When the Scarton woke up hours later he did so with additional hangover plus also grief, anguish and numerous yells of Alaram, for whilst he slept his backpack/rucksack or similar was stolen by an unknown vagabond knave. Summoned to this scene of distress the guardians of that mirage garden bothered him (Scarton, the tourist bloke) immediately with a numerous questions and suggestions concerning the topic of whether he was sure he had actually and in fact definitely, brought the bag/rucksack out with him after all, or was this hoopla just a innocents mistake, something for which another much more simpler and less melodramatic explanation could be implied, for example; had he not left his bag in a Hostel, or wherever, or in the Coat Check of the Museum of the City of Lisbon & Its History or etc. And he (Scarton, with the bag that was supposedly stolen) waited till they had done with all this clap trap then bode them all to pray look at his cheek for an evidence of his tale, pointing to his skin there whereupon the imprint of the zipper and texture of his backpack was imperfectly enacted from where the bag had recently served as his improvised pillow, his cheek a fading registration of the stolen (or in any case or otherwise, now absent) item that he had prized so very dear.

*

For many months (or days) thereafter did Scarton seek a urgent return of his rucksack, scouring Bars in the old town via fingerprint search and Google glasses, looking for leads from his underworld connections at the harbour, walking the beach out as far as Estoril and questioning such stray persons and dogs as he met, even putting a small advert in a local Newspaper quite badly translaterd into local language, LOST RUCKSACK: ADEQUATE REWARD and all to no avail. Eventually though, lacking even a change of clothes and other possessions, Scarton grew tired of sleeping in the sand dunes near the carpark and eating only food waste from the zoo and instead made some proper effortz to get a job.

Some say he found employ as a waiter in a Rap club called House of Ill Repute, others that he was a horrible fisherman, yet others that he earned cash money by hard labouring in a digital salt mine, his fingers and complexion ruined by his long hours grafting at the salt face and staring at a screen in a Internet Cafe. Regardless if all this is true or not really, his phone records implied beyond reasonable doubt that he was in the area of Rua D’Esperanza on 23rd August around 22.13pm, and that there – hearing the news of a House Fire in his old brutalist housing estate back home in Endland (sic), and plunging to a deep fever of ‘homesicknass’, he tried calling home some several hundred and 17 times. No answer. The eyes of the Scarton turned heavy with pain, his heartbeat knocked askew.