Staying Alive
Matt Beaumont

HarperCollinsPublishers

For Sam, spaceman of the future

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

nov.

one: like on the telly?

two: nobody died

three: fifteen weeks, four days and an indeterminate number of hours

four: fancy that. outposts of the nhs that examine nothing but balls

five: you’ve been wanking, haven’t you?

six: it’s kind of personal

seven: i have done this before, you know. that’s why i keep my nails short

eight: absolutely dandy

nine: i said run!

ten: trance is the bollocks

eleven: three words

dec.

one: thoffy, thakki

two: you work in advertising. you earn more in a week than the average filipino takes home in a year. what do you know about crisis?

three: they asked me to feed their fish

four: i promise

five: the pharmaceutical industry is mired in the shite with the arms dealers and big tobacco, murray. they’re little better than a mob of sallow-faced pushers outside a wee kiddies’ playground and it depresses the hell out of me

six: two jacuzzis (!!)

seven: back in the land of the living

eight: you risked a criminal record for a garlic crusher?

nine: yoo berra gerrootta thuh fookin ruhrd

ten: do smack, rob banks, screw everyone

eleven: out of the silo

twelve: ze vacky guys behint our vunderful adwertisements

thirteen: i still want us to be

fourteen: who’s mona?

fifteen: the best way forward for humankind: mutant antlers or giant lobster claws?

sixteen: as if

seventeen: things

eighteen: he ain’t worth it

nineteen: i know where i can get one

twenty: whoops-a-fucking-daisy

twenty-one: it’s gonna be chocker with dusky totty

twenty-two: i won’t sink

twenty-three: why couldn’t he have met a nice spanish girl?

twenty-four: i won’t say it

jan.

one: mike said why didn’t they put a sainsbury’s there? something to benefit the whole community

two: poor megan

three: i’m fine

four: call me completely crazy but i think a byzantine theme might work in here

five: please don’t jump

six: exquisite

seven: you’re a dead bloody cert, chief

eight: like lena zavaroni

neuf

ten: it’s the fucking pig bin

eleven: bermuda? barbados? somewhere hot beginning with b

twelve: you should get some west and welaxation. spend time wecupewating

thirteen: this isn’t a suntan. it’s teflon

fourteen: i love you

fifteen: in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend. those with loaded guns and those who dig

sixteen: he likes his peace and quiet

mar.

do you know what today is?

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

nov.

one: like on the telly?

monday 3 november / 10.05 a.m.

I point the camera at…

Sophie Dahl’s prone and virtually naked body.

The dawn-lit terraces of Machu Picchu, high in the Andes.

Elvis/Lennon/Tupac as he emerges from a cave deep in the Hindu Kush.

None of the above, actually. They’re there to make me seem big and clever.

The truth now.

I point the camera at a multi-pack of Schenker Alpenchok bars. I angle it carefully—experience has taught me to do this to avoid catching the glare from the fluorescent tubes that line the rim of the Safeway freezer display. Hell, am I good at this? The box shows Heidi patting a cow on the foothills of the Matterhorn. She beams at me through the viewfinder—a big happy-dairy-girl smile.

Exude sexy ice-creaminess, baby…Mmm, yeah, that’s working for me big ti—

Something crashes into my thigh. A shopping trolley, the type that hitches up to an electric wheelchair to make the HGV menace of supermarket aisles. I should know; I’ve been dead-legged by enough of them. An old lady is at the controls. A lime-green hat sits on her head. It’s shaped like a turban and makes her look like the Mekon—as if Dan Dare’s archenemy just popped into Safeway for baked beans, loin chops and loo roll. ‘What’ve you done with the frozen veg?’ she snaps.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t work here,’ I reply, rubbing the fresh bruise.

‘You lot keep messing with the freezers and I can’t find anything.’ She scrutinises my lapel for a badge proclaiming name and rank.

‘Really, I don’t work here,’ I protest. ‘If you ask—’

‘What are you doing, then?’ she says, spotting the camera. ‘You shouldn’t be taking pictures. You’re a spy, aren’t you? You’re from Tesco.’

‘No, I’ve got permission…I work for an advertising agency.’

My trump card, though I don’t produce it as if it’s the ace of spades—more like the three.

‘Adverts? Like on the telly?’ She sounds impressed.

I nod. And smile—it’s rare that I impress anyone with my career choice.

‘I’ve been wanting to have a word with you,’ she says, her eyes narrowing. ‘I saw your one for the funeral plan. I signed up, but I’m still waiting for my free carriage clock. It’s been weeks now.’

‘I—We don’t do that one,’ I explain.

‘Oh, you’re ever so charming when you want to sell us something, but the minute you’ve got us you don’t want to know,’ she spits.

My mobile vibrates against my hip and I pull it gratefully from my pocket. The Mekon looks on with distaste. ‘They cause cancer, you know,’ she says. Then she hits the throttle, running over my foot with her wheelchair’s solid rubber tyre and trundling off into the fluorescent Safeway sunset—taking no prisoners in the quest for world domination/frozen peas. I look at the phone display. Maybe it’s Sophie Dahl’s people calling to tell me her body is prone, very nearly naked and waiting aquiver for my camera’s attentions.

Funnily enough, no. It’s work.

‘Hi, Jakki,’ I say.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting grief about a funeral plan.’

‘You what?’

‘Never mind. What’s up?’

‘You’d better get back here. Niall’s having a shitfit. You’ve fucked up, apparently,’ Jakki tells me. ‘Something to do with invoices. Don’t ask me to explain. He wants to see you.’

‘Well, he wants me to do store checks in five different supermarkets before tomorrow’s meeting as well. Which is it to be?’

‘It’s serious. You’d better come back…’

‘OK.’

‘But don’t come without the ice-cream shots.’

Silence, but only because I’m stifling a sneeze.

‘You all right, Murray?’

‘I’m coming down with something, you know.’

‘Got the sniffles? You’re such a wuss,’ she laughs.

‘Am not.’

Sitting behind her desk manning the phones and diaries she has no concept of what it’s like out here in the field. Every time I head for the supermarket freezers I risk death from hypothermia. I’m the Captain bloody Oates of advertising.

I end the call and as I re-aim the camera at the ice-cream display, the sneeze finally explodes. Definitely coming down with something. I look through the viewfinder and wonder if the Schenker Foods brand group will spot the shiny glob of snot on Heidi’s embroidered bodice.

two: nobody died

tuesday 4 november / 11.15 a.m.

I’m sitting in a conference room on the seventh floor of the Canary Wharf Tower, wondering how I’d like to die…

1. Peacefully, boringly in my sleep…

God, that is so me.

2. Surrounded by loved ones as I utter some carefully chosen, though seemingly spontaneous last words: Megan…Forgive her for she knew not what she…uuugggghhhhhh…

3. Alternatively (and, let’s be honest, more likely): Nurse…is it time for my enem…uuuugggggghhhhhhhh…

That’s the trouble with final words. Timing. Surely the hard part is catching that moment when there’s just enough breath left to squeeze out the ultimate sentence. With all the distractions of being terminal—pain, drugs, tubes, iron lungs and whatnot—the chances are you’d miss your cue. But that’s not the worst that could happen. No, imagine coming out with your killer epilogue and then…you don’t die. You linger. Maybe for hours. Or days. Picture the awkwardness. Lying there knowing what they’re thinking: ‘Well, he’s delivered his punchline. He should at least have the manners to get off the stage.’ No, best keep it zipped.

Where was I?…Meeting. Seventh floor. Canary Wharf Tower. Wondering how I’d like to…

4. Beneath several tons of sub-standard Stalin-era concrete, seconds after having pulled newborn triplets and their mother from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building, making me:

1 a Hero of the People in post-quake Uzbekistan.

2 a Millstone of Guilt around the neck of Megan Dyer as she watches the news coverage. Tough—the burden is something she’ll have to learn to live with.

5. At the controls of a 747, having wrested them from the grasp of a bug-eyed Arab before banking the jet inches clear of the Canary Wharf Tower as its paralysed occupants look on with unutterable gratitude.

6. No, no, no. At the controls of a 747 as I plunge it into the Canary Wharf Tower whose paralysed occupants look on with this final thought flashing through their brains: Is that Murray Colin in the cockpit?

Silly. I don’t like flying. I’m not exactly phobic, but every time I climb aboard I have to work hard to banish visions of the jet plummeting into, say, a tall building. Therefore:

7. Nothing that involves heights.

8. Or depths. Diving, submarines, stuff like that. I may be poor at altitude, but I am flat-out terrified of slowly running out of breathable air while being trapped at the bottom of—

I can’t think about that one without breaking into an icy sweat. Change the subject, Murray, change the bloody subject.

9. From a spectacularly massive coronary—‘My God,nurse, his heart literally burst!’—while my body is entwined with:

1 Megan Dyer’s

2 Megan Dyer’s

3 Betina Tofting’s, whose thigh—as she allows her skirt to ride up it—looks alarmingly similar to Megan Dyer’s.

Betina catches me gazing at her legs and yanks at her hem. Feeling shabby, I look away at Niall Haye circling his telescopic pointer around the phrase ‘ Consumer expectation/Taste delivery synchronicity’.

‘I’d like now to discuss the crucial point at which the consumer and the brand interface,’ my boss says, turning from the screen to me. ‘Murray, perhaps you’d like to take us through the results of your store checks.’

Perhaps I bloody wouldn’t. Why does he say that as if I’ve got a choice? Perhaps what I’d really like to do is shove that irritating telescopic pointer up your—

‘Thanks, Niall, I’d love to,’ I reply as I reach for the A0 sheet of Polyboard that has spent the last ninety minutes leaning against my chair. This is its Moment. I prop it up on the table and take the Schenker Foods brand group on a tour of five different supermarket freezer cabinets. In a bravura display of top-notch store checking I somehow managed to complete my mission before returning to the office for my bollocking—something to do with invoices, indeed.

I’m beginning to suspect that advertising isn’t all it was cracked up to be. When I was a goggle-eyed undergrad the recruiters tempted me with talk of drugs, models and shoots on sun-kissed beaches. No one mentioned the store check. Eight years in, the number of lines of coke that I’ve snorted off models’ sun-kissed bottoms runs to not even single figures. Yesterday, by contrast, I completed my ninetieth store check. No, as a career choice advertising does not do exactly what it says on the tin.

And if ad people can’t even be straight with one another…Well, it begs questions, doesn’t it?

11.32 a.m.

‘Thank you, Murray, that was fascinating,’ Haye says as I sit down. Hard to believe that anyone could, but Niall Haye finds pictures of supermarket freezers fascinating; almost—but not quite—enough to make him forget that I really did mess up on the invoice front.

Betina Tofting smiles at me for the first time in nearly two hours. This has nothing to do with her forgiving me for staring at her legs. It’s because she too was riveted by my presentation. She’s probably no more than twenty-five, a good two-thirds of her life still before her, yet that life revolves around Schenker Foods’ new line of adult choc-ices; nothing else exists for her. I smile back as if I feel the same way.

She says, ‘They are excellent photographs, Murray,’ in a Danish accent that’s incapable of irony. Her sincerity puts a glossy red cherry on top of my whipped cream of a depression…Is this as good as it’s going to get? Murray Colin, the world’s finest store checker. You want an oil fire extinguished, call Red Adair. You need a guaranteed thirty goals a season, stump up several million for Van Nistelrooy. You’re after flare-free snaps of icecream packaging, Murray’s your man.

Haye segues to the final item on the agenda: the media plan for the European launch of ChocoChillout. As he explains in excruciating detail how he proposes to blow an advertising budget big enough to buy every child in Africa three square meals a day, inoculations and a PlayStation 2, I mentally compose a letter to the Chief of Internal Security in North Korea.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I appreciate that you must be busy and I apologise for tearing you away from your important work. However, should you be looking for new and imaginative ways of extracting essential information from the many detainees you have in your care, I believe I may have just the thing.

Forget sleep-deprivation and attaching electrodes to genitals. I humbly suggest that just thirty minutes in a locked conference room with Niall Haye, his telescopic pointer and a selection of overhead projections will have even the most recalcitrant counter-revolutionary screaming for mercy and telling you everything you wish to know—as well as, I hazard, some stuff you didn’t even think to ask about.

Should you be interested, Mr Haye could be in Pyongyang on the next flight—sanctions permitting, of course.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to pass on my very best wishes to everyone at your end of the Axis of Evil.

Yours et cetera…

Job done.

I close my eyes.

No, Niall, I’m not going to sleep. I’m concentrating deeply on your exciting proposal to spend 5.2 million giving the lucky citizens of Benelux no less than fifteen opportunities to hear a voice-over promise a sensously silky taste adventure (in Dutch, Flemish and French).

Never mind how I’d like to die. What will surely kill me is terminal cynicism.

12.36 p.m.

The meeting finally breaks up.

I grab a bottle of mineral water from the middle of the table and take a swig, washing down the three aspirin that I’ve placed on my tongue. My glands are up like feisty walnuts and I feel rough, much worse than yesterday. I shouldn’t be here.

Niall stands up and announces lunch. My cue to scurry ahead to reception and organise the taxis. Before I leave the room he grabs my arm. ‘You won’t be joining us at the trough today,’ he hisses. ‘I’d like you to spend your lunch hour going through every invoice you’ve issued over the last twelve months. The rest of the board and I would like to know just how many of our clients you’ve wrongly billed.’

It was a mistake, Niall. An accident. Slightly less than three thou-sand pounds demanded of the wrong client. Nobody died, for God’s sake.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘That’s exactly what I was planning to do.’

12.41 p.m.

‘You look peaky, babe. Not up to the lunch?’ Jakki says with concern (at least thirty per cent of it sincere) as I arrive at my desk. She has me down as suffering from hypochondria, but it’s nothing so serious—just a touch of flu.

‘It’s not that. Niall’s put me on punishment duties.’

‘Jeez, it was only an invoice. Nobody died. He sends out the wrong ones all the time.’

‘Yes, but he does it deliberately. Did you know that Schenker was billed for the new boardroom table? Thirteen grand. He bunged it on the budget for their last commercial. He even put the agency mark-up on it.’

‘At least you weren’t ripping anyone off.’

‘More fool me, Jakki. If I’d been ripping someone off I’d have probably got a rise…Anyway, I need to go through a year’s worth of billing now.’

‘I’ll give you a hand.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

And she doesn’t. As secretary to four other account supervisors besides me she has enough bum-numbing rubbish to deal with.

‘I don’t mind. You’ll be doing me a favour. If I go out I’ll only end up buying a double cheese and sardine melt and something with triple-choc in its name. No bloody willpower.’

I let her pull up a chair next to mine. She could do with losing a little weight.

2.09 p.m.

‘Well, I can’t find anything,’ I say.

‘Hmm,’ Jakki murmurs. She lost interest some time ago. She’s still sitting beside me, but now she’s looking at the pictures in Italian Vogue.

‘The independent Murray Colin Commission hereby concludes its investigation into the administrative record of Murray Colin, and hereby finds that Murray Colin has billed impeccably.’

‘Hmm,’ says Jakki.

‘That was one too many herebys, wasn’t it?’

‘Uh-huh…What do you think I’d look like in this?’ She holds up a picture of a model who’s thinner than the paper she’s printed on. She’s wearing two squares of chiffon, each the size of a pocket tissue.

‘Gorgeous,’ I say.

‘Who am I trying to kid? I’d look like Mrs Blobby. God, I can’t hold out any longer,’ she announces, standing up and pulling on her coat. ‘I’ve got to get food. Want anything?’

‘You could get me a Mars.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yeah. Hang on, I’ll give you some money.’ I stand up and reach into my trouser pocket. I freeze as my hand touches something—it isn’t loose change.

‘What’s up?’ Jakki asks.

‘Nothing…Nothing at all. You go. Forget the Mars.’

Well, I’m not going to tell her I’ve just found a lump, am I?

three: fifteen weeks, four days and an indeterminate number of hours

tuesday 4 november / 7.44 p.m.

At least, I think it’s a lump.

I stand in front of the long mirror in my bedroom and lower my trousers and underpants. I unbutton my shirt and lift the tails out to my sides to reveal myself in seminaked glory. Nothing glorious about it, actually. My body is thoroughly average. No flab to speak of, but no corrugated sheet of abdominal muscles either. Just a gently bowed curve of stomach descending to an untidy clump of mid-brown hair. Every once in a while I consider shaving it off. Nothing to do with vanity. No, the thought appeals to my sense of neatness. But…shaved pubes. There’s something pervy about that. A bit porn star. And I can’t stomach the idea of being knocked down by a car, getting rushed to Aamp;E and the medics discovering that I groom down there.

Doctor: Take a look at this, nurse.

Nurse: My God, a depilator. Is he a porn star?

Doctor: What’s it say on his admission form?

Nurse: Advertising executive.

Doctor: He’s most likely just your run-of-the-mill pervert.

Nurse: Shall I call social services?

Doctor: We’d best be sure first. I mean, he could be a pro cyclist. I understand they shave. Something to do with aero dynamics, apparently.

Nurse: No, he hasn’t got the six-pack to be a cyclist.

As a rule my sense of neatness is pervasive, all-consuming, but in the ongoing face-off between shaggy and trim, shaggy wins every time.

My eyes travel down a little further to my…You know something? I don’t know what to call it. I’ve never felt comfortable with any of the standard terms. Penis sounds too formal—a bit sort of Presenting His Excellency Lord Penis, Duke of Genitalia. Willy, of course, is too cute. Cock? Too blunt, macho, in-your-face. There are dozens of other words for the thing—well, thing for one. Then there’s knob, todger, schlong, pecker, love trun-cheon. Love truncheon. Not even in my dreams. None of them feels right. And before anyone suggests it, I am not going down the road of personalising it, giving it a pet name. So I’m not left with much. But I’m looking at it now. Like the rest of me, it’s nothing special. Thoroughly average, I suppose, though I’ve never taken a ruler to it. But that isn’t why I’m staring at myself in the mirror, my trousers round my ankles. I reach down to my…Balls? Bollocks? Knackers? Testicles? Same problem. I’m stuck whenever I have to refer to anything in the…er…meat ’n’ two veg region ( meat ’n’ two veg—truly horrible). My solution to date has been to avoid any reference if at all possible. It has worked well enough for thirty-one years, but now…Well, I’ve got a lump. Or something.

I think I read somewhere that men should check themselves once a month, like women are meant to examine their breasts. I also read that you should check the batteries in your smoke alarm on a regular basis. I’ve never done that either. Frankly, I’ve never felt happy about the idea of self-examination, and only partly because I’m not especially fond of molesting myself. My principle objection is that the doctors—men and women who, let’s not forget, undergo only slightly less training than architects and London cab drivers—are advising the rest of us—a bunch of barely informed amateurs—to do the checking. Where is the logic, please? Why the billions blown on teaching hospitals the size of Devon if they end up making us do the work?

But I’m checking now. Feeling with my hand. Very tentatively. My left one…Just say the word, Murray. My left testicle is lower. Though I’ve never paid it the kind of attention I’m giving it now, I think it has always been lower. It’s also bigger. Definitely bigger. I don’t think it has ever been that. I take it between my fingertips and roll it gently as if it’s a bingo ball and I’m looking for the number. There it is. My fingers weren’t deceiving me in the scrabble for change at lunchtime. I quickly let go. Drop it like a red-hot pebble. As if I’ve turned the bingo ball and seen the number.

Six, six, six.

I’ve got a lump.

11.38 p.m.

I’m in bed, but I can’t sleep.

I feel dreadful. Hot and sweaty, bunged up, achy. It’s the flu. But that isn’t what’s keeping me awake. I’ve got a lump. My mind is racing, looking for explanations. Alternatives to the obvious and deeply unpleasant one. Until a moment ago none had offered itself. But the one that does now is so blindingly obvious that it practically switches on the light and yells Eureka!

Megan left weeks ago. Three weeks, two days and (quick glance at the alarm) just over nine hours ago since you ask. It was weeks—OK, precisely twelve weeks and two days—before that when we last did it. That makes fifteen weeks, four days and an indeterminate number of hours without sex. That’s over a quarter of a year without any kind of release. Nothing so much as a…Say the word, Murray…Nothing so much as a wank.

The lack of sex has surely caused the lump. I must be backed up, overstocked, whatevered—there’s almost certainly a correct medical term for it. It’s probably only a matter of days before my right testicle swells in a similar manner. If I don’t do something soon they’ll be as big as satsumas—or full-blown oranges. Well, I can do something right now. If only to rule out the possibility.

wednesday 5 november / 1.33 a.m.

It didn’t work.

Oh, it worked in as much as I managed to shuffle through some mental reruns and get the job done. But nearly two hours on the lump is still there. Just as big—though, actually, it’s pretty small. So I still can’t sleep. And now I’m in the corridor outside my bedroom. I’m standing on a chair checking the battery in my smoke alarm.

It’s flat.

four: fancy that. outposts of the nhs that examine nothing but balls

wednesday 5 november / 9.12 a.m.

Blimey, I didn’t know Tom and Nicole were back together.

Mildly surprised but, honestly, not that interested, I return Hello! to the pile on the table. It’s only now that I see the date on the cover—July 1998. It must be a cunning policy cooked up by a Department of Health think-tank. Put ancient magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms and watch as patients are transported back to a halcyon age when Tom and Nic were the golden couple and you only had to wait two years for a hip replacement.

I’ve never met Doctor Stump. He has been my GP for years, but I’ve been avoiding him. Doctors make me squeamish and having one called Stump is hardly likely to cure me of that. The only time I did visit, a locum was on. He was Polish. No disrespect to the guy—I’m sure he would have made an excellent practitioner in suburban Gdansk—but in South Woodford, where the East End blurs into Essex, he was no use whatsoever. Normally I take my ailments to the chemist, where I ply the pharmacist with my symptoms before leaving with an over-the-counter remedy. But I couldn’t see myself dropping my trousers in Superdrug, so here I am.

Up on the wall the green light blinks. I’m on. I walk into the shabby surgery and sit down. Stump caps his biro and looks at me from behind his desk. Then he coughs. It isn’t a polite throat-clearing ahem. It’s a prolonged, spewing-blood-into-a-hanky, Doc Holliday affair that doesn’t look as if it’s going to finish any time before lunch. ‘Can I get you some water?’ I ask. He glares at me angrily—like Who’s the doctor round here?—so I sit back and wait. As he tries to catch the spittle with a billowing cotton hankie, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I mean, the lump…It’s probably nothing. The thing is, it doesn’t hurt. I’ve squeezed as hard as I dare squeeze one of my own testicles (a word I’m growing increasingly comfortable with) and there’s no pain. If it were something bad, surely it would be painful. By bad, of course, I mean cancer. Pain is the first thing I think of with regard to that disease. Cancer hurts. Like hell, by all accounts. Yet I feel nothing. So what am I doing here? Wasting precious NHS time, most probably.

Then again, if it is something bad, what am I doing here? Why am I entrusting my health to a doctor called Stump? It’s like calling a new brand of sweetener Anthrax and expecting the public to sprinkle it onto their cornflakes. And look at him retching into his hankie as if he’s spent the last few decades ignoring his own profession’s very sensible advice on smoking. He can’t even manage his own cough and I expect him to help me?

No, whichever way I look at it, coming here was a poor idea. Best I leave now, let him get on with the three old ladies in the waiting room, all of whom looked as if they might die in their seats if they don’t get immediate medical attention. I stand up, but with the hand that isn’t preventing his lungs from spilling into his lap Stump waves me back into my chair. With an effort that turns his face purple he finally strangles the cough and says in a voice awash with phlegm, ‘What can I do for you, Mr…’ He searches for the name on my file. ‘…Collins?’

‘It’s Colin,’ I say. ‘Like Cliff Richard.’

‘What, it’s not your real name?’

‘No, I mean it’s Cliff Richard, not Richards. I’m Co lin. No S.’

‘What can I do for you, Mr Co lin?’

I’ve been giving my next line a fair amount of thought. Actually practising it in front of my bedroom mirror. Much like I used to mime to Smiths songs when I was fourteen. (And now I think about it, Doctor, it would appear that I have a growth on one of my testicles sounds like a Morrissey lyric, one he rejected as being too gloomy—that and the fact that finding a plausible rhyme for testicles would have been beyond even his considerable lyrical gifts.) But now I’m here—on the stage, in a manner of speaking—I can’t say it. So instead I mumble, ‘I’ve got the flu.’

‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?’

I don’t answer.

‘I suggest you go home, take some paracetamol and sleep it off,’ he says.

I don’t move, though.

‘Is that it?’ he asks. ‘You’ve got the flu and you just came to tell me?’ He picks up his pen and writes something on my file—time waster probably.

‘No,’ I say quietly.

‘What then?’

I still can’t say it.

‘Speak up.’ He’s irritated now. ‘I’ve got a waiting room full out there.’

Yes, three old ladies and the Grim Reaper.

‘It’s my…I’ve got a…’

He nods by way of encouragement.

‘I’ve got cancer.’ There. Said it. It’s out now.

‘Really?’ he asks, genuinely curious because, well, there’s no note of it in my file. ‘Where? When was it diagnosed?’

‘It hasn’t been…Not exactly. But I’ve got a lump.’

‘Where precisely?’

I can’t say it.

‘Give me a clue.’

‘It’s…It’s on…My…’ No, still can’t say it.

‘Somewhere rather personal perhaps?’ Stump hazards.

I nod.

‘Why don’t you point?’

Good idea. I point.

‘You’d better drop your trousers.’

‘Do I have to?’ I ask.

‘Well, you could just describe it for me, I suppose,’ Stump says.

Excellent. Relaxed now, I say, ‘It’s on my left…er…you know, my left one, and it’s about—’

‘I was being facetious, Mr Collins—’

‘It’s Co lin.’

‘Whatever, if we’re going to make any progress at all today you really will have to take your trousers off.’

Damn.

9.24 a.m.

Still traumatised, I buckle my belt and zip up my flies. Stump noisily peels off his surgical gloves and sits down. He picks up my file. ‘Smoke, Mr Collins?’

‘No,’ I say fairly honestly. I’ll share in the very occasional joint, my one weedy concession to my inner Jimi Hendrix—I’m sure he’s in there somewhere—but I’ve never touched a cigarette.

‘Drink?’

‘Only socially…’

…And not much of that these days.

‘How’s your general health been?’

‘Fine, I suppose. Apart from the flu.’

‘Are you stressed?’

‘Well, I’ve got a lump,’ I say, not adding, You cradled it in your bloody hand. How do you think it makes me feel?

‘I meant generally,’ he explains.

I should be, shouldn’t I? Advertising is one of the more stressful businesses. At least, that’s what everyone in advertising would have you believe. Maybe it is if you have to make knife-edge decisions about the fate of multi-million-pound marketing budgets, but I don’t do that…I lurk around freezer displays with a digital camera.

It wasn’t always so. There was a time when I lived on an adrenal diet of tension. It lasted for about six months. I was an account supervisor in the fast lane, whizzing past blue and white signs pointing me in the direction of Rapid Promotion and Big Corner Office. It couldn’t last. After its initial rubberburning burst of speed, my career stalled. I’m languishing on the hard shoulder now, watching younger models scoot by in a blur of alloy wheels. I’m only thirty-one and they’re not that much younger, but life spans in adland are measured in months, not years. Strangely, while this state of affairs depresses me, it doesn’t stress me out.

‘No,’ I tell Stump, ‘I’m not stressed. Generally.’

‘Testicular cancer is the commonest form of the disease in young men, you know,’ he says, leaning back in his chair and ignoring me sinking in mine. ‘Having said that, it’s almost certainly not cancer. One big testicular clinic saw over two thousand lumps in a year. Less than a hundred of them were cancers. Incredible, eh? There are testicular clinics. Fancy that. Outposts of the NHS that examine nothing but balls.’ He’s rambling and I’m not feeling comforted.

‘If it isn’t cancer, what is it?’ I ask.

‘Could be any number of things,’ he replies vaguely.

I need some help here. ‘Like?’

Seems he needs help too because he leans over to a pile of books on the floor and examines the titles. After a moment he pulls one from the middle, a big, dusty softback that looks as if it hasn’t had its spine bent in years. ‘Wonderful book, this. Excellent pictures,’ he says, flicking through the pages. He stops, peers at the print for a moment, then reads, ‘“Testicular swellings commonly misdiagnosed as tumours”…Blah, blah…“Seminal granuloma, chronic epididymo-orchitis, haematocele” and so on and so forth…See? Any number of things.’

All of which are not only unpronounceable but also pull off the difficult feat of sounding more terrifying than cancer.

‘I’m going to refer you to Saint Matthew’s,’ he says.

‘The cancer bit of Saint Matthew’s?’ I whisper.

‘Heavens, no. They’d try to have me struck off for wasting their time. You’ll see a general surgeon. Maybe a urologist.’

What’s a urologist? He’s not going to tell me and I’m not about to ask.

‘You’ll get an appointment within the next couple of weeks—try and keep it. And cut out the cigarettes. Ridiculous habit.’ To emphasise the point he launches into a fresh fit of coughing.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I remind him.

‘Well, better not start,’ he says through the hacks.

I scrape my chair back—I think we’re done. ‘You really shouldn’t worry unduly,’ he says as I stand up. He manages to sound annoyed rather than soothing, as if what he’d really like to say is Pull yourself together, man.

I look at my watch: nine thirty-five. Sorry, doctor, but I should worry. Niall Haye is big on two things—store checks and punctuality—and I’m very late.

11.03 a.m.

Niall Haye is big on three things: store checks, punctuality and contact reports. When I arrived at my desk and checked my e-mail there were seven from Haye. Seven times he demanded to know the whereabouts of a contact report. Fair enough. It is a week overdue. I’m typing it now.

murray.colin@blowermann-dba.co.uk

to: niall.haye@blowermann-dba.co.uk

g_breitmar@schenker.com

s_gilhooley@schenker.com

b_tofting@schenker.com

cc: brett.topowlski@blowermann-dba.co.uk

vince.douglas@blowermann-dba.co.uk

re: Contact Report No. 37

Brand Group Meeting: | 23 October
Venue: | Blower Mann/DBA
Present for client: | Gerhard Breitmar, Sally Gilhooley, Betina Tofting
Present for agency: | Niall Haye, Murray Colin

Despite having a potentially malignant growth on one of his testicles, plucky Murray Colin took the client through the results of his store checks. There were general oohs and aahs of appreciation and it was unanimously agreed that there is no one better at shooting in tricky supermarket lighting conditions.

Niall Haye presented draft 27 of the ChocoChillout script. There was much discussion about whether the voiceover should read ‘a sensuously silky taste adventure’ or ‘a silkily sensuous adventure in taste’. After failing to reach a consensus, the group agreed to put the matter to research so that a bunch of housewives in Solihull can make the decision.

(Action: NH)

Niall Haye presented the launch media plan. The chart (consisting of the usual Xs in boxes) was generally well received. Sally Gilhooley requested that the Xs in the central column be moved two columns to the left. Betina Tofting agreed, and further suggested that the X immediately below the X at the top right be moved to the box below. Gerhard Breitmar endorsed these proposals and added a request for the Xs in the extreme left-hand column to appear in red rather than blue. Murray Colin slept peacefully.

(Action: nobody—on the basis that in two days’ time no one would remember what anyone else had said and that, besides, all the Xs could be put in a very big hat, shaken vigorously about and tipped in a heap on the floor, where they would make the same amount of bloody sense.)

Before the meeting broke up Niall Haye invited Gerhard Breitmar to climb onto the table, lower his trousers, kneel on all fours and have his strapping Hunnish behind peppered with kisses by the account team.

Murray Colin

Account Supervisor

I click send…But only after I’ve completely rewritten it to make it as dull and harmless as every other contact report I’ve ever written. My hand goes into my trouser pocket and touches the lump. Thankfully, an incoming e-mail takes my mind off it.

brett.topowlski@blowermann-dba.co.uk

to: murray.colin@blowermann-dba.co.uk

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

…reading them always makes me thank my sweet lord jesus I wasn’t at the meeting. question: is a betina tofting a self-assembly dining table from ikea? another question: fancy buying me and vin bonfire beers tonight?

Taken at face value it reads like the e-mail of a friend. I know better. Brett Topowlski is a copywriter. Vince Douglas is his art director. Together they are a creative team. I, on the other hand, am a suit. Creative teams do not buddy up with suits. We’re like the Bloods and the Crips. This is because, while it’s a creative’s job to come up with ideas that are out there, it’s a suit’s function to water them down until they’re as bland as every other ad on the box. ChocoChillout is the perfect case in point. Draft one was well out there and barely on the legal side of the Obscene Publications Act. Draft twenty-seven is wallpaper—and not even patterned, not even as interesting as, say, a magnolia-painted woodchip. Suits 1, Creatives 0.

No, Brett, Vince and I could never be true friends. They only want me for my access to expense-account beer. However, it doesn’t stop me being drawn to them, and especially to Vince. He’s an entire Victorian freak show in a single body. He’s a bad car crash, one where the firemen are cutting the corpses from the twisted wreckage: you know you’re not supposed to look but you can’t tear your eyes away.

But it’s an experience I won’t be enjoying tonight.

I hit reply.

murray.colin@blowermann-dba.co.uk

to: brett.topowlski@blowermann-dba.co.uk

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

Can’t do beer tonight because

1 I’m broke.

2 Megan is coming round to pick up stuff.

3 There’s a distinct possibility I’ve got cancer.

Sorry.

Murray

I send it, but only after deleting item three.

A couple of minutes later:

brett.topowlski@blowermann-dba.co.uk

to: murray.colin@blowermann-dba.co.uk

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

what bloke wouldn’t pass up getting ratted with his mates so he could wait at home for the bitch that dumped him? you sad cunt.

Brett is right—I would sooner hang around at home for the bitch that dumped me.

five: you’ve been wanking, haven’t you?

wednesday 5 november / 7.05 p.m.

I stand in my living room and survey the rock-star chaos. The discarded Stolly bottles, the dusting of coke on the coffee table, the TV lying on its side—well, watching it the right way up is for squares, dude. And, stone me, is that a peroxide groupie wedged down the back of my sofa cushion? How long has she been there?

Actually, most of that was rubbish.

OK, all of it was.

A part of me—the deeply repressed, inner-Jimi-Hendrix bit—would love to be able to say that my flat is a temple to debauchery and that in the post-Megan fallout it resembles Hiroshima at tea-time on 6th August 1945.

I can’t, though, in all honesty.

Because I stand in my living room and see…Neatness, a pleasure dome of just-so spick and span-ness. No dust or greasy finger marks and certainly no used socks, half-empty takeaway cartons or exhausted vodka bottles. No drugs on the coffee table—just a few magazines, the spines of which are precisely parallel to the table’s edge. And while I’ve got some fairly cool CDs, they’re stacked in order. Not in some esoteric rock bloke arrangement, but alphabetically (Smith, Elliott preceding Smiths, The). This conforms to no rock ’n’ roll rulebook I’m aware of.

I could say that this outbreak of tidiness is because Wednesday is my cleaner’s day, but that too would be a lie. I haven’t got a cleaner. This obsessive order…

It’s…Me.

My inner Jimi Hendrix doesn’t stand a chance. If I were a pie chart, Cleaning Impulses would be a huge slice taking up well over seventy per cent, while Playing Guitar, Screwing Girls and Drowning in Own Vomit would be a negligible sliver. I’ve always been like this. I’m well-known for it and I barely have to clean any more—household grime sees me coming and emigrates. When we first lived together Megan found this side of me endearing and I was a talking point among her girlfriends. One evening she answered the phone to Serena or Carol or whomever to be told, ‘I wanted to speak to Murray, actually. Does he know how to remove encrusted limescale from the base of a tap?’ I spent a memorable thirty minutes extolling the unbeatable combination of Limelite (‘Not the liquid, mind. It’s got to be the Power Gel.’) and an old toothbrush while Megan looked on with an indulgent smile.

After a time however, the indulgence petered out and I became an irritant. There she was busy making the world a better place, while all I seemed to fret about was who was going to keep it dusted. Over time a nagging tension developed between the forces of Pledge and There’s-more-important-things-to-worryabout.

When she left so did her mess. Order returned. No more work files heaped about the living room like badly planned council high-rises, no more damp knickers draped on the central heating and no more scented candles dripping irksome dollops of wax on hard-to-clean surfaces. I should have been happy, shouldn’t I?

Well…No. I was devastated. After a dust and disorder-free week I couldn’t stand the vacuum (I refer to the emptiness as opposed to my excellent Dyson upright) a moment longer and headed for Wax Lyrical where I bought a fresh stock of smelly candles. Then, inexplicably, I found myself in the Knickerbox next door, six-pack of cotton bikini briefs (assorted colours) in hand. No, it was perfectly explicable. I was going to take them home, rinse and wring them out and leave them dangling from the radiators—a Comfort-fresh reminder of what used to be. As I was about to pay I realised what a pathetic gesture it was. Megan was gone and I’d have to get used to it. The knickers stayed in the shop and, though I was already lumbered with the candles, they’ve remained wrapped up in a kitchen cupboard.

And now I stand in my living room and survey the germ-free perfection that is a tribute to my hermetically sealed single-hood…And when Megan turns up in half an hour, a reminder of the tedious dust buster she left behind.

I know what has to be done.

Deep breath—You can do this, Murray.

I start by taking the back of my hand to the magazines, flipping them to a wanton seventy-three degrees to the edge of the coffee table.

7.45 p.m.

She should be here by now.

As I wait I look at the mess that I’ve painstakingly created and it’s taking every ounce of willpower to resist tidying up.

I need a distraction. My hand goes in search of one, snaking into my trouser pocket and feeling for the—

I have got to stop this. Stop worrying unduly. Pull myself together.

I go to the bedroom, fetch the cardboard box containing Megan’s belongings, and put it on the coffee table. One more thing. I root around the kitchen until I find the scented candles. I unwrap one and light it. I immediately blow it out. It’s lavender. She hates lavender.

7.53 p.m.

‘What’s that horrible smell?’ she says as I let her in.

Though I dumped the candle in the bin, the bouquet has lingered.

My ex has an implausibly sensitive nose. The one and only time that I lit up a joint while home alone she busted me, picking up the scent as she walked out of South Woodford tube. ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she declared. ‘I work with the police, the CP-bloody-S. Do you have any idea how much you could be compromising me?’ It was like going out with the drug squad’s star sniffer dog—the one that can smell the heroin in the baggage hold as the plane takes off in Islamabad. I couldn’t get away with a thing. One night she climbed into bed about an hour after me and as I stirred she said, ‘You’ve been wanking, haven’t you?’

‘Have not,’ I mumbled sleepily while simultaneously shifting my hip onto the small sticky patch on the sheet.

‘Don’t lie, Murray,’ she snapped. ‘I can smell it.’

I follow her as she walks through the hall and into the living room for the first time in three weeks, three days and nearly six hours. She must have been in court today because she’s wearing a sober-ish grey suit, white blouse, glossy opaque tights and shoes that tread the fine line between sensible and sexy. I feel something stir. In my gut and down there. You cannot imagine how gratifying this is. I’ve got a lump, yet I’m getting aroused. Any sign of a normal sexual impulse (even if it’s lusting after my depressingly unavailable ex) is surely also a sign that I don’t have cancer. I mean, cancer and sex drive, they’re mutually exclusive, aren’t they? But I have to stifle it because this is neither the time nor the place. No, it is the place—at least two of my happiest memories consist of spontaneously doing it with Megan in this very living room (having first spontaneously draped a towel over the sofa to avoid troublesome stains)—but it is clearly not the time.

‘You can tell I’ve moved out,’ she says jauntily. ‘It looks really…tidy.’

‘Does it?’ I reply, deflating, probably visibly. ‘I haven’t cleaned in ages.’

She raises a sceptical eyebrow, then says, ‘How have you been?’

Well, since you decided to move in with a QC who probably earns thirty times my salary and is old enough to be, if not your father, then your considerably older brother, and since you chose to announce the joyous news on the very day that I’d been out and blown six and a half grand on a ring with which I was going to get down on my knees and ask you to be mine forever and ever and ever, and since you’re now twizzling your hair around your finger in a manner that is guaranteed to make me melt like a Mars Bar in a Glasgow deep fat fryer, I feel like rubbish…If you must know.

‘I’m getting over the flu,’ I say, going directly for the sympathy vote, before adding, ‘but I’m fine, thanks…You?’

‘You know—busy. How’s work?’

‘Oh, the usual juggling act of exotic shoots and five-hour lunches.’

‘Still taking your orders from Mammon, then?’

‘Well, from Mammon’s little helper…You know…Niall. Can I get you a coffee or something?’

‘No, I’d better not stay. I’m in court first thing—my client fled Nigeria after she’d been raped by an entire army platoon and now the Home Office wants to send her back there. Unbelievable.’

This brief snatch of conversation pretty much sums it up. Why Megan left me. I lack commitment. Not the emotional kind—splurging six and a half grand on a ring more or less settled that one. What I lack is her passion for justice. While she is using her degree to make the world safe for the poor and disenfranchised, I’m using mine to feed them choc-ices. It doesn’t take Naomi Klein to argue that, while it undoubtedly delivers a sensuously silky adventure in taste, ChocoChillout won’t even begin to address the iniquities in the continent of Africa.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the same things as Megan. I do.

Mostly.

Up to a point.

I always encouraged her crusades on behalf of victims of police harassment and the fascist asylum laws, but that wasn’t enough. My trouble was that I could never bring myself to make the leap to actually doing something. It was never quite the right time to give up my comfortable salary and the job that—even if I don’t love it—is a pretty cushy number. Besides, how was I going to make a difference? Social work? Sorry, but I’m too easily scared—show me a pug-faced dad accused of beating up his kids and I’d be hiding behind the six-year-old. Voluntary Service Overseas? What skills can I offer? Do they need an expert store checker in Eritrea? I do have fantasies about joining a crack earthquake rescue team (see How I’d Like to Die, Item Four), but—come on—I also quite fancy the idea of having dew-drenched sex in a spring meadow with Uma Thurman. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

(Number one: it’s far from certain that Uma would be agreeable. Number two: where can you find a spring meadow that isn’t saturated with pesticides these days? And—much more pertinent, this one—number three: faced with the reality of alfresco sex, I’d flee. Said meadow could be miles from the nearest homestead and I still wouldn’t be able to get it up—well, a skylark might be watching.)

I did once make a personal sacrifice and take a stand. I gave up a Saturday—valuable housework time—to accompany Megan on the last big protest before Gulf War Two. I wasn’t comfortable though and she could tell. Issues simply aren’t that black and white for me—my politics are coloured not red, orange, blue or green, but a vivaciously vague shade of grey. (In the opinion polls, I’m one of the fourteen per cent that always votes Don’t Know, the true third party in British politics). While Megan and thousands of others were yelling ‘Blair out!’ and ‘No war!’ I was looking vainly for a small group chanting (quietly, so as not to bother anyone), ‘We’re not sure, we’re not sure.’

In the end she couldn’t live with an armchair liberal and dumped me for the real thing: Sandy Morrison QC, defender of the wrongly convicted, champion of the underdog and regular star of Question Time. He was on it last week. He was brilliant. And his hair looked fabulous—like a lion’s mane. He was maddeningly articulate too. Bastard. Call me bitter, but it struck me then that taking a stand for society’s losers must be a doddle when it gives you a seven-figure income.

I look at Megan and I wonder if Sandy Morrison QC is waiting outside in his Bentley Arnage T with its six-point-eight-litre engine which delivers four hundred and fifty brake horse-power, making it the fastest production Bentley ever. How do I—an automotive illiterate—know all about Sandy Morrison’s one-hundred-and-seventy-grand car? I read about it in the Mail. They were doing one of their so-called-lefty lives in lap of luxury stories, and had got wind of the fact that he’d recently traded up from a Jag. But he hadn’t completely sold out. He’d bought one in lush socialist red.

Megan looks at the box on the coffee table and asks, ‘Are those my things?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There isn’t much. Some soppy compilation CDs, half a dozen books, a pair of jeans, a bra that ended up in one of my drawers for reasons that have nothing to do with anything unsavoury, and some photos from our last holiday—they were taken with my camera so strictly speaking I should keep them, but I’m making a point.

I didn’t put in her garlic crusher. I want to keep something of hers. Besides, it might give her a reason to call me.

I did slip the ring into the box. She doesn’t know about that.

The evening had gone like this:

‘Megan, I’ve got something I want to say.’

‘Me too. You go first.’

‘No, you.’

‘OK…Look, there isn’t an easy way to tell you this so I’d better just do it…I’ve…I’ve met someone…’

After that, ‘Will you do me the honour of marrying me?’ seemed a tad superfluous.

She picks up the box and clasps it to her chest.

I will her to spot the VSO booklet that I carefully placed beside it on the coffee table (at a cocksure fifty-eight degree angle), but—damn it—she doesn’t. She doesn’t notice the application form for a job with Waltham Forest Social Services either. Instead she looks at me searchingly.

‘Murray…Are you really…all right?’

No, I am not all right. The moment you’ve left I’m going to surround myself with snapshots, holiday souvenirs, the set of aluminium espresso cups that we bought together in Camden Market (the ones we never used again after the third-degree burn to my bottom lip), my copy of the Complete Seinfeld Scripts which you said would always remind you of me—and will thus always remind me of you—your garlic crusher, the other bra that I didn’t put in the box and several other mementos of our five years, eight months, one week and three days together. Then I will swallow an entire bottle of paracetamol and wash it down with the ouzo we bought in Kos, before dying weeping, broken and about fifty years before my due date.

All of which I manage to condense into a shrug.

She looks at me sorrowfully and says, ‘You need to—’

‘What, get a life?’

‘I wasn’t going to say that. But you do need to do something with yourself.’

I’ve heard this before, though never delivered with such pity. You need to do something with yourself was Megan’s cry throughout the five years, eight months, et cetera of our relationship. Towards the end it was uttered with increasingly desperate shrillness. She had a point. All she wanted was for me to have a dream, a direction, to stop drifting. She wasn’t the only one. I wanted me to stop drifting—still do. But I’ve never been one to take destiny by the scruff of its neck and give it a jolly good shake—or even to tap it on the shoulder and utter a polite ahem. A few years ago I thought my job was The Thing, but it wasn’t long before I realised my heart wasn’t in it. I turn up and go through the motions, but I lack the desire to make anything of it. But what do I possess the desire to do? I’ve asked myself that one enough times. I’ve come up with answers too. Lists of them. In the fond belief that committing something to paper will make it seem more tangible and therefore achievable. I remember my last one, written shortly before Meg left:

1. Pony trek up Andean spine of S America

I should point out that the only horse I’ve ever ridden was pink and had a slot for the fifty-pence piece…But, you know, think Big and all that.

2. Write Bill Bryson-ish book of pony trek (drawing attention to plight of indigenous peoples, threatened tree frogs, etc.)

3. Return Elgin Marbles (NB: check first)

The NB was a reminder to check whether it was Elgin that had stolen them or Elgin that wanted them back. I was pretty sure that Elgin had nicked them, but you know how these things can go pear-shaped for lack of basic groundwork.

4. Buy old bus. Refurb as mobile drug rehab unit (double-decker/make it residential?)

5. Mobile soup kitchen?

6. Mobile potage kitchen? (Sell lobster bisque/vichyssoise to City workers at £7 per portion)

Because it was clearly getting pretty stupid at this point, I took a coffee break. That was when I noticed my kitchen hygiene was slipping below its usual operating theatre standard and wrote:

7. Clean kitchen cupboards

8. Ditto hob

9. Mr Muscle Kitchen Spray

10. Cif Cream (lemon)

11. Flash Wipes

12. Plain digestives

13. Gold Blend (decaf)

I probably needn’t add that items seven to thirteen were made reality within hours, whereas numbers one to six have yet to progress from back-of-an-envelope status.

‘I’m fine, Megan,’ I say now. ‘I’ve got all sorts of things in the pipeline.’

‘I hope so. Just don’t leave them in there too long.’

She turns to go and I ask, ‘Do you want a lift?’

Now, why did you say that, because it’s only going to lead to her asking you…

‘You’ve finally had the car fixed?’

See what I mean?

‘Um…No…But I could call a minicab.’

‘It’s OK. I’ll get the tube.’

I follow her to the front door. She opens it and says, ‘Bye, then. I’ll give you a call if there’s anything else.’ She dips forward clumsily and kisses me on the cheek.

Then she’s gone.

I return to the living room and open a chink in the curtain. I watch her cross the road and walk in the direction of the tube station. But she stops fifty yards away beside a gleaming red Bentley and climbs in.

The woman I was meant to be with.

Megan and Murray.

Mamp;M.

Two little peanuts nestling in their chocolate and candy shells.

Gone forever.

(Unless she comes back for the garlic crusher.)

Now it’s Megan and Sandy.

Mamp;S.

Two items of sensible cotton underwear nestling in a…

It really doesn’t bear thinking about.

And she doesn’t even know that I wanted—want—to marry her.

And that there is a statistically slight (according to Stump, who hardly seems the reliable type) yet distinct possibility that I have a disease that begins with C and has been known to kill people.

I listen to the sound of fireworks fizzing and popping all over South Woodford. It’s as if they’re celebrating the fairy-tale union of Meg ’n’ Sand.

God, this self-pity. Megan was right. I have got to do something with myself.

Well, I can take care of that right now. I start with the magazines, adjusting them so they are once again in perfect alignment with the table’s edge.

9:17 p.m.

I switch off the vacuum cleaner and turn on the stereo. Solace in song. A disc is already in the slot so I press play. It’s Caesars. ‘Sort It Out’. A nice, bouncy tune. And, now I listen to it, lyrically apt.

I’m gonna smoke crack

’Cause you’re never coming back

I’m gonna shoot speedballs

Bang my head against the walls

I wanna sniff glue

’Cause I can’t get over you.

Yes, that is sooooo…not me. If, on the other hand, it went, I’m gonna spring clean, Wanna spray some Mister Sheen…

six: it’s kind of personal

monday 10 november / 8.57 a.m.

I wake up and the first thing I think—apart, obviously, from Damn, forgot to set the alarm—is that it has been five days since Megan came for her stuff. I wonder why she hasn’t been in touch about the ring. Or the garlic crusher. I tip myself out of bed and make a coffee. Then, still in my pyjama bottoms, I head downstairs to the hall and grab my post. No Jiffy Bag containing a jewellery-box-shaped lump. Just the usual crap.

Back in my flat I sit on my sofa and open…taran-tara!…a Barclaycard statement:

BALANCE FROM PREVIOUS STATEMENT | £977.74
PAYMENT RECEIVED—THANK YOU | 30.00
JP STEIN OF HATTON GARDEN | 6,499.00
MONTHLY INTEREST AT 1.385% | 13.12
NEW BALANCE | £7,459.86

Bugger.

I’ve spent the last few weeks filing this under D for Denial. I have no idea how I’m going to pay it. The truth is that I had no idea when I walked into JP Stein and picked out the chunky diamond in an eighteen-carat setting. I figured that the moment Megan said yes, the world would transform into a magical place where it chucked down in Ethiopia like an August bank holiday, George W embraced Osama B on the White House lawn and credit-card bills were quietly forgotten.

Which I’m sure would have happened if she had said yes.

So, if you’re upset about the sad state of the world, you know who to blame.

No, that’s not fair. The fact is that she never got the chance to reply because I was too wet to ask the question.

I crumple the statement and toss it across the room. Then, unable to fight the Cleaning Impulse, I retrieve it from the floor and put it in the bin. I return to my post and open an exclusive invitation to become the proud owner of a Capital One Platinum Card…an exclusive invitation from Renault to test-drive a Mégane…and an exclusive invitation to an appointment at Saint Matthew’s Hospital in Leytonstone.

Something else I’d filed under D.

Actually, I’m not in denial. Over the last few days I’ve persuaded myself to take up Doctor Stump—a wise and experienced general practitioner—on his reasonable and statistically based suggestion that I almost certainly DO NOT have cancer. It’s probably a straightforward case of seminal granuloma and, honestly, how bad can that be? It sounds like a nourishing high-fibre supplement, available at Boots, Holland and Barrett and all good health-food shops. Whatever, I bet it’s something that clears up with the help of a non-astringent ointment. No, I’ll surely be putting unnecessary pressure on an already stretched health service by showing up for the appointment.

I bin the letter and switch on the TV.

Hyam.

Richard Hyam-Glass. Ex-junior minister for something or other, convicted of taking bribes after having unsuccessfully sued Channel Four, which had made the original accusation. The sleaziest aspect wasn’t the lying or even the backhanders—he was a politician and they’re part of the job spec. No, his one truly despicable act was to shove his thirteen-year-old daughter into the witness box to lie on his behalf. She provided the false alibi that very nearly won his libel trial.

I remember feeling sorry for her, being scarred in public by her own father, branded a perjurer when she’d barely grown out of Barbies. I wonder what she’s up to now. Languishing in a rehab clinic for teenage junkies? I doubt it. Probably lounging around the grounds of a Swiss finishing school.

Finally rumbled, Hyam-Glass did his time in a five-star Hampshire jail, where he wrote an ‘ achingly confessional’ (the Mail) and ‘ poignantly repentant’ ( The Times) memoir. Now he has found redemption. A canny producer read his book, studied the jacket photo—which showed a handsome face etched deeply with the lines of suffering—and decided to re-launch him as daytime telly’s Mr Empathy.

You might wonder why I remember some relatively minor politician’s fall from grace so vividly. Well, I lived and breathed it vicariously through Megan. She was a junior in Channel Four’s legal department at the time. For her it was the clearest case of good against evil since Superman versus Lex Luthor. The TV channel’s cause looked hopelessly lost, but at the eleventh hour their barrister put in a barnstorming performance. He stood up, cleared his throat and reduced the plaintiff’s key witness to tears as he showed her to be nothing more than a brazen liar. Of course, that she was only thirteen might have helped him. At the time a saying about candy and babies sprang to mind, but I didn’t mention it to Megan.

I wish now that I had. The barrister was a bloke called Sandy Morrison.

I watch Richard Hyam-Glass bounding up and down the steps on his set, allowing his audience one or—if they behave—two words in edgeways. The show, like all these things, has nothing to do with giving ordinary people a voice and everything to do with providing a TV studio large enough to contain its presenter’s bloated ego. He’s tossing out empathetic phrases: emotional credit account and the long and winding road to closure. He could be talking about anything that entails trauma—which these days does mean anything—and I have to look at the caption to see what the topic is. Living with cancer.

I switch off the TV—not because I’m in denial, but because I’m late for work—and head for the bathroom. I run the shower and climb in. I squeeze a dollop of gel into my hand and soap my body. Same order as always: face, shoulders, arms, torso, groin…I can feel the lump and I don’t know if it’s an effect created by the blast of water bouncing off my scrotum, but it feels as if it’s alive, like it’s setting off on an impromptu growth spurt for the benefit of my soapy fingertips.

Stupid. Of course it isn’t growing. But I’m panicking now. I rinse off, towel myself dry and dress. Then I head for the office. But not before I’ve retrieved the letter from the bin.

10.54 a.m.

‘You’re late. Again,’ Haye snaps. ‘And you’ve got soap in your ear.’

‘Sorry—I seemed to run out of time this morning.’

‘Well, don’t let it happen again. This isn’t the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients.’

Haye is big on four things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports and the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients. To give him his due, soap in ear surely breaches the spirit, if not the letter of the Blower Mann dress code.

‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘it’s assessment time. I’ve got you down for a thirty-minute slot on Thursday morning. Make sure your diary’s clear.’

After I’d left uni I got a letter from Blower Mann informing me I had an interview with one of their group account directors—Niall Haye. Wow, I thought, Niall Haye. Of course, I’d never heard of him, but what a sexy-cool name—a twinkle-toed Irish footballer’s name, an edgy author’s name, a rock star’s name.

Never be seduced by a name.

Got that?

Never.

Niall Haye is a drone. Of all the drones in the hive, he is the droniest. A hundred-grand showbiz Porsche sits in his designated parking space, but it can’t conceal the man’s total lack of colour.

And if any one thing has killed my ambition it’s the fact that twice a year he sits me down for my assessment and dangles the promise that if I work really hard then one day I could turn into him.

‘Thursday, Thursday,’ I burble as I feel the bump of the hospital letter in my jacket. ‘Er…I can’t, Niall. I’ve got a hospital appointment…Sorry.’

‘Nothing I should worry about, Murray?’

His uncharacteristic display of tenderness surprises me and the words, Er, it’s almost certainly nothing, but I’m having a very minor lump checked out, almost spill out…but not quite. What I say instead is, ‘It’s nothing really…It’s kind of personal.’

Which is a mistake because, now I think about it, Haye is big on five things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports, appear-ance, and the prevention of personal affairs impacting (his favourite verb—though, of course it isn’t actually a verb; just a word that he and his kind have press-ganged into performing against type) on work. Worse still, the linking of a hospital appointment to the phrase it’s kind of personal surely has him picturing a visit to an STD clinic.

‘You of all people,’ he says, ‘should not be taking your biannual appraisal lightly. If I may use my favourite analogy—’

Let me guess. Space, the final frontier?

‘—a career is rather like interplanetary travel—’

Bingo!

‘—The slightest misfire on your rocket’s trim controls—’

Trim controls, trim controls…Must have left them in my workstation. In my desk-tidy perhaps? Oh, I was forgetting; this is an analogy.

‘—and you’ll miss your destination by light years. Your ship, my friend—’

Pur-lease, Haye—I am not your friend.

‘—has yet to leave the launch pad. If you’ve any interest at all in achieving lift-off, you’ll reschedule the hospital.’

Oh yes, how I’d love to cancel an urgent investigation into a potentially life-threatening disease so I can listen to you marking me out of ten on my performance across fifteen key criteria.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.

He turns and walks briskly away, all things-to-do-people-to-see. I can’t believe how jaded I feel. A thirty-one-year-old burn out. Yet there’s one thing that gives me hope. I do, after all, have a dream, though not one of which Megan would approve. I’m not sure I entirely approve of it myself. This is how it goes:

Haye: Murray, something huge has come up, a gold-plated revenue opportunity and a chance to make the world a better place.

Colin: What is it, Niall?

Haye: Before I tell you, I need to know I can count on you one hundred and ten per cent. You’ll be playing on the A team, pissing with the big boys, and I need to know you’re up for it.

Colin: You know I relish a challenge, Niall. Show me your biggest executive urinal and let me hose down that porcelain.

Haye: We’ve been appointed to handle Mr Muscle.

Colin: Fantastic! Stupendous. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Haye: Isn’t it? We’ve got the whole lot. The kitchen spray, the bathroom cleaner, the entire kit and caboodle.

Colin: Even the oven spray, the drain cleaner and the handy orange-scented kitchen wipes?

Haye: Their entire product portfolio is ours and I believe there’s only one man who can handle it…(Unnecessarily over played dramatic pause)…Murray, this is your baby.

SFX: Manly backslaps and high fives.

It isn’t always Mr Muscle. Sometimes it’s Cif, sometimes Dettox. Other times, as a sop to my ex, it’s an as yet un-launched range of eco-friendly products that really do make the world a better as well as a cleaner and more fragrant place.

Murray: Can you believe it, Meg? Thanks to me the Midlands and the Southeast have been officially pronounced germ-free, and it’s been achieved without any increase in CFC and chlorine levels.

Megan: Oh, Murray, you really have made the planet safer for our unborn child and you’ve done it without sacrificing market share. Come here and let me smother you with kisses.

Whatever, I honestly think that being given control of a bigspending household cleaner account would give my life meaning and purpose. I imagine the factory tours where I’m shown how they mix the chemicals that cut through grease, yet leave no unsightly powdery residue. I picture myself in a white protective suit being allowed a glimpse of the aggressive solvents that, if they weren’t so busy breaking down baked-on filth, could be used by some crazed despot for his WMD programme. I dream of brainstorming sessions where I lead a crack team of marketing pros and detergent boffins in search of the Holy Grail: a multi-surface cleaner suitable for kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a question of fragrance. You may or may not have noticed, but kitchen cleaners smell entirely inappropriate when you use them in the bathroom and vice versa. It’s only a little thing, but a one-product-fits-all solution must be out there…If only they could find the right scent.

I’m rambling. My point is that, sad to say, the task—the job of Detergents Tsar—would be more than advertising. For me it would be evangelism.

seven: i have done this before, you know. that’s why i keep my nails short

thursday 13 november / 9.26 a.m.

Why Saint Matthew? He started out as a tax inspector, didn’t he? Hardly a name to comfort the sick, and surely it only reminds the dying of death duties.

The place is vast; an industrial sprawl reminiscent of a Soviet uranium facility in the Siberian wastes—except somehow it ended up in east London. It must take the health budget of a third-world country just to heat and light the place.

Where’s Outpatients? Is it the same as Aamp;E or is it something different? I wonder this as I walk past a group of three old men in winceyette pyjamas smoking by a fire exit. Don’t think I’ll be asking them.

The story goes that a minor royal—the Duchess of Chingford or something—turned up to cut the ribbon on a new paediatric ward in the early nineties and she still hasn’t found her way out. Never mind pegging out on trolleys in corridors, people must die simply trying to find the right department—unless they’ve had the good sense to pack a rucksack with food, water and Kendal Mint Cake.

I’m walking around in circles. I know this because the chain smokers are looming into view again.

9.55 a.m.

By the time I find the right Outpatients I’m nearly half an hour late. I’m tired and footsore, and I’m wishing I were significant enough to qualify for Blower Mann’s corporate BUPA membership. I’m also worried that I’ve missed my slot. I shouldn’t be. This is the NHS and they’re running well behind.

My appointment is in one of Saint Matthew’s new bits. The reception area has floor to ceiling windows and a bracing view of big trees, though I think I can make out a tall chimney stack between two sycamores. Hospital incinerators always unsettle me. I know they put old bandages and stuff in them, but what else? I mean, if you’d asked the commandant of Auschwitz about his, I bet he’d have said, ‘Ach, zose zings? Zey are just for burnink ze garden rubbish und votnot.’ Hospitals bring out the paranoiac in me. I’ve seen Coma too many times. Show me a couple of doctors chatting by a coffee machine and I’ll show you a conspiracy. I’m scared of flying, but I’m terrified of hospitals. And it’s an entirely rational fear. Statistics are used to soothe the nervous flyer: you’re far more likely to get knocked down by a car and so on. But when it comes to nervous patients they’re flummoxed. Hospitals are perfectly safe—more people die in…Er…Die in…Die in what, then? Look at it this way: even if you get whacked in a car crash there’s a fair chance you won’t die in the wreckage—no, they rush you to a hospital to do that.

I badly need a distraction. I reach into my briefcase, fish out the Guardian and open it at random—‘MIRACLE’ CANCER DRUG DISCREDITED IN TRIALS. Why didn’t I buy the Daily Sport? Right now I could do with a light-hearted lap-dancers-abducted-by-aliens-for-intergalactic-sex-orgies story. Ironically, I have a sudden urge to take up smoking—nicotine might be just the ticket. Without even moving my eyes, though, I can see three NO SMOKING signs. I look at a kid in a baseball cap on the far side of the waiting area. He’s got no eyebrows, which suggests that he’s most likely bald beneath the hat. Jesus, cancer. He’s trying to read a Spider-man comic, but it’s obvious his heart isn’t in it. How old is he? Nine? Ten? He should be in school. Or bunking off. Whatever, he doesn’t deserve to be here. At least his mum is with him. I don’t often wish for my mother, but I’d like her to be with me now. What am I thinking? No, I wouldn’t. She’d be crying. When I gashed my shin at scouts she was hysterical. I needed two stitches and a tetanus. She required treatment for shock and was kept in overnight for observation. I had to catch the bus home on my own. Could she cope with cancer or, rather, with the faintest and most wafer-thin outside chance of it? Forget about it.

But I wish someone were with me.

A few weeks ago that someone would have been Megan. Situations like this bring out the best in her—her innate empathy makes her a natural Florence Nightingale. Last night I came close to calling her—I got as far as dialing the first five digits of her mobile. I couldn’t go through with it—I hate to seem needy.

The engagement ring. How needy must that have made me look? She must have found it and seen it for what it was—a cheap (six-and-a-half-grand-cheap!) shot at emotional blackmail. I picture the scene:

Megan: Jesus, Sandy, have you seen this? He thinks he can buy me. He just doesn’t get it.

Sandy: Have a heart, darling. He must be—(The rest of his answer is drowned out by…

SFX: £6,499 of diamond solitaire being flushed down a toilet.

I need that ring back—with or without Megan attached. I still have no idea how I’m going to pay for it. I’ve started buying lottery tickets—£20 blown on them today—because odds of fourteen million to one must be better than no chance at all.

Can’t think about all that now. I return to the newspaper. With eyes closed I flick past the cancer drug story. When I open them again I’m staring at RADICAL QC CAMPAIGNS FOR REFUGE and a picture of Sandy Morrison. Well, who the hell else? He’s standing outside an asylum centre in Highbury that’s facing closure. The neighbours can’t stand the place, apparently. Sandy is one of them, but he’s swimming against the NIMBY tide and is all for it. Normally I’d be sympathetic to his argument, but seeing his handsome face makes me want to round up every last refugee, load them into containers and truck them out of the country. And if a certain radical lawyer gets caught up in the mêlée and ends up being shipped to a crime-ridden tenement in Tirana…Acceptable collateral damage, if you ask me.

My mobile beeps. The receptionist glares at me and points at the MOBILE PHONES MUST BE SWITCHED OFF sign, which is competing for attention with NO SMOKING. I don’t care though—being in possession of an active mobile could be an imprisonable offence, but at least mine is dragging me from the excruciating thoughts swimming about my head. I turn away so she can’t see me lift the phone to my ear. I listen to the message. It’s Jakki: ‘Niall wants to know where you put the Schenker job-start file. Call me when you can.’

Haye was miffed when I didn’t reschedule my appointment—which guarantees me a column of fat zeros on my assessment, as well as about a dozen pesky messages on my mobile. Well, sod him. I’m having some quality me time.

In a hospital.

With some sick people.

I switch off my phone with a decisive flourish just in time to hear the receptionist call out, ‘Mr Collins?’ She’s squinting at a folder with—I presume—my name on it. ‘It’s Colin. No S,’ I say on autopilot, though I don’t know why I bother.

‘Doctor Morrissey will see you now,’ she says. ‘Third door on the left.’

Just what I need—a doctor whose namesake is pop music’s singing suicide note.

10.29 a.m.

Doctor Morrissey doesn’t have a bunch of gladioli sticking out of his trousers and a comedy quiff. In fact she has very short hair indeed. She’s young as well. Which is reassuring, actually—if I were on some critical, tumours-sprouting-out-of-his-ears list, surely I’d be seeing a battle-scarred senior consultant. With her Peter Pan haircut and pert features she’s quite elfin. No way would an elf pull the literal graveyard shift.

‘Take a seat,’ she says pleasantly with a hint of a West Country accent—not one of the Manchester Morrisseys, then. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.’ She must know why I’m here. Hasn’t she got some notes, a letter or something? Do I really have to explain? She seems to sense my discomfort and says, ‘I know you’ve found a lump…On one of your testicles. I just need to know how long you’ve been aware of it.’

‘A couple of weeks. Maybe three,’ I say.

‘That’s good. Our biggest headache is when men find something and then ignore it for months. Why don’t you let me take a look?’

I knew she was going to ask me that. In fact, I showered twice this morning because I knew someone was going to ask me precisely that question. So much for all the preparation because I feel extremely uncomfortable now. I hated it enough when sixty-something Stump had me drop my trousers and felt me up. Twenty-something, not unattractive Doctor Morrissey is an entirely different proposition and I imagine a lot of blokes would be thrilled at the thought of her small and fragile hands down there. Not me, though. I suppose I’m shy. Or uptight and repressed. Whatever, I’m someone who needs to be on very familiar terms with delicate feminine hands before I’m comfortable with them touching me below the waist. Again she senses my awkwardness and says, ‘I have done this before, you know. That’s why I keep my nails short. You can take your trousers off behind the curtain if you like.’

11.17 a.m.

I’m sitting on the edge of an examination couch, a needle in my arm, and under the circumstances I feel remarkably relaxed. Doctor Morrissey is taking blood. ‘We’ll do some tests for tumour markers,’ she explains matter-of-factly. ‘They indicate the possible presence of cancer cells.’ I flinch at the mention of the T-followed closely by the C-word. ‘Of course, you most likely don’t have cancer,’ she goes on, and I relax again because I believe it from her. ‘It’s much less common than you might imagine. It looks like you have some sort of growth down there though and we need to get to the bottom of it.’

She knows that I have some sort of growth because she sent me to a room along the corridor where a technician gave me an ultrasound scan. This, bizarrely, is what sparked my sense of calm. Ultrasounds—to me, anyway—are Good Things. My only experience of them was when Liz Napier, a senior account director at work, brought the print-out from hers into the office. A small, fuzzy black and white image that drew a gaggle of cooing onlookers. I peered at it too. I looked at the snap of the perfectly formed foetus that everyone agreed was sucking its thumb, though all I could see was something that resembled a photo of Greenland taken on a particularly cloudy day by a satellite equipped only with a disposable Kodak. But of course Liz didn’t give birth to Greenland. She had a perfectly formed, thumb-sucking baby girl called Carmen. That’s why ultrasound scans equal nice, warm and pleasant, even when they’re looking for cancer. So what if this has no basis in reason? It’s a sturdy-looking straw and just try and stop me clutching it.

Doctor Morrissey has helped to ease my stress as well. She has told me several times that I most likely don’t have testicular cancer and that even if I do, the cure rate is up in the very high nineties when it’s caught early enough. I’m choosing to go with her because she’s pleasant and competent and seems to know what she’s talking about. She takes the needle from my arm—very competently, I might add—and says, ‘OK, we’re done.’

I stand up, roll down my shirtsleeve and pull on my jacket. I bend down to pick up my briefcase and my Lotto tickets tumble out of my pocket and onto the floor. She picks them up and hands them back to me. ‘You’re the optimistic type, then,’ she says.

‘More like desperate, actually.’

‘Well, if it’s any consolation, the odds of there being something seriously wrong with you are almost as long.’

Almost? Only bloody almost?

Bloody Morrisseys. Why do they always have to drag things down?

eight: absolutely dandy

thursday 20 november / 9.21 p.m.

I pick up the tray of drinks from the bar and fight my way across the room to Brett, Vince and Kenny. Kenny is Production Geezer. The man without whom the glittering mirror ball we fondly call advertising would come crashing to the dance floor. He’s the man responsible for seeing to it that Brett and Vince’s lovingly crafted adverts make it into print. Always just in the nick of time. And usually, to his immense credit, the right way up.

As I sit down it only takes a moment to figure that the conversation hasn’t moved on from ten minutes ago. The question: How would you spend a Lotto win? It was sparked by my fumbling for a twenty to cover the round and pulling this week’s hopeless punt from my pocket.

‘You’re mad, Vin,’ Kenny pronounces. ‘Why would you risk blowing it when you’ve just won at fourteen million to one?’

‘Egg-fucking-zactly, you tubby twonk,’ Vince says. ‘If I’ve just won at fourteen mill, I’m gonna fancy my chances at twos, ain’t I?’

Vince’s Lottery Dream: ‘ Hit the casino and put the fucking lot on red.’ Which, naturally, struck me as deeply insane, though I didn’t say so. Partly because, as is often the way with Vince, his logic has a perverted appeal. But, no, I mustn’t get sucked into this way of thinking. It’s profoundly insane.

‘You’re mad,’ Kenny repeats. ‘You’ve got your millions. Why piss it away?’

‘I wouldn’t be pissing it away,’ Vince says. ‘You’re forgetting the secret.’

I must have missed this when I was buying the round.

‘You gonna tell us what this secret is, then?’ Kenny asks.

‘The secret is I couldn’t fucking lose.’

‘Yeah, but what is it?’

‘If I told you it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?’ Vince says.

‘More like there ain’t no secret,’ Kenny mutters, draining his glass. ‘Here, stick another one in there, Murray.’

Hey, wow, you noticed I’m here.

Brett says, ‘Give him a break, Kenny…’

What, you’re buying this round?

‘…He hasn’t said how he’d spend his win yet. Tell us, Murray. Then you can get the beers in.’

‘Er…I don’t really know,’ I say, because…Well, I really don’t know. I don’t have a dream, unless you count getting Megan back (not sure a lottery win would do it) or being promoted to Account Director (Detergent Brands). Endless lists on the backs of envelopes have more or less proved that I’m devoid of credible ambition.

‘There must be something,’ Brett prods. ‘Just make it up.’

He’s right, there must be something. Even Vince, who usually never projects beyond the next ten minutes, has an ambition.

I’m not talking about putting it all on red, which as far as I could tell, came out of nowhere. I’m referring to the Official Vince Douglas Dream. Vince is like every creative. None of them wants to be doing ads forever. Nearly every copywriter I know is working on his Novel (though they’re so conditioned to thinking in thirty-second chunks that they rarely make it past page two). Similarly, every art director wants to Direct—prefer-ably Cate Blanchett and Halle Berry in a twenty-first century Thelma and Louise, but, frankly, they’d take Police Academy 12 if it came down to it.

Vince is the exception. He longs to break out of ads, but he has no wish to become the next Ridley Scott. His dream involves cunning, bravado and a miniature submarine. Ironically, it was inspired by a film—an action flick about a sunken nuclear sub. The crew spent a couple of hours running out of oxygen while outside Kurt Russell or Chuck Norris or whoever attempted rescue in a little yellow submersible. I can’t give you much more detail than that because I didn’t see it. I’d sooner have typhus-dipped slivers of bamboo shoved under my fingernails than sit through one minute of a film about my personal idea of hell. Vince saw it seven times though, munching his popcorn and thinking, What if you put the docking mechanism on the top of the rescue sub instead of the bottom and went up instead of down? In short, this is the plan: buy sub, sail up and down Med on lookout for millionaires’ yachts, dive beneath them, dock, make hole, climb in, clear the loaded sods out of boat and home, cruise off into deep blue yonder.

Sounds slightly more insane than putting it all on red, but…

I cannot stress enough how deadly serious he is about this. He has spoken to submarine makers and even drawn up a business plan—which he only just stopped short of taking to the small-business advisor at NatWest. He even nags Brett to begin every one of their TV scripts with Open on miniature submarine in the hope that he’ll get to shoot it and do some real live research. Bizarrely, their Cats Undersea script for Pura Kitty Litter came within a whisker’s breadth of making it onto the telly. As far as I can tell—though I have to say I’m no expert in the field—his plan is more or less flawless. Every time someone proposes a but, Vince has an immediate and convincing answer.

There is one problem, actually. Everyone that Vince has ever shared a beer with knows about it. If Trevor McDonald ever announces, ‘And now let’s go to our reporter in Monaco for more on that daring underwater robbery…’ a couple of thousand people will scratch their heads and try to remember the name of the drunk who was sounding off in the pub about magnetised docking tubes.

‘I’m sorry, Brett. I pass,’ I say finally. ‘Don’t know how I’d spend it.’

‘What’re you asking him for?’ Vince sneers. ‘You know what he’d do. Buy a Volvo, a cottage in the Cotswolds and invest the rest in the fucking Nationwide.’

Well, I’d have said the Woolwich, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

‘Leave him be. There must be something you wanna do, Murray,’ Brett says.

‘I’ve always fancied the idea of pony trekking in the Andes,’ I say nervously.

‘That is fucking cool,’ Vince splutters—to my amazement because to the best of my recollection I have never had an idea that I would consider cool, let alone Vince.

‘Is it?’ I ask, wincing as I wait for the rug to be whipped from beneath me.

“Course it is. Buy your conk candy at source. Cut out the middleman—’

That isn’t what I had in mind, as it happens.

‘—Here, you fancy joining me in the gents for a toot?’

I’m stunned. Is he offering me a line? Of cocaine? Because I don’t believe he’s suggesting we repair to the toilets for an impromptu trumpet recital. Either would be unprecedented, actually. Vince only has me around to pick up the tab. I’m not here to join in—with drug-taking or lavatory jam sessions.

‘Er…no thanks,’ I reply. ‘I’m…um…detoxing.’

He looks at me as if I’m mad.

Well, I’m hardly going to tell him that few things are more terrifying to me than the prospect of snorting white powder of indeterminate origin up my nostril. A very, very, very occasional joint is the furthest I’ve ever dared travel down the road to junkie hell. And my answer wasn’t a lie. I am detoxing. Since my visit to Saint Matthew’s my body has been, while not exactly a temple, a lot more spick and span than usual. I haven’t had a single burger and right now I’m drinking Sprite—though there is no reason for Brett, Vince and Kenny to suspect that it isn’t a Vamp;T. The new regime isn’t because I think I’m actually ill, as in ill ill, really it isn’t. But these things—lumps and what have you—serve as a warning, don’t they? Shape up or ship out, so to speak.

And, well, I’m shaping up.

Vince arches a brow and says, ‘You don’t even burn the candle at one end, do you, matey?’ Then he turns to his partner. ‘What about you, B Boy?’

‘I’ll pass,’ Brett replies. ‘I’m sick of waking up with the three a.m. nosebleeds.’

‘Kenny?’

‘Drugs is for mugs,’ Kenny replies, draining his eighth pint of mind-altering lager. ‘Reckon I’ll be off.’

‘Whatever,’ Vince says as he staggers off in the general direction of the gents. I watch him go, envying his complete inability to live beyond the moment. As Kenny hauls himself to his feet and takes his leave, Brett asks, ‘You OK?’

Well, I’ve got a lump in my trousers that may or may not be cancer and I’m on the eve of visiting the hospital to get the verdict, but, that apart, I’m absolutely dandy.

‘I’m absolutely dandy. Why do you ask?’

‘You’ve seemed a bit spooked lately. And you asked for that last lot of script changes like you couldn’t give a toss. I kind of missed your usual cheery Hey, guys, the client’s made a tiny suggestion that’ll improve the core idea immensely bollocks.’

‘That was because I couldn’t give a toss…I’d just had my assessment.’

‘Not good?’

‘Haye reckons my career might be helped by a visit to the Job Centre.’

‘He’s firing you?’

‘No, but I guess my name’s pencilled in for the next efficiency-focused downsizement.’

‘Take it as a compliment. The man’s dull as fuck. I’ve had livelier conversations with the automated menu on the Odeon booking line.’ He gives me a hearty slap on the back—I think I’ve just risen in his estimation. ‘Know what you need?’

‘What’s that?’

‘A fuck,’ says Vince, back from the bog and full of the joys of Colombia.

This—their uncanny ability to complete each other’s thoughts—is what marks them out as a team.

‘I was going to suggest a new girlfriend, but it amounts to the same thing,’ Brett says.

‘You wanna grab your secretary,’ Vince goes on. ‘She’s gagging for it.’ He gestures in the direction of Jakki, who’s on a Breezer binge with her mates from the office. I like Jakki, even if she has given her name its pop-star spelling. But I don’t fancy her any more than she fancies me.

‘I couldn’t,’ I say.

‘Gimme one good reason,’ says Vince.

Well, she works ten feet away from me which would make things awkward the morning after, she’s a bit on the plump side, she likes Enrique Iglesias, which isn’t the end of the world but it could form a potentially insurmountable stumbling block six or seven months into a relationship, and she loves sardines which, though they’re a rich source of omega acids, have an unfortunate habit of repeating…Oh, and her first name isn’t Megan and her second isn’t Dyer.

‘I dunno…I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get involved with girls you work with,’ I say.

‘What’s the fucking point of having birds at work if you ain’t gonna get involved with ’em?’ Vince says.

‘Murray’s a one-woman man, Vin,’ Brett says. ‘Even when the one-woman done gawn left him fucking weeks ago. He deserves our sympathy.’

‘Deserves a slap on the arse more like. Spineless twonk. Fucking suit.’ Having whacked the nail painfully on the head, Vince stands up and heads for Jakki’s crowd.

Like a fly heading for shit.

I don’t mean that at all. Vince is a bit fly-like—certainly when it comes to attention span and personal hygiene—but the girls are not shit. They’re extremely nice, if slightly the worse for wear. I’m just not feeling too grand at the moment—entirely because of my dire assessment (reiterated so succinctly only moments ago by Vince) and nothing to do with the…you know…lump. I’m sure that if I were drunk I wouldn’t feel like dragging everyone down with me. Perhaps I should trade in the Sprite for a grown-up drink.

‘Bevy?’ asks Brett, reading my mind.

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I reply, changing it.

‘Vin isn’t the cunt he makes out, you know.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘He’s got his sensitive side. Did you know he’s a dad?’

‘You’re kidding,’ I say, watching him work Jakki and her friends like they’re King’s Cross hookers.

‘Yeah, he got this flaky PA at Miller Shanks pregnant. Bit of a shock at the time. Vin’s never been too choosy, but she’s the type who’d look at Prince William and think he’s a common little twat. How she ended up in a locked toilet with the V-Bomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries. Mind you, she’s the most staggeringly stupid person I’ve ever met. She thought Doctor Pepper was a Hungarian tit surgeon on Harley Street…You think I’m kidding? I read the letter she typed trying to book a consultation.’

‘Vince, a dad,’ I say, still unable to wrap my brain round the concept.

‘He couldn’t believe it either,’ Brett says. ‘He was in denial until the baby came out. No need for DNA—she was his Mini Me. She’s three now.’

‘What’s she called?’

‘If Vin had had his way, she’d be Diddymu.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Name of a nag. Came in for him at forty-to-one on the day she was born. Mum obviously wasn’t having that. They couldn’t agree and rowed about it for two months. In the end they compromised. Went for two names. Mum chose Scarlet.’

‘What about Vince?’

‘Bubbles.’

‘That’s the name of—’

‘Yeah, Jacko’s chimp. I told him he was mad; he was writing out a permit for adult therapy right there on her birth certificate. I mean, if they had to have two names the least they could’ve done was make one of them Kate.’

‘Does he have custody?’

‘Fuck, no—he makes Fagin look like a model carer. But he’s very hands-on. Takes her to toddler ballet every Saturday and brings her to all-night edits at Moving Pics.’

Bang on cue, Vince reappears with Jakki. His hand is on—what else?—her bum and I’m trying—struggling, frankly—to picture him cosseting a tiny bundle of humanity; his pride and joy.

‘Here, Jakks, do something with your soppy boss, will you?’ he says, shoving her in my direction. She lands in my lap, where she stays, giggling. She smells icky-sweet—Dune mingling with the Bacardi marketing department’s notion of passion fruit, which at least masks the sardine sandwich she had for lunch. I pull her upright and she slides off onto the bench seat beside me.

‘Leave him alone, Vince, he’s lovely,’ she slurs, putting an arm around my shoulder. He takes her advice and leaves me alone, heading back to her mates. Jakki looks me in the eye and says, ‘You OK? You’ve been very…distant lately.’

‘Have I?’

‘Yeah…I notice stuff, you know. I’m like a radio. I pick things up.’

‘I’m fine, Jakki. Just a bit under the weather…You know, tired.’

‘You wanna pull yourself together,’ she snaps suddenly, pulling her arm from my shoulder. ‘You don’t know how bloody lucky you are.’

What did I say?

She starts to cry.

What did I say, for heaven’s sake?

‘My uncle’s got cancer,’ she says through drunken sobs.

‘I’m sorry, Jakki,’ I say, though she’ll never know how truly sorry I am.

‘He had this lump on his forearm for ages. He used to joke about it—said it was his extra muscle—but it’s cancer. They cut his arm off at the elbow last week. He’s having chemo now. They reckon he’ll be OK, but you’re never OK after that, are you?’

No, I don’t suppose you are.

‘It’s like a knife hanging over you—’

OK, I get the picture.

‘—a ticking time bomb—’

Shut up, for God’s sake.

‘—a death sentence. It’s so sad.’

Sad? It’s tragic, girl. You do not want to know how much that little nugget of family news is churning me up inside.

‘I’m sorry about your uncle, Jakki, really sorry, but…’

But what? She looks at me for a morsel of comfort.

‘…But I’ve got to go.’

I stand up, grab my jacket and leave the bar.

10.01 p.m.

Outside the icy air whacks me in the face. I suck it in, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. My legs are shaking and I have that sharp, presick taste in the back of my throat. I try to swallow but my mouth is too dry. I can’t shift my mind off tumescent, throbbing tumours.

I need to get home. Now.

I see a taxi—a rare sight in Docklands at this time of day. A rare sight at any time of day. Docklands is placed next to Papua New Guinea in the cabdriver’s atlas. I stick my arm out. Barely slowing, the taxi swings through a dizzying U-turn and pulls up in front of me. The driver’s window slides down and a cheery voice calls out, ‘Where to, chief?’

‘South Woo—’

The rest of the word comes out as a stream of vomit that pebble-dashes the Rimmel poster on the cab door—it looks as if Kate Moss has suddenly quit extolling longer, lusher lashes in favour of drawing attention to the horror of eating disorders.

‘Drunken fucker,’ the cabby shouts as he accelerates away.

I wish—I truly, truly wish.

nine: i said run!

thursday 20 november / 11.04 p.m.

What am I doing here?

It’s barely an hour since I gave the taxi a spray job. Here is nowhere near South Woodford. Here is Barnsbury Square, Islington. I have no idea which house they live in, but it’s surely close. I start in the northeast corner and set off. Halfway round I spot the Bentley. I can’t be far away. Resisting the urge to give the car a good kicking, I look at the houses. They’re only terraces—albeit nice, big terraces—but each one must be worth over a million. I walk along the iron railings that separate them from the pavement and peer down into the basement wells. Most of the windows are shuttered, but light pours out of one—shining like an irresistible come on. I stop and look inside. A couple sits at a rustic pine table. In front of them are half-empty glasses and dirty plates decorated with scraps of rocket, Parmesan shavings and smears of glossy, dark brown sauce.

I look at the couple. He’s thirty-ish, deliberately unshaven. A chunk of surgical steel glints in his eyebrow, paint splatters his jeans. A decorator? Eating rocket in Barnsbury Square? More likely he spends his working days in a barn-like studio off Old Street roundabout which he shares with canvases and objets trouvés—AKA shit from skips according to Brett, who’s something of an art critic. She’s long and angular in a way that a scout from Storm would describe as momentous before booking her on the next flight to Milan. Her hand is on his leg and they’re laughing.

I remember that. Laughing. With Megan. Her hand resting casually on my thigh.

Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?

Did I really think I’d see her and him through an un-curtained window? And even if I did, what was I proposing to do? Ring on the doorbell and invite myself in for coffee? Slip a burning, petrol-soaked rag through the letterbox? I should have known that the journey would leave me feeling embittered, not to mention bitterly cold—it’s mid-November and all I’m wearing is a flimsy suit.

I half turn to walk back the way I came, but before I can take a step, a second woman comes into view. I only catch her as a blur out of the corner of my eye, but in our five years, eight months, one week and three days together her every molecule was processed and stored in my head so that—however brief the glimpse and obscure the angle—she’s instantly recognisable.

I turn back and look at Megan. She’s putting a fresh bottle of wine on the dining table. She’s laughing, too, sharing in the hilarity with the artist and the model. He isn’t far behind her. His arms reach around her waist as she refills the wineglasses.

Sandy sodding Morrison.

Queen’s bastard Counsel.

I try desperately to recall the last time that Megan and I had friends round for dinner. Did we rustle up something with Parmesan and wilted rocket? Was there wine, marinated olives and lashings of laughter? Did we ever invite anyone to dinner at all? Because right now I honestly can’t remember doing so. Not once.

My tears make her appear in soft-focus and, therefore, more perfectly beautiful than ever. Silently I plead with her to look up and see me. She doesn’t, though, and as my hysteria subsides I’m glad. She surely thinks little enough of me as it is. I don’t need her to add pathetic stalker to my list of failings. I turn again and this time I stride purposefully away.

But I stop when I reach the Bentley. I don’t know why, but I peer inside. He’s a scruffy git. One hundred and seventy grand spent on the car and he treats it like a dustbin. The ashtray is overflowing and belongings cover the seats and floor. My car is spotless. OK, it doesn’t happen to…you know…go, but you won’t find so much as a sweet wrapper in the ashtray. How can Megan live with such a slob? I know my…er…orderly nature irritated her towards the end, but did she really have to rush so madly to the other extreme? It’s like…I don’t know…Brad Pitt, for example, dumping Jennifer Aniston and going out with a really fat girl with dull, lifeless hair. Like he’s got a point to make and he wants to rub it in his skinny, glossy-maned ex’s face. I bet Jen would be cut to the quick and, well, I’d be totally with her.

My eyes tour the car’s interior. I can see old newspapers (the Guardian of course), exhausted fag packets, a bag of Murray Mints ( Murray Mints—way too Freudian), a fat, dog-eared law book and…a white, lacy bra. It’s there on the back seat next to a crumpled pair of 501s, three soppy compilation CDs and a few snaps of Megan and me frolicking on a beach in Kos.

She made such a fuss about coming to pick up the last of her things—‘ You know how I’ve got to have all my stuff around me’—yet now it’s obvious that she didn’t really want them; she simply didn’t want them to be anywhere near me. The realisation hurts me almost as much as ‘Murray, I’ve…I’ve met someone.’

I can’t take this. I’m about to walk away for good, but something else catches my eye—a small rectangular box in the rear foot-well. Though most of it is hidden beneath the driver’s seat, I can make out the glint of the elegant gold lettering stamped into its lid. I can’t actually read it in this light, but I know what it says: J.P. STEIN OF HATTON GARDEN.

So she never found the ring. It must have jostled out of the carton along with her other things and it has lain on the floor ever since. This new knowledge takes some of the edge off my hurt—at least she and Sandy haven’t been holding the sparkler up to the light, admiring its exquisite ( J.P. Stein’s adjective) cut and laughing at the sad, clingy mug that bought it.

But I need the ring back. I’ve had two letters from Barclaycard threatening to turf me into the bottomless pit of credit-card hell if I don’t cough up. The summons can’t be far away. Jesus, yes, I need it. I stand back from the car and consider my options. They’re limited. I could return to the house, knock on the door and say something like, ‘Hi there, Sandy. Look, I know it’s a bit late and I live several miles from here, but I just happened to be passing and—loved you on Question Time, by the way. Terrific point you made about electoral reform. Anyway, as I was saying, I was just passing and I remembered that thing in the Guardian about the asylum seekers’ centre. Really good that you’re taking a stand. You haven’t got a petition to sign or something?’ Then, when he disappears to find it, I nip into the hall and grab the car keys that just happen to be lying on the table…

I don’t think so.

Which leaves only one course of action and I feel my heart race at the prospect.

Come on, you can do this. How many times have you watched those Police, Camera, You’re Nicked You Recidivist Twat shows and seen cocky little twelve-year-olds do it on CCTV? Piece of piss.

I glance up and down the street for late-night dog walkers or—far less likely these days—coppers. No one. I’m alone.

But I can’t do this. I’m the bloke who breaks into a cold sweat when he pads his expenses. I don’t have a criminal bone in my body. I so cannot do this.

Course you can, because if you don’t it’s CCJ time. And eviction—have you any idea at all how you’re going to make the rent this month? You’ll be lucky to borrow the price of a cup of tea after your creditors have finished stripping the flesh off your bones.

Shaking, I take my jacket off and wrap it around my right forearm, making sure that one of the shoulder pads covers my fist. It offers scant protection, though. I rue the day that fashion designers tired of the shoulder-pads-of-an-American-footballer aesthetic—what I really require is a pad big and broad enough to land a helicopter on…as worn by Dex Dexter in Dynasty.

Jesus, this is no time for a delve into the history of men’s fashion, 1980 to the present.

I suppose I’ll just have to make do, then. I pull my arm back behind my shoulder and hold it there.

Go on, pussy, do it.

I close my eyes and swing. Though I can’t actually see it, I’m sure my arm is cutting a menacingly sweeping arc on its descent towards the car. One worthy of Lennox. Or Brad in Fight Club—

Fist connects with car. There is no give, though—no implosion of glass.

Just a sharp, burning pain that shoots through my hand and up my arm before coming close to blowing the top of my head off.

Who told you to close your eyes when you punch, you wanker? That was the door pillar you hit.

I cry out in agony, but luckily the blaring of an alarm drowns me out.

You are such a pillock. It’s the alarm on the fucking Bentley. Run!

I stagger back from the car, which has sprung into hi-tech life. Its indicators are flashing wildly and its muscular red body is shaking visibly with the vibrations of its banshee security system. I look down at my fist. The jacket is still wrapped around it, but I can make out a dark patch of blood spreading through the fabric. I hear a front door open and I turn to see Sandy Morrison QC illuminated by brass coach lights. His dinner guest—the artist—is at his shoulder and between them I can make out…I think…Megan.

I said run!

I set off as if my life depends on it.

Which I suppose it does.

11.20 p.m.

By the time I reach Highbury amp; Islington station I’m wheezing audibly and my lungs are burning with pain. It’s nothing compared to the excruciating torture going on in my thighs, which haven’t had to pump so hard since some dim and distant school sports day. This agony, in turn, fades into insignificance next to the paroxysms of pain firing off in my hand. I look down at it. It’s so red and sticky with blood that I can’t make out where it’s cut. I try to flex it, but nearly pass out with the effort. I’d throw up again if it weren’t for the fact that Kate Moss is already wearing my guts on her cleavage.

As the pain recedes slightly it strikes me that there is virtually no movement in my ring and little fingers.

Something else hits me—where the hell is my jacket?

ten: trance is the bollocks

friday 21 november / 2.03 a.m.

I arrive at Saint Matthew’s only eight hours early for my appointment.

But I’m not here to see Doctor Morrissey.

This is Aamp;E.

I walked, of course.

All the way from N1 to E11.

My wallet and my tube pass were in my jacket.

It was a slow, freezing walk, every step jarring fresh pain into my fingers. Despite the agony I didn’t want to come to the hospital. No, I wanted to crawl home to bed in the hope that half a night’s sleep would somehow set things right. Bed is where I’d be now if halfway across Hackney Marshes I hadn’t realised that my front door keys had been in—where else?—my jacket.

I read in the Standard that this is Britain’s busiest casualty department. Apparently it boasts the longest waiting times and the most assaults on staff, and the doctors here know nearly as much about tweezering bullets from crack-crazed gangstas as the guys on ER. Seems I’ve caught the place on a quiet night though—not a single lurching drunk with a pint glass embedded in his head at a jaunty angle. Even so, I’m told that I’ll have to wait at least an hour.

I sit down on a chilly perforated steel bench and watch a girl drop some coins into a vending machine. She waits a moment before pulling out a Styrofoam cup of steaming liquid. She cradles it in her hands and walks it to the bench facing mine. I watch the vapour rise from the cup and—even though it’s almost certainly whatever the NHS passes off as coffee, and by definition undrinkable—I want it.

I’ve never felt so cold in my life. The ambient temperature in Aamp;E would be comfortable enough in normal circumstances, but my body is so iced up that I’d need to sit in an industrial bread-oven to have any hope of bringing warmth to my bones. Right now a cup of whatever passes for coffee represents my only chance of raising my temperature. I stare at the girl. She’s vaguely familiar. But she has long purple hair and the grime-encrusted look of homelessness. All my acquaintances have addresses and hair colour that passes as natural—even when it isn’t. But she does look familiar. I dismiss it—probably gave her a quid once outside the station. She takes a tentative sip from her cup. Her caution isn’t surprising—she has a ring through her bottom lip, which must make drinking hot beverages an ongoing hazard. I’ve always wondered about body piercing. Doesn’t it compromise everyday activities? Things like eating, peeing, sex, breast-feeding, navel de-fluffing and walking unhindered through airport metal detectors. Or, for that matter, getting work. All those rivets would surely hinder her prospects of a job in…say…account management at…for example…Blower Mann/DBA. She peers back at me through the gaps in the lank curtain of fringe, and…Is that a sneer? She must be reading my mind. And if she’s thinking, God, not long past thirty and already he’s thinking like his mother, well, I wouldn’t blame her.

She takes another sip of her steaming coffee-style beverage.

I so want some of that.

Hang on. Not everything was in my jacket. Haven’t I got some money in my trousers? I shake my legs gently and experience a wonderful sensation. Chinking change. I stand up and reach my left arm across my body in an attempt to feed my hand into my right pocket. Left hand to right pocket is a manoeuvre that I suspect even a bendy Mongolian contortionist would have to think about—a knackered and stiff-with-cold me doesn’t have a prayer. I look at my bloody right hand and wonder if it’s up to it. I have no choice but to try so I gingerly feed it in. I’ve got no further than an inch when I feel a jolt of pain as my little finger catches the lip of the pocket. I try to strangle the Aagh!, but I’m too late. The admissions clerk doesn’t look up from his computer, but the girl does and she calls out, ‘You OK?’ I nod my head, but I guess I don’t look too happy because she adds, ‘Wanna hand?’ I shake my head and look down at my pocket—there must be a way of getting in there.

This is like a rubbish ‘based on a true story’ TV movie; Luke Perry and the bloke who used to be Pa Walton as rescue workers standing at a cave entrance, post-landslide.

Luke: There must be a way of getting in there.

Pa Walton: We gotta find it, son. If we don’t rescue the change from Murray’s pocket there’s no tellin’ how long the guy will hold out.

Luke: I got it! You can get the chopper to drop me on his waistband and I can abseil down from a belt loop.

Pa Walton: That’s pure crazy. No one’s ever made a climb like that…and lived.

‘Whatever it is, you ain’t gonna get it with that hand.’

I look up. It isn’t Luke or Pa Walton. The studded girl is in front of me.

‘It doesn’t matter—it’s only some change,’ I mumble.

‘Let me,’ she says and she thrusts her hand where no girl has been since…I was going to say Megan, but, actually, Doctor Morrissey was fumbling around my groin only eight days ago. Her hand, though, wasn’t decorated with weeping scabs and a tattoo of what looks like a cod.

Moments later it re-emerges from my pocket clutching nine or ten one pound coins, a fifty-pence piece, two tens and assorted coppers. ‘If you were gonna get a coffee with this, don’t bother,’ she says. ‘It tastes like a rat pissed it out.’

‘As long as it’s hot I don’t care too much.’

I reach out for the money.

‘It’s OK, I’ll get it. Milk? Sugar?’

2.56 a.m.

She’s eighteen. She has ambitions. She wants to be a tattooist. Or a psychiatric nurse. Or an environmental terrorist. Or a model. Or a contestant on Big Brother. Or a bus driver. Or—truly fanciful, this one—a long-haul flight attendant (‘ Chicken or Beef? Nah, don’t bother, mate—they both taste like a rat shat it out.’) But she’s between jobs at the moment. She loves dogs but not cats, ecstasy but not acid and The Matrix though not the sequels. And she stinks. BO, KFC, Bamp;H, Woodpecker and—ever so faintly—piss all jostle for my nose’s attention. She smells because she hasn’t had a bath or, I suspect, a change of clothes for some time. This is because she lives in a squat in a condemned tower block on the Cathall estate in Leytonstone.

I study her as she talks—and she hasn’t stopped for over half an hour. A thin film of dirt lies over the skin on her face, and her pores are clogged with enough black grease to lubricate the drive shaft on a sixteen-wheeler. Her teeth are chipped and stained the colour of the ‘before’ set of dentures in a Denclens ad. She has a cold sore on her top lip—roughly the shape of Cuba, though obviously not as big. She’s wearing the world’s baggiest jeans so I can’t tell, but I’ll bet she hasn’t waxed lately. I wonder what she’d look like if she scrubbed up, but not for long—she’s way past scrubbing up.

‘What are you doing here?’ I say, getting a word in edgeways at last. I’ve been curious because she has no discernible signs of injury or illness. Perhaps she’s come about the cold sore—but at nearly three in the morning?

‘It’s the only place round here you can get a coffee this late,’ she explains. ‘And it’s quiet—tonight it is, anyway. These three Dutch guys moved into the squat and they play trance all night.’

‘I hate trance,’ I murmur sympathetically.

‘Trance is the bollocks, man—but the arseholes’ve only got one CD.’

Like you can tell one from another, I don’t say on account of the fact that it would be exactly what my mum would say.

She doesn’t need to ask why I’m here—though, curiously, she hasn’t expressed any interest in why my hand resembles a clumsily butchered chicken quarter that I’ve found in a dustbin and stuffed up my sleeve for a rag-week-type jape.

A voice calls out, ‘Mr Colin?’ I look up to see a tired-looking doctor scanning the reception. I rise from the bench, but before I follow him I turn to the girl. ‘Thanks for getting me the coffee…And for the company.’

‘No problem. Take care of yourself, yeah?’ she replies with apparent sincerity.

‘Thanks—you too. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Fish.’

That would explain the cod.

‘ Fish…That’s really…Er…I’m Murray.’ And then, because I haven’t been able to shake the feeling, ‘You look familiar, you know.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless you’re the twat from Tesco who keeps moving us on from their ATMs.’

‘No, that wouldn’t be me…Bye, then.’

‘Yeah…See you ’round, man.’

I almost ask for my change—the coffee was only 50p—but I stop myself. My life is at a fairly low ebb, but I still think she needs the money more than I do.

Maybe she’ll use it to buy soap.

But I doubt it.

7.21 a.m.

It seems like an hour since I last checked the time, but it was only two mintues ago. I’ve been sitting on the wall outside my flat for just over forty-five minutes. I walked here from Saint Matthew’s. After the doctor had finished I looked for Fish—I was going to ask her for a pound for the bus fare—but she’d left. Now my body is even colder than it was when I arrived at the hospital, which I didn’t think would have been possible. There is an upside, though—my right hand is so numb that I can’t feel any pain for the first time since I punched the car. A bandage covers the four stitches in my knuckles. My ring and little fingers are strapped and splinted. Seems I was wrong about my body’s lack of criminal bones. I have at least two, both of them fractured.

My peripheral vision catches something and I quickly look round to see movement through the window of the groundfloor flat.

At last.

I shake my legs to check that they’re still capable of movement before slipping off the wall, climbing the steps and ringing the bell to flat A. I see a hand part two slats in the venetian blind of the bay window, and my neighbour’s eyes peer at me through the gap. I hope they belong to Paula and not to her slightly scary girlfriend, whose name I can never remember. After a moment the intercom gives a farty buzz and I lean my shoulder into the door. Inside, a yawning, crusty-eyed Paula is standing in her doorway. She’s wearing a long, baggy T-shirt printed with a picture of, surprisingly, Sigourney Weaver (skin-head Alien 3 model). Surprising because Paula goes to great lengths to avoid the shaved head and swagger of stereotypical dyke-ness—obviously all the effort goes out of the window when she goes to bed.

‘Bloody hell, Murray, what happened to you?’ she asks.

I guess I don’t look my best, then.

‘Oh, nothing much. I fell…outside the office. Spent all night in casualty—it was like Piccadilly Circus,’ I say. I didn’t want to lie, but there was no way I was going to tell her the truth. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I left my jacket at work and my keys were in it. Can I nick my spare set back?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ She disappears into her flat.

Aminute later she’s back with a key ring.

‘Are you really OK?’ she asks.

‘Yes, really. Thanks for these,’ I say, jangling the key ring.

‘Murray,’ she says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something?’

Here we go. You want to know how I’ve been coping since Megan dropped me for a barrister with a highly developed social conscience, TV charisma…

‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—’

…a million-pound house close to several cabinet ministers…

‘—I’d hate you to be upset—’

…and an impregnable (to idiots, at least) Bentley.

‘—but would you mind having your TV on a bit quieter? We could hear everything the other night and Apollonia—’

Apollonia! How could I forget?

‘—is a really light sleeper.’

Fine—so you really couldn’t give a damn that I’m a miserable, lovelorn wreck—one, by the way, coping manfully with a potentially cancerous tumour—and that my one and only comfort is to watch repeats of Seinfeld on Paramount with the volume right up to drown out my sobs as I cry at all the bits that Megan used to laugh at hysterically. Well, fuck you too.

‘Yeah, sorry, Paula, I’ll keep it down.’

7.34 a.m.

As my (very, very hot) bath runs I go to my wardrobe to choose some clothes. I pull out a mid-grey suit—one of several mid-grey suits I possess. I hold it up and wonder if it’s suitable attire for the kind of appointment I’ve got in less than three hours. It looks a little formal for a cancer verdict. It’s more the other kind of verdict—you know: ‘And how do you find the defendant?’ It will have to do, though. I’ve got a meeting in Croydon this afternoon. I shouldn’t think I’d get past Schenker security in anything other than mid-grey. At the height of post-9/11 fever they had a walk-through metal detector in their foyer, but now they’ve replaced it with a spectrometer.

Needless to say, Niall Haye loves it there—Croydon is his spiritual home. He needs only the flimsiest excuse to board a train for the Schenker Bunker. This afternoon’s is a slimmer-than-slim excuse for a meeting—we’re presenting draft thirty-two of the script, which is all of three words different to thirty-one—but I’m duty-bound to attend.

I lay the suit on my bed and go to the front room—I need to call Barclaycard, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley and Goldfish to tell them I’ve lost my cards. (To which they’ll doubtless reply, Good—it’ll save us the bother of calling on you to seize them and then casually beat the shit out of you as a warning to other piss-takers.) I sit on the sofa and as I reach for the phone I see the red light on the answering machine blinking at me. I press play.

‘You have—one—new message—’ the familiar synthesised voice announces, ‘left—yesterday at—eleven—thirty—seven—p.m.’

Beep!

‘Murray, it’s me,’ says another familiar though less robotic voice. ‘I was really hoping you’d be home, because it’d mean that what I just saw was an hallucination…Obviously not. I think we’d better talk…Oh, and by the way, don’t you think it’s about time you took my voice off the answering machine?’

Funny that. For weeks I’ve been desperate for Megan to call.

Now that she finally has my heart…s

i

n

k

s.

eleven: three words

friday 21 november / 9.52 a.m.

Like A&E last night, Outpatients is quiet.

As a morgue.

But, hey, maybe they’ve cured everyone; the London Borough of Waltham Forest is now a tumour-free zone…Oh yeah, and it’s twinned with Never Land.

Actually, given that this is my first ever trip to a hospital where the news could be truly dire (as opposed to being dire only in my paranoid fantasies), I’m coping pretty well with my nerves. Keeping a lid on things.

I look at the only other patient. He’s a ginger nut, about my age. Needless to say he isn’t wearing a mid-grey suit. He’s in faded black jeans and a red and white Arsenal shirt that clashes disastrously with his hair.

Should have worn the away strip, matey.

Even so, he isn’t wearing a mid-grey suit. Lived-in jeans and favourite team shirt seem suitable wear in which to receive possibly life’s final piece of significant news. Not a suit in which your own mother would have trouble picking you out in a crowd.

But as I said, I feel pretty good. I’m not expecting the worst. As the pixie doctor assured me, testicular cancer isn’t that common, and far be it for me to do anything uncommon. Being the original Mr Average, departing from the norm isn’t my thing and I’m wearing the mid-grey suit to prove it. Last night’s panic attack was silly, irrational, and totally induced by (other people’s) drunkenness.

Ginger nut isn’t alone. A woman is with him, her arm linked comfortingly through his. She turns to him and says, ‘Fancy some tea, Mark?’ He nods and they get up. I watch them amble off hand in hand. Love’s young-ish dream. I wish someone had come with me. (Purely for company—I am so not worried.)

Obviously not Megan. Not now.

I almost returned her call before I left, but I chickened out. What was I going to say? Let me get this straight, Meg. A man who looks exactly like me was seen in your road trying to punch in the window of your boyfriend’s car? That is incredible! But what a sick bastard—going round impersonating women’s exes. Some sort of weirdo vigilante for jilted blokes. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Somehow I didn’t see that convincing her, a lawyer.

‘Mr Collins?’

I don’t even bother to correct the receptionist this time.

‘Doctor Morrissey is ready for you. It’s the third door on the left.’

Her tone is far more sympathetic than the last time I was here. Does she know something?

Don’t be daft—hospitals, paranoia and all that.

I walk down the corridor and tap quietly on the door.

‘Come in,’ Morrissey’s voice calls out. I ease the door open and step inside. The elfin one isn’t alone. A nervous grey-haired man is sitting beside her. He’s wearing half-moon glasses and he peers over them at me with moist, kindly eyes.

Wait half a bloody mo—…I’ve seen that look before. Vets in Practice—they save it especially for dogs that they’re about to dispatch to doggy heav—

For Christ’s sake CUT IT OUT. Remember: HOSPITAL plus MURRAY COLIN equals gibbering PARANOIAC.

‘Please, take a seat,’ Morrissey says with a smile.

I smile back.

Go on, give me your worst, which I know for a fact isn’t going to be bad at all. And make it snappy, because I’m a busy man—I’ve got three words to discuss in Croydon.

dec.

one: thoffy, thakki

wednesday 3 december / 10.16 p.m.

I’m flying.

(Metaphorically, of course. I don’t like flying flying.)

‘It’s really good to see you smiling again, Murray,’ Jakki slurs, leaning her head on my arm.

Amazing, isn’t it? I am flying, girl.

I nod vigorously. Since I’m simultaneously draining my glass, most of my drink ends up on my shirt.

So what? I’ll buy another…beer…shirt…whatever.

‘I mean, you’ve been so down since.. .’ She mouths the unutterable M-word. ‘I thought you’d never get over her.’

I am so over her. I am more over her than any man has ever been in the millennia-long history of jilted blokes. Want to know just how over her I am? She could—even as we speak—be having deviant, unprotected sex with the entire Bar Council and I really wouldn’t give a damn.

‘I’m doing OK,’ I say.

‘So why all the time off lately? You haven’t really had the flu again, have you?’

Course not. I have the constitution of an ox; an exceptionally big and strong ox; Super Ox. Disease sees me walking down the street and hides in a shop doorway.

‘Not…exactly…I just needed a break.’

‘Well, it’s done you good. Mind you, Niall isn’t too chuffed.’

‘When is he? Fancy a trip to the toilet?’

‘Excuse me?’ She’s shocked.

I tap the side of my nose.

‘Oh, for that,’ she says, knocking back her Breezer. ‘I’d never do coke.’

‘If they made it in a range of six fruity flavours, I bet you fucking would,’ Vince says as he crashes between us and into the bar with the impact of a Scud.

‘You what?’ Jakki asks again.

‘Narco-pops,’ Brett says, completing Vince’s thought as he, too, joins us. ‘Top way to market toot to the teenies.’

‘Bacardi would love it,’ Vince says, slapping his partner on the back. ‘They could hand out little sachets at the school gates.’

‘Or at Busted gigs.’

‘Or free with Happy Meals.’

‘You two are sick,’ Jakki says.

‘No, we’re marketing professionals, darling,’ Brett explains, ‘and our highly paid minds never sleep when it comes to seeking an edge for our clients’ brands.’

‘Stop giggling, Murray,’ Jakki says. ‘You’re only encouraging them.’

‘Leave him alone, Jakks. He’s all right. He’s our flexible friend,’ says Vince.

Jakki’s brow furrows so Brett explains. ‘As in, “Barman, do you accept Account Supervisor?” Talking of which, you gonna get some drinks in, Murray?’

I pull myself together and order two more of the blackcur-rant-flavoured Belgian beers that are tonight’s novelty choice—an alcopop for those too cool to ask for an alcopop. I’ve already put my one remaining card behind the bar and I’m running up an Enron-sized tab.

My one remaining card: an RSPCA Visa. I got it because the idea that a small proportion of my profligacy might help some abandoned puppies and half-starved donkeys appealed to me. When the card arrived and I saw the fluffy kitten on it I let out an involuntary aaah. But the first time I used it—slapping it on the bill at a client lunch—I was laughed off the table and—wimp that I am—I banned it from my wallet. Now it has made a comeback. Well, in the absence of Barclaycard, Morgan Stanley et al, it’s saving my (and with it, I hope, some poor animal’s) bacon now.

I hand over the drinks and give Vince a discreet look. Brett spots it, though, and says, ‘You sure? You’ll do your schnozz a serious mischief.’ It’s as if he can sense that I’m a rookie and his concern is quite touching.

‘Leave him alone,’ Vince says, coming to my support for the second time in the space of less than a minute. ‘First rule of the market economy: it’s the consumer’s inalienable right to fuck himself over.’ He slips me another wrap.

I have one of those moments. You know, those moments. The moments that overwhelm you when you’re exceptionally drunk. The sort of moment where nothing else matters except the here and now, and that is invariably accompanied by a slurred, spit-spattering I love you guys, I really fucking love you. Brett is sober enough to see it coming and he leaps in to cut me off: ‘Go on, fuck off to the bog.’

10.28 p.m.

I close the cubicle door and, despite the fact that this is my second such excursion tonight, I immediately have an anxiety attack. It may be my second time tonight, but it is also only my second time ever. What am I doing here? This is not me. Locked toilets, rolled-up banknotes and white powder that may have arrived in Britain inside someone’s bottom. I’m not even properly equipped. No Amex. All I’ve got to cut the stuff up is a Homebase Spend amp; Save card. How un-cool can I get? And the lack of hipness is the least of my concerns. What if the card swipe machine at Homebase can somehow sniff cocaine and automatically cancels the reward points I’ve painstakingly accu-mulated before summoning the manager? ‘ We’re sorry, Mr Colin, but we can’t allow you to leave the store with that Black amp; Decker hot air gun, which is clearly intended as a weapon in a drug turf war.’

No, I’m being silly…Pathetic…I’m being Murray. Like I said, this is my second excursion tonight. Obviously the first hit is wearing off and that’s what’s causing my wobbles. I can handle this. All I need is another blast. I tense my hands to stop them trembling and take the wrap from my pocket. I tip some powder onto the lid of the cistern, chop it up with the card and coax it into two little lines. Then I snort them up through the rolled tenner. I lean back against the cubicle wall and feel…Nothing, as it happens. I’m about to leave when I have a flash vision of Casino and a stoned James Woods dementedly massaging coke residue into his gums. I smear my index finger over the cistern lid to pick up the last few grains before popping it into my mouth and—

Hang on, this is Sleazy Junkie Land, a place I’ve never been. The anxiety kicks in again, because, apart from the culture shock, the coke has a horrible bitter medicinal taste and no amount of frantic salivating seems to be shifting it. Something else. I’m in a bog and I’m as good as licking the porcelain. Doesn’t this raise some grave hygiene issues?

I’m breaking out in a cold sweat when the rush saves me, washing over me at the exact same moment as I’m being struck by the ridiculous, black irony of that last thought.

10.34 p.m.

When I get back to the bar I find Brett and Jakki in conversation. I pull up a stool and sit down next to them. I don’t tune in, but instead watch Vince, who has made his way to the far side of the room. He’s harassing Juliet, the public face of Blower Mann. She has a perch in reception from which she welcomes all and sundry with a shimmering Miss World smile. Vince, being Vince, is the last person to care that Juliet has a fiancé. He should be a little less blasé though, because her beloved is a scaffolder or a meat porter or a circus strongman—something that involves brute strength, anyway—and he’s built like a concrete fallout shelter…And right now he’s standing ten feet away with his back to them.

You really don’t want to be putting your hand there Vince.

Juliet is obviously of similar mind because she shrieks and pushes him away as if he’s diseased—which he may well be. Fiancé turns round, takes one look and wades in. I must say he’s pretty light on his feet for a fallout shelter.

Jakki must have been watching as well because she says, ‘Jesus, he’s a complete bloody idiot. He’s gonna get himself killed.’

‘You’ve got to understand that Vince operates by a simple code,’ Brett explains calmly. ‘It only runs to one rule—he doesn’t have the memory capacity to take in any more. It goes like this: F.E.A.R.’

‘ Fear?’

‘Fuck Everything And Rumble, darling. Live each day as if it’s your last.’

‘But he’s got his whole life ahead of him,’ says Jakki, wincing as Vince ducks his wiry five-seven frame beneath a heavy right from fiancé.

‘Yeah, but who’s to say he isn’t gonna step under a bus? Or get his head ripped off by an irritated scaffolder? He’d hate to take his last gasp in the knowledge that he’d missed out on something by showing restraint. Oh lordy, lordy, the mibs are here.’

Security has arrived. Three black-clad bouncers are attempting to subdue fiancé while another two are slamming Vince’s face into the wall.

‘Of course,’ adds Brett as a parting comment before he goes to his partner’s aid, ‘the corollary is that by living each day as if it’s his last, he dramatically increases the chances that it actually fucking is.’

Now, this strikes me as the funniest thing I’ve heard all night, a view that I demonstrate by falling off my stool with the force of my laughter.

‘Murray!’ squeaks Jakki.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’

I am as well. Somehow—luck not judgement—I managed to prevent my broken fingers from taking any impact. Jakki sticks out her arm and I take her hand. But she’s had too many Breezers to mount a successful rescue effort and I bring her crashing down on top of me. She lies there panting for a moment, her plump breasts moulding themselves over my face. The coke and the alcohol—as well as the fact that the sensation is unde-niably pleasant—cause my brain to fast-forward through some fairly disgusting thoughts before guilt and shame regain supremacy and press stop. ‘Thoffy, Thakki,’ I say—a soft pad of boob is pressing onto my mouth, preventing normal speech. She won’t be able to see me blushing but surely she can feel the heat from my cheeks that’s threatening to melt her bra. She manages to peel herself off me and then attempts to push herself upright by planting a hand first in my stomach and then in my groin. Her face breaks into a drunken grin and she says, ‘My God, you’re big.’

You do not know the half of it, darling.

She sees I’m not smiling—anything but—and her grin fades. We look at each other in embarrassment. Her hand is still somehow welded to my groin. We’re saved by an explosion. A thunderous crack followed by the tinkling of a thousand fragments of glass hitting the pavement outside. Something—a table? A bouncer? An art director with a death wish?—has gone through a plate-glass window.

two: you work in advertising. you earn more in a week than the average filipino takes home in a year. what do you know about crisis?

thursday 4 december / 12.02 a.m.

I’m sitting on the sofa in my front room with the phone in my hand. Slowly and deliberately I punch out a number. This is a call I’ve been dreading.

But one that I’ve also been desperate to make.

Now that I’m out of my head on drink and unfamiliar drugs, it is perhaps the ideal time to make it.

My mother will be asleep, of course.

So what?

I’m too hammered to care.

And I’m her only child.

She lives in Spain now. Javea. It’s twenty minutes along the coast from Benidorm. But nothing like Benidorm. It’s low-rise for a start. Much smaller and prettier. Terry Venables has a house there. That should tell you something. Not sure what, but something all the same. It has a thriving expat community, actually. Brits who have, for one reason or several, given up on life here. My mum went because David, her husband, my stepfather, took early retirement. Medical grounds. He was a policeman—a detective inspector with Hornchurch CID. Twenty-five years of loyal service to crown and country. Then his back went. Just like that. You had to feel for him—he’d lost the job he loved and he would…

…never swing a golf club again.

They spent a couple of years of mooching around Essex’s garden centres. Then Mum and DI David Finch (rtd.) packed their bags for Eldorado. After putting down the deposit on the half-built villa the first thing they did was to join the golf club. My mum is a crap golfer, but she enjoys ‘a good walk’. I supposed that David was joining purely for the social side, what with his back and all.

Amazingly, though, he has managed to get his handicap down to thirteen.

I slump back with the phone to my ear. The long, rhythmic beeeeep of the Spanish ring tone is making me sleepy. Come on, Mum, answer the sodding…phone…I need to…talk…to…

4.14 a.m.

‘—is not responding…Please replace the handset and try again later…’

You what?

‘…The number you are calling is not responding…Please replace the handset and try again later…’

I pull myself upright on the sofa. The phone is still wedged between ear and neck. The mouthpiece is coated in drool. I lift my head and let the receiver slide down my chest to my stomach. How long have I been asleep? The room is cold. The hangover is kicking in. I peer at the clock on the VHS.

Jesus, Murray, you do not want to be awake at four-fourteen on a night like this.

I get up and walk to the kitchen, where I fill a glass from the tap and drink.

Where the hell is my mother? For nineteen years of my life—right up to the second she left for Spain—she was always there for me. Especially—especially—when she wasn’t wanted. Doesn’t she owe it to me—just this once—to be there when she is? My dad was rarely there when I needed him, but I’d call him now if I had a number.

He was a cop too. The desk sergeant at Hornchurch. When I was seven he came to my school assembly and lectured us on the Green Cross Code. I don’t mention that because it was a seminal Freudian moment in my young life. I mention it because…Oh, you’ll figure it out. Though I was quite proud of him that day, he wasn’t a model policeman. He smoked and drank too much, ate rubbish and he had his ideal cop job—sitting idly behind the desk as opposed to chasing down alleys after harelegged muggers. He was severely overweight, he had a perpetually raging ulcer, his blood pressure was off the scale and he had enough cholesterol coursing through his veins to open a burger stand.

They say that scientists have looked at the physics of the bumblebee and figured out that technically it should not be able to fly. Dad was like that. Technically he shouldn’t have been alive.

Everyone told him so. Mum, me, his colleagues, his mates and various doctors. Even strangers would wince and cross themselves as he walked by huffing, wheezing, purple-faced. Finally, sick of the nagging—and maybe just a little scared—he got off his backside. He did the Allen Carr thing and quit fags. He joined Weight Watchers. He kept a fastidious record of his vastly reduced alcohol intake. He joined a gym and started doing step. And one Sunday morning, not long after the start of his new regime, he stuck on a tracksuit, opened the front door and set off on a jog. He never came home. The Nissan Sunny that hit him as he lumbered across Upminster Road was a write-off, too.

Yes, I’d call him now if I could.

I drink another glass of water before stumbling into bed. I know I won’t sleep, though.

5.26 a.m.

I was right. Sleep is out of the question.

I go to the kitchen and fill a glass with orange juice. Maybe that and the three ibuprofen I pop from the blister pack will do something to attack my headache. They’ll do nothing to slow my heart though. I can feel it hammering against my ribcage. I wish it had something to do with all the coke I put up my nose. But the rush has long gone and I can no longer plunge myself into the blizzard of denial that comes free with every line.

This is purest, uncut panic.

I go to the PC in the corner of my living room and switch it on.

Come on, come on—so slow.

I click on the Explorer icon and listen to the beeps and burbles as the machine goes online. I call up Lycos and type one word into the search box. The same word I’ve tapped out every single sleepless night since Friday 21st November:

cancer

6.23 a.m.

Brett Topowlski claims the Internet is responsible for taking mankind—by that he does mean mankind; women are excluded from this hypothesis—to the next stage of evolution. ‘Look at it this way,’ he contends. ‘There’s an entire generation of blokes who’ve become ambidextrous. They’ve had to master the art of wanking left-handed because their right hands are too busy manipulating the mouse.’ He should know. He and Vince spend their working lives being virtual sex tourists—and, fair’s fair, I’ve spent a little time glancing over their shoulders. (I defy anyone to wander into their office with a Schenker research debrief for their immediate attention and not look at the image of, say, horse and rider engaging in a spot of role-reversal.)

But over the past fortnight I’ve made a remarkable discovery. The porn sites haven’t taken over. They’re outnumbered—dwarfed—by ones that deal with the C-word, the six-letter one. Tonight I carried out an experiment. I typed tits into the search box and hit go. It came up with a staggering 3,199,658 matches.

It is nothing, though.

Because cancer got me 18,073,389. Over eighteen million mentions of the disease that will afflict one in three of us and kill one in four.

I haven’t been keeping count, but so far I must have visited several hundred cancer sites. I now know more about it than I ever did. (Not saying much, granted.) I know, for instance, that one per cent of breast cancers occur in men; that a Calgary businessman claims he was brought back from the brink by an ancient cure used by the Ojibway Indians; that over eighty per cent of lung cancers are attributable to smoking, yet only thirteen per cent of smokers will get lung cancer; that on the day Philip Morris—in an expensive corporate con—changed its name to Altria, some web wag re-christened lung cancer Philip Morris; that drinking milk produced by cows treated with bovine growth hormones increases the risk of colon cancer; that Hosen is the Hebrew word for strength and is also an acronym for Cancer Patients Fight Back; that frequent masturbation reduces the risk of prostate cancer; that frequent sex increases it; that shark cartilage, liquefied and given a pleasant fruit-style flavour, is the miracle that will revolutionise cancer treatment…

6.55 a.m.

The trouble is that I’m none the wiser. I fly around the web hoovering up facts, seizing on speculation and clutching wildly at every out-of-its-tree conjecture. I’ve looked at countless pictures of tumours the size of kumquats…nectarines…grapefruits…watermelons (which strikes me as wholly inappropriate. Why is it that, when dramatising their size for their dumb patients, medics invariably compare tumours to fruit? Fruit is tasty, nutritious, life-enhancing. Tumours, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, are not. Better, surely, to state that Patient X is host to a malignant growth the size of, say, a hand grenade, or a decomposing, maggot-ridden rat). I’ve waded through turgid papers posted by academics and heartbreaking poetry penned by mothers coming to terms with their children’s leukaemia. Yet I’m no closer to dealing with the only cancer I really care about.

My cancer. The one that will kill me.

‘ It isn’t possible to say without a lot more tests, but without treatment you’ve maybe got between three and five months.’ That was how Doctor Morrissey put it in her sweet, slightly yokel voice.

Between three and five months…

I consider myself a truly average individual—to the point, actually, of being totally un-individual—so I’ve gone for the middle ground.

I give myself four months.

Working forward from the day they told me, that’s 21st March.

It’s a Saturday.

Best keep my diary clear.

‘But you must be able to do something,’ I said. Pleaded, actually. Hadn’t they told me that these days the cure rate for testicular cancer is well over ninety per cent?

Well, yes, they said…Provided we catch it early enough.

‘But I went to the doctor as soon as I’d found the lump,’ I said.

Hmm, they mused, and how long had the lump been there by the time you stumbled across it?

Well, I dunno, I didn’t say. I don’t like to touch myself down there, do I?

Unbelievably, considering all this appalling news, my cancer is still only suspected. They can’t be certain until they operate to remove my testicle and then get it under a microscope. Having said that, the blood tests suggested I’ve got something called a teratoma. This is the less common of the two main testicular cancers, but—wouldn’t you just know it?—it’s the more aggressive. Given the high probability that I did have cancer, they wanted to see if it had spread. They gave me a CT scan. CT scanners are those gleaming high-tech machines that you see pictured in private health-plan brochures—photos of patients with peaceful smiles gliding into wide tubes where they’ll be showered with gentle diagnostic rays of something or other. ‘CT scans are amazing,’ gushed the technician giving me mine. ‘They give your medical team the kind of information they could only have got by slicing you open in the old days.’

Sorry, techie, but I hate any machine that tells my medical team I’ve got great big bloody growths in my lungs and liver that will kill me very soon.

‘There must be something you can do,’ I implored.

Yes, they’d like very much to lop off my left testicle and then subject me to an aggressive course of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or both, but they feared that the cancer is so advanced that it wouldn’t achieve anything other than prolong my life for a few extra months.

Well, I supposed, under the circumstances—death staring me in the face and all that—a few extra months sounds pretty good. ‘Let’s do it, give me drugs,’ I cried—no, screamed—in utter desperation. That was when they sat me down and took me through what it is to go through chemo and radiotherapy. I got all the ‘cancer may be grim but the treatment is invariably grimmer’ stuff. You don’t want to know.

I know I didn’t.

‘But I don’t even feel ill,’ I said. (Which was and still is pretty much the truth. I have a painless lump on my testicle. And a tightness in my chest, which is more than likely due to a heavy dose of hospital-related stress.)

They didn’t say much then. They simply looked at me, their expressions doing the talking for them: ‘ You don’t feel ill now? You will, boy oh boy, you will.’

The choice, of course, is mine. To be treated and last maybe a year: time spent feeling sick as a dog. Or not: enjoy a better quality of life for a shorter time. Quality of life. Ha!

You really should talk to someone, they said.

I haven’t talked to a soul.

Instead I came to the web, the first resort of sad, lonely twonks. I came in search of…What? An understanding? A miracle? I haven’t a clue and, besides, whatever it is I’m no nearer to finding it.

No, the Internet has made things worse. The sites that have freaked me out the most are the ones that are there to console and inspire. The ones filled with personal testimonies from fellow sufferers. Brave struggles in the face of overwhelming pain. Stubborn refusals to accept the verdicts of the doctors. The worst are the ones where I read a memoir of courage and endurance and then at the end a caption: So-and-so died on 19th June 2003.

So hang on, let me get this straight. After all that teeth-gritting, bloody-minded effort you went and died anyway? Please tell me there’s a point here.

I haven’t seen myself in a single one of these sites. I am not brave or stubborn. Never have been. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about death—panicking, actually—and the only way I could cope at all was by reminding myself that while it was a cast-iron certainty, it was a long way off—I could think of it as hypothetical.

Not any more. Now I’ve got a date. I’ll be gone in four months, give or take. I’ll expire incoherent, incontinent and saturated with enough morphine to keep all of Glasgow’s junkies in a permanent blissed-out fug. And while I wait for that to happen I’m staring numbly at my PC as a fresh site downloads. Pretty graphics in shades of pink and lilac. Pictures of smiling doctors and nurses who look like they know what the hell they’re playing at. I read the menu.

ABOUT US

LATEST TREATMENTS

UNCONVENTIONAL ALTERNATIVES

YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS

WHERE CAN YOU TURN?

I click on YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS.

A diagnosis of cancer comes to most people as a shock. Your mind may well be confused with many different feelings, some of them conflicting. Some may be very negative feelings…

It has been written for me.

…This should not worry you, because all of them are part of the process of coping with your illness.

Phew, that’s OK, then.

The remainder of the page is written as bullet points.

You may experience:

 Shock

 Disbelief

 Denial

 Anger

 Guilt

 Depression

 Isolation

I could put a big fat tick next to every item. Jesus, in the past few days I’ve gone through more mood swings than a country and western album. Just for starters I’ve done a lot of denial. Only tonight I was buying it by the gram. And I still have moments of disbelief. Moments when I think—I really think—pixie Morrissey is going to leap out from round a corner, probably in clown make-up, and trill, ‘ Da-daaa! We really had you going there, eh?’ Actually, the disbelief is overwhelming. More than anything I can’t believe my bad luck.

While a drowning man supposedly reviews his life at lightning speed, I can afford to reassess mine at a slightly more leisurely pace. I’m doing a lot of looking back and all I can see is a catalogue of lousy fortune. And look at me now: up to my neck in credit-card debt, in a job that makes me loathe myself, and I’ve lost the only girl that ever mattered. That is not the description of a lucky guy.

Well, at least I’ve got my health.

Can’t say that any more, can I?

I’ve got a cancer that only a couple of thousand British men will succumb to this year. And while the overwhelming majority of them will make full recoveries, I’m one of the forty or so who won’t.

Why me?

Why couldn’t I have found that lump months ago, before its vicious mutant cells had begun their journey around my body?

And while we’re at it, why that particular cancer out of the dozens on offer?

Why not a little melanoma on the small of my back? A slice with a scalpel, a quick zap of radiation and I’d be back on the streets in no time. Then there’s colorectal cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma. My chances would almost certainly be better with any of those. They surely couldn’t be any worse. I’d happily number among the one per cent of male breast cancers. I could put up with the sniggers. Or how about bowel cancer? Let them hack some of my stomach out. I’d put up with that. I’d put up with pretty much anything over the deal I’ve been dealt. A tumour on my arm like Jakki’s uncle. That’s a nice treatable one. Just cut off my arm. Hack off both to be certain.

At least I’d be alive.

But, no, I’ve got cancer in my testicle, my liver and my lung and I don’t even smoke. I can’t even shrug and admit I was asking for it. Well, thanks a million, God, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, the fairies at the bottom of the garden, whoever the fuck.

I thought I’d plumbed the depths of my self-pity in the days after Megan left.

I had no idea.

And I’m terrified. The website doesn’t mention that one, does it? All-consuming, mind-curdling fear. More than anything else, I’m frightened…Of the impending pain…Of losing my dignity (not that there’s much to lose)…Of losing my life, obviously…And, strangely, of telling people. Making it real. Official.

You really should talk to someone.

Yes, but who?

I click on WHERE CAN YOU TURN? More handy bullet points.

· A counsellor

I have major issues with this one. I know, I know, issues—as in the raising of and the dealing with—are what therapists are all about. But I’ve known me for thirty-one years, and I have trouble talking frankly about my feelings with myself in the mirror. It would take me an age to feel sufficiently comfortable with a stranger and, well, an age is something I don’t have.

· Family

I’m trying, but there’s no reply at Casa Mama. Anyway, how is Mum going to comfort me? I know only too well how she will react. Remember the gashed shin? She will take all of the emotions listed on this website and fuse them into an incandescent ball of hysteria.

· A sympathetic employer

Now they’re having a laugh, surely. The thought of taking my disease and the excess emotional baggage that goes with it into Niall Haye’s office and plonking the whole lot down on his desk is just so ridiculous that it’s almost—but not quite—funny.

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