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

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)

Section 2, 6

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

I suppose Zig-Zag could have crawled in somewhere and got stuck. I remember when Oxford Archeology were on the top floor of the Storey and they had the old bones of some fellah that had been buried with all his cattle and horses, and the bones were laid out on the floor and Zig-Zag went in, sniffing and licking. Another time he rolled in some grass cutting sculptures and was blamed when they rotted and gave off poisonous fumes that nearly killed the people from the chamber of commerce.

Zig-zag loved to play. He liked streamers and ribbons, and I used to attach them to the window ledge of the portico, and he’d bat them with his paws. I think he’d have liked somewhere like a garage forecourt where they always have streamers and ticker tape and glitter and balloons - like being at a permanent party. Maybe if we put streamers on the front of the Storey he’d come back.

The builder left me with the jacket and the note and I sat on the sofa for a long time holding the note in my hand and looking at the wallpaper. Then I put the note in my pocket and got into the car and drove to a place I like near Arnside and I sat and looked out over the bay, over the sad, sad sands, and I watched the tide racing in, and the trains slipping over the bridge to Barrow and the sheep grazing at the waters edge in this alienplanetscape of grass and sand and slate-grey sea and seeing the train out there on its own on that spindly bridge surrounded by water, frothy waves splashing up on all sides, and the birds squealing and sobbing, waiting for the tide to ebb again and give up its riches, made me decide.

So please find Zig-Zag

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

(You’ll see how important the 11 plus exam was to shaping our lives if you look at what Fern has written on her blog.)