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When Jennifer wanted to wait

Clogs and green trousers ignite with puke, a grotty rainbow Catherine-wheeling the gurney as it burns through A&E. Recoiling behind a perspex shield, a nurse yanks straps as sparks of orange sick spray from my lips. Go fuck yourself, I’m saying, but it’s just bile and spit. Unconsciousness would be a gift. Up-tempo teeth-chattering harmonises with flaps of skin tapping against the exposed bones and vessels of my wrists. Hands, arms, folds of bottle-coloured gown roll along as waves of motion, rhythmic ceiling lights surfing their sea until rubber fingers lift my slimy mouth upwards and force a plastic tube into my throat. Doctor faces buck, cotton masks puff and blow, brows bunch tight around nose bridges. The relief of white light compressing to black through double doors. Just let me fucking die. But they won’t, I know, if they can help it. My saviours swarm, buzz around me as tungsten-bright insect eyes consume my braced head and neck. The Queen is here. Syringes and pipes and knives cocoon my face, my face and my torso. Jennifer. Over my wrists against the edges of the glass, long shards from the broken shop window haloed around my arms, silver and white against the darkness of the alarmed interior. Bells deafen me with wo-wo. I sit apart from myself, from the gush of black liquid popping over the display models and my Nike shoes. Swinging like a towny drunk, the world punches me in the face with its pavement fist, leaving me flat on my back with a piece of glass clamped in my hand. The makedo shiv forces a spray of black pearls, jet droplets etched with Christmas baubles, into the chewing gum air as I ram it into my uncut wrist. The palm and fingers of my right hand slice widely. Wo-wo. Slam and slam and slam until my arms and hands are beyond control and so damaged all I see is pulp against the wheeling spots of shop-tops and streetlights, the translucent orange of the city night sky. Blood’s raining into my mouth and eyes while the stumps judder and the glass clatters off my cheek to the concrete slabs.

“Ambulance. This guy cut hissel up real bad. Oxforstree, side Carphone Warehouse a Centre Point. He gonna die, looks like.”

“Guggo,” I shout, clasping my pissing arms over my chest. Muddy headlights of cars and buses sloth behind the forest of feet now planted around me, and a man is yelling straight at my face, her cheeks and eyes on fire, her bleached hands raised in fists at chest height.

“I’m not fucking ready,” she screams, shoulder-length blonde hair jellyfishing around her as the words sting her body. “Maybe I never will be. I don’t want your fucking children. And stop calling to see where I am. Let me live my life. I’m not your dog. I’m your fucking wife.” Her face crumples. “For now, at least.”

“What the hell does that mean?” My palms are up. Chandelier candle bulbs rock under the plaster medallion overhead as she stamps on the living room’s wooden boards. Bending to her form, the air around her solidifies into a circus mirror of escalating energy. She warps. I step back. The room’s atmosphere is densified as if by a concussion grenade when she barks the words, her vocal chords stressed to the point of rupture.

“It means we’re done.”

The house shakes. Then rests. Highbury’s trees sluice in the silent afternoon behind sash windows; then the leaves in the street stand still. Bold pictures on neutral walls drip then evaporate. Our glaucous rug freezes and cracks.

“We’re done,” she says but I see nothing aside from the rigid foliage and motionless clouds, hear nothing but the door slamming as the last designer tugs on a mustard jacket and jogs out, an unlit cigarette spearing his mouth. Rings dump to answerphone. Sighing accompanies the click of the receiver. I run a hand under my glasses and over my eyes, blanking out my office door and the empty room outside it, the rows of computers and glass partitions cast in gloom by night-lighting. Jennifer beams from the framed wedding picture I keep on my desk. Her hands clasp over mine. The kilt seemed like a good idea nine years ago. I’m showing all my teeth. My reflection materialises as I shift focus. I find a man in shadow. His eyes are patches of black behind spectacle frames. His mouth is flat. His product-stiff, two-week haircut sits in pompous dictation over gym-hollowed cheeks.

“Not out with Jennifer tonight, boss?”

“No.” Miriam’s leaning against my doorframe. “She’s busy. Something she couldn’t get out of. Personal stuff.” I smile. “You’re in here late?”

“Just finishing. It’s your birthday, no? Come for a drink with me, if you like. Doesn’t sound like you’re doing much else.”

Miriam, stick-wide Miriam with her photographic PR memory and cherry lipstick, is an infant. I’m 41 today. I’d be a 41 year-old, married man having sex with a child.

“No, thanks.” My voice wavers. “I’ll just sort out the AE release for the morning then I’ll be out.”

“Sure.” Words form on her painted lips, then vanish as she inhales. My fingers move back to my keyboard. “If you change your mind, call my mobile,” she says.

Her body's replaced by banks of PCs as she pulls away from the door. The phone’s still warm when I pick it up again and dial, and the tone’s so familiar it hardly registers when she cancels the call and drops the handset into her bag. Groups on surrounding leather sofas pay no attention thanks to the driving electro. Dancers towards the centre of the cavernous lounge rock at full peak, a chemical array of limbs and sweat. Rolling her made-up eyes and crossing her bare legs beneath the tiny white skirt, Jessica waves a lit cigarette at the man working at her feet.

“Him again?” He’s about thirty years old, a plaid shirt filled with muscles, Manga-black pupils pulsing below a lineless brow and salt-and-pepper crew cut. He’s chopping finger-width lines of cocaine onto a copy of Glamour.

“Fuck him,” she says. Smoke drips out of her sloppy mouth and she adjusts her knee to show knickers. “Give me some of that.”

He bites his lip and I order another Stella. The only thing I recognise of my old regular is the name above the door. Sports screens bully the bar, and the whole place stinks of paint. The man and wife team, him with the dicky eye and her with the pie face, are long gone. Dead, most likely. Bubbles creep up the pint, which tastes revolting. I buy a large Jameson and sit in a corner at one of the few tables to survive the transition to football. Then rise to buy another. When I sit back down, I drink the pint as quickly as possible and nearly drop the glass. Some woman in a dismal suit and blowtorch blusher sneers. I stare at her until she turns away, then I pick up my phone.

“Tim. It’s Michael.” Silence. “Michael Jeffreys.”

“Christ. Mike. Very long time no speak. How’s things?”

“Good, yeah. You?” He pauses. I down the Irish.

“What’s up?”

“I need to get some charlie. Can you still score?”

His voice becomes clipped.

“Nah. Mate, that was years ago.”

“Yeah, I know. Something’s come up. Was just wondering. You know if anyone else can sort something out?”

“Nah.”

I hang up. My eyes are watering. After another round I get the tube into town. Some place in Soho, lit in blue, and the smell of poppers. A tuk-tuk takes me to a sex shop, shelves of ejaculation beyond the plastic strips. The cardboard trays of golden glass bottles are near the till.

“They’re three for two.” The brutally thin attendant, all dyed black hair and pierced face, looks up from a video game magazine. “Special offer. Lucky you.”

Neon strips on the street outside wear raindrops as jewellery, fuzzing my vision so hard I find it difficult to stand. A doorway to a closed bookstore gives me shelter. Solvent fumes and the stench of piss. My heart thunders. The Stella begins to climb back up to my mouth.

“Wannany rocks?”

Brandy miniature bottle tapped through and fitted with a bent gauze flame bright shines diamond milky smoke in ribbon streams and I jabber around in circles round and round and I shake and chatter she left me she left me I can’t she left me so I so I shake in rain and shake she left meshake in rain and shakesheleft me shake in rain then I stop.

“Good, innit.”

“Two.”

“Twenny each.”

Notes.

“You need a pipe?”

“No. Leave me alone.”

“Come on, man. Lemme help you.”

I hamster the polythene-wrapped crack into my cheek, wet brick wall running against my palm as I limp forward into Oxford Street, a sparkling concrete valley rivered by headlights, and he’s gone. I cry and I cry and I cry then I shout and I scream and shapes around me become further away and I hear a voice and words telling people to fuck off fuck off fuck off then I grab a bike she left me and hurl it through a shop window leftmewant to die slam my wrists are wrapped in snowy surgical dressings. The two plaited cotton shapes are detached, alone. My brain pencils in the bedclothes, the pea green blankets, the playground grass to my injuries. Brave soldier. Air conditioning and Jennifer’s breathing. She’s sitting at the other end of the bed on a blue plastic chair. Her tiny hands rest on thick tights, her knees protruding from a black skirt.

Waves of golden hair frame her gypsum face, threading around her ears and down her brutish jaw to a neck so smooth it looks painted. Lucifer-red eye sockets surround sapphire cores. Dwindling anaesthetic robs detail, blending the aquiline nose and pressured mouth into the glossed wall behind her. A white oval and two bloody spots. The marks she leaves on our sheets every month. The ovary eyes blink, and when she speaks she’s quiet as a primary school prayer, the sound washed away by institution air.

“I love you,” she says.

Meredith

I doubt Meredith could have been happier when I handed over her first penknife. All I could see were beaming teeth. I told her to be careful with it, and she promised. She's a big girl. She's six. I showed her how to break it apart so she could use it to eat - it's a complete, fold-away cutlery set - and she tried the spoon on an aluminium plate of canned lentils and sausage I'd heated on a gas burner. We were hoping to see bats as the light dropped, as they usually feed over the river at dusk, but the water was so clogged with deadfall on the bend next to our camp I assume it would have been impossible to fly. I set up the bivouac, and after the meal we washed the dishes in the Vézère. Meredith made me jump around like a rabbit on the stones next to the river, something she found hysterically funny. Eventually we just sat and watched the summer water flow around the faces in the boulders. After we lay down, the trees blackened so deeply that we couldn't see our fingers, or our feet, or the trunks on which I'd tied the ridgeline.

Meredith has been giving me sleepless nights recently. I'm losing my daughter, as every father loses every daughter, and the realisation that her toddlerish world of surreal imagination is being chipped away by time is making me increasingly sentimental. I'd announced I was taking Meredith to sleep rough in the woods with me one evening over dinner, much to my wife's weariment, and the girl was thrilled. I'd never done any such thing before, obviously, so went on a trial run alone to practice setting up the camp, see how much water to take and use a compass. I decided I was going to give Meredith her first knife. I could see the shift in her, and I was determined to make our memories. I took her down a gradient so steep we would have been in serious trouble if one of us had fallen, well out of range of any mobile mast and not expected to appear until the following morning, but she lolloped spider on the roots and rocks, bright fear bonding us as we hunted the bank for a flat spot to sleep. Then we played and ate and explored and slept. I took a picture of Meredith in her sleeping bag. I kept a four-inch tactical folding knife in my fist for the entire night, and always ensured I could feel her next to me.

She's starting CP next week. This is the first year of "proper" school in France, the year in which children get homework and do real classes. Primaire's finished. She can speak fluent French and read in English. She can count to 100 and write her name. She knows the difference between a cep and a fly agaric. She can ride a horse.

She has her own penknife.

It occurred to me just how quickly she was changing when I read Through the Looking Glass with her over this summer holiday. At the very end of the book is a poem which has nothing to do with the text itself. Dodgson always claimed that Alice wasn't based on a real person, but he knew a young family of three children - Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell - he clearly references in the verses. He talks about "a boat, beneath a sunny sky" in July, and "children three that nestle near" to hear his story. But "long has paled that sunny sky: echoes fade and memories die: autumn frosts have slain July."

The children are "dreaming as the summers die." When I read it to Meredith I stroked her head and she looked at me as though she could see nothing else. I'm watching the leaves of her total innocence wither, and it's so painful I sometimes wish I could hide her with me in the woods forever. But I can't. And I have to let go of the rabbit by the river and the shining face in the trees. I have to let go of my beautiful little girl, and accepting it is truly breaking my heart.

My boys will be next. They're starting school together next week, and I can already see the doubt in their expressions, the knowledge that they're going to have to be brave, away from their parents and alone for the first time. But they're excited about coming with me to the woods when they're bigger, and about owning their own knives and torches. As they get older, I'll teach the three of them to trap, fish, build fires and find their own way. I'll make our memories while I'm still here, and I'll show them that there are bats over the water and faces in the rocks, that magic doesn't have to evaporate with the summer of childhood. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I didn't try.

Toast

I love to toast,
I love to toast.
Toast's when I like bread the most.
There's nothing better
When you're a host,
Than to give your guests
Some lovely toast.

How to read more, avoid rewriting your novel

I haven't started rewriting the Ooning yet. Actually, that's not true. I've done a good deal of work on it, but I've managed to avoid putting down any of the second draft by doing other things. I'm now happy with it from a plot perspective. I think. A friend recommended I read Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris. She'd heard it gave out good advice for struggling first-timers, and so it does. It's short, but does an enlightening job of walking you through the most common traps associated with getting your book to completion. It affirmed I was right to rewrite from scratch. It wasn't finished. It's barely started, in fact.

The first draft is just that. It'll probably have to be redone another two times. I'm fine with that now, and reworking the plot has come up with something infinitely more interesting that the version I have now. Roz's book gives a few methods on studying structure (I won't go into detail, as you really should buy it; the Kindle edition's only a few quid) and moving blocks of narrative to create a book that won't bore people to death. Probably worth knowing.

Reading Nail Your Novel was encouraging. I'd already arrived at a lot of its devices and systems through trial and error over the last 20 years. Roz is a bestselling author, so I'll put this down to my dormant genius and leave it at that.

But. I still haven't started writing the second draft. There's a bit more work to do on the structure, I tell myself. I can't start until I'm absolutely sure, I say. I know I'm deliberately pushing it back because I remember what it took to get through the first draft. That and "I'm busy". Pathetic. And tired. Who isn't? I'll start very soon.

Positivity has emerged from my heel-dragging, however. I'm reading a lot more, more than I've done in years. A couple of things have driven this aside from work-avoidance, so I thought I'd share. Simply:

• Get yourself a Goodreads account. I've mentioned this before, but it really is a great site. Everything about it encourages you to read. Reading's good. Do this.
• Buy a Kindle. Anecdotally I'm sure you've heard friends say they started reading more when they bought one. It's true. I got one for Fiona a few Christmases ago, and she uses it a lot. I bought a Kindle Touch recently and I can't put it down. Instant books and dictionary, an amazing screen, one-handed reading (handy for Fifty Shades of Grey) and never having to worry about carting heavy books around again make Kindle essential for any reader or writer. Why don't you have one? I finished Matterhorn on it a few days ago (it's a 600-page book with none of the annoyances of 600-page books) and now I'm reading a Palahniuk on paper. It's a great novel, but going back to springy, shadowed, curvy pages feels odd. It's digital for me.

If you write you should read a lot. If you're not reading a lot, sort it out. It inspires you to write. It's inspiring me to write. I will get Ooning draft two complete this year.

San Francisco

When I connect my phone to my laptop it boots iPhoto and pictures of my children appear on the screen, so I quit it as fast as I’m able. I don’t watch anything on the plane related to children or families, because it makes me cry. I start watching Warrior. It’s a terrible film. Nick Nolte’s the father of two men, one an ex-marine fallen into alcoholism and the other a physics teacher facing default on his mortgage. There’s a scene in a bank, in which the teacher tries to convince the manager to help him, but he won’t. He gives him 90 days to catch up with payments on his house or he’s going to repossess it. The teacher has two little girls. I have to stop watching.

My boys seem older than when I left. They show me tattoos on their arms and tell me what they did that day, or the day before, and I make them laugh by showing the camera my open mouth or by walking round the room with the laptop or by showing them the street outside. That’s America, I tell them, and they say yes, daddy, that’s America. Will you bring me a present? I want a car with big wheels so I can roll it.

I don’t really understand much. I have confusing meetings in which I nod my head and look serious, in which someone else always asks the right question, but not me. I see people I haven’t seen for a great deal of time, and the conversation always dries quickly. There’s looking at the floor, or the wall, or another person, and we shake hands and leave to do other things, except I do little apart from moving to the next stilted hello. There are some I’m pleased to spend time with, but few. I stare at things. When I’m standing in a lift I face forwards and I know the doors are moving and the car is rising or falling, but it’s a different part of me that knows and cares about it, the auto-me that stops me walking in front of buses and gets me through the day-to-day motions of checking in and out, paying people money and eating. The me part of me sees a mess, someone else’s reality blended to geometry and colour. The strangeness of my wakefulness is percolating into the other me, and both sides know nothing will stop the rotting of the membrane. It’s just a matter of time.

A homeless person stands on the sidewalk with his arms outstretched as I walk along with a man who’s just paid my breakfast bill. We both ate steak and eggs. The beggar smiles broadly. A super-size soda cup rattles in his hand. He says hey like the Fonz, as if doing this will make us give him some money. There is a block and some noise, and on the road behind him are moving blocks and to the left is some blue. The rattling man is behind us now, and I shake my meeting’s hand. It was good to see him. Now he’s gone.

There’s a film I’ve been meaning to see for some time. We have a little horror discussion club on Twitter and Facebook, and someone dropboxes me an AVI I manage to get down on the hotel’s free Wi-Fi instead of going to a party. I sit in my empty room and watch the film on my computer. I refresh Twitter as a couple are tortured to death in a dungeon by a man dressed in medical clothes. He straps them both to frames and masturbates them to orgasm in front of each other, starting with the woman. It doesn’t make much sense. She squirts onto his hand. When he ejaculates, he covers her midriff with semen from six feet away. Later, he nails the man’s testicles to a table and severs his penis with a kitchen knife before cutting off the woman’s nipples with a pair of scissors. In the middle of the film we get an earthquake, a 4.3. Mirrors rattle for seconds after a thump, and it feels to me as though there’s a fat person rolling a beer barrel down the hall outside my room. I don’t know what’s happened until I see people tweeting about it. The jailer kills the young man by strapping his intestines to a hook and inviting him to crawl across a floor to grab a pair of scissors so he can cut his love free. I’m looking at my own chin in the mirror as the credits roll. It wasn’t a very good film.

We have two types of blade. He knows what I want as a result of me saying I need a pack of safety. After the word safety the blurred me stops, and the rest of the action fails to transfer to motor-me. I stop talking and look at him. It's pointless trying to explain what's happened, so I don't. Gillette and something else I don’t catch. Disappointment pinches his bespectacled blue eyes and picks at the folds of his beautifully shaved skin. Gillette are sharper, he says, and I say that’s fine. I want two boxes. They come in packs of five, he says. They keep them in the cabinet behind the tills, leaving only brushes, gift boxes and tubs of lather on display in the main part of the shop. While he bends down I look over a glass cabinet full of cut-throats, from old styles to modern builds milled from single blocks. Through a door in the back of the shop is a chair spinning slowly next to a large man. A royal shave costs fifty five dollars. Here you go, says the man. He charges me thirteen dollars and I leave.

Hot link. You want more coffee? No thank you, I say. I wanted to sit at a table, but the man made me sit at the counter. The grill in front of me is staffed by two men, one doing the eggs and one cooking meat and hashbrowns. The egg man has five frying pans and can make omelettes and fried eggs as easily as he can breathe. He uses a ladle to fetch oil from a great, reused bain-marie pot at the back of the hob next to the wall. The other man uses another ladle to cover his griddle with watery oil, then picks up a plastic bag of shredded potato and tips pounds of it into the corner of the plate. Then he pours more oil on top of it and shovels it against a black metal wall at the side of the grill. He uses weights with wooden handles to press bacon and burgers into the fat. Sausages are deep-fried. Do you need the change, sir? No. I don’t.

Do you have another card? This one’s been refused. Yes, hang on. There. No, this one’s been refused as well. Can you put it through manually? No. Is there an ATM in here? There’s an ATM right there. Could you please just hold onto the bag for me for a second? Sure. He pulls away the brown paper bag containing the two toy trucks and a pair of binoculars for my daughter. I walk over to the ATM and my card works. When I return to the counter he has to scan everything again because a woman went to the same till after me to buy a banana.

Pull me to try me. The exhaust pipes on the trucks move forwards to trigger honking and engine noises. I try them both in turn, touching only the exhaust pipes and no other part of the packaging. The thought of the boys doing the same makes me happy. The excitement of the noise will last for maybe a week. In the back of each truck is a ball, presumably for loading. I'm unsure as yet as to whether or not I'll buy them, so I step aside from the shelf and stand at the intersection to two aisles. Most of the toys in the chemist are branded Disney, and I don't like that. I stand in the aisle with my arms by my side and look at some nuts. I'm not looking at anything. Lines wash up to the ceiling. I relax my hands and my lips pop open.

My name is Michael. How are you today? Michael is holding his hand out to me. I’m fine, thank you, I say, shaking it. Is there anything I can help you with today? No. I’m waiting to get on a plane and I’m bored. He doesn’t smile. Right, so you’re thinking of picking one of these up before you fly home? He gestures at the MacBook Pro. I already have one. I don’t need two. I’m just bored. Right. Well if you have any questions at all, I’m right here. Thank you, I say. That’s reassuring.

I arrive at the airport four hours early because I have nothing else to do. The town car driver tries to talk to me at first, but I’m monosyllabic and he gives up after chuckling his way through a story of how he took a day off yesterday to ride his motorbike but was thwarted by some fog. Buildings then sea, blurred by window tint. People speak French in the queue for the baggage drop-off. I buy a root beer and walk down to the gate to find an empty seating area. I sit next to a plug. Another man, an older man, sits next to me in a room of a hundred empty seats, takes out the same laptop as mine and plugs it into the same socket as me. He puts on earphones and watches a film. His presence is a white bulge on the left side of my vision, as if an albino person has forced his fist into my eye and is refusing to remove it. A woman walks down to our part of the gate area looking for a socket. Neither of us acknowledge her and she goes away again.

Open face

    Gin fizzed in the tall boy, and the girl to his left glanced at him through shadow. Red and black soaked the room. Ahead, away from the patch of darkness he'd specifically chosen, three incongruous men dressed in brickie's clothes shouted over the din, stick-thin students sneering at them past buck teeth and eyeliner. A mirror on the far wall, closer to the door, showed half bar and half window leading to the wet night outside. Coal could see two bouncers in the silver light, luminous armbands Nazi over greatcoats. They wore black gloves. He finished half the drink in a mouthful and pushed himself further into the corner, only the knee of his crossed leg and the tip of his shoe visible to the curious twentysomething in the lit part of the table, sitting drinking with three others. His head, she saw, was a mark against the back of the sofa, eyes and teeth imagined. His hand flashed in the light as it took the drink again, the glass returning empty. He stared at her from his hole and she looked away.
    The bar was packed. He rolled his body off the edge of the seat, refusing to show his face to the woman, and vanished into the toilet. Indonesian decor suited Brighton's young population well, but Coal stared dead at the wooden carvings. Just gin. He locked himself away from the urinals and brought out a wrap, thankful to find the toilet empty when he entered. He ran a finger along the cistern and found it covered in jelly. He tipped powder onto the back of his hand, brought it to his face and inhaled. Fuck you. Gin.
    Back in the bar's black he found his seat taken. A wooden corridor ran down to the service area, away from the main floor space, and was only partially clogged with people. The cocaine was better than usual, and the back of his throat was already cold closed, his tongue numb. He used the fairy lights surrounding the bar to lead him through the passage and emerged to find a three-deep queue of man-boys with Sassoon hair and uncasual Goth-girls waiting neatly for drinks. He waited at the side of the throng, a man with a sweaty face and torn t-shirt eyeing him, a ten pound note clamped in a ringed hand. He backed his stare away from Coal's blank face, scrunching his brow.
    The brickies were becoming violent, heard even over the drippy house and clatter of posturing. One of them was shouting in Brighton Cockney, unseen behind the back of the wooden corridor. Coal evaporated as a glass flew over the bar and the doormen burst into the room. No one can see me. A scream and a bloody teenager. Bulldog men barking through the crowd, turned looks of panic in the velvet light, black donkey jackets bulking over the bony arms of boys and girls, an overweight woman dressed against her years shrieking as a roaring bouncer managed to squeeze his way through the press at the bar.
    A heavy impact shook the wall of the flimsy wooden passage. The bouncers were there, and power-shouts rocked over an exploding table and a cascade of sweetened glass. Grunting. Can't see me. Coal moved around the neck of the corridor, grinning, sliding an unloved cocktail from a small table and looking past the opening crowd to see the bouncers controlling the situation with headlocks and surreptitious fists.
    “Fuck you,” yelled a brickie from an armpit's folds. Another leant against a sofa, his face torn by glass. Coal snarled and finished the drink in one. “Fuck off. You fucking cunt. Fuck off. I'll fucking kill you.”
    “You fucking do that,” shouted the bouncer, sliding a heel down brickie shin. The man screamed and unbalanced himself, giving his captor the chance to haul him away from the scene by his neck. The other bouncer had approached the bleeding man with one hand outstretched in a gesture of calm. The injured brickie was crumpled with shock, and Coal saw now that his was seriously hurt, one side of his face sliced open. Coal saw teeth. The bouncer yelled for an ambulance as the brickie in the headlock threw himself into the mess of people surrounding the bar. The music stopped. The girl who'd been watching Coal in the shadows while he drank his gin was screaming at the top of her lungs, her friends pulling her away from the shaking man standing next to the sofa. The bouncer in front of him was gently wrapping a glass cloth over the wound in an effort to stem the bleeding.
    Coal sat at one of the upright tables while the rest of the people at the bar either left or stood in the midst of spilt alcohol and sounds of fear, watching on in morbid fascination. The front doors rushed open as the police entered, pushing a group of men trying to enter the bar aside to shouts of derision. Coal grabbed another drink, a full pint of lager. He finished it in one, satisfied by fullness and suffocation as the police handcuffed the headlocked brickie. Coal waltzed around, dodging the paramedics and moving back into the wooden corridor, slipping down to the toilets. He opened the wrap and inhaled the contents straight from the paper, finishing it. He gasped in delight, the lighting in the toilet flaring against his watery eyes as the powder dissolved over their whites. Chatter was replacing shouting at the bar, and, as his stood there, one hand against the wall, his face contorted, he heard the music snap back on. Two young men entered, giving him a second look and giggling before one locked himself in the toilet, the other waiting outside by the mirror, smoking. Coal shook his head and pushed himself away from the wall, clenching his eyes then forcing them open again, leaving the toilet.
    Back in the bar, people were starting tore take their seats, disbelieving that the scene could be so quickly mopped up. Coal was exploding. His mouth was open and he panted, his coat flapping around his hips, his hands flexing. The seat where the bleeding man had stood was shiny with the residue of a cleaning cloth and conspicuously empty. He sat heavily, eyes bulging, teeth bared. He grabbed a cigarette from a packet in his pocket and lit it with a lighter from the table where the girl had sat. The people surrounding it turned to him, masked by the deliberate shadows, their conversation cut dead. Coal threw the lighter back where it had come from.
    “Sorry,” he said.
    A man approached Coal's table. He was somewhere around 40, dressed in jeans and wearing a light, navy jacket over a black t-shirt. His face was pocked and looked like orange peel under the red spots. He ticked his head in greeting, squinted then laughed at Coal's wire-tight body.
    “Mate,” he said loudly over the beat. “You want to fucking calm down. I'll get you a drink.”
    Coal hissed, unable to speak. The cigarette was nearly gone, and he pulled another from the pack, lighting it from the end of the first. Another man had joined pock-face at the bar, putting his arm around his shoulder, shouting in his ear with his drink order. He was obviously excited, waving briefly at Coal through a twisted smile as he disappeared down the corridor to the toilet. The edge was coming off Coal's cocaine, but only slightly. His heart hammered his ribs. He smoked as hard as the puny cigarette would allow, dragging the end until it fell from the filter. He threw the orange plastic to the floor as the man from the toilet returned, his nose covered in powder.
    “Fucking hell, man,” said Coal, pointing with disgust. The other laughed like a dog. There were drinks on the table now, pints of lager, and the first man sat down, jeans casing his legs like skin.
    “Bit better now?”
    “Fuck off, Tim,” said Coal.
    Tim snorted and looked pleased with himself, smoothing back hair containing too much product. Greasy fuck. He was sniffing and pushing his hand over his mouth, blowing heavily, sighing from the bottom of his chest. Every time he caught Coal's eyes he grinned, then went back to his blowing. The man who'd just been to the toilet had evidently had too much. Tim was relaxed, but toilet man was gurning heavily, struggling to even remain upright on the sofa. He kept lifting his feet onto the seat then putting them back on the floor. Tim watched him with glee. The music picked up again. 'Cos I got the pills. Pills pills pills pills pills pills pills. Toilet man looked as though he was about to have a heart attack.
    “Fucking sort it out,” said Coal. “You'll get us fucking thrown out.”
    Toilet tried to get a hold of himself. The people on the table next to them were staring over, occasionally laughing into their drinks. Coal stood up. He made two steps towards the table and stopped next to the girl with the lighter.
    “Something funny?”
    The four faces blanched
    I want you, I need you.
    “No, mate.”
    “Good.”
    Coal didn't move. Fear rocketed between the looks of the four and he felt a distinct drop in his high. He jerked his legs away towards the toilet, hearing a commotion erupt behind him before he even reached the wooden corridor. He turned to see toilet man wrestling with a bouncer, and sighed. Tim was stepping back from the table holding two pints of lager, still laughing. Coal made for the door, his knees working at odd angles, Tim arriving at his side, slotting a glass into his hand, the two of them parting the crowd while they drank the beer. The bouncer pushed toilet man passed them, knocking a group of cocktail-drinkers aside like ten-pins. Coal and Tim barged through the door, still holding their glasses, to find the way blocked by the bouncer's back. Toilet man sprawled in the street, laughing, shouting incoherently.
    “You can't go out with those,” said a gigantic man with a bald head. Coal and Tim bent and put the glasses on the floor next to the door. The bouncer made to say something about putting them back inside but they weren't listening, shoving past and out into the street. Tim grabbed toilet man by the collar, cars and spray streaking their vision with sparkling red and white, lurching lasers punctuated with punch-hole neon. Then they were gone.

    Coal led the way through black streets to find drink. Toilet man became more manageable as they walked down East Street, past the Into You tattoo parlour and round the back of the Thistle hotel, along the seafront. Tim's face weathered with the minutes, his hair becoming lank in the rain. Coal noticed nothing. They were refused entry at the first place he picked at random but they were composed enough to get away with it at the second. The bar was lit with yellow sections encircled with black. Coal did another quarter of a gram in the toilet and entered a stupor, slumped in the corner of a wooden pew behind a Guinness. Toilet man and Tim did occasional lines in full view of the bar and laughed at him. The barstaff stared out of the window at the wet. When Coal came round he was slurring heavily and chewing his lip.
    “Have some of this,” said Tim, offering a wrap. It contained loosely-formed, yellowish crystals. “Careful with that. Only a bit.”
    Coal put the paper on the table with perfect movements, autopilot actions, one eye open, the other fighting hard to focus, avoiding beer rings and piles of ash. He picked up one of the larger crystals between his thumb and forefinger, testing its hardness briefly before placing it on his tongue. The chemical taste of urine permeated his saliva as he crunched. The effect was remarkable. Within minutes he was sitting upright.
    “Nice,” said Coal.
    Tim winked and went to the bar for more drinks. The table was littered with glasses. Coal became mesmerised by ice in a tumbler. Toilet man lolled on a stool. Got to get out of here. Tim returned and put glasses of white spirits onto the table with thuds, the glass and liquid shimmering through milky light and blurred vision. Coal drank his whole.
    “Got any more of that powder?” he asked.
    “Of course I have.”
    Tim handed Coal a wrap. He opened it and swallowed half of the granules.
    “You'll be awake for a week,” said Tim. He sipped his drink and swayed. “I'm not joking. You'll be fucked.”
    Coal stared blearily at him, spilling some bluish drink down his shirt. He mumbled, then stood away from the table and lurched towards the door.
    “Where the fuck are you going?” said Tim, eyes drooping, a sloppy smile vanishing instantly to be replaced with little retches. He looked forwards again, unseeing, his chin nodding towards his chest as the vomit came. Coal fell into a table but managed to right himself; a woman dressed in a skin-tight t-shirt barked an obscenity. He stood with one hand on the table. The woman came at him again, closer this time. Something about a drink. He took a tentative step away towards the door. Another footfall didn't bring disaster and he made some more, clattering through the half-locked double door and onto the street. Come on. Fucking come on. Want to fuck. Hey man, what the fuck's wrong with you? Fuck. Fuck off.
    A hand on a wall. A spiraling can of beer, arching foam against the sky, lit from below. A sex shop. Three for one poppers. Do you a deal, mate. Fucking hell. Mark, check this out. Fingers and wrist covered in cold liquid. Hard puking, pounding. Black again. A cab.
    “I want to have sex with girls.”
    Silence from the front of the car then the rustle of a nylon jacket.
    “What?”
    “I need a brothel. Fuck knows. Do you know?”
    A foreign man covered in hair in the car's interior light, orange, an eye's glint and a diseased lung.
    “I know one place.”
    Coal fought to keep his head up, sprawling over the seat, yelping non sequiturs.
    “Have you got any money?”
    “Yeah. Fucking money. Yeah, I have. Don't fucking worry.”
    He made random noises. The driver turned to face the grimy windscreen and put the car in gear, the engine whining into life against a backdrop of thinning traffic. Coal pushed himself upright, instantly going over again, pressing his face into the seat's cloth, grunting, his fingers and toes cramping uncontrollably. Fuck. The car swung a left, leaving thick streetlight behind, darkness becoming interspersed with occasional white. Fuck. He managed to get himself up again, forcing his back into the seat. He looked up at the rearview mirror to find a pair of eyes fixed intently on the backseat, shooting back to the road, then back again to the man behind. Coal couldn't escape the back-throat taste of solvent and busied himself with trying to ascertain where they were going. Nothing outside the car's watery windows made any sense. Don't fucking care.
    The eyes flashing in the mirror, a stream of Brighton streets and never any sign of the sea. Tiny roads he never knew existed. Deep breaths. Just weathering a storm. The car stopped.
    “How much?” Coal was having difficulty forming words. He felt as though his mouth was being torn apart.
    “A tenner. That door.”
    He hooked his fingers through the handle, unable to flex them, using them as a handless man might use a hook. The muscles at the top of his arm were in a hopeless spasm, leaving him flapping at the elbow, unable to get enough traction to open the door. The eyes in the front were replaced by hair as the driver turned.
    “I need a tenner, mate.”
    Coal pulled the fingers away from the door. He sat still, the driver staring at his warping face, waiting for the exact moment when he'd be able to reach inside his jeans and pull out his wallet. His cheeks were rising and falling independently of his mouth, which by turns showed pushed lips and teeth. God. Come on. He bunched together the fingers of his right hand and pushed them into the top of his pocket. His chest jerked but next he was out of the car, his hand crushing his brown leather wallet, the door open, the driver obviously satisfied.
    “Nice one,” said the man, laughing, getting out on the pavement to close the back door, never taking his eyes from Coal's back. “You have a good time.”
    Coal waved a claw behind him by way of farewell. The world in front of his eyes was streaking at beserk angles as his head jarred from side to side, a yellow door with hacked paint spinning upwards and opening inwards to a flight of stairs covered in red lino sided by a stripped pine banister. A room with a huge man and a table with a plant.
    “You alright, love?”
    “Want two women. How much?”
    Blond hair piled and pinned. Garish make-up. The man unmoved on the sofa. The impression of tits.
    “Forty five quid. That good for you?”
    “Yeah. Good. Where do I go?”
    The room was a mess of colour. Red and green carpet merged into the blue walls and the woman looked to him as though she was being thrown violently from side to side.
    “Wait there.”
    She picked up the phone.
    “Yeah. He wants two girls. He's really pissed.”
    The man led him through the door and up some more stairs. Two flights. Another woman and a room with a bed and a television. This is a fucking nightmare.
    “Why don't you sit here for five minutes and watch this? Get you in the mood, yeah?”
    She had dark hair and pushed him down gently at the shoulder, but he fell most of the way to the edge of the bed. Chipped patent stilettos from the back as she walked from the room, the door closing. Porn blared on the ancient TV, the room's light dancing over the superimposed image of cock and cunt. A white square framing skin against the red drench from numerous bulbs on the walls. The lurching was redoubled, and he whimpered, the door opening on a man with the face of a crying child. There were no tears. Two women walked in, both wearing untied pink dressing gowns over negligees, stockings and suspenders, a different colour for each woman. What the fuck. One of the women was black. Both were in their forties. Never fucked a black girl.
    “Hello.”
    He was unable to say anything.
    “Why don't you take your clothes off?”
    He fell over sideways on the bed, rolling backwards and grabbing at his belt. His eyes were closed but he was forced to open them again before he threw up. Fingers flapped helplessly at the buckle. The two women started to undress him, one taking care of his jacket and shirt, the other his trousers. Coal instantly relaxed, imagining himself to be part of some scientific experiment, having been administered a drug, a rat in a box being filmed by an unseen eye. The smell of old sweat and foot odour began to suffocate the room and the white woman caught her breath. The black woman yanked down his boxer shorts with some difficulty, disgust creasing her nose. Coal stared at the ceiling where it tipped sickeningly to one side; he jerked his head upwards to get a view of the woman and stave off vomit. Blurring obscured expression. His cock, he knew, was flaccid.
    “What do you want to do, then?”
    “I want to fuck you.” Coal retched. “You two kiss and I'll fuck you.”
    “Let's put a condom on you first.”
    Sensation left the space behind his eyes as he fell backwards again, grunting in agreement. Desperation passed between the two women at the edge of his vision, his mind failing to push blood into his penis. The white woman rolled the rubber over his semi in a show of routine, grabbing his foreskin through the condom and tugging the sheath down to his sweating pubes. Uncertain, the black woman lay on the bed next to Coal while he struggled to his knees, the white woman hoisting him by an elbow.
    “Are you alright, love?”
    “Yeah.”
    On the screen, a girl with no hair pulled a gigantic cock from a rectum and pushed it into her mouth so far she choked.
    “I'm fine.”
    The white woman held him steady as he lowered his pelvis onto the black woman, his hand either side of her hips as though he were doing a female press-up. She was wearing red underwear made of cheap lace. Dimpled fat lolled over red stockings. Coal panted, pushing a hand into his crotch and nearly toppling. The black woman grabbed his cock and pushed it against her cunt, but he wasn't hard enough to penetrate her. He thrusted forwards, the woman's hand still cupping the condom, then thrusted again. Leaning back, he lifted his head level and pushed forwards three more times. The white woman leaned over, watching like a nurse.
    “It's not in.”
    Coal rolled onto his back.
    “Why don't we suck it, love?” said the black woman.
    How. Come to this.
    “Yeah. Kiss her.”
    The two woman looked at each other. Squinting through one eye, Coal down-turned his mouth and pulled his balls, arranging them. The white woman shrugged inside her black underwear and kissed the black woman. Coal's breathing steadied. The two women were kissing as though they loved each other. Lights on the ceiling burnt his eyes and the room swung again. The black woman's mouth on his cock stopped the sick. He tipped his head up and glanced down to see a woman either side of his hips, his blackened feet sticking out at the end of white legs passed their heads, the flocked walls dancing in the background. He failed to harden in the white woman's mouth. She passed it back to the black woman. Tears rolled down his face. Porn of some kind that made no sense to him thrashed on the television screen.
    “Time's up, love.”
    “That's right,” said the black woman. “It's been half an hour now.”
    “OK,” Coal shouted, sitting upright. His head rolled forward and he grunted, throwing it back again. Then he faced straight ahead and squinting his vision into temporary focus, the two women standing slowly and making a few small steps away. He pulled clothes on while they watched.
    “Did you enjoy yourself, love?”
    “Yeah. Was great. I'm going to get some more money.”
    He lurched away from the bed, his trousers hanging open, a fastened belt stopping them from falling. Over the carpet to the door. Spit welled in his loose lower lip, his arm cramping up back into a claw. Stairs, and the large man again. A street shining yellow. Poppers and vomit. Trudging towards brighter lights, passing cars glowing against wet roads. Still got my wallet, he thought, and grinned, one shoulder against the corner of a cashpoint. A hundred quid and some poppers. He looked back across towards some loosely lit buildings as though he'd eaten poison, eyes slitted and lips drawn back over teeth that clamped his tongue. More poppers. Walking and no hope of finding the brothel.

    The speed abated slightly and he was able to stand straight. Pocketing the solvent, he leant backwards against a soaked wall, inhaling deeply and staring in either direction down the street as his face freed itself from the worst of the contortions. Sighs rushed from his lips, which pulled into a mixture of smiles and shakes. Walking off, he found his legs more free than they had been, less pigeon-toed. Early morning cabs lurked like mid-sized dogs, collars locked, wiry faces creeping out from behind steering wheels. Thin rain coated streetlights. Coal's wet jeans tugged at his fat legs. Tinsel-clad women wobbling on heels ruined his solace and he hugged walls. Can't see me. Shirts and shoes throwing up in front of Black Marias. Some man in handcuffs, one shoe off and one shoe on, socks ruined. Coal stopped in an alley and sniffed as much poppers as he could fit in his lungs, capped the bottle and staggered back out into the street past a group of policemen, his speed surging back to an intolerable level. Giggles and jibbers. Away from Brighton's main lights and down towards the sea. Walking for miles. Crack streets in Hove. Two women and a man standing in a doorway.
    “I want two women.”
    “You got money, mate?”
    “Yeah.”
    “This way.”
    Into a house filled with bedsits. No street-hookers in Brighton. The lalas wouldn't stand for it. It's proper down here.
    “How much is it?”
    “What do you want to do?”
    “What do you do?”
    “Tenner a blowie. Twennie a fuck. If you wanna fuck us both it's sixty quid.”
    “I want to fuck you both.”
    He handed over three twenties. The woman took the money and vanished. Eyelids flickered as he inhaled, the smell of dope making him nauseous. The room had a bare bulb and a mattress. Voices outside the door and painted blue walls with a patch of damp next to the ceiling. The woman came back in.
    “Right.”
    She grabbed his belt and he slumped backwards against the wall. Camphor and silverfish. Sweat cracked onto his brow as she pushed on a condom. Again, he urged himself erect with no real consequence. The woman sank to her knees and began sucking his shriveled penis in an effort to stimulate it, tugging the saggy foreskin backwards and forwards with her teeth.
    “Get a load of these,” said the other woman, pulling open a thin, green top to show breasts nestled in an open bra. Coal leant forward and spat in her cleavage, almost falling, then licked her neck, licking down to her tits. The woman between his legs tutted in frustration and moved her head away as his body twisted. He slumped his weight against the standing woman and she brought up her arms, pushing him back. He lifted his head back against the wet wall, grabbed his genitals and shook them, tried to wake them.
    “Here,” said the standing woman. The previous suckee stood back, her mouth set in an “o” below a lacquered helmet of black hair in the bulb's hard light, watching the kneeling woman as she gingerly held the base of his penis next to his stinking pubic hair and jutted her head backwards and forwards on his now tiny cock. Coal continued to slump towards the door, using the frame as support but becoming increasingly prone to knee-buckling. His eyes twisted behind their lids.
    The woman stopped.
    “It's not happening, is it?”
    “Nah. He's fucked.”
    Standing, the woman wiped her mouth and walked out of the room, the other hesitating then following, leaving Coal standing against the wall. Light from the bulb swung through his field of vision as he jerked himself into space to stand independently in the room. Deafening noise matched watery colour as he fell into the door and slammed it, then opened it, then fell to one knee, tripped by his open trousers.
    “Wait,” he said.
    The two women were out on the street, he saw through the open door, a cube of red black superimposed on faded white walls lit from within.
    “Wait,” he said.
    “Fucking back off,” said the man.
    “Come on.”
    “Do yourself a favour and fuck off.”
    The three of them were walking down the street away from Coal, who attempted to follow.
    “Are you fucking thick?”
    Clattering heels on tarmac and paving slabs. And alone. He sat on a curb between two cars and fastened his trousers, his head hanging down between his knees. Rain fell again, wetting his hair and shoulders. He lay backwards, carefully, with his feet in the gutter and his head on the pavement, and closed his eyes. Patterns leapt through loops and trellises, blocks of colour messing with the black. He pulled himself upright, grunting, then rolled over onto a shoulder and pressed his weight away from the ground.
    “Fucking hell,” he said.
    Walking away, he found the reeling was subsiding rapidly. He could walk in straight lines for a time, but his jaw was cramping and his vision blurred. Cars supported him at convenient intervals. An autopilot moved his feet towards Kemp Town, and sex stayed at the forefront of his thoughts; faces from cars scanned him without provoking reaction. Wet brick cooled his palms as the unbalance dissipated, wet shoes gnawing at skin as yet unable to feel pain. Traffic was reduced to police and taxis and people that needed neither. St James's Street then smaller roads, white light gone to orange, lit doors and men. Coal looked for anything still open, but the yellow from the last cab office spilled far back down the street and the bars and pubs were well shut.
    “Got any drugs?” he asked a two men walking past. They put their heads down and moved off. Rain fell again. A wall held him as his eyes hooded almost passed opening. Someone was there and he pushed himself upright, opening his face wide. Shoes then nothing.
    “Hey.”
    Coal failed to register.
    “Hey. Over here.”
Through the mists there was a man. He was standing away from the street, down a ramp running through to an alley. His arms were making large movements and Coal could see a smile in the grime.
    “Over here,” he hissed. Coal walked over to him. Then he stepped off the street and into the shadow. “You didn't think I'd let you get away, did you?”
    Coal moved his blank face forwards and slid his hand up the man's back. When they kissed, Coal was shocked awake by the clatter of teeth and the grind of stubble. The man motions increased in intensity, a hand holding the back of Coal's head, the other resting on his hip as he pushed into Coal's groin with his pelvis.
    Coal groaned and opened his mouth wide, his tongue hard against that of the other man, their lips forced together. He pushed the man back against the wall, still kissing him, and drew his palm up the front of his jeans, cupping it around his erection. The man tore his head away, moving the hand on Coal's hair to his shoulder. Coal tried to focus through the smeared glasses.
    “Oh, you're great. Let's go to mine,” said the man. “I live near here.”
    “OK,” said Coal, leaning forwards against the wall.
    “Come on,” said the man, pulling Coal's arm. Coal's mouth was open and the wall's bricks were against his teeth. “It'll take a few minutes. Then we can lie down.”
    The man held Coal up as they walked through some kind of parked area and down a car-lined street filled with nothing but black, dabs of orange and the hiss of lone cars along the prom. Coal made an effort to fondle the man's backside as they walked along. The man laughed.
    Indistinct lighting and the closing of a door. A dark space. The man was naked and Coal was in bed. A beige carpet. Coal sucked in his stomach and lay flat on his back, arching his spine as the man pulled down his underwear. The man lay next to Coal and they kissed, passionately again, the man's hand firmly holding Coal's hardening cock. Coal reached over to the man's body and stroked his balls.
    “Yes,” said the man.
    “I want you in my arse,” said Coal.
    “Not yet,” said the man. “We've got all night.”
    The man sucked Coal's cock, now that it was very hard. Coal groaned.
    “Is that nice?” asked the man.
    “Yes,” said Coal. “Yes, it is.”
    “Do you want to come in my mouth?” asked the man.
    “Yes,” said Coal.
The man sucked and licked Coal's cock for minutes. Coal was reminded of the tongue of a dog. The man's hand wrapped around Coal's naked thigh and his nails dug in. Coal gasped. Eventually the man stopped, apparently tired. His eyes showed their whites, but he was smiling. His hand worked Coal's wet cock, up and down.
    “Come on my face,” said the man.
    “I'd like to,” said Coal.
    The man dropped his face back up next to Coal's, his hand still rhythmically working between Coal's legs. Coal dropped his hand back to the man's cock, but found it saggy. He wanked it nonetheless.
    “I'm going to come,” said Coal.
    “Oh yes. Yes,” said the man. “Don't feel bad if I don't though, will you? I've had a lot to drink.”
    “I don't mind,” said Coal.
    Coal arched his back and ejaculated.
    “Wow,” said the man. “I got some on my face. That's so nice.”
    The man lowered his head onto Coal's cock and began to suck. Coal pulled his teeth back in a smile and sighed.
    “Please fuck me,” said Coal. “I want you in my arse.”
    “I'll try,” said the man. He pulled himself up onto all fours, then up onto his knees. He face was hidden in the darkness away from the bed's sidelight. Above the torso was the impression of a head, below the stomach a gripped fist trying to wank a cock to erection. Coal ran fingers through semen on his stomach, tapping his fingertips together. He licked his fingers and he man's cock noticeably stiffened. The man reached over to the bedside table, his face dipping into the small bulb's pool of light. He snapped open a plastic bottle and squeezed a thick fluid onto his fingertips, then closed the bottle and rested back on his heels, coating his cock.
    “Turn over,” said the man.
    Coal did so.
    The man knocked his knees against the inside of Coal's legs, parting them. Coal raised his buttocks by drawing his knees toward him. The man seemed to be in an awkward position so Coal raised himself further. The man pressed his cock between Coal's cheeks, then adjusted his body and pulled Coal up by the hips. The man reached down with both hands and smeared Coal's anus with the remains of the fluid. Coal stiffened and pushed his face into the pillow, moaning. The man forced himself against Coal but wasn't hard enough to penetrate.
    “You're really tight,” he said.
    “Keep trying,” said Coal.
    The man pushed the head of his cock back against Coal's anus, but quickly gave up.
    “Never mind,” said Coal.
    “I can't get it in,” said the man.
    “It doesn't matter,” said Coal. “Here.”
    Coal rolled over and curled himself backwards on the bed, foetus-like, and moved his head to the man's groin, taking his semi-turgid, lubricated cock in his mouth. He chewed on it slightly, and the man laughed. Coal's eyes flickered against the room's womby gold.
    “God,” said the man.
    Despite Coal's sucking, the man failed to stiffen. Some time passed, Coal thought, the room settling into a slow spin. They talked and kissed. The man's name was John, and he was 35 years old. John was a nurse. John held Coal in bed while he skirted consciousness.
    The conversation, such as it was, became fragmented as day dawned, reality painting their den an unwelcome silver. Coal emerged shattered from his drugs, suddenly, and left the sheets, ready to leave.
    “Hey,” said John. “Don't go. Stay here. We can get some breakfast. Can I call you again?”
    He grabbed Coal's arm. Coal turned, sat on the edge of the bed, attempting to pull his arm away but failing. John reached up quickly and took him by the back of the neck, pulling his face down. Coal saw that John's skin was pockmarked, that the edges of his eyes were deeply lined. John reached up and violently kissed Coal, painful stubble making Coal wince and he pulled back hard. John's grip failed and Coal stood away from the bed.
    “Yes, of course you can,” Coal said. “My mobile number's oh nine seven nine oh, four eight two seven eight four six. Here. I'll write it down for you.”
    Coal picked up a pen from the bedside table and scribbled the number, a lie, on an envelope. John reached out and grabbed his wrist.
    “I have to go,” said Coal.
    “Stay here,” said John. “We can fuck all day.”
    Coal tore his arm away. John made no move to follow it. The smile shrank from his mouth and fatigue clouded his face.
    “I have to work,” said Coal. “My number's there. Just call me.”
    “I will,” said John carefully, the smile splitting his lips again. “I had a great time. I think you're amazing.”
    “I had a great time too,” said Coal.
    “Kiss me,” said John.
    “I have to go,” said Coal.
    “Please,” said John.
    “OK,” said Coal, bending.
    They kissed, mouths wide open. John rested his hand against Coal's bare thigh, then stroked his leg down past the knee. He fell back onto the pillow as two tears dropped to his lashes.
    Coal dressed, the drugs picking back up as blood worked around his system. His socks stank.
    “Sorry,” said Coal.
    “For what?” asked John.
    “Nothing,” said Coal, standing, pulling his shoes on and stepping toward the door. "Just forget it."