Afterlude
AFTERLUDE CHAIN OF OFFICE With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamourous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare center’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture. Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mic... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 11 : Go See Now This Cursed Woman
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 26th, 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 worl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 10 : The Jolly Smokers
THE JOLLY SMOKERS Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent, Ground to which he feels no entitlement Nor any purchase on the sullen street; Unpeels his chill gray cheek from chill gray stone Then orients himself in time and space. The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor With on one wall some obsolete decree Meant for the Cypriot community And at the near end an iron-studded door, A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face, Or that of some more academic tome. He struggles up onto one threadba... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 9 : The Rood in the Wall
THE ROOD IN THE WALL It’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder. Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 8 : Cornered
CORNERED to judge, that’s what keeps going round and round with me well I suppose you could say I believe that everyone should have the benefit of what’s the phrase, I worry sometimes when I can’t remember things, benefit of the doubt, there, everyone should have it well not everybody obviously not some of them round here, with them what they should have it’s more doubt of the benefit in my opinion you take her, the one with stripy hair Bath Street St. Peter’s House I think she lives you see her on Crane Hill up from the Super Sausage black girl well not black mixed race, from what I hear she’s on the lot the benefits the crack the game part of the pond-life the Monk’s Pond-life I should say I mean it’s not her fault up to a point and if you’re from a disadvantaged background then statistically it’s like predestination how you end up but I still think and perhaps I’m... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Asbos of Desire
ASBOS OF DESIRE What Marla thought was, it had all gone wrong when the royal family had killed Diana. All of it was bad things what had happened after that. You knew they’d killed her, ’cause there was that letter what she wrote, how she’d thought, like, they’d do it with a car crash. That was proof. Diana was expecting it, what happened to her. Marla wondered if she’d had a whatsit, premonition, a prediction thing that night it happened. That bit what you always see with her and Dodie and the driver coming out the Ritz where it’s like on the hotel cameras and they go through the revolving doors. She must have known in some way, Marla thought, but it was like Diana’s destiny what couldn’t be a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A Cold and Frosty Morning
A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING Alma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work. The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of gray steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fiberglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s b... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Forbidden Worlds
FORBIDDEN WORLDS In Bill’s experience, being both intelligent and working class was usually a recipe for trouble. In the lower orders – lacking academic aspirations – genuine intelligence most often manifested itself as a kind of cunning, and if Bill was honest with himself he’d always been too cunning for his own good. Just look at the frankly awful current circumstance that his latest scheme had led to, cowering behind the portly shade of Tom Hall while a gang of nightmarish and drunken specters tortured a bald, weeping man who seemed to be made out of wood. Hardly an ideal outcome, even for a serial optimist like Bill who generally tried to make the best of things. He could remember the first intimations that had ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Steps of All Saints
THE STEPS OF ALL SAINTS CAST JOHN CLARE HUSBAND WIFE JOHN BUNYAN SAMUEL BECKETT THOMAS BECKET HALF-CASTE WOMAN The three broad front steps and sheltering portico of a late Gothic church with Doric columns left and right, a foggy nighttime. In the background beneath the portico, there are recesses set into the limestone front wall of the building, to either side of its locked doors. From off, the almost inaudible sound of a piano in the far distance, playing “Whispering Grass”. Seated in right-hand recess, JOHN CLARE, wearing dusty-looking early 19th-century rural dress, including a tall wide-awake hat. The sole is hanging off one shoe. He peers around into the surrounding gloom, hopefully. JOHN CLARE: Well, this... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Burning Gold
BURNING GOLD Smolder-bearded, blind with tears of laughter, Roman takes Dean’s hand and drags him from the crackling nursery, little streets on fire behind them. Out in fresh air, grabbing their still-sniggering kiss behind a rolling screen of acrid gray, Roman can smell all of the potential never-to-be-realized cash as it’s cremated, an expensive stench diluted and dispersed in the slum firmament, into the dead-end Saturday, the hard-up afternoon. He’s still got that big painting in his shrunken monkey head: the giants in nightshirts thundering the fuck out of each other with their blazing billiard sticks, a precious gore of ore sprayed molten from the point of bloody impact. For Rome Thompson, snogging with his lover-boy... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)