“They won’t this time.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I brought half of this lot here, and I’ll make sure they dance.”

So I played it, and sure enough Laura and her mates flooded the dance floor, but one by one they all drifted off again, shaking their heads and laughing. It is a hard song to dance to; it’s a mid-tempo R&B thing, and the intro sort of stops and starts. Laura stuck with it, and though I wanted to see whether she’d struggle gamely through to the end, I got nervous when people weren’t dancing, so I put ‘The Love You Save’ on quick.

She wouldn’t dance to the Jackson Five, and she marched over to me, but she was grinning and said she wouldn’t ask again. She just wanted to know where she could buy the record. I said if she came next week I’d have a tape for her, and she looked really pleased.

I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one, because … to be honest, because I hadn’t met anyone as promising as Laura since I’d started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with ‘Got to Get You off My Mind,’ but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs, and … oh, there are loads of rules.

Anyway, I worked and worked at this one, and I’ve still got a couple of early demons knocking around the flat, prototype tapes I changed my mind about when I was checking them through. And on Friday night, club night, I produced it from my jacket pocket when she came over to me, and we went on from there. It was a good beginning.

Laura was, is, a lawyer, although when I met her she was a different kind of lawyer from the one she is now: then, she worked for a legal aid firm (hence, I guess, the clubbing and the black leather motorcycle jacket). Now, she works for a City law firm (hence, I guess, the restaurants and the expensive suits and the disappearance of the spiky haircut and a previously unrevealed taste for weary sarcasm) not because she underwent any kind of political conversion, but because she was made redundant and couldn’t find any legal aid work. She had to take a job that paid about forty-five grand a year because she couldn’t find one that paid under twenty; she said that this was all you need to know about Thatcherism, and I suppose she had a point. She changed when she got the new job. She was always intense, but, before, the intensity had somewhere to go: she could worry about tenants’ rights, and slum landlords, and kids living in places without running water. Now she’s just intense about work—how much she has, the pressure she’s under, how she’s doing, what the partners think of her, that kind of stuff. And when she’s not being intense about work, she’s being intense about why she shouldn’t be intense about work, or this kind of work, anyway.

Sometimes—not so often recently—I could do something or say something that allowed her to escape from herself, and that’s when we worked best; she complains frequently about my ’relentless triviality,” but it has its uses.

I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about the long-term future: I used to think—and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do—that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have a look around and see what you’ve got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.

With Laura, I changed my mind about that whole process for a while. There weren’t any sleepless nights or losses of appetite or agonizing waits for the phone to ring for either of us. But we just carried on regardless, anyway, and, because there was no steam to lose, we never had to have that look around to see what we’d got, because what we’d got was the same as what we’d always had. She didn’t make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease, and when we went to bed I didn’t panic and let myself down, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

We went out a lot, and she came to the club every week, and when she lost the lease on her flat in Archway she moved in, and everything was good, and stayed that way for years and years. If I was being obtuse, I’d say that money changed everything: when she switched jobs, she suddenly had loads, and when I lost the club work, and the recession seemed to make the shop suddenly invisible to passers-by, I had none. Of course things like that complicate life, and there are all kinds of readjustments to think about, battles to fight and lines to draw. But really, it wasn’t the money. It was me. Like Liz said, I’m an arsehole.

The night before Liz and I were supposed to have a drink in Camden, Liz and Laura met up somewhere for something to eat, and Liz had a go at Laura about Ian, and Laura wasn’t planning on saying anything in her own defense, because that would have meant assaulting me, and she has a powerful and sometimes ill-advised sense of loyalty. (I, for example, would not have been able to restrain myself.) But Liz pushed it too far, and Laura snapped, and all these things about me poured out in a torrent, and then they both cried, and Liz apologized between fifty and one hundred times for speaking out of turn. So the following day Liz snapped, tried to phone me and then marched into the pub and called me names. I don’t know any of this for sure, of course. I have had no contact at all with Laura and only a brief and unhappy meeting with Liz. But, even so, one does not need a sophisticated understanding of the characters in question to guess this much.

I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all four, of the following pieces of information:

1) That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.

2) That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.

3) That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her and have not yet repaid any of it.

4) That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of maybe looking around for someone else.

Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you have done to your partner, even if—especially if—your partner doesn’t know about them. Don’t dress these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? OK, so who’s the arsehole now?