his earliest encounter with the food that ghosts eat comes when he’s aged twelve and drunk on ale for the first time, a brimming jug he’s swiped from home and swiftly emptied in the fornication-scented alleyways of Lambeth. Reeling full of bravery and poison past the walls of the old Bethlehem, his stumble is arrested by the sight of flickering colour dancing just above the darkened paving slabs ahead. In the same way that floating shapes behind the eyelids often crystallise into coherent images when on the brink of sleep, so too does the prismatic shimmering resolve into an insubstantial coterie of tiny ladies with no clothes on. Through the intervening folds of beer and murk he marvels at their tits and fannies, being the first proper ones he’s seen, and can’t believe his luck. The women waver and there is a sound they make that is initially like individual voices giggling, and yet after a time these seem to merge into a high-pitched whine at the periphery of the young drunkard’s hearing. He stands leaning with one palm against the mossy stone of the asylum gatepost, wondering muddily if this means he’s about to die, and is not reassured when passing strollers seem to only laugh or voice their disapproval at his obvious inebriation while they kick obliviously by or through the haze of naked manikins cavorting at their feet. He understands with a dull pang of apprehension that these manifested fantasies are visible or audible to him alone, perhaps a vision presaging his own internment in the institution he is currently propped up against, made an apprentice madman to his own incarcerated father, both off with the fairies. Swallowing warm spit he thinks about the inmate that he saw on his last visit with his sister, elderly and scabby-faced from the repeated self-inflicted beating of his head against a door. The stolen booze and scalding bile erupt into John Vernall’s throat and he is copiously, blasphemously sick over the gossamer-winged little people swirling unconcerned about his ankles. Undulate as weed in water the translucent nymphs ignore slivers of fish-flesh from his supper, part-dissolved and steaming, and continue with their lazy sway as if moved by a breeze or current rather than their own volition. Sweat streams down his forehead. Foot-long threads of dribble dangle trembling from his panting mouth, his sagging chin, and the damp pavement is on fire with girls. Their perfect pink-white faces are identical and make him think of sugar mice, the features blank and motionless with no more human feeling than if he were scrutinising some ingeniously camouflaged variety of insect, horrid beetle thoughts concealed behind the painted icing of their eyes. The mere idea precipitates a second surge of vomit and the unconcerned minuscule females, stood in its foul spatter as though showering in some crystal waterfall, elicit yet a third. Distantly he becomes aware that other passers-by are drawing closer and prepares for further mockery, only to look up in surprise when this is not forthcoming. Even through the filter of his reeling senses he immediately realises that there’s something wrong with the approaching onlookers. Drifting unhurriedly towards him along the inadequately gas-lit street come two men and a woman, shabbily attired and without any colour whatsoever, figures carved from smoke. They seem to be in agitated conversation but the noise of this is muffled, as if come from far away or else as though his ears are plugged with wax. The trio pause when they draw level and regard him, albeit with a less judgemental eye than the nocturnal stragglers who passed him earlier. One of the men says something to the oddly dressed old woman, evidently with regard to the inebriated urchin, but it’s much too faint to hear. Shivering now and drenched in icy perspiration, he is disappointed to discover that these unobtrusive newcomers are no more able to perceive the pixies pirouetting in his spew than were their raucous predecessors. Something else, however, seems to have attracted their attention: silvery and grey like a Daguerreotype, the crone in her old-fashioned skirts and bonnet is now pointing to the upper reaches of the pillar that the boy is slumped against. Her lips are moving as though under glass, her utterances only audible to her two male and monochrome companions, one of whom steps forward now and reaches up to fumble under the eroded, jutting lip of the post’s capstone. As he does, one of his sooty arms slips through John’s own outstretched and trembling limb as if it isn’t there. The tall and spindly man seems to be prising something blurred and indistinct from off the madhouse gates, and simultaneously the pretty miniatures are guttering like candle flames. The shrill hum that he had at first mistaken for their voices rises to a maddening whistle and then shuts off altogether, at which point the pygmy dancers vanish into scintillating dust and he is staring only at a pool of his own recent stomach contents upon which the iridescent meat-flies are already settling. The lofty wraith is lifting something down, some shadowy and writhing octopus or hydra, tearing off its limbs and sharing them amongst his phantom colleagues as the three fade gradually from sight. Surrendering, the wayward youth closes his eyes. The liquid shapes bloomed from that private dark are truant stars above a ceaselessly unreeling scroll of path where