In the back of the car the kids could not talk openly but rather only mouth some rare words to each other, hoping that dad would not catch sight of them in the rear view mirror. One time O wrote a note to J and she slipped it to him when they skidded round a corner and she smiled a bit and the note said HOPE but she dared not sign her name.

Dad talked all the time, like someone had cut out the valve between the tongue and the brain, his words a stream of signals, a tv jammed, a sickness of voice. He said the cuntry (sic) was all fucked up, he said the cuntry (sic) was going down (on someone ha ha), he said the planes were empty, the hotels were deserted, and the good spirits were staying away (all except for vodka). He said the olde cuntry (sic) needed a good olde fucking and he laughed like he made a joke that no one else in the car could understand.

Doncaster. Rotherham. Tirana. New Antwerpen. As they drove the roads were awash with travellers, caravans, great hordes, and persons going back to the source, thousands (1000s) of people heading in all directions. Many in cars and more still on foot, others in caravans of motorbikes, horses, oxen, even donkeys. All going back to the place of their conceptions. A thick tide of human persons and a flood of colours, ages, races, genders, sexes, types, shoe-sizes and ontologies, all pressed bumper to bumper. Broken cars at the roadside, great campfires on the edges of towns, the feeling of a country in distortion of itself.

And at the centre of it somehow Dad. Talking and talking. Like the cuntry was him, or he felt it was him. Some confusion between him and it (the cuntry). Some confusion of the borders.

*

And of all the talking he heard James only really remembered one thing. One thing that truly scared him, one thing that cut him, one thing (1) that kept him awake that nite when they lay in the car, lit by moonfall, covered up in a blanket and trying to find sleep in the forecourt of a burned out DIY Superstore called DO IT RIGHT.

Dad said: “Do you hear me? You hear me alright?”

Olivia said: “Yes, we hear you . . .”

And Dad said: “When everyone gets back in the town of their conception(s) I tell yer something, I tell yer . . .”

“What?” James asked him, getting tired of the bullshit.

“I tell you that would be a perfect time for the universe to end . . .”

Dad laughed. He called the census as psychic equalisation, a millennial balancing of books. He laughed and called it Herod’s joke. A counting up. A chance to get back to where time really started. A chance to have his kids (and all others) sleep again (for one last time) in the bed where they were made.

*