Number 9 dream Page 0,99

in the nick of time! Nowt but cannibals in these parts, nowt but cannibals! If it isn’t too much of an imposition, I’d thank you kindly to take me back to the venerable coach.’

‘Climb aboard, ma’am.’ God moved his surfboard alongside the handlebar moustache of the beloved commander. ‘And hold on tight!’ Mrs Comb tightened her headscarf, and watched the hungry town unroll below her. Why did humans despise what was beautiful and good? Why did they destroy the things they needed the most? Mrs Comb could not understand human beings. She really could not understand.

Back on the balcony step I light another cigarette. The box of Marlboro is way too heavy. I look inside. Yuzu Daimon’s platinum lighter. One side is inscribed in English, so I get a dictionary to work out what the words mean: To General MacArthur on occasion of seventy-first birthday, January 1951, from Aichi Citizens Repatriation Committee – Earnest Beseech to Assist Countrymen Captured USSR. So the lighter really was the real thing! It must be worth . . . what? A lot. Way too much. I go back to the entrance hall and peer through the front door, but Daimon is gone. The sound of a sports car – maybe Daimon’s, maybe not – is swallowed by the afternoon neighbourhood. This is more than a little finger. Sort of sad, too. I wonder how many Aichi citizens ever made it home.

QUEEN ERICHNID’S WEB

Pithecanthropus peered out of his undercarriage hammock. The venerable coach was on its juddery night journey. White lines and cat’s-eyes sped from blurry darkness ahead like salmon in a river of hyperspace. Pithecanthropus loved the lullaby swing of the hammock as the coach banked, and the headwind combing his hair. A piebald rabbit, headlit, hypnotized and huddled, hurtled unharmed between the wheels – its nose nearly touched Pithecanthropus’s. ‘Hot diggetty!’ thought the rabbit, finding itself alive after all. ‘The angel of death is one ugly critter! Wait until I tell my relatives!’ By and by, Pithecanthropus yawned, and slid back down his hammock, settling in the sediment of broken wishbones, flat batteries, oily rags, and Stilton rind. His final thought was that it wasn’t the venerable coach which moved over the earth, it was the earth which spun beneath its ancient stationary wheels.

The vacuum cleaner of Mrs Comb in her boudoir directly above bumped Pithecanthropus out of his morning dreams, and he awoke a happy early man. The venerable coach had come to a standstill. Even in the undercarriage, Pithecanthropus could tell they were parked somewhere hotter than a Sahara saxophone sextet. After munching on dry-roasted locusts, he crawled out, and stood up in an arid ochre desert of pebbles, boulders and bleached behemoth bones. The naked eyeball of the sun stared unblinkingly from a sky pinkish with dry heat. A desert wind did nothing to cool the world it wandered through. The road ran as straight as a mathematical constant to the vanishing point. A quorum of quandom quokkas thumped off as Pithecanthropus flexed his powerful biceps, drummed his treble-barrelled chest and howled a mighty roar. The coach door opened and Mrs Comb shook the crumbs from the breakfast tablecloth. ‘What an ungodly racket!’ Goatwriter climbed down the steps and sniffed the desert air. ‘Good morning.’

Pithecanthropus grunted a greeting and a question.

‘I believe,’ Goatwriter replied, ‘we are in the Northern Territories, but of Australia or M-mars I cannot be sure. If one consults—’

Goatwriter never finished his sentence because a miraculous maelstrom of birds rose from nowhere and filled the air around the venerable coach – moogurning, phewlitting, macawbering, endizzying birds, many unseen since the days when mythology was common gossip. ‘Archaeopteryx!’ exclaimed Goatwriter. ‘Thewlicker’s goose! Quetzalcoatlus! Greater Hopeless Auks! Nightjars at noon! Listen! Listen to the tune! Fragments! I hear fragments!’ Goatwriter closed his eyes and a druggy smile graced his face. Pithecanthropus gazed too, remembering childhood days in fossilized forests. Mrs Comb had dived for cover beneath the venerable coach. The birds vanished thitherly as suddenly as hitherly. ‘Extraordinary avifauna!’ declared Goatwriter. ‘You can come out now, Mrs Comb! Do you know, I heard fragments of a truly untold tale! The birds were singing it! Excuse me, friends, I m-must return to m-my writing bureau this very instant!’

Another two or three days of nothing weather go by. This is how I spend them. I get up late, smoke in the garden, and make some tea and toast. I watch my black eye dapple lighter. I clean up the living room