In Bed With Lord Byron

Monday mornings I regularly stand on the Tube platform and contemplate chucking myself
under the train. I am about to resign and go travelling again when I meet Anthony. And then I decide to stick around. And two years or so on, I’m still sticking around.
    Which brings me up to here and now – a great boyfriend and a crap job. A life that seesaws between fulfilment and boredom, only now I’m worried that it’s
beginning to tip the wrong way. Or perhaps it’s been tipping the wrong way for quite a while and I’ve only noticed now it’s about to hit the ground.
    I came out of my life-crisis reverie as my mobile beeped. It was a message from Anthony:
    Tonight when we hve dinner I have a surprise 4 u.
    I’d only got a mobile phone last year, relatively late in life (most people seem to acquire one at about twelve). I didn’t even want it. I hated the idea of people
being able to track me down wherever I was, and my social conscience was sickened by the idea of phone masts. But Anthony said: ‘I’m fed up with having an affair with your answerphone,
so I’m going to buy you one whether you like it or not’, and that was that. Within a week I was utterly addicted, despite the image that kept creeping into my mind of squiggly green
rays beaming into my brain and gobbling up cells.
    As for texting, the first week Anthony and I exchanged fifty a day. Then, when we realised we were in danger of getting the sack or, worse, RSI, we settled on a more sensible five a day,
bouncing back texts like ping-pong balls; we even had text pet names for each other; I called him Valmont, after
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
(specifically, I was thinking of John Malkovich in
the film version), whilst he called me Catwoman (specifically, I think he was thinking of Michelle Pfeiffer in
Batman).
But gradually we had run out of steam, until two years on we were
reduced to the odd joke cribbed from a magazine or
Hi, I am bored – u?
    I looked at Anthony’s text and sighed, trying to think of a reply that was more witty than
What?
But I couldn’t, so in the end I didn’t bother.
    ii) A brief history of Anthony and me
    I met Anthony on a transatlantic flight, New York to London. I had been to the wedding of an old school friend and now I was going home with a hangover.
    I have never liked flying. I am not a nervous flyer; I am a paranoid flyer. I am paranoid about everything, and my specific aviation fears are silly little things that on the day of the journey
will buzz in my brain like hyperactive flies. I worry that when the check-in attendant asks, ‘Could anyone have tampered with your luggage or given you anything to add to your luggage?’
I will discover that, though I have not let my case out of my sight for one second, somehow someone has stashed a load of drugs in my face cream and it will be sniffed out by the black security
hounds and I will end up spending the rest of my life in jail. I worry that the benign balding man next to me who keeps scratching his M&S patterned socks has secretly lodged a knife in them
and is about to whip it out at any minute.
    There were no suspicious ankle-scratchers on this plane, but actually something far worse. I had been given a seat in between a young couple. The girl was by the window, her boyfriend on the
aisle. He introduced himself as Dominic and kept flirting with me; he was mad, sad and boring to know. I kept trying to give his girlfriend reassuring ‘Isn’t he a wanker?’ smiles,
but her grimaces showed she was clearly interpreting them as ‘Oh, your boyfriend fancies me, how smug am I?’ smirks. I had offered to swap seats but Dominic quickly refused, ignoring
his girlfriend’s enraged grimace.
    Several times I got up and went to the toilet. Each time I returned I hoped the girl might have moved into my seat, but she was in a total strop now, arms crossed, shoulders hunched towards the
window.
    As I made my fifth escape trip, I noticed the guy who was sitting in the seat behind me. I had been vaguely aware that he was attractive, but when he happened to glance up, I felt quite
breathless. Dark-haired and handsome, eyes the colour of olives. Lightly tanned. Possibly Spanish. An expensive coat was draped across the empty seat next to him, and he was squinting tiredly at
his laptop. He smiled at me, an eye-crinkling, soft, sexy smile. I felt the blood beating in my cheeks and hurried to the toilet, silently cursing and close to tears.
Why?
I wanted to yell.
Why