By the end of next week, it seemed as if rejecting that bright-eyed stranger at the bar had brought some kind of cosmic karma down onhim.

After Redhawk finished banging him, he picked up off his dealer. Took it free in the end for a blowjob, which was exactly why all his dealers were women or at least a little gay.

Not so bad on that front, but he stepped through his shitty, broken front door to find Jack waiting for him on the sofa. Coked to his eyeballs, horny, and got his face right up in Casper's ass before he jerked back with betrayal crushing through his gorgeous face.

"Nah, fuck this, Cas," he said before he left. Once he'd finished shouting for about a quarter of an hour while Casper sat on the sofa with his head in his hands. "I told you, baby. No more. Hope them tricks keep you warm at night."

They didn't. Casper became intimately familiar withthat over the next week.

His boss rung later. Pinged him a message right the same time and told him to watch it. A video. High as a kite, Casper laughed at the guy getting led out the back of the bar and fucked against the wall outside. Kept laughing for the whole video before his boss told him it was him.

The boss chewed him out in that disappointed father way that might have made Casper’s skin crawl if he hadn’t been so far gone. Told him he was on probationary suspension.

"You're a good kid, Casper. I don't want to lose you, but I can't excuse this behaviour. Find your money some other way for a couple of weeks, kid. Come back the Saturday after next."

Two weeks. Rent was due in one and Casper had already been running short.

And that meant it was time to be a sleepy boy again. Reactivating the old accounts made him sick. Actually sprint to the toilet sick as soon as he saw those soft-lit photos of his naked body. Username: Roach boy. Cheapest on the market.

And it all took him plummeting downhill so fast the bottom was light-years gone. Maybe he took in money, but his drug use went through the roof. That week he slept about twelve hours combined and ate one meal a day.

Sunday, he gave himself a day off. His hands shook too badly to rack a line or pour a drink and that had always been his timeout marker.

Shitty day off really. He spent it in a zombie-like fugue, half-asleep on the sofa beneath a blanket with his threadbare toy lion while he played all his comfort films and wondered why he couldn't cry. Would it make him feel better, sobbing into this blanket and letting out all this pain gnarled up inside his mind? Ease out the tangle of thorns on the salty tear-slick?

It didn't matter.

The night hung like a haze around the streets when Casper went out for food. The sky was supposed to be black at night, like velvet, buthere it reached only a murky amber too much like rainclouds. The line he'd had earlier had worn off and his stomach had actually growled.

Strange how positive it felt actually laying all those notes out on the table and budgeting them off. Even a little stack of treat yourself, Roach Boy – a hundred to spend how he liked.

So Casper had taken a ten off the top and headed out to the Chinese. Not the cheap, food poisoning in soy sauce one he usually went to and not the one Jack used to take him to. The nice one on a nice street where the shops all looked welcoming and there wasn't a single gang of tracksuited dealers in sight.

The city still smelt like petrol and rotting food, and claustrophobia still crawled down his spine, but it felt like life a step above grimy, monotonous purgatory.

Few people walked the long avenue, drifting beneath the bare trees. Soft amber light from olden wrought-iron streetlights bathed the pavements, and the shop fronts lay gently backlit and tasteful behind them. Casper's Chinese was about halfway down, the name Fortune Wok scrawled in cursive gold across a blue background peeking between the netting of branches.

His heart seemed to beat slower here than it had in months, gentle and rhythmic, not a stutter away from heart failure like usual. Ice nipped at his cheeks, a splash of cold water over his face startling him awake. Just a glimpse of nature, evergreen bushes circling the trees behind those little square fences, made his mind slow and his breath come easier.

Maybe he should get a houseplant. Some huge green-leafed monstrosity. Maybe he should get about ten – nothing better to spend that spare money on really than turning his flat into a hothouse jungle.

A tall, slim figure in black slacks and a white shirt stood outside the Chinese. Amber-tinted smoke floated from the tip of his cigarette to the soft-lit heavens, and the green neon strip from the shop next-door bathed half of him the shade of sunlight filtering through forest leaves.

At first, Casper only looked twice because of the weather. Cold enough to have him in about four layers and still shivering. Everything else made him keep looking.

The man from the bar.