I plodded around my apartment’s single room for a good hour just watching the infant’s tears of the rain against my window for no particular reason. I was jobless and poor, so my breakfast consisted of a lightly toasted rat and a colony of maggots living in my last apple. It tasted like my soul had died. Never mind. I had a pressing engagement with a nearby ‘bank manager’.

I use the term loosely, in fact as loosely as it is possible to do without actually being wrong. Truth be told the man I was meeting wasn’t a bank manager, nor was he a meagre loan shark. You know you’ve hit the bottom of the barrel when you have to borrow money from the homeless.

My benefactor, for want of a better word, had been selling the local charity newspaper when I ran into him three days prior. I walked towards him at a brisk pace, desperately trying to avoid eye contact and thereby the awkward conversation that comes from declining to purchase one of his hideous papers. I failed in this regard and, after a long conversation, somehow managed to broker an industrial contract with the destitute young man. Originally the deal was that I would buy all his papers and he wouldn’t kill me in my sleep and feed me to his dog, because he knew where I lived and where I worked. Naturally I saw through his bluff (having no job for him to follow me to) and through an aggressive negotiation strategy we agreed that I would buy all his papers now, or he would kill me. Of course as I was penniless he would lend me the money to buy the papers, but I would have to pay him interest within a few days or, yet again, he would kill me.