Sit down next to me

Hayley is leaning with both hands on the kitchen worktop, her tits pushing forward. My cock is hardening. "Fucking hell, you're fit Hayley." Last week she saw me looking at them. "They're great, aren't they?" and cupped them, admiring them herself too. It's liberating being with a woman unapologetically aware of her own attractiveness. She makes another proposal. I live in her flat, she moves in with Harry.

It's tempting -- a street full of birdsong, ten minutes' walk from the city centre, thirty feet of garden. The woman in the flat upstairs seems to think I live there and am Hayley's boyfriend, so we could keep that useful fiction going.

But I keep running up against a difficulty Hayley refuses to acknowledge: what happens when they split up? Do me and Hayley then share a one-bed flat? My life is coloured brightly from her loud hedonism, but I like having a lulling suburban harbour.

I suggested last night that we could have a bop and a drink in the garden this afternoon. "That sounds a great idea looby, yes!"

The flat's deteriorated since I left. Black tidal marks of dirt on the vinyl floor, cigarette ash dusted everywhere, sodden butts in the sink; strawberries with grey bouffant hairdos, suppurating into the fridge. But the lovers didn't turn up, and the itinerant cat was making an insufficient contribution to the afternoon, so after a couple of hours of sitting distractedly on the wall, I came home again.

The other day, having wandered around the northern suburbs for a few hours, I was hungry, and a bit cold. Along the part of Gloucester Road known as Pigsty Hill, a church was offering "soul food", a meat or vegetable curry, for free. A dozen or so of us, in various stages of decay, were dotted about a ruthless plaza in front of the church hall.

I was engaged by one of those over-clean thirtysomething men which guitar-based Christianity attracts. To my secret delight, he said that that "fashion sense is obviously important to you." I was wearing this new mustard coloured pashmina scarf, and the trousers which were implicated in an appreciative remark my arse received from Trina. Then I realised the poor currency in which the compliment was paid, given his own mediocre dress.

He told me that God is in everything. I looked down at my butternut squash curry. I can do without God in my curry. For an omnipotent, if surpassingly needy and insecure being, he seemed to be a much weaker influence in the dish than garlic or turmeric. I said I found that idea difficult to understand, but thought it might be politic to avoid biting the hand that was feeding me. "But your compassion, and kindness, in doing this -- I find that very easy to understand."

A few days ago I was irritated to see that someone had gone to the not inconsiderable effort of tearing the leg off a plastic chair that had been stationed on the Common for at least all the time I've lived at this address. The vandal had then tossed it into the adjoining nursery's playground. I have spent nearly a week now simmering with fantasies of violence towards him.

Refreshed from having had God in my mouth for several minutes, I noticed that someone in my street had placed four plastic garden chairs in their front yard. I asked permission to take two, and removed them to the Common. Next day I sat with some cider and wrote to one of my elderly aunts.

Later, I thought how lovely it would be to sit in the dusk, on one of the now publicly owned chairs. One had disappeared entirely. The other is extant now only in its back, which has been sawn from its legs.