The blue cover says ‘Apocryfan’. Surely that’s a mistake for ‘Apocryphan’. I prod it with my screwdriver, examining it through the eye-glass. I am sure I am dreaming. The book was not on my desk when I was awake. It may have been in one of the drawers but, if it was, I’m sure I didn’t put it there. My daughter may have put it there, hoping I’d pick it out to see it working. Books can work like osmosis. She’s always deep into books, absorbed by reading, doubly sure that she drains time to its dregs. I dream the book is not bound but made inside from a series of loose-leaved pages or cards, with two-headed pictures of a stylised royal family. Fannable by Duchess Guermantes in Proust wanting to cool her fevered brow. I lift the front board cover with the end of my screwdriver. Bits and pieces of human body inside for dealing with which I reach for my middle-sized tweezers. Nature study was always Mr Socrates’ forte when a teacher. I hope I am not him.
*
Adrian dragged himself from off the bars of the dream’s drain, as the dream itself flowed away into the communal sewage system of Bonnyville’s madness. Not only dreaming of the Apocryphan but also dreaming that he, Adrian, was someone else dreaming of someone else dreaming the dream made the dream far more frightening, far more memorable upon waking … cloying his mood for the rest of the day as he wrestled Smee’s dinghy once again across the sealess wastes of Bonnyville Bay in search of the world’s final fish.
Only yesterday, his brother Charlie Bubbles (aka Paliser) had been taken off the ‘Glittenburier’ by a floating horde of policemen. He had been charged with the murder of Denise Dumond and of the mutilation of Claura Gill. Charlie was now being held on board the police vessel by Det. Supt. Hogg for further questioning. The actual mechanics of this arrest, including the subsequent anchoring of the police vessel nearby, had all happened without assistance from the lubrication of dream, but it had happened nevertheless, against the odds, under the auspices of a new Terrorism Act put into place by anti-Government forces. Nobody any longer blamed Mankind for global terrorism, as Nature itself had become the prime suspect, Nature having created Mankind in the first place. Murders and mutilations were simply sideshows and anybody arrested were not arrested for these crimes themselves but for being clowns of a deeper motive that Nature had got jerking like puppets in its cause. Just a means for cosmic slimming. To chill the buds of global warming. Double bluffs, if not triple.
“Do you think the sea will ever return?” asked Adrian absent-mindedly as he faced Smee across the rowlocks of the dinghy. Tonight Adrian was due to visit Claura in hospital a journey away. They had renewed romance between them. Things were not wholly bad.
“The sea never went away,” was the careless reply, interrupting Adrian’s revery. Smee wasn’t intelligent enough to give such an answer. He simply smiled at an inbuilt wisdom that betrayed his own unthinking alliance with Nature. The vision in his head was of higher tides and eroded coasts. Who could say whether that vision was less real than the real one around them of sealess wastes?
They shook hands across the dinghy before, with initial positive anticipation, Smee stooped and picked up, from between two sand-ribs, what looked like a pink human foot with only four toes.
