Section 3, 2

I had to get to her, but I didn’t know where she was, so I packed a small suitcase and the Storey Institute breathed me in again. I couldn’t explain what I was doing. I had to go to the Storey and wait, that’s all I could say. I would wait for Fern McCaulay to appear. The Storey was our anchor, our Paris, our Rome.

My wife cried, and so did the children, but we had grown a long way away from each other by then.

Fern and I were separated by class; the lino factory, the university, the 11 plus. She thinks I cheated at the 11 plus: ‘There is a charming lack of logic in the way you order your thoughts, Charlie.’

A woman who had fallen in the water was dragged out in a drowning condition by a man, but she did not thank him because:

1: She never felt thankful for small things
2: She did not know the man well enough
3: She was feeling better
4: She was still unconscious

I’m looking at those choices and Fern is absolutely right about the way I think. Every option makes sense to me, and none of them do, and I can’t accept that only one is right, because to me these people in this little scenario have bubbled up off the page and spat themselves into real life and it’s not a logic question anymore, it’s a question about how people think about the things they do, and people think about the things they do in very strange ways.

A man left his wife and children to live in the portico of the Storey Institute because

1: He wanted to smell like a tramp
2: He was having a mental breakdown
3:Street people are always laughing
4: He didn’t like living in a house

That’s how I got here, how I met Zig-Zag.

My Mega Lager cans stood huddled together in the place where Zig-Zag used to sit, like a group of children looking up at me. I hit them hard. Those purple tubes of joy became my favourite things in cylindrical form. Love, pure liquid love, sweet honeyed syrup with sugar on top, smothering, enveloping, numbing. Oh my sweet balm, take me down, take me into that soft world where there are no hard corners, the light is fluffy, and all the harsh noises of the world blancmange into a purple mega womb of love.

Find Zig-zag. The children are crying

(Find out where Zig zag has been living all this time - have a look at Fern’s blog)