The first called DEAD SOLDIER. Back from the grave.

Adept in real survival training he arrived one dawn, crawling in thru the cat flap, belly down, like under barbed wire, having dug himself out of the grave, his ‘real gripping’ fingers bloody with homing instinct, eyes swollen with travel and tiredness, his moaning turned to language once again.

There is a strange sight in the old house: James curled naked in his parents old bed, himself the image of a foetus, the smaller foetus of DEAD SOLDIER cradled in his arms. A mix of shite white skin, moulded plastic, cold white sheets, sweat smell and earth. Gently the sun awoke them with its touch.

*

What dead soldier talked to James all about.

1) The incredible journey.

2) Morality.

3) The futility of art.

4) His ‘soul’.

5) New developments in warfare and technology.

*

Second visitor. Dad – arriving late one night.

O and J didn’t hear him enter, didn’t hear him call.

But when they woke at lunchtime he was downstairs, waiting for them.

And things weren’t very good.

Dad had a gun and he had pointed it at them.

*

Dad explained some things. How much of it was real and how much of it was not real was hard for either Olivia or James to understand. He was talking too quickly.

He explained about love, and where babies come from. He tried to explain the war which had left Endland in darkness. He explained that woman (in the sense of the feminine) is like a shadow – you chase her and she walks away, you run away and she follows. Dint really make sense. He explained about how a car engine works and how the operations of a human brain cannot correctly be compared to those of a computer. All this and other stuff he said he had learned in his long stay in a hospital for people whose heads or hearts have been broken into pieces (as he called it).

DEAD SOLDIER interrupted dad’s talking by moaning from upstairs. The shrill wretched sound continued, as hopeless as it ever had been and Dad went upstairs in a temper, took DEAD SOLDIER outside to the rockery and shot him twice in the face, a loud ricochet sending echoes in the street and a putrid stench of burned shattered ‘plastic’ hanging in the air for the rest of the afternoon.

Last of all dad came back inside, shaking a little and poured himself a gin and stirred it with the gun and explained that Herod had issued a decree and that a census was to take place in Endland. He said that everyone must return in haste forthwith to the town of their conception and there to be registered by full and legal statute of the law.

*

James cried.

Dad waved the gun he held in his hand a little, for emphasis. Olivia packed bags.

*