Outside the flat was odd – with each step, Nick began to remember coming home. He could vaguely recall falling up the steps, knocking over the plant pot and dropping his keys into a puddle. For the bits he couldn’t remember, there was a helpful trail of kebab-shop-salad and chips, and for the bits he hadn’t managed to map out, there was always the lingering smell of piss to guide him. For a full minute, he stopped and pondered the notion that primitive pissheads had used a similar system to find their way home. Half way into the minute, the smell became overbearing and he correctly predicted that he would be sick into the garbage chute.

His phone bleeped. It was Matt.
“Good night? Lack of a further hoedown suggests you’re either dead, or stayed in. Based on that, I’m sorry to hear you died, mate, but on a more positive note, does this mean I can have my Mega Drive back?”
Nick wasn’t dead, though he might as well be. He replied “Not dead. Think I might have fucked things up with Rachel though.”
Outside the flats, more evidence to his evening. The kebab itself. Neatly folded in a damp pitta bread, it looked worse that he did. He kicked it. It moved. A rat scuttled away, presumably annoyed that his dinner was gone. As it ran away, Nick could be sure he heard it call him a cunt. “You’re a fucking cunt and all!” he shouted at the rat. The rat didn’t reply, and from across the road, Nick’s elderly neighbour saw a man cursing at the very ground he walked on. Nick’s neighbours were more than used to his ‘outbursts’ but this was low.
Phone again. Matt, obviously.
“** COCO MESSAGE ALERT ** – I told you to leave her sister alone! ** END COCO MESSAGE ALERT”
Nick was amused for a full 18 seconds at the inclusion of a Coco Message Alert and put his phone in his pocket and ambled to the shop.
In the shop, Nick got the hangover munchies. For those of you unaware of this precarious and dangerous condition, its the feeling you get after an evening on the piss in Exeter that forbays you to not eat a fried breakfast, a quiche and an ice cream for breakfast, washed down with more beer.
He picked up a quiche and a Cornetto, plus one of those ghastly all-day breakfasts that come in tins, the defacto eight beers and a copy of the Sunday tabloid. It seemed the stars of that show Matt really liked had been caught waving their genitals in the faces of an Otter. Again.
Another flashback. No otters, though, in case that suddenly got your attention. No, this had Nick lying on the floor of someone’s house, while they poured a full can of lager in his mouth from a height. Nothing unusual about that, until he realised it was that mystery girl again. “What do you want?” he asked her. “I don’t want anything. Drink up.” she said, and carried on pouring. Another can, then another. Five cans now. Six. Seven. Nick was quickly becoming intoxicated. An hour later, he woke up, back at his own flat, lying on the floor, surrounded by beer cans, with a melted ice cream perched atop a solitary can of lager and a quiche in a bag.
What the hell was going on? He looked down. He had pissed himself again.