I, I, I. ME, ME, ME.

HE’D LOST THE ability to reflect, to remember the relationship in general terms — no, each moment, each incident was in itself. Today’s rejection measured more than yesterday’s, the day’s before sweet bodily welcomes.

If this moment hurt, then it hurt. And someone had to fix it and since he wasn’t into fixing mode himself for himself, then the someone had to be Kayla. And since she couldn’t, not every time, Alistair’s only option was to sulk. Or even feel devastated, for the Alistair Trambert of Gordon and Isobel’s raising had been told from a young age that sulking was for those with no means to articulate their problem. (Well, a young man who’d given up, a young man who’d surrendered his personal pride, rejected the standards he’d had instilled, he could sulk.)

One morning, though, just before his wake-up time of between eleven and twelve, maybe half an hour past that into the afternoon, Alistair either had a dream, or he had a thought that felt like a dream because it was crazy. It must’ve been a dream because it read like a story. First there was this life, on welfare, in the club, a couple dossed down in the living room from two weeks ago, who’d said they were only staying a couple a nights and who screwed very noisily, and it was an obscenity, not a turn-on, not free audio porno. And, it came a little harder than faintly, an obscenity that his own life had gone nowhere and ended up like this.

They seemed just like the couple who dossed there before them, who stole Sharns’s little stereo from her bedroom (violators) and this being the third flat in a year they’d invaded; the parties, the trashing done to this place and the others, if not by them then other welfare losers. But we’re guilty by association.

Every afternoon dragged by, slouched in front of the TV, or down at the pub making a glass of beer last till someone walked in with the dough to buy you a jug, which usually became two, three, which gave you the courage to go up to someone else and borrow till next Thursday, and then you spent weeks and months avoiding him and your twenty-buck obligation, but it was inevitable he’d run into you. Then it was either pay-up time or physical retribution. Or you could grab a Peter to borrow from to pay Paul.

The fridge was empty, echoing to the weekly question: Did you contribute to the food kitty? And there would always be times when the fix ran out, reduced you to going through the ashtrays, but Sharneeta was too tidy to keep full ashtrays in her bedroom.

Then every Thursday the woes got washed away, again, by the government bank instalment; you got to have beer, cheap wine by the cask, tailor-made cigarettes, maybe a McDonalds or KFC treat, just as long as too many spongers weren’t in residence — and then life got steadily more difficult in this seven-day cycle. It seemed to have no end, did this film reel of life on welfare.

Where Kayla was he didn’t know. And for once he wasn’t filled with that fear, that bleating need to call out for her, Where are you, hon? Kayla? Kayla, you here, babe? In that usual way of his, which he’d also stopped reflecting on. Until right this instant, when he asked himself, Would my old man ever have done that? Woken up bleating like a hungry spoilt baby for my mother’s milk? Worse than that: with a need, being a weakness, that my existence is nothing unless it’s got my (baby) lady on tap, on call?

No, never, not Gordon, for all his faults, for his blind belief that the next big money deal would solve his every problem, still he had never sought his meaning from Alistair’s mother.

For the first time Alistair looked at those dirty sheets with his mother’s eye. Oh, she wouldn’t like to see this. Did she dirty them? Did my father’s tossing dreams and sexual exertions and accumulation of sweat and bodily secretions dirty them? Not even Alistair could throw that kind of blame ball. Then who did?

You and Kayla did. (So why hasn’t she washed them?) Why should she? (Why shouldn’t she? She’s the woman. I’m the man.) Is that what you call yourself — a man? (I don’t think so, Al.) I don’t think so. Oh, to hell with this, go and get myself breakfast and stuff my father. He’s to blame all right, at least for a lot of it.

Out in the living room the couple were up, kind of, end to end on the sofa under a blanket, smoking and laughing and, Alistair noticed, flicking the ash on the floor. Like they did yesterday, and he was just as surprised as yesterday at himself for noticing such a trivial matter. What’s the problem?

So he ignored it. The dude, Shane was his name, no surname — who has a surname in the club? — offered Al a smoke, and his bird, Neylatia (pretentious, working-class name, cheap, like she is), said, Hi, you sleep later’n us. Hahaha. (Hahaha to you, too, peasant.) Alistair feeling a venom he usually reserved for thoughts of his father. And this had class snobbery in it (but who cares?). His mother would die to see him in company like this. (Look at the black mascara smudged round your stupid blinking eyes. Your hair’s not been washed in ages.)

Neylatia asked then: Hey? Anything t’ eat in this place? We’re starving.