I’m shaking when I get into the flat, and I feel sick. I know it’s him; I knew it was him the moment I saw the letter. I remember Laura going up to see him a couple of times; I remember Laura … not flirting, exactly, but certainly flicking her hair more often, and grinning more inanely, than seemed to be strictly necessary when he came down for a drink last Christmas. He would be just her type—little-boy-lost, right-on, caring, just enough melancholy in his soul to make him appear interesting. I never liked him much then, and I fucking hate him now.

How long? How often? The last time I spoke to Ray—Ian—the night before he moved … was something going on then? Did she sneak upstairs on nights when I was out? Do John and Melanie, the couple in the ground-floor flat, know anything about this? I spend a long time looking for the change-of-address card he gave us, but it’s gone, ominously and significantly—unless I chucked it, in which case strike the ominous significance. (What would I do if I found it? Give him a ring? Drop round, and see if he’s got company?)

I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can’t remember anything good about him at all.

I manage to block out the worst, most painful, most disturbing memory until I go to bed, when I hear the woman who lives up there now stomping around and banging wardrobe doors. This is the very worst thing, the thing that would bring anybody (any man?) in my position out in the coldest and clammiest of sweats: we used to listen to him having sex. We could hear the noises he made; we could hear the noises she made (and there were two or three different partners in the time the three of us—the four of us, if you count whoever was in Ray’s bed—were separated by a few square meters of creaking floorboard and flaking plaster).

“He goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling. “I should be so lucky,” said Laura. This was a joke. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.

When a woman leaves a man, and the man is unhappy (and yes, finally, after all the numbness and the silly optimism and the who-cares shrug of the shoulders, I am unhappy—although I would still like to be included somewhere in the cover shot of Marie’s next album) … is this what it’s all about? Sometimes I think so, and sometimes I don’t. I went through this period, after the Charlie and Marco thing, of imagining them together, at it,and Charlie’s face contorted with a passion that I was never able to provoke.

I should say, even though I do not feel like saying it (I want to run myself down, feel sorry for myself, celebrate my inadequacies—that’s what you do at times like these), that I think things were OK in That Department. I think. But in my fearful imaginings Charlie was as abandoned and as noisy as any character in a porn film. She was Marco’s plaything, she responded to his every touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world had better sex than the sex Charlie had with Marco in my head.

But that was nothing. That had no basis in reality at all. For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing miserably—to recapture the quiet, undemonstrative ecstasy of the nights that we spent together. I know, however, that Ian was something of a demon lover; so does Laura. I could hear it all; so could Laura. In truth, it pissed me off; I thought it pissed her off, too. Now I’m not so sure. Is this why she went? Because she wanted a bit of what was happening upstairs?

I don’t really know why it matters so much. Ian could be better at talking than me, or cooking, or working, or housework, or saving money, or earning money, or spending money, or understanding books or films; he could be nicer than me, better-looking, more intelligent, cleaner, more generous-spirited, more helpful, a better human being in any way you care to mention … and I wouldn’t mind. Really. I accept and understand that you can’t be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don’t know why.

I know enough to know that this is daft. I know, for example, that the best sex I have ever had was not important; the best sex I have ever had was with a girl called Rosie, whom I slept with just four times. It wasn’t enough (the good sex, I mean, not the four times, which were more than enough). She drove me mad, and I drove her mad, and the fact that we had the knack of being able to come at the same time (and this, it seems to me, is what people mean when they talk about good sex, no matter what Dr. Ruth tells you about sharing and consideration and pillow talk and variety and positions and handcuffs) counted for nothing.

So what is it that sickens me so much about ‘Ian’ and Laura? Why do I care so much about how long he can go on for and how long I could go on for and what noises she made with me and what noises she makes with him? Just, I guess, this in the end: that I still hear Chris Thomson, the Neanderthal, testosterone-crazed, fourth-year adulterer, calling me a spastic and telling me he has knobbed my girlfriend. And that voice still makes me feel bad.

During the night, I have one of those dreams that aren’t really dreams at all, just stuff about Laura fucking Ray, and Marco fucking Charlie, and I’m pleased to wake up in the middle of the night, because it means stopping the dream. But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it’s 3:56 a.m., although with his stamina—his inability to climax, ha ha—you never know), and I’m here, in this stupid little flat, on my own, and I’m thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost. And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people’s home, I wouldn’t worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn’t even have had to kill myself.

It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.

“Have you got any soul?” a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.