Black magic

I cycle to a tree-shaded public square. White people in their twenties are doing yoga. It looks ridiculous and striving, but it's peaceable, and I don't feel frowned upon for drinking beer at 11am. My reading gives me an insulating warrant of harmlessness.

Hayley and Tammy are going to Primark on its reopening. We meet afterwards in Castle Park. Azimuth sun. Hayley likes the speed, and says she'll chip in towards the next lot. "No, no. You'll never pay for yours." They complain about boyfriends and the tactics needed to keep them, and the provider of sexual enjoyment, separate and keen. I'm the honorary girl again, but I like it, being included, and not as a favour. It's a feeling as warm as the sun is upon us.

Harry turns up. Me and Tammy have been advising her to keep him on, despite his sexual failings. The air between them is a lot easier than at the weekend, probably connected with the fact that Hayley has taken the untoward step of going to sleep in the interim.

Tammy, who is affected by the long tail of a stroke, but whose greater impediment at this moment is her narrow dress, levers herself up on her stick to go home. The first attempt doesn't work. "Come on Tammy," I say, "you're looking like an old spaz." It's been an unselfconscious, friendly afternoon. The girls are gorgeous, Hayley especially, who looks a bit like a London raver c.1998: unzipped black jacket pushed open by her tits, bare legs, and trainers.

I walk Hayley home. The men's scanning looks at her, a mirror of my own. At my house, thrust into respectability, I suddenly feel much more drunk than I did in the park, and betray it during a ham-fisted explanation, involving C18th architecture, of where I've been. I feel like a naughty boy.

Next day, I am up bright and early, put on my costume for work. Not an inkling of any ripples from the day before.

I cycle to the wrong pick-up point. The works van picks me up from my erroneous location. As soon as I climb in, I start feeling sick. I force sociable sentences out. We lurch twelve miles to a village hall, where I can't fake it any more, and someone asks me if I'm OK. They lay me down on the floor with my feet up. I vomit. They call an ambulance. They do tests and stay with me a long time, before I convince them that I'm OK. The nurse in charge has to cancel the session, sending all the donors away.

They put me and my bike in the van to run me home, but a minute in the van and I am vomiting again. The ambulance picks me up and I'm taken to hospital. "How are you feeling now?" says the ambulance man, and I convulse another stream of vomit up. I am put into a draughty back-revealing gown.

The receiving nurse arrives and pulls the curtains round. Instantly, she does magic on me. She checks my details against my wristband, but even before she says anything I know I can tell her. She's stylish and attractive in her concave-waisted black tunic, unbound straight black hair just short of shoulder length, dark eyes, black-rimmed glasses. I wonder if such an ensemble is deliberate.

"Probably about six, seven pints of cider, and several lines of speed. And sitting in the sun for several hours," I add, hoping to encourage the diagnosis of sunstroke which had been floated earlier. "Any water? Or food?" "No." "So, what's the earliest time you would have a drink?" And "do you take other drugs, Mr looby? Recreational drugs?" She knows already.

An older woman arrives to put a cannula in. I'm impressed at her efficiency in seeming to go under my vein and then into it. I'm put on drips of saline solution, vitamins and minerals, and an anti-emetic. "Drugs and alcohol," I hear my black-clad seer say to the venepuncturer.

A few hours later the consultant comes round. "So, have you any idea what that was?" he asks. "Well, possibly sunstroke, in my uneducated guess." We have an amiable chat about his experience of la peste and I am sent home with a referral to the alcohol and drug services and an exhortation to drink more water, every day. At home, my housemates' friendly curiosity makes me feel interviewed. I tell them that the session overran a bit and try to look bright.

I tell Hayley all about it first. She sends me solicitous texts, suffixed with kisses. "Come back to mine. Stay here. I want to know you're better." "I'd love to but that'd cause problems here. I can't my love." "Well, [pet name], let me know if I can help. Even in a thunderstorm I'd come and help you xxxxx".