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The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s
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The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

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Waves of reality came and went, breaking over him, drenching him. Wall angles hinged. He was aware where he was going yet at moments the streets appeared a transparent rues; he imaged that this was just another mock-up of the quest he had follyed all his life, looking for some final authority perhaps: the central point of the quest never revealed itself, so that he was driving on the B route. He sang a line of Ouspenski’s: Men may torture themselves but these tortures will not make them awake. Also Charteris so worked in him that he said to himself: You see how I released more potentialities in you, Cass – you carry on several lives at once!

Men may torture themselves. He could write it for the Tonic Traffic or the Genosides or the Snowbeams to sing. Their numbers had taken over the nine-to-fives. They must make themselves awake. The magician hypnotised his sheep and they turned to mutton believing they were immortal. All flocks there to be preyed on, and this new kind no exemption. Soon to be cassoulet He always drove at more than one wheel, whoever took lead car.

In the centre of the city, people whistled along their own bones though the empty bowl held roses. The European dislocation had harvested no fields and canned no fish. In hospitals, nurses with prodromic eyes dreamed islands, doctors smiled in lunar orbits whistling down syringes or snubbed their scalpels abscessmindedly on submerged patient bones. Although it’s true the bakers ritually baked in massive factories, the formulas were scrambled and even what was edible did not all reach mouths, for the distributors so hot for truth drove their loads into amnesiac fields of wheat and lay there till they fecundated in the calendar of decay. The parliament still took its conclave but all the ceremony these last two months had brought were these laws passed: a law to stop the drinking of the good earth; a law to prohabit hats from becoming unseen when the sun set; a law to make Belgian hounds sing the night away like nightingales, with an amendment asking cats to try their best in that melodious direction too; a law to permit redness in traffic lights; a law to abolish the plague; a law against Arab invasion; a law to extend the hours of sunshine in cloudy winter months; and a far-sighted law to encourage all members of parliament to be more industrious by the granting of six months leave to them per annum.

Cass had the secret contacts. A drink in a bar, a ritual holding of the glass, a certain stance, a procedure of guarded phrases, and there was help for him and he smoking secretly with seven men. Who said to him at the end of an hour or so: ‘Sure, it’s for trade the maximum goodness that Charteris gets billed big and comes into town. Come he must. You go and see Nicholas Boreas the film director and put to him what we say.’

And Cass was given certain assurances and pay and moved along to see the mighty and highly-sung Boreas.

Under the tawning in the semi-house time buckled and they were still saddled by the sporadic barney with Him downtrodden in a multi-positional stance on a chaircase and Marta racked on the bunk-up while Angeline barn-stormed about the gesticulating room, rehorsing her old nightmares.

‘Face it, Colin, you’re now stuck on an escalation okay ride along but just don’t forget the old human loot like what you did to my husband or maybe that’s all gone overhead in your reeling skullways maybe maybe not?’

‘It was the Christmas cactus there blinding as the lorry swerved and I could never make you understand. Don’t go through all that again. It’s the velocity, girl –’

‘Verocity nothing you killed him and why should I pull down my knickers and open up my pealy gapes for you to come in beefs me oh the sheer sheer tears of every diving day and now I shape and rave at you and who knows through the encephallic centre you have shot some of that steamin’ add so I’m hipping too and like to flip oh meanin’ Christ Colin what and where the dung day dirt is done and you know how I itch I never dote a damned desire without my shift and all my upbringing undone!’

And Marta said, ‘You’re chattering your passion into threads Angel cause isn’t there enough I mean he can the carnal both twomescence and I don’t mound no moral membrane in a threesome and we sort of sisterly! Isn’t the organ-grinding the big thing?’

So she seemed to flip and like a seafouling man embarked on culling Marta for a frigid and bustless chick while egging her on with premaritimely oaths to reveal what a poultry little shrubby hen-penned canal awaited bushwanking or the semenship of motiongoing loiner under her counterplain and how those specious sulcal locks were just the antartickled coups of man’s ambit or if more trapical then merely multi-locked the vaginisthmus of panamama!

Thus spurred slim Marta unbuckled and pulled enragged away her entire and nylonvestments to kneel up flagrantly tightitted the slander ovals with an undividual stare took them like young imporktunny pigscheeks in lividinous palmystry squeezing to pot them smoothly at all rivels cried the heir erect command insprict the gawds meanwhile thirsting out her chubby plumdendumdum with its hennaed thatch of un-own feelds and throaty labyrings of kutch with cinnamons di-splayed.

The other sneered but he to her cheeky pasture lured advanced to graze and on her stirry eyepitch clove his spiced regarb as if his universion centered there his mace approaching friggerhuddle. She now as never evoluptuary bloomed in her showy exinbintion outward easily spread her cunative flower by rolling sternbawd rumpflexed to make him see the fissile smole of spicery fragiloquent of tongue almoist articulpate well-coming with spine archipelavis and her hands abreasted eagerly. He snared his bait engorged in cleft vessalage like a landlopped fissureman on the foreshawm groined.

‘So that’s the little spat that catches the bawdy muckerel the briney abasement where we scomber at our libertined gaol!’ So far all jackular but now a saltier infection. ‘I teened tined without embarkration down that slitway my jolly tarjack yearning for the fretdown of this narrow fineconment swished-for incunceration ounspeaking O where noughtical men wisely feast in silence a coop or lock-up maybe Angel but for the brightest cockalorys no lighthouse but a folderoloflesh espressionless no landmast certainly no buoy yet more than polestar to the marinader the milky wet itself the yin-and-yank by which life orients the loadstir that aweights all tonninch on the populocean incontinents awash the very auto-incestral fracturn between generoceans mother of emoceans gulf where the seacunning sextant steers and never more gladly lock we to that flocculent in carcerationen like sheep incult cumbency on the long combers O so furly I will my rompant chuck of gristle uncanvas to cell and serve as croptive to her in the shuckling socket and set soul for dungeoness!’

He launched himself to the briney swell with merry horn-poop in her focsle and cox’nd every vibrant stroke till her unfathom ablepuddle deigned and drained his saloot but her aglued mutions rollocked on.

Angeline walked impotiently outside and some of the tribe noted or did not note – caught in their own variable relationships – how her face was fleshcrumbled with folded eyes. So it was these days and no one had too much in mind of others though the mood was good – too wrapped in selfhood and even selfishness to aggress, no matter who aggrised, on alcohol or the needle. She was thrown to a sexual nadir and would not bed, not with Charteris, not with Ruby Dymond even when he folked up the blues for her, backed by infrasound and its bowelchurning effects. Even for her it was getting not for-real, as the war-showers still lingering acidly in the old alleyways, curled into her and she too dug the spectrums of thought made visible, leaping up exclaiming from a lonely blanket to see herself sometimes surrounded by the wavering igneous racks of baleful colour: or at gentle moments able to watch bushes and elms erupt in crusty outline singed by the glow of cerebral sundowns, in which climbed and chuckled a fresh unbeaten generation of mammalphibians, toads with sprightly wings and birds of lead and new animals generally that with feral stealth stayed always out of focus.

So it was also with Nicholas Boreas but more splendidly trumpets with icing oil He too had more inhabitants than reached consciousness and drank news of the motorcade miracle from Cass in his palatial bath. A mighty figure he was, bare without a hair, though with a poet’s eye he had schillered his breasts and pate by dint of a bronze lacquer to laid a sort of piebald distinction. His flower was water hyacinth and in the foetid warmth of his apartment the tuberous plants multiplied and festered. Having heard Cass’s spiel, he pushed his current nymph aside and slid under water, neptunelike, snorkel between crowned teeth. There submerged, he lay as in a trance, letting the feathery floating roots caress him; tickle his lax flesh, gazing up between the stiff fleshy leaves, nibbled by snails, nudged by carp and orfe bursting past his eyelids like coronary spasms.

Finally, he rose again, hyacinth-laurelled.

‘I’m in full agreement with your suggestion as long as I can make it my way. Pour all my genius in! It should be a great film: Charteris Auto-Trip or some such title. Maybe High Point Y? The first panorama of post-psychedelic man with the climax the emergence of this messiah-guy after the colossal smash-up on the motorway when he was killed then risen again unscathed. Ring my casting director on this number and we’ll start auditioning straight away for someone to play Charters. Also we’ll want smashees.’

Whitewhale-like he rose, brushing black ramshorns from his knotted sheepshanks and the band began to play. In his veined eye gleamed the real madness; again he could explore – now on the grandest mafiabacked scale – the fissured continent of death. His best-known film was The Unaimed Deadman, in which a white man wearing suitable garments slowly killed a negro on a deserted heliport. He had been inspired to find a negro willing to volunteer to give a real death to art; now his messianic power would transfix on a large scale the problem of the vigour-mortis intersurface.

Attended by the plushy nymph, Boreas began to issue his orders.

His organisation staggered into action.

The idea was that the film should be made with all speed to take advantage of topicality. Archives could be plundered for effective passages. Except for the climax, little footage need be newly shot Episodes from The Unaimed Deadman could be used again. In particular, there was a sequence showing the Optimistic Man doing his topological topology act which seemed applicable. The Optimistic Man walked along a wide white line with hands outstretched, his hands and head and the white line filling the whole screen against the ground. The camera slowly disengaged itself from his shoulder as the line became more intricate, rising upwards like a billowing roof, revealing that more made less sense for the Man now seemed to be doing the impossible and walking on the rim of a gigantic eye; but, with increase of altitude, the eye is seen as the eye of a horse carved from the flank of an enormous mountain. Slowly the whole horse comes into view and the Man is lost in distance; but as this anomaly clarifies another obtrudes itself for we see that the great downland on which the cabbalistic horse is etched is itself astir like a flank and itself cabaline. This mystery is never clarified, there is only the nervous indecision of the whole hill’s glimpsed movement – we cut back to the Man who now, in a white suit, stretches himself out wider and wider until he can saddle the horse. He has shed all humanity but bones; skeletally, he rides the charger, which is given motion by the rippling flank on which it is engraved.

There are sequences from old-fashioned wars, when the processes of corruption sometimes had a presynchronicity to moribundity, and a shot of a nuclear bomb detonated underground, with a whole sparse country rumpling upward into a gigantic ulcerated blister and rolling outwards at predatorial speed towards the fluttering camera. There are sequences in shuttered streets, where the dust lies heavy and onions rot in gutters; not a soul moves, though a kite flutters from an overhead wire; somewhere distantly, a radio utters old-fashioned dance music interspersed with static; sunshine burns down into the engraved street; finally a shutter opens, a window opens; an iguana pants out into the roadway, its golden gullet wide.

After this came the Gurdjieff Episode, taken from a coloured Ukrainian TV musical based on the life of Ouspenski and entitled Different Levels of the Centres.

A is a busy Moscow newspaper man, bustling here, bustling there, speaking publicly on this and that. A man of affairs whom people turn to; his opinion is worth having, his help worth seeking. Enter shabby old Ouspenski with an oriental smile, manages to buttonhole A, invites him along to meet the great philosopher Gurdjieff. A is interested, tells O he will certainly spare the time. G reclines on a sunny bedstead, derelict from the mundane world; he has a flowering moustache, already turning white. He holds onto one slippered foot. In his shabby room, it is not possible to lie: nonsense is talked but not lies – the very lines of the old dresser and the plaid cloth over the table and the empty bowl standing on the deep window sill declare it.

The window has double casements with a lever-fastener in the centre. The two halves of the window swing outwards. There are shutters, latched back to the wall outside. The woodwork has not been painted for many years; it rests comfortable in morning sunlight, faded but not rotten, seamed but not too sear. It wears an expression like G’s.

G gives what is a grand feast for this poor time of war. Fifteen of his disciples come, and some have an almost Indian unworldliness. They sit about the room and do not speak. With lying out of the way, presumably there is less to say. One of the disciples bears a resemblance to the actor who will play Colin Charteris.

In comes O, arm-in-arm with A, and introduces him with something of a flourish to G. G is very kind and with flowing gestures invites A to sit near him. The meal begins. There are zakuski, pies, shashlik, palachinke. It is a Caucasian feast, beginning on the stroke of noon and continuing until the evening. G smiles and does not speak. None of his people speak. A politely talks. Poor O is dismayed. We see that he realises that G has set this meal up as a test of A.

Under the spell of hospitality, soothed by the warm Khagetia wine, A sets himself out to be the public and entertaining man who can enliven even the dullest company. The chorus takes the words from his moving lips and tells us what A talks about

He spoke about the war; he was not vague at all; he knew what was happening on the Western Front.

He gave us word of all our allies, those we could trust, those we couldn’t, and had a bit of innocent fun about the Belgians.

He gave us word of Germany and how already there were signs of crumbling: but of course the real enemy was the Dual Monarchy.

And here he took more wine and smiled.

He communicated all the opinions of the public men in Moscow and St Petersburg upon all possible public subjects.

Then he talked about the desiccation of green vegetables for the Army: a cause with which he was involved, he said: and in particular the desiccation of onions, which did not keep as well as cabbages.

This led him on to discuss artificial manures and fertilisers, and agricultural chemistry, chemistry in general, and the great strides made by Russian industry.

And here he took more wine and smiled.

He then showed how well he was informed upon philosophy, perhaps in deference to his host

He spoke of melioration and told us all about spiritism, and went pretty thoroughly into what he called the materialisation of hands.

What else he said we don’t remember, save that once he touched on cosmogony, a subject he had somewhat studied.

He was the jolliest and certainly the happiest man-in the room. And then he took more wine and smiled and said he must be off.

Poor O had tried to interrupt this monologue but G had looked at him fiercely. Now O hung his head while A heartily shook hands with G and thanked him for a pleasant meal and a very interesting conversation. Glancing at the camera, G laughed slyly. His trap had worked.

Afterwards, G jumps up and sings his song, and the disciples join in. Gradually, the whole screen is choked with whirling bodies.

While the film was being pieced together, a French actor called Minstral was engaged to play Charteris. Because France had been neutral in the war, Minstral was one of the few prepsychedelic men left in Brussels. He played tough roles. When not filming, he kept himself apart, ate tinned food sent from Toulouse, meditated in a Sufic way, occasionally visited two young Greek sisters in the suburbs, and looked at volumes of beautiful photographs published by Gallimard.

Boreas’s script director, Jacques de Grand, made his way out to the motorcamp on the lunatic fringes of the city with a haircut full of gentian hairoil. He wanted to get some background for the messiah’s life, him and his success-drive both.

When de Grand arrived at the smokescream, the messiah was sitting on an old bedstead, picking his toes; from his two women he had only bad images; they would not yield to his healing power and he was feeling several things at once, that nothing could be done on any level unless women were involved in creative roles, that they were trapped in a history jelly, that he was a discarded I, and that the world was on the whole perched on the back of a radioactive tortoise.

‘We’re very fortunate to have you here at the early stages of your career, Mr Master, and witnessing the first miracles. How you like Belgium? Planning to stay long? Planning to resurrect anyone in the near future? My card!’

The card held a hand in it on a detachable body materialising in rubber smokelp.

‘It was the vision I had in Metz. That’s what betrayed me on my adjourney north up the web of photofailures, fleeing that Italian camp.’

‘I see.’ Quick application of more refreshing hairoil, head chest mouth. Nom, but the PCA was thick here and all hair growing whispers on it. ‘You say photofailures, I gather from reports you enlarge Ouspavski’s thought?’

‘Well like Ouspavski I dig the west got too hairy with everyone and so the Arabian nightmare was just a justice and on the ill-painted poser the near-nordic blonde grew a moustache like a shadow across her force. …

‘And so how about some more erections in the near future? Please speak clearly into the visiting card.’

The whole mesozoic mess-up of the best west pretensions going themselves with the buns turning to gutter and silence is golden but a Diners Club card gets you anywhere. It was the whole city of a ruined version I had, he told de Grand. ‘Now Europe’s bracken up from a basic oil-need-greed and beggars can ride so even Gelina and Marta and me can’t get along in a harness and all clapped out of the big ambushes of Westciv, eh?’

‘I see. You think the bill’s at last been paid?’

‘Yes, the treadbill, trodden back to low point X and the city open to the noman. My friend, that was a short round we trod, less than two hundred degenerations the flintnapping cave-sleepers first opened stareyes and we break down again with twentieth sensory perception of the circuit. …

‘I see. More hairoil quick, and you think we’re back where we squirted?’

‘… which bust be the time for real awakening from machinality and jump off the treads into a new race that I will lead.’ And the new animals falling out of new trees on the old beaches of stone.

‘Yes, I see, Master. So you have no definite pains to insurrect anyone in the near future?’

‘Angelina sees if she’s not by now hyacinth-hipped the waters of sickness wrys and where we might have been balsam only balsa on the flord but me urgenus impatiens spends on merely the unhealing womenwound that helotrope witch tows me with its bloodstone balmy fragrance unavailing nector’s womenwound me my ackilleaseheal.’

‘You motion the waters of sickness, so you don’t entirely rile out the possibility of insufflation in the near-flowering fuchsia?’

Taking back the visiting cod he filed his nail-dropping in a filing gabinetto.

‘I am a fugitive from that perfumarole yet all beneath our feet the quakeline blows and vulcanows which runway lies firm aground for all this ilyushine is a flight merely from other ilyushins and not from anything called real.’ The broken wind of his sail lay under the tall shrouds of offices.

‘I see. I see what you’re goating at. Like there’s been a disulcation. Hair owl? No? Tell me couldn’t you practise on a dead child if we brought you one?’

Charteris coughed his eyeblink a world gone then back in its imposture. Lies he could take, not disfigurements.

‘Perfect sample of what I’m trying to gut over with the prolapse of old stricture of christchen moralcold all pisserbill it is are phornographable smirch as childermastication to be hung by the necrophage until strange phagocyte of the crowd.’

‘So you deignt insufect anyone in the puncture?’

‘Lonly Angina and the flowerhip-syrup girls.’

He coughed. When world came back steadied, in the big carred-up arena, tyres were still burning. The smoke crawled and capered a black nearest brown; up the side of a ruinous housewall where wallpaper hung montaged, its shadow grew like wisteria in the palid sun. Over one side, some disciples in gaudy hats and ruby beards were making a sing-in on the torture song. Another, a guy stoked an old auto with its upholstery in flames by flinging on petrol arcing from a can. The flames flowered at him and he rolled over yelling. Several people looked across him and the unbelievable patterning of it all, life’s gaudy grey riches richer richness. The world of motion-in-stillness. All rested here today from the speed death but a migratory word and they would be away again, switched on to the signal the Master would unzip from his banana-brain. Right now, even as he proclaimed, all possibilities were open to them and under the crawling black tyresmog lay no menace that did not also swerve for poetry, so the tribe let all burn.

A strip of the motorway south of Brussels to Namur and Luxembourg had been closed to traffic Boreas’s men worked and sweated, hundreds of them, many skilled in electronics, to fake up the big smash-in.

Some got through their work by being cowboys. Yipping and yelping, they thundered down upon the frightened cars, which stampeded like mad steers along the course, tossing their horns and snorting and backfiring in the canyon of their cavalcade. Branding irons transfixed hot red figures.

Other men from Battersea treated the steeds as underwater wrecks. In mask and flippers, down they sank through the turbid air, securing limpet cameras to cabins and bows and battered sterns which would record the moment of the mighty metal storm, rigging their mikes unfathomably, helter-scootering.

Other men with mottled cheeks worked as if they were charge nurses in an old people’s home. Their patients were as smooth as they were stiff of limb, dummies with nude sexless faces, dummies without female fractures or male mizzenmasts, non-naval dummies, dummies lacking meatmuscle or temperature who pretended to be men, dummies with plaster hair and amenorrhoea who pretended to be women, dwarf dummies with a semblance to children, all staring ahead with blue eyes impevious, upholders all of the couth past wesciv world that could afford to buy its saudistruction, all terribly brave before their oncoming death, all as unspeaking O as G desired.

Rudely, the charge nurses pressed their patients into place, the backseat-drivers and the frontseat-sitters, twisted their heads to look ahead, to stare sideways out of the windows, to enjoy their speed deathride, to be mute and unhairy and non-drivnik.

It was an all-day labour, and to wire the cars. The crews revelled that night in Namur, shacking in an old hotel or sleeping in a big marquee tent pitched on the banks of the Meuse, with a beat trobbing like a temple. Boreas went belting back to Brussels and with a shivering sight stripped virgin bare, gripped tight the snorkel in his crowned teeth and sank beneath the feathery roots of his water hyacinths. The plants were spreading like a nylon nile, growing in the steamy atmosphere over the floor and up the black-tiled walls.

‘Escrape from these lootless psychedelics showing their barbed crutches round the eyes,’ he gruntled wallowing, ‘as if I don’t own all my own univorce!’

‘Don’t you believe in Charteris as new Christ, darling?’ the nymph asked, floating pasturised cowslips on the sumper surface. She was delicious to his sight and taste, good Flemish stock.

I believe in my film,’ he said and grasping her alligator-like in his jaws he looted her down into her depths.

Next day refreshed and bellyrolled, Boreas drove down towards the scene of the faked authentic speed death with his script director de Grand who gave golden speech about the Master between cranial embrocations.

‘Okay, so he was kinky about children and gone on flowers and didn’t seem to have plans about bringing anyone back from the deadly nightshade. Similar to thousand of people I know or don’t know as the case. Did you get a glimpse of his life story?’

‘You know those ruins out by Sacré Coeur, boss? They had a five gallow saturation bomb on them when the Arab air strike came down! You can’t hardly see out there. I was switched on myself and it seemed to me his logic was all logogriph and missing every fourth syllable of recorded time. That fabled bird, the logogrip, took wing, was really hippocrene in all his gutterance, where I way-did but could never plum.’

‘Cut out that jar-jargon, de Grand! A hell of a help you are! What about his bird?’ Chin belly and balls are jetting promontories.

‘I tell you the logogriph, the new pterospondee, roasts on his burning shoulder!’

‘His bird, his judy! Did you get to speak to her?’

‘He mentioned a part of her with some circumlocation.’

‘Godverdomme! Get her and bring her to me in my pallase tonight. Ask her to dinner! She’ll give me the low-down of this Master Man! Have you sot that straight in your adderplate?’

‘Is registered.’ And bennies quickly swigged down in oil.

‘Okay. And get some more snow delivered to Cass – some of the motorcaders need a harder ticket in the arterial lane. Comprenez?’

They march from each other together in the web.

His unit was already setting up the crash-in. Technicians swarmed about the location with cowherd and keelhaul cries. By somebody’s noon, the cars were all linked umbiliously with cables to the power control and the dummies sitting tight. They ran through the whole operation over and over, checking and rechecking acidulously to see if in their hippie state they had overlooked a technicolor time error. The four-lane motorway was transfilmed into a great racetrick where the outgoing species could stunt-in for its one and only one-way parade, a great tracerack in tombtime where sterile generations would last for many milliseconds and great progress appear to be made as at ever-accelerating speed they hurtled on, further from shiftless and forgotten origins the unknown target. This species on the vergin of extinction bore its role with detachment, waxed unsentimentality, was collected, chaste, impeccable, punctual, stiff upper lip, unwinking gaze. Remembered its offices and bungalows of iron sunset. Its lean servants, ragged even, not so; excitement raced among them; they all believed in this authentic moment of film-life, cared not for a fake-up, slaved for Boreas’s belief, harboured their dimensions.

And to Boreas when all was ready came his chief prop man, Ranceville, with shoulder-gestures and slime in his mouth’s corners.

‘We can’t just let them gadarine like this! It’s sadism! They are as human as you or me, in our different way. Couldn’t there be thought inside those china skulls – china thought? China feelings? China love and sincerity!’

‘Out my way, Ranceville!’

‘It isn’t right! Spare them, Nicholas, spare them! They got china hearts like you and me! Death will only make them realer! Real china death-in!’

‘Miljardenondedjuu! We want them to look real, be real. What’s real for if you can’t use it, I ask? Now, out my way!’

‘What have they ever done to you?’ The mouth all slaving lotion. ‘What have they ever done?’

Boreas gestured, brushing away a fly or snail from his barricaves.

‘I’ll tell you something deep deep down, Ranceville … I’ve always hated dummies ever since china shop-rows of them stared in contempt at me as a poor small boy in the ruptured alleys off Place Roup. That’s how I began you know! Me a dirty slum boy, son of a Flemish peasant! Weren’t they the privileged, I thought, all beautifully dresden every day by lackeys, growing no baggy genitals, working or spinning clean out the question, glazed with superiority behind glass, made in god’s image more than we? Dimmies I called them to belittle them, dimmies, prissy inhibitionists! Now these shop-haunting horrors shall die for the benefit of mankind.’

‘Your box-official verdict, so!’ Gesture of a gaudy cross. ‘Okay, Nicholas, then I ask to ride with them, to belt in boldly in the red Banshee beside these innocent chinahands. They’re sinless, guiltless, cool – I’ll bleed to death with them, that’s all I ask!’

Open mouths gathered all round turned their stained suspicious teeth to ogle gleaning Boreas, who waited only the splittest second before he bayed from his mountain top