey’m en individualist enarchist, eckchelly. No point going into it that way, with a string of isms. I believe in you, I thought of trying, but that wouldn’t do, either. She looked so desperately serious!

I swallowed. ‘No God, no country, no “society”. Just people and things, and people one by one.’

‘Just us?’

I considered it, tempted. It would be a good line to hug her closer with.

‘No us either, unless each of us chooses, and only as long as each of us chooses.’

‘I don’t know if I could live with that.’

‘Better than dying with something else.’

She gave that glib response a more welcoming smile than it deserved.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can see you’re not just trying to chat me up.’ She caught my hand again and shoved it, with hers, into her parka pocket. ‘Come on, see me home.’

We walked through the wet streets as if we were joined at the hip, stopping every couple of hundred metres for a clinch and a kiss. Neither of us talked very much. At her flat a faint glow and giggles came from Sheena’s small room. We had the front room, and the couch, to ourselves. We did a lot of hugging and kissing and groping and rolling, but when it became obvious that I wanted to go further she pushed me away.

‘Not ready yet,’ she said.

‘That’s all right,’ I said.

‘Maybe you should go now. Some of us have to get up in the morning.’

I thought of several smart replies to that and in the end just nodded and smiled.

‘Maybe I should. What about tomorrow?’

She stood up and pulled me to my feet.

‘Let me see…I’m going to a wedding on Saturday. I’ve got shopping to do tomorrow lunchtime. Hen night in the evening, recovering the night after. And sorting out dresses and stuff.’ She mimed a curtsy. ‘How d’you fancy coming along to the dance at the reception? Saturday evening.’

‘That sounds great! Thanks.’

She peeled a sheet of paper from a pad and scribbled on it. ‘Place, time, bus routes,’ she said, handing it to me.

‘Thanks very much. OK, I’ll see you there then.’

We found ourselves at the door.

‘We still have to say goodnight,’ she said, and made good on it.

The reception was in a hotel in a part of Glasgow I hadn’t been before, reached by a succession of buses through parts of Glasgow I didn’t know existed. They looked like a war had been lost there: entire blocks and streets razed or ruinous, street-lamps smashed, derelicts or wild kids around fires…

I later learned that this was the result of a road-building programme disguised as a housing policy, but at the time – sitting in the smoke-filled top deck of the bus in a suit I normally wore only for interviews – I indulged in some enjoyably pessimistic thoughts about the breakdown of civilisation. As the bus wended on, however, the islands of darkness became less frequent and I eventually hopped off in a residential area in front of a reassuringly bright and noisy hotel. I followed the light and noise to the function suite where I found a scene just like a disco except that most people were wearing something like Sunday best and the age range approximated a normal distribution curve.

Around the edges of the room were tables, a buffet with food and trays of drinks, and a bar at the far end. I picked up a glass of whisky at the buffet and looked around for Annette. The music stopped, a dance ended, people moved on to or off the floor.

Annette came out of the crowd as if it were parting just for her – for a moment, it seemed a spotlight had caught her, so that she shone, while everyone around her dimmed. Her hair was circled with leaves and small red roses, and her dress started with a frill at the throat and ended with a flounce at the floor. It was likewise rose-patterned, red on green on black, and over it she wore an organza pinafore with ruffles from the waist to over each shoulder, the tapes wrapped to a bow at the front. Her face, flushed by the dance, was smiling. As she stopped in front of me I smelt her strong, sweet perfume.

‘Hi, Jon, you got a fag?’ she said. ‘I’m gasping.’

As I lit the cigarette for her she caught my hand and pulled me to a seat by a table. She dragged up another chair and sat down facing me, our knees almost touching through the rustling mass of her skirts.

‘Ah, that’s better,’ she said. A passing waiter offered her a tray – she reached past the expected wine and lifted a shot of whisky. ‘Thanks for coming.’

I raised my glass. ‘Thank you. You look different. Beautiful.’

‘Aw, gee, thanks.’

‘Beautiful in a different way,’ I hastened to add.

She gave a quirky smile to indicate that she was only pretending to misunderstand.

‘You didn’t mention that you were a bridesmaid,’ I said.

‘Didn’t want to scare you off.’

I laughed, unsure what to make of this. ‘I like your dress,’ I said.

She leaned closer and said in a gossiping whisper: ‘So do I. I dug in my heels to get one that I could wear again for parties, so after long discussions with Irene – that’s the bride, went to school with her – we settled on this nice little Laura Ashley number. Then she decided it wasn’t icky and brides-maidy enough, so she got her Mum to run up this thing.’ She flicked disdainfully at the apron frill.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The pinny’s what makes it. You really must keep that for parties.’ I was only half teasing – there was something undeniably sexy, in an undeniably sexist way, about its trailing associations of feminine servitude.

‘Oh yeah, and get taken for a wench?’ she grinned.

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Lady, would you like to dance?’

‘Well,’ she said, considering, ‘perhaps after you’ve refilled my glass, and I’ve emptied it.’

By the time this was accomplished, more than once, Annette had introduced me to some of her friends and relatives and the dancing had changed from disco-style bopping to traditional, but much wilder, Scottish dancing. Annette drew me into it, and started flinging me about until suddenly, like a memory of a previous life, I discovered I knew the steps and the moves and was able to fling her – and the bewildering, spinning succession of other partners – about with the best of them.

As I danced, skipped, stomped, turned, twirled, lifted and swung, I tried to remember how I remembered all this, and realised it was all down to my father. His interpretation of Marxism – broad-minded even for his socially tolerant, if politically dogmatic, party – insisted on the desirabilty of culture in all its forms. Hence, piano practice and dancing classes – and, when that had led to playground taunts, boxing lessons. Hence also, the Science Museum and the BMNH and the Zoo and the theatre. He was interested in everything. He was there.

And at Hyde Park on Sundays, telling unbelieving onlookers that whatever demo-of-the-week was passing through was a complete waste of time…He thought he was turning a space-age schoolkid into a scientific socialist, but all he was doing was raising me to be as stubborn an outsider as himself.

The dances flew past as fast as the dancers, with only snatched gulps of whisky and puffs of smoke between one and the next. An eightsome reel finished the set. Annette and I leaned on each other’s shoulders with one thought between us. ‘Drink?’

‘Drink.’

We went to the bar this time, our fortuitous and fortunate position at the end of the dance getting us there ahead of the rush. Annette perched on a stool, the hang of her skirt concealing it so that she seemed suspended on air. I propped my elbow on the bar and ordered pints.

‘Well, that was something,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed that.’

‘Me too,’ Annette said. ‘Cheers.’ She sank half a pint of lager. ‘Mind you,’ she went on, ‘throwing the littlest flower-girl in the air, swinging the bride onto your hips, and carrying her granny halfway across the room weren’t all absolutely essential.’

‘Oh.’ I thought back. ‘Did I do that?’

She grinned. ‘You sure did. Made me proud. Nobody’s going to gripe now about me bringing along a strange Sassenach.’

‘I didn’t know I was a subject of debate.’

‘Well, now it’ll just be speculation.’ She winked.

‘About us?’

‘Aha,’ Annette said. ‘So there’s an “us”?’

Face suddenly serious, haloed in red and black.

‘If you choose,’ I said.

Her green eyes regarded me levelly.

‘And what do you choose?’

Around us people were shouting, reaching for drinks, brushing against us. The music was rocking again. I see and hear it only now. At the time there was nothing but her.

‘There’s no choosing,’ I said. I took a step forward and put my arms around her waist. Our foreheads touched. ‘It was all decided the second I saw you.’

‘Me too,’ she said, and we kissed. It felt strange doing it at the same height. By the time we’d finished she’d slid off the stool. She looked up at me, smiling, and said: ‘But I saw you first.’

‘So what,’ I asked in a bitter-tanged amazement, ‘have the past three months been all about?’

‘I’m like you,’ she said. ‘I want to be free.’

‘You can be free with me!’ I said. ‘Any time. Please.’

We were falling together laughing.

‘Yes,’ she said.

And then it had all been said, and we were just standing together at the bar, having a drink.

Irene, the bride, clicked up to us in high heels and a smart blue two-piece, gave me a wary smile and whispered to Annette.

‘See you in a few minutes,’ Annette said. I bowed to them both – and to this necessity – and watched their whispering progress out of sight.

Annette returned about a quarter of an hour later.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked, sliding her a G&T. She looked a bit preoccupied.

‘Basically yes. Thanks,’ she said, sipping carefully. ‘I just spent ten minutes hanging about in reception with Irene’s wedding-dress in a plastic bag over my shoulder. Finally got someone to stash it till I leave. Couldn’t leave it in the room. Some mix-up with keys.’

‘So it’s not all fun, being a bridesmaid.’

‘Ha, ha. Little do you know.’

‘I think I’d rather not –’

I realised the music had stopped and somebody was trying to make himself heard above a hubbub.

‘Hey, come on!’

Annette swirled about and dashed away to the nearest exit, where Irene and her man were backing out of the doorway with a kind of female scrum going on around them –

Something sailed over the heads of the scrum. As I looked up, startled, Annette shot her hand in the air like an eager pupil with an answer, and caught it. She brandished the bouquet as she turned slowly around, acknowledging cheers and catcalls, and faced me with a broad smile.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Lucky me.’

Everybody trooped outside to send the new couple on their way. They’d cunningly called a taxi, and left behind a car covered with shaving foam and lipstick for the rain to wash.

Then more dancing, and more talking, and a long taxi ride to Annette’s flat, with Irene’s dress draped across our knees. As I paid the driver she ran to the steps of her house, laughing, her hems bunched in one hand and the other dress flying out behind her like a comet. I caught up with her as she unlocked the outer door. We went down the stairs and into her darkened flat, noisily trying to be quiet.

She took me straight to her bedroom, hooked the wedding-dress on its hanger over a wardrobe door facing the foot of her bed, and turned to me. I caught the tapes of the bow at her waist, yanked them and she twirled around, catching the pinafore as it came off and sending it sailing into a corner. I fumbled with buttons down the back of the dress, found a concealed zip and opened it. The dress fell around her feet. She stepped out of its circle in a long nylon slip, and deftly undid every button of my shirt while I got rid of my footwear, trousers and Y-fronts as fast as possible. The slip slid down to her feet with a rattle of static electricity. The rest of her underwear took enjoyably longer to remove.

I cupped her breasts in my hands and buried my mouth between them. Her skin tasted of talc and salt. Holding her away to look at her and holding her close to touch her led to a closer, quicker rhythm as we tumbled onto her bed.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and held me away, reached behind her head and waved a small foil package in front of my face. Then she tore the package open with her teeth.

‘Get that on, you irresponsible bastard.’

‘Wouldn’t want to be responsible for bastards,’ I agreed. I rolled the condom onto my cock. ‘I do have some with me, I just forgot.’

‘If you ever say anything as feeble to me again you’re outa here, Jon Wilde.’

I tried for a moment to think of some reply, and then put my tongue to a better use.

I woke in a room dim in the curtained light of mid-morning, my limbs still tangled with Annette’s, and was momentarily startled by the apparition of the white gown looming over the end of the bed, its falls of lawn and drifts of lace protected by a shimmering forcefield of polythene, like a ghost from the future.