When Winter came on hard Danny was wrapped up warm with his family in a centrally heated three-bedroom apartments with a service charge for the cleaning of all communal areas and a commanding view of a recently renovated waterway and Paul was like crashing on some guy’s sofa in a basement conversion that did not have air or even any windows but then the guy whose name was on the lease got put in prison (for fraud and non-payment of rent) and Paul was evicted and some guys threatened to eviscerate him if he didn’t get out of the neighbourhood and fast.

He made it round to Danny’s and was like All Apologies for how he treated him before i.e. during the past (with disdain) and how he never remembered the kids’ birthdays, or their names or whatever and how he repeatedly called Danny’s wife a stuck-up cunt and everything like that. Help me out Bro he said, again repeatedly, into the intercom thing that he had to talk into because Crystal (the wife) would not let Danny buzz him up to enter the building and their lives. No, I am sorry said Danny, what were you doing all this time just like wasting away and everything, making a kind of chirping sound instead of being totally industrious and part of a essential work ethic like me?

Paul did not have a good answer of course. He begged all nite on the intercom thing, pressing the button and pleading his case again and again but the cunt Crystal was steadfast and Danny was under her thumb and the kids were asleep and in the end Crystal just disconnected the thing at the apartment end and so his endless buzzing went into the category of a limbo reserved for those buttons in life that are pressed to no effect at all.

That same month that country they lived in was subjected to an invasion by armed forces from an elsewhere that believed in a supposedly different system of beliefs. After the invasion things went from quite bad to much worse and following sundry riots and rebellions the town was subjected to a curfew, roads were subjected to roadblocks and respectable members of the community were subjected to brutal humiliation. Women were distressed, denigrated and then degraded, troublemakers were rounded up, railed at, assaulted and subjected to torture. Danny’s entire family were killed and he himself was dragged from out of his shop one afternoon for no good reason, covered in some kind of highly flammable liquid from out of a plastic canister and set on fire by a group of men that were laughing in an off-hand kind of way and wearing outfits that made it seem like they were probably soldiers.