I left my shared office at the State Library the next day, rode down to meet her in the Queen Vic Gardens, realised I’d seen her before, maybe with Mel. I liked her amber eyes, her wild blue-grey hair, her pre-loved clothes, her athletic body, fuck, she was …

She was Mel’s friend, and I was there to score drugs, nothing more. She gave me the caps, I gave her the money, saw more fingers than I’d … What was …?

‘You’re admiring my extra digit?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘It looks … good.’

She held it up for inspection, and it did look kind of good: an extra two-thirds finger on her left hand, between her wedding-ring finger and pinkie, its knuckle raised higher than the others, its diminutive nail painted in the same eggplant sheen as the others.

‘Does it move independently?’

‘Yeah, kind of.’ She wiggled it, laughed – it seemed to need the pinkie’s help to get it going.

‘That’s really cool.’ I stuffed the bag of caps into my pocket. ‘Look, I really appreciate this – especially cos it’s Sarah’s fortieth. We’re going dancing, if you want to come … Mel’s coming …’

Raised eyebrows. ‘Oh right, yeah. I’m supposed to be going out with some friends, but I could maybe text you guys afterwards to see where you are?’

‘Yeah, do that. It’d be good to see you.’

I rode back towards the library with the drugs, not fancying Biddy because I didn’t fancy anyone because I was a spoken-for man in the middle of his best-case-scenario life cycle, with two kids and a wife who told him what she’d been doing with another man with whom she might fall in love, precipitating the end of her marriage or somehow – the mechanics were still a bit vague – making it stronger.

I strode through the library entrance, shoulders back, feeling happy and light and … no. My life was shit, my prospects laughable – not that I laughed about them, because they were shit, and even though that was only my perspective, or – as Sarah would put it – my ‘pain body’ manifesting, I was powerless to fight the impression that she was now happy while I was professionally, spiritually and sexually shit. I slumped into the lift, got out on the fifth floor, trudged into the marketing office, said hi to my colleague Agnë, sat at my dickhead desk, shook the moribund mouse to wake the munter monitor.

Clacking was the thing. It didn’t matter what you were doing. Clack away, clack away. And occasionally stretch, stand, go to the bathroom, wander into one of the reading rooms, sit down, leaf through some pages, an autumn leaf. Oh, it could charge you up, the reading, or plunge you into abject gloom.

And then back onto my feet, back into the office, a quick hello, a nod and a smile to Agnë. And clack and clack and –