‘What?’ said his still sobbing compatriot. ‘What?’

‘We are going’.

‘But . . .’

‘Do not ‘but’ me. Listen. We are just going to lock the car and walk away. We can leave this dead guy here. He’s a corpse. Unwanted. We do not need to take responsibility or face impact of this in our lives.’

‘But . . .’ The talkative kid was then more or less panicking.

‘We lock the doors and walk away, we never come back here, we never speak of what happened. This narrative branch can sort itself out. Or not. In which case it’s a dead end. That’s all. Simple like that. It does not matter. It’s not our problem, whatever Badass says. We look after our own endings, this dead guy can fend for himself and what happens next.’

With that statement the two of them were already stepping out of the car and walking away from it to the malfunctioning lift, climbing in and starting their descent, not bothering to look at the dirty human handprints on its aluminium walls or read the graffiti that said RAW FUTURE NOW and ANGER IS JUST SADNESS TURNED INSIDE OUT.

They were breathing steady. Descending. And walking away. Moving forwards. Moving on out.

As they went out the doors and down the steps to street level the talkative kid was still talking, already riffing on things that had happened, reminiscing about a film they once saw with a science fiction flavour, which he said was set in Rotherham but filmed somehow in Spain. They were talking above love and about one holiday he rembered not far from Stonehenge, about things he wanted and things he was frightened of. About sanity and options. Money and sex. And at the top of the building, locked tight, silent in the boot of the Peugeot Anodyne, the dead man waited his slow time in the darkened space of the boot, passing time with no will to anything, no will to story, but still potential for it. An anomaly or orphan event. A left-over. Yes. Or a closed door that might also be an opening. An end that might or might not be the beginning of something else.

Maxine

Maxine

In the year of Asbestos, country of Endland (sic), Maxine gets a job to read words to a blind man called Casper, what lives alone outside the peripheral ring-road, in a district beyond all forces of yuppification.

Maxine don’t know too much bout ‘geo-demographic dynamics’ etc that is talked about on TV but she knows very well that a powerful permanent hex-ring of dog excrement, broke glass and partly crushed up Strongbow cans is keeping the Stasis in that neighbourhood.