Time passed. In the town (of S_____ ) Martha watched her screen each day for sines of Gina, while outside the sunshine lost its fight with the sundry forces of shadows, bureaucratic incompetence, boredom, pollution and proliferate dog shit.

It was a hard time for her and fam in general. When the millennium came her Mum passed away whilst one of her sisters died of nostalgia, another of greed, another of rent arrears, another of Syphilis, another of Blackmail, another of malnutrition. Her brother had a accident at work and was confined to a wheelbarrow.

Martha built a shrine to her missing daughter, inkjetted photos and a printout of her browser history pinned all over the living room wall, a scented candle burning and a lock of Gina’s hair pressed between pages of an old SUDUKO magazine whereof M thought (wrongly) that the numbers in the puzzles might be some kind of lucky.

Around the same time there was one of those slow and mysterious declensions to the tags marking the bus-shelters and underpass walls in the city that happened in Endland (sic) in those dayze, whereby VILE / OK MELT / HEDZ / JERK / VOTE and SKEEMER were slowly edged out by the new names that no one really recognized at first like LO / WIDE / SMURFIT / SLIMEZ and later FWIW / JCRW / TWAKTIKS and O. The last of these, perhaps simplest of tags as cld be ever imagined, was soon appearing all round the whole town, more or less each and every wall in that place apparently infected with its wide void and profligate gape – O O O O O O – like a scream maybe that had disperse into the bitter architectures of S______, or some kind of desperate abstracted and communal gasping for air.

*

Martha found a job in one of the groups clearing rubble from WWII bomb sites that still for some reason seemed to riddled the town centre. It was hard labour, paid in old money and the work had to be conducted entirely in black and white, requiring that she and other workers each day spent time and effort before the shift started to put on appropriate makeup and retro clothes (also black and white). Martha liked the job tho and also liked what she called ‘the camaraderies of people’ etc and how they were supposedly working together to build a new world debased on commonly held principles and a desire to end the hardships, divisions and struggles of the recent past.