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.)

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.)

Sleepless Swords
SLEEPLESS SWORDS That blowing-up bloke on the balcony had rattled John. He liked to think that generally he kept an even keel but the two-legged fireball had upset him, there was no denying. For a kickoff, John had never seen before what an exploding person looked like, not in all that frozen detail and not from outside. When John himself had copped his lot over in France he hadn’t even realized it had happened for a good few minutes. He’d just taken it for a near miss and had gone running up the road with all the other lads. He’d noticed that the shell-fire was now muffled and that he was seeing everything in black and white, but just assumed the bang had made his eyes and ears go funny. Only when he’d realized he w... (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.)

The Trees Don't Need to Know
THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW Marjorie Miranda Driscoll was among the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a gray, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed ne... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Blind, but Now I See
BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE The mark of a great man, way Henry figured it, was in the way he’d gone about things while he was still living, and the reputation that he left behind when he was gone. That’s why he weren’t surprised to find out that Bill Cody would be represented to Eternity as a roof-ornament made out of grubby stone that birds had done their business on. When he’d glanced up and seen the face raised from the orange brickwork on the last house in the row, carved on some sort of plaque up near its roof, at first he’d took it for the Lord. There was the long hair and the beard and what he’d thought to be a halo, then he’d seen it was a cowboy hat if you was looking up from underneath the brim, ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)