MARTIN

It was only when we got back to the flat that I had any recollection of describing Penny as a right bitch who would fuck anybody and snort anything. But when had I said that? I spent the next thirty minutes or so praying that it had been before Jess's arrival, when Maureen and I were on our own; if Jess had heard, then I had no doubt that my opinion of Penny would be passed on.

And, needless to say, it was hardly a considered opinion anyway. Penny and I don't live together, but we'd been seeing each other for a few months, more or less ever since I got out of prison, and as you can imagine she had to endure a fair amount of difficulty in that time. We didn't want the press to know that we'd been seeing each other, so we never went out anywhere, and we wore hats and sunglasses more often than was strictly necessary. I had - still have, will always have - an ex-wife and children. I was only partially employed, on a dismal cable channel. And as I may have mentioned before, I wasn't terribly cheerful.

And we had a history. There was a brief affair when we were co-presenting, but we were both married to other people, and so the affair ended, painfully and sadly. And then, finally, after much bad timing and many recriminations, we got together, but we'd missed the moment. I had become soiled goods. I was broken, finished, a wreck, scraping the bottom of my own barrel; she was still at the top of her game, beautiful and young and famous, broadcasting to millions every morning. I couldn't believe that she wanted to be with me for any reason other than nostalgia and pity, and she couldn't persuade me otherwise. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle-class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand, and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. Anyway, she read a book about this couple who were in love but couldn't get together for donkey's years and then finally managed it, aged about one hundred. She adored it and made me read it, and it took me about as long to get through as it took the characters to pair off. Well, our relationship felt like that, except the old biddies in the book had a better time than Penny and I were having. A few weeks before Christmas, in a fit of self-disgust and despair, I told her to bugger off, and so she went out that night with some guest on the show, a TV chef, and he gave her her first-ever line of coke, and they ended up in bed, and she came round to see me the next morning in floods of tears. That's why I told Maureen she was a right bitch who would snort anything and fuck anybody. I can see now that this was a bit on the harsh side.

So that, give or take a few hundred heart-to-hearts and tantrums, a couple of dozen other split-ups, and the odd punch thrown - by her, I hasten to add - is how Penny came to be sitting on my sofa waiting up for me. She would have been waiting a long time if it hadn't been for our impromptu roof party. I hadn't even bothered writing her a note, an omission which only now is beginning to cause me any remorse. Why did we persist in the pathetic delusion that this relationship was in any way viable? I'm not sure. When I asked Penny what the big idea was, she said merely that she loved me, which struck me as an answer more likely to confuse and obscure than to illuminate. As for me… Well, I associated Penny, perhaps understandably, with a time before things had started to go awry: before Cindy, before fifteen-year-olds, before prison. I had managed to convince myself that if I could make things work with Penny, then I could make them work elsewhere - I could somehow haul myself back, as if one's youth were a place you could visit whenever you felt like it. I bring you momentous news: it's not. Who'd have thought?

My immediate problem was how to explain my connection with Maureen, JJ and Jess. She would find the truth hurtful and upsetting, and it was hard to think of a lie that would even get off the ground. What could we possibly be to one another? We didn't look like colleagues, or poetry enthusiasts, or clubbers, or substance-abus............