“We have to wait ’til dark,” he told the foot in a loud, creepy voice. There was ketchup in his bag, for blood. He took it out and squirted some on the foot.

“Hey, see that guy?”

“The one talking to his food?” Liam pushed himself up on his elbows and peered through the dusk. “He’s not homeless. His clothes are too nice.”

“I know. He’s still weird though. What’s he eating anyway? It looks like a foot.”

“Should we go?”

“Are you okay to go?” Shy asked. Liam’s eyes were slits and he could barely talk.

“I don’t want to go home. Can we go to your house?”

“Yes. My dad might be home though.” Her dad was always home.

“Can we have sex?”

“Maybe.”

“Seriously? Okay, let’s go.”

Tupper’s scary-man act had worked. The two teenagers got to their feet very suddenly and ran out of the park, holding hands and shrieking. They’d left their schoolbags beneath the swings. All the better. It was a nice effect, the abandoned schoolbags, the scattered limbs, the darkening sky. Just for fun he’d leave a head.

Roy slammed his laptop closed and sank back in his armchair. The notion that he could pull off a Russian assassin in space detained by oversexed—possibly pregnant—teenagers with a backpack full of gold and urinals that made Evian water out of piss was completely ludicrous. He was once a beloved, prolific author, but the current mess on his laptop was a not very subtle sign: his authoring days were over. Time to get a proper job like Wendy and end the misery.

Roy had always admired Wendy’s attitude toward work. You got it done and then had a glass of wine. Roy could never quite leave a book alone. Once it was in his head, it stayed there like an infection or a tick, niggling at him, filling him with guilt and dread, or inspiration and elation. Writing novels was like walking endlessly up a hill made of shit, stopping to eat the shit along the way and deceiving oneself into thinking it was cake. Each night when Wendy came home from work, poured herself a glass of wine, and switched on the news, Roy would follow her into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of wine too. But no sooner had he finished the glass than he was filled with self-loathing. At most, he’d written yet another stream of shit that day, even runnier and smellier than the last. What on earth did he have to celebrate?

“Oh, this part always makes me cry,” he heard Wendy say in the kitchen.