Right now, Sally puts down her coffee and waits for the percolator to stop with a silence more shocking than any noise, and asks me: so, how you doing?

I tell her not-too-bad.  I tell her I got a new job in Pest Control, and it's going okay.  I say, 'you?'

She says she's been taken-on by a consultancy firm specialising in Problem Solving and the hours are pretty rough.

We both grin.  Our little joke.

This is the conversation we have every time.  Some days I tell her I got a new job as a troubleshooter.  Some days a cleaner, specialising in stain-removal.  Some days I'm a gamekeeper.

In the past I've been an undertaker and a waste-disposal operative.  I've been a Resources Redistribution Manager.

Some weeks, I work in Personnel.

All our murderous little euphemisms.  All our little jokes.

Sally steals a piece of bacon from the edge of my plate, prying it out of the eggyolk setting like mustard cement.  Already it's putting me in mind of bright sauce and monosodium glutamate and microwave curry sinking into the carpet as its owner thrashes and gurgles and just-won't-sodding die.

That's a-whole-nother-story.

Move on.

She puts the bacon between her teeth and nibbles, sort of ladylike despite the grease, despite the haystack hair, and she asks me again about The Plan. 

 'How close are you?' she wants to know.

She loves hearing about The Plan.

Most guys, this trade, they have a plan without a capital "P".  Mostly it's a vague thing – a sketchy idea of what and where and when and how.  Maybe they'll quit and open a bar.  Maybe they'll retire and spend their days playing golf.  Maybe they'll drink themselves silly and die of cirrhosis.

Also, sclerosis of the liver.

Also, pulmonary tuberculosis.

I don't drink.

Most guys, it never comes-off.  They tell themselves "I'll do it tomorrow," and they take One More Job.  They tell themselves, "when I get around to it."

These guys, you see them around.  Small men in pubs.  Faces like a ploughed field, skin like leather.  Cigarettes and cheap beer, eyes like mummified Pharaohs, resenting everything and everyone.

Tutankhamen thought he'd live forever too.

Sally does not have a plan.

Mine is written in concrete.

In the inside pocket of my jacket is a piece of paper.  It's folded six times into a rectangle and sealed with sellotape.  On the paper is a number.  I haven't looked at it in about six months, but I know it off by heart.

I wrote the number two years ago, with the blue biro from the cheap desk-organiser next to the computer in my flat.  This number, all you need to know about it is: it's big.  All you need to know about it is, it has a bunch of zeroes and a pound sign.

This is the magic number.  This is my Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Borrowed wisdom.  Days and days on the Internet.  Daytime teevee.  A place in the sun.  Moving on.  Making notes, tapping a calculator.

Working out the price of Getting-the-fuck-Out.

Let me tell you: Golden beaches and waving palms.  Real estate prices in Mexico, St Lucia, Antigua, Bali. 

Let me tell you: the cost of living in Mombassa, Cancun, Dubai, the Algarve.  Flights, taxes, visas. 

Let me tell you: Melbourne, maybe, Aukland, Pretoria, Rabat, Tobego, Honolulu.

That's the plan. 

Remember the Golden Rule?

It's. All. About. The. Money.

This is why.

I never had family holidays.  I never squeezed aboard a baggage-class human cigar with wings.  I never had two weeks in the sun, paddling in rock pools, eating paella, lying on beaches, building sandcastles.  I never left the UK. 

And I.

Hate.

It here.

I'm up to my ears in my own shit.  Stick a pin in the roadmap and there's blood there, see it, oozing from the hole, filling-up the motorways and the suburbs and the countryside, spilling down the white-fucking-cliffs of Dover, lapping at the edge of Hadrian's wall, funnelling down the Severn bridge like a tsunami to drown Wales, waves pounding the Midlands, sucking through the New Forest, filling the Lakes, souring the Home counties, great gouts of arterial slime mixed with broken bullets and heroin; rippling, pooling, crashing down on the last dry spot.  London.  An Island in a sea that I made, all alone, and it's sinking. 

Even captive animals learn to shit in the same corner, so they don't have to wade in their own filth.

My mother refused to leave this grey little land. 

I was the one who found her dead.

So fuck those old men who never chased their plan.  Fuck those mercenary wankers who didn't know when to quit.  Fuck state pensions and reduced bus fares and queuing for benefits and Getting By.  I have the magic number, to cover every cost, and then I'm gone.

Fuck everything else.

Sally likes this story.

It's All About The Money