LITMIR.BIZ

       NINESaturday

      Lena toyed with her scrambled egg. We were having breakfast in the café round the corner from the gym, just near Stoke Newington Green. The café was hot and full of the perfume of fried bread. A number of single men sat eating plates of sausage, egg and beans. Everybody had a large white mug of tea in front of them. It was nine o’clock. I couldn’t imagine the time Lena had had to get up in order to go to the gym first. She looked flushed and healthy. I just looked flushed. With her thick long hair pulled back and wearing a loose pink T-shirt you couldn’t tell Lena was ten years older than me. It didn’t help that I was feeling ten years older than I was. I was telling her in the vaguest terms about my few depressing days at the inquiry in Birmingham.

      ‘Just remember, you’re only up there for a while,’ she said. ‘It will be over in a flash. What do you think that is?’ She speared something on her fork. ‘You don’t think it’s bacon, do you?’

      ‘It’s probably a bit of mushroom. Does it matter? You haven’t gone vegetarian have you Lena?’

      ‘I’m trying a new diet,’ she said. ‘Three days vegetables to one day meat.’

      ‘The point being …?’

      ‘To see if I can, I think. I mean, we’ve got to stop eating meat. It’s not good for us or the rest of the world.’

      ‘But it’s so delicious.’

      ‘So’s foie gras but we don’t eat that, do we? Do we?’

      ‘Not often,’ I mumbled. ‘Well, never, actually, but I might do if, say, I was going out with a racy, possibly French, torchsong singer who was also a wizard in the kitchen.’

      ‘Remember what happened with your last torchsong singer,’ Lena said sagely, spearing a dripping piece of fried tomato.

      ‘It wasn’t her fault I got arrested for murder.’

      ‘No, but she would have been happy to see you take the rap.’ Lena, trying to be kind, blamed the whole thing on Margo, but it wasn’t like that. Not really.

      ‘We never ate anything at her place. I don’t know if she could even cook.’ I thought back to Margo’s small desolate flat, denuded of its contents by her ex-husband at the end of her marriage, all the borrowed furniture, brown and depressing.

      ‘Exactly, she would probably have opened a tin of the stuff, all porky pink and covered in jelly.’

      ‘You seem to know a lot about this,’ I said. ‘Or else you’re confusing it with Spam.’

      ‘Just stay away from nightclub singers,’ she warned. ‘It’s the wages of foie gras.’ She looked at me piercingly. ‘You need help. You need to spend some money.’

      We strolled along Stoke Newington High Street. ‘Let’s go in here,’ I said.

      ‘A furniture shop?’ Lena sounded as if I’d suggested we go into an abattoir.

      Overstuffed sofas were squashed one behind the other in two rows, with an aisle between them, like a chartered aircraft that was aiming for comfort as well as maximum passenger numbers.

      ‘I just wanted to smell the smell,’ I said. The smell of new fabrics and polished wood. ‘I was thinking I might get a new sofa.’

      ‘You don’t need a new sofa,’ Lena said, looking round the shop in despair. ‘Certainly not a cream and maroon one.’

      ‘This is the kind of place Yolande works in.’

      Lena frowned, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Yolande?’

      ‘She’s the girlfriend of someone in Birmingham.’

      ‘Oh.’ She was disappointed, but her eyebrow stayed where it was. ‘Well, if you seriously want to buy something like this, buy it from her and get a discount.’

      ‘What about leather?’ I said.

      ‘Don’t you have to kill an awful lot of cows to cover a sofa? How could you sit comfortably with that on your conscience? And stop looking at me like that.’ Lena looked down at her leather coat. ‘Leather jackets are the offcuts of shoes. Or they should be. Anyway, I am aware of the contradictions that society forces us to live with. But it’s very pushy, isn’t it, leather furniture? Dominating. In a room. A huge leather sofa. Surely as feminists we didn’t give up being dominated by men to be dominated by our furniture?’

      ‘I was thinking of a small armchair, I thought it would feel sort of deep and intellectual.’

      ‘Buy a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, they’d be cheaper.’ She looked round the showroom again. ‘Can we go now? All these smoked glass coffee tables are depressing me.’

      The air was clean and fresh, even for Stoke Newington, and the sun was high in the sky as I walked back to the flat. It was going to be a really hot day. The grass in front of my house looked almost verdant. I unlocked the main front door. There was no post on the mat and no neat pile outside my front door, but on a day like this I was not going to feel miserable about Margo. I wandered into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink and gazed out of the window.

      In the garden the sky was blue and the lawn ached in the light, calling to me. I shared the garden with the people in the flat upstairs, which worked rather well because I like a garden and they liked gardening. Technically my half was the half nearest the house, but they did it all, mowing, pruning, planting, weeding. That is the kind of gardening I like. I pulled open

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