As night turned to early morning the view from the carpark went from deep black to a strange shade of violet caused in part by the dawn and in part by local damage to the upper levels of the atmosphere in terms of toxic emissions. The two of them were looking out at the city, shifting their gaze from the former Steel Works to the brand new TimeWarnerG4S Detention Centre and Multiplex, when conversation turned again to possible methodz for disposal of the body.

They had no time for the meat grinder and chemicals route and anyhow knew from movies that shit left residue, which could also damage narrative integrity. They discussed the wasteland/bin-bags option, the sack-binding rocks-and-canal possibilities, the shallow grave deal and even some version of the improvised funeral pyre/human arson solution favoured by some of the more enthusiastic killers locally. But nothing seemed right. It was all too difficult, too final, too much to get their stoner heads around.

After long pause (620 seconds) the talkative kid kicked off on one of his long more or less free-associative trails; talking about something his brother once said, about a troubling incident he’d once been involved in during a war in Afghanistan, about a girl he fancied that turned out to be a guy and a guy he’d fancied that turned out to be a girl, about his kid that he didn’t really see that much cos it was complicated with Kareen, about his own dad who had cancer of the eye, about a horse he backed in a horse race that had stumbled and died, about the drugs he had taken at various times, and one pill in particular he’d dropped believing it to be some new kind of Ecstasy but how really it was some kind of Despair. I cannot go back there he said, I cannot go down there, I cannot go back down. It wasn’t clear if he was talking about the place he had got to on the drugs he had taken, or about a well which he had climbed inside during an incident in his childhood. Then he started to cry, freaking out completely, like the mad guy in Crazy Heart.

‘Narratives of the self are not personal impulses made social, but social processes realised on the site of the personal’ he said. ‘The self . . . is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, mature, and die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that’s presented’.

That was when the not-so-talkative idiot slapped him, inducing silence and turned off the radio also, with its promised ‘endless hard-beat of heart-beats hard-ons and heartaches’ ©.

And it was then, also, as the poets say, that the not-so-talkative idiot opened the car door with Resolve. ‘Get out’ he said, ‘we are going. Get out. Stop crying. This is it. We are leaving’.