There is a sick pulse in Luckenbooth and crazy things do happen around the full moon and right now we have a moon so big it’s making the entire city feel like a film set. I have déjà vu every second of the day and I won’t be able to sleep in that fucking building ever again. Do you know how long rats can go without sleep before they die?

Thirty-two days give or take.

I am a lot bigger than a rat but I can’t see me making it beyond a month.

Since all that happened I was trying to drink myself unconscious so I could sleep at work. I hoped to pass out and crash for a week in the bone library but I didn’t have a chance to do that because they fired me.

The bone library is no longer my domain.

I am heartbroken.

Don’t ever go see a mermaid on the tip of a blood-red moon.

Far less after the Buckfast! It’s a drink made by monks – those drunken cunts know what they are onto. Each barrel has a sediment and the lower you get in the barrel, the stronger it gets. I think me and the postman got through four bottles each, as potent as could be. We didn’t know what we were doing, Leo. It’s the weekend, most of the staff were away, we were singing, then we went into the labs and turned the taps on. We let some rabbits free, they went off hopping down a corridor, we had a quick turn at the shooting range, went to the distillery for more supplies. The postman took a photograph of me surrounded by sheep heads – not yet decomposed – all of them smoking. I was found asleep this afternoon by the head of the Royal Dick Vet College – in bed with a bone mermaid. When he asked me what I was doing with her, I told him we’d recently wed.

I suppose in my inebriation I didn’t want him to think she was a slut.

I don’t know where I will be by the time you read this, Leo, but I am definitely going to try to sail my way home. I am thinking of offering to work for my passage – all the way to New York if I can, if I can find any ships down at the docks that will have me.

I have been thinking and it’s far harder to tell you about that.

There are many ways to fight what is wrong in this world and I know I have them in me.

Bad men are always coming.

Especially for people like us – and we are the good ones!

I think a lot about all the invisible lines we cross because of white men.