After a week of distractions, Rob returns home one night to find a message from Laura on his answering machine. The tone of her voice makes him revisit his initial sense of victory after their last conversation. He obsesses over her statement that she has not slept with Ian “yet” (143), going so far as to subtly ask Barry for his opinion on the use of the word. Barry offers no help, so Rob calls Laura. She reluctantly agrees to meet him for a drink. 

As Barry and Rob bicker about a top five list of songs, Dick reveals that he has a date planned. Barry teases Dick and, in doing so, reveals that he knows about Rob’s night with Marie. Rob is shocked. He intervenes in Barry’s taunting, before Barry storms out of the shop. Left alone, Rob realizes that Barry’s incessant mockery comes from a place of fragility. Like Rob’s encounter with the pitying man in the cinema queue, Dick’s date makes Barry realize that he is “worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all” (151).