It was a strange thing, consciousness. He’d used the excuse before at uni – I was so drunk, sorry mate, I can’t remember. To get out of bad behaviour, spilling someone’s pint or staggering off home without them from Park End or groping a girl on the dance floor. Sorry, sorry, I can’t remember, all a blur, must have blacked out. Back then, it hadn’t been true. He’d never truly blacked out, the kind where you’re walking around and talking and doing things but there’s just a big black hole in your memory. These days, now he kept a vodka bottle in his glove box and one in his desk drawer and went to a bar for a whisky chaser every day before heading home, he’d learned the true meaning of that word. Blackout. And who could blame him if he needed something, when he was going home to Jodi, standing at the top of the stairs with her dressing gown done up all the way to the neck? Wrinkling her nose at him. You stink of booze. She could smell everything now she was finally, at ruinous expense, pregnant. Other things had changed too. When he reached for her, made sad and squishy by the booze, sad enough to wish they could bridge the space between them somehow, she turned away in bed. I don’t want to hurt the baby. I can’t bear the stink. I’m too tired. Reminding him, in a million subtle ways every day, that she was pregnant with another man’s child.

Callum thought about the man a lot. He was German, that was all they knew. German and thirty-eight. Callum imagined someone tall and blond with amazing abs. He pictured him like he’d always pictured Bill, stripped to the waist hewing wood in a pine forest. Jodi had always liked Bill a bit too much. All the girls did. He’s so sweet. He really listens. Easy to listen when you had nothing to say, no jokes, no banter. A man like this would be the father of his child. Callum would dandle a huge German baby, who’d grow up taller than him. He could picture the graduation photos, the strapping blond boy and his dark, five foot seven father. People would laugh. People would know he was not the dad. That he wasn’t man enough to get his own wife up the duff. When the kid was eighteen he’d maybe be allowed to track the man down, his real father. While Callum would have spent years paying for him and changing his shitty nappies and picking him up from discos pissed. It wasn’t right.