In a very short time he had figured out how to turn it on; everybody’s television seemed to have a different process, but this was simple, as the power button illuminated itself when the remote was moved from its resting place, he pressed it and that seemed to produce an almost immediate picture, but no sound, which he didn’t want anyway; it revealed itself to be a shopping channel.

Had the previous occupant really watched a shopping channel?

A shopping channel, the perfect visual delight for the brain that can take nothing in, although that is exactly what they wanted you to do. Take it all in. A woman was massaging another woman’s neck with a cream, obviously claiming it worked tightening wonders, and he watched expecting the miracle to happen as his dream came back to him in the form of waking reality. Clarissa and Jacob, the son wasn’t his, playing around in his mind like the nightmare of hearing a stupid song that you can’t clear from whichever part of your brain is insisting on keeping it going and going, till you have to try really hard to think of another annoying song to replace it with, and then the two songs compete. One jealous of the other’s dominance. Or was that just his brain? For Ever it was usually Kate Bush and ‘Wuthering Heights’. As a kid he remembered his mother playing it on repeat. Or was it Withering? He moved off the subject quickly, in case his brain put the disc on the turntable. Oh God, he could hear her, wailing. Focus on the television. There was a woman presenting a large jar of cream to the camera with the price on the left-hand side of the screen dropping every thirty or so seconds. Would they eventually give it away? The Jacob dream had started to have same repetitiveness as the pale blue swollen hand and to be honest he would rather have that waking, sleeping nightmare.

*

Clarissa he had met while swimming.

And he saw her every Saturday for weeks at the Porchester baths before they actually spoke, which wasn’t at the baths, but around the corner at Planet Organic, squeezing avocados, and he realised she was there, next to him, also testing the avocados for ripeness. So they spoke, unsurprisingly, about avocados, then they decided to sit there and have a coffee; then that progressed. The following week they had lunch and then he recalled their first official date.