The weekend before my first week as a Police Community Support Officer began. The last week in which my brain’s valleys, ridges, streets and avenues remained in perfect working order.

Back when I thought a lot differently. Before I became ‘Better Than Normal’ as Ryans says. He says that because in some ways I definitely am. Better than you, I mean. No offence.

It’s a Christmas gift that will lie under my brain stem, wrapped in the folds of my cerebellum, romantically lit by my angular and supramarginal gyrus, for the rest of my grateful life.

So let’s go back to the last week when the inside of my skull was anatomically ‘correct’ and aesthetically as it had been since the day I was born.

When my brain functioned as it does for the ‘normals’. The others. The ones devoid of irregularity or uniqueness. No offence.

Before the fractures. Before the accident.

If it was an accident.

‘So it’s you

The one I thought I knew, I knew,

No matter what we put the other through

It’s always you’

The truth about Gary Canning is revealed to me by Anita herself. Like most things, I don’t see it coming.

I imagine Gary as a P.E. teacher, displaying his sporting prowess and gym-earned physique to the kids of Tower Hamlets as he coaxes the unwilling into exertions like rugby, basketball or maybe even worse. But in actuality, Gary is a Geography teacher with a fair to middling beard. It has pretty good coverage but is patchy in a way that suggests inconstancy of character, a fatal lack of conviction in his genes, or a rather flawed grooming technique. I know this because I find his picture on social media. That’s when I first see the face of Gary Canning.

Gary Canning blogs about food and travel and seems to have ambition beyond the school system. Photos find him caught candidly by the camera lens in clearly orchestrated scenarios, curated to paint him as a soulful character; playing a banjo with his eyes closed, or blowing bubbles with some sort of child, or larking in a European villa while holding a float to his head like it’s an antenna, in a move that will soon be lauded by his fawning friends as ‘classic Gary bants’.

He lists his favourite world cities as Tangier, Iquitos and Bobo-Dioulasso. Only half of one of which I’ve ever heard of. But I guess it isn’t surprising Gary Canning has been to places I’ve never even heard spoken aloud. Given that I’ve never even been to Paris. I thought about taking Anita once but then I forgot to book the tickets and my life moved on. But I’m sure Gary Canning’s been to Paris. Paris is child’s play for Gary Canning. Gary Canning probably went to Paris without even realising it. Because that’s just Gary Canning. Good old Gary Canning.

Anita’s hours have always seemed wildly inconsistent for a job I’d always thought was fairly strict in terms of time frame. Which I’ve never wanted to bring up for fear that it will seem like I’m misunderstanding her life, or being sexist, or teacherist, or some kind of combination of everything that shows me for the true chauvinist idiot I didn’t know I was.

When her late-homes stretched to late nights, I stopped asking questions, as I disappeared into my world. One dominated by online gaming and films I’d seen when I was younger but wanted to watch again to check if they’re still good. Or the lure of sports results on my phone, or direr still, merely staring blankly at the screen glow waiting for that appetising hit of something. Not even current affairs; I can’t handle that, everything is a killing or a manhunt and it gets me down. No, I prefer the safer land of sports news. Where the only tragedies are poor tactics. Where the only manhunt is inane ‘gossip’ about a Portuguese manager ‘tracking’ some sixteen-year-old French-African midfield wunderkind.

The Thursday night before the Monday I’m due to start my latest career experiment begins typically. Anita arrives home and I detach myself from the smart phone umbilical cord to greet her with my best conversation and the second half of a bottle of wine that I’ve started before her arrival. Already one in, having apparently ‘decompressed’ with a single glass on the way home ‘with her colleagues’, she tells me about her day and I listen loyally, retroactively defending her where appropriate from the passive-aggressive comments made by the head of the History department, my mind only occasionally drifting to how much a truly world class defender costs these days and what exactly I’m going to do with the rest of my life.

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