LAYABOUT (FRAGMENT 3)

"You forget where you live again?"

"Saw your light was on and thought you might like me to read you a bedtime story."

"I'm not a kid, Arthur — or even your kid, for that matter."

Arthur felt Amanda's cutting riposte slice through the fog of his drunken confusion like a sharp, glinting knife.

"Besides, I have company."

"You do?"

"Yeah, his name’s Mr. Pillow, and I was happily resting on him until you decided to come a-knocking like the perpetual horny drunk you are."

Standing beneath the swaying bare bulb with no lamp cover in Amanda's welly-filled porch, Arthur felt like one of those suspects hauled in for questioning and grilled under the hot lamps by hard-boiled detectives in old movies.

"You want me to leave you to it?"

"Yeah, probably best. I'm not drunk enough to meet you where you're at right now."

"I'm not—"

But before he could finish the sentence, Amanda — a wry smile on her face — quietly closed the door, leaving Arthur in darkness and presenting him with the very real risk of breaking his neck down the narrow steps leading back onto the street.

Watching from Amanda's bedroom window and smoking the last half-inch of a badly rolled joint, "Mr. Pillow," otherwise known as Ben, observed with amusement as Arthur stumbled down the steps, unsure of his footing.

"What did he want?"

"Company, probably. He gets lonely."

"Yeah, right. More likely he wanted to bang your brains out."

"Yeah, well, that’s never happened and will never happen. He's more like an annoying little brother to me."

"Incest, eh?"

Ben blew a cloud of smoke out the window, as if to have it follow Arthur down the street behind him, then turned back to face Amanda, who had just hung her silk robe on the hook behind her bedroom door, revealing her matter-of-fact nakedness as if it were nothing to him. It wasn’t.

"Yeah, well. Sorry for your sad neighbour, but I got first dibs on this one."

"First dibs?" Amanda arched a questioning eyebrow at Ben.

"You know what I mean."

Exhaling smoke through his nostrils like a stoned dragon, Ben flicked the end of his joint like a spinning Catherine wheel, its sparks trailing before being extinguished in the cool grass below the window.

Back in his own flat, flicking on the lights, Arthur had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, that Erotic Lagoon still swilling around in his seesawing guts. It reminded him of the first time he got seasick, when his father had taken him fishing off Musselwick Sands in Pembrokeshire, and he’d thrown up his eggs and bacon over the navy-blue waves. The vomit spread like a miniature oil spill, covering the approximate dimensions of a large breakfast plate.

Finding his sea legs in the living room, Arthur stumbled to his turntable and fumbled blindly for a 7-inch single from the tightly packed stack in his vintage record carry case. Dropping the needle on The Jarmels’ A Little Bit of Soap and instantly regretting his late-night booty call at Amanda’s door, Arthur decided to check on Nemo — to end his drunken bender with a reminder of what he’d gotten hammered celebrating in the first place.

But as he scanned the tank for the little fish, he couldn’t find him anywhere — until he peered around the back, among the castle ruins, and saw Nemo, motionless, fins resembling a deflated air balloon, eerily reminiscent of one of the dead-eyed fish his father had brought back from their day’s catch in Musselwick all those years ago. Arthur feared the worst.

In a frenzy, he ripped the lid off the tank and scooped Nemo up in his hand, blowing gently over the gills and nudging him with the tip of his finger — anything to get a sign of life.

“It’s not over!” he shouted over the record spinning round and round. “Come on, Nemo, breathe, you little bastard!”

But it was over. Just like the record, which came to its final, crackly end.