BONELINES
Phil Smith  & Tony Whitehead 

---

In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.

In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines​ is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light.  ​It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. 

​(You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.)

---

Bonelines
  Instalment ​9   (Chapters 45-53)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith

---

Chapter 45 
​
The morning had gone well; despite the two-day delay in her return to the office, everything was in order. The systems Mandi had set in place were as evident as ever; her appointees demonstrated every bit as much aptitude for improvisation and autonomy as when she had left them. The annoying projects of the Queen Bee had remained a thing of disinterest to the Childquake office; as they should be. 
In the afternoon, Mandi called the staff together for an office meeting; mostly to pat heads and share hugs all round, but the long walks in Devon had taken a physical toll and somewhere in amongst the going around the table to take verbal reports she had begun to lose focus and to struggle with an intrusive string of violent fantasies... pinching her ear lobes, biting her lips, digging her nails into her thighs, breathing in short snorts, pulling the short hairs behind her ears; Mandi did her best to stay... but faded.... and when she snapped to she was still in the business meeting. It was unclear to her how long she had zoned out for, but now everyone around the table, wide-eyed and straight-backed, looked terrified and subservient. When she asked if anything was wrong, everyone assured her that everything was fine, yet no none would tell her what, if anything, had happened while her concentration was abstracted. In every other respect her colleagues were extremely co-operative; concluding the meeting to her advantage, the office clicking back into its routine innovativeness.... 
 
“Here, Mandi...”

She hated Toni for treating her like a trained dog; the day had transitioned through after-work cocktails and slipping into the uncreasable midi dress from Warehouse in her handbag to a flat warming in Hoxton. It was all work related.

“... you must meet Jonny, he’s... they’s... that thinking-woman’s alt-righter I was telling you about.” 

A thin figure turned on its axis, a hand fluttered up to a sharp cut of black hair, flicking long tendrils over the shaved patch above the ear. Jonny smiled like a snake and the air in the room seemed to shudder for a moment. Mandi looked him directly in the milky almond eyes, the creases at the far edges somehow had naturally bent upwards, like a working-class girl’s make-up. A cheap fox is what he or they was; except that for a brush Jonny wore a thin skirt, slit down one side and leggings that showed off chopstick straight legs.    

“There’s no thinking on the alt-right, Toni” – Jonny spoke of her, but looked at Mandi – “just bile spat in the wrong direction, so we all get covered; they’re manipulated, a smokescreen for the pathetic warding off of the death throes of neo-liberalism...”

“I soooooo agree, babe”, and Toni dropped a hip, earnestly. “Trying to ward off real authority, real control....” 

“Oh”, Mandi smirked, “take control of our lives, our own courts, take control of our own borders? Not an intellectual Brexiteer for once?”

“‘Mere bagatelle’”, Jonny quoted slyly. “Can we not play for higher stakes than that? We need agreeable masters.... and mistresses...” 

“See what I mean?” chipped in Toni. “Orgasming woman’s alt right...”

“The Fourth Reich will be social democratic, my dear, more social than democratic...” 

“I’m a libertarian”, pronounced Mandi. 

“All the alt-right started as libertarians...”

“Only on the tin. If you want to find out what I really believe you’ll have to open me up...”

Why? Flirtation bored her, nauseated her, she had written long, anti-puritanical rants against it and then binned them. 
  
“.... intellectually. Men can’t do that anymore. Especially young men. Young men have forgotten how to turn sex into ideas. Young men talk to women as if words were foreplay; their vocabulary is so limited. Five words, if you're lucky and none begin with ‘v’. There are no intellectual orgasms to be had anymore.” 

There it was. The gauntlet thrown down. Like some pilgrim knight battering at the gates of a lonely castle, asking after the Grail. 

“Is that why they call you Taleb’s representative here on earth? O yes, Amanda, I know exactly who you are. I am not like other ‘young’ men; I do my homework before I step out socially. I am never over-dressed or under-prepared; just a hint of foundation and only enough liner to be ambiguous. Look at my hands; see how feathery they are? Now, hold them.”

This was more like ‘Night of the Hunter’ than ‘Sex in the City’. Wow. 

Jonny’s tiny hands were no bigger than hers, but the bones just under the skin were like handcuffs. It felt as if they had her bones in a judo lock. She felt claustrophobic. 

“Without discipline there is no social ecstasy; everyone says the 1950s were the most exciting time, sexually; all the private lesbian clubs, cellar cinemas with damp seats and long coats and the suburbs writhing with door-to-door salesmen, don’t tell me that the sex those two in ‘Brief Encounter’ might have had wouldn’t have been fabulous!”

“You’ve been reading too much E. L. James...” 

“Erika? Have you ever met her? Bataille, babe, I’m one of Bataille’s Babes, ha ha! Now he can write about ‘pussy’! I don’t like decadence, Amanda; it’s disrespectful of real transgression; there has to be something serious. That’s why I like the fifties, shot in black and white; a paper party hat with the promise of a trivial venereal disease. Francis Bacon drunk and in bed with George Dyer, the ever present promise of queer East End hoodlums. The smack of firm government; while the rest of us get on with partying. I read your pieces on green politics; I think we share some uncommon ground... let’s burn all the coal we want, and close all the power stations...”

“You make me sound like something I’m not...” 

“Deep green? I think there’s something deep inside you, Amanda...” 

“Yes, and it won’t be joined by you, Jonny-o...” 

“’Vertigo’? Nice – “only one man in the world for me, Johnny-o....” O well, and I thought we might at least publish something together? Something mathematical to prove a correlation between the right to perverse pleasures, resilient feminine survival in the urban jungle and the persistence of the unhuman planet. Kali dancing and shitting and fucking everyone, giving boons and lopping off heads. Multi-tasking - devouring us and birthing us. Something about Slut Earth rather than Mother Earth. She's my fucking girl, Amanda...”

“There’s your meme,” said Toni, unnecessarily.

“I have tickets for the NFL at Wembley, do you like sports?”

“No.”

“Pity.” 

Jonny turned on their high heels and flounced away to the canapés; just before reaching them, they swivelled and mimed throwing a quarterback pass to Mandi. She did not mime catching its spiralling mirage; but she watched it. Toni saw Mandi twitch as the ball smashed into her chest.

“Stupid cunt,” whispered Mandi.

“God”, said Toni, “you’re really wet for him.”  

Mandi spent the rest of the party expertly navigating the bores and predators, drifting from icy brilliance to slushy brilliance, going with the floes, in the helpless search for her equal. But it was Jonny she kept coming back to; as feminine as he was masculine, attractive from whichever direction she approached. Eventually Mandi asked Jonny back to her flat, just to see who they might turn out to be. 

Sex with Jonny was ambiguous; there was always something existentially stimulating for Mandi about her other’s uncertainty. It was less about fucking, more about being. Mutability made everything, even foreplay, crucial. Flesh was suspended in moisture, a weighing of bodies with sums that never tallied, each within the other now, their multiple senses drilling down to a single touch. In each other’s arms they were deep sea creatures, or divers, feeling their way down to a black gnosis articulated in rippling gills and a second touch that seemed to come from nowhere, as if there were an extra limb in the bed. Bubbling, they fell back into the pillows and slept. An hour later, they were wide awake and arguing; that was the most erotic part of the night. With their bodies open to each other like unfolded OS maps, the legends no longer fitted the territory, they rowed – in the manner of lovers – until 5am, when the relative virtues of Jordan Peterson and Cornel West, Butler, Baudrillard, Taleb, Rorty and Camille Paglia abruptly lost their appeal, stolen by blackbirds. Mandi and Jonny had abandoned their prejudices to each other and taken chances on sincerity. But there was something more; she had begun to adore Jonny, there was something of April’s gentle courage and fierce intelligence there and the ability to surprise Mandi with new versions of what xe was. 

A low kind of dawn slumber overwhelmed them. Even yet though, the buzz of their intimacy throbbed like a dying battery. Sometime between Sun and alarm, Mandi felt for the light down on Jonny’s shoulders, stroking a finger without thought along xyrs shoulder blades to the wheals she had seen there; they felt more, she didn’t particularly want to admit this to herself, puckered and very slightly moist, like an arsehole, but there were two of them; she lazily but tentatively pushed a finger into one of them and felt something soft, dry, like a feather duster on a stick, which emerged, pushing her finger away, and straightened upwards. Jonny seemed to unfold inside a pair of arms, as if by denying masculinity, a hyper-masculinity was achieved; Jonny’s body erupting into multiple erections...    

When she awoke, Jonny had gone, but the dream remained. It had folded into more sex, or maybe it had sexed their dreaming, one way and another. Mandi was soaked, cold, a single layer of her clothes sticking to her body, a mass of goosebumps and hard nipples pushing against the fabric; she was an initiate, shivering in procession under a giant arch on her way to the heart of the gargantuan city of rotting concrete. She lay back in the pillows and closed her eyes; tiny bits fell all around her, crystal and ivory, shards from the cyclopean towers fluttering downwards in sparkling showers as the alarm repeated its insistence.... she awoke again, with a start. The dream had been different this time; she had again woken inside the dream, but this time Jonny had been impassive, cold, motionless and unresponsive to her touch. She had left Jonny in their bed. On returning home from work she had found that Jonny had died, xyrs body had rotted and all that was left under the duvet was a map of bones like that in the Bay Museum. Except that there were two places on the map that were missing. The cave with its darkness and broken teeth, the chapel with the whole statue and the smashed statue and the graveyard with the three angels were all there, marked by bones, but one of the blanks was in the centre of the body, above their groin, perhaps the bellybutton, and another was far to the edge of the bed. At first this second one might have been a hand thrown outwards, Mandi thought, but when she looked closer it was where the head had been severed from the body. In order to complete or heal the figure, she must return and find the unvisited points. 
​
Lying in bed, properly awake and alone, she pondered where the two places might, in actuality, be. The Ipplepen dig, perhaps, for the first one. Was that the birthplace of all this?     


Chapter 46
The old white van slid crazily down the tiny lane. On the pitted road surface raindrops the size of shotgun cartridges cavorted, like hobgoblins composed of Glacier Mints. Streams of red soiled water ran across the road ahead of the van, as if it were driving beside a wounded animal. 

Pulling into the small gaggle of buildings that impostered as a village, the driver leaned his nose against the inside of the windscreen, then sat back. Despite the greasy smudge and stippling rainfall, he could make out the tall gothic tower of the church; the farmhouse he sought was sat directly in the shadow of the tower and he fired the engine and turned carefully into the yard. 

No one answered his knocks. Calling at the pub, an old church house with a mock-Arthurian sign where beer sales had once financed the inflated ecclesiastical construction turning green in the unrelenting rain, the driver – after subjecting himself to a variety of opinions and directions – followed a track up to the cow sheds and shouted the farmer’s name over the gate until all the Reds turned their heads in useless curiosity. Bitten by one too many farm dogs, the driver left word with the patrons of the old church house and then deposited his cargo of fertilisers in the porch of the church. 

The rain fell in ghost-like sheets across the graveyard as he scuttled back and forth to the van. The tower appeared more than usually modern in the storm; against the purple sky a concrete rocket at odds with the castellated nave. Having stacked the sacks inside the porch, the driver swept the water from the shoulders of his jacket. Sweat streamed down the bridge of his nose and mixed with rain and catarrh. Sod this for a game of soldiers. Something carved in the white stone of the ceiling caught his eye; in the brownish-green light he could barely make it out. Four distinct figures; three had their faces smashed, one remained. He wasn’t interested in this. Turning to run back to the van, he splashed into the incoming tide of rainwater that was inching its way up the path. O for... There was no way he could leave the sacks now. He tried the church door and was surprised when it sprang open. He grabbed the sacks and dropped them through the door, and against the stained whitewash wall. Around the walls of the nave, saints glowered in bold colours.

Pausing in the porch to pull up his collar, succeeding only in sending another dribble of rainwater down his neck, he glanced up at the pale figures in the ceiling. He could see now that there were patterns made partly of ribs and partly of feathers. He rose up on his toes to get a better look at one of the vandalised supernaturals; its hands made an oval, its body ended at the waist in what looked like the bubbles of a Jacuzzi, its wings jutted almost perpendicular to its body then curved to form a notional circle with those of the other three; inside the broken face were two still eyes, blemishes in the stone, and a white beak. 

He turned on his heels and skid-ran down the church path and through the lych gate. Gunning the van, he raced it through the brown tide covering the lane, sending a backwash into the roots of the hedges, and disappeared from the village. In the church house, the handful of locals finished their pints; someone would tell the farmer that his fertiliser was in the church porch. 

Chapter 47 
In the morning, Mandi submitted herself for psychological assessment.

She had gone to the party straight from the office; not bothering to look at her post while Jonny was around. Now, she had an hour to get herself across London for the appointment, or risk losing her Remington Model 700. 

“I have three years yet to run on my FAC...” 

“It’s a random check, Amanda, concerning your mental health.” 

“You’re a GP, you’re not a psychologist, Doctor Khan.” 

“I’m surprised you of all people put your faith in psychologists...”

“Read my blog, do you? I don’t put my faith in anyone.” 

The doctor swung her chair around and scrolled through Mandi’s notes on the practice’s pc. Then swung back to Mandi.

“Have you ever had treatment for a mental health problem?” 

“You know from the records. No.”
 
“I don’t mean recently...”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Cross-checking, Amanda. The wonders of the digitization of records; nowadays they talk to each other. Your name has come up in the notes of a whole group of other people, children, back when you were a child.”

“I’m in their notes?”   

“Not their usual notes; this is a very recent thing. A release of documentation that wasn’t on the system before. I can’t give you names, obviously, for reasons of confidentiality...”

Dr Khan shifted some of her pens around on the surface of her desk.

“But you can drag me into this rubbish at short notice...”

“Amanda, as a member of a gun club and a gun owner, your name came up in these files as someone that the children associated with... potentially dangerous activity. It’s fuzzy, children can say strange things but the children in the files all say the same strange thing. Separately.”

“Say what?” 

“I can’t tell you that because it would probably reveal their identities...”

“Well, I can already make a guess...”   
   
“Don’t, please. Let’s leave it there, I simply ask you to re-confirm that you yourself have had no treatment or sought no treatment for mental health issues. Counselling, for example...”  

“Counselling?”

“Or advice.” 

“Dr Khan, the state of my mental health is a matter between me, my id and my clitoris and I am not interested in what any files or any counsellor or advisor might have to say about it. No, I have not had, nor sought, any treatment of any kind for mental health issues. OK? But just this once, let me lay things out in a little more detail for you. At least more detail than I really want, and that you, probably, really want – or ought – to hear. So, when I was a kid I was adopted and I lived on a holiday camp that my new parents owned. During that time something happened that was so unimportant to me that I can’t even remember a tenth of it, but whatever it was there were unsubstantiated accusations made against my parents. This was the satanic abuse scare time, do you remember that? Maybe not, you look about the same age as me.”

“I know what you’re talking about... we studied it.” 

“Well, as sure as I can be, my parents were a bit hopeless, a bit inept in bringing up a teenage girl, and a bit too nerdish for me to cope with in my twenties, but not in a million years were they are any danger to me or to any other child. Capeesh?”

“The issue is not your parents. The danger came from you.” 

Mandi looked about the doctor’s room. It had all the usual family memorabilia, worthy charts and preachy posters, greetings cards, paraphernalia for on-the-spot tests and a view onto a tiny garden; everything she would expect to find in a GP’s surgery. And a second door. 

Mandi got up, went to the second door, grabbed the handle and pulled it open. A tiny cupboard of shelves, a few files, more equipment and wipes, gloves, disinfectants and what looked to be Dr Khan’s lunch, one of those worthy rice concoctions in Tupperware. What had she expected? The Queen Bee? Her own staff crouched around the keyhole? A contrite Tyrone? A giant hall full of servers?

“Fuck you. Fuck you, Doctor.” 

 Mandi shut the door and grabbed up her coat and bag. She left the practice at half-jog and twenty minutes later she was filling in the forms to check out her Remington from a firing range deep beneath the central city streets. “Hunting. In Devon,” she explained to the club’s security officer. “Devon” seemed to reassure him; he had never heard of anything bad happening there.

After the officer had checked her rifle and ammunition, Mandi secured it in its rectangular carry case and locked it in. 

At the offices of her charity, Mandi secured the rifle in its CPD Pelican case in a locked cupboard in her private office. The staff meeting was already in progress, her people had barely noted her arrival so rapt were they in whatever the order of business was; this was just as Mandi had requested. After civilly fielding enquiries about the funeral from two staff members who had missed the previous day’s meeting, the planning for a new project resumed as if not missing a beat. Mandi found no difficulty in maintaining her full attention; she even contributed a few ideas which were politely received and massaged into the model. Childquake’s response to Edubirdie’s use of influencers; re-thinking the notions of cheating and entrepreneurialism: nutrition and attention. This time, there was no zoning out for her. They had her attention; more than intrigued to know how much they all knew about the system’s access to the files under Belsize Park. There were two possibilities; that little trip underground was always about her, about Mandi, about prising at a chink in her armour. They had already found the information about her, and the whole meta-health thing was smoke and mirrors. Or, much worse, the files were already in digital form and Childquake’s was a post hoc smokescreen for big data irresponsibility. Either way, someone, maybe everyone, in the room was responsible for keeping her in the dark, until now. So was the appointment with Dr Khan a slip up or an intimidation?

Mandi called ‘time out’ on the meeting and the human flies clustered to the water cooler and coffee maker. Mandi locked herself into her office and went out to stand on her balcony. If she had less self-control she might have yelled at a passing cloud; if she had no control she might have taken pot shots at a couple of pigeons... where were the pigeons? Mandi looked up and around the marbled sky. A grid of starlings split from their symmetrical formation and began to murmurate half-heartedly before disappearing behind one of the neighbouring office blocks. Mandi stared directly down from the balcony and the map-like streets seemed to make more sense than usual; all the streets led to somewhere, all the blobs of organic passerby were on their way to something important, everything had meaning. Nothing random or unfit for purpose and that suddenly worried Mandi as much as the absence of pigeons. 

In the corner of her eye, she caught a flap of wing, coloured like mother of pearl. She looked up in hope, but it was the reflection of an angel the size of the Shard in the ocean of glass on the office block opposite; it stood, legs planted between the various icons of the skyline, titanic and juggernaut-ish, and Mandi instinctively knew it was not an angel, but a social-psychotically induced spectacle, a product of all the sentimental mythemes of the programmed found-souls racing down the tracks of their Tron-esque lives below. They had collectively ordered the birds into matrices and distorted the sun’s reflections into the shapes of their own derivative fantasies. This was the mob’s idea of scary; they just did not know the half of it.

Mandi looked down again. She saw the screens blinking in unison. She noted the absence of children. She noticed the way the insects moved politically.

“I think there’s something sinister going on,” Mandi told the meeting. High stakes. All in. She was firing with the wrong ammunition, but she had nothing else. “I’ve been approached to allow our name to be used in order to free up a massive cache of research information on medical histories for the use of the state in long-term planning of services, dietary advice... the usual nannyish stuff, but also as guidance for free-market research groups towards what’s needed rather than what’s profitable. The medical gains, the illness and genetic problems that might be eradicated before they even appear, obesity, addiction, depression... all the dark sides of pleasure... that could be considerable. No one knows, but it’s likely. On the other hand, it would be a massive betrayal of the trust of the participants, a massive infringement of privacy and a massive shift of information-power from independent researchers to the state. Consider the possible consequences. What if the data was used to slow down millions of cases of dementia and at the same time allowed... facilitated big pharma and deep state to manipulate mutations in different groups in different ways, in the interests of some of those groups and against the interest of others?” 

“But you already gave permission for that?” 

“What?” 

“You emailed us all more than two weeks ago to say we were giving it public backing...” 

“Have we made that public yet?” 

“No.” 

“Good. Don’t make any public statement on the subject. Can you forward me that email?” 

“Sure...” 

Mandi went to the window and looked down. There was a ripple in the order. A knifing perhaps, or a robbery. A disturbance alien to this part of town. Maybe someone had dropped their coffee, broke their phone; a small rip in the fabric. They would soon haul up the backdrop. There was no sound from below, but hers was not the only face in the windows, staring down. At street level there were men now, in white shirts, surrounding a woman possibly, something different, maybe... not an insect, but someone in a costume like an insect... they were tiny, they all ran off as if at a signal, the faces in the windows were closer, but unidentifiable... Mandi’s mind was wandering... it was as if she were looking at the future.

“Ugh? What?” 

“I have it here.”

Mandi’s PA was holding up her tablet, showing her inbox.

Mandi took the Underground, in the interests of anonymity; her Oyster card would leave a trace on the system so she got off a stop early and walked through Paddington, navigating the new Exchange flats that flanked Paddington Basin. At the corner with Praed Street a Tesco delivery lorry had pulled up, on its side was a map of the UK made up of its products, on the Art Deco pub on the opposite corner giant ceramic Satans, all with breasts and large green penises, gazed down goggle-eyed as Mandi hurried by.


Chapter 48
In Devon the rain persisted; early morning news programmes reported record rainfall. In the tiny village with the rocket-like church tower, hours of lashing rain had loosened something in the church roof and during the night rainwater had begun to run down the walls of the nave, saturating neat piles of Hymns Ancient and Modern and forming a pool around the sacks of fertiliser deposited by the jittery delivery man. The sacks had sucked up the water through tiny abrasions from being dragged from porch to nave. The chemicals within were greedy for fluid.

As the miserable morning light began to filter through the sheets of rain and stained glass, a thin miasma gently rose into the roof of the nave.
Watched by the unreal saints in the rood screen, the gas settled for a while, and then gently fell again, reacting with the walls. Swirling patterns emerged, curling and crashing like the tumbles of waves or the vortices of whirlpools, blue and purple, with highlights of pink and white, fading again as the sun rose, the air in the nave warmed, and the gas dispersed. 

A fresh breeze sprang up, the rain clouds that had been hanging over the county were finally blown away, and the sign on The Old Churchhouse Inn began to sway, animating its unlikely image of Nymue, the Lady of the Lake, seated high on her horse, knee deep in the water she was the maker of, a swan at her side and a king’s sword held upside down, her fist unharmed by the blade it wrapped around. 


Chapter 49
Mandi fled back. She knew now that there was a curse and that somehow she had to ‘lift it’. It was no good running away; it followed. She must track it down to its source. “Attack the enemy where it thinks it is strongest”; that was what the aged messiah had told her.  She had never thought of it as a curse before. As the train pushed its iconic nose through Wiltshire and then Somerset, easing back the landscapes, she scoured in vain the shadows of village lanes, the edges of woods and the grass between the limbs of white horses for any sign of a demon with bleeding teeth. For any sign at all. A whole hunt of devils would have been a consolation after the confusions of the night before; it had left her a little more bruised and scratched than she had appreciated at breakfast, as if she had been screwing a sentient thorn patch. At first, she thought the wounds were the remnants of her fight with the brambles at the retirement home but these were deeper and more emotional. The flesh would quickly heal, but her union with crumbling edifices of flesh, with giant urban towers and her immersion in the peristaltic sewers would take longer to resolve. How had the delightful ambiguities of the night before become this: like out of date cream on a hot body under theatre lights? She felt she had been peeled and left raw to the metropolis.
Outside the carriage the world was remorselessly ordinary and secular. Landmarks she had noted as spooked and off-kilter were now forbiddingly “quotidian”; a word her poncy snowflake opponents preferred to “everyday”. She liked to crucify them for stuff like that, but right now she would have valued the company of a few snowflakes to enlighten her about the blizzard she was caught in. 

Mandi tried to visualise Jonny, how ze seemed to her at the party; how she had watched hir in mirrors after their initial conversation, but when Mandi looked in her memory there was nothing there. She felt much; she had been in a kind of darkness, or maybe she had simply reached behind her, she remembered that this moment happened later, somewhere between the party and her flat, she had reached for something out of sight; she could not see the thing that she had touched or that had touched her. Choice and power had been fuzzy in that darkness. Wherever it was and whatever it had been, it had been alive, damp and heavily muscled. Yet Jonny was not like that; ze was light, vivid, elegant, with a dry wit and a dancer’s deportment and a great haircut. Mandi felt back into her memory and touched the thing again, recoiling from the recollection. There were still the ruins from last night not wholly lost to her; a dream landscape in which waves broke on black rocks, the crumples of a bed like a wasteland full of burial mounds and dark valleys, a flat purple sky stretching for miles and miles, and yet, the whole thing was in a cave, a massive cavern filled with thick wriggling things, the life of the world was all inside; she had felt an urge to reach her hand into the mass of living rope, to break the knot, to pull apart the rat king and scoop up the whole fucking thing she knew was beating with the disgusting mess of life. And it was only then that the thought struck her; that it was not Jonny, whoever ze was, that had scratched her, that there had been something else in the bed with them. Something that, if Mandi could just for once be honest with herself... she subtly punched the table in front of her, and the passenger in the seat in front turned quizzically... she already knew, she had known for a long time.   

A gathering of trees stood darkly on the top of a smooth hill. A flat valley bottom stretched away from the train, punctuated by sheep. There were walkers silhouetted against the sky, up on a ridge path, consumed by their own conversations. Nothing addressed her; the ordinary beasts of the landscape lumbered along as if her trip were of no consequence to them.  Where a tree had fallen in the winds, ripping up its roots, it had dragged up a great sheet of darkness, a plane of featureless black moss and Mandi fantasised about falling into its spongy arms.

Mandi had hoped that somewhere just after Taunton a trio of drowned angels would be waiting for her at the county border, ready to look after her. Dark fields and clumps of woodland flashed by; it was getting dark. Soon, even when she cupped her hands around her eyes and laid her forehead to the carriage window there was nothing more than the odd pinprick of light in the sea of Devon. 

Approaching The Sett she tried the same trick for the river and the lights on the far bank of the estuary, but there were no celestial objects afloat. Instead, at the tip of The Sett itself, the sandbar beyond what little remained of the second world war wreck of a broken-back coaster, Mandi made out four white figures goading a large stumpy object which oscillated in the dimness. Mandi checked around the carriage but no one else was noticing, stuck to their screens or nursing empty bottles of Chardonnay. She crammed her face to the glass and the scene was ongoing. 

At the stop she stowed her bag behind a fence and set off at a run across the sands. She could not leave the Pelican case; that had to be in her possession or in a locked and secure place. The dunes, in the intermittent moonlight, rose up like the bumpy heads of submarine fiends. The marram grass scratched affectionately at Mandi’s shins. She was approaching the wasteland part of The Sett at the very end of the spit where it faced off to the holiday resort on the far bank of the estuary. So far, so familiar, but as she got to the final rise of dunes before the bleak end beach, she laid down the rifle case and wormed her way to the brim.

It was not the head of a giant blubber-thing; but it was just as mis-placed and unreal. Somehow, by the erosion of the sand or maybe some shifting of the harder rocks beneath the dunes, a monolith had been thrust up through the end of The Sett, twice as tall as a person, the thickness of an old telephone box, the shape of a rough coffin. Around it four figures in white fatigues, hooded up and armed, were not goading the thing, but seemed to be guarding it. Mandi eased herself up over the edge of sand to get a better view beyond the fringe of marram; despite their white uniforms the figures were still shaky, but Mandi recognised the shape of military issue rifles, the kit of snipers. What the hell were they doing out here? She was still straining to detect any badge or insignia on the blank fatigues when a tiny eruption of sand burst up from just beside her hand and another a few inches from her face throwing grains across her shoulders and hair. Mandi flipped like a seal and rolled behind the rim of the dunes. 

Unbelievable. They were firing at her. “Yey! Ceasefire! Friend!” she shouted. Further spurts of sand and tiny screams of sound followed. There was little thought to what Mandi did next; she knew these moments were traps. That everything hung on her judgement and that she was far too strung out to make any kind of choice. She went with her fear, snapped open the case and loaded the Remington. This was not going to end well however it ended. She cocked the rifle and fired before she aimed. She got off the round which – without the silencers used by the figures in white – cracked open the quiet of the night. It zinged past the stone and headed off towards the resort on the other side of the estuary chased by ringing echoes. The four figures in white responded like an old mechanical pier machine, clicking into a routine of dives and rolls; they were on the beach and launching their tiny black inflatable before Mandi could get to her knees and reload. 

Mandi lay on her side, letting the grains of sand make dents in her cheek. Who the fuck were they? She had to report this, but... They would take her licence away, for sure. She got to her feet and looked about her, brushing away the sand from her clothes and skin; the white trail of the inflatable was far off now, heading West. There were no lights from other boats. No one on the beach, no one she could see on the dunes. Could she get away with it? Say nothing; hope the white gun toters were a group of... what? Gun nuts? A stag party on an illegal hunt who mistook her for a rare migrating duck? Were they likely to come back? Not given how they left when she returned fire. And those shots in the sand? Was she lucky or was that expert provocation? In that light it would take a crack shot to get so close without injuring someone. If they were that good, it would make very little difference what she did now; if they wanted to get her they would. And if they were just a bunch of jerks, what business of hers was it? They had missed; why cut her own throat and do their work for them? She would keep this quiet. 

She quickly packed away the Remington, careful that no sand got into the case. Then she walked it over to the stone. 

It towered over Mandi. It was wet, not long out of water. In the thin moonlight that struggled through a tracery of clouds to make much impression on the dark, Mandi had little hope of identifying the kind of rock it was. It looked dark and it felt smooth, but it was riddled with ridges and defiles. Mandi pushed at it. It was solid; it might have been there for a million of years. Yet, it had not. Mandi’s queasy memories of childhood were sufficiently coherent to know that this monolith had been no part of it. It was an arrival. A sign – like the weird patterns in the London streets – that things were accelerating and would overtake her unless she was able to get ahead of them. Make some of her own moves.

That night she was on the bonelines again. 

She tried to follow them to the dark space at the centre, but the map flung her out to its edges. Then she was back on the Sett again, with the monolith; except that rather than standing on its own, an isolated exclamation mark in the sands, it was the centre of a village of houses made of wood and mist, a trace of a place that had something of Russia or the wilds of the US about it, cabins in the woods, but all gathered together around the stone. There were no people there, only ghosts, and they fled into tiny boats and paddled away using saucepans and serving spoons when the caretaker appeared in the lane between the wooden villas. There was a crack like a rifle shot and the houses were reduced to splinters and trash, gathered not around the rock, now, but around the caretaker. In the dream Mandi looked at him, his black clothes, his face was a question mark. “I didn’t do this,” he said. She felt the Everglades rise up inside her. “Well, you did something,” Mandi replied and woke up, sat up and was shaking and gasping for breath.


Chapter 50
Idiot! Her Pelican case was sat at the foot of the bed. She threw the bedclothes aside and took the case and locked it in the tiny room Anne and Bryan had used as an office. She skipped coffee. At least she had managed to get her clothes off before falling asleep. Chewing dry toast did not make things better. London was no longer a retreat, that was infected too. The Sett had its own standing stone. The messiah, the saviour of the world, had died on her watch. She had taken her rifle without proper storage and she had discharged it at another person. She was no longer seeing angels. 

She considered calling April. In the end, she chose Grant Kentish. There was something about April... but with Grant Kentish, Mandi knew exactly where she stood. Her life had been full of Grant Kentishes, but she had never met another April. 

She was still deep in thought when the taxi, which she had forgotten ordering, arrived. She grabbed her coat and pulled on her boots. It was the same driver who had taken her to the Italian Gardens the first time. Mandi made it clear she did not want to talk and curled up on the back seat; this time she wanted shot of the long expanses of green between each homestead. She caught the top of the Great Hill; the cave must be close. As they pulled up, Mandi asked the driver to wait and offered him a portion of the fare. He took it. 

Just as before, there was no answer at the front door. The handpainted sign THE OLD MORTALITY CLUB was gone. The Italianate poise of the portico was coy. Mandi rang again, nothing. She pushed at the door, it did not shift. Mandi made her way down the high side wall listening out for the sounds of ritual, orgy, electronica or cocktail party. When she stopped and listened hard there was only the birdless wind in empty trees. She remembered how Mimir had described the Club in confused terms; perhaps Mandi had underestimated them? How would they react to Kentish’s betrayal? Did they even know? 

Inside the wind, like a signal hidden within a signal, Mandi could hear a muted track of whistle, washing machine and synthesiser jamming with the leaves. Far off the deep bass rhythm of a train dawdling or a lorry labouring up a hill. But no one greeted her this time. She expected the door to the garden shut fast in its Romanesque frame, but it was open and Mandi stepped cagily into the gardens. 

There was no steam, no cocktail. The pools were dry, the tarpaulin roofs, tubes, heaters and generators were all gone. There was no sign of the Old Mortality Club. Not a wine glass, not a cork, not a discarded undergarment. The absence was overpowering. Mandi wandered for a few minutes through the gardens, looking hard for a dropped cigar butt or a condom hanging in the leaves of a shrub. Nothing. The paths were raked, the lawns immaculate and cropped. The stone sides of the bathing pools were disinfected, there was nothing to suggest the ageing naked bodies that draped and entwined around each other. Any residue had been burned away. 

Mandi found the stone jar with the impish face into which she had tipped her poisonous cocktail; she held it upside down and then felt inside it. There was no sticky revenant. Either these people employed a director of detail or the whole thing had been a mirage. She recognised the tiny granite pillar, but there was no friendly wren. The gardens were a blank, a place with dementia. The shaggy clumps of ivy had been trained, the soft cushion of mosses scraped away and the oranges, yellows and reds of the lichen were more orderly. There was nothing to climb the steps for, nothing to be defended in the miniature castle, no posturing sybarite to be held up by the half-baked Roman arch; it was as dead as an English Heritage site. No porn to these ruins. Just a base instinct, a meaningless malevolence; the place was soulless and yet mechanically alive. It had pulled Mandi in and as she made her way back quickly to the Romanesque door in the high outer wall she was scared that it might slam shut and lock her in. 

Back in the taxi, Mandi told the driver “all done” and lay back down on the seat and closed her eyes until they were pulling up inside the gates of Lost Horizon.    

She needed a new approach. She sat on the edge of her adoptive parents’ bed and thought things through. She had been increasingly convinced that the three drowned sisters were attempting to communicate with her through the angelic forms in which they had been ‘immortalised’ in alabaster. Yet, either she was wrong or they had been unable to get through to her and given up. Or something else was trying to contact her and she did not recognise it. Perhaps she had been trying to make too direct a contact, maybe they were all making the same mistake; or it was too oblique, everyone being too clever, too symbolic? Maybe the secret to making contact was right there in front of you, so simple, it was not all the stories, statues, representations, paganism, magic... it was just the place, just the place. If she could get out on the water where all this started...

She was not surprised to see that the standing stone had disappeared from the end of The Sett. She was more surprised by the eerie trace of the houses. Leftovers from her dream.   

Mandi commandeered one of the primitive kayaks that had been drawn up on the shore and began to paddle out to the site of the three sisters’ drowning. The sea was choppy and Mandi had to work hard to make headway against the wind; comforted by the thought that it would quickly sweep her back to shore as soon as she was done. It was better not to look back at what you were leaving, better to fix your eye on the bow and the angry stretch of water ahead. Chugs of wind smacked at Mandi’s face, water spat at her from the ends of her paddle. She bent into the rising wind, as different regiments of waves marched in from opposite sides and slashed each other to pieces, grinding the bow of the kayak in its tattered ranks. Something soft and heavy slapped against the side of her boat. 

Mandi looked over each of the two sides. Parts of the same huge shadow lurked beneath her, they sullied the sea all around her. She looked to shore for a bearing. The mist had hardened, most of the houses were boarded up but one was hung with bathing towels and flags, tennis nets and fishing trophies. On the sand outside a young woman in a black gym kit was yelling in German to two men on the veranda and waving a salute to Mandi’s boat. Although they seemed a very long way off, Mandi could hear the conversation on the veranda.

“Is it really too much to ask that someone at least let off a bomb beneath the pier?” 

“And that dreadful squealing cliff railway! Like a caterwauling coon-singer!”

“We’ve been invaded! Rather than Hampstead types belly-aching about the so-called sufferings of wogs occupied by our well disciplined troops, what about us? Don’t we have our privacy invaded every summer; the vandal hordes crowding out our best restaurants, shoulder-barging us off the trams! Dropping paper bags and god-knows-what-else wherever they damn well please!”

“I am thinking of starting up a secret society of county people and the first point in the constitution will be the duty of each member, every day before lunch, to seize at least one of these visitors and smother them with a pastie! That kind of treatment the industrial classes understand!” 

“Let’s get up a navy! Redeploy the ammunition presently used on innocent folk and rain it down on the tourists, blow their moronic amusements and their civic flower beds to smithereens! And their concrete steps! Can’t the buggers climb rocks?”

“That’ll stop their jazzing and Jews!”

“Survival of the fittest!”

“Come on, you Saxons!” 

The men’s humour was picked up in the laughter of female voices. Mandi felt her body twist, the young woman’s body in which she was lodged, dressed in the same black gym costume, jerked its right arm stiffly up to the sky, palm-straight, and gales of encouraging laughter swept her up into the clouds. 

“It’s human nature to defend your own!” 

“Damn human nature, its scientific neurology, it’s in the mind! We are the flesh machines obedient to our best selves!”
 
Mandi suspected that these were powerful men. She snapped back into herself. A storm was rising. On the shore, just visible through the flying froth and watery mounds, she could still make out the spectral community, foundation-less, drainless, paying no taxes, represented by no one, but only just. Their romantic anarchism had frightened her; their pirate flag grinned at her. Such were the ghosts that had been left. She felt sick. She heard complacency and entitlement in those voices. They were different from her! She would not have made their mistakes. 

Her rifle... 

The waves came like calculations, as if they computed her, spreading her inside out across the surface of the sea, condensing her down and extracting the core. “Who are you really?” they seemed to be saying. “What are you hiding that is important? Give us your three main drivers!” Why was an ocean interested? Who was so powerful they could employ a storm for a therapist? Her ordeal at the hands of the waves was being conducted according to strict principles. 

Mandi looked down into the solid swell and she was looking down into herself. She felt the sleeves of squirming waters move inside each other, the parts parting so she could slip down between them, into darker and darker darkness. She felt herself unfold, she felt the burdens unpeeling from her shoulders, her thoughts like flocks of birds beginning to move in tumbling cascades, fluttering in lace-like shapes, then jerking in mind-changes to left and right. All her separate parts were feathers in one wing, their black parts murmurated like memories; she waited for her feet to touch the bottom of the ocean, and for the dim dome of light above to unfix itself.

“Squirty Mary up from the deep,
Rode the big squid in her bare feet,
When she dropped her guts...”

The song faded as she fell deeper and deeper into a bloated bag of soul. No line to catch hold of, she looked at her fingers and they were curled like hair in a gale. She was losing her grip on surface realities, sinking into the wriggling being of her self, inside the struggling sinking thing she had become, inky and thoughtless, closing down, shutting out, the sinking of the fields...

“Muddy Mary mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath...” 

There it was again, just a refrain and then gone. Where had she heard the song before? She struggled to look down inside her darkness and fish it out. She saw the muddy Mother rising up to meet her, spreading Herself out across the Bay, a massive stain beside the bleached dunes. Mandi tried to haul the memory up; if only she could shuffle the fields while sinking. Then the whole kaleidoscope would work for her... and she would never need... again.... she wallowed and something salty tried to force itself into her throat. The colours were too bright for real darkness she realised, the spiralling strings of ideas were holding her like seaweed tangled around her ankles and she shrugged them off and dived for the wordlessness, there was more than one force down here, and she threw off the paddle, let go the line, the silhouette of the kayak began to dissolve as the shape of the sun had done before it, she gave in to the darkness and the darkness raised her, slippery and immense, a black and red football field of gooey beakless fleshiness, rising like an undulating platform, fierce tissues flexing and contracting beneath its leathery sac, and pushing her back...

This was not the time...     
   
She fought it. For a moment it was her adoptive mother, enforcing some simple rule. She thrashed out with her fists.

Wait. There will come a time... 

She didn’t have time. She wanted the darkness now! The darkness refused her and with a final spasm spat her out onto the surface, where she coughed and retched salt and water and microbeads and tiny living things.

The sweet, calm ocean had gone. Dark brown waves, sloping and kicking, rose all around her. Where was the boat? She was in the water! She had no memory of falling in. The wind ripped at her face with broken nails, a wave smacked into her back, she ploughed her arms in a crawl up the side of a wave, trying to get her eyes above the fuming soap suds, in quick succession two waves broke over her head and a third drove her sideways until she could reach around and drag herself upright with her forearms; she was grabbing for a hold on mounds of water, when she was abruptly borne forward like a surfer on another thick wave of foam. Waves broke in a circle like a gang of maddened drunks, then they fell away and she could see the kayak twenty yards off, its sails kicking wildly against the gale, her paddle jumping and hopping close by. Mandi struck out for it and a solid mass of icy fluid pushed her forward, then dragged her down. She surfaced quickly, a rip tide pushing her back up. She struck out again, though the kayak seemed farther away, pushed another ten yards in a few seconds. For minutes she battled, the tiny lurching and flapping target visible only in glimpses through the valleys of furious water. On the point of exhaustion, the kayak finally seemed blown towards her; snatching the paddle from its mount on the top of a white horse, Mandi pulled herself across the last few feet of water by her one free arm and grasped the edge of the boat. She tried to pull herself in, but her arm was now so cold and the muscle so acid-bound, she could get no leverage. She threw the paddle into the bottom of the kayak and tried again with two arms, but a slipping grip and exhausted biceps meant she could do no more than hang on. Then her fingers failed, one by one they were peeling from the topsides as she began to slip slowly back to the deep. 

A deep mound of water lifted the kayak. Instead of breaking the last two fingers of Mandi’s tenuous hold, something swelled and lifted her higher than the boat and laid her down, gently at first, then her midriff crashing onto the gunwale. The chance would not come a second time and – simultaneous with a sudden draught of water and the movement beneath her of something massive and red and black – she pushed off from some numinous thing and tipped herself over the side and into the bottom of the boat as the waves foamed white around her feet. For a moment the waters around the boat turned the black-red of just dried blood and then faded again to the same watery brown as whipped waves. Mandi allowed the tiny boom to pass back and forth above her, like a crazed metronome. Tick, tick. Bang, whoomph. Cracks like rifle fire. The squall had come like a gunshot from cloudless heavens dragging a curtain of grimy vapour over the dome of sky. 

Recovering her composure, grabbing the boom, Mandi lowered the sail and beat the waters with the paddle. She seemed, as she had hoped, to be riding an incoming tide; despite the giant breakers falling in temple ruins around her she was soon leaping into the raging white shallows and dragging the kayak out of the sea and hurling it sideways onto the strandline. The sail escaped its cleat and unravelled, crestfallen, as if it wished to race back to a master it had failed.

Mandi lay back on the sand, dragging herself up the incline of the beach like a giant turtle; her limbs leaving long curved scrapes. Out of reach of the waves, Mandi felt self-possession returning; whoever had been playing with her out there, they had made a mistake; they had given her an insight into who they were and from what they had come. More than that, they had introduced her to something she felt was their enemy; not just the thing she had intuited, felt barely, sensed was all, but that was immense and just beneath her, out of reach this time – but there would be another time for that – strongest was a feeling that it was all in the exactitude of the place. Some enemy was responsible for the boat – she cast an angled glance at the glorified kayak, its tiny mast dug into the sand, its sail flapping helpless now like a landed eel – but she had steered it against their will, she had felt their resistance, she had provoked them almost to killing her and that meant that she was doing something that they intended to keep her from: the exact drowning spot of the three sisters. There was something about this precision, and presence, the being there of it, the precise just being that had somehow triggered the power of the place; something with more power than a storm.

“What were you doing out there?” 

The caretaker, breathing heavily, was stood over her. 

“I needed a bigger boat...”

He smiled briefly. 

“You didn’t have a boat, you swam out...” 

“What?” 

Mandi sat up; everything inside her hurt. There was no kayak on the sand, no flapping sail. 

“I borrowed it from a guy in plus fours and a smoking jacket... strange accent... natty moustache... fancied himself... he kept it in one of the ho...”

Although it tore and hurt, she swivelled around. There was nothing on the dunes but marram grass, the red officious markers of the wardens and the standing stone.

“Do you mean wooden houses?” 

“Yes, sure, I mean.... they’re not here now but...” 

“There haven’t been any houses on here since they were blown off in a storm in the 1930s.” 

The winds died unnaturally. An eerie calm settled like a large mammal sinking to the ground. The wild roaring of the water became an irritable lapping of waves on bleached driftwood.

“And what the fuck is that?” Mandi pointed to the monolith. 

“That’s the Cheeke Stone. The high spring tides have uncovered it for the first time in over a century. Once upon a time it was on all the maps of The Sett.”  

“Who’s screwing with my mind, Mister Crabbe?”

“I have no idea, Miss Lyon, but that’s not a good place to be swimming.” 

“I got that impression...” 

“I mean historically bad. A few years back a kid was trying out a new snorkel he’d got, just playing really. Summer holiday stuff. The tide was right out, shallow compared to now. Anyhow, kid pulls up a small cannon from the mud. Everything goes wild, Time Team get involved, a lot of excited talk about the defeat of the Spanish Armada and a sea battle... after all the fuss died down, and the more serious people got involved, turns out it was probably a Venetian slave ship, not transporting slaves but crewed by them, people captured in North Africa, they went down in a storm in their chains... their bones are still out there, indistinguishable now from sand and mud...  whatever it was that was luring you, it knows the geography of bad places...”

“Is the sea a place, like that? I mean the stuff on the bottom vaguely sticks around, if it’s a cannon or something, I imagine, but tiny flakes of bone? That stuff surely gets caught up in all the washing back and forward of the tides, how is that a place? It’s all flow and currents and – the thing about rivers... never stepping in the same water twice... in a sea, it’s the same, churning, mixing, disappearing...”

“Heraclitus. What if everywhere’s like that?”

“No! Fuck!”          

 Mandi lay back on the beach, grabbing at the sand in great fistfuls. The caretaker stared into the grinding waves. The brown expanse was breaking up into fluffy white clouds. There was flow and there was something else. Something that moved more slowly, something older, even than galleons, older than slavery, something very old that had put down markers, or roots, or something... and was trying to talk with her, tell her something... but without a mouth, without any vessel or organ of communication... it was coming through to her in the form of events. 

As if to taunt her, sails of blue began to break through the murk above, the wind that whipped foam on the rise of the waves was driving the storm away towards the obscure horizon. Mandi began to struggle to her feet. The caretaker offered his hand and Mandi took it, levering herself up. Where Mandi had lain the shape of her body formed one part of a vast arrangement of flotsam and jetsam: seaweed bound by fishing line, grey barkless logs, tins, punnets, tampon applicators, hollow crab shells, rust-orange aerosol cans, the lid of a boardgame in Arabic, a faded blue Sulley figure, large floats, a lobster pot and jumbles of plastic packaging. 

“What does it mean?” 

“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out.”

“But you made it! I saw the others... didn’t you?”

“No,” said the caretaker, “I find them, but I don’t make them. I do, however, think that they are parts of the message. Maybe a warning. Of which you, for the first time, are a part...”

“A message from who?”

“From something that is possibly indifferent to us understanding.”

“Why would it warn us then?”

“Well, if it’s indifferent to us understanding, it wouldn’t need a reason, would it?”

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t speak to me like that, Amanda. Please.” 

And he began to weep; not expressively, but tears ran down his cheeks. Mandi was taken aback. She was always the first to rush forward to comfort (or to stick the knife in, at an assassination), but this was so unexpected from someone so composed. 

“I’m sorry. I think it’s the stone. If you must know... o, fuck it...”

And they laughed at each other. 

“I do know what the messages mean. The same as the stone. The camp’s gone, Mandi. Finished. I’m sorry. I had hoped I could come back and help secure the camp, but look at the erosion here, despite the best efforts of everyone. It’s just going to go. It’s nature, or at least it’s the nature we’ve invoked. It swept away the houses on here years ago; something made it mad and it came for them. Well, something’s made it mad again. I’ve seen the storm predictions; you can check them out online. We haven’t had the highest spring tides yet, not the half of it, when one of them coincides with a big storm, like the one when the railway was all washed out five years ago, it will take Lost Horizon. It won’t leave a stick. There’s nothing we can do except get the people to safe dry ground before it happens and see if anything can be rebuilt after it’s over. Maybe nothing; maybe it’s coming back to reclaim what is rightfully its territory, and we shouldn’t try. Brunel and the railway took away a lot of land from the sea...”

“Christ. You’re not shitting me?”

“No,” he laughed, “I’m not shitting you, Amanda. It’s so, so angry right now.” And he looked out to sea and Mandi followed his eyeline to where the giant shadow of a cloud was making its way between two sheets of silver ocean. She felt inordinately fond, suddenly, of this old and dying man. She snuck up behind him and put her arm around his waist. She feared that he would flinch away, but he continued to stare out to sea. 

“You come from a difficult, but wonderful thing, Amanda. Let’s get you back to the camp, you need a rest, settle back into routine for a few days, I’ve found another of the camps that can take our people, on higher ground. They’ll be safe to move there when they need to, but we need to warn them so they can take their most precious things. Be good if you came round with me, saw people, gave reassurance, avoid a panic. We don’t need to do that for a day or two. Have some time out; I’ll drop some bottles off tonight, I know you like a drink, won’t do you any harm now, and I’ll make some food, there’ll be a stew on your front door step, so you don’t need to worry about cooking or shopping for a while...”

“Who are you, my father?” she repeated, fondly. 

And the two turned their backs on the Cheeke Stone and walked slowly and painfully – both with their own kinds of tumours – back to Lost Horizon. 

Chapter 51          
Mandi focused. The preparation for the espresso she had forgone a few hours before took far longer than she usually spent. For once the anticipation was better than, or at least as good as, the satisfaction. It was as if she could place life, dunes, shadows under the sea, snipers in abeyance, put them on hold. Keep them on ice. 

Sips of the black gold tasted of hibernation; warm and safe and deep.

Her wet clothes were whirling around in the washing machine. She was dressed in a weirdly pleasing combination of Anne and Bryan’s clothes. The time that had passed and the days of mourning were slowly dissolving those images of fractured windscreens and flesh and skulls. In their place old memories had begun to seep back in; of picnics at megaliths, slow passage through museums, cinema visits to see the first three ‘Spy Kids’ movies. 
Mandi sat. She never did this. For an hour she just sat. She let thoughts click over her eyes, like counters. Some she noted for further attention, but mostly she let them come and go. It was only when she lifted the cup to her lips and the dregs were cold that she realised how much time had passed. It had been a full day already; she reviewed her swim. There was some logic there; something about that area of sea and water-buried sand that connected to all of this. But there was also vulnerability, poor judgement, a troubling irrationality that was expanding and a reliance on a man to sort it all out. She felt a pleasing bitterness seep back into her. She would not let the caretaker take care of her. 

Jesus. The rifle. She was supposed to check it regularly. It was behind a locked door but one that probably did not conform to the Firearms Licensing Law 2016. She must re-enter the office. It had mixed connotations for Mandi; it had been a no go area for her as a child, a repository of confidential and commercial information, the only place in the mega-trailer that was special to Anne and Bryan. Even their bedroom was less private than their office. It had been where they had felt themselves as most individual, rather than as father and mother, where Mandi felt closest to them as Anne and Bryan. Anne with her old-fashioned veneer and her underlying outrageousness and Bryan in his determined search for things that would never be found and his love of Sumo wrestling, perpetually frustrated either by his lack of money or technical understanding to get the right channel.

She retrieved the key from under the carpet and let herself in. 

The Queen Bee was seated at Bryan’s desk. Flanked on each side by two white snipers, their hoods back and their young, overly-made-up features brazen in the dull lights of the trailer. Mandi’s Remington was in pieces on the carpet, expertly disassembled. At a glance Mandi knew that every tiny spring was there laid out; the entrails had been read.

“We’ve been waiting for you.” 

“How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to smell your coffee. Must be hard to get a decent blend in these parts?”

The white snipers shifted angrily. No guns were evident, but Mandi noted that each had a Ka-Bar knife strapped to their thigh. They were female. Mandi’s ‘stag do’ guess had been way off; not even binary reactionary, just plain old assumption.

“We missed you in the Smoke. You came back and everyone was happy. Then you ran away again. What’s going on with you, Mandi?” 

“I have t...”

“Don’t answer that. I have a far more important question. Or pitch. Our proposal for a series of debates has been accepted by the broadcaster, we want you to mediate on screen, that includes a book deal based on your blogging – it’s Random House – and there’ll be a social media team assigned to you. You’ll never need to write your own tweets again.”

“You know the answer.” 

“Yes, but I needed to test your integrity. You’re such a one-off, Mandi, no one is sure about you. They always need to be reassured about you. Why is that? I find it fascinating. Don’t answer. Nothing is ever contained in itself, but is a ladder we pull away in order to go higher? A boat to burn to encourage us to go further in? Stop denying it – you are one of us!”

Mandi bristled. 

“You think we are playing at controversy? I always saw your scepticism. Your lack of faith in our determination to put a philosophical bomb in the heart of the communal being. Right?”

“You were going to tell me who I am, but you’ve got sidetracked into telling me about yourself. How did that happen?”

“The two things are inextricably linked. People are very pleased with you, Mandi. Quiet, powerful people. You liberated medical files for tens of thousands to the future benefit of millions; this will collapse so many assumptions about what ‘human’ is, you’ve retired The Old Mortality Club, and the troublesome messiah seems to be no longer... troublesome...”

“I did nothing.”

“Like I say, what you are and what we do is inextricably linked.”

“And what are you inextricably linked to, Bee? What’s your relationship with the Hexamerons?” 

“No secret about that. I am a member of the Ladies Essay Society...”

“They’re a bunch of racists!”

The Queen Bee turned to the white snipers.

“Would you ladies excuse us?”

The four women began to file towards the door.  

Mandi stepped backwards and blocked the frame. 

“Who are these people? They shot at me!” 

“We are quite capable of answering for ourselves.” 

Mandi was impressed at how similar the women looked; blonde hair, elfin haircut, immaculate La Praire make-up, mid-twenties, high cheek bones. Ladies College accent. 

“We are the Pavlichenko Brigade of the Devon Beliye Kolgotki. We honour the name of Ludmilla Pavlichenko, the greatest sniper of them all, but our allegiance is to the county.”

“We are Devon girls.”

“We honour Pavlichenko because of her accuracy, not her politics; our first brigade, The Fair Toxolites, was formed in the country houses in the 1860s. We were renamed after the Second World War in honour of the Ludmilla’s visit here in 1942; our weapon had been the long bow, and then a war bow that could shoot a heavy arrow a quarter of a mile, but Ludmilla changed all that...”

 “...whatever our weapons our principles have remained the same.”

“Which is?” 

“To support the aims of The Hexameron Essay Society.”

“By any means necessary?”

“By any means appropriate. We follow the teaching of Edward Hyams; that in those exceptional circumstances where an individual endangers the well being of the general good an equally individualised act is a justified one.”

“You kill people?”

“We give democracy a nudge.” 

“And how exactly were you nudging democracy on The Sett last night?”

“We never discuss operational matters. Now, if you would excuse us, we will let ourselves out.”

And they stepped forward. Mandi stepped aside. What intimidated her was not the knives but their effortless authority and their beauty. She recognised ‘class’ and she hated it, and she hated herself for stepping aside for it; but she was trembling from head to foot. The best she could do, as the four women tramped through her living room, was to shout after them: “you might have re-assem...embled my Remington!” She stumbled, even over that.

“Are you going to take my gun away?” she asked the Queen Bee.

“A black woman with an unlicensed gun in Devon? I think not. Let’s talk racism.” 

“OK...” 

“We are well aware what the Hexamerons are...”

“They’re Beyondists! They believe in evolutionary struggle between groups. To you, me and the gatepost, that’s a race war.”

“It’s more complicated than that... But, sure, it isn’t any better. If anything the truth is even worse. The Hexamerons are rich elitists who like to takes risks with technology. They were in at the birth of computing, they pioneered the mechanisation of mass destruction, the first telegraphic communications with the dead. They are reinventing themselves by the power of their giant servers. They’ve come full circle in a Nietzschean nightmare sort of way; except they don’t mind the nightmare, they embrace the nightmare. The nightmare is what they do.”

“So what’s your interest in them?” 
       
“Not them, the nightmare is key to this – they won’t outlive it, they are in practice the living contradiction of their philosophy – they say they wish for dominance but what they really long for is destruction. Self-destruction. Those four women – psychopaths to the last one – that’s what the Hexamerons are. Always have been; the death wish in the accumulative heteronormative anthropocentric economy. They have survived by failing; and now, by succeeding, they will disappear and we will pick up the pieces.” 

“Who are “we” and what are the pieces?”

“That’s why I love you, Mandi! You save so much time! “We” are not who you think “we” are. “We” go back a very long way. But there are only a very few of “we” left. So, although we work for the many, we must work through the few.”

“Giving the revolution a nudge.”

“Neo-liberalism is at an end; read the runes! It has run out of energy in the margins of its own popularity. A new wave of authoritarianism will replace it, rushing to an equally toxic extreme; neo-liberalism’s extreme concentration of wealth wed to authoritarianism’s extreme concentration of power. The wealthy and the powerful have become a small, identifiable and vulnerable elite. They will fall at the hands... not of the masses, but of their immediate subordinates, their security guards, their accountants and lawyers, their generals and their housemaids. And then it will be our turn.”

The Queen Bee laid out for Mandi, as carefully as the dis-assembling of her rifle, without a spring forgotten, the conspiracy of which they were both a part; the subversion of the last remnants of social democratic consensus by luring jaded neo-liberals and clown-demagogues into a libertarianism of anti-identity so radical they would effectively disappear as human beings. Just as the English countryside, following the death of Christianity, had, Queen Bee explained, effectively disappeared as a meaningful locus. The field were still green, the paths still red, but there was no real ecology there. The New Right was vanishing quicker than democracy in a liberated Iraq, its policies lead to social chaos and the evaporation of the individual, a vacuum opens up...”

“So what?” 

No wonder they valued her brevity. The Queen Bee was a windbag.  

The Boss, focused now, explaining how an elite of digitally-savvy social intellectuals was situating itself in scientific, media and religious organisations, in lobbyists and charities, accountancy firms and consultancies, political and academic organisations – ready and prepared to intensify each coming crisis to breaking point, so that when the New Right failed they were adroitly placed to advocate a violent response to its failures and usher in a new kind of digitised transhuman world. 

Mandi laughed at the arrogance. 

“Am I the only real libertarian left?” 

Mandi could match the Queen Bee for arrogance and raise her. 

“But there’s more... you mock yourself and your family, you laugh at what and who you are.”      

“Who am I?” 

Like everyone else she had asked in the past few days, the Queen Bee ignored the question, launching instead into a lecture on two schools of anarchism: helplessly pacifist and violent terroristic. 

“The terror-anarchists were the most influential world political movement through the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century...”

“You’re going to tell me that African-Americans never had it better than when they were in the Black Panthers...” 

The Queen Bee did not skip a beat.

“...they destroyed tsars, they blew up parliaments, they engineered the First World War, but in 1917 they were decisively defeated. In the aftermath of the revolution in Russia, they contested the leadership of the revolution with the Bolsheviks and suffered such terrible defeats at the hands of militarised collectivism, the worst at Kronstadt, the mutiny put down by Trotsky’s Red Army... that kind of anarchism never recovered. Yes, Baader-Meinhof, Angry Brigade, and some Middle Eastern nationalists borrowed the tactics, but the real last gasp was in Catalonia, and the Communists came for them again and finished them off. The something happened. A small number of the leading terror-anarchists – the ‘aristocrats’ of the movement – finally... finally! ... accepted the scale of their defeat and went undercover, prepared to lay low for generations while placing themselves in positions of influence, particularly in newspapers, mass media, intelligence community, communications, arts and the social media industry...”

“Right wing conspiracy theory... Marxist culture war...”

“...with a view to tempting and compromising and exposing and destroying the dominant political forces...”

“What I said...”

“...preparing the vacuum which they will one day occupy.... do you know what their name means?”

“Whose?”

“The Hexamerons.” 

“No.”

“The ‘Hexameron’ is the six-day creation of the world. They don’t mean the biblical creation...”

“Pengelly and...”

“They believe they can create a new world in six days.” 

“How?”

“Well, not by persuasion, is it? By blowing up the data.”

“And you have generously allied me with this bunch of delusional racist digital megalomaniacs?”
   
“Our heritage is to take risks with the world, that’s what we do. Your grandparents, your adoptive grandparents, the parents of... er... your parents? I get confused with all your family complications...”

“Anne and Bryan?” 

“Yes. Er, Anne’s parents. That’s right. They were part of the movement inside the establishment. Your parents were less interesting, more flaky, but we managed to track you down, monitor and nurture you, recruit you away from deviationism; ready to take your rightful place in a revolutionary aristocracy. You have come home to the movement... accept the contract, you’ll be notorious!” 

“How big is all this?”

“Tiny. Has to be. Very few of the genuine anarchist families survived the Soviets, the Nazis and the FBI. We are all of the same tempered blood! I can trace my ancestry to the Haitian slave revolts and Toussaint L’Ouverture, but also to Prussian bomb-throwers. Unlike the paganism of your adoptive parents which goes no further back than Dennis Wheatley and the News of the World – we closed that down, you know! – we have real heritage, real continuity... blood and roots... not that any of that counts for anything, but our ideas are magical. Don’t you feel their rush through you?”   
 
“How far do you think this conspiracy goes?” 

“No, no, no... There are no aliens, no Illuminati, there are just a few of us who respect an idea and pass it on mother to daughter... sometimes it skips a generation... waiting for the moment. When two people agree is that a conspiracy? Everything valuable in life is a conspiracy. To plant a forest, to shoot a movie, to fall in love. There are the plebs of conspiracy and then there are the aristocrats.”

Mandi was deeply grateful to the Queen Bee, in a way. Not for spilling the beans; they pretty much echoed gossip she’d heard before in the media world. There were different versions; but each person always put their heritage – self-made man, war hero, poet – in the driving seat. None of them understood how driven they were. Bee and her senior colleagues had once been part of some headcase animal-activist set-up that had dissolved itself in order to re-emerge as media butterflies. Like the Hexamerons, like the pagans, like the political parties, like the Church of England for god’s sake, they all had their imaginary heritages and their delusional aims and utopias. What really met Mandi’s need in the moment was the opportunity to think clearly and critically about all the bullshit. All of it! The last few weeks – the trash in patterns on the sand, the weird walk with April, the standing stone that had emerged on the dunes – had been resolutely unsusceptible until now. Listening to Bee she knew exactly what they, and she, were not. 
The end of the conversation came remarkable quickly. Once Mandi indicated that their encounter was over, Bee did that thing again and made a pretence of calling the meeting to a halt. Mandi promised to consider everything that she had heard, thanked Bee for her generous offer. She would clear things up in Devon and then get in touch in a week or so for a meeting to discuss her decision and the details of her future involvement. 

A car was waiting for Bee outside the trailer. Not a taxi. On the porch, Bee put in a parting shot. That she would see to the issue at the gun club; Mandi knew that was a threat. Bee then handed Mandi a book taken from her shoulder bag. 

“Read it.”

The book was entitled ‘Soil and Civilisation’.

“Edward Hyams?” 

“You heard his name a few minutes ago. The anarchist author whose ‘Killing No Murder’ inspired the first members of the Pavlichenko Brigade of the Devon Beliye Kolgotki. Stay alert. We observed you having tea with that peculiar archaeologist at his home: Hill House. I want you to study his ideas, not for their content, but for their pattern. He was a Hexameron member, collaborated with Far Right members of the Soil Association, best friends with Lady Eve Balfour, daughter of Gerald the father of the Hexamerons’ failed messiah who you... well... exceeded the best efforts of the Pavlichenko Brigade of the Devon Beliye Kolgotki, shall we say? Hyams wrote dystopian sci fi novels, they predict the exact particulars of the coming Beyondist authoritarianism... how did that matrix form? Any why here? It’s not black magic, so what is it?”

The Queen Bee gestured helplessly, then turned her back on Mandi, just before Mandi could turn her back on the Queen Bee. As Mandi shut the front door behind her, she heard the slam of the car door, and as the copy of Hyams’ book crashed into the waste bin, she heard the gunning of its engine, the crunching scraps of gravel, and its speeding off towards London.           

Chapter 52    
That night Mandi dreamed she was in a church; in the village she and April had rushed through after visiting the cave. ‘Maybe this isn’t right at all’, she thought, inside the dream, but the dream pressed on. It was cold inside the church, and noisy, a choir of five singers were in the porch, holding a single deep note that resonated in the building. Mandi slammed the door to the nave and there was a dead silence which somehow contained the swoosh of a snaky belly and the slurp of slithering olms dragging their torsos over dusty stones. The doors in the centre of the brightly painted rood screen – reds and blacks and whites and oranges and more reds – were madly opening and shutting; each time a figure of God enthroned on one panel crowned the Queen of Heaven on the other. Mandi was surprised at how sexy Mary was; dressed in a poster paint red dress, her long gingery-blonde crimped locks swimming down her back. Was it OK to fancy the Virgin Mary? Well God had, she supposed? It’s a funny kind of virgin that has a kid. These people could never stick as one thing. The doors slammed shut, the Queen stayed crowned, and God – who looked a lot like the Old Man at the retirement property – grimaced. 

“Why did you break the statue?” Mandi asked and the Old Man replied, as if they were a comedy double act, “because he wrote Utopia, I took a hammer to him, haha!” and the doors began to flap again, flinging Mucky Mary back and forth, crashing the crown into her skull. Blood and teeth flew. Above the altar – which had a keyboard like an old cinema organ and was churning out thundering chords – two rising chains of angels throbbed with purples and orange tinges and deep sea blue lights, up and down like decorations on a pinball machine; red wingtips glowed, and two angels with shocks of white hair threw up their hands above four feathery mantles coloured green like bathroom tiles. 

“What have you done?” shouted Mandi. 

“That’s up to you,” said the Old Man sat on the ponderous throne of heaven. 

Saints began to peel off the panels of the rood screen; the male ones couldn’t get themselves properly free and they flapped like plastic bags stuck on barbed wire, except for Armel... how did she know this? ... who led a dragon on a chain to drink at the font. The women were more like two-dimensional stickers from a girl’s magazine, flatfish floating about in a waterless tank; Barbara carrying her own wall which she disappeared through into a mountain gorge, Margaret climbing into the mouth of a dragon and digging her way out through its throat with a crucifix, Apollonia (were these real names?) pulling teeth with giant callipers from the mouth of a dark cave, and Helena digging the true cross from the ashes of a wooden Temple of Venus, burrowing, excavating.

“Why aren’t you all building Utopia?” Mandi asked them.     
               
The Old Man laughed: “you haven’t got it yet, have you?” And he pointed with his free hand to the darkness between the legs of the god in the stained glass into which the dove, white wings aflutter, was rising. Mandi leaned forward towards the darkness and the rood screen doors creaked gently open. Straining to see what it was in the darkness, Mandi bent forwards, towards the altar, fearful that the doors might swing abruptly shut and trap her head. 

The light outside was failing; shadows crept across the windows. The great East window began to fade, the angel lights fizzling out in a shower of sparks, then blanked, black nothingness began to crawl up the insides of the murky barrel of the nave. Mandi, determined to know the darkness of God thrust her shoulders through the rood screen and with the last haunting of its image, Sidwella, perched on the wing of the congregation of saints, leaned in and sliced off Mandi’s head with her spectral scythe. The head rolled along the carpet of the dark chancel and came to rest in a sea of teeth. 
“Now,” thought Mandi’s head, “I will receive a great secret.”

And the rows of teeth jingled as they replied: “treat everyone as you would want them to treat you.”

“O, for fuck’s sake,” thought the head, “after all that, the same old hokum.”

Mandi rang the Bay Museum. April was unavailable; out at a dig. It was the Lack of Engagement Officer. No, he could not divulge volunteers’ phone numbers.

The Chairman of the Hexamerons had sent an email. The same image as before, but now angled so that the black sun looked more disc-like. A black frisbee.  Mandi replied “wtf?” There was no response.

Coffee, for once, did not help. The thrill of authenticity of those first hallucinations had faded, the purity of initial contact lost. Mandi wanted April’s practical help, though she suspected she was meant to do things alone. So much had been going on that she had forgotten to get drunk enough, deep enough, hopeless enough. Sure, she could admit to herself now that she had been in a bad way even before Anne and Bryan had died, but since all the drama in her head she had neglected to neglect herself; she had turned the world grey and sad and controllable. She wanted her scary angels and slimy monsters back.

 Perhaps there was something in the house she had not found yet?

For hours she turned it over. She considered reassembling her rifle, but she had none of the vices, keys and other tools she needed. She had hoped to find some of her own clothes; maybe if she dressed as she had when she was seventeen, she could recover some of her wounded surliness? She took out all the drawers of the unit in which she had found the Lovecraft manuscript in the hope of finding something she had missed, she pulled up carpets and peeled back the edges of the 90s wallpaper. She scribbled down lists of the cans of food and bottles of booze, in case there was some exotic code at work in the order of their storage. She lay on the floor to look for messages on the ceiling. She had almost given up on finding anything when, flicking through the empty pages of a scrap book, she found a collection of drawings she had done as child. They were folded in half and wedged into the gutter of the book.    

Mandi pored over the pastel drawings. They must have been drawn when she was six, maybe seven; a house, an elephant, an island with palm trees, an aeroplane, a sky with clouds. Mandi arranged them on the floor. Perhaps they were like a jigsaw puzzle? She poured herself a drink from an opened half-bottle of whisky. She contemplated cutting out shapes and making a collage. It seemed too brutal, too violent, but she did it. Not that it helped. The elephants were no less banal in juxtaposition than on separate sheets. If Mandi ever had good reason to cry, it was now, but she was not prepared to be swayed by reason yet; she was looking for something buried, not something you could think through. 

She threw the whisky down the sink. She swept the paper creatures, outlines and machines into a pile, screwed them into a ball and lobbed them into the fireplace as tinder for a future blaze. She swooped on the remnants of the oily drawings, gathering their thin and floppy frames; hills, beaches, gateways, caves... drooping between her fingers... she paused and then carefully laid out the pieces once more, moving the leftover parts around, connecting the river to the sea, the house to the hill, the chapel to the cave. She opened a new bottle of whisky. 

None of anything fitted, really. She knew was making things up. The colours contradicted each other, the lines never matched, there was no flow from one scene to another, no continuity. She had bent the roads and paths and ladders into a writhing mess. There was a patchy geography; the clumsiness and ill-fitting junctions were like they were in real places. Real... places. What that the pattern she was missing; that there was no pattern; how weird was that? There was always a pattern. But instead, she just had a mess left behind to find her way back through. A childhood has places, it happens somewhere and that somewhere had never been in this trailer home. Mandi had made another place, other places maybe, for her early years. God, the whisky was helping her. She had – this was typical of her – she had, even then, built the space of her own childhood. Her pattern was never – never! – the one made by her parents. The memory was still hazy, full of holes, but somewhere out there, beyond the camp, not far away she was sure, were places that she had found and adapted to her own... pattern... places where she had hidden herself and hidden things, gone to and done important stuff that her parents never got to find out about. These were places the whereabouts of which she had concealed so carefully that she had eventually forced herself to forget; anxious that she would not be strong enough to keep from giving the game away.

She still had no clear picture of routes; only a jumbled sense of unwanted and unloved spaces that she had occupied and nurtured, like the tangle of offcuts on the carpet. Damp and abject spaces that she had savoured and sunk into; safe spaces protected by their general unattractiveness. She was remembering fast, but the line of brown liquid inside the bottle was sinking alarmingly. It was coming back now, she did not have much time left. She had learned fast how adults, even most kids, would stay out of certain kinds of dark and dirty spaces, soft slimy spaces, spongy and odorous spaces; it was there that Mandi had built her incubators and chancels, and it was time to see if they were still there.  

She crept through the holiday camp, skulking at the edges of the unoccupied trailers as though she were not their owner anymore. The car of one of the permanent residents turned into the camp and Mandy dived behind a barbecue flat-topper. Veering towards the permanent section, the hatchback’s red brake lights flickered on like a blinking demon. Mandi emerged. Small things scared her. She was remembering now how they – who were ‘they’? – had built ritual dens around the fringes of the camp, and told stories to each other of their own lives and their own world, without a heaven but a place for the dead that was just like this one, hidden in the woods inland and guarded by an angel army commanded by a blue lady, and where there was long grass as soft as the kind of bed that was advertised on TV. There were scary things too – how could she not have remembered all this before? – but they were basically the same as the good things. Yes, now she knew where to go.

The ‘Everglades’ stretched from the backs of the junkyards to the grey stream that crept along the edge of Lost Horizon. New water management systems had not affected it much; its waters refused to obey the usual laws of hydro-dynamics and rather than seeking lower ground they were loathe to move on to anywhere else, they hung around the Everglades for as long as they could. Seeping into the mushy loam and gruel-like humus they hid like an outlaw band in the spongy floor of the ‘Everglades’. Where she got that name from she had long forgotten. Some self-deprecating humour on the part of a previous resort manager, maybe, or the bitter gibe of a visitor repeated by successive waves of guests. Maybe.

Black pools hung around the base of moss-ruined trees, the air stank and seemed to loaf, suspended, like rags on a fairy-tale beggar. Or scalded skin peeling from a shinbone. There was nothing inviting about the ‘Everglades’; kids in the camps had whispered about leeches that could crawl inside your pants, earwigs that nested in real ears and drove people mad with pain. The less the strip of land was visited, the more inhospitable it became; the soft silky mud a few inches beneath the surface of the stream under the over-sized run-off pipe was full of tiny bugs with razor teeth, so thin and silvery was the silt it would drag you down and under in seconds; the cruel and mocking roots reaching from its vertical banks just daring their victims to grab at their rottenness. 

On the other side of the grisly interlude of decay, various cast-offs and retired mannequins from carnival floats cluttered the fence of the junkyard, its wood long fallen away and replaced by broad rusting orange and blue wire meshes draped in tarpaulins. Ropes held a mass of cast-off things together. Posters drooped from their boards and signs from floats dissolved into pulp alphabets. Painted masks peeled and leered. The front quarter of a Bedford van had been strapped to the side of a shed. It was unclear whether any of the yards constituted actual businesses. Or were hobbies run out of control.

Streams of vapour would occasionally rise from hardboard vents or tin can chimneys, but no one from the yards ever looked over the fence into the ‘Everglades’.     
               
As Mandi picked her way between splintered stumps, their shards shredded by dissolution in the heavy air, a rhyme, sung in a freakish falsetto, drifted through the trees. 

‘Muddy Mary mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!’

The singer had been expecting her. Calling to her. He stood, his feet apart, hands clasped behind his back; he might have looked vaguely military if it were not for his obvious discomfort. 
   
“Did you call me back to here?” 

“No.... did you feel called?” 

He looked about thirty. One of those adult-children; although his clothes were not absurd, they hung on him like parasites. He had the kind of frame that could make an Enzo D’orsi suit look ill-fitting. His eyes were muddy and watery, his lips full and clumsy, his hair had been disciplined by an angry barber and the grey-brown mud had crept up to his shins.  

“I had to come... my ... there was an accident, I had to arrange the funeral... who are you, that you’re so interested?” 

“Don’t you recognise me?” 

“No. Help me out, why don’t you?”

“We played here as kids. Twenty years ago, exactly. Right here. Do you remember now?” 

“No.”

She made to tell him to clear off, that he was on private property, that they didn’t need stalkers and creeps and that he was lucky it was winter and there were no holiday kids around otherwise she would be calling out the police on him. But a dark blankness opened up and it smelt of the same decay as that underfoot; she tried to fix on a single childhood memory. She knew that if she could, the memories would roll out like scrolls with befores and afters, in a long line of days. But the anchor point, the catalyst refused to come; the silence sank like wings folding over the past.

“My name’s Edward Mann, but I was always called Eddie then. Most people do that now, actually, even though they know (he said “now”) I prefer Edward, but I’m stuck with Eddie.” 

“Well, Eddie, I don’t remember that name or an Edward...” 

“O, I wouldn’t have been an Edward then...”  

“Well, I don’t remember an Eddie, so I reckon that gives you two minutes to convince me and then let’s say we leave the reunion for another twenty years?” 

“You were a magician, Amanda, not a stage one with tricks, but a... real thing, actual spells, a whole myth you discovered in the Everglades...”

“You know it’s the Everglades?” 

“You remember?” 

“I do actually... why would we have called this place the Everglades? It stinks.”

Eddie shrugged, his anorak hood stood up like an exclamation mark above his head. 

“You really came here twenty years ago... or so?” 

“From Dudley.” (He pronounced it “Dud-lay”.) “The whole family, but I was the only one to play in here. Of our family. There were other kids from other families. We came here three years on the trot, then... something put my folks off and we went to Minehead after that. No Everglades in Minehead.”
Mandi could hear the angry calls of birds above the tree tops. The thick canopy obscured what kind of birds they were. They sounded like her London bosses; yelling at the tops of their voices because they were too permanently freaked out to do anything quietly powerful. A greenish steam lifted off from the surface of a caravan roof visible above the dummies and tarps; a moth-eaten pirates’ flag fell limp against its cricket stump pole.   

 Eddie Mann described the rituals through which Mandi had once led him and the other Brummie holiday kids. He began to describe “the big picture” that they had all believed in back then and Mandi dimly recollected something like that; a myth they had concocted from overhearing stuff from parents and other kids she had spied on from the Everglades. 

“I do remember that we put together some wild story...”

“No, only you, Amanda. Only you put it together. The rest of us were your magpies; the rest of us kids were, some of us, channelling bits of something, but you had the lot – the whole thing down. Like a religion.” 

“OK. I remember some of this. You have another ten minutes. Pitch it to me.”

Eddie Mann settled against the rotten stump. He grinned.

“Are you sure you (he pronounced each “you” as “yow”) don’t remember this?”

Mandi screwed up her face; for once she was choosing a long silence. 

“OK, well... it was our beliefs, right? Our manifesto, if you like (“loik”). We were kids. It went something like this. It didn’t all come at once. You learned it off of things we’d heard, things we saw, things adults say when they don’t think kids can hear. You used to hide in these woods for hours waiting for some couple to come walking by, repeating stuff they’d heard. Then you told us. You stitched it all together. We brought some of the bits, but you made the whole story out of them.” 

“I don’t remember that. I remember being here, I remember the dens and stuff. But stitching together, what did I stitch together?”

“You (“Yow” again) made it into one big story. How God was murdered by his mother...”

“What!” 

“Yes! That’s what you told us.”

“I told you God was killed by his mother?”

“Murdered. You were quite clear about the details. He was in his bath. She grabbed Him by the ankles when she was kissing His toes; He never knew what hit Him, the shock made Him breathe in the bathwater and He never came round. They hung Him up on a post. When the ropes slipped they nailed Him to it, but He rotted and began to slip down.”

“That’s sick. How come his mother did that?” 

“She heard that God had turned aeroplanes into bombs, light had gone bad like old bananas and that was His doing as well, she was crazy, because He had put messages inside soaps...” 

“Like microbeads?” 

“Like in Corrie, and Eastenders...”

“Ah, that kind...” 

“God’s mother said she was going to wash God in darkness, and when He refused to let her she murdered him. Jesus went crazy and tried to get rid of the body in Hell, but that scared all the demons and the criminal masterminds and the torturers and the Moors Murderers and they ...”

“Stop right there. The Moors Murderers? They weren’t dead in... whenever it was you were on holiday here, 1999 or whatever...” 

“Who said anything about Hell being only for dead people? You told us it was mostly the evil living. And they wanted out, God’s corpse was stinking out the place, so these portals started opening up on Earth and the evil started coming through...”

“This doesn’t sound much like a message of hope...” 

“Ah, but it is! Mucky Mary, the murdering mother of God, lived in a swamp...” 

“Mucky Mary?!?”

“or Muddy Mary, or Murdering Mary... she lived in a swamp... called the Everglades, under the mud, near the posts of rotting flesh, one with the flat top and one with the point, but she couldn’t escape because the mud was a kind of quicksand, and the more she tried to get out the deeper she sank down and down into the darkness...”

“This is not uplifting! But great story anyway!”

“It’s not a story. It’s a place. The Everglades is real. The story is about here. It’s the spirit story of this place. In the same way people have souls, you were told the spirit story of here, like some people are a medium and get to hear the stories from dead souls. You told us that Mary was still here in the mud, and that she still had a call on the angels and she sent them to take down the bombers from the sky. But it all went wrong, the bombers crashed into a city and the wrong people died. The angels screwed up. Even those on holiday were crying; they left the beaches and went to the bars to watch the TVs, the same programme over and over and over again. That night everyone sat outside their cabins, because they were scared that the planes would come for them, come for their little buildings. Everything on the planet changed. The angels covered the portals to Hell with their wings, to stop any more evil pilots getting into this world; even when it meant leaving their burning skeletons across the mouths of the portals like bone cages. Every time a bomb went off, it would have been much worse but for the angel that had wrapped itself around the bombs; they were picking up flesh and feathers for months after. Thanks to Mucky Mary and her angels, the Earth was just hanging on, but the demons, master criminals, Moors Murderers and evil pilots were always trying to break through from Hell...”

“That was about twenty years ago... Hell is below here?”

“No. Here is good all the way down. There are good places that are pure springs, you told us. Even though they don’t look like it. This wasn’t here until you started hearing the stories, and then here... developed. It works both ways. Story is a kind of place, you said, made by imagination, story made this place from deep in the planet like a spring makes a well; and the place made the story. The floods came one year and the camps were all like lakes with water up to the doors and inside the kitchens, and the next year they dug out the stream and the Everglades were born, between the stream and the junkyard. Even though it had been here forever, in a way, it needed the floods to give it... birth... physical shape! You said that we can map these places out. And you said that they were growing; Everglades type places. The more that people believed in pretend stories, the more pretend that was shown on the TV, the more confused people got between the truth and the lies, the bigger our places would grow, the deeper our mud would sink and the more that Mucky Mary would be recognised. Mucky Mary who loved children so much she would eat them and they would re-form in her belly and she would spit them out as angels. The more children that are hurt, the more Mary searches for them, to turn them into angels, with real feathers.”

“Wow. I made all this up?”    

“You didn’t make anything up. You were told. Or you heard.” 

“This Mucky Mary? Do you think that was about a real person?” 

“Not a person. She goes back a very long way; further back than people. You told us she was very, very, very old, and yet she was also very sexy. Way back when the bread was real and there was water in fountains, you said, she seduced ... you didn’t say that word exactly, but that’s what you meant...  my mind has changed, I’ve become a... a adult, since... she seduced the old rubbish God, the original one, who made everything symmetrical and full of rules, corners were all like the corners of a square and everything was perfect, except for people, who were either monsters or disabled, and flowers and trees which were monsters too in a way, there was no beauty even though there were perfect rules. The rules ground up everything into mincemeat. Mucky Mary introduced curves into the universe and winding rivers and worms, snakes, dragons and intestines and ever since then God has been mad on science and proving everything he did was real, and trying to put the tubes back in the bottle. Mother Mary hid in the sea. I don’t know what you meant by that, but “trying to put the tubes back in the bottle” is what you said. You have any idea?”

“None. This universe?”

“Yes, God was really furious with it. The angles kept turning into ladies...” 

 “Angles? You mean angels?” 

“Ah... now... I forget parts... I’ve told these stories to myself, repeated every word every night now, before sleep, since the holidays back then, but I do a lot of other things, now. Ufos. Aliens. Steam locomotives, I’m part of a voluntary... I go to a day centre. I like football. I get mixed up.” 

“Can we forget aliens and steam locomotives for a moment?”

“Sure. No aliens. No steam trains. Because everything you ever said has been true.” 

“What do you think this Mucky Mary looks like?” 

“Like you, maybe? You said that when the stories begin to be more important than then news, when people become confused and hypnotised, when real and not real are mixed up, then She will come back again.”

“And I came back, here, and you think...” 

“I don’t think. I repeat. I’m only telling you what you told me. Except that you said that Mary would come from the mud and she would have eight arms and eight legs.”

“Right...”  

Mandi threw her arms wide, palms out, as if to say: “and where’s my other six?”

Eddie shrugged. 

“That was then, when she was the Deep’s thing. Now, whenever someone tries to revive the old God, and make rules of pure consciousness, She rises from the depths and wraps her legs with tearing teeth round them and pulls them in pieces. That is what you said...@

“And I was how old?”

 “You were standing right where you are now, and me right here. 1999. All of this, in one big story just like today, and you said at the end ‘don’t forget that’ and I never did, so help me Mary, cross my heart and I hope to die.”

“Why did you come back to The Sett, Eddie?”

“I stopped liking it in Birmingham. People at the club talking about this amazing time to come when we’re out of the Common Market and I just thought ‘Mucky Mary is not going to like this, Mucky Mary is not going to put up with this’ and I thought I better get down there and show her that I’m not like the rest; I’m the same way pretty much as you made me in 1999.” 

As Mandi picked her way back to the camp, balancing on the slippery run-off pipe across the stream, she thought she heard Eddie speak; turning, precariously, she saw he was down on his knees. He was too far away for his words to carry clearly, but she thought they were these: 

“Hail Muddy Mary, full of dirt and scum, the Old Boy is dead. Blessed is you number one among all the old girls in the earth; blessed is the crab apple from your guts. Holy Muddy of Mud, pray for us, the disconsolate ones, now at the hour of our earthing. And amen down there.”  

What unholy mess was this?

She went back across the pipe and collected Eddie. She found him an empty caravan and let him in, promising to return with hot food and whisky. She was as good as her word, and through the evening Eddie and Mandi talked of what exactly the thing under the mud might be like.  

​​Go to Bonelines Instalment 10
​​Go to the Bonelines homepage