It’s weird, really. I never see any of these men again. I don’t sleep with them all. No. If I manage to get a small memento in the bar I just leave. They could probably find me if they look hard enough. I seem to spend a lot of what I think of as my in-between time in the bar of some Premier Inn or another. In-between because it’s somewhere in the fuzzy boundary. The bit where the worst of my pain resides – the deep visceral pain I feel for my babies. I rely on the rationalisation that they’re not going to tell anyone what really happened, are they? How would they explain that to their wives?

When I turn the key in my front door ten minutes later, I see a white postcard on the mat. There’s a police crest on it and a note that they called around last night. Of course they did. You know me, Jack. And I know you. That would be your next move. You can’t come around here yourself because of the restraining order. So you would call the police. You’d want to make a big deal of it to make me look madder. I’d anticipated this so it doesn’t worry me.

An hour before I must be at work, so I clear up the debris from last night – smashed glasses from my clumsy drunkeness and the empty vodka bottle – and move the briefcase and the holdall to the buried box at the end of our garden, a fire pit that I’d long ago covered up and grassed over the lid; it’s where I keep all my souvenirs. Watches, wallets, before I figured out that a missing wallet was quickly noticed. Much better to delay their guilt and inconvenience as long as possible by making it debatable as to whether they had actually been robbed or just lost or spent everything while they were pissed. All the token items I’d taken from women I thought you were seeing. The perfume. A wheel trim. Yes, it sounds crazy but I was trying to keep my family together.

I pull up a small raised flower bed and remove the piece of soil-covered wood underneath. Of course, I’m fucked if anyone finds this. But really, why would anyone look there? The hole is deep and I’d made a box in it out of some scrap wood left in the shed. A bit damp, but not to worry. It all fits in, and I drop in the remnants of last night’s little foray into my other self.

Everyone’s got a dark side and a light side, haven’t they? Problem with me is when I drink I become someone else. Mild-mannered researcher by day; crazy, hoarding, seeker of revenge by night. Never the twain shall meet. Hopefully.