The city is filled with people moving around stupidly, milling up and down the streets with no apparent purpose, and it's aggravating to realise I'm one of them ... Why did I order chicken breasts wrapped in prosciutto if I no longer eat pork? Why are there certain rubbish bins I can't walk past without compulsively lighting a cigarette? Why can't my spell check learn "Springsteen"?

Why is "I've killed my world, and I've killed my time" the only song lyric that resonates properly with me?

When I get on the train, there's a discarded newspaper with a review section that mentions, in passing, that Emily Blunt is dating Michael Buble, and for some reason, this bothers me immensely.

My machine rings out with messages from people with grief-stricken voices, informing me that someone I know has "gone back on the needle", or been stabbed to death, or given birth with considerably more complications than was expected. Christine Molinaro undergoes a cornea transplant, has a piece of a dead person's eyeball inserted into her own, but why? A few days after New Year, a girl asks me, "Why does the drawer of your bedside table contain a platinum Mastercard with a chinese woman's name on it?" My response: "That table was custom made. It was ... crafted."

At any other dinner party, someone lectures me for acquiescing to hot milk in my coffee. I stand in a writer's garden and wonder what the moon is for, while he tells me that he suspects feral rodents have began to live close by.

Problems that arise are quickly batted away, before returning stronger and heavier. It takes considerable effort to knock them back twice, and eventually they lunge forward again, defeating me.

The ex-wife of one of my former acquaintances takes me to her flat and shows me her large pornography collection, and her even larger collection of Butterfly knives. Then she shows me the little white scars running up and down her forearm, that she made with them. The next morning, I walk into her bathroom, wash my mouth and face in the sink, and try to will myself into feeling bad about what transpired the night before ... But it just doesn't happen.

And while empathy for the misfortunes of others if still a concept I have trouble grasping, it no longer feels quite as distant as it once was. It has become a watch behind a shop window that I can't quite afford, but can easily imagine wearing. My agent sells some of my non-fiction to a glossy, overpriced fashion periodical, and, to some nameless French maniacs, some of my more disturbing short stories. And during a different conversation, I tell her, "I've got a new tv idea ... Late night Mah-jong!" But it disheartens me to discover that she takes it somewhat seriously, and is, to an extend, excited by it.

I buy four identical v-neck cashmere sweaters, three are grey, one is black. For the first time in a few years, I get into an actual fist fight, throwing decent right-hooks outside the Whitworth Art Gallery. On the day before Christmas eve, I fall off the wagon, but the year and a half I spent riding it has lowered my tolerance to the point that I almost don't make it through the first night.

People keep drilling holes in the wall, next door. I meet a friendly cow in the middle of a field, and feel bad for stroking her head while wearing a leather jacket. On another date, we're watching Lust, Caution in a crowded cinema. When it gets to the part when the young women is beaten with a belt by her assumed lover and then forcibly taken from behind, I lean in close to the girl beside me and say, "That's pretty hot" and she doesn't disagree.

And later that night, after the wind had screamed all up the avenue and destroyed my carefully planned side-parting, we found ourselves - rather predictably - in Zinc, where she began to tell me she felt certain she was adopted.

"So what?" I told her, "I'd be glad to find that out."

"You would?" She asked, after scraping an olive out of her glass and eating it.

I thought about it for a second or two, then replied, "Actually, no. I wouldn't. I mean, at least now I can look back at my family tree and quite easily blame all these character flaws on all the other twisted and bent up branches. If I found out I was adopted, the concern would be, what if my real relatives were normal human beings? I'd be the anomaly. At least now, I have someone to blame ... For all this."

This caused her to laugh, even though it had not been intended as a joke. She smoothed out her tights and then she said, "So, this house warming I'm having ..."

"Yeah, you bought that place. I'd congratulate you, but you realise the coming recession is going to ruin you, right? I'm just glad I've always rented." I said.

"Well, be that as it may, this party ... It's a 'no shoes' party."

"It's a what?"

"A 'No shoes' party." She said. "Don't you know what that is?"

"I have an idea."

"Okay."

"But I'm not doing it."

"I just had all the floors redone. So I'm asking people to take their shoes off at the front door."

"No."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, I'm not gonna be doing that."

"Why?"

"Because my shoes are more important than your floors. I like my shoes. Half of my jumping off points are based around my shoes. Placing a pair of shoes on my feet is not an arbitrary decision, a lot of thought goes into it. I'm not having you negate that."

"But ... That's the way I want it."

"That's fine, it's your house. I'm just not coming."

"Have you ever been faced with a situation you didn't completely overreact to?" She asked me, "Don't you ever even listen to yourself?"

"Let me ask you something, do you think this 'No footwear' decree is going to induce a sense of excitement in your guests? Do you think people are looking forward to this now? To standing to attention all night while you walk around behind them holding a dust pan and brush, waiting for the first crumb to fall on your sofa? I'll tell you the answer ... The answer is no. I guarantee you've lost thirty percent of your invitees with this thing ... Not to mention the ten percent that weren't coming anyway."

"Why did the ten percent plan not to come anyway?"

"Because they probably hate your guts. You think everyone you know likes you? Some of them are probably wishing bad, bad things to happen. Let's go outside, I need a cigarette."

The cold air hit me, forced me to realise I was drunker than I thought. I reeled back, almost hit the railing separating the street from the road, then I put my arm out to hail a passing taxi before realising it was actually a police car.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck. Lighter, lighter, lighter." I heard myself saying.

She was crying now, her hands shaking while she tried to light her cigarette, although I couldn't tell if that was from the upset or the cold.

"What's wrong with you?" I said. "Was it the thing about people hating you? You're twenty-four, for Christ's sake, you should have figured that part out a long time ago."

She didn't reply. Her back was half turned to me, I was paying close attention to her hand bag, and wondering why I had the notion it matched my belt.

"Is it so hard for you to be nice?" She finally said.

"I am ... nice." I answered, trying to sound convincing. "I'm a good guy."

A sort of resentful snigger exited her being, and then she said something I didn't quite hear ... Because I was imagining a car bomb igniting across the street, the shards of glass from the windows of the department store that missed me and hit her in the neck. Then I was sitting in La Luna and the world was ending. I was sending back the Baked Ziti, telling a waitress with one arm, "The crust on the cheese is burnt, they can't expect me to eat this." And outside people kept walking past with thick layers of ash on their faces. Some guy wearing a bright orange hooded sweatshirt with The Gap logo on it was trying to plug the hole in his face where his nose used to be. Blood was pouring out through his cupped hands and I wasn't particularly affected.

I put one arm around the girl, said I was sorry. I put the hand on the end of the other arm into my coat pocket and retrieved a loose pill. I opened that hand and offered it to her, "Valium?"

And when she took it from me she placed it inside her mouth and knocked it back without speaking, or the aid of liquid. We finished smoking and went back into the bar. I had gluttony on my mind.

"When travelling on business in Germany, you hear Hungry Heart by Bruce Springsteen in a lot of elevators." My agent informs me, over an afternoon phone line that's beginning to crackle slightly.

"I'm pretty sure you've told me that before." I tell her.

"Really?"

"Yeah, you told me that when you got back, from Germany. I seem to remember I was drinking a Becks, at the time. You said you'd thought I'd be interested in hearing it."

"And were you?"

"Was I what?"

"Interested?"

"Not really, no."

There's a pause, maybe the line momentarily breaks, and then she's saying, "Springsteen originally wrote Hungry Heart for The Ramones, can you fucking believe that?"

"See, now ... I told you that."

Another pause, this time the line isn't breaking. "Oh."

"Yeah." I say, without much conviction, opening the refrigerator and then shutting it.

"So, what's going on?" She asks.

"I ordered a chicken club sandwich for lunch, from Zinc. I actually just came through the door."

"Was it good?" My agent asks.

"I don't normally like chicken sandwiches ... Or, at least sandwiches that have a combination of ingredients that includes chicken. There's a tendency to use them as a depository for the brown meat. They think they can just mix it in there and get away with it. I ... don't like the brown meat."

"Uh huh." She says, with far more enthusiasm then I can imagine anyone being able to summon.

"But this one, this chicken club, is nice. I've had it every day this week. At lunch time. For my lunch."

"That's terrific. All white meat, that's terrific."

"On monday, I had a Glenfiddich with it. Tuesday, a glass of Laphroaig. Yesterday, a Glenlivet and today an old fashioned shot of Jamesons. The waitress, I think she's Ukrainian, today she finally said, "Why do you order a different whiskey each day with your club sandwich?' I told her that I was trying to find one that matched the colour of the egg yolk exactly."

"Was that the truth, or a lie?"

"Truth. At the time, it seemed important."

"A hard boiled egg yolk isn't really amber at all though."

"In Zinc, the hard boiled egg yolk is amber."

"Maybe you should try Canadian Club?"

"I'm not a big fan."

"There's a Christmas tree right outside my door," My agent says. "I can see it through the glass. For a long time, I thought the fairy on top was a plush Spiderman doll. But I came to realise I was just observing it from on odd angle."

"That must have been traumatic for you." I say.

"Everyone in the office wants me to organise the Secret Santa this year."

"I don't know that that is." I tell her, truthfully.

"I've been designated. There was a vote taken, over drinks last night at Flo-Bar, and my name came up."

Sitting on the work top in the kitchen, there's a letter in a plain white envelope, my name and address printed in a deceptive font that might look hand written to someone not paying full attention. The letter inside concerns a young boy in Africa who has recently began the slow process of going blind. There is also a helpful form I'm urged to write my bank details on and a prepaid envelope to send it back in. These letters arrive daily, more or less. Sometimes they're about village wells that have stopped working, or about the fallout from an atrocity I never heard of. The letters that reach me occasionally include free pens. Once, there was a twenty pence coin taped inside, as if daring me to keep the money, or send the money back without including an additional donation (a tactic I found distasteful). Western doctors toiling unpaid in a far off desert and well-intentioned groups of men and women, trying to save a specific brand of tree found only in Ecuador, that receive no government funding for their work. They're all vaguely upsetting, but there's not much I can do about any of them; all my charity money is currently being diverted, by monthly arrangement, to a donkey sanctuary somewhere on the south coast of England.

"Damn." I say, dropping the letter into the bin.

"Flo-Bar is now serving a cocktail called The Madame Bovery, and I'm not sure how I feel about that." My agent says.

"What's in it?"

"I honestly don't know. Vermouth, maybe?"

"Anyway ..." I say. "What's the story?"

"The offer, it seems, is mid-fours."

I make a noise, it comes from the back of my throat and I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. "I don't think I see the point, really."

"The point? The point is the cheque. The point is, mid-fours."

"But I'd have to do all the leg work myself, anyway. I'd be in the same position. I'm thinking about going the other way."

"I'd advise you against that."

"Why?"

"Because, and I hate to make it seem like I'm only looking out for my interests here, but there's not a great deal of a relationship between an agent and a ... No, there's fucking no reason for me to be involved with a self-published author."

"Well, there's the other thing."

"The other thing has its problems too."

"It always has had." I say, walking over to the door, lighting a cigarette.

"The big sticking point, for all intents and purpose, is the burning dog." She says. "'Why does the dog have to be set on fire before it's thrown off the balcony?' That seems to be the main question. An other is, 'Why does the dog have to be thrown off the balcony at all?' These are sticking points."

"I can't lose the dog. That dog is integral to the story. Fire-dog is integral."

"I agree. Not because the, uh, fire-dog serves any great purpose, but just because there's so much other ... offensive shit in there anyway that I don't see why they'd make an issue of that in particular."

"Maybe they just don't wanna have to give us the cash to CGI a burning terrier falling from the penthouse of an apartment building."

She laughs, then says, "The other problem, which, in hindsight would also appear to be the larger one, is that Anthony James said he'd rather develop a show where a fat chick sitting in a bare room reads the phone book into a single camera set-up for an hour than have anything to do with something you're involved in."

"Yeah ... He doesn't like me."

"Bad blood there, still." She says in a half-whisper that disconcerts me, primarily because the rest on her conversation has been delivered two octaves higher.

"You should tell him to make that show anyway, the phone book show. I'd watch it faithfully."

"People are saying I should probably drop you."

"People are probably right."

"Maybe you should fire me first. That's the kind of thing that gets around. It might create interest of some sort."

"Could we still hang out?" I ask her.

"We live in different cities."

"You could come up here. We could make some moves."

She gives a low chuckle and says, "Make some moves? Even if I hadn't already spent as much time with you as I have, you forget I've read enough of your shit to know what something like 'make some moves' actually means, when you say it."

"Can I still sleep on your sofa when I come to town?"

"Sure."

"Can we go out for Campari and sodas?"

"Of course."

"That's ... relieving."

"So yeah, they're trying to rope me into this 'Secret Santa' bullshit." She says.

"I still don't know that is." I tell her.

"It's a Christmas game for retards."

"I'm thinking about getting an iPod touch." I say, seeing an Apple commercial on the television as I walk into the living room.

"They're cumbersome. I prefer the click-wheel."

"The click-wheel," I repeat. "Yeah."

"I've already formed an aversion to my iPhone." She tells me.

"I'm figuring out if I want to see a movie this afternoon. I don't want to wear any 3D glasses though. Last time, I swear to God, I had a rash on the bridge of my nose."

"I think I might get Chinese for lunch." She says.

"For lunch? What are you, a savage?

"It's a late lunch."

"Yeah ... But, still."

My agent makes a low growling sound of extended length. A noise that sounds like a huge and brutish animal being slowly asphyxiated by a man not quite strong enough to get the job done properly.

"What are you doing?"

"That's my Stallone impersonation," My agent says. "I was doing Rocky."

"It's not very good." I tell her.

The Christmas tree was hung with black tinsel and old beer bottle caps tied with blue string. We were all up on the fourteenth floor. There was no smoking in the apartment, Natalie told me, more than once, when she let me in and took my coat. She opened the door that led to her bedroom very slightly and edged into it backwards, keeping herself turned towards me.

"Please don't just throw that on the bed." I told her.

"You can't smoke in my flat." She said again.

"I liked it better when you called it your apartment."

"Go and sit down." She said in a way that made me believe 2007 had been a subjugating disappointment for her.

"Where?"

"The table." She answered, distantly, from behind the door.

"You should get a painting of a horse and hang it out here." I said, looking at the egg shell coloured hallway walls. They bothered me. In the elevator, on the way up to the fourteenth floor, I'd suddenly remembered recently dreaming of being on a life support system. Laying face down with my eyes wide open while doctors and nurses with distorted features leaned over the bed and into my face. I'd brought the feeling back across with into the real world when I woke up, and it had bled into my entire day, as those feelings so often do.

"But, I don't like horses." She said.

As a boy, no one had ever sat me down and explained the rules of the dinner party, but over the years I had developed a system, various protocols, that had always just about go me through them without breaking down completely. I pretended to listen intently to whatever the people beside and across from me were saying, while drinking far more than anyone noticed. I politely parried questions about myself and smiled gratefully as I chewed whatever sinewy piece of meat happened to be in my mouth at the time.

And even though I no longer swallowed mouthfuls of Vailum on the ride over before passing out in the bathroom or made awkward passes at the host's wife or screamed out "Oh fuck it all" prior to extinguishing a cigarette dead in the centre of the pizza in front of me, it was still impossible for me to avoid, at least once, unintentionally telling the table something that they clearly found perturbing (Example: Jovial abortion anecdotes that were always met by thunderstruck expressions, despite the fact they were never crude or graphic. Or the time when once, a middle-aged creative writing professor asked me if I had plans for the weekend and I told her they included sitting down in the dark and giving in to the inevitable mental collapse that had been creeping up on me since I was twelve).

These parties were always attended by women who had just got back from the United Arab Emirates, from where they had filed huge amounts of copy and purchased tax-free gold, and by people in their late thirties who were somehow still in one form or another of higher education. There was always at least three or four men who looked like they'd been accused -but never convicted - of several rapes and gross sexual indecencies.

These parties were sometimes populated by people with felt it was acceptable to admit that they watched Caroline In The City. More than once, I felt black clouds fill the room as I was introduced to someone who said "I've heard a lot about you." Occasionally, these people even went so far as to mention that a mutual acquaintance had recommended to them something I had wrote, which made me feel like I was being stabbed in the solar plexus by a phillips head screwdriver).

There were people who "did logistics for supermarkets" and television producers who, at a different time, in a different building, had rejected my pitches. There were probate solicitors who had submitted to breast augmentation and people who claimed their blogs had "attracted industry attention." And there was once a woman I went home with, who described herself as "an underground sculptor", who indicated her sexual interest in me by cocking her head back so I could get a good look at her deviated septum.

The air in these rooms always seemed unacceptably diluted, and it had occurred to me several times that, in any type of just world, these people would have been taken out into the alley and shot. And the fact I was always around seemed to suggest I was one of them too, and probably didn't deserve to be spared either. So I was always making the sign of the cross when I thought no one was looking.

"Do you have a balcony?" I asked.

"No." Natalie said, painstakingly inching through the gap in the bedroom door and then closing it behind her .

"Can I smoke by the window then?"

"No."

"You don't like horses?"

"They're ... Weird looking." She said.

"So, you want me to go all the way downstairs to smoke on the street?"

"If you want to."

"I don't want to."

"There you go then."

"Most people let me smoke by the window."

"It's too cold for that."

"It's colder on the street." I told her. But she didn't reply, just opened the door that lead into the living room.






"Do you think the war will end soon?" A girl with huge brown eyes sitting in the chair next to mine asked me, as I sat down.

"Which one?"

"The main one." She said.

"I doubt it."

"Name's Beth."

"What do you do, Beth?"

"I make choices." She said, cheerfully.

"Choices?" I asked, reaching half way into my pocket before remembering the non-smoking edict.

"I make choices. Before, I wasn't making any choices at all. I had frozen embryos and a life I wasn't really living, on a cruise ship. I made no choices. I didn't live my life. Now, I'm living my life. Now, I'm making choices."

"Such as?"

"Well, for one ... I choose not to worry about the frozen embryos anymore. I used to get all worked up thinking about a power outage, the fridges breaking down. Someone knocking them over and my genetic material running out over the checkerboard floor. I used to call the infertility centre every day, making sure nothing had gone wrong. I was on a first name basis with the secretary. I wondered what might have happened to her if someone else answered the phone. My phone bill was insane. I didn't get international discounts. I wasn't on an international package."

"Why did you need to call international?"

"Because the embryos are in New York. They're on Third Avenue in New York."

"What are they doing there?"

"I told you, I was on a cruise ship. It was when we docked in New York that I decided to freeze the eggs."

"Is that legal?"

"What?"

"Having ... Having these frozen embryos in another country."

"No one told me different."

"Did you imagine they would have?"

"I'd imagine their profession demands full disclosure, yes."

"What were you doing on the ship?"

"I owned the beauty spa."

"Owned it?"

"I paid the concession. That's right. I owned it. It was mine."

"Do you run it too?"

"Yes, of course. That's why I was on the ship, because I ran it. I could have just owned it from my living room."

"Where is your living room?"

"Now, or then?"

"Now, no, then ... No, I mean now. Where is your living room now?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Was there a library, on the ship?"

"Yes, several."

"What kind of books did they hold?"

"Almost all of them seemed to be about the JonBenet Ramsey mystery."

"Really?" I asked, although it was phrased more like a casual statement than a question.

"At least most of the ones I saw."

"Was there a pharmacy onboard?"

"Yeah. I once heard it referred to as the 'Farmacia'."

"Who called it that?"

"A mexican woman that came in for a manicure, at one point on the voyage. She complained about a stomach ailment."

"You did the manicure?"

"No, I was close by. I was observing someone's ..." She trailed off, lost in something.

"Someone's what?"

"Someone's violent face."

"Tell me about the captain."

"Never met the man." She said, putting down a wine glass I hadn't noticed she'd been holding. "Most of the girls that worked in the Spa were Haitians who'd had their families wiped out by various cyclones. At first, I'd just assumed they'd all been a victim of the same one. But over the months, killing time, I'd hear them tell their stories in more detail, until the stories eventually started to include the name of the cyclone that had come rushing up on them one day, ruining their lives and then going about the rest of its business. I was surprised when numerous different names started coming up. Surprised and fatigued."

I was about to inquire to Natalie - who had now seated herself on the other side of me - how long it might be until the starter would be served, when I noticed the black, oblong-shaped plates strew all over the table. All holding different kinds of potatoes chopped into tiny pieces or miniature christmas pies or upsettingly arranged bite-sized burgers and pointless quiches. Little pieces of pink, almost raw meat, impaled on tiny wooden sticks rested on the plate closest to me.

"What's going on?" I asked Natalie, elbowing her in the ribs to break her concentration on whatever it was the genial boob sitting opposite her was saying. He looked mildly annoyed, but said nothing. Choosing instead to lift a piece of celery from one of the plates and hold it contemplatively. He looked like just another cretin with rapidly yellowing teeth and too much time on his hands; a remnant from the days when the masses where harder to lean on and an eighth of skag couldn't get you high unless you mainlined it.

"What's wrong?" Natalie asked, as it dawned on me that the celery had been cut into the shape of a Christmas tree.

"What's going on? What the fuck is all this?"

"All what?"

"All. This. Shit." I said, gesturing at the table. I picked up one of the sections of stabbed pink meat. "What, for instance, might this be?"

"That," she said, somewhat too smugly for my taste, "that is Star anise-cured salmon. Try the sauce in that bowl there, that's what the salmon goes with. The sauce is made from mayo, honey and beetroot. You dip it."

We live in times we are unsure of, and this is the food we eat because of it. The world has revealed itself to be an extremely small place, and we fret about it, wondering about the vicious breeds of human beings endlessly spawning on other continents, crafting plans and blades and receiving ungraspable religious instruction that disconcerts us greatly. Nobody is grilling steak, in fear that a case of Mad Cow Disease will render them unable to properly configure their TiVO and Sky Plus systems. Stone owls in the forest. We watch feature length motion pictures on hand held devices and order bottles of french vodka from conservatively designed web sites, and then wait around for something to blow us up or poison the city's water or just shoot us in the thigh as we walk out of a petrol station at thirteen minutes to midnight on a friday evening. Cubed pieces of fish doused in an ill-defined sauce are just a symptom of the indisposition, and pondering the notion that a remedy might be forthcoming seems, on most days, like an exercise in grand futility.

"This is cocktail food." I told her. "Why are we sitting down to eat this cocktail food?"

"There's mini chicken tikki burgers with mint chutney over there. Try one." She said.

"What are you, nuts?"

"Saffron hummus?" She offered, pushing the bowl under my nose.

"This is 'moving around' food. You've got me boxed in over here for no purpose whatsoever." It occurred to me that I didn't even have a drink in front of me. I lent across the table and grabbed at a bottle of wine, it was empty.

"What did you expect, a fucking turkey?" She said.

"I expected knives and forks." I called out, exasperated. "I expected to be able to smoke."

"Look, I had to seat people. I'm serving a very special trifle later, and I didn't want people standing around eating it off plastic plates. I didn't want the pomegranate and rose cream jelly landing on my floors. I just had them restained."

"Would you please get me a scotch." I said, on the verge of tears.

Someone at the far end of the table passed the bottle down, after Natalie interrupted him in the middle of an incomprehensible sentence that included the word "Topography." As I poured the amber liquid into the tumbler, Beth lent into my ear and whispered, "When an American solider drives over a land mine in Iraq, do you laugh?"

"No." I told her.

"But do you cry?"

"No."

A voice at the far end of the table asked "What are these little red things?" and Natalie said "Cherry tomato and bocconcini lollipops." I put my head in my hands.






And later now, down on the street, I'm lighting an American Spirit and trying to figure out how November became December and why I've already forgotten what happened at Halloween. I'm standing with two girls I met upstairs, girls introduced to me in the kitchen by Natalie like so: "This is Kate, she's in film school. Right now she's making a short film about a group of animals that are plotting to take over a town of some kind. And this is Rachel, she's addicted to Oxycontin."

The trees coming out of the carefully placed gaps in the concrete outside Natalie's building are all wrapped in red fairy lights. Which the girls seem to enjoy, but that, unfortunately, look to me like barbed wire submerged in blood that's started to glow. Kate asks me what I'd been up to before coming to the party, and I debate telling her the truth: Before coming to this party I drifted indiscriminately around various exhibits in a museum made of glass, eventually becoming confused by a moving staircase made of metal that I hadn't expected to encounter. After that, I hung around the food department of a high end department store for what seemed like an eternity. Debating with myself over what sort of coffee I might like to try next, becoming disoriented by a product I had no hope of being able to rationalise on the kosher aisle and finally having to divert a serious spasm of anxiety by buying (but not eating) four packets of Reese's Pieces.

"Natalie has a cat in her bathroom." Kate says.

"I'm smoking another cigarette before going back up there." I say.

"Why is the cat in the bathroom." Says Rachel.

"Are we even going back up there?" Kate asks me.

"My coats up there, at the very least." I tell her.

"Did she lock the cat in the bathroom? Is it vicious or something?" Rachel asks Kate.

"No, he's just scared of strangers. He's not feral, he's just nervous." Kate tells her. And then, to me, says, "Pardon?"

"I said my coat is still up there."

"I thought we were taking off?"

"We can, once I get my coat."

"What does the cat do when he's nervous?" Rachel says. "Does he try to scratch?"

"All the coats are in her bedroom." Kate says.

"I know," I tell her. "She wouldn't let me in there before. She went to great lengths to not even open the door enough to let me see her bedroom. All the while I'm thinking 'Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart.'"

"Her bedroom is fucked up." Kate.

"You mean the walls are, like ... Terracotta?" Rachel asks.

"No, I mean like, her ex boyfriend punched her in the ribs and then threw her right into her armoire ... And like, she went right through it. She went into it sideways and splintered it." Kate answers.

Rachel makes an odd sound. I light another cigarette, cupping the flame in both hands, and try to catch the eye of a women sitting in the back seat of a cab on the other side of the street. Kate goes on to say, "Then he started feeling bad about it and punched a bunch of holes in the walls."

I notice they're both looking at me, waiting for a reaction to this news. I breath out a nicotine cloud and say, "That ... sucks."

"Maybe ..." Rachel starts, then stops.

"Maybe what?" Kate asks her.

"Maybe he got pissed off at the cat always scratching him and being so vicious all the time."

"But the cat isn't fucking vicious. I already told you that."

"So, where are we gonna go?"

"Did anyone try those bocconcini lollipops? Seriously, what the fuck?"

"We could still get into Zinc."

"I don't wanna go to Zinc."

"Actually, neither do I."

"Are we going to have to wait online for our coats now? A fucking ticket system up there?"

"She doesn't display any signs of injury, at least in her gait."

"Who?"

"Natalie."

"The cat is probably traumatised from seeing his mother getting slung into an armoire. That's why he's in the bathroom."

"I hate the elevators in this building. There's nothing pleasing about them."

"Listen, this armoire, it was nice?"

And you said, more than once, how you couldn't understand why people preferred the American version of The Ring to the original Japanese. You said this in a chain restaurant, while eating egg rolls and little balls of pork you continuously dunked into a bright orange sauce in a little plastic cup, while I drank steadily from an oversized brown bottle. You mentioned something about the commercialisation of asian cinema, about how it has been watered down by faceless cutthroats in the USA. And I just smiled sweetly and said nothing at all, because I was thinking that both versions were as useless as each other.

You wanted to walk around the second hand record shops. You wanted to look at vintage clothing and old novels that smelt disgusting. You sang along to a song on the radio that seemed to concern a pair of humps as you moved around the metal racks. You picked up shirts and advised me to try them on, while I imagined all the parasites living deep in the weave of the fabrics. You bought a velvet scarf. I was starting to realise that our views were ... dissimilar.

In a crowded food market, you kept pointing out imaginary suicide bombers. I lit a cigarette and carefully dodged a question about my romantic past as you fastened the top bottom on your coat.

You told me that you felt sanitary towels should be provided by the government, free of charge, because "it's not a woman's fault she has to have periods." But when I said, "Shouldn't people be given free food too then? Because it's not our fault we have to eat? How about rent free housing? I'm pretty sure we didn't ask to need shelter either", you went quiet and then turned your head towards a nearby Starbucks, as if someone inside would soon rush out and offer a valid reason or excuse for your stupidity .

And when we ducked into a basement bar to avoid the rain, I refused to be pinned down on various topics. I offered platitudes and muttered vaguely about the state of it all. When you told me, in detail, about the cousin who had starved herself for weeks and subsequently expired from complications brought on by acute kidney failure, I just nodded bleakly and said, in monotone, "Not everyone can be thin. Not everyone can be ... rich" before changing the subject to the odd aftertaste of my Guinness. It was hard to know if you found all this detachment charming or not. Or even if you happened to be aware of it.

When you were trying to explain the way your sister lived and the way you felt as a ten year old when your father suffered a brain infarction, I grew so bored that I secretly threaded the earphones of the iPod in my inside pocket up through the sleeve of my suit, cupped the ear buds into the palm of my left hand and then placed it against my ear, giving the impression my arm was just propping up my head while I paid perfect attention to your drone. You kept talking and I made the appropriate facial expressions at the right moments, while listening to an old Zevon album.

The sun died. We wandered the streets. I was having a hard time figuring out what day of the week it was. I was praying you'd say something even vaguely engaging, reveal an interesting facet of yourself, because I was no longer willing to recognise the shape of your face as an equal trade-off for putting up with whatever it was you'd convinced yourself was actually a personality.

The wind kept picking things up and putting them down on the other side of the road. When I dropped a pocketful of change into a beggar's hand, you made a comment about how she'd just spend it on alcohol, and I replied, "What would you have her buy instead?"

We drifted in and out of stores we had no interest in purchasing anything from. You felt Phil Spector was guilty. I was wondering if my standards had slipped, or just become variable. You noticed a huge reindeer, made of light, perched on the top of a high building. I noticed a pigeon that had been perfectly flattened in the middle of the road and the reflection of the nearby fairy lights glowing in the trickle of blood running away from it.

October 31st - I'm wide awake at three in the morning. Restless. Something unnamable on my mind. There's a bottle of sleeping pills on the bedside table, but given the dreams I've had recently (Kate Winslett taking off a red tunic as her face turns a dark, mottled green. Scales start growing on her neck. Josh Hartnett squinting in at us through the window) they don't seem too appealing.

I'm in the kitchen, feeding my dog something called a "Denta-Stick" and then, when that's finished, a day old plate of vegetable risotto that's sitting on the cooker. I had friends over a few hours before and one of them has used a magnetic alphabet to write "Not all Israelis kill Arabs" on the door of my refrigerator. My mouth is really dry again and somewhere down on the street, a person in a parked car is listening to the Bobby Darin version of If I Were A Carpenter.

I eat some crackers. I make some coffee. I stare at the same Ralph Lauren magazine advertisement for twelve firm minutes. My entire house is either too clean or too dirty.

I try to watch The Shining, but it's not cheering me up. it's not as funny as it once was. I try to fast forward to the part when the cook catches the axe in his chest, but the disc keeps skipping.

Since the last time I used the television for anything other then dvds, they seem to have added a staggering amount of channels to my package and just scanning through them seems like an ordeal. One I'm not sure I have the strength for

A report about some kid that had his fingers blown off by a firework. A virtual tour of Hitler's bunker. A show about traditional Ukrainian cooking that I find hard to bare. A famous race horse buried under the final stretch of a famous race course. A hideous channel showing never ending commercial presentations for mineral-based make-up that covers horrible birthmarks.

Elle Mcpherson torturously demonstrating how to get the best out of a new Pilates contraption. Elle Mcpherson manoeuvring her bare feet into weird little stirrups and making obscene windmill motions with her legs. Elle Mcpherson wearing a purple leotard and Elle Mcpherson making excruciating facial gestures.

One early morning call-in show decides to ask the question: Stenographers, are they the unsung heroes of our culture?

I'm urged to donate blood by a football player I've never heard of.

A visually stimulating Cat Power video and then, on one of the American news networks, a sympathetic piece about the upcoming Writer's Guild strike that almost moves me to tears.

And when I turn the tv off I can hear the sounds from next door (grunts, moans, other amorous grotesqueries) far too clearly.

I move over to the computer and, after cueing up a Brenda Lee playlist on iTunes and lighting the first in an apparently endless line of Marlboros, I sign into one of my poker sites. But, after losing five or six hands badly, I start using the Instant Message facility to berate people, pointlessly insulting their hands and their names, telling players they should stay away from "The Big Boy's Game" and asking entire tables if they've "heard of any good satanic rituals happening tonight?" At one point, while catching a Full House on the River, I sheepishly admit to a woman in Nebraska that I've always had a crush on Dido.

Go through old e-mails, all with the same accusatory tone: You blanked me in Zinc. Your last blog was a thinly veiled attack on me. You cheated on my cousin with a veterinary nurse (One of them simply says, "You Heartless Prick", and it's hard not to admire the minimalism of the expression).

A fresher, previously unread piece of mail from the editor of a small press, short-story anthology contending that I recently left an "obviously intoxicated" message on his machine, in which I claimed to have a machine gun.

I reply, opening the missive by describing him as an inveterate liar. Closing with the assertion that he "happens to be a fucking delusional fantasist." I add a postscript, for the sake of form, that states he "better pay me my fucking money soon." Even though I'm quite sure he doesn't owe me any.

Make more coffee. Add more Anisette.

Browse old documents, realise in horror that I have, over the past year, started (but failed to complete) six different stories narrated by a young woman who has fallen deeply in love with the serial killer who abducted her in a 98 Ford Explorer and tethered her to a central heating pipe in his basement after beating her with a wet towel ... Delete all of them.

I stand by a window, still smoking, waiting for the sun to come up. But when it finally decides to - around seven am - it creeps out from wherever it has hiding far too slowly for me to tolerate. It lingers around the sides of various buildings, creating an odd visual effect and reminding me of a child molester happily obscured by some kind of huge concrete tree, doing something awful to itself.

And this seems like as good an indication as any that the rest of the day won't unfold in an especially pleasing manner.

A woman I once slept with died recently. There was something wrong with her brain. The fluid had become infected. Various treatments proved ineffective. Tears undoubtedly rolled as doctors shook their heads in an expression of sorrow and regret. Loose ends were tied up. Stock was presumable taken. Plans were made, revised and then finalised. Good byes were said.

It was some kind of terrible virus that started in the bones of her back and then began to crawl upwards, affecting vision and memory and even motor skills. It was one of those long, hard battles during which the human body reveals to you just how hard to work with it can be, if it wants to.

I hadn't seen the woman in over five years, and didn't know she was sick until she was gone, but when a mutual friend told me she had died, my first reaction was "Aids? I bet it's Aids. Fuck, what if she had Aids? That's it for you now, you're done."

The worst part of momentarily believing I was carrying the HIV virus wasn't the idea that I was going to perish. It was picturing how awkward it would be to have to be to go out into the world and tell various females that I might have given them "The Monster."

Because what are the rules for an engagement like that? Where do you have to take them? Coffee would be better, it would enable you to make a quicker exit, but my gut tells me that you probably owe them dinner, a situation that presents it's own set of equally vexing issues: Would it be appropriate to order meat? Should you get drunk? Red wine would perhaps have an unsettling symbolic meaning, given the context of the discourse. Should you wait until desert to ruin her evening (and, perhaps, life), or get it out of the way early and try to coast through the rest of the evening suavely?

Maybe you should drive them down to the reservoir and softly explain how you've doomed them forever while slugging from a bottle of Jamesons, backlit by the headlights of a rental car so they don't have to see the expression on your face.

These questions were not probed any further, because they became moot about 20 seconds after I first started asking them of myself. Which was a relief, but I still felt an eerie sense of dread for quite a while after, brought on by the fact someone I'd once been intimate with was now dead, even if it wasn't caused by something transferable.

It wasn't sadness, at least not personal, "loss of a friend" sadness ... Not for someone I hadn't seen (and had, in fact, successfully forgot even existed) for almost half a decade. There might have been a touch of that detached, far away sense of grief you feel when you see a dead hedgehog on the road or watch a news report about a couple of aeroplanes flying into a set of skyscrapers.

But, that's getting away from the point ...

Let's face it, nine times out of ten, nobody wants to see the people they've slept with ever again. It leads to nothing except an intense feeling of anguish that likes to manifest itself as a throb in the left side of your head and a lot of unanswerable questions (Like, "What's your phone number" and "What happened to all the tranquillisers in my medicine cabinet" and "Why did you strangle me so hard?").

But that isn't to say we want them down in the ground. Dealing with the idea that body parts you once touched are now rotting in the earth does nothing positive at all. It conjures no agreeable images. It means you've crossed a line and The Big Nothing is just that little bit nearer. You've been in contact with a skeleton. You've been riding with a ghost.

Even if you no longer have any personal connection to them, sharing a (brief) sexual past with someone who is now doing the termite dance (and has, for all intent and purpose, become nothing but the past) sands away one more layer between you and the end. In that "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" way, it means something huge and nasty is bearing down on you.

It's like the time you found the mouldy pear in the back of the refrigerator, except washing your hands twelve times in a row doesn't remove the stench.

There are a lot of sinister pathologies being practised in the world today. People have grown devious. They use underhanded tactics to achieve goals that would keep most of us awake at night. Grown men wear bright red robes and chant in latin, expelling breath that smells of rotting vanilla stems. Others collect china cups with pictures of Princess Diana on them. Records of the dvd box sets you buy from Amazon.co.uk are kept in some type of virtual vault, and then the information is correlated by a nerd who uses it to e-mail you recommendations that bare no relation to any of the items you've previously decided to purchase.

You go to the movies and you see a sign on the door telling you that, when possible, it would be advisable not to carry bags onto the premises - In case you're thinking about blowing up the 8:45 showing of The Heartbreak Kid, spraying gore and hair across Ben Stiller's thirty foot tall face and scattering limbs and bone out into the foyer and across the bar that recently became a "Tobacco Free Environment."

The police drive around with cameras attached to the roofs of their vans and sniffer dogs pull you over at the train station. Their handlers take you to one side and inform you that you've been in contact with someone using prohibited drugs in the past 24 hours. And they look disappointed when the (apparently legal) search comes up with nothing (and one of them will be unable to mask his jealously when they notice the label in your suit). You discover the dog's name was "Cilla."

These things occur daily. You wake up in the morning, look out the window and see something red and pulpy being scrapped up off the road by minimum wage paramedics. And then you log onto the internet and are instantly tracked by people you went to school with who have become addicted to hair-gel and pointless trauma.

Some thing casts a shadow across the peephole in your door. One of your less distinguished peers keeps winning awards. You open a bottle of shampoo and it smells like the sewer. All the toothpaste brands burn your gums. The pipes start making clinking sounds at odd intervals and kids with speech impediments, wearing Fred Perry shirts, approach you at the golf course, trying to interest you in low-quality balls and you keep hearing, from different people, the theory that Ian Curtis was "suicided" by faceless spooks for reasons too grim to ponder.

It gets to the point where your only relief comes from closing the blinds and pouring a glass of red wine and then watching the woman you're on first name basis with taking her Nicole Farhi jeans off in front of you and admiring the dents around her collar bone.

But even that will sometimes wear you down, because after, when she wants to "go eat", you get in her car and have reservations about putting on the seat belt because every day there's another story about the belt springing back out of the socket and cutting some kid's arm off and also because you've decided to believe the NFL is fixed, which will impact your finances greatly over the next few months. Or because, once you've sat down, the woman you're on a first name basis with might want you to share your suspicions about carbon-based life with her.

Nothing bothers us more than the image of the double helix. IVF Treatment: how do we know those kids won't melt like wax when they get to fifty? After all, no one figured out smoking was bad in the first few decades.

Over in the US, when the police decide to bug someone's phone or install some kind of electronic transmitter in their home or place of business, they need permission from a judge. Written permission.

Probably cause must be shown. The relevant parties must "first make a sworn written application to a judge specifically describing the location where the communications will be intercepted, the reasons for the interception, the duration of the surveillance, and the identity of any persons whose conversations will be monitored. The application must also explain whether less intrusive investigative techniques have been tried. Electronic surveillance may not be used as a first step in an investigation when less intrusive means are likely to succeed."

If these steps aren't followed, any and all evidence picked up by the surveillance would be inadmissible.

You might hear some frenzied preacher talking to himself in his artfully tiled downstairs toilet about the time he took a first class flight out to Somalia and ate five or six children for lunch and then shot a homeless woman in the face, just for laughs, and it wouldn't matter because unless the correct steps had been taken, it wouldn't, legally, have happened.

You could intercept Hillary Clinton on a tiny plastic Motorola cellular phone, reminiscing, with a practising satanist who keeps his christmas tree up all year round, about the good old days when they used to get zapped on pochine and then beat stray german shepherds until they lapsed into comas and their brains leaked out through their ears ... But, unless you have that little piece of paper from the court, technically, no one heard it.

And, so, with all that in mind, the question is: Is it okay for your girlfriend to brake up with you over pieces of information she only obtained by surreptitiously reading your Facebook account?

Tense conversation with some woman from the Inland Revenue this morning. She wanted to know why, since I officially declared myself self-employed three years ago, I haven't paid a penny in tax.

I decided to tell her that I'd been out of the country for exactly three years, fought the impulse to tell her that she had an alluring telephone accent.

"What countries did you work in? That might have to be assessed."

I told her I hadn't worked in any of them.

"If you don't mind me asking, Sir, how then have you been supporting yourself?

Pondered an insincere response to that one for a moment or two, settled on, "Rich girlfriends."

There was then a hideous silence that quickly grew so uncomfortably that I finally had to break it by saying, "When the flood comes, every man tries to grab a floating orange crate."

Contrary to popular belief, the most common question I'm asked, day to day, isn't "How do you keep your hair looking so shiny and feeling so soft without taking away from your rugged good looks?"

And another question I'm never asked is, "Sam, why don't you devote more coverage to some agent's insanely dull industry blog?" But, guess what ... I've decided to address it anyway!

So, let's take a look at what Jonathan Lyons (of Lyons Literary LLC) recently had to say about the intensely important subject of the Author biography:


"Lately I've noticed a number of queries that were skimpy on a biography. Most agents really do
care about your professional and personal history - at least in how it connects to your work. I've listed below the basic areas you should hit.

* Publishing Credentials. Previous books, short stories, etc. Other agents might feel differently, but POD books don't impress me, unless the sales are significant.

* Professional Career. What do you do for a living? How does it affect what you write? Do you have a special knowledge that will be evident in the manuscript?

* Personal Details. List anything that affects your writing. Where do you live? Hobbies? Major events in your childhood? Family?"


If I were a literary agent, I would probably:

A) Drink two or three bottles of Stoli a day, in a (no doubt futile) attempt to quell the intense feelings of shame and degradation constantly brought on by the knowledge I was living the life of a bloodsucking whore.

And, perhaps more pertinent to what we're talking about today...

B) spend more time actually reading and considering the manuscripts I'd been sent than carefully vetting the artist's employment history and contemplating the name of the street their mother moved them to when they were twelve years old and what that infomation might or might not mean.

But then, what do I understand about it? I'm sure these people know what they're doing. Otherwise, why would so many of them be wandering about the earth with such a deeply ingrained sense of smug self-satisfaction. Maybe the amount of time someone spend cleaning out the filters at Starbucks does say something about the rhythm of their prose or their capability to construct interesting dialogue.

Do your interests happen to include playing Volleyball? Well, that's unfortunate, because Volleyball is boring and it obviously speaks volumes about your clear inability to write an engaging or intriguing book ... Clearer than, you know, actually reading the book itself.

Back to the scrap heap, Kid. Do not pass go. And thanks for letting another fevered ego take contol of your existence.

I wouldn't like to pick a favourite line in amongst all that utterly riveting information, but if you pressed the muzzle of a gun to my dog's cranium and forced me to choose, I'd have to go for:

"POD books don't impress me, unless the sales are significant."

Which, when translated, actually says, "I don't have a high opinion of people who have self-published their work. But, hey, if it's turned a buck, the smell of cash will override even my own convictions and beliefs ... ."