Violet, Gunn’s Penelope-replacement, lives in a studio flat in West Hampstead.

‘You do, actually, expect me not to be annoyed, do you?’ she said, having let me in, turned, and stormed up the stairs to her living room. Neglectful of me, I know, not to have offered an explanation for my tardiness, but I was still in a state from the garden.

‘I don’t imagine you stayed in waiting for me,’ I said, following.

‘No I bloody did not. No, Declan, I bloody, thank God, did not.’

‘Well then,’ I said. ‘No harm done, eh?’

She stood with her arms folded and her weight on one sharp leg, lips parted, eyebrows raised. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind. Right. I thought it was just partial. I mean – are you . . .? I mean what are you?’

Violet thinks of herself as an actress and is almost wholly unacquainted with talent and has a great froth of dark red hair she pretends to be perpetually irritated by and at war with (the legion clips and scrunchies, the barrettes, the ties, the pins, the sticks, the bands) but which she secretly thinks of as her pre-Raphaelite crowning glory and under the glow of which she poses, endlessly, in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door after narcissistic, unguent-heavy baths on her many unemployed afternoons. She can’t make her mind up whether she’s at her sexiest as chin-upholding Boadicea or dimpled and cleavaged Nell Gwyn – but either way she’s baffled and chagrined that not one BBC period drama casting director has so far had the good sense to be instantly at the mercy of her hair’s splendour.

She waited, still with her weight on one leg.

‘I thought perhaps Italian,’ I said, after a sudden twinge in my salivary glands. (Me the bemused amnesiac, Gunn’s preferences my forgotten family and friends, introducing themselves, willy-nilly.) ‘What do you think?’

She did something with her face then, a simultaneous smile-snort that lasted a third of a second. Then she put her head on one side like a perplexed kitten. ‘Let me just check something with you,’ she said. ‘Are you actually aware that you’re six hours late?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry.

‘Well perhaps, since you’re six hours late, and are dreadfully sorry, you wouldn’t mind fucking off?’ she said.

For a moment I held my tongue – which was difficult, given that I’d only seconds ago discovered the fascinating imprecisions entailed in letting it loose. (So quaint, too, that humble servitude paid by the organs of speech to the organ of cognition, all those cerebral constrictions eased by labials and glides, palatals and stops, the concerted efforts of wet little bits and pieces.) Then I very slowly and with excessive expansiveness installed myself in her one battered red leather armchair. ‘Chimera Films have commissioned me to adapt my novel, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, for the screen,’ I said, quietly. (To be fair to Gunn, he’s thought of this himself, some bogus incentive to keep her boudoir friendly. What he’s never come up with, what’s stopped him going through with the yarn, is the explanation necessary for the day of reckoning when Violet – money-shot, fisted, assbanged, lezzed-up, whatever carnal prices he would have tagged on to the starring role – discovered that there was no starring role, no supporting role, no bit part, no walk-on, no fucking movie.)

Violet stared. Then switched her weight from her left leg to her right. Then said, ‘What?’

‘Martin Mailer at Chimera Films has optioned Bodies for the screen and has asked me to write the screenplay.’ I fished out a Silk Cut and ignited it with a languidly struck Swan Vesta. The scent of sulphur reminded me of . . . ahhh.

‘You’re . . . Declan you’re having me on. Tell me you’re having me on.’

‘Chimera Films is a UK unit owned by Nexus,’ I said. ‘They trawl novels here looking for stuff. You know, seventy per cent of all films made are adapted from novels or short stories. Nexus, as you know, isn’t a UK unit.’

‘Nexus as in . . . Nexus?’ Violet asked.

‘As in Hollywood Nexus,’ I said.

‘Oh my God, Declan. Oh my fucking God.’

I didn’t bother trying to conceal my grin. Violet thought I was grinning with glee – and so I was – but only at my own chutzpah. At the last, the very last moment, I’d resisted christening my phantom optioner Julian Amis. ‘Martin Mailer was the guy behind Top Lolly, Bottom Dollar.’

‘Oh my fucking God,’ Violet said.

‘I’m having casting consultation written into the contract.’

‘You are not.’

‘I am.’

‘You are not.’

‘I am. Oh yes. I am.’

Violet thinks of herself as stunning. She is stunning, too, in her self-absorption verging on autism. She’s got a retroussé nose and expressive eyes and breasts like fresh little apples. There are freckles she’d be better off without, an arse on the low side, reddish heels and elbows, but on the whole you’d definitely say she was attractive. Not that it doesn’t come at a price. To say she’s high-maintenance would be to murder her with understatement. She gets headaches, back aches, leg aches, eye aches, indigestion, colic, near-perpetual cystitis and PMT that doesn’t hold with all that old-fashioned nonsense about only showing up just before menstruation. If you’re her boyfriend, really quite a lot of things get on her nerves. Chiefly, it seems, if you’re her boyfriend, being with you gets on her nerves. Being Violet’s boyfriend means spending quite a lot of your time listening to Violet itemizing (while you rub her shoulders, massage her feet, run her a Radox bath or prepare her a hot water bottle) the many ways in which you get on her nerves.

Like all women who think they’re actresses, Violet’s ferociously untidy. The West Hampstead studio flat looks like the Nazgul have just thundered through it – an appearance I had considerable time to note, waiting firstly for Violet to finish her pre-coital bathroom routine, and secondly, fruitlessly (tossing and turning in the bed’s swamp) for the arrival of an erection.

‘Fucking hell,’ Violet said, tactfully, backing away from me as if at the discovery of a noxious smell. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Oh well go on, get your chuckles over with now if you must. Yes. Hilarious, isn’t it. Let’s all have a jolly good wheeze.

‘Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can’t . . . I mean what is it?’

‘Perhaps I don’t fancy you any more,’ I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a foetal curl.

‘Oh come here,’ I said, like a successfully soft-soaped uncle – and she did, too (rifling through her memory files, wishing she hadn’t lied to Gunn about having read his novel, wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers, hers!) – but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell you. Gunn’s penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best work to date.

‘Never mind, honey,’ she said, huskily. ‘It’s no big deal. It happens. You’re probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot last night?’

I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a slight American accent.