"What's that?" shouted Susan, fl.u.s.tered but retaining the studied innocence characteristic of her.

There was what appeared to be a pier on stilts-of the seaside pleasure variety-reaching into or across a very shallow inner sea-not a sea so much as a series of dark gleaming puddles creating the feel of an elfin archipelago that had gone to seed, made from patches of black sand. Near this pier was a stained-yellow block-building of inferior architectural qualities which once-they guessed-had housed an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade. They thought they could hear the ghostly whirrings, blurps and chortles of erstwhile jollification.

And nightsome gurgles of waves against the pier's stilts.

"The pier's pillars are made of wood," said Amy, as if in a speech she'd learnt parrot-fashion. She was desperately trying to be herself, not someone else. She needed to be herself-otherwise n.o.body could sympathise with her as a potential human being. The once thick-thighed oaken hafts were slowly decaying into the brine, even as she watched them. Wilting as boniness would.

They soon pa.s.sed this real or mocked-up (they weren't sure which) version of a seaside resort from Fifties England... not even something the city had ever boasted. But here it was. Seedy growing on seedy.

In the distance, beyond the puddly sea, they all saw two small figures-no bigger than match-stick marionettes-employing their own silhouettes to crouch and peer into or under-not a manhole cover but now, far from the city proper, the first of many under-underground oubliettes that peppered the northern night lands in an un-manmade state of existence.

"I can hear something," said Mike. He heard it as if his feet were ears. A distant downward noise-not of underground trains that were what such noises pertained in the city but, rather, underground dogfights by second world war spitfires that felt just as much at home within earth as air. Yet, Mike didn't put his description of these noises into words. He was more concerned with the others in his party running away from his own position near the puddly sea towards the matchstick silhouettes that were sinking slowly into a surface which once seemed solid enough to bear their slightest weight as well as for them to walk upon.

Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls-the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls-otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city-but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn't grow. Brick is more p.r.o.ne to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south-but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.

Edith and Clare, when they fell asleep, the walls vanished as if they had never existed in the first place. And when they woke up-the walls were back where the two girls knew the walls had always been. One twin tried to stay awake while the other twin slept... so as to check out the walls, but they could not sleep or wake without the other one sleeping or waking. They dreamed each other alive.

Edith and Clare were once quite young. Now they were old. If one of them died, they wondered if the other one would also die. Identical twins were one thing, but mutual twins were twins even a step beyond mere ident.i.ty.

Greg had two recurring dreams of characters that he called (from within each dream) Edith and Clare. In one dream, they were twin sisters and, in the other, complete strangers who meet up and conduct an even stranger relationship. In the latter dream, they did not live in a city wall but in a tied cottage near a tree with an enormous knotted girth of crusted bark-about twenty-five feet in circ.u.mference at its base but a normal amount of various branches emerging in a tangle from the tapering top of this over-sized cone-topped trunk-making it seem like a normal tree from about eight feet high onwards. A bottom-heavy tree that was called a Canterbury Oak.

However, each time, before Greg could pin down any memory of the tree's ident.i.ty or its significance to Edith and Clare, he woke up with a start into a situation he could not remember how he had reached in real life prior to sleeping, until a slow waking-up process reminded him.

He was on board 'The Hawler', a vast Drill thing, with helicopter vanes, that was to take Beth and himself underground on a trip to the centre of the earth by means of a well-trodden route from the Left Foot region of the city... as the Captain had informed them-and if the vertical chimney-tunnel was already "well-trodden", they asked the Captain, why the need for it to be a Drill at all?

"Because the tunnel has closed up again, as it always does... the tectonic plates ensure we have to forge the route anew each time we make the trip from here."

The Captain's answer had an air of disinterest about it. But Greg and Beth nodded with full understanding. They had been astonished-when they first arrived on board-at the facilities of the Drill's interior. Very modern and high-tech but interspersed with antique or fine art accoutrements so as to make it feel more salubriously civilized than it actually was. They had to clamber through various tasteful 'floors' via attic-like s.p.a.ces and even smaller pa.s.sageways that one might have called open-ended oubliettes. In fact, the Captain teased them into a race from floor to floor so as to see which of them arrived first at their private cabin.

Imagine their disappointment, however, when they both breathlessly reached the highest floor in the Drill, at the furthest point from the Drill's leading edge of a bit-tip. Their cabin turned out to be a mock-up of a seedy city flat, with a damp smell, hung with stained and slightly bulging wallpaper... and a worn beige carpet or, dependent on the light, yellow carpet on the floor.

"There is always at least one thing that makes any event imperfect," had said the Captain with a wry smile, as if this explained the inferiority of the couple's quarters within the Drill.

It was here within the damp bed that Greg had awoken from his by now fully forgotten recurring dream-Beth beside him. And, indeed, the cabin itself had reverted to its original state of a sleek comfort-zone of tasteful decor. Not one single sign of seediness or mildewy carpets or peeling wallpaper anywhere.

Greg recalled, with still increasing wakefulness, that, the next day, the Drill (and them within it) would be setting forth on its big adventure. He smiled to himself as he listened to Beth contentedly dozing beside him in the cabin's plush double bed. Her snores could not disguise the trial revving noises of the Drill's bit-tip as the pilot rehea.r.s.ed its re-ignition of spinning, even now at the dead of night. The Drill's launch would be quite well prepared by the time daylight appeared, Greg was sure-and a daylight firework display would be set off in celebration, with the sparks in cascades and their colours designed even to outshine the sun... colours that would include black as well the more usual brighter colours of fireworks.

Mike took one glance at Susan, Arthur and Amy, the three of them vanishing towards the point on the dark horizon where they had seen the two small match-thin figures sink down into it-and he loped after them, conserving his energy because distances looked further than they actually were in the north's night land.

A number of black seagulls flapped their wings inefficiently above him as he plugged on beneath their migrating cloud. One defecated on him. Gulls were traditionally p.r.o.ne to a sod's-law more than any other foulness of the sky-certainly as far as human targets were concerned. But this was no normal birdmuck. It was gull vomit that stung the top of his head, searing his scalp through the hair. Gull's vomit-a sign of bad luck. Black gull's vomit-worse than the worst bad luck. All the vomit was spotted with blood-flecks whatever the gull's own body colour. So one could never be certain which type of gull had splattered you unless you saw the gull itself. And the sky's roof camouflaged any of the stub-winged birds that managed to coast or skim along its under-surface.

Ogdon sat on the customer's side of his pub's bar, staring into the decorative mirror behind the gleaming shorts and their optics. The reflective gla.s.s had the word C O U R A G E etched in swirls of artistic lettering at the top of the mirror: an advert for one of the bitters that were sold there. Ogdon could see his own face lower down between a bottle of rum and a bottle of vodka. But it wasn't his face but that of a Spanish playwright by the name of Lope de Vega who, Odgon always thought, was the author of "La Vida Es Sueno", but he also thought William Congreve had written "She Stoops To Conquer", so whether Ogdon was correct about any literary matters was anybody's guess! In any event, he imagined a dialogue between himself and the reflection in the mirror. There was n.o.body else to whom he could talk-the barmaid (a replacement for Susan) being down the other end of the bar and not seeming to have anything much in common with Ogdon; and she freely admitted to being a fan of the 'Big Brother' TV show and other Soap Operas. And it was now that no-man's-land of time between popular drinking sessions: and next to no customers were present to listen to his pub small-talk.

Ogdon: There is one people carrier.

Reflection: A people carrier?

O: Yes, a human being who's infecting the birds with a virus, and not vice versa.

R: Now that sounds possible, but how do you know?

O: Well, the birds are becoming more like red meat than white poultry-flesh when you cut them open.

R: As if they've got an animal disease?

O: Turning them gradually, from a bird into an animal or half and half. And they've caught it from us humans. Or they have just started to catch it from us humans. That's why many of them can't fly any more and only hop about. Their whole essence is somehow corrupted.

R: So, they don't need roofs to aviary cages any more in the zoo? Makes you want to cry.

O: There is one single bird that is in charge of all the other birds. Did you know that? A sort of Bird G.o.d. This Bird G.o.d is set to wreak vengeance...

R: Really? What do they call it?

O: Like all G.o.ds in religion, the birds know it with different names or no name at all.

R: If it's got no name at all, what do the birds think of when they think of it?

Ogdon pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket, placed it on the damp drink-stained surface of the bar and started to write out a few of the possible names for the Bird G.o.d. He then folded it up and returned it to his pocket. He had by now forgotten about the conversation... until the reflection brought him back by asking a further question: "Can the Bird G.o.d, whatever its name, stop birds coming in contact with the people carrier?"

"It remains to be seen," answered Ogdon, now forgetting his own point or why he had started the topic or even the whole topic itself-as if he had simply been doodling with words and concepts... in the composition of an abstract poem. If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.

"It's the beer talking" was a saying that Ogdon's mother often said-usually about his father, her husband. His mother was very wise, he thought, as he called out to the barmaid: "Chalk up on the blackboard that drinks are on Happy Hour all night!"

He returned to his thoughts, desperately wanting the people who were caught up in these thoughts of his to be believeable, sympathisable figures: because, if not, there would be no way that the conflicts in store for them would be sustainable conflicts at all. These people were in danger, he thought, of becoming mere ciphers acting in a game, or a dream, or a lie. Little did he know, however, that the people themselves (Mike, Greg, Susan, Beth and so forth)-currently on the brink of enormous human significance-were essentially real: tangible bodies with flesh and blood, owning minds that could be hurt or filled with joy, thinking thoughts that could be clarified, confused or defused.

Meanwhile, by comparison, he, Ogdon, was the emptiest cipher of them all, less real even than his own reflections. Hence, the sheet of paper.

One viewpoint is that his dream is separate, insulated, uninfecting and uninfected.

An alternative viewpoint would be that the dream itself-this we read-was infected from outside.

Or, yet, as there always are three alternatives, the dream itself infected other dreams, other realities.

Reflection: The daylight firework-display on the open plateau of the Left Foot Region was indeed a sight to behold. It was intended as environmental context for the Drill's 'lift-off'. The bright primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous bangers were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one's retina. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices and slashes of display-accentuating how faded the sky's otherwise bright backdrop had become. Meanwhile, the revving throbs of the Drill's engine took sway as the sunlight sparked off the fast-revolving bit-tip at the Drill's lower leading-edge. The pilot could be seen grappling with the controls in his c.o.c.kpit as the bit-tip finally met the beachy terrain beneath it with a sickening crunch-both the bit-tip's self-induced sparks and the crunching noise now outdoing the firework display which had previously outdone all else.

Ogdon turned from the mirror and busied himself with more pressing duties that the current Happy Hour in his pub had created.

Mike reached the area on the horizon (a horizon now turned into the hard-rippled ground beneath his feet) where the rest of his party seemed-at the previous distance from which he had viewed them-to have slowly sunk from sight. The others had, in their turn, been pursuing two stick-thin figures of child-size that, it was a.s.sumed, were the stolen or missing ident.i.ties as children of Amy and Arthur who were also in the same party pursuing the same figures. Mike's wife Susan and her teenage daughter Sudra were also in the party, so Mike panicked when thinking that something evil had befallen them. He could not remember why he was so behindhand with his own pursuit.

Any possible quicksand needed to be respected by means of a slow approach to its suspected whereabouts. He had shouted out warnings to the others. However, there was no sign of quicksand at this headpoint in the northern coalfields. The sky had, by now, grown even darker and he wondered how dark any sky could possibly grow. Was there a black blacker than black? Despite this, there was a thin effulgence which picked out an untidy mound of what appeared to be old stiff and rumpled carpet in the vicinity of where the others had last been seen. That was the only way he could describe the sight before gingerly approaching the odd crumplings to investigate what it was and whether any blackness could exceed any other blackness. This and different rhetorical questions buzzed through his head, some relatively sensible, others completely crazy or off-the-wall-and he felt himself desperate in not being able to differentiate the crazy from the sensible.

He was a hawler, he knew, and, amid the current mishmash of his mind's thoughts and questions, the concept of 'hawler' seemed-against all the odds-to crystallise. A miner went down to gather fossil-fuel never expecting to return to the surface. The word 'miner' derived from 'mine'-as in 'belonging to me'. It all seemed so simple. That was why the Himalayas were so high. It made sense. And the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral seemed to set a varying context of clarification. And the Ewbank-a brand of non-electric carpet-cleaner. Hoover, too. Who? Bewhiched-Susan's Herstyle-much was unravelling as he tried to gather his thoughts... Hurler... Horla... hair-curler...

He looked down at his own hands. The nails were too long-the recent events preventing all manner of ablution or body-care. His tongue felt his teeth, teeth that now seemed too big for his mouth-a most uncomfortable feeling. He needed to sink them into something juicy... or creamy. He needed to reach the core of things and haul off its bone-caged heart. Feast off its pulsing meaty pith. Milk its weakening metabolism. And he knew, in this context, that filters could work both ways...

At that sudden point in his thoughts, all his teeth clamped and became (or felt like) a flickering hinge of two scooped out bones.

Soon, however, the storm of thoughts subsided and Mike became worried again about the others in his party. There was a gap in the blackness of the ground beneath his feet; he lowered his head to peer into the ragged aperture. He sensed it was merely an oubliette of vacant earth-so he was amazed to find a further sense that followed the first sense indicating it was the start of a shaft that reached beyond any conceivable depth possible within the context of earthen tunnel-able dimensions. When did depth become height? Another question that was soon forgotten when he saw, in the thin effulgence, that there was a spiky hedge filling the gap in the ground-and, at the back of his mind, he somehow recalled the time when he had first encountered such a hedge, needing to thread his own body through such a tangled ma.s.s of twigs and sharp leaves. But, then, it was a horizontal hedge which grew along and from the surface of the ground. This new hedge was a vertical one; he knew instinctively it would be relatively easy to push aside and penetrate its nettly growths in a downward path-but if he changed his mind and tried to come back up through the hedge, such growths would have closed ranks, changed points of direction, with each spike jagging against the matted grain, making any escape impossible.

He heard the other's voices below him from within the hedge's ambit but he could not judge whether they called for help or for him to join them in the renewed pursuit. Nor could he judge if they had fallen accidentally through the hedge that had opened up its scratchy spindly arms to welcome them into the undergrowth (in the true sense of that word) or if they had jumped with joyful shrieks into its enticing knots of wood-nymphs. His mind was evidently still trying to play tricks on itself. At least all this explained the stick-figures that had tempted them this far. Explanation, however, is not a two-way filter.

Reflection (talking to itself with alternating prurient relish and prim properness in a now empty pub): It is hard to reconcile the earlier characters of Mike, Susan, Sudra, Amy and Arthur with their later madness in undertaking such a downward search. Mike had soon faced this conundrum even more starkly by investigating the so-called crumply mound of 'carpet' only to discover it was a pile of discarded clothes. All of them had indeed needed to take off their clothes to be able to slide with greater ease through the hedge-filled tunnel as the spikes would have otherwise snagged on the teased and worried material of even underwear. Therefore, they spent their first sleep-stop completely naked (it couldn't be called 'spending the night' as the thin effulgence that seeped through the tunnel was uniform, thus making it impossible to differentiate between seasons of time), but they had managed by then to re-establish their personalities, inhibitions and vulnerability to fear-just like the real people that they had been when first walking through the city zoo, certain then what was dream and what was not dream. This hedgy drop was another area-as with the zoo-where one could be oneself without fear of becoming other than oneself. Not confusing what was real and what was not real. What was and what was not.

Ogdon (returning out of the blue to his position opposite the mirror, cigarette glowing redly): But don't forget when they were in the zoo, someone, for whatever reason, left quite unreported one of the sights they saw in a cage just before leaving the zoo!

Reflection nodded sagely.

Amy finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the Ewbank and emptied what it contained. Not only flies from a cabbage fell out.

Greg inside the Drill, just before its 'launch' and its now famous daylight firework-display, had dreamed of Amy in various inexplicable roles-which was a bit surprising as he didn't know Amy at all well. Amy was more Mike's acquaintance than Greg's. Yet, Greg had also dreamed that he, Greg, was not Beth's husband and equally Beth's husband was not Greg. A further dream, or rather, nightmare, made him live through an existence where he and Mike were the same person-which belied their quite distinct characters as men of the world. Perhaps Greg's dream had reflected that they-he and Mike-may indeed have been distinct characters, but also that n.o.body (other than Greg and Mike themselves) could distinguish one from the other. In another dream, Greg felt as if trapped within an outlandishly huge trunk of a Canterbury Oak-unable to budge up or down. He heard voices, familiar voices, but from within the nightmare he sensed that they were quite unfamiliar voices and that he failed to grasp that it was a Canterbury Oak at all-because in the dream he was simply trapped in a vertical body-hugging coffin.

He woke in a sweat-only to feel the Drill around him starting to throb, as its pilot made a few playful testing twirls of the bit-tip before making the final teasing approach towards earth encounter.

Beth, already up, having creamed her face with beauty unguents, was standing at their cabin window, eager for the start of their trip. Indeed, it was ironic that the best view of the trip would be the one currently from this window, because soon the window would be immersed or covered with earth's own crumbly curtains for the duration. Inner earth itself was-like the city zoo-a discrete dream-territory and any dreams they dreamed once they'd entered the earth would be clear-cut dreams, unconfused with waking life-so they would need to acclimatise in due course with the new conditions. Meanwhile, they could enjoy (if that was the correct word) the blurring of reality and dreams as a thought-provoking accompaniment to the start of their journey-against which backdrop they would soon be able to enjoy dreams for dreams' sake rather than the enforced dream-curdling of the rest of their waking life which prevailed above ground, in most places, other than designated areas such as the city zoo. Speaking of which, the city zoo had a lot to answer for, because it was too high-profile, too often trumpeted as the only discrete dream zone, a fact which created a situation where most people forgot that being underground was a better way of sorting dreams from non-dreams. There was far more underground available to explore and where to spend one's time than upon the finite surface of the overground.

Greg got up from the bed and joined Beth at the window. It was yet a few minutes before the final 'lift-off' and he knew there was to be a firework display as accompaniment-a display which had apparently now started. But it was a pretty pathetic affair-a few spluttering Roman Candles, a Catherine Wheel that refused to spin on its nail, a number of bangers that farted in a spinsterly fashion. One of the fireworks, however, wasn't too bad inasmuch as it quite successfully depicted a peac.o.c.k with a fan of rainbow fire, pluming smoke in grey sculptures that reminded Greg of maps in the making. The traditional bonfire was ignited but spluttered to a dead heap since it was not doused enough in petrol... but the Drill's bit-tip at last struck the beachy terrain with a teeth-on-edge grinding... as the Drill began to delve towards its journey's path. The firework display thus soon became an irrelevancy.

Greg now sensed one of the helicopter vanes from the Drill's back flashing by their cabin window like a camera shutter strobing or a dose of rarefied migraine or a foreign flicker at the screen's edge as an old film was projected upon it.

Earlier, upon their first arrival in the Drill, Greg and Beth had met two unexpected additional paying-pa.s.sengers on board. These were dowager ladies by the names of Edith and Clare-and n.o.body knew from the way they acted, whether they were just good friends, blood sisters or more than just good friends. If they were sisters, the family likeness was quite remarkable. The Drill's Captain seemed to know these two ladies already-but he retained a professional approach to any pa.s.sengers and had promised them all to show and comment upon the various sights through the window of 'The Hawler' during the coming trip.

The two ladies were avid readers in the Drill's library, being particular fans of Marcel Proust's Du Cote De Chez Swann-and there was also much promise of them sharing their reading pa.s.sions with Greg and Beth, should there be periods during the trip when there would be time for all of them to kill...

Ogdon held his head in his hands after he had looked round his empty pub. The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of Angevin which had taken away most of his customers-and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine... or even drinking it for real.

Nevertheless, there was still activity in the city and, in the distance, he could hear the sound of serious clanking-so hugely riveting-so vastly ear-splitting and ground-grinding-he guessed it was another huge broken ship or liner being forcibly dragged for mending to the Dry Dock nearby. A gigantic contingent of shift-workers and trained apes were involved in its transport to this its temporary berth... and no doubt many of this contingent would be visiting Ogdon's pub later... but with no bar staff left, he may as well lock the doors now.

However, before Ogdon could do so, he spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn't his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke: "Help me, I'm Greg. Please don't let me be Mike. I know it's easy to confuse us but I'm the one who's on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I'm desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I am Greg."

Ogdon's own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.

"I'm Greg," continued the face opposite. "Help me, I'm Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike."

It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his gla.s.s across the bar and it smashed itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror's contents.

But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice: "I'm Greg. Please don't let me be Mike."

And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Crazy Lope was settled in front of his drink of Angel Wine, surrounded by the customary sticks of furniture that populated the top flat of an inner city block. He had just switched off his wireless because, he guessed, the news was full of lies. His cape hung on the door-hook like a giant bird-of-prey at rest. He stared at the Angel Wine before daring to take a sip. It was sold like milk in the city these days, without fear or favour, to rich and poor, young and old, sane and insane alike. In fact, it looked like milk, but even whiter, creamier. The supplies had been freed up to prevent a black market emerging for it-yet a lot of money was still being made by those who were supplying it. From whatever source, n.o.body knew. Its original tradename was Angevin, but most customers in the city could only get their mouths round the English tongue-and soon Angel Wine (a very evocative name, as it turned out to be, from the mouth of whoever coined it) took over and now it was on all tongues.

Lope slowly raised the gla.s.s to his lips and allowed them to sip slowly, then sup noisily, lapping with a relish... not at all like milk to the tongue's feel or taste, but more a slimy consistency with a fabricated flavour of aniseed which could not really conceal its insipid chemical quality: he sensed a deeper undertaste or aftertaste even more insipid. He was savouring not so much the taste or drinkability for a deadened thirst but more the mental effects that sped to his brain in a direct socket-to-socket fashion from the tongue, or so it seemed. The relishing experience prevented him from spotting that he had accidentally spilled some of the Angel Wine-in a slow motion of the liquid's sluggish specific gravity-to his flat's carpet.

Somewhere, in a clouded mirror, appeared a wide face-wider even than the mirror itself so that one could not see the face's edges, howsoever they stretched beyond the mirror's frame. Slowly, but as quickly as the time pa.s.sed, the wide face grew cloudier and yellowier-and a beak emerged as part of a narrow face from within the original wide one that faded from around the second face, with a pecking and sharp-nodding combined.

"I'm me. Please don't let me be other than me..."

And tears runnelled down the face like Angel Wine.

The words spoken, however, weren't from an English tongue.

Sudra squatted with her young nude body upon a narrow ledge in the thin effulgence of the hedgy tunnel. Her companions snored nearby-in equally precarious sleeping perches-no doubt dreaming. They had just undergone a long but relatively easy descent so far-and it didn't seem to matter that none of them truly appreciated the real purpose of their quest. A quest for a quest was the nearest they could come to it. In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts they would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times.

The hedge itself had almost helped their descent of pa.s.sage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected-but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance. The only real problem was the soot-like substance that clung to the hedge's twigs and branches, a damp consistency that Arthur seemed to recognise (but he kept his cards close to his chest) and that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they'd heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey. The stickness (not sickness or even stickiness) of the two pursued creatures, suspected as subst.i.tutes for Amy and Arthur, was simply more than a dream away-despite their often hearing these creatures crackling (if not cackling) further down in the hedge towards even lower regions than anyone could imagine approaching without feeling the traditionally believed molten heat of earth's Core.

Soon enough, Sudra herself dozed off on her ledge and dreamed. She dreamed of being a small girl again and of the Christmas when she was due to receive a pair of new shoes as a present. She knew it was a real dream because she was dreaming it far beneath the surface of the earth-and it mattered little that the events in the dream took place above ground and in the past and upon her old bedroom carpet. She simply knew instinctively within (and, later, from outside) the dream that it was a real dream and not real life-although the dream was about real life, a real life from the past, filtered by both her dreaming and waking minds-so it was uncertain whether the dream was exactly how the real events once were-but they were surely close enough to reality to be called a reflection of reality in the future of the past, Sudra's past.

Those promised new shoes had been important to her as a very young girl that Christmas: more important than anything else before or since. Even the flies in the cabbage were forgotten when she turned her mind towards the prospect of the new shoes that she had been promised. The flies in the cabbage had been originally important because she'd been instructed to clean the cabbage ready for supper and the task had now taken on a frightful dimension when she discovered a nest of black stringy flies at its heart. All she needed to do, however, was to think of the new shoes (which she imagined as supple yellow leather with blue laces)-and then all the troubles that beset her young mind seemed to be a.s.suaged, healed, removed to a new dimension where she did not exist and if she did not exist there why should she worry about anything that happened in that dimension? This was not exactly an out-of-body experience but more a projection of a troubled ghost from her body into areas where that ghost could be left to cope with problems by paradoxically escaping the same problems otherwise besetting her real self-here-today.

She dreamed about all that in the future but once upon a time she had lived through it all for real, indeed lived through all such thoughts as real thoughts. She tried not to recall who had told her to clean the cabbage. It was probably her late father (whose name she had since blotted from her mind). He had been a nasty man. She hated him and pitied her mother. She was later pleased when he died and Susan eventually remarried, and Mike became her stepfather. But in those old days Sudra pitied Susan having to live with such a nasty man as her real father. It had been Susan who had promised Sudra the new shoes-and, as the words 'new shoes' returned to Sudra's mind, the thoughts of her father, then and now, dispersed into forgotten memories, yet memories that lurked and silently threatened to return should she lower her guard. So as to prevent this eventuality, she kept repeating the words, 'New shoes, new shoes', time and time again, until the words 'New shoes'-more and more quickly said-took on a new meaning, almost a new sound, a new single word: 'Newshoes' and she could not even visualise its spelling, least of all fathom its meaning.

"Flies in the cabbage" became another expression or mantra which she tried to enchant with her chanting repet.i.tion of this phrase's syllables. "Flies in the cabbage, flies in the cabbage", trying to weld the words into unbroken letters and unbroken fragments or phonemes or morphemes. Yet, on this occasion, the spell didn't work and it brought her dead father to the bedroom door, staring at her, beady-eyed and smiling. Sometimes, smiles were evil. Indeed, smiles were always evil. People only smiled if they wanted to get something out of you, achieve something, delude someone. A smile was always a lie. Even her mother's smile, Susan's smile, hid something below it. And at that moment, the dream became a nightmare as a swarm of flies flew from her dead father's mouth and nose.

She woke with a start. Not from the dream she was dreaming but from the dream she was dreaming about.

"New shoes, New shoes, New shoes," she quickly chanted as she found herself in her dark bedroom-at the cusp of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She smiled to herself as she saw a shadowy figure with a prodding horizontal beard at the place where its chin should have been-with a long cape-like body silhouetted against an even darker backdrop, a backdrop that seemed to ooze the natural darkness into the room. She hoped she knew who this figure was. She convinced herself she knew the real colour of the cape-enveloped shape, because red wine often did look like black wine when Susan left a bottle of it in a dark corner. The figure placed a package on the bed, with a crinkly paper sound, together with its heavy weight upon her feet that were in the part of the bed where the package had been laid upon it. She sighed and fell asleep with a sense of satisfaction, submitting herself to dreams she was destined not to remember when she woke up on Christmas morning.

The Christmas bells woke her with a steady tolling-and the sun surprised her with its Winter power as it shafted through the ceiling-light and also surprised her how it had not woken her before the bells had woken her. "New shoes" were the first words she spoke-both an incantation and an expression of truth as she pounced out of bed intent on reaching the package left at the end of the same bed from which she had just pounced. The words doubled up on themselves in unnecessary repet.i.tive patterns as if to delay the time before she opened the package, because, even if she herself didn't realise what was happening, everything-else-that-could-think thought that she would be devastated by the contents of the package and anyone describing these events needed to spend as much time describing these events as possible to delay the inevitable-describing aspects of the room, its carpet, the sunshine, the bells, all of which were quite untrue-in the increasing desperation of preventing the young girl from reaching the package in which she believed were lovingly wrapped new shoes of supple yellow leather and blue laces that she had been promised for Christmas, new shoes with feminine tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, small studs on the soles to create sparks on the pavement, vestigial spurs on the heels to allow her to pretend she was an elf or fairy-and toecaps of silver beauty that would spark more naturally than the studs without any sharp friction, sparking in the sunlight that still shafted through the ceiling-light as she finally, inexorably reached the package, eager to unwrap it without caring whether the wrapping-paper was torn in the process because the all-important things were the package's contents, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes, the new shoes that she would wear all day, that perfect Christmas Day-and Boxing Day, too. And, in the end, she reached the package without much help or hindrance from outside forces and she started to unpeel the various wrappings as if it were a pa.s.s-the-parcel game for one person. A cunning game for first thing on a Christmas morning. She could not hear her mother stirring-although she sensed the front room fire was already blazing. And, at last, there they were-the new shoes in all their glory. She whispered "new shoes" through her milk teeth, with awe and wonder and an intoxication beyond any angel's wine. She was past all possible excitement. This was now a tranquil moment, amid the hubbub of her busy childhood. A moment to cherish forever. If a moment could indeed last forever. The new shoes were no disappointment. Supple yellow leather, indeed, and black laces. Not blue laces, but that didn't matter. The colour of the laces was only a minor detail. These were perfect shoes. The new shoes to complete a childhood. All else could be forgotten.

She woke she knew not from which dream within which other dream. The nightmare was not the contents of any dream but not knowing how many dreams she had to travel as dreamer and dreamed to get back to her real self. "New shoes," she whispered through her milk teeth or through her old yellow teeth or through her toothless mouth. "New shoes," she repeated as she walked to her bed on bare floorboards, the carpet gone. All that she was sure about was that the laces had tied themselves.