I had him cycle over to see me after his shift finished at one in the morning. He’d appear on my doorstep, exhausted and dirty, and I’d search his pockets for tips and those tiny umbrellas they put in the drinks at his restaurant. I was obsessed with those tiny umbrellas. To me they represented a sort of pocket-sized joy, where the regular-sized ones represented despair. I was happyish then, as you are at the beginning of relationships, before the crud starts forming—literal crud, because you can’t be bothered to clean, just to have sex, but also the crud that forms on your heart from having
...more
