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‘Yeah. Me too,’ he mumbled.

‘Eight more days,’ she said.

‘Eight more days.’

‘Think you can hack it?’

‘Who knows?’ He smiled affectionately and, for good or ill, everything was just as it had been before. ‘So how many Rules did we break tonight?’

She thought for a moment. ‘One, Two and Four.’

‘Well at least we didn’t play Scrabble.’

‘There’s always tomorrow.’ She reached above her head, turned the light off, then lay on her side with her back to him. Everything was just how it had been before, and she was unsure how she felt about this. For a moment she worried that she might not be able to sleep for dwelling on the day, but to her relief she soon found herself overcome with weariness, sleep creeping through her veins like anaesthetic.

Dexter lay for a while looking at the ceiling in the blue light, feeling that he had not been at his best tonight. Being with Emma demanded a certain level of behaviour, and he was not always up to the mark. Glancing over at Emma, her hair falling away from the nape of her neck, the newly tanned skin dark against the white sheets, he contemplated touching her shoulder to apologise.

‘Night, Dex,’ she murmured while she could still speak.

‘Night, Em,’ he replied, but she was already gone.

Eight days to go, he thought, eight whole days. Almost anything could happen in eight days.

1993–1995

Late Twenties

‘We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same cond ition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.’

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

THURSDAY 15 JULY 1993,

Part One — Dexter’s Story

Brixton, Earls Court and Oxfordshire

These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another. Old-fashioned notions of a.m. and p.m. have become obsolete and Dexter is seeing a lot more dawns than he once used to.

On the 15th of July 1993 the sun rises at 05.01 a.m. Dexter watches it from the back of a decrepit mini-cab as he returns home from a stranger’s flat in Brixton. Not a stranger exactly, but a brand new friend, one of many he is making these days, this time a graphic designer called Gibbs or Gibbsy, or was it maybe Biggsy, and his friend, this mad girl called Tara, a tiny birdlike thing with woozy, heavy eyelids and a wide scarlet mouth who doesn’t talk much, preferring to communicate through the medium of massage.

It’s Tara he meets first, just after two a.m. in the nightclub underneath the railway arches. All night he has noticed her on the dance floor, a broad grin on her pretty pixie face as she appears suddenly behind strangers and starts to rub their shoulders or the small of their backs. Finally it’s Dexter’s turn, and he nods and smiles and waits for the slow dawn of recognition. Sure enough the girl frowns, brings her fingers close to the tip of his nose and says what they all say now, which is:

‘You’re famous!’

‘Who are you then?’ he shouts over the music, taking both her small bony hands in his, holding them out to the side as if this were some great reunion.

‘I’m Tara!’

‘Tara! Tara! Hello, Tara!’

‘You’re famous? Why are you famous? Tell me!’

‘I’m on TV. I’m on a TV programme called largin’ it. I interview pop stars.’

‘I knew it! You arefamous!’ she shouts, delighted, and she cranes up on tip-toe and kisses his cheek, and she does this so nicely that he’s moved to shout over the music, ‘You’re lovely, Tara!’

‘I am lovely!’ she shouts back. ‘I am lovely, but I’m not famous.’

‘But you should be famous!’ shouts Dexter, his hands on her waist. ‘I think everybody should be famous!’

The remark is without thought or meaning, but the sentiment seems to move Tara because she says ‘Aaaaaaaah’, stands on tip-toe and rests her little elfin head on his shoulder. ‘I think you’re so lovely,’ she shouts in his ear, and he doesn’t disagree. ‘You’re lovely too,’ he says, and they find themselves caught in a ‘you’re lovely’ loop that could potentially go on forever. They’re dancing together now, sucking in their cheeks and grinning at each other and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind. In the olden days, when people only had alcohol to fall back on, talking to a girl would involve all kinds of eye-contact, the buying of drinks, hours of formal questioning about books and films, parents and siblings. But these days it’s possible to segue almost immediately from ‘what’s your name?’ to ‘show me your tattoo’, say, or ‘what underwear are you wearing?’ and surely this has got to be progress.

‘You’re lovely,’ he shouts, as she grinds her buttocks against his thighs. ‘You’re really tiny. Like a bird!’

‘But I’m strong as an ox,’ she shouts back over her shoulder and flexes a neat bicep the size of a tangerine. It’s such a great little bicep that he is moved to kiss it. ‘You’re nice. You’re sooooo nice.’

‘You’re nice too,’ he fires back and thinks, God, this is really going just incredibly well, this back and forth, just so well. She’s so small and neat that she reminds him of a little wren, but he can’t summon up the word ‘wren’ so he takes hold of her hands, pulls her towards him, shouts in her ear, ‘What’s the name of that tiny bird that fits in a matchbox?’

‘What?’

‘A BIRD THAT YOU PUT IN A MATCHBOX YOU CAN FIT IT IN A MATCHBOX A TINY BIRD YOU’RE LIKE A LITTLE BIRD CAN’T THINK OF ITS NAME.’ He holds his finger and thumb an inch apart. ‘SMALL BIRD TINY YOU’RE LIKE THAT.’

And she nods, either in agreement or to the music, her heavy eyelids fluttering now, pupils dilated, her eyeballs rolling back in her head like one of those dolls his sister used to have and Dexter has forgotten what he’s talking about, is unable for a moment to make sense of anything, so that when Tara takes his hands and squeezes them and tells him once again that he really is lovely and that he must come and meet her friends because they’re lovely too, he doesn’t disagree.