Can't pay, would dearly love to pay

At Manchester airport I went to a cashpoint and found 14p in the account into which Gail said she'd deposit the rent. Rain rained at Manchester, hours after we'd been chatting in a wine bar in Pisa in a place which both Kirsty and I had decided was the quiet centre of the oddbods, sexual and otherwise, in the city. Huge glasses of a smoky Chianti served by a knowleagable vinophile, a spikyhaired man-woman.

Back to England to a pelting of problems, a sleet of email, a mound of hectoring letters. I drink to suffocate the worries.

New Business Colleague texts, asking to meet me. I wait in the pub. Girlf, with whom I was at school, turns up first.

Last time me and her were together alone, after NBC had gone home helplessly pissed, she said "Right I'm going to have to leave now otherwise we'll end up sleeping together." She approaches the table and I don't know whether to kiss her or not. I don't. She leans forward in her low cut dress and puts her forearm on the table. As she does so, she pushes her tits up. She's a hairdresser and is into jazz-funk, my sometimes vilified music of choice.

She goes to get the second bottle of Prosecco and it's much more relaxed than it has ever been with them. I'm enjoying it, laughing, the tit-glancing crackle of sex. I'm aware of neglecting both my children, wanting their tea, and the friend sitting next to me who isn't in on it.

NBC says we should have a talk outside. I follow him across the car park, wondering whether to make small talk. He outlines the deal in much more straightforward and trusting terms than I had expected. It was though I'd passed some sort of test of manliness, an inverse manliness where I'm not a braggart.

"Look," he says. "I don't want any skanks." "No no no, don't worry" I say, feeling an unwonted sense of power. "This'll work. You can't talk to middle class people and I haven't got your contacts. Yin and yang." Back in the pub, the Prosecco drips from the ice bucket as she poured out another. The tiniest glance at her, invisible almost to myself, powerful to us both, the lure of the forbidden.

Girlf tells us about her job in a record shop when she left school; he shows me pictures on a phone of the building work he's done. I feel the sense of admiration that someone who can't do anything respectable feels in the face of someone who can do something practical. She presses his abilities upon me as we look at glassy corporate buildings in the Middle East. "He did this". I feel the sexual frisson dissipate, and I'm losing her.

Tomorrow dinnertime I'm off for a date at the Water Witch with Trina, a woman who lives on a houseboat on the canal. She apologises for only having an MA, not a PhD, "but I do have great tits".

Mel, the woman I met in Liverpool, replies to an email I sent her yesterday.

Hi looby,
glad you had a good time. I had a good week off with [my son] thanks except it rained...a lot. Back at work now. You were right about Sweden winning the [Eurovision Song] Contest. See you soon M.

What a shame. I liked her, but that's so lukewarm as to almost approach a goodbye.