Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-crossed Love

As demonstrated by the subtle and melancholy story that follows, memory can be a very unreliable thing, even in matters of the heart. Or perhaps particularly in matters of the heart…

One of the hottest stars in science fiction, fantasy, and horror today, Neil Gaiman has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, one World Fantasy Award, seven Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, four Geffen Awards, one Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and a Newbery Medal. Gaiman first came to wide public attention as the creator of the graphic novel series The Sandman, still one of the most acclaimed graphic novel series of all time. Gaiman remains a superstar in the graphic novel field. His graphic novels include Breakthrough, Death Talks about Life, Legend of the Green Flame, The Last Temptation, Only the End of the World Again, MirrorMask, and a slew of books in collaboration with Dave McKean, including Black Orchid, Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

In recent years he’s enjoyed equal success in the science fiction and fantasy fields with his bestselling novel American Gods winning the 2002 Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Awards, Coraline winning both Hugo (2003) and Nebula (2004), and his story “A Study in Emerald” winning the Hugo in 2004. His novel The Graveyard Book won the Hugo and the Newbery Medal in 2009. He also won the World Fantasy Award for his story with Charles Vess, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and won the International Horror Guild Award for his collection Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany. Gaiman’s other novels include Good Omens (written with Terry Pratchett), Neverwhere, Stardust, and, most recently, Anansi Boys. In addition to Angels & Visitations, his short fiction has been collected in Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions & Illusions, Midnight Days, Warning: Contains Language, Creatures of the Night, Two Plays for Voices, and Adventures in the Dream Trade, and Fragile Things. He’s also written Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion, A Walking Tour of the Shambles (with Gene Wolfe), Batman and Babylon 5 novelizations, and edited Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman), Book of Dreams (with Edward Kramer), and Now We Are Sick: An Anthology of Nasty Verse (with Stephen Jones). His most recent books are The Graveyard Book, and two YA novels, Odd and the Frost Giants, and, with Gris Grimly, The Dangerous Alphabet. A movie based on his novel Stardust was in theaters worldwide in 2007, and an animated movie based on Coraline was in theaters in 2009.

The Thing About Cassandra

So there’s Scallie and me wearing Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, complete with sideburns, at five o’clock in the morning by the side of a canal in Amsterdam. There had been ten of us that night, including Rob, the groom, last seen handcuffed to a bed in the Red Light District with shaving foam covering his nether regions and his brother-in-law giggling and patting the hooker holding the straight razor on the arse, which was the point I looked at Scallie and he looked at me, and he said, “Maximum deniability?” and I nodded, because there are some questions you don’t want to be able to answer when a bride starts asking pointed questions about the stag weekend, so we slipped off for a drink, leaving eight men in Starsky-and-Hutch wigs (one of whom was mostly naked, attached to a bed by fluffy pink handcuffs, and seemed to be starting to think that this adventure wasn’t such a good idea after all) behind us, in a room that smelled of disinfectant and cheap incense, and we went and sat by a canal and drank cans of Danish lager and talked about the old days.

Scallie—whose real name is Jeremy Porter, and these days people call him Jeremy, but he had been Scallie when we were eleven—and the groom to be, Rob Cunningham, had been at school with me. We had drifted out of touch, more or less, had found each other the lazy way you do these days, through Friends Reunited and Facebook and such, and now Scallie and I were together for the first time since we were nineteen. The Starsky-and-Hutch wigs, which had been Scallie’s idea, made us look like we were playing brothers in some made-for-TV movie—Scallie the short, stocky brother with the thick moustache, me, the tall one. Given that I’ve made a significant part of my income since leaving school modeling, I’d add the tall good-looking one, but nobody looks good in a Starsky-and-Hutch wig, complete with sideburns.

Also, the wig itched.

We sat by the canal, and when the lager had all gone we kept talking and we watched the sun come up.

Last time I saw Scallie he was nineteen and filled with big plans. He had just joined the RAF as a cadet. He was going to fly planes, and do double duty using the flights to smuggle drugs, and so get incredibly rich while helping his country. It was the kind of mad idea he used to have all the way through school. Usually the whole thing would fall apart. Sometimes he’d get the rest of us into trouble on the way.

Now, twelve years later, his six months in the RAF ended early because of an unspecified problem with his right knee, he was a senior executive in a firm that manufactured double-glazed windows, he told me, with, since the divorce, a smaller house than he felt that he deserved and only a golden retriever for company.

He was sleeping with a woman in the double-glazing firm, but had no expectations of her leaving her boyfriend for him, seemed to find it easier that way. “Of course, I wake up crying sometimes, since the divorce. Well, you do,” he said at one point. I could not imagine him crying, and anyway he said it with a huge Scallie grin.

I told him about me: still modelling, helping out in a friend’s antique shop to keep busy, more and more painting. I was lucky; people bought my paintings. Every year I would have a small gallery show at the Little Gallery in Chelsea, and while initially the only people to buy anything had been people I knew—photographers, old girlfriends, and the like—these days I have actual collectors. We talked about the days that only Scallie seemed to remember, when he and Rob and I had been a team of three, inviolable, unbreakable. We talked about teenage heartbreak, about Caroline Minton (who was now Caroline Keen, and married to a vicar), about the first time we brazened our way into an 18 film, although neither of us could remember what the film actually was.

Then Scallie said, “I heard from Cassandra the other day.”

“Cassandra?”

“Your old girlfriend. Cassandra. Remember?”

“…No.”

“The one from Reigate. You had her name written on all your books.” I must have looked particularly dense or drunk or sleepy, because he said, “You met her on a skiing holiday. Oh, for heaven’s sake. Your first shag. Cassandra.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering, remembering everything. “Cassandra.”

And I did remember.

“Yeah,” said Scallie. “She dropped me a line on Facebook. She’s running a community theatre in East London. You should talk to her.”

“Really?”

“I think, well, I mean, reading between the lines of her message, she may still have a thing for you. She asked after you.”

I wondered how drunk he was, how drunk I was, staring at the canal in the early light. I said something, I forget what, then I asked whether Scallie remembered where our hotel was, because I had forgotten, and he said he had forgotten too, and that Rob had all the hotel details and really we should go and find him and rescue him from the clutches of the nice hooker with the handcuffs and the shaving kit, which, we realised, would be easier if we knew how to get back to where we’d left him, and looking for some clue to where we had left Rob, I found a card with the hotel’s address on it in my back pocket, so we headed back there and the last thing I did before we walked away from the canal and that whole strange evening was to pull the itchy Starsky-and-Hutch wig off my head and throw it into the canal.

It floated.

Scallie said, “There was a deposit on that, you know. If you didn’t want to wear it, I’d’ve carried it.” Then he said, “You should drop Cassandra a line.”

I shook my head. I wondered who he had been talking to online, who he had confused for her, knowing it definitely wasn’t Cassandra.

The thing about Cassandra is this: I’d made her up.

I WAS FIFTEEN, almost sixteen. I was awkward. I had just experienced my teenage growth spurt and was suddenly taller than most of my friends, self-conscious about my height. My mother owned and ran a small riding stables, and I helped out there, but the girls—competent, horsey, sensible types—intimidated me. At home I wrote bad poetry and painted water colours, mostly of ponies in fields; at school—there were only boys at my school—I played cricket competently, acted a little, hung around with my friends playing records (the CD was around, but they were expensive and rare, and we had all inherited record players and hi-fis from parents or older siblings). When we didn’t talk about music, or sports, we talked about girls.

Scallie was older than me. So was Rob. They liked having me as part of their gang, but they liked teasing me, too. They acted like I was a kid, and I wasn’t. They had both done it with girls. Actually, that’s not entirely true. They had both done it with the same girl, Caroline Minton, famously free with her favours and always up for it once, as long as the person she was with had a moped.

I did not have a moped. I was not old enough to get one, my mother could not afford one (my father had died when I was small, of an accidental overdose of anaesthetic, when he was in hospital to have a minor operation on an infected toe. To this day, I avoid hospitals). I had seen Caroline Minton at parties, but she terrified me and even had I owned a moped, I would not have wanted my first sexual experience to be with her.

Scallie and Rob also had girlfriends. Scallie’s girlfriend was taller than he was, had huge breasts, and was interested in football, which meant that Scallie had to feign an interest in football, Crystal Palace, while Rob’s girlfriend thought that Rob and she should have things in common, which meant that Rob stopped listening to the mid-80s electropop the rest of us liked and started listening to hippy bands from before we were born, which was bad, and that Rob got to raid her dad’s amazing collection of old TV series on video, which was good.

I had no girlfriend.

Even my mother began to comment on it.

There must have been a place where it came from, the name, the idea: I don’t remember though. I just remember writing “Cassandra” on my exercise books. Then, carefully, not saying anything.

“Who’s Cassandra?” asked Scallie.

“Nobody,” I said.

“She must be somebody. You wrote her name on your maths exercise book.”

“She’s just a girl I met on the skiing holiday.” My mother and I had gone skiing, with my aunt and cousins, the month before, in Austria.

“Are we going to meet her?”

“She’s from Reigate. I expect so. Eventually.”

“Well, I hope so. And you like her?”

I paused, for what I hoped was the right amount of time, and said, “She’s a really good kisser.” Then Scallie laughed and Rob wanted to know if this was French kissing, with tongues and everything, and I said, “What do you think,” and by the end of the day, they both believed in her.

My mum was pleased to hear I’d met someone. Her questions—what Cassandra’s parents did, for example—I simply shrugged away.

I went on three “dates” with Cassandra. On each of our dates, I took the train up to London, and took myself to the cinema. It was exciting, in its own way.

I returned from the first trip with more stories of kissing, and of breast-feeling.

Our second date (in reality, spent watching Weird Science on my own in Leicester Square) was, as told to my mum, holding hands together at what she still called “the pictures,” but as told to Rob and Scallie (and over that week, to several other school friends who had heard rumours from sworn-to-secrecy Rob and Scallie, and now needed to find out if it was true), the day I lost my virginity, in Cassandra’s aunt’s flat in London: The aunt was away, Cassandra had a key. I had (for proof) a packet of three condoms missing the one I had thrown away and a strip of four black-and-white photographs I had found on my first trip to London, abandoned in the basket of a photo booth on Victoria Station. The photo strip showed a girl about my age with long straight hair (I could not be certain of the colour. Dark blond? Red? Light brown?) and a friendly, freckly, not unpretty, face. I pocketed it. In art class I did a pencil sketch of the third of the pictures, the one I liked the best, her head half-turned as if calling out to an unseen friend beyond the tiny curtain. She looked sweet, and charming.

I put the drawing up on my bedroom wall, where I could see it from my bed.

After our third date (it was Who Framed Roger Rabbit) I came back to school with bad news: Cassandra’s family was going to Canada (a place that sounded more convincing to my ears than America), something to do with her father’s job, and I would not see her for a long time. We hadn’t really broken up, but we were being practical: Those were the days when transatlantic phone calls were too expensive for teenagers. It was over.

I was sad. Everyone noticed how sad I was. They said they would have loved to have met her, and maybe when she comes back at Christmas? I was confident that by Christmas, she would be forgotten.

She was. By Christmas I was going out with Nikki Blevins and the only evidence that Cassandra had ever been a part of my life was her name, written on a couple of my exercise books, and the pencil drawing of her on my bedroom wall, with “Cassandra, February 19, 1985” written underneath it.

When my mother sold the riding stables in 1989, the drawing was lost in the move. I was at art college at the time, considered my old pencil-drawings as embarrassing as the fact that I had once invented a girlfriend, and did not care.

I do not believe I had thought of Cassandra for twenty years.

MY MOTHER SOLD the riding stables, the attached house, and the meadows to a property developer, who built a housing estate where it had once been, and as part of the deal, gave her a small, detached house at the end of Seton Close. I visit her at least once a fortnight, arriving on Friday night, leaving Sunday morning, a routine as regular as the grandmother clock in the hall.

Mother is concerned that I am happy in life. She has started to mention that various of her friends have eligible daughters. This trip we had an extremely embarrassing conversation that began with her asking if I would like to meet the church organist, a very nice young man of about my age.

“Mother. I’m not gay.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, dear. All sorts of people do it. They even get married. Well, not proper marriage, but it’s the same thing.”

“I’m still not gay.”

“I just thought, still not married, and the painting, and the modelling.”

“I’ve had girlfriends, Mummy. You’ve even met some of them.”

“Nothing that ever stuck, dear. I just thought there might be something you wanted to tell me.”

“I’m not gay, Mother. I would tell you if I was.” And then I said, “I snogged Tim Carter at a party when I was at art college, but we were drunk and it never went beyond that.”

She pursed her lips. “That’s quite enough of that, young man.” And then, changing the subject, as if to get rid of an unpleasant taste in her mouth, she said, “You’ll never guess who I bumped into in Tesco’s last week.”

“No, I won’t. Who?”

“Your old girlfriend. Your first girlfriend, I should say.”

“Nikki Blevins? Hang on, she’s married, isn’t she? Nikki Woodbridge?”

“The one before her, dear. Cassandra. I was behind her in the line. I would have been ahead of her, but I forgot that I needed cream for the berries today, so I went back to get it, and she was in front of me, and I knew her face was familiar. At first I thought she was Joanie Simmond’s youngest, the one with the speech disorder—what we used to call a stammer but apparently you can’t say that anymore—but then I thought, I know where I know that face. It was over your bed for five years. Of course I said, ‘It’s not Cassandra, is it?’ and she said, ‘It is,’ and I said, ‘You’ll laugh when I say this, but I’m Stuart Innes’s mum.’ She says, ‘Stuart Innes?’ and her face lit up. Well, she hung around while I was putting my groceries in my shopping bag, and she said she’d already been in touch with your friend Jeremy Porter on Bookface, and they’d been talking about you—”

“You mean Facebook? She was talking to Scallie on Facebook?”

“Yes, dear.”

I drank my tea and wondered who my mother had actually been talking to. I said, “You’re quite sure this was the Cassandra from over my bed?”

“Oh yes, dear. She told me about how you took her to Leicester Square, and how sad she was when they had to move to Canada. They went to Vancouver. I asked her if she ever met my cousin Leslie—he went to Vancouver after the war—but she said she didn’t believe so, and it turns out it’s actually a big sort of place. I told her about the pencil drawing you did, and she seemed very up-to-date on your activities. She was thrilled when I told her that you were having a gallery opening this week.”

“You told her that?”

“Yes, dear. I thought she’d like to know.” Then my mother said, almost wistfully, “She’s very pretty, dear. I think she’s doing something in community theatre.” Then the conversation went over to the retirement of Dr. Dunnings, who had been our GP since before I was born, and how he was the only non-Indian doctor left in his practice and how my mother felt about this.

I lay in bed that night in my small bedroom at my mother’s house and turned over the conversation in my head. I am no longer on Facebook and thought about rejoining to see who Scullie’s friends were, and if this pseudo-Cassandra was one of them, but there were too many people I was happy not to see again, and I let it be, certain that when there was an explanation, it would prove to be a simple one, and I slept.

I HAVE BEEN showing in the Little Gallery in Chelsea for over a decade now. In the old days, I had a quarter of a wall and nothing priced at more than three hundred pounds. Now I get my own show, every October for a month, and it would be fair to say that I have to sell only a dozen paintings to know that my needs, rent, and life are covered for another year. The unsold paintings remain on the gallery walls until they are gone and they are always gone by Christmas.

The couple who own the gallery, Paul and Barry, still call me “the beautiful boy” as they did twelve years ago, when I first exhibited with them, when it might actually have been true. Back then, they wore flowery, open-necked shirts and gold chains; now, in middle age, they wear expensive suits and talk too much for my liking about the stock exchange. Still, I enjoy their company. I see them three times a year; in September, when they come to my studio to see what I’ve been working on and select the paintings for the show; at the gallery, hanging and opening in October; and in February, when we settle up.

Barry runs the gallery. Paul co-owns it, comes out for the parties, but also works in the wardrobe department of the Royal Opera House. The preview party for this year’s show was on a Friday night. I had spent a nervous couple of days hanging the paintings. Now my part was done, and there was nothing to do but wait, and hope people liked my art, and not to make a fool of myself. I did as I had done for the previous twelve years, on Barry’s instructions, “Nurse the champagne. Fill up on water. There’s nothing worse for the collector than encountering a drunk artist, unless he’s a famous drunk, and you are not, dear. Be amiable but enigmatic, and when people ask for the story behind the painting, say ‘My lips are sealed.’ But for God’s sake, imply there is one. It’s the story they’re buying.”

I rarely invite people to the preview any longer: Some artists do, regarding it as a social event. I do not. While I take my art seriously, as art, and am proud of my work (the latest exhibition was called “People in Landscapes,” which pretty much says it all about my work anyway), I understand that the party exists solely as a commercial event, a come-on for eventual buyers and those who might say the right thing to other eventual buyers. I tell you all this so that you will not be surprised that Barry and Paul manage the guest list to the preview, not I.

The preview begins at 6:30 p.m. I had spent the afternoon hanging paintings, making sure everything looked as good as it could. The only thing that was different about this particular event was how excited Paul looked, like a small boy struggling with the urge to tell you what he had bought you for a birthday present. That, and Barry, who said, while we were hanging, “I think tonight’s show will put you on the map.”

I said, “I think there’s a typo on the Lake District one.” An oversized painting of Windemere at sunset, with two children staring lostly at the viewer from the banks. “It should say three thousand pounds. It says three hundred thousand.”

“Does it?” said Barry, blandly. “My, my.”

It was perplexing, but the first guests had arrived, a little early, and the mystery could wait. A young man invited me to eat a mushroom puff from a silver tray. Then I took my glass of nurse-this-slowly champagne and I prepared to mingle.

All the prices were high, and I doubted that the Little Gallery would be able to sell them at those prices, and I worried about the year ahead.

Barry and Paul took responsibility for moving me around the room, saying, “This is the artist, the beautiful boy who makes all these beautiful things, Stuart Innes,” and I would shake hands and smile. By the end of the evening I will have met everyone, and Paul and Barry are very good about saying, “Stuart, you remember David, he writes about art for the Telegraph…” and I for my part am good about saying, “Of course, how are you? So glad you could come.”

The room was at its most crowded when a striking red-haired woman to whom I had not yet been introduced began shouting, “Representational bullshit!”

I was in conversation with The Daily Telegraph art critic and we turned. He said, “Friend of yours?” I said, “I don’t think so.”

She was still shouting, although the sounds of the party had now quieted. She shouted, “Nobody’s interested in this shit! Nobody!” Then she reached her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of ink, shouted, “Try selling this now!” and threw ink at Windemere Sunset. It was blue-black ink.

Paul was by her side then, pulling the ink bottle away from her, saying, “That was a three-hundred-thousand-pound painting, young lady.” Barry took her arm, said, “I think the police will want a word with you,” and walked her back into his office. She shouted at us as she went, “I’m not afraid! I’m proud! Artists like him, just feeding off you gullible art buyers. You’re all sheep! Representation crap!”

And then she was gone, and the party people were buzzing, and inspecting the ink-fouled painting and looking at me, and the Telegraph man was asking if I would like to comment and how I felt about seeing a three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed, and I mumbled about how I was proud to be a painter, and said something about the transient nature of art, and he said that he supposed that tonight’s event was an artistic happening in its own right, and we agreed that, artistic happening or not, the woman was not quite right in the head.

Barry reappeared, moving from group to group, explaining that Paul was dealing with the young lady, and that her eventual disposition would be up to me. The guests were still buzzing excitedly as he was ushering people out of the door, apologising as he did so, agreeing that we lived in exciting times, explaining that he would be open at the regular time tomorrow.

“That went well,” he said, when we were alone in the gallery.

“Well? That was a disaster!”

“Mm. ‘Stuart Innes, the one who had the three-hundred-thousand-pound painting destroyed.’ I think you need to be forgiving, don’t you? She was a fellow artist, even one with different goals. Sometimes you need a little something to kick you up to the next level.”

We went into the back room.

I said, “Whose idea was this?”

“Ours,” said Paul. He was drinking white wine in the back room with the red-haired woman. “Well, Barry’s mostly. But it needed a good little actress to pull it off, and I found her.” She grinned modestly: managed to look both abashed and pleased with herself.

“If this doesn’t get you the attention you deserve, beautiful boy,” said Barry, smiling at me, “nothing will. Now you’re important enough to be attacked.”

“The Windemere painting’s ruined,” I pointed out.

Barry glanced at Paul, and they giggled. “It’s already sold, ink splatters and all, for seventy-five thousand pounds,” he said. “It’s like I always say, people think they are buying the art, but really, they’re buying the story.”

Paul filled our glasses: “And we owe it all to you,” he said to the woman. “Stuart, Barry, I’d like to propose a toast. To Cassandra.”

“Cassandra,” we repeated, and we drank. This time I did not nurse my drink. I needed it.

Then, as the name was still sinking in, Paul said, “Cassandra, this ridiculously attractive and talented young man is, as I am sure you know, Stuart Innes.”

“I know,” she said. “Actually, we’re very old friends.”

“Do tell,” said Barry.

“Well,” said Cassandra, “twenty years ago, Stuart wrote my name on his maths exercise notebook.”

She looked like the girl in my drawing, yes. Or like the girl in the photographs, all grown up. Sharp-faced. Intelligent. Assured.

I had never seen her before in my life.

“Hello, Cassandra,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

WE WERE IN the wine bar beneath my flat. They serve food there, too. It’s more than just a wine bar.

I found myself talking to her as if she was someone I had known since childhood. And, I reminded myself, she wasn’t. I had only met her that evening. She still had ink stains on her hands.

We had glanced at the menu, ordered the same thing—the vegetarian meze—and when it had arrived, both started with the dolmades, then moved on to the hummus.

“I made you up,” I told her.

It was not the first thing I had said: First we had talked about her community theatre, how she had become friends with Paul, his offer to her—a thousand pounds for this evening’s show—and how she had needed the money, but mostly said yes because it sounded like a fun adventure. Anyway, she said, she couldn’t say no when she heard my name mentioned. She thought it was fate.

That was when I said it. I was scared she would think I was mad, but I said it. “I made you up.”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t. I mean, obviously you didn’t. I’m really here.” Then she said, “Would you like to touch me?”

I looked at her. At her face, and her posture, at her eyes. She was everything I had ever dreamed of in a woman. Everything I had been missing in other women. “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

“Let’s eat our dinner first,” she said. Then she said, “How long has it been since you were with a woman?”

“I’m not gay,” I protested. “I have girlfriends.”

“I know,” she said. “When was the last one?”

I tried to remember. Was it Brigitte? Or the stylist the ad agency had sent me to Iceland with? I was not certain. “Two years,” I said. “Perhaps three. I just haven’t met the right person yet.”

“You did once,” she said. She opened her handbag then, a big floppy purple thing, pulled out a cardboard folder, opened it, removed a piece of paper, tape browned at the corners. “See?”

I remembered it. How could I not? It had hung above my bed for years. She was looking around, as if talking to someone beyond the curtain. “Cassandra,” it said, “February 19, 1985.” And it was signed, “Stuart Innes.” There is something at the same time both embarrassing and heartwarming about seeing your handwriting from when you were fifteen.

“I came back from Canada in eighty-nine,” she said. “My parents’ marriage fell apart, and Mum wanted to come home. I wondered about you, what you were doing, so I went to your old address. The house was empty. Windows were broken. It was obvious nobody lived there anymore. They’d knocked down the riding stables already—that made me so sad. I’d loved horses as a girl, obviously, but I walked through the house until I found your bedroom. It was obviously your bedroom, although all the furniture was gone. It still smelled like you. And this was still pinned to the wall. I didn’t think anyone would miss it.”

She smiled.

“Who are you?”

“Cassandra Carlisle. Aged thirty-four. Former actress. Failed playwright. Now running a community theatre in Norwood. Drama therapy. Hall for rent. Four plays a year, plus workshops, and a local panto. Who are you, Stuart?”

“You know who I am.” Then, “You know I’ve never met you before, don’t you?”

She nodded. She said, “Poor Stuart. You live just above here, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s a bit loud sometimes. But it’s handy for the tube. And the rent isn’t painful.”

“Let’s pay, and go upstairs.”

I reached out to touch the back of her hand. “Not yet,” she said, moving her hand away before I could touch her. “We should talk first.”

So we went upstairs.

“I like your flat,” she said. “It looks exactly like the kind of place I imagine you being.”

“It’s probably time to start thinking about getting something a bit bigger,” I told her. “But it does me fine. There’s good light out the back for my studio—you can’t get the effect now, at night. But it’s great for painting.”

It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and wait), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on—romance covers, mostly, over the stairs.

I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barber’s chair I had rescued from an ancient barbers’ that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.

“Who was the first grown-up you liked?” she asked.

“Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?”

“I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mr. Postie. He’d come in his little post van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something. He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.”

“And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid would make up.”

“He drove a post van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.”

She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-coloured, still flecked with splatters of ink. “What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember?”

“Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.”

“Do you remember it? Or do you remember being told about it?”

“I don’t see what the point of this is… ?”

She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of her skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.

She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting.

“Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.”

I lay down, my hands at my sides. She said, “You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose that I do.”

She lay down beside me.

“You can touch me now,” said Cassandra.

I HAD STARTED thinking about Stuart again late last year. Stress, I think. Work was going well, up to a point, but I’d broken up with Pavel, who may or may not have been an actual bad hat although he certainly had his finger in many dodgy East European pies, and I was thinking about Internet dating. I had spent a stupid week joining the kind of Web sites that link you to old friends, and from there it was no distance to Jeremy “Scallie” Porter, and to Stuart Innes.

I don’t think I could do it anymore. I lack the single-mindedness. The attention to detail. Something else you lose when you get older.

Mr. Postie used to come in his van when my parents had no time for me. He would smile his big gnomey smile, wink an eye at me, hand me a brown-paper parcel with “Cassandra” written on in big block letters, and inside would be a chocolate, or a doll, or a book. His final present was a pink plastic microphone, and I would walk around the house singing or pretending to be on TV. It was the best present I had ever been given.

My parents did not ask about the gifts. I did not wonder who was actually sending them. They came with Mr. Postie, who drove his little van down the hall and up to my bedroom door, and who always knocked three times. I was a demonstrative girl, and the next time I saw him, after the plastic microphone, I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs.

It’s hard to describe what happened then. He fell like snow, or like ash. For a moment I had been holding someone, then there was just powdery white stuff, and nothing.

I used to wish that Mr. Postie would come back after that, but he never did. He was over. After a while, he became embarrassing to remember: I had fallen for that.

So strange, this room.

I wonder why I could ever have thought that somebody who made me happy when I was fifteen would make me happy now. But Stuart was perfect: the riding stables (with ponies), and the painting (which showed me he was sensitive), and the inexperience with girls (so I could be his first) and how very, very tall, dark, and handsome he would be. I liked the name, too: it was vaguely Scottish and (to my mind) like the hero of a novel.

I wrote Stuart’s name on my exercise books.

I did not tell my friends the most important thing about Stuart: that I had made him up.

And now I’m getting up off the bed and looking down at the outline of a man, a silhouette in flour or ash or dust on the black satin bedspread, and I am getting into my clothes.

The photographs on the wall are fading too. I didn’t expect that. I wonder what will be left of his world in a few hours, wonder if I should have left well enough alone, a masturbatory fantasy, something reassuring and comforting. He would have gone through his life without ever really touching anyone, just a picture and a painting and a half memory for a handful of people who barely ever thought of him anymore.

I leave the flat. There are still people at the wine bar downstairs. They are sitting at the table, in the corner, where Stuart and I had been sitting. The candle has burned way down, but I imagine that it could almost be us. A man and a woman, in conversation. And soon enough, they will get up from their table and walk away, and the candle will be snuffed and the lights turned off, and that will be that for another night.

I hail a taxi. Climb in. For a moment—for, I hope, the last time—I find myself missing Stuart Innes.

Then I sit back in the seat of the taxi, and I let him go. I hope I can afford the taxi fare, and find myself wondering whether there will be a cheque in my bag in the morning, or just another blank sheet of paper. Then, more satisfied than not, I close my eyes, and I wait to be home.