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Asa Gunn bares his teeth as he slurps from his water, his strong jaw protruding like freshly baked bread.
    â€˜Well, good luck with the play,’ says Joe.
    The pop star tuts noisily, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Pointless,’ he mutters. ‘Probably pointless.’
    â€˜I guess,’ says Joe, almost accidentally, walking away.
    In 2002, Asa Gunn was the unlikely winner of
Pop Head
, a TV talent competition that took Britain by storm. To the surprise of many, he went on to release quite a few hit records and firmly establish himself in the industry. His songs were usually sweet, sentimental little tunes that he succeeded in singing with a persuasive emotion and in a delicate, genuine-sounding voice. By 2007, many have forgotten Asa’s talent-show origins.
    After years of frolicking around in the tides of pop, where the undertow is vicious and where children sometimes shit, Asa Gunn wants to dip his finger in reality and sample its flavour with a thoughtful suck. This is why he’s come to Manchester. He wishes to act, to see people up close, the audience, he wants to pretend to be someone else in front of them.
    He’s just a jangling bag of nerves as Joe leaves him at the bar. He’s tapping his thigh with a flat hand. His cheeks are drained of colour. Probably just nerves, thinks Joe, as he walks towards the disabled toilet to take a luxurious and spacious crap.
    In the months leading up to Christmas, Life had become obsessed with the Wild World. Any article containing a reference to it she would cut out of the newspaper and pin to the noticeboard in the kitchen. When the Wild World was mentioned on TV she would nudge Joe and say, ‘See?’ in that beautiful voice of hers. She began stealing clothes from the vintage clothes shop she worked in. When she was finally sacked in mid-December she didn’t give a shit. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said to Joe, staring at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. ‘Because everything is changing.’
    Thinking back, Joe realises that Life always hated the old world, or ‘the world’ as it was then called. She hated talking, for example. Life could not see the point in people talking at all. (‘What is there to talk about?’) Life thought talking was complete crap. She used to yawn loudly if Joe strung more than two or three sentences together.
    Life did enjoy sex. But she wasn’t massively bothered about the emotions of it all, the bond it created between her and Joe. She was fairly indifferent to the idea of orgasm. It’s true that she demanded that Joe finger-fuck her to climax on a daily basis but that was simply pragmatic. Her love of sex had nothing to do with desire for pleasure. No. Life seemed to think that if you kept having sex then life was somehow being lived, you were succeeding, you were happy. She wanted to fuck constantly only because sex was the cheapest, most exciting and readily available event that was on offer in Manchester. It didn’t matter that Joe was fairly shit in bed. Having sex meant life wasn’t passing Life by. That’s why her and Joe were forever fucking outside. If a conversation in a pub went on too long, she’d drag him to the toilets and bend over the cistern. Once, in an art gallery, she’d been so worried they were wasting their lives that she’d insisted they fuck in every disabled toilet in the building. There were six. It was tough. Life needed to be constantly living inside events.
    When an article in the
Media Guardian
suggested that the Wild World would have less to do with talking and thought and more to do with actual events she was overjoyed. ‘See?’ she said to Joe. ‘See?’ Within a month she had left for London.
    Joe wipes his arse and drops the dirty paper into thetoilet. As he stares into the bowl his thoughts naturally turn to the crumb. The darling crumb.
    â€˜Proof of Life,’ he whispers,