Another punk is “Plasticbum”. Eccentric names and grotesque life stories seem a prerequisite for assimilation into the “A” Centre. The history of how he acquired this singularly unpleasant sobriquet is far more self-evident than the previous thumbnail sketch. Apparently the poor chap needed much plastic surgery upon his posterior, after simultaneously indulging his twin propensities for meths drinking and lighting up his farts. The most outstanding feature of this fellow, at least as far as Nat is concerned, is that he is “moustachioed”. Such facial hair always repulses him except, of course, for that time in the depths of his own despair, when he’d failed to tend to any aspect of his toilet.

Nat has made great efforts to speak to at least one “degenerate”, introduced to him by Greg: “The slenderest, palest, and most delicate creature you ever beheld”. This “Mark F” is a frail being who eats hardly anything, but Nat assures me that Mark still feeds from his mother’s breast and has been doing so for the last eighteen years. Such parental dependence is unheard of, but not an impossibility.

Mark lives in Blackly. He is able to regularly travel the fifty odd miles to Wapping, as he is unemployed, and his father works as a guard on the railways so Mark gets privilege tickets.

As a child, the sickly but tenacious Mark F accompanied his father on numerous sojourns along the Blackly to Euston line. On one such outing, Mark F spotted an acephalous corpse upon the tracks. Mr. F stopped the train and, still in shock, ran four hundred yards to the nearest station. He soon returned with a small party of officialdom, only to discover that his son had located the severed skull and was picking at its splattered brains with a stick. Such ghoulish infant curiosity later resurfaced in Mark F’s documentation of the incident, a heavily illustrated work of some seventeen volumes, which his father subsequently destroyed.

In adolescence, Mark lost interest in such self-expression. He delved instead into occult lore and now claims to have an English translation of the Necronomicon. This, coincidentally, was made under the auspices of the “Black Pope” thus making it immune to later papal censorship, unlike the unauthorised Latin and Greek versions. Much of this work he has committed to memory for fear of what his father would do if he were ever to find it. He now wishes that he could forget what he has learnt, but not even death—or so he says—can save him from his fate. It is not difficult to see why Mark F and Nat should find one another such compelling company.

Nat was glowering as he regaled me with these peculiar tales. I do not think that they were deliberate terminological inexactitudes. Indeed, these stories are not unlike those of the Turin Shroud: more fantastic if they be counterfeit fabrication than if they are the genuine article.