Upstairs, off the landing, the locked door, solid and familiar and unmovable. Next to it, my bedroom door, real and functional and not quite closed. A cat-wide gap existed between the door and the frame and this projected a floor-to-ceiling wedge of yellow bedside table light. Beyond the crack and into the bedroom, the impenetrable exercise book on the carpet, four columns of numbers and a crossed-out chart facing up at the ceiling. On the double bed Ian the cat curled in a nose-to-tail sleeping ball, The Light Bulb Fragment book, slid halfway down between pillow and duvet, and me, on my side, forearm covering my eyes from the forgotten-about electric bulb, dreaming:
I walked along a sun-dappled avenue lined with overgrown bushes and vines, half-collapsed Greek columns and classical white statues with missing arms or tumbled heads or broken plinths which tilted their weathered masters at angles which would have been precarious and scramble-sliding for any real person. The air was sweet-sappy with the smell of eucalyptus or linseed or camphor oil and was so hot and alive it got into your mouth and vapoured away the moisture with gentle, intimate care. I passed an old marble statue of the celebrity chef who wrote my cookbook. His blank eyes stared out of his licheny face as he stood tall and aggressive, holding – wielding – his spatula as a hero would a sword. A little further on in a deep alcove, a shadowy, spider-webbed Humphrey Bogart leant against a rough carved piano, his grimy stone glass held in his grimy stone hand up against his grimy stone tuxedo.
At the end of the avenue, I strolled under a crumbled archway and out into the remains of a large open square with a Roman bath at its centre. The bath was half-empty and what water there was had been covered by a quiet mat of leaves from a wide willowy tree which had forced its way up through the ancient flooring. I made my way towards the tree, carefully overstepping a busy line of big black ants and weaving around the many tall brown grass tufts and low flat bushes which had also pushed up wherever they could between the stones. Nature’s reclamation committee.
As I got closer I noticed a white plastic sun lounger parked up in the tree’s shade. There was a girl lying on it, on her side, her back to me. As I got closer the girl sat up to dig for something in her bag and my insides leaped throatwards with a wet jerk of recognition.
“Clio.”
Clio Aames stopped what she was doing, turned and pushed her sunglasses up into her long dark hair like an Alice band.
“Fucking hell,” she said. “Look who it isn’t.”
I arrived under the tree and dipped as she half rose, scooping my arms around the solid summer heat warm reality of her. She squeezed me back hard and we sank down together onto the lounger. We stayed like that for a long time, holding tight, our faces buried in each other’s necks, breathing and being still.
“You alright?” I asked with just breath and hardly any sound, under the lobe of her ear.
“Yeah, I think. Yeah.” Air, words from inside her against my neck. “I missed you.”
“I’ve forgotten you, Clio. I’ve forgotten it all. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Hey. Come on, it’s okay.” Her hand on my neck and her fingers stroking circles in the back of my hair. “It’s alright. Everything’s okay.” She pushed us gently apart so she could look into my eyes. “It’s alright. We’re here now and everything’s okay.”
“Clio,” I said.
“It’s alright. I know.”
“You’re gone.”
“I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not. You’re dead.”
Clio let go of me and sat up straight.
“For your information,” she said, “I think I’m looking pretty good.” She ran her hands down from bikini top to bikini bottoms to emphasise the point. After a second she looked back at me. “This is the part where you’re supposed to agree.”
“You look fantastic.”
“Fantastic for a dead person?”
I let go of it, felt the smile open up on my face.
“Don’t start with me, Aames. How come you’re wearing your top anyway?”
I reached over to touch her in the same way she’d touched herself but she slapped my hand away hard with exaggerated amazement.
“Oh my God. Clio, you’re dead. Hey Clio, can I see your tits? One word for you: necro–” she broke it in half and pinned each part down with a finger point “–philia. This is what you degenerate into when I leave you on your own?”
I stared at my feet with as serious an expression as I could manage and answered in my gruff, B-movie samurai voice.
“I am filled with shame.”
“Good,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chin. “Now tell me what’s been happening in EastEnders.”
And that’s what I did. I was about halfway through a complex and unlikely plot surrounding the return of one of the programme’s villains when Clio leaned in, slipped her hand around the back of my neck and kissed me, at first gently and then deeply and honestly.
“Hang on,” I said quietly as we moved apart. “I’ve not told you about the stupid one with droopy eyes getting pregnant again.”
Clio smiled an empty kind of smile and pushed her forehead back against mine.
“I’m sorry this had to happen,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not as good as it was. I think the ratings have suffered too.”
“Eric.”
“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just. How can we do this, you know? How can we even do the jokes?”
“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition,” Clio said, her head nodding a little and making mine nod too. We stayed like that, forehead against forehead, for a few seconds.
“Could – was there something I could have done?”
She pulled back a little so we were eye to eye. Her hand still drooped over my shoulder. She shook her head.
“I don’t even know.”
I took hold of her other hand and held it on my lap with both of mine.
“Clee, tell me something to prove this isn’t a dream.”
“Something like what?”
“Like something I don’t know and I have to go and look it up and when I do it turns out to be true.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“Just tell me I’m not dreaming?”
“Maybe you are,” she said. “Probably you are.”
“I don’t want to be. Clio, I can’t do this on my own.”
There was a bang.
We both jumped, turned towards the Roman bath. A clump of leaves swirled on the surface of the water in a slow spiral.
“Is there something alive in there?”
Clio nodded. “Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, watching the waters. “Something from down where it gets black.”
There