He is sitting on his bed, unable to decide how he feels or what to do.  Paralysis of the head, a dull explosion in his heart.  She sits at the other end of the bed, curly hair down covering her face, teeth biting her bottom lip.

'Who?'

'You don't know him.  I told you that.'

'Who was it?'

'No body.'

'Well it wasn't nobody was it?  How can it have been nobody?  How can you fuck nobody?  How can you can suck nobody's dick?'

'I didn't do that!'

'Yeah right...'

'Excuse me!?'

'Where.  Tell me where.'

'His flat.'

'His flat, WHERE?'

'Somewhere in Sandyford!  I can't remember exactly.'

'So, let me get this straight in my head.  You meet a guy and fuck him, you didn't mean it to happen… but you went back to his flat?  Why?  What did you think was going to happen once you got to his flat?  What the fuck was going to happen?  You're telling me you didn't mean it to happen, but you made a decision to go home with him.  Why?'

'I don't know.'

His voice is interchangeably tight with rage and loose with grief; a cacophony of spits and sobs. 

She barely whispers.

'You don't know?  Well I know, I fucking know alright.'

'I'm sorry!  I don't understand it…  But I told you.'

'Oh well fucking done!  Well fucking done!  Should I be grateful?!'

'No.'

Outside his bedroom window he sees a man bending over to tie his shoelace.  He is leaning against a phone box.  Inside the phone box a woman stands, eyes wide, waiting for an answer to her call. 

The contempt he feels for them quickly turns into contempt for himself.  Noticing them was the first, accidental acknowledgment that life will go on.  It pushes him closer to the reality of his pain and so he throws himself backwards onto the bed, grabs a pillow and pulls it over his face.  Words, actions are failing him.  She tries to place a hand onto his thigh and he jerks it violently away.

'So what happens now?'

'I’m going to leave.  I am so sorry.  I am so sorry that I've hurt you.'

He sobs with great restraint, the last strong-hold of his pride.  Tears follow their natural course down the contours of her cheeks, rolling slowly from the shimmering pools clotting beneath her eyes.

'You're just going to leave?  That's it?'

'What can I do, or say?  I've fucked it up.  I always do.  And now I have to leave you alone to forget about me.'

Finally he lets go.  He bursts open.  She puts her hand lightly on his back and he grabs it suddenly and then buries his face into her stomach.  He locks her with his arms and cries.  There is no thought in his head.  She runs her fingers slowly through his hair, feeling its softness for the last time.  She looks around his bedroom and recalls all the hours she has spent there.  Lying, naked and content.  Sitting, wide-eyed in conversation.  Stood, in awkward silence.  She knows she will never see this room again.  She bends down and kisses his head firmly, puts her forehead down for a moment onto his hair, then stands and runs quickly out of the room.

*

Her phone vibrates on her bedside cabinet and she grabs it instantly.  As the message opens she runs one hand frantically through her short, spiky hair. 

-------------------------------------------------
all we do is fight + argu.  wots the
 point???
------------------------------------------------

She feels a familiar exasperation wash over her.  The desperate inadequacy of text messaging as a medium for serious human interaction.  She furiously punches the keys with her thumb, accidentally deletes her message half way through, growls loudly, and starts again.

-----------------------------------------------
the point is ur a selfish bastard +
if u loved me ud make more of an
effort 2 get in touch with me! u r
acting so weird recently i am sick
of it!! 
-----------------------------------------------

As soon as it is sent, she goes into her 'sent messages' inbox and re-reads it twice.  Then she goes into her inbox and re-reads his last five messages in chronological order.  Then she puts the phone back down on her bedside table, and flicks on her television. 

Two men are talking very seriously about climate change.  One woman reads the weather from an autocue.  An Australian couple are getting married on the beach with their friends and families weeping joyfully behind them.  Impossibly beautiful women enthuse about plastic bottles of goo and wink at her suggestively.

Time passes. 

She keeps tugging at that short spiky hair and bouncing her knee up and down.  It dawns on her slowly that he may be playing the ultimate hand in the game of text messaging.  The most poignant text anyone can send to anyone:  no text message, no fucking text message at all.  But then she jumps at the dull sound of vibrating plastic on wood.  Smirking to herself she grabs the phone and clicks 'read'.

---------------------------------------------
i've met someone else.
---------------------------------------------

Then her heart misses a beat.  She snaps the television off, sits upright, locates his number and hits 'call'. 

*

Like the beam of a light-house his thoughts rotate, burning alternatively across the jaggered land of his rage and the dark, bottomless ocean of his sorrow.  The fucking bitch, the fucking bitch, I love her that FUCKING BITCH.  He isn’t sure where he’s headed, though he’s aware of a vague plan to find alcohol. 

Northumberland Street.  A Big Issue salesmen nods gratefully at a passer-by who does not take a copy but hands him some money.  A Mother bends over her daughter and points at the Christmas display in Fenwick’s window.  Sullen teenagers stand outside HMV, idly prodding the snow with their feet.  He stands in a puddle and curses loud enough for a elderly couple to look around at him wearily. 

Five years.  Five years with that bitch and she does this.  Now he is thirty years old and he has nothing.  A job that bores him and a flat that will no longer be visited by the woman he loves. 

*

The last place she wants to be is in a city she doesn’t know, in a flat occupied by strangers.  She throws some things into a bag and quickly sends a text.

------------------------------------------
fine, if u wont answer ur phone
i’ll come home & find u!
-----------------------------------------

She re-reads it and regrets it in instantly.  It was supposed to sound ominous, instead it sounds desperate.  Nevertheless, she wants to be on a train to Kent so badly she leaves the house and heads straight for the station.  He can’t be serious.  She moved to university one week ago.  How do you meet someone else in one week?  It can’t be right, he must be making it up, or maybe he just fancies someone else, or maybe he didn’t sent the message, or maybe… maybe… but he won’t answer his phone.  She keeps on trying. 

On her way to the station she shakes her head angrily at the dozen people that offer her flyers for club nights and cheap drinks, rather then taking them with a smile, holding them awkwardly, then disposing of them a few feet later in a bin as she normally would.  She is driven, not by pain, or by anger, but by a burning indignance.  She has to find out what the hell is happening; she has no other purpose then that.

*

He becomes everything he hates by buying a bottle of whisky in an off-license and not even saying thank you.  He grunts at the shop-keeper and leaves without looking up.  He believes manners to be the spoken grammar of life; what makes communicating right, what keeps it orderly.  Now in a bitter instant he retracts everything he has ever said about manners: that they don’t cost a penny, that unmannerly people are inexcusable twats.   

Outside he reaches a second person low.  He opens the small bottle with his freezing cold fingers and swigs it self-consciously.  The burning gives way to warmth as he strolls on.  He sits at the foot of Greys Monument and pictures her with an anonymous, big-cocked man, her face twisted with pleasure, and her love for him draining with every sweaty lunge.

*

As she strides past the Monument she feels her phone vibrate in her pocket.  Her heart misses another beat as she sits slowly down on a bench next to her. 

---------------------------------------------
dnt b crazy u cant come down.
Im sorry but its ova – ive been
seein someone 4 a while. Just
enjoy uni & 4get about me x
---------------------------------------------

It hits her.  What the fuck is she doing?  He’s meet someone else and he’s been cheating on her behind her back.  She looks at her bag.  She realises she hasn’t packed any clothes and that she doesn’t have any money.  Swallowing back her tears, she looks up across the busy street hopelessly. 

That bloke selling Chronicles from his little box. 

That couple on that bus talking. 

That tired looking man drinking from a glass bottle, alone in the snow. 

Nobody here knows this pain, she thinks.

Nobody understands.