What became of us

but set in London. When can you do a treatment?’
    The friend who usually did the stand-up routine never spoke to her again, although Annie still sometimes saw his name in the listings for the Edinburgh Fringe.
    The only minor hitch in Annie’s meteoric rise had been what to call the show. In the end they had settled on I Love Annie.
    After spending years dreaming of being Rosalind, Lady Macbeth or anything whatsoever to do with Theatre de Complicite, fame and fortune had come to Annie when she was herself. She was sure that there was a lesson in there somewhere.

    Annie wrote non-stop until she ran out of ideas. By the time she looked up from her screen, she had mapped out the shape of the I Love Annie Christmas special, which involved Annie going to a party where the invitation said ‘Dress: Something you’ve always dreamed of wearing’. Annie McClintock was wearing a dress with a hooped petticoat and the only other person who had noted the dress code was a skinny prat in a Tarzan outfit. She had three storylines going but she could only think of jokes to make two of them pay off, and she couldn’t think a satisfactory ending. She saved the file and switched off the computer, so pleased with her Morning’s work that for a moment she was tempted to flop into bed and sleep for an hour or two, but when she looked at her watch she remembered that she was supposed to be meeting Ursula in Brown’s in Oxford at noon.
    Panic.
    Ursula was bound to have some sarcastic comment about how she had come halfway across the country and managed to be there on time, whereas Annie just lived down the road.
    Annie tried to think of a valid excuse not to go, but the writing had exhausted her creativity. She thought about ringing Brown’s and saying she had broken her leg, but annoyingly Ursula watched her programme religiously and would be able to work out when it was screened that that wasn’t true, unless she pretended she had broken her leg for the programme too, but Annie McClintock had broken her leg two series back and it might seem a bit repetitive. Anyway, a broken leg would not be a serious enough excuse to miss the whole day. She had been bullied by Leonora into agreeing to read something at the dinner. If she was going to get out of it altogether, rather than just reading from a wheelchair, she would have to invent a much more critical illness, which would be in pretty poor taste. It was bad enough to have missed Penny’s funeral because she was on holiday in the Caribbean, but if she missed this, Ursula would never forgive her, nor would Leonora and more importantly, nor would Roy.
    The prospect of seeing Roy again made Annie shiver with excitement.
    A couple of nights after the invitation to the reunion arrived, she had woken herself up with an orgasm in the midst of an incredibly erotic dream in which Roy had been fucking her on a tennis court. What was so weird was that she had never been aware of fancying him, yet what they had been doing together in the dream was unbelievably sexy. In fact it was so intimate and wonderful, she somehow felt that Roy’s subconscious must, in a curious telepathic way, have been involved too. It was the first really randy dream she could remember having since her early teens, when, still a virgin, she used to get up to all sorts of things with Ilie Nastase in her sleep. She imagined that the connection between sex and tennis stemmed from the fact that when she was a teenager, the sports pavilion in the recreation ground near her mum’s council house had sometimes been the venue for discos, and she had experienced her first snogs against the wire netting surrounding the courts.

    The wall of wardrobes in Annie’s bedroom was one of the interior designer’s better ideas. He had designed them as a row of beach huts at some unfashionable English seaside resort. The first hut was a washed-out chalky pink colour and contained her underwear. The second had weatherbeaten white paint and was full of dresses and suits. She took a long time making up her mind before choosing her new Gucci dress and a Donna Karan little black dress as a stand-by. The third hut was painted with vertical red and white stripes and held her casual separates. She took out a pair of cargo Pants, a pair of jeans, and a couple of white T-shirts for the next day. The fourth, for shoes, was white again. She selected a pair of red sandals to go with the dress, some Nike trainers and her ponyskin mules. The final