The sky had turned a nasty shade of grey, a large cloud in the shape of dog peeing up a lamppost spitting rain on the taxi windows. Not entirely a good omen.

Roger was wary of omens ever since his best friend’s cat suffered an unforeseen and untimely end. He was thirteen at the time and the cat was black, shooting out from the under privet hedge he buried his foot in while reconstructing a left foot strike in goal. The aforementioned doomed feline ran straight in the path of the number 26 bus to end its life looking like a Pontefract cake.

The Roger of those days, not particularly tall with a caved in chest, spindly limbs and a mop of indeterminately brown hair that his mother cropped with a pair of kitchen scissors, had not really changed. Sometimes as he caught his adult reflection pulling on his underpants oppressed by the thought of another day, he could still see him. In idle moments he wondered what became of the many faces that had coloured his past and faded into obscurity, but not today. Today he could only think of the future, staring anxiously out on a rapidly greying view as he trundled through the streets of a town that had remained starkly unfamiliar despite his frequent visits.