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now? I never used to. I want to be drunk all the hours there are. I expect I drink so much simply because I’m losing my bottle. I used to smoke hash, too. I don’t any more. It makes me feel
tonto
. Unless of course I’m drunk. I do then): in a heat haze of peeled and gonging crapulence I go back to my room and insert my body among items of bristly clothing.
    On account of the perverse design of the flat we live in (it’s meant for someone flash living alone, or someone flash plus his girl), the trip to the kitchen takes me through Gregory’s room, within a couple of feet of his bed. Quite often, he brings it about that there is someone else in there with him (never a boy, though. Why not? I’m
glad
. I don’t like queers. I don’t like them, which I suppose means I’m queer). This morning, at the far side of Gregory’s slender torso, there is a lot of brown hair and a light, intermittent truffling sound; and, as usual, maximum de-proximity between their bodies has been established, with Greg’s narrow face bent to one side in that familiar expression, askance, unfriendly, replete and disgusted in sleep. I want to shout with pain and pull the world apart, but I just vaguely peek in the direction of the girl’s breasts (I’ve seen a couple every now and then: it’s the most sex I’ve had for months), then carefully turn the squeaky kitchen doorknob. I am sincerely terrified of waking Gregory, despite my intense envy and disapproval of his freedom to rise as late as 9 or 9.30. (He might chuck me out. Could he? Would they let him?) So I creep downstairs with a big mug of instant coffee and sit at my desk drinking it and smoking lots of cigarettes. I pour the dead ashtrays into the wastepaper basket. (The wastepaper basket is one of the Bad Things about my life at the moment. I haven’t emptied it for several weeks. I daren’t. I just compress the rubbish even further. One of these days it’s going to get up and walk out of here all by itself.) I make a last visit to the bathroom to pee and adjust my hair, then it’s the streets.
    We live in Bayswater — district of the transients. Nearly everywhere is a hotel now; their porches teem like Foreign Legion garrisons; a fucked-up Arab comes here and is an automatic success. (The local boys are taking over, too. They work the streets, roping off the bits they want. They’re winning. I feel that I could join them if I could just wire my nerves up tight.) But I can’t. I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems tobe no extra room for me inside. I hate this daily ten-minute walk, along the outlines of the cold squares, past dark shopfronts where cats claw at the window panes, then into the tingling strip of Queensway, through shuddering traffic and the sweet smell of yesterday’s trash. I look at girls, of course, watch aeroplanes (take me to America), buy a paper and lots more cigarettes on the way, but I don’t think I’m convincing anyone by all this. No one senses my presence; they walk on by (you might pass me one of these days; you wouldn’t know it. Why should you?). At kiosks and stalls of which I am an abjectly faithful patron I attract not the slightest notice — never mind my identical good mornings and wellenunciated demands for goods. The huge, exhausted newspaperman who sells me my
Guardian
(and who has a smile and a hello for virtually everyone else, I see) never returns my greeting when I give him the exact money and will stare at me with sick hatred should I offer him a trembling one-pound note. Underground officials throw me a knowing glance as they dispense a ticket or check it over at the entrance gate, but it isn’t standard, all this. Sometimes I will turn, halfway along the stone corridor, to see that I am being followed by curious and unfriendly eyes. And once I’m down there, down in the streets of the earth, and the train bursts angrily out of its hole, and I try to join the people stacked inside — I keep