Gormenghast took the stage to remonstrate with all the crowd.

It was at this moment, perched in their vantage point high among the walkways above the stage that Olivia and James decided to take their chances and risk escaping rather than endure another season in the orphanage.

ON THE RUN

All the night and all the next morning James held O’s hand by the motorway with the big wind rush as lorries thundered past, whipping the bitter dust and threatening to blow the children away.

First bloke took them to Leicester.

Second bloke took them to Hull.

Third bloke took them to Blackpool, or somewhere else in olde Endland (sic), or nearly near enough.

The lastest driver (thin and brittle) couldn’t read, his eyes the colour of a week-old bruise, his manner slow like a ghost. There was something dangerous about him that both O and J recognised instantly – a man with bone hands and stickers of the Spice Girls spread all across the dash, a man adrift in signs he could not decipher. Somewhere past Grimthorp (sic) he gave O some paper, a folded scrap from deep inside his wallet, and asked her to read it to him.

She read – 6 lines of sentimental verse. Doing 90 in the fast lane. Tears in eyes.

There was a kind of silence, after the reading, and in the silence James slept, his pretty head nodding, a frown across his face. O looked at the lorries and hoardings as they passed, wondering what (if anything) the driver must make of the slogans on the walls. A lorry went by, stacked high with cattle going somewhere to get burned. Another lorry passed, the back graffiti:

EVERYTHING IS FUCKED UP

and just below it, in a dry excitable hand:

GET READY

*

J dreamt when dozing. It was him and Olivia – the 2 of them running, through rain and at night time again – the giant made from plastic rags abandoning his climb up the pylon and coming down to stalk right after James. A horror soundtrack, with breathing in the head and moonlight in the sky – like in the painting by Debussy: ‘A Flight Across Astroturf Covered in ‘Dew’’’

When James awoke he was sweating, his fingers knotted in the letters of his father’s name.

*

Blue Boar Services or Leicester Forest East. A huge community mural showing the execution of Prince Charles. Guns. Flowers. Diana in the clouds.

When he dropped them the thin man did not murder the children as they expected but rather he gave them money – for breakfast. J cried anyway in the sweet relief of incomprehension still shaken from the dream. In the services they ate hurriedly the standard fare of their world – a meal of chips, ketchup and mini-cheddars with a pudding of Spatsky’s Chocolate Nooses.

*