 
Grasslands: through H-shaped windows

by Andrew McEwan

*

Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

*

Cover design by Andrew McEwan

*

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

***

One

1 - BROKEN

My name is Broken. I fix things. It's what I do.

The sky is blue and the grass green. I can see white clouds, brown ponies, silver eagles, the yellow sun. Sitting next to me on the sofa are Vern and Edgar, between them holding a large colour photograph. On a nearby table Almeric toys with a short red-handled screwdriver and a hydrogen bomb.

All three are unaware of my presence. One day soon they will discover I'm here, but until then...

'See anything unusual?'

'Yes,' Vern said. 'Right in the centre, a kind of smudge.'

'A face?' prompted Edgar, whose photo it was, taken a week ago in a field behind his father's house. 'Grinning?'

Vern rubbed his eyes. 'Nah -I can't say for sure. Looks...' His glasses had fogged.

'Looks?' echoed Edgar, desperate to prove to someone that he existed, that the world had indeed conjured him up.

Almeric downed tools and stepped over. 'Let me see.' He grabbed the glossy paper and reversed it. 'The sky is blue and the grass green,' he said, face twisting. 'It's too dark.'

'What?' said Edgar. 'In here?'

'He means the photo,' Vern explained.

Almeric shook his head. 'No I don't.'

'Then what?' insisted Edgar. 'What's too dark?'

'The ponies,' Almeric told him, 'and the eagles.'

Edgar snatched back his picture. 'But I'm there, bang in the middle!' he shouted. 'There are no ponies or eagles.'

Almeric picked his nose. 'If you say so...'

'I do. '

'Okay, okay - don't let your face slide.' Almeric spun on his heel and loped back to the table.

'And that'll never go off,' Edgar said. 'You're wasting your time.'

'Ten says I'm not,' offered Almeric.

'Make it fifty.'

'You're on.' He tapped the screwdriver on the bomb's metal casing. 'What about you, Vern, you want in?'

'I'm dead,' said Vern. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth and put out his tongue. 'Leave me out of this.'

'Ich-nng-ach-gorb-moop?' said Edgar.

'Chicken,' said Almeric.

Their names are Planes, Ritsky and Jones. They are friends. This is Ritsky's and Jones's fourth-floor flat. Planes lives with his mouse and cockroaches several streets away...

'What's the time?' Vern asked. 'I have to go.'

'A woman?' Almeric guessed shrewdly. 'Nice smile? Wide hips? Small nipples?'

'A coffee-machine,' said Vern.

'This time of night?' He looked at his watch. 'Nine thirty.'

'Thanks. And yes; it's a favour.'

'Ah, you're all heart,' said Edgar, wiping his mouth. 'How much does she pay you?'

'Nothing. '

'Nothing?'

'It's a favour - I said so.'

'The woman?'

'The coffee-machine.'

'There's two of them?' Edgar sat up, loosening his tie.

'Three, if you must know.'

'Three?'

Vern stood. 'A coffee-machine and two toasters,' he said.

Almeric dropped his screwdriver. It rolled off the table and hit the floor with a bump. 'Need a hand?'

'No, Al, I've got all the hands I want.'

'Nine thirty-six,' declared Edgar, not looking at his watch, having no watch to look at.

'A hundred,' raised Almeric. 'But I want thirteen days.'

'Two hundred:' Edgar responded. 'A baker's dozen.'

'You haven't got that much money.'

'So?'

'So how are you going to pay?'

'He won't have to,' said Vern, leaving; 'if he loses.'

Almeric frowned. 'I never thought of that,' he said.

'Bet off?' challenged Edgar, grinning like in the photograph - the supposed photograph, of himself.

Almeric spat in his palms. 'No way!'

The door slammed.

'Gone so soon,' said Edgar.

In the street kids throw soggy clumps of toilet-paper at car windscreens. They trail Vernon Planes down the road, daring each other to launch a sticky missile.

At his shoulder, my smile goes unnoticed by all...

2 - MEAN TIME

Vern has unhinged the cover and fiddled around inside. He pulls springs, adjusts levers, removes bent coins and flattened bottle tops, scratches his head. Lights flash. The machine gurgles. I can't tell him the problem; even if I knew it, he doesn't yet know how to listen. My own fingers itch to be at the machine...

'It was nice of you to come over, Vern,' said Joyce.

'That's okay,' Vern answered. 'I wasn't doing anything.'

Joyce folded her arms. 'The boys'll be pleased, they say my coffee tastes like old paint.'

'Yeah?' He tinkered, loosening and tightening. 'Got it!'

'Fixed?'

He nodded.

'That was quick. No time to waste, ay?' The phone rang and she plucked the receiver from its cradle. 'Tom's Taxis.'

Vern clipped the panel back on the coffee-machine and pushed it against the stained office wall.

'Yes,' Joyce was saying. 'Yes, aha, yes, let's see ... six? No, that'll be fine. Bye.'

'All done,' said Vern. He inserted a coin and watched as the plastic cup rattled, filled and steamed. 'See?'

Joyce folded her arms again, lifting her breasts and wrinkling the skin of her upper arms. 'You want paying?' she asked. 'Only Tom's not in.'

'No, no,' he said; 'no charge, I told Tom I'd do it.' He buffed his glasses and headed for the reinforced door, the rain and orange lights beyond.

'What about your coffee?'

But he didn't hear. He'd lied about the toasters. The falling water urged him to run, but he sauntered instead, hair wet and shoes squeaking as he made for home.

My feet descend after his. This world is new to me, vague at the edges, insubstantial. In time I will grow more solid and my footsteps will slap like Vern's, reassuring thwacks on the uneven pavement. But for now I must be satisfied with the sound of his rubber soles.

On first arriving, drawn by the possibilities of Almeric's hydrogen bomb, I was surprised to learn that the materials required in its manufacture were so readily available. In my world science is the province of the city dwellers, the faceless antagonists whose tyranny we fight, and therefore shunned. Also, such things as heavy water, battery-acid, copper-sulphate, zinc-oxide, aspic and strontium are, I believe, unknown...

'Hugget,' Vern sang. 'Where are yooou?' He dragged a pencil across the bars of the cage. 'Here, mooose - tck, tck.'

Getting no response from the white rodent, Vern proceeded to the kitchen. His roach trap was a cardboard tube four inches long and two wide, paper doors at either end, a half-sucked boiled sweet within. Blackcurrant, he'd quickly discovered, was the most effective flavour; only he was out of blackcurrant having scoffed the last on his way to work that morning and so was relying on lemon.

Vern hated lemon. The cockroaches hated lemon. The trap, which he placed behind the beaten oven, was empty.

'Hmm,' he said. 'What's to eat?' He pulled open a cupboard and found a tin of spaghetti. 'Yuk!'

Vern hated spaghetti. He went and sat on his bed. The mouse appeared, gnawing a huge almond, pink eyes shining, teeth and claws busy with the nutty flesh.

'Nice?' inquired Vern.

The rodent ignored him.

'You're lucky,' he moaned, standing, undressing. He peered at his zits in the bathroom mirror three long strides away and then pissed in the sink as the toilet wouldn't flush. 'Real lucky. I should buy a cat...' A cat that eats cockroaches, he thought, climbing into bed, closing his weakened eyes. What time is it? When did I last eat? It can't be much after ten. Six hours ago!

The alarm shrilled and hammered.

'Morning already?' He got up. 'It's too dark. I don't remember turning the light off. I don't have an alarm:'

There was a mousy laugh.

'You look terrible,' commented Stan as they drove to work in Stan's car, a gold Honda. 'Late night?'

Vern yawned. 'Nah,' he said. 'I don't know.' He watched the people in other cars and on foot, their sureness irritating.

Stan switched on the radio.

'You oughtn't to work Sundays, Vern.' Then, 'Traffic at this hour. Traffic at any hour: Did you see that?'

'No.' Vern pinched, his nose, blinking.

'The guy in the Rover there...' He honked twice, then one long gleeful blast.

'There's a Merc,' said Vern. 'Why don't you rear-end it?'

Stan's previously glazed expression turned hostile. 'So you had a rough night,' he said. 'I'm sorry, that's too bad; just don't take it out on me, okay?'

'Okay. '

'Okay, Vern?' He'd stopped at a green light.

'Okay -drive, will you, we're going to be late.'

'I am driving.' Stanley pulled away, the light red, and Vern shut his eyes.

They parked in the usual place. When it came time to clock-in, Stan couldn't find his card.

'I don't know why we have to do this anyway,' he complained. 'Hey, Rita, my card's missing!'

The pay clerk glared at him. 'Name?'

'You know my name.'

'Name?' she repeated, holding her blonde head to one side.

'Stanley Nex,' he said. 'My card's gone.'

'No it isn't,' said Vern. 'You're standing on it.'

Stan took a step back. Rita laughed.

'Did you ever wonder,' Vern asked, a dishwasher's innards all round him, 'where all the time goes?'

'Sure,' Stan replied. 'Pass me the pliers.'

'I mean, a minute ago I was thinking what it was I did last night and wondering if that time still existed somewhere or was gone forever.'

'The pliers, Vern.'

'I think a strange thing's happened to me.'

Stan checked his watch. 'Ten fifteen,' he said. 'Coffee time.'

'I don't want coffee.'

'You didn't bring any.'

'I'll fetch the pliers,' Vern said. 'They're in the van.' He stepped outside. The sun was shining, illuminating the walls and trees.

There were puddles in the alley, shrinking in the May heat, glossy pools that reflected the scene around them, captured the light like a camera lens, images of brick and leaf and cloud. A bird flapped through one such unfrozen snap, dived past and was gone from the puddle's dying memory in the briefest of moments, the shortest of exposures, the fastest of frames.

Steam rose from the water as it evaporated, erasing the inverted picture. Vern heaved open the van doors and hunted around for the pliers. There was a smell of spring, an odour of cut grass on the air trapped inside, a piece of somewhere else enclosed he couldn't say when, brought here, transported, the alley unused to earthen bouquets, its only green the new leaves, the stunted trees each penned behind flaky red-brick walls.

'Aromas from elsewhere,' said Vernon Planes.

He returned to the house, the dish-washer and Stan, pliers in hand, holding lungfuls of spring till he thought he might burst.

My legs and arms, my chest is pink. The hair on my head is grey. Vern's mouse knows I'm here; so do the cockroaches I've caught, the trap behind the oven subtly improved.

I like lemon-flavoured boiled sweets.

Vern comes in and flops on the bed, the logo of his work's jacket visible to the ceiling.

Stay Fixed, it states, reminding me of the triple string of beads hung around my neck, clay baubles inscribed with letters, spaced with yellowed teeth.

They read:

A City On Wheels

A Field Of Arches

A Man With Strong Lungs

The first two are easy, the city known to all in my land, the field there to be discovered by those who would seek it out. It is the third string which puzzles me...

'Spaghetti,' said Vern. 'Yum!'

He fed himself and the mouse and himself again, drowned the cockroaches, puzzled at their sudden manifestation in the trap, their newfound eagerness for sticky death.

Lemon, he said to himself, fed, who would've guessed it'd grow on them like that?

Must be an acquired taste. There wasn't a trace of the sweet.

Feeding complete, he sat with his feet up before the portable, pondering whether he should go out and if it was worth the slow inconvenience of a bath. The water, he estimated, would take an hour and twenty minutes to heat, another fifteen to run, an he'd be in and out in a further ten, making one hour and forty-five in total.

The telly clock tocked quietly to six, instigating the news. 'Which means eight at the earliest,' Vern reckoned, 'by the time I find something to wear.'

Did he own a clean shirt?

'There just aren't enough hours in a day,' he grumbled, tripping the meter, listening with satisfaction to the shaky boiler.

But then, if there were more, would he know what to do with them? Probably not.

Vern consoled himself, appeased his face with a shave. The door announced a visitor. It rattled, quaked like it were about to explode.

He cut his cheek. They let themselves in.

'You didn't answer,' said Stanley. 'Are you okay? Vern, what happened?'

'I cut my cheek.'

'I can see that.'

'So why ask?'

'I didn't mean.' He pointed. 'I meant.' He pointed somewhere else. 'What happened?'

'Nothing happened.'

'But you walked home. Is it my driving?'

'I wanted some air.'

'Air? There's air in the car.'

'It's not the same,' Vern said. 'I wanted some real air.'

'What's wrong with my air?' demanded Stan.

'Nothing...'

Stan looked about him, grimacing. 'This place is a tip,' he said. 'You could do with some air in here.'

'Goodbye, Stan,' said Vern, soothing his cut cheek.

'Don't worry, I'm going. You still want a lift in the morning?'

'Yes.'

'Well,' Stan said over his shoulder, 'you can forget it!'

The door slammed.

'Gone so soon,' said Vern.

Outside in the street, Stan discovers wads of soggy mulch on his windscreen.

Kids, he says, why do I even bother?

Because you like to spend as much time as possible away from your wife, I venture; she's greedy for every minute of your life, and you hate her.

Stan can't hear me, of course. He gets in his gold Honda and sets the wipers to motion, their noisy sweeps irritating as he pulls hastily away from the littered kerb.

3 - PICTURE THIS

Edgar Ritsky put his camera down next to him on the bus seat and contemplated this latest trip to the chemists. Over the phone he'd been told his pictures were ready but that some were a little fuzzy. He laughed aloud. Fuzzy? What did they know? To Edgar it was further proof of the non-existence of a singular reality, the fuzziness perhaps a Harriot or a Claude, maybe a rare Brian or even a Lucy. He rubbed his palms in excitement, imagining the find, the affirmation that he was not alone in this world of cynics and deceivers, that he was indeed right in his singleminded pursuit of the unknown.

The bus stopped. He alighted. Mrs. Turn the chemist regarded him strangely as he leant on her polished counter. She'd keep him waiting, he knew, she always kept him waiting.

'Won't be a sec,' she said.

Edgar frowned and unwrapped money. Having his photos developed and enlarged cost him a small fortune; but he took it bravely, like the soldier of fate he was.

'That'll be ten pounds sixty-nine,' said Mrs. Turn, handing Edgar a folder.

He paid, as usual forgetting his change in the rush to get at his pictures, to leave the chemists, to catch his bus home. But it had started to rain and the bus-shelter leaked, adding weight to his annoyance, a fervour inspired by Mrs. Turn's parting comment of, 'You might try keeping your greasy fingers clear of the lens, young man.'

After endless water droplets from endless clouds the sun came out again. It would rain and it would not rain, thought Edgar, life was that predictable - and when it wouldn't rain, it would sun or fog or snow.

But it was all soon to change. He was real even if this world didn't believe in him. He was more real than it. There would come a time when this world would, like the rain, cease, and the sun, the different sun, would shine through.

The bus stopped. He boarded.

The bus stopped. He alighted. Mr. Jones his flatmate regarded him strangely as he leant on his polished table and gazed inside the hydrogen bomb.

'The clock's ticking,' he said to Almeric.

'I can hear it,' said Almeric back.

'Twelve days and counting,' portended Edgar.

'I can count.' Almeric wafted his screwdriver. 'You're in the light.'

'I got some pictures. Want to see?'

'Later. '

'There is no later.' Edgar reversed to the sofa and carefully opened the large envelope.

'Vern called,' said Almeric; 'we're going to the pub.'

'Vern's at work,' said Edgar. 'It was a hoax.'

'Vern called later,' Almeric explained.

'What time later?'

Al consulted his watch. 'About seven,' he said.

Ed spread his pictures on the floor at his feet. 'And what time's it now?'

'Two thirty,' Almeric said. 'But I've got a hunch.'

Edgar selected four of the photographs, each ten by twelve, and arranged them in a square. The first showed the field behind his father's house, two young girls chasing butterflies. The second was of a tree just come to leaf, the mellow green of new shoots hung with cobwebs and blossom. The third captured a red poppy as it was visited by a bumble-bee. And the fourth, fuzzy and out of focus, pictured a man blowing up a balloon, the two girls in the background, the sun to their rear, golden haloes of spring light in their wind-ruffled hair.

'Who's that?' queried Almeric, indicating photo number four.

Edgar dug his nail in his chin, peered closer. 'Kevin,' he said. 'I'm not certain though; I haven't seen him before.'

'So how do you know his name?' Almeric kneeled to get a better look at the pic.

'Hey, that's one of Vern's balloons. See? It's got his company's logo.'

'I don't,' confessed Edgar. 'I mean...'

'That's okay, Ed,' Almeric murmured. 'You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.' He rose and slouched back to his bomb, screwdriver dangling.

Edgar watched him suspiciously a moment, avoiding his pleasant stare as he sat at the cluttered table.

Eyes lowered, they came to rest on the balloon.

Stay Fixed, it stated.

'I'm not going to the pub,' said Edgar. 'You can tell Vern when he calls.'

'I already did,' Almeric replied.

'When?

'Later.'

'You should have told me before.' Photo number four, Kevin, the two golden girls drew him. Edgar swallowed.

'There is no before,' said Almeric. 'And there'll be no after when this goes off.'

'It won't. '

'Like to raise the stake?'

'Yes,' said Edgar, 'I'd like to double it.'

'You're on.'

The city on wheels travels round the world, crosses land and ocean, divides forest and mountain, creates and destroys as its masters see fit. They have laid a strip of grass a mile wide. It serves, this flat plain, as their city's road. Once every year the nameless city circumscribes the globe. The earth shakes at its passing and the sea rumbles...

4 - KICKS TO THE HEAD

Vern has his bath and dresses in his not so clean shirt. His flat is really a bedsit, one of four, the house an end terrace. The pay-phone at the foot of the stairs has been recently vandalized and he struggles with fingers and penknife till it clicks; then he dials.

Almeric Jones replies. They talk. Vern hangs up. The telephone clicks once more, but surrenders no valuables...

'Oh well,' Vern said.

'So I was an hour out,' said Al to Ed. 'That's still pretty good, you have to admit.' He pocketed his screwdriver.

'Don't slam the door,' said Ed to Al. 'I said...' The door slammed. Edgar gloated. 'Never mind,' he added to himself, 'you forgot your keys.'

The four photographs stared up at him from the floor. Edgar, an apple in hand, stared back. He walked round the pics and studied them from a multiplicity of angles. They composed a quartered image twenty-four inches by twenty. He sat on the sofa and bit the apple. Juice ran down his chin, followed the curve of his throat and soaked into the collar of his blue sweatshirt, a print of Frank Sinatra eating spaghetti on its front.

Vern leant on the polished bar and ordered two pints of lager and a ham sandwich.

'Make mine Guinness,' said Almeric. He toyed with a beer mat, peeling off its backing.

'Two pints of lager and a Guinness,' said the barmaid.

Vern shook his head. 'One lager, one Guinness,' he corrected. 'And a ham sandwich, please.'

'No ham left.'

'No ham?' Vern said.

'Beef or cheese,' the barmaid told him, pouring a second pint of Guinness.'

Vern sighed resignedly. 'Cheese then.'

Almeric carried their drinks to a table while Vern waited on his sandwich. The pub was nearly empty: five old men and a young girl dressed in a long grey Mack by the bar. The interior was dingy and, thought Vern, too quiet. He wondered if it mightn't liven up. Perhaps later on the old men would get drunk and make improper suggestions to the young girl. Or maybe Almeric would beat them to it. Vern could see his eyes shining from fifteen feet away.

His sandwich arrived. Vern traipsed over and sat at the table with Almeric. 'I hate Guinness,' he complained.

'Guinness is good for you,' said Almeric. 'Puts hair on your chest.'

'I have enough trouble shaving my legs.' He took a bite from his sandwich. Released from its cling-film wrapping the bread seemed somehow less attractive.

'You've taken the gloss off it,' Almeric said.

'I hate beef,' answered Vern, chewing.

'I thought you asked for cheese?'

'No, ham.'

'Ham?'

'No ham left - then I asked for cheese.' Vern sipped his beer, going over recent events. 'I think,' he added.

The doors burst open and a party of revellers stumbled in, laughing and cheering, a manacled young-executive type hustled at their van.

'Stag night,' observed Almeric, draining his glass. 'Same again, Vern?'

Vern was attempting to reseal his sandwich. He'd hardly touched his pint. Foam speckled his upper lip. 'What? No -yes! Lager this time, okay?'

'Okay.'

The girl in the grey Mack rose from her stool with a bored expression. She unbelted the long coat and draped it across the bar. Almeric froze in his tracks. A lurid cheer went up from the party crowd.

Clad only in red lingerie the girl began singing.

Vern turned to see, spilling beer.

The inevitable fight started; inevitable because one of the revellers made a lunge for the girl, her red lingerie, and one of the old men, a balding ex-military type possessed of noble stirrings and too much alcohol coupled with an aggrieved disposition towards modern youth in his high-pressure blood and a guilty conscience having sworn at his wife earlier that night, it being her birthday which he'd forgotten.

Noses broke.

'Two pints of Guinness,' said Almeric, leant on the polished bar. 'And a cheese sandwich.'

The girl jumped onto a table to escape being molested. Vern's and Almeric's. The young-exec and two others gave chase. She kicked one in the gut with her pointed red shoe. He crumpled. The second grabbed her foot and ran his other hand up her long leg.

Vern said, 'Hey!'

The manacled reveller knocked his drink over. 'Shut it!'

The girl tore at hair. 'Bastards!'

Almeric, returned from the bar with two pints of shandy and a ham sandwich, yelled, 'Cops!'

Nobody cared.

Vern stood. 'Let go of her...' He pushed the groper whose shirt he thought overly clean and the man fell, lost his footing in a pool of shimmering Guinness.

'You tell 'em, Vern!' shouted Almeric. He put down the pints and unslung his screwdriver, brandishing it.

Nobody cared. Noses broke.

The old men waded in.

'Cops!' the barmaid screeched.

The revellers fled empty-handed. The young girl climbed from the table and walked casually to the bar, grabbed her Mack and proceeded to the ladies.

'I hate ham,' said Almeric.

'I'll swap you,' Vern offered.

They moved tables, drank and chewed. The old men at the bar became old men once more. The cops came and went.

'They went that way,' the barmaid had told them, indicating the doors.

The girl reappeared. She stood a moment, straightened her red hair, and then came and sat at Vern and Almeric's table.

'I hate it when that happens,' she said.

'Yeah,' said Vern.

'Yeah,' said Almeric.

'Does it happen often?' Vern asked.

'Only this side of town,' said the girl, pouting.

'Yeah?' said Almeric.

'Yeah, but I get danger money.'

'Yeah?' said Vern.

'Can I buy you a drink?' Almeric asked.

She smiled. 'If you like.'

'What do you want?'

She spread her hands on the table and peered intently at her cracked red nail-varnish. 'Guinness,' she said.

When Almeric had gone to the bar Vern said, 'What's your name? Mine's Vern by the way, and that's Almeric.'

'Hello Vern,' she chimed. 'My name's Lucy.'

Almeric returned with a glass of white wine. The girl didn't seem to mind.

'Her name's Lucy,' Vern informed him.

'Hello Lucy,' said Almeric.

'Hello Vern,' said the girl, not looking up. Her reflection gleamed in eight out of ten fingernails.

Vern, perversely, was reminded of an advert for cat food.

The doors burst open again and in staggered Edgar, his face all beaten up.

'Hey, Edgar,' Vern called. 'What happened?'

'I don't remember,' he replied, leaning for support on a polished table.

'Did someone beat you up?'

Edgar held his head in both hands and weaved towards them, blood down his Frank Sinatra sweat-shirt, blood and apple juice and spittle. 'Yeah,' he said; 'that's what happened.'

'Who was it?' asked the girl.

'He doesn't remember,' said Almeric.

Edgar flopped into a fourth chair and stared at Lucy. 'Who's this?' he wanted to know.

'Her name's Lucy,' said Vern.

Edgar was spellbound. 'Hello Lucy,' he said. 'Are you real?'

She considered her cracked nails a moment, pouting.

'Yeah,' said Vern, 'she's real.'

'She got you beaten up,' Almeric said.

'Yeah? '

'Yeah.' He fidgeted with the screwdriver. 'I thought you weren't coming to the pub?'

Edgar wiped his eyes. 'I changed my mind...'

'Into what?'

'You forgot your keys; I decided to bring them.'

'That's nice of you,' Vern said.

'But I lost them,' Edgar continued, 'when I got beaten up.'

'My keys?' said Almeric.

'The whole bunch.'

'That was clever,' said Vern. 'The whole bunch?'

'Yeah,' said Edgar. 'We're locked out.'

Almeric folded his arms.

Lucy said, 'I'm sorry.'

Edgar squinted at her through a haze of sweat and blood.

'This's Edgar,' Vern told her. 'He's in love.'

'Hello Vern,' said Lucy. 'In love with whom?'

'You,' said Almeric.

'Me? He's in love with me? I never had anybody in love with me before.'

'Well you have now. Right, Ed?'

'Yeah...' Edgar took his eyes off her a second. 'Does anyone want those sandwiches?' he asked.

Almeric checked his watch. 'Quarter to nine.' He tapped the screwdriver on the rim of his glass and slouched. To Lucy, red beneath grey, he said, 'Do you fuck? I'd like to oil your hinges and measure your tongue.'

'I think my nose is broken,' mumbled Edgar. 'Yeah, I remember now, these coppers beat me up!'

The four of them drink shandy and white wine. The old men at the bar tell each other war stories. The barmaid swears, gives wrong change, and scowls at Vernon.

For his part, Vern closes his eyes, opens his mouth and puts out his tongue.

I'm dead, he says...

Almeric opened the door with his screwdriver. 'Easy.'

Edgar tripped behind. 'Don't say that.'

Vern helped him to his feet. 'Easy, Ed.'

'Don't say that!'

Lucy winked at Almeric. 'If he loves me,' she said, 'why won't he talk to me?'

'He's shy,' explained Vern.

'He's not sure if you're real,' added Almeric. 'Come in.'

Lucy stepped over the threshold, catching her right heel in the rug. She winked again.

'Watch the rug there,' said Almeric, winking back.

'Can I use the toilet?'

'Yeah - just be careful of the rug.'

'In the toilet?'

Almeric shrugged. 'They get everywhere,' he said.

The hydrogen bomb sits quietly on the table. Vern makes tea, black, because there's no milk, in mugs, because there're no cups and he doesn't like drinking tea out of cups anyway. The girl in red lingerie falls asleep on the sofa. Vern drinks his tea and leaves for home. Almeric unscrews a plate on the bomb casing and sprinkles in sugar and flour, tops up the reservoir with boiling water, and stirs. Edgar quickly undresses, sits naked on the floor with his camera mounted on a tripod taking Lucy's picture, wincing every time she moves as he's using a time exposure...

'Why don't you use the flash?' quizzed Almeric.

'I don't want to risk waking her.'

'Is that why you dimmed the lights?'

'Yes. '

'But I can't see.'

'You don't need to,' Edgar told him. 'The camera's watching for you.' He licked his bruised lips as a red-stockinged knee protruded, edged in grey Mack.

'What's the camera see that I don't?'

Edgar turned his swollen head. 'Plenty,' he stated.

I fade in and out, unseen by all save the camera. The night sky, the stars peek through a gap in the curtains.

In my world the stars are different. The nameless city travels below them as it circles the globe, soil and water, grass and air its rails.

In my world the brown ponies flee the crushing wheels, their slow-turning death.

In my world the silver eagles stay well clear of the city's rising towers.

In my world...

5 - OLD GRAFFITI

Today is a Tuesday...

A week ago Vern had scratched his name on the reverse of an inspection plate forty feet above a factory floor strewn with paper bags and confectionery. He opened that same plate now, seven days later, and saw his title crudely etched in shiny aluminium, gateway to drive-bands and electric motors. The inspection plate was on the side of a box suspended by rusty bolts, home to a ventilation system. Beside him on the narrow gangway was Stan, weaving erratically as his personal-stereo crammed his skull with noise.

Stan had picked him up as usual that morning.

'Thanks, Stan,' Vern had said.

'My pleasure, Vern.' He'd taken a deep breath. 'Like it? I left the windows open all night so as to make sure you got to breathe good air.'

Vern nodded. 'Nice.'

They stopped at the lights, red like Lucy's lingerie. Stanley would have put the radio on, but it had been stolen.

They parked in the usual place. When it came time to clock in, Stan couldn't find his card.

'What is that?' said Vern.

'Doors,' said Stan, lifting the tiny headphones from his ears. 'You want some?'

Vern told him no and began poking around inside the oily box, making his own music as he twanged the frayed, sagging belts.

On their way home that evening Stan took a different route, turning left instead of going straight ahead at the lights. He smiled at Vern, said, 'Detour.'

'Where to?'

'You'll see.'

About ten minutes later the Honda pulled up outside a disused cinema, its facade covered in ancient movie posters, spray-paint and pigeon shit.

Stan got out and sat on the car's dented wing. Vern couldn't loosen his seatbelt.

'Come and look at this, Vern.' Stan pointed at the cinema with his thumb and walked off.

Vern was trapped. He reached behind the seat and searched for something sharp with which to cut the strap amongst the discarded tools on the floor. A wood-chisel did the trick. His door was jammed. Vern clambered over to the driver's side and fell to the pavement when his foot caught in the pedals.

Stan was nowhere to be seen.

He thought about stealing the Honda, but he'd driven it once before, when Stan got drunk one afternoon, and crashed into a lamp-post. Thus the dent.

The cinema stood alone amidst the rubble of its neighbours, demolition still in progress, the picture-house no doubt next.

'Vern!' Stan appeared in the ticket kiosk. 'Come on, we'll miss the start.'

Vern looked around. 'What's playing?' he asked.

'The Guns of Naverone,' Stan replied. 'It's packed.' His curly head vanished within.

Vern stuffed his hands in his pockets and pushed open the doors with his shoulder. Inside was dark. Dust hung in pencil beams of yellow light, spotting the littered foyer with globs of littered sunshine. A brass banister curved to his right, ending abruptly in midair. He walked towards the next set of doors and into the theatre beyond.

'Took your time,' said Stanley, invisible.

'Are you the usherette?'

'That I am. Two seats is it? Or perhaps just one?' His shade moved against the imperfect blackness. 'Front row, sir? Right this way. '

Vern proceeded down the aisle.

Stan lit a match, its light exposing the torn screen. He indicated the front row of seats and Vern obediently sat, throwing up a cloud of dust.

The match went out. There was a thud, the scraping of boots on wood and then the sound of someone clearing their throat. The screen was lit again. Stan's monster shadow danced across it in a parody of silent action.

'Did you ever come here, Vern?'

'No.' He crossed his legs. 'This's my first visit.'

'They used to show horror pics all night; the old stuff; and Harold Lloyd on Saturdays.'

'I've seen him on the telly,' said Vern.

'Not the same,' Stan muttered. 'Just not the same.'

'What's this place called, anyway? I don't remember seeing it before.'

He received no answer.

'Stan?'

The darkness, the black had grown.

Vern tore up his imaginary ticket and left, blinking in the early evening sun.

The gold Honda was gone.

He wandered round the side of the cinema and looked at the layers of graffiti instead, most of it faded, as old as the building in spots, dates as early as fifty and fifty-two.

Well, he thought, at least it was in colour.

Today is a Tuesday. Vern walks home, pausing briefly in order to purchase a tin of beans and a loaf of white bread. The clouds roll across the sky, herded like sheep by a windy shepherd, his crook a westerly breeze...

6 - MENTAL FILINGS

'He's not wearing any clothes,' Lucy said.

'He's meditating,' answered a tired Almeric. He yawned. 'He often does that.'

'Meditate?'

'Wears no clothes.' Almeric scratched his face. The bomb, he realized, needed a timer. He glanced at his watch.

'It's ten o'clock in the morning,' said Lucy.

'Yeah,' said Almeric. 'It's been a long night. You talk in your sleep. Did you know?'

'What'd I say?' She sat up straight, eyes bleary.

'You told him you loved him and that you wanted to bear his children.'

'I did?' She grimaced, winking at Al.

'No,' he admitted; 'I was kidding.' He winked back.

'You keep winking at me,' said Lucy.

'I have a tic.'

'Me too.'

'Maybe you should love me instead,' he suggested. 'Our kids could all wink at each other.'

'You're disgusting,' she retorted. 'He's disgusting. I don't even remember his name!'

'Vern. His name's Vern.'

'Goodbye Vern,' Lucy said disgustedly.

'Goodbye Lucy.'

The door slammed, waking Edgar. He squinted, getting his bearings.

'It's ten o'clock,' said Almeric.

'In the morning?'

'Right. Lucy just left.'

'Gone so soon,' said Edgar.

At three in the afternoon the phone rang.

'Answer that, Ed.' Almeric shouted from the shower.

'Briinnng-briinng,' said Edgar, 'briinng-briinnnnng.'

The phone went silent.

'Who was it?' questioned Almeric, dripping in the doorway.

'Wrong number...'

Almeric spun round and tripped back to the bathroom, feet catching in the rug.

'Briinnng-briinng,' said Edgar, 'briinng-briinnnnng.'

'Answer that, Ed.'

'Rello...He's not in right now, can I take a message? Uh-huh, yeah, I got it.'

'Who was it?' questioned Almeric, dripping.

Edgar snapped his fingers. 'Damn!' he cursed. 'I forgot to ask.'

Almeric sighed. He opened the window and sat on the ledge to dry.

At seven o'clock that evening Vern approached his front door, a westerly breeze hooking crooked fingers in his pockets in an effort to steal his keys. Waiting for him outside the end terrace was a girl in a long grey Mack.

She had red hair.

'Is it my birthday?' he asked.

She moaned.

'Did someone die?'

'You live here, don't you?' she accused.

'Yes.'

'You know a man called Hugget?'

Vern dwelled a moment. 'Eh, not quite.'

'Meaning?' She stamped her foot.

'I know a mouse whose name is Hugget,' he said.

'At this address?'

He nodded meekly.

She stamped her other foot. 'I can't get in,' she said. 'I can't get an answer.'

Vern took a step back and thought about running. 'He lives in a cage,' he tried explaining. 'He can't make it to the door.'

'You're disgusting,' she responded. 'What's your name? I don't remember.'

'Vern,' said Vern.

'Vern?' She took a step forwards.

'That's right -Vern,' he repeated.

'Not Hugget?'

'No, Planes. Hugget's the name of my mouse.'

'Hugget's the name of the man I'm supposed to sing Happy Birthday for.' Lucy unbelted her Mack. 'See?'

Vern dropped his loaf. 'Yeah...'

'Do you have a toaster, Vern?' she inquired, belting up.

'No,' he said; 'but I have a grill.'

'That'll do,' said Lucy. 'I'm starving.'

He picked the loaf up and fumbled for his keys. At the foot of the stairs was a sign that read: Out Of Order.

'Does this mean we take the lift?' Lucy asked.

'Nah,' said Vern, 'it's off the telephone.'

She bent to retrieve the sign and stuck it back on the phone, which rang.

Vern answered. 'Hello?'

'Briinnng-briinng, briinng-briinnnnng!' said the caller.

Vern hung up. 'Wrong number.'

Upstairs was chaos and disorder.

'Looks like you've been burgled,' Lucy said.

Vern was stunned. 'But I haven't anything to steal...' He dropped the loaf again, and the beans, and ran around the bedsit in a state of confusion.

'My sister was burgled once, not long ago,' Lucy was saying, her nails gleaming redly as she stooped to collect the tin and the loaf, removing her red shoes while she was down there, 'and all they took was her underwear.'

'Hugget!' Vern yelled. 'Hugget!'

'Where? Where is he?'

'Gone.'

'Gone?' She threw aside the bread and beans in disgust.

'They stole my mouse,' said Vern. 'Hugget's gone.'

Lucy sat on the disarrayed bed and lit a cigarette. 'I won't get my danger money,' she lamented. 'I need his signature.'

Through the open door walked Stanley Nex, grinning like he'd just won the pools. 'Hey, Vern, guess what?'

Vern held his head in his hands.

'My car was stolen,' Stan told him. 'Can you believe it?'

Lucy turned the portable the right way up and switched it on, quickly changing channels.

Stan noticed her for the first Lime. 'Hello,' he said.

She winked at him. 'Hello Vern.' Then, 'There's no colour. '

'It's a black-and-white set,' Stan informed her.

Lucy stared at the yellow plastic casing. 'Who're you trying to fool?'

Stanley folded his arms. Downstairs, the phone rang.

'It's no good,' Edgar said to Almeric, 'he won't answer.'

'What makes you say that?'

'I was over there the other day; the phone's out of order.'

'It can't be,' said Almeric, 'it's ringing.'

Edgar shook his head. 'That's just some lunatic doing a phone impression.'

Almeric looked disgusted.

Vern took his work's jacket off and cast it on the floor with the rest of his junk.

'Are you making toast?' Lucy asked.

'Toast?' echoed Stan. 'I'd love some.' He glanced round the bedsit. 'Nice place you've got here, Vern.' Then back to the TV. 'Vern, come see,' he said; 'it's Harold Lloyd.'

In the tiny kitchen Vern was reaching behind the oven for his roach trap. It was unexpectedly heavy. His eyes widened.

Lucy came in, bringing the bread and beans, a cigarette stuck to the red lipstick at one corner of her mouth. 'Can I help?'

Vern didn't hear. Amazement transformed his features. He put the trap down on the workbench and gently coaxed his mouse from inside.

'What's that it's eating?' Lucy wanted to know.

'A cockroach,' said Vern.

'Yuk: '

'Hugget seems to like them.'

'Hugget?'

'Yeah,' Vern said. 'My mouse. Somebody's stolen its cage, though.'

Lucy took off her long grey Mack and sang, 'Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear Huuuggg-et, Happy Birthday to yooouu!'

Vern's amazement turned to incredulity.

Lucy removed the cigarette from her red lips. 'I've never had to kiss a mouse before,' she said. 'He won't bite me, will he?'

'It's a her,' said Vern.

'That's okay,' said Lucy, 'I prefer girls.'

Someone hammered on the door, as yet ajar, rattling under the assault.

'Someone at the door,' Stan called, adding, 'You're wanted on the phone, Vern.'

Vern gave Lucy the mouse and went to hear who it was.

At eight minutes past nine that night Vernon Planes, Almeric Jones, Edgar Ritsky and fourteen girl-guides stood waiting in a Chinese takeaway.

'Whose idea was this?' questioned Vern.

'If we'd come earlier, like I suggested,' said Almeric, 'Then we'd be at the other end of the queue.'

'If you'd brought your car,' said Edgar, 'then we'd be home by now, and not hungry.'

'It's only two streets,' Almeric protested. 'Besides, you lost my keys.'

'It still would've been quicker to drive,' Edgar came back; 'and you always start your car with your screwdriver anyway!' He glared at the ceiling in victory.

'My place was broken into,' Vern said. 'Somebody sole my mouse cage...'

'Eeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeeee-eeee!' chorused the girl-guides. 'Eeee-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeee!'

'You should've run if you're in such a hurry,' Almeric said to Edgar, brandishing his screwdriver as was his wont.

'I'm going to take the afternoon off work tomorrow and go shopping,' Vern decided.

'That,' said Edgar, 'is a great idea.'

'Running?'

'Shopping.'

'What're you going to buy?' Almeric asked.

'Food,' replied Vern. 'Food.'

'Just food?'

'And some rubber washers, so I can fix the toilet in my place,' Vern added. 'I'm sick of having to take a crap wherever I can.'

Almeric fished in his pocket for a pound coin and slotted it in the flashing, luring, trilling bandit.

Vern continued, 'I used thirty-two different toilets last month alone and expect to get over the forty mark this time round.'

'You count them?' Edgar said.

'I must do...'

The queue dwindled. The girl-guides screamed and exited the too cramped takeaway.

'Fish and chips three times,' ordered Edgar.

'No feesh,' said the girl at the counter on which he leaned, polishing. 'No cheeps.'

'What did she say?' queried Vern.

'She refuses to serve us,' said Edgar.

'That's ridiculous - let me try.' He smiled at the girl who didn't smile back.

'Be my guest,' Edgar told him. 'But I don't think she likes us or something.'

Vern hesitated. 'What're we ordering, Ed?'

Almeric waved his hands in the air and did a little dance. 'I won! I won!'

'What did he win?' asked Vern.

'Peanuts,' scoffed Edgar over the rich clatter of money, bright warm coins, silver and gold.

'No peenots,' said the girl behind the shiny counter.

'No fish,' said Edgar.

Vern looked at the menu on the wall. 'Who wants fish? This's a Chinese.' He ordered numbers at random. They waited.

At five minutes to ten Almeric said, 'What's this I'm eating, Vern?'

Vern was abashed. 'Fish,' he said.

'I hate fish,' said Edgar. 'I'm going to get a kebab.'

'I hate kebabs,' said Almeric.

'Food,' said Vern. 'I hate food.'

'You still going shopping tomorrow?' Edgar wanted to know. He fiddled with his plastic fork.

'Sure,' Vern nodded; 'I really need some rubber washers.'

'I hate rubber washers,' said Edgar.

'I hate Edgar Ritsky,' said Almeric.

Vern belched. Forking fish into his exhausted mouth he made a mental note, filed it under W for washers, and then forgot.

At two o'clock Wednesday morning he woke from a dream of red sands and yellow oceans.

At five o'clock he had heartburn and was unable to sleep. The night was dark, he observed, pieces of his consciousness floating in it; blue, green motes his eyes told him were outside his head. But his brain knew better, that and his stomach. The motes were flecks of his tortured mind, he thought, the blown particles of his sleeping ego that had leaked from his nose and ears.

'I'm not really awake at all,' he said.

'Be quiet,' Lucy replied from the bed. 'I'm trying to sleep.'

Vern turned on the hard floor and ached, confused his feet with his hands and scratched his chin with his toes, curled his fingers inside his socks.

I grow more solid. I am able to move larger objects and consume greater amounts. I sit and read, and my laughter rings, spinning colours the sight of which is pleasing.

The new day comes, and I fade...

7 - SUPERMARKET TROLLEY PUSH

Edgar stared at his bruises in the mirror. 'What colour would you say space is, Al?'

'Space is black.'

'What about during the day?'

'Blue. '

'And when it's cloudy?'

'Grey-white.'

Edgar scraped his front teeth. 'Did you know those grey-white clouds were really spaceships full of evil aliens come to invade our planet and eat us all?'

'Yeah,' said Almeric, 'I knew that.'

'And did you know that they make the weather, the rain and the snow and the fog?'

Almeric nodded.

'Supposing they went away then,' posed Edgar. 'What would happen?'

'All the seas and rivers and lakes would dry up,' Almeric replied.

Edgar grinned. 'We'd all die in that case, wouldn't we?'

'Yes,' said Almeric.

'Which proves my point.'

'What point?'

'That the aliens are really on our side.'

'Then why are they attacking us, Ed?'

'A communications foul up,' explained Edgar. 'A long time ago the people of this planet sent out an order for pizza and it got mixed up somewhere with an order for southern-fried chicken from Venus and so the Galactic Overlords sent out these aliens to see if they couldn't sort it out only the aliens received the wrong instructions and the wrong directions and came here instead of Saturn where the pizza and southern-fried chicken places are and as a consequence they got stuck.'

'How? How did they get stuck?'

'Simple, the aliens ordered pizza too, only they got chicken, and so the Venusians, who got the pizza they didn't order, they declared war on us Earth people.'

'So it's the Venusians who're attacking us?'

'No, no, it's the aliens the Galactic Overlords sent; they made a deal with the Venusians, you see, that in exchange for the southern-fried chicken, which the aliens had intercepted on its way to Mars, they'd bombard us on Earth with all this weather we couldn't live without.'

'And they got our pizza?'

'No, the Venusians kept all the pizza, just in case.'

'Just in case of what?'

'They ever got hungry enough to want to eat it.'

'It seems to me,' Almeric said, 'the aliens got a bad deal - but I still don't see why they should be stuck.'

Edgar brushed his hair in a haphazard fashion. 'The alien's spaceships run on pizza,' he said. 'The Venusians tricked them, so now they're stuck.'

'Couldn't they order more pizza?'

'They tried that, but the Venusians bought Saturn and ceased its export. They keep all the pizza to themselves.'

Almeric rapped his screwdriver off the cold tap. 'I hate pizza,' he said.

'Yeah,' said Edgar; 'so do the Galactic Overlords. I think that's why they gave the aliens the wrong instructions and the wrong directions in the first place.'

'They did that on purpose?'

'Sure. It all makes perfect sense when you consider that just before the Venusians bought Saturn and all the pizza the Galactic Overlords took over the southern-fried chicken business and now have a virtual monopoly.'

'Sneaky.'

'Very sneaky. The Venusians went crazy.'

'Why? I thought...No, they ordered chicken,' Almeric reasoned, 'which means they like it, only they got stuck with pizza.'

'Like the aliens didn't.'

'Right, they got stuck without it:'

'And so on Earth it rains and snows and fogs and everybody stays living.'

'Yeah,' said Almeric. 'Yeah.' He was truly impressed.

'Which is just as well,' Edgar concluded. 'Because if there weren't any clouds you wouldn't have been able to tell me what colour they are...'

Almeric moaned.

'What's the matter?' asked Edgar.

'My screwdriver,' Almeric said; 'it's rusting.'

Vern leaves work at noon and walks to the supermarket where he meets Lucy. She has brought her sister Harriot along...

'These places terrify,' admitted Vern.

'Me too,' said Harriet. 'One time I got lost in the freezer section and had to spend the night with a lot of chilled beef and yogurt.'

Lucy shivered. 'Don't say that.'

A screeching of tyres in the car park turned their heads. Two old ladies in a Porsche had narrowly missed ramming Almeric's VW Beetle.

The old ladies swore and promised vengeance. Almeric got out and locked the door with his screwdriver, a smug expression on his face as he had succeeded in occupying the last parking space. Edgar took longer to emerge. Caught up in some hidden duty, he sat quietly fuming.

'Well,' said Almeric. 'Here we are.'

My name is Broken. I fix things. It's what I do.

I am in danger of neglecting my mission, such are the overt distractions of this world. The city on wheels is visible across the ocean as I speak. The leaders of my kind plan their attack on the nameless leviathan, their brown ponies and brave hearts stern and resolute. I must locate our champion, the man with strong lungs of whom my beads tell, and return with him to the grasslands of my home, there to fight and die under a too blue azure, amongst the many generals, the few real warriors, the gathered army of fools and silver eagles...

'Soup?'

'No. '

'How about strawberry jam?'

Vern shook his head.

'Potatoes, carrots, lemons?'

'Mushrooms,' said Vern. 'I like mushrooms.'

'No mushrooms.'

'None?'

'Not any,' said Almeric. 'They got celery though.'

'You can't fry celery.'

'You can't crunch mushrooms.'

'I don't want to crunch mushrooms; I want to fry them.'

'In butter or oil?' inquired Lucy.

'Bacon fat,' Vern said. 'I like my mushrooms with bacon.'

'No bacon.'

The two old ladies crashed their trolley into Vern's. He saw the look in their eyes and said nothing.

'Tomatoes,' said Harriet;'you can fry tomatoes.'

'We've got tomatoes,' Edgar said.

Vern reached for a shrink-wrapped pack of cheddar cheese.

'No cheese,' said Almeric.

'I want cheese. There is cheese,' argued Vern, taking a pack of Brie just to annoy Al, who'd ignored the old ladies.

'I like cheese,' said Edgar. 'Get cheese.'

Vern put the cheddar back by way of a compromise. 'Isn't anyone else shopping?' he asked.

'What?' Almeric appeared shocked.

'Us?'

'Yes, you and Ed.'

'Oh, we get all our stuff delivered,' Edgar told him.

'So why are you here?'

Almeric's mouth fell open. 'We came because you wanted us to. This was your idea, Vern. We came to help.'

'We are your friends,' added Edgar.

'Can you get mouse food here?' Lucy queried.

Harriot said, 'Mouse food?'

'Vern has this gorgeous mouse,' she said to her sister, 'His place was burgled and they stole its cage.'

'Really? Vern, you know I had a mouse once. Or was it a rat? Anyway...'

Vern wasn't listening. He pushed his trolley down the next aisle and wondered how much money he had to spend. He motioned for Ed and Al to follow - or imagined he motioned, as it was then that he discovered the theft of his wallet.

Almeric took one look at his face and said, 'Shopping's off, Vern forgot cash.'

'Vern forgot cash,' mimicked Edgar.

'Thanks, Vern,' said Almeric, 'for wasting our afternoon.'

The girls wandered off in search of mouse food.

Vern was jealous.

Edgar screamed, 'Pizza! I found pizza! The universe is saved and the aliens can go home: We're all going to die!'

'His seas and rivers and lakes have dried up,' Almeric told the robbed Vern. 'And he hates southern-fried chicken.'

Later, Vern was arrested for shoplifting.

Harriot and Lucy stole eight packets of peanuts.

Edgar walked out with a frozen pizza. 'It must've come direct from Venus,' he told Almeric. 'Only they changed the label.'

And for his part, Almeric purloined a can of rust-preventer and another of WD-40.

'I'm innocent,' Vern pleaded. 'I can prove it.'

'How?' the store-detective asked, adding, 'We already found these mushrooms about your person.'

'I've no idea...' began Vern, and then gave up.

'They fined me thirty quid,' he complained that evening.

'Don't worry about it,' said Almeric, tinkering with his bomb, its newly installed timer, his rust-prevented screwdriver bold and shiny. 'You got off lightly.'

'Thanks.' He sat on the sofa between Lucy and Harriet. 'But I didn't even get to keep the mushrooms.'

'Too bad,' said Edgar from behind the sofa, where he'd erected his tripod.

'What's it called?' said Harriot.

'The mouse?' said Lucy.

'Yeah. '

'I don't remember,' the redhead answered. 'Vern maybe; I'm not sure.'

Vern stood and motioned, this time to leave.

'Luck ain't free,' Edgar declared, camera mounted.

'Not even bad luck?' Almeric said.

'That's the most unfree of all.'

The door slammed.

'Gone so soon,' said Lucy.

It is a cloudless night, the lights in space radiant, matched by those of terrestrial origin, sources varied, candles and lamps and open fires spreading yellow and orange and white glows over furniture and pavement, room and street, faces...

'Rubber washers,' said Vern. 'I knew there was something.'

'What's that?' said Joyce. 'Do you want coffee?'

'Please. The machine okay?'

She shook her head. 'Tom was going to ask you to have a look at it,' she admitted.

'Tonight?' Vern folded his arms. Why did I come in here? he pondered.

'No rush,' Joyce told him, lifting a lock of hair from her stony brow and pushing it behind an ear.

'Coffee would be nice,' said Vern, dreamy.

She disappeared, reappeared minutes later with a steaming mug of thick sludge.

Vern regretted his decision, but smiled anyway. Tastes like old paint, he reckoned.

'What was that you said about washers?' probed Joyce. She leant over her desk, arms locked, breasts squeezed between her elbows. 'It's just that mine's been acting up lately; I thought maybe I'd get you to fix it for me.'

'Stay Fixed?'

'Yes.'

'We'd be delighted.'

'Will it cost much?' She straightened. 'I'm not a rich woman, you know.'

'A fortune,' teased Vern. He turned around. 'The work's number's the one on the left, under the logo. See it?'

I faze quickly in and out, flashing solid in the office of Tom's Taxis.

The woman faints...

8 - RELAXING TO DEATH

'Where've you been?'

'I just went to buy a paper.'

'What took you so long?'

Stan gazed at his watch. 'Ten minutes?'

'More like twenty,' retorted Susan, his wife. She lay on the couch with a box of liqueurs in her lap.

Stanley reddened. 'There was a queue,' he said.

'Liar!' She didn't even look at him. 'You went to the pub. I can smell you from here.'

Stanley boiled. 'I just went to buy a paper,' he repeated.

Susan stretched for the TV remote. 'I had you followed,' she said, switching channels. 'You had two double whiskies.'

Stanley erupted. He hit the door. 'You what?'

'You can't be trusted to be out alone...'

'You had me followed?'

'Exactly.

'Why?'

'I told you.' Her back arched and she sighed gently as the warm brandy-chocolate mixture caressed her tongue. 'You're a bad boy, Stan-man.'

Stanley whimpered. 'But, but, but,' he said.

'Sit down,' ordered Susan, languid.

He sat facing the wall.

'Now repeat after me.' Sugar and cocoa oozed inside her limp body like cool magma. 'I'm a bad boy, I can't...Stan-man? What're doing?'

Stanley did not reply.

Stanley said, 'Vern, I killed my wife.'

Vern stuck his fingers in his ears. 'You didn't say that,' he told Stan. 'You're kidding.'

'No,' answered Stan. 'I mean it. I strangled the lazy bitch. Her eyes popped out. She just came apart in my hands.'

Vern slammed the door.

Lucy came up the stairs in her long grey Mack, whistling, waving a bunch of grapes. 'My best friend's in hospital,' she explained; 'and she hates grapes. Want some?'

Stanley said yes.

'Is Vern in? The downstairs door was open.'

Stanley groaned.

'What's the matter?' Lucy asked. 'Did someone die?'

'My wife,' he said, 'was murdered.'

'Really?' She couldn't believe it. 'Wow, I never met anyone whose wife was murdered before. How'd it happen?'

'She was strangled.'

The door flew open, startling Lucy. 'You have to go to the police,' Vern said earnestly. 'You have to give yourself up.'

She winked at him. 'Why? What did I do?'

'You killed her.'

'Who?'

'Your wife!'

'I haven't got a wife,' protested Lucy. 'I'm not even married.'

'They'll never believe that,' Vern said. 'I know, I was arrested yesterday, they fined me thirty quid!'

'Calm down, Vern,' said Stan. 'It's okay.'

'Okay?'

'I disposed of the body. No evidence...'

'That's right,' said Lucy; 'if there's no corpse then there's no murder.'

Vern slammed the door again.

'What did you do with it?' Lucy asked Stan.

'The body?'

'Aha.' She sucked a grape.

'First I cut it up into little pieces and then I flushed it,' Stan said. 'It was hard work, she was big.'

'Yeah,' said Lucy. 'You flushed everything?'

'The lot.'

'There must've been an awful mess.'

Stanley nodded agreement. The door flew open once more and Vern staggered out.

'Hello Vern,' chimed Lucy. 'Want a grape?'

'I'm calling the police.'

'No you're not,' Stan informed him.

Vern froze, terrified.

'The phone's out of order.' Stan cleaned his fingernails. 'I saw the sign on the way up.'

The army moves silently through the trees at the forest's edge, awash in moonlight. The nameless city can be felt through the leaves and bark, which rustle forebodingly. The air smells of damp cloth and cooking; ovens simmer, and the odour of freshly baked bread cheers many a soul...

9 - EYES IN LETTERBOXES

On Friday morning Edgar went to the post-office to cash his giro and mail his letter to his pen-pal Iku in Somalia. He'd left his camera at home and so was totally unprepared for what happened next.

Two

10 - A MAN THEY SENT

'And?' said Vern, miserable.

'I haven't seen him since,' Almeric finished. 'I thought he might be at your place.'

'With everybody else you mean,' mumbled Vern, unhappy.

'What?'

'Lucy what's-her-name and Stanley Nex have decided to move in with me.'

'But Ed isn't there?'

'No. '

'And you haven't seen him?'

'No. '

'Are you sure, Vern? You might've missed him in the crush. I know, I've done it myself.'

'Yes, I'm sure. I haven't seen Ed since the other night.'

'Did you look under your bed? He's fond of dark spaces.'

'No!' Vern shouted. He slammed the phone down - or up - and thought again about calling the police. But he could imagine how that conversation would turn out.

'Briinnng-briinng, bri-inng-briinnng,' went the phone. And Vern, against all his better instincts, broke it.

The field of arches lies north and east of the grass strip, a sanctuary shrouded in mystery and wood. It is said the arches are all that remains of a once great settlement, a city mighty, stone-built and earthbound. If this is true, then it must have been a beautiful place.

On finding the ruins at sunset I walked amidst long shades and muted tints, red and gold shafts of colour, shadows thick, circles and squares to compliment the once proud geometries. In my mind dwelled impossible hopes and improper fears...

'What are you making?' Vern asked.

'Chocolate cake,' said Lucy.

'It was my idea,' Stan confessed. 'I love chocolate cake.'

'Where'd you get the ingredients?'

'I popped out on my lunch-break,' said Stanley, 'when you went for a crap.'

'I never went for a crap,' Vern said.

'So where did you go?' Stan licked clean the bowl, like he hadn't done in years. Cake mixture adhered to his face.

Vern's forehead grew heavier. 'I don't remember,' he said.

'That's silly,' Lucy commented. 'If you went somewhere then you must have gone and come back.'

'Which makes two things you've forgotten,' added Stan. 'Three, if you count what you went for in the first place.'

Vern frowned, possessed of a new melancholy.

Almeric was lonely. He got drunk. There was a knock at the door which he answered, tapping the rosy panels with his shiny screwdriver.

The knock came again, this time louder.

Almeric thumped his side of the door in reply.

Whoever was out there paused, then slipped a note under the door.

It had the wrong address on it so Almeric set it alight. The address was Vern's, he realized, smiling wickedly.

Whoever was out there knocked one last time, very loudly, heavy fists banging like skulls or footballs.

Almeric sneered. He started loosening all the screws he could find in the flat; excepting, of course, those in the hydrogen bomb, which was largely held together by an assortment of black high-carbon threads.

He missed some, being sloshed. But when he went to bed that night, it collapsed.

He dreamt of grey-white clouds and black space. He curled up in his blankets and moaned out loud. He dreamt of silver eagles and green grass. He talked to himself, saying, 'Luck ain't free, and bad luck, that's the most unfree of all.'

The heavy-fisted man - he was sure it was a man - didn't come back.

During the night a man climbs the stairs and stands outside Vernon's door. The mouse and I both know he's there, but he makes no noise, and neither do we...

11 - CABIN FEVER

It was the weekend and Vern paced nervously, having nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to meet. What he did have was Stanley Nex. Lucy had disappeared, her knickers inside-out and her red lipstick smeared as she rushed to further the cause of her odd employment. Vern, peeking, had said nothing.

There was a knock at the door, but when he answered it there was no one stood on the landing.

Stan read a Viz comic and watched telly.

'How can you read a Viz comic and watch telly at the same time?' Vern asked him. 'Stan?'

'What, Vern?'

He repeated the question.

'Easy,' said Stan. 'I only listen to the pictures.'

Vern paced some more. His life had been overrun and he was at a complete loss what to do about it.

Stan folded double, laughing.

'Rude Kid,' Stan said to Vern twenty minutes later, 'is my favourite.'

'When did you buy that?'

'On my lunch-break yesterday; but you wouldn't remember.'

'Why?' Vern stopped pacing. 'Why wouldn't I remember?'

Stan looked puzzled. 'I forgot,' he said.

At that moment the door burst open and a blonde girl in a blue anorak swayed in, a cigarette in her purple-painted mouth and a plastic bag in her free hand.

Her unfree hand contained her change from the bus.

'What do you think?' said Lucy. 'I needed a new image, so...'

She shrugged, dumping ash.

'Who are you?' Vern demanded.

'I'm me,' Lucy responded, pocketing her change and dropping the plastic bag on the floor.

'Who's me?

'My me!'

Vern grimaced.

'What's your name if you're you?' said Stan.

'Lucy. '

Stan rose from Vern's director's chair, patted his gut. 'Now there's a coincidence,' he said. 'There's a girl about your age and height who lives here with me and Vern.' He paused to cough and belch. 'And her name's Lucy, too.'

'Yeah? That's disgusting,' said Lucy.

'I know,' agreed Stan. 'She's a terrible slut.'

'I can imagine. I bet she's one of those awful kiss-a-gram girls.'

'That's right,' said Stanley.

'And a lesbian...'

'Right again!' He clapped his hands. 'You're good at this.'

'Thanks,' Lucy said. She pouted and winked. 'And I bet she wears red knickers inside-out and a long grey Mack.'

Stan slapped his cheeks. 'Amazing!'

Vern groaned.

'Well,' announced Lucy, 'you won't be seeing her again, I can tell you.' She pivoted on one hip and unzipped her blue anorak, beneath it an array of subtly frilled sea-green frillies.

'Amazing:' Stanley applauded. 'Truly a-maz-ing...'

Vern put the kettle on.

'I brought coffee,' Lucy told him, finding Vern in the tiny kitchen.

'Great,' said Vern, unsmiling.

'What's up?'

'Life's up.'

'I know the feeling.'

'You do?' His expression softened.

'Yeah,' said Lucy. She stubbed out her cigarette and appeared suddenly gloomy. 'Only I had an abortion,' she concluded.

And there's just no answering that, thought Vern. He removed his fogged glasses and cleaned them on a dirty tea-towel.

'It's why I gave up men,' Lucy went on.

'I'm sorry,' said Vern, reseating his lenses, 'but there's no cake left, we ate it all for breakfast.'

'That's okay,' she replied. 'I hate cake.'

'Right, cake's fattening.'

'Cake gives you zits.'

'And heart disease.'

'It blocks your arteries.'

'Cake fills you with gunk.'

'It corrodes your intestines and ties your bowels in knots.'

'Cake stinks.'

'What's that about cake?' Stan called through, all of seven feet.

'Cake,' said Vern. 'We were discussing it.'

'Yeah,' said Stan, 'I know; that chocolate cake the redhead made has poisoned me.'

'She's a woman, that redhead,' Vern expanded. 'Maybe she did it on purpose, to avenge your wife.' Surprised at his own daring Vern cleaned his glasses a second time.

Stan's eyes nearly popped out of his head. 'Hey, I never thought of that,' he whispered, those same eyes rolling. 'The ceiling could use a coat of paint,' he added.

Lucy bounced enthusiastically. 'Yes, yes, I could paint this wonderful mural - you know the kind of thing!' She punched Vern in the arm and he dropped his glasses.

'Angels,' said Stan.

'Sailors,' said Lucy.

'Broken,' said Vern; 'my glasses are broken.'

'Rich girls,' said Lucy.

'Back-yard fences.'

'Tents. '

'I don't have another pair,' said Vern.

'We could plan a murder...'

'Or start a religion.'

They giggled insanely. Vern pedalled the pedal-bin and popped his fractured lenses, wondering if that's how Stan's wife's eyes had sounded. He trembled, hooked the wire frames round his ears, stared through hoops and said, 'Now listen to this...'

Lucy punched him in the arm again, harder.

He didn't get the rest out; only, 'Let me tell you...'

'About God,' said Stan.

'Out here,' said Lucy, 'we is stoned, immaculate.'

'The movie will begin in five moments,' Stan continued.

And so it went.

'For a crap,' said Vern, leaving. But the door was jammed, the window nailed shut.

'You'd probably forget anyway,' consoled Stan. 'I shouldn't worry too much.'

'About what?'

'About whatever it is,' he answered, scratching.

Almeric's door fell on him when he tried to open it. The screws were missing. The wood was scorched at its base, the rug also. He glared about him suspiciously and decided, although it maddened him, to remain at home.

Perhaps the phone would ring. Perhaps Ed would call. Perhaps his skull would clear and he wouldn't need aspirin.

Or perhaps not.

Lucy finds a pencil and begins to draw on the ceiling. Vernon tries to get the door open. Stanley watches telly and reads his Viz comic, laughing at Rude Kid and Buster Gonad...

12 - Ws

The day is Sunday. The sun shines brightly down on the sleepy world as it rouses, full of hope and promise. Lucy crawls out of bed on her hands and knees, white skin ablaze, mauve lips smudged at the corners, sea-green frillies scattered like kelp across sheets of red sand and yellow ocean, Vern's quilt and mattress between which he no longer sleeps. The girl tip-toes, places her dainty feet, steps lightly, a naked mermaid whose fishy tail she has abandoned to the sea.

From a glass shelf in the bathroom she lifts a can of shaving cream and daubs the exposed flesh of hairy knees and ankles...

'That'll teach you to peek,' she said, standing astride Vern's somnolent head, his nose topped with a wet spray of foam.

Stan rolled over and his genitals flopped out. Lucy suppressed a chuckle, and shook the can.

They found her taking a bath, the meter earlier jimmied, and burst in toting washing-up bottles full of cold, watered-down soup.

'You dare!'

'Fire one,' said Vern.

'Aaaaaahh...'

'Fire two,' said Stan, who had secretly added tomato-ketchup to his chicken-broth.

'Aaaaa-aaaaaa-aaahhhh!' said Lucy. She hurled a bar of green soap and hit Stan in the eye.

'Aaaahhh!' he wailed.

Vern laughed.

Lucy reached over the side of the bath and yanked the rug out from under his feet.

'Aaaaaa-aahh...' said Vern, tumbling down.

I get too close and fall in the bath. The water boils around me and carries me away.

As the sun rises, the shadows melt, and the field of arches comes alive. At such an hour can worlds be viewed through the many gates and windows, worlds too numerous to count, worlds whose very existence draws me on, nearer, their multiplicity at once frightening and compelling. Through stone arches I pass, and through stone arches I find myself here, on a quest for a man with strong lungs...

'I'll double you,' Vern said.

'Okay, what've you got?' Stan replied round a mouthful of toothpaste.

'Two aces.'

'Hmm,' said Stanley Nex.

'I thought we were going out,' said Lucy, dressed in her blue anorak.

'I can't get the door open,' Vern reminded her.

She stuffed her hands in her pockets. 'I opened it,' she said. 'Let's go.'

'What?'

'I opened it,' she said again. 'See?'

Vern saw. 'How?' he asked. 'It was jammed solid.' His pride was hurt.

'There was this wad of paper wedged under it,' explained Lucy. 'I just set it alight.'

'Is that what I could smell burning?' Stan wanted to know. He threw his hand in, rinsed and smiled at himself in the mirror.

'Yeah,' said Lucy. 'Come on.'

Her purple high-heels left on the grass verge Lucy paddled in the shallow water, feeding the ducks.

The park shimmered with new growth and fallen blossom. People sat on benches and ate picnics. Dogs and children ran loose and tirelessly.

Vern said, 'Did you see that?'

'See what?' Stan replied. 'I had my eyes shut and didn't see anything.'

'In the sky,' Vern pointed. 'Look.'

Stan shaded his eyes and peered upwards. 'There's nothing to see,' he complained.

'There's blue,' said Vern; 'so much blue.'

'Blue it may be,' Stan answered. 'But it's still nothing.'

'How can something be nothing?'

'Simple.

'Well?'

'Sky is air.' Stan closed his eyes again. 'And air is invisible, which means you can't see it. Therefore there's nothing to see.'

'But there isn't nothing there,' persisted Vern. 'And you can see blue.'

'Blue's just a colour.'

'The colour of air?'

'Yes - no! Wait a minute.' He sat up.

'Air's invisible,' said Vern. 'You said so yourself. So how can it be blue?'

'You're deliberately confusing me,' said Stan. 'Air's invisible; end of discussion.'

'Not blue?'

'Sky's blue.'

'I thought sky was air?'

'It is.'

'And it's blue...'

'No, space is blue.'

'Space?'

'Correct. Now let me sleep, Vern.' He lay back down.

'Let me get this straight,' Vern went on, having some fun for once. 'Sky is air and air is invisible and space is blue, right? In which case I shouldn't be able to see sky or air, just space. In which case I wouldn't know sky or air were there at all, just space.'

Stan grunted. 'Something like that,' he said.

'In which case,' Vern said, 'I'd think I was breathing space, which is impossible, because space is a vacuum.'

'What you breathe,' said Stan, 'is wind.'

'Ah, wind. I get it, I can feel wind, so I know it's there and that I'm breathing it and not vacuum.'

'Yes.'

'In which case,' said Vern, 'I'd have to be quick.'

'Quick?'

'To breathe the wind,' Vern told him. 'Especially during a storm when it'd be moving fast.'

'Who wants ice-cream?' Lucy asked, splashing. 'I know I want one of those funny pink things.'

'Funny Feet,' said Vern.

'Yeah,' said splashing Lucy, 'don't they.'

'Don't who?'

'The ducks.'

'Oh.' Vern got up and searched his pockets for money.

'I hate ice-cream,' said Stan. 'Make mine a ninety-nine.'

'There!' shouted Vern. 'I saw it again.'

'What is it?' said Lucy.

'Sky,' Stan told her. 'Blue sky. Nothing to get excited about; you've seen it before.'

'I have not,' she said flatly. 'Not like that.'

Curiosity got the better of Stan. He looked.

'Got you,' said Vern. 'Ha!'

But Stan didn't hear him, kept staring upwards.

Vern pursed his lips and followed Stanley's gaze. A vapour trail pushed an aeroplane through the air.

'The moon,' said Stan. 'I can see the moon.'

'That's not the moon,' Vern said; 'that's a flap that says pull here, or open other end, or something.'

'A ring-pull,' said Lucy; 'like on a can of pop.'

'I hate pop,' said Vern.

Lucy walked away carrying her shoes. She'd stuffed her sea-green stockings in the pocket of her blue anorak, wishing she could take that off. The water had cooled her toes, but the rest of her body roasted.

'Have you got any money?' Vern inquired, catching her up.

'Some,' she said. 'Not much though.'

'But enough?'

'Enough for what?'

'Ice-cream. '

She winked and pouted. 'Not if I buy cigarettes.'

'You plan to?'

'Maybe. Or maybe I'll give up.'

'Cigarettes or ice-cream?' said Vern, counting his change and finding it small.

Lucy stubbed her toe. 'Ouch!' she said. 'Hold these.'

Vern took her shoes and waited while she rubbed her foot. The sun went behind a cloud. Strange, he thought, and looked up. 'A balloon!'

'Can't afford it,' said Lucy.

'Uh?' Vern dropped one high-heel. The balloon melted away. He stooped to retrieve the shoe and dropped his money.

'It's ice-cream or cigarettes,' Lucy proclaimed. 'Let's try and keep this simple.'

'I don't smoke,' argued Vern.

'But you hate ice-cream.'

'That was Stan.'

'He said he wanted a ninety-nine.'

'He was joking.'

'And you said you wanted a balloon.'

'No, I saw a balloon.'

'Where?'

'In the sky.'

'What colour was it?'

'Blue.'

'A blue balloon in a blue sky?'

'Yes.'

'Rubbish! It'd be camouflaged.'

'I saw its shadow. It passed right over us.'

'When? '

'When you handed me your shoes.'

'I didn't see it.'

'You weren't looking.'

Lucy walked away again, this time with her hands jutting from her brow like the peak of a cap.

Vern caught up once more, having recovered his money. She was leaning on the shop counter.

'You bought cigarettes,' he said, disappointed.

'Yes,' she admitted, 'I did.'

Outside Lucy stared upwards at the sky. 'I don't see it.'

'It's gone,' Vern said. 'You're too late.'

'Was it a big balloon?'

'Massive. '

'Then it couldn't have gone far,' she reasoned.

'It was moving fast.'

'For a balloon?'

'For anything.'

'For an aeroplane?'

'Not that fast,' said Vern. 'Just fast enough.'

'To escape me,' Lucy finished. 'Things always escape me; I can never keep up.'

'Then give up smoking,' Vern suggested. 'Go jogging instead, and perhaps you'll be quicker next time.'

'Luckier, you mean.' She inhaled dramatically.

'Why luckier?' Vern sat on a metal chair and polished his lensless wire spectacles.

Lucy sat in another. 'Tell me a joke,' she said. 'I feel sort of depressed all of a sudden.'

'It's the poisons in your lungs, they're killing you.'

'Wubbish!' she retorted. 'Wigarettes waren't woisonus.'

Vern sat up straight. 'Wes whey ware,' he affirmed. 'Whey's weadly.'

'Wrove wit, Wern.'

He paused, wondering. Then said, 'Why?'

'Cheat,' said Lucy. 'People always cheat when they play with me.'

'So cheat back.'

'I tried,' she told him.

'What happened?' He squinted at the sun and thought perhaps he'd been seeing things in the sky that weren't there and should apologize.

'I got pregnant,' Lucy stated.

Vern was silent. He slouched, examining the brass frames. The park crowded his consciousness with shapes and smells, kids and dogs and balls and Frisbees, car exhausts and tables. The moon was real though, he was sure.

13 - DESCRIBING FACES

Amongst all the worlds I chose this one. I passed through its stone arch and walked on air, danced in alien climes. Almeric's hydrogen bomb intrigued me, but I think it will not solve my people's dilemma. My mind has changed, changes still; my mind revolves round the core of my brain and comes not to rest. The tides of my substance ebb and flow. While in my world the city rolls closer. It thunders...

'Goodnight Vern,' drawled Lucy. 'Goodnight.'

'Did you set the alarm, Vern?'

'I don't have an alarm.'

'Then how do you know when to get up?'

'Hugget wakes me.'

'Your mouse?'

'Yeah.'

The door burst open and in charged Stan. 'You left me,' he gasped. 'I woke up in the park and it was dark and nobody was there!' He seemed upset.

'We ate your ice-cream, too,' said Vern.

'I was followed up the stairs.' Stan didn't know which way to turn. 'There's this strange man-thing lurking outside.' He tripped over the bed and Lucy screamed.

'The strange man-thing!' Vern yelled. 'It's got Lucy!'

An almond, half-eaten, mouse-gnawed, fell on his head. Hugget, thought Vernon Planes, my mouse has turned into a bat, it's the full moon and we're all going to be eaten by vampires - or vampire bats. Or strange man-things.

He was hungry. He ate the nut and was soon asleep.

He woke up.

He hadn't been dreaming; in one corner of the room a greenish shape coalesced out of street-light and curtain. Vern peered at its newly fashioned contours and discerned a face in profile, an eye, nose, mouth and chin. The room was utterly quiet. He felt his pulse in his neck, imagined it ticking, his life descending as each breath he took vanished into the past. He wondered if a person only had so many breaths, a fixed number, and that was it, death at zero, the end. He wondered what that number was, and whether it was always the same for everybody. In which case he should slow his breathing down, take it easy, not run around getting excited or anything strenuous like that, it would only cause him to use up his breaths too fast and he'd be a gonna. It all made perfect sense when you thought how much quicker a small animal breathed, say a mouse or a cat, and compared that to how much shorter they lived than say an elephant or a person. The number must be standard, he intuited, fixed by God.

He was asleep again.

He woke up.

Vern and Stan walked to work. In Stan's usual parking space was a brand-new Ford.

'Junk,' said Stan.

'Junk,' agreed Vern.

When it came time to clock-in, Stanley couldn't find his card, so he punched the machine with his fist instead.

'You shouldn't have done that,' said Rita the pay clerk.

Stan was unrepentant.

'What's your name?' Rita asked. 'I'll have to take your name.'

'You know my name,' Stan grumbled.

She glared at him. 'Name?'

'Stanley Nex,' he said. 'My card's gone.'

'No it isn't,' said Rita. 'I've got it here.'

'You've been sacked,' Vern guessed. 'Someone must've told them you murdered your wife.'

Rita peered at Vern and Stan peered at Rita, who laughed.

Stan leaned on her polished window ledge. 'You're next,' he said ominously, and Rita shut up.

'What's gone wrong with the world?' said Vern. He stood up to his knees in rubber washers.

'Find what you were looking for?' asked the stockroom assistant whose boss was out leaving him in charge.

'Not yet,' replied Vern.

'Perhaps I can help. What's the number?'

'Three. '

'Just three?'

'It's a standard half-inch,' Vern said.

The stockroom assistant frowned, scratched his head. 'There's thousands right in front of you,' he said, disgusted.

'Yes,' Vern answered, 'but I don't want black.'

'They don't make them any other colour.'

'No yellow ones?'

'No, only black.'

Vern turned and left. 'I hate black,' he said. All round him machine parts stared like skulls in a necropolis, empty fixtures and sockets.

Joyce leaned over and smiled. 'How's it going?'

'Okay,' said Vern; 'when I find my pliers.'

'What happened to your partner?'

'He got the boot.'

'Really? That's too bad. What did he do?' She slipped past the wreckage of her washing-machine and stepped out into the May sunshine. Vern didn't answer. He snapped two hoses together. Impressed in the rubber of one was an eye, unblinking. He searched and found a nose disguised as a plastic clip, fixed that in place. When he had reassembled the pump unit and installed the electric motor a mouth appeared. The face was chinless, however, it kept the peace.

'Want a coffee, Vern?'

'Eh, no thanks.'

The number three on his door was new. So were the scratches, claw marks incised in the wood. Lucy was standing on a chair painting the ceiling.

'What is it?' inquired Vern.

'A face,' said Lucy.

'An angel's or a sailor's?'

'Neither,' she said. 'Don't you recognize it?'

'Can't say I do.'

'It's yours!' she shrilled, blue anorak speckled with paint, cigarette unlit. 'It's Vernon Planes.'

He bent his neck. 'I took like that?' The face was awful, its lips were too thin and its eyes too large.

'Some of the time,' Lucy told him.

'What about the rest of the time?'

'I wouldn't know,' she said. 'That's when I'm not here, so I never see.'

'You think I change, look different when you're not here?'

'Yes, I think you smile less.'

He looked harder. 'That's a smile on my face?'

'Sort of.'

'Meaning?'

'Well right now it's a smile because I'm here; but if I go out or something it becomes something else.'

'Something,' echoed Vern, perplexed.

She dabbed. 'Something different,' Lucy said. 'Like, maybe a canoe or a vagina.'

Vern smiled at himself and thought of paddling and screwing, neither of which he'd done.

'Or a pig's arse,' Lucy went on. 'Or a worm...'

'Two worms,' Vern put in. 'Two worms stuck together.'

'On a piano.' She got down from the chair and hunted in her pockets for matches.

'And the eyes look like planets,' said Vern. 'Earth and Venus behind lensless glasses.'

Lucy giggled. 'Can you see okay?' she queried.

'No - I lost Stan this morning, my eyes are so bad.'

'Maybe he's with Edgar,' proposed Lucy. 'Your friend Almeric called round looking for him.'

'Did he look under the bed?'

'Look!' she declared. 'He's under there now.

Vern got down on his knees and lifted the crumpled sheets. He found Almeric asleep, clutching his screwdriver.

'Pizza, ' said Lucy.

'What?' Vern raised his head from the floor and squinted up at the ceiling. 'I look like pizza?'

'I hate pizza,' mumbled Almeric from under the bed.

'I hate Almeric Jones,' replied Vern.

Lucy got back up on her chair and began splotching Vernon Planes' complexion.

'I don't think that's funny,' he said.

She paused. 'You're right, it's beginning to look like some ghastly alien man-thing from outer space.'

Almeric's screwdriver trundled clear of the under-bed closely followed by Almeric himself.

'You're awake,' Vern observed.

'I am?' He pinched his leg.

'Edgar's not here,' Vern reiterated, 'I told you that.'

'You did?'

'On the phone.'

'When? '

'Saturday or Friday.'
'I don't remember,' said Almeric. He stood and peered up at the painting. 'What's that?'

'It's catching,' Lucy said. 'What's it look like?'

'One of Ed's photographs,' Almeric told her. 'Fuzzy.'

'Fuzzy?'

'Like you took it with one of your greasy fingers in the way of the lens.'

'Edgar does that?' She stepped to the floor again, having spotted a lone match in the bed covers.

'Yeah.' Almeric toyed with his glossy screwdriver. 'Either that,' he added, 'or he's on to something.'

'Something,' echoed Vern, perplexed.

I recognize the disordered features, but cannot put a name to them. They remind me of the unseen, the faceless city dwellers who crush the breath from pink men and brown ponies alike, who cast fine nets to snare the silver eagles that stray too near their rising towers of despair...

14 - FLAT ROAD

How the mountains sing. Far to the north and south of the mile wide grasslands they raise their proud heads, sheathed in snow and cloud. Water runs from them and gathers into rivers. These cold heights are where the eagles make their homes...

'What time is it?' asked Vern.

'No time to ask,' Lucy replied.

The road was flat and long. He could not say how far he'd walked, or even how many cars had sped past, and there had been few. How few, he did not know; for him there was only the flat road that was straight and endless and dry and hard and black, lined either side by fields.

A car pulled up, its driver offered him a ride. He didn't know where he was going or where he'd come from, but he accepted all the same as his feet hurt and the man's face was familiar. His name, the man's, was Claude.

'Where're you headed?'

'Where's the road go?'

'Lots of places.'

'Then that's where I'm headed.'

'Okay,' said Claude. He pulled away, accelerating the field's blurred passage.

He watched the miles unwind.

'I have to pick up a friend in the next town.'

'Fine.'

'It must be nice,' Claude reasoned, 'to have so much time.'

'Yeah,' he said, smiling. 'It is - I never thought of it like that before.'

'You seem a man with no worries.'

'I must be. I don't remember any, at least.'

The fields gave way to low houses.

'Won't be a minute,' said Claude. He got out of the car, a gold Honda.

He watched the miles stand still.

Claude returned with another man, a Brian. They drove from the town and were soon dividing green fields again.

Brian sat in the rear, reading.

Claude said, 'Looks like rain?'

He glanced up through the windscreen at the deepening clouds of grey-white.

Water streaked the horizon, hit the car. Claude tried the wipers, but they refused to function.

'The motor's jammed,' Brian told him; 'got clogged with toilet paper somehow.'

Claude laughed. 'Kids,' he said.

He watched the rain come down. It bounced off the curved glass, the wind tearing it back over the roof like a film wrapping.

Claude slowed. He hunched forwards, pushing the steering-wheel against his chest in order to see better.

'There's another town not far ahead,' said Brian. 'If it hasn't washed away.'

'Right,' said Claude, 'we'll stop there till the rain eases off. '

He watched the fields turn from green to grey.

The car stopped and they climbed out, running next towards a pub. Inside they sat on stools and leant on the polished bar. He drank beer, listened to music, turned and saw he was alone. The two men had deserted him.

When the rain finally ceased he started walking. The fields stretched to the horizon, each identical to the last. The road was hard and straight.

Some miles on, just as the sun set and the green took on a bluish tinge, he came upon a car wreck. The vehicle had seemingly struck another head on, but of the second car there was no sign. He walked round the mangled Honda and peered inside. There were two bloody corpses, both twisted, smashed, crumpled in the front seats like paper dolls.

The car's boot had sprung open. Lying scattered on the black surface was an assortment of ladies' undergarments, frilly items soaking up the wan sun and the wet petrol. What looked like a mouse cage, bent out of shape. And still in the boot, hidden in the dark interior, was a boxlike container, its ticking that drew his attention to the watch sellotaped to its side.

He shrugged and walked on, unwinding the miles.

'Seven fifteen,' said Lucy, giving in.

It is Tuesday morning once more...

15 – 'I DUNNO'

Vern gets dressed and eats cereal. Lucy stands on her chair and dabs with paint and brush. She is wearing no clothes and her breasts rise and fall with each deft stroke.

The mouse and I chew almonds.

Stanley has not returned. Neither has the man who placed the number three on the door...

'I have to go,' Vern said.

'Good,' Lucy answered. 'Get out of my way, and bring some food back with you - no beans or spaghetti.'

'What do you want?'

'More paint, more colours, more work, more pay, but I'll get those myself.' She stepped down, pouting. 'Southern-fried chicken,' she decided, winking.

'I hate southern-fried chicken,' said Almeric from under the bed.

'Nobody asked you,' said Vern. 'Why don't you go home?'

'I'm looking for Ed.'

'He's probably at your place looking for you.'

Almeric stuck his head out. 'You think so? Nah, he would have called.'

'The phone's out of order.'

'What? Why didn't you tell me?' His screwdriver appeared. He shook it at Vern and crawled for the door.

'Watch the rug,' Lucy warned. 'There.'

'Finished?' said Vern.

'Almost. '

'What's to do?'

'On your face, Vern,' she informed him; 'eyelashes.'

'Just eyelashes?'

'They're tricky.'

'How tricky can eyelashes be?'

'Very tricky,' Lucy said. 'They're like caterpillars, and you know what caterpillars do?'

'Turn into butterflies,' he replied, the able pupil.

'Precisely. And then you have to start all over again, using tame ones, which don't fly off, only you look like Dame Edna and that can have its drawbacks.'

'I know, you turn into Sir Les,' said Vern, top of his class, opening the door for Almeric who dashed down the stairs like a thing possessed.

He walked to work, perversely cheerful. At the lights someone had rear-ended a Merc, causing great damage and possible loss of life. He didn't stop and check.

Rita scowled balefully when he clocked-in. His section manager introduced him to his new work-mate, Stan's replacement a man named Kevin who said nothing all day, just appeared kind of distant, far away, dreamy and preoccupied.

More than once, Vern saw, Kevin would sneak off to inflate a large yellow balloon with the Stay Fixed logo on its expanding side.

Lucy was glued to the telly when he got home.

'What's so good?' asked he, unwrapping kebabs, clinking a bottle of vino.

'Stan.' She glanced at Vern, her expression halfway between excitement and disbelief.

'Stan?'

'Is on TV,' she said. Then, 'They caught him.'

Vern sat on the bed and peered at the screen, leaning back to focus on the black-and-white image. 'I can't see a thing.' The volume was turned down so he couldn't hear a thing either. He rocked forwards and nudged the control up.

'...police questioned the suspect,' the telly said.

Stanley's bemused face manifested.

'What do you know of your wife's disappearance, Mr Nex?' The interviewer shoved his microphone at Stan.

'I dunno.'

'Can you tell us when you last saw her alive?' The microphone weaved back and forth much as Vern.

'I dunno,' said Stan. He scratched his ear.

'They must've released him,' said Lucy.

'I couldn't get southern-fried chicken so I got kebabs,' Vern told her. 'And a bottle of wine.'

'Did the police say why they were releasing you?'

'No chicken?'

'Sorry.'

'I dunno.'

'What do you think has happened to your wife?'

'I'll get glasses.'

'There aren't any.'

'Mugs then.'

'I dunno,' said Stan. He picked his nose.

'But they didn't charge you with anything?' pressed the irate interviewer.

'I hope you like chilli,' said Vern.

'I love chilli.'

'I dunno.'

'Is there any further information you'd like to give us at this time, Mr. Nex?'

On the screen, Stanley grinned.

'These are good.'

'Yeah, real good.'

'I dunno,' said Stan. 'Can I say hello to someone?'

'Uh?' the interviewer grunted.

'Hello Vern!' Stan blurted, waving. 'Hello Lucy!'

'Hello Stan,' Vern answered. 'Can they prove you did it?'

The face on the screen changed.

'Too late,' said Lucy. 'What's for afters?'

'I dunno,' Vern admitted.

'And now over to our crime reporter,' said the new face, and there was Stan again, being rearrested.

'Luck ain't free,' chimed Lucy.

Vern lay back and stared at the ceiling. 'What's this?' He heard a match strike and smelled tobacco.

The telly screamed its innocence. Lucy downed the volume and inhaled. 'What's what?'

'This splodge next to the Vikings.'

'They're not Vikings,' she admonished.

'No?'

'And the splodge is just a splodge.'

'What are they then?' Vern leaned on his elbow.

'Norsemen,' Lucy said.

'What's the difference?'

'Norsemen don't wear spiky hats like Vikings.' She seemed very sure of her definition.

'In that case,' said Vern, 'these are Vikings.'

She blew smoke at him. 'What do you mean?'

'They're wearing spiky hats,' he told her.

Lucy stood on the bed, spilling the remains of her kebab, a ladder in one sea-green stocking. 'I didn't paint spiky hats,' she said. 'It's sabotage.'

'You must have; nobody else could've done it. You've forgotten, that's all.'

'The angels!' She lost her balance and jumped to the floor, dropping ash on Vern.

'Have moustaches,' he observed, spotting the cluster. 'And tattoos,' he added.

'I didn't paint tattoos!'

'You didn't?'

'Or moustaches!'

'You got mixed up,' consoled Vern. 'See? The sailors all have harps.'

She screamed, mimicking the now silent telly.

Vern stood and walked around, his head thrown back. 'My face has turned green,' he said.

Lucy grabbed the half-full bottle of vino and launched it at his head, missing narrowly.

His face turned white. 'Aaaaah,' he said.

'Calm down.' She lit another cigarette and hunted for her shoes. 'I'm going away,' she declared. 'I'm going on a voyage of discovery. You won't know me when I get back - if I ever do.'

'Lucy?' Vern felt sad.

'Goodbye, Vern. I hope it all works out.'

'Lucy?' He folded his arms.

'I can't handle it,' Lucy explained. 'I'm going crazy.'

Lucy, thought Vern, if you go away I'll be all alone with no one to talk to and no one to talk to me.

She paused, the door open.

'Lucy?'

'Why don't you get a clean shirt,' she said; 'or use deodorant?'

'I dunno.'

'I hate men.'

'Lucy...' he began, stammering.

'You end up spoon-feeding them. They're disgusting.'

'Don't go.'

'I'm going!'

'Lucy?'

'Vern?'

'Lucy. .'

'Goodbye Vern,' she said again. 'I hope it all works out and everything. I mean it.'

'Lucy?'

'God, I hope you're not going to cry or anything - it's not like we were...' She gesticulated, rolled her eyes.

'No,' said Vern. 'I know. It's just, well...' He gesticulated, rolled his eyes.

'See you around,' said Lucy.

'Yeah.

'Yeah.

'Lucy?' But it was too late, her face had gone.

Another replaced it, briefly, and then that vanished, too.

Gone so soon, I say.

Vern picks a stray match from the floor and attempts to set alight the mattress, but to no avail.

He sticks his head in the oven, thinking all the while how childish is his behaviour. His mind is confused. I try to faze in again, to reassure, but am unable. It is left to the mouse to tug at Vernon's sleeve and gnaw his conscience.

Hugget sits on her hind legs, shines her little pink eyes, and Vern relents. He reaches to stroke Hugget's snub, furry nose in a gesture of animal comradeship, but the mouse is as short-sighted as himself, and bites, drawing blood...

'Argh!' Vern said; then laughed. There was no gas anyway, he needed to trip the meter.

'A clean shirt!' he yelled. 'Deodorant!'

16 - MYOPIC SNEEZE

His eyes go from bad to worse. Vern's that is, his an emotional upheaval, one engendered in confusion. He drops the pliers and loses the screws. Kevin smiles, but says nothing. A lift control panel blows up at his touch, sparks and dazzles, smells of burning wire. Vern blinks stupidly at the resultant destruction, but it is Kevin's lopsided smile that really bugs him...

'Is that all you can do?'

Kevin winked, had something in his eye. It was too much for Vern, who stomped off down three flights of stairs.

At their foot he sat and contemplated.

He called Almeric.

'Vern?'

'Yeah. Listen...'

'Have you found Ed?'

'No, Al, that's not what I phoned you about.'

'What did you phone me about?' said Almeric, disappointment heavy in his voice.

Vern felt guilty. 'Lucy,' he replied.

'Lucy?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know any Lucies.'

'Yes you do,' said Vern. 'She was at my place, when you were under the bed.'

'What was I doing under your bed?'

'You were looking for Ed.'

'And did I find him?'

'No!'

'So why are you calling me, Vern?'

'About Lucy.'

'Lucy who?'

'Lucy what's-her-name,' Vern told him, exasperated.

'Oh, that Lucy,' Almeric said, adding, 'She talks in her sleep - if it's the same Lucy.'

Vern muffled a sigh. Said, 'She does?' His curiosity was aroused. 'What did she talk about?'

'All sorts,' Almeric fudged.

Vern was near the edge. 'Yeah? Tell me, Al?'

'Why do you need to know?'

'She left.'

'Big deal...'

'I'll help you find Edgar this evening,' said Vern, ashamed, grabbing at straws.

'Okay,' said Almeric. 'But you don't want to hear.'

'I do!' He squeezed the phone.

'Well you can't say I didn't warn you.'

'Just tell me, Al.'

'You sure?'

'Of course I'm sure.' Vern sweated, slowed his breathing.

'Sure you're sure?'

'Yes.'

'All right,' said Almeric.

Vern heard a tapping sound. 'What's that?'

'Morse code.'

'She talks in her sleep in Morse code?'

'I told you you wouldn't want to hear,' Almeric said, hanging up.

Vern moaned, loudly.

'Are you going to be sick?'

He turned round. A man with a hat and badge stood before him, fiddling with a ballpoint.

'You don't look well,' the man said.

'I'm dead,' Vern told him.

Kevin appeared, eating a banana. He smiled at Vern, and Vern was sick, colourfully.

He began sneezing on the way home from the doctor's, a pain in his side the doctor had inflicted with his fingers.

The number three on his door had grown, he was sure; it had never been so large when he'd gone out that morning.

Maybe the door had shrunk, he thought, the whole world even, and only the number three remained constant.

Or perhaps this wasn't his door at all. Perhaps he had the wrong end terrace in the wrong street in the wrong town in the wrong country in the wrong world in the wrong solar system in the wrong galaxy in the wrong universe.

It was possible. He never saw his neighbours, if indeed he had any, so it was no good asking them. He walked downstairs and examined the phone.

'That does it,' he said. The phone had been mended. 'Someone's stolen my real self and replaced it with this myopic copy. The man-thing probably.' He stroked his chin. 'It was the man-thing that Lucy was frightened of,' he decided.

Was she frightened?

'It was the man-thing who lured Edgar away.'

Was he lured away?

'It was the man-thing who ratted on Stanley Nex.'

Was he ratted on?

'It was the man-thing who mended the phone.'

Was the phone mended?

Vern bit his lip. He sensed hope, and had begun to tremble, mouth dry as he searched his pockets for his penknife, but was unable to find it.

'The man-thing's swiped it,' he muttered, digging out change, live money he fed kicking and screaming to the hungry pay-phone.

It clicked and he dialled.

Nothing. It was dead, unmended, broken, knackered, kaput and out of order. He was redeemed!

'Hello.'

Vern pretended not to hear. After all, he hadn't heard it ring.

'Hello. Vern, is that you?'

'You didn't answer,' he said. 'Okay? I never called and you never answered.'

'The phone just rang.'

'No it didn't,' Vern argued. 'You imagined it.'

'Then I must be imagining you as well.'

Vern was cheered. 'Yes, yes,' he said; 'I'm imaginary, too. I didn't call, I'm not real anymore.'

'Anymore?' queried Almeric. 'Vern, have you seen Ed? Only you're beginning to sound like him.'

'Maybe I am!'

'What?'

'Maybe I turned into Edgar Ritsky without knowing,' said Vern. 'I mean, I don't know. It's all the man-thing's doing.' He sneezed repeatedly.

The phone clicked again and died for real. Vern refused it more food, thinking it greedy. It rang at him, but he ignored its pleas and went upstairs where the number three had swelled to fill the entire doorframe.

He looked in the kitchen cupboard and came away with a tin of pineapples.

'The man-thing must've bought them,' he reckoned. 'If I eat them I'll have these weird dreams and the walls will fall apart and I'll wake up in the middle of a huge field with trees and mountains in the distance and a strange rumbling in my ears.'

He searched for a tin-opener. He didn't have one, or rather the one he had was on his penknife and the man-thing had swiped that.

'Which,' he told himself, 'is odd.'

He switched the telly on and watched Stan on the news. He had escaped. He burst through the door.

'Vern, you've got to help me,' Stan said. 'The coppers are right behind...' He collapsed, out of breath.

'I need a tin-opener,' said Vern, unconcerned. He couldn't be sure it was Stan lying there and not the man-thing. His eyes were streaming. He sneezed again.

Stan got up and stumbled forwards. 'I'll kill you,' he said. 'I'll kill you all.'

Vern just stared at the label on the tin. It showed a mammoth pineapple bursting with juice.

Or was it a melon?

'I hate melon,' Vern said ruefully.

'Vern!' shouted Stanley. Six coppers came in the door one at a time, wielding truncheons. 'Help!'

They chased Stan into the bathroom where there was a crash, a shattering, a breakage of after-shave bottles and soap-dishes and sundry fixtures.

Vern changed channels. Harold Lloyd was on the other side, clambering freehand up a skyscraper.

The coppers hit Stan repeatedly in the stomach as they dragged him out of the bedsit. He made one last grasp for the door and pulled away the engorged number three, which flopped on top of his unconscious form like a deflated balloon, or a dead snake, or an unravelled spool of film.

Above the skyscraper silver eagles flew. What may have been brown ponies toiled in the street below.

He would open the tin with something broken, he thought, and went to look in the bathroom for an item suitably jagged.

Outside in the street the policemen hoist Stanley Nex into a waiting paddy-wagon and speed off down the road, the windscreen spattered with gobs of sodden toilet-paper, the air missing from the tyres, the once proud aerial reduced to a splinter of its former glory...

17 - TWO-D

The army is restless. In the tallest trees the lookouts stand, eyes fixed to the western horizon. Some may yet break and run as in previous years, previous, futile campaigns, but this season their leaders are strong and their anger great. Many have died after drinking poisoned water, and all blame the city dwellers for the contamination.

A cloud of dust signals the city's proximity; that, and the creaking groan of its giant engines...

'What happened to the door?' Vern asked.

'It fell off,' said Almeric.

'I can see that.' Vern looked around the room. Shelves and furniture lay part dismantled, part collapsed.

'Somebody stole the screws,' Almeric told him.

'The man-thing,' said Vern calmly, no longer impressed by the chaos that blossomed like spring flowers all round him.

'The what?'

'The man-thing,' he repeated. 'It's following me. I think it lured Edgar away and frightened Lucy off.'

'Yeah? What's it look like, this man-thing? Maybe I've seen it?'

'I'm not sure,' Vern confessed. 'I think it's invisible.'

Almeric rose from his chair, which was glued and dowelled. He twirled his screwdriver between his fingers.

Vern said, 'It looks like your bomb went...' But he didn't finish the sentence. Almeric had pushed him against the wall, eyes glazed, screwdriver poised like a knife at Vern's throat.

'Don't say that!'

'Al?' Vern was staggered.

'Don't even think it.'

'What?' He did a quick retake of the room: the hydrogen bomb was not on the angled table. 'Ah.'

Almeric let go and turned his back.

'When did it?' Vern said tentatively.

'When I was at your place,' said Almeric, a note of accusation in his voice. 'It grew little legs and walked out.'

'Little eyes too?' quizzed Vern.

'Yeah, so it could see where it was going.'

Vern sat on the sofa. It shifted under him. 'Where did it go?'

Almeric shrugged. 'We'll know soon enough,' he said.

'You mean when it goes off?' Vern was sceptical; he fancied Edgar - wherever he was - to win that bet.

'Exactly,' Almeric confirmed.

'And it's all set to blow?'

'Saturday night.'

'You're sure?'

'That's when I set the timer for - midnight on Saturday, like I said.'

'Al,' Vern said, squirming. 'I hate to bring this up, but shouldn't there be plutonium or uranium in a hydrogen bomb?'

To Vern's surprise Almeric grinned good-naturedly. 'Hmm,' he stated, screwdriver wafting. 'They fooled you, I know, yes, they fooled you and everybody...'

Vern folded his arms.

'They only say that to make it difficult for just anyone to make one.'

'A hydrogen bomb?'

'Right,' Almeric said. 'It's really quite straightforward if you know the ingredients. All that radioactive stuff is a waste of time, propaganda put out to confuse people.'

'No kidding?' said Vern, wishing he'd stayed at home with his head in the oven. He felt tired of life at that moment; life had gone badly wrong.

'The hydrogen,' Almeric was saying, 'is in the water.'

'So it's really a hydraulic bomb,' commented Vern, studious once more, cleaning his nails, which reminded him of Stan and popping lenses.

'Very good,' Almeric said. 'It's not widely known, but they let it slip from time to time.'

Vern was nonplussed. Almeric had lost him, but the mention of THEM brought his attention staggering back.

'It's even possible your man-thing is an agent,' conjectured Almeric.

Vern was intrigued. 'Would an agent know how to mend phones?' he wanted to know. 'And induce sneezing?'

'Of course, they're trained from birth.'

'What about painting?'

'That too. In fact, anything you can think of.'

'Then what hope is there?'

Almeric's grin widened. 'It's unstable,' he said cryptically.

'The?' guessed Vern, avoiding trigger words.

'Yes.

'And it?'

'Certainly.'

Were they talking about the same thing? Did it matter?

'If they?'

'Right. '

'Which means...' Vern hesitated, wondering what to say next, what possible relevance it could have.

Relevance to what?

'The end of civilization,' said Almeric, hand on heart, head held high. 'The birth of a new order,' he went on. 'The rise of a superior dough.'

'Dough?' Vern inquired, otherwise speechless.

'Pizza base,' explained Almeric. 'I plan to export, starting Sunday.'

'Where to?'

'The alien spaceships first, and then to Mars and Neptune, and ultimately Venus, flooding their domestic market. It's all part of the plan.'

'Plan?' Vern felt like a cue-card, some crude plot device.

'To rescue Ed from the Venusians,' Almeric said. 'It's called blackmail.'

'I see,' Vern said, suitably awed. 'What if it doesn't go off, the you-know-what?'

'The plan?'

'The bomb.' He clamped his hand over his mouth.

Almeric's eyes closed briefly. When they opened again they were brighter.

Possessed was the word that came to Vern's mind.

'In that event,' enlightened the revolutionary blackmailer, 'Ed was right, he wins the bet, and isn't worth rescuing.'

Vern unclamped his mouth and sneezed.

'I could adjust that,' Almeric told him, approaching.

'No thanks,' said Vern.

'It wouldn't take a minute,' insisted Al. 'Really, there's this tiny screw that controls the sinuses, like in a carb.'

'A screw?'

'A tiny gold screw. It probably only needs tightening. Trust me, Vern, it's easy.'

'I'll stick to aspirin,' Vern said. 'Okay?'

Almeric knelt on the sofa next to him. 'Now lie back. It won't hurt, I promise.'

Vern, recalling childhood dentist nightmares, wriggled away, narrowly escaping having a screwdriver thrust up his nostril.

The sofa fell apart, taking Almeric with it. When he got up, he seemed changed.

'All right, Al?' Vern asked, nervous.

'Did I show you the pictures,' Almeric replied; 'the ones Ed took?'

Vern shook his head.

'Yeah,' said Almeric. 'Come look.' He tip-toed through into Edgar's bedroom. On the wall were four photographs arranged like the panes of a window, forming a larger rectangle. There was a cardboard frame surrounding and dividing them.

'What do you think?' said Almeric. 'Ed was planning to send copies to one of his magazines. I forget it's name.'

Vern could only make out a field, a few figures, and perhaps a balloon. 'My eyes,' he said, indicating his glasses, their missing lenses.

Almeric didn't seem to hear. He stood transfixed. 'I made the window,' he murmured. 'It was my idea. You know what it is? He didn't wait for an answer, saying, 'H-shaped.'

Vern stepped back and felt for the door.

'The Semitic H,' Almeric continued, 'is boxed off at the top and bottom to form an oblong, like this, only not on its side...'

'Yeah,' Vern said, wanting to exit, in a hurry, run in fact, although he wouldn't admit it, even to himself.

'Isn't it pretty?' Almeric said. 'Do you see the dancing girls? The butterflies? The bee in the poppy?'

'Yeah...' And he was out.

Poppies grow at the forest's edge. They mark the graves of the fallen. I stand entranced by these images, the third of which, in the bottom right-hand corner, shows golden haloes of spring light in wind-ruffled hair...

'I never want to live again,' Vern said as he walked. 'The strange things are too many.'

Waiting for him outside the end terrace was a girl dressed in a heavy black trench-coat. She had black hair, too.

'Too many,' Vern repeated. 'Are you another?'

'Another what?' the girl questioned.

'Strange thing,' he said.

The street-lights flickered on. The advancing dark retreated to roof level and grumbled, its probing fingers draining into shadows.

'I don't know,' she said, restless. 'I can't get in.'

'The door's locked.'

'So open it.'

'I will.'

He did. They stepped inside. The phone, Vern saw, had been freshly vandalized. He was pleased. It rang. He broke it more thoroughly than before.

'That might've been important,' said the girl.

'It was Almeric,' said Vern, tackling the stairs.

'How do you know?'

'It's always Almeric.'

'Even when it's somebody else?'

'There are no somebody elses.'

'Then who am I?'

'I haven't the faintest,' Vern admitted, entering his bedsit.

'I'm Lucy,' she said. 'I came back.'

'Why?' Vern flopped down on his bed, staking his claim to the charred mattress and paint-speckled covers.

'Because,' said Lucy.

'I never did that before,' said Vern. 'It was nice.'

'I used to do it all the time,' said Lucy. 'I even charged for it. Then I went to work for a hairdressers.'

'I like your hair this colour.'

'Me too. '

The images of angel and sailor on the ceiling seemed imbued with an ethereal light, otherworldly colours.

'I bought you a new shirt,' Lucy said; 'only I left it on the bus. '

Vern laughed and it felt good.

'It had these strange designs on it,' she told him. 'It was weird.'

'I can imagine.'

'Are you hungry?'

'I'm starving.'

'We could go out for a pizza,' suggested Lucy.

'No,' said Vern. 'It's too far.'

'It's just round the corner.' She sat up, head lolling. 'Or did they move it?'

'They move everything.'

'Everything?'

'They moved Stan,' he broadened. 'They moved the harps and the tattoos and the spiky helmets.'

'Don't talk about it,' said Lucy. 'Talk about nice things.'

'Like we just did?'

'Yes.'

'I'd rather do it than talk about it.'

'So kiss me.'

'Your lips won't move?'

'No!'

'You're sure?' Vern wasn't. Vern wasn't sure of anything. He got out of bed.

'Vern, what're you doing?'

He was on his hands and knees looking under the bed. 'Looking under the bed,' he answered.

'What for?' She sounded impatient.

'A tear in the fabric of time and space,' he said, 'through which a man might easily disappear.'

She sighed and reached for her trench-coat, the cigarettes in its pocket.

'I never did that before,' said Vern. 'It was nice.'

'I used to do it all the time,' said Lucy. 'I even charged for it. Then I went to work for a kiss-a-gram agency.'

'That's better,' Vern told her. 'I like your hair red.'

'It's always been this colour,' Lucy responded, a puzzled glint in her eye.

He kissed her.

In Edgar's bedroom Almeric tore the pictures from the wall and ripped them up, shredding two dimensions in three.

'I never did that before,' said Vern. 'It was nice.'

18 - BLEEDING

Who can tell one world from another? A field of arches stands in a clearing. When the sun is right, a man may pass through, his shoulders beneath stone, his feet treading grass, his mind cast about him, drawn between worlds he has no intention of seeing at first hand. But a man has more hands than he knows...

'That isn't paint,' said Vern.

'I know,' said Lucy; 'it's blood.'

'The angels are bleeding?'

'No.' She prodded him. 'I am.'

'You're not an angel? That's disgusting!'

Lucy got out of bed. 'It's Catholic heaven,' she quoted.

'But it's the colour of hell.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Now you know why I used to charge for it.'

'Danger money,' Vern recollected. 'Were you expensive?'

'Very.' She winked and pouted.

'Then I'm lucky.'

'Very,' Lucy echoed herself.

'Luck ain't free,' Vern concluded, pretending seriousness, feigning death. 'What have I contracted?'

'I've marked you, claimed your soul.'

'You're a witch?'

'A devil.'

'You eat people,' he said. 'Is that it, the price I pay?'

She smiled. 'If you like.'

The Vikings were Norsemen. The sailors were drunk. The angels twanged harps and lit cigarettes.

Almeric discovered a horde of screws in his toolbox and began the reassembly of doors and furniture.

He cut his thumb.

My name is Broken. I fix things. It's what I do.

My home world is to be filled with a dreadful sight. The weak and the strong shall succumb, despite my ministrations, to the growing pressure of noise and wheels. Arrows I will pluck like stiff feathers from paling flesh. Bones I will set and wounds I will tend, unless...

Three

19 - ELVES AND ROPE

Do cockroaches have lungs and believe in God? Does a can of paint know what colour it is? And does white gloss occupy a privileged niche in the hierarchy of emulsions? Such things concerned him at this late hour as he watched the elves untangle themselves from the roadside verges and go off in pursuit of fun and games. They gambolled over the tarmac, contemptuous of the madly gyrating wheels that threatened to crush them, quietly oblivious of the many exhausts which rumbled above.

He waved to them, the bright elves, but they didn't wave back.

'What day is it?' asked Vern.

'What day was it yesterday?' Lucy replied.

'I don't remember.'

'Me neither.'

'What day is it today?' Vern sat up, fingering a zit on his forehead.

'Thursday,' said Lucy.

'Then yesterday was Wednesday,' said Vern, squeezing.

Vern stared at Kevin from inside a disused freezer where he couldn't be seen. They were salvaging copper wire and cute little transistors from a derelict butcher's shop prior to its conversion into a wine-bar called, of all things, Edgar's. Kevin was busy stripping down the meter-box. He bobbed silently as if to unheard music, tunes in his enigmatic skull.

Vern was sick in a bored sense.

Kevin paused to unwrap a Mars bar. He folded the warm sticky chocolate-covered slab into his big mouth and tossed the wrapper away.

Vern sneered.

Kevin said, 'Arm-ummph-baa-hg-jomb.'

Vern pulled back from the hole he'd made in the freezer's crumbling insulation, surprised and appalled. He spoke, the sly dog talked, he thought. But what did he say? What did it mean? Was Kevin an alien spy? Perhaps a Venusian after Almeric's secret dough recipe or an agent like the man-thing or an under-cover cop working on the Nex case in which case he'd be seeking evidence to implicate Vern in some loathsome conspiracy, the murder and subsequent disposal of Stan's wife's body whose name Vern didn't even know.

Perhaps he should confront Kevin. But that would make him look guilty, like he had something to hide.

Perhaps he did have something to hide. After all, hadn't he harboured a known criminal?

He should have called the police. But the pay-phone was broken, wasn't it?

Kevin opened the freezer door, pliers in hand. 'Have you got a spare balloon I could borrow, Vern?'

Vern froze, literally. 'Why?' he muttered.

Kevin smiled. 'It's my lungs,' he said. 'I have this rare respiratory condition and need to take samples of the air I exhale every few hours.' He shrugged like he was frightened Vern would laugh. 'Doctor's orders.'

Vern melted. 'Really?'

'Yeah - it's weird, I know, and sometimes my voice goes, too.' Kevin pointed at his throat.

'I'm paranoid,' Vern confessed. 'I don't carry balloons. I'm afraid they'll inflate in my pocket and burst.'

'That can be scary,' Kevin acknowledged. 'I know. Onetime I had this rubber glove explode in my face.'

'A rubber glove?' Vern started liking Kevin. He wasn't so bad, he reasoned, if bad things happened to him.

'Sometimes it's necessary to improvise.'

'Like now?'

'Right, if you don't have any balloons.'

Vern shook his head. 'But I did see some sausage-skins lying around,' he added.

The sky turned blue and the sun ascended. The clouds paraded like yachts at a regatta, their grey-white hulls and sails crewed by spinning birds. He stood on the sea-bed amidst green coral, metal fish and variegated crustaceans, some of which were houses and shops, the people therein hermit crabs, their soft, shell-less hind parts protected in the flexible cast-offs of looms, needles and presses.

'Harriot?'

'No, Cindy.'

'Cindy?'

'I live downstairs,' she said.

'You look like Harriot,' Vern said. 'Do you have a sister?'

'Yes, I do.'

'What's her name?' Vern was determined to get to the bottom of this.

'Lucy,' said Cindy, edging towards her door.

'Ha!' said Vern. 'I knew it; Harriet's sister's called Lucy.'

'What a coincidence.'

'It's no coincidence,' Vern told her. 'You're her.'

'Who?'

'Harriot.

'No, I'm Cindy.'

'Then what are you doing here?'

'I came out to answer the phone.'

'It isn't ringing,' said Vern.

'It stopped just as you came in,' she protested. 'It often takes me a minute or two to hear it.'

'You must be deaf.'

'A little.' She had her door open now and was disappearing behind it.

'You're a terrible liar,' declared Vern. 'If you live here why haven't I seen you before?' He squinted, one foot on the stairs.

'But you have,' she replied, only her mouth visible. 'I came up to tell you you were wanted on the phone.'

Vern peered harder. 'When was that?' he quizzed.

'Wednesday,' said Cindy.

'Yesterday,' said Vern. 'Couldn't have been.' He had her, he was sure.

'No, not Wednesday yesterday, Wednesday last week, I think.'

She's cracking, thought Vern. 'I don't remember,' he said.

'Well I did,' she confirmed. 'There was another man in your flat.'

'Stanley?'

'No, Cindy.'

'Cindy?'

'I live here,' she said, the mouth retreating.

'He was called Cindy?' Vern persisted.

'Who?'

'The man in my flat last Wednesday.'

'No.'

'But you just said...'

'My name's Cindy!' she bellowed. 'I don't know the name of the man in your flat.'

'Last Wednesday?'

'Any Wednesday.'

'I thought your name was Harriet?' Vern said.

She slammed the door. The phone rang. Vern sat on the stairs and waited, but Stanley or Harriet or Cindy or whatever her name was didn't come out to answer it

'Liar,' Vern said again.

'What?' said Lucy, crashing through the door.

'Nothing. '

'Who's a liar?'

'The woman who didn't answer the phone,' Vern told her. Then, 'What's the rope for?'

She had a coil of orange rope over her shoulder that clashed badly with her red hair and long grey Mack.

'A hammock,' Lucy said.

'Who for?'

'Us.'

'Us? But we've got a bed.' Vern was dumbfounded.

'I know,' said Lucy, 'but I've never slept in a hammock before and I want to see what it's like.'

The door of the downstairs flat opened and the woman who didn't answer the phone stepped out.

'It's all right,' said Vern. 'I told them you'd moved.'

'There was a call for me?' she asked, incensed.

'If your name's Cindy,' he said.

'I told you it was!'

'Then you don't live here anymore.' Vern stood, triumphant. 'You're not who you seem.'

The woman burst into tears. 'I was expecting a call,' she said between sobs. 'My cat's gone missing and I put a card up in the post-office with this number on it.'

'It's dead,' Vern announced, feeling suddenly wicked. 'If it's the same cat I think it is then it was kidnapped and tortured.'

The woman screamed hysterically.

'They cut it into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet where the remains were eaten by giant rats.'

The woman fell back against her door, which had locked.

'What colour was it?' inquired Vern.

The woman clawed blindly for the door-handle, weakened by her tears, her tragic loss.

Vern, remembering she was a little deaf, repeated the question, adding, 'The man you saw in my flat killed his wife. He was on the telly. They arrested him three times.'

She trembled, obviously horrified. 'B-b-black,' she eventually whimpered.

'Oh, sorry,' Vern replied, 'wrong cat. This one was ginger.'

The woman fainted, cracking her head on the banister rail.

'That was rotten,' Lucy said a while later.

'Yeah,' agreed Vern. 'I don't know what came over me. I couldn't help myself. It's not like me at all. I've been corrupted.'

'I won't buy anything there again.'

'I just got carried away, that's all.'

'The grapes look okay though.'

'I've changed...'

'How's yours?'

'Will I ever be the person I was?'

'Vern?' Lucy shimmied her legs into red hosiery.

'Lucy?' He bit into his apple.

He pulls a face. Lucy laughs and straightens her seams. She goes out. I hide in the kitchen a time, entirely solid...

20 - BEACH FRIENDS

Friday sees Vern fixing a drinks-machine in a beach-front cafe, his shirt off. Kevin tinkers with the ice-maker...

'Vern, let's take a break and go for a swim.'

'In a minute.'

'It's too hot to work,' said Kevin.

'In a minute it'll be even hotter,' said Vern.

'What's the problem?' Kevin looked over his shoulder.

'Leaky dispenser.'

'Stick something in the hole.'

'Such as?'

Kevin scratched his cheek. 'Chewing-gum,' he suggested. 'Or will that dissolve?'

'Nah,' said Vern, 'it just goes hard.'

'Yeah. How d'you reckon that?'

Vern held up the plug of chewing-gum he'd removed from the dispenser.

'Hmm,' said Kevin. 'It worked before though.'

Vern said he was correct and they stole a pack of chewing-gum from the cafe, plugged the dispenser, reassembled it, and went running into the cold ocean.

Two girls in a canoe nearly ran them down.

'Hey, watch out!' shouted Vern.

Kevin turned a funny colour and sank. Vern dived under and fished him out. The two girls beached their canoe, dragging it up the sand.

'Is he okay?' asked one.

'Graaah-hsst-ydo-kluaaaaf,' Kevin answered.

'What did he say?' the second girl wanted to know.

'He said he's all wet,' translated Vern.

The girls stood with their hands on their hips, as if to say: we can see that.

'So why did you ask?' said Vern, acerbic. And the girls walked off, careful to place on foot directly in front of the other. They spun their canoe round to face the water, and paddled.

Kevin belched. He said nothing more that day, only waved his arms impatiently as he drove the work's van along the beach at a speed incompatible with the terrain.

Vern jumped out in time to see the vehicle disappear below the foamy hooves of white horses.

He phoned the depot.

'This is Vernon Planes,' he said. 'Listen, I've got some bad news.

'In that case,' said Rita, 'I'll put you through to Finchly; hold on.'

Vern held. He didn't like Finchly. Finchly had given Stan the boot.

'Hello. Planes is it?'

'Yes,' said Vern. 'I have to tell you that my partner, Kevin something-or-another, just drove the van into the sea and hasn't come back.'

'Into the sea? Are you mad?'

'No,' Vern replied. 'But I am worried.'

'Worried!' Finchly yelled. 'Is this a joke, Planes? Because if it is you're...'

The line went dead. Vern shrugged and, hands in pockets, sloped off down the beach.

A clock somewhere told him it was eleven thirty. The sand in his shoes made his toes itch. He'd lost his shirt. It had been nearly clean, recently ironed. People were avoiding him for reasons they kept to themselves, shielding their children behind their fatty thighs and drooping breasts, pot-bellies, pipes and picnic baskets. There were palisades all across the beach. Hidden in the grassy dunes were snipers with tennis racket ray-guns and tennis ball hand-grenades.

Vern crouched over a rock-pool and watched the life within, its complex motions of survival. He tossed flat stones, skimmed thin rocks on the breaking waves. The sun tugged at his shadow and he realized it was past noon, a whole hour flown by.

His reflection in the water was disturbed. Beneath it, the yellow sand gave no hint of the many footprints that had been erased.

The salty air made his mouth taste bad. His skin burned. He thought his neck was on fire. There was no sign of Kevin. The van never surfaced like a submarine; no matter how much he wished it, there was no dramatic rescue scene. Vern saw the two girls in the canoe, but they weren't looking for sunken vehicles. The gulls chased each other and snapped up fish. If they were larger, Vern told himself, they could've snapped up his partner, choked and regurgitated him whole. But the gulls were small, like the few people he could see, and far off.

The time washed past, relentless in its stalking, its hunger great, preying on lives.

The sky filled and emptied.

The tide came in. Vern kicked it. It didn't care. The ocean flecked him with spittle, rolling mockingly, hugging its beach in a possessive manner and eating more at each fresh incursion.

Vern was forced to back-pedal. The water cast a chill at him, its frosty breath drawn from square miles of landless H20.

It would suck him under, drown him like Kevin, his work-mate's oxygen limited to what was trapped in the van. Vern recalled its special springness - air infused and rarefied, sharing the fate of its kind, drowned in its turn, pumped, adhered to haemoglobin, transmuted, respired, used, carbon-dioxide its surrogate, which was waste to man and ambrosia to plants and trees.

He sighed wistfully.

A pink figure appeared next to him.

I stand by Vernon and prepare to offer advice in exchange for specific information. I ask if his friend can swim. He says he thinks so, but not too well. I ask if he knows of a way to stop an object of unknown but immense size, one that runs on an unknown but vast number of wheels, in its tracks. He ponders this a moment and replies: put a similar object, one of equal or greater mass, in its path; or dig a big hole.

A trench? I inquire.

Yes, he says. Or get out of its way.

He is extremely perceptive...

'Hey, Vern!' Lucy, running down the beach, trailed her grey Mack behind her like a kite, its string her slender arm.

I disappear. Above the grasslands the crows circle, readying themselves for the coming feast...

'How did you find me?' said Vern.

'I looked,' Lucy replied. 'Who was that you were talking to?'

Vern gestured ambivalence. 'I didn't ask and he didn't say. I was...' He turned his palms up.

'Dreaming,' provided Lucy.

'Yes,' Vern confirmed; 'dreaming about submarines and wondering how far it is to Sweden or Denmark.'

Lucy stared out to sea, her Mack draped over her naked shoulder, her high-heels undermined.

'How can you run in those?' queried Vern.

'Practice,' she said. 'You keep on your toes.'

'Mine itch.'

'So wash them.'

Vern guessed how far away the horizon was and said no. He had read somewhere there was a road beneath the ocean, a road flat and long, lined either side by fields. Every place was on this road; it went through every town.

21 - TONS OF ICE

Vern and Lucy caught the bus home. On the front seat on the top deck they found a weird shirt, still in its original plastic bag. Vern put it on, regretting the loss of his work's jacket, which he'd left in the van.

'It's you,' said Lucy, pleased with herself.

Vern pulled his shoes off and rubbed his toes. 'Thanks,' he said. 'I like it.'

Almeric chipped away at the freezer compartment of his fridge with his screwdriver, amassing a pile of splinters and crystals, green shards and blue starforms to go with the white ice-cubes he'd weighed carefully and stacked on the table in place of his pilfered bomb. He smoked a Union cigar. His eyes mirrored the wet ice's wet glare. He made notes as to the quality of this latest batch on a memo pad. The light-bulb swung mysteriously, casting moving shades amongst the slowly melting fortification, and the carpet soaked up the run-off.

The colours told him nothing.

'It's too warm,' he said.

He needed more ice, tons more.

'It should be winter,' he declared. 'Then I could open the window and let the cold in.'

The fridge laboured dutifully, its freezer compartment full of water-filled cups and containers.

As they froze, Almeric tapped them out like sand-castles and added them to the stack, rebuilding as was necessary. But the pile failed to grow, its wings and buttresses sadly transient, gloriously spangled.

He reached seventy pounds at two in the morning. The floor was saturated. The phone rang.

'I'm watching it melt,' he told Vern groggily. 'And it hurts. Can you come over?'

'Isn't Ed back yet?' asked Vern. It had been a week.

'No,' said Almeric. 'But someone's stolen his camera.'

'Maybe Ed stole it himself,' Vern posed.

'How could he?' Almeric countered. 'It's his. Besides, he'd have left a note or something.'

Vern wasn't convinced.

'Bring some food,' Almeric said, and hung up.

Vern cannot sleep. Lucy's hammock never got off the ground, its orange net irregular and stubborn. There was nowhere to hang it and she was disappointed, moody, taking it out on Vern. He paced, ignoring her.

I sit meditating with Hugget the mouse. We have become good friends, staunch allies in the war against the roaches, the insect's surreptitious activities widespread by night. We set traps for them, devise new ones. The mouse eats as many as she can catch by herself and I vanish the rest in the childish hope they will harass, via some unimaginable means, the faceless city dwellers who bear down on my kin; but there is no end to the armour-plated marauders...

22 - WAITING FOR SUNRISE

Birdsong is not to be heard. The city is near, the battle, the dying imminent. It is night and the campfires are muted. Through the trees the mountains rise, ever first to see the dawn...

'What the?' said Vern. 'I should've brought my wellies.'

'They'd only leak,' said Almeric. He sat naked on the window ledge, legs dangling.

'Brrr,' shivered Vern. 'It's cold.'

Almeric shook his head. 'It's too warm, it's nearly summer.'

'Too warm?'

'All my ice melted,' Al explained, adding, 'Did you bring my supper?'

'No,' Vern said, climbing on a chair. 'There's nowhere open this late.'

'This early,' corrected Almeric. 'You could've stolen some milk, or brought something from your place.'

'It's too early for milk,' Vern answered, 'and it's too late to bring anything from my place.'

Almeric rapped his screwdriver on the window-frame. 'I can see a fire,' he said.

'Yeah?' Vern shuffled his chair closer and peered over Almeric's head. 'Isn't that Tom's Taxis?'

'Nah, too far; it's a couple of streets on.'

'Whoosh!' said Vern. 'Did you see that? The flames just burst through the roof.'

They watched in silence a while. The fire climbed unchecked into the night sky, blotting out the stars.

'I packed my job in,' Vern told Al, yawning.

'Good for you,' said Almeric, transfixed.

'I was thinking about going away, somewhere different.'

'Everywhere's the same,' Almeric proclaimed. 'I think Edgar had a similar idea.'

'And he left,' Vern reminded.

'Yes, but he'll come back, you'll see. I'd put money on it.'

'How much?'

'How much can you afford to lose, Vern?'

'Zero.

'Okay, it's a bet.'

'A bet for zilch, nothing?'

'Pounds sterling,' Almeric confirmed. 'Payable in denominations not exceeding naught.'

Vern frowned. 'You know,' he said, 'that looks like my street, where the fire is.'

'Hard to say exactly,' said Almeric.

'Must get my glasses fixed,' mumbled Vern.

'Put the kettle on, eh?'

'You want tea?'

'Black, there's no milk.'

'Right, it's too early for milk.'

'Too late,' corrected Almeric. 'It's probably been stolen by now.'

Vern splashed into the kitchen. He checked the fridge, but it was empty. He plugged in the kettle, wary of frying his bones in the general dampness.

'I can't find the tea-bags,' he shouted through.

'There aren't any,' Almeric said.

'Then what am I doing?'

'You're looking for tea-leaves.'

'Artefacts,' said Vern.

'What's that?'

'Tea-leaves always seem old-fashioned to me,' Vern explained; 'like wind-up watches and things.'

'You're ahead of your time, Vern,' said Almeric.

'Don't I know it:' He located the caddy and prised off its lid. 'There's only money in here, Al.'

'That'll do...'

'You want a cup of money?'

'Yeah, why not - I can see a fire engine!'

Vern tore several large notes into little pieces and dropped them in the teapot.

The kettle boiled, or rather the water in the kettle boiled. Either way, he poured scalding water over the shredded money and left it to brew.

'It crashed,' Al said to Vern when he emerged from the sodden kitchen.

'The fire engine?'

'Yeah. It swerved to avoid a cat or something and drove right into the wall.'

'Of the house that's burning?'

Almeric nodded.

Vern laughed. He waded back to the waiting teapot and stirred its contents. He found mugs and filled them. Almeric was gone when he came through again and Vern thought he'd fallen out the window, but he appeared behind him carrying a pair of rubberized binoculars.

Almeric proceeded to give Vern a running commentary. It went like this: 'He lost his hat. No, yes, no...The fireman's...This is nice money, Vern...They can't get the upstairs window open; it must be nailed shut against burglars. They broke it. Smoke is billowing out. Wow! There's this naked girl, she's tied up. The fireman's...What notes did you use? One of them just fell, he's hanging upside-down from the ladder...The fire's spreading. All is lost! Hah-haaa...The naked girl's a redhead. Or maybe her hair's on fire. Yes! No! Is there anymore in the pot? One of the hoses is stuck...The mechanism must be jammed...oho...heee-hee, Vern! Ow! There's this crazy woman, she's fighting with the - no, it can't be...Look out! The wall's going to...'

But Vern, overcome with excitement, had fallen asleep.

The sun appears, a radiant sphere, its light to colour the land and decorate the sky...

'Rise and shine!' yelled Almeric.

'What time is it?' Vern demanded.

'Who cares? It's Saturday, the world is made anew, the clouds have eaten breakfast, and all is not well...' Almeric vanished into the bathroom.

Not well? pondered Vern. I feel okay.

'You're lucky I have a spare room,' said Almeric, appearing once more, foaming at the mouth.

'I have to go to work,' said Vern, struggling to his feet, the sofa lumpy, rocking.

'You packed your job in,' said Almeric. 'You told me so.'

'I did?'

'Yes.'

'When?

'Last night.'

'What day was it last night?'

'What day is it today?'

'Saturday,' said Vern. 'You just said.'

'Then last night was Saturday.'

'Saturday night?'

'No, tonight's Saturday night.'

'But how can last night be Saturday if tonight's Saturday.'

'Last night was left over from Friday.'

'So it was Friday night then, last night?'

'No, Saturday morning.'

'I feel seasick,' Vern said to Al.

'Not well?'

'No.' He lay back down, increasing his nausea.

Almeric said, 'You look okay.'

'I do?'

'Yes.' He ran into the bathroom and unfoamed.

'What time is it?' Vern demanded a second time.

'You missed the best part,' Almeric told him, appearing again.

'The best part of what?'

'The f ire.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. After they rescued the redhead...'

'What redhead?' Vern jumped up, suddenly afraid.

'The naked one,' said Almeric. 'The fireman's...'

'Was she wearing a long grey Mack?' Vern tottered dangerously, taking hold of the swamped table to steady himself.

'No, she was naked,' reaffirmed Almeric. 'She was all tangled up in this orange rope and...'

The door slammed.

'Gone so soon,' said Almeric.

The noise is terrible. The arrows fly. In my heart I know the day to be already lost.

The brown ponies throw their riders in panic...

23 - PARTY

Amidst the blackened ruin of the end terrace Vern thought to spy the melted remains of his portable. The TV's screen had exploded, looking like a fractured space helmet, the sometime astronaut boiled to astro sludge. The whole place steamed and sizzled. Its ill-defined shapes were painful to the eyes.

A cockroach appeared at Vern's feet. The insect circled twice and set off down the street to found a new colony. Vern's thoughts turned to his mouse.

The postman arrived.

'Is that for me?' asked Vern.

'Ah,' the postman said. 'It says here,' he added, digging in his pocket and extracting a dog-eared booklet. 'Let's see. It says that in the event of fire or other act-of-God the letters, parcels etcetera, should be returned forthwith to the main sorting office until such a time as - that is to say...' He grimaced, tilted his hat back on his head.

'Is that for me?' Vern repeated, wiping his hands on his sole remaining shirt.

'It's for a Mr Planes,' said the postman. 'But I can't deliver it, there being no letterbox.'

'That's me,' said Vern.

'You're Mr Planes?'

'Yes.

'And you live at this address?'

'Until recently,' Vern told him, a vague attempt at humour on his part.

The postman adjusted his belt. 'You've moved then,' he said. 'What's your new address? I can deliver the letter there.'

'I haven't got one,' said Vern. 'Can't you just give me the letter?'

'No. No, can't do that; it's against regulations.' He studied the booklet again.

Vern snatched the white envelope.

The postman's hat fell off.

'It's the wrong address!' shouted Vern. 'I don't live there. It's not even for me.'

'You're not Mr Planes?'

'Yes! But the address isn't this one.'

The postman stooped to pick up his hat and dropped a package from his sack.

Vern handed the letter back but the postman refused to take it, saying, 'Sorry, sir, you'll have to post it again.'

'But it isn't for me,' Vern argued.

'Well, I can't help that,' the postman said, straightening his tie and retrieving his package. 'The regulations are quiet strict on the matter. Once a letter's been delivered it becomes the addressee's responsibility and...'

Vern stuffed the envelope in his sack. The postman jiggled expertly and it popped out, floating to the pavement.

'You couldn't have delivered it,' said Vern. 'There's no letterbox.'

'Ah,' replied the postman, toting once more his booklet. 'It says here, in black-and-white mind you, that in the absence of a letterbox or other such suitable repository the postman - that's me - is perfectly within his rights to deliver the letter, parcel etcetera, it what manner he deems fit.'

'Rubbish!' said Vern. 'You're making it up.'

'I beg your pardon, sir, but the regulations are quite clear on this point.' He sniffed the burnt air and padded off.

Vern picked up the letter and opened it with his finger. There was a single photograph inside, the kind used in passports and ID's. It was a picture of himself. He was smiling, wearing a funny hat. On the back of the photo was the same unfamiliar address as on the envelope together with a date. June the third; which, thought Vern, was exactly a week away.

Just then a car rumbled up the road. It seemed to wobble, as if he was seeing it through a heat-haze.

Parking at the kerb Almeric regarded the burnt-out dwelling and shook his head.

Vern was nonplussed.

'What happened to the roof?' he said.

Almeric looked puzzled. 'The flames burst through it.'

'Not that roof,' Vern said. 'Your roof.'

'My roof? Nothing's happened to my roof. At least it was still there when I left.'

'Not that roof - the roof of your car.'

'What about it?'

'It's gone.'

'I know,' said Almeric, 'I sawed it off.'

Vern stood back from the Beetle, amazed. 'Isn't it unstable?'

'Nah,' Almeric said; 'it's fine.'

'Why'd you do it?'

Almeric shrugged. 'It's a nice day,' he said, 'and I didn't have a sun-roof.'

Vern, remembering the picture, showed it to Al. 'What do make of this?'

'It's you. Where'd you get the funny hat?'

'I know it's me; but look at the date on the reverse.'

Almeric turned the photo over. 'You made a mistake,' he told Vern. 'It's only May.'

'What about the address?'

'Yeah, I know where that is.'

'You do?' Vern was intrigued. 'Can you take me there.'

'Sure,' said Almeric. 'I need to do a few things first, though.'

'Right.' Vern got in the car. The door was stuck, so he had to climb over it.

Almeric wiggled his screwdriver in the ignition and they were moving.

Wobbling, corrected Vern. It was no illusion.

They drove around in circles for hours.

'I thought you knew where it was?' said Vern on more than one occasion.

'I do,' Almeric would reply. 'I'm just having trouble getting there.'

They drove and drove, eventually stopping outside a pub whose windows were sheathed in black.

'I don't like the look of this place,' Vern said. 'Why did we have to stop here?'

'I've run out of petrol,' Almeric explained.

'Is that why we're in the middle of the road?'

'Yes.'

'So what now?' Vern folded his arms.

Almeric pondered a moment and then jumped out. He lifted the bonnet and produced a length of tubing.

Vern slid down in his seat as he saw what Almeric intended doing. Outside the pub were six motorbikes, stylized machines with elaborate handlebars and chromed engines. Almeric pulled off the petrol-feed on the nearest machine and replaced it with his own tube. Sucking furiously he then disappeared under the bonnet once more.

Vern heard the gurgle of siphoned liquid. He cringed in fear of possible violence.

Sure enough, the pub doors opened and out marched several bikers in denim and leather, clutching their crash-helmets like bludgeons.

Vern clambered into the driver's seat and started the engine, scooping Almeric from the road as he pulled away. The bikers roared as they realized what was happening, their prize machines toppling like glittering dominoes as the first was still connected to the car via the tube.

Vern put his foot down. The car veered left and right. He couldn't see where he was going. Almeric's eyes stared at him through the bonnet grating.

'Take the next right, Vern!' he howled. 'Okay, now right again and then the second left.'

They narrowly missed a letterbox, two old ladies and a dog with a ball in its mouth.

Vern steered, following instructions. The engine thuddered and died some eight miles from the pub. Luckily it stalled on a hill and Vern was able to coast down into a driveway at the bottom, catching a gatepost on the way in.

Almeric got out, grinning. 'That was fun,' he said.

'They would've killed us!' Vern retorted. 'They'll probably still kill us!'

'They have to find us first,' said Almeric. 'Anyway, we're here.'

'Here?'

'The address you showed me, this is it.' He pointed to the house in whose driveway the car had come to rest.

'Yeah?' Vern was impressed.

'Yeah,' Almeric said. 'I wonder what time the party starts?' He walked up to the door and rang the bell, obviously meaning to ask.

Vern got out, shaking. The car had warped badly. One of the front wheels hardly touched the ground. The body panels were either misshapen or out of line.

Almeric tapped him on the shoulder. 'Nobody home,' he said, pouting.

'I don't get it,' said Vern.

'It's easy,' Almeric replied. 'They get your picture, send you the address, and you come to the party.'

'Yeah?' Vern was mystified.

'Yeah. And you can bring a friend, too.'

Vern glanced at his nails. 'How do you know all this?'

But Almeric wasn't listening. He was counting down the hours till midnight when his bomb was set to go off.

There were eight left.

Then seven.

Then six.

'I'm starving,' said Vern, stretched out on the grass. 'Al?' He sat up. 'Where are you?'

The door opened and Almeric appeared carrying a box of wine and a plate of sandwiches. 'I thought you might be hungry,' he said. 'Thirsty as well.'

'You were right,' said Vern. 'Is there someone in?'

'No.'

'No?' Vern expected the worst. He wasn't disappointed.

'I broke the kitchen window,' Almeric said. 'It was easy.'

Then five.

A screech of brakes brought their attention to the sudden rush of traffic.

Bodies dived over the hedge and tripped up the driveway. They hammered on the door, which Almeric had graciously closed, shouting and swearing, waving cans and bottles.

'About time,' said Vernon Planes, whose stomach ached. He stood and put his shirt on.

Then four.

'Aaaaeeee-eeeeggghh!' screamed a blonde girl, vomiting over the mantelpiece.

The music was loud and mean.

The mouse and I stand on street corners and in bus-stops. We wait for Lucy, who appears along with Harriot, and then follow them in the hope they'll lead us to Vern.

The cockroaches started the fire. They rubbed together used matchsticks and set ablaze the bathroom rug, having drenched it first with after-shave. It was a devilish trick, but it has given me an idea...

24 - KITCHEN RINK

The alcohol flowed freely and the bodies thronged, seemingly doubling every half hour. Like amoebas they reproduced by fission, just as Almeric's hydrogen bomb should, although it had other ends in mind.

Vern emptied all the containers, metal and plastic, he could lay his hands on. The rooms he entered took on a surreal quality not in the least displeasing, reminding him of home. Once, he imagined he saw Edgar, but it turned out to be another amorphous form, a man whose eyes and mouth opened and shut in unison.

'Where's the toilet?' the man asked him, blinking rapidly.

'Upstairs,' Vern answered. It was a guess, but he felt pretty sure of himself.

Almeric brushed past, steering a female towards the kitchen from where excited shouts emanated.

A person emerged covered in cream. Their tongue darted in and out pinkly, gooey.

Vern fell over an outstretched limb. It protruded from a dark cupboard under the stairs. It was rubber. Curious, he folded it inwards, crawling deeper as the appendage wound like a cool snake or thick coil of plaited hair.

What was at its other end? he wondered. Rapunzel? He heard giggling, soft and muted. The cupboard door closed beneath the weight of tidal bodies. Vern could see nothing.

He crouched further, stumbled drunkenly and collapsed in a heap. He was unable to feel where his legs were. They had become one with the rubber limb.

'It looks like space,' he murmured.

'Would you like to see some stars?'

'Yeah, stars would be nice.'

He saw stars. Tiny lights flew around him, fading as they cooled in the blackness, vanishing from sight.

'Welcome to the cave of the vacuums. What is your name?'

'Vern,' said Vern, drinking.

'Welcome, Vern.'

Something moved against him, hard and plastic. A fixture, he knew instinctively, an attachment.

'We have waited for your coming. Your life is troubled.'

Vern nodded agreement.

The fixture bobbed before his unseeing eyes as if to hypnotize him. The plaited coils shifted below his loose body.

'Hey, that tickles!'

'Be at peace. Your time is nigh. Do you see a light?'

'Yeah, I see a green light.'

'It is a button. A magic button. If you press the button all your troubles will cease. You will be sucked away. There is a better place.'

'Really?' Vern liked the sound of a better place. 'What if I don't press the button?' he questioned, sorely tempted.

'If you should decline, it may be pressed for you.'

He didn't like the sound of that so much.

'This is the cave of the vacuums. The vacuums' demesne is void of choice.'

That neither. Vern was aware of silence. The light had turned amber. He had to act fast.

It was impossible to tell where the cupboard door was. Vern had the impression of a far larger space. The light switched to red and a roaring noise filled the air, its suction tugging at his skin as he flailed madly, spitting beer, emptying his lungs the rubber limb alive, attacking him.

He grabbed its flexible throat and squeezed, but it was no good, the limb braced with steel rings, strong cartilage. He wrestled with the toughened appendage as it grew in power, adhered to his stricken face. He was lost, deformed as the vacuum sucked him down, threatening to rip him apart if it could not swallow him whole. But Vern wasn't finished.

He sucked back. With a strength he hadn't known he possessed Vern fought the vacuum, duelled with it, theirs a contest of lungs, motorized bellows, determined hearts, a combat to the grisly finish. And he was winning - sucking the very guts out of the writhing monster, its rubber limb moaning as Vern drew material up through its hose like a straw.

It was the kiss of death, and Vernon Planes proved the victor, the supercharged vanquisher of vacuums, a sucker amongst suckers whose mouth and lips were the envy of attachment designers across the planet, their feeble efforts no match for his multi-purpose organ; the device, the implement, the gadget, the tool of his most justifiable pride.

Vern's was truly a gob to be reckoned with.

He slapped his chest like Tarzan and shouldered out through the now clearly visible door.

Yes, Vern was appliance-supreme!

He went in search of another beer.

Someone had spilt milk on the kitchen floor, which accounted for the chaos. Bodies skidded between fridge and cooker. Others were less graceful and lost their footing. A pile of lifeless shapes mounted under the table from where vino and yellow-foamy beverages drained, adding to the floor's slickness.

Almeric sat on a work-bench with his female. He was trying to weigh her breasts, one at a time, when Vern walked in, cool as you like, and glided over.

'The right one's heavier,' he told Almeric.

'Your right of hers?'

'Hers of course,' Vern said. 'I don't have a right.'

'Neither do I, but she's made no objection. So...' He finally calibrated each breast.

'Well?' said Vern, knowing the answer.

'You're right,' admitted Almeric.

'What do I win?' Vern deftly plucked a flying can of ale out of the smoky air. It had been aimed at his head.

'An all-expenses-paid trip of a lifetime,' said Almeric. He allowed his female to slide to the floor where her momentum carried her below the table.

'Where to?' asked Vern, casually pulling the can's ring. The contents didn't even fountain. They were afraid to.

Almeric's eyebrows rose. 'The living-room,' he said.

They left the skaters to it.

In the living-room the music was loudest. A beaten stereo blasted uncontrollably, its speakers crackling with static and the heavy bass strains of Led Zeppelin. The volume knob was missing, so it couldn't be turned down; and someone, perhaps the same someone who'd spilt milk on the kitchen floor, had snapped the door from the cassette-deck, making it inoperable.

A competing ghetto-blaster was wedged tight behind the curved settee, screaming Bob Marley hits.

Vern and Almeric stood in the centre of the room beneath the broken lampshade.

They said things to each other, but neither could hear what they were.

Everywhere bodies groped and collided.

The city on wheels does not slow. It is too late to save the many lives. A man with strong lungs would be needed just to give the order to retreat, such is the clamour. I can be in two places at once, but have failed in my mission...

25 - CHIEF PLANTER

Lucy opens the door and enters with myself and Harriot close behind. The mouse clings to the triple string of beads about my neck. For the present I am entire and pink.

It is easy to recognize parallels between worlds, for inside and out, within brick walls or on the blood-spattered grass, the sounds are all alike.

We are quickly separated in the crush...

'Lucy!'

'Vern?'

'Where did you come from?'

'Somewhere else. I even brought a bottle, and Harriot, and this strange man.'

'Thing?' finished Vern. 'Was he a thing?'

'A what thing?'

Vern waved the conversation aside. 'Never mind,' he said, a strength in his voice that surprised her. 'At least they released you from your bonds.'

'They?' queried Lucy. 'My bonds?'

'You were tied up,' Vern told her. 'Almeric saw you rescued by the firemen.'

'Oh.' She hugged the borrowed coat around her, produced a wan smile and a cigarette, which she pressed between red lips. 'Have you got a light?'

Vern grabbed the first person that passed and shook them till a box of matches fell to the floor.

'Thanks,' said Lucy, reappraising.

'No problem.'

'You tore your shirt.'

'I had a fight,' said Vern, pushing out his chest. 'Where's the bottle?'

She reached inside the coat and uncovered a litre of gin. It flashed greenly. Lucy handed it to Vern who took a swig. Jostled from behind he nearly choked.

'Let's move,' Lucy said, 'away from the door.'

'What door?' Vern asked, squinting in the dim light.

'The one we're standing in.' She motioned him towards the foot of the stairs. 'Up,' she said. 'Up, up, up.'

Vern stepped over lifeless shapes and towed Lucy behind like a mountain-guide.

Halfway up the bumped into Al.

'Which way are you going?' said Vern.

'I forgot,' said Almeric. 'Either that or I hadn't decided, and so stopped half-way.' He leaned out as if preparing to abseil down the side of the stairs.

'You'll fall,' Lucy told him, winking.

A descending body obliged with a shove and Almeric tumbled over the polished rail, yelling, 'No chute! No chute!'

'What's he mean?' the body inquired of Vern, scooping hair from its sweaty lineaments.

'No chute,' Vern answered. 'He means no chute.'

The body's head nodded sagely. 'I get it. No chute! Right...'

Vern couldn't decide whether it were male or female. It shrank past, reeking of perfume and Pernod.

'Up,' Lucy said again. 'Up, up:'

They stood on hands and faces as they climbed.

The world had turned upside-down for Almeric. He stared at boots and shoes, socks and ankles, calves and knees, thighs and crotches. His skull ached, as if a great weight rested on it.

'My skull aches,' he complained.

None of the aforementioned replied.

'I can't walk.' He moved his feet but nothing happened. It was like walking in air.

He sneezed. His screwdriver dropped out of his pocket and hit his chin, struck his brow before rolling off into the blue and white and chaotic kitchen.

His nostrils filled with ash. He sneezed again, and this time displaced his inverted mass through the wavering kitchen door. Momentarily blinded, Almeric was oblivious of the tangled forms he slid past, aware solely of the adjoining utility room towards which he sped, into which he crashed.

'Your head's in the tumble-dryer,' a kind voice told him.

It was silver and wonderful, cold and metallic.

'Are you stuck?'

He was sad to leave the hall of mirrors.

She was arranging peanuts on the concrete floor.

'Did you see a screwdriver?' said Almeric, dazed, bedazzled, abuzz.

'Yes,' she responded. 'It destroyed a whole column.'

'And?' The peanuts, he thought, looked good enough to eat. So he ate some.

She scowled. 'That was half a cavalry regiment.'

'Tastes nice.'

'You just scoffed a general and two captains,' she said, offering chagrin.

'Sorry,' Almeric said. 'The screwdriver?'

'Went that way.' She pointed behind him.

He looked. It shone like a beacon, bright amongst floor-cleaner and bleach, a plastic bucket.

'What're you doing?' he said, returning his attention to the woman.

'Planning my strategy.'

'Using peanuts?'

'They're all I could find.' She manoeuvred a division of salty conscripts to a new position.

Almeric reckoned she must have arrived early to have found peanuts. It was uncanny. 'How can you tell the two sides apart?' he wanted to know.

'The enemy's dry-roasted,' she explained.

'0h, yeah.' He leaned closer. 'Who's winning?'

'I hadn't decided.'

'You'd better hurry.'

'Why?'

'I can see your watch,' said Almeric, 'and Mickey says the world is only fifteen minutes from ending.'

'That's silly,' she said.

'No,' Almeric came back; 'this is silly.' He grabbed a handful of unsuspecting infantrymen and tossed them in the air, catching as many as he could in his mouth while stretching out an arm and plucking the screwdriver from its nest of rags, its fortress of detergent bottles.

She rocked back on her heels, disgusted.

'KP or Big D?' asked Almeric.

'Planters,' said the strategist, eyeing him shrewdly.

Almeric had a premonition. She grinned broadly. He was quickly sick.

'You shouldn't be so greedy,' she said, coy. 'Or do you like rabbit shit and pepper?'

Almeric turned first green, second purple.

'Any room?' said Vern.

'No,' chorused the bodies in the airing-cupboard, 'try the attic.'

Outside was warm and electric. Almeric smelled the night, happy at its bubbling. The cloudy spaceships were blue-black and omnipresent.

'Yaaaa-eeeeay!' A figure cast gnomes at the greenhouse in the next garden.

'Haaaa-hooooo!' Another kicked over garden furniture and pots and vases.

'Wooo-wahhh-gggga!' A third mutilated growing things, stripping them of leaves and flowers.

Almeric recognized the bikers and suppressed the urge to dance and whistle.

An engine roared. Wheels cut up the grass.

He ventured back inside.

In an upstairs bedroom Harriot is taking bets on the outcome of an arm-wrestling match between two male bodies, their eyes bulging like their muscles, the winner to collect a bored young dark-haired girl whose near unconscious self is glued to a video, miming in turn its silent dialogue. There have already been three such contests, the lucky heroes each nursing severed lips and bruised testicles.

The girls split fifty-fifty. I sit on a chest of drawers and wonder at my profession. In another world I tend the wounded; in this I applaud their bleeding.

Soon it will be time to bury the dead and number the living amongst the fortunate...

26 - SECRET

It was foolish to think of using fire as a weapon, for the city dwellers simply replied in kind.

The trees give off an acrid smoke as they burn...

'Let's try in here,' suggested Vern.

'It's a balcony,' said Lucy.

'It's full,' said Vern. He breathed fresh air a moment, head spinning.

The balcony was actually the garage roof. 'It smells of tar,' Lucy remarked.

'And mustard,' Vern added.

'French or English?'

'Ukrainian.'

'I hate mustard,' said Lucy.

'There's no way up to the attic,' Vern said again.

'You already said that,' admonished Lucy. 'When we were stood beneath the hatch, remember?'

'I should've got a chair to stand on.'

'You did; it broke.'

'I could've given you a hand up.'

'You tried, and dropped me,' Lucy stated. 'There's a bump on my head.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. Come on.' She yanked his arm.

'Where?' The empty gin bottle clattered from his grip and rang off the stair-rail.

'In here.' Lucy elbowed aside sodden carcasses. A crescendo of noise greeted them.

'Hey, Harry!'

Vern entered the room in time to see a male body writhing in contorted agony.

'Baby sis!'

A dark-haired girl pressed her bare heel into his stomach with practised cruelty.

'That looks like fun,' said Lucy to no one in particular.

'It's an art,' Harriot told her.

Vern slumped on the bed, causing others to fall off it. They groaned beyond the blankets' colourful horizon, lost souls in a deep well, cast down by the avenging angels.

His mouse appeared, white and pink on his weird shirt as if it had grown from the pattern. Vern stroked it, careful not to stick his clumsy fingers in its face, lest Hugget bite him.

He wondered how it had escaped the flames. Or had the mouse risen like some rodent phoenix from the ashes?

'Twelve minutes to twelve!' said Almeric as he rebounded inwards. 'Vern!'

Vern was quiet.

'Guess who?'

'Almeric Jones,' Vern guessed, breaking his silence.

'What? No.' Almeric knelt, whispered, 'In the garden.'

'Is that a hint?'

Almeric nodded. He took a swig from a bottle whose label was a skull-and-crossbones, and grimaced.

'I give up,' said Vern. 'Who?'

'Eh...'

'In the garden...' Hugget clambered over him and disappeared down the back of the bed.

'Our friends from this afternoon,' confided Almeric. 'Or was it this morning?'

'You mean?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'Here?'

'Yes. But don't worry, there's no time; not to die.' He rose and swaggered in a directionless manner.

Vern sat up, feeling like a rusty hinge.

'Hurray!'

'Hurray, hurray!'

'Hurray, hurray, hurray!'

The dark-haired girl interrupted her viewing once more. Her fifth victim's head grazed the ceiling. She leant on one hip and smiled at him.

'It's her boyfriend,' somebody said.

'That's not fair,' said another.

The mass of bodies agreed. They wanted pain and violence and blood and entertaining.

One threw a pillow. It might have had little effect, but the case was stuffed with empty glass receptacles.

'Hur-rrrray!' the bodies cheered, hiding, falling over each other in their attempts to elude the wrathful giant.

His laughter was deadly.

Almeric made it to the window and peered upwards at the sky, his head resting on the crowded sill.

Lightning flashed, followed a few seconds later by thunder. A bird struck the glass and vanished. Almeric's screwdriver rotated on his upturned palm like the needle of a compass.

Vern crawled from the bed and joined him. 'What do you know that I don't, Al?'

'The distance and orbital placement of Venus.'

Vern stuck his finger in his ear in a reflex of bafflement. 'What else?'

'The pink guy on the chest of drawers is from another world, an alternate plane of existence,' Almeric said, concentrating on the dark heavens, the broiling clouds, the imminent storm.

'There's no one on the drawers,' said Vern.

'He fazed out,' said Almeric.

'Will he faze back in?'

'Any time now.'

'What's he look like?'

'A boiled lobster with beads.'

'Beads?'

'Yeah, a triple string round his neck.'

'How do you know all this?'

'I'm a special agent,' Almeric told him.

'Is a special agent different from just an agent?' Vern wanted to know, thinking of the man-thing.

'Right,' said Almeric.

'In what way?'

'They're special.'

Vern borrowed Al's skull-and-crossbones labelled bottle, held his nose and took a drink.

'That's disgusting,' he said.

'I know,' Almeric replied. 'It's Algebrian.'

'Tastes like battery-acid...'

'It's made from imported seaweed.'

'Imported from where?' Vern had his suspicions.

'Here,' said Almeric, proving him correct.

'From just down the coast,' said Vern, nodding.

The dark-haired girl and the giant had taken off all their clothes and were now incising each other with bite marks as they climbed the walls, keening.

Lucy and Harriot shared a cigarette.

'Don't worry about it,' Almeric said, picking out their mingled reflections in the glass; 'it's all part of the plan.'

'Plan?' said Vern automatically.

'Yeah.' The screwdriver came to rest. Almeric straightened with an audible crack. 'The Galactic Overlords,' he said, 'are sick and tired of herring.'

'I don't blame them,' Vern answered, drinking deep and long. 'I hate herring too.' Especially red ones, he thought, lucidity a temporary resident of his skull.

The lobster-person appeared on the chest of drawers and waved with an unsettling familiarity.

'How long've you been an agent, Al?'

'A special agent,' corrected Almeric. 'For as long as it takes to get the job done.'

'How long's that?'

'Until June the third.'

Vern paused in his inebriation. He dug in his trouser pocket and found the white envelope with his picture in it, this address on the reverse, and the date: June the third.

'What happens on June the third?'

Almeric put his arm around Vern's shoulders and drew him away from the window and the coming storm.

Vern was stunned; his mouth fell open. Almeric was the last person he's suspect of harbouring such comradely impulses. It was totally out of character and left him speechless. Almeric on the other hand seemed fired with a paternal zeal, inspired even, like a man whose finest hour was nigh.

It was a shame then, an affront to his newfound dignity, when a horde of leather and denim clad bikers charged the door.

Many things occurred at once.

The bikers growled and barked in triumph, wielded lengths of pipe and fence.

The dark-haired girl and the giant melted into the ceiling, their bite marks glaring tattoos.

Lucy and Harriot shucked off their coats to reveal an array of sparkling lights and pulsating electronic gadgetry strapped about their slim bodies like jewelled lingerie.

And through the window that may or may not have been H-shaped crashed the van that Vern had last seen dipping below the foamy hooves of white horses, Kevin at the wheel, the same Kevin or a different one who grinned now from the helm of the barnacle-encrusted work's vehicle. Edgar leaned out of the passenger window, his camera held before him, clicking and winding like a demented press photographer who had just stumbled upon a famous actress with her dress tucked in her knickers.

Time froze everything. The instant was captured, immobile and everlasting.

The universe moved on without this scene, taking Vern and his mouse with it.

The vacuums rumbled angrily. The city on wheels thundered past, its sound echoed, translated into stalks of fiery lightning as the night sky exploded into a torrent of rain.

The clock, any clock, read twelve exactly. The hydrogen bomb was a hydraulic bomb after all.

And as one world ended another began.

Vern's. He watched its making. He saw the stars hung up and the moon put out and set to waxing and waning. He witnessed the seasons, the sun and snow. He was present at the birth of a new day, which was as much as anybody could ask.

He was unemployed come Monday.

He'd set up his own business, he decided. Pizzas, maybe. More likely the repair and maintenance of diverse electrics and misunderstandable machinery.

He'd be in direct competition with Stay Fixed.

He'd call his new outfit Planes' Parts And Aparts, and have as his logo a shiny screwdriver.

Oh, and a mouse.

27 - BANDAGES

The rain extinguishes the fires. A little of the mountains is washed away. In the trampled grass lie the fallen, man and pony side by side, the crows kept at a distance by the silver eagles whose hovering presence so illustrates the beauty and frailty of life and the hanging reality of often sudden death.

Souls rise with the steam as the sun draws breath. I walk and stop, walk again, in search of those I might tend, as a loving gardener the limbs of plant and tree after the passage of a great storm. What can be repaired, I fix, and what cannot, I prune.

The cuttings I collect will nourish once more the earth from whence they came, and will come again, in the springtime...

'Hello Vern,' said Joyce, passing him in the street.

'Hello. '

'What happened to your face?'

'I cut myself shaving,' said Vern.

Joyce laughed. 'You've certainly had some bad luck lately,' she commented.

Vern disagreed.

'You don't think so?'

'Not really,' he told her. 'It could have been a lot worse.'

'How much worse?' Joyce was aghast.

'Well,' Vern began, 'civilization as we know it might've come to an end.'

She poked him playfully in the ribs. He winced. 'You know what I mean,' she said. 'Did that hurt? Are you okay, Vern?'

'Okay?' he gasped.

'You've gone a funny colour.'

'Then I'm fine,' he said, and walked off.

She caught up to him. 'Tom said he was going to put some work your way.'

'I hate work,' Vern said.

'He'll pay you for it,' said Joyce. 'I'll see he does.'

'I hate money.'

'No you don't, you're just down.'

'Down?' He paused.

'In the dumps.' Joyce smoothed her dress. 'You'll pull out of it. I'd bet on that.'

'You would? How much?'

She folded her arms, feigning serious consideration. 'Ten.'

'Ten?'

'Ten - twenty! But no more.' Joyce smiled.

'Twenty?'

'Yes, twenty crowns your luck changes and you brighten up.'

'Crowns,' he repeated. 'No bet.'

Joyce looked tired. 'Please yourself, Vern.' She turned from him and strutted away.

The sun went out and in.

'Luck ain't free,' said Vernon Planes.

AFTERWORD...

This has been a boiled-down novel; a prototype, if you will.

This has been the turning point in the life of Vernon Planes, technician.

The nameless city on wheels is a dead city, its defences automated, its dwellers having long since abandoned its towers for the grasslands, forests and clearings of their past creation, in search of a simpler existence.

Vern, far from being stranded in an alternate plane, need only sniff the air to realize he is close to home. He has about his neck a triple string of beads, clay baubles inscribed with letters, spaced with yellowed teeth.

They read differently now, but that's another story. He has a world to explore, a world to casually peruse, to enjoy at a trot, a festive canter, as it were, on a calm-caboodle of tours.

