Starr

1

The ghost of John Lennon can no longer sing. 

He perches half in, half out of the wardrobe and wails all night about being dead or trapped in Ringo's apartment.

Ringo wears earplugs, but this has no real effect.

2

Paul McCartney, also a ghost, lives in Ringo’s bath with remnants of the water which drowned him.

‘I’m like a yellow submarine now,’ he says, whenever Ringo gets into the shower.

‘Can’t get out of the tub even if I tried,’ he says, whenever Ringo gets out of the shower.

Sometimes Ringo plays the old records and Paul croons along. His voice is underwater sounding, and he does not know the words. John, phasing out of the bureau, shouts for Paul to ‘can it’ and focus on playing the bass.

3

Ringo is a playwright now. His fourth play has just opened. It is about a young man who lives in Liverpool, named Derek. He has problems with his sexuality. Namely, that he doesn’t have one and feels like he should. Ringo feels the same way about himself.

Sometimes, he goes online to look at porn, but finds himself reading the descriptions instead. He wonders why the descriptions so frequently use capitals. HOT DILF finds pleasure from SCOTCH EGG. NAUGHTY foursome with neighbour’s DAUGHTERS after WINTER PILGRIMAGE. LORRAINE KELLY makes PASSIONATE love to LESBIAN FRENCH teacher on LONGBOAT.

Sometimes John arises from the bed tutting.

‘Looking at porn again Ringo?’

From the bathroom, Paul chimes in: ‘Leave him alone, John.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Then stop making him feel bad about it, being a man of his age and sexually active should be praised.’

‘He’s just looking!’

Slooshes, splashes. ‘It’s good he’s trying, John, you can’t begrudge him that.’

4

Ringo hires an exorcist. She has a van with Julie’s Ghost Removal Service written on it in curvy red letters.

She unloads several thick metal boxes, covered in aerials, dials and chunky switches, onto the pavement outside Ringo’s apartment building.

‘Do you know what kind of ghost it is?’ she asks.

‘What kind?’

‘Yeah: poltergeist, spirit, wraith?’

‘It’s John Lennon and Paul McCartney.’

She pulls the straps of an infrasound generator over her shoulders. 

‘Who?’ she says.

5

George Harrison, as you may have noticed, is missing. But George exists now in the atoms above Liverpool Secunda. He thrums joyously with the other souls who have relinquished their temporary forms. He hopes his band mates, both him and not, will resolve their differences.

6

In the flat, Julie scans the room with her equipment, attempting to find the ghosts.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ says Ringo. ‘Paul’s in the bath, John’s lying on the bed.’

‘Ringo!’ shouts John, ‘don’t give the game away!’

‘Who is it?’ shouts Paul. ‘Do we have a visitor?’

‘So you can see them?’ she says.

Ringo nods. Julie shakes her head and unstraps the monitor from her back.

‘You should have ticked the box for personal haunting,’ she says. ‘The approaches are completely different.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ringo, ‘to be honest, I’ve never quite been in this situation before.’

Julie reaches up and takes a hold of his shoulder with a hand; she looks into his eyes, as if to say, that’s okay, no one has been beset by this specific problem before so it would be unreasonable to expect yourself to handle it.

‘Are they confined to this space?’ she asks.

He nods. 

‘Then let’s speak outside.’

7

The play, the one about Derek, is not going particularly well. The critics don’t believe it holds up to Ringo’s former masterpieces. Those plays which grappled with concepts of being and substance and how we cannot really know ourselves and how the world ultimately does not care whether we know ourselves and how all of this was funny, somehow, but not haha funny, more like a joke you were excluded from and are only trying to find funny, a joke where the laughter catches in your throat. His new play is not like that. His new play, they say, is silly. It has silly jokes in it and they hate it. They want the new play to be like the old plays. But then, Ringo thinks, why not just watch the old plays? Why bother coming if you’ve already decided what you want?

8

Outside, Julie leans an elbow on the roof of the van and looks Ringo in the eyes. Ringo does not understand this look, and then realises that Julie is ‘levelling’ with him. To confirm, she says:

‘I’m going to level with you.’

Julie thinks Ringo should simply move out. It would cost a lot of work both mentally and physically to get rid of his ghosts. He would need to hire an occultist and they charged around £500 an hour.

‘How much!?’ he says.

And that’s not all, Julie continues, he would need to determine what these particular spirits - John and…

‘Paul McCartney’

…Paul McCartney - were haunting him for.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well there’s usually a reason. Most want to pass on.’ She looks at the sky, where the dead gather, no longer separate but whole. ‘Once you’ve shed the flesh you realise how burdensome a body is. So to remain you need a deeper reason. You’d have to find that out.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘You could try asking them.’

9

Three weeks later, Ringo moves flat.

Ringo’s new flat overlooks the Mersey ver 2.0. He has put posters up and rearranged the furniture. He plays old records and listens, still, for Paul McCartney’s crooning from the bathroom. When it doesn’t come, he feels a sense of peace.

He writes for several hours most nights. In bed, he still puts in the earplugs, but soon enough he abandons this practice. Without John singing, there is only the dull hum of technology, of charging devices and fridges and hallway lights left on.

He sleeps better than he has in years.

10

The play continues to fail. Ringo asks his director: why aren’t the audience connecting with this play? The director takes off their glasses and pinches their nose while screwing up their face in annoyance.

‘Do you really want to know?’ they ask.

‘Yes,’ says Ringo.

‘It’s for you, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘This one’s for you.’

The theatre sends an email about the play’s lack of ticket sales, and several paragraphs about risk, and marketing pushes, and sincere thankfulness on behalf of upper management in regards to all the hard work all of you have put in all this time, but unfortunately the play is not performing anywhere near where it should be and though they are willing to give it another few weeks, soon they will have to look at decommissioning the play.

Ringo opens another tab. 

This ALL TIDES DAY I’m going to dress up and FUCK my uncle’s GARDENER. My SN3001P ATEN 1-PORT RS232 SECURE SERIAL SERVER DEVICE is gagging for DOUBLE PENETRATION. SLUTTY cheerleader HARRISON FORD devours BEEF taco in short skirt and BUTT PLUG.

He tries to sleep but can’t.

11

At the play’s last show, theatre management puts out several paper cups and three bottles of champagne. Most of the actors don’t come and Ringo, given his advanced age, no longer drinks. He and several of the stage hands and the director stand around awkwardly for half an hour. The director keeps looking at his watch and talking about the train he’s going to catch.

On the way home, the rain stops for a while. This amazes Ringo, for it seemed as if it had been raining for over a year. He looks up at the clouds, their grey underbellies, the winking sun, and tries to imagine the dead. He cannot.

Ringo grows sadder day after day. He tries to write, but nothing he writes seems relevant now that the play has flopped. The fear that he will write something just as bad and just as disappointing freezes him. After a fortnight of this, he decides he needs help.

12

When Ringo returns, John is partially in the toilet cistern and Paul is still submerged in spectral water.

‘Perhaps I like the bath,’ Paul says.

‘Come on Paul, don’t lie,’ John says, ‘you must want to explore.’

‘Explore what? The flat? It’s hardly the most enticing geographical excursion, is it?’

‘I don’t really think you’re achieving your spiritual potential in the bath.’

‘Hello,’ says Ringo, ‘I need your help.’

John phases out of the cistern and drifts into the centre of the room. He has his arms crossed.

‘And what makes you think we’re willing to give it?’

From the bath, gurgling from the water, Paul says: ‘I’m all ears Ringo.’

13

What follows is thus: Ringo brings the script he has been working on to Paul and John. John immediately trashes it. ‘Wrong form, Ringo,’ he says and ghosts through a nearby wall. Paul says now lets bear with it and give him a chance. John returns through a different wall. ‘It’s a novel,’ he says, ‘anyone can see that.’

At first, Ringo writes the novel in his own apartment, and brings the printed pages across the city, but soon enough this doesn’t quite work. He moves back in with his ghosts. In the evenings, he reads out his writing.

The ghosts give feedback:

‘That scene doesn’t contain enough conflict.’

‘Your use of Ekphrasis is far too short; if you must use that technique then have the confidence to expand.’

‘Try excising all of the Anglo Saxon words from the description of the bakery.’

In return, John and Paul show him the songs they have been writing. Sad songs. Songs about how lonely non-life is. Most are terrible. But some, some touch on something new and these he praises.

Over the summer, Ringo completes the first draft of his novel. When he reads them the ending, they clap. Though, being corporeal, this is more like sea winds visiting the shores, like the quiet stirrings of the ancient forest where all things come from.

14

One night, John, supine in the sock drawer, begins to sing. It is a song they have heard before, but John has been working it over in his head, trimming words and tuning the melody. It is a song about how the river Mersey - the original river Mersey - burst its banks and all the shopkeepers watched their goods flow away. It decorates the air with ready sadness and when it’s done, Ringo and Paul don’t want to break the silence.

‘That’s beautiful,’ says Paul, eventually, leaning his head over the bath’s side so he can see John. But John is already fading. He is passing on to the sky above, ready now, it seems, to finally leave. The lines of him become indistinct and his features blur and scatter. Ringo hears the faint ring of tinnitus in his left ear.

After John’s leaving, the pair sit for a while.

‘That song was really quite something,’ Paul says. ‘We should record that when he comes back.’

Ringo doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

15

The flat is quieter without John. The pair continue to work on their art. Ringo traces his way through the passages of his first draft. It is like looking at ruins and trying to determine what sort of a civilisation lived there. He can feel John’s advice as he writes. He knows, almost, what must be done, what sentence should be cut, what paragraph needs moving.

He is content, he thinks. He feels, at least, that he cannot fail and that may be as close to contentment as one can come.

Every night, Ringo sits on the toilet to listen to Paul sing. Paul has lost his gift for melody almost entirely. Many of his songs would rightfully be considered a racket. But Ringo hopes that one day Paul will luck upon some new song, a song like he used to write, simple, quiet, but new, with its parts placed neatly together and no flourishes, no wilder touches, a song for a listener and nothing more.

Skelmoth

We discovered the crab when emptying the washing machine's lint collector. It was no bigger than a five pence piece and translucent. Its limbs were caught in the lint. Most would have flushed it down the sink, but we decided to keep the crab. We placed it in a jam jar, half filled with water, and fed it prawns from the freezer.

We kept the jam jar near the kettle and whenever one of us was waiting for the water to boil we would bring our faces close to the curving glass and smile at the crab. It seemed to recognise us and would raise its claws in greeting. Occasionally it would tap upon the glass, softly, with no violence, just enough for us to know it was trying to communicate.

We soon found that it only ate the prawns if it was starving. At the pet shop, we purchased a number of different feeds. It enjoyed bloodworms the most. When we emptied them into the jar, it would devour them, stuffing its mandibles until its innards shone redly. We brought the jar to the dinner table, so that it could eat with us.

Some mornings, when we came downstairs, we found a ghostly second version of the crab in the jam jar. We fished out this remnant with pliers. Often it collapsed upon contact. Soon enough the crab’s claws were hampered by the glass and it struggled, at times, to settle into a comfortable position to sleep. We moved it to a tank; this, we positioned at the foot of the dinner table. 

Inside the tank was a grey plastic cove, dotted with red and white ferns. The crab slumbered here throughout the day. It emerged only to eat its bloodworms and, we felt, be part of the family. We were a laughing family back then, and our lives felt filled with great joy. The crab tapped occasionally upon the glass and this tapping seemed to coincide with our laughter, as if it were laughing with us. 

I cannot remember which of us had the dream first. But it became the dream we all had, night after night. It consisted of a cavern, vast, with water dripping from the stalactites, and the dripping echoing, and other sounds, sounds like words, but not words we could make out, only really the vague feeling of the words, resounding about the cave. The feeling of the words was Skelmoth. 

We did not know what it meant, but we awoke with the word upon our tongues. We thought nothing of the dream.

The crab grew bigger. When it found it could push open the lid of the tank with a claw, it escaped. When this first happened, we feared the worst, that somehow it had been snatched up by the birds or trampled by the tires of a car, but instead we found it in the linen basket, nestled among our discarded clothes. It looked up at us blissfully, with two black eyes, and we decided that perhaps we had no need for a tank, that the crab could simply wander the house. 

The crab’s newfound freedom quickly translated to dinner time anecdotes. Sometimes the crab climbed into the shower with us or followed us, insistently, about the house, watching with watery eyes as we made sandwiches or collected items for school. We discussed its favourite perches and sleeping spots - under the sofa, upon the shelving above the boiler, once, in the washing machine, as if trying to return to its place of origin.

I don’t wish to discuss the welts that began appearing on our arms and legs. Welts in the shape of a tightly curved ‘c’. Nor do I wish to discuss the time we rushed ourselves into a car and drove to hospital, as one of us, one of the younger ones, had lost too much blood. When we returned, we discussed what we would do with the crab. It sat innocently - or apparently innocently - at our feet. We could not face driving out to the sea and letting it go free. It would die, we felt. And was it not our fault that the crab could not fend for itself? Was it not us who had robbed it of the experience necessary to survive? 

But we could no longer give the crab free reign of the house, especially not at night, so we closed it in the front room. Within an hour, we were woken by a rhythmic tapping, repeated every minute. One, two, three, of the claw upon the door, and kept up at all hours. After three nights of broken sleep, it was agreed that the shed would be emptied of tools and made into a home for the crab. 

The dreams did not diminish though. We found ourselves in the cavern every night, but now we could sense there was some great beast slumbering within the cavern alongside us. We could not turn our heads to see it. The word - Skelmoth - became clearer in the dream and started to bleed into our everyday lives. We found ourselves idly writing the word on notebooks and hearing it, faintly, within the walls of our house. We still did not know what it meant, only that it could not be escaped.

On the day we moved the crab to the shed, a light rain was falling. The crab exited the house side-wise, tempted, as it was, by a bucket filled with earthworms (these were the replacement for the blood worms which were now too expensive to feed it). It paused when it stepped out into the fresh air and looked to the sky. Its mandibles twitched. The crab was the size of a wheelbarrow at this point. Its shell had hardened to a crisp white that glittered like sandstone. It adjusted, quickly, to the feel of the outside air and then, remembering the earthworms, came scuttling after us.

We locked it in the shed. Back inside, we attended to our guilt. We knew the shed would be cold, too cold for the crab, and lonely, though we reasoned that a crab could not get lonely. Every night, we went out to the shed with buckets of food. At first, the crab was eager to see us. It would scrap its claws against the wood and strike insistently at the door so that the lock rattled, but as the days wore on, the crab seemed to grow tired of this game. When we arrived, we would find it lying, legs and claws tucked beneath itself, sleeping. Although in the mornings when we came to collect the bucket, we always found it empty.

Skelmoth - this word continued to disturb us. We began to search for it in libraries and on the internet. We found only nonsense. On certain occasions, we would be reading books and glance the word, only to look again and find that we had simply misread some other innocuous set of letters. The only mention we found of Skelmoth was in the manuscript of a cloister of medieval nuns. The word - well, the lithograph - was merely a picture of horses, but when you looked at it, the word came clearly to light. Skelmoth. An author of an article on this particular lithograph was disturbed and searched for the word elsewhere, but he found nothing, and when we looked into the details, he had died some forty years prior.

Pets were going missing. Mostly dogs. Posters were pasted onto lamp posts and telegraph poles, displaying frolicking canines in back gardens and cats perched neatly on windowsills. The police were involved; a facebook group was created: October Country Pet Lookout. Some pets were never seen again, and a glut of funerals took place. Others returned home, limping, bloodied, as if they had been fighting for their life. A dog was found washed up in the river, disembowelled and partially eaten. This disturbed everybody in the village, and soon enough pets were locked indoors, for fear they may become the next victim.

On occasion, we would find two crabs in the shed, one asleep and the other, ghost-like, made of fine, paper-like skin. These residues of our crab were robust enough that they could be removed and placed in the garden like statues. The rain got to them eventually, and they would diminish, collapsing in upon themselves, before the wind wafted away their fragments or the jackdaws arrived to feast.

Then, one night, a neighbour appeared at our door. He had his phone out and wished to show us the cuts on his dog’s stomach. He insisted on coming in. In the front room, he showed us the cuts. Three gashes across the stomach. It’s the crab, he said. We indicated the locked shed. It burrows out of the shed, he said. It goes through the ground. It needs to be got rid of, he said, before it does any more damage. Then he went madly to the backdoor. We surged after him but already he was in the garden. He had picked up a spade from the set of tools leant against the fence and begun striking at the shed’s lock. We tried to stop him, but he lashed at us. This is madness, we said, standing back now, but he kept beating at the lock and when it cracked and came off, we felt our hearts sink.

This was it, we thought, foolishly, not knowing what would soon occur.

In the shadows of the shed, only the outline of the crab could be seen. It was vast now and when it stood, we saw the shed could barely contain it. Our neighbour tried to strike at the crab with the spade, but up came the claw and severed the shaft in two. He turned to the other implements on the lawn, but before he could reach them, the crab gripped him by the waist and lifted him from the ground. 

He screamed and grappled with the pincers as they dug into his stomach.

The crab pulled itself from the garden shed. There was a moment where it looked at the neighbour, squirming in its claw and the neighbour's terrified face was reflected in the blackness of its eyes. It looked upon him with malicious indifference; there was no anger from the attack with the spade, nor a hatred towards him, instead only the cold acknowledgement of its place and his place within the order of the world. It dropped him upon the garden lawn. We saw what we must do.

We pinned him to the floor, placing our weight on his limbs. His legs kicked and thrashed, gouging lines into the soil. He continued to scream, but we knew that no one would come to help him. The crab observed us. It wished us to utter its name before it feasted.

Our voices rose as one.

Skelmoth, we chanted into the night air. 

Skelmoth, we chanted as its mandibles touched our neighbour’s neck.

Skelmoth, we chanted, knowing not what we had become.

What It’s Like Here

On the seventh week, the truck gets stolen.

Together we go to the hotel’s secure compound. It’s a chainlink fence, a ticket-booth, four mismatching cars. Gunter leans on the booth partition and talks to the guard. His namebadge says Yen in red italics. I know the workers here pick daily from a cache of badges by the door – it’ll be Yen today, Wao tomorrow, Lei on friday. Yen removes his cap and awkwardly shoulders his rifle, a Kar. 98. He has a custom crimson shoulder strap, with badges on it. One of them is a peace sign. He tells us the man on the night shift, Hwan, is not responding to messages or phone calls. He has gone AWOL.

Then Yen takes us to the hole in the fence. It’s truck shaped. Tire tracks lead up the dirt bank and onto the road.

‘Can’t fucking believe this,’ Gunter says, under his breath. He kicks the fence till it rattles.

‘I am sorry,’ Yen says, adjusting the rifle strap again. ‘I lost my car two weeks ago. I use my bicycle now. Five miles.’

He holds up the four fingers on his left hand. It should be five, but the middle-finger has been hacked off. Yen is grinning despite this. Yen, I feel, is an optimist.

‘Fifty grand,’ Gunter says. ‘Fifty fucking grand.’

‘I understand,’ Yen says, nodding now. ‘I lost my car two weeks ago.’

‘Huh,’ Gunter says and turns on the guard. Before I can stop him, he’s unholstered his revolver and has the barrell pressed against Yen’s temple.       

‘You don’t understand,’ Gunter says. ‘You don’t have a fucking clue. You and I aren’t even in the same fucking league. You and I aren’t even playing the same fucking sport.’

Yen – bless him – smiles and says: ‘Sorry. It was a nice truck, I understand, I lost my car,’ while showing his palms and trembling and nodding; still nodding.

Then I’m there, pulling Gunter away – an elbow rushes up and strikes me on the nose. I go reeling. Then he cracks Yen on the skull with the revolver butt, and kicks his feet out from under him. I ask Gunter what the fuck, exactly, was that for and Gunter spits and tells me to fuck off – louder this time – so his voice booms out across the car park.

I stumble over, still giddy from the elbow, and apologise to Yen. The poor man is blinking in the sunlight; there’s a red mark the shape of a revolver butt on his temple. Not once did he reach for the rifle. He stands, dusts off his trousers.

‘It’s not a problem,’ he says and saddles the Kar. 98 on his shoulder once more. ‘People love cars. People will do anything for a good car. I understand.’

And he beams, eyes shut, crooked teeth showing. I turn to Gunter, but Gunter is already marching across the parking lot with the Smith and Wesson 657 over his shoulder.

Next Gunter waves his gun around the hotel reception, sending bell boys and kindly matrons barrelling for cover. Gunter demands they waiver the booking fee – he’s pissed, he says, about the booking fee. Tourists squat behind a pot plant. A waiter is stood with a flute in hand, just watching. Eventually the manager arrives in his underwear, trembling and blubbering. Gunter shoots a window to prove he’s serious and says something about being fucking pissed about the booking fee. Someone, somewhere outside, screams. The manager yields, through tears, and gives us a hundred yen out of his desk. He apologises, hands together, prayer-like.

At the bus stop, Gunter scowls and looks east. I do my breathing exercises and try to think. The rebels plastered recruitment posters all over the town, offering money, good wine, bounteous woman. I imagine a truckload of weapons would buy a man a lifetime of good-will. I imagine Gunter believes that if our truck is anywhere, it will be in the camp.

*

This is our last contract together.

Two weeks ago, I found Gunter in a bar with Carlos. Carlos is one of our suppliers; he wears flip-flops with little pictures of palm trees on them and is often coated in a fine sheen of sweat.

When I arrived, Carlos was in the middle of telling Gunter about his new business. Gunter was counting out notes on the table.

I told Gunter no. And I tried to stop him, a hand on the shoulder. But Gunter brushed me off, and told me to fuck off. Meanwhile, Carlos giggled to himself and sipped, lengthly, from a gin and pineapple. I tried again and this time I was harder.  I told him to think about lilly, the kids back home.

‘I’m going,’ he said.

I said nothing.

Gunter spat.

They went outside and climbed into the truck, Gunter hanging heroically from the rigging. I stayed underneath the electric heaters, and watched them fade into distance. I ordered two shots of ozo to pass the time. Then two more. I remember throwing up into one of those dank Korean toliets. When Gunter returned, I was on my fifteenth.

I broke a pool cue across his back. He slammed a fist into my ribs. We went through a table. Gunter told me he always hated me. I spat teeth and told him to go fuck off, dickhead. Someone had to knock me out before I swung at him again. That night we slept in separate rooms. I lay awake, did my breathing exercises, and thought.

Carlos had found out, somehow, that certain people wanted to experience killing. He’d seen an opportunity, hired the right people, and was selling the experience for two hundred a time. He’d take the buyer to the woods, place a gun in their hand and bring them a hooded P.O.W.

The gun was a Nagent with a six-round revolving cartridge. I know because I sold Carlos the gun. It’s not a bad gun by any means, but dramatic and messy for close-range executions. Gunter used all six of the cartridges, and finished the guy off with the butt.

At night, Carlos would return and escort the body to one of the many mass graves, which had sprung up, like theme parks, around town.

*

On the second day, we get stuck in traffic. We crawl past a row of cages with prisoners jammed against the bars for two hours. Men with cattle prods, in federation colours, poke at the cages and smoke cigarettes. None of the passengers seem to notice there is a war happening. A boy at the back of the bus reading may have looked up from his reading; once, maybe.

Gunter walks the length of the bus, and stands, with his hand on the holding bar, behind the driver. Then he comes back, and sits with his legs across the seat. Sometimes, he smokes. Then he walks the bus again.

Gunter comes back from the front of the bus with a cigarette in his mouth and sits on the seat in front of me.

‘We should get our truck back,’ he says.

‘I was wondering when you’d bring that up.’

‘They fucked us.’   

I shake my head. Days before, my wife had found a villa on the slopes of southern Italy. I gave it to her. On a whim. Like it was nothing.

‘So what,’ I say, ‘look at what’s around you.’

Outside, a line of chained men are being packed into a cage. ‘Let’s let them fuck us,’ I say, ‘they deserve at least one last consolidatory fuck. We owe them a fuck.’

‘They still fucked us.’

‘It wasn’t personal, Gunter. They don’t give a fuck about us, or our money.’

‘It’s not money,’ Gunter says, eyeing the other passangers. ‘Don’t think it’s about money. It’s-’

‘It’s what? About respect?’

He said nothing.

‘Go on. Say it.’

‘It’s about respect.’

The heat is untenable, I realise. Before I thought it was managable, but with Gunter sat there, I suddenly think it’s untenable.

‘That’s a very broad brush application of that word.’

Gunter nods, says he thought I’d say something like that and goes back to staring through the window. Gunter has our kitbag on his lap. Every so often, he feels along the creases for the rifle butt, then he caresses that and takes deep, sonorous breathes – as if this, the caressing, is soothing him.

*

Town after town of bombed out shop fronts, collapsed church roofs, orphans playing in the streets.

Gunter finds a car rental in a town by the sea. It’s a murky lot on the main street, ringed by a lilting chain link fence. When we arrive, the proprietor is closing for the day. He’s in a Cardiacs t-shirt and knackered boat shoes. He doesn’t let us inside until we pay fifty, each.

Twenty minutes later we’re beyond the city limits and in the mountains again. At sunset, we eat in the outside dining area of a family restaurant. Crickets play in the darkness.

Opposite us is a shot up play area, bullet holes in the slide, the swings torn from their frames. Beyond that, another pair of men, men who look just like us, dour in suits and striped ties, who eat like us, talk like us, could be us, maybe are us; will, at the very least, become us. We tip extravagantly.

I remember, while sat in the restuarant’s well-heated outdoor area, that for a time, Gunter and I were friends. On the first week at the resort, TV reports had informed us of a Buddha boy who was protesting the war by meditating in one of the forests around the town. We rented bicycles and rode there, spokes clacking in the silence of the afternoon. One of the bridges had collasped and we’d had to take the long way round, so by the time we arrived it was almost mid-day, and hot. The buddha boy was just as expected, silent, still, composed, with his legs crossed and his forefingers pressed to his thumbtips.

‘This isn’t bad,’ Gunter said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not.’

Sunlight was coming down through the leaves and twenty shimmering pennies of light dot Gunter’s face. Birds burst from treetop to treetop.

‘It’s always quieter than I expect,’ he said and looked around at the trees.

‘The forest?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The war. You always expect war to be loud. Bombs, screams, gunfire. But here it’s just kind of still. Like everybody’s waiting for something to happen.’

‘I thought I’d see someone get shot. I prepared for it, tried to imagine what it’d be like to see someone get shot. Maybe what it would be like to shoot someone myself.’

‘In my dreams, I always see myself carrying someone from the wreckage. A pretty girl in a white dress. A business man in his dust-coated suit. An old woman. I answer questions to microphones. Flashbulbs illuminate my face.’

I nodded. ‘When my wife was pregnant, I always imagined saving our son from something. He’d slipped and slashed his wrist open, but I was there, in a flash, assembling a tourniquet with startling rapidity and technique.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘Startling rapidity and technique. That’s scripted. That’s pre-written.’

‘That’s how I tell it to people in my head.’

He nodded towards the Buddha boy. His clothes were orange, but he’d been sat so long in the wind and rain and snow that it had faded and become a sort of reddy-brown.

‘What do you think he’s thinking?’

‘Apperently nothing.’

‘I don’t believe that. I don’t believe any of that.’

We mounted our bicycles and rode back to the town. By the time we arrived, the stars were out. Our first deal was with a rebel captain in the back-alley of some pub. He wanted to sell us cocaine, and had bags of it ready to sample, but we told him no, we weren’t those people.

I saw someone get shot later that evening. A serving girl. The bullet went through her metasternum and she was thrown over a table. I tried to help, came stumbling over with the medical pack I kept in my briefcase. I made a mess of the whole thing, got myself and two of the waiters covered in blood. Gunter did the rest of our round alone and I sat in the hotel shower, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing.

*

Gunter drives from then on; I curl up in the backseat and try not to dream. I dream anyway – the usual – fire and singed limbs. There is this one incident with a child climbing out of a bus with an arm missing, and trying to get his back pack to just, you know, kind of, sit right, which I think about – dream about – a lot. I dream that in the backseat, with the highway streetlights passing over my face.

When I wake, the clock shows one a.m. I try to get my bearings. It’s just trees, a gibbous moon, shadows moving like oil across the road. We pass the restuarant again – the waiters are out, bowties undone and slung around necks, striking golf balls into the forest.

‘Where are we going?’ I say.

Gunter keeps his eyes on the road.

‘East,’ he says, like I didn’t know.

I climb awkwardly between the seating partition and into the passenger seat. We drive a while in silence, the trees coming up and by.

‘I’m not coming with you,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says, eyes on the road, sharp-mouthed.

‘I think what you’re doing is stupid,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says.

He turns down a mountain pathway and we drive for some time along twisting roads. There are no lights, only stars.

*

It’s three hotels before we find a room. I wait in the car with my bag clutched to my chest while Gunter pays triple; he comes out, looking fleeced, and raps on the window.

‘Get moving,’ he says.

The bell-girl – teenage with unconditioned hair, haunted eyes – welcomes me with a loose-limbed gesture and takes our suitcases. She struggles with them; when she picks up the first one, she almost falls flat on her face with the weight. When she picks up the second, it looks as if she’s walking on tip toes. By the fourth flight, her face is flushed red and she groans with every step.

At a turn in the stair, she staggers and catches herself on the corner. The suitcase goes trundling down the stairs, and Gunter steps asides to let it go. She darts after it before I can stop her and gathers up the suitcase. Hurt plays across her face.

‘I can take that?’ I say, but she’s already past me, making her way, lopsidedly, up the staircase.

I give chase and say, no, no, it’s alright, I can take it, I can take it and I make a grab for her wrist.

‘No,’ she says and wrenches it from my hand.

‘I can help,’ I say, and try again to take it, but she shakes her head and twists he suitcase away.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I have to carry. I have to carry.’

Gunter stands two steps down from us, arms folded.

‘For chirst’s sake, Jason,’ he says. ‘Let her carry the damn suitcase.’      

She’s panting by the end of it. I try to tip, five yen, but she wags a finger.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No tip no.’

I force the money into her hand and tell her to take it.

But she won’t, she tries to give it back and I dodge and parry her hand. She looks to Gunter, but he’s stood over by the window with his back to us. In the end, she leaves it, neatly, on the side table and says again:

‘Can’t.’

She leaves and I try to follow, but Gunter forces the door closed with a palm.

‘The tip will go to the owner,’ he says, firm.

‘Not if I do it right.’

He looks at me.

‘There’s no way to do it right.’

‘There is.’

He exhales for what feels like a minute.

‘This isn’t our fight,’ he says, at last. Outside, a bi-plane screams across the sunset, flanked by birds.

*

Gunfire in the night. I hear trucks barrelling towards the forest. Shouts and cries. There is a fire somewhere in the town and the blue lights of a fire engine come wailing past the room. With the sheet clutched in my hand, I think of home and do my breathing exercises. Gunter sleeps, curled up, alone.

*

When I wake, Gunter’s bed is made. His suitcase sits in the centre, open, with the luggage – shirts, shoes, books – scattered around it. He has removed both our pistols, a rifle and an army knife. Outside, the rental car is gone. I sit and think about this. Then I pull on my coat. I climb into the forests surrounding the hotel. I call his name. I kneel and try to find tracks. I listen for the tell-tale sounds of snapped twigs or heavy breathing. I wander and try to navigate by the stars.

Mostly though I just call his name.

I keep going till my throat starts to hurt. By then, I realise that Gunter won’t reply even if he does hear my shouts. But I want to feel, I guess, like I’ve backed myself up. Like I’ll be clear now, conscious-wise, when I look back on these days.

After a while, I return to the streets, and the streetlight. My shoes are thick with mud and pine needles. A passing car heckles me as I walk along the pavement. Three soldiers on bikes come by and their heads turn in unison. It’s something like 6 when I get back to the hotel. The dark-eyed girl is polishing shoes in the hall light; their shine winks at me, like sucked liqourice, when I come inside. It is not clear whether the shoes are owned by guests or the manager. I do not ask.

In my room, I lie on the bed, turn over, sleep like a baby.

*

In the canteen of the hotel, I eat breakfast slowly. A tv shows news footage on a one hour loop and I watch it till twelve. There is no mention of Gunter, or anyone resembling Gunter. On loop four, the dark-eyed girl comes out of the back room and waits by the hotel counter in her coat.

When I come over to her, she does not look up.

‘I want to buy you something,’ I say.

She looks at me then, tired, but awake. Her shoes are battered converses; they have red laces, different in design, as if she laced them herself.

I say it again, and she shakes her head. I tell her how much money I have made. I go into great details about the deals Gunter and I have made. I give her breakdowns, figures, percentage gain; she listens throughout, patiently, then looks about the hotel lobby.

‘Where is your friend?’ she says.

She looks around as if he is hiding.

‘You were here with friend?’

The hotel manager comes out with a small brown envelope. They exchange a few words in Korean. He laughs at the end of it, with his hands on his hips. She smiles at him, then says something else. He nods and laughs again. He has redness around his cheeks, from drink.  

Then she is walking. I scramble after her.

‘Let me buy you something.’

She turns left out of the hotel; her satchel bag bumping against her back.

‘It is nothing to me,’ I say. ‘I have lots of money. Much yen.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘He paid, look.’ She shows me the envelope. ‘I paid.’

We are at the bicycle rack now, and she is removing her bike. It’s a horrible thing, coated in rust, loose handlebars straps, rotten spokes. What she wants, I decide, is a new bicycle.

She shakes her head when I suggest it.

‘This one okay,’ she says and rings the bell three times.

I stress the fact that she will be getting a new bike and that I will be the one to pay for it. I say this slowly, then I take hold of her wrist and lead her, and her old shitty bike, downtown.

She stumbles along beside me, barely keeping her bicycle upright. I’m coated in sweat from the sun. We pass a fire hydrant, painted green of all colours, and she makes this horrible whimpering noise.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I come, but,’ and she touches my hand. I look down at her wrist; her hand is coated in blood.

‘What?’ I say.

‘It hurts.’

‘You’ll run if I let go.’

‘I won’t.’

‘If you run I can catch you.’

‘Just please,’ and she pulled at my wrist. ‘Whatever happened to your-’

‘Shut up,’ I say and wipe my hand on my top. ‘Just shut up and come with me.’

When we arrive at the bicycle shop, the owner sits, gut out, on a white plastic chair. His bicycles are hung from the ceiling behind him. The sign is blackened from grease and there’s a bomb crater just outside the front door. The price of the bicycles ranges from between 300 to 600 yen. There is one for 800. When she sees it, and sees too what I’m about to do, she shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says, ‘no.’

I say: ‘come on, for fuck’s sake,’ and grab her by the wrist. She tries to pull away.

‘No need,’ she says.

And then it all comes to a head: I shout at her first of all. I tell her I don’t give a fuck about whether there’s a need or not, she’s getting a fucking bike. You know, it’s just a kindness. Why won’t she just accept the fucking bike? What’s wrong with just a simple act of kindness? Then I hit her, barell a fist into her stomach, and she falls to the floor. Her bicycle is thrown off to one side, and I’m going for her face. A pair of arms drag me off her, and I kick at them and bite and elbow. She frowns at me; everybody is telling her to ride away. Someone comes over, the owner I think, and hits me in the stomach. Another fist, then another. I lose my footing. There are four or so around me. She’s at the corner of the street, pulled to a stop, with one foot on the bike’s left pedal, and one foot on the pavement. Another fist, or maybe a foot, comes down on my nose and I feel it give. She watches for a moment, then cycles.

*

My contractor tells me about it. I’m just off the bus and have my holdall with me. Storm clouds gather above the airport.

Gunter had got to the truck, he’d managed that much. He killed two of the camp’s guards and jettisoned the camp’s fuel tanks. This was his mistake. They would have let him go, my contractor tells me, if he had just stolen the truck.

‘Are you crying?’ I say, phone cradled against my shoulder, while I pay for my ticket.

He says no. He says he had just not expected this.

They flayed Gunter afterwards.

‘Flayed him?’

‘Stripped the skin off his corpse. With, like, a boa knife. Like the red indians.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know the definition of flayed.’

They strung him up from the fence posts after that. My contractor had pictures forwarded to him from an on-site consultant. He can send them to me, via email, if I’m interested. I tell him I’m not. He says they are very high quality. I tell him I don’t want the pictures, regardless of quality.

I sit in the foyer of a fast food restuarant, with my rucksack on the table.

‘They want a fee,’ my contractor says.

‘For what?’

‘The body.’

A family of six arrive, with kids dressed in hawaain shirts and peaked caps. One of them has a life-sized inflatable dolphin. The adults examine maps and translate foreign text on devices. The government cordoned off resorts in the south, where the fighting has not yet started.

‘It’s strange here,’ I say.

I hear my contractor move something around his mouth.

‘You going to pay?’ he says.

One of the kids hurtles past with a cap in his hand, followed by another, capless.

‘How much is it?’

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Ten?’

‘Too high?’

I look down and hold the bridge of my nose in between my fingers. My eyes sting.

‘I need to go.’

‘I’ll message them,’ he says.

In the the bathroom, there’s an empty stall. I climb onto the toilet seat and once again I do my breathing exercises. I shave in the wall length mirror. I nick my chin, twice.

I leave. I try to read. I walk between the stores. I ask a clerk whether there are more stores, on a different floor, with different stuff. He shrugs, says it’s all pretty much the same.

‘I sold guns,’ I say. ‘That was my job.’

He nods.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you look like the type.’

I drink two scotches and sit on a row of plastic seats. A family arrives and bickers. A couple hold hands and talk about finance. I try to sleep, curl up with my head on the rucksack, but nothing happens. The ceiling is one large window, broken into small triangles. Planes, when they arrive, come in over the glass, their wheels unfurling like silver petals. I try to sleep, but can’t.

Vacuum

For the past six hundred and fifty two days, my husband has brought home a new vacuum cleaner to add to his collection. On occasion he has brought home two.

He has no plans for storage. This perturbs me. There was once order to the vacuum cleaners; they were lined along the wall, as if at attention, but now they are simply formed into piles of colour or category, and these piles grow day by day, until every room is no more than a fusion of cheap plastic and cold steel. To reach the garden, one must pass through the winding valley of vacuum cleaners which was once our front room. To ascend the stairs, one must pick their way past the Dustbusters and CarpetCleansers. He has stored the various specialised nozzles - the ones for reaching between gaps or for removing fur - in with our cups and bowls. I can no longer use the bath.

No obvious event triggered his collecting of vacuums. It is not a reaction to grief. Nor is it some late onset mental illness. He says there is a hole in our life, a hole he intends to fill.

*

Sometimes, at night, he perches among the vacuum cleaners. I find him squatted among the Dysons and the Mieles with his head tucked between his knees. When he sees me, he is angry, as if I have interrupted him during important work. He requests I close the door on my way out. In the corridor I hear him tutting.

I try to reason with him. On day eight hundred and fifty two, he enters the house bearing three indistinct boxes. I tell him that we cannot keep this up. He tells me that we have been keeping it up though, haven’t we? We have been keeping it up. Why not, after all? Why can’t you just allow me this? 

“But this,” I say, and indicate the stacks of errant cleaners, which climb to the ceilings, which cascade from every spare room, “this is far too much.”

On day nine hundred, he refuses the food I make for him. I find him chewing and request he spit out whatever he has into my hand. A wad of wet bluish lint hits my palm. 

There is a shrine to vacuum cleaners in our study. It is a four tiered structure with different types of vacuum cleaner on each tier - canisters on tier one, handhelds on tier two, et cetera. At their peak sits an Airway Dirtmaster, its bag a lime green. He purchased it for thousands at an auction. Every morning he kneels before the altar, eyes closed; his lips move but I cannot make out the words.

*

There are modifications you can make, he tells me one day, sitting at the foot of the bed, a Sir Cleansalot across his lap. 

The costs wipe out our savings, but I don’t care. I have been told, by parents and well-meaning friends, that this is what it means to be in love. Until now, I had never experienced it. But within seconds, the money in our bank account reduces to what it always has been: a set of numbers, pixels upon a screen, no good for anything if not for this.

On the way to the hospital, we pass a billboard where a new brand of vacuum cleaner is being advertised. His eyes track the billboard as it slides past the passenger window; there is a light to him which I have not seen since our wedding day.

I must wait in the parking lot while he has his procedure. It takes over eight hours. I wander the nearby industrial estate; I am nervous; I worry about what our life will be like from now on.

When he is returned to the car, he no longer fits in the front seat. I place him in the trunk. I rest a hand on his chrome exterior, run my fingers along the extendable tubing of his new neck. He is still so soft, and newly beautiful. I see it now; he has become a god.

The Incredible Flightless Bird Boy!

1

They start as welts on his back, but soon morph into wings. Flightless, featherless, but big enough to beat. We house him in the attic, as per his request. I bring him hot milk in the mornings and seed in the evenings. We install bars on the attic windows and one Sunday, padlock the attic door. At night, I hear him screaming.

Once word of the flightless bird boy gets out, we set up an exhibit. We design little caps and t-shirts with cartoons of our son and the phrase The Incredible Flightless Bird Boy! on them in bold red. We charge five pound to tour the attic, attendance is strong. So strong, I book a month off (I have holidays saved up) and my wife, bless her, quits the cafe job. 

The wings grow feathers and brush now against the cross beams. We discuss an extension. Or perhaps an outdoor exhibition. But we hate the idea of letting him fly away. I can almost imagine him, a black dot shrinking in the vast blueness of the sky.

2

One night: a crash from the attic. He has removed some roof tiles and is crammed, feet pedalling, in the hole. We drag him back. He bites at us. An incisor comes loose in my wife’s arm. She slaps him and when he screams his mouth is red with blood. We chain him to the radiator with a set of cuffs from my workplace. 

When we’re downstairs, in the kitchen, we hear the cuffs rattling.

‘What do we do?’ she asks.

I don’t know, so I remain silent. 

‘We need him to stay,’ she says.

She looks out into the night sky - four moons are visible this evening.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know.’

In bed, we cleave to one another. I rest my cheek against the curve of her shoulder.

3

On my first day back at work, Julia from HR is due to be hanged. She stole stationary and displayed explicit art work in the bathrooms and communal areas. The art depicts Harry, also from HR, in a light that makes him seem both god-like and vulnerable. His member, vast and girthy, looks to be semi-erect. Harry is married with two children. He tells everyone that he would do anything for those two children. 

At the copier: I’d skin a goat. 

In the car park: I’d swim the amazon.

Beside the water cooler: For these two, anything. And he prods a finger at a 6x4 photo. Anything. 

Harry was the one who went to HR with a complaint. Harry, it could be said, is responsible. 

We watch Julia’s hanging beneath the purple sky of noon. There is fanfare - candy floss, blackcurrant crumble, a tombola. She screams when they kick free the stool, but it’s a snap, not a strangulation and the disappointment is palpable. There’s a bottleneck at the stairs, so I get a bonus twenty minutes away from my desk. Everybody is ground down by work and the mournful evenings of middle age. 

When I return, my wife has installed a four foot chain on our son’s foot. I try to pull it free, really go at it, but cannot. She tells me later the professionals tried to feed our son biscuits. 

‘Did he chew?’ I ask.

She opens her palm and shows me the teeth. Six molars and a canine. Our son’s face is distorting beyond measure, it seems caved in. I am worried he is developing a beak. We cannot market a toothless, half-beak bird boy. Sales would decline. I promise to ring the doctor.

4

The doctor arrives, sethescoped, and ascends to the attic. He checks the pulses, opens our son’s mouth and shines a torch around the inside. When he prods a yellowed tooth with a latexed finger, it wiggles. He frowns at us in the viewing booth. 

He tells us that we need to do something drastic - and he puts special stress on the word drastic.

‘What do you suggest?’

He tells us that we are at a critical juncture. A most critical juncture. Only the right medical professional will be able to sort it. However, and here he pauses, it will cost.

We wait in the silence, hampered by this grinning man. He holds up a hand, fingers splayed. These three, he says, and indicates his middle, ring and index finger. From: and then he points at me.

‘Me?’

He nods.

‘Me!’

‘Correct.’

‘And will it hurt?’

He frowns. ‘Most definitely. You are not exactly trimming your nails here.’

‘I don’t think I can do that.’

‘The right reaction, I’d be scared if you did. Although it is really very simple. Not as bloody as some might hope but most definitely simple.’

‘And what will happen once you have the fingers?’

‘It will slow his condition, most definitely. He will remain like he is now for another year.’

‘You say “most definitely” a lot.’

He looks at me with disdain.

‘Ring me when you have the fingers.’

He climbs inside his station wagon and removes the stethoscope. It is as if he has cleansed himself once the stethoscope is removed. He looks a new man, fresh and unharried. I can see the couple across the street, watching from the bedroom window. Midges dot the air.

5

My wife is on the sofa, her legs beneath a rug, leafing through the catalogue.

In the catalogue, boys, red-faced and sad, look directly into the camera. They have numbers beneath their photos. We circle the ones we like. 566827, we like very much. He has freckles and curly ginger hair. He looks like a nice boy, my wife says. 

With a set of scissors and a pritt stick, she has been testing him in our family photos. He fits. He has the necessary features.

Two years ago, Thomas developed gills. He spent a summer at the institute, very happy, until he grew too big for the cage. We transferred him, but the bills have made it difficult for us. 

This bird thing is a real boon. We’ve been able to save up enough to afford Thomas a surrogate. We dial in - hold for twenty - and speak with a woman named Sandra. Sandra is most happy to accommodate us and wants us to visit in order to trail our son’s surrogate. We beam with happiness.

6

Just like the doctor said. The finger thing is not hard to do. We tourniquet my arm, and my wife sharpens the knives. 

Once done, we bag the fingers with ice and return them to the doctor. He works the necessary science, then returns to the attic. The serum makes our son scream, but over the next few weeks, we see teeth returning to his gums. White peaks, piercing through the pink. 

7

On his birthday, we take our son outside. The sun makes him squint, and his taloned feet catch in the fabrics of the carpet. He folds his wings tight against him to get through the patio doors. We keep him collared. 

He caresses the fabrics on our washing line. For the first time in a long time, he smiles. Then, realising he is no longer constricted, he flexes his wings. They unfurl and our breath is taken away. A light breeze ruffles his feathers and they seem to glisten. Thick musculature twists and ripples beneath the skin. He flaps, once, and the wind knocks against us like waves. He smiles. He says something, but we can’t hear what. Then he beats his wings again. Giggling. He beats them again, and again, and again, until he lifts, just slightly, from the ground.

We panic. My wife yanks on the leash and our son crashes against the patio table. He shrieks and tries to stand, wings thrashing. But now I have gathered up the collar with my good hand and am pulling him closer. 

The neighbours’ voices ring out in the street. I hear their feet running, a woman squeal. I turn and the minister Rev Chardonnay stands in the gate with a hand covering his mouth. I hold up a hand as if to say, nothing to worry about, usual Tuesday. But there is much to worry about and I am sweating feverently. With our feet slipping on patio tiles and my wife straining against the doorframe, we finally haul our son inside.

He tries, again, to unfurl his wings, but they smash against the corridor walls. My wife clambers astride him and covers his eyes with her hands. Shush, she says, shush. But his wings still beat, tearing ugly, gash-like marks in the wallpaper, knocking aside a vase, ripping plugs from sockets. I’m in the kitchen, tearing through the drawers. The sleeping pills are in the bottom drawer, I bark my shin, wrench the top free with my teeth and head out into the corridor. They’re both howling, my wife sprawled atop her son. I force a dozen pills into his mouth. He tries to spit, but I clamp a hand over his lips. We hold his nose till he swallows.

8

For a fortnight, Joseph refuses to eat. Afterwards, his skin seems to be draped upon him, his wings lie limp, lice dot his feathers. 

Customers complain, as they are wont to. Occasionally, they bring vegetables to throw. This does little for his self-esteem.

My left hand is still not accustomed to the lack of fingers. I go to pick up glasses only for them to slip from my hand. I miss letters while touch-typing. Sometimes, at night, I will touch my wife and she will shiver. 

‘You’re like my little crab man now,’ she says.

I make crab noises to make her laugh.

9

In the room where we reunite with Thomas, there is only a bed, a desk and a mirror. Thomas is drawing when we arrive. My wife squeezes my hand.

We sit, side by side, on the bed. 

The nurse says: ‘Thomas, why don’t you speak?’ 

He looks at her, and shakes his head.

‘Thomas,’ she says, ‘this is a special moment for your mother and father.’

He shakes his head and frowns. 

‘Thomas,’ my wife says, ‘Thomas please. We’ve worked so hard for this.’

But Thomas doesn’t care, Thomas is drawing again.

I crane to see but can’t.

‘Thomas,’ my wife says. ‘Please.’

She goes to touch him, but the nurse stops her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you touch until after the purchase.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay.’ 

The pencil sounds heavy upon the paper. It snaps and he reaches for the sharpener. My wife gets there first and offers it to him. Instead he picks up the pencil nub and begins to draw with that. 

My wife wipes the tears from her eyes and comes back to the bed. 

‘We should go,’ she says.

She doesn’t take her eyes from the boy. I reach for her hand, but it’s limp. We move to the doorway. I say: ‘It was nice to see you again Thomas.’ 

He is sharpening the pencil, furiously. He does not look up.

10

When we get back, Joseph’s chain is snapped in two and the padlock has been removed. It lies smashed on the landing’s carpet. Talon marks scar the lawn. I climb into the treehouse and scan the patchwork of gardens and white suburban houses for my son.

When I come down, a detective’s kicking at my lawn. He has a notepad and a cream overcoat. He has a stubby moustache and thinning hair. He looks at the garden as if it could, but has not yet, comitted murder.

‘What were you doing in the treehouse?’ he says, chewing.

‘Searching.’

He bites his bottom lip and nods.

‘You weren’t masturbating?’

‘No.’

‘It’s important to keep sexually active during a crisis. If I had a treehouse, I would masturbate in it. Especially,’ he says and points to my claw hand, ‘if I had a hand like that.’ 

I place the hand behind my back.

‘You’re strange for a detective.’

He shrugs.

Inside, they ask questions of my wife at the breakfast table. They are not complex: where did you last see him? What did he like to do with his spare time? She is coddling an empty coffee cup. When the detectives leave, one (not the treehouse one) stops at the door, and takes hold of my wife’s hand. 

‘We will find your son,’ he says. We nod. We understand.

For the next week, we receive updates on their progress via telephone. There are, of course, many sightings of the bird boy, but nothing conclusive. After asking a number of forensic experts, they determine he will nest in a belfry within a seven mile radius. They begin their search in earnest.

11

My wife calls in sick and spends the day in bed. She refuses food. 

I can’t take it. I drink two bottles of wine at a restaurant and throw up behind an alleyway. When I return, we make hasty, quiet love with her hands pressed hard against the headboard. I find her in the morning, on the sofa.

It goes like this for a few days. We orbit one another in an empty and cold house. My wife visits side-rooms to cry. I often find her curled up, with an item of his pressed against her face. She takes to driving around in the evening, hoping, I think, to find him wandering the side streets, his wings dragging on the pavement.

Things - silly things - make me angry. Empty staplers clunking mockingly beneath my palm, unclear signage in the car park near work, elderly people shuffling in path-disrupting packs through crowded shopping centres. At work, I forget to boil the kettle when making tea and have to spend a half hour in the toilet trying to calm down. 

My eyes and chin have grown dark. My hair seems to lack gloss and body. My breath stinks. Everything tastes like ash. I look at myself in the mirror, and feel an ounce of exasperation that this here, this man, this body, this face, is me - a shambolic semi-corpse assembled from vague ambitions and lusts. I cry more often than not.

12

I receive the call at work. 

‘He’s in a bad way,’ they say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s fallen,’ they say.

13

The cathedral’s dome is huge and perplexing. Police lines ring the outside, and a dozen cars, the sirens silently rotating, park across the pavement. Within the drafty silence, my son is splayed across the cold stone. Halogen lamps illuminate his huge corpse. Five pews lay smashed in twine. Forensics take pictures, moving about in creased blue suits.

Later, the priest tells me Joseph lived in the dome, perched on his taloned feet. Every morning they fed him bread and milk, dipping the bread till it was soft. He thought the boy was an angel, a divine messenger. Did you tell anyone? I ask. He shakes his head. My secret, he says. He looks at the boy and a sadness heaves it way up through his body and onto his shoulders.

I drive for hours and smoke for the first time in ten years. Finally, I head to the house. I lock the car door, pocket my keys, head up the path and stand there. I stand there for longer than I’m supposed too - it is as if I sense passing through this moment will mark the partition between one portion of my life and another. Finally, I ring the doorbell. No answer. I ring it again. She’s in her dressing gown when she opens up. I don’t know what to do. 

I tell her in the kitchen beneath our pricey LED display unit and we sit, just with one another, resting our backs against the refrigerator. 

14

We have the funeral in the summer. We serve tacos at the wake.

15

The drive takes place on a rainy Sunday, but we are beaming with happiness. 

At the institute, the boy is in a suit with grey shorts and a red tie and a straw hat. He has a suitcase, filled, we understand, with drawings. I tell him we will display them on the fridge when he is settled. The boy does not nod; he does not frown. But I know this is temporary. This is a situation which can be fixed.

In the car home, I glance insistently in the rearview mirror. The boy is strapped in (two seatbelts, set to maximum tautness) and keeps his suitcase on his lap. When he doesn’t think I’m looking, the blankness falls from his face and is replaced by a sad, mournful expression. I know that Thomas is in there, but can’t quite see how.

He refuses our help with the suitcase, and my wife and I think how very much that is just like Thomas. Thomas, we say, would not want help with his suitcase. Thomas would want no one to help him with anything. He bumps it up the staircase and heads towards the room which used to be his. 

My wife busies herself by making copies of the boy’s face and sticking them onto all of the family portraits. We agree that we are stronger and turning over a new leaf. We are having good sex and better conversation. We cook, daily, and take turns caring for one another.

At bedtime, we curl up in a sleeping bag at the foot of his bed. My wife presses her whole body against me. We will make great love this evening. In the reflection of the windowpane, I see the boy’s eyes are open.

END

Pretty Like Lucy

We rode to the forest, spokes clacking on empty roads. Outside, three bikes – red, yellow, yellow – lay across the tarmac. Lucy said: I’m scared, and clamped hold of my hand. We passed kids, backpacked and high-socked; one was crying.

The Eye hovered, elephant-sized, a leash of red vein binding it to the earth. Its pupil, vast and sad, darted about the forest. Birds clattered overhead; the sun shone. It looked at me when I stepped into the pine-carpeted clearing, took me in, then looked away.

‘Holy fuck,’ I said.

*

David and I took a blood oath that we wouldn’t tell anybody, specially not adults, about the eye. The girls took it too and whined for the night about the sting. But then Sandra, that stupid girl, told her parents.

The next day, in the summer rain, police in mackintoshes and hats wrapped in cellophane strung up yellow tape. They had pistols attached to their hips. As it grew dark, their flashlights sent beams out into the forest. Tall shadows revolved about the trees. If someone neared the eye, they would approach, flashlights up, frowning. Who are you? What are you doing here? This area has been sanctioned from 8PM and is now off limits.

We issued beats to Sandra. For a while, we toyed with the knife. It’d be good, we reasoned, to cut a chunk out of her. An inch here or there. Someone said something about an eye for an eye. Tears swamped Sandra’s face. But then Lucy, always the soberest member of our group, elected to shave a patch from Sandra’s hair instead. She cried during the removal, shoulder-heaving, wet sobs. But after, the group felt a certain equilibrium restored. The status quo now thoroughly in effect.

*

The Eye made the news: wobbly helicopter footage, reporters on scene – finger pressed to ear, in the fore. A ticker tape – EYE FOUND IN FOREST CLEARING – scrolled.

For three days, on every channel, experts – elbow-patched, corduroy abundant – explained the eye’s cultural and cosmic significance: where it came from, who, if anyone, it belonged too.

Whenever school closed, the kids made their way, on scooters and bikes and pedal-buggies, to the eye. We milled about, two hundred of us, a certain nervous awe in the air. Cars packed the road. Police looked sheepish. A cult formed; flyers plastered the town. One of their pamphlets described Zanton, the demi-god. There were meetings in church basements.

Sam, profiteer of a rusty double-decker, advertised in far-off towns. COME SEE THE ELEPHANT-SIZED EYE!!!! TICKETS ONLY £200. In the heat, he jammed his bus with tourists, kicked a wheezing air-conditioner into action, and read from a makeshift script. Sam showed his clientele the sights of our town – some fictionalised – and concluded with the eye, hazed in the hues of sunset, pulsating beneath the setting sun.

*

Reporters, of course, told stories about their stories.

*

I came in from school and found my father beneath thin grey blankets with the curtains drawn. Husks of dried rice on the pillow beside him. Sometimes, he would adjust and try to see me in the light.

Downstairs, the sounds of race-cars played on the television. Mom slept in the easy chair, her glasses crooked on her nose. I worked around her, clearing away the cans.

On Abyss Days, mother called in sick for my father. She spent the first ten minutes of her day pacing around the landline, rehearsing her lines. At night, I would find her smoking a cigarette on the back step – arms crossed, right foot tapping. At some point, she would say – I’m going out. She would return drunk.

When the sun was coming down, she found me in my room. There was no alcohol on her breathe. She was in her raincoat, hair in a bun, strands like spirographs. We drove out with a thermos of hot chocolate. There was rain and it was the sort of rain which doesn’t give the windscreen wipers a chance.

Tourists in plastic ponchos snapped photos in the semi-darkness. The eye stood out; magnificent. I need to touch it, she said. Her progress across the forest floor was shy but steady. Raindrops framed her slumped form. It turned to observe her – a second – then looked away. She reached for it. When her fingers touched – just for a moment – I saw her smile. A happy, worry-free smile.

*

Scientists arrived in buses and set up tents. In the mornings, they gathered around gas canisters to fry sausages and bacon and mushrooms. Some, the specialists, stayed in a hotel – its carpark chock with cars.

They constructed polyethylene barriers around the eye. Men in yellow hazmat went in and out. From inside, we could see shadowy somethings. Flashes of pink and orange and blue; the eye quivering.

Soon the eye no longer levitated. It lay, surrounded by the hazmats holding clipboards. There was always a tool bench. Always someone cleaning a tool. Out on the forest road, a truck was parked, on its back were industrial tethers.

Sometimes, the news would run reports of the scientists progress. Towards what? – the reporters would say. Discovery! – the scientists would say.

One of the scientists said: ‘What we are looking for, I think, is some sort of explanation as to what this eye is, why it has appeared and whether we, as a species, can learn anything of significance from the eye. That is our mission. To understand something more of the universe. To identify a clear purpose.’

At school, the ample-busomed Mrs Richardson, sentenced me to three weeks after-school detention.

I went to the Eye in the late evenings with the anoraks, the white-collar workers, the milk-smelling middle-aged, the religious in ankle-high dresses. The lonely people, the lost people. It would be us, in the darkness, staring. And the eye staring back.

*

The scientists left; the reporters left. We hunted for the eye and found it, shrivelled and yellow, left, half in, half out, of the river. Clotted red veins had appeared across the iris. There were hack marks and gouges. It’s blood, we saw, was purple.

After stacking our bikes against a log, and huddling in the forest, we decided to take its life. David sharpened sticks with a swizz army knife. Sandra found a rock the size of her head.

Out in the creek, we worked at it for ten minutes. It was tough to pierce, like the skin of a tomato, and it quivered in pain throughout. We were soon bloody to the elbow. I walked away, leaving the stick, and threw up by a sycamore. I could still hear them working at it from the forest, the slap of arms on flesh. I can remember scratchy bark beneath my hand.

When I came back, it was done. The iris had drooped towards the ground. Streams of purple criss-crossed towards the river. Crows appeared, dozens of them, and began to feast.

*

It was a Tuesday in May when my father took a handful of pills and passed. Mother found him after work, mouth agape, coated in spit.

I was at my aunt’s, making pineapple upside down cake. She took the call in the hallway. When she returned, she sat down, and then, with violence, pecked my forehead. Mother arrived in Dad’s mackintosh. She stopped the car, twice, to cry.

We held the funeral in the forest. No Churches, pointless – that’s all his note said. We did not recognise the people who arrived. Men from the buses, pub friends. Lardy men wiped sweat from brows. We scattered his ashes across the creeks and woods of the valley. Everybody said what a nice day it was for it. Exactly what he would have wanted. I can remember confetti and a banner, lacklustre, with the name Simon across it.

Come eve, the sky scarlet, Mother drove home slow. She turned the radio off – she could not stand the radio. All that talking, those garbled not-there voices. I pressed my forehead to window. We passed the scientist’s empty camp, their experimental tent like the shed skin of some vast plastic snake. We passed an inn, the backs of two hikers. Finally, we passed a sign for cigarettes. There was a vast ocean of anger in me. I could feel it, at night, in the quiet, its waves breaking against the shores of myself.

*

Lucy and I lost our virginity together near the end of the summer. She arrived in denim shorts with a condom in her back pocket. We sat on my bed, holding hands; outside, a car went whispering past. She asked – ‘do you wanna?’ and meekly, overcome by a new kind of shyness, I surmised. She wore lime-green underwear, with white frills.

There was something, I realise now, about the summer evenings of teenage years. The summer would leave, quietly, before we knew it. There would be new places, new people in town, and time would march on. David, a few years later, while swimming, would be caught in a cross-current and be pulled under. Sandra, then married, would press her forehead to the coffin edge and wipe mascara from her cheeks. The summer then would feel distant and unknown. But there was something. A half-light. No money. Bounty all around.

Lucy kissed me on the walk home, beneath the pink umbrella of a freshly blooming cherry tree.

‘I love you,’ she said.

I looked at the stars. They didn’t shine for us; they did not compliment the mood of the evening; they didn’t even know we were there. But they were pretty all the same. Pretty like Lucy.

_____

Post Script: In 2030, Nikolo Szizek, then ancient and gnarled like a tree, writes an essay entitled Discourse on the Twenty Foot Eye which Haunted the Forest around Wanopop Lake for a Mere Forty Days and Forty Nights. It is not his best work. It is not even considered among his best work. In it, he suggests the eye captured public fascination because it satisfied the criteria of the unexplainable. (The essay contains a list of seventeen points). Like thunder to the ancient Greeks, he advises, the eye enabled us to re-establish our bond with primitive unease, that is: the known unknowability of the world, our helplessness at the feet of cosmic indifference. It was this argument that enabled Szizek to describe the eye as an act of absurdity on behalf of a great creator and nothing more. A humbling. As of yet, I have not found a better adage for the events which effected Wanopo Lake between October 15th and late November.

Report from the Bridge

++Log Activated, Terminal 23T4: 10.11.2012++

Three hours to get here and three hours to get the power working. I wonder, often, what sort of an operation you think you’re running? The subject of my report - my charge, if you will - is the bridge connecting [redacted] to [redacted]. Bridge=Georgian, red brick, wide enough for one car, lit by sort of intricate looking street lamps. Foot traffic minimal so far. But who would ever want to go to [redacted]? I will attempt crossing tonight as instructed.

++11.11.2012++

Crossing only marginal success. Crossed bridge in 2 minutes the first time. Was so overjoyed with my success, tried to make the return trip over the bridge - rather than the suggested re-route past the coffee shop and the fresco of [redacted]. Second trip took twenty-five minutes. I suspect my stopwatch malfunctioned at the midpoint, so perhaps thirty-five minutes.

++12.11.2012++

Didn’t realise I was meant to record my trips with such detail. Yes - it was mostly fog. In the distance were those trees, thick trunked, looming far past the sky. No sounds beyond usual city ambience; again, unusual. Same sign repeated every hundred or so steps - the school crossing one we’ve seen in other instances.

Fine, yes, I do see how these observations are useful.

But no sign of Them. Never is initially. Don’t know why you get your hopes up.

++13.11.2012++

Foot traffic minimal again today. Most avoid the bridge. Common sentiment is that if you want to get to [redacted] you’re better off going down by the canal.

Not that I wish to be that employee but don’t think I’m paid enough for what you’re suggesting, nor is it stipulated in my contract.

++14.11.2012++

Nothing to report.

++15.11.2012++

Nothing to report.

++16.11.2012++

Yep, you guessed it. Nothing to report.

++17.11.2012++

Six boys on bikes entered from the west side of the bridge. I looked down at my crossword (I know, I know, negligent) and when I looked up they were gone. 

Entered on the east side on bike provided. No sign of them. Came out on the west side. Swore. Turned the bike around. Entered from the west side this time and had a similar experience to several weeks ago. Fog everywhere, those massive trees. Some sound this time. But no end in sight. Pedalled for twenty minutes before I came on the boys. They had abandoned/dismounted their bikes and were standing looking out over the bridge’s railing. They were terrified at what they saw.

I got their attention after a while. I had the badge out as per regulation. Already they had the signs. Hard to describe really. The sharpness in the eyes. The slight gauntness to the face. One of them had lost a fingernail.

Managed to get them on their bikes with some persuading. They were desperate to keep looking. Showed them the badge again. That worked wonders. And then I think the fear kicked in, as we all went hell for leather to get out of there. 

Still pedalled for far longer than expected. Still saw that damned sign. But we got out, safe-ish. Have provided a list of boys details, addresses, names, star signs, etc, with dispatch.

++18.11.2012++

Nothing to report. Question: why have you provided a mountain bike with what feels like eighteen gears and the stiffest set of pedals? Have you been to [redacted]? It’s flat. Legs are stiff from frantic pedalling. Please send whisky.

++19.11.2012++

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

++20.11.2012++

Terminal is/was bust. Swear every terminal provided has some sort of malfunction. I say ‘was bust’ as previously it was writing only commas. I say ‘is bust’ as now it has no commas whatsoever. That’s okay though it’s not as if my main task is recording information on this thing. That said: nothing to report. Whisky appreciated.

++21.11.2012++

I’ve said it already. No. I don’t want to do that. You’ll have to fish about behind the sofa and see what you can find. Financially that is. I’m talking about MONEY down the back of the sofa. Not spa tickets. I have seven already. I don’t like going to the spa. 

++22.11.2012++

It’s always an old lady. She entered West side. Saw her wandering about the bridge for a while and then staring northwards for what felt like far too long (there’s only a block of vacant flats to look at). Didn’t take the bike this time. Encountered her like the others just staring out. Same procedure: badge: stop looking at that: and hooked her arm in mine. We exited but not as successful as the boys. She threw up a whole litre of that foul blue stuff then collapsed. Called evac. She was dead by the time they arrived. Eyes so black you can sort of see yourself in them. She lived in [redacted}; the family and news outlets (why were they involved!?)  have been informed the incident was a stroke.

++23.11.2012++

Woah, thanks for the shiny new terminal guys! It’s way better than my old terminal. ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, - just been doing this all day. That said, nothing to report. Is dispiriting boredom considered relevant? I think not.

++24.11.2012++

Yes, I agree the terms. 

Nothing to report. Did you know that in 1793 [redacted] opened a bar beneath this very bridge?

++25.11.2012++

As extrapolated from the various reports you sent over prior to me heading out, yes, it does appear that the longer you spend in parallel, the longer it takes to get out. This is terrifying when you consider certain agents have been tasked with spending a month on stairways, in corridors and alleys. They must have been there for years.

I entered four days ago for what was meant to be an overnight stay. Set up a tent neatly beneath one of the signs. 

Woke to find the sign had gone. Love that. 

Began walking, realised after about an hour I hadn’t seen a sign. Noted that down. Walked for another hour: came upon my tent beneath a sign (I’d packed up my tent and had it on my back). So I noted that down as well.

Already, I believed the amount you paid me was not enough.

Already, I began to regret taking the job in the first place. 

Kept walking though. Walked for hours.

Some description for R&D: fog continued to be oppressive; bluish light near the place where we would consider the sky to be; those trees seem to move a little. 

They - the big They - don’t understand noise after you’ve been in parallel for a time. There was city ambience, but it was like a mockery of city ambience, the wrong birds, sirens and horns rather than passing cars. I heard waves, like on-a-beach-waves. I don’t know whether it was because they were tethering on to me and my experience, and as I’d slept, and my subconscious had drawn other experiences to the surface, the continuity of the parallel had been fractured. Working theory. You can determine whether I’m talking shit.

I saw Them, of course. Based on rations I would say I’d been in there for around three days. Obviously I am an alerted denizen, so their approach was faltering and skittish.

I did look. I think the light caught my eye peripherally and just by instinct I turned my head. And I saw, of course I saw. All of it. The Unravelling. The Promised Gifts. The Falling of the Light. The Symphony for the Slumberers. I looked away, but only just. They hounded me all the way back, sparking and flashing and trying to make me look once again.

When I arrived back in my little bunker, I used the mirror to look beneath my eyelids. There’s a line of sheer black around the iris. Concerning. May need medicine.

Nothing more to report. I have not slept for three days, so next report will not be prompt. Sorry.

++26.11.2012++

Low and behold, nothing to report. Slept like a baby. Not that you care about that.

++27.11.2012++

Woah, what’s that? Is it….nothing to report? Why golly, yes it is!

++28.11.2012++

Blackness around the iris is ever so slightly expanding. Like a spot where you’re not sure it’s getting bigger and then actually yes it does look like it’s getting bigger and then, oh my, yes, actually that is a big spot. No itchiness yet. I don’t know whether you have the medicine to treat this, but if you do, please send it.

++29.11.2012++

Nothing to report.

++30.11.2012++

Or don’t reply I guess. If there is some person I can escalate too, please can you consider this log here as the escalation so that I may get this looked at please. Thank you.

++31.11.2012++

Blackness is now about a cm thick. Sight not failing, but can’t help but not trust what i’m seeing. Please send some kind of assistance.

++01.12.2012++

Please send assistance.

++02.12.2012++

Please send assistance to [redacted]

++03.12.2012++

Please send assistance.

++04.12.2012++

The Falling of The Light. The [redacted].

++05.12.2012++

No thing to report.

++06.12.2012++

And there shall come an awakening though thou/one/THEM may not wish it. [red-LIGHT-acted] Assistance.

++07.12.2012++ 

NOTHING report

++08.12.2012++ 

[redacted] a [redacted] all eye black [redacted]

++09.12.2012++ 

[redacted] thanks

++09.12.2012++ 

Nothing to [redacted]

++Log Terminated, Terminal 23T4: 10.12.2012++ 

Sanguine

In the afternoons, Sanguine painted The Constable’s portrait. Sanguine, of course, was the name only he knew. To everybody else, he was The Painter. Even if he tried to utter his real name, to say the word Sanguine, his tongue swelled and his hands, so talented with the brush, the pencil, became useless. In those moments, Sanguine became terrified he might forget his real name as had happened to so many others. The Constable, for example, no longer knew his name. If asked, he frowned and scratched at himself, looking lost, as if not knowing what a name was, let alone his own.

Sanguine took The Constable’s portrait quickly. He had over a thousand years of practice, after all. The Constable sat perfectly; you would think him dead, if it weren’t for his breathing. When everything was complete, Sanguine turned the easel for The Constable to see.

‘Fantastic,’ The Constable said, ‘you have very much outdone yourself, my man.’

A hand clapped Sanguine on the back, a crumbled bill arrived in his palm. 

The Constable kept his portraits in his jail cell. It is as if I have committed a dozen crimes, he told Sanguine once. Whenever I pass, a crowd of me, serving a lifetime of sentences. Sanguine watched him leave, tottering away on his bicycle. The sun shone through sparse clouds, already the day was getting away from him.

Sanguine returned to the roof. Here white crows with red beaks gathered. He tossed a clod of moss at them, and watched as they wheeled about the roof, squawking, wailing, only to land once more upon the guttering and take to cleaning themselves. 

There was much to do today. Loose tiles. A kink in the weathervane. The drainpipe full of mulch. 

Inside, more tasks awaited. The grouting needed replacing, the gate repainting. The switch in the dining room turned on the bathroom light; the switch in the bathroom turned on the cooker. He needed to dust. He needed to sweep, to do the dishes, iron the shirts, reorganise the books, fix the table’s wobbly leg. The oven smelled off. The bin was nearly full. 

Other stuff nagged at him. He was missing a fork. The radio kept making this staticky sound. None of the skirting boards quite matched. And all this dreck pushed away the task he really wished to complete: The Painting. The Painting that, so far, he’d spent nearly seven hundred and ninety two years upon.

On certain days, he made it to the attic, exhausted, yes, but feeling warm and good with the brush in his hand. The creaking floorboards and dripping taps retreated when he touched brush to canvas. Why, he asked himself, why don’t I just do this all the time?

Outside, the sky turned a bruised purple. Sanguine wondered whether he would see the moon today. He managed only a few minutes of painting, before he went to fetch his coat. It was time to go to The Forest.

When he left the house, a crowd of villagers were heading towards the black trees which gathered to the west of the river. Sanguine saw faces he knew: The Clerk, The Secretary, The Philistine, The Orthodontist, The Jobsworth, The Magistrate. Some, the practical ones, bore candles. He merged with the crowd at the bridge. It was polite to remain silent - this was, after all, a sacred time - so that was what Sanguine did, remained silent. 

Black and long dead, the trees of the forest groaned in the evening winds. Nothing else grew in the rich white sand at their bases. Once, The Dendrologist told Sanguine they were oaks, but Sanguine did not believe him. The Dendrologist said every tree was an oak, but this could not be true, thought Sanguine, else what would be the point of the names?

The crows circled overhead. As the villages filtered out to their allotted spots, the birds perched in the branches and cawed. Their red beaks dotted the canopy like beads.

A crimson box awaited Sanguine at his spot. Inside would be a gift. Usually he opened it at home, lighting a candle, making something of it, but already it was far too late, the sun was almost set, so he opened it before The Forest, leaving the pink ribbon that adorned the box fall among the sands. Oh, he thought, upon seeing his gift, again. Inside were several dozen clothes pegs. He forced a smile onto his face. With as much cheer as he felt possible to muster, he said:

‘I give my thanks for the gifts of The Forest.’

Around him, the other villagers repeated this chant. This was the fifth day he’d received clothes’ pegs from the forest.

On his return, he saw The Constable with his box under his arm. His scars had healed. He raised a now unbroken hand in greeting.

The gift box went in the cupboard, alongside some hundred others. Every year, they made a pyre in the main square and burned the boxes. The Chocolatier made gifts and these were disrupted among the villagers; The Demolitionist set off fireworks. They celebrated until sunset, and only then did they disperse; they were appointments to keep, after all, errands to run.

In his house, the chimes named the hour. Sanguine sat in his armchair, trying to calm his heart. But whatever he did it continued to thump relentlessly in his chest. Already the old wounds were appearing on his neck. The knock came at 8.05. Sanguine removed his top and stepped outside.

The Executioner perched upon a wooden block, wearing his black hood and garb. His axe leant against his upper body. He scraped a whetstone across its blade. In the silence, this rang out loud, as if he were sharpening the entire world. Sanguine knelt in the same spot as always. The mud before his door was scored from night after night of this ritual, so that now, in the semi-darkness, the moist earth cupped his knees.

‘Was it a good day?’ The Executioner asked.

‘Same as always, some good, some bad.’

‘I believe this should be one of the bad bits.’

‘Correct.’

The Executioner shrugged and rose to his feet.

‘The axe is a little blunter than usual.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing much, only that it may take more strikes than usual.’

‘I never feel the second strik-’

The jolt of return still surprised Sanguine. For an hour after waking, his neck ached and he struggled to breathe. Usually, he woke arranged in bed or on one of the armchairs. The Executioner, he had been told, liked him. Other villagers woke to find the noose still around their neck or the knife buried in their guts. Some, who The Executioner actively disliked, woke on rooftops, soggy from rain, or folded up beneath the floorboards of their abode. These unlucky few went about their days cramped, an ever present crick in the neck, trouble bending down, knees, elbows, shoulders, all shot.

Down by the river, Sanguine came upon The Sister fishing. A small wicker box sat beside her, with a set of tackles spread across its lid. Arrayed upon the bank, her rods wilted towards the river. A mist lingered here, which never seemed to leave. Despite her daily expedition, burdened by angling equipment, half drunk from her morning whisky, The Sister never seemed to catch any fish. Sanguine wondered whether any lived in the river, as he possessed no memories of ever seeing one.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I did not expect to see you today.’

‘I usually go by the path.’

Two empty bottles of whisky gathered by her feet, seemingly confiding with one another; a third, half full, leant against the wicker basket. She swigged from it, then turned to Sanguine.

‘Do you think this is the village we lived in before?’

Sanguine shook his head. Where he was before felt much denser and less muddy. The name of such a place escaped him.

‘The village I used to live in,’ The Sister continued, ‘had a granary. But there’s no granary here. So I think this must be someone else’s village, someone who perhaps saw me in passing and now I’ve arrived here, as a sort of figurine for them.’

‘What’s a granary?’

‘A place for storing grain.’

‘Isn’t that one?’ Sanguine asked, pointing across the tiled roofs and chimneys to the tilting white tower on the horizon. 

‘Could be?’ The Sister said. ‘Might have been?’

Curiously, Sanguine found a selection of dice in his right pocket. 

‘Do you remember your past life?’ Sanguine asked.

‘Only that there was a granary in my village.’

‘The Constable says he remembers his dogs and his wife. They bring him comfort. Does the memory of the granary bring you comfort?’

‘No,’ The Sister said, ‘no more than dreams.’

On his return home, Sanguine saw The Dandies dragging The Constable out onto the street. They wore trusses and curls. Handkerchiefs bloomed from their pockets. With their pimpled faces contorted from giggling, they struck at The Constable with whips and canes and stamped upon him with heels. One pulled down The Constable’s trousers. Another pulled free a knife, its handle inlaid with jewels.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Does the collective believe this implement adequate?’ 

One shook his head. ‘Thou have unveiled a knife for buttering and inquired into its adequacy for barbarism? Whatever next? A silent concerto? A pig dressed for marriage and presented as a bride?’

The third came over, leering. ‘Regardless of an object’s observed adequacy,’ he said, ‘one must make do.’

He snatched the blade from the others and began making his way after The Constable. 

Sanguine tried to ignore the screams peeling out from the village square. At home, he bolted the door.

When The Constable arrived for his portrait that day, his eye was swollen and his nose broken.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Sanguine asked. ‘You look as if you need one.’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Let’s just get on with it.’

Sanguine painted the portrait, and quick. He felt kind today, and this kindness came through in the painting. He made The Constable look noble. Kingly.

Usually, Sanguine did not feel so kind. Often, he gave The Constable rotten teeth, warts, big, ugly ears. Nothing grotesque, just enough so that when The Constable looked at the portrait he had an unfavourable view of himself. 

One day perhaps The Constable would finally notice and no longer arrive, beaten and bloody, for his portrait every afternoon. Sanguine hoped as much, but this was all it was, a hope, a stone tossed, objectiveless, into the sea.

On his way out, the portrait tucked under his arm, The Constable paused.

‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘How does it happen for you?’

‘Beheading,’ said Sanguine and sliced his finger across his neck.

‘Oh,’ The Constable said and took to examining the horizon. ‘Do you come from France?’

That night, when The Executioner lifted his axe, Sanguine thought: What’s France?

Sanguine once filled a jar with the white sand found about the bases of the black trees of the forest. He stashed it beneath his kitchen sink. The next day, the jar was gone. Come evening, he saw it, thirty feet into the forest, the sunlight catching the glass.

If you placed your ears to the black bark of the trees, you could hear faint - very faint - laughter.

One afternoon, a new villager arrived along the river. The boatman, shawled in ragged grey robes, faceless, worked the oars in silence. She bore the confused look of all new villagers, frowning at this new world, which she understood, but could not quite remember, as if it was a recently disassembled puzzle, now she could only get the corners and some of the edges, the rest, no matter what she tried, did not seem to fit together.

The villagers gathered on the banks with candles. The new villager stood and brushed the sawdust from her dress. This made a good impression. A sense of propriety was necessary in the villagers’ diminished state. Hands reached out for her. She took hold of them and stepped dainty, ladylike, onto the bank.

The Milkmaid, who had long since crossed to The Forest, used to place a wreath over the heads of new villagers. She assembled these from bracken and shell-like flowers. No one knew where the flowers came from. They did not grow in the village, nor the barren hinterlands surrounding it. Now, with The Milkmaid gone, the villagers instead gifted new arrivals with a pair of socks. These were grey with pink horses upon them, freshly knitted by the baroness.

‘Oh thank you, that’s awfully, wonderfully kind,’ the new villager said.

She wore spectacles and announced that she was once a librarian. Well, that’s what she thought, anyway. There were cheers. The Mayor, bedecked in his chain of office and vast cape, arrived to present the landmarks of the village. 

‘I am not quite sure we have books here,’ he said, ‘but perhaps we can find some for you.’

The crowd, led by The Mayor and The Librarian, headed towards the village. Several of them, mostly men, tried to make The Librarian laugh, but none succeeded, mostly through dint of their eagerness.

Sanguine remained on the bank. Out on the water, The Boatman re-oiled his lantern. He stank, even from a distance, of fish and sweat. In silence, he nudged an oar against the bank and pushed out into the water. Sanguine tried to remember whether he, Sanguine, knew how to row a boat. The Boatman faded into the fog; if the work was hard, he did not show it. 

The Sister arrived with her whisky and fishing rods.

‘Do you think anybody has tried to copy him?’ Sanguine asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ The Sister said. ‘Wouldn’t we know about that?’

‘No,’ said Sanguine.

The Sister shrugged.

‘Perhaps we should try,’ she said. ‘You know, I have a boat in the church.’

Sanguine reached the painting early that day. It looked good, but something was not quite right. Not in a way that announced itself, but a different, quiet incorrectness, that he had to search for. He paced, made countless drinks, stared, for all too long, out of the window. Finally, he saw it. 

He worked for the afternoon upon the pale flesh of a cherub’s elbow. He wanted it to look as if the cherub had recently leant upon some rough surface. This work took time. He mixed pinks and reds, tried new blends, new shades. But still it was not quite right. Soon enough, the day was almost up.

The crows were on the roof again; through the window, the black trees of the forest loomed.

The frame was here before Sanguine arrived. When he climbed into the attic, it was as if it was waiting for him, along with the oils, the palette, the brushes. It dominated the attic space. To reach its upper corners, Sanguine required a stool. Lengthwise, even with both arms spread, he could not touch both sides. For some two hundred years, he ignored it.

But then, on an impulse, he began making sketches in the spare moments of his day, usually minutes before the axe was raised, usually to calm his nerves. Slowly, very slowly, his sketching spread across the hours. Soon enough, when he was not running errands or completing chores, he was sketching and this, somehow, made him feel right, like a ball, running smoothly along a groove.

He conceived of the painting as a classical scene - a river, a forest, and a crowd deep in discussion, surrounded by ruins and watched over by the gods. The sky would be a vast blue vault, dotted with clouds. Later, during its composition, the crows arrived, taking up their places in the branches, pecking at the ground. But this was not until some time into its composition. He began with the ruins. Doric. This was the word which kept coming back to him. He did not know what it meant. Perhaps it was another word for columns. So, yes, figures, emerging from a pair of dorics, in discussion, heading on.

He liked its size, the vastness of it. If it were small, no one would consider his painting a great work. If it was small, it was almost a waste of time.

‘Scale makes the soul sing loud,’ Sanguine said to The Constable one day.

‘Sing? I thought you were a painter.’ His voice was reedy; earlier, The Dandies had broken his jaw and the wound had not yet healed.

He often remembered the first brush stroke. A short black line, just off from centre. He scratched it out the following day. No, he thought, while scraping the paint from the canvas, utterly incorrect.

Rainwater pooled in the nave of the church. Most of the pews were shattered and a statue, headless, arms wide, stood at its centre. A noose hung in the transept. She should remove that, thought Sanguine, after she’s done for the day.

‘Did you bring it?’ The Sister asked.

Sanguine unwrapped the bread. It was hard, hard enough to plug holes in the walls of his house.

‘I don’t think we’ll need it, it didn’t seem to take that long to arrive here.’

Sanguine cannot remember his crossing, but even so, it felt long, a number of days at least.

In the basement, The Sister unveiled the raft. It was made from pieces of broken pews and the confession box. Removing it from the church took more geometry than Sanguine anticipated. It kept catching on walls and doorways. At one point, The Sister took a hammer to it, so that it could fit through the main entrance.

They trekked through the village with the raft upon their shoulders. The house of The Arsonist burnt crisply in the morning fog. From his attic window, The Constable watched them go, shaking his head.

At the river, they launched the raft onto the water. They waited nervously, their feet wetted by the river’s ebb. It drifted along, turning in the flow. 

‘I told you so,’ The Sister said, as if Sanguine had doubted her this whole time. 

With paddles shaped from driftwood, they pushed off the bank. At first, the progress they made was swift. The village retreated to the horizon and they passed the windmill, its crooked spokes turning in the low wind. They flowed alongside a field of dead flowers. This was the furthest either had been from the village and shortly after they went past the statue of the headless horse which only The Cartographer had spoken of. But the paddling was demanding. Sanguine’s breathing was ragged and he could feel the weight of exertion in his chest. He had splinters in both palms. A damp circle had formed on The Sister’s habit. They did not stop though. They feared getting caught and this fear pushed them on. 

At points, The Sister drank - big swigs, barely breathing between chugs; she held the bottle out to Sanguine when she was done, but he only shook his head.

‘Your loss,’ she said.

Soon enough, the bottle was empty. She hurled it downriver. They pass it, later, rotating in a swell.

‘Were you a drinker in your former life?’

‘No idea. I’m not sure I was even a nun.’ 

Soon, the river expanded and became everything. They realised, almost simultaneously, that they had reached the sea. Sunlight played goldenly upon its contours. It reeked of brine and salt. On either side of them, sand, white, but not white like the sand of the forest, expanded ever outwards. Before them was the horizon, but nothing was upon it except water. Birds dotted the sky - not crows, something white and loud. 

They drifted out onto it, propelled by the river’s flow. Trepidation filled Sanguine’s heart. He did not think he could die, but he worried he could become lost out here, that all he was doing was replacing one eternity with another. 

‘We should have some bread,’ The Sister said, ‘to celebrate.’

The bread tasted like dust. Long ago, Sanguine had resigned himself to this fact. Everything, from the fruit that grew on the trees, to the stringy meat on the rabbits and white lizards, tasted like dust. Still, hunger made him choke it down and soon enough they were going again. 

There was a rhythm to their movement now. The oars made contact with the water, flowed neatly through it, and were pulled free with ease. They rowed in silence. Neither talked about what they wished to find. Saying it out loud,  Sanguine felt, would taint it.

Soon enough, they could no longer hear the not crows.

An hour went by, then The Sister demanded they stop. She remained hunched over, gasping for air. Sanguine waited, oar in hand, for her to regain her composure. Behind them, some distance now, a faint line of white marked the shore. The sun was drifting towards the horizon, soon it would be night.

‘Can you go on?’ Sanguine asked.

She nodded and picked up the oar once more. They went on for another hour. Sanguine’s hands stung from the splinters and blisters, like fat white leeches, were forming upon his palms. His knees felt cramped and his shoulders screamed every time he pulled the oar through the water. He gritted his teeth against the pain.

They kept on and on, until they had nothing left. They collapsed in heaps upon the raft, barely able to breathe. It seemed they were still no closer. The sun was coming down; Sanguine raised his head from the damp boards of the raft. It had been a long time since he had seen a sunset. 

When the sky was illuminated in reds and oranges, and these reds and oranges swam upon the water, and it seemed the whole world was presenting itself just for him, he felt suddenly small and undivine. This, he thought, was why he became a painter. But no. To paint this would build a divide between himself and the world. Somehow, painting this would take it from him. All he wished was to be here, to be time observing itself.

Soon enough, the sun completed its descent, glowering redly, then winking out of existence and leaving the world dark. The raft’s bobbing and The Sister’s ragged breathing broke his reverie. They shared the bread again. Already, they were halfway through it. Sanguine looked to the distant horizon. Did they really have enough to last? The Sister chewed mechanically and picked the crumbs off her habit. If she was worried about the lack of bread, she kept it to herself.

That night, he woke intermittently. Upon his back, on the soft sway of the raft, he scanned the starless sky, but found no moon. The waters moved blackly beyond the raft. He listened to the vastness of the sea. The Sister slept, her hand held between her legs, and her breathing soft. Eventually, the rocking sent him back to sleep. He felt weak, too weak to meet the dawn.

The Sister was gone when he woke.

The bread was gone too. He expected to see her floating, face down, upon the water, but all he saw were the waves.

He took up his oar and began. It was twice as hard now. His stomach howled through the long morning, longing for the bread. Near noon, it quieted, but he still felt wrung out and hollow. He cursed The Sister for her selfishness. On he went, his hands turning slowly to mulch, his body clamped in pain. Soon the oar became heavy and he had to lay it down. He rested his head upon the raft and tried to gather her strength. Just stay, he told himself, just stay here for a while.

He fell into half-sleep, and dreamt of a half remembered France. There were trees and people talking to him about mice. Every few hours, someone stepped outside and set fire to a bucket. Pegs were currency and people displayed manure in their abodes. Here, he was a famous tobogganist. People said: oh look, here is the famous tobogganist, wherever he went. His mother, face veiled, asked him when his next event was, but he doesn’t know mother, they just tell him on the day. I've told you this before; you don’t listen. Oh, sorry, yes, that makes a lot of sense, silly me.

Sanguine woke, starving. Dream spires shimmered on the horizon; somewhere, a bell tolled. Calling for dinner, probably. 

The oar had come off the boat. He paddled towards it, the raft’s wood scratching his stomach. When he pulled it onto the boat, it felt heavier than before. He might die out here, with this hole in his stomach and this thirst and these insistent bells. He pushed the oar into the water. It was no longer the sea he was paddling through, instead he was making progress along a street of thick mud. People came out of their houses to heckle him. They told him his ankles were weak, that his pets, all seven of them, would abandon him, that rain, so democratic, did not deign to fall upon him. He edged forward, ignoring the foul insults about his mother. An hour later, he woke up on his back, the sun searing spots onto his sight. Not crows circled overhead. Sanguine wished he was back in bed, but then here was his mother, here was his maid, and here was a quart of milk to raise his spirits.

‘To liberty,’ his mother said.

‘Why yes,’ Sanguine said, gulping down seawater, ‘to liberty!’

Sanguine heard the cacophony of the steamboat first, the grinding of gears, the clanking of engine parts, then he saw it, slicing mercilessly through the waves, chugging a plume of black smoke towards the sky. A foghorn peeled out across the water. The oars were now too heavy for Sanguine to lift. Five days had passed since The Sister left him. He’d tried to chew upon the wood of the raft, but this made him hurl his guts into the water.

The Executioner pulled up alongside the raft. Sanguine was almost happy to see him.

‘My friend,’ The Executioner said, voice muffled by his black hood, ‘what are you doing out here?’

A pirate hat perched upon his head. He disembarked onto the raft. His weight almost threw Sanguine into the water.

‘Let’s get you home,’ he said and carried Sanguine, easily, onto the boat. He placed him in the bilge, with the lobster cages and the harpoon.

‘Why do you have a harpoon?’ Sanguine asked.

‘It's symbolic,’ The Executioner said, ‘don’t worry too much about it.’

Sanguine knelt to place his forehead upon the gunwale. The raft drifted away across the waves, already the oar had become lost. He dreamed of silk sheets, like in France, and of sleep.

‘Why do you wear the hood?’ he asked, but before he got the answer, he woke, with a jolt, in his bed once more.

One afternoon, Sanguine sat to paint but could not think what needed to be done. He stepped back, to observe the painting in full, and stood here for some time, examining the work. Was it done? No, no, of course not, it couldn’t be.

That day, he paused for a moment at the boundary of The Forest, looking out over the many mounds of sand. There must be something, you assumed, on the other side. He tried to see it now, but The Forest expanded too far onwards. One day, he would find out, but there was no reason for this to be today. As he left, he paused, yet again and looked back. His gift that day was a box of fruit.

He encountered The Sister on the bridge, while chewing upon an apple.

‘So how far did you get?’ she asked.

‘That’s difficult to say,’ he said, ‘it was just sea, after all, on and on. Just water.’

‘We should try again,’ The Sister said, but Sanguine gave no weight to The Sister’s words. If they were to try again, he would be on his own, he knew, and he did not think he could face the hunger and the madness a second time.

‘Perhaps we should wait a while.’

She nodded at this, and looked quickly at her feet.

‘The Constable is looking for you,’ she said. ‘He says you have abandoned your post and no longer wishes to be associated with you.’

‘Why is he looking for me then?’

‘He wants to tell it to your face.’

The Constable’s house was a semi-detached red brick block. The adjoining house collapsed some fifty years ago; the ruins of it - the wooden frame, the stubbornly standing bricks - clung to The Constable’s house like plaque. The Tramp used to live in the ruins, but all that remained of her was a musty coat and pocket flask.

When The Constable saw Sanguine coming, he leant through his upstairs window and shouted: ‘Piss off!’

Sanguine burst into a run and shoved in through the front door.

‘Get out of my house, you brigand!’

A shoe (leather, black wingtip) flew out of a side room and down the stairs at him. Sanguine ducked, sidestepped a second shoe (canvas plimsoll) and then hurried up the last few steps.

He found The Constable in his bedroom, arms crossed, surrounded by photos of people Sanguine did not recognise. One of his feet was shoeless.

‘You abandoned your post,’ The Constable said. ‘I no longer wish to be associated with you.’

‘Well I’m back now,’ Sanguine said, panting. ‘I can paint you again, if you like.’

‘Where would you paint me? Your post? Well you can’t, can you? You abandoned it.’

But the next day, The Constable arrived with his coat folded over one arm. He handed Sanguine a note. We are not speaking. The Dandies had put out The Constable’s left eye; the flesh around the socket was a foul black and a dribble of blood scored his cheek. He sat for an hour, still, despite the pain.

When Sanguine turned the easel to display the portrait, The Constable hid his smile. On his return to the village, Sanguine saw him dismount his bike to look at the portrait again. He touched along his jaw, as if trying to align the image before him with the flesh of his face.

Alone, Sanguine washed cups and swept floors. He cleaned the windows and straightened the weathervane. Finally, he returned to the attic and the painting. He sat, brush in hand. He paused, leant forward with the brush, but could not bring himself to touch the canvas. He put down the brush.

‘Wow,’ he said.

After several hundred years he had done it. The painting was finally complete. Outside the crows were cawing; it sounded, somehow, like cheering.

Sanguine posted flyers through the letterboxes of the village.

COME AND SEE THE MOST MAGNIFICENT PAINTING

CABIN BEYOND THE BRIDGE

TOMORROW MORNING WHENEVER

Villagers arrived in small groups after sunrise. One by one, he led them to the attic. Upon seeing the painting, The Doctor took off his glasses and put them back on again, then took them off again; my my, he said, my my. The Clerk fixated on the cherubs in the bottom corner; they had been leaning on something prior to this, he said, bark, I think. The Librarian used to be an art critic and proclaimed the painting one of the greatest works she’d ever seen. The Watchmaker stood for a while, fidgeting; on his way out he placed a coin in Sanguine’s hand; if you need a new watch, please swing by. The Guest simply nodded. The Dandies giggled. The Constable believed all the faces were his own. Both The Candlestickmaker and The Baker cheered and shook Sanguine’s hand on departure. The Singer believed that this was what they had been aiming for with their voice this whole time. The Sister did not quite get it, but came back all the same. The Arsonist patrolled the wooden boards before the painting, chewing upon his cheek, before squatting in one of the corners and peering intensely at the crow, after a moment or two, he smiled. The Libertine brought a measuring stick and took the length and width of the frame very seriously, along with the proportions of the ruined columns and the figures. The Child said, not quite your best work, and left. Finally, The Mayor announced that they should display this in the village hall and began drafting the necessary correspondence to make this a reality.

When Sanguine examined the faces that looked upon his painting, none wore quite the right expression. They missed the detailing on the eye of the magistrate, the subtle symmetries of the river, the trees, the clouds. They could not sense the discarded composition sketches or the long inhospitable days of doubt. His work, which supposedly would bridge the gap between them and him, only made him feel further from them.

Sanguine finished the day exhausted. When the knocking came at the appointed hour, Sanguine invited The Executioner to see the painting. The axe remained outside.

He stood and admired the painting for some time. Eventually, he removed his hood, so Sanguine could see the tears upon his face. 

‘That’s very beautiful,’ The Executioner said. Sanguine had never seen The Executioner’s face, but now it was revealed all he saw was the blackness that ringed his eyes and how the whites appeared almost red from tiredness. Did he not sleep like the other villages? Sanguine wondered. Or had his time here taken on the aspect of one long day? Either way, eventually, with resignation, The Executioner donned his hood once more.

‘Do you think it was worth the time?’ he said when they stepped outside.

‘Yes,’ said Sanguine, ‘yes, I think it was.’

A rumour arose in the village; today, it was declared, was Tuesday. But around midmorning, a new theory emerged: it was not Tuesday. No. That was foolish. Instead it should be known that today was instead Thursday. When The Sister emerged from her church, the debate had been raging for an hour. She stepped, dramatically, onto a crate and declared that, given the angle of the shadows and the circling of the crows, that it could not possibly be Tuesday, or Thursday, but was, in fact, Sunday. Several agreed. They became Sunday advocates, flagrant Sundayists and gathered to the crate. The Sister, smug and triumphant, eyed The Constable, whose Tuesday declarations had started the whole debate.

‘You just want us to go to your church,’ he said.

‘If anything, I don’t want anyone in my church. I hate it, on Sunday, when you all show up.’

Sanguine passed, carrying a set of green tiles.

‘Let’s ask The Painter,’ The Constable said. ‘He will know.’

But Sanguine did not know. ‘Most likely it’s Tuesday,’ he said. ‘Yesterday was Monday after all.’

‘That is true,’ The Clerk said. ‘Yesterday we agreed it was Monday.’

‘Yes but we wouldn’t be arguing if we didn’t think we were wrong yesterday as well,’ The Watchmaker said. ‘Clearly there is doubt, only yesterday people kept the doubt to themselves. Now they’re voicing it and you’re mistaking their silence yesterday for agreement.’

‘What?’ The Waitress said. ‘I don’t understand any of that.’

Sanguine quietly departed. Alone in his house, he worked patiently in his bathroom. He was re-tiling the bathroom. Crammed into his tiny bathtub, he hummed to himself. Once, the song might have had words, but these were lost. Come evening, several rows of tiling were completed. He made himself tea and stepped out into the garden. It tasted bitter but warm against the early evening chill. Above, the sky turned a peachy orange. I could paint this, he thought, but then: no. No, it’s fine as it is.

‘What will you do now?’ The Constable asked. ‘Another masterpiece?’

‘I expect so,’ Sanguine said. With the brush, he made The Constable’s teeth taper to points.

‘Excellent,’ said The Constable, ‘everybody, I am sure, is in anticipation.’ He looked through the window then, and a sadness gathered to him. ‘Why do you think we’re here?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Here, you know, in this place.’

‘I don’t know. It seems like a second chance.’

‘I think I killed someone,’ he said, ‘or maybe killed the wrong person. Something like that.’

He placed his head in his hands with rehearsed tenderness.

‘I think it was a policeman and now I’m here, wearing his uniform and reliving what I did to him.’

Sanguine remained silent. Words deserted him. Eventually he turned the portrait. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

For three days, Sanguine stood a little longer than usual at the boundary of The Forest. The sand seemed never ending. He tried to imagine what could be in its depths or its other side. He wondered whether he and The Sister had gone the wrong way, that they had gone back, when they should have gone forward. Even when he left the boundary, he could not shake thoughts of The Forest. Even when the axe came up, even when, yet again, he woke in pain.

Shortly after completing the painting, he spent a whole day in bed, avoiding the chores required of him. When The Constable arrived, he spent less than ten minutes upon the portrait. When the axe came down, he found himself welcoming it.

On a morning not long after, he went to The Forest early and stood upon its boundary. He knelt to find a pebble of suitable size and then, pausing for a moment to get his eye in, he launched it into the depths of the forest; it landed some feet away in a tiny geyser of white sand. He waited. He anticipated something, he did not know quite what, a shifting of wind perhaps, the sands to rearrange themselves over the stone. But nothing occurred. Tentatively, with more reserve than daring, he stepped over the boundary.

His boots made dusty sibilations while he walked. He looked back, once, at the village, the church steeple, his little shack. He wondered why he had stayed so long. It was some time, walking, almost wandering the forest, before he began coming upon clothes. Doublets, gowns, robes. He saw a pair of walking boots, standing to attention, a hat hanging from the branches of the tree. They seemed numerous, more than enough to clothe the entire village twice over. 

The Forest appeared to continue on forever, as did the clothes. It was not until another hour of wandering passed, that Sanguine felt his fingers tingling. When he looked down, he saw his hand flowing away from him. He thought, suddenly, of the garden back home, all overgrown, and turned, as if to head back, but when he turned, he could not remember why exactly he had done so, and then this thought, the thought of a thought, flowed away too. He remembered the painting, the hours of it. These felt vivid. No. Like they should be vivid. Then there was a shore from another time, a kite in the wind. Black cats, curled by the fireplace. A loom. An apricot, mid morning sun upon it. His name. Sanguine. Sunlight streaming down through the clouds. A kiss. Laughter from the attic. Smoke curling in a dark place. Sanguine.

And then he was gone. A pile of clothes remained, folded on white sand. Through the neckhole, a single crow, beak somewhat askew, pushed itself free and burst skywards.

Seven Journals

Murano

While visiting a city filled with canals, the name of which I forget, a gentleman thrust a copy of this slender pamphlet into my hands. He made off into the night. Strangers are often handing me bizarre objects and making off into the night. Perhaps they sense I am waiting for an event, that I am perched here with my binoculars, scanning for noteworthy material. I flicked through Murano later that night, in my room, lit up by candles.

Much of this journal is given over to an abundance of crosswords and as such, is probably the most profitable on this list. These crosswords are cryptic to a high degree, clotted with annoying symbolism and anagrams which would take even a cryptographer six days to decipher. I gave up after perhaps twenty minutes of struggle. I had managed hamster and nepotism, but couldn’t wrangle another word from the fifty clues presented to me. The book itself went wheeling through an open window.

We begin with Murano because Murano was the first thing I saw you reading. I was new to Prague and haunted by dreams where my mother was eating my limbs one by one. I avoided sleep as a result and my days had started to stretch far into the nights. The world had taken on a sheen of lilac during this period, for me at least. It was here when you emerged, in summer dress and sandals, legs crossed, working your way through a crossword puzzle.

You were stuck, I believe, and were tapping the pencil against your teeth. I, great master of words, descended in the raiment of my profession (turtleneck, grey blazer) and coughed up an answer. I slept well that night, better than I had done for a month.

Illicit

This is the journal you left on my bedside in winter.

It is white and compact. Monochromatic photographs wedge themselves between stories: pictures of discarded pipes and shattered pallets, the roof structure of warehouses, trains on train tracks, steel bridges with chunky bolts, a lighthouse. The text – and this irritates me – is not justified, so across the page’s right border, an unkempt skyline, all towers and alleys, juts into white sky.

I did not read it immediately, instead I wandered the rooms, checked the shoe and coat rack for visible signs of departure. It was like you had never arrived. After some weeks, perhaps as a wish to remember, a need somehow to feel closer to you, that I read Illicit.

(Books, I realise, are ways for people apart in time to live together.)

Your marginalia littered the free space. You had reviewed each piece with a seven-star system, annotated those of especial merit. I did not purchase another copy of Illicit, but I did submit a number of stories. It was the very last on my list at the time, but I hoped, while you were breaking or travelling in far off places, that you would read something of mine, finish it, and see my name at its bottom – I hoped to pull you back from paradise, to jolt you back to our unmade bed.

Nekuia

Founded in 1974 and disappointingly discontinued in 1990, the Nekuia (pronounced, Neck-ee-r) was home to a number of stylists from the Post-Gothic movement. Its founder, James Lancaster ­– a fine name, although, I suspect, a pseudonym – laid out the post-gothic manifesto in the first issue’s opening pages. I will not quote it here.

While I greatly appreciated much of the prose on display, much of it was overwrought and lacked vigour. Too many voyages to dank European settlements, veiled antisemitism and candelabras for my liking. James Lancaster, it seemed, was a sucker for the fetishes of another time.

Nekuia accepted two of my stories, one about an unnameable chess player, the other about a visit to a county manor during the French Revolution. I have since disowned both stories and consider them a misstep.

You, meanwhile, came upon these stories by accident, sometime before we met. It was only much later you associated my name with them and then, after chasing me around the kitchen, up the stairs, and under a desk, you cornered me in the bathroom. I ascended onto the toilet seat and perched there, a fleshy gargoyle, while you thrust them at me, demanding a signature. I was kind. I am mostly, I think, kind. I gave my signature a certain gothic charm and we spoke no more of it.

The Green-Eyed Beast

‘We only accept stories dealing with themes of jealousy, that is, the want or desire to possess something belonging to someone else. Preference is given to stories in the romantic genre.’

I have never thought it possible for a literary theme to be exhausted; yet, somehow, The Green-Eyed Beast (or the GEB as most circles referred) managed it. And quickly too, within fifteen issues the founder had decided that there was simply nothing more to say on the topic of jealousy and folded.

I came upon this during the time after you left. What had I done with that summer? Well, I had: wandered Prague, drank myself silly with musicians, got lost until I found St. Peter’s bridge a little after 2 a.m., darned socks, bought art, tried to write a short story, read perhaps fifty pages of Magic Mountain, lost those darned socks, drank myself silly again – this time with a travelling circus, climbed onto the rooftop and looked out over the sunset, found myself kissing some girl on a park bench, cried myself to sleep a little, tried again at that short story, drank myself silly a third time – this time by myself and bought three grey blazers of differing pattern; in short, I wasted it, burnt away those days like pages.

But I bumped into you in that time too, on some scarfed gentleman’s arm. His handshake was firm, annoying. You told him I was a writer and I realised I had faded from your life. Snow, I think, was coming down. You wore red. Or blue. I watched you make your way along the embankment, weaving between pedestrians.

Anyway, founded in 1967 by Sebastian Low, it ran monthly for, as stated, fifteen issues. Low’s partner had left him for a married man during the Christmas of 1966, and I do not think I am making some grand deduction when stating that Low would most certainly have founded this magazine off the back of that spurning.

The GEB did not accept my submission for a quartet of short stories, set within a Japanese orchid and featuring three bickering sisters, one long-distance runner, and a lady who owned sixteen dogs. Fortunately, I am an adult now and have grown used to taking these sorts of setbacks in my stride.

Lonesome Dove, an Event!

Sebastian Low, after a period of bankruptcy (perhaps caused by The Green-Eyed Beast, perhaps due to a number of excursions to India), managed to secure a job at a fish market and launched another magazine. I think it should be noted now that Low is not a literary man. He is unpublished, graduated with a degree in architecture and rarely made a penny from his literary endeavours. Look to the magazine’s title for proof. One could perhaps puzzle over those four words for an hour and still not discern what it meant. I wonder whether Low would have been happier, richer and more fulfilled if he had perhaps plugged his commendable energy into some other pass time. Golf, for instance.

Still, Lonesome Dove, an Event! was a decent magazine. Glossy covers, well made, with worthy contributions from Julian De La Red, Ivor Juzowazkia and Anna Lem. After three years running the magazine, Low moved from the fish market – his new boyfriend complained about the consistent fish scales on his fingers, the stench which invaded their sock drawer and, for a long period, how it appeared they only ever ate fish. Low began working as a site auditor for a German construction company. For many, this would have been the end of their life, but for Low it gave a great sense of purpose and so he handed Lonesome Dove, an Event! to one of his more literary friends who, after failing to even request submissions for six months, managed to tank it within a year.

As a side note: Low enforced a strict fifteen-story limit – an ambitious bar to scale month on month. For long periods, even if you submitted after the deadline, you would occasionally be picked by default due to Low’s last minute panic and on two or three occasions, Low had to fill in many stories by himself – these are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

I suspect you are wondering where you feature in all this. Unfortunately, you do not feature at all here, but this little snippet always amused me and I suspect you will never read this.

O

In this magazine’s first editorial, Synthia Gosel describes O as the most erotic letter. She goes on at length, is often perverse and at one point mentions the virgin Mary. She is sadly incorrect. The most erotic letter is obviously Q. It is far rarer, has a permanent admirer in ‘U’ and, not to be crude, also looks very much like a vagina.

O is perhaps most famous for its bestiality issue, which drew a great amount of attraction from the press. I remember an issue of Farmer’s Weekly which discussed the ramifications of O’s recent publication on the profits of the automatic trawl to great length, an article I still fish out during certain dark days in September. When not depicting rams being rammed, O featured stories erring on the literary side of snuff. I sent a number of stories to the publication (I was starting to starve and needed the money). They paid well. I would say they were the second most profitable magazine on this list, following Murano and this, I think, gives us a unique insight into the human condition. Or, at the very least, our wallets.

The stories I submitted were under a pseudonym – Mary Radcliffe – but who I wrote about, every glanced stocking and licked lip, was you.

Ukulele Sunset

I remember now buying you a camera, wrapped in red paper for a birthday. The rest of the day we spent photographing our flat. An unmade linen basket – picture. Train leaving town with a plume of ready smoke ascending – picture. Me, alone, looking pensively into the distance – picture. Soon, our apartment was coated in framed monochrome photos. I would look up from my desk and find some spaniel staring back at me, in the kitchen rows upon rows of empty wine bottles, preserved in a gold frame, our laughing friends accompanied me in the bathroom. In the Spring, we bought train tickets to some coastal town – cheap, idyllic – and headed out there one weekend. I took Ukulele Sunset. You took the camera, there was, you said, a Ferris wheel you wanted to make immortal.

While many magazines are known for their content – or, more often than not, their editor who expresses a certain sensitivity through the content – Ukulele Sunset was renowned for its cover. For me, books and records are just as useful for decoration. There are, for example, a number of records I keep simply to stare at. The five issues I own of Ukulele Sunset all possess the most fantastic covers. One depicts a blocky, nouveau art depiction of the cliffs of Dover, another a set of futuristic graffiti, a third the pores of an orange disturbed by many-eyed flies. The content, however, is sorely lacking. And so I was reading just to be reading.

We travelled northwards in our own personal carriage. Our attempts at lovemaking, a wrestling match which for completion would require an advanced understanding of Euclidean geometry, failed. We turned to reading, interrupted intermittently by the darkening of a tunnel. Around us, the train clattered onwards. You’d made it perhaps fifty pages, before resting your head on my stomach and falling asleep. You had on a jumper, no trousers; I was in just my socks. We had begun to fight a little before now and I knew the breaks, the silences were not lulls in the tide, but instead the water drawing out. But still there was this moment, with you resting on my stomach, and the world passing by through a window and I thought that this was not too bad, that this would do, and closed my eyes, just to rest them, and think about you.

The History of New Venice

1.

Stanley Kubrick, old and mottled, wakes late at night, alone. He envisions a film about Venice, its beginning, its middle, its end. Compelled, he begins.

2.

The year is 2093 and the real Venice is gone. It is the Atlantis of that time.

In April, Kubrick starts scripting. He plasters his study with photos, archival documents, letters from famous Venetians. He reads extensively. Interviews various subjects. The film will be about an artist who cannot find inspiration. His name will be Julian; he will wear mostly tangerine.

Soon though, Kubrick abandons this idea. It must be a woman. She must be tall, with cropped hair, and deeply in love.

3.

Construction on Kubrick’s New Venice commences on the 4th of May 2094. By now, the study does not have an inch of free wall or floor. A hand drawn map dominates the ceiling.

Kubrick’s wife frets. She wants him to eat better. Sometimes, she wonders why she married this queer man – so neat, so professional in his work. Yet: his watch is forever incorrect; ketchup stains appear on his trousers before breakfast; recently purchased white shirts are dashed with pen marks within the day.

She watches him from the study doorway. Sometimes, she kisses his forehead and though he does not pause, does not look up from his work, her heart swoons like first love, a teenage crush she indulges daily.

He elects David Gilmour to be his lead musician. Due to scheduling commitments, and David’s ailing heart condition, filming is delayed by 14 months. Kubrick waits.

4.

The locals cannot believe the beauty of New Venice. They are simple folk. Their lives revolve with prompt and shocking regularity around the weekend. Sometimes they see Kubrick strolling New Venice’s cream streets. He is ancient – 168 years old – and cannot move without a cane, cannot see without heavy spectacles. He is somewhat of a marvel to them.

5.

Cars arrive, bounteously, at Kubrick’s manor – they bear actresses and actors, they bear film crew and set dressers, they bear secretaries, runners and researchers. He interviews them all in the aviary in the squall of squawking birds. For the lead, he interviews over fifty girls. Many come back again. None are right.

At night, Kubrick, impatient with his stalling project, fearful he will leave it incomplete, thinks of death. He is overdue death now. Liver spots decorate his paunch, the flab of his thighs, his chins. He can pinch this and roll that between thumb and forefinger. His belly has accreted folds and wrinkles, like some great sagging ballsack. His arse is lumpen like a stamped upon cushion. There is mottled flesh at the tops of his thighs – green welts. Daily he decays.

6.

Samson, the biblical hero, is central to the film. Kubrick has the art department replicate his image on walls and ceilings. He designs intricate frescoes. When the work is complete, he feels closer somehow. At home, he kisses his wife and their kisses become embraces. They tumble over a rug and roll across the study floor. Photographs stick to her back; Kubrick’s foot shatters a vase. They come crashingly together and the whole world caves in. Like they had slipped for a moment into death, and then returned, like light, to the universe. The following morning, they breakfast on the patio and Kubrick, who has been in love with her for so long, cries from happiness. New Venice lingers on the horizon, perched on the lake, forgotten.

7.

They find a girl, by accident. A tall Catalan waitress. Kubrick converts the script to Spanish. He tells the producers – the backers – that this is necessary. People swear he is half-mad. Now New Venice towers. The New Doge Palace pierces the horizon. When the set dressers, the painters, the film execs, the actors and even Kubrick himself pace the place, they all say the same thing: it is both Venice and not.

8.

Shooting begins and goes well. Then, disaster: a portion of the set, built upon unsure foundations, collapses into the lake. The engineer hangs himself from the rafters of the New Venice cathedral. Kubrick allows a day of mourning before shooting resumes, and new engineers, better engineers arrive to take his place.

9.

One night – and it is a very dark night – Kubrick’s wife passes. He finds her days after, in a room he rarely visits. He sits on the chair opposite her bed. He takes her hand. He kisses her forehead. He watches, through many-paned windows, as day becomes night. Finally, he cries.

Nightly, Kubrick walks the streets of New Venice. The film is no longer about love; it is about death. Then he realises that all love stories are about death. Then he realises that all stories are about love and death. And that creation exists between the two of them. This is not a revelation for Kubrick, merely a remembering.

10.

There is a shot which Kubrick cannot get right. In his head, it is a moment of sublimity, a pivot in his character’s life.

It is simple: the artist sees her first love in a café. He is well-dressed, clearly richer, with a tangerine neck scarf hiding his scars. He is being served tortelli di zucca – pumpkin ravioli –and sits opposite his mother. Or perhaps his wife. It is not clear.

In this moment, the artist realises her world has changed. That the love she felt has died with the thing she loved. That the person who loved (her former self) has died as well. That death comes again and again in tiny increments.

After four days on set, fifty takes, and many a storm-out, Kubrick finally nods. This is the shot; this is the angle. All of that, that revelation, exists now within a single image.

11.

Kubrick holds his wife’s funeral on the docks, amongst cranes and lilting vessels. Kubrick wears all white and carries a single red rose, plucked free of thorns. She is cast out, upon a buoyant coffin thick with flowers, and when she is out far enough, the pyrotechnics alight and her coffin burns in the bay. Fireworks clatter overhead. A shy sun sets. Kubrick sheds copious tears. He wipes them from his eyes with a handkerchief, its edges embroidered with red thread.

He says something but it is nothing important, nothing of note.

12.

When the film is finished, everybody is exhausted. The crew return to their families and sleep for days. Divorces happen. Affairs are outed. One woman severs a finger and displays it in an art museum. She calls it the trigger finger. It was the finger which held the recording device.

Kubrick retires to his attic, ascending daily through the aviary and working till dark. The house feels semi-haunted now that she is gone. He does not dress. He shawls himself in a crimson kimono, slips on slippers. Mostly though, he is naked.

He dreams of her padding feet on the bare floorboards. He glimpses her ghost, once, in the Venice room, crying over photographs. Then again, from the road, this time at the third story window, staring out at the lake, at the shadows of New Venice.

The film is missing some vital piece, he realises. That night, he returns to New Venice and walks its streets. He sees a cat, teetering across a windowsill and knows, suddenly, what he must do.

In the attic, he works for an hour.

The pieces cohere and fall.

A moment.

It is done.

13.

Critics fawn; family send congratulatory letters; awards are suspected.

14.

If Kubrick had six pairs of tape recorders and one set of pants, he’d be happy.

15.

On the evening of the premiere, an old friend arrives to celebrate with Kubrick. They drink wine. His friend asks:

“What did it feel like when you were filming?”

But Kubrick never felt like he was filming. He was just a father to it, a medium.

He has grown sad. They wander the garden in silence. Crickets cricket. There is an owl, probably. Stars. The friend has become drunk on wine. He points to the town – golden against the hills and valleys. Kubrick does not want to go. They look at New Venice’s white stone carcass. Its maze of dark streets.

That night, Kubrick dreams of flying. In the morning, he gets up, puts on his suit, and heads for the ferry to New Venice. There is no ferry. There’s nothing. He returns home. Thick silence. He tries to eat. He lies in bed. He knows he should start something. He sleeps.

16.

They dismantle New Venice over a period of weeks. Kubrick sees trucks and vans ferrying away pieces of it, the painted ceilings, the tower of the Doge Palace. Eventually, all that remains are the streets themselves, a vast and undressed stage.

On the final day, crowds gather. They stand on the shore, holding hands, laying out towels.

When it happens, there is not much to see. There is a muffled boom and then the whole thing teeters and sinks into the lake. He thinks of the labour which had been put into those cobbled paths. He thinks of the times spent wandering the streets. He lights a cigarette, smokes it. The crowd cheers when New Venice comes down. They clap.

17.

Two years later, a royalty cheque arrives, among the bills and fan correspondence. It is folded inside a red envelope. The studio, quite naturally, have a touch for the dramatic.

Kubrick buys a pair of sturdy shoes and a parrot. He names the bird Julian.

He has not thought about New Venice for a time, but, later that day, while moving between rooms, Kubrick feels something pass through him, a sense of something, a quickening. He sees all of it, rushing past like a dream, and feels, for a mere nothing, that he has been there before, as a different person, living a different life – a pair of eyes looking in – and then, like that, the feeling departs. And he is alone again.

The Boy

There are only two styles of portrait; the serious and the smirk.

Dickens

1

I don’t know what I did that day. Pottered, I suppose, from room to empty room. I lounged for an hour. Read five pages of a book. 

Through windows, I saw clouds with torn black undersides gathering above the sea. As always when storms were near, my elbow ached. I’d fallen from an oak when I was five and crashed through a shed roof. I remember being carried bouncingly inside, then, later, an ambulance. Since then, the spot between my radius and ulna, where I hit the rusting axle of an upturned wheelbarrow, twinges whenever the air thickens and rain clouds darken the sky. My wife - former wife - thought this, the twinge, a talent. She would sit up straight and grin when I told her about it, ask questions. I found a notebook of hers down the side of my bed a number of days ago with a whole page devoted to it. It was neatly done, with the table drawn in pencil, values in ink. Drawings of the elbow too, annotations around the swell.

I suppose now, now that so much of my life is memory, it would have been good to crack its spine and leaf through it. Find further secrets: diary entries, theories, extrapolations. She was a scientist - considered herself a scientist. On walks around our little island, I’d find her examining flowers and fauna, squatted, hood drooping over her face. She kept a collection of snails in the pantry. Knew the latin names for various butterflies. In her bedroom, she piled notebooks on a mantelpiece, their memory threads drooping like rat tails. When she was gone, I built a pyre on the beach and burnt them, with most of the photos. Her clothes too. I must have lost this last notebook, kicked it under the bed. At night, coming across it again on my desk, I trawled to the cliff and hurled it into the sea.

I thought of Mary again, in the pantry, when the storm hit. I’d spent the morning pegging clothes to blue twine, and I watched on, biscuit in hand, as my washing line’s pock-marked post barrelled across the lawn, trailing shirts through the sludge. Socks were scattered towards the beach. A jacket sleeve waved and fell. I cursed, a sharp fuck, and hauled on boots.

*

They arrived, the boy’s father and his arcane chest, on the morning tide. The storm had kept me up most of the night, slamming itself against the house, howling out over the sea. My dreams were storm dreams - me in caverns and coves, a choppy sea breaking against rocks - ladies with soaked hair, damp ringlets, looking drowned across vast stone tables from me - candles; fish heads on white china; dark red wine - curtains of droplets from arches - negotiating floating shipwrecks, upturned hulls, vast frozen crossbeams.

I woke early and wandered the halls, ghost like, while outside a bruisey dusk persisted. Waves rustled on the beach. The house was chilly, like the cold had crept into the stone. In the library I found an unread book, and, skimming through it, returned to my bedroom. Morning came, as it always does, and bloomed pink. I sat up in bed, working my way through an anecdote about memory. Something about the nature of time. At the midpoint - page twenty-six, I think - I saw the boat emerge from the fog.

It came acropper at the foot of my island, rode itself up onto the beach (the beams of its hull snapping and splintering), and then it toppled, lazily, onto its side. The rain was still coming down in waves. It was a frigate, its sails heavy with water, the mast cracked and bent. Its crew were all dead, the sailors, the captain; most of them were prone in the mulch of my garden - or face-up, their jaws unclenched, seeming to howl, their eyes staring at the sky. I heard later that one had made it off alive and washed up, clinging to half a door, on the east coast.

Much later, when I was heading past the slit windows of my stairwell, I spotted him; the scientist. He was just a dot down on the beach, distinct against the billowing folds of his shirt. I went out to him. His tie was wrapped around his left leg. One shoe was missing and the sleeve of his jacket was ripped at the shoulder. A wave broke over his feet and swilled around his ankles. He clenched a fistful of sand. I stood for five minutes, chewing thumbnails, before I made my decision.

*

I tire of listening, this is the simple truth.

When Mary died, I returned to England and rented a crank-handled car. For four days, I drove slowly northwards to see a friend. The countryside was wintergrey, horrible, like it had died just for me. I came to his village, drove for some time down country lanes, arrived at his gravel drive (bold gold gates, rows of trees), drove some more. He stood on his doorstep in a grey cardigan, waiting to greet me. I forget his name. I forget everything now. I had seen a number of friends on the way up and it had been very much the same ordeal. Quiet drinks in living rooms. Chit-chat. Then usually after I mentioned Mary - the twitching began. The uncomfortable glances between loved ones. Her taking his hand. Him standing abruptly. I was ushered onto doorsteps, driveways, gravel forecourts and told so long, see you again. And always they would watch me go, waving from doorsteps and doorways, while I put the car in reverse and made my way unsteadily to the gate. This time, however, was by far the worst. In his plush observatory, we sat and talked. Well, he talked, he was a great one for that, an orator for the ages; he paced, champagne flute in hand, and shook his fists. And I? I merely listened. I could barely stomach the champagne. Mary’s death hung like two stones from my neck. Perhaps he had been informed in advance. A telephone call earlier that day, warning him about myself, about Mary. He would not shut up. I lost it, shouted at him, and he cast me out.

It was a long walk back to the car. He stayed on his doorstep with his champagne flute and watched. I clambered in, half-drunk, and headed off. Trees swept into my headlights. The backs of two hikers. A hotel. 

In a layby, halfway home, I pressed my head against the steering wheel and did my best not to cry. I had never felt so tired.

*

Thomas - that’s the name I gave him. Thomas Eagerton. Thomas James Eagerton. And to think, when I first saw him, I wanted the waves to break over his head and drag him away. 

Instead I hauled him onto my shoulders and returned to the lighthouse. He was light, brittle-feeling, like a sack of loose bones. The sky that day, once the clouds had cleared, was a greying blue, like someone had mixed milk with blueberries. I propped him on a chair and set the kettle going. A crab fell from his hair and scuttled under a crockery cabinet. He shivered, teeth like a rattle. I wrapped him in a shawl (the corner frayed from chewing) and tried to get him a drink. He pushed the cup away. Stubbornly, I insisted, and wished again I had left him.

‘No,’ he murmured, ‘the chest.’

He made me go out for it. It was by a fallen tree, a dead fish wedged in the handle. I tried to lift it, but it came down on the sand with a weighty thud and almost broke my toe. I tried again: failed. Then I attempted to jimmy it open with a branch, to lighten the load, but this failed too. I ended up dragging it, two-handed, across the sand. When I came in, my guest had wandered into the kitchen, the shawl still wrapped around his shoulders.

‘No cigarettes?’ he said.

‘What?’

He held up my ashtray as an indication.

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘No cigarettes.’

‘Where am I?’ 

I told him. He put down the ashtray.

‘And who are you?’ he said.

Joseph Pike. This was a lie. I had dreamt it up on the beach.

The chest sat dripping on the kitchen tiles. Chunks of seaweed were strung across its frame and Apollo, his head haloed in starlight, was emblazoned on its front; maybe Apollo. My mythology is rusty. Let us say Apollo. Let us say it was Apollo and Thomas was Prometheus. And I was Charon, the boatman. And we, all three of us, were stood on the banks of the styx.

‘So tell me,’ Thomas said, ‘how do I get away from here?’

Outside, a seagull clattered from the sky and landed on the forehead of a sailor. It cocked its head and plucked free an eye.

‘The postman,’ I said, ‘you can leave on the post barge.’

*

He insisted upon a desk. I found him one in the basement, a robust oak with a drawer missing and a pair of loose handles. I found him a bed too. And a bedside table, jammed between a doll house and a pair of chess sets. He grinned when I brought that over to him and knocked on it twice with a fist.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said and pressed an ear to its surface. ‘That’s the ticket.’

I left him, ascending the short staircase to my living room. I should have done something about the sailors, dragged them out of the muck by the boots, covered their faces with white cloth, but I longed for familiarity. I retreated to my study and passed the day in books and manuscripts, and at five, I called down into the dark and inquired about dinner. Thomas appeared in an apron and bent an ear my way.

He emerged at eight o’clock in a fresh shirt and tie (purple, of all colours), pulled out a chair and sat. There was a raw red nick on the underside of his jaw, spots of wetness on his upper chest. I placed him at twenty-five.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, after spearing a potato. ‘What is it, exactly, you do?’

‘I’m a scientist,’ I said.

‘A scientist of what?’

And here I run into some difficulty. The official answer was something to do with time. Chronologist, I suppose. Chronosist maybe? In those days, I entertained this wild notion - and it really was wild, barely plausible, let alone possible - that if I studied time, the concept of time, well enough, dug deep and all that, I would find something - a loophole perhaps, a missing digit in some famous theorem - something, a crack, a crevice which would enable me to head back, squeeze through, re-inhabit my old self, and live out a few golden moments, a few precious days here and there, and then live them again, and then again, and once more, and over, and over, and over. It was a foolish endeavour. I can barely stomach my research now. All piffle and drabbling. But Thomas seemed to like my answer. He nodded, swallowed it whole and said, with a sort of steadfast solemnity:

‘I, too, am a scientist.’

Something shifted downstairs; I heard a pan clatter to the floor and bounce ringingly.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘a mariner?’

‘No.’

‘But the boat?’

‘My research,’ he said, ‘it is - I am - I am an exile.’

‘Ha,’ I said, ‘well, we’re all exiles, aren’t we?’

He picked another piece of meat from his plate and snapped at it.

‘You said you have a wife?’ he said.

*

I loved my little island off the coast. I liked being perched there, about thirty feet up, surrounded by sea. It, the island, was shaped like a large kidney bean, with beaches and rock pools and coves at one end, and a sheer cliff-face at the other. My house squatted near the centre, and if you climbed the stairs to the lighthouse, and the day was clear and crisp, England could be glimpsed on the horizon, a thin seam of rock and sand wedged between sky and sea.

There was a light drizzle when I left my house that morning and a harsh, choppy wind. England was not visible. I found the stake lodged between two rocks on the beach and while I was dragging it back to its original holding (both arms wrapped bodily around its shaft), Thomas appeared in the doorway, holding a heavy tin battery in his right hand.

He came out to me. I took down my hood to hear.

‘Joseph,’ he said and planted both feet. ‘What’s your electricity situation like?’

I let the stake drop.

‘Why?’ I asked.

And he told me some lie about illuminating a fish corpse.

‘For inspection,’ he said. ‘Anatomical drawings.’

He was looking at the body of the captain, hatless in the flowerbed, when he said this. Rain dripped from our noses. 

‘You know,’ he said, ‘all my life I’ve been stuck, it seems, between two choices. I don’t know whether the dead haunt the living or whether the living haunt the dead.’

And then he put his thumb tentatively in his mouth, and a sort of glazed look played over his face. What was this nonsense? I looked at the captain, worms had taken up residence in his skull. I presumed, perhaps falsely, that Thomas was from one of those galvanic cults which had sprung up around London. The box was probably filled with commoners’ pets. The ‘fish’ was probably a family’s Yorkshire Terrier. 

Nevertheless, I pointed him towards the lilting generator shed at the bottom of my garden and watched him march off towards it, with the battery swinging at knee height. For science, you understand, nothing more. For science, which I still worship at the feet of.

Half an hour later, while I was taking a mallet to the washing line, the lights of my house flashed like lightning and went dead. Like an afterthought, my porch bulb popped and showered the doorstep in glass. And do you know what I thought, stood in the rain, in my bright yellow mackintosh and boots, trying, desperately, to get my washing line operational: idiocy, I thought, pure unadulterated idiocy.

*

At dinner one night, I spotted blood on Thomas’s shirt collar, and I did wonder, quite idly, what he was attempting down in the basement. The following day, while perusing the downstairs library, I overheard conversations between Thomas and another. I paused, craned an ear to the door. The second voice was barely formed, a wail without words.

From the glimmers I had sighted of his private life, I knew Thomas was divorced and that his son - Sebastian - was long dead. Sebastian he only mentioned in passing, like it hurt to speak about him. He showed me a photograph of the boy, peering out from beneath a bowl cut, his mother’s dress clasped in a chubby paw.

‘A train,’ he said and withdrew into silence.

2

I used to have a servant: Gerstalt, I shall call him. He was a lumpen, aggressive young man with a large, crooked hunch. The hunch was caused from a fall. A loose set of scaffolding, he told me. I had not expected him on the day he arrived, emerging from the fog in a boat half his size, and then limping loudly up the garden path, with a hand outstretched to greet me.

‘Gerstalt?’ I said.

‘Ja,’ he said and gripped my hand tightly.

Most mornings, I would wake to the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen. He had a particular fondness for fry-ups (no eggs) and would cook up a wad of greasy food every day - I attribute his tremendous size to this habit. He really was big. Sometimes, I would spot him on the beach, sitting like a boulder, a heap of flesh and muscle, looking out over the sea.

Gestalt's advert, located near the back of the paper, was a singly plain thing. Black and white. A line drawing of himself. Support for those who need support, it said, and provided an address - Tuppenny street. I didn’t need support. No. Just companionship. I paid him for that. And there was companionship. Some, at least. He would listen, his head bent, his face screwed up, while I told him about my research. And I, in turn, accompanied him stargazing once or twice a week. We would hobble out into the garden, the grass wet with the night, and set up his telescope and charts, and gaze, avidly, at the stars.

He left quite suddenly. I found his luggage in the hallway - two square suitcases and one small brown bag. No doubt containing something ridiculous. A french horn, perhaps, to sate the silence. He came out of the bathroom with the telescope slung over his shoulder.

‘Ah,’ he said and smiled. ‘I did not expect you to be up.’

I had not expected it either, standing there in my dressing gown, the kettle rattling in the background. He grappled with me in a huge embrace and said goodbye. I waved farewell from the short pier which prods out into the ocean. Him and his dinghy sped away, like a zipper prying apart the sea.

Thomas arrived for dinner, with the boy, on the third day.

I was lighting candles at the time and almost burnt myself on the match. Thomas stood, beaming in the doorway, with his hands on the shoulders of the child.

Later, I did wonder how Thomas had kept the boy so secret for so long. For a moment, I entertained the notion of Thomas stuffing the boy inside the chest and letting him ride around on that ‘frigate of his. The boy was certainly small enough. It did seem, perhaps, a little callous though. A little cruel.

‘Who’s this?’ I said after lighting yet another candle, blowing out yet another match.

‘My son,’ Thomas said. The boy was frowning at Thomas’s right hand.

‘From the photo?’ I said.

‘His brother.’

They boy was short and his face had a thick covering of freckles on the cheeks and foreheads. His hands, fat, unlike his brother’s, also sported freckles. As did his legs, when I saw them. And probably his belly too. And his back. Everywhere, in short. I smiled.

‘Hello,’ I said and held out a hand.

‘He’s still terribly shy,’ said Thomas.

‘Oh,’ I said or something like that. Ah, maybe. I returned to lighting the candles. The boy’s eyes followed me across the room. When I looked at him again, he was marvelling at the freckles on the back of his hand. He gave one a short, forceful rub and frowned at it when he remained. An invalid - that’s what I thought. And, as if to confirm, the boy tripped over his own shoes and landed in a heap.

‘I noticed you had a piano in your library,’ Thomas said. We were reclined, wine glasses in hand, on two big-backed red leather chairs. The boy ate on in the background. He kept glancing at the candles and sniffing nervously at his cutlery.

‘The piano belongs to my wife,’ I said.

Thomas squinted at me over his glass.

‘And you keep it around?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to throw it out?’

‘No,’ I said.

He picked a strand of something from his teeth and admired it in the half light.

‘That seems foolish to me,’ he said.

The piano was in the study. There were still thin, gash-like marks on the stairwell where we’d moved it from the dining room. I remember we found it at a junk sale, strapped it to the roof of the car, and drove the seventy miles back with it. That had all been Mary’s doing. I never wanted the piano and sulked all week. I did learn to play, but later, when my pride finally faded.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘My son,’ Thomas said and pointed to the boy, ‘expressed an interest in the piano today.’

‘Really?’ I said and turned. The boy was attempting to get a stack of peas from the plate to his mouth. 

‘He saw you earlier, playing, and wanted you to teach him.’

The boy was still no closer to his goal of getting his food off the plate. If anything, he was further from it.

Had this oaf been tip-toeing around my house all day? Watching me from behind bookshelves? When I turned back to Thomas, the man was attempting to get a cigarette lit.

‘Well?’ he said.

The cigarette caught on the third attempt.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘Teach him?’

He blew smoke. ‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what good I’ll be.’

Thomas glanced over my shoulder at the boy.

‘I know he’s a little slow,’ he said.

‘More than a little.’

‘But there’s no harm in trying, is there?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, I suppose there isn’t.’

He was fiddling manfully with the cigarette, trying to get the ash off, I think, although failing copiously, and then dropping the whole thing onto the table.

‘So you’ll do it then?’

‘Yes,’ I said and moved the cigarette to the ashtray. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you want money?’

He was leant in, close, and trying to get the cigarette clasped - re-clasped - between his middle and forefinger. I noticed he was a little drunk. Out of sympathy, I almost reached over and tucked it between his fingers for him.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’

‘I have money.’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll teach him.’

Thomas leant back suddenly, making the chair wheeze, and clapped his hands together. He grinned.

‘Walter,’ he said, ‘Walter. What do you say to the man?’

*

Truly it was like nothing I had ever heard, that boy speaking. It was like - no, my words escape me. It was horrible, I do not kid. Terrifying. Like someone running over a trombone.

*

I don’t believe I would be lying if I said I loved her. Mary, this is. We met at a quayside restaurant (it was a gathering of friends) and when the evening ended, she wrote her name and address on the back of a napkin and pressed it into my hand. She smelt ever-so-faintly, almost untraceably of vinegar. Her hair was thick and vibrant, like auburn ink. Her waist was seemingly designed for my hand. I won’t extoll the virtues of her smile, how often she made my heart race. She knit me a small giraffe when we next met, and soon after, around six months later, we married.

A few days after we moved to the island, I can remember her standing at the top of the stairs, late one autumn evening, in a dress I had bought her. We had our clothes drying on the bannister and there was a cymbal, for some reason, leant against a stack of books. I was moving a tin of biscuits to the pantry when I spotted her, silhouetted against the landing window with both her elbows upon the sill; dust fell, minutely glinting. I often think of this moment. I can’t explain why. It is not important. I attached no meaning to it. I just revisit it, over and over.

She died bed bound. It was autumn then too. I was downstairs making tea while she coughed out her lungs. When I returned, she was lying, stiff and askew, on the bed. Black blood covered both pillows. I tried to get her neat - arms crossed over her chest, that sort of thing - but this was heavy work, more than I could take. The sky, it was - no, it doesn’t matter. I left my tea on the sideboard and when I was done, adjusting and re-adjusting my wife, a scummy layer of flotsam drifted across its surface. I buried her in the garden, out near the clifftop. I do not remember much of the ceremony. Some vague words. I burnt something perhaps, then headed in. Through the window, I glimpsed a flock of ravens - surely not - take off and bank towards England. I am certain the cliff will fall away one day, the sea will erode its foundations and cause it to topple, and Mary’s pale, worm-gnawed cadaver will slip from the soil and plummet head first into the sea.

*

When it came to playing, the boy was truly terrible. He would mash at the keys, making all manner of racket for the hour or two I taught him. It was his fingers - big for a child, upon recollection, like the hands of a rugby-playing teenager with chubby middles, thick tips and huge horrendously gnarled knuckles.

Most days, he arrived at my study for three o’clock and stayed until five. The first time he came, I was working and didn’t spot him until I turned, by chance, towards the door; I have no idea how long he had been there for, clinging to the doorframe, oppressively mute, watching me from beneath the bowl cut, scared of this hulking adult he had been thrust into the company of; he soon grew in boldness, however, and was coughing into his fist and tapping me on the shoulder to grab my attention whenever he entered. 

He did not, would not, speak. Occasionally, he would growl or groan when he hit a false note. Maybe sneeze if the mood struck him. But speaking seemed beyond him. Still, mute or not, there was something unnatural about every move he made, as if he was being jerked about by a set of invisible strings or was told a few moments before, what he would be doing, and how he would be doing it, only in arabic, or some other language which required translation, re-adjustment, analysis. 

I can tell you now he was never Walter to me. Always the boy. Never a person, always an ‘it’. I would like to allot this to a particular tick or trait of his, but really it was something else, some tension which seemed about to spring forth at any moment. This may be a lie. Maybe it was simply his stillness. He did not fidget. No, he was too dull for that. Instead, he sat, curtly, with his knees together and his hands placed upon his thighs. And, like I said, did not speak. 

But why am I being so insistent here? Maybe I’m hoping to uncover something which did not occur to me at the time. Maybe I’m trying to redeem something of myself here. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m lost, like we’re all lost, and I’m fumbling in this dark room for a non-existent light switch, which was removed long ago - in fact, never installed, and never to be installed either. Maybe, maybe not.

I would like to say the boy grew calmer as time went on, but this was not the case. He seemed to weaken with each session (there were roughly six in all; the post barge had been delayed by further storms) and soon his playing was incomprehensible, a cacophony of missed notes, false starts and jumbled orchestration. Sometimes, Thomas, bored of work, would ascend the stairs early and lean an elbow on the piano’s back. The boy stiffened when he heard Thomas’s boots on the stairs. His cheeks flushed red and, trembling, he fell upon the key’s with increased frenzy. Once, during one of these clattering recitals, I placed a soothing hand on his shoulder and felt a dense heat radiating from his skin. I withdrew my hand in shock and Thomas frowned at me. I told him some lie about arthritis and went back to listening - enduring, sorry - the boy’s atrocious playing.

Thomass pulled me aside after our third lesson, with a cigarette once again in his hand.

‘Why is he so…(and here it was as if he was moving a piece of meat around his mouth)...incoherent?’

‘It’s his hands,’ I said. ‘His fingers are too big.’

We looked over at the boy, who was in the process of removing a book from the top shelf. He smiled at us and the book fell, pages rattling, and struck him in the face.

‘Hmm,’ Thomas said.

*

The next day, a fine bright thing with no sign of rain, the boy came into my study with Thomas behind him and excused himself from practice. Thomas smiled broadly over the boy’s bowl cut. He had on a dark grey waistcoat, with burnished bronze buttons and slit-like, squinting buttonholes, a waistcoat which I recognised from somewhere…

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘He fell,’ Thomas said and held up the boy’s hands. They were bandaged to the wrist with thick, fraying fabric and spattered in orange-ish drops. Blood, I thought, surely. I leant forward and took the boy’s hands in mine. They did feel different. Lumpy. Thomas didn’t go into much detail and kept his eyes from mine. Said he found the boy at the foot of the stairs, splay-limbed.

‘Knocked out?’

‘Oh, no, just a fall.’

‘Onto his hands?’ 

The boy looked up at Thomas pleadingly.

In truth it did not surprise me. The boy was an oaf, after all. He could probably break his foot while trying on new shoes, smash his skull in with an umbrella. No, the real mystery was why Thomas had come to my study, wearing - ah, yes, now I see - one of my old waistcoats.

‘Yes,’ Thomas said, after a while, ‘the klutz fell.’

I nodded.

‘But he’s okay?’ I said and tried to look into the boy’s eyes. They were emerald, I think, and dotted with light orange - bronze, I suppose - flecks.

‘You are okay?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you?’

Thomas pulled the boy towards himself.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘He’s fine. Why not speak to the gentleman, Walter?’

His grip tightened on the boy’s shoulder.

The boy nodded, his cheek twitching fiercely.

*

The bandages came off two days later. Some remained, tattered and yellowish, on the wrists. Faint blue veins, which stood out whenever the boy was warm, were visible beneath the papery surface of his skin. The fingers were slender now, the metacarpals prominent near the knuckles. The freckles gone. The thumbnails bitten to the quick. In short, the boy had received, somehow, through a kind of witchcraft,  a pair of new hands.

He played no better than before. Worse, sometimes. He was more accurate, certainly, but still sorely lacking in technique. There was one bar - it still sticks out in my memory - which he murdered for all eternity.

Thomas arrived near the end of the session and stood smiling in the door frame with a mug of steaming tea. He still had on my waistcoat. I kept my eyes on the backs of the boy’s hands.

Thomas managed to corner me afterwards in the kitchen, when I had soapsuds up to my elbow.

‘So,’ he said, ‘is he improving?’

‘He’s more accurate,’ I said and washed the grime off a coffee cup. 

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘excellent, excellent. Just like Sebastian.’

*

Later, much later, when I landed on shore, still reeling from the events which had occurred, I bicycled down to the local library and searched through the county archives. The library was a big, ugly-looking place with a set of pillars out front. Pigeon-shit coated its window sills. Inside, there was a delicate, powdery silence and a librarian, Miss Tick I believe her name was, who watched me through half-moon spectacles and frowned while I wandered the shelves. After an hour or two, I hit upon a scuffed news report (at the bottom of one of those bottomless cardboard folders) and devoured it whole. The story featured ‘piano prodigy’ Sebastian Eagerton and his father ‘renowned scientist’ Thomas Eagerton. It must have been a slow news week, because the paper dedicated three pages to it with a full-page photo of the boy and his father, standing side-by-side. No mother though, I suppose she was out of the picture by that point. And the pun there is very much intended.

I’m rambling.

Sebastian was dead. That was the heart of the matter. Sebastian was dead and played piano. That was it.

*

It was Thomas who removed the bodies, out of consideration for the boy I see now. He went out late at night with a lantern and got to work. It was just bright enough to make him out in the moonlight, dragging the sailors downhill by the armpits, binding them to a cabin door and pushing them out onto the waves. I watched him as he watched them drift away.

The ship remained, lying on its side, half-buried in sand. Crabs had taken up refuge in its bilge and I regularly saw gulls perched on its mast. A few days into his stay, Thomas had taken an axe to some of the more expensive features and stashed them downstairs. Now it sat, glowering up at me from the beach. In a sense, I believed the ship blamed me for its idleness. This is your fault, it said and showed me its crippled rigging. How could you? it wept and revealed its broken hull. I wanted to work for a week and chop it into firewood. And if this could not be done, burn the whole thing upon the beach.

*

Oh, and by the way, I was wrong back there: Thomas is not Prometheus. He never was. Thomas is Orpheus. But aren’t we all, in some way or another, Orpheus? Even I, part-Charon, part-Chronosist, am more Orpheus than Icarus. I share no halls with Pygmalion, nor walk arm in arm with Hephaestus. I have never shot the breeze with Cretan constructor Daedalus, stood by while Pandora unlatched her jar, crafted clay with Gaea and her hubby Uranus. That all escapes me.  Mnemosyne is my muse. Moneta the guardian of my soul.

Perhaps not.

A snag: I no longer care. In truth I’ve never known who I was. Whether I was Orphues or Icarus, schemer or scientist, dreamer or deconstructionist. What is it Iago says? Oh yes, I am not what I am.

Isn't that the truth? I am not what I am.

*

A day goes past. Then another. On the next, I spotted Thomas and the boy step out into the garden. The boy was carrying a kite almost twice his size and wore a pair of tiny khaki shorts. It was not a warm day, but the wind was down, the sun was out, and there was no rain.

I watched the boy climb eagerly to the top of a small mound and hurl the kite into the breeze. I watched Thomas slouch into a deckchair with a cigarette behind his ear and open a small, paperback novel; he tucked the bookmark under his left leg and cracked the spine.

I wonder now, while penning this confession, whether, if I were to unfold the collar of the boy’s shirt or peek inside the waistband of his shorts, whether I would find his name there, in crude black marker, or Sebastian’s…

The kite remained airborne for a second or two, wobbling in the wind, before it swerved off in a sharp quarter circle, and cracked its spine in the dirt. The boy’s head dropped. He came scrambling down from the mound and went over to the kite, lying like a crippled bat in the mud. He held it up to Thomas and Thomas got up from the chair and walked over to him.

I choose this moment to leave my desk and head for the basement. I waited till they were both kneeling in the mud and attempting to fix the frame with loose twine - and then disappeared downstairs.

*

Gerstalt and I spent the first few days of spring moving furniture to the basement. It was Julia’s stuff I wished to be rid of. Oh yes, Julia; I had a daughter, once. Every time I passed the half open door of her bedroom, something cockroach-like scrambled up from my stomach and perched in my throat. I spotted her mittens while moving through the basement, and then the purple headboard of her cot - re-painted, of course, she loved purple most of all.

*

I didn’t see them straight away. I saw the bed with its rumpled sheets, the desk, the bedside table, and, of course, the chest, locked, on the floor beside his used clothes. He had cleaned it since the beach. The metal shone and the wood, sandalwood, I think, felt smooth to the touch. It was while running my hand over the modulations of Icarus’s wings that I saw the hands.

They were on a cutting matt with the wrists ragged around the edges. There was a set of straps and a clamp. It embarrasses me to admit I was curious. I found a bone saw and a hammer in one of the desk drawers, along with a notebook. There was not much else. I stood for a long time, thinking. I picked up one of the hands. It smelt like flesh, and when I bit down on one of the fingers, it tasted like flesh. I thought of taking it, smuggling it out of there in my coat pocket. In the end, I stole only the notebook and a few of his drawings. These were scatty at best (bloodstained too), but they depicted his intentions clearly. Something moved upstairs.

I suspect that all of this will be seen as some lengthy illusion of my own making. A web I have woven myself. So be it. I don’t care.

3

I remember it was evening. The stars were out and the moon too, looking chalked in against the clouds. I had gone out for a stroll along the beach to think. Crabs scuttled behind rocks. The waves made their usual racket.

I saw the boy while wandering between the salt-soaked wreckage. He wore a straw hat and those schoolboy shorts and stood, alone, on the clifftop. I had a feeling, a sudden tightening in my stomach when I saw the boy up there, jacketless and leaning into the wind.

It all happened at once - isn’t that what they say? But it did. It was all one, like someone had laid a number of photographs on top of each other. I saw him step off the cliff. I saw his foot find no purchase and fall into nothingness. I saw the wind catch him and turn him onto his back. His hat sailed off, its ribbon snapping, and he reached for it, sadly, hopelessly. I thought suddenly of the rocks, glinting in the twilight. I expected him to hit them, break his spine, and flop fish-like for a few moments.

I did not anticipate the bounce, however, and the brief, tumbling flight into the sea. And then, as in the manner of everything, nothing more.

*

I locked myself in the study after he’d done it. I don’t know why I did that. I expected consequences, I suppose, a kicking off. There was no sign of Thomas when I came in, although the basement door was open. I walked around my study for a few moments, browsed the bookshelves, then I sat and looked at myself in the mirror. My reflection was smudged in the dust, but even then I could see that my eyes had rings around them, that my cheeks sagged. Out in the garden, two shirts appeared to clap hands in the breeze.

For some time, I thought about what I’d seen. The boy turning over and over, hitting the rocks, hitting the water.

There was a knock at the door. Thomas. A thud on the landing.

‘Come out,’ he said and kicked the door three times. ‘Come out and look at what you’ve done.’

I stayed in my seat. Mary’s hair brush was off to my left. I picked it up and ran a thumb over the prongs. A strand of hair came loose and attached itself to my sleeve.

‘I’m not coming out,’ I said.

I had gone up onto the cliff top afterwards. The wind kicked up my scarf and struck me across the face with it. I got it under control with a fist and spotted the boy, swaying face down across the waves. The hat was off somewhere to his left. I called out to him. Two gulls, standing side by side, looked over at me and blinked. Thomas must have drawn upon some supernatural strength to save the boy. I could picture  him wading out, his jacket and shoes on a rock nearby. He showed no signs of exhaustion though, with his pounding, his yelling, his stamping and kicking.

He called me monstrous, a husk, before taking one last running shot at the door. Then there was nothing for some time.

I heard him stomp downstairs a few minutes later and smash something. Then he appeared in the garden with his shirt untucked, his hair matted and dripping. He tossed stones at my window and cursed me. I unknotted my tie and hung it on the rack. Then he returned with the boy in his arms. He had the sad look the drowned always have, the limpness in the neck, the pallid waxiness of the skin, the clothes clinging like a second skin. I retreated to my desk. What was I to do? I sat there and took off my shoes. I supposed Thomas would eventually give up. And he did, eventually, give up.

*

I spent most of the evening in bed with the pillowcase clenched to my cheek. When I emerged about, oh, two, three hours later, the house stewed in eager silence. I descended to the kitchen. A pan lay near the fridge. Some of the cupboards had been opened. I found the handle of a teacup in the sink, two uneven halves of a plate.

A series of coin-sized droplets led the way.

I found him with his back against the bed. The boy, his chest open like a pair of wings, lay across his lap. Thomas’s left hand gripped a pair of bloody surgical scissors. He too had his chest open. And there was blood, of course, pools of it. I turned away and clasped a hand over my mouth. Outside, I threw up in the water trough. The sky, a velvety sort of purple decorated with stars, stared back at me.

When we lost Julia, Mary came into my study and asked, quite calmly:

‘Where’s Julia?’

She leant in the doorway with her hair up in a bun. I swivelled to look at her.

‘No idea,’ I said.

Together we searched the rooms, neither of us calling out. I believe we both knew there would be no answer. I went into the garden on a whim and spotted the hem of Julia’s white dress in the doorway of the generator shed. One of her fingers was blackened and kinked from the electricity. Mary didn’t cry when I told her, instead she rose unsteadily to her feet, using the dining room table for balance, and came over to me. She paused, then slapped me across the face. A week later, I fetched a shovel and dug a pit out in the sand. It was four feet long; I had measured it out the night before.

*

I went back, of course, to Thomas and the boy; eventually, I went back. There was much to be cleared up, bodies to be removed, blood to be swept away. It took me three hours, all in all, to get them out of the basement and tied to a raft.

In the early morning, I sent them out to sea. The sun, just awoken, climbed its way steadily upwards. Gulls cawed. Soft spring surf draped itself across sodden sand. I thought nothing, I had done away with all that the previous evening. I packed my bags, took all my prized possessions, and headed towards the mainland.

Oh, I burnt the ship too. For the hell of it. I sat on the beach and watched while the thing collapsed. Black smoke billowed ceaselessly towards the sky. Its foremast cracked at the base and fell into the ocean and lay there, smouldering. I could just make out the pyre when I landed on shore, a black smudge of smoke on the skyline.

*

I am sure the jury knows what happens next. The summertime retreat, me, upstairs, in a scarlet dressing gown; the revolver. I almost escaped, made a dash out across the Yorkshire dales (my hands cuffed tightly behind my back) while the officers smoked cigarettes in a lay-by. I tripped and fell, face-first, into the mud. They came lumbering over eventually; after I’d spat and called them both fucks, they carried me, squealing and writhing, back ot the car.

I have shouted till my lungs are sore. Kicked until my feet ached.

It was a pair of young lovers, walking hand-in-hand on the beach, who found the raft. Tucked in the pocket of Thomas’s shirt was a letter, partially smudged, indicting me. That was piece one. Then they went to my seaside haven and dug up the graves of Mary and Julia. (I must tell you now, that I picked those names from a hat.) They say - whoever ‘they’ are in this equation - that Julia’s injuries suggest she fell from somewhere, the top of the stairs perhaps. Mary, they say, looks as if she has been strangled.

Like I said, I have shouted till my lungs are sore. Kicked until my feet ached.

But Mary, if we can talk privately for a moment, you don’t believe this, do you? These aspersions upon my character. These false, far-fetched theories. Because it is you I am writing to, by the way. You I’m pleading to.

I’ve spent my whole life, Mary, wandering around, hoping to catch one last glimpse of you. An atom of auburn hair. A bijou, maybe, of sweet smile.

I remember a dream you told me once. You dreamed, Mary, of a faraway land, decked out in forests and rivers and pretty little villages. We were at the base of a great mountain, with some friends, I think, and we intended, when the sun rose, to climb the mountain and look down upon the world from its peak. And that night in the dream, after some fireside chit-chat, we argued over something mundane and, in anger, I sent you away. And in the morning, I searched for you, threw my hat in the dust. Something like that. You refused to answer my calls. Oh, I can’t remember. I can’t remember whether I climbed the mountain or not. Whether you came back or not. I can’t remember anything now. I am empty. I have run out. Oh, Mary, Mary dearest, Mary sweetest, whatever will become of me?

Office 227

At the end of my first month at Code-Breaking Office 227, when we ran out of code, I learnt the true meaning of boredom. One of the veterans warned me about this on day three. He told me that once a month or so we’d have to find some way of amusing ourselves, or, alternatively, go insane. His suggestion was chess, but I had no interest in chess and instead spent my time reading big books with big themes and making long lists.

I’d been carted out to Office 227 on May 6th, 2024. There were fifteen of us and many of us were underweight and skeletal. There was one German and one Jew. I was the only Brit. This became the source of some camaraderie, we exchanged anecdotes and stereotypes, but the jokes and laughter soon stopped and we rode in near-silence.

After an hour, the German turned to me and told me about his flight to Mexico. He told me it had been delayed, which he had been expecting, and that due to the delay, his ticket had been refunded, which he had not been expecting. We talked about airports, rocking due to the truck, then we talked about Office 227.

‘But why the desert though?’ he said. I shrugged. I told him I had no idea.

We arrived way past midnight. I was issued a badge which said Win Cresmaschi, although they’d spelled it Crematche, and was told to wear it around my neck at all times. Floodlights cut across the dust, the truck’s engine idled. We headed indoors, laden with bags, straps criss-crossing our chests. The desert lay silent and expansive over our shoulders. It seemed to hum. 

I synchronised with the rhythms of Office 227 quickly. My body became adept; at points, I believe even my pulse was altered. I felt the sway of upshift and downshift. The incoming rush and the outgoing tide.

Upshifts caught us unaware. The coffee machine maxed out after two hours and flashed angry ‘out of order’ signs at anyone who approached it. I worked on a code till 4am, crashed, and woke at 7am to start work on another. Lochtie was seen in the corridors, yelling into rooms, his hair tufty and unwashed. We no longer walked anywhere, but ran instead, papers pressed to our chests, sleeves rolled up to our elbows, the sound of clattering feet and tortured breathing a near constant. There was a phantom energy among us. I began to think that happiness, true unfettered happiness, existed in the depths of concentration. At one point, we stayed up for over fifty hours. Many of us started on medication. Lochtie wore four nicotine patches. I myself got noontime shakes for days afterwards and felt the lingering sting of caffeine on my palette. Afterwards, we slept for days.

By month six, my attempts to ward off boredom in the downshifts became more intense. I started learning German. I played marathon sessions of solitaire. I surfed the internet and watched a little too much pornography. I even went walking in the desert, keeping Office 227 in sight, as a reminder, I guess. It looked large, flat and squarish against the desert. I wondered why they had painted it grey. In the distance, two buttes stood cinematically apart.

I was transferred from a British Code-Breaking Office. It was numbered somewhere in the hundreds. I was hired because I was an expert on asymmetric cryptography. This was a rare and sought-after skill. I had my own alcove in a larger office; I had a stapler and my own printer. I worked primarily on my own. On my first day, three or so interns leaned their chins on the division of our alcoves and watched me take apart three codes. The codes had been moved from department to department for four months and no one had been able to crack them. It took me less than ten minutes; the shortest intern said it was a pleasure to watch me work.

The rumours that Iverson was masturbating in the conference room began in June. On Tuesday 7th, Lochtie told me he’d seen him do it. He told me Iverson used his left hand. The following week, I saw it myself, or thought I did.

Iverson was 6’3 and German. He was stringy, almost all bone. It was never determined whether this (the fact he was German, not the tallness) had anything to do with the rumours or not, whether we had singled him out.

I saw it during a brainstorming session. The temperature was high and we were all jacketless. Iverson talked for around three minutes on the benefit of departmental synergy. He spoke slowly, pausing before each sentence, gesticulating with only his right hand. When making a delicate point, he touched thumb to index finger and prodded at every word. When indicating someone’s opinion or idea, he pointed with all four fingers. There was a car-crash intensity to his eyes, a force. He seemed to shake throughout the session; his left hand engaged. I found myself compelled to look at my lap.

After the meeting, I headed to Lochtie’s desk in the bullpen. On that day, the bullpen was loud and keyboard-intense, almost primal. Interns streamed past me, each with a folder of loosely paper-clipped code tucked under their arm. There was a juicy collison across the room, two interns with their ties over their shoulders, heads down and texting. Someone near me described it as a limb-jangling collision; this was the only term that felt appropriate. Limb-jangling. There was laughter and repartee, quick quips, cross talk. I had to shout to get Lochtie’s attention. He came over to see me. He was tieless. I told him I’d seen it, that I could confirm Iverson was doing things in the conference room. Lochtie was sceptical. He told me that at this point rumour was no good, that for him to do something we’d need evidence. I told him that Diven had seen it too and about the tissue Diven had found, but Lochtie was still sceptical. He asked whether we could trust Diven and I told him we could. I’ll see what I can do, he said.

I started to avoid Iverson. When I saw Iverson coming down the hall, I pivoted and disappeared. Once or twice, I threw myself into an empty room. I alternated my route through the building on a day-to-day basis. I kept a tight and ever-changing schedule. I timed my break room trips so they didn’t coincide with Iverson’s. I spent as little time in the bathroom as possible. I sped through the process, increasing my intake of fibrous foods to keep seat time minimal.

Around this time we began playing ‘Victim’ to avoid boredom.

Victim required each player to submit a 3x2 passport photo. These were then mixed up and redistributed. Each player got a photo and carried it with them in the inside pocket of their blazer. My first photo was of a guy named Hackers.

The aim of the game was to ‘seek out’ whoever the photo displayed. Once found, employee A (the seeker) tapped employee B (the victim) on the forehead. The tapping required you to hold your index finger and middle finger together, like a lance. Once tapped, the victim surrendered their photo. The game ended when everybody had their own photo. There was rarely any confusion or errors.

I got Hackers easily. He was on the toilet, defenceless. We swapped photos and he was out of the game, at least for a while. My next victim was Lochtie.

The best players ambushed, attacked, or took aggressive military action against their victim. I remember waiting for three hours to burst out of a cupboard at Hackers. Lochtie famously barricaded Jobidia in the conference room and rushed him. Diven once dropped out of a duct and surprised an intern.

Lochtie envisioned a version of Victim where the victim could overrule their own assassination if they blocked the prod just in time. We shook our heads. It would be too complicated, said one. It’s good as it is, said another. I asked why we held these meetings in dark rooms. The collective - we named ourselves ‘the collective’ after about a month - told me to fuck off. Lochtie then suggested implementing Dramatic Fake Deaths. Silence. Then everybody nodded. Dramatic Fake Deaths were commissioned and spread. It pushed the game to a new level.

Some of us carried our photos for days.

It was Diven, despite his size and inflexibility, who championed the Dramatic Fake Death contest. He toppled from chairs, thrashing in agony. He fell from bunks. He crashed into kitchen cupboards. People sought out his seeker. He was a well-choreographed and realistic die-r. He understood, intuitively, how a body would ‘die’ at any given moment. His trick was to not make the death overblown, nor seek to break established Fake Death formula. He died. That’s all that can be said. Diven’s best death came on June 28th. Lochtie surprised him in the break room. Diven was drinking milk at the time and fell to his knees, dribbled milk, and collapsed sideways. It was by no means his most technical death. However, the combination of slowly expanding milk puddle and classic crime-scene-investigation pose came together perfectly. Lochtie stood, admiring, for around half a minute, before finally asking for Diven’s photo.

The quickest game was a mere thirty minutes. It was frantic and aggressive. I remember being tackled by a largish intern and blacking out. Lochtie told me he had to hide under his desk to avoid getting trampled. Jobidia was, apparently, the winner, although his victim looked ashamed and coerced.

After about a month, we worked in a state of near-constant agitation. New rules arrived and disappeared almost weekly. Someone crossing the room towards you felt like a threat. The break room became tense when a new member entered. Everybody froze till the employee proved his innocence. Sometimes successive killings occurred in a five minute span. Sometimes less. Lochtie and I witnessed a group of twelve interns descending upon one another in an unoccupied corridor. Three interns were walking abreast, chatting, when a stranger burst from a closet and massacred the first. One of the three avenged his fallen comrade. Then another intern came sprinting from the west. Before you could blink, there were twelve. The interns exchanged a flurry of finger jabs and collapsed in mock death. Soon there were twelve interns in various states of repose. There were howls and screams. One survivor tread between the wreckage; a hand emerged and proffered a photo.

On August 9th, due to a faulty vending machine, I had to spend a minute watching a metal spiral unwind in the west-side break room. I was on a three kill streak and had a shot at winning. When I retrieved the crisps, one knee on the tough tiled floor of the breakroom, I heard him breathing.

‘You want to ask me something,’ Iverson said. He was peeling grapes at the table. Moisture clung to his top lip and he breathed solely through his nose. 

‘No,’ I said. A photo of Iverson sat in my blazer pocket.

‘You want to ask me something?’ Iverson said again.

‘No.’

Iverson was yet to blink.

‘I do it because I’m bored,’ he said. ‘I am bored minute to minute, day to day.’

I told him I didn’t want to hear this, but he kept going. He had thirteen grapes now. The fridge had been opened and remained open. It hummed. I still had the packet in my hand. There was a pause. He told me he was efficient, that he was quick, didn’t waste time, that it kept him awake. He told me that he started by pretending his wife was under the table, but this soon turned sour, so he began adding other team members, to break the monotony of his task. There was always monotony, he said, always. He told me about other fantasies. Twins, triplets, a dominatrix, even himself. I placed all my weight on my leading foot and threw the packet at Iverson’s face.

The game of Victim is now hardly played in Office 227, once a month at best.

I collided with Iverson at full pelt and we barrelled over the table. Iverson’s hands grabbed at my face. The fridge began beeping. A chair got upturned. Iverson knocked my fingers aside twice. We collided with cupboards. Then I was on top of Iverson, trying to disengage his arms. I pinned his left arm with my right leg. Iverson spat in my eye. It was unexpected, dirty, off the grid. It was understood then that we had stumbled into a new patch of the game, something violent and unexplored, a special zone specifically for this engagement. We began testing limits. I grabbed his hair. He bit me, firmly, on the elbow, leaving a semi-circle of pinkish tooth marks. It got savage. He went for my eye again. I scratched at his neck. At one point, he reached for a spatula and I kicked him in the face. Iverson was shouting something vicious and German. We kicked and kneed, elbowed and slapped. Iverson began punching me in the leg, vicious, flesh-whacking punches. It felt solid, painful. I stretched for his forehead. He writhed and twisted as my finger came closer. He tried biting again, this time on my upper forearm, but I was determined. The fight finished with us entangled. Iverson’s left knee up against my chest, my right arm wrapped around his neck, the index and middle fingers of my left hand pressed firmly against his forehead. He continued to breathe solely through his nose. The moment held for a second and then faded.

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘Just disgusting.’

On my way back to work, I checked my elbow and found I was bleeding. It was a sustained kind of bleeding, not dramatic, just constant. I went into the nearest bathroom and sat on the toilet applying tissue for about fifteen minutes. He had really bitten deep. Each of the bite marks was fleshy and when I pulled away the tissue they would weep blood. I met Hackers in the corridor after I was done. I told him about what happened and showed him my elbow. He looked it over. That’s pretty fucked up, he said, are you okay? Yes, I said, I’ll be fine.

My most painful memory was from when I was about eight. It happened in my first home and surrounded a painting competition. It was June, perhaps July, early summer at least. My grandfather and grandmother were over for tea and biscuits. Every year in September, the winner of the junior competition had their painting hung in one of the corridors of my school, Smithfield Combined School, in a dark, sandalwood frame. It had its own imitation-gold plaque with Win Cremaschi (or whoever the winner was) in neat, copperplate writing.

Moments before it happened, I remember clearly the feel of cold, white porcelain on my nether regions. I had been painting all morning and had that special post-work type of happiness, which comes from long periods of sustained concentration and feels good and raw. I could hear the sound of conversation from the front room, plus acoustic - memorably acoustic - music. I remember wiping, flushing, then coming downstairs, still dressed in my ‘work’ dungarees, and pausing on the third step of the stairwell. From where I stood, I could see my father and my grandfather standing with their backs to me, the painting framed between them. I have my doubts that this is exactly how it happened. This layout seems too much like a metaphor, as if I’ve constructed this memory rather than simply remembered it. My father was shorter and both were wearing shades of blue or possibly green on their top halves. Beyond them was the table, covered in yesterday’s papers. The palette, which was a paper plate with dry and half-dry splotches of paint around the edges, rested on an old notebook. My four paintings were wooden-pegged to a long, room-spanning length of twine. Then my grandfather told my father that the painting was kind of crap, really, wasn’t it. And my father looked at him.

I didn’t see or hear what he said next. Instead I sat down on the step and found myself unable to cry. This was the most horrific aspect of the event, the inability to cry and express my distress. The next thing I recall is my mother, her hair up in a rubber band, coming out of the front room and seeing me on the step. What’s wrong, she said and I remember just shaking my head, unable to speak. Faintly, I could just about make out the word Jolene.

The memory fades off here, the acoustic music still playing, my mother stood with her hair in a band and me unable to cry. I think about this event all the time. Mostly at night. The event is sharp and I don’t like to think about it, but it comes upon me in periods of silence or dullness. A type of static, throbbing beneath everything else, background noise.

Diven and I were sitting, comfortably supine, on the faded rec-room sofa, watching low-bit, non-HD, non-3D television in RGB. It was a downshift and everybody was either relaxing or sleeping. I was reading a dog-eared, secondhand edition of Crime and Punishment. I had made a list of all the things I wanted to do on a battered notepad and then proceeded not to do them. Diven was playing along to Countdown with a well-chewed pencil and a moleskine notebook. He took up most of the sofa. His face was spotty and shone in the 60-watt glow of Office 227’s ill-maintained light bulbs. Whenever he guessed a longish word, or a particularly poetic combination. His feet paddled with excitement. The noise level was low; there was only the scratch of fabrics, or the crack and tear of a turned page. Both of us checked our phones frequently, we had our feet up on a chipped, tea-stained table. A clock ticked.

‘Intaglio,’ Diven said. I looked up. Somewhere down the corridor a radio played songs which felt both familiar and not. 

Jobidia, Lochtie and I stayed up late one night working on code 654 when we became trapped. Jobidia had leant his keys to Hackers and it was this, and the fact that the doors of Office 227 locked automatically at 11.45pm, which meant there was no way out till morning. Lochtie had read somewhere that concentration increased when a person needed to pee and, as Code 654 needed his full ‘cerebral wattage’, had decided to delay his bathroom break till past midnight. I remember him eyeing up bins and bottles, hopping from one leg to another, pacing, shouting, directing long, angry non-sequiturs towards Jobidia, kicking walls and tables, jumping on the spot, having moments of heartfelt regret, threatening to piss on me, climbing on chairs, punching at a keyboard for three minutes, and then, eventually, relieving himself in a plant pot, while we watched on helpless and somewhat dismayed. Later, Jobidia and Lochtie attempted to break down a door, but suffered multiple shoulder-based injuries and decided to stop. By 1am, we found ourselves floorbound, arguing over the situation. I was lying spread-eagled. Lochtie was over by the wall. Jobidia was prone with his chin resting on his fingers. At roughly 2am, someone suggested we climb into the ducts.

We had first attempted this manoeuvre upon arrival at Office 227. Everybody was settling in and relations were edgy and awkward, but people will do anything, anything at all, to escape boredom.

Our trips evolved, slowly at first, into a full scale exploration of the ‘ductosphere’. Suddenly, ropes seemed somehow appropriate. Accidents happened. On day 5, two members got lost and were found blackened and bruised in a foyer two hours later. On day 6, Lochtie attempted to get people to call one another ‘explorers’ or ‘expidites’, but this never caught on and caused a fight instead. On day 9, Diven got lost in a yet uncharted portion of the ductosphere and was not seen or heard from for a whole 24 hours, until he returned with a half-eaten rat in his bag. He refused to tell anyone what went down in the area, now named quadrant 3, and possessed a pronounced aversion to ducts and cramped spaces from then on. At some point, I found a bat.

Finally, after twenty-three days of edging forward and banging hard-hats on cramped duct ceilings, Lochtie collated the maps, listed the various areas and pathways, and pinned this construct to the wall. It was, dare I say it, beautiful. 

That particularly night, our progress through the ducts was painfully slow and hard on knees and elbows. Jobidia got trapped twice. Lochtie, after hitting his head for the fifth time, promised to never trust Jobidia with any key-based duties for the next six months. Jobidia kept telling us it was tight in here, fucking tight in here. I made a crack about Jobidia’s mother, which Lochtie found riotous. At one point, we found ourselves lost and Jobidia kept telling Lochtie that he Lochtie, had made a fucking map, so how, exactly, was he, Lochtie, mapmaker and renowned explorer, lost. Lochtie retorted, twisting around in the cramped interior of the duct so he was facing Jobidia, that whether or not he made the map was unimportant because, currently, they were without the map. So regardless of whether he, Lochtie, had made the map or not, they couldn’t use it right now because they were in one place and the map was in another. I asked why the hell the ducts were so complex in the first place and Lochtie began spieling about how Office 227 was a conglomerate build and so there were three construction parties and - you’d know this is you’d read the introduction pamphlets Win - there was a big mix-up with the building plans so there’s no coherent layout to the whole building and it’s all got kind of fucked up and abstract. Jobidia told him that technically conglomerates were companies formed from several businesses with differing aims. Lochtie told him to fuck off.

Jobidia found a maintenance hatch at 02.45am approx. and exited into a second floor bathroom, somewhere in the west sector, quadrant 2. We all took the opportunity to relieve ourselves. Lochtie had landed in a toilet and had to walk back with a soaked left leg, leaving a dotted trail of toilet fluid. We were silent, each of us too tired or pissed off to talk. At one point, we had to make our way through a blacked out section of Office 227’s west sector and I stumbled into a mop and bucket, spilling water over Jobidia. I said sorry. Jobidia looked at his leg and shrugged. We went a little further and I apologised again. Really, he said, it’s fine. I remained silent after that. At the dorms, Jobidia nodded and wished the pair of us a good evening. Lochtie and I remained hunched with hands on knees. What a fucking night, Lochtie said.

‘That’s the thing about it though, the -deleted by publisher due to libel concerns- image, it’s intoxicating.’

‘What are you on about?’ Lochtie said.

‘Well, it stirs up all this press and ruction around it. I mean, there’s a palpable hullabaloo around this image. I don’t want to get into the whole feminist, should she, should she not angle, but you have to agree there’s a palpable hullabaloo around this image, Lochtie.’

‘Well, yeah, I’ll agree, it’s a cultural touchstone.’

‘These images are shocking now because they’re shocking. They’re primarily irrational, random. There’s no set criteria around what constitutes this image as shocking. It just shocks.’

‘Did you sleep last night, Win?’

‘Well, think about it. They don’t fit into the standard shocking criteria. They don’t tick all the ‘shocking’ boxes. There’s this new breed of artist Lochtie, this is what I’m saying, listen, no, listen, there’s this new breed of artist.’

‘Caffeine. Caffeine is what you need.’

‘I think it’s because we’re bored, Lochtie. I think it’s because what used to stun or shock us has been numbed. Now we need a girl dancing, twerking even, around a paternal figure waving a foam finger, sometimes mock-fingering herself with said foam finger - I’ll spare my semi-freudian analysis of the whole thing. But, listen, there’s a need, a want, at the centre of all of this.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘A need, a want, at the centre of all this. That’s the punchline.’

‘Win?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you sleep?’

The greatest writer on boredom I know is Benjamin Schwartz. His popularity exploded while I was at university; the covers haunted bookstores and cafe tables, the bookmark never past halfway. Critics and students fawned. The word ‘genius’ was used. Me and five or six others would meet and discuss him in a small post-grad pub. We sometimes talked about girls, sometimes other authors, but mainly, Schwartz. I once talked about maths, but this seemed to bore them, so I made sure to avoid the topic from then on. I cannot remember the group’s faces. I can remember their names were distinctly Christian and that two of them insisted on using their middle name when signing documents or on essay submission sheets. It was through the group that I met Anna.

Anna came to the discussion with Mark. She wore a tight, dark green sweater and had her hair tied up with an elastic band. Only Anna and I smoked. Mark came out with us, but couldn’t stick the cold and left after less than a minute. I told her she was very pretty and she nodded. I tried talking to her about Schwartz, but she told me she hadn’t read any Schwartz and, besides, she much preferred American authors. At the moment she was in the thrall of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She said she had read Fiesta that afternoon, which explained the sweater somewhat. I asked whether she had read Steinbeck and she told me she hated Steinbeck, who wants to read about the poor, she said. I lit another cigarette; we stayed outside and talked for two more. She told me she wasn’t afraid of death, which I thought was brave. She told me she planned to go into television, but preferred books, which I thought was stupid. She told me that the magic of books, the real true worth of books, was that they were a type of medicine for the lonely. I thought the phrasing a little clunky, but the statement struck me as true nonetheless. I asked her whether was lonely, and she said yes, but not right now. We slept together that night.

Anna and I slept together at least twice a week. She eventually told me she was in love with me. We were lying on our backs, her fingers circling my belly button. She told me about her family and listed her long string of ex-lovers, some of them girls. We often stayed up late, talking. I began to leave my books and coursework in her room and would return there after lectures. We were very close, but I was never in love with her. On two occasions, I came close to convincing myself I was. Once, I said it accidentally and probably, in that instance, I meant it.

Mark stopped talking to me at discussions. At first, he was subtle about it, but eventually he dropped the pretence. We would sit in silence when it was only the pair of us. One day, I asked him whether it was due to Anna and he nodded. On reflection, this was a fairly stupid question. Then he asked whether I was in love with her. I told him I didn’t know. Okay, he said.

Another Schwartz book came on the market - posthumous, assembled from found short stories in the mass of his notebooks (these were published later that year) - and was sold out within a week. I got to read Daniel’s annotated copy. I struggled with some of the stories, which were either bad or too experimental, or, often, both. When we came to discuss the stories, Mark wasn’t there. Daniel said he hadn’t seen Mark that day and he wasn’t answering his phone. A kid called Henry, rather jokingly, said that maybe Mark had killed himself. We began to take bets on whether Mark had shot or hanged himself. Someone suggested he threw himself in front of a train, that became the new favourite. It seemed characteristic of Mark, enigmatic, somewhat rustic, a vintage suicide. The joking continued until we realised Mark still hadn’t turned up. I began to think that Mark had actually committed suicide, that he had killed himself because of mine and Anna’s relationship, that I was responsible. I was tempted to phone the police. I left Anna a text, explaining the situation. She didn’t reply. Half an hour later, a few of us began to seriously consider that Mark had committed suicide. I was on my feet, suggesting we go knock for Mark to see if he was really dead. Mark arrived then and told me to sit down. He had been talking with a lecturer about Schwartz’s new book, that was all, and he displayed the book as proof. Henry told Mark that we had been worrying about his suicide. Why were you worrying about that? he asked. Because of Anna, I said. He looked at me. Who?

At the start of the summer term, Anna asked me when we were going to have a baby and I laughed. Then realised she was serious. We had just watched a French film about a failed romance and the room was far too hot. We lay there in silence and I rolled over so I couldn’t see her face. I could feel her looking at the back of my head.

Anna and I began watching things in February, neither of us talking, just watching. We watched two series of the nineties hit Friends. We watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which she was a big fan of. We watched pretty much everything by the director David Fincher. We watched an hour long interview with the writer David Foster Wallace and chewed popcorn. We watched a movie set in and around a diner, just a diner. We watched a box set of adapted Shakespeare plays. We watched The Fugitive, Minority Report and The Departed in one sitting. We watched the Star Wars trilogy over the course of a week. We watched a Jack Nicholson movie which I forget the name of. We watched the movie Changing Lanes, thinking it was Changing Places. We watched Oliver Twist. We watched Hannibal. We watched the first two Alien films. We watch a French film without subtitles and then the following week with subtitles. We watched the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad. We watched Gangs of New York. We watched Rainman. We watched Cosmopolis. We watched an episode of The Wire and didn’t think it was all that. We watched Gladiator. We watched Clash of the Titans. We watched Back to the Future. We watched Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom. We watched Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Arc. We watched Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom again, even though it’s probably the weakest of the three. We watched Death in Venice. We watched Highlander. And so on. 

One day in the March of that semester, I went out walking. It was sunset and everything was bathed in orange light. I stopped by the tennis courts and watched a pair of medics, in thigh hugging shorts and tank tops, play a gruelling but undynamic set. The first was somewhat taller than the second and dominated serving, but was slack in open play. They were counting points, but soon lost track and just played instead. I didn’t watch the game for long. Two girls with red faces jogged past. In the distance, I saw four jacket-wearing first years, sitting with legs crossed, discussing something theoretical and no doubt dense on the terrace of the campus cafe. I went to skim rocks on the lake, but couldn’t find any. I listened to an orchestra tune up. I went home and slept for a long time.

I broke up with Anna on August 17th, it took me that long. I did it over the phone and when she got difficult I put the phone down and sat in silence. She told me that I had betrayed her, that I had lied to her. She tried to ring again, but I didn’t pick up. When we next saw each other, she was quiet and talked in a murmur. I once caught her gazing mournfully through a library window. She asked to meet for coffee and I said no. She asked whether I wanted to go to the cinema and I said no. She said she just wanted to be friends. I told her I didn’t want to be friends. I used cliches and slogans to defend myself. I didn’t say it’s not you, it’s me.

The last time we talked was at 2am. She rang me and I picked up without thinking. We talked for an hour about several subjects. We talked about Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She told me she had read Schwartz and didn’t get it. I told her that was what happened, you either found him boring or fascinating, there was no in-between. She didn’t argue. At the end of the hour, she asked me whether she bored me. I said no. I mean, when we were together, did I bore you then, as a lover? she said. I paused and looked at my calendar. No, I said, of course not. There was a silence. We made quiet, but meaningless conversation for half an hour and then she told me she was tired and had things to do tomorrow. I said okay and waited for her to hang up. I went to bed and thought about what was going to happen to her, whether she would be okay. I thought that maybe I should ring her in the morning and check she was okay, but, come the morning, I forgot and didn’t even try ringing her until the week after. I waited and got her roommate. Her roommate told me Anna was out at the moment. I didn’t tell her who I was or what I wanted, but that I’d call back that evening and could she pass that on to Anna. I forgot and didn’t think of it again till a month later, when I saw she won a prize for one of her essays. But, by that time, I had moved on and so had she. I don’t know what happened after that. 

The postman, who arrived at Office 227 at around 1300h-1400h every Wednesday, was named Harold Bergman. This tall and dumb-looking postman was only ever referred to as Harold. Never ‘Hal’ or ‘Berg’. Nobody had seen Harold’s lorry or van or post-truck within a three mile radius of Office 227, nor a tell-tale dust-trail, and it was never understood how he arrived, transport-wise at least. He seemed to simply emerge from the desert, wearing his regulation uniform of beige shorts and white socks, the socks stretched to their limits, his shorts belted, with no compromise around the term ‘waist-height’.

Harold told me and Lochtie that he, Harold Bergman, was a time traveller. He claimed he was an active participant in the Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Saigon. For 50p or a trinket, he promised to tell us our future. His predictions were sometimes oddly correct. He managed to pinpoint the location of Lochtie’s left sock. He successfully predicted the winner of Wimbledon 2024. I noticed a few days after meeting him that he spoke with a slight lisp. He told me that I would look back on this part of my life with deep sadness and loneliness. He told me that I would always exist most purely on my own, that I was a natural exile, a lone force, always existing on the fringe of something. I asked him how he knew this and he told me I had written it and was writing it as we spoke.

I highlight Harold here because Harold’s job was boring, truly boring. His sorting was messy and rarely correct; letters addressed to names beginning with D would end up in the Z section and the letters Q and P were consistently confused. The whole thing took Harold twice the time it should have, but he seemed somehow immune to boredom, happy despite the monotony of the task. Once, I followed him around the shelves. He was in a state of almost euphoric happiness. I asked him how he could be so happy and he told me he was just a happy kind of person. I asked whether he found the task boring and he told me, no, he did not. I asked him how he managed to fend off boredom and he shrugged. Then he said: ‘the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting’ and looked at the letter he was holding.

‘What?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply.

A new batch of code arrived on September 1st. It included Code 729, which was passed around a total of three departments before arriving at my desk. I began work on it at 10am and continued to work till around 2pm. I skipped lunch and was still going at 4pm. Lochtie dropped in and told me he was going to eat and I got up and went with him, although my mind stayed at my desk.

We met Hackers at the food hall. It was packed and the line was way out into the corridor. There were six or seven members at each table. One had seventeen around it. Some squatted or knelt. Hackers had already got our food and sat, making pencil altercations to various red-lined sheets, while shovelling rice into his mouth with a fork.

‘Have you ever seen it like this?’ Hackers asked.

‘No,’ said Lochtie.

‘We heard you got Code 729,’ Hackers said.

Lochtie looked at Hackers, then at me. I nodded.

‘That one’s a real bitch,’ he said.

There was a fight happening on the other side of the room, two big interns, one of them holding a tray.

‘It’s the stress,’ Hackers said, apparently to himself because no one replied. Lochtie began telling us about the code. He told us that ‘the case’ this month was quantity over quality; that, apart from Code 729, we were basically faced with a lot of easily solved code, but so much it would take a whole month to crack. He said that on their part the move was elegant. Simple, yet effective. I noted it was always ‘they’ or ‘them’, never Russia, Ukraine, Japan, especially not ‘The Democratic Republic of Asia’. Lochtie said that the simplicity and quantity of this month’s batch was probably the reason last month’s batch was so weak; they’d been saving up for this move. He didn’t theorise that this may be because they were planning some big offensive or pivotal tactical manoeuvre. I was about to ask, but was cut off by Lochtie’s phone ringing. He stood up and left. I hadn’t known Lochtie to do that and asked Hackers about it.

‘It’s his daughter,’ he said, through mouthfuls of rice. ‘She’s comatose. He goes back to England once a month. His wife rings him with updates.’ He paused, looked over his shoulder and continued: ‘They’re on the rocks,’ he said. ‘I heard them arguing last night. Something about a whore. I think Lochtie is having an affair.’ I looked at the door.

‘You think so?’ I said.

‘I don’t know, I’m guessing,’ he said and looked at the rice.

Hackers and I did not have much to talk about, and after we finished talking, he went back to making altercations. I found myself waiting for Lochtie to return. The fight between the two interns had been resolved by the time he came back. We talked about the code some more while I ate. I stayed for about fifteen minutes more and then went back to work.

I worked on Code 729 till 1am, fell asleep at my desk and started work at dawn. Three days later, I solved it and started on Code 730. Code 730 took five minutes. I remember feeling distinctly disappointed.

Lochtie told me this in the west-side break room when there was no one around. That, yes, his daughter was comatose and that he would read to her every other week. That, yes, she had fallen on a French holiday from four storeys up. That it had been raining and the wet cobbles had flashed blue and red. That she was twelve and three quarters. That her hair was ginger, not so ginger that she was auburn, but ginger enough that she was unhappy being called a strawberry blonde. That the crowd was dense and hard to push to the front of. That she wanted to be an archaeologist. That, no, Lochtie had never believed it was his daughter, even while he was riding towards the hospital, watching the paramedics bustle and gripping his wife’s hand all too tightly. That the doctors refer to his daughter as ‘semi-comatose’. That she had a fondness for riding horses and horses in general. That her favourite colour was blue, not pink, although he had once guessed wrong. That, yes, that was probably the tightest he had held his wife’s hand. That once he had read to his daughter not from a book, but from his rental car’s instruction manual, not because he wanted to, but because he had forgotten his book. That her name was Karen. That he thought about her when he had nothing else to think about and that, yes, thinking about her was painful. That she would be thirteen in February and he was planning something big. That while reading from the car instruction manual and attempting some form of humour, he had looked down at Karen’s expressionless face and the various breathing apparatus which extended from it and had thought, without any heart or basic humanity, oh why god, why me. That his daughter had two necklaces which they swapped once a month. That the silver one was her favourite. That there had been one elderly witness in an orange shock blanket. That his wife was never at his daughter’s bedside when he was. That the instruction manual was soggy. That when he asked, everybody told him that someone’s daughter fell, someone’s daughter fell. A daughter. Three storeys. A daughter, someone’s daughter. Fell. Someone’s daughter. No, four storeys, four. A daughter, someone’s daughter. Someone’s daughter fell.

On my last day I clocked off at 3pm and went to my room to lie down. Jobidia came by and said it had been a pleasure to work with me. He had a coke in his left hand, and every so often he spat into it. After about the third time, I asked why he was doing that and he started to talk about his tobacco habit. He told me about it as if it was a stand-up routine. There were punchlines and short observational skits. He seemed to get more out of it than I did. He told me he wanted to be a stand-up. I nodded and told him it was evident. Lochtie came in around halfway through and told me, not Jobidia, that he had smuggled drinks into the office and that he was planning a party for that evening, a party which was to celebrate my leaving, or, he supposed, commemorate. I looked up past Jobidia and said thank you. Lochtie nodded and then lingered in the doorframe, listening to Jobidia. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them he was gone.

The ‘party’ took place in the large dorm room, between three ‘corridors’ of bunk beds. Drinks were passed round and soon there was a happy, alcohol-based buzz. I was sitting on a top bunk, drinking rum and coke. Hackers was beneath me with his arm around the shoulders of an intern. Two of the interns had entered a drinking competition and were cheered. Lochtie, leant against someone else’s bunk, observed this all with a great sense of pride. Diven had concerned Jobidia and was telling him about his wife. Iverson had taken a bottle of gin and removed himself from the party. He had bounced off the door frame on his way out.

About halfway through, Hackers and Lochtie got into an argument about the hotness of various cleaning maids. Lochtie was backing Cassandra, but Hackers reckoned that Maria, the 5’8 blonde, who spoke poetic and melancholy English, topped the bill. Lochtie had a couple of forerunners, but, as of yet, no real stake in the hottest maid debate. Hackers and Maria had had sex roughly three times; twice in private and once while Lochtie slept off a terrible hangover on the floor below. There were rumours that Lochtie had slept with Maria, but these were only rumours.

Diven and Jobidia were discussing sport in the corner. Jobidia was on the floor, a coke can balanced on his chest. Diven squatted and fell almost three times. I was on my seventh rum and coke. Hackers and Lochtie were on their feet, face to face and shouting. Everything felt kind of echoey and detached. Hackers told Lochtie that it didn’t matter whether or not Maria or Cassandra was the hotter of the two maids and, in fact, this whole discussion could be solved by some sort of group vote, and Lochtie yelled that Hackers’ need to formalise everything was the reason why he couldn’t understand the downright-illegal attractiveness of Cassandra and thus should probably consider himself exempt from any sexual conquests in the near future. There was silence and everybody’s eyes were on Hackers and Lochtie. In the corner, an intern threw up over Diven’s shoes. Hackers said the point, Lochtie, was that Cassandra, no listen, the point was that Cassandra had a pornstar’s beauty whereas Maria was actually legitimately beautiful.

Lochtie threw the first punch. Hackers, who was astonished that Lochtie had actually hit him, staggered backwards, nose bloodied, into Diven’s bunk bed. Jobidia came over, coke can in hand, and got Hackers’ elbow to the face. Jobidia ducked and Lochtie struck an intern. The intern went to retaliate, but struck Jobidia. Jobidia, who was missing a tooth, struck the intern, who clattered into Iverson. Iverson, who had just returned and was drunk and alien to the world, went mad and punched the nearest guy, Diven, in the face.

Soon everybody was fighting and it all got blurred. I was dragged off the bunk by two eager interns and punched in the stomach. Diven came out of nowhere and collided with the pair. The three smashed into a bunk bed and the thing collapsed around them. I stood up and tried to take stock. All I remember were images: Lochtie having Hackers in a headlock, Diven elbowing Iverson in the chest, myself kicking an intern in the stomach, somehow everybody ending up in the break room, Iverson breaking a blender over Lochtie’s head, an intern striking Hackers in the crotch with a spatula, the smooth, gas-like hiss coming from the oven, which no one really noticed at the time, Hackers trying to defrost an intern’s head in the microwave, Jobidia stumbling over, still with his coke can somehow, and telling Hackers there’s no possible way to fry a head with the microwave door still open, two interns galloping at each other with their heads in saucepans, me and the head of HR going through a table, Large Al, who was not be messed with, sitting on a pile of moaning interns, trying to light a cigarette, Diven by the door doing nothing, Jobidia and Lochtie fighting by the fridge, Hackers still trying to solve the defrosting problem, Al’s cigarette catching and the whole room going up. 

We were propelled through the window and collapsed in a wave of soot-stained shirts. Iverson and Lochtie landed in each other’s arms. Jobidia was catapulted through a dorm-room door and collided with a desk - miscellaneous papers covered him. Diven emerged from the break room completely black; he raised a hand to everyone and walked slowly to his room. Hackers came out with his arm around the intern, who still had the microwave on his head. The pair made it about three steps down the corridor and collapsed. I was the first to survey the damage. The break room was completely black and little flakes of ash and soot fell like snow. The only sound was the cold hum of technology.

My final day at Office 227 was overcast. I felt fuzzy and threw up shortly after waking. On my way out, I saw people in yesterday’s clothes, clutching heads and collapsed against walls. In the kitchen, hunched and lingering, a pair of unshowered interns recalled what happened, their memories patchy and blurred. Lochtie had got up early and met me with a steaming cup of coffee. It was just me leaving and the car hadn’t arrived yet. We had nothing to do but fill the time.

‘It’s quiet this time of morning,’ I said. ‘Nobody up, the desert just sort of breathing.’

We looked out at the desert. We expected to hear the wind, but didn’t.

‘Did you ever find anything out there?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a desert.’

‘Nothing at all? Nothing, like, spiritual or something?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

We stood in silence. At one point, he kicked a stone. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Is this driver ever going to get here?’ he said and looked at his watch.

I looked at the dirt road; there was no sign of the driver.

‘This is how things end,’ I said and didn’t really feel it was the right thing to say.

‘Silence?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you find you’re always waiting for something to happen and then nothing ever does?’ he said. I sighed and frowned and looked back at the desert. I didn’t have anything to say. I just wanted to look like I was thinking.