Page 77 of Untether

She’s in my flat, and she’s strolling around, admiring the huge abstract oils on the walls and teasing me about my bookshelves—I’m big on sports biographies. I reckon I’d outperform her at interviewing any Premier League manager or England cricket team captain, past or present.

‘You really like Spurs,’ she observes.

‘Yep,’ I tell her. ‘London boy, born and bred.’

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘Interesting. And youreallylike cricket.’

‘I fucking love it. I’ve played for a club every summer except this one—we opened Alchemy in Cannes so I spent most of the summer down there.’

‘I bet you did, you dirty boy,’ she says, pulling out my Alastair Cook memoir. ‘But I wish I’d had you around this summer. Kit and Pip are obsessed with cricket.’

‘I wish I’d been there, too,’ I tell her softly, and something in my voice makes her turn and give me a once-over. ‘Nah,’ she says, sliding the book back into place. ‘Orgies in the South of France or bowling endless balls to my kids? You don’t fool me for a second, Sinclair.’

I knowtwo things to be true.

Whatever Aida needs, I’ll give to her.

Whatever she’ll let me have, I’ll take from her.

Need has been building throughout the meal I cooked us—seared fillet on a bed of julienned vegetables if you must know. I have her in myhome. We’re less than ten metres from my fuckingbed. And all the heady insanity oflast week at the masked ball couldn’t make up for what we have now.

Privacy and time.

And I’m a master at availing of both.

But first, when you have the most fascinating woman you’ve ever met to yourself, you listen.

Like I said, we’ve got time.

I resist the urge to ask her what Obama was like in person—because everyone does that, right? Instead I ask, ‘Have you ever had brain freeze live on air?’

She gives a little laugh. ‘All the fucking time.’

‘No way. I don’t buy that for a second. You always seem so terrifyingly on the ball—your mental gymnastics are insane. It’s one of the absolutely most impressive things about you.’ I take a leisurely sip of the very smooth Pomerol I decanted to complement the steak.

‘Theywereinsane. They’re not anymore.’

‘What do you mean?’

She sighs. ‘It’s—not embarrassing, but it’s awkward.’

‘Okay…’ I say. I wait and swill my wine.

‘You won’t know anything about this, because you’re thirty-freaking-six, but I’ve been perimenopausal for the last couple years. That’s the period before you hit actual menopause, and it can last years and years.’

I make a sympathetic moue with my mouth and reach over to take her hand, but I don’t say anything, because I have nothing intelligent or helpful to contribute at this point. So I stroke her thumb instead.

‘Anyway, there are a lot of insidious symptoms that creep up on you, and you don’t realise what’s causing them, and you chalk it up to losing your goddamn mind. And brain fog was one of those for me.’

She pauses. ’It’s a stupidly inadequate term for havingabsolutely no brain function. I kept losing my train of thought when I was talking. I found myself trailing off at the end of sentences a lot, and I couldn’t hold a question in my head, you know? I’d be interviewing someone and mentally queuing my next question while I listened to them speak, and when I cut in it was likepoof!My question had just vanished. It started happening on air more and more. There were a couple times my producers had to rescue me through my earpiece.’

I’m staring at her in horror. ‘Jesus,’ I say, squeezing her hand. ‘I can’t imagine how bloody terrifying that is.’

‘Terrifying and humiliating. I felt like such a cliché—that middle-aged woman who’s losing her mind, or losing the plot, as you guys say. There are some very nasty TikTok montages of it.’

‘Seriously? That’s so fucking rude.’

‘Uh huh. People are shitty. I haven’t watched them, obviously. But it was one of the reasons I stepped down from the nightly news. It really dented my confidence—I’d panic right before I was due to go on air. You know those dreams where you’re on stage and you don’t know your lines, and then you realise you’re actually naked, too? Oh, and the play is in Japanese?’

---