25. Asparagus

You wake on a long leather couch. On your back with hands clasped on your stomach, you would look like a psychoanalysis patient to an outside observer, if not for the blanket. There is a blanket and there is an outside observer.

You do not recognise the short man, seated on leather chair in the parlour's corner, who asks: 'Symptoms?'

'Uh, who are you?'

'I'm a friend of Chris'. And Al and that lot.'

'I didn't see you at the wedding.'

'I was there.' Smiling in double meaning. 'In spirit.'

'I have to get go-'

'Symptoms.' He insists. 'Your hangover. Is it in the head or the stomach?'

'Uh.' You consider. 'The head.'

'Good, I can work with that.'

You try to rise from the couch but fail. It could be done, but you just plum darn drank too much last night. Too much effort. He sighs and takes off his glasses.

'I'd say I was like you once, but I don't know much about you. What I know, however, are hangovers. Hangovers, the other side of drinking's coin, are half the reason I drank. The other half being, of course, to get drunk.

I enjoyed hangovers. Suburbia is less mundane in the twisted light of lack of sleep. Chris always said that I should find a better masochism.'

Now he looks sad.

'And it was boredom. Booze is life's "pass-time" button and the hangover felt doubly productive because recovering whilst working feels like multi-tasking.

But time is the only real hangover cure and it will run out. You don't have to trust me, but word of advice. Don't waste your time.

Now wake up.'

You do. Same couch, same parlour room, same amount of daylight. You are laying on the floor, blanket over your head. No hangover.

Sizzling elsewhere in house. You go to the kitchen, where Chris fries bacon. Frank and James sit at the table with furrowed brows:

'Did you have the same dream?'