I am sitting at the window in Zinc Bar, watching the rain beat against the pavement outside. In front of me, a cup of coffee and a day old newspaper open to a page featuring a story about a breed of penguin that seems to have become extinct without anyone noticing, until it was too late. The tone of the article is somewhat manic; various people are blamed for the penguin's demise, including Gerald Ford, who apparently refused to sign a bill that would have done something to protect them, at some point in the late seventies. There is also grim speculation that thousands of these penguins were slaughtered brutally by Japanese fishermen, for reasons too dire to ponder. On the street, a woman who looks unnervingly like Glenn Close staggers past, drenched. The sound of the rain hitting the window becomes a deep rhythmic pounding. It's eleven o'clock on a Monday morning.

I order another coffee and ask to look at a menu. I try to remember how long it's been raining. All I can really remember is that people have been complaining about it for what seems to have been months, but may, in fact, only be days. I have grown so intensely bored of listening to people fret over the weather, the "lose of our summer", that a few nights ago I had to excuse myself from one of these discussions while over at a friend's. I had told the people involved I needed the toilet, then slipped out the back door and jumped over several garden fences until I found myself back out on a main road. The next day, I unfortunately realised I'd left my overcoat in his house, and had to return with a sheepish expression and an oblique excuse.

The waiter walks back over to my table, asks if I want to order.

"Yeah," I tell him. "You see this thing here, this ... toasted ciabatta thing, with brie and salmon?"

"Yes," the waiter says, rather smugly, as if he invented it.

"Yeah, I don't want that. I don't like salmon or brie. Now, here's what I'm hoping you can do. I just want two ciabattas, with nothing on them, and untoasted. Then, get a little bowl, put a decent amount of olive oil into it, and then pour some balsamic vinegar on top of the oil. I just want that."

The waiter doesn't appear to like this. He looks away from me, stares out into the street for a time, then says, "That's not on the menu."

"Yeah, I know. But it's not hard to do. I mean, you obviously have the bread, I'd assume you have the vinegar and the olive oil. So ..."

"You want me to ... mix olive oil and balsamic vinegar in a bowl?"

"No, No ... Just pour the balsamic on top of the oil, so it sits up on the oil like an egg yolk. Okay?"

The waiter acts like this is a legitimate hardship. He seems to be toying with the idea in his head, wondering if it's acceptable. "I'll have to ask the manager," he tells me. "I'll have to see what she says."

"About what? Why do you need to ask her?"

"I don't know what to charge you for that."

"I'm confident you'll be able to figure something out," I say, as we walks off.

My telephone begins ringing; it's a shrill, offensive sound and I'm bothered by it. I used to keep it on silent, until I began worrying that when I answered it in public the people around me thought I had just decided to start talking to myself. It's a no-win situation and on most days I spend a certain amount of time trying to decide how to cope with it.

"Do you want my Jersey Boys tickets?" Tara asks me, when I eventually pick up.

"No."

"Why not? I'll give 'em to you face value."

"I've already seen it," I tell her.

"I didn't know you went," Tara says, almost wistfully, as if this is information that actually makes some form of difference to her life, and is hurt that it has been previously withheld.

"Yeah, I took Claire to see it, last month. The theatre smelt vaguely like vomit."

"How is Claire?"

"She's fine. She's good," I say. Then, thinking about it, "I don't know. Maybe she's not fine. Maybe she's ... fucked up."

"What do you mean?"

"Haven't you ever noticed how nutty she is? It's almost like she's a Martian that has watched a lot of our television shows, in preparation for visiting Earth, but never interacted with an actual human being before. We were in the supermarket a few weeks ago and she was like, 'I want some of those tiny little apples.' I didn't know what the fuck she meant. She's pointing over at the fruit, I'm looking around ... It took me about seven minutes to figure out she was talking about grapes."

Tara says, "That's cute," and it troubles me that I can't work out if she's being completely genuine or utterly mocking.

"She thought my dog's food was breakfast cereal. She asked me why I had Cheerio's in a big pink bowl sitting on my kitchen floor ... without any milk in them."

"What did you say?"

"I had nothing. I said nothing. What the fuck could I say? You just have to block these things out, pretend they didn't occur. But then ... You end up blocking so much out that you eventually find yourself sitting in a booth in some awful chain restaurant at three in the morning, eating a BLT and wondering how you got there ... "

"I've never liked BLTs," Tara declares, in a tone of voice that makes me sick with fear.

"And she talks in her sleep. She starts yelling and hollering in her sleep in some weird language I can't understand. I think it might be Yiddish. It freaks me out. The first time it happened, I leapt up and grabbed a ball-peen hammer that was under my bed. The second time, we were at her house. This time I jumped up and tried to grab a lamp that was on her bureau, but the cord is kinda wrapped around this mirror that's on the bureau too, right? So I rip the cord out of the socket on the wall because I hear this sound and I'm getting ready to hit whatever this thing in the room is with the lamp, and the mirror goes flying across the room and shatters. I had to buy her another one. It was an ordeal, you've never seen anyone be so picky about mirrors. Ten fucking stores we're walking around until she finds the right mirror."

"I didn't know Claire was Jewish," Tara says.

"Yeah, no, I don't know," I say, feeling confused and suddenly worked up. "Who said she was Jewish?"

"You just said she cries out in Yiddish in her sleep."

"I said I thought it was Yiddish. It's not the point if she's Jewish or not. Who gives a shit if she's Jewish, that's not what I'm saying to you. It's not the point. The point is I almost clocked her in the fucking head with a hammer because of this insane screaming, these sick screaming sounds. The point is that every time she shuts her fucking eyes she starts acting like she's being menaced by poltergeists."

It's hard not to notice that most of the people in Zinc have become aware of my conversation; perhaps due to the level my voice has risen, or maybe because I now have the phone wedged between my head and my shoulder, so I can make the appropriate hand gestures - left hand held out with the palm up and flat, right hand repeatedly hitting down into the left in a chopping motion - while describing the hammer incident.

The middle-aged couple sitting at the next table are attempting to concentrate on their eggs and the girls behind the bar seem to be having problems deciding how best to pretend they didn't just hear what I said. I take the phone back in my hand and try to turn my chair towards the window.

"Why do you have a hammer under your bed?" Tara asks.

"I have ... I keep money in the house," I say.

"You never heard of a bank?"

"You never heard of an Inland Revenue investigation?"

"What, you don't pay tax now?"

"I pay enough to realise I don't want to pay it all."

Tara sighs, as if she didn't really need to get into all this. "So, do you want these tickets or not? I have to get going."

"Why don't you want them? You should go. I doubt the theatre still smells like vomit."

"Danny won't go."

"Why did you get the tickets then?"

"I booked them months ago. But now he's freaked out about Swine flu. He won't go anywhere. Especially a train station or an airport; so how would we get there?"

"How could you have married such a moron?"

"He barely leaves the house. It's like he's put himself on house arrest or something. Also, he pronounces 'Jalapeno' with a hard J. I really wasn't aware of any of these things before the ceremony," she admits this so sadly that I feel obliged to try changing the subject.

"I know a guy on house arrest, actual house arrest that is. My cousin Marie? Some relative of her brother in law. He was convicted of running a credit union into deliberate insolvency. He was meant to get locked up for three and a half years, but the judge grew lenient when he found out the guy's son suffers from a rare muscle wasting disease. Also, it went in his favour that he plead guilty. They would have done a number on him if he'd gone to trial; they had all sorts of paper work proving he'd approved small business loans to companies that didn't exist. I met him at a christening, he was an alright guy, I think. Although I do remember him telling me he was allergic to cured meat ... or something."

"Why would the judge care? About the son being ill, I mean."

"Because they wheeled the son in at the sentencing. They brought him into court, in a wheelchair. He did the whole 'impassioned plea' bit. You know? Read a statement to the court and all that. Gave that whole big thing: 'If my dad goes to jail no one will be able to care for me, I'll have to go and live with nuns in a care home. Please don't punish me for my father's mistakes, blah blah blah.' They went all out. The judge bought it"

"They scammed the judge?"

"Well, no ... I mean, after all, the kid does have muscle degeneration."

Tare sighs again. "Anyway, Danny won't go down to London. At least until this vaccine comes out."

"Huh?"

"The Vaccine. The Swine flu vaccine."

"What are you, insane? You can't take that vaccine. It's poison, you'll fucking die."

"What are you talking about?" She asks.

"That vaccine will kill you. What, you think it's a coincidence that they were patenting the vaccine before the outbreak in Mexico? Or all this hysteria in the media? They're trying to get you scared enough that you'll willingly let someone shoot you up with chemicals that'll destroy your immune system."

"What ... Why the fuck ... Who are you talking about? Why would anyone want to poison millions of people?"

"To decrease the population. For the same reason that you'd gas a rat's nest if you found one in your basement. It's a cold world, and it's not helped by the fact that a lot of us are walking around believing we're at the top of the food chain."

"He particularly enjoyed raw fish so fresh that he could start eating as its mouth is still gasping and the tail is still thrashing.
 I sliced the fish so as not to puncture any of the vital organs, so of course it was still moving. Kim Jong-il was delighted. He would eat with gusto."

Kenji Fujimoto, former personal chef.



Michael Jackson is dead now, and the world is a better place. At least, that's the word we get out of Pyongyang; the North Koreans have their own favourites, and "The King of Pop" is not among them. There is vague speculation that the supreme leader tolerated him, for a time. But that's all over now. He couldn't stand the idea that he'd been bumped from the front pages of newspapers around the world, for a pointless story about a gruesome little pervert with a sinister sense of dress and unfortunately designed facial features quietly expiring in a dark room somewhere.

And neither can I, really. We had some good weeks for a while there. Where have they gone? The stories about Kim's love for live fish and ballistic missiles and the illegal hair products he uses in an apparent attempt to resemble Elvis Presley? Nobody knew exactly what was going to come next, but we waited excitedly for the morning papers like children on Christmas eve.

But we were robbed. And now we have to make do with this ... this thing that seems to have at least twelve legs and five heads; a never ending barrage of dreary rubbish concerning "Funeral Lotteries" and the ugly face of Joe Jackson screaming into our televisions nightly.

We also have the "Jacko buried without brain" story; but the details of that one are in no way clear. It has something to do with the autopsy, according to Sky News. But for all we know it may be a subtle message that Michael Jackson's brain is to be stored in some type of highly advanced fridge-freezer until such time that the art of the cyborg is perfected. This is an upsetting thought. If you're worried about your children growing up on a planet dominated by swine flu and war, imagine the dread you'd feel in knowing that, in around twenty-five years time, Mr. Jackson's memory and personality will be implanted into a huge robot, in much the same way that people are currently placing Lady Gaga tracks onto their iPhones. This is not something that most members of society would wish to dwell on; the idea that a man who had no interest in becoming a productive part of the human experiment will soon be wandering the streets inside a seven ton exoskeleton, with a lop sided gait and two giant butterfly nets attached to the end of his steel arms and an awkward glint in his eye.

This may seem like an unlikely scenario, but things like this are what tends to pass for news these days. And I could, if I were so inclined, tell the exact same story on Twitter, then walk down to the second hand record shop at the bottom of my street and argue about the price of Dire Straits albums for forty-five minutes before coming home, turning on my brand new television and seeing it repeated back at me by the cretin with the odd hair on BBC News 24.



The year was 1989 and it was the last day of summer term. The teacher (a stern, Presbyterian type known as Mrs. Martin) put down a piece of purple chalk and told us we were in for a treat, work was over and we would spend the last few hours of the day watching a film.

Brilliant, we all thought. Which movie would we be watching? The day before, we'd each been asked to bring in a VHS cassette from our personal collections, and Mrs. Martin would scrutinise our selections over the course of the afternoon before making a final decision of her own.

My choice was Predatori di Atlantide, a minor classic of the Italian Sci-Fi genre. The plot concerned bearded scientists, Russians submarines that people were attempting to raise from the deep, and the island of Atlantis suddenly emerging from the sea along the coast of Florida. There were many violent set-pieces featuring the brutal Atlantians rampaging up and down the streets of Miami and a man with a crystal head who rode around on a motorcycle, shooting innocent bystanders in the face with an automatic pistol, for reasons the screenwriter never felt particularly burdened to clarify. There were also scenes of men sneaking up behind people on oil rigs and drugging them with Chloroform, grenade attacks and policemen lying in the foetal position and pleading for early death.

It was, in short, exactly the type of film an eight-year old child would enjoy watching.

But it was not to be. Instead the curtains were closed and we were sequestered in the class room for what seemed like several days and nights while being forced to witness a nasty piece of confusing garbage called Moonwalker.

I recall the film opening with an insane sequence of shots of small children, most of them grinning absurdly towards the camera or making upsetting facial expressions that suggested trauma. At some later point, Michael Jackson himself made a brief appearance, his general demeanour worrying us all deeply, before turning into a rabbit or something. The narrative was hard to follow, possibly due to the fact that it didn't actually exist, and because of this several of my classmates had become restless and confused; some of them were quietly sobbing; I realised I'd been repeatedly jabbing the same button on my calculator for more than fourteen minutes and my friend Paul was pretending his watch could talk to him.

The movie than switched to a dimly-lit scene that was perhaps supposed to have been set in the recent past. Michael was wearing an ill-prepared suit and behaving like a heavily drugged parrot while two children followed him around a nightclub populated by transvestites and reprobates. A man, who I later figured out was Joe Pesci, was flawing his arms around and trying to stick one of the kids with a huge hypodermic needle, and this brightened us all up for a moment or two. But then Jackson made a series of spastic jerking motions before eventually finding a way to turn himself into a spaceship, and we all began to despair again.

It was sometime right around then that the girl sitting next to me, Bernadette Germanotti, began bleeding forcefully from the nose. She had been crying hysterically for almost a full hour, and the vessels in her nasal cavity had finally reached breaking point. She was whisked off to the nurse's office, where she suffered a mild asthma attack while having her face dabbed with wet cotton wool.  The next day, her parents attempted to cheer her spirits by taking her to ride on a horse farm just outside the city limits; but as soon as she entered the paddock she was kicked in the head by a silver Palomino and rendered into a state of prolonged unconsciousness.

It was a huge beast, something like eighteen hands. Bernadette eventually remembered how to say her own name but she never stopped drooling out of the left side of her mouth and the last time I spoke to her, via Facebook, she explained to me that she had moved to California and applied for a license to purchase medical marijuana.

The horse went on to have a successful show jumping career, winning many rosettes and posing for pictures with minor celebrities around the circuit before retiring to birth a long sequence of foals that were sold for large sums of money to rich men in Saudi Arabia and Donegal.

But Bernadette never blamed the horse, she understood it was just a tool of a sometimes cruel universe. She knew, they way we all knew, that it had been Jackson's fault. He had implanted something awful into our minds that day; a deep-seated neurosis that would one day physically manifest itself unless we could master the power of positive thought projection. The entire movie was an exercise in mental distress; a product of evil.

And the bastard is still trying to do it to us today. Even in death he haunts the collective mind like a pan-gendered version of Freddy Kruger or Jack The Ripper. Endless footage of the young, creepy Michael feverishly screaming about Billie Jean, to the later years of prolonged dilapidation. Our regularly scheduled programming is repeatedly interrupted to show previously unseen video of him drifting balefully around huge malls while his eyelashes fall off, wearing a bright yellow burqa and madly clutching at the shoulders of his children as members of the public yell and squeal and point small digital cameras in his general direction.

We are even being asked to cope with reruns of his last sex trial. The man himself turning up outside the courthouse looking like something you'd expect to see haunting the dungeons of the Bastille and his lawyer ranting indignantly into the microphones at a never ending press conference:

"Sleepovers? What's so bad about sleepovers? You're trying to tell me you never went to a sleepover, Jack? Everyone loves sleepovers. And, well, I hate to say it, but if you find something troubling about the mental image of a grown man sharing a massive, heart-shaped water bed with five or six prepubescent boys ... Well, then you've got a really nasty side to your thought process there, my friend."

No one is immune to it. Even my own agent was recently questioned by members of the Metropolitan Police's fraud squad, based on a complaint that she'd been selling bootleg tickets to the Jackson comeback shows on eBay.

They tried putting the screws to her, muttering knowingly about "money trails" and "electronic footprints", but she just smiled tightly and then called her lawyer ... Because she was innocent, just like Dick Cheney and Michael Jackson.

   I am sitting across from Claire, at the table in her kitchen, cutting my veal into diagonal strips and wondering if I'm supposed to be eating the little green things on the side of the plate. Each time Claire swallows a piece of food, she moans strangely and says something like "That's so good", which, considering she made it all herself, I find slightly distasteful.
   I finish the wine in my glass, look for a clock on the wall but there isn't one. I think about glancing at my watch, but don't want to get caught.
   Claire leans across the table, refills my glass. I smile weakly and quickly drain half of it off. This afternoon, a man on the tram wearing a surgical face mask was mocked by a group of teenage girls. They sat across from him, sniggering at first, but eventually building into a crescendo of fake coughs and sneezes - one of the girls even pretended to keel over and have a fake fit at his feet - until the man (clearly distraught) got out at a stop that was obviously no use to him. I shook my head sadly, trying to give other passengers the impression that I hadn't approved, but deep down I couldn't help thinking he'd deserved it.
   "Do you have a problem with veal?" Claire suddenly says, her voice so loud I visibly jump in my chair.
   "What do you mean?" I ask, staring 'thoughtfully' at her in an attempt to deflect her attention from the fact I haven't eaten anything at all, the fact that everything on my plate that isn't a little strip is now an odd triangle.
   "Well, some people, they think eating veal is unethical," Claire says, pronouncing 'unethical' in a way I've never heard before, adding to my unease.
   "Oh, no. I don't care ... about that."
   "I'm pretty sure these cows had a good life," Claire says. "On the packet, it said this veal was produced in a stringent fashion."
   "Stringent?"
   "Yes," Claire says, opening another bottle of wine that has just materialised on the table.
   "Stringent could mean almost anything though," I tell her. "It could mean, for all you know, that those baby cows were brought up in a stringently cruel environment."
   "No, it didn't say anything about cruelty on the packet. I would have remembered that, trust me."
   "That's not what I meant, I don't think that was my point."
   "All I know is that people eat lamb all the time," Claire says. "And I'm sure lambs are younger than cows that get turned into veal."
   "Is this milk-fed veal?"
   "It might be."
   "It either is or it isn't."
   "Then it is."
    I stab a piece of meat with my fork, contemplate if for a moment, and when Claire's attention is back on pouring wine, use my finger to flick it down onto the plate.
   "But milk-fed veal is white. This is ... very pink."
   "Well then it isn't milk-fed. Jesus, does it fucking matter?"
   I'm thinking: Does it matter? Not really. But you served the veal, you wanted to carry on a discussion about it, so what's the fucking problem? And now that I think about it, yeah, yeah it does matter. If you're going to buy veal, how the fuck does it not occur to you to buy milk-fed? But, considering I haven't had intercourse in almost three weeks, I just smile and say "No, of course it doesn't matter."
   "Are you going to do the midnight walk?" Claire says, quite unexpectedly.
   I look at my watch, "It's only half past eight," I tell her. And in my head I'm saying "It's only half past eight?"
   "No, it's a charity walk. It's next week. People are getting sponsored to walk across the city, at midnight."
   "That doesn't seem like much effort, I make it across the city all the time."
   "But this is for charity."
   "Are you doing it?"
   Claire thinks about this for so long that I'm not even sure she heard me say it. She lights a cigarette, sips from her glass and eventually says, "Perhaps."
   "What charity is it for?"
   "I don't know, some type of muscle issue. Children that are having muscle problems. Listen, do you want cheese cake?"

   And we're in the living room; Claire is trying to make sense of her stereo, I am having huge problems, struggling heroically with the lighting that I'm sure is making my skin look translucent.
   "What do you want to listen to?" she says.
   "Do you have Men Without Women?" I ask.
   "Excuse me?"
   "You know, Men Without Women, by Little Steven?"
   "I don't think so."
   "Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul?"
   "I have never even heard of that, I have no idea what you're talking about," Claire calmly tells me.
   "What about some Ornette Coleman?"
   "Are these even real people, or are you just trying to bait me?"
   "Whatever you want to hear is fine," I say, feeling the contortion being to take shape on my face.
   A shrill noise begins to announce itself from the opposite side of the room, a telephone. I take this as a cue to go into the bathroom and eat some Valium.
   I walk back into the living room, Claire is looking out of a window, a peculiar expression on her face. "Mum and Dad are coming over," she says.
   By this point, my thought process is so soaked in red wine and Grey Goose that all I can find to say is "My parents got divorced years ago, how is that possible?"
   Claire tries not to look at me like I'm strange, "No, my parents are coming over."
   "Oh," I say. And then, when this sinks in I start to panic and can't stop myself from asking her why.
   "They were in the area. They want to stop by and say hello."
   "The area? Why were they in the area?"
   "They were eating around the corner."
   The sweat begins forming on my head. "Is this locked in?" I ask, aware my voice is starting to become irritatingly high pitched.
   "Locked in?" Claire says, perhaps amused, perhaps not.
   "This appointment, it's locked in? You can't cancel?"
   "What are you talking about?"
   "I have to go home."
   "What are you talking about?"
   "I don't ... I think I didn't leave enough water out for my dog."
   "What is wrong with you?"
   "They want to say hello? Didn't they say that on the phone just then? Don't they ... have Twitter or something?"
   "You're really going?" Claire asks.
   "Yeah, I think I should ... Let you ... Let you visit with your family alone. This isn't the place for ... Well, you know?"
   "I don't think I do, no."
   "Ok, I'll call you," I say, as casually as circumstance will allow. I lean in to kiss her, but it's too late because the buzzer is going off. I'm still thinking I can get out now, take the stairs down while they come up in the lift; and then it occurs to me that Claire's building doesn't have an intercom on the street, her parents are buzzing from outside her front door. No way out the back, we're on the seventeen floor.
   "Oh well," I say to myself, slumping back down into the sofa, "Here it comes." I place my hand against my heart, which Claire sees as an act of meaningless hysteria, but in reality I'm counting how many tranquilizers I still have in the breast pocket of my suit jacket.
   Muffled sounds in the hallway. I pour a vodka, drink it and then pour another one while I have the chance.
  
   Some time later, the Valium having kicked in, I am dimly aware that I'm sitting in the same place on the same sofa, being asked questions by a middle-aged man about the economy, and how I feel about the bailouts. The man, who I assume is Claire's father, is wearing a yellow tie and holding a crystal glass filled with red liquid. I have been skilful enough to make it seem as if I've been concerned with the same drink since we began talking, but of course I've actually refilled my glass several times, to the point that my capacity for ordered thought is on the verge of falling utterly apart at any moment.
   "It's all just so immoral," the man says, shrugging sadly.
   I shrug too; a gesture so practised I barely notice I'm doing it. Claire and her mother are in the kitchen, I can overhear pieces of their conversation and it seems to be about pesto.
   "I mean, how are these people getting away with it?" the man asks.
   I mutter something that even I can't properly hear, something about how "the separation of self is an illusion."
   "What do you mean?" the man asks, genuinely interested.
   "I mean ... Ah,  what I'm trying to say is ... that, all thought is creative."
   The man, who seems to exist on a plain of indignation I can't even begin to comprehend, shakes his head and says, "They've ruined it for everyone."
   "Yeah, it sucks," I say, sympathetically. "It really ... does suck."
   "I'll tell you one thing though, one day someone is going to write a hell of novel about all this."
   "About what?" I say, lost again.
   "The credit crisis, the god damned recession."
   "Really? Why?"
   "Are you being serious? This is the most important thing that's happened in my life time, the most dire thing that's happened. It's awful, truly awful. It's messing up everyone's life ... Mine, yours, every one of us. Wouldn't you agree with me?"
   I think about this for a long time, and what eventually comes out of my mouth, completely against my will, is this: "I ... don't even realise it's happening, unless I turn on the news, and even then it seems like some type of ... collective breakdown or something. I ... I don't know, what would I know? I've been unemployable, in any real sense of the word, for several years now. And yet, my standard of living remains so incomprehensible high that most of my friends have trouble viewing it as anything other than a cruel joke, some kind of vicious insult against their daily existence. The last time I ... No, no, I'll take that back, it has affected me. Yeah, sure ... I got told, they told me that no one would watch a television show like the one I was trying to make during a recession. They said people ... that people would not want to watch a woman laughing hysterically as her father's funeral at a time like this. They were like, they said people wouldn't, viewers wouldn't stand for being depressed or confused. They actually ... said this, they called it confusing. Can you imagine that? So yeah, man ... I agree with you, it's all very, very ... nasty. It's a nasty business, television, you know? I mean, the broadest possible audience demographic? What the fuck does that even mean, right?"
   The man is just staring at me, open-mouthed. I look up to see Claire and her mother standing beside the sofa, sharing the same expression. I reach for a piece of cheese cake on the coffee table, it tastes like bleach.
   I surreptitiously swallow another tablet and try to grin.

"So, Jenny says you wrote a novel."
  
"Jenny?" I ask, while trying to maintain eye contact.
  
"My niece, Jenny," the editor says. "Jenny, the one who told me I should talk to you about this job?"
  
"Oh, yeah ... Right. Jenny," I say, grinning and recalling something it probably wouldn't be prudent to announce.
  
"What's the book about?" he asks.
  
"The repetition of certain male pathologies," I tell him.
  
The editor looks up from a blue post-it note he was inspecting and says, "Excuse me?"
  
"Spies. I said it was about spies."
  
"A thriller then?"
  
"And wizards. Wizards and ... spies."
  
The editor, apparently intend on moving quickly away from this topic, asks me if I'm familiar with his magazine. When I tell him I'm not, he makes a pained facial expression that seems to suggest he's trying to swallow something large and hard. The phone on his desk rings, and we both decide to dumbly stare at it for thirty or forty seconds, until it stops.
  
"Basically, we need someone to interview people, about their gardens," he says, still staring at the now quiet telephone.
  
This strikes me as such an absurd statement that I have to concentrate very hard to figure out if I actually heard him say it or not. When I'm finally sure he did, I don't have many other options than to ask him what it means.
  
"Articles about people's gardens. You would go around and interview prominent members of the community, asking them how they feel about their gardens, why they've planted specific things, flowers and the like."
  
"And you would run this why?"
  
"This is Cheshire Style magazine," he says, as if that may be an adequate response.
  
"What sort of people?"
  
"Celebrities, mainly. A lot of them would be footballers."
  
"I doubt many football players have much to do with their own gardens."
  
"Never the less ..." He says, and I'm waiting for this sentence to be picked up, but it isn't.
  
"What about Totti?" I ask after a laboured silence. "Could we interview Totti?"
  
"Who?"
  
"Francesco Totti."
  
Another extended pause, during which I struggle to come up with something to do with my hands, eventually settling on placing them palm down on the desk (mainly just to keep myself upright).
  
"Doesn't he play for Roma?" The editor asks.
  
"That's right. He does."
  
"Then, wouldn't he ... live in Rome?"
  
"I would imagine so, yes."
  
"But this is Cheshire Style magazine."
  
"So? Wouldn't your readers like to see a garden in Rome, as opposed to one they probably walk past every day?"
  
"I don't think that's the point."
  
"Okay ... Listen, I know I'm not getting it anyway, but you should know I don't want this job. It sounds strange and boring, and that's not a good combination. So, uh, thanks for your time, but I can't do that."
  
This is supposed to be the part when I'm told to leave, but oddly, he looks at me and then asks, "What could you do?"
  
"What do you mean?"
  
"Apart from the garden thing. What else could you write for us?"
  
"Well ... I mean, if you're looking to run some pieces about couples screaming at each other in restaurants, I'm your man, I've done that a lot ... Getting busted with smack at Charles De Gaulle? ... Or, stories about me hanging out with my agent and discussing which brand of whiskey works best with chicken sandwiches, I'm pretty good at those."
  
He picks up a biro, in what seems like a desperate attempt to stop his face from screwing up beyond repair. "I don't really see how any of that will fit."
  
"What about a regular article where I talk about how no one will commission my TV script?"
  
"What's the script about?"
  
"Free-floating anxiety."
  
"That's not ... really what we cover."
  
"Cat psychics? I mean, communicators. Cat communicators."
  
"What about them?" the editor says, grimly.
  
"I can give you some copy about them."
  
"You know about that stuff?"
  
"I could show you," I say, gesturing towards the laptop on the desk.
  
He just sits back in his chair and shrugs, clearly thinking "Fuck it, I don't have much to do this afternoon, let's indulge the nut a while." I log into Myspace, find my last blog, and then turn the computer back around to face him.
  
It takes him a long while to get through what is essentially a very brief passage. As he reads I alternate between watching little pieces of  water bounce off the window and his face, which remains aghast the entire time.
  
And when he finally finishes, he starts to speak and then stops; does a double take towards the computer screen, as if he can't quite grasp the concept that a fellow human being, a writer no less, would attempt to gain employment on the strength of that. He closes the page and then obviously begins to feel that isn't quite strong enough of a reaction, so he folds the laptop down altogether and very gentle pushes it away from him. At this point, I'm willing to offer pretty decent odds that his next move will be to take a gun from his drawer and put a couple of holes into the computer, just to make sure that material never pops back up at him sometime down the road ... And I'm thinking to myself "I should have shown him the one about the girl setting the Yorkshire terrier on fire, or the one when my grandmother told me apes were responsible for the HIV virus."

I'm sitting on a plastic bench, waiting for a tram. I'm trying to roll a cigarette and the wind keeps blowing the tobacco away, and this is moving me towards some type of nervous collapse.

Ten minutes previously, I'm sitting across the table from my doctor, listening to her weird vagaries, trying to hear whatever it is she might be talking about. I'm tapping my fingers on the desk as my head nods dumbly up and down. At one point I smile, for no particular reason and then check my watch. The doctors says something about a "membranous labyrinth" but the majority of her sentence is obscured by what sounds like a seagull's mating call coming from somewhere outside the window; this troubles me, considering we're in the middle of the city, and I have to work hard not to ponder it.

The doctor takes a picture out of a blue folder and shows it to me. For a time, I believe it to be a piece of abstract art, until I'm made aware it's actually an MRI scan of my brain. This causes me to nod three or four times more. The doctor, who seems intent on drawing all this out for as long as possible, says nothing. I'm resisting the urge to check my watch again. I'm also resisting the urge to just come out and ask her for a Dilaudid script.

"It looks relatively normal," she says.

"Oh," I say. "That's good."

"The scan was just a precaution."

"Yes," I say, looking her in the eye, then across the room at a photograph of a huge mastiff on the wall. "Is that your dog?" I can dimly hear myself asking.

The doctor appears puzzled, as if there are a hundred pictures of dogs covering every inch of her office walls, and she's not quite sure which one I'm referring to. "Yes," she eventually says, rather cautiously.

The MRI picture is placed back in the file; a gesture I take to mean this is concluding. I'm about to stand up when she asks, "Have you researched this syndrome?"

"Excuse me?"

"Looked into it? Most people, when they get diagnosed with something, they look in to it."

"Should I?" I ask.

"You don't have to. Most people Google things like that though." I'm pretty sure she actually sighs as she says this.

"Oh, yeah ... I did that. I got sidetracked by a list of famous sufferers though. Marilyn Monroe was on there. And Charles Darwin ... Also, Emily Dickinson."

The doctor looks at me strangely, although I can tell she's trying not to. "I see," she says.

"I ... like Emily Dickinson."

"Right, well ..."

"Wait," I say, cutting her off. "Syndrome? You told me it was a disease."

"It is a disease."

"Then why did you just call it a syndrome? You asked me if I'd Googled my syndrome."

"It is a disease," she says, tiredly. "A disease has a clearly identifiable cause. A syndrome is a set of symptoms that occur together and suggest the presence of a certain disease."

"Uh huh," I say. This is all becoming quite boring.

"You have a malfunction. You're not dying."

"I know that," I tell her. "I never said I thought I was dying."

"You seem to be getting distressed though."

"Not about the syndro ... I mean the disease itself. I just don't understand why you'd call it a syndrome when it isn't."

"It was a slip of the tongue," the doctor slowly says, spacing each word out. "I made a mistake."

The next ten minutes of my life slow down to an excruciating crawl. The doctor tells me, again, that I should avoid nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. I tell her, again, that there is very little chance of that occurring. She then goes off on a long diatribe about symptom aggravation, low sodium diets and "fluid volume." I keep making my way, backwards, to the door. When I eventually get there she opens it and shakes my hand.

Something that feels very much like relief floods my veins as the door opens. But then, anticlimactically,  it dawns on me that I need my prescription refilled. She takes this in, then tells me that I was given a month and a half's supply, two weeks ago. This forces me to admit I've been taking three times my daily dose. The doctor decides to recoil at this. I shrug and then say, "Force of habit."

And then it abruptly gets warm, and I don't know quite what to make of it. My barber gets into an argument with the man who works the second chair, and ends up attacking him with a pair of scissors, an act that inconveniences me greatly. I date a systems analyst, but find I have nothing pressing to tell her. Things reach their natural conclusion when I pick up a knife and - while she is blathering on about Sawyer and Kate - stab it forcefully down into the centre of my untouched veal, creating a sundial effect.

I stop by the theatre a few times, to see how things are progressing. I hang out in a lot of bookshops. I talk to a person who tells me she wants to hook up a gas pipe from her kitchen to her bedroom, so she can lie in bed and freebase "in style." I lose a lot of money on a horse called Gore Vidal. I try to grow a geranium.

My agent goes to Bali; ostensibly for a holiday, but really to "sign" a psycho-neurotic drifter who is currently awaiting trial for crushing four homeless women's skulls, and claims he has a story to tell. The last time I spoke to her she mentioned something about "flying under the radar" and "jurisdiction issues", but I'd taken so much Citalopram that I really had no hope of being able to properly follow what she was bringing out, all I could do was moan faintly about the vertigo attack I felt was imminent. She eventually hung up after saying, "There's a lot of money in this non-fiction thing, maybe you should kill someone and then write about it. Anyway, I'm standing under the status board at the airport, I just wanted to tell you that."

I'm sitting out on Leila's balcony now. She gently tilts her glass over the side, until a stream of Pimm's falls down into the street. Inside the apartment, there's a party of some sort taking place. Leila has just told me that she'd been listening to Walking With The Ghost by Tegan and Sara, over and over, for five or six days.

"Non stop?" I ask.

"Right," She says. "Non stop."

"Even at night?"

"It was on repeat. I wasn't aware of it while I slept, but I never turned it off ... So, yeah."

I start rolling a cigarette, then something occurs to me and I ask, "Have you ever heard two foxes fighting?"

"Why are you changing the fucking subject?" She asks.

"Damn." I say.

"I must have heard it a thousand times by now."

"Well, it's a pretty short song," I say. "You've probably heard it far more than that."

I hear the glass doors slide open. A man from inside wonders over to me and says, "Are you rolling a joint?"

"Get the fuck out of our faces," Leila screams at him. "We're trying to have an important conversation out here."

The man's own face registers bewilderment. He quickly turns around and goes back in.

Leila sighs, then she says, "Disorder in the house." Or, at least I think that's what she says. I, for some reason, start laughing. She moves back over to the railings and says, "Look at these fuckers, they walk back and forth all day long. I can stand none of them."

"Maybe you shouldn't live right in the middle of the city then." I tell her.

"Did you watch that thing about the war last night?" She asks. "They were interviewing soldiers. One of them told the camera that he found his friend's tongue on the side of the road. It was boring."

"My mother saw her friend's head rolling down the street towards her, in Ireland. He'd been planting a bomb in a pub, but it went off prematurely." I say, before immediately wondering why I bothered. Then I lick the inside track of a cigarette paper. "Some guy she went to school with or something."

"A venezuelan women stopped me on the street this morning," Leila says, uneasily. "She asked me if I'd ever met a nun before. She claimed to be one herself. I told her that I didn't think she looked like one, looked like a nun."

"What did she look like?"

"She said she was a Hare Krishna nun. I asked her what the point was."

"What was she wearing?" I say.

"I don't know. This, like ... thing."

"And what was the point?"

"I don't know."

"You said you asked her."

"Yes."

"And she wouldn't tell you?"

"I think the point was money. She needed some."

"For what purpose?"

"I handed her some coins, I don't know how many. Then she gave me a little book. I think the title contained the word 'Truth', and there was a photo on the cover of a very ugly old man. But beyond that," She shakes her head sadly, "I really don't recall."

"I think I've met this women," I say, my voice suddenly sounding strained, almost cracking. "I think I ... talked to her."

"The whole encounter lasted, probably, four or five minutes, but by the time it finally ended I had almost completely lost the will to live."

I stare out across the terrace, watching the building opposite. It has the look of a place in which a man would plan the kidnapping of an important dignitary and then never go through with it. Or sit up all night reading a Hugo Chavez biography, turning the pages carefully, with reverence. Admiring certain pictures in the photo insert and rereading specific passages while sitting in the toilet. The final resting place of those unaccustomed to modern pleasantries: Anaemic vegetarians, utensil storers, cod stick boilers and terrifying women desperately scouring the Internet, trying to locate a cure for their child's ghastly indisposition. A place of unwitnessed histrionics. A portion of space where stalkers brood endlessly over the motives of those they've never met and constantly rearrange their bedrooms while listening to early Dylan, hoping to decipher an important piece of the code.

Leila is craning her neck, trying to see through the growing crowd in her living room. It dawns on me that she resembles a catfish. "Is Dirty Anthony here yet?" She finally asks.

"I haven't seen him." I tell her, although, considering the fact that I have no idea who Dirty Anthony is, I'm not sure if that's true or not.

Leila suddenly lunges over towards the table, grabs the paperback copy of The Kite Runner that came free with the morning paper, and with one more highly fluid movement she's back over at the railing, hurling the book over the side. "Take that, you pigs." She yells down at the street.

I walk over and look down. The book has landed next to a distant black object that is probably a rubbish bin. An elderly woman stops, slowly bends down and picks it up. She holds it close to her face, considering it for longer then I feel is required, then she drops it into her bag, looks up towards the balcony and gives us a thankful little wave.

"I hope you fucking choke on it, you toxic little gnome." Leila screams.

Inside, an awful cover version of Candy Says is being pumped into the room. A person whose face refuses to make sense to me asks what I've been up to and I tell him/her/it, "Last night I spent hours searching Google for pictures of Linda Darnell ... I was doing this for a while, I mean, hours. And even though I couldn't quite raise to enthusiasm to masturbate, it still struck me as one of the more positive sexual experiences I've had in the past six months." And then I absently pretend to admire a framed black and white photograph of a Dalmatian on the wall, until whoever it is walks away from me.

I have a hard time making my way to the kitchen, and when I get there I overhear a man with an alarming hairstyle say, "I punched a Saint Bernard in the face yesterday." In the fridge: a lot of beer, a packet of dried out meat and, strangely, a cactus sitting by itself in the vegetable crisper.

Take out two beers, ponder removing the cactus, but by the time I've decided to take it I've already walked back out into the living room. Notice five or six people that I'm sure have it in for me. Also notice that Badly Drawn Boy is here (for a long time I'd just thought it was a homeless guy someone had met on the way over and invited up). On my way back out to the terrace, I use a skillful act of misdirection to steal someone's unopened bottle of Bombay Sapphire. I've been at this party since I was twenty-one.

Leila and a woman I don't recall meeting are sitting at the table and Leila is explaining, "My mother says that every day my father wakes up and starts to scream and wail about getting arrested."

"Why?" The other woman asks.

"He thinks the Iranians are bound to be interned any day now." Leila says, in a style I find distressing. I slump down, defeated, in the chair next to her and immediately begin to take huge, urgent hits from the gin bottle.

The other girl breaks off from whatever it is she is saying (who knows?), looks at me, and then asks, "Do you think I look like Eva Green."

I look back at her, trying to ascertain if this is a joke of some kind. Leila is staring intently at me. An image, this building violently collapsing, enters my mind and it's not a scenario that would bother me all that greatly, given the circumstances.

"Do I know you?" I eventually say, after playing out the disaster scene in my head: the lower floors giving way, a sudden snapping sound, glass landing on people as the building starts to tilt at a bad angle, the kid with the haircut somehow thrown clean out a window and down on to the road (where his corpse is unfortunately crushed under a bus that couldn't find the time to swerve or break). And then the wreckage, a man calling out in a high, camp voice, "Bobby, Bobby can you hear me? Please don't be dead. Bobby. I still love you." Various dogs tasked with body part recovery that can't really be bothered. Help lines set up ("Text 'Missing Spouse' to 801309. All loved ones may not be found safe but all messages will be charged"). Faces of the dead at Ten. The lucky few who managed to get out in time receive angry calls the next day from Leila, enraged that they left her party without saying good bye. Another moderately upsetting turn of events.

"No, you don't know me. But do you think I look like Eva Green?"

"Not really, no," I say. And I'm thinking, "Even if you did, do you honestly believe I'd give you the satisfaction of telling you, you dumb bitch?"

The miniature chandelier is interesting, the television hasn’t worked since we smashed it. Topics of discussion brought up in the living room are promptly and routinely dismissed. We do most of our reading in rocking chairs; there’s at least two urns around here.

People come and go. You can try to explain things to the stuffed owl, but she won’t talk back and the music that emits from the radio just makes you want to wrap razor-wire around your arms, if you bother to turn it on. You can clip the flowers that grow in the garden (above the remains of various exotic rodents), but they’ll dry up and die when you bring them inside. You can listen to the rain clawing at the window, but eventually it will just bore you. You can sit quietly and watch the ivy climbing wildly all up the front wall, and wonder how it grew strong enough to destabilise the foundations, but a pleasant answer isn’t likely to dawn on you.

When you sit down by the busted lamp and try to do some work, it will be increasingly fatiguing to resist the urge to construct stories that end with people having their tracheas crushed. And eventually, the sounds from outside (tom cats trying to eat each other, old men screaming, quarter-witted children dragging things around) will become a welcome distraction.

You’ll keep asking yourself what happened to all the whiskey, why you haven’t been hungry in days, why there’s always a thin sheet of white powder covering the pestle and mortar, why you’re keeping a sickly magpie in a large cupboard, why the sun comes down at whatever time it does. Why the credit card statement is bloody again.

And because, again, there will be nothing favourable about the answers, you’ll smoke cigarettes outside, muse about replacing the skirting boards and putting a lock on a gate.

And when you go to sleep, you’ll be in a car, on a motorway, moving away from the city. You’ll see mountains coming up in the distance. Fog and snow. Something vital inside you will be broke and missing. You’ll pass a field that contains sheep.

"I think the Brontë sisters lived around here." You mention loudly.

The driver nods, eyes kept on the road. "The school house is haunted."

You’re in a rented car, moving away from the city. There’s a compact mirror sitting on the dashboard and a premature full moon beginning to show itself awkwardly in the afternoon sky.

You pick up the compact and ask, "Yours?"

The driver shrugs.

Some people sent flowers, others failed to understand. And this dream has lasted so long that you can remember a point when you were watching Sex And The City dvds, gagging each time you left the bed. Finally vomiting a small amount of unblurred liquid onto unsanded bedroom floorboards. Wiping that away with a white vest. Stumbling back under the covers. Hearing popping sounds in your head.

Earlier, when the car was still moving between tall, familiar buildings, along streets that made sense, The driver said, "The consumption of the drug is the symptom of the disease. Then the symptom becomes autonomous. And the disease requires you to believe that you are beyond help and so it is your only friend. That predication is an exact recapitulation of the fundamental emotional malaise that you start out with." But now, out here in the cold, The Driver is saying, "We all have our ways of dealing with the loss."

You are in the front passenger seat of a rented Range Rover. The bumper sticker on the car in front says, "Eat More Lamb - 50,000 Coyotes Can’t Be Wrong."

"Are there even coyotes in this country?" You ask.

"We’re not here to talk about that." The Driver says harshly, but without malice. "We’re not here to discuss you."

In a rented Range Rover Vogue, moving further away from the city, you’re aware of a heater blasting out warm air, but you’re so cold that you wrap your arms tightly around your ribs. "When did you write this piece?" The Driver asks.

"I think I’m writing it now." You say.

"That doesn’t make sense." The driver says. "That fails to compute."

"I thought we weren’t meant to be talking about me?" You say.

"I bet you feel like someone has shot a syringe full of ink into your belly." The Driver says. "I bet you feel like you’re floating in space."

"I thought we weren’t meant to discuss me?" You cry.

The Driver gives way to a small, yellow hatchback, takes a corner very slowly. "There are no coyotes in this country." The Driver says.

And now you’re on a small road, twisted trees above. Muddy paths, the dead shapes that have been hit, hard and heavy, lie strangely beside them. The Driver opens the windows every time you light a cigarette. The wind pushes snow towards you, some of it evaporates, some of it rests on the shoulders of your jacket.

Country roads. Crumbled bones. A shut-up building. Something you weren’t ready to let go of. A Greta Garbo retrospective on the radio. Fibre and clay. People who forget to forgive. The Driver wants to know what you do with the coins in your pocket. The Driver wants to know why you strain milky-white liquid through paper coffee filters, over and over, until it becomes clear. The Driver wants to know why you can’t be bothered to make yourself useful, in any kind of significant manner.

It’s so cold, your lips so numb, you can’t feel the cigarette in your mouth. A car overtakes, swerves to avoid a lorry in the other lane. There are traces of it everywhere, and you can’t bare discovering them. "Most Four by Fours don’t have acceptable sunroofs." The Driver says ominously.

The Driver eventually pulls over. It takes a lot of effort for you to open the door. You walk over to the wooden fence, watch the horses moving trivially around in the field.

The Driver asks, "Which one is yours again?"

"That one." You lie, pointing at a huge grey chewing on a rotting fence panel.

"He’s going to get splinters in his mouth." The Driver says.

"There’s nothing we can do about that."

The Driver fumbles with a Zippo, lights a cigarette. The Driver regards the sky for a time, then says, "There’s children skipping in the garden over the road."

"Uh huh."

"It’s a good thing no one had a notion to abort them."

"Why?" You ask.

"To their mind." The Driver replies, "We’re talking about how they feel about it."

The first tuesday back in England, I decide, grudgingly, to go and see Jade. Partly because I’ve just heard the thirty-eight, increasingly shrill messages she has left on my machine while I was in France. But mainly because I just remembered that I lent her my Deadwood box sets before I left, and it’s eating away at me not to have them around the house, for some reason.

I stand outside her building, pressing the buzzer at five second intervals. A female police officer rides past on a brown, dirty looking horse, a bothersome enough image to more or less force me to light a cigarette, despite the fact I only just flicked a dead one away.

"Hello?" I’m inquiring, into the little metal grate embedded in the wall. I’m rolling up my white shirt sleeve and vigourously scratching my forearm and I’m saying "Hello?" into the little metal grate.

Eventually buzzed in. Sharing the elevator with an old man with a grey face. He tries to show me something on the sports page of the newspaper he’s holding. "See the game last night?" He asks. I try to avoid bringing up the obvious fact that he appears to be rotting on his feet, right in front of me.

When she opens her door, jade is wearing, quite inexplicably, a black crepe wool dress. I try not to let this phase me, but it’s hard. She leans over to kiss me on the mouth, even though I’m holding my head in a direction that would suggest the cheek as the optimum destination for her lips. She waits for me to speak. I nod my head and smile in what I hope is a reassuringly fashion. Saying nothing at all, she turns on metal heels and walks down towards the kitchen.

"Drink?" She asks.

"Can I get a scotch?" I say, looking around the room, catching sight of various objects I’d prefer not to.

"It’s a little early, no? I meant coffee, orange juice, mineral water." She says, dismayed.

"Huh?"

"It’s midday."

"Okay, fine. Let me have a beer. Can I please have a cold beer? Some type of beer?"

Jade opens a huge chrome refrigerator, takes out a Budweiser and places it on the counter in front of me. I stare disapprovingly at it while she retrieves a bottle opener from an interestingly concealed cutlery drawer.

She’s on the other side of the counter, hands firmly resting on hips. "So, how was it?"

"It?" I ask.

"Paris."

"Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was ..." I trail off.

"Was what?"

"It was ..." I search for a description. "It was ... Instructional."

"I’m not sure that makes a great deal of sense to me, Sam." She says, putting a Marlboro Light in her mouth. "What were you even doing out there?"

"Working." I say, tightly.

"Really? Fighting with taxi drivers, heroin stupors, going to runway shows, sleeping with god knows whom ... That’s work?"

I try to formulate a plausible excuse for why all those things could be work, but then something dawns on me and I say, "Wait, how do you even know about any of that?"

"I saw your blog." She says.

"You ... read my blog?" I ask her, sheepishly.

"Not usually, no. But my boyfriend had disappeared. Poof! Gone from the face of the earth."

"The face of the earth extends to Paris." I offer jokingly, hoping to break the ever mounting tension. But she pretends, I think, not to hear me.

"So yeah, I had to get some answers. But no, I don’t read it regularly. I actually find it to be too glib and quite repetitive. It seems like you’re just showing off a lot of the time. It reminds me of one of those 80s rock albums were every song had an eight minute guitar solo that served no purpose."

"That’s, uhh, cool."

"I also think it’s too cynical." She says, flicking ash into the sink and blowing smoke down and out of her nose.

"I don’t know what you want me to tell you."

"Why don’t you start by explaining yourself?"

"Okay, well ... I mean, I’ve heard that before, that ’cynical’ thing. I don’t really see it myself but I guess it’s because -"

"No, you idiot." She interrupts. "I mean, explain why you just took off without telling me."

What does she want me to tell her? What does she need to hear? That I lost my way in the fourteenth arrondissement one sunday afternoon and ended up spending half the day on a park bench drinking merlot with an art student called Charlotte? That my signature was routinely described as "illegible" and that I had a hard time ordering an espresso or that I saw a young child in a pram being pushed along the river with tubes up her nose? Mounted shapeless movements from behind? Smoked cigarettes from packs with warnings in another language? Mourned people I never knew in a cemetery with a name I couldn’t correctly pronounce? Heard vague speculation about a Michael Jackson comeback and a Dallas movie and what it all might mean? Went to dinner with a professional dog walker named Babette? Discussed various carbon monoxide related fatalities? Met numerous females who claimed to sleep in haunted rooms? Witnessed something that later became the focus of wider public consideration? That I was constantly unable to measure energies? That my scope was routinely throttled by urges that sympathetic friends kept telling me to regard as "genetic flaws?" That I accidentally swallowed a partial fragment of a wine cork?

Her fingers tap the marble, once, twice.

"I just had to leave." I eventually say. "I was bored."

"And now you’re not?"

"No. I’m still bored."

"But now you’re back?"

"I suppose."

"I thought you didn’t want to be with me anymore." She says, genuinely.

"Were we even together though?" I ask, a little confused.

"Of course we were. We’ve been out. I’ve stayed at your house."

I try to sip the Budweiser, but it disgusts me. "You’ve been to my house? So what? The postman is at my house every day. It doesn’t mean I’m having a meaningful relationship with him."

"You’re saying what then, that we weren’t together?"

"I’m just saying ... Why try to categorise everything? I don’t remember getting married, that’s what I’m saying."

"I had problems while you were gone. I felt like I’d been deserted."

"I’m not sure how I fit into any of that."

"You could have helped me with them."

"Me?"

She takes a moment, processes something. She walks over to the window. There’s another sigh. I’m playing a game with my lighter. Her left foot is off the floor, she’s leaning out, looking at something on the street. I’m feeling utterly tired, suddenly, so of course this is the exact point that Jade decides to ask, "Sam, do you even know what I do for a living?"

I close my eyes, rub my temples and say, "You buy and sell rare and antique recording equipment."

"This is the sad part," She says bleakly. "The sad part is that I don’t know if you’re trying to make a joke, blindly guessing or confusing me with someone else."

"All of the above?" I mutter, under my breath.

"I was recently offered grief counselling." Jade says cryptically. And then she begins cubing a large, damp fennel bulb that was previously resting on the draining board with an orange-handled knife that seems to have just materialised in her left hand.

Minutes pass, hours float away, we’re walking in the private gardens across the street. Bloody red flowers are pushing up through the soil. The willow tree is encased in frost. "I’ve never really paid that any mind." I reply to almost everything that is said to me. Someone’s toddler bangs into us. Due to motives I entirely fail to grasp, Jade begins to cry. I’m thinking of Chinese fighter pilots shooting ballistic missiles into the city at some point after the year 2014 and horrendous sex positions. We’re walking around a small park in the middle of the afternoon and I’m starting to (very slowly) realise there’s a hat on my head and somewhere very far off, too far for us to hear, someone is listening to Hank Williams complaining through their stereo.

She wipes her face, points at something and says, "Look at that weird bird." She’s wearing a black crepe wool dress that stops existing just below her knees.

"That’s just a pigeon." I explain to her. "Maybe it’s crippled."

Five weeks of deep stupor. Constantly pushing the Open/Close button on the dvd remote, watching the disc tray move in and out, until it eventually just gives up and refuses to play the game anymore. The day before I leave, a panic in the park. She takes my photo next to a piece of graffiti that says "Cleaning walls is not a career" in red stencilled letters. "Check out that messed up bird." She says later. "That's just a heron." I tell her.

Off the plane, walking towards the gate, scraping noises leaking out of my iPod and into my ears. I'm tapped on the shoulder by a group of French policemen who ask to look in my pockets. They
are then kind enough to remind me that it isn't quite legal to enter a foreign country with what they find.

Later, another cop, speaking perfect english, asks if I'd like to make a phone call. "Not really. Thank you anyway." I say.

"There's no one you want to talk to?"

"I don't enjoy talking on the phone." I tell him while readjusting my tie. He shrugs.

And later still (the next morning, I think), the same cop is passing my effects across the front desk to me. He hands me my passport last, looking at the photograph far longer then I feel comfortable with. "Let me ask you something," I say to him. "What kind of a world is this when you can't fall asleep in the toilet of an aeroplane without the stewardess ratting you out to armed men waiting on the ground below?"

The cop looks at me somewhat incredulously, then he runs his fingers through his moustache and says, "But you were high in there, weren't you?"

"I could have been really tired."

"But, you were high, weren't you?"

"That's beside the point. If someone is sleeping, why should she assume they've nodded out? That's a pessimistic outlook." I say while the cop just stares at me. I stare back, waiting to see if he has a response, and when it becomes obvious that he doesn't, I finish this chapter by saying, "Someone should tell this stewardess that it's unhealthy to constantly assume the worst about people."



I stay in a flat next to a little park, and every time I walk through the front door my vision turns to sepia. My "roommate" wants me to sign some type of contract. I keep grinning at her suggestively (although what it is I'm trying to suggest is not always clear). There's a plastic litter tray in the corner of the kitchen, and before she uses it, the tiny cat that lives here always mewls enthusiastically for at least five minutes. People keep coming around, and when I'm introduced, a not insubstantial percentage of them ask if Gemmill is a french name, and because they pronounce it in a way I've never heard before, I tell them that I'm not really sure.

The Seine is all fucked up. Oily water. A water bird floats past me with its eyes shut. Haphazard boutiques. Women with red soles. In certain sections of the city, too many tourists (for some reason, I don't see myself as a tourist. I prefer to think, wherever I go, I've dragged my entire existence along with me and now this new place will just have to grin politely at it while pretending its not causing huge offence).



"Someone should tell this stewardess that it's unhealthy to constantly assume the worst about people." I'm saying, into the receiver of a borrowed mobile telephone and on the other end I hear my agent saying, "Well, perhaps that's true. But when are you coming home?"

I tell her I have no idea.

"You're going to fuck everything up all over again." She says.

"For me to be fucking something up would suggest that it was at one point good." I say.

"You can't keep pulling this shit, Sam." She actually sounds annoyed, a first.

"I don't even know what I'm doing." I tell her.

"I know, that's the problem."

"No, I mean ... I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

"Okay, how should I put this? I'll put it like this: When you walk into the shop and buy cigarettes, the man behind the counter hands them to you after he takes the money. The man doesn't say, 'Thanks for paying me, I'm just going to catch a plane to Paris now. Don't know when I'll be back, but I'll give you your cigarettes then, or maybe I won't. It all depends on how screwed up I am that morning.' It doesn't go on like that, it's not how the world works."

I start talking. "I think ..."

"Yeah?" She says, leading me.

"I think ... I think I should have married a red head." I say. "I think my life would have followed an entirely different trajectory if that had transpired. Yeah, why not? I think that I am just going to date girls with red hair now."

I hear my agent sigh, then she says "Jesus Christ" four of five times under her breath. "Look, just fucking write it. Just write it there. Something. Anything. If it's not good, it's not good. But we gotta turn something in. If it sucks, they don't have to run with it. But we have to turn something in."

"I don't think I can do that."

"Why not?"

"Because when she read that first draft the director said there were too many people smoking. She said that because of the smoking ban, it would be impossible to have the actors smoking on stage."

"Then just take all the cigarettes out of the stage directions."

"But I don't fucking know how to write characters that don't smoke." I scream.



It rains every morning. I always wake up feeling like my stomach has been punched. There's a creepy toy pony in my bedroom. My nose is always running and the back of my neck is always itching. I buy a pair of black leather shoes with white stitching and they look like this:

Some Sunday evening: I get in a cab and tell the driver to take me to "'The 'Irreversible' tunnel. I want to see that tunnel." He starts driving, even though I'm quite sure he doesn't understand my instructions. I briefly lapse into a state of unconscious, then I wake up and vomit all over the back seat. The next thing I'm aware of is the driver, some maniac algerian, pulling me out of the door head first, he's got a grip of my suit jacket up by the shoulders. Then I'm rolling around the side walk as he kicks me repeatedly in the ribs. He's gone by the time I catch my breath, But I still manage to summon the energy to buy a large vanilla milkshake from a close by McDonalds and then hurl it directly onto the windshield of the next taxi I see.



My "roommate" is having a book release party in her second story book store. A young writer in a preternaturally short skirt is standing on the riser, reading a story in a language I have a fair amount of trouble following. The room is packed. This city has a (and I loathe to use this term, but a better definition fails me) "literary scene" the way most places have a music scene. People here actually seek out new and/or obscure writers, like doom struck kids in London trying desperately to find a new band to throw themselves at the feet of before they get a record deal.

I get on stage, wine bottle in hand, and start to read a story called "Sycamore Chase." Mainly because it's the only thing I was able to cut, paste and print before we left the house. I want to close my eyes, but need them open to read the pages in my other hand. I take a long, deep hit from the bottle and then place it by my feet. I light a Marlboro. As I start talking, I find myself gripping the microphone stand and rocking back and forth.

When I get to the paragraph where the narrator talks about his time in Paris, the crowd cheers. And at the end, when I read the part about " some atrocity that had taken place in America five or six years ago" they cheer even louder (which I find vaguely disconcerting).

I step off the platform, my "roommate" hands me a Glenfiddich - large. I'm approached by a man called Bernard who describes himself as "a fan." My first instinct, thinking that he's mocking me, is to try and break his jaw. But then I get the impression he's sincere. He tells me he's a writer too. "That's ... cool, man." I say. "I'm happy for you."

"I work for a magazine. Do you think I could interview you?" He asks, and again, I have to resist the urge to duck quickly to the right and then clock him with a big left.

"Well, I don't have much to say." I tell him, truthfully.

"Could we print the story you just read?" He asks.

"Sure," I say. "How much do you want to buy it for?"

"Okay, just the interview, yeah?"

A few hours later, I get back up there. But, with nothing else to read, I just start ranting about getting busted at the airport, about the evil stewardess and about the judge I had to see the next morning and the stern, but kind lecture he delivered to me in his best english: "Son, you can't just stroll into our country with Heroin about your person." And I tell them about the, what seemed to be, wildly arbitrary sum of money he fined me. When I hop down for the second time, the writer with the short skirt taps me on the shoulder.



I'm at a bar, listening to a girl with huge brown eyes say, "The English are just like the Americans, they go around the world expecting people to talk their language. If I hadn't watched so many Howard Hawks movies as a child, we wouldn't be able to have a meaningful conversation right now."

"I don't think that would bother me in the slightest." I say.



I view skeletons in museums. Residents chain their dogs to the railings of the balconies, and at four in the morning they bark as I walk by. Down by the river, I overhear a man and wife talking. I can't understand all they say, but one sentence, phonetically, sounds just like, "Someone is going to have to put a bullet in his own skull soon." When I don't buy, I'm sick. And when I do buy, I'm good and numb until I have to buy again.

I keep dreaming in print.