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  ‘Great,’ I said. His use of the word ‘her’ had not been lost on me.

  ‘She didn’t say nothing about something missing, though,’ he said, doubtfully. He looked down at the tin again without enthusiasm, sensing that it represented a major diversion from standard practices that could only bring problems into his life. I looked at it too.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, as a thought struck him. He gave the tin to me. ‘Be right back.’

  I waited on the doorstep as he picked up the crates on the path and carried them back to his van. A couple of minutes later he reappeared, looking more optimistic.

  ‘Sorted,’ he said. ‘As it happens, she’s next but one on my list. I’ll take it, see if it’s hers.’

  I handed the corned beef back to him again, thinking quickly. I was going to need my house keys. Oh, and some shoes.

  ‘Don’t worry about bringing it back, if it’s not,’ I said, to hold him there while I levered my feet into the pair of slip-ons which always live in the hallway.

  This confused him, however. ‘But if it’s not hers, then... I can’t...’

  ‘It’s just I’ve got to go out for a while,’ I said. ‘Tell you what — if it’s not hers, then just bring it back, leave it on the step, okay?’

  I could see him thinking this was a bit of a pain in the neck — especially over a single tin of canned meat — but then realizing my solution meant less disruption and paperwork than the alternatives.

  ‘Done,’ he said, and walked off down the path.

  I ran to my study, grabbed the house keys from my shelf, and then back to the front door. I slipped out onto the step and locked up, listening hard.

  When I heard the sliding slam of a van door, I walked cautiously down the path — making it to the pavement in time to see the delivery vehicle pull away.

  There followed half an hour of slightly ludicrous cloak and daggery as I tried to keep up with the supermarket van without being seen. The streets in our neighborhood are full of houses exactly like ours — slightly bigger-than-usual Victorian terraces. Many of the streets curve, however, and two intersections out of three are blocked with wide metal gates, to stop people using the area as a rat route between the bigger thoroughfares which border it. The delivery driver had to take very circuitous routes to go relatively short distances, and bends in the streets meant that — were I not careful — it would have been easy for him to spot me in his side mirrors. Assuming he’d been looking, of course, which he wouldn’t be — but it’s hard to remind yourself of that when you’re engaged in quite so silly an enterprise.

  Keeping as far back as I could without risking losing him, I followed the vehicle as it traced a route which eventually led to it pulling up outside a house six or seven streets away from our house. Once he’d parked I faded back forty yards, and leaned on a tree. He’d said the stop I was interested in was not this one, but the next, and I judged him to be a person who’d use language in a precise (albeit not especially educated) way. He wouldn’t have said “next but one” if he meant this house, so all I had to do was wait it out.

  Whoever lived here was either catering for a party, or simply ate a lot, all the time. It took the guy nearly fifteen minutes to drag all the red, green and purple bags up the path and into the house — where a plump grey-haired man imperiously directed their distribution indoors.

  This gave me plenty of time to realize I was being absolutely ridiculous. At one point I even decided to just walk away, but my feet evidently didn’t get the message, and when he eventually climbed back into the van and started the engine, I felt my heart given a strange double thump.

  She would be next.

  I don’t know if the delivery driver had suddenly realized he was behind schedule or something, but the next section of following was a lot tougher. The van lurched from the curb as though he’d stamped on the pedal, and he steered through the streets at a far brisker pace than before. I was soon having to trot to keep up — all the while trying not to get too close on his tail. I don’t exercise very often (something I take recurrent low-level flak from Helen over), and before long I was panting hard.

  Thankfully, it was only a few more minutes before I saw the van indicating, and then saw it abruptly swerve over to the curb again. The funny thing was, we were now only about three streets from my house. We were on, in fact, the very road I walked every morning when I strolled out to the deli to buy a latté to carry back to my desk — a key pillar in my attempts to develop something approaching a ‘life-style’.

  I waited (again, taking cover behind a handy tree) while the delivery man got out, slid open the van’s side door, and got inside. He emerged a few minutes later carrying only three bags. They were all red, which I found interesting. No frozen food. No household materials. Just stuff to go straight in the fridge — and probably meats and charcuterie and cheeses that were a pleasure to eat, rather than foods that came on as if they were part of a gym work-out.

  There were only two front paths that made sense from where he’d parked, and I banked on the one on the right — sidling up the street to the next tree, in the hope of getting a better view.

  I was right. The man plodded up the right-most path toward a house which, in almost every particular, was identical to the one in which Helen and Oscar and I lived. A three-story Victorian house, the lowest a half-basement slightly below the level of the street, behind a very small and sloping ‘garden’. I was confident this lower floor would hold a kitchen and family room and small utility area, just as ours did — though of course I couldn’t see from my position across the street.

  The man had the bags looped around his wrist, enabling him to reach up and ring the doorbell with that hand. After perhaps a minute, I saw the door open. I caught a glimpse of long, brown hair...

  And then a sodding truck trundled into view, completely obscuring the other side of the street.

  I’d been so focused on watching the house that I hadn’t seen or even heard the vehicle’s approach. It ground to a halt right in front of me, and the driver turned the engine off. A gangly youth hopped down out of it, busily consulting a delivery note and scanning the numbers of the houses on the side of the street where I was standing.

  I moved quickly to the left, but I was too late. The supermarket delivery man was coming back down the path, and the door to the house was shut again.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said, without meaning to.

  I said it loudly enough that the delivery man looked up, however. It took a second for him to recognize me, but then he grinned.

  ‘You was right,’ he called across the street. ‘Was hers after all. Cheers, mate. Job done.’

  And with that he climbed back into his van. I turned and walked quickly in the other direction, thinking I might as well go to the deli and get a coffee.

  Maybe they could put something in it that stopped middle-aged men being utter, utter morons.

  That evening Helen had an assignation with two old university friends. This is one of the few occasions these days when she tends to let her hair down and drink too much wine, so I made her a snack before she went out. After she’d gone, and Oscar had been encouraged up to bed (or at least to hang out in his bedroom, rather than lurking downstairs watching reality television), I found myself becalmed in the kitchen.

  I’d got almost none of my work done that afternoon. Once the feelings of toe-curling embarrassment had faded — okay, so the supermarket guy had seen me on the street, but he’d had no way of knowing what I was doing there, no reason to suspect I was up to anything untoward — I’d found myself all the more intrigued.

  There was the matter of the corned beef, for a start.

  I knew damn well that there had been no error over it. I’d bought it myself, a month or two back, from the mini-market. I like some corned beef in a sandwich every now and then, with lettuce and good slather of horseradish. I’d fully assumed the tin would make its way back to me. And yet, when presented with it, the woman had decided to cla
im it as her own.

  I found this curious, even a little exciting. I knew that had Helen been in a similar situation, she would have done nothing of the sort, even if the item in question had been totally healthy and certified GM-negative. This other woman had been given the change to scoop up a freebie, however, and had said “Yes please”.

  Then there was her hair. It was infuriating I hadn’t been given the chance to get a proper look at her, but in a way, the hair had been enough. Helen is blonde, you see. Really it’s a kind of very light brown, of course, but the diligent attentions of stylists keep it mid-blonde. A trivial difference, but a difference all the same.

  Trivial, too, was the geographical distance. The woman lived just three streets away. She paid the same rates, received cheery missives from the same local council, and would use — probably on a far more frequent basis than us — the services of the same take-away food emporiums. If she went into the center of London she’d use the same tube station. If it rained on our back garden, it would be raining on hers. The air I exhaled stood at least a chance of making it, some time later, into her lungs.

  This realization did nothing to puncture the bubble which had started to grow in my head. I can’t stress strongly enough that this was not a matter of desire, however nebulous. It was just interesting to me. Fascinating, perhaps.

  Difference doesn’t have to be very great to hold the imagination, after all. Much is made of men who run off with secretaries twenty years younger than their wives, or women who ditch their City-stalwart husbands to get funky with their dreadlocked Yoga teacher. Most affairs and marital breakages, however, do not follow this pattern. Helen and I knew four couples whose relationships had clattered into the wall of mid-life crisis, and all amounted to basically the same thing. Two men and two women had (in each case temporarily) set aside their partner for someone who was remarkably similar. In one case — that of my old friend Paul — the woman he’d been having a semi-passionate liaison with for nine months turned out to be so similar to his wife that I’d been baffled on the sole occasion I’d met her (Paul soon had the sense to go back to Angela and the children, tail between his legs). Even Paul had once referred to the other woman by the wrong name during the evening, which went down about as well as you’d expect.

  And this makes sense. Difference is difference, whether it be big or small, and it may even be that the smaller differences feel the most enticing. Most people do not want (and would not be capable of) throwing aside a lifetime of preference and predilection and taste. You are who you are, and you like what you like. Short of being able to have their partner manifest a different body once in a while, many seem to opt for a very similar body that just happens to have a slightly different person inside. A person of the same class and general type, but just different enough to trigger feelings of newness, to enable the sensation of experiencing something novel — to wake up, for a spell, the slumbering person inside.

  Difference fades quickly, however, whereas love and the warmth of long association do not, which is why so many end up sloping right back to where they started out. Most people don’t end up in liaisons with barmaids or artists or other exotics. They get busy with friends and co-workers, people living in the same tree. They don’t actually want difference from the outside world.

  They want it within themselves.

  I realized, after mulling it over in the quiet, tidy kitchen for nearly an hour, that I wanted to be someone different too, however briefly.

  So I went upstairs, told my son that I was popping out to post a letter, and went out into the night.

  It was after nine by then, and dark. Autumnal, too, which I’ve always found the most invigorating time of year. I suppose it’s distant memories of changes in the school or university year, falling leaves as an augur of moving to new levels and states of being within one’s life.

  I didn’t walk the most direct route to the house, instead taking a long way around, strolling as casually as I could along the deserted mid-evening pavements, between lamps shedding yellow light. I was feeling... something. Feeling silly, yes, but engaged, too. This wasn’t editing. This wasn’t ferrying Oscar to and from school. This wasn’t listening to Helen talk about her work.

  The only person involved in this was me.

  Eventually I found myself approaching the street in question, via one that met it at right angles. When I emerged from this I glanced up and down the road. It ended — or was interrupted — by one of the traffic-calming gates, and so was extremely quiet. There’d be little reason for anyone to use it unless they lived in one of the houses I could see.

  I stood on the opposite side of the street and looked at the house where the woman lived, about twenty yards away now. A single light shone in its upper storey, doubtless a bedroom. A wider glow from the level beneath the street, however, suggested life going on down there.

  My heart was beating rapidly now, and far more heavily than usual. My body as well as my mind seemed aware of this break in usual patterns of behavior, that its owner was jumping the tracks, doing something new.

  I crossed the street. When I reached the other side I kept going, slowly, walking right past the house. As I did so I glanced down and to my right.

  A single window was visible in the wall of the basement level, an open blind partially obscuring the top half. In the four seconds or so that it took me to walk past the house, I saw a large green rug on dark floorboards, and caught a glimpse of a painting on one wall. No people, and most specifically, not her.

  I continued walking, right the way up to the gate across the road. Waited there a few moments, and then walked back the same way.

  This time — emboldened by the continued lack of human occupancy — I got a better look at the painting. It showed a small fishing village, or something of the sort, on a rocky coast. The style was rough, even from that distance, and I got the sense the artist had not been trying to evoke the joys of waterfront living. The village did not look like somewhere you’d go on holiday, that’s for sure.

  Then I was past the house again.

  I couldn’t keep doing this, I realized. Sooner or later someone in one of the other houses would spot a man pacing up and down this section of street, and decide to be neighborly — which in this day and age means calling the police.

  I had an idea, and took my mobile out of my trouser pocket. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and wandered a little way further down the street.

  If anyone saw me I’d just be one of those other people you notice once in a while — some man engaged in some other, different life, talking to someone whose identity they’d never know, about matters which would remain similarly oblique. It would be enough cover for a few minutes, I thought.

  I arranged it so that my meandering path — I even stepped off into the empty road for a spell, just to accentuate how little my surroundings meant to me, so engaged was I with my telephone call — gradually took me back toward the house. After about five minutes of this I stepped back up onto the curb, about level with the house’s front path.

  I stopped then, taken aback.

  Someone had been in the lower room I could see through the window. She’d only been visible for a second — and I knew it was her, because I’d glimpsed the same long, brown hair from that morning — starting out in the middle of the room, and then walking out the door.

  Was she going to return? Why would she have come into what was presumably a living room, then left again? Was she fetching something from the room — a book or magazine — and now settling down in a kitchen I couldn’t see? Or was she intending to spend the evening in the living room instead, and returning to the kitchen for something she’d forgotten, to bring back with her?

  I kept the phone to my ear, and turned in a slow circle. Walked a few yards up the street, with a slow, casual, leg-swinging gait, and then back again.

  I’d gone past the point of feeling stupid now. I just wanted to see. When I got back to the pavement, I caught my breat
h.

  The woman was back. More than that, she was sitting down. Not on the sofa — one corner of which I could just make out in the corner of the window — but right in the middle of the rug. She had her back to me. Her hair was thick, and hung to the middle of her back. It was very different in more than color to Helen’s, who’d switched to a shorter and more-convenient-for-the-mornings style a few years back.

  The woman seemed to be bent over, as if reading something laid out on the floor in front of her. I really, really wanted to know what it was. Was it The Guardian, choice of all right-thinking people (and knee-jerk liberals) in this part of North London? Or might it be something else, some periodical I’d never read, or even heard of? A book I might come to love?

  I took another cautious set forward, barely remembering to keep up the pretence with the mobile phone still in my hand.

  With my slightly-changed angle I could now see her elbows, one poking out from either side of her chest. They seemed in a rather high position for someone managing reading matter, but it was hard to tell.

  My scalp and the back of my neck was itching with nervousness. I cast a glance either way up the street, just to check no one was coming. The pavements on both sides remained empty, distanced pools of lamplight falling on silence and emptiness.

  When I looked back the woman had altered her position slightly, and I saw something new. I thought at first it must be whatever she was reading, but then realized first that it couldn’t be, and soon after, what I was actually seeing. A plastic bag.

  A red plastic bag.

  Who unpacks their shopping in the living room? Other people do, I guess — and perhaps it was this connection to the very first inkling I’d had of this woman’s existence (the temporary arrival of her food in the kitchen of my own house, in the very same kind of bag) that caused me to walk forward another step.

  I should have looked where I was going, but I did not. My foot collided with an empty Coke can lying near the low wall at the front of the woman’s property. It careered across the remaining space with a harsh scraping noise, before clattering into the wall with a smack.