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borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.
    I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.
    Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.
    Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf –
golf
. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the
Marie Celeste
of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?
    This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.
    I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

White Springs, Texas
    LORRIE WAS A woman of generous proportions. She liked to eat, who doesn’t? Nor was she alone. Most of her girlfriends were super-size, they had ballooned in girth over the years, their jaws were always working. They joked, ‘It ain’t got no calories if you eat by the light of the refrigerator.’ Her husband didn’t mind, he said he didn’t mind, he said there was more of her to love. He served in the army and their marriage was one of partings and homecomings. She ate for solace during the long months when he was a blurred face on Skype, and she cooked up a storm when he was home. Between this lay the tricky period of readjustment, this could take a week or more, when their strangeness to each other drained away and they rediscovered their old companionship. She found herself snacking heavily then, just as, long ago, during stressful times, she had smoked.
    So she had put on the pounds. It was hard to believe that she had once been a skinny kid, but then there were few of them around nowadays. Children were heavier, it was a national tragedy, many of them were downright obese. Her own two kids were big for their age, it broke her heart to see them rolling from side to side as they walked, like drunken sailors. Just the other day, when she had to fetch Dean early from school, she had seen him struggle from his chair and lift the desk with him. His face, pink with shame!
    Junk food was to blame. Apparently it was all to do with the presidential elections. Her neighbour’s son, Tyler, was studying chemistry at college. He said the swing votes were in the corn belt, in the Mid-West, so the farmers were wooed by big subsidies, which meant over-production of corn and its by-product, high-fructose corn syrup. Imported sugar was taxed sky-high and this syrup substituted and put into practically every processed food that Americans ate. He said it had a destructive effect on the body and artificially stimulated