In fact, with the eagles well and truly pounded, no one seemed to bother too much about that cunt Taggy anymore.

For a few nights there were visitors. People curious to see if new eagles would show up or something or if the old ones would come back to life, recomposing thereselves out of the bloody earth like in an olden horror film. But when they didn’t come back like that folks kinda forgot about Taggy and after a few days the landlord took the chairs back to the pub where they had been before and people ate their chips there in the yard in hot air of the extractor fan like they always had done in previous times.

Things quietened down on the rock. Sometimes one of the old timers going into Ladbrookes would tip his cap to Taggy, or else Lampton would sit by him, tears of glue welling up in his eyes, shaking with cold, in silence while Taggy talked.

Calita gev him his blow job of course. But after a time even she cunt see the point of having sex with a bloke who was a kind of ex-tourist attraction and a blast from the past and in any case who was chained up all the time.

*

John John always meant to go back and cut off the chains but he somehow never got round to it, so puffed up with the pride of slaughtering the eagles and everything. He was he poets say, ‘easy distracted’ by his new-found fortunes and had plenty of girls and went out drinking on alternate Fridays with Two Eyes and the rest.

One day in May he did stop by and sit a while and try to chill with Taggy but they cunt seem to find much to talk about. Taggy was a changed bloke – he dint have the same interests anymore and John John was changed too. John John had a life, people at work were friendly to him now but Taggy just had the rock. He just wanted to talk about what he could see from where he was lying – problems, the universe, philosophy of isolation, creation of lies.

When John John left it wasn’t even closing time but he made his excuses. Taggy was talking about Greece. How he wished he’d found time to go back there once, how he sometimes remembered the days of his childhood, not memories so much as flashes, strange pictures of another life.

*

Taggy’s taxi went rusty. Some kids broke into it and drove it around for a few days, smashed up the steering column, scraped it down the sides. Week later they crashed it into a lampost at Wards Corner. It stayed there. After a month (1 month) some dosser started sleeping in it. Soon the whole thing stank of piss. Kids burned the car. The dosser died.