In the bathroom mirror, of course, he would be reduced to two dimensions, so the bathroom mirror was no place to go if what you wanted was depth. And he didn’t want depth. By a certain age, everyone has the face they deserve. Like the eyes are the window to the soul. Good fun to say, good fun even to believe, when you’re eighteen, when you’re thirty-two.

Looking in the mirror now, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had. No one in the history of the planet. There was nothing on the planet it was that bad to do. What happened? What have you done, man? His hair, scattered over his crown in assorted folds and clumps, looked as though it had just concluded a course of prolonged (and futile) chemotherapy. Then the eyes, each of them perched on its own little blood-rimmed beergut. If the eyes were the window to the soul, then the window was a windscreen, after a transcontinental drive; and his cough sounded like a wiper on the dry glass. These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him – but smoking and drinking had done a lot to him, so he drank and smoked a lot. He experimented, furthermore,  with pretty well any other drug he could get his hands on. His teeth were all chipped pottery and pre-war jet-glue. At each given moment, whatever he was doing, at least two of his limbs were immovably numb. Up and down his body there were whispered rumours of pain. In fact, physically, at times, he felt epiphanically tragic. His doctor had died four years ago (“Unfortunately I am terminally ill”); and that, in Richard’s mature opinion, was that.