Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 31

I tried to keep videogaming to a minimum for a while. I had early nights and took vitamins. I read books instead of playing games. I called Dermot and Tina and arranged to go out as often as I could.

The trouble with my flat was that it was boring. It wasn’t that there was nothing to look at. There was plenty of junk. There was everything I’d bought in the last twenty years because I couldn’t face throwing any of it away.

‘You’re a hoarder,’ Dermot had said on one of his visits. ‘The fucking council will come in here with rubber clothes and a big fucking skip.’

Most of the space was full of my history. I didn’t want to look at any of that, I’d already had to live through it. There were hundreds of books and magazines, but nothing I wanted to read. Like Tina and Roger, I had stuck with the five terrestrial TV channels and there wasn’t anything on I wanted to watch. The BBC had limited their output to programmes about people who were:

Detectives.

Doctors.

Vets.

Detectives who were also vets or doctors.

The rest of it was worse. There was nothing to watch and the radio stations played generic dance music. If I sat and read I’d fidget and end up picking skin from around my fingers, which made me think of Betts, which upset me.

I hadn’t been in any serious relationships for years and I wasn’t in one then. I had no one to distract me.

Dermot had a theory about that.