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.)

A Host of Angles
Book One: THE BOROUGHS He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” —Elizabeth Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus A HOST OF ANGLES It was the morning of October 7th, 1865. The rain and its accompanying light were foul against the squinty attic window as Ern Vernall woke to his last day of sanity. Downstairs the latest baby wailed and... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Rafters and the Beams
THE RAFTERS AND THE BEAMS Mashed in the Atlantic’s iron-green jaws off Freetown, on his skinny ship out of a Bristol plump from sugar and the sale of Africans, John Newton weeps, makes promises which he will not immediately keep, pleads for amazing grace and on the skyline, lightning-lit, are tumbling granite manes, are snarling caves and heavy paws of avalanche. The Lion Mountains, as the Portuguese adventurer Pedro da Cintra calls the land in 1462: Serra de Leão. Romarong, as it’s known to the local Mende tribesmen. Sierra Leone, the name tawny with dust or rank with ambush, where sweet hymns are pressed from vintages of mortal panic and undying shame. When he gets to be old, Black Charley don’t care for the songs... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

An Asmodeus Flight
AN ASMODEUS FLIGHT The devil couldn’t call to mind the last time he’d enjoyed himself as much as this. This was a great laugh in the greatest sense of the word great: great like a war, a white shark or the Wall of China. Oh, my sweethearts in damnation, this was priceless. There he’d been, just leaning on somebody’s old dream of a balcony and puffing on his favorite pipe. This was the one he’d whittled from the spicy, madness-seasoned spirit of an eighteenth-century French diabolist. He fancied that it made his best tobacco taste of Paris, sexual intercourse and murder, somewhere between meat and licorice. Anyway, there he’d been, loafing around above the Attics of the Breath, close to the crux of Angle-l... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Modern Times
MODERN TIMES Sir Francis Drake leaned up against a wall of printed bills outside the Palace of Varieties and let his oiled bonce settle back against the giant names in black and red. According to his pocket watch there was a good half-hour before he had to draw his face on with burnt cork for the Inebriate. He could afford to kick his boots here on the corner until then and watch the horse-carts and the bicycles and all the pretty girls go by, with possibly another Woodbine for a bit of company. He’d been a six-year-old at school in Lambeth when the other boys called him Sir Francis Drake. That had been at the outset of his mother’s slide to poverty, when he’d been forced to wear a pair of her red stage-tights that had bee... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Rough Sleepers
ROUGH SLEEPERS It had been in one sense forty years since Freddy Allen left the life. One day he might go back to it, there was always that possibility. That door was always open, as it had turned out, but for the moment he was comfortable the way he was. Not happy, but among familiar faces and familiar circumstances in a place that he was used to. Comfortable. Somewhere that you could always get a bite to eat if you knew where to look, where you could sort of have a drink and sort of have some of the other, now and then, although the now and then of it could be a pain. But there was always billiards, up the billiard hall, and there was nothing Freddy loved more than he loved to watch a cracking game of billiards. He could remember how he&r... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)