Therapy

Our neighbours are mostly senior managers in industry, or accountants, doctors and lawyers. The houses are all modern detached, in different styles, set well back from the road and bristling with burglar alarms. It’s green and leafy and quiet. On a weekday the loudest noise is the whine of the milk float delivering semi-skimmed milk and organic yoghurt and free-range eggs door-to-door. At the weekend you sometimes hear the hollow clop of ponies’ hoofs or the rasp of Range-Rover tyres on the tarmac. The Country Club, with its eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, indoor and outdoor pools and spa, is just ten minutes away. That’s the main reason we moved to Hollywell — that and the fact that it’s conveniently close to Rummidge Expo station.
    The station was built fairly recently to serve the International Exhibition Centre and the Airport. It’s all very modern and hi-tech, apart from the main Gents. For some reason they seem to have lovingly reconstructed a vintage British Rail loo in the heart of all the marble and glass and chromium plate, complete with pee-up-against-the-wall zinc urinals, chipped white tiles, and even a rich pong of blocked drains. Apart from that, it’s a great improvement on the City Centre station, and is twelve minutes nearer London for me. Because, of course, if you’re in any branch of show business, you can’t keep away from London entirely. Heartland record in their Rummidge studios as a condition of their franchise — bringing employment to the region and all that — but they have offices in London and rehearse most of their shows there because that’s where most actors and directors live. So I’m always up and down to Euston on good old BR. I bought the flat three years ago, partly as an investment (though property prices have fallen since) but mainly to save myself the fatigue of a return journey in one day, or the alternative hassle of checking in and out of hotels. I suppose at the back of my mind also was the thought that it would be a private place to meet Amy.
    Lately I’ve come to value the privacy, the anonymity of the place even more. Nobody on the pavement knows I’m up here in my cosy, centrally-heated, double-glazed eyrie. And if I go down into the street to get a newspaper or pick up a pint of milk from the 24-hour Asian grocery store on the corner, and mingle with the tourists and the bums and the young runaways and the kids up from the suburbs for an evening out and the office workers who stopped for a drink on the way home and decided to make a night of it, and the actors and catering workers and buskers and policemen and beggars and newspaper vendors — their gaze will slide over me without clicking into focus, nobody will recognize me, nobody will greet me or ask how I am, and I don’t have to pretend to anyone that I’m happy.
     
    Amy came to the flat straight from work and we had a couple of g & t’s before going round the corner to Gabrielli’s for a bite to eat. Sometimes, if she comes here from home, she brings one of her own dishes from her deep-freeze, moussaka, or beef with olives or coq au vin, and heats it up in my microwave, but usually we eat out. Very occasionally she invites me to dinner at her house and lays on a super spread, but it’s always a dinner party, with other people present. Amy doesn’t want Zelda to get the idea that there’s anything special about her relationship with me, though I can’t believe the kid doesn’t suspect something, seeing her mother sometimes going out in the evening dressed to kill and carrying a container of home-made frozen food in one of her smartly gloved hands. “Because I hide it in my handbag, stupido,” Amy said, when I raised this question once. And it’s true that she carries an exceptionally large handbag, one of those soft Italian leather scrips, full of female paraphernalia (or should I just say paraphernalia?) — lipsticks and eyeliner, face-powder and perfume, cigarettes and lighters, pens and pencils, notebooks and diaries, aspirin and Elastoplast, Tampax and panti-liners, a veritable life-support system, in which a plastic container of frozen moussaka could be concealed without much difficulty.
    I was replacing a phutted lightbulb when Amy buzzed the entryphone, so I was slow to push the button that brought her comically distorted face, all mouth and nose and eyes, swimming into view on the videoscreen in my microscopic hall. “Hurry up, Lorenzo,” she said,