54

Even over the revellers’ voices you can hear the boats moving on the river. The creaking of ropes as they tighten and snap to take the strain from this November night’s wind.

Buoys clank hollow against empty hulls and untied awnings lash rebelliously as the wind blows in harder from the North Sea.

I remember after nights like this, when my father would a fret and always come down early the next day to check for damage.

52

And where should I start, where? Sweating at the great machine before me as it spits out great streams of unwanted papers. It never asks for small chat, never asks for star-signs in the age of reason or falls foul to fatness and domestic life death. When are they ever caught with one eye on the window? 

49

Her urban body is tight against my own. Forget the kooky; this is a dementia of rubble-laced gardens and metal-boarded houses. The vision of the city in profile: I watch her skin erode slowly away as planners and money lenders carve her up like a juicy hot steak. A forked fraternity’s licked this town clean like a nightmare. Riddz crew painted on the walls in graffiti. Gangs stand around. Everything is as sweet as a hamburger.

This whole estate is being removed from existence, redeveloped and re-imagined by our civic overlords. Near the gang, a team of builders smash down part of a terrace house. Murdering sledgehammer swings above, ready to cull the space into an image they see fit. The surgeons play their music whilst they work, cover their slobbering mouths and have their sterile instruments laid out in order.

Scapula. 

47

A blotting occurred on the white ceiling as it began to shift into bright vortexes of light. 

Lombard tried to sit, failed, and then slumped back down onto the soiled bed. That old oafish ghoul was back, the one who threw a fishing line periodically inside his arm. It hit, split the skin to the soul and extracted it out through tubular fingers hard.

Each tug of the line echoed along the diaphragm, trailing a path up towards the neck veins and directly into his brain. At this point it changed from being a provincial corruption to something worse.

His skin felt like melted butter. Nebulous flushes of deep-heat precipitated through each limb. All actuality evaporated away in a single tipsy minute. Ears warmed up; the nose, the lips, the extremities all tingled enticingly as they shifted across to another reality.

Lombard tried to raise himself again. It was 

all he could do during this episode to shrug

 off the sickly draw of unconsciousness. 

45

Suited man in cowboy hat lounges on cathedral seats.Tantalizing peeks as summer skirts lift upwards in the wind. All the best girls smoke. Dried leaves spiral, toil  in a trapped cyclones. The black trousers suck down the heat. Everything is aroused and peaking.

43

People crawl out of here and they crawl back in when they are old and tired. 

39

Thick alcohol fingers. Swelled rich from boozing like leeches on blood. The rings on my fingers feel tight.

Three eggs.

Nate watched as she cooked. She had a small frying pan with nothing in it but a slither of dirty fat. She slid it around left and right like a calm wave.

'Do you have a light?'

Lombard took out a lighter, it was squeezed tightly in her back pocket and her long fingers worked hard to pry it free.

She broke three eggs into a bowl and whipped them lazily.

'Do you want a drag?'

She kept whipping. Then stopped for a second and said, 'drugs make you weak.'

'There's only one drug man. And the rest, well the rest I've learnt ain't much of worth.'

'You're talking about weed?'

'What else?'

Lombard poured the eggs into the pan, sipped her coffee and stared out the window. He'd be here soon and then they'd be well and spectacularly fucked.

Lombard looked down at Nate's leg.

'Why are you wearing one sock?'

'You can't moderate how i sheave these feet. For your information I only own one pair and of that one pair one sock was made sodden and would not dry.'

'Did you try the radiator?'

Nate stood and thought hard. Then there was a knock on the door.