THE LONESOME DEATH OF WILLY SPIKE (2024)

Let's go into ol’ Willy’s office.

Oakland Tower, it flashes on and off - on and off - on and off - a beacon at the heart of a city that arrived like an army of occupation just a few years ago.

By comparison, the old city crawled out of the sea a thousand years ago. It’s still there in the distance, washed up against the mountains by waves of progress.

And its in that decaying war-zone that the Hellzappopin’ still rumbles, raw side of the dream, hidden away from the eyes of the lords and bastards. It’s just down a beaten track off the Lost Highway.

But, in the new city, a ballet of gas towers sinks and grows by the motorway, batteries of MoD satellites, helicopters wheeling and spinning.

Oakland Tower is the biggest thing since sliced eels. And it’s here that Willy Spike ekes out his existence.

Like a bug.

On the inside Oakland Tower is stiff with fear. Its lifts and stairs are veins teaming with adrenaline, caffeine, nicotine, Solpadine, whiskey, gin, more nicotine, the odd touch of an illegal substance, lettuce, bananas, health foods, diets, Armani dresses, perfumes that smell like the seaside, coffee machines, smoking areas, stairs going nowhere, security men, cameras outside the gents … people you pretend to be friends with because they got a hold over yerrr.

People you don't know you say hello to, just in case. And the women - Oh man, the women! Ol’ Willy’d like to spike’m all … if he only knew how. Or even understood a thought like that.

Yes, it was his wilful indifference to anything below the brain which gave him his sickly complexion. Willy was the colour of dead sem*n. It was as if celibacy had filled him up.

"We all forgot to die young," the building should have emblazoned on its great glass-ious sides where the moon whizzes among the stars as bosses go by in a black cabs and Jaguars.

That office block is a world of nightmares. It’s the arena where the Christians eat the lions. It’s everything - hysteria! Gossip! Accolades! And failure ... failure is always sitting at your desk.

It’s life itself, indelibly inked in to you, a fingerprint. The contract you signed years ago has become your DNA.

Oh, you are the life and death of the office party, of course. That’s who you are! With your fist up somebody's arse and your co*ck in somebody else's mouth, and somebody's co*ck in your mouth, and your other hand scratching somebody else’s back and your one good eye on the clock and the other on your colleague and every hair on your head standing out like antennae for your bosses and your other co*ck standing out for the girl across the other side of your computer terminal, and your knee kicking around like ten to the dozen.

It's a goddamned way of life ...

… and it breeds life. It breeds pockets of subversion, mutants, monstrosities of life. It grows cancer.

And sometimes this cancer turns into a Willy Spike.

But what the hell! This is commerce! Hahaha! Bloody hell! Yoiks! Hewo Ni-gel! Hewo Ev-webody! Hohohahahahhahaheee!

Bing! Bong! Floor Number One AB now arriving.

The lift doors slide wide like they're lubricated by slugs. You get out. Or in. Ups and downs, Ins and outs. Bing! Bong! The Fourteenth Floor. The doors open with a hiss of reverence.

Bing! Bong! ‘Mr Oakland asks you to take a seat, he will see you as soon as possible,’ a Robo-sec’s voice picks at the air. And you realise with a swell of horror you are on the wrong floor – you have accidentally entered the land of the kings ... another embarrassing day.

You scurry off down the stairs back under the floor where you belong.

Oh, these bloody stupid pages. What meaning have they got to anybody but Willy?

And these pages are piled up in front of him in a green wire basket and he’s got eight hours to sort them out – plus, of course, the couple of hours extra he’s expected to work to clear them. Ten hours to do a year's work of ... of what?

Ten hours with the sun and the moon blocked out by glass. Ten hours of doing something for somebody who is doing the same as you but who's getting paid more. Then there's the two hours a day of travelling - that's 12 hours - then there's the hour-and-a-half you spend in the pub with your colleagues talking about business and sh*t, scoring points, posing - that's thirteen and a half hours - then there's the two hours you spend thinking about all the day’s little successes and little failures - that's fifteen and a half hours - then there's the eight hours you’re supposed to spend asleep - that's twenty three and a half hours - by this time you are tired and a little bit pissed ... and you have to spend quality time with the wife and the f*cking kids!

Yeh, okay! I can manage that. Every problem is an opportunity, we don't make mistakes, we create openings for improvement.

Oh yeh?

The great gladiator of commerce. Totally confident. Anything to make you stand out in your crowd of colleagues. Even a f*cking bunion will do. Bunions, piles, ulcers, bad liver, Crones Disease, Crown Derby, cancer, gum disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, alcoholism - but not drug abuse, no definitely not drug abuse - any kind of disease - or a posh car, or flash about with somebody else's wife, or think about ways to make more money for the company and get your two per cent rise - it compensates so well for the hundred per cent loss or erectile tissue.

But our Willy was not one of these great gladiators. He was weak and seedy. An accountant. Yet he had something no accountant should ever have. He knew where the control is.

He knew that the control is here, inside the money, cars, kudos, houses, families and self-esteem. (This is actually the steam off self-esteem if we only knew it). And he knew that nobody, not the bosses, not the ants, could survive without it.

How we do survive is by getting up every morning, putting on our adornments inside and out, and going out there and knocking them dead kid! That's how we survive!

Ha! Ha!

All those buildings of commercial enterprise stands up against the skyline of the new city like celluloid phalluses, elongated monuments to the control of the male hunter, the avaricious grabber, the colonialist, the expansionist, the procurer, the conman and - “do what I want and I will give you dreams beyond avarice, do what I don't want and I'll destroy-ya” - the Giver and the Taker-away. Buildings populated by scurrying people on the take and on the make.

Survivalists. Survivors, that's how they see themselves.

But what Willy knew is that the buildings can't exist without human input. Its people are plugged into the electrical sockets and are galvanised into crazy dances. They are being barbecued. The fat is being roasted out of them and they think it's nervous sweat!

And the flames lick higher, like a tongue up your arse. You have become a brittle husk of a person, your skin is like ash, your eyes have melted into pinky gelatinous orbs, your breath is like mustard gas in your nostrils ... your throat rasps ... you are dying from some tropical disease you caught on a sales junket, But you are powerful, keeping the building and the economy hot, and there are tongues up your arse! Well, if that's the way you want to live, welcome to success. The most controlled state you will ever be in.

The success of failure is far more exciting, but you people don’t actually find that out until you are too old to enjoy it.

Strange days inside a glass phallus that marches with its debt-ridden army against the sky, wearing neons and flashing armour of lights. The temperature is 14C - the time reads 17.48 - the clock is wrong by one hour and forty minutes - but it doesn't matter because the flash is there, high above the new city.

And the mistake in time is deliberate. We have clocks everywhere, on our wrists, in our cars, in the lounge, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, time checks every few seconds in the air, control ticking like a bomb.

The bastard who got the time wrong on Oakland Tower knew exactly what he was doing, and probably got well paid for it. Its designed to disconcert everybody who works there, makes them insecure and nervous. They are late for work although they know damned well that they aren't.

Punctuality is next to Godliness. And the flashing neon tower has the whole city in a panic. And you know, don't you, that time is only a man-made illusion. A way that we can tick away our time until we are dead. Control is the light bulb of the Saviour's skin.

What are we afraid of though? Tears?

Oh, ye of little faith. Blessed are you who are controlled by money. Diesel fumes, headlights like comets of snakes winding at incredible speed in and out of the alleys between the buildings. This is biological suicide inside metal bullets, all aimed at death beyond nightmares.

The death beyond nightmares. What will that be?

Totally unrestrained behaviour, that's what death should be. The total disruption of reality. Death should be pandemonium. Then we might die happy. And yet death is only more control.

Your blessed snakes of diesel fumes are only more vehicles designed to hasten death. You cannot love life and want to control - control is the fear of death and only God has the dubious right to control in that way.

And that right has only been bestowed on God because WE created HIM and placed HIM on the edges of the universe. And we told HIM HE controlled our life and death. We created HIM because we had to find a reason for death.

We control God, you know, but we can't accept that. That's how stupid we are. We don't know when we are in control. But that is the control that control has, the fact we are afraid of being controlled and of being in control. We are controlled by our total fear of control.

Willy’s cat controlled him with its snake eyes. The smile at the window. Its dissatisfied hunger - and his need to control it by feeding it and petting it.

He opens the window to his bedroom and the creature pours in. She is all black, a rarity a couple of hundred years ago which could have brought about his death. To own a black then cat meant that you were in cahoots with Satan. Sensible cats evolved white patches under the chin.

It was daylight in the city where everybody is kept in the dark. The bullets were about to fly.

Old Willy Spike put on his brown derby and walked off in the direction of the gent’s ablution. Nobody said goodbye to him, they were all so intense about their computer screens. Besides, they didn't like him. Strange man. They were convinced he was a secret visitor to the Hellzappopin’.

They’d watched him wandering off in the direction of the old city. Over the horizon and far away.

All accountants know that the accounts department is a dangerous place to work if you've got an inquiring mind. And that's one thing old Willy Spike had, an inquiring mind. It was the kind of mind that makes people on the upper floor wonder why he's survived so long.

He was a scruffy guy, even though he dressed in a shirt and a suit and a tie. Didn’t wear braces though. He wasn’t fat. Gaunt in fact. A silent man with a hint of bad breath. Did his job - but kept inquiring into files that really had nothing to do with him. Inquisitive but silent. Perfect accountant to those who don't know him. But he was dangerous, knew how many seconds fast that clock was and the day and the hour and the minute it went wrong. Mathematical detail, you see. Facts that'd got nothing to do with him. He should be looking at the figures, not figuring things out. He shouldn't be investigating the strands of control.

Besides, most of his colleagues thought he was a pervert.

Actually he was an Everyday Joe who just couldn't cut the mustard. Funny guy. But where could we gone with him?

Well, I'll tell you ... right to the routes of control. That's where old Willy Spike could have taken us. Right from the roots to the top of the tree and back down again, back into the mud where the spunk comes down. Splat! Right on the belly, missed its orifice, no babies tonight, thank you. A real McCoy wanker.

Figures fascinated him every waking moment…

… until the moment he was MURDERED.

Fat figures, thin figures, indiscriminate figures. Figures that should never be seen undressed. Figures that should never be seen at all. Figures whizzing around in his head, making sense. He understood them. Figures. Whiz. Whizz. Another figure. Whizz. Whizz. Whizz. A Whizz-kid with figures.

But what a boring bastard. Not a joke or a f*ck in him.

He stood on the black marble floor of the fourth landing.

And he knew it should take four seconds for the lift to arrive after he punched the black button. It took five. He knew because he counted the flashes of the green arrow above the button. The lift had passed five floors by any mathematical equation. It didn't make sense. Four floors, five flashes and he had witnessed this for days now at the same time every day. Something didn't add up. Or it did.

Somebody had slipped in another, but secret, level of control. It was generally invisible - the general, run-of-the-mill, scumbag people in the building wouldn't notice the loss of a second - but an accountant knows that every second, like everything-else, counts. Black counters like gravestones placed on your eyes. Pennies. Pounds. The weight of the universe. Bringing you down to the ground floor.

The lift has arrived. (This isn’t Willy now, this is you!)

You disembark.

There is the cool breeze of scented breath as some woman pushes by you to climb up in a box of steel-and-pulleys to the next floor. Room 17. An analgesic in her cheek pressed up against a rotten tooth.

You aim for the glass revolving doors, you can't see'm and you can't feel'm, they operate automatically, and they whisk you out like a dry leaf into the city. Flickering recognitions of life. Lights of a bus going by, a white face in a taxicab. Sweat. Cars take precedence. You get knocked down, it's your fault. Underground, overground, speeding, people beware, car's coming, get out the f*cking way - weee hoooonnkkk -

Jus' on ma way home. Jus' on my way home.

Willy remembered a glass curtain in his grandmother's house. She was an Irish woman, very large in an apron. She didn't have a lot of things that he could remember, but he could remember that glass curtain. It used to glitter and sing in the sun and the breeze when she used to leave the back door into the yard open ... he never felt comfortable there when his mother used to leave him for a morning or an afternoon. It was always warm in that house, and the old woman radiated a kind of warmth too but it was somehow like a distant fire and he could only just feel its warmth as if on a draft or a breeze. He knew he was safe though, he was in good hands. But those hands never touched him. Or if they did, it was to wipe something of his face in a rough grunting fashion.

His grandmother wasn't a woman. She was a man. A fine role model for an impressionable baby boy. First rule of thumb, don't show any affection, but be dependable. Do all the jobs, make the fire, keep the family fed and warm and well. There's little to be said after that. And she saw little point in talking very much.

A silent woman, but always ready with a reproach. Maintained a dignified silence otherwise. Nothing wrong with that. Watchful and thoughtful, unapproachable.

Even when his grandfather died, he didn't see her show any real emotion. All her daughters were gathered around her and they were wailing like waterfalls, and the sons were standing stoically by. But the old woman, she was dressed in black with her hair tied neatly back and she was off in the kitchen making the sandwiches. Not a tear to be seen.

So, he gathered that people didn't cry. Stoicism was everything. And mathematics is the antipathy of emotion.

A pedestrian jogs his arm, tinny music bursts out of a boutique door and he smells a row of kebabs, book shops taste of dust, an antiques shop decays. He liked the little back streets. Went down them every night on his way to the station.

But he always rushed past the Lost Highway even though he preferred the parts of the city that hadn't changed too much - oh, obviously the smell was of kebabs and not of fish and chips but - it was how he'd known it in the 1950s, when he was a child.

You know, there wasn't a violent bone in his body and you need a certain edge of violence to exist in the city, even if it's simply a little jostling in the bus queue, or some fool in a wheelchair who's ploughing a straight line in the middle of the footpath. Punk in a news queue with twenty pence in his fingers and a snarl on his lips. Labourer sucking on a butt like it's a nipple, showing his cleavage.

Willy would go off down the back streets. Only for fifteen minutes, do it to a tight schedule, but it'd help him relax. Look in the second-hand record shops, Victorian postcards, memorabilia, markets packing up and closing down. Cobbled gutters and handcarts. Back passages, entries, ginnels, cul-de-sacs, fire escapes, dirty windows.

And he of course would always avoid the Hellzapoppin’.

It was down an alleyway and fizzed against the bomb sites of the night with lightning sabres, unholy neons and a fuggy yellow glow. This is the real old city. A place where the world is in tatters. It's like a great torn federal flag waving in the flames of this ball which burns insignificantly nowhere near the edge of the universe.

The good thing about the Hellzapoppin' is that it's never closing time, ever again. The clock is always open, like an opportunity.

This was the place the Old Writer lived. Their paths had never crossed. But one day soon the Old Writer would almost lose his life because of Ol’ Willy’s.

Every night Willy went for his train from platform five. At 6.35 precisely, or whenever the train decided to leave.

He never really thought about girls or women. But he did have one relationship, funnily enough.

Only a woman he knew in the Ol' Cop Derby, a utilitarian public house on the corner of Applegate Drive and Rudyard Grove. Three minutes walk from the unmanned station. Nothing more than a corner house really, glazed brick and bay windows, a small car park with concrete posts and plastic chains.

Sold Wilsons Ales. Jolly good drink.

He would have two halves of mild over the next twenty-five minutes and talk to Sarah.

Jolly nice girl who looked as if she was from a good solid stock, he thought. Perhaps there were farmers in her stock - she did talk incessantly about the horse she had in her childhood.

Lovely girl. Nice and ordinary. Obviously with an uninteresting background, unthreatening and unchallenging. The kind of person you would like to meet after a hard day at the office. Figuring this, figuring that, hahaha.

She smiled. Had a lovely face. An open honesty in the size of her features. She had a simple goodness.

He quite liked her, although, of course, months ago he had worked out that the odds against him ever touching her were quite, quite high.

"Well, sir one day I hope to become a pub manager but the odds arsn't that good when one are'nt married." She smiled coquettishly.

"Well, we can all live in hope young lady." He smiled sternly and averted his eyes.

What a wonderfully evocative situation. Sarah had a lovely face, quite like a model's. She'd dyed her hair blonde and it suited her. Willy liked to try and estimate how many black hairs had become blonde from the roots. She had an inestimable number of dark roots.

She painted her face white and her lips red.

They talked to each other. That's what he liked. There were no stresses between them.

Oh, dear old Willy Spike, where did you come from?

Out of the controlling factors you appeared, like an asthmatic breath. Dry as a sheet of paper lining your lungs. Breath so tight that it hardly exists at all. Just enough to stay painfully alive. Painfully and steadfastly alive, no matter the odds. People who commit suicide are dangerous - because they take control of death.

Divided we stand and divided we fall, heh what? Hahaha. An accountancy joke, for what it's worth.

Hahaha. Hohoho.

Dear old Willy Spike with his halves of mild. So safe in the equation that is his life.

His voice kept singing his name over again and again against the metronome of numbers and sums ticking away inside him. Tick away that, tick away this. Tickertaptap. Tickertaptis. Tickertaptap, tickertaptis. Tickertaptap, tickertaptis.

"Of course, if I do get a pub of moi own, I'd run it strict and proper. None of your louts, if you get moi meanin'. Proper gents, in tois an' jackets, loik potatoes! Whooo,whoo, whoo, whoo," She giggled.

Willy heard her voice break in like a logarithm and took notice. He smiled.

"I gott'n a phew pounds put boi. Roight place cum up, oid be roight there Mr Spike, I tells you. Whooo,whoo,who,who,who."

He smiled.

He liked her more at that moment. Got a little ambition. Not too much of course, emphasis on the little, that was the kind of thing he liked and understood. A little ambition can take you just so far, and far enough. Then you are never disappointed.

Willy was never going to be Jack the Lad from the day he was born. He had no self-esteem, no self-confidence, but he was bored. Nothing ever happened in his life.

Willy didn't stand a chance out there in the real world that he so wanted to be involved in.

Everybody who isn't in the know takes the Mickey out of accountants, you know. But they shouldn't. They really are the ones who know what's going on.

"I arsn't an intelligent woman but I know generally what's what an' that two and two makes four. I can keep the customers happy. Oi used to look afer moi dad afer all. Whhooo, whhoo, whoo, who."

"I'll take one on account then," Willy dead panned. It was an easy remark, one that he'd practised.

Sarah didn't acknowledge the remark at all. She moved off down the bar and Willy watched her.

Her bottom was very large but not disproportionate with her calves and her breasts. What was disproportionate was her face. That made-up monstrosity of a face! She was denying her true self. She was a good country girl at heart with a figure to match! She should be cooking a sheep's head - not painting her face.

"Oi want to make something of moi self you see. My family've never ad nothin' so I don't see why oi should be the same. If you gets moi meanin'"

She slipped a half of mild under his nose.

"I've had two." He complained deliberately.

"Oi know, but another 'alf won't do any 'arm."

"No," he lied. Three halves made him have to keep getting up in the night. It disrupted him. Two halves, he'd joke on his rare social occasions, and I'm anybody's - three and I'm everybody's. It was a good joke, he knew, he'd tested it a hundred times. But it would be wrong to say it now, in front of Sarah. It was a disgusting thing to say, and Willy was wise enough not to say it. But he smiled at his joke and she responded like she’d heard it. Just a smile.

This was too good to be true.

But his instincts tripped in: Don't read anything into anything. If you read it you will almost certainly read it wrong and act accordingly.

Willy retreated into silence after thanking Sarah for his third beer. He raised it to his tensely pursed lips and sipped at the froth, quickly snatching away the moustache it left with his thumb and forefinger. He took a larger swig and thought: This beer was obviously a bribe of some sort - either she wanted to consolidate a business relationship with an accountant in case she ever did get a pub, or she simply liked him. Either way, there was nothing in it for him, either financially or fundamentally. Perhaps he meant emotionally. The physical aspect never crossed his mind. He didn't see himself in that way. He wasn't a physical person although of course he kept himself impeccably clean and well dressed, if a little dusty from his scalp problems. But women simply didn't fancy him. He'd never had a proper relationship. Not with a woman, a friend or even a family.

To Willy a friend was a person whom you acknowledged in the morning at the station, the bloke who sold him his newspaper and commented on the news or shared a joke about the weather. A friend was the security guard who nodded tersely as Willy was whipped in by the revolving doors at the office.

Then it was down to business. And in business there are no friends. He'd heard that said. And he believed it. That was part of his self-image. A competent man alone.

Oh, my dear old Willy.

That smell of fish at the seaside and the taste of salt on the air, great globs of candy floss and the piers, all those flashing lights turning trams into caterpillars of reds and golds, old lady in a doorway next to a blistering palace of slot machines, reading palms. Old Chap and Mommy suspending him in the air by his arms and dropping him into rubbish bins! All the holidaymakers are laughing and gulls are wheeling, the seaside is alive with laughter and sound of gulls, sweet sweet smells, frying onions, a laughing policeman, children sitting on the doorsteps of pubs wearing plastic swords eating crisps and swigging lemonade while Daddy is in the pub swigging down beer! And Mummy is giggling. He can hear it through the frosted windows. He is a child alone, with his plastic sword.

Blackpool promenading and the sea air ... and the child's in the dustbin. His parents are laughing and running away, summer dress in a swirl, dad’s trousers flapping like they were wet around his legs. Donkeys gambol off down the beach with screaming kids hanging on for life with straw boaters bouncing on their necks. These kids are panicking! And so's the one in the bin!

Old Willy remembered all these things as he sloshed through the snow as he walked home from the pub. The slush made his ankles wet and he hung his head down against the cold. Sarah was allotted a back space in his mental filing system. His mind was dwelling on memories - and connotations. To Willy memories were the foundations of facts, he felt no real emotion from them, they were more points of reference, something for things to be weighed up against.

And because he had a retentive memory, his points of reference encompassed a wide area.

For instance, he knew exactly where his bosses were coming from. They all looked like Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra.

And it fascinated him that he could readily make these connections, yet the people he worked for couldn't. The creatures who inhabited the higher echelons of Oakland Towers saw themselves as modern and thrusting, fine and upstanding, belonged to the Masons, ate in the best restaurants and were to all intents and purposes bastions of society.

Willy knew differently. He knew them for what they were. He knew things about his bosses that even they didn't know. And the mad irony of all this was that Willy never actually realised how dangerous Willy was!

At this stage in his career, no matter how subconsciously, Willy had control of this billion pound business empire and he was being allowed to keep it - as long as he made no attempt to use it to advantage or detriment. This impotency was his power.

He had a photograph out of the business section of the Financial Times, it showed Mr Oakland and all his boardroom cronies outside the Towers, it was obviously a windy day but they were all smiling at the camera like they were laughing ... a devil-may-care confidence I suppose. They were businessmen, but they looked like conmen. Or they were conmen who looked like businessmen.

But what ever they were they were stars! They were slapping each other on the back. They were successful.

Mr Oakland, Josiah, John, Christopher, Richard and Sammy, standing outside Oakland Towers like it was a Las Vegas casino.

And that's exactly what it was. They could have gambled away all that amoebic life teeming away inside the tower at any time of any day of any week of any month of any year.

That's how powerful those businessmen were, dancing like dicks in the wind outside the flashing tower. Gambling fools. The people who make things happen in this world.

He liked to compare that Financial Times picture to an old newspaper photograph he'd found of Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

The five members were relaxed and easy under the towering sign of Sands. The name was a signature in luminous plastic standing twenty feet high. Beneath it it said A Place in the Sun.

Then there was a billboard: Frank Sinatra Dean Martin Sammy Davis JR Peter Lawford Joey Bishop.

Sinatra started the line up. He turned in slightly towards his partners in crime, stuck his hands nonchalantly into the pockets of his immaculate single-breasted suit and smiled easily. Dino came next, he too was immaculate in a generously cut grey suit. His tie was tight in the neck of his gleaming white shirt. He was tanned and beautifully groomed but a little stand-offish. Next to him was crazy Sammy, the one-eyed black Jewish dwarf. He looked a lot of fun with his body like a coiled spring on bendy legs. His smile was the most honest, big gleamy white teeth and a drifting eye. He looked off the wall and full of energy, probably out of his mind on co*ke.

And then there was Peter Lawford, who ever he was. Some kind of second-rate actor, Willy supposed. Could have been President of the United States at some stage too. He hadn't got a lot of class, the kerchief in the breast pocket of his ill-fitted suit was garish and he wore white socks inside his loafers. Stood a bit like DeGaul, one hand in a pocket the other hanging stiffly by his side, shoulders back betraying some military training. And then there was Joey Bishop. Who he? He was the only one who wasn't smiling, he was balding and screwed his eyes up against the Arizona sun. Jacket buttoned up too tight.

Sinatra was known as the Chairman of the Board.

These guys had all the trappings of success, the clothes, the cars, the booze, the drugs, the broads.

Their clothes were up-to-the-minute stylish, telling the world that it wasn't only the politicians and gangsters who could have class. Working-class, back street immigrants - even blacks - could make it to the top if they had big personalities and egos and voices to match. Kikes, Yids, Eyeties and hangers-on all had equal rights in the Land of Dreams and corruption. The Land of Bilko and Money.

"All hail the American Dream.”

The world changed with these people. Ambition became different. Divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse became the public trappings of success. You have to admire them.

Willy turned the key in the Yale lock to the front door of his semi-detached home in the leafy cul-de-sac. The hallway was dustless and smelled of polish. The lady who does for him had been in and done. The house was warm and clean and he could smell coffee percolating in his den.

He went straight up the stairs to the den. As he removed his jacket and loosened his tie he glanced at the two photographs by the side of his computer.

He smiled. He knew these people. He knew what they were about. He winked co*ckily at Mr Sinatra and Mr Oakland.

He poured himself a coffee, mixed a little cream and sugar in it from the tiny jugs on the tray and lit his first cigarette of the day. He would have three over the next two hours while he added to the profile of Oaklands he was compiling.

He sat down at his desk in front of his computer screen, allowed a long plume of smoke to slip from his lips, sipped one sip of his coffee and hit Control D on the finger pads. The screen came alive and he typed in Eyedoc./.

It was a long document and his computer purred and buzzed with authority as it searched through its bulging memory. Then it found the preferred point and spat it onto the screen. Figures began to dance before his eyes like mad things. Almost every single line of neat input was flashing up Error, Data not found, Input error, Does not compute. It had been like this for months.

And funnily enough Willy didn't find it either intimidating or frustrating. He found it fascinating and challenging. He saw each of those errors as an opportunity. And, if he were honest, as an escape, something to occupy his mind. Each glitch wasn't a hitch ... it was an ... an ... a problem! And every mathematical problem has a solution!

That excited him. He smiled as the screen flashed broken lines of hieroglyphics.

Discrepancies he loved! Oh Vey! He put on a Jewish voice to make himself laugh. Good fun coming up! Hahaha.

Whhhooo,whhoo,who! He heard Sarah laugh as his mind became unfocussed for a couple of seconds.

Hahaha. Whhhooo,whhoo,who. Oh, he wasn't a fool, he knew nothing could ever come of it. But their laughter did seem to compliment each other somehow.

Anyway, down to business. Hahaha, whhhooo,whhoo,who. He shut that aspect of his mind down, firmly.

Now he knew that everything that had been input was legitimate. He'd checked over and over for input errors. There weren't any. He actually spent 183 hours checking and rechecking this aspect. It was perfect.

And the figures weren't spurious. He'd checked and rechecked those at work. No, he knew his business - and everything that he had committed to this sheet was correct. And if it was allowed to add up in Oakland Towers, then it should add up here. There was no difference.

Something had to be missing. And it had something to do with that five seconds.

Something so obvious that everybody would miss it if they didn't know it should be there.

The real level of control. The one that nobody but the controllers know exists.

What old Willy Spike was looking for was a stolen moment, the inexplicable gap, the thin slice out of the air, the missing star in the universe, the truth. No that’s wrong, what Willy was looking for was the empty space that represented truth. He was looking for the reality that made the equation work. The one blank spot that would make everything appear – in essence, a white hole!

Hahahaha! He was enjoying himself.

So, what was missing?

Over the next hour he had another cigarette and another cup of coffee. And he also took time out to take his vitamin tablets and eat his cold pork sandwich that his lady who does always put up for him.

The screen flashed monotonously. He stared and thought. Stared and thought.

His mind blipped monotonously, waiting for a thought to become the equation which would take him to the sum-total of everything. But all he could see was the darkness before the light.

Suddenly, his mind became a blip.

His search for the white hole had turned him into a black hole. His mind collapsed in on itself and brought its own vortex to a halt. It was as if he wasn’t functioning. He was – but on a different level. His mind had discovered something that it could compute. He had blipped and he had frozen. Like the proverbial rabbit.

And yet, he knew, without the advantage of a thought, that the blip was the actual frozen moment of the beginning of control.

The screen speeded up, pulsating like an urgent heartbeat. The fan began to whirr as the temperature began to rise inside the machine.

And then his ancient black cat slipped like liquid from the screen and poured across his desk towards him. She mewed tetchily at him a couple of times before letting out a more urgent cry.

Much to the cat’s consternation he didn’t notice her. So she circled in front of him, muling and whining. Her eyes were becoming larger and larger, so large that they looked like they might burst. They began to water. Her agitation was complete and her heart was pulsating faster than the screen she had just escaped from.

Finally she rose to her full height balancing on her back legs, tears tumbling from her eyes making her coat shine like a slick, and began to bat his face with the pads of her feet. Willy didn’t respond, so the cat turned itself into a black hole and tried to disappear.

Then the screen froze completely – the pulsating stopped – and a whole line of figures right at the heart of the equation highlighted itself and began to eat itself up.

Outside, inside the Listening Bank, a red smudge silently appeared at the centre of one of any number of monitors.

Dwight and Reginald missed it of course. They also missed the ticker-tapping of the read-out that snapped into life on the printer in the corner of their ancient caravanette…

Action Now!

… it said at the top in blood red. Special paper in a printing slot all its own. Both of them had seen this paper before, so the fact they hadn’t seen it this time didn’t really matter.

They had all the savvy of corporate identity – they had no other identity, believe me – and they knew that if anything was there, they would see it in due course and, of course, they would action it as soon as possible afterward. It would be then rather than now. As they saw fit.

Besides, Ol’ Willy wasn’t going anywhere. They knew that. They knew his routine.

‘But this ol’ willy’s going somewhere,’ Reg cooed as he snuggled his head deeper into Dwight’s lap.

They did not want the job in hand, so to speak, to go flat. This was the action now. This was the action now in the back of their van that stunk of farts and foreskins, tea-breath and cheese and onion sandwiches.

Dwight and Reg had spent 25 years together in the back of this van. Man and boy. Living in the dark, having other people’s sh*t heaped upon them – people who were about to burst the corporate bank. People who had brought about the untimely end of their own careers, and worse, because they were about to know too much.

They did it for a very handsome profit, it has to be said. They had all the dignity and advantages corporateness could bestow on them, fiscal security, a good reputation, worked only by recommendation and never, ever, encountered any kind of danger themselves. It was in their contract – kill but never be killed.

Nobody who employed them cared how literally or metaphorically this couple of weirdos took that clause.

And nobody ever saw them anymore.

Just once had they revealed themselves, at a corporate dinner fifteen years ago. But it had only served to reveal to them what other people had always seen … other people saw what living in the dark and in such cramped circ*mstances for all those years had done to them.

It brought home to them their own deformities. They’d scrubbed up well for the dinner, dark suits and black ties. Shiny boots. But in the light even they realised how tiny those boots had become over the years. Almost bootees. So tiny it looked like their feet had been bound at birth. Truth was they had been metamorphosing for years. Nature had taken control. They never went anywhere, so they didn’t really need feet. Their legs too were nothing more than string beans left to rot on the vine. They’d struggled to the table like those legs was made of rubber bands and those feet were crunchy co*ckroaches. Sweat burst out on their faces like the heat of the chandeliers was in danger of blistering them. They were pure white and sweaty.

They settled in their chairs like deflating balloons, feet a foot above the floor, the disgustingly long hairs on their palms swishing crumbs from the table as they reached for their chicken wings and salsa dip. People didn’t know how to cope with them. Small talk seemed patronising.

All Dwight and Reg could do was smile weakly at each other and whinny at the platitudes that hemmed them in by the air.

They’d started out on all the correct steps to corruption, as Cubs in the same troupe, developed into boy scouts and ended up as school monitors. Telltale tit* by any other name.

Now they were the Listeners who preferred to be in the dark. But the one thing they knew – and so did everybody else even back then, when they were callow wobbly youths scouting for talent amid the woggles and the khaki shorts – was that they were very frightening people.

Deadly earnest in everything they did.

One day, when they were eleven years old they did their cub master. Nobody knew they did it. They’d done their first immaculate cover-up.

It had been an idyllic day, the kind where a lark was in the air - and in the woods and under a copse. The sun was high already. And the sap was rising. The cubs were spiky and horny, playing the parts of Viking invaders, helmets of papier-mâché and swords hewn from cardboard boxes. Those little sailors from the Boy’s Brigade were their enemies, played the part of the Picts with painted newspaper wigs and clubs fashioned from glazed and roasted legs of lamb.

It was a jamboree in the hilly climes of Boggart Hole Clough with its valleys and Argonaut trees, crazy golf course, tearoom and boating lake. The game was ’kill or be killed’ … the Vikings were tasked with scalping the sailor boys of their paper wigs for points and the Picts were there to nab their opponent’s helmets. The tribe that plundered the most won. It was such a larrrrfff. Arkala and the Captain from the Brigade would count the spoils of war at the end of the afternoon’s skirmishes.

Older and trusted boys along with non-commissioned officers were tasked with making sure the battlefield was a place of honour.

And it was one of these unfortunate non-commissioned officers who found young Dwight and Reg dibbing each other’s dobs underneath a geranium bush. It sent a rush of blood straight to his head.

He was only 23. A lost soul in so many ways, like any cub master. And he was about to lose his life in a most bizarre manner.

Well, if the truth were to be known the boys weren’t doing anything that boys – and girls – don’t get up to at that age. Don’t mean nothin’. Just one of those juvenile acts that, one way or the other, colours your life. Defines you. And for little Dwight and little Reg it was a very defining moment. Their woggles began to wobble as they lay with their khaki shorts around their knees facing each other like squawking chickens.

It wasn’t even the fact that the monitor was wearing a big hairy-bear brown duffle coat with the hood up or the fact he had on his own khaki shorts that made him look like he was dumb-buff naked under his toggles. Legs like diseased spiders.

It was the fact that at that moment the boys realised that all three of them faced a future of secrets and lies. Secrets and lies forever. Shame and destruction over a moment’s temptation towards unfettered genitals. The suckling kiss under the geranium that would brand them all perverts for the rest of their lives.

So, they killed him. Covered it up with hoots of laughter and gung-ho stabbing and waving of their cardboard swords

“Whhhoooo,hooo, hoo Sir, we caught you!”

They hanged him by his lanyard - strange fruit on the bough of an old and diseased oak tree.

Then they abandoned the game and simply went home for tea. They had found out in one sticky moment the secret of how to control things.

Well, when the lady who does came in the next day the first thing she noticed was that the black cat’s luck had run out. It had become a gory rug spattered across the wall.

The coffee pot was smashed on the floor and the rind from Willy’s pork sandwich had been deliberately draped across the bulb of his table lamp giving off the stench of dead burning flesh.

Willy wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Less than twelve hours later the police came into the Hellzapoppin’ like a raiding party, they smashed down the front and rear doors, knocking over tables and people as they picked the middle ground. Willy’s murder was the excuse they needed for a full-scale invasion. Time to pay back the plebs for existing.

And God, what a sight it was for them to behold. They'd finally entered the bowels of the world. And it was nothing like they'd expected.

Well, the Old Writer knew instinctively that it was time to make a quick exit but it simply wasn't possible. Not any more.

Everything was coming to an end, inexorably, like an engine disintegrating.

Whatever happened next was beyond his control. His little people began to phut! into the ether as if they were internally combusting. They were becoming tiny wisps of meaningless smoke.

Phut! Another one went. Phut! Then another. The air was alive with metal flies.

His ideas and his characters were disappearing in puffs of smoke before his eyes.

He instinctively hit the sticky floor. A boot picked up his face by the chin. Eyes pierced a dark visor trying to find some threat or even just a sign of life and then removed the boot allowing his head to smack down onto the floor again.

The police rounded up the Hellzapoppin' revellers as if they were herding sheep as the helicopters continued their waspish ascents and descents of the night sky telescoping the shafts of light like bolts of lightning, atomising people into spraying globules of panic and fear. People rendered down in a split second to steam and blubbering lips.

Obviously the people from the Helzapoppin' had to have killed old Willy, stripped him and then put on him lady's stockings and a suspender belt before dumping him in the trash alley outside their despicable bar.

It couldna have been the good people who had the Listening Bank and the tower in the city centre and the rumoured funding of a terrorist organisation. The people that Willy had known about.

No, seeings that he'd been found dead with his mouth full of piss and wearing those particular items of clothing in the trash alley of the Hellzapoppin', then (A) he must have been one of the perverts who frequented the place in the first place - and (B) one of them must have murdered him. Stands to reason dunnit.

The message had come down from the upper echelons - kill two birds with one stone - close this case quick and use it to close the Hellzappopin’ too.

The police were aware that this wasn't a difficult job, a killing at the Hellzapoppin' was a killing at the Hellzapoppin' and that was that. But this time the killer or killers dumped the body in the trash alley instead of the sea ... so the police had to act - decent people could ha noticed it on the side-walk on their way to work in the morning. You ice a body in the sea and the fishes secrete it away. That's okay. It was an unwritten understanding. Kill your own and feed it to the fishes, don't dump it on the doorstep.

The Old Writer began to flop around the floor like a fish in its breathless death throws.

Seeing God as architecture, he thought. Few people who can be happy in the moment. Uncertain of himself, an only child, lost perhaps, laughter, head of hair with a nit walk, musty churches and graveyards, a thread of life where nothing finally emerges. Boundless and energetic - magnanimity.

He watched a tiny rabbit of man jumping around with excitement and panic. A copper split him from arse to tit with a burst of gunfire.

Nobody else moved. It was an immediate and unanimously instinctive decision on behalf of all the revellers.

Only the Old Writer kept on pumping, but the police ignored him.

In the Hellzapoppin' the only good egg was a smashed egg. Some other copper smacked the butt of his gun into the head of a woman. Her brains came out a little into her hair.

The Old Writer was moving almost imperceptibly towards the safety of a table.

Somebody came out of the gents with a bewildered look. 18 bullets from two separate guns cut both of his legs in half. He fell through the air with his arms flailing. He didn't even know he'd been hurt until he hit the floor and couldn't run. The stumps of his legs fizzed and smelled like a kebab house. He was in agony. His screams galvanised some people into action but a tirade of bullets into the carcasses hanging from the ceiling froze them again immediately.

Then it was all over. The guns fell silent. All over bar the shouting and the screaming of the little people phutting into the night.

It is the dawning of the next morning. But the dawn is silent. Not a gull wheels or spins. Not a mountain bird swoops or climbs.

Thousands of them were crushed on the escarpments, flushed from the night and flung down by the draft from the copter blades. Thousands more were blown clean across the sky and became fodder for the fishes. This devastation carried over the tops of the towers and into the sea far away.

Hours later, blisters of flying fish were flipping in to the sky, gills melting as chemicals from dumped aviation fuel fried them in the burgeoning sun.

The streets of the old city are empty now. The ambulances are gone. Almost nobody is around. The dawn hookers have taken all of their things inside, the early morning caffs are closed, the air smells of cordite and smoked flesh.

The Old Writer is there though, sweeping up, hat pushed to the back of his head and cigar protruding rudely from his lips. He brushes and he hums an independent kind of a tune. An old rebel song. Something there in the back of his head, penny whistles, a Scottish swirl, the proud rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum like a salute of bullets.

He dusts broken windows and broken bottles ahead of him as he brushes on by the Hellzappopin’. Dried blood has left scarlet ribbons under the swinging doors and thin grey wisps of smoke escape through the holes in the wall.

First time in living memory the place has been closed.

The Old Writer brushes on down to the Lost Highway. That old road is here for him, taking off into the mountains like the brittle discarded skin of a snake. It glistens like razor blades. A broken crossroads sign aches and groans in the breeze. The Old Writer stands there, shattered glass at his feet like diamonds.

Then Oakland Tower flashes the time and the temperature on and off - on and off – 6.15am – 6.15am - like a beacon at the chosen heart of the city.

He looks back to the Hellenization’ – a place where the world is in tatters. It's like a great torn federal flag waving in the flames.

Ol’ Trash Can Willy with his knickers in his twist. Hehehheh. He smiles to himself. Maybe there’s more to Willy than meets the eye. Why did he end up here, of all places, and capable of causing all this devastation when he’s dead?

Maybe this was the break the Old Writer needed.

Well, the Old Writer brushes his diamonds on to the tail of the highway and goes back to where he belongs.

Maybe there is something here for him to investigate. He keeps asking himself why the lords and bastards of the occupying army lost control so badly over somebody as insignificant as Willy Spike.

That night the Hellzappopin’ staged a grand re-opening, selling blood-red co*cktails. A helium filled black heart floated above its turrets in defiance.