Most probably though, it was the advanced experiment where the foolish duo, one decrepit, the other daft, built Schrödinger boxes for themselves. This was an ambitious project by any standards, involving bastardisation of several further wardrobes (‘liberated’ from storage of a local IKEA with some help from a lass who worked in maintenance there – a friend of Andrew’s that used to go to the same Rehab). It also involved several further rolls of roofing felt and like material what had to be stolen from a nearby building site. The people from CERN or NASA (or whatever) are still looking in detail at these human-size boxes, the like of which has not been seen before on earth. The diagrams have been pored over too and ‘at time of writing’ the boxes themselves stripped down for close scrutiny. But as far as can be ascertained with any conviction, it seems that in early December Andrew and Curtis sealed themselves inside their pair of crude but effective Schrödinger boxes/devices and with a complicated pulley system rigged thru the cellar’s ceiling, pulled the strings causing the guns that they’d rigged up there above them to fire down and into the boxes in which they lay, cocooned in a state of silent darkness. From that point on, with this bold act that summoned a new world, the two of them, sealed in their soundproofed oblivion, were both apparently dead and alive for ever, in that state of indeterminacy they had so long sought gone for good and probably never to return.

In Doncaster and environs from (the firing of those gunshots), the citizens were thrown into the world in the new new way. Indeed unlucky locals were the first people to see their own selves doubled, here, there and everywhere, a fact recorded in near uncomprehending tragic-comical style in the local paper (Doncaster Herald) by means of bizarre and confusing news stories. People in Doncaster were first to see their own ghosts, first to know the double-, triple- and quadrupleness of everything. Sight was a flickering shimmering thing from then on, the world as dense as a film exposed many times in the same place, on the same subjects, but from different angles.

There were suicides of course, in the confusion. And depressions. And untold complexities, as the so-called Doncaster effect spread and these phenomena dispersed across the nation and the globe, all the while still seeping backwards and forwards through what people once called time. But all that is what we are used to by ‘now.’

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