of lumberjacks. Blinding white light flashed across his beleaguered brain. Simon groaned. While he had been asleep his tongue had been removed and replaced with a large slab of medium-grain sandpaper. The chain saws had by now been joined by a chorus of crashing anvils.
Simon lay back and, against his better instincts, thought. Trying not to move, he mentally did a rapid check of his body. There was a painful throbbing in his right hand, and an even worse one in his left foot, but apart from that, and his monstrous headache, everything seemed to be all right. Tentatively he moved his left hand over to feel his right, and found that it was trussed up in bandages. Frowning, Simon opened his eyes again, and waited for the mist to clear.
He was in a hospital ward. On either side of him motionless figures were humped beneath sheets and blankets. Simon struggled up on to his left elbow, trying to ignore the demonic pounding in his head.
What was he doing here? he wondered. He cast his mind back to the previous evening. The last thing he could remember was being inelegantly spread-eagled on the Twister sheet, waiting for Heather to spin the needle. Suddenly the unpleasant memory of Joe’s appalling fart popped into Simon’s brain, and he recalled collapsing on to his hand. Simon looked down at his body. He was wearing a pair of pyjamas that he did not recognize, and which bore the unmistakable smell of an industrial cleaning process. Someone had undressed him. Slowly he began to assimilate the possibility that, as humiliations went, he had quite possibly just eclipsed all his previous efforts.
Simon’s hangover began to reassert itself as waves of nausea flooded over him. He slumped back on to his pillows and sighed. His left foot throbbed. He stared at the ceiling. This was all very peculiar, and very unpleasant. With Wagnerian hangovers such as this one, there was only one place to be: at home, in bed, within running distance of the nearest toilet. He glanced up and down the ward again. There were no nurses to be seen. He would have to wait to be rescued.
Eventually Simon drifted off into an uneasy sleep. When he woke again, a nurse in a dark blue uniform was standing next to the bed.
‘Good morning, Mr Teller,’ she said as soon as he opened his eyes.
Simon’s brain was still eddying around the fringes of unconsciousness. ‘Er, hello,’ he replied.
‘How are we today?’ asked the nurse briskly.
‘Not too great, actually,’ admitted Simon. ‘My hand and foot hurt, and I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
‘Yes, well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said the nurse, ‘after all of last night’s excitements.’
Simon said nothing, hoping for more information.
‘What did you think you were doing?’ continued the nurse.
Simon stared back at her blankly. ‘I really have no idea,’ he answered truthfully. ‘I was quite drunk, I think.’
The nurse snorted. ‘I think that much was obvious,’ she said, extracting a thermometer from her pocket and inserting it in Simon’s mouth without further pleasantries. She glanced at her watch. ‘I gather the board of the hospital have asked for a report to be prepared,’ she continued.
‘Wur yur moorr terrin mir wur harwen?’ asked Simon politely.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Teller,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ She reached over and extracted the thermometer from Simon’s mouth and scrutinized it. She pulled a face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your temperature seems fine. May I see your hand, please?’
Gingerly Simon pulled his right hand from beneath the covers and presented it for inspection. The nurse examined the binding. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You sprained it quite badly. You’ll need to keep the pressure off the wrist for a while. Does it itch?’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘It just hurts a lot.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ said the nurse. ‘That’ll wear off soon enough. How is your foot?’
‘Painful. Especially when I move.’
The nurse nodded. She walked to the end of the bed and picked up the chart which hung there. ‘I’ll arrange for you to have an X-ray so we can find out what sort of damage you did to yourself. In the meantime, I suggest you try and keep as still as possible so you don’t aggravate things.’ She smiled, without humour. ‘Here are two aspirins for your headache.’
Simon took the pills. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Please make sure you stay in bed and don’t get into any more trouble,’ said the nurse.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Simon, who was ransacking what was left of his brain for some small snippet of information, some undeleted detail, about what had happened the previous evening. He could remember nothing after the game of Twister in Angus and Fergus’s flat. After that there was a great, depressing, black hole of nothingness. What had the nurse meant about preparing a report?
Unable to ponder more recent events, Simon’s mind turned back to the dinner party itself. The brain being the playful organ that it is, he could remember in agonisingly clear detail Joe’s story about the magic coin, and shuddered at the embarrassment of it all. He remembered his anguish when he saw Delphine laughing at him along with everyone else. Cruelly, Simon’s brain was able to reconstruct Delphine’s exquisite face in photographic detail. His spirits spiralled still lower.
What was it with women? Simon wondered. They were a confusing breed. He really couldn’t understand why he had been single so long. He had read all the right books and magazines. He knew what women wanted. He could tick every box on the Ideal Man wish-lists that cropped up regularly in Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. He had read Crime and Punishment, twice. He had Grade 6 piano (with Merit). He was an excellent cook. He liked Jean-Jacques Beineix films, and owned several on video.
Years of gazing critically at himself in the mirror had persuaded him that physically he wasn’t too bad, either. He had dark, curly hair, and green eyes that he suspected might be his best feature. (He had been told this one evening, by his first girlfriend, in between tongue-heavy snogs, and had clung on to the belief ever since. After all, it was quite something even to have a best feature.) Overall his face had a pleasing look to it: decent skin, middling cheek-bones, good teeth. His chin had in the past been described as ‘strong’; Simon wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but had concluded that it had to be better than having a weak one.
There was no doubt: in the eligibility stakes, Simon was up there with the best of them. He had the lot.
What was more, Simon didn’t just regard females as members of another, alien race. He was not an Angus or a Fergus, for whom women were either cooks or sex objects. Women, he knew, wanted to be respected as people, to be liked and admired for their minds and not just their bodies or domestic skills. Simon understood this, and behaved accordingly.
And yet they stayed away in droves. It was all very perplexing.
Simon had never had any trouble making friends with women. It stood as testimony to his sensitivity and emotional candour. Women felt able to talk to him openly. They loved him for it. It was just that they loved him like a brother. It would have been nice to find one who would love him like a randy hot-blooded sex machine.
Despite the number of female friends that Simon had had, they never stayed friends for very long. There were two principal reasons for this.
The first problem was his respect for women generally. This meant that he wasn’t interested in trying to sleep with a girl before he got to know her properly. The difficulty with this approach was that, by the time Simon felt that they knew each other well enough to progress to the next, more interesting, stage, the girl had either got bored and had given up hope, or they had become such good friends that neither of them wanted to risk the friendship by sleeping together.
Eventually of course the girl would meet someone else and start sleeping with him immediately. She would then gradually see less and less of Simon, until disappearing completely in a frenzy