Phil looked even more terrified. What a complete pansy!

‘Actually,’ he said, giving the menu in front of him a nanosecond’s scrutiny, ‘You know what, Lynny?’ (Lynny! Puke.) ‘I don’t think I really fancy any of this. In fact, I’ve got a bit of a yen for a Chinese.’

He laughed nervously and said to both of us: ‘Yen! For a Chinese! Get it?’

‘The yen is Japanese currency. In China it’s the Yuan,’ I said, standing over him with my arms folded, and noticing with glee that he had a bit of a bald spot.

‘Oh well. Same continent,’ he said. ‘Ha ha.’

‘Ha ha,’ I replied. Lynn was shooting daggers at me by now. She stood up. ‘Yeah, I fancy Chinese too – let’s walk round the corner to Ho Lin’s. Nice to see you again Siobhan.’

They started to move away between the tables.

‘Did you get my messages, Phil?’ I called after them.

He half turned. ‘No. I didn’t.’ And then they were gone, not even a word of goodbye.

I went and sat down again, with Angelo’s horrible wicker chair scratching the backs of my legs, but I’d lost my appetite. My tomatoes looked half-cooked and soggy, and the feta had left an unappetising white juice all over the plate.

It’s so odd, how you can be completely intimate with a person, and then they treat you like somebody who once ripped them off in a pub. That man has had his tongue in places that I didn’t even know I had, and now he can’t even be bothered to say goodbye, let alone return my calls? It’s really depressing. I know I don’t want to get back together with him or anything, but I can’t help but feel jealous of what he obviously has with Lynn. Why can’t I find a man who loves me like that? Why didn’t Phil love me like that? What’s wrong with me? I miss having a boyfriend.

I abandoned the rest of my salad, left a tenner on the table, and trudged up the hill back to my empty house. I suddenly felt that even finding Alex there would have been better than coming home to this… loneliness.

Loneliness, and a credit card bill for £398.80 – my new tennis shoes, plus the money that Alex stole from me. Which he still hasn’t paid back, the bastard. There’s no way I’m letting him get away with it.

Later

I’ve been working on the new novel, miraculously. It’s the first time in ages I feel that I’m really beginning to get stuck into it. She’s not a bad character, this Stevie woman – I’m actually starting to quite like her, whereas at first I actively disliked her. Fear, probably, if I try and analyse it. Fear that she, i.e. my creation, won’t be good enough to get me another publishing deal.

Although I’m beginning to feel a tiny bit more optimistic about the prospect of future publication: I’ve just had an email from Patricia. She sounded a little sniffy, and said she’d been trying to get hold of me for a few weeks (well, she can’t have been trying very hard. I get relatively few emails, and would definitely have seen one from her had she, as she claims, sent one before. Why hadn’t she phoned?) Anyway, the good news was that TLA has, unbelievably, been selling very well in translation in Holland, and the Dutch publisher’s got in touch with Patricia to ask if I might be interested in coming over for a bit of an event: a reading, and some stock signings. A free trip to Amsterdam might be just what I need to take my mind off all this trauma.

I don’t know, though. If I had a man to take with me, it would be different; I’d be there like a shot. Amsterdam is such a romantic city, with all those kindly windows and canals. I can see myself in a – what is the Dutch equivalent of a gondola? – well, in a boat, trailing my fingers seductively through the sunlit sparkly water as a beautiful man recites paragraphs of TLA to me…yes, I like that. He could be a fan. He’s learnt whole pages of TLA off by heart, and he’s lying there with his head in my lap, reciting them. Mmm, that would be blissful. Then we’d go back to my hotel and –

- I’ve got sex on the brain at the moment. I was writing a sex scene for Stevie earlier, when Rollo follows her home, lets himself into her house, strips off all his clothes and joins her in the shower. I know showers are rather a cliché, but there is something so damn sexy about being shoved up against a slippery tiled wall, him lifting her with his thrusts as they gasp to try and catch their breath, through the streams of hot water blasting off their bodies.

This is pretty sick, though – and God knows what Dennis Tennis would have to say about it – but when I was writing the scene, I accidentally typed Alex’s name, when I meant Rollo. Twice! I suppose it was because I was still subconsciously thinking about Alex outside the bathroom door like that, with me naked inside. But if Alex had been a lover, it could have been extremely erotic.

So anyway, I haven’t decided about Amsterdam. I feel so lethargic at the moment that frankly, I’m not sure that I can be bothered. I mean, a couple of signings and a reading to one bored punter whilst – in all probability – tumbleweeds blow through the empty bookshop? It’s hardly going to make a difference, is it? Especially as it’s the UK where I want to get another deal. I’ll think about it for a while. I’ve emailed Patricia back to say that I’m not sure how my work commitments are going to pan out over the next few months, and provided there’s no urgent rush on a decision, I’ll let her know in a week or so.

Later still.

Feeling down again. Have just been to Sainsbury’s, and everywhere I looked there were couples cooing over the angel-hair pasta, or planning their next dinner party, or buying nappies. I haven’t even got a boyfriend, let alone a husband or baby. And there’s been all this stuff in the press lately about how, if you’re not married by the time you’re 35, then you only have a 13% chance of ever getting married. And worse, if you haven’t had your first baby by the age of 38, you only have a 3% chance of conceiving! That’s terrifying. I want a baby. Even though I hate other people’s babies…

I want to be loved. I don’t want to be alone.

There must be something awful the matter with me. Am I the sort of person who gets less appealing the more you get to know her? I mean, for heaven’s sake, two weeks ago I had a man who was utterly obsessed by me. How ironic is that – even my stalker has lost interest!

Although that’s probably because he’s having trouble getting the money together to pay me.

No, I am so not going to feel sorry for him. I’m having trouble getting the money together to pay my bloody credit card bill! Time is running out for Alex Parkinson, and I’m not going to let this drop. He owes me that money, and I want it back.

Chapter 18

Alex

Thursday (the morning after!)

Emily and I had arranged to meet at Moulin Rouge, a wine bar not far from here. I have no idea why I agreed to go to a wine bar. I spent the whole of yesterday morning trying to work out what to wear, then trying to work out how to iron a crease into a pair of trousers, and finally trying to figure out how to get rid of said crease. After that, I counted my money.

£3.76. It wasn’t going to buy the best bottle in the joint.

However, after turning the sofa upside down and sticking my arm inside, I no longer only had £3.76. I had £3.86. And a dead spider. And the oversized ten pence piece I’d found wasn’t even legal tender any more. What was Emily going to think? Maybe I shouldn’t even bother turning up: it was pretty obvious that when she saw how poverty-stricken and sartorially-challenged I was, she would make an excuse and climb out the window in the Ladies.

Thinking about money reminded me of Siobhan’s letter. I imagined myself going round to Siobhan’s and handing her the cash. She would invite me in and tell me she’d had a change of heart. She didn’t care about the money. In fact, she was wearing the lingerie I had bought her and she wondered if I might like to see it on her; take it off her.