Just down the road from the orphanage there was a tall electricity pylon that were strictly out of bounds and that ‘cold winter’ © in particular a huge plastic sheet half turned to tatters had caught in the bottom of the pylon tower. To James, stood at the window of the orphanage, this black polythene tangle, shredded, draped and folded, looked for all the world like a huge figure dressed in rags just starting out on the arduous task of climbing up into the sky.

James was scared of the big plastic giant but he didn’t tell no one about it, not even Olivia, not even when the wind blew and rattled that giant mans bones. J’s Motto was MOUTH SHUT, his practice, in them days, was sticking to it.

*

Routine at the orphanage demanded a lot of getting used to, with many lessons and concerts and debates. Boys and girls were kept separate and schooled in different ideas. The boys learned chemistry and French, the girls learned maths and displacement. There was no outward logic to it that anyone could guess but the rules were immovable.

J wrote a letter to his dad in condensation on the dormitory window, but the letters ran to bits and pieces like the letters in Hammer House Of Death.

*

The only chance for James and Olivia to be together was by participating in the out-of-normal-schooling-time dramatic ‘entertainment’ organazized by one of the most fearsome ‘teachers’ called Gormenghast.

G had written a complex long drama about the life story of Madame Curie, a person from history who invented something called Radiations and later (apparently) died as a result. It was hard for J (or anyone) to understand what the point or message of this story was meant to imply. Girls in hoop skirts represented radium atoms, boys in black clothes painted white were a chorus of X-rays and the whole thing was broken up with nervous musical interludes of indeterminate length.

*

After audition O secured a small part in the play (probably as a wood-nymph) and she brought James along too, lending him a pair of her old brown tights to wear and covering their faces completely in that old green brown make-up like the camouflage worn by DEAD SOLDIER.

Rehearsals were late at nite-time in a part of the orphanage called a BASEMENT and each nite began with the sombre eating of an extra meal – a thick grey gruel that turned the stomach shuddering. James looked once in his bowl and described it to Olivia, lip quivering with vivid repulsion – ‘just bits of a skeleton buried in mud’.

*

Gormenghast left a shadow wheresoever he walked (even in the dark) and was an object of great horror and speculation for many in the ‘school’. After blocking one nite he stopped Olivia in the corridor and sternly drew her into a darkly lit and sweltering corner. Olivia gulped. Gormenghast asked: