It wasn’t that he didn’t want a girlfriend, a proper girlfriend. Someone to come home too, someone to call up when you wanted to moan about your day, someone to read the papers with in bed, breaking off from the review section to indulge in sleepy Sunday sex. All the sort of things that single people thought a relationship was all about. Despite Veronica’s adherence to separate rooms and minimal public contact, there was still enough heat between her and Carl to make Jake sometimes feel superfluous to requirements. Sometimes they were curled cosily on the sofa when he came in from work and although they disentangled themselves fairly sharply, he could never see the dents in the sofa cushions without feeling it as a little blow to his heart.

As much as a girlfriend would have been nice, there just didn’t seem to be one in the offing. Perhaps it was his nurtured passion for Veronica that blunted his attraction to other girls – perhaps they could sense, in some dim feminine way, that he wasn’t playing the mating game with a full deck of cards. He was spending less and less time with his other friends, now that Fever Street was generating its own little club of three. He still caught up with Mark for the occasional drink but the cord of their friendship, woven back in college, was fraying ever more slightly every time they met up.

It was almost inevitable, what happened on that night. Looking back, Jake could see that – it stood out a mile, it was something waiting to happen. Not everything that happened that night, obviously, not the worst, the most awful thing that happened. But the other, the precursor to the horror – it was inevitable. Why do I see that now, thought Jake. Why couldn’t I have seen it then? Why can I only see now what a dangerous game we were all playing?

Chapter Twenty

It started innocuously – perhaps momentous days always did. Afterwards, Jake was to think back with a kind of incredulity to the complete and utter normality that had reigned all day, right up to the moment where Candice Stanton turned around and said ‘yes’. It was such a normal Friday night, such an average, everyday end of the week.  At times, he still couldn’t quite believe what had happened later that evening. For morning after morning once that day had passed, he would wake up and in the first thirty seconds of consciousness, he would have forgotten. For thirty seconds every morning, it was as if it hadn’t happened. Then with full wakefulness, back would come the remembrance, crashing back into his skull, again and again, undulled in all its horror. It was unbearable. More than once he considered whether not waking up at all would be better in the long run. But he was scared. He’d always been a coward, that was his problem. If he hadn’t been such a coward then, he wouldn’t have fallen in with their plans and things would be very different now. He could scarcely bear to think of it, how his weakness had brought him to this moment. If he’d just said something then…. If he’d just stuck to his guns and stood up to his brother, for once…

The morning of that day had been so humdrum. It was a Friday, which always put a little bit of a spring in Jake’s step. It was early July, a beautiful morning, the sky pearled with cirrus clouds, the sunlight already warming up the streets. As Jake came down the stairs, buttoning his shirt, Carl was clattering irritably around the kitchen in search of his keys.

“Fucking keys, keys, keys…”

“Have you looked in the bowl?” Jake slung himself into one of the kitchen chairs and reached for the cereal packet.

“Of course I’ve looked in the fucking bowl, Jake, not having had a full frontal lobotomy overnight. Fuck’s sake…” Carl swept a copy of Maxim off the table and gave a cry of triumph as the glint of a car key was revealed.

Jake rolled his eyes.

“Man, you get tetchy when V’s got a day off.”

“What?”

Jake felt a sudden tiny lurch.

“Hasn’t she got the day off?” How am I going to explain remembering that when her boyfriend hasn’t?

Luckily Carl was too irritated to notice.

“I get tetchy when anyone in the world has got a day off. I never get days off. I never get minutes off.”

“Weighed against that, you do earn about a million quid a day.”

“Well, how come I’m always so broke then? Where does it all go? I think you steal it. I think you break into my bank account and salt it away slowly, note by note.”

He was grinning by now and Jake felt the tension in the room dissolve. He pushed past his brother to get to the kettle.

“Doing much tonight?” said Carl.

“Nah. Not much. You?”

“We’ve got some moribund party to go to. Wanna come?”

Jake kept his face turned to the slowly boiling kettle, if only to hide the grin that was struggling to make it onto his face. A whole evening with Veronica, and a party too – where Carl might find others to talk to and then he would get her to himself for almost all of the evening.

“Sure, why not?” he said, pleased at the casual tone of his voice. The kettle boiled, flicking its off button with a sharp, condemnatory click.

“See you later then. The party’s in Mayfair but we won’t schlep until about half ten or so. Alright?”

“Cool. Have a good day, bro.”

His good mood continued for the rest of the day, dampened only slightly by the myriad little annoyances of crowded London streets and public transport. Fridays were always a good day at work – they all knocked off at one for a pub lunch and a pint and spent the afternoon in a slightly alcoholic haze, messing around, emailing the better of the week’s spam to each other, and waiting for it to be five o’clock. Then the glorious moment of switching off the computer; rolling back the chair; heading out into the streets wrapped in the heady expectation of two days of relaxation, lie-ins, heavy drinking and a whole lot of lazing around. The whole working week is worth it for the Friday night feeling, thought Jake as he struggled through the crowds to the tube station. He felt like bursting into song. The weekend and a party with Veronica – it didn’t get much better than that. The good weather had held and the evening streets were drenched in golden light.

There was no one in at the house on Fever Street when he got back home, but in his joyous mood, that was no hardship. He whacked a CD in the stereo and boogied around the kitchen in his socks, clattering out the drumbeats on the table with two wooden spoons. He took his first beer from the fridge, the glass bottle lusciously beaded with condensation. The first swallow tasted so good it almost brought tears to his eyes. Jake glopped a can of spaghetti into a saucepan, skidded over to the bread bin and threw a couple of slices into the toaster. He yelled out the song lyrics as he stirred the spaghetti, thinking once again how fine it was to live in such a big house that you never even had to worry about annoying your neighbours.

Three songs in and the spaghetti wolfed down, he heard the front door close and the clop of high heels on the wooden floor of the hallway. Immediately his heart leapt. Veronica. When would this feeling ever stop? He had a sudden, horrible vision of himself at forty, still mooning around deep in calf-love, following her around like a gangling, six-foot shadow. He forced his face into nonchalance as she came through the door.

She looked tired but just as beautiful, in a strained and drowsy way. Her eye shadow has smudged a little, giving her the look of a sleepy-eyed panda, and her hair was pinned up carelessly.

“Hi Jake.”

“Hey.”

“How was your day?”

Veronica slung her bag into the corner of the kitchen and flopped into the chair opposite him. Jake smiled at her, hoping he didn’t have any remnants of spaghetti caught between his teeth.