Carry on like that, my son, I thought, the following morning, and you might as well move back to Clerkenwell.

I arranged drinks with Violet at Swansong. Violet, I deemed, under a fateful delusion of wisdom, was just what I needed.

‘Look this is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I think the least you could do is introduce me. I mean is that going to fucking hurt?’

Pacific as ever. This is her mode, now: a curious oscillation between blunt impatience and cosy collusion with me.

‘That’s why I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I think it’s about time I introduced you to Trent.’

I’d given it thought. Likely outcome was, of course, that Violet wouldn’t get a part. If that happened, it would leave Gunn with the business of getting rid of her (that boy’s going to be trading up when he gets back into these boots) and Violet with bitterness straining the seams of her soul’s pockets. Violet in that state – having come close enough to fame to reach out and touch it, only to see it turn and whisk glamorously away – will be promising material indeed. Truly, there’s no telling what Violet close-but-no-cigar’d will be capable of. Certainly I’m seeing stalking. Certainly I’m seeing rage. Certainly I’m seeing a tag-duo of self-loathing and self-love with potentially fatal psychic consequences. Certainly I’m seeing a vast and hungry silence into which any number of my voices might enter . . .

‘Oh Declan you are horrid,’ she said, thumping Gunn’s humerus with what was intended as little-girl exasperation but which in fact dead-armed me for the next ten minutes. ‘Why do you let me? I mean why do you let me, eh?’

Alternatively, she might end up with a part. You never know. She’s not, after all, going to have to act that much. I’m seeing her as one of Jimmeny’s groupies or Pilate’s bits on the side. Maybe one of Dirty Mags’s pre-conversion colleagues (there’s some obvious two-girl action there that I’d trust Trent not to sidestep). Or maybe Salome, since she’s got the fleshy erotic puppyishness that would drive a dad mad. The point is it’s a win-win situation. What do you think Vi’s going to be like if she gets to Hollywood? What sort of a couple do you think her and Gunn are going to make?

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘You need the loo.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘No, Declan, honestly I don’t. Oh I see. Oh.’

But damn me if Gunn’s . . . What I mean is despite Violet’s businesslike adoption of the requisite . . . One stilettoed foot up on the seat of the can, both reddish hands gripping the cistern, the Jane Morris froth tossed, as if with petulance, aside . . . Despite the charming attire of libertinage revealed under the hoiked-up skirt (’be prepared’ is Vi’s new motto, apparently) I find once again that . . . I find myself . . . Well.

‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said, zipping, buttoning, tidying with compressed fury. ‘I mean this is –’

‘I’ve told you never mind. You look a bit under the weather if you want my opinion. Why don’t we arrange it for Friday.’

‘Friday?’

‘Trent Bintock. Friday evening. Where’s he staying?’

They keep the bogs spick and span at Swansong, but on a tile just to the left of the cistern a markered line had been incompletely erased. ‘For nothing’ it said.

‘At the Ritz,’ I said, a little wearily. ‘Where else?’

The day went from bad to worse after that.

I’d no plan to end up passed out on Declan’s kitchen table, yet that Heinz-flecked and mug-ringed board was where I woke, at the slaked end of the city’s afternoon, packed full of treats and delicacies – those 99s, man, can one ever have too many? – and woozy from hourly pub-halts, where single malts and fortified wines followed rowdy bloody Marys and chilled pilsners down my broadminded gullet. That afternoon drinking thing. And in such heat, too. Well, you know how it is. Did I feel terrible? I felt terrible. The body’s queasy lurch and roil, sure – but chiefly the mind’s curious deflation. Chiefly my irritation with myself. It’s a long time – really a very long time indeed, since I’ve felt irritated with myself. And why, in a month of Hadean Sundays, I thought of visiting Angela Gunn’s grave I’ve no idea. Did I think that was going to help?

None the less don’t laugh, because that is what I did.

There are of late these urges, peculiar blips that are taking me into all sorts of sudden and absurd gestures. Words like ‘irreducible’ and ‘occult’ nudge at the back of my brain. Wordsworth’s blank misgivings, fallings from us, vanishings . . . You’ve got to laugh, actually. One minute I’m sprawled on Gunn’s formica observing through the window the sky’s slow-mo parade of whipped and beaten clouds, the next I’m back in the stewed streets heading for St Anne’s, a heart murmur, an insistence laid against Gunn’s backbone like an icy palm. Images fluttered in and out: Angela’s face in the photograph. Mourners like dark menhirs around the raw grave. Gunn’s face – the pocked mirror in the loo at the funeral directors’ to which he’d adjourned mid-sentence, ambushed by the thuggish gang of his unspoken filial endearments. All this while I kicked my way through the remains of Value Meals and footprinted tabloids with my hands in my pockets and my guts gone heavy. Well, you’ve got to laugh. They’d piss themselves, Downstairs. I’m practically pissing myself now, just thinking of it. Teeny cemetery. No blue left in the sky by the time I got there. Less than a hundred headstones like . . . like what? Terrible teeth? Victory Vees? Damn and blast this language tries my patience. Anyway the little beds of the dead, some crisp and white, others gone to leprous ruin. Blurred dates. Even New Time’s got the clout to smudge the lines of who and when. Doesn’t take long. There was no one else there. The small, dark, and insensitively renovated church threw its shadow at my back. I did contemplate, briefly, popping in to see Mrs Cunliffe of the strabismal leer and compulsive polishing – but thought better of it in the end. She’s in capable hands. She’s getting worse. I felt chilly. I felt dreadful, actually, if you must know, what with the bare flesh of my throat turned tender and Gunn’s ticker doing its broken-winged bird thing in his chest, what with my bunch of bright daffs held headsdown, what with the dropped wind and suddenly attentive trees, what with being slowly flooded by the sense of how seldom Gunn can bring himself to come here.

D’you know what I did? I cried. Oh yes indeed. Cried my eyes out. Right there by her headstone. ANGELA MARY GUNN, 1941–1997, ETERNAL REST. You can laugh now. It was the eternal rest did for me. Not my fault. Gunn’s. He’s noticed in himself of late a vulnerability to venerable abstract nouns and hallowed phrases. Duty. Grace. Honour. Peace. Eternal Rest. Tears start. The bottom lip wobbles in that way that always makes an observer – no matter how compassionate – want to giggle. Grief. Home. Regret. He lives in mortal fear of Love. A child of his times, he buried these things away in some cellar of himself under sprawling cobwebs and drifts of dust. They lay there, the holy relics his sceptic had outgrown. Then his mother’s death, with, not long after, the discovery that even the most casual utterances of such words in the world he’d thought debunked could wake their awful magic. British Airways TV commercials, country and western songs, Hallmark birthday cards, hymns. Only two weeks before I arrived he was unmanned outside a church, arrested by the tune he knew.

Be there at our sleeping and give us, we pray
Your peace in our hearts Lord at the end of the day . . .

Dreadful. He’s tried caution. Steers clear of poetry on the Underground, with its things of beauty being joys for ever and cycle clips removed in awkward reverence. He’s invariably undone. Once a laryngitic busker’s mechanical yet strangely desperate version of ‘Wish You Were Here’. Once (oh please) a speech by Tony Blair. It’s not the self-congratulatory comfort of mere sentimentality. More a queer surge of bowel and soul, a twist or wrench of feeling as liable to have him hurling his dinner as breaking his heart. Whatever it is it messes him up – and I don’t balk at telling you that it messed me up, too, good and proper there by old Angie’s rotting remains.

Debilitating, that’s what. Had to go and sort myself out with a quadruple Jameson’s in a nearby Knave of Cups. (I mean how do you bear it, this being suddenly overcome by feeling? Isn’t it just an almighty jumping Jesus Christing drag?) I felt mighty peculiar afterwards, when the Irish had kicked-in. Faint, you might say. And yet, I must confess, not wholly dreadful. There was, it must be admitted (must it? Well, yes, perhaps it must . . .) a slight . . . a sort of . . . How is one to put this? An internal breathability. A space around the alarmed heart. The feeling that someone, somewhere (I know, I know, I know) was quietly, simply, without a concealed agenda, telling me that it was all right, that stillness would come, that peace is purchased in the currency of loss . . .

At which point (having called for another Jameson’s family of four, sparked-up a Silk Cut, sneezed, and cracked my knuckles), I found myself laughing, to myself, at what an unpredictable wheeze this caper was turning out to be.

Took me an awfully long time to get home. I seemed to think it a terrific hoot to take buses and tubes at random. Hardly surprising, I suppose, that I ended up in the arms of a nineteen-year-old young-man-of-the-night in the anonymous yet surprisingly trim and lavender-scented boudoir above Vivid Videos, just off Gray’s Inn Road – though, having rather foolishly succumbed to the honeyed tongue of a hallucinogens salesman not an hour before, I can’t be absolutely sure of the location.

I had . . . paused at King’s Cross. Intriguing to see one of my little urban kernels of vice (and misery, and regret, and shame, and guilt, and violence, and greed, and hatred, and rage, and confusion) from the other side, so to speak, from down on the ground. Theory in practice. The abstracted boffin down among the engine-room grunts. My brothers were busy in the ether, I knew, the ticklish temptations and purred prompts; I was a bit taken aback, however, at being able to see them, flowing around the multitudes in gorgeous streams – until I realised that I was in fact hallucinating. Extraordinary, let me repeat, to see the fruits of our labours from the material end. Normally, you understand, my brothers and I ‘see’ only the spiritual correlates of physical actions, not the physical actions themselves. There’s an entire realm (again ‘realm’ is very misleading, but it’s the best you’ve got) in which the spiritual dynamics of this mortal coil have their home. We know when an operation’s been a success, of course – not because we see the bodies but because we feel the effects (the rips, the rucks) in the fabric of the spiritual realm.

I had paused, as I say, at King’s Cross, leaning against a lamp-post with what must have been an expression of near obscene carnal happiness, when young Lewis had caught my eye, I his, and with an exchange of raised eyebrows and a couple of smirks, passed from the vulgarity of his price list to the charm of the room above the shop.

Slender lad. Elfin eyes of yellowish hazel; bones and lips that must have passed through the Caribbean at some stage, though his skin was barely the darkness of a Pret-à-Manger latte. Delicate (and slightly grimy on closer inspection) hands with long and pearly fingernails, and a dark dong of surprising proportions for one so otherwise slightly built. Talented, too, from what I can recall, though for all the impact his attentions had on Gunn’s treacherous member he might as well have been reciting the Highway Code. Oh those drugs. Cockroaches by the hundred hurrying out from the legs of my discarded trousers; the curtains’ burgundy roses morphing into tiny, sack-carrying dwarves; my hand the size of a double bed; a stadium of whispers; hot flushes; me expelling geysers of nonsense that did nothing for Lewis’s peace of mind. Worst of all (don’t relax too deeply, Monsieur Gunn, I’ll right this wrong before I go!), a penis that might as well have been a Brillo pad for all the sensitivity it retained.

‘I don’t think this is going to work, you dear beautiful boy,’ I heard myself saying, as if from a great distance, after forty minutes of fruitless fondling. ‘No reflection on your . . . your fitness for the task in hand, I hope you understand?’

‘Yeah well there’s no fuckin’ refund, babe,’ my companion replied, surprising me, somewhat, with the speed of his shift from cheeky mincer to no-dice businessman.

‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Just the tack that’s likely to get your darling head cracked open one of these days – although not by me, of course.’ Not that it hadn’t occurred to me, especially given the sudden appearance of an enormous twin-headed battleaxe propped up against the mantelpiece, looking very much the part with both its edges sporting coagulated blood and the odd wisp of human hair. Lewis, meanwhile, got dressed as if the drawing on of each garment expressed a distinct and unique contempt. I was wondering how to reach the battleaxe – given the howling and bottomless chasm that had just opened in the floor between myself and the mantelpiece – when the door opened and a meaty-headed man with a very black beard and very blue eyes entered. He surveyed the scene with his knuckles on his hips and his chest thrust out – not entirely unlike the posture of a pantomime dame – an expression of mildly displeased boredom on his face.

‘Oh yeah?’ he said, rather non sequiturially, I thought, to no one in particular. ‘Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah?’

It was taking me an age to shake those damned devil’s coach-horses from the legs of Gunn’s jeans, distracted, as I was, by the regularly rising urge to vomit and by the erratic flight of the room’s previously unnoticed white hot bats that whizzed hither and thither weaving a cat’s cradle of phosphorescence around the three of us.

‘Yeah, well, Gordon okayed it, babe,’ Lewis said.

‘Oh yeah?’ the bearded man repeated.

‘I do think, old sport –’ I began.

‘And you, sunshine, can fuck right off out of it,’ he said.

Well that tickled me beyond reason, I must say. Having finally managed to get Gunn’s de-bugged jeans and shoes back on, I staggered over to where our hirsute observer stood with both eyebrows raised and both lips joined in a curled expression of distaste.

‘I’d leave it, babe, if I were you,’ Lewis murmured.

Wisely, as it turned out, though I took no notice at the time. (I mean there’s no surer recipe for getting me to do something than the one warning me not to . . .) Besides, for hours – days, actually – a part of me had been busy decoding the body’s potential, its unreleased violence and bottled energy. Crystal clear that a good punch-up now and again would’ve done our Declan the world of good. Would probably have staved off suicide. (It’s shocking, really, this neglect of violence, your oft’ fatal ignorance of its therapeutic heft.) No chance of it with him living in his carcass, obviously, what with him being yellower than a canary in custard – strangely, specifically terrified of having his teeth knocked out (strangely, I mean, given what all else might happen to him in a brawl: spleen ruptured, kneecaps smashed, eyes gouged out, fingers broken, eardrums punctured, goolies crunched, nipples torn off and so on) – but it was all still available to me, the pent potential, its lively aesthetics of blows, gnashings, kicks, butts, throttlings, forkings and swipes – and I do quite clearly remember thinking how joyful his body was going to feel, how much it was going to thank me for finally releasing its stoppered talent into the world . . . I do quite clearly remember a fantasy vision of myself, post-fisticuffs, floating in a seratonin haze (I think I was reclining in a vast red leather armchair, actually, in this image), just before the guy with the beard took umbrage at my hands on his lapels and headbutted me with astonishing speed and accuracy, sending me – with similar speed and inevitable accuracy – down onto my buttocks, which, whether by his design or otherwise, turned out to be the perfect position for my face to receive his kneecap, a bit of down-to-earth physics with all the subtlety of a cannon-ball landing in a rum baba. I’m assuming, given the bruises, given this body’s new collection of aches and pains, that other things were done to me after that. Assumption is required, since an unequivocal blackness swallowed my consciousness a split second beyond impact, and did not regurgitate it until several hours later, when I found myself quite comfortably wedged between a recycling bin and a mountain of shredded paper in an alley at the back of the shop. Fleeced, I believe, is your word. Stiffed. Done over. Fucked. Teach me, I suppose, to walk around drunk and on drugs with 1,500 pounds sterling in my pockets. Nice team, those two, Lewis and his guy. I made a mental note to find out which of the boys is working with them and give him a raise . . .

‘Do you need help?’ a voice said. ‘Do you want me to call an ambulance?’

I looked up. Indecipherable against the dark brick and pewter sky. A patchouli-flavoured hand, dry and cool, reached down and took mine. My left. My right was clenched around some tiny object. ‘Can you stand?’

Apparently, I could, given that I found myself, after her braced yank, on my feet. Vertical, I found myself face to face with a stout woman in her late fifties. Ruddy cheeks, manly hands, a silver-grey ponytail, red corduroys and a battlescarred leather bomber jacket. Cheekbones. One earring of Chinese turquoise. Breath roll-up-scented and boots steelcapped.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You’re covered in blood.’

What does it say about the state I was in that I merely stood there opening and closing my mouth for a few moments? To my absolute astonishment, she started feeling me up. Or at least, so I thought, until I realised she was looking for the source of the bleeding.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please. No. I haven’t been – I’m not, ah, wounded.’

‘Just fucked over?’ she said, giving my elbow a compassionate squeeze. ‘You’ve got a shocking black eye, you know.’

Hard, really terribly hard, to describe my feelings at this point. First, I own, was incredulity. Do you, by any chance, have any idea how STUPID it is to go wandering around London’s alleyways in the small hours? And do you have any idea, dear Miss Ruth Bell, how FURTHER STUPID it is, given your presence in such locales, to extend a hand to a beaten body indisposed among the bins? Do you know who you could run into? But then that is Ruth, you see? Very seldom troubled by the gaps between knowing what the right thing to do is and doing it. (Whereas Gunn . . . Well, he’s all gaps, really.) She’s what we call Downstairs a Lost Cause. Course, being celibate helps. Leave sexual energy unspent and it’ll turn its hand to all sorts of creative activities (no wonder Gunn’s output was so poor), and dear Ruth hasn’t had a jump in three years. Claims she doesn’t miss it. Claims she’s too busy. But what irritates me is the stupidity, the ease with which such people keep themselves out of my grasp. There’s no reading, very little reflection, just the spirit’s rough expression through salubrious hobbies and a worthwhile job. She doesn’t even go to fucking Church.

‘What’ve you got in your hand?’ she said, lifting my clenched right mit up between us.

Well, I thought, as I opened my palm and struggled to focus, perhaps things are looking up after all. She’s going to be . . . disappointed when I repay this kindness with . . .

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling terrible all over again. ‘Oh.’

‘Is that one of your . . . Is that one of your teeth, love?’

In the café (‘Come on,’ Ruth said, as the light brightened around us, ‘I’ll buy you a cuppa. You look like you need it.’) I went into the bathroom to get a hold of myself. Lucifer, I said – I did, you know; I don’t spare myself when I need a right good talking to – Lucifer, I said, you are going to pull yourself together. Do you hear me? Can you imagine – for the love of Farrah can you imagine how this would look in certain quarters? Can you imagine how Astaroth . . . No, enough. Amusing in its way – but really: enough. Enough.

‘Got to go myself, now,’ Ruth said, when I returned to our table. ‘Keep an eye.’

You’d think she was loaded. Two full Veggie Breakfast specials, despite my protestations. I saw the ex-crim behind the counter sketching his London theory: Older bird, arty, bit a dosh from the family; younger bloke – but he came a cropper with it when he saw the state I was in. Probably not your idea of aromatherapy, a night between King’s Cross rubbish heaps, though I myself found my lately acquired odour whoreishly seductive. You’d think, as I say, that she had some middle-class wedge behind her, but the truth is she’s barely making ends meet.

All the more reason, therefore, to relieve her of her purse while she was in the loo. A laughable haul, obviously, £63.47, NatWest chequebook and Switch card, photo of her dead ma and pa, any organ you like as long as I’m dead, and a slew of useless contact numbers scribbled on aged scraps and tickets – but that was hardly the point. A faithshaking betrayal, that was the point.