Ever felt rather inadequate as stories of fitness and endurance and Rigo’s regular training regime were discussed; although enjoying the tobacco even without marijuana, he wanted the time on his own and brought the conversation to a polite conclusion at the first I’ve-listened-enough-this-is-a-polite-moment-to-leave moment. Which coincided with the finished cigarette going to ground to be crushed underfoot.

Rigo looked at him, hard, he had most certainly broken a rule, and he bent down and picked up the butt just as one of the staff came forward with a dustpan and brush contraption, both with long handles that negated the need for bending; the remaining ash was swept up and the dustpan offered as a receptacle for Ever’s crunched cigarette. No class, thought Ever, he had no class. He wandered back to his own shiny black mass and transferred his guilt from father to wife. The tennis game of guilt.

He sat in the car with the door open to receive the night air, he was sure running the engine would also be a rule broken, and plugged his ears to listen to Lana.

If there was a person to go back into one’s life with a burden of doubt it was Lana Del Rey.

He had graduated from Sussex University in economics; then did a year at law school in London; and was now working at a hedge fund company at their legal offices which were in Chandos Street, just by the Langham Hotel where he often went in for a cocktail after a day at work. Work that he was finding increasingly unrewarding. He had a good income and after two years had been able to purchase a mews house in Bayswater, London W2.

Although politically opposed, the physical attraction was there and it was not long before items of Clarissa’s were spending more time in Ever’s mews house than they did in Oxford Gardens, which she was still sharing with Amy.

Along with the chronic sleep disorder diagnosis, she had started to explore, much to his annoyance, the confusion of his body ownership, mainly because Ever had always put forward the alien theory: that he was an alien. She explored the possibility, he always assumed in a sense of joking, that if an anterior portion of his temporal lobes had been removed as a treatment for his early onset epilepsy, a petit mal, that had been associated with developing adolescence, this could then explain his mental state, his alien, outside feeling. His own personal depersonalisation-derealisation syndrome. But he hadn’t had the invasive procedure of a temporal lobectomy; at least he didn’t think he had; at least he hoped he hadn’t; but he supposed if he had then it was possible that the ownership and control of his body was not his own. That would have been a result.