The Adversary by Michael Walters Page A

hell had this happened?
    He sat up slowly—he was incapable of moving with any greater acceleration—and looked slowly around him. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Admittedly, he had never been the tidiest of men. Some might say, he reluctantly acknowledged to himself, thathe was one of the least tidy. But he had never found himself living in a state like this.
    And, at least for the moment, he still couldn’t quite remember how he had reached this point.
    He had, he realized, a severe headache, pounding at the rear of his skull. His throat was parched, and tasted as if he might have tried to chew some of the discarded clothing before his collapse. As he stared at the stacked rows of empty and half empty glasses, the source of his condition became clearer. He was fortunate only that much of the contributory liquor remained unconsumed.
    He pulled himself very cautiously to his feet, blinking as the sunlight from the uncurtained window caught his eyes. The cheap clock was still there above the sink, he noticed, its crimson plastic as gaudy as ever. Ten past eight. He assumed that was morning, though at this time of the year it could still be light at eight in the evening. In any case, he had no idea how long he had been unconscious.
    He dragged himself across to the sink, found a relatively clean looking glass, rinsed it out and filled it with water from the tap. He drank the water down in one, then refilled the glass and emptied that one in the same fashion. He repeated the process a third and then a fourth time. By that point, he felt slightly more human, though now nausea was beginning to replace thirst as the dominant sensation in his body.
    As he moved away from the sink, he caught sight of himself momentarily in the full-length mirror he kept propped behind the main door of the apartment. The mirror had been his wife’s, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why she had decided to leave it with him.Possibly only to maximize the unpleasantness of moments like this.
    There was no way round it. He looked an even worse mess than the rest of the apartment. He was dressed in a filthy cotton vest, stained with sweat under the arms and spilled food down the chest and stomach. Below that, he was wearing a pair of sagging old boxer shorts which were in a state some way beyond rational description. And he was even wearing a pair of socks with matching large holes through which each of his big toes protruded.
    But all of that was relatively reassuring compared with his face. He looked like death. No, he looked like death in an advanced stage of decomposition. He had never seen any living person, let alone himself, looking quite as awful as this. In fact, over the years he had seen one or two corpses that might have been in a healthier state.
    He was unshaven. That went without saying. Three or four days’ growth at least. His pendulous stomach served only to emphasize the filthiness of his yellowing vest. And his hair looked as if it had been dipped liberally in some deeply unpleasant viscous substance—possibly oil, or possibly something sweeter to attract the lice which he suspected were breeding enthusiastically somewhere in there—and then held in a wind-tunnel for a considerable length of time. It was, he reflected, quite possible that this was exactly, or at least approximately, what had happened.
    He couldn’t remember last night. That wasn’t unusual. What concerned him more was that he couldn’t remember any of the preceding ones either.He poured himself another glass of water, and then slumped down on the threadbare sofa, carefully moving a mold-encrusted plate out of the way first.
    So what did he remember?
    Well, he remembered being suspended, that was for sure. Now, how the hell had that happened?
    Partly, he’d just had enough. He put up with this crap, year in, year out, throughout his whole career, and he’d thought it was about time he did something