Perfect Day

right?’
    ‘Lovely.’
    They’re running out of time. He knows she’s about to ask him what happens next. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say.
    ‘Will you be here when I get back?’ she asks as casually as she can.
    ‘I don’t see why not,’ he says, avoiding a direct lie.
    Now her eyes are sparkling, excited. She was not expecting him to say that, and it makes him feel even more of a coward.
    ‘You might meet Marie,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about her.’
    ‘Why don’t I wait for you in Marco’s?’
    ‘OK, then.’
    She’s at the door.
    It’s all happening too quickly.
    She waves, her face all smiles, then just as the door’s about to close behind her, she pokes her head back round.
    ‘Did you mean what you said back there?’
    ‘Which particular thing?’
    ‘You know...’
    ‘I meant it.’
    ‘Really?’ She does a little skip.
    ‘Later!’
    ‘Later.’

    He hears her running down the stairs, the front door slamming, and the squeak of her boots as she walks down the alley. Then a burst of police siren so near he feels it’s coming for him. When it screams away, her footsteps have been absorbed into the chaos of urban sound.
    Images of her running towards the cherry tree play behind his eyes like a home movie, as his mind begins to archive snapshots of her, storing them under sight, taste, sound, ready to call them up when he sees pink blossom, or eats oysters, or hears Lou Reed singing ‘Perfect Day’.
    He lies with his hands propped behind his head, staring at nothing.
    In this room he is a different person. The rest of the world is happening outside but it seems to have no relevance here in this half-harem, half-bedsit.
    The sudden terrifying thought that this is the reason Kate’s sister painted the windows slips through his mind. Do her clients rationalize their behaviour just as he is doing? Has he become the same as them? Is the transformation into being a man who visits a prostitute so rapid and imperceptible?
    Kate is not a prostitute.
    Kate shivering in her borrowed underwear, too-large panties tugged halfway up her narrow chest. Her face astonished at her own audacity. There’s something quintessentially innocent about her.
    Sasha sees magic in everyday things!
    The voice that swings between dourness and wonder and makes every word finish differently from the way he expects it to.
    He sees her standing on the top of Primrose Hill with London stretched out below, asking, ‘What happened to the magic carpet?’

    Nell got the dustmen to take the moth-eaten old relic away one day last week when he was at work.
    ‘It wasn’t doing anyone any harm!’ he shouted at Nell, when he noticed its absence that evening.
    ‘Oh for God’s sake, it was a carpet, not some incontinent old family dog, even if it smelt like one! As a matter of fact, I think it was giving Lucy asthma. It probably gave you asthma when you were small.’
    ‘Didn’t,’ he said, like a child.
    But Nell was probably right, he thought. She usually is. Nell is admirably practical. Nell has read all the available literature about allergy. Nell doesn’t let things frighten her irrationally, she controls them by becoming an expert. Nell knows that carpets harbour just mites and so they must all pad about the house on stripped wood or unforgiving flagstone.
    Nell.
    He had been unfaithful to Nell.
    He wonders if the sin is multiplied by repetition. Was he more unfaithful the second time they fucked than the first, or is it the same quantity of wrongdoing each time?
    The second time felt like more of a betrayal, making love naked, skin upon skin.
    Can he and Nell ever go back to how they were, or has what he has done changed their relationship so irrevocably that nothing will make up for it?
    Will he tell her?
    Perhaps he should come straight out with it: look, I’ve done a terrible thing, but it’s made me think about my life and I feel better now. Will you forgive me?
    No, best not to tell her.
    Will she know?
    She did not notice when he came back from the Christmas party reeking of Mel’s scent. When he looked guiltily in the mirror that night, his lips were a different colour, but Nell did not see.
    She will know.
    Will she shout at him and throw him out, or will she retreat into martyrish silence, determined not to let their child suffer? Which punishment would he prefer? To be disgraced, cast out, or to continue much as they do now, like the rainbow soap bubbles Lucy blows that float around the