At six in the morning, I asked if I could use the phone. They had one of those fancy cordless ones, so I took it into the hallway and sat on the bottom of the stairs.

  It rang and rang for bloody ages, no surprise really, given the hour. Eventually, a grumpy girl answered, sounding stoned and pissed off.

  “Somebody had better have died, mate.”

  “I need to speak to Alex,” I choked out. “Alex Valentine. Room 35, second floor.”

  “For fuck’s sake. Do you know what fucking time it is?”

  A clatter, and I envisaged the phone receiver banging against the wall of the corridor as it dangled from the cord. Ten minutes passed, maybe longer. I stared at the crusts I’d abandoned on my plate, seeing toast, smelling dog meat.

  “He’s not in his room.”

  Rupert’s lazy drawl. He had the room across from Alex; the other person’s hammering must have dragged him out of bed. He sounded equally pissed off—cool posh voices were excellent at conveying bad humour.

  “It’s his friend, Matt. I need to speak to him.”

  “Can’t it wait? It’s the fucking middle of the night, Matthew.”

  “No. Are you sure he’s not there? Can you check again?”

  Tears escaped me then, in ugly slobbery sobs. I retched too; fuck knows what that wanker must have thought. “It’s really…really…important.”

  “I’m not walking up those bloody stairs again. He’s not there. I think he’s at Callie’s. Phone him in the morning when you’ve sobered up a bit. Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I need to speak to him now,” I urged, through a fresh round of sobbing. “I haven’t got her number.”

  “Tough titty, Matthew, nor do I. You’ll have to cope until he gets back.”

  His words had a note of finality about them. “Wait!” I begged. “Rupert, please, wait.”

  “What? I don’t need this shit.”

  “Tell him I phoned.” I begged once more, not caring how pathetic I sounded. “Please. For fuck’s sake. Tell him I need to speak to him. It’s urgent. Give him this number. Tell him Bren…Brenn…just tell him, okay?”

  A cold draught crept under the front door, coiling itself around the bottom stair. The damp sort of cold, the kind that seeped into your bones and built a home, especially if you hadn’t spent the night tucked up in bed.

  Once he’d realised I had no intention of budging, Phil’s dad had lent me his dressing gown and I dozed a bit, slumped awkwardly on the stairs. Phil’s mum, white-faced and dishevelled, tried to persuade me to go up to bed, or home, but I was having none of it. I must have looked quite fierce, sitting there, clutching the phone, because in the end they left me alone and went for a lie down.

  I passed the hours picking at a loose carpet tack. Once I’d pulled it out, I stuck the sharp end in my palm a few times, dragging it down one of the pink creases, to see if it hurt. It didn’t, no matter how many times nor how deeply I drove the tip into my soft skin. My other hand was just the same and I sucked the blood off so as not to get any on the carpet.

  At ten a.m. I tried Alex again. And once more at one p.m. At three in the afternoon, he still hadn’t phoned. Nor had he phoned by six. Phil and his mum didn’t know what to do with me, so at eight o’clock, when I heard the theme tune to Last Of The Summer Wine, I took off the dressing gown and made their blameless lives a hell of a lot easier.

  By walking away from everything.

  PART TWO

  2005

  MR BRIGHTSIDE

  (THE KILLERS)

  ALEX 2005

  “Buy the fresh rigatoni. Two bags, and we’ll put one bag in the freezer. Don’t get the penne. It’s too rubbery.”

  “Mmm. Yes.” There was a difference? Apparently so.

  “Last time, you didn’t listen to me and bought the penne. It’s cheaper but not as nice. And don’t buy the Waitrose own brand—it turns gloopy, even if you add oil to the water. Oh, and make sure it’s the organic rigatoni, not the ordinary.”

  “Yes.”

  “The organic pasta is on the left, just below the fresh sauces. Halfway down the milk and cheese aisle. And if you can’t see it, ask. Sometimes they run low. Especially towards the end of the week.”

  “Mmm. Yes.”

  As I drove through a short tunnel, my wife’s educated and, dare I say, nagging voice crackled and faded out for a few seconds. I contemplated switching off the Bluetooth speaker then claiming bad reception for the remainder of the journey.

  The tunnel opened into daylight.

  “And if they have run out, go for the tagliatelle. The verde, not plain. It’s not as good.”

  “Yes.”

  “Three bags. It tends to not go as far as the rigatoni.”

  “Yes.”

  I might have zoned out. She’d already sent me an email of the annotated shopping list anyhow; this was merely my extra, extra talk-through. Faced with a shelf of pasta varieties in Waitrose, it seemed I couldn’t be trusted to make a sensible decision, despite the NHS regularly trusting me with ten intensive care patients for entire night shifts.

  My wife’s controlling tendencies had always lurked, so I don’t know why I allowed phone calls like this one to affect my mood as negatively as they did. Four years ago, I’d been so flattered that this vivacious, smart woman had selected me, and so dazzled by the magnificent future she mapped out for us both, that I’d chosen not to see it.

  Traffic grew heavier the farther south I drove. As a rule, I enjoyed long car journeys, especially solo ones, but Samantha’s shopping list took the edge off my pleasure. I wasn’t even picking up these groceries until the return journey tomorrow.

  “Three-ply, not two-ply. Sometimes it isn’t that clear on the packet.”

  Uh? I’d missed an important chunk. Was this ravioli, or had we moved onto bog roll? I played it safe.

  “Mmm. Yes.”

  “Alex! For goodness sake! Are you even listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you join in a bit, then? Could you say something other than ‘Mmm, yes,’?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Mmm, I mean…no. Yes. Bloody hell, I don’t know, Samantha. I’m trying not to crash the car through three lanes of motorway traffic. You want me to arrive in one piece, don’t you?”

  “I hope your repartee will be a little more sparkling at the interview, that’s all.” She harrumphed, and I pictured her thin-lipped contempt. “Okay. I’ll let you drive. Phone me when you get there.”

  Peace at last. Irritably, I flicked on the radio. REM, in a whiny fashion, informed me that ‘Everybody Hurts’. Yep, they do. I flicked it off again, unable to tolerate another rendition of the chorus. My head had to be in the right space for that particular nostalgic stroll through the 1990s, and the contraflow merging onto the M3, combined with Sam’s nagging, wasn’t conducive to finding it. Neither was the prospect of tomorrow’s job interview.

  Following a bumpy start, my ten years in Nottingham had settled into something vaguely approaching contentment. After gathering up the shards of my shattered heart and piecing them back into an ersatz version of the first, I’d immersed myself in my medical studies and sweated out my pain on the muddy fields of the university rugby club.

  My original gang of sophisticated hedonists had drifted away, to be replaced by nerdy boys, suiting the new, melancholic me much better. My free time at med school revolved around anatomy textbooks, working out in the gym, and the occasional pint of real ale. I even joined the chess club.

  Time did its thing, and the bitter, all-consuming intensity of teenage heartbreak faded. Though a compulsion to scour every group of pub-goers and young men waiting on station platforms hung around much longer. Part of me never stopped praying my eyes would land on a slender, raven-haired young man. They didn’t, of course, and by the time I’d qualified as a doctor, I’d almost grown out of the habit.

  To this day, I have no idea why a social butterfly like Samantha had landed on me. Sure, having the title doctor before my name didn’t hurt, but Samantha wasn’t one to hang from someone else’s coattails, or bask in borrowed glory. Armed with a first-class pharmacy degree herself, and combined with endless confidence and charm, she’d been snapped up by a major pharmaceutical brand, and climbed the corporate ladder. She could have chosen anyone, yet bizarrely, she chose me. Maybe she viewed me as a stable, predictable hook on which to hang her smart suit jacket after a hard week spent schmoozing clients. Maybe I could be relied upon to never steal her spotlight.

  The M3 merged onto the narrower M27. I’d driven this route down from Nottingham to Bournemouth plenty of times—Samantha’s parents lived in a leafy village just outside town. As I drove, I mentally rehearsed my answers to the questions likely to come up at tomorrow’s interview for the anaesthesia registrar post I didn’t want.

  So then why was I here, driving past the Welcome to Dorset sign, with an itchy suit and my best dress shoes that pinched my toes laid out across the back seats?

  Because Samantha wanted it, of course. My wife wanted to live closer to her parents. My compromise suggestion of looking for jobs halfway between both our families had fallen on stony ground. After warning my own parents we were considering moving a three-hour journey away from them, my sister had given me the type of hard stare only siblings can get away with. One that spoke volumes without her ever opening her mouth. My parents had smiled brightly at the news, then declared they’d enjoy exploring the south coast, even if my mum’s eyes glittered and she’d busied herself stripping beds and folding laundry for an hour afterwards.

  I was lucky the interview fell on the date it did, otherwise Samantha would have been delivering her pasta tutorial from the front passenger seat. And instead of dinner for one and a few drinks at a pub, followed by a quiet night on my own in a budget hotel just off the seafront, I’d be badgered into having sex. At least twice this evening and maybe twice in the morning, too, if she could coax my exhausted dick into another round. Which, on the face of it, didn’t sound too terrible at all, except it had nothing to do with being madly, passionately in lust with her husband. Oh no. This was all about persuading one of my sperm to penetrate one of her shy eggs. A precious union triggering a cascade of hormonal surges, which itself would prompt a nanoscopic cell to divide into two then four then eight then sixteen, and so on, until ultimately a little blue line appeared on a plastic strip, indicating that finally, finally, my wife was up the duff.

  Samantha’s biological clock ticked in much the same way cartoon bombs ticked—very, very loudly and in a menacing fashion. My own biological clock, in stark contrast, had not yet had the batteries inserted. I liked kids, I supposed, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I needed one in my life any time soon. Nonetheless, eighteen months ago we’d begun trying for a baby, and latterly, it had become very trying indeed. After a year of false expectations and dashed hopes, sex was not only an activity I viewed with antipathy and dread but also a chore I failed to perform well.

  Which didn’t sound normal for a twenty-eight-year-old man.

  Never the most rampant of guys, I’d gone from once-a-week, maybe twice on holiday, to plotting ovulation times on squared graph paper, taking temperatures, and sharing our intimate bedroom details with a friendly fertility expert, at vast expense. Frankly, it was a wonder I ever got it up at all.

  To top everything, we discovered my sperm had the capability to form its own gold medal-winning Olympic swim team. Those boys were alarmingly efficient, even if providing a sample of them, in a little cubicle tucked into the back of the outpatients department, had been touch-and-go. The well-thumbed copies of Fiesta were of a similar vintage to the women displaying their wares across the centrefold, and my dick had point-blank refused to cooperate. If it hadn’t been for Samantha’s incipient wrath and an incongruous, ancient copy of Country Life, featuring an interview with a dashingly youthful Hugh Grant, chances were I’d still be there now.

  Knowing my sperm sample contained squillions of the little buggers, their long swishy tails and big fat heads swimming in perfect synchrony, kind of made matters worse. Whereas I appeared fertile enough to double the population of the entire northern hemisphere singlehandedly, Samantha’s sporadic eggs were deemed to be of below-average quality. And, oh my God, did she endeavour to make me feel all kinds of bad about that. Nothing about my wife could ever be below-average.

  All in all, having a night off in Bournemouth on my own, even if accompanied by an unwanted job interview the following morning, was a blessed relief.

  INTERNATIONAL BRIGHT YOUNG THING

  (JESUS JONES)

  MATT 2005

  “From the shit coming out of the radio, I thought I must have died and been thrown straight down to hell.”

  “I had to do something radical to wake you up, Matt. I’ve got a client meeting me for a house viewing at ten.”

  Phil sat straighter and closed the newspaper he’d been perusing. He tipped his head from side to side, ironing out the kinks.

  Surgery to untangle the spaghetti of sliced tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in my wrists had taken several hours. Instead of surfacing sluggishly, bathed in strong painkillers and anaesthetic gases, my brain had woken with a zing to the fucking awful warbling of Coldplay.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered. Turn that crap off.”

  Its job done; the radio was silenced. Phil loathed Chris Martin’s middle-class, navel-gazing angst almost as much as I did.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “How do you think?” Bloody stupid question.

  “I dunno.” He shrugged. “Happy to be in my devastating company? Glad to be alive? Full of gratitude someone phoned for an ambulance? Again?”

  “They should feel free to walk on by next time.”

  I attempted to shuffle myself further up the pillows; a tricky manoeuvre with one bandaged arm suspended from a drip stand and the other swaddled in even more dressings. “Shit, that hurts.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Phil observed. “You did a right proper job on yourself this time.”

  I inhaled deeply and winced. Even breathing made my arms hurt.

  “That was kind of the fucking point.”

  “Yeah, ‘cos Brenner would have really wanted you to try and top yourself on the anniversary of his birthday.”

  “Anyone ever told you your bedside manner needs some work, Phil?”

  As did my attitude. Shutting my eyes, I turned my head to face the blank wall. The deep-seated pain clawing just under my rib cage had nothing to do with my self-induced injuries. Brenner would have been twenty-eight today. No fucking age at all. Perhaps if I asked the nurses for some morphine, I’d drift off to sleep again. Manage to blank out reality for a little longer.

  “Do you remember my maths friend, Alex?” I’d said his name out loud. Achieving that minor feat had taken years.

  I heard Phil sigh. “Alex was a little bit more than your maths friend. Yeah, of course I remember him. You nearly destroyed the poor kid.”

  I laughed softly. “He’ll have got over it. I’m surprised he searched for me as long as he did.”

  “Me too, mate. You’re not that fucking special.”

  If I hadn’t been so bloody miserable, I might have smiled at that. Part of my depressed brain found Phil amusing, even though an appropriate witty comeback hid just out of reach.

  “He’ll be a doctor somewhere by now. At a hospital in Nottingham, probably.”

  “Yep, probably.”

  “Married, too.”

  My words felt thick in my mouth. Maybe four hours of surgery had caught up with me after all, if I was confessing this crap to Phil. That, or the blood loss had messed with my self-preservation. Talking to anyone—even to Phil, left me so fucking exhausted.

  “Sometimes, I have this…I don’t know…little fantasy game I play with myself.”

  “If it’s kinky gay shit, Matt, then I don’t want to know.”

  I ignored him. In Phil’s vanilla world, gay and kinky were the same thing. Until recently, he’d thought LGBT was shorthand for lettuce, bacon, and tomato sandwiches with added gherkins. I suspected a day didn’t go by when he didn’t shake his head in wonder at how he’d managed to saddle himself with a suicidal queer best mate.

  “I imagine lying on a trolley in A&E, you know, after I’ve cut myself. Or with a burst appendix or something. I’m waiting for a doctor to appear around the curtain, and when he does, I imagine it’s Dr Alex Valentine.”

  “And then the pervy gay stuff happens.” Phil laughed. “You’re dafter than I thought.”

  He delved into a plastic bag, pulling out a pair of pale blue tracksuit bottoms and a red-checked flannel shirt. Great, I’d walk out of the hospital dressed as fucking Bob the Builder. Can he fix it? No, he fucking can’t. They’d be huge on me, too, but that was what happened when you were a skinny, depressed piece of shit, whose main dietary staple was sertraline. Phil yawned and rubbed his face tiredly. He’d spent the night in the hospital with me—like he always did, and he looked like crap.

  “Go home, Phil.” Stay. Please stay. I could be a selfish bugger.

  “I will when the doctors have done their rounds. Someone needs to make sure you don’t do a runner beforehand.”

  “I’ll at least wait until you’re halfway through your house viewing before I leg it.”

  Saying nothing, he helped me slide the hospital gown off over my dressings then expertly directed my arms into the shirt. He had twin toddlers at home—my background swearing couldn’t hold a candle to their bloody incessant screaming when he wrestled them into their sleepsuits. The current Mrs Phil didn’t approve of me very much. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t much approve of myself either.