DAVID MATHEW

David Mathew was born to the north of London in 1971, and lives in the general area nearly 33 years later, although in the meantime he has lived and worked in Wales, Australia, Egypt and Poland. He is the author of 400 pieces of fiction and non-fiction and is working on a novel and two film scripts.

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BRAINWRECK MEALTIMES

I. Cocktails

It was late when Solomon arrived home. Armed with a packed and heavy briefcase, he dragged his key from the lock; he entered the building and smelt the evidence of a burnt meal from Flat Nine. He was tired; not even the smell could make him panic, as it usually would. Unenthusiastically, Solomon eased the door closed, then he shuffled through the remaining unclaimed mail in the basket (nothing for him) and took himself up the stairs. It was time for bed.
      The cleanliness of the air within was what alerted Solomon - was what alarmed a part of his depths that had only been touched by two events, two tragedies, in his life - to the fact that change had occurred in his flat. The air was wrong. He deposited his briefcase. The air should have smelt of old cigarette smoke; but it didn't. The air was as pure as city air ever got: untasteable, but above all, cold - above all, moving. Christ, thought Solomon, moving quickly into the lounge, I've left the balcony doors open all day…
      Or…
      For less than a second - for the time that it took for fear to infiltrate every organ in Solomon's body - Solomon imagined that his brother had somehow gained entrance to the flat. Another black man was standing by Solomon's low coffee table. In that fraction of a second Solomon experienced something rare: genuine disdain for his mother. Despite his voiced wishes to the contrary, Mum had passed on a copy of the key to Zach…
      But it wasn't Zach. It couldn't be Zach: Zach was taller, with more meat on his bones and less hair on his head. This man Solomon had never seen before. His fear arrived in the form of anger.
      'What the hell are you doing in my flat?' asked Solomon.
      'Woe, mate. Easy, tiger,' said the man by the low table. The hands he held up were empty, plump, their palms as pink as ham - in distinct contradiction to the cappuccino colouring of his sausage-like fingers. His hands were a breakfast apiece, shockingly salted with sweat. 'It's nothing much.'
      'You're in my flat! Get out!'
      'I'm leaving, man, I'm leaving.'
      An exit would require close contact in the hallway. He could attack me, thought Solomon, going on to wonder how he would reach the telephone before a similar fate emerged. His heart burned; his mouth dried up.
      'Y'ain't got nothing work stealing anyway,' said the visitor. 'You live like a monk, man.'
      Solomon frowned. 'Yeah I know,' he replied. 'Thanks for the social commentary. Stay where you are.'
      'I'm leaving.'
      'Not before you have a talk to the police you're not,' said Solomon.
      'Fuck that gibberish, guy! Day I talk to them's day you put me in a box.'
      Solomon paused. 'That doesn't even make sense,' he told the intruder. 'How did you get in?'
      'Balcony doors, mate. Weren't too canny if you wanna know the truth of it. You'll have a proper burglar one day…'
      'What are you then?' asked Solomon, regaining a semblance of confidence.
      'Desperate, mate. Money-desperate. I'm a painter-decorator.'
      '…This is getting surreal…'
      'You're telling me. What's the most expensive thing you own?' asked the man who was yet to be a burglar.
      'My computer. And you're not having it.'
      'And what's with all these books?'
      Solomon shrugged. 'I like to read. You should try it.'
      'Hark at you, guy. Sarcasm an' all.'
      Another pause ensued.
      'So what happens now?' said Solomon.
      The burglar did something that Solomon had not expected, and what was more he did it quickly. Violently, even. It was almost as though a film had been unprofessionally spliced. One second he was standing up, a picture of petulant self-defeat; the next, he had plumped himself down on Solomon's buxom couch, and was crying. Is this a trick? thought Solomon, stunned by the suddenness of the display. The intruder was leaning forward, his shrubbery head imprisoned in his hands. Sniffing and whimpering like a pup. And the tears looked as real as tears ever did; they spoke of futility, bad luck and the souring of expectation.
      Solomon wanted to put his arms around the man.
      'I'm sorry…'
      'It's okay, it's okay,' said Solomon, remaining neither deaf nor blind to the fact that this might be a scam - sympathy-inducing, weakness-inducing crocodiles. 'Man, it's fine.'
      'It's Clement.'
      The tears: so rarefied, husky; so indeterminate and sharp: they did not discontinue.
      'Name's Clement.'
      'Oh. Well I'm sorry…' That was wrong. 'I'm Solomon,' the other man forced out. 'Welcome to my home.'
      And the tears, the tears; the weeping, the lachrymae…
      'Thank you.'
      …How it came! How they fell! The bogginess of his ample nostrils…
      'What's wrong?' asked Solomon, eventually, helplessly, after a sizeable portion of the crying jag had elapsed. Others' tears had always made him feel cold.
      Slowly Clement raised his face. The eyes burned palely - silhouetted islands in twin pink lakes - and the lips had lives and directions of their own. 'Oh guy,' said Clement, 'I'm so sorry. I'm just… God. I'm just so sorry.'
      Fearing another outbreak of emotion, Solomon said, 'It's okay. It's okay, friend.' Friend? he immediately challenged himself. Hasn't it come to something when you're striking up an instantaneous rapport with the guy who has come to take your belongings?
      'I just need so much money,' Clement explained. 'So much money. So much. You wouldn't believe what my bird demands.'
      'Me too,' Solomon replied.
      'I know, I know: I'm a cunt. I should leave.'
      There was a second or two of emptiness, and then Solomon - knowing full well that he might be pitching his tent in a gale - said something that surprised them both.
      'Would you like a drink?' he asked. 'Seriously. Would you like a drink?'

II. Entrée

'A drink?' repeated Clement as if the word was a trap or a hoax. 'Are you having one?'
      I'm tireder than I thought, Solomon told himself. He was staring into the bleachlit guts of the refrigerator. The wine bottle was hiding itself like a sniper.
      Solomon blinked. There! It had been there all along, and now he retrieved it with an archaeologist's glee: the touch to his fingertips as cold and gluey as mud.
      'No. I don't drink,' he said. 'But I have some wine.' He exhibited the crock of gold. 'My brother left it here the other night. He stayed over.' Solomon was still peering into the fridge with the fascinated gaze of the scientist. What was wrong? He couldn't even recognise the food as being his. 'He could only manage the two bottles before he passed out.' Feeling guilty for the sarcasm, Solomon turned back to Clement and raised his eyebrows.
      'Sure. Glass a wine a be good. How come you don't drink?' asked Clement.
      'Recovering.'
      'Cool. Bad luck.' Clement nodded.
      'Thanks.' Solomon poured and then replaced the stone-cold bottle. He filled the kettle and flicked the switch; the kettle made sounds of waking, of toil.
      Clement chose his moment (he waited another three seconds) before asking: 'How long?'
      'Three years…'
      'Good for you, man. I sometimes think - '
      'Seven months…'
      Clement raised his fluffy brows. 'And?'
      'Nine days.'
      Clement nodded. 'My sister was the same, yeah? Like a sump. And you know how I find out? I'm on a train, right - I'm working on a paint job, in me overalls an'at? - and he's sitting there, man: two seats away. The boss: her manager. Don't even know me, right? - but I was at their Christmas bash, as a guest, and I knew him. He gets a call on the moby dick. "Blah de blah" - figures. Bollocks. You know the deal. Seen 'em.
      'And then he's like, "Shit day, actually. Really rough one - Charles. I had to let Beverley go." Why almost lamped the cunt. Really. And then he's like, "She came in drunk again." It was that word did it. "Again." So I'm listening. "Eleven o'clock" - and I'm going, scotta be another Beverley, right? "But I needed evidence."' Clement laughed plumply. 'So bumping into the 'atracks and the fucking paper fucking…' Clement made the sign of a piece of paper being torn.
      'Shredder!' said Solomon with uncharacteristic suddenness.
      Clement nodded. "The paper shredder - that weren't enough. But anyway. So he send one a the girls in the office inna the bogs to follow her in, right? She's not even subtle about it: doing a fucking line of Charles Dance on the sink.'
      'Cocaine?' Solomon wished to clarify.
      'And this girl's like, "Sorry, Bev." And Beverley's like, 'Sokay. Just do it. Just make it happen: the next thing. Make it happen."'
      '…Jesus. So what did you do?' asked Solomon.
      'Went round there. Give her a squeeze,' said Clement.
      Solomon had just enough time to wonder whether squeeze was a euphemism for slap, punch, kick - before Clement added:
      'The least I could do. Bit a comfort, yeah? "Time for help," I said. "Be big, Dolly. It's time for help." She ust crieden said yeah: help's good.'
      'Man,' said Solomon.
      'It's screaming innit?'
      Or he said something like that, thought Solomon. It might have been creaming. 'What happened to her?' he asked the man who had become his confessor.
      Clement sighed. Of errant attention, he plucked at his left eyebrow and inflated his lips to a comic cubic-capacity. In truth, Solomon now feared a recurrence of the weeping; but it didn't transpire. Understanding, growth and wealth - spiritual wealth - fled his features in gushes. What remained was not a shell, not quite; what remained was a cretinization of a two-second-previous past; a child.
      'Don't remember,' said Clement. 'It's just rank innit? I don't remember whatever happened to her.'
      'It's okay.'
      'It's rank. Where's me memory?' he asked, genuinely and not rhetorically. 'It's disgusting.'
      'It's okay, Clement,' said Solomon.
      With a voice as stiff as a starched collar Clement continued. 'She depends on me so much, guy.'
      Not again, thought Solomon and skated the glass of wine over to the Clement with the maximum of practical speed.
      'Thanks.'
      'Thanks,' said Solomon too. 'Your girlfriend?'
      Clement was suddenly stern. 'Do you know what her new thing is, mate? Tits,' he said. 'She wants to get her tits done. I say, "Dee? Get 'em done on the Nash Nelf." She says no. Gets well haughty. Giving it - "Nash Nelf's rubbish" - all this. "Come out with two different sizes" - and all that. "Different shapes, man - like a rugby ball and a fucky space 'opper." Jesus.' He laughed. 'What a carry on, eh? What a carve up. Birds!'
      'I'd like to help,' said Solomon quietly, 'I really would, but you see…'
      'No, mate - you're all right. You're all right,' said Clement with an air of low appreciation. 'Books ain't gonna do it, are they?'
      'I doubt it.'
      'No. Stupid idea. Stupid.'
      After rinsing his mouth with saliva, Solomon said, 'Don't be so hard on yourself, Clement.'
      At which point a scratching noise could be heard, a slithering and a skittering; it was the sound of a key in the lock on Solomon's door. Both Solomon and Clement remained still. Whatever next? thought Solomon.
      The door opened. Preceded by giggling and by mock-urgent insistences for quiet, a man and a woman in their thirties fell into the flat. Clearly, they'd been drinking: if the behaviour hadn't given this away, then the fumes they were producing would have taken on the challenge. Equally clearly, there was a sexual agenda that the two of them intended to adhere to. With a smile on her face, the woman leaned back against the wall and pulled her partner closer by tugging on his tie. As he slipped his hands onto her derriere, she licked the underside of his chin and worked on his belt buckle…
      Solomon got to his feet. Surprisingly, the feeling that was proving the most intensive was that of acute embarrassment. 'Excuse me,' he said as he breached the threshold into the hallway. How perfectly British, he thought. He was still carrying the glass. 'Excuse me, but…' His mind was racing. A few months earlier, his mother had called to ask if Solomon would give his brother, Zach, a key to the flat; his mother (Solomon suspected) had at least grown tired of picking up the tab for Zach's taxis. Zach would sometimes work in Solomon's town on IT support contracts. On such occasions, Zach would round off his days with explosively alcoholic sessions in The Dirty Rat, where he would attempt to seduce a particular co-worker into bed. When that failed (when her boyfriend turned up) Zach would realise that he was too late to make the train connections home and that he'd be killing time on a platform somewhere. So he'd take a taxi to the next town along - to Mum's place - and she would pay.
      Solomon had said no to the key idea. He didn't want his flat to be used as a hotel. If Zach called on an evening when Solomon was still awake, then of course he could crash for the night, but otherwise… So. Mum had given her own key, had she? Well, Solomon was not best pleased about that; but ho won earth had these two strangers got hold of it? And at what price?
      Only a few seconds had passed, but Solomon was of the opinion that this should have been ample time to have secured the attention of the interlopers - whether they were drunk or not, randy or not. He said, 'Excuse me,' with a good deal more force.
      The man and the woman were kissing in the hallway. She was kneading his protruding penis…
      'Get out of my flat,' said Solomon, experiencing a rush of déjà vu. But so engrossed in their moment were they that they failed even to hear his demand. Indeed, the woman's apparent efforts to yank the man's erection from his body now intensified.
      Solomon was less than a metre from them. 'For Christ's sake - stop,' he pleaded. Or at least, he thought - at least acknowledge me. But other matters burned in Solomon's mind. Why, for instance, had the couple shown no surprise at the lights being on?
      'Wait,' breathed the man.
      Solomon's face burned with acceptance and relief, but only briefly.
      'I need the loo,' the man went on. 'You get into bed…'
      'I want to watch,' she replied.
      'Listen to me,' said Solomon. He didn't know it yet but his hands had started shaking.
      'Hey, lovebirds!' said Clement from a point very close to Solomon's back. (He hadn't heard him approach.) 'The fucking flat's booked for the night, all right? Be on your way.'
      The irony of the utterance was not lost on Solomon, but it was buried under a rising pile of panic. His ears were awash with blood-noise. Disconnecting himself from his lover's clutches, the man walked directly at Solomon, a twinkling smile on his face and a single word - 'Cheeky!' - on his lips.
      'Be quick!' said the woman, ducking left into Solomon's bedroom.
      'Jesus,' said Clement.
      Led by the questing nose of his engorged rig, the male lover closed the gap between his partner and Solomon in two small steps. Solomon raised his hands…
      The pain that he had expected - the jolt of brisk contact - did not arrive. What came was infinitely worse: a discordant recognition of his own pulse, but raised to rock-stadium decibelage. (He imagined having to apologise for the noise to his neighbours in the morning.) A scream of his own blood; a weakening of limbs and a cracking of joints… The only sensation that Solomon had in his banks was a memory of slotting a light bulb into a socket in a low-rent Egyptian hotel. The shock he'd received for his troubles had thrown him from the bed.
      'Nooooo…' screamed Solomon -
      … as the untethered lover moved quickly through a body that seemed to have lost all substance, all form.
      Solomon tingled and spasmed. He fell down on the carpet. Effortlessly the man plucked his way out of Solomon's spine and cranium; Solomon's drink spilled against the door to the storage cupboard. The glass cracked neatly: bowl and stem. And Solomon looked up. What he saw was as bad as what he'd experienced:
      Clement, stunned (his mouth open, the circumference of his eyes unenlargeable), swiping at the shoulders of a man who could walk through walls…
      Said man now torched the bathroom light; he stood before the sink, fully clothed but with his manhood maintaining its salute. He eschewed the lavatory itself, and begun to go into the basin. Solomon even sympathised: waking on many an occasion in a similar state, he'd been obliged to stand two metres from the toilet and put his faith in the Hands of God, moving closer only as the urgency dwindled. It was easier to angle it down a little bit…
      'He's pissing in your sink, guy!' said Clement, but the remark held little vigour. It sounded as though Clement had just been trepanned and asked to comment on an aspect of higher physics. The reason for this he now elucidated:
      'He went right through you, man…'
      Solomon's body felt far from normal and far from resilient. Though able to pick himself off the floor, Solomon was unable to train his mind to travel in one direction at a time; unable to identify a source for the problem's solution.
      They can't hear us, he thought abruptly distilled clarity. They can't see us. We're not here.
      'He went right through you,' Clement repeated.
      Or they're not here, continued Solomon.

III. Pudding and Pie

During the first ten minutes of their lovemaking, with the smoking the cigar of his penis while riding her lover's still-clothed face as she would have a dolphin's body through azure and tepid waters, both Solomon and Clement learned the names, or at least the monikers, of the interlopers. Responding to something he did correctly with his tongue or nose or chin or eyelashes (it was hard to tell) she gasped and said, 'Yes, Bob…' as though confirming an answer to an over asked question. All they learned from the man, however, was 'Babes'. It seemed to work.
      'We shouldn't be watching this, man,' said Clement, failing to remove his eyes from the spectacle.
      'They're in my bed!' Solomon protested.
      Babes slid down and took her place on Bob's hips, looking at the mirror on the wall. Bob regarded her back and with calmly lingering fingertips he traced both the carnation tattoo on her spine and the dimples in her buttocks. They took a few seconds to get they rhythm right.
      'Pissed as cunts innit,' said Clement.
      'Apparently.' Solomon wondered how the world would appear when he awoke from this dream. Would the sky be thrashing and molten? Would there still be life on earth?
      Solomon worked for a brick and tile company; his work was telephones and his working life was ordered. At twelve-thirty he had a lunch break. Around three he loosened his tie, sensing the finishing line of another day. This couldn't be happening.
      Clement had shown no indication of wanting to leave. In single file - not that there was any choice in this matter - he and Solomon had followed Bob into the bedroom, where Babes, naked, had already established her place in the king-sized bed. Astonished, the two black men had watched the scene unravel. Now -
      'Do you see her reflection?' Solomon asked. He was still standing by the door. On the other hand, Clement had moved some laundry from the reading chair and had deposited the clothes and towels on top of the television.
      'Yeah, man,' said Clement. 'She got nice tits. I wouldn't mind…'
      'Her tits don't enter into it,' Solomon snapped. 'You see her, right?'
      'Yeah. Keep yair on.'
      'And do you see yourself? In the mirror.'
      'What?'
      Solomon's tone softened. 'Please, Clement. One party in this room is alive and one party in this room is dead.' He gulped. The fajitas he'd eaten at the station came back to haunt him with a savage and electrical burp. It hadn't been as difficult to say it as he'd imagined it would be. 'I think the first thing I should be doing is making sure which is which.'
      Clement rose.
     
      'Christ,' said Clement an hour later, 'in they got homes to go to?'
      'That's not funny,' said Solomon.
      'Sorry. But look at 'em, man! I don't mind admitting, I be snoozing by now. I mean… he's not much in terms of a rig, but you can't fault his stamina. Thought white blokes were supposed to be shit.'
      'Well he's not. They're not,' said Solomon, who had never been to bed with a white woman. The air was full of the punchy drug of vaginal secretions. More you get, more you want. The air was pluvial - it was desperate - enthusiastically vegetabular. Solomon hoped that Bob would come soon.
      But he didn't. No doubt a thoughtful lover, Bob was ensuring that they both got their money's worth, withdrawing from her folds or from behind her teeth (making Solomon think, incongruously, of a cartoon mouse on a lightning raid from the skirting board - that forgotten piece of food) every time he got close to the jackpot and applying his tongue, his fingers, his nose, until he calmed down again.
      'Guy's an animal,' said Clement, not without awe.
      'The chair,' said Babes.
      All eyes now on the chair, but only one pair focusing on the man who was lounging in its cushions. Briefly but potently, Solomon imagined that Clement had been seen. But no: the words were a suggestion, a request - an order.
      The lovers started to relocate.
      'Oh man,' said Clement.
      'Get up!' said Solomon. 'Get up!'
      Clement stayed put. An irascible but childish grin swept the years from his features. 'Wanna feel, man,' he said quietly. 'Never been in a threeway. Not for ages,' he corrected himself briskly.
      Bob - sweating Bob, with his wide hips and his nova of back-hair, sat down on the reading chair and slid through Clement without displacing him any more than a few centimetres to either side. Clement's dark face lapped inside and outside of Bob's, like an undertow. The noise? The noise was shock and late evening trainwreck; the noise was rhumba and thunder and tidal. Clement shrieked. His eyeballs rolled out of their sockets, then snapped back home with the sound of a fish being reeled in.
      Babes joined the two gentlemen, her knees on the armrests, her breasts against both Bob's and Clement's lips. Like a proud mother hen she settled down and wriggled for comfort.
      Clement's head lurched backwards. What's he saying? thought an anxious Solomon, stepping closer.
      'Weird mango, man,' said Clement. 'This is some damn weird mango…' With which he reached through the lovers to unbutton his own fly.
      Babes laid her hands on the windowsill. Only Solomon noticed this, and assumed at first that it was for the purpose of supporting herself - an anchor. But she was reaching under the curtains for something. Solomon watched her find it… withdraw it. Its edges caught the only light available, that which was coming from the hallway - shining through Solomon (he now noticed for the first time) as though he were tiffany.
      'No,' Solomon had time to mouth. Intending to knock the knife from Babes' hand, he strode forward, his fists bunched, his blood malarial. But his strike connected with nothing…
      Unlike Babes'. Confidently, powerfully, she drove the blade into the back of Bob's head. Blood came running…
      Bob started screaming. Bob had the voice of a pig, mid-slaughter. Not that it was enough to deter his attacker's ministrations: as though she were trying to unblock a drain she was now ensuring that the knife wriggled ably in his lower skull. She was numb: or so it seemed. Dead-fish cold was her face. Her eyes were painted marbles: pinched.
      'Oh I love you,' said Babes as -
      Bob attempted to rise from his seat. But it was too late. Blood was flowing down his and Clement's shoulders. (Clement wasn't shrieking. What had he felt?) And Babes leant backwards…
      Again, Solomon attempted to deflect the strike. It was ineffectual: the blade clipped into Bob's throat and a fresh geyser erupted. Bob's vocal protests now gurgled moistly; waves of blood ran down his chin and onto his tie.
      Clement and Solomon could do nothing but watch. It was not over quickly, but neither was it long before the events slowed down and mellowed. Seemingly without a care in the world, Babes pulled herself off her impaler and stood by as Bob slid to the right and half-fell over the armrest. For the first time in a good few minutes his face and Clement's became fully detached. And for all its liquidity, Clement's appeared frozen.
      'Mango,' he was repeating. 'Seriously weird mango, man.'
      'Don't call me Babes,' said Babes. 'My name is Georgie,' said Georgie. 'As in Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie.' She smiled. 'Kissed the boys and made them cry.'
      Said Solomon: 'Jesus.'
      Said Georgie: 'Christ. Do you have to make so much mess?'
      Said Clement: 'Mango…'
      As Georgie dipped down onto her haunches and set about removing Bob's fingers.

IV. Main Course

'I'm leaving,' said Clement - it was becoming a familiar refrain.
      'No you're not. Nor am I.'
      'We can't stop her, man!'
      'We don't know that,' said Solomon.
      'She goes right through us! Or the other way round… I can't watch this.'
      Georgie was now slicing fillets from the dead man's podgy jawbone. She was whistling an Elvis Presley tune - 'Heartbreak Hotel' - and mumbling the odd word or phrase.
      Clement and Solomon adjourned to the lounge.
      'It's down at the end of Lonely Street,' they heard.
      'We haven't tried merging ourselves,' said Solomon.
      'I ain't merging with no one, mate!' said Clement. 'But I agree. Do you know something? We have a job to do, don't we? There's a reason why we're here.'
      'I think so.'
      'Good. What is it?' Clement asked.
      'I don't know. What do ghosts usually do? Haunt people.'
      'Are we ghosts?' The notion clearly shocked Clement more than it had Solomon on arrival at his station.
      'I don't know what else we can be.'
      'Shit.'
      'What's the name of your girlfriend, Clement?'
      'Dee,' said Clement defiantly.
      'Short for?'
      Clement paused. 'I don't remember.'
      Solomon nodded. 'As I thought,' he said, well aware of the wanky arrogance of the statement. You can knock that nonsense off right away, my boy, he told himself. 'Listen. I don't remember where I was tonight. I know I was at work, but what do I do? It was midnight when I got in. I'm in a suit, Clement; I'm not fighting fires or dealing with Uzi drive-bys all night, so what do I do that gets me in in the early hours? I don't even think this is my flat. I can't find my keys.'
      'Where's the electricity meter?' Clement asked.
      'No idea. See?'
      'She killed us, man,' said Clement with slow discovery. 'Like she did that dude in there.'
      'I think you're right. I think we fucked her and then she did us with a knife.'
      'Well I fucked her first.'
      'Whatever. We're dead, Clement.'
      'Jesus. I don't wanna be dead.'
      'No. I can appreciate that,' said Solomon. 'Question is, what we gonna do about it?'
      Clement's brow stiffened. 'Wait,' he said.
      'For what?'
      'For Bob to join us.'
      Solomon nodded. 'Stand up,' he said.
      They touched. The boom of blood and the whine of gristle this time did not materialize; instead a soothing purr and a distant sea-like gossip reached their ears.
      'Closer,' said Solomon.
      Like waves, like breezes, they moved into one another, eyes closed and emitting babyish sighs of chuckling contentment. The pains of which they had been unaware - the heartburn, the knee-twitch and the sleep-deprived eyes - melted away. All was calm. Vision was sharpened. Clement peeked into Solomon's nicotine-roughaged lungs; and Solomon strolled around the rooms of both Clement's head and his apartment. He saw Dee. She was young; she was white; she had a bosom that yearned for no further emphasis; she was dreaming of a man who had a mop-head for a face and dusters for hands. She was crying in her sleep.
      'Mango.'
      'And now… the end is near,' sang Georgie, having moved onto another notch in her repertoire.
      United but overlapping as a result of their infinitesimally different walking styles, Solomon and Clement made it back into the bedroom. It was like, Solomon mused briefly, a three-legged race at school. A sense of farce prevailed. Until the two men saw the abattoir, at least.
      Georgie had all but removed Bob's head. She had wrapped his severed nose, lips and ears in a pouch made from the tie that she'd wrenched from her victim's throat.
      'Jesus,' said Clement.
      'I did it… my. Way,' sang Georgie.
      'Are we strong enough, do you think?' asked Solomon.
      'Where's Bob?'
      'I don't know.'
      'Bob?' said Solomon. He raised his voice, a public speaker; but he had not wine glass against which to tap a spoon. 'Bob!'
      Although Georgie failed to notice it, so engrossed was she in the excavation of Bob's shining eyes, the air shifted. The room adjusted its tie and straightened its collar. The temperature dipped; the walls smelt of sad oranges and Brie. A dog howled plaintively in the distance. Pelicans squawked and muttered.
      'Can you hear me, Bob?' asked Solomon.
      'Come on, man.'
      '… and through it all…' sang Georgie.
      'Bob, we need you…'
      The reading chair twitched in a sudden heat haze. Transparent but fully-formed in front of it, Bob sat up and left his solid shell. His face spoke of pain, of betrayal.
      'Where am I?' he asked with a voice too close to falsetto; a voice not yet used to speaking.
      'Fuck,' he continued, his eyes on the dentistry that Georgie was now executing with vim. Ineffectually, Bob swiped at Georgie's paws and weapon.
      'What can I do?' Bob shrieked.
      'It's too late, man,' said Clement. 'Join us. Teach her a lesson.'
      Bob rose. He was clothed, rippling, and in perfect proportion. Unlike his carpet-bound counterpart, he still owned his features and even his tie. But he was scared. He tucked his rig in and zipped himself up. He coughed exploringly.
      Contact. The three men merged cell and sinew; as one they regarded the mirror and recoiled from the image, despite the sense of peace that prevailed. It was something about the atrocious consanguinity of the features; the shock of all-at-once hairstyles; the cornflake-yellow teeth and anchored-open mouth.
      Nor were the three men the only ones to notice the transformation. Transfixed and agog, Georgie was now looking up from her surgery and moulding. Her eyes were heavy with the unknowable.
      'No…' said Solomon, Clement and Bob; but the word did not sound like their voice. It was nobody's choice of word either. It had come from somewhere else, using the three spirits as its trumpet. It was loud.
      Decked out from head to foot in Bob's blood, Georgie stood. A whimpering flow of urine coursed its way down her left thigh. She covered her breasts and her eyes were open to the size of tablespoons.
      'No more,' roared the men. 'No more.'
      What are we saying? thought Solomon - while he was still capable of independent decision-making and opinion. What are we?
      'You'll get caught,' Georgie was told.
      She bowed her head and now gently cupped her pubic hair.
      I want to scare her, thought Solomon.
      I want to leave, thought Clement.
      I want her to die, thought Bob.
      But there were no choices here, and there was no room for earthly concerns. A warning? thought Solomon. That's all she gets? Then we're no better than… than…
      'Are you my guardian angel?' asked Georgie.