“Where the fuck have you been?” I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Saturday morning. I haven’t seen him since we went to Marie’s gig at the White Lion—no phone calls, no apologies, nothing.

“Where the fuck have I been? Where the fuck have I been? God, you’re an arsehole,” Barry says by way of an explanation. “I’m sorry, Rob. I know things aren’t going so well for you and you have problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent fucking hours looking for you the other night.”

“Hours? More than one hour? At least two? I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at half-twelve, right? You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.”

“Don’t be a smartarse.”

One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be able to refer to me without using the word arse somewhere in the sentence.

“OK, sorry. But I’ll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-Bone.”

I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie.

“That’s not the point.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“It was great. T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.”

“Far out.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

I’m glad it’s Saturday because we’re reasonably busy, and Barry and I don’t have to find much to say to each other. When Dick’s making a cup of coffee and I’m looking for an old Shirley Brown single in the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.

“And do you know what? He’s a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that’s about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.

Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable.

You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.

The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, ‘Happy Go Lucky Girl’ by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.

You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didn’t know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon they’re handing over fivers almost distractedly as if that’s what they’d come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they don’t own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they don’t own Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four o’clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it’s going OK, maybe because I’m proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.

So when I come to close the shop, and we’re getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every Saturday, we are all happy together again; we have a fund of goodwill which we will spend over the next few empty days, and which will have completely run out by Friday lunchtime. We are so happy, in fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello songs (I go for ‘Alison,’ ‘Little Triggers,’ ‘Man Out of Time,’ ‘King Horse,’ and a bootleg Merseybeat-style version of ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ I’ve got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry) and, after the sulks and rows of the last week, it feels good to think about things like this again.

But when we walk out of the shop, Laura’s waiting there for me, leaning against the strip of wall that separates us from the shoe shop next door, and I remember that it’s not supposed to be a feel-good period of my life.

The money is easy to explain: she had it, I didn’t, and she wanted to give it to me. This was when she’d been in the new job a few months and her salary was starting to pile up in the bank a bit. She lent me five grand; if she hadn’t, I would have gone under. I have never paid her back because I’ve never been able to, and the fact that she’s moved out and is seeing somebody else doesn’t make me five grand richer. The other day on the phone, when I gave her a hard time and told her she’d fucked my life up, she said something about the money, something about whether I’d start paying her back in installments, and I said I’d pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That’s when she hung up.

So that’s the money. The stuff I told her about being unhappy in the relationship, about half looking around for someone else: she pushed me into saying it. She tricked me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else. So I asked if she was always thinking about meeting somebody else, and she said of course, so I admitted that I did daydream about it sometimes. At the time I thought it was a let’s-be-grown-up-about-life’s-imperfectability sort of conversation, an abstract, adult analysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into absolving her. It was a sneaky lawyer’s trick, and I fell for it, because she’s much smarter than me.