He walked the evil local park on Saturday afternoon. The dads coddled their pitbulls and kicked balls at shaven-headed children. The light was giving up by four. He kept his eyes down as he passed the haggard masturbators who patrolled the territory of the public toilets. It was his usual bad luck that when the bell-ringer appeared to signal the park’s closing, he did so directly behind him on the pathway, and he marched there, solemnly tolling, a harbinger, and each time he looked over his shoulder, on every third or fourth peel, the ringer was staring directly into him: a soul-reader in a parks jacket. He let himself be steered out of the park on the tip of the bell’s ringing and he walked the High Road, where people at bus stops ate kebab meat and chips and the traffic looked as if it might do away with itself at any minute. January, and he turned down the long street of pre-war terrace houses on which he made his home. ‘Humps for Half a Mile’ a road sign read, warning of the traffic-calming measures that were in place, but the words had a metaphorical resonance. The house that he lived in was not a house in which he might casually talk of metaphors. It was not yet five o’clock but already his housemates had for some hours been going at the Excelsior lager. They were Connemara men, with the look of bunched and tragic navvies, though all three of them worked in IT. The Excelsior lager was 9.8 per cent to volume and would take the paint off the walls if left to its own devices. He settled into his usual armchair and received the usual vague smiles in greeting. They were watching gazelles in the forest wild – some dappled idyll in equatorial light – but kept flicking back and forth to the BBC for the final scores in the football.

‘Fucken Lampard’s on fire.’

‘He fucken is the cunt.’

This was not a house in which to talk about the heart. This was a house in which to drink super-strength lager and cut yourself shaving. The bathroom in the mornings was out of Scarface. He was not a fastidious man – he was twenty-five – but the blood on the white tiles and the tiny scraps of scrunched-up bloody toilet paper, these were hard to stomach. His stomach was not the greatest anyway. He had not been eating well for the best part of the year since she had left him. Occasionally, a communal stew or casserole was attempted in the house, but most often it was forgotten about, causing smoke damage and small fires – the brigade had been out more than once to number 126.

He could not keep the Excelsior down and always instead drank Heineken. The housemates shook their heads at this and accused him of gayness. But they were not lads overly bothered by sex in any of its varieties. The Excelsior ruled out attempts at courting and copulation. It pretty much ruled out walking, too, and when more weed was required from the Jamaican in the flats, he was, as always, the one sent to fetch it. Soiled fivers were found in the pits of denims and slapped into his hand; an ounce was agreed on for the house to share. He drained what was left of his Heineken and he stood up and into his jacket and he watched the last few moments of the programme about gazelles.