Simon entered a pub he had never been to. Nobody looked up from their drinks, business quiet this Tuesday night. Behind the bar, light lit up polished glass bottles and the liquor shone honey amber gold.

He sat on a stool and felt his jeans damp from the rain outside. In long leisurely arcs, the barman wiped the bar with a damp cloth.

‘What’s it going to be?’

Simon ordered a whisky and drank it in one go. His mouth filled with sharp saliva before he felt the warmth in his chest. He ordered another, and in the mirrored glass behind the drinks, noticed a man sitting on the stool beside him. He hadn’t spotted him earlier.

‘And one more for my friend.’

The man accepted the drink but didn’t say anything. As they drank together, Simon spoke about his wife Alice. They had argued – they argued a lot recently. She was five years older you see; said her ovaries were drying up, all her friends had started families, why won’t he at least talk to her about it?

Simon could not be bothered. All he wanted was an easy life. He was being suffocated, he explained, and in the bar felt a freedom he didn’t feel at home. It didn’t matter that he went to bars alone, there was freedom in that too. He had friends of course, but he was drifting from them also.

This man was a good listener, thought Simon, quiet, but clearly one of the good guys. If only there were more of his sort about. Perhaps they could become friends. The man even ordered them another round of whiskies.

Already Simon felt better. His jeans were beginning to dry, and the warm liquor swam happily through his blood. He looked at his friend and, deciding that he could trust him, began to tell him about his 14-year-old lover.

Christine sat at the back of the class listening to Miss Burnett give a lesson on sex education. She had been feeling so tired recently, nauseated every day. She made a mental note to start going to bed earlier.

‘The deposited sperm must make its way to the fertilisation site.’

Miss Burnett – standing in for her usual science teacher – lived in a house near Christine’s parents; in Blake Mead, a couple of miles from the School.

‘After ovulation, the Fallopian tube collects the egg.’

Christine supposed that some of the children giggled out of shyness. The others were staring intently at Miss Burnett; the boys found her attractive and the girls absorbed greedily the revelations spilling out from red lips.

‘The sperm and the egg must meet. Fertilisation must then take place.’

Christine did not like Miss Burnett. Not because she was a bad person, or had wronged her in any way, but because Christine was sleeping with Simon: Miss Burnett’s husband. She wondered whether they still made love, whether he kissed Miss Burnett in the same way he had kissed her. One time he had bitten her lip; she remembered the taste of blood, like licking a battery.

‘The embryo must implant and begin to grow in the uterus.’

Christine thought about having Simon’s baby, what it would look like. They had been careful of course, Simon always brought protection. Except that one time, when the condom had broken. Wipe it all off, he had said. Make sure every bit is gone. She had gone to the bathroom and cleaned as best she could but later that night felt a trickle down the inside of her thigh. She didn’t see Simon for a whole week after that.

Alice Burnett looked down at her notes at the word Blastocyst and lost her train of thought. When she looked up, she made eye contact with one of the pupils, Christine. She felt a little awkward and then dismissed the notion as silly. Outside, a passing cloud allowed sunlight to sweep through the classroom window, making her eyes squint. When the cloud returned, she collected herself and told the pupils to study Chapter 6 of their textbooks.

As they read, Alice wandered to the back of the classroom and opened the window a little: the air smelled fresh, sweet with the beginnings of spring. Out on the grass were already daffodils and purple crocuses, their colours strong against the dark cypresses surrounding Valley Field Secondary School.

Why did the girl disrupt her harmony? she asked herself, already knowing the answer. In her street, she had observed Simon talking with Christine and did not like the way that it made her feel. Christine was a child but seemed older. She noted the way the boys – and some of the teachers – acted around Christine; her allure was something that everyone felt but would never admit. What reason had they for talking with one another? Alice herself didn’t know Christine properly, speaking only to say hello. Never more than that.

When the school bell rang, Alice’s heart leapt.

Twenty years later, it stopped beating altogether. Alice lay dead on the floor in the same classroom, her brown eyes reflecting ceiling squares of polystyrene.

That same night, the Valley Field Secondary School reunion was in full swing: school bully Jamie McAlister leaving the pop-up bar with a tray of Jäger shots; wheeler dealer Richard McPherson showing his Rolex to anyone interested; once shy Paul Henderson entertaining a crowd near the buffet, stopping only to pop sausage rolls into his mouth.

Outside on the dark grass, Alice’s husband Simon shared a bottle of champagne with Christine’s old school friend, Fiona Thompson. He was pointing out stars in the Orion constellation, ‘The red one, that’s Betelgeuse. It’s dying, and when it explodes – any time between now and one-hundred thousand years – it will look like there are two suns in the sky.’

Inside, music from the disco danced along grey linoleumed corridors, down three stairs and through the door of the girl’s toilet. In a cubicle, Christine sat on the toilet and took another swig from a half bottle of vodka. Gloria by Laura Branigan, she remembered. She rubbed her eyes, her face swollen from crying. Earlier, to her complete horror, she had formed one point of an awkward triangle, with Simon and Alice.

She wondered why she had bothered to come, why any of them had. Often, she dreamt of the unborn child. A life terminated after it had grown to the size of a plum, when its toes could curl, and mouth could suck. Sometimes during those dreams, the foetus would scream, ‘What if you’d kept it, and ruined both our lives?’

‘Alice Burnett is dead,’ she heard someone shout.

Outside in the night time, the cypresses shook in the wind.

As he took Fiona against the trunk of a Monkey Puzzle, his trousers down around his ankles, all Simon could think about were all the little birds asleep in the trees.

March 2019