Round midnight some soldiers came in and H. served Strong Beers and listened in to their bullshit dialogues on love and happiness, sports results and Home Sweet Home. Later the soldiers were getting drunk and arguing with one of the creatures that came in for cigarettes, about the difference between Arabic and American Robots. There was something innate in the difference, the soldiers maintained, something to do with the firmware, something deeper than code but the creature was sceptical, shrugging the place where its shoulders should probably have been. At the height of the argument the night outside burst with a sudden stab of sunshine from North, East and West all at the same time making shadows split over the leafy corpse-strewn ground, the landscape of the car-park like a temporary sun-dial for Schizophrenics.

After that the argument subsided and soon enough there was something weird with the audio and the soldiers reluctantly went out to search the forest again and the creature slipped out too, leaving a trail of something that looked like badly pixelated dust.

*

What felt like 5,235 hours later another customer came in and Holly prised herself out of daydream to serve him. The guy had a fat head and a tattoo of Tetris Bricks on his face as was the fashion in Blackpool then and he ordered Falafel and Fries and she microwaved it home-style with a Jackson Pollock of Ketchup and Mayo on top.

The guy made no conversation but at his request she flipped the TV off Kev Spatula’s Head Injury Marathon to a re-run pornographic Breakfast TV show called Crack of Dawn hosted by Dawn Wendy Lomax. It seemed strange at first, watching breakfast TV in the middle of the night, but by the time they had reached the weather and the desultory money shots it was all making sense somehow, the guy finishing up his food and Lomax wiping the come out of her eyes.

You have kids? The guy said to Holly

No, she said.

I got three he said. You want to see a picture?

Sure, she said.

Gimee a pen.

She took the biro from her overalls and passed it over, fingers almost touching his on the counter-top.

Thanks he said.

He took a napkin and started to draw while she watched, looking from the tip of the biro to his fixated expression. When it got too much to bear she looked away, to outside where the distant bombing had made fires in the depths of the forest. Her eyes scanned the empty road for ages and by the time she looked back the picture was done – a barbaric scratching of lines, tears and blobs in the flesh of the napkin through which three stick figure humans could just be discerned; triangles for bodies, stick arms, stick legs and sad tangled hair hung in matted scratches from the grinning circles of their heads.

All girls he said, I love them. This one Istanbul. This one London, this one dead.