Extract from 'Apocalypse Now'

I’d eaten the luminous orange macaroni and was in bed reading when I heard Jane’s scooter pull up outside our apartment some time after ten. She sashayed into my room, grinning maniacally, lit cigarette in hand. ‘Get up! Get dressed! I’ve found you a man.’
     I smiled but didn’t move.
     She sat down on the end of the bed. ‘He’s a friend of Peter’s, from London. He’s funny and very handsome and his name is James.’ She said all this in a low, silky voice, as if I were one of her recalcitrant pupils. ‘We were all at the restaurant and he was telling this crazy story and I had to interrupt him mid-sentence to say, “You’ve got to meet my friend, Myfanwy. I think you’re going to get on well.”’
     ‘There is no way I am getting up now to go and meet a friend of Peter’s.’ Peter, a young Chelsea fop who developed property in Saigon, had once told me he found Australian girls too coarse. And besides, I’d had a bad run with men and needed time – lots of time – on my own.
     ‘I’m telling you I have this uncanny feeling you’re going to connect.’ She wandered out to the living room, still talking, and came back with two Tiger beers. ‘But you’re coming anyway, because I’m going home in the morning and you’re going to miss me.’
     I smiled. She was right. It was going to be a lonely, albeit virtuous, month. I’d miss her restlessness, the coffee she brewed each morning over our wobbly kerosene one-burner, her Pantene and passion for American politics and poetry, her motherliness. ‘I really don’t want to go anywhere right now,’ I said.
     ‘You can wear my jeans.’
     I sat up and drank some beer. She put on 4 Non-Blondes, very loud. I dressed in her Gap jeans and short-sleeved olive blouse with the little white dots. Probably I wore mascara. ‘I’m not talking to Peter’s funny friend,’ I warned her. I think she just smiled.
     Twenty minutes later we were skidding, weightless and wanton, through the vaporous Saigon streets, good intentions shucked off, yet again, like some weighty coat of armour. I can see us still, gliding down the long hill of Hai Ba Trung on Jane’s Honda, hair flying out in flags behind us; the crescent moon; a banh mi stand at the side of the road lit up like a Christmas tree.