The Car Park Lad

The flyer wouldn't come off clean. I knew it before I pulled — that tape had been up there since the first preview and it decided to take part of me with it. The slice was nothing. Paper-cut territory. The sort of thing I'd mine for a bit on stage. But it bled onto the card, right across my own name, and I stood in the empty stairwell with a tissue from Sandra's office wrapped round my hand and thought: well. That's the poster. I couldn't even take the bloody thing down properly.

Holborn didn't look at me all night. Corner table with the Soho programmer, the two of them speaking just below the hum so you can't hear. I clocked it. I clocked myself clocking it. Then he raised his glass across the room and mouthed well done, lad in Pryce's voice and I had to leave the beer garden for a minute. Pryce has been dead ten years and Holborn still does him better than anyone. I don't know what I hate him for. I don't know what I want from him.

Someone left a card at the bar. The car park lad on the front, a tenner inside, no signature. A tenner. That's the going rate for a month of me.

I wrote walked out of Edinburgh in the Moleskine and closed it. I don't know what that sentence is yet. Title, confession, the only true thing I've said on paper all year. All three, probably.

The hoodie is still on the chair. The chest is still doing that still thing. I keep waiting for the panic to come up and meet me and it just doesn't.