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technically possible to have a shower and brush his teeth while still sitting on the toilet. There he peed angrily, simultaneously leaning across and searching the bathroom cabinet for some leftover antibiotics to fend off his impending tonsillitis. In a perfectly understandable fit of insanity, the previous owner had painted the bathroom a deep blood-red gloss, and one day, when he could face it, Stephen had resolved to set upon the epic task of painting it over with something less oppressive: eight coats of magnolia, perhaps. Until then, it was a little like showering in a crime scene.
    Of course, there were limits to what a new coat of paint could achieve. The flat, he had to admit, had been a terrible, terrible mistake. He had bought it in an emergency, during the insane booze- and grief-blurred weeks after the end of his marriage, as a place where he could be alone and clear his head—a bolt hole, a stopgap, a temporary solution, just until the dust settled and life got better again. In time, perhaps, he’d smarten it up, turn it into a hip, cool and compact bachelor pad, and with this in mind he’d kitted it out with the Holy Trinity of grown men living alone: the games console, the broadband connection and the DVD player. And here he had sat most evenings, watching old movies and drinking too much, trying not to phone Alison: the overriding soundtrack of this period was the pop of a fork piercing the film seal of a ready-meal, and the lesson that he’d learned was harsh but clear—never invest in property when drunk and/or clinically depressed. Slowly, the months turned to years, two years now, and here he still was, shipwrecked and fridgeless. Miss Havisham with PlayStation 2.
    Still, no point dwelling on it. Keep optimistic. Keep cheerful. His luck was bound to change soon. He found the mystery antibiotics: huge, ancient yellow-and-black things, like hornets. In the divorce, Alison had granted him custody of all the leftover pharmaceuticals. He couldn’t remember quite what they were originally for, but an antibiotic was an antibiotic. Returning to the kitchen, he poured himself a beaker of red wine, swallowed one of the pills and, already feeling better, he decided to watch a movie. In the living room, he pulled his most valuable possession out from under the bed: the Toshiba TX 500 digital video projector.
    Of course, there’s no match for the true cinema experience, but the previous Christmas Stephen had unexpectedly made a little extra money from a low-budget educational DVD he’d appeared in—
Sammy the Squirrel Sings Favorite Nursery Rhymes
—in which he’d played the eponymous squirrel. It had been a personal and professional low point, but the reward was the digital video projector which, when connected to his DVD player, projected movies, eight feet by six feet, and only slightly blurred, on the wall, turning his bedsit into a private screening room. If it wasn’t quite the true cinema experience, it was pretty close, and all that was missing was the smell of popcorn, the rustle of sweet wrappers and the presence of a single other human being.
    The white wall opposite the sofa served as his makeshift screen. Three large framed film posters,
Serpico, Vertigo
and
The Godfather Part II,
brought a little bit of Hollywood to southwest London. He took these down, leaned them carefully against the wall, then balanced a pile of books on a kitchen chair, plugged the DVD player into the projector, and turned it on. The room was immediately illuminated with an eerie, almost nuclear blue-white glow.
    He turned to the rows of DVDs and videos. Of his own work for the screen, he owned an episode of
Emergency Ward
on video (the non-speaking, all-wheezing role of Asthmatic Cycle Courier), his poignant, doomed Rent Boy 2 in
Vice City,
a small role in a seemingly endless short film and an Open University mathematics program in which he’d played a Quadratic Equation. He also owned a complimentary DVD of
Sammy the