The Weirdmonger had indeed been a normal child before he'd thrown youth away like a crumpled sweet-bag. That was the day he realised that the words which he believed were true actually became true. Faith was everything. Faith dictated reality. And he had been his own father was all that he recalled-a strange fate for an even stranger sire-and he as the older Weirdmonger had taught the younger Weirdmonger how to throw words like b.a.l.l.s in a game of Catch. Popping boiled humbugs or acid drops or aromatic crystallised figs from mouth to mouth. Perhaps his father was the true Weirdmonger, and the true Weirdmonger (so-called) was the true impostor. Words became impossibly tangled as soon as the concentration dropped and the years pa.s.sed by, consigning his father to merely an oil painting of himself stippled with misdirected pellets-and the Weirdmonger (now the true one) went out into the world, park by park. But the world was hot and dry-and the parks were deserts of Inner Earth. But now they were global-cooling, artistically speaking. Today, the parks were wet and soggy-terribly muddy, denying the flowers' plots any ambition other than the extrapolated brown blooms upon wilting stalks, each one weeping yellow tears for a poet called Charles Baudelaire. Even the park-keepers had given up their watering-cans... and you know how officious they once were when school caretakers.

The Weirdmonger nodded as if he heard his father in his head. The shop stood there, now, tall and stately-with the waxen exhibits he expected staring through the windows, wielding axes like ancient Northumberland Reivers or French Angevin Kings, denoting the precise historical moments, bringing then to now with all the force of precariousness. History made real-whilst any students of his would become part of some fantasy world which learned the lessons head on. These wax figures, he was aghast to see, however, were simply shaped like shoes in odds and not pairs.

The Weirdmonger nodded again. He was his own son as well as his own father and now as the former he had returned to the turning pages and the juggling words as he did as a student-with the words sprinkling the air above the print like hover-flies, depleting the print by their very presence or, rather, the print had left the page and become the hover-flies themselves. He paid for his museum ticket at the kiosk-a guide-book to s...o...b..xes from Crazy Lope for a round tour, complete with ear-m.u.f.fs and learning devices that were stuck straight into the body's veins. Go'spank smiled as he pa.s.sed over the long spool of tickets, saying: "Enjoy the trip."

As if (the Weirdmonger thought) the parks hadn't already been enough. He looked back wistfully to see over-sized birds, with stubby wings, failing to fly from the last park. This was the first time he'd noticed how the mud had stopped all Nature in its tracks... as if mud was an effluent with which Nature had tried to oil itself but, in the process, had over-egged the cake that had been left out in the rain.

The Weirdmonger toured the Shop on the Borderland with torchbright eyes-or that was how he was subsequently described by an unseen onlooker. There were many oil paintings of shoes... and a whole host of nemonymous figures wearing them... their names queueing along the wainscotting beneath their wildly daubed likenesses, making the museum more of a modern gallery of ultramodern pretension than a potentially tedious array of educational wax figures, speaking in misalignments of recorded voice or reported speech.

He wondered why Go'spank traipsed in his wake, half-staggering, half-shambling back and forth in tides of indecision.

"Mr..."

"Yes?" he boomed.

"The shop shuts in half a trice."

Go'spank was evidently concerned that the Weirdmonger would be angry at not previously being warned before he had the tickets unravelled for him at such great cost. Go'spank seemed to hold a stub of a ticket for dear life in his mitt-end, as the Weirdmonger's booming voice belied the nervousness he shared with Go'spank.

Truth, sometimes, on a good day, can be felt as well as told. The Weirdmonger did not shrug, did not laugh, did not utter anything approaching the suspicion of a word... yet there were sounds of tongue clucks and palate cleaving, igniting a whole string of horror images: spilling from his mouth like regatta flags towards Go'spank. The only thing that could be said for the Weirdmonger was the free-flow of tears from his remorseful eyes, as Go'spank twisted amid the entanglements and coils of designer rudery. Rudery (a collective noun for rude things) was better, however, than, say, sweaty bird-heads: this being the giggly observation of an unseen onlooker. Better than the mounds of crusty scabs and curds of gangrenous pus from a million childhood accidental abrasions failing to heal. Better than corrupt organs that rotted because they had no owners to wield them. No more giggles. Only side-swipes at the absurdity of the situation from now a rather cool, detached onlooker. There was indeed a harvest of healthy rudery wrapped around Go'spank, a harvest of rudery, indeed, wielded by spectral athletes, gymnasts, body-builders and hawlers in yellow jingle-jangly shoes and invisible carpet-coats. Despite their already swollen appendages, the ghostly figures lovingly meted out more and more of their body-ends from the modelling clay of ectoplasm to form the ridged winding-sheets... swaddling poor Go'spank. Killed by kindness.

With his ultimate cliche thus uttered (tested for truth as well as timbre) the Weirdmonger left the environs of the shop for the purlieus of the nearest park. It was just one minute before the shop was due to close. Not that it really mattered now. The saddest part, if the truth were told, was that Go'spank's whole life heretofore had been as preparation to be a spear-carrier in an onlooker's scenario he would never understand, even given the chance.

But if Go'spank had been merely created for his own death, then what, if not who, was I? I, the onlooker, stared from the attic's own attic of Sudra's shop barely concealed among the ridges or narrower lobes of the roof. I gazed over the mudparks as they fitfully vanished towards the middle distance, even to a point where the war had re-started-as evidenced by the sight of new tannoys being built by combatants for sirens.

Like a geomantic zodiac, the mudparks formed the face of the man I'd known as the Weirdmonger, with brown eyes and even browner tears: above which hovered a creature with stubby wings: either a child bobbing upon a playground ride# (a ride so burnished it shone with pure invisibility) or an Angel that had been stripped to the bottom bone of meaning.

"Fly!" I shouted.

And it was.

#Stub of pencil: A third party claimed this was clearly a see saw.

Sudra was in her bedroom in the shoe museum listening to the newly prepared armies march-running towards war through the cutaways of Klaxon-measuring the pavy-crazed sluices between the lobes with the rhythmic onward march of their medium-pace limbs in running mode as opposed to any standard patterned walk. March-running is a forgotten art. Neat ranks of soldiers (mostly female) these were, keeping perfect pace with each other at the run, rather than the lift-and-separate of slow-motion goose-step or slightly quicker frog-march or general English slow marchpast for Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday. Memories of Things Past-a hypnotic echoing march-run as the various sections of army proceeded-half in and half out of Sudra's dreamtime perception of them from her bedroom window-towards their billets in the various establishments of darkening Klaxon.

This was during the early stages of the war before sides had been picked, like children in the cla.s.sroom exchanging bright coins of choice for the best runner on their team, leaving the solitary turnips to be the final choices. Sudra had earlier watched a strange individual visit her shoe museum-despite Crazy Lope (her doorkeeper) and his good offices to keep unpaying customers at bay-and she wondered if war was something that had come accompanying the visitor, rather than a genuine interest in viewing the shoes on mannequins' feet. Ulterior motives... led to a neat withdrawal of the visitor back to the mudparks whence he'd first arrived (Go'spank's dead body upon his back like a cancerous growth).

One of the march-running woman officers was to billet in the shoe museum. She was introduced to Sudra by Edith who was now in temporary charge of billeting arrangements in the city prior to full-out war. Armies needed their sleep, and armies were made up of individuals who thought sleep would help later as acclimatisation to death.

The woman soldier who had splintered off from the synchronisation of her fellow march-runners when she'd reached her appointed billet (in this case, the shoe museum) was shown to a bunk bed in the attic's attic.

"Rest here," said Sudra with a smile. A fine figure of a woman who had loosened her tie on first sighting the equally attractive soldier. "If you need anything in the night..."

"I shall be fine," said the soldier, listening to other sections of march-runners still rhythmically pa.s.sing in the night, eager for their own billets elsewhere. The soldier slowly withdrew from her uniform while simultaneously covering herself with the carpet-blanket that Crazy Lope had earlier provided for the bunk, thus revealing nothing of her eager body.

It was like imagining one was in a dream simply for the sake of haunting oneself with it. A means to extend life. Wars often caused similar mentalities of false dreaming.

Sudra smiled, determined to bide her time. March-runners were now pa.s.sing with the perceived sound of much smaller groups, silhouetted by sirens. Until only an odd pair of billetless march-runners echoed down the sluice-alleys that Sunnemo's withdrawal into its nightmask had created from the once wide esplanades of a finer siecle.

As Sudra settled into a feather-mattress, she heard the war crackle into existence on a far ridge of Klaxon with mere Muskets of Ma.s.s Destruction.

"Wagger Market, Wagger Market, Come to Wagger Market!"

The Weirdmonger once had a stall of his own at torrid Wagger Market (a suburb of Klaxon)-but today at the fun-at-the-fair, stuff seemed as tawdry as the sun now seemed cool. The brown canvases, once pulled taut by hooks on ancient tenter-frames appeared soggy, threadbare, frayed... even worm-holed. The wares as chipped and crocked as the costermongers' faces that tried to sell them from deeply-veined marble slabs, slabs so stained, the Weirdmonger knew that dead fish had once sat on them eyeing the customers... with imperceptible flicks of their tails...

No sign of the healthy human rudery that once hung from the tenter frames... much sought after by the mountain nomads as ornaments as well as carnifications. Nor were there now displayed those rolls and rolls of partly piled carpets and mats, with rough-sewn inner cylinders of s.p.a.ce being home for numbers of creatures that had since become as legendary as they were once so far-fetched, despite their inarguable existence as forces for dream.

It was then the Weirdmonger was delighted to find a stall with a bit more get-up-and-go than the other downtrodden trestles of junk. It bore a sign with yellow lettering saying 'Olden Days' and a beautiful attendant who wore a name badge saying WAR. The Weirdmonger lowered his eyes from her buxom comeliness to the stall's comestibles and purveyances of provender. These were all varieties of syrup, it seemed-ranging from some Happy Shopper stuff through branded Tate & Lyle-until eyes reached the more exotic end of the syrup market that stemmed from Far Samarkand and Ancient Cathay-flecks of spice generously lacing the aromatic glue-syrups and treacles, the slimy tentacles of which curled and coiled within the substance they themselves const.i.tuted, in and out of each other like tubular sinews of bee-honey.

More marmalady substances squatted like set jellies without the help of containers to hold them up. Thick cut & thin cut. Peppered with peels. Peels like orange ones. Or peels like lumps of hairy hide. All sitting incoherently within clear syrup as well as cloudy... like pickles or foreign bodies or sizeable splinters of rind or hardened skin. The top-notch syrup was not from the deepest, strangest Orient but from the Pacific Islands. Petals floating in silken tides. Tiny nugget-sown lagoons of amber wreathed with garlands... teased back and forth by weltering waterfalls.

Some syrups actually moved by their own volition-seething, gurgling, even burping-as bubbles broke towards the meniscus of more turgid marmaladery (at the lower end of the range). A single syrup was effervescent, as a series of p.r.i.c.kling sensations cascaded into existence-microscopic air-pockets tingling to the Weirdmonger's imaginary touch. Then, he spotted letters floating about in it. Making words. Unmaking words. Poems being slurped and sloughed between the walls of the transparent jug. The words 'Olden Days' abruptly ratcheted into view, locking into some serendipitous significance beyond any semantic meaning. Telling, perhaps, of the particular stall that sold these sinuosities of syrup. Then-just like an ugly duckling-a lonely letter 'g' floated into view through the undulating avenues of aspic-and joined up just as the Weirdmonger's attention returned to the stallholder. Syrup, as well as silence, was golden. He felt dazed, as he momentarily bent his head under an impending emotion. This emotion was strong, more golden than anything. But then he was startled by the thought that came into his head-unannounced. He knew the game was up. His sluices of logic had been blocked by plaits of gooey love.

WAR smiled meltingly.

"Would you like to buy some syrup, Weirdmonger?"

"Yes, but can I ask why you call yourself WAR, WAR? I recall wars as men all mouth and trousers who fought till they found that fighting was harder than drinking."

"My father died of a broken heart over a botched result at his own World War."

WAR seemed even more pretty when she spoke serious. The Weirdmonger wondered what heights of pa.s.sion she might engender if she actually talked dirty. He nodded as if he understood without the necessity of her continuing. Apparently, her father had lived his whole life upon the hope of winning the World War.

WAR said that she was continuing the investigation at the behest of some paternal beyond-the-grave power which could not be defied. When a corpse got its claws into an issue, there was the devil to pay.

WAR herself turned as white as a ghost, gaunt and stare-eyed... as she fiddled with the jars of syrup. A haunted woman. Prettiness draining from her by the second. The bitterness of something that wouldn't let go even in death. She sighed. Her eyes glazed as her father's eyesight spun from them like wasps. She wielded long cultivated fingernails which she scratched along the nearest trestle-as if playing noughts and crosses for real and in earnest. From the middle of her head there sounded two voices clicking like miniature wooden dolls-foully swearing. Then WAR slumped forward...

The Weirdmonger now heard the voices inside his own head. He shook his head to free these poor creatures of his thoughts. Wagger Market resumed its business, oblivious of the tragedy. n.o.body even bothered to clear up the huge mound of slime till the various corpses that had formed within muscley folds of it had disfigured.

The Weirdmonger had stayed away too long. The blanched thistles crouched like forgotten cruel love affairs-and he whistled with delight as he recalled the games of Catch he'd played here during those hotter days of youth. Not that he'd grown any older. Weirdmongers never did. And he was the only one left. Perhaps the only one that there ever was.

The landscape had changed. Cooler. Wetter. Strangely brighter. Or was it whiter? Paler. He tried to juggle the words. Despite the dankness, things looked shrivelled, burnt, desiccated... even more so than when Sunnemo had shone strong and high, during those endless days of his... youth. Yes, why not say the word? Even if it meant little, if not nothing. Agelessness was a burden that many carried, but the Weirdmonger carried it with some style and panache. Why use two words when none would do?

He shrugged. He had returned to the Klaxon Keys to renew acquaintanceships, if not with the original contacts of his "youth", but with their progeny. He had recently travelled-further than anyone could imagine-towards lobes and poles of Inner Earth where few appreciated his art-with-words, an art of uttering a word or phrase or saying which then immediately became a self-evident truth. The Weirdmonger's watchword was 'one word, one truth' for generations-but sometimes he needed to visit people able to have faith in this facility, thus to regain his self-confidence. Some, for example-in (G.o.d)forsaken clans of siren-driven wastes shadowed by Canterbury's gravity-logged Oak-had merely stared at the Weirdmonger, open-mouthed, expecting their own words to issue forth as true as his. And they never did. Others had not even bothered trying, especially amid the coming war, failing, as they did, to understand anything the Weirdmonger said. Yet, here, back in Klaxon, he hoped at least the people retained a modic.u.m of empathy with 'one word, one truth', not that anyone could truly empathise. If they did, they'd be Weirdmongers, too.

He shrugged again. He watched two boys throwing a ball to each other, with, between them, a puddle that the relatively weaker Sunnemo had failed to dry up... although, judging by the hover-flies sprinkling about above it, there was steam rising...

The Weirdmonger could hear the nagging voice of the two boys' mother: a descendant, no doubt, of the woman he had known on his earlier sojourn in these parts... and for the likes of the Weirdmonger, knowing was not knowing nearly enough, there being far more about people than the people themselves or others could possibly imagine. The Weirdmonger recognised that knowing was tantamount to not-knowing, until he spoke the word, and then he'd know someone to the bottom bone of the soul. One word, that was all it took. One word from the Weirdmonger.

And today the voice scorched each Inner Ear... to their bottom bones. She was screeching for her boys to come in and not speak to strangers... and she stared across at the Weirdmonger, as if daring him to speak first. The boys, indeed, scampered to either side of her wide skirt.

"Git! We don't need need you here."

The Weirdmonger touched his chimney hat with the tip of two fingers, fingers that had grown webbed since he'd been known in these parts. Even Weirdmongers can change. Even plural can become singular.

The woman's ancient great-grandmother Sudra had, if the truth were told, accused the Weirdmonger, in a dim past now beyond any torching out, of turning everything red. You've made bread red, she'd shrieked, YOU'VE TURNED BREAD INTO MEAT!

That was the day he had uttered the word which meant just one more gear up from breeding-where love was more a feast than anything else (if comparisons can be made so loosely). The word-even he had forgotten now... but it still seemed, from today's evidence, to run free in this present woman's blood. She had spoken instinctively...

"Don't worry thyself," the Weirdmonger said, with such simplicity, the woman immediately calmed down, held out her hand to him and smiled so generously, he wondered if laughter could possibly be as fulsome as her slicing grin.

"Welcome, Weirdmonger," she said. "A stranger like you cannot be strange for long." And she pushed her two boys towards him, uncaring whether they were being sacrficed to a demon or merely being introduced to a kind uncle.

The Weirdmonger offered to catch their ball. He held up one of his hands which was swollen like a huge keeper's mitt or oven glove.

"Thou, throw," he said.

And the ball, as if of its own volition, left the boy's right hand straight into the safety of his finger cage which the Weirdmonger's other hand had seemed to have become as his hands switched responsibility of catching.

There was always a catch. Even blind ones.

The room into which the Weirdmonger was shown was certainly not a showroom. Cramped, cluttered, yet beautifully cloisonne. The ta.s.sel on the blind clicked irritatedly against the window as a damp, then dry breeze absconded. A dry sound like a moth in a paper bag. A broken siren-breeze.

The woman frowned her two boys into the corner. They sank back into the shadows as if they were learning to swim or, at least, float... but silently failed to do so, smiles frozen on their faces like disguises for disgrace.

The kitchen, too, was nothing to write home about. There was meat stretched in strands from sink to worktop... like Christmas decorations. Sinews and threads of dripping muscle.

The Weirdmonger blinked. And the vision vanished. He dared not speak it... for obvious reasons. However, during the next few days, as soon as the boys had recovered from shyness, the Weirdmonger played trifling word games with them, like saying something along the lines of 'bubble' and a huge sooty one expanded from his mouth and-once complete-floated off. He'd say: a colour and, momentarily, the place where they were dallying-be it sitting-room or backyard-would blush to its roots with the colour chosen. Purple-and the trees swagging over the fence or window sill were like richly Royal garments or ecclesiastical vestments. Grey-and the boys laughed to think they'd returned to the days when films had a grey monochrome consistency; TV, too; black and white versions of Big Brother. Not that screens even existed at all now, even in colour. Screens had been kicked in ages ago, for all the right reasons. Visual image overdose had caused all manner of aberrations. Including no need for shoes as feet had become webbed and weather-proof like birds'.

He made as if to play catch with an imaginary tongue-tied ball of tumours, threaded throughout with veins and almost living morsels themselves. The boys cringed when they saw the Weirdmonger being so uncouth with his game. And the mother would cluck with distaste, despite being duped by phrases such as "Never you mind, my dear" or "Give me the benefit of the doubt" which flapped from the Weirdmonger's mouth like plat.i.tudes with a demon's wings disguised as an angel's.

One day, the Weirdmonger uttered some words which didn't quite take off. Whether it was a catch in the throat, a tickle caused by some misbehaving phlegm or a more serious seizure of bodily function, the words wormed out warped and wayward. He had meant to say, "Where is your father?" (and to himself, "Where is me?")-the optimum of a love he was beginning to feel for these boys, his new-found foundlings or changelings or lostlings now found. One of them had the biggest ear he had ever seen. All the better to hear you with, perhaps. Instead the sense shifted... in a language so foreign-looking it represented the outset of a civilisation that had never existed-until now. The words' exit was wrapped in cross purposes.

The mother wept. For she didn't know who the boys' real father was-having been taken in her sleep between one dream and the next. She had felt for some time that there was some deeper meaning to the Weirdmonger's words. She examined her own right hand. For as long as she could recall, it had been swollen like an oven-glove and the left one articulated like a cage with a trapped pellet of dry dung rattling in it like a ball valve.

The Weirdmonger was sad and deep kissed her. And she vanished like a fast shrinking red balloon into the fundaments of his being. The boys laughed and laughed till they died of it-or the Weirdmonger dropped the ball, whichever came first.

The Weirdmonger was then free to leave the Klaxon Keys-his feet crunching thistles like hollow bones. He held his chimney hat on against the dry wafts of air. Sunnemo never seemed to set any more, or it became a volcano called Mount Core. "Grey!" he shouted at it, with as much feeling to the word as he could muster. And he smiled at the black and white movie upon which he lived and had his being... before the screen blew its circuits, vanishing-as old-fashioned TV sets used to do-into a fast diminishing white dot.

Except he was never to know it wasn't white, but red.

It was a May war. Perhaps earlier, perhaps later, but May maybe was the best guess. Klaxon seasons were as slavishly followed as their months, despite the weather-mad waywardness of Sunnemo itself. Sudra watched her billeted soldier guest with beady, if not steely, eyes. Eyes both looking and looked at. She suspected the soldier (often now glimpsed intimately and seen to bear a body fit for all sorts of use and not only for cruelties entailed by war) of being someone else. Too much of a coincidence to believe it was Amy or a May-masqued Amynemo returned for a further bite at the cherry of Sudra's doom. Thus singled out from those thousands, if not millions, of march-runners-ceremonially making the relentless churn-churn rhythms of footwork by-pa.s.sing the Klaxon sluices in pursuit of military glory-why would it be Amy herself s.n.a.t.c.hed from these very churning ranks as chosen by higher authorities to billet in the shoe museum during the course of the war?

Sudra also watched the watcher-the man who had mysteriously visited the museum in past months, both as regular customer and as an inspector of museums. Dealt with by Lope, following the unexplained abscondment of Go'spank. This man stood outside staring up at the imaginary salacious silhouettes that were not silhouettes at all but shadows of the window-blind itself rattling in noise-breezes rather than at any sights that the blind itself concealed. Sudra watched a watcher outside in the city sluice thinking he was looking up at an attic's attic-window watching Sudra but really watching the empty s.p.a.ces she left behind so as to darken in her wake like stains of deceptive movement-as she later surrept.i.tiously sought her soldier guest in places where they had not yet darkened sufficiently to tease with the nipply b.u.t.tons of military undervest or see-through camisole that dressed the fleshy s.p.a.ces below the eyes that looked and the eyes that were looked at.

Lope could be heard floors away straightening the mannequins in their demonstration shoes. Much of the museum depicted earlier periods when shoes were more in keeping with not squashing the toes, but after toes had gradually pointened with layers of white poultry flesh-eventually hardening into horns or curlicues that no chiropodist could possibly cut-mannequins had taken on the role of stolid lifelessness more in keeping with hand-puppets that had lost the hands that worked them from within as if the puppet-skins were soft body-hugging chambers and the hands c.o.xcomb flamingos shrunk to the size of gristle-flags. If mannequins could walk at the dead of night-with the cracking of bone that once typified derelict butcher-shops in hawling-days-then they surely no longer walked there now. Any footstep heard on the breath of night was Sudra's own or Lope's slow lope (so slow it had become rather a slouch or shamble) or, in recent times, the soldier's boots deadened by the thicker carpets she had insisted upon for step-comfort as well as insulation against the gullible s.p.a.ces between floorboards and the cavity-rock.

Lope told Sudra of the man who visited the museum being someone he once knew as a younger man (both of them, he and Lope, often, it seemed, the same young man). Indeed, the watcher wore a cape similar to Lope's. Rumoured to be in league with the Ogdonites-but n.o.body in the know or otherwise was meant to be aware of this the war's third force or whether Ogdonite officers wore capes sufficient to hide themselves against the chameleon backdrops of Klaxon's lobes and dunes cresting the upper profiles of the city's more habitable chambers.

Sudra: I had a dream last night.

Lope: The Weirdmonger again?

Sudra: No, it was just that our guest was showing me out of the window the leading-edge of a vast surface city pa.s.sing slowly through Klaxon's cavity as it worked its way towards the Core.

Lope: There have often been rumours of a man-city.

Sudra: It was difficult to see it all in one go to define its shape. It was just a vast city-with buildings, and streets, and people clinging on to what they could to help themselves stay with their homes-and I did see a long area or runway that must have been an airport oozing through Klaxon brick like knife through b.u.t.ter. It must have been a dream. How otherwise did it avoid coming through here? (She pointed to the long corridor of shod dummies that made part of her museum.) Lope: And the carpet is untouched. It would have ripped it to shreds if a city had pa.s.sed through it, surely.

Sudra: Yes. However, the soldier took off the top of her uniform and I could see shapes sliding through her flesh, like bones on the move...

Lope: Must be a dream. Like that married couple from Clacton.

Sudra: Yes, that was a dream definitely. But sometimes I think the city dream pa.s.sing through here is still going on even though I've now woken up. Look out the window. Its walls in silhouette marching like staircases or collective chimney-stacks-all taking their slow-motion march-past-to war, via war, from war. One bit, the other day, like a vast model of a ship, got stuck in a chamber, and is still lodged there as if it's landed itself on a cliff ledge-a cliff ledge to it but part of Klaxon to us. Guess it depends on the perspective, rather than on whether it's a dream or not.

Lope: Yes, I wonder whether dream is a relevant term any more. If all is dream, it does come down to perspectives rather than an easy excuse of dreaming. Turkey-halting, I call it.

Sudra: Why?

Lope: Well Turkey is both a bird and a country.

Sudra: Yes, but how many times is the globe melting-making all countries one?

The conversation itself was being dreamed by Amy as she rested in her bed between battles. Between perspectives.

Arthur as a child enjoyed mixing experiments in the back garden-often watched by his younger sister Amy. He'd requisition household substances-Fairy liquid, white powdery Surf, Dettol disinfectant, creamy-white cleaning-fluids, soaps of all sorts and consistencies, dishwasher tablets, table salt, left-over food and so forth-then proceed to imagine he was a top scientist, plying thick pastes of such concoctions to looser fluids and hardened surfaces of impacted sponge or crystalline solids. 'Requisition' was a posh word for creatively transfer from one place to another. His mother Edith failed to notice much of her stock of kitchen lubrications had gone missing over time or she turned a blind eye to the 'messes' that Amy tried to tell her about if only she'd go down the garden to see.

Arthur saw himself as a top scientist. His experiments led to much global good. Even Amy was astonished when watching Arthur flick the tail of his Davy Crockett hat from his eyes as yet another steam creature erupted into the sky like a wet version of a firework display.

Sometimes, Arthur was also a top surveyor or geographer. Indeed, he often made dams from his 'messes' mixed with earth-and a moat of suspiciously multicoloured ditchwater around an island whereby his toy soldiers had a field day training amidst a sticky alien landscape of Tide and Toilet Frog.

He laughed as Amy turned up with a watering-can and flowerpot.

"I don't need those."

And she went off sobbing her heart out. Brothers weren't easy monsters in her world of blurred growth and incipient humanity.

Arthur continued shaping swill into barely erect castle-battlements on his island, fostering insect-nests to take root to give some semblance of unpredictable inhabitants threading in and out of the maze of half-frozen messes that the winter weather had brought about.

Often, he'd put his larger ear to the ground to see if any larger inhabitants were about to emerge, and being larger, noisier, too. The insects, if insects they were as opposed to chemically-induced mites of impossible lifeforms, merely created a relentlessly mild buzz barely above his young hearing-threshold.

He stared back at the tower-block where he saw Edith waving at him. Apparently this was the day for his schoolteacher's visit, someone who was most definitely not on Arthur's side in the race for Natural Selection amid a compet.i.tive world where children were no longer offered flying-starts. Amy turned on her heels, dropping the watering-can, but managing to keep grip on her flowerpot for dear life.

Arthur could also see-through the gap between two of the four tower-blocks-the square where a fountain played at its middle amongst four cast-iron benches where both residents and strangers could sit, given clement weather. Today, it was deserted, and the fountain frozen into the shape of the creature that had once been its free-flowing water-sculpture.