The radio’s on low and Gabriel’s half-listening. Trump, Brexit, more deaths in Syria and beyond, Trump again. Gabriel sits up in bed in the dark as Finn sleeps beside him, dead to the world. He lights another cigarette and tries to concentrate, tries to take an interest in the world outside. He tries to distract himself from himself, and the mess he’s gotten into.

     Finn stirs and twists her body away from him, pulling the quilt a little and upsetting the ashtray balanced on Gabriel’s lap. He catches it before it spills, places it on the bedside table and stubs out his cigarette. He lies back down, Finn’s back to him, her face turned towards the wall. She begins to snore:  a slow sputter ending in a nasal whine. The bed is old, large, and sags in the middle. Gabriel can feel the heat from the young woman’s body, even though there’s a distance between them. He feels a sudden, desperate need to have Finn one last time, a need to have her beneath him, hips rising to meet his, her mouth on his mouth, his chin, his neck, his shoulder, his mouth again, their tongues dancing. He dismisses the images. No more, it’s finished. He wills himself to move, now, soon. If she wakes he will be powerless to stop it. He’s not strong enough. She always turns to him in her half-sleep, reaching, wanting. It’s been this way since the beginning.

     Gabriel decides to smoke another cigarette. The LED on the clock radio is blinking 05:04, just under an hour until the alarm will ring. He sits and smokes and thinks about the film they had watched together earlier that evening. Finn had never seen Casablanca so Gabriel brought a DVD over to her house. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s watched it over the years. It’s one of his favourites, a film which always manages to renew his faith in love. Rick’s love for Ilsa, and the sacrifices he makes for her, gets him every time and brings tears to his eyes. As Bogart and Claude Rains walk off together at the film’s conclusion, Finn had turned to Gabriel and smiled at the tears filming his eyes. She told him that the movie was just like him: old-fashioned, but sweet and sentimental. There were tears in her eyes too, though. That’s when she had told him, and that’s when he should have left, should have risen from the settee and walked to the door without a backwards glance.

                                                                              *

The darkness in the bedroom is easing from black to blue. Time is passing. As suddenly as it had begun, Finn’s snoring ceases. She twists again in her sleep, turning once again towards Gabriel, both hands gripping her pillow and pressing it to her cheek. Her fair hair is darkened with sweat, her fringe plastered to her forehead. Her nose wrinkles against a sudden itch and her breath pouts out between wet lips. She lets go a long, low fart.

     Gabriel brushes flakes of ash from the duvet and studies the hairs on his chest. Two strong silver strands have appeared amongst the density of brown seemingly overnight. They are the same approximate length as their brothers, so Gabriel can only assume that they have turned silver, rather than grown that way.

     Stubbing out his cigarette he notices an inch or so of red wine at the bottom of the glass he’d left on the bedside table a few nights ago, a crimson kiss of lipstick smudged on the rim where Finn, naked, had reached across him and stolen a drink before falling back on the bed and pulling him down into her soft, yielding centre.

     Gabriel tries to focus on the voice on the radio, tries to take his mind off the warm body that lies so close to him. Ronald Binge’s ‘Sailing By’ heralds the morning Shipping Forecast on Radio Four. A dolorous male voice sings softly a sad song of squalls in North Utsere and South Utsere, thundery showers moderate or good.

     He lifts the wine and drinks the last inch down, thick and strong like medicine. He’s given up any hope of sleep now, it’s just a matter of waiting for Finn to wake and him summoning the nerve to do today what must now be done.

     Beyond the foot of the bed is a bookcase crammed with paperback books. In the quickening light Gabriel can just make out some of the titles on the spines. The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Light Years. Calamitous love stories all. Finn is in love with the tragedy they convey. They sing to her bruised heart, make epic her own fateful past: a ‘widow’ at twenty one, her boyfriend—and father of her young son James—dead in a stolen car which crashed on the Broadway underpass one wet July evening almost five years past.

     When they first discussed Gatsby, Gabriel noticed Finn wiping away tears as she sat at a desk at the back of the classroom. He was intrigued. During the first few weeks of the adult learning evening class he taught at the Metropolitan College one night a week she had struck him as one of those girls you often meet in Belfast: bright beyond her education. Pregnant at fifteen, Finn had left Secondary school before she had a chance to sit her GCSE’s. She had a quick, cutting sense of humour and a low, filthy sounding laugh. She was popular in class and liked by the other students, a mix of older men and women taking the class because they loved literature, and younger people like Finn taking up studying again for qualifications they’d missed out on or messed up first time round for one reason or another.

     Gabriel wondered if she was attracted to him. She was flirtatious, forward, stayed behind after class to talk to him about whatever they had been discussing that evening. Her gaze as they spoke flittered between his eyes and his mouth, and she stood just near enough to him to make Gabriel aware of her closeness.

     As the Christmas break approached Finn badgered Gabriel to come along with the class for drinks when they broke for the holidays. He’d become convinced he could have her if he wanted to, but that he didn’t want to, and wouldn’t. When the night came he joined his class in The Crown Bar, telling himself that he’d stay for just one drink. The pub was packed, buzzing with people on their staff do’s as well as tourists drinking Guinness as they gazed at the famous fixtures. With no room in the snugs they stood at the bar and talked books and Christmas plans, drank pints with Whiskey chasers and, as the noise of their fellow revellers rose, Finn and Gabriel found themselves talking into one another’s ears to be heard.

     “I’m having a few people back to mine after,” she told him, her fingers gripping his shoulder as her breath warmed his ear. “You should come.”

     When the bar reluctantly emptied at one thirty Finn somehow managed to commandeer a black taxi amidst the mayhem on Great Victoria Street and Gabriel found himself sitting next to her, more than a little drunk and conscious of the heat from her thigh pressed against his as the taxi flew up the Grosvenor Road at speed. Amidst the chatter of the three others in the back of the cab they were silent. The air around them was filled with booze fumes, perfume and sweat. A faint flutter of nausea nagged at Gabriel’s stomach. Finn’s shoulder pressed into his arm like a hard comfort.

     The taxi turned right at speed into a housing estate and pulled up suddenly at an end terrace. “C’mon, this is us,” Finn told Gabriel, opening the door and pulling him from the taxi by the hand before he had even registered the car had stopped.

     “I should pay the taxi,” Gabriel told her.

     “The others will get it. C’mon.”

     Inside the house Finn offered him wine, whiskey or tea. He asked where the others were.

     “They decided to head on,” she told him. “It’s just you and me. Is that OK?” Before he could answer she was kissing him, pushing him up against the living room door, and Gabriel lay aside the pain he’d been feeling the past eight months since his wife Siobhan had walked out on him and gave himself over to the urgency of his need.

     That was how it began. They agreed to keep it quiet, and casual. It would be nothing serious, just a bit of fun. After a month or so, though, Gabriel could sense Finn was beginning to want more. She tried to pretend otherwise, but he could tell. He also knew that he should never have let it happen in the first place, and that it was up to him to end things as soon as he could. But he didn’t, he couldn’t bring himself to. After months of self-hatred he’d grown fond of the version of himself he could see reflected in her eyes.

     He berated himself as a coward for not breaking things off. He didn’t really care about her. He’d given so little of himself and told himself he had nothing to give. He’d been non-committal about moving things forward and left Finn to accept this or break it off herself, which he knew she wouldn’t do, just as he knew that she was damaged, a woman who had already been hurt terribly in her young life. A young woman who needed someone to return the love she had to give, the love she was giving to him. Gabriel knew all this but still did nothing.

     In January Gabriel went back to work at the Met. At the night classes which Finn attended he treated her no differently than he had before, although it was obvious to him that the others in the class knew what had happened over the Christmas break. They didn’t say anything, though, and Finn respected Gabriel’s wishes and kept her distance whilst they were within the college walls.

     They slept together once, sometimes twice a week. Always at Finn’s house, never at Gabriel’s apartment, even though he lived alone. Finn’s mum was happy to look after James in the evenings. Gabriel had only met the boy once. He was tall for his age, looked him up and down suspiciously and mumbled “alright” when Finn introduced him as “my teacher friend Gabriel”.

     For a while Finn seemed even happier in class: alive, curious, filled with a desire to do well. She aspired to be like Gabriel when she was older she told him one night in bed. She thought of him as charming, witty, successful. He told her he wouldn’t wish being him on anyone. She thought he was joking.

     The truth was he was tired, and felt diminished since Siobhan left him. In his life he’d hurt and been hurt in turn, but he was no longer strong enough, or brave enough, or good enough to give whatever was left of him to anyone. Lately, he’d been finding it difficult to keep up with Finn’s desire. As she lay beneath him he pressed his mouth to her throat and let his mind fill with cold, pornographic snapshots of a multitude of women. As she rose to meet him he thrust on, willing himself to finish, his mind a whir of images. All women bar one, all women and none, all women then one—Siobhan—and it’s was only by holding the image of his wife’s smiling face in his mind that he could finally come with a shameful, guilt-filled shudder.

     With Finn’s increased desire came a change in other aspects of her—mood swings, jealousy, drinking to excess. One minute she was using her tongue to trace the line of his hip bones, his stomach muscles spasming as he grew harder than he had in months, the next she was spitting invective at him about how he was using her just for sex, how he didn’t respect her or her life, didn’t care about her or think about her from one day to the next, only gave a shit when he was lying naked in her bed.

     She was right, of course. Gabriel knew this but by then he felt himself trapped, by both his cowardice and his own pathetic need.  He knew he should’ve taken steps to finish it. He knew he would never want for their relationship to become anything other than what it was, anything other than what he had allowed it to be. Finn was unknowable to him only because he hadn’t taken the time to try to know her in any other way than the way they were.

     And now this, the reason he was sitting up in bed just before dawn, smoking cigarette after cigarette while he tried to summon the courage to get up, to get dressed, to—finally—leave.

     “I’m pregnant,” she said.

     As soon as the words were out of her mouth he knew she was lying. He sat on the settee, looking at her.

     “What are you thinking?” she asked.

     “I thought you were on the pill.”

     “Well, I’m not.”

     “You told me you were.” She shifted on the settee, her thigh touching his. “I’m… we’re in no position to have a baby. Us, I mean.”

     “Why not?” Her fingers began to pluck at the hem of her skirt.

     “Don’t do that,” he told her.

     “What?”

     “That!”

     They sat there, side by side, neither of them talking. Finn studied the side of his face as he stared straight ahead, seeing nothing.

     “So… ” she said eventually. “What are we going to do?”

     “Nothing. There’s nothing to do.” He reached for his cigarettes, fumbled one out from the pack and lit up, inhaling deeply.

     “I’d love a fag,” she said. “But I can’t. Not anymore.” She smiled at him.

     “In the name of God, Finn, stop this nonsense now!” He stood up, staring at the menu page of Casablanca on the TV screen, a still of Bogart leaning into Ingrid Bergman, his fingers cupping her chin.

     Finn had begun to cry. He turned to her. “There is no baby, Finn. You know it, and I know it.”

     She was wailing now, her hands fluttering again at the hem of her skirt, then gripping and twisting the cloth as he stared at her bony knee caps then at her face— a smear of mascara, tears and snatter.

     “Fuck you, you selfish, selfish man!” she spat, standing up and moving towards him with her hands raised. Then she paused, her sobs ceased and her face lost all expression. “Fuck you, Gabriel,” she said quietly, then turned and left the room. He heard her footsteps as she walked upstairs and then the faint sound of the bathroom door closing and the lock being pulled across.

     Gabriel sat back down on the settee and waited, smoking another cigarette, his mind filled with recriminations, shoulda’s and coulda’s, what if's and if only’s, until the bathroom door opened and he heard Finn walking back downstairs, her steps heavier now it seemed.

     When she opened the living room door she stood in front of him wearing her white towelling robe. There was blood spotted across the hem. “Look what you’ve did,” she said.

     “What have you done to yourself, Finn?” he asked.

     “I haven’t done it. You’ve done it.” She began to cry again, quietly, as if she didn’t want Gabriel to notice. He stood up and took her in his arms. She leaned against him; her hands drooped at her side.

     “It knew it wasn’t wanted. Not by you.”

     He shushed her and rocked her in his arms as her tears soaked his shoulder until her silent, wracking sobs subsided.

     “Let’s go to bed,” he told her, and helped her up the stairs, walking slowly as if they were on their way to their executions. She wouldn’t let him take her robe off. He tucked her into bed. She fell asleep almost immediately. Gabriel sat on the side of the bed watching her breathe, her forehead gently uncreasing until her face looked peaceful. When he was sure she was sleeping he walked to the bathroom. There, on the edge of the bath, he found a pair of small nail scissors. Spotted with blood, a single hair lay trapped between the blades.

                                                                                 *

Gabriel checks the clock for a final time. It’s almost six. The heating kicks in with a low hum and the radiator by the side of the bed begins its low gurgle. Soon the alarm will ring, and Finn will slowly wake, then press herself to him, seek out his lips and try to draw him down into her warmth. She will have forgotten, or at least pretended to have forgotten, what happened the night before. Gabriel pushes back the covers and leaves the room to shower. When Finn wakes she will wake alone.

     The water is still cold, the oil heater yet to warm it. Gabriel strips off and steps into the shower. He cannot wait to be clean.