Outside the Launderette

He lives above a launderette on a road in Leytonstone with a bus garage at the end of it, and the entrance is a blue door beside the machines, and I stood in front of it for ninety seconds working out that if I rang the bell I would be a woman who had turned up at a man’s flat.

I rang the bell.

He came down in a T-shirt with a tea towel over his shoulder and opened the door and his face went through about four things.

“Tess.”

“I’m not coming in,” I said. “I want you to come out here and have the argument, because if I come in it becomes a different thing and we both know it.”

“It’s raining.”

“Then we’ll get wet.”

So we had it on the pavement outside a launderette in Leytonstone, at twenty to eight on a Wednesday in July, in…