Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space insideher: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her ribs. In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.īeside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver's face is set. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.Ī sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white.

The dead won't be coaxed and they won't be coerced. You don't want them and you can't send them back. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces. There are nights when you don't want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potter's Bar. Four o'clock: light sinking over the orbital road. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin's scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon.

Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas.

Beyond black novel