This was when she’d been in the new job a few months and her salary was starting to pile up in the bank a bit. She lent me five grand; if she hadn’t, I would have gone under. I have never paid her back because I’ve never been able to, and the fact that she’s moved out and is seeing somebody else doesn’t make me five grand richer. The other day on the phone, when I gave her a hard time and told her she’d fucked my life up, she said something about the money, something about whether I’d start paying her back in installments, and I said I’d pay her back at a pound a week for the next hundred years. That’s when she hung up. So that’s the money. The stuff I told her about being unhappy in the relationship, about half looking around for someone else: she pushed me into saying it. She tricked me into saying it. That sounds feeble, but she did. We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were always thinking about meeting somebody else.
