 
The Beach At Reality aka Disko

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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PART 1: THE LAST QUAGGA

One

The beach at reality is wide and long. The surf rolls in crescent shaped, reversed like a new moon, resembling the white of a fingernail. It is deserted. There are only empty shells, exoskeletons washed up from the world beneath. One such is mine, only about this shell there is something different, as held tight within is my still soft flesh. The sun bakes me. The sand dries hard and crusty over my eyes, rendering this new place a blur. Sound comes as before, only faster, sharper, less muted. Clouds swim in the sky.

Why am I here?

I know where; at least the name presents itself. Here. Reality. Thinking on it makes it absurd. But I'm unable to deny the evidence, albeit fragmented, of my own enthused and investigative mind.

I just can't decide whether this place merits a proper noun.

i.

Disko is cold and black. Cold because of the weather, the wind and snow, black because of the coal. They mine coal here. They cut it like cake. Christmas cake, I like to think, with a white frosting on top and a layer of marzipan.

Disko is an island largely inhabited by lost souls. Ghosts, doppelgangers and seldom seen indigenous folk populate the land mass, each here for a reason, all confused as to the last time they were anywhere else. The mine is largely automated these days and the miners typically idle, time as vague as seasons, gatherings like this one near permanent social outlets for gossip; scandal and misadventure a must.

Right now, Freddy Ungo is boiling water to make tea. He looks pissed off. And who can blame him? His wife has left him. His lettuce has wilted. Last night he lost four thousand Canadian dollars at poker. Ah, poor Freddy. But he has a trick up his sleeve.

Arnold Freight and Gilbert Snow are sat in exploding armchairs awaiting the brew.

'It's the absolute truth,' insists Freight. 'There in the Heavens for all to behold, there for a few fleeting seconds was the face of the Virgin.'

'How many times is that?' asks Snow, a man whose smallness of stature has never impeded his bigness of opinion. A man whose migration north was some kind of pre-emptive karmic strike. 'Ask around and you'll find such sightings are everyday. Nothing to get excited about.'

Freight ignores him. Freight is a large man with a sad looking beard. Freight believes in extra-terrestrials and just about anything anyone whose first language isn't English tells him. Excepting French, but that's another story. Freight believes in seals that play chess and frozen kingdoms under the ice \- under, in fact, the coal.

The armchairs are exploding, I should clarify, due to having been shot with a four gauge a few weeks back, an act to which no one has yet to confess. Stuffing protrudes like frozen steam.

Freight saw God's son's mother's face in the Northern Lights.

Not a brand of cigarettes.

The trick up Freddy Ungo's sleeve is this: C20H26N2O

Tee hee hee.

Going to be some fun and games in this cabin, I can tell you. I leave them to it and take a walk round the compound. As ever, it is lit up like a Christmas tree. A dilapidated sign at the entrance reads: SANTA'S WORKSHOP. The entrance gate itself is lying in mud the consistency of margarine. A peculiar olive colour; piss and vomit mixed with diesel oil and antifreeze. There are vehicles everywhere, tracked and wheeled, of every size and description. All of them leaking. The compound covers approximately half a square kilometre and is ringed by a three metre fence designed to keep polar bears out. That there are no polar bears on Disko makes it, like the unhinged gate, redundant.

There's a security hut, torched a year ago, on top of which is a growing pile of rubbish. Mostly plastic bottles in plastic bags in plastic bins. Beyond this containers of every hue offer the aspect of ancient fortifications. Piled six high in places, they sit rusting, mostly empty, a few dozen crammed with baked beans and assorted culinary misfortunes. An unknown number of redundant miners live in these steel caves, unable to tear themselves from the ice and snow of this black island, unwilling to return to civilization. They'd rather freeze than co-mingle with folk from warmer climes.

Fires poke through buckled oil drums. I don't know what they find to burn. No coal comes to the compound. It travels to the docks via conveyor and is swallowed by waiting ships.

Most buildings are prefabs. Most corrugated iron hemispheres. Most single-storey and most inhabited by degenerates.

Smoke and steam rise in equal volumes, strange ghosts to inhabit the eerily glowing night sky. The aurora dances to an unheard tune, its varicolored oscillations like a gigantic screen-saver.

Approaching once more the cabin I hear screams coming from inside, quickly followed by laughter.

The company has swelled to six, with the addition of Velma Pearson, Pamela Verspotten and Giorgio, the base orangutan, who winks at me conspiratorially as I enter. The men are in hysterics; Arnold and Gilbert especially, neither seemingly able to control various motor functions, while Freddy is more or less catatonic. It's unclear whether he's sampled his own lysergic acid diethylamide.

The women smoke cigarettes.

'Crazy fucks,' says Velma. She hasn't seen her kids in maybe three years and sometimes forgets their names. I have no idea what her job is. She may no longer have one.

Pamela is an electrician.

Giorgio, the base orangutan and onetime company mascot, is wearing an enormous sealskin poncho. He was the sole survivor of a helicopter crash that killed the company's chief marketing executive, a film crew and a former glamour model named Tiffany whose breast implants are nailed to a plank over the bar at Gugson's, Disko's sole hostelry, situated midway between here and the mine perimeter.

At least that's what I told everybody when I hung them there, thus sowing the seeds of my notoriety.

ii.

Come rushing, my friends, to where the wind strums the water and the rocks sweat great globular melons of light; come rushing into the fall's sweet, cool embrace. Watch through its tears the buffeting of spring leaves and orbiting insects. See through the flashing lenses a fractured creation made whole. Experience the heady delirium and be refreshed by this sparkling cascade's ordinary, peace-filled, magnificent reason. Observe; all the water observes, the passage of time; time caught but not overtaken; time held in seasonal transience; time in the shape of stream and glacier. Come rushing, my friends, with positive abandon, and give to this instrument, reassembled from shattered clouds and bounced perspiration, the freedom of your hearts...or if not your hearts, then your ears.

Listen.

It is the voice of the last quagga.

'The what?' queries Brutus.

The last quagga.

'Oh.'

He's spear-fishing in a coastal inlet, the ocean to his back a vast blanket. The land is his pillow, he thinks. The covers rise and fall round his chest and neck. Some days he gazes down, in the rough direction of his toes, and the sheets look completely flat, nought but a few ripples to show there's anything under them. Other times the creases fight for space, climbing over one another, leaning on each other's shoulders. It's as if his dreams, day and night, transmit their undulations, or lack of them, to the coverlet. He shakes his head at the absurdity. Hurls his spear and misses.

Once there were many pillows, his father has told him; the bed was shared. But places had different names then. The world, '...was a lot smaller.'

'Or people were bigger.'

The old man thinks about this, one eye squeezed shut, its neighbour puzzled.

'Maybe that's it,' he says eventually, scratching his chin. 'Maybe the world's the same size as it always was and it's people who've shrunk.'

He seems to like the idea. Brutus feels pleased with himself. It isn't often he gets one over his father.

'On the other hand...it's not just the world that's bigger now - and everything looks the same as before, mostly, from a point of view of perspective.' He pauses. 'The days are bigger, too; much longer than they used to be.'

Brutus slots his hands behind his head and lies back to gaze at the stars.

'There's still twenty-four hours in a day, and sixty minutes in an hour, yet somehow those minutes and the seconds that compose them are longer. Everything is much farther apart...'

'Tell me about the city, dad.'

The old man laughs. 'Which one?'

To Brutus there is only one city. He doesn't know it's name, or if it ever had one, but as he's never seen a city, let alone been in a city, to him they're all the same.

He imagines the world as a child, still small. You could walk across it in a few days. Nowhere was very far away. You could drive there in a car. Wherever there was. Wherever you wanted. His father professed to owning a car in that unknowable past. Ironically, he wasn't a traveller then.

Grown now, the world adopted a new aspect. Stretched.

'Time for bed.'

And three or four months sleep? Old months, when seasons were not distant memories.

How old would that make him? he wonders, just gone 19. Ought he to be dead?

Of course he's seen cars. There are still a few on the road today. Only the road is longer and straighter. Like his father says, 'Life isn't that different; there's just more space.'

Brutus reads books. He thinks maybe he'll write one.

The world as seen through the pages of these novels is fantastical, a place of many wonders. Many dangers, too. There's men on the moon and pirates on the seas. People do amazing things in books, he thinks, curled up tight with assassins and adventurers; they conquer strange sounding lands, wrestle with inner conflicts, love and lose and love again. Everything is compressed, just the way it used to be. Whole lives are detailed in a few chapters. Great cities rise and fall inside a thousand words - not centuries, as if the novels themselves are time concentrated, much as he imagines the past, crushed up tight by the weight of history. Only the very present has room to stretch its legs, to live and breathe. And it is the cities that fascinate him. The city, that of countless names.

Their caravan, dragged slowly along the highway by a tractor the size of a house, passes through many a village and town, but these are not the metropolis he imagines. That is on a far grander scale, all flashing lights and buildings in the clouds. There traffic hums by overhead and underfoot, the people move in a blur, and life is actioned at pace within a milieu of frantic detail. On the road things come and go at a much slower rate. The caravan trundles between destinations hundreds of miles apart, sometimes snaking round the entire girth of a place, laying siege to its occupants, who come pouring their pennies into the waiting throats of the entertainments, buying minutes and hours of comedy and tradegy, shooting at metal ducks and tossing rings over fishbowls. The world comes alive then. You can see it in the many faces. Brutus likes nothing more than to don a costume and smile at the girls.

Morning comes with apparent swiftness, despite the supposed long tenure of night. He just can't grasp its dimensions, lacking his father's memory of times past. Even the old man is puzzled by the phenomena. Like anyone of his generation, all he can do is shrug.

'A day is a day,' he says. 'The memory adjusts.'

Brutus, washed and chomping a lump of bread, finds his dad gassing the tractor, its interlocking caterpillars an inch thick of steel wrapped about giant drive wheels and lesser pathway cogs. He's wearing a grin and whistling, dropping the white gas tablets into twenty gallon cans, waiting for the water to fizz with its distinctive rush of sound and cheap perfume odour before spinning the cap down and heaving them onto the gantry at the back of the vehicle.

'Give us a hand then!'

Brutus squashes the last of his breakfast into his mouth, barely able to work his jaw until the bread softens.

His father, The Incredible Peeling Man, aka Faraway Jones, shakes his head.

A theatrical laugh resonates through the metal structure, that of Vincent, the tractor's ancient mechanic and driver, by his own reckoning fourteen thousand and twenty-two. He has a birthday every week, which he spends drunk in the cab. The only time he ever leaves the sanctuary of the tractor's steel embrace, in fact, is on those frequent occasions when he falls off. The ground, Vincent is of a mind, is not something one can trust.

Faraway marks off the gas tabs. They are a currency in themselves and carefully logged.

A short time later and the caravan - twelve trailers of various size and description, all bouncing on pneumatic tyres - is underway, pulled at a steady 9mph along a flat road, wide and dry, the earth stretching away to either side the hue of oatmeal biscuits. Grasses sway like animal fur, pale and tight, yellow stems darkening to green at the roots. Brutus casts his eyes over the landscape. To the rear is the ocean, twinkling and deep. And up ahead, where the road disappears into a point? The forward direction is always uncertain. Standing on the last trailer, his father somewhere inside the old bus, he peers at the horizon, a hazy future the present never seems to reach.

The funambulist makes his way along the wire, the ground beneath a cloth of upturned faces, cut stems that wander around in boots and shoes, their vases. He has the best view of the showground, perched on his tyreless bicycle, a big grin painted on...disguising his grimace, his concentration. The wind is unpredictable up here. The wire shakes and quivers.

Brutus notices the clown's agitation. He nudges Tullulah, who jabs him hard in the ribs.

'Hey!'

'Keep your hands to yourself then,' she tells him, two years his junior and not much shorter. It is Tullulah's ambition to outgrow Brutus, in height at least. Her parents, entertaining in the sky, mother Penelope in her ball-gown tossing fruit, lighted torches, plates and knives to father Zeus, are both small.

The clown makes a meal of things and Brutus turns his attention back to the boards.

A smug little kid with incredibly large hands has scored three bullseyes.

Brutus folds his arms.

The kid's head starts to boil.

A second later, neither having moved a muscle, two of the darts fall to the floor.

Brutus lets out a slow breath and smiles. 'Better luck next time!'

The kid just stares.

Night advances from the east, rolling like the blades of a combine, the chaff of stars blowing above and a sickle moon riding like the polished token of times past. The generators up a beat and lights swell across the noisome expanse of dirt on which are parked, in a snaking W, the dozen buses, trailers and wagons out of whose sprung roofs and sides explode magic and animation, colour, chance, wonder and excitement, music, gossip, laughter, curses and promises, all manner of human restlessness and contentment here catered for by a caravan of illumination.

It is home to Brutus. The calendar and its inaccuracies, histories and fictions, have no place here among the blur of teeth and skirts. The past, as the future, is suspended. Organ music, steam-driven and cacophonous, has pitched its flamboyant tent over this rough acre of the globe.

Tullulah plays guitar. On a hillside overlooking a snaking river, the wind a dry breath through this summer's afternoon, the water rolling shallow over polished stones. Her fingers dance lightly over the strings and her voice whispers in echo, the song that of her restless spirit, the dreaming of her heart and mind. She can never sit still for long. Brutus, casting rocks across the watercourse, glances back and smiles - but the song isn't for him. It is hers, and hers alone.

She stops playing. The wind has risen and Tullulah drags the hair from her eyes, pulling it behind her head and fastening it with an elastic band.

He watches her go, traipsing over the horizon in rolled-up jeans, a darker patch where a pocket is missing, the remainder coming away. Her sweatshirt is shrunk, exposing her lower spine, the guitar slung over one shoulder like a rifle. He's known her all his life, yet doesn't know her at all. He loves her like a sister. No helping that, as Tullulah has made plain.

'I don't go with boys,' her phrase.

Not that Brutus is frustrated. There are other girls in the caravan pleased enough to share their favours, to dig their nails and writhe.

There is Damson.

She moves his head. 'Put your tongue out!'

'Errgh?'

'Yes - that's it. Now.'

There is Milly.

'Brutus!'

And of course, there is his favourite, Caroline.

Tullulah and Caroline are a pair. Tullulah is fair and Caroline dark, their limbs together like different shades of chocolate. Brutus has watched them for hours, enmeshed in a slow reverie of pleasure, all giggles and moans. They weave in and around each other, bodies arched and curved, a near liquid aspect that intensifies with the passage of time. They are so in tune, he thinks, rising together like birds. They are beautiful, no more so than when they squabble. Caroline comes looking for him then, frustration making her hair curl, while Tullulah sits cross-legged on the roof of her parent's trailer, strumming her guitar.

She knows he watches.

'That girl's impossible,' says Caroline.

'I know,' he replies. 'But I don't mind.'

Clouds sit effortlessly above this quiet valley. They barely move. Brutus, shading his eyes, wonders if years ago they used to rush across the sky, a whitish blur. In stormy weather, they bunch and roll like sheep being sheared on a glass floor above, fleeces dirty from the fields, collecting in deeper, thicker piles till the light can no longer seep through to the world below. Washed and rung, stretched and combed, the clouds change shape and size, piling up, gauzing out, stray wisps the remnants of another harvest as the sky's activity is taken once more with blue.

His feet are numb. He looks around for his shoes. Something moves under his toes. Perhaps he imagined it, but for a moment the riverbed had lifted, as if something had passed beneath, or the river was itself alive, a living creature stretched out in the sun while it digested a meal.

The greening of his skin marks the beginning of the transformation. He takes in great lungfuls of air and contracts his every muscle. The veins in his forearms and neck stand out like ancient earthworks, ridges in a landscape only visible from above, interlocking in a pattern both mystical and plain. Turning red first as the fruit ripens, then a deepening purple, the colour highest in his face. It drains slowly downward and he squats, folding his limbs, gradually adopting the final shape, the green shot through with yellow and pocked with black and white. After a few minutes it is difficult to imagine a man there at all, one who not so long ago stood tall and naked. Now there is just a giant watermelon on the stage, heavy and slightly oval.

As ever, it is left to one of the players to incite the applause. The crowd of gawping onlookers, the audience for this sensation, are too overawed, a suspicion in their minds of hidden mirrors and secreted trapdoors. Some nod together knowlingly. They cannot believe their eyes. What they have witnessed is a parlour trick, barely worth the tuppence it cost to enter. But it is an uncomfortable feeling to watch that huge melon being carefully rolled to one side.

The caravan moves on, the hills grow bigger, greener, and a few trees begin to crowd the road. Brutus rides with Vincent in the rumbling cab of the tractor, the old man's pipe guttering in mimickry of the twin exhausts, venting through a window the top half of which in slid part way down. The two don't talk much, but watch the road as it disappears under the caterpillar treads, the vehicles towed behind invisible, unheard and unfelt save for the occasional lurch as one or more shuffle, coming together on the downslope and drifting apart on the up. The day is long and serene, occupied with an increasing degree of shadow. The wind can be seen to mix with the closing leaves.

Vincent spots a car ahead, a lone black shape like a bulge in the tarmac. It grows slowly as they close, light glinting off broken glass and warping over dented bodywork.

'Better get your father,' he says, rattling his pipe empty and gearing the tractor down to a crawl.

Brutus swings out the door and climbs back across the engine cowl, jumps between the exhausts, takes the ladder onto the roof of the engineer's cabin, Vince's oil and spares emporium, amongst which he sleeps like a dragon curled on its horde of jewels, dark-smelling and home to a maze of maintenance hatches, each guarding a secret, a maze of narrow passages beyond leading into the tractor's mysterious innards, and at a run takes the seven foot gap between the rear of the gurgling machine and the first trailer, a distance he first attempted at eleven, only falling and breaking his collar-bone. Twelve saw him clear the divide. A few faces poke between the bus and wagon hulks that compose the train, wondering at the change in noise, the caravan's steady vibration having wound down to a more chaotic shuffle. Brutus takes each subsequent gap in his stride, perfectly balanced on the roofs, till the last reveals itself and he brakes, dropping onto the truncated ledge at the front of this last carriage, always midful of the lumpy welds, expecting them to crack each time. Faraway is inside, feet on the table.

'We stopping?'

'There's a car in the road.'

'Can't we go round?'

Brutus isn't sure what to tell him. His father looks impatient, as is often the case after a performance; something Brutus doesn't like to watch any more.

'Well?'

'It's smashed, the car,' he says. 'Vince sent me...'

'Okay.' The man nods and closes the atlas he's been reading. Then he smiles. 'I was remembering a trip abroad.'

The caravan halts and they disembark, walk its length to where a gathering has collected about the wrecked vehicle.

There's a body inside. A dead man with open eyes and a hole in his head. Most of his skull is adhered what is remains of the windscreen.

'Somebody get a spade,' says Jones.

Brutus has seen death before. There was Curly Loon, crushed under his trailer, cut almost clean in two. And Rebecca, Tullulah's sister, who drowned. But this is his first killing. A gun had left that hole in the man's skull, and a finger had pulled the trigger. A murder victim. He wonders: how and why?

They bury him by the side of the road and push the car off the highway. Jones gets everyone back on board and the caravan resumes its previous trundle. Brutus though lingers. The car has been searched for gas tabs, yielding a half dozen. What facinates him most is the nodding dog on the rear parcel shelf. After mimicking its action, sure of some hidden message, he runs after the caravan, and catching it climbs back over the roofs and sits on the engineer's cabin.

iii.

As I struggle from my shell, I try and imagine what awaits me inland, but few shapes or ideas enter my head. It is unformed. The beach slips under my feet and I stumble, making progress thereafter on all fours, like the first fish to sprout legs and crawl up the strand. My lungs feel raw and unfamiliar, but my eyes are slowly adjusting to their new environment.

I take a few deep breaths and stand upright, naked and alone.

A distant wind seems to talk to me. I don't understand it's meaning, yet I'm drawn toward it, can feel its pain. It is perhaps the distress call that has brought me here.

iv.

Brutus practises his latest, the audience a reluctant Tullulah. She would rather be lying under the trees, counting stars and strumming a tune of her own invention, lost to the vast sky bowl, but has agreed to witness his magic. He decides to cut short the intro, all the hand waving and distraction along with the carefully mapped out spiel, and goes straight for the denouement. Her theatrical yarns aren't helping, but he continues, largely unruffled, poking around in his right nostril and pulling on an ever lengthening hair. Tullulah's face crumples with distaste. She doesn't say anything, however, curious to see the outcome of this charade, saving her commentary until the facts are known. Meanwhile, Brutus keeps yanking this invisible strand, his head bobbing and his eyes screwed up, and then RELEASE, he almost falls over backwards, squinting at her in triumph as he shakes his noggin and holds out his hand before him. Dangling from it on a black hair a foot long is an eyeball. It appears glazed. Tullulah scissors her legs erect, slings her guitar over her shoulder and ambles away, a smile on her face she does well to contain, leaving Brutus and his eye none the wiser.

He tucks the orb back in and shrugs. It's never easy pleasing Tullulah, as Caroline often tells him.

'I think all she's after sometimes is a fight.'

Brutus snaps the hair, deciding on a wander, taking the opposite direction to the girl and stuffing his hands in his pockets as he kicks among the vegetation. The caravan is well off the road, mostly invisible. A few fires illuminate distant faces, but there is nothing to suggest more than one or two vehicles, their passengers, like the buses and trailers, having melded with the undergrowth. He hears voices, the occasional giggle. Gliding through the moonlit trees he happens upon grumbles and gropes, both equally illicit; yet it is the former he finds of most interest, suggesting as they do something of the unknown life of the protagonists, whether it be Gladys and her poodles sharing hoarded chocolates and wine while they chew cigars and make poker faces, the three dogs able to best all but the most able punter, only never Gladys, who exchanges her mounting pile of chips for a bigger ration of the cocoa, or here, in conversation with Numo the Nail and Elastic Eddy, Dronch, increasingly his father's bane. They are sitting on a fallen bole well out of earshot, smoking rolled tobacco, the smoke collecting in a slow-moving kaleidoscope about the metallic Nemo, whose every muscle twitch generates a pattern, Eddy here with his thumbs knotted and Dronch adopting his usual leer. He produces a beard to disguise it, face disappearing inside a silver hedge, his clothes bulging out at that moment, then falling back as his hirsute persona is withdrawn.

'What we need to decide,' he says, bald pate glimmering dully. 'Is how we get rid of Jones.'

Brutus hunkers down. Conspiracies are nothing new among the players, and Faraway has a knack of smelling any approaching revolt, quelling it with a minimum of fuss. He is what holds the caravan together. Vince's tractor may drag their train along the highway, but Faraway Jones is at its rear, pushing; together he and the driver sandwich the whole. Without either there would be no entertainment, no assembly of clowns. Without one or the other, a gradual breaking of ranks. Brutus realizes this, and is acknowledged by Vincent as his successor; but the old man has yet to reveal much of the secret workings of his caterpillar-driven throne.

Tullulah appears beside him, arriving invisibly in the dark. He can see the pale brown of her eyes.

She tugs his sleeve and they crawl away.

'You've been listening?' she asks, hinting at her own snooping.

'I didn't hear much,' Brutus says. 'Just a few rumblings. The usual discontent.'

She's shaking her head slowly, side to side. 'It's worse. They want rid of your dad. They want to turn the caravan north.'

'North?' Their usual pattern is east-west. 'Why north?'

'Can't you guess.' She smiles, lifting darkened locks aside. 'The towns are bigger north. More people, more money.'

'How do you know?' He's intrigued, having not thought in such simple terms before. Previously, the ambitions of the likes of Dronch have appeared vague, more to do with personality than anything material. They view Jones as a dictator, an overlord whose status is maintained via some visceral force. That he stamps his authority on the caravan and its core of artists is undoubted, but his motivation is communal, not private; his father does not demand total obedience or a bigger cut of the takings. He isn't greedy. Wealth, as hardship, is shared. It hasn't occured to Brutus that there might be more lucrative trails. Dronch and his cohorts obviously think so. How many others?

North. Bigger towns. Bigger crowds. There has to be a reason for Jones' reluctance, considers Brutus. More knowledge he is denied.

Tullulah kisses him suddenly and flits away.

He is left with the night and eventually settles down. Not to sleep, however.

His imagination is taken with the unknown.

It makes him angry, all that his father his kept from him. Suddenly it is as if Faraway has deliberately maintained his ignorance, denying him specific knowledge of the greater world, instead feeding him a diet of myths and fictions - one he has consumed readily, that has built his bones and muscles, framed his mind. That much he has always taken for granted might be false sickens him. Has his father told him nothing but lies? Brutus hates him, he realizes. But, no, it can't be true. Can it? Then why? All he has ever known is the road. East-west, an irregular path between coasts, the towns and villages lining the way, each similar, so much so that he never takes any notice of their names. He can barely remember the eastern extreme. They must have arrived there last when he was seven or eight. Twelve years it's taken for the caravan, in various guises, to cross in the direction of sunfall, its shadow dwindling behind. And now, another twelve years with the morning sun in their eyes? The notion of heading north seems a good one. He can see its appeal. Jones will never agree to it though.

Brutus rolls onto his stomach, the distance of the stars making his head spin and his guts churn. Of a sudden, everything that matters is close, as close now as the ground. The indistinct ground. He can barely make it out. Only know that it is solid beneath him. Real, yet lacking detail. He's scared, peering into its vague closeness. Might he have to go against his father? Choose a different side?

It won't come to that, he tells himself. It mustn't. But already the doubts are whispering in his ears.

'What's north?' he asks over breakfast.

'Ice and snow,' his father replies, fork paused and dripping mashed tomatoes; 'steep hills and bad roads. Why do you ask? Or are you more than usually curious this morning?'

'I heard some talk about it,' he says, gathering his courage, pushing a rasher of bacon round his plate. 'I hear there's larger towns...'

'Farther apart than you can imagine,' Faraway interrupts. 'They don't care for strangers.'

'How so?'

Jones puts his fork down. 'They're unpredictable,' he offers, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair. 'Places get too big, and before you know it nobody trusts anyone. They get suspicious.'

'But the people must be richer,' argues Brutus, supposing the size of a town to reflect the wealth of its inhabitants.

His father snorts derisively. 'Perhaps. Why do you think they build fences and carry guns? Like I say, they get suspicious. They start imagining all kinds of things. Everyone - even their neighbours - becomes a thief in their eyes. And that's when the trouble starts.' He leans forward again, elbows on the table. 'Whose been talking then, eh? I know there's those who'd like to steer us that way, maybe stay a week or a month in a place rather than a couple of days.'

'Just a conversation I overheard.'

'I'll bet. Finish your breakfast. I want to be off by noon. That is, if everyone's agreeable.'

Brutus looks up in time to catch his wink. It is his reticence though, that lingers.

'And south?' he ventures, having cleared his plate, Faraway stood now over a washing bowl.

'South,' the man mutters. 'South is the same as north, only upside down. We're better off sticking to the middle.'

Brutus isn't convinced. He still dreams of the city, and the city doesn't exist in the fold of a page.

Escaping before his father can gift him some less than urgent task, a need to free more than his bowels, he runs through the woods in the direction of a hillside, rocks protruding like almonds in a torn cake sponge. The height isn't as great as some of the trees, but he can make out the caravan, strewn in sections, and the narrow strip of asphalt that has become over the last twenty-four hours a wound, not only in the landscape, but a laceration running the length of his spine. He wants to be free of it. He needs to be free. The road is like Zeus' tightrope; it bends and quivers, never as straight as it looks, and the caravan upon it is the funambulist, precariously balanced, always pretending, yet too practised at not falling off. He wants that wound to heal, or at least wind in a different direction. Dropping his pants behind an outcrop Brutus grimaces at the day, the length of it ahead, the days after, following that same grey-black strip laid east to west across an Earth here sparsely populated. If north and south are more populous, he figures, then the roads there must be as good. Or did they peter out, travelling only so far from their centres? Like the roots of a tree. How far apart were these towns? He clenches muscles, a breeze stirring. Piss runs between his boots. Perhaps he should talk with Dronch or one of the others, Elastic Eddy say. He's always got on well with Eddy. Or might they think he's spying? Brutus gives a last squeeze, waggles his cock and rips a handful of purplish grass to wipe his arse. He has to talk to somebody. There are too many blanks in his life, too many paragraphs with half the words missing. He hasn't appreciated those gaps before, not on such a scale. Brutus has simply accepted the world as it was presented to him, the education his father has given him so full of now obvious holes. Not Jones' fault, in reality; but there is some complicity in it. Perhaps his father was afraid of telling him too much, of losing him to that greater space of facts outside of his limited, changed-world experience. Protecting him maybe. He acknowledges that. But it doesn't excuse it, the forced parameters of his learning. What's a traveller need to know? How to deal off the bottom of the deck? Knot a rope? Charm the girls? All such things are easy. More: finite. He feels like a goldfish. It has been explained to him that there is nothing of worth outside his bowl.

'Hey!'

He doesn't turn. A stone hits him.

'Hey...stupid!'

He hears soft footfalls behind him. Damson.

'How dare you take a shit on my mountain,' she chides.

'Watch you don't step in it,' Brutus advises, turning then to grab her arm so that she's forced to leap over his still steaming pile.

'Ooohh...' She wriggles in his embrace, dark hair tangled and face close to his. 'I seem to be in your power.'

It's those winces that get him. That smile. He can feel his erection gather between them, pressing into thighs.

'What you waiting for then?' she says, pecking his nose. 'Find a soft place and pin me down.'

He walks with her a short distance, to where the grass grows thicker, places her on her back and slides her dress all the way up over her round flat breasts. Strange, he wonders, how when she bumps into him like this she's never wearing any underwear. Kissing her, her hands on his shoulders moving him down.

'You're don't know how lucky you are,' she tells him, 'I'm in a sweet mood this morning.'

Yes, her cunt tastes of pineapple juice. Or is grapefruit?

Contentedly, he laps away.

There's a loud mechanical rattle, followed by a laughing noise. The exhausts gutter, twin plumes of black smoke that are quickly taken apart by the breeze. The tractor shakes violently, missing on one or more cylinders, then an even blacker shroud from one pipe and the whole resonates with a wheezing equilibrium, each set of lungs finally balancing. Brutus takes his fingers out of his ears. He grins at Vince who engages a gear.

v.

Gugson's is packed to the rafters, or the criss-cross of aluminium beams to be precise. Everyone is drunk and the atmosphere is bawdy. Men and women, some half frozen, jostle at the long curved bar and dance between the mostly improvised tables. All the original furniture was burned some time ago. Was it Halloween? Dates don't seem to matter much anymore.

I realize I'm not dead yet, not haunting the mine, one of many ghosts trapped between worlds; but with the realization comes the knowledge that my demise may be imminent.

Murder? Accident maybe. I belch loudly and hope at least to take in some female flesh before I'm - by whatever means, fate or foul - killed.

'Ladies and gentlemen!' bellows the PA. 'For your corrupted pleasure, your twisted delight, your perverted fantasy...I give you...'

There's a scream of feedback and a high heel upends our compere into the orchestra pit below.

Cheers resound, cymbals clash, everything goes dark a moment, and then, soft as a seal pup:

Where is my lover, my sweet

honey lover?

Where is my man this night?

The voice of an angel, one of three, on a stage transfixed now by four hundred eyes and a medley of spotlights.

A blissful wave issues forth and beer is spilt on boots, jaws are slackened, hearts pound.

They are not of this world, I reckon, this triumvirate, beautiful girls, long of limb and hair. They are Sirens whose voices herald destruction and I would go gladly into their arms.

Someone stamps on my toe.

The spell is broken, momentarily.

O where is my baby, my sweet

lover baby?

Where is my man...

Lubricious in sparkling evening gowns, hips and breasts thrusting a mad symmetry of curves, full lips and hypnotic eyes. The air, heated as much by needy breath as the thermal boilers beneath, ripples round them like they are reflections in a pool. Where they have come from if not the netherworld is a mystery as no truck, bus, cat, plane or helicopter has, to my knowledge, arrived at the mine in...

...out of the pale crimson horizon.

Abroad, that place all here have left behind and largely forgotten, wedded as we are to the ice and snow.

They occupy the creaking stage at Gugson's this night and cast their spell on an audience of black-toothed miners.

I feel myself swept away on a wave of lust along with the rest of the dearly depraved.

It cannot end well.

For me, at least, who's name I don't recall, it doesn't. But that's for then, the tepid future, now is red hot and...ah...a knife in my ribs...is that it? Is that how I die in this God-forsaken wilderness? For why? A reason at least to linger, to relive these moments of wild abandon, the girls' dresses changing, shortening with each number, the crowd more raucous, the flesh more honed, the floor bouncing and the alcohol thicker, sticking in throats and spilling like oil. Lights refract off each spillage, whether across a cable barrel table or down a hirsute run of chins, spangled colours oozing through the thickening air. All is ablaze with light, the aurora indoors and partying.

I have some hours I think, and grin expectantly, caught as I am in the unfolding night of my demise. My head throbs, my cock too, the music eating me from the inside, the girls on stage manipulating my every organ. I fancy I have eye contact with one or more, their pupils telescoping cartoonlike to join with my own. We are that close. I wonder if it is a memory, a promise of delights, of magic within the Sirens' cave.

Down the rabbit hole.

My arm is taken and I'm made to dance, which angers me at first, but then I settle into the rhythm of a woman whose face I do not know. I ask her name but fail to catch it. She smiles and shakes her ass, pouts her lips in parody. It's good enough for me.

Two

Samuel Bluck had an innate fear of success. It wasn't that he didn't desire to succeed, in whatever venture, that he lacked passion or ambition; what scared him was the next stage, the thought that, having succeeded, he would have to follow through. Take pulling girls for instance. It was easy to dive in, all brash and full of himself, but once the locus was reached and lips were joined - what then? It was game over really. Reality stark and mushy. He lost interest as he lost momentum. Amidst puzzled looks and displaced undergarments he'd find himself, well, limp.

He was kind of like that now, sagging in an armchair, chin on chest. Deflated. Not despondent exactly; more inert.

Taking up most of the sofa opposite, lugubrious in pink and grinning stupidly, was Life. Life had big blue eyes and a cherubic smile. A single kiss-curl of blond hair sprouted like a pig's tail from Life's enormous forehead. Life was a fat baby, a smug teenager, a scary middle-aged bank manager who liked to dress in women's clothing, a drooling, corpulent old man. Life wore a suit too small for Life. A deeper pink than Life's shirt, the jacket puckered under chubby arms. Its sleeves barely reached past bloated elbows. Each trouser leg ended mid-calf, while the waistband stretched round the full girth of Life's enormous stomach, fastening by some ingenious means just below Life's nipples. Life, wearing no socks or shoes, mouth agape as if waiting for words, sat in Samuel Bluck's living-room. As large as.

Exclamation marks flashed momentarily, hundreds of them in midair, manifestations of shock, surprise, disbelief. Call it what you will. Upright electric eels, thought Sam, that had just taken a dump.

Varicolored, the eels pulsed.

'I don't normally do this,' said Life in a squeaky voice, scratching Life's arse. 'I mean, it isn't usually necessary once a body is breathing.'

Samuel didn't know what to say. He sensed the rebuke. Intuitively, he realized Life was normally only present at birth. That was Life's job done. Next on the scene was Death. The inbetween was pretty much down to the individual. But, undeniably, here was Life on Bluck's sofa, slowing steaming up the windows and making him feel faint.

'So, what have you got to say for yourself?'

Samuel, after all, was 39.

'Hmmm...' squeaked Life. 'Hmmm?'

Desperately, Sam tried to think of an excuse. It was no good though; Life knew everything.

'It's not that you've lacked opportunity, eh? You even have a modicum of talent.'

'I...'

'Yes?'

'I got married. I had kids!'

Life's brow rose. No eyebrows visible, but a definite slant in the resultant creasing.

'She married you and she had kids. Not yours, I'm afraid.'

It was a thunderbolt, or should have been. Strangely, he felt it pass straight through. It wasn't that he'd always known. There'd been no real suspicion. Not an inkling. She'd left him three years since. He saw the kids, Alice and Lucy, once a fortnight. Twins, they had their mother's eyes, dark and knowing and approaching womanhood. He gulped. They filled him with pride, his daughters. He couldn't think of them any other way. That he wasn't their natural father made no difference. He had always seen them as unique individuals, persons in their own right. Nothing could change that. Not parentage. Nothing. He loved them regardless. Such revelations merely rippled his armour, which, it transpired, was his loyalty.

Life jiggled amusedly and blew him a kiss.

'So now what?' he asked, sitting up. 'What's the reason for your visit? You didn't make yourself known just to tell me I'm crap. I know I'm crap. I don't need to see your smug face to know it. I don't need you in person to slap me down. I can do that for myself. Why then, are you here, dribbling on my crap furniture in my crap flat?'

Life smiled, dimples in Life's cheeks like navels.

'Well?'

'Sam,' said Life in a ridiculous high-pitched voice. 'This is where you get on, not where you get off.'

Sam laughed and slumped back. His ears hurt.

'Opportunity takes many forms...'

No kidding.

Green rolling hills as far as the eye could see.

Buttercups and butterflies and not a cloud in the sky.

A perfect afternoon.

Peace and quiet.

A large, truculent ginger man in shiny black knee-length leather boots.

'Gunner Rear!'

'Yes, sarge?'

'I don't see your taper, gunner. Why don't I see your taper?'

He had to think quickly. His hat felt heavy. His boots were leaden. The white leather ammunition belts criss-crossing his belly made him feel like a fishing weight. Over that beautiful horizon, he knew, lay an enemy more terrible than any he could imagine.

The stench of faeces. The distant drum rolls. The knowledge of battle yet to be met and the surety of battle impossible to evade. It was all too real.

Samuel itched from head to foot. He trembled under the sergeant's ginger breath as he gazed about him for the taper.

'Perhaps,' hissed the sergeant, leaning in close, 'we ought to be throwing a party instead.'

'Here you go,' chimed O'Donnell, Bluck's rammer, him and Kersey the loader idling up out of the daisies. 'Just borrowed it a moment, to light me pipe. Sorry for any inconvenience.'

The sergeant's face filled with blood. His cheeks swelled and his moustache twitched dangerously.

'Are the enemy in range, sir?' Kersey inquired, a cannonball in each upturned palm, a curious look on his face as if gauging the merits of one metal ball over another.

'Five minutes,' replied Sergeant Door. 'And then you'll be laughing...'

No kidding, thought Sam, expressing relief through inflated cheeks as Door marched away.

'You know what's over there, don't you?' said O'Donnell.

'The end of the world?' opined Kersey.

'Near enough,' the rammer answered; 'but not quite, as I'm sure the world will continue regardless. No, what lies beyond those hills, mate, is a race of creatures unknown to this here Earth. Monsters from another dimension, no less. It's the end for us, for sure. They'll bite our heads right off our necks and use our guts for curtain cords.'

'Or it could just be the French.'

'You wish. Listen, lads, I've seen these devils with me own eyes and it ain't a pretty sight, I tell ya.'

'When have you ever been out of this camp?' Kersey wanted to know, still weighing the shot.

'First light; went sniffing for rabbits.'

'And?'

'Not a rabbit to be found.' He nodded sagely, as if that were explanation enough.

'Not a rabbit to be found,' repeated Life, dabbing at pink cheeks, voice higher than ever, causing Samuel's fillings to ache.

'Okay...'

'Okay?'

The funniest thing, he decided, was that he kept going back for more. More pain, more humiliation. It was a peculiar kind of torture, one dripped like burning wax by womankind. The cold shoulders, the mails un-replied; the merry dance along back-burners and the seemingly inevitable passing by. That he was largely immune to it was perhaps untrue. It (the pursuit of love) could as easily be straightforward. Simple joy. Yet those ladies eager for his attention were never the ones he wanted. They'd drink their drinks and spread their legs on the page and over the phone. They'd suck his cock in person and gasp pleasingly, seemingly happy for him to be a little rough with them. There was no disdain on either part, and he attempted to take pleasure in their pimpled nipples and soaking wet folds. As indeed he did, usually drunk, sometimes hard, pounding regardless whilst not feeling part of the scene at all. Perhaps that's why his dreams seemed so real: reality itself was vague. He hopped from dating site to dating site. He skipped from world to world. He jumped in sometimes with both feet and was pleased with himself thereafter. He felt his way blindly, much as he did in the light. He did not understand. Women. The world. They were not so much a mystery to him, more a vast unknown, a universe he felt free to explore but which he could never hope to fathom. Well, there was always booze, and celibacy to take his hand.

He drove a van. It was a very average thing to do. He did not see himself as average at all, however, but was comfortable with the contradiction. He was a writer, he inhabited other worlds, worlds of his invention over which he had complete control. Or did he? They appeared, once engendered, to have lives of their own. They were not fantasy worlds, although he had dabbled. They were not masturbatory, or self-indulgent, at least insofar as his sexual gratification was concerned. No, they were explanations, ideas that had somehow got out of hand.

Water poured in everywhere. The day had turned from beautiful to ugly in every regard. The dead lay about the field, punctured and torn, ripped through and emptied. Their screams mixed with the dark clouds, the sound of the rain their hideous echo. Blood was nowhere to be seen. There was no colour at all, only inky blacks, sour greys and melancholy whites.

Bluck, aka Gunner Joseph Rear, third battalion His Majesty's Woeful Womanizers, sat under a leaking tent roof and smirked.

It was the best he could do. There was no waking up. Neither, ironically, was there sleep. Not for the living at least. A few of the dead, too, appeared restless. Through a rent in the canvas he had watched more than one fallen soldier climb to his feet, issue no breath, shake himself and wander off toward an unknown, shattered horizon.

No, no rabbits here.

'Pink, pink, pink!' screamed the girls, that afternoon out shopping, their mother floating darkly nearby. She cast him glances as if measuring the distance between them while their daughters orbited first one and then the other parent like a couple of flushed-faced comets. 'Pink!'

'Pink?'

'Yes,' they replied, arms folded as punctuation.

'Not blue?'

Eyes rolled. They were ten this past week and demanding, burgeoning with girly smugness and almost out of control.

'Pink then.'

'PINK!'

The hue of Life itself, fat and corpulent in the corner of Sam's ever-reaching eye.

The twins stomped off, satisfied with his acquiescence. Their mother almost smiled.

He hefted a paint tin in each hand and imagined them gunpowder.

'I'd be careful with those,' said Kersey. 'Blow us all sky high.'

The numbness of his fingers, together with the ache in his neck told him he'd been asleep, but not for how long. Consciousness crept in slowly, awakening his limbs to a clammy sensation. There was no feeling, no sensation of cold until he moved, and then the water sloshed and the plastic bath groaned slightly, announcing his whereabouts to a still foggy mind. A mind elsewhere, displaced like the water in which he half sat, half lay, rising and falling dangerously close to his mouth and nose. It had been steaming hot when he'd got in. Now all it did was insulate his thin pink body from the air, the inevitably cold air of the bathroom into which he stirred like a resuscitated penguin.

The image made him laugh. He flapped his arms and feet and made peculiar quacking noises. Nothing like a penguin.

A phone rang somewhere. He gazed at the towel on the radiator and, filling his lungs with air, heaved himself from the soap-filmed liquid.

It hadn't been his phone ringing but a neighbour's. Still, the sound roused a sense of urgency in his bones. He had a date this evening, a date with a fat girl. Well not fat actually. Plump maybe, which was okay. At least he hoped it would be okay, that he'd get to give her a squeeze. But it was best overall to have no expectations.

Fewer disappointments followed.

It was a blank page. An empty space on a computer screen in reality, with a blinking cursor. In the background floated all manner of detritus, from unfinished sci-fi novels to half-forgotten faces and ideas. The faces were all female. The ideas? They were half-forgotten as lingering on a hard drive somewhere, belonging to the past and thus randomly filed away.

A blank page that might sparkle with her smile, Sam thought, the elusive creature that was, for all intents and purposes, his muse. He was in love with his muse, but she seldom made an appearance. Just when he dared to hope he'd found her she'd vanish. Nameless, she was forever intangible, the one thing beyond his dreams.

Suzanne. Eight o'clock in The Tyne. She appeared wearing a white poncho, blonde and tall, not fat, nor even plump, a slightly scary Amazon in fact with thighs he took to immediately and a wicked glint in her eye. They talked nonsense. A band exploded in the too small pub. They moved up the hill to the Free Trade Inn and talked some more. Suzanne was recently back from Thailand and had, not two weeks previously, got a spelk in her arse in this very drinking establishment, sliding along that bench against the back wall there. She had a word with the barman, winding him up slightly. Samuel liked her. They drank some more and she offered him a lift home. She drove fast. He felt guilty she was driving at all. He invited her inside but didn't get to know her thighs. He would though see her again, before saying the wrong thing late one evening having just been admonished for feasting drunkly on her breasts.

Barely an anecdote in the end, albeit an above average foray into the romantic underworld.

Blank page, blank page.

He awoke the following morning with one eyelid stuck closed. Out of the other eye he could see only sky. Whichever way he turned his head, sky. The ground disappeared from under his feet. He lost his balance and clattered against the wardrobe, springing the offending lid open like the rusted bonnet of a crashed car. A wreak. The sky faded, indoors at least, and he made it as far as the bathroom before throwing up.

Life was quietly whistling in the shower, a deeper pink from all the scrubbing, steam rising about rolls of strawberry ice-cream flesh. Samuel glanced behind him to see Life's pink suit hanging on the back of the bathroom door and contemplated stealing it, but the French cannon thundered in his ears and monsters spilled from his memory.

Life tutted, but said nothing. Life, it seemed, had moved in with him; to rub his nose in it and cajole. Life all clean and smelling of talc, a permanent fixture now, no longer the passing fancy, the outrageous glamour he had suspected, squeaky, squeaky clean Life whose high high pitched voiced drilled Sam's head now with, 'Right. What's for breakfast?'

It continued to rain for days. Bluck imagined himself slowly sinking into the mud, his sole shelter a shrapnel holed tent. Would the enemy happen by and finish him off? Perhaps the ghouls once known as Kersey and O'Donnell would drop by to gnaw on his shrinking carcass, or - worse case scenario - Sergeant Door's head would appear under a canvas flap; there'd be a snicker, and the gunner would find himself marching again.

'But I'm wounded, sarge.'

'Wounded, gunner? Wounded where?'

i

Brutus collects his thoughts. They are scattered like ninepins, most fallen and rolled aside, one alone left standing.

The sun tickles the side of his head as it rises, slower than ever, like the world is all but stood still.

The world stretches in every direction, bigger than ever this morning, grown immense, stretched flat, remade and massive. And he's alone in it. Lost in it. All he's ever understood to be, his father, the unfathomable past, the clunking caravan of his day to day, books of ancient lore, faces, nameless towns on the long road east to west, west to east, the ocean...has vanished. All that remains is this one thing, this visual clue. A token to encapsulate his memories. He thinks hard on it. He thinks it must have been left by Tullulah. Why? Brutus doesn't know. The question is too big for now. Now, looking down, he sees an arrow drawn in the dirt; drawn by hand and pointing north. An arrow that without doubt he must follow.

Listen.

He turns and there it is. The last quagga.

Hear the soft rustling of cilia under the mushroom cup? The eagles' distant breath? See the edges of the clouds and the middle of the lakes, and point thus; walk there in fact, and touch?

All this and more awaits.

Now run.

Run fast. Run north, he thinks, as the ground turns to a blur and the air whistles in his ears.

Run, as if into the arms of a lover.

Brutus stares at his palms a moment, thinking them unfamiliar. Stares at the sky. The few wisps of white cloud appear motionless, as if daring him to look away, that they might suddenly transform and make a run for the horizon. The clouds are his past; the past, he thinks: there but gone in a moment. He wonders how long it may take to forget.

The quagga snorts calmly, pretending, he imagines, not to look at him. Brutus himself then, next to vanish. He grins and feels his head swell with the memory of guitar strings.

Tullulah.

Her absence leaves the deepest hole.

North.

He gazes upon the arrow once more, a crude scuffed line. He raises his eyes to the creature with dark hooves and levers himself off his arse.

Did it just wink? No. The light playing tricks; the light flowing thickly through his newly remade world.

All he has is what he's wearing. Brutus in jeans and t-shirt. Some fluff in one pocket, a cherry pip in another. He pops it in his mouth and considers how to mount this quite different ride.

North.

The clouds make a run for the horizon.

Brutus grabs the quagga's thick spikey mane and throws his leg over its back. The beast shakes it's head and they're underway.

ii.

On the train down to Brighton a brown girl sat next to him having parked her bike just behind them. She smiled and opened a packet of almonds and a packet of dried apricots. She pressed an almond into an apricot and offered him the appealingly suggestive result. A come on? He was travelling down to spend the weekend with a Mancunian named Rachel. The brown girl intimidated him. He was too scared to flirt, but something told him he could have made plans for the return journey. Rachel met him at the station and kissed him. They drove back to her place and soon found themselves in a pub. In fact a great deal of what became an extended weekend was spent in one pub or another, more time than even he spent in her Easy Access Shorts. Rachel smoked a lot of dope. Her father was American, her genes Dutch. She had big feet and a pussy that flowered magnificently. She loved stockings and the sort of suspenders that belonged in the 50s. She had a picture of her dad as a GI in Vietnam. She had a large bonzai tree. She loved him to tug on her suspender straps in public. Her stroked her crotch on the beach, white knickers under a denim skirt. It was Tuesday before he made it home. Rachel sent him digital photos of what he was missing but distance told in the end.

'Aaaarrhhh! What was that for?'

Life had, not for the first time, poked him in the eye.

'Oooowwww!! Fucking hell...'

Kicked him in the shin.

'You're daydreaming, loser,' Life screeched. 'Get out and SEIZE THE DAY!'

Bluck went back to bed instead. It was Sunday.

Life clattered pans in the kitchen and played Tori Amos really loud. It was like being married again, only worse.

'Come on, will ya.'

'What?'

'Sober up quick, we have to be at the church in twenty minutes.'

'Oh.'

'Or we could just go to the pub.'

Samuel had to think about that. 'Not a bad idea.'

'Like her brothers wouldn't kill you or anything.'

'Right.'

It wasn't real; never had been.

'Coffee.'

It was like he'd crashed on an alien world. Concussed, crawled forth from the bent remains of his spaceship, he'd fallen in love with the first women he'd seen.

And now he was marrying that women. In fifteen mins. On his 27th birthday. Oh my...

'How far is it?'

'What?'

'To the church?'

'Erm...'

They made it, him and Davy Spine, a cracked bumper and no time to leave a note on the Mercedes Davy had compromised. Sam stood rocking on his heels. The church hummed quietly and smelled of flowers. His balls ached. Saying goodbye to freedom, Bluck thought. Or maybe he had his underpants on backwards.

How had it come to this?

They'd met in a park only six months previous. There he was just giving up smoking when he heard the sqeal of a chain swing and gazed up to see a skirt riding high, above that a smile as big as a fridge door. Bella, Bella, stealing his heart that exact moment and eating it like the soft furry animal it was; that is, whole.

Predator.

He was helpless, however. Complicit. To the likes of Bella no man says no.

The vicar was nervous and fluffed his lines.

Samuel experienced a peculiar calmness and pronounced his vows particularly well, as Davy would later tell him.

Bella appeared to hover an inch above the floor, as Davy told him also, which he mentioned to Bella later, at which she laughed, eyes briefly askance, and explained, 'Magic heels.'

Sam wore the same suit to Davy Spine's funeral, six weeks on and in the pouring rain, the sole person there sans umbrella a corpulent pink gentleman who waved before disappearing, portentuous and holding a large slice of cake.

'NO WANKING!'

'Fuck off!'

Life, dragging a nail across sheet steel whilst screaming in your ear.

iii.

The moon hangs awkwardly in daylight, unsure, perhaps unhinged. A few stars are visible in the sky like the ends of snapped wires. He marvels at them, Brutus, rocking on the quagga's back, preferring to stare upward than look around or guess at the road. There's a song in his head, one of Tullulah's, but he cannot find the words. He misses the noise, the fumes of the tractor, Vince's swearing, his father's truculence even. He misses it all.

Trees wander by. He imagines he can hear their conversations. They mostly discuss leaves and caterpillars, birds, squirrels and small boys. The air tastes briefly of vinegar and he thinks: chips, I'd love some chips right now.

The quagga's ears flick and its head drops as if to hide a smirk.

There's dust up ahead. A commotion.

The trees roll to a stop at a rise the quagga ambles up. There's a shallow escarpment, beyond that an open plain of pale green grass in the midst of which hangs a low cloud. Metallic objects project from the cloud, spikes and what look like coloured awnings. He can just make out voices. Scattered around the cloud for some distance are twisted pieces of glimmering metal and what might be bodies, but from this distance it's too hard to tell. The cloud fizzes briefly and projectiles spiral into the sky like fireworks. A series of small explosions sends more material into the air, dispersing the cloud briefly to reveal - to Brutus' eyes anyway - a giant red and black chicken, broken and half buried in the plain.

Debris lands nearby and the wind from the blasts thrums past. The vinegar taste is stronger now and to his right flops a scorched, twisted arm.

'Wow,' says Brutus, as the quagga continues in a staight line, picking its way gingerly down the escarpment and heading directly for the enormous impacted bird.

As they approach the scene it's clear some catastrophe has unfolded. The body parts multiply, heads and torsos littering the ankle-deep grass. Shards of metal impale the earth, some acting as grusome flagpoles to flags of ragged flesh. They look like the bodies of children, Brutus thinks, strangely cold. He feels little emotion. The whole smoking panarama before him is one of a confusing dream.

The voices come again, battering their way into his consciousness. Deep voices, gruff voices; not the voices of children at all. And then there's one voice, an angry grunt suddenly coalescing to an almost understandable shape from the babble, with it and indeed empowering it what looks like a human form. Only short, about three feet in height. The quagga halts and Brutus swings one leg over and slips to the ground. The humanlike creature, dressed in some kind of armour, stops abruptly, spying them for the first time.

'My God!'

Brutus thinks not. The little man grabs at his helmet and after a struggle raises the visor, peering forth from large bloodshot eyes.

'It can't be!' he exclaims. 'There's no life here...'

Brutus regards the quagga who ignores him. It would rather be eating grass than providing opinion, he surmises.

'Those damn Cantaloupes!' the armoured man says. 'Did they plant you? I suppose you've a message for me, hey?'

Brutus looks quizzical, like he doesn't understand the language the man's speaking, and sure enough his ignorance is conveyed.

'Hmmm.' He has bright ginger hair and a long ginger moustache which he twists, thinking out loud, 'What to do? What to do? No hope of rescue. Most of the crew dead...'

The cloud has begun to lift from round the devastated structure. Crackling noises emanate, like the chicken, as he can't help thinking of it, is being roasted, ravaged and unplucked, victim of a larger, more voracious predator.

'Yes. Yes,' states the man, following Brutus' upturned eyes. 'That's where we came from all right. A routine moon hop until those bastards got hold of us. Shot our tail clean off they did, and before you could say "man the lifeboats" we were spiralling down to, er, well...here.' He says the last as if not wanting to reveal too much of where here is exactly.

Brutus is intrigued, sharing as he does that peculiar vagueness about his home, this planet on which he's grown up, that has befallen some catastrophe of its own in the not too dim past. He wonders what the man knows, and his reluctance to express that knowledge, even to one he believes unable to understand.

'So,' pulling off his helmet and examining a dent in its rear, 'what to do? What to do now?'

Any answer though is immediately eclipsed by a far larger explosion, ripping the sweat from Brutus' brow and flinging him backward through the air, leaving him in an unconscious heap on the ground.

It's night. Stars spell out as much. The ringing in his brain is constant, a great aural bruise making his eyes water and his ears leak. He can taste blood and smell his own burnt skin. Mentally he counts his arms and legs. His limbs refuse to move but are present and whole. He can just make out the distant echo of his fingers, like far off waterfalls. It's too soon to begin explaining anything to himself. Sleep takes him and he languishes in its embrace.

He dreams of his mother. He's rushing toward her but she's always far away, her face a shadow, her smile a memory he can't quite grasp, ever reaching, running to her and yet never closing the gap between them. He can't think of her name and the fact shames him. He falls to his knees and cries and his tears turn the world into an ocean. His mother is swept farther off, calling to him, imploring he rescue her from the growing waves, but he is fixed, rooted in bedrock, an island, helpless as she is swept beyond an impossibly distant horizon.

It's day. Someone is leaning over his supine form, someone who sniffs, whose long tongue flicks out and slaps his cheek, causing the world to invade his mind. He sits up and realizes he's soiled himself.

Shading his eyes he strives to identify the form stood over him. It is the quagga on four legs, yet something more. On the animal's back sits a small man, red-headed and encased in dull metal. The man creases his jaw and mumbles something he can't quite hear. His legs barely make it over the quagga's girth and he's carrying a long twisted sliver of steel. He taps him with it, instructing him to rise. Brutus, for that's his name, makes it to his knees before falling flat on his face again. The mounted man laughs and prods him with his spear once more. Brutus opens his mouth and croaks something, but to his surprise it is not words.

The small man, whose name he does not know and now cannot ask, is singing quietly to himself, a dirge or lamentation in memory of his fallen comrades. His voice is deep, bigger than himself, and rolls heavily to earth where it unravels, shakes off its skin and is transformed into a new monster. The giant metal chicken was a crashed spaceship, Brutus understands, but from what space it fell he fails to comprehend. He's dubbed the man Brasso on account of his armour needing a polish. Vince would have that shining like Caroline's pussy. Brutus grins a stupid grin and Brasso, watching him amusedly from the quagga's back, pauses his dirging a moment to offer a puzzled look.

'I know not where this beast takes me,' he says; 'though should it halt by that brook over yonder I fancy we might catch supper.'

And so they do, Brutus doing the spearing while Brasso builds a fire and the quagga munches grass.

It feels good to have his feet in the water. His jeans are still a bit crusty so having impaled half a dozen silver shapes and passed them over he immerses himself fully, ducks, bobs and floats.

What day is it? What month? The air is cool, the water chill, but neither uncomfortable.

Brutus gargles and attempts a few vowel sounds only they come out mangled and he's glad Brasso's attention is taken with the nascent flame of the camp fire he has managed to ignite using a monocle. He gets out and sits by the struggling fire. Brasso hands him a fish on a stick.

'Reminds me of my youth, camping out under the stars.'

Reminds Brutus of his 19th birthday gone and Caroline once more. He lets out a sigh and Brasso pats him on the back like a dog. He's three times the size of the man, yet somehow it's reassuring.

A mystery is solved thereafter, a mystery Brutus hasn't realized until he sees it unfold, that is the explanation of just how Brasso mounts the half zebra half pony. The red-haired dwarf takes great lungfuls of air, leaning back so his portly belly is exposed beneath his breast plate, fists clenched and elbows pointed outward. Moments later, his face turning slowly purple, he floats clear of the ground and rises as if on strings, a fat puppet to clumsily straddle the quagga, who winks. Brutus marvels and walks.

'Monkeys.'

It is a day later and the ground has grown rougher, the trees taller and the sky darker. They are sat among an outcrop of grey rocks looking down a shallow valley to where a number of men are chasing a rabbit. So far the rabbit has managed to evade their grasping hands, leading them a merry dance. Two collide and fall over, a third trips and falls on his head. There's a shot, increased shouting and waved arms, but the rabbit skips no more. One man holds it up by its back legs. They've not bullets to waste, Brutus guesses. Brasso talks to himself as is his wont, ruminating no doubt on whether the men pose a threat.

'Colonists?' he mumbles. 'Bloody Cantaloupes and their interfering...'

They wait for the men to disappear before moving on.

There's a dead body hanging from a tree. It's hanging by the neck and has no feet or hands. Brutus can't tell wheher it's a man or a woman, so badly beaten is the corpse. Brasso stands twiddling his moustache, contemplating the meaning of this spectacle, an air of suspicion hovering about him like a metallic aura. The vinegar smell Brutus first encountered at the crash site permeates the air and he's almost aware of a mechanical ticking. Beads of oily brown sweat bubble up on the short man's forehead.

Beyond the tree is a wall about fifteen feet high. And beyond the wall?

'The unknown, my mute friend. Daunting, eh? Well, well, seems the gods plucked me from the sky and set me to this adventure. What it may entail I can only guess at, but as we are here it seems only right that we should proceed onwards. Hmm? We make good company I think, if a somewhat peculiar exploration party.' Brasso laughs deeply, rattling from the gut. The quagga has wandered off. Brutus stands with his hands in his pockets, flexing his toes in his worn out boots. 'So...'

A few large globules of rain spatter.

Brasso peers at him as if in entreaty.

What they need is an idea.

Something drips from the corpse.

The quagga's white tail flicks away to his left and Brutus points that way.

They investigate and there's a door.

Brasso makes to knock but Brutus snatches his wrist before his knuckles make contact with the wood.

The dwarf squints with annoyance.

Brutus lets go, purses his lips, inserts a finger in the sizeable lock, wiggles it a moment, smiles and eases the door open.

Beyond is a garden; a beautiful garden bursting with colour and scent.

A large butterfly floats through the door, its wings resplendant purple and orange, but as it passes them it stalls midair and falls to the ground as dust.

Brasso clears his throat. Says nothing.

The quagga nudges Brutus from behind and he's the first through, ducking to avoid banging his head.

iv.

It was coming up to the twin's seventh birthday. Sam, not for the first time, had escaped to the pub to lick his wounds.

'Of course you know she's a witch, don't you.'

The pale figure had parked his pint next to Bluck's and scraped out a stool.

'Who?'

'Your wife of course,' said Davy Spine, not breathing but talking.

'What makes you say that?' Deliberately, and with some effort, he managed not to regard Davy directly.

'Oh, just a hunch!'

'You shouldn't be here, Dave.'

The corpse lit a cigarette. 'Exactly.'

'So, why are you, here?'

'This is my local.'

Sam put his head in his hands and banged his head gently off the bar.

'I've been coming here for years,' Davy added. 'Bit dead though.'

'Yeah...' wheezed Bluck, 'I suppose you could say that.'

'Never been the same since they lost the pool table.'

It was true. Death had clearly made Davy more insightful.

'What happened?'

'I fell under a bus.'

'And?'

'As much as I can say I'm afraid. There are rules about disclosure of information.'

'You weren't pushed then?'

'I really couldn't say.'

'Oh.'

He took a long draught of ale and set his glass down. Half full? Half empty?

'How's the writing coming?'

Sam didn't have an answer. Perhaps why he'd been asked. Point taken.

He was working on something. It was gestating in his head and leaking out onto - eventually, via a knackered laptop - paper.

'I have to go,' said Dave. 'Nice seeing you though.'

'You too.'

A yellow slash of light extended across the bar as if a curtain had been opened and he was alone.

He'd always been alone. It was a matter of fact.

It was as he left the pub, stooping to tie a shoelace, that he found himself a shilling richer, and, ironically, with a whole new bunch of mates.

'Gunner Rear!'

'Yes, sarge.'

'I don't see your taper, gunner. Why don't I see your taper?'

v.

It's like being inside a kaleidoscope. Huge fats strawberries and lush ripe plums, bursting with juice apples, red, pink and green, oranges the size of his head and...bananas a velvety purple? He's never had a banana but knows from books they're yellow. So what's this? Brasso is eating everything in sight; the quagga, too. It's a veritable feast. Brutus starts to feel a little tipsy and puts it down to the fat tomatoes.

'I smell a trap,' slurs Brasso, who's had his fill of tomatoes also. 'Is that rhubarb over there?'

He wanders off, clunking slightly.

A shadow passes overhead.

'Hey, mute boy, this way.'

Huh?

A walled garden of delights, beautifully sculpted trees and bushes heavy with ripe produce. Every family of fruit and vegetable, glossy and perfect and bigger than ever they should be. Visually intoxicating. Whichever way he looks his eyes are crammed full of coloured spots. Lemons, onions, pears, pomegranates; peas, grapes, pineapples, carrots. A groan, an enormous long fart. Brasso on his back amongst the rudest rhubarb imaginable.

'I can see a balloon!' the portly dwarf exclaims, pointing upward with all the excited pleasure of a small child.

Brutus' eyes glaze over as he attempts to tip his head backward. He thinks better of it, his brain swimming like a hippopotamus with several too many legs.

Brasso is kicking his feet now, a baby before a breast, salivating and gargling and with something long and hard quivering in his chest. He peers at it in wonder. It's an arrow and it's pierced his breastplate. A second thuds wetly an inch from the ginger man's head.

'Shit...'

Brutus is violently sick. It's a blessing as a third projectile skims past, just missing him as he doubles up.

'My lance! Where's my lance! We're under attack, lad - quick!' But he can barely roll over. He's hit in the shoulder, skewered through. 'Ambush! Run for cover!'

Neither of them is running anywhere though. The last Brutus remembers he's about to explode.

'You okay, son?'

Vinegar.

'I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'

Limes.

'Whatever's going on down here, it's not what they teach at the academy.'

He's sat leaning against a tree.

'They got the surprise of their lives though, eh?'

His eyes focus on a circle of scorced earth, what looks like a collapsed picnic basket nearby, burnt and frayed.

The garden doesn't look so beautiful anymore.

'Can you stand?'

Brasso is already standing, he realizes, wincing a little as he straightens. There's puncture holes in his armour but no blood, just oily stains and the by now familiar vinegar smell. Brutus, feeling like he's slept through whatever it was occurred, makes a mental note to investigate the short man's peculiar physiology - if that's the right word.

He tries to speak but his throat is raw. His vision blurs once again and he coughs up a little smoke.

Brasso grabs his arm. 'To your feet, soldier!'

The quagga appears from behind a gooseberry bush, snorts amusedly and plods off.

And they follow it, short and tall, short making a quick detour as he spies his lance in a cabbage patch, waving it triumphantly, tall wondering if he ever had a life and a home, if ever there was such a thing as a caravan, east to west, west to east between oceans the hue of Tullulah's arse that time she fell off her father's highwire and wasn't able to sit down for weeks.

Three

The moon is massive, made dim by the perpetual twilight, stubbornly large as if fighting the effects of rising steam and smoke, determined not to be forced into anonymity by the efforts of a bunch of puny men on an island that would not look out of place in one of its dusty seas. Its light rebounds off fresh snow, conjoining at ground level with the light of sodium lamps, the offspring of this union clinging to all that moves, man and machine, like an aura of cartoon radiation.

Disko. The final frontier. The best damn arctic tern pie in the universe. Right here, right now.

I light a cigarette as I pass the propane tanks and toss an imaginary match over the barbed wire.

Ka-boom. Well, one day maybe.

The shift has just ended and bodies are oozing from beneath the earth. Clean bodies, as these miners push buttons and gaze at screens. The dirty work is done kilometres away, the dirty humans there mostly occupying a neighbouring compound. A neat bit of corporate apartheid. I'm headed that way just as soon as I can hitch a ride.

'Hey, doc,' someone shouts. 'Take a look at my canary?'

Very funny.

But what use a veterinarian on Mars?

"An elephant is just a pig that never learned to fart."

Yeah, sure.

That's limpid thinking, I think, sat on the shitter reading Gravity's Rainbow, one of numerous tomes hanging on elastic cords from the corrugated ceiling. The quote, in all its misdirected gravitas, is written on the back of the door.

"I kept my knees together but they fucked me anyway."

And my current favourite:

"In a million years it'll be coal."

A boot rattles; my ride.

On exiting the shitter I note the moon hasn't moved at all.

The event that requires my attendance at the 'B' compound is a wedding. It's two barks by sled, according to Romario, who has his own rules about the world. Twenty minutes in human time, sufficient for lights to fade and noise to transmute into weirdnes out on the tundra. Zelda Marsham is tying the knot with Sarah-Lee Highbottom. Both are snowcat drivers, their vocation a methphor for lesbianism apparently, although I've never quite got the analogy. They look magnificent in blood red frocks, huskies as page boys. There's a surprising female bias over in B, dirty girls outnumbering dirty boys, a growing number of whom, if not wandering stoned in the wilderness searching for Spanish gold, have all but given up scrubbing their fingernails and plumped for a life of faked death idleness. It wouldn't surprise me to find either Zelda or Sarah-Lee to be identified on their wedding certificate as Carl, or Richard perhaps, soon thereafter to be listed MIA, that's Mindless In the Arctic, a corporate slug to investigate, that is, travel no further north than the Holiday Inn, Montreal.

And who can blame them, after so many reruns of Apocalypse Now at Gugson's Thursday.

Not I.

The disco at Disko is pounding the 80s beat.

'Where's the donkey?' I scream over the noise.

'Wha?'

'The donkey.'

Having survived the cake fight earlier I'm determined to get to the bottom of this rumoured equine.

'Oooooohh, mister vet person, you got a pregnancy test in there? Zelda's looking a little bloated, no?'

Sarah-Lee, who's parrot I treated for Parkinson's, thus gaining the invite, is pointing at my groin like it's a medicine bag.

'No. The donkey?'

'In the stable of course.'

'The stable?'

She smiles hugely, luminescent, and I'm tempted for a moment to fall in love. 'Follow the star...'

Of course, only in this case a gold-painted cardboard replica obscuring the fire exit sign.

The temperate drops thirty degrees.

I can hear frozen piss rattle against blockwork.

A frustrated groan.

There's a light ahead and I walk toward it, past the parked up snowcats to a beaten hanger. The doors are chained but only for show. Inside is littered with empty diesel drums and flattened fruit boxes. The light emanates from an oil lamp. A throwback; just the sort of thing increasingly fashionable in B. I hear something move in the shadows at the light's edge. An animal. I approach. It's skittery. I make myself plain, uncertain what it is I'm encountering. Not a donkey, a beast unknown, yet with the aspect of a horse, an equine with zebra stripes from its head back to its forelegs and a coat thereafter of dun brown, long white legs and a promiscuous tail.

It's bleeding.

There's an almost unbearable pain in my heart.

i.

Samuel used to hang to the left, but with a little training and a lack of underwear he was latterly hanging rightward with almost universal success. He fancied himself to be quietly unconventional, an understated rebel. An underachiever, as Life would have it. So? What was there to achieve anyway? Money? Fame? A three book deal? Okay a three book deal, but his material was hanging rightward also, resolutely against convention and determinely unmarketable. He was available for download but the hits were few and the feedback zero. He was sat in his van eating cheese and onion crisps. It was August. The year was incidental.

He felt pleasantly calm, a calmness tinged with embarrassment for he had minutes earlier been hurling increasingly imaginative abuse at car drivers numerous, none of whom would let him exit a junction regardness of zero traffic flow up ahead. There was an old man standing at a bus stop over the road. Sam's window was down. The old man was bug-eyed behind NHS glasses. Oh well, nothing like blowing off a bit of steam, full demented mode in public. He chased the last of his crisps round the bottom of the bag and mumbled something choice at the radio.

Where to go next was his big dilemma. Chapel Park or Lemington? Could as readily be Brussels or Gent, for he and the boys were due some R&R. And what about poor old Skidmore Shuffledeck? Where had he been abandoned? Piggyback riding an intergalactic haulage vessel was it? Collapsing a star? No, hang on, collection in West Denton. Not nearly as glamourous as an undersea casino on a gleaming white space orbital but handy for the A695.

Skidmore was myopic and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He repaired spaceships and should Sam ever get round to it he'll die heroically saving the galaxy from Lord Technical, the super villian of this great work of literature, the master of machines and the champion of conformity. And we can't have conformity winning the day, can we? Lord Technical was the name of a shop in Heaton that sold theodolites and other engineering wonders, since closed. Inspiration comes in tiny packets.

But since the divorce the words were slippery. They'd fall right off the page. He'd try sticking them back on again, like the soldier refitting a limb stripped from him in battle. Nothing like as heroic, just equally futile.

So Samuel drove, Skidmore waited expectantly, no doubt growing fat, aged and ultimately blind. Kersey and O'Donnell haunted his dreams and leaked through into his waking hours, and Life made a mockery of it all. Perhaps there was method to this madness. He wasn't sure it mattered.

Red light stop.

They were everywhere and for the most part in control. They watched from rooftops and spied from tall poles by the side of the road. He laughed at them, but they didn't give a shit. Bluck knew a place he could hide. He'd take his daughters there, he thought, Alice and Lucy. He'd set them free like butterflies.

Green light go.

Suddenly though, nothing seemed funny. His laughter was empty. Comedy had drained from the world, rendering it monochrome. Black and white, silver and grey. And we can't have a world without comedy either.

'Watch out for the cyclist,' warned Skidmore.

'Look at the jugs on that.' O'Donnell.

'Shit...' Bluck torn from his reverie by his mobile phone.

'What's it all about?'

'Eh?'

'I mean...'

'Yeah?'

How drunk are we right now?

Stood on a balcony.

The city stretched away like a gas cloud, all coloured stars. There were horse heads poking above blue globs of light, too far away to see but drawn from memory. All cities; one city.

Coming in backward waves.

Susan said, 'Fuck, I don't know.'

Sam jnr had let Sam down. Not the first time. It was anxiety. It was detachment. Knowing what it was didn't help. Naked woman; limp cock. At least being this drunk he had a scapegoat.

There was a cool breeze smelling of pigeon shit.

He was looking at the arrivals board and nothing made sense. Or was it the departures board? Did they make such distinctions in railway stations? Railway sounded so old; toylike. They should just call them railstations, he thought. Against usual behaviour, and for reasons unknown, he'd decided on a burger. He was early, time to kill, weapon of choice mechanicallly recalimed meat, sugared bun and chemically retarded lettuce etc. Delicious. As a kid it was tomato sauce on everything. As an adult random, inexplicable burgers. He made it out before the boards again. Ah, here we go, platform 4. A short shunt to Darlington. Only when he got there, phone to ear as he followed directions to the car park, the directions made no sense at all and the woman giving them grew increasingly impatient. Pub? Exit? Other side of the tracks, okay - nope, where are you? Turned out he was miles away, at the wrong station entirely. Middlesbrough, shit, how the...

She'd cooked chilli. He could't eat it. They'd paired beautifully online but here he was in her home, staring at her fantastic tits and her lovely arse and it just wasn't going anywhere. He was toast. From the moment he'd peered confusedly at the arrivals departures board he was toast, roadkill on the love highway, an armadillo under the wheels of a truck, outwardly hard-cased, inwardly soup.

It hurt. Her spare room hurt, as did having to beg a lift back to Darlington station the next day.

He squeezed her and she smiled. The sun shone and the beer flowed and soon tongues wrestled and hands wandered. It was a great way to spend an afternoon. He thumbed her pert nipples and, as night fell by the river, unbuttoned her jeans and slid a finger over her clit. There on a wooden bench, disturbed by the occasional dog walker, he made her come, a feat to repeat a few months later in a tent in the Dales. Even more beer. Lots of rain, too. They didn't do much walking. No fucking though, either. It didn't seem to matter. She liked to be squeezed and interfered with. He pushed her head down and flopped his cock in her mouth on a dark road back to their tent.

His 39th birthday. A second date, the first having involved snogging at a taxi rank and being spontaneously bundled into same thereafter, back to hers and drunken fumbling. Here he was again then, being cooked risotto and plied with wine. She spread a sheet on the bed as if about to conduct an autopsy. Handed him a condom borrowed from a gay housemate thankfully abroad. Okay. Knickers off. Much eating of pussy. Bingo. His cock was hard and the rubber rolled and all was well and rhythmic and her tits bounced and her vagina slurped and he pounded and no slipped out but back in again and yes she made the appropriate noises and he banged away for seeming ages wondering if he felt anything at all till at last his knee slipped off the bed and he slid to the floor.

Coffee shops, bars, galleries, Sam had visited them all. A couple of times he'd wanted to run away but was too polite. A couple of times his date had received an urgent phone call and had to leave early.

It was ludicrous, yet painfully addictive.

It was 7:30am and Life was stropping a cut-throat razor by the side of his bed.

He turned over.

There was a whole imaginary plane to explore.

ii.

The days pass with little incident. Brasso is unnaturally quiet, sitting stooped astride the quagga, head bobbing and lips trembling like a sleeping old man. He seems to drift in and out of consciousness, and there are times when his mind appears to wander. The garden is well behind them. The landscape verdant green, rising and falling gently with no great natural obstacle. Rabbits are plentiful, and Brutus catches them easily, knowing which way they'll turn and grabbing them deftly about the throat. He snaps their heads off and skins them in moments. They see cattle and sheep, but leave these be, the quagga always shying away from larger mammals. Perhaps it does not wish its presence known and believes them to be gossips. Of man there are few indicators, only scattered houses, abandoned years since, derelict and scavenged, carcases ripped open and feasted upon, left to bleach in the sun and mould in the rain, slowly disintigrating.

Brutus wonders if he'll ever get his voice back. He's changed, he realizes, changed in many ways. Gone is his carefree existence; if ever there was such a thing. Gone is his father, he believes, too. Should he encounter Dronch and the caravan anywhere north, he's unsure how he will react. Perhaps those people, once so close, will be like shadows from another world. He doesn't know. For now the striped-necked beast has stopped, ears pricked and tail flicking.

'Guns,' wheezes Brasso. 'In the next valley.'

Brutus can hear drumrolls, muffled shouting, whip-cracks as arms are discharged, the rumble of machinery.

They've stumbled on a war.

Or a circus.

Smiling, he runs faster than he thought possible, dancing between trees and leaping boulders as he makes his way up the hillside. The sounds come louder, more confused, the trees thicker, grabbing at his already torn and holed t-shirt. There's the taint of smoke and the noises of chaos. He reaches the summit and stops, taking in in one gigantic swallow all the sights of the valley below.

A flare arches over the field, just as the sun dips below the horizon. All is red and burnt orange, scorched pink and vermilion. A mile distant guns flash, discordant and deadly, their thrashing heard moments later. The light hangs low like a ceiling, smoke billowing out along it's width. High overhead stars are visible, but close to ground the day remains, trapped like a firefly in a jar, kept alive by a richness of oxygen, made vivid and opaque.

Blimps bob suspended on wires, some afire, others crashed. Men run like blown specks of dust. Vehicles tracked and wheeled lie broken or else limping like shot deer. Everything is far away and yet the pain radiates, swelling outward with each percussion. There are flashes of colour, some fixed, shapes of friend and foe, the outfitted and the uniformed.

He wonders why it is they fight.

'A sorry history,' opines Brasso, appeared at his side like a shell case fallen from the sky, silent in form, function displaced. 'But was ever so, ay? Enough to inspire epic poetry and wring the heart of desire.'

Brutus just stares at the circus.

See the clowns? See how the seals balance balls on their noses and the trapeze artists fly?

'What experiment here unfolds?'

Brutus isn't listening. His brain has swollen.

Night is pressing down but its weight is insufficient to quell the incandescence.

Streaks of fire issue from gas sacs. Flaming projectiles. A chariot thunders across a field of dismembered torsos.

Brasso falls onto his back, a rusty hinge.

Brutus cannot sleep for hours.

'Hey!'

Dew on his eyelids.

A boot in his midriff.

'Come on; there's not a lot I have left and I'd witness the remains of this carnival.'

All is calm, the air crisp and cool.

'Might at least offer some clues...'

He sits up squinting, a new sun flickering through branches. For a moment it's Vincent rousing him, the resemblance uncanny in the thin light.

Brasso grumbles something and hefts his lance.

They roll gently into the valley like a mist.

The quagga appears nervous, Brasso walking for once, trudging through the short grass toward the remains of a hideous banquet. The air smells sweet, heady and increasingly acidic. There's a balloon foating close to ground, pegged by the weight of its wasted cargo, agitated like a wounded bird. It's almost identical to that which assailed them in the garden and Brasso pierces it with his spear.

Beyond the balloon is trampled earth, churned and now paused mud. Amid the escalating detritus of conflict, however, despite all the past evidence of their eyes, is not a single corpse.

'Truly a spectacle,' says Brasso. 'A glamour of huge proportions!'

A tracked vehicle not unlike that which towed the caravan, buckled and bent.

Ordnance and the cutlery of death.

But what of the combatants?

Machine parts lie scattered, complicated engines torn asunder. Brutus doesn't know what to make of any of it. Brasso, however, appears to see something he can't. The ginger head is bowed.

Then he stands on what looks like a face, only flattened, crumpled as if ripped from a book. The face is clownlike, yet anguished, a parody of a human face. He picks it up and it's oily, smelling of vinegar.

Brasso is some distance away, wandering aimlessly, leaning on his spear like a broken old man.

And it hits Brutus, that Brasso isn't a man at all, that none of the fallen here are men, rather manlike constructs, once alive in essence, now destroyed, creatures beyond his understanding. The dead have gone nowhere, he realizes, they're underfoot, blown up and scattered over the width and breadth of the field.

He jogs over to where the red-haired dwarf is kicking through broken pieces, mumbling to himself incoherently. Brasso, leaking brown oily fluid. There are small fires here and there, and other blimps and balloons of various size, most holed and flapping. The quagga is stood by one, a blue air sac tethered to the rear of a mangled truck, its survival seemingly at odds with the violence that so wrecked the vehicle. He stares at the beast momentarily, its mouth opening and closing not in speech, but the message it sends is clear.

Brasso coughs painfully, spits a great glob of black mucus and folds to his knees.

He's dying, Brutus thinks, kneeling beside him, but the short man ignores his offers of help. He's spent enough time on his feet. As if to emphasize the point Brasso's head turns through 180 degrees with a loud squeak and he falls flat on his chest, the colour drained from him, his once proud moustache limp. One dislocated arm points upward, somewhere to the left of the moon.

'There,' he says, as if that's sufficient explanation for their current plight, for all that's gone before, all that's to come and everything in between. 'There. The fat one.'

The fat one?

But that's all, and indeed everything Brasso has to say on the matter, as he duly expires, eyes rolling back to expose delicate metal gears, now stopped.

Brutus scratches his head and walks across to the quagga. He looks back and wonders whether he should bury the pretend man, or dismantle him maybe. He shrugs, and a shrug seems appropriate, sufficient even, his own silent tribute. The animal is restless to be underway and he next hauls on the rope attaching the balloon to the truck, bringing its basket down to earth. There's a gate in one side and he unfastens this. The quagga steps aboard. Brutus unties the rope and joins it, not sure what to expect. The basket creeps and the air sac sways but they remain anchored to ground. He shrugs again. The quagga waits patiently while he comes up with something. Hot air rises, he recalls. The underside of the balloon has half a dozen down-hanging pipes, like a cow's udder, rubber stops in the ends. Not knowing what else to try Brutus takes a deep breath, holds it, removes one of the stops whilst squeezing the tube associated with it, puts the end to his mouth, loosens his grip and contracts his lungs, blowing with all his might into the air sac that must be eighty feel in circumference. He nearly faints from the effort and issues a hot steamy fart. The air sac groans as it stretches, tautening the wires that suspend the basket, and after what seems an age the whole thing lifts into the air.

The fat one, Brutus repeats in his head, breathing laboured as he replaces the stop. Another mystery for another day as steadily they gain height and float north from the battleground, leaving behind its confused remains.

The next valley is thickly wooded and they drift over a dense green carpet. Hunger churns his belly but it's too late now to forage for breakfast. The sky starts to fill with clouds and by mid-morning it's raining; a refreshing draught at least, water running off the balloon in tiny riverlets so it doubles as a drinking fountain. The quagga and he both take their fill.

He's dozing when they come under attack from a larger blimp, he and the quagga both hunkered down in the insubstatial craft as the arrows strike. Brutus has no idea how far they've travelled. It's ceased raining but the sky is grey. Through gaps in the crudely woven basket he can just make out the darker shape of the other dirigible, larger and elongated in shape with two baskets suspended beneath, each with a propeller mounted to its rear, although only one of these is working. Another volley of arrows comes their way, most of them missing as the gap is still great, but a few puncturing the air sac which writhes as it loses pressure, throwing them from side to side. There's nothing in the basket that might be a weapon. Defenceless then, Brutus contemplates death by falling. Whoever their attackers are, if capture was their aim they may have achieved it more readily by stealth.

The quagga brays with fear. The balloon drops violently. Brutus can't see what's below. Might they be smashed onto rocks? The wind rushes by, branches snap and leaves fizz in the air. The world is an upside-down blur. His voice rises momentarily in his throat before being, quite literally, drowned out as the balloon splashes down in turbulent water.

Tullulah kisses him. He's lying naked on a hard bed and she's stroking his bruised, tired limbs. He aches from head to foot but her tender ministrations are giving him an erection.

His head lolls. His eyes open and there behind him is a muddy road winding away acoss a field into some trees. It doesn't look like the road west to east, east to west, and he wonders which way and why the caravan has turned.

There's no roof on the wagon he notices. More than one woman is laughing, poking him roughly with blunt fingers.

'Huh?'

Brutus sits up coughing. A little water runs down his chin. It's not Tullulah at all stirring his loins but a dishellved older woman and she's got a pistol. A second woman says something he doesn't understand. It's not a language he knows.

'Where am I?' he asks, stunned.

The woman points the pistol at his groin and to his relief his penis surrenders.

The grubby pair laugh and exchange more foreign words.

He's naked in the back of a wooden cart.

It's cold.

He recalls the crash and wonders what has become of the quagga. He has his voice back at least, but as he quickly discovers it's useless here, wherever here is. With a resigned groan he lays back down, sleeping fitfully as the cart slowly bounces along the road.

Brutus isn't sure whether he's a guest or a prisoner. They feed him and he eats. They've given him clothes, although what he wears feels more like a costume: loose brightly coloured shirt, breeches of a clashing hue, flat black shoes. He feels like a freak. Or perhaps a pet. His hosts number roughly fifty and occupy a rundown house ringed by a wooden fence twenty feet tall, like that of an old fort. He's allowed to roam free within the grounds. There are pigs and chickens, vegetable plots, apple and pear trees. Children follow him like geese, squawking their own peculiar squawks and mimicking his accent. The adults just smile and laugh, largely ignoring him since he's ceased miming the quagga in the hope they've seen the animal alive. Today he's dressed in red and green, an alien among folk mostly wearing brown. He sleeps in a small room above a pantry at the back of the house and counts himself lucky he's alive.

One of two of the older girls have flirted with him, nervous of capture, which just makes the whole business worse.

It's approaching noon, the sun is high. There's a frisson of excitement about the place and soon the outside is abandoned, the inside full. Brutus isn't sure whether to follow, but cautiously steps out of the sun. The house's entire population is crowded into one large room, which is darkened, and there's a buzz of whispers and an air of anticipation, followed by a crackle of what he recognizes as static. Feeling like an intruder he gingerly pokes his head round the door. The room is hushed. Everybody is staring at a high table, upon it a television. He knows it's a television as his father possessed one once, bought from a travelling family headed in the opposite direction and down on their luck. You connect it to batteries and pictures flicker on the screen, pictures pulled from the air, sucked from another world like ghosts.

The television works its magic. The audience is enraptured. His father's was a gold mine until it exploded. This one evinces similar symptons and he reasons it'll not be long before it suffers the same fate.

On the screen, shadowed by her own image, a smiling woman is ecstatic over a a fruit pie.

Later that day he's snoozing under a hat he's found when footsteps approach.

The feet belong to a small dark girl with a sweet round mouth and pert breasts.

She skips away and Brutus follows, finding her as find her he must behind a screen of beans, her skirt round her waist, lying in the shade between a ripe marrow and the wooden perimetre.

He thinks maybe this isn't a good idea, but it's already too late.

He's quietly fucking her when he notices one of the children sitting in a nearby plum tree chewing a blade of grass.

Brutus wonders if he can make it over the fence.

But it's already too late. The girl's eyes are wide open and staring.

There's a gun pressed to the nape of his neck.

People he can't see discuss his fate in a language he doesn't comprehend.

He's dragged off, cock wagging, gritting his teeth as he half expects a bullet. None comes, but he's marched toward the gate. Relief floods him as he dares to suppose ejection to be the sum of his punishment. A short time later, however, suspended by his feet from a branch, he prays to no god he knows that those are potatoes they're hefting and not rocks.

So it proves, but with his hands tied behind his back he's battered and bruised and left hanging, numb with pain, loosing consciousness as his head swells with blood and his senses revolt.

He'll be on his way then.

He wakes up in a clearing. His body aches but is unbroken. He's still wearing the red shirt and green breeches but the black shoes are lost. His hands are tied but in front of him and he sets to work on the grassy rope with his teeth.

It's late evening as he staggers to his feet, stomach rumbling and vision blurred.

How he comes to be here gives Brutus no pause for thought. He'll decide on a likely scenario when he comes to write his book someday.

A glimpse of the emerging stars points him in the right direction, which is all that matters.

North.

iii.

'I'm leaving you, Sam,' she said.

His knife paused half way through a steak.

'There's no future in it.'

It was their anniversary and this was a nice restaurant. He was sure he was blushing, the colour of cabernet sauvingnon, the hue of medium rare.

'I'll keep the house of course.'

Of course. And the kids?

'And the kids.'

Or maybe he was just scorched. He felt like the well done steak that's been on the kitchen floor.

'You'll be fine without me,' she said. 'You'll see.'

Five minutes later he was crying in the gents.

iv.

Brutus' feet hurt. He's walked for days barefoot and his feet are bloody and deformed, his toes wrapped tight and hard, his toenails exaggerrated, knurled like the control knobs in Vincent's cab. And like the tractor Brutus has once more begun to issue steam.

The air is cooler, the ground rising. He can make out snowy peaks in the distance and the trees have changed in nature.

Last night he brought down a deer.

Birds follow him like spies.

He wonders if he's losing his mind.

The sound of rushing water brings everything into focus. Perhaps it's the same river the balloon came down in. There's no way of telling, but something about the sound of turbulent water gladdens his heart. He skips up the rocky outcrop between himself and the torrent and is soon up to his waist in freezing water, snatching fish from the stream and eating them raw.

The water feels like his blood, the river an artery running from his heart, streaming in one and every direction. He could rush away with it, thinks Brutus, give himself to the current and see where it takes him, visit his elbows and knees, swim through the lakes of his eyes and skirt the whirlpool of his arsehole. But it is the nature of his being to go against the flow.

Upriver, hanging in the blue air, its extremes hidden behind slowly waving foliage, is a bridge. That's his direction. A bridge means a road, an asphalt highway the likes of which he's not come across...in how long?

He has a beard, he notes. If not mad then surely he looks so, thrashing about in the water like a bear.

The river must have a source.

Tullulah...

Three, four trucks pass over the bridge in a convoy, moving at speeds he can barely gauge. As soon as they're there, they're gone.

Brutus spits out out bones and farts a geyser.

'North,' he says croakily.

And it's begun.

Four

Skidmore Shuffledeck sat in the comfy chair and peeled a banana, one eye skipping from dial to dial as he tore the yellow skin, all the time searching for that dial whose needle wavered toward the red. The hair on his arms stood erect, tingling with expectation as he manoeuvred the pale flesh into his mouth, breaking the soft fruit with his lips and squeezing it into the roof of his mouth with his tongue. His eyes closed momentarily. He swallowed, opening them again, a pang of guilt entering his consciousness as he swept the dials with both eyes, suddenly afraid he'd missed one vital, split second needle kick.

The needles were wired indirectly to Sara - Sara who roamed the stricken engine in search of fault, that Skidmore, in more conventional mode, might repair. She was a gestalt being, more than the sum of her parts, and had no existence outside of an engine's tortured heart.

The antiquity of the dials he monitored were literally a world away, but their seeming impracticality amused him. And besides, they were easy to maintain.

Sara had come with the ship. Unlike the ship, however, she was not of his design.

Gestalt beings had no form in solid time. In time shortened, distended, squashed and impacted, they were as human as himself, flesh and blood creatures that occupied a separate yet incorporated realm. They lived in the spaces and the moments that were the voids between worlds. Sara went where it was difficult if not impossible for him to travel. She was at home in the guts of a star; and an engine was little more than that, albeit a star hollow, and in places, cold.

He had never seen her, only imagined her. He did not know what she thought, even if she thought at all. Did she view him in a similar light? It was an established conundrum. Once a ship was catapulted on its maiden voyage, taking that first tentative step past the speed of light and glancing back on a receding tide, then the gestalt being was born. Perhaps the ship gained a soul, or ensnared a being from another world. Whatever the truth, that ship, The Rockett Heel Bar, was gifted with a crew member its captain could name but never really know, an invisible yet omnipresent figurehead, both a guardian and a concierge: Sara, roaming the disabled engine of a water buffalo.

The craft was salvage, its engine eighteen hundred kilometres across and its cargo an ocean. Frozen in space, the water glimmered like polished coal.

Skidmore had come across it a month earlier, lifeless and drifting, and been intrigued. He'd registered the find, without co-ordinates, on the nearest Earth approximate world, then entertained himself with the mundane task of burning fuel. There were always living ships whose extended families had grown bored of orbiting a given body, but whose motive machinery had seized. And an easy job could be made to appear hard.

The living ships paid in a variety of currencies, among them fresh fruit.

Now, tilting forward in his chair, Skidmore sucked his lips tight and focused on four dials in a cluster whose thin metal arms had swung as one into the danger zone. He imagined Sara ensconced within the buffalo's engine, almost feeling her contentment, a professional satisfaction he was unable to fathom but which he shared. He wondered what she was experiencing as he snapped open his spectacle case and looped the stainless steel wire band of the glasses round his shaved, yet lumpy skull.

Was there danger? Pain?

Skidmore thought not. There was an empathy between them, a bridge of understanding that instructed her where to go and how and when he might follow.

The spectacles were for myopia.

Standing, he wondered what had become of the water buffalo's gestalt being, her ghostly navigator. With the engine's failure, was she subsumed? Did she die? And afterwards, when that engine was brought back to life by Skidmore, was it a different figurehead or the same that resumed its temporal role? Did he reanimate a ghost, or create a fresh unknown? The captains of such vessels, for their own reasons, were never able to say. He shuddered, realizing that was one truth he would have to experience to understand.

A new Sara? Skidmore refused to imagine the scenario.

He walked from the tiny control room into the vast dimness of the number 13 hold. It was colder here, a draught sluicing like dead breath forced from the lungs of a corpse. There was nothing to illuminate as the hold was empty, used for parking a variety of small craft that he might clamber about their tarnished metal hulls with the benefit of gravity (optional) and air. He stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and hunched his shoulders up to his ears, crossing briskly the four hundred metres to the nearest door. Beyond lay a passage, tubular, and his waiting car.

'Exit nine,' he instructed the vehicle, once sat inside.

The car hummed, its three wheels sucking electricity from the two metre wide conduit, accelerating Skidmore backward toward his destination while he sat with his eyes closed and smiled.

It took several minutes to reach the exit, at which point the car braked dramatically and the vehicle's three extended limbs stretched to absorb its passenger's momentum, contracting again seconds later with the smoothness of telescopic elastic. Skidmore tipped out of the seat and palmed the gate open, the metal shutter rising like a portcullis. In the space beyond, warmly lit yet as cold as the parking hangar , stood an MPV. It radiated the light, a pleasing sun yellow.

The belly of the MPV reminded him, as ever, of an octopus' tentacle.

He boarded via a ladder and plugged into the control console.

There were messages.

'...anoint me, shuffledeck, i am made afresh and shine like a new dawn, blissful and blessed being that i am healthy and whole, survivor of a wasting disease...'

His eyebrows rose. The words sang in his ear.

'...come into me and be one with my wholeness, embracing that which i embrace and feeling that which i feel and seeing that which i see and belonging to that which belongs to me...'

Sara? No.

'...make haste, shuffledeck, and rescue your heart from tyranny...'

Three messages, they could have come from nowhere but the water buffalo.

But there had been no-one aboard. The console quizzed him as to a reply.

'Negative,' he said aloud.

A joker, had to be; someone had reached the nameless vessel in his absence and installed themselves; illegally, as Skidmore had filed his claim. They might be gutting the engine now. But that would have shown on the dials. And Sara was unconcerned, either by the messages or the condition of the water buffalo. She displayed no anxiety.

Skidmore pushed the big red button and felt the MPV's battery of attraction motors swell with life. He flipped her off the pedestal and out the revolving door.

Here was the darkened ocean, billions of tonnes of frozen salt water suspended in void. The MPV seized on its gravity and approached, Skidmore twiddling his fingers. Contained in the aquatic body were thousands of species, mammalian and piscine, trapped now, preserved in this brittle state. An entire self-contained universe, he pondered, the end product of millions of years of evolution. An enormous, glaciated mass the water buffalo had instituted by means of its engine's super-chilled exhaust.

The engine itself, although large, was near invisible on the frozen surface. Skidmore viewed the housing, greatly magnified, via the console. He imagined Sara sitting patiently within, her cool professionalism her embodiment, her long hair tied back, her dark eyes impenetrable by his own, quietly examining her nails. Had she met the buffalo's guardian and navigator? Was that being as extant as she? And if not, where had it gone? The engine's hull was dented and scarred by fire, the symptom and cause of its breakdown. Ranks of bristlelike chimneys gave it the appearance of a shoe-brush; thanks to the damage, a shoe-brush that had seen better days. The MPV closed, the engine eclipsing its cargo, and nestling among the bristles attached itself to the hull by means of suction from its underparts.

Skidmore slid a finger under the rim of one lens and scratched the corner of his eye. He extracted himself from the command console and proceeded the short distance to the equipment lockers. The gravity experienced was approximately one third standard, assisting him there in two exaggerated strides.

He shucked off his jacket and trousers and eased himself into a spacesuit. The faceplate moulded itself round his spectacles and inserted its breathing tubes up his nostrils with an audible crunch. The spacesuit's boots were sticky, counteracting the lessened gravity. Its air-pack registered 98%. Once more he was wired to the console and through it to the Heel Bar and Sara.

There was a further message.

'...life is a transient phase, shuffledeck, a poignant malaise of uncomfortable moments and predictable occasions into which a man is born not of choice, but by accident, raised and bruised and lied to repeatedly, given few choices, moulded to another design like an actor in half familiar shoes...then finally dropped from the role and forgotten by all - all save i, shuffledeck, me and mine and mine and yours...'

He waited for the ship to offer an explanation. He waited for some hint of the gestalt being.

Both, however, were quiet.

Meaning? he asked himself, momentarily disturbed.

Sara had left the water buffalo, reasoned Skidmore. The ship was unaware of his concern. Unaware? He traipsed to the lock and spun the door. Outside, the engine's exhaust flues, black and towering, leaned like charred forest boles, coiling to invisibility overhead, beyond the yellow glow of the MPV and the paler tones of his spacesuit. Did something await him? Something intelligent and antagonistic...

He paused in his own shadow. The command console was operating normally; no malfunction there. He walked toward the nearest chimney, its surface sparkling and indented, twenty metres in diameter and sixty kilometres high. But there was only silence from the Heel Bar, and emptiness, deep in the pit of his stomach, from Sara. Ridiculously, he wondered if she was playing a joke on him, a joke the ship was in on. Did the two conspire? Skidmore thought. No. It wasn't possible. The gestalt being, he realized, had disappeared.

He waited for panic to set in. Two minutes. Four. A puzzling, vacant sensation rose from his toes and fingers to slowly fill his lungs. Was this how it felt? Was he experiencing what those reticent captains had in the past? Without the gestalt being he was stranded. Alone. With Sara gone the Heel Bar was un-navigable; it would take the onboard computer several hours to fix the ship in a stable orbit about the nearest star, a hundred times that to make even a routine transit across this stretch of the galactic arm. That amount of time was impractical. He needed her. He missed her. He stood rooted on the engine's mighty housing using up his compacted air.

Message: '...most things are redeemable, shuffledeck, given time...'

Then, the soles of his boots still firmly adhered, Skidmore slowly toppled over.

i.

Another train journey, another station, another meet in a car park. Thankfully the correct one, Janice in a floppy beatnik hat. She looked underwhelmed, but Sam was used. They stopped off for a drink. She had red wine, he a pint. Her place then, convoluted and surrounded by hills, the kids away. They got stoned on the sofa. He took her jeans off. Her legs were smooth but he already knew there was nothing up. It made no difference. He'd been with a variety of women, dazzled them with prose and sauced them with double entendre. Wended his way into their imagination with humour and gained their trust through empathy. Nothing underhand. He was just a nice guy who wanted to get laid. He liked women; liked bright women; liked women with great tits. Janice was a 34DD, though somewhat liquid. The wine flowed and his tongue followed his fingers. But his cock slept through everything. He could barely move given the copious intake of dope. Standing up was a worry. There was no door on her bathroom, which reminded him of Janka, half Polish, who he'd met in Sheffield on a blistering hot day, winding up in her bed after an afternoon into evening of biergarten quenching and balcony smoking. Janka who lived in Nottingham, had warm beer in the footwell of her Rover, driving him down the M1 to her place at some unknown hour and practically carrying him to the bedroom - sans door. The light fitting in her bathroom dangled dangerously. Women. In need of man. In need of tooled-up man. In need of orgasm.

Samuel loved them. That was the problem, he thought. He loved them all. He only had to go out the door and there'd be a woman, loveable.

He invited Janka to his place soon after. Kind of unfinished business. She liked him, and he liked to be liked, but truth was he didn't really fancy her at all. As ever the vacuum of datachment was obfuscated by alcohol. Sam ordered a Chinese, too, for good measure. And Janka, bless her, answered the door in nought but a pair of knickers and his too small Hawaiian shirt. He fucked her in the AM, whereupon she announced her period. Ah, Janka, paint my wagon, Samuel thought, washing his knob in the sink therafter, loins red from jellystitching.

Back in bed with Janice and an awful lot of snogging. Her cunt was strangely elsewhere, both their genitalia out of the equation. A boy had to do something with his hands though. In the dark, her head over his, he could feel something dripping on is cheek. Sam couldn't imagine why she'd be crying, but there were definite drips. In the morning though, a morning that stretched through to the afternoon as he was immobile from wine and cannabis, she revealed a stubble-chewed chin, a meshing of their faces that had brought about the damage, as if she'd been dragged by the ankles over pavement, oozing not blood but, well, ooze.

Ouch.

Curry. Cold Mountain at the cinema. Train home the following AM.

ii.

'Hey, doc, you okay?'

Half frozen it appears, the creeping pain a good sign: no tissue damage.

'You look like shit.'

Death warmed up indeed.

The faces are half familiar, but no names will stick to them. There are ice sheets over my eyes.

Half a dozen half familiar people dressed in lab coats with plastic aprons hanging loose.

'Some party, eh?'

Was that it? I don't think so. I feel like someone has sucked my insides out and spat them back in again.

I can't remember a thing.

All suddenly paused.

A hiccup in reality it will take years to understand, but with immediate effect.

I think therefore I am.

I think.

I fall asleep and the universe reorients about me.

'What happened?'

'The sky went a funny colour. Other than that, I dunno. Sunflare, some are saying.'

Memories start leaking back but I'm unable to distinguished them from dreams.

'We've been bagging dead terns for days. They just fell from the sky, like a volley of arrows. Fucking things are everywhere.'

'What about the dogs?'

'A few keeled over, some sick but mostly just disorientated.'

'Any other casualties?'

'You mean other than the TV? Jack Sapaski. You know Jack?' I don't. 'Security guard; think he choked on a pizza.'

Only static on the radio.

iii.

Shopping in Asda after work Sam noticed something peculiar. There were no men anywhere. Here he was, wandering with basket, and down every aisle, squeezing fruit and scrutinizing frozen burgers, were women. Not just women either, but attractive women, young and not-so-young women, women alone, not with friends or partners, but one their own, SINGLE.

It was terrifying. He gazed around sheepishly, half expecting to be waylaid by butch female security guards at any moment. Had he stumbled unknowing into a lesbian theme evening? He peered down his front wondering if he had grown breasts, but could see clear to his toes. Perhaps he ought to grab a couple of oranges and stuff them in his shirt pronto, try his best to meld.

High voice at the checkout?

It was Hell.

He'd never felt more lonely.

A fat pink hand landed on his shoulder.

He could smell talcum powder.

'Ha!' squeaked Life. 'Got ya!'

And then suddenly everything was normal again.

'Can you see 'em?'

'I can see something.'

'Frenchies?'

'Dunno - all a bit blurry like.'

The sun had barely risen. He sat with his back to a stone-chocked cannon wheel stubbornly trying to infuse a lump of stale bread with moisture. Kersey and O'Donnell were reconnoitring, between them a dented telescope won in a card game the night before. They were wasting their time, he thought, the terrain as much as anything obfuscating: trees, folds in the earth. A gunner's nightmare in truth, and before a snout was loaded.

As was his habit, Samuel Bluck, aka Joseph Rear, rubbed the back of his head where His Majesty's truncheon had blessed him not long since. He had a wife back home, kids. His army pay was pissed against a tree. Baptised into this new order, he did the only thing he could do and farted.

Kersey and O'Donnell squabbled like children.

'Sam?'

'Yeah?'

'Don't forget to feed the cats.'

'Okay...'

Something sped over the horizon. A rider. Impossibly fast. Hooves that didn't appear to touch the ground.

The sky refused to lighten.

He got up to double check the powder, smelling the coming rain.

It was all so blissfully quiet.

'And Sam.'

'What?'

'Clean up in the kitchen, it looks like a bomb's gone off in there.'

Ketchup, he recalled. Twins festooning, decorating walls as well as plates with admirable squirts of red liquid.

The likely fate of his compadres.

'Here that?'

'What?'

'Drums.'

Hannah. Lovely Hannah. She could drink him under the table. He wondered where she was now as he parked up for the evening.

It didn't matter. It never did. Being normal somewhere, doing normal things. Not for Bluck that. The universe had being trying to spit Bluck out for decades.

He laughed, got in his car and drove home. Life was in the kitchen, huge fat pink arse cheeks greeting him, naked but for a pinny imbosed with the legend WORLD'S BEST DAD.

Life? Cooking?

'Shit, shave, shower!' came the brusque instruction. 'Thirty-five minutes till your date arrives.'

Huh?

'Get a move on, soldier! You don't want to blow this one, do you?'

An invitaion to disaster. What it was Life was serving up he did not know; or could not remember.

Nevertheless, Samuel found himself shortly hence stood in his Sunday best awaiting the doorbell to ring. He felt like a teenager, a gawky pubescent wearing a dead uncle's suit and smelling of cheap aftershave. He closed his eyes and wished himself back to a foreign field, a date with death and destruction rather than this - whatever this was or might be. History was largely composed of men fleeing the imminent arrival of la femme; rather the front line than the bedroom, a confrontaion with lead and steel over one with soft warm flesh.

Fuck, he thought, what's that all about?

Bing-bong.

He swallowed hard. His hands shook. And all he could think about was how steady his nerve was in the face of an enemy bent on kiling him, how precise was his aim and how patient the action of his taper, how steady the men at his side as he weighed their lives, as he measured his own in those seconds between lighting the taper and touching it to the fuse, the crack and sparks thereafter a prelude to extreme volume and unshackled violence.

The smoke was enough to kill.

Bing-bong.

A woman?

He could hear Life sniggering, a sound like a rusty hamster wheel.

Now there's a motif, Sam thought, and answered the door.

iv.

Skidmore blinked once, blinked twice. He could hear Orgone Accumulator somewhere distant, which made him wonder if he'd pased out at a Hawkwind concert. In the back maybe. Near the bar? Skidmore was always near the bar. That much was a given. It wasn't often he passed out though. Extraordinary. He tried to focus on his physical self but there wasn't much feedback. Tried wiggling his toes. Attemped opening the eyes whose lids flapped so but failed in that, too. Infuraiting. What drugs had he taken? Applause and shouting followed by the first bars of Brainstorm. More fitting, perhaps, yet he remained divorced from reality. Receptive to sound, immune to motion. Pain in the arse.

Someone kicked him hard. Or had he burst?

His eyes snapped open to a blurry world and he instictively fished around for his glasses. Not finding them he squinted at the purple walls, the purple doors, poorly lit and closed. Shapes, people bled past. His head thumped. And finally some acknowledgment from his impossibly distant pinkies. This one went to market, this one stayed at home, this one had roast beef, this one tripped out on acid and spewed down his t-shirt.

Ah.

In another few minutes he would get to his feet, he thought.

Where was he?

Planet Earth?

Like it mattered anyway.

Time passes, as it does, and man remains prone, or struggling to his feet, uses tools, creates civilization, destroys same.

He laughed and choked thereafter on phlegm.

Hawkwind encore'd with Silver Machine and Skidmore mused over a means of transport. He must have got here, somehow.

v.

It was so much easier when you were young. You never had to worry about big stuff as a child, could concentrate on the detail: that elusive football card, how to scrape enough money together to purchase an Airfix kit, and later, how many increments of the Slow Hand it would take to reach the promised land. Of course, just as you got your fingers wet, it was gone. Youth. Couple of draws down the mangroves at break time became couple of years on the dole, depression and enormous fucking zits on your nose. Nothing but TCP would shift those rivets. He still had a crater from a holiday (always worst if you were going anywhere) zit aged 19. 19 though at least saw him lose his virginity; at a party, in the wilds near Hexham. Bizarrely, his mother had bought a Triumph Herald convertible with her redundancy money. His mother couldn't drive. He was on a provisional. His older sister took the wheel. He remembered when they picked the car up, the guy selling had a hole in his cheek courtesy of a masonary bit that had chewed through the garage wall and not stopped there. Was a bloodless wound, like a meteor crater. The car was cream with a while roof. L-plates affixed he and his best mate picked up his best mate's work friend en route, a blonde girl named Susan, and headed west with twenty tabs apiece, cider and cans, a crate of home-brewed brown ale in the boot. They wended their way into the country. Somebody had put a Land Rover in a ditch. Was a good omen. The house was big and whoever owned it abroad leaving their offspring in charge. Nothing like a house party. Susan plonked herself in his lap without much ado and soon his jaw ached. She was 18 and horny. She took him upstairs, found an empty room, and with enthusiasm if not skill had his trousers round his ankles, discarded her shorts and knickers and desperately tried to mount him. He was miles away though, watching from afar and utterly detached; perhaps mentally filming the episode for later digestion, to be pored over and recounted in words as an example of late adolescent autistic behaviour. So no hymens were breached just yet. They were disturbed by a girl in a black dress and fastened up, although afterward he was never certain whether said girl wasn't a ghost. He saw her a couple of times, once later that night floating about the house, again in the morning, outside as he and his best mate toasted the new day with much shaken homegrown ale, that, despite a night in the boot, remained explosive. Susan and he had slept in another room under crisp white sheets, a tidy room where it transpired their host's grandmother had died not long since. He had a hardon in the morning. She stroked it. He slipped between her legs and distantly plumbed away. It was underwhelming, but he had scratches on his back to show his mates.

And the dark-haired girl in the black dress?

So out of place.

Stood on his doorstep now like Death.

Rain darkened the sky. Rain that seemed only to fall so far and then stop, collecting above their heads like fishing floats. The darkness disguised the enemy's movements. The enemy appeared to hover. There was a strange taint to the air, like old beer, or stale piss. Probably both as their ranks trembled. Orders were screamed from afar, largely inaudible. He took his hat off and stood on it. Kersey laughed as only Kersey could and moment's later their cannon let loose. The ground spewed somewhere. Perhaps limbs were lost. It was not for him to think on lives taken, only for him to spark up.

The noise grew more and more, like no sound could escape his head. Each scream and explosion crowded into his skull but none vacated. Like bodies crammed in a lift as the cables snapped.

Smoke slithered everywhere, weighed down by the souls of men.

'And then,' squealed Life; 'you won't believe what he did then.' Winking at Samuel as Life prepared to offer Death yet another example of Bluck's ineptitude. 'Well! Let's just say...' No let's not. But already it's too late, the truth was out and he had lasagne down his front. Either extremity of his reality laughed heartily. It was more than he could handle. Sam expertly fitted his fingers round his wine glass, raised it to his mouth and drank.

Not a drop spilt.

His ribs were sore from the pair of them poking him. All he wanted to do was sleep, only Death had brought along any number of thrash metal CDs.

'And he threw up on her shoes!'

Hilarious.

It was going to be a long night.

Sam set down the book and lay back, fingers laced over his chest. He didn't know what if anything he had learned from ninety pages or so but it was worth thinking about.

He wasn't sure he enjoyed retrospection, but it was a fundamental part of life. Like dreams. Who knew what dreams meant? If they meant anything. But dreams were real, they happened in your head while you were asleep. No denying that. You could say you dreamed them, those dreams, only that would make you feel like an idiot. Dreams were dreamt, yes.

Such was retrospection, inasmuch as it was involuntary and baffling, yet hinting at truth. According to the book all conscious thought was doomed precisely because it was deliberate and therefore corrupted by the thoughts preceding which in effect created those thoughts in the first place, thus making them irrelevant, relevance being defined by spontaneity. Pure thought came from nowhere. Given that, and human biology, it might be construed that no life possessed relevance as it was the product of a reproductive chain, a series of random events. To be pure, and by definition relevant, was to be the ultimate bastard, to be both fatherless and motherless, to have no cousins or kin.

Okay, he had a headache.

A lot had changed. His daughters were gone, vanshed without trace. His ex wife a phantom without so much as a tax record. He might have been in a coma these past fifteen years, his retrospective memories false. Dreams unvalidated. Dreams made valid by their echo, for how much of a dream is ever recalled? They are just glamours. He thought perhaps he would burn the book as what answer in a book? Words. Not medicine, words. Words, the mechanical interpretation of the world through prose. Cogs. Intricate. Tiny. Depending on their manufacture, precise in their design - to whatever end, cogs not being decision makers - and random in their operation - having no predisposition as to their use.

Gears in the earth.

Worms.

He fell asleep.

Samuel Bluck, the latest installment of the Bluck chronicles, as confused as any of us and as pissed off.

Dreamed of explosions.

Woke up.

It rolled around with a temperate inevitability, his birthday. He spent it alone and unannounced, the few cards he received laid flat as if wary of snipers. Wine and the internet occupied him. And then there was a peculiar hiatus while his mind vacated his body and his soul was allowed out to play. The triumvirate of his being formed a triangle whose angles constantly changed, whose sides shrank and elongated as mind and soul sped off in constantly changing directions. The lines between each point remained straight though; straight as space and time, which is to say not straight at all. Straight as reality.

Sometimes it wasn't funny.

Sometimes it was too much wine and no fun at all. Sometimes it was months of celibacy.

And sometimes madness.

'On her shoes! I tell you!'

You had to be there really.

40.

PART 2: THE MEAT HOUSE

Five

It is no coincidence that watchtowers are built on hills. From a height, it's possible to see great distances. The world stretches forever. The higher the hill, the more world is presented to the eye.

A world lit up, if not illuminated.

A city without a name, Brutus thinks, squatting on said watchtower, a machinegun sleeping coldly beneath. His father had opined that farther north the folk grew unfriendly. In all his travels he's seen nothing to disprove this; indeed the opposite, as his life has narrowly missed being ended more than once. And now here he is, gazing down on a sea of stars, atuned to more lives than he's ever seen in one place, sitting quietly, immobile and all but invisible on a corrugated roof as the sun comes up.

There are mountains on the far horizon, glistening snow-capped peaks that glow like candles behind frosted glass. Shapes bleed into the middle distance as the sun pours its energy into the earth, buildings emerging like new growth from the forest floor, unfolding leaves of brick and concrete, reflecting the light in myriad dewdrop windows. Streets appear as translucent stalks, the traffic, busy even at this hour, nutrients travelling their length to feed the ever-arching growth of coalescing red and brown. Greys, blacks, dots of red; a thoroughly alien landscape, at once familiar and strange. Brutus stares upon the scene unfolding and it is as if a thousand pages from a hundred books have come alive.

To his left, some distance off and shrouded in mist, he can see another tower. To his right some buckled hills, the same hills out of whose belly he'd earlier rolled. A road streaming from a tunnel, on the back of a rickety automobile, pressed between caged birds whose feet resembled his own, their shiny eyes and bad breath a reminder of times past, their present situation perhaps a hint of things to come. He's wary, well wary, perched atop this roost like a basilisk soaking up the new day, preparing to slip unnoticed into the conurbation that is, Brutus believes, the conduit to his future, the way the quagga has come. Tallulah, too, perhaps, this mesh of light, sound and people irresistible to one of her fey nature. As fingers to guitar strings.

It's a new day. He leaps like a toad from a stone twenty metres or more, those half somnolent in the tower blinking roughly as the roof shakes, registering nothing but a blur. They go back to their dreams and their coffee, grumbling as only lowly soldiers can, unknowing and uncaring of the greater plot, that yet to unfold, which they may, if they're alive, still yet admire.

Brutus covers half a mile in a short time, bounding a two metre fence and spinning off the canvas side of a truck. He comes to rest against a brick wall and laughs quietly to himself. The sun seems to chase him, swallowing his shadow. He darts between buildings, avoiding all contact with folk upright, smoking cigarettes and spouting verbiage, till at last he lands on a plastic lid atop a metal container. Only then, stomach squirming, notrils flexing, does he realize he's hungry. The container smells warm. Brutus sniffs it, then drops to the pavement. He lifts the lid and the warm smell rises, delicious. He begins to rummage for breakfast but his digging is interrupted by a scream.

The scream is cut short. Brutus pauses. Colours bleed from the world, leaving only monochrome, and red. Suddenly he's frightened. He sees figures along the alleyway, three men in long coats. A glint of steel. He scrabbles to the rooftop, makes his way along the ledge, hangs upside-down from a gutter. Three men and a girl. They're teasing her with knives, snicking buttons, laddering her stockings. Her breath comes short but hard. She's brave, he thinks, watching. It seems too early for felons. He's confused. The knives impress her breasts and thighs. No blood is drawn but red welts adorn her flesh. Brutus tenses. He realizes he has a hardon. He slips to the ground, a penny drops, a snowflake intecedes but it is not enough to quell his anger, manifest in broken limbs, emptied lungs and - all to quickly - blood on his hands.

He supposes it's no good thinking how that happened. The girl looks more scared than before.

If he had a voice he'd ask her name. As he doesn't he draws an arrow pointing north.

'It's simple; you nurture your own,' says Faraway Jones aka The Incredible Peeling Man. 'Rightly or wrongly, who knows?'

Dronch snorts as Dronch does and looks about for support. His beard swells and recedes like the quills of an anemone. 'There's plenty here tired of your talk.'

'On parenting? Well, what's the alternative?'

He can sense the gun. He might yet slip from his skin and escape via the nearby stream. But it's slow moving. He wouldn't get far.

He apologizes to his son. His son's mother.

And then he dies.

'You shouldn't be out after sun up,' the girl says. 'They'll arrest you'

It's good information he thinks.

'Where have you come from?'

He indicates south. She looks puzzled, as if uncertain of his veracity. She wants to trust him, perhaps, but is afraid, squeezing the fear down in order to stay in control of the situation.

Brutus imagines how he must look to her. In the days and weeks that have passed since the caravan was lost to him he's undergone a metamorphosis.

The girl comes to a decision. She straightens herself, smooths down her skirt. 'I know a place you can stay. Safe for now. There's a man there, a professor. If you're one of the good guys he can help you.'

And if not? Brutus wonders, but dwells no more on it.

'Follow me. Not too close though, okay?'

She spits on the broken bodies in the dim alley, lightening now to a thinner grey, turns and walks briskly. Brutus comes after, clinging to shadows and pavement before taking to the roofs, low here on the outskirts and uncluttered by pedestrians. He steals a jacket, feeling the cold, but more to hide his discoloured torso. His hair is lank and matted, his hands and feet grown alike, his skin crumpled and leathered and his teeth spikey. Barely human at all anymore. In a place now thronged with humans. Trusting a girl who is perhaps bait in a trap. But he feels he has no choice.

It's the pattern of a man's life, he supposes, this traipsing after females. Duty, love, lust; foolhardiness, stubbornness, stupidity. Greater minds than his have written poems on the subject. It's all there was and all there is.

Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy follows girl to a deserted warehouse on the docks where she introduces him to an old man with wild white hair and a peculiar piebald moustache.

She leaves for her job in a cafe and Brutus and the professor consider one another in silence.

'She's an actress you know, Laura. But the theatre, like most things, has been in decline since The Event.'

Brutus is sitting on a rickety stool. Steel benches covered in odd-looking machines fill two thirds of the space. It reminds him of a black and white movie he once saw. Flash Gordon, that was it; so this must be Zarkov. And The Event? In the movie the planet of Ming The Merciless passes close to Earth, initiating a series of natural disasters. Or did Ming turn some fiendish weapon upon the world? Whichever, the parallels are many. He remembers Brasso pointing accusingly at the sky. 'The fat one,' the red dwarf's last words.

'There have been a number of anomalies of late,' explains the professor. 'What the authorities call alien manifestations. You'd fall into that category I'm afraid, and face imprisonment if captured. I'm not convinced how much danger these visitations represent, but the reaction to, or rather against them is sadly predictable. It's a phenomenon that in more enlightened times one such as myself might be able to freely study; but these are not enlightened times, and phenomena there are aplenty!' He laughs with a rattling noise, like he's concealing unknown implements under his white lab coat. 'So my friend, you see we must proceed with caution.'

It's that proceed that disturbs Brutus. He weighs running against hunger and his stomach wins noisily. The professor raises a finger and smiles. 'Of course! How rude of me. We must breakfast, no? Erm. Eggs? Bacon?'

Bacon? Eggs? For a man who's been living on raw fish these past days the promise of anything cooked is irrefusable.

He almost sighs, and with that bodily gesture Brutus feels something of his old self take hold, a loosening of bones and a rippling of muscles that seemingly shed their newer aspect and relax into more youthful guise. Gone is the burgeoning monster and in it's place the gangly boy, to the professor's surprise if not amusement, sat on the creaking stool like an orphaned panhandler.

'Well...'

'Food,' says Brutus throatily. 'Food.'

He's reintroduced to Laura later that evening. She gazes in unsure amazement but makes no comment as to his prior state. She has long dark hair, is a little older than himself, but Brutus finds he's unaroused by her. She smells of coffee, smokes cigarettes.

'They arrested a whole bunch of aliens this afternoon,' she tells him. 'Everyone's scared. There was a big commotion in some shopping arcade. Martial law, I reckon, is imminent.'

'Cue more arrests,' the professor opines. And with raised eyebrows, 'Lessons from history.'

'The professor reckons time itself is screwed. A universal misfortune.'

'You put it most succintly my dear.'

They're drinking red wine. It's a first for Brutus and he feels the alcohol meandering through his veins. Should it get too excitable, however, he's aware he can snuff it.

He's given samples of blood and urine and endured numerous biopsies, watched as his flesh has gone up in flames and listened to the professor pronounce with increasing polarity upon everything from the price of potatoes to the preponderence of pedestrians in public places, or lack thereof as the police patrols grow in number as the political fallout penetrates.

'They'd have us all in cages!'

For now though it feels good to be warm and comfortable.

Laura is staring at him. 'You must have some stories, eh?'

Brutus still finds words hard.

'Don't tease the lad,' admonishes the prof.

'I'm not,' she protests. 'Just curious. After all...'

He's back rending flesh in the alley, only seeing it now, viewing his own suppressed memory, the creature he was attacking other creatures. Not men; he never thought that. Then what?

Smiling, gathering his thoughts, he regales them with tales of the caravan, of Vincent's farting and Milly's loose toes, of endless small towns along the endless road between the oceans, east to west, west to east, and in doing so he makes himself real again, establishes his past and justifies his present. It can't last though, this secure feeling. Soon it must evaporate and be replaced by chaos. But for now, like a soldier on the eve of war, he's content to share, to celebrate the small things and imbue the detail with meaning, which is where meaning belongs, he's certain.

Brutus looks at himself in a mirror. He looks fairly ordinary he decides. He's been with the professor two days now and part of him wishes to stay, to reside here in the city, anonymous and unconcerned. He feels trapped though, the urban landscape alien to him, much as he is to it. The people here are different from any he's known, great in number and yet homogenous, one face melting into another, oddly similar in aspect, mannerism, voice. So his ordinariness is a contradiction. His anonyminity an impossibility. Not something he wants after all, to be lost amongst the human fold, just another citizen leading a citizen's average life. He needs to leave, perhaps to grow up, to persue newer dreams, the metropolis here met not that of his imagination. That lies elsewhere.

Tullulah.

He hears her name in his head.

'Brutus?'

'Yeah...'

'Hurry up in there. We need to forage.'

What Laura calls shopping.

Brutus is an obedient and efficient bag-toter. It keeps his mind focussed and his hands occupied whilst they meander through a dizzying panoply of stores. For a populace all but under siege (as Laura has it) the people shop without restraint, garnering produce in abundance and spending great bricks of cash. The money is different here, mostly paper; lots of paper; everyone counting as goods are bartered and exchanged. There are bare shelves though, and prices sometimes change before their eyes. He doesn't understand the wherewithal of it but a growing urgency simmers under the surface, becoming more palpable as the afternoon lengthens and the newspaper stands proclaim lurid headlines in large red and black letters.

SIX DEAD IN DAWN RAID

He hasn't taken much notice of what Laura has purchased.

LOCAL OFFICIALS IN CRISIS TALKS

He only knows they're heavy and that his knuckles hurt.

'Shit,' says Laura. 'Are you feeling okay?'

It's a moment before Brutus realizes she's talking to him. The world snaps back in and his skin fades from green.

'Hang in there, okay?'

'Okay.'

After what seems an age they make it back to the professor's dockside hideout and Brutus collapses on a settee.

He can hear them talk, but suddenly it's a foreign language.

Later again, hunger gnawing, the professor taps him on the shoulder. 'Can you get up?'

Brutus grunts and a wisp of smoke escapes from one nostril. The settee is charred where his face has been.

The phone rings.

'Fuck!' screams Laura.

He has no idea what's going on but suddenly it's pandemonium.

'Up! Up!'

When he doesn't respond she connects with a stinging slap.

'NOW!'

All the lights go out. There's a series of crashing noises, like a dog running riot in a kitchen.

'Take these. Follow me.'

His eyes adjust enough to make out Laura's white blouse, mostly hidden under an oversized parka. She's handed him an even larger garment and some boots. He dons the parka but leaves the boots, aware his feet are swelling to their previous clawlike state, his body reacting before his mind can even comprehend the threat. There's no sign of the professor.

'This way,' she whispers and they scoot down metal stairs to the basement just has beams of pale blue light slice through the upper level. 'They'll have the place surrounded. I'm sorry. It was stupid. My fault. They must have followed us back. I don't know...'

The basement is dark, empty but for a number of tables.

'Don't look at those,' she tells me. 'You don't want to know.'

But he does know. The dead from the alley. Others, too, lying in frozen postures, opened like food containers, their insides scooped out, organs removed and heads severed.

Trophies?

Are you my friend? Brutus wonders, unsure whether he's asking the girl or the corpse nearest, its barely invisible outline begging to tell its story, to inform and enlighten the changing man at this moment of catharsis.

'Brutus, we have to go.'

Shots from above, explosive percussions.

Laura hauls open a door, pulling on his arm as she disappears through it. He spins to follow. Flames lick below the stairhead they previously descended, illuminating the gory basement scene, exposing it's true horror for a split second before the door slams shut behind and Brutus lands knee-deep in freezing water.

'This way, come on!'

A massive explosion above brings down rock and soil, blows the door from its hinges.

Brutus is underwater, clasping the girl's limp body to him as he swims blindly from the scene.

Come rushing, my friends, to where the wind strums the water and the rocks sweat great globular melons of light; come rushing into the fall's sweet, cool embrace. Watch through its tears the buffeting of spring leaves and orbiting insects. She through the flashing lenses a fractured creation made whole. Experience the heady delirium and be refreshed by this sparkling cascade's ordinary, peace-filled, magnificent reason. Observe; all the water observes, the passage of time; time caught but not overtaken; time held in seasonal transience; time in the shape of stream and glacier. Come rushing, my friends, with postive abandon, and give to this instrument, reassembled from shattered clouds and bounced perspiration, the freedom of your hearts...or if not your hearts, then your eyes.

Watch.

It is the sight of the meat house.

'The what?' queries Brutus.

The meat house.

'Oh.'

He's sat on a crumbling shelf of brick and mortar with a dead girl in his arms. Her face is peaceful. In death she resembles Tullulah's sister, quiet, shy Rebecca, taken under by strong currents and similarly drowned. He can't leave her to the rats, he thinks, plentiful even in this bitterly cold sewer. But what choice does he have? His enemies grow in number. Brutus stares in her dimmed eyes and demands answers to questions only half formed. He cannot think ill of her, and yet perhaps she fished him for the professor's gruesome table. None of it matters now. In this inert state she is just a girl, strong yet soft, vulnerable to the scavenging rodents who even now gather for the feast.

There's only one thing to do.

She burns with a vivid orange flame, one sprung from his powerful lungs, a fire that readily consumes clothing and flesh. A great moan pours forth from Brutus along with the conflagration, the sum of all his pain, a sound that resonates through every manhole in the city, chilling hearts and rattling cups on saucers. It is heard everywhere, the last rites of a little known actress, a dirge so terrible and monotonous that it brings, in minutes, six inches of snow down from the previously patient clouds. Traffic stalls, lights extinguish, Laura's ashes are scattered into the flow. Brutus wipes his nose on his sleeve and the arm of is parka crumbles away. He sloughs it like used skin, stretches erect, cracks his spine. Perhaps one day he will return for the professor. Tonight and tomorrow, however, he must progress, under the mountains if need be.

Sniffing the air, spitting boiling phlegm at those rats brave enough to still be around, he chooses the appropriate conduit and heads north.

i.

Alcohol was Samuel Bluck's whipping boy. A sympton of his depression was wanting to give up the booze. A mask, perhaps, for his own painful inadequacy. At least what passed for inadequacy under Depression's heavy cape. It wrapped round him like crushing steel, pinned him to the floor. It slowed his thoughts and set them in loops, turned his brain to mush and made heavy his limbs. Yes, Depression was not a welcome caller.

'Heeeeeeeyyyy, Sam-u-el,' said Depression in ultra-low tones, bass bouncing inside his skull like a wet leather medicine ball. 'You want girls, pills?' Now Jim Morrison, fat and pasty and coked. 'Come on, man; you gotta gun, use it. Let the light in. Let the stars shine. Il-lu-min-ate your mind.'

Of course he told Depression to fuck off, but Depression hung around all the same.

'Man, that pink monkey, Life. That pink monkey pink monkey pink monkey pink monkey pink monkey is bad for you. Life puts your soul through a grinder. Life laughs at you, Samuel, eats your guts and tosses your carcass on the carcass heap.'

He just wanted Depression to go away.

Depression didn't know any jokes.

'You know, Samuel, you just have to step in front of a bus.'

Like Davy?

A-ha.

'It will be beautiful. Everyone will love you when you're dead.'

He wasn't convinced; but it was like a TV you couldn't switch off, a programme you couldn't escape, a presenter who's irritating mannerisms and affected speech you just could not shake.

'I-am-your-true-self. Listen-and-all-will-be-expalined. Those-women-despise-you. They-think-you-weak. They-see-your-failure. Feel-it-between-their-legs. You-are-not-a-man-to-them. They-offer-nothing-but-contempt. You-will-never-be-loved. You-will-always-be-alone...Sam-u-el. In the morning and last thing at night. I am your only true friend...'

Uproarious laughter then, a piercing crescendo of sudden bright pink, a wrestling match of gigantic proportions and a chance to breathe again. Slam. Life goes down wincing. Slam. Depression reels on the ropes. Slam. Life held aloft before being thrown down hard and crackng a rib. Slam. Depression thrown from the ring. But what's this? Depressions's wife/manager getting in on the act, palming flat the referee before straddling Life and crushing breath from lungs. Life turning slowly blue, blue, blue - whack! A fairy called Optimism weilding a chair. Depression's wife/manager's teeth knocked out. Depression furious now but fatally undermined by a lack of spousal cajolling. Slam. Slam. Sam on his feet and walking to the fridge, at this late hour no longer givng a shit.

Of course they're all there playing cards, every manifestation of his troubled psyche with a pile of greater or lesser chips.

'Turn the lights out will you.'

Smirks and knowing glances, poker faces none of which he trusted. He left them to it, his Fates, that elusive waif Angst amongst them, Manic too, and took a sheet of kitchen paper to bed.

Back in York again. He knew the pub adjacent to the station well having been stood up another time. Or was that in the future? This, today, was Kim. The sun was shining and they wandered, sat at aluminium and plastic tables in aluminium and plastic bars by the river watching the red tourist boats go by. You could hire small boats, but he was no great fan of the water. And so passed a pleasant afternoon.

Into the evening and more drinking. They encountered a dwarf and she enquired of body weight alcohol ratio. The short man considered, nodding. She commented on men's tendancy to bounce their legs under tables, and looking around he found evidence of same, one or more vibrating limbs pumelling away as if at high hats or bass drums. It was people watching of the highest calibre. Her cat back at her place seemed to have opinions on humans, too.

'I want you inside me,' she breathed heavily, post orgasm. He licked his fingers but it wasn't happening. If only his cock was as steep as the stairs.

He met her again some months later, more as friends, and the pair of them went out on the pull, a session that started at 5.30 with white wine and progressed via much lager and cocaine well into the early hours, by which time he had lost the ability to talk although not to dance and she had encountered a tall stranger. The coke mostly stuck in his nose, he reckoned, being inexpert and mucus prone. Shitfaced, they wandered back to hers. He was jealous and jumped onto the boot of a parked car rather than stagger round it, continued on over the roof and, victim to his own momentum, staged-dived inelegantly off the bonnet, a manoeuvre that took a good chunk out of his chin and one knee. Bloodied, she tended his wounds and put him to bed in the spare room. In the morning he dreamed of sighs and pleasurable noises, that blissful sound of a woman climaxing; gentle, needful moans. It was beautiful. Only the noise woke him up and his head exploded. He staggered down the precipitous stairs and made six cups of coffee, collapsed on the settee. England were winning the Rugby World Cup. He wanted to die. Slunk off to catch a train and eventually made it home with a wardrobe tied to his head and a feeling in his bones like cabbage. His chin got infected, bits of road buried therein, bulging like a zit of old and squirting the bathroom mirror a week later with viscous goo.

God, it hurt.

ii.

Sara?

He had a theory, but his theory involved the impossible. Not that the impossible was too much of an obstacle to Skidmore. He'd found himself in a bathroom mirror and after much squinting and washing of his face he realized he was younger. Quite a bit younger. So this was some engine malfunction, right? A time warp, for want of a better description, brought about (induced?) by the water buffalo, or whatever had caused the water buffalo to hit the rocks in the first instance, rupturing its hull and stilling its heart. Sara had entered the stricken vessel. Perhaps she'd encountered the special entity that was it's soul; or perhaps that similitude was deceased, or passed over, or however one described such things. All in all the ship was dead. How it's cargo might be salvaged and a profit made for himself in booty, spare parts and scrap, was Shuffledeck's raison d'etre.

He smiled toothily.

This whole current scenario reminded him of an episode of Star Trek. Only sans phasers.

A toilet flushed behind him and a woman exited the cubicle. Fastening her belt she peered at him coldly before approaching to wash her hands. Surreptitiously he gazed from side to side but could see no urinals.

But wasn't The Enterprise famous for having no bathrooms?

The girl lit a cigarette and left saying nothing. Skidmore favoured cigars, but they were hard to come by. Decent cigars anyway. It was said the Devil hoarded the choicest tabacco. At least it was said by privateers out on the rim of the galactic arm, men and machines he had cause to do business with from time to time, whose hospitality was always on the scale of a banquet and who smoked till their ears bled. And if anyone should know...

'...ladies and gentleman...'

A message to vacate the auditorium.

Skidmore patted his pockets, leather jacket and jeans, but failed to locate his glasses. He'd put them down somewhere, he surmised. Not to worry. This wasn't reality after all. Maybe he could squint mentally and bring the distance into focus. Or was that asking too much? He had still to figure out how and why he was here? He supposed he must find Sara. But where to start? Lonely hearts?

'...the future is no less probable than the past...'

Eh?

Stairs. Doors. Street.

He could see his breath.

He had nothing that might pass as money.

But he had grown up problem solving. This was just more of the same, with added mystery.

The accents were North American, French. There, that's his first indicator. Long days trawling archives being of some use. A bit more snooping and Skidmore found himself once more, this time in Montreal circa 1993. Not vintage Hawkwind then. Then again, 1993 was largely subjective. There were probably a dozen 1993s out there, some orbiting stars, others floating kitelike from steam locomotives, great ponderous towing engines whose velocity never altered, who made no stops and supported no - breathing or otherwise - crew. None the wiser he followed his nose to a hotdog stand and salivated quite openly, doing his best impersonation of a basset hound.

If he stood absolutely still the universe turned about him. It was an old trick, but ever useful. People, cars, the near full moon, all oriented round Skidmore this chilly October eve. This was true of the hotdog vendor also. His wares were in thrall to Shuffledeck's gravity. Sooner or later a meaty tube in a bun would find it's way to him, with onions and mustard.

The only flaw in this design was that it was getting him nowhere. But he was hungry, and universal charity was all he could bank on right now.

Out there, perhaps among the gleaming skyscrapers, the woman on whom his life depended was lost. There was no helping that, however. Panic at this juncture would only see him spiral into madness - madness the fate of those captains whose ship's mascots had become detached, for without Sara he and The Rockett Heel Bar were rudderless. He'd be left paddling with hands, an altogether more primitive lifeform.

In the end he had to settle for a burger abandoned largely intact on a bench nearby. Skidmore hoped it wasn't a metaphor. It was going to be difficult obtaining cash legitimately, so he skipped to the chase and committed a crime.

Then found a bar.

'They did what?'

'Destroyed a whole field of cognitives.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Mashed them into ingots and spent them at the casino.'

'Oh.'

'Did I tell you it was underwater? The mermaids are something else.'

The bed he woke up in smelled of vinegar. Any sudden moves might render him dead.

The girl he'd met around midnight, floating to him as if on wheels, was nowhere to be seen.

It was ironic, he thought, that the one guaranteed way of finding out anything was to go looking for trouble.

'Well, well, well,' said a tinny voice. 'If it isn't Skidmore Shuffledeck, bon vivant and galactic mechanic. This is a bit out of your orbit, isn't it?'

If only he knew who the voice belonged to, but his tormentor was invisible.

'Call you in to fix a leaky rocket, did they?'

Who?

'We should ransom your arse, meatboy. There must be a price on it somewhere.'

'You flatter me,' he said to no one, rising naked and walking to the toilet, where he took a pleasingly long and noisy piss. The machines in this universe hated more than anything the humans wastefulness when it came to fluids. They barely passed a drop.

'Why are you here?' the voice asked, ensconced behind some curtain, a ripple in space from beyond which he could feel a bombardment of probing radiowaves.

Skidmore got dressed and looked for something to eat. Finding bacon and eggs in the fridge his heart nearly popped with excitement. A fryup was just what the doctor ordered. Coffee. Grapefruit juice, too.

'Who wants to know?'

'Important personages.'

Personages, eh? A few steps up the social ladder from cognitives. Which made this guy what, a flunky drone? In that case he or it wouldn't kill Skidmore without permission, but permission might not take long in coming. Obviously something more than his missing avatar was going on here. He guessed his inquisitor knew as little as he though.

Cracking eggs he came clean. 'I hit my head and woke up here, wherever here is,' he said. 'That explanation enough for you, my friend?'

Silence. Static.

The kettle boiled, the toaster popped, the lights flickered and the girl appeared, stretching and yawning. 'What the fuck?'

'Eh, breakfast?'

'Yeah, thanks.'

'Strange dream?'

She looked at him funny. 'Very strange.'

A damn fine piece of work, thought Skidmore. Even sober she looked every inch flesh and blood. Not the first machine he'd had sex with either. He smirked and buttered toast.

'Tell me about it.'

'What?'

'Your dream.'

She looked imaptient, tucked short brown hair berhind her ears and fished for a cigarette.

'I'm starving.'

'Then eat.'

'I wish I had your powers of recoverey. You were wasted last night.'

Skidmore laughed.

'Eat. Talk.'

'Yes, sir.' But first she smoked.

He turned the TV on. Interestingly it was 1997.

'Did I tell you you look like that actor?'

'Who?'

'I forget his name...'

'Forest Whitacker.'

'That's the guy. You must get that all the time.'

Ironically, he'd forgotten the girl's name and was too embarrassed now to ask. Few clues to her identity were to be found in her tiny apartment. No photographs. No mail. Nothing stuck to the fridge door, although judging by the general untidiness perhaps whatever had been fastened there had been removed.

'Who do you think I look like?'

'Contemporary actress? Late twentieth century?'

She rolled her eyes.

'Did I mention I was from the future?'

'You mentioned a lot of weird stuff.'

'Weird?'

'Science-fiction weird. Gross, too.'

'I'm in town for the convention.' Thinking on his feet.

'You speak Klingon?'

Skidmore grunted some nautical ditty he'd picked up cleaning exhaust flues as a teenager and she looked suitably impressed. He had no idea what language it was in. Could have been old Norse.

'Well?' She pouted, and when he didn't respond to the cue began searching for something under her bed.

A long blonde wig.

'Now do you see?'

'Erm - you could help me actually. I need to find someone.'

'That's it!'

'What?'

'Susan.'

'Susan?'

'I'm Susan.'

'You are?'

'Yes. No. Hang on.'

It was going to be harder than he thought enlisting the aid of the other side.

'In the movie. The actress in the movie.'

She had her arms held out in front and to her sides, fingers splayed open.

And then it came to him. 'Rosanna Arquette.'

'Yes!' She whooped delightedly. 'Blowjob coming your way, Mr.'

'Desperately Seeking Susan. Yes, I get it now. Only it's not Susan I'm looking for, it's Sara.'

She threw the wig at him.

In her dream she was walking across a perectly flat field of short grass. Huge drops of rain floated slowly from the sky. As they hit the ground they burst revealing people or animals. She gazed upward and saw the rain came from a giant machine, wet bubbles swelling at the mouths of numerous brass trumpets before peeling away and beginning their ponderous descent. She wondered if that's where she had come from. She wondered why she was here. Some of the raindrops contained tools and weapons, she saw. Fights broke out. Men were killed as well as animals. Night came and fires appeared. She found that if she flapped her wings she could fly, but was too scared to take off in case she was shot. She hunkered down near a fire and awaited instructions. Electricity crackled behind her eyes. Morning came and she saw buildings had emerged from the earth, great pillars of brick, steel and glass. She searched for her reflection in windows various but saw only strangers, parking meters and cars.

And then the world dissolved.

Six

At least the toilet is still working. When had man first created an actual toilet, I wonder? Rather than a hole in the ground, or just the ground, gravity doing what gravity does. They used to have netties in my grandfather's day, outside toilets in that faraway universe that is northeast England. Brick shithouses at the bottom of the yard. Drafty, same as this prefabricated arsehole, here at the arse of the world. A storm has brewed up and rattles the corrugated iron. The lights blink on and off. I realize my watch has stopped. When did that happen? At least I still have my feet. Apparently there are gaps in my memory, chunks of time erased. Or shat out. Who knows? So I can walk and talk and eat and shit. Not much else to life really.

Disko. It was the name that drew me initially. How dumb is that? How far north does a person have to go to forget? The irony is something else, being as I can't actually remember why I chose to cross the Atlantic in the first instance, let alone skip north to this stop on the ice. I suppose coming from a land of coal mines defunct it's something of a throwback, except here there are no pit wheels, no slagheaps, fewer dirty faces and not a terrace of red or yellow brick to be seen. Coal though, aplenty. It all happens under the earth. It always did, yet back in the light of Geordie lamps the graft was done by men. Machines cut the coal now. Machines feed it like hard black molasses into the vast dark bellies of steadily sinking ships. The whole operation is automated, with only token bodies in attendance, tens rather than thousands; more scrubbing vegetables than fingernails in this production. Yet how many more ships will come? I wipe my arse and light a cigarette. Orange flames snap about me and are as quickly gone. The books on their elastic cords smoke slightly. Or maybe it's my eyebrows. I exit the shitter and get hit in the head by a snowball. Not till later, back at the infirmary, do I find out my hat was on fire.

'What we going to do with you, doc?'

'I give in,' I say.

There's talk of big meeting nobody will attend. Nobody gives a shit it appears and therefore nobody plans on turning up. Anyway, the biggest space known to Diskoman is Gugson's and no way will the powers that be hold a meeting there. Would make more sense if they did, but making sense is the last thing on their minds, so the meeting is to be in the open air, a management decision if ever there was one as it's October and the electricity is rationed. Rumour has it that management won't turn up either as management has evacuated already and it's all a diversionary tactic, only one the workers are wise to. So nobody will attend.

The PA is set up all the same.

Various lags take turns regalling the populace with tales of wives and girlfriends back home. Others somewhat more imaginatively declare war on compond B. Then the ladies get in on the act and state quite categorically that venison jerky is now banned.

I can live with that I reckon. Romario isn't so sure, tugging on my sleeve as he's been doing a lot lately, asking me to check his dogs, which seem to have doubled in size.

'What the fuck am I going to feed them if they ban jerky?' he asks.

The largest, sitting, comes up to my chest.

'That's some jerky,' I say.

'I get it from an undisclosed source.'

By the truckload.

'Doc?'

'Yes.'

'Do you think any of us will survive?'

It's a strange question from one so mad.

'No.'

A week passes with few desertions. People go about their work, luminous and robotlike. Administers administer. Technicians tech. The pizza guy puts up a sign saying UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT in respect of the security guard Sapaski. Or perhaps it's more social comment. Anyway, underlining this sentiment with TWO FOR ONE GARLIC BREAD kind of dillutes the meaning. I mostly play cards and stroke my chin. The compound is strangely awash with cash, perhaps a precursor to the fact that no supply planes will be incoming and company cheques may soon mean nothing.

There are five round this table, two wearing guns.

It's not long after that callendars start disappearing. Kittens, famous castles, tits, all are void. Pictures, too, reminders of an outside world, one by one they vanish to be replaced by bare walls, telltale lighter patches and incrimating, orphaned drawing pins. Then the coffee starts to taste peculiar and the shit hits the radiator, to which it sticks, unpleasant as that is. There's a minor coup.

'Flush,' says the woman next to me, smoking a seal blubber joint.

Apt, I think, apt, before laying down four of a kind.

'You cunt.'

I smile.

'And they told us you were dead...'

'Not dead, but certainly tax free.'

I scoop in the chips and build my tiny empire.

It's only a matter of time though before the smile is wiped off my face.

'Eat shit.'

Damn.

Someone throws a fish at me. I look at my drink but most of it's still there.

'Doc!'

Romario.

He's frantically waving and I cash in to jeers.

'I had to let the dogs go,' he says, tears in his eyes. 'If they stayed they'd get eaten.'

He's right, of course, although given their escalating size perhaps the opposite was true.

'Meet me at the main gate in ten minutes,' I tell him, reaching a decision from nowhere. 'Skied.'

The pair of us set off across the wilderness thereafter, a landscape unaltered and yet irrevocably changed. It's beautiful and ugly at once. The neighbouring compound eventually hoves into view, scene of my previous episode, the to date unexplained finding me naked in a snow drift misadventure that catapulted me momentarily to fame and referenced my name with that of Tiffany's breasts above the bar at Gugson's, which of course I'd nailed there in times past, unknown to man, save perhaps as 'man with funny accent'. Now here I am approaching B again, where I will assuredly stay. Obscure and patient.

i.

He woke up in a barn, sunlight teasing his eyelids and hay scratching his chin, wearing no boots or uniform but what could only be described as a dress, a stained blue pinafore over an equally grimy white blouse. An owl gazed down on him from a buckled rafter. The owl's stern gaze reminded him he had deserted. The life of Gunner Joseph Rear was over. Not that he saw much of a future in milkmaiding, but having escaped the horrors of war he really ought not to be complaining.

Phew.

His brain hurt partly because of shellshock and party because he knew what shellshock was, vaguely.

It was 1789.

It was 2005.

No...

'Why wake up?' said the owl. 'It'll only be shit - shit life, shit day, shit morning with shit breakfast and shit news, shit drive, shit work, shit day, shit evening to follow. Nothing but shit and more shit. Shit world. Starving millions. Bitch women. Debt. Creaky knees.'

He had to concede the owl had a point. But he was awake already, wasn't he?

'No, stupid, this is a dream.'

A shit dream.

'You said it.'

All he could really think about though was the milkmaid whose clothes these were. Where was she hiding?

'Shit and more shit,' owl said. 'Give it up, shithead! FUCKING EXPIRE!'

In a deft move he grabbed a nearby pitchfork and propelled it rafterwards, skewering the surprised owl and stitching it to a barn roof plank with an audible whang.

Time did not matter anymore.

There was no ladder down from the hayloft. A couple of geese below minding their own business. No use asking them. He clambered back over to a paneless window and stared out at the new day, the new landscape, the green and pleasant land distantly occupied by armies. Out there lay what? Joseph wondered. Mabe if he headed north. Denmark, Finland maybe. The farther the safer he thought, although dressed as he was he'd be lucky to make it past the next village.

Destiny beckoned. It'd be rude to fail now.

He'd been drinking to forget that day the King's men had found him. He still had the lump on his head. Not from the artful shileighly either, but a gift of Rose's best copper pan. She was pure fire, his Rose, lost since to the vagaries of fate and governments, a speck of salt blown whichever way across a beef roast by a belching uncle.

Joseph smiled. He still had the poet in him.

The sun reflected off a stream a few hundred yards hence, spiking his eyes, relieving his thoughts of tension. He would travel north, he decided. He would discover what lay ahead, and even to the sides. He would explore his freedom, mourn his comrades and perhaps lift a few skirts other than his own. He would live, love, laugh and cry, and for Kersey and O'Donnell's sake take a really big dump on the first ginger person he encountered.

Northern Europe.

Rear didn't have much in the way of an education but he knew that they drove on the right in Flanders. How he knew this was incidental, but it irked him to see a cart in the middle of the road. In truth the road in question only had a middle, no left or right, but still it offended his spacial awareness. And carts there were aplenty, drawn by oxen and mules, slow and barely worthy of note, save his feet hurt and he was hungry. Boys whistled at him, men throw potatoes and apples, women spat and babies gawped. He walked with his thumb out, himself partly understanding the convention, but it was mid afternoon before a wagon paused briefly enough to indicate he skip aboard, the fellow driving with a patch over one eye and lips the colour of wet leather. The wagon was covered and rattled metalically. Light and sound flashed and burped from behind a dark curtain.

The man said nothing.

Rear sat with his arms folded. All would be revealed, he supposed.

Sure enough a village was arrived at and the one-eyed man drew the wagon up by a well. He stepped down and unhitched the horse, a strange beast with white hooves and stripes at its neck. Only a few curious children, ducks and goats were to be seen.

Joseph felt more conspicuous than ever. The man thrust something at him, a uniform. The material was strange, almost slippery, and had no obvious buttons or seams. Bright red with yellow flashes it reminded him of a child's drawing of a conductor. And the orchestra? A crowd started to together, the day fading. He shucked off the pinnafore, his nakedness a price worth paying, one embarrassment assuaged by another as he then dragged on this new clothing, pulling and stretching it up over his legs, about his midriff, slipping his arms into the tight tubes meant for them. The yellow flashes were jagged lightning stalks running down his chest and thighs. Perhaps there was to be no orchestra. No sooner had he thought it, however, than music flared from the wagon, bringing gasps from those gathered by its sheer volume. Strings and brass thundered. The roof frame covering the wagon concertina'd back and light in many colours illuminated the space for a great many yards. The man produced a megaphone from nowhere, as big as himself, and began ragalling the crowd in Flemish. Joseph squinted. Found himself at the end of a finger. A hard round helmet was pushed into his chest. He grasped it and instictively fitted it to his head.

Drums rolled.

Straddling the blunt muzzle of a fat brass cannon was a girl. She was painted and luminous and crooking her index finger. A second girl appeared, perhaps her twin, equally glittering. She took his hand and they clambered up to the cannon. A third girl appeared with a cape and a stool. She fastened the cape round his neck, a golden yellow lozenge, placed the stool before him and had Joseph step on it to much applause. The music rose to a cacophony. It was an escape or sorts to slide feet first into the inviting muzzle, which tilted thereafter toward the stars. Only his hands protruded and fitted to each then was a glove of outsized proportions made of soft cheese.

Everything went quiet.

His rectum tightened.

He smelled the familiar odour of gunpowder.

Rose. Rose. Rose. How much he hadn't thought about her. Weeks and months had passed and nought. It was the bitterness at the bottom of his heart, the confession he had yet to make, the regret he had yet to acknowledge. The woman that was his undoing. His mother had warned him of such.

Only she was aptly named, sweetly perfumed and several shades of luscious pink. The landlord's daughter to boot.

ii.

Life sat Samuel Bluck down for a quiet chat. Well not so much quiet as high pitched and whiny. However, Life's eponymous kiss-curl was all but unfurled, flopping like a baby combover, a sure sign of Life's seriousness in the matter.

'What the fuck are you doing?'

Bluck shrank inwardly. He had an enormous booze-induced headache.

'You're going off the rails!' Life shouted piercingly, and began battering him with a large pink cushion appeared out of nowhere.

Sam just wanted to fold up and cry.

'Aaaaaaarrrrrggggg-gggghhhhhh!' spake Life.

His head exploded, bone and brain impregnating the walls.

The relief was exceptional.

'I'm all you've got you know. You want me to wither away and die?' To make Life's point Life tugged at the waistband of Life's pink trousers, emphasizing their apparent looseness. This witnessed from jarring angles as Sam's eyeballs were hung one from the lightshade and the other tight up against a dead spider on the windowsill. Or was it dead? He could feel a scratching, see a blurred and hairy limb.

'Sort your shit out!" Life shrieked, tears streaming down Life's cherubic red cheeks. 'Or I'm leaving...'

Sam didn't know what to say. Sam couldn't say anything. He felt strangely guilty, but the guilt was attached to Gunner Rear who he'd recently fired from a cannon in Flanders. Joseph didn't know it yet but those cheeses would break his fall. He'd come down on the Isle of Wight, not smelling too good but neither in parts, hale and whole with only Monty Pythonesque vampire rabbits to contend with until he escaped to the mainland and fell into some seven league boots which would take him inexorably north.

And Skidmore? Bluck didn't worry too much about Skidmore Shuffledeck. He could take care of himself.

The spider had begun moving over his eyeball. Sam didn't even have the luxury of blinking. The horrible slow torture of it was as bad as any headache, he thought. Then he saw it had Davy Spine's face, Davy who's own life had ended under the no. 63.

'I shouldn't really tell you this,' whispered Dave the spider, 'but the fat pink guy has a point.'

But the fucker is always shitting on me.

'I know, mate.'

And kicking me in the nuts.

'That, too.'

Well?

'But he introduced your mum to your dad,' said Dave. 'He taught you how to tie your shoelaces. And besides.'

Yes?

He knew already. Bigger things than himself. The twins' birthday coming up for one. His flowering girls.

'I'll be down the pub later,' offered Dave, 'if you need me.'

For a moment he thought seriously about getting back with Bella. That was a different agenda though. He felt like the mouse in his wife's juggling claws, always had. He'd like to read the book of that sorry tale one day. So what was left? What remained? Great for anecdotes but ultimately calamatous internet dating?

Life snickered.

'Life to Samuel, come in Samuel.'

Scooping him up and tutting at the stain on the carpet. Patiently reassembling the jigsaw of his head.

'Are you beginning to see the picture?'

The many forms of opportunity, of which he could think of no examples.

Did he want a quiet life? he wondered. Dullness. Mediocrity. No, but neither did he wish to self-destruct \- accidents aside.

'Ah, I love this face!' squealed Life, pinching Sam's cheeks and kissing him, fragile yet thankfully bifocal.

You had to wade through the shit to get to the good stuff it seemed.

Seven

Does a stopped clock grow old?

The withered hands above the mantle were testament to age, but still right twice a sun cycle. They cared not for weeks, months or years, nor even days 'cept in the coincidental abstract. Skidmore had a lot of time for clocks, at least clocks of a mechanical heritage, cogs and gears and springs and weights engineered into a simple thing of simple beauty. Machines didn't know how to lie. Unfortunately they'd learned. When they'd learned was a matter of some debate, even among the machines themselves. Long before his time, however that might be judged.

'What are you thinking?'

'Nothing terribly original,' he confessed.

'Oh.'

Oh?

He'd thought of dismantling her, but lacked the tools; reassembly then a problem, and Skidmore was no butcher. Besides, what was there to learn? Her guardian or overseer, the flunky he'd met previous, would surely intervene. To what end? He wanted the machines' help but could not elicit it directly. Mangling Susan here might just send the wrong message. And he was no good to himself dead. Dead would involve a slow rebuild in a boneyard he couldn't remember, for obvious reasons, the whereabouts of. Complicated. As yet ungainly, not at all like a well oiled mechanism for distributing time.

They'd spent the afternoon fucking and making scones.

Skidmore felt no real urgency in his pursuit of Sara. He might want to get out of here - back to normal - as fast as he could, but that did not mean panic. He had all the time he needed, as such things are measured.

He might as well watch TV. Earth at the end of the 20th Century was pretty interesting. The Simpson's, too. He patted his gut and burped.

'Moving in?'

'Beer!'

'Very funny.'

'Nuts!'

'We need to go shopping.'

We?

It had started to snow. There was something about a city in the snow that enthralled him. He walked with his mouth open, much to Susan's chagrin, catching snowflakes on his tongue. She crunched ahead with him on an invisible leash. It would be impossible to lose her, he knew. The genie in her bottle was ever present. The streets were busy with evening shoppers. Cars thronged the road and advertisements either peeled wetly or glowed with LEDs. People flickered through the edges of his vision. Real people, fake people, people that didn't look like people at all. A few regarded him strangely, only there was nothing otherworldly unusual about Skidmore. He blended in nicely, which was more than could be said for the increasing number of vacant black shapes on his tail. Perhaps he alone saw them, like the shadows of ghosts, an incoming tide.

He caught up with Susan by a set of electric arcade doors. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him.

'...feel the terror, shuffledeck, feel it as i feel it, as only mordant souls can feel...'

Through her lips like Morse code.

'...join with me and bring your weight to the fight...'

The picture developed now. He'd been stumbling through it, awash in colours uncomfortable next to each other. He had no need to enlist the machines to his cause; they'd already come to him. What Sara's part in it was remained obscure, but she was neither flesh nor metal. By astonishingly underhand means he'd been recruited by the other side, the why and wherefores of it a mystery he might never solve. There was purpose to it, however. That was machine thinking. He was a means to an end, if doubtless not a popular one, for Skidmore had few loyalties and fewer friends. But just as Sara could go where he could not, a man of flesh, maybe Skidmore might venture where no construct could survive. And that delighted him. He kissed her and squeezed her arse. In seconds the black tide would envelop, perhaps snuffing his consciouness for good this time or catapulting him into some other time and place.

He waited nearly that long before running.

i.

Sam threw his arms up over the side of the pool and rested his chin on the cold tiles. For a moment this wasn't a metaphor, he was seven again and learning to swim, he was eleven and tying knots in his pyjama bottoms and inflating them to make a float, he was fourteen and overly body conscious, scared to turn up for the inter-house gala for which he'd been volunteered. He was a good swimmer, especially underwater. Bella would never go near a public pool. Her eyes would narrow and her teeth show as if she were about to hiss should he invite her along. The girls loved the water, splashing like a pair of excitable toads.

On the lilypad of the back seat they froze though, a pair of ten year olds quietened by loss, perhaps what seemed abandonment. All the way home he prayed they'd pass an ice-cream van, that he might somehow assuage the hurt, explain his pointless guilt with a Funny Feet or a Rocket. What their mother would tell them he had no idea. She might poison their hearts. She might say nothing. She loved her daughters, too. Any bitterness Sam felt would be kept for later.

Truth was he was an absorber. Hate wasn't on the cards, or not in the hands Bluck was dealt anyway. If that made him foolish then so be it, but he regarded women as bears, cuddly and unpredictable; no warmth without claws. Like most poets he scratched his head and celebrated them in verse. Like most men he craved for more. His dreams became increasingly haunted by tales of female duplicity, of evil-women-doing, cautionary vignettes full of honey traps and poisoned thighs, scandalous manipulation and tortuous bloodletting, the femmes involved dark and scheming, generations of them turning men on the spit, callously offering a cold shoulder before going home to a chocolate bar.

But he was in love. With those very thighs and shoulders, with all the soft hard parts, the indifference and the disdain. And yet strangely it got easier to be alone.

Life, however, had taught Samuel Bluck one thing about himself. He never did anything the easy way.

He sat down at his computer and did some writing. He wrote about Skidmore Shuffledeck's early years. Skidmore though seemed to have his own agenda and Bluck left him to it. He wrote anonymously about anonymous characters, facets of himself. He wrote bad poetry and he wrote nonsense. Anything to take his mind off this or that missed opportunity, be she blonde or brunette; his mounting debts, ex-wife.

He thought of ways to up the ante.

He thought maybe he'd died in 1982 and had yet to realize.

He thought about what to write next.

2001.

Or so the paper told him. He felt like he was catching up.

The girls were out playing. If the weather held he was charged with lighting the barbecue.

ii.

The juxtaposition of images, given an overall perspective of change, made the city alien.

It was obvious he would have to reinvent his conceptual language.

Lights blurred, sounds stumbled over one another. A head on collison. Glass shattered and metal deformed, flesh brusied somewhere inside as he and the girl contravened the usual momentum of the urban landscape. No time to think or speak. Skidmore had been feeling a little out of shape but his younger self here running for his life proved as lively as a frog in a frying pan. He bounced off brick and metal, all the while expecting his hair to be parted by lead, Susan not so much in tow as riding shotgun, her expression calm, her body reacting in ways that would perhaps surprise a meat girl, flexing his lips with a spilt second of amusement as they dodged in front of a bus and skated the aluminium slope between escalators. Thereafter - as seemed fitting to Skidmore who had seen so many Hollywood movies, both waking and sleeping - escaping - at least for now - by means of an underground train.

'Shit'

'My thoughts exactly.'

'Could we possibly exchange some information?'

'Fire away.'

'How far up does this go?'

'As far as necessary.'

'An internal or external matter?'

Pause.

'I'm not privileged to say.'

He should leave her and continue alone. Only continue where?

'North.'

'North?'

'There's an island. That's as much as I can tell you.'

Meaning as much as she knew.

'How do I get there?'

'Same way you get anywhere.'

Travel.

He took most of her money and left her on a platform. Her breath hung in the air like a map.

There were no shortage of kidnappers, bountyhunters or assassins in the galaxy. He'd even flirted himself. Neither was this the first time Skidmore Shuffledeck had had a price on his head. Perhaps that was over-romanticising the fact, but it amused him to do so, as it amused him to mantle and dismantle interplanetary craft. Nothing could match an explosion in space. To be in the midst of one was even better, as long as you were suitably suited up. Skidmore had spent three months once drifting (accelerating and decelerating) in the wake of a fine mini combustive event, sleeping near death to conserve air and thinking his way through any number of problems ship and life related. He meditated now, retired to a barstool after filling his younger less rounded belly with Chinese from an irresistable 'eat as much as you like for $25' buffet. In truth he'd nearly walked past, hands in pockets, collars turned up, but the lurid orange and red glow of a dragon had hooked his eye and he'd squinted across at the window

What was north? It was the sort of question, ironically, he would expect Sara to answer.

How many islands? Which one?

If Sara was there then he ought to be able to locate it. He was atuned to her. Not for the first time he told himself to forget what the machines wanted with him and concentrate on getting himself and Sara out. Lord Technical - who he always pictured as having a clock for a head, albeit a quasi-dimensional nuclear one - could square up with Skidmore another time, and vice versa. Sitting here on his arse though wasn't exactly tantamount to travel.

'You okay, soldier?'

Skidmore looked askance. A middle-aged transvestite waggling a cigarette between two creased and painted fingers as if expecting a light.

He patted his coat pockets for matches and shrugged.

From her handbag she pulled a Zippo the size of a pack of cards and flipped it's polished metal lid. The case shone dully, marked as if with runes. A calloused thumb poised on the heavy brass wheel a moment, making sure of his attention before flicking down. Sparks flew like comets. There was a delicious petrol smell and then a yellow flame sprung from a blue one cast the pair of them within the intimate ball of its candescence. She touched her cigarette to the flame and drew on it.

'I'm no soilder,' he said.

'Of course you are,' replied the man in the red dress, four inch heels and black wig. 'We all have out wars to fight, no?'

The Zippo's lid snapped shut and he blinked in the afterglow. She placed it on the bar and the runes appeared to dance.

'You like my lighter?'

'It's unusual.'

'Keep it. I've hundreds at home. Presents from sailors...'

'Thanks.'

'So, be a darling and buy a girl a drink.'

Her name was Brian. She was from Holland, she told him, but had landed in this lowly borough of Montreal a year past by way of Finland, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and Disko.

'With a kay.'

'Disko?'

'It's an island,' Brian said, flicking ash.

The lighter winked. The runes had coalesced by now into a legend, a faint motif, a woman's breasts and the name Gugson's.

'I was a madame, yes,' Brian confessed. 'I pimped.'

'Sex On The Beach?'

'Thank-you, thank-you...'

And so it went.

The spring rolls came back on him but little else. The night was otherwise quiet. In the dark he rubbed his fingers over the embossed lighter case and marvelled at the pictures cast in his skull, a kind of sensory braille; images of frozen wastes, flamethrower tennis, haggis bobbing and, perplexingly, the hanging of a monkey. Perhaps that was too much scotch, but there was a very real context to these events, the island that had become his goal: Disko.

Brian wandered through, naked and sagging, perhaps forgetting Skidmore was there slumped on the sofa.

He took a long reassuring piss.

'Nite, big man.'

Nite.

Skidmore went up to the roof and sat among the pigeons. The sun came up. On a neighbouring roof, partly constructed and far removed from water, floated a boat. It sailed on the dawn tide, he saw, liquid rays under its keel like jostling currents, golden waves of rich new light poured forth from the distant orb. An explosion in space. Beautiful.

He had near two thousand miles to traverse. In space a heartbeat, on land a lot of walking.

By air, by sea?

Underground perhaps.

An escalator, part shiny, part dull, bruised aluminium and unseen underparts, vaguely sexual, motile, hidden workings like a secret downward agenda. The joke being they sneaked back to the top again, those rubber-rubbed steps, smudged by countless heels and coated with sweat, blood, chocolate...every drip of mankind endlessly rotated...like a spit, like a planet.

As he descended into the earth Skidmore fingered the lighter in his pocket. He wore two coats, a military jacket under a parka, and carried a bag over his shoulder with more socks than he'd ever seen or would likely employ, t-shirts and underpants. Hardly equipped as an Arctic explorer but Brian had done him proud, kissing his cheek and winking as he left, full of scrambled eggs and the best coffee he'd encountered in ages. He wore no watch and strived to think outside of time. There were walls before him. To left and right. Above him ceilings and below him floors. There were alligators in the sewers, and crazed men with shotguns. There was an underworld and his purpose was to descend, thereafter progressing north, disbelieving in obstacles and making light of whatever danger came his way. It was being a child again.

iii.

Flares convince the night it's day in part, but their argument is thinly woven and soon the dark crashes back in. There's the stench of seal blubber and diesel, old cheese and cheap vodka. Interchangeable odours in fact, one pretty much like another. The aftermath of a screening at Gugson's. Ghost Dog: the way of the Samurai.

I float through my own smoke thinking of the cold biting at my toes, the gnawing in my stomach and the impossibility of escape. We are locked here, us Diskoites, fated to play out a predictable scenario, the endgame unfolding even as snow melts under piss at my feet.

There are still ships in the harbour it's rumoured. Larger vessels than before, with greater appetites. The machines that feed them coal work flat out and the humans that oil them struggle to keep up. Nobody understands what's going on and that's just fine. Nobody knew beforehand either. New boss, same as the old boss, right? But if these ships are only rumours? A raiding party from A compound had earlier flattened part of the perimetre fence and made off with two snowcats and a pallet of margarine.

Sebastian Ganahied is holding a council of war, to which I'm privy, although I hold my peace, fascinated by the madness, the obviousness of the folly.

He's a baker by trade, a master of the crossaint, here now cajolling half a dozen disgruntled miners to a get them before they get us rally the troops attack at dawn (sic) take matters into our own hands strike while the iron is hot full scale assault that if it weren't for the fact of my inebriation would seem ludicrous, if not doomed to failure. Not that Sebastian cares, who has a hardon, and access to firearms and plentiful amounts of local currency skunk from The Secret Greenhouse.

Fuck, I exhale, and wallow sideways.

Follow the leader.

The next I wake up it's forgotten, at least by me, but there's a strange air and an eerie silence about the camp and I soon realize the quietude is down to a shortage of human beings and a dimming of lights. There's illumination out beyond the fallen perimetre though, sporadic gunfire, cracks, bangs and small colourful explosions reminiscent of Guy Fawke's back home. It was a matter of some pride when I was a kid, the size and fierceness of one's local bonfire. Few regulations and over-zealous local authority figures back then, just eager boys and scavenged wood, a Guy dragged through the streets, door to door for small change before being burnt in effigy atop the clumsily stacked inferno, kids with sparklers stood about, fireworks going off, parents swigging beer. I hope no one is being burnt for this cause, whatever its manifesto, save perhaps Ganahied and his supporters whose fingers could use scorching that sense might prevail. I have friends over there, after all. Things need to heal. Yet fester first?

There's a snort, almost equine. I spin around but see nothing. It's a sound I've heard before, I think, but can't recall where.

The penguin orchestra will be performing live this Sunday, Chilly Willy on vocals, requests welcome, no refunds.

Normalcy. Lies south it is said, a world removed. Tea brewed and board games scrutinized. The dead soon forgotten. A war in miniature really; best erased from memory, like a regrettable evening on the town. Disko is all the reality folk here require, the more inquistive of us poking our heads under the earth and plodding out to the docks but unable to discern anything of import: coal and more coal, layered and sliced. A month passes, and then another. Winter takes hold and the tea flows, chess and backgammon vie for popularity and a stash of Cuban cigars is discovered, which leads to several weeks of debate as claims of ownership are heard and dismissed until it seems everyone has had their turn.

South.

I can only remember my youth. Disko perhaps a home for the aged which in turn is a backdrop for my delusions, sitting drooling, tubed and bagged. I invent this place, its desperation and shenanigans, the fatuous detail of its daily soap. Perhaps I am tolerated as mad, whether in one world or another, the too warm retirement castle or the too cold alien landscape. For surely this can't be Earth, not the Earth I took for granted as a lad, that I swam through and clambered over en route to a life. What? Displaced? It grew harder and harder to think there was anything beyond the island, even beyond the compound, other than Gugson's. Soon perhaps we all might forget we're on an island at all. The world will have grown so far away it will in fact seem to have shrunk, to have collapsed in on itself. We will be like the survivors of a crashed spaceship marooned half way across the universe.

I start to write things down but I cross out as much as I scribe. There are no two clocks now that agree, no satellite input or ringing phones. We are truly deserted. As winter gives way to spring, however, none of it, of this, seems remarkable.

iv.

Vincent looks over his shoulder at the drawing. It's not a great likeness of Tullulah he knows but he thinks he's got the cheekbones right. Beyond that the girl is a swirl of pencil. Her hair looks like the wind is permanently in it and her eyes bulge as if about to pop from their sockets and roll into his lap. He makes to kiss her but she bites his chin.

Vince laughs.

Soon they're underway, the tractor lugging the trailers along the road. Brutus sits with his father, unable to contain the thoughts in his skull, thoughts Jones knows all too well.

'Tell me about my mother.'

'Have I not told you before?'

Yes, many times; only the memory never seems real.

'She was a girl I met whilst fishing.'

'Fishing?'

Jone smiles. 'Okay, knitting.'

'Knitting?'

'Like she would say, "You knit planets".'

'How so?'

'She thought I made the simple elaborate, that I complicated the mundane.'

'And did you?'

'Of course! Life is in the detail. But she was of the belief that all men made hard work of all things, that we couldn't just enjoy life, that we're predisposed to do everything the hard way. We can't just accept the world as it's presented, we have to reinvent it, make it anew in the most contrived and artificial manner.'

And what more difficult a way to fashion a planet than knitting.

Shortly thereafter they come to a toll bridge over a river. No one can remember the structure from previous transits and it is a matter of heated debate whether they are even on the right road. Dronch spits in the dirt at the edge of the highway and scuffs the toe of his boot over the damp patch while others, his father among them, look for a way round.

Perched on the roof of the tractor cab Brutus can make out a figure sat in a booth reading a magazine.

Wandering back from the bridge, hands in pockets, is Elastic Eddy.

'Fifty.'

'Fifty?'

'Per trailer...'

There is much argument and commotion.

'How many are there?'

'They're bandits! We don't have that sort of money.'

'I only saw one man, a little ginger fella.'

'Armed?'

'Who can say?'

Dronch is smiling.

Faraway Jones paces. The last thing he wants is this to become a leadership issue. Most are looking to him but others are already shaking their heads. His father looks tired and vulnerable, Brutus thinks. He won't be held hostage, but neither will he condone violence. Yes, they could simply cross the bridge and refuse the toll, resist if they must. Perhaps the man in the booth is alone after all. Or perhaps not.

Brutus decides to find out.

The river is pristine, cold clear water running over shingle, perhaps two feet deep. The tractor could make it across, but it is the descent from the road, the softness of the banks that form the real barrier. The tractor would most likely sink. They have no choice, either the bridge or turn back, find another road, another direction perhaps. He ambles away from the group, invisible, unseen as he's practiced more than once. He blends with the landscape. Only Tullulah winks, the motion of her dark lash sending a ripple of air across his face. It's near noon and hot. No fooling that girl, but the rest of his extraordinary extended family are oblivious as Brutus slips toward the stone and metal bridge. It's span is a hundred feet or so, cast iron holding itself up, narrow and punctuated midway by a wooden booth painted the same pale blue as the box metal structure itself. The bridge seems to offer him this information as if eager to share the manner and method of its construction. He ponders that, and supposes he's tuned out of the real world, the world of man, and into the world of...what? Metal? Mechanical things? Gazing back at the tractor it appears alive, alive as much as it's driver, Vince, half hanging out the cab door with a cigarette between his lips. He smokes, it smokes. Their relationship is one of symbiosis, neither fully existing without the other. Maybe that's how he sees himself and Tullulah. So different, and yet. Something moves at the water's edge. A dark shape like a large eel. Brutus creeps down to the river, hearing it's every ripple. He can almost see the rolling motions of the water, its myriad eddies and currents turning like machine parts. He's twenty feet from the bridge, itself no more than that wide, but its underside is black, heavy with noon shadow.

He can feel himself aging, up to his ankles in cold liquid. His eyes tumble into the void and his body follows.

Come rushing, my friends, to where the wind strums the water and the rocks sweat great globular melons of light; come rushing into the fall's sweet, cool embrace. Watch through its tears the buffeting of spring leaves and orbiting insects. See through the flashing lenses a fractured creation made whole. Experience the heady delirium and be refreshed by this sparkling cascade's ordinary, peace-filled, magnificent reason. Observe; all the water observes, the passage of time; time caught but not overtaken; time held in seasonal transience; time in the shape of stream and glacier. Come rushing, my friends, with positive abandon, and give to this instrument, reassembled from shattered clouds and bounced perspiration, the freedom of your hearts...or if not your hearts, then...

'Smell the fear.'

It is the beach at reality.

Coke cans and condoms, every detritus of humankind choking a metal grate, an underground portcullis.

Brutus raises it easily and wades on through the freezing water, numb from the shoulders down yet singleminded in his endeavour. Lights pick him out, seemingly random beams that strobe and flicker as if determined to burrow into his skull. He can hear distant laughter, music. A warm breath coaxes him forward. Shapes float up ahead, boats of every size, dark yet illuminated, their windows merging into one large vessel.

He emerges naked from the water, clambering a rope ladder to the deck and hiding briefly behind a pile of luggage. There seems to be no one around, the voices, the sounds of man and machine all coming from below, reverberating through wood and metal, speaking to him via windlasses and funnels. He feels peculiarly vulnerable and after scouting back and forth breaks open a suitcase and, perhaps not surprisingly, finds himself an entire wardrobe. Soon he's wearing a suit and tie, shoes but no socks, and thinking he's little to lose finds himself poised businesslike at the head of some stairs. Laughter from below, clinking glasses. His stomach drives him down.

It's a party, everyone smartly attired, waiters with trays sidling between an uncommon collection of beings. Brutus helps himself to unidentifiable morsels, discreetly swallowing - or so he hopes - countless small baked items and sugary fancies. He feels himself grow in his suit and pauses a moment, not wanting to breathe fire. None of the assembled pay him much regard, however, so after a moment he continues to gorge. A string quartet accompanies. There are card tables, a roulette wheel.

The waiters are robots, he realizes. Some of the guests, too.

v.

God made the Earth. The moon and stars are of His manufacture. The sun is His pulpit and the continents His pews. And Disko? A loose tile I think, or perhaps a drain cover. Anyway, if Romario - among others - is to be believed, things have begun to crawl forth, to leak upon the world's visage and besmirch it with filth.

'An eight foot rabbit?'

He shrugs.

It's not the rodent's stated height that I find difficult to swallow; afterall Romario's dogs grew as big before disappearing. Slyly butchered I've always thought, but some insist they floated off like helium balloons.

'There are no rabbits on Disko.'

'So you say, doc, only...'

Only?

'Magerty has the pelt, over at number 36. He shot and skinned the beast himself. They had a big barbecue and everything.'

The evidence is compelling, I agree.

'Sounds more like a polar bear,' I say, to Romario's disgust, as we all know the ill-famed perimetre fence was erected with polar bears in mind and not one within 500 miles. 'Or a hearth rug. Did it have a pocket watch, this rabbit?'

'Ahhhh.'

Perhaps I'll go see Marvin Magerty, only he's of that bunch that have taken to wearing cowboy hats and spurs, and if I'm to die here on this increasingly mysterious island then I've a long list of better ways to go than being mistaken for a giant omnivore.

'Put the kettle on, Romario.'

It's unusually warm. The compound is all but void of snow and everything seems to be at an angle as if sunk slightly. Another couple of degrees and all might vanish below the surface. Swallowed. Absorbed.

I'm strangely discomforted. Having read everything I can lay my hands on, great novels to shipping charts, I suddenly find the library is empty, that I need to venture farther afield to glean fresh words and get my fix of adjectives. I keep this to myself as it's kind of embarrassing, but whereas there are those revelling in day trips to the coast and seal bashing I'm more with the peek out the curtains brigade. I need to empty my head I reckon, but the booze and the dope never seem to dry up. I've become an inward when what I really want to be is an outward. Surely I was an outward before? Had to be. Taken a knock on the head. That's it. Maybe another such will right me.

Romario plonks a steaming mug down on a monster aspirin coaster and I bound out the door.

There's greenery. Nothing too unusual this close to Greenland this time of year but there seems to be plantlife everywhere. Those jokes about there being enough grass to build a golf course have taken on a whole new meaning. Flowers, too, big white ones with bright yellow faces. People are smiling and going about their lives like frontiersmen from a TV series. All that's missing is the smell of freshly cut wood, the sound of hammers battering nails and the frolicking of lambs as a backdrop to the new church being raised.

Somebody hands me a flier.

GARDEN FETE SAT, it reads, CLOWNS, TOMBOLA, FRUIT & VEG SHOW.

Oh, my.

Something brushes my leg. I could swear it's a cat, a fat ginger one.

Fireworks explode.

A snail makes slow progress up a sheer face of aluminium.

I'm nearly run down by a bicycle.

vi.

Ankle deep in freezing water Skidmore strained his eyes, putting his faith in an apple core that bobbed erraticaly. The docks might have been a better idea but he remained convinced of inner workings, of this not being a planet at all. Deep, somewhere deep lay answers; perhaps Sara, too, ensconced on cushions, regalling her host with stories, tales of thin galaxies and fat moons, hollow stars and invisible enemies. The apple core sank momentarily before choosing tunnel number three. He sloshed after, virtually blind, progressing by the light of his own grim determination.

Somewhere, The Rockett Heel Bar yawed, which he felt in his soul. It was an empty vessel.

He waded through stench as well as liquid, a turd orchestra whose nasal crushing extremes threatened his sanity. It was like prog rock in a chicken barn, designed to subdue and deafen, performing for all the wrong reasons, a sensory catastrophe he would just have to get through, or die trying.

There was a light up ahead, a pin-prick in the gloaming, surely more than a lost torch or a stain on his retinae.

His guts spasm'd. He'd lost the bag some ways back he realized. The light came from a lantern on a pole held by a figure swathed in a dark cape in a row boat.

'And that's all I remember,' he told the ambassador. 'Until you guys picked me up.'

He'd said fuck it and hit the punch.

Waking up under a table he filled two empty wine bottles with slightly yellow piss, a tricky manoeuvre accomplished as if practised but don't try this at home kids. From beneath the white veil of a tablecloth he could see one or two feet, a flash of white heels stomping off, voices drowned by a vacuum cleaner. It was kind of a scary moment in fact, having zipped himself up, feeling at once conspicuous and anonymous. Where from here? his brain screamed. But Skidmore had no idea how he'd got here in the first place.

He was on a ship. He felt it in his gums. An ocean-going vessel. Underground? That opened a few avenues of inquiry. And clock faces, a lavish ball, gowns and mechanisms, all manner of guests engaged in polite conversation, political manoeuvring and, doubtless, the pursuit of wealth.

Which could only mean one thing.

Only the one thing eluded Skidmore.

What did he know?

Their were machine thumbprints all over this scenario. He was, uncomfortably, the puppet of machines, his presence of use to high ranking machines, a tool arrayed to fix a problem, an in-house affair. They couldn't or wouldn't move against one of their own, he thought, so here was Shuffledeck the emergency plumber. As ever though, the nature of the leak escaped him. He puffed his cheeks out. A hand raised the tablecloth obscuring him and he smiled.

'May we vacuum under the table, sir?'

Skidmore excused himself, he hoped, diplomatically.

The ship was a warren of corridors, pipes snaking overhead, carpet underfoot. He was wearing a tuxedo. The lighter weighed heavily in an inside pocket but his relief in finding it there was even more tangible. He was still drunk, with no knowledge of the hour, or of what corresponding hour was in use to starboard, port or stern. He felt perhaps Sara would disapprove, but then caught a glimpse of her disappearing round a corner. He gave chase, only at each turn to glimpse no more than a flash of calf and skirt. No woman at all really. A spectre. Which was as it should be. But it was obvious she was leading him somewhere.

He rattled down metal steps, feeling more and more at home as he descended into the guts of the vessel. There was the smell of diesel oil and the hum of electricity. The hairs on the back of his hands pricked up. His nose twitched. Strangely, there was no crew. Skidmore explored: a chartroom, a galley. Metal hatches. Engines deep in the bowels, lumpy paint and fraying wires, a veneer of oily grime. And a sound. Echoing. Metallic. Buried.

vii.

Life squirmed on Bluck's settee like Life had a horse chesnut stuck in the crack of Life's arse. Sam pondered what metaphor this might echo.

It was one of those long uncomfortable evenings with nothing good on the telly.

Life was uncomplaining and largely quiet, however.

Strange.

Portentuous even.

Sam was smoking a cigar, the wonderful profusion of it enfusing the room, stinging his tongue and exhausting his lungs.

Life farted and the horse chestnut took out the TV tube.

Phew.

According to The Book Of Boys' Own Desires the three greatest satisfactions in life were, in no particular order, new socks, a new toothbrush and a new pussy. Sam had to agree, and read on.

He was brought up short, however, by the manifestation of the girl in the black dress, who looked upon him with disappointment.

She said nothing. She didn't have to.

He put aside childish ways, abashed.

Davy Spine followed on her heels, careful not to get too close.

'What I wouldn't give...'

'Dave. News from the underworld?'

'No news is good news,' he chirruped.

Sam turned over and went to sleep.

The girl came again in his dreams. She'd haunted him for years, ever since that first spilling of his seed inside a vagina. She disguised herself as cats and hid in the back of his fridge. She didn't have a name. She had dark eyes.

She made him think. Sam didn't like thinking much. It made his head hurt. It didn't come naturally. He could muse all day long, happily ruminate, ponder till the cows came home. Thinking though wasn't something he did.

His ex wife would tell you as much.

And more besides.

Like that time he left the kids at Burger King.

Forgot to pick her up from the airport.

Gave her favourite shoes to the charity shop.

Turned up drunk...on many occasions.

Ran over the neighbour's dog.

Was arrested for shoplifting.

'That was mistaken identity!'

Blew £843 on power tools that were then stolen from the back of the car after he'd fallen asleep in the bath.

Quit his job.

Set fire to the kitchen.

Started a fight in the queue at the Post Office.

'Now that's just not true. It was the guy in the hat.'

Lied repeatedly.

'Wha...?'

Soiled himself.

'Okay, enough!'

So who was the girl? Not his conscience. She was the one who led him astray, the mischievious lighthouse that guided him onto the rocks. Or perhaps he had it all wrong and she was Ariadne. The fuckups were all Bluck's own as he couldn't think things through. Yes, that made sense.

Goodnight.

Abandoned on an ice floe like Frankenstein.

Shot in the head like Bambi's mum.

Left for dead in the jungle.

Falsely accused.

Taking one last exhausted leap over the Tweed but falling short of the bank, being eyeballed by salmon, scrabbling ashore and finding himself breathless at the feet of a woman in orange Wellington boots.

You had to feel sorry for Joseph Rear really.

He spat out a terrapin that had been flushed down a toilet.

She offered him crisps.

viii.

In the moment of darkness he reaches all, flits through the heads of the assembled and makes off with images and thoughts. Damson filled with fear. His father staring at a blank, accusing wall. Elastic Eddy itching for trouble. Dronch clenched and vacant, making a show of what little he has. Tullulah...vanished, the echo of her confusing, dancing, floating, random like a butterfly. He leaves them behind. He falls headlong into the void. Shapes rush up to greet him.

His head swells.

He's face to face with the troll and unsure what to do.

The troll quietly snickers.

Tick-tock.

On the bridge amid machinery, guest of the captain, luminous eyes strobing over dials, uniforms worn with stiff authority.

He reckons the crew to be around a hundred, perhaps three times as many passengers.

Loula Belle, black and white beneath a continent.

The face of the troll eludes Brutus. However hard he tries he just can't pick out it's features. That he'll recognize it again some day he has no doubt.

'In approximately one hour we will come upon the first of the scheduled entertainments,' elucidates the first mate, speaking into a brass funnel. 'All eyes to starboard!'

Eight

Giorgo, the base orangutan, is sitting under a parasol winding up mechanical elf children and setting them off down the slope. A few make it as far as the cliff a kilometre hence, but Giorgio's game appears to be to wind them sufficiently that they come to a stop as near the edge as possible. Small puppetlike bodies litter the middle distance, a few upright and motionless, most on their sides, big brass keys in their backs and permanent smiles on their rosy-cheeked faces. No telling how many lie smashed on the rocks, battered by the high summer waves.

It seems a perfectly ordinary thing for an orangutan to be doing so I leave him to it.

Grass skiers sail by, using the fallen automatons as slalom poles. There's a large cast iron bathtub in the shape of a penguin, the man in it unknown to me. He's immersed in slush, blood and piss stained. I trouble him for matches before continuing up the rise, pushing my sunglasses back up my nose and congratulating myself on foregoing socks this morning. At the summit I survey the distant seascape, a paleish blue like the sky. Wildflowers populate the foreground. Behind is a trough in the landscape like a timeworn crater, a dent in the earth softened by thousands of passing years. A grass bowl with jutting rocks. No, rabbits, white bunnies straight off Easter cards, pure like the driven snow that has been driven off the isle of Disko. A new hegemony holds thrall, and it's one from the subtle jokery of hell.

It's hot anyway.

I continue my hike with not much in mind but a cold mountain stream.

It's the day before the Big Show and I've decided to remove myself from the vicinity. Traipsing without direction I wander over hill and down glen, never far it seems from human involvement - here a croquet match, there an abandoned mine shaft - all the while filling my mental notebook with gems such as, two nights removed, Yanuck Crowshack's attempt at a balloon flight to the mainland, his vessel constructed of seal bladders and powered by no less than 3300 AA batteries. A brave yet inevitably futile enterprise without a working compass.

Not that Greenland is invisible. It just keeps moving, like the lumpen train of a dress dragged down cellar steps, receding into the dark.

We'll speak not of it, ruminates the herd.

It's clear to me I'm being watched, spied on by unseen eyes. Tiny periscopes mark my passing, popping up briefly from behind rocks and sneaking a peak under the fluffy skirts of grounded gulls. I ignore them for now but there will come a time when I chase down the prying orbs and demand answers from the owners of those eyes. Laughing, I take a piss and invite all to witness the pink hue of my cock.

I've a flask of whiskey and a packet of mints.

Tomorrow's fruit & veg exposition has turned deadly serious. Leeks have been uprooted, others vandalised. Romario's resplendent tomatoes are under round-the-clock guard. There's rumour of a giant watermelon, easily the weight of a man. Guano is at a premium and all silver polish and red ribbon has been requisitioned. I take a glug and chase it with a mint. For a moment, knocking my head back, I lose all track of the sun in the sky.

Up the escarpment I go, down the other side, slip-sliding on shale. Hither a courting couple go bareback, his arse thumping, her tits rolling. Thither lesbians run barefoot with huge butterfly nets, laughing as they capture one another, pausing to wave.

I fish out the stub of a cigar and strike a damp match off the rusted throat latch of an upended hollow metal horse, one of it's up-pointing legs broken away and bullet holes in its tail.

My smoke sails away like its soul.

There are others like it scattered about the broadening valley. Darkened steel equine statues in various postures of frozen demise, most damaged in some way, impacted, ruptured through, like this was an uneven battle, the enemy ranging greater firepower. No cavalrymen though. Fractured stirrups, snapped bridles, a polished whip, but not a rider anywhere, whole or in part.

The grass grows longer as the land flattens out. Squint and it could be a savanna, antelope pricking their ears and lions sidling through the dry growth in search of a meal. I peer over the top of my sunglasses and sure enough there's a grazing beast out there, its brownish outline smudged, disappearing from view as soon as it's seen, like a survivor from the debacle above. The soft inner being of a horse, a truer ghost than my cigar smoke, armour sloughed and mane flying as it melds with the horizon.

Disko.

i.

A drop of water, last motile in 1437, hangs precipitously above a cavernous void, lost in dark, expectant, swelling with warmth like a newborn. A universe is reflected in it's small case, a universe unseen as yet by man. This drop has passed through time to the here and now, perched and poised on the verge of potential, liquid for the first time in centuries and at any moment to fall, to spin downward toward a destiny that waits to be unfurled. It shivers. It quakes, the minuteness of its being in blunt contrast to the magnificence of its debut below. Time itself takes a moment out, holds its breath, pauses.

There is a painful silence, experienced through the Earth. All shifts. The world contracts in parts and expands in others, cracks, the fracture enough to jolt reality and expedite the moment.

A drop of water.

Trembles.

Falls.

Forms a perfect sphere while everything beyond it flexes, convulses, is reformed and remade.

Falls toward the centre, straight and true.

Comes rushing...

There was a series of detonations, like a broadside or a cannonade. The air warped and pulsed with sound, forcing Skidmore off his feet and all but crushing him against a bulkhead. For a moment he was back in the toilet, Hawkwind winding up the encore, noise burbling through his body, brain liquified and vision blanked. Cold water snatched at his limbs and his head rocked. A spider in a bathtub. The plughole loomed.

Deep in the bowels of the ship he loosened his bow-tie, squinted through the tumultuous assault and spotted a stairway.

Metal groaned. Lights extinguished briefly, strobed back to life. Hot air passed over him like dragon's breath, enriching his senses and pulling him forward even as it repelled.

Skidmore made the stair.

There was smoke, the stench of burnt diesel, the aftermath of spent coal. The ship lurched to port. It's bow went down. Perhaps they'd struck an iceberg, he thought, grappling his way, the disorientation nothing new to him. It was like being in void, weightless, no up or down to worry about, only forward and back, the progress he made sometimes underwater, sometimes through otherwise impenetrable dark, following the thread connecting his being to his one true, unknowable love. Sara lost somewhere, Shuffledeck ever loyal, captain and crew, stretching across the reach to the farthest star.

A fire extinguisher glanced off his shoulder, attached to it half a man, upper torso and part skull, no telling if mechanised.

He pushed on, ever deeper. The engines had died and their echo drowned. The darkness swirled, random colours interceding, flashes of emergency lighting and as yet unsmothered fires. It was chaos, and Skidmore revelled in it, bouyed by his own momentum as he tackled ladders and hatches, descending as if into a labyrinth of chill watery disdain. He could hold his breath for hours, although doing so would negate his purpose. But there were still pockets of air and he filled his greedy lungs, gorging on oxygen and starving the flames. The ship was sinking he knew. It didn't matter why. He had simply to find, and find he did in a battered hold, the hull breached here, metal rent, blossomed outward like an opened flower. He swam for the opening, the last light dying, and made it through into open water, thereafter fighting the sinking vessel's gravity as it rolled inevitably down.

'...feel the dry breath of failure shuffledeck and dare not to inhale, slip from view beneath the cold blanket of despair and rest forever among the scorned...'

He broke the surface and floated on his back gazing up not at stars but glinting dark balloons.

A projectile passed nearby, fizzing wetly. A second and third. He wasn't sure whether it was debris from the ship tumbling back post explosion or someone was taking potshots at him. Best not to linger though, and to that end he spun over backward, feet together, swimming under the surface, far from streamlined in a torn and charred tuxedo.

He met the shore, clumsily throwing an arm over smooth cold stone. Scrabbling from the water he sat and shivered, running over the past day or so in his head, far from convinced he was alive at all. He had blithely supposed his purpose here was mundane, that he was in no real danger, merely suffering the consequences of machinations he did not care to understand. He was indestructible, right? He was his younger self and fully cognizant of an older version, successful as Skidmore measured such things there amongst the stars. He had simply to figure out what he was meant to do and the pieces would fall into place, he'd find - or locate - Sara and be on his way. Only now he wasn't so cocksure. Misadventures were a byword for life, but they could still kill you.

And then he saw the light.

Bursting. Spinning.

He thrashes blindly and sinks.

Guttering, reeling, convulsing, he vomits fire and radiates a baleful moan. It echoes deep, gathering about him as he slips from one medium to another, water to air, filling his expanded lungs and gushing heat.

Tullulah smirks, her lips squeezed together like red cabbage leaves, not so much breaking his heart as peeling it like an onion.

'Well?'

'I think it needs some work.'

Brutus re-attaches his thumbs and sits crossed legged.

'Don't be like that,' she chides.

'What?'

'Despondent. You should never sulk.'

Easy for her to say he thinks.

She plucks a long blade of grass and knots it repeatedly, making a bracelet.

'My mother's dying. She has cancer. My father doesn't know. She thinks I don't know either but I know everything.'

It will crush him.

'I can't bear it, you know? The waiting.'

'What will you do?'

'Not sure. I may have to go away...'

Drowning. It's a constant theme. He kicks against it and secures a next breath. There's a cliff face, which he sees as an entrance gate, steps leading to a new world. Brutus is reinvigorated and clambers upward, glimpsing behind an impossible scene, the dimensions of which his eyes have difficulty containing, the overwhelming blackness given substance by globular patches of incandescence, myriad shapes afloat, both on the water and in the air. He shakes his head and climbs.

'By my wooden leg,' Vince says.

A ginger man with matches.

Skidmore trailed the creature, a mouse after cheese, the void to his back forgotten as he picked his way gingerly up the slippery face. Out there was kilometres of hidden ocean, deep underground, a continent overhead whose lake bottoms leaked moisture. Ahead was a warren of tunnels, mostly dark, plentiful opportunity to lose himself, the lighter he bore warm and heavy, eager to uncover detail, yet a finite resource.

He was half blind anyway, and in pursuit of fire, making a tunnel entrance and progressing thereafter through the very roots of a world he had yet to acknowledge as planetary, adhering to the belief this was some proximate, an idea of Earth, one of many engendered for no other purpose than hollidaying, a belief given substance by the fact that the Earth had not been seen in two hundred years, a memory faded, slipped from space/time like a coin through a pocket hole.

Or maybe this was it after all.

Well into the oily distance small lanterns hang, some from poles, others from hooks, strings of dull beads spiralling away like galaxies. He's past a thousand and still they come, tiny regular markers along a black corridor irregular in both shape and temperature.

The pain in his head subsides with each step. The rock beneath undulates like the throat of some gargantuan beast into whose gut he gradually descends.

He's reminded of a time he was convinced the world was alive, occasionally felt moving underfoot, breathing softly as if hibernating.

He's reminded of many things.

Caroline's inner workings, for one, the metal buried deep he once proudly nudged with his penis.

An exotic fruit, flesh grown round the metal branch of her spine.

He hears something behind him and glances back. The distantmost lights are winking out, darkness rushing toward him. It's like losing consciousness, being subsumed, suffocated...

Those ahead remain lit, but soon the dark tide will overwhelm.

Brutus thinks about running.

He's back under the bridge again, wrestling with the horror there. No place to panic.

He imagines his father, Faraway cooking breakfast. Mushrooms on toast this morning.

'Come on - eat up!'

Brutus frowns. 'Dad?'

'Hmmm...' Distantly paying attention.

'That man we found, the one dead in the car.'

'What about him?'

'He'd shot himself, hadn't he.'

Jones looks askance. Wiping his hands on his pinny he sits down at the wobbling table, the tractor's reverberations echoing through each trailer, this the last like a rattler's tail.

'Go on.'

'There was a gun. Dronch took it.'

'You saw him?'

'Yes.'

'And?'

Brutus isn't sure he wants to say anything. But it's his father. 'He might use it against you...take us north.'

'Dronch has been promising mutiny for years,' comes the dismissive reply. 'He's a broken man.'

'How do you mean?'

This is new.

Faraway gets up, and reaching on top of a cupboard brings down a battered old tea caddy.

'Ask your mother.'

There is no darkness, only an absence of things to illuminate. Space, being largely composed of light, is - as Hawkwind would have it - a paradox.

Skidmore laughed and marched on. Nothing much ever stopped him. Momentum was everything.

He could smell distant burning and increasingly soot infiltrated his nasal passages. He fished a slightly damp handkerchief from an inside pocket and tied it round his head like a bandit. All he needed was a couple of six-shooters and a Stetson.

Formless shapes slapped nosily past him, emerging like ambushers from a hidden side tunnel. Bats probably, they chittered madly, their sound as their manifestation, spontaneous. Their vanishing immediate.

Skidmore had visions of being eaten alive and thought it only a mater of time before he tripped over a skeleton. He was journeying to the centre of the world. Or not. He was a bacterium in a wound. What lay ahead was unimaginable. He cleared his throat and the echo dissipated into a far larger space, bringing him up short, within touching distant in fact of a wooden upright. Edging closer he fumbled blindly in an effort to discern its proportions. There was what seemed like a plank, easily two metres wide with subsequent planks adjacent. A door? If so it was enormous. Skidmore walked side to side and counted seven planks in all, making it 14 metres across, at a guess three or four times that in height. A warm draught escaped from beneath, but the gap was at most no greater than the breadth of his fist. Reluctantly, he hefted the lighter, flipped its chrome lid and brought his thumb down on the wheel.

More than one thing shrieked and fled from the subsequent glow. His buttocks clenched slightly. Looking up the door loomed like a fairytale entranceway, the hole in it newly made and perhaps accounting for the soot as it was burned, scorched and circular. He pursed his lips, took a mental picture and extinguished the lighter. Nothing assailed him. Just renewed blackness. He could barely reach the opening but somehow scrabbled up and through the metre thick door, pausing briefly to wonder at the oddly constructed void beyond.

The darkness was no longer total. He could make out vague shapes, black on black, subtly outlined by a peculiar glint, a sheen that somehow draped over the indistinct forms and images Skidmore's myopia offered up to his brain. He gazed down and could just about pick out his shoes. A distant crunching brought his head up once more and he squinted at what he was sure were moving objects. They weren't the reason he was here, however; that was clearly the creature, the man or machine whose long shadow he followed, in pursuit not so much of him or it but that which him or it might effect. Though whether he was intended to thwart or assist Shuffledeck did not know. He shrugged at that. It was always better to let the little people worry about the big stuff. He wouldn't dally. More would be revealed by motion than stasis anyway.

The interior slowly lightened as it opened up, presenting a hazy valley beneath a torrid grey sky. All was monochrome, a panorama of steel and slate, hillsides black shale, clouds like the undersides of cement-laden wheelbarrows. No plant life was evident. As if grazing beyond a broken horizon though were huge metal artefacts, massive cranes whose heads dipped below the torn edge of what he guessed was some sort of quarry. The lowering clouds were smoke blown from great engines, the crunching of leviathans at work.

Skidmore made his way toward the noise and activity, crossing a kilometre of broken rock before spying what looked like a road. He followed the road as it snaked for a further two or three kilometres to the perimetre of the excavaction. There he rested, out of breath and dehydrated, staring into the dusty pit at the mammoth machines, all but their upper parts obscured, their racket as their activity largely subsumed.

The road divided here, left and right round the earthworks. Skidmore chose left and made good progress, ignoring the pain in his feet and his head, half choked and half blind, missing really for the first time the surety of space and the routine of dial-tapping and caffeine. What chance a little Italian joint here in Mordor? he wondered, one eye out for a welcome sign, the other for orcs.

No time passed. The light had to be coming from somewhere, yet it was too thin and broken to even cast a shadow. He plodded on at pace, then came to an abrupt halt as movement animated the murk ahead.

There was a vehicle, black and functional, about it several forms, all of them stooped, large heads conveyed on spindly bodies. Skidmore edged closer and saw the heads were bull's. And the bodies? He squinted, as they seemed skeletons, but machine, base metal drones, five of them milling confusedly to the right rear of their vehicle like debutantes appraising a flat tire.

He seized his chance and snuck alongside, climbed into the bewildering cab, dredged his mind for knowledge, depressed a lever and jerkily set the thing in motion. The vehicle leaned dangerously toward the precipice and seemed to want to throw itself off the edge, which he surmised was the reason the minotaurs had stopped in the first place. Skidmore though was of more irrational thought and somehow managed to keep to the road, intuitively yanking and pulling, steering by guile as he circumnavigated the quarry, ready at any moment to leap from the cab while simultaneously admiring the crude method of his transport. No time now though to investigate engine parts. He rode the increasingly jerky chassis as far as he could, that being within sight of an unnatural structure, whereupon he jumped clear an allowed the vehicle at last to slew off the road, close enough to the checkpoint - as he imagined it - to draw all eyes if any to the diversion while he slipped quietly by and down the throat of another stygian tunnel.

The small machines load coal on to wagons which in turn are hauled by slightly larger constructs. The bigger machines wield picks and shovels and make light of their labour.

He breezes past them, unnoticed, for these beings have intent only for their task, that a perverse representation, an arcane language of cut and stack. These the very coals that fuelled the Lulla Belle, he thinks, since punctured and listed, the robots busy at the seam dull of eye and dented, yet breathlessly afloat.

Brutus has no time to question them or pursue significant meaning. He can smell a city ahead. At last, he supposes, the city of his childhood dreams.

Gleaming spires. Resplendent buildings.

Unlike no place on Earth.

'I suppose it started with the aurora,' his father says. 'Unknown this far south; few appreciated its beauty.'

And spread to here, Brutus thinks, curled in a ball, peering intently into the palms of his hands.

He feels responsible for the ship and yet at the same time dismissive of its captain and crew. Those who'd attempted his confinement. Not something possible he understands; far from it, as Brutus has developed a survival instinct far in excess of any gifted by nature, unless of course it be supernature, as every molecule of his being is geared.

He gets up and continues apace.

The spires are coal, the buildings hollowed out, hewn from the same back deposit.

But there's life here, commerce, only mechanical, organs traded, instruments of brass on show, polished telescopes and burnished theodolites, compasses and clocks, the latter animated by eyes and clicking tongues, adding to the growing background noise, the atmosphere of electrostatic discharge and the smell of vinegar.

Brutus wades through this alien cityscape, dreamlike, immerses himself in the heady atmosphere. Traffic floats overhead. Bizarre conglomerates of shiny metal argue at street corners. Everything is slick and polished, moving with purpose, the language invoked one of truly otherworldly meaning. He might linger here indefinitely and not comprehend, for every motion of the coaly metropolis is but a consequence of a greater whole. It's like a mind, he thinks, a brain's inner workings made solid.

Strangely, the citizens of this city pay him no heed. He's invisible to them. Yet if he stands still no object collides, no passerby bumps into him, and neither does he have to dodge them. He steps into the road and isn't run down. Everything continues as before, only round him, smoothly flowing about its business. Brutus is amused by the phenomena, feeling human for the first time in days. He grabs at shiny insects, hundreds zipping past his face like messages, but fails to catch even one. He has no substance here it appears, no right to exist in this place, and is therefore ignored by the reality of it, factored out. He's part of the background, the native coal that is the inanimate road and wall, the solid pavement, superstructure about which the inhabitants flow like oil.

No time for reverie though. He risks melding with a doorway or transmuting into a lamp-post, becoming rooted, part of the furniture. Closing his eyes he orients himself and keeping them firmly shut runs as fast as he can, blind yet hearing every sound of traffic and machine, his senses embattled, his ears telling him one thing, his eyes defiantly cancelling out the increasingly vociferous warnings of imminent disaster. He runs against a tide of misinformation, and eventually breaks through into silence, surfacing into fresh air and warm sun.

Eventually he's able to cool his feet in a shallow stream.

Grime washes from them, leaving his toes almost pink.

It's a peaceful place he finds himself in. Outwardly the water trickles over rocks and the breeze licks at his ears. Inwardly is another story, a maelstrom of bile and anger that seeks to transform Brutus, to tear him asunder, drown him in hate. That is the real conflict. To tame himself. Otherwise he may as well have gone under the professor's knife.

He rode a conveyor belt, sleeping on and off the hours it took to wend its way over the heads of industrious automatons. He chucked lumps of coal at minotaurs and calmly went about the business of sabotaging adjacent belts, moving from one to the next like a mischievous hamster. A gremlin, Skidmore listened as wheels jammed and coal rained down on the perplexed worker ants below. There was all manner of bastardized machinery slaving away at the face. The minotaurs were the overseers, dumbly marshalling the not-unreluctant labourers. There had to be more sophisticated machines somewhere, but thus far no evidence of them. He had lost the creature, too, but it didn't concern him greatly, expecting to home in again on that fiery magnet.

His belly groaned. He was flesh and his flesh demanded sustenance. He was weak by definition, although manifestly robust and not without a few extra pounds to keep him going. Still, the ship's hors d'oeuvres seemed far removed.

He knew his destination, at least by name, but how far away Disko remained Skidmore had no way of telling. How deep was he anyway? The heat and fumes from the mine addled his brain. That there was oxygen at all he was grateful, but it was oxygen intended as fuel not for meat but metal.

The sound of rattling graders up ahead roused him. Through the gloom it was difficult to gauge height or distance, but he had no choice other than to find a new mode of transport or be sieved. Clambering beneath the conveyor he hung by his fingers, peering between his toes for a soft spot on which to land. Guesswork unfortunately. Nothing seemed to be moving down there. He let go, teeth clenched so as not to bite his tongue, and had the good fortune or otherwise to strike water. The liquid though burned his eyes, contaminated with every by-product of the mine and Skidmore had to fight the urge to retch, swimming like a drunk and clasping at anything solid, the closest he had come to panic.

Darkness overwhelmed once again. Flopping out onto cold stone he coughed, hand over mouth, the handkerchief still tied there. No place to use the lighter. He quickly scrambled away, fumbling, bloodying his knees, then coming upon a set of steel doors.

Dull light within. A machine shop. Parts, mostly dismantled for repair. Faces grimaced and limbs stood patiently, suspended from the invisible ceiling on wires and arrayed on tables. Torsos opened and components removed or else prepped for insertion. No mechanic other than Skidmore present and he wasn't about to operate, his natural curiosity overriden by a more urgent need, that of survival.

His eyes adjusting he made his way through the autopsy piles to a second shop, this housing vehicles, and there in a corner spied something with two wheels, a crude motorcycle that perhaps had, or once had, an identity of its own, a purpose and even a personality. It was a prisoner, thought Skidmore, robbed of volition, cast out, its mind recycled and its body to be stripped for spares, its sentence interminable, its crime unknown, but right now his new best friend. He ran his hands over the metal skeleton. It appeared whole. Fuel? No shortage of carbon derived propellents here.

Shapes rushed the door. Minotaurs. Skidmore fired the motorcycle to life and sped away, bumping over ankles and shoulders, fracturing both as he made good his escape. A horn grazed his thigh, causing him a momentary wobble, but he simply wound on the throttle and slewed through the metal crowd, cresting a rise to leap a fence, thereafter only having to worry about projectile weapons, their discharges singing like insects too close to his ears, one nicking his left shoulder. Nothing made of metal would deny him now, however. He sped past countless stooped machines, chain gangs by the side of an increasingly lighted road, work parties and powered down locomotives, their boilers seeping steam while their wagons awaited cargo.

Skidmore burst on, the overshadowed interior peeling away. He forced himself to think of his ultimate goal, she of his essentially mechanical soul. A subtle irony. A marriage. Shuffledeck and his Sara, hand in hand. For what was one without the other? Man without means, sans tools? You might as well cut away these opposing thumbs. Not that she was a machine. Far from it. Manmade? That was a distinction he had no time for at this juncture, motoring suddenly into traffic, increasing the revs exponentially as only he knew how. Risking all.

Sky blossomed, a great blue rose, the first real colour marking out the second real colour, Shuffledeck's blood leaking redly. He looked about for green and saw the blurred outline of stunted bushes, defiant trunks and thin leaves eeking a life out of not much at all. That was his cover. In pursuit a growing army of cold metal, base and empty machines of war, no beauty about them, tanks and soldiers brought to the surface of this innocent world. There was a cruel poetry about them, Skidmore thought, skidding to a halt amidst sparse undergrowth. There were ships in the harbour, a dozen or more greedily swallowing coal.

He turned the motorcycle inland, putting some distance between himself and his pursuers.

The wind blew cold. The light faded the farther he travelled from the mine entrance, the intrusion of it, a wound in the landscape, in fact warming and lighting the earth around. Armoured trucks would roll over the new grass, he thought, but more would always grow.

It was soon freezing, however.

And he was out of ideas.

ii.

The colours fade and the music drains away. I'm alone for what seems an eternity, long enough anyway for fear to turn to emptiness, cold near death oblivion. Hardly the finale I envisaged. Perhaps I'm drunk out on the ice having swallowed my fill of a Siren's sweet intoxication.

Perhaps I'm dying, the memory of it yet to fall back into place, this frozen moment a preamble, the prologue to my haunting. If so, I can barely make out my heart beat as it counts down to zero.

I feel cheated.

It's too ordinary a death. Foolish and mundane.

Then I see something, a woman on horseback strumming a guitar. She beckons to me and I follow.

The world winds into motion like a fair ride, ablaze with music and colour. Events come tumbling in, piling up like wrecked vehicles, a coming together of bodies, vectors of circumstance manifesting in a chorus of screaming flesh and metal parts.

Wonderful.

I'm back in Gugson's and someone has just crashed the door. All is chaos. Death stirs at last, impaling me like a cocktail sausage, my feet dangling inches above the floor. The dance continues with renewed vigour, my fidgeting body a broken marionette, round me absurd cartoon violence, heads on springs, legs and arms scampering this way and that, bumping into one another in the smoky confusion and falling over.

Firearms discharge. Raised voices are choked.

It's a butcher's shop free-for-all. Only a matter of time before I'm hacked to bits, either intentionally or by the next explosion.

It's pure human comedy. Only not human for a large part. I'm skewered by a large metal femur.

Most of the roof has vanished, leaving only twisted aluminium to point out the stars, brushed silver eyelashes, tendrils melted like tears.

It's the end of it and a new beginning, the island without transformed from here forward, Disko part deux, the paint yet to dry, much still to resolve. Gugson's drenched in flame now like an Xmas pud. Hot, blue and rich with fruit, the cake having long since been consumed.

iii.

The crushed remains of history lie underfoot. Having emerged from one ocean I stand before another, perhaps the same, my journey to this point across an island. The surf here maintains the same outward shape, rolling as if reversed toward the shore. Electromagnet in element, I suppose, casting my mind back to an earlier self, one whose substance was theory, a consequence of time folded inward. Engendered by stars, my shape female, mirrored by that lying dead at my feet, body translucent, dissolving midst the surf.

She, the avatar of the water buffalo.

Reality lies at my back. I have a choice now whether to acknowledge it. If I chose to continue and descend under the ocean once more then I'm uncertain what my fate may be. Perhaps I'll be washed up dead, too. Yet equally if I turn around and head back inland my future remains oblique. I have a purpose there. Not one of my choosing but a life of many parts and possibilities.

Sara I am. A proper noun. Real to myself. On this beach. At this time.

