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two . . . friends? Yeah.’
    â€˜Not your thing, hey?’
    â€˜Well, no, to be honest. I don’t actually get it.’
    â€˜So what do you get?’
    â€˜God, not much really.’
    Somehow it’s easy to say this to her, so I tell her I’ve never had brilliant results with girls, much as I’d like to. It’s almost like talking to a guy, talking about girls with a lesbian, and knowing there’s nothing at stake. So I tell her, sort of as a joke, that I think it must have been easier in other centuries, and I run my poetry theory by her. And she laughs, but nicely. I’ve never told anyone my poetry theory before.
    And I say to her, ‘Maybe you can help me. I’ve got this thing. This thing where I can’t get started. It’s like, I can’t even start a conversation with a girl, a straight girl, in case it doesn’t work out. Frank says I should play the numbers, and not care if it doesn’t work out, but I just don’t think that’s me, because I do care. And I’d like to, you know, get to know them a bit. I can’t start the conversation maybe partly because I like it. I like the talking. I like the idea that one thing leads to another when you’re ready for it to, but I don’t think that’s how things work. It’s a dumb idea.’
    â€˜Is this some line?’ she says, and laughs.
    And I laugh too, since we both know how useless a line would be. ‘No. I’m not that dumb.’
    I ask her her name, realising I can’t keep thinking about her as Lesbian Number Three, and it turns out it’s Melissa.
    It also turns out that I like her and, without the possibility of sexual tension, that’s much easier to do than usual. In other circumstances, though clearly not these, I could find her attractive. But even as things are we could be friends, which wouldn’t be so bad.
    I can make her laugh, and she seems to like it. I certainly do.
    She takes Frank’s tongs and we cook the food together for the people who want seconds. She tells me a few things about girls, straight girls, and I don’t mind listening, even if she is making them up.
    Demand dies down again, and it’s just the two of us, turning things.
    â€˜You’re looking a bit sweaty there,’ she says.
    â€˜Well, yeah. It’s thirty-seven degrees and I’m stuck behind a barbecue.’
    â€˜You know what? I think it’s somebody else’s turn.’
    â€˜Probably.’
    â€˜A swim’d be good.’
    â€˜I’ve been thinking that all day.’
    â€˜Yeah, but I live in a flat a couple of streets away, and we’ve got a pool.’
    â€˜Oh, that’d be great. So are you going to round up a few people?’
    â€˜No, I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I was thinking you and me. It’s not a big pool, but it’d be nice. And No one ever uses it. And maybe we could have something to eat other than this shit,’ she says, turning a steak I’m in the process of thoughtlessly charring.
    â€˜Oh yeah?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    She pours herself more red wine from the jug, takes a sip.
    And I’m thinking, can you actually ask someone if they aren’t a lesbian? Can you actually get someone to confirm right now that they’re the lesbian you’d thought they were, so that you can relax again and get back to the conversation.
    â€˜Yeah. Just us,’ she says. ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou,’ in a voice that turns self-consciously Elizabethan at the end.
    She shuffles a few crispy onion bits.
    â€˜Oh right. Once more into the breech, dear friends,’ I say in something like panic, then crash internally as I contemplate simultaneously the sudden strange obstetric overtones, and the fact that I think the next line has something to do with our English dead. ‘Sorry. I . . . ’
    â€˜It’s fine. I like Henry V. It was a bit of a