My one friend spent her days on the phone to the refuse collection. There had been a dispute over the bins, no one knew who started it, but the rubbish had not been collected in six weeks and it was not a time for chit-chat, idle or otherwise. I wanted to tell Paula about my discovery, ask her had she noticed anything different about me, but all she did was place her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone and mutter ‘Sorry’. She had married young and was squeamish about all sorts.

I used my mornings to investigate what was wrong with me. I opened several internet tabs, each one containing something possibly wrong, and explored them all. In the afternoons, my boss came and sat at the edge of my desk, like a hip teacher, and tried on being a thoughtful man. He was always trying to sell me things that were allegedly good for me – almond butter, aloe vera juice, himself. His face was stupidly handsome and so symmetrical it made me roll my eyes to the ceiling. He wasn’t perfect though. I noticed he had a hidden aggressive streak and, at times, I suspected he was responsible for the absent bin men. Also, he was not someone I went to for love and affection and he was maybe better dressed than I would have liked. I had a lot of problems with him. He was obsessed with success. I felt I was under constant inspection, and he had a way of looking me up and down like I was a CV full of errors and misspellings. He was older, but it was hard to pin down anything precise. We went to a lot of dimly lit restaurants. Anytime I thought I got a handle on his age, he ordered another bottle of wine and it was gone again. We talked mostly about the office, the flies that we couldn’t get rid of, the people we disliked, how we physically had to wrench ourselves out of bed in the morning. Afterwards we would go back to his and he would attempt one of his two-and-a-half moves. He always fell asleep with both hands on my shoulders like we were in a conga line at a party. Conga, conga, conga. Honestly, I hated him.

At first, I worried about it a lot. The worrying made my food come up and up. I came to resemble my father in the early days of his illness; I was surprised when I caught sight of my concentration-camp legs. ‘How do they support me?’ I wondered. I had no idea but I got high and giddy on the engineering of it. At lunchtime, I ate outside with Paula. The smell of the office forced us into the cold and we sat together shivering over our lunchboxes. Paula’s lunch was made up by her husband and always contained the correct amount of protein and carbohydrates. I can’t describe the empty, whooshing feeling that went through me when I saw those food combinations. When I found the courage, I asked Paula if, at any stage of her life, she felt herself moving closer to the ground? If the chewing-gum stains on the street were any clearer to her than they used to be?