Her dreams are of heaven, her days a Bosch picture traced out onto skin. Touches, grabs, caresses, jabs, bites, collisions, kisses, scrapes, grazes. Too-brief (or way too long) encounters. All written on her.

Fast forward through it – i.e. a whole bunch of stuff about all different people in the bar and what a hard fucking time Arse had and ‘stink of poverty’ ©. The bright bright colours of earth. The violence of sound. Neon sign outside the bar runs that Coke-slogan KEEP ON FALLING and the red then green then red again figure of an angel falling, neon dancing. Strange to fall from heaven to such a place as this.

Arse forgets most of what happens to her which is just as well. She keeps trying to write a report on MODERN LIFE (as she calls it) but many of the salient facts are missing.

*

After a time she learns a bit concerning friendship.

One of the other girls that works the bar is called Tiffany. Tiffany and Arse become good friends. Tiffany is from the ‘countryside’ or possibly from a small town in Lancashire – it’s a place no one speaks the name of unless they happen to come from there or unless they get kinda lost on the route to someplace else.

Arse and T move in a house together. Girl intimate. A blue house. With lavender curtains.

T tells Arse about her text-book country-girl childhood – a family of drunken wife and kid beaters, strong silent types that could say more with a thrash of the belt or something than they ever could in English language. In return Arse makes up her own childhood – not the one she lived in Olympia – but a miserable fiction based in Burton Upon Trent.

*

Arse and Tiffany fall in love on the night when they’ve got tickets to see the live recording of the new smash hit Italian comedy-show called SUBLIMINALISSIMO!

On the way they get lost in the huge multi-storey car park under the TV studios. Tiffany breaks her leg in a fall on some oil. They hear fragments of SUBLIMINALISSIMO! floating thru the vent-ducts of the car park. Their eyes meet. There is quite a look between them.

*

Back home the girls ‘make love to each other’ but that bit got torn out.

Banging on the walls from next door and upstairs.

THIS SECTION WRITTEN WHILE THE HOUSE WAS UNDER ATTACK FROM A DRUNK.

At some point in the act of sex that night Tiffany puts her fingers up Arse’s arse. She feels something there. Something moving a little. Something unexpected. She’s scared.

For days Arse feels uncomfortable down there – a moving, growing feel, an ache. She goes to the doctors and gets some ultrasound or a scan of some kind.

She is pregnant – only the child is in her anus. And she knows of course that it must be the child of ____________ the nameless god up in Heaven.

*

Key questions:

Can poverty be beautiful?