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'How did you know Alison?'

'I was her first boyfriend.'

There's a silence, and for a moment I worry that for the last twenty years I have been held responsible in the Ashworth house for some sort of sexual crime I did not commit.

'She married her first boyfriend. Kevin. She's Alison Bannis…

'Yeah, yeah, I know. But say I hadn't seen it and I said to you, "I haven't seen Reservoir Dogs yet" , what would you think?'

'I'd think, you're a sick man. And I'd feel sorry for you.'

'No, but would you think, from that one sentence, that I was going to see it?'

'I'd hope you were, yea…

Silence. i don't know what to say. There are lods of things I want to ask, but they are all questions I don't really want answered: when did you start seeing Ian, and was it because of the you know the ceiling noise thing, and is it better (What? she'd ask; Everything, I'd say), and is this really …

[...] she said something about the money, something about whether I'd start paying her back in instalments, and I said I'd pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That's when she hung up.

[...] You walk much more quickly afterwards, 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 candyflos…