My poor head was wedged between a rock and a hard place. I guess that most of the population were in a similar state on that bitterly cold frosty morning of January 1st but I was a special case. Because nobody's more important than me, right?

I'd decided to spend New Year's Eve at 'The Gaff', my somewhat urban term for a little thatched cottage on the edge of an obscure village called Mather Down in Wiltshire. An Aunt, my last remaining relative, had left me the place in her will. The exact wording? "I leave the cottage to Alan, my nephew. He's a self-obsessed, morally depraved little toad but he's all I have." Nice.

I'd struggled for the last few years as a semi-professional novelist and achieved moderate success with my second work. The carrot-crunchers from the neighbouring farms found all this desperately glamorous and treated me like a celebrity. Great for my ego and chasing the pants off some of the gullible wenches. So, after an evening of intoxicating ribaldry with the locals till the early hours, I endeavoured to spend much of the next day in post-party slumber.

The annoying ringing sound reverberating between my ears was muffled as if I were being suffocated by a pillow. It took a few moments to realise, through the dim fog of my brain, that it was the doorbell. At 10.35. In the morning. On New Year’s Day. I groaned, inwardly and outwardly. What kind of congenital idiot would knowingly disturb my well-earned sleep on this, the quietest of days? I did the prudent thing and ignored it but my visitor seemed disinclined to give up the ghost.

Throwing on a dressing gown and cursing the stubborn persistence of my rural neighbours, I stumbled my way to the door just as it rang once again.

The man standing before me was not a local. He looked the same age as myself, mid-twenties. While not exactly shabby, neither was he the sharpest dresser in town. Everything about him was cheap or second hand from the supermarket trousers, well worn moccasin shoes and a dork-ish haircut from Charlie the Greek at seven quid a chop.

Yet this nondescript stranger was not so strange to me. Something about the pale white skin, overlong lashes like a woman’s, eyes as doleful as a puppy. It reminded me of…of…..

“Hello, Alan. Remember me?” he ventured.

It was the weedy voice with a slight nasal quality like a Scouser’s that made the penny drop. I stared at him with slowly dawning comprehension.

“Dreary?” I questioned, already knowing the improbable answer.

“Nobody calls me that any more” he replied flatly.

He searched me for a reaction while I continued to stare at him if not open-mouthed, then perhaps halfway there. Vernon Drewry aka Dreary Drewry, V.D, Baby-Face, Twat-Head. He was the boy with a thousand names and none of them very flattering. From what I can recall, I never hated him but I sure as hell didn’t like him. At a time when our hormones were competing with each other to be the best, the fastest, the strongest, Drewry suffered from a distinct lack of everything. He was weak and dull and stupid; he was considered fair game for anyone looking for some extra-curricular sport. I think he left school early or was pulled out or moved or whatever. And now the stupid bastard seemed to have suddenly materialised outside my door like a character from ‘Star Trek’.

“How are you, Alan?” he asked.

I’m not often lost for words but right now, I possessed all the articulate powers of a goldfish.

“What…..wh….I…what are-what are you doing here?”

“Just thought I’d come pay you a little visit” he replied, lying through his slightly crooked teeth. “Catch up on old times.”

He half-smiled, knowing something I didn’t. His smugness had the effect of making him more unbearable than the wretched fifteen year old I had disliked so long ago. It helped me regain some composure.

“What the hell are you doing here, Drewry?” I repeated.

He stomped his feet and exhaled some cold misty air.

“Look….Alan. D’you mind if I come in? I can explain.”

My first impulse was to say no. Tell him to bugger off back to the hole in the ground from which he emanated. But I gave in to my overwhelming curiosity. Why, in the name of God or any other deity you choose to mention, had a singularly unpopular teenager arrived outside of my door in an obscure village years later? And considering I was always on the lookout for creative material, this was intriguing at best.

“Alright, Drewry, but before I let you in, just tell me how you found this place.”

“Oh, it was easy. When we were at school, you had a conversation with your friends about a mad aunt in a village called Mather Down.”

“But-but that was, what, nine years ago!” I exclaimed.

“I remember things. And then I read this article about you and you said you owned this cottage in Wiltshire where you used to go and write and I-well, I put two and two together.” He seemed a little pleased with himself.

I stared at him with some derision then relented. “Alright, alright, you’d better come in.”

He followed me through to the living room. The timer was broken on the boiler and I hadn’t manually switched on the heating. The room was somewhat cheerless and cold but I had no intention of improving matters by offering him a mug of something hot. While my curiosity was piqued, I was not in the mood for entertaining. He seemed to prefer standing which suited me fine.

“So….Alan” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing all these years?”

“No, not really” I answered bluntly. He seemed slightly crestfallen. “I just want to know what you’re doing here now on a freezing morning when every self-respecting soul is greeting the day with a sore head and a bad taste in their mouth.”

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway” he replied, “because all of it leads to here and now.”

“Go on then,” I sighed. “Try not to make an epic out of it.”

He paused, then paced a little as if trying to find some sort of rhythm. He wasn’t quite the cowering nerd I remembered, but he still seemed to lack a lot of self-control. I guessed that he’d probably practiced this scenario a hundred times in front of the mirror.

“As you know, my school days weren’t very happy ones. I dunno what I did to be singled out like that. All the pushing and shoving and slapping me round the head like-like some Chinese water torture over and over. And the names. That was the worst. All those terrible names. Just sinking into me, day after day, making me feel cheap and nasty and hated. I-I just couldn’t take it any more” He wrung his hands at the memory of it. “I left Peterham High on my fifteenth birthday. My parents took me out because…..because they couldn’t stand me not eating and having nightmares and not talking to them any more. They could see me being slowly killed by that awful place.” He searched my face for some sympathy; he didn’t find much.

“So, you went to another school, right?” I asked, already bored with this self-pitying drivel.

“Yes. Yes, I did. They weren’t so mean to me there, but it wasn’t so different. My therapist told me I’d carried a lot of emotional baggage from Peterham with me. That’s why I got such bad marks for all my GCSE’s.”

I thought it prudent not to suggest that he most likely failed his exams because he was desperately stupid. I nodded sagely, then glanced surreptitiously at the clock wondering when he’d get to the point.

“And everything went downhill from there” he muttered. “I was either on the dole or in crap jobs no-one else wanted. I had nothing going for me.”

I didn’t know what to say. A tiny part of me felt sorry for him but in general, I wish he’d go and take his maudlin tale of suicidal woe somewhere else. If this didn’t get a lot more interesting very soon, I’d have to throw him out.

“So, Drewry,” I prompted. I just couldn’t bring myself to call him Vernon. “At the risk of pointing out the bleeding obvious….what are you doinghere?”

He stared at me for a moment as if trying to comprehend something.

“All the rubbish and the bad luck and my parents’ disappointment and everything that’s made up my stupid life…..all of it, it’s all down to the way I was treated at Peterham. If it hadn’t been for all that, I could’ve been happy, well adjusted…. I could’ve been somebody.”

“Ya coulda been a contender” I suggested helpfully.

“Yeah, exactly. A contender” he replied. “And…..and that’s why I’m here now. ‘Because of you.”

“Huh? What’s it gotta do with me?”

“You.” He jabbed a finger at me. “You were the one with the-the words. The clever insults. You’d come up with those names, those awful, hurtful names. And-and then everyone would join in and laugh and laugh till I couldn’t get it out of my head.” He became increasingly child-like as his tirade continued. “Oh, yeah, if you wanna have a crack at Vernon Drewry, who you gonna call? Good ol’ Alan. Wordy Alan. Clever Alan. Always so popular with everyone. Everybody’s mate. “Hey Alan, we all took a pop at him today. Mr VD, Venereal Disease, Very Dirty, Vacant Droid. Hey, the Vacuous Dork was so scared he nearly pissed his pants.” The girls just loved you for it, didn’t they?”

Drewry sounded slightly out of breath from his verbal exertions. He looked at me with undisguised resentment. I have only a vague recollection of exercising my wit at his expense. Most people found it hilarious. Teenagers are masters in sadism. But what Drewry conceived as my relentless malice was, to me, just a bit of fun. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve stood his ground but he was….well, such a victim.

“So,” I shrugged. “Where do we go from here?”

Drewry now seemed strangely pacified. Calm. “Y’know, it’s taken me nine long years to do this but…..my New Year’s Resolution was to…to….well, that’s just what it was. A resolution. To resolve something. That’s why I came here on the first day of the year. To put things right.”

Oh, God, I thought. It’s worse than I imagined. He wants me to say sorry then we hug like a couple of hippies at a love-in.

“So, er, “you wanna what?” I winced. Be my friendor something?”

He looked surprised then paused for effect. “Of course not, you silly sod. I’ve come here to beat you up.”

I stared at him, stunned. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I decided to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“Dreary, what in Christ’s name are you on? You couldn’t punch your way out of a paper bag.”

“Huh, think it’s hilarious, don’t you? Everything’s just a big joke to you. You haven’t changed in all this time. Well, I have. Don’t think I’ve been idle all these years. I’ve been taking lessons in Karate. And I’m pretty good at it an’ all.”

It was beyond pathetic. I envisaged him in some cheap self-defence evening class practicing with ten-year-olds and pensioners. I saw him at home every night in some turgid little bedsit fantasising about kicking my lights out. This sorry excuse for a man blamed me alone for screwing up his teenage years and, as a result, his entire adult life. I wanted to tell him to go home back to his meaningless existence.

“Well, whaddya say, Clever Alan?” he prompted. “Care to go a round with me? Or are you too chicken?” My God, he was actually taunting me. “Always the one in the background leading the others on, always keeping your hands clean, eh? But when it comes down to it-“

“-alright, alright!” I yelled. “We’ll do this. You can take a pop at me, get a load off your back. Just shut the hell up, will you?”

Why did I agree to it? Why not just boot him out the door? Because I was hungover and cold, and I wanted to crawl back into bed. Because I was heartily sick of his incessant whining and longed for silence. Because he was the kind of man you just wanted to punch even if you weren’t usually that way inclined. And mostly because I knew I could take him. I mean, he hadn’t changed much from the cowering wimp of my youth; he was still skinny and pathetic, and I reckoned all this Martial Arts talk was mostly that – just talk. So, how hard could it be? A couple of blows to his stupid face and it would all be over.

“Right….right then. Shall we go out in the garden?” he suggested.

“God no, it’s freezing. This’ll do” I replied, indicating the very space in which we were standing.

Without hesitation, he adopted the stance of a Karate student, right foot and right fist forward, ready for action, steeling himself for his big moment. He grimaced defiantly, “Alan, you’ve had this coming for a long-“

I immediately grabbed his protruding arm by the wrist in a vice-like grip and simultaneously punched him full in the nose with my free hand. There was a moment of absolute shock, his dull features stricken by the unexpected force of my blow. I struck him again, my fist connecting with his teeth. He staggered backwards and collapsed into the sofa. It rocked with the impact of his fallen, crumpled body.

He tried to mask his bleeding mouth with the back of his hand, but the real pain was in his hurt, defeated eyes.

He had obviously enrolled in some ‘Self Defence for the Vulnerable’ class, desperately trying to give credence to his warped fantasy of conquering his perceived nemesis in hand-to-hand combat. But he was as vulnerable now as he’d always been, spineless, impotent, redundant. And he knew it.

Neither of us said a word. Blinking back the tears, he stood up slowly and silently, wiping some blood on his sleeve.

He stared at me for a long moment seeing nothing but his own demise. He staggered out of the door, the house and, hopefully, my life.

I wondered briefly if this had been an instructive life lesson, whether my strange liaison with Dreary Drewry had brought on a sense of remorse or even a grudging respect for the man.

But it didn’t.

I went back to bed and, despite my bruised knuckles, slept very soundly for the rest of New Year’s Day.