Im not exaggerating; when she looked at me and didnt recognize me, I thought she was messing about, until I noticed that her eyes werent quite big enough, and her hair was bleached; Jen would never have bleached her hair, however much she wanted to disguise herself. Anyway, this girl didnt like me staring at her, so I had to have a few words, and she was English and unfortunately understood those words, so she gave me a mouthful back, and I sort of took it on from there. And after wed been at it for a while, we were both asked to leave. Ill be truthful and say that Id already had a couple of Bacardi Breezers, even though it was still quite early, and I think they made me aggressive, although she didnt take up my offer of a fight.

I dont think everything the next day was my fault. I take some of the blame, but when things go wrong, you just make them worse if you overreact, dont you? And I think some people overreacted. Because my dad is New Labour and all that, hes always going on about tolerance for people of different cultures, and I think what happened was that some people, in other words Martin, were not tolerant of my culture, which is more of a drinking and drug-taking and shagging sort of a culture than his culture. I like to think that Im respectful of his. I dont tell him that he should get pissed up and fucked up on drugs and pick up more girls. So he should be more respectful of mine. He wouldnt tell me to eat pork if I was Jewish, so why should he tell me not to do the other stuff?

I felt terrible the next morning, mostly because Id gone to bed without anything to eat, although Im sure the Es and the Breezers and the blow didnt help. I felt low, too. I had that terrible feeling you get when you realize that youre stuck with who you are, and theres nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can make characters up, like I did when I became like a Jane Austeny person on New Years Eve, and that gives you some time off. But its impossible to keep it going for long, and then youre back to being sick outside some dodgy club and offering to fight people. My dad wonders why I choose to be like this, but the truth is, you have no choice, and thats what makes you feel like killing yourself. When I try to think of a life that doesnt involve being sick outside a dodgy club, I cant manage it; I picture nothing at all. This is I; this is my voice, this is my body, this is my life. Jess Crichton, this is your life, and here are some people from Nantwich to talk about you.

We ran into them one night in a local bar, and they pretended they didnt know us. Later, the woman took Penny aside in the supermarket and explained that they were worried about their teenage daughter, a particularly unprepossessing fourteen-year-old who, to be perfectly frank, is unlikely to lose her virginity for a good many years to come, and certainly not to me. It was all nonsense, of course, and she was no more worried about my proximity to her daughter than she was about my proximity to her purse. It was her way of tell九-九-藏-书-网ing me, as so many others have done since, that Ive been cast out of the Garden of Islington, doomed to roam the offices of crap cable companies for evermore.

Im a friend of JJs, said Kathy, and Jesss eyes lit up ominously.

Whos "everyone else"? Kathy asked, I guess reasonably.

Oh, I said. I mean, I wanted to know why Jess had been brought home in a police car and everything. But I didnt want to know right then.

Thats nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything. Anyway, at the end of their seven years, theyd probably got sick of the sight of each other, and you can see that they wanted different things. John wanted to be in a bag or whatever, and Paul wanted to be on his farm or whatever, and its hard to see how you can keep a relationship going when youre so different, and one of you is in a bag.

And then the usual stuff happened: Notjens brother, this bar, this guy, money, dope and a couple of Es, wasnt going to do any of it until later, ended up doing most of it straightaway, some people from a place called Nantwich, this guy, freaked, left to freak on my own. Puke, sleep on the beach, woken up, freaked, driven back to the hotel in a police car. I dont think Id ever met anyone from Nantwich before, and this all happened during the day, but other than that it was a pretty typical night out. I told the police that Maureen and Martin were my parents, and Martin wasnt happy.

If everyone else shows, Kathy and I will move, I said.

Thats your mother? said Kathy. She was trying to be real casual, but I could tell she was freaking a little.

That holiday with Penny was the first time I fully apprehended the trouble I was in, and the trouble I would always be in. The villa at the end of the road was owned by people we both knew, a couple who ran their own production company and had, in happier times, offered us both work.

Thats a laugh. Sing for her, JJ. You should hear him. Fucking hell.

Oh, no, said Jess. Aaaaagh. Help. Well just panic, Ispose.

Hello, said Jess. Im in such a state I didnt even realize I dont know you.

Did he tell you he was a musician? said Jess. Ill bet he did. He always does. Thats the only way he can ever get a girlfriend. We keep telling him not to try that one, because people always find out in the end. And then theyre disappointed. Ill bet he said he was a singer, right? Kathy nodded, and looked at me.

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums.

What have I said? Its what youre going to say.

You dont knock on your friends doors and tell them that youre once again available for dinner parties. You neednt even bother telling your ex-wife you want to see your kids again. I doubt whether Mrs Big Joe would have attempted to deny him access to his children, and I doubt whether many of his mates in the pub would have stood in the corner muttering their disapproval. Ill bet they bought him a drink and got h九*九*藏*书*网im laid, in fact. I have thought long and hard about this, and have turned into something of a radical on the subject of penal reform: I have come to the conclusion that no one who earns more than, say, seventy-five thousand pounds a year should ever be sent to jail, because the punishment will always be more severe than the crime. You should just have to see a therapist, or give some money to charity, or something.

Criminals serve their time, but with all due respect to my friends in B Wing, I was not a criminal, not really; I was a television presenter who had made a mistake, and paradoxically, this meant that I would never serve my time. It was a class issue, and Im sorry, but theres no point in pretending it wasnt. You see, the other inmates would eventually return to their lives of thieving and drug-dealing and possibly even roofing or whatever the hell it was they did before their careers were interrupted; prison would prove to be no impediment, either socially or professionally. Indeed, they may even find their prospects and social standing enhanced.

Martin and Jess, said Maureen. But Jess got brought home in a police car last night. So she might be having a lie-in.

Maureen is… But then I couldnt think of a way to finish the sentence.

Have you met our mum and dad yet, Kathy? Kathys eyes flickered nervously over to Maureen.

Im Kathy, said Kathy, who was also confused. Im a friend of JJs.

Maybe I should make a move, said Kathy. She stood up and gulped some coffee down.

What am I going to say? I have no idea.

Its over, and youre out. You dont go and see the Head of Daytime TV and tell her youre ready to reclaim your seat behind the Rise and Shine desk.

And get this: not only did I get heard, if I may use a euphemism, but I got heard by someone whod seen the band and liked us. I mean, what are the chances? OK, she couldnt remember us real clearly, and I kind of had to tell her shed liked us, but, you know. Still. What happened was, I found this cool salt-water pool in the town, designed by some local artist, and I stopped for a beer and a sandwich right across from there. And this English chick was sitting by herself on the next table, and she was reading this book called Bel Canto, so I told her Id read it too, and we started to talk about it, and I scooted over to her table. And then we started talking about music, because Bel Canto is kind of about music - opera, anyway, which some people think is music - and she said she was more into rocknroll than opera, so I was like, which bands? And she listed a whole bunch, and one of them, this band called the Clockers, wed done a tour with a few years back. And shed seen them on that tour, in Manchester, where she lives, and she thought she might have gotten there early enough to see the opener, and I said, Well, that was us. And she said, Oh, right, I remember, you were cool. I know, I know, but I was at a period in my life where I took what I could get.

Maureen and her croissants sat down at the table.

No99lib•net, see… But then I didnt know what to say.

Im Kathy, said Kathy.

Of course its not my mother. Were not even the same nationality. Jess is being...

JJ I had a good day, that first day. In the morning I read The Sportswriter by the pool, and thats one fucking cool book. And then I ordered a sandwich, and then… Well, the truth of the matter is, I thought it was about time to jump-start my libido, which had been on life-support and demonstrating no outward signs of life for like four or five months. You ever read that book some dude wrote with like his eyelid? He had to flicker it every time whoever was helping him got to the right letter of the alphabet. True story. Anyway, my fucking libido couldnt even have written that book. But sitting by the pool in my shorts, with the sun warming parts of me that had been frozen for a long time, in all the ways there are to be frozen, there were dim but unmistakable signs of life.

Fuck me, she said. That was by way of an introduction. I feel so shit.

Is someone not coming down for breakfast? She wasnt being rude.

Kathy looked at me. She had some questions, I could tell.

OK, we hadnt even been going for seven weeks, but we were different in the first place, whereas John and Paul liked the same music and went to the same schools and so on. We didnt have any of that to go on. We werent all even from the same country. So in a way, its no wonder that our seven years got condensed into about three weeks.

I didnt have to find a way, either, because then Jess walked in and sat down.

I went into a couple of bars looking for the kinds of people who might sell spliff, and in the second bar I saw a girl who looked exactly like Jen.

We were staying on the north of the island, in this place called Puerto de la Cruz, which was OK. When I came before we were in the south, which is really mental, but probably too mental for Maureen, and as it was supposed to be her holiday, I didnt mind too much. I did want to buy some blow, though, and it was harder to find up here than it would have been down there, and thats how come I ended up getting myself into the trouble that Martin was in my opinion disrespectful of.

Maureen had never been anywhere, and Id had a holiday just a few months before. Penny and I went away for a few days after Id come out of prison, to Majorca. We stayed in a private villa outside Deya, and I thought it was going to be the best few days of my life, because the worst three months were over. But of course it wasnt like that at all; to describe prison as the worst three months of ones life is like describing a horrible car crash as the worst ten seconds. It sounds logical, and neat; it sounds truthful. But its not, because the worst time is afterwards, when you wake up in hospital and learn that your wife is dead, or youve had your legs amputated, and that therefore the worst has just begun. I appreciate that this is a gloomy way of talking about a mini-break on a perfectly pleasant Mediterranean island, but it was on Majorca that I realized that the w99lib.netorst was nowhere near over, and might never be over. Prison was humiliating and terrifying, mind-numbing, savagely destructive of the soul in a way that the expression soul-destroying can no longer convey. Do you know what quizzies are? Neither did I, until my first night. Quizzies are when drugged-up psychos hurl questions at each other across the blocks, all of them centred around what the participants would like to see done to unpopular and /or celebrated newcomers. I was the subject of a quizzie on my first night; I wont bother to list even the more imaginative suggestions, but suffice to say that I didnt sleep very well that night, and that for the first time in my life I had intensely violent fantasies of revenge. I focused everything on the day of my release, and though that day brought with it an overwhelming relief, it didnt last very long.

What hadnt she done? said Maureen. The waitress came over and poured us some coffee, and Maureen went to the buffet table for her croissants.

She was just confused.

And youre having breakfast together? Shut up, Jess.

The first evening wasnt too bad, I suppose. I was recognized once or twice, and ended up wearing JJs baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, which depressed me. I am not a baseball-cap sort of a chap, and I abhor people who wear any sort of headgear during dinner. We ate so-so seafood in a tourist trap on the seafront, and the only reason I didnt complain about just about everything was because of the look on Maureens face: she was transported by her microwaved plaice and her warm white wine, and it seemed churlish to spoil it.

We ended up spending the afternoon together, and then I blew off the family dinner and we spent the evening together, and then, finally, we spent the night together at my hotel, because she had a room-mate at hers. And that was the first time Id gotten any since the last night with Lizzie, which was more like necrophilia anyway.

Kathy saw my band, I said. But as soon as Id said it, I remembered that Id told Kathy shed seen the band, which isnt quite the same thing; Kathy turned to look at me, and I could tell she was remembering the same thing. Oh, man.

He was a little sad when he said it; he told me it was, in the end, a failure of imagination.

The trouble is, there isnt really room for five on the table, said Maureen.

Maureen was first down. I waved to her as she came in, to be friendly, but the wave was somehow misinterpreted as an invitation, and she came and sat down at our table. She looked at Kathy suspiciously.

What are we going to do if Martin comes down? Theres no room.

I dont think there was any need for him to check out of our hotel, though. It would have all blown over.

And thats me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do, apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights. Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it want九九藏书s. Try it, and see what happens.

It was a boat made for pootling around the lake in Regents Park, and we were attempting to sail to fucking Tenerife in it. Youd have to be an idiot to think it was going to stay afloat for much longer.

But you dont return to the middle class when youve been banged up.

What sort of friend? We just met yesterday.

So the dinner that first night in Tenerife just made me gloomy. These werent my people. They were just people who would talk to me because I was in their boat, but it was a bad boat to be in - an unseaworthy, shabby little boat, and I could suddenly see that it was going to break up and sink.

It wasnt like I went out with the express purpose of doing anything about it. I just thought Id go for a walk and look around, maybe get back in touch with that side of life. I went back to the room to get dressed first, though. Im not a bare-chested kind of guy. Im like a hundred and thirty pounds, skinny as fuck, white as a ghost, and you cant walk around next to guys with a tan and six-pack when you look like that. Even if you found a chick who dug the skinny ghost look, she wouldnt remember she dug it in this context, right? If you were into Dolly Parton and they played a blast of her album during a hip-hop show, she just wouldnt sound good. In fact, you wouldnt even be able to fucking hear her. So putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people.

Normally Id think a good puke might make me feel better. But I puked my whole insides up last night. Theres nothing left.

What happened was, we had breakfast together, and we agreed that wed go our separate ways until the evening, when we were all going to meet up in the hotel bar, have a cocktail and find somewhere to eat. And then JJ and I went for a swim in the hotel pool while Maureen sat and watched us, and then I decided to go out on my own.

Kathy and I had breakfast together in the dining room the next morning, and not only because the hotel didnt have enough stars for room service: I was kind of looking forward to bumping into the others. For some reason I thought Id get some props - OK, maybe not from Maureen, but from Martin, certainly, because hes got an eye for a pretty girl. I even somehow got it into my head that Jess would be kind of impressed. I could see the three of them on the other side of the room, and two of them whispering dirty jokes, and Id feel cool again.

I once asked Dad what hed do if he wasnt working in politics, and he said hed be working in politics, and what he meant, I think, is that wherever he was in the world, whatever job he was doing, hed still find a way back, in the way that cats are supposed to be able to find a way back when they move house. Hed be on the local council, or hed give out pamphlets, or something. Anything that was a part of that world, hed do.

Youre braver than me, JJ, said Jess. I wouldnt bring a one-night stand down to the family breakfast table. Thats fucking modern, man.

What had she done? asked Kathy.