IT IS POWERFUL.

IT IS CUNNING.

IT *gasp!* HATES YOU.

Beware!

Oh balls. Oh balls, Charles thinks. If only I could get to grips with the course, watch it from start to finish (YES! The Holy Grail!) instead of just dipping in and dipping out. If only I could muster a sense of … of order, of connectedness, of coherence. If only I could marshal my wayward spirit. Then – only then – might I finally be able to come to grips with the malign influence the Toxic Super-Ego is exerting on my every waking thought and feeling and breath and impulse.

Charles feels so … so disparate.

Desperate?

No.

Disparate.

‘I suppose the important detail here is that he – or she – didn’t actually break in,’ Avigail murmurs, ‘she just tried. She tried but she failed.’

Avigail looks at Charles. Charles is holding a popcorn maker (retailing at £14.95 excl. p&p) which is still boxed and which he is trying to give to the prospective purchaser, a ferocious-seeming Chinese woman called Wang Shu who seems to speak no English. Wang Shu is barely through the front door. Wang Shu’s interpreter is her dumpy daughter who has her right arm encased – wrist to elbow – in slightly grimy gauze. The daughter is called Ying Yue. Ying Yue has emphatically assured Avigail (on Wang Shu’s behalf – and insofar as Ying Yue can be emphatic, which isn’t very far) that Wang Shu will not be put off by the sheer amount of stuff clogging up Charles’s small property, because the property number just happens to be 8, which is highly propitious in Chinese culture.

Charles lives in the centre of Llandudno in a curious house which has no real, independent character and seems more like the back end of a giant office space (a dark corner for designated parking, drains and growling air-conditioning filters) or possibly even the unkempt kitchens of a large but seedy hotel. There is no front. It is all rear. Small windows. It’s on a grimy side street close to the seafront. There is no garden. There is hardly any pavement. He inherited the property from his mother. His mother (Branimira) had worked for thirty years as a veterinary nurse in Conwy – after arriving in Wales from her native Bulgaria in 1964 – even though she was always allergic to both hair and fur.

Hair and fur.

(In fact hair and fur aren’t actually, qualitatively different, they’re just alternate words for the same kerotin-based substance. It’s the proteins – Can f 1 and Fel d 1 – which are released in the dog’s saliva and the cat’s saliva/skin that provoke allergic responses.)

Charles’s mother was not a home-body or a consumerist. Charles’s mother was made of sterner stuff. Charles’s mother lived at a high altitude – a lofty attitude. Charles’s mother lived a life of the spirit.

Charles’s mother LOVED TO GIVE.

Without inhibition.

But not to Charles. No. No. No. Not to Charles.