It was unfortunate, the next morning, that contractors should begin to gut the lobby outside my flat’s front door, causing an almighty noise at just eight o’clock after an unsettled night’s sleep. I had retired with a sad mood all about me, stirring often. The racket disturbed the cat, curled warmly between my legs; she leapt up and slunk around, watching the front door at all times, wide eyes unblinking. For hours, the hammering and drilling that shook the building worked at my state of anxiety, had me on edge. I felt a little hopeless again, a little blue, like I was back at the start.

It had not been a good date. As she headed towards a bus-stop bound for Stoke Newington, I put away my umbrella and walked back to the train station in the rain. I took the umbrella from my backpack, opened it for us beneath the narrow doorway, white streetlights spitting, small though it was, left-handed, either side, cowering but good-spirited. The umbrella belonged to us in the rain along Columbia Rd, otherwise it was desolate and windy. She was pressed up against my shoulder; her cheek & laughter so close I could feel their heat, which was her heat as the umbrella was ours, and the rain the sky’s.

It was warm in the pub from the fire we sat opposite, its orange light slowly dying as the evening went on. Goodness, I thought, the fire is hot! it is so warm in here. I had been to that pub on a date before, some six-and-a-half years earlier, during kinder weather. Although I sought to push that meeting aside, I could not, it being my first return since. I thought that it had been a good date, with much conversation and laughter, with stopping on the way home for another carafe, with her menstrual blood in my pubic hair and beard and on my sheets, and the bittersweet hum of a hangover over morning’s cum.

But this was different and I was different — it has been a long six years after all, as we had discussed — so that I felt stifled and, owing to dry-January, quite unable to liberate myself even the tiniest amount from the dumb state I was in, opening my mouth to talk but saying nothing. What a boring person I am, and so timid. Do I really need a draught of beer to loosen up, to be anything more than a stricken silence? But no, this is not me, I thought, out of sorts.

She talked. More than making up for my uncharacteristic silence, she talked with enthusiasm. If I scolded myself for my being mute, then my self-deprecating thoughts stole my attention and much of what she said could not be recalled. It was so warm in there, from that hot fire! A man could hardly think! I excused myself, went to the lavatory and threw water, cold from the frost, upon my flushed face. I returned with nothing to say. She talked and I believed that she talked to me the same way she talked to everyone and that I had not really known her at all. I was struck by the suspicion that I had walked in on a performance of hers, that my unfortunate inability to conjure even the most banal topic of conversation was of small consequence, that I could be replaced by anyone else in the pub right then and that she was quite happy to talk uninterrupted, because it was practice, all practice for some bigger thing.

The one-sidedness was quite unfamiliar to us. How we had talked before! and talked and talked! She had been out of the country for five days, delaying our rendezvous, forcing us towards the telephone, long nights swapping the handset from one arm to the other as cramp set in. One evening, because such things pique my minor fascination with numbers, I calculated that since matching we had spent 8.74% of our time talking on the phone. The decimal places were important; I did not want to round it up to nine, but just pay special attention to the seventy-four. And, of course, eight is a lucky number, so why stray? She was my favourite way to pass the time.

The photograph was of her, as I later learned, in Morocco for a friend’s wedding. She is from the side, wearing a black sundress and straw hat, drenched in light amongst pale stone walls. She is laughing and her face is smiling, her eyes are smiling, all of it is honest and beautiful, blurred in the whim of its capture.