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seething with earwigs) must cringe to the sound of other children’s laughter. The fag-strewn, rotten-vegetable palisades of the market where I ingested my first tab of acid, the one bearing the cartoon squiggle of a Pink Panther, must now be suffering vandalism by other biker-jacketed lads, their collars up against the tidal teenage night. The place is still there, in the memory, but I’m absent … So, back there in my cramped seat, I found myself in a kind of altered state, a translucent stasis. After ten minutes of intense meditation—the soul visiting, enraptured; dazed by vividness—I discovered that I was bursting for a piss. And not a little sick. I caught a flash of myself in the darkened train window and saw a half-bald, salmon-faced tippler who hadn’t spoken to his father for ten years. And I knew I had to go. My mission: the khazi.
    It wasn’t easy.
    For a start I upset the game of dominoes the Accountant Couple had been playing ever since I put my notebook away. Such a simple movement—onto my feet, palms pressed against the bare surface, a twist of the hips and then out—but so much carnage. Ten apologies later and I was snaking down the aisle, absorbing the punishment of innumerable glances. Yes, I’m drunk! It’s Christmas Eve, for God’s sake! A quick pratfall over a suitcase someone had helpfully left in my path (and which seemed to intensify the steel blade in my bladder) found me in front of the flimsy door to the loo. A strip on the ridge of the handle showed red. Engaged. I started hammering.
    ‘You in there long?’
    There was no answer. I started to feel the first bilious twinge; a pigeon-like undulation of the Adam’s apple. ‘I’m bursting …’
    I knocked again. Silence. ‘Look, whatever you’re doing, I’m, I’m … in great need here.’ No response. They could at least answer, it being the season of goodwill and all that. I changed tack and kicked the door instead. A sort of shuffling sound came from inside. Then the unmistakable scrunching of harsh toilet paper being broken into strips. Oh, Christ. A number two-er … I must, I must piss! ‘Oh, come on, take your time. When are you coming out? Some time within the next decade would be—’
    The toilet flushed: a muffled evacuation followed by a serene hiss. Under the cover of this sound I started to shout at full throttle: ‘How long does it take to pull your trousers up? I mean—for God’s sake!’
    Then the door exploded open. It was, I’m not happy to relate, Tracksuit Man.
    At this point my memory gets a little hazy, but I remember feeling something like the sudden disintegration of all my limbs at once, as if they were filled with hot washing-up water. Simultaneous to this was the sensation of a sweat instantly covering my entire head, like an icy tea cosy. The huge man searched my face until our eyes met with a dismal familiarity His intensely blue, mine intensely afraid. I was about to say, ‘Haven’t we met somewhere be—,’ when he pushed past me, knocking me into the obstructive suitcase for the second time.
    Then I was throwing up.
    I’m back in my booth now. The game of dominoes continues at a cracking pace. Tracksuit Man is fifteen seats away down the carriage. He still looks familiar somehow, like the Ghost of Beatings Past. His brutally shorn head is now wearing a Santa hat—at the insistence of his delightful children, no doubt. I’m hoping we can co-exist for the duration of the journey without me actually dying. For the moment we seem to have a fragile symbiosis—like Chamberlain’s with Hitler, like Antony’s with Octavius. Ah, the respect that comes from facing down the oppressor. I bet mine was the last face he expected or wanted to see as he pulled open that toilet door! My first playful thought was: we must stop meeting like this. Admittedly this was before I fell backwards over the suitcase (sustaining injuries to both arms—the pain of which has now joined the throbbing in my head).