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Thanks. It’s just that I don’t like the sensation of condoms.”

      “Well, I don’t really like the sensation of abortions.” I sat up. “I don’t really feel like having a fetus ripped out of my womb, thank you very much.”

      There was silence.

      I felt for it, but now it was dead.

      He got out of bed and stood over me. “Why do you humiliate me?”

      I waited.

      “Hit me, then,” I said.

      He exhaled, agonized. He lay down again.

      Soon he was snoring.

      I moved into the crook of his arm. I felt so happy then.

      The dawn entered the room. I rolled over and lit a cigarette. I tried to hold on to Vic, but he was pushing me off in his sleep. His head injury had scabbed. Experimentally, I ground the cigarette into his chest.

      He woke up, screaming. “What the fuck are you doing?”

      I rubbed the cigarette out between my fingers.

      Now the room was ablaze with morning.

      “Do you love me?” I said. “Now that we’ve had sex?”

      He pretended to sleep again.

      Finally he mumbled: “We didn’t have sex.”

      “But do you love me anyway though? Because we might have sex in the future?”

      He sat up. “What about the pussies from the refuge?” His face looked dire in the light. “What about the red silk kimono? Who are you?”

      “Yeah, I’m not in the habit of going out in nightwear. I do own one though. Freddie’s always trying to borrow it.”

      “You know it’s really off-putting for a girl to keep on going on about her ex-boyfriend on a first date.”

      “Freddie’s not my ex-boyfriend, I told you. And this isn’t our first date, Vic. We met in a past life. I was your faithful concubine. But now I’m an empowered woman.” I corrected myself: “I’m a woman in the process of becoming empowered.” I laughed. “If you’ll only let me.”

      Vic lay down again.

      I rolled another cigarette.

      “No,” he said, and tossed it somewhere. “You’re desperate.”

      I laughed. “No, Vic. That’s the trouble. I think I’m desperate, I even want to be desperate, but I’m not. The sad truth is that I’m not. Maybe if I was, then you’d love me.” I stood up, exhilarated. “But I’m not.”

      I got dressed quickly.

      “You’re all the same,” he mumbled, face down in the pillow.

      The front hall was adorned with black-and-white photographs of Big Ben, captured from a range of surreal angles. This was a terraced house. I could hear operators talking in the kitchen. I went in.

      There was a breakfast bar. Operators—two men and a woman—were sitting around it on matching stools. There was a laptop. On the screen, there was a picture of marmalade on toast. A real piece of half-eaten toast was spotlighted on the counter.

      “Yeah,” the woman was saying. She had brown hair and no distinguishing features whatsoever. “And put the date and time. And say what it is.”

      “What is it?” said the man, fingers poised over the keyboard.

      “Toast,” said the woman.

      “Hi!” I said. “I’m Ann-Marie! Vic’s new friend.”

      They stared at me.

      There was an empty stool—Vic’s? I perched on it, taking a bite out of the toast, nodding with approval. I could see that the marmalade on the screen was a more brilliant shade of amber. It had been photoshopped.

      “I’ll probably be hanging round here a whole lot more from now on,” I said.

      They continued to stare.

      The woman plunged a French press. They didn’t offer me any coffee.

      “Vic told me what happened in the army,” I lied. “It’s terrible. I’m really hungover. We got totally trashed. I don’t usually get this trashed anymore, not since I went on this mad detox diet for the six months leading up to my finals.” I nodded. “I just graduated. I got double-starred first actually, from Cambridge.”

      They didn’t look impressed.

      “My director of studies, Dr. Kyle, said that I could easily win a scholarship to Harvard or some other Ivy League place,” I said. “Maybe a more progressive one, but I said I just want to be free, you know? Like now.” I finished off the toast. My voice sounded dead: “I’m free.” I got off the stool. “Well, um. I better . . . go to work.”

      “Vic never talks about what happened,” said the woman. “It’s dangerous for him to talk about it. It triggers things.” She looked at one of the men. “I told him he shouldn’t hang around that meat market. Why seek out what you’re most afraid of?” She held the fridge door open. “Vic is terrified of meat.”

      “Oh?”

      “Yeah,” said one of the men. “Ever since the accident in the woods when he was in the army, he can’t go near it. The doctor told him not to go near it.”

      “I can empathize with that though,” I said. “I only ever want what I hate.”

      “Well, you’re special.” She pulled out some raspberries and closed the fridge.

      I was about to leave and never come back, but then I changed my mind and ran upstairs. I tried every door before I got the right one. There he was, a corpse. I got out my notebook. I thought about writing him a love poem.

      “Vic?” I knelt beside him. “What did you do? What happened in the woods?”

      Nothing.

      “Did you kill someone?”

      Still nothing.

      I wrote down my number and left it on the bookshelf, which wasn’t well stocked at all. There was a military memoir and Fifty Shades of Grey and—oddly—something by Fay Weldon. For all his positive attributes, Vic was not an educated man.

TWO

      I NEVER SAID that Allegra could come into my room, but she came in anyway.

      Her gift to me was a box of postfeminist cupcakes decorated with tiny gold balls. I had been listening to an Amy Winehouse lament, writing an essay on Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. The sweetness of those cupcakes was harrowing. The sponge collapsed in my mouth like a cloud. And she would claim later that I was the witch.

      That was three years ago, during freshman orientation, before I got thrown out for calling one of the guards a cunt. The college was supposed to be proud of its all-girls tradition, owner of the second-largest feminist art collection in the world. We ate dinner under a portrait of an Iranian woman wearing a hijab, aiming a Kalashnikov.

      “Oh, I can’t tell you,” Allegra had babbled. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have found someone who I can really relate to. Someone who makes me feel real.” She produced a bottle of cheap red wine, rinsed out two cups, and toasted to our newfound sistahood.

      One wall of my dorm room was taken up by a huge window that let in a lot of light. It looked out on to the college lawn, the sign saying “Keep off the lawn,” and the red star of the Texaco gas station across the road. I was living for Sebastian’s weekend visits, when we would lie together all day and night in my single bed. But he wasn’t there that day. It was a Tuesday.

      Allegra told me that she was studying law under the duress of her

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