Phil eyed my scrawny exposed legs and blue boxers warily. “Can you manage the bottom half yourself?”

  “Do I get a kiss if I do?”

  “No, you don’t, you bloody faggot.”

  Winding Phil up was one of my favourite pastimes. Fortunately for him, I was only at half strength. He manoeuvred the tracksuit bottoms over my feet and up to my knees before letting me wriggle them over my hips myself.

  “I wish you’d stay in here for a couple of days,” he began. “Or at least until the psych team come to assess you. You’re not thinking straight right now.”

  “I’ve never thought straight, mate, you know that.”

  We’d played this game before. It never became any easier though, which is why I cracked tired jokes and Phil focused on the practicalities. After helping me on with my socks, and checking I had fresh water and sufficient dosh for a taxi, he’d walk out, back to his normal life. As usual, I felt myself tearing up and pretended to fiddle with the shirt cuffs.

  “I’d just be wasting their time, Phil.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “You know that. Go on, I’m all right here. You don’t want to be late.”

  It was his cuddle that set me off. The soft bugger. I always managed to hold it together until he did that. Slicing my wrists open never induced the waterworks. The opposite, in fact. Last night’s efforts had been a temporary blessed release. An old-fashioned bloodletting of the evil humours, activating an endorphin-induced natural euphoria.

  The ambulance crew had been nice, too. Professionals, who’d talked to me as if I wasn’t a basket-weaving crazy, who acted as if slitting your wrists on a Friday night was a perfectly acceptable way to pass the evening. That making my brief acquaintance had been an absolute pleasure, even if I had bloodied up their shiny clean van. And the healthy slug of morphine administered by my new best friends kept the adrenaline high hanging around a little longer. Thus transforming the trip through A&E into a pleasant hazy blur of harassed doctors and nurses, none quite meeting my eye, wondering if I was one of the unpredictable psychotic nutjobs who’d suddenly pull a knife or make a leap from the fourth-floor window. They needn’t have worried. I was only a common or garden depressive; I couldn’t even spice up my recurrent downers with an occasional bout of mania.

  And good old Phil, glued to my side throughout. Dragged from the office or the pub or his wife’s warm bed, he negotiated the whole shameful saga as if there was nowhere else he’d rather be, either. Or, on a mild Friday day night, no one else he’d rather be with, than the wretched bag of bones attempting to bleed out on a park bench behind Sainsbury’s. His tongue had never lost its razor-sharp edge, even if he had started to talk like the posh folk he flogged expensive houses to. He certainly dressed like them. So God help anyone if they even so much as fucking breathed near me in anything other than a calm, professional manner.

  All that jazz I could cope with, as if the drama was happening to some other poor sod with screwed-up brain chemicals. Yet now, when the one constant presence in my life tightened his solid arms around my chest, crushing my face so tenderly against his neck that the suffocating scent of stale aftershave risked succeeding where my botched efforts with a Stanley knife had failed, that was when it always started to really fucking hurt.

  I slipped out of the ward a little after ten. From prior experience, I’d learnt that announcing an intent to self-discharge generated a flurry of excitement. Well-meaning nurses questioned my wisdom. I was a nutcase—unwise decisions were part of the package. I waited until I detected a commotion in the bay next door, then simply wandered away.

  For the best part of the last two years, I’d been shacked up with Darren Eames. On and off, anyhow. We’d met in a professional capacity, a smooth way of saying I’d been a reluctant guest at the local psych hospital and he’d been assigned as my community liaison nurse after they’d foolishly declared me sane enough to be let loose in polite society. I didn’t know the precise rules governing nursing staff fraternising with patients, but I reckon Darren and I broke every single one of them. He swore he’d never made a move on a patient until me. For a long time, I believed him.

  Thank God he was out at work when I quietly let myself into the house. My wrists were bloody killing me; I was in no mood for tears and recriminations. After hauling my abused body up the stairs, I rooted through his bathroom cabinet for codeine. An afternoon blacked out on the sofa beckoned.

  Darren knew me too well. Gingerly holding both bandaged arms up against my chest and like a man three times my age, I made my way back downstairs to find him waiting for me at the bottom. At some point during the night’s shenanigans, Phil would have texted him and reassured him his presence wasn’t required. Hurt blue eyes assessed me speculatively.

  “Let me get you some water for those.” He took the codeine packet from me. “Watch you don’t trip—those trackies are way too big for you.”

  Well, duh. Like I hadn’t noticed. Like I cared.

  Darren Eames was a catch. I was lucky to have him. I knew this because he reminded me almost daily. And in many ways, I concurred. God knows what he saw in me, although when we got the balance of my meds right, Phil insisted I still had amusement value. Nearly ten years my senior, Darren possessed appealing chunky, sturdy good looks. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, he was an exact replica of every other bloke who’d fucked me. A mental health professional might be so bold to suggest my taste in men stemmed from having never recovered from my first ruggedly handsome, blond almost-lover. One of the many reasons I never attended my psych appointments.

  Darren was solicitous, too. Like now, as he helped me onto the sofa, arranged the cushions behind my head and laid my arm at a comfortable angle on the arm rest. His pampering was not unexpected. Out of the bedroom, he handled me with kid gloves, contrasting nicely with the rough, forceful way he threw me around in the bedroom. I had no complaints in the sex department—Darren fucked me like a champ, every chance he got.

  Moreover, as a psych nurse, Darren managed my minor downers (our cute euphemism for my major depressive crises) with as much dexterity as anyone else I’d ever met in a professional capacity. He excelled at monitoring my medication compliance, explained, and forgave side effects, and encouraged me to eat a healthy diet. He was blessed with an even temper and an understanding attitude, as befitted a man in his chosen career.

  Apart from when I disappeared and slit my wrists without warning, then called a local estate agent for support. My “other half” as Darren nauseatingly referred to himself, didn’t care for that very much. It tended to ruffle his professional feathers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me how you were feeling? Why didn’t you call me from the hospital, Matty?”

  He spoke in the gentlest manner possible, kneeling on the carpet in front of me and rubbing the only part of my palm not swathed in white bandages. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I detected an undercurrent of annoyance, outweighing his concerned words. Cloudy blue eyes, almost the same fabulous shade as Alex Valentine’s, but not quite, gazed worriedly into mine.

  “I should have been there, Matty. It’s my job. You should have called me first. Not Phil.”

  And there we had it. All those sentences had a “me” in them. Why was I doing this to him? Why hadn’t I involved him in my nefarious plan to bump myself off? I’d been in the house barely five minutes and already he was nagging. Anyone would think I’d tried to kill myself for my own convenience. As if, sitting on that bench behind Sainsbury’s, I’d been in a sufficiently cohesive, logical frame of mind to consider the impact on anyone else.

  “I don’t understand. You seemed okay. We’ve had a good few months.”

  Christ, if a psych nurse didn’t understand how my brain could randomly flip from contemplating buying tickets for an upcoming Franz Ferdinand gig one day, to wondering how deeply I could get away with cutting my left wrist yet still maintain sufficient dexterity to slice through my right, then what hope was there for the rest of us?

  “It’s really important you open up to me when you’re feeling low, babe. I’m upset you didn’t call me. You know we have therapeutic strategies in place for this. Calling Phil in a crisis is no use. He doesn’t know anything about mental health.”

  If I wasn’t mistaken, that last bit sounded an awful lot like jealousy. Phil might have fuck all knowledge about mental health, but he knew damn well there wasn’t a fucking therapeutic strategy in the world that could reverse the wrongs in my childhood, or bring Brenner back to life. Or, come to that, magically transform Darren Eames into Alexander Valentine. Instead, he offered the next best things; cuddles, clothing, cash for a taxi and unconditional love.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled meekly. Because what else was there to say?

  “I’m only telling you this because I love you, babe. Because I want you to get better. You do know that don’t you?”

  I nodded. I did. Bizarrely, Darren loved me. Cut wrists, downers, overdoses, unemployment benefits, the whole sorry lot. He loved me with a passion bordering on obsessive. Phil reckoned he had some sort of saviour complex or something. Deliberately missing my cue to reassure him I loved him in return, I screwed my face up, as if in pain, causing him to leap from the sofa in alarm.

  “Let me do that for you, babe. Close your eyes for a bit. Let the codeine do its work.”

  He rearranged me on the sofa again, this time with my head in his lap. He was an excellent hair-stroker, and boasted broad, comfortable thighs. For the next hour or so, I drifted away, too sore, too knackered, and too fucking miserable to do anything else.

  CAN’T STAND ME NOW

  (THE LIBERTINES)

  ALEX 2005

  There was something about hotel pillows that always made me wish I’d brought my own from home. My mother unfailingly packed her favourite whenever she travelled. What stopped me copying was that it felt very much like a descent into middle age. A depressing thought when I hadn’t even reached thirty. Especially as I’d developed enough middle-aged tendencies already, such as taking an interest in newspaper articles about pensions, and checking the weather forecast prior to venturing out. I didn’t need to add another.

  Anyhow, my head had hardly graced the overstuffed foam boulder before yet another phone call from my wife disturbed my early evening nap.

  “I thought you were going to phone me after you arrived.”

  “I was just about to, I’ve only this minute picked up the room keys. Everything okay?”

  That innocuous query could go one of two ways. A simple fine, or a tearful, hour-long dissection of where we were in Sam’s ovulatory cycle. Given we had reached the end of another month, her mood was low, although I detected the anticipatory peaks and despairing troughs had flattened out of late, into more of a general despondency. I’d started to want this baby almost as much as Sam did, if only to rescue my wife’s sanity, which was at the mercy of her ovaries.

  Our marriage was possibly beyond rescuing.

  “I’m okay,” she said in a small voice, very unlike the bossy tones she’d displayed earlier. “You know, tomorrow and all that.”

  She wasn’t referring to my interview. Tomorrow meant testing day, the earliest day possible to perform a pregnancy test after the end of a cycle and the beginning of another. Throughout the week leading up to it, Samantha became more and more irritable, then fell into a blue funk for the week afterwards, barely speaking to me. And then we started all over again. Somehow, because I didn’t possess a uterus, it was all my fault.

  “We’ll get through it, Sam.” My usual, useless platitude. But what else could I offer?

  “What if we don’t?” An even smaller voice, and I pictured her curled up in the leather armchair in our cosy kitchen, twin tear tracks running down her cheeks, messing up her mascara.

  “You never know,” I said comfortingly, “It will happen one day. Maybe this month we’ll get lucky. We need to be patient, that’s all.”

  She let out a despairing little moan. “You keep on saying that.”

  “Because it’s true, darling. We’re doing all the right things.”

  Infertility had truly become the gift that kept on giving. The tearfulness I managed, even if I did make a poor show of it. Tears, however, tended to be precursors of anger and resentment, mostly directed at me. Being several hours away made not a jot of difference.

  “That’s okay for you to say, isn’t it? Mister bloody perfect sperm count! And there’s no ‘we’ in this! I’m the one swallowing tablets that make me sick as a dog and then having my legs yanked up in stirrups, while some bloody doctor guzzles about my insides. So no, ‘we’ aren’t doing the right things. I’m doing the right things and having a shit time, while you’re carrying on as normal! Do you even want this baby?”

  And so on. I’d been the recipient of this rant so many times, and I still hadn’t a bloody clue how to handle it. If I tried to soothe her, she accused me of being patronising. If I lost my rag and shouted back, then I was mean. Worse still, I was terrified she’d rile me so much that I’d blurt out something I’d regret, like ‘our marriage is over,’ or ‘I don’t know if I love you anymore’, both of which hovered daily on the tip of my tongue. But what sort of first-rate bastard would I be if I walked away now? For better or worse, those were the vows we’d exchanged at the altar. Sam’s chances of conceiving diminished with every failed cycle of drugs and IVF, and every year that passed. But they’d hit absolute zero without a willing sperm donor. So no, I couldn’t walk out, but Christ, I was tempted. I wasn’t one for bad language, but I was well and truly fucked.

  The best tack when Sam lashed out at me was to count to ten and say nothing until she ran out of steam, then drag the conversation towards mundane topics.

  “How about we plan something nice for next weekend? We could ask…um…maybe we could ask that new colleague of yours and his girlfriend if they’d like to join us for dinner somewhere?”

  Our social life—yet another minefield to tiptoe through. One by one, Sam’s friends had started reproducing, farting out babies left, right and centre. My sister and her kids were a no-go area too—I’d taken to visiting them on my own, always with a ready excuse as to why Sam couldn’t make it. Over the past year, our group of friends had steadily diminished to single figures and box sets.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  God, I needed a drink. Grabbing my wallet, I left my room and headed for the pub next door. Some decent grub and a couple of pints, to help me sleep. Mid-week and out of season, the bar was pretty quiet—its only patrons people like me, passing through.

  A few tables had been commandeered by a rowdy gaggle of young men and women in business suits. A group of casually dressed, middle-aged blokes, maybe on a golfing trip, judging from their clothing, gathered around another. Staying overnight in hotels alone wasn’t something I did very often, and, self-conscious about sitting at a table on my own, I selected a stool at the bar.

  The first pint of bitter slipped down a treat, as did the second. My shoulders dropped from around my ears and my jaw unclenched. I made short work of a third too, to wash down a greasy burger and chips, then, feeling bloated, I switched from gassy beer to red wine. I hated the cliché that men didn’t understand women, but Christ, I didn’t understand my wife.

  “Do you mind if I sit here, mate? The match is starting.”

  I shook my head and smiled politely as a man, maybe a year or two older than me, took the adjacent bar stool. Wallowing in my own misery, I hadn’t noticed I’d selected a seat with a prime view of the widescreen television. I recalled from the radio on the drive down that Chelsea had a home match. I preferred rugby, myself, but there were worse ways of whiling away a couple of hours than in front of the football.

  “No, go ahead. Which team do you support?”

  The man dropped his voice conspiratorially, glancing up at the barman sporting the blue of Chelsea. Draped over the optics was a matching scarf. “Manchester City. But don’t tell anyone in here. I’ll get lynched.”

  His amused, soft northern tones were comforting. “That accent’s a giveaway.” I signalled to the barman for another glass of red. My companion chuckled and nodded for one too.

  “Shall we split a bottle?” he suggested. “If you’re staying for the game. Cheaper for both of us.”

  Feeling mellow, I readily agreed before ordering one bottle of Shiraz and a couple of bags of crisps. God, I deserved this, didn’t I? A break for a few hours, perched anonymously on a bar stool, quietly getting pissed and talking about nothing? A hiatus from eggs and temperature monitoring, from wives and careers? My new companion poured two generous glasses and we clinked them together.

  “Cheers.”

  It wasn’t until halftime, as Chelsea trailed two-one, that I realised my new pal, Gerard-from-Liverpool, was flirting with me. Even more shocking, came the realisation I welcomed the attention and mildly flirted back. After Matt, I’d made an effort to parcel away that side of my nature; the more attractive of my male friends and colleagues would be gobsmacked if they had an inkling of how much they brightened my day.

  None of them were a patch on Matt Leeson though. Gerard didn’t come close either, even though a rumpled grey suit and white shirt, with the top button undone, was a good look on him. Carefully cultivated black stubble disguised a soft jaw line, but he made up for it with a cheeky grin and a bucketload of Liverpudlian charm. Being short and dark-haired helped, because I’d worked out long ago that when it came to men, I had a very specific type. Even if I’d never done anything about it.

  A second bottle of peppery, fruity Shiraz meant I didn’t pull away when Gerard’s knee and shoulder nudged mine. On the contrary, I let his knee linger, the warmth of his lean thigh titillating through the overlying fabric. A fuzzy image of Samantha asleep in our marital bed, at home and alone, floated into my head, then out again just as fast. It was her bloody fault I was getting hammered in the first place, instead of snoring peacefully next to her.