“Look at the size of this one! It’s like a hand without fingers!”
As Simon got up to open his tupperware box and make the latest addition to his ‘interesting crisps’ collection, briefly blocking Stu’s view of the latest episode of Deal or No Deal (which, incidentally, was very similar in tone to the previous day’s. And the day before that’s. And the day before that’s), Stu wondered exactly how he’d ended up here.

Three years previously, he’d been optimistic about the blank canvas of life that lay before him: no, he hadn’t gotten the grades to get into mother’s precious university, but bollocks to it. He knew he was smart and had the potential to go places; the rest of the world would have to find out in a different way than that of the infinitely flawed system of measured academic achievement. The first job was just a stopgap, as was the second, and the third, and the fourth – or so he thought – but when he blew job number five, he felt defeated. As Stu noisily reached under a rear which had doubled in size over the last year, dismissing the pizza crust he retrieved as not worth bothering with, he looked down at his moth-eaten, sticky, Coca-Cola-stained Waitrose shelf-stacker’s shirt and around the squalor in which he’d settled himself. It was a grotty two-room flat literally next door to the Job Centre so as to make it easier to look for his next former place of work, complete with cigarette-burnt carpet, wallpaper which was more bandage-white than cricket-white, windows so stained and dirty that they necessitated having the solitary, ever-dimming bulb perennially light the room, and in the corners, two torn, stained mattresses offering little but the retreat of an uncomfortable night’s sleep.

Simon returned to his seat, sweeping his dressing-gown under his legs in a deceptively ladylike manner that belied his sheer abhorrence. Stu glanced over at him, thinking to himself that if he’d seen a state like that a few years ago, he’d’ve thrown it a pity 50p. Unlike Stu, Simon actually had an income – but every penny the tit earnt from his three hours a week selling The Big Issue went on either vodka, cigars, crisps, or bizarrely, Toblerone. Stu felt he was better off on the dole, where all he could afford to do was pay his – and most of the time, Simon’s bills.