The following morning, upon his waking up, the thick, beery fug was pierced almost immediately by Peter's euphoric sense of creative rebirth. This euphoria was in turn pierced by the strain of his bladder, which he duly emptied after shuffling down the hallway to the bathroom. Empty-bladdered, the piercing euphoria returned.
There was a framed photograph of Patty which hung in the hallway. It wasn't objectively a flattering portrait; it depicted Patty, half out-of-frame, poorly lit, eyes closed, placing a Thai spring roll into her upturned mouth, like a hungry chick devouring a worm. The photo had been taken at the King's Head, before the change of management, and it was unfortunately one of the few photos Peter had of his dearly departed. (Charlie had recently offered to "photoshop" it, which was not a term Peter understood. It sounded mercantile and sinister.) This morning, Peter drew up beside the portrait and serenaded Patty with a joyous ditty, or at least he meant to - in the moment he could only recall the words to a Beach Boys song about promiscuity. Nothing, however, not even memory loss, could ruin his good mood.
"I'm going to make you proud, my love," he told her; stroking the image of her plump cheeks, bulging gloriously around that ravenous maw.
After breakfast, Peter read through his mail (bills; fliers; the usual selection of harassing notes from an anonymous local fox-lover; more bills), pulled on his shoes and headed out to the local library. His mission was to identify a playwright who had fallen from prominence, and whose plays could be revitalised with considerate staging and a bold new direction.
It took Peter some time to get his own table at the library. Desk space was at a premium in that library, fought over hungrily by pensioners, tramps and the unemployed, who circled them like bull sharks around a lone canoeist, waiting for a moment to strike.
After several trips to the relevant bookshelves, he had before him a tower of screenplays and theatrical compendia, and began working his way through them, from top to bottom. The hours flew by, and many a circling tramp lost patience with his unceasing vigil. At 5 o'clock, when "last orders" were announced over the public address system (the chief librarian was both a humorist and a dipsomaniac), Peter's notepad was full from the margin to the edge of every page. The names of three playwrights were emphatically underlined: Edward Bond, John Osborne and Caryl Churchill.
As he left the library to walk home, he toyed with a number of ideas: Churchill's memorable and contentious Seven Jewish Children, perhaps, with the eponymous offspring emerging from the shadows over the course of the ten minute play, revealed to be wearing blackface and afro wigs - a subversive commentary on how one's racial and ethnic prejudices are involuntarily transmitted to one's children; or what about Osborne's Look back in Anger, with the actors delivering their lines from deckchairs on the edge of a pier, an allusion to the deckchair in which Osborne wrote the play, on Morecambe Pier in 1956...
He discussed his ideas the following day with Tariq, who worked in one of the few remaining independent local pharmacies. Tariq was formerly of the South Wimbledon Martyrs jihadist group, but disowned them when they declared X-Box to be haram in an issue of their quarterly magazine, Jihadi Life. That same issue, which led with a piece on beard-grooming and burqa fashion disasters, also declared haram frivolous Western art and literature, which Tariq, following the Sanskrit aphorism that my enemy's enemy is my friend, took it upon himself to learn and appreciate anew.
By the time of his cross-counter parley with Peter, he had worked his way from Apollinaire to Dryden, by way of Babbage, Bacon, and Calvino, amongst several dozen others. The X-Box gathered dust in his loft.
"...And so you see," explained Peter, "the seagull defecating on Jimmy in the final act is symbolic of John Osborne's wife fouling things up for him."
"Powerful imagery," Tariq agreed. "Although you don't consider Osborne may be too obscure for a Mertonian audience? The same could be said, I think, for Churchill and even Bacon."
"Obscure?" Peter asked. He stood aside to allow Tariq to serve a customer, an elderly gentleman purchasing toothpaste.
"Indeed," continued Tariq when the gentleman had left the shop. "You want your play to be a furnace, and every furnace must begin with a spark. A spark is bright, and white hot; it draws the eye. How can you draw the eye in the Merton Community Centre with a play such as Osborne's, which requires foreknowledge and context to appreciate its many layers."
"Yes, true. Well perhaps not Osborne then."
"And Bond neither," Tariq replied. "Let me tell you a story, Peter. The South Wimbledon Martyrs - fools to a man - once protested at Bond's Saved, being performed at a theatre in Putney Heath. Our sheikh declared it was obscene. But barely five people turned up to see the play, and since it was raining outside we congregated in the foyer to protest, and purchased refreshments for it was late in the day and we were famished. We discovered later that the theatre had realised a higher opening night profit on catering for protestors than from the play itself. Not long after that the Martyrs produced a list of obscene plays which our sheikh considered too obscure to be worth picketing."
"Golly," said Peter. "I must say I hadn't really thought of that. May I see the list?"
"I am not, thank God, a part of that group any longer, but unless arrangements have altered drastically since my departure, the list - along with a schedule for protests and a copy of the sheikh's sermons - can be accessed in a shared Internet folder."
"A what?"
"A shared Internet folder," Tariq repeated. "A webpage accessible to anybody, and from which one can download files. It was, I think, intended to be secret, but the sheikh does not understand about Internet security, and is not what you might call 'computer literate'. I think he's taking IT lessons at the library."
Peter felt a pang of sympathy with his brother Luddite, and did in fact recall having seen a thickly spectacled old man at the library the day before, glaring sullenly into the grimy glow of an ancient computer monitor. He was noteworthy on account of his being dressed like the villainous Jafar from Disney cartoon Aladdin.
Tariq went on to explain to Peter how he could access the shared folder, and he found himself back at the library that very afternoon, browsing the Inter-web in accordance with Tariq's guidance. Updating his MySpace profile on the device immediately adjacent was the sheikh, this time wearing a beret, some navy blue overalls and a red-white keffiyeh, which he had made himself by stitching together a number of his wife's kitchen towels.