A bit too much

Andrew Taylor wasn't accustomed to being woken by the sound of his own voice booming out across the Home, but that, it was. It took him a minute to reach full consciousness, and even then he was unaware of the acute stench of last night's alcohol mingling with stale farts and what smelt suspiciously like rather acidic urine. Fucking hell, who's that prick on the loudspeaker, was his initial thought, as he peeled the sheet from his sweaty back and attempted to find some boxers in the chaos at his feet.

There came a frantic, and in his mind somewhat unnecessary, pounding from somewhere to his left.

"Andt! Andy! Open the fucking door. What are you doing?" It's four in the morning!"

He stumbled to the door and twisted the key which he had obviously failed to remove two hours before. He could imagine a multitude of things he would've preferred to see than the sight that awaited him.-Hazel, exhausted from night shift, grim-faced, complete with snow-flake pyjamas, pink ear-muffs and a large bunch of keys swinging aggressively from her right hand. Her expression flicked through three stages in quick succession: serious irritation, mild surprise and then utter horror. She glanced from his shoulder where his hand was resting, to his crotch and back to his hand. It was then that he had his fourth thought of the day, 'oh shit, that's my boxers slung over my shoulder'.

"For god's sake, if I wanted to know what your dick looked like I would've asked Chloe. Get that thing away from me!" she exclaimed, and pushed him aside to inspect his room. "Urgh...what's that...seriously?...you couldn't even make it to the toilet? Andrew, that's gross." She was at the sink now, appraising it's contents with a mixture of interest and revulsion.

"Um yeah, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," he mumbled sheepishly, pulling his discoloured boxers over his pasty bum. They both looked up in shock as a decidedly drunken cackle issued from the nearest speaker, followed by uneven Scottish tones, "keep it real, one love, keep it real, totally man, ONE LOOOVE!"

"Crap, I literally don't know how that is happening" present day Andrew muttered, fishing around for the second yellow sock and finding only a green one. For some reason that he couldn't quite explain he liked to put his socks on first, and it was this routine that gave him assurance at times like this, when he had no fucking clue what was going on.

"Well neither do I. And if you don't make it stop in the next five minutes I'm going to murder you and chop you up into tiny little pieces and burn you and take you to Claudine and you'll get sent back to England and everyone will be angry with you and they'll all shout at you and feel really bad and I won't care because you've woken every single one of my fucking girls up and they won't go back to sleep!!" At this, he defiantly pulled on his t-shirt and marched out of the room, but not before he'd hissed, "I'm Scottish you twat."

By the time he had reached the living room he bitterly regretted not bothering to put on trousers, as the Atlantic wind had hit the Cape with some ferocity that evening and was succeeding in making his spindly legs feel like frozen chicken drumsticks. He turned the corner into the living room to find Chad, Phillip and Jonny huddled around the intercom sniggering hysterically. He saw that they had an iphone pressed to it, from which a hazy version of himself was giving an inebriated performance he did not recall.

"You don't know, but you know! You know? Like you know, but you don't know that you knew...ha-ha-ha" even he, normally unflappable, was embarrassed by his manic, broken laugh.

He snatched the phone off them and spun round, knocking into Chloe who had just emerged from the kitchen. Being a petite girl, she fell onto the sofa and landed, bum in the air, power puff girls pants proudly on display through her translucent leggings, and luckily for Andrew, she was giggling. He'd seen her furious once before and it was an experience that he never wanted to repeat.

Instead of checking if she was alright, he stormed past her to the back door he assumed was open and proceeded to walk straight into it. It was glass, though that really was no excuse. Laying on the muddy floor (which was dirty primarily due to the fact it was his task that week, and he neglected his tasks on a matter of principle), staring up at the purple snoopy sock on the smoke-detector, he might have cursed his own stupidity, had he been sober. As it was, Andrew was not a man to focus on regrets and so he focused on the slowly swirling sock and blurry lights until he slipped into unconsciousness for the second time in twenty-four hours.

At seven o'clock, awake and disorientated, he discovered that five words had been permanent-markered across the length of his left leg,

"I NEED TO DRINK LESS."