Highlights

He woke at 6.25, and lay for a while measuring the violence of his headache and the sundered intimacy of their two beds. The digital clock cast a faint green light across the table between them and drew Archie’s face very dimly out of the blackness. He was sleeping steadily, open-mouthed, eyebrows raised, as if phrasing a question.

Colin felt the horrible tightening under his ribs and pure instinct hurried him out of bed, patting and stumbling in the near-darkness — the blaze of the bathroom lights was like the spasm of his own body, swallowing wildly to gain the two seconds he needed to reach the bowl and double up.

In the shivering frailty afterwards, tears blurring his eyes, the tiny unaccountable prickle of pride… He rinsed his mouth out and cautiously drank a glass of water, leaning against the edge of the basin. In the mirror he saw the bony moppet, ghastly with age, grey-jawed, its grey-and-gold hairdo squashed tall by sweat and sleep. The vein in his temple twitched with its pain, and behind it, slipping in one against the other, the disordered images of the night, the shared taxis, the insane new friends, the cash machines, the immense walk home, and somewhere, in the second club, an image seen only from the corner of the eye, Archie signalling to Aldo that Colin was blind drunk and that this was their moment. A moment that had seemed a long weekend to Colin, gripped by his own simple but absurd idea.

He got his nail scissors out of his sponge bag and, tilting his head forward in the mirror, started hacking at his gold highlights, which came away in small jagged tufts, mixed up with the adjacent grey. He kept moving his scissors in the wrong direction, snipping at the air, poking at his scalp. This showed he was still very drunk. He piled the rough clippings on the glass shelf beside his toothpaste and the cologne he had bought for Archie at Gatwick. A whorish cologne, he’d felt at the time, though that was the one thing he could never say to his young friend, companion, whatever the hell he was.

‘What are you doing?’ said Archie, sounding bored, barely awake.

‘I’ve just been violently sick,’ said Colin.

‘Hmm,’ said Archie.

‘I hate this hair,’ said Colin.

Archie looked at him in the mirror, and what might have been guilt, or maybe some harder impersonal sense of comedy, twitched for a moment under his sleepy frown. Colin put down the scissors.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Archie amicably, but as if he had limited time for the answer.

Colin looked at the little offering of his own hair. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Um…yes, what…is…the matter…’

His heart was pounding at the scale of the opportunity; he held the edge of the basin and looked into it with a pant of panic. He saw that if he started to answer, if he opened that padded and studded door a chink, he would be answering all day, all the way to the airport, and on the flight, and in the long anti climax of the train to Victoria.

He managed to sleep again, with his fist against his forehead, to equalize the pain. Archie was sleeping too. At eight the piercing bleeps of the diggers began. It was Monday morning, it was that time already, they had started and they weren’t going to stop. Archie pulled the covers over his head, and Colin lay across from him, looking at the shrouded hump he had become. There were the brief intermittences, distant rumbling and clanking; and then the bleep again, the bleep of a thousand busy reversals.