He lies, his eyes rolling like they are going to fall out of his arse.

He is being sexy.

I feel like I am dying.

I'd rather be dyeing t-shirts.

He is pouring vegetable oil over everything, he falls out and it hits the bedside table, he yelps.

Why so greasy?

Can we just do it normally?

No....... putting on Kings of Leon isn't going to make me horny.

Sadly it isn't that simple.

That thing between your legs isn't a turn on I am afraid.

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This is in many ways a familar vision of paradise, but look at the red reflection in the windows, and the man watching me in the top left. Look at the five-armed creature reflected in the window of the white car. If you look closely at the wall above 'is' of paradise, you will see that it is melting. This is not the first paradise I have seen. Do you live near paradise? If so, please send in a photo.

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Machinery functions particularly well. Outboard engines make no sound. I am told this has something to do with the quality of the light.

The ferry to Finland takes two days, and you must sleep on the frozen deck in a special rubber suit. The sea grows steadily thicker the closer you get to the Finnish coast. As the shoreline looms into view, the ferry moves just a few inches an hour. Through the gritty air you can see the lanterns glowing in the towns, and the people moving on the quays, dragging wet knotted tangles of rope behind him. You can wave, but they don’t wave back. Once, you think you see a girl’s smile, though not directed at you. And then the captain turns the ferry around. It’s time to go home.

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There's little chance you've never wheeled out this old question onto the dinner table. The hypothesis is something like this: faceless studio executives have commissioned a film about your life, because you're a well-known, exciting and naturally cinematic so-and-so. Uncharacteristically they've given you the executive decision on which actor will be portraying you, and a billion Hollywood dollars to convince them to do it. Who will you pick?

The industry takes fairly large leaps of faith when portraying real life figures. In I'm Not There (I think that was the name, no-one really remembers) Cate Blanchett played across gender to become Bob Dylan. In the last year alone whole handful of American actors including John Malkovich, Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman have portrayed real-life South African figures, presumably to the chagrin of ten thousand unemployed South African actors.

Elijah Wood, clearly too tall to be a hobbit, was shrunk with medication for the duration of the Lord of the Rings shoot to bring his height closer to the historical Frodo Baggins. And so on.

But before you choose your kinogänger, please consider the following:

- Can the actor who will play you act your age? Are they even alive? You can pick someone who is too old or even decesed only when there's a real physical resemblance. By this I mean you have to really look like Orson Welles to get to pick Orson Welles. And you should probably watch how much you drink in the future.

- Have they shown they can act? Anthony Hopkins embodied Nixon perfectly in spite of looking, well, just like Anthony Hopkins. Obviously their ability to act will go far in negating any physical differences.

- Could they do your voice? It's very hard for American actors to do an every day British accent, thanks to its ongoing mangling and maligning and the fact that many just can't do it (i.e. Keanu Reeves) or just don't care (i.e. Mike Myers).

Incidently, Robert Downey Jr. does an excellent job of it in the new schlock Sherlock Holmes film. But on the whole, it's like Hollywood learns the accent from just these voices: Trever Howard in Brief Encounter, Ralph Fiennes, any Guy Ritchie gangster, Madonna and Daphne from Fraiser.

And if your Irish, you're screwed. Even Liam Neeson's accent is a bit ropey these days.

- Will they do nudity? Is this a problem for you? What kind of film are you making, anyway?

- Are they too good? If you're have insecurities about being portrayed on screen by a Hollywood dreamboat, perhaps choose one of the more unconvential beauties. How about Merry or Pippin, the lesser hobbits? Or the bus-stop face man from Twilight?

I'm interested to hear who you pick, so please comment below.

And choose wisely! If you miscast this one you'll NEVER WORK in Hollywood AGAIN.

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Despite his humble beginnings, at the time of his death, Dom Ostros was acknowledged in the art world as second to none. His renowned ‘aurora’ paintings – which accurately depict the solar system as we will see it twenty years in the future – were owned by such luminous patrons as Prince Rupert of Algeria, singer Molly Villa and the supermodel ‘ù’. His ‘petra, sequence 3’ is said to have been hanging on the wall in the White House when Bob Garée made his famous decision to invade Oman. His paintings, which use a unique brush stroke method, have been called variously ‘spellbinding’, ‘corrupting’, ‘genius’, ‘wild’, ‘magisterial’ and ‘overpowering’. Characteristically dressed in a tailored suit and a leather cap, Ostros was not only the best painter of the epoch, but a handsome and exuberant society player, famous for his love affairs with beautiful and intelligent women. It is little known that Ostros sponsored the development of Tig.org, a charity that enables the conservation of Arctic Tigers.

*          *          *

This groundbreaking new exhibition will show ‘the real’ Ostros as he appeared behind the façade of talent, beauty, and dignity. Featuring all of his discarded letters, his dirty vests and the contents of his bins, this exhibition will reveal how Ostros was actually a talentless, weak sociopath who had trouble meeting women and writing joined-up. Key pieces include a letter from Ostros to his doctor detailing his trouble passing urine, a holiday postcard written to himself, and a letter to brother Maurice detailing his financial hardship and misery. Key to the exhibition is restoration work that has been done to reveal a far poorer painting lying behind a work typically considered his masterpiece. The canvas holding the famous ‘petra, sequence 3’ has been carefully cleaned and now shows an unattractive, inferior painting first laid on the canvas of the artist’s mother, done in a hurry. This buried painting is worth less than one percent of the value – financial, cultural or aesthetic – of ‘petra, sequence 3’. Come to the gallery and see for yourself how, far from being a national treasure, Dom Ostros was actually a pathetic hit-and-miss loser like the rest of us.

Until May 11. £20/£15 concs.

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My wife designs beasts. This is what she does. And every day, I must hunt the beasts through the dark pine forest that surrounds our house, and drag their pelts home through the snow to lay before her fire.

She releases the beasts before dawn, when I am still in bed. She opens the door and sets them loose, the beasts she has designed. Sometimes they are reluctant to go, I hear them rasping and moaning in the cold, and my wife must shoo them away with a broom or pelt them with lumps of coal. And then she brings me hot sugared tea, porridge, thick bread, slabs of butter and cheese, and she makes certain I wolf it all down because she does not want me to stumble, despair or succumb to the freezing wind.

Together we wait for the sky to turn the colour of blood and gold. My wife dresses me for the cold, in my layers of fur and my winter hood and my ropes and my sacks and my snowshoes. She slips leather gauntlets on my hands, and gently wraps my fingers around the slender hunting needle I use to lance the beasts through their tiny hearts and send their bright blood bubbling into the snow.

I set out at a steady pace, following the tracks of the beasts where they leapt, hopped, slithered, crawled, lurched or bounded over the hill, and from there descended into the woods, to merge with the shadows of pines. From their tracks, I make assumptions about the forms their bodies have taken. I note the scrape of a trailing wing, the indentation of a horn, the prints of toes or talons or stumps, the drag-mark of a tongue.

Through the black and threatening firs I plunge, with no thoughts in my head. I must chase the beasts to the end of the earth. That is what I must do. My snowshoes crash through deadwood and crunch deeply in the snow. They slip and slither over frozen streams, and sometimes I trip and go tumbling down, face-first into whiteness. I pick myself off, dust the snow from my clothes, and continue without respite. I do not allow myself to tire. I do not allow myself to pause. There can be no rest until I have the beasts at my needle’s point.

It has been this way for a year and a day. Ever since our wedding night, when my wife designed her first set of beasts. Ever since our honeymoon, when she first sent the beasts out into the snow. Ever since she made it clear that she wanted me to deliver their pelts, soft and warm and wet with gore, to where she sits by the fire at night, toasting her feet before the flames.

The tracks run together for the first few miles, and then they split different ways. They diverge along separate paths, weaving complicated knots through the trees, in an attempt to throw me off and force me to turn back. This means the beasts have heard my pursuit, pressed their misshapen heads to the ground to feel my thudding footsteps. I imagine they imagine I can simply be confused, that I can be made to falter. But the beasts should know I will not be stopped. That the pattern will never be changed.

By noon, I have run the first to ground. Made dizzy and careless with exhaustion, it will have paused to catch its breath, sucking the frosted air through its snout, or its beak or its swollen purple lips. I fall upon it through a mist of powdered snow. The needle slips through matted fur, rainbow scales or casing of bone. I hear the muffled pop of its heart. Steam pours from the tiny hole. Its blood paints a red map on the snow. I gently stroke its head as it fades, wiping away its teardrops of blood, smoothing its crumpled feathers.

Deftly, barely pausing for breath, I remove its pelt with the notched, bone-handled hunting knife that hangs at my side. I loosen the muscle and flesh from the bone, and slip its skin from its skeleton as if I’m tugging a woolly jumper off the body of a sleeping child. I roll the pelt up like a rug and stuff it into one of the sacks that dangle from my shoulders. I clean the needle with a fistful of snow, draw breath, and plunge back into the trees. The others will still be far away. Mindlessly, pointlessly running.

Deeper into the woods I go, where the trees darken and the ground becomes littered with rocks and fallen branches. I stagger uphill, crashing through the thickets of thorns that tangle my path, tearing into my winter furs, whipping across my face. After hours of pursuit, I come upon the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, scattered at intervals in the trees, foam-flecked, flanks heaving. Sometimes they have injured themselves in a fall, smashed headfirst into the trunk of a tree, or fallen through a thin patch of ice halfway over a frozen river. Sometimes the joints of their limbs have popped. They might attempt to continue like this, dragging useless extremities behind them, and I will find tattered strips of their skin caught on protruding branches. Sometimes their lungs will have given out. They will be too weak to go on. They are not designed to run too far. My wife sees to this.

I dispatch them cleanly, efficiently. I don’t like to shout or make a fuss. By this point I’m as exhausted as them, and I take no pleasure in it. Occasionally they try to fight, flailing, bellowing, kicking up snow, but most of the time they await the needle in silence, even expectantly. Sometimes they seem almost relived. Sometimes I think they understand why their deaths must happen.

It’s dark by the time I get back to the house. My entire body hurts. I see the lights glinting through the trees. I smell the rising wood-smoke. I stamp off snow at the front door, and collapse into the room. My wife unwraps my ropes and sacks, tugs the frozen furs from my body. She drags me over to the fire, rubs my arms and legs with hot towels, and coddles me in blankets. She bathes my wounds. She brings hot spiced wine. She unfreezes the skin of my face with kisses. And then she unrolls the pelts I have brought her, and while I nod off to sleep in my chair she kneels on the wooden floor, examining them meticulously in the flickering orange light.

I see the pleasure on her face. I hear her admiring words. I’ve been doing this for a year and a day, ever since we married. My wife designs beasts. This is what she does. There can be no rest until I have the beasts at my needle’s point.

One day, I am too sick to go out. I moan as my wife pulls away the covers, and cannot swallow the tea she brings, and gag at the sight of porridge. My chest is glistening with sweat. It looks like the underbelly of a fish. I lie there and stare at my chest as it heaves, and my heartbeats boom inside my head.

Perhaps it was something I caught in the cold. Perhaps one of the beasts showered me in poison. Or perhaps I didn’t eat enough thick bread, or drink enough hot sugared tea. When my wife insists I get out of bed, my legs buckle and I fall to the floor. My head feels strange. I don’t know up from down. Sweat pools in the backs of my knees.

All morning my wife tries to bring me back to strength, growing ever more impatient as the sun climbs in the sky. She rushes back and forth from the kitchen, trying to spoon things into my mouth. She brews chicken broth, nettle tea, dark medicinal concoctions steeped with forest herbs. She sticks cones of garlic in my ears. She steams my feet in spearmint tea. She presses hot bowls upon my back. It only makes me sicker.

I swim in and out of nightmares while my wife fusses around me. Beyond the wall, I can hear the beasts. They must have gathered around the front door, huffing the air through the crack where the draft blows in. They want to get out, but she will not let them go. As the day goes by, their anxiety grows. They begin to shriek, pawing at the floorboards. I can hear their nails raking the wood. The next time my wife leans over the bed, adjusting the blankets I have thrown off, I take her shoulders with my clammy hands and tell her I cannot leave the house. I say she must let the beasts go without me, on this one occasion. She presses her fingers to my lips, instructs me to be still.

I cannot move for five days and five nights. It feels like a year. Gravity holds me to the bed, and the sickness spins inside me. My body feels yellow, then black, then green. My fingers have turned into thumbs. My hands feel bloated, full of dense liquid. I imagine them swollen to the size of hams, but when I drag them before my face they appear completely normal. A heavy stench lies over the bed. My skin is leaking like a muslin cloth. My condensation drips down the walls and windows.

My wife continues designing beasts every night while I am sick. I want to tell her that she must stop, that she must wait until I’m well, or there will be too many.

The beasts are filling up the house. They don’t have anywhere to go. They crowd against the windows and doors, desperate for release. The walls shake as they bang into them, the crockery rattles on the shelves. My wife cannot stop. This is what she does. I do not know what will happen.

On the fifth night, my sickness peaks. It plunges me through swirling clouds, clouds of lurid pink and green. The sky is flashing horribly. I am lost in a storm of beasts. I close my eyes to make it dark. Through the darkness, my wife comes. I think it is my wife. A dark shape bending over me, a blackness blacker than the black, devoid of form or features. She watches me through a mist of dreams. She holds me with her eyes. I want to touch her, to speak some words, but I cannot move a muscle.

She watches me through the long, black night. She never makes a sound. Later, I find I can move my hand. My body is starting to function again. I attempt to reach out for my wife, but she is no longer there.

I awake to white light streaming through the window. Its brilliance hurts my eyes. I pull myself up to sitting position and wipe frost off the glass. Everything is white outside. The world is clean and cold. Above the boundary of the pines, the sky is turning the colour of blood and gold.

My feet find their way to the floor. My fingers grip the bed-frame. My legs tremble, but support my weight. I stagger from the room.

There is silence throughout the house. The fireplace is cold. A cloud of ash hangs over the hearth, and the embers are dead grey. I cannot remember this happening before. There is no tea, no porridge, no bread. The furniture is disarranged, and the floorboards deeply scored. My wife is nowhere to be seen. A blue and white china plate lies broken on the floor.

The snow is all churned up outside, and a stampede of many tracks, far too many tracks to count, leads towards the forest. They must have had several hours head start. There is no time to lose. I do not allow myself to tire. I do not allow myself to pause. I am stumbling through the snow, following the tracks of the beasts where they leapt, hopped, slithered, crawled, lurched or bounded over the hill, and from there descended into the woods, to merge with the shadows of pines.

Before I have reached the crest of the hill I am bent almost double, staggering for breath. I have to drag myself up the slope with hands already turning blue. It is at this point I remember something. My hunting needle is back in the house, in its rack on the wall. I turn my head, peering back down the hill. There is wood smoke rising from the chimney. The door is standing open. Something moves in the white field, and it is now that I see the man, in his furs and his winter hood and his ropes and his sacks and his snowshoes, hunting needle in gauntleted hands, lift his head from the tracks at his feet and begin to run, in long easy strides, towards me up the hill.

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Boredom had not made him disappear.
Boredom had made him sit down at the table. Boredom had made him sit in front of the screen.
Boredom would leave him there and he would start pressing square pieces of plastic which triggered beautiful sounds. Sounds of a videotape rolling forward the childhood he remembered in a screen. It was beautiful. There was the Tv WITH THE WOOD CASING AND the sphere like picture. There was a fogged sun down and a feeling of embrace reaching around him, pressing his stomach and neck. He had never lived it, but the screen explained. The sound was beautiful. It made him think of her. The sound of knickers sliding down her legs and the heavy feather bed sheet. It was the sound of affection. A young woman with no face and a heavy white wool jumper. The smell of the girl's hair housed like cotton pushed on his mind, and made it move around. He crippled with filled emptiness. The blind playful sound made his shoulders slide. His head let go and his body was sphered into his stomach.
The music stopped. The feeling died.

forever

the expression of nostalgia had become the feeling of nostalgia and the sensation he had never felt but once recognised already burrowed deep into his sadness

andloopandloopandloopthe beautiful

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James Blunt
Mark Ronson
Jo Whiley
The Killers

Please add to the list, Richard Branson has plenty of space!

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Part 1

Alexei and Alden stand at the porthole, eating freeze-dried ice-cream. The two men are naked apart from the magnetised boots that hold their feet to the floor. The unreal glow of the Horsehead Nebula streams through the triple-reinforced glass, bathing the fronts of their bodies in light, casting the rest into shadow. A faint smear of Alexei’s semen glistens on Alden’s belly.

‘Which one you like best?’ asks Alexei, crumbling ice-cream between his wide lips.

Alden squints at the purple diffusion of hydrogen gas swirling in space, the clouded mass of interstellar dust that resembles a rearing horse. In the twenty weeks they’ve spent up here, measuring the radiation emitted by collapsing stars, supernovae (though the finer points of their technical duties have been somewhat overlooked in recent weeks), they’ve seen so many wonders he feels he has lost the capacity to judge.

Alden touches his forehead to the glass. He stares at the universe. ‘I can hardly tell them apart anymore,’ he says. His breath mists the porthole. ‘Once you get past a certain stage, seeing beauty like we’ve seen, you reach a kind of saturation point. I don’t think I can say.’

‘No. Which ice-cream flavour you like?’ The burly cosmonaut starts to laugh. Specks of powder detach from his lips and spin frictionlessly away. Alden starts to laugh as well. He slips his fingers round the Russian’s waist, where the sweat has cooled.

-

Alexei heaves at the rowing machine while Alden checks the charts. Each man is wearing a white vest and a pair of lightweight, silvery trousers. Now and then Alden can’t resist looking up from the screen, his face awash with blue light, to watch Alexei’s arms at work, the muscle flowing beneath the skin, his jawbone’s perfect line.

When Alexei works out, Alden has observed, his eyes become immutably fixed on one or another opposite point: a distant star system, a bolt in the wall, once on the bump of Alden’s knee as he stood in the doorway, watching. The man’s concentration is absolute. He cannot be distracted.

‘You know how muscle builds up, right?’ Alden asks, watching the big man’s shoulders heave and roll, heave and roll.

Alexei’s brow wrinkles, he scowls, but he doesn’t break his rhythm.

‘You’re aware of the physiological process going on in your arms? You tear the tissue a little bit every time you pull. You gradually rip the muscle apart. And then new tissue grows to fill it in. The more you damage it, the more it grows.’

‘Body wastes quicker in space,’ grunts Alexei, pausing for a second to flick sweat off his brow. The sweat falls to the metal floor. The gravity is on. ‘Some spacemen, when they get up here, they let themselves go. I’ve seen it. Me, I like to stay strong. Disciplined is better.’

‘Disciplined, huh? Is that what you call it?’ grins Alden, moving close.

‘You think I work out in order to look good? Up here, where there’s no-one to see?’

There’s me, Alden thinks, but he doesn’t say it. Then he says it. ‘There’s me.’

‘You?’ says Alexei, heaving at the chain. ‘You, I think you have seen me already.’ He hurls himself into each pull as if he’s trying to escape his own body. His triceps look like the moving parts of some complicated instrument, a church organ made of muscle and bone, but the only two notes the organ can produce is the suck and whistle of his breath.

Alden listens to the cosmonaut’s fugue and returns to his screen. He cannot bring the data into focus. He is thinking of the power and concentration of Alexei’s stare. His vision is like a laser beam. That time his eyes fixed on his knee. As if it had been nailed to the wall. He almost expected scorching.

-

‘Seriously, which one you like best?’ Alexei’s voice rises from below, breaking the artificial silence of night. Alden is lying on the top bunk and Alexei is lying on the bottom. The bunks are so narrow and cramped the two men never think to share. Besides, it wouldn’t feel quite right, somehow.

‘Nebulae, or ice-cream now?’ Alden is almost asleep, about to start dreaming of trees and kites, things blowing around in the sky. Wind is something you don’t feel here. Wind is one of the few things he misses.

The lights are down, and the cabin is lit by the nebula’s eerie purple glow. At first they used to pull down the blinds to help maintain a notion of night, but lately they’ve taken to leaving them open, this protocol, like the rest, having diminished in importance now, so they can look out at the stars.

‘Most people, when they see pictures, they say they like Horsehead best. Horsehead is something that looks like something. It is something they recognise. But to me, it just looks like chess piece. Resembles only symbol of horse, not horse itself.’

Alden listens to the familiar voice, the only voice he has heard in twenty weeks. He can feel the deep bass rumble in the frame of the bed.

‘Al-den? Are you listening?’

‘I’m always listening,’ says Alden. He enjoys the way Alexei pronounces his name, splitting it into two parts. As if it is something to be divided, measured.

‘Same with Cat’s-Eye Nebula. Looks a bit like eye of cat, or maybe, the symbol of eye of cat. People down there, they are always trying to look for things they recognise. Saying this collection of stars is like bear. That one is like twins. Twins? Me, I always thought that was dumb. I could join them up myself and say it’s like submarine.’

His voice goes silent for a time. Alden wonders if he’s gone to sleep. He listens for the sound of his breathing, but can only hear the tiny clicks and muffled bleeps and hisses of the ship, sounds as familiar to him now as the Russian’s voice. Every single sound he hears he can trace back to its source. Every single sound happens for a reason.

‘Crab Nebula I like best,’ resumes Alexei, as if no time has passed. ‘You know why? You know why, Al-den?’

‘No,’ says Alden. ‘Tell me why.’

‘Because it doesn’t look like crab.’ Alexei sounds satisfied at this. There’s a soft thump from below as he rolls onto his side.

‘You know, when I was a kid,’ says Alden, ‘I preferred the clouds that didn’t look like anything. I guess that’s kind of the same thing. Seeing faces and animals and stuff made me feel kind of claustrophobic.’

‘So, which ice-cream flavour you like?’ Alden can tell from the sound of his voice that the Russian is grinning down there. This makes him grin as well. He pictures the lines around Alexei’s mouth, the feeling of his stubble.

‘They all taste like fucking chemicals. Which one do you like best?’

‘Raspberry ripple,’ says the Russian. ‘That one is the best.’

Part 2

The two men make love without gravity, gently bumping off the walls. They schoon from the ceiling to the floor, getting wedged in the narrow doorways. They put the ship on standby mode, disconnect communications. There is no hurry up here. There's no time at all.

The first few times, ridiculously, Alden found himself drawing the blinds before they took off their clothes. Alexei laughed so hard his belly shook. Now they do it in the nebula's glow, in the pulsing luminescence of the stars. Sometimes Alden tries to calculate how long the light that illuminates them will take to travel back to Earth. Will people exist to see it then? Will there be anyone left to understand?

When Alexei comes, his semen forms a whirling galaxy of pearls, pale planets and moons, perfect spheres, finding their own orbits. Alden blows a stream of air to channel them this way and that. Sometimes he spends minutes at a time, until the globs are as cold as chilled water, arranging them in recognisable formations, to test the cosmonaut's knowledge.

'Which solar system does this represent?'

'If that big one's Jupiter, and that speck is Io, what's this medium-sized one over here?'

Alexei laughs. 'Do I look like God? Do you think I look like God, Al-den? If I'm God, what are you? You must be Holy Ghost.'

When Alden comes, it sometimes feels like the walls of the ship have disappeared. That everything is rushing out of him, into the vacuum of space.

If technology would only permit, Alden would like to make love outside the ship, their breaths clouding the screens of their helmets, surrounded by nothingness. But their suits haven't been designed for this. The access points are in the wrong places. So they content themselves with mere floating, holding hands through bulky space-gloves, connected only by umbilical cords of air.

'It's always reminded me of frogspawn,' says Alden once afterwards, sharing a thin regulation blanket that's more like a paper tissue. 'Come. It's like frogspawn. Don't you think?'

'What is frogspawn?' asks Alexei.

'You know, the stuff that frogs produce. Eggs, I guess. It looks like the tapioca balls they put in pearl tea. You see it in ponds when you're a kid. At least, you do when you're a kid in the States.'

'What is pearl tea?' asks Alexei. He is resting his big head on the metal shelf that runs along the length of the bed. He has the ability to make himself comfortable in any situation.

'Never mind,' says Alden. 'It's just a thought.' His own head is resting on Alexei's stomach. He can feel the contraction and expansion of the muscle wall. He wonders if they have frogspawn in Russia. They must do. They must have frogs.

Back there on Earth, there's a room somewhere in which the data they collect is compiled and analysed. Where streams of figures, binary-encoded, pour down flickering screens like rain. Teams of scientists translate these figures into graphs and models and charts, drawing conclusions about radiation, half-life, temperature, the speed of stars, the lifespan of planets, the collapse of galaxies. In deserts thousands of miles apart, in Kazakhstan and Nevada, combined control rooms make adjustments to the course of their ship measured in hundredths of degrees, where the slightest error could send them hurtling helplessly into space, into vast uncharted regions from which they would never return. Alden thinks about these things sometimes, but none of it seems real. He thinks about his old colleagues, his apartment, his neighbours, his dog Dog-Star, who's in kennels now. None of that seems real either. He can hardly even remember the faces of his friends.

They are eating bowls of instant noodles at the brushed steel table. The noodles are topped with sliced carrots, pak choi, water chestnuts and rehydrated pork. All of it comes from shrink-wrapped packets with codes that indicate the day of consumption. There are little sachets of soy source. They eat the food with plastic chopsticks. This sort of thing is meant to provide variety, to stop them getting bored.

Alexei complains about the food, but Alden doesn't mind it. These artificial meals don't bother him. It isn't really so different from what he eats at home.

'You realise we've only got twenty days left?' he says, after they've finished. They are drinking tiny shots of sake now. This was another inspired stroke to stop them growing despondent up here, one 5ml (CHECK) tot of alcohol in every twenty-four hour period. There's a timer system on the alcohol sachets, so only one measure is dispensed per day. Of course, if they wanted, they could stockpile spirits and have a big session in a fortnight or so. But they've never felt the desire for this. Getting drunk in space feels strange, like it will never stop.

Alexei grunts. He licks his lips, getting the last taste of sake.

'It's not long. Three weeks. And then back down.' Something is tugging at Alden's chest, an impulse he knows he should ignore.

'I know that,' says Alexei. 'It's long enough. Days don't feel like days up here. Everything gets stretched out.'

'It's not long, Alexei,' says Alden stubbornly. The cosmonaut has got to his feet and thrown the plastic plates and food containers into the vacuum-crushing unit, which compacts them to the size of grains of rice and fires them into space. 'It isn't very long at all, not after the time we've been up here.'

'What do you want me to do about it?' says Alexei, turning back to him. There is no harshness in his voice, just a simple question.

'Well nothing, I guess. What can you do? It's the end of the mission, right? That's that.'

Alexei hovers uncertainly, frowning. It's strange to see such a big man uncertain. It doesn't suit him. Alden doesn't know what he wants to say, or if he wants to say anything at all, but now Alexei seems to be expecting something.

'So what's going to happen?' he says at last.

'What's going to happen when?'

'When we get down. When we get back home.'

'There will be a big party,' says Alexei, folding his arms across his chest and standing with his legs splayed wide, like some kind of circus strong-man. 'A big party, with champagne and caviar. No more fucking little sachets like this. Our presidents will shake us by the hand. They will take our photos for magazines. Women will put their arms round us. But only for a few weeks.'

'You know what I mean. After that.' Alden wants to stop speaking, but he can't stop now. He knows his voice sounds sulky, juvenile. But all he can do is go on.

'After what, Al-den?' Alexei's voice jumps up a level. It rings off the steel walls and ceiling of the tiny dining area. 'You know what. We talked about this. Two times, we talked about this. Why do you want to talk about it again, this same thing?'

'I know we talked about it before, so what? Are you keeping score?' Alden's voice is rising too, but he quickly drops his tone again. 'I just want to know, okay? It's just, three weeks. It isn't long. I need to know what happens next. After we get down.'

Alexei sits. Rests his arms on the table. The hairs on his forearms look like they've been combed.

'Alright, I tell you again,' he says. His voice is quiet now as well. There is no hardness in it, but it's firm. Alden raises his head to look at him, and Alexei's face suddenly looks like the face of an older man's. 'Down there, on Earth, I have my wife. I tell you this many times. I have two beautiful little girls. Lisaveta and Natasha. Twins. I tell you all this.'

'I know,' says Alexei. 'I saw their pictures in the paper.'

'So. That's what happens next. You will go to the United States. I will go to Russia. That's what was always going to happen. You understand. You know this.'

They sit opposite one another for a time. The thing that Alden hates the most is the embarrassment he feels. All of this was unnecessary. He didn't need to start this conversation. He'd known that from the beginning.

'Al-den. You should have someone too.'

'What do you mean, have someone?'

'Down there. A woman. You should have a wife. I tell you this, as a friend.' For a second, Alden thinks that Alexei is about is to reach out to touch his arm. But he doesn't do it. Alden knows the feeling of his hand so well, every callous, the soft parts of his palm, that he can feel it anyway. Even when it's not there. 'A man should have a wife, Al-den. Otherwise, what reason to return to Earth? What reason to come down?'

Later it's a long time getting to sleep. They lie there on their separate bunks, Alden above and Alexei below, with the ship making its regular noises, and the sound of their separate breathing. Alexei turns over three times, as if he can't get comfortable. Alden listens to the sound of him, and when he knows he's fallen asleep he can't stand listening any more, so he gets up and climbs down the ladder and turns the air dispenser on, which covers every other sound with a gentle hum. In the morning he tells Alexei he was cold.

'It's a man's universe up here,' Alexei was saying a month or two ago. 'A man's universe. But it's a woman's world. You know what I mean?'

'No, I don't. What do you mean?' They'd just finished imaging another nebula. Now they were sharing a chocolate bar, which didn't really taste like a chocolate bar, and filling out the requested questionnaire. That was another, smaller duty, something to do when there was nothing else: giving feedback about the food, the taste, consistency and so on, to improve future missions.

'What I mean is man's eternal urge,' said Alexei. There was chocolate round his mouth. 'To send the rocket into space, to hit the moon. The sperm and the egg. Men get out and put a flag in the ground, like planting a little seed. How many sperms get to the egg, whenever a man comes? One in twenty million. See, that's us. We're the successful ones.'

'Right. I guess,' Alden said. The cosmonaut's philosophies amused him. The seriousness on his face made him want to laugh, but he knew that Alexei would get offended. Their senses of humour sometimes weren't compatible. Alden would laugh at things that filled Alexei with honour and importance. In return, Alexei would laugh at things that Alden actually found quite sad.

'That's right. We are only following a pattern. We are going with the flow. The flag sprouts up. We must plant new flags. Look at how many eggs out there, we can't count, there are billions of them. So, more phalluses shooting out. Man can never stop.'

'Phalli,' says Alden.

'What?'

'It's phalli. Not phalluses. Like cacti and cactuses.'

'You think I am not being serious. But everyone knows, Al-den. We keep thrusting forward. Into this void. Because we must. There is nothing else. A man's universe, and a woman's world. Phalluses, phalli, however you like. But have you ever seen a space-rocket shaped like a vagina?'

Alden had to admit that he hadn't.

Part 3

They make love twice, after that conversation they had as they were eating noodles, but nothing about it feels right. It feels like something mechanical. Like another function of the ship, something that has been pre-programmed. Alden has an image of two flesh-like robots, thrusting away at one another in a capsule millions of miles from any living thing. With no-one to see it and no-one to care. The image makes him want to cry.

Even worse is the way Alexei acts towards him afterwards. He acts as if he's done something wrong, as if weakness made him commit some mistake that needs making up for. Alden doesn't want him to be apologetic. He wants him to be like he was before, without a flicker of shame or contrition. Heaving a contented sigh and stretching his limbs out luxuriantly, grinning, rubbing his stubbled chin, like a lion after a feast. With pearls still orbiting in the air, splashed against dashboards, screens. It's like he feels pity for him now. Alden can't bear that.

He wishes he'd never been so pathetic, starting that conversation. They are still weeks away from Earth. Anything could happen up here. Alexei was right, three weeks in space is a long time, much longer than three weeks. The days and the nights could have stretched out endlessly, like matter sliding into a black hole, like one of Einstein's elastic bands. It could have been like it was before. They could have wrapped time around themselves, stretched those few weeks into a lifetime. But, by starting that conversation, he ruined it all.

Alexei acts differently now around the ship. He is less booming, less strident. He makes less noise when he moves from place to place. His manner is slightly withdrawn, almost cautious. It's like he's already pulling away, Alden thinks bitterly, re-acclimatising himself, preparing to plunge back through the atmosphere. Getting drawn into Earth's gravitational field. Back to that woman's world.

Up until now, when Alden thought of Earth, he hadn't really felt anything. He missed the wind. He missed his dog, but mostly he didn't miss his dog. The planet was just a speck in the blackness, one of untold millions. Now, when he thinks of Earth, it casts a feeling of dread. Dread and dullness. Disappointment. Nothing will have changed down there.

They still work together, eat together, drink their sachets of alcohol together. They do their jobs as they did before. Where else could they go?

'I've been thinking,' says Alden one day. It's afternoon, according to the system of time they follow on the ship. But really, of course, it isn't afternoon. Or, perhaps, it's always afternoon. Night-time, morning, midday, afternoon and evening are conflated here, and it's always all time at the same time, or no time at the same time. It doesn't feel like afternoon. It just feels like space.

'Thinking about what?' They are putting some final reports together, making sure the data's in. Alexei is eating a freeze-dried banana. It looks clownishly small in his big hands.

'That it's fine. You're right. That's the way it has to be. I've been thinking about it, and it's fine.'

'What is fine?' asks Alexei, frowning. He eats the freeze-dried banana whole.

'About us. Sorry, I don't mean “us.” About the situation. This mission. You've got a wife down there, a family. I understand. You're right, that's the way it is.'

'Okay. Good,' says Alexei. He continues clicking away on the keyboard.

Alden watches the side of his face. He doesn't want to look like he's watching him. Before, he could have stared for hours – he could have reached over to feel his rough skin, or the very soft skin behind his ear – but now, if he looks too long, he feels like he's being demanding. Like he's acting in a childish way. Like he's making some unreasonable request.

And Alexei doesn't look at him, not the way he used to. Not with the same laser-beam stare, like the time it felt his knee had been nailed to the wall. It's as if he's scared that his eyes actually might do those things. Like they might fix Alden in a certain place, and he wouldn't be able to pull him free again.

'But,' says Alden, moving his gaze from the side of Alexei's face to the screen, where the numbers are falling into place in neat, decimal-pointed rows. 'But, let's keep it the way it was, huh? For these few weeks. Like a holiday. Let's try to forget about Earth just a little longer. Earth is Earth, and space is space. We're still up here, after all.'

For a time he thinks the Russian hasn't heard, or is pretending he hasn't heard. When he speaks he hardly moves his lips. 'Space is space,' he says.

They make love that night, on the bottom bunk. It still feels like robots.

They are two weeks from the end of their mission when the message comes.

'It's a request for assistance,' says Alexei, bending over the screen. He is bare-chested, wearing only navy-blue boxer shorts patterned with little silver stars and moons. Alden knows these were a gift from his daughters, Lisaveta and Natasha. He also has another pair that shows a rocket blasting off, surrounded by clouds of smoke and flames. These ones are from his wife.

The transmission signal woke them both from sleep, clambering from their bunks. Alden had been dreaming about flags, washing-lines. Things flapping around in the wind.

'Assistance? What kind of assistance?' he asks, trying to focus on the message. His eyes are a long time concentrating, as if they are full of dust or smoke.

'Chinese space-station,' says Alexei. 'Only twenty hours from here. Something wrong with their power supply. It's manned by a single astronaut.'

'What? They want him to evacuate?'

'Control room wants us to bring him aboard. We're taking him back to Earth.'

Twenty and a half hours later, Alexei and Alden are standing side by side at the air-lock doors. For some reason Alden has felt the need to put on his cap, which he's never worn before, emblazoned with the logo of the mission. Other than that, both men are still wearing their vests and silvery trousers. The stubble is thick on Alexei's chin. It makes his body look even larger, somehow.

A light comes on above the door which indicates the pod has latched on, safely suckered to the outer wall of their ship. Then another light comes on, which tells them the outer door is open. Then these first two lights go off. Thirty seconds after that, a third, brighter light comes on, and a siren sounds from the ceiling. And then, with a sigh, the door opens.

Alden realises, stereotypically, that he'd been expecting a little guy. But the Chinese astronaut is tall. Almost as tall as Alexei, though slimmer, not nearly so broad across the chest. He's wearing a sky-blue t-shirt and sky-blue tracksuit bottoms. On his feet are a pair of plastic flip-flops that look like they come from a cheap beachwear stall. His hair is cut in a buzz-cut, like an American marine. He has a warm, easy smile.

He gives Alexi a firm handshake, then he high-fives Alden. After that, he bows from the waist, and straightens up with a grin.

'You've got all the bases covered,' says Alden.

'Space is a celebration of diversity,' says the Chinese astronaut. 'That's one of my mission slogans.'

The Chinese astronaut is called Hu. He's been up here for eight months. Originally he was one of three men manning the Chinese space-station, but the other two were recalled to Earth and he elected to stay up alone, to carry out additional research. 'I like it up here,' he says. 'I would have stayed half a year longer.' But there had been damage to a solar panel, and he had been running on emergency power, and without a partner there was no way he could fix it.

'So now they want me back on Earth. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride.'

'What will happen to the station?' asks Alden.

'They'll blow it up,' says Hu.

They are sitting at the table in the dining area. Alexei and Hu are eating hamburgers, dipping them in barbeque source, while Alden is eating something that's meant to taste like duck a l'orange. The food units were only programmed to dispense two portions at a time, but they've managed to rewrite the code to get three meals out. The duck a l'orange was meant for tomorrow's dinner, which means that tomorrow the unit will dispense one duck a l'orange along with two different meals, and the sequence will go on like this, always an odd one out. Alcohol sachets they will share: the coding on that dispenser is harder to interfere with.

There are only two chairs in the dining area, so Alden is sitting on one of the crates that contain medical supplies. For a second, when they took their seats, he thought of sitting on Alexei's lap. What would the Chinese astronaut do then? Probably he'd be too polite, and pretend not to notice. But Alden didn't do that, of course. He didn't think Alexei would like it.

The three of them make space-talk until bedtime. Hu is lively in conversation, but the lines around his eyes and the purplish shadows in his skin hint at a deep inner exhaustion, an after-effect of long hours alone, working in stressful conditions. He starts yawning at eight o'clock. They make him up a bed beside the bunks, a foam mattress covered in spare insulation blankets from the survival kits.

'Seems like a nice enough guy,' says Alden, after Hu has gone to bed.

'He's done a good job. Professional,' says Alexei approvingly.

'It's kind of a shame though, isn't it?'

'What shame?'

'You know. Three's a crowd.'

Alexei doesn't say anything. Maybe he doesn't know the expression. They put the empty food containers into the vacuum-crushing unit, where they will be compacted into rice-sized grains.

That night, Alden lies awake and listens to the sound of a whole new breath. A whole new respiration system, labouring away in the darkness. Hu's breathing is pitched higher than Alexei's, and sometimes his throat makes a kind of click, as if a string of mucous is catching somewhere. Alden concentrates on the rumble of Alexei in the frame of the bunk. It reminds him of when he was kid, living in the house behind the railway line, with the sound of the trains going through the night, shaking the window-pane. But now there's this Chinese astronaut, whistling and clicking. It sounds disturbing and unfamiliar. It's a sound as ominous to Alden as if the ship had started making new noises, whistles and clicks it shouldn't be making, some subtle shift in the mechanism. After a while Alden climbs down, steps carefully over Hu's sleeping body, and turns the air dispensing unit on. It hums.

Part 4

They carry on with their work as before. Hu watches their procedures with interest. Sometimes he discusses his work at the station, without revealing too many details. Much of it is classified, of course. But their conversations are convivial.

After one meal, a meal in which Alexei was the odd one out, eating ravioli with tomato sauce while Alden and Hu ate beef stroganov, the Russian brings in a portable viewer and shows Hu some of the images they've made of various nebulae. Hu is delighted by the pictures. He says the colours are clearer and cleaner than any pictures he's seen before. He says that in all his years of space-work, immersed in equations and complex mathematics, he's never lost his simple amazement at the aesthetics of the things he sees. He says the knowledge that these colours are caused by the mere diffusion of gas, by the way hydrogen reacts with light, has never undermined his appreciation for the beauty of the universe.

'I think that's what all spacemen feel,' says Alden. 'Otherwise we wouldn't have chosen this job. Otherwise we wouldn't be up here.'

'Which one you like best?' Alexei asks Hu, pointing to the thumbnail images.

'I like them all,' says Hu.

For dessert they eat freeze-dried ice-cream. Alden has strawberry. Hu has vanilla. Alden hands Alexei raspberry ripple, but Alexei doesn't seem to notice.

Alden is in the shower unit, listening to them laughing. The shower is not a lot of fun. It seems to involve more procedures than going on a space-walk. It involves airlocks, double doors, a complicated system of nozzles that suck the water droplets away, to stop them dispersing around the ship and damaging electrical components.

Alden and Alexei made love in this shower, one time long ago. The space was so cramped, with two people in here, that they could hardly move. They did it very slowly, and the limited space seemed to amplify the tiniest movements. Alden felt it was like having sex under a microscope. Afterwards, they'd dried each other's bodies using the suction nozzles, carefully removing every drop of water and of sweat.

They have been laughing for a while. He can't hear any of their words. Alexei's laugh is a deep vibration, while Hu's is like the sound of a spoon clinking round in a coffee cup. Alden has this feeling in his gut. It reminds him a little of the feeling he gets about ten seconds after blast-off, when the world is getting left behind.

He comes into the dining area smelling of lemon soap. Alexei and Hu look up as he enters. Alexei is leaning back in his chair, with one of his bare feet up on the table, his arms crossed on his chest. Hu gives Alden a friendly grin. He is still chuckling.

'What's all the laughing about, guys?' asks Alden, feeling stupid.

'I always thought Russians had no sense of humour,' says Hu. 'This is what people told me. They said, Chinese people are always laughing, and Russians are always scowling. Now I find it isn't true. I look forward to telling them this, when I get back down.'

'We were talking about women,' says Alexei. The lines of his laughter are still on his face, even though he's stopped smiling.

On a ship this small, in such cramped conditions, it shouldn't be possible for one man to feel like he's ever alone. Alden discovers now how easy it is. Alexei and Hu talk like he's not there. Joking, wisecracking, comparing experiences. They get into humorous arguments about conflicting points of protocol, the best way to make minor repairs, methods for reducing gravity sickness. Their language is the language of space, the same language that Alden speaks, but he cannot enter these conversations. He hovers on the margins.

He concentrates on his work. He makes sure all the information is in order. He rechecks data he's already rechecked, backs up files he's already backed up, tries to memorise figures he already knows.

There's a kind of steady buzzing in his brain. It seems to crackle when he moves his eyes, when he turns his head. It's a bit like when he was a kid, back home, and their TV signal was so bad that if you stood on one part of the floor, the picture would fuzz up with static, and if you moved to another place it was fine. He doesn't know why he keeps thinking like that, about these times when he was a kid. He left it all behind long ago. He left it back down there on Earth, on the woman's world.

The first time he sees them brushing hands, he turns away and goes to the porthole and looks at the stars a long time. He thinks about constellations, the imperative to put a name on everything, to join the dots into bears and twins and crabs. He closes one eye and sketches lines across the black, from star to star, covering millions of miles of empty, lonely space. 'This one's a cactus. This one's a gun. That one's a submarine.'

The first time he sees their fingers lock, he goes to the computer and starts to type messages for Earth, which he knows even as he writes he will not send. 'I am writing from the Combined Space Mission to report some changes to our night sky. The moon isn't shining anymore. The stars have all gone out.' It's pathetic. 'The planets have stopped orbiting their suns. Everything is getting further away. It's cold up here, it's dark up here, and everything is fucked.' He's ashamed. He deletes it all, watches the cursor gobbling the words. Like it's going back in time. He sits with his head in his hands, not moving. He stays like that for a long time.

The first time he hears them kiss goodnight, he makes himself wait for fifteen minutes, then scrambles down the ladder and shuts the door behind him. He knows they didn't mean for him to hear. It was only a light peck. But he has become an expert now in every creak, every hiss, every small vibration of the air.

He goes into the storage area and takes out his space helmet. He puts it on, adjusting the straps so it fits snugly on his head, eliminating all sound. His head is immersed in a heavy bubble. Nothing can get in. He makes his way to the dining area, bumping the helmet on the doorframes. Then he opens up a survival kit and drags out one of the insulation blankets, lays it down on the chilly metal floor.

When Alexei and Hu come in the next morning, after six hours sleep, they find Alden sprawled out on the blanket, wearing his vest, his boxer shorts and a space helmet. It takes him some time to get the helmet off, he can hardly see through the tinted visor, and he gets it jammed for a moment underneath the table.

'Morning, campers,' he says when he's got his head free at last. His arms and legs are goosepimpled, trembling from the cold.

'What the fuck are you doing?' demands Alexei. Hu turns away, confused.

During his training, Alden was put through endurance tests of every description. He was made to crawl through metal tubes so narrow that if he got his elbows jammed, they would have to cut him out with special equipment. He was suspended upside-down for up to two hours at a time, wearing headphones that blasted out white noise. He was forced to hold his breath under water until a red mist rose in his brain, spots of blackness blooming and dancing sickeningly across his vision. They spun him round in a gyroscope and made him subdivide equations.

He's a highly-trained professional spaceman, one of the few. 'The successful ones,' as Alexei said. He's been taught to carry on, to function on only ten minutes sleep, to keep his mind clear, to operate when the air supply drops to dangerous levels. He's used to being starved of oxygen. He's used to induced sickness.

But no-one ever trained him for this. Not this sinking in the gut, not this constant pain.

When Alexei moves off his narrow bunk and starts sleeping on the floor with Hu, Alden loses it.

Alexei wakes from a heavy sleep, his arm draped across Hu's chest, to find Alden tearing at his hair, kicking at his body. Hu tries to roll from under the blows but Alden claws him back by the arm, chopping at his stomach and ribs with an open hand. It's like he can't decide which one of them deserves the force of his blows, which one he wants to hurt the most. Alexei launches himself from the floor and grabs Alden in a powerful squeeze, trying to pin his arms. But Alden is going at it like a madman. He gets his leg free to kick Hu in the ear. He has Alexei by the hair. He fights in silence, not making a sound apart from vicious exhalations of breath that sound like a front crawl swimmer. Alexei slams him down to the floor, and Hu hangs onto his feet. Alden lands one good, solid punch in Alexei's eye. But now they have him heavily pinned, and it doesn't last much longer.

'I hate you,' says Alden calmly, fifteen minutes later.

'You shouldn't say that,' says Hu. 'It's a very strong word.'

'I wasn't talking to you,' says Alden. 'It's got nothing to do with you. You shouldn't even be here.'

They are sitting at the steel dining table, onto which has been emptied out the contents of a first aid pack. Alexei is holding an ice-pack to his eye and is bleeding a little from the head, where a clump of hair was torn out. Hu is holding an ice-pack to the swollen cartilage of his ear. Alden is pretty much unscathed, apart from some light bruising.

'We should eject you back into space,' Alden says to Hu.

Alexei suddenly starts to laugh, although it makes him wince. 'Shut up, Al-den,' he says. 'Just shut up. You're the one we should eject.' His eye looks like a burst fruit. It's already turning livid.

'Why did you do it?' asks Alden, later.

'Do what?'

'Do anything. With him. Didn't you think about how I'd feel?'

Alexei frowns and looks confused, as if he doesn't understand the question. He removes the ice-pack from his eye and touches the swelling with one finger. It puts his face all out of balance. It almost looks like he should topple sideways.

'Space is space,' he says after a while. 'Space is space, Al-den.' He looks at Alden for a few seconds that feel much longer than a few seconds, as if the ship has got snagged somewhere, caught itself in a fold of nothing, and then passed out again.

When the air-lock light comes on about an hour afterwards, Alexei and Hu are at the table, watching a nature documentary. They've been watching it for half an hour. It's about polar bears getting in trouble, because the Arctic has melted. They aren't watching it because they think that polar bears are interesting, they don't really think any animals are interesting, it was just the first video file they found. And there's nothing else to say. Alexei has one foot on the table, and Hu still occasionally dabs at his ear with ice. Their bodies aren't touching.

After clearing away the medical supplies, they sat at the table and ate two chicken kormas and one cottage pie. None of them was really hungry, but they got most of it down. Then Alexei made a flask of coffee. They got two measurements of Polish vodka, and put the vodka in the coffee. Earth is only six days away now. The clock says it's the middle of the night, but it feels like another afternoon. They pulled up the video screen.

When the air-lock light comes on, neither Alexei nor Hu notices at first. They continue to watch as a polar bear flops around on a lump of half-submerged ice, slipping off and clambering back on. Then they become aware of the siren. It's a sequence of sounds they both have ingrained. Alexei frowns. Hu opens his mouth. They turn to look at one another, puzzled. Hu's mouth is pink inside, like a cartoon frog. They turn their heads, and register that the dining area is empty. They stand up almost as if synchronised, and make their way quickly, profesionally, along the passage to the air-lock doors.

Alden is standing at the porthole, staring into space. He is leaning forward so his forehead is resting against the triple-reinforced glass. He is gazing hard at something that is out there.

'Look at 'em go,' he says.

Alexei and Hu take their places at the porthole either side of him. They are just in time to watch the packets of freeze-dried raspberry ripple ice-cream rushing into the vastness of space, into the infinite black.

'What are those?' asks Hu, confused.

Neither of the other men responds.

'You are like a fucking child,' says Alexei, some time later. With a cautious finger he is mapping out the new scab on his hairline.

The three of them are still standing there, in the same alignment. They can make out the packets, but only just. They look like a scattering of tiny comets.

'I'm sorry,' says Alden, after yet more time has passed.

'I'm sorry,' says Hu.

'I'm sorry,' says Alexei, finally. The comets are not visible now. The three men turn away.

Part 5

Alexei, Alden and Hu stand together, on the podium. Behind them hangs a blue velvet curtain, spangled with silver stars. The words 'Welcome Home!' are written in red, white and blue letters, and below those words hang the American, Russian and Chinese flags.

They wear fresh uniforms, pressed so sharply the creases down the legs are like blades. They have fresh-shaven faces and fresh haircuts. Spotless moon-boots are on their feet, boots they never had a reason to wear. Each man holds his space helmet, its visor polished to a dazzling mirror, under his right arm.

Every so often, one of the three men raises his left arm, or gives the thumbs-up, and smiles at the cameras. Their smiles are tight, economical, because they've been smiling for hours now, since the second they climbed down off the ship. Hu keeps flashing the V for Victory sign.

Alexei's black eye, which has faded to yellow, or purple, or something in between, has been artfully covered with foundation, dusted with powder to match his skin. You can hardly see it now. It just makes his face look larger, uglier. You can hardly make out Hu's swollen ear, especially if he keeps his head dead-centre, and he distracts from it with a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of his mission.

Alden smiles, waves, thumbs-ups. He has to squint his eyes. All he can see is a barrage of flashbulbs, light pulverising his eyeballs. The camera flashes are like the bursting of a hundred suns.

There is champagne and caviar, just as Alexei said. The three men stand in dinner jackets, trying to balance tiny plates and champagne flutes in their hands. They wear bow-ties. Hu still wears his baseball cap. On stage a silver-tuxedoed band plays lounge jazz versions of themes from sci-fi shows.

Alden holds out his hand for people to shake. He allows them to slap him on the back. Some of the Russians even kiss his cheeks. Every time anyone approaches him, a camera flashes somewhere. The American president shakes his hand. The Russian president shakes his hand. The Chinese president shakes his hand, and Alden feels embarrassed that he didn't know who he was.

His colleagues are there, people from training, the guys from the control room. Former astronauts and cosmonauts punch his arms and say, 'good job, kid.' Old generals from the army are there, stuffing their bulldog faces with canapés, military chiefs-of-staff rubbing shoulders with world-renowned astronomers, astrophysicists, Nobel Prize winners, experts in international relations. All of them want to shake his hand. All of them want their photo taken with him.

The three men are standing on another stage. A final photo-shoot. There is a rosette pinned to each of their chests, at the centre of which lies the emblem of two hands joined in front of a satellite. They have never seen this symbol before. It must have been invented for the occasion. Alexei holds a huge spray of carnations. He looks like he wants to put them down, but can't find anywhere to put them.

They are all standing some distance apart, waving and thumbs-upping. Alden doesn't want it remembered like that, with each of them standing alone, in their separate places. So he gets between them, pulling them close. He puts his arms around the other men, around Alexei's big familiar shoulders and around Hu's skinny back, squeezing them tightly together. The audience swells with applause. Alden squints at the cheering crowd, invisible behind the camera flashes, and he smiles and smiles.

Then all kinds of people come on stage, to shake their hands and slap their backs and pretend to wisecrack in their ears all over again. Alexei's family come on stage. Alexei hands his wife the carnations. There are whistles from the audience. Alden gives Alexei's wife two quick kisses, one on each cheek, but afterwards he doesn't remember her face, not even remotely. What he does remember is the two little girls, Lisaveta and Natasha. They are wearing new frocks, one bright red and one midnight blue, and they look confused and thrilled by everything.

'I've seen your dad in his boxer shorts,' says Alden in a stage whisper. 'He wore them all the time in space, the ones you gave him. To remember you by.'

The twins giggle and cling to each another, falling about the stage.

Alden kisses them both on the forehead. They smell of soap and flowers.

Dog-Star has put on weight. He always does in kennels. Alden decides to walk him twice a day from now on.

Alden's apartment hasn't changed. He paid someone while he was away to drop by every week or so to open the blinds, water the plants, sort through the junk mail.

He lies on the sofa for a long time, looking at the ceiling. He listens to Dog-Star padding about. This is the first time Alden has been alone for seven months.

Later, he gets up and opens all the windows, to let the air circulate. His apartment is on the thirty-second floor. He feels the wind on his face and neck. He closes his eyes, standing there.

Later still, when it's dark over the world, he takes his telescope from its case, the telescope his parents gave him as a kid in the house behind the railway lines, and spends a long time carefully fitting all the parts together. He aims the telescope at the night sky and gazes at the emptiness where, in the future, their love affair never ends

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I ended up watching this accidentally as well, as I nearly got distracted by So You Think You Can Dance which I considered in the spirit of open-mindedness, and hot dancers. And because its very aggressively titled for a dancing contest, but in a catty way. But I’m very glad I didn’t as this is a fantastic film that follows the minutiae of an election campaign, shows how big it is, what a caucus is, and just how exciting it was to see him win. It shows the US political process in its minutiae, and shows how awesome Michelle Obama is. And to find out that Jon Favreau the scriptwriter is not the same Jon Favreau from Swingers as I originally thought.

Watching it now post-Copenhagen and some of the inevitable disillusionment has kicked in, it’s bittersweet to watch how excited and energised he made the US, and its difficult not to share in that excitement. And then it’s differently difficult to look at our upcoming election and how the UK is not energised by any of the political leaders in the UK. Obama’s campaign shows this is not a feature of a generation or an impossible task to get people involved, but it not happening here. I wish this wasn’t the case.

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Righteous walked into the bar. He overheard some people on the stools to his right.

“…not as much as we’d like, but we do alright… playing next week actually if you're around….”

He walked into the back. It was an eclectic affair. People and chairs. It gave you the feeling that there wasn’t two of the same thing in the whole room. Though there was. Ledges were filled. Accessories worn. Eyes darted around casually. They said ‘we are not the sort to judge other people, though we will just make sure you are the same as us so as not to disrupt the non-judging atmosphere we have established’. He spotted his acquaintances. His soon-to-be drinking……people?, and went over.

“Blahblahblahblah…everyone alright for drinks?” His inebriation crutches. His Tuesday night drinking excuses. “blahblahblah”. Righteous went back to the bar.

“…yeah thanks… that’s kinda important…that’s the thing I pay most attention to….they’ve got to be good or I couldn’t do it……I don’t understand people who don’t listen to words…”

He wandered back, and as he did questioned whether ‘eclectic’ was inherently a positive word.

“…it pays better than it should and I can get there easy enough from blahblahblahblah…I dunno…he’s a completely different person when she’s around, sometimes blahblahblahblah…I can get put on his insurance this time so it shouldn’t be too blablahblahblah”

Righteous noticed a girl diagonally across looking at him. Or she was until he noticed. She must only have been a few feet away. The sheer volume and closeness of the furniture added greatly to the establishment’s demeanour.

Righteous had changed his name four years ago. Not to, but from Righteous to Robert. Rob. Not officially. More like ‘Can you all just call me Rob now’. He did announce it though. For the benefit of his work colleagues. That was the worst. Doesn’t see a single one of them anymore. He wrote letters. Put it in writing. Polite but firm notes to his closest friends. Explained how he would very much appreciate it if the next time they saw him and every time after that, forever, they would call him ‘Rob’, ‘The more likable and anonymous sounding ‘Rob’ is what he actually wrote, and on the most part they did. He felt they understood. Though he was never sure what they referred to him as when he wasn’t there.
Righteous had hated his name from the day he truly understood what it meant. This was a few months before other people his age did the same. The virtuousness his name achieved him invoked a hostility amongst most. There was a definite feeling that a peg or two separated him from others in his eyes, and the sooner these pegs were dispatched of the better. ‘Naming is a fundamentally aggressive act’ he would repeat. In his head. Thousands of times. Over the years. He had read it somewhere. Nowadays he has trained himself out of it. Thought he’d probably said the phrase enough times for an entire country. Now he gets to ‘Naming is…’ and replaces the rest with something he sees. ‘Naming is…an unwanted headboard up against a wall’. ‘Naming is…a spiral in the stubble of the man in front’

“Blahblahblah but it’s not as dangerous as people say it is…I’ve been here blahblahblah and I’ve never had any blah”

‘Naming is…a prominent nose on the face of the girl who was looking at me’. She was now talking to her company, a boy, man, and as her face turned and darted with interest Righteous developed a definite recognition for it. She was familiar. Recently familiar, and potently so. What a strange feeling to know something in every part of your body except your brain. He was now staring. So he stopped.

He started thinking about places he’d been recently. Places where people introduce you to people. It was pointless. Her face was only metres away and nothing was being sparked.

“Blahblahblah” Someone was describing how something that no longer exists was far superior to the thing which has now replaced it. It was ill thought-out. She looked at him again. This time in mid conversation. The recognition was marked on her face too. ‘Who is she…?’ or ‘where was she……at the same time as me……recently?’. Her glances were more subtle than his but they were just as searching.

Naming is…an attractive girl I recognise, recognising me. Naming is…someone from…….school?….no….someone from…….no. Naming was…at Sally Ballam’s party?…..no…..naming is….like she’s on a poster on the inside of my head but there’s no signature at the bottom to make out.

Righteous returned to the bar.

“it’s true…………………when we run out of words…that’s when I’ll die…”

‘Who is this girl?…What the hell is her name…?…Why do I want to know her name, I don’t want her to know mine….When we run out of words, that’s when I’ll die? What…is that supposed to mean…?’

The girl with the prominent nose walked passed Righteous and outside with her male company. She did not look at him and he did not notice her leave.

He went back to the blahblahblahblahblah.

His sister ‘Jess’ was called Forever.

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After her step-mother had finally died in her hospital bed, Odede inherited and then sold the old house. Some of the money she saved, some she spent, and life went on. The idea to buy the android came from a conversation that she'd had one hungover Sunday morning with a work colleague. It was her idea. She hadn't seen them in any adverts. At that point, she wasn't even sure if you could buy them.

But after some research on the internet and a few emails here and there, Odede found a Slovakian university teacher that would help. He had planned the whole thing after she wired him the deposit. He booked her flights, found a place where they scanned her body in a 3D imaging machine and took a thousand reference photos. He went as far as getting his uncle out of retirement (a tailor) to make a replica set of clothes of the ones she felt the most comfortable in.

With the android she bought, Odede thought, this unique experience. And the story, which she would lay out to anyone who visited her apartment, telling them which parts were made of whichever new silicon or plastic or metal the engineers had used. The experience of having hours of Skype conversations recorded, and then intricately poured over by the language programmers, whose first language wasn't even English. And, of course, what it was like to live with an android.

No-one ever asked about it, but these days Odede spent more time talking about what it was like now that she - and not the android - was aging. Just around the edges, around the eyes, she thought. But noticeably so, especially in comparison.

This morning Odede stood staring at the android while she ate her cereal, lost in thought, chewing and frowning. The android was benign and silent as always. It sat on their sofa, it's perfectly lifelike hands placed still on the glass table.

In the kitchen, Odede rinsed her cereal bowl under some cold water and left it next to the sink. She put her coat on, and her scarf.

'I'm going to work now,' Odede told the android.

Its hands upon the table, the android turned towards Odede and in a familiar voice said goodbye.

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I’ve become neurotic and hate the mailman, he’s the bane of my life, him and his fucking incompetence. If I had his job, I’d deliver his mail on time and fucking enjoy it. Useless bastard.

When I run out of things to do, when I fall to despair at how much I hate the mailman or how much lack of motivation I feel towards ‘waxing that old wardrobe as it would help’ or translating that fucking letter. I just sit on the couch. I sit on the couch and I bathe. I bathe in my own misery and boredom. I have nothing to complain about. I just have nothing.

Cars go by in the scenery of the massive window, and I curse the mailman with every vehicle that passes without ‘La Poste’ inscribed on it. Fucking arsehole. I want tears to run down my face, but I don’t have a reason for it.

It’s strange because I don’t feel worthless. All my applications have been rejected. Actually, they haven’t even been acknowledged. And that’s work that I have volunteered for, that is free. People don’t want my services even if they are free. And I have degree, so I can only feel sad for the poor sod who’s only got anything lower than that.

Strange being jobless, it’s not all that bad. I’ve just been trying to recreate images of myself of about two years ago. I like to keep a ‘facial diary’. I take a picture of my face every two months or so, in three positions. Front, side left, side right. Sometimes I get caught up and try to distort my face to look as different as possible. So today I was recreating those. That was fun.

When you’re jobless, everything is amplified, sublimated to a new level. Because life is so dull, what is aggravating becomes almost unbearable, makes you want to die, to disappear. The mailman could kill me. But at the same time, simple pleasures are enjoyed tenfold. Having to drive the car somewhere. Your own joke. Fooling around with your brother. Repeating funny words. Letters from friends.

Now there's a hard one, friend’s letters. They’re like a drug. You get one and the relief of being acknowledged is so intense. You frantically reply, but you don’t send it immediately of course, you might look desperate. But you send it anyway, and email is instant so he/she should get to read it within the next few hours. And when she does, she should respond. But she takes her time, she doesn’t respond, well not automatically. You fucking hate her, eventually. Checking your emails 3 times an hour, nothing ever comes. Time is atomised and expended. Your perception of it becomes dangerously acute. An hour takes twice as long to go by, but you never know what time it is, and your estimation is always late.

Which reminds me, I’m off to the Job Centre.

"Joseph Merrick Love Explosion"

"Being Patrick Bateman"

"Gay Moustache"

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'Get out of here'

'I can't.....

I am resting him'.

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Last summer coming back from Corsica my saucepan, which had been used on a camping stove for cooking purposes, and at home for many years for the same purposes, was confiscated by the airport staff. ‘No way! Surely not my saucepan!’ I said. ‘Mais oui I am afraid so’ replied the Corsican guard. ‘But why?’ I said. At which point he picked it up and made a gesture of bludgeoning someone over the head with it. Until this point I had never thought about attacking someone with a saucepan but for the duration of the flight I could think of nothing else.

Were other people on the flight, victims of the same confiscatory policy, now going down imaginative routes of murder involving their own lost objects? The man in front of me had had his nail clippers taken and I wondered if his mind was now full of images of him slowly clipping through his neighbour’s temples. The woman next to me had had some tent pegs taken. Did she just now contemplate how she could have stabbed someone straight to the vena cava?

What is better? A plane full of people with benign objects in their bags which could, if animated by the will-to-kill, become weapons, or a plane full of people with no weapons but minds full of unusual and resourceful murder techniques, suggested implicitly to them by the very guards employed to ensure their safety? The act of confiscating an object changes the status of the object itself. A saucepan becomes a potential, and potentially fatal, club.

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The Slippy Butler is a story in which you make the choices and find your own adventure.

Start your adventure now!

Lady Crumble, an eccentric widow, has invited you to her charming mansion to investigate a series of paranormal occurrences that she believes may have been caused by the ghost of her former butler.

As your carriage draws up to Crumble Mansion, you are excited about solving the mystery. Fame and fortune await. But first you must untangle the riddle of the Slippy Butler...

WARNING: The following adventure contains disturbing imagery and sexual content.

That's OK with me! Turn to page 1

Page 1

Lady Crumble thanks you for coming on such short notice, and compliments you on your bravery. 'Before you start your ghost hunt,' she says, 'do join me in the living room for light refreshments.'

She brings out a tray and offers it to you.

Do you choose:

Tea 11
Chocolate cake 4
Crumble 18

Page 2

You plunge your arms into the warm, soapy bubbles, and start to scrub. You find a few fingers floating in the sink, but soon the plates are all clean. Lady Crumble enters the room, wearing a ball-gown that artfully hides the ravages of age. You embrace before the gleaming pile, and she leads you to the greenhouse for a fuck.

One year later, you are still very much in love, and living together in Crumble Mansion. It is a source of great joy and comfort to you both to discover the ghost of the dead butler has possessed your son.

Well done! The End.

Page 3

The rat looks devastated, and very reluctantly he offers you his last pigeon's face. You really don't want it, but raise it to your lips. As you do so, the beak moves weakly. It either whispers 'Go to the kitchen' or 'Don't go to the kitchen.' You can't tell.

You crunch the head between your teeth and swallow it. The feathers get stuck in your throat.

The rat is now sulking and won't speak to you, so you ask directions to the kitchen from his wife-rat. She tells you to go through the hatch in the ceiling.

Go through the hatch 6

Page 4

The cake is rich and delicious. Lady Crumble encourages you to wolf it down. It leaves you with a greasy sickliness. Lady Crumble informs you that the butler had very slender white fingers - but before you can find out more, you have an urgent need to find a toilet, and quickly.

Do you:

Probe her for more information on the butler, and hope the feeling will pass 9
Excuse yourself quickly, and try to find the toilet 12

Page 5

As you stir the soup, a sense of profound well-being overwhelms you. You feel happy and relaxed. As you bend down to kiss the soup, you feel the butler's fingerless hands gently lifting you by the hips and easing you into the pot. You feel too happy to resist, and murmur gratefully as he prods you under the surface with a spoon.

The butler sings in a masterful tone:

'Stir the soup
That soupy gloop
You're the stock
It's soup o'clock.'

Your adventure ends here.

Page 6

To your surprise, the kitchen seems perfectly normal. A pot of rich, creamy soup is bubbling on the stove. A pile of dirty dishes is stacked up on the sink. A meat grinder stands on the table, along with a pile of meat waiting to be ground.

Do you:

Do the washing up 2
Stir the soup 5
Grind the meat 28

Page 7

As you do so, the sow flies into a frenzy of violence, catapulting itself across the room with a speed that belies its massive size. It propels itself on a jet-stream of dung and urine, squealing a complicated Biblical curse. You seize a large candlestick, and bury it deep in the sow's bloodshot eye, but this only serves to enrage it more.

The last things you see are the stained yellow teeth that rip off your nose.

Your adventure ends here.

Page 8

To your surprise, the serum tastes delicious, and the retching stops immediately. You relax, and, after a few minutes, ask how the butler died. 'It was a kitchen accident,' she says. 'The sink was blocked with fat, skin and rice, and he attempted to unblock it with his fingers. We found him later that afternoon. His clothes and fingers were missing.'

Your sickness returns, and you begin to sweat profusely.

Do you:

Make your excuses and try to find the toilet 12
Ask for directions to the bathroom 15
Ask more about the butler's fingers 9

Page 9

'Tell me more about the fingers,' you say, feeling your abdomen tenderly as your bowels groan within it. You learn the butler used his fingers for all kinds of tasks around the house: picking locks, stirring lard and birthing piglets. Shortly before his death, however, he lost one of his fingers inside an old sow.

She asks if you'd like to meet the sow to help in your enquiries.

Do you:

Agree to meet the sow 13
Press on with your search for the butler himself 12

Page 10

'It's me, Lady Crumble,' a voice replies.

'I was coming to look for you when I heard strange noises from the kitchen. It sounds like there's something awful happening in there. I demand you investigate.'

You open the door and step out. Lady Crumble grabs you by the hand. As she leads you back downstairs, you notice several pale fingers writhing in her hair.

'You must go in alone,' she says, as you come to the heavy iron door of the kitchen. 'Here's a good luck kiss.' Her tongue darts into your mouth. It feels like a jabbing finger.

Enter the kitchen 6

Page 11

As she pours a cup of tea, you begin to make enquiries about the recent hauntings. You learn that, before his death, Lady Crumble's butler had been fired from her household for eating the other servants' rations of pickled eggs.

As you sip the tea, you notice a thin layer of grease on the surface. It leaves a slightly unpleasant coating on your throat, but you drink it anyway. Immediately afterwards, your bladder swells uncomfortably.

Do you:

Excuse yourself quickly and hope you find the toilet in time 12
Ask Lady Crumble for directions 15

Page 12

You leave the room and head upstairs, where you hope to God you'll find a toilet quickly. You notice that the carpet is damp underfoot, and wonder at what point you lost your shoes. Ahead of you are two doors. One is slightly ajar, and you can hear the sound of rushing water. The other seems to be thinly coated in a viscous oily substance. A clear-coloured jelly oozes from the keyhole.

Do you enter:

The rushing water door 26
The oozing jelly door 22

Page 13

Lady Crumble leads you to the pig room. An oily sign on the door depicts a young child in a blue nightgown, holding an old-fashioned candlestick, stooping to kiss a pig.

'I'll leave you two some time to get to know each other,' she says, handing you a blue nightgown.

Do you:

Strip your clothes and don the nightgown 16
Enter the pig room without the nightgown 7

Page 14

As you hold the handkerchief to your lips, you involuntarily retch, and crumble sprays from your mouth all over the table. The retching continues, and you urinate slightly in your trousers.

'You must be sick,' says Lady Crumble, looking pleased. 'Before he died, the butler developed a special serum for people like you.'

She pulls out an oily green bottle with a label that says BUTLER'S SERUM and a diagram of a large intestine. She pours some into a spoon and holds it to your lips. It smells like fishy tripe.

Do you:

Drink the serum 8
Run from the room 12

Page 15

After a long, complicated explanation and what seems like an eternity of wandering through identical corridors, you find a door with a bell beside it. On the door is an inscription that reads:

A BUTLER'S LIFE IS SAD AND BLEAK
THE BUTTER URN OF WHICH I SPEAK
HAS CHURNED AND TURNED FOR HALF A WEEK
RING THE BELL TO HEAR ME SHRIEK

Do you:

Ring the bell 17
Open the door 26

Page 16

The nightgown is ridiculously small, and doesn't allow for much movement. As you awkwardly enter the room, you see the sow hurriedly concealing a ouija board with a guilty expression on its face. The room is lit only by goose-fat candles. A broken rocking-horse rocks sadly in the corner, and a taxidermied monkey spills its stuffing over a pile of mushy, greenish bones.

There is an overpowering smell of offal. You try to approach the sow, but it backs away in fear.

'I was only trying to contact him,' whimpers the sow.

Do you:

Attempt to interrogate the sow on the butler's whereabouts 7
Join in the seance 20

Page 17

Ding dong! Bad choice. A heavy urn of rancid butter crashes into the back of your head, accompanied by an ear-splitting shriek.

As your life-juices ebb away, you see the butler scraping up the bloody buttery mix from the floor, and ladling it into a vat. The vat reads:

LADY CRUMBLE'S SPECIAL CRUMBLE.

Your adventure ends here.

Page 18

The crumble is utterly disgusting, but your hostess is watching you intently licking her glistening lips. The crumble tastes like little balls of fat rolled in muesli. It cloys and clogs in your mouth, and your body is utterly unable to swallow.

Do you:

Keep chewing, in the hope of choking a bit of it down 21
Discretely spit your mouthful out into a handkerchief 14
Run from the room 23

Page 19

The words are smudged and almost illegible, and a family of slugs has hollowed out a slimy home. The only passage you can read appears to be a poem.

'LUCKY YOU, YOU READ MY WORDS AS YOU SIT UPON THE TOILET.
THE KITCHEN HOLDS A HAPPY END, UNLESS I COME TO SPOIL IT.
HERE I COME. YOU'D BETTER RUN. WILL YOU FIND MY FINGERS FOR ME?
IF YOU DON'T, IT WON'T BE FUN.'

A pale, slender finger rolls out of the book. As you put it in your pocket, you become aware of a looming presence outside the frosted glass of the toilet door.

Do you:

Ask who it is 10
Open the door 25
Attempt to escape down the bubbling hole 24

Page 20

After reassuring the frightened sow, you rearrange the ouija board, hold the sow's trotter in your hands, and attempt to contact the dead butler. He answers immediately.

'Remove my finger from the pig's arse, collect my other fingers from around the house, and you'll solve the mystery.'

You thank the sow, and apologetically rummage until you find the finger. You also find one of your missing shoes.

You pop it on your foot. It's warm. You kiss the pig and hop to the toilet with a renewed sense of urgency.

Proceed to 26

Page 21

You gag as the crumble slides down your throat, and tears of misery roll down your face. Your hostess is delighted you like it so much, and slaps another big helping on your plate. Sticking out of the fresh crumble is a slender white finger.

Thinking it might come in handy, you slip it in your pocket. It wriggles slightly.

You have a strong urge to get away from the table as fast as possible, but Lady Crumble insists you try a slice of greasy black chocolate cake.

Do you:

Run from the room 23
Eat the cake 4

Page 22

Your stomach churns with the greasy warm air that fills your nostrils as you open the door. In front of you is a large porcelain bathtub, literally spilling over with pus. The butler's fat bald head breaks through the surface with an expression of surprised delight. 'Hop in!' he gurgles, clearly aroused. To your horror, you find yourself removing your clothes and whistling a jaunty tune from your childhood bath-times.

'Childhood is over,' says the butler.

Your adventure ends here.

Page 23

As you hurry down the passageway, ashamed and disappointed with yourself, you become racked with nausea. Bent double with pain, you desperately clutch at the bannister.

It feels warm, greasy and strangely porous. It dawns on you that what you are holding is the butler's engorged, turgid penis. The penis is covered in goose fat.

Your adventure ends here.

Page 24

You take a deep breath, and jump head-first into the hole. Almost immediately, you are badly winded by the bloated body of a dead piglet, and swallow a few mouthfuls of rotting sewage. You are rushing through the secret sewer pipes of the house at enormous speed.

You splash down in a fetid rat-hole. A wise-looking rat approaches you. He's eating the face of a pigeon. 'Riddle me this!' he says.

'A pigeon's face is fat and sweet,
What's your favourite thing to eat?'

Do you say:

Lady Crumble's crumble 17
A butler's thumb 27
A pigeon's face 3

Page 25

As you open the door, you are flung violently backwards by a greasy, powerful arm. Your head smashes into the cistern, breaking it and drenching you in stagnant water. As your eyes regain focus, you make out what can only be the butler, sopping wet, trouser-less and wearing a yellow dog mask, bearing down upon you with terrible force.

'The pet becomes the master,' he chuckles. The mask slips off, revealing a giant penis in the shape of a dog's head.

Your adventure ends here.

Page 26

You are relieved to find yourself in an ornate and beautiful bathroom. You are standing ankle-deep in water. Water cascades from a broken pipe on the wall, and the tiles are covered in green mould. After crushing the toads on the toilet seat, you gratefully use the facilities.

Next to the toilet you notice a hole, bubbling and frothing with dirty brown water. On the floor you find a sodden leather-bound book entitled 'The Butler's Manual.'

Do you:

Read the book 19
Leave the bathroom 25
Jump down the hole 24

Page 27

The rat is delighted. He produces a butler's thumb from his wife-rat, who regurgitates it in front of you. He insists that you eat it immediately. You really don't want to, but you feel it would be rude to refuse, as the wife-rat is now near death.

As soon as you put it in your mouth, it takes on a life of its own, wriggling and forcing its way down your throat. Disgusted, you ask the rat how to find your way back to the surface, but he is now sobbing and choking over the body of his wife-rat.

By the time you find a ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling, the rat has died of grief, and is being eaten by his friends.

Climb the ladder to 6

Page 28

As you grind the meat, a sense of profound well being overwhelms you. You become mesmerised by the sight of the meat churning out of the grinder. Some of it starts to look strangely familiar. You recognise your own fingernails in the mince, and realise it is no longer you turning the grinder, but a sweaty bald man smoking a pipe full of human hair. He is whacking himself off into one of your shoes with one hand, and furiously cranking the grinder with the other.

Your adventure ends here.

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I first became aware of the worm on a dentist visit. I’ve never liked dentists. I don’t trust them. It isn’t that I’m afraid of them; I just don’t know what they want. This was my first time in six years. I’d hoped never to go again. But a month before, on holiday in Syria, I’d cracked one of my molars on a pebble – it’s a rocky country, full of pebbles, perhaps you will go there yourself one day – and at night the pain made me feel as if I was in an aeroplane, but instead of flying through normal clouds I was flying through clouds of pain. The right side of my mouth wouldn’t chew. My face was becoming unbalanced. And that was why I was in the dentist’s chair, gazing up at the underside of the dentist’s facial features, and it was while I was in the dentist’s chair that I became aware of the worm.

Another reason I don’t like dentists is because they are so clean. They have an unpleasant glistening quality, a bit like dolphins, who I don’t trust either. And all the instruments around them are clean, glistening also, like the instruments dolphins might use for whatever unpleasant things they get up to down there, in those underwater caverns where no-one can see them. This dentist was clean, like all the rest. The lights were so bright and white I could see into every pore of her skin, and not a trace, not a mote of dirt, could ever be concealed in there. ‘How did this happen, then?’ she asked, smiling a dolphin smile.

‘On a pebble,’ I said awkwardly, as she pushed back my lips with a rubber-gloved thumb that smelled like a condom.

‘What were you doing with a pebble in your mouth?’ she asked next, an expression of horrible interest rippling over her face.

It’s an old desert trick, I wanted to say. I also thought of saying: I was perishing of thirst. But I didn’t want to be forced to converse in such an undignified fashion. ‘Just fix my tooth,’ I said. ‘Please.’ The dentist smiled, another dolphin smile, a smile like a dolphin trying to pretend that it isn’t a dolphin, but something else entirely. She produced a little mirror on the end of a stick, and lowered her face towards mine.

‘Okay, open wide,’ she said, corresponding to cliché.

In the second I opened my mouth, which caused seams of pain to shoot around my jaw – or in the very first fraction of that second – a long, fine tendril like a hair coiled out from between my teeth and stroked the dentist’s face.

She brushed her hand over her forehead as if a stray hair had fallen. I closed my mouth instinctively and ran my tongue over my teeth. I couldn’t feel anything inside, but I knew what I had seen. The dentist did a good job of hiding the look of shock and surprise on her face. ‘Open wide,’ she said again, as if this might reset the situation. I obeyed her command. Nothing emerged. She stared tentatively around my gums, but nothing was forthcoming. She brandished the little mirror again, and the ordeal proceeded as before.

You might expect me to say here that I thought I must have imagined it, that strand reaching out for the dentist’s face from the sanctuary of my mouth. But actually, I accepted it. I knew I’d seen it as clear as day, the way you know you’ve seen a speck of dust the sunlight briefly catches.

Anyway, the dentist fixed my tooth, and then scrutinised my other teeth and went through the standard motions of grave, even wounded disappointment, as if my teeth did not belong to me but were merely on loan from some kind of charity. She gave a short speech about brushing and flossing, staring with interest at my mouth as if she’d had the sudden idea that the thing that brushed her face was perhaps a strand of dental floss; dentists, as you may well know, have little imagination. And then I paid an extortionate fee and went home to tell my wife all was well.

That was my ex-wife, you understand. I’m not talking about your mother. I’m telling you this so you know how it happened. I think you’re old enough now.

I studied myself in the mirror that day, forced my mouth open as wide as it would go. I took a pen-torch and shone it inside, watching the shadows of my teeth wash across the rippled walls, scanning every fleshy nook for traces of the strand. I saw nothing. Perhaps it was a freak occurrence. My wife appeared at the sink beside me and started brushing her hair. We gazed at each other’s reflections like two frogs regarding each other in a swamp, frogs who don’t know the other is there until a bright light is switched on. Then my wife squinted; a dull, froggy squint. ‘There’s something in your eye,’ she said, without pausing her rhythmic scraping. I bent closer to the mirror. Sure enough, in the white of my eye lay something very thin, much thinner than an eyelash. I stared hard. I saw it flex. And then it slid quickly across the lens, disappeared for a moment in the blackness of the pupil, bisected the iris as it passed, then vanished from sight around the other side of my eyeball.

I rubbed my eye with an index finger knuckle, and then rubbed the other eye too, for effect. ‘Gone?’ my wife asked, dragging the brush with a noise like a corpse sliding on a concrete floor.

‘Gone,’ I said, and left the bathroom. But I knew it wasn’t gone.

From that point on, the worm appeared – it was undeniably a worm, a worm that seemed as thin as a single atom, but a living, moving organism beyond any doubt – with increasing frequency on my person, or rather, just inside my person, like a deepwater fish that comes up to the surface every now and then to feel the sun. It came up from my throat and tickled my lips, it slid through the gaps between my teeth, and glided, as I’d seen in the mirror, across my eyeballs quicker than I could blink. It seemed very busy.

I could never tell when it might appear, or in which region of my body. It appeared to travel at great speeds inside me. Initially I saw it in my face, ducking and weaving through the upper orifices as if this were its primary dwelling place. Then it discovered how to glide beneath my skin, travelling a couple of layers below, using my epidermis as a highway to access other regions. Sometimes I’d see it underneath a fingernail, lying there like the splinter of a splinter. I’d tap the nail sharply with a pencil as if I was knocking on the window of a zoo, and the worm would quickly travel on.

Sometimes, if I was sitting quietly, it would protrude from the tips of my fingers to brush against teacups, the pages of books, exploring the outer world. I permitted it to wander, though not too far. I had no idea how long it was. Clearly it had a will of its own; perhaps its own agenda.

I toyed with the thought of getting rid of it, unravelling it like a loose thread and throwing it in the bin. Once I made a grab for it, seeing it extending from my knee as I sat in a tepid bath, finishing a glass of tequila. I caught hold of its tip between two wet fingers and tried to draw it out. It resisted. I pulled it out about thirty centimetres but it tugged back like a fish on a line, and after a short, indecisive tug-of-war I let it slip away. I examined my knee with a feeling of vague guilt. It hadn’t left any perceptible mark. It was so fine it merely squeezed between the pores. It had done me no injury, no more than a spot or blackhead would.

I knew where I’d picked it up, of course. Parasitic worms, it is known, inhabit exotic, otherworldly countries, and I had only been to one country like this in the past dozen years. That fortnight in Syria with my wife. The holiday was her decision. Syria was mine. She’d lobbied for a Turkish beach, but something about Syria called to me, something about the strangeness of the name, a twisting, twining sort of name that hinted at ancient mysteries. A worm-like name, in retrospect. It seemed to make a kind of sense. Although at first, I admit our destination wasn’t nearly as exotic or as otherworldly as I’d hoped. My first impression was that someone had piled a heap of concrete boxes on top of each other, concrete boxes covered in dust, and then rigged satellite dishes and wires onto every available surface.

We saw the usual tourist sights, the crumbled remains of ancient things, the mosques that looked like evil space-rockets, rockets built by ancient robots that hid the true purpose of their design with coloured tiles and intricate patterns that might have been computer codes. My wife swam in the hotel pool. I dipped my feet in the hotel pool, but its colour reminded me of cleaning fluid, and I felt aloof and disappointed and yearned for some private adventure. Before we left London, I’d had an image – foolish, I know, but a man has to dream – of myself struggling through luminous sands, my face swathed in a turban I’d made by wrapping a t-shirt around my head, the sky dark with swirling clouds of sand and dust that blocked the sun and gave the scene an eerie brilliance, dying of thirst, or at least half dying, just about to stumble on some glorious oasis where I could swim to my heart’s content and feel manly and triumphant at coming so close to death. I tried to explain this to my wife, and she smiled and offered me a dish of warmed almonds that a waiter had placed on our table. I ate the warmed almonds methodically, but my vision didn’t fade. So that afternoon I told my wife I was going for a walk, took a knapsack and a bottle of water, and set off for the edge of town.

After an hour, I had drunk half the water, and was making my way down a rocky track that led off the main road towards a horizon that struck me as suitable. There were low hills in the distance. I could see no buildings, no pylons or satellite dishes. Admittedly the terrain through which I was passing was not so much desert as arid scrub, littered with sun-bleached plastic bags and occasional twists of metal. But I imagined sand dunes ahead, tracts of desert between me and the hills, perhaps an oasis after all. It was certainly closer to my vision than the hotel pool.

After two hours, I had finished the water, and the hills felt no closer. The plastic bags and twisted metal were gone. There were occasional bones in the rocks, bones of sheep, I supposed, or other ruminants. The sun was less distinct than before, hidden by a yellowish haze.

After three hours, the sand storm hit. Actually, it was more dust than sand, like the bursting of a giant vacuum cleaner bag. It blocked the sun and obliterated the vague shapes of hills on the horizon, hurling the dry earth on which I walked into my eyes and nose. I carried on, but the dust disrupted all sense of time and direction. It was like being trapped in a filthy snow-globe being shaken by an idiot. I could hardly distinguish up from down. The sky was the colour of orangeade. I sweated, and the sweat hardened with dust. I took off my t-shirt, and made a turban by wrapping it around my head.

Actually, the storm didn’t last long. Maybe only about five minutes. It was more like an unusually long, ragged gust of wind than a storm, if I’m truly honest about it. Nevertheless, its violence spooked me. When the dust settled again the sun seemed hotter, much hotter than before. I coaxed one last drop of water from the dust-covered bottle. I felt like the dust was in my lungs, clogging up my veins. The thought of water was more like an ache. I wondered if I could drink my own sweat, but the idea was unappealing.

It was then I remembered the old desert trick. I picked up a pebble and stuck it in my mouth. This is supposed to generate saliva. I sucked it, but it didn’t help much. My mouth and throat felt like quick-drying cement. I rolled it around. I held it in my teeth. And then I tried chewing it, and heard a crack inside my head and spat out a little bit of tooth in the shape of a trapezium.

After three and a half hours, I stumbled upon my oasis. Perhaps the term oasis is a little romantic. There were no date palms, for example. Very little in the way of greenery, except an ugly thorn-covered bush that wasn’t even green. My oasis was actually a concrete tank about the size of half a tennis court. The water wasn’t azure, or even blue, but a murky grey surfaced with a coat of yellow dust. There was some type of valve at one end, and a dirty plastic pipe that snaked off between the rocks. On reflection, I think it must have been part of some irrigation system.

Nevertheless it corresponded to my vision, if only symbolically. I plunged in – it came up to my knees – and splashed around for a while, falling forwards onto my face and spurting water out of my mouth until I started to feel a bit ridiculous and clambered out again. I’d gulped down a few mouthfuls, and it didn’t taste so bad. At least the filth was washed from my body, and now my skin was coated instead with a tepid layer of slime. I stood there drying in the sun, and was just starting to wonder what a concrete tank full of water was doing out here, in the wilderness, so far from civilisation, when I noticed the telephone lines above my head, a faded billboard advertising soap powder, and, a few metres away, the road that led back to our hotel.

‘You swam in a lake?’ my wife exclaimed when I finally tramped back in, powdered grey, a dripping sandman, halfway through eating a box of dates I’d bought in a shop on the way.

‘I had to,’ I said. ‘I was hot. I was thirsty.’

‘A lake? Here? You swam in a lake?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a lake exactly. More like a concrete tank…’

‘You can’t swim in lakes in countries like this! Standing water carries parasites. Didn’t you read the travel advice? There’s worms that get in through your skin. Everyone knows you get infected that way. Everyone knows that.’

‘I feel fine,’ I said. I did. I had survived a sand storm, a desert. I had stumbled upon my oasis. I felt manly and triumphant, just as I’d imagined. I’d come close enough to my vision to justify the hotel pool and the mosques, the dull inertia of coming on holiday and not getting on with my wife. ‘Actually, I feel more than fine,’ I added, treading sand across the carpet. ‘Apart from the fact my tooth hurts a bit.’

‘Your tooth? What’s wrong with your tooth?’

‘I cracked it on a pebble…’

The holiday didn’t go well after that, but there were only two days left, so it didn’t really matter.

That, it seems, is how the worm first came to inhabit me, gliding through my internal pathways at its own leisure. It smuggled itself back to London in my body, undetected by customs. I didn’t resent its presence at all. I even grew a little protective. On one occasion, as I was driving, my wife reached across and made a grab for it, the tips of her nails like a pair of tweezers fashioned from mother-of-pearl. ‘You’ve got a nose hair,’ she said, as the worm wavered for a moment in the breeze, and I automatically twitched my head like a horse evading a fly. The manoeuvre wasn’t necessary. The worm, with its lightning quick reactions, had withdrawn in an instant. ‘Why won’t you let me look after you?’ my wife asked, aggrieved.

‘I don’t like you pulling the hairs in my nose while I’m trying to drive,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that reasonable?’

‘You’re never reasonable,’ she replied. Since the holiday, we were finding it increasingly hard to get along.

As my wife and I hit the doldrums, the worm became more bold. It extended itself, little by little, perhaps being aware of a vacant space it could tentatively explore. On rainy, grey East London days it would waver from the tip of my thumb as if it was tasting the air. Once, on the tube, it emerged from my elbow to brush the moustache of an old man, and sometimes it brushed the faces and breasts of women who stood close to me. The old man didn’t notice anything. The women sometimes shivered or adjusted their hair or impulsively checked their mobile phones, as if vaguely disturbed by a sensation they couldn’t identify. Sometimes I would meet their eyes, but they’d look away quickly.

As time went by, it grew stronger too. It developed the ability to move things. I felt a soaring sensation of pride the first time it shifted the page of a book, pulling it almost imperceptibly closer to my hand. It did the same with a paperclip. It idly rolled a pen across the table, whipping back into my finger at once as if it had startled itself. Sometimes if I sat very still, scattered objects within reach would be drawn little by little towards me – crumbs of food, cigarette butts, dust-balls – giving the impression my body possessed some force of magnetic attraction. Once, in the street outside, as I went to work with a lollypop stick to gouge chewing gum from the tracks of my shoe, a five pound note nudged up against my fingers, drawn by that hairline strand.
That was when it occurred to me that these scraps were offerings. A payment, of sorts, for inhabiting my body, comprised of whatever pickings lay within reach. It made me feel generous and expansive. I felt like a grateful god.
The five pound note incident wasn’t repeated. The worm appeared indiscriminate in the nature of the objects it chose. I imagined it was incapable of distinguishing between high and low value offerings, that it simply dragged in whatever was close. I know different now.

My wife and I were eating Thai green curry from the pan-Asian takeaway. The worm had been especially active that day, and now I imagined it curled up safely somewhere, in the crook of my elbow, perhaps, or coiled snugly beneath my left nipple, recovering from its efforts. I wondered where this would all end. What length had it attained? Had it infiltrated every part of me? Was it tangled inside my brain? Could the worm hear my thoughts, could it influence my actions?

It was at that moment that my wife – as if she’d felt the cold wind blowing, as if she somehow sensed its powers – told me that she’d booked me an appointment at a tropical diseases clinic.

When we got back from holiday, I’d confidently agreed to sort this out myself. I’d gone as far as looking up the number of the tropical diseases clinic and writing it down on a piece on paper, attaching that piece of paper to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a camel I’d bought in the airport coming back from Syria, despite the fact that we hadn’t even seen a Syrian camel. But my wife kept persecuting me about it, telling me to be responsible, asking me why I hadn’t booked an appointment yet, and this constant barrage of admonition only made me want to shirk the duty.

‘You have to be pre-emptive,’ she said, which put the image in my mind of rockets falling on a desert city, one of those cities in Syria, say, all concrete boxes and wires and satellite dishes. ‘I looked into it myself, seeing as you can’t be bothered to lift a finger. Immediate treatment is recommended if you suspect you might have been exposed. I still can’t believe you were thoughtless enough to swim in a lake, in a country like that…’

‘It wasn’t a lake,’ I repeated, ‘it was a concrete irrigation tank,’ and as I clarified the point yet again I saw the oasis of my vision shrivel to a filthy puddle, the date palms wither like neglected daffodils.

‘Standing water is a magnet for diseases. You might as well swim in sewage. These parasites enter through your skin. Sometimes the symptoms don’t show for months. You haven’t noticed any symptoms, have you?’

Gloomily, picking up a prawn cracker, I neglected to reply.

‘An early symptom is peeing blood. You haven’t done that, have you?’

‘Oh, please,’ I said, grinding the cracker to powder in my hand. I wondered if the worm had stirred. I imagined it doing manoeuvres in my spine, weaving in and out of vertebrae, blissfully unaware of the ominous course the conversation was taking. ‘No, I have not peed blood.’

‘Well I booked you in for tomorrow afternoon. Will you please go, for your own sake? It says that water-dwelling parasites can cause blindness if you don’t get treated. They can cause brain damage later in life. I’m not having you getting brain damage. Do you promise me you’ll go?’

Inevitably, I agreed. I was weak, I admit it. It had always been the same, for as long as I could remember. There seemed to be nothing else for it, it had been a pleasant few weeks but the worm would have to go. So midway through the next afternoon, I was sitting on a green plastic chair in the waiting room of the tropical diseases clinic, staring with a sense of doom at the medical posters on the wall, which gave information on dengue fever and yellow fever and hepatitis and rabies and polio and pig flu and other barely credible afflictions.

The waiting room in which I waited was eerily identical to the waiting room that had preceded the dentist’s. I suppose all waiting rooms are the same, wherever you go in the world. And as, a few short weeks ago, I’d been sitting in the dentist’s chair, where I’d first become aware of the worm, soon I’d be sitting in the doctor’s chair, where presumably that awareness would cease; or rather, lying on the doctor’s couch, if those things are even called couches, those shiny beds with metallic legs, covered by a blanket no thicker than a paper napkin, the sort of napkin you might find while eating in a very cheap restaurant, the kind of restaurant that’s so cheap they have carefully cut the napkins at the folds to produce four single sheets from each one, the kind of restaurant, I imagine, you might find in Syria if you went to a working-class district of town, though my wife would never have considered eating at any place like this. Those beds that are usually blue or lime green, the colour of detergent, or the way detergent smells, and over which you know for a fact all manner of bodily fluids have been spilled, perhaps bodily fluids you’ve never even heard of, for doctors have a way of getting to these things, of accessing secret juices.

As a rule, I don’t dislike doctors as much as I dislike dentists. They don’t have that glistening dolphin quality; doctors are generally grubbier. That isn’t to say I like them, however. They make me feel vaguely repelled. There is something unpleasantly sexual about them, something like bonobo monkeys. I imagine this is because their profession involves as much proximity to sex as it does proximity to death, and a simian masturbatory essence somehow must rub off.

The worm had not shown itself all day. Perhaps it was hiding in the deepest part of me, rolled into a tight ball in the marrow of my bones, where in its dark, wormy way, it imagined it would not be found. Of course, this wouldn’t save it. They’d blitz my system with pre-emptive pills, dropping fizzing payloads of poison to penetrate every hiding place, no matter how deep it burrowed. It would be purged, liquidated. There was nowhere it could hide.
Again, I had a sensation of guilt. The worm wasn’t doing any harm. It only wanted a place to live. I felt certain I would miss its comings and goings, its thoughtful, if useless, offerings; its touchy-feely fascination with the world.

Just as I was thinking these things, someone else entered the room. It was a young woman with short, dark hair and sunglasses over her eyes. She sat three chairs away from me, took off her jacket, crossed her legs and settled down to wait. I glanced at her without much interest, brooding on my worm. And then she picked up a magazine about healthy diet or home decoration or reading matter equally as dismal, and took the sunglasses off her face. And I found myself looking again.

My head swivelled, my eyelids opened. It felt like my features rearranged themselves. A tendril of incredible fineness reached from the corner of my eye and honed its way towards her through the air. From her eyes, which were green, I noticed, or greyish green like light falling through water, an answering tendril hesitantly emerged and crept its way towards mine. They met in the centre of the room, briefly drew back from one another, then quickly bound together. And then we were staring at each other, and we couldn’t stop.

Strands began creeping from my fingers, sliding out from the nails and skin, reaching for the corresponding strands that had begun their stealthy approach from the tips of her fingers, which, I noticed, were slender and appealing. They threaded, tightening like wires, tugging our hands together. And then, though neither of us knew how, we were sitting in neighbouring chairs, and our arms were fumbling for each other’s bodies, delving this way and that.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked, dry-mouthed, as if the question was needed.

‘I have some sort of parasitic worm,’ she mumbled in an unsteady voice, and then something about backpacking, a stagnant lake in Equatorial Guinea, but already our mouths were closing on each other and we both became lost for words.

We left the waiting room before we were called, clumsily gaining the street. With urgency, we found a cheap hotel, almost dragging one another up the narrow staircase, where rapidly clothing was removed, new tendrils emerged from unexpected places and tugged us together in gratifying ways, and gifts of a vastly more personal nature than paperclips or five pound notes were duly offered, and accepted. By the next morning we were so tangled up it took a coordinated effort to extricate ourselves enough to get dressed and go downstairs for breakfast.

And that is how I met your mother. That’s how you were conceived. Nine months later you popped out, perfect in every way. And when we examined you, of course, gliding through your grey-green eyes, which I’ve always thought have the quality of pebbles, pebbles plucked from the desert and polished by the sea, we glimpsed just the hint of a hint of a strand, a mere tendril, the width of an atom, so fine we might almost have missed it.

And that’s why our love for you won’t be unravelled. That’s why you will always be protected in this world. No matter how far you might drift from us, dear, we will reel you back in with love.

» Under Scrutiny is a contributor on alittlepoison.com. If you like this please tweet it or share it on Facebook.

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Everybody loves pirates. Here's a song written by them, for them, with them and around them AND MAYBE EVEN INSIDE THEM.

» The Sociable Truth is a contributor on alittlepoison.com. If you like this please tweet it or share it on Facebook.

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STOCK AND BOUILLON - Detective Inspector John Stock, veteran of Scotland Yard, teams up with Detectif Claude Bouillon of the Parisian constabulary to crack the latest case in a cross-channel crime wave. They trace the sauce of the criminal activity to the Consomee Gang, led by souper-criminal Tony Gazpacho. The cordiality of the entente is strained to breaking point in this gripping new drama.

TOO MANY COOK[E]S SPOIL THE BROTH - the corpses of Peter Cook and Alistair Cooke are exhumed, reanimated with voodoo spells, and set the task of cooking soup for the whole crew. Soundtrack by the resurrected corpse of Sam Cooke.

MARKS AND ENGELS - Friedrich Engels compares the efficacy of various brand name cleaning products at removing unsightly marks from a range of textiles.

MARX AND ANGLES - an investigation into exactly what angles Groucho was playing.

MARX AND SPENCER - the comic dramatisation of the real life misadventures of  loveable upper class buffoon-cum-political and economic theorist Karl Marx and his extremely brainy butler Spencer. Adapted from the classic biography by P.G. Wodehouse.

CEREAL MONOGAMY - an exploration of the lives of the individuals, calling themselves 'flakies', who dedicate their entire lives to just one brand of breakfast cereal. You'd be nuts to miss it.

THE BRITISH AISLES - a quite dreary show taking us around some of the more notable church aisles of the nation.

OKEY COKEY - a hard hitting documentary about cocaine addiction in rural Oklahoma.

MILK, TWO SUGARS - a "what-if" drama, exploring politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk's relationships with two rich, older men, (his sugar daddies), who also  happen to be champion boxers 'Sugar Ray' Robinson and 'Sugar Ray' Leonard.

HYDE AND SIKH - a televised game of hide and seek in Hyde Park featuring a Sikh, (the seeker), dressed as the nefarious Mr. Hyde of Stevenson's classic novel, and  lots of people who share the surname Hyde, (the hiders), all dressed as Sikhs.

INTOLERABLE FUNK - an insight into the colourful life of the late funk legend, Funky Bunkus, featuring interviews with all surviving members of his band, Cosmic Funk. The documentary focuses on the funk-addled years spent recording the seminal album 'Set Phasers to Funk' at the now legendary Funk Trunk Studios, known to funk fans the world over as the 'Mecca of Funk'. Part two charts Bunkus' descent into funk abuse that brought him to such an untimely, yet extremely funky, demise. Rated F.

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This is my wake up call.

I will wake everyone up whilst I make my way to my position.

A hatred and disregard that goes to the top,

The sun hits my globules of sight.

Captain hasn't woken up yet.

I watch my night shift go, his body heavy and drunk.

The sun catches his hairy backside.

Now I am on my own, a short time.

The storm of winter has passed, and our sailing is slow but peaceful.

My thoughts drift to Fiji, where the women were buxom and the nights were long.

Sun, wind, water, rum and cunts, it's another day in paradise.

I masturbate over the side of the boat, while my Captain watches.

The Straits of Gibraltar have never felt so far away.

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A very calm and respectful old man wrapped up in his shawl and beard. ‘Do you need money, father?’ my friend asks. ‘Yes , I need money. I’m a beggar,’ he replies, after careful consideration. ‘How much money do you need?’ ‘How much can you afford to give?’ ‘I asked you first. How much do you need?’ The old man thinks for a little while. ‘I need five birr,’ he says at last, ‘I’m on my way to buy bread.’ Five one birr notes are counted out. I go to offer some as well. ‘No,’ he says, his hand on my arm, ‘thankyou, but I don’t take money from foreigners. Not from foreigners, or breast-feeding women. I don’t want to give them my trouble.’ He smiles kindly and shakes my hand. I start to introduce myself. ‘Thankyou, no,’ he stops me again. ‘I don’t want to know your name.’ I ask why not. ‘I have trouble,’ he says, as if talking about rheumatism or gout. ‘The trouble has followed me for a long time. I’m worried that if I know your name, I might remember it at a bad time, and then the trouble will transfer to you. I care about you. I don’t want to give you trouble. So please, don’t tell me your name.’

Mean Girls

On my way up to the bar, I am stopped by a couple of revealing girls. One is pretty in a mean sort of way, and the other is fat in a mean sort of way. The mean fat one seizes my hands, while the mean pretty one reaches out and removes the glasses from my face. She puts them on, and gives me a look which might be cute if it wasn’t so mean. I smile and try to take them back, but she holds them out of reach. ‘St George beer,’ she demands. It is less a flirtation than a mugging. I pretend not to understand. ‘Are you lonely?’ she asks. ‘No,’ I say, and manage to prise my glasses from her. Then I shoulder my way past and go upstairs to dance with my friends.

The mean fat one soon tracks me down. I am busy doing something groovy with my feet when she appears in front of me and manfully grabs my wrists. Her fingers have a fearsome strength, but my arms are sweaty so I slip away. I turn my back and continue dancing. She quickly moves in front of me again, as if I have misunderstood. She does ten seconds of aggressive grinding and then seizes the back of my neck. ‘Drink,’ she says. ‘I don’t speak Amharic,’ I say in Amharic. ‘Drink,’ she says again, with more force. ‘Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ She seems genuinely offended and retreats to a bar-stool, glaring with undisguised scorn at my moves. I find it quite hard to enjoy myself now. I manage to dance to half another song before the mean pretty one reappears, having finished simulating sex with most of the other men in the room. She seems to regard me as a professional challenge. I make my dancing as complicated as possible so she can’t get a step in. Only by moving furiously can my flailing limbs keep the mean girls at bay, but I know this tactic won’t hold up forever. The next track is a slow number.

View all of Under Scrutiny's vignettes from Ethiopia >

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He’s affectionately known as YNG: Young Naked Guy. Occasionally he wears a shirt, but never any trousers. He does own trousers, but chooses instead to carry them over his shoulder. He’s tolerated remarkably well by the people of the town, who give him food and water every day, and sometimes try to make him wear trousers, without any success. He wanders from one neighbourhood to another, doing inexplicable things. Today he is fascinated by a bottle, turning it around and around in his hands to watch the motion of the liquid sliding about inside. He has a truly enormous penis (it almost reaches his knees) but is utterly innocent of sex, and seems completely happy. I’m told the local women say with regret: ‘the right dick on the wrong man.’ Occasionally he tries to board a minibus, which causes a commotion. He also loves chasing cars, and it’s a fine sight to see him sprinting at top speed barefoot down the hill, his penis flapping joyously in the wind.

ONG

Old Naked Guy is a different matter. He’s a truly malevolent old fucker who has built himself a horrible nest on the street outside the Ethiopia Hotel, where you can’t easily avoid him. His nest is constructed mostly of rocks and mysterious knotted plastic bags that probably contain awful things. His main activity seems to be burning: burning cigarettes down to his fingertips, burning tangled clumps of string, burning electrical cables and rubber, things that shouldn’t be burnt. Every time I walk that way I try not to meet his eyes, but I always do. He has a piercing, venomous stare that sometimes makes me trip on the kerb or stumble over a rock.

ONG does wear a pair of trousers, but only pulled halfway up his thighs, which is somehow much more indecent. For the record, his penis is tiny. It looks like the knot on a burst balloon. One day, perhaps he’ll burn it.

View all of Under Scrutiny's vignettes from Ethiopia >

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At some point in the future we may be able to influence the genetic make-up of an unborn child, allowing it freedoms unimaginable. Gills could let homo modern breath under water. A thicker skin could save them from the insults of physical damage and deadly sun radiation. More fingers and optimised neuronic pathways could make possible entire new piano symphonies. But for those already born; what for they?

Let's look at breasts. Evolution has placed milk production in the breasts of just the females (unlike society, which has placed it in the hands of the milkmen). In many situations a couple with only a 50% capability to feed a baby may be more than adequate. But for many the discomfort of carrying breasts may be a small price to pay for having both parents able to provide milk for baby.

We strive towards a new dawn, where a man AND/OR a woman can open the door of their house, look out and say "I now have milk for baby!"

New science is exponentially more expensive than old science, and what we're talking about here (two breasts on a man) is not yet even new, it's that hypothetical. It will be the great entré-preneurs and billionaire thinkers of our civilisation who will march us towards the future. The great men who today invest portions of their riches into small bouts of space travel, will tomorrow invest their own breasts and those of their children (nepotism). Namely: Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking etc.

Great men such as they.

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- Two elephants are walking through the jungle. Suddenly, a human runs across their path completely without clothes. One elephant turns to the other and says, "But for how does he eat?!"

- A 60 year-old man is lying in bed with his 50 year-old wife. Suddenly, a Good Witch flies in the window. "I will grant you any wish you like," she says. The man thinks, then he says, "I would like to have a wife thirty years younger than me. "I will grant your wish," she says. And the man was ninety.

- A man is walking through the forest when he meets a Good Witch. She tells him she will grant him three wishes. "Okay," he says. "When I walk into the next clearing I want to see a huge castle. And when I walk inside, I want to see 100 beautiful women. And when I see them, I want to have a penis as big as my horse." "Of course," she says. So he walks to the clearing, he sees the castle, and when he gets inside he sees 100 incredible, beautiful women. But then when he looks down, he dies of shock. Why do you think he died...? Because his horse was a girl!!

I then asked if he had any jokes that weren't about animals. "Yes," he said hesitantly. "But they are very bad jokes, about black people, and they are not so funny."

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The first thing I asked myself when I received this in the post from Lovefilm was why did I put this on my list? Was I drunk, nostalgic, ironic, wanting to believe or all of those things...
The next question I asked myself is why on earth did they decide to make a new X-files movie?
The last film came out in 1998, the television series finished in 2002. Was there any need in 2008 to make a new one? Both Actors had had reasonable success away from the franchise and didn't they feel that maybe it was time to forget the past and concentrate on a new exciting career? No.

As the Fox sign came up and that catchy eerie music played, for that moment, probably in the whole movie, I got goosebumps and the excitement of nostalgia and all my scepticism disappeared. Then Billy Connelly was on the screen. Yes that's right, Billy Connelly?! Playing a paedophile priest with psychic powers?!?! (there will probably be a lot of ?! in this review).
I will give a short synopsis of the story, as much as I could understand from this silly film. Billy the paedo priest has 'visions' of a young female FBI agent. He can see she has been kidnapped by some evil looking men. There is a moody scene of Billy walking like a zombie through a barren snowy field, followed by 25 FBI agents who are lined up behind poking for things in the ground. Then Billy begins to run toward something. He then falls to the floor and starts to dig. He discovers.......a bloodied arm!
The female agent in charge decides that the only man for this case is none other than Fox Mulder. But Fox is in hiding because he is wanted by the FBI for murder (of which he did not commit). I won't go too deep into the storyline. Lets just say that the film involves stem cell research, it is mind boggling and as with every X files episode/film, doesn't really make any sense. But it does have Mulder with a beard! And they kiss! (Mulder and Scully, not Mulder and his beard, although maybe they do...)

Now. It is hard to really give a review of this film in so many words. As with every episode the acting is wooden, Mulder isn't funny and Scully looks like she's about to soil herself/cry/both.
One exception is Billy. He is quite scary. I have never found Billy scary (or to that matter particularly funny, but that's for another day), but in this I found him quite frightening. His psychic/paedo character was haunting. I was thinking about him today! The worst person in the film by a country mile was Agent Mosley Drummy(?!) played by a soulless, almost humanless Xzibit (pronounced 'Zig-Rib-It'). A rapper who is most famous for presenting Pimp my Ride. A man who's only facial expression in the film is one of pissiness. I think the character of Mosley Drummy should have been played by Steven Van Zant's character Silvio Dante in the Sopranos. At least his silence and background cameos in the scenes would bring a light hearted nature to the film. Also Silvio doesn't have to say anything, the face says it all.

One thing that I will say about the film is that it was a bit scary, I got a bit scared. That means the film is okay. Also it is so much better than the first film. For one there are NO ALIENS! This makes it a masterpiece in comparison. One thing I do with films such as these. Ones made from something beloved long after the creative force of the thing has dried up is compare it to the Star Wars Prequels. There was no hype about this X-files film, so it had nothing to live up to. It also did not have Jar Jar Binks. The acting is magnificent in comparison and the storyline is truly superlative.

Would I recommend it? Yes I think I would, if you liked the X files back in the day, its a nice trip down memory lane and doesn't completely suck. Also there is quite a cool remix of the theme tune at the end of the film which was quite beautiful. (I can't believe I just used the word beautiful to describe something to do with the X files that isn't Scully!)

Would I watch it again/ think about it after today? Probably not, Billy might haunt me a bit, but no I doubt it.

TRUST NO ONE

5/10

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I see you, I am watching from my KA,
I see you, no blood of mine.

You both stop, looking deeply into each others eyes.
She puffs, you stuff your face with puffs.
I see the dust of that cheesy goodness settle on her face as you talk about me.

I remember when I used to share those puffs with both of you.

As I glug my high glucose energy drink and look in the mirror.

'YOU'RE NO BLOOD OF MINE' I shout.

He stares at me and his mouth drops. I see his moist yellow spongy innards.

She stares at me blankly.
That's it.

'AHH MATE, COME ON'.

I spit out some high glucose drink on the floor, and it dribbles down my face.

I pull off, hitting a bin.

'YOU'RE NO BLOOD OF MINE'.

'BUNT'S GANG RULE' He runs off and there is silence.

Apart from the crunching of that yellow moist and spongy Bastard.

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