ducked instinctively, shielding my face with my hands. Through my parted fingers I could see what it was. A fishing rod, the end snapped off. It spun past my ear and struck Mr Pinner across the side of the head, too fast for him to dodge. A broken umbrella flew point-first from a pile of rubble and embedded itself in his shoulder; a deflated plastic football spun from the ground and tangled around his feet, a blackened barbecue spun past me and knocked into him; and now it wasn’t just one thing, it was a dozen, a hundred, the whole yard spinning and screaming and rattling and twisting and rising and turning and falling, all falling in, tumbling down from the great pyramids like iron filings drawn to a magnet, like a rocket into the sun.
We threw ourself on the ground as the tarmac cracked and splintered beneath us, covering our head, tucking our arms into our ears and our hands over our eyes and willing fury and life still into the old dead things left to rot around us, pushing every drop of fear and anger and strength we possessed into the rust and mould and telling it, him, get him. Somewhere nearby I was vaguely aware of running; I half thought I heard Oda call my name; kept my head down and started to crawl on my belly, the last rats running over my spine and the back of my neck in their desperation to escape, as I headed for where I thought the exit might be.
I couldn’t see; the air was too full of spinning broken objects that, even as they travelled, shed spare parts, clattering to the earth around them. A thick orange dust of metal shavings, sawdust, sand, rust, old spilt chemicals, shattered moulds, ripped-up mosses and bits of thick purple fungus and thin green slime filled the air, turning clear lines of perspective into a maddened oil canvas painted by a drugged-up loon. I breathed through the sleeve of my coat, and even that hurt, my nose burning with the rust that tried to slash and tear the soft tissues, my eyes running and every sense overwhelmed with so much information all at once that I could barely register any thought at all. Just crawl, keep it simple, too much thinking, too much trouble, too much of too much, just keep crawling . . .
I bumped into the chain fence, bent back like a clifftop tree in a storm, and crawled along it, feeling my way to the edge. I half thought I heard Oda again, but it was hard to tell, beneath the tumbling of a thousand dead bits of steel, iron, plastic, brick, concrete, rubber, glass, plexiglas, clay, tin, plywood, chipboard . . . a hand closed over our ankle and we whimpered, glancing back into the storm and half-blinded by the blast of everything that hit our eyes, so weak, small, frail, mortal,
Mr Pinner
his hand was paper
for a moment we blinked and pushed back against the storm and saw
the skin torn away. It was just white paper, covered in tiny illegible writing and the suit, his suit tearing in the wind, was sewn into the paper; I could see the tiny stitches as the cuff was pulled back by the whirlwind. His eyes were full of blue ink; his hair was unravelling, each strand unfolding into a tube, a receipt or a bus ticket or some small marker, that flew away and unfurled behind him. His teeth were rubbers, tiny white rubbers set into a broader rubber gum; his tongue was some sort of thick moleskin or leather, dry, like the kind used to bind an executive diary. It occurred to us quite how much he looked like a thing summoned, a creation of someone’s fury: consequence, not cause . . .
His other hand came up, holding a not-quite-gold-nibbed pen, the end dripping black ink drops that were snatched away into the whirlwind. He was on his belly, an arm, part of a head sticking out from beneath a falling tonnage of rubbish and scrap, which writhed and twisted above him like a great angry worm, bits of old fridge and shattered chair rising to the surface and falling into the depths, like a liquid creature, not a thing of solid mass at all. I kicked at the hand that seized my ankle, grabbed the strength in my chest, the heat and the fear and sent it blasting down my leg,