The rest of the week Danny didn't have a psychological battle with the cheese. The cheese wasn't thinking about him or plotting against him, though its silence made Danny all the more suspicious. It was very ripe. But when he opened the fridge the cheese didn't look back at him, let alone stare challengingly. The cheese was apparently indifferent to whether it was consumed, left alone, or had Dickens read to it. This certainly wasn't a battle. But when Danny got up to go to the toilet in the night, he knew the cheese heard him. And Danny thought about the cheese.
While all this was going on at chez Danny, Dave and Lucy carried on with their day-to-day lives. They never got the cheese, or even the unexpected pleasure of Danny's company for the evening.
Having forgotten about his friends while buying the cheese, Danny had bumped into [weak] his good buddy Ray at the door of The Cheese Shop [weaker] who had subsequently accompanied him for a stroll around the shops. This uninteresting episode culminated in the two of them shuffling down the street toward the bus stop. Danny was feeling strangely upbeat and was gently swinging a small bag of toiletries in his left hand while clasping the cheese in his right, when he spotted a vague acquaintance from the semi-distant past. Then he realised who it was, and made a 110% effort not to be noticed.
"Shit!"
"What?"
"Don't look right."
"Alright then."
"Don't look!"
Ray kept his eyes straight ahead, and his expression vacant. In the corner of his eye he could see Danny making an apparently blase effort to find something at the bottom of his bag of toiletries. Although Ray couldn't see it from his viewpoint, Danny was also slightly furrowing his brow to add depth to his bag-searching charade.
A sinewy, ferret-like man of around Ray and Danny's age wearing a wispy moustache passed by ten yards to their right without showing any knowledge of Danny's presence. Ray heard an exhalation from Danny, but it was only after five more seconds of bag-fumbling that the latter spoke, still not daring to look over his shoulder at the man who had passed them by.
"Jesus, I just aged 6 years. That was probably the most undesirable acquaintance I have in the world. Hellish. Truly hell, Ray! Hell!"
"Moustache."
"I'll tell you about him. His name's Mark, my old neighbour's-daughter's ex. Last time I spoke to him was on a bus. He offered me a crate of duty-free whisky for 50 quid. I said 'I'm not a whisky drinker, but thanks anyway.' So he said, 'What about Red Bull, chap?' I laughed (he didn't) then said that I didn't have the money to go throwing my money around on fizzy drinks, even if it was cheap, but that if I ever did, I'd know where to go. I thought at the time, as well as now, that this was weak. Then immediately after this speech I realised that I had a 'The Cheese Shop' carrier bag on my lap, and that I was holding a can of Sprite."
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'Apart from this stuff!' - to which he replied, 'Get you some Sprite, chap, unless you don't want anything off me,'"
"Oof! So you said?"
"Nothing. I smiled and turned my head, while making a 'heh' noise."
Ray laughed, and shook his head. "You nobhead," he said.