After Brexit there was a bit of peace. Hope seeped into the idiots’ heads. They dreamed of a country populated only by white, hard-drinking people, of work and economic recovery, of compact cars and domestic workers. They dreamed of British music and British films and British food. And then—nothing happened. The Arabs are still here, the Blacks, the Poles, the poor, the struggle that life represents, it all remains. Ten years ago the mattress seller’s business had reached its high point in sales. Mattresses were the lifestyle product of the moment. Every middle-class earner had become an expert on memory-foam-feather-down-slats-seven-comfort-zones-latex-and-hand-sewn-mattress-science. Sleeping and sex. The last bastions of supposed freedom. And then they lay on their overpriced mattresses “Made in Wales,” which meant a small factory in Wales employed a hundred illegal workers from Romania and Pakistan who were given two hundred pounds a month and a bed in a gymnasium, and nothing was luxurious. Insurance got more expensive, wages fell, jobs disappeared, and today nobody buys mattresses anymore; these days hardly any of his previous customers have space for a double bed; these days few of his previous customers even have a bed at all. They lie on rented sofas that come with use of a shared kitchen and definitely don’t buy mattresses. So now the shop is closed and emptied, on the floor old advertising circulars, and the mattress seller goes home, well, okay, goes. On the tube, which is delayed three times. And home. Well, yeah. Dagenham, Ilchester Road. A street that doesn’t even look nice at night. The park at the end of the street is something for the eyes, though. Used to be. When he originally rented the place. When he was in his mid-forties and still in a relationship. It’s not easy as a beaten-down middle-aged person to find someone who will spend the final years with you at the kitchen table. “Hello, I’m a mattress seller. I have endogenetic depression because I attacked my missus. Because I realized time was getting away from me and I’d taken too long to find myself and then I found myself and there was nothing special. There was no form of genius in me, nothing. And without some ingeniousness, existence is nothing more than renting little redbrick houses in treeless lanes that look as if they’re housed in a paperweight.”

“Aha, interesting,” says the man he’s speaking to. “It’s exactly the same with me. Let’s go to your row house straightaway and fuck away the fear.”