Lain on the sofa of her near-paralysed Temazepam dreams ©, Mariam often thought the building would be better to spend time in if she did not feel so lonely there. And on those same late nights, when she really could not sleep, drawing on scrap paper of all kinds, she started to make plans. Scribbled on the backs of the letters from her Putative Husband in Jail, on napkins from Cheetah’s Palace or on the filthy scrap paper blown from nearby walkways in the wind, she sketched plans for machines that might somehow make the place feel occupied. Her plans were as ambitious as they were incoherent, desirous and somehow delirious – machines that would somehow make the sound of her long yearned-for neighbours, contraptions that would simulate their motion in the corridors, or on the floors above or those below, devices to somehow imitate the sound of their long sought-after voices, constructions conceived w the purpose of simulating light from under their doors, the same light designed to shift in time with a schedule of programmes for their non-existent televisions, or to shift with the movement of games played on non-existent consoles.

At a certain point in space and time (the fifth of April 2017 in the town of H____ and country of Endland) Mariam met and befriended a young bloke of The Wildlife at a silent disco in the local BINGO. She took him into her arms and then into her flat and then into her bed and then also (to a more limited extent) into her heart and into her life. Wirral was his name tho people also called him Special Measures, on account of some legal problems he once had that he did not like to talk about and which are still subject of a restraining or gagging order that prevents any detailing of them here.

Wirral had a Qualification in Metalwork and once half-served time as apprentice in a car parts factory before his role was replaced by the robots. He was handsome. He was a handy, kind and practical man and when he was off the Jellies for long enough and not otherwise forced into badly paid or more or less useless work he studied her designs and set about it, of his own devotion and accord, to try and realise some of Mariam’s machinery. The days and nights were then full of him dragging salvage metal, wood and fly-tipped treasures into the lift, hauling them in corridors, fiddling open the locks on the flats adjacent and starting to make stuff in there. His work was bang, shatter and clatter. His work was tough, thoughtful and often illegal. His work was in its own strange way a gift and also a calling.