Sarahribu

This is not one of those stories where the rain returns to a land long parched. We have always had rains here, they are known for their persistent and periodical nature. We are known to moan at lengths about them. Our crops have traditionally been modest but sufficient, our people not stricken with dehydration other than as a side effect of too much alcohol. We are a green and pleasant land, and it is if God himself gives us our moisture with his watering can, pleasant consistent drops that nurture us.

What is falling now is not rain. There are not words for what it is.

It started with ‘and in other news’ on the nightly broadcast. Record rains in Australia, a thick band of rain a mile deep appearing across the satellite pictures. The rain paid no heed to the traditions of weather patterns, the inexplicable gulf forces and trade winds, nor microclimates insidious or divine. The deserts were drenched, the reservoirs swollen far beyond breaking point. The story quickly moved within days to the main broadcast once a man died, gaiety removed from the reporters’ tone as if it had never been there.

There were initial hopes that this was just a hurricane that had been missed. Perhaps some other known natural disaster, a tsunami like in ‘04, but whilst we dithered making shiny graphics on the nightly news to explain the thing, The band moved onwards, gaining momentum over the endless seas and deepest oceans. By the time it reached the equator the band was ten miles longitudinal with delicate corniced ends curled in, vortex like, where it could be seen on the latitude. The first images arrived from boats over the South China Sea of it raining upwards where the edges were, as if an invisible sponge was being wrung in reverse. What fell as it reached China was confirmed what people suspected – saline, supersaturated and ineffably destroying.

The band was slowly edging upwards; leaving behind it ruined ecosystems and damage that could barely be described in monetary terms, as we so normally do describes tragedies in our modern culture. The reporting switched back to describing the loss in terms of life, of miles and kilometres, the language of war and other things easily quantified in huge numbers whilst maintaining some kind of rational meaning. By this point it had gained proper noun status, The Band being ominous and irreligious enough to stick, as if what we named it would make a difference.

I was watching television and the gentle comedy I was attempting to enjoy was interrupted to give the news that edges of The Band had joined up over Chile. The implication sat underneath the gravitas of the announcement. The hysteria rose like bile, and then there were scared masses panic buying, as if rice could save us by doing anything but swelling up and absorbing the water! I mocked the stockpiling masses when amongst my peers, but found myself crying in Tesco’s blessed aisles at 3AM, unable to sleep, attempting to work out which can of carrots would last me longer when the time came to suck them down.

A week later and our song had changed to Oh, Africa! We once sang for you and donated goods and cash to bring water where none fell. Oh, we said, how delicious our irony. Yes, there were tasteless jokes and political cartoons featuring Geldof for what they were worth, but the underlying current was ‘embrace black humour, because it is us next.’ We are now at stage [x] of the grieving process.

We held our breaths as it crossed the mythical line that separated Europe from the world. We knew little of what remained behind it, the band covered much of the world, but was it still just rain south of the equator, or were we in the throws of a biblical level flood? Last I checked boats were not returning to harbour, and my hands could barely build a barbeque, let alone an ark. How long would my modest house last? Sure, my windows are double-glazed and they keep out water in normal situations, but what of this? Could the man from Everest soothe my querying soul? I entertained the thought of calling the hotline for a minute, demanding an answer, before dismissing it as a stupid, overindulgent idea.

Three weeks after it all started with that little joke at the end of the nightly news, we British were told in the sombre tones of the Prime Minister and then the even sombre-er tones of the BBC that Paris was now beneath the band. Our old enemy was drowned. The rain would be here by lunchtime.

My friends and I had decided, during a ‘celebratory’ end of the world dinner the week before, that since my house was the only one with plastic windows we would take our refuge there. Grey faces arrived that evening, and we played music and did things fitting of a last night on Earth. We climbed onto the roof to watch the last sunrise. I would have liked to say it was amazing, breathtaking, moving or heartbreaking but with all the vapour in the air, the heavy cloud cover and all the smoke from fires and fireworks hanging choking thick, it was barely noticeable, a slow rise from the orange tinge of the city to that of the day. It was sad more than anything that our end was here and it was so unspectacular, so very British.

The sun was blotted out, finally, at 11:06 on an understandably humid morning. It had not been beaming down but it was still visible, the cherished golden orb. My last hysterical thought in daylight was that it was fitting that the sun would now never set on the British Empire. It’s strange what the brain throws up.

My face turned upwards, I felt the first drop and was surprised that it felt like normal rain.

My time with Raffles has left me a far fitter man than before I started as a cracksman’s accomplice. Not a sporting man by any measure before, I was still a little breathless and rather dispirited after our sprightly and emotional jaunt to the train. My guilt from my reckless endangering of Raffles’ life weighed heavily on my thoughts despite his endless reassurances and backhanded compliments, and I was still mealy-mouthed with sullen pride once we settled into silence on the train and allowed relief to roll through our muscles. Raffles sat opposite me, smiling his most genuine smile at me whilst gently bleeding on the pristine seats of the first class compartment, his eyes another story, burning with the embers of intent, of want, take, and have, the dangerous edge to his eyes he gets when he sees the quarry.

Adrenaline is an odd thing. Of all the hormones and chemicals that rush around the body when one is escaping from the scene of a crime it’s the one most transmutable, turning from lead to gold in your blood with alchemic delight. Raffles and I shared a mutual moment where it rolling-boiled its way through our blood; sitting opposite and well apart but sharing the same breath, a delicate prickle of sweat despite the cold edge of the July morn, the compartment heated by the lamps and the infernal edge. My collar tight and damp from exertion, and there was heat radiating from my close quarters companion, a localised sultry smog I could sense and taste on the edge of my senses.

When it takes hold, this adrenalised lust and relief, the world is sharp and for a bare few moments I sensed, rather than saw, Raffles, radiating intent and sensual heat as he reached out and took the two ends of his Zingari scarf that served as my hasty disguise between his fist and pulled my face round to his, and if I hadn’t already been breathless I would have been undone when, eyes half-lidded with seductive conviction, he slid his nose softly along the line of mine and followed through down to kiss my willing and waiting mouth.

Without adrenaline as my drug I am not this man, the one who is so adept at peeling another out of wrinkled clothes, whether unpicking the knot of a tie and detaching a collar from the delicate flesh of the neck to expose the soft skin underneath or peeling whites and mouldering disguises from weary arms, trailing their path with my mouth until Raffles is the one whimpering. I can be glad that my hands do not shake anymore as I parted Raffles from his cracksman’s threads; I can’t have been anyone but myself as I pressed my nose to his skin, the early morning scrape of beard a grounding touch against my lips and the taste of his skin intoxicating; rich with the deep smog and salt of a man who had earlier scored a match-saving 62 (not out! I could not doubt that he would go on to improve that score later), dodged through London’s soup to assist in a robbery, and still had the energy to take me apart, pressed tight against the seat, himself flush against my hips, his strong thighs vicelike against the outside of mine, my scalp tender from the hands that grasped my hair during long, deep kisses. That is the man I have resigned myself to be, but what kind of man am I to be minutes later sprawled undone on another gentleman’s cloak, with the same said gentleman’s scarf clutched against my wet, bitten lips, the upper hand long lost with the touch of his. He admonishes me harshly to ‘be quiet Bunny’ between lavishing bites and the low litany of cruel perversion against my ear as his hands are in my trousers in a first class carriage rapidly drawing into Waterloo.

Raffles as a lover is perfunctory, laconic and an utter bastard, he is all the words from all sides of the spectrum of my education, he is all too brief, too focused to get to the point and out again, so to speak. He loves like he thieves, my lover and friend, and the combination is barely more than I can take. As the train slows he peels himself away from me with a groan, standing and smoothing himself back to acceptable levels. I am left sprawled across the cushions like the rest of his pretty things, undone, stolen and forever his.

He leans down to kiss me to seal his promises, the promise that he holds me in regard, that I am useful to him, the promise implicit that despite the head wound he still has the energy to pull me, bright eyed in dim light, across London into his bed at the Albany for a snatched hour before heading off and saving the Ashes. It’s a heady combination, a little something to keep me his, to quell my doubts and seal my guilt in his hand.

You might ask, is the adrenaline response always like this? All I can say is that occasionally we fight, landing punches where they won’t be seen, secret batteries of release in places covered by clothes. Sometimes we just drink silently, decompressing in each other’s company with nary a touch and I return to my Mount Street flat alone. Sometimes the telephone is already ringing when I walk through the door; sometimes it never rings at all.

And sometimes, sometimes I am against the wall, sometimes I am the heavy glass for the whisky as the decanter drips amber into the hollows of hipbones and stomach. Sometimes there are bruises on edges of acceptance, sometimes I am dolled up like a lady in our loot and christened like a child.

We should be above all these earthly, sinful things, above unspoken inversion and amateur cracksmenship, above all of this because we are British and we are gentlemen, loyal to queen and country. Perhaps that is why we do never speak of them. Instead, we merely act.

Black magic in general is a tedious business, all chicken guts and the lust of virgins, far easier to bottle than virtue and more effective in the long run. Mademoiselle would generally sit and stir and fret, taking on the odd job of a love potion or a tedious revenge, and watch the pennies roll in. All the best black magicians are French, so he of course puts on the illusion, magic is all showbusiness these days. The petite raven haired goddess sits on a stool more delicately than a hulking brute ever could and the curves of hers he wears cushion his joints so softly that when he slips out of her in the evening and hangs her up he barely creaks. She was just so beautiful.

Of course he never sees the man’s face when he first comes by, that would be rude, a violation of the very blackness of the black arts to have the illusion of a busy-body too. Mademoiselle is coy beneath her veil, and he listens through her ears to this abhorrent demand. She has never split a man before, and neither has he, not even the King Warlock he learnt his craft of had handmade a Mandragora before, let alone split a man into earth and hate and parts and sewn them back together into twins. The client, as he now obviously had to become, spoke of loneliness with the twinge of the brand of sadness particular to the self-absorbed. Something tedious and over reactionary about a lost companion and subsequent failed necromancy, now he just wants something, everything, the magical reciprocal love. He almost recommends a whore, surely that would be more useful than a masturbation fantasy of selfcest and eternal companionship? But what is another heresy in the world, how much harm could a split-soul wank-stain wreak on God’s already blackened city?

The man says he will return when Mademoiselle indicates she is willing. They make no time, and it is weeks before the driving rain parts to show a tall figure shifting uneasily, jabbering nothing, following Mademoiselle like a kitten through the streets to the anonymous townhouse. Mademoiselle removes his work-clothes and hangs her up, and smirks a big brown smile at the gaping look. The man is handsome out of the rain; the whole affair is really quite the pity.

Black magicians don’t tend to do conventional spell techniques, there is little meditation or candle work to be faffed around with, and so Mademoiselle takes the man’s hand and pushes him in the centre of his chest down onto the chair. There are anatomical problems with turning a man into a twin, diploid to haploid, dust to dust. The heart must split but the bile can’t boil, and the book is insistent the lobotomy cannot be too rushed. The pipes and liquids and effluence must be rewired and tied off neatly before you can even think to split the metaphysical, the person from the personality and what was the human from the humanity. The earth helps, the clay reforms what was never there in the shape of what was, it takes the shape of the man and is bound. And so when the guts spill and the man screams inevitable curses and blasphemies, the earth reaches up, full of mother’s milk and the life force of gods and all the little pixies and fills the lungs till they are blesséd and silent.
In the end the procedure was a reassuringly short one, an hour at the most. A sawbones would take longer to fix a bad break, and so it is surprising at the least that it takes Mademoiselle as long to tear a man in half and mould him back together. He sits back on his heels, hands and arms spattered with the core of the man, gore and earth mixed together evocative of the battlefields of France where he learnt his craft. The rich iron tang of slain bodies and the clean mud-luscious taste mixed together are the building blocks of civilised life; the battlefields of Europe after all are vineyards now; unstoppably verdant and shockingly fertile as they turn life force to wine.

The…men, as they are now, are asleep and Mademoiselle cannot help but feel proud of his work. He pulls them round into the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window and admires his work; the bodies are smooth; they crackle as they dry and as the magic settles down into is place, continuing on its own to bind the infernal seams, the patchwork quilt of the seeping darkness. The dark mud skin is paper-thin and just inside you can make out the secrets and guts nestled together like pomegranate seeds in their collusive membrane. The men look darkly innocent, slender half-bodies slowly gaining form, trunk arms punctuated with long root fingers that need to suck up the sun if they are to lose their sickening translucency. The men need a week of solid photosynthesis out of the London soup but he can’t imagine a weekend by the sea is on the cards. He just hopes whatever hovel they crawl in to gets just enough light to bring life fully into their shells, or this whole thing will end up a waste.

Mademoiselle tidies up slowly, scrubbing the blood from the floor and burning the chair in ritual thanks. It takes another hour for the first fluttering of life to manifest and then in the twilight of the soup-stew London night the men wake, opening their eyes onto a strange dual world. The connection between the halves of the brain is tenuous and latent, it will be gone within a few hours, leaving them to develop personalities independent and distinct, dexter and sinister, the logical manifestations of physical left and right. They stagger to their feet and fall, climb up again, clinging to each other as if in a three-legged race after an afternoon of beer. Their tongues won’t work for days, if they master speech again at all. They indicate a parcel of money and Mademoiselle smiles a big friendly smile, all customer service and points to the door. They amble out like deranged fawns and disappear, melting into the anonymous hustle of the city.

Its only when he goes to pull the girl back on for his evening hours that he realises exactly what he has done, and instead of flogging love potions to the blind goes out as himself and proceeds to get extremely, devastatingly shitfaced, until he lying in the gutter, screaming apologies to the universe.

(A special double-length story! I’ve been working on this for a while. And by while I mean 4 days)

And so it came to pass that the seas did rise, for even the church leaders declared that God probably would not save us for what we had done to ourselves. The cities of the world did not crash or scream so much as whimper and write letters to the editor. On the whole the people filed out, two by two back into the countryside, clutching teddy bears and pet carriers, talking animatedly to friends, then gazing back with empty eyes, salt-stone faces and dimly violent smiles at the lives they left behind.

The United Kingdom, noted throughout history as a contrary, weather-obsessed isle, managed to muddle through without drama (and with a fair amount of grumble about the lack of drama, because what is the point of being weather obsessed if there isn’t some headline generating drama), and so almost without incident over the century waterways replaced roads, gaily daubed traditional canal boats with cable television and wireless internet became the ‘new’ aspirational brand for the middle classes who read the right newspapers, and altogether it was all a bit of an anticlimax.

At this unspecified time in the future, in the Northern Historical City ™ of York, a young woman named Katherine punts her boat through the desolate canals. It’s the summer of her independence and armed with the fresh self-important flush of exam results, a pocketful of historical anecdotes on laminated crib sheets, a striped shirt and impressive upper arms, she takes to the flooded streets to try and forge a living on the waters. It’s battered and a bit damp, but the Gunhild is her baby, bought with her earnings from her now distant Saturday job selling scratch cards and cigarettes to the sheepish parents of her school friends, hiding their petty vice in their handbags as they duck back into the rain.

Its hard not to live in the city of York and not become a little saturated in history right down to your genes, and Katherine is a little bit obsessed in the forgotten oddness of the past, and at the same time a little bit jaded and frustrated by the breadth of knowledge needed to join the scrabble for tourist custom and dime.
The water had been high for a long time by the time she was born, the streets that were once full of revellers, buskers, shoppers and dreamers now obfuscated by dingy water, the poetry in the ripples punctuated with the gaping faces of abandoned cans. Remade in the image of a perfect tourist town once more, she is fascinated by the mundanity still visible on a clear day, the chewing gum marks and the little glass indentations from promotions long forgotten. It gives her a thrill, the thrill of amateur archaeology at the swish of a pole, more personal and fascinating than waterlogged Romans, Vikings and Vampires.

Tourist money is easy pickings, even in a city as waterlogged as York. While there are at least four separate gondolier girls with licences and a couple who manage a week or so at a time without, Katherine still manages to grab her first family the day she starts. They are all smiles and politely balance on Gunhild’s rickety seats, whilst Katherine’s babble is nervous and her punting largely inexpert at the unexpected weight. The father gives her a substantial tip and lascivious wink as he steps off at the boat terminus. She manages to get safely under Ouse Bridge before she retches overboard into the dark waters.

Happily though, by the end of the week she has her patter and route down. Drifting by the raised platforms in the square in the heat of the afternoon sun, it is a perfect day, not a cloud in the sky. She hears the cacophony of young voices raised in competition, promising tours at the best price, young men and women in historical costumes of varying degree of accuracy, promising bigger and better secrets than the competition. One stands out, a tall adolescent on wading stilts in a cheap frock coat and a top hat both too shiny and too small to be allowed on top of the shocking shock of ginger hair. His voice is clear with a Northallerton lilt and he’s promising the world, the juice, the savvy to the customers with their dollars, a self-satisfied smirk in the direction of the punters looking jealously on as he strides between them like an oversized bird. He is the Amazing Elli, Proprietor of Olde Fashionede Victorian Ghost Tours (est. 1997). Katherine is instantly, overwhelmingly in lust.

Night falls, and like most of the city’s functioning poor she lives under the waterline, in reinforced centre flats that are mainly safe and mostly dry. She docks by her front door with the only mariners’ knot she knows and glances up, convinced on a balcony above she sees a glimpse of ruffled ginger hair vanish behind the sun.

She is surprised how easily she takes to her new career. Cutting a smooth line through the black water more heads turn as she passes through on her way back to the terminus, her silhouette promotional picture perfect bar the unsightly bulge of the dollars and euros in her pocket. After a month she is the most profitable water-based tourist operative on the Ouse and Foss, and the dreadlocked boys in the bar she deposits the more fashionable of her customers in name a drink after their favourite girl, a sickly sweet honey rich concoction, a beautiful burnished gold that slips down the throat with a sensuous grace. Back at her flat she sits on the porch, feet dangling into the murky depths, and practices her spiel to no one in particular.

“Gunhild was married to the most powerful man in the Danish kingdoms, Eric Bloodaxe, whose name I imagine loses much in translation. Beautiful as a queen should be, fiercely intelligent, far more so than her husband, she was also a witch, which was a good career move for a woman in a position where young pretty things could be dab hands with a poisoned chalice.

Her beloved husband was king of York and a man of large ego, and so when a young poet upstart called Egal started spreading rumours back in the old country that Eric was ineffectual and impotent and all things men find most hurtful, the king pleaded privately with his wife to intervene. Gunhild was a smart woman, smarter than most, and so she placed a curse on Egal that meant if he took to the seas he would be deposited into her husband’s grasp. When news of this reached Egal, he scoffed in disbelief, took to the seas, and came-to staring at the point of the king’s men’s swords on a stormy Yorkshire shore.

Eric was ecstatic to have his enemy bought to him, but he prided himself on not being publicly ruthless, and so allowed Egal one night to prepare to argue for his freedom. All night Egal sat in his cell, trying to think of a reason not to be put to death. Every time he thought he had a thread of a thought, the fluttering plumage of a golden bird sitting outside distracted him. This was of course the queen, who mastered transfiguration at a very young age, and by the time the sun rose and the bird queen glittered her distracting dance a final time, Egal realised what he must do.

Standing dishevelled in the courts the next morning, there was a hushed silence, and Egal took a deep breath and launched into a poem, a most brown nosing and declarative love poem that was ever improvised on death row. The king sat in shocked silence at the end, and then finally, a tiny emo tear slipped down his cheek, as there is nothing kings like more than being praised, he granted Egal his freedom, as long as he walked the kingdom speaking that exact same poem in praise of Eric. Egal agreed, and there was much manly hugging in the court that morning.
With a glitter in her eye, the queen cast a final spell, binding Egal’s speech to those few words he spoke in praise, so he would never be able to speak ill of the king again.”

Rounding a corner on Swinegate a few days later Katherine is returning back to the terminus when she hears the beautiful northern vowels of the Amazing Elli. Her crush had gone un-nursed for many weeks at this point, as Elli was rarely to be seen for more than a few minutes at the terminus, and he never hung out with the other tourist trappers at the skanky bars. It was probably for the best, as without the bitching about Elli they would be stuck for conversation topics and be stuck sitting in polite silence drinking bad beer. She drifted through the streets and was barely listening when they came face to face and she heard it, what he was saying to his tour of adoring visitors. It was her words he was so earnest with! Her story, her boat’s tale of magic and glittering birds that she knew were not in the original! They were close now, and he was smiling disarmingly at her. She smiled sweetly when their eyes met and when she got close enough, stuck out her pole and swept his feet out from under him, not bothering to look back as he fell with an undignified splash.

The shocked gasp-laughter of the tour was the music to her ears as she punted elegantly off.

August came around faster than relativity should allow and the edict came down from the council that the season would be over on the 31st, rather than the 10th September that was the traditional dates they would shut the gates and bar the bars. It was a bittersweet sadness for Katherine had become used to her life of being top of the heap, her sabotage and reclaiming of her story from the Amazing Elli had led her to boldly take his prime place in the terminus, and so for the few last days of summer she was the queen and Gunhild, sailing triumphant on artificial shores.
She chooses not to go to the final party, at least not early. Instead she pushes her boat out into the calm torrent of the river, staring down past drowned trees to the glorious sunset and lets loose, feels herself let go of the tension in her weary arms, pole clattering down as she lets Gunhild drift.
She’s woken from her delicious reverie by a shout. Looking up, she is of course surprised to see the Amazing Elli, resplendent in tailcoat and the glinting expense of his cuffs and studs in pure white shirt. He smiles, not the knowing smile of the story-thief, but a more normal, mortal smile. She watches him, fascinated as he leans over the bridge, a graceful somersault of black clothes and ginger hair, and kisses her. It’s a proper kiss, grown up; it stands up and speaks for what it wants, the kiss of someone who knows you, even though they’ve barely spoken. He ghosts a phrase she can’t hear for the rushing of blood in her ears, and then there’s a thud and Elli, no longer amazing, drops into her boat and knocks her backwards with a choreographed ease, like he has done this throughout history, throughout time. He looms over her, his grin wide and beautiful and she can see other people’s lives flash before her eyes, not costumes like those cheap and waterlogged by the pier or the smart and perfect like in the history texts, but the ordinary lives they have led before, scuffed sneakers and well worn cottons that sneak through mundane history.

Later, its in orange shimmering light of the final sunset of the season that she delights in the prickle and chafe of his false moustache, until he rips it off like a television villain and for the last time for the summer she feels her body and boat swell with the pull of the summer tide.

The horizons are empty, but that really is nothing new. He would take anything these days, a burnt out shack, a bundle of thorny brush, a half eaten carcass picked over by vultures. Locking his rifle above his head, Maram strikes a severe line against the endless frozen tides of the desert. His glasses were small and hyper functional to counteract the sand-blindness that had blighted him for far too long since leaving the city to try and eke out an unnatural extension of his life on the sands.
Bell is his trusted steed, glorious and awkward all the same. Camels were slaughtered and eaten in the cities where they no longer have any use for beasts of burden, but plenty of use for large slabs well exercised of protein for the weak limbed kids blighted from the heartbreak of millions. The cities are like animals, anthropomorphised by the half-dead souls rammed into every crevice. Life has always been hard in the desert, in the black tents that billow like storm clouds that a long way back he assumes his ancestors lived in. Camels always make it easier.

Every day the world slips just a little further away from him. His past life, with lovers and meals and eyesight, where he never had to put his shoulder back in joint because the kick from the rifle was too much stress for it to take. He cannot see if there was a rabbit on the horizon anymore, but having its present bulk, tricked out with addendums to the stock and the muzzle to make it easier, the brass still gleaming thanks to his constant handling, a solid metal security blanket against the monsters in the night.

The nights out here are a punch to the chest. The sun descends into its bed exactly as it has since the start of history and the darkness rises, but if it is your first night in the desert you would be forgiven if you found yourself overwhelmed. There was a time where the desert was the last place on earth you could see the beauty of the night sky, and at that time there was a hope that maybe having hope wasn’t a useless human folly. Thousands were still there as the last of the stars seemed to shudder before they were sliced out of existence as the now omnipresent sheath rolled over, the sky is now ribbed for no stargazer’s pleasure, possible astrologers forever silenced.

He huffs laughter to himself. Every omnipresent cloud of death and destruction has a silver lining.

He used to read horoscopes waiting for his sister in the doctor’s office. She was ill a lot, her pale hand weighted down with the jewellery her husband would buy her, shiny baubles to preserve his dying love. The doctors could do nothing, and eventually the money ran out, the jewellery taken away and pawned for more medicine that made no difference, and his sister was buried swiftly, an unpreserved body in a unprepared grave.

The cold, after the oppressive heat of the day, never stops being sudden, shocking and a stealer of the breath a man holds dear. He is back now, his scarred corneas show the black behemoth of his home.

Dismounting with a exuberance and flair aimed only for the invisible onlookers that make up the omnipresent pressure of there being someone in the room, Maram grins at the nothingness and ducks inside the tent. His meagre possessions are spread out uselessly, in piles; the cacophonograph plays music loudly and distortedly, spurred on with an affectionate kick, pitch bent beyond repair as the needle scratches across warped disks. With no chance of a replacement you get used to the mocking pastiche of music. You have to.

Bell huffs outside, trotting in circles and grunting. Maram ignores her for now, and digs his daily bread out of the sand oven. Even the small amount of flour he has left now is nearly all sand, nutrition a hollow word from a time when the people always could get something to top up what they didn’t like to eat, when people had glossy hair and perfect white teeth. Hair, teeth and nails, the first things to go, the last things you would have thought you’d missed.

They have got so far today. Bell is so beautiful, a reassuring tower of strength and understanding but he can feel her tired and starting to break, the burden of taking him half way across the world taking its toll on such a magnificent beast. He goes outside and examines her, the light dim but just enough to see her sad eyes with their caramel lashes flutter at his touch. They are linked, his magnificent steed, linked through their shared blood matted in her fur from travel and the tracks of her tears. He touches her wounds and massages feeling back into her tired legs and sings to her simple songs of famous love and the purity of childhood, until his own eyes grow heavy with sleep and he drifts off pressed against her solid, still labouring bulk.

He passed the skeletons of other men fleeing the cities as they clawed their way out of hell. There is a radius of bones around the major metropolises, the first few miles they are smaller, more delicate, the initial burst of the unprepared. As you get further away you hit the bodies of the men and their horses, mules, sweet donkeys liberated from beachfronts. The whips and chains lay testament to the breaking points of man and beast.

He tries not to think too hard about what the camel skeleton he saw a few miles back means for him. Bell grunts impatiently as he gulps down water, the two of them swathed in once-white fabric to keep off the haze of the morning sun. He loads her aching back with apologetic whimpers and clicks at her to head off, the horizon unbroken all the way until the end.

Everyone remembers the first moment of proper human disappointment. When Petite Agustine was a tiny child befitting her name, she lived in a small village (within easy commute from Paris), where her parents were very important people to do with the kind of important task that is very boring. Back then though, they were just Maman and Papa and Agustine, and they were mainly happy.

The village was perfect, the kind of place that is not seen anymore, either appropriated through the decades by commuters or suburbanites or aggressively maintained at its old level of twee with an iron fist. Back then the village was full of characters, but none were so noteworthy as Madame Touillard. She was a thickset woman as tall as a house, who both terrified and entranced all the tiny children, who whispered unimaginatively that she was a witch over their chocolate at break. She carried a large cockerel on her shoulder, which was the most magnificent beast Petite Agustine had seen in the whole of her short, uneventful life.

The first time she saw Madame Touillard in all of her glory it was a Wednesday and Agustine was out with her mother at the market when Madame Touillard swept past in a whirl of skirts and fresh feathers.
“Maman”, lisped Petite Agustine immediately, for she was disgustingly cute and remarkably astute. “Can I have a bird?”
“Why would you want a great dirty bird?” said Maman. “Do you want to grow up to be an old woman with no friends? Anyway, you have Guillaume. You cannot have a bird even if it wasn’t disgusting, because Guillaume would eat it. Which would make you guilty by association. Do you understand, Agustine? Of course you don’t. Why did Eric think that getting a kitten the same week we had a baby would be a good idea?”
Maman had a point, thought Agustine as Maman continued to talk at her, her babble fading into the grey mist of childhood memory. She had been ignoring Guillaume recently. So Agustine resolved to pull herself up by her socks and enjoy her cat and then maybe when Guillaume left home she could get a bird, and train it to sit on her shoulder and caw at people, and maybe take out the eyes of the her enemies. Yes, thought Agustine, it would definitely be worth waiting for her bird.

Later on, it was still a glorious Wednesday afternoon and Maman shooed a fractious Agustine and Guillaume off to play. They ambled amiably through the hazy countryside of the past and Agustine had, in the rush of the beautiful afternoon, forgotten all about her desire for a bird. She stumbled through long grass and kicked up explosions of late-summer dust in her own world, until she saw Guillaume fumbling in the abandoned animal holes with something, but by the time she reached him it was nothing but a delicate filigree of albumen strung around his dusty paws.

She rushed across the path and prodded Guillaume away with a decent amount of force, and bent down in an attempt to rescue what he had ruined. In her hands the remains of the egg were nothing more than a friable relic; it crumbled gooey-disgusting between her clumsy fingers in the echoing silence of her shocked dismay.

She turned and almost stepped on it – the identical brother of the egg-corpse in her hands, sitting untouched by the hateful cat. She slipped into her pocked wrapped in some of the dry grass, grabbed the cat and gripped him tightly all the way home, both grumbling audibly with annoyance.

Once she got home she paused, dropping grumbling Guillaume with a plop, she paused to think. Maman said she could not have a bird, but obviously the egg needed her. Agustine had done the heavily censored basics of life in class and so knew all about mummy-birds and daddy-bees. She climbed silently up the stairs and clicked open the door into her bedroom. After shredding some much hated items with her safety scissors and rescuing a box from the kitchen she had a perfectly serviceable incubator box. She tucked it under the radiator and basked in a job well done.

The box stayed her secret. Every day she would have a peek at it, and then after a few weeks she would leave little bits of food, in case the egg got hungry. But even tiny children know when something is wrong, and one day she decided to see whether the bird inside egg needed some help getting out. Maybe without a mummy bird nearby the baby would have cheerleading, no coaxing to come out into the beautiful, dangerous world. She carefully took it out, and lifting it out. It was so dainty, thin like good china and speckled like good bread. With a firm and decisive crack! she broke the shell, and it shattered to leave nothing more than a whisper of a life that never was. A perfectly empty shell, crumbling into powdered disappointment.

She took it in to Maman, tiny tears running down her tiny face, and Maman took one look at the desiccated shell and swept her up in her big arms, the last of the shell a smear across perfumed silk.

Petit Agustine went to bed early, morose, clutching Guillaume to her chest, so worn out she didn’t hear Maman slip out into the night.

By her breakfast setting in the morning was a pretty blue box. Maman was in the kitchen and so Agustine opened it to find a tiny, perfect chick sitting disgruntled in cotton wool. Maman poked her head round the door and smiled wide.

Agustine named the chick Boc-Boc and over time Agustine grew to be a willowy dark haired girl and Boc-Boc grew to be an almost perfectly sypherical mess of feathers, and they continued to be happy. At least, thought Agustine, if Boc-Boc should ever die, there were plenty more eggs in the fridge.

It was a small advert in the back of one of the better papers. When she rang to place it the charming Glaswegian refused to take her seriously, bantering ‘Oh, is this one of them alternate reality games? When you have to save the princess through hacking websites?’ It cost £36 and he took her bank details with that perfect customer service laugh that tells that this will be one call for the future pub-anecdote pile.

She bought her copy the day after next and there, between the advert for speechwriting and tax advice was her plea.
‘My name is Maria Maria Lowell. Six month ago I was in a bad car accident and subsequently I have lost all the memories of my life. From my family I have been told about who I am and what I’ve done with my life and so I have the facts.
I know I was a braggart. I know that I would spin stories and spill my memories given slight provocation so I know that there are people around the world who have my personal memories. So if you’re one of the people who’ve heard my silly stories at dinner parties, train stations, on blind dates, in playgrounds or wherever you encountered me please get in touch so I can try and find out who I am.’

She purposely left it a few agonising days before she checked her PO box. It was crammed full of letters in all shapes and sizes, the stamps from all over the world postmarked exotic and full of potential that caused her heart to flutter. She ripped one open at random still standing in the dirty hallway, ten others hitting her feet with a dull swoosh.

“You owe me $10,000. I expect payment tomorrow” followed by bank details.

Her enthusiasm deflated she emptied the box out with a heavy heart and trudged home carefully through the listless rain, boots kicking up a spray of disappointment.

A few hours and several cups of tea later she opened another missive from a well meaning former acquaintance. “I remember you from university. You studied economics but failed out after second year because your maths wasn’t good enough…” it was frustrating to get letters like this, with facts. She didn’t want facts! She wanted history, humanity, soul, and personality. There must be a touch of what she needed in amongst the solicitations, descriptions of obviously fake sexual encounters and vitriolic hate mail…

It was three days later when her mother came round, filled with hennish worry. She called out for her cautiously; Even though her ‘new’ daughter was coping wonderfully according to the doctors, she couldn’t stand being shocked. A strange noise met her, and in the kitchen she found a sight that no mother can see and ignore, but her heart fluttered and her eyes pricked when she saw what was sitting there. For the first time in months, Maria looked back at her. For the first time since before the accident her beautiful face was now full of the light of identity and this was enough to make the eyes wet with the burden of loss and regret.

“I was so normal” was all she managed to get out before she dissolved into tears. Her mother took her in her arms and they said nothing else.

Later in the evening, Maria’s mother returned to the kitchen to tidy and found the few significant letters spread out across the table, a perfect anachronology of a remembered life. She kissed them lightly with gratitude and pressed them to her heart.

“You told me once about the time you got backstage at a gig from some Canadian singer you liked from your childhood. You bonded with him over a trivial manner and you described with relish how he kissed you and it tasted like home. His girlfriend was in the next room and he whispered things in your ear you claim were the basis for the lyrics of his next single. No one believed you, but it was a good story. I hope this helped”.

“We were set up on a blind date once. I met you after work, where you did something boring that involved databases. You explained, at length, how you implemented a system wide fix for an ongoing printer problem. I’m sorry to say I made my excuses after the first course despite how hot you were and stuck you with the bill.”

“You were my first. It was pretty good, but I’ve had better since. I’m sorry to hear about your injury.”

“You travelled a lot as a kid because your dad was in the Army. You always wanted to be a soldier as a kid like him, and managed to get us kids to play at bloody warfare, which scandalised the nuns.”

“You used to tell people that you kept your super-Catholic first names for the irony because you considered yourself a pagan now. Really you just worshipped at the altar of Senor Tequila and were generally pretty insufferable”.

“You used to lend people books all the time and then bitch when you never got them back. I still have your copy of The Time Travellers Wife, and sorry to say, still haven’t read it.”

“We lived together the first year out of university and so I know a lot of things about you. I think I was the longest person you ever lived with and vice versa, which is pretty sad, considering our age. I always thought you were cool, even though you had Chinese food stains on your sheets most of the time. You used to sleep with your laptop and complain that it was worse than crack when I complained about it pressing against my back when we crashed there after watching a movie. I loved you for thirteen months and fourteen days, and those were some of the happiest days of my life. I hope you find happiness in your new self”.