Temps perdus

Kim left on Thursday. We must have looked a state dragging ourselves up to the station. the train, the sudden bereftness and her-missing hit me. I had to be myself again, which was difficult to recover after a closeness in which everything is made together.

I left the house one morning to go to the dentist for a filling. I was self-conscious about my gait, an old man's forward stooping walk being the best I could manage, concentrating to make my legs work. In the surgery I could hardly talk, and made a stumbling, over-salivered mess of asking them to turn the canned music off. Too late, I suddenly worried about how any anaesthetic might react to the drug. But anaesthetic wasn't necessary, and I hardly felt a thing.

On Monday, leaving the house when the sky was already beginning to blacken, we went into town. Everything sensual was more so. Feeling the changes of the dark light of a winter, the wind not just in my hair but staying in it long after it had died down. I couldn't resist chatting, to friends and to shop assistants, my pleasure at fabrics and patterns and jewellery, picking up things just to feel the tiny details through my uncommonly sensitive fingertips; colourful geegaws and plastics, the beauty of artificial things too. In another shop it felt as though someone was turning the world's amplifier down to a hush, leaving only a crackling of packets and wrapping, and I stood still and gazed up to listen to a gorgeous aural snow.

I loved the long silences with Kim, sitting together with blankets over us, having to curl my toes up occasionally with the pleasure of her presence. And talking about sex with her, the tacit permission to get turned on by talking about Mary-Ann. "What do you like?" Kim asked, which caused a deep breath of pleasure at the question.

I had a long late night phone call with Mary-Ann, and was glad that the word "love" has never, not even in the state I was in, imposed itself. I wouldn't know what I'm signing up to, or what feelings prove or disprove it. I do worry though, that we might be storing up difficulties for ourselves with too many words.

Our last re-dosing outdoors took place down an alley, in the dark of overgrown weedy bushes that are beginning to claim back a disused factory. A kaleidoscope of patches of black and dark green leaf, and little piercings of orange where the street light pricked through. We shovelled it into the hollow of a Bic pen top to get it up our noses.

I wanted to laugh and laugh. The comical sounds of our big sniffing, usually followed by something like "Oooh, bloody hell," said in that English tone of self-mockery at having done something a bit modern. The amateurishness of it, the improvisation; the scruffy little blue plastic carrier bag holding our bananas on the ground looking up at me like a friend. We're from Lancashire! We take drugs by using 20p biro lids!