The Reason Your Shampoo Wants You to Use More Shampoo is Because That Means You Will Buy More of Your Shampoo

Meet Eric and Carl

I have never enjoyed asking people to buy my books but I've decided I'm not going to worry about that with my latest, which is a novel called Everything Will Swallow You. To put it in the simplest terms, this book is far too important for me to allow myself to get bashful about that sort of thing. So I wanted to give you the good news that, if you pre-order it here from the excellent 146-year-old bookshop Blackwells, they will send you a signed first edition hardback, wherever you happen to be in the world. Even better, they will not charge you for delivery. This is a perplexingly brilliant deal (e.g. it normally costs me around £30 to send a hardback from the UK across the Atlantic, tracked, with Royal Mail) and I wanted to let you all know about it as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how many pre-orders come in or what it spells for the health of my right hand: in a few weeks I will take the six-hour round train ride to the Blackwells warehouse in Gloucester and sign every Everything Will Swallow You hardback it contains.

In another sense, of course, it does very much matter how many pre-orders come in, since each one gives this novel a better chance of being widely stocked in shops in September. Thank you if you are helping with that. You are giving the most important book of my life - a book that has already been kicked around, and almost lost altogether, due to the crueller side of the publishing industry - a chance to survive, and maybe even flourish.

You might have already seen the other day’s post revealing Joe McLaren’s wonderful cover art and explaining a little about Everything Will Swallow You’s difficult path to publication, but I also wanted to give you a little taster of the book, so - drum roll - I’m publishing the first chapter here, today. It’s too long to fit onto an email so you’ll need to click through from here to the web version to read the full thing…

1. THE REASON YOUR SHAMPOO WANTS YOU TO USE MORE SHAMPOO IS BECAUSE THAT MEANS YOU WILL BUY MORE OF YOUR SHAMPOO

The deer had been kicking the shit out of the hedgerows again. You could see their trail of destruction, curiously evenly spaced, all along the high ridge. ‘Bambi and the vegan diet are a clever bluff where deer are concerned,’ thought Eric. ‘They lull everyone into thinking they’re delicate peacenik flower children when in truth they’re punk anarchist mystics.’ This lot, here in west Dorset, would nut down fence-posts as if it were booting-out time on Friday night and the fence-posts had just called their sister a slag, sail through barbed wire like it was the mesh curtain over their gran’s back door and trash your delphiniums, never once pausing to tot up their fucks along the way. Over in the big field where the farmer particularly didn’t want them to go and a triangle of spidery dying elms looked like the marker posts of some oncoming dark ritual, they’d pop up from their hiding places in the cabbage in threes, gallop silently away, then freeze and stare back with a synchronicity that appeared choreographed.

‘They’re checking you out, pal,’ Eric told Carl. ‘Fellow oracles. Intimidated by your power.’

‘I was thinking we could try that new Indian in Axminster tonight,’ said Carl. ‘I fancy a break from cooking. I think I’m leaning towards a dhansak.’

‘Iggy Pop has deer energy, I reckon. Like one of those whatdcharmacall them, the little ones. Muntjac. The way he used to run around the stage. Or maybe he’s more like a bantam rooster, darting up to everyone with his chest puffed out, always legging it about in those little circles. Did I tell you about the one my neighbours had when I lived in Wales? Right little hooligan, he was. There was no hedge between the gardens so he’d be around a lot. The prick would come at me, claws flying all over the shop, every time I turned away from him. I’d be always walking about with all these cuts on the back of my legs.’

‘Dhansak is a curious one. The takeaways never seem to come to an agreement on the spice level. I’ve had some with quite a kick to them – nothing that I couldn’t handle, obviously, but the kind that would have someone of your inferior constitution blowing your nose every six seconds – but I’ve had some pitifully weedy ones, too. I see Iggy more as a centaur, myself. The bare chest and that feeling you get that he might have a couple of possible extra legs that he could whip out in moments of crisis. Hold on. Did you hear that? Over there. Was that a dog? It sounded a lot like a dog.’

The day, bracingly cold, chasing away weeks of pissant winds and concerningly lukewarm rain blasts, was one of those where a sun halfway up the sky will hold the landscape frozen in perfection for a number of hours, offering a bittersweet illusion of permanence. Dorset was a painting, balanced in the admiring hands of Horus. Where the busy little rivers had leaked, the ice, splintered by bootsteps, resembled the kind of glass you might find on the floor of an abandoned pub, but under the vandalised hedgerows it remained shadowed and solid. Soon it would begin to spread again and the Marshwood Vale would be drained of comfort, burping and groaning with the part-explicable sounds of the greedy January night. The transition was something Carl could already sniff on the ground directly in front of his nose. Looking at his only timepiece, which was now falling fast over the cliffs three miles to the south, it struck him that, as usual, they were going to be late. Eric had agreed to call at the Meat Tree’s house – which was around half an hour’s drive from where Eric had parked the van – to pick up the keys to the manor at five. The Meat Tree had emphasised that he had to go out by six at the absolute latest. It was now at least a quarter past four, and where was the van parked? Two miles away? More?

‘Here,’ Carl thought, ‘is one of the drawbacks of going out on walks with a collector.’ The impulse that made Eric feel the need to own nineteen Linda Ronstadt albums, including several from after the mid-seventies, when she began to go off the boil, was that same one which, half an hour before, had made him insist on following a footpath purely because it was one of the dwindling number in the Vale that he and Carl had not previously ticked off their list. It certainly could not be described as a bad footpath. Whether it was a necessary footpath, however, was highly debatable. And now here they were, a mile on from its source, ducking away from a potential Border Collie Situation through a hole in the hedge made by insurrectionary deer, onto an unmarked path beneath the steep brim of an Iron Age hill fort, in the direction of who knew what.

‘I’ve got a lot of trust in deer, me,’ said Eric. ‘What you’ve got to remember is that every place you walk, every one of these routes that some guy in an office decided to stick a sign on saying ‘Bridleway’ or ‘Public Footpath’, was originally made by deer, long ago. They know where they’re going and they know the best way to get there.’

‘I do completely see that,’ said Carl. ‘But at the same time we have no way of knowing where the particular pre-Christian deer who originally made this path were going. My guess is that it probably wasn’t a Victorian terrace on the outskirts of Sidmouth owned by a book dealer, nor a haphazardly parked vehicle waiting to take them to it.’

‘Cheeky fucker. That was some top parking.’

‘You left it sticking half out into the lane, looking like a stolen vehicle somebody abandoned before fleeing into dense woodland to evade the police. I’ll be impressed if it’s even still drivable by the time we get back.’

What would you have thought, if you’d been relaxing in the grass behind a hedge – a dense one, as yet unwrecked by a nihilistic buck or doe – and heard the conversation of Eric and Carl, from their unseen position on the other side of the brown-green divide? Would you have pictured, in your mind’s eye, a long-married homosexual couple? Two rivalrous professors of philosophy or zoology out for a stroll: one unlikely, a rough and ready maverick motormouth, the other more housebroken and genteel? A man still assimilating after arriving from the extensive and unknowable lands of the north, and his well-spoken friend from . . . another country, somewhere that you couldn’t quite pinpoint? Had there been a space in the bottom of the hedge, and had you spied, through it, two booted feet accompanied by four furry ones, you might have wondered where along the path the missing biped was speaking from, or perhaps just thought, ‘Oh, that’s sweet: the talkative man and his erudite migrant lover have a pet whippet.’ Whatever the case, it is extremely unlikely that you would have correctly guessed what was there, hidden from you by the tightly knotted twigs and branches.

The union of Eric and Carl Inskip was one that would not have been easily anticipated by society but, like any couple who’d been cohabiting for close to two decades, they were not unprone to sarcastic bickering. If somebody had witnessed this bickering – which Eric and Carl took careful measures to ensure almost nobody ever did – they might have observed that, more often than not, it was Eric who played the role of bickeree. The ways in which Eric had infuriated Carl, in the almost nineteen years they had known each other, were so numerous as to be unlistable but, even at his most exasperated – even at the height of his infuriation with Eric’s tardiness, his forgetfulness, his sticky-handedness, his repeated failure to close the door while urinating in the downstairs toilet, his general way of progressing through life like a boulder pinballing down a tiered forest chasm – Carl repeatedly found disarmament in Eric’s endearing way of never speaking to him as someone outside his realm of being, never as a lesser or something other, but in the casual manner that you would speak to a close, trusted long-time friend. In short – and, as he thought this, he suspected that at least one ex-lover might refute it – if you ever happened to be mad at the guy, he somehow made it impossible for you to stay that way for a length of time that would significantly erode your relationship.

As they rounded the base of the hill fort, an abrasive choir of voices could be heard directly below them: a quacking conference, with no space for one authoritative voice to raise above the din and call for order. Through the gaps in the trees could be seen a sloping field where, on a large patch of ice, 200 or more ducks had gathered, apparently for no reason other than to discuss what was most pressingly on their minds.

‘Ah, man, I do not enjoy that,’ said Eric. ‘Why are all those ducks there, like that? There’s no reason for them to be there. There’s not even a pond or river. It’s just a field. I’m telling you, pal, I’m not happy about it. That’s far too many ducks.’

‘I love you,’ thought Carl. ‘You are a ridiculous human being, and I love you.’

As the path followed the curve of the earthworks, it pitchforked into two fading prongs then died away to lethargic winter-bramble mess and decomposing tree-trunk muddle. Above the two friends, the Iron Age fortification steepened. Did the deer who had originally formed this path – Norman? Roman? – lose heart and decide to throw in the towel at this point? Thinking about the dog, and the falling sun, Carl pressed on, thorns tearing at his flanks, with Eric a few steps behind. Every time he dropped a gear, allowing his companion to catch up, he could hear a small whistling noise coming from Eric’s chest: like, but in a slightly different register to, the other small whistling noise he had recently witnessed on car journeys when Eric became visibly troubled by congested traffic or the senseless actions of his fellow drivers. Carl leapt a fallen tree and, seeing no easy way through directly ahead, began to scale the steep prelapsarian wall to his left. For this exercise, being quite sure there was no other human in sight besides Eric, he took his weight off all fours and rose to his full height, which was his preferred state, particularly where severe gradients were concerned.

Behind him, accommodating the change of direction less easily, Eric remonstrated with piked branches and vines.

‘Ey, do one, you divvy.’

‘Lay off, soft lad, or you’ll get what’s coming.’

‘I paid thirty quid for these here keks, you fuckin’ binhead, and I’m not having the likes of you ruining them.’

‘Everything ok, back there?’ asked Carl.

‘Sound, pal. Don’t you worry about me.’

Those who know Dorset well – those who, like Eric and Carl, have spent many hours deep within its creases, slits and folds – know it is the most deceptive of the West Country counties. It is the taller-than-average broad-shouldered gentleman you meet and think ‘Oh my, look at his freshly cut, neatly parted hair and tailored clothes, he must be enormously civilised – maybe I will accept his invitation to dinner’, whose house you then go to, only to find it is a hole in the ground containing half a chair, a corn dolly and the remnants of an old fire. Driving the top roads, eyes directly ahead, you’d never suspect a place like the one Eric and Carl found themselves in right now existed. Unfarmed, uncoppiced, unmanicured, unpollarded, unconserved, unmaintained, it was as toothy as it was halcyon. It was the place foliage came to live its best unfettered off-grid life, unafraid to be a cunt: a dark spunking of undergrowth where trees did their most clandestine bidding and badgers and foxes and rabbits hid from every soul in Christendom who’d ever wished them ill. Eric found the steep barrier of earth that faced them tough going. Knots of old brambles grabbed and tore at him. Unseen tree trunks punched at his shins. He felt that a spirit not far from the surface of where they trod had been awakened and its one mission was to vanquish him. ‘Will this be the venue, then? The one where I will finally expire?’ he thought, looking up into the latticework of the trees on the rim of the ancient tribal defence point from his position, on his back, on the rapidly crisping damp earth, where he’d been knocked for the third time in as many minutes. ‘Here, in soft southern Tory Wessex? I, who have made my bed in the L8 postcode of Liverpool, and behind a tin mine in the Cornish interior, and in the bit of Nottingham people in Nottingham warned you not to live in, and under the frowning brow of a Welsh mountain, and, for four whole months, opposite a bookies in one of the more antagonistic towns in south Derbyshire?

‘But – hold your horses, pal – what is this miracle, that is now saving me? Why am I now floating above the ground, free of the tawdry attentions of underbrush and sharp bristles? Is this my final ascent to the Good Place? And what will be the verdict when I am there? What will count against me, when all is added up: how many of my blunders and infractions?’

But it was just Carl, hoisting him from his damp place of despair towards the waiting sky.

They were an hour and three minutes late arriving at the Meat Tree’s place, a tall redbrick house, built to last, where barely an inch of interior wall was not covered by fabric, art or bookshelves. This was what the clock on the van’s dashboard informed Carl, who, once night had fallen, relied on devices less romantic than the skies for his timekeeping. Fortunately the Meat Tree, having known Eric for over a decade, had made allowance, substituting ‘six’ for ‘seven’ when emphasising to Eric his deadline for leaving the building. A few acquaintances of Eric’s had distanced themselves from Eric over the years as a result of his apparent antipathy for all notions of punctuality – one even going so far as to arrange an official summit to discuss the problem – but the Meat Tree wasn’t one of them. Possibly the central fact to know about Eric was that Eric was Eric and was always going to be Eric and that was just something you had to accept if you wished to regularly continue to spend time in Eric’s company. In a more general sense, the Meat Tree was also aware how pointless it was to campaign to alter the core ingrained behavioural habits of any man of sixty-seven, being almost one himself. He opened the door to his friend with a grin and a fraternal pat on the shoulder which, once he saw the state of Eric’s trousers and footwear, evolved into a restraining arm.

‘You know the rule, Inskip,’ said the Meat Tree. ‘Shoes off before you come in. Why not give yourself a good old shake while you’re at it.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Eric, complying on both fronts. ‘I feel like a naughty horse. Why don’t you get me to do a little dance while I’m at it? I’m pretty nifty at the Watusi, but it’s been a while.’

From the window of the van, with a subtle smile spreading across his face, Carl watched this scenario, which bore sturdy resemblance to one he’d hypothesised on the way here. He enjoyed visiting the Meat Tree’s house, loved its maximalist ambience of learning and needlepoint warmth, but, not having the luxury of footwear of his own to remove, had decided to stay put, being worried about shitting up Meat’s nice Turkish rugs. He also had a Rosamond Lehmann novel he was keen to get back to, even if that meant clambering over the seats for half a dozen hastily devoured pages in the back of the van.

‘That new?’ asked a now marginally less-soiled Eric, stepping into the Meat Tree’s hallway and pointing to a painting above him at the head of the bare wooden staircase, depicting a lugubrious woman in a hooded black cowl, whose warning eyes appeared to track his every step as he ventured deeper into the building.

‘Fairly new,’ said the Meat Tree. ‘I got it in Bridport, off Salford Ricky.’

‘Ricky! Bloody hell. You don’t want to get anything from that tottering fiasco. You should have come to see me. I’ve got a ton of depressing shit like this in the lock-up.’

‘Ah, he’s not a bad sort, Rick.’

‘I’ve known shadier Mancunians, I will admit. Shite jackets, though. Don’t know how he manages to find so many quite that shite. He must go to Shite Jacket Warehouse or something. So who is she, the bird?’

‘Well, the title on it says “Welsh Woman” so I’m deducing from that that she may have been a Welsh woman. Mid-seventeen hundreds, I’d guess, from the Palladian frame. There’s a signature but it’s almost completely faded. Carl not with you today? Tea?’

‘He’s in the van, sleeping. We did a long walk. I knackered him out. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him panting that much. Nah, pal. You’re all right. I won’t keep you. I know you’ve got to leg it. So what’s the deal with this place tomorrow?’

‘The Meat Tree’ was of course not quite what it had said on the Meat Tree’s birth certificate, in 1957, when it had been presented to his soon-to-emigrate parents in Astakos, Greece. The name derived from a misunderstanding by Eric and Carl’s friend Mel, back when Mel and Eric had briefly been a couple. ‘Who’s Dimitri?’ Mel had asked, the first time Eric had referred to his bibliophile acquaintance in a text message to her. ‘Are you going mental?’ asked Eric, who, while aware of Mel’s occasional feathermindedness, was unnerved by this blank spot, since she’d already met Dimitri twice and heard Eric talk about him on dozens of occasions. Later that day, in person, they straightened it out. ‘Oh, DIMITRI!’ said Mel. ‘So that’s what he’s called. I always thought you were saying ‘the Meat Tree’. I had assumed there was some kind of story behind it but didn’t like to ask. If I’m honest, I did think it was a bit weird.’ By assuming the story, Mel – in a thoroughly Mel act of Melness – had made the story, become the story. From that point on, to the weary forbearance of the Meat Tree himself, the name had stuck.

In truth, the Meat Tree didn’t look much at all like a meat tree. What nobody could think, upon scrutinising him for the first time, was ‘Giant Redwood made of ham’. He weighed a little less than a child’s go-kart and stood fractionally over five and a half feet high, with wiry grey hair, a neat beard and clean hands with long fingers and smooth fingernails. Ideal fingers for gently examining and evaluating rare books, which was how, for the last couple of decades, since being made redundant from his post at a small municipal library on the Somerset Levels, the Meat Tree had earned a living.

What the Meat Tree and Eric had in common was that their jobs involved picking through the clutter and dust of lives, relieving others of what they had realised they couldn’t take with them or what, if those same others were too late in coming to that epiphany, sisters and brothers and children and nephews and nieces and grandchildren did not have the time or inclination to selectively put up for auction. They were the ones who placed it back into circulation, finding a slot for it on the ever-spinning carousel of Lovingly Made Hard-To-Find Old Things That Get Better As They Age. Neither had chosen their profession for its anthropological perks but they enjoyed them almost every day. They heard so many small, intertwining stories, they couldn’t help but become storytellers themselves. They hung around along the seams of life, regularly experiencing truths about its shape and weight that most people rarely did. But that was where their similarities ended. While the Meat Tree’s specialisation was books, Eric dealt in used records, ‘plus a few other bits and bobs’ as he would put it, although the ‘few other bits and bobs’ part had begun to dwindle more recently. The people who bought what the Meat Tree had to offer spoke quietly and with great care, as if wiping every word with a soft cloth before it left their mouth. They complimented one another on their expensive scarves. They circled awkwardly beneath bookshelves in a dance of exemplary manners until finally one of them gave in and reached the shelf first and picked up the very first edition hardback the other one had been trying to hunt down for years and had travelled here, several hundred miles, specifically to find. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ they asked. ‘No, please, really, be my guest,’ they said. ‘Exquisite endpapers on that,’ they said.

Eric’s clientele, by contrast, wore politeness like a thin summer cardigan. Upon entering the building and seeing a box marked Rare cosmic jazz: 1/2 price!, they relieved themselves of this impractical garment by absentmindedly letting it fall to the floor, where it was soon trampled by shoes discreetly stained with street vomit, piss and last night’s spilled ale. The money that many of them might have been better advised to spend on toiletries they splurged on freakbeat 45s and scarce Afrofunk and post-punk test pressings. Any concept of acceptable elbow room that society had taught them became a distant memory, in sight of their prey. Devoid of daintiness, the dance they performed was that of haggling goats. You could almost hear the clack of locked horns as an agreement was reached. When it wasn’t, the time lag and physical distance between saying ‘Ok, I’ll leave it in that case, mate’ and mumbling ‘Stingy wanker – he’ll be lucky to be get half that much for something in that condition’ was expertly judged, just as it had been so many times before. A few of them were just casually looking for a bit of recorded music to listen to in its most authentic form, but most were lost in a descending mist, striving to fulfil some atavistic hunter-gatherer need, as urgently and single-mindedly as if the survival of their nearest and dearest depended on it. What they generally discovered when they got out of the mist and back to their front rooms was that they owned some more records to add to some shelves that already contained a large number of records.

The beauty of Eric and the Meat Tree existing in independent universes within the same universe was that they could help one another out every now and again with no peril of treading on one another’s toes, no danger of crossing the streams from their proton packs while rounding up their ghosts. Eric read books but felt scant physical attachment to them. When he’d finished them – and, no less frequently, when he hadn’t – he left them, usually much stickier and more dog-eared than when he’d found them, in friends’ bathrooms, hotel rooms, on trains, buses, benches, on walls above blacktop estuary footpaths. The Meat Tree was a person only lightly shaped by the musical revolutions he’d lived through, not tied to any genre or era, a marginally more than passive consumer of other people’s recommended noise, which is to say he had a Spotify account he sometimes remembered to use, a couple of Beatles LPs and a copy of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends in the loft and just about knew who PJ Harvey was – mainly because, nine years ago, she’d ventured into the Meat Tree’s short-lived physical book shop in Lyme Regis and purchased a hardback about pagan iconography in the churches of Wessex.

The key that the Meat Tree now placed into Eric’s hand, entrusting him with its safekeeping, would tomorrow open the door to a building more than three times the size of any that either man had ever resided in: an eighteenth-century manor house containing one of the most flabbergastingly excessive book collections in southern England. The Meat Tree had already done his work in Batbridge Manor, over the course of three intense and exhausting visits, separating what he would offer the family of Batbridge’s late owner a non-insulting fee for from what would soon be removed by a less-highly-regarded book dealer and a house clearance company. During the course of his investigations, he had lifted a stray horsehair blanket and spotted two split cardboard boxes, both half-filled with long-playing vinyl.

‘Of course, I can’t vouch for its condition,’ he told Eric. ‘The place is riddled with damp and probably hosts at least three warring colonies of rats. And what’s in there might just be worthless crap. But maybe there’s some more that I missed. And you really need to see this place – as an experience alone it’s worth the price of the petrol. I swear to you that it’s not quite of this planet. Whatever the case, it’s probably worth a look.’ It was always worth a look. That was more than an attitude or piece of advice. For Eric, it was a philosophy to live by. What kind of purveyor of vintage items would he be without it? Probably the kind who no longer purveyed vintage items at all but was living a far less varied and interesting sixty-something life after retiring from a significantly more beige job.

Carl, now back in the passenger seat after finding himself regretfully unable to focus on Rosamond Lehmann’s 1932 novel Invitation to the Waltz, watched his best friend emerge from the Meat Tree’s front garden under the glow of a street light, neglect to reclose the gate, then cross the road back towards the van, a spring in his half-limping step. Between his index finger and thumb he held a piece of knotted string attached to a dark brown metal key of comically large dimensions which he dangled theatrically at Carl in the manner of a man who, thanks to his conversational swagger and influence, had secured the use of the honeymoon suite of an exclusive medieval castle hotel for the weekend. ‘Ok good,’ thought Carl, ‘it looks as if he isn’t going to die just yet.’

Ninety minutes earlier, scaling the hard-packed former defence pinnacle of the Durotriges tribe, feeling 76 kilograms of wheezing, thorn-damaged record dealer on his back, he had felt less confident about that.

‘Can you just give me a minute or two, pal?’ Eric had croaked in a stale scrap of his normal voice, when Carl, having negotiated the worst the hill had to offer, had deposited him on a ledge just under the summit’s shaggy, overhanging rim. Returning to all fours for the final part of the ascent – though it was dusk on a weekday, there was no guarantee that fellow walkers would not be milling around the summit of the hill fort – Carl had sought out a soft spongy patch of grass to stretch out on while he waited, with a good view of the last of the sun dropping over the distant cliffs, and, feeling the cooling grass under his tail and hands, permitted himself to indulge in a brief analysis of the destination he and Eric had reached in life.

It does feel like a destination, he had thought. And not a bad one, at that. Just over the last green shoulder on the left, less than four miles distant, in the narrow cleft of a salt-blasted valley, could be found the cottage they shared: an overstuffed, rented cottage, certainly, but an attractive rented cottage, significantly more idyllic than the majority of places they’d lived together in the past, with a spacious garden, and where they felt reasonably confident in being permitted to stay – and being able to afford to stay – for the foreseeable future. After a little wobble during the nadir of the pandemic, Eric’s business had bounced back to rude health, and beyond. No doubt aided by the sea air, Carl’s coat had never looked in better condition. Clients Eric talked to about the gigs he’d been to in his youth often closed one uncomprehending eye when he cited dates, having mistaken him for a man a decade younger than he was, partly due to his skin and posture but also due to his uncontainable entrepreneurial energy, which Carl had never seen him spark and fizz with more of. Any restrictions regarding their diet were imposed by health concerns, not financial ones. Their domestic environment – although never quite as clean and tidy as Carl would have preferred it to be – was quietly earthy and stylish, filled with the chairs and tables and cookware Carl (and, to a more distracted, less aesthetically particular extent, Eric) wanted, rather than cheaper stand-in versions of it. They owned six charismatic chickens, none of which attacked their legs when their backs were turned. Their local swimming pool, though a bit chilly for ten months of the year, was pleasingly uncramped, measuring a total of 139 million square miles, and, with a little light trespassing, could be reached on foot in less than eleven minutes. Their life was dominated by Eric’s work but left Carl ample time to follow his passions: needlecraft, reading, Dolly Parton, husbandry, obscure historical facts, snorkelling. They went on holiday, sometimes, but – since there was so little to escape from – didn’t especially feel the need to.

‘Have I cursed us, in a moment of absentmindedness?’ Carl had asked himself, as he stretched out on that rapidly cooling grass. Did I break the golden rule of never saying ‘Things are going really well right now!’ because it’s always when you say ‘Things are going really well right now!’ that everything bursts into a giant rolling ball of fire, or at least begins to splinter and crack? If so, at which point must it have been that I let my guard down? Six, seven weeks ago? That was when he’d first noticed the noise: the one that leaked from Eric’s body in the front of the van when he was dealing with anything even marginally stressful in front of him on the road, the one that Carl tried not to worry about but instinctively wanted to reach over and repair, like a plumber poised with a putty knife in front of a damaged pipe. Then there’d been the forgetting of things that had never previously been forgotten: names of oft-visited places and favourite records and songs and even bands. A map incorrectly read. The year of a record’s pressing, in perhaps the most shockingly uncharacteristic error of all, incorrectly identified. Just little incidents, but enough of them for Carl to take notice. And then a moment of larger significance. From his bedroom window Carl had seen an old man in their garden, with an old man’s late autumn posture, taking two packages from the postman at the gate, then dropping the packages, then bending to pick the packages up, failing, then having another go, then, finally, on the third attempt, finding success. ‘Who is that old man, stealing our mail?’ Carl had thought, before releasing that he was looking at his housemate: looking at him from an angle he’d never looked at him from before; not his usual Carl angle, but perhaps the angle from which others now saw Eric. And then just a few minutes ago, in that wild place below him, this vulnerability that might have been predominantly comic, even a year ago, but which now, bewilderingly, unbalancingly, wasn’t.

There was a lot Carl knew about himself and a lot he didn’t know. In fact, Carl sometimes wondered if there was any other creature on the whole planet who simultaneously knew so gargantuanly much and little about themselves as Carl knew about Carl. Carl knew that Carl was fundamentally kind and had never intentionally done anything to hurt another living being. Carl knew that Carl had an immense tolerance for spicy food, more immense probably than that of any human, even more immense than Eric’s friend Reg Monk who, it was said, had once eaten all of the hottest curry in the spiciest restaurant in Newcastle upon Tyne – a curry so hot that the manager’s official policy was that he’d waive the bill on it if anybody was superhuman enough to eat all of it – then ordered it again, polished off every last morsel, then had gone home and stunk his house up so much that his wife Jill had moved into her sister’s place for the following four days, taking the kids with her. Carl knew that Carl possessed a capacity to be a more sociable being than he was, and that a whole other strand of happiness would spread from the fulfilment of that capacity, but that circumstances rendered it almost completely unexplorable, and that was fine, because in the grand scheme of life, things could be much worse, and indeed had been. Carl knew that Carl was more intelligent than Eric but knew that did not make him better or more important than Eric. Carl, though deeply in love with Wikipedia, also knew some of the minus points of living in an age where something like Wikipedia existed. Carl knew that Carl was sensitive and that life would be less painful if he wasn’t so sensitive but also that he didn’t want to be less sensitive, no way, not in a million trillion years, not for all the spicy food in Thailand. Carl knew that he would like to stand proud and upright in public and walk around on his two stronger back legs and converse with more people than just Eric and his friend Mel and knew that his self-esteem would be greater if he did and knew all the problems this would cause and why it was utterly prohibited by Eric, and by himself. But Carl didn’t know where and when or to whom he’d been born. Carl didn’t know why he was covered from head to toe in fur or why he had a tail or why he had four hands – exceptionally clever, dexterous hands, each equipped with two opposable thumbs – or why those hands had a total of twenty-four fingers and why they were hidden in the folds of what looked like fluffy paws. Carl didn’t know what the official name was for what he was, or if there was one. Carl didn’t know why he was here, right now, only that it was right, or as right as anything ever could be, in this big cosmic accident people called ‘the galaxy’, with its knock-on effect, ‘consciousness’.

But within the enigma that Carl was to Carl, there were narrow triangles of knowing: they came to him in slivers of phosphorescent light, in a language his brain didn’t speak, but – because that brain was a sophisticated and empathetic one – could roughly translate into noises splashed and rutted with meaning. The triangles frightened him on occasion, especially as he wasn’t totally sure whether they were in his head or in the world or both. Some of them contained images he knew he’d already seen, without knowing where or when. These images made him feel like time didn’t exist, which also unnerved him, because he loved time; loved the way it shaped the landscape, loved the way the sun abided by it, loved what it did to faces and to music and to objects crafted with passion and honesty by hands.

The triangles had slowly become larger and more frequent in recent years. And something about that frequency gave him another knowing that he felt physically, coursing innately through him, felt in his face and legs and arms and tail and torso and eyes and all eight of his thumbs: the knowing that he was not destined to be here very long. But he didn’t talk about that or worry about it. It grounded him, in fact, framed his relationship with Eric. It allowed him to find an extra solace, every day, as he observed Eric. The solace that Eric would always be completely Eric – both right now and after Carl was no longer around. It was a given: one of the facts of life. This new, potentially diminished, more vulnerable Eric – furthermore, this new, potentially diminished, more vulnerable Eric in some not too distant future, without Carl there to look out for him – was not part of the plan. Carl had never expected it, pictured it, or allowed for it, and it knocked him sideways. It was a cold thought, colder than the ground he was stretched out on had become since being deserted by the day’s strong, pragmatic sun.

But now they had a vegetable dhansak, a chicken jalfrezi, four onion bhajis and two portions of pilau rice and everything was going to be ok.

On the track leading down to the cottage, the puddles were zipping themselves back into their translucent sleeping bags in preparation for another cold clear night. Eric edged the van carefully down the track leading to the cottage, the aroma of the double-bagged food, cooling in the footwell beneath Carl, a song whose temptress of a chorus seemed to beg, ‘Touch that accelerator a little bit harder, big boy.’ Had they arrived here any later they’d probably have had to leave the van at the top of the hill, near the main road, due to the ice, and stagger down on foot: a zigzagging gravelly stumble of well over a mile in the dark. Not far inland, houses spilled down hillsides like dice shaken from a velvet bag and formed villages and hamlets, but here, in the space between the main arterial road and the sea, which was much bigger than it appeared from that road, the buildings were arranged misanthropically. There had been a community in this spot, with its own chapel, but not for more than 200 years. The chapel was now missing a couple of walls and attracted mostly four-legged worshippers: rabbits, stoned-looking cattle and sometimes – when he needed a quiet place to read, away from the late 1960s proto heavy metal albums Eric liked to play – Carl. Six hundred yards up the hill, at diagonal points north of the cottage, situated more or less the same distance away from each other, were three farms: one vacant and for sale at a price deemed by Eric to be ‘a colossal piss-take’, another owned by Dan and Anne Fentonbrook, a well-spoken couple from the South East who were still perceived as fresh-faced incomers to the area (they’d moved here twenty-five years ago, in 1998) and a third occupied by a Dorset native called Russell Loosemore, now well into his eighties, who, if you talked to him for long enough, and he hadn’t told you before, and probably also if he had, would recall the time when the old World War II radar station at the top of the hill tumbled down the hill in a landslip.

‘I’m fucking starving,’ said Eric when they’d parked. ‘I think my hair is looking better today. Don’t you?’

‘It’s hard to pass judgement, considering that we’re stood in almost complete darkness right now,’ said Carl.

‘I’ve been using that shampoo, the one I got from that place where all the staff won’t leave you alone. It says on the tub hat I should grab a generous amount and that I’ll see the best results if I wash daily.’

‘Natural oils are important, though. I suspect the reason your shampoo wants you to use more shampoo is because that means you will buy more of your shampoo.’

‘Did you leave the living-room light on?’

‘No. I’m guessing that will be Mel. She probably parked around the back.’

‘Oh! Should we have got her some food? I feel bad now.’

‘She’ll probably have already cooked for herself. You know what she’s like. There’ll be nothing but some chilli flakes and half a packet of Maltesers in the kitchen and somehow she’ll turn it into the best risotto you’ve ever eaten.’

Carl, who had sampled Mel’s cooking on several occasions and found it too bland for his tastes, tactfully refrained from comment. ‘Hi, Mel!’ he said cheerfully, rising onto his back legs as he opened the kitchen door and planting a kiss on Mel’s cheek that, though delicately administered, was all nose and tongue. ‘We’ve been to get a takeaway. We only got two portions but Eric says he’s not feeling very hungry, so he’s happy to give you about three quarters of his.’

‘Oh don’t worry about me,’ said Mel, who stood above the sink, holding a glass of red wine in one hand and in the other a scrubbing pad, with which she was non-committally removing some streaks of melted cheese from a plate. ‘I’ve just eaten. Pasta. I hope you don’t mind. There wasn’t much here but I found a courgette in the food waste and it looked fine. Maybe someone put it in there by mistake when they were tired? What I always say is, “Ask not what your pantry can do for you. Ask what you can do for your pantry.” ’

‘Good day?’ said Eric.

‘Ohmygod I don’t even know where to start. How about you?’

‘Sound,’ said Eric. ‘Went for a walk. Almost had to call out an air ambulance rescue team. Popped into the Meat Tree’s place afterwards. He sends his love.’ The Meat Tree, who in Mel’s presence always had the look of a man standing on a brittle porch eyeing a patch of extreme incoming weather, had sent no such thing.

‘So,’ Mel began, ‘you wouldn’t believe what happened to me this afternoon. I met this bloke ca—’

‘Now,’ interrupted Eric, grabbing some cutlery from a drawer just beyond Mel, then heading to the living room. ‘Sorry but if you’ll both excuse me I’m not going to speak to any fucker until I’ve shoved every last bit of this lot down my neck. You don’t want to make me hangry, do you. You wouldn’t like me when I’m hangry.’

As Eric settled down into what in all but name was his own exclusive personal armchair, jalfrezi on lap, and searched for a TV channel showing some form of news, Mel and Carl huddled on the two-seater sofa, careful not to disturb a teetering pile of singles that Eric had purchased last week from the widow of a former northern soul DJ. Mel minded this arrangement less than many others might, since she always enjoyed breathing in the aroma of Carl: a mixture of salt, nutmeg and downy warmth, plus an extra spicy something she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Dismissing her refusals, Carl forced a bhaji on her, unaware that Eric had already scoffed every last flake and crumb of the other three. Carl decided he’d give the dhansak about a 7/10 for taste but only a 5/10 for heat. Twice he bit into it and tasted something springy and dry that defied logic, only to discover he was in fact biting into Mel, via a long nomadic corkscrew of her hair. With great delicacy, he twanged the offending coils back into place, to the obliviousness of their owner, who, no longer being able to contain herself, was defying Eric’s prandial wish and running him through her day.

‘So Deborah and Tony asked me if I could do an afternoon at The Loft today and I was sure they’d said get there at 11.30 but it turned out they’d said 12.30 so I decided to walk to the top of that hill, the one with three trees on it that makes it look like it’s wearing a wig, because I never had . . .’

In its rampant indecision, its dogged mission to use its time to cover an area as large and divergent as possible, Mel’s hair always appeared an entirely apt extension of Mel. At fifty-seven, she was a care-flaying inspiration to anyone in middle age worrying that they still hadn’t decided what they wanted to do when they grew up, that their life hadn’t locked onto the one set of rails that would carry them redoubtably into the future. During the time that Carl and Eric had known her she had announced the beginning of at least twenty-six different careers, few of them easily anticipated, most of them quickly, painlessly forgotten. At present, her income came from the sale of vintage clothes and fabric and sporadic part-time shifts at The Loft, a large warehouse twenty minutes’ drive inland which was devoted to the secondhand wares of over forty traders, including Eric. As a working life, this would have sounded, to those who hadn’t experienced the weather system that was Mel in person, more tranquil than it was. Mel nipped around the borderlands of Dorset, Somerset and Devon between shops and landmarks of intense national beauty in her small, obnoxiously coloured car with a way of making everything appear to be part of a schedule, even if it wasn’t. Something of note had invariably just happened to her or, if not, was soon about to. If there was someone in her catchment of flitting that she didn’t know, it was highly likely she would imminently know them, or at least know of them. Carl was aware that, at one point, for a period of several months, she and Eric had regularly touched one another’s naked bodies, and that this arrangement had long since drawn to a close, without tears or recriminations or possibly even discussion. Both were people who operated at 45 rpm, their 33 rpm settings long since abandoned. He didn’t know quite why it hadn’t worked out between them but wondered if it might have been a question of space: there was only so much room for words in any one relationship and if neither party was able to turn down the waterfall, where did that leave you? These days, depending on who she happened to be dating or not dating at the time and several other less explicable factors, Mel came in and out of Carl and Eric’s lives with the capricious bustle of a travelling carnival. As far as Carl and Eric were concerned, that was fine. She knew which rock the spare door key was hidden under in the garden, and she often brought cake.

‘. . . I mean that’s ridiculous, right? I must have driven past that tree a thousand times in the last thirty years, and I’ve never been to the top of it. Have you ever been? It’s ever so nice. The trees don’t seem so much like a wig when you’re up there. And then I’m on the way down and this woman who’s holding this dog, it’s got a muzzle on it, says to me, “If you don’t mind, would you just say hello to him? We’re training him – he’s an XL Bully,” so I did, I said hello to it, this dog, which looked a bit scary, and I was wondering why this woman didn’t tell me its breed or its name and just insulted it instead. I mean, why would you say that about your own dog as soon as you met someone, especially while asking them to say hello to it? I didn’t even think it looked that big.’

‘That’s the breed,’ said Eric. ‘They’re called XL American Bullies. A lot of people aren’t happy about them. A bloke threw one off one of the cliffs near Lulworth last month. Reg Monk told me.’

‘What? That’s terrible. How could anyone do that? It’s not the dog’s fault if some stupid humans are breeding it to be a bully.’

‘Would anyone like some tea?’ asked Carl, who was feeling less than comfortable at the turn the conversation had taken. He picked his iPad up off the coffee table and located the page he’d saved that morning on its browser. ‘Did you know that female hyenas have non-ejaculating penises?’

‘Anyway,’ continued Mel, ‘that wasn’t what I was really trying to say. So after that I went to The Loft. Oh my days it was cold. I wish Paul would put the heating on in there. It’s still January, for heaven’s sake. I’m not kidding, I had to go outside at one point and stand by the river, just to warm up. Ooh, don’t let me forget, Eric. A girl came in asking after you. Very nice eyes. She left her name and number. I wrote it down on a postcard of Golitha Falls. I couldn’t find anything else. It’s in my coat. I only realised afterwards that it was one of the vintage ones Paul was selling. £1.20, so don’t tell him. I thought for a minute that she was one of your old floozies from your rock-star days but she looked a bit young. I’m guessing she wants to sell you her great-granddad’s records or something. Anyway, about an hour later I’m going over to the back room, to see if I could find an electric heater underneath all Paul’s junk, and on the way I pass this bloke, and he says, in this nice deep voice that’s a bit like chocolate, “Excuse me, I’m ever so sorry, but I’m wondering if you might be able to help. I seem to have got myself into something of a predicament.” So what it is, right, you know that carved woman with the serpent’s head, sort of African, the one that Leslie Hobhouse has been trying to sell for ages and keeps reducing, he’s got his coat trapped in its mouth. God knows how he’d done it! It’s a really lovely coat, too, tweed, with this beautiful embroidered silk lining, so there’s the two of us, trying to get it out of this serpent’s narrow mouth, and it didn’t take too long, really, but long enough, especially as I worried about damaging the coat. And afterwards we get talking and he gives me his business card and he tells me his name is Cliff, and he lives on the edge of Eype and he used to live in London and edit books.’

‘Every time I go to Eype or see a sign to it, I can’t help making an “eeep eeep” noise in my head, like a little mouse,’ said Eric.

‘I do that too,’ thought Carl, but didn’t say it. He wanted to find out what happened at the end of Mel’s story.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ continued Mel. ‘Anyway, it’s not until later, when I’m back at the car, that I look at what it says on his business card: Cliff Falls. He lives in Eype, right over on the far edge of it, nearest the sea, where they had that massive landslip last year, and he’s called Cliff Falls! You couldn’t make it up.’

‘I could,’ said Eric. ‘I can make all sorts up. I’ve got all the top skills, when it comes to making stuff up.’

‘Cliff Falls! It’s brilliant. I haven’t stopped chuckling to myself about it all afternoon. I’m going for a drink with him next Wednesday. Sometimes I think I’d quite like a non-ejaculating penis myself, but only for some of the week.’

That night Carl flipped and flapped about in a rigid tray a few inches beneath sleep, never quite finding the leverage or grip to reach the softer shelf above. What Eric had told Mel about the dog being murdered had got him replaying an incident from many years ago that he’d done his best to forget: a regrettable altercation with an Alsatian, at a similarly cold and barren time of year, on some godforsaken Cornish headland, back when Eric had been renting a house in that part of the country. It lived on in the memory as a generally depressing day: cold, rheumatically damp, full of wind and inarticulate anger, the sky a collection of grey shades of pain. Eric had later received a parking fine in a vast beachside car park he hadn’t realised he needed to pay for, where his van had been, comically, the only vehicle parked. Carl had never looked at the sea and been more afraid of all the ulterior motives it had for being the sea. For several yards along the coast path, the Alsatian had nipped at his heels, its dripping teeth either uncomfortably close to his haunches or his bumhole. He was used to this, from dogs – it was why he avoided them, when he could – but this one was a monumentally persistent fuckwit of a brand he’d never previously dealt with. ‘Piss off, you binhead, or I’ll drop you like an egg from a tall chicken,’ said Eric, waving a stick at it, to no avail. He had been nervous around big dogs since being bitten by one in Knotty Ash as a seven-year-old. Where was the owner? They’d seen him earlier, but he must have fallen well back. Under one big black cloud that felt like a big Satanic hat Eric, Carl and the Alsatian were collectively wearing, they approached a lichen-coated Napoleonic watch house where the headland turned back on itself, and it was here that the Alsatian chose to make its strike, so quick and clinical and deep that Carl could feel a chunk of his flank leaving the rest of the body. All he knew is that a second later he was in the air, and the Alsatian ahead of him was higher in the air, screaming – screaming a scream that sounded like a song inspired by that Satanic cloud above them – then returning to earth in a deep frost hollow, a cricket pitch’s distance to their left. ‘I do not know quite what I’ve done but I know I have done it in a way that ensures that Alsatian is not dead and will go on to live a full, if considerably less fearless, life,’ Carl had thought. ‘I am sure of that.’ Nonetheless, the thought did not stop him and Eric making a hasty escape, nor did Carl’s memory of the thought, right now in present-day Dorset, prevent him from replaying the incident in his mind, over and over again, and imagining the Alsatian, in pain, at the bottom of that crevice. And in that hard tray of messy undersleep he was in, in its cold sauce of nonsensical anxiety, the Cornish crevice conflated itself with the Wessex crevice from earlier today, and the Alsatian became Eric, on his back at the bottom of it: not the Eric of today, but a Carl-less Eric, an Eric of the not-too-distant future.

‘What am I?’ Carl asked himself. ‘My own Ghost of Christmas Future, putting extra hours in during the off-season?’

At first light he rose, crept downstairs and gently opened the back door of the cottage, careful to not wake Mel, who had bedded down for the night on the sofa under an old towncoat Eric kept promising himself he’d wear again but never did. Her cat Bathsheba, who had emerged from an eleven-hour sleep in the airing cupboard on the house’s most expensive towel, observed him high-handedly from the sofa’s arm. The forecast was for another bright icy day and the sun was only just beginning to airbrush the back of the cliffs orange. The Golden Cap was what people called the tallest of them: the highest point, at 191 metres, on the entire south coast of the UK. At its summit a person – which Carl did often view himself as – always got the sense of having been granted access to a secret mezzanine far above England’s living room. You looked down at the plateaus below with the understanding that they were cliffs and you were on something else. Whenever Carl scaled it, he was always struck anew by its scope, of how massively, if it ever collapsed, it would swallow everything beneath it, and, in turn, how massively everything beneath it would swallow it.

Everything was always crumbling along these few miles of coastline, falling away, turning itself inside out and upside down, as if the particular earth, soil and sand of the region was easily bored, leading to a propensity to reimagine itself from new angles. Talking to people who were visiting the house for the first time, Eric would often describe it as ‘the little white cottage at the bottom of the hill’ but that was not strictly accurate. A building being pelted so regularly from above with this much debris could never quite raise itself beyond off-white, no matter how hard it tried. ‘Where is it all coming from?’ Carl would wonder, on the wildest nights. The next morning he’d half expect to open the door and find the cliffs gone but there they were, looking much as they always had done. They were like those celebrities who’ve been subject to widespread deathwatch for years, the ones whose self-abuse has become public legend, who you then see a new photo of in a newspaper and are surprised to discover they still have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a protective head of hair, upwards of six teeth. The kind of people whose death, when it finally comes, is met with a flurry of clacking keys as a large proportion of people who felt certain they’d died years ago verify the facts on a nearby device.

But today Carl headed in the opposite direction, past the Fentonbrooks’ farm, past the ‘Hens On Path!’ sign that always made him sad – he suspected it had been put there because something bad had happened to the hens on the path – and up the hill, where the footpaths criss-crossed one another through the gorse and cattle chewed on steaming piles of ex-grass. He saw nobody. Carl had walked untold hundreds of miles with Eric but he also liked to walk alone. There were of course many persuasive arguments for him not to go for walks unaccompanied, but he did not wish to hem himself into the box of Individuals Who Don’t Go For Walks Unaccompanied, the subtle cage of Those Who Wait For Permission From The Head Of The Household Or At Least A More Assertive Map-Reading Friend Before Experiencing The Freedom Of The Breeze In Their Hair. He usually did not go upright as, in the event of a problem, it would complicate matters twofold, but sometimes found the novelty of doing so impossible to resist. He chose his times carefully, preferring the untrustworthy half-light that bookended the coastal days. Today he opted for a conservative two and a half miles: up to the radar station – not the one that old Russell Loosemore had seen fall down the cliff in 1942, but a later, sturdier replacement – then back along the low ground where, under the cover of a hedge, he rose briefly to his full height. It was around here that, a few weeks ago, in one of those confusing triangles that invaded his vision from time to time, he had, for just a minute, before the image disappeared, watched a weeping male figure, dressed in drenched raggy clothes, holding an inert woman in his arms on the beach.

Today, however, the near-inaccessible foreshore remained deserted. Behind it, the greensand rock of the Cap was now thoroughly burnished by the sun. In these moments, its similarity in colour to the churches of the region was unignorable. And who was to say it wasn’t a church, just because human hands had not built it? After all, it did what churches were supposed to do: it reached for the sky and filled those in its vicinity with awe and fear and, perhaps, a curious kind of reassurance.

Eric had almost purchased a real church not all that long ago. Which is to say Eric had seen a church advertised for auction at a starting price with tenuous connection to reality, then had gone, with Carl, to view the church, then talked about all the things that were going to happen after he bought the church (gig venue, arts centre, rehearsal studio, tent erected allowing Eric and Carl to live in the church’s epicentre during renovations) then watched as the church was bought by someone far wealthier and less idealistic than him for several hundred thousand pounds above the price on the advert. Carl had done his best to disguise his relief. The church was in a village twenty miles inland and nothing ever seemed to work out as well for them when they were further from the sea. Also, during his researching of the village, the first thing he’d found was a story about an overweight, locally adored pig which had escaped from its meadow then fallen down a steep bank into a river and drowned, and he feared that, if they lived there, he’d be haunted by mental images of the enormous pig’s demise, or to be exact haunted even more by it than he still was now, which was already quite a lot. And not buying the church had led Eric and him here, and here, he thought, was obviously much better. Just look at it!

When Carl got back to the cottage Eric was unloading the van ready for the day’s trip. A couple of coffee tables he hadn’t quite worked out what to do with yet. A lamp he’d found in Honiton which he felt confident he could flip for twice the price he’d got the dealer down to. A bell.

‘Is that a bell?’

‘It is.’

‘You didn’t tell me you’d got a bell.’

‘I didn’t tell you when I brushed my teeth this morning, either. Some things are a gentleman’s own business.’

‘Are you not forgetting something quite significant here?’

‘Look, it’s fine. Art deco. Not even a century old. Not even in the same universe as that other one, as far as bells are concerned. It came from Reg Monk. He was clearing out a 1930s place over in Budleigh Salterton. It was for the servants, I think. Can you believe she brought her cat with her?’

‘I actually can. We are talking about Mel here.’

‘I just went to dry my hair with my towel. It’s covered in all this brown fur. Can you see any on my hair now? I feel like I’ve got brown fur on my head. She said she was worried about it getting lonely. Did you know that she feeds her earwax to it? She just stuck her blummin’ finger in her ear and gave it some, a few minutes ago, in the kitchen. I saw her.’

‘I’m ready!’ said Mel, who, not having anything else planned for the day, had decided to join them. She was well wrapped up in a duffle coat and a red Fair Isle sweater she’d appropriated from a high-altitude window cleaner she’d briefly dated in 2014.

Before they left, Carl went inside for his customary pre-trip check-around. He moved the kettle and a couple of Eric’s muddy socks from yesterday off the Rayburn, but decided not to turn off the radio, concluding that Bathsheba would appreciate the company. He noticed a couple of new black handprints on the wall and made a mental note to see to them this evening. When he got back out to the van, Eric was still talking about the earwax. What he told Mel he was most curious about was how she’d first discovered that Bathsheba had a taste for it. Had it been a total accident, or was it her habit to try out all her bodily fluids on pets until they hit on one that really did it for them? ‘And what about this Cliff Avalanche bloke? Are you going to tell him about it when you go on your hot date?’ he added.

‘I woke up with her tongue in my ear one night and it sort of progressed from there,’ replied Mel. ‘It’s not my fault my cat’s weird.’ Carl was thinking about the time he’d eaten some of his own by mistake and been surprised to find it was nowhere near as saltily bearable as he’d predicted, instead tasting like something that, if manufactured in the right quantities, could probably be useful in biological warfare. All the same, he refused to pass judgement.

Order a signed first edition of Everything Will Swallow You from Blackwells with free international delivery.

Support independent bookshops and order Everything Will Swallow You from Bookshop.org.

If you can’t afford a paid subscription but want to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee here.

More recent pieces by me you might have missed: