After he’d managed to find both his door key and his front door, Todd let himself into the house and collapsed onto the sofa and then, as it was made from an untextured leather-like substance, slid off again onto the rug. He remained there in a sort of crumple until two o’clock in the morning, when cold and cramp woke him and he was able to get up and make his way to the spare room.

*  *  *

The next morning, Todd waited until he heard Janis’s car drive away (he imagined her reversing past the Volvo, which was parked half on the lawn and half on the drive) before deciding that he should stay in bed an hour or two more.

Ten minutes later, Todd was out of bed and into his clothes.

*  *  *

Sometimes Todd surprised himself with how methodical he was. Right now he was surprising himself to an extraordinary extent, as he pulled out folder after folder of writing. Once he’d got all the folders down, pastel blue and pastel pink and pastel red, he got on a chair to reach up to the top of the bookshelves and brought down two boxes marked JUVENILIA. Then, just to make sure, he went through every drawer in the desk.

Todd was pretty sure he had everything out. He stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by folders and boxes.

“My fucking career,” he said, and got down on his knees.

*  *  *

Everyone needs an audit, whatever they do for a living, and Todd’s personal audit was way overdue. He methodically opened folders, reunited pieces of paper with other pieces of paper, put stories with other stories, and then did the same with the boxes. When he’d done that, he made a pyramid of all the manuscripts, notebooks, and bulldog-clipped writings. It was less than six inches high. Todd, who’d started writing when he was seventeen and was now hitting forty, worked it out. Half an inch a year, and most of that written before he was thirty.

Todd sat down in the middle of his career and started to read.

*  *  *

None of it was any good. None of it was finished, for a start: there were novels that were one or two chapters long, there were short stories that were so short they were barely paragraphs, there were movie treatments which were three pages long but neglected to mention what the story or characters were… and there was a play. Todd could barely bring himself to read the play, but it seemed wrong to single it out for special treatment, so he dove in. After three pages, he went to get a drink. After six more pages, he got another drink. Eight pages later, the play ended, halfway through a speech by a character called The Fisherman, and Todd was so glad that he had to get another drink.