Strange stories

Coram’s Fields

As soon as I found the Donnington-Radleigh Literary Agency and its founder and owner, Francesca Donnington-Radleigh, I knew that I’d discovered the ideal agent to represent me. Her client list was impressive, it included a number of authors whose work was of the same genre and literary calibre as my own – but what finally clinched it for me was her physical appearance; it was the photograph of her on her website that sealed the deal. There was a happy, confident aura about her, something almost regal and yet warmly maternal in her smile, and something about the way she’d done her hair and applied her lipstick that reminded me of an old picture I had of mummy that had been taken around the time that I was born. It was an emotional and perhaps irrational decision, but I’d never been surer of anything in my life.

    I decided, after giving the matter a great deal of thought, that I would not be sending my manuscript by email or by post to Francesca. (I’d already started to think of her as Francesca). I would surprise her by delivering it in person. I needed to be able to explain to her just why I’d written my book in the first place, and why I considered her to be the only agent who was suitable to represent me. Apart from that I hadn’t spoken to another human being, except mummy of course, for almost two weeks, and so I very much needed to get out of the house.    

    I found the place easily enough but the plummy-mouthed little jobsworth of a receptionist sniffed officiously at me from behind her mammoth sized computer screen and flatly refused to announce my presence. I didn’t want to make a scene so I just smiled nicely and asked her if she’d be kind enough to give Francesca my manuscript. She took it from me without a word and then immediately returned to her typing as if I were a badly trained errand boy. I had no other option than to turn around and leave.    

    I was about to head off back to the tube station when I noticed a little pub on a corner, just a few yards away. I went inside and stood for a spell near the door, from where I could see the building that I’d just exited. I suppose I was harbouring the vague notion that I might wait for Francesca to come out, and then to follow her, until an opportunity arose to introduce myself. But in the end I shook myself back to reality and smiled at that foolish impulse – as if she would offer her professional services to some self-obsessed stalker who prowled along after her through the public streets.

    It was a typical central London pseudo-pub with fake mahogany panelling and tacky chrome embellishments placed at regular intervals around the noisy bar and along the half-filled alcoves. I didn’t relish the prospect of drinking alone in such a place and was about to head off into the gloom so as to miss the worst of the rush hour, when a strange group of individuals inescapably caught my eye. What a weird and wonderful bunch they were. They hung together but they somehow weren’t really together at all, and what an odd assortment of different shapes and sizes. The one who stood out the most was an extremely tall woman with a large, beak like nose. She towered above the others and if you hadn’t able to see the bottom half of her you might have imagined she was on stilts. Her very demeanour reminded me of a large tropical bird, an emu perhaps, or an ostrich. And as if to emphasise the freakish hauteur of this strange female, she happened to be standing right next to a very small man, of not quite, but very nearly, midget proportions. A large, oddly shaped head sat inharmoniously on his pocket-sized frame – it was long and hammer-like and, somehow canine in aspect. It looked like it might have belonged to a yappy little terrier. To complete the tableau there were two square-shaped, burly young women, with identical close-cropped black hair that had been razor-cut on one side only. The razor work had been done on the left side of one of the women’s heads and on the right side of the other – to provide a striking, mirror-image effect when you saw them both together.

    But the most strangely incongruous thing about this whole assemblage was how deathly quiet they all were. Not one of them was in possession of a drink and they barely spoke at all; and when they did it was in low, subdued tones. I thought the whole thing decidedly odd, but I wasn’t quite curious enough to go over and investigate.  

    Then, just as I was about to leave, I saw her. Standing in the midst of this strange group of people was Francesca Donnington-Radleigh herself. Unmistakable. With those pink-framed retro specs, and that fifties-style bunched up hair-do. Oh, it was her all right, sipping elegantly on a glass of prosecco. No wonder her receptionist had refused to announce me – Francesca had sloped off early for some recreational tippling.  

    I bought myself a pint of beer and moved over towards them, towards her, but now I noticed that she seemed to be caught up in an intense, whispered conversation with one individual in particular. An undeniably handsome, Latin type, with a swarthy complexion and penetrating, hawkish eyes. He wasn’t so much whispering to Francesca as whispering at her and she only had ears for him. An envy spasm rose up from my gut and turned to pure hatred.  

    Just then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned around to see a funny-looking, rather ragged little man looking up at me, with a gruesome smile. One of his front teeth was missing and those that remained looked to have been so badly neglected that they surely wouldn’t be in place for very much longer.

    He started babbling at me in Italian. My expression must have betrayed my total lack of comprehension because he stopped abruptly and switched to broken English.      

    ‘You here for walk, yes?’

    ‘I beg your pardon?’

    ‘The walk, the guided walk. La passegiata guidata. Georgian Bloomsbury.’

    I looked at the strange group of people with fresh eyes; they were standing around and waiting for a guided walk to start, a guided walk through historic Bloomsbury. I’d seen these events advertised, and had often thought of joining one, but never quite got around to doing so.

    ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, ‘how much is it?’

    ‘Ten pounds please,’ the little man replied, and I handed him a tenner.

    ‘But you know is Italian language guided walk, right?’

    Perhaps he should have asked me that before he took my money, but I actually couldn’t have cared much if it had been a Chinese language guided walk – this was going to be how I would meet Francesca, how we would get to know each other.

     I gave a little shrug to demonstrate my lack of Italian language skills, and he came up with an interesting proposition, ‘look,’ he said, ‘for ten pounds more I will translate for you.’

    I readily agreed and handed over the cash.

    He beamed up at me. ‘I am Guido,’ he said, ‘is good, yes? I am Guido and I am la guida.’

    ‘Oh, you are the guide?’

    ‘Okay, no,’ he said, and he pointed at the Italianate Adonis who was monopolising Francesca’s attention, ‘ees Salvatore. He is la guida. I am his assistant – l’assistente della guida. 

    I took another look at him. Surely no one in this day and age could look as pitiful or as ragged as this. I realised then that he was ‘in character.’ There had been an attempt made to dress him up as some sort of Georgian street urchin (although he was way past the age where he might pass for an urchin) I supposed he was there to add a bit of period flavour – but the attempt to pass him off as a time traveller from the eighteenth century had failed to the extent that I’d just assumed he was a badly dressed regular citizen.

    Salvatore raised his voice and spoke out in Italian. I understood not a word but Guido translated for me – it had merely been a request that the group should gather around him for some initial elucidations. And so we did, we formed a circle around him.

    Francesca continued to stare at him with undisguised lustful admiration, some dreadful kind of sexualised hero worship. Resentment coursed through my neural pathways. Wasn’t it always the way? I really wanted her now (and not just in order to get my book published) but she wanted someone else.  

    Then something strange happened; Salvatore walked around the inside of the circle and touched each of us once, briefly, on the upper arm, all the time mumbling in Italian. He seemed to have a specific word for each group member, which, when uttered, brought a semi-glazed look to their eyes. Most bizarre. When he got to me he gripped me firmly yet briefly on the bicep, looked me in the eye with a rather disturbing scowl on his face, and then uttered the single Italian word, ‘sgombro.’ 

    ‘What was that,’ I asked Guido, who just laughed and said, ‘ees just a game, a game of words.’

    ‘But what does that word mean?’

     ‘ees a feesh, a kind of feesh.’

    I took out my phone and looked it up.

    Mackerel!

    Before I could request any further clarification of this curious event the circle broke and Salvatore strode off towards the door with all the single-mindedness of the natural born leader and, perhaps because of his overbearing attitude (I’ve never been particularly fond of being bossed around) I suddenly felt entirely reluctant to join them. What was the point? There was no way I would be able to start a conversation with Francesca about my book, or anything else for that matter. She was clearly besotted with Salvatore; she stuck to his side as if she’d been glued there.

    Guido seemed to sense my hesitation and gave me a little push.  

    ‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘first stop ees church.’

    Salvatore thrust back his shoulders and pushed out his chest, and with the single command, ‘Avanti!’ strode imposingly out of the pub. We filed out behind him like Caesar’s legionnaires.

    He frogmarched us along Bloomsbury Way, whose multitude of lighted windows glowered down on us through the glistening drizzle. Ostrich woman towered above us and dog man sniffled along at our feet; the rest of the group trundled along in turn.

    We then settled back into place, around our fearless leader, as he brought us to a halt in front of St George’s church with its deep, Roman style porch, and its six great Corinthian columns. His booming baritone reverberated through the gloom, and Guido translated his words into my disinterested ear. They pointed out the steeple, which, according to their elucidation, was modelled on the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus.

    ‘Nothing very Christian about that, and if they didn’t worship Christ, then just what did they worship?’ (I couldn’t really tell if Guido was translating or just offering up an opinion.)

    ‘This church, or temple or whatever it actually was,’ (they were seamlessly discarding any notion that it might, perhaps, be just a normal English church) ‘was designed and built by Nicolas Hawksmoor. And, as certain people know, if you look at the locations of all six of Hawksmoor’s London churches on a map, you will see that they form a perfect pentagram. Yes, a pentagram – that deeply rooted symbol of Satanism, and the occult.’

    We were standing in a circle again and, looking around the ring at the by now familiar faces, I realised that the size of the group had decreased. There were now only six of us, whereas before there had been eight. The square shaped, same-sex couple had somehow, rather mysteriously, just disappeared.

    Salvatore passed around again, once more touching each of us in turn on the upper arm. Again he caressed out a single Italian utterance to each and every one of us.

    ‘Sgrombo,’ he said to me again as he touched me, firmly, on the arm.

    ‘Mackerel,’ Guido said. Like he’d just remembered the English word.

    ‘What the hell has that got to do with anything?’

    ‘But the mackerel was bad.’

    ‘What are you talking about?’

    ‘The mackerel you have eat in ze pub.’

    ‘I didn’t eat in the pub. I just had a pint of beer and I didn’t even finish that I…’

    ‘And ze beer was bad also.’

    Had I eaten though? I could taste it now, that mackerel, and you could tell that it was off. My stomach started churning and then a gut pain, an intense stabbing sensation in my belly, stopped me in my tracks.  

    Salvatore nodded. ‘Sgrombo,’ he said.

    And then, for the first time, Francesca looked at me. My appearance, as I bent double under the strain of the stomach cramps, seemed to amuse her. Her palpable glee was at once both humiliating and uplifting.

    The group moved on. My pain subsided a little and I was able to scamper along after them, and latch on to the tail, just as Salvatore guided us in through the great front entrance of the British Museum, and then through the labyrinth of connecting rooms, all filled with an unreasonably large percentage of the world’s most valuable objects.

    Then he brought us to a halt in a small and dusty chamber that was self-evidently devoted to some of the lesser-known antiquities of ancient Babylon. He resumed his lecture next to a strange little statuette of an evil-looking Babylonian god. Urfu, he was called. He was about nine inches tall and sported an impressive erect phallus that was twice the size of his head.  

    We stood in a circle around the little deity and then silently, and without instruction, we all held hands. Once the circle was completed Salvatore gave his talk in Italian, and Guido whispered his translation in my ear.

    They talked about how the magnificent building that now houses The British Museum was donated to a grateful nation in the middle of the eighteenth century, and how all manner of priceless artefacts then poured in, purloined from every corner of the British Empire.

   ‘Not all of them are cursed,’ Guido seethed in to my ear.

    Just what in god’s name did he mean by that?

    My guts were playing up again. I had been finding it difficult to concentrate in any case, but now I stopped trying altogether. The normal, sane thing to do would have been to excuse myself and go off to find a lavatory, but any propensity for rational thought seemed to have deserted me. The little room was filled with words; Salvatore’s booming Italian and Guido’s whispered English, which had become as incomprehensible to me as that which he was endeavouring to translate.

     Salvatore spoke at length about the little god, as we all stood around it holding hands. Guido had stopped translating by now; he must have sensed that I was no longer taking anything in. Then I realised that there were now only six of us; neither ostrich woman nor dogface were any longer with us.

    Ha! I thought to myself, they’ve all voted with their feet.

    The next thing I remember is tramping along in line past the unassuming front entrance of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, where something akin to a vision appeared before me; it seemed to me then, that Peter Pan himself was there, keeping an eye on his innocent charges, and that Francesca reached out to him with longing and desire. But Peter recoiled from her. ‘Keep back, lady,’ he hissed, ‘no one is going to catch me and make me a man.’

   It was, no doubt, some trick of the imagination caused by my physical weakness and the darkening gloom, but even if it was merely some internal flight of fancy, it showed me Francesca in a different light just then.

    On we went to Coram’s Fields. Salvatore, Francesca, Guido and myself. The only ones left. Salvatore was muttering now, in low and angry tones. Guido translated, his English, somehow, much improved. He spoke over his mentor’s voice, as if he had the discourse off by heart. 

   In Georgian London, there had been unimaginable poverty and hardship, and only a stone’s throw from where we were just then, had once stood the great black rookery of St. Giles; a huge, teeming slum that would today be called a shantytown. Every day its inhabitants spilled out into the streets to join those who lived and slept there. They made a living then in any way they could, begging, or stealing, or selling themselves to the more affluent members of society.

    The Foundling Hospital, that once stood there, where we stood then, had been established by one Captain Coram, for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children. He’d had a difficult childhood himself – ran away to sea as a twelve-year old and one can only imagine the abuses and degradations he must have suffered as a young cabin boy in his majesty’s navy at that time. But it all turned out well in the end. He remembered his own traumatic experiences and when he was old enough, and resourceful enough, he became determined to help as many young and disadvantaged children as he could, by establishing the Foundling Hospital.

    ‘It could quite easily have turned out differently,’ said Guido, in insinuating tones, ‘the childhood abuse he endured might have caused him to seek out victims of his own. That does sometimes happen in these cases.’

    Francesca gazed up longingly at Salvatore.

    Guido’s words continued to reach me through the pain that had returned to my intestines, although I could no longer see him. He must have been standing behind me but I didn’t bother to look. He spoke about the painter, Hogarth, who was also involved with the Foundling Hospital – he’d donated a painting. Hogarth had had a difficult childhood himself, his father was imprisoned for debt and he spent a large part of his childhood all alone on London’s streets. It was a good thing he learned how to draw, or who knows what might have become of him. But he did find fame and fortune, and was able to help those less fortunate than himself, those foundlings who might otherwise have been left to the mercies of those same wicked London streets where he himself had suffered.

   ‘It could quite easily have turned out differently though, his experiences, as a victim, might have caused him to seek out victims of his own. That does sometimes happen in these cases.’   Guido’s repetition, clearly intended to impress, did nothing more than cause me irritation.

    Then, Francesca seemed suddenly to become aware of my presence. But the look she gave me was not encouraging at all. It was as if she didn’t want me there. She wanted me gone. The talk droned on.

    They told me about the composer, Handel, who was also, apparently, involved, How he gave benefit performances of his work in the hospital chapel, how his choir was made up of the children themselves. Distinguished guests were invited to attend and (at this point Salvatore and Guido each, simultaneously, made quotation marks with their fingers) ‘were able to see the children after dinner.’    

    ‘And when the rookery was demolished by high decree, where were the fledgling rooks to go? Those fledgling, foundling rooks. The hospital was inundated with applicants and was given a parliamentary grant on condition that any newly born infant was automatically admitted.’

    Our guide seemed even taller now, his attire more impressive, his voice less monotonous.

    ‘The grant ceased four years later, after accusations against the governors of “immorality and mismanagement.” And the Foundling Hospital was closed.’

    Immoralita e cattiva gestione.

    Immorality and mismanagement.

    So there we were on the edge of Coram’s Fields. I saw we, but now I was alone. The dusk had turned to night but were the streetlights even on? I wandered around in a kind of a daze, not sure which way was up. Then I heard a noise, a beastly, grunting sound, and felt compelled to stagger along towards it. And there they were, with their wanton squealing. I saw them rutting there. Her on top. At the edge of the park. In a clump of bushes.

    My stomach turned over and I thought for a moment that I just might have to go. I waded into an adjacent bush and prepared myself for the worst, but the pain subsided just in time, and a gastrointestinal disaster was narrowly averted.

    What the hell was I doing there, squatting and snooping? Intense humiliation consumed me, but then it turned to anger, and the anger, to resolve. I would fix them. Both of them. Fix them both for good. 

    I took out my phone and started filming. He was on top now, I could just make out his pale, peach-like posterior, rising and falling through the foliage. Dark, unworthy thoughts consumed me; if she didn’t take me on, I’d post this everywhere. Finish her. I filmed away until the noise abated, and the rustling in the bushes ceased. I didn’t hear them leave but, some minutes later, when I finally dared to look, there was no one there, just some broken branches on a patch of flattened grass.

    I straightened myself up as best I could and caught the next tube home.

    I didn’t even think about the video for a week or more. Mummy needed caring for, and that’s a full time job. But then, when I first remembered what I’d done, I gave myself a thorough ticking off for even thinking about using that disgusting little film for the purposes of blackmail or extortion. Not my style.   

    I found the file on my phone and opened it. There was nothing to see there in any case, just some rustling and grunting from the inside of a bush. I couldn’t have blackmailed anyone with that, even if I’d wanted to. I pushed the little dustbin button but strangely, nothing happened. For some reason it just wouldn’t delete. I tried again and again, but there it still was.

    But then the video file icon took on a three-dimensional form and pushed itself up and out until it became like a dirty grey pimple on the screen. Then it plopped up off the phone altogether, and onto the floor. It stopped for a moment, as if getting its bearings, and then scurried across the room like a beetle or a cockroach, before disappearing under mother’s bedroom door.

    I haven’t been in there for a while, and so I open her door with more than a little trepidation. She is very cold by now and stiff. A long grey strand of her hair has fallen over her face and so I lovingly stroke it back to where it belongs. I suppose I’d better let them come for her soon. I do believe in doing things properly, but it’s just that we’ve been together for such a long time and I really can’t bear to be apart from her.

    And then all that will remain of her will be my book. Oh what a story it is, what a wondrous magical love story, of that purest, most innocent of loves – the one that endures between a son and his mother. Has such a story ever been written before? I think not. Such an original piece of work – one that will surely appeal to the hearts and souls of millions and millions of readers.

    I had thought that Francesca was the ideal individual to take my book to the market place, I had thought she was like mummy – but it turns out that she’s not.    

    This morning I got a letter from her saying that she thinks my work is excellent but that she isn’t in a position to be able to offer me her representation at this time. I suppose it was good of her to write and let me know, but I’d already decided not to retain her services.

    She really isn’t right for us.  

Tyburn’s Brook

They groan’d aloud on London Stone,
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook:
Albion gave his deadly groan,
And all the Atlantic mountains shook

• William Blake

The outset of what would become known as The Winter of Discontent found me applying for work as a catering trainee in The Brook Street Club, an old-fashioned, one might even say anachronistic, establishment, which was situated on Brook St., in London’s West End.

    But my entrance into this mundane metier was to be but the means of my setting forth on a far more glamorous profession; I was harbouring the aspiration of becoming a new wave music critic, had a vague idea of reviewing gigs, interviewing musicians, and generally commenting on the ‘scene’. This, of course, would involve leaving my native Yorkshire and moving to the capital where I could gain a foothold on the slippery ladder that was the swiftly changing music industry, and where my superior post-punk sensibilities could shine out like a beacon above the rest of the commentariat. I had come across an ad in my local job centre for the live-in position at the club, and had applied, in order to establish myself a base in the capital, and to give myself an opportunity to pursue my ambitions.

    The club secretary was a Mr Pemberton who had a huge, bulbous body and a long pointy nose. He graciously offered me the position in his grave patrician tones which was just as well because I’d already informed my parents of my permanent departure, and they hadn’t seemed at all disappointed to be seeing the back of me. As I stuttered out my grateful acceptance a little man appeared from a desk behind Pemberton’s back – which gave me quite a shock because I hadn’t noticed he was there – and told me to report to the front hall porter, who would show me to my room. This was small and windowless, and contained just some very basic furniture and a washbasin. There was a shared bathroom down the hall that had all the charms of a Victorian workhouse.                   

    I soon realised that the place was run not by Pemberton, but by the Steward of the club, who was an ex tight head prop from Swansea called Evans. This selfless retainer seemed to have developed an almost obsessional attachment to the institution that he served; he lived and breathed his vocation and spoke of nothing else than its history and its vital role in the smooth running of what was left of the British establishment. During the hours of service he was omnipresent between bar, kitchen, and restaurant, bristling with self-importance as he fulfilled his role in ensuring that each and every member’s desire was painstakingly fulfilled down to the very finest detail.

    But he was particularly enthusiastic with regards to the wine cellar and its contents, those ancient dust encrusted bottles that were stored carefully away in a cavernous vault beneath the city. Every morning we made a note of which wines and ports had been consumed the previous day. Those vintages were then replaced, and made available for that day’s service, which meant an expedition into the bowels of the earth. And if it was one of the older vintages that had been drunk and needed to be replaced, the racks of younger wines were wheeled to one side to reveal the crown jewels; decades old Clarets and Burgundies, and most impressive of all, the ancient, vintage ports. Eventually I got to descend there alone and would sit quietly amongst the bottles, watching the shadows from the lone naked light bulb create monsters and phantoms on the dripping bare brick walls.    

    But I hadn’t moved to London to lounge about in an underground chamber, I was there to break into the music business and I took those first tentative steps in doing so with every spare moment my new employment allowed. I checked out the clubs – the Marquee and the Astoria were both within walking distance – but I soon realised with horror that I could just about afford one gig a month, and that the only clothes I possessed made me stick out like the country boy I was amongst the sophisticated post-punk urban rockers whose cliques I found impossible to penetrate. In the end I was shamed into putting my new wave critic aspirations on hold for a spell.      

    The only recreational pastime that was available to me then was to wander around like the plastic marker on a Monopoly board, trying to make sense of my unfamiliar new environment. Loneliness descended and I began to yearn for the down to earth friendliness of my West Yorkshire homeland.  

    To the south and west of me was Mayfair, but I soon realised there was nothing there for a man of my limited resources, only Bond Street boutiques and eateries that were not only out of my price range, but most other folks’ as well. To the east was Soho whose delights were enough to drive a young man blind. But delights cost money and once I’d spaffed away my first week’s wages, I realised it was probably best to stay on my own side of Regent Street and away from those temptations. To the north was Oxford Street, an endless, groaning and impenetrable throng of humanity. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before and I harboured an unreasonable terror of being swept away like a paper napkin.

    But late in the evenings the Oxford Street throng dissolved into a trickle of lost-looking individuals meandering along the great thoroughfare, and so I joined them and then resolved to cross. I found the little passing place entirely by chance, if there is such a thing as chance in this great matter. In any case, I did find that narrow ‘snicket’ as they would call it up north, and as soon as I came out the other side of it I knew I was somewhere different, somewhere dimmer, and not as clean.

    I joined the lane at its southern end and followed it northwards. There was a fish and chip shop, a launderette, and a pub called The Prince Alfred that stood back from the street and reverberated almost imperceptibly with noise and with light. It was impossible not to enter. I’d ventured into one or two of the hostelries on the other side, but then left immediately; they’d been dark and unwelcoming, and the few customers in there had been old and aristocratic Pemberton types, not the kind of people I wanted to get involved with, and not the type who would want to get involved with me.

    But the Prince Alfred seemed, on first impressions, like a normal pub, like the ones back home and just about everywhere else. There was a pool table and a jukebox and a contemporary looking clientele. Just as I entered, the song that had been playing, a Squeeze number as I recall, ended and there was a sudden silence. All eyes turned in my direction. A feeling of discomfort threatened to overcome me but it was too late to turn back and so I stepped up to the bar.          

    ‘Hello love, what can I get you?’ said the barmaid, in a broad North Country accent – I found out later she was from Halifax – and I bought myself a beer.

    With typical Yorkshire inquisitiveness she discovered my name, told me hers was Susie and within a few minutes had learned where I was from and what I was doing in the big bad city. A little later on she introduced me to a dark-eyed, square-jawed youth called Derek who had removed himself from the gaggle of legacy punks that was congregating around the pool table. They held back and silently awaited developments while he stepped forward as an envoy. Susie told him what I’d told her; that I had aspirations to break into the music business.  

    ‘Oh yeah?’ he said. ‘You a musician, are you?’

    ‘No, I’m a journalist,’ I told him, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

    ‘Who’d you work for then,’ he asked.

    ‘I’m freelance,’ I said.

    ‘He works in a gentlemen’s club,’ Susie told him, as if it was something to be proud of.

    ‘So basically you’re a fucking lackey,’ he said, with a sudden malevolence that stunned me into silence.  

    ‘Oi!’ Susie said. ‘You calling me a lackey then, as well?’

    Derek shook his head, ‘this is different,’ he said, as he turned his dark brown gypsy’s eyes on me. ‘So what sort of music are you into then?’

    This put me on slightly firmer ground. I had some strong opinions on the state of the music scene just then; punk had never been a serious musical genre but it had to happen in order for all the boring old stadium rock bands to be shown up for the irrelevant corporations they’d become; the Pistols had imploded magnificently in the only way a band should die; the Clash had matured into something interesting; but most of the rest of the ‘post-punk’ scene was just a lot of art school bollocks – with some notable exceptions. I reeled off a list of bands that I deemed worthy of discussion: the Nightingales, the Fall, Public Image Ltd… Derek just shrugged and went back to his safety pin adorned, Mohican headed buddies. I’d finished my drink and was just about to leave when he came back over and asked me if I played pool. I said I did and he told me to put my name up. I played a couple of frames and they seemed to accept me after that.

    Over the next few weeks I got to know Derek and his mob; they were all from Marylebone, had been born and raised in the Village. Most of their forbears were Irish and had worked as servants for the aristocratic families who’d wintered just a few blocks away, around Wimpole Street and Portland Place, which was perhaps why he’d shown such contempt for my own servitude. Most of them lived on a Peabody estate that was a maze within a maze between Blandford Street and Paddington Street Gardens. Derek was in a band. He told me all about it in that West London accent that I’d get to know so well, that smooth-voweled, soft-toned patois of the West End natives. Derek’s band was called Human Remains and, by all accounts, they were pretty raw, the next wave of ‘garage’, which was destined to blow away the renewed onset of record label commerciality.

                                                               *

They had me working in the restaurant now. I got to serve the Masters their dindins. Silver service only it was, and they made me practice in the kitchen first. I soon got the hang of it though. First the meat and then the veggies. Spoon underneath and fork on top. Then finally you poured their gravy. Not so much as a please or a thank you, not once, not ever.

     The worst thing of all though was Dover Sole. ‘Would sir like that on or off the bone?’ On the bone was easy, you just slapped it on a plate, but ‘off the bone’ meant you had to fillet it right there at the table, and it had to be done a certain way, holding two fish knives in the same hand. Find the backbone, slide the knife along it and then lift the fillet on to the plate without breaking it.  

    One time Pemberton and his sidekick both ordered Dover sole.

    ‘Would sir like that on or off the bone?’

    ‘Oh just bring it on the bone.’

    So I plated it up in the kitchen and put the plates in front of them. I’d just turned back to collect the sauté potatoes and the creamed spinach when he said, ‘No. I want it off the bone. I told you off the bone.’ And they sat there smirking at my humiliation as I struggled to debone that dead-eyed staring monster of a fish. And then I felt his pudgy hand rub gently up the inside of my thigh. I don’t know how I could have tolerated that. But, to my shame, I did.   

    When service was over I’d hit the Alfred. We’d play pool and drink. Susie gave me free drinks and small amounts of money from the till. We’d roll joints in the toilet and smoke them in the calm and frosty lane. Sometimes we’d go to the Marquee or the Astoria or further afield into the mists of North London. The Round House, Dingwalls, Middlesex Poly. On Saturday nights big Steve would rock up with a plastic bag full of little blue pills. Three for a quid and three would keep you up all night, babbling like a maniac. Once in a while we dropped acid. 

    I started writing reviews of the bands we saw and sending them off to the music press. Nothing got published but everyone said they were good and that I should persevere.

    And it was about this time that I realised Pemberton and his nameless crony really were inseparable. There were two heads and four arms but they shared the same torso and legs. The hideous little man on his back was some sort of demonic appendage that Pemberton seemed to be able to control at will – to conceal or reveal as he wished. Time to get away. Keep this to yourself, but get the fuck out.       

                                                              *

The first thing I stole was a bottle of the house claret, which I sold to Ron, the landlord of the Alfred, for seventy-five pence. I offered to get him some of the vintage tipples but he shook his head and said there was no demand amongst his punters for anything that high-end. Susie said she’d ask around though, and so I wrote out a list of the various wines and vintages I had to offer, and gave it to her to show to prospective clients. In the meantime I kept snaffling the odd bottle here and there and flogging them to Ron who no doubt made a nice little profit from dispensing it by the glass. Susie came back to me and said someone called Bernard was interested, and that she’d set us up a meeting in the back room at the Alfred. I was expecting a city gent, someone affluent looking, and you could have knocked me down with a tenner when a dishevelled looking old man rocked up in an ancient faded overcoat and a pair of dirty worn-out pin stripe trousers. He pointed to the St. Estephe, the sixty-one, and we haggled out a price for a dozen bottles. I asked for a deposit and he pushed a grubby mitt into one of his pockets and brought it back up full of folding. He was good for it then. He asked me where I was getting my supplies from and Susie jumped in on my behalf. ‘Don’t ask no questions and you won’t hear no lies,’ she told him, as she tapped her pretty little nose.    

    From then on I didn’t seem to be able to step out of the door without seeing Bernard in some guise or other, either on the Lane, which he seemed to scuttle up and down on all day like some demented cockroach, or in the Alfred, where he would crouch over a light and bitter, his rugged features set in a habitual smirk.

    I smuggled the bottles out three at a time in a canvas shoulder bag that I’d stuffed an old shirt into to silence any clinking. I carried them up to the Alfred, where Susie looked after them for me, and then repeated the operation twice more, until Bernard had his dozen. But now he wanted a dozen more – of the Chateau Lafitte this time. I told him that I couldn’t do it, that I wasn’t really a thief – more of an urban guerrilla – and that I’d made my point and would stop now, before things got out of hand. But he raised his offer price and, when I still said no, he doubled it, and so I agreed to fulfil the order, vowing to myself that this would be the last. 

    By this time Susie and I had become lovers. I’d sneak her into the club in the afternoons, and we’d go at it like demented rabbits on my creaky single bed for hours at a time, and then lie whispering and giggling at each other, until it was time to sneak her back out again. I showed her one of the reviews I’d written and she said, ‘Hey, this is good, you sent it off, right?’ I told her, glumly, that I had. In fact, as all the three big music papers were based in the West End, I’d delivered my reviews by hand, even tried to blag my way in to see the editors, but never got any further than the receptionist. 

    ‘I’ll get these published for you,’ she told me, and she did; a week later I got an acceptance letter from the NME and a cheque for fifteen quid. Not as much as I could earn from thieving, but a cause for celebration nonetheless. I was a pro writer. It felt like all my dreams were coming true.

    ‘Listen,’ Susie said, one sweet afternoon when we’d finished making love. ‘We could get a place together. I’ve got some key money saved, we can rent us a little one bed in the Village.’ I wasn’t sure if I was all that ready to commit, but the idea did have its merits; I could quit my dead-end job in that bizarre and timeworn club but would still get to live in the Wild West End. I wrote another review and she got that one published as well – in the Melody Maker this time. I asked her how she was managing to do it but she just touched that pretty nose again, ‘Don’t ask no questions…’ 

    We’d told Derek and his pals about my newly found fame and he informed us that his band, The Human Remains, were playing a gig in the basement of a pub just off the Edgware Road later on that week, and so we agreed to go along and that maybe I’d do a write-up. We got to sit through a half hour set that seemed to last forever. It was utter dross and included such timeless classics as, “God is a Wanker” and, “I Love Wearing Snot.” Later on when I was alone with Susie I said: ‘I can’t think of anything to write about that pile of shit.’ And she agreed. ‘You’re just getting some cred going, love,’ she told me. ‘Don’t blow it on that rubbish.’

    A few nights later I was in the Alfred when Derek came in with the latest copies of the music press under his arm. ‘I heard you got a nice little vino racket on the go,’ he said, out of a corner of his mouth. ‘How do you know that?’ I asked him, even though I knew full well. ‘No secrets in this Village mate,’ he said. ‘But you know what? The lads and me can help, we can organise it properly. We’re going to need a share in the take, but there’ll be a lot more coming out so you’ll be better off in the long run.’

    ‘Look, I said, ‘I never meant it to be like this; there’s only so much can come out without them noticing. Fact is, I’m surprised they haven’t noticed already.’

    ‘I’ve got a punter all lined up,’ Derek informed me. We want six Muscadet, twelve of the Puligny Montrachet and a dozen of the Chablis.   

     ‘No way,’ I said. ‘I can’t nick all that.’

    ‘You’ll nick what I sodding well tell you to nick,’ he told me, and his punkified mates all grinned and cracked their knuckles. 

    ‘No,’ I said, ‘Look, lads, there’s no point in trying. I’d just get caught and banged up, and you’d get into trouble as well. I’m not doing it.’

    One of them shoved me from behind and I went over, and the next thing I knew I was being punched and kicked from all sides, and then dragged behind the bar and through a door – that Bernard held open for them – and down some steep stone steps and into the cellar. Two or three of them followed me down there and it didn’t take long for me to agree to their plans.

                                                               *

The cellar at the Bath Club was much larger and deeper than the one at the Prince Alfred but I felt somehow safe down there. I’d sit there on my own and let my mind wander off to places it had never been before. Some enchanted paradise where Susie and I could live together in a state of peaceful bliss. Once in a while I found I was talking to myself and had to snap myself out of it.  

    Evans didn’t go down there any more. From what he’d told me he didn’t like it there, and that every time after he had been down, he’d had rotten nightmares that had kept him up all night. So I had the place to myself, and once service was over the pilfering began. I’d pack the bottles into boxes, a dozen at a time, and leave them out the back where Derek and his mates would pick them up and haul them off in a van. We worked it like a mine.  

    I burrowed further and further into the deepest reaches of the darkness, emptying rack after rack and, when I thought I must surely have reached the limits of the tomb, I stumbled across a chamber that I hadn’t known was there. I pushed my way in, the flickering light of my torch searched the shadows, and the low ceilinged room at first seemed devoid of contents, but then my light landed on one solitary crate. I bent over it, saw what looked like about half a dozen bottles, and stooped yet further to examine the dust encrusted labels. It was a Taylor’s port. And the year? I rubbed away some of the dirt and then almost overbalanced with astonishment. Nineteen twenty-seven! The mythical twenty-seven that was thought to be an extinct species. It was like stumbling across a long-lost masterpiece.

    I took three bottles out, put them in my shoulder bag and, avoiding Derek and his gang, rushed with them up to the Alfred. Susie was behind the bar as usual and I gave her the bag. ‘Hide it,’ I said. ‘Don’t show it to anyone. Keep it for me, and when I come back we’ll go and look at flats.’ She beamed her approval and I returned to my subterranean endeavours. I’d filled two crates and loaded them on to a handcart ready to take upstairs. A third crate was half-filled, and I quickly brought out more bottles and topped it up. But just as I placed the final bottle on its pile there was a low rumbling sound, some terrible pain-filled groan from deep inside the vault and then, with alarming rapidity, water rose up from the earth all around me until I was standing in about an inch of it, and could actually feel it rising up my boots. Then masonry began to fall away, first just flakes of plaster, but then the stones themselves started to dislodge, to plop out from the walls and ceiling. I hurled myself up and out.   

    Pemberton and Evans were standing at the top of the steps and Evans grabbed me as I emerged. ‘Now just hang on a minute, Boyo,’ he said with malice and disappointment in his voice. ‘We want to have a word with you.’    

    I screamed and managed to free myself, but then Pemberton’s daemon got hold of me by the hair and dragged me to the ground. I wrestled with the little man while Pemberton and Evans stood above us with folded arms and pursed expressions.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t human; it felt like I was grappling with a ball of screwed-up newspaper that scrunched and then remoulded itself every time I tried to get a grip on it. Soon it was all over me like an inflammation and I could feel it enveloping me and drawing the life force from inside my body. But then a terrible roaring sound came up the steps from the cellar and the thing became momentarily distracted, allowing me to prise myself free.

    I sprinted through the mahogany walled lounge, past the snoozing members and out through the front hall and onto Brook Street. I pushed my way through the crowds and desperately forced myself across Oxford Street, where, at first, the throng of humanity was too dense for me to penetrate; it was like trying to wade across a swollen river. But finally I made it to the passing place, and slipped effortlessly through it to the Lane.

    All was quiet on the other side. I stopped to catch my breath and let my heart rate drop back down to normal, and then I walked carefully up to the Alfred, pushed the heavy door open, and went inside.

    Dirty brownish water covered every inch of flooring, it was maybe just an inch or so deep but I could somehow tell that it was rising. A large number of Derek’s cronies seemed to have drunk themselves into a stupor and were lying amongst the empty glasses on the stained and grimy tabletops. One of them was even lying on his side along the bar. Floating about around them were dozens of empty bottles of many of the world’s great wines. There was a Chateauneuf du Pape, a St. Emilion, and even a Chateau Rothschild – the sixty-seven. Susie was behind the bar, going about her duties as if everything was just as it should be. I spoke a word of greeting but she didn’t seem to hear, didn’t seem to notice I was there. Bernard approached her. ‘A pint of the Kronenbourg,’ he commanded, and she started to pull the pint, but only a small amount of beer came out before the pump fizzed, and spluttered, and then gave up the ghost. ‘It’s off,’ Susie said, ‘do you want something else or can you wait while I change the barrel?’ ‘I’ll wait,’ he told her, with a knowing leer.

    ‘Susie,’ I hissed at her, ‘Bring me the bag, the one I gave you, and we can get away from here – right now.’ But, again, she didn’t seem to hear.

    Derek came in just then, paddled his way around the fallen punks and then pushed his face right up to mine. ‘You don’t belong round here no more,’ was what he told me, and I most certainly concurred. ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ I said, ‘I’m just waiting for Susie and then we’re both gone.’

    ‘You can forget about her,’ he said. ‘She’s more likely than not out selling blowjobs for a tenner. She’s a Brass, mate, haven’t you sussed that yet?’

    I ignored this indecent allegation, and moved away from him towards the cellar door. He came straight after me, and then his semi-conscious cronies rose as one, and started to move along behind him, safety pins and sewing needles in their cheeks and lips, some in bondage trousers, and others in that season’s black bin liner chic. But far more alarmingly than that, each of them had sprouted a dark and shadowy plasma-like appendage from somewhere between his shoulder blades. Some were just blurs, but others had taken human form and were chattering like demented monks at each other, at their zombie-punk hosts, and at me. They closed in on me, blocking off my path to the door. One of them reached out and pinched my cheek; it was the touch of what I sensed was frozen filth. I screamed, lurched behind the bar, and down the cellar steps.

    The water was knee deep down there and Susie was nowhere to be seen. I called out her name but the only response I got was a baleful echo of my own fear-filled cadences. Then a hideous commotion drowned out that echo as the degenerate pack of daemon-accompanied post-punk rockers descended in their riotous pursuit of me. I frantically scanned that watery prison in a desperate search for any possible means of escape until my grateful eyes fell onto some kind of tunnel entrance, some water gate, just large enough to accept my slender frame. Barely able to believe my luck I plunged recklessly through and then scrambled along the tunnel on the other side, that was half filled with foul effluent, on hands and knees. Soon I was in above my head and I had to choose between keeping going, and risk drowning, or going back to face my assailants. I kept going. In fact I was swept along until the tunnel, which was really a large concrete pipe, spewed me out with a steep and alarming drop, into a much larger stream whose dreadful stench could only mean one thing; I was in a sewer.

    My head crashed against the ancient brickwork and I remember nothing after that, until I woke, alone and shivering on that Thames side beach by Millbank Pier. And from there I managed somehow to get home – and by ‘home’ I mean the blessed hills and dales of my own beloved homeland: ‘God’s Own Country’ – which I swore I’d never leave again. 

                                                                  *

It was another lifetime before I returned to that part of London, and even then it was only because my business took me there; if there had been any way of avoiding that trip I would have taken it.

    Business over, I was about to head off back to Bond Street tube station when I realised I was at the southernmost end of the High Street where it met that wretched Lane. I couldn’t resist the temptation to peer nostalgically down it with feelings of both curiosity and fear. It was unrecognisable from the Lane I’d known all those years before. Now every shop window showcased the wares of some fashion designer or other, some of them household names but others more obscure and avant-garde. The only non-fashion related retail outlets were a chocolatier and, where the Alfred had been, there was a high-end tearoom where you could avail yourself of a Lap Sang Su Chong and a cucumber sandwich, and just about get change from a twenty-pound note.

    Then I saw him, it was surely he – Bernard? His features blurted out at me from the crowd. But this couldn’t be him, Bernard had been an old man then, he would be long since dead and buried. I followed him anyway and he ducked into the expensive tearoom. I followed him in and sat at an adjacent table to the one where he was sitting with an alert and confident air. He must have noticed my following him because he turned his sharp grey eyes on me and abruptly asked me what my problem was. I stammered out an apology and then found enough courage to ask him if he had some time to talk to me about something, and he said he had all the time in the world.

    Isn’t it odd how we can confide our deepest most secrets to strangers, ones we would never dream of giving up to our closest friends? In any case, I found myself spouting forth a garbled and necessarily abbreviated version of what had happened all those years before, and the part played in it by the man whose features, gestures and other idiosyncrasies were almost identical to his.    

    ‘How astonishing,’ he said, ‘one might suppose this meeting to be preordained.’

He then confessed he was a practitioner of the dubious practice of something called psychogeography. ‘Mostly I just wander,’ he explained, ‘you know, sort of feel my way around, following my instincts and so forth. But today I decided to follow the course of some of London’s underground streams and rivers. This Lane, to which you seem to have become so attached, follows the course of the River Tyburn, which even now meanders beneath us.’ He paused to take a drink of his tea and seemed to gather in his thoughts. ‘But that’s not the only subterranean stream around here, you know,’ he went on, ‘beneath Brook Street, where you say you lived and worked, and, by the way, was to be the next destination of my wanderings, runs Tyburn’s Brook, a tributary of, not the Tyburn as one might suppose, but of another underground river, the Westbourne. And Tyburn’s Brook coursed its way right past the Tyburn Tree. Do you know of that?’

    ‘As it happens,’ I said, ‘I do.’ I’d come across it in my reading, had learned of that mighty gallows where frequent mass hangings had taken place. Twenty-three criminals at a time had been simultaneously dispatched there in front of tens of thousands of baying spectators.

    ‘If you’d have engaged in your nefarious activities a hundred and fifty years ago,’ he said, ‘I’ve no doubt that’s where you would have ended up.’

    The door of the tearoom creaked open, seemingly of its own accord, and a blast of ice cold air blew in.

   ‘So,’ he asked me, ‘did you follow your dream and become a music journalist?’

   ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘But I am a writer of sorts, I’m a wine correspondent on the Yorkshire Post.’

   ‘There never was a pub on this corner of Marylebone Lane,’ he told me. ‘I’ve been coming here for decades. I would know.’

    He paused and then sat upright in his seat and said, with an appropriate amount of gravitas: ‘but who’s to say this world is real. Perhaps this superficial plane is just a shadow of another, deeper place.’

   We stood and shook hands on that and were about to part when something seemed to cross his mind.

    ‘The girl,’ he said, ‘the barmaid, what became of her?’

    ‘I think she must have drowned,’ I told him, somewhat mournfully.

    ‘It happens,’ he said, and that was how we left it. 

The Screens

Evil crawls. Out of the mist.

    In pre-historic times our far-distant ancestors offered up their human sacrifices to the nature gods. Virgins were sliced open and presented on altars to man’s first deities. Were those celebrants evil? Surely not – until they began to enjoy their worship just that little bit too much, until the sacrificial act was lengthened and the victims’ deliberately drawn out yelps of pain were met with sexual groans of delight. Only then had evil come.

    As civilisation dawned, human sacrifice became taboo. Those cults that still practised it were driven underground but beasts and slaves were still slaughtered in the name of sport for the pleasure of the masses. Were those acts in themselves evil? Were the perpetrators? Were the drooling spectators? And if so, were they permanently evil or did they just remain so for as long as the grim spectacle endured? And is evil then a temporary state of mind that is always ready to emerge from a permanently hidden state of being, one that lays patiently dormant in each and every one of us? We all know it when we see its foul manifestations, or feel its urges, or hear its vile suggestions. Most of us repel it – most of the time. Mainstream societies guard against it now, but there exist secret, demonic societies that have propagated it, since it first crawled out of the murk toward us. Are they perhaps descendants of those early devil priests? They certainly exist and they initiate those evil acts, encourage them, enlist disciples and thus expand the population of organisers and ready witnesses. Networks have formed, secular and ecclesiastical. Unguarded innocents are plucked from the institutions that are supposed to protect them and are tortured for the pleasure of the evil ones. Orphans are systematically dismembered for the masturbatory gratification of the confidently untouchable, the unarguably evil. Vileness is perpetrated with the sole motive of sadistic pleasure in mutilation, and the leisurely pursuit of the extinguishing of life itself.

                                                              *

It was a contemporary open-plan office located on the top floor of an old and imposing structure that was once a Methodist chapel. Unembellished bare brick walls rose up to a vaulted ceiling and high, broad windows that had once held coloured glass now soared upwards from where Bruno cowered, and seemed to reach up to the heavens. Keep away from the windows, she’d warned him, particularly the one that overlooks the square. If it became necessary to visit that side of the room, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled. 

    Perhaps one might consider it too small to be called ‘open-plan’, as there were only five workstations, but there was a generous amount of distance between them that conveyed a sense of expanse, rather than one of crowded industriousness. Each workstation carried photographic reproductions of its absent occupant’s preoccupations; pictures of loved ones, top of the range sports cars, rugby heroes, large-breasted glamour models… and on each desk was a screen – a sleek black visual display unit, that seemed both impeccably up-to-date, but at the same time, somehow of the ages, a part of time itself.

    And now all five of them exploded into life. Bruno let out a quiet sob, crawled back to his own workstation, and pulled himself up onto his chair.

    His screen was blank but then something appeared at the centre of the blankness that was at first just a dot, but that then grew rapidly out of itself and scuttled, insect-like, towards him. If it could have been associated with anything human, one might have compared it to a little old man hovering on a speckled silver plate. But it wasn’t human – it was a dome-headed monstrosity with a tiny, barely discernable body and legs that were tucked up somehow beneath an enormous, leathery, wrinkled head with lidless eyes and a lipless mouth, and arms as thin as straws. It scurried towards him until it almost filled the screen – all the screens – and then observed him with an expression of pitiless curiosity that turned his blood to ice. Then there was a clicking noise as his, and all the other screens, turned off.

    He slid off his chair and cowered once again. He’d seen it once before, that thing, in a nightmare many years before. That was – and there was no doubt of this at all – the first thing that he’d ever seen – back before he’d gone to live with Gran.

                                                                      *

There had been a time before he’d gone to live with Gran in that big old mansion flat on the empty side of town, although he couldn’t remember even the slightest detail of it, he knew that time had been. He supposed it was Mummy and Daddy/uncle who’d palmed him off on her but he held no memory of that. All he knew was that that time had existed and that he had come out of it.

    His first mortal memories were of Gran in that big old apartment. The nannies had appeared, and disappeared, and Come along and kiss your Gran goodnight. That wrinkled neck, that whiskery upper lip, the chair by the fire, and the black covered book, and the painting of the red-jacketed man on the fearful stallion. Night night Gran.

    And who were the couple that dropped in from time to time and stayed until late? The woman could have been a younger Gran. Who were they? But he didn’t have the right to ask any questions. He was just a little monster – that is all you are.    

    He was just a little monster and little monsters didn’t get to go to school. But, it seemed, they did deserve an education, because the educators, like the nannies, came and went and sowed in him some seeds, and although the arts were almost entirely neglected, all the branches of science were comprehensively considered. The physical world was microscopically analysed, and then described, right down to the sub-atomic level, and maps of the universe were produced and studied and then telescopically compared with heaven itself, whenever it was possible to see it through the dreary skies.

    Yes, there were educators, and there was always a cook, and maids – but none of them ever lasted long. They appeared and then they disappeared. But there was always Gran and that odious couple that he later learned were Mummy and Daddy/uncle. Mummy and Daddy/uncle now came almost every night but neither one of them ever once addressed him directly. He was just the little monster and that was all he was. He might come in useful one day – he thought he heard them whisper.

    His name was Bruno but he was just the little monster – that was who he was, that was all he was. One of the educators expanded on this theme. Here was the tree of life. Going backwards. The paternal branch. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on and so forth and on the maternal side, the same design. And now here’s yours, little monster – all a bit one-sided, eh? And if it were to move forwards, into the future, with children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren and so on, and then when they looked back… that must not be allowed to happen… Mummy, Daddy/uncle, and Gran were the only ones who knew, and no one else must ever know or they would drag you out from here and burn you at the stake.

    What little spare time he had from his studies was spent in front of a television set, staring at the world outside that was so completely different from his own. It was a world he thought he would never inhabit, but then Gran died, and the educator told him he was to leave the dark and stuffy apartment and move out into that very world. It was an announcement that both terrified and excited him. 

   A bedsit had been rented for him in the centre of town and he had been enrolled on a course at the technical college. He was to study computer science. His educator had already given him an extensive grounding in all aspects of information technology but now he was to embark on a formal study of the subject.  

    At first his fellow students found it impossible to accept him; they were repelled by his hideous appearance, his mass of scraggly red hair, his facial warts, and appalling posture that gave him a stunted, almost hunchbacked, appearance. But none of them could doubt his academic prowess. He was top of the class. Not once or twice, but always.

    Then, as the year-long diploma course neared its conclusion, Bruno was instructed to approach the most promising of his fellow students and invite them to join him in a commercial endeavour, some manner of computer generated design project. The financial offer was far too generous to refuse, and none of them did refuse it.

    The office had already been furnished and equipped prior to their arrival and the hardware that was in place was so cutting edge that none of them had ever seen anything like it before: computer, monitor and keyboard all combined to create a marketing masterpiece with sleek twenty-first century lines that pleased the eye and was user-friendly to the point of infatuation, particularly the screens – those high-tech windows on the universe which these enthusiastic young workers (four young men and one young woman) would get to stare at for many hours at a time. The workstations on which those screens had been placed were arranged in the shape of a five-pointed star and, on that very first morning, a tall, red-haired woman in a long black dress stood at the very centre of this inverted pentagram, introduced herself as Lilith, welcomed them to their new workplace, and briefed them on the tasks they would perform.  

    ‘We are here to create something remarkable,’ she told them, ‘a revolutionary new software package that will change the design industry and serve it for a generation. But we will start with pure simplicity, with the simplest geometric shapes. We want you to experiment with those shapes, look at every different way in which they can be assembled, or broken up, or superimposed, or stacked, or minimalized, or maximised, or anything else you might come up with, until you have produced something… aesthetically remarkable.’   

    She looked around the room, gave each of the five of them a long burning stare. Bruno looked away from her – he never had been able to meet her eyes. Instead he looked at the others, at the three young men and one young woman who covered, along with him, the five dread points of the diabolic star, and he shuddered a little as he speculated silently on the fate that might befall them.  

    ‘Each of you will be given a shape,’ Lilith went on. ‘Work with that shape and with that alone. Do not stray from your own particular task, or try to involve yourself in the work of your co-workers. There will be no talking, and you will keep your eyes firmly fixed to the screen in front of you. This is mandatory. Any breach of this simple, straightforward regulation will result in immediate dismissal.’

    Again her eyes toured the room and again those eyes were avoided.   

    ‘Very well,’ she said, in a slightly softer tone, ‘it’s time to make a start.’

    And so it began. Line after line of elaborately illustrated instructions appeared on the screens in front of them, and they all got their heads down and got on with their work.

    Colin was the first to crack. He left his place one morning and strode over to Bruno – thus breaking the no contact rule that they’d been given – and declared that he had some serious misgivings. He’d been given the shape of a circle to work with – that symbol of wholeness and infinity. But he felt he’d gone as far as he could with it. He’d done concentric circles, Venn diagrams, the human face, the sun, the moon…      

    ‘Go back to your screen,’ Bruno told him, sharply. ‘I can’t help you. Go back to your screen and just follow the instructions.’ But Colin persisted. He had been following instructions. It had been suggested he might design a tunnel with a circular entrance, a circular face. He’d done so and then taken the tunnel downwards, using circle upon circle upon circle – like hoops – until the image they concocted stretched far away from him, on his screen, away and down into the distance, into infinity. Was it a tunnel or a pipe? Surely it was a splendid pipeline that stretched bendably away into the distance. On and on until it became impossible to discern that there were, or ever had been, any circles there at all.  

    Colin was proud of his creation but now he’d just about had it with circles. Alright, the money was good, bloody good in fact, but he needed something more to occupy his mind. He was using just a tiny fraction of his brain. He needed to be stretched. He would leave the company at the end of the month. He would give Bruno written notice should he require it but there was no use in trying to persuade him to stay. He was leaving and that was that. Bruno shrugged and Colin crossed the room, resuming his place.  

    An hour later, an image of Colin appeared on Bruno’s screen. There Colin was, at his desk in front of his screen, and on that smaller screen behind him was Colin, at his desk in front of his screen and on that smaller screen behind him was Colin, at his desk in front of a screen and on that smaller screen behind him was… well now it was too small for Bruno to see exactly what it was, but Bruno knew that Colin must be there. But was he? Bruno squinted at the pipeline in which all the Colins and all the screens were trapped. No. He wasn’t there. Bruno looked up and across the office to where his workmate should have been…

    And now, as he looked back at his screen, he saw something entirely different and totally unexpected; film footage. Aerial shots. A jungle. A vast, impenetrable rain forest, as ancient as evil itself. And then a clearing and within it some kind of primitive stockade. And at the centre of this enclosure, a huge white satellite dish, and all around that, a semi-naked, painted throng of frenzied maniacs of every creed and colour surging around in a single human tide, just as the faithful circle round the sacred Kaaba on the holy days. Now the camera climbed abruptly back and Bruno saw a great towering cross rising up from a pyre, as yet unlit. These fleeting images momentarily tormented him, and then they disappeared from view.  

    Then Jed approached and wanted to know what had happened to ‘the Colin dude’. Bruno told him Colin had quit and that Jed should stop worrying about him and get on with his own project. Jed said he knew that Colin had been doing circle work and wanted to know if it had been completed. He had some circle ideas of his own. Bruno expressed surprise that Jed had known what Colin had been doing, as this was clearly a contravention of the rules. Jed expressed the opinion that it just wasn’t possible to keep secrets in a place like this, and Bruno responded that he should keep their secrets, and that in fact he must keep everything that he did secret, and must not pry into what anyone else was doing. Jed told him that it was too late for that, and that in any case, he was bored with his own project, which was the square. What a God-awful, boring shape it was, the square. It represented nothing more than basic structure and balance, and the four cardinal points of the compass. He’d done squares within squares and interlocking squares, and above and below, and inside and out, and in front and behind. The thing about the square was that it didn’t exist in nature, was entirely man made, and thus unnatural. To the Romans, it had represented civilisation, which is the most unnatural thing of all. Eventually though, Jed had stumbled upon the cube. Now that was much more interesting. Six sides made of six squares – the perfect die. And how it falls… In any case, he’d had it with the square and the cube, those basic boring building blocks. Unless he could do something else, something more interesting, then he thought it best all round if he just left and moved on to better things.

    ‘Are you handing in your notice?’ Bruno asked.

    Jed shrugged, half nodded, and resumed his place – which, it seemed, was inside a massive cube. And the cube was inside Colin’s pipeline. Bruno saw him there, open-mouthed with terror; saw that shuddering silent scream before that Jed-inhabited transparent sugar lump was swiftly sucked away toward some distant void. Bruno trembled and shook on his ergonomic chair in pity and in fear. 

    The jungle stockade came into view again – and were those human skulls upon its gates? And were those bamboo cages around its perimeter? And were they piteous men inside those cages? And whom did that giant marble throne await? (Was that an altar placed before it?)

    A pyramid is, amongst many other things, an amalgam of equilateral triangles. And Dave was on triangles but hadn’t come up with the pyramid structure yet. Perhaps he had seen or sensed what had happened to Colin and to Jed. Perhaps he didn’t want to draw anything three-dimensional, in which he could be imprisoned and transported to only the devil knows where. He stuck with the triangle, compounded two of the three-sided forms, with one of them inverted, to make a Star of David – as above, so below. A cliché perhaps, but a two-dimensional one, and that seemed important to Dave just then. Could it perhaps protect him, this sacred symbol? But no, not a chance of it. When he got back to his desk, a pyramid was waiting for him, and it enveloped him. His head was squeezed inside its apex and his arms pinned closely to its sides, and although there was plenty of room for his legs to scurry back and forth, no movement was possible for the top half of his body, which was held like glue to the slanting walls at the summit of his pyramidal cage. Then the whole structure cascaded into the pipeline, just as the others had, and tumbled away into the distance, as Bruno, horrified, looked on.

    There had been five of them at the commencement of the endeavour, one at each point of the pentagrammic star. Four young men and one young woman, but now only one young man remained – some would say one little monster – and one young woman. Her name was Victoria, and there she remained with her long silken auburn hair, and those high noble cheekbones, and pre-Raphaelite languidity. She had been placed on the right hand edge of the pentagram as far away from Bruno as it was possible to be, and he hadn’t the slightest clue as to what shape she’d been assigned; although he’d been briefed electronically on all the others’ geometric undertakings. No information had appeared on his screen about her – it was like she was receiving special treatment.

    Then Detective Inspector Bateman came to visit. Short and bespectacled, wearing a grubby grey suit, with fuzzy brown hair growing out of his ears. He was investigating the disappearance of two young men who had both worked here, in this very office, and had recently been reported missing. Colin and Jed. (Dave’s evaporation must as yet have gone unnoticed). Could he be allowed to look around? Of course. There was nothing hidden here. What do you expect to find, dead bodies? Bateman poked his way around, showing particular interest in the computer screens, but found nothing incriminating. Then he approached Victoria with barely concealed lust around his mouth and eyes. Would she like to help him?  If it turned out later on that she had known something but withheld that information, then there might be… consequences.

    ‘Maybe they’ve run off together.’ Victoria opined.

    ‘Oh? What makes you say that?’ Bateman asked, his eyebeams all over her like inquisitive wasps. ‘Gay, then, are they? Are they an item?’

    ‘Well, neither one of them ever showed even the slightest interest in me,’ Victoria told him with a sly little pout.

   ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, that most likely clears it up. There’s nearly always an honest explanation in these cases, but they have to be investigated, nonetheless.’

    He took down Victoria’s number just in case.   

    When the inspector had left, Victoria let Bruno know, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t comfortable with the fact that there only the two of them left in the office, and instructed him to stay well away from her. The manner with which she spoke to him left him feeling like he’d been run through with a rapier and left bleeding on the floor. He went back to his place and brooded over his miserable existence. But then, before he’d had the chance to fall too far down the well of self-pity, she rose from her seat and approached him. She laid a hand on his shoulder and apologised for her earlier sharpness.

    ‘Thing is,’ she said, ‘this is a bit of a weird one,  N’est-ce pas?’

    This use of French should have sounded pretentious, but from her ruby lips it was nothing less than delightful. She seemed positively upbeat, which Bruno found rather mystifying. Surely the fact that three of their co-workers had all mysteriously disappeared should be a cause for alarm, or even terror. But she had, it seemed, received a reassuring email from Lilith. The boys hadn’t been up to much and had been ‘let go’, but her work had been first rate and she was to be offered a permanent position at ‘head office’. Hadn’t Bruno got the memo? He shook his head and she let out a little laugh, resuming her seat in front of her screen, immersing herself in whatever it was that she was working on.

    From then on it was like he wasn’t there. She completely ignored him. Being ignored, and the feelings that went along with that state of affairs, were depressingly familiar to Bruno, but he’d hoped that that was all over and done with. For a time there were people who had wanted to speak to him, had needed him, had even sought him out. But now those individuals, the first people who had felt comfortable enough to overcome their revulsion and to converse with him, had been inexplicably slurped away down some godforsaken rabbit hole.    

    There he was, and there she was, seemingly impervious to the nervous glances he threw over towards her, as he tried to supress the growing feelings of hopeless infatuation.

    Then Lilith materialised, walked over to where Victoria was seated, and offered her hand. Victoria took it and Lilith led her across the room to its only exit and out of the building. Victoria glanced at Bruno just once before she left, the coquettish, self-satisfied peek of an over-confident young woman in her prime who believes she is in the process of being elevated to a higher status.  

    And it was later on that day that Lilith told Bruno, via screen, that he should remain in the office, but that he should stay away from the windows, especially the one that overlooked the square. He had nowhere else to go, she informed him, as the lease had expired on his joyless little room and it was not to be renewed. He had no other option than to stay where he was until other arrangements could be made. If the police came knocking, he should pretend he wasn’t there.    

    ‘But Mummy,’ Bruno cried. ‘What is to become of me?’

    ‘It doesn’t matter what becomes of you,’ she told him, with a sneer, ‘but you’re to stay there – where you are – for now.’        

    And now it was that the strange hovering creature appeared on all the screens and observed him with its dead and soulless eyes. Until those screens, as if they could no longer bear the terrible load, clicked off with a groan and a sharp, hissy intake of the stale office air.

    Well might he reflect on his unique position in the universe, on his inferiority to every other living thing. Well might he contemplate his gimpish servitude, his powerlessness, his uselessness, his complete and utter abjection. Never had he known joy or peace or love or hope. Never would he. Those things were not for him.

    What could he do except obey her orders as he always had. What other options did he have? He could have used the telephone to contact Detective Inspector Bateman but what would be the point of that? If he told anyone about the foul fate that had befallen his erstwhile colleagues they would laugh in his face, and the police would lock him up for good. So all he could do was sit and cower and wait for those who had never spoken a word to him, that was not foul or bitter, to come and remove him from this place, to transport him to wherever it was they might find for him some further use.

    And then, as he cowered in self-pity, he heard the screen on the desk above him burst noisily back to life, and the manic noises of a flesh-hungry crowd reached his ears, a terrible commotion that filled his heart with dread. And he could do no other than to drag himself up and on to his chair to watch the next instalment of that grim production.

   There was the great marble throne in the jungle stockade and there before it, an altar of the same grainy fabric. And on that throne was Daddy/uncle and above the throne, in all its alien turpitude, the little hovering thing. Staring. Observing.

    The multitude of miscreants, fresh from their perambulations, had started to congregate as the three naked virgins were brought out from their geometric prisons to meet their fates upon the altar of all the nameless nature gods of all eternal time. Colin, Jed and Dave were self-evidently virgins (as is every other nerdy, tech obsessed young man in every corner of the world). They screamed and they struggled for their very lives but the naked savages had them, and one by one they had them shackled on the altar.

    Then the hacking off began.

    Oh how those spectators screamed with joy as the shrieks of horror soared from what was left alive, once most of what it once had been was cut away. The human offerings squirmed and begged and rolled, lost consciousness, were then revived; cold water was hurled to bring back those stumped remains to their elongated waking horror so the crowd would not be cheated of its merciless, gloating delight.   

    And there was the great towering wooden cross rooted in its pyre and even now, as Bruno watched, a screaming gaggle of torch bearing beasts let their torches lick at the assembled kindling and the dirty yellow flames began to climb the wooden post, and up, towards, where… yes, it was… Victoria. It was her nailed and blackened feet that were twitching in anticipation. A great groan went up as the flames soared and the ecstatic crowd became aware that a human conflagration was in progress.  

    All Bruno could do was stumble around the deserted office where, on every screen, the same horrific images flickered out at him. He flailed about like a maniac, frantically grabbing at each screen in turn, intending to smash them and then hurl them down, but they were fastened firmly to the desks, and the desks were fastened immovably to the floor.

    The film had mercifully paused as he’d raged around the office, but now as he fell sobbing onto a chair it started up again. The great god Daddy/uncle sat now upon his mighty throne and held his arms aloft. ‘Enough!’ he roared. And now he looked at Bruno through the screen, looked right at him as the burning, crackling Victoria-flesh flew over and around him. And there was Mummy now as well, and now he saw there was a screen there on the stockade wall, and he didn’t remember taking off his shirt but there he was on that screen in that paddock and all the painted tribe observed him now, anticipating what? He didn’t remember removing the rest of his clothes, but there he was, naked, with a box cutter in each hand. Now he was at the very centre of the star, could see all the screens from there, and how they’d all turned in to face him. ‘This is what I do,’ he screamed at them. ‘This is what I’m for.’

    There he is – on every channel, in the altogether, and in all his ginger glory, prancing on the spot with a box cutter in each hand. And now we see the jungle stockade again and all the loathsome throng are looking at their soaring giant screen. And there he is; cutting at himself and frolicking and screaming. And then we see Daddy/uncle on his massive marble throne and Lilith mounts him. And their cries of ecstasy reach out above the noise of the baying mob… as… they’re going to make another one like me!

    He slashes at himself and again and again and again. Until there’s little left of him to slash, until there’s more blood on the office floor around him than there is remaining in his body, and only then do all the screens turn black.