O heaves himself out little by little, on cold, bald, chicken-skin elbows; beady bat-like, horribly crawls from the two o'clock hole of the cellophane rotary dial of a giant Bakelite telephone; like Jerry Mouse reluctantly reappears from the black hole in the skirting board; gulp, he's been pursued by Tom for more than 50 years; sniffs whiskers all wrinkly, grey and weary; breathlessly fearful, and longs for the chase to terminate in savagery, and finally, torn to pieces; whilst cruel metal owls clatter tooled up, sharpened claws and spitting lead from dead tree boles, rat-tat-tat red hot pellets, and lay waste the forest; like the incompetents blinking behind ono-specs, Ginsberg good looks no longer de rigueur, those who saw her standing there, moles emerging from four thousand holes, furrowed faces for you to slap, nicotine knuckles for you to rap, O returns to noise and loco-motion; remembers winter kept us warm, and sealed his eyes and ears with wax; oh, Mum, I can't do my exams blocked up like this: course you can, Malcolm; flap and crack of flags and sodden slacks and a storm-tormented, disused wartime airfield, as black tarmac buckles and Kraken tree-roots rip it up and whip red tendons, and soft, pink muscle strips down to dry, white bones, and skeletal feet keep right on running; and gawp as black tongues loll from gaping holes and gurgle on the gallows; or follow shoals of shark-nosed spitfires splutter overhead; almost lulled for a moment by the music of the flowers, as a poor girl drowns again and again and again in a drab, brackish bath, for the hordes of dribbling, whiskery fools with soft, wet mouths and smooth boyish hands [...]
