The thing about the rubbish was that it didn’t keep still. I could see it bobbing up and down in front of me. There was a large cupboard of some kind, some old dresser I think, I could see it in the distance, one of its doors flapping open and closed. Sometimes I could see it but at others it went down and I couldn’t, it dipped deep, one moment high on a mountain top, the next sunk down a valley. The further out you got the more the objects shifted. There were fewer Iremongers with me soon enough, fewer and fewer, and after a bit there were probably only five of us, and I could see the others around me had ropes that had begun to stretch out full, that they were at their limit already, but not me. I had far to go yet.

The birds were thick about, swooping around, some of them found it hard to wrestle with the wind and kept plummeting or were swept far away. I saw one dive down and come up with a rat in its beak. On I must go, keep the line free, don’t let it get snagged. Now and then I must turn around and lift up my rope to make sure it was all right. And then I’d tug on it twice so that the anchor should know I was still there, and then so I should know the anchor was still there he’d tug back twice and that was good. That was something. He was still there, then.

I couldn’t hear much of anything, the helmet was too thick. I was certain the gulls who flew around me waiting to see what I might tug up from the heaps were probably screaming, but I couldn’t hear them. All I could hear was my own breathing, my own laboured breaths. The further I struggled on the more I heard myself. Each exhalation fogged up the glass of the helmet for a moment, so that only when I breathed in did the steam go down a bit and I could see the swirling swaying mass before me.

I was hit several times. I hadn’t realised it was the rubbish at first. I thought it was the heap Iremongers beside me, bumping me, but then I saw that what had knocked against me was actually an old wooden chair frame, rotten and chewed through, damp and useless. Once I got tangled around some chain and fell down and as I tumbled the ground beneath me opened up for a moment and suddenly I caught a tiny sight of a great cavern beneath me, a break in the heaps, a crack, and in between the crack I could see down and down into some great hollow where the objects tumbled about fathoms below. Keep moving, keep moving. Don’t look down. Don’t. Look down. Down there. Look.