five: you’ve been wanking, haven’t you?

      wednesday 5 november / 7.05 p.m.

      I stand in my living room and survey the rock-star chaos. The discarded Stolly bottles, the dusting of coke on the coffee table, the TV lying on its side—well, watching it the right way up is for squares, dude. And, stone me, is that a peroxide groupie wedged down the back of my sofa cushion? How long has she been there?

      Actually, most of that was rubbish.

      OK, all of it was.

      A part of me—the deeply repressed, inner-Jimi-Hendrix bit—would love to be able to say that my flat is a temple to debauchery and that in the post-Megan fallout it resembles Hiroshima at tea-time on 6^th August 1945.

      I can’t, though, in all honesty.

      Because I stand in my living room and see…Neatness, a pleasure dome of just-so spick and span-ness. No dust or greasy finger marks and certainly no used socks, half-empty takeaway cartons or exhausted vodka bottles. No drugs on the coffee table—just a few magazines, the spines of which are precisely parallel to the table’s edge. And while I’ve got some fairly cool CDs, they’re stacked in order. Not in some esoteric rock bloke arrangement, but alphabetically (Smith, Elliott preceding Smiths, The). This conforms to no rock ’n’ roll rulebook I’m aware of.

      I could say that this outbreak of tidiness is because Wednesday is my cleaner’s day, but that too would be a lie. I haven’t got a cleaner. This obsessive order…

      It’s…Me.

      My inner Jimi Hendrix doesn’t stand a chance. If I were a pie chart, Cleaning Impulses would be a huge slice taking up well over seventy per cent, while Playing Guitar, Screwing Girls and Drowning in Own Vomit would be a negligible sliver. I’ve always been like this. I’m well-known for it and I barely have to clean any more—household grime sees me coming and emigrates. When we first lived together Megan found this side of me endearing and I was a talking point among her girlfriends. One evening she answered the phone to Serena or Carol or whomever to be told, ‘I wanted to speak to Murray, actually. Does he know how to remove encrusted limescale from the base of a tap?’ I spent a memorable thirty minutes extolling the unbeatable combination of Limelite (‘Not the liquid, mind. It’s got to be the Power Gel.’) and an old toothbrush while Megan looked on with an indulgent smile.

      After a time however, the indulgence petered out and I became an irritant. There she was busy making the world a better place, while all I seemed to fret about was who was going to keep it dusted. Over time a nagging tension developed between the forces of Pledge and There’s-more-important-things-to-worryabout.

      When she left so did her mess. Order returned. No more work files heaped about the living room like badly planned council high-rises, no more damp knickers draped on the central heating and no more scented candles dripping irksome dollops of wax on hard-to-clean surfaces. I should have been happy, shouldn’t I?

      Well…No. I was devastated. After a dust and disorder-free week I couldn’t stand the vacuum (I refer to the emptiness as opposed to my excellent Dyson upright) a moment longer and headed for Wax Lyrical where I bought a fresh stock of smelly candles. Then, inexplicably, I found myself in the Knickerbox next door, six-pack of cotton bikini briefs (assorted colours) in hand. No, it was perfectly explicable. I was going to take them home, rinse and wring them out and leave them dangling from the radiators—a Comfort-fresh reminder of what used to be. As I was about to pay I realised what a pathetic gesture it was. Megan was gone and I’d have to get used to it. The knickers stayed in the shop and, though I was already lumbered with the candles, they’ve remained wrapped up in a kitchen cupboard.

      And now I stand in my living room and survey the germ-free perfection that is a tribute to my hermetically sealed single-hood…And when Megan turns up in half an hour, a reminder of the tedious dust buster she left behind.

      I know what has to be done.

      Deep breath—You can do this, Murray.

      I start by taking the back of my hand to the magazines, flipping them to a wanton seventy-three degrees to the edge of the coffee table.

      7.45 p.m.

      She should be here by now.

      As I wait I look at the mess that I’ve painstakingly created and it’s taking every ounce of willpower to resist tidying up.

      I need a distraction. My hand goes in search of one, snaking into my trouser pocket and feeling for the—

      I have got to stop this. Stop worrying unduly. Pull myself together.

      I go to the bedroom, fetch the cardboard box containing Megan’s belongings, and put it on the coffee table. One more thing. I root around the kitchen until I find the scented candles. I unwrap one and light it. I immediately blow it out. It’s lavender. She hates lavender.

      7.53 p.m.

      ‘What’s that horrible smell?’ she says as I let her in.

      Though I dumped the candle in the bin, the bouquet has lingered.

      My ex has an implausibly sensitive nose. The one and only time that I lit up a joint while home alone she busted me, picking up the scent as she walked out of South Woodford tube. ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she declared. ‘I work with the police, the CP-bloody-S. Do you have any idea how much you could be compromising me?’ It was like going out with the drug squad’s star sniffer dog—the one that can smell the heroin in the baggage hold as the plane takes off in Islamabad. I couldn’t get away with a thing. One night she climbed into bed about an hour after me and as I stirred she said, ‘You’ve been wanking, haven’t you?’

      ‘Have not,’ I mumbled sleepily while simultaneously shifting my hip onto the small sticky patch on the sheet.

      ‘Don’t lie, Murray,’ she snapped. ‘I can smell it.’

      I follow her as she walks through the hall and into the living room for the first time in three weeks, three days and nearly six hours. She must have been in court today because she’s wearing a sober-ish grey suit, white blouse, glossy opaque tights and shoes that tread the fine line between sensible and sexy. I feel something stir. In my gut and down there. You cannot imagine how gratifying this is. I’ve