text: Charlie had been drinking for days, solidly, sleeping little and doing little other than drinking. The sleep wasn’t even real sleep; it was just his body crashing the way it does when one is perpetually drunk. It was midday on Thursday. He had crawled off the king-size luxury mattress at around 10am; the king-size luxury mattress that had lain on the floor, dirty and without sheets, since he’d destroyed the bed frame in a fit of pure rage a few weeks earlier. He had a mug of gin with a bowl of dry Weetabix, and then started on the ouzo. The pub next door didn’t open until after 12, and his sciatica was really playing up so our man had to make do with the remains of his dwindling home stock. Dozens of half empty bottles that sat in a small dark wood chiffonier pulled up right next to the sofa for ease of grabbing. It was a large living room, but the television and all of the furniture had been dragged over into the back corner, on the other side of the room from the bay window that looked out into the real world. It had been this way since Kelly left. His wife, his agent, the only thing bringing any semblance of organisation to his life, had left. And all that remained of a prosperous and happy partnership was an alcoholic old man, with a novel to write for a publisher that had already paid him, writers block and chronic back pain. **Charlie Slater and the fight with the delivery boy.** *I feel like shit. Where’s the remote? I can’t listen to these idiots anymore. I used to like chat shows, people mulling over their lives and careers with a man in a nice suit who really looked like he was interested and knew all the right questions to ask. I used to like a lot of things; movie stars and rock bands and popular culture. Then this new decade happened and everything just got fucking annoying.* Charlie scrabbled around the seat for the television control. He switched over from the light-hearted daytime talk show being hosted by a young man he didn’t know the name of talking to an old actor he’d forgotten the name of, and onto ‘antique hunters’, which was basically a lot of people without real jobs running around a car boot sale. He did this whilst simultaneously pouring himself another mug of ouzo and coughing violently. Charlie was a man who could multitask. *Jesus this is boring. It’s the sort of thing Kelly made me do. Put wellies and a windbreaker on and chasing around a car park at 7am looking for useless rubbish people are willing to sell for pennies. I might be miserable and alone but at least I’m not freezing my balls off trying to look excited about an old lamp.* It was lunchtime. The television and Greek alcohol had kept him occupied for the last couple of hours and now it was time to feed. He had peculiar eating habits did Charlie, and they’d become even more peculiar since he was left to his own devices. Kelly would always try and get him into a routine, whereby he would eat three square meals a day, with an equal amount of carbohydrates, proteins and roughage, but he’d never really taken to it. He would try to find ways out of sitting down for dinner at normal time; say he’d hit upon a purple patch, that he was really getting somewhere with a character and had to stay in the study to write. And if she nagged he would pretend to yield and take his plate into that dimly lit room with him, but instead feed the neighbour’s cat through the window. Over the years that little tabby grew plump, whilst Charlie just got leaner and leaner. Charlie was 6”4, and weighed on average just over ten stone. His doctors would say he was underweight, he would say he was svelte. His bones were brittle, and as a teenager he broke his arm in four places, his leg twice and his collarbone once. He kept all his old casts, sweaty and signed, in a cardboard box in the airing cupboard. Every so often he would get them out to show guests, almost as proof that at one point in his life he had friends. He reached for the nearest takeaway menu. He had hundreds of them scattered around the house, Chinese, kebab, pizza. There was even a leaflet from a place that only sold roast dinners, full roast dinners with gravy and Yorkshires and all the trimmings, delivered straight to your door by a man on a scooter. But these glossy little menus, all brightly coloured and screaming for your intention, were scattered out of reach and Charlie had no intention of moving from his groove. He grabbed at the only one he could. It was a plain and poorly put together leaflet, with bold Helvetica font on the front that simply read ‘The Tandoori Palace’. *What time is it? Can I eat curry at this time in the day? This place gave me the shits last time. I’ll just order some bahjis. And maybe some sag aloo. That’s onion and spinach and potatoes. All vegetables and the healthier I eat the more alcohol I can drink without feeling guilty. That’s actually three of my five. Then if I ask for some of that mint yoghurt stuff aswell I’m basically sorted for the rest of the day. Free delivery on all orders over £7...I reckon that’ll come to £7. They shouldn’t charge me for the yoghurt though. Should come gratis.* When Charlie was eleven years old, his sister Claire took him to Margate for a weekend. Claire was born a decade before Charlie and had moved out when she was just sixteen, just as Charlie would when he reached that age. She had decided she had been spending too much time drinking and taking drugs and had been neglecting her little brother by leaving him in a sterile home environment with their overbearing mother and mostly absent father. She wanted to get him away for the weekend to experience some life seeing as the only occasions she had spent any time with him in the prior three or four years he had looked painfully bored and lonely, and whilst it had taken her some time to convince their parents they eventually relented. Claire picked Charlie up in her rusty Vauxhall Nova and on a road trip to the Kent coast they went. She booked them into a bed and breakfast on the seafront; being the early nineties and Margate still being popular destination amongst day trippers and holiday makers from all over the country this wasn’t cheap, but Claire was doing alright for herself working for an insurance company in the city and wanted to treat the little boy brother she had barely seen in months. On the Saturday night Claire took him to an all you can eat Indian buffet. It would be the first time he would sample food of an ethnic origin, and he sampled all of it. A little bit of something from every metal trough. He had Chicken Korma, Lamb Madras, Vegetable Jalfrezi and egg fried rice. He had onion bahjis and potato fritters. He had little garlic prawn skewers and chapatti and peshwari naan. He had dal and endless poppadoms. He ate until he vomited, and then he vomited for the rest of the weekend. When Claire returned young Charlie home on the Sunday morning, pale, shaking and still occasionally expelling Indian food from his stomach, their mother went berserk, hollering charges of recklessness and irresponsibility at her reckless and irresponsible daughter. What she didn’t realise was that something had stirred in her innocent and impressionable young son. What had stirred was a love of anything exotic, and a composition of dangerous compulsion. *“Tandoori Palace...”* *“Hello can I make an order for delivery?”* Charlie sat upright on the sofa and adjusted his pants, still looking at the menu; still unsure of what it was he wanted to eat. *“Go ahead...”* *“Excuse me?”* *“I said go ahead”* *“What do you mean go ahead don’t you need my address first?”* Technology had always been something that had puzzled Charlie. When he wrote he used a pen and pad, and only occasionally a vintage typewriter. He didn’t have a mobile phone, wasn’t a member of any social networks, and consistently refused to upgrade his 25 year old television. The fact that the young man that had answered the phone to him to take his order already knew his address had caused a panicked and confused look to appear on Charlies face, and when he was in a state of panic and confusion he had a tendency to get angry. *“I have your address. What would you like to order?”* *“How do you have my address? That’s an infringement of my privacy”* *“It comes up on our computer system. If you don’t like it mate call someone else...”* *“I don’t like your tone.”* Charlie took a second or two to deliberate. Whilst he was extremely unhappy that his whereabouts could be so easily located, his stomach moaned at him in impatience. *“Can I just have some pilau rice, mushroom bhaji and some sag aloo please?”* *“Is that all?”* *“A thank you wouldn’t go amiss”* The line went dead, and Charlie cursed the abruptness of youth. Still, his food wouldn’t be long and he could then carry on his business of getting as drunk as humanly possible. The television spat noisy disorientating images at him; the sun crept in through a gap in the curtains and after what felt like a lifetime, the doorbell rang. Charlie stood up for the first time in over an hour and his knees cracked. It was a sound he had always enjoyed, and frequently initiated by way of bending his joints and bones until they popped. At the door stood a slight Indian boy, no more than 17, holding a crash helmet and a vinyl bag full of hot pungent food over his shoulder. *“Are you the one I spoke to on the phone?”* asked Charlie, with the intensity of a wronged man. *“Dunno what you’re talking about mate. Thirteen fifty yeah.”* *“Don’t lie to me you little shit”* he spat *“I recognise your voice!”* The boy, not intimidated in the slightest in spite of Charlies hulking frame towering over him, laughed impudently in his face. In a sudden fit of rage Charlie lunged, knocking the bag of hot food all over the doorstep. They fell to the floor, grappling and wrestling for dominance. In a moment of improvised genius, the boy reached out and grabbed a plastic spork from the vinyl satchel and rammed it in Charlies eye, snapping it in two and causing immeasurable pain. Charlie let out a high pitched squeal, the sound a dog makes when you accidentally step on his tail, and clutched his face with his spinach and potato covered hands. The boy sped off on his moped and left Charlie rolling around on the pavement. After a minute or so he regained his composure, scooped the bhajis and from the floor and stepped back into his house. Charlie smiled to himself, a packet of frozen peas strapped to his eye socket. A free dinner, and all it took was the blunt trauma of some recyclable cutlery to the face and a bit of a roll around with a teenager. The only downside was that he really fancied that sag aloo. *“Tandoori Palace.