So instead what I do is I say “I’m a really good writer” and I stick it up on Facebook and MySpace and all those shitty sites and people believe me on those sites, mainly because I stick up a picture of a naked woman instead of me and people believe that I am that naked woman because they want to believe that I’m a naked woman and not me.

And in the meantime I write this email to the Isle Of The Improverished Geniuses telling them to write me a book about being a nude woman for 10p and they do it because they don’t give a shit about money and they write the book in about 2 days and it is not a work of genius but it is good enough really and everybody has a laugh about it.

And I tell all the people on Facebook and MySpace and all those shitty sites that I have written a book and that if they buy the book then I will go round to their houses and sit about in the nude for a while so they all buy the book and I sell the book for £10 and about 100 million people or something buy it because that’s how many people there are in the world that would like to believe that I could become a naked woman and sit around in their houses for a bit but I never go round to their houses but I make loads of money anyway and the people on the Isle Of The Impoverished Geniuses have a right laugh about it all and the people on Facebook and MySpace and all that shit just sit around and think I’m playing hard to get and read weird sex things into the book and I agree that I’m playing hard to get because I am a writer and therefore complex and hard to pin down in any general sense of the word.

So everybody wins in the end and I just do that over and over and over again until everybody in the world dies.

THE END.

It is 3pm, Wednesday, Thursday, or Tuesday.  Dave sits on the couch.  The TV set is on, but Dave can’t see the TV because there is a six foot high pile of rubble between himself and the TV.

Jim enters the room carrying a hammer and a half-eaten pie.  He holds the pie at arms length by the crust and scrutinises it.

Every few seconds Jim looks over at Dave, but Dave is not amused.  Dave knows that Jim wants the subject of the pie broached.  Dave knows that Jim wants to yammer on in every small detail about the pie, about how he happened upon it, how it came to be in his possession, its origins, life story, and so on…  but Dave does not rise to the bait.  Not this time.

Dave hears a thud.  He knows that this thud is Jim trying to draw attention to the pie.

Jim is hitting the pie with the hammer.  It crumbles to the floor.

Dave stares at a block of cheese on the floor.

Jim is destroying a pie with a hammer.  Dave is staring at a block of cheese on the floor.

All is well.

Jim sighs and leaves the room.  Dave continues to stare at the cheese.

Dave tries to move the cheese across the room using only the power of his mind.

The cheese refuses to move.

2.

It is 3pm, Thursday, Friday or Wednesday.  The next day.  Dave sits on the couch.

Something is different, he feels.  Something has changed.

Dave is correct.  Drilling is going on outside.  A bunch of idiots have found a pneumatic drill and are drilling holes in the road.

The drilling is interfering with the sound on the TV set.

Or everybody on the TV set has Tourette’s Syndrome.

Jim enters the room and stares down at the floor, at the remains of the pie on the floor, that has congealed.

Jim sits down on the couch.  Dave crosses his legs.  Jim makes this clacking noise with his mouth.  Dave’s agitation is intensified by the drilling, the clicking, and the TV sound going weird.

“What’s on the telly Dave?”  Jim says.

“I don’t know.”  Dave pleads, “I just don’t know.  How am I supposed to know?”

Dave waves his arms around in the air as Jim looks on in wonderment.

“How in the hell am I supposed to know Jim?  The sound is just ‘takka-takka-takka-takka-takka’ and I can’t see because of…”  He opens his palms to the pile of rubbish on the floor.  “Whatever-the-fuck that is.”

Jim looks around the room sheepishly.  “Why don’t you sit over there Dave?”

Dave sighs.  “That is not my chair Jim.”

Jim pauses.  “Whose chair is it?”

“How am I supposed to know?”  Dave says, staring at the six foot high pile of shit.  “I’ve never seen anybody sit in it.”

He stares at the six foot high pile of shit he attempts to move it using the power of his mind.

It does not move.  Not even by one inch.

“Maybe we should tidy this place up.”  Jim says.

Dave shrugs.

Jim points: “I mean, what is that yellow lump on the floor?”

“Cheese.”  Dave says.  “Its cheese.”

“Where did it come from?”  Jim says.

Jim turns and points at Dave.  “I don’t know.”  He shouts.

Jim raises his eyebrows.

“I mean, why would I know?  Do you think I’m some kind of expert on these matters?”

“No.  I just thought you…”

“…might have put it there?  Is that what you are insinuating?”

“I…”

“Because if you are I can assure you that the cheese on that floor has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with me.”

“Well where…”

“…I’m sick and tired of being accused of leaving a mess in this room.  See that pile of pie crumbs over there?  That was you.  See that six foot high pile of shit right there?  That was you.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you were responsible even for the cheese.”

“Jee-sus.”  Jim said.  “Sorry.”

Dave pouts and stares at a piece of filth on the wall that looks like shit.

The drilling is getting louder.  Is it the landlord trying to get them out of the house?

He is way too furious now to attempt to move that piece of shit with his mind.

He eyes Jim with contempt as he gets up off the couch and scrutinizes the cheese.

“You know something Dave,” He says, “This isn’t cheese.”

“Yes it is.”  Dave says.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely not cheese.”

“It’s cheese Jim.”

“I think it’s just a very old, wet piece of cardboard.”

“It’s cheese Jim.”

Jim pokes it with his finger.  “Yes.  It’s cardboard.  It’s almost as though somebody has manufactured this cardboard to look like cheese when wet.”

“It’s cheese Jim.”

Dave is staring intensely at the rubble.  Jim notices that his eyes are bloodshot and his body is shaking with tension and fatigue.  “Jesus Dave.  You look awful.”

“It’s cheese Jim.  It’s fucking cheese.”

“How long have you been staring at this pile of rubble?”  Jim says.

“Cheese.”

Jim looks at the rubble.  “It’s not good for a man to stare at rubble all his life.”

“Cheese.”

“When did you last get some sleep?”

“Cheese.”

3.

It is 3pm, Friday, Saturday or Thursday.  Jim is sitting on the couch.  He is eating toast.  White noise is coming out of the TV set.  Jim is listening to the white noise.

Suddenly Dave enters the room in camouflage make-up!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks at the cheese-like piece of cardboard on the floor!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave looks at the six foot pile of rubbish!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks at the cheese-like piece of cardboard on the floor!

Dave tries to move the rubbish using the power of his mind!

The rubbish does not move!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Dave tries to make Jim move using the power of his mind!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks at the pile of pie crumbs!

Jim notices that Dave is armed!

A raw water chestnut flies from Jim’s mouth onto the six foot pile of shit!

Dave looks at the pie crumbs!

Dave tries to make the pie crumbs move using the power of his mind!

The pie crumbs do not move!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Jim looks at the water chestnut on the six foot pile of shit in the centre of the room!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Jim looks up at Dave’s gun!

Jim looks at the water chestnut!

Dave turns and looks at the water chestnut!

All of a sudden, they can both hear a faint rumbling sound!

Both Dave and Jim listen to the sound together!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Dave turns and looks at the water chestnut!

Dave looks at the giant six foot high pile of shit in the centre of the room!

Dave tries to make the six foot high pile of shit move using the power of his mind!

All of a sudden, the six foot high pile of shit starts to billow smoke!

The six foot high pile of shit in the centre of the room is billowing smoke!

Jim just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave just sits there, mouth agape!

“Dave!”  Jim says!

“Jim!”  Dave says!

“The pile!”  Jim says!  “The pile of shit is about to collapse!”

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Jim just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave just sits there, mouth agape!

The six foot pile of shit in the centre of the room is letting out great billowing plumes of dust and ash!

“Dave!”  Jim says!

“Jim!”  Dave says!

“Why are you wearing camouflage make-up?”  Jim says!

“I don’t know!”  Dave says!

“Dave!”  Jim says!

“Jim!”  Dave says!

“Why are you armed?”  Jim says!

“What?”  Dave says!

Jim looks at Dave’s gun!

Dave looks at Jim looking at Dave’s gun and then looks at the gun himself!

“Shit!”  Dave says!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave just sits there, mouth agape!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Jim just stands there, mouth agape!

Dave looks at the six foot pile of rubbish in the centre of the room!

Dave tries to make the six foot pile of rubbish stop moving using only the power of his mind!

The pile of rubbish is now a smouldering inferno!

“Dave!” Jim says!

“What?”  Dave says!

“The pile of rubbish is on fire!”  Jim says!

“I’ve just remembered!”  Dave says!

“What?”  Jim says!

“The bomb!”

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape, pointing the gun at Jim!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Jim just stands there, mouth agape!

“The bomb!”  Jim says!

“And the gun!”  Dave says!

“The gun!”  Jim says!

“The gun is not real!”  Dave says!

Dave looks down at Jim, pointing the gun into his mouth agape!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

“The gun is not real!”  Dave says!

Dave looks down at Jim, pointing the gun into his mouth agape!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave just stands there, mouth agape!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

“This gun is not real!”  Dave says!

Dave looks down at Jim, pointing the gun into his mouth agape!

Jim just sits there, mouth agape!

Jim looks up at Dave!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Dave looks down at Jim!

Dave looks at his gun!

Dave tries to make the gun move using only the power of his mind!

The cheese is on fire!

Jim is correct!

The cheese is burning like a piece of old cardboard!

Jim is correct!

Dave is incorrect!

“This gun is not real!”

Dave is incorrect!

Jim is correct!

Dave looks at the cheese which burns like old cardboard!  It is quite unmistakable!

Jim is correct!

“This gun is not real!”

Dave is incorrect!

-

END



Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light.  Graham momentarily averted his eyes.  When he looked back he saw a giant mushroom cloud where London formerly was.  An ominous rumbling noise followed.

“Sir?”  A small ratty man in a fluorescent yellow jacket said.  “Could you please extinguish your cigarette?”

Graham apologised and extinguished his cigarette.

Both the small ratty man and Graham were burned to death seconds later.

“Yes.”  I said.  “It is.”

My agreement did not stop The Drunk from pursuing this tedious metaphor.

“You’re given a hand, and if it’s a good hand, you’re good.”  The Drunk said.

“Very fortunate.”  I said.

“It’s all luck!”  The Drunk laughed, believing that I was now interested in his tedious metaphor.  “Luck of the draw, luck of the draw.”

“Yes.  Now that you’ve mentioned it.  It makes a lot of sense.”  I said, taking a backward step to try and get away.

“Wait!  I’m not finished.”  The Drunk said.

“Oh really?”  I said.

“No!  I haven’t mentioned what happens to the likes of you and I, you know, the poorly gents with the bad hands in life.”  The Drunk took a sorrowful swig of lager.

“No you haven’t.”  I said.

“Now they face two options.  They can fold the hand.  Kill themselves.”

“That doesn’t sound too pleasant.”  I said.

“Well I wouldn’t recommend it.  You see, the thing with suicide is you always kill yourself too fucking late.”  The Drunk said.

“True.”  I said.

The Drunk fell into a nodding, muttering stupor for a few seconds as he thought about suicide.

“Anyway, where was I?”  The Drunk shouted.  “Oh yes, you can kill yourself, or you can bluff with the shite cards you’ve got and hope that the ones with the good hands fold first.”

“Ah.”  I said, trying not to look puzzled, interested or engaged in any way.

“We’ll lose if any other old fucker lives longer than we do.”

“What will we lose?”

“Face, son, face.”

“Oh right.”  I said.  “So, we’ll be laughing if everybody else on the planet is dead and we are alive.”

“Yes!”  The Drunk announced.  “But, at the very least, we can score a mild victory if every person we know kicks the bucket.”

“Ah.”

“Because the bluff will have paid off!”

“Oh.”  I said.  “What?”

“The bluff.  Remember?”

“Yes.  The bluff.”

The Drunk raised his glass. “To the bluff.”

“The bluff.”

“Whenever I go out these days I fully intend to drink myself to death.”

Then a dog ran past the window.

“Did you see that dog?”

“Yes.”  My friend said, “They do it all the time.  They run toward the sea.  Then they bark at the sea for a bit until they realise the sea isn’t going anywhere.  So they get fed up and whimper and wait for their owners to pick them up.”

“How do they know where they’ve gone?”

“All the dogs go to the same place.”

“What a depressing prospect.”  I said.

“Not really.”  My friend said, “I always thought they looked quite cheery, running along towards the sea.”

“I suppose so.”

My friend and I mulled over that one for a while.

“I’m not really going to drink myself to death.”  I said.

“That’s good to hear.”

“I might have a bark at the sea later though.”

“That’s fair enough.”

“Yes.”

“Hey there Ed.  How are you?”

Ed was strange, in that he would think, and think, about any question that you asked him.  He looked up into the sky, as though looking for an autocue to provide him with the correct answer; as though he were translating my question into machine code – the machine code of his computer where he processes his problems; as though by asking him, “how are you?”, I was asking him the question in its philosophical form: “Hey there Ed.  How do you exist?  How is it possible?”

Watching Ed think about this made me think about the question in its philosophical form, but I have nothing important to note on the subject.  Then Ed said:

“I’m OK.”  He said this with an air of pleasant surprise.

“That’s good, Ed.”  I said.  “I’m pleased to hear that.”

I liked Ed.  Ed was strange.  And he’s the only person who told the truth when I asked him stupid questions.

Inky darkness. Metallic doors slam and reverberate down long passageways. Screams trivialized by echoes. Trivialized. Ghostly echoes. Supernatural origination. In his darkness lines and shapes are seen. They cluster together forming images of atrocity. His heart splutters and burns like a dying, ill-fed machine. Vast impossible trombone edifices control the wake. Like fatherhood Sam misses the sound of electricity harnessed and fed through plastic pipes. No people no. Samuel sits blinded by the light burns in his eyes. His extremities quiver uncontrollably. He does not know whether he is dead or alive. He can’t seem to draw any distinction between the two. Mickey Mouse salutes to the closing strains of some pidgin-Schoenberg suite. He sits alone and in darkness and in some ironic form of hell and is relieved.

He squints down the road and notices the skyline flickering. There is a rumble of thunder. He squints down the long road and notices a crowd of maybe a hundred people heading his way. There is another rumble of thunder. The crowd are running towards him. Muffled shouting et al, like a dull 1960s documentary about Vietnam. There is another rumble of thunder, shattering glass. A cutesy fighter plane shoots over his head like a firework. A brief silence punctuates then the tower block explodes. Everybody inside it is now dead. Samuel is awestruck. This is like some new filmic device that will shatter the old-school paradigm. His boredom, for the time being, is shot down with novelty. Planes scream as the sky turns red, anxious plumes of disturbed dust swirl over the sky. The crowd approach him and then they knock him to the floor and trample him into the ground. He lapses into unconsciousness. He is looking up at the sky. The stars form devastatingly pure geometric patterns; a square, a rectangle, a circle. The devil all red and bloated sits on a skyscraper, bellowing and roaring and ranting about something or other. Then he descends softly by his side – some cheap theatrical angel; the exoskeleton of the devil pumps blood through plastic wiring. His eyeballs on closer inspection are marbles stuck in his face. His face is cobbled together from a base of cheap plaster and splattered with poster-paint primary colors. Explosion. Lightning bolt. Etc. A small fire burns on an overturned riot van. Disparate crowds of two or three in refugee garb sit and stand and stare. Army officials with machine guns stand in horizontal lines blocking either side of the street. Guns point at heads. Brains discharged across pavements crossed by freshly sewn dust. Cars skid into shop-fronts. The face of our leader appears in a dust cloud. “We will vanquish your enemies.” He repeats “Your enemies” ad nauseum. Elderly fools crushed to death by feet, the imprint of a Nike trainer sole stamped into their faces. Tramps stand in front of tanks, markedly derivative of great scenes of triumph in the face of ungodly oppression. Pockets of people in khaki apparel hold up vague banners calling to “Stop The Loathing! Now!” with pictures of starving children and Eskimo children freezing in the tundra and statesmen and celebrities whose facades have been brushed with bloody tomato ketchup. An old man with an eccentric mustache gesticulates wildly. “See! What did I tell you! I told you this was going to happen didn’t I? What did I say? What did I tell you?” A motorcycle gang leader blowtorches the tramp in the face and he falls melodramatically to the floor and screams “Why? Why? Why?” Samuel stares with a face curiously etched with boredom. The old man’s coat catches fire easily as a result of long-term vodka abuse. The motorcycle gang scoff with callous humorlessness then pair off and begin to partake in random acts of homoerotically charged violence. The cops walk by joking and laughing as they tediously interrogate a small child in an alleyway drinking fetid, bloody water from a puddle. Samuel staggers through the broken glass of a shop and grabs a packet of cigarettes from behind the counter. He puts one in his mouth and walks over to the charred corpse of the man, leans over and lights his cigarette. A scarred pool of black blood continues to sizzle and spit and slowly dries up in the light of a vague and musky moon.  Samuel hasn’t smoked in over a year and, as he predicted, the first drag of the cigarette was disappointing to say the least.

Samuel is sitting in his flat and annoyed that the money on the electricity meter has only lasted a couple of days. This is because some scrounger in another flat has found a way to tap into his electricity supply. It is almost definitely the case that one of those dreadful creatures have done such a thing. Certainly the war veteran in the room next to his who shouts out orders and racist slurs in his sleep has a part to play in this travesty. And the couple who argue with each other every evening about the washing up and various other trivialities. They definitely have a part to play. And the hideous couple who deafen everybody in the building with their orgasmic screaming during their sordid nightly performance… their sordid nightly performance that goes on for hours and hours. They could definitely lower themselves to stealing Samuel’s electricity. It is close to miraculous that Samuel manages to survive these rebuttals… rebuttals that have cracked men of much stronger constitution than he. Samuel by contrast has a pathetic constitution in comparison to those who have cracked up completely under the continual pressure of living under intolerable circumstances such as these. And Samuel is not a man of an oafish constitution but a man of such acute sensitivity that even the slightest thing could be enough to shatter his being. The tiniest thing could drive him over the edge of a cliff. Yet he has been forced to live under this grotesque pressure where he is forced to live like a caged beast. Grotesque pressure that would have driven a man of the very strongest constitution to the brink of extinction. Samuel sits in the dark like some mad starving beast in his flat. Staring at the gray rectangle of his TV screen, he seethes. He seethes under the infinite pressure that has been exerted upon him since the very day he was born to this earth.

Since the so-called nuclear catastrophe nothing much has changed except that my parents are dead and my friends are dead and pretty much every living creature is dead and this weird dense smog that circulates around the place has coated everything in this inauthentic looking grayish dust and I live in near-continual darkness because the sky is a permanent shit-brown colour and the sun can’t get through it not for “love nor money” as people used to say before they all died of radiation poisoning or because they decided to kill each other as part of some time-honored tradition. I am doing well considering the fact that I am probably the last human being alive. In fact, I have come to enjoy the solitude. I live in the same tower block I have been locked up in since the nuclear strike and still eke out an existence playing on a battery-powered Frogger machine and writing vitriolic letters to my parents that I stuff in envelopes and post every week. Although the odds that my letters will ever reach their destination have been diminished by the fact that my parents are dead and the mail service is slightly more inefficient since the death of the species, I have come to see this as a liberation rather than an inhibition, and has allowed me to truly vent off at my parents for giving me a raw deal from day one. Sometimes I write suicide notes to my dead parents. When I consider all things, I find that I am precisely as unhappy now as I was when life was bustling all around me. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but I am mildly perturbed that my Godlike sway over the Frogger machine and frog therein is dwindling because the batteries are dying, and I now have to restrict myself to a mere three plays a day. It won’t be long now before reality comes crashing in like a drunken Uncle at a wedding ceremony. Maybe then I will finally be able to fully consider the impact of this rather bizarre and compelling turn of events.

I’m sitting in a bar with Thomas who has recently hit the big time while I continue to plunder what I can from hitting the small time. People who have hit the big time are big on advice for people who have somehow failed to hit the big time because they attribute their hitting the big time to something other than blind luck which it almost always is. His advice about how to hit the big time is tedious to say the least. He says: “In order to hit the big time you have to…” and then he goes on about something or other but mostly I phase out and stare at some drab pseudo-abstract expressionist painting on the wall that offers me nothing which is more than Thomas can offer me. Often when I phase back in to the lecture after about half an hour of him whining on in the background he’s still boring on about getting a posh car or getting all the sexy girls or being seen in the right place at the right time or being smart or being “the best” or networking with “the best” or hanging out with “the best”. He says that the “pursuit of business excellence” is the only way you can hit the big time and to do that you need “talent, dedication, motivation” and other words you cringingly put on your curriculum vitae as a kind of pre-emptive confession to being a subservient, worthless drone for some medium to big time boss or other. When he’s droning on like this about the big time I always notice an acrid smell emanating from my armpits; a reminder to cleanse that I have long since adjusted to ignore. Why this reminder always retriggers when Thomas is boring on is beyond my comprehension. The past couple of months have been relatively tough for me on the “talent, dedication, motivation” front. I no longer sleep at night but sleep at dawn instead because I am terrified of people. I realise that the only time Thomas and I are both awake is on an evening like this and that is ironic because we both seem to want to be at home asleep when we are trapped in each other’s company. Our waking time would present itself on a Venn diagram with The Big Time written in one bubble, The Small Time written in the other and, somewhere in the tiny slot in the middle, “This Evening”. Or possibly “regrettable”. I do not know why Thomas continues to haunt me now that he has hit the big time and cannot talk about anything but his hitting the big time and how I can emulate him if I copy his behaviour in as exact a manner as I can muster, but I know why I am here and that is because Thomas represents my only link to reality and has done so for some time. Because of this, I look upon Thomas’s recent appropriation of big time rhetoric as a direct sign of my own insanity, insanity in these terms being a belief that life is nothing short of total bullshit. I sigh and finish my drink and decide that I will never meet this man again because some aliens have come down and taken the small time Thomas away and replaced him with this crude android version of Thomas that can no longer listen to conversation because he no longer has any ears but just buys me drink after drink after drink and hectors on insatiably about “the big time this”, “the big time that”. I go home and slip into a coma for the next six months and then I emerge from the house and buy myself a small bagful of canned goods. I emerge from the Tesco with a bagful of tinned goods and three bottles of vodka. I notice that the police have cordoned off the road which constitutes my main route home. I am rather confused about this, but eventually reconcile this bizarre event to the belief that I have committed some kind of terrible crime without knowing it and as such am about to be arrested. However, as I trot by with my hands in the air I notice that the police are disinterested in my behaviour. Instead they are jokily bantering on while they stare upwards. I stand there for a few minutes gawping and then, as I decide to move on before the police realise that I am to blame for the small crowd of suicides stood in a line at the top of the bridge, they all jump together, hands locked together in a human band, diving into a plate of tarmac and certain collective death. Immediately afterwards, looking from a distance at the pool of blood and bones and muscle and sinew, I find myself shouting “now there’s hitting the big time for you” at the top of my voice. I wander off down the street imagining with clarity that Thomas formed a part of that festering, disgusting pile of rotting human meat, and I am happy.

The pestilence-ridden weekend commuter watches the screen as the time for his connection edges forward a few minutes every few minutes and has been doing so for the past hour and a half (approximately). Because his fine watch had been stolen by three 17 year old ASBO kids on the perennial hunt for fag money he does not know the time. The digital clock overarching the platform says 88:88:88. Despite his drug-addled state that has made the desolate landscape around him look like a maggot-infested grey jelly, the pestilence-ridden weekend commuter knows that 88:88:88 isn’t a valid time of day, not for him and not for anybody. He stands vexed and cuts through strands of thick dreadlocked hair with his yellowed fingers to scratch his head. Then he realises that the clock is in fact broken. For some reason, knowledge of the time becomes extremely important for him. He attributes this to the sense of efficiency that emanates from personnel working at the place. While nonchalant in their general appearance, staff here have a complex knowledge of time. While ruminating upon the origins of his current obsession and frustration, he looks up again at the vast array of train arrivals and departures to check if his train to Brighton says “cancelled” yet. When he looks up he realises that the train destinations have in fact changed in their entirety. The 12:41 to Kidderminster is now the 12:41 train to “Hell”. The 12:45 to Skipton is now the 12:45 train to “Shit” and the 12:52 train to East Croydon is now the 12:52 train to “Death”. The sky turns red and a weird kind of massive horned creature with smoke billowing from his exaggerated nostrils descends from the balcony Wetherspoons as though suspended from string. “We have come for you!” The horned devil shouts as poor theatrical smoke pours through the station emanating the plastic smell of dry ice. Looking around, the commuter then finds that he can easily extrapolate the time simply by looking at the expected time of his train and subtracting a few minutes. He lets out a sigh of relief.

This vast uncontrollable machine careened through the city as though the city were made of tinfoil. Expectant of his imminent destruction, a rogue commuter (swept off the belt and into a dank pub on the council estate suburbs) peered into the weird phosphorescent gloom created by the unprecedented carnage. He took a larger-than-normal hit of his rancid 4% proof bitter and watched helplessly as billowing plumes of smoke rose up from the garbage infested city. An old man’s contorted head bounced past the window. “Eggs.” He muttered. “This pint tastes of eggs.” Phil Collins’ Something in the Air Tonight played ominously on the pub speaker system.

Limbs half-gnawed by giant rats rise again bleeding profusely, a landscape of eyes hanging from sinews, raw bones and severed limbs animated by the miraculous dance of life. Those intact enough to do anything other than spasm or crawl endlessly in circles while being slowly buried by interminable piles of human shit on trucks make their way to the local discount store on the hunt for the cheapest vodka available to humanity. Unfortunately commuters become swiftly aware of the uprising and phone local radio stations to comment on the grisly affair. The consensus appears to be that “the state of politics today” is to blame for the rising of the dead. The scene is pathetic. One commuter frustrated by his day doing accounts makes a sport out of running into these figures that clutter the roadside in generous numbers, splattering their flinching bones against his windscreen, laughing maniacally, et al. By the time the dead arrive at the supermarket checkout their numbers are severely depleted and TV crews, police and checkout operatives are present and watchful. Because they do not have money to buy vodka, till operatives armed with cheap outsourced toy machetes stab them brutally and repeatedly in the guts and lungs, cracking through their ribcages with ease. Coconut shells cracking to the sound of Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love” pouring through a crap PA system lends the song an increased air of tragedy that makes the song more beautiful than was previously imaginable. The dead undead are carried forward on the shoulders of till operatives who, unused to murder, have expressions that clearly disguise a euphoric release of will behind a sheen of dour, respectable solemnity. Every one of them appear like politicians who, bored by the relentless, churning mechanics of everyday politics, decide that the only thing to do is to bomb the living crap out of a bunch of innocent foreigners. Many appear on news forecasts in the evening and retell the fantastic tale of their collective battle against pure evil. We, they say to themselves at night in front of the mirror, are the great heroes of our time.

The underground station has been flooded with daylight and the concrete sheet of dust and rubble in the two tunnel entrances at either side of the visible stretch of track are obfuscated by a cartoon display of torn concrete and limbs (atomised from the whole). Rats gnaw at them with the innocence and indifference of nature as it presumably was before we got our wicked way with it. The rats congregate on the platform in an almost celebratory manner, the squeaks echoing down the corridor like the rusted hinge of a vast oak door in some crap yesteryear horror movie, or the muffled chitchat of a next-door party: “Yes dear, no dear, yes dear”. Arms and legs dangle pendulously from the jagged metal spines of the blown-apart concrete hellhole. Oceans of corpses are piled up in the centre of the track before a commuter who reads a three-day-old free paper and waits for his train connection, smiling incredulously at all of these bizarre goings-on. He watches paramedics in blood-stained overalls dumping bodies unceremoniously onto the slipshod pile of human wreckage. He waits for the train even though he knows that it will take months, even years for one to arrive, because at some point during his floundering confusion as the whole platform collapsed in on itself and flaming bodies ran past him and alarms triggered to evacuate the station and the emergency services arrived with all their seriousness, he broke through some pain barrier and for the first time in his life became happy with who he was. It was as though the explosion on both sides of the platform exploded something inside himself; all of the crushing responsibility he had felt for everybody else’s despair dissipated and he became quite, irreducibly free.

I walk into the local kebab emporium, stewed after a night on the tiles, and notice that instead of the usual unidentifiable doner meat skewered and rotating against the grill in the corrosively lit kitchen, the figure of a man burnt and disfigured turns ponderously on the skewer instead. The man was clearly some kind of genetic disaster from some fly-by-night Turkish laboratory, I suggest to myself, what with arms where arms shouldn’t be, legs where legs shouldn’t be, four eyes and a curious twin penis that hangs off as though brutally severed by a carefully executed chisel blow. On the fabulously lit menu with grotesquely coloured plates of fluorescent, sickly meat products under grey lighting, the word doner is crossed out and replaced with hooman, next to a picture of a man wearing a jumper with the words “fine meat” written on it. Contrary to classical economic theory, sales of hooman do not appear to be subsiding despite a noticeable price increase. In fact, I have never in my life seen the place so full of who I can only call the chattering classes. What’s more, the majority of these people do not appear drunk; moreover, they seem dressed not in the shit-stained fleeces and florescent underground worker coats that constituted the majority of the clientele in previous times, but wear dresses and suits, and carry umbrellas and fine handbags. My bafflement is clearly transparent, as a man with a ludicrously antiquated monocle, moustache and bow-tie combination (who professes to be a food critic for a popular right wing newspaper) tells me that a number of celebrities, artists, scientists and reverends have recently gone about touting the health benefits of cannibalism – as such human meat has become a highly prized and sought after delicacy. Fresh graves are robbed at night by entrepreneurs desperate to cash in on the latest trend. In particular, malnourished third world homo sapiens have become particularly cherished, due mainly to the scant amount of meat on the bone. This, due mainly to a bizarre “fixed tax per corpse” by-law makes third world meat considerably more precious a thing to get hold of and “savour thee delights of”, or so the plastic-faced Tory food critic suggests as he contorts his face and stabs his gums with a gargantuan speciality toothpick made from ivory, with a picture of Prince Charles on the handle. “Where the hell have you been for the past six months?” He asks in patronised bewilderment. “Somewhere. Nowhere.” I reply. “Yes, but the problem is, you see, it has become incredibly difficult to attain the same quality of third world meat as you could in the old days. You see, the wild poor have become somewhat… diminished shall I say. Too much money over there. Everybody is getting fat.” “I see.” I reply. “Not only that, but the whole thing is compounded by the fact that some of the urchins have caught on and started eating each other!” “Shit.” “Not to worry though. I have a plan to ship out some poor people from the inner cities on trucks to farms and starve them.” “I see.” “Lock ‘em up. It’s character building.” “Yes.” “Plus it guarantees them a quality of life they otherwise would not have, stinking little cretins that they are.” He smiles kindly. “While farmed human is nothing compared to the wild stuff, the kind of wild meat we’re getting from the third world nowadays is appalling… simply appalling. It is a sad testament to our age.” “Yes it is.” The man walks off as I contemplate with some degree of shock how low the man’s centre of gravity must be, concluding that it must be located somewhere within the back pocket of his enormous shimmering cream trousers. I decide not to eat Hooman not for ethical reasons, but because for some reason my local kebab restaurant had stopped doing takeaway food, and I always had a problem with public eating and the overabundant service sector in general. Next day I walk past the kebab emporium and there’s the dirtiest van I have ever seen parked outside it with some incomprehensible Arabic symbols painted on the side. A person is balanced precariously on a ladder with a paintbrush trying to cross out the name of the place: “Abdul Meat Hotel”, I discover later, has become “Flamboyant Highly Acclaim Turkish Restaurant II”. I never went to “Flamboyant Highly Acclaim Turkish Restaurant II” again and realised that, as every day passed I was becoming more and more obsolete. It felt like that Myspace thing I simply couldn’t get my head around.