The city was bound on this side by a canal, and Bobby’s peregrinations tended to bring him, as now, into intermittent contact with this body of water. He noted the tarry density of its bilious murk, the tidemark of pearlescent scum bearding the ­centuries-­old brickwork as the canal subsided towards the stark quays and the notional sea beyond. Bobby traversed the back lane of a housing estate and detoured through a brushy interval that served as one of the numerous pickup sites scattered across this side of the ­city – with a grin he registered the dangling lobe of a used condom snagged on the branch of a bush like a dismal festive decoration. He stopped at a McDonald’s ­drive-­through, inhaled three ­one-­euro hamburgers, a fries and a Coke, and took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle bathed in the ­purple-­blue glow of ­anti-­injection UV lighting.

In the bathroom mirror Bobby studied himself.

With his cheeks flocked with old acne scars, the sebum gleam of his forehead, his significant but gracefully tapering nose (his favourite feature), inexpiably seedy smile, and untameable squall of dark curls, Bobby, at ­twenty-­nine, resembled a not unhandsome but grotesquely ancient teenager, a physical template he considered not unsuitable for a poet. Adolescence was the stage of human development at which nostalgia (that is, the awareness of mortality) first becomes fatally possible, and was the reft, the fracture, out of which poetry grows. The greatest poets, so Bobby believed, lived and died without losing the furious unreason, ­self-­consuming nerviness and malign naivety of teenagerhood.

He washed his hands with pink chemical soap and resumed his walk.

He wanted to be a poet but suffered from a day job, or at least a source of regular income, that was at this stage a discipline almost as interesting: he was a popular house artist on the ­online-­community site AllFreeekArt, confecting pornographic paintings and animated shorts according to the punctilious specifications of a zealously loyal and steadily expanding client base. He drew Disney princesses, anthropomorphised ponies, superheroes, ­video-­game protagonists and cartoon versions of celebrities in endless combinations of graphic congress. His clients craved every conventional iteration of the erotically depictable, but the medium of animation also permitted the realisation of dimensions, stylisations and acts not available to reality, and Bobby enjoyed the challenge of actualising the more outlandish of the carnal vistas sweated up by his customers. Towards those most recherché of deviants, the real sickos, Bobby felt something close to affection. As he absorbed their anguishedly detailed requests, he realised that the purest perverts longed for their own species of the poetic, for the incarnation of the inconsummatable.