On her journey that morning by olde tram she chews gum forever, her jaw a machinery, eyes bright. Kids in prams nearby look from M to their mothers what have ‘long since forgotten how to cry’ ©. Tram passes thru the city (S_____). Getting off at the tram stop near Casper’s place M. takes the gum out + sticks it to a poster for some new Bangla movie, kneading residue deep into the pixelated faces of stars, their transfigured appearance what she hopes will be an omen for the day. Something has to change.

*

Casper’s place, a shithole on 33rd floor.

As a startup for reading he asks Maxine to take 3 chapters from a closed-down airport novel called A Romance of Sadie. The book is just a turgid paste of words that knots up in her brain and mouth and M. finds it boring, wishing there was something less predictable – a story about robots and consciousness, a story about a new kind of sunlight, anything but reading porn to old blokes.

When the reading is all done Casper pays her (£4.50 the hour) and she goes home.

*

Other jobs of Maxine involve reading to:

- hyperactive children

- persons/animals in a coma

- voice recognition software

- dying persons/animals

- prisoners

- the dead

etc

*

One night there is a bombing in centre of town. Front of shops are hanging all off again and main entrance of the shopping mall is a cliché debris of twisted metal, filthy trashed consumer items and limbs/body parts all motherfuckered into dust. Pundits arrive and set up to start filming segments, rearranging debris and other aspects of the carnage. All around taxis and private cars double-up as improvised ambulances, every single bystander a temporary trauma nurse, every driver an unqualified maniac of urgency, every victim screaming blood out all over upholstery and no one knows what’s on the radio.

On the pavement near the bomb scene, a spray paint graffiti makes a promise or prediction nobody reads:

THE THOUGHTS OF THE LIVING REPLACED WITH THOSE OF THE DEAD.

Rescue workers are going back and forth w the wounded, shaking their heads at the dead deceased that lie carelessly anywhere. All the while sniffer dogs and assorted looters emboldened by breakdown of lawlessness freely walk the rubble, attentive to strange vibrations from down below fallen masonry and looking for stuff to ‘purloin’.

The air in all directions is ‘alive with distant sirens’ when Maxine gets there to scene of explosion – reporting for reading duties. A Doctor on all day and all night shift sends her Immediately to the commandeered Gymnasium of a nearby school what has been turned into a temporary hospital/morgue. The whole place is stuffed with the  wounded/dead pulled out and then carried from their wannabe graves under the waste-scape that used to be Primark or possibly Lidl, no one seems to remember or care.

*