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middle-aged.'
    'Ah!' said Martin. 'Now I see where all this is leading. It's MLC. Isn't it?'
    'Midland Light Chamber? Millicent Loves Coffee? Melvyn Likes Chat? Mellifluous Little Chubbies? My Little Charlie? My Lovely Chocolate? My Love Chunders? Millicent Loves Charlie? Etcetera. Etcetera.'
    Martin didn't even smile.
    MID-LIFE CRISIS!!!
    Phew, buddies! It was plumbiferous. It was worse than a heavy vellum. It was fiercer than that painful parchment which Ffion had laid on me. And it was accurate: it had the ring of truth.
    'I've told you before, mate. It's survivable.'
    'Even an amputation is survivable. But I don't want anything cut off.'
    'You already have had, mate.'
    'Yeah. My bloody youth.'
    'It's not your youth that's gone. Is it? It's your energy. It's that limitless energy which youth squanders.'
    'I mean, I can't keep this up, Martin.'
    'Here's the deal,' said Martin. 'Get back to your software. Return to your job.'
    'Yeah, but I lost it all before. Didn't I? Lost my job, I lost... hang on a minute: you sacked me. You bought me out from our companies.'
    Martin turned, looked and said: 'What companies, Charlie?'
    I said, 'The games software companies that we owned.'
    He said, 'What are you talking about? We don't own any companies.'
    The ice was melting. Martin didn't have much longer.
    'I'm your old mate, Charlie. Remember? We used to go out for bellyfuls of beer and curry then redecorate shop doorways.'
    'Yes, that was pre-MLC. Wasn't it?'
    'Certainly was, mate. We're friends, Charlie. Okay? Look, I told you at the time that I couldn't come to visit, and that's all going to become clear when you get home.'
    'So, we've never had companies?'
    'No. We haven't, mate. You write software.'
    'What do you do, then, Martin?'
    'Oh, come on. You know that,' he said, 'I'm an actor.'
    An actor? Yes, of course—Martin the chameleon. It was starting to come back now. I recalled that the last thing which I'd seen Martin do was a commercial in which he morphs into a monkey and the monkey morphs into a glass of lager. He told me it had paid disgustingly well. You remember the catchphrase—don't you?—Go Ape For a Monkey's Bum.
    'Sorry, mate,' I said. 'I wasn't reading papers—we weren't allowed newspapers or TV. What are you doing at the moment?'
    'At the National,' he said.
    Okay. I could accommodate this: if Martin was an actor and I was a software writer, a programmer, then my life was building again. It was becoming clear. I was starting to remember what really was true and what was made up. Goodness me! I must have been bad for a long time, buddies. Don't you think?
    'Been out of circulation too long, mate,' he said. 'Got just the thing for you at home.'
    I could picture him at my gaff: spreading the mustard. Made me recall the day, just before I went away, that they dug up the tarmac at the entrance to my block of flats and resurfaced it with a terracotta preparation.
    'What's that for?'
    'Anti-skid coating, sir.'
    Well, I thought, I could do with some of that in my Y-fronts.
    'I act,' said Martin. 'You programme.'
    'Who's the Cyberchick, then? Who's the Cybernurse?'
    'Well, you laid her in hospital. You laid her in there. Didn't you?'
    'Course I did, mate. And Belinda...?'
    'She left you, mate.'
    'And Ffion?'
    'It'll all become clear.'
    I was still trying to sort it all out, mates. If I had felt like an actor in an early Martin Amis novel and I was sitting next to a guy called Martin who was an actor and he was telling me I was a programmer, then was I programming all this? Talk about circles within circles and wheels within wheels. Had I got my wires crossed down the bidirectional highway? Had my data been completely wiped and substituted with somebody else's? Or had it been corrupted and they couldn't properly reconstruct it?
    Oh yes, buddies. They're very good at breaking you down but they can't build you up again, in that place which some people call home.
    Buddies, I'm telling you how it is; I'm telling you how it