'Did you keep the bones..?'

When Guy gets home I’m in the spare room, stamping on a potted cyclamen. His head appears at the top of the door. He surveys the carnage passively.

‘Caught fire during the incantation,’ I explain, breathless. ‘It’ll be alright.’

‘Hm. Good luck spell?’

‘Anti-nightmare charm.’

‘Right. Much longer?’

‘No. Just the photos.’

He nods, at once disparaging and acquiescent, closing the door behind him. His voice floats back to me through the hall.

‘Hocus pocus one, two three. There’s wine and duck breasts for our tea.’

I do my best with the remaining blackened petals and place the plant at my altar, tactfully placing a few tea lights so that the scene glows prettily. I prop up grandma’s spell book next to it, open at the cyclamen charm with its soft watercolour illustrations. I hoist up the camera around my neck and take five photos. I’ll later edit them to within an inch of their lives before sending them to ClaraRusso_675, a Sicilian client who saw my profile in Elle last month. She is having recurring dreams about a beautiful vampiric creature who chases her and sucks her blood. Later she will transfer £60 into my Paypal account (tenner extra where fire is involved), and close her eyes, hoping to dream tonight of softer things.

            I pad into the kitchen. Guy has his back to me, tending two pans of spitting duck. He turns round lazily as I sit at the table.

‘Jack Nicholson’s not going to appear at the front door in a fucking dressing gown, is he?’

He’s used this one before, but I give him a benign smile and a kiss as he puts my plate in front me. he’s done a beautiful job of the duck.

‘So, Viv is on about Woolf again,’ he says, pouring the wine. ‘Or should I say, Wolves.’

Viv is Guy’s PHD tutor. I’ve never met her, but Guy has played her radio contributions to me a few times. I remember being distracted from what she was actually saying by the slack, lazy quality of her voice. Something about the gentle click in her throat when she said her cs left me vaguely nauseous. I suppress the memory and look up from my duck.

‘As in Women Who Run With…? Or Virginia’s potential offspring.’

‘Well, both. Always both. But mainly Ginnie’s bastard cubs.’

Guy’s face swims palely in the candlelight. I take a glug of my wine, trying to remember the exact point this brand of smug, conspiratorial ‘young academic’ conversation became the norm for us.

‘She didn’t have any, though, did she. Not really,’ I offer.

Guy glances at my wine and smiles at me, which is what he does when he’s trying to make allowances for my contributions falling below par.

‘Well, the Americans’ take on it was that Leonard felt she was too weak, mentally and physically, to do the childbirth thing. Anorexia, didn’t sleep. Heard voices. But that’s really just a blind rhetoric.’

‘You said that the other night.’

Guy frowns at me. ‘What?’

‘Blind rhetoric. Something Jon Snow said on the news. You said that was a blind rhetoric too.’

Guy eyes my wine again, and changes tack.

‘We talked about you, today, too.’

‘Ah?’

He nods, crunching carelessly on a breadstick. He lets the crumbs fall over his duck, using its remaining length to punctuate his speech, like a conductor.

‘She’s very interested in your really rather fucking lucrative cyber-witch project. She thinks it’s revealing that you’re making so much money casting love spells during what is arguably the most liberated period women have ever lived through. Sort of, you, know, ‘in public I’m updating my Facebook with some anti-male rhetoric, but in private I’m working out a way to extract hair from my co-worker’s head and then pay sixty quid for an Insta-sorceress to make him love me by setting fire to potted geraniums and taking photos of it.’

‘Cyclamen.’

‘What?’

‘If you’re talking about the anti-nightmare charm, it uses a cyclamen plant. Not a geranium,’ I say mildly.

‘…other interesting moral questions, too,’ Guy is saying.

‘Oh?’

‘Like, does it make it better or worse that you don’t actually believe in magic. Worse, probably. Because you’re earning money off the oh-so-very-dated notion that women need men to be happy.’

‘Is every woman who’s ever married a man anti-feminist? Or fallen in love with a man? because that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s saying your life is better with the other person in it. Am I anti-feminist? For being with you?’
Guy surveys me for a moment, chewing coolly. 

 ‘No, because I acknowledge that you are a full, whole person in your own right. We merely compliment one another’s existence, but we are whole in ourselves.’

He smiles at me sweetly. I think about how very far from a whole person I felt the last time we had sex. I finish my wine and watch as he polishes off the food that I paid for.

‘Did you keep the bones, by the way? I need them.’