Section 3, 4

It was so cold out there in the Portico, Zig-zag and I used to freeze, while in the basement there was a giant boiler where seven and a half thousand litres of slik black gunge bubbled away in a giant throbbing fist of alien tubes and valves that I wanted to crawl inside and fall asleep.


The cold sent me home and my wife found the lost cat posters I’d made and she told me all about Fern and the accident in the bay and we both cried and I felt dead and elevated at the same time.


The next day I got a train to Barrow and when it stopped on the spindly bridge in the middle of the bay I put my hand out of the window and dropped the suitcase with all the lost cat posters inside it into the water, and I thought that I was sending them to the same place as Fern McCaulay, and I knew now that I’d told our story to the public in the best way I could, in a language special to us, and train moved off and as we got closer to Barrow the sky became darkly overcast as it always did on summer evenings on the bay and I switched on my tape and listened to the music that she told me she used to like and mourned her like a lover would.


THE END