Chapter 1

I don't want to bore you with my past history, because I don't want to be the focal point of this story. But at least I need to tell you that I'm 27, I live in London, and none of my past relations with the opposite sex have ever been really successful. At university, there were several people who displayed what you might call a lively intelligence - that was a quality that definitely attracted me. But physically speaking, as I look back, I realise that they weren't all that alluring, or at least not alluring enough. Things easily petered out, embarrassingly sometimes right when we were in bed.

Then when I'd graduated to the real adult working world, I found the problem was the other round. If a woman looked appealing, and some definitely did, it was usually the case that she also had the intellectual horizons of a chihuahua. The perfect combination never seemed to arrive. I grew quite morose about it. It was never going to happen, I decided; I was always doomed to disappointment. Over time my thoughts about the situation grew more and more gloomy, so that when I came across some like Kirana, who definitely ticked both boxes, I still thought disappointment inevitable.

We met at our rather esoteric place of work, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, where archaeology nuts and selected tourists come to stare at display cabinets featuring what was claimed to be one of Queen Nefertiti's teeth and lots of pieces of broken pottery. I'd found a rather lowly place in the team after studying archaeology at Cambridge. Kirana, who'd done the same thing a bit earlier at Oxford, was already there and immediately stood out as a slightly dusky mixed-race beauty, English and Indonesian. Physically, it was the Indonesian side that dominated. Hence her skin colour, one of those lovely gentle golden browns. Hence, too, as she told me one time, the defining feature of her face: high and visible cheekbones, a characteristic of Indonesia's former colonists, the Dutch, which gave the face its taut look, and a look entirely in keeping with the rest of her trim physique. Yes, she had breasts; yes, she had a bottom. But they were her only curves. She'd been into athletics at university, apparently, and physical fitness had obviously remained important to her.

As work colleagues, we rubbed along easily enough among the cabinets of Egyptian relics and eventually started having social contacts outside working hours. I asked her at one point if her first name meant anything in Indonesia. Yes, she told me, rather coyly: 'beautiful sunbeam.' I started to hope that she might be the one to spread sunbeams into my own life, especially when she held my hand at one of our after-work dinners (she never ate much) and suggested that we both withdraw to her flat afterwards where, she said, she had a rather comfortable bed. That took me a bit by surprise: I hadn't known that she was that interested in bed matters, at least involving me. Swallowing slightly nervously, I told her I'd be honoured.

Unfortunately, the bed experience didn't turn out as I'd hoped. Better than some of my university encounters, yes; but for me it was still on the perfunctory side, and I felt it was the same for her. Something was missing. A passion shortage? Or perhaps we were just too nervous? The sad thing was that instead of raising our relationship to a higher level, our rather rudimentary sex exchange seemed to prevent it progressing any further. Neither of us afterwards referred to our disappointing experience. Both of us, I guess, felt embarrassed about it. Perhaps Kirana had her own hang-ups and history of failed relationships. I suspect she had, though our conversations in the weeks after weren't ever deep and personal enough for her back-story to emerge, or for mine either. We never 'fell out', as the phrase goes, but the warmth of feeling between us did seem to cool a bit.

Two months after our disappointing tryst, the pattern of our lives significantly changed. The Petrie Museum had established a working relationship with the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which had its own Egyptian artefacts, and there was talk of a joint exhibition. As part of the limbering-up process, a job swap was proposed, with one staff member from each museum switching continents for six months, absorbing each institution's work practices. From our side, Kirana was selected. I didn't like her leaving us: even though our relationship appeared stalled I knew I'd still miss her, and kissed her goodbye with real sadness.

At the same time, I did take some perverse comfort in finding another reason, or excuse, for another personal relationship in my life that appeared to have reached a dead end. As her temporary replacement, the Petrie Museum was blessed (I am being ironic) by the arrival of Bruce, from Brooklyn, who showed himself a pretentious prat by turning up for work wearing a bow tie. What a lot of fun he was! Obviously born into money, he was staying in the luxurious London pad of some swanky friend of his and seemed to be spending his lunchtime visiting the posh clothing shops in the West End, probably buying more bow ties. He just didn't fit in.

It might have been the arrival of Bruce, plus the feeling that things with Kirana were going nowhere, that made me start to look at job ads, though perches in Egyptology collections in London weren't ten a penny. I began to think of myself as boxed in, stuck in a rut. For several months there were no suitable jobs to apply for, but eventually a post turned up at a museum in the London suburbs, which didn't go in for Egyptology but had enough old bits and pieces that someone with professional skills and a sense of history might be considered an asset. This was the Horniman Museum, whose mixed specialties included exploring world cultures (very on trend) and displaying Victorian stuffed animals (very not). Taxidermy and Egyptian mummies, I reasoned, were kind of related, so I applied.

I was interviewed and made a point of mentioning the Egyptian mummy connection. Was it that that got me the job? Something worked, anyway. During these months I'd been sending Kirana occasional emails, as she had been sending some to me. They were all chatty but short affairs that kept our little flickering flame just about alive, but on her side didn't go into much detail about her new life in New York. When I told her I'd be in a new job when she came back, she wrote that she was pleased for me, but would miss me. At what level would she miss me, I wondered. Would it be superficial missing, or something involving deeper emotions? By this point I just wasn't sure. True, she added two kisses - two x's - after her name when she signed off, something I began reciprocating. But you can't really go by email correspondence, can you?

By the time Kirana returned to London - "happy to be coming back," she wrote - I had been at the Horniman for just over a month. She told me that she was looking forward to seeing me, but didn't appear in a rush to make it happen. That's probably unfair of me, for she did have practical issues to face, like finding a new place to live after being forced to give up her rented flat when the landlord wouldn't allow a short rent to fill in the gap before she returned. Within a few weeks, however, she'd found at least a temporary solution, sharing an apartment with one of her old university friends from Oxford, Bridget. The apartment, she said, was near a railway line and in a slightly dilapidated state. Some painting and wallpapering was overdue, and while Bridget was away for a weekend at some leftie kind of political rally she planned on helping out by doing a bit of it in her absence. Maybe, she suggested, I could come round on Saturday, if I was free, and we could hang out together, catch up, and share a bit of the decorating.

I didn't know quite what to make of this, even when the two kisses in her emails advanced to three. Was our relationship still on? Did Karina really, really want to see me, or was she principally angling for help painting a ceiling? It's not that I minded pitching in, but I'd have been happier and clearer in my mind if no decorating had been involved. For one thing, it meant that I had to think about the clothes I should wear. If I was going to hold a roller or paintbrush, I'd better be wearing things that could take getting sploshed with drips. In the end I compromised, by dressing as I normally would - that is, clean and boring - but carrying with me an old pair of trousers and a torn shirt in a bag.

When Kirana opened the door, the first thing I spotted were the paint splotches on her own shirt. Aha, I thought! But the splotches were immediately knocked out of my mind by the second thing I spotted. She had gained quite a bit of weight. Her face was fuller. So were her breasts. There was a visible curve on her tummy. Wider hips. She seemed squeezed into the old worn-out clothes she was wearing - frayed jeans, a checkered shirt worn loose. With the shirt, the bottom button was undone, and the buttons that were done up had gaps between them, an obvious sign of the material under stress from her bigger breasts. As for the jeans, I noticed that the clasp on the waistband at the front was actually undone, with the front zipper stopped almost an inch from the finishing line by her belly's extra flesh. Whatever else she had done during her six months in New York, she'd obviously spent a lot of time eating. Extra proof arrived within seconds when we hugged and kissed - actions that happily came easily to us both, signalling to me that our relationship perhaps hadn't been put in cold storage after all. During previous physical contact I'd been used to a trim body with very little 'give'. Now she felt so soft when I hugged her, especially soft in the upper arms, but also round her hips. I'm sure I was brushing against love handles. It was all so strange and surprising. It was also, I must admit, rather enjoyable.

Once we'd pulled ourselves apart, she immediately began stating the obvious, with a rueful tone in her voice. "You notice I've got bigger. I've put on weight here -" (her hands were gesturing towards her breasts) - "and here -" (her tummy) - "and here" (her hips). I got the feeling that this was by now a practised routine as she met up with old friends. Actually, I could have pointed out some other body areas too, but caution and politeness intervened.

"But you carry it so well," I said. And I wasn't lying.

"I don't know about 'well', but I'm certainly carrying it. 25 lbs, would you believe? Anyway, you're looking good. The Horniman must be suiting you."

By this time we were sitting on a dust sheet that hid what I guessed was the lounge sofa. Kirana's sitting position, I noticed, generated a visible bulge of tummy fat, poking out below the undone bottom button of her shirt and hanging a little over her jeans. Good God, I thought, a spare tyre! I gave her a general picture of my time at my new museum, and what I thought of Victorian taxidermy (grotesque, amusing, fascinating, disgusting: my feelings about it kept changing). She did the same with her Brooklyn experience: the objects she'd handled, the cataloguing procedures, thrilling things like that. I told her how awful we'd found Mr Bow Tie. She said she'd heard Bruce was a bit of a pill, and wasn't much liked over there too. What I really wanted to talk about what she felt about gaining weight and how it happened, but something told me to keep off that topic for a while, unless she picked it up again herself. And besides, I thought, we did supposedly have some painting to do. There'd be time enough, I figured, for the other stuff.