GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN

Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26^th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams.

Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to an impasto skim.

War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The continually adjusted now – a hairline crack between the stupefying masses of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked – is a hot interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to interior, night.

Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying to minimize the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummeled by the working week just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlors reconfigured as the stylized paths of palace gardens wherein varicolored button dynasties conduct their patient courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his specialty and he is thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic, rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box. Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the consideration of annoying games. New angle.

Levering by stealth onto his back he fancies that from overhead he must resemble one of those stone medieval knights, asleep on cold sarcophagi with petrified retrievers at their feet. There must have been a Middle Ages battle game at one point, he supposes, keeps and castles, jousting and the rest, although he can’t call one to mind. Among the various John Wadham’s pastimes of his younger days, historically-themed entertainments had been thin upon the ground, the focus mostly on a modern world then trying to compose itself from out the bombsite rubble of the 1940s. He remembers one called Spy Ring, plastic head and shoulders busts of men in trench-coats and fedoras inching between foreign embassies, an accurate embodiment of Cold War machinations in that rules of play were by and large impenetrable and made no apparent sense. Alma and Mick had given up on it almost immediately and consigned the whole thing to an oubliette beneath the wardrobe, an effective and achievable detente. Monopoly, he thinks, has always been preoccupied with a hard-nosed modernity, a compensatory ritual to suit those long years of postwar austerity, imaginary Weimar wheelbarrows piled with confetti-colored currency in which to lose your ration book, if only briefly. In his childhood play, he realizes, he’d been largely quarantined within the present day. He thinks he can recall Napoleonic stylings to the packaging of Risk, the game of global strategy that made world domination by Australia seem unavoidable, but then megalomania, he decides, has always been more timeless than historical. It’s like a leather jacket, never out of date. Tight close-up.

Blinking lids descend like long exposure shutters on the slate-blue irises, silicate debris swept discretely to the corners. Pupils expand, saturated, blotting up the midnight ink. It comes to him that all human endeavor is a game of some sort or, more properly, a great compendium of games that are obscurely interwoven and connected, a confounding complex of pursuits with pre-set difficulty levels where the odds are always with the house. A game, he thinks, is surely any system with an arbitrary set of imposed rules, either a contest which results in many losers and a single winner or some noncompetitive arrangement where the pleasure of participation is its own reward. And obviously, unless the rules are those of physics they are arbitrary in one sense or other, made up by somebody, somewhere, sometime. Capital and finance are quite clearly games, probably poker or roulette, at least to judge by those Enron executives who’d featured on the evening news before Mick went to bed, trading in future markets they’d invented out of thin air and were trying, unsuccessfully, to will into existence. Actually, that kind of play, rogue traders and all that, it’s not like poker or roulette so much as it’s like Buckaroo, seeing how many gold-prospecting pickaxes and shovels you can hang on the spring-loaded donkey of market credulity before, inevitably, it explodes and startles everybody.

Status, reproduction and romance, political maneuvering or the cops-and-robbers interplay of crime and legislation, all of it a game. His sister’s exhibition in the morning which he’s partly dreading, partly looking forward to; all of the paintings, all the art, it’s just a different sort of game that’s played with references, nods and winks to this or that, the highbrow clever-dickery that it alludes to. Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilization and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddledywinks. It’s ludicrous, as if the species had developed higher consciousness in order to invent a more elaborate form of naughts and crosses. When is everybody going to get serious? Even when people are engaged in slaughtering one another like in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s just Cowboys and Indians run disastrously out of hand. The last time Britain had been twat enough to interfere in Afghan matters, with the British and the Russian Empires staging their almighty pissing contest in the hundred years preceding World War One, they’d come right out and called it the Great Game. Perhaps the toppled pawns back in their flag-draped boxes for a final toytown tour of Wooton Bassett could be viewed as forfeit tokens in a game, although he can’t see what’s so great about it. Wearying of this internal shuttlecock, this back-and-forth, he opts to take another run for goal, the goal being insensibility. Closing his eyes is purely aspirational as he commences the commando roll onto his right side. Pull back to a streaming, howling stratosphere.

Below, invasive species move from continent to continent, from chair to chair, according to the music of an altered climate. Avocados thrive in tropic London. The percussive clash of particles is registered in delicate quantum cartographies, ferns of explosion and decay, beautiful spirals to annihilation mapped through concrete time. Everywhere information, seething as it nears the boil. The U.S. president George W. Bush and prime minister Blair discuss their deep fraternal bond, admitting errors in their handling of Gulf War II. The disagreement of Megiddo percolates through every culture and in Palestine the car belonging to Islamic Jihad leader Mahmud al-Majzoud erupts in lethal traceries of hurried metal and projectile mortal splinters, disassembling the insurgent along with his brother Nidal. Black and red, such are this spring’s prevailing blossoms, vivid scarlet hearts in petals of oil-colored smoke or bruises offset by an open cut. Cross-fade to vehicle interior.

The shadowy Ford Escort rocks and squeaks in hateful parody of Marla, kneeling in its back seat with her red mac and her halter top pushed up to show malnourishment-honed shoulder blades, the micro-skirt that’s rucked about her waist worn as the black belt of an inverted karate, an exacting martial discipline of victimhood. Her self, the kicked-in and fragmented personality she’d thought she was, is frozen in proximity to her approaching end, frost-welded to this unrelenting moment, her last wretched stretch of here-and-now before a terrible big baby staves her skull in and ends all of her, stops the whole world forever by eliminating that pathetic and pained little rag-end of it which she’d stupidly assumed was hers. Her future has always been such a miserable and stunted thing that she’d thought nobody would bother taking it away from her but now it’s happened, now it’s happening: his pudgy cock-stub punches up inside her dry hole from behind in a ridiculously hasty silent film staccato so that she’s afraid she’s going to start a kind of hideous and open-ended laughter. Marla’s seen his dead-eyed cherub face. She’s seen his license plates and knows this is her finish, with her bloody forehead bumped against the Escort’s right-side rear door by each angry thrust, every resentful bayoneting. This is the worse-than-nothing that her life’s amounted to, the thing she’s always dreaded, always known would happen and she only ventured out tonight to pay for rock. She’ll never have another hit now and she doesn’t care. It’s not important, never was important and she’d give it up without a second thought, she’d go and live back with her mom if only that meant that she’d live and not be killed in this garage enclosure, whimpering and paralyzed on her arrival at the universal terminus. Nothing she ever wanted as a child will now be hers; no one will ever say she’s special, just another shitty story in the local paper, one more useless scrubber nobody will miss, raped and, what, strangled? Oh, no, please not that. Just one blow. One blow to the head and this is over. No last drink before the gallows, no last cigarette before the squad start firing. Blood and snot, she understands, will be her only balm. New point of view.

Dez Warner stares, his eyes those of a hot and snorting horse, at tonight’s catch with his magnificent erection going in and out of its mud-colored cunt. He’s sizzling like a god or an unstoppable machine and the all-powerful chemistry that’s in his head reduces everything to this, the back seat of his motor, to this situation he’s created. When he’d driven into this enclosure it got worried, didn’t it, and started all that stuff trying to make him see it as a person. Telling him its name was what had got him started with the smacking and the punching, all of that. If you don’t know the name it could be anybody, couldn’t it, the one off Countdown, anyone at all. It could be Irene. Even on the wedding night when both of them were pissed she wouldn’t let him fuck her tits, she wouldn’t suck him, nothing like the stuff you get in mags or DVDs, nothing like that. Nothing like this. All his awareness centers on that tingling last inch of his mighty ramrod, squeezing up inside a frightened fanny, feeling so electric that it must be glowing like the sticks they have at festivals or like a red hot poker when the end bit looks translucent. He can smell the sex, the fear, the tangy and exhilarating soup of it, oh yeah, oh yeah. He’s crossed the line with this and can’t go back, he knows that, but this new thing, this is everything that he was always meant to be, not marching into banks with a crash helmet on and strongbox handcuffed to him, trying to look like Terminator for the girls behind the counter, that’s not him. This, this is him, the king of night, the king of fuck and it’s so easy, why don’t people do it all the time? White noise behind the eyeballs, there’s a sort of faulty strip-light flicker and he’s still got pop-up phantoms at the corners of his vision but he doesn’t care. He owns this creature’s life. He can do what he wants. It’s like a doll, it’s like a fly you’ve caught but better for the crying, better for how scared it is. He’s stiffer than a bolt, never as big as this before and pumping up and down like mad. He can’t remember the exact point when he’d made his mind up to put it out of its misery when he was done, or even if there was an exact point. It’s more of a continuum, to be fair; a sliding scale where he’s not come to a decision as such but he knows it’s going to happen, definitely. Just the thought of it excites him and he’s banging harder but his nerves are kicking off like popcorn and he’s trying to shake the feeling that there’s someone else there in the car with them. The window-glass is gray with scalding breath. Dissolve to satellite perspective.

Underneath its shredded wedding dress of cloud the naked globe sweats electricity, stale beads of light most concentrated in the armpit cities, trickling thin in breastbone valleys. Limned with glitter the black map below persists in its unhurried process of evaporation, borders that were only ever topographical conveniences made irrelevant by new communications media, an ongoing negation of geography with threatened and belligerent nationalism churning in its backwash. Gym-fit viruses take longer run-ups to the species barrier. Unkempt taxonomies of novel and more finely graded madnesses are diagnosed, while in Berlin, Chancellor Merkel’s wrapping up the opening ceremony of the Hauptbahnhof as Europe’s biggest railway station when a stabbing rampage is commenced in the attendant crowd, more than two dozen persons wounded and six of those critically so. It’s discovered that one of the earliest knife-victims is HIV positive, to further complicate the tally of postponed fatalities. Newly accreted islands of volcanic matter rise unnoticed. Insert footage, black and white.

An angry smudge of chalk and charcoal, Freddy Allen draws a line across the street plan with his passage. Streaming in a dishwater stop-motion queue of doppelgangers the indignant spectral tramp splashes unnoticed through brick barricades and bollards, through the gaseous blur of fleeting automobiles and the ground-floor flats of the disabled, a fog bullet, die-straight in its murderous trajectory. Evicted in his flickering wake the dislodged ghosts of fleas seek new accommodation, vampire jumping beans in search of other unhygienic apparitions, plentiful in these parts. Raging thunderous and splenetic as he stumbles, even in the muffle of the ghost-seam his unbroken howl of ghastly epithets and curses is the unrelenting rumble of a derailed freight train hurtling dirty through the sleeping district, dragging a funereal scarf of smoke and spitting hot sparks of pejorative. With panting locomotive rhythm Freddy damns the lot of them, rapists and rent-collectors, councilors and curb-crawlers alike, all vicious fishes circling the depleted bait-ball of the neighborhood. The anthracite which keeps his fury stoked, he knows, is mined from bile directed at himself and the appalling thing that he once nearly did, the guilty weight that keeps him mired in this monochromatic wraith-sump and eternally unworthy of the color-drenched emporia Upstairs. He fumes and fulminates in an expletive storm-front, rattling among the sulking residential slabs named after saints and over atrophying streets sealed off from traffic to deter the sex trade. As a ragged chain of paper dolls cut out from folded newsprint Freddy is reiterated in school classrooms, in conspicuously shriek-free moonlight corridors, exploding from prefabricated walls adorned with genial crayoned grotesques to surge down Scarletwell Street in an avalanche of countless flailing limbs and spite-contorted faces.

Cutting off the blunted bottom corner of Greyfriars House he’s like another line of grubby washing strung across the empty court within, flapping and damp, and in his billiard projectile rush he at last understands the full weight of the Master Builder’s loaded gaze, earlier on at the ethereal snooker parlor: it’s him, Freddy. He’s the trick shot, the archangel’s cannonade, skittering on the Boroughs’ dog-fouled baize, the full force of that mighty circumstantial cue propelling him, and all to save this skinny little girl? She must be so important to the play, a black or mistily-remembered pink at least, but why would he, would anyone suppose she wizn’t? That’s not right or fair, dismissing her because of what she does, because she’s not a doctor’s daughter. Everybody wiz a baby once and innocent of all their future. Trembling ectoplasm born of wrath and tenderness wells up in soot-creased sockets as the long-cremated indigent swirls into Lower Bath Street, rippling like eyestrain through pitch dark a foot above the sagging tarmac and, as ever, with no visible means of support. Stretched silver beads pass through him like neutrinos as it starts to rain. Resume full color and cue montage.

From this vantage, features of the natural landscape have been superseded by abstraction, where the spooling ribbon rivers are replaced by fiery canals of routed information, sluicing from one lock-gate server to another and oblivious to mountain, ignorant of sea. Data that previously drizzled escalates to an extreme weather event. The fathomed knowledge rises past its hastily-drawn plimsoll line and populations find themselves out of their depth, clutching for straws of dogma or diverting novelty as they commence their surface struggle at the rim of an e-maelstrom. Seen in overview Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square is an old-fashioned color blindness test card, swimming with pale tinted dots despite the pounding rain. Fledgling Pope Benedict the sixteenth makes his first major appearance in the homeland of his predecessor, tannoy mutter sputtering against the downpour as he references Pope John Paul’s prayer of some twenty-seven years theretofore, asking that the Holy Ghost descend and change the face of Poland, this plea widely held to be more instrumental in dismantling the Soviet Union than the acted permutations of the world’s implacable equation. Species disappear and new discoveries are introduced with the breakneck turnover of soap-opera characters. Newfoundland crows develop secondary tool use, implements for modifying implements, and on Kilimanjaro’s slopes uncounted lightning bolts sow precious tanzanite, fulgurant echoes in a cobalt glass. Conflicts move on from place to place like homicidal drifters, changing names and altering appearances while yet retaining signature brutalities. Theories proliferate. Repeat interior, night.

Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening. Game-plagued as he flips his pillow in a vain search for its fabled cool side he has now progressed to a consideration of the playing card. Before the board games with the satisfying creak of their unfolding or the mystique of their top-hat tokens, cards had been the staple recreation of his childhood in St. Andrew’s Road. At some mysterious adult signal, passed between his gran, his parents and such aunts or uncles as were present, it would be decided that a round of cards was called for. The white tea-time tablecloth would be replaced by the far cozier deep rose one which was Mick and Alma’s favorite, and then from the sideboard drawer that was its ritual resting place the battered and revered familial deck was next produced. He realigns his problematic knees and tries to conjure up a tactile memory of the talismanic pack, the waxy box worn by the handling of at least four generations and declining like the then-traditional extended family unit inexorably towards disintegration, folds becoming perforations. Like the converse of the weathered pasteboard tiles inside, this fragile packaging had been predominantly purple on a ground of twilight lilac, where a silhouetted schoolgirl in a long Victorian pinafore-dress bowled her wooden hoop among midsummer poppies through the gathering violet dusk. Beneath the child’s capering shoes this image was inverted so that for some years Mick had been under the impression that it was the ingénue’s reflection in a puddle at her feet, before he’d noticed that the lower girl was running in the opposite direction. Even as a maroon outline she’d looked pretty, and with hindsight Mick supposes that she might have been his first crush. He’d been faintly anxious for her safety, he recalls. What was she doing out so late to make her race home under darkening skies, across the overgrowing summer meadow? He knows that if she’d got into any trouble, if there’d been somebody waiting in the tall mauve grass for her or for her bouncing, trembling circlet he’d have wanted at the age of five to rescue her, this being then the limit of his amorous imagination. Ninja-quiet in his determination not to puncture Cathy’s well-earned rest he shifts once more onto his back, face up and freshly dealt. New angle.

Supine, the chalk-outlined posture of a Cluedo victim, he remembers Alma telling him about Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Band, stretched out flat on stage before an audience and talking to the rafters: “Hello, God. Here’s what I look like standing up.” It strikes Mick that imagining ourselves as seen from some superior elevation, some projected and omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, old as civilization; Harryhausen’s Greek gods at their fatalistic chessboard peering down through tattered cirrus. Perhaps modern skepticism and the consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play. Mick rests a blond-fuzzed forearm on his brow and shimmering among the shoal of slippery night-spawning ruminations in his catch there is a fugitive impression of how everything is flattened when perceived from overhead, from the perspective of the player. Fleetingly he wonders if these hypothetical celestial gamblers would see everyone as being two-dimensional, as hieroglyphs with no more depth or substance than the inversely reflected royalty compressed onto the court-cards, but the thought melts to the slap of trumps on a red tablecloth. The things they’d played down Andrew’s Road were exercises in precisely regulated tedium – Whist, Sevens, Draw-the-Well-Dry – though he’d found them all sufficiently engaging at the time. Just as each wireless, motorcar or socket seemed to have a face, so too had every card possessed its own distinct charisma, from the almost military formation of the fives to the precariously stacked crates of the nines. The aces, in their abstract grandeur, had been the four archangels or maybe the quartet of fundamental forces constituting spacetime, spades bewilderingly singled out by an impressive Gothic filigree. This attribution of a personality to each design reminds him of the tarot images his sister maintains both precede and serve as basis for the ordinary deck, the stack of archetypal bubblegum collectibles that Alma drags to Mick’s house every year at Christmas dinnertime so that she can read Cathy’s fortune or at least pretend to; Hanged Man, Chariot and all the rest of the unsettling crew, as if that’s any sort of proper seasonal tradition. To hear his crow-scaring elder sibling tell it, Draw-the-Well-Dry is derived from divination while all board-based pastimes are descended from those tricky magic squares where all the rows and columns add to the same number, as though every innocent and commonplace pursuit were only a degenerated form of sorcery. She has a willfully Carpathian worldview, Alma, although now he thinks about it games might well have had some metaphysical or more important human function back at their inception, judging from the terminology found everywhere in language. Hunting some animal down and killing it, that makes it game. Being prepared to carry out some act is to be game. Something that offers easy opportunities for exploitation is regarded as fair game and then of course there’s prostitution, going on the game. Game face, game on, game over, plays of light and sports of nature, Einstein making out God does not dice with matter. Mick’s not sure about the last of these, suspecting that not only do the powers that run the universe do a fair bit of shaking, rattling and throwing, but that generally they do this so the die end up behind the settee and you have to take their word about the double six. With a dismissive grunt directed at the certainties of physics and religion he elects to take another punt on slumber and begins to gradually roll the bones onto his left side, facing Cathy’s curled back. Come on, come on, just this once be lucky. Insert jump-cut sequence.

Spread below, an oriental carpet realized in fiber optics, there are causal curlicues; there are affray motifs. In Scotland a humanitarian award commemorating Robert Burns is given to a youthful relief worker in Baghdad, albeit posthumously. In Peru a clash of adversarial supporters at the run-up to elections ends with injury and gunfire, and in Hereford West Mercia Police appeal for witnesses after a man is violently assaulted by a group of teenagers. With Mandelbrot self-similarity, structures repeat at different scales throughout the system and there remains ambiguity regarding whether harm is percolated up or else decanted down. Wrath boils and steams, where soon thereafter cold and ruthless condensation is precipitated as a trickled legislation. The resultant culture, internal combustion driven, is a clown car only jolted forward by a series of explosions, without any linear progression and no entertainment value save in the anticipation of the vehicle’s inevitable knockabout collapse. A pin-mold creep of neon media adorns the planet’s carcass ideologies, metabolizing incoherent chaos into palatable narrative, an edited awareness of experiential deluge. In near-extinct newsrooms still perfumed by cigarette smoke, telephone calls of the newsworthy are intercepted, victim’s family or adulterous celebrity alike, while in the Congo brutal territorial disputes are waged over the mining of the necessary tantalum required by every trilling mobile and, like Tantalus, the world discovers its anticipated banquet future disappeared. Predators more accustomed to the higher reaches of the food chain are compelled to shin down several blood-oiled links in search of alley-scraps. Zoom in through icy flight-paths and cop-copter altitudes on Lower Bath Street.

When he comes, she goes, or at least that is Marla’s numb appraisal of her likely schedule. The abrasive and continual penetration going on behind her is remote, just as persistent hammering in another room becomes ignorable, inaudible with the monotony of repetition. Dried peas rattle on the vehicle roof above and she is distantly aware that it has started raining. Rare even among the ranks of her impersonal clientele there is no intimacy or involvement in this frenzied pummeling, this punishment clearly directed at somebody other than herself, a private ritual from which she is excluded. Hanging down around her damaged face the braids swing back and forth, a final curtain, jolted by each incoming percussive impact. There is something in the situation that is horribly involuntary, as if neither she nor her rosy assailant are participating of their own free will, both of them clattering and jerking in an ugly puppet drama which is simply happening because it is. She has no choice except to sit through this lackluster recitation to its unambiguously bitter end, a captive audience to this man’s mute soliloquy, this statement through the medium of rape. Detached, without a speaking part, she affords the production her attentions only intermittently. She almost recognizes the performer on her knees in the supporting role, the concave cheeks tracked with mascara and the disappointed little face, eyes staring fixedly into the dark of the Escort’s interior and filled with flat acceptance of this miserable denouement, this abrupt and meaningless conclusion, except who is this that makes these observations, and from where? Someone who isn’t Marla, evidently. Someone with a different name, with clear thoughts unencumbered by the clamors of anxiety and need, somebody looking on with only dull regret, as though reflectively, at an event transpired already. This unprecedented night, has it occurred before or is it in some fashion always happening, these giant final moments that seem so much bigger and more absolute than they appeared from further off? The leatherette beneath her sticky palms, the garish and sensational pulp colors of car dials and instruments delineating the scenario, each vivid element as resonant and hauntingly familiar as Miss Haversham in flames, as the big Indian patient smashing the asylum window with a water-cooler, as those images from literature or film that blaze in stained-glass hues outside of mundane time. With animal obeisance she advances on her dismal ending, doggy-style, on sore knees friction-burned by the seat-covering towards the precipice, the edge of death. There is no tunnel save the focused clarity of her perception, no white light except for an occasionally wakeful motion-sensor fitted to one of the garages. Life fails to flash before her eyes and yet she finds herself preoccupied with the most insignificant of details from her earthly drama, the Diana scrapbook and the morbid library of Ripper memorabilia. Her previous fixation on these subjects, with such specificity, is now incomprehensible and sits more like unconscious omen than the random hobby she’d presumed: she is about to join the sorry file of doxies in their petticoats and bonnets, victims of essentially the same man down across the ages, always Jack, and furthermore she is to suffer her protracted, painful termination in the rear seat of a car. This mean enclosure with its stammering illumination isn’t a Pont de l’Alma, is no bridge of souls, although in the confining brickwork and haphazard paparazzi bursts of brilliance the distinction all but vanishes. All places are distilled to this place just as all of history reduces to these last few precious and excruciating minutes. Every human story, though it be biography or wild romance or primal narrative of old, boils down to her and this, her present situation. Well aware that each breath represents a countdown she sucks in the backseat atmosphere of souring shock and copulation gratefully, exulting in the soon-curtailed delight of inhalation. Watering, her eyes refuse to blink, to miss a single photon in this last parade of light and eyesight, staring at the inside handle of the car door only inches from her streaming nose but, in the process of her disengagement from the world, unable to remember what it is she’s looking at. New point of view.

Mechanically he pulls half out and pushes in, the action looped, but something of the magic patina is gone, as subtle as a change of film-stock or a shift from digital TV back to plain analog. Outside the lurching car it’s pissing down, although he can’t recall the onset of the shower. He’s starting to feel moody out of nowhere, thoughts and that, most probably connected with the powders that he’s on. Thoughts like ‘You’ll be cut off from other people after this’, not if he’s caught because that isn’t going to happen, but because of what he will have done that makes him separate from everybody. Thoughts like ‘After this you mustn’t be yourself with anyone’ because after tonight he’ll be a different person in a different world and nobody must ever know him, who he really is. The real Derek James Warner, 42, will be excluded from all normal interactions with his mates, his kids, with Irene, and will only properly exist on nights like this. This is the end of who he was, but he can’t stop. The thing he’s doing now, the thing he plans on doing afterwards, sooner or later this was always going to happen, ever since he first learned of the concept as a schoolboy. Dez is in a foaming, charging current of events with nothing he can do except surrender, bow to the inevitable. All his life thus far was leading to this moment just as all his future will proceed from this same point, indelible in memory so that to all intents and purposes he’s always going to be here, here and now, at least inside his head and this is always going to be happening. He’s like a fly in amber, eyelids squeezing to a crayon scribble, nose compressing into ridges like a collapsed paper lantern and the awning of the lower lip rolled down. He shoves his cock in and he shoves his cock in and at the peripheries of vision catches sight of dashboard glints in green and red. He knows that only chemicals are causing the illusion of mismatched eyes watching him dispassionately through the ambient blur, yet cannot shake the sense of a third party bearing witness from the driver’s seat, an unintended and unwanted passenger he can’t remember picking up. He’s never been a drugs man, Derek. He’s not used to all this, with things shifting everywhere and how he feels about stuff shifting along with them, like a lion one minute and the next he’s got the horrors, the unbearable sensation something terrible is just about to happen or, worse, is already happening. He holds the bubbling incipient panic down, concentrates on the job in hand. Lowering his gaze he looks at what he’s doing, at the hairy dagger plunging in the slimy wound, his thumbs holding the negligible ass-cheeks open and apart. There’s a minuscule punctuation-point of shit clinging to the exterior of the clenching sphincter where it’s not wiped itself properly, the dirty fucking animal. He hates it, hates it for just having stood there on the corner in its PVC coat waiting for him; for participating and for letting him go through with this. The hatred makes him harder, gives him focus, and he’s just beginning to consider how he’s going to kill it after he’s done fucking it when out through the front windscreen’s beaded glass he notices that there appears to be a fire or something in one of the nearby garages, with smoke escaping out from under the closed … no. No, that’s not quite what’s happening. He squints and frowns, bewildered, pausing his convulsive pelvic back-and-forth while struggling to make sense of what he’s seeing. The gray smoke – not smoke exactly, being slow and viscous – seems to bleed out through the corrugated metal of the garage door and its surrounding brickwork like an exhalation, an expression of the damp and misery that soaks the walls in neighborhoods like this. Curdled and seething in the oil-stain gloom the sluggish vapor looks to be collecting in one spot, rotating languidly an inch above the tarmac and much like one of those litter-whirlwinds that he’s sometimes seen in car parks, cyclones of discarded rubbish. What the fuck is going on? Put off his stroke he softens and slides out, slips off the nest almost unnoticed as he gazes through the trickling glass into the gradually revolving and resolving front of ugly weather, so unnaturally localized. The shifting crenulations arbitrarily take on a host of momentary semblances like the white, Persil-laundered clouds he thinks he can recall from childhood only grubbier, more hurriedly, and with less room for whimsy or interpretation. There’s a cone of filthy fog by now and up towards the top – “Fuck! Fuck, what’s that?” – towards the top slim ashen threads and tendrils writhe like bile in toilet-water, accidentally curling to the contours of an agitated old man’s face. Then suddenly there’s lots of faces, all the same and screaming without making any noise, eyes multiplying to a string of hostile, glistening jellies. Several mouths identically decayed and toothless open in the plethora of smoldering heads, and flocks of unwashed hands rise fluttering like oversize factory butterflies. He finds he’s making an involuntary plaintive noise high in his sinuses and at the same time notices the night air splashed on his perpetually blushing cheek in a cold water gust. What’s … fuck, it’s got the door open, it’s getting out. It had been frightened at the start, did what he told it and he hadn’t bothered with the lock. Fuck. Fuck! It slithers on its belly like a seal taking to water, tumbling face-first from the car into the tarmac black outside and though he lunges for a stick-thin ankle all he comes away with is a Cinderella shoe.

“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”

Forgetting in the fugue and fury of the instant the hallucination that had so distracted him, he scrambles awkwardly out of the vehicle into the rain after his bolting prey with flies undone and murder in his boots. Cut to new point of view and insert footage, black and white.

Through brick and metal only fifty years thick at the very outside boils the incorporeal moocher with his kettle scream of anger rising even through the corpse acoustic of the ghost-seam. There is his faint, sudden scent of damp and mildew everywhere as with gray cemetery eyes he drinks the dark of the enclosure with its spitting puddles and makes out the fuck-sprung vehicle stood rocking at its center. Edge stitched with pale phosphorescence in his wraith-sight he can see a stout man, perspiration streaming on his choirboy cheeks as he kneels upright in the rear seats shunting back and forth repetitively, a stuck dodgem. Freddy doesn’t need to see the frightened girl crouched like a dog in front of him to know exactly what he’s doing, oh the cowardly little speck of shit, the dirty bugger and the worst thing is there’s two of them, two of them to one skinny little lass. He’s got his mate there with him, sitting in the driver’s seat with a big titfer on and staring straight out through the windscreen so that if you knew no better you might think that he was glaring right at Freddy with his different-looking peepers, one dark and the other … oh. Oh, bloody hell. It’s not another man at all. It’s something a sight worse and Freddy’s bowels would turn to water if they weren’t already steam. The motor has a fiend in its front seat, one of the grander and more frightening ones, the kind much talked about yet rarely seen and gazing fixedly at Freddy with mismatched eyes and a knowing smile that’s all but lost among the curls of his bindweed mustache and beard. It’s the same look the Master Builder gave him earlier up at the snooker hall: an exchanged glance, a mutual acknowledgment that this is it, this is the crucial incident that Freddy’s whole existence, both in flesh and fog, has been in aid of. He has a profound conviction that the smirking devil isn’t here for him tonight, unless in the capacity of an amused spectator. It won’t harm him if he tries to interrupt the shameful business going on in the back seat, he knows that. It’s almost as if it’s granting him a special dispensation to do all the things which specters shouldn’t really do, without fear of reprisal. He’s allowed to haunt, to be a charnel terror of the most extravagant variety, and if this should indeed be Freddy Allen’s moment then he isn’t going to fluff it. Peering past the infernal celebrity into the black Ford Escort’s rear he is encouraged to observe that the perpetually-blushing perpetrator has abruptly ceased in his compulsive thrusting, kneeling motionless and squinting in belligerent bewilderment out through the misted glass, apparently at Freddy. Is it possible the man can see him somehow, through the agency of drink or drugs or psychiatric ailment? By way of experiment the smoldering vagrant shakes his head and waves his arms around so that his foliage of persisting after-images blossoms into a fag-ash hydra, pale hands a fast-breeding nest of blind white spiders and a rheumy frogspawn clot of eyes, rewarded by a deepening of the rapist’s puzzled frown, a further slackening of his blancmange jaw. Oh, yes. Oh, he’s on something, right enough. He’s got the sight, the deadeye, and it’s put him off his stroke, this gray grotesque, this inability to make out what he’s looking at. It’s like he’s seen a ghost. Flexing his ectoplasm Freddy feels the bilious thrill of unaccustomed potency diffusing through his dismal vapors, an acceptance of the terrifying, ragged thing he is reflected in the plump man’s shriveling pupils. As he gathers up the dire cumulonimbus of his countenance for an assault he realizes something is occurring in the car, events to which his presence may or may not be connected. There’s a click, faint in the auditory muffle, which the scruffy phantom retroactively identifies as a rear side door opened from within. The dazed assailant breaks from his fixed scrutiny of Freddy to survey his victim and immediately gives a bark of thwarted rage.

“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”

That isn’t right. That’s not a word you use about a woman. Freddy rolls in crinkling crematorium billows, churning forward for a better vantage but immediately brought up short by what he sees. The girl, there’s not two penn’oth of meat on her, slithers from the partly-opened crack in her condemned cell with her face a sticky mask of blood, newborn into the night. At Freddy’s back, erratic flashes from an inexplicably disabled garage light pick out her desperate escape-attempt in a distressing series of Box Brownie snapshots, scrabbling on her stomach, trying painfully to climb onto her hands and laddered knees with scarlet scabbing on her careful plaits, crawling towards the distant mouth of the oil-stained corral which she must know she doesn’t have a hope in hell of reaching. From the car the blustering villain lunges, navigating the haphazard bright and pitch dark with a ladies’ shoe in one hand like a tomahawk and his old feller hanging out, an overheated dog-tongue, from his gaping trousers. Surging in a sooty, viscous streamer through the demi-world’s near silence, Freddy Allen and his trailing scrum of lookalikes flood in to occupy the dwindling space between the crawling, keening woman and her persecutor, baby-faced with dark hair plastered to his forehead by the downpour’s brilliantine, a sputtering and indignant old-style bully. Through a hushed and flickering realm of scratchy black and white, the little tramp rushes to save the heroine. Pull back to documentary material, reintroducing color.

On a turntable of gravity the planet spins, just over halfway through the eagerly-awaited new millennial long-player’s opening ten year track, the critical response as yet divided on the merits of its noisy plane-crash introduction or the strident nature of the vocals; theists and cosmographers in bickering counterpoint. Jehovah is eroded by the tree of knowledge’s alarming exponential growth, by paleontologic scrutiny, resorting to a fortified Creationist denial in result: visitors’ centers serving the Grand Canyon are reported to have concealed references to the chasm’s geologic age or origins in favor of a biblical scenario evoking the deluge of Noah. Carolina legislators argue that authentic rape cannot result in pregnancy based on the two-seed theory of conception popular two thousand years before. Conceptual centuries collide and in the deafening impact are belligerent Zionist assertions, fundamentalist crusades and detonating martyr vests.

Besieged, the secular response is militant, an atheism volubly affirmed that in its dogmas and its certainties approaches the religious, although armed with nothing more substantial than established scientific fact, itself a changed constituency of shifting ground. The classical and quantum models are persistent in rejecting all attempts at reconciliation, with the string by which they might be bound proving thus far elusive. Insufficiently grasped gravity engenders multiplying entities in its support, exotic states and substances, dark energy, dark matter, necessary beasts arisen from mathematics yet escaping observation. Faith and politics ferment, aided by a fast-propagating yeast of theory and device, and all the architecture of the world’s traditions seems erected on an information floodplain, vulnerable to every fresh downpour of data or the bursting banks of ideologies too narrow and slow-moving to accommodate the surge, the inundation of complexity. Despite its evident fatigue, afraid of missing some vital development in this incessant and incendiary pageant, culture dare not close its eyes. Resume interior, night.

Unable to be rid, now, of his sister’s oddly memorable tarot images, Mick finds them strewn all over his cerebral carpeting as the surcease of thought continues to avoid him. Circumspectly levering onto his back he hooks his left foot over his right knee in what he realizes belatedly is an unconscious imitation of the deck’s mysterious Hanged Man, a figure signifying an uncomfortable initiation if Mick’s memory serves correct. He doesn’t understand the Hanged Man or the other twenty-something ‘trump’ cards even slightly, not the Chariot or Lust or the High Priestess, none of that lot; can’t imagine any game elaborate enough or of sufficient scale to utilize them all and so discards them from consideration. Nearly all the other pasteboard pictures, though peculiar, are what he thinks of as the ordinary ones, the ones that have an obvious correspondence to the pack with which he’s most familiar. There are four suits with ten numbered cards in each, the suits roughly analogous to the existing quartet but called different names with diamonds become discs and spades now swords, hearts turned to cups and clubs made wands, his sister stubbornly insisting that the tarot suits came first. The court cards, similarly, are almost identical to the more regular monarchical arrangement with the queens unchanged but knights and princes substituted for the kings and jacks respectively, these three joined inexplicably by a fourth flat aristocrat, a princess having no equivalent among the hard-eyed and mistrustful-looking royals of convention. Mick is unsure how this last-named personage is meant to fit into the play, no way of knowing if she beats a prince or what. Like the Hanged Man and his unfathomable pals, Mick finds she functions only as an irritant in an already irritating set-up. Tarot, to be blunt, gets on his nerves. With different occult iconography on every card it would be near impossible to even manage a quick hand of snap, and so for any grown-up purposes the concept is completely useless. Feeling suddenly annoyed at Alma, albeit obscurely, he negotiates the move onto his right side without auditory incident. New angle.

The whole problem with his sibling, he decides, is that she judges her successes by such baffling criteria that she can even claim unutterable disaster as some kind of victory, with everybody too uncertain as to what she’s going on about to challenge her preposterous and yet authoritative-sounding proclamations. The most reasonable objections will be flattened by an insurmountable artillery barrage of quotes from sources no one else has read and which are very possibly invented on the spot. Any debate is a rigged contest held according to a manual much like the Book of Mormon, to which Alma evidently holds sole access. Rules of play change seemingly at random as though one were arguing with the Red Queen from Alice Through the Looking-Glass or possibly Alice in Wonderland. Mick always gets the two of them mixed up. In fact, now that he thinks about it, Lewis Carroll is almost as aggravating as his older sister in the author’s patently deliberate attempts to puzzle and confound the punters. Why else have a Red Queen in both books, both with the same abrasive personality, when they are plainly different characters with one derived from playing cards and one from chess? In fact, with an intended audience of children, why involve chess in the first place if not as a way to intellectually intimidate the spiteful little buggers? It’s a tactic which would definitely work with Mick, who’s always found the very mention of the subject petrifying. Chess – there’s something else that seriously gets on his tits. All of the fancy and entitled pieces with their fussy, idiosyncratic ways of moving are no more than obsessive-compulsive drafts when it comes down to it, the bishops sticking superstitiously to either white or black squares and the knights continually turning corners that aren’t there. Then there’s the game’s neurotic aristocracy, apparently dysfunctional royal couples who are usually the center of attention; kings restricted in their actions to the point of constipated immobility with queens free to go where they choose and pretty much do anything they want, despite the fact that it’s their powerful husbands about which the wheels of intrigue turn. Mick’s class-based supposition that the chessmen’s quirky movements have their root in mental feebleness resultant from inbreeding notwithstanding, he’ll admit that the distinctive figures have their own mystique, their own minimalist charisma. There’s a sense about them that they stand for something more significant than just a knight, a horse’s head or a game token with a strange waltz-step trajectory. It’s more as if they symbolize big abstract qualities that skirmish and maneuver on a higher board, a field of play that’s far into the ultra-violet of Mick’s comprehension. Kings, queens, princes and princesses, whether you’re discussing playing cards or chessmen or real flesh and blood heirs to the throne, it isn’t who they are or what they do that makes them seem important, but the huge and formless thing it feels as if they represent. It’s what they signify. It’s what they mean.

Deciding that a supine strategy might be the answer after all, he’s halfway through the necessary repositioning when it occurs to him that that’s why everybody made such an extraordinary fuss about Princess Diana with Kensington Palace wrapped in cellophane, swaddled by teddy bears. It wasn’t her. It was what people understood by her. Against the bedroom window a soft fusillade announces scattered showers. Cut to panoptical perspective.

Church and State, in bed, share a post-coital cigarette and now the quilt of nations smolders. The intelligence community’s perpetual shrill alerts begin to seem those of a broken smoke-detector, generally ignored but not without a gradually accreting residue of jitters. Terror-stricken in a war against their own emotional condition, snapping fretfully at shadows they themselves are casting, western powers attempt to color-code a nightmare. The white rucksack-flash is prism-split into a spectrum of diurnally adjusted dread, a heat map of anxiety that never cools below Guantanamo Bay orange with the icy blue of safety a forgotten hue that’s out of vogue and isn’t coming back.

Friday, May 26^th, 2006. In Washington D.C. the governmental buildings which comprise the Capitol are locked down while the U.S. Senate is in session, voting to confirm Michael V. Hayden as the new director of the CIA, after authorities receive accounts of gunshots heard in the vicinity and of an armed man sighted inside an adjacent office gym. Police identify the sharp reports as probably those of pneumatic hammers and the putative gymnasium gunman as one of their plainclothes operatives. Across the planet fresh security initiatives fail to keep out the resolute insurgents of the mind. With each explosion the wraith population also booms, new sheeted forms arisen wailing out of idle chat and propaganda, tricks of media light and hulking Brocken specters flung on pools of fog between stark summit headlines. Pepper’s ghosts with headscarves and bandannas loom in popular imagination’s steeply angled glass to stage schoolboy commando-rolls through grainy training footage, mythically disfigured clerics wagging a remaining finger heavy with grim emphasis. Concepts of nation first spun as religious parables or else dime-novel daydreams in less nuanced centuries play out on multiplying modern platforms as ensanguined pantomime; fond re-enactments already nostalgic for the slaughters of a simpler world. Cue rapid intercuts.

Across the soaked enclosure’s pittering surface skim of wet she slithers, legs conjoined by the entangling tights and knickers dragged around her thighs, a landed mermaid flopping in the shallows. Blind with blood she hears her cheated captor bellowing as he explodes from out the mobile dungeon at her back.

“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”

Somewhere amid the panicked rat-run of her consciousness the previously unsuspected part of her prioritizes: if she can regain her feet she can pull up her underwear and flee, a difficult maneuver best accomplished without thinking. Managing to lift both knees at once she finds that she is moving forward, partly toppling and partly running in constrained and tiny geisha steps while trying to claw the fishnet waistband back above her hips. With both her high-heel shoes now gone she hurtles splashing through the pools collected in depressions, visual continuity reduced to blackout skits by nearby motion-sensor lights in spasm, too concerned with gulping back great sobbing drafts of air to think of screaming and unable to believe he hasn’t grabbed her yet. New point of view.

He’s had enough. He’s had enough of drugs, they’re fucking weird. He wades through seizure light across the walled-in yard and tries to catch it, tries to get it back into the motor so that he can finish but the stuff he took is giving him the horrors, things he hadn’t been expecting. It’s there right in front of him, just a few paces off and struggling to get on its feet but when he takes a step towards it there’s this wind, well, not a wind but a stale gust of something that slams into him and knocks him back. The smell is all like dosshouses, all alky sweats and meths-breath and damp pants, derelict buildings with shit up the corner and all that, an aromatic fogbank he can nearly see. Fingers of slum-gray vapor curl around his ankles, trickling like albumen along his arms and running down his back and even though he knows all this is in his head and only happening because he’s on one, he can’t help recoiling. The hallucination squeezes in until he’s struggling with a cloud of phlegm, but in the slithering mucous tendrils there are bits of face, chin-swarms and ornate frills of glistening lip. Worse, there’s this faint sound that he catches fleeting snatches of, like a transistor radio tuned between wavebands, an enraged tirade that’s unintelligible as if coming from a long way off or a long time ago. Some of the squirming, insubstantial stuff is in his mouth and tastes like sick, or is that him? For all he knows this might be a brain hemorrhage, an overdose. He might be in real trouble here. New point of view, reintroducing black and white stock.

Furious in his resent, the threadbare dead man presses his advantage with a flurry of attack which utilizes every ghoul-display that’s in his clammy repertoire. He tries the frightening stilt-walker elongation that results from levitating upwards with a string of doppelgangers dragged up after him, and executes a miserable spider-dance of multiplying limbs. He shoves his hands inside his own head so that wriggling fingers poke like crab’s legs from his gurning face, gob widening impossibly into a scream of filthy polyps. He does his inflating eyeball trick or with an awful kiss performs disgusting sleights of tongue; reaches to cup the reeling sexual predator’s exposed and dangling testes in one mortuary palm; extrudes a finger of cold ectoplasm past the clenching sphincter and into the bowel. Human ideas of fighting dirty, well; they’re nothing to a ghost. With eyes screwed shut and baby face in a tomato crumple his opponent swats the night, as if at bees, and takes a solitary backward step towards the motor. There is now nobody sitting in the driver’s seat, the ghetto-wight observes with some relief, its sulfurous former occupant having apparently moved on to other matters, demon business being surely plentiful in such a morally uncoupled world. Swirling his head about and momentarily accomplishing a Saturn’s ring of ears, he reassures himself that the young woman is now up and staggering for the enclosure’s mouth before resuming his assault on her tormentor. Barking inarticulate profanities the besieged rapist yields another yard in his retreat, a spook-punch landed in the frontal lobe and fingering for the amygdala. New point of view, reverting to full color.

At the exit of the killing yard she risks a glance across her shoulder just to see how close he is behind her but he’s still stood by the car, hands flapping at the air, having a fit or something though he could be on her in a minute. Every step a burning ache between her thighs she plunges out through Lower Bath Street’s black, propelled by bad adrenaline and mindful of the coming crash into paralyzes and shock. Because it’s easier stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, grass theater of her late abduction, steeped in piss-pot sodium light. An only sign of life is the diluted lemon filtered through drawn curtains from the solitary house down near the corner and she limps across the road in its direction, gravel gouging at her tender soles, breath bubbling in her throat. Please, please let there be someone home, somebody capable and unafraid to come to their front door on a wild Friday night, although she’s crushingly aware of the unlikelihood. Off to her right the isolated home abuts upon the yawning mouth of a since-vanished alleyway, the memory of its cobbled ribbon spooling down into the dark beside the chain-link fence that bounds the lowest edge of the school playing fields. Ahead, St. Andrew’s Road is bare of any traffic whatsoever, let alone police cars, and the murderer of her imagination is now panting like a beast and close enough to scald her neck. Her legs seem disconnected from volition suddenly, nerveless and unresponsive as if made of cake, and then the ninety-year-old slabs are hurtling up to punch her knees and slap her stinging hands. She’s down, she’s down and dripping blood into a gutter where rain gurgles through the stone esophagus. Abject and crawling, a thrashed dog, she scrabbles whimpering over inundated pavement, levering herself half-upright at the doorstep to thump her exhausted fists on the wet paneling, surely too limp and ineffectual for anyone to hear. The seconds stretch excruciatingly, barbed with the premonition of his any-moment grip descending on her shoulder, of fuck-scented fingers bunching in her braided, bloodied hair. Please, please, please. From somewhere indoors slow, slipper-muffled steps approach along an unseen passageway. New point of view.

He isn’t scared as such, he’s not that sort of bloke, but he can feel something attacking him, some big junkyard Alsatian when there’s nothing there for him to see, for him to swing at. Worse than an Alsatian. Yank their back legs open and they’re dead, he’s heard that, but this is like fighting congealed custard and the mess goes everywhere, inside his clothing, up his nostrils, up his ass. He can’t take any more. He doesn’t know if this is just what meth does normally or if he’s gone mad or been grabbed by aliens or what. Slicing through an occasional illumination, raindrops fall as razor cuts. Inside a whiny voice he doesn’t know, more like a woman or a panicked kid’s, is pleading with him to get out of here, get in the car, just go. The loose skin on his balls is cringing, Jesus Christ his flies are still undone, and there’s a dismal avalanche of hats, a dozen vacuum-cleaner orifices ringed with rotten teeth that he can almost see. Unfathomable images persist in the uneven dark, electric filaments burned sizzling onto his retina, these visionary floaters coruscating at their edges where the radiance has a grain of teeming maggots. Everything is wrong. Fumbling behind he shoves the rear door of the Escort shut while trying to find the handle on the front one, swiping with his free paw at the flock of ugly flying heads assailing him. With flapping hands as bony pinions sprouted from the temples, snapping their decaying jaws and grimacing, like monstrous charnel hummingbirds they come, preposterous and terrible. His frantic fingers finally locate what they were seeking, the cold metal button underneath his thumb, and making noises meant to be a snarl he flings himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door closed after him. A surf of dirty laundry suds is launched against the wound-up window, leaving a gray residue of viscous facial features sliding down the glass outside. Twisting the key in the ignition, for some reason he meticulously checks the dashboard clock and notes the time as almost twenty to eleven. Out beyond the rain-streaked windscreen something putrid that he doesn’t understand tries to get in. New point of view reprising monochrome.

In headline black and white through stammering, convulsive light the skirling deadbeat churns around the vehicle, a rancid cyclone. Car walls being nothing but a flimsy tissue three or four years thick at most, the vagrant vapor-trail could easily reach through them to continue the assault but it’s deterrence and not punishment on the agenda here, much as he wishes it were otherwise. Just scare this tubby little bugger off and then make sure the woman’s safe, those are the things he needs to keep his petrifying eye on. Never mind what somebody who’d do that to a young girl might deserve: that’s a decision better left in larger hands than his, although with half a chance what devastation wouldn’t he bring down upon this animal, this wretched failure of masculinity that he so nearly could have been? He’d do a Banquo, do a Hamlet’s dad, a Tam O’ Shanter with his ghastly oppoes from the Jolly Smokers drafted in to help, a ragged locomotive smoke of pitiless and violent dead men shadowing this mucky fucker through his every waking moment and his every dream, for the remainder of his worthless life and then they’ll just be getting started. There’s no Hell, no merciless retributive Inferno save for the Destructor, but the bilious spirit is convinced that with the inspiration of a life and death transacted in the Boroughs one could be arranged, to beggar Dante and to make blind Milton look away.

Pulling a train of chalk and charcoal sketches in a falling domino progression he encircles the throat-clearing automobile as it starts, his eerie Doppler howl pursuing him through the flash-punctuated and torrential night, his floating coat a rippling funeral banner in his wake. An aggregate of dust and retribution, in the gaberdine sieves of his pockets all the grievance of the outraged neighborhood is carried, the deferred affront viciously vented as a steaming horse-piss stream on the intruder, a malign deluge to sluice him from these wounded streets until him and the other knicker-rippers learn to keep away. New point of view, reverting to full color.

Smeared across a stranger’s doorstep in the pounding torrent she’s a broken toy, discarded with torn seams and every bit of psychic stuffing gone, one button eye obscured by sticky cordial. All of her hurts. She doesn’t care if the dull footfalls in the hallway that she’d heard were only wishful thinking, doesn’t much mind if her persecutor catches up and finishes the job. She just wants this to end and is less fussed about the manner of that ending by the moment. Treacherously cozy lassitude descends, every last vestige of intent or motion drained out with the contents of her emptying bladder. Self and personality are a retreating tide strained rattling on synaptic shingle and she barely comprehends the light that strikes pink through her lowered eyelids; can’t remember the phenomenon or what it means. At length the lashes unrestrained by blood-glue flutter open and she squints up into puzzle-colors, clots of shine and shade resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she knows from somewhere, framed by the now-open door. Against a ground of patterned wallpaper and mismatched carpet, limned in sixty watts of Pentecostal fire stands an old woman built from long and knobbly bones and crowned with white hair like ignited phosphorous, one thin hand pressing on the lintel. Veiled in gloom by incandescent blaze beyond, the tallow contours of an Easter Island face hang heavy on the bone and oh, her screech-owl eyes. Pale gray with golden irises they stare down, reservoirs of depthless fury and compassion, on the smashed child at her threshold. Gaunt cheek tracked by angry brine the occupant stoops, creaking, crouched on leather haunches to cup Marla’s chin while a free hand tenderly smooths the bloodied braids.

“All hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem,” pronounces Audrey Vernall, and her voice chokes with an all-redeeming pride. Pull back to planetary mosaic, abruptly edited.

Bulbs pop and data effervesce. Wigan police release footage of car involved in fatal hit-and-run with cyclist. Reefs quietly disintegrate. Convicted Enron fraudster Kenneth Lay says he believes good will come out of his predicament. The stars of supermarket magazines change shape, change partners. Arctic ice recedes. A paralyzed Welsh rugby player calls to ban contested scrums and startlingly tenacious tubeworms offer hope of life on other worlds. Quantum or nation, states collapse when looked at. Oil chess, fiscal figure skating and the tendency of Homo sapiens to fuze with its technologies. Australian mountain climber Lincoln Hall is briefly believed dead. A badger harasses sports center staff in Devon. Mice glow and grow joke-shop ears. Racism fears dog World Cup buildup. Budgets shrivel and reality shows relocate their target audience inside the television, closing the ouroboros. New forms of carbon and new scales of manufacture. An ethereal scrapyard orbiting the world. Popular culture, formerly disposable, dragged to the curbside for recycling and art residing solely in the pitch. Internal interregnum. Double helix turns informant. Touch-screen intimacy. Algorithms of desire. Bespoke need, and text messaging a carrier pidgin. New, new, every second bigger than the last. The populace recline obese with novelty yet consume ever more enthusiastically, as if to master the onrushing future by devouring it; to drink the tidal wave. Cut to interior, night.

Flat on his back, Mick listens to the rain against the glass and thinks about Diana Spencer. It’s a natural extension of his restless thoughts on chess or chase-the-ace or tiddledywinks, with the whole Princess Di phenomenon a game – or a compendium of games – that had apparently got badly out of hand. That almost literal unveiling in the newspapers, a first glimpse of the nursery assistant standing in a cheesecloth skirt with pouring backlight, prurient X-Ray specks illusion of gray silhouetted limbs caught by an opportunist snapper to be sure, but who was playing who? For all her shy fawn glances from beneath the fringe, a strategy established even at that early stage, this was a scion of the Red Earl whose name was writ in road, estate and public house across the face of working-class Northampton. Dodgy dynasties had been reduced to bouillon in her blood, from fifteenth-century livestock farmers passing themselves off as relatives to the House Le Despencer, through to five or six authentic bastards sired by Stuarts and thus a genetic conduit to the lines of Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach and Hanover; of Sforza and Medici. Chromosomes not to be trifled with, and this before an admixture of Churchills are infused into the Northamptonshire family’s already-potent genealogical concoction. Poisoners, tacticians, bloody-minded warrior kings.

Born Althorp in 1730-something and one in a lengthy line of Johns, the first Earl Spencer proper fathered Lady Georgiana, later to be made Duchess of Devonshire and famously alluring doppelganger of her later tabloid-teasing relative. The fifth Earl Spencer, born around a century thereafter, was the red one if Mick has his local history straight, a mate of Gladstone’s named after the color of his ostentatious beard. As Lord Lieutenant out in Ireland it appears he’d done his bit to play fair with the Fenians and even came out for Home Rule, which saw him ostracized by everybody from Victoria down. However, earlier in the 1880s he’d had people hung for murdering his secretary and Gladstone’s nephew, so the nationalists all hated him as well. Mick glances to his left, at Cathy’s soft topography beneath its turf of duvet, and observes not for the first time that there’s no pleasing the Irish. Dull discomforts start to mutter in his hips and shoulders – none of us are getting any younger – and he essays the maneuver to his port side, curls himself about his sleeping wife’s turned spine like fingers round a hand-warmer. New angle.

By the century just gone, Mick’s century, the Spencer family’s genetic creep had moved like Burnham Wood, unnoticed, ever closer to the hubs of power and history. The Spencer-Churchills had slipped into Downing Street with Winston and then, shortly after that, returned with Winston’s niece Clarissa as Anthony Eden’s missus; the Suez crisis prime minister’s trouble and strife, although by no means all of it. Meanwhile in 1924 back home at Althorp, Eighth Earl Johnny had arrived, and yet Mick’s only mental image of the man is as a rubicund and seemingly concussed attendee of official openings, someone with a prize-fighter mumble, to be seated furthest from the microphone. Though to be fair he’d pulled a decent-looking woman in that first Viscountess Althorp, Frances, even if her dynasty-dispenser seemed obdurately to only turn out healthy babies of an inconvenient gender. First came Sarah, then came Jane and then at last the hoped for Ninth Earl, yet another John, who died in infancy a year before the advent of a further disappointing daughter, this one named after a week’s procrastination as Diana Frances. During his occasional lucid moments Johnny Spencer starts to see his wife as culprit in the inability to sire an heir and the humiliated Lady Althorp is dispatched to Harley Street in order to determine just exactly what her problem is, the difficulty clearly being hers alone. Mick can imagine how that might have put a strain upon the marriage, even after the arrival of Diana’s younger brother Champagne Charlie Spencer just a couple of years later. When the future people’s princess was just eight years old in 1969 her parents were divorced amid some acrimony following her mother’s extra-marital affair with Peter Shand Kydd, whom she’d soon thereafter wed. Despite the unreliability of hindsight, Mick supposes that some of the fateful architecture of the youngest Spencer daughter’s life might have been loosely sketched in by events around this time, although he can’t help thinking that by subsequently marrying Barbara Cartland’s daughter Raine her father had recklessly introduced an element of overheated gothic romance to the mix that would eventually do most damage. Fairy story expectations without due acknowledgment of all the things that fairy stories bring: the poisoned apple and the cradle curse, the glass shoe full of blood. He feels uncomfortable. If Cathy is a roasting hedgehog, Mick is wrapped around her like baked Gypsy clay. Evading her inferno he once more essays the shift onto his back. New angle.

He’s not really certain how it had all worked, the courtship and the marriage into royalty. Presumably Diana had been drafted into service as a brood-mare, like her mother, to produce the necessary male successor while allowing her new husband to continue a longstanding dalliance with his married mistress. Did she know that on her way in, or find out about it later? Mick supposes it depends on how informed about each other’s lives the aristocracy, as a community, might be. Even if she’d entered into marriage in a state of blissful ignorance, she must have tumbled to it early on. That first press conference with the two of them stood by that gate, the distant and laconic tone that he affected when he said “Whutever love eez” and you saw her look uncomfortable at this obvious disclaimer. But whichever way it went, once all the cards were on the table it was guaranteed that there would be a messy end-game.

When the fault-lines started showing it was in the form initially of a schoolgirl rebellion, turning up with Fergie at some fashionable and exclusive club disguised as WPC strippagrams, but by the time it got to Martin Bashir you could see that she was wheeling out the big guns and that her campaign didn’t appear to have retreat among its options. It was clearly going to be hard-core attrition all the way. The tactical component became, literally, more naked. The ostensibly intrusive but surprisingly composed gymnasium rowing-machine picture. The abbreviated swimsuit on Dodi Al Fayed’s boat, deliberately teasing the long lenses to erection, on the same day that her former husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles were due to meet the press and public. She’d got game, you had to give her that. And then, and then … that week or two before the bridge, before her crossing, the queer British admixture of clammy lust and lip-curling contempt had humped its way to a vituperative climax: they despised her. They despised the future-king-humiliating Arab-shagger, and the AIDS patients and landmines came to seem an unconvincing camouflage for a new Catherine de Médicis, a new Catherine Sforza; some Renaissance vamp with no elastic in her knickers and a cyanide ring. Loathed her all the more for having wanted so to love her, but she’d let them down with all her gallivanting and her diet disorders, hadn’t been the person that they’d wanted, that they’d needed. It’s so hard to love something that’s moving, changing; something that’s alive. The marble memory is more dependable. Mick wonders, his thoughts starting to fuzz up at last, if it was that great weight of disappointed expectation that had suddenly descended on her like a prehistoric mudslide, fossilizing her forever as the perfect tragic Hitchcock blond, leeching the human color out and freezing her into the black-and-white monitor image at the Ritz, the half-smile ducking out through the revolving door into eternity and outside chauffeur Henri Paul called back on duty at short notice, maybe catastrophically attempting to offset his after-hours imbibing with a few revivifying blasts of white line fever. Rolling highlights, glints, refractions. Obscure scintillations in the Paris dark beyond the glass. Pull focus to kaleidoscopic torrent of found footage, interspersing full high-definition color with unstable silent film stock.

Rural roads can be most deadly, a report suggests. Abandoned turtle sanctuary to open at a sea-life park in Dorset. Russia jockeys for control of three Siberian oil pipelines currently in Western hands, and Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the surviving perpetrator of 2004’s Beslan school siege is found guilty on specific counts of terrorism, hostage taking, murder, but steers clear of the death penalty by virtue of a current Kremlin moratorium on executions. Lucky breaks and random tragedies, the acted permutations of Newtonian physics with its endless knock-ons and its circumstantial cannonades; stochastic popcorn for tomorrow’s papers. In the Indian Ocean some sixteen miles south-southwest of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of Java and more than six miles beneath the seabed the Australian and Eurasian plates, tectonic sumo wrestlers, slap powder on their palms and close together for their seventh or eighth bout this year. It’s fourteen minutes to eleven, Greenwich Mean Time.

She can barely feel the bony hands that help her to her feet, and briefly has the thought that she might be ascending. Distant from the instant, in a snowglobe glaze of settling shock with all the painful parts of her a mile away, she registers the tissue-paper whisper of the fragile woman gathering her up into the doorstep’s light only remotely. Something about saints, she thinks, and calmly wonders if she’s dead, if she’s not really managed to escape the car or vehicle enclosure after all. Nearby in the torrential night an engine starts to angry life before its growl moves off uphill away from her, a disappointed and receding snarl which, like the spattering deluge or murmurs of her elderly deliverer, seems to possess a new dimension; a cathedral of unprecedented resonances ringing in her blood-caked ears. Through this celestial tinnitus her rescuer is speaking now with a fresh force and sharpness that she gradually comes to understand is not addressed to her for all that Scarletwell Street, other than the two of them, is bare.

“See ’im off, Freddy. See ’im all the way off.”

There’s an eyestrain shimmer in the rain and then there’s something that’s the opposite of wind, a howling gust that’s sucked away from them into the Boroughs dark in an indecent hurry, as if late for an appointment.

Derek sweats and skids and swears and can’t get out. The neighborhood’s a labyrinth and he’s like a bull at a gate, his chemically assisted courage burning away with the rubber to leave a black residue of acrid panic. Out of the enclosure with that flapping and horrifically proliferative thing behind him he swings right and into Lower Bath Street, but he doesn’t know the layout of the place and halfway up there’s concrete bollards blocking off the road, the district’s blunt and jutting teeth, where the compulsory left turn past a despairing local pub, the Shoemakers, delivers him once more to Scarletwell Street. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A right, another right and the corroding wall-fixed sign informs him he’s in Upper Cross Street with those ugly tower-blocks looming over him like oviparous doormen. At the end, what’s he to do? He can’t turn uphill how he wants to, he can see more bollards up the top there, but when he looks downhill to his right he realizes his hallucinations are still with him: on the corner there’s a – he can’t even find the words – a monstrous cog of fog rotating in the margin of his eye but if he looks at it dead on, it’s gone. He screeches into Bath Street, trying not to see the grinding phantom gear, and then almost immediately left to Little Cross Street. What is it with all these Cross Streets? What’s the big deal about crosses around here? Careering through a blacked-out warren the black Escort hurtles straight across the roundabout and into Chalk Lane. Veering left around the funny chapel with the doorway halfway up one wall he finds he’s in St. Mary’s Street, with at its end the lights of Horsemarket in joyous conflagration, the illuminated exit to this haunted maze. He’s made it. He’s got out. He’s got away with it. He drives on into glowering taillight fire.

It’s black and white as Freddy sees it, sizzling in a pale fuze over the school playing field, through still machines and empty benches at the factory and across Spring Lane.

“See him off, Freddy. See him all the way off”, that’s what Audrey Vernall had instructed him to do. Orders are orders. The chain of command is simple and straightforward: builders, fiends, saints, Vernalls, deathmongers, then the rough sleepers. Everybody’s got their job and this, at last, is Freddy’s. Frilled with fifty repetitions of the same old coat and leading a great fleet of hats he smears through the deserted business complex that was Cleaver’s Glass once and before that Compton Street, heading by moocher instinct for the ragged area’s northeast corner, the skull pocket near the pinnacle of Grafton Street. That will be where whatever’s going to happen happens, he knows this in his remembered water, in his absent bones. That’s where they immolated the enchantresses and heretics. That’s where they spiked the heads, like settled bills. A fatal gambler’s spray of playing cards, all violent clubs and spades, his centipede of selves pours over what remains of Lower Harding Street and skitters at unnerving speed into the monolithic crossword blank of empty courts and blazing windows on the other side. Saint Stephen’s House, Saint Barnabas’, buildings with lightless landings, several dozen front doors and one roof that stand where whole streets used to be yet still call themselves houses, canonized high-rises in a disenfranchized litany, an air of nominative sanctity to mask the scent of urine. Dirtying the televisual stupor in the ground-floor flats with angry-out-of-nowhere thoughts on homicide, the sepia stampede of Freddy Allen fumes through other people’s Friday nights trailing a cloud of baseless argument, lapsed conversation and stalled DVD in its infuriated wake.

At seven minutes to eleven Mick essays a stealth-turn onto his right side and into a position that seems promisingly soporific, thinking of that final August night nine years ago. The black Mercedes screams through his increasing serotonin levels down the Rue Cambon towards its date with twenty-three past midnight. In the back, no seatbelts on: they’re young, hormonal, unaware that alcohol and their chauffeur’s anti-psychotic medicine are contraindicated. Vampire fireflies in the rearview but the heavy Gallic lids sag and he knows he’s crashing. Touching seventy he slips down Cours la Reine along the right bank of the river, into the Pont de l’Alma underpass.

And even on its seismologic Ring of Fire, Java shivers. In Galur, shrine-ornaments begin to jingle, small and delicate percussions as an overture to cataclysm. Nearly seven thousand people are awakened by the sound with slightly quizzical expressions on their faces for the last time, and the birds don’t know which way to fly in this gray wolf’s tail, just before the dawn. At 7.962˚ South by 110.458˚ East one of the two diastrophic combatants yields but an inch and all five million souls within their sixty mile-wide sumo circle are spontaneously and suddenly at prayer.

Suspended in an aura of averted ending, she finds herself in the kitchen of the woman with magnesium-flare hair. A blessedly warm flannel dabs away coagulated burgundy from her closed eye, at intervals squeezed into a half-full enamel bowl with fugitive pink clouds diffusing in hot water. Perfectly sweet tea is set beside her on a beautifully frayed tablecloth, and at her ear the anciently accented voice continues its account of saints, and corners turned, and the impossibility of death.

He’s flying up Horsemarket and across the Mayorhold into Broad Street, horrors vanishing behind him, face first, washed with gold in the oncoming lights. He buzzes with adrenaline and luck past the Gala Casino on his left; keeps laughing to himself with the exhilaration of it all. Just before Regent Square, and without slowing, he takes the abbreviated turn for Grafton Street.

In chessboard chiaroscuro Freddy streams through empty premises, dragging a pennant smoke of faces over Cromwell Street and Fitzroy Terrace, bursting through the brickwork and into the path of the approaching traffic. Only in the headlight glare does he appreciate that it’s stopped raining.

Mick forgets exactly where his limbs are. In his faltering mind a hypnagogic limo disappears into the tunnel mouth, abruptly lurching to the left of the dual carriageway as Henri Paul loses control.

Measuring 6.2 upon the Richter scale the earthquake ripples across Java.

Through an unglued eye she notes the woman’s kitchen clock: six minutes to eleven.

Something dreadful scuttles over Grafton Street in front of him. He screams into the swerve.

From Freddy’s monochrome perspective the black Escort mounts the curb almost in silence.

Mick imagines the Mercedes as it smacks into the thirteenth pillar under the Pont de l’Alma.

Houses fall, more than a hundred thousand, and some one and a half million homeless stumble out into erased streets wearing bloodied nightclothes, staring, calling people’s names.

In its enamel bowl the water is now carmine, she observes, concentric rings dilating from its epicenter. The old lady’s rung the ambulance and the police; asks if there’s anybody else that should be contacted, and in a voice she doesn’t recognize she soberly recites her mother’s number.

Up onto the pavement and straight at the lamppost in a series of bejeweled saccades, he impacts on the steering column with his breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, his heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Head punching through the windscreen, for an instant he believes that he’s been flung miraculously clear until he notices that he’s now deaf and colorblind.

Idling towards the wreckage of the car, unhurried now, he glances from the driver’s body half emerged across the crumpled bonnet to the duplicate that stands amid a pavement spray of shattered glass and stares at the black bloodstains soaking its white shirtfront in incomprehension. Someone else lurks at the end of Fitzroy Terrace, looking on, who Freddy takes at first to be a mortal passerby until he spots the mismatched eyes.

“It looks like he could use a drink”, says sympathetic Sam O’Day.

Against his twitching eyelids Mick screens a montage, commencing with the buckled vehicle at rest against the tunnel wall, almost immediately lost in a dissolve of swarming flashbulbs which resolves to snapshot images highlighting the events of the next … had it really only been a week? Kensington Palace bleeding flowers and cellophane, New Labor’s rush to spin the shroud, newspaper editors demanding a response from those they’d helped bereave, the whole fast-forward flicker of activity concluding with a still shot of Westminster Abbey, hushed in dull September light.

At the approach to sunrise thousands clog the Solo-Yogya highway, fearing a reprise of the tsunami two years previously and fleeing inland, leaving ruptured homes to opportunist burglars who, in districts high above sea level, nonetheless spread tales of an impending tidal wave that never comes. Almost six thousand dead, six times that many injured and along the highway’s teeming margin in Prambanan a collapsing ancient Hindu temple complex spills its god-encrusted pinnacles into the dust below, cracked deities become unmoving obstacles for the incoming surf of refugees to flow between in curling eddies, with so many in pajamas that it all seems a bewildering mass dream.

As though time isn’t really passing, she sits motionless beside the table while green swirls of paramedic and fluorescent yellow surges of police orbit her in a gaudy palette of concern, bright twists of color artfully embedded in the great glass marble of the moment. Audrey – that’s the woman’s name – Audrey is telling the attending officer that she’s a former patient of St. Crispin’s Hospital up Berry Wood turn, relocated to this halfway house during the care-in-the-community initiative. Marla’s not really listening; not even really Marla anymore. The capable and unafraid perspective from which she’d viewed her backseat ordeal has not receded alongside the threat of imminent annihilation, and whoever she is now it’s somebody considerably older than eighteen. There in the vastness of the tiny kitchen objects are illuminated in church window hues: the muted turquoise label on a tin of beans, her forearms bruised to plush cinema-seat maroon and Audrey’s slippers, pink as sugar-iced flamingos. Every detail, every sound, each thought that passes through her mind is outlined with the glorious blood and gold of martyr-fire. She hears her own voice answering the policewoman’s questions and it’s strong, it isn’t weak. It isn’t ugly.

“No, he had a chubby build, with rosy cheeks and dark hair graying at the sides. I didn’t see his eyes.”

And all the time there’s part of her that’s still there in the juddering Escort; still there on the doorstep looking up at Audrey with her head all filament-glare and combustion, speaking that peculiar name from J.K. Stephen’s doggerel and a dozen spine-lined ripperbacks, as if she’d known it would be recognized. A brandied slur of syllables or an elaborate sneeze, a name that nobody was ever called just lying around empty, waiting for the individual singular enough to put it on: Kaphoozelum. New point of view, resuming black and white.

Wet tarmac glints in an abrupt theater shush, as though some drama were about to start. The boot’s been sprung by the collision – fuck, what will he say to Irene, say to the insurers – and the children’s beach toys and inflatables are scattered in the road as pale and gray as uncooked crabs. Exasperated and confused he tries to kick a punctured armband to the curbside, but he’s either seeing double and he misses or his foot goes through it like it isn’t there. Given his probable concussion he decides the first of these alternatives is the most likely, although this still leaves him with the problem of that mangled body sprawling through the absent windshield. Did he hit somebody? Oh, shit, he’s in trouble now, but then how did they manage to go through the screen feet first, that isn’t possible, and finally he glimpses the glass-freckled ruin of the face but still can’t quite determine where he knows it from. That’s when he notices the two old boys stood watching him from further down the street, both of them wearing hats, which isn’t something that you very often see these days. The nearer of the two comes up to him, asks him if he could use a drink and Derek says yes just like that, grateful for anybody who might let him in on what’s just happened. The old dosser tells him there’s a place nearby, the Jolly Something, where he’ll have a chance to get his bearings now the sat-nav’s fucked. They start to walk together back up towards Regent’s Square and, actually, this could all still turn out okay. Remembering the tramp’s companion he asks “What about your mate?” They both pause and look back. The other man – one eye looks like it’s got a cataract or something – smiles and lifts his hat, at which point Derek understands exactly where he is. He starts to weep. The vagrant near him quietly takes his arm and leads him, unresisting, off into a soot and silver Friday night. New point of view.

As Freddy sees it, once he’s led the sniveling new statistic down Daguerreotype walkways to the Jolly Smokers, that’s him done, his duties and responsibilities discharged. Puzzlingly, at the ghost-pub there are two men made of wood that seem to have arrived from somewhere, one of them embedded face-up in the worm-drilled floorboards while the other one, more corpulent but similarly naked, stands beside the bar with tears of varnish rolling down his grain-whorled cheeks and Mary Jane’s initials gouged into his arm. As Freddy makes excuses and slips out the back door, he looks round and sees the distraught new arrival being introduced to the likewise disconsolate fat manikin by Tommy Mangle-the-Cat, fragments of a brutal smile sliding across his juggled physiognomy. There’s no need to see any more; no need to know the precise nature of the justice that’s administered above the streets. He smolders out into the sodium-stained darkness at the top of Tower Street, where above a fast-disintegrating overcoat of cloud are stars that look the same to dead and living. He feels differently about things now, not least about himself. Some of the stains have gone from his escutcheon, blots evaporated from his copybook. When it came down to it, he’d done the right thing. He’s been better than the man he thought he was, the man who was resigned to an ink-wash eternity, too guilty and impoverished in his character to ever go Upstairs. He’s paid the district back for all its pints of milk, its loaves of bread, its disappointed doorsteps. Much to his surprise he finds his worn-out shoes are leading him down Scarletwell Street to his friend’s house, Audrey’s house there at the bottom with its crook-door, with its Jacob Flight. He’s hurrying now, past the deserted playing fields. He thinks he can remember yellow, thinks he can remember green. Cut to interior, night.

His breath so regular that he’s forgotten it, Mick falters at the brink of dream, that overcast September afternoon nine years ago replaying in an emptied cranial cinema. They’d watched on television, him and Cathy and the lads, and it had all seemed stage-managed and strange, more like a Royal Variety Performance than a funeral beneath its Cool Britannia branding. Needing something three-dimensional and more authentic than a screen could offer they’d all climbed into the car and Cathy drove them out to Weedon Road, where they could watch the cortege on its way to Althorp. All the people that were gathered at the roadside there, as quiet as ghosts, nobody really certain why they’d come except the sense that something old was happening again and that their presence was required. Almost asleep Mick starts to misplace the dividing line between event and memory. No longer horizontal and in bed he’s helping Cathy shepherd Jack and Joe between spectators on the verge, somnambulists with tongues stilled by mythology. Finding a clear spot in the threadbare grass beside the curb it seems to him that these exact same people must have turned up to remove their hats for Boadicea, Eleanor of Castile, Mary, Queen of Scots and any dead queens who have slipped his slipping mind. An engine is approaching in the distance, loud for want of any other sound, even the birds remaining mute for the duration. It glides past them like a ship, imagined bow-wave rippling the asphalt, floral wreathes like lifebelts on the bonnet, bound for its pretended island grave. Having attended to her homecoming the crowd and vision both begin to break up like commemorative crockery, melting into the throng at Alma’s exhibition that’s tomorrow morning. Letting go of everything, Mick sinks into another of his five-and-twenty thousand nights. He fades to black.