Bedless

The washing machine is stalled, knobless. Neither May nor June's rent has been paid. Having to see Seriouscrush to explain why this is so. An overdue and very boring article to finish. Drinking on a credit card, questionnaires I should have pestered people about for the anti-fracking campaign, and Gillian's quiet, parasitic presence. But it's mine and Trina's afternoon and nothing's going to spoil it.

I bumped into Keith, who showed me the metal stiches in his lower back from an operation, and said that he got 64 for a dissertation I helped him with. I bought him a pint and told him about Trina. "She's a nice mixed race bird," I said. "Welsh Mum, Scouse Dad."

She rang to say she'd got lost and was outside a pub. "Right Keith I'll have to go--she's outside the Brown Cow." I went to the loo where a jailbird I know saw me brushing my teeth. "You know, if you want to get rid of the smell--chocolate. Just get a little bit of chocolate, you know, them squares, bite a bit off, and it'll get rid of it."

We walked hand in hand through town and we met one of the couple who cooked for me the other week. It felt like a declaration of sorts.

In the garden at the Sun, the air is of stolen luxury. Glinting glasses and bottles of wine, long slow lunches that feel illicit. Why is no-one at work? A young man in a suitably existentialist uniform of scruffy jeans, jacket with rolled-up sleeves, and white plastic sunglasses was at the next table, earwigging perhaps, and reading something by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Trina and I fall over each other with talking, two chirruping chatterboxes knotting conversational threads where only what's of most immediate interest survives. "It's so simple and straightforward with you," I said. "I don't have to think," reminding myself of Furtheron's wise advice to avoid doing just that on this blog a few days ago. Slow and gradual kissing, her biting my lips. It feels as though she's witholding something; I find it very sexy.

She said she'd still like to come to the the wine club in three weeks' time. "Well, there won't be a bus back," she said, "and I'll just have to stay over, won't I?" I sleep on a long cushion, on the floor. I haven't got a bed at all, let alone a double one.

In the bus station, the ugliness of the scene in front of us is almost miraculous. Line-painted pockmarked tarmac, the Co-op supermarket in a grey metal prefab, a bit of wasteland picked over by gulls, and a gaudy fruit machine and bingo place, staffed by buxom women in polyester tuxedos. "We've snogged in some romantic places you and me," she said; and we'll be doing so again tomorrow.