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the lobby watching. I nearly fainted backwards with embarrassment. Next I’m staring barefaced at an engraved proposal of marriage. And with not another word out of him he gets up, bows and goes off scribbling in his little book in the corner.’
    Rain dripping on the stone sills. Wind growing stronger. Boom of the sea. Down where the great conger lurks. Over his collection of bones. Got my elbow back where it was before. Up against the side of her bulging breast. Fattened further by the last of my cheese. Just push my foot down a little between the damp sheets. Feel if it’s true. That she’s got webbing between the toes. Mamba venom in the veins. And influence with the insurgents. Who might as well be here already. To take up positions. In the halls. And direct traffic for this carnival.
    ‘Are you constipated, Clementine.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well I was. For years. Frozen like concrete. Didn’t the doctors have to dig it out of me. Till I took the infusion. After winning the contest the three of them in white coats subjected me to a rude intimate examination with stethoscopes and blood pressure contraptions. Said my breath wasn’t what it should be, caused by the inner contamination. Sure I listened to them, I had to, strapped stark naked as I was on my back to an operating table under a big sky light with the clouds going over above right in the best part of town. You never heard such a bunch of high falutin comments. Streaming out of the three of them. Said that the tone of my voice would be sweetened. Well I can tell you I’m thankful to them for that. For the greatest relishment I’ve been having at the bog of a morning. Sitting there with it coming out two feet long at a time like satin. Franz’s donkey distillate may be a hoax. But I’m telling you right now the infusion is a holy miracle.’
    ‘The distillate is ok too.’
    ‘You’re not codding me now. Grrrrr. Give us a feel. Ah if that’s not good quality granite I’ve never felt a bit in me life. Maybe they’re genuine scientists enough then.’
    Rose growling, rearing up on top of Clementine. Elmer’s ears cocking. The rusty springs of the lumpy mattress squealing. She’s trying to open my pyjamas which are on backwards. But through the arse of which I forged a hole for peeing. By constantly making this mistake each time I had to take a midnight leak on my storm tossed trip across the seas. To reach this land. After a eleven and a half days of nautical horror. Witnessed in silence. At the long end of a nervous decline. Right to the edge of the grave. Kept holding myself back. Not wanting to go just yet. But inching there all the same. Waking each day at dawn. The light cold with death. My great aunt sitting through afternoons down below in her gabled house on a shady street. Where I watched the milkman, mailman and garbage collector come and go. And like Erconwald does with Rose I took my rectal temperature. Measuring the slow combustion ofthe fatal disease. Taking me around the throat and arse. Parts it seemed to fancy. As my aunt’s servants went out my bedroom door shaking their heads. With the trays of untouched food. Seven ounces less I weighed each day. Looking at my white tongue in the mirror. New pains behind eyeballs. Doom fuming up from the outstretched supplicant palms of my hands. Had I known Franz, Erconwald and Putlog then they could have squirted a tonic vapour down my throat and an aeriform serum up my arse. To meet in the belly for a gaseous eruption and blow both hips out of joint forever. Flap round like a puppet buried as I am under Rose’s two massive swinging breasts and cascading hair. Growling and biting. What a change from crawling down the last mile. Auntie rolling in my bedroom door in her wheel chair, telling me I was just like my father. He was big and strong. Buried my mother and three more after her. Screwed to death. It was rumoured by doctors who diagnosed an agitation caused by his testicular trinity. An