– I do like those but yes. We don’t need religion – we need reality – a good solid 24/7, 365-day-of-the-year exploration of reality. Poverty, domestic violence, rape, child abuse, intolerance, bigotry, racism, tyranny! All of those religions are just programme structures if you like, so is class, wealth, racism, they are things people in this world just don’t need any more – they are holding us all back. What we need is every human fed and educated and told to question their own programme – every single one – to know that the real idea of why humans are here can belong to this generation. That we could explore it on a daily basis until we find a way to replace bad men with good children – to overrule archaic modes of human intervention over the fates of others via totalitarian brutality.

Bill is crying.

John puts his arms around him.

– I think we should have some tea and then we should go and walk all night long, I’m going tae take you on a train tomorrow, out of the city, just fir the afternoon. It won’t be like California, it will be cold.

– Good, I loathe the sun, unless it’s falling.

– We can walk along North Berwick beach, go for a pint or two. I’ll take you to the lobster shack before we come home. You can see where they burnt all the witches then we can get back into town well before your reading starts.

– That sounds perfect. I’ll meet Jim beforehand. It was so good at that conference, I’m not sure they’ll ever top it again.

– When all those men began jumping up to say they were queer, I felt proud to be from Edinburgh, to have all that energy here and that handsome Dutch guy wanting someone to baptise him!

– We all wanted to baptise him.

– What about the Sikh guy, saying queers are incapable of love and hermaphrodites can’t cum? That hair down to his waist – I wanted to chop it off with scissors.

– Quite the conservative you are, John!

– You were getting along well with Miller.

– It was civilised.

– The press had never seen anything like it. It’s been reported on everywhere since you left!

– I know.

– You’ll be so famous. You know they love it when you talk.

– I can’t think of anything more hideous.

– But how will anyone know that language is a virus and how it works if you don’t send those words out into the world?

– True.

– Mary McCarthy said how much she loved Naked Lunch.

– She clearly has taste.

– Perhaps we should go sailing together, Bill.

– Into the sunset?

– Something like that, John grins.