He was drinking alone now, at night, a bad sign. He shouldn’t be doing that, it only depressed him, but he had to dull the pain. The pain of what? The pain of the raw torn places, the damaged membranes where he’d whanged up against the Great Indifference of the Universe. One big shark’s mouth, the universe. Row after row of razor-sharp teeth.

He knew he was faltering, trying to keep his footing. Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. Carefree, thick-skinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything. Turning a blind eye. Now he found himself wincing away. The smallest setbacks were major—a lost sock, a jammed electric toothbrush. Even the sunrise was blinding. He was being rubbed all over with sandpaper. “Get a grip,” he told himself. “Get a handle on it. Put it behind you. Move forward. Make a new you.”

Such positive slogans. Such bland inspirational promotions vomit. What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.

On the worst nights he’d call up Alex the parrot, long dead by then but still walking and talking on the Net, and watch him go through his paces. Handler: What colour is the round ball, Alex? The round ball? Alex, head on side, thinking: Blue. Handler: Good boy! Alex: Cork-nut, cork-nut! Handler: There you are! Then Alex would be given a cob of baby corn, which wasn’t what he’d asked for, he’d asked for an almond. Seeing this would bring tears to Jimmy’s eyes.

Then he’d stay up too late, and once in bed he’d stare at the ceiling, telling over his lists of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dibble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat. If Alex the parrot were his, they’d be friends, they’d be brothers. He’d teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.

But there was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them. It no longer delighted Jimmy to possess these small collections of letters that other people had forgotten about. It was like having his own baby teeth in a box.

At the edge of sleep a procession would appear behind his eyes, moving out of the shadows to the left, crossing his field of vision. Young slender girls with small hands, ribbons in their hair, bearing garlands of many-coloured flowers. The field would be green, but it wasn’t a pastoral scene: these were girls in danger, in need of rescue. There was something—a threatening presence—behind the trees.

Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull.

Or it might be the girls themselves that were dangerous. There was always that possibility. They could be a bait, a trap. He knew they were much older than they appeared to be, and much more powerful as well. Unlike himself they had a ruthless wisdom.

The girls were calm, they were grave and ceremonious. They’d look at him, they’d look into him, they would recognize and accept him, accept his darknesses. Then they would smile.

Oh honey, I know you. I see you. I know what you want.

11

Pigoons

Jimmy’s in the kitchen of the house they lived in when he was five, sitting at the table. It’s lunchtime. In front of him on a plate is a round of bread—a flat peanut butter head with a gleaming jelly smile, raisins for teeth. This thing fills him with dread. Any minute now his mother will come into the room. But no, she won’t: her chair is empty. She must have made his lunch and left it for him. But where has she gone, where is she?

There’s a scraping sound; it’s coming from the wall. There’s someone on the other side, digging a hole through, breaking in. He looks at that part of the wall, below the clock with the different birds marking the hours. Hoot hoot hoot, says the robin. He’d done that, he’d altered the clock—the owl says caw caw, the crow says cheerup, cheerup. But that clock wasn’t there when he was five, they’d got it later. Something’s wrong, the time’s wrong, he can’t tell what it is, he’s paralyzed with fright. The plaster begins to crumble, and he wakes up.

He hates these dreams. The present’s bad enough without the past getting mixed into it. Live in the moment. He’d put that on a giveaway calendar once, some fraudulent sex-enhancement product for women. Why chain your body to the clock, you can break the shackles of time, and so on and so forth. The picture was of a woman with wings, taking flight from a pile of dirty old wrinkled cloth, or possibly skin.

So here it is then, the moment, this one, the one he’s supposed to be living in. His head’s on a hard surface, his body’s crammed into a chair, he’s one big spasm. He stretches, yelps with pain.

It takes him a minute to place himself. Oh yes—the tornado, the gatehouse. All is quiet, no puffs of wind, no howling. Is it the same afternoon, or the night, or the next morning? There’s light in the room, daylight; it’s coming in through the window over the counter, the bulletproof window with the intercom, where once upon a time, long long ago, you’d had to state your business. The slot for your micro-coded documents, the twenty-four-hour videocam, the talking smiley-faced box that would put you through the Q&A—the whole mechanism is literally shot to hell. Grenades, possibly. There’s a lot of fallen rubble.

The scraping continues: there’s something in the corner of the room. He can’t make it out at first: it looks like a skull. Then he sees it’s a land crab, a rounded white-yellow shell as big as a shrunken head, with one giant pincer. It’s enlarging a hole in the rubble. “What the shit are you doing in here?” he asks it. “You’re supposed to be outside, ruining the gardens.” He throws the empty bourbon bottle at it, misses; the bottle shatters. That was a stupid thing to do, now there’s broken glass. The land crab whips around to face him, big pincer up, then backs into its half-dug hole, where it sits watching him. It must have come in here to escape the twister, just as he did, and now it can’t find its way out.

He unwinds himself from the chair, looking first for snakes and rats and any other thing he might not wish to step on. Then he drops the candle end and the matches into his plastic bag and walks carefully over to the doorway leading into the front reception area. He pulls the door shut behind him: he doesn’t want any crab attacks from the back.

At the outer doorway he pauses to reconnoitre. No animals about, apart from a trio of crows perched on the rampart. They exchange a few caws, of which he is probably the subject. The sky is the pearly grey-pink of early morning, hardly a cloud in it. The landscape has been rearranged since yesterday: more pieces of detached metal sheeting than before, more uprooted trees. Leaves and torn fronds litter the muddy ground.

If he sets out now he’ll have a good chance of making it to the central mall before mid-morning. Although his stomach is growling, he’ll have to wait till he gets there to have breakfast. He wishes he had some cashews left, but there’s only the SoyOBoy sardines, which he’s saving as a last resort.

The air is cool and fresh, the scent of crushed leaves luxurious after the dank, decaying smell of the gatehouse. He inhales with pleasure, then sets off in the direction of the mall. Three blocks along he stops: seven pigoons have materialized from nowhere. They’re staring at him, ears forward. Are they the same as yesterday’s? As he watches, they begin to amble in his direction.