ONE

      Simon Teller kissed the card.

      It was a hesitant, surreptitious, don’t mind me kiss. A small, I’m not really doing this kiss. His lips barely puckered as they brushed against the white cardboard. It felt good. He read the card once more, and then kissed it again. As he did so, he made a ‘mwah’ noise. Then, feeling rather silly, he put it down on the kitchen table.

      ‘OK,’ he said out loud. ‘Good.’

      He picked the card up again, and walked into the sitting room.

      There he cursed silently. That was the problem with these converted flats. The builders had got rid of all the fireplaces. Without fireplaces you had no mantelpieces, and without mantelpieces – well. Where was one supposed to put invitations?

      For that was what Simon Teller had been performing his solitary act of osculation upon. An invitation, yes, but the word failed to convey the full import of the rectangle of reinforced card that Simon held. This was no ordinary invitation. This invitation was the key to God knows what, the ticket to God knows where, the introduction to God knows who.

      Simon went over to the record player and lifted the stylus on to the waiting vinyl. Sonny Rollins broke into an effervescent ‘St Thomas’, his joyful, bristling, honking saxophone reflecting Simon’s own mood. Simon propped the card up against the stereo and stepped back to admire it. There was no doubt about it: it looked good. All right, the handwriting was messy, and the green ink had smudged badly. But that didn’t matter. What mattered were the names scrawled along the top of the card.

      Angus and Fergus.

      Yes yes yes.

      Angus and Fergus were Simon’s neighbours. They lived in the flat immediately above his. They had moved in about two years ago. Since then, Simon had only actually seen them a few times – chance encounters on the stairs, mostly – but he felt that he knew them intimately. For the other draw-back about the building in which Simon, Angus and Fergus all lived, lack of mantelpieces aside, was extremely thin ceilings.

      As a result, Simon had witnessed, albeit indirectly, most of the important recent events in the lives of Angus and Fergus. He listened to their rows, and to their drunken reconciliations. But, most of all, he listened to them having sex. It wasn’t that Simon was a voyeur, or whatever the aural equivalent of that was, it was simply that he didn’t have any choice. Wherever he sat in his flat, the unmistakable sound of heavy-duty bonking would permeate through the ceiling, causing his light fittings to wobble alarmingly. Angus and Fergus enjoyed having sex, and consequently they did it a lot, with as many different girls as they could.

      Simon grew to recognize the sounds of the various females who visited the upstairs flat. There seemed, at any given time, to be at least five or six who could be identified. Simon would sit in bed and, recognizing a particular