A flash of lucidity pierced the hangover fogging his brain and a warning light winked in his consciousness. Not thinking to hide his naked parts reduced by fear, the Count rushed to open his front door.

“What you doing here, wild man?” he asked, the door open, feeling uneasy in his heart. “Something happened to Josefina?”

An explosion of laughter brought the Count back to the idea of his irrevocable acts, and skinny Carlos’s voice alerted him to the magnitude of the disaster he’d just committed: “Fuck me, you animal, you’ve got a right titchy cock…” prompting more laughter, which was boosted by Andrés and Rabbit, whose heads had peered round the corner to check out Skinny’s observation.

“And your mother’s is even titchier,” was all he could manage, as he beat a retreat, mooning a pair of incongruously pallid buttocks at his adversary.

The Count had to swallow two analgesics to see off his impending headache, which he preferred to blame on his scare rather than the rum: skinny Carlos’s unexpected appearance, in his wheelchair, had made him afraid something must have happened to Josefina. His best friend hadn’t been to his place for a long, long time and he thought that the visit could only be triggered by some unhappy event. The morbid vision he’d had that evening, when he’d seen himself cast into the void unsupported by any wings, seemed definitely out of reach: could he go and abandon his friends like that? Leave Carlos alone in his wheelchair and kill off old Jose with an attack of sadness? The water running down his face washed away the last cobwebs of sleep and doubt. No, he couldn’t, least not for now.

“I thought the worst,” he said when he finally returned, cigarette between lips, to his living room and saw that Carlos, Rabbit and Andrés had helped themselves to the mortal remains of his last bottle of rum.