Tin Man spoken word

Music and production by Brian Ledwidge Flynn,

listen to the track here

Tin Man: Oh, Francis Illstration pt1

These panels are illustrator Kate Dwyer’s interpretation of my micro-story, Tin Man, due to be published in this month’s issue of Oh, Francis.

Tin Man: Oh, Francis Illustration pt2

full size here

The Dublin Review

An excerpt from my debut novel – The Lair of Doctor Future – has just been published in the summer issue of The Dublin Review – available in Hodges Figgis, Waterstones, Books Upstairs etc… any Irish bookshop worth its salt!

Short Stories:

Four short, but fully-formed, stories. Excerpts from my China novel “The Lair of Doctor Future” coming soon.

To read the stories just click on the links, or scroll down the page.

1. Billy Blazes and the Hairy Pigs:  Necromancy and life among the culchies “eeheeheeheehee!”

2: Tin Man: Conceived and written in a late-night laundromat, where I had been worrying about things that often worry me.

And then my head fell off.

3. The Knew You: Tarkovsky’s Solaris got me thinking about how memory persists after death.

Then I died and was resurrected by a team of scientists.

4. C.O.M.A.: This one buzzes along softly, but there are tricks below the sleepy surface.

Onward Onward!

中国的朋友！

欢迎你们看我的网站！

现在我不太能写字， 所以我翻译不了我的短篇小说。

如果你们可以看得懂，还有觉得有意思，请你们帮我翻译！

祝你们看的开心

大卫 （David Damien Foster)

The Disputed History of David Damien Foster

A little background info, for those of you who like to fill in the blanks.

I only gurn when I’m feeling particularly happy with what I’ve written.

Billy Blazes and the Hairy Pigs

Oh-hoh, can ye hear him piggies? Yeah, ye recognise the voice don’t ye? He’s out there, jiggerin’, pokerin’, trying to get that “yoosless feckin’ durr” open. The clatter of his key and him stompin’ like he’s gonna piss himself.

Yiz are right to be worried, yiz know well he’s long overdue a visit. Could be nuttin’, a trim, a short back and sides for yiz, but, well, sounds excited doesn’t he? Ah yeah, the blood is up alright boys, ye know that flush he gets – that glaze on his eyes like he’s had a few. Ned Grubbling. Evil lookin’ bollix.

Here now, listen to this the rest of yiz bony-arsed messers, there’s still time for me to fill in the gaps for yiz, wouldn’t want to be settin’ off on somethin’ like this half-cocked would ye? It’ll be a few minutes yet before he bursts in, spittin’ and squealin’, grippin’ the knife in front of him like a snaggle-toothed prick. See, theres a reason ‘dem pigs are snufflin’ scared over there in the corner, a reason nuttin’ grows in that top field, a reason the moon rises arseways over Crudhubbart.

Must have been just shy of two years back that William Blazes came barrelin’ into town in his shiny black “ve-hickle”, all show band lah-dee-dah, snappy suspenders and cocked hat, some brasser wigglin’ on his arm.

The local raggedy-brats were quick to get wind and came scurryin’ out to catch a gander at this flooterin’ Jackeen, him grinnin’ and puffin’ his chest out like St. Francis of Fuckin’ Assisi!

Christ, I’ll tell ye, he must have cut a queer figure in that getup, paddin’ from dry patch to dry patch, tryin’ to keep the town square’s muck from splatterin’ his nice new trousers. Ha! His politician smirk and yer one’s boo-boopy-doo lasted about as long as it took for those filthy runts to swipe a few bob from his pocket and cop a squeeze of yer one’s knockers.

He lashed one a belt with his sovereign ring and they legged it, duckin’ into the nearest public house: “Nanny Mangan’s Secret Pocket”.

Now, I’d be lyin’ to yiz if I said the yellowin’ loungemen didn’t have a sniff at this pair of townies that came puffin’ through the door. Y’know, they could well have been the first people to wipe their feet on that mat in, Jaysus, wha? A decade I’d say! Sure the muck of the floor was three shades deeper than it, and wasn’t the mat brown to begin with?

Anyways, they got a few queer looks alright, lizardy eyes pointin’ at them from under frayed hat bands, from above noses shot to bits with blood vessels. It wasn’t even noon and half the seats were taken, silent as a widower’s kitchen on Christmas day.

“William, I don’t like this place, let’s just knock on and find the house, alright?” she hissed into his shoulder.

“Ah would ye give over? Sure do you not think it’d help to check the directions?”

They frogmarched to the bar and were leanin’ so as to get the proprietress’ attention – a mustachio’d bowsey with her head in a book, mouthin’ the words along to what appeared to be a Catholic detective mystery, “Father Panini and the Case of the Lascivious Jew” – real PhD stuff - when one of the creatures, bent over his pint, piped up.

“Yoo’d be de man who just bought up the Gilliginegan place, would ye not?

“I am, I’m Dr. William Blazes, nice to …”

The Dub accent on him set half the pub off cluckin’, his extended arm stood there for a moment and when yer man didn’t reciprocate, withered back to his side.

“And dat’d be your wife?”

“Eh, actually no, this is my friend Ja… Jospehine, she’ll be stayin’ with me for a little while.”

“Oh, is dat right, now, tell me what manner of trade will ye be doctoring to up there, dat’s a fierce amount of land for handin’ out pills and the like.”

The ignorant shite pronounced pills with such spite that a heap of gob flew off his wobblin’ lips and plopped into his pint, sendin’ ripples out to kiss the greasy glass. Distracted, Blazes traced a spiral in the dust of the bar top in response, before answerin’:

“Well, I ‘spose ye could call it “Geomantic Agriculture”, there’s a few ideas I’ve got tha…”

“Oh! Be the hokey! jimmymatic agriculture is it? Oh Sacred! These Dubs, renowned for their farming they are! Eeeheeheeheehee!”

The “ing” of farmin’ rose to an awful squeal that set the rest of them whoopin’ and hackin’, loosin’ up monsters in their throats that, like the memories of their livestock-molestin’ childhoods, hadn’t seen light of day in God knows how long. Phlegm pinged about the bar, one fucker collapsed and started convulsin’, honest to God, twitchin’ and frothin’ at the mouth. Blazes just stood there gawpin’ like a gobdaw, it was yer one that dragged him out to the street. As the door swung shut, that brayin’ jackass hollered: “Oh, we’ll be seeing ye Dr. Blazes, drop by anytime now! Eeeheeheeheehee!”

Now, as I’m sure yiz can imagine, any plans young Master Blazes had for a dirty weekend – a spot of hairy rasher under a thatched roof – got herself on the first bus back to Dublin. So, bein’ the man that he was, after spendin’ half an hour scratchin’ his knackers and flickin’ half-heartedly through a pack of nudey cards, he got down to work.

Ah, but then he wouldn’t consider that sort of enterprise work would he? Nah, he was riddled with that streak o’ devotion that ye’d only see nowadays in some holy-joe monk. Ye know the type: rollin’ eyes and blabberin’ ‘bout how the Virgin Mary touched him; touched him where is what I’d ask! Yip, it was with a genuine love that Blazes started to gather the numbers around him, to work the sacred geometries into the pocked slopes that ringed the farmhouse (ye should have seen the state of it when he got there mind, ye’d be lucky to grow a beard with the amount of rubble in it). Hwisht… ah, me eyes are mistin’ up here – but sure what would a pack of slobberin’ shamblers like youse know about the mysteries of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the esoteric wonders of the lay lines that seam the very earth with energy; forces so po…

Here, youngfella, what are you laughin’ at? Jaysus the cheek of ye, there’s a reason you’re standin’ here in the warmth of a pig-sty as opposed to bein’ picked at by crows in that top field! Do yiz think I’m coddin’ yiz boys? I’m talkin’ about forces so potent that only a true initiate can as much as gaze upon them without ripplin’ like a primordial jelly, his nipples fallin’ off and findin’ his grey thinkin’ pot’s leaked all over his pillow durin’ the night. Have yiz not noticed the cut of them pigs? Are they or are they not dressed up for a trip to the Baltic? Had it not occurred to yiz that pigs, in their natural state, don’t generally acquire a fleece so thick as to put a prize ram in a covetous mood? Ah! Would yiz ever stop rilin’ me and let me get this story finished before yer man gets that door open. Honestly.

So, work was underway as soon as the sun chased that sexy wee sliver of blue sky back over the mountain tops. By the sea-bottom silver of a waxin’ moon he set about mouldin’ the fields in the sacred shapes of times passed. Within a week the land was unrecognisable: delicate spirals and whorls of stone dickey’d up the landscape somethin’ marvelous, all funnelin’ towards a centre point, the sty. This mischief didn’t go unnoticed mind; the “Secret Pocket” sent regular scoutin’ missions to keep an eye on the east coast oddity. Blazes would catch a glint of starlight on worn-shiny hat patches, bobbin’ behind the stone wall like plastic ducks in one of them fairground games, y’know the ones, with the barrel and the hooks.

And God only knows what nonsense they brought back with them, no doubt shitin’ on about how Blazes loped around like he was langered (he may well have had a jar or two), mumblin’ about a squared circle and the distance to the moon bein’ an exact match of the vertices of the Great Pyramid, of Egypt no less! Ah, but the chance of them rememberin’ somethin’ monumental like that are pretty bleedin’ slim. Most likely they just told of the flashes and squeals comin’ from the pig sty.

But I’m getting’ bogged down, cut to the chase says you. Well time waits for nomads, as they say. I’ll skip to the day that Blazes came to the fair, that’ll tickle yiz.

The day began as the last Sunday of every month must. Mornin’s grey popped the stars from the sky with a rusty breakfast spoon, they drifted earthwards, spangly corn flakes, gustin’ past the jagged maw of mountains that ring Crudhubbart and landin’ with a fizz in the puddle that took up most of the town square. Concentric ripples waved out, disappearing towards the edges. Jaysus, poetic wha? I should write that down! Well, I’ll tell yiz, the cause of the ripples that followed wasn’t so easy on the ear; it was the tromp of shitkicker wellies that mangled the reflections of the fairgoers, but in all honesty, they were fairly fuckin’ grotesque as it was.

How can I explain to culturified city folks (I’m bein’ generous in includin’ Naas, am I not, Malachi?) like yerselves what goes on at these affairs? As far as I can tell, after a skinful of booze has been consumed by all asunder, and a few ratty chickens have been tossed back and forward for ludicrous prices, then the main event gets underway:

“The Dancin’ Sisters of the Muckaveye Crossroads”.

Now, far be it from me to be castin’ aspersions on the propriety of time-honoured culchie traditions, but I tell yiz lads, yiz have never seen the likes of it! Three “women” (again Malachi, generosity) are selected a week or so in advance: a Maiden, a Mother and a Crone. They arrive before the close of the fair in pantomime get-up: the young one in pigtails and pinafore, the ma with a brace of them rollin’ eye dolls strapped to her, the ‘aull one in a shawl with a hollowed out turnip for a nose.

On enterin’ the ring of leerin’ mucksavages, they’re greeted by the newly crowned “King Cock of the Fair” (His position having been decided earlier by various feats of strength), who happens to be blindfolded by a mask of red feathers. He then proceeds, guided by the yelpin’ of the onlookers, to chase the terrified ladies around the circle, the crowd leanin’ in with fetid fingers, tryin’ to pin them. When he finally gets a hold of one of them, he whips out the baldy fella and has his way with her then and there, rollin’ like a pair of gypsies in the filthy square.

I know! You couldn’t make it up, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

On that particular Sunday the “King Cock” in question had just tackled the unfortunate Crone to the floor and was in the process of defrockin’ her, a breathy giggle barely muffled by his mask, “Eeeheeheehee”. His falsetto was balanced though; by a risin’ bass rumble that skulked just beneath the lip-lickin’ cries of “get up ye boyah!” and “oh yer a fierce divil Neddy!”.

That third ripple of the afternoon started as a furrowed brow at the edge of the circle and worked its way inwards via a series of caught breaths and nervous coughs: “Hows for dat… dat queer noise from the Gilliginegan place?”

The whole crowd, with the exception of them brawlin’ in the centre, turned to face West. Somethin’ was ridin’ the last rays of the settin’ sun their way – somethin’ big and fast and noisy – a bubblin’ black sea hidden just beneath the blindin’ daggers of evenin’ orange, flashes of snouts seen though gates, the gruntin’ mass hurtled closer and closer ‘till someone shouted “Feck lads, dem pigs amn’t stoppin’!” and the black wave broke with a crash of trotters across the square.

Farmer and farmhand, priest and publican alike were swept aside. Ned Grubbling was clattered from his dirty business with the biddy, knocked six feet in the air, out of his mask and face first into a heap of horseshite. Aahahaha! I tell yiz, it did my heart good to see him splashin’ around, f’in and blindin’, and not so much as a squeak out of him!

So the pigs washed out over the fair, settled, and went about their piggy business. The fellas that were quick to find their feet saw Blazes ridin’ in on the tail end, stradlin’ a particularly meaty lookin’ sow. He hopped up onto a porter stand, from where he boomed out over the crowd, in the third person, as was his habit when particularly proud of himself:

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, hoist up yer jaws, sure you’ll catch nothin’ but an aul’ bluebottle! Ladies, no need to pinch yer luminous cheeks, this is not a dream, I tell yiz this is not a dream! The magnificent beasts yiz see before yiz are 120% homegrown, magifactured, Crudhubbart piggy-wigs. But what about the hair on them says you? Well I’ll tell yiz: that’d be down to Dr. William Blazes’ patented and oh-so-secret marryin’ of up to the minute techniques with hand-me-down lore that’d make the hills around yiz go wa-wa and reach for their rattle! But don’t be botherin’ yer pretty wee heads with that high-falutin’ stuff, who’s gonna start the biddin’ at twenty? C’mon now, don’t be shy, sure which one of yiz wouldn’t feel the benefit of a good, honest wooly jumper when yer cookin’ up yer pork chops in the January dark? C’mon, will we say twenty…”

Lads, hot cakes isn’t the word! There weren’t enough pigs to go round, the bulk o’ the herd was sold in an hour! Blazes had to fight to keep a hold of one to ride home on, his pants bulgin’ with mattress money. Now I don’t need to tell yiz that this brightened his mood considerably. Instead of wakin’, drawin’ his curtains and spittin’ at the sight of Crudhubbart – as had become his habit – he’d spring from his brand spankin’ four poster and out to the fields, potterin’ with the grin of sudden wealth plastered across him.

Yip, life couldn’t be better, only six months out of the city and already considerin’ settlin’ for the foreseeable future, startin’ to view himself as a benevolent feudal somethin’ or other, lordin’ it over a pack of noble savages.

There was one savage he hadn’t counted on mind, and you lot know well who I’m talkin’ about. A certain someone would appear to have harboured quite the grudge for bein’ denied the carnival rights of the “King Cock” – or that’s how he’d plead it no doubt – though as only us innocents can testify, somethin’ bloodthirsty lurked behind that giggle, them fishy eyes. Oh Christ, lads, that night. I still get the willies when I think of it.

It was mostly starless apart from a few wanderin’ pinpricks that shimmered on the white stone whorls and cairns though which Blazes wandered, drunk. He was hummin’ a happy little song, divinin’ wand in one hand, bottle in the other: “An’ aull Parnell when they sent him down to hell, for the sake of yer one O’Shea, Made the Divil grin when he told him all his sins… Who’s there? What do ye want?”

The shadow spread out over him and the knife slid in, smooth as ye like, just above the belly. There was a gasp and a clatter as the bottle rattled over the stones. Oh Christ lads, I can still… no, I’m alright, I’m alright. The clouds parted for the briefest moment allowin’ Blazes, as he slumped, a glimpse of whodunit’. That grin, them dribblin’ lips, that giggle, then darkness.

Darkness interrupted now and then by a feelin’ of movin’, a brightenin’ sky jigglin’ with the rocks beneath him, the grunts of whoever was doin’ the draggin’. Then dawn and bein’ upright without standin’, arms stretched out to hug the mornin’, a weary “eeheeheeheehee” disappearin’ from the top field, blendin’ with birdsong.

And that’s how he left him, the fucker, strapped up like the Son of God himself, ridin’ a scarecrow’s crucifix to kingdom come.

But it didn’t end there did it? It would appear that with the unseamin’ of Dr. William Blazes, our friend Ned Grubbling acquired a bit of a taste for the aul’ foul play. Now, from what I’ve managed to piece together – and believe me, I’ve been taxin’ me poor brain over this – a couple of weeks passed between the end of Blazes and your arrival Malachi, on your somewhat ironic mission to sell kitchen knives to the folks of Crudhubbart. Then another month or so before you came to town Francois, though what malicious bleedin’ guidebook sent you to this neck of the woods I’ll never know. Then there’s yerself, Mickey-Joe, the only local among us. Must have been a fierce desperation on him to start lurin’ kids away from the schoolyard.

What happened next, well even a man of the esoteric sciences like meself can only throw his hands to heaven and proclaim his pig-ignorance. I just don’t know. All we can say for certain is that four bodies, of varyin’ proportions and ethnicity, were left as bird feed in that top field and through some wildly unlikely correlation of cadavers and land-magic, a necromantic process was begun.

Does it not put a tingle through yiz lads? The thought of yer bodily goodness drippin’ down through the sacred spirals of that field? Yer life force catchin’ in the shapes that hum a scrap of melody overheard an eon ago, a sliver of song that in some inconceivably minute way makes up a spec of a quaver in the tune of the music of the spheres themselves! Does it not boggle yiz boys?

And all the while that murderous bogman is livin’ it up in the farmhouse below! Passin’ his feverish nights in the sty, prancin’ about like a pickaninny, knife in hand, indulgin’ his murky dreams on my beautiful piggys, screamin’ over and over…

Oh but hwisht boys, that’s him now, yiz can hear for yerselves.

“Eee, Blazes, come out now, heehee, Billy Blazes, stop yer hidin’, aheeheehee. Who’d be playin’ him tonight den eh? Eee, Blazes! Heehee, where are ye, which one of yoos pigs’ll be Billy Blazes?”

I’m right here Neddy. I’m right here. We’ve been waitin’ on ye. Ha! That put the shits up ye wha? Don’t ye recognise me? Fair enough, the bag o’ bones and bits on show here is a poor reflection on the dapper-dan Blazes of a few months back – I’m havin’ a little trouble coming to terms with it meself honestly – But Dr. William Blazes it is Neddy, Dr. William Blazes it is. And what are ye lookin’ so frightened for? Sure it’s only yer arch-enemy returned from the dead in zombie form via a spot of aul’ sorcery to wreak revenge on ye Ned, nothin’ too out of the ordinary for this town.

But come here Ned – oh I believe ye’ve met the boys – and give us that knife. I’m just about sick o’ talkin’, it’s time this story ended.

Tin Man

I passed a very peculiar night last night, half drenched in cabin fever. Everything I heard, read, struck me and chimed in the tin shell of my torso. The nuts and bolts that held me together began to worm their way out, wriggling free, and bit by bit I fell apart.

Finally, all I was aware of was the rollercoaster plunge and the bathroom blurring as my head toppled, rattling, rolling, resting on the floor. And all the while that song loops within, those lines:

“and you can have it all, my empire of dirt, I will let you down, I will make you hurt…”

Not being one to wallow, I lolled out my tongue, flexed it and started myself rolling. Tiles gave way to carpet gave way to gravel and soon I was well on my way, freewheeling downhill.

As I gathered momentum the world lurched orbits around me, alternating between darkness and a streaked cosmos of street lamps. (These pseudo-suns, they’ve washed my world in seedy jaundice for too long, they hum with the coital throb of suburbia!)

My nose threatened to derail me, its’ bump veering me towards the street, towards scandalous up-skirt glimpses. I rolled until the incline evened out, until I tottered to a standstill.

Settled in sawdust outside McCullough’s Butchers, I waited with eyes on the vertical horizon. Patient, waiting for the sun to peep sheepishly around, a drunken lover in a door frame. Stage-whispering.

I must have dozed off, or indulged in an extended blink, as next thing I knew it was morning and I was surrounded by dogs. Hungry dogs, snarling ribcages. Above us a pair of aproned arms were shaking out a sack. The flump of meat sparked a frenzy, and I felt the damp of offal as I turned over organs with lips and tongue, searching ‘till I found what I’d come for. A heart.

Functionally useless, of course, but enough to fill a gap in me.

The Knew You

I died four years ago. An arbitrary correlation of bathtime, a teetering boombox and a wandering cat left me wracked, spasming in crackling soap suds. I had probably bobbed there for hours, my loyal ducky lapping at the unsubmerged portion of my face until the paramedics hauled me out, bloat and birthmarks on display for all; the incidentals that attach personality to an accidental death.

From there, how to know? Hurtling headlong through the void, propelled by a melancholy howl? Prancing with maidens in a plentiful garden? Needless to say, I can’t recall these intervening years. My “memory” has been troubling me of late.

Like tell-tale gaps in a C.V., untraceable days frittered in poolhalls and parks, my time between living and, again, living is lost to me. All I can relate is what I have since learned of my resurrection.

Staggering leaps in genome technology, twinned with my privileged position as the prematurely dead firstborn of a geneticist father allowed me access to a highly-experimental cloning procedure: “Corpo-Psychic Regeneration.”

My gasping, wordless confusion as I reared myself, puffy, patched with pipes and gauze, from the incubation vat: “Hurt! Let sleep go mine bathtub softing.” A doctor later told me there had been a power surge during an advanced stage of synapse reconnection; a throb from the neighbouring district that had sent me flapping, clattering the still-classified engines and monitors behind me. They dragged on tubes like tins from a newly-wed car. Attendants leapt to re-submerge me.

I was assured this persistent prebirth memory would fade in time, finally vanish with the continuing reprogramming. It hasn’t.

As far as my amateur knowledge of this process will allow me to discern, the physical side of my remaking was relatively straightforward, if somewhat time-consuming. Cell by cell my subatomic cartography was fanned out under the template of a single prototype strand of D.N.A., a helix-shaped domino that sets tumbling the baffling spectacle of the human body.

It reminded me of fusili. Is it cannibalistic to feel your stomach wince when presented, by a proud-looking man in a white coat, with a graphic reconstruction of your most fundamental element?

My body was restored to all its pulsing, secreting glory within six months, and from there the personality programming could begin. “Corpo-Psychic Regeneration” works on the hypothesis that dead human beings continue to exist as a psychic entity for as long as the people who knew them remain alive. They persist as a stain on the life stories of those who had met them; a series of shards lodged in the fatty grey of a disparate set of memories. Thus, if these fragments were to be harvested and reconnected, a semblance of the original being could be constructed to serve as a basis for new experiences. I am a test case.

Fittingly, my parents were allowed first dibs at the psychic portion of the new me. Hence my second incarnation is irrepressibly “full of life”, armed with an arsenal of qualifications, unfailingly polite and well turned out. Whatever deviancies my teenage years had unleashed were acknowledged as “phases”; the trial and error of a hunched and slovenly half-man, experimenting with the world from the safety of his bedroom. I am as mechanically, manically driven as my father, as devoted to my mother as she is to me.

I dream of lying underwater, neck craned on the upturn of the tub to regard my shadowy, rippling body. It seems insubstantial, spectral, as though if I were to reach out for it, it would scatter like squid ink. There is music, or the muffled remnants of music. Then there is a rush of bubbles as something enters the water. They fizz, cloud my vision so I can barely see myself. When the last one pops, I am gone.

The input of my friends seems to have been bulging with incident, but a little light on insight. With prolonged concentration I can summon a list of out-of-body recollections, like watching myself on CCTV; a catalogue of mischievous misdeeds, though I can’t for the life of me figure out how they happened.

There is a glimpse of an impromptu parade through the dawn-bleached streets of a tiny Eastern European town. I am naked from the waist down, bearing a Catholic icon, a blubbering Mary, and chanting a language I don’t recognise. There are flashes from a year spent with a cane and sunglasses to justify a cheque from some or other disability board.

How ex-lovers have rendered me seems to depend on how they apportion blame for our breakup. I am distant, chronically cold, yet clingy with a tendency to suffocate. I am a genuinely talented pretentious fraud, a vain, insecure, hopelessly inadequate yet occasionally exhilarating bedmate. I have a penchant for pigtails, I struggle with bra straps.

There is a family dinner shortly after my release from observation. I am seated at the head of the table, avoiding contact with three generations of eager eyes. Their questions are relentless and I struggle to reply, I’m finding it difficult to attach words to concepts. They come to my aid; finish my sentences for me, effortlessly plucking aborted lines of thought from my stuttering head, stringing exactly what I had meant to say out in front of me in a syllabic daisy chain. As if they had known all along. Pretty soon they stop asking and sit smiling at me.

As yet unable to find gainful employment, I spend my time reading; that I “always had my head in a book” was apparent from several accounts. I tend these days to veer away from the muscular tomes of theory that I had found flexing on my bookshelf upon release. It’s not that I’m not able for them; my parents were most conscientious in providing my academic record. I just seem to enjoy historical biographies more at the moment, and fiction with a coherent beginning-middle-end. The reason for this is beyond me. I used to revel in escapism, was this missing from my reprogramming?

I made a friend last night, and, I think, a memory.

On the short walk home from the shops a man crossed the road without looking, and was sent flailing over the bonnet as a car ploughed through with a horn-honk. For a moment he was draped over the sunset, a spread-eagled silhouette grasping at ozone, before time resumed and he hit the tarmac with a crunch. I dropped my groceries and padded to where he lay; an attending orange bounced along beside me. I gripped him, tried to pull him to the roadside. He was a limp weight in my arms, his body slopped like an abattoir bucket. Someone yelled “Don’t move him!” I held his head, met his rolling eyes, asked him his name. He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. I smiled, reassured him.

I will visit him in hospital. I think we will have a lot to talk about.