14

“Xenana!” shouted Beta in surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you after so long!”

I was somewhat taken aback by Beta’s exclamation; and looked ahead along the marbled floors of the shopping mall we were in to the subject of Beta’s greetings. It was a woman of about Beta’s age, standing beside the glass sheets enclosing a small fountain scattered with tiny crabs and fish: her pale image reflected on the plate glass of a saddlery emporium. Like Beta she wore no clothes, but unlike her this did not evoke an appearance of naturalness. She was festooned with bangles, rings, necklaces, earrings and jewellery. Her lips were bright red with lipstick. The very prominent application of eyeliner made her eyes unusually striking. Her hair was totally shaved off, and not only on her head. She teetered on black leather platform boots that raised her an extra six inches off the ground, but she was still shorter than me and not much taller than Beta. She held a cigarette in her forefingers and desultorily stroked her chin with her other fingers while inhaling.

“How super!” Xenana exclaimed. “How jolly super! I would never have thought it possible I’d ever see you in the City. And in a mall like this!”

“We were just looking at the shops. We could never afford to buy anything here! It’s so expensive. The prices are simply Brobdignadian!”

The prices may have been high, but Beta’s wonderment as we had wandered through the marbled, windowed and laminated mall had also been for the comprehensive range of goods on offer. There was everything for every species and every taste. There were imported suits, obscure gramophone records, antiquarian books, fancy horse-wear, dinosaur eggs, buttered croissants, white chocolate and computer games. We would stand in front of the windows outside the shops or simply wander in and gaze in awe at the video images and material goods that saturated them. It was sometimes difficult to tell amongst the mirrors and windows whether we were in the confines of a store or in the general walkway. Bright artificial light illuminated everything. Wherever we went we were followed by a sometimes annoyingly indistinct and sometimes annoyingly disruptive wallpaper of music ranging from the ambient and the classical to the irritating and the banal. At intervals we came across chairs or benches, fountains, statues, clock-towers, garden beds, wooden bridges or glass elevators which promised further delights on other floors. We pursued a series of tall escalators up and down and around a never-ending series of shoppers’ paradises, occasionally approaching the glass ceiling protecting the mall from the elements outside. The air-conditioning pumped out by the shops made it much cooler inside the mall than the warm sunny day outside would have one expect it to be.

“You certainly don’t dress any flipping different to at home!” Xenana commented.

“I don’t see any good reason why I should,” Beta retorted. “But your appearance surprises me. When you left the Village you said you’d never walk naked again and here you are...”

Xenana laughed. “Ohh, Beta! Your naïveté is so wonderful! There is a blinking world of difference between the nudity of the Village and the current fashions in the City. But don’t let’s quarrel! It’s super to see you. Absolutely super!”

The two girls embraced.

“I wish you hadn’t shaved off all your hair,” commented Beta sadly. “It was so beautiful!”

“You mustn’t get too attached to such ephemeral things, Beta. But who is your friend? He doesn’t come from the Country, does he?”

“No, he’s from the Suburbs,” Beta explained, who then introduced me to Xenana: a good friend of hers from the Village who had left to live in the City as soon as she was able. “You don’t regret it yet, do you?”

“Not at all!” Xenana claimed. “After living here, I just don’t see how I could ever live anywhere as slow and uneventful as the Village!” She glanced at her cigarette butt and noticing that it had burnt down to the filter tossed it to one side. “I’m glad you’ve come to the City. It’s a great place! Are you staying long?”

“We don’t know! We only arrived last night. But, what about you, Xenana? What are you doing these days?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. I don’t have a proper job as such, but I get enough work to see me through jolly well. I help out at a record store where they sell white label twelve inch vinyl. I sometimes work at clothes shops and alternative book shops. I do some bar work some evenings or just help out at night clubs. I sometimes do a bit of my own business - selling things I buy in cheap outside the City for less than you’d normally pay for them here. A bit of entrepreneurism if you like. There’s no shortage of ways to earn money in this place if you know people. And believe me, Beta, I know people!” Xenana’s broad grin threatened the fabric of her lipstick, clearly delighted with her social success. “I know so many flipping people! When I lived in the village, I just didn’t think it possible that you could know so many, so very many of them. Even when I first arrived here and it all seemed so frightening - you know, the tall buildings, the crowds, the traffic, the constant rushing around - I didn’t believe it was possible to know so many people. And now I just do!” Xenana giggled for joy and slightly bounced up and down. “I’ve arrived you see, Beta! I’ve arrived! I’m as much part of the City scene as anyone else. And that’s a great buzz! It’s the biggest high you could ever have!”

“I’m glad to see you’re happy here,” Beta remarked. “You always said you’d do better in the City. Do you meet many others from the Village here?”

“Oh absolutely flipping millions of them, Beta! People are flooding into the City from the Country every day. I’m sure that’s one reason why there are just so many people living here. And you can’t blame them. There’s so much more here than in the Country. If you can’t get a job in the City and make it in whatever you want then where can you go? And the scene here is so wild. It’s where you can really get into the groove!” Xenana fished her hand into the ethnic leather handbag that dangled decorously over her shoulder and pulled out a cigarette case and lighter. She proffered cigarettes in our direction, not really expecting us to accept them, put one into her mouth and lit it theatrically. “But come back to my bedsit. I insist! You can’t just meet me in the City and not visit my home. I can get us something to eat if you like.”

Beta and I were easily persuaded, and followed Xenana through the maze of shopping aisles to the City streets outside. With Xenana leading the way, the mass of people and traffic was no obstacle at all, although it was impossible to remember the details of a route which took us through a series of quiet side roads, small parks, cobbled gas-lit antique shopping streets and finally via paved walkways, past swings, slides and a small river, to some tall apartment blocks sporting names such as Equestrian House, Cardiovascular Villas and Xanadu Mansion. However exotic the building’s title, they were essentially all identical towers heights of punctuated balconies, mostly wholly anonymous and with doorways guarded by a row of named buttons and intercom grills.

“Home Sweet Home!” announced Xenana pushing open the door to Bodhisattva Heights, after using a complicated series of keys and punching the keys of encrypted locks. We followed her through the heavy door which slammed behind us, sucking dust into the foyer from the busy street outside. Xenana attached another key to her mail box and opened it to reveal a sudden cascade of unsolicited mail relating to financial opportunities, holidays abroad and local window-cleaning services. She sorted out one single manila-enveloped letter and deposited a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured mail into one of the overflowing plastic rubbish bins lined up on wheels just opposite the green battered metal mail boxes. “It’s only a bill!” Xenana commented, placing it into her handbag. She scanned the clear metal sliding doors of the lifts where angular numbers mutated in illuminated displays to indicate the floors that the lifts were currently passing by. “I’m on the fourteenth, so we’ll have to take the lift.”

We waited for several minutes as the lifts descended, then rose and then descended again, but one finally arrived on the ground floor where a small purple pony with a very long tail trotted out smelling lewdly of perfume. She pursed her heavily lipsticked lips at us and trotted on, waggling her buttocks lasciviously from side to side. Xenana smiled indulgently. We clambered into the escalator to be joined by a hefty crab wearing a large black hat and an unfiltered cigarette who took up more than half the space. The numbers displayed above the door transfigured from 0 to 14, and the escalator doors opened to free us from the claustrophobia of the tiny room, to pace along a narrow corridor, past the constant thump of audio systems emanating from behind the doors that lined the corridor, and then, after another ritual of key-turning, we entered Xenana’s bedsit.

I had never seen such a small home before in my life. Even Beta was astonished by how cramped it was, and she’d already told me how much smaller Village homes were to those in the Suburbs. Most of Xenana’s room was dominated by a single bed, surrounded by the surfaces of furniture serving one, two or three different purposes. A shower unit stood in one corner, from which jutted out the porcelain of a sink or washing basin. A microwave oven stood underneath a television screen and a small chair was squeezed just behind the door and had to be moved every time the door was opened. Xenana seemed very proud of her home, however. She clambered over the bed to spread the ragged curtains to let in the slant of the early evening sun, and proudly displayed a view of other tower blocks, some of which being so much more monstrous than the others must have been in the financial district. She then switched on the audio system positioned at the head of the bed, and the speakers scattered about the room emitted an insistent heavy percussive rhythm sprinkled with samples, vocals and electronic doodling.

“It wasn’t easy to get this bedsit!” Xenana explained. “It was flipping hard! And it’s so expensive as well. About a thousand three hundred guineas a week! And that’s cheap for a bedsit as well appointed as this so close to the City centre. Most of my money goes on paying rent! But it’s worth it. Most of the time I’ve been in the City I’ve had to sleep on friend’s couches or in their beds. I just never got it together to rent a place of my own. But now I have. And it really is super! I’m absolutely independent. I can do what I like. And I’ve got the whole of the flipping City to groove in!”

Beta was still reeling from Xenana’s admission of the bedsit’s expense. “More than a thousand guineas a week. That’s seventy or eighty thousand guineas a year! You could buy the whole Village for much less than that!”

“You get used to these sort of expenses after a while,” Xenana commented, sitting down at the head of the bed. “Is it any wonder the country’s in such a mess when you’ve got such ridiculous price disparities! But now I’m jolly used to it. Anything priced with a number with less than two zeros isn’t worth doodly squat.”

Beta and I sat cautiously at the foot of the bed which bounced with a life of its own after the introduction or removal of any weight. We twisted our bodies round so we could face Xenana who was lighting up another cigarette. The room was already infused with the smell of nicotine and of somewhat sweeter substances the nature of which was hinted by a scratched mirror on its side, a few torn shreds of cardboard and the blackened neck of an exaggeratedly bent spoon.

“What do you do in the City, Xenana?” Beta wondered.

“What don’t I do, Beta?” Xenana boasted. “There’s just everything to do that you could possibly hope for. It’s just one endless round. Once I tried to keep a diary, Beta. You know like we did when we lived in the Village. I thought, there’s so much excitement in my life, so much that’s new and groovy, I’d better get it recorded. But clubbing, partying, all the boyfriends I’ve had (and not always serially), the bingeing, the orgying, the indulgence...! Soon keeping a diary just got out of hand. I was a week out of date in making an entry. Where was I? What the heck was the guy’s name? What had we consumed? I just couldn’t remember. It was all a haze. And then I let it slip by a month. And when it gets that bad - you can’t remember anything you blinking well did a month ago. In the City a week’s nearly a lifetime. And a month’s nearly an eternity! I can’t even remember what was fashionable a month ago. Was it long hair, short hair, curly hair, no hair? Was it platforms, stilettos or flats? Was it shorts, minis, jeans or crinolines? Was it monetarism, millenarianism, communism or eco-awareness? It all blurs into one grey rush of motion. All you know is that you had a groovy time. The drugs were absolutely fabulous! The vibes were out of sight! The sex was simply super! You just keep to the rhythm, and let the rhythm flow!”

Beta seemed a little puzzled by Xenana’s words. “I don’t really understand more than half of what you say now,” she remarked with a weak laugh. “But I’m still very glad you’re enjoying yourself in the City.”

“And you will too!” remarked Xenana, stubbing out her cigarette in an ash tray and leaping up. “I’ll get us something to eat and then I’ll take you to the Cancer Club. I got a few free tickets one of my boyfriends gave me. It’s really kicking. The jam is really wild. You’ll enjoy it.”

She opened a few cupboards where cans of food were carefully stacked one above the other in the very little space available, and pulled out a combination of cans. She then opened them with an electric can-opener and with a deft combination of cooking rings and micro-wave cooker she managed to prepare quite a reasonable mushy meal in which all pretence of subtlety was totally engulfed by spices, curry and rich sauces. However, both Beta and I were extremely hungry.

There were several hours from when we’d eaten until Xenana felt it right to head off to the night club, but this time drifted away idly and lazily as Xenana chatted about her life in the City, the boyfriends she’d had, the drugs she’d taken and the more amusing or entertaining anecdotes of her new life. Occasionally she listened politely as Beta talked about life in the Village. How there were plans to redecorate the Village Hall. How some of the small-holdings were trying out a new breed of heifer. The trouble some of the horses had given in demanding higher rates for their services.

It was clear, however, that Xenana wasn’t really that interested and took the opportunity of rolling marijuana infused cigarettes as Beta was speaking. The air in her room soon filled up with thick smoke which irritated my eyes and made me extremely dozy. In the background, Xenana’s choice of music began to take on shades of meaning and relevance that had hitherto seemed rather hidden in an aural wallpaper of noise and rhythm. I lay back on the bed, while Xenana continued her account of City life, occasionally being nudged as she passed a reefer across to me. I made an attempt to be fairly abstemious. I noticed Beta had refused to touch any of it, and any drug other than alcohol was extremely rare in the Suburbs. It certainly wasn’t sold across the newsagent’s counters as it was in the City.

It was very late when Xenana finally took us to the Night Club, but the City, however, had clearly not gone to sleep. The streets were brightly lit and although less crowded than during the day, they were far from barren. Xenana flagged down a horse-drawn carriage and asked the horse to take us to the club which he gladly did, chatting as he went on about how there were too many foreigners in the City these days and how the change of government to the Red Party spelt disaster for small businesses such as his own. As we trotted along, I observed how much the life on the City streets had changed from the day time. Although it was cooler at night, there were many more women dressed in very few clothes and quite a few more than I’d seen before dressed like Xenana in virtually nothing and their scalps shaved to the skin. Gangs of youths sauntered along, yelling randomly at other pedestrians and dressed in peculiarly dandified clothes contrasting with a partiality for working-man’s boots. A gaggle of what I at first thought were women, but then recognised as men dressed up as women, emerged in a giggling cackling crew from one of the many wine-bars, restaurants and pubs that lined the roads and appeared more prominent at night when the shops were closed and security bars obscured their windows.

The Cancer Club was no different from the outside to the many other Night Clubs we’d passed en route. The exterior was emblazoned with inviting lights in blue and red neon, with the illuminated image of a crab flashing on and off over the doorway. Xenana tripped out of the carriage, paid the horse for his services and strode boldly to the door where a large aggressive-looking crab was standing, clicking his claws in tune to the distant pulse of music emanating from within. Beta and I hastily hurried behind her, aware that in comparison to her and all the other club-goers we looked rather too obviously like non-sophisticates. I had thought that Xenana’s appearance was relatively unusual or at best an extreme representation of City fashion, but judging from the bare flesh, the shaved heads and very prominent make-up adopted by both the men and women entering the Cancer Club, her appearance was not at all remarkable.

“Yeah, Xenana! ‘Course you can! And your friend and her boyfriend too!” sniffed the crab doorman amiably. “You didn’t really need the invites at all. Keep them for another night!”

We followed Xenana through the heavy door and up a staircase spangled by little lights, along a corridor decorated with images of exotic animals and into an enormous dance hall which was far from full but fairly lively. Music similar to that which Xenana had been entertaining us in her bedsit boomed out distinctly and deafeningly from massive speakers dotted about the place, and the spectrum of single coloured lights beaming from all directions somehow failed to properly illuminate a place where visibility was obscured by mirrors, floor-clinging clouds of smoke and the long shadows of the guests. There was dancing on dance-floors which were positioned all about the place and where people, many dressed like Xenana, were gyrating, gesturing and gesticulating in full abandon.

The centre-piece of all the attention was a pulpit on which a disc jockey was energetically busying herself on a collection of turntables, electronic equipment and stacks of vinyl and compact discs. Generally her head was face down, a bald pate facing to the audience, concentrating on what next to play. Then she would raise her face, perspiration visibly illuminated by the powerful beams, and look out at the audience as if surprised that there were any there. Not all her audience were dancing. Several were sitting on stools and chairs around the several bars or near the cafeterias serving convenience food.

Xenana sat us down on a comfortable black leather sofa looking down on a dance floor occupied by a sideways-dancing crab and a sinuously shaking snake. She rushed off to the bar, which was wholly composed of mirrors and tiny bulbs, leaving Beta and me to chat as best we could. To make ourselves heard, we had to lean quite close to each other and shout in our ears. On a sofa nearby, a gibbon with a hypodermic needle was carefully injecting himself in an arm bandaged tight by a handkerchief, while his companion, another gibbon, inhaled on a clay pipe shaped like a funnel, giving off great clouds of dark smoke. Xenana returned after a few minutes with three bottles of beer, each with a lemon inserted in the opening where the metal top had been wrested off. She handed us a beer each.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Xenana shouted at us, bottle in hand, “but I’ve just seen a jolly good friend of mine over there with his mates. It’s absolutely ages since we last met. You don’t mind if I go off with him do you?” Beta shook her head. “That’s groovy! You’ll find oodles to do here. Dancing, boozing, food! Everything! Just get on down! I’ll see you later!”

With that, Xenana disappeared off into the dark shadows leaving us rather unsure of ourselves in a quite intimidating claustrophobic environment. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the music to be able to dance to it: an ignorance shared with Beta when I suggested to her that perhaps we ought to dance.

“I’d like to! But not to this!”

This was probably appropriate as the disc jockey had very much increased the beats per minute of the music, which was cut with frantic samples and disconcertingly frequent breaks in the tempo and melody. The dancers became more frenetic with their movement, pumping the air with their fists, kicking their feet out like mules and shaking perspiration down from their foreheads onto the increasingly damp patches on their chests.

“Is there anywhere quieter do you think?”

We eased ourselves out of the sofa and wandered around the perimeter of the night club that was beginning to get full now it was getting well past midnight. The place was much larger than I’d imagined. When I thought we’d come to its edge there was yet another dance floor on the other side of a glass pillar or up some sparkling steps. But eventually we found a quieter bar where the music was still principally electronic but resembled more the sound of waves battering against the shore than that of a pile driver battling with a road-drill. We sat with our bottles of beer on stools at the edge of the room regarding the clientele, who were generally rather less strikingly dressed than Xenana or others on the main dance floor.

A penguin waddled towards us with a bottle of beer held tightly in a black flipper and his other flipper pressing a large hard-back book against his chest. He stopped by the bar-stool and looked rather askance at the distance between himself and the counter where he could rest either his beer or his book.

“Do you want some help?” asked Beta, in perhaps a louder voice than she needed as we were no longer in such a very noisy environment.

The penguin eyed Beta a little suspiciously, but appeared to conclude she was unlikely to cause any trouble.

“Yes, that would be very welcome, thank you!” he said cautiously, allowing Beta to take his beer and book and place it on the counter while he pulled himself up onto the stool in a feat of avian ingenuity and sat opposite us around the circular plastic table. “You’re new to the City aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I confessed. “It’s all very strange...”

“...And confusing!” Beta added. “Especially in this Night Club. It’s nearly two o’clock and, rather than quieter, the place is just getting busier and busier! Don’t people in the City ever go to bed?”

“Oh they do!” the penguin assured us. “They just get up correspondingly later. The City never sleeps, they say, and in some ways it gets more awake as the hours pass by.”

“Are you a frequent night-clubber?” wondered Beta.

The penguin’s appearance certainly didn’t have a great deal in common to Xenana’s, except perhaps for his nudity, the fashionableness of which was somewhat undercut by the tartan scarf he wore around his neck.

“It’s a place to go at night,” the penguin replied cryptically. “I’m a post-graduate student at the City University which means that I am under no pressure to get up in the morning.”

“What are you studying?” I wondered.

“I’m researching the famous novelist, Oscar Xavier Peregrine, for my doctoral thesis,” sniffed the penguin, indicating the novel he had entitled Winchester Revisited with the author’s name occupying nearly as much space on the cloth-covered page as the title. “Are you familiar with his works?”

“Not at all,” I admitted. “What sort of novels does he write?”

“Did he write,” corrected the penguin. “Oh all sorts. There can’t be a genre he didn’t attempt and master. He was a genius of eclecticism and a master of all styles. Oscar Peregrine started his literary career before graduation from university in Lambdeth with Porcelain and Diapers, the first of a series of gritty, naturalistic novels based on his intimate experiences of poverty as a student (which I can fully empathise) and the grim world of his working class childhood. In this, and following novels, such as Torn Upholstery and Desolate Days of Memory, Peregrine struggled hard to capture the essential grimness of life: the dirt underneath the fingernails, the grass growing through cracks in the concrete in the backyard, the sheer ghastliness of the ignorance and stupidity manifested by some of the working class. He captures a world of bare-knuckle boxing, dog fights, solvent and child abuse.

“These works soon established a strong reputation amongst serious critics, although his books sold in the tens rather than the thousands and he had to survive on government grants and sponsorships. These are the years in which he married his first wife who committed suicide by swallowing a rolling pin and had to care for their triplets by himself. These grim years are well illustrated in his books at that time.”

“Why didn’t he write books that people might want to read?” Beta wondered.

“A question his publishers often posed to him. But of course he was writing to satisfy his literary muse, not to pander to the base tastes of his public. However, the demands of his creditors and the death of his second wife who was chewed up by a defective meat mincer persuaded him to write more commercially profitable books. He was particularly upset that the critics had criticised his novel, Misery is My Only Friend, as being too pessimistic and making rather depressing reading. He then wrote a number of pornographic novels under certain pseudonyms such as Cynthia Fox, Fanny Truman and Monica Temple. They were hailed as classics of the genre and sold in enormous quantities from the top shelf of book shops at railway stations throughout the world. It is only recently that it has been established that Peregrine was the author of Knickers for Free, Sex Supermarket Sausages and Confessions of a Prostitute’s Maid. Up until now no connection had been made between the sudden improvement in Peregrine’s material and psychological welfare, his marriage to a part-time prostitute and the release on the market of pornographic novels with a fondness for the grittier details in their characters’ environments.

“Peregrine’s more literary works took a turn away from naturalism to a kind of inner monologue where from the beginning to the end of his novels there was no external reference to a world beyond the ramblings of the central character. In these novels, time seems to stretch out endlessly, with details becoming larger and larger. Whole paragraphs might concentrate on accounts of blowing the nose or scratching the ear. Whole chapters may involve nothing much more than walking from the front door of a house to the front gate. These novels regained Peregrine’s reputation amongst the literary critics who praised him for revealing the depth and scope of minutiae, but he didn’t really gain any commercial success under his own name for books like Breaking Wind and To The Bus Stop, until he combined this new style with his skills at writing pornographic literature and with his novel, Bump and Grind, managed to sell in substantial quantities under his own name. This is the account of the sexual congress of a couple on a single afternoon, which in Peregrine’s story takes rather longer to read than it could possibly have taken to happen.

“Peregrine was clearly very encouraged by the success of this novel, and this encouraged a great change of direction where he started writing a series of science fiction and science fantasy trilogies. His Swords of Andromeda trilogy featured wizards, hairy-chested heroes, large breasted heroines, large doses of mysticism and the meaning of life, and became a classic of the genre. The books are incredibly thick and in places unreadable as he became rather obsessed with neologisms. In places it is quite difficult to know what is supposed to be happening as every noun and most of the verbs were invented by Peregrine. His Gannium Arsenide trilogy is set in a future dominated by homosexual drug-pushers and computer games, and he set himself the difficult task of understanding a sub-culture of which he had only the vaguest previous knowledge. This was why for a period he and his fourth wife, later to die of inhalation of hydrogen peroxide and MDMA, became rather more famous for their drug-taking excesses than for their literary output.

“He was later to receive treatment at one of the best detoxification units in the City, where he returned to more overtly literary novels. His novels now struggled to penetrate beneath the veneer of vocabulary and syntax to get at the deeper and more profound meanings of life. In his novel Having, he retains conventional English but the plot is randomly organised and events occur in deliberately haphazard fashion with regards to their normal temporal sequence. In What, he takes English sentences and reorganises them, so that the sentence may begin with present perfect verb and finish with the subject noun. In Xbldwq, Peregrine abandons the conventions of language altogether, making this undoubtedly the most difficult of all his books to read. Few of his neologisms contain vowels in expected places and few of the words are anything but invention. Many critics accused Peregrine of self-indulgence, but now most agree that this may indeed be the man’s masterpiece. It stands as a statement of the impotence of language against the pressures of an impossible world.

“Peregrine took the criticisms to heart however and abandoned his project to write a novel composed entirely of the letter X. Instead, he started work on his unfinished masterpiece, Winchester Revisited, in which, to a certain extent, he returned to a more naturalistic style of writing. This book tries to incorporate everything within it. There are great themes of love, death, war, peace, crime, punishment, pride and prejudice. There is the clash of sword, the didacticism of religious discourse, great mythological symbolism, digressions on feminism, poetry, politics and sport. The book brings in characters and themes as immense as those of any book. Each page is a towering structure of carefully crafted style, beautifully drawn characterisation, vivid dialogue, and, yet, it is unfinished. It is barely a tenth the length that Peregrine would have desired. A mere fourteen chapters long: even though they still comprise well over two thousand closely printed pages.”

“Why didn’t he finish it?” Beta demanded.

“His sixth wife killed him with a dictionary. We now know that she was a homicidal maniac who feasted on aborted foetuses. In any case, he was making very slow progress with it. He would constantly write, revise and rewrite every page, every paragraph and ever word of the novel. He wanted it to be perfect. He worked from early morning until late at night, pausing only to eat sandwiches and go to the toilet (chores which he reputedly resented). So now all we are left with is an unfinished canon of work and a bottomless source of material for doctoral theses.”

There suddenly erupted from the bar, a very loud neighing and clicking of claws. We turned our heads round to see several young people dressed in dark green collarless suits, rather similar to those I’d seen in the town of Rupert.

“Illicit Party!” sniffed the penguin disdainfully. “Since they’ve been around, they’ve been nothing but trouble. I don’t know much about their ideology. In fact, if you ask me, I don’t think they really have an ideology at all. They’ve just got a leader and an excuse to cause trouble. Just look at them!”

A large crab held a spaniel by locking his arms behind him, while a horse taunted him and insistently pressed a hoof against his chest. The spaniel was wearing a tee-shirt proclaiming Go To Bed With a Red. The horse shoved his muzzle malevolently against the spaniel’s face, eyeball to eyeball.

“So you Red bastards are going to change things, are you? Rob the rich and feed the poor, will you? More like raise the flipping taxes and turn the country into a glorified trades union! You might think you’re going to flipping change things, but not before we do a bit of changing you first, you ugly bastard!”

“I didn’t say anything!” protested the spaniel as one of the aggressors spat in his face. “I’m just wearing a tee-shirt, nothing more!”

“I distinctly heard you bad mouth me!” exclaimed a young jackal wearing a large button emblazoned with Chairman President Rupert’s face. “You told me that the Illicit Party was scum and didn’t deserve to win the Election. You said that the Reds were going to flipping wipe the floor with the Illicit Party.”

“I never! I never!” gasped the spaniel shaking his muzzle from side to side. “I wouldn’t! I’m a pacifist! I don’t believe in violence!”

“Don’t Believe In Violence...” repeated the crab hitting the spaniel forcefully on one side of the face, forcing his head to reel back, blood dribbling from his nostrils. “Don’t Believe In Violence! Yellow Red scum!”

The bar speedily emptied while these representatives of the Illicit Party tormented the spaniel. The bar steward had disappeared and no other staff could be seen.

“We’d better get moving!” remarked the penguin softly. “These Illicitists look like they’re gunning for trouble.”

“Why’s that?” whispered Beta helping him down from his chair and handing him his book.

“Election disappointment, I suppose. Hatred of all the other parties. In fact the Illicit Party, like the Black Party, is a rather violent lot on the whole.”

“Did I hear you bad mouth Rupert and the Illicit Party?” asked a small pony wearing a Rupert badge on his harness and a green beret on his head.

“Not at all!” the penguin said carefully. “I was simply saying ...”

“You’re a flipping Red too, aren’t you?” the pony repeated pushing his muzzle against the penguin’s face. He glanced at the book that the penguin dropped. “And Red propaganda too! It’s you bastards who’re going to bugger up this country...”

“I’m not a Red!” insisted the penguin as the pony pushed him back against the wall.

Beta glanced at me fearfully, unsure whether to interfere. The decision however was made by the jackal who had been punching the spaniel in the face and left him on the floor for his equine companion to kick with his hooves.

“If my friend says you’re a Red, you’re a Red!” the jackal stated emphatically poking the penguin in the chest. “You’re a flipping Red. And your flipping friends are Reds, too, I guess!” He snarled at us and was soon backed up by a group of his companions who loomed over us. “You’re all Reds! And we’re going to kill you!” He thumped the penguin very hard on the face with the book and left the penguin in a pool of blood where the pony feebly prodded him with his hooves.

“Illicit Bastards!” shouted a group of gorillas in black leather outfits decorated with swastikas and iron crosses. “You making trouble again at the expense of the pacifist Reds! You just don’t know what a real fight is!”

One gorilla unravelled a long chain from around his waist and flicked it aggressively on the ground.

“Come on lads! No trouble here, eh?” spoke the large crab we’d met at the door accompanied by some bestial acquaintances. “Let’s just make our way home before the police arrive, eh?”

“Don’t you flipping count on it!” snarled the jackal pulling out a flick-knife from a pocket and brandishing it.

“We better run!” I cautioned Beta urgently.

We took advantage of the stand off between the three groups to race down the stairs and onto the main dance floor, leaving the penguin and spaniel groaning in pools of blood. We hadn’t left a moment too soon, as a terrific yell erupted as we ran away followed by the crash of large bodies impacting against each other. A stool flew through the air a few yards ahead of us and smashed against a mirrored post. Glass shattered in an explosion of shards, so we ran the faster.

While we ran in one direction, young people of all species were running in the other direction towards the scene of the conflict: several carrying knives, broken bottles and even guns. We found ourselves in the main dance floor where the music was still pounding out loudly, but emptying rapidly. Most people were picking up their things and leaving. The exits were jammed with people struggling to get out.

“Thank goodness I’ve found you!” exclaimed Xenana running towards us with some very similarly dressed friends. “What’s going on? Why’s everyone leaving?”

“There’s a big political fight, I reckon,” one of her friends remarked. “The Illicit bastards have been spoiling for one all day. I saw a few really aggressive looking people. Like they were looking for a flipping fight rather than a good time!”

“It was where we were,” Beta breathlessly replied. “They attacked this penguin we were talking to. They beat him up really badly!”

“Come on, Beta! We’re getting the heck out of here!” Xenana cried.

Then just as we were about to run to the exit, some very loud bangs rang out in rapid succession. This was followed by a frantic chasing from the exit to our direction as horses in black leather outfits came galloping in carrying some very ugly small men dressed in black on their backs waving guns and clubs.

“More Blacks!” someone shouted.

Beta and I ran off to a chink of light in the distance that turned out to be an emergency exit that had been opened. Behind us the violence was getting worse, illustrated by loud crashes and what may have been the wholesale destruction of the record decks judging from the abrupt manner by which the music came to a scratchy end. We panted in the cool air outside, along with others similarly frightened and worried.

“Where’s Xenana?” wondered Beta looking around her.

There was no sign of her, but we didn’t feel safe in such close proximity to the Night Club, from which came a cacophony of screams, shouts and commotion. We were soon running down dark alley-ways framed by towering buildings, occasionally illuminated by the light from windows above or the neon lights of smaller night clubs and wine bars that were still open.

Eventually we were far enough away from the Cancer Club to consider ourselves fairly safe from attack, but now we had the inevitable worry about where to sleep for the night. The answer was actually fairly evident as we passed people huddled up in doorways or inside cardboard boxes. The street was the only hotel we knew that wouldn’t turn us away, so we reluctantly searched for somewhere to sleep in the alley-ways less uncomfortable than most.

We eventually found a pile of cardboard boxes behind what might well have been a shop during the day, judging from the exotic nature of some of the rubbish. We nestled in some artificial fur toys broken free from a box and tried to sleep in the sinister and haunting night sounds of the City. Even now, there was a constant roar of traffic emerging from nearby streets. Occasionally hoots, screams and other nocturnal noises interrupted our sleep. Beta huddled close to me for company. She was unquestionably upset by the turn of events.

“I’m so frightened!” she whispered, hearing the howl of wolves. “I hope we’re going to be all right!”

I nodded, grateful for the intimate closeness of her body and fearing every sound we could hear. The rustle of rubbish, the whistle of wind through metal fire escapes and the distant sounds all had a sinister edge to them. It was also not that warm, although Beta appeared to notice the cold rather less than I.