Their parents never met, because of his mother’s complete obliviousness to any world, thought or emotion that wasn’t about her, and his father was living in Los Angeles, and, Ever thought at the time, doing fine: painting. No, please don’t go there, don’t punish me with that guilt pain as well…

He was talking to his grey cells, which rarely listened to his instructions, which was why he was trying to occupy half of them with face-tightening creams, and now, lo and behold, the application of a mascara that must have some special quality, but he didn’t know what, he couldn’t hear anything.

Neither of his parents came to the wedding, but Clarissa’s did, committed Liverpudlians both, to Liverpool FC and the city and stony broke, had been all their lives and now lived on their state pensions. With a little help from him and Clarissa after the marriage, gladly given, like for holidays and attempts at improving their flat. Which, bless them, didn’t bother them either way. After years of living where they did, their environment, the quality of it, lost significance in their lives. Clarissa moved into his mews house in Bayswater and started counselling at a residential rehabilitation centre in Hammersmith, Hope4. Their lives couldn’t be more different; he earned a lot more money than her and didn’t help people other than those who had more than enough money anyway; she helped people who were basically fucked.

The mascara, he gathered, was waterproof, so how the hell did you get it off? Cream, his semi-focused brain eventually settled on. Cream. Sure enough, one eye was receiving water, the other removal cream. The wet cloth didn’t make the slightest smudge on her face, but her eyes looked sore, and he wondered how much she was being paid for this.

What he was doing now, not sleeping, had been his problem since he was eight, but it was Clarissa who tried to wean him off the sleeping pills that he took with a recklessness that in her mind classified him as an addict; his mood changes and depression and wall-staring she diagnosed as a chronic sleep disorder, the result of a lifetime, a short one, of pharmaceutical abuse.

It was after the first really bad crash that his doctor put him on his first round of antidepressants. The brain-frame mashers. Prozac. They made everything worse, probably because he carried on with the sleeping pills, refused to quit wine in the evenings, and the more-than-occasional cocktail, and the benders every now and then. He never told his doctor about his intake of substances. Why should he? Hell no, don’t be ridiculous, he wasn’t an alcoholic.