Yes.

When I walked in the door, he span around and eyed me gleefully.

‘I’ve had no sleep,’ he said.

‘I bought biscuits.’

‘Nice.’

I laid them on the desk among the cigarette butts stuffed straight into the table and coffee cups with whole gardens growing out of them. I sat on the piano stool, removing from it a pair of suspicious underwear.

Ed pointed at the chandeliers. He’d replaced a couple of the two-hundred light bulbs that had nearly all blown.

‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘The place looks better.’

Ed smiled as he reclined on the antique sofa. He’d hired the Rug Doctor a week before and was riding the crest of a foaming wave.

‘I’ve had no sleep. I need a cup of tea,’ said Trewin as he span around in his terrifically engineered chair. It was the kind of chair that an Italian technology-fantastist might baulk at for being too gaudy. Visibly, it was a locomotive.

Seryn walked in, handing Ed and Trewin two dirty pint glasses in which puddles of creamish liquid sloshed about.

Trewin took a glug.

‘Cold,’ he said, looking blankly at Seryn.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, ‘That's because I left them on the side for about fifteen minutes.’

‘The biscuits are nice,’ said Ed.

Seryn and Ed went to Seryn’s room to set up a new synthesiser while Trewin and I sat and chatted about very little of note. When is the album coming out? How are we? That sort of thing. Predictable. Unimaginative. Of little or no note. Trewin played the same fourteen seconds of music over and over again for the longest time, tinkering with a graphic equaliser which sat in a little box inside a little window inside a project in another window which filled a screen packed with squares and other oblongs and infinite simulated knobs drawn on to all colours of pixelated pretend equipment. The bass elements of a distant whining sound phased in and out, ever-so slightly.

The music stopped.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more,’ he said.

He leaped out of the chair and went to microwave his tea as an atonal trumpet sound blasted at concert volume from Seryn’s open door.

Tim