The next day the goddess Anastasia appeared in a shivering and shimmering vision to Naomi in her room. She helped Naomi a bit with her jigsaw (completing one of the really difficult bits which showed 3 blokes who’d been eviscerated by a landmine), exchanged diet ideas with her and then got round to the real point of her visit. Laying a map of Endland down on the table Anastasia pointed to it and told Naomi where the twin gods had been hiding, their names changed and their faces disguised. Naomi traced red roads over blue rivers on the map, her finger joining places with names like Rotherspoon, Cardiff and Nigeria. That very afternoon she set off to find her friends, her few possessions packed up in the back of a car. Sweet Anastasia waved her goodbye and goodluck.

By this time of the yr (April) ‘Crispin’ and ‘Gibson’ were at their luck’s end and surviving only by drinking rainwater and eating cardboard. Indeed ‘Crispin’ was working in a factory during the industrial revolution and safety was not its strong point. The walls of the factory were bedecked with slogans like LOOK BUT DO NOT TOUCH and WASTE NOT WANT NOT but this latter especially did not seem to apply to the workforce who were forever being maimed in interesting and barbarous ways in the machinery which, according to the management was for knitting the tangles and knots of wire and wool that people sometimes see in dreams.

It took several weeks for Naomi to track the twin Gods down and for a while it seemed like Spatula/Crispin and Porridge/Gibson were always one step ahead of her. She tried the Bureau of Missing Persons and tourist information and then, in desperation hired a crippled detective whose compromised manhood was a kind of complex state-of-the-nation metaphor bound up with issues of contemporary polymorphous sexuality.

Ironside (for it was he) did a good job helping Naomi and only charged her half the price he had on his business cards, smiling as he gave her the address of that hotel down near the Park & Ride Car Park where Spatula/Crispin and Porridge/Gibson were holed up. Naomi went down there early morning, the trees on the avenues all tangled in their branches with old audio tape and polythene bags hung in tatters.

When she got to the hotel Naomi bribed the bell-hop (three kisses) and then made her way up in the goods lift, hoping to be something of a surprise.

FREE KEN LIVINGSTONE said the graffiti in the goods lift.

MR BOOMBASTIC.

WHO WOULD DREAM THAT TRUTH WAS LIES?