Phantom limb: the sensation that an amputated limb is still attached to your person. You could extend it to metaphor and call it grief for a lost love. Or you could could take its converse and consider a healthy limb to be wrongly attached. It is not yours and has no place being on your body. Extend it: I should not exist. My very being in this time this place this world is a mistake. But I cannot just end it all: it would hurt my wife. I fear suicide anyway, and with my propensity for misfortune I'd probably get it wrong. Wind up like Steven Hawking, only not so clever. Colostomy and a Jean Michel Jarre voicebox. That would hurt my wife. Oh sure, this is my husband ... tried to top himself you know ... no of course I don't mind devoting my every waking hour to his maintenance ...

Anyway, I digest. I need to unexist myself and where science has failed, magic must not. And well you may laugh but I'm not talking about pointy fucking hats with moons on them. No white tipped wand here. No rabbit. You think the holocaust came about through rationalism? Takes some dark magic to bend people that way. The mind is the key, and what science knows about that you could fit on a postcard. Salivating dogs? Do me a favour.

I took great encouragement from drunks and geriatrics and people afraid to recover from the pain of heartbreak. Minds in the then; flesh in the now. What a bizarre notion to imagine a body could actually travel back in time! Throws up too many theoretical paradoxes. Back to the Future; family photographs fading in a petrified hand. The mind must travel, not the flesh. The mind is the key: detach it from the body and space-time travel is not only possible, it is inevitable. A body might simply fail to exist; might fail to have ever existed.

So I began to study the events surrounding my conception. This proved both difficult and time consuming. Through one of my journalist friends I eventually located my father, who had been jailed shortly after ejaculation for drugging my mother. They had never met before that unfortunate night in Dagenham and, to my knowledge, had never maintained contact afterwards (save for the arbitrary court appearances you understand).

With extremes of patience and fortitude, I finally contacted my mother one night during a seance with a dilapidated old romany woman from down the road. Eyes like milky marbles. Cat urine. Incense. Super Ser portable gas heater. Take the High Road on the telly.

With the testimonies of my mum and dad, bless 'em, I commenced upon a meticulous reconstruction of that dirty Dagenham evening. I took photographs of the guest house bedroom (and masturbated in the bed for the purpose of enginerring a connective bond), read old newspapers published on that date and watched reels of archived news footage and soap operas in keeping with the time frame. I have saturated myself with the mood of that December night; with Swiss clock precision I have mapped every link in that chain of events; returned to the scene every day for six months like a jilted lover on a boozy monologue. Which pretty much leads me to now. I am ready.

I scored a sheet of Purple Shield LSD blotters this morning from a Czech taxi driver I had a brief fling with last year. Pawel. Hairy as a silver-back gorilla. I reckon if I wash them all down with two bottles of absinthe that should do the trick. Disconnect mind from flesh. I have decided to inhabit the very same outfit as worn by my mother on that night (fortunately there were Daily Star photographs to help me with this bit). I've even done the make up to the best of my ability, but the hair's a bit of a cock up: too short to perm well.

I intend to seize control of her mind in the moments leading up to the drugging incident. I shall then cast down that half pint of lager and lime as if it were Lucifer himself. Blast him out! And I think that should remedy the situation nicely. I won't be discovered drugged-up and dragged-up by my distraught wife because I will have ceased to exist. Indeed, I shall never have existed in the first place.