The third time the snooze alarm went off I decided it might be about time to get up. Besides, the pillow had fallen off the bed.

Hang on, I wasn’t on the bed.

Ow. Fuck. I’d fallen asleep on the typewriter again.

The typewriter was large and clunky and, frankly, fucking uncomfortable. I levered myself upright, and momentum continued me backwards, slumped against the unsteady back of the chair. I rubbed at the imprint of the shift key above my left eyebrow. Eyes. Open. Come on, not that hard.

First thing I saw, blurred and bleary, was the bottle of Jim Beam. I blinked. Well, that explained quite a bit. I could have sworn there was something in it last night.

Coffee. Now.

In some sort of controlled fall off the chair, I managed to end up on my feet. I grabbed the bottle on the way through. Paul would have a cow if I didn’t put it in the recycling bin. Paul cared about things like that. But I could put up with it if Paul had made coffee before he left this morning.

He had. All was right with the world.

Half-way through the cup I woke up enough to find the recycling bin and relinquish the empty bottle. When I straightened up, I saw the note taped to the coffee machine.

“Dear Mike,” I read out loud, because I was alone in the flat and in that sort of mood. Half a hangover, half-awake and half a cup of coffee induced some sort of whimsy. And added up to one and a half. I was an Arts student; why let maths stand in the way of metaphor?

Anyway. “Dear Mike. You suck. More than usual, apparently. Yolante came round especially to tell me so at six-thirty this morning. I was inclined to agree with her. But I told her you were dead. We’re out of milk, by the way. Yours in collusion, St Paul.”

I managed a chuckle. Well, at least I’d missed Yolante. I missed the bin with the crumpled-up note as well. I dumped my empty coffee cup in the sink, and headed back into my room.

Standing in the doorway, I analysed the damage. Tie and shirt on the floor where I’d discarded them last night. Shirt couldn’t be saved, especially since I’d dumped my shoes on top of it. I was still wearing my dress pants. The typewriter had a half-written page sticking out the top, and a clear indentation in the keys from my head. The hammers, levers – whatever those things are called, the little metal things that fly up and smack the ink onto the page – were all trapped together in a twisted mess. I crossed the room to unpick them, letting them fall back into their allotted spaces.

From the corner of my eye, I caught my reflection in the spotted mirror on the wall, and almost laughed out loud. Haggard, dishevelled, in need of a shave, wearing pants and nothing else, looking over the typewriter. Sometimes I was so much the picture of the bohemian writer I simply couldn’t take myself seriously. Paul always told me I needed to take up smoking so I could have the overflowing ashtray as well. Some things were just going too far.

I’d got a lot written last night, by the looks of it. I’d been fairly close to the end in any case, and I did vaguely remember going at it like a demon. I’d come in fairly late, too het up to settle down to the study I should have been doing, and decided to work off the energy on the typewriter for a while. It had worked, it seemed. And then, apparently, I’d fallen asleep. Mid-sentence. The penultimate sentence, in fact.

“There was nothing more...”

My fingers twitched. I simply couldn’t leave it there. There were some half-printed letters afterwards, the sort of jumbled mess passing out on the keyboard creates, but I fiddled with the page, rolled it back up, got the positioning right again.

I took a deep breath, hands hovering over the keys. This was, after all, the end. The end of The Novel. I’d only been writing this for the past four years of my life, pouring all my dreams and creative energy into it. And all building up to this, the ending.

In other words, not something to be rushed.

“There was nothing more annoying...”

Halfway through the word, it became patently obvious that nothing was happening. Well, not nothing, precisely. The hammer things were doing their part, smacking their negative imprint against the ribbon, leaving the impression in the paper. And that was it. There was no ink.

My ribbon had run out of ink.

Fuck. Halfway through the second-last sentence, and the ribbon runs out? Of all the damn times to run out.

If I was me, where would I put the spare typewriter ribbons? I kicked a pile of clothes out of the way so I could pull the door of the cupboard fully open. Obviously I was still slightly hungover, or I’d never dare to tackle this. The jumbled mess in the bottom of the cupboard hadn’t been touched since Paul and I had moved into this place. Which was... fuck, almost two years ago now.

So, a half-burnt American flag, a pile of magazines – oh, that’s where I put Paul’s sheet music for Mozart – and, finally, under a pile of old cassettes (did anyone, let alone me, ever actually listen to Bros?) were half a dozen typewriter ribbons boxes. I pulled them out.

The first two were obviously, by weight, empty. The third one contained a ribbon so worn it was practically lace. The fourth one wasn’t actually made for my model of typewriter. The fifth one – finally – looked all right.

Once I’d wrestled with the mechanism of the typewriter, those tricky little springs and catches and the fiddly little holders for the ribbon itself, and once I’d put the top back on the typewriter, I tried again. It only took two letters – “an” – for it to become obvious that this ribbon was no better off than the last one.

The last box was empty too.

“Fuck,” I declared to the room in general.

The room didn’t seem to care.

I hit the N key again. Then harder. I held it down, then whacked it as fast as I could, a staccato beat. I wondered if maybe I could manage to push the N completely through the paper, and could just hack the last sentence and a half out of the paper, and get it finished that way. Caveman style.

Before that could happen, the phone rang. My mobile. At least, I assumed it was my mobile, because there was tinny canned midi music playing somewhere in my room. Someone had changed my ring again. I certainly wouldn’t have set it to play Oops I Did It A-fucking-gain.

The ring was just starting its second rendition when I found it. It was in my shoe. Where else would it be?

I hit the little button on the phone, and thankfully the noise stopped. “What?”

“Well, aren’t you just fucking charming this morning.”

I had been crouched, but at the sound of that voice, I collapsed, sagged against the bed. “Oh hi, Yolante.”

“Oh hi? Oh hi? You think you can just pull this shit and then say ‘Oh hi’ like that? Having your trained monkey run interference isn’t going to help you, either.”

I glared at the typewriter. “Don’t talk about Paul like that, Lante.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, you pig! In fact, don’t talk to me!”

Typical Yolante. I honestly didn’t know how Veronica put up with her, but she seemed to actually be quite friendly with her. “Look, you called me.”

“Because fucking Paul wouldn’t let me in to tell you to your face what a fucking arsehole you are.”

“Yolante, what the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about what you did to Veronica, you bastard.”

What I did to Veronica. Ah.

I sagged even more, lolling back against the bed. And as I did so, my alarm clock, pushed behind the lamp by my snooze-alarm-smacking activities of earlier, came into view. I stared at it, and the little red bars stared back at me, declaring blithely that it was 8:50.

8:50?

“Oh fuck.”

“Yeah, you might well –“

Yolante’s voice was cut off as I ended the call, making as close an approximation of a leap to my feet as I could manage. Shirt, shirt, clean shirt. Shoes. Fuck.

I had ten minutes to make it to my exam.