Throughout my teens and into my twenties I found it an extremely satisfying way to pass the time: chipping away at each thin keratin sheet with the thumb from the opposite hand, crunching up the fibres to produce sharp corners, like spoiled tin cans, that I could then pinch and peel back – Ziploc style – and tear away from the soft, white, crinkly nail bed.

The resultant shards, these pale and spiky crescents, would litter the floor by my bed and gather down the side of sofa cushions, with me able to identify at a glance which finger they’d been pulled from – the dimensions of each half-moon distinct to the width of each digit.

The thumb was my favourite; the thickest, and therefore the most rewarding.

Now the other side of thirty, I am trying to do better, but for the longest time the finger picking would drive Kay mad.

While I had the good grace to stick to my designated picking zones, namely my desk or my side of the bed, all it would take is a breeze, one oscillation of the room fan, to disturb a neat little pile of trimmings and scatter them like autumn leaves. These little shards had an unfortunate tendency to then snag onto socks and be traipsed around the rest of the house, leaving nail peel that started out on my bedside table getting caught on the hallway carpet or living room rug.

“I feel like I’ve just taken the Christmas tree down,” Kay said to me once as she went round with the vacuum. “They’re like pine needles, these things, they get everywhere.”

Though I know this sounds pretty grim, I think what actually bothered her most wasn’t that she had to wear sandals indoors, for fear of treading on rogue talons, but was the apparent nervousness of the man she lived with. Sometimes she’d ask me how work was, or whether I’d heard from my parents and if they were ok, and I knew that she’d spotted a fingernail somewhere in the house. And then on occasion she’d just come straight to the source and check my hands for herself, taking me softly by the wrist and unfurling each knuckle for inspection. On seeing the fresh shiny tips, the wetly pink lines where I’d peeled the cuticle away from the stem like thin strips of old wallpaper, she’d smile sadly and murmur ‘Oh, my love’.

And then she’d go round again with the hoover, which makes a far less sympathetic sound.

In truth, I find I’m becoming more nervous the older I get.

Little everyday things that never bothered me before – making an appointment, sorting a return, filling out a form, driving somewhere new – have for some time now taken on a significance that exceeds the mundane, and the imperative I feel to complete these tasks can turn even the smallest errand into a feeling of great pressure.

Some of this started when I lived in Berlin, where failure had to be navigated in a second language, upping the stakes, and making day-to-day interactions feel threatening and uneasy.

Entschuldigung. Keine ahnung.

I’m sorry. I have no idea.

In the supermarket, when paying with cash I’d become convinced that I didn’t have enough with me, rounding up the price of every item as I shopped then adding up the inflated figures as I loaded the conveyor belt, just to make sure. This was maybe reasonable enough in my first few months when I was costing to the nearest Euro, but after the first year I found that I was mentally doubling and tripling the price of groceries just to play it safe, walking the aisles at Kaufland with wodges of money in my pocket that I didn’t need.

‘If these four peppers cost more than €20 then I’m in trouble.’

So, the finger picking was no longer simply recreational, but something I’d try to reserve for my more anxious moments; something distracting and familiar that I could rely on to bring me some temporary calm.

Something not always understood by other people.

I remember once, ahead of a job interview, standing in a sparkling lobby to greet the hiring manager, and seeing his eyes drop to my feet and the calcium confetti that surrounded me – the party-popper debris of my crumbling self, dusting his clean tiles. Later, in a small meeting room with one window and soft blue chairs, I said to him when questioned that I felt I thrived under pressure, taking care to fold my pink, bleeding stumps into my palms.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the position, but he was kind enough to shake my hand gently before showing me the door.

But whatever, it’s never been one for me, confidence.

Seeming confident.

Aside from an almost pathological need to not inconvenience people, I find I have a tremendous preoccupation with not wanting to appear at all certain, about anything.

I mistrust it.

It makes me think of that bit in Star Wars: Certainty leads to confidence; confidence leads to arrogance; arrogance leads to contempt; contempt leads to hate; and before you know it you’re a member of the Conservative Party and a fucking tosser to boot.

That’s not me, and I make sure of it.

In speech, whether consciously or not, I start most of my sentences with ‘Ummm’, as if I’m struggling to think in real time – so I seem less assured about the thing that I already know that I know, whether it’s a fact or my opinion.

What did you have for dinner last night?

Would banning Amazon from operating in the UK be good for society?

Have you been watching House of the Dragon?

Was it Mikhail Gorbachev that implemented glasnost in the 1980s?

‘Ummm’

Even though it’s often the case that my reply is already fully formed in my head, I find myself pausing, as if in mock deliberation, just in case there’s a chance I’m taken seriously.

Recently, in an effort to be more grown up, I’ve started picking my nose instead.

While somewhat cartoonish, and certainly more revolting in a conventional sense, the main problem with nose picking is that snot runs out very quickly, and usually at the point at which things are at their most interesting. It’s unavoidable, I suppose; you have ten nails to go at – twenty if you count your toes (which I do) – but just the two nostrils. And yet they remain the source of a tremendous amount of pleasure.

It’s a joy you see most freely in children.

What they lack in technique they make up for with enthusiasm, going at it with a rigid finger, where adults know that the most effective action is that of a curling, almost hooking motion, like scrolling the wheel on a computer mouse or going after the prostate.

Another orifice worthy of exploration.

They wear it on their face, the satisfaction and glee that is to be had, rummaging around these unfamiliar parts of themselves and producing stuff that didn’t appear to exist before. They raise a hand as if to say, ‘Look, I made this’, and then quite often they bestow it on you, and you thank them and think them lovely.

Whereas an adult picking their nose will only ever appear to be a moron.

Simple.

Though I don’t know why, there’s really nothing like it.

Picking my nails always felt like I was damaging myself, breaking a part of me away from the whole, whereas bogeys feel more like something I’m creating. Some great, vast and rounded with fraying edges, like Russia or China, while others are stringy and less generous, like Italy or Peru.

A United Nations of snot.

There’s such pleasure to be had in plucking at a dried strand of mucus, only to find that it brings with it a fresh, wet, globular milky bead that, when free, helps to lubricate the rolling of a nice small ball. Or the gentle battle when teasing one away that clings to a nose hair, that you must surely take with it. Or the ones that tickle as you peel them away from your nasal wall, or that you need to leverage with your thumb against your septum.

Blissful, and yet in modest supply.

“You should’ve called him more often,” I grumbled, lifting rows of paperbacks off our shelves by the dozen, applying enough pressure to the first and last books to keep them suspended between my hands like an accordion before carefully lowering them into packing boxes. “By the way, I’ve got these alphabetised by author if you’re looking for a way to sort them.”

“I’m not,” she said, putting something by a J on top of something by an R then closing the cardboard lid and quickly wrapping the box in twenty yards of shrieking industrial tape.

Moving back to the UK meant living with our parents again, and with Kay’s family home only a five-minute drive from my dad’s place the arrangement was simple enough to start with; she’d be there, and I’d be here.

After the last couple of years shopping in German supermarkets, with no ready meals or Robinsons squash, I felt I’d really landed on my feet. Every evening dad and I would settle on the living room sofa with plastic containers of lasagne, tikka masala or crispy chilli beef and we’d watch Traffic Cops or Road Wars or Police Interceptors, or any other show that involved ‘scum getting what was coming to them’, as he put it.

The boys really were back in town.

We quickly settled into a routine, with my readying dinner in the microwave giving him twelve minutes to find an episode we hadn’t seen. And yet such was his passion for justice that he’d often shout me before the machine had even pinged the end of its first cycle; I could be standing at the kitchen counter still piercing sheets of taut plastic film with a fork when I’d hear him laugh loudly and bark my name with real urgency from down the hall.

“Alex! Come here, quickly. Quick!”

Poking my head round the door, the picture on the telly was usually the same: A black Golf GTI or white Audi A3 parked upside down on its roof in the middle of a field beside two men in dark tracksuits lay with their faces in the grass and their hands cuffed behind their heads.

“Look,” dad would say, beaming. “Vermin!”

Of all the cop shows on TV, Police Interceptors was our favourite. Each episode began with profiles of the officers on duty, and so it wasn’t long until we were on first-name terms with half of Cheshire Constabulary. Our favourite was Paul, a 6’4” bloke from Yorkshire whose dream car was a Ferrari and whose favourite food was chips. I liked him because he had a dry sense of humour and wasn’t afraid to put his foot down, whereas my dad liked him because he had a temper and seemed to hate criminals as passionately as he did.

“Paul knows the score,” he’d say proudly whenever Paul slammed someone up against a car door or twisted their arm behind their back. “I bet he loves giving them a few digs back at the station.”

“I don’t think he’ll do that,” I’d say.

“Well, I would.”

While the car chases were undeniably entertaining, with the green Cheshire hills and hedgerows blurring by as sirens howled and the airwave radio blared, what really got dad’s adrenaline going was the closing credits, when over a slow-motion montage of arrests made the narrator would announce the punishment or sentence that had been handed down – which was often significantly less than he felt was deserved.

The driver of the stolen Mercedes was banned from driving and received a six-month suspended sentence.

“I’d have given him life in prison.”

It soon became clear to me that in James McBride’s Britain, the jails would be overflowing with first-time offenders and people guilty of minor petty crime; indeed it sometimes seemed that there was no real correlation between the severity of the offence and the consequences he felt were deserved.

“Do you not think the death penalty is a bit steep for driving without insurance?” I asked him after he exploded during an episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody.

“They wouldn’t do it again would they?”

“Well, they’d be dead.” I reminded him.

It wasn’t that the crimes that bothered him most were insignificant, but I’d say they were closer to being a sign of a deficiency of character – of selfishness, of a lack of consideration, of recklessness – than they were pure evil.

Before too long, this militant sense of right and wrong spilled into our daily lives, when on short journeys to the supermarket or to see family he’d adjudicate on any infringements of the law, or displays of bad manners, as they appeared.

“They should get five years for that!” he howled once after someone failed to give way to him at a junction.

Soon after came text messages that preceded his commute home from the office: ‘Bad RTC at Sharston Roundabout. I’ll be home soon, going to go Code 2’

On Googling ‘Police speak Code 2’ I learned that this was ‘an urgent but non-emergency response, not requiring the use of a siren’, so was pleased to see that he was at least keeping some perspective.

Things did finally escalate though when, during a Sunday walk round Lyme Park, he announced that he’d been thinking of buying a second car.

“If I just got like a £500 banger, I could drive it round on weekends and start smashing into people.”

I stopped by the lake.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, the other day on the ‘56 some bloke in a Range Rover pulled in front of me without indicating and the whole way home I thought about how great it would’ve been to just drive into the back of him.”

“Seriously?”

“Honestly I’ve thought about little else.”

That night when I text Kay to let her know that I thought my dad was going mad, she was less than understanding.

‘But you’re like that!’

‘Ha, I’m not like that’

‘You are you always get angry at people for no reason’

‘I don’t’

‘You do’ she insisted. ‘Literally last week at Tesco that couple didn’t take their trolley back and you had a go at them’

‘Well that wasn’t for no reason was it’

‘Hahaha’

‘I just said you’re supposed to put it back’

‘No you told them they were a pair of cunts’

Locking my phone and putting it back on the arm of the sofa I cut into my tray of spinach and ricotta cannelloni and turned to my dad.

“What do you think about people who don’t take their trolleys back at the shops?”

“Subhuman scum.”

“I never knew my parents,” she’d say. “And you kids won’t ever know yours – that’s just the way of things.”

At the time I was yet to meet my dad, and didn’t even know his name, so I had no reason to doubt her.

Back then there were eleven of us in the flat – mum, my nine siblings and me – though it didn’t take long until we were less than half that number, and after my first five weeks of living I had only one brother and two sisters left.

“The Spanner must’ve told the girls at the bar about the birth,” mum said when another visitor – a blonde woman who smelled like burnt paper – walked out of the door with yet another member of the family. “It’ll just be me and you left if one of them doesn’t sleep with him soon.”

It was true that The Spanner didn’t really have any other visitors except the ladies who came to take my siblings home with them. It was just him and the voices from the light box, which he did sometimes speak to but didn’t seem to need him in quite the same way, often carrying on one long conversation without him.

When finally it was just me and mum he began to let us out of our room in the day, which stayed exciting until I left. She was glad to have free run of the flat again, while I was happy to see where she’d lived before, and what her life had been like. Her go-to spot was the big square squash where The Spanner slept, but it was only when he was out that we could curl up on that. The rest of the time I sat on the shiny windowsill, which in the mornings was warm from the hot metal bars attached to the wall below, but quickly became cold and damp, misting up the window to hide the grey-sometimes-blue that was all we could see outside.

And then at night, no matter how comfy, we were scooped up and returned to our closet, with its cardboard towers and the smoky sleeves that hung above our heads, slack and un-full. It was not a nice place to be, but mum said that it was better than the down below – which was where she came from, before The Spanner brought her up here.

I don’t like him one bit, but she loves him, I think.

It’s hard to tell.

My mum is called Carol, after one of The Spanner’s friends from the light box. She’s the one he talks to most of all when she’s there, shouting over her, arguing with her, yelling ‘Doo doo da doo, doooooo’; it’s like they don’t really get along, but still he spends time with her most days.

I don’t have a name yet, which after two months of life had become a bit of an embarrassment, and something of a sticking point between mum and me.

“Why can’t you name me?” I’d ask her often, but apparently that wasn’t the way of things.

“We don’t get to choose,” she’d say, licking my head.

I’d suggest that maybe I be called the same as dad, and she’d snort and try to end the conversation, but there was one night when I wouldn’t let her.

“I didn’t actually know him,” she finally snapped at me. “It was just a one-time thing – he was from the inside, and I’d only ever been outside so, we didn’t have a lot of time together. A one-time thing.”

That night I learned more about mum and myself and the world than I’d known before.

“So, did you not know his name?” I asked from up on my perch, settled on one of the collapsed boxes in the closet.

“Yes,” she huffed. “I knew his name.”

“Well,” I pleaded. “What was it?”

“Biggles.”

“Biggles?”

“That’s right. Mister Biggles…”

“Mister Biggles?” I yowled. “What kind of a name is that?”

“Look, it was the 90s, okay!” she replied defensively. “Aviation was, y’know, still a pretty big deal at the time…after all we were pre-9/11, and…”

“What’s 9/11?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Like I said, we don’t have names till we’re given them, and Mister Biggles – your dad – was proud to have one.

“Hm.”

“It was more than I had back then. He lived behind these tall walls that I never saw behind; I think like what we’re maybe in now, but smaller. And I used to sometimes sit outside, and the person that lived there with him used to keep the green grass short and so it was easy to poo on, and they used to hose it away after for me and sing about it and call to me so, I used to always try to go back there when I could and use the same spot. And one day I saw your dad looking at me from the window, and a couple of days later, when the person with the water pipe was shouting at me, he came out and ran over to me, and we ran off.”

“Ran off together,” I purred. “That’s kinda’ cute.”

“Yeah,” she smiled. “I guess it was cute. We went around a shed and over a wall and sat behind some bins, and he was all funny about the dirt so I made sure I got some on him, and he did this thing with my nose – booped it – that he said he learned inside and I liked that.”

“The boop?”

“The boop, and that he knew things like that. He knew a lot that I didn’t know, and I knew a lot that he didn’t know, so I showed him my places and we chased a squirrel and the next day…”

“I thought you said it was a one-time thing,” I interrupted, and she smiled.

“Well, it was only one time. But we were together for a while, then one day we saw his face, lots of it, floating up in the air on poles and posts all around. He was really scared, I remember him saying, ‘Fucking hell, that looks like me that does,’ and I knew that was the end.”

“What was it?”

“The water sprayer with the grass from behind the big wall wanted Mister Biggles to go back to them, so they put up these squares with his face on so that he couldn’t stay outside anymore. With those up, many would be looking for him – and not just them, but foxes too, so…”

“I thought you said foxes weren’t real?”

“Everything’s real,” she murmured.

“So, he went back?” I asked, shaken. “Was he okay?”

“We went back together,” she said, jumping to join me on my box. “And they smiled to see him but didn’t want me, and he started to spit and I started to run, and then I just know that The Spanner lifted me up from the road and brought me to this closet…where I had you and your brothers and sisters.”

“And so here we are.”

“Here we are, yes.”

“Mum?”

“Yes?”

“I think 9/11 sounds like a pretty cool name…”

“No,” she said. “No, absolutely not.”

“Sure,” I replied. “Do you know when?”

“Yeah, the tracker says any time between 8am and 8pm…”

“But that’s the whole day!” I protested, looking up from my phone.

“Well,” she said, looking down at her phone. “The only other time for drop off was six in the morning, and I know that you’ll still be asleep then…”

“You’re right,” I said. “Thanks for thinking of me.”

Come the weekend, 19:45 and I’m sat in the living room watching for any sign of a van, thinking about how rich and full my day might have been if only I’d left the house. Truth was I didn’t have plans, and I don’t really like doing anything anyway, but even just the potential to do something is nice.

Can make a difference.

As it was, I’d done close to nothing, save for the few jobs that one does when left alone on a Saturday: jerk off, hoover the stairs, etcetera. I’d also spent about eight hours imagining what I might order from the Indian, but had committed to not pulling the trigger until after Kay’s parcel had been dropped off and I knew the evening was my own. These kind of day-long takeaway deliberations are I think a form of edging – a denial of gratification that allows you to prolong and intensify the pleasure of ordering dinner; while not necessarily masturbatory or pornographic in nature, there’s definitely something about the experience of scrolling through Just Eat, staring at the different categories and flirting with the more exotic options before landing on something comforting and familiar, and then making yourself wait, and wait, and wait for it.

Until you can’t.

So it was that I’d been thinking about sundries since midday and was on the brink, the sensation of peeling pristine cardboard lids from the grooved folds of foil trays already tickling my fingertips, the feeling of that sloppy, feverish, kitchen-counter mouthful that precedes plating up already pulling the corners of my mouth apart.

God, I love a Saturday tea.

It was 20:45 and I was starving hungry when finally the letters DHL filled the front window, wiping noiselessly into view like a PowerPoint slide.

“Fucking polo shirt wearing van driving cunt,” I muttered to myself as I walked to the door and opened it.

“Hello, mate!” I said brightly.

I’d been expecting the usual black and white ASOS pillowcase, and so was surprised to be handed a cardboard box with no labels or markings.

“Can you sign this?” the polo shirt wearing van driving cunt mumbled, waving a small bright screen in my face and then holding it too far out of reach for me to reasonably scribble on.

It felt like a challenge.

“Anywhere is fine…” he continued, now waving the device around, unable to keep the thing still for more than a moment as my raised index finger followed it around like a child pointing at fish in a pond.

Finally I lunged for it and left a faint squiggle that at least looked like it began with an ‘A’.

“First time,” I said proudly, and the man huffed as he left, seemingly disappointed.

Back inside I turned the mysterious box over in my hands a couple of times before leaving it on the side and reaching for my phone to order dinner; unable to deny myself any longer, finally I clicked the orange ‘Order’ button, my mind ablur with the image of future me hunched greedily over the white carrier and brown paper bag and its contents; the sweet grit of Peshwari naan on my tongue as it roves around my mouth searching for grains of pilau rice, tangy bright red sauce dripping down my chin with the afterburn of hot claggy chips in my throat.

Oh, you little slut! I thought to myself, grinning and heading back to the living room window to wait patiently with my hands on my knees.

“What’s this?” I asked Kay the next day, waving the nondescript package at her the moment she walked through the door.

“Oh good, it’s here!” she replied, looking pleased. “That’s my new defrosting plate.”

I scowled down the hallway, not quite sure that I’d heard correctly.

“It’s a what?”

“A defrosting plate, for defrosting things on,” she said, her smile fading as she spelt it out slowly for me. “A de-fro-sting plate.”

I lowered the arm that was holding the parcel to stop myself from throwing it at her.

“But you don’t ever defrost anything,” I said, handing it over. “You barely even cook. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never defrosted a thing. Not once.”

“Well no,” she said. “But now I can.”

A couple of weeks later I was working from home when there was a loud and continued banging on the front door.

“Can you sign this?”

It was the same bloke, holding a similar parcel but an even smaller device which he waved around more erratically than before.

It took me four attempts to leave a passable signature, and he walked back to his van with the same smile of satisfaction I’d worn a fortnight previously.

One-all.

On closer inspection this box was smaller than the first, but despite rattling loudly when I shook it I could gather no further clues, so went back to my meeting with nothing else on my mind until Kay came back from the office.

“Who signed for my parcel?” she started. “I got an email confirmation of delivery and it looks like Guy Fawkes signature after they tortured him.”

“I’ve got something going on with the delivery driver,” I muttered. “But never mind that. What’s in this one, magic beans?

“No,” she said, curtly. “It’s called LiLash actually. All I need to do with this is put a few drops on my eyelashes before bed, and it’ll make them grow longer overnight!”

This time I did throw the box at her, but only underarm.

That next weekend and there was another untimely knock on the door, this time on a Sunday night, and my patience snapped.

“Can you sign?”

This time the bloke handed me a lit sparkler and I scrawled my name out in mid-air for him, all too willing to call it a draw.

Barely back inside the house and I retreated to the living room, tearing into the packaging until little plastic parcels striped with foreign print scattered themselves all over the rug, revealing tiny pairs of translucent socks with pictures of cats and pandas on them.

“What in god’s name are these?” I exclaimed.

“Erm, Baby Feet,” said Kay, barely glancing up from the sofa. She sounded weary and exasperated, as if affronted by how ignorant and unfashionable I was for not knowing that for myself.

“You wear them,” she continued, “and after like ten minutes all the skin on your feet peels off.”

I left the room and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the evening.

I began to consider spending more time in the office midweek, and making weekend plans of my own, to avoid the trickle of Taiwanese rubbish that had gradually begun to flood the house. After finding a long read in the Independent about the rise of the ‘TikTok shop’ I’d realised what was happening; in much the same way that Facebook had polluted the minds of the over-sixties, we under-thirties were being sold bright ideas that claimed to make our lives easier, offering solutions where there were no real challenges.

Just lots and lots of plastic, with a zero returns policy.

But my not being home didn’t help things; didn’t stop these objects from turning up, being unboxed and dropped into our lives – to change and to improve them. My absence just meant that I missed the knock at the door announcing their arrival, and left me even more perplexed when stumbling across them in my day.

One evening, when washing the dishes, I came across a green, gelatinous dome made from silicone, resting on top of a dirty plate. I dropped it into the water and watched it float around the basin for a while before Kay came into the kitchen.

“What’s this?”

“Well, what do you think it is?” she asked me, smiling encouragingly.

I pondered the object before me, prodding it beneath the murky dishwater and watching it rise to the surface.

“I thought it might be one of those moon cup things,” I said.

“Look at the fucking size of it,” she replied. “And it’s bright green.”

“Well I don’t know what they look like do I? I’ve only ever read about them in the Guardian. And I have no idea what this is either.”

She sighed.

“This,” she said proudly, plucking it out of the water and holding it out on the flat of her upturned palm. “This is an Egg Cup.”

“Oh, it is, is it?”

“Yes,” she continued. “Yes it is. All I need to do with this is to crack an egg into it, drop it into a pan of boiling water, and then it will poach it for me.”

I blinked at her for a moment longer, waiting to see if any further information was forthcoming, but it was not.

“But that is what happens when you crack an egg into boiling water,” I started. “That’s literally the only thing that possibly can happen.”

“Well not when I do it,” she replied bitterly. “It always just falls apart.”

Now, while it is true that the Egg Cups do help the egg to maintain its shape in the water, what they absolutely don’t do is let Kay know when her egg has been sufficiently poached. And so I’ve spent many a morning since that particular purchase scrubbing rubbery slithers of over-cooked egg out of these things, like I’m working in an underfunded sexual health clinic rinsing out used condoms for reuse.

Or that’s what I thought was happening.

Is what the evidence seemed to suggest.

Most nights, shortly after ten o’clock, the edges of my curtains would glow with a celestial light, illuminating the bunk bed where I lay and casting angular shadows around my four walls. It’d last for no more than a few minutes, and then everything would go dark again.

My bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking a long garden and driveway that led to a double garage that my parents never parked in, but that my dad used to store old tools and pieces of wood, as well as a number of broken deckchairs, a Flymo, and an old punching bag that he’d pound on whenever he grew tired of trying to assemble the deckchairs; it wasn’t unheard of for him to step out the backdoor on summer weekends, wanting only an hour’s doze in the sun, to later be found pacing the garage, shiny with sweat and balling up red-gloved fists like a Victorian boxer, talking trash to a pile of metal tubing and floral cushions that had again reduced him to madness.

“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” he’d pant, thudding punches into the cracked leather cylinder that hung from the ceiling while kicking pieces of chair across the floor. Then during the course of the beating he’d often lose focus, reciting the names of our local MP, city councillors and people from the tele that he didn’t like, punctuating each with a short sharp hook to the bag before eventually walking back to the house, shadow boxing his way across the lawn.

“Don’t disturb your dad while he’s sunbathing,” mum would caution us.

The garage itself backed onto a row of neighbours’ gardens from the street behind our own, meaning that there were no streetlamps in view of my room, and no way that a car’s headlights could reach the house.

When I first went to my parents and told them that I was getting scared at night because angels were coming to my window, my mum took my temperature and my dad worried that I might be an idiot.

“He’s fine,” she said, satisfied, removing her hand from my forehead.

“I’m not so sure,” he replied, eying me fretfully.

The next night, when the window lit up again, I fled to the living room to summon potential witnesses. And although my dad was unwilling to move, and seemed keen to stick to his earlier diagnosis of suspected idiocy, my mum was already out of her seat and agreed to follow me up the stairs to clear things up for herself.

“You shouldn’t encourage him,” my dad called from somewhere behind us, as I thundered away with her in tow.

“Look,” I cried, throwing open the door and gesturing wildly into the darkness.

The room was pitch black.

Tucking me up in bed, she took my temperature a final time and said goodnight, lingering in the doorway as a short silhouette that shrugged before walking away.

I was furious.

I knew that if I was to be believed I’d have to build up a strong case against these ethereal bastards, and so the next evening before bed I took my dad’s alarm clock from his bedside table. It was a small, oblong unit with petrol station numbers on an LED screen, illuminated by a turquoise light that would glow whenever a long button of the same colour was pressed, allowing me to read the time from under the covers. Later, pressing down every five seconds to keep the screen lit, I watched as the minutes either side of 22:00 passed by, until sure enough, at 22:07, through a gap between the duvet and the mattress I saw the same white glow bordering the big window, and scrambled to hide the light of the clock against my chest so as not to give myself away.

Gotcha, I thought.

For an entire week I carried on in the same way, recording the times for each apparition in the back of my school journal: Monday, 22:11; Tuesday, 22:06; Wednesday, 22:15; Thursday, 22:04; Friday, 22:12. Though I’d set out to catalogue data for an entire month, during that initial period of observation my dad was late for work every morning, five days out of five, and so with some reluctance I was forced to abandon my register and return the alarm clock to him.

At that point in our lives, bedtime for my sister and I wasn’t determined by anything so woolly and constant as time, but by the more regimented and reliable TV schedule. Or at least this was certainly the case during the school week, when goodnight for Hannah coincided with the watershed, while as the elder sibling I received a two-ad-break grace period out of respect for my seniority. Either way, come nine o’clock and the escalating, synth-pop tone of the opening theme for The Bill was a signal to us both that ‘lights out’ was fast approaching – and that, like the programme’s many nameless arsonists, muggers and car thieves, our remaining time at liberty was limited.

Originally recorded as the song ‘Overkill’ by Andy Pask and Charlie Morgan, then heavily dubbed with sirens, this was a soundtrack that blared out from the living room and rang around the whole house, amplified as it was by my mum and dad who would immediately turn up the volume and accompany the same final few bars with an enthused vocal that never dulled in the many years they watched the show.

Da da da daa,

Da da daa da,

Daaa, daaa,

Daa, dadada,

Daa, dadada,

Da da, da!

More than just a sense of rhythm, and a respect for authority – enforced by the fear that there are corrupt cops everywhere who will gladly stove your head in and then lie about it and be backed up by their colleagues because they’re ostensibly ‘good guys’ – The Bill gave me the idea of having a stakeout; that to catch my elusive angels in the act I’d need to leave my bed and set up camp in the garden after hours; to go outside, and confront whatever it was – whatever they were – for myself.

And that’s how it came to be that I started peering through my neighbours’ windows at night.

Every day without fail, £2.

It was never an afterthought scraped from the bottom of her handbag, or a loose collection of coins clawed out of the car glovebox or centre console cupholder. It was always two one-pound coins left in a neat little pile on the kitchen side – a golden blur on the dark granite worktop, each and every morning.

After many cellophane years of squashed sandwiches and popped yogurts, dinner money was a new and novel thing for me, and I took to spending it diligently, with absolute care and consideration. This was money, that was mine, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

I was going to buy five chocolate bars with it.

Every day, I’d arrive at school shortly before 9am and head straight for the vending machines – ‘the venders’ – in the top canteen, so named because the school had been built on a gentle hill, with the cafeteria, playing fields and staff car park at its crest. Here, I’d use my newly acquired care and consideration to make my diligent choices: one bar to eat first thing before registration; one for morning break; two to eat at what was actually lunch time; and then one for the walk home.

It was a perfect system, and one that only ever varied in the decisions I took.

I made a point to only ever select one or two, a couple of bars, that I really liked, that always managed to feel treaty, like a Galaxy Caramel or a Crunchie. The rest I padded out with what felt like a fairly unindulgent selection, bottom-of-the-tin chocolate like Mars and Snickers, that sort of thing. I’d do my time with them, maybe even choosing something as uninspiring and raisin-ladened as a Picnic or a Topic for the first half of my lunch, so as to really savour that bag of Minstrels that then felt like a proper dessert.

Yes, I may have been buying five chocolate bars a day, but the way I saw it, I wasn’t being greedy – I didn’t allow myself to overindulge.

After the first few terms of picking and mixing from the same vending machine – of watching some amalgamation of the same eight or nine primary-coloured packets twizzle free of their whorled prongs – I grew bored, and endeavoured instead to keep hold of my lunch money until the end of the day, when at the final bell I’d race down to the newsagent at the bottom of the hill in search of a broader selection. Now starving hungry, and in open rebellion, I took to buying the most peculiar sweets I could lay my eyes on, desperate for some more variety in my diet.

First, I discovered Wham bars in their Roy Lichtenstein wrappers; purple and sticky, they’d cling to the roof of your mouth and would glue your teeth well shut. Then came Milk Chews, cuboidal and creamy, individually wrapped sweets that were like Starburst in texture, but entirely dairy in taste; I think they’d been popular during the Second World War, when milk was perhaps a more rarefied flavour than it is today.

And then there were Brain Lickers, which caused no end of trouble.

Shaped like a roll-on deodorant, and with their distinctive snot-green lids, these cylindrical plastic containers were filled with a sweet and sour liquid that could only be tasted by licking it from a plastic bearing in a ball and socket joint – the pressure from your tongue swirling it around in its housing, coating it with flavour.

Back in 2004, Brain Lickers had a period of unbelievable popularity in our school – well and truly in vogue, they were everywhere. This is because in 2003, the headteacher had banned them. After the British Food Standards Agency issued a warning to parents that the contents of these little tubes was ‘as acidic as lemon juice’, that excessive enjoyment may result in oral burns, oral blisters or oral scarring, and that the inventive delivery mechanism was in fact a choking hazard thinly disguised as an accident waiting to happen, schools across eight council boroughs in the United Kingdom came down hard.

And yet, as with any ban, prohibition only encouraged consumption.

Practically overnight, Brain Lickers became the Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the moonshine, of the confectionery world. They were dangerous and sexy, and were quickly synonymous with the wrong crowd. The wrong boys would watch the way the wrong girls attacked them, tongues dancing across the synthetic raspberry hemispheres, and they’d think things previously limited to break-time bananas.

I didn’t do that.

For the teachers that patrolled the corridors, it was something else for them to worry about. Soon enough, when caught outside of lessons students across all years had to turn out not just their pockets but their mouths, presenting their flat tongues for inspection. For as with all worthwhile sweets, the chemical flavouring stained your tongue and gums, and quickly the trademark green of Sour Apple became the anti-vandal paint of the I-didn’t-do-it brigade – an indelible smudge of guilt that caused faculty staff to recoil when confronted by young adults with mouths blotchy and dark like inkblots, or necrosis.

‘Look at the colour of your mouth!’ they’d say.

An impossible ask.

‘Let’s get your name in the book, shall we?’

And yet, mindful of all dietary and safety concerns, the biggest problem with Brain Lickers came not with the licking of them, but when they were empty. Rather than disposing of the drained containers as rubbish, kids took to placing them down on the ground, side-on to the way they were standing, before stamping down hard, with the force projecting the large plastic pellet from its housing and toward any target of choice.

Now, the teachers really did have a fight on their hands.

The first I saw fall victim to these makeshift munitions, Mr Smith, was a PE teacher and a nice guy. A nice guy, but flash. He’d played lacrosse for England when he was younger, and he continued to play it for England during our lessons, often sending students into the dirt with sharp elbows and enthusiastic body checks. He was good at basketball, and even better at football, which was enough to draw the ire of most of the school’s teams.

One day, just after the final bell, walking home with a Toffee Crisp, I was startled to hear an impassioned adolescent voice cry out behind me, cutting through the rumble of cars that queued along the main road outside the school.

“Forward battery, ready!”

Turning, I saw a half dozen boys lined up along the pavement, facing the road where a long traffic jam had formed behind the school bus, taking on passengers at the stop opposite the main gate. In front of them, I could see Mr Smith’s blue Volvo, and a dark figure inside frantically winding down the driver’s side window; there were no electric windows back then, or at least not in Volvos, and so I could just make out his elbow jutting up and down as he cranked the handle round and round.

His cry of, ‘Don’t you little bastards even think about it!’ was drowned out by a second voice, bellowing, “Ready on the quarter deck!”

And as our teacher raged louder and louder, gesturing through the open window, so too the boys carried on with their maritime pantomime, back and forth, elbows folded across their noses and mouths and blazers draped over their heads to obscure their faces.

‘If anything so much as comes near my car, I’ll…’

“Bring up the howitzers!”

‘I am not joking, I will…’

“Brace the sails, lads!”

‘I will be writing to your parents to…’

“Prepare to fire!”

Each boy was leaning toward the road, standing with front legs bent at the knee while their rear limbs angled back behind them. Stooping low, they each trapped a Brain Licker beneath their front foot, taking a moment to line it up with their target, Master-and-Commander style.

It was only at this point that Mr Smith gave up hope of taking down any names and started rocking the car back and forth on the clutch, trying to inch out around the jutting back end of the double decker, still moored at the stop. As the despairing man revved his engine, neck craning to look beyond the double decker to the open road ahead, the cry finally went up.

“Fire!”

The mutineers sprang forward, stamping down hard in unison as plastic pellets shot from the containers at their feet, pinging loudly and pimpling the Volvo’s paintwork on impact.

I kept watching as the boys raced, laughing and whooping, into the street to retrieve their sherbet ammunition, hands slapping against the Volvo’s bonnet, boot, roof and side panels as they crossed the road, arms reaching under stationary cars to grab for their projectiles. I’d not long turned away before I heard another voice shouting joyfully, ‘Let’s give him another broadside!’ and so I put my head down and walked briskly on as the revving and shouting started up again.

“It’s nice to see you both, so sorry to keep you out there waiting.”

First Eve and then Adam walked into the room, moving apart from one another after being funneled through the tall oak frame. It was bright and airy in the office, the day pouring in through a large sash window, the view outside an immaculate green and blue, stretching to a haze on the horizon.

“Come on now, clothes off. Yes, that’s it, clothes off – I shouldn’t have to say it every time I see you. Come on, please, as I made you.”

The two of them paused in the doorway before reluctantly beginning to undress. Adam stepped on the back of one shoe with the toe of the other, squashing down the heel and sending a limited edition Spezial cartwheeling across the carpet to the skirting board, unbuckling his belt and ripping it through the loops of his jeans as if he were a spinning top.

“You’ve ruined those three stripes,” God noted disapprovingly, watching as the other Adidas trainer was stuffed with two balled-up socks and kicked to join its mate.

Eve meanwhile was more deliberate, folding a leather jacket at the collar and leaving it on top of a leather bag by the sideboard. Loosening the front of her trousers she turned away to unbutton her blouse, quickly thumbing through the buttons.

God bit his lip and pretended he wasn’t watching, glancing to the pad on his lap and gesturing to the sofa opposite.

“And how’s the rib?” God asked, furrowing his brow with concern as a naked Adam made his way over.

“Still giving me trouble,” he replied, rubbing the faint scar down his side and glaring pointedly in Eve’s direction.

God burst out laughing, leaning across the low table between them to fist bump Adam as Eve sat down, shaking her head. They never let her forget where she came from.

God was pleased; he’d spent ages working on that bit with Adam in their last one-to-one session, and so to pull it off in such style was a real win.

“Classic, classic,” he said. “That’s a classic.”

With pen perched on page he glanced back up and smiled apologetically.

“So, let’s start again. How are you both?”

Now sat well apart on the same chair, Adam and Eve shuffled in their seats; having taken up a cushion each – he resting his flat on his lap, she hugging hers to her front – they both shrugged, staring down at their pink knees.

God tutted and scribbled a quick note: Still ashamed.

“Eve, then,” he started. “Let’s begin with you, shall we?”

“I’m fine,” came the reply, but then she quickly rounded on Adam.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” he replied, turning away to the window.

“No, ‘cause I thought you said something?”

“I didn’t.”

“Right, then don’t fucking…”

“Guys!” God cut in, shocked. “I thought we’d gotten past this?”

Wearily he kneaded his face with his palms, smoothing his light beard and putting his pad to one side. He’d been seeing Adam and Eve once a week for more than a year now, ever since the incident, and progress had been shaky and impermanent.

“It’s been a while that we’ve been sitting down together,” he started. “And yet it feels like you’re further apart now than when we started…”

“Is that a question?” asked Adam, his eyes fixed on the vista outside.

Through the clear space between the bottom of the open window and the sill he could see the tops of the metal railings that surrounded the Garden of Eden; they’d only been fitted within the past twelve months and Adam still found them hard to look at. Every spindle was about twice his height, tipped with a golden spire, and while there was enough of a gap between each one not to obscure the view entirely it was a clear boundary to the world beyond, whatever that might be.

“If it were a question, would you answer it?”

The window itself was made up of nine panes of glass – a three-by-three grid of white wooden frames that apportioned the sky, and Adam watched as a flock of birds moved across each one; narrowing one eye to keep them in focus, he followed their flight, trying to guess which portion they might move through on their way out of sight.

“What?”

God knew that Adam had heard him and couldn’t help but snap.

“I’ve got quite a lot riding on this you know, guys!”

“They gave me these,” she said, arriving home late one day after no more than two weeks in the job. “Just gave them to me.”

Shedding her bags in the hallway, dropping the one that contained her new company laptop with a clunk, she hurried into the kitchen and placed a bright orange box on the counter. Leaning over it, removing the new staff pass from around her neck – tugging the lanyard free of her hair so the laminated card at its end with her face on wouldn’t dangle in her way – she placed an index finger at each corner of the lid and gently rubbed the sharp angles with her thumbs.

“Is that laptop okay?” I asked, glancing down the hallway with concern.

“They said I’d have to have Nikes for when I have meetings with Nike,” she continued. “How crazy is that?”

“Really crazy,” I replied, nodding. “It’s mental if you think about it…”

“And Adidas for when I have meetings with Adidas!”

I tried to think of a company that would be funny to ask if she’d have meetings with, but all that came to mind in the moment was Andrex; this wasn’t worth putting to her, but I did for myself imagine a big boardroom table surrounded by people wrapped in toilet paper like Egyptian mummies – or dressed normally in nice suits and dresses but with wodges of tissues shoved up their arses.

With me peering over her shoulder she examined the shoebox slowly, smoothing her hand over the distinctive white tick on the top and blowing away imaginary dust, all with the reverence and seriousness of an archaeologist.

“Shall I find you a little brush?” I asked.

She turned to me and opened her mouth wide in mock giddiness before very gently, and very slowly, lifting the lid.

The unboxing was a careful, deliberate action, like watching a young girl opening a music box, and as the pristine white trainers were revealed I thought about humming the Song of the Swans – but already she was tearing through the tissue paper inside and removing cardboard cones from each shoe.

“They’re alright, aren’t they!” she exclaimed, turning one over in her hands before resting it on the flat of her palm. What they were was a pair of white Nike Air Force Ones, so clean and uncrinkled that they could’ve been made from ceramic.

“Yeah, nice,” I said, taking hold of the other and giving it that awkward new-shoe fumble, turning it upside down, looking at the chunky tread and the toe and pulling the tongue rigid behind the narrow lattice of laces.

“I think they’ll be fine for meetings,” she said, dropping one on the floor and gesturing for me to do the same before wiggling her socked toes into them.

“And besides, I fucking love free stuff!”

The two of us had never really been ‘trainer people’; Kay mostly wore Doc Martens and Vans, while I owned battered Converse and no-name pumps – a hangover from both being wildly unpopular moshers in our teens. But with her free shoes, and the many boxes that followed, I watched as she was reborn, an urban ballerina, like Channing Tatum.

The months tripped by, a probation period was passed, and more and more meetings were had with Nike and Adidas, and New Balance and Puma and FILA, all requiring new pairs of the latest trainers, gifted or purchased at a heavy discount. Where once we had a couple of tatty pairs of shoes apiece lined up by the front door, piles upon piles of brand spankers grew, no longer plain white either but mixed like Liquorice Allsorts, with black leather and luminous accents and colourful laces and patterned soles and shrill Velcro.

On one evening I counted nine sets of trainers, all piled up by the door.

“Do you know,” I said, crouching down and sorting them into pairs. “I sometimes feel like I’m working in a bowling alley.”

It’s quite an unusual sensation to have such a sudden excess of something that implies a presence – that there are other, unfamiliar people in your house. On arriving home each day from work, stumbling over shoes I didn’t recognise, I’d assume that we had company, that someone was round, and would stall to listen for voices before poking my head tentatively into the living room, expecting to say hello, and finding only Kay sat on the sofa, frowning back at me.

“What are you creeping around for?”

I began to attribute different personalities to each pair of shoes, as if they were themselves guests, which would in turn impact how I’d treat them whenever I encountered them in my day. Checkerboard Vans with leopard print laces – bought for a meeting with Vans – I’d place heel-and-toe together by the radiator in the hall, ready for wearing, while charcoal Nike TNs with lime green piping I’d roughly stuff into the back of her wardrobe with gusto because they reminded me of a stupid mean boy from school. It wasn’t uncommon for me to tell a particularly egregious pair to fuck off as I tidied them away, and more than once when Kay called from the next room to ask who I was talking to, I’d say your shoes.

Good at her job, it wasn’t long before she knew all the words for them, and worse still the numbers – so not just the make of shoe, but the model and product variation too. Like people who know about aeroplanes or Porsches will rattle off digits like 747, A380 or 911, soon she was dropping the brand name altogether and speaking to me in code.

“Where are my Max 90s?” she’d shout from upstairs.

“Have you seen my yellow 1080s?”

“Did you move my U571s?”

“Have you put my Hasting 1066s somewhere?”

She’d been walking a full trolley down the main aisle of a local supermarket when she exploded in a fountain of Skittles, leaving behind the barely developed form of a small baby on the floor. It was a scene that nobody in the shop that day would ever forget: the rattle of thousands of hard-shelled sweets hitting the ground like hail stones, bouncing and skittering beneath the shelves and promotional rackings.

Customers who had been standing nearby jumped back, desperate to avoid treading on any of the now many parts of Mrs Rogers, while the staff, still stunned, rushed to the aid of the still child.

“It’s not breathing, not breathing,” a man shouted. “It’s choking!”

In just a few seconds, the small face had darkened from a healthy pink to a washed-out lilac to the deepest shade of purple, blotchy and dark around the eyes, cheeks and sinuses.

A woman was crying over by the Scottish oats.

“Look, look,” said a voice, and one by one people in the crowd began to notice the tiny rise and fall of the baby’s chest. Then, as they stared, one of the little feet turned green, the colour soaking the skin like an inkblot, staining the toes, the heel and the shin, right the way up to the thigh.

“What on earth…”

Tiny, bright orange fingers furled and unfurled, the shoulders turning into sunsets as the chest and stomach reddened, and an elbow shone yellow like a buttercup chin.

On another aisle, somebody was asking where they could find the margarine.

A short distance from the child, the store manager was crouched next to a man who was down on all fours, his coat stretched tight across his back, the hood flapping down over his head in the annoying way it does when a person leans too far forward.

Mr Rogers had returned to the spot where he’d left his wife, standing at the intersection where the refrigerators for the fresh juices and yoghurts meet the cereal aisle, to find a beach of Skittles surrounding the trolley containing their weekly shop. He’d looked for an explanation to the mess, initially amused, and then confused, as the confectionary was located at the other side of the store. It was only when he heard the people nearby talking about what they’d seen – what they couldn’t believe they’d seen – that he’d become frantic, racing up and down the aisles, his head turning left and right, looking for the only face familiar to him.

“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” said the manager. “I don’t…”

The man’s shoulders shook as he sobbed.

“No!” he cried, clawing at the cold tiles, his fingers nudging the little round candies. Suddenly and with purpose, he sat upright, causing the manager to make a little oop sound and fall over backwards. “No,” he said again and again. “No, no, no!”

He leaned forward and began pulling the Skittles toward his body, first with scooped hands and then using his forearms to sweep them up, appealing to the other shoppers to please return the pieces of his wife. And, embarrassed, they did, gently collecting them between thumb and forefinger, and taking them one at a time back to him. As he continued to wipe the floor with his sleeves, softly they’d place them within his orbit, putting them in the briefly clean arks of space that he left behind, each person timing Mr Roger’s movements like the levers of a coin pusher in an arcade.

“Thank you, thank you,” he croaked.

A couple of members of staff started to go through the Rogers’ trolley an item at a time, deftly picking Skittles from between the ingredients for meals that now wouldn’t ever be made, while the store manager began to encourage the other customers toward the checkouts, watching as a junior colleague scooped up the multi-coloured and screaming infant in her apron, carrying it away to the back of the shop.

Shelley had only worked at the supermarket for four months, and though she hadn’t yet memorised the price per gram for the cooked hams and couldn’t confidently work her till at the deli counter, she knew as she walked with the warm child clutched to her chest that this was the right thing to do. Dipping her head to pass through the heavy strips of hanging plastic that separated the back of the delicatessen from the store, she approached a big white basin surrounded by notices to wash and dry hands before handling food.

Placing the baby in the sink, turning on the hose attachment to a burbling lukewarm trickle, slowly she started to rinse his little body down, when, to her surprise, the crying faltered and then stopped. Turning off the tap, she gazed down at the little berry face staring back up at her; their eyes met, and they properly looked at each other, and Shelley smiled. The orange fingers reached up to her face and so she placed a single fingertip against the soft apricot palm, and as a small fist closed around her painted nail she felt a soft tingle and then a sudden rush, and with a shriek she too dissolved into Skittles, collapsing like rain around the sink and industrial faucet.

When finally the store manager appeared he found the child lying quietly in a shallow puddle of water, with swirls of purple, red, orange, yellow and green staining the ceramic and trickling down the plughole.

Barely a half hour had passed when Mr Rogers arrived at the hospital, stumbling through the doors of A&E. He approached the front desk not knowing what to say, his arms hanging heavy with supermarket carrier bags that were brimming with sweets.

“Hello,” said the triage nurse. “It’s a little early for trick or treating, isn’t it?”

“That’s my wife!” Mr Rogers screamed.

He bent to put the bags on the floor, his hood falling forward, and reappeared with handfuls of candy. Shaking both fists in front of his face like an Italian footballer, he stared wide eyed at the woman in the white uniform as Skittles fell from his grip and bounced off the countertop.

“Please, you have to help me. This is my wife – my wife!”

The nurse didn’t break eye contact as she reached for her phone, pressing a single digit on the handset and smiling weakly as she waited for it to dial.

“Hello? Yes, it’s me. Yeah, I’m going to need the Psych team over here, quickly.”

“No,” Mr Rogers stammered, taking a step back.

“A white male, maybe early forties…”

Mr Rogers bent again and gently deposited Mrs Rogers back into one of the bags, his hands sticky from the coloured shells.

He felt sick.

“You have to believe me, please.”

At that moment, the manager from the supermarket strode into the reception area, blood pumping after paying £8 for a ticket to the short-stay car park.

“Everything cost money these days doesn’t it,” he murmured as he arrived at the desk, looking from the unfortunate man to the nurse and back again.

“Explain, please. Explain,” said Mr Rogers, breathlessly. “Please, tell her.”

“Yes,” said the store manager, whose name was Phil. “This man and his wife were shopping in my store earlier this afternoon, and well. This is her. Those bags of sweets are her… That’s her.”

The nurse had been prepared to dismiss just the one madman – indeed it was part of the job – but this new arrival was matter of fact and confident, and clearly used to getting his own way. Glancing the ‘General Manager’ badge pinned to his shirt pocket before looking again at the lumpy bags on the floor, she flapped her lips and scribbled something on a slip of paper.

“Somebody will be with you as soon as possible,” she said. “Take a seat.”

Kay checks it for post regularly, and is always excited to do so.

The letters from her bank are cordial and polite, bordering on friendly, while mine can be rather more ominous. It’s for this reason that all our utilities are registered in her name, and so the meter readings for the gas, water and electricity arrive addressed to her also. The student loans company sends healthy summaries of where her repayments are up to, her office keeps her up to date on her pension policy, and her friends who live in other countries will send postcards just to say hello, even when they aren’t themselves on holiday.

It’s no surprise then that she’s always keen to check for such positive correspondence – and I do mean, always.

It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, whether we’re running out the door to catch a train or coming back from the supermarket with a week’s worth of shopping, Kay will stop to open the mailbox, only too happy to risk delay, or leave me weighed down with anything that we’ve been carrying. Once, in late November, she left me standing with our new, seven-foot-tall Christmas tree balanced on my shoulder.

“Can this not wait?” I asked at the time, the sweat of the effort stinging my eyes and pine needles dropping down the back of my collar.

It could not wait.

She just stood there, idly turning over fresh envelopes in her hands and looking very pleased.

“There’s nothing here for you,” she replied, smiling. “And you’re getting tree all over the floor.”

The flat in Berlin was the first place we’d lived where it was just the two of us and nobody else. Before that, Kay had been by herself in a smaller apartment that had a view of Treptower Park and was closer to her office, while I was in a basement flat in South London, living alone but with two other people.

Our building in Friedrichshain was on a quiet, tree-lined street, and had a heavy, orange steel door that swung slowly on stiff hinges, yet still clanged loudly when it closed. On its immediate inside, the walls of the empfangshalle were lined with faded green tiles, save for the large space occupied by the forty-two mailboxes. At the far end of the lobby, a wide staircase with linoleum steps curved across the hallway, the dark wood banister sloping from its acorn newel cap toward our home on the second floor. Disappearing into the white plaster and then reappearing on each subsequent floor, this chunky railing punctured the walls on each level like it ran through the building in one long, unbroken spiral all the way to the rooftop, as if it was something organic that the apartment block had been built around, to preserve and to keep safe. Indeed, when I think of Berlin now, I picture the city from the sky, with none of its cladding, brickwork or stone, but as many, many thousands of rows of spiral bannisters, corkscrewing out of the ground to the heights of their different storeys, like a great twisting wheatfield of metal and wood.

Our first time living together as a twosome, Kay and I had been quick to gift each other new behaviours to get used to – which I suppose actually were some of our oldest behaviours, previously hidden to better present ourselves as reliable, untroublesome companions. I pick my nails till my fingers bleed; she can’t sleep without a desk fan on; I have a ‘way’ I like to fold the tea towels; she wees with the bathroom door open. So it was pretty early on that the fixation with the mailbox settled comfortably into the list as an endearing quirk of character that, now noticed, was cherished.

In the same way as I took comfort from feeling the second-hand breeze in bed, or hearing the tinkle of piss from the hallway, I enjoyed being there in the lobby to see her face light up as she rifled through each new batch of letters. Or on the rare occasion that there weren’t any, to do my part to console, or to remind her that actually she’d already collected the post earlier that same day.

I’d say it took about four months all told for it to become annoying.

What happened I think was that it was just too frequent an interruption to retain its charm, and so actually, it quickly irritated me.

In time, I drifted away from the mailbox and joining Kay in the big reveal, and instead took to standing pointedly with my back to the pair of them, scowling in the direction I hoped we’d soon be going – whether that was out of the building or up the stairs.

I hope she doesn’t think I’m acting like a child, I remember thinking to myself one evening, stood as I was with my arms clamped to my sides and my nose pressed firmly up against the main door.

“What are you doing?” she asked from somewhere behind me, rummaging in her handbag for the mail key.

“Me?” I said. “I’m waiting to go.”

“No,” she replied. “You’re acting like a child.”

“You are,” I muttered, stepping onto the street and counting a beat before the door banged loudly behind me like I knew it would.

The sad truth of the matter was that I’d grown to resent it – the postbox, I mean.

I was taking it too personally.

This source of joy for her, so close to home, that wasn’t me, was a constant reminder of all it could offer that doesn’t come easy for most humans to provide – least of all unemployed creative writing graduates.

First of all was a sense of security.

Where I could only give Kay my thoughts and opinions on where we were in our lives, and where we might be going, the mailbox could be far more certain: the bank statements revealed the very reality of the present, while the letters about her mounting pension could provide her with a more concrete assurance for the future. All I had to offer on both was my very genuine belief that we’d always be okay, whereas the postbox was able to define things rather more clearly in fiscal terms.

Then too came a sense of possibility; of the unknown.

What she really loved was that on any given day she never knew what she might find. Maybe her friend in Los Angeles had sent a handwritten letter with an invitation to visit in the winter, or perhaps the frequent use of a store loyalty card had yielded some money-off vouchers. It could just be routine admin or even junk mail that drew a smile. We’d receive shiny leaflets advertising local restaurants and takeaways, discount flyers for nightclubs and thrift stores, and even homemade political pamphlets, rallying against local gentrification, regional inequality, domestic responsibility, international war, global terror and intergalactic concern; all needed to be read, acknowledged and understood before either being taken upstairs for further review or pressed into a wire metal bin that had been bolted to the wall between the mailboxes and the main door, appearing overnight and overflowing ever since with consumer-savvy or radical literature.

It soon became clear that the landlord, the hauptverwaltung, was becoming sick of the junk mail too, and perhaps was increasingly mindful of it not upsetting his gentrifying tenants, and so one day, not long after the appearance of the bin, small oblong stickers appeared on each of our mailboxes; ‘Bitte keine werbung einwerfen’. Barely a week went by before Kay chipped the polite little notice away with her thumbnail, dropping it into the new bin and carrying her envelopes and flyers up the stairs with me following on behind.

The mailbox was able to offer her ‘out of the ordinary’, whereas I am endlessly predictable.

Round my way it’s brown for bottles, blue for cardboard and black for plastics. The green bin is for biodegradable waste, and so that’s where I put myself.

With the lid shut, sitting on a spongy cushion of grass cuttings with my knees to my chest, I squeezed my phone from my pocket and thumbed my way to the council’s website, searching for the list of ‘things that can go in your green wheelie bin’.

Garden trimmings, fruit and vegetable peel, meat including bone…

I should be fine, I reasoned.

The short list of ‘things that cannot go in your bin’ included only soil, which I am not, and branches ‘larger than 10cm in diameter, or thicker than your wrist’.

It said nothing about actual human wrists, or the size thereof.

Nothing about ankles or thighs, or heads; and nothing about my innards – my lungs and pancreas, and the miles of blue, pink and white wires that I have, and all the other wet mush that’s packed in between that’s also me.

And certainly nothing about my soul, and what I should hope to do with that.

At the bottom of the list was offal, which I thought would probably cover all of the above, but not wanting to inconvenience anybody at the recycling plant I pressed the link to contact the help desk, and waited patiently on my shredded lawn as the sound of a reedy, on-hold clarinet echoed around the dark, narrow space.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme…

“Hello. You’re through to Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council Recycling Centre. This is Kelly speaking.”

“Hi, Kelly!” I said. “I was just wondering, can I put a body in my green bin?”

In the silence that followed, I pictured a young woman sitting at a white desk wearing a polo shirt the same colour teal as the masthead of the website, with the council crest stitched in white thread on the chest.

“Erm, sorry but is that a joke?”

A lanyard round her neck with a staff ID card.

“Nope.”

Dark hair, possibly.

“Do you mean a human body – like, a person?”

I assumed that she’d heard it all before, and wouldn’t have time for nonsense.

“Yes, that’s correct,” I replied. “A human person.”

There was a shuffling of paper and the click of a tongue.

“Yeah, no you can’t do that.”

Now it was my turn to be quiet.

“Sir, are you saying that you’ve actually…”

She trailed off, unwilling to say it out loud, or to find out.

“Oh god, no,” I exclaimed, suddenly understanding her unease. “I’m so sorry, I should’ve said!”

She laughed, relieved.

“I meant for me. Can I dispose of my own body that way?”

She stopped laughing.

“Because, I was thinking like, maybe under meat and bone that might be ok?” I continued, hopefully. “Do you think that might be…”

“Erm, no.” she interrupted. “No, that’s absolutely not okay.”

“Okay, see I’m glad I called,” I said. “It’s just, that’s not actually clear from your website.”

Two clicks of the tongue.

“Well, what’s on the website is based on a series of reasonable assumptions around the kinds of things people might think to recycle. So, it’s no surprise that…”

“I’m sorry but is there maybe someone else I can speak to?” I asked, sensing her hostility. “It feels like we’re not really getting anywhere.”

Another tongue click, and then her voice brightened.

“Sure, okay. There’s a colleague of mine, Andy…”

“Great!”

“…it’s normally his job to peel labels off tin cans that…”

“Oh.”

“…”

“……”

“But no, I’m sorry sir, there’s nobody who will give you a different answer.”

“Okay, well…”

I’d already decided I was going to stay in the bin, I just needed to end the call as quickly as possible.

“Thanks, Kelly.” I said. “You’ve been…”

“Are you telling me you’re actually sitting in your green bin now?” she cut in.

I flushed, and could for the first time hear the hum of other voices in the background of the call, and what sounded like laughter.

“Erm, no, no. I’m calling from…”

“Because, you do sound very echoey.”

There was definitely laughter.

“Sir,” Kelly said, more gently. “Please could you tell me where you are, sir?”

“I’m not going to do that, sorry,” I said, more quietly, aware now of the depth and sound of my voice, amplified and sonorous, and silly, like I were speaking through a traffic cone.

“Do you live in the Stockport area, sir?” Kelly continued. “Because we can send somebody out to you, just to talk…”

I ended the call.

My day hadn’t actually been that bad, so far as bad days go. Maybe on the whole it had been a bit nothingy, but that’s fine, right? That’s most days.

On getting it home we took it out onto the balcony and sanded it down, painting it a bright, bright blue before putting it in place by the front door.

This would be the first sign to visitors that we were interesting people.

In the weeks that followed we did the same to a big mirror and a little side table, hanging the now-blue mirror by the entrance with the now-blue side table beneath it, and moving the still-blue hat stand deeper into the flat, though still keeping it in sight of the door.

Now it would be the third sign to visitors that we were interesting people.

I was proud of our invention, and it quickly became one of my favourite things that we owned, representing as it did a shared effort and taste.

Soon I found that I was making time for it in my day, looking to it when I passed between rooms – regarding it, taking a moment here or there to adjust its placement, turning it this way or that by a couple of degrees whenever I felt that it or I might benefit.

This quickly became routine, and in the same way that the pots get washed and bedsheets changed, with the allocation of an appropriate verb the hat stand got ‘sorted’ each time I tidied the flat.

‘I’m just sorting the hat stand!’

This meant that I’d strip it naked before dressing it again, curating a stylised mix of our best coats and jackets, their shoulders slumped inward and sleeves hanging slack, with rogue hoodies and cardigans returned to hangers in the bedroom wardrobe and a hat and scarf kept for variety, though only in the winter months. I’d leave our one good umbrella propped up in the base, relegating the telescopic ones in their tatty canvas socks to a tote bag that I kept inside of a nicer tote bag that housed all our other tote bags, at the same time making sure there were plenty of antlers left bare to be used by visitors.

The intention was for enough of the stand’s spindly blue skeleton to remain visible while at the same time appearing to be very much in use and in no way for show; just like the scatter cushions in the living room that were in no way scattered and the throw in the bedroom that couldn’t have been further from having been thrown, it appeared totally casual, but was deliberately so.

After all, surely such interesting people wouldn’t worry about such details.

And actually, only one of us did.

Kay wasn’t much interested in the good thing I had going on with the hat stand, and despite my best efforts come each weekend it looked like we were having a jumble sale in the hallway. Which we weren’t.

Coats were draped over the top of other coats, material loops ignored in favour of collars scrunched over the wooden prongs, while umbrellas pierced the folds of material – sticking out like they’d been put there by Zorro – and bags piled up around the base with shoes that were supposed to be somewhere else entirely. It flew in the face of everything I was trying to achieve, and when I tried to explain how much effort it took to coordinate such an apparently casual collection of outerwear, she said that she thought I was mentally ill.

“Don’t you think you might be?” she asked, after I offered to talk her through my process. “You can’t honestly tell me that you think you’re well.”