"You were snoring," he said.
"I was sleeping."
"Well I wish you wouldn't."
"Sleep?"
"Snore."
I knew he'd been drinking even before I saw the Highball next to the computer. He pointed at the screen and I saw he was on Gumtree again. He was fascinated by it for some reason.
"What's a WAG?" he asked.
"It stands for 'Wives And Girlfriends'."
He half turned to me and I could see in the weak light of the screen how his eyes glistened beneath his furrowed brow. "They are advertising on here a website which young ladies can join in order to become one of these WAGs. Can they not go about it in the normal fashion?"
"Well, a WAG is the girlfriend of a rich, professional footballer. It's kind of a thing now."
"So this website is for women who want to marry a rich football player."
It wasn't a question but I answered anyway. "I guess."
"So they themselves can become rich and, presumably, famous. By association."
"Well there are varying degrees, Winston... But yeah, sounds like it."
"Jesus Christ," I barely heard him say.
He turned away from me and raised the glass of Scotch to his lips. He took three long, deep swallows, but when he put the glass down it contained no less liquor than before.
I pulled the covers off and sat next to him.
"How bad is it?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
He made a snorting noise through his nose and then was silent.
We sat like that. The steady flow of traffic outside was mesmerising, and I began to doze. I was jolted back by Winston's elbow digging into my ribs.
"I am dead, you know," he said mildly.
"That's right. You're a ghost."
He laughed, and just then he sounded young, and his eyes began to sparkle with something more than booze and sadness as he recited to me: "'A ghost! One trusts such things? In will, and sight?'"
I had no idea what he was talking about. "Is that... Shakespeare, or something?"
"Ha! Close - Master Winston Churchill, I believe it was." He smiled, and whatever had been dancing in his eyes vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
He took another drink from his bottomless glass, and I waited. He drank and drank and when he was finished he slammed the glass down. "This," he bellowed at it, "no longer fucking works!"
I nodded my head. "I know man, it doesn't help anyth-"
"I didn't say it doesn't fucking help, I said it doesn't fucking work! When you are dead, alcohol no longer has any effect on you. Whatsoever. Point of fact."
"But I've seen you drunk loads of times. Like... now?"
His shoulders hunched and he held his hands up before me as if they held something. "What you see is a pantomime," he said, his voice wavering almost imperceptibly on the last syllable. "A placebo. Psychosomatic bullshit. I go through it because I know how to, do you see? But it doesn't work, and because it doesn't work it doesn't help. And so it rolls in, as it always did whensoever it would desire... and I'm powerless." He stared into me, his eyes wild, and what I saw within them wasn't fear or anger but a perplexed despair far more dreadful to witness than either. He turned away and bowed his head. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder but it went straight through him.
After a while he looked up, but not at me. "What time is it?"
I did not want to get into this.
"What time is it?" he repeated.
"It's six to midnight," I said eventually. "They haven't moved it since you last asked, Winston. They haven't moved it since January - and that was to put it back."
He wasn't listening. "Six minutes," he muttered under his breath.
"It's not..." But I didn't know what it wasn't. "It's not... so bad," I finished weakly.
He took another drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A faint smile appeared as he patted me firmly on the back. "Stephen, you're an idiot," he said - not unkindly - and then he faded away, taking his Scotch glass with him.
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