Catmachine

Another interlude that takes place during the novel I started during 2012's NaNoWriMo containing some more of Wendi's backstory.

January 1990

After a while the appeal of working in the record shop began to wane for Wendi. She earned little more than she would have by signing on and had only taken it in the first place to get the Restart people off her back. The free promos from the record company reps were all that kept her going - and she wouldn't be able to get them anywhere else - but finding the money to go to gigs and to rehearse with the nascent band her and Peter were putting together was becoming difficult.

In the end SoundStore made the decision for her. A new contract from senior management came round which all staff were obliged to sign. One clause said that all promos received from reps were "the property of SoundStore Ltd" which was a bit of a coincidence given that one of the senior managers had just set up a mail order rare records service. Further clauses said that the cost of any credit card fraud came out of the wages of the member of staff responsible for performing the transaction and that as a theft prevention measure the management had the right to stop and search any members of staff outside work at any time.

Charlie, the manager of Wendi's branch, told her not to worry about it, and that he wasn't going to enforce any of this. As far as he was concerned he had a nice little relationship going with the record company reps - he accidentally made a few more entries of their pet projects' singles into the chart computer and they took him out for expensive meals - and keeping his staff sweet was all part of that.

But the atmosphere had changed. Wendi felt as if she was being watched and could no longer relax.

The last straw came when she was unceremoniously transferred to the Rotherhithe branch. She didn't have any say in the matter; moving the staff around like this was another feature of the new contract. The fact that she now had to get up far earlier and spend a fortune on public transport meant nothing to the management.

She began looking at the jobs pages in the Evening Standard and it wasn't long before she spotted a post which seemed to consist mainly of mundane administration in the events department of a conference centre in the West End. She'd never done anything like that before, but had a certificate in typing and shorthand from a secretarial college she'd attended a couple of summers ago. The clincher was that the wages were twice what she was earning at SoundStore.

To her surprise she got the job despite her unusual fashion choices - it probably helped that the woman in charge of the department appeared to be a bit of a bohemian and was probably hiring Wendi just to piss off the head of a rival team.

It was dull and Wendi had nothing in common with any of her new colleagues, but at least she had some money and access to the West End in her lunch break. Sometimes she would go straight to gigs after work and on one or two memorable occasions went straight to work after having pulled an all-nighter.

An unfortunate side effect of this lifestyle was that she got addicted to soluble codeine painkillers.

At first the pills been intended as a hangover prevention or cure after one of her nights out but then without consciously becoming aware of the transition, she realised she was taking them as a matter of course as part of her morning routine. Coffee from the machine, sandwich and bottle of still mineral water from the canteen plus two co-codamol.

Then two more mid-morning.

The routine expanded and she begun taking them after lunch. Then before going home. Then she began taking them four at a time. Then she began visiting different pharmacies on the way to work so the shopkeepers didn't recognise her and guess what she was up to.

The problem was that she didn't really know what she was up to herself. She'd become addicted to codeine but wasn't really getting a buzz off it, wasn't suffering any noticeable withdrawal symptoms at the weekends when she didn't take any. It was just something her body did automatically.

Plink, plink, fizz.

The thought of that cold effervescent water and the subsequent vague white numbing of her brain made her mouth water. She looked forward to getting into work in the morning.

Panicking, she'd gone cold turkey, substituting sparkling mineral water for still in her morning routine in an attempt to fool her senses. It worked, but every so often even months later she would catch herself in Boots looking wistfully at the economy-sized packs behind the pharmacy counter. Wendi hated the expression "addictive personality" and the implied abnegation of responsibility for one's own actions and would never have described herself in that way. She had no-one to blame but herself, but she had to admit there was something in her mental makeup that made it difficult for her to stop once she'd started.

All habits died hard with Wendi.

Sometimes it seems as if the world we now live in at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a particularly awful one. There are so many things going on that are simply wrong and make you see red. But don't worry - if you're feeling this at all it means that you're alive and furthermore do have a sense of morality. At least you're not giving up and at least you care.

Of course having discovered that you do care, the problem can be where to start. To which of these causes - all of which are valid - do you offer your support? There are so many of them. OK, so you pick the one that means the most to you, the one whose underlying injustice brings your blood to boiling point the quickest. You do what you can for it whether this means donating your own money or your own time. You do what you can to raise awareness.

But most important of all, you always remember that you are not doing this to feel better about yourself. You are doing this to fight injustice and if you can do it anonymously, all the better. Of course sometimes anonymity is counter productive - if people take notice of you, if you have some form of celebrity, then of course you lend your name to the cause if it's going to help it.

But it is not about you. It is not about proving your credentials.

One of the many problems of today's society alluded to in the first paragraph is that people are all out to get whatever they can out of the world, get something for nothing, buy low sell high, cheat, swindle and bamboozle their way to the top. Consider spam - and just how much effort and money is expended just to make using email manageable. The issue here is that email is free and that sending out millions of messages costs next to nothing and even if only 0.01% of the audience fall for it then the spammer has made a profit on the deal.

Consider how much more money and resource would be in the global economy if people just didn't send spam, if people simply decided to stop.  OK so the anti-virus companies would be out of a job but aside from that it would make the experience of using the internet - which is, let us not forget, one of the most important inventions in human history since the printing press - an infinitely more pleasant and natural one.

But it's never going to happen. The majority of people are fundamentally selfish when it comes down to it. A lot of the time you show a human being something new and the first thing that comes into their head is "how can I exploit that?"

This is even true of causes.  Sometimes people don't get involved in causes because they are infuriated by the underlying injustice.  They get involved in causes because it makes them look good.  Such people are poison to a cause. Whilst their involvement might help in the short term, in the long term their true nature will out. Morality begins at home and whilst posturing in public about their swollen public duty organ might make a lot of noise it means nothing if they treat people like shit in private.

If someone tries to bully or exploit you, call them on it. If you can help someone, do. If we all start practicing this on a small scale in our interpersonal relationships then it will become all the easier to put in to practice out there and slowly but surely we will start overcoming prejudice and discrimination in the wider world.

And perhaps then it will start being a bit less awful.

Disclaimer: given that this blog entry is about the correct use of English there will no doubt be a large number of typos and incidences of misuse.

One thing you hear a lot about these days is the so-called bastardisation of the English language. These complaints take many forms but seem to boil down to a couple of main griping areas:

• The old complaining about the way the young use language (thinly veiled youth envy)
• The British complaining about the way Americans use language (thinly veiled xenophobia).

Language is a constantly evolving system. Two key ingredients of evolution are vast numbers and swiftly changing environments in which those numbers exist. The population explosion of the past fifty years combined with the way information and communications technology has enabled an exponential growth of the number of channels via which language can be used and transmitted mean that English is probably evolving far faster now than it ever has before. However the existence of media recording over the same period - something which previous generations simply didn't have access to - results in the way English used to be spoken also being preserved.

What does this mean for the development of the language?

In the past people becoming geographically isolated from each other usually resulted in the development of dialects and eventually new languages altogether. This is of course what's responsible for the differences between American English and British English - although some of the British complainants may be dismayed to realise that the American form of certain usages, spellings and pronunciations is actually the original, the differences having arisen on this side of the Atlantic in the interim. The reverse is also true of other usages, spellings and pronunciations, so when it comes down to it who is bastardising whom? Both forms are in fact equally valid descendants of the kind of English spoken 500 years ago, a kind of English that no longer exists.

However, the digital preservation of forms of English from up to sixty or seventy years ago means that from now on these older forms of language will continue to exist and this, combined with an accelerated change, means that dialect may start to develop not just due to a lack of spatial proximity but also due to a temporal distance. Language changes and language evolves. Just because some people don't like the idea of LOL or WTF entering into common spoken usage, it doesn't mean that it's wrong any more than either one of "color" or "colour" are wrong.

Chill out.

Misuse of apostrophes is another matter of course. An apostrophe is used to indicate missing letters due to an abbreviation or contraction of a longer word or phrase. Sometimes they fall out of use as part of normal language evolution - no-one says lunch' any more (short for luncheon) - but where apostrophes are (or aren't) used now is still important and probably always will be. Some claim to hate apostrophe pedantry as much as the apostrophe pedants hate the rogue punctuation marks themselves, but I suspect some of that is a deliberately contrary stance, perhaps adopted by former pedants who found that the obsession was beginning to take over their lives...

I will now stand up and confess that I am a confirmed apostrophe pedant. Years of having to copy out Section 13 of the Modern English Usage rules book at school whenever I made a mistake saw to that. Whilst I can understand how they might fall out of use in some instances due to the evolution of language (see lunch' above), I can't fathom why people add them where they're not needed. It's as if people have heard that there are these things called apostrophes and know that they're something to do with adding the letter S on the end of words but beyond that have no clue.

According to a piece in the Guardian today, a Devon district council have had enough and decided to abandon the apostrophe altogether. Whilst this may solve half the problems - never again will people have to wonder about how a root vegetable can own money when they see a sign reading Carrot's 30p - it probably creates just as many new ones and seems to be being done out of laziness more than anything else.

The odd thing is that the rules aren't that difficult. Section 13 of Modern English Usage was relatively short, so copying it out wasn't actually that onerous a task.

So come on everyone.  It's easy and would make a lot of pedants very happy.

There is simultaneously something sad and laughable about the sight of redundant technology being thrown away. These old plastic and metal boxes, most of them that off-white grey that was so popular for a while, tumbled together in a skip or a dustbin. How clunky and huge they seem, how ridiculously inefficient and pathetically low in capacity. That shoebox-like cabinet that used to sit on someone's desk with a total storage of 100MB, an amount of data that would now fit into something the size of a toenail clipping ten times over. How far we have come in such a relatively short space of time.

And yet in a way this old tech is also oddly exciting. When we look at it we remember how not that long ago such a thing was an object of desire. That it epitomised bold new developments in technology that seemed so groundbreaking and enviable.

That hand-held scanner that I was so desperate for in the early nineties that looked like a bizarre hybrid of a torch and a miniature vacuum cleaner and which required me to dismantle my PC in order to insert the expansion card.

The external ZIP drive that I wondered about ordering with my latest PC at around the turn of the millenium all the better to back up my data with (the piles of floppies really were getting a bit much and I craved downsizing).

These covetous memories serve to add a tinge of exhilaration and melancholy to the sight. These objects may be laughable now but once upon a time you would have sold your soul for them.

The familiarity and ubiquitousness of technology these days make us take it for granted and not make the most of it. As a teenager the idea of using a video camera was a thrilling prospect. My dad had bought one - a great hulking thing that was connected to a box you had to sling over your shoulder - but wouldn't let us just use it willy-nilly. We had to write a script first.

Well fair enough, I thought. So I spent some time writing a script. Of course it involved spacecraft and aliens; I even gave a lot of though as to how I was going to put the special effects together. But for some reason it never got made, and in the end my brother, my sister and I just waited for our parents to go out before filming our own short films and episodes of Doctor Who.

Nowadays many of us have the equivalent of BBC Television Centre in our pockets and it is quite possible for us to film, edit and transmit our own programmes without getting out of bed. But because it's now so easy it's no longer quite as special. These days I can do at any time those things that I wanted to do so badly when I was a child, but most of the time I can't be bothered. That free arcade game they had in the dentist's waiting room was whole orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Angry Birds and yet about a million times more exciting and eagerly anticipated.

There is probably a lesson to be learned here about taking things for granted. When you gain control of your own life those things you promised yourself you'd do every day no longer seem as urgent because you can do them any time and so you end up not doing them at all.

When I was a kid for a while my favourite toy was something I'd made myself. It consisted of a green box file containing a number of sheets of A4 paper upon which I'd drawn various electronic devices. You clipped the paper to the open lid when you wanted to use that particular device. Sometimes you combined the devices - clipping the TV screen to the lid and having the typewriter upper most in the box meant that you had a computer. Also available were a radio, a reel to reel tape recorder and a record player. There were a few more devices, but I can't remember what they were now.

In retrospect it's now obvious that this was a toy laptop. My mind was groping its way towards what the most exciting object of desire could possibly be.

It's a shame my current laptop can no longer engender such feelings of enthusiasm.

The most annoying thing about buying a new jacket is the way that the pockets are all sewn up. I mean, why? Pockets are there for a reason and it's a very good one. You need to carry stuff around with you. There's always the wallet and the keys and the phone and not to mention the two separate travel-card holders - one for Brighton and one for London (I have to keep them separate in case the Key and the Oyster card interfere with each other somehow).

These are the bare minimum of pocket essentials. Sometimes I might want to carry a USB stick, a padlock, a pen or a Kindle around with me.

Which is why it's nonsensical that they sew up the pockets. It just means I have to spend an annoying ten minutes undoing what they probably had to spend an annoying ten minutes doing. It's pointless. Every time something like that happens it's another victory for our old enemy entropy.

Some would argue that pockets are sewn up because keeping things in them would spoil the lines of the jacket. I would argue that if this is the case why put the pockets on the jacket in the first place? I would also argue that the lines of the jacket are only important if you're taking part in a fashion show or are in some bizarre world where the lines of your jacket are more important than being able to get on the bus, buy a newspaper and a Mars bar or open your front door. If the former - why not just empty your pockets for the duration of being on the catwalk? If it's the latter - well there's not much that can be done for you. You probably deserve to have to walk home only to find that you're locked out with nothing to eat or read.

I have always been a big fan of pockets.

Not everyone has always had the same view. Buying a jacket in a twenty-first century department store was not the first time I found my pockets sewn up. For some reason my mum decided to sew my trouser pockets up when I was at school because I was always keeping things in them.

But that was what they were for!

Whilst I may not have needed to carry keys, wallets, travel-cards or phones around in those days, I still found my trouser pockets to be essential personal storage, so having them sewn up was a bit of a blow. Where was I going to put my interesting shaped pebbles and matchboxes with things in them now? The bits of odd shaped plastic I'd found in the dust and had almost convinced myself were alien space ship parts? The sycamore seeds? The small toys? Not to mention the loose change - a few half, one and two pence pieces chiefly - that I accumulated for buying sweets on the way home.

The school bag wouldn't work - I needed these things on me at all times, who could tell when a game in the playground might not suddenly require an alien space ship part or interesting pebble? After all sometimes I was Doctor Who, and he had pockets so they were essential. When I was Mr Spock perhaps not so much, but the Doctor Who games were the more enjoyable ones and I like to think that was partly because of the pockets.

Then the next day, dropping my hand to my hips, I felt something in my trouser pocket. Something in my recently sewn up pocket. Surely it couldn't be? Was it?

There was a two pence piece in there. 2p! That would get me two black jacks or two fruit salads. Or - and let's go a little crazy here - one of each. Or one of those chocolate tools. But how was I going to get it out? I couldn't just unpick the work my mum had put into sewing the thing shut in the first place, but I really wanted the 2p. I manipulated it through the cloth of my trousers. If I brought it right up to one end of the pocket I could just about make out the rim. All it would take then would be to pick away a few of the stitches at one end - that way my pocket would still be effectively sewn up but I'd end up 2p richer.

I worked at it throughout the day during lessons. Gradually I opened a hole at one end of the sealed pocket and eventually this hole became large enough to admit the trapped coin. I pulled it free and...

It wasn't 2p. It was an old pre-decimal penny. No longer legal tender and more importantly no longer exchangeable for sweets or a chocolate hammer. What had I been doing carrying around an old penny anyway? My pockets had let me down. Furthermore I learned that when your pockets are sewn up you can imagine that they contain all sorts of unlikely things.

I also learned that pockets are too important to be sewn up. After all, where else are you going to stick your hands if you want to appear nonchalant?

There's something a bit creepy about logging onto Facebook these days.

What's happening, Chris?

I can't help imagining these messages from the system in the voice of Douglas Rain, otherwise known as Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

How are you feeling, Chris?

However, it's not the Halness of these pronouncements that's creepy. It's that they share something with Hal's mode of speech which is a major contributory factor to what made him frightening in the first place.

Just what do you think you're doing, Chris?

Inappropriate use of a person's name.

Of course there's nothing wrong with calling people by their name when saying hello or trying to attract their attention. However, once engaged in a conversation - either electronic or physical - I find it increasingly uncomfortable if the other person keeps using my name. It's almost like being inappropriately touched.

The thing is, Chris...

Yes, I know you're talking to me. There's no need to use my name again. It's creepy. It feels as if you're trying to ingratiate yourself with me or patronise me, neither of which I want. Even worse is when - in writing only as punctuation is notoriously difficult to pronounce - someone uses my name followed by a full stop and then tells me what they wanted to get across.

Chris. I think the important thing to consider here...

This makes me want to kill. It comes across as an attempt to be superior and didactic, neither of which I am remotely happy with.

I realise of course that a lot of this is a problem in my own head. In reality anyone using my name is just being friendly. However, it isn't helped by the fact that these are exactly the kind of tricks that some people - estate agents, police officers - may employ in an attempt to gain your confidence for their own ends; probably something they go on a course to learn. This behaviour only strengthens the name taboo in my head, forcing it to interpret the more innocent uses as patronising or deceiving. Overusing my name makes me suspicious that even though someone might be trying to appear friendly they have a hidden agenda and are trying to manipulate me.

There may well be more to it than that, as I have other quirks when it comes to the use of names.

Sometimes I feel I would rather die than refer to myself in the third person, than use my own name. And yet some people seem to do it all the time, telling themselves off, having quirky conversations with themselves for your benefit. I have no problem with this but cannot imagine ever being comfortable doing this myself.

This is strange because when writing fiction, Third Person Limited is my favourite point of view.

My final name quirk is a problem using other people's names. I will tie myself in ever more complex semantic knots trying to avoid doing this. At the beginning of an email or when saying hello to them is fine; when trying to attract their attention is uncomfortable but I can do it if I have to. It's certainly better than hey, you.

Anything else is forbidden. It just feels so bad.

A Christmas interlude that takes place during the novel I started during this year's NaNoWriMo. It's not part of the novel and not written in November so is probably more of a NoNoNoNo...

---

Saturday 25 December 1993

Wendi opened her eyes to find herself lying on the sofa in front of the muted television. On screen Noel Edmonds was wearing an obscene jumper and talking on the telephone. She felt about for the remote and the cathode ray tube relaxed into inactivity with an electric sigh. The sun was shining through the large glass window and against the odds - it had been pissing down the night before - it was a nice day. She wrapped the blanket around herself and stood up.

The penthouse flat was bare and undecorated. The record company had purchased it only recently and were intending it to be used by the more successful members of the talent whilst in London. Whilst Beam certainly were flavour of the month in some quarters they were hardly the most lucrative act on the roster so Wendi was only here on sufferance.

Peter had actually done most of the talking to the powers that be - ever since the summer tour during which her life had fallen apart, Wendi had been staying at his flat. However he'd recently embarked on a relationship with a new girlfriend so what with her, the guitar collection and Wendi on the sofa it was all getting a bit crowded.

Wendi was rootless and adrift. Her only family and her lover cancelled out in one fell swoop. They'd both attempted to contact her since the summer via the record company but she still had nothing to say to either of them. She doubted that she ever would. People talked about going home for Christmas. Up until this year Wendi had been lucky enough to live in the same house for almost all of her life so it hadn’t applied. Now that made the fact that she couldn't go back even worse.

Johnny had told her that the company would be happy for her to stay here until February when they intended to move DJ Drake in - he'd had that huge hit so they obviously felt he was worth investing in. Never mind the fact that he probably had a parental home and a girlfriend. Wendi was bitter as she shuffled over to the sliding door that led out to the balcony. She walked out into the cold London air.

The roar of the metropolis was muted that morning and the concrete of the balcony was freezing. She pulled the blanket tighter about herself, walked over to the railing and peered down into the alleyway. A row of dumpsters stood there like a train in a siding, a scattering of pigeons wandering about pecking at the overflow in a desultory manner. Normally the smell of Chinese food rising from the alleyway made Wendi hungry but this morning the aroma was like Berwick Street market at the end of a long day, rotting vegetable matter with hints of urine and other bodily fluids.

She was hungry though. She hurried back inside and pulled on her basic costume - thick socks, oversized boots, skinny jeans, sweatshirt and leather jacket. As an afterthought she donned a woolly hat and oversized shades. Not that anyone was going to recognise her.

She only had to hope that there was somewhere open this morning. Somewhere that did a full English breakfast.

Reaching into the pocket of her leather jacket for money, her fingers touched something unfamiliar. She pulled out a plastic baggie inside which a few wraps nestled. That coke Peter had given her the day before she'd moved in. She'd forgotten all about it. She hadn't been in the mood, and besides, she still preferred ecstasy. Coke tended to make the Persona too strong and whilst this was useful when working, when she was alone sometimes she felt like she was being swamped by this other mind, this alternative Wendi who had sprung into being as a direct result of her chosen career. Sometimes she thought she remembered the Persona whispering to her in her childhood, a tall shadow that hovered just beyond the corner of her eye and guided her fingers when she'd been drawing, but she was probably just retrofitting it into her memory.

She hadn't done any drawing for years. She missed it. She had no illusions about being any good, but there was something calming about working on a large complex piece over several hours or days, the way she could lose herself in the act of creation, the way her mind was reshaped by the lines of the image and the way the act itself cemented certain memories in place, the programme on the TV in the background, the songs being broadcast on the radio. She had never liked to put her stereo on during these sessions. TV or radio was a lifeline to the outside world, an umbilical cord connecting her to the non-drawn universe in which the real people lived. If she put her own music collection on it was too isolating.

This was also why creating music was a very different experience.

It was a team effort for a start and by its very nature it required total commitment. There was no-room for multi tasking, she couldn't switch off any part of her brain, it was all consuming. And apart from anything else it was the very opposite of relaxing. It made her electrified, it made her heart race and her brain with it.

She pulled the penthouse flat door shut behind her and began jogging down the stairs, thinking about drawing. There was an art shop in Great Marlborough Street wasn't there? She began to feel a warm glow of anticipation and excitement. She could buy some pens and pencils and a sketchpad. Or a one of those huge pads with paper half the size of her. It was going to be great. She could do one of those intricate drawings that took days, those floating islands with almost infinite detail, tiny people and animals crawling all over it...

It was only when she closed the street door behind her and was enveloped by the unusual silence that she remembered that it was Christmas Day and that the art shop would be closed. Disappointment crashed in on her as the planned excursion into her imagination was curtailed. It wouldn't be open tomorrow either and then Monday and Tuesday were bloody Bank Holidays as well thanks to Christmas falling on a Saturday. It wasn’t the sort of shop that tried to maximise sales by opening as much as it could. Quite the opposite in fact; she wouldn't be surprised if they weren't planning to stay closed until the New Year. Which mean Tuesday 4 January.

Lazy fuckers.

She kicked a bottle as she stepped out into a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue and it spun into the gutter. Knowing her luck she wouldn't be able to find anywhere to get breakfast either. So far she hadn't seen a soul.

Wardour Street smelled foul. Aside from the odours it shared with Berwick Street there was a distinct flavour of vomit, alcohol and revolting chips. Wendi had tried some of them the other night and had ended up throwing away the entire portion. They simply didn't taste right. The oil had probably been in use since the eighties and she strongly suspected that the chips themselves had been fashioned from reconstituted mashed potato. She'd been hungry too, but there would have been no point in going back to complain. They'd all be like that. Instead she'd flung the packet across the road in fury as hot tears had sprung to her eyes. It hadn't just been the chips. It hadn't been anything to do with them.

She pushed the memory away as the tears welled up again. Not now, not here. Not appropriate. She'd feel better after a cooked breakfast.

The Telecom Tower looked down on her in a way that made her uncomfortable. There was something she didn't like about it. She never had. A shape, an indication of evil eyes about the cluster of antennae that crowded around its neck just below the revolving restaurant. She turned off into St Anne's Court and out of its field of view.

The alleyway was as deserted as the rest of London but in her head it buzzed with a peculiar potential. There was something odd here. She looked off down an even narrower passage that led off between two buildings to her right.  Was that a person sleeping rough or just a pile of old rags? Shadows and shapes flickered at the periphery of her vision as she squinted. Something familiar from deep in her childhood, something she would have preferred not to remember.

Wendi sped up and hurried past, wanting to escape whatever it was that she’d been about to see. Besides, she had a feeling that the end of her quest was within reach. Yes, there it was. Even though she didn't remember having visited it before, her subconscious had obviously noted the presence of this establishment. The windows were steamed up, glowing with a warm yellow light and the faded Pepsi sign above the word CAFE was illuminated. She pushed open the door.

Six tables were crammed into the space, each of which was occupied by one figure swathed in coats and scarves. A radio was playing, too loud and distorted to be able to work out what the music was. The man behind the counter gave Wendi a complex wave that managed to convey that she should take a seat and he'd be with her in a minute. She looked around and decided to sit opposite the smallest of the huddled figures.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" Wendi pulled the chair out and looked down at the top of a matted mop of bottle-black hair. The figure looked up, large bloodshot eyes hovering over a white mug that was cradled in interlaced fingers each of which terminated in a bitten black varnished nail. It was difficult to tell whether this was a boy or a girl. The head nodded so Wendi slid into the chair and plucked the menu - which had been laminated with yellowing sellotape - from between the ketchup bottle and the saltcellar.

No, not fried eggs. They gave her the creeps. Not bacon.  She never knew what all the fuss was about - in her experience it was like eating salty cardboard. Cooked tomatoes just seemed wrong. The idea of a full English was much more attractive than the reality. What did that leave her with?

"What can I get you miss?" The man from behind the counter was suddenly looming over her. A few inches from her nose a filthy apron exuded the odour of decade’s worth of fried breakfasts. That clinched it.

"Beans on toast please. And a cup of tea." Wendi didn't fancy the idea of anything that had been dipped in the oil soaking that apron.  Like that chippie in Wardour Street, they probably recycled everything here.

"Anything else for you before you go?" The man had turned to the diminutive figure opposite. Wendi wondered why he was being so rude.

"No fanks," the timbre of the whisper indicated that this was probably a girl, "I still got this." She held out the mug for the man to inspect, and sure enough it was at least a third full of a watery brown liquid that had probably once had a teabag waved at it.

"Actually can you make that coffee?" Wendi said. The man sighed and made an adjustment to whatever it was he’d written down on his pad, before shuffling back behind his counter and busying himself with Wendi's breakfast. She stared with fatal fascination as he pulled a couple of slices of lowest common denominator white from a cellophane packet and ladled a scoop of own brand baked beans into a tiny saucepan from a catering sized tin that stood open next to the hob.

This was hardly going to set her up for the day or get rid of her hangover. Still, never mind. She turned her attention to the girl opposite.

"He was a bit out of order, eh?" she whispered. The girl shrugged but then looked up into Wendi's eyes and managed a quarter smile.

"I guess. I ‘aven't been in here that long though. You'd have thought..."

Wendi nodded. The girl must have been sleeping rough. Somewhere like this was the only place she had to go.  A lot of the homeless probably ended up in here but there was no need for rudeness. Wendi didn't believe in “compassion fatigue”. People who used expressions like that probably never had any in the first place. But are you any better, she asked herself, after all what are you going to do? She recognised the voice of the Persona in that question and resolved to prove it wrong.

"I'm Wendi." She held out a hand and the girl shook it. It was quite astonishing. Wendi was used to other people's hands always feeling warmer than hers, they told her she had bad circulation. But this girl had fingers that felt as if she had liquid nitrogen flowing through her veins.

"Juliet," the girl whispered, releasing Wendi's hand. Wendi could still feel the cold spots on her skin where Juliet had touched her fingers and had to stop herself from rubbing warmth back into them. That would have been tactless.

The man appeared at Wendi's side again and slammed a plate down in front of her. Watery baked beans swam on top of what looked like a couple of thin sheets of singed polystyrene foam. It was hardly the Full English she had been imagining and would do nothing to quell the relentless march of her hangover....

See? A sarcastic voice within. It was right. Any problems she had were nothing compared to Juliet's. She had no right to feel sorry for herself.  To be hung over implied the ability to drink heavily the night before. OK so she'd had a shit year. Some might have called it the worst year of her life. But when everything had fallen apart she'd had options. Her friends were looking after her, her employers were looking after her. She may have wished she was dead as she looked down on fifty thousand people from the main stage of a major music festival in July, but for fuck's sake. She'd been on stage in front of fifty thousand people. OK so it had been first thing in the afternoon and more than likely a fluke of the programming due to the unavailability of the Zine stage later that day, but even so. Some people worked for years to get in that kind of position.

Nevertheless, the lukewarm beans and nominal toast were on the wrong side of foul. She wondered if she should complain but then thought better of it. What would everyone think?

"Are you sure you don't want anything?" she addressed Juliet who staring down into the depths of her mug again. She could at least get the girl something, "I wouldn't recommend the beans on toast, mind."

Juliet looked up and the ghost of a smile flickered across her frail features again.

"Nah. Fanks anyway. Not hungry. Plus I can't stay here much longer."

"Are you sure?"  Wendi rubbed at the back of her neck with one hand. A dull nauseous ache was advancing determinedly up muscles and tendons that were as taut as an over wound bass string. She could feel the tendrils of neuralgia exploring the rest of her skull; if she wasn't careful this was going to turn into a fully-fledged migraine that would put her out of action for days. It was always a risk when she drank too much. She looked down at Juliet's hands, and imagined those thin cold fingers massaging her neck. It was an intoxicating thought. Maybe there was something she could do for the girl. If she asked her to come back with her then maybe... You're despicable, you know that? the Persona cut in.

"Yeah. Been sleeping rough but got somewhere to go now as long as I'm quick. Don't want to miss the boat."

"That must have been grim," Wendi was in danger of blushing at her earlier thought, even though there was no way Juliet could have known about it. The Persona was right though.

"It was. All over now though!" Juliet's ghost smile bloomed into full life as she pushed the chair back and stood up, "I'm looking forward to it!"

"Where..." Wendi started as Juliet started to walk towards the door. Juliet stopped and turned towards her.

"'S OK. I'm flattered. Would have been nice," she whispered and reached out a hand to brush Wendi's cheek. The cold almost felt like a slap. Wendi felt dizzy, her brain clouded. What was going on?  There was something cold and hard pressed into one cheekbone.

She opened her eyes. She was lying on her side in St Anne's Court in front of the cafe, a smear of rotten vegetable matter on the bottom of her boot. Had she followed Juliet outside and slipped over? She struggled to a seated position.

"Are you OK down there, Miss?" A man in uniform stood at one end of the alleyway. Wendi nodded and raised a hand. She grabbed hold of the railing in front of the cafe and pulled herself upright.

The cafe. It was closed, and obviously had been for some time. The windows were thick with grime and there was no furniture inside apart from the counter at the far end. Had she fallen over before going inside and dreamed the whole thing? It had seemed so real. But that was the only explanation.

"Are you sure, Miss?" The man at the end of the alleyway had turned towards her. A policeman? She was suddenly very aware of the wraps of cocaine in her jacket pocket. Walking away would have aroused suspicion so she turned and began making her way towards him instead.

Ouch. Her knee seemed to have taken the brunt of the fall and she was limping. A blow on the head would have accounted for her being knocked out, though. She prodded gingerly at her skull. Nothing she could find. No tender spots.

"I slipped over," she called out. The man was no longer looking at her and now that she was closer she could see that he wasn't a policeman after all. An ambulance driver? Behind him in Wardour Street the windows of the ground floor buildings shimmered with an unearthly blue flashing and she could hear the sound of an idling engine.

As she drew abreast of the entrance of the narrow passageway she’d noticed earlier, two figures emerged, paramedics carrying something between them. A stretcher. There was a small figure slumped on it, still half wrapped in a filthy sleeping bag. It was Juliet and she was quite dead.

"Poor kid," one of the paramedics muttered, "That's no way to spend Christmas."

Wendi stood rooted to the spot as perspective slammed into place around her.  It had taken a girl's death to show her how trivial her problems really were.

Even the Persona had nothing to say.