The Assistant. S. K. Tremayne

       1

       Jo

       Are you a woman, man, other?

      Well, that’s easy enough. Despite that curious wish for a twirly moustache, age ten, and a twelve-year-old’s desire to be an astronaut, which came with the vague yet outraged sense that only boys could be proper astronauts, I am quite sure on this one.

      As the daylight in the room shades to grey, I lean towards my shining laptop screen and click,

       woman

       Are you straight, gay, bisexual, other?

      A pause. A long pause. I’ve no doubts about my sexuality, I’m just bemused by what other might mean in this context. What is that fourth possibility of sexuality? A desire for ghosts? Ponies? Furniture? My dear beloved mum can get oddly excited when reading magazines about interior decoration. But I somehow don’t think her demographic is the target of this website.

      On the other hand, sitting here at my laptop in the fading winter light, I’d quite like a fourth choice, or a fifth choice, or, dammit, seventy-eight choices. Because if you were in a critical mood you could say my choices so far in life have not turned out entirely optimal: divorced, childless, and nearly homeless at thirty-three. OK, yes, I might be living in a sleek flat in the nicer end of Camden, North London – where it merges into the real, five-storey Georgian opulence of Primrose Hill – however, I know I’m only here because my richer friend, Tabitha, took pity on her newly divorced and virtually bankrupt old university mate. Hey, why don’t you have the spare room, I really don’t use it much …

      I think it was the casually generous way she made this offer, the blasé effortlessness of it all, which confounded me. At once it made me feel impossibly grateful, and even more fond of Tabitha – funny, kind, generous, and the best of best friends – yet it also made me feel guilty and a tiny tiny tiny bit jealous.

      Turning from the laptop, I look out of the darkening window. And see my own face reflected.

      OK, I was properly jealous, if only for a minute or two. What barely mattered to Tabs – Here, have a spare room, somewhere really nice to live – was so crucial and difficult for me, and she was barely aware of the emotional difference.

      This is because Tabitha Ashbury already owns, Tabitha Ashbury will also inherit. I love her but she’s never understood what it’s like not to have all that: in London.

      By contrast with Tabitha, I’m not just Generation Rent, I am Generation Can’t Afford to Rent Anywhere Without a Major Knife Crime Epidemic. And it doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon, because I’m a freelance journalist. I have become a freelance journalist when the phrase freelance has become a kind of fantastical joke in itself: hey, look, I know that these days you basically have to write for free, but where’s my lance? Don’t we go jousting as well?

      This career, however, was – for all its challenges – definitely one of my smarter choices. I love my job. The work is varied and compelling, and every so often I get to think I have changed the world slightly for the better, revealing some scandal, telling a decent story, making someone I’ll never know chuckle for two seconds, over a sentence that may have taken me six hours to get right. But that scintilla of human gladness wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t made the effort. Or so I hope.

      Reverting to my computer I refocus on OKCupid. I may have a home (however fortunate), I might have a job (however sketchy the salary), I have, however, no other half. And I am beginning to feel the absence. And perhaps the magic of internet dating will guide me, like a digital fairy godmother, with a wand of sparkling algorithms, to a new man.

      I answer the question:

       straight

      With this, my laptop screen instantly flashes, and grows even more vivid: whisking me into a world of warm, cascading images of What Could Be: luridly happy pictures of emotional and erotic contentment, where beautiful couples sit laughing, very close together.

      Here’s a smiley young Chinese woman sipping red wine and draping a slender arm over a handsome Caucasian man with enough stubble to be masculine without being prison-y; here are the white and black gay boys holding hands as they put red paint on each other’s faces in a carnival mood; here is the exceptionally well-preserved older couple who found love despite it all – and now seem to inexplicably spend all their time grinning on rollercoasters. And all these happy ThankyouCupid! people are promising me something so much better than the view through the big high black sash windows of this million-quid flat: looking out onto the chilly, frigid, 3 p.m. twilight of wintry London. A world where it is getting so cold and dark the angry red brake lights of the