not meaning anything

a department of the Ministry of Destinies

a series, which starts with "The Mill Girl" in 2008 and ran into 2009, based on dreams, that elicited them, making them to order, so that I had to abandon it.

I finish it here with the two long sci-fi pieces "Preparations for Transport" and "Transport 3Z1."

The Mill Girl

We cornered the mill girl at the back of the arcade.
There were piles of boxes and the smell of behind a
restaurant.
Fried chicken or something.

Every second light was broken in the arcade.
It was where John’s brother said to come and find her.

John didn’t come in the end.
Because he wasn’t in the club.

Everyone in the club had special powers.
I was the only one who didn’t know what his were.
But it was my idea so I had to be at the front.

Half-way in to the arcade it had been like it was breathing
on us.
The tiles were covered in soot.
The gum on them had turned black.
And the pigeons were scuttling in ahead of us, then
doubling back.

There was a news-agent’s with heaps of wrapped-up
magazines.
And upstairs there was a storefront with red velvet curtains
inside the glass so you couldn’t see in.

When we’d got the mill girl we came back out of the arcade.

She led us through a door and we all filed in.
I waited on the other side.

It was actually a huge room with brick pillars.
Bolts stuck out from where machinery used to be.

She was in front and all of us were quiet.
But she talked and talked.

‘Fuck’ and ‘shit’ were written on the walls.
In the middle of the room there was a pool of black water,
like oil, a sofa and a mattress with the kapok coming out.

Holes in the iron roof sent in narrow beams of sunlight.
She said, ‘This used to be an old mill.’

She had black hair and her bag was covered in black pen.
She moved her hands and I saw her fingernails were
painted black.

She laughed and turned towards me once.
When I came in range I saw her eyes were drawn around
with black eyeliner.

Her room was small.
It was in a kind of tent.
She said, ‘This is it, home.’
And she threw her bag down on the bed.

There was a splash.
I heard the others call out, ‘Come and look at this!’
I didn’t know I’d left them so far behind.

She laughed then it was quiet.
She’d turned to me a second time.

I wanted to say something before the others got there.
I wanted to tell her something that I’d never said out loud.

I wanted to tell her a terrible secret.
Because I knew she’d understand.

I wanted to tell her about the store upstairs in the arcade
with curtains just inside the glass.
That I looked in the doorway and all I saw was pink.

I said, ‘What was it a mill for originally?
What was it a mill for?’

But she’d gone.

‘in your shadow the world was on fire’

The boy had veins in his arms, under the freckles,
and a scar.

He got it where a stick went in.

In summer the grass went brown on the bank.

We took wax candles and cardboard
and pieces of wood.
The wax made them go faster.
(Crayons were just as good.)

There was a sharp stick hidden in the grass beside the track.

The boy came off at full speed.
He did it for fun and to show off.

He landed on the stick.
The end went in above his wrist.

It went under the skin, opening it,
and came out half way up his arm.

I saw it in,
and a thin trail of blood, black on the dirt,
on the concrete path at the bottom of the track,
over the tennis courts, across Seaview Rd.
to the sick-room at school.

There were rumours that he had no home
when his mother and father separated.

And he was having sex with his girlfriend,
by the park, in the bushes.

I asked my dad if it was possible for that age.

The boy was expelled.

We would see him making faces at the window.

Our teacher would go out to him.
We thought he was going out to get him
and bring him back in.

Then the headmaster would come down.

He was not allowed on school grounds.
They threatened to call the police.

He told us after school.
He waited for us at the top gate.

He showed us his lighter.
It was dirty, as if he’d been holding it tightly
all day.

And I had a fight with him once.
It got broken up and an appointment was made.

My friend didn’t want me to get hurt
so he turned up instead.

I waited at the bottom of the path.
I looked at the fence around the tennis courts.

There was a steep bank up to a wooden fence and some houses.
You could have almost jumped over the tennis-court fence from the top of the bank.

I thought of someone we’d heard of at another school
who had tried a similar thing.
They had landed on one of the twenty-foot tall metal posts
that held up the wire netting.

The post went in at their thigh
and came out through their chest,
just below their shoulder.

They were stuck
and slipped down so far but no further,
because of the wire netting.

They would have seen the end of the post sticking out.

‘He wouldn’t fight me,’ my friend said when he came back.
‘I warned him that the only way for him to get to you was through me.’

Later that night we heard sirens.
It woke me up.

I walked out into the hall
and the front door was open.

Dad came back in.
‘Fire,’ he said.

Mum and he were still sitting up, talking
They said 'Go to bed.'

a drop

I couldn’t carry all of you
without spilling.

I had to use two hands
when I went up the stairs.

I was scared that if I spilt
a drop, just one drop

you’d end up being retarded
and you wouldn’t know who I was

and I’d know why.

If only I could have told you

what you should wear

‘The Buttock’ and ‘The Bread’

In my hand the buttock was like a cool fruit.
But I could tell that this had not always been so

and that it did not always appear so.
It was slippery like a water droplet.

And in my mind there were a thousand names for it.
Mercury.

And I wished that my hand could be like a nasturtium leaf
and hold it with its tiny hairs in a constant heavy globe.

…

Because of the shopkeeper’s hands,
they had freckles and short ginger hairs,

I always bought a whole barracuda.
I didn’t want to see them tear it in half.

I didn’t want to see his nails dig in to the crust.

One day he asked what you were doing.
‘I’m perusing,’ you said.

‘That’s a good word,’ he said.

By the time we got home all the soft bread
was gone
and the crust was hollow.

‘Mice,’ said Mum.

I was sent to get the bread and no matter
how much we ate on the way
there was still always enough

to make sandwiches and eat with soup.

I picked at the crust with a finger.
You picked a hole in the middle.

And we burrowed in to the white dark warmth
and lived there

for as long as we could
every day.

Jack's Cage

It was an open-air enclosure they kept him in.
Put right out of sight at the end of the orchard.

An orchard of course was where they made his cage.
Where the apple-trees were.
Although you saw citrus from the road.

And we kids came upon it by accident.
Jack’s cage.

It was rusted and overgrown.
And you might’ve thought chickens
but for the paths worn down to the clay
where Jack walked.
And there was no chicken-house.

There was no cover at all in his cage.
No shelter from the morning frost or the rain
or hail or the snow that sometimes fell.
But far worse of course than this,
there was no shade from the sun.

And worse again for us,
there were no latrines in Jack’s cage.

We didn’t see Jack at first.
We saw his shopping-trolley.

God knows how he’d contrived to get that in there.
Or tricked the owner into lobbing it over the bars of the cage.
A mere eight foot or so, with razor-wire on the top.

But there it was.
Upside-down.
Woven into the grass, the matted hair and plastic
from plastic-bags which migrate west.

We didn’t see Jack because he’d deserted his trolley-bivouac.
And his skin was the colour of rust and clay.
And his limbs were as skinny as a bird’s.

And we didn’t expect to find a man in a cage.
In an orchard on my uncle’s farm.
Although you could scarcely call him that.

He was Jack.
And we were kids.

We poked him alive with sticks.
And when he finally moved we threw apples at him.
But only the rotten ones.

And it was probably the funniest thing I’d ever seen,
watching him shake and crawl and scratch himself.
And when his tongue remembered how to speak
listening to his crazy talk.

Without telling the adults anything we’d sneak down to Jack.
And roll around on the ground laughing outside his cage.

Just how it happened I’ll never know.
But one day the fun at Jack’s cage came to an end.

He must have overheard one or another of us talking.
Us amongst ourselves.
Saying –
‘Go and get some stones or mud or something else to throw.’

Anyway, he learnt our names.
And he stood up on his legs.
And with the utmost dignity pronounced each one.

For once we didn’t laugh.
And dropped the rocks or clumps of turd or mud we were holding.

And before we ran away from there without ever turning back
we heard him say –
‘I am Jack, Friends …’

difficult work

We worked through the night
on work that was difficult

and were answered at dawn
with a chorus of car radios.

The Chinese Man

The Chinese man couldn’t stop sneezing.
He sneezed and sneezed.

There were ten bags of flour waiting to be packed
into his car. The boot was open.

I was just about to get him a paper napkin
when he kicked his car.

With every sneeze, he kicked the car.

He leaned on the boot, holding onto the edge
with his hands, his head down.

He sneezed and kicked, sneezed and kicked.

He went around to the side door and opened it.
He went back to the bags of flour
waiting on the trolley.

He sneezed and swore.
He sneezed and did karate chops in the air.

He sneezed and kicked the car again.

The Secessionist

We left the city and headed north.
It looked like New Zealand, green,
fertile and messy, with weeds growing
along the wire fences and unmown berms.

A series of hairpin bends took us up a steep
hill, into what in any other country in
the world would be called ‘the mountains.’

The farm was not signposted
but the directions we’d been given were clear.
We left the paved road and soon came to a
fenced enclosure, in which there was a herd of
cattle. We didn’t notice the calves
lying in the grass in the shadow of the fence
until we were almost on top of them.

Their mouths were broader than ordinary,
like hippos.
But they were warm, furry and smelt of milk.

One of the farmhands took us down to the homestead.
The interior was dark, with stained wooden panels on
the walls, and heavy wooden rafters.
There were animal skins on the floor, and,
opposite the one enormous window, a lurid
illuminated sign. It read, Bandon.

Flashing arrows and dots in different colours
with legends beneath them, written in cursive,
gave the history of Bandon, from the earliest
settlement to the time of the Mexican revolution.

Entering, the owner saw me looking at the sign,
apart from the window, the brightest thing
in the room. He told me about how the region
had been wrongly acquired, that it did not belong
as part of Mexico. He showed me a map.

On it, although it was very old, I could see
that Bandon possessed a natural border
in the hills we had crossed to get here,
from which it extended on a promontory
into the sea.

‘Were you ever a secessionist?’ I asked the man.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
Just then something nuzzled my leg.
I looked down to see a salamander the size of a
dog. I jumped.

I turned to the window.
It was filled by the head of a salamander,
its skin a mottled reddish-green and
purply-blue, like the one at my feet,
except this one was truly a giant.

‘Is that the mother?’ I thought, staggering back
towards the man, who, laughing, caught my
arm and held me upright.

I flung myself from his grasp
and hurtling through the gloom
of the dark hallway toward the light,
I discerned in the half-open bedroom
doorways along it

more giant salamanders at various ages
and stages of maturity, as if the entire
farmhouse was in fact some kind of a nest.

Alerted to my presence they were now
stirring, curious to see the new arrival.
Their bodies twisted and their tails thrashed

in the shadows as they lumbered forward,
their mouths open in lipless cracks
over the blue of their tightly
coiled tongues.

The Children

No matter how strong you were
the children were there to help.

Sometimes they caused you to fall
flat on your back.

Sometimes you noticed them going
down the stairs.

None of them was taller than
your knee.

Complete little people,
the children had no dreams.

They also had no spite.

And without dreams or spite
they were quite invisible.

I Died

Walking around the house touching everything again.

While my parents slept.
And I went and touched their poor old heads.
And left them sleeping.

People were pushing in from every side inside the house.

When my grandfather snored his mouth made a perfect ‘O.’
He could do it anywhere, seemingly at will.

I walked out onto the grass like daggers.
The sun hung over the hills where the cloud had lifted.

Granny made them semolina pudding.
Which came as a surprise, because nobody had noticed
them growing so old.
The way they had lost their teeth.

I remember my parents as if I was older than they were.
I remember them being in love.

Soon they will wake up and see a million faces.
But not mine.

And they’ll understand.
And reach back into the dream.
And hold each other gently.

And for a few minutes everything will seem to be back
the way it was.

I will carry them the way they used to carry me.

Their eyes will sneak a peek before they fall.
Before I lift them into bed.
And they’ll smile before lying down again
Together side by side

Before being tucked up safe and warm
till morning.

Cathedral Steps*

We met in front of the cathedral,
on the steps.

The doors were closed
but the steps were open,
and they were free.

It was the best collection of steps of anywhere.

On any given day we’d find a thousand ways
to cross them,
a thousand ways up
and a thousand ways down,

times the thousands of combinations,

where we neither rose nor fell,
nor went straight
but curved and spun,
making diagonals across the crossings,

never reaching either the top or the bottom
of the steps.

We crack-walked, we rat-skidded,
we scampered, we bounced, we
slid like globes of mercury
up and down, and,
we followed a path
which foreclosed to us
the idea that there was any one path.

Our path was a very large number.
An imaginary number.

The steps were so vast you could take any number
away and it would be the same,
or add any number and it would be the same,
and even more incredible
a single cathedral step could be split
by any number of steps in any
number of directions.

The making of our step music got to the point we
might spot it even in somebody who was not one
of us,

who used the steps simply for ascent,
to the doors of the cathedral,
where they’d usually find they were shut,
and then for their descent,
back down to the bottom.

We saw it when we were resting,
the pull at the stranger’s muscles of the steps,
as if invisible fish-hooks were tugging at them,
sideways,

low up, low down, high up and across,
from the middle, across and down.

And sometimes in a stranger’s walk,
even away from the steps,
we saw a suggestion,
a further refinement of an established route,
or a completely new angle,
and we couldn’t wait to be allowed to go and
try it out.

We all managed to get some practice in.

When I went to the beach I’d race out onto
the rocks.
Unlike most people I preferred the rocks
to the sand.

The rocks weren’t the same as the steps
but my feet had been so trained
they’d find ways over the jags
and through the miniature valleys,
down seams and over pools,
where there was the added hazard of seaweed,
like silk,

and then the moving rocks,
a field of them,
which preceded the beach and tide-line,
snarled with driftwood.

I became lighter and faster at the beach.

And I know there were exercises with
cushions and furniture that were done
indoors,

and even out in the bush, over the loose
floor of twigs and leaves, between the
roots and trunks and onto stones in the
creek.

This was before skateboards came out.
And I lost some of my crew to them.

And some of the others just got thick
and clumsy,
or had new shoes which they didn’t want
to take off,
with thick and clumsy rubber soles.

It was hard to get the right shoes.
It was better sometimes just to take them off,
and run the risk of broken glass and dogshit.

But we were better than that.

We could avoid danger of the smelly or
the painful kind,

and fly-dance,
over the steps in front of the cathedral.

*recently I discovered both Jo and I, using completely different methods, can fly – she jumps to reach flying mode, I lope down hills, throwing my legs out in front of me.

The Clouds

I wanted to be lying in the sun.
But I wasn’t.

I wanted to shut my eyes and see the light flicker.
While the clouds queued up to pass across the face of the sun.

I wanted to lie on a rock
like a basking lizard.

I wanted to be strong.
But I wasn’t.

A fear had hold of me.
I was afraid this heaviness would not lift.

I looked away from you
and you still expected me to say something.

What could I have said?

My voice sounded shrill and alien,
on the edge of panic.

With every moment the expectation grew.
And I couldn’t move.

But worse even than this,
I could only imagine ruining everything that I loved.

Spoiling everything.

Making an effort to enjoy something
when there was no enjoyment to be had.

If I lay back now and closed my eyes
the heat would be suffocating.

And I would shiver in the deep shadows that chilled me

To a depth the sun would never reach.

The Experiment

The experiment took all day.
I arrived early.
I had agreed I would film it.

I brought the old video camera.
The girls would think they were on a
reality TV show.

I asked Mr. Perry where he came from
originally.
He spoke with an accent.

‘Bogotá,’ he said. ‘Colombia.’
There were a couple of things to move
in the garden.

Mr. Perry had already gone to a lot of trouble.
He’d hired tables and chairs,
tarpaulins and stands.

My sister arrived with three or four other girls
and one boy.
They took their places at the table.

I filmed them.
The girls were very excited.
They all wanted to look after Mr. Perry.

Some of their excitement rubbed off on the boy.
‘Do you know he was in the service, as well?’
He asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.
He’d fought against the Allies.
I told the boy this.

‘Wow!’ He said. ‘Imagine him
fighting against the English!’

Mr. Perry was very particular.
I thought his tests were a bit harsh

but the girls didn’t seem to mind
being humiliated.

He wore a woollen jerkin
over a pale cotton shirt.
He had grey hair.

He was quite photogenic.
But even he turned to me once

and said, ‘Don’t point that thing at me!’
Then he went inside.

I heard raised voices,
Mr. Perry’s and his wife’s.
We never saw his wife.

Mr. Perry brought out the lunch himself.
He put it on the trestle table he’d hired.
He had made it, he said.

The girls stuffed themselves
and giggled in little groups

about how handsome he was
and a ‘good look.’

Mr. Perry watched them.
He looked disgusted at the way they ate
the fairy cakes.

The girls were not embarrassed.
They licked their creamy fingers.

It started to rain.
I had to help Mr. Perry put up the tarps.

The girls thought even this was great fun.
They played in the wet.

The boy sat sadly off to one side
on the swing.

I talked to Mr. Perry.
Earlier he’d shown me some old events’ fliers
for clubs and parties.

I said how you didn’t see anything like that
these days.
You didn’t see those kinds of designs any more.

The afternoon resumed with more tests and games.
The girls were having to use the bathroom frequently.
Mr. Perry went in to check it.

He stormed upstairs to his wife.
Again there was shouting from inside.
I stood next to the window.

His wife shouted that she would be damned
if she was going to clean up the mess
made by those little so-and-sos.

Mr. Perry marched out to confront
the perpetrators.

The girls went quiet,
although they were each eager
to point the finger.

Before they had a chance,
Mr. Perry announced that one of them

would have to clean the toilet
and that this would be a test.

The girls milled around,
like farmyard animals.

The boy went to put up his hand.
I held it down.

My sister was standing further away.
I couldn’t have stopped her.

There were sounds of relief from the girls,
and even a titter or two as Mr. Perry fetched
a sponge and a bar of soap for my sister

to clean up the foul mess they’d made
of his facilities, facilities
he’d been generous enough to provide.

I watched my sister walk away to her fate.
She’d got some rubber gloves from somewhere.

The thought occurred to me
that this was what it would be like
to watch her walk away for the last time.

I realised I didn’t want her talking part
in the experiment.

The other girls had taken advantage of her
and soon it would be the boy’s turn.

Mr. Perry was, anyway, too furious
about the state of his precious facilities
to continue.

In the meantime the sun had come out.
The girls reluctantly
gathered their things and left.

They held their wet clothes in front of them.
They looked disappointed.

The boy offered to help pack up the equipment.
I said no.
‘Bye,’ he said, but Mr. Perry didn’t answer.

He had descended into a black mood.
Now he was worried about the state of his lamps.

He went off again, inside,
probably to shout at his wife
and I put the lamps back where they should be

and folded the tarps and demounted the stands.
I was waiting for my sister.

When she finally reappeared
I was putting the camera
into its case.

Mr. Perry came out at the same time.
He looked around the garden,
judging my work.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘See you
tomorrow.’

My sister and I wandered forlornly up the hill,
away from Mr. Perry’s,
with its perfectly clipped hedges.

‘I don’t want you going
back tomorrow,’
I said.

A Fort

We made a fort with cushions.
And we lived there for a year
on air and sandwiches.

And when we came out
we were old.

By the pool

When I asked where the blood by the hotel pool had come from,
because if it had gone into the water
it would have been diluted,
I was told a child had stubbed its toe there on the tiles.

A child had stubbed its toe in the same place
beside the pool on five different days,
it seemed.

On the five separate occasions
when I saw blood by the pool
I was given the same explanation.
I was told it was a child that had stubbed its toe.

Perhaps I had not risen early enough on the days
when it was there for me to see?

Or perhaps it was only through the negligence
of the hotel staff that I saw it at all?

But I did see it,
at the same place
on five mornings,
a messy puddle on the tiles,
smeared and streaked at its edges,
as if feet had run and slipped in it,
as if a body had been dragged through it.

I later learnt that executions
were conducted beside the pool
and that there had been executions
scheduled for the entire ten days of my stay.

I found out that the local commander,
through some quirk in his nature,
enjoyed running the risk of being found out
by a foreigner.

It would have seemed
he had a taste for the bizarre
and the theatrical.

Not only did he plan his executions
around the hotel guest list
and then leave evidence
of blood beside the pool
for foreigners to ask about;

not only was there a threadbare story
for the staff to relay,
that it had been a child which had stubbed its toe
on the tiles;

and not only did he set these events
in the brilliant white and blue
surroundings of the hotel pool:

it appeared he was also renowned
for his use of a samurai sword
as his unique means of execution
by beheading.

A Lesson in Fashion

I got the Felice Hooper.
It was just a variation on the dress suit
but it looked good on.

‘You look great,’ said a friend.
‘I’ll call Johnny. When he sees you
he’ll want to do a shoot
with you in it.’

I left for the shoot.
I was on my way through the arcade
when a stranger fell into step beside me.

‘That fits really well,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
She seemed to be going to the same place
as me.

‘It’s like I made it just for you.’
Now I looked, I knew who it was.
It was Felice Hooper.

‘Oh,’ I said and laughed.
She laughed too.

We kept walking.
We crossed the road,
stepping out from under the shop verandahs
into sunshine.

She smiled.
I looked at her.
I saw her.

‘We can see each other,’ she said.
‘How?’ I thought.
‘You like me,’ she said
as if answering.

We both laughed and carried on to where
the billboard was, on the corner
of a busy intersection.

My socks were wearing thin.
My toes were coming through.

‘Don’t even bother. Look,’ she said, taking
off her shoes. ‘It’s like that with fashion.’

‘When we get back to the shop
I’ll get you some more,’ she said.

The billboard rose above us
like the prow of a ship.

The men arrived dressed in zoot suits
with low-brimmed hats.
Johnny was not impressed.

He pointed to the wavy line of a hat brim,
a cuff that wasn’t straight, and the line
of a trouser leg that wasn’t adequately
pressed.

‘Be careful what you pay for,’ he warned.
The men shuffled and mumbled
in the dusty room.

Sunlight came through the large
mullioned windows giving on
to the street below.

The mini

We pulled up outside the location in the hire car.
It was a mini, mint condition.

A bar downstairs was closing.
You left me sitting in the back seat
and while I waited I watched the dregs
stagger blinking out into the street.

Some were still drinking from bottles.
One woman, a brunette, approached the car.
She stuck her arm through the open
passenger-side window
and planted her bottle, upturned, into
the head-rest slot, as if it were a bin.

I grabbed the bottle and splashed the remains
of the beer in her face.
I quickly wound the window up.

She walked off, screaming, mutely,
back into the bar.

When you returned the car wouldn’t start.
Another mini pulled up beside us.
It was driven by a business-woman.
She waited at the lights
and, as if to taunt us, took off with a roar.

The problem seemed to be the incline we were on.
‘I remember we used to have to rock ours back
and forth when we had one,’ I said.
It was to encourage the petrol flow.

You got out.
Someone had jammed a beer bottle under the bonnet.
You said it was from the night before, when your
brother had used the car to visit a strip club.
It had been his birthday.
It was forgivable but he should have checked,
you said.

You dislodged the bottle and placing it on
the footpath got back in.
‘Damn those strip clubs!’ you said.

A couple more stragglers left the bar.
‘Drive!’ I said.

‘Now!’
A group of men passed by the driver’s side.
One was carrying a wooden crate.

‘Let’s get out of here!’ I said.
He slammed the crate down on the bonnet right
in front of you hard enough to buckle the metal.
You shouted at him.

‘Let’s go!’ I said, from the back seat.
The mini lurched forward.
We did a U-turn.
The lights were green and the tyres squealed
as we took the right into Courtney Place.

The man threw the crate into the road after us.
He started running.
One of the group grabbed his arm.
‘What do you want to do that for?’ he asked.
‘I’m bored,’ said the man.

He shook off the other’s hand and took off
after us.
‘I’m bored!’ he yelled to the early morning traffic
and the drinkers and party-goers dazed from
the night before.

He ran down the middle of the road, his arms and
legs pumping.
‘Bored!’
The veins stood out on his forehead.
His face was bright red and
sweat ran down his neck.

His head pounded as if his heart
were in his skull
and his hard heels hit the paving
like gunshot.

Holland Balland

Her name was
Holland Balland.

We sat in a circle.
She said, ‘Bring your hands
together.’ We did.

‘And… you will feel…
green.’

…

She stood and said,
‘Find your own step
on the stairs.’

And then she told us,
‘Pass
Balland’s step

and take 115 steps
after that.’

That was all.

The Artisan of Prague

We were taken for a tour of Prague,
where I had never been.

The city passed by outside the window
of the old white Mercedes Benz.
Our guide pointed out that this quarter
had been unaffected by the war,
most of the original architecture was intact,
while this was all new.

Hexagonal towers seemed to be a theme
in the architecture of both quarters,
old and new.

We drove beneath a building
I immediately said was my favourite.

It was composed entirely of glass cylinders,
each room occupying a circular cross-section.

Its tubular structure cantilevered out
over the road, glass cylinders above
and beside us, in different sizes,
ascending twenty storeys or more.

We hit the motorway.
The old Benz hurtled out across five lanes,
under bridges, overpasses, between trucks,
rocking gently on its suspension
like a river-boat.

We were beginning to change our minds
about our guide.
He had before seemed quite congenial,
pleasant and considerate.
But he drove like a madman.

Perhaps it was a cultural difference,
he never seemed to use his indicator.
I checked the speedometer: 160 miles an hour.

The walls of the motorway restricted our view
of the city.
Soon, however, we reached the artisans’ quarter.

I explored.

I found a white well-lit arcade where a distracted
young man leant against a bench rolling a cigarette
and putting it to his mouth.

I hadn’t smoked in years but I approached,
my Zippo already having opened in my hand
with a satisfying click,
presenting its flame to light the young man’s cigarette,
just like old times.

What had caught my eye and caused me to approach
was a perfect jug.

It was about the size of a teapot but without a lid,
open, and like the buildings of Prague hexagonal,
flaring at the top.

Next to it sat another perfect item.
A solitary cup.
Blue.

Its sides parallel, perfectly cylindrical,
two thin lines, also parallel, etched into the glaze,
passed around its circumference threading through
the simple handle.

It’s beautiful, I said.
The young man had nodded thanks when I lit his
cigarette.
Now he scowled.

I would have liked to have a lot more
but this one took two weeks, two weeks
before it was perfect.

I noticed the age of his jacket, frayed at the cuff,
the collar worn through to the interfacing,
its elbows patched, and his faded corduroys.

I had many failures before this one. Many.

It was worth it, I said.
He brightened. Slightly.

You think?

I picked it up. It was light and pleasing to hold.
I checked underneath.
Only an artisanal stamp, no number.

The young man was becoming more enthusiastic.
This I made before.

He gestured behind me.
I hadn’t noticed the gallery of naive drawings
set on miniature easels in glass boxes
that ran down the length of the narrow arcade.

Again, they were simple and beautiful.
Figures done in jet black, hard lines,
simple block-like heads and bodies,
but at the same time expressive and striking.

He had come out from behind his display counter.
Come here, he said.

We walked to the end of the arcade,
where, to the left, in a sort of storage area,
he showed me earlier work.

Some was ceramic. One piece he took from a drawer,
unwrapping it from tissue-paper,
a trompe l’oeil:
an orchestra if you held it one way,
a political message if you held it the other.

I didn’t understand it
but I appreciated the workmanship.

Some of it was on paper. Some on canvas. Some wood.

Each piece he showed me bore the same stamp of the artisan.

It was clear he did not sell very much, that he was poor
and driven to perfection, less an artisan than an artist.

A great artist, I thought.
At least, on the evidence of what he showed me,
his work did not warrant the stamp of authenticity
of a mere craftsman.

Why don’t you number your work? I asked.
What do you mean?

In limited editions.
One number to show how many of a series you have made,
another number to show its place in the series,
whether first, second, third.

His mood darkened again.
That is the whole problem! He stormed.
Every one is one of a kind!

He pulled in frustration at the hair on the back of his neck,
took a last drag on his cigarette
and ground it into the dirt floor with his heel.

I wanted to help.
I wished that I could be an impressario
and take his work into the world.
But his work was already in the world.
And I had as few resources as he.

I was under no illusion that this was art not industry,
while he…

I was almost jealous of his obstinacy.
One cup in two weeks and you call yourself an artisan?

At least he had his so-called artisanal life!
What did I have?

While this was all going on
I did wonder for a second where the rest of our group had go to.

I had, out of the corner of my eye, spotted a couple of them
as they passed by the entry to this arcade,
sparing it and its treasures the merest glance,

before they went on to other stalls,
where they would find the goods meant for tourists
which they would, no doubt, buy up
to give to friends and relations at home

from their trip to Prague’s famous
artisanal halls.

My grandmother

My grandmother came to me
in the night.

She said, ‘It’s only right
that you should write
a history of stones.’

The carpark

The carpark was a castle.
In fact it was the castle.
All the carpark officials
communicated in the German
of Hanover.
Only one of them insisted
he spoke flawless English.
But even he used strange words,
like ‘minch,’ which he expected
everyone to understand.
This meant to the left of
10 o’clock.

Such instructions were necessary
as the carpark was almost impossible
to find one’s way around
without a guide.

The unsuspecting pedestrian
would suddenly be confronted
by sheer drops, where guard-rails
had gone missing,
or had never been fitted.

It was disconcerting to find oneself
with one foot unsupported, dangling,
the floor having disappeared under it.
Where there might have been a rail
or banister there was nothing
to help pull oneself back
from the brink.

Naturally, because it was now a carpark,
it was lit with bulkhead lights,
which gave a dull yellow glow
to the dark seeping stone,
broken, in places, by sections
of small white tiles.

The tiles reflecting it certainly
increased the overall amount of light
but provided the illusion
that where they stopped so did
the solid structure of the carpark.

The tiled sections were islands
of solidity suspended in a blackness
above and below where it was only
a matter of conjecture
as to whether the walls and floors
continued beyond them.

This was anyway a city of
architectural oddities.
There were streets of
apartment blocks and
shopping centres
with more spires
than Westminister,
illuminated by a greater
wattage than Las Vegas.

There was a whole block
resembling phosphorescent
dried noodles. The Bird’s Nest
had nothing on this.

There were mock Tudor terraces
which rose to the height
of regular office towers,
some 40 overhanging storeys.

And there were office towers
that had been harvested
and bound in upright ricks like hay,
the stalks leaning in together
tied around the middle.

The subway system
not only connected the city
horizontally but also went up
vertically among its many
structures and on the inside
of its biggest buildings.
Individual seats sat in
gyroscopic cradles.

The language of the city
was German. It was really
no surprise that the denizens
of the carpark should
speak it too.

Looking at it now,
it was more a lighthouse
than a castle.
It had a central tower
of mammoth proportions
with a crow’s nest at the top,
from which observations
of the city could be made.

The subway led
into the lower buildings,
around the central
tower, without penetrating
any further.

It was as if
from one’s car
to the safety and modernity
of the subway system,
one was being asked
to negotiate a dangerous
labyrinth, while the only
helpful official barked
out ‘minch‘ at intervals,
to keep one from falling
down a stairwell to a
certain death.

The Harbour

We were driving downhill towards the harbour.
The sea was a beautiful blue.

I sat in the back.
We had a friend visiting from New York.

I sat beside him.
The armrest was down between us.

We looked at the view.
I thought, ‘This will remind him
of San Francisco.’

We turned right at the bottom of the hill.

The road wound around the bays,
then straightened as we neared town.

We reached the esplanade
and drove along it,
until we came to the front of the hotel.

Instead of stopping
we did a U-turn right in front of it
and headed back the way we had come.

The wall separating us from the sea
became a low breakwater.

We veered over the road, to the right.
Before we had time to react
we’d crossed over the top of the breakwater
and Dad had driven us into the sea.

Mum yelled his name
and the car hung there,
suspended, floating.

Our American friend leaned forward,
his fingers digging into the armrest.
Mum was screaming.

I tried the windows.
So did he.

We flicked the switches on and off.
The electrics were dead and nothing happened.

Dad said I would have to do something about it.

He sat perfectly calm and still,
with his arms resting on the steering-wheel.

I lunged through the gap between the front seats
and beat against the windscreen
with the palms of my hands.

Soon we wouldn’t be able to open the doors
because of the pressure of the water.

How deep was it?
Were we already resting on the bottom?

I remembered it was deep enough in this part
of the harbour for large ships to pass.

I remembered the same situation from movies.
The car would sink nose first.
Water would come rushing in below the dashboard.

I should have taken the headrest out and
smashed a window with it.

I should have told Mum and Dad to undo their seatbelts.
Even if I rescued the friend from New York,
they would soon run out of air.

The car sank in slow-motion.
It raised a cloud of silt

and when it reached the bottom,
it hit without a sound,
the back wheels following the front.

There was very little light.
It was murky,
and there was no chance anyone would rescue us.

I heard my father say my name:
‘He’ll have to do something.
Let’s see if he can.

He’ll have to do something about this.
Let’s see.’

Red Dog Row, or The Eye

I was down in the slum area of Wellington.
I came down here often.

We called it the slum area
but no one really lived here,
unless you counted a couple of winos and
homeless people
who came for shelter.

It was mainly brothels, and an old theatre,
which had been left partially demolished
behind the street front.

Someone was usually working down here
at some time of the day,
tearing down another wall,
taking out plumbing fittings
and copper wiring.

It amounted to little more than the shells
of the old buildings.

Most lacked roofs.
Although there were sheltered places
under overhangs.

And you could pass from one building
to the next without going through a single door.
(The doors had gone to demo yards years before.)

You could go from the black and white
tiled floor of the theatre foyer,
around the back of the old commercial kitchen,
which still had a street frontage –

it was a Japanese restaurant
(they were Korean but they liked you to think
they were Japanese and the place was always
packed with young guys with no shirts,

as if it was the local Asian pick-up joint –
it was hard to know who worked there
and who didn’t) –

you climbed over a low wall
and there was a rectangular pit.
It was open to the sky
and had filled with rain water.

Then you went, through a series of black enamel
door-frames, into an old department store.
Some entrepreneurial locals had made this
into a stage where bands sometimes played.

You crossed a courtyard with tables made
from wooden cable spools and milk and beer
crates for chairs and you passed into a broken
maze of rooms and hallways.

These were the remains of the brothels.
I’d got bored with the international comedy act
and wandered away.

It sounded like it was over now.
A quiet had come down over the whole slum area.

I saw patches of stars above
and used my cellphone light
to find my way through the labyrinth.

There were banisters and no stairs,
sudden breaks in the walls which,
down a half floor,
gave onto other rooms
in another building.

It was to one of these rooms I was drawn.
The light attracted me.
It was mauve and green, with a stripe
of baby blue where the colours met.

It must have been coming in
off neon signs from the street behind.
There was a bed in the room.

I stopped.
I held my cellphone out
over the room and took a snap.

Withdrawing my arm from the gap in the wall,
I had a look at my photo.
On the bed lay a blond woman.

One eye was turned up towards me,
its white showing.
It was the eye of a startled horse.

I ran and tripped
and ran again.

I could hear whoever it was chasing me.
I glanced at the photo on my phone.

The coloured light I’d wanted to get a shot of
wasn’t the thing you saw.
It was the eye.

It still stared at me,
the eye of the blond woman.
It shone in the room.

I kept on running.
I wished that by deleting the photo
I could erase the fact
of having taken it.

Whoever it was
who was chasing me
knew it could not be erased.

I’d been seen.
She’d seen me.

The Golden Age

‘Oh,’ she said in a voice that said, ‘How could you?’
‘Seven hundred dollars!’

At first it was only an overdue book notice.
It wasn’t even for seven hundred dollars.

The notice was in an official style I didn’t recognise.
It was ornamented with exotic graphic motifs in brown ink.

It said that I had The Golden Age
and to return it within a period of three days
or pay for its replacement.

There was no mention of a fine.
But the replacement cost was in the hundreds.

I recognised the title.
It was a book I’d read
and I’d definitely borrowed it from somewhere.
Was it still on my shelf?

I looked at the address of the library that had issued the notice.
I didn’t recognise it.

We had travelled to the islands the year before.
Perhaps it was one of the stop-overs?

The notice came with a sticker featuring the same graphic
in brown ink with the word ‘RORLI‘ above it.

I assumed it was an acronym
but for what I’d no idea.

I peeled the sticker off the backing paper
and stuck on my suitcase.

It took several attempts to get it square with the leather
corners of the suitcase.

I hadn’t realised how furry calf-skin could be.
As I removed the sticker to get it even
it came away half covered in hair.

The calf-skin was a russet gold
and the sticker with its dark brown emblem
went well with it.

Perhaps I would collect more stickers
and they would fade over time
and my suitcase would have the look of a classic,
a world-traveller.

I delved further into the package
in which the overdue library notice came.

It was becoming clear I was the target
of some marketing scheme for the island.

The notice itself opened into what appeared to be
an aeroplane-ticket for RORLI.

The thing was so cunningly designed it could have
had innumerable pockets hiding who knew what.

I began to explore, opening now the tickets at the fold.
After a couple of folds I found a packet of red pills.
I waved them in front of me.

‘Don’t!’ she said.
Along with the red pills I found blue and yellow pills,

more stickers, a book of blank cheques,
a stamped return envelope, and all of this
tucked into the fly-leaf of a thick volume.

I was about to turn it over and check the title.
It would not have surprised me to find it was the book
for which the original notice had been issued.

‘Look!’ I said.
‘Rorli,’ she said.
She explained it was a small island nation in the Pacific.

‘They’re crazy,’ she said, as if to say, ‘They are known
to have gone crazy in colonial times.’

Just then we were interrupted by the smiling faces
of a man and a woman.

The woman had an hibiscus flower behind her ear and
wore a long flowing dress.

The man wore a white shirt without a tie, with the sleeves
rolled up, and black dress pants.

I tried to conceal what I had received in the post.
The man extended his hand.

Both of them were still smiling.
‘I’m W___ C____ C____,’ he said, ‘A friend of your mother’s.’

I shook him by the hand, with the package, the book
and the drugs tucked under my arm.
His eyes were drawn to the RORLI sticker on my suitcase.

For an instant a shadow passed over his face.
It might have been embarrassment, but he said nothing.

Help

I couldn’t move.
I listened to the sound

of the words.
I was paralysed.

I was terrified.
I couldn’t move.

And it was all so stupidly
real, my hands,

the chair on which I sat,
the ranch slider I would have to open

to escape.
I couldn’t say

enough, or use my words
or get up.

And then you came to get me.
You came to pick me up.

As if you knew

I was going to need help
to find my wrists,

my long wrists.

The Captain’s Table

They
cooked
Will.

By the time I saw him
there was nothing I could’ve done.

They’d cooked him whole.
He lay face down
across two trolleys fitted with bains-marie.

They’d turned his head to the side
so we’d get the benefit
of seeing his expression.

He looked surprised
as if he’d been caught unawares

and slow-cooked,
poached, by the look of him,
while occupied with something else entirely.

He looked as if at any moment
he might just say what.

His spine had been dug out of his back.
And the gravy had risen to the level of the skin
on either side
of the long trough made by its removal,
which ran from his tailbone to his neck.

As he came past I grabbed the fish-slice
and attempted to find part of him not well-done.
If it was raw, I reasoned, there’d still be a chance.

The fat moved
and non-descript lumps were all that rose to the surface
of the rich and yellowy-orange gravy.
It was like a curry.

My table were more amused
than dismayed at this show of bad manners.

‘He wants to compliment the chef!’ piped in one woman.

The staff, who were apparently well-versed in how to deal
with uncouth behaviour in the dining-room,
gently removed my hand from the implement
and sat me down.

My cuff was dripping fat.

I knew I was getting the brush-off
but what point was there in making a spectacle of myself?
It was already too late for Will.

I cleaned myself up with my napkin and,
smiling, I dabbed at the tears that had sneaked out.

I was like the naughty old man
at a home for the elderly,
cognizant of exposing himself
to the young female visitors,
suddenly ashamed
and crying uncontrolled.

The twinned trolleys had made their rattling way
around the room
showing off the special.

A glass was struck with a knife.
And there was movement at the captain’s table.
The white-jacketed figure was standing.

Before we could start
he waved his finger in the air,
as if to say
this was how I gauged the mood of the nation,
this was the finger
with which I took its temperature.

He had done so perfectly.
It was a coup.
Here we stood,
hungry for the main course.

The waiting-staff had come to attention
at their makeshift servery.

The media were gathered behind the diners.
Their cameras rolled.

A few incomprehensible words were mumbled.
We applauded.

And then we all sat down.

I knew that Will’s wife and his two children
had been confined to their cabin tonight.
And how I wished I was in mine now too,

and not confronted with this tiny portion
of my old friend
on a bed of saffron rice
and swimming in his gravy.

To Do

I’d done everything I had to do on my to do list
when I realised I was in the wrong car.

And it was not my to do list.

The Land War

We sang and joked.
We prayed and joked.
We listened to the radio and joked that
if you couldn’t hear the bombs you must be asleep.
How anybody could sleep through that racket
I didn’t know.
And it was getting closer.

It was clear we couldn’t just do nothing.
First they’d taken our land.
Then they’d taken our language.
Now they wanted to take away our will to live.

The bombs kept falling.
And it wasn’t so bad, we joked,
until they went off.

They went off like thunder.
Like thunder they made short exclamations –
‘What the hell!’
Then came long rumbling sentences we heard begin
on the radio, that echoed out over the surrounding hills,
encircling us down in the valley.
It was loud and exciting.

There were comings and goings all the time.
People arrived with fresh information
about whose place had been hit and what
bridges were still up
right through the afternoon.
It was like years of gossip in a couple of hours.

The radio stayed on into the evening
with no let up in the noise of the explosions.

And our place shook.
And I ran between the two houses
to keep up with new developments.

By evening the mood had definitely started to change.
The jokes were thinning out and no longer
defused the situation.

The old people were arriving.
The sense of affront we all felt was becoming rage.

The women and the girls were leaving the men to gather
around the table.
A crowd of them sat.
Some pulled up beer crates.
Some sat on chairs.
Others were leaning against the wall.
And Uncle Bill was standing.

He pulled down plans and maps of the area.
Old ones with landmarks on that were no longer there.
That had been taken.

He showed that the bombing was likely to precede
a ground action against us.
That this was not a new hostility,
simply another round of the old
which had run for miles underground
to blow up now again in our faces.

There was a judgement in his words.
And his eyes glittered.
As if he was saying –
‘I told you so‘ and
‘I would have done differently‘
to the old people.

I went back to our place.
And lay for a while listening to the bombs
rain down around the valley.

I think I slept.
And then I was back again.
It was later.

And Fred was there.
I was so pleased to see him and
we did our special handshake.

A tighter group had formed in the kitchen
with Uncle Bill in the middle.
Fred went straight in and sat down.
‘Right then,’ he said.

Behind their backs
Grandmother turned to me and smiled.
She was holding Dad’s old double-barrel shotgun.
And she shook it.

She said: ‘It’s all right.
You and me, we’ll sneak around.
And come up behind them.
Like this.
We’re all right, us.’

Later that night I remember waking.
And hearing music in the silence.
A song which seemed to make it richer and darker.

I got up and went over to Uncle Bill’s and Selma’s.
A record was playing on the stereo.

And apart from that everything was still.
Fred was slumped at the table.
And Uncle Bill had gone to bed.

The Ornament

I was skipping down the road on the arm of a girl.
She was younger than me.

Suddenly I was tired.
‘Stop,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she said,
‘We haven’t even reached the corner!’

But she stopped and we walked on
arm in arm in silence.

We came to the gift shop.
‘Let’s go in!’ I said.

She was quick and bright among the new
and foreign things.

The shopkeeper brought out masks.
They were made of coloured cardboard.
We tried them on.

She laughed
and my tiredness of before was forgotten.

We played in the shop for hours,
and the shopkeeper didn’t ever seem to get tired of us,
until she settled on a small ornament to take home,
a lead snail or a glass paperweight.

The box was tied with a white bow.

She carried it carefully and proudly back.
I walked along beside her.

At her front gate,
half of me wanted to go with her and see inside her house
and help decide where to put the ornament.

The other half had already been there, years ago
and could imagine the dust and neglect.

I moved around inside,
as if in some kind of dream,
with memories of how little love there was.

I was old.
I was what some day she would be.

But I was  young.
And I went with her into the house.

And she played me Elvis singing ‘Wooden Heart’
on a portable record-player.

She said it had been playing when her mum and dad
had met and even now he was gone
it was still her mother’s favourite.

And we found a place for the ornament
on her bedside shelf.

It was a lead snail.
It was a glass paperweight.
It was a white stone loveheart.

And she patted the bed beside her.
And I curled up and went to sleep.

And when I woke up
I was in her bed.

How little love there was in that house,
and how much regret.

And how much I wished she was
what some day I would be,
and not myself.

I looked,
and where the ornament had been
there was an outline in the dust,
and nothing more.

The Studio

A dusty light came through the window. The view was of New York. It could have been a false view done with a photo.

I crawled out from beneath the rostra. This was only my preferred means of getting around the studio.

I didn’t need the invisibility. When I appeared I was immediately involved in whatever activity was in progress. The invisibility of getting around sub-rostra was more a game I played with myself.

And in the wooden legs and struts of these raised floors that, since they were the platforms on which the work was made, took up a large of the studio, it was still.

It wasn’t quiet, not with all the machines for cutting and grinding, not with all the shouting of directions and the tramping back and forth, but it was a sanctuary, my private domain.

I had as little need to be out from under foot, while under floor, as I did to be out of sight. I could ‘Hold this,’ ‘Take that,’ and ‘Tell so and so about the revised deadlines for such and such.’ And I could provide the invaluable serve of complimenting the artists on their work.

There were as many as ten projects going on constantly, four main artists and several satellites.

‘Artist’ meant a magician able to transform tangible materials into intangible things, like feelings. Quantities of things, sometimes with their own innate qualities, became new qualities. Parts were made into wholes and vast quantities of things were supplied.

There were diamonds, paper, hessian, silk, marble, iron nails, gold leaf, resin, powdered minerals and natural and artificial kinds of waste, plastic and shells.

They were layered and they were stripped away. They were built up and ground smooth. The soft became rough. The solid softened.

Time was accelerated. Skins wrinkled. Stone wore down. Fabric turned to rags. Iron rusted. Wood rotted.

And the passage of time was halted.

Apples remained bruised forever. Paper, like diamonds, could last forever. Decay was stopped in the middle, where something else was revealed.

Palettes of materials arrived at the loading dock. They passed through the workshops on the first and second floors, then to the loft where final assembly or finishing took place. From there pieces were lowered by hoist down the shaft, back to the loading dock.

Plans travelled in a zig-zag up and down the building, up from the workshops, down from the loft.

Orders followed the same course, to the stock rooms behind the dock.

Notices of the arrival of new stock retraced that path to the loft, to be posted on one of the noticeboards in the drawing room, where plans were made up.

The drawing room was down a corridor from the open part of the loft. This was one of the few places I’d have to break cover if I were going below rostra.

Even in the dock I could crawl behind and below the shelves on either side of it. This was dangerous when materials were being unloaded or when the hoist was in use. But it was exciting to see some of the larger pieces from below as they came down.

There were works like church spires, which barely fitted in the shaft and had to be lowered inch by inch and slowly turned, degree by degree. The more impressive they were, the more dangerous for me.

I might have enjoyed them being moved but these were not the works I felt most for.

Two of the studio’s artists made large-scale works. There were the church spires, like missiles frozen in stone, or prehistoric space-ships, and there were the wooden derricks, the scaffolds, the huge jetty structures, bridges that began and left you suspended, as if expelling you, making you walk the plank part way, halfway across.

Sometimes these were placed in rivers, with one end in the water, the arch left soaring fifty feet or more above the bank. And there was no way to get on.

Sometimes wooden scaffolds went up and you could walk on them but where the building ought to have been there was nothing. They were built around an empty space.

And just occasionally they collaborated, the spire artist and the wooden scaffold artist.

What you got were cranes.

The expected scaffold might take you up to the top of the spire, but it would then take you out from it, on a wooden arm that ended in space.

I admired them but they were not my favourites.

They were big as the artists themselves were big.

I eavesdropped on their arguments in the drawing room. Sheets of paper were screwed up, ripped and even burnt when they could not agree.

The paper artist hated these displays.

He would sit at the great desk and quietly pull a new sheet from its hundreds of shelves, where every kind of paper or card imaginable was kept.

The argument might increase in fury, like a storm. The paper artist would sit at its centre, its eye, working away.

When he’d finished, he might say, ‘Is this what you mean?’

And sooner or later the two others would stop and look.

There on the paper to their astonishment and embarrassment would be the answer.

You might have claimed the paper artist as the author of both their works and therefore as the greater artist.

The bull-headed sculptors would shuffle away, sometimes with a reflexive, ‘I told you so!’ or, ‘That is not quite right,’ about some unimportant detail in the drawing. But they would concede that the paper artist had got it, had captured it.

Of course, they wouldn’t thank him and by the next time it would’ve been forgotten.

The paper artist’s own works were as small and delicate as arrangements of iron filings. But the filings they arranged were built fibre by fibre from the paper itself. Or the works were made of layers of materials, fabrics, paper, slivers of glass and even diamond chip and gold leaf.

The top layers were stripped back, torn and cut. Those underneath were scratched at and scarred. Textures were brought to light and new zones were discovered where they met and joined or flowed into one another, or frayed on top of another, or butted together or interlaced.

Sometimes these shifting, shimmering zones would come to occupy an entire work.

From a distance little could be discerned in the way of landmarks. As you approached mountainous regions would be discovered, diamond screes and copper valleys with snaking green rivers between banks of clotted silk.

I loved watching the paper artist work in his corner of the loft when he was working on his layered pieces. He was a builder of worlds, except in reverse.

When the work was finished, when it had reached the point that nothing more could be added to it, was when creation began. With a rip or a gouge, the textures of what was underneath, the insides, would be revealed.

He didn’t go at this process carefully like a surgeon when he opens up a body. He moved about the work like a boxer, like a dancer, jabbing at it and cutting it and stripping it, with long downwards and sideways strokes.

And he would laugh. And watching him I’d laugh too.

The filament works, those fine arrangements of paper and fabric fibres, were put together in a specially constructed tent.

I could see him, his face distorted by the clear plastic, with tweezers and an eyepiece, like a jeweller.

In a strange way these miniatures were more impressive than the monuments of stone and wood going up elsewhere in the loft.

They didn’t have the excitement of the layered pieces but when they were complete they were like tiny windows onto uninhabited worlds.

They were alive. They held you in a kind of thrall.

However even these were not my favourite.

The fourth artist resident at the studio was the laziest. At least, he was hardly ever in the loft.

His works were often under dust-cloths. And I never saw him make a sketch or plan of what he intended to do.

This was not because he didn’t like paper-work. On the contrary, he kept the whole place supplied with materials.

There were order- or dispatch-forms to be conveyed around the building. These were his. And if there were notices of revisions to deadlines or instructions of any kind with anything to do with the commercial running of the studio, they also tended to be his.

You might have said he was a lazy artist but an active businessman. This was true, in a sense, but it didn’t quite cover his enterprise.

As the loading dock, workshops, drawing room and loft were inside and part of the studio, as the diamond-encrusted layers were revealed by ripping away the outer skin, the fourth artist’s work was somehow the world in which the others might exist. He provided the principle of their co-existence.

And under the dust-cloths in the loft his works were unassuming. Although they seemed to be a sideline, they were at the centre of everything else.

They were not however the centre. They were like gravity.

Sunlight penetrating through the cracks in the raised floor of the rostra sent down bright shafts. They trapped the dust in the air and were narrow and sharp.

Like spotlights they caught a hand or hit a leg as I crawled over and under struts and spars and squeezed between the wooden legs supporting the roof of my domain.

A blood-red block of marble was being raised to the loft.

The fourth artist followed its progress from floor to floor and I was following him, invisible, sometimes under the platform he stood on, sometimes beside him, hidden in the shadows.

When the dust-cloths were removed in preparation to receive the block I was there. I saw the smooth and polished curves of the marble.

The work was made of many different colours and grains. It took up a large square of stage.

It was like a lounge suite but for aliens. No human could have sat on its strange and contorted shapes.

I liked this work most of all.

It was neither too big nor too small. You could look at it all at once and not climb onto it or into it.

You could hold the whole thing in your mind and let your eyes slip down the curves and walk in the deep shadows of its squares, in clefts between the marble faces.

You could glide through and over its passages of black, green, beside its blunt towers and trunks.

It was as private and still as my own domain below the stage.

It was like a mausoleum.

And it held you that way too. As if you were among the spirits of those for whom it had been built, it was your house, your home.

The block of blood-red marble was being slowly manoeuvred into position.

It had been perfectly cut so that between it and its neighbours there was not a crack. It slid in and joined the others as if into a vacuum.

And you could not imagine its ever being removed, or moved again, at all.

The President Elect of the United States of America

After many men
with grey hair,
a man with black hair
was president.

He had a beautiful voice.

And we saw a crowd
of maybe a million people
with flashes going off
above their heads.

The new president’s voice was slow.

It was like following a wave
all the way in to the shore.

And as the president’s voice
rolled over them
the crowd said, ‘Yes we can,’

and they withstood it.

And, as if the new president’s voice
was reaching some private place
that was theirs alone
and flooding it and it was flowing out,

a lot of them cried.

And as each wave washed over them
and was followed by another
and another

the tears were all that was left.

It was a mystery
how he knew what to say
and what was
pulling the words out of him.

I thought,
Something has happened.

There was the election
that chose him that was bigger
than any crowd

but for all these people to cry with joy
if that was what it was

or hope
if that was what it was
there must have been something.

I wondered if he was just the sign
of what had happened
or the thing itself

and whether this was history
or history was like the sea in which
as soon as it happened

all was lost.

The Sea-egg

I couldn’t see what you were pointing at, in the depths below the wharf.

The water was clear. It was like a magnifying glass. It moved over all the objects on the bottom.

The rocks were the colour of rust. The kelp was black. I saw a sea-egg. It had lost its spines. It was the pale green of the sea. Was is this? I asked.

Beside it something else came into focus. It could’ve been a hand, a hand that had been underwater a long time and lost its colour. It was the same hand you saw in pictures of the developing foetus.

The hand had a red vein in it. Like a loose thread in a clear piece of soap or vaseline jelly. One that made you want to pull it. One that might undo it.

‘Look!’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

It was too horrible for you to say. Or was I imagining things?

No. You shook your head.

Did you shake your head at me or what you saw, what you pointed at?

‘It’s gone,’ you said.

I looked again. I saw that what had been there had disappeared. There was only the sea-egg.

You pulled my arm. Three men were walking towards us. The front one had tensed his muscles.

I turned. Our means of escape were limited. There was the bank of piled rocks of the sea-wall, against which waves were breaking, or there was the scaffolding around the front of the old wharf building.

You stood your ground. I searched my pockets for a weapon. I drew out an empty hip-flask and piece of a car aerial. It was sharp at one end.

I wielded it like a knife and you got behind me. I lunged.

All the men had seen was the hip-flask. When they saw the sharp rod of metal they stepped back.

We ran along the loose planks of the scaffolding.

We’d reached the corner before we noticed people in the building. It was converted to a pub. People were drinking and I was carrying the aerial like a knife.

We had to go sideways around the corner. The people helped us down into a courtyard. There were picnic tables and jugs of beer.

The men were in the pub and you didn’t want to stay. I handed over the hip-flask and the broken aerial and we got out.

I noticed you shaking. We walked into the sunshine. Your eyes were wide. You looked like a frightened animal or a child.

‘Did you see that?’ you said, ‘Did you see what they did?’

This Evening

We met at the beach,
the whole family.

We stayed inside all day.
We did collage
with friends and hangers-on.

There was a knock at the door.
It was the lady from the end house.
She’d brought her horse.

It was low tide.
‘You can get right around and it should be fine
with a horse,’ I said, ‘I’ve done it thousands
of times.’

‘The rocks are quite big on this side.’
I had to jump from one to the next
as the sea rushed in between them.

‘And you have to be careful
when you go round the point,’ I said,
‘but at low tide it should be fine.’

I looked over the lady’s shoulder
at the horse.

I thought of its hooves sliding off the top
of the flat rocks and getting stuck.

I imagined the horse struggling and deep cuts
on its legs and flanks.

They would have to get the man with the gun
from the bay at the far end.
He would have to shoot the horse.

I remembered how he’d shown off his gun
when we had an escaped prisoner
and the whole bay was placed on alert.

I walked beside the car with the loud-hailer.
‘THE MAN IS DANGEROUS.
DO NOT MAKE ANY ATTEMPT
TO APPROACH OR TALK TO HIM,’
it bayed.

The man with the gun came out and said,
‘Approach him?!
I’ll approach him all right.
I’ll take care of him with this!’

He raised the gun above his head
in a premature sign of victory.

It had a leather strap.
The strap waved.

A wind had come up.
It blew in off the sea.

The lady from the end house
stood waiting at the door,
the reins in her hand.

She was looking at me distrustfully,
as if I was not the one she’d come to see at all,
as if she hadn’t asked for my advice
and didn’t appreciate me giving it.

At last she turned to go,
leading the horse by the reins.
It was a sad old nag.

Back inside there were the shadows
of all the friends and hangers-on.
Black figures stood in doorways,
lay on sofas and daybeds
and propped up on cushions
sat on the floor.

It took time for my eyes to readjust
from the brightness of the light outside.

I was feeling nervous.
Soon I’d be leaving.

This evening I had a train to catch,
back into the city.

The Prime Minister of New Zealand

There was a thin boy standing in the corner of the room.
He told us one day he would be Prime Minister.

He made his fingers into glasses
to show what he would look like.

He smelt a little bit.
So we didn’t want to go very close
to see.

So he spoke in a loud voice.

He was wearing grey woollen shorts
and a grey vest.
It was a V-neck
with a coloured stripe at the collar.

His mother ironed his clothes.

The Human Breeding Programme

By 2050 the wealthy countries, namely the G8, had instituted human breeding programmes. This did not mean that many other countries were not sub rosa conducting their own programmes.

At first, such programmes were a natural extension and development of human embryonic studies and stem cell research. The routine screening for congenital diseases also contributed a fund of knowledge and personnel to the breeding programmes.

2050 was a watershed year because it was in this year that the United Nations recognised the programmes as being in the interests of the survival of the human genome.

Super diseases were threatening human populations with increasing frequency and severity every year. It was argued that the human genome ought to be considered as within the remit of human custodianship of the creatures of the earth, as biblically granted, but apparently so in many other traditions as well.

Muslim and poorer countries objected and there was talk of reprisals in both directions and of those reprisals taking the turn towards the deployment of nuclear armaments.

The U.N.’s public endorsement of human breeding programmes also stated that besides being in the global interest the programmes were in the national interest of participating countries and would therefore be funded at the national level.

The spectres of racism and eugenics were revived. However the spread of global pandemics had brought to a halt almost all international travel.

Fully immersive worlds in virtual reality had been in use since the twenties, for entertainment and profit. Large portions of the communications network, the hardware infrastructure, were now annexed for sole use by parties acting in the national interest. The corporate-military alliance had never been so strong.

Business was conducted in V.R. rooms, along with trade talks and all international dialogue. The U.N. had its H.Q. off-world. Its buildings came to serve a purely archival function. As indeed did most real-world architecture.

Further, no consensus could be reached as to the aims of the human breeding programme. It therefore fell to individual countries to decide what form the new man and new woman would take. There was supposed to be some multilateral discussion about the aims of the various programmes and a registration process, overseen by the U.N., was initially undertaken, which required full transparency and disclosure of all research and development in human breeding.

In practice, however, this could not and did not work. Nations pursued their own lines according to whatever each decided was in its interests, with results that bore out the general absurdity of national stereotypes.

The Japanese bred Samurai, the Russians Cossacks and the Danes Vikings, not, however, exclusively. H.G. Wells would have recognised in the experimental rejects his own troglodytes.

The Russians, with extreme weather events more common, tended to go underground; the Japanese took to the air with their new-breed Samurai; Vikings were born with fat layers and nutrient pockets allowing them to swim unheard of distances.

A diversity of lines was followed by the United States. But, unfortunately, all efforts to realise the Hollywood cliché of a Superman or Terminator, a Bourne or a genetically enhanced clone army, came to nothing. Where they could not be euthanised, protected by the pro-life movements, rejects were sent to California.

The North Americans prepared a ship bound for Mars, while its programmes bred Sky-farmers and super-aggressive hyper-suggestible Land-pirates, otherwise known as Cowboys.

The Germans, who at one time had had the project of a master-race within their grasp, considered the future to belong to a race of athletic women with empathic powers that were almost telepathic.

The French went for a stereotype which combined the Foreign Legionnaire with an enhanced capacity for sensuality and memorising cultural minutiae. The aim was a walking repository of French culture and history who could appreciate a fine cheese and recapture it if it fell into enemy hands. The Teutonic Amazons also appealed as targets of Gallic attentions.

The English bred dwarves. Nobody could work out why, or if this was simply the Irish influence, until the dwarves started building machines.

Of the unofficial breeding programmes, two are worth mentioning here: the Brazilian and the South Korean.

The Brazilians had by 2100 succeeded in breeding naked apes impervious to all forms of disease. He-ape and she-ape were walking biochemical laboratories.

The Koreans, meanwhile, had increased human fertility to the point where in a single lifetime a woman would and could produce upwards of 6,000 viable foetuses. A caste system developed which separated those who were reared by machine from the chosen special ones who were brought to term en ventre sa mère and thereafter were cared for by humans.

Albeit that by this time all-human families were scarce on earth, still the so-called human-breed were naturally given privileges not afforded to the swarms tended by machines.

The Sickle Heart

The sickle heart was the form of heart in the future.
It was disembodied.

Dad said not to touch it
in case it bonded with a whole human.

It lay in the bath looking more like a boomerang
or a bow than a sickle.
It was white and smooth and shone
as if wet.

I knew how it had got here.
I could fly.

I had to not think of what was below me
but of the other layer only I could see.

It was a pattern of shapes, colours and textures,
and if I tried to make sense of it
it didn’t move underneath me
and I fell to the actual ground.

What I saw that only I could see
was of course the real.
If I shut my eyes and focused entirely on it,
I travelled through time.

I had arrived from four hundred years
in the past.

I had flown faster and faster.
I had shut my eyes.

The real ground had raced past underneath me,
and when I had opened my eyes again,
I was here.

It had been hard adjusting.
But I had not been able to get back.

This was how the sickle heart
had come.

White Peace

The attractive European doctor
was a woman of substance.

She was also a cannibal.

Whereas our anti-hero had perversions
we could only guess at.

The movie was subtitled.

In all other respects
it was a conventional love-story.

By the end we had seen her
nibbling on the neck flesh
of her research subjects’
severed heads

and performing contortions
which could only have been realised
using camera trickery.

Unless she really was able to
cut herself in half,
her face appearing between
her thighs.

His bad habits,
apart from a bout of womanising,
seemed to amount to no more
than some secretive shuffling
and brooding in the plush interiors
of all-night bars
in a city that might have been Budapest.

You’d have been excused for thinking
not only will it never work but if it did
he’d be worse off for the bargain.

No.
‘You are a difficult man,’ she said, ‘to love,’
when the would-be couple reached the peace
hinted at in the difficult title.

And having tied the knot quite literally,
given her particular skills,
in a for once deeply shadowed scene,
she soon resumed her research.

And while she sucked on the leather-like skin
of heads she’d placed in jars,
he took up what else
but secretive shuffling
and brooding in all-night bars
in a city resembling Budapest.

It was dark when we left the cinema.
The streets were full of traffic
of a vintage sheen,
as if there was a car rally in progress
down on the promenade.

I crossed to a bookstall.
And in among the paperbacks
I found a knife.

I flipped it up,
concealing it in my cuff.

And crossing back,
I walked quickly away.

From up on the rise
two figures approached.
They were unmistakably policemen.

The taller one had seen us.
He pointed.

‘Stop being stupid,’ you said, ‘just get in!’
The interior light showed a 1950s dashboard.

I slammed the door.
And you swung the car
out into traffic.

There were carhorns and shouting
as the two policemen ran out
into the street behind us.

You wouldn’t speak to me
the rest of the drive.

I dropped the knife into the seat-well.
It made a soft clunk.
You didn’t hear it over the noise
of the engine.

We sped out of town.
It was raining in the country.

Nothing to look at
but the flick of the wipers
in the white tunnel
made by the headlamps.

Eventually you said,
‘How could you do that to me?’

The boy’s eyes shone.
They were watching us in the dark.

I got up later that night.
I walked for miles to find a hiding-place
for that knife.

All the way there and all the way back
I asked myself, ‘Am I really so
difficult to love?’

Preparations for Transport

The treatment was compulsory. And all the parents seemed to think it was necessary. Consent forms went home and came back duly signed.

Mum and Dad might’ve agreed why but they didn’t know what it was, of what the treatment consisted. It had cycles and phases.

Mr. Lord, our principal, explained at assembly that the first cycle of the treatment would only affect the middle school. So my little brother wouldn’t get it yet.

The junior school would be in the second cycle, when the programme was better resourced and we knew how it worked, he said. We laughed at Mr. Lord’s weak joke.

Phase one began with a physical examination. Booths were set up in each of the classrooms of the middle school. They had plastic curtains and cardboard walls.

We lined up, boys on one side, girls on the other. And when our turn came, we said: ‘See you on the other side!’ Because we hadn’t seen anyone come out.

In the booths there was nothing but a nurse who prepped you and a doctor who squeezed and prodded you and took a genetic sample. The sample was collected on a swab and the swab pushed into a plastic tube, sealed and labelled. The tube went into a battered suitcase at the doctor’s feet. And that was it.

You came out into the corridor where strangers in blue overalls ushered you to the school gym. In our school’s case, this was also the hall.

Here phase one proper started. The examination had been only a formality.

The hall swarmed with blue overalls. As soon as you entered you were presented with a set of them. You were supposed to strip off your clothes and wear these instead.

The leaders of phase one weren’t health professionals. They seemed to be dancers. They expected us to get our stuff off just like that in a crowd with strangers, as if the hall had become one big dressing room.

It had in fact. There were the mirrors and the tables. There was the same urgency and sense of expectancy.

I looked around. Girls and boys were stripping down to their underwear all over the hall.

The dancer assigned to me grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around and got me started with taking my things off.

It was warm in the hall and the light was odd. As my legs were being guided into the overalls I looked up. Where the old fluoros had hung there were now racks of heatlamps.

After me, my dancer, Karim, tended to two others. He made them undress and put on the blue overalls.

It was all happening so fast there was no embarrassment. Some of the girls were crying but that was more about having their clothes taken away and the general strangeness of the situation.

Very soon we were a sea of blue. All of us were in groups of three or four to one of the dancers. They gave us padded mats and told us to find a space.

Stepping away from the walls, there were mirrors, like a ballet studio, and tables at regular intervals around the room. On each table was a first-aid kit in a tool-box.

We started with our feet. We were told to rotate each joint to its fullest extent.

If there was a giggle or a word the dancers would home in and physically manipulate the subject, making further contact impossible. They were gentle and forceful and very fast.

From our feet we moved on to our ankles, from our ankles to our knees, all the way to the tops of our heads. Our spines were given a special work-out. And where we were sore or stiff the dancers made us do it again.

Our teacher, Mrs. Moss, appeared in the afternoon with the other teachers from the middle school. There was a wave of relief at the familiar. There were chants of ‘Mrs. Moss!’ and shouting that went around the room.

The dancers stood back and let the teachers say their goodbyes. It seemed they were going on holiday. This news brought more desperate cries and shouts of ‘Don’t leave us!’

But they did leave us. And the dancers went back to work.

In phase one we limbered up. We were stretched out, every muscle lengthened. Our chests ached from the strain of breathing. We felt loose and jangly and left the hall taller.

We were given our clothes back at the end. Nobody had the energy to be embarrassed. We could barely talk about it we were so tired.

Mum and Dad asked me how it was. ‘It was OK,’ I said.

It hurt. And I thought it was going to end.

It was mat work everyday. They bent us and we stretched and twisted. And, as the dancers started really applying themselves, every bend, every stretch and twist got pushed and pushed. Day by day it got harder and harder, and hurt more and more.

The hall became noisier by degrees and we soon became accustomed to sounds of pain, both hearing them and making them.

When the weekend came we were told, ‘Well done!’ We were hoping that that was the end.

You thought it was. But on Monday morning there were notices up. We were back in the hall.

We had another whole week. And if we’d been thinking it was going to get easier, we’d have been wrong again.

If you showed any resistance your dancer would hold you and force you into the position and hold you there. And then do it again. It didn’t matter if you were crying.

It didn’t matter if you thought your arms were going to break or your legs or your neck. Nobody listened. They were like machines.

The first-aid kits were brought increasingly into service over the week, providing pressure bandages, compresses and straps and anaesthetising creams for strains and cramps. They fixed you and then it was like they wanted to break you again.

This was only phase one of the treatment. If we’d been wondering what phase two held in store, we got a taste of it. It was on Thursday or Friday.

The girl lay as if paralysed on the mat. Having exhausted the battery of temporary fixes from the first-aid kit, the dancer called in a woman in white. The woman gave her four injections, one in each of her limbs, at the joint, and went.

The girl’s dancer took her by the ankles and crunched her into a ball, then released her and did it again, and again, until the girl could do it on her own. My eyes might have been tricking me but I saw an unnatural bend in one of her legs.

At home for the weekend none of us spoke of the horrors of the week. You were happy to be there of course. And you didn’t want to bring it up at home where everybody was so nice to you. It might have made them angry. Anyway, we sort of knew phase one was over so we said nothing.

Nothing was said, nothing bad. And so our parents had no excuse, and were given none, not to sign the consents for phase two of the treatment.

On Monday morning assembly was held in the hall. The seniors usually had their assemblies separately but without the forms there was enough room for the whole school standing. The mats and tables had been cleared away.

Mr. Lord spoke to us from a small raised dais which hadn’t been there before. He was saying he’d been told that the middle school had made amazing progress, that the programme could move ahead as planned to phase two and that his school was being promoted as a model to all the other schools.

He said the seniors ought to be extremely proud of us and show their support at every opportunity. I was surprised to hear some applause at this point.

Mr. Lord said in response that he was pleased the seniors were taking seriously what was not only an important undertaking for the school, the whole school, that it would would reflect well on them, but which was also of the greatest importance for the welfare of the country, our international allies and, ultimately, mankind itself. I was again surprised to hear no laughter at this.

From in amongst his friends my little brother gave me a funny look. And he pointed me out to them and they all did something like a little bow.

‘As a result of this excellent progress,’ Mr. Lord went on, ‘we will be bumping forward both the programme for the middle school and the start date for the juniors.’

I felt a sudden pressure on my heart. It was one thing for them to give us the treatment but what about the littlies? What about my brother? They can’t do this! I thought.

Mr. Lord was in the process of excusing the senior and junior schools. He was bending down to the secretary who’d received our consents.

I rushed forward to my brother. I was going to warn him.

He brushed me off with, ‘See you on the other side!’ It had taken fortnight and already it was a catchphrase.

Mr. Lord made himself heard over the noise: ‘Your parents,’ he declared, ‘your parents in a show of outstanding cooperation and trust that together we can achieve our goals have consented to your at-school residency for the duration of phases two and three of the programme.

‘You will in effect be ‘on camp’ at school. The school has been assured you will be fully provided for, in terms of hygiene, nourishment and the rest that growing bodies need.’

The teachers from the junior and senior schools had gone with their pupils. Mr. Lord left the dais. On his way out he shook hands with the woman in white.

As before, we were very quickly turned into a sea of blue. This time, however, it was as if our sweated on, stretched in and, in some cases, actually blood-stained blue overalls had been put through the wash. They were now a light blue, presumably to mark our transition to the second phase of the treatment.

Onto the dais was lifted an odd piece of apparatus. It looked like you sat in it.

It looked like a giant egg-cup, except it had movable pieces, a curved headrest, stirrups and arm- and leg-rests, all on threaded rods which passed through the cup-stand of the egg-cup. The rods ended in adjustable tap-wheels.

There were gel pads where the apparatus met the different parts of the body. They too were light blue. The bulk of it was a surgical synthetic white. The rods were steel.

The blue exercise mats came out and in phase one groups we performed some of the more severe poses of the weeks before. Although we didn’t so much perform as were pushed and moulded into them by our assigned dancers.

While this warm-up was being inflicted upon us, the woman in white had been joined by four or five others, similarly dressed. They had trolleys.

I couldn’t be sure of their number because every time I tried to get a good look Karim, my dancer, would position my head to look the other way or put me face down.

The rubber wheels of the trolleys squeaked as they rolled between mats.

Phase two proper seemed about to begin.

The nurses would stop and while you stared at their white shoes with black soles you heard the clatter of instruments on the top tier of the trolley and the ripping open of plastic packaging. If you were unlucky enough to see what was going on before feeling the sting, you’d see a needle being prepared. And if you were especially unlucky, you’d see a whole series.

Our dancers held us down gently and forcefully. They exposed the appropriate muscle or joint. The nursed lunged in with a swab and then there came the sting. If it was a muscle the pain was slow to build. the joint and bone treatments hurt immediately. The hall rang with cries and the occasional full-throated scream.

The dancers’ main occupation through this process, apart from holding us still for the shots, seemed to be making sure our mats did not get wet and slippery. They had towels hung around their necks which they’d whip out for the tears, the sweat and involuntary snot.

They might give our faces a quick wipe first. But I learnt, after the first couple of encounters with the soggy flannel, it was better to staunch your own fluids than entrust them to the towel.

At lunch we ate little, as if we were on diets as well, and we were feeling groggy and ill. We ate in the hall under the heatlamps, which provided an added disincentive.

After lunch the nurses continued their rounds. The wheels squeaked. There were screams and cries, which as the afternoon progressed gradually wound down.

Our dancers now manipulated us into poses designed to test the effects of our treatment. And, like machines needing oil, where our movements stuck was bound to be the target for the next syringe. The trick was not to stick but to cooperate fully with the dancers’ prompts, to be eager to follow their directions.

The big clock at the end of the hall had not yet been removed. It was getting on to five when some of the middle school lay down on their mats and would not be moved again. We thought they were dead.

The woman in white conferred with her nurses. And with rattles and squeaks the trolleys withdrew.

Soon the dancers had gone too. The lamps were off and the standard heaters in the hall had come on to keep it at a constant temperature.

I must’ve slept. I woke to the sound of shuffling feet.

Old people were moving around the hall amongst us. I thought they were ghosts, that they’d succeeded in killing all of us and we were about to join these others who had clearly gone some time before.

I sat up and I made my escape to the toilets. The toilets were on the way in to the hall.

Even out here the fluoros had been exchanged for heatlamps. It was hot and bright.

I tried the main doors.

I could go home. I could tell Mum and Dad. They’d put a stop to this. And my little brother wouldn’t have to go through the treatment.

I found I was sliding down the glass, falling so slowly I might’ve weighed no more than a feather, until I lay on my side on the doormat.

I dreamt I was flying, like when you’re little and your parents carry you. I opened my eyes in the dream. An old man was carrying me.

I struggled. Either he had arms of steel or my efforts were puny.

He put me down amongst the other sleeping bodies in the hall, in the red glow of the heaters on the walls.

I tried to kick him in the face.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘A volunteer,’ he said.

He brought me a glass of water, pulled a light blue blanket over me and patted my arm. I closed my eyes.

The next days followed quickly and without major variation, except they got shorter. Tolerances to this phase of the treatment apparently decreased over time, our days ending earlier and earlier.

By three o’clock on the fourth day immobile figures on mats outnumbered those who were moving. There were squeaks and rattles and the trolleys departed.

The woman in white stopped a tall male dancer on his way out. He came back minutes later with a ladder and removed the clock. The woman in white no longer wanted us to measure the effects of the treatment by the clock.

After that first time I did not wake again in the night. But I had the impression of ghostly old people padding around me, the volunteers.

Your arms began to remember late at night and your legs and buttocks. And you might have fallen into a deep black well to start with but before morning you became restless, rolling from one side to the other.

Waking reality infected what dreams there were until you awoke at last exhausted and afraid.

On the fifth morning, or it might have been the sixth, the heatlamps came on and as usual the room went from a warm red to a brilliant white and the dancers hurried through collecting our blankets and mopping up whatever had spilled or seeped from our sleeping bodies. As usual they brought out bowls of thin sweet porridgey stuff and put them on the side tables.

There were the normal sounds of yawning and different ones like whimpers and small cries as we made our way to breakfast. But today only one trolley squeaked and rumbled into the hall.

The woman in white parked it up beside the odd piece of apparatus, which had become familiar enough to have almost disappeared.

Four nurses stood beside the apparatus. The woman in white consulted some papers and the nurses whispered amongst themselves.

The dancers variously mopped, wiped, shook out mats and repositioned them.

Breakfast took two or three mouthfuls and you felt sick. It tasted like condensed milk reinforced with baby’s formula.

By the time we’d finished everything was in order.

The half full bowls went into big plastic tubs and were whisked away. Our dancers guided us to our mats at a pre-arranged signal.

The dancers left us sitting or lying on our mats and joined the nurses around the giant egg-cup.

The woman in white seemed to be questioning them.

There were nods and some shaking of heads. Then the mood of the dancers rapidly lifted and became light as if they were relieved, as if the woman in white was pleased with their progress. There was even a bit of laughter and some gentle applause.

One of the dancers took a little bow. Her or his group, sometimes it was impossible to tell, comprised two of the smallest girls.

The dancers came away from the meeting with smiles. The one with the little girls went so far as to give them both a quick hug.

Karim smiled at our group. He patted me on the back.

It was impossible not to feel happy for them even if you didn’t know why.

Karim guided us through our movements.

You felt that the normal resistances of bones and muscles had gone. You saw into the small of your back, while your legs changed places with your arms and your neck stretched around. And even your skull seemed to be able to change its shape. And for all that you didn’t want to look too closely or consider how you looked from the outside.

If you did for an instant step out of yourself, it was sickening to see. It was like watching a snake swallow an egg.

Your limbs slithered over each other. You were jointless. You were all fibre, a single sinew.

The movement was continuous, until at some point you passed out again.

Waking, you would resume the exercises.

I’d gone for a few seconds into blackness. I came back out of it to the sound of clapping.

The hardest things were now things like sitting up, getting upright.

You could say I rested on my elbows, but equally my cheek rested on my knees. I tried to see what was going on.

Karim and other dancers were clapping. Most of the middle school were like I was.

A few attempted weakly, limply to join in with the applause. They slowly brought their arms together, like flippers.

One of the small girls had been lifted to shoulder height by the dancers. She wore a slack grin and was being paraded around the hall.

After a circuit, she was carried to the front, to the woman in white and the egg-cup.

They sat her in the egg-cup. She rested limp as a squid on the blue gel pads, which held her arms and legs and supported her buttocks and neck and followed the curve of her spine.

Adjustments were made. The tap-wheels turned.

Her legs met her chest. Her arms crossed in front of her. And her neck bent forward. It was taken further forward.

Then they seemed to compress her body.

As if they’d suddenly thrown a lever sucking all the air out of the egg-cup, there was a strange sort of hiccup from the girl.

Her body was vacuum-packed, yet still suspended on the pads.

The woman in white removed several syringes from their packets.

She took samples from all over the compressed form, sliding one under the thin skin of her scalp.

The small girl blinked. She didn’t, she couldn’t struggle.

Seeing all eyes in the hall on her, the woman in white gave a small bow. It was an acknowledgment of their accomplishment as much, now that we had all seen what we were working towards, as a sign to resume our work.

One by one we were hoisted, first onto the shoulders of two of the dancers.

There was some clapping, which as the day wore on became less and less. But there was a sense of celebration, of achievement and also a sense that our sufferings were not to be endless.

From the shoulders of the dancers you were deposited in the egg-cup.

The woman in white readied your limbs, torso and head, so that the gel pads could stick in position by suction, and this seemed to be the secret of the vacuum-packing of bodies, the snap compression and the hiccup your body made.

The pressure squeezed every atom of air out from between where parts met, until the body itself found its perfect form, its smallest possible volume, and snapped together into a single thing. It was like a puzzle, which is turned and turned until it finally clicks.

There were failures. In some cases, it was simply the fabric of the light blue overalls, which had fused and had to be cut away.

For a handful of us, four or five, the treatment had not been utterly successful. There was not enough bend in the bones or elasticity in the muscles to give that final satisfying hiccup.

For these, there was to be no phase three. They were removed, and, I hoped, I genuinely hoped, they’d find a place in the next cycle.

Your own session with the egg-cup was difficult to appreciate. Mine came on the second day of the trials.

By now I knew how light we’d all become. I flew on the shoulders of the dancers and landing in the egg-cup I nestled into the pads.

Karim had been a good teacher. I knew my form.

The woman in white said, ‘Breathe!’

I hadn’t noticed I wasn’t.

The steel rods turned and the pads pressed against me. And one second I was all over the outside of myself and felt every point of pressure. Then it was like a clap of thunder and I was deep inside myself.

I was a tiny spark and I was looking at the tiny spark I was. I was looking after it in a dark hollow. Nothing more.

I knew afterwards that tissue samples had been taken but I’d not been there to worry about them.

I had pins and needles all over. It was maybe the third day of trials.

While I’d been away, my body had unfurled. I was on my side. A dim gauzy light came through the sheet covering me. I could hear people clapping in the distance.

I scratched at the pins and needles. My overalls had gone.

Karim came. He fed me from a bottle. The mixture was sweet, as before. But now it tasted good. It tasted comforting.

I was aware of the change in lights. It was hot white. Then it was a warm red glow.

I heard the old volunteers padding round. There were no more cries of pain.

Then it was hot white again.

Karim lifted the sheet.

Folded white overalls were placed on the floor in front of me.

I spent minutes rolling back and forth on my side before rolling onto my front and pouring myself upright.

I was helped into my overalls and I stood there.

The egg-cup was gone.

The mats were wiped and taken away. The feed bottles were placed on the tables around the outside of the hall.

Mr. Lord, the principal came. He shook the hand of the woman in white, smiling.

He was followed by strangers. There was a mixture of ages and types of clothes.

Almost all of the women came in crying or burst into tears when they got into the hall.

The men paid their respects at the front of the hall before searching the faces of the middle school, all of whom were, as I was, standing in white overalls in space.

Dad found me. He hugged me.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked.

‘She couldn’t,’ he said and cried into my cheek.

Mr. Lord cleared his throat.

‘If I could just have your attention,’ he said. ‘I understand. Surprise and relief on both sides. We have come a long way. And I think we can be truly proud.

‘I would like to thank parents and pupils of the middle school. And I would like to thank Ms. Verhoeven for running an exemplary programme.’

The woman in white acknowledged the applause of the parents with a broad smile. Dad put his arm back over my shoulders. It was heavy.

‘We all now recognise it as being an exemplary programme and it will be so recognised and written up for a long time to come. A model programme.

‘Those parents with children in the junior school can look forward, in the knowledge that we keep our promises here, to an equally successful second cycle.

‘You have made us proud and you have given us hope. Thank you parents, for your cooperation. Thank you Ms. Verhoeven and her fellow workers. Thank you children. Thank you all.’

I shrugged off Dad’s arm and brought my long hands together. They made a slapping sound and not a clap.

My forearms were curved.

Karim stepped forward and introduced himself to Dad.

Dad looked at him a little strangely, then relaxed.

They chatted and laughed. About me.

The woman in white called the proceedings to a halt. She went around each of the family huddles in turn.

When she came to us, she spoke so softly I couldn’t understand what she said.

There were more hugs and kisses and tears. And fathers helping the mothers to walk.

It looked like the dancer’s help might be needed when one of the mothers broke into a wail and collapsed.

This made it worse for the other mothers.

A great keening wave crashed around our ears. I was glad Mum hadn’t come.

Dad, of course, helped where he could. And his helping carried him away towards the door.

He turned at the last moment. He frowned and smiled at the same time.

He raised his right hand, as if swearing an oath, and he was gone from me.

It was a great relief to leave the world of the upright and most of us dropped down into a bent crouch when the parents left. The parents couldn’t see how our legs buckled in the loose overalls, how our hands twisted and our spines swayed.

To them it must’ve looked like we were fidgetting and couldn’t keep still.

To us they looked clumsy and unnatural moving their big alien bodies around on two feet and trying to make straight lines from the ground.

The dancers brought our mats out.

We did our forms, sliding in curves, no straight lines, low and compact and graceful.

We ate less and less. But it was out of choice now. It wasn’t from the heat and treatment putting us off.

Still, there were corrections to be made. The woman in white walked around the room. She checked our stats and I assumed she also had the results from our tissue samples.

Throughout that day there was peace.

We slept under the warm red glow of the heaters.

We hardly had to go to the toilet anymore. And, when we left the room, it was more like leaving a magic circle: what happened outside it was of no consequence, and we missed it as soon as we stepped outside and couldn’t wait to rejoin it.

On the third day there was disaster. We were practicing the hiccup.

Of course, we could not achieve full compression. Our white overalls weren’t made to do this and we didn’t have the egg-cup.

The smallest girl, the same one who was chosen for the first trial, broke her arm or leg. I couldn’t tell before she was hidden by a circle of dancers and the woman in white.

I saw something spring from her compressed form, a stick of white with yellow and a growing red stain around it. Her dancer noticed. He or she squealed, which in the prevailing calm, immediately pulled our attention.

They had to carry her out without first unfurling her. She was crying now.

She was angry and she yelled, ‘Let me go!’

‘I want to go!’

After that, there was vigilance around this form. The woman in white walked around with a kit, ready to administer additional injections at the slightest show of strain.

The small girl who had sped things up for us had now slowed us down.

The injections tired us out and days once more grew shorter.

Karim corrected my posture.

I said, ‘Thank you.’

He was now the only one I used my voice to speak to. The rest of the middle school didn’t have much to say anyway, but when they did, you didn’t need to be looking at them. You sort of got it.

I sensed the frustration we’d come so far. And we’d been through so much.

Karim said, ‘Shh. Soon you won’t be needing me.’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Could be tomorrow. Could be the next day, ‘ he answered.

And so I never gave up hope. And we all strove together.

In fact, it was four or five days later that there was a change.

The woman in white gradually weened us off the drug therapy. We were still sleeping a lot but now we ran through our forms almost automatically.

We could hold the hiccup, incomplete as it was, for long periods and, since our bodies were not fully locked, we could unfurl ourselves.

We were eating. We had our bottles.

When the dancers went around each member of their groups and said goodbye, Karim put his hands on either side of my face and he kissed me on the forehead. At least, I thought he was a he but I was never entirely sure.

‘Remember this.’ He patted my shoulder.

When I was tense my right shoulder-blade would pop out of the form. I’d had any number of injections but he was reminding me it was up to me to control.

He made a shrugging gesture and smiled.

It was only when they’d gone that you realised how much you needed them.

The day ended early.

The lights went out. The old volunteers brought our blankets out and tucked us in.

We were alone. And it sounded like the whole middle school was crying quietly.

Under my blanket I practiced the shrug.

We woke up and collected our bottles. The light was no different.

The heatlamps going on had woken us as usual. The hall was no different. But there was a buzz.

You could feel it. You could almost hear it in your head.

With no dancers to wipe down the mats and store our blankets, we went back to them.

Somebody had the idea of making a big group in the middle of the room. We did. And we touched each other’s hands and faces.

We were like puppies. We shut our eyes.

Later we pulled all the mats together and lay down.

It was like we’d been left behind and were the only ones still there. But it didn’t last.

A sort of disgust passed through the group. I grew stronger and several of us dragged our mats back to where we’d begun.

Anger passed between those who’d left and those who’d remained. But the group gradually diminished.

It slowly spun us apart, like a galaxy.

What started with an uncomfortable feeling that we were somehow letting them down, the dancers, the teachers, ourselves, ended with each of us returning to our former positions and resuming the practice of the forms.

Now, without anybody to guide us, we regimented ourselves. We acted in unison.

Signals were no longer necessary. We stretched, twisted, strained and bent along the curves set down for us.

We stopped together as we’d begun.

We drank together, rolled and unrolled our blankets together. We strove in unison.

Another day or so passed.

The group was somehow able to contain and control its enthusiasm so that the weakest of us did not suffer, did not strain too hard, did not finish by puncturing themselves with their own bones.

Because our bones sprang. They bent and whipped back. Only in the full hiccup was there ultimately a balance, a click, without a violent unwinding.

And we’d been trained well, so we pursued the goal of that balance in unison. In order to achieve it, we lost our overalls.

There was no further embarrassment. There was no need. It was warm and we were one.

And the treatment had made us so alike, it was virtually impossible to tell girls from boys.

We were woken by the sound of machinery.

There was the graunch of the fire-doors opening. Then the daylight burst in.

A man stood silhouetted in the opening. He was directing a forklift back into the room’s warm red glow.

It barely fit. It backed in with a hair’s breadth of clearance.

The director scurried out of its way. He checked the load.

Right up against the wall of the building was a massive truck. Its tailgate was lowered. On it sat another three loads for the forklift to bring into the hall.

Down the inside walls of the truck similar loads were stacked. The truck was a giant egg-carton.

Because they were eggs.

The woman in white marched through the hall straight up to the director. She shouted at him, trying to be heard over the noise.

He shook his head.

The nurses, once more with their trolleys, followed the woman in white. They cleared a path for the forklift between the mats.

Soon the middle school was gathered at the front of the hall watching the forklift work.

The eggs stood at about three foot. They were set in square stands made of surgical plastic. They glowed pink in the light from the heaters.

We used our white overalls for pyjamas and were still draped in our sleeping blankets. But it was cold with the fire-doors open. We clutched together for warmth.

Several men in hard-hats stared at us.

The operation took very little time once bodies and mats had been removed from the forklift’s path. The director ensured that the eggs went where the mats had been.

The room now looked like a giant incubator.

The woman in white signed the director’s dispatch forms and as the tailgate rose on its hydraulics, the director pushed the fire-doors closed, cutting off the noise and shutting out the chill and the daylight.

The woman in white stormed down the room and out the main doors.

Minutes later, after locking the doors and turning on the heatlamps, she returned a little more composed. She gathered her nurses around her.

When we were warmer, we went out into the hall and crept amongst the eggs.

If you looked closely, you saw that between the surface of the eggs and the stands there were light blue gel pads. The shells were soft to the touch.

We were all really happy.

It was like feeling understood and being provided for before you yourself knew what you wanted or needed. It was wonderful.

The woman in white made us wait before we could enjoy what had happened to us. We each sat or crouched, curled up by our eggs.

The nurses squeaked amongst us on their rounds.

They put us on scales, where it was difficult for us to balance. They listened to our heart rates as well as taking our pulses. They made us breathe.

They noted it all down. There were no injections.

The woman in white came after the nurses.

She explained in simple words what the eggs were and what they could do. There was a whole laboratory in their thick soft shells.

It was much later by the time she’d been around all of us.

The nurses withdrew to the front. The woman in white joined them.

They stared at us.

We realised they were waiting too. They were waiting for the miracle.

As this realisation made its way through us, there were some chuckles. We stared back at the nurses and the woman in white.

And we laughed at them.

Mainly inside. But we laughed.

They might not know what to do next. We did.

They were lost. Not us.

I didn’t know how they finally got the message but they did.

The woman in white ushered her nurses with their trolleys from the hall.

The doors closed behind them.

We crawled out of our overalls.

We put our hands together like divers. In slow motion we dived into the warm surface of the eggs.

The shells were not smooth in consistency but were made of cells. It was like warm snow or suet pudding.

The skins parted and let us in.

We were free of gravity inside.

At last.

If anybody had entered the hall at that moment they would have seen row upon row of giant eggs, discarded white overalls on the floor beside them, but not one pupil from the middle school.

After a moment of stillness, they would have heard issue in unison from the rows of eggs one great hiccup. And nothing more.

Transport 3Z1

My older brother had already been taken.

It had been our turn, in the junior school.

Mr Lord had said how we’d a lot to live up to, and so on, before handing over to an old woman in a nurse’s uniform.

She’d read out some names. Mine was in there. And we’d been told we’d been given the chance of a lifetime.

They’d flown us down to the ice, of which there wasn’t much, and we’d spent I don’t know how long, probably the whole winter, training. It was dark all the time.

After that, there were more flights, and finally the big one.

We were crew.

There’d been a ceremony, a short one, and Mum and Dad had said good-bye by video.

Now here we were watching the ship’s eggs being placed in the jellied folds of its underbelly. They were like frog’s eggs, held together by something flexible.

An old-fashioned machine, with a claw arm, was doing the loading. Every time it drew near the ship, we winced.

The ship was delicate. And this was a difficult procedure.

We were onboard. And this was space.

We could see outside. We could see all around the ship. But there were no windows. And this wasn’t a ship.

We could see the earth. It was rising out of the shadow of the moon. It was still blue and white, green and tan, but it didn’t do anything. It just hung there, stupidly, in the blackness.

The ship was a living being. It had been grown in space. It had grown up without gravity. And it was enormous.

It showed us what was happening outside through pictures. And we felt some of what it felt. But its mind wasn’t very strong. I thought this was because it had more important things to think about, like the eggs, and leaving and carrying us all safely through space.

It had reached full size almost a year ago. And now it had its own children to look after.

After the last of the eggs was pushed inside the ship, you could hear it in the background repeating what it had learnt, repeating its lessons. It was like the sound of the sea in the distance. It was like a lullaby.

…

The ship lay in space, its wings stretched out against the stars. It was bigger than the space-station, to which it was still attached by thin tubes and wires. It was like a patient in a hospital, except that tiny specks buzzed around. They were like flies.

It had grown up with only humans for company, but we were its first crew. It had known people only from the machines they drove. It had seen them through the small windows in those vehicles, lit up at the controls. It was like a giant animal, grown by flies, to carry their eggs, out into an alien universe. We were the first to feel the ship shiver when the flies buzzed near its skin or pricked it with their metal probes.

And we were its first friends. Like it, we wanted to throw off the lines that held and connected us to the machines. Like it, we wanted to begin our mission and sail out of reach of these annoying little creatures. And, like the ship, we ourselves had been made by them.

It was dark inside and warm. There were large open spaces spanned by softly glowing white bones. There were also narrow pipes with bumps along them, like throats. You had to squeeze through and they gave when you pushed into them with your heels and hands.

Our sleeping compartments were not much more than recesses in the wall. They had valves for doors, which opened at your approach and when you crawled in and filled it the space moulded itself around you.

It was a shock to feel the ship push against your face, covering your mouth and nose with its strange skin. And you panicked the first time and held your breath. Then you emptied your lungs and found you could breathe through these folds in the ship’s skin and that the air was fresh.

When you were hungry there were cavities along its passages where food and drink were made available in the same way. The food smelt slightly of fish and the drink was mildly salty.

Our other bodily needs were just as easily dealt with. After a couple of incidents of embarrassment, the ship soon withdrew politely when we went to the toilet.

In fact, the hardest part of our new lives onboard was the weightlessness we encountered in the open areas. Elsewhere we had the walls to push against. They held us. The interior skin of the ship was textured and rubbery and easy to grip. Where the passages opened out it was almost possible to make your way along the sides or the roof or floor, but it was like cliff-climbing. You had to keep as much of your body in contact with the surface as you could. Or else you floated away.

This was fun if there was more than one of you, but even then somebody would get hurt in a mid-air collision, or by banging into the giant chicken-bones that held the ship together. And it made it difficult to do our jobs.

The main open area was what we called the hold. This was where the eggs were kept. The eggs occupied the entire length of the hold. There were thousands and they glowed. Their light passed through its walls illuminating the whole bottom half of the ship.

Our job was to look after the eggs. We were a crew of egg-gardeners.

We even had implements, on long white plastic handles, like rakes or hoes, to rotate the eggs and keep enough jelly around them so they stayed at the right temperature.

The problem was, every time you pushed against something, an egg or a load of jelly, it sent you spinning upwards, towards the white bones that spanned the space and the smaller spines which stuck out of the ceiling.

It was fun when we had a battle. And we used our gardening tools as swords and staves. But it was dangerous.

The ship could help us heal, we knew that, just as we knew it would look after us when we were sick.

If somebody got hurt, the problem was moving them, towing or carrying them, without disturbing the eggs or the jelly, up to the sleeping passages, where a fold could be opened and they could be placed inside. They would scream if they were badly hurt and sometimes fight and stuggle. They were as light as feathers, but dangerous for the eggs.

…

It wouldn’t happen until we were a long way into our journey, and the space-station was far behind, but when one of us died, the ship couldn’t help.

She would get stuck on a ceiling spine and blood would form into globes that would slowly float down and stain the surface of the eggs, as if the eggs had their own small forces of gravity.

We would have to bounce ourselves up to her and grab her by the arms and remove her body from the white spine on which she was pinned. And we’d have to look at her. And her sleeping fold would be sealed up forever with her body inside.

…

We didn’t have days. The ship woke us up when we had to go to work. It showed us pictures of light. They were like fireworks without the sound.

At first it wasn’t clear that the pictures came from outside and were not part of our dreams. Then the ship would make them flare so brightly that even asleep or half-asleep they would hurt our eyes.

This was like the ship’s tone of voice. When it was angry or when something was urgent the pictures became more intense.

I was sleeping when we left earth. Even asleep I noticed a change, because it went quiet.

The ship woke me with bursts of green and blue and in my dreams it looked like the world exploded and where it had hung in space there were just lights the size of raindrops. Nothing else was left.

When I opened my eyes and wriggled out of the fold in the ship’s skin where I slept and into the dark passage, I felt the change more clearly. The air was fresher. The darkness was deeper.

Under my palms in its skin, even this far inside the ship, there was movement, as if there was blood in its veins, as if the ship was using its muscles to fly, flapping its wings against empty space.

And it was silent. The sound of what I had thought was the ship repeating its lessons was gone. We were alone.

The ship showed me what was outside. There were the stars, above and below, and nothing else was there, only the glow of the eggs in the hold.

It was exciting to be on our way and I had butterflies in my stomach. I pushed my way along the passage and, after a toilet stop and some breakfast, which had a new taste, as if we’d only ever had stale food before, I arrived at the hold.

I met up with a few others of the crew. We were never all there. At any one time at least half of us would be asleep.

‘Why are the eggs so bright?’ I asked.

‘Look at this!’ One of them picked up some jelly.

It looked clean and clear. It had been cloudy before.

He held it against the shell of an egg. It melted away and my eyes could’ve been tricking me but the egg seemed to glow even more brightly.

All day we worked hard. We still called them days.

The eggs absorbed the jelly as fast as we could pile and rake it up around them. The ship produced the jelly as fast as we could collect it, faster, in fact.

It rose like a foam, not from the floor, but from the sides of the hold. The eggs in the middle rows needed our constant attention to make sure they didn’t go dry.

If this happened they started to get dimmer, but only slowly. The ship would show us where the dim eggs were and the pictures it sent would be more or less intense.

Nobody knew what would happen if an egg dried completely. Maybe it went black. One day this might’ve happened but I would never see it.

If the jelly didn’t need to be pushed too far, we used our rakes and hoes. If, as now, we couldn’t keep up, we had soft-sided buckets and things like a cross between a scoop and a shovel, and the scoopers would scoop, the ones with the buckets would carry and those with the long-handled tools would spread. Carrying and scooping were easier than spreading, so we took turns.

We worked so hard we hardly ever spoke, except to say how tired we were.

A long time passed like this, perhaps a year, a year without a single egg of all the thousands going dry!

The ship was pleased with us. It made us warm sugary drinks. We had a party. And, when we’d gone to bed, there was another party for the crew who worked while we slept, our opposite numbers.

One day, soon after, I realised we were slaves. We were the ship’s slaves. All we did was work and eat and sleep.

For play, there were the beautiful and frightening images of space the ship sent to our minds, but space moved slowly, the ship thought slowly. And we were small and fast.

…

I opened my eyes against its warm rubbery skin and I bit the ship. It was tough.

As soon as I’d done it, I knew I was going to go all the way. I bit down hard and began to tear a hunk out of the inner skin of my sleeping fold. Tears came when I though of what I was doing.

Finally the ship responded.

It sent an image of teeth being bared.

They were not human. They were a monkey’s, with big canines and incisors. They were coming closer.

I tore at the skin, jerking my head from side to side.

The monkey’s teeth opened and lunged at me as if they could bite me from inside my mind.

The skin was hanging on by a couple of threads and there was now a bitter taste in my mouth, like plant sap, with an even more disgusting smell, like fish oil.

On the underside of the skin there was slime. I could feel it sticking to my cheeks and on my chin and against my nose as I worked the flap of skin back and forth.

The image changed from the monkey’s teeth to its whole body.

It was a chimpanzee.

It lay on its back. It had a little pair of overalls on, like ours. It was sleeping.

No, it wasn’t. I stopped tugging against the ship.

The chimpanzee was lying on its back in one of the ship’s sleeping folds. It was dead. Then something started happening to it. It was something only the ship could’ve seen.

A kind of liquid gradually enveloped the monkey.

First it ate through the overalls. It was very slow.

Then the hair began to melt into the liquid, the hair, and the lips and eyes of the monkey, eyes that were still open, still staring.

I got out of there as fast as I could, leaving the flap dangling and slimy with the taste in my mouth and the sticky stuff on my face, which I tried to wipe off now. But I couldn’t run away from the pictures the ship was sending.

I saw the chimpanzee’s eyeballs break open and melt away until there was nothing in its head but two staring black holes.

I couldn’t get away from the pictures but I kept going. I bumped into things and people. I didn’t stop.

I ran and tumbled and flew down passages without knowing where I was going.

If the valve-like doors didn’t open in time for me, I ran straight into them and bounced off and sometimes I changed direction and sometimes I tried again. I squeezed through and shot out or I was spat out like a lemon pip.

I had to feel my way, but then I went for periods without touching the walls, the ground or the ceiling, until I hit something and I’d grab it and slingshot myself further. I was completely weightless now and there was nothing but black around me and I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. The muscles in my body wouldn’t let me.

When I closed my eyes it was the same as with my eyes open. The ship wasn’t sending but I went further, on and on.

I was racing along passages so narrow I had to crawl or pull myself with my hands flat against their rubbery insides. The passages were getting narrower and there were few branches.

At least, I couldn’t feel their openings or valves from the one I was in. I was lying and using my toes and the flats of my hands to go forward.

I realised I was barely moving. And then it occurred to me that I was stuck. I could neither go on nor go back.

I put all my remaining strength into it. I heard myself grunt with the effort. It didn’t work. I heard myself sobbing.

…

I woke up starving. I woke up without knowing whether my eyes were open or shut. Whichever way, there was only blackness.

‘This is what the earth must have felt like,’ I thought, ‘hanging there, nothing around, not turning, but being turned.’

I was starving. And I was lost. I was lost inside the biggest animal ever made in the biggest place you could ever think of.

How far we were from home, I’d no idea. How far I was from where I was supposed to be, I’d no idea. Were the others in the hold? With the eggs? There were always crews at work down there.

I thought of it as down because for some reason where the eggs were there was some small amount of gravity.

So I had been going up.

Did the ship have a head? I didn’t know.

And were there other crews on board in other parts of the ship who could find me? Perhaps there was even a search-party crew.

Perhaps there were crews working at more important and interesting jobs than raking jelly around giant eggs, than us egg-farmers, and they’d just told us we were the only ones and we had an important job to make us feel important. And there was a crew actually steering the ship, with a captain and a bridge, with a window looking out onto all of space. That’s all I wanted. I wanted a window.

I saw it. The stars came out.

First a couple, then, shining brightly, millions. Millions and billions and trillions.

I reached out my hand but I didn’t see its shadow. But neither did I feel the grip of the narrow passage.

I thrashed around.

I was suspended in the blackness and my eyes were open.

I shut them tightly and all of space opened up in front of me.

Nothing moved and yet it didn’t look like a picture. I started to see some stars were close and some far away. And there were parts where the light smudged, as if it was raining in only that part of space. And you could see colours and the colours blurred. But nothing moved.

‘Rain,’ I thought.

I remembered rain. I remembered the smell and the black spots it made on the footpath.

…

It was like I was looking down on myself.

I lay on the footpath. My mouth was open to catch the raindrops and the eyes of the footpath me were shut.

I could taste the rain.

I opened my eyes suddenly.

It tasted salty, as salty as the sea.

It was spraying out of the blackness.

‘Stop!’ I shouted.

My voice cracked. I didn’t have enough voice.

I shut my eyes again.

Footpath me was walking to school. He had his schoolbag on his back and the sun was shining.

Then it was lunchtime. The bell went.

He sat on the warm wooden benches outside the classrooms. He got his lunchbox out. He unwrapped his sandwiches.

‘Come on,’ I thought.

But he looked inside to see what was in them.

They were ham and chutney. He ate them.

I didn’t want him to stop eating them. I wanted him to go on eating them and sitting on the warm wooden bench in the sun at school forever.

He was chewing. He looked like he was listening to something.

I couldn’t remember if I used to sit on my own or not.

His chewing slowed. His jaw stopped moving.

He gave a little shake, as if he’d thought of something, as if it gave him the jibblies.

Then he just got up and went off and played.

…

It was the weekend.

We had a special dinner.

I was eating.

…

I thought, ‘What are you doing? Why are you waking me up at this hour?’

I felt a heavy lump by my feet. It was the dog, the family dog.

I rolled over and went back to sleep.

…

I had no breakfast.

We were told to have no breakfast. It was in the notice.

I was starving.

I wanted to run away and not go to the training, not today.

Maybe I’ll go another day.

Was it my birthday?

…

My friends’ faces were all dark, as if the ones you get when you’re in a bad mood, as if cartoon rain clouds hid them.

The cake was made of whale meat and the candles were eyes on sticks.

I blew them out but not with one breath.

I cried because it was bad luck and when no one was looking I took another breath and blew again.

…

The ship was sending something. I tried to resist.

I must’ve drifted. I was by a wall. Or it could have been a ceiling or a floor.

I had food. At least it was sweet.

It was so chewy it took a long time to eat.

It tasted like the colour dark green.

…

The ship showed the way I had to go.

When I got back to the light, the light from the eggs down below in the hold, the others said I’d been gone for ages, maybe weeks.

I was so tired. I opened my sleeping fold and crawled in.

In the place where I had bitten the skin had grown back. There wasn’t even a scar or a bump.

The skin rested over my face like my mum’s cool hand, except I could breathe through it.

…

We had no idea how long had passed.

I knew that I had grown. I knew this not from looking at the others but against the egg-farming equipment and the eggs themselves. I could touch the top of an egg.

I thought, ‘We’re getting used to it.’

Was this the bad thing I’d thought it was when I bit the ship? I didn’t know.

…

Our battles in the hold became more serious after I came back. I knew that this wasn’t because we were now used to being weightless. It was because we could fly. Although it wasn’t really flying.

It was more like gliding, jumping to a high place, making a turn around the giant chicken-bones, or between the spines on the ceiling, and bouncing in a curve. We could do this while still holding on to a rake or the handle, just using our legs.

Some of us broke their handles to get rid of the annoying plastic blades or comb things on the ends.

One of the crew worked away in secret sharpening his into a point. When he went to use it in battle, the ship sent a warning.

We hardly noticed the ship these days. It woke us up. It fed us and looked after us in its slow way.

We found the store of extra overalls. We discovered where the gardening tools were. We felt that we were no longer its slaves.

It sent us views of space. And by now we were so used to it being in our minds that we didn’t really talk about it.

And the ship showed us about when it was being made and how they trained it using monkeys.

It never showed the chimpanzee that I saw again. And I never mentioned it to anyone.

The ship usually sent soothing pictures, slow ones, like space. So when it sent a warning, we all reacted.

‘You can’t use that,’ we said. ‘It’s not fair.’

The sharpened handle was broken and thrown into the waste.

…

Somehow it happened that the night and day crews began to overlap.

At the end of a shift or at the beginning we would hold our competitions.

The ship must’ve known. Maybe it even watched.

It showed us we should put jelly on cuts and that for anything more severe we needed to get the wounded player to their sleeping fold.

The ship was able to heal even broken bones. But we’d been on board so long and the gravity from the eggs was so small that perhaps our bones were lighter now, easier both to break and to fix.

If so, we had all been affected the same way. We had no point of comparison. Except our clothes.

When I’d started egg-farming I was almost the same height as a rake handle. I’d grown half that again. And my wrists and ankles were one and a half times its width. I was not the tallest. And I was not the shortest.

I thought that the ship must still be growing as well. The spaces inside it never seemed any smaller to us.

In the passages where we could reach the top and bottom and propel ourselves along with our hands and feet, I could still only place my hand flat against the ceiling with my foot flat against the floor.

In the clothes store we found big overalls. They must’ve been designed for humans, not a ship’s crew, like us, from the junior school.

They were usually too wide in the bodies and legs and arms, so we pulled them in with sashes and belts torn from our old blue overalls.

For battles we wore as little as we could, not to get caught by the whirling staves of the tool-handles.

The night-workers took to wearing white. They must have found another store-pod somewhere.

When our shift finished we’d meet at the very end of the hold. Where it narrowed, a small passage came in and there was a raised platform big enough for us to sit in a circle.

We’d carry not only those we used for the jelly but also our fighting tools. Fresh buckets were kept there with food and things like sausages which were skins full of drink. The ship made us this specially for the battles. It gave us energy.

We looked out on the thousands of eggs, and, separated from us by one of the hold’s giant bones, which ran across from side to the other, was another raised platform.

The night shift left the folds they slept in while we talked and, dressed in their white belts, sashes and armbands, they prepared for battle.

There were two types, individual and group contests. We knew which it was going to be because that’s the way it would happen. Suddenly one or a couple of us would leave the circle and the battle would begin.

It was exciting. We shut our eyes and watched.

Battles sometimes grew and more of us would be called to join in. And sometimes a fight in which we were all involved would be decided in a bout of single combat.

This was how it happened. It was a misjudgement.

One of the night-shift girls faced a day-shift boy.

We were yelling for him. We’d only just left the fight ourselves.

She managed to press him down onto his back.

With all the strength he had in his legs he kicked her away.

She simply flew into the ceiling.

At first she struggled, flapping her arms and legs.

We were making so much noise and we thought her screaming was a battle-cry.

Our view of her went right up close. We saw the spine coming out through the middle of her chest and went quiet.

The day-shift boy was the first to get to her.

She’d stopped moving her mouth and her eyes were open. He didn’t know what to do so he held her hand.

When we got there, he said, ‘She’s not dead.’

Then he said, ‘Is she?’

The ship was sending urgent messages to get her down.

Together with the night-shift we pulled her off the long red spine, being careful not to spike ourselves.

Blood formed into fat round drops and slowly fell down to the eggs. It marked them with dark spots.

A strange noise came from the girl, like a hiccup.

The ship showed us to take her as gently as we could back to her fold.

We all went and we lifted her and one by one each of us from the day-shift and the night-shift all mixed together touched her and we placed her inside.

For a long time we stood and then we sat in silence.

The ship played us what happened.

She hadn’t time to turn around. She wasn’t looking where she was going.

She didn’t do the turn. She didn’t push off from the ceiling with her handle or push away with one leg to avoid the spines.

She didn’t do what she was supposed to.

‘Listen!’ the ship seemed to be saying. ‘She didn’t listen!’

When the ship showed us what was happening inside the sleeping fold, that it couldn’t heal her, we cried. We cried out.

It wasn’t like the monkey. Her eyes stayed shut.

It was like watching someone sink into a dark sea forever.

The ship left us looking into the fluid darkness where she’d been. We stayed there until there was no more trace of her fold, until it had sealed without a join or a seam.

A mixture of night-shift and day-shift crew returned to work. They worked together to make sure the clear jelly was evenly distributed around the eggs.

The ship soothed the rest of us with special food and, when we were awake, with its memories of the earth, sunrises, sunsets, and the changing face of the moon.

…

We were soon back in the hold, formed into alternating shifts of day and night, night and day. White overalls and light-blue overalls worked side by side and there was more to be done than before, or it seemed there was. We were tired and the shifts were long. And for a while we did not have the excitement of the battles.

We had little to say to each other. We’d sit in our circles, now mixed together, and share meals, and the ones who were starting would be hurried on by the ship and those who weren’t would be so tired they’d sometimes nod off.

When you woke up it was disconcerting. You didn’t know whether your shift had begun or ended, or whether you were supposed to still be working. Some just sleep-walked through their shifts anyway.

I knew what that was like. Your limbs were sodden and heavy. The jelly looked like mountains. It was too much to carry even a spoonful. The buckets stuck to the floor and the gardening tools refused to face the right way. They were always banging up against something, or someone. And a little play fight might develop but you couldn’t really be bothered.

…

Who knew how long had passed? Longer than necessary, when the routine for all of us was suddenly broken.

The ship called us together, sleep-walking workers and actual sleepers.

We made our way through the rows of eggs to one right in the middle of the hold.

We stood staring at it.

Its shell glistened and you could see the glow was from somewhere deeper inside it.

It was tempting to touch it.

And then I did.

It didn’t feel like the eggs I’d touched before. Whatever they were made from was more tightly packed together.

This one was loose, like you could get a scoop and dig into it. It also felt cold.

I tried to get some by gouging into it with my fingers. It didn’t give.

I made my hand into a tight fist and I punched the egg.

My hand disappeared into the hole.

I was so surprised I jumped back.

I noticed that others were doing the same, punching holes into the shell and jumping back. One of them had grabbed a handle. She was poking the shell.

She stuck it in as far as it would go and it hit something hard.

Now everybody was grabbing whatever they could find and stabbing the egg.

A deep green fluid dribbled out of the egg. It seeped through the shell, dying parts of it. It smelt familiar. But as more came out, the smell grew stronger and we were forced back.

It smelt like a taste. It got stuck at the back of your throat. It made you want to throw up. And the girl who’d poked the egg started retching.

The ship got some of the crew to move her right away.

It was the same for anybody who vomited. They were removed to a safe distance.

It looked like the egg was crumbling and now whole chunks of it fell to the floor of the hold.

The smell increased as more and more of the blue-green syrup flowed out. I tied a strip of old overall to cover my face and seeing me a few others did the same.

We stepped forward avoided the still glowing chunks of eggshell. They were like icebergs and we tried to breathe only through our mouths.

We were scared now at having broken the egg. It was a mess. And it was what we were put on board to protect, to feed and look after, as the ship fed and looked after us.

The ship wasn’t sending. It was as if it had withdrawn to a safe distance too.

There had to be a reason the ship wanted us to do this and I was curious to see what was inside.

I had a hoe-type tool. With its blade, I hooked and pulled and brought some of the shell down.

In its wreckage there was the source of the stinking liquid. I didn’t want to use my hands.

A couple of the others had got a whiff. They retreated.

I crept just a bit closer, both to see and to more easily pull down the rest of the shell.

It was still pretty solid and heavy. I hooked it and gave it a really strong yank. I had some help. Somebody had grabbed the end of the handle.

A large irregular piece of the shell wobbled. Like the continent of America on the earth, it spanned nearly the whole egg, from top to bottom.

We tried again. Then we released the blade and pushed at it from the outside to loosen it.

We went from inside to outside. It refused to part with the egg.

Another pair of hands joined us. Back and forth, back and forth, we pushed it in and pulled at it.

We got all the hands we could fit on the handle to help and the ship was watching again. We gave a mighty tug. America fell to the floor of the hold.

It even sounded like ice. It landed with a dull thud. Then, following it, a green-blue object sloshed to the floor. It slipped out on a wave of the remaining egg-syrup, which splashed at us. We jumped back.

Whatever creature it had been, it looked dead. None of us moved.

It wasn’t a baby, we could see that. It was folded into itself.

I could sort of make out limbs, but the limbs met the hair and smaller elaborations on the limbs, which could have been fingers as much as they could’ve been toes or claws.

It was the same colour as the stinking liquid. It was still covered in it in a thick layer.

Then something strange happened. It cracked. It cracked in a way the egg hadn’t, but like an egg.

We all gasped and inadvertently got a big whiff of the stink. We tried to keep our attention on it but it was difficult with the smell.

The ship told me to hook it, to hook the thing that’d come out of the egg, when I don’t know. I’d gone into a kind of a daze, stunned by the smell and the awful thing we’d done.

I hadn’t noticed that the egg-thing had freed its head. It had no face but a noise was coming from it.

I got my hoe and I attempted to hook the head. It was moving, sort of nodding.

I scraped it and a thick chunk of slime came away on the blade of the hoe. It was green and had dark blue tendrils or veins running through it.

As I pulled it in I saw in the deep green a thing like a tree, a blue tree. It had a hollow trunk, hollow branches and bare hollow twigs, like blood vessels.

Where it had met the egg-thing’s head there was a hole, a black-rimmed hole.

It kept on coming out. I had to turn and walk it away.

Behind me there was a sound like a kitten coughing.

I looked back at the egg-thing. It now had a face.

Just as the smell of the egg-yolk had been, the face was somehow familiar. It was horrible. But it was horrible in a different way.

It was my older brother.

I didn’t need the ship to tell me what to do. He couldn’t breathe. I went up to him and I stuck my fingers in his mouth to pull out the remains of the dark-blue tree that had allowed him to breathe in the egg.

More came out than I would have thought possible, as if it had grown inside his lungs. I got it off his mouth and cleared his tongue. My fingers could reach halfway down his throat, he was so tiny.

He convulsed and I tipped his locked-together body. He vomited up more fluid, like the egg-yolk, with more tendrils in it from the lung-tree. The vomit came out his nose and mouth. I put a hand over my face to stop myself vomiting too.

Each time his body spasmed it loosened slightly, until with a sound like a faint hiccup, like the dead girl’s, he unfurled. I could now ask for help.

We carried him away from the hold, through passages with valve-like doors to where the sleeping folds were. The ship showed us his.

He still smelt and was slippery with slime and he slid into the fold easily. To get clean again most of us had to do the same. I shut my eyes, the skin of the ship against my face, and I slept.

My brother was as skinny as the rest of us. But when I stood next to him, he was half my height. He was a baby.

My older brother had become my younger brother.

His skin had a green-blue tint to it. He was the first of the new crew.