Zaryab appeared, walking in front of him, the most regal of ghosts. His yellow dress caught and shimmered in the moonlight. He stepped out on to the sea, treading its silvery road. His voice floated back with the wind: ‘I often come here, to remember the time when Africa began at the Pyrenees.’

The moon tipped backwards and slid down to the other side of the world.

The sea had become a cauldron of smoking black oil.

The Room in Jessie’s Head

Oh, for Crissakes, Jessie, what have you gone and done this time?

What the hell do I know! One minute Stanley and me are in it together. Catastrophe hits. The next, he’s gone off in a major huff. Had I caused the flood? Was I responsible for Belsen? Did I drop the bomb on Hiroshima? A pettifoggin’ argument – over what?

Was it really over filthy moola, you know, money?

Not all of it. You know what? I’ll tell you why: it’s ’cos like that Evelyn Soames said, I’m a rotten stinking guttersnipe and no one sticks around me for long. When I’m in crisis, the devil suddenly snaps off the Linda Lovelace Porn Special on XTC TV and zooms drunkenly into my orbit on his pitchfork, waving a bottle of gin in one hand, and giving me the finger with the other. And where’s God when I need him? Sitting in front of JC TV with a glass of home-made (reduced sugar) lemonade and watching another rerun of Little House on the Prairie.

Did you fall, Jessie? Come on, be honest now.

You fall in, you fall out.

Not good enough. Try again.

If you don’t label it, you can retract it when you’ve been dumped. Don’t give me that look. Oh, all right, I was swollen with feeling for him, like when we held each other at night. Was like sleeping with Terry before he outgrew Mum’s bed. He was such a good, dear boy. I was beginning to think he’d last the course.

How did you feel after the bust-up?

Put it this way – I felt every man who ever loved and left me had started swinging at my insides. George Foreman’s fists were in there and Muhammad Ali’s, and that Henry Cooper’s too. And no, it wasn’t the Rumble in the Congolese Jungle but the Rumble in Jessie O’Donnell’s Tummy. Oh, forget it. Look, I thought I’d left that all behind. I thought Stanley and I were travelling into our future. But all of a sudden he’s back-pedalled and I’m struggling uphill on one of those children’s scooters what Santa Claus never left for me when I was a kid.

Yeah, as the saying goes, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die.’ In the meantime, what did you do?