Despite all subsequent activity, since new man and I went our separate ways (and yes, hair gel did play its sticky part) the weekend that I didn't spend in The Halkin passed idly at home in the void that is the life of the recently single.
It goes like this:
You've let your friends slip a little bit to accommodate romance, and so, on Friday, though you've arranged for your daughter to stay out in anticipation of a torrid evening, it now looks like consisting of you, cheese on toast and the boxed set of Grey's Anatomy. In the afternoon, you're sitting in the kitchen in the last wash of sunlight fighting its way through the grime of the window. The table, for once, is so clean it looks like it has been licked, the dishwasher is empty, the washing machine is empty, the dryer is empty, the whole house is empty and it's just you, laptop open, the click of the keys measuring the seconds, and work - trying to make a sceptre flit across the webpage instead of a cursor - isn't working so that the only hotspot in your life is the one you've created in Flash.
Did you hear a loud, thundering boom?
You can't remember. You may be torturing yourself, but you just can't remember, and yet - later it haunts you - that fleeing feeling that there was a tumultous crash and that maybe, idly, you listened, wondering what it was, and heard nothing further, and so went on - click, click, clicking, reloading the page, refreshing the image, click, click, click.
In fact, in the evening, you did go out. You wandered round to the local Tapas bar with friends, forgiving enough of your neglect, to take pity on you, where you ate Serrano ham and tortilla and lamb chops and washed it down with a couple of glasses of the red wine that you haven't been drinking for the last 21 days, but which, tonight, damn it, you think you need.
You flirt with a short Spanish man who comes up to your armpits, even when you're not towering above him on a bar-stool, who talks as though he's had his jaw wired shut, and whose gentle lithping lulls and comforts you into pleasure, in spite of yourself. And later, you walk home in the frost and let yourself in to the dark, gloomy house that seems to mock you with the unexplored possibilities of its emptiness. You double lock the door.
Next day you rise early, just to spite yourself, and carry on click, clicking until you decide you should to go to the supermarket for food that you're not going to eat, cook, or need, but nevertheless buy, store in the fridge in which everything is at right angles, and will probably throw out untouched before the end of the week. The afternoon turns to evening, broken only by a visit to the National Gallery to see The Sacred Made Real where you marvel at homoeroticism through the ages, before you while the evening away watching people pretend to be even more miserable that you, but with better figures and medical degrees.
At eleven o'clock, you're are still sitting there. The hotspots are no longer hot and the laptop has crashed. You've written emails you haven't sent (because who wants to advertise that they are sitting at home on a Saturday night) and forlornly called your youngest daughter who never goes across the threshold when there's the hint of squeaking bed springs, but has now just announced she is spending her second night out and may be back some time tomorrow, but only for a change of clothes.
The house is as quiet as a grave.
Your phone hasn't rung once.
You lock all the internal doors before you go to sleep, which you do fitfully, but for once, the floorboards and old walls are merciful and don't advertise their creaking, aching limbs while you lie awake, in the middle of the bed, which doesn't really fool anyone into making it feel occupied.
By Sunday, you're sick of the bloody website, and think Doctor Dreamy Derek is a wet prat, and you sling on your wellington boots and plod through the mud on Wormwood Scrubs where people look at you oddly because you are not accompanied by a dog. Damn it, even here you feel single. Back home, you walk up the red tile path and let yourself back into the house which fails to notice your arrival. You don't even glance at the house next door which cuddles up to yours, separated only by one flowerpot which your neighbour tends. Why should you? Unless the door is standing open, which has happened once or twice, or the burglar alarm has gone off, which has happened two or three hundred times, why would you look next door? Did you look when someone broke in through the side window and robbed the place? Did you look when another opportunist climbed over the back wall and let themselves in the bedroom window and stole all her mother's jewellry? Did you look the day that the woman who has lived there for the last 23 years set fire to her blouse and calmly called the ambulance herself, although you were at home and could have helped?
No. No. And no.
You did look the night the neighbour's daughter tried to kill the mouse with a brush and woke you up in the middle of the night screaming. The walls between you are so thin, you used to able to listen to the Today program in the morning without turning on the radio. They're so thin you can hear everything.
Can't you?
In the evening you go to the theatre with someone from work and get lost on the drive back, not getting in to bed until almost midnight. Daughter is in her bedroom. Her bag is slung across the kitchen table. Son is in his bedroom. His bike is poleaxed in the hall. There is a knife smeared with peanut butter on the kitchen counter.
Signs of life as we know it.
The office next morning feels like going to a holiday camp.
And then at the end of the day you park the car outside the house. It's dark. You notice a light on next door, not in itself unusual, but half of one window seems to be gone, and the other has a crack in it that's been mended with black electrical tape. Your heart sinks. Damn it, she's been burgled again. And your eyes immediately swing to your own front door, wondering if you've been hit too. But your son's bike is still in the hall so, no - even if he's fighting demons in the Land of Ork all day, he probably, might have, would have, surely, heard someone breaking in. You are about to turn the key in the lock when you hesitate. Your good neighbourliness kicks in and overrules your fear of intruding and you bang on the door.
Which is when, finally, you see your neighbour lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
Quite dead and bloodied.
Where, apparently, the police think she has been since Friday.
Less than six feet from where you sat around all weekend - both of you, home alone by yourselves.
But it's only later that you start to pick at the scab of your memory and convince yourself that perhaps you heard her fall.
And did nothing.
