‘If you want to go, babe,’ I said, slurring slightly, ‘we can go. We don’t have to let him talk to you like that.’

   ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She snapped back, turning away from the hand I’d placed on the small of her back and looking at me like I’d done a shit in her breakfast. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are. I’m not going anywhere with you. Get away from me.’

   I just laughed. She was always quirky like that, old whatsherface. With her dyed black hair and her… fringe. I laughed so hard I spilt beer all down my arm, but she and all those boring fuckers that were trash talking her just stood there staring at me, all pretending not to get the joke. Which was funny and all, but after a while I wasn’t in the mood for it so I decided to walk off and talk to someone else for a bit. I’d fuck whatsherface extra hard later, just because I could.

   I saw a baby in a pram, shaking a rattle and talking gibberish to itself. Diddl-iddl-iddl-iddl-aaaaaaaah it was saying, and its parents were sitting next to its pram talking to another couple about something or other and I’m sure I knew the whole crowd from somewhere but I didn’t really know how to start conversation so I just started tickling the baby’s cheek and making funny faces at it, until the pram was pulled away from me and I found the whole table of adults staring at me. I suddenly felt an immense pressure to greet them; to look at me this intensely, they must have recognised me.

   ‘Oh, hi everyone,’ I grinned, ‘how are you all?’

   ‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the dad, a dashing young chap I must have drunk with a thousand times in this very bar. Real cutting edge banter was going down in the bar that night, and I was lapping it up. Heartily laughing, I play-punched his arm.

   ‘Oh, you,’ I said, stumbling a tad and spilling a bit more of my pint onto their table. ‘What are you like?’

   The wife – I can’t remember her name for the life of me, but it’ll come back to me at some point – was covering her nose with the neck of her jumper.

   ‘Look, you’re making my wife uncomfortable and I’m not happy with you touching my baby’s face. You’re filthy. Can you go away please?’ He play-snarled.

   I gave him a cheeky wink. He’s a riot, that guy. ‘Sure thing, mate,’ I said, backing away, ‘I’ll see you next time you’re in here anyway.’

   On my way to the bar, I bumped into a guy wearing a sweater vest and slacks, all posh like, and his four friends, all wearing the same. It took me a while to recognise them, but when I did I was so pleased that I downed the rest of my pint.

   ‘It’s you!’ I said, pointing at whateverhisnameis, the tall one who I used to play cricket with down at the wherever. ‘How’s it going, man?’

   He just looked at me, a wry smile creeping over his lips. He eyed his friends one by one, then looked back at me. ‘I-I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘do I know you?’

   ‘Oh shuttup,’ I chuckled, ‘and Tony! It is Tony, isn’t it? Or Greg? Mitchell? I forget, I’ve got a shit memory these days, but it’s you as well!’

   Tony or Greg or Mitchell also looked around at all his friends, who were all stifling laughs like I was, before formulating his answer: ‘I have honestly never met you in my life.’

   Of course, we all burst into fits of laughter. All of us, in on the joke, we just stood there wetting our pants with laughter. One of them even said to me, ‘It appears none of us know who the fuck you are!’ My sides nearly split.

   But soon they got boring too, so I eloped with my empty to the bar, where I called the bartender over in the jovialest of tones. ‘The usual please, mate,’ I grinned.

   ‘You don’t have a usual,’ he replied, maintaining a deadpan expression with much more skill than I could have mustered in his shoes, ‘you’ve never been in here, and frankly, we’d like you to leave now anyway. You’re scaring away our real customers.’

   I pointed and winked and guffawed a little more as I walked away from the bar. Real, tangible, world-class banter was going on that night. All round mental bant. I decided that if he was going to keep up his act (and he was keeping it up brilliantly and hilariously, so who could blame him), I should wait for another barman if I hoped to get served. I realised I should probably take a break anyway, since I’d had eight pints already.

   So I just leant on the bar for a while, looking around the pub and baring my teeth in a big grin at the room. I looked around until I spotted whatshername, that bird with the huge jugs from a couple of weeks ago, the one who did that thing with the wine bottle. Instead of greeting her, I thought I’d give her a pleasant surprise – a cheeky snog. Grabbing hold of her arse with one hand and her neck with the other, I locked my lips onto hers before her eyes had even focused on me.

   She must have recognised who it was straight away though, because she screamed in pleasure straight away. She screamed and screamed and struggled and struggled, but I just kept laughing and snogging. That is, until the barman from before grabbed my collar and bent my arm behind my back and wrenched me off her.

   ‘Who the fuck are you?!’ she screamed. Looking at her more closely, I realised that maybe I had the wrong woman. But I still definitely knew this one.

   ‘Right, get the fuck out,’ barked the barman, pushing me into this strange little porch thing by the doors, ‘and don’t come back.’

   This was all part of the plan anyway. I’d been planning to leave soon, so they’d done me a favour by chucking me out. I’d go home, have a little cry, have a big wank and then go to bed.

   But when I got outside, I realised that it was only midday, and the sun was blistering hot, and I had no home to go to. So I downed a half-pint I found on the windowsill (swallowing the floating fag butt too), and moved on to the next bar.

   'Here, that's great, lad,' mumbled Derek, barely audible over his grandson's babbling. His eyes remained inches away from the blue glow of his computer screen. He was Googling donkey shows.

   Derek's grandson Harry was reciting the fourth division table out loud, making sure his grandfather could hear every result. Although Derek's hearing was starting to buckle under the pressure of passing time, he never let on to the kids that it wasn't bad enough yet that he couldn't hear the television unassisted because then he couldn't pretend not to have heard them when they asked a question he didn't want to answer or brought up a subject he didn't care to discuss. He was happy for Harry to read the table out to him, as long as he didn't start reading what was on the computer screen.

   'Charlton nil, Crystal Palace three,' Harry practically shouted across the room. He accented certain syllables in a way that Derek had heard many teenagers do in recent years, putting on some accent he was never brought up with just to fit in with friends that Derek can never imagine himself choosing when he was Harry’s age. Harry was fifteen, an age at which boys are normally loth to spend time alone with their grandfathers; but since the death of Ethyl, Derek’s wife, Harry’s mum has never been the same. She spends one half of her time staring into space, and the other half crying and yelling incomprehensible curses at Harry without reason. Grief has turned her into a wreck, a shell of the mother she once was; and as such, Harry avoids her like the plague.

   ‘Chelsea two, Bromley three,’ he shouts, typing a text message into his phone.

   Ethyl’s death was three years ago now, and although Derek still grieved for her, he had dealt with it in a far different way than his daughter. At first, he had sunk so far back into his shell that he feared even leaving the house. He would lock himself in his bedroom and hardly explore the house at all. When the mail came, he would throw it straight in the bin, fearing that it might hold more bad news he wasn’t ready for. Danger lurked around every corner, in every cupboard, in the face of every stranger that wandered past in the street. He read books, he wrote short poems about the pain he was feeling, and he lost two stones in those months.

   Then he found a present that his daughter and her son had bought him the Christmas before Ethyl died. Still boxed, never even looked at for longer than a few minutes, it was a laptop computer that Derek had no idea how to use and no idea what to use for. He unwrapped it that day, and invited his grandson round to teach him what to do with it. He’d heard somewhere that you could send letters to people on the other side of the world for free, in seconds, using one of these; and he wanted to learn how to do that, and then more.

   Over the weeks that followed, Derek gradually discovered the Internet. Having become a terrified skeleton following the death of his wife, he fattened up again into a chubby explorer, emerging from his shell and surfing everywhere from the Amazon to Expedia, from Adult Friend Finder to Flickr. He found out about karate and yoga, LCD screens and time travel, cats and literature, religion and India and hacking and boilers and Canada and wars and pregnancy and everything else that exists in the bottomless pit of the blogosphere. Even stuck inside his house, he was freed by the world inside his computer screen.

   And after it dragged him out of his shell, the Internet dragged him out of his house. He arranged French lessons for himself, cookery classes, a writing club, a skydiving trip, and holidays to every European city you or I could name off the top of our heads. He learned to play guitar (although not that well), he bought a games console that he never even played, and he went to plays he never even knew had been written. He even fucked a prostitute, a lovely young lady who it turned out had been in the year above his own daughter at the very same school. And now, the same Internet that had brought him all those new experiences had Derek discovering his favourite new topics yet: donkey shows and Tijuana.

   Derek had always heard that curiosity killed the cat. But for him, curiosity killed the pussy. The terrified wretch he had become was slaughtered mercilessly by his newfound thirst for knowledge.

   ‘Grimsby four, Man United one,’ mumbled Harry.

   ‘YES!’ Ejaculated Derek, at the top of his rusted lungs. Harry jumped out of his skin, and Derek couldn’t stop coughing until his laughter broke through as the more powerful convulsion.

   ‘Is you alright, granddad?’

   Derek looked up from his laptop screen. Still chuckling and coughing and spluttering and guffawing, he met Harry’s eye across the room that hadn’t been tidied or vacuumed for the last three months, what with Derek spending so little time in it; and he said, ‘Yes, son. I just like Grimsby, that’s all.’

   But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t a love of Grimsby at all. It was the amazing price that Derek had just got for a return flight to Tijuana, Mexico.

   My mother was already fuming when we reached the roundabout, on account of the fact that I was nine minutes late out of my counselling session (one of the perils of still living with your mum at age twenty-two is that you have to live with the fact that everything that goes wrong in her life will be taken out on you, even if you don't know what it is). Crime of the century. So when we reached the thick traffic at what is normally a very smooth flowing, easy going roundabout, it just worsened her mood. 

   Through the gaps in the cars, we could see that something was blocking the stream of traffic from all directions. 'Oh for fuck's sake,' she hissed, 'this had better not be an accident.'

   But it was. As we edged closer and the impatient, loudly honking cars in front of us gradually side-stepped around the blockage at the centre of the roundabout one by one, it revealed itself as a nasty knock between two cars in the middle of the road. One, a brownish Ford of some sort, was sitting there with its bald, smart-looking, middle-aged owner standing next to it clearly seething. Behind it, a pink Citroen lay wounded, its nose smashed off into the road, its bonnet curled up into a horrid frown that told a thousand words of damage.

   My mother wound her window down as the van in front of us made its way carefully around the wreckage. 'Oh come the fuck on, you idiots!' she bellowed at the cars that wouldn't get out of her way to let her around the accident. That wasn't why she wound down her window; she was preparing to shout even worse at the lead actors in this little drama.

   But as we made our own way around the collision, she lost her nerve. She caught sight of the girl crying next to her destroyed Citroen, barely even nineteen years old, her heart broken and her limbs shaking. At the same time I did, my mother caught sight of the bald man in the Ford shouting at the girl, calling her all the names under the sun because she had a lapse of concentration that sent her car hurtling into the back of his. That poor girl, she just stood weeping and harshly inhaling, wiping the tears from her cheeks but not being able to keep up with the flow of them, while a bald man with a scratched Ford lectured her and around her dozens of cars blasted their horns and shouted abuse from their windows. My mum, she just wound her window back up and cursed under her breath.

   With my mum's ears still steadily steaming and a flat feeling of fragility humming away inside me from the session I'd just left and the blame I had taken for something that was out of my control, the tension is the car was palpable. But I didn't think about it. All I could think about was that poor girl, distraught and ashamed and afraid, standing in the middle of a roundabout, sobbing her heart out; and all I wanted to do was take her in my arms, and tell her everything was going to be alright.

   Setting his foot on the cold iron of the railing in front of him, shivering involuntarily in the chilling wind that tugs at his thin cardigan and brushes his pale skin, Matthew calls Andrea's mobile phone number again. He knows it'll ring out; there's no coming back from where Andrea's gone. But a spark of hope still burns away inside of him; hope that the past few weeks will turn out to be just a bad dream, hope that his actions had never led to her death, hope that the guilt that plagues him can be left to drift away like a plastic bag in the wind. 

   Standing precariously on top of the four-foot high rail, gripping a lamppost to stop himself slipping and falling prematurely to a watery grave, Matthew listens to the tone ring and ring, more times than he can ever remember any other telephone ringing, before Andrea's voice chirps into his ear, Hey it's Andrea. Sorry, I can't get to the phone right now, but please leave a message after the tone and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Matthew wonders if the guilt would be diluted, be numbed somewhat, if her family had deactivated the number by now. He knows it wouldn't undo what he has done, but maybe he'd feel a little lighter if he could let go of this nightly routine.

   Not that it matters either way. Because tonight, on a Tuesday evening in the biting frost of a bitter winter, Matthew is going to throw himself from this bridge into a dark, wet death. It's only right, he tells himself, that someone should pay for what happened to Andrea. He can't live with the guilt, so he will take it to the afterlife instead. 

*

   It had been a long night by the time Andrea telephoned him on that drizzly night just a few weeks before now. Matthew had had a long day at work, a nightmare journey home, and drinks with a girl he liked in which he said such embarrassing things that he doubted she would ever contact him again. At half past midnight, as he'd just arrived home and was slipping his shoes off for the first time all day, the last thing he needed was a call from Andrea. 

   He knew how it would go as soon as the phone started ringing. She would slur her pleasantries, drunk again, and he’d have to pretend he was amused by her idiocy until she changed the subject. Even then, he’d still have to grin and bear the conversation, as she asked too-intrusive questions about the date he’d just been on with faux disinterest, pretending not to care about the answers but quite obviously becoming more brokenhearted with every new mention of it. Then she’d get upset and remorseful about that one night a few months ago, before putting on her vulnerable voice and begging him to pick her up, claiming she had no other way of getting home.

   He just couldn’t be bothered with that. Instead, he kicked his shoes off, and as the phone continued to ring he removed his coat, throwing it on a hook and thinking back to the night when everything had changed between them.

*

   She had been hinting towards it for weeks. Saying the odd thing here, suggesting the odd idea there. And Matthew had ignored it because he thought that after a decade of friendship, she knew he would never go there. But like women do, she grew more persistent, more desperate to get her own way. Deluded, lying to herself, she finally went all the way one night after a few too many drinks, and asked him, ‘So when are we gonna stop playing these games and just fuck?’

   ‘What?’ He had replied.

   ‘Oh, you know what I’m talking about, Matt. We both want it, so let’s just do it. I’ve been waiting years for you to offer, and now I just can’t wait anymore.’

   ‘You’ve got the wrong idea, Andrea,’ he had said, backing away from her and wishing he had distanced himself months earlier, ‘I don’t like you like that and I never have.’

   ‘Bullshit,’ she had laughed, ‘the way we flirt, anyone would think we’re together sometimes.’

   ‘That’s wishful thinking on your part, I’m afraid,’ he had snapped, more annoyed than he would have been if she wasn’t breathing her desperate wine breath in his face, ‘I flirt with every girl I know. You know that. You’ve seen it for years.’

   ‘But Maaaatt,’ she had sighed, leaning over and resting her hand on the crotch of his jeans, ‘stop denying it…’

   Matt got up and left that night, and things had been cold between them ever since.

*

   So when the phone rang that night after his date, he decided to ignore it. Officially, things between them were supposed to be fine now – she had apologised when sober and he had accepted it just because they were part of the same large social group and as such were forced to spend long periods around each other, so it was easier if he just forgave. But he hadn’t forgotten.

   If she asked the day after, he would say he had already fallen asleep when she called. Failing that, he’d say that he was in the bath so he couldn’t get to the phone. Any excuse not to have to pick her up and have her fake her pleasure at hearing that he was getting along okay on the dating front. Any excuse not to have to put up with her advances, which were repulsive to him after they had known each other so many years. It was deception, there was no doubt about that, but it was a forgivable kind of deception. The kind of deception that everyone has been guilty of countless times. The kind of deception that is justifiable; not like Andrea’s self-deception that told her she had a chance with him.

   But the next morning, when he woke to find his phone ringing again, this time being called by Andrea’s best friend, he wasn’t so sure that what he had done was forgivable. When Aimee’s normally chirpy voice had informed him, in sullen tones between loud sniffles, that she had been found dead and dumped by the side of a road, he felt like maybe his tiny piece of deception last night had grown into the biggest and worst lie he had ever told overnight.

   With no one to take her home and no forward planning to tell her to keep enough money for a cab, she had tried to stumble back to her house at midnight after a whole evening of heavy drinking. On the way home, tottering slowly under the dim streetlamps in her highest heels, she made herself into a sitting duck for all the lowlifes that wanted to take a piece of her. She painted a target onto her own back. And just like it does when it’s given half a chance, the night had its way with her. The night chewed her up, and spat her out as a bruised and abused cadaver.

   And Matthew had no one to blame but himself.

*

   And so, standing atop a handrail on a bridge above an ice cold, aggressively flowing river, Matthew tells himself that this is the end. He brought this on himself, he thinks, so he has no choice now but to end it all. Give himself what he deserves for ending his friend’s life so cruelly. For lying, and causing the demise of someone he had once been best friends with. I can do this, he whispers to himself, I have to now.

   It’s deception, there’s no doubt about it, but a forgivable kind. The kind of deception that everyone has been guilty of countless times. The kind of deception that is most potent, because self-deception is more powerful than any other.

   And once he has accepted that, he steps down from the rail. He takes a gulp, releases that breath that has been locked up tight in his chest since he decided to climb onto the iron rail, and climbs down to the pavement below.

   Sliding back into his car seat, he lights a cigarette and weeps. He knows he’ll be back here tomorrow, in exactly the same position, and this just breaks his heart. But at the same time, it comforts him; the day that he doesn’t visit this bridge and at least attempt to attempt suicide is the day that he has forgiven himself for his deception that night, and he is far from deserving that yet.

   He weeps until his ducts are dry, and then he drives home in the pitch black night without his headlights on.

   I want you to write down everything I say. Yes, everything. Even this. Do you have a pen? Good.

   It's only when you get to the edge of the cliff of your lifespan, when you teeter on the edge of that eternal drop into mortality, that you really get a chance to look back at your life and evaluate once and for all the successes and the failures that summarise your tenure on planet Earth. It's only when it is escaping you that you see life in the clearest light. Then and only then do you really appreciate the colossal achievements and catastrophic mistakes that got you where you ended up. Only when you are about to die, my friends, can you truly consider the only thing that will be left of you once you're gone: how you will be remembered.

   Me, I would like to be remembered for the first class degree I earned at university. The pride my family felt when the first of us ever to attend a higher education institution walked out of there with a tightly rolled scroll that read First Class Honours. I want to be remembered for the societies I chaired at that university; the finances I managed, the socials I organised, the like-minded individuals I brought together. An excellent start to life was carved there, a solid foundation built.

   More than that, I would like to be remembered for my time as a youngster at GeneriCorp, where I increased sales by 400% in my first year alone, all through the innovative marketing techniques and aggressive tactics I had the initiative to put in place. Under my charge, my team’s productivity levels soared until we were given more new projects year on year than all the other teams in our area, and we still had time to run a table tennis league on the side. Some of the methods that company uses today can still be traced back to me and my time there, so it would please me to think that they will mourn me when I'm gone.

   I'd like to be remembered for my fast rise up the corporate ladder, that ruthless ambition and ingenuity I showed that meant I went from Analyst to Senior Analyst to Assistant Vice President to Vice President to Senior Vice President to Director to Managing Director in under a decade. My wish to be respected for such a speedy ascension might sound to some like unabashed arrogance on my part, but I assure you it is only confidence and pride in my own achievements, a trait our species could benefit from appreciating every now and then.

   My time as CEO of GeneriBank should not be forgotten either. After years of jumping from company to company, being headhunted here and poached there, I finally got the recognition I deserved and was put in charge of one of the world's largest financial institutions. And boy, did I rock it. Under me, profits skyrocketed. Our share price soared to dizzy new heights with every passing day. We acquired new profitable companies at the rate of two a year, until we were a staggeringly huge behemoth of banking the likes of which has never been seen before. Almost every decision I made led us into new successes. If I could choose how I wanted to be remembered, it'd be for the sterling job I did running that company, and the legacy I've left behind there.

   More than all of this, I'd like to be remembered for the happiness I gave my wife and the fantastic children we brought up. Really, they're my greatest achievement. The money I made, the businesses I saved, the projects I completed, all of this is transient. It could all be forgotten the minute my casket is closed. But those kids, they're how I'll truly live on. When I see their smiles, their popularity, the grades they achieve at school, their blossoming personalities, I realise that my real successes lie in them.

   And finally, I'd like someone to remember me for surviving this illness for so long, and the dignity and strength with which I have handled it. I can only hope that I've inspired other people to never let go of the fight that keeps them alive.

   That's how I'd like to be remembered. If I could choose, that's how I'd... Could you get me a glass of water? My throat is getting dry. Quickly, please. I'll stop dictating until you return.

   Thank you.

   That's how I'd like to be remembered, but it's not how I will be. That's because it's not the way things happened. I won't be remembered for those things, because they're not really my achievements.

   My degree, I achieved by bullying the geekier students into helping me with. If they were paid enough or bribed with enough alcohol, they'd even complete whole assignments for me on occasion. Failing that, I’d borrow their work and just copy it. For all their talk of crackdowns and eagle eyes, universities are surprisingly lax with their plagiarism checks. And that's how I achieved my First. As for the societies, they ran themselves. Anything that didn't function autonomously, I would assign to someone below me. I was just a pretty face to put on the societies' posters.

   At GeneriCorp, my biggest achievement was choosing a team that knew what they were doing. I knew nothing of the world of sales techniques or marketing; I was just loud enough to be able to order my peers around so convincingly that everyone thought I was the boss. Like a tired girlfriend, I was faking it; and no one saw through the act, so I kept on acting. I didn’t even learn anything there; the work was so technical and I was so clueless that I never understood a single concept that I bragged about applying, but I got through it by becoming a self-styled people manager. Ask me to do that job now, I still couldn't do it. My team did it all.

   My rise up the ranks was similarly driven not by talent but by loudness of my voice. Like a ruthless shithead, I stormed my way up that ladder treading on every toe that poked out in my way and beating down every underdog that crossed my path. I was a vicious bastard, ordering people around like they were my servants and disappearing above them before they'd even realised they had been two ranks above me. None of that was down to my talent, unless not giving a fuck is a talent these days.

   And of course, once I was in real management I really had the chance to sit back and do nothing while everyone below me ran around like headless chickens desperate to finish the work I piled on top of them. Like every modern manager, I had nothing nice to say to my staff and knew nothing of their work except for when I wanted it done by. Everything I accomplished at GeneriBank can be attributed to one of my direct reports, but none of it to me. I came up with no ideas and no strategies. Everything I put my name to was stolen from someone else further down the chain. I was fantastic at managing, but a terrible manager.

   My kids aren't my doing either. While I was at work 24x7 with my feet on the desk watching daytime TV, I left my wife to bring them up. They hardly know me, but thanks to my incredible income they’ve received an enviable education and a nanny that takes more care of them than I ever have. There are at least twenty people in front of me in the queue to collect kudos for bringing up those children. And I didn't even need to please my wife; I let money do that for me. In fact, I can't even take the credit for our marriage - we only met because I ordered a friend to introduce me to his barmaid friend in my twenties.

   And then there's the illness. I could take full credit for that one, if it wasn't for the private healthcare I'm taking advantage of, the nurse I'm employing, the crazy alternative therapies I can afford. I've done nothing to help myself over the past few months other than lay here and order other people to care for me.

   So although I'd like to be remembered for all these things, I won't be. Because I didn't do them. What I'll really be remembered for, when I finally kick the bucket, is one thing: I was a master of the art of delegation.

   Now type this up and submit it to that story website that I like by the end of the day, please.

   Third meeting of the writing club. Once again, conversation had swung so far from the topic of anything akin to putting pen to paper that Horatio had fallen into an uninterested trance that was broken suddenly and shockingly by the muffled clink of glass on wood. Frederick, placing three more double whiskeys on the table. With this being the third double whiskey that each of them had had since they arrived, it was little wonder that the topic of discussion had wandered so far off course that not one of the men gathered could define it with any degree of certainty any longer. From what Horatio had picked up through the haze of his disinterest, it seemed that Frederick was once again boasting about his successes in the bedroom, which so far consisted of four separate nights with drug-addled prostitutes (one of whom had kindly passed on to Frederick a painful case of crabs) and one night of drunken fumbling with McCarthy’s cousin (which McCarthy found so disturbing that he would physically wince at its mention); and McCarthy was attempting to complain about his job, managing to get a word in edgeways only occasionally over Frederick’s constant prattle.

   The walls in this place, Horatio noticed, were a sad collage of patterned wallpaper from all across the ages, torn edges peeling from the surfaces to reveal paper below each layer that seemed slightly more faded and stained than that which was pasted over it.

   ‘Her skin was as soft as the smoothest silk kimono you ever touched,’ Frederick daydreamed, eyes closed and hands running over an imaginary lady’s torso in front of him, ‘and the way she ran those tiny fingers of hers down my cheek, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’

   ‘Is this the one who left you with parasites in your underpants or the one who smelt of fish and charged double what she was worth?’ came McCarthy’s retort, through a grin that stretched smugly from ear to ear.

   ‘No no no, sir, the woman to which I refer right now,’ Frederick said, opening his eyes and knocking his pointed finger on the table between them, ‘is your mother’s niece.’

   Rustling his small collection of short story ideas on the wooden table around which the men sat, Horatio turned to face off to the side, away from the bickering pair. After a short while surveying the surroundings, his eyes fell upon a striking man sitting across the room. 

   Much like Horatio, this man was sitting with two friends, uninterested in their conversations and staring into middle distance. He wore tattered boots like Horatio’s, scuffed and paint-stained trousers like Horatio’s, and a tired old plaid shirt like Horatio’s; but where Horatio knew that there was something missing in his own life (or rather, something gone awry never to be set straight), he saw only fullness in this man’s. This stranger was a handsome man; he had a square jaw sprinkled evenly with a thin layer of dark stubble, sky blue eyes that sparkled so brightly that even from across the room Horatio caught their glare, and scruffy blonde hair that would have looked untidy had it not suited his face and clothing so well. His rugged good looks implied only success to Horatio, and though he knew that one can only know so much about a person by just looking at them, what he saw by just looking at this person was a life that could never go wrong.

   ‘Don’t you hate your job too?’ McCarthy loudly enquired, tapping Horatio on the elbow.

   Horatio ignored him.

   ‘The reason you hate your job, McCarthy,’ Frederick slurred, ‘is that you’ve never felt the touch of a woman! You long to come home to the things that I come home to; the kissing, the holding, the warmth, the… the love that I make!’

   ‘The touch of a woman?!’ McCarthy sputtered, outraged, ‘You’ve only felt the touch of whores and the accidental brush of my cousin’s misguided hand! You know nothing of what love is.’

   Horatio continued to watch the man across the room. On the surface, they were so much the same; but underneath the surface, Horatio was an exhausted man way older than his years. Embittered. But none of this showed on the man whose face he watched closely. The man he watched had crow’s feet from years of laughing, horizontal wrinkles on his forehead from decades of raising his eyebrows in wonderment. He wanted to live this man’s surface life, and have nothing within him eating him from the inside. He wanted to be this man who was so free of a back story, so liberated from a past that had left him jaded and tired of the world. He wanted to live in that hollow skin and live that hollow life just to escape the dark thoughts that haunted him every day.

   But he knew that this was just a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. He knew that that man had issues just like everybody else. He knew that you can only spend so much time on the surface before the current drags you back under, wailing and clawing for the perfection that shallowness spends so little time prohibiting. Were he to become that man, the image he saw in front of him, Horatio would soon be eaten alive by the weathering world once again. And though people might look upon Horatio and see the worry-free man he saw, they would only be seeing a superficial façade hiding another sky-high pile of anguish and failure, just like those that fill every disillusioned man.

   And this fact frustrated Horatio more than the scratchy backing track provided by his two intoxicated friends.

   ‘Why don’t you go and get us each another whiskey, McCarthy,’ Frederick mumbled, pointing his empty glass at McCarthy and breathing his hot whiskey breath in his direction, ‘make yourself useful, instead of sitting there with a face like a kangaroo in concrete shoes.’

   McCarthy grumbled under his breath like a chain smoking bride as he stood to renew the men’s drinks. Horatio covered his glass with his hand to let McCarthy know that he didn’t want another, and McCarthy shrugged so that what remained of his whiskey sloshed in the glass and spilled onto the hand-written first pages of his novel. He stumbled off as if he hadn’t even noticed destroying his own work.

   As Frederick carried on speaking in Horatio’s ear despite Horatio’s obvious lack of interest, Horatio continued to stare intently at the man across the room. Horatio had noticed as McCarthy wandered away, not for the first time but definitely in a way that rendered it a new discovery, that this man was staring back at him with the same intense glare. Caught in an eternal staring match with the man across the room from him, Horatio began to hate his very being here. What had started as a strong case of the grass being greener on the other side had swiftly become a case of the grass dying equally everywhere. The soil underfoot was rotten no matter where one trod, and Horatio could see that now. This man was staring at Horatio staring at him with identical bitterness behind his eyes and exactly the same ugliness in his soul, and Horatio only wanted to hurt him for not being the healthy pasture he had imagined in next door’s field. Horatio had to get revenge on this man for destroying the surface with so much baggage below it.

   So Horatio removed his boot. With its heavy sole and leather body, he was sure that it would fly through the air nicely, hitting exactly where he aimed it.

   With the same intentions, the man staring at Horatio removed his boot too. The men raised their shoes above their shoulders simultaneously.

   Just as McCarthy stepped back into the room, he was stopped in his tracks by the flying footwear. It almost skimmed McCarthy’s face as it glided gracelessly across the air, its laces dangling lazily like a sullen teenager’s caveman arms even as it gained speed. Straight toward that man’s face it flew, and the three men watched it as it made its way in slower motion than seemed possible across Frederick’s dining room toward the full-length mirror he had propped against the opposite wall.

   On impact, the mirror smashed, and the man was gone forever.

   ‘We’ll have to keep the conversation snappy,’ the man with no cardigan on half-whispered to the girl with the shy smile, ‘I’m soluble. The slightest hint of moisture in the air, and I’ll start to dissolve. I’ve never had a shower in my entire life. I shouldn’t have even come out today; I can feel my skin melting already.’

   The girl with the shy smile and the Starbucks grande skinny latte smoking in her petite, feminine hands giggled a laugh that was a little overenthusiastic, and the snort that followed it made her stop herself abruptly and blush so intensely that her face felt like it might be on fire. She would never admit it to her friends, but a man with a quirky sense of humour and the confidence to show it off was just what she went for. Especially when he was this attractive.

   ‘This will probably be the last conversation I ever have.’ He smiled politely after delivering this deadpan line, and this time the pretty girl with the shy smile and the penchant for a man who told strange jokes hid her keen amusement behind the coffee cup she held, which was almost the size of her forearm. Normally, she would have drunk it on the train home from work, but the rain came out of nowhere today and she just had to take shelter before she was washed away. What luck, she had thought as she reached the awning under which she now stood, that I should be stuck in the same doorway as this hunk in a wet t-shirt. She hadn’t slept with anyone in a while, this pretty girl with the shy smile and the penchant and the coffee and the inner monologue. ‘I’m Steven, by the way.’ Steven, the man with the wet t-shirt that clung to his skin and the quirky sense of humour and the handsome face that had somehow managed to remain bone dry, didn’t hold out his hand for shaking.

   ‘I’m Lillian,’ she replied, sipping again from her coffee cup and smacking her delectable lips after swallowing the warm liquid, ‘but my friends call me Lil.’ 

   A moment of silence passed that didn’t seem awkward for Steven from Lillian’s perspective, and as a result was not felt as awkward by her either. She breathed deeply and calmly and absorbed the atmosphere – the chilliness of the air around them; the endless stream of businessmen and businesswomen half-running along the pavement with newspapers and briefcases held over their heads as makeshift protection from the surprise summer downpour; the loud thumps of the heavy raindrops beating their tribal drumbeats on the awning above their heads – as she tried to think of a witty response. Failing completely (and blaming that on the fact that Steven was making her heart flutter with his skin-tight t-shirt and chin that was carved from marble), she replied, ‘So being dissolvable, huh, that must be a real drag.’

   Steven, the man with the chin of marble and the wet t-shirt and the supposedly soluble body, grinned a warm and toothy smile at Lillian, who cringed at the fresh memory of her just-uttered sentence. ‘It’s a downer, Lil,’ he replied, noticing for the first time just how beautiful Lillian really was, with her tied back brunette hair and slim neckline and acceptable-yet-revealing business attire. ‘The biggest problem is the fact that I can only really eat dry biscuits. I’d give anything to drink a cold beer like all the other men do, but if I did I’d fizzle away from the inside out. Sometimes I think I’m going to turn into a digestive, the amount I have to eat to stay alive.’

   Lillian giggled a third time, and as she began to loathe herself for the shrill tone of her exhalations and the abrasive grind of her snorting inhalations, Steven warmed to her further for the very same reasons. 

   ‘So tell me something interesting about you,’ said Steven the soluble man who claimed he couldn’t drink beer, ‘you know I can’t get wet or I’ll melt, so it’s only fair that I should know one of your secrets.’

   Lillian, the beautiful girl with the slim neckline and the suit that did all the right things for her figure and the coffee that was now reaching its end, tried desperately to think of a lie that was equal in quality and imagination to Steven’s. Again, she failed. ‘You’ll hate me for this,’ she replied with regret, ‘but I work for a company that bottles and sells natural water. And that’s not a lie.’

   Steven grinned again. ‘Who said anything about lies?’ He joked.

   They held eye contact for a moment. Lillian wondered again why Steven hadn’t even been wearing a cardigan; it was not, after all, a fantastically warm day before the rain began to fall. Not warm enough to be in that top. Not that she was complaining, but still.

   ‘Why aren’t you wearing a jumper?’ She began, bending slightly to place the empty coffee cup beside her high-heel clad feet but holding eye contact the entire time, ‘I mean, it wasn’t even that warm this afternoon. Not warm enough to just be in a t-shirt, anyway. And if you’re soluble, surely you should take every precaution.’

   Steven grinned a third time, and Lillian noticed a hint of melancholy in his smile that indicated a secret meaning to his inviting facial expressions. Some people laugh when they’re nervous, she thought to herself, and wondered if she was making him nervous or uncomfortable. Perhaps she was coming across too keen again. Had she mentioned anything about marriage? Babies? Not that she could remember. For now, she was safe. Steven, however, was suffering with a dilemma – to tell Lillian the truth, or to make up an amusing lie.

   ‘To tell you the truth,’ replied Steven, the man who claimed he was soluble and didn’t wear a cardigan on cool days and smiled a smile behind which lay a sad secret or tremendous nerves, ‘I came out today hoping for rain. I’m at the end of my tether, see, and I just can’t go on anymore. I left the house hoping that it would bucket down and I would melt into the rain and be washed down the drain. I didn’t count on meeting such a beautiful lady; if I knew I’d meet you, perhaps I would have worn a rain mac to save myself.’

   Lillian’s flawless cheek skin turned cherry red once again, as she bit her bottom lip without even realising and looked up at Steven with unabashed admiration. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine,’ she muttered sweetly, almost too quietly for Steven to hear, ‘your t-shirt is quite wet already, and you haven’t dissolved yet. Besides, you seem like you have a hell of a lot to live for.’

   ‘Believe me, Lil,’ Steven began at the same volume as Lillian, his tone betraying a hint of genuine sadness for the first time in the conversation. So often, Lillian’s interminable inner monologue piped up, men with a quirky sense of humour only display them so proudly to hide the other emotional baggage they’re carrying. She wondered in this fleeting pause whether that was one of the reasons that she was so very fond of those guys – that they were like birds with broken wings, who needed nursing back to health. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong. I have no reason at all to go on, and underneath this top my skin is melting faster and more painfully than you could ever imagine.’

   This time, Lillian did not giggle, and it was her turn to return a smile that was only polite and not genuinely amused. In just a few minutes, Steven had transformed from a funny boy to a vulnerable man in Lillian’s estimations, and although it made her heart warm and her desire for this stranger grow, it didn’t make her any happier. ‘Well, I guess it’s good that you’ve met me now then,’ she whispered, with a hope in her heart that she could save him.

   ‘It is,’ he responded, grabbing her arms with his manly hands and standing face to face with her as they looked each other in the eyes, both wondering how the relationship was moving so fast when they had never even met fifteen minutes earlier, ‘because I get to steal a kiss from a beautiful girl before I walk off to meet my maker. Kiss me, Lillian.’

   And even though Lillian’s mother, the woman who couldn’t play chess and loved parmesan cheese and gave all the best advice, had always told her not to kiss strangers, Lillian joined mouths with Steven, the man who claimed he had hoped for rain to wash him away. She kissed him passionately and hungrily, running her fingers through the back of his hair as he pulled her body toward his with his strong hand on the small of her back. The feeling of his tongue against hers made her knees feel weak, as she felt the fizzing electricity between them and the sparks flew so high and he tingled against her tongue so much that she almost wondered if she was kissing Angel Delight. They kissed like it was the end of the world, and even though Steven’s tongue was shrinking with every second and it felt like popping candy in Lillian’s mouth and she could only taste digestives, Lillian felt truly happy and unconditionally wanted for the first time in months.

   When they finally withdrew, they spent a while staring into each other’s eyes. Lillian’s were filled with desire and contentment, and Steven’s were filled with the same degree of melancholy as his smile. The longer he stared, in fact, the sadder they got, until a single tear ran down his perfect cheek. In the wet trail left by the tear, his skin fizzed and popped like that of a freshly salted slug. But before Lillian could react to this strange sight, Steven turned, and walked off into the rain to leave Lillian’s life forever. As he walked, he became shorter and shorter, and thinner and thinner, until he was just a pile of empty clothing that sat, inanimate and drenched, on the pavement.

   And it was in that bar where the barmaid didn’t even know what a fucking shandy was that I stumbled across the man I’ve always wanted to be. Sitting there, alone at a two-person table, was the epitome of all I’ve ever wanted to amount to as a human being. In short, it was me, but good. After I recovered from the initial shock of seeing everything I ever wanted to be sitting at a table with a J2O and a smile that was as warm and unthreatening to men as it was charming and attractive to the girls that walked past him, I sat and began a conversation that would eventually reveal the extent of the renovation my personality would require before I could ever become even close to the way I’d like to be. Lowering myself slowly into the seat opposite Perfect Me, mouth still agape with the shocking impact of the light that emitted from the bulbs above us and bounced off his skin and hit my eyes, I took in his hair, perfectly gelled into a wave that swept across his face at just the length I’d like mine to be. I noticed how well he must be sleeping, as the whites of his eyes shone blindingly into my own and the blue of his irises washed over those globes in miniature circles that could enchant a blind man. As for his clothes, they were too cool to ignore; and too envy-inducing to describe.

   ‘H-Hi,’ I stuttered.

   ‘Hello,’ he grinned, his straight white teeth putting themselves right out there on display where they belonged.

   ‘You’re… you’re me.’

   ‘Of course,’ he grinned again, rolling his eyes in a way that was equally belittling and charismatic. Every one of his movements seemed designed for some purpose, to suit some end goal. I felt like he was judging me just as much as he was genuinely caring for me. ‘How are you?’

   ‘I’m fine, I guess. You?’

   ‘Literally,’ he paused to raise his eyebrows at a passing beauty and grin as she giggled and blushed before moving on, ‘never been better.’

   I grinned too. I felt like maybe this guy could teach me what it’s like to be me but good. Maybe he held the key to Normal Me becoming Perfect Me. So I made myself comfortable, and allowed my chin to wag.

   ‘Remember that time we told that girl we loved her and she kept following us around for weeks thinking we were made for each other but in the end we had to tell her that we only said it to get in her pants?’ I asked, still trying desperately to find a reference point that we shared. This was seven shandies later, so I was probably slurring my words by this point.

   ‘No, Aaron. I told you, we haven’t had the same experiences. I would never do the things you do, they hurt people and you live to regret them. Me, I have no regrets. I’ve never made a mistake in my life.’

   ‘You mean not even…?’

   ‘Not even that.’

   ‘What did you get in your A-levels?’

   ‘All As, obviously.’ The confidence he exuded cheekily trod the line between Modest and Arrogant so precariously that when it slipped into either side for a moment, you could do nothing but adore its character and charm. Without even realising, you could fall in love with this guy just by having a conversation with him. You’d know fully well that he wouldn’t be absorbing every word you say, but you let him off because he’s just so popular. After all, would you be able to listen intently if you had to keep interrupting the conversation to greet adoring passers-by?

   I bet he even got a first in our degree, the adorable bastard.

   ‘So… I guess you don’t have the messy love life I have?’ I asked, suddenly feeling depressed that I was sitting opposite such a behemoth of all-roundedness.

   ‘I’m single too,’ he replied calmly, ‘but only because I haven’t found the right girl yet. I’m seeing people, sure – that girl from the pub quiz, the one from work that we like, even a few dates with a gothy little number from the train station; but I won’t get sexual in any way with any of them until I know that it will feel special and… nice.’

   Nice is a meaningless catch-all word, isn’t it. It’s appropriate that he used the word nice, because it pinpointed for me exactly what I had had difficulty throughout our conversation putting my own finger on. Normal Me had been feeling uncomfortable throughout the conversation, because he had been under attack from a barrage of … niceness. Everything about Perfect Me was nice, and balanced, and considered, and… fucking… perfect. It was exhausting for everyone around him.

   ‘So let me get this straight,’ I began, as a final ditch attempt at building some common ground between us, ‘you never even got walked in on by…’

   But he held his hand up before I could even finish the sentence, shaking his head and closing his eyes in knowing denial. ‘I know the time you’re thinking of, Aaron,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t me. I never did that. She and I ended just the way we would have liked, and we still talk regularly. She’ll always have a special place in my heart.’

   Of course he hadn’t done it. He hadn’t done anything. All those mistakes with the webcam, he didn’t do. All the times a little bit too much alcohol and all-too-easy access to a mobile phone had caused havoc in my life, he hadn't experienced. He hadn’t argued with any uppity moron at work over things that didn’t matter; he hadn't lived to regret spouting out his grandparent’s ignorant and outdated views as if they were his own long before he had even had any real political inclinations; and he hadn’t strung girls along like I had all for the sake of gaining their attention. He had never had to learn from these experiences like I had, because he knew it all already. The anecdotes he told were borrowed from other people who led more exciting lives, and they were suitable for family audiences, and they made everyone around him politely chuckle at the charm and wit of the raconteur that he was. This man sitting opposite me, everything I had ever wanted to be, would never have the depth that I have because he didn’t have the regrets and triumphs and tiny imperfections that make up my horribly flawed – but experience-enriched – personality. He would never build real relationships because he kept everyone at that perfect distance of being close enough to feel his charm and warmth, but being held far enough away that they could never hurt him. Sure, no one would ever really hate him, but no one would ever really love him either. He would never benefit from the darkness that looms within me because he was forever bathed in the synthetic halogen light of his success. On the surface, this man was living and breathing perfection; but underneath, I was beginning to notice, was nothing else.

   This man was fucking dull.

   I sighed, disappointed to have discovered what I had discovered. It had been a steep fall from the pedestal I had put him on to the hard ground below, but he hadn’t felt a thing; he was too wrapped up in his perfect, two-dimensional reality to bother reading my mind. ‘Well,’ I said, my voice a let-down mumble, ‘I’d best be off. I’ll see you around, eh?’

   ‘Sure thing, Aaron. You take care now,’ he replied, grinning his grin. He smiled that toothy smile so much that I was surprised his teeth weren’t sunburnt.

   As I walked away, questioning everything that I had aspired to be and every ambition I had ever held with regard to personal development, I was uplifted by a thought that struck me just as I was replaced by a new hanger-on that had noticed Perfect Me from across the room and was dying to join him. He might not miss me when I’m gone from his life forever, I thought, but there are a handful of people who would. There are people out there to whom I mean the world, and who mean the world to me; and that’s something he might never experience.

   And that, I decided, is enough for me.

   It’s been like this for three months now.

   Since I wrote that story, the one with the handsome guy and the shy girl and the iris-blistering prose and knee-weakening romance, I just can’t write anything else. Like I poured everything I had into that one masterpiece, and now I have nothing left to… put. I don’t know, I can’t think of the word I want.

   ‘The only reason I’m with you,’ she says, stroking moisturiser slowly down her glistening, toned right leg, ‘is your stories. Without those, I don’t know if our relationship will survive.’ She’s nude again. She’s always nude.

   Sitting on the bed with my laptop illuminating my frowning features, watching her apply her beauty regime to her entire body at less than one mile per hour and in an order I can never understand, my resentment grows like a… baby. We haven’t made love in four weeks. What she just said, that wasn’t a joke.

   ‘It’s not like I’m not trying,’ I reply pathetically, tapping the keys so that the screen displays a string of random characters then pressing backspace until it shows nothing again. ‘I’ve been trying to write a short story for weeks. I just… can’t.’

   ‘Well, I don’t know…’ she mutters, straightening her back and cupping her breasts in the mirror, before letting go of them for a few seconds then cupping them for a few seconds and repeating this process two or three times. After a while, she gets bored of admiring her perfect torso and proceeds to apply mascara to her eyelashes even though she has nowhere to go today. She never has anywhere to go. ‘…There’s a poet who lives two roads down. Apparently he writes a mean sonnet. Maybe I should start sleeping with him instead.’

   I swear, if she wasn’t my… muse, I guess… then she’d be out on her… I don’t know… so fast.

   ‘Shut up,’ I snap, slamming the keyboard with my stroppy fingers.

   She pokes her pretty wet tongue out at me in the mirror. ‘Does that inspire you to write a story?’ She asks. ‘Me, playing away? Does it give you the kick you need?’

   ‘No,’ I reply as I light up a cigarette, ‘it just makes me really pissed off.’

   ‘Hmm.’

   She continues applying her makeup, the cheekiness of the poked-out tongue entirely removed from her… you know.

   ‘I just can’t think of the right words,’ I moan. ‘It’s the words that are escaping me.’

   She stands up with a heavy sigh, and pat-pats her feet across the wooden floor toward a drawer, which she opens and reaches her manicured hands into. She removes from it two heavy books which she throws onto the bed at my feet. One says DICTIONARY, and the other says THESAURUS.

   ‘There you go. Problem solved. Now write me a story, before I leave you.’

   She sits her bare bottom back down on the seat at the dressing table, and inspects her forehead like it’s a… picture.

   ‘Very funny,’ I groan, dragging out each syllable like it’s… something that you want to last a long time, ‘but it doesn’t help, does it.’

   See that full stop? That’s because that wasn’t a question.

   My stunning girlfriend pulls on a pair of French knickers and slides a baggy t-shirt over her head. She’s always pulling on a pair of French knickers and wearing a baggy t-shirt.

   Taking her covering up as a personal attack, I grow bitterer by the… unit of time.

   ‘Ugh,’ she says, applying eyeliner simply because she can and not because she needs to, ‘well I don’t know how to help then. Maybe we should just call it a day right now.’

   We sit in silence for a moment.

   ‘Hey,’ she clicks her fingers; an idea has struck her like a bolt of… erm… ‘I’ve got it! Why don’t you write a love story, and dedicate it to those friends of yours who have just got engaged?’

   ‘What friends of mine?’ I ask sarcastically, knowing what friends she means but deliberately acting difficult out of… spite, I think.

   ‘Oh, I don’t know. Dale and his girlfriend. I’m not friends with your friends. It’s just an idea.’

   I resent the whole conversation. I hate my laptop and I hate the bed that I’m sitting on and I hate the fact that she’s naked when she’s naked and she’s clothed when she’s clothed. Like right now.

   ‘It’s not the subject matter I have trouble with.’ My tone is Educated and Superior, with a generous dash of Arrogant. ‘Some say that I could write a story about a matchstick and make it interesting. On a good day, I could write a story about a road sign and people would tell me it’s the best story they’ve read. I can make any subject matter work, it’s just the words, like I keep telling you.’

   She tiptoes across the room and begins to climb into bed next to me despite the fact that she just spent three hours preparing her face for some imaginary fashion show. Pulling the thick covers tight around her neck and facing away from me, she closes her eyes and… goes uggghhhh.

   ‘I’m tired of helping you,’ she mumbles, already half asleep, ‘I might as well just run off with that poet. Yes, I’ll do that tomorrow.’

   We share another moment of silence, as I bite my nails and suck on my cigarette and rue the day I ever met this idiot and rue the day I ever caught Writer’s Block and rue the day I ever lived two roads away from a damn… poet.

   ‘Or maybe you could write a story about having Writer’s Block,’ she slurs, as sleep pulls her further into its… thing.

   ‘What a fucking stupid idea,’ I reply, through gritted teeth.

So, I'm taking the dive. I'm sending a novel to literary agents. You can't see the novel until it's published, obviously, but for now I'm gonna let you see the cover letter I sent out. I worked on this for days. I followed advice from Writer's Workshop and Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, and I constructed the perfect cover letter, shown below (click to enlarge).