It's astonishing how many things you can find to sell on Craigslist, even in a zero-capital home such as my own. So far I've managed to get rid of an old wall mirror (not strictly mine), a couple of foldup chairs, an outdoor barbecue, a coffee table, a rug, a mat, a stool, two other lamps, an office chair and, most impressively, a plastic wine rack from the dumpster in the car park. Oh yes, and the dining-room table.

As for meeting women...I've thought about trying to fob off my prospective male customers, but it's impossible to determine their sex until it's too late. And, of course, I need the money. I need more money, but I'm running out of things to sell.

I look around the room and all I see are bare floors and the ants on the skirting boards. One thing remains: the beige carbuncle in the middle of the room - a sofa the weight of a small battleship, spiked with nails, stuffed with the feathers of a mechanical duck, catastrophically uncomfortable and wrapped in a fabric of the most offensively poor taste. If only it hadn't been a gift from my grandmother. To sell this sofa would be to turn my back on everything I was taught as a child: waste not, want not. I have no choice. The sofa must go.

In the first response to my sofa advertisement the prospective buyer requested photographs, and signed off with an intriguing “L.”. There was something playful, I decided, in that single, full-stopped initial. It suggested an appreciation of the tease, a mastery of suggestion. Yes, it was oddly romantic, that L. It made me think about a long, explicit sofabed demonstration. This L., I bet she would be a decadent creature. A wayward, foreign-born beauty, she would lie around in expensive black underwear, smoking French cigarettes and discussing Milan Kundera novels.

I looked again at my photographs of the sofa. In vain, I had tried my best to prepare it for the camera. With kitchen tongs, I had removed a pair of boxer shorts, wedged into the far northwest quadrant by the armrest. As for the dusty sock between the centre cushions - it was mysteriously heavy, as though a small farm animal had died inside it - I pushed it out of sight into the blackhole of the bed frame.

Fortunately, the objectionable colour of the sofa had rendered most stains invisible, aside from some remaining evidence of a recent nosebleed, which I had covered for the photograph with a copy of Vogue, carefully selected for my target demographic. There was a lot of work ahead of me. Between opening the front door and showing L. my grandmother's sofa, I had, at the very most, 30 seconds. Thirty seconds to work the Ayres magic. There was one problem, of course, with the Ayres magic: it didn't exist. So I would have to rely instead on hard work and preparation, or, failing that, outright deception.

I changed into boxer shorts and rubber gloves and cleaned with the enthusiasm of a murderer at a crime scene. Then it was time for another outing for house plants. I emerged from the Boyz Town florist's with a selection of defiantly heterosexual blooms: bloody reds, military greens, police-car blues.

My final assignment was a visit to a photo lab down on Hollywood and La Brea, to pick up a blown-up copy of a newspaper clipping from my war-reporting days. The article recorded my one and only moment of glory on the battlefield: a front-page account, in first-person detail, of how my unit had survived an ambush using only its wits, honour and three-hundred-billion dollars-worth of state-of-the-art military hardware. I was photographed wearing an expression that suggested gentle amusement rather than the profound, bowel-imploding terror from which I was actually suffering. The enlarged clipping would be hung above my desk.

And then home again, where I positioned a copy of Being and Nothingness, humorously annotated, next to my collection of National Enquirers on top of the toilet cistern. Elsewhere in the apartment I scattered Larkin, Hemingway, The Day of the Locust and some romantic poetry. Was there a danger of coming across as too sensitive, too insular? Girls want the poet and the fighter, after all. I fought my way into the closet by the front door and emerged with a tennis racquet, which I leaned against the wall.

One detail remained: music, they say, is the key to seduction. I settled on Miles Davis. The jazz would hang there in the air, twirling and glistening, like smoke from a cigar glimpsed through a half-open blind.

“That it?” said Lucie. “It's cute. Do you mind...?” With that, Lucie powered through the front door, put down her expensively buckled pocketbook, took out a camera, and started to photograph the sofa bed from every angle. I joined her in the living room, while trying not to notice just how...how...God, those jeans looked good on her. So did those low heels, with their V-shaped toes, and that neat, businesslike ponytail and that tight sweater.

“Could use new covers.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“They're removable, right?”

I began to reply, but quickly realised that no sound was coming out of my mouth. I badly needed a drink of water - something to help me to talk, to help me to swallow. I looked at her and thought, ‘You can have the bloody sofa, I don't need the money. You can take anything you want'.

“I'll take it,” said Lucie. “Cash or cheque?”

“Oh, cash,” I said, coughing again. “I need cash. I mean, cash would be great. Preferable. To a cheque. Thank you.”

Lucie laughed unexpectedly. “I'm a Czech, actually.”

“Cheque, bank draft, IOU, whatever.”

“No, I'm Czech. Born in Prague. Moved to New York when I was 5. Well, escaped to New York, technically. The communists didn't exactly know we were leaving.”

“Bloody hell. You're a Bond girl,” I said.

“Not quite.” She winked as she said this.

I had to see this girl again. I began to recite a silent prayer to Craig (was there a Craig?) thanking him for bringing this funny, beautiful, hugely overconfident and yet strangely anxious young woman into my apartment, so that she could give me cash. Ah, yes, the cash. Could I seriously take this girl's money?

“Is that you?” asked Lucie suddenly.

I tracked her gaze and found myself staring at my blown-up war clipping.

“Oh, that?” I said, “Oh, that's nothing, really...”

“You're a war reporter?”

“Used to be. Sort of.”

“So - what? - you put that up there on the wall so the girls ask you about it?” Lucie started to laugh. “Pretty slick.”

“Actually, I was a pretty terrible war correspondent,” I blurted, trying to stop the exodus of blood to the vessels in my face. “I kept running away.”

“Isn't it normal to run away from bullets? The species wouldn't get very far if we kept running towards them, would it?”

And that was when I did it: something inexplicable, something stupid, something I had no business doing whatsoever.

“We should go out for a drink sometime,” I announced. “To celebrate the sofa purchase.”

A long pause. We looked at each other. In her eyes I saw greens and browns, and a million unknowable shades in between.

“I need to go find an ATM,” she announced. “I'll be back.”

Yeah, right, I thought. Back in ten thousand years.

It took her 48 hours to return. Within those 48 hours we must have sent each other a dozen silly banterish e-mails. The second viewing went on for about an hour - I ended up telling her about a magazine piece I was working on about babies swapped at birth - after which she promised to come back with a truck. Which is exactly what she did. When the U-Haul's tailgate was closed, Lucie counted out the asking price of the sofa in cash.

“Aren't you supposed to negotiate?” I said.

“OK,” said Lucie, slowly. “Will you take five hundred?”

“Yes.”

I took the money. I didn't feel so bad about it. Because I knew then that if Lucie gave me half a chance - a quarter of a chance; a millionth of a chance - I would give her everything I ever owned, ever earned, ever wanted. And then I would try to give her more.

Chris Ayres is now married to Lucie and they have a son, Milos

©Chris Ayres 2008

Extracted from Death by Leisure, to be published by John Murray on July 10 at £12.99. Available from Times BooksFirst
at £11.69, free p&p. 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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