She was what you'd call an archetype. The goddess. I never liked Diana that much but she just had that look. Blonde hair, big tits, brown cow eyes that talked to you. She had a way of walking, a lazy kind of slouch from the hips. The whole package just gave you one clear message. It said, "I can deliver the goods".

She was the first woman I saw when I moved into Steve's place. I'd been in Saudi for three years and London seemed colder than I remembered. Steve had lent me the flat until I got myself sorted out and I was glad of a cheap base. It was in one of those slum blocks which had been taken over by a leftie co-operative and there was a lot of primary-coloured paint about, dinky window boxes and cat shit on the stairs. The flat was basic but cosy enough. I got myself cable and a video and settled in for a quiet winter. I phoned Caroline but she didn't want to see me. She said she'd finally got her head together again.

The flat was on the second floor and Diana lived two doors along the balcony. The day I moved in I saw her struggling up the stairs with some carrier bags and I offered her a hand. She had this little blonde kid with her and she was wearing a huge, baggy sweater but I could still see her tits. She had good legs too. So I carried the bags to her door, told her I'd just moved in and was out of coffee.

She was panting a bit as we went into her kitchen. I found out later she was an asthmatic, which made me laugh. You wouldn't have thought such a magnificent chest would hold dysfunctional lungs. Even when she'd got her breath back her voice came out kind of strained in high-pitched little gasps, somewhere between a whine and an orgasm. I could tell she was used to complaining. She was friendly enough but I knew she didn't want me hanging about. She was cooking the kid's fish fingers and putting the shopping away so I finished my coffee and said I'd see her around. She told me to pop in for a drink one evening, meet her husband.

They weren't a happy couple, but you could tell they got on out of a shared bitterness against the rest of the world. I went round the following week and her husband, John, plied me with single malt while the two of them took the piss out of all the other tenants in the block. She was a great mimic, Diana. I'd met a few of the neighbours by then and she could take them off really well. The Russian bloke with the fat neck, the bearded communist wanker, the crippled girl downstairs, she had them all off to a tee. Dead funny.

Later on that evening another couple dropped in, an artist called Luke who lived on the other side of the block, and his plain little girlfriend. John skinned up a few joints and soon they started to talk in a kind of code. One word would have them all rolling about laughing but I could tell I wasn't quite supposed to get the joke. In the end I left them to it, but I knew I'd hit on the in-crowd.

It was a couple of days later that I saw her going into the flat with a load of smart carrier bags, Joseph, Browns, Harvey Nichols. She looked kind of furtive, a bit shaky with the key as she fumbled into her flat before anyone could see her, and she was really embarrassed when I sauntered along the balcony and started to help her with the shopping.

"Go on - make my day," I told her when we were inside. "Show me what you've bought."

"Oh nothing much - just clothes, Colin, nothing interesting."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Nothing interesting!" I said. "Oh, Diana, take pity on a poor bachelor boy, deprived of the delights of fashion. C'mon - just a peep."

I made for the Joseph bag and she squealed a half-protest before opening it and throwing me a velvet dress.

"Go on then - indulge yourself - I'll put the kettle on."

I glanced at the price tag and followed her into the kitchen.

"I'd like to see it on," I said.

"It wouldn't fit you, Colin," she giggled. Then she grinned conspiratorially. "Come and have a look at these shoes."

We sat drinking tea as she unpacked the rest of the shopping. Another dress, two pairs of shoes, high and strappy, and a couple of cashmere jumpers with low necks. I noticed that the Harvey Nichols bag was tucked under her legs so I pointed at it.

"And what's in there?"

She put her foot, in its shiny new stilleto, on top of the bag.

"Secrets," she said.

"Lingerie department?" I winked.

"Absolutely."

Very carefully she removed the bag from under her shoe, her eyes never leaving my face. For a moment I really thought she was going to show me, and she smiled when she saw me thinking that. I must have looked like a prize dick. Diana shifted her hips, popped the bag under her bottom and sat on it. Then she winked back at me.

After that I started going round to Diana's quite a lot. She never asked me, but then she never shut the door in my face either. John often worked late so she was on her own after the kid had gone to bed, and she'd open a bottle of wine for us and start entertaining. She liked attention. You could see her in those drinking clubs in Soho, leaning on the bar being the life and soul. That's where she used to go, she told me, before she had the kid, when she and John were students. That's how long she'd known Luke and Jane too, since the four of them were still thinking they'd be the new Bloomsbury group or something, never believing they'd end up in a slum in the East End watching Blue Peter with the kid and wheeling a trolley round Tescos every Saturday, while they waited for John's company to make enough for them to move to Hampstead. She looked really pleased when I offered to babysit.

Two things happened the day I agreed to look after the kid. Firstly the artist, Luke, came round in the afternoon and asked me to help him shift some big frames into town. He'd hired a van and needed a driver and a bit of muscle, he said, grinning on my doorstep with a roll-up in one hand and a dead hare in the other.

"Is that your dinner?" I asked him.

"Next weeks'" he told me. "It's a still-life at the moment."

I was lifting weights and I didn't much feel like helping him, but I knew a refusal would get back to Diana so I followed him round to his flat. As we walked he swung the hare by its hind legs, obviously pleased with the horrified expressions in the car park.

"I'll see you right," he said. "Bit of a cash-flow problem at the moment, but maybe next week."

"Don't worry about it," I said.

The girl, Jane, was kneeling on the floorboards of his studio polishing a frame.

"Hi," she said. "How's it going?" But she didn't do more than glance up at me. She was a skinny thing, mousey with these huge, mad eyes, and she gazed at Luke like a stupid puppy.

"Shall we get on with it?" I said, and we started loading up the van. Luke was a skinny bastard too, as tall as me but hollow-chested and scrawny. His filthy jeans hung low and you could see his jutting hip bones when he reached up. But I had to hand it to him, he was strong. By the time we finished I was sweating and my arms ached, but I didn't let on.

"Well cheers, mate," he said when we got back. "Come in for a beer?"

I said I wouldn't bother. I wanted to have a bath before I went to Diana's.

The second thing that happened was that Caroline phoned, just as I was getting out of the bath. I wrapped a towel around my waist and sat dripping on the carpet.

"I need to see you, Colin," she said.

I reminded her of our last conversation, but she seemed to have forgotten that she'd sorted herself out.

"We need to talk," she said. "There's still a lot we have to talk about. Can I come over tonight?"

"Sorry, not tonight, babe," I said.

"Why?" she asked, suddenly jealous. "What are you doing?"

"Babysitting," I told her.

"Babysitting?" Her voice was incredulous. "What's your game?"

I was smiling when I put the phone down.

Diana looked better than a Vogue model. She was wearing the black velvet dress which was so tight that her tits were almost bursting over the top. It was hard to keep my eyes on her face as she handed me a whisky, but I concentrated on her full red pout and the blonde hair piled up, and the wicked black eyebrows that made her look like the naughtiest girl in school. John was wearing a Paul Smith shirt and these daft red braces, but he looked okay. They were certainly a good-looking couple.

"Well don't mum and dad look the business?" I said to the kid who was watching T.V. in his pyjamas and eating a yoghurt. He ignored me.

"It's really good of you, Colin," said Diana. "Bedtime's eight o'clock - you might have a bit of a fight but don't stand for any nonsense - he usually just likes a bit of rough and tumble with John before bed."

She kissed the kid's blonde hair.

"Bye, darling - be good for Colin."

"See you later, mate," said John to me. "Cheers."

I asked the kid a few kiddy questions but he just said "Ssshh" and kept his eyes fixed on the T.V. Kids never like me. I looked at the paper, smoked a couple of fags, and I was glad when it was eight o'clock.

"Eight o'clock," I said to the kid.

"Actually it's five to," he informed me.

"So," I said. "Want to fight?" I smiled at him and held up my fists. The kid just looked at me, picked up his yoghurt carton and carried it out to the kitchen. Then I heard the sound of running water in the bathroom for a long time before he appeared at the door.

"It's eight o'clock now," he said.

"Right," I said. "Want me to read you a story?"

"No thank-you," said the kid.

"Goodnight then," I called after him as he disappeared.

I waited for a bit. I looked in at the kid who was fast asleep with his thumb in his mouth. Then I pulled the door shut very gently and headed for the other bedroom.

I knew Diana would be a slut. There were books, clothes and odd shoes scattered all over the floor, glasses of stale water and teacups festering by the high double bed. I went straight to the big chest of drawers and opened the right one first time. Second drawer down, it usually is. I found the bag from Harvey Nichols, full of black satin, and I found a lot of other things too. She had a good selection, nice stuff some of it, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. So I went to the bathroom and found the big wicker basket waiting for the wash.

They were home earlier than I'd expected, but I was already positioned back in front of the T.V. with a large whisky. She was in a foul mood. You could tell they'd had a row on the way home, and she poured herself a drink and started to tell me about the awful food she'd had to eat. I could still smell her as she spoke. I didn't stay long, though. It was still early enough to call Caroline when I got home.

"I thought you were babysitting," she said huffily.

"I was," I told her, unzipping my jeans. "But I'm home now. Come over."

"We-ell."

"Come on, babe," I said. "I really want to see you."

She said she'd be over in twenty minutes.

I've always been a good infiltrator. I know how to make myself useful. Women tell me I'm a good listener. But there was something about Diana that I couldn't get past and the four of them, when they were together, formed an impenetrable clique. I did odd jobs for them, collected gossip from the other tenants to feed their collective contempt, and I humoured their sense of being the elite. But I always knew I was never in the same league. Diana had a way of looking at me, when I complimented her hairstyle or a new dress, a way of making me feel like dirt. And sometimes when I left the room, during those evenings with the two couples, I'd hear some muffled sounds of laughter, and then the silence of exchanged glances.

She loved to flirt. She swung her hips and looked me straight in the eyes, but you could see her repulsion if I looked too long. She wanted me to know she had secrets, but she wasn't going to tell me them. She always looked so clean, clothes spotless and neatly pressed, that perfect pale skin. Diana had two baths a day, one in the morning before she took the kid to school, and one just before she picked him up. Her bathroom window opened onto our balcony and it drove me just about mad listening to her splashing, imagining her in there. That was the first clue, the baths, and it wasn't long before I found out what they were all about.

I'd found an old telescope of Steve's in a box of junk under the sink, and standing behind the curtains in the living-room I got a good view into the windows of the flats on the other side of the block. You'd be surprised what people get up to in the afternoons. Mostly I just watched people eating, that disgusting way of gorging they do when they're on their own in front of the T.V, but I'd seen a few other things too. The babe on the top floor, for instance, dancing with herself in front of the mirror. That got me going. I'd been keeping an eye on Luke's studio, watching him painting and I'd seen Diana round there sometimes in the afternoons, drinking coffee and chatting. I kept the telescope on her when she was there, so I saw it all when Luke and her started necking on the sofa. I saw him grabbing her tits, putting his filthy hands up her sweater, and I saw her face. The bitch was loving it.

I was waiting on the balcony when she got back, watching the sunset over the gasworks.

"Beautiful eh?" I said.

"What - oh yes." She came and stood next to me. Her pale skin was glowing.

"You should see the sunsets over Riyadh," I told her. "Nothing like it."

She smiled over the balcony, but I knew she wasn't really looking at the sky.

"I'll pop round later on," I said. "Show you the photos of Saudi."

She was miles away.

"Oh yeah -yeah - well I must go in - I've got to - "

"Have a bath?" I said.

She almost jumped. It took a few moments before she remembered the innocence of the question.

"Yes," she laughed. "You certainly know my routine, Colin."

"I certainly do," I told her.

I didn't even wink at her. I just watched her hips in the tight black skirt as she slouched into her flat, and then I watched the sunset, listening to the water running as she scrubbed off the evidence.

They weren't really interested in the photos.

"Well you can't really capture a sunset on film, can you?" said Diana. The bitch. Jane was the only one who looked through them all, asking a few polite questions. The five of us were sitting in Diana's flat drinking whisky and it all looked pretty cosy. You wouldn't have thought there was any wife-swapping going on. Diana was giving us a run-down on the slag upstairs and her string of boyfriends. Luke was laughing and skinning up joints with Jane kneeling at his feet and John, poor bastard, was leafing through the Caribbean holiday brochures that Diana had dumped on him. It seemed a shame to blow the whole lot to pieces and, anyway, I was biding my time. I didn't feel so bad that night, though. Even when I left and Diana said,

"Thank you for bringing the photos," in that mocking way she had, and glanced at Luke who was smirking into his tobacco pouch, I didn't care. I knew what she'd got coming to her.

I watched them getting down to it most afternoons. They had a little routine. Coffee first. He liked her tits. The bastard was usually in the way, spoiling my view, and just as I unzipped they'd be off out of sight, into the back bedroom to finish the business. Later I'd see Jane come in from work and kiss him. Sometimes she'd even have picked up the kid from school for Diana. Luke often patted Jane on the head, just like you would a dog, while Diana was back home in the bath, washing off his spunk and getting ready for a fresh batch that night from her husband.

And even that was not enough for her. I wasn't really surprised when one day she knocked on my door, in between the two of them, on her way home from Luke's.

"I just thought I'd pop in for coffee," she said, still flushed with sex. But I didn't fall for it. In my mind I bent her over the kitchen table, but my hands were busy making the coffee as I asked her about her day. She was looking at me in that way she had, eyes wide, lips parted, the look that just made me want to fall on her like some starving old peasant on a rotting carcass, with an ugly inhuman greed from another world. I've seen people starving. They looked like vermin, and I guess that was the look that Diana wanted to see. So I made it a bit cosy with the coffee and biscuits. I listened to her stories and I looked like I wasn't hungry. She talked a bit about the kid, about moving to a better part of London, about how she wanted to write a novel.

"You'd be good at that," I told her. "You're very observant."

She looked pleased, and then bit her lip.

"Yes - well - maybe I'll do it one day - but I've been saying that for years."

"Are you happy?" I asked her.

She looked slightly shocked. It took her a while to reply.

"Yes - of course," she said.

We had never sat in silence before, and it was only for about a minute. She couldn't have known that in that minute I'd had her in ten different positions in the room.

"Do you think you can ever love someone forever?" she asked suddenly.

I shrugged.

"Life's a single bed, babe," I said.

"Life's a terminal illlness," she said quietly.

I fell for it then. For a moment, as I drowned in her dark eyes, I truly believed she was sad. Like a fool I went over to the sofa and put my arm gently around her shoulders. She froze. Then she shuddered out of my embrace as if she had touched something disgusting, like a rat. As she got up to leave, triumphant, my guts felt sick, my dick withered, and I knew that her time was up. It wasn't just for me. It was for John and for Jane too. This was for everyone.

I chose my time carefully. I checked out that John was working late and I'd heard that Luke and Jane were going out to dinner. I knew she'd be glad of company but I couldn't believe my luck when she opened the door in her dressing-gown. She said she'd just get dressed but I told her not to bother in my most brotherly way, and we sat on the sofa together with a bottle of wine, me watching as her tits kept nearly falling out of her dressing-gown each time she picked up her glass. She passed me a photo, an urban cottage, newly-painted with roses round the door. Very Hampstead.

"Keep your fingers crossed," she told me. "I think we're finally getting out of this hell-hole."

"Nice," I said, looking at the photo. "Expensive?"

She grinned.

"Very."

"Good luck to you," I said. "I don't suppose you'll miss much around here." She refilled our glasses.

"Well you know, Colin, it's funny," she said. "I think I will miss the old slum a bit. You know, you get used to a place don't you? The people and everything."

I nodded. Diana was the kind of person who'd complain about winning the lottery and I knew she would soon find a thousand and one things to moan about in the new place. I also knew what she'd be missing the most.

"The people you like will visit you," I said, "and there'll be a street full of new neighbours for your entertainment - a classier brand I imagine."

She laughed.

"Yes but that's just it, Colin, I'm not sure if I want class - the seedier side of life is just so much more fun." The black eyebrows arched over her cow eyes, taunting. I knew it was the last time she would look at me like that and I held on to the moment, smiling at her like a humble, hopeless suitor, as if I was gratefully content just to look at the perfect pout of her lips. For the last time I let her feel powerful.

"You'll come and visit us, won't you Colin?"

I drained my glass. I wanted her as drunk as possible.

"Am I keeping you up?" I asked, putting my empty glass pointedly on the table.

"No, not at all - shall I open another bottle?"

As she poured the fresh Chablis I wondered if she knew I could see right down the front of her dressing-gown. Her tits were so big they looked unreal, like someone had stuck them on as an afterthought. I glanced down at her slim, hairless legs. She looked top-heavy, mis-matched, and the dark eyes beneath her platinum bob were all wrong. She was like a collage someone had made from a copy of Penthouse, all the best bits stuck together to make this weird dream chick. She looked grotesque.

"You will come and visit us, won't you Colin?"

I only smiled in reply. I knew that once she'd settled in Hampstead I'd be forgotten, but at that moment she needed me, needed to believe that the adoration wouldn't stop. Even goddesses have confidence crises, and Diana hadn't quite put her faith in the string of admirers who would be her future. I realised then just how unhappy she was, that she would never be satisfied, not with her husband, her lover, the crowd of sad bastards like me who thought about her night and day. But I wasn't going to feel sorry for her ever again.

"You will, won't you?" she repeated.

I looked straight at her.

"Oh, I don't think you'll want me to visit," I said. "But I expect Luke will be round quite a bit."

She didn't flinch, but she reached for her glass.

"Luke?" The nonchalance was hysterical. "Oh yes, I s'pose he'll come and see us."

"Us?"

Diana closed her mouth. She looked strange without the pout.

"What I mean," I said smilingly, "is that Luke will come and see you. Not you and John. You."

She wouldn't look at me, but she carried on desperately, like she was reading her lines.

"Oh I suppose I'll see Luke sometimes, when John's at work, but I don't expect he'll be coming regularly - he's a lazy sod, you know, but maybe Jane'll bring him over in the evening, for dinner and - "

"You're a bad actress," I said. "But you look nice when you're frightened."

She didn't answer.

"I've been watching you," I explained. "With a telescope. I know all about you and Luke. I know exactly what you get up to in the afternoons. I know why you have to have so many baths, Diana."

She nodded at the floor. Then her chin shot up with a child's defiance and she shot me a look of pure hatred. She'd have shot me dead if she'd had a gun.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked. Her voice was even higher than usual, kind of strangled.

"Do?" I laughed. "Oh I'm not going to do anything. Or say anything, if that's what's really worrying you. Jane's a sweet girl and she'd be pretty upset if she knew what you were doing with Luke while she was looking after your kid."

Diana stared at the floor.

"And John," I continued. "God, he's worked hard for that dream family home, hasn't he? In fact he's been out earning the money to pay for it while his wife's been shagging his best mate. I just don't know how he'd take it really - I mean, it might just ruin everything."

I smiled but she wasn't looking at me.

"Look at me, Diana."

With her mouth tightly closed and her white face she looked very young, the way old people do when they're losing their minds.

"I told you that you wouldn't want me to visit you in your lovely new home," I said. "So I'm going to say goodbye to you now, before John gets home."

Her chest was pumping up and down like a piston and she went to the windowsill and picked up her inhaler. She had two blasts and stood still, her back to me.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"You know," I said.

It was a gamble, but she was drunk, trapped and terrified, and I was banking on the alternative being a whole lot harder. She took another blast of her inhaler and turned round, trembling, looking somewhere near my left shoulder.

"Do you have a condom?" she asked.

I kept my smile to myself.

"Oh that's not what I want," I told her.

I waited for her to meet my eyes, for the tiny glimmer of hope, of relief. Then I told her to open her dressing-gown.

I left her mopping her tits with a towel. I couldn't tell if she was crying. I went home and channel-surfed for a while, but the film in my head was better and I played that one back over and over again. Then, when I was ready, I phoned Caroline.

I kept my word. I usually do. Three weeks later I helped John carry the furniture downstairs and load up the van. He was happy as a sandboy, poor bastard. The kid was jumping around all excited, and Luke and Jane were handing round the champagne which Luke, uncharacteristically, had bought. Luke seemed happy too. He looked like a man who knew nothing was really going to change. Diana kept out of the way. I could hear her whining inside the flat about a broken mirror, but I didn't need any superstitious crap to tell me she was in for some bad luck. John clapped me on the back and handed me their new address.

"Stay in touch," he said.

I told him I certainly would.

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