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switch, but for a while the noise continued to pulse inside his brain. The tormented, feverish dreams had gone, but they were only to be traded for the reality of a cold, stark Monday morning of work. His heavy head started to clear as the dawn shadows began to define the room. A surge of panic exploded in his chest as he reached out by instinct, his bare leg surging into the cold of the other side of the bed.
    No.
    Kay had not come back, had not stayed the night. She stopped over at his a lot, most weekends, in fact. Perhaps she’d gone for a drink with her friend Kelly; two fit girls, two dancers, on the town. The thought appealed to Skinner. Then a sour smell rose in his nostrils. Across in one corner he saw a pile of vomit. He gave thanks that it was confined to the strip-pine floor, missing the oriental rug with several Kama Sutra positions illustrated on it, which had cost him half his month’s wages from an antique shop in the Grassmarket.
    Skinner snapped on the radio and listened to the implausibly cheerful DJ slaver on for an excruciatingly long time, before a welcome, familiar tune alleviated his misery slightly. He sat up slowly and looked at his clothes strewn over the floor and hanging on to the bottom of the brass bedstead, with the desperation of shipwrecked men on driftwood. Then he morbidly contemplated the bottle of empty beer and full ashtray by the bed. These dregs were lit up like an abhorrent composition by thethin early-morning sun, which filtered in through the threadbare curtains. A chilly wind whistled through cracked, rattling window frames, stinging his naked torso.
    Wrecked again last night. Last weekend. No wonder Kay had elected to go back home. Fuckin dingul Skinner . . . fuckin useless phantom bastard . . . acting like an idiot . . .
    He considered that he never used to mind the cold. Now he felt it chipping away at his life force. I’m twenty-three, he thought in nervy desperation, jagged with the hangover. His hand rose to his temples to rub out a twinge of neuralgia he felt might herald the onset of the explosive aneurysm that would blow him into the next life.
    It’s fucking cold in this place. Cold and dark. It’ll never be Australia or California
.
It’s not going to get any better.
    Sometimes he thought about the father he’d never met. Liked the idea of him being somewhere warm, perhaps in what they call ‘the New World’. In his mind’s eye, he could see a healthy and tanned man, perhaps with salt-and-pepper hair and a bronze-limbed family, youthful and blond. And he would be accepted into their midst in an act of reconciliation that would make sense of his life.
    Could you miss what you’d never had?
    Last winter he was skint and he’d tried to stay in, to stay off the drink. He found himself listening to Leonard Cohen, studying Schopenhauer’s philosophical works and reading assorted Scandinavian poets, who seemed to him to be clinically depressed, tortured by those long winter nights. Sigbjorn Obstfelder, the Norwegian modernist who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, was a particular favourite with those great lines of morbid decadence, Skinner’s most memorable being:
    The day it is passing in laughter and song.
    Death he is sowing the whole night long.
    Death he is sowing.
    Sometimes he thought that he could see it on the faces of the old boys in the Leith pubs: each pint and nip seeming to bring the Grim Reaper one step closer, while fuelling delusions of immortality.
    But what sweet delusions!
    And he remembered dragging his girlfriend out to the pub on Sunday afternoon, when all she’d wanted to do was lie around watching television with him.
    Skinner, though, had needed to drink off his Friday night and Saturday hangover and he’d all but jostled her out the door and steered her up Leith Walk to Robbie’s, where several of his cronies were drinking. Yet Kay sat there, the solitary woman, smiling and uncomplaining, indulged or ignored by