Dinner was on me this evening. Usually he pays. There have been a number of occasions when I’d planned to pay but then the meal had ended so badly that I no longer felt like covering the bill. So many meals ended badly. Was it the drink? Certainly when we drank less we fared a little better.

Sometimes I think about Xavier. There was a time when I wanted him to kiss me, very much. There was a time when I got lost in kissing him for whole afternoons. But not any longer. And I suppose truth be told that is why he was so unkind about my book and why I haven’t heard from him since. He might be old, and he really is very old now, but that

The following Tuesday he emailed to tell me he’d read my book, which was, he said, ‘some sort of HELL.’ I was queuing in the supermarket when I read that. It winded me. I almost ditched my basket of groceries. I did not reply. What was there to say? That was three months ago and not a word since.

Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to. There really was no way of responding to it. I sort of feel like calling him now – I wonder what he would say? But it seems irreversible, that’s really how it feels. It’s better, I suppose, to have nothing

why have I changed my mind all of a sudden? Why do I want to give it back now? Is it just that I want to throw something back at him because I’m upset and angry? Am I upset and angry? I am intensely indignant.

It didn’t suit us, the apartment. Its windows are floor-to-ceiling, and the walls paper-thin. Too much of the outside world got in, putting us on edge.

He asked me if I’d like to kiss him, which surprised me. He hadn’t asked me that for a very long time, but it had been a year more or less since I’d last seen him, a strange year too – it would be forgivable, wouldn’t it, to forget, or overlook, how things stood. ‘Oh,

A peculiar intimation came to me in the early days and I understood and accepted that I will be beside him when he dies. It seems that a witness is needed for the event and that witness is me. That is something, a sacrosanct role, which has been assigned to me, whether I like it or not.

I made sure that I always had at least one of his voice messages saved. He could die just like that at any moment.