in a sunset arbour following the world and Snowy’s weathered, almost corrugated thighs are dappled by sliding and elongated rose ellipses, an elegiac radiance filtering through sculpted voids in the waxed dinner-plate leaves of the canopy above him. With his darling burden he strides on into a reprised cryptozoic, all of history in his blisters. For a period they travel in the midst of an inquisitive and scuttling company: the amiable shades of table-crabs who seem to be endeavouring to communicate by tapping an adapted fore-claw on the moss-occluded boards of the immortal boulevard, an inarticulate crustacean Morse. Riding her grandfather as if atop a howdah the grave eighteen-month-old prodigy quotes Wittgenstein, to the effect that even if a lion could speak, mankind would not be capable of understanding it. As if in mute acknowledgment of this persuasive observation presently the entourage of furniture-sized arthropods abandon their attempts at conversation, losing interest, clattering away en masse between the monstrous bolls of that terminal orchard. Everything is doomed with beauty. Later there are further whale-goats and a huge tree-mimicking variety of octopus that they’ve not previously encountered, with impassive garnet eyes easily missed in the surrounding column of bark-patterned skin, and liver-coloured suckers on what first seem to be overhanging boughs. May formally proposes they should call the species Yggdrasil after the Nordic world-tree, given that taxonomy itself will surely be extinct by now and that the splendid creature thus must otherwise go nameless in eternity. The motion, after a debate and vote, is passed unanimously whereupon the baby and her wrinkled steed persist with their excursion through the final foliage, amongst incurious monsters. After wading in the magma of four thousand serial dawns Snowy and May elect to make their temporary bed amid the shivering mimosas of a twilight mile somewhere in the next century, if indeed there are centuries anymore. As the old man remarks while fashioning a shelter from the shirking greenery, the base-ten counting system and conceivably the whole of mathematics must have surely disappeared from the inferior territories downstairs by now. From this point on, where science and faith and art and even love are only fossil memories, he and his granddaughter must venture past the end of measurement itself, perhaps even beyond the unavoidable demise of meaning. The unlikely pair consider this new, unsuspected lower register of desolation whilst they messily devour their last remaining specimens of snow-queen Bedlam Jennies, prudently expectorating the pink eyeball-pips into the flinching and fastidious vegetation trembling about them. At the bottom of their wolfskin tucker-bag there are now only a few snapped-off chorus girl limbs much like shapely and anaemic doll-parts, with a sparkling dragonfly debris of wings. Above, cut into slices and trapezohedrons by the silhouetted branches, an unfolded constellation that is possibly hyper-Orion — Snowy notices three displaced repetitions of the famous belt — is stretched across the settling indigo, a malformed tesseract of ancient lights. Replete and comfortably sluggish after their fungal repast, the juice of tiny women sticky on their chins, they slide into the hypnagogic drifts of ghost-sleep mumbling and holding hands. Around their hide are brittle crunches, fracturings, reports distantly audible beyond the blurred peripheries of their awareness, probably the cringes and contractions of the cowering shrubbery within which they are nested and so swiftly filtered out by a receding consciousness. Gorged upon visionary arctic truffles both the baby and her ancestor are borne on an eidetic surf of faerie imagery, unwinding madhouse dioramas with a miniaturist intricacy that is bottomless and sometimes borders on the terrifying: at hallucinatory Elizabethan frost-fairs stand bare-breasted ladies in preposterously large hooped crinolines with decorative motif snowflakes made of lace around the hems. Each has a flattened palm raised to face level for inspection, smiling in delight at the scale reproduction of herself that seems to balance there, complete in every detail, beaming down approvingly at the almost infinitesimal homunculus perched on her own hand, peering into a vertiginous regression of excruciating and exquisite pulchritude, a mesmerising vortex of wan femininity. These are the dreams the dead have when they’re Puck-drunk. After an incalculable interval they shrug away their gem-encrusted drowse, refreshed despite the Midsummer Night alkalis that have been coursing through their slumbering ethereal systems. Waking, unsurprisingly, to the same shade of dusk in which they bedded down, not until Snowy lifts their wolf-pelt satchel do they realise with bewilderment that while they napped the previously almost-empty sack has been mysteriously replenished, filled now to its brim with an unusually picturesque mass grave of conjoined Thumbelinas. Still more inexplicably these are not the albino strain responsible for their nocturnal visitations, but are rather the more ruddily-complexioned type familiar from the traveller’s own now-remote home century. Not wishing to examine their gift horse’s dentistry the bony veteran ties the pixie-bag about his shoulders, crouching while May climbs aboard. It calls to mind
him and his young ’un Thursa chuffing through the Lambeth chill to see their father, locked away in Bedlam, with the siblings’ warm breath crystallising to grey commas in their wake. Being at ten years old the senior of the two John is in charge, towing his crooning and distracted younger sister down the fogbound lanes by one sweat-slippy hand. They skirt around the Temperance revivalists and ne’er-do-wells, the clustered corner conferences about the Kaiser or Alsace-Lorraine, avoiding those insanities they’re not immediately related to. November scalds his sinuses and Thursa drags annoyingly, winding her dreary half-a-song in a damp skein amongst the toughs and gas-lamps. “Shut up, you, or I shan’t take you to see Dad.” The eight-year-old is loftily indifferent, screws her nose into a little concertina of distaste: “Don’t care. Don’t wunner see ’im. This is when he tells us about all the chimneypots and numbers.” John doesn’t reply but only drags her with more force, across the cobbles with their ochre archipelagos of shit, between the rumbling wagons, from miasma to miasma. Though he hasn’t had a conscious thought about the subject before Thursa speaks those exact words, they fall upon him with the gavel-weight of a harsh sentence, long anticipated, indisputable. He knows she’s right about this being the occasion when their father shares some sort of secret with them, can almost recall the countless previous times she’s told him this, on this same night and halfway over this specific road, avoiding this precisely-contoured patch of horse muck, on their way to the asylum. Furrowing his freezing, aching brow John makes an effort to remember all the cataclysmic things their father will be telling them. Something to do with lifebelts, and the special flowers made of bare ladies that are all the dead can eat. This outrageous curriculum sounds eerily familiar, although for the life of him he can’t see how it can be, not in the same world where the trudged-smooth slabs of Hercules Road are so immediate and hard beneath his worn-through soles. They carry on past Autumn-bare front yards with waist-high walls, through a green dark that the infrequent lamps only accentuate, towards the mist-wreathed shores of Kennington. Ahead their future footsteps are arranged like unseen slippers running off along the vapour-shrouded pavement, waiting patiently to be tried on, however fleetingly; waiting here on this side street for them since before the world began in their inevitable and ordained procession to the madhouse gates. His sister’s hand is hot and horrible the way it always is tonight, adhesive with a barley-sugar glaze. A cab whose hoarding advertises Lipton’s tea clops by on cue as their incipient prints lead them around a corner, up the way a bit and suddenly the wrought-iron bars and flanking posts of rain-gnawed stone are only a few moments, a few feet away. The hospital and the impending hour which it contains drag themselves eagerly across the intervening space and time, approaching through the churned murk like a plague boat or a prison hulk, crushing the kids to specks with brute proportion, piss and medicine on its breath. The keeper standing guard beside the gated entrance on its far side recognises them from other evenings and unlocks with a begrudging attitude. It seems to John not so much that the gateman doesn’t like them, rather that he doesn’t like them being there where grown-ups act like frightening children. Every time they turn up here he tells them they’d be better off not coming and then lets them in, gruffly escorting them across the walled-in grounds to the front doors in case of wandering stranglers or buggers. Once inside the building, swallowed by the stern administrative hush of a reception area with its austere high ceilings lost from sight to a gas-mantle glow of insufficient reach, Thursa and John’s reluctant shepherd hands them over to another warden, a stone-faced and somewhat older man whose head is all grey bristle. “They’re for Vernall. It’s not right, them being here with all o’ this, but there you have it and there’s nothing to be done.” The words have a faint echo, have a ring to them as if spoken before. Still holding hands, although for comfort rather than compulsion, they accompany their mute chaperone down creaking corridors that crawl with whispers and the memory of incontinence. A dusty, miserable residue of pipedream empires and bewilderment accumulates in phantom drifts against the skirting boards where their stilt-walker shadows list precariously, teetering abreast with them on this subdued and strangely formal outing. Bolted doors slide by, and contrary to popular opinion nowhere is there any laughter. Led into a dimly-lit hall of intimidating scale reserved for visitors, the urchins are confronted by an umber lake in which perhaps a dozen table-islands float suspended, juddering hemispheres of candlelight where inmates sit like stones else gaze enraptured into empty air while relatives stare wistfully at their own shoes. Marooned on one such islet is their father, the white hair grown out as if his head’s on fire with gulls. He asks them if they know about tonight and John says “Yes” while Thursa starts to cry. An oddly reminiscent litany begins, lightning and chimneypots, geometry and angles, spectre-food and the topology of starry time; the widening hole in everything. He tells them of the endless avenue above their lives where characters called