Saturday night, and a lot had happened since Abbott walked away from that drink in The Sportsman. One thing that hadn’t happened, though. He hadn’t touched a drop.

Arriving back at his digs that night, he’d poured the last of his spirits down the sink. It wasn’t the first time he’d done such a thing, and experience told him that it probably wouldn’t be the last. But it was still a significant act. It was still Abbott saying to himself, Enough is enough.

Before he’d turned in that night, he’d reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted the real reason that his jacket had been so precious to him. Inside was a colour photograph of himself and Nathan at Nathan’s passing-out parade, both in their uniforms, Abbott the proud dad.

Abbott had never wanted Nathan to join up, not when the military had fucked him up, but Nathan had joined anyway – of course he had; he was strong-willed like his father – and once he was there, and when it came to passing out? Well, Abbott had been just about as proud as a dad could be.

And he put that picture on the side of his bed and kept it there. He kept it there the next day when he spent most of it in bed feeling ill but denying himself the cure. He knew that you weren’t supposed to cold turkey on booze. How bad he felt would be a test of how far along the road to alcoholism he had travelled.

The second day, his head was shrouded in a constant fog and his bones ached. There was thankfully no sign of the withdrawal fits that he’d heard about in AA meetings, but even so, it was bad, especially with his alcoholic voice, that AV they always talked about, constantly nagging at him, telling him, Just one drink, just have the one to sort you out. Buy a small bottle. Set yourself a limit of just two a day, OK maybe three a day.

No.

Because what else was it they said in AA? ‘One’s too many, ten’s not enough.’ He didn’t want ‘just one’, because never in his drinking life had he ever wanted ‘just one’. None or many, that was the thing. Preferably many.

At some point he managed to drag himself to the washing machine downstairs, and at one stage he went to the shops, fighting an extra-strong urge to purchase alcohol and coming away with just a pack of sandwiches and a feeling of having scored a major victory.