Busker vamping vaudeville. Fingers shadow familiar beat on sponge-sprung vinyl. Air-con breeze syncopates a twelve-string jingle jangle with keys to a house no longer his sanctuary. Stretching, looking up to a heaven of nicotine-ochre; he really should give up. So many things.

Johnny smears fetid grease from his daily Spicy Bean Cafe breakfast across his knotted brow, needle-prick sweat forming stalactites in his eyes. 6am, gridlocked, trapped.

Busker beats tuneless time, singing his name, song vague, remembrance innate, scratching him, bee stinging his throat. He loosens his tie, catching Andrex-scabbed razor nicks with a biscotti-filled nail, remnants of varnish cowering in forgotten corners; he had got careless, it could never have lasted.

The Lexus in front trundles three painful yards. Momentary hope dispels as a clumsy four-point-turn is the only outcome. Someone giving-up; perhaps he should too. It would kill Patti of course, torture the kids. Tony too young to understand, but Michael. So sensitive and playground taunts cause life-long scars, and the tabloids.

Would he make the front page? A perverse frisson, masochistic ambition. Who knew. A lack of body bags, a drug-bust, a violent footballer - not sure they would relegate his shame - better dreaming of an atrocity or a minor Royal breaking something playing Polo. It was a private club, though. Nothing illegal, no drugs, no sex even. Fuck, Johnny flaps at a cheese pastry, frustration fuelled backhand propelling it into the footwell, stain growing on the seat, mocking him, describing a permanence on the velour, he'd left behind.

The dismembered mobile glares defiance from the console, battery exiled beneath the passenger seat. Still, no escaping the voicemail, they would be mounting-up in some non-descript warehouse somewhere. Recorded, neatly filed alongside email and texts, a vapour trail. You could destroy the man, but the vapour trail persists. Endures.

Perhaps he should call Patti. He'd wanted to tell her himself, before...

Chocolate-bitter self-awareness. Before the papers, but little hope of that. The paps would have been on his doorstep before he'd removed the rouge, gaudy petals withdrawn back into a Saville Row bud.

He traces the grease stain with his fingertip, carving the outline of Galway Bay into the man-made. Perhaps he should just go, leave the car, walk, run, drop out, give up, find a calm - no need to defy the torrent. No need to drown.

Lights rotate green to red unnoticed. Busker shifts key, still discordant, still atonal, still hard to tell why he is bothering.

Erik Ryman is the author of a novel, ‘God’s Game’, which was nominated for the 1999 Booker Prize, but never won it; a collection of short stories, ‘The Tsetsefly Chronicles’ that came from a highly visited web site, that is no longer around, a novella, ‘Doctor Mooze’, which appeared in a dead boy's name and is a noted artist who can’t draw. His work has been compared (favourably) to the films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, the poetry of Jeremy Reed and the fiction of JD Sallinger, Douglas Coupland, Terry Pratchet and Irvine Walsh, but he has never taken it personally. He is currently completing a new novella ‘Doggone’, and collaborating with Japanese poet and critic Nenko Joretsu on both a collection of 'white noise' poems, ‘TM’ and a novel ‘Nenko and the Red Plastic Clockwork Pig’

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.