It had been the maraschino cherry. For some reason I wanted to put it on top of my ice cream in the cinema but it had cost ninety-five pence and I didn’t have enough change. It had been the last one and it glared at me out of the confines of its perspex box like a bloodshot eyeball.

‘You’re really asking me to pay you the full ninety-five pence for that thing?’

The man behind the Baskin-Robbins counter was loosely oriental. His English was none too good but he got the gist of my irritation.

‘Yes, please, ninety-five pence,’ he repeated nervously.

‘Come on, how long has it even been in there?’

He shrugged miserably, a sheen of sweat on his jaundiced forehead, and for no good reason I saw red.

Of course it really wasn’t his fault. Someone in Baskin-Robbins Sales and Pricing had sat down at a table with someone in Odeon Cinema Marketing and come up with the price for fruit addendum on top of a double scoop. It wasn’t his fault either that I had finally got to the point where I found myself enraged by small and unimportant things. He couldn’t have known that I was using all these small unimportant things as buffers against the big significant things I hadn’t the courage to put a name to. It was just bad luck his snail’s thread crossed mine on the night when I reached an advanced stage of life fury. The one when if anybody had dared look sideways at me, I would have killed them.

‘The city can do that to you, Duval says. ‘Ten million angry people all with their own grievances and those grievances all with problems and frustrations of their own.’

‘Do you think you could ever live in one again?’

He shakes his head.

‘Say you had to, though, what would it take?’ I lick my fingers greedily.

‘Too much.’ Duval passes me the last of the tortillas.

‘Okay, say you had to, but you could have three wishes,’ I amend. ‘Three things which would make it bearable – what would they be?’

Duval lies on his back and puts his hands behind his head. ‘Let’s see, I suppose ... a woman I couldn’t stay away from, a half-blind dog and maybe a lucrative commission to pen a tome on the shattered heart of America. Oh, and obviously the ability to write it.’

‘That’s four.’

‘So it is.’ Duval nudges Taco fondly with the toe of his boot. ‘Sorry, fella, but all good things must come to an end.’

I laugh.

‘And you?’

‘Live in a city?’

‘In Temerosa.’

‘I’m already here, aren’t I?’ Smoke from the fire rises upwards in fine wisps.