“You enjoying yourselves?”

We nod.

“Good, ’cause I’m enjoying myself.”

“Good,” I say, and that seems to be the best I can do for the moment.

I’ve only got a tenner, so I stand there twiddling my thumbs while the guy fishes around for four-pound coins.

“You live in London now, is that right?” I ask her.

“Yup. Not far from here, actually.”

“You like it?” Barry asks. Good one. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

“It’s OK. Hey, you guys might be the sort to know. Are there any good record shops up around here, or do I have to go into the West End?”

What’s the use of taking offense? We are the sort of guys who would know about record shops. That’s what we look like, and that’s what we are.

Barry and Dick almost fall over in their haste to explain.

“He’s got one!”

“He’s got one!”

“In Holloway!”

“Just up the Seven Sisters Road!”

“Championship Vinyl!”

“We work there!”

“You’d love it!”

“Come in!”

She laughs at the onslaught of enthusiasm.

“What d’you sell?”

“Bit of everything good. Blues, country, vintage soul, new wave … ”

“Sounds great.”

Somebody else wants to talk to her, so she smiles nicely at us and turns round. We go back to where we were standing.

“What did you tell her about the shop for?” I ask the others.

“I didn’t know it was classified information,” says Barry. “I mean, I know we don’t have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not, like, a business strategy.”

“She won’t spend any money.”

“No, course not. That’s why she was asking if we knew any good record shops. She just wants to come in and waste our time.”

I know I’m being stupid, but I don’t want her coming to my shop. If she came into my shop, I might really get to like her, and then I’d be waiting for her to come in all the time, and then when she did come in I’d be nervous and stupid, and probably end up asking her out for a drink in some cack-handed roundabout way, and either she wouldn’t catch my drift, and I’d feel like an idiot, or she’d turn me down flat, and I’d feel like an idiot. And on the way home after the gig, I’m already wondering whether she’ll come tomorrow, and whether it will mean anything if she does, and if it does mean something, then which one of us it will mean something to, although Barry is probably a nonstarter.

Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops?

When I get home there are two answering machine messages, one from Laura’s friend Liz and one from Laura. They go like this:

1) Rob, it’s Liz. Just phoning up to see, well, to see if you’re OK. Give us a ring sometime. Um … I’m not taking sides. Yet. Lots of love, bye.

2) Hi, it’s me. There are a couple of things I need. Can you call me at work in the morning? Thanks.

Mad people could read all sorts of things into either of these calls; sane people would come to the conclusion that the first caller is warm and affectionate, and that the second doesn’t give a shit. I’m not mad.

I call Laura first thing. I feel sick, dialing the number, and even sicker when the receptionist puts me through. She used to know who I am, but now there’s nothing in her voice at all. Laura wants to come around on Saturday afternoon, when I’m at work, to pick up some more underwear, and that’s fine by me; we should have stopped there, but I try to have a different sort of conversation, and she doesn’t like it because she’s at work, but I persist, and she hangs up on me in tears. And I feel like a jerk, but I couldn’t stop myself. I never can.

I wonder what she’d say, if she knew that I was simultaneously uptight about Marie coming into the shop? Laura and I have just had a phone call in which I suggested that she’d fucked up my life and, for the duration of the call, I believed it. But now—and I can do this with no trace of bemusement or self-dissatisfaction—I’m worrying about what to wear, and whether I look better stubbly or clean-shaven, and about what music I should play in the shop today.

Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK … there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.

I phone Liz early afternoon. She’s nice to me. She says how sorry she is, what a good couple she thought we made, that I have done Laura good, given her a center, brought her out of herself, allowed her to have fun, turned her into a nicer, calmer, more relaxed person, given her an interest in something other than work. Liz doesn’t use these words, as such, I’m interpreting. But this is what she means, I think, when she says we made a good couple. She asks how I am, and whether I’m looking after myself; she tells me that she doesn’t think much of this Ian guy. We arrange to meet for a drink sometime next week. I hang up.

Which fucking Ian guy?

Marie comes into the shop shortly afterward. All three of us are there. I’m playing her tape, and when I see her walk in I try to turn it off before she notices, but I’m not quick enough, so I end up turning it off just as she begins to say something about it, and then turning it back on again, then blushing. She laughs. I go to the stockroom and don’t come out. Barry and Dick sell her seventy quid’s worth of cassettes.

Which fucking Ian guy?

Barry explodes into the stockroom. “We’re only on the guest list for Marie’s gig at the White Lion, that’s all. All three of us.”

In the last half-hour, I have humiliated myself in front of somebody I’m interested in, and found out, I think, that my ex was having an affair. I don’t want to know about the guest list at the White Lion.

“That’s really, really great, Barry. The guest list at the White Lion! All we’ve got to do is get to Putney and back and we’ve saved ourselves a fiver each. What it is to have influential friends, eh?”

“We can go in your car.”

“It’s not my car, is it? It’s Laura’s. Laura’s got it. So we’re two hours on the tube, or we get a minicab, which’ll cost us, ooh, a fiver each. Fucking great.”

Barry gives a what-can-you-do-with-this-guy shrug and walks out. I feel bad, but I don’t say anything to him.

I don’t know anybody called Ian. Laura doesn’t know anybody called Ian. We’ve been together three years and I’ve never heard her mention an Ian. There’s no Ian at her office. She hasn’t got any friends called Ian, and she hasn’t got any girlfriends with boyfriends called Ian. I won’t say that she has never met anyone called Ian in the whole of her life—there must have been one at college, although she went to an all-girls school—but I am almost certain that since 1989 she has been living in an Ianless universe.

And this certitude, this Ian-atheism, lasts until I get home. On the windowsill where we put the post, just inside the communal front door, there are three letters amidst the takeout menus and the minicab cards: a bill for me, a bank statement for Laura … and a TV license reminder for Mr. I. Raymond (Ray to his friends and, more pertinently, to his neighbors), the guy who until about six weeks ago lived upstairs.