spotted a creature from her direst nightmare jumping between Pithecanthropus’s eyebrows. ‘Fleas!’ she shrieked. ‘I knew it! All along! Fleas!’
‘Yes, by jimminy, yes!’ clopped Goatwriter. ‘Of course! The most mathematical animal is the flea!’
Queen Erichnid’s rumba halted. ScatRat’s leer fell away. ‘Ya gotta say why or it don’t count!’
Goatwriter cleared his throat. ‘“Fleas subtract from happiness, divide attention, add to miseries and multiply alarmingly.”’
ScatRat gazed up at his screen idol. ‘Some ya win, Ya Majesty, and some ya—’
Queen Erichnid muted ScatRat with a double click. You failed me, you corrupted, bugged, cybervermin! Only one punishment fits this crime!’ ScatRat’s ‘nooo-ooo-ooo . . .’ dwindled to zero as the queen dragged him into the recycle bin. The queen’s ire grew dire. ‘As for you, o Bearded One, if you think some legal-eagle babble prevents me from seizing’ – her eyes narrowed with wintry menace while megabytes crackled – ‘the object of my desires, then even for a writer you are cretinous beyond belief ! Stand by – for digitalization!’ She primed the on-screen digitalizer. ‘Five – four—’
‘Sir!’ Mrs Comb fluttered but was still meshed fast. ‘Sir!’
Goatwriter strained against his cable harness. ‘Deuced dastardly diabola!’
Queen Erichnid’s teeth sparkled with silicon. ‘Three – two—’
Pithecanthropus pulled out the plug.
The screen died, and the website vanished as if it had never existed, which in a sense it hadn’t, for Goatwriter, Pithecanthropus and Mrs Comb found themselves sitting in the sun-blasted desert, too astonished to utter a syllable.
17th SeptemberA ski resort town in the Nagano MountainsEiji,If you tried to contact me after I sprung myself from the clinic in Miyazaki, it was sweet of you, but I couldn’t stay there any longer. Anywhere on Kyushu is too close to Yakushima for comfort. (If you didn’t, I don’t blame you for a moment. I didn’t really expect you to.) I may have problems but the patients there were so scary I figured I’d take my chances back in the big bad world. (At least they give you knives and forks out here.) Burn the last letter I wrote. Burn it, please. I won’t ask you for a single thing but I’m asking you to do this. The only thing Dr Suzuki taught me is that there comes a point in your life, and when you pass this point you can’t change. You are what you are, for better or worse, and that is that. I shouldn’t have told you about the stairs incident. You must hate me. I would. Sometimes I honestly do. Hate myself, I mean. Be careful of counsellors, therapists, head doctors. They poke around, and take things to bits without thinking about how they’ll put it all back together. Burn the letter. Letters like that shouldn’t exist. (Especially on Yakushima.) Burn it.So here I am in Nagano. What sunsets they make in these mountains! The hotel is at the foot of Mount Hakuba and the view from my room is swallowed up by the mountain. It needs a different word to describe it every day. You should visit Nagano, someday. In the Edo period all the missionaries from the capital used to ‘summer’ up here, to escape from the heat. I suppose we have the missionaries to thank for naming these mountains ‘the Japan Alps’. Why do people always have to compare things with abroad? (Like Kagoshima, the Naples of Japan, that always sets my teeth on edge.) Nobody knows what the locals used to call the mountains before anyone knew the Alps, or even Europe, was out there. (Am I the only one who thinks this is depressing?) I’m staying as a non-paying guest in a small hotel opened by someone I knew from my days in Tokyo, years and years ago, after I left you in the care of your grandmother. He is a big-shot hotelier now, quite respectable, except for two very expensive divorces, which I’m sure he deserves. (He changed before he reached that critical point where your life is set in concrete.) He wanted me to help scout for a location for a new hotel he wants to build from scratch, but he doesn’t know how much I drink yet, or he’s persuading himself he can ‘save’ me. His favourite two words are ‘project’ and ‘venture’, which seem to mean the same thing. The snows are due in early November (only six weeks away. Another year on its last legs). If I have spent the good-old-days currency I have with my friend by winter, I may go in search