They go places we can't...

It was 9.30 pm on a Tuesday and Grahame was concentrating. He leaned across his half empty schooner of VB and stared at a corner of the pub the conversation he was listening to wasn't coming from.

"It's crap these days, you know. Where are the Grandmaster Flashes of our generation? Where's our Chuck D or Jam Master Jay? It's all right for us, we're old enough that that stuff was still around for us to listen to, but kids even just five years younger than us are gonna grow up thinking rap music begins and ends with Fiddy, eminem and Flo Rida."

The tall, well-dressed young man was waving his arms wildly at his two quiet female companions. He had been talking for 15 minutes about hip hop music.

"Where's the message behind the music? Where's the commentary? What's its purpose? It cold sucks. All the humour, the fun and the humanity's been sucked out and replaced by sneakers, Hummers and misogyny."

The young man was in full flight. His eyes ranged around the pub, resting only occasionally on the girl Grahame assumed was his girlfriend. She had merely asked who sung the song the jukebox was playing. A procession of four indie rock anthems and six R&B hits had shuffled past since the young man (Grahame guessed an Economics student) had started talking.

Grahame picked up his schooner and prepared to walk over to the man to tell him he was wrong, but the moment he stood up the other girl scooted across from the bar to take his seat. The other two followed her, passing Grahame as he stood, flummoxed, in the no man's land between the tables and the bar.

Grahame got that feeling he got most nights at the pub. A weird combination of humiliation, anger and relief. He felt none of them distinctly, and none separately, rather the feelings piled into his chest and mixed like lemon juice and milk. At a loose end, totally disoriented from the sudden shift in position, he walked around the curved bar and found a seat at an empty table. He settled in and waited.

A cockroach crawled across the wall, some five feet above the heads of the few punters with nothing better to do on a Tuesday night. Grahame noticed it and wondered where it had been before here. He often wondered about the almost unlimited access to the world that insects had. He speculated about the places they could go that he couldn't. Grahame hoped the cockroach had been somewhere amazing before it came to the pub. Somewhere no-one else had seen for years, like the inside of the wall in an old warehouse, full of old magazines, cigarette packets and other rubbish the builders had thrown down the gap between the sandstone bricks. He hoped the cockroach appreciated the things it had that he didn't. He hoped it was buzzing with excitement about the places it had been and the places it would go.

Grahame had been to the pub every Tuesday for five years. He used to go to one up the road, but had been told not to go back. He remembered the bar girl there, and how disappointed she had looked. Vulnerable and unhappy. He'd walked out that night and hadn't seen her since. He'd started going to this pub, which he didn't like. He counted the Tuesdays. About 260 and he'd never brought anyone with him.

He looked at the three empty chairs around his table. He hoped someone would come and ask for one, so that he could start up a conversation.

The cockroach worked its way down the wall slowly. It headed for the gap behind the jukebox and the wall, but before it could get there a bearded man, clearly unhinged, pulled it off the wall and shoved it in his mouth. The old bearded man ate the cockroach, and turned to his desperate looking friends, who all laughed. They were pissed. They were always pissed. At least when Grahame saw them. Old drunk lunatics with nothing better to do than eat cockroaches and laugh like zombies. Grahame had never understood zombies. Why did they feed on human brains? Why did they pick the least available and most difficult to obtain food in the world? At least the zombies here ate cockroaches. They weren't stupid, even though last week Grahame had told them they were. Sometimes they talked to him but Grahame would just fidget around in his seat until he wasn't quite facing them any more, and they would lose interest and play the pokies and call him a wanker. There were shitloads of cockroaches. They should eat them.

A plain, but sweet looking girl slid nervously up to Grahame.

"Excuse me, is anyone using this seat?"

Grahame abruptly said yes, it was taken. He shoved his empty schooner into the hand of a passing bar girl and leant back in his chair. The girl went away and stood awkwardly at a table where her friends were seated. After a couple of minutes, a man at the table stood up and walked over to Grahame's table. The man made eye contact with Grahame, picked up a chair, and took it over to the girl.

Grahame stood up and took his curdled insides outside and walked home with them sloshing around in a congelaed mess inside him. He pushed past his son in the hallway, went upstairs and pulled the door of his bedroom shut.