The tap pisses water into a narrow basin of cracked porcelain. It looks tired; but then again so would I if I'd been through 74 fuckin people to get here. I splash some on my face, just to make it dirtier. The drop that collects on the end of my nose smells of hormones. Washing in recycled sewage: can't fuckin beat it. Gotta love that shit.

Andy Peters walks in and tries to surgically attach itself to my leg. Fuckin hate cats. Used to love 'em, but then I went off to school and came back to find I was allergic to the bastards. So I guess I kind of have to hate 'em, otherwise I'd be rolling on the floor, windpipe the size of an ant's ass, gurgling like a rusty plughole. Not the most fuckin dignified way to go. I give Peters a kick for good measure.

Then mum occurs. She oozes through the doorway, quivering slightly.

"Now Wayne, you'll remember to post that letter tomorrow, won't you?"
Like she hasn't told me a fuckin gazillion times already today. It's a fuckin Reader's Digest prize draw. You'd think it was a ticket to swap places with the queen or something. But that's my mum - fuckin easily amused. Then again she did win like, the 34th prize or something once. Spent it on breast implants.
"Yeeeeessss," I hiss. She doesn't take the hint. Always misses the subtle signals, does my mum. She seduced my dad with GHB. No, seriously.

Ettrick smiled, and across the room a plate of ham started rotting.

He loitered over to the doorway, coming to rest with a hip thrust out underneath his crust-green golfing jumper. The Ettricklips pinched together in a contortion that passed as a grin. I could feel my hackles rising.

'Hey.'
'Grphm,' I grunted back.

Icy eye-slits frisked the room, and finding no-one worth their attention, the hips about-turned and sidled away. Off to richer pastures with flocks of simpering sheep, no doubt. Ettrick was one of that breed for whom life was a performance. Actors never perform for free though, and I was flat out of simpering flattery.

Alfie has a walk like a tree full of owls, and a great future behind him.

He wiles away his time festering on his bed in quiet desperation, idly picking up grandiose ideas, sniffing them suspiciously, then jettisoning them like used tissues. The nights are the best; he dreams of people and places and ideas and things and adventures. Concepts that no longer inhabit his reality: all that does is a bed, a TV, and a box of used tissues.

He knew it was going to happen; she hoped it was inevitable. Once enough alcohol was trickling through his vitrified veins it was only a matter of following the recipe. A little perfume here, a brush of the hand there – she’d watched so many others do it on him.

And then the moment. Her last sight as her eyes closed in anticipation was of a pair of parted lips, bulbous and clammy, coasting towards her. Next thing she knew septic fumes were pervading her nostrils, and a bloated tongue was enthusiastically probing the recesses of her throat. Frightened, she opened her eyes to a fish-eyed mass of ruddy flesh. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. Not like this.

Wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, he threw her a lopsided grin. Eyes sliding closed, he swayed forward again. She couldn’t do it. All those aspirations she’d painstakingly created around him vanished in that moment.

It was all too much. Cracking apart, she fled from her seat and away, away to seek solace in some empty bus stop on the way home.

She sits across from me and rambles on about some people I’ve never met and probably never will. I’m not even listening; too busy watching her hair, her fingers, those eyes. I like eyes, and hers radiate a pale blue astuteness that is at once captivating and too arresting to look at. Shame I can’t even begin to decipher what lies behind them.

Today I made an ill-advised voyage on an escalator. As my shoelace caught in between the steps, I lost my balance and fell downstairs. For an hour and a half. During that time I became Edinburgh’s premier tourist attraction. The Fringe has gone mad.