prologue:
The end

Some time before I lost everything, I heard laughter drifting up to my office at the top of the house, a sound I could never resist. My family were my favourite audience, and if they were already laughing, well then, even better. Normally, I’d gallop down, asking what was so funny, to join in or see if I could steal something to turn into a joke or a sketch or a scene or a show. But this time I just stood at the top of the stairs and listened. This was after the first year of relentless harassment, while I was still dissecting the workings of the trap I had walked into, and the limits of friendship had allowed it to snap shut on my remaining testicle, the one that the cancer had somehow not stumbled upon during a recent tussle with its immediate neighbour. I didn’t yet know how firmly the trap held me, but it certainly held me at the top of those stairs.

It was still early days in my exile from the dinner party circuit; work, opportunities and social engagements had only just ceased to darken my door. Sure, no one was saying anything, no one was helping – my friends were, in fact, giving me odd looks, ghosting and blanking me, not returning calls, giving my wife shit on the phone, writing nasty letters about the importance of kindness, and perhaps worst of all, sympathetically nodding while telling me why they couldn’t get involved – but I still believed it was only a matter of time before these friends and colleagues from the entertainment industry would fly to my aid. The satirists, the stars, the progressives, the feminists... Those I’d made famous, and who had made me semi-famous in return. I thought they’d be along any minute.

But no one around me expressed an opinion about the issues I was desperately asking them to address: women losing their words, spaces and sports, and the systematic dismantling of basic principles of safeguarding that protect the most vulnerable. My nerves were shredded, waiting for my friends to turn up and them not turning up. So when I heard my family laughing from downstairs I knew I couldn’t go down because it would all be written on my face and I’d do to the atmosphere what the internet did to privacy: kill it stone dead.

It was out of the question. It’d be like Lurch fromThe Addams Family walking into the room. So I sat down at the top of the stairs and listened to them, smiling, glad that there was still at least some happiness in the house. Maybe the dog joined me, or one of the cats. It wasn’t so bad.

‘A nursing home on one side and a graveyard on the other,’ the lettings agent had said, forcing a laugh. ‘Not ideal, I know.’

‘No, no. What could be more convenient?’ I said.

It’s early in 2020. My modest flat, which is a few hundred yards down the road from my family, is on a corner of the building and does indeed have a nursing home to one side and a graveyard behind it. When I’m preparing food, I look out of a window at the nursing home; when I’m eating, I look at the graveyard. It’s quite the rollercoaster! Every day, I lock eyes with one elderly patient propped up on pillows, staring straight back at me through his window. I waved once and got no response. He’s either suffering from dementia or he knows who I am and doesn’t have the strength to raise his middle finger.

In the earliest hours of the morning, the nurses at the nursing home (it would be odd to have nurses at a graveyard) gather outside to gossip and smoke. Because I’ve stopped watching the news, the soft tr