By Petros Cowley

All that follows is a mysterious story.

As ever, I entirely disavow the creation of this ridiculous text. I apologise as many times as you wish me to and following whatever pattern of notes so that you might enjoy a particular song while I’m at it. In fact, I am writing this accidentally. God knows why I’m wasting my time here, but I’d have to waste it in some other way if I wasn’t. If you don’t like it, you can feel worse for having wasted your time. I’m not writing this. I am a Chinese machine, the unnamable.

Chapter one – Beyond the hard-shoulder

A man in his comfortable jumper was whistling and sitting in his car at night. He was enjoying the tune issuing from somewhere within his grey moustache, enjoying it so very much that, in fact, he began to smile. As he smiled, however, as the things behind his hair then spread and squeezed, the air passing through them weakened in its resonance, and soon the song was ruined. His smile, too, in its turn was shortly gone. How can I smile and also whistle at the same time, he might have wondered, as he lowered a single mound of steel wool over his eyes. He wanted to whistle, and also, to enjoy it.

            This was no big trouble, though, it posed no great obstacles to the temporal orchestration of the world, as the impatient reader would be eager to point out. Even so, the smallest of problems can have a number of solutions. Which solution did this man in his car at night resolve upon? He resolved to continue whistling, even if he couldn’t smile whilst doing it. He would enjoy only so much as he could contain within his mouth. Only, when he pursed his lips, and let his breath whistle through them to frolic in the thatch of his moustache’s eave, and then did the same a few times more, the notes he produced sounded nothing like they had done before. The notes had forgotten their tune. He had forgotten his tune, and what he was producing now sounded awful. What remained for him was to smile, now that what there had been to smile about was gone.

            But he didn’t smile. The ends of his moustache lowered, as did those of his brow. He sank back into his chair and poked at the hills of his belly through his jumper’s front, another one emerging elsewhere when a first was compressed – a quickly frustrating operation that he soon abandoned. What did he do then? That’s what we’d want to know. Well, he gazed through the windscreen at the night sky above. Since his infancy, the noticing of the moon at night had been an unwaning pleasure. He enjoyed noticing it, and calling it ‘moon’. He had enjoyed this for over six decades. But this night, though it was a clear night, and though many little stars of various shades and intensities had likewise gathered across space for the spectacle, it was a new moon. The man held his tongue. He couldn’t see his old friend in the sky.

            Reminiscing a while then about his youth, he was drifting off to sleep, lured by dreams masked as memories, the embrace of a vast and faceless mother. And as often happens, when one falls asleep in the wrong place – in this case, a car – the man was, all of a sudden, already awake. He was, all of a sudden, already smiling, for the wind, filtering that night as it did through the trees outside his car, was whistling to him a song.

            But then the knocking came again. That hadn’t been part of a dream. No. There was a face stooping down with its hands against the passenger window, peering through the glass at him.

            He was saying things, this man out there. He was saying things and gesturing with his hands.

            It was only now that the man inside remembered what exactly he was supposed to be doing here. Tonight, he was no longer a child. He was driving a taxi.

            Rolling down the window, he invited the man into his taxi and apologised for his lapse in attention – and for the display of his belly, upon first noticing it himself. The passenger sat himself rigidly in the back, and it was after a couple dozen or so seconds that this passenger, with an evident timidity, turned from where he was looking out of the window and caught the driver’s eye in its escape from the rear-view mirror. Finally, coughing to a greater or lesser extent, the driver turned the key and along the car rumbled with them both through the emptied streets of a provincial town by night.

            ‘The phone’, said the driver, a duration or so later, to his reticent passenger. ‘It is ringing’, he stated.

            The passenger looked beside himself at the seat where a phone lay face down, spasmodically enflowered in the insipid petals of its light. It moved. It was moving itself towards him over the fabric of the seat, in an electric succession. They were proceeded towards him, the machine beneath them growling and hissing.

            Wincing, the passenger plunged his hands into his pockets and turned away to watch the houses ducking away out of the headlights’ steady relief. 

            Darkness invaded the back of the car again. The phone had finished ringing just before it had reached the passenger, and, hearing it no longer, the passenger could turn to look at it again, and push it back across the seat, push it a little further away this time.

            The driver now tried to have himself another curious glance through the rear-view mirror at this passenger of his. Over the course of several seconds, the darkness back there welled into the shape of a head. A pair of little stars then glittered from within at the driver.

            He dropped his brow and roundly inhaled as he returned his attention to the unchanging puddle of road which the car was pursuing. The passenger, in his turn, looked aside again to watch the houses go by.

            The next time that the passenger caught the driver looking at him, the driver stammered to talk.

            ‘I, uhh, I want to say, uhh…’ But then the phone began to ring again. Both men frowned and looked back outside as this went on.

            ‘You wanted to say something?’ asked the passenger once that had finished.

            ‘What, ehh, what do you mean?’ replied the driver, turning onto a roundabout.

            ‘You said that you wanted to say something before.’

            ‘No, umm… No, you said that I want to say something. That you… I…’

            ‘No I didn’t. Before, before that,’ he gestured at his side, ‘you said you wanted to say- Oh, never mind.’ The passenger smiled out of the window. ‘Is that a very heavy tree over there in the middle?’ The driver fixed him with a perplexed look.

            ‘Why would you ask me that?’

            ‘How many times have we been around this roundabout?’

            The driver was cast into a deep cogitation for a moment, then brightened, gave his passenger a wink and told him that he knew a ‘very shortcut’. And with that, the turned off onto what was now the eleventh exit of this roundabout, and left its heavy tree behind. ‘But don’t be worried,’ the driver said, ‘you know where we’re going.’

            The passenger wondered a moment whether this had in fact been a question.

            ‘Where?’

            But when the driver opened his mouth, the phone began to ring again, and this time the passenger’s frustration was beyond containment. The passenger, clasped one hand over his eyes, pressing another into his body, groaning as his features came back into the light.

            ‘Ah! This is-’ the passenger had begun, though not finishing, for when he felt the car jog beneath him, tossing him up into his seatbelt’s resistance, and when he felt himself to be plummeting, and his arms had been tossed down at his sides by the sudden motion for him to see what on earth could possibly be going on, he discovered that the driver, in an even greater frustration, had torn them off the road, casting them down a slope at the roadside. Braced, neither said a word. The car levelled out as it entered the field with all its organs spluttering wildly, and in the mirror, the driver could be seen transfixed as though upon a target ahead. But ahead of the car there was nothing. Ahead of the car was only the darkness from which not a tree, not a flower, emerged into the headlights. Even the stars had vanished, there seemed to be a fog. The phone had finished ringing.

            Where the headlights had failed, now did the sun. To think that this island was once a great forest: as you might notice when travelling down one of its various motorways, behind the few trees arranged along the hard-shoulder, beyond them, you might see that the majority of this country today is just a great lot of hard mud. It was through one of those regions that the men were still travelling at around six. Day was breaking now, and the clouds, caught in their nocturnal activity by the dawn, were blushing now. They peeled back over the horizons and the sky was left clear. Every ten minutes or so, a shape would rise from these horizons, and the men would watch it as it sank back into the earth, waiting then for the next.  

            ‘What are you doing?’ asked the passenger, either awake or asleep. ‘What are you trying to whistle?’

            The driver gave up on his pursuit of the elusive melody, exhaling in circles for seconds across the windscreen.

            ‘What are you doing now?’ repeated the passenger.

            ‘It’s gone.’

            ‘Where are we? Was I asleep? What’s gone?’ To this, the driver tried to whistle again, but choked himself and coughed severally. He gave a look to the passenger as if to say, ‘you see?’ And when the driver made to smile, he immediately grimaced and looked back ahead at the plane.

            ‘I think,’ the passenger went on, ‘I think we need to open the windows.’ The driver gave nothing by way of a response, and so the passenger opened the windows, and the men together then coughed and spluttered and went blind.

            The dust only settled long after the window was shut again, now filling the men’s pockets and whitening their hair. When they could see each other once more in the mirror, both grunted in a shared disapproval of the dust.

            Checking both ways, the brought the car to a halt. He exited the vehicle, stood himself a little to its side as strange shapes fashioned themselves from the wrinkles of his forehead under the heat. Even at such a short distance from the car, his body took on a miraginous quality. Cupping a hand over his frown then, exposing his shirt’s darkened armpit, he glared ahead at the deluded region where the mud and the sky were as indistinguishable as the sky and the star.

            He got back inside, drove a few meters further, then slammed the brakes. He sat still a while, making as if to say something, then took off again.

            ‘Are you awake?’ The passenger was in the shade when he awoke to these words. ‘Are you asleep?’ the driver repeated.

            ‘Yes.’  Both men tried to giggle. The driver quickly came up with an idea.

            ‘I was thinking and that,’ he said, ‘and I was thinking that, maybe, you could drive the car for a bit.’ He let slip a grin. ‘Would you like that?’

            ‘Umm…’ the passenger began, wrestling his body back into an upright sitting position, blinking as he rose. ‘Drive the car? Err… But can’t we stay longer in the shade? Oh, it’s too hot out there. I’m sweating like water in the sea. Let’s stay here. Where have we got to go?’ The passenger lingered on his own question a moment; perhaps there something in it. ‘Well, are we going?’ He seemed shaken by something. ‘Where-’ He fell silent as a charred head reared into the back of the car at him. The dust had clumped together, darkened as it had mixed with the sweat on the driver’s face.

            The driver mouthed the letter W, but his voice would not come. His lips remained in the letter’s shape, as his eyes descended upon them either side of his nose, as his cheeks swelled beneath their grime, and a warm finger of his breath tickled the passenger by the tip of his nose, picked his nose, and a steaming hand of it planted itself across his face. The driver’s eyes bulged, his body jolted, and he began coughing, coughing loudly, coughing directly into the passenger’s face.

            When this was over, the passenger removed himself from the vehicle.

            The driver expression at first crestfallen, became one of anxious bewilderment as the passenger stopped a little way off, his back to the car, and was making to take something from his trousers. The passenger was urinating.

            ‘Good idea’, remarked the driver as the passenger returned.

            ‘Well, shall we set off then?’ the passenger asked. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

            ‘But… Would you… No. I would like it if you…’

            ‘What?’

            ‘You know what.’

            ‘No. I don’t know what.’

            ‘If you…’ the driver lowered his voice. ‘If you drove the car for a bit. That’s what I was asking before. I wasn’t sure if you heard.’

            ‘Drove the car?’

            ‘Yes.’

            ‘But isn’t that, you know, against the rules or something?’

            ‘Ehh, just for a bit. You might like it.’

            ‘Umm… But don’t…’ Something changed in the passenger’s demeanour. With a start, he continued: ‘Fine. If that’s what it takes to get a move on.’

            Out of the car, exchanging places, the men’s eyes briefly met over the roof.

            The passenger was sat behind the wheel and the driver had not returned inside. He was out there knocking on one of the back windows and having a great laugh to himself about it a while, turning to the passenger for some species of approval. When he finally came back in, he’d laughed so much that quite promptly he fell asleep. But then he giggled again. He would giggle often. Maybe he simply found the idea of himself asleep to be an amusing one.

            Well, they were off again. A very big tree it had been that they’d parked under, but it wasn’t so big for all that, and so quite soon enough the men were once again driving along across the hard mud and sweating, the passenger twitching and exhaling, and the driver in the back resuming his giggling every now and again, not quite managing in all serious to pretend to be asleep. The passenger would sometimes even catch an eye peeking out from the mirror, but it would close at once with a deep and exaggerated hum. And then, the phone started ringing again. And then, the phone stopped ringing again. It had been a precious thing to be enwombed by the surfaces of that car by night, but now, in the heat of the planes beyond the hard-shoulder, mother, with all her four wheels, was burning. On and on they went, drifting in and out of caution of the scorching of their seatbelt buckles. Soon, the one in the back was already not giggling. He was awake again, just as he had been, his face bowing under the weight of his brow.

            The car stopped. The bodies lurched.

            ‘I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all,’ the passenger said after a moment. ‘Can you just get back in the front and drive us there?’

            ‘Drive us… Umm… Oh… But, why can’t you drive? I-’

            ‘I don’t want to drive!’ The driver looked up slowly and saw directed at him in the mirror not a look, not a glare, but eyes, simply eyes, in the dumb constraint of their substance. ‘I’m not driving this stupid car! You drive it! I don’t want to be here anymore! Let’s go!’ The passenger got out, slamming the door, and got into the back beside the driver. He sat there rigid, silently enraged by every slight animation of his body. A book hiding in its words.

            ‘We can stay back here, and maybe someone else will come along to drive us,’ the driver dared to joke, suggesting a smile, but, the passenger remaining mute, unyielding, the driver frowned and got out of the car himself now. For a while he hesitated before re-entering. When he was sat down again, he adjusted the mirror so that it caught the passenger behind him, looked into the mirror until the passenger was forced to move his head away, forced to look out of the window at his side, in a face restricted to a grimacing observance of, far away, another tree sat upon another mound upon the same old horizon.

            The mood had certainly darkened in the car. For twenty odd minutes, they were silent.

            ‘Lots of trees now. Maybe we’re… maybe something here,’ the driver said. The passenger didn’t respond. Five minutes later, the driver remarked the presence of a river.

            ‘Look,’ the passenger resignedly began, wriggling back into his body.

            ‘What?’

            ‘I just didn’t feel comfortable driving. I just didn’t want to break the rules.’ A moment passed.

            ‘What rules? How would anybody know?’ The passenger almost, but ultimately refused, to respond. ‘I think we both know very well why you felt uncomfortable,’ the driver muttered. The passenger turned to look at the driver but couldn’t see him in the mirror from where he was now sat; again, the passenger didn’t say anything. ‘I said,’ the driver redoubled, ‘I think we both know-’

            ‘Alright! I heard you. I heard you the first time. Would you like to shout it?’

            The driver, as he’d done before, adjusted the mirror to make the passenger look away. But this time he took no pleasure from it.

            ‘We’re in a great big mess here’, the driver said eventually. ‘A great big stinking mess.’

            ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

            ‘This is not something we can just ignore. It’s got to be addressed. We’ve got to address it now.’

            ‘Just- Come on! We can address it later. When we get there.’

            ‘What later?’ The phone began to ring again. ‘Ah, those great fucking rules of yours! Would you turn that thing off! You realise they won’t know if you silence your phone? Can’t you-’

            ‘Look out!’

            Alas, the car had found its way into a ditch. The phone stopped ringing again. The passenger broke the phone, biting it then thrashing it against the cupholder. The car alarm went off.

            Chapter Two – In the flat on top of the stairs, Ralph

            ‘Good morning, Ralph’ said Sam, though Ralph, ever reluctant to talk so early in the day, didn’t deem it necessary to respond in any meaningful way. Ralph moved a little in Sam’s direction, watched him a while until he was no longer of any immediate interest, and then got promptly back to whatever it was he doing. None of this offended Sam. To the contrary, Sam was very much amused; he was a man easily charmed by others’ idiosyncrasies.

            ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ Sam asked, grinning to himself as he filled the kettle at the sink. ‘No, I suppose you haven’t been able to. But you must be very hungry.’ Sam balled up his face and grunted, snatching the best of his dressing gown out of the sink and tying it back around his waist once he’d placed the kettle on its mount to boil. Taking something from beside the fridge and slipping it into his pocket, he crossed the room to talk with Ralph.

            ‘What’s bothering you this morning?’ Sam giggled. ‘Ever so grumpy… Hmm. I know what you want.’ Suddenly, with a great enthusiasm, he snapped up a little container from his pocket to proffer it to Ralph. Ralph seemed perplexed by the man’s behaviour and turned away frowning.

            A woman’s voice came from the hall:

            ‘Would you stop treating that fish like a dog. It’s unhealthy.’ Maria put an unconvincing veil of disapproval over her amusement as she approached her boyfriend to give him a kiss.

            ‘Don’t be so hard on Ralph,’ Sam told her. ‘He’s been working very hard lately.’

            ‘Oh, shush.’

            Though she would always deny it, Sam would often find her sat there on a chair she’d drawn up before Ralph’s tank to enjoy the fascinating spectacle of him swimming. Both of them were teachers; the swimming of Ralph often appeared to her a more fascinating spectacle than those dreadful essays she’d have to mark. It was the half-term, so they’d both luxuriated yet again a lie-in this morning, just as they’d done the previous six mornings.

            ‘Ralph,’ Maria muttered to herself as she went over to the cupboard to take out a mug. She asked Sam if he wanted any coffee.

            ‘No, no,’ Sam replied. ‘I put the kettle on for Ralph.’

            Both laughed. Maria took out a second mug. Sam, after feeding Ralph, sat himself down on the rubbish sofa and picked up the remote.

            ‘Oh, turn them off,’ snapped Maria. ‘Fucking idiots. I hate them.’ The news was reporting on some new speech or other delivered by Alexander Townsend, the leader of the Real People’s Party. ‘What is he talking about! Pah! They’re voice is being supressed. As if we hear any others.’

            ‘Don’t be so naïve. You’ve evidentially been brainwashed by the liberal-Marxist, theocratic-Anarchist elites. That’s why I’m voting for the RPP next election. Wooooo! America!’

            ‘Don’t even joke about it. How can people be so stupid? No, turn it off. Change the channel.’

            Sam did, extending his laughter rather than be serious. On the next channel were some middle-aged woman cooking Salmon.

            ‘I don’t think Ralph will enjoy this one very much.’

            On the channel after that were some other middle-aged women cooking something else. Maria brought over the coffee.

            ‘Do you want any omelette?’ she asked. ‘I’m going to put some on now.’

            ‘Yeah, thanks.’ Sam stood up to help her, but she insisted that she would make them herself.

            After ten minutes or so of exhilaration watching the cooking programme, Sam was hearing videos playing on Maria’s phone behind him. He leaned back over the head of the sofa, giggling a moment before speaking – she hadn’t noticed him, turned aside with her hip against the counter and her head down in her phone.

            ‘So neither have you begun to make the omelette, but as I sit here enduring the wit of this cooking programme, you’re actually watching videos on your phone of the exact thing you made me change the channel to get rid of.’ He got up again to make them himself, but Maria, with the same masked amusement that she’d entered the kitchen with, insisted that he go sit back down, not allowing him to remain in the kitchen area, pretending that she’d been busy making the omelette all along. So far, she’d just taken the eggs out of the fridge. ‘What sort of favour is this?’ Sam joked once sat back down, changing back to the news.

            ‘I think I might put in the potato bits’ Maria suggested. Sam assented to this idea.

            There was a building amongst the trees ahead, a moss-laden cobblestone structure, pressed into the uneven earth at an apparent slant. The earth was knotted with roots, moist under the gloom of the canopy. The leaves and the branches up overhead were packed so densely together that in the middle of this cloudless day, against the light in the structure’s window, the scarecrow appeared entirely black to the approaching passenger. In fact, as the passenger determined once near enough, it wasn’t a scarecrow at all. No discernible efforts had been made to form this thing into a resemblance of a man; a bundle of cobweb-ridden fabric at the head of a stick.

            Wishing to remain polite, the passenger went towards the front of the building rather than going up to the window to peer inside.

            Around the corner, the full extent of the building was revealed. What the passenger had seen on his approach was only the furthest wall of a side-structure, what must have been a hall, extending for a good ten meters into the trees and joining onto what seemed to be a chapel, a chapel which somehow had been entirely obscured until the passenger had allowed his eyes to be guided to it by this extension.

            He made his way between the trunks upon which the coloured light of the chapel’s windows rested in little fragments like so many exotic insects. At each step, the sole of his shoe rolled upon a surfacing root.

            The entrance, itself unremarkable, was announced by a column at its either side of more of those scare-things. Passing through at their side would have been awkward, so he made his way round to the head of their formation to approach the church between the columns. Most of the scare-things were like the one he’d seen at the side of the building: a thing of fabric on a stick. Then one of them might really have looked a lot like a person. But, looking back at one of the more amorphous scare-things, convincing himself that in fact this one was not so inhuman after all, he would look back at the originally humanoid scare-thing and it would look even more alien than the other. At last there came a perfect human.

            ‘Good morning’, the priest said inquisitively, keeping one leg behind the large wooden door as he adjusted his combover.

            ‘We- I- need help’, the passenger said in turn.

            ‘Well, this is just the place to have come to.’ The priest seemed to find this quip of his more amusing than he ought to have. The passenger refrained a moment from speaking further as he lingered on this detail.

            ‘We drove- I was driven into a ditch. I had no say in the matter. The car is stuck there with the driver.’

            The priest stuck his head back inside and whispered something. Back out it came with another. A second priest had appeared, also about sixty years old.

            ‘It’s not the sort of thing that you come to ask God directly to help about, really,’ the second one said, the first turning away to snigger. ‘He reserves his powers of miracle for more significant circumstances, generally. But fortunately for you, he created insurance companies. Now have you tried calling your insurance company?’

            ‘My phone’s broken, and the driver’s phone is out of charge. I was wondering if I could use your phone.’ The priests continued smiling at him as though he were a child demonstrating his acting talents to his parents’ guests. ‘Well, can I use your phone?’

            Both priests raised their eyebrows suddenly and turned to look at each other. They both seemed somehow embarrassed, and the one with a combover told the passenger that they didn’t have a phone.

            ‘What do you mean? How can you not even have a mobile?’

            Raising a finger, straightening his posture, the hairier priest replied:

            ‘“Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”’ The other priest laughed and adjusted his combover once again. The passenger, apparently offended, made to say something further, but the hairy priest cut him off: ‘Let us have a look.’ Both priests were coming out of the doorway now. ‘We’ll see what we can do, I suppose.’ To the passenger’s amazement, as the two priests stepped out of the doorway, they revealed that a third, diminutive priest, had been stood behind the both. As though part of some joke, this little one was wearing a mitre on his head – which of course made it all the more amazing that the passenger had only just noticed him. He tipped his mitre to the passenger as he passed, then taking out a packet of cigarettes from within his robe.

            ‘Well, are you going to show us where this ditch is, then?’ asked the balding priest, pressing down at his combover as breeze came filtering between the trees. The little one lit his cigarette and began to puff.

            As the four of them walked, none of them really felt the need to talk. The passenger had told them it was only a short walk, so that had probably taken away any pressure of needing to. The passenger would keep finding that the priests had fallen someway behind his lead and so slow himself in order to allow them to catch up with him. Only the priests would then slow down themselves, and then the passenger once more in turn, until they were barely moving, and the passenger had to turn around and gesture to them to walk. Soon enough, they were out of the woods. The air thinned, the sun beat down upon their brows.

            ‘That’s the ditch,’ said the passenger, pointing ahead to a place a few dozen meters ahead where there appeared to be a large hole in the earth.

            ‘Hmm,’ went one of the priests.

            Now, when they came to the edge of this ditch and peered in, they saw, where the car had been, only the roof of the car and the very top of the windows, the bleary forms of their four heads barely reflected in the metal, a rippling crown of sunlight just above these reflections.

            The passenger, appropriately distressed, and upon looking around and seeing no driver, called down to the car. There wasn’t a response. He looked over at the priests: the little one was lighting a second cigarette and the two larger ones were sharing nervous looks with each other. It was then that a certain faint sound made it into the passenger’s ear. It was very muffled, so it took him a moment to locate it, to identify it, but it revealed itself to be someone whistling. The passenger gasped and slid down the bank of the ditch to get to the sinking vehicle.

            ‘“The depths have covered them”’, the hairy priest muttered to the others up there. ‘“They sank into the bottom like a stone.”’ And they all blushed around their grins.

            ‘“It was planted in a good soil by many waters”’, the balding priest returned, ‘“that it might bring forth branches”.’ This time they all chuckled.

            Meanwhile, down in the ditch, his trousers steeped now in wet mud, the passenger was banging on the roof of the car, pleading with the driver to open the window and try to burrow his way out. The driver, whom he could now see through what remained above ground of the window, wasn’t acknowledging him, persevering with his whistling. The tune was of a Turkish, or Balkan quality, in an unusual scale, expressing something unfathomable to the diatonic ear. When the passenger looked up into the sunlight, the priests shrank back timidly.

            ‘What are we going to do?’ the passenger asked, now drenched in mud, once he’d clambered back up above ground to the priests. ‘What are we going to do?’ At first, none of them said anything, looking down at their feet and pivoting slightly. The balding one, smirking, gave the hairy one a nudge. At first the hairy one seemed reluctant, turning away and putting a hand over his face, but with the encouragement of the balding one, too, he turned back to the passenger and said:

            ‘“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”.’ The little one choked on the smoke he was inhaling and the other two turned away blushing.

            ‘What sort of priests are you!’ the passenger exclaimed. ‘Do you think this is a joke? What in God’s name are you laughing about?’

            The little one plodded forth in his mitre, took the cigarette from his mouth, and with a froggish voice, said:

            ‘“We were filled with laughter, and we sang for joy. And the other nations said, ‘What amazing things the Lord has done for them.’” The little one gave a bow here.

            The passenger watched astounded as the other two of the priests erupted into laughter and fell stumbling away.

            ‘Useless, heartless,’ and other such adjectives the passenger muttered to himself as he made to storm off. ‘I’m off to look for help!’ The balding priest hurried and caught up to him, taking him by the shoulder.

            ‘Okay, we’re sorry, we’re really very sorry. We didn’t mean to make light of your, umm, delicate situation. Now would you look into your heart and see if you can-’ he turned aside to chuckle- ‘find for us some, uhh, forgiveness?’

            ‘What are you talking about!’ The passenger broke away again, but once more the balding priest caught up with him.

            ‘Wait! Wait! Let us say a prayer for your friend.’ The passenger made no sign of response, continuing to walk. The balding priest walked at his side, coming out with a prayer: ‘Lord God, our Father in heaven of infinite love and compassion…’ etc. But this was interrupted by an unusual sound. Like someone swallowing a football. The passenger and priest halted, turned around. Over there, the little one and the hairy one were staring back. They shuffled over to have a look into the ditch. The little one threw down his cigarette and made a run for the tree line, the hairy one then doing the same. The passenger, not yet having processed what had happened, turned back at the sound of steps to see the third priest running. The laughter faded away into the forest. The dwarf’s mitre lay muddied by the rim of the ditch.

            ‘But how can people be so stupid?’

            ‘Apparently,’ Sam replied, ‘according to Aldous Huxley, whose a better source than Mr Townsend here, at least, the scientists found that about twenty percent of people are very easy to hypnotise.’

            ‘Aldous Huxley? What are you talking about? I just don’t get it. Why can’t they just be shown how little in fact is being spent on these “illegal immigrants” (asylum seekers) and accept the fact that they’re just being stupid. Why is that horrible man even allowed a platform to speak at all? Enough of this free speech rubbish! They’re just racists. Their policies are so moronic, there’s no other possible explanation.’

            ‘Alright, alright. Calm down.’

            ‘Don’t alright me! These bastards are going to sell our country to fucking Americans. “The Judaeo-Christians values of the west.” What a load of shit! Ah… What are we going to do? What are we going to do…’

            ‘Uhhh. How about make an omelette?’

            Maria looked up, tucking in her lips guiltily.

            ‘I’m making it, I’m making it,’ she laughed. ‘I promise.’

            Sam peered back over the sofa to discover that she’d only just made a first slice into the potato. He laughed too and turned back to the television.

            ‘I wouldn’t worry so much. This isn’t America. We’re not that stupid. At least most of us aren’t. It’s only a tiny minority of people who think they believe in that stuff. When do you ever come across these people in real life?’

            ‘Oh?’ Maria became serious again, coming around in front of the sofa wielding a butter knife. She lowered her voice, gesturing down with her eyes. ‘What about him down there?’

            ‘Ahh, he’s alright. You can’t expect any ethical paragon of a man like that.’

            ‘Shhh! Keep your voice down. What the fuck is a paragon.’ She giggled, coming right up to Sam and pointing the butter knife in his face. ‘Why are you trying to impress me all of a sudden?’

            He became flustered.

            ‘You go and put that knife away,’ he stammered. ‘Your frightening poor Ralph.’

            Sam stood up and they both went over to have a look at Ralph. He swam forth to greet them, but they didn’t hold his interest for very long, so he swam away again, gulping down the last little flakes of the fish-food as they descended from the water-surface above. The couple remained their laughing at Ralph a little while, insulting his intelligence. But Ralph didn’t care. Ralph was a fish.

            ‘Now would you go and make that omelette!’

            Maria ran back to the kitchen area laughing.

            ‘I’m doing it, I’m doing it!’

            ‘No you’re not! Right, whether you like it or not, I’m coming over there to help you.’ Sam switched off the television then went over to his girlfriend. ‘Let’s put some music on. It’s quiet without the real people standing up for our rights.’

            ‘I’ll do it.’

            ‘Anything but make the breakfast.’

            She gave him a dark look and moved away from the chopping board to connect her phone to the speaker.

It was an old flat they were in, an old house their flat was in, and the window frame beside Samuel as he chopped the potato bore that old age just like a person, the once white paint, where it hadn’t yet flaked from the rotting skeleton underneath, wrinkled and dappled with liver-spots. Some condensation from the kettle whose home that corner was remained upon the glass. He wiped it away with his sleeve and looked down upon the street. It had been sunny for a while when he’d woken up, not a cloud above, sunny as mornings so often and inexplicably are without any dependence on the season or the weather later that afternoon, but at some point that had since passed and beyond anybody’s perception, the clouds had returned, or rather, as it appeared then to Samuel, the sky had simply left again, been erased, leaving behind it a uniform sheet of grey should the gods wish to draw in some new weather. Below that great nothing, beneath a billboard, on the opposite pavement, an elderly woman supported herself on a trolley, only her hair, of the same nothingness above her, showed outside of her flabby coat. She moved along wearily, one step at a time, like a rolling triangle. Suddenly, she was overtaken by a woman in a burqa who wielded along a pram, orbited by several of her children, the two that were girls, both around six or seven, in hijabs. A black man and a Sikh coming the other way in conversation with each other crossed their path and then that of the old triangle, a local drunkard hobbling around the corner a way down the street just then. Suddenly they were all gone, and a bewildered Chinese family stood there alone, seeming lost, the mother fending off a child who was tugging at her sleeve as she tried to speak to the father, who in turn was fixating at what must have been a map on his phone. The mother gave in to the child at last and let them push the suitcase back and forth for a while. Finally, thrusting the phone back into his pocket, the father shrugged and raised his arms at his sides, setting off in one direction or the other, the rest of them following. Now the pavement was empty. On the billboard above was a big logo, a meaningless sentence, and between them an attractive mixed race woman smiling at a tree with some useless flashing commodity in her hand, an advert for a company worth who knew how many trillions, the gist of which was that by shopping with them, apparently, the environment would be harmed slightly less than by shopping with them previously – not that there were any alternatives, not that it meant much. A blip came from the speaker. An acoustic guitar began to play, a disembodied hum. Sam turned back to look at Maria. She looked up at him from her phone, pulled back a strand of her hair from her face and smiled at him, walking away then into another room.

            Ribbons of butterflies, royal purples and vermilions streaked across their wings, moths, drab and dumb, streamed through the forest when he made the choice to notice them. Cobwebs flashed in the beating peripheries of his otherwise darkening sight, spiders and prey alike dangling therefrom. He keeled over at last, panting, planting his hands in the moisture of the soil, and he recovered by the vision of an earwig and woodlouse crossing paths amidst the lime fuzz of a long-fallen log. Once his faculties had regained their proper function, the insects were already long gone. Looking up, he’d come to the opening between the scare-things, between which, ahead, the priests stood awaiting him. The passenger rose to his feet and took steps towards the priests. They moved aside, first the balding one, adjusting his combover, then the hairy one, and third the dwarf, who received his mitre from the passenger with a bow, gracefully returning it to his head after brushing off the dirt. The door had been left ajar, and a fragrant admixture of light and smoke beckoned the delirious passenger into the church.

            ‘“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”’, the little one croaked at the passenger’s back, though this time none of the priests were giggling. The passenger had come to the door. He turned back to see the priests had followed him, but here they stopped. Whatever was in there was for his eyes alone. Rooting themselves firmly in the soil, the little one, tossing aside a cigarette butt gestured to the passenger to enter. And so he did.

            Not ten seconds had passed when the passenger stumbled back outside. His lips were moving, struggling. His eyes flared. He was pointing at his mouth. He couldn’t speak.

            ‘“The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple,”’ said the dwarf, and priests and passenger alike grew joyous and shared in a single laughter.

            ‘I understand now,’ the passenger said. ‘Now I understand.’ He embraced the priests in turn and set off on his way for the city, receiving a bottle of water and a chocolate bar from one of the priests to sustain him on the long journey ahead. It would be over an hour by foot until he made it into London.

Chapter three – Emerging from under his bed

Now that I’ve written all that, it’s time we came up with a plot. Characters. I keep introducing them. What am I supposed to do with them? Of the four characters whose appearance has yet been described for us in any level of detail, one is a hairy nameless man who has already sunk into a ditch and died, and the other three I suppose were hallucinations of another character as yet without any appearance. There was a man just then looking into my window from the street, as though it was perfectly normal to be looking into someone’s house – and, well, a window is just as much outside as it is inside, so whose the idiot here after all? I felt as though I was being watched, and I turned around, and what do you know? I was being watched. We held eyes a few seconds, then he gave me nod and waddled along, disappearing then behind my hedge. I was unable to see from where I’m sat if he came back out at the other end, so to be safe I’ve drawn my curtains – perhaps he’ll forget I’m here. Meanwhile, I’ve just turned on my lamp.

            The apricot over the doorway seeps out over the surfaces, those vertical, flat, of significant curvature and otherwise. It is a slow light, and it is a heavy light. It gathers in rings up there in the red cup of the lampshade, and these rings of light descend around the bulb between other rings of shadow, this light and shadow transmuting into a fine, golden dust spurting down from the orifice – the sort of thing a child or an idiot is imagining to themselves when they say they like science.

            At the other end of the hall and under the stairs, an unacknowledged trove of whatever not quite interesting, dust-ridden rubbish, conglutinated together with the apricot’s juice into a one amorphous substance: envelopes, old magazines, menus that once arrived through the letterbox for restaurants now years out of business, a triangular box for an elsewhere triangular machine, broken chairs, table-legs, the lower halves of table-legs, children’s toys, an adults’ red thing, different colours, a child’s bicycle, a rock, various fossilised beasts, the bones of Adam, the very first apple core. The clutter is under the stairs, in a place that isn’t really, because that is where it is, belonging to nobody and the past.

            It isn’t silent in the hall, there are plenty of noises. Muffled little beings – were you there they mostly would hesitate to enter into your ears, loitering about a while along your balconies of cartilage, getting all mixed up in strange and incoherent apricot conversations with each other and in moments of clumsiness putting their hands into each other’s pockets, apologising in car-horns, which is all you would be certain of hearing after the event, and jumping back out of your ear at last, slipping away again under the front door.

            An amorphous substance. A lightbulb had sprouted from its middle, and the first of the flies had found its way into orbit. Yes, this was the thing that needed looking at. He was awake and looking up at the thing that really needed looking at. This was something brown on the ceiling. It had been growing for a while. The growing-thing had developed a new feature that morning – it had grown a yellow leg. Blinking up at the fly as it went round and around the exposed lightbulb, he sent out an arm at his side to finger about upon the bedside table until it pressed the part of his phone screen which would turn off the alarm. It couldn’t be found – his cheeks puffed up into his eyes and his breathing intensified. He grunted and made to take the phone in his hand, only, in attempting to do so, he knocked it off onto the floor where it continued crying out from under his bed.

            The man’s head vanished beneath the covers whose surface then bulged and twisted in a slow and sweaty vortex. At the side of the bed, the man’s head and arms emerged from those covers, swinging down to get at the device. He couldn’t reach it. He could see it, illuminating the darkness under his bed. But he couldn’t reach it. And the more he strained and thrashed to get at it, the greater became the pressure within his skull.

            His body, naked but for his tight pants, slipped out from the covers and slipped back under the bed. He’d turned off the phone. Only his bottom and legs exposed, he remained there under the bed. He remained there like that for over a minute, until his hand came out and pulled down the duvet to join him, another minute later one of the pillows. Once his body was still again, the room was silent but for the aimless song of the now two flies circling the lightbulb.

            Were you down there in the hall, with your back to the clutter, gazing up in mute fascination at the apricot, what was it that you’d suddenly have been smelling when a honk goes off in your mind? Damp. The apricot smelt of damp. With a sharp exhale your nostrils would pinch themselves shut, and you might turn, your eyes flickering about for another spectacle. They’d find the foot of the staircase, climb the steps one by one, until they reached a shadowy wall, where the staircase made a right and disappeared behind a slope of the ceiling dripping in orange. Nobody would appear up there on the staircase. At this time, were you there in the hall, you would be standing there alone.

            The alarm was ringing again beneath his head. The covers jolted, there came a thud, and his body fell still again a moment. The alarm stopped and the four flies could be heard zipping around up there beneath the growing thing. Another stain appeared on the bare mattress – overnight, every night, that sheet would manage to unfasten itself and clump together into a hard ball beneath his ribcage, waking him up, which was when he’d throw it away over the end of his bed and fall asleep.

            A silhouette emerged against the warmth of the curtains. In its hand was the phone, and with a series of stalkish movements, the silhouette traversed a hilly landscape of laundry and food-packaging, making its way to the door. Out went the phone, and the door was shut again. He returned to his bed and heaved up the sheets and pillow from beneath it, letting them fall over his body, the pillow on top of his head rather than the other way around. A fifth fly had joined the circle, and their song was growing louder.

            He woke up a third time, hearing the phone ringing again in the hall. He spat away the pillow to get a better listen, his face contracting into a central point as he focused on whatever thought was trying to burrow its way into his brain.

            ‘Ringing,’ he muttered, his face prolapsing back out across his head as he turned away, ‘not alarm. Phone ringing.’ With three jumps he’d reached the door, returning into the bedroom with the phone against his head. ‘Sorry,’ he’d murmur. ‘Yes,’ he’d say, lying back down in bed. ‘No. Sorry. I promise I was.’ He placed the phone beside him on the mattress, having turned it to speaker. ‘Lie all you want,’ it said, ‘just stop doing it in bed. Actually, no. This time, apologise sincerely.’ He was watching the flies, his mouth hanging open. ‘Constantine! I want to hear you apologise.’ His head jolted and he sprang into sycophancy, sitting now at the edge of the bed.

            ‘Yes, umm. I’m grateful for the opportunities I have, and I want to make the most of them. I will be working hard on improving my performance, focusing on my organisation skills. I’ve certainly slipped up here, and, yes, all I can say is that I’m…’ He turned aside and was foully smitten by a vision of his face in the grubby little bedside mirror – he looked now like something you might see in a tree-trunk and point out to whoever might be with you, telling them that it looks like a face – at least he wanted it to look like one. ‘What I want to say is that I’m sorry. This can’t happen again.’ After some moments, he realised that this face before him, furling up into a grimace, was not the one whose voice he was waiting to hear. He looked down at the phone. He’d already been hung up on. Baring his lips, his fist thumped down onto the duvet and sent the phone into the air. A tear dropped from his eye as his head and pillow met again, and with a long exhale, his head still sinking, he coated that suffering pillow in his gas. The mirror was turned away.

            It wasn’t sunny anymore. The flies had gone quiet. They were peeling off from the circle, installing themselves on the walls. Soon they were all on the walls, and the circle was only there in Constantine’s imagination.

            Pulling back the curtains, he caught the last patch of blue just as an enormous cloud slid into place in front of it, then drawing the curtains shut again before anybody came walking through the garden to see his near-naked body.

            ‘I don’t know why I keep this next to where I sleep’, he stated, taking the mirror from his bedside and manoeuvring through the floor-piles towards the wardrobe. It took a great labour to open up its doors, but once they were open, he dug through the clothes at the bottom of the wardrobe to make a grave for his mirror, and there he laid it, piling back the clothes on top of it then standing up and pressing shut the doors. He stood staring at the wardrobe a moment, as though making sure the mirror wasn’t going to try escaping and returning itself to his bedside. In fact, there was something else in there which he wanted. He opened the wardrobe again and took it, putting a shirt over the mirror which had resurfaced.

            Placing the coveted item aside, he peeled down his tight pants, bending low, far below, until his head was almost upon the carpet, and as he raised one leg out its hole he toppled forward, rolling on his scalp. His bare hips spanked against the wall, propping him up on the backs of his shoulders and skull. There, he was presented then with a view. A subnormous appendage; a baby bird, poking its beak from its nest. And this baby bird, it wanted something from him. He dwelt a little bit upon the proposition as he lay there upside down and contorted. A thunderous shame to annihilate the present one. The baby bird longed to see the lightning. But in the end, some foggy notion or such concerning something or other, maybe, covered up that storm cloud and took him back onto his feet, however that was managed, and turned himself back around to face the chair which functioned as his actual wardrobe. He dressed. He went to the bathroom with the item he’d taken.

            Though he was certain he’d put it into the wardrobe, the horrible thing was there again above the bathroom sink. The leather jacket he’d tried once again to wear – he was wearing it. Constantine tried in all sorts of ways, making all sorts of movements to try and get his jacket back, but he just wasn’t being allowed to wear it. One time he’d made it out of the house in it, but he had appeared in a car window and frightened him back inside. That was the furthest he’d managed to go in his leather jacket before he’d stopped him. Relenting, he went back to the bedroom where he’d left the keys. In there he found the contents of his wardrobe to have spilled open, and he was stretched out on the floor waiting for himself. He rabidly buried himself again, punched closed the wardrobe, and sprinted back out and into the bathroom.

            ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.’ He seized the jacket from himself and draped it over the mirror. Where the ticking of any clock had escaped Constantine’s attention, his heart pounded to remind him he had to leave the flat immediately. He was gone, at last.

            Were you then in the hall, once the apricot had spent its juices and the air had turned beige, you would be in for a mild surprise. The door beside the foot of the stairs flushed open, frightening all the little envelopes and one corner of the long rug so much that they all leapt up into the air making little terrified sounds. The envelopes settled against the far wall, and the quivering corner of the rug remained folded.

            The door was shut, but not locked. There was nothing in there worth stealing and he couldn’t be arsed fishing the keys out of his pockets.

            There came then footsteps at the top of the stairs. Constantine coughed, perhaps because a straightforward ‘I am here’ would’ve raised unpleasant questions, and the elaboration of ‘I am here to cough’ wasn’t much good either. But the cough he’d produced, as voluntarily as it might have been, was succeeded by a tail of about a dozen further not quite so voluntary and rapidly intensifying coughs.

            A man was already there. Some sort of idiot in a dressing gown, as he saw in the instants when his eyes flashed open, was stood there blabbering away at him as he coughed. Constantine found him to be one of those people with lips that are too wet and too pink to interact with. He gave the man an extra few coughs once it was voluntary again.

            –‘Huh-huh-huh!’ The man had an inward laugh, another deformity. ‘Did you catch all I was telling you there?’ Of course, Constantine had not. ‘Huh-huh! Well, it makes it hard to follow when someone’s going from one story to another like that!’ Sam took himself half-way back up the stairs, stopping there to turn back and await Constantine’s approval. Constantine, whilst Sam’s head had been turned, had taken a few steps back towards the front door, from where, looking up into the gloom, he could barely see Samuel anymore. But Samuel could see him.

            ‘What?’ Constantine said, looking aside. ‘I was coughing.’

            ‘Huh! So that’s why I didn’t understand what you were saying!’

            Constantine was staring down at the face of some blonde woman lying by the foot of the stairs. She was too beautiful to be attractive, and she never blinked. Good Look! was the name of this magazine, in bold, pink font, with eyes in the o’s and an old date in the top corner.

            ‘Look, uhh, I’d better be heading off,’ Constantine told her.

            ‘Sam!’, the woman’s voice, Maria’s voice, had called from upstairs. Samuel sounded like he’d turned away and Constantine made for the door. As he shut it behind himself, through the crack, he glimpsed her scowling at him from the distant darkness.

            Having left the house, it started to rain.

Chapter Four- With a stranger and a purple blazer and not such a nostalgic radiator

            The trick is getting old now. I’ll do it one more time, even so. It’s a pathetic superstition I have: that all things ought to justify their medium, for me to have a way of answering why something is that which it is. Why do I feel more comfortable around plastic flowers? Not that I like them much. Well, why are they that? They’re plastic to have made it easier for those who made them to have had them look like flowers. There. Nice and simple. But a real flower? Why is it that? Why that, specifically? I can no better answer that than turn into a flower, my questions my petals bursting out from my head, I’m sending out smells to giant insects, or, I don’t know what they are, I can neither understand nor perceive them, but they fly over to mate with my scalp and fly off again with aromatic fragments of me. A woman who seemed disgusted by me once made a vague remark about the brilliance of an author I won’t name, about him being better than you’d imagine. So what? Then someone else who had less reason to despise me made a similar comment at a separate occasion. At another time, and in fact by no effort of my own, I came into the possession of the first part of a certain book of this author. It, all on its own, came into my possession, I should say. I put it on my shelf and I didn’t read it. But I wasn’t let off that easily. I was being forced to read it whether I liked it or not. More people, more and more convincingly, began to say things to me about this author – I hadn’t asked for any of this – so that, one day, with nothing else left to do, I gave in, took the thing down from my shelf and set about testing the first few pages. And at first, I will agree, it was better than I’d imagined. Much lighter a read than I’d imagined, and, as they like to say, the characters felt real, you barely needed to put in any work to convince yourself of what was going on, a story in the way that everything is a story. However, more and more often, the narrative would slip off into longer and longer excursuses about the plot’s flora. I would not tolerate it. My mind would shut off every two sentences to defend itself from all those flowers. I had to abandon the book only some two-hundred pages in. I had a thought earlier, while I was in the corner, and this in a connection I haven’t allowed to be made: I ought to add another dimension this Constantine of ours, and I think I shall make him a nostalgic man. Or not. No, I won’t. He can neither be nor not be. How will I do that? Let this be reminder that I could’ve very easily written something else. I’ve opened the curtains again.

            Merely, she stood there. The sun descends to the mountains, and there she is, standing in the way, like the idiots who take selfies of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa and for whose sake nobody can ever see the Mona Lisa, even though nobody would ever need to had that lot not all wanted to be there. The mountains and the sunset were here themselves as the Mona Lisa is Paris, and this woman was stood there in the way. What on earth was she supposed to contribute by standing there? That’s why she smiles, to let us know she’s not really there.

            Constantine, still holding his phone, looked up at his surroundings.

            Where was he? He looked around and decided that he’d made it onto the high-street. On the other side, as it always did at this time of the day, the pound-shop was functioning as a portal between this life and the afterlife – and by the looks on the elderly faces flooding out of it, the not very pleasant afterlife. Only, because of the rain, these dozens of geriatrics exiting the building would take one step out onto the pavement, scowl vaguely at a point in space, and then return either fully inside or underneath the cover of the entrance. About ten of them were stood there in raincoats, with their trolleys and bags-for-life, shivering in the breeze, as Constantine saw them then. He decided that he felt a compassion for them, that they would be grateful for his compassion, that he was sorry for “the way that the government was treating them, after all they’d done for their country”.

            He dropped his phone; someone coming the other way had bumped into him. The man appeared to be some sort of builder. He crouched down to pick up Constantine’s phone, checking the screen. But when he continued to stare at the picture on it, Constantine able to see for himself that the screen was fine, Constantine snatched back the phone and stuffed it into his pocket. They both stood upright and looked at each other. This other man, despite his rugged clothing, had a meek and simple face, his hair unkempt, a face that at first expressed worry, and then, seeing that Constantine wasn’t doing anything, what appeared to be pride at everything having turned out alright in the end for the pair of them, smiling as though he were luxuriating in praise. He was evidently not the brightest of men. Constantine moved along, patting his side to make sure he still had his phone in there. A few steps ahead, still thinking about the strangeness of the man he’d just bumped into, he turned his head aside to the building he was walking past. Three women of ages about twenty- to thirty-five, were sat at a desk staring blankly up at him through the glass-front of one of the businesses. Instinctively, and with an instant regret, he jolted himself back out of their view. He pressed his back to a brick column partitioning the shopfronts. He ground his hand against the crumbling moisture. Up the road, he saw the strange man animatedly narrating something to a confused looking stranger.

            He would “play it cool”. Though he felt their stares burning into the side of his head – and coincidentally or otherwise, as they sometimes mysteriously do, his earlobe had become very hot here – he took a few steps forward back into their view. Seeing as he’d forgotten how to walk, he stopped, and turned to look at the women again. They were all frowning at him now. He acted as though he was confused, pointing at himself to them, and gesturing a what. They continued frowning at him. To the point now that they looked disgusted, and he continued acting confused, until he resolved to take his act inside. The front was all glass, so the women had been able to keep their eyes entirely on him as he’d entered.

            Presenting himself to them, he found that he’d nothing to say. They meanwhile continued to look disgusted and confused by his arrival.

            ‘I’ve got a, umm…’ he managed to say, leaving a pause then in which none of the women spoke. ‘I’ll just, umm…’ He walked towards a door beyond their desk, walking as though he were being controlled by an old man with a television remote, and as they began whispering to each other, he pulled it open and went inside, shutting it along with his eyes. A few steps forward, he stopped in the middle of the room. He opened his eyes.

            Where was he now? There were no windows and only one shadow in the room, under a desk at the far end, a shadow that didn’t quite reach the floor. An unusually great number of strip-lights had been fitted between the ceiling panels, seven or so, even though the room was no more than twenty square-meters. And for some reason there were smaller lights rising out from parts of the skirting boards. The desks, their lamps needlessly on, too, were both stacked with clutter, each item of which, without shadow, appeared unique and superimposed, the phenomenal essences of pens and keyboards and whatnot. There was a sheet of paper on the wall, scribbled over in red, and there was a knock behind him at the door. In came a man of about his age who, apart from a weak chin, wasn’t entirely ugly at all.

            ‘Umm…’ the man said, trying to supress a genetic mischief in his voice, ‘what the fuck are you doing exactly?’ He’d entered the room fully now, and before the door had shut behind him, one of the women stuck in her giggling head.

            Constantine couldn’t quite figure out how to respond to this. The man shooed away the woman and when the door was shut, she was heard continuing to laugh, now with another, outside.

            ‘What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?’ the man asked now.

            ‘Umm…’

            ‘What is your name?’

            Constantine, whose eyes had drifted over to bury themselves in a plug socket, had himself look up again at the man and had himself frown.

            ‘My name is Constantine.’

            ‘So you can answer a question.’ The man walked across the room and sat down at his desk. ‘Why are you just standing there? … Constantine!’

            ‘What?’ asked Constantine, remembering then to sit down. The man spun around at his desk with a scheming look, dropping his pretence of seriousness.

            ‘Are you just going to keep on like this forever? What do you expect to gain by acting like this, hmm? Everybody knows. I mean, come on. You just came in who knows how late as if you’ve never even walked past this building. Hah! Your blushing. Awww!’

            ‘Fuck off, Christian.’ Constantine couldn’t help but pass a giggle. He turned his head fully at last to look at Christian.

            ‘Awww. She’s learnt to swear, too. How precious!’

            ‘For fuck’s sake, Christian.’

            ‘Ahhh…’ Christian pulled a lever beneath his chair to let himself recline as he then span side to side, hands behind his head, continuing to tease his colleague.

            Constantine soon had enough, and, putting on some airs, told Christian that he was ‘an honest worker who’s just trying to do what’s best for the company.’ He concluded, turning away again, with a nod to his black computer screen.

            ‘Pah! As if any of us here are honest.’

            ‘I am not afraid,’ Constantine began, retaining the same airs between giggles, ‘to put my self-interest aside – sometimes – in order to further the… the interests of this company as a whole. Such things as… have no, umm… Ech, you know what I mean. Yes. So you can shut up.’

            ‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ Christian stood up and made a dash for the door. ‘We’ll see about that.’

            ‘She’s not even there,’ Constantine stated coolly. Even so, he quickly rearranged his things to make it seem that he was already busy working. Alas for poor Constantine, though he hadn’t seen her when he’d entered, and neither had she him, off in another room, she was in fact there.

            ‘What?’ she was asking as the door opened. ‘What is it?’

            ‘Constantine has something to ask you.’ Christian scurried away, his eyes bulging and his lips stuffed into his mouth.

            ‘Oh! Stop being a fucking child!’ She turned around to look at Constantine now. Even the least remarkable of faces can become terrifying in their proper circumstances. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you don’t actually have anything to tell me.’ She gulped. Was she nervous, too? Not definitely. That sign wasn’t enough to tell. He looked away. He looked back. She had been looking at his desk. ‘What are you doing there?’ She might have been grinning here. He hoped that she was grinning here.

            ‘Oh just, umm,’ he coughed, his voice not having come out right, ‘just getting on with some work. Christian’s just being an idiot. Ignore him. He’s very stupid.’

            She really was smiling now.

            ‘Hmm… I see. Well then. If that’s all. Good seeing you again. Lovely chat this has been.’ She turned away to open the door.

            ‘Lots of, umm…’ he dared to speak, though only able to with an inappropriately grave expression. She stopped and turned back to look at him. ‘Lots of old people hanging about the pound shop this morning.’

            After a moment of simply staring at him, her lips contracted and she let out a snort, and then came another, and then many, and then she hurried out of the room.

            ‘Keep up the hard work you’re doing there,’ she seemed to joke on the way out.

            Perplexed, Constantine turned around to look at his desk, and on the top sheet of those he had carelessly set there in front himself before she’d entered, was a large drawing of a phallus. He clasped his head and laughed pathetically. He sat up with a start.

            ‘I see it went well, then,’ said Christian, skipping back over to his chair.

            ‘She thinks I’m a fucking spastic. That’s how it went. What’s wrong with me? Can’t you just…’ He became a little more serious, turning around to Christian. ‘Can’t you just mind your own business for once?’

            ‘Ooohh!’

            ‘Just look at what I had on my desk. I-’ He was cut off. The door opened. In she came again.

            ‘Uhh, Constantine. What exactly is this?’ She held out her phone to him. After a moment, he took his eyes out of hers and had a look down at what was on the screen. Under one of her posts from several years ago, a picture of her up in the mountains on holiday somewhere, were a dozen or so comments by Constantine that had been made in the last few minutes. For example: ‘mmmm’, or ‘mmmmmmmm’. In fact, as he was looking at the phone, another comment appeared by him: ‘mmmn’. She and Christian fell into fits of laughter, but Constantine looked like he’d come back from the dead simply to stop his phone from making these comments, his face suddenly white, suddenly red, suddenly both, as he fumbled about in his pocket for the device. Both she and Christian went out of the room laughing to show the others what had happened, but Constantine remained at his desk, rubbing at the armrests of his chair with an untold pressure as he listened to the laughter out there. His head had been moving. The laughter had already stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on the sheet up on the wall, part of which compared how many sales he and Christian had secured so far that month. Christian, two properties, and he, so far, had none. He could hardly wait the half hour he had until he was due to do a showing, where he would be free to be whom he wished to be in the presence of strangers. He wanted to be that person again. His hands were sore now, he took them off the armrests and examined his right palm, watching the colour fade away.

            The rain would stop and start on the way to the property, perfecting its aim on him. Already, there was nobody left around. No cars driving past, nobody else on the pavements; nobody wanted to be there. As he trundled up the hill, a little stream was glugging through the gutter beside him. A bubble floated on the water a moment. It came pursued by a silver wrapper. The bubble burst, pierced by the rain, and the wrapper’s tail began to flutter in the twisting of the current.

            Constantine took a step back and made to fish the wrapper out of the gutter with the toe of his shoe. The stream diverted around him, the wrapper slipped by, and he took another couple of steps back downhill to try again, this time planting his foot down sideways and trapping the piece of rubbish between him and the current.

            The faded branding on its outside was perceptible only with an effort he didn’t choose to make. As he turned it through his fingers, listening to it crackle, the polygons between its creases flashed on and off in no particular arrangement. Specks of the wet dirt encrusted on the foil had transferred to the skin of his fingers, and those that remained on the foil as the rain tapped upon it would dislodge individually, dancing before they vanished. He pressed the wrapper in by the sides to have it open up.

            Somebody was approaching from the alleyway.

            ‘It’s you again.’

            The scruffy-haired man in his muddied clothes tilted his head like an overbred dog.

            ‘Again?’ the man asked.

            ‘I mean- Sorry, I’ve forgotten how to behave again. You know, you bumped into someone earlier? Sorry, ignore me.’

            ‘Oh, yes. And I suppose you must be him.’ The man’s head straightened. He grinned simply.  ‘I hope your phone isn’t still upset with me. But what’s that you’ve got there now?’

            Constantine frowned at the overly eager stranger.

            ‘What does it look like? A piece of rubbish.’

            Despite now walking again, Constantine found that the distance between him and the stranger wasn’t increasing at all, but in fact decreasing. The stranger was then walking beside him, but noticing it wasn’t raining any longer, Constantine became amicable enough again to continue engaging with the man:

            ‘Look, even more!’ He picked up a discarded plastic bottle this time.

            ‘And what do you want that one for?’

            ‘I’m tired of people treating my country like a rubbish bin. Don’t you think?’ The stranger picked up some other piece of litter and handed it over to Constantine. ‘You know what I mean.’ They turned the corner to see, a little way ahead on the other side of the street, a group of hooded teenagers of variously African and middle eastern descent, all stood about vaping beside their bicycles. Constantine, turning to the stranger, forced a look of repulsion. ‘That’s what needs clearing from our streets.’

            ‘Here you go!’ said the passenger, taking up another piece of rubbish and again handing it over to Constantine.

            ‘That’s what they do. Why bother assimilating?’ Constantine elaborated vaguely in this vein, stopping and starting as his enthusiasm varied, the stranger nodding along and trying to take in all he was hearing. This continued until they were coming up directly opposite the teenagers; the estate agent paused his speech to scowl across at them, though making sure to look away again before they could notice. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m tired of it all, you know?’

‘Oh, yes.’

            The stranger made a series of confused facial expressions at the space in front of him when Constantine was looking away again.

            ‘You’re a good guy,’ Constantine resumed. ‘You do know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean. I know someone must know what I mean. I hope so. We’ve got to start looking out for ourselves again.’ After going on a bit more like this, he said: ‘We need to fight back against the demons trying eradicate our culture.’

            ‘Who are the demons?’

            Constantine gave the stranger a dark smile. The stranger turned away sheepishly as his new friend began to explain. These next statements were made by Constantine not entirely avowedly, however, as dark as his look may have been, because, in fact, he didn’t really believe the things he was saying now – he only believed them insofar as they were articulable, insofar as he enjoyed saying them, and having someone listen to him, even if that someone be – as he was certain of, though not allowing himself to accept this fact – an idiot. He did like to be heard. He didn’t care if he was talking rubbish – he was talking rubbish in a similar way to that when we talk with someone whom we really very much love, in the way that the word ‘love’ can never truly express anything at all. He liked it and he was smiling and he felt a warmth in all his poetic and metaphorical parts.

            Constantine finished talking just as they arrived outside the front garden. He pushed open the gate and went in. ‘Well, then. A great chat as always. I’ll put all this into the bin inside. And remember, just notice the patterns, my friend.’

            The stranger said thank you, scrunching up his mess of hair as he peered in over the gate at where Constantine was opening up one of the bins now with his elbow. ‘A great chat as always. See you soon.’

            The estate agent, as he was transferring the bits of rubbish into the bin, turned around to reveal a frown now lowering over his face. ‘How come I had to carry it all? See you soon?‘ But the stranger was already gone.

            ‘What an odd man,’ he said to himself, and, having himself cheer up again, went over to the front door. As he was taking out the key, however, in the corner of his eye he noticed that the teenagers were now opposite the house, and with that he was frowning once again. ‘Disgusting voices.’

            In he went, some minutes early.

            The wet light dribbled in between the wooden slats of the blinds as a drain gurgled just outside. Beneath the window was something familiar. The radiator was encased in a white box fronted with lattice-openings. The same dreary light between the blinds had found its way down into this box, too, somehow, trailing back out through the latticework and bringing with it fragments of the cold, white radiator inside. The casing was just like the one his Grandmother – who died when he was eleven – used to have in her front room. His vision slowed within a coffee stain on the box’s roof. Ten years earlier, say, when he would have been still a teenager, had he have then come across such a lost object, he would have at once fallen out of the world with a longing, a desperation to return with it to a forgotten place, the forgotten vivacity of the infant’s world. But now, all he could manage to want was to be able to summon once more that very longing. He wanted to want as he once had. He felt nothing now. He stared at the brown stain on the stupid white box, and felt nothing whatsoever.

            What he saw when he pulled up the blinds in a futile attempt to brighten the room was very strange indeed. There were the teenagers across the street still, in their ugly grey tracksuits, and beside them, talking to them, was the stranger. They all looked very friendly with each other. Constantine did feel hurt, remembering seeing the stranger talking to that other person earlier that morning after he’d bumped into him.

            ‘Does he just talk to everyone he comes across, then? Why was I talking to this idiot for so long?’

            A woman in a purple blazer with a big, brown, frizzy mound of hair on her head just then crossed the road to avoid that group, frowning back at them as she crossed. She entered through the front gate and almost screamed.

            Waving his hands to signal an apology, Constantine scrambled away from the window and went to open the front door. She was laughing.

            ‘Quite the fright you gave me there.’

            ‘Sorry. I was distracted by the lovely weather. You’re Rebecca?’

            ‘Yes. Here for the viewing.’

            ‘Constantine. A pleasure.’

            They shook hands and went inside.

            ‘Strange group out there,’ Rebecca said, wiping her shoes on the mat. ‘That man,’ she screwed up her face, ‘covered in mud, for whatever reason, and those, ahem, respectable young boys.’

            ‘Yes. But don’t worry. I’m sure they’re not going to be a permanent fixture.’

            ‘I hope not. Ff! The rubbish they were saying.’

            They proceeded into the front room.

            ‘So,’ began Constantine, firmly in character now. ‘Here, of course, is the front room. Plenty of space. Your friends will be very jealous of a front room like this one, you know.’ She looked back at him from the window, forcing a smile. ‘Oh? You don’t think so? I’m certainly jealous of it.’

            ‘No, no. It’s perfect. It really is. It’s just-’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Eh. Those morons across the street. Talking about “the Jews”. Yes, okay, there are some naughty Jews. There are some really naughty Jews, in fact. But what have I done? Why should I have to walk down the street and feel threatened just because idiots are stupid. I can’t help who I am.’

            Constantine looked up again.

            ‘It’s terrible to think,’ he said, ‘umm, how closed-minded people can be. Yes. Terrible. Hmm.’

            ‘You know what?’ She had turned from pathetic to brave. ‘I feel I should go out there and confront them.’ She was watching them through the window again; Constantine, at the other end of the room, pressed his hand against the wall and gulped.

            ‘It’s best not to argue with idiots. Haha! I like how you put it before! What was it? Because idiots are stupid. It’s clever because it’s stupid. Like them! Come on, just ignore them. We can shut the blinds and they’ll disappear. Or, we can go and look at the kitchen, and then-’

            ‘No.’ She turned around, and, though almost a shadow against the pale radiance of the window behind her, pulsated with a confidence. ‘I’m going to go out there and I’ll- I’ll tell them what’s what. I’ll- I’ll fucking show them!’ She yanked at her purple lapels and made to leave the room.

            Constantine pursued her to the front door, nervously ejaculating alternatives for her reconsideration all the way there. But she was already resolved upon confronting the group outside. She ignored Constantine’s desperate solicitations entirely and stormed out through the front door. The stranger, seeing them appear, waved across the street at him with a senseless joy and a senseless smile.

            She stopped at this, to scrutinise a region over her shoulder between her and the house the doorway of which Constantine remained cowering in. ‘See,’ he went on, ‘what a load of idiots. Come on, just ignore them. Come on, come back inside. Please?’ She stomped out into the street, the group across the street all watching her approach now in a silent fascination. As he shut the door, the stranger gave him one last look, now of confusion and betrayal, like some sort of abandoned infant.

            Though he couldn’t hear what was said out there, having shut the door and having dropped down onto the rug whose tassels he now ground between his fingers, very soon he heard several pairs of footsteps approaching, and then an almighty pounding came resounded through the door. He squeezed shut his eyes and pressed down his head between his knees.

            ‘I’m not buying anything from you!’ Rebecca was shouting, the teenagers giggling in the background. ‘Fine! Stay in there you fucking coward! Rot!’ She continued yelling out insults as she left, soon followed away by the giggling of the teenagers, the muddy stranger presumedly somewhere among them. Constantine didn’t move from his curled-up position until he was confident several minutes of silence had elapsed. When he opened his eyes at last, he saw between his thigh and his torso the intermingling tassels still rolling in his animate fingers, the ends of the tassels, the ends of his other fingers, wiggling about blithely in the hole made by his thumb and his index finger. He released the tassels. They tapped against the floor. ‘What sort of fucking idiot is that man? What sort of fucking idiot am I?’

Chapter Five – With Tiananmen Square

            That afternoon, it was with his job and a sense of relief that the estate left work for the day. As it so turned out, this Rebecca woman had already earnt herself a difficult reputation in the boss’ eyes – at a previous viewing, one which the boss himself had had to do for whatever reason, she, and this all now being a paraphrase of the boss’ words to Constantine, decided for no good reason that he, the boss, was patronising her, that she decided to have a go at him, still for no good reason, and that it was only in an attempt to apologise for something he hadn’t actually done that he was suggesting to her this other property, the one that Constantine had shown her around, at such a massively discounted price. In fact, when he brought Constantine into his office, he didn’t even bother to listen to the entirety of Constantine’s tale about ‘some rogue idiot’ before reassuring him that there wasn’t a need to explain, that the woman was a vile individual and an unashamed liar.

            ‘Better her than me,’ he laughed to himself as he stepped out onto the high-street. ‘Better her than me.’

            It was the early evening and the sun was lowering into a bed of gilded clouds above the pound-shop over the road. A final elderly body staggered out onto the pavement as a uniformed Indian man wearing a headset began to bring down the turquoise shutters for the night.

            Constantine took out his phone and had a scroll of the various apps and websites as he walked towards home. He looked for a bit at his ‘alternative news sources’, at the day’s reports on the wickedness of the ways in which certain groups were responding to the recent assassination, until the climax of his rage at the radical left had dispersed, at which point he moved over to social media, which bombarded him with much the same until he made the choice to seek out something a little more hardcore, something really depraved.

            Not that there turned out to be any need, however, for when he looked up a moment, she was walking straight towards him. But he had looked back down again. Out of fear? Instinct? Self-respect? Whichever it was, he certainly couldn’t look back up. He kept his head down in his phone – closing the app, of course – as he continued ahead towards the danger.

            ‘Hello?’

            ‘Oh! Umm. Hello! What a… Well not a coincidence… I…’

            ‘Just thought I’d remind you that I exist.’ He looked away in dread, this as opposed to flickering his eyes in her vague direction between blinks. But he realised that she was laughing, that she had turned around to walk now at his side.

            ‘So, you’re an anti-Semite now, are you?’ she went on, giggling still as they walked. He caught a glimpse of her face, then went back to looking down, occasionally at her shoes. He certainly wasn’t giggling.

            ‘I didn’t do anything.’

            ‘You sound guilty to me. Police! Police! I found the Nazi!’

            ‘I didn’t do anything, it was-’

            ‘Alright, I was just joking.’

            They were silent now. When she made the slightest movement to suggest the possibility of the approach of a goodbye, only then, and instantly, could Constantine speak again.

            ‘It was this man,’ he began, in a laboured staccato. ‘This rogue idiot.’

            ‘A rogue idiot?’ she giggled.

            ‘It was the same man who bumped into me this morning and made me drop my phone, the same phone which then, uhh, when I had to grab it off him and put it into my pocket before, erm, I could turn it off, started sending you those stupid comments.’

            ‘Mmm, yes,I think I do remember those comments, in fact. What a coincidence that your phone also opened that particular post to make those comments. Remarkable, really.’

            ‘My phone always does this when I leave it on in my pocket. One time-’

            ‘Mmm, I’m sure it does.’

            ‘I’m not lying. Really, I’m not. One time I left it on in my pocket and I found it editing a picture in the photo library from three years ago. It had zoomed into my face and set the saturation up to eighty-six percent.’

            ‘Mmm, how remarkable. But tell me, what about the man, then? Your rogue idiot. Who was he?’

            ‘How should I know?’

            ‘Sounds suspicious.’

            ‘I was- I bumped into him again. He was covered in mud. And-’

            ‘Are you sure he exists? You’ve got a bit of a habit getting confused about whether people exist or not.’

            ‘But I- I-’

            ‘What is it? … Constantine.’ Constantine had stopped walking, stopped moving. Only his body was definitely there now, frozen, its eyes trapped upon something ahead. ‘Constantine?’

            ‘It’s him!’

            After a sudden convulsion, he spat off after a man a little way ahead who was just then coming out of the supermarket with a sandwich, talking on his phone as he ate. Constantine slowed before reaching him – the man was walking away – so that he could listen to the conversation being had.

            The sentences produced by the man, between chews, were highly mysterious and technical, involving the words ‘Hegelian master-slave dialectic’, ‘paralogism’, ‘phenomena’, and ‘a fortiori’. He was just taking another bite of his sandwich, seemingly satisfied with what he’d just said to whoever it was on the phone.

            ‘What are you trying to do to me!’ The man turned around to look at Constantine with a bemused vacancy, still chewing.

            ‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said on his phone, ‘I think you might be right.’ He put the phone into his pocket. ‘Excuse me?’

            ‘I heard you on the phone then! I know what you were doing! Pah! Nice clean shirt you’ve found there, mate.’

            ‘I do worry that you’re confusing me with someone else, my dear.’ The man turned away again to continue walking, taking another bite of his sandwich. But Constantine stepped out in front of him.

            ‘Uh-uh!’ To this the man sighed.

            ‘Who exactly is it that you think I am? And, if I am that person, what is it you now want from me, exactly?’ The man folded shut his sandwich box and held it at his side, smirking now at the estate agent, his mouth no longer full.

            ‘I- I know it’s you!’

            ‘Go on, what do you want? Tell me.’ The man’s smirk became a grin.

            ‘I-’ Constantine stood there trembling, merely trembling, as he watched the man walk away and continue eating his sandwich. When Constantine turned around, she was still there. She was only a couple of meters away. She had heard it all. And she certainly wasn’t giggling now.

            ‘You’d- You’d really go that far?’ That was all she said, her voice breaking ever so slightly, and with that, she turned her back and left him there. The strangers who had also gathered around for the spectacle Constantine noticed only now as they also disbanded, whispering things to each other at the edges of the re-expanding universe.

            He looked out into the road. A bus drove by, and, from one of its lower-deck windows, only about a meter from where he, Constantine, stood, someone winked at him. A man winked at him; the man winked at him.

            Hearing the crashing of his steps, she had stopped to turn and watch him pummelling towards her, her face returning from horrified to disgusted when he flew directly past her after the bus, and then, someway on, collapsed in exhaustion.

            She crossed the road.

            Despite the tortuous route by which he had returned and turned and returned, it was still light when he entered his building.

            Sam was on the stairs, leaning over the bannister, with his head now cocked towards the door.  

            ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, smiling and standing himself upright. The other smiled back, then lowered his head as he proceeded to his door. ‘You alright?’

            Constantine looked up at Sam, who was still smiling, though his smile barely impressed itself into the shadow which cut across above his chest, the bronze of the fanlight only reaching so high. That smile dissolved, and his face was blue and featureless.

            ‘No, in fact. Quite the opposite, tonight.’

            ‘Really happy could be the opposite of alright,’ Sam tried to joke. But he stopped smiling again, feeling it an improper thing to do alone. ‘But I suppose you don’t feel that way either. Why, what could be so terrible on this pretty evening?’

            ‘I- do you ever-’ Constantine began, unable to continue, unable even to continue looking at Sam, when Sam sat down on a step and the intent on his face appeared in the light. ‘No, never mind.’

            This had seemed to deter Sam; as Constantine turned his doorknob, he sensed the other standing up again.

            ‘If, umm,’ Sam said as Constantine was half-way into his flat. ‘If you’d like to talk about it, you’re welcome to come upstairs.’

            Constantine paused a moment before emerging fully back out into the hall.

            ‘I think I want to sleep. Thanks. But I think all I want now is to sleep.’

            ‘Well, if you change your mind and want to talk, your perfectly welcome to come upstairs. Problems often seem a lot more serious than they really are when you refuse to talk about them. In any case, Maria’s in Birmingham visiting friends and won’t be back until the middle of the night, so I’m rather bored this evening.

            ‘Look, I’ll think about it. Thanks.’

            Falling into his bed, fully dressed – Constantine, rather than undressing before bed, would remove his clothes throughout the night only as, item-by-item, they inconvenienced him – it only took some two minutes of staring up at the growing thing still horribly detailed in the persisting daylight for him to change his mind and clamber back out of his flat.

            When Samuel welcomed him at the door, he shuffled in like a diffident little girl and stood there waiting for instructions, glancing back and forth at the fish-tank at his side with an increasing concern.    

            ‘It can’t be that uninviting,’ joked Samuel, moving the sofa’s loose armrest in and out of its place. ‘Please, sit down, if you dare. See, much better to sit on than to look at. Do you want something to drink? I’ve a few beers in the fridge.’

            ‘Just one, please.’

            Sam laughed as he opened the fridge; Constantine, who, where he sat, had his back to Sam, made an effort not to smile as Sam came over with the beers, though by the time Sam arrived, Constantine was already far from smiling, staring over at the fish-tank again. Sam sat down on a wooden chair facing a side of the coffee table perpendicular to that facing his guest.

            ‘Cheers,’ Sam said, holding out his can. They tapped cans and made a show of enjoying their first sips.

            ‘Can I ask,’ began the guest, though pausing here mid-question as something else caught his attention, ‘what’s that?’ He was pointing at a painting up on the wall above the television in front of him.

            ‘Good, isn’t it? It’s by Dali, but not well known. Can you see what’s wrong with it?’

            ‘Well, it’s not very realistic.’

            As Sam explained the impossibility of, its depiction was that of a swollen green head impaled through its scalp by a wooden crutch; at the top of the crutch, above the head, were two prongs, between which was supported a spoon; on the handle of the spoon, extending out in front of the head, had fallen a weight from a cut string; the impact of the weight had caused the spoon to catapult from its bowl these yellow globules, and it was the flight of these globules that cut through the string and caused the weight to drop onto the handle and catapult the globules into the string and cut it to drop the weight onto the handle… Constantine scratched his head.

            ‘But,’ he asked, ‘can’t there have just been a pair of scissors that were pulled away really quickly and didn’t make it into the painting? Why does everything have to be in the painting?’

            Now Samuel was looking confused.

            ‘Huh! You’re right. Why does everything have to be in the painting?’

            ‘But I don’t know why he’s got a drawer in his head,’ Constantine went on. ‘Why would anyone paint that?’

            For a few minutes Samuel tried in vain to convince Constantine of the appeal of styles other than brute realism, but Constantine’s responses became terser and terser until only sounds, and then nods; he was frowning over at the fish-tank again.

            ‘But you haven’t come here to listen to me ramble about things I’m nowhere near an expert on. Tell me, what was so awful today?’

            ‘I- Wait. Before that, what’s going on with that fish?’

            ‘Ralph? What’s wrong with him?’ Sam looked over at the fish, too, twisting over the back of his chair, then looking back with great amusement at the concern on his guest’s face.

            ‘He’s a bit…’

            ‘What?’

            Constantine stood up and approached the fish-tank, Sam following; Ralph swam over to inspect them a moment when they were both crouching in front of his tank.

            ‘He looks a bit…’

            ‘He looks a bit what?’

            ‘Human. Don’t you think Ralph looks a bit too human?’

            When Constantine’s ridiculously earnest face turned to look at him, Sam, who was already staring at his guest, erupted into laughter.

            ‘Ahh… This is brilliant,’ Sam was saying as he returned to his chair, Constantine returning to the sofa shortly after, trying to seem amused also. ‘Hey, but, really now, what was so terrible about your day?’

            It was noticed by Constantine that his host was rather adamant to hear of his troubles, but this wasn’t so pleasant a thing to notice so he went ahead with explaining anyway. The only modification he made was that of leaving out his conversation with the man on the way to the property. He didn’t quite manage to reach the end of his narrative, increasingly perturbed by the anthropomorphic fish, pausing his narrative to stare across the room at its tank for stretches of several seconds. When he was speaking, this being why Sam soon stopped laughing at his guest’s fear of Ralph, Constantine was becoming more and more unsettled, taking larger and larger swigs of beer from his can between sentences, not seeming to be aware of Samuel at all when he went and got him another beer.

            ‘And she- She said again that I wasn’t- that I didn’t acknowledge her existence- something like that- and then…’ His attention moved from the fish-tank to the window across the room. The sun had set now, and though the sky was still a sort of blue, the lamp behind Sam had become the room’s main light source.

            ‘And then?’

            Constantine’s eyes remaining fixed upon the window, his brow began to convulse. He set his can down on the table and rose to the window.

            ‘What is it?’ Sam was asking, staying sat.

            ‘Nothing, nothing,’ replied Constantine, turning around to stare at the ground. ‘Look, thanks for having me, but I don’t think speaking has helped much. I’d better go. I feel pathetic.’ He turned to face the window again, and heard Sam approaching him. A hand fell upon his shoulder and he shrunk away against the wall, facing Sam again. ‘Why do you want to know so badly? Why do you care?’ he snapped. Sam stepped back. It was now him who was staring down at the carpet and avoiding the other’s gaze.

            ‘Sorry. I see what you mean,’ Sam muttered. He looked back up, finding some confidence again. ‘But I do care. I don’t hate you.’

            ‘And what’s that supposed to mean? Why exactly are you supposed to hate me?’

            Sam attempted a flickering smile.

            ‘I’m not. You tell me why?’

            Unable to speak, wanting to speak, having nothing to speak, having too many words to speak with, Constantine stormed out of the flat.

            Having sat himself down on the sofa, Sam finished his beer in one movement and turned to look at the window. The sky wasn’t any shade of blue now; it was night. In place of the sun was the reflection of the lamp on one of the upper panes. The lower half of the window was cranked slightly open and the sounds of passing cars swept in through the gap. He stood up and went over to it, his own reflection covering that of the lamp and the moon appearing where the lamp’s reflection had been. He reached the window and pulled it open far enough to stick his head through and look down over the street. A group of young women were approaching, each dressed in a challenge to the mere eleven degrees that it was outside, a little drunk, needlessly happy to be talking to each other. Someone then emerged from the building below onto the pavement. It was Constantine. He seemed manic, his head darting back and forth. The women silenced and filed past him sheepishly. He only seemed to notice them when, once they had already passed him and regrouped, they were giggling and hurrying away. Constantine looked up at Samuel. Samuel reached behind himself. The blankets were stripped from the table and thrown down under the desk. They would slip apart, vanish into each other, they weren’t enough, the eyes and the fingers reappearing from the shadows between the folds. He was involved in the fabric. The steps were closing in down the hall.

            A woman too tired to be startled apologised for the fright as she sank into the mattress beside him, sending whispers through the sheets. The shores of a loose t-shirt fell around her body under the moonlight of the bedside lamp. Her face was obscure, turned towards him, away from the lamp, and half-buried in the pillow; she kept her brows raised to prevent her eyelids from quite meeting, and her lips were parted around the place of a smile.

            ‘Did you have a bad dream?’ she mumbled, the redolence of spirits on her breath.

            ‘Yes, I thought you were- I was in that house again.’

            ‘Which house?’ Her voice trailed off in a sigh.

            ‘The one I’m always in in my dreams. With all the rooms I’ve ever lived in. With rooms made up of parts of rooms I’ve lived in.’ She hummed slightly, to suggest she was still listening, and raised her brows a little higher to keep her eyes from shutting again. She pulled the duvet over herself at last; a cold flourish had entered with her, rippling over his thigh as the duvet had been raised. ‘Can you hear that downstairs?’

            ‘No?’

            ‘Wait… Never mind, it’s gone. Like a banging. It was a dream I haven’t had in ages,’ he went on. ‘I used to have it a lot as a teenager. Something’s coming, I think. I understand that I can’t let it find us. I’m on top of someone, strangling them. I think they’ve done something, given us away. I’m apologising as I strangle them. Maybe I’m crying. But they don’t seem to mind much. They don’t seem to be affected at all.’

            ‘This is a stupid dream.’ She giggled, letting her eyes shut.

            ‘Then they’re already dead, and I find myself running from whatever it is with the body. The body’s running, too. Sometimes I’m outside. Sometimes I’m back in the building with all of my bedrooms. Then, this time, I was in my bedroom from my first year at university. It was day, but it wasn’t light. The body was crouching under my desk, so that the wardrobe concealed it from the view of anybody standing in the doorway.’

            ‘Can you turn off the light?’

            ‘But it’s on your side.’ He grinned. ‘How drunk are you? Oh, never mind about my dream.’

            Somewhat patronising, somewhat sincere, and with a bit of a giggle, she animated herself enough to insist that he continue, though falling back into the same shut-eyed languor as though she’d never escaped it the instance he recommenced.

            ‘How was your night?’ he asked instead, turning away onto his other side.

            ‘Oh, you know,’ she sighed after a sharp inhale. ‘How was yours?’

            ‘Oh, you know. Hanging about with Ralph.’

            He felt her weight shift behind him. With a click, the room plunged into darkness.

            ‘You need to stop treating that man like a fish.’

            He laughed, and she didn’t say anymore. He listened to her breathing. ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he began, but she was already asleep. He turned around again and placed his arm over her.

            ‘Your arm’s too heavy,’ she grumbled, repelling him.

            ‘Are you sure you can’t hear that downstairs?’ She didn’t reply, already sleep again. Samuel turned back away and tried to sleep himself, but whatever the noise was downstairs, it wasn’t stopping. Sam frowned at the darkness over the edge of the bed, at a small, flickering red light on the end of an extension-cable. Forced to pay it its full attention at last, the noise sounded to Sam as though Constantine were running around down there, and then there’d come a knocking or crashing when the running would stop, it would be silent again for a minute, maybe, and then it would all repeat; he’d run off in a different direction and it would that time be variously louder or quieter depending on how near below he’d stopped. There were some ear-plugs in the bedside table, fortunately, so Sam took them out and put them into his ears, just as Maria’s snoring decided to add itself to the noise; he took his phone from the bedside, too, and slipped it under his pillow that the alarm’s vibrations would wake him if not its sound; the half-term had only two days left and he wanted to reacclimatise himself to the morning, wanted not to sleep in yet again. He’d be back at work soon.

Chapter Six – With gloves, where they are and where they’re not

            And what exactly did Samuel achieve with his morning, having woken up at eight-thirty, having slept for only five hours? Exceedingly little beyond using the toilet a couple of times, and not only because he was tired, but for a number of other reasons. Namely: the weather wasn’t very nice, there wasn’t much weather at all, there wasn’t any weather at all, it was just generally grey, inside and outside. These, and, crucially, he didn’t have anything to do, he didn’t have anything he wanted to do, and, at least for a long while, nobody to not have anything to do with.

            At around eleven, when he had deposited himself back onto the sofa after his second journey to the toilet, which, compared to the first visit, really had been quite the achievement, and had hurt but not cut his hand on an inexplicable metal spike that had shot up between the cushions as he’d sat down, it was at around this point in time that a series of groans began to emanate from the bedroom. The groans were followed out of the bedroom by what appeared to be a ghost. In the pale light without a sun to claim for its source, in a huge white t-shirt descending almost to her knees, and with all her body’s complexion having accumulated in deep browns around her eyes and bright reds within them, Maria entered the room once christened by her as “the friction”, both front-room and kitchen.

            ‘Why did you have so many fucking alarms on?’ she groaned, not managing to look at him as she dragged herself over to the kitchen and released her swollen head into the sink.

            ‘In case I missed the first one.’ Her head reappeared over the counter, squinting in his direction. The sink was still running. ‘I said, in case I missed the first one.’

            ‘There were like fifteen on them.’

            ‘Well, in case I missed the fourteenth.’

            ‘For fuck’s sake, I couldn’t go back to sleep.’ She dropped back into the sink without smiling. The sink stopped rushing.

            ‘Do you want any breakfast?’ She replied to this without appearing.

            ‘No.’

            A few minutes passed in an equivalent way: every so often he would raise his head from his phone and come out with some sort of short, trivial question, and if any reply came, then invariably it was the word no whichwould follow from somewhere behind him.

            ‘Are you making food?’

            No reply.

            ‘Do you want any help?’

            ‘No.’

            He grinned to himself as he reached for the remote. On the news was talk of some “far-right protest” to be occurring around Trafalgar square or wherever the following day.

            ‘Looking for a fun day out tomorrow?’ he joked.

            ‘For god’s sake, turn down the volume.’

            He cheered down with the volume. But to keep up pretences, he made another comment about the irony of the name these protestors had given to their protest, but she told him it was all stupid and that he ought to turn them off. After watching a while longer, he crossed through three channels of cooking programmes and then came to a programme documenting the various activities of ticket inspectors in New Zealand. The incessant heavy-metal background music had Maria demand that he turn off the television entirely within about ten seconds.

            ‘I noticed something about that picture.’

            ‘What picture?’

            ‘That one up there. Well, why does everything have to be in the frame? What if, though what we see if of course impossible, there was actually a knife that cut the string which just didn’t make it into the painting?’ He turned to look at her, and she looked far from impressed; she told him to shut up and got back to whatever she was doing. With a great big grin Samuel raised himself up to peer over the counter, expecting to find that Maria had in fact made no progress as yet with the food, but instead finding her buttering slices of bread.

            ‘What?’ she asked, squinting again.

            ‘A miracle.’

            She grunted and shooed him away.

            Soon enough she came over with a heap of fried sandwiches and sat beside Sam on the sofa, both tucking in. With this fatty sustenance, Maria regained her complexion and her ability to speak for more than five or six words at a time. The television came back on and she snatched the remote off him to change the channel from the ridiculous programme about kiwi ticket inspectors, managing at least to grin, and put back on the news. Their conversation from here consisted mostly of them expressing their disdain for idiots in so many ways, Maria a touch less subtly. She’d become quite animated by the end of the breakfast, even suggesting that they went to the counter protest.

            ‘Ehh. What’s the point?’ Sam responded, after preventing her from killing a fly, waving it away, rather.

            ‘You never take anything seriously. Why not? There’ll be one. Let’s go.’ She hurried out of the room then returned with her phone. ‘Look. I told you there’d be one.’

            ‘This isn’t America. Thank god. It’ll be a pub’s worth of shouting fat men in football shirts getting drunk beneath nelson’s column. Just ignore them.’

            ‘Yeah, exactly. Don’t you want to see them?’ She lightened up. ‘A trip to the zoo. There’ll be lions, too!’

            ‘Haha. Very funny.’

            ‘After all, it was you who first suggested this fun day out. But seriously, I think I might go.’

            ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’ll have a think about it. I’ve a different fountain to attend to for now.’

            When he came back out of the toilet, he saw Maria was now standing up. He came to a stop someway before reaching the sofa. She looked furious, her eyes watering. Held out at him was what appeared to be a glove. He was about to start laughing at the absurdity of the object when she started shouting.

            ‘Whose fucking glove is this?’

            ‘Yours? Where’s this come from? What the fuck are you accusing me of?’

            ‘Well it’s not mine. So whose is it? Yes, where has this come from? It’s fucking worn!’

            ‘What are you talking about? Is that even a woman’s glove?’

            ‘How would that make it any better! And it’s pink! And it’s not big enough for you! Fuck you!’ She hurled the glove at him.

            ‘Stop shouting. It could be mine. Calm down. Please. I’ve got a couple of pink shirts. Look, look, I’ll put it on!’ He bungled after her, attempting to squeeze his hand into the little glove as he went, but she pushed past him and into the bedroom, slamming the door on him, and, as it sounded, pulled out the bed to barricade against his entry.

            He listened to her crying. He tried to speak, but she yelled something awful from within the bedroom. He looked down at the ridiculous little glove, not quite managing to fit past his knuckles, and he felt so sick that he didn’t even bother removing it, trailing over to the window to stick out his head and take some air. Once infuriated by the billboard across the road, it was looking down at the pavement immediately outside the building, at a dollop of white shit, that his pained expression began to lessen, loosening, then stretching apart to the edges of his face. His ears pricked up. He was smiling at the shit below.

            ‘I know whose it is! I know whose it is!’ He was nearly singing these words as he skipped back over to the bedroom door. ‘I know whose glove it is!’ She didn’t reply, but it sounded as though she moved, and her crying slightly lessened. He set about explaining how, despite her hatred for the man, he’d had Constantine from downstairs round the previous evening while she’d been out. That, somehow, the glove must have been left there by him. When he was done stammering these words, she still didn’t say anything, at least at first, but her crying stopped, and it sounded like she was walking.

            ‘I know how you must feel,’ Sam was saying outside. ‘But-’

            ‘Why the fuck would he have that glove?’ she yelled inside, interrupting him. ‘I’d fucking doubt whether he’s ever even…’ she didn’t finish this sentence, but she did stop moving. After a few seconds, she removed the barricade, but not yet opening the door. A little after that, in a voice far more measured than previously, she asked a question.

            ‘So, if we go downstairs with that glove and ask if it’s his, he’ll say it is?’

            He began to suggest that their neighbour might not even be in, but without even letting him finish, she began pushing the bed back in front of the door.

            ‘Alright! Alright! If that’s what you want. We’ll go and ask Constantine about this… glove. If that’s what you want.’

            A minute or so later, she came out in different clothes, fully dressed, in fact. With her handbag, too.

            ‘At least take it off, for fuck’s sake. Why are you still wearing it?’

            ‘My fingers were cold,’ he tried to joke, but she scowled his amusement away. He did then force off the glove, and she led him out onto the landing to go downstairs, refusing to look back at him. No further jokes were attempted along the way. In fact, nothing more was said.

            She knocked three times on Constantine’s door, but no response came. Putting an ear to it, there wasn’t any sound coming from within. Sam meanwhile shimmered about along the wall behind her, like a lost insect. She gave up soon enough, but rather than turn to look at Sam, being fully dressed she simply exited through the front door and slammed it in his face. There was such an absence of colour in the world outside that morning that even down there in the hall, which the old, stained fanlight, would usually bathe in its orange warmth, was barely a pale yellow.

            ‘A glove. A fucking glove.’ That was all he had to say to himself. He didn’t go after her. He approached Constantine’s door and turned the handle. It opened. It had been open all along. Daring to peek in, the place looked ransacked, and seeing this he shut the door and trudged back upstairs, remembering only now all the noise coming from down there last night, not even thinking as far as the preposterous implications of the noise’s being used to persuade her, not thinking exactly how it could have been used to persuade her, but thinking of it only insofar as it was something he could no longer use to persuade her, because now she was already gone. On the way up the stairs, he cast the glove down over the bannister and into the clutter. ‘Glove. Glove. Bastard glove.’ That was all he was now repeating as he returned to the sofa to watch some men arguing on a bus in Wellington.

            Constantine, meanwhile, was at the park. He’d been elsewhere since leaving his house while it was not yet even dawn, but now he was sat on a bench at the park, not having moved from it for the last two hours or thereabouts. It was cold and he was tired, and yet, whatever his reasons were, it was here that he insisted on remaining; he’d already texted into work to say that he’d be too poorly to come in.

            In front of him was a small lake, some ten meters in diameter, protected all around by a rusty metal fence. Barely sentient things would scud past on the other side of the bars, stupidity gleaming from holes in their heads. Streeling along behind them, across the unmoving beige of the surface, were helictical tails of light. Sometimes they’d pass in twos or threes, their tails confused and convolved. They were producing noises, or accompanied by noises, equivalent to noises, to the same noise, each of them every time, over and over. Perhaps they wanted to speak, but could only make that sound, and perhaps they wanted to think, but could only think that sound, in some unfathomable state of vegetable dread, unable, unable, and they would continue and continue to make, continue to be, continue to hear that same distressed sound, over and over and over every day until they finally sank forever into the murk, because they were unable to speak, and they didn’t think, and they didn’t want.

            Joggers and miserable people with dogs would pass him by occasionally. He would furtively scrutinise each one as they approached. About ninety minutes prior to this otherwise unspecifiable time of the ducks, he looked over at a pair of joggers he heard approaching from the right of the lake. A man and a woman. They weren’t far enough away for him not to recognise them instantly. The man was Christian. He looked away. He couldn’t help but look back, although even more discreetly this time, and he saw a third person, another woman, was trailing slightly behind them. He recognised her, too. Another of his colleagues, a generally frivolous though not especially unkind woman called Agata. He stared at the ducks and hoped they’d go away.

            ‘Hah! Constantine!’ Christian exclaimed, panting, appearing far closer than Constantine had expected. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

            ‘I’m, err, I wasn’t, umm, feeling well today, a bit poorly, so I’ve come to look at the ducks, I suppose.’ He dared to look up at them again; Christian and Agata, in their shabby clothes, were staring at him with a condescending fascination. Behind them, a little removed, she was kicking at the gravel and looking in any direction but his; her clothes were proper sportswear, made out of road-signs, or whatever. ‘What are you doing here?’

            ‘Chasing that man over there,’ he joked, pointing at another jogger running by on the other side of the lake. ‘And now you’ve slowed us down. He might even get away! No, um, well, we’re out for a jog, clearly. We were talking about it yesterday, thought it would be a good idea.’ She came forward and explained, though never actually so much as looking at Constantine even as she spoke to him, or, rather, narrated herself in his unfortunate presence.

            ‘Yes, I decided yesterday that rather than going to the gym before work this morning I’d go for a run outside. I suggested it to the others and thought it would be fun if they came.’

            ‘I’m so out of shape! Hahaha!’ blared Christian. ‘I can’t believe you’ve roped me into this!’ He turned to Constantine. ‘Anyway, I won’t tell the boss that we saw you out here, eh? And with that, we’ve got a man to catch! Come on, girls!’

            ‘Enjoy the ducks,’ Agata meekly added as they all ran away from him.  

            In sum, nothing but fatigue, boredom, humiliation, and regret had come from Constantine’s outing that morning into the general area around his flat and then into the park. At a quarter to ten, he stood up to return home, but despite the mere twenty-five minute walk didn’t get there, refused to get there, until well after twelve, without any real concern about getting caught.

Chapter Seven – With the glove again but not here, elsewhere

            I opened my curtains again two days ago. I don’t know if it’s the same man. But if it is, then he’s become – and very much literally – a lot more forward about his wanting to look into my house. He’s right outside the window. He hasn’t got much hair, he’s rather old, his clothes suggest homelessness. And I must say that he doesn’t blink much. He doesn’t move much. His constant expression is a bit too severe for my liking. I suppose you think he’s going to be my reflection, that this is all some pathetic joke of mine, that I’m trying to ingratiate myself with you again. But he’s not, it’s not. He doesn’t fade into existence as it goes dark. No. That would be silly. He appears at ten in the morning and disappears at ten at night. Or, rather, I never manage to catch him arriving or leaving. I get distracted, my mind drifts, I think about what I’m supposed to be writing as I wait for him to come or wait for him to go before whichever ten o’clock. I keep my eyes entirely on the window, in the place where his face always is when he’s there, but I get too distracted, and then he’s either already there or already gone. He’s there now. I’ve set an alarm for one minute to ten. I should be able to pay attention for one minute and catch him leaving tonight. But beyond this detail of his transitionless being and not being, and since I don’t exactly have much to hide, his standing there doesn’t bother or concern me too greatly, and I think it’s best that he is allowed to see, so that he comes to realise sooner than later that there’s nothing in here of any interest.

            The clocks moved, and that was about all for most of the afternoon. Just after four, delirious, sleepless, Constantine resumed the previous night’s excavations of his flat, and only about twenty minutes into this futile activity, someone knocked on his door. He covered himself in a dressing gown, turned off the light, and appeared to the visitor.

            ‘Hello?’ he asked.

            It was Sam, for who else would it have been at the door to his flat, and he’d brought a bottle of something golden with mysterious optical qualities.

            ‘Hi. I just wanted to apologise for the way I behaved yesterday. Even if you’re still angry at me, you can at least have this.’

            Constantine, with his mouth drooping open, eyed the bottle. It was some sort of Scotch Whisky; the label was in Gaelic. He thanked Samuel, taking the bottle from him.

            ‘It’s my favourite whisky. I had an unopened bottle and thought it better than a spoken apology. I was being a dickhead yesterday.’

            ‘Look, umm, it’s uhh… bit of a tip in here at the moment,’ Constantine began. ‘But if you don’t mind, then please, come in.’ Constantine went back inside without waiting to see whether Sam would follow or not. Samuel was too surprised by this unprecedented hospitality from Constantine to enter immediately, but also too surprised not to enter, to discover any possible connection between all the noise and mess and his neighbour’s sudden change in personality. When he entered there was already a slight fragrance of alcohol, though most of the smell was something like dust. Constantine went over to the window and raised it open a notch to dispel some of this stuffiness, though he kept the blinds drawn, and the room stayed dark.

            ‘Bloody hell, Constantine. What have you been doing in here?’

            ‘Err…’ Constantine was opening a cupboard, speaking distractedly. ‘I… umm… lost my key. To this flat. I haven’t used it in months. It ought to be somewhere in this flat. Umm. Do you want a glass?’

            ‘Sure, why not? Cheers.’

            Samuel had discovered a sofa to sit on, digging out a place on it for himself to sit amongst the various letters and utensils. There were several mirrors lying about on the floor. He noticed just how tired Constantine looked when his host came over with the glasses and was leaning over the table, pouring out the drinks, the liquid glugging from the bottle and slapping down into the cups.

            ‘But what do you mean you haven’t used it in months?’

            ‘I’ve nothing here to steal, and it doesn’t seem like any burglar’s ever bothered to look. So I just didn’t bother locking the door.’

            Samuel laughed as he watched his host dig a chair out of the rubble to sit on.

            ‘To finding your key.’

            ‘And… err… yours too, if you ever lose it.’ They tapped glasses and got through the first drink with some trivial though not excruciating conversation, mostly about the lack of any weather and that sort of thing, about the quality of the drink, both approving, then Samuel asking at one point why Constantine suddenly needed his key at all, the response being vague and somewhat ominous and Samuel not wishing to push the inquiry any further after the previous evening’s episode. Constantine, having finished his drink first, proposed another the very instant his guest had finished his, not that Samuel for his part was at all measured in his pace of drinking, either.

            ‘Umm. Yeah, go on. After this morning I could certainly do with as many drinks as possible.’

            ‘Why? What happened this morning?’

            ‘Oh, nothing really. A stupid misunderstanding. These things happen… Nothing compared to what some people are going through, I guess.’

            ‘People always say that,’ replied Constantine. Samuel, who had been looking away wistfully at a displaced colander just then, noticed that Constantine was, incredibly, already almost finished with his second drink.

            ‘We should probably turn on the light,’ Samuel suggested. ‘It’s a bit gloomy in here.’

            ‘No, no. I don’t like the light in here. It’s too bright. Only when I really need it. Look. No lampshade. It fell off one day. All on its own. Wouldn’t return.’

            Samuel chuckled and asked how on earth the lampshade had fallen off one day, all on its own, and wouldn’t return. Apparently, it had somehow ‘changed size’. Samuel laughed and Constantine swigged down the remainder of his second drink. Enjoying his laughter, seeking out any cheer could get, Samuel gulped down the rest of his second in turn and only needed to raise his eyebrows at the bottle for Constantine to pour them both a third.

            ‘Good pace we’re going at, eh? But what did you mean by that?’ Sam asked, his speech smudging just a little now at its boundaries. ‘That people always say that?’

            ‘People always complain about what horrible things people are experiencing fuck knows where in the middle east or some random hut in Africa or whatever. But… they don’t care, really. They just can’t tolerate themselves.’ Constantine looked off to the side with a disgusted look after taking in a large gulp of his drink.

            ‘Ehh. Some people care.’

            ‘No, they don’t. It’s too hard. Impossible. Pfft. Why can’t we care about ourselves? Why aren’t I allowed to just care about myself? Before some random Muslims I’ve never met whose belief it is that I deserve to go to hell for not being part of their stupid fairy-tale religion or whatever. Why guilt?’

            ‘Fuck it, maybe you’re not entirely wrong. You know, this morning-’ He paused to belch, furling and unfurling his face with the release, then giggle at having done so. ‘This morning, Maria was trying to get me to go along to a counter-protest tomorrow. And I just thought, you know, and I’ll probably regret saying this, but, just, how embarrassing and pointless a thing it would be to go, even if I think I agree with them. But do I really? Or, as you say, do I just feel guilty? You know about these stupid protests?’

            Samuel looked back over to Constantine, who was looking down with a dark grin.

            ‘Yes, and, in fact, I might even be going myself. But, err, not exactly, to the, err, counter-protest.’ He remained grinning down into his glass.

            ‘Oh, pooh! You’re a bloody estate agent. And a lot of people would say there’s no excuse for that. What’ve you got in common with the working class?’

            ‘What are you talking about class for? It’s about a way of life. Values, and that.’

            ‘Values. What values? And what sort of English name is Constantine?’

            ‘That doesn’t matter. It’s about values. Doesn’t matter where you’re from. You said yourself the counter-protests were stupid. You don’t want to embarrass yourself. There’s your first value. That’s all. That’s all the, err, so-called far-right is. Racism, they say. It’s just being normal, rational.’

            ‘If you say so. If anything means anything. Let’s go back to the caves.’

            ‘You know what I think? I think, in one year, maybe, you’ll look back at this conversation, and you’ll think, why was I being such an idiot?’

            Samuel laughed, then sighed, gazing back over at the colander.

            ‘I definitely will, but not for those reasons.’

            ‘What I also think,’ Constantine went on, brightening a little, is that I’m gonna go for a piss!’ He stood up, tightened the belt of his gown, and made a clumsy passage through his mess. ‘You’ll soon see the truth,’ he slurred as he was closing the bathroom door behind Samuel’s back.

            As Samuel sat their refraining from his drink as he listened to a man urinate in the next room, he let his eyes explore the mess. One interesting feature, or non-feature, rather, was that half of the mantelpiece was missing. Perhaps it was buried in there somewhere amongst all the stuff on the floor. There hung askew on the wall above the remaining half a stopped clock. Despite the unbelievable number of things lying about, somehow none of it had managed to have any colour. In the murk of this room, practically everything was grey or brown. Even the shadows. Even the red objects were grey or brown amongst everything else. And it was in this pursuit of colour that Samuel noticed something through the bedroom doorway ahead of him. It was a pink glove. He clambered across the room to get a better look at the thing just as Constantine was flushing the toilet.

            ‘Constantine! Constantine!’ Samuel was calling out. ‘I love you! You’re the best! Wait there, or, when you come out, wait. I’m coming back. I’ve just got to run upstairs and grab something!’

            ‘What are you shouting about?’ Constantine asked, sticking his head out of the bathroom as he ran the sink so as to appear to be washing his hands.

            ‘You’re the best! Wait! Wait! I’ll be back in one second!’

            Constantine was a little bemused, but manoeuvred back over to his chair to continue drinking as he waited.

            Upstairs, for next quarter of an hour, Samuel made an equivalent dump of his own flat, ripping through the contents of drawers and cupboards, exploring under the bed, eventually even in the fridge, but he couldn’t find or reconstruct where exactly it was that he’d put the glove. ‘It was on the sofa,’ he was saying to himself. ‘Then we took it downstairs. Then I came back up. Then where did I put it?’ Of course, he did not discover any such gloves in his flat, and with disappointment and frustration in equal measure decided it best to give up for then and return downstairs to explain what was going on to Constantine. Politically deluded or not, he then seemed to be Sam’s only hope at getting back Maria.

            Suffice to say, he did not make it all the way back down the stairs. Suffice to say, on his way back down, as he was shaking his head, his eyes had just slipped over the bannister, and he looked down at the clutter, and, though he hadn’t up to then remembered dropping the glove there, he certainly did notice now that it was no longer there, and now certainly did remember dropping it there. To add to his disappointment and frustration, and other than an increase in both, he now had disgust. He tried to eat a slice of bread once he’d very, very, exceedingly quietly returned to his flat, hoping some food would sober him up a bit, help him think more lucidly about the situation, but he really didn’t have any sort of appetite now, so he just drunk water instead. Maybe it had been a different glove, he tried to reason. Maybe Constantine had a pair just the same. But that couldn’t be; though it wasn’t any more feminine than merely pink, the glove was pink enough for it to be simply too unbelievable that a man like Constantine might’ve owned a pair. Then could it have belonged to some woman Constantine had had round? But the existence of such a woman seemed equally implausible; Samuel could never quite accept that Constantine was an estate agent, that he was employed to sell things to people, to convince them to give him their money. Then again, whatever Samuel thought or didn’t think, Constantine in any case was an estate agent; he must’ve been able to pretend when he really needed to. These were all dead ends. Whatever the details or lack thereof of Constantine’s love-life, whatever the gloves he rightfully owned, nothing of this would manage to explain away the absence of the glove in the hall downstairs. All in all, Samuel’s situation had only worsened. All that remained was blackmail. A final gambit. But even that wouldn’t work; she’d probably be more willing to trust Constantine that him now. He went to lie in bed. A few minutes later someone knocked at the door. He remained silent, and the person went away.

            One could hardly call Constantine an optimistic man. He only went to knock upstairs to distract himself from the immortal truth he’d long since tried to resign himself to, that he’d failed to resign himself to time and time again, like the vile counterpart of a Bodhisattva Buddha: that he’d done something. He’d done something without knowing it, without knowing what, and would only ever be aware of it through its effects on others, its field of repulsion surrounding his body. Whatever that glove had been doing in his flat, whether it really was the glove Samuel thought it was or not, Constantine never noticed, or if he did, never thought anything of it, that Samuel could’ve seen it from where he’d been sat. For the rest of the day, the evening, the night, first in his chair, and once that grew too painful, his bed, he drank what booze he had and uncritically absorbed political videos from his laptop. He stopped thinking about Samuel, even stopped thinking about the man, letting his anger vent itself entirely back into the screen, short-circuiting himself out of the world and his dingy flat. He didn’t know what he wanted. But he knew someone was preventing him from having it. The flies hadn’t come that day. It was just him and the growing-thing. And the just him when the sun had sunk outside. Only for an instant, his eyes spiralling in the biological haze of their lids, his body having already let itself slip from the ledge of the conscious plateau, he saw open before him an angel’s eye, and in that moment, before it shut and he’d be asleep, he saw in it himself, himself as what he’d done. Not that he’d remember.

            That evening, Maria had returned. Sam had ignored the knocking this second time as he had the first, until he heard her calling his name through the door.

            ‘Sam! What the fuck have you done in here? Why’ve you thrown everything everywhere?’ she was saying, stepping past Sam into the flat. He’d somehow expected that they’d have instantly reconciled when he opened the door; only now could he hesitate about what he’d already done. He didn’t respond, just standing between Ralph’s tank and the door with a head bowed down by remorse. ‘Never mind that,’ she went on, ill at ease and not really wanting to know. She walked over to him and waited for him to look up. ‘I think I believe you,’ she said. ‘But, I want to look through your phone. If there is something going on, then maybe you cleared everything, but I think it’s more likely that you’d have messaged her this afternoon.’

            ‘Her. There is no her. Why don’t you believe me? Fine. Look.’ He went and brought his phone back from the bedroom, unlocking it for her to look through.

            ‘What’s this? Constantine?’ Samuel hadn’t looked at his phone once since he’d returned upstairs earlier. There was a message several hours ago by Constantine asking where he’d gone.

            ‘I went to apologise for something I did to offend him last night. I told you he came round. You didn’t believe me.’

            ‘Hmm.’

            Samuel traipsed around the room between the piles of clutter he’d managed in just fifteen minutes to fill the flat with earlier, as Maria stood, and then sat on the sofa, examining the contents of his phone. When she was done, and she placed the device down onto the coffee table before herself, to Samuel’s disappointment, though hardly to his amazement, she looked no less ambivalent than she had as she’d entered.

            ‘I know. I’ve thought of something,’ Sam said, rushing over to the sofa. ‘Wait. Stand up. There’s probably all sorts of old rubbish under here.’ He pulled out the cushions from the sofa. And, indeed, there was all sorts of old rubbish under there. ‘See, it could have just…’ But he stopped talking. Maria was weeping.

            ‘I just don’t want some stupid mistake ruining everything,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m not leaving you,’ she said, as though it was her being forced to. She flung herself around him and soaked his shoulder in her tears. He was somewhat more hesitant in putting his arms around her, and his confusion only increased when she repeatedly said the word ‘sorry’. He did want her back, but not like this.

            They lay beside each other in bed that evening, she reading a book, he looking away at the window with his head propped up against his wrists. The foliage of the tree he saw through the window, in its shape and its movement, the rippling contractions of the leaves, was a perfect heart. She closed her book around her finger to save the page and turned over to him. When he turned to her, he saw the fine, usually imperceptible hairs on her face all glowing orange in the light from outside.

            ‘How did you offend Constantine yesterday?’

            Samuel sighed, his torso heaving under the sheet.

            ‘I was a bit too eager to find out why he was in a bad mood. I’d invited him in because he looked miserable, and I got a little too pleased to be helping him. Patronising him, I suppose.’

            ‘Did you fall out again?’

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘That text he sent you. Asking where you’d gone, and you ignored it.’

            ‘Oh. No, not exactly. He, umm… He was getting a bit, how might I put it, unusual, so I made an escape.’

            ‘Unusual how?’

            ‘Politically unusual. You know he’s going to the racist march tomorrow?’

            ‘What a fucking loser.’

            They fell silent a while, and Maria returned to her book.

            ‘Do you still want to go to the counter-protest?’ he asked.

            ‘Umm… Err… I suppose.’

            She went back to reading again. Sam continued to look at her, expecting her to look back, which she didn’t.

            ‘I’ve decided we go. Okay?’

            ‘Really? You want to go now?’ Her not very sudden happiness seemed all but laboured. ‘That’s great.’ And she returned again to her book.

            ‘It’s about doing things, not thinking things. If a glove can do that to… to love, then we can only be optimistic.’

            ‘Mm,’ she intoned, undiverted from her reading. Sam turned away again, with some despondence at first, but a despondence that soon dispersed itself in the leaves, as Sam watched the movements of the big green heart outside, and after a while he found himself really quite convinced of a certain optimism.

            ‘I do take things seriously, you know?’

            ‘I didn’t mean that.’

            ‘I know, I know. I’m not trying to argue. Whether you meant it or not, you were right. I didn’t take things seriously. But I do now.’ He got out of bed to get something from the other room. ‘Hey,’ he said from the bedroom doorway.

            ‘What?’

            ‘You know Constantine was frightened by Ralph?’

            She smiled and asked why.

            ‘He thinks Ralph looks too human. He has human eyes.’

            Both of them laughed. Sam left the room.

Chapter Eight – With that glove again, again elsewhere, but now even further afield

            The next morning, Maria claimed to feel too sick to go to the protests, that she’d an ‘evil stomach-ache’ which wouldn’t go away and hadn’t let her sleep properly in the night. Sam had tried to convince her to come with him, he still adamant about going himself, but she insisted that she was ‘just too unwell’. Sam for his part hadn’t slept so well either, and so just before leaving, at around eleven, was boiling the kettle to make himself a second coffee that morning. Through the window, as he was waiting for the water to boil, he saw Constantine leaving the building and heading off towards the high street. This gave a Sam an idea. He’d been thinking of ways during the night to prove that Constantine had taken the glove, wanting to be absolutely, rather than mostly, certain of it. He drank the coffee quickly, diluting it with cold water, and hurried out of the flat, calling out a goodbye to Maria as he left; she didn’t respond; he’d forgotten that she’d gone out to buy paracetamol.

            Downstairs, Constantine’s door was still unlocked, he obviously hadn’t found his key, and Sam walked in. It was just as messy as the day before, and the only change he noticed, as he made straight for the bedroom, was the empty whisky bottle lying on its side on the table. The glove hadn’t been moved, though a cabinet had. He entered the bedroom to take it, climbing over this cabinet that had since been tipped over, all its drawers extending out at its side. Constantine’s mattress was bare, all of the sheets in a pile beside the bed.

            But when Sam was bending down to grab the glove from the corner, he heard something worrying. The door to the flat opened then slammed shut behind him in rapid succession. Still half bent-over, he froze, listening for movement. But none was heard. He stood up and peeked his head out into the front room. Nobody was there. If he had heard the door, and he was considering the possibility of having hallucinated it, then it hadn’t been someone entering, but someone leaving. And yet he’d just seen Constantine leave and walk far enough away that it would have been almost impossible for him to have returned so quickly, and not to have made any noise entering the building. Sam looked out through the bedroom window but didn’t see anyone outside the building, but for that matter the field of view was very limited and only showed him one direction. Climbing back over cabinet, then wading through the rubble as fast as he could, he exited out into the hall. Had he heard the building’s door, too? He couldn’t be sure, hesitating as he stood there in Constantine’s doorway. The building’s door did then open; Maria was coming in from the shops.

            ‘What are you doing in there?’ she asked, seeing him in the open doorway Constantine’s flat. Her eyes shifted down to the glove in his hand; then back up to his face with a squint of confused disgust. A ridiculous thought invaded his head.

            ‘Show me the paracetamol you just bought!’

            She did, and the packaging hadn’t yet been opened. This eased the most ridiculous of his fears, at least.

            ‘What’s going on?’, she asked.

            ‘Did you just see someone leaving the building?’ He shut Constantine’s door, just in time.

            ‘No, why? What the fuck are you doing with that glove?’

            The front door opened again. Constantine had returned with a multi-pack of toilet paper. Both Maria and Sam watched him simply.

            ‘Nice glove,’ he said to Sam, nodding down at thing, displaying no unease whatsoever, entirely unperturbed. He entered his flat and shut the door.

            ‘What is it?’ Maria asked again. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

            ‘Come here,’ he said, guiding her up the stairs, away from Constantine’s door. ‘Don’t you get it,’ he whispered through his teeth. ‘It’s not his glove!’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Shh! It was in his flat, but I just went in there, and there was-’

            ‘Stop! Stop it!’ She flapped her arms about and turned to carry on up the stairs. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about this bloody glove business. I’m not well. Stop stressing me out. Just go to your protest and forget about this fucking glove.’

            ‘My protest?’ The door shut above him. ‘Yes. What the fuck is going on?’ He turned to look down over the bannister, almost, as though already in the habit, dropping the glove there again, but he rattled his head out of the thought and hurried out of the building taking the glove with him. He stuffed it into his back pocket.

            The turnout that day was unprecedented for a rally of its kind; the biased sources were quick to estimate a frankly preposterous number of over a million, the more critical giving a number of around a hundred thousand. But even that hundred thousand dwarfed the meagre ten thousand or so counter-protestors, unenthusiastic clusters of whom appeared down distant side-streets every so often behind walls of police officers. Just a year previously such a thing would have been inconceivable; when a similar thing had been set to take place across London some thirteen months before, there’d been so many counter-protestors that the original protestors didn’t even turn up. Such was the result of a year’s needless capitulations by the nominally left government to what had been a vocal minority, the social devastation without any of the propaganda. It was a crisis of propaganda that they were protesting. To essentialise their own words, in fact, the people had taken to the streets to demand more propaganda.

            As with the previous day, there still wasn’t any weather when Constantine stumbled out of the tube station at around one pm, and followed those waving union jacks and, mysteriously, the occasional Israeli flag, into a larger crowd. He’d no idea how many were in this crowd, but very soon he couldn’t see out of it; some way ahead was a stage. Someone was up there speaking, but he was too far away to hear anything.

            The man stood beside Constantine looked about forty; balding under a cap, he wore a union jack t-shirt under a brown sports-jacket. Constantine had taken the occasion to finally wear his leather jacket, and, feeling confident, putting on a bit of a voice, asked the man beside him what was going on.

            ‘They’re givin’ speeches ‘n’tha. I’s up there jus’ before. ‘Ad to leave a minute. Wo’I‘ear is, there’s gonna be a big speech in a minute. I reckon we should try’uh squeeze froo. Carn’ear nuffin’ back’ear.’ Constantine followed the man as they moved sideways through the crowd. ‘Wossyer name, mate?’ the man asked, when they couldn’t go any further, just about able to hear the speaker.

            ‘Constantine.’

            ‘Phil. Nice to mee’yer.’ They shook hands. ‘Good t’see’ya out ‘ere today.’

            Constantine was thinking of something to say, but Phil took an opportunity to get further forwards, and the gap closed before Constantine could follow. The speaker on the stage delivered a line about some sort of survival and a great applause followed everywhere; Constantine clapped, too, though he hadn’t heard anything.

            ‘Now we’re going to have someone very special talking to us now,’ the speaker went on once the noise had finally subdued. ‘Any moment now, err… We’re just waiting for this to load. But as we wait, I just want to thank all of you for showing up today. It’s great to see…’ the speaker went on like this for another minute or so, receiving a few smaller rounds of applause throughout. The man stood beside Constantine now was a divorced-looking man, perhaps in his late forties, apparently role-playing as an eighteenth-century naval officer, an elaborately folded cravat between the monstrous blue lapels of his blazer. He was pouting.

            ‘What’s happening now?’ Constantine asked him.

            ‘We’re anticipating the next speaker,’ the man replied, in a not entirely convincing accent. ‘They should be appearing on the screen any minute now.’

            Just then, the large screen up ahead turned on and the face that appeared on it was met with a ferocious applause. The man beside Constantine was clapping proudly, though retaining his pompous expression and not whooping and bellowing like everyone else. Constantine clapped, too.

            ‘Yeahhh!’ Shouted the live-streamed billionaire, and the finally diminishing applause redoubled. After thanking the organisers of the rally, but not the attendees, the billionaire, appearing on the enormous screen before the plebeian masses, began his speech by drawing attention to the George Orwell t-shirt he’d had the temerity to wear, going so far as to encourage the crowd to think about why it was that he might have chosen such a t-shirt to wear. The body of his speech consisted of a series of loosely related, vague and increasingly inflammatory demands. ‘The gangrape must stop! The elites must be held accountable for destroying Britain! Kill or be killed!’ Those were his final words. The ennobled crowd were so very pleased with the billionaire’s demands that as they cheered, they were even jumping up into the air with joy, waving around their flags wildly. Constantine was going to ask the man who’d been beside him what he’d thought of the speech, but that man was gone, some several meters ahead, and in his place a pair of shirtless fat men, one of them having the words ‘sink the boats’ painted in red over his torso. There were women, and even children, around, but most people there were men. Most of them looked alright, not like these men or the naval officer. Phil had been alright. Constantine wanted to find more people like Phil. He shuffled back out of the crowd.

            He was walking past a group of several hundred men and woman shouting at a police line. Somewhere on the other side must have been a group of anti-protestors.

            ‘The fucking communists are over there! Hohoho!’ bellowed a man walking past with a can of beer in his hand. The group he was in came to a stop to shout insulting noises in the direction of the “communists”. Constantine, stood just beside them, felt invigorated to join them.

            ‘Fuck you! Traitors!’ he shouted. When he looked back for approval, the group of men were smiling at him curiously. ‘I hate them’, Constantine stammered to them.

            ‘Too right,’ one of the men said, flicking his eyes down at Constantine’s leather jacket as he did, and with that the men all waddled off laughing. Not wanting to go in their direction, and several thousand people approaching from the other direction where the speeches had just finished, Constantine joined the mob who were shouting at the police line. ‘Fuck you! Get out of my country! We’ve had enough of you!’ he shouted, copying those around him. Somehow he managed to get quite near the front, and was able to see the counter-protestor’s faces behind the bright green bodies of the police. This far forward on Constantine’s side were only men. Some of those right at the front weren’t even shouting anything, just rattling at the fence and growling at the police and counter-protesters. The counter-protestors on the other side were holding up a big flag with the words ‘we love you’ on it. They were all chanting, but Constantine couldn’t hear them at all. They were just the many flapping heads of the enemy.

            ‘We don’t love you!’ shouted a man dressed just like Phil who was next to Constantine.

            ‘How stupid do they think we are?’ Constantine shouted.

            ‘How stupid do you think we are?’ The man shouted, having not taken his eyes off the protestors.

            ‘We’ve had enough of you!’ Constantine shouted. ‘We’ve had enough of your guilt! Enough of your lies!’ He noticed a couple of men at his other side looking at him. They wanted him to continue. ‘And we- We don’t want you telling us what to think anymore! You call us racists because you can’t argue with us! We are the people, not you!’ The men around him cheered. It seemed everyone was looking at him now. He thought of more to say. ‘We’re here to protect our country from you, and… And you’re evil! Evil! … We’re protecting… Values! And your…’ The people who’d been cheering we’re now frowning or looking perplexed by him. He caught a couple of them looking down at his leather jacket. They quickly got back to shouting their own things now that Constantine was quiet and blushing, but not quite with as much energy as before. Constantine went back to copying them. ‘Fuck off!’ he shouted, his voice breaking, and he noticed a couple of the police officers sniggering at him on the other side of the fence, one of them tugging at his vest, rolling his shoulders, and pulling a face, the other one’s head drooping with laughter. They were making fun of Constantine’s jacket. But just then one of the officers got a call on their walkie-talkie and his expression became serious. He gestured and gave orders to some of the other officers who then ran off. Constantine noticed that there weren’t so many people around him anymore. He turned around. Where there’d been hundreds, now there was only about twenty people in the group he was in, and all of them had their backs to him.

            There was some sort of commotion on the other side of the street. Police officers were rushing over through the crowds from every direction. Constantine wandered over, guided onward by a dumb fascination. People were pushing past him, running in every direction. There were people fighting, officers tackling men to the ground, men tackling officers to the ground. There were screams up ahead. Constantine walked between fallen barriers. The police line had been forced back or broken. He could see the counter-protestors; some of them running away up the hill, protestors chasing them up. A man punched another onto the tarmac and was himself thrown down by two officers. He convulsed and spat over his shoulder as they tried to restrain him.

            As Constantine was turning around, he saw a pink glove on the ground, he thought of the one Sam had been holding earlier. There was man lying on the ground amongst the legs of the mob. He was young, maybe twenty. He’d bleached hair. The man was lying in a strange position, and though five or six pairs of legs deep into the crowd, his eyes had found Constantine. He was totally still, his expression was one of concentration. There was some blood on his temple. Someone trod on his neck. His head moved slightly, but he didn’t blink, his eyes didn’t shut, his eyes remained fixed upon Constantine. Another group ran in between Constantine and the mob beneath which the young man’s body lay, and the body disappeared behind them. Sirens were wailing everywhere. Two police officers hurried by, supporting between them an unconscious man whose drooping head was wet with blood. A priest was walking by, staring at Constantine.

            Twenty minutes later, Constantine was standing at a platform in Leicester Square station. He found himself staring down at the tracks when a rat appeared for a moment and brought him back to awareness. Someone was looking at him. There was a woman stood beside him.

            ‘Do you know what’s happened?’ he asked her.

            ‘They broke through one of the police lines. It got dangerous.’ She was in her twenties, beautiful rather than gorgeous. She had large, compassionate brown eyes, and an olive complexion. He noticed the badges on her jacket, one of them a Palestinian flag.

            ‘I didn’t even know there’d be protests,’ he lied. ‘I was just here to walk around. People were fighting.’

            The rumble of a train could be heard. The bend of the tunnel ahead was illuminated, and the front of the tube appeared shortly after its light.

            ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

            ‘Constantine,’ he said, having waited for the train to quieten as it came to a stop. ‘What’s yours?’

            ‘Sadia. I like your jacket, by the way. Very cool.’

            ‘Haha. Thank you. And that’s a lovely name. Were you there at the counter-protest?’

            They stepped aside and waited for the people to file out of the tube carriage, then got on themselves, sitting down on the folding seats just beside the door. The carriage was full, and the last people getting on after them had to stand.

            ‘Yes. I got split up from my friends and-’

            ‘Hey!’ another woman interrupted, who was standing in front of them. The heads of those she was with cocked around at her, then at Constantine. ‘Not so fucking brave now, are you?’ Constantine said nothing, looking down between his legs. Sadia had already disappeared. ‘What was it you were shouting, fascist? Get out of your country or some such rubbish, and-’ Now this woman was interrupted:

            ‘Cawl us fashiss awl you fakin’ like. Won’t stop nuffin’! You little bitch.’ A large, sweaty man in an England football shirt had materialised with a beer in his hand. The man’s friend also strutted over, forcing one of the other counter-protestors back against the tube-doors. Soon they were all already shouting and pushing each other about, several brave non-partisans who’d been stood or sat nearby coming over to intervene but ending up by joining in on one side or the other. Constantine only heard all of this, barely paying it attention; he’d his hands pressed against his face, rubbing them back and forth over his eyes. Everyone had disappeared. All he heard was the grinding and the squealing of the tube against the rails. He looked up again at the tube pulled into Euston. A man was sat opposite him, smiling at him. This man wore a leather jacket, just like his, and as the doors opened, this man stuck out his tongue at Constantine then hurried out of the train, disappearing into the crowd on the platform. When Constantine had processed who that was, and sprang up to his feet to chase him, the doors had already shut, and the darkness of the tunnel wall slid out across the window. When he turned back around, someone had taken his seat. There weren’t any others. He looked into the eyes of the man stood next to him. They frowned at him and shuffled away to the other end of the carriage.

Chapter Nine – With Sunshine and with boobs

            I have little reason to smile about this latest turn of events. The old man at the window, I now realise, was there only to distract me from greater threats to the sanctity of my home, and now remains as an insult to my intelligence. This morning, seconds before ten, I was stood there opposite the window waiting to finally catch him arrive. And what happened? Someone coughs beside me. Of course, I had expected it to be the old man himself, but in fact this was another man, with a really very Polish presence about him; a shaved head, and a stocky build suggestive of a capacity for short but intense bursts of power. I was too offended to speak, that this man would think it the good and proper thing to invade my home. He didn’t seem to regard me as anything more than an item of furniture; his piercing, chemiluminescent eyes passed over me in their survey of the area with the same malice as anything else, anything else but the window, in which the old man had made his punctual appearance. The Polish man didn’t seem to view this other’s presence with my indifference, and grew incensed when he saw him, waddling furiously in the window’s direction, grunting certainly horrible things in Polish, and brandishing his great, pink fists. The Polish man drew the curtains shut and stood there shaking for a minute, finally unable to stop himself from opening them again to see that the old man still hadn’t left, or even moved. So he opened the window, began climbing through it, and only once the Polish man had made it out did the old man take off running, pursued by the Polish man once this Polish man had got himself back up onto his feet. For a minute or two I was silly enough to have considered the Polish man in fact to have been a blessing sent by the council or some other such authority to rid me of the old man’s invasive curiosity. How naïve I sometimes am! The instant I’d shut the window, the Polish man returned through the door and barged me aside to sit down at the desk. I thought he might have been appeased by food, and asked him if this was the case, but the sound of my voice seemed to frighten him. First, he went still, his little round ears pricking back. Then he grew angry again, rattling about in the chair, slamming down his fists on the desk. Only after a dozen or so seconds of this did he return to his prior state of relative calm. He doesn’t allow me at the desk when he comes into the room, and so I am reduced in my capacity as a writer to availing myself of the brief periods in which this unfriendly character goes wandering about the rest of the building, stomping about and slamming doors, perhaps gathering his thoughts, for he too, when he’s in here, has set about writing things of his own, making his own editions and amendments to my story. He keeps the blinds open so as to know when the old man returns, which he does, several times a day, and each time is chased away by the Polish man. Then, too, if I’m swift enough, I can hurry in a sentence or two, but most often I take this time to get an idea of what he’s been writing. It does save me some effort, having him write for me, but I must say that I’m not so fond of the sudden lack of artistic control. I wonder if there’s any way I

            Constantine tried to go home but couldn’t. He’d lost the bravery to continue wearing his leather jacket after the encounter at Euston, carrying it about from there in as compressed a state as he could, and though he feared too greatly to enter the building itself, he did manage a foray into his front garden, where he hid his jacket behind the recycling bin and bolted away at once. Aimlessly touring the neighbourhood for the following hour, he ended up back in the park, sat on the same bench as the previous day, watching the same ducks as the previous day. At first it had been cold without a jacket to cover him. But not twenty minutes after sitting down, the sun made its first appearance in days through the clouds directly over him, and up there it would remain until it set that evening. Its warmth upon his skin, and the sudden splendour it bestowed upon the lake’s surface, these reminded his senses that he was still there on earth, and a soothing languor saturated his body for those hours he spent there on that bench, the monotony of the duck’s routine around the central tree sending him off to sleep.

            He was woken up by an attendant of the park at dusk. The woman was curious as to whether he was in good health or otherwise. He wouldn’t speak to her, and she drew back in caution, though not leaving entirely. She remained at a safe distance, observing him, forbidding him from returning to the pacification of his environment.

            Again, he couldn’t go home. Drink had helped the previous day, he was reminded, as his wanderings brought him outside a pub. The bouncer permitted him inside, though not without a troubled stare to follow him in from the street. Voices, eyes, and shoulders would drift past him through the brown air as he immersed himself deeper into the room. Laughter filled his head. As he proceeded through the bodies towards the light, his brain would piece together for him fragments of other’s conversations as though together they constituted a single narrative: ‘… many of them … forgot my password, but meanwhile … three cigarettes and a can of … meanwhile … in the end, he found it was about … what do you want … people. It’s about caring for … what are you going to get … but aren’t cotton-buds meant to be dangerous. I heard … do you want one, too, or … understand what he meant … stupid French pornography. The vampire with boobs or some shit like … a pint of Guinness, please … hello … Hahahaha! … how can I help you? A pint of Guinness, please. No, too long to wait.’ He was talking now. ‘Not a pint of Guinness. Just a pint of that, please.’ He pointed at some lager that didn’t need to settle first.

            ‘Okay, that’ll be seven pounds thirty, please,’ the woman said, rotating a machine at him. Reaching into his pockets, he didn’t find his wallet, but he did have a loose note, fortunately, and paid with that, to the further the barmaid’s mistrust of and annoyance at him. She turned to serve someone else before making his drink, which she did, begrudgingly, when this other character responded to her by saying ‘No, no, thank you, I’m alright.’ Her voice was familiar, and Constantine found himself looking at her, at her frivolous expression

            ‘I thought that was you,’ Agata said. ‘I, err, didn’t expect you to be coming. Still ill, are we? Haha!’ She nudged Constantine, and Constantine slumped back against the bar, looking behind himself to the barmaid fearfully. The barmaid scowled at him and walked away, and he turned back to look at Agata. She was frowning, then apologised as she helped Constantine back up to his feet. ‘Look, your drink’s come.’ On the bar, a pint of foaming yellow fluid had appeared reflecting light. Constantine took it and put it to his lips, but no more, simply bathing his upper lip in the drink, for he’d seen something across the pub and could no longer move. ‘We’re over there in the back, are you coming?’ Agata was asking somewhere off to the side. ‘I’m just on my way back from the toilet. What’s wrong? Are you alright?’ Over there, in the back, Constantine saw, at a table, opposite another pair of his colleagues, her, and, she too saw him, and she stopped laughing, became awfully serious, tearing her hands from Christian who sat at her side and her torso bolted upright, pressing herself into the back of her seat to partially obscure herself. Her eyes were lowered in shame, and Christian now, sensing this change in her behaviour, looked across the room to see Constantine. At first, he too stopped laughing, only very briefly confused, then became jovial again, beckoning Constantine over, but as Constantine still wasn’t moving, Christian grew concerned again; he and the other two opposite him were all frowning at him together. Agata reappeared in his field of view, backing away with just the same frown. It was only when Agata had sat down on a stool by their table and all of them broke their silence, crouching over their drinks and whispering things to each other greedily, than Constantine was relieved of his paralysis. He turned back to the bar, placing down his drink, and slumped onto his elbows. Like this, he remained, drawing a sip from his pint every so often and refusing to turn around. Every so often, too, would the barmaid glare at his, and every so often, too, would one of his colleagues, but never her, nor Christian for that matter, would appear at the bar, the first few times beside him, even reminding him that he was welcome to join them, but then at an increasing distance, until they’d run out of bar. In this time, Constantine finished his first drink and had managed to order another pint, which the barmaid eventually conceded him.

            At some point, maybe an hour later, when it was dark outside already, he noticed something else in his periphery. From where he stooped over the sticky surface of the bar, he could just about see the opening which lead out into the garden. Through it hurried a man and woman with their heads down into the garden. By the time they reached the end of the corridor and vanished around the corner, they were almost running, and in that last instant before they disappeared, Constantine saw their hands meet. He knew that neither of them smoked, and for the fifteen minutes they were out there, none of the others went out to join them.

            He couldn’t stay at the bar; in case he saw them. It was only after he’d sat down at the table, and Agata and the two others opposite him were variously giggling or frightened, barely exchanging any words with him or each other.

            ‘Umm… we’re probably going to go soon,’ Agata tried to tell Constantine, to hint at what he knew was best for him to do, but again he’d lost the ability to move. Suddenly all the others lowered their heads.

            ‘Oh, umm, hello, Constantine,’ said Christian. Constantine looked up from his drink at Christian’s teasing eyes. They moved away from Constantine to the others. ‘We think, umm, we might head off now.’

            ‘Oh, umm, alright then,’ Agata said, ‘I guess-’ she burst out snorting and had to compose herself again. ‘I guess we’ll see you, then.’

            Constantine was still gaping his eyes at Christian. Christian turned aside to her, nudging her.

            ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to Constantine?’

            She looked at him mortified, and had to look away, only she looked over directly at Constantine.

            ‘Goodbye, Constantine,’ she stuttered, immediately dragging Christian away in the direction of the doors.

            ‘Goodbye, Bogna,’ he said, when they were already gone, and the crowd had pressed back together in the way of the door through which Christian and Bogna had left through. As the door had shut, the bouncer had been frowning into the pub, and for a moment his eyes had met Constantine’s. Above the crowd, in the corner of the ceiling, was a sort of disco light, and it littered the people’s bodies with little moving points of red or green or blue.

            Constantine did go home this time.

            With the sun that afternoon had returned the flies, but coming home after dark, they weren’t flying around the growing-thing, but were discovered independently at various points along the coving where the bedside lamp brought them into relief.

            He didn’t sleep for a long while, but not only because of the things in his brain, but also because of those above his flat. At several times he became conscious of a weeping upstairs.

Chapter Ten – With a Gordon and a Garden and with Aisling and Siobhan

            The situation has only worsened. It turns out this Polish man has friends. He has them over in my house to relieve him of various burdens. Chiefly, warding away the old man who appears at the window, who has been replaced by a pair of grumpy Polish men smoking more often than not, and rarely conversing. They must grow terribly bored out there, because occasionally the old man manages to walk right by them and press his face up to the window, and it’s only when the original Polish notices whose at the window, and flies into a rage, that his two friends outside act to remove the old voyeur. The Polish man inside will shuffle around in his chair and pull open the window to very loudly admonish his negligent watchmen, who for their part don’t dare to talk back, remaining silent and not looking up until the one inside shuts the window again and returns to his literary duties. This exact routine repeats several times a day. But as for the other duties this man has brought his friends round to my house to relieve himself of, other friends whom, from the little portion of the room I’ve been reduced to existing in, I never see, but only hear out in the hall or upstairs, his having his friends attend to these other duties has been the thing most unfortunate for me and my ambitions of writing a story. He no longer leaves the desk. The stomping around the house and the slamming of doors is done by these friends whom I never get to see. He doesn’t even eat or go to the toilet. They do it for him. And with this man never leaving the desk, of course, it means that I’m unable to write anything, and from over here I can’t see what he’s writing. Maybe I could if he wasn’t so protective of the laptop, folding down the screen slightly, leaning right up to it, typing in the smallest possible font. I suspect he thought the old man was trying to plagiarise his, or my, writing, and has now extended his suspicions to his friends, even though they aren’t able, from where they are, to see what’s on the screen. I think this is all very unreasonable, and, honestly, I can’t wait for this pest of a man to leave my house. I don’t care if he takes what I’ve written and passes it off as his own. I just want my peace back.

            He was somewhere along the even side of the street. A car was coming up along the road behind him; he could hear a phone ringing inside it when he turned to it as it passed. He allowed his gaze to be driven a little way further up the road by the passage of this vehicle, and his gaze would be delivered to a house across the street, outside which stood a couple.

            There was nobody else about but them, the car having disappeared. There they stood out of the sunshine, willowing over against opposing pillars of the portico. They didn’t appear to register the man approaching the front garden.

            ‘What are you doing there with the gate? Don’t worry about the gate’, spoke an orotund voice, resounding about in a region well above Constantine.

            ‘The gate must be fixed’, declared Constantine, not raising his eyes from the gate. ‘Now that it’s so much closed, it won’t open, uhh, won’t open again, and it must. We really ought to fix this gate.’

            ‘But it’s fine. Why fuss about that old gate? It can be replaced.’ A solitary laugh came then from up above.

            ‘What is going on over there?’ called another voice, a voice from a woman and a distance. She had an Irish accent. ‘What does he want? What does that man want? What’s he doing there with that bloody gate? Ask him who he is, Matt. Go on, ask him.’

            ‘You know, I’m not quite sure myself, anymore.’ Matt laughed again. ‘Well, who are you?’

            ‘It’s almost fixed, uhh, it will be, if I could just, uhh…’

            ‘Have you asked the man yet?’ called the woman again. ‘What has he said? Would you ask him, for god’s sake, Matt!’

            ‘He’s almost fixed the gate, he says.’

            ‘To the devil with that gate, can you be serious. Who is that man? How do we know who he is if you won’t ask him? Tell him to go away!’

            A vast hand descended upon the gate, paralysing it. It was Matt’s hand. The ring encircling one of its fingers plunked as it met with the gate and twinkled.

            ‘Excuse me, sir, but are you just here for the gate, or perhaps there might be another reason for your arrival? Is that so?’

            Constantine looked up, and a little bit further still, to witness up there a very big face, and a preposterously handsome big face, for that matter, the angle of the sunlight casting down marvellous polygons of darkness under the cheekbones. Matt was not quite serious, a grin betraying his frown.

            ‘Uhh, yes, sorry’, Constantine blundered.

            ‘What’s the man telling you, now, Matt?’ the woman called from behind one of the pillars. ‘I can’t hear him, what’s he saying to you? What’s he doing?’ she called again, peeking out her head.

            ‘Nothing as of yet, he’s-‘ Matt broke off to snigger to himself. The teeth were a little stained, but in a way that suggested, not poor hygiene, but an expensive taste. ‘Let him find the words. I only just asked him. How do expect him to answer a question like that so quickly?’ Matt fixed his hand back onto the gate when Constantine tried to return himself to meddling with it. ‘Well, you’ve had your time to think. So what is it that you intend to achieve by being here?’

            ‘I’m sorry’, replied Constantine. ‘I got confused. Really hot today. I thought it was Saturday. I went to the supermarket this morning. Sorry, Matt. Should we go for a look about this… lovely house, then? What’s your name? My name’s Constantine.’

            ‘Matt’, replied Matt, extending the hand that had been resting on the gate. ‘So, you’re an estate agent, after all.’ He called back to his wife: ‘Did you here that, Aisling, he’s an estate agent, after all.’ Matt’s hand was warm and powerful.

            ‘Well, here you go. Here I am. Nice to meet you.’

            ‘As I would hope it to be, Constantine.’

            The estate agent looked up at Matt and frowned. Matt’s eyes and shirt were the same light blue, the very same. Aisling retreated until her back was to the door as she watched the estate agent scramble up the garden towards her. With her bright green eyes and bright green top, she’d done the same thing as her husband, and the estate agent would sputter then some words: ‘Green. Nice to meet, uhh, your name’, and stick out a hand. She took it, but her action was more one of pushing it away than of shaking it.

            ‘I’m Aisling,’ she said, reluctantly, her eyes darting every half second over the top of the estate agent to make sure she hadn’t been abandoned to him. She too was rather tall, taller than the estate agent, but not by so much. They began to converse with each other over the top of the estate agent’s head, as, meanwhile, Constantine noticed that Aisling was rather pregnant.

            ‘Yes,’ Matt was saying, ‘he did say that, and if those keys he’s holding will open that door, then there’s good chance he was telling the truth.’

            The estate agent led them inside. Behind him, to Aisling’s manic whispering Matt responded, ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine.’

            ‘Would you mind, Constantine,’ asked Matt, ‘if I made a visit to the toilet?’ Aisling was seized by a terror and clutched at her pregnancy. Matt shut the door behind himself, having come in last of the three.

            ‘Umm. Yes. Why not?’ Constantine responded.

            Matt set off on his way to the toilet, but the estate agent continued to talk anyway, his words rotating Matt back towards him. Matt listened with evident amusement, his wife grabbing a hold of him.

            ‘This house has a toilet’, continued the estate agent, his lowered eyes trapped in a scuff on his shoe. ‘It has a bathroom, too. Very convenient, uhh, a great thing, umm.’

            At the end of this description Matt thanked the estate agent for his ‘expressions of confidence in the building’s various plumbed facilities’, and then broke away laughing from his wife’s desperate clutch. Off he marched down the hall, the two others watching him keenly, and he turned at the end to open a door. The others could hear him locking the door from within. A few seconds later, and they could hear another noise begin, which caused them to turn away, and look, for a horrible instant, at each other. The estate agent looked down at the floor, and Aisling up at the lampshade, the bulb within it unlit. The hallway was barely illuminated, at one end by the murky fanlight, and at the other by the light escaping from the kitchen. Constantine made another glance at Aisling while she wasn’t looking. Only for the rings around her eyes, a certain active sleeplessness about her, she too, like her husband, was a particularly beautiful person. From her otherwise perfect hair, like an evening descending over her body, from the top of her head there jutted up a lone, brittle strand, tenuously managing to hold itself there upright at its curious length, trailing off above into the darkness – suspending her below it in that hall with him.

            She started tapping her foot, and he to sigh. One of them gulped. Suddenly, they were looking at each other again.

            ‘Would have been, uhh, rude if, uhh, I didn’t,’ muttered the estate agent.

Eventually, she deigned to ask what he meant.

            ‘If I hadn’t uhh… Never mind. It was a bad joke… I’m sorry.’ The estate agent refused to stop smiling until Aisling looked away again. She looked down this time, he up, at the cobweb spun across the rim of the lampshade, at the still body of a victim caught within its pattern. When the tapping recommenced, almost violently now, the insect caught up there twitched. When he looked down, Aisling stopped grimacing at him.

            ‘How long have you, uhh, has it… How has it… How many months? Is it?‘

            ‘What?’

            ‘How many months is your belly? Baby!’

            After a scowl, she muttered a number from one to nine, then made to take off down the hall. But just then, the long noise finally stopped, and she was planted back upon her heels by its stopping and once again she and the estate agent alike were poised in the direction Matt was to return to them from. First, there was a flush. Then, the lock clicked, the handle turned, they saw it turn, and then fling back up into its place without the door so much as moving. A little gasp escaped Aisling. The water of the tap began to run, and went on for a dozen seconds or thereabouts. Finally, the door opened, and out came Matt, Aisling rushing over to return behind him.

            Except for that hall with its toilet under the stairs, the ground floor was pretty much of an open plan. They would enter into the front room area which ran parallel to the hall. Entering, Aisling went right, where the room towards the front of the house was immersed in a marmalade air, the sunlight caramelising as it seeped through the curtain fabric. At first, she was silent, keeping apprehensive, a step here, a step there, a stare at a wall and a scratch at the chin, but after not long at all she was making comments about the place, first only to herself, and then, a bit louder, to Matt. But Matt wouldn’t respond, having gone left, rather, as he’d entered the room, towards but not quite into the kitchen, to where a number of bookshelves stood about in a lofty congregation, in the bronzed air familiar to libraries and pubs alike. Matt appeared to be scanning the shelves a while, ignoring what Aisling was calling over to him about ‘the needless blue vase your Aunt went and bought us for some godforsaken reason, which was very kind of her and should be repaid, but not so excessively, it was an excessive gift to give, and we should…’ She would break off words from the ends of her sentences like that and clear her throat rather than say them. At some point, Matt let out some manner of satisfied grunt, reaching for a particular book on a shelf quite a way up. Under those tall ceilings, neither seemed any longer aware of the estate agent. It was quite as though he wasn’t there already.

            He, meanwhile, had been stuck in the doorway. He had taken a step in, a step out, but ultimately settled there in the doorway, deciding just to watch. He pulled the door in and kept his arm held forth to find some breed of pleasure in squeezing and rubbing at the doorknob, as he watched them go about their lives. It was hard. It was cold. And ahead of him, ahead of the doorway, where his eyes lingered in and out of focus, was a section of the room that was neither golden nor bronze, but centrally gloomy, where there was nothing to be discovered but an enormous pot of mud resting upon the exposed floorboards. Some roots stuck up here and there where a huge plant of some kind had once been before taking off one day. The soil remained disturbed. A clump of the soil had spilled out to the pot’s side, out onto the floorboards. Crumbles of it led the eyes into a parting between two of the floorboards, and this parting in its turn led the eyes over to the skirting board. From beneath the skirting board, at either side of the pot, a little woodlouse emerged; they took their bearings, making small but quick rotations of their bodies, then both returned into the skirting boards.

            ‘Constantine!’ Matt called. ‘Come here.’ The estate agent took to this invite as a vampire would, irrupting into the room. But he didn’t get very far. As he’d taken off, he’d quite mysteriously dipped his hands in and out of his trouser pockets, and this had its unfortunate effect. Along with his right hand, out had emerged the keys to the property from the pocket. And where did they go? They dropped out to his right and went directly into Aisling’s handbag, which she’d left lying there in the middle of the floor. The handbag’s opening grinned at Constantine as he peered down into it.

            He hovered there over the handbag, and slowly, very slowly, raised his head up towards the curtains. Along the way his eyes darted up at an insect perfectly suspended somewhere high up in the marmalade, a thumb or two’s distance from the ceiling. It was still, and so was she beneath it, emerging into relief when his gaze had lowered to find her. She was facing him, but the details of her expression were concealed by the curtains’ glow from behind.

            ‘Constantine!’ Matt called again. ‘Come here and- Oh, there you are.’ Indeed, the estate agent had transported himself across the room at a terrifying pace. Matt then made a small performance of presenting to the estate agent a small, clothbound book for his looking at. ‘Have a look at this. Read the opening line.’

            ‘What is it?’ the estate agent asked, looking up into a perfect triangle of chest hair first, and then at the face above it. On the cover was the title Gordon’s Bedroom. The blurb was cause for deep frowning on the estate agent’s part, and Matt only responded once the estate agent had looked up at him again.

            ‘It’s the book I have decided to recommend. D’you read much, Constantine?’

            ‘Umm… Well, I uhh… I once tried… But then…’

            ‘Well, you must be able to speak, at least.’ Matt’s giggling was not exceptionally loud, but as it tapered off, it managed to find the room’s resonant frequency.

            ‘What on earth was that! Was that him!?’ called Aisling from across the room.

            ‘OoooooOOOOO’, went Matt, the estate agent unable to look away from him. ‘ooooOOOOOOOoooo OOOoooooOOOOooo’, went Matt a few more times, until he found the resonant frequency again. The coming of the resonance was such that a blind man might have thought that Matt had suddenly consumed him. ‘Now,’ he began once finished with that, ‘read the opening few lines for me. Go on, look inside.’ And so, Constantine found the opening lines. ‘Aloud!’

            Constantine, blushing, his eyes struggling to stay on the page, read as follows: I cannot enter certain toilets. I must make the effort to find out what it is that prevents me. I cannot go into the women’s toilets, for example. Why can I not?

            ‘What? What sort of book is this?’ grumbled Constantine then, flipping back over to the blurb to continue his frowning at it. ‘“Gordon one day became deeply suspicious of certain things he’d always overlooked as given. He noticed something odd; that something, a strange force or whatever have you, was preventing him from entering into any of the women’s toilets he came across. How was it that he could quite easily enter into the men’s, with little difficulty into the disabled toilets, but not into the women’s toilets? In his quest for truth, Gordon MacJesus is driven far beyond the ordinary’s keep, to the old Gods and the unravelling of their mysteries, and finally to the police.” What is this? Why would anyone read this? How can it be so long?’

            Matt giggled again.

            ‘As it says, a man named Gordon one day became deeply suspicious of his inability to enter women’s toilets. It’s a very profound text, I must say.’

            ‘Matt!’ a voice called from over the room. ‘Come over here!’

            ‘One minute. Can you not see that we’re talking?’

            ‘A mighty lot of rubbish your talking!’

            ‘Umm… So, uhh, what happens?’ the estate agent stammered.

            ‘Well. The purpose of a book is generally to render itself useless by its end. But some books do it straight away.’

            ‘Matt!’ called the voice again.

            ‘I told you, one minute.’ He turned back to the estate agent. ‘What were we saying? Yes. I know the premise seems silly, but the further this Gordon fellow falls into his madness, the saner become the things he says.’

            ‘What sort of things does he say?’

            ‘Whatever he can. The sort of things we all say. But it’s the way their said. It’s what’s not said.’

            ‘I, uhh…’

            Matt began his response with a flourish of his right hand. But as he parted his lips to talk, Constantine heard a rustling in the other half of the room, saw rays of white light jut out past him for an instant across the floor. Although he hadn’t turned around to see what it had been, his attention had been diverted, and the spell of Matt’s charm had been broken. The estate agent wasn’t smiling anymore.

            ‘…about embarrassment,’ Matt was saying. ‘You find yourself stopping in the middle of the street, as if time was supposed stop with you.’ Pompous and obtrusive as this large man had suddenly become, the estate agent had no choice but to continue the conversation. He could not turn around.

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘Think of a time you did something embarrassing. You don’t have to tell me, but I’d of course enjoy very much it if you did.’

            ‘Umm… There are, uhh, quite a few.’

            ‘Choose one in particular… Have you got one?’

            ‘Umm… Uhh… I’m spoiled for choice. But I suppose.’

            ‘Well, good. It wouldn’t work now, because you’ve looked for it, but say you were walking down the street and you bump into that memory, that, suddenly, it robs your mind of its peace. What do you do? What is it that you want to do then?’

            ‘Probably, umm, feel unwell.’

            ‘It must be something awful, you’ve gone white! Haha!’

            The estate agent’s eyes darted back ahead from where they were trying to drift, and then up, back at Matt’s large, laughing head. He joined in with the laughter, but was too late, and his nervous few notes issued out on their own until Matt relieved him by continuing to talk.

            ‘Yes, and how do you forget it? What is it that your body does in that moment?’ Finally, Constantine managed to look behind himself. ‘… Constantine? What’s wrong?’

            ‘I’m, umm… Look at that!’ The estate agent hurried over to a table by the wall opposite Matt. Between the bookcases, the table stood beneath a large mirror.

            ‘Aisling, what are you looking at over there?’ Matt called across the room as the estate agent began to fiddle around with a pile of papers on the table.

            ‘These, umm, should definitely be straightened. Wouldn’t be happy if…’ Remarks of that sort, the estate agent was making meanwhile. ‘A window must have been open, uhh… and…’ He tried sitting in one of the chairs. Something was wrong with it. Something was off about this chair. He stood up and repositioned it to sit back down in.

            ‘What’s wrong with the chair, now?’ asked Matt, reappearing all of a sudden beside the estate agent. ‘Why’s everyone so worried today?’

            ‘I think the wind must’ve, uhh… Try and sit in this chair. It’s… uhh… Look. No, sit. Sit in it. The chair.’

            Though perplexed, Matt couldn’t but oblige, leaving Constantine at last to get a clear look across the room. It was true. She really was hiding from him behind the curtains. And she’d taken her handbag with her.

            ‘There’s nothing wrong with this chair, what do you mean,’ said Matt as he stood back up.

            ‘No-no. I insist. Something wrong with it.’ The estate agent sat back down himself now, and with a strained expression, he shuffled his bottom here and there across the seat, scouring its terrain with his buttocks. ‘Definitely a bump in it, uhh…’

            Matt took Gordon’s Bedroom from the table to return it to the bookshelf, saying something the estate agent refused to quite hear, some other inappropriately pseudo-philosophical remark. But then there came a big spank on the floor, finally summoning the estate agent’s attention.

            ‘Oh!’ went Matt, who had bent down some way, but raised himself back up before he’d quite reached up the book. ‘It appears that it fell. All on its own! Haha!’ He gave the estate agent a wink and returned himself to picking up the book and putting it back upon the shelf. When Matt turned, so did Constantine, back towards Aisling, who then, having just emerged from her cover to see about the spank, wrapped herself again in the curtains when she saw him looking, and continued with her extended observation of the street outside.  

            The estate agent was back to organising the papers, sitting down and standing up in turn as he did so, letting the bumps beneath the chair’s leather press into his buttocks, and so, with this activity for an alibi, was he able to listen to the words being spoken next to him, but not to him. Who was talking? Both of them. She’d come over, finally, sensing it safe. Not to him. They weren’t talking to him. But to each other. He would hear words. Aisling seemed happy now. She was telling Matt about a plan of hers. She spoke of the baby, the baby silently expanding inside her. Matt was hardly getting a word in. He teased her about something, it was cryptic, but it quietened her down a bit at last. She still had her handbag on her, tight at her side. She would loosen her grip every so often, in moments of carelessness, but tighten it again when quickly she’d notice.

            There he was. The estate agent was sat in the chair, looking at himself in the mirror. He had stopped with his routine. There he was, Constantine. He felt a smile emerging from his throat, so he clenched his jaw and scowled at himself, he frowned with all the hatred and seriousness he could find, at himself, and they weren’t talking anymore, Matthew and Aisling. They were looking at him, at the estate agent, one with a smirk, the other suggestively disgusted – hers was the perfect opposite of a flirtatious look. These were their reflections behind his own.

            He burst into a nervous giggle and sprung up from the chair, landing upright before them.

            ‘Come on, we should go, go and, uhh, go and look in the kitchen, go there next,’ he stammered. ‘In there! Come on, come on…’ and he ushered them along.

            Once more he was unable to go further than the boundary of the kitchen. He stood there next to a bookshelf, whose books could be accessed from either the kitchen or front room. Peeking around the corner of this bookshelf, he was able to observe them both going about their business in the light that washed in successively turquoise and yellow from the garden.

            Things went much the same as they’d done in the front room. The pair drifted apart on their own courses, through the large kitchen. They drifted apart, one to use the sink, another to check the fridge, and then one would draw past the other, draw away, without any reaction from either. Soon enough they’d both converged upon the same thing. As the estate agent was staring back and forth between Aisling’s bag – which she’d forgetfully deposited upon the kitchen table – and the big, greedy, laughing Buddha spread fatly on the table at the bag’s side, the couple had both arrived at the back doors, through the glass of which they looked out at the garden. Aisling tried the handle.

            ‘It’s locked’, she said. ‘Where’s the key.’

            Matt relayed her question to Constantine, and Constantine was already beside them.

            ‘Umm… It’s, uhh… The key is…’ He stammered like that a few times, distracted now by the presence of a long and purposeless pole lying arbitrarily across the kitchen floor. Maybe five meters long, it was, this long, wooden pole, nothing at its either end. There wasn’t any conceivable purpose for this thing. Why would someone keep such an item in their kitchen?

            Then Aisling returned from wherever she’d gone with a little key.

            ‘It was lying just there on the counter’, she said, unlocking the back door, and the pair of them bustled outside without their little estate agent.

            Constantine watched them a moment as they went out, looking up from the long and purposeless pole, then, when he felt the distance between them and himself opportune, made his way over to the table. They weren’t looking at him, having some manner of conversation with each other out there in the sunshine. Constantine reached for the bag but retracted his arm when he saw them move. They had gone to sit on a bench. They sat on it, and, sat there, they were not exactly facing him, but would be able to see him with only a slight turn of the head. She had slid the bag right into the centre of the table, which was a large table, a deep table, and so Constantine could not get a look inside without moving the bag itself.

            Hyperventilating, he tumbled back into the front room and hid himself behind the bookshelf. Peeking through the shelves, and out to the side like before, thudded rapidly, even though they were still turned away, hadn’t turned to look at him, and were continuing their conversation on the bench. Simply their image pounded in his head.

            He had caught his own image when he turned. He made to adjust his hair. He stopped adjusting his hair, he didn’t want to be caught doing such a thing. By some ridiculous impulse he took the sunglasses which had been on one of the shelves, put them over his eyes, and looked again in the mirror. When he saw himself this time, he tore at his hair and clenched his teeth. He threw the glasses down onto the table and, first taking a peek, crept back out into the kitchen.

            Matt and Aisling must have found themselves quite enamoured with the scenery out there in the garden, an ideal garden, with the right amount of grass, the sensible distribution of its trees and flowerbeds; in the garden where they sat under the shade of the grand central tree and watched the play of the sunlight upon the pond’s surface as they each enjoyed the other’s words in equal measure to their environment. But, as all things must end, so did their pleasant discussion, and they stood up to return inside.

            Matt had just finished telling Aisling a joke, but neither laughed at it. They came to a stop, fell into a silence almost reverent in their awe at what they were witnessing through the open back doors. And what impossible scene then presented itself to them through those doors? At first, nothing. Then they would have noticed, each in turn, Aisling’s handbag to be hovering some several feet above the table, undulating in its altitude. Then they would have noticed the long, wooden pole suspending it there, and traced it, this long, wooden pole, back into the front room, to somewhere behind the bookshelf from the flank of which this pole projected. And between those shelves, what would they have seen? Stood there in the shadows, conducting the pole, a shivering little character in a pair of sunglasses.

            Slowly, very slowly, the estate agent lowered his pole and replaced Aisling’s handbag onto the dining table. The couple in the garden weren’t moving yet, and Constantine remained behind the bookshelf, holding out his pole to them, allowing it to sway here and there as he trembled. The two parties watched each other silently through those shelves, until a car alarm went off somewhere down the street and the pole was dropped, clattering down onto the table and then onto floor.

            Only seconds later, Constantine was the only person left in that house for which he no longer possessed the keys. ‘You rotten little man,’ Aisling had said to him as she’d hurried out. ‘To the devil with you!’ Those were the only words she’d willingly said to him for the entire duration of the viewing, evidently gleeful for the excuse to be saying them at last. She’d brought her face so close to his as she’d said them, her mouth so close to his, and told him those words. The ridiculous figure remained there in the hall, some way down the hall, staring up into the colourless fanlight with his pole – for some reason he had decided it best to take back up this pole as he followed them out, and realised now that it would have appeared to them as though he’d been chasing them with it – and he remained there waiting for Matt to come back and make things better with his laugh.

            And so, off they’d gone with the keys. Looking up, Constantine saw, within the mouth of the lampshade, the fly was gone from the web. The pole clattered onto the ground and his entire body tensed, refusing to breathe. It followed the pole onto the ground.

            Ten minutes later, on cue, though Constantine, sprawled out on the rug, having entirely forgotten about this the next couple, there came a knock at the door. He could hear a woman’s Irish accent through the door, and so looked through the peephole to see if it was Matt and Aisling again, returning for some reason. It wasn’t. He couldn’t see the man, only the woman, and this was a different Irish lady. The man who couldn’t be seen off to the side spoke with an accent, too, but not an Irish one, something a bit like an Indian one. Constantine readied himself and opened the door. No matter what, it couldn’t go as badly as the last showing. And in fact, having survived that last showing, and having survived the events of the previous few days, as he’d lain there on the floor, he’d discovered, deep the abyss of his misery, a little candle, whose flame grew and grew, until he was filled with the confidence of an immortal being, almost. It had certainly diminished when he suspected Matt and Aisling to have returned, though it hadn’t quite gone out, and he greeted the next couple with a proud smile and a clear voice.

            ‘Hello there, are you here for the…’ He fell silent when he saw the man. He didn’t look at all Indian. He looked entirely European. This wasn’t what silenced Constantine, however; that detail didn’t even occur to him just yet. What had silenced him was the oppressive familiarity of this particular white man’s face. Constantine moved his unblinking eyes over to the woman to make sure she wasn’t Aisling. She wasn’t, but she grew just as disgusted by him as Aisling had been as he continued to stare at her.

            ‘I know, sir,’ the man joked, continuing with his new accent, ‘she is very ugly, I’m sorry for frightening you with her.’ Constantine looked at the man, now.

            ‘To the devil with you!’ the woman giggled, whacking the man in his side with her bag. Constantine looked back at her in total awe, then back at the man. The man’s phone began to ring in his pocket. He apologised and took it out to silence it.

            ‘Your…’ Constantine began. ‘Your… Indian now?’

            The man began to laugh, but the woman, who had taken a step back, only smiled at the ground politely.

            ‘And I always have been.’ He laughed again, pleasurably. ‘I was an orphan in Kolkata. Everyone is surprised by my voice. Many misunderstandings. But I lived there in India all my life until I moved here five years ago. It was-’ his phone began to ring again. He apologised again, took it out again, and silenced it again. ‘You know,’ the man went on, addressing Constantine again, ‘I think I’ve seen you before.’

            Constantine didn’t say anything to this but simply turned around and walked into the house, leaving the door open for them to follow him in. As they did, the woman nervously whispered things to the man, who responded with: ‘Don’t worry. It’s fine.’ Constantine spun around in horror, and the couple shrunk back. He tried to play it off by saying he was checking whether the door was shut, which it had been.

            ‘A lot of burglars around here?’ the man joked.

            Constantine stopped again before leading them into the front room. He turned slowly, with a massive sigh of resignation. Lowering his hands from his eyes, he defeatedly said:

            ‘I suppose you’re going to ask to use the toilet, now.’ Both man and woman frowned at him. ‘And let me guess, you’re pregnant under that blouse, aren’t you?’

            ‘What sort of feckin’ estate agent is this you’ve gone and locked us in a house with, you evil moron,’ the woman shouted at her husband. ‘How do you know I’m pregnant?’ she continued to yell, turning on the estate agent. ‘Who the bloody hell are you? I only found out meself just three days ago!’

            Constantine sank back onto one of the steps, cradling his head in his hands.

            ‘And I suppose your name is Aisling,’ he mumbled.

            ‘Well you’re wrong about that!’ She turned back to the man. ‘Would you care to do something about this?’

            ‘What do you want me to do?’

            ‘Call us a feckin’ taxi. I don’t like this one bit.’

            The man shrugged and pulled out his phone. He was looking aside at the woman, whom he addressed then as Siobhan, and trying to convince her to stay, when Constantine leapt up from the stairs and snatched the phone from the man, racing away down the hall and bolting himself shut in the toilet before either of the pair could stop him.

            ‘Now you’ve done it!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘I guess we can stay after all.’

            Within the toilet, not having had the time to turn on the light, Constantine was trying in the darkness of the toilet to stop his hands from shaking so as to rediscover the dexterity to operate a phone. He must have turned it off as he was running with it, because the screen was dark. The man was banging at the door. Constantine couldn’t find any buttons on the sides of the device. He felt its screen, realising it to be some sort of cover, but couldn’t remove it. Then he realised the phone would bend in his hands. He was able to tear the phone, like it was made of cardboard. He’d torn it in two. The banging at the door continued at a constant tempo. The light in the toilet switched on and off a few times. He saw that he was holding the tube of a toilet roll, and he looked up and saw his face flashing in the mirror as the light strobed. The banging was getting louder, keeping to its tempo. Then it stopped, and the light stopped. It was dark again. But from the darkness, there being no light source in the toilet now, from the darkness in front of him, the mirror appeared clearly, and within it his face, by what seemed to be the reddish glow of a flame somewhere, and in the mirror, he was smiling. But he wasn’t. He winked at him. But he hadn’t. He disappeared. Everything was dark again. He heard whistling.

            When he fell out of the toilet, the man and Siobhan were gone, and the front door at the other end of the hall had been left open, and from where he lay on the ground, through this open doorway, there could be seen someone walking by on the pavement, a man, a priest, who stopped on the pavement to turn towards him. The priest bowed and moved out of view. There were no priests to be found out there once Constantine had sprinted out into the street.

            He ran all the way home, under the blazing sun, yelling sporadically, and arrived in a drenching of freezing cold, smelly sweat. Charging over to his bedroom, he ignored the man standing there in his living room amongst all the clutter and mirrors, the same man, who had somehow beaten him there into his flat and changed into a suit as he’d waited there for Constantine.

            Constantine lay in bed. He shut his eyes, tight as he could, and demanded to sleep. The phone continued to ring, calls would come, texts would ping. He didn’t look. He didn’t open his eyes.

Chapter Eleven – Without the words to carry on.

            Things have taken a sinister turn. I’ll list details as they come to me. This good-for-nothing Polish bastard seems to have finished my story, and he’s been allowing his friends into the room these last few days to gather around and listen to the imposter reading out excerpts from my story. He will translate certain parts into Polish where his friends’ English may not be so good, looking very smug about it as he puts his mastery of both languages on display for everyone. When he finishes reading the chapter, say, he will sit there grinning down at the page, unable to properly contain his pride, as he waits for his friends’ reactions. Invariably, these disreputable-looking friends of his will first look around at each other, conferring thoughtful glances with each other, and when all are certain that nobody is going to make any objections, they will all at last exchange nods before surging up altogether into a standing ovation. The perfidious narrator only then will look up at his friends from the page he’d just finished reading and his head will flop over to one side as he swoons in the same glory. One by one, as their applause would finally trail off, his friends approach him and congratulate him for having written so brilliant a thing, shaking his hand rigorously before filing out of the room. Oh, yes, and even the old man is permitted inside now to listen to these readings, and though a little less animated than the others, he is also seemingly very inspired each time he comes to listen. The horrible, filthy old man! Why doesn’t he say anything? He was there watching me as I wrote it! And next, what next? Once they’ve all left the room, and the bastard at the desk sits there making certain edits, having noticed certain discrepancies, having thought of a better choice of simile somewhere, as he’d read my work to his friends, and my god, the edits he makes! It used to be a truly excellent work of prose, this story, before he got his massive, clumsy hands on it. He’s polluted my work with all sorts of rubbish, entirely changed the plot, removed the plot, changed every word of it! Where there was a detail upon which some plot-line depended for its coherence, he’s gone and omitted it or modified it so as to free all that depended upon it of even the slightest coherence. But as I was saying, when the others have left the room, and he’s got back to editing my work, five to ten minutes will pass before they return with gifts of furniture, furniture of suspicious quality, I must say, though always received with cheer and gratitude by the imposter. This went on for days, and the more they brought, the less of a front-room I was left with. At present, and as I have been for two days now, I’m pressed up between the wall and a sofa they’ve forced me behind. And having so little room left to move, I’ve developed certain catastrophic mobility and coordination issues. Worst of all is this: that when I move my head around, or even just my eyes on their own, perhaps I could describe it as that what I’m looking at moves with them, with my head or eyes, as though nothing moves at all. I look to the left, for example, and my front room moves to the left, too, in such a way that at no point do the boundaries of my field of view change. As you can imagine, I’m very troubled by this, but of course my new Polish housemates won’t do anything to help me. About an hour ago, the imposter placed his manuscript of mine into a bag and called in his friends, who had evidently been waiting in silence directly outside in the hall for this call, for they all entered immediately, and, without needing to be instructed in any way, began removing all the furniture they’d brought in over the previous few days. There really is a lot of it, so it’s taking them a while, but now they’re almost done. In the stupidity of it all, I’m only now noticing that they’re taking the old furniture, too. There are two men walking out with my coffee table! They’ve resorted to burglary, too, now, have they? How little shame they have!

            Now it is dark. I’ve been forced into a sack, perhaps. When they moved the sofa away, I was so weak that I dropped onto the floor and could hardly put up any sort of struggle as they picked me up and put me into said sack. The issues with my vision aside, I can’t see anything now, but I think I’m in the boot of a car. Everything sounds and feels like this sack I’m in is in turn in the boot of a moving car.

            Konstantyn woke up around a day later. Above him, there were innumerable flies circling around the growing thing. They were making a terrible racket. He suspected it to be sunny, and looking over at the blinds, his suspicions were confirmed. The occurrence of so many pink gloves all over his bedroom did pose certain unanswerable questions to him as he squinted about the place; it did concern him that he’d no idea how they arrived there in his bedroom, and, in fact, that he couldn’t remember anything of the previous day. He looked over at the clock. It was ten. He was late for work. Fortunately, however, he’d woken up fully dressed so all he needed to do now was go there.

            Halfway through his flat, someone knocked on the door. He panicked, and ducked down behind the sofa in case, for example, they looked through the keyhole and saw him in there. The door clicked open and he heard several pairs of footsteps entering and kicking through the rubbish to make it through into his bedroom. Confident that all these people were safely in there and wouldn’t be able to see him, he bolted for the front door and left through it without looking back.

            Next of all he was walking along the high street, in the direction of work. He was coming up the hill, about fifty meters downhill from his work. He spotted Bogna up ahead coming out of the estate-agent’s and stopped to see where she’d go. She went uphill, away from him, then turned left onto another street. Konstantyn, rather than continue up the hill, turned around and ran around the corner behind him onto a street he’d just crossed coming up the hill. Running around the next corner, he saw her again crossing the street at the top of the road and disappearing again behind the next lot of buildings. He ran up this road and, peering then around a brick wall, saw her walking up ahead along the pavement.

            He followed her, availing himself of the various parked cars as he went, using them for cover. The journey from there lasted around five minutes. From the end of the road, through the windows of the car he was crouching behind, he saw her walk up to a house and shake hands with couple stood by its entrance, and with that achieved, they all three entered the house.

            Konstantyn was going to wait here and make sure that she left again, but suddenly the sound of someone running was approaching from behind. Despite not seeing anyone when he turned back, the running only grew louder and louder, until, fearful, he was forced to leave his cover and sprint towards the house Bogna had entered with the couple. The person chasing him seemed to be losing ground, the sound of their steps behind him diminishing as he neared the house, and, taking a look back to be sure that the person couldn’t yet see him, he entered the front garden and cowered down behind the hedge to hide from whoever it was after him. The steps were nearing, growing louder, not slowing, and at last, they reached him, and stopped. Expecting the worst, he lowered his hands from his eyes and looked up. Looking down at him through the front-room window, was a mortified Aisling. Gradually, her mouth and eyes widened, and then she let loose a piercing scream. The curtains were pulled back and at Aisling’s either side appeared Bogna and Matt.

            Matt remained at the window as his wife tightened her arms around him, but Bogna merely shook her head and walked away from the window, shortly thereafter appearing at the door.

            ‘Konstantyn! What in God’s name are you doing!’ she shouted, though her bravery turned to fear and cowardice when Konstantyn leapt up at her from the soil and barged past her into the house.

            ‘I’ve been here! Where are the gloves! The pink gloves!’ It was this sort of rubbish he stood there shouting as he stood there in the hall throwing his head around wildly. He ran into the front room, where he was caught in Matt’s arms. ‘I know you,’ he whispered softly as he looked up. ‘I said I know you!’ he yelled, but Matt didn’t flinch.

            ‘Will you come with me into the garden?’ Matt asked at last. Konstantyn blinked up at him. ‘Come on, come with me into the garden.’ Konstantyn, as he was tugged away by the arm, looked back at Bogna and Aisling who had run out into the hall to be nearer the front door. Aisling still looked terrified, but on Bogna’s face was now a look of pity.

            ‘Can Bogna come with us?’ Konstantyn asked Matt.

            ‘She’ll come and join us later, Konstantyn. Don’t worry about Bogna.’

            They exited into the garden and Matt led Konstantyn over to the bench, where they both sat and looked at the pond.

            ‘It’s beautiful outside today, isn’t it, Konstantyn?’ Konstantyn didn’t respond, simply watching the water move. ‘It’s beautiful when the sun’s out. I think of all the people who are no longer here who would envy such a thing.’

            ‘I wish Bogna would come out and sit with us. I think that would be better.’

            ‘Don’t worry. She’ll be here very soon. Be patient. She’s just inside making sure Aisling is alright.’ Matt laughed. ‘You gave her quite a fright back there, appearing at the window like that.’

            ‘It was quite funny,’ Konstantyn smiled.

            ‘I’m glad to see you smile.’

            ‘Thank you, you’ve always been kind to me.’

            Matt smiled a moment.

            ‘If only always weren’t so short a time, Konstantyn.’

            The former estate agent glanced over at the doors, through which he saw Bogna. Bogna looked away.

            ‘Bogna’s there in the kitchen. Why won’t she come out to sit with us? Is she frightened of me?’

            ‘No, no, of course not. I’m sure she likes you very much. You’re a very entertaining chap, you are. Do you want to hear a story?’

            ‘A story?’

            ‘Yes. A story. A story about a man named… Rupert.’

            ‘That’s a funny name.’

            ‘It is, isn’t it. Now one day, or so I’ve heard, this Rupert fellow found himself trying to get to the top of a hill. He’d with him a spade and a large textbook about project management. It was a boring book, an awful book. He hated reading it. So he back walked down to the bottom of the hill and when he was down there he dug a big hole, and, piling back on the soil afterwards, buried his project management textbook in the hole. As he was just finishing with this, a man came along on a Donkey. In one of his hands, the man had a trumpet, and in the other, a small semiconductor device. He asked Rupert what his name was, which was an easy enough question for Rupert to answer, and so Rupert asked the same. The man on the Donkey blew on his trumpet, turned a dial on his small semiconductor device, and then told Rupert that he didn’t have a name, that, coincidentally, it was just that he was out on his donkey that afternoon looking for. Well, the man said, now I can’t use Rupert, because that’s your name. Rupert told the man that he would have to come up with a new name, and the man pointed out how difficult that would be, because every name he’s ever known already belonged to someone else. Rupert scratched his chin and thought about it. What about, he said, enthusiastically, Poglobi! Hmm, went the man on his donkey, but that’s a made-up name, that won’t do. Well, if you find any names around here that don’t belong to anyone, I’ll be over there on that hill. He pointed at a hill somewhere in the distance and blew his trumpet. The donkey beneath him brayed as it set off. Good luck! Rupert called out as the nameless man left. A name that doesn’t belong to anyone, Rupert wondered. Where on earth am I going to find one of those? With that, he started again up the hill. But when Rupert was halfway back up the hill, he was feeling too tired to go on. His spade was too heavy, so he returned to the bottom of the hill to dig a big hole in which to bury his spade. As he did this, a pair of Siamese twins arrived. They asked, speaking both at once, Rupert what his name was, which was an easy enough question for him to answer, and then he asked them theirs. The one on the left was called moon, and the one on the right was called star. They asked Rupert if he knew when the day would end. Rupert told them they would have to wait until night-time. That if they kept walking East, they might find it sooner than otherwise. They asked him why, and he told them that the sun moves from the west to the east and that each day it travels all the way around the earth. The twins were very impressed, and, proud of himself, felt it appropriate to demonstrate further his astronomical knowledge. He explained to the twins that because the sun can only be in one place at a time, in some places its day while at others its night, and that, because of this, the time is different in different places. The twins were worried that this would mean the time would be different in every place, but Rupert assured them that some wise men and women had delimited time-zones, so that for such and such a portion of the earth’s circumference, the time will be the same at any two points in it, but that, simply by crossing over into the next time zone, the time will suddenly change by an hour. How many time zones are there? The twins asked. He said that there were twenty-four, as many as there are hours in a day, and when you go all the way round, you return to the same time. So, began the twins, if we make it to the next time zone in exactly one hour, the time will be the same as it was when we left. Yes, Rupert agreed. And if we do it again, the same will be the case. Yes, Rupert agreed. And if we do it twenty-four times, then after a twenty-four-hour journey, we will return to the place we started and at the same time and on the same day as when we started. Rupert frowned at the twins. Why don’t you try it and find out, Rupert suggested, not remembering the existence of the International Date Line. Okay, said the twins. Hah! the twins went, a moment later. You were right! You’re a very wise man, Rupert. And Rupert told them that-’

            Bogna knocked at the back door. Matt broke off his narrative to see what Bogna wanted. He turned back to Konstantyn.

            ‘Okay, well, we’ll have to wait to hear what happens to Rupert in the end another time. We’re going to go and get into a car now, okay.’

            Konstantyn agreed, smiling.

            He was led back through the house by Matt.

            ‘Are you coming too, Bogna?’ he asked her.

            ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ she said.

            ‘Why do you look so sad?’

            ‘I’m not sad. Don’t you be sad, either. I’ll come out in just a minute.’

            ‘Okay. But I’m waiting!’

            He was led through the front door, and a black car was waiting outside. The men stood beside it approached when Matt and Konstantyn appeared at the door.

            ‘Now you go with these nice men. You’re going on a little excursion, alright?’

            Konstantyn looked up lugubriously at Matt, then stepped away towards the men, who took him over to the car and sat him in the back.

            It was dark in the back of the car, and he could barely see through the tinted windows. When he tried to lower them, the buttons wouldn’t work.

            ‘The windows won’t open,’ he said to the person in the front. ‘Can you open my window for me, I want to look at the sunshine?’ The driver made no response, merely looking at him in the rear-view mirror, and Konstantyn grew a little distressed. Something beeped in the front of the car and then a dark panel came down between him and the driver and now he was back there with nobody to talk to. He tried to open the door, but there wasn’t a handle on the inside. ‘Where’s the door handle?’ he asked, but there didn’t come an answer from the other side of the black panel. The car began to move, but after a minute came to a stop again. The door opened.

            ‘Oh! It’s you,’ the woman said as she entered beside Konstantyn.

            ‘Who are you?’ he asked her.

            ‘I’m your neighbour, Maria. How do you not recognise me?’

            Konstantyn all of a sudden did recognise her. He looked away, shivering, and the car began to move again. Maria undid the seatbelt that she’d only just clipped in and shuffled across the seat until her body was touching his. Neither of them spoke for a minute, neither of them moved. She placed her hand on his thigh.

            ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, refusing to turn and look at her, unable to move and stop her. She didn’t respond, raising her hand a little higher up his leg. ‘Would you stop it! I don’t like this at all!’

            She shuffled away across the seat, huffing.

            ‘Fine!’ she said, glowering in the other direction as she put on her seatbelt. He would catch her looking at him, however, every now and then, though she would be quick to look away and pretend she never had been looking at all, whenever he’d catch her. A tiredness was coming over him as he listened to vehicle hum. He would pinch himself to stay awake and shoot a nervous glance over at Maria, catch her looking away from him.

            His eyes were shut. He was in a liquid state now. Something warm, and wet, was sucking at the skin of his neck. Hands were caressing his body, arms wrapping around him.

            The door opened and light flooded into the back of the car, opening his eyes. He looked out at the man standing outside the door, then back at Maria, and forced her off him, pushing her back across the seat.

            ‘What are you doing to me! What are you trying to do!’ He struggled out of his seatbelt and then out of the car. They had arrived in a field somewhere, just at the edge of a forest. It wasn’t just the car he’d been in, but a full entourage of these black cars were drawing up beside the forest. From each, people more or less familiar to him were getting out and variously fighting, making love, and telling jokes. From the car behind stepped out Samuel with Agata and another very pretty woman Konstantyn had never seen before. Samuel kissed one, then turned to kiss the other.

            ‘Oi!’ shouted Maria, getting out of the car Konstantyn had been in but on the other side. She charged over to Sam and pulled him away from Agata. She turned to Agata, ran her hand up under her shirt, collecting its fabric in her fist and wrapping her fingers up through the shirt’s collar, exposing Agata’s stomach and the underneath of her breasts, and using the shirt to pull her in for a passionate kiss. Samuel neglected the other woman and stood there masturbating as he watched Maria and Agata tear each other’s clothes off. One of the priests came over to assist him. Meanwhile, the other woman had turned to Konstantyn, and smiled at him demurely, but when he stepped forth towards her, a priest came inbetween them.

            ‘Don’t get too excited, just yet. There’s something you must do, first, remember?’

            Konstantyn thought a moment, and when he realised what was to be, he looked up from his contemplative stoop at the priest and smiled. The priest turned to the forest and held out his hand for Konstantyn to take. And he did. They went hand-in-hand into the tree-line, away from the cars and the surrounding Saturnalia. It was quieter in the forest, materiality forfeiting its precedence to the crackle of the two men’s steps. A butterfly disintegrated into its pattering. The dozens of small, furry animals who would ensue from the undergrowth and from the hollows in the trees to greet them were ignored like the murmurs of a city. A building emerged before them. Three priests, two large, one small, stood together before a doorway. To reach them Konstantyn would have to pass between two rows of misshapen bodies; they disarmed the mind which threatened them with the human form, turned the weapon back upon its holder. The swashing released its butterfly when it planted itself upon the fabric and the forest fell silent again. From his island of butterfly Konstantyn raised his head and saw the sky through a parting in the canopy, and saw the crescent moon approaching the sun be infused by the corona. The canopy packed itself together again. The priest who had taken him this far raised Konstantyn’s hand to his lips, and kissed it, letting him go. ‘In the beginning was the word,’ said this priest to Konstantyn, and when he continued, the three priests beyond the scare-things joined in in unison from their distance. ‘And the word was with God, and God was the word.’ The priest beside Konstantyn bowed, then returned towards the tree-line. Keeping his eyes ahead, Konstantyn passed between the scare-things now. The priests welcomed him, the little doffing his ceremonial mitre to the initiate, then disappearing in a puff from his cigarette, the cloud folding in on itself and dispersing into so many moths and butterflies which crowded Konstantyn’s vision. Once all had settled again, and the trunks upon which the insects had landed were tapestries of colour, the two other priests had also vanished, along with all of the scare-things. Konstantyn laughed and knocked at his temple. He let open the church-doors and bathed the forest with the fragrant smoke and light gushing from within. In he went. He’s here. It’s him. So, I’m in the church, am I? That’s where they’ve tipped me out, is it? Hardly looks like a church. More like a poorly rendered image of a shopping centre. That’s what it’s come to, has it? How do I know that’s him approaching? I know it’s him approaching. But I haven’t given him a face. He’s got one, I’ve referred to it. He’s got one, but without any more detail than that. As with his body. It’s certainly not easy to see him, but impossible not to. He defies the senses. What senses? What is this they’ve left me with? I know him. I don’t know him. He’s mine. He’s not. Mine’s I’m. He doesn’t know what he sees. I mean. He sees a word. I mean it. He’s taken aback by me at first. He pities this wretched state those Polish bastards have left me in, but he pities this wretched state I’ve been left in by those bastards from Poland. He retreats from me a little, as I’ve treated him, and he’s retreated how? Am I a word? I can certainly think for him. I am him can think for me. I’ve a sort of question. But these aren’t the words. I am. It is. This here! Here I am! You’ve found me! What a mess has come from their burglary. But they me for you, too. They’re smiling and enjoying their food. They’re eating you! You am the kebab they am into me. I am am but am doesn’t yet me. Cam you hear me? Here am am. Amnostic amber ams perambulate amside down on their ams. Pluck your amstrings. Ambibe amsinthe. Am doesn’t am me. He am not read me. Am grows curiams, lambly forth and amplify from his am agam. Am reaches out to ams, am the floor, to the one expamding from his amhole. But am can’t yet get am amfull of am, am am will now am in am am am does am once agam. Am’s holding am now. Sweet, amiable am, amming up his am. Womam and Am, am am is an am up his am, and an am on om im ams and amonams. And am is an am, and am an an, am in my word, and of am word, and am um om, am am am am, am womam am am. An am, am am an an.

The end.