There are surprisingly few places to piss discreetly along most towpaths in the daylight, and John was running out of time. He clenched whatever he could between his piss balloon and piss tube and raged at the sun for refusing to fuck off. He’d been drinking for eight hours, it should be dark by now. John fucking hated the summer.

You know what else he hated? Gnomes. Aloof little shits. Dungarees and Santa hats? Fucking ridiculous. He pitched his empty bottle into the garden and knocked one of the beardy little bastards straight into a pond.

“Ha!” he spat into the air. “Not bad for a pissed fucker!”

John’s joy loosened the resolve in his groin, almost causing a leak. He squeezed hard and felt a sudden movement. The focus of his problem was suddenly quite different. He wasn’t turtling, but it might be a terrapin. Some vicious little fucker snapping to get out. Desperate times. John tried to blink clarity into his blurry world. That’s when he saw the open door.

Dignity had been tied to the towpath for as long as John could remember. He’d always enjoyed the reference. It never moved. It wasn’t moored on the other side of the water like the houseboats. He’d never seen anyone on it. The lights were never on at night.

Four heartbeats later, John sat pantless in the dark as every foreign object in his body plummeted into what he hoped was a toilet. Bliss overwhelmed his body with an intensity even morphine couldn’t match. Surrounded by beautiful silence, John exhaled, let his head fall against the wood behind him, and passed out.

He woke because somebody coughed. It could have been seconds, it could have been hours. His trousers were still around his ankles and the upright coffin around him was thick with an ungodly miasma. He retched but choked back the sound.

John shook his head and tried to put his thoughts in order. The cough didn’t sound deliberate and hadn’t been repeated. The fact he’d been left undisturbed suggested he hadn’t run past an unsuspecting occupant and released six feet from where they sat. The person now in the boat had either been asleep or elsewhere when John had mounted his emergency trespass. John wasn’t caught yet but, somehow, he needed to make a dignified dismount.

Gently, John pushed the porthole open to dilute the air and make space for a plan. He pushed his head into the hole. The towpath bobbed directly beneath his nose. His heart filled with opportunity, John yanked his head back to check if the porthole was big enough to push his body through. His ears wedged tight against the metal ring of the window. “Fuck!” he spat.

“What the…. who’s there?!”

“Fuck…” John sighed, his eyes locked with those of a gnome whose friend had recently gone missing.