Midnight Mass

I roam, not half-awake and now away,
Brought back to stand to sing;
The fourth port in the corner eye,
Where Christ will see his mother -
See opposite of meet -
Cross on bare back, strained, weighed down.

Behind them waits a soldier,
A cobweb strung between his wooden hand and wooden eye.
It sways and quivers.
I watch it through the bleak midwinter,
Don't brush it, wrong to touch,
But let it stand between hymns,
Stirring to the rhythm of our breath.

It's not important. No-one will see it
When the church is less full.

Negotiations

My fingers rattle a rhythm on the desk. They are talking to me, requesting my attention, looking for something to do. Always keen to keep them sweet, I ship my digits across to the keyboard so they can tap out a more specific message.

"Hello, Fred."

"Hello, fingers," I say back.

"Sorry to bother you."

"That's ok."

"We're a little bord."

"Spelling..."

"Sorry - bored. :)"

"What do you want to do then? Some drawing?"

"No, thank you." My right-hand fingers stop typing. "It's a bit shit for us."

"What about a little pottery?"

"NO NO NO. TOO DIRTY. THE CLAY DRIES UNDER OUR NAILS."

"Alright. You can turn caps lock off. I get the point. Do you have any ideas?"

"We want to play the piano."

"But you've played the piano six times already today," I groan.

"Just once more. We'll put your earplugs in for you."

"What's in it for me?"

"You can use us to pick your nose as much as you like." This is the clincher.

And so, five minutes later, the eleven of us are all over by the piano, fingers bashing out a Mozart sonata whilst I try to do the Times crossword in my head.

Geneva: The Third Gate

At the third gate of seven, Jessie and Jim come to their first real problem. Two pictures from L'Etranger's past which seem unconnected but which they must somehow link if they are to get any closer to the ideas at the centre. An otter thrashing about and a rank full of taxis. This is bloody hard and they're only at gate three.

They have identified obscure family members (Catherine de Clemency, Gerard Rougerie) and recalled unwitnessed conversations from decades before (with Marion Delaunay), pieced together through the untrusted testimony of one-time acquaintances (Jonathan Allen, Martha Linehan), but there is a limit to the number of locks they can pick through homework alone.

Now they will have to intuit, to prove they knew L'Etranger by making a connection which is beyond logic. They have to "be" him, if they can, imagine the puzzles which he might himself have set, untangle his intentions, identify his bluffs.

He must be the only man who could have answered these questions. Not only are they about him; they demand him. That's the whole point of the idea-safe. That's why it's the most secure joint in Geneva.

Towards the Sky

They first appeared on Tuesday, three o'clock, when I was elbow-to-elbow in Room 28, creeping through a page of trigonometry. They'd itched beneath the surface since lunch, pushing up against the inside of the skin, bristling briefly and urging me to scratch. But no actual buds appeared 'til three.

They started on the left forearm, leant on the table to keep the book in place, pushing through white and thin and painless, three in five minutes, one on the inside of the elbow and two more up towards the wrist.

I tried to cover them, stop Norris from noticing, but when I glanced down at my writing hand and saw a creamy stem peeking eagerly up between my thumb and index finger, I couldn't help but shriek and toss my triangles to the floor.

Norris looked up from the shoulder of a struggler on the front row and, as he did so, the class all swivelled to stare. I was up out of my chair, through the door and away down the corridor, my face watered with tears, Norris' fat roar bouncing around the walls behind me.

I ran into the loos, rushed into a cubicle, swung the door shut and locked behind me. Lifting my shirt, I counted - seven, eight, nine plants sprouted from my chest and belly, white and delicate and now beautiful. I could see them emerging, slick and bloodless, with fresh buds following behind - twelve, thirteen, fourteen - creeping up and shooting through the skin. I fell back onto the seat, pushed off shoes, unpeeled socks and looked down at my foliaged feet, plants peering up between my toes and what felt like roots suddenly pulling from inside down towards the floor, yearning for turf. I was to be planted, I realised now, and suddenly it didn't feel like such a horrible thing.

But the boys' toilet would never do. I unlocked the door and walked out, caught sight in the mirror of my still unblemished face, then strolled down the corridor and stairs, barged open the big double doors and stepped into the sunlight of the yard. I knew where I should go now and headed straight there, marching through the gates, across the road and into the park.

There I stood, my feet together, in a nice south-facing flowerbed and let the roots push down at last, relieved, through my soles and into the soil. I sighed, leant back towards the sun and felt my face give in to the flowers, arrowing through my cheeks and lips and eyes, stretching up and out towards the sky.

The Star

Maxwell Dandy has a fine physique - tight, lithe, CASTABLE. Taut mocha body topped off with thick chocolate moustache. And, lurking beneath, the thin satisfied lips of a hatefully spectacular lover.

He is invariably the first to take off his shirt when the weather allows, to parade around La Cienega Park in his unfeasibly tight shorts (on anyone else ridiculous, but around his upper thighs quite the sexiest thing that any passer-by can ever have seen). He will stop and talk to THE FANS (if they're able to speak), sign photos, kiss babies, "do his thing"... and they will swoon and faint, probably, and he'll call an ambulance and sit in the back with the emasculated husband, reassuring him that his wife will be ok, that it was just the heat, when we all know that she's only cracked her head open because HE'S SO BLOODY GORGEOUS.

I'm working with Maxwell Dandy next month. We're filming the sequel to Prometheus Lives. I'm playing Fourteenth Mortal. I wish I was playing the eagle.

Picking Out the Tomatoes

I saw him out of the window this morning for the first time in months, standing by a bin, picking the tomatoes out of his supermarket sandwich and flicking them away. He was doing it one-handed, gripping the packet with his left while he fiddled at the filling with his right. Even from eighty feet above, I knew it was him and I knew exactly what he was doing.

"Matthew!" I shouted, but he had his iPod in. I tried again, louder than before and with a wave, but still he didn't hear - probably listening to Belle and Sebastian or Teenage Fanclub or something else I used to sneer at but secretly like.

I walked back in off the balcony and hurried across to the lift.

Inside, I pressed zero; the doors eased towards each other and clicked together. The capsule crept away, counting its way down from the fourteenth floor, away from the present and into my past.

I leant back against the mirrored wall and thought about Matthew, about what we'd experienced together and what had followed once we were apart. The doors opened at the thirteenth, eleventh, eighth and sixth floors; at every stop, a different memory snuck its way inside.

I thought about when I'd left him lying face down in tears on the sofa, walked out of his flat at three in the morning with no money for a taxi and made my way back home through the streets around Crouch End feeling...relieved.

I thought about the time when he'd asked me to marry him and I'd said yes, because that was what I'd been sure I would want to say, even though, when the moment arose, I'd known immediately that I really wanted to say no.

I thought about the time when he'd flown from London to Budapest to see me, on a whim; when I went down to the hotel bar and he was sitting there, waiting for me with no bags and no plan and two pints of cheap Hungarian lager, I knew that I loved him, that I loved him, that I really loved him, in all ways and with every possible emphasis.

I thought about making his ham sandwiches in the morning, cutting off the crusts and wrapping them in cling film.

The lift reached the bottom. I wandered out, through the lobby and into the street. He wasn't there. The tomatoes and the crusts and the sandwich packet were perched on top of the bin.

I still don't know if I was disappointed.

Reverse Hair Loss Today: Proven Results!!!

I'm trapped in the spam folder. I know I'm not meant to be here, but they saw my name and assumed, as you would. In retrospect, the triple exclamation mark is a little over-emphatic.

It's not as bad as I'd feared. In fact, I'm having a grand old time - online degrees to the left of me, penis enlargements to the right. There are plenty of Viagra salesmen and religious nuts to talk to, so the conversation is always pleasingly salacious.

The only problem is the time limit. Another five hundred messages and I'll be squeezed out the other side, into the recycle bin or maybe the unknown beyond. I hope that doesn't happen. I'm an important message - an advert, sure, but a damn relevant one. Not a bill or a job offer or anything absolutely essential, but seriously worth a look if he ever wants his locks back.

Unlike the charlatans who surround me, I can actually do some good. I hope he checks before the rubbish chute sucks me through; I hope he clicks me open, hauls me up into the inbox and saves me from whatever lies in wait.

Why the Books Need to Breathe

The staff keep you quiet in the library so the books can hear each other breathe. It is the only concession to the prisoners' wellbeing.

The inmates are not allowed to actually talk, but they may communicate quietly across the concourse, like lonely whales in a sea free of waves, inhaling and exhaling slowly, steadily, reassuring their friends that they are ok, that they are not in the library alone.

They stand up straight in their shelves, wedged in back to back, too tight for neighbourly exchange. So they breathe to stay hopeful, to while away the long long hours for which they sit there helplessly, ready to be taken out.

Dancing Iguanas

When I close my eyes I see dancing iguanas. They rumba in the rushes on the banks of Lake Mahoy.

They don't know I'm there. I just watch, attach my eyes to their swaying samba hips, the Brazilian rhythm marked out in ripples on the water. They're mostly paired up, boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls - libidinous lizard dancers raunching happily away.

I'd like to go and join them, free my hips down there on the bank, gyrate my way through to the loose louche satisfaction which they all seem to enjoy.

But I can't go and join them, because they don't really exist. They're just part of the picture, the moving picture which paints itself when I close my eyes. Any sensible person knows that iguanas don't dance.

The Interview

I sit in the corridor outside the office, as Jenny has instructed, and wait for Mr Marsden to emerge and beckon me in.

I have been here for eight and a half minutes. He knows where I am, for sure - I heard him on the intercom when Jenny buzzed through to tell him I had arrived. He must be very busy. I am happy to wait.

The corridor's walls are made up entirely of the windows of the offices which flank it. Some are not occupied and the blinds have been closed on those which are. I cannot see into Mr Marsden's office. I can hear him chattering away on the phone, but I still have to imagine what he looks like.

There is another voice now coming through the window. Mr Marsden wasn't on the phone at all. There must be a second person in the office, the person before me, the competition. There is a laugh. I presume it is Mr Marsden. He's cracking him up. The bastard's cracking him up. I bet he gets it.

Then suddenly silence. Genuine silence - not a single sound. A few seconds pass...but then it is broken by an enormous thump and a grunt. I can hear Mr Marsden again, but the other voice has stopped.

I look up at the clock. Eleven minutes have passed now. There must be some mistake. He is busy - I should go and check with Jenny. I stand up and start to walk along the corridor back to the reception.

But I am stopped by a voice behind me.

"Fred Gordon?"

I turn around. Mr Marsden is a very tall and very wide man with very little hair.

"Yes."

"Please, come in. Sorry to keep you waiting."

I smile and walk back along the corridor and into the office. There is no-one else in the room. It is just Mr Marsden and me.

"Sit down, please."

I sit down at the desk. Mr Marsden walks around me to his chair. He sits and rests his hands on the table. I see that his left little finger is askew, dislocated, sticking out at the side of his hand.

He sees that I have seen it. He sees that I have seen that he has seen that I have seen it. He smiles and my shoulders stiffen.

The Hypnotherapist

Jefferson Marlowe leant back on the hypnotherapist's couch, tucked his thumbs beneath his braces and prepared to regress.

"Ok, Jefferson," said Dr Mandrake, "are you ready to go under?"

Jefferson sighed.

"Yes. Yes, I am," he mumbled as the dubious doctor produced his pendulum.

This was Jefferson's fourteenth appointment with Dr Mandrake and almost certainly his last. So far he had uncovered a gamut of traumatic experiences: as an infantryman at the Battle of Fondu Dyke, as a bankrupt blacksmith in the remote mountain village of Ashling Potsville and as an exceptionally comely courtesan in the ancient kingdom of Mavlavia.

Jefferson did not believe in reincarnation, but he did believe in con men, and he was beginning to come to the conclusion that Marcel Mandrake "M.D." was making most of this stuff up. He was certainly no closer to triggering his memories of the blank patch between his altercation with Alfonso Barsquador on the road to Batahausen and his sudden arrival at the Quinto Rock Mining Collective seven months ago. What on earth had happened? Who the hell was "Marukash"? If he was ever going to find out, he needed a new and, if necessary, drastic approach.

He reached out and grabbed the swinging stone.

"Jefferson!" cried the quack.

"I'm sorry, Dr Mandrake. I don't think I'm getting anywhere here."

"But we've unearthed so much already. Please just give it one more try."

"No, Dr Mandrake. I need to tackle this head on. I'm going to go and see the Carletian Oracle."

"But she charges three hundred groats an hour! That's seven whole sessions with me!"

"I've spent six hundred on you already," Jefferson replied, as he donned his poncho. "Anyway, you'll thank me for this when I'm saving you from Marukash."

"Who's Marukash?"

"No flipping idea, mate. No flipping idea."

Jagalath, Marukash, Jefferson and Clive

Rarely can a pair of demons have been much more demonic than the fearsome twins, Jagalath and Marukash, two ancient terrors birthed by a belligerent black hole, which spat them spiralling away to wreak havoc across the embryonic stars in the very earliest days of the universe.

And what havoc they wrought, toppling gods and gobbling up galaxies: the Kray twins of Cassiopeia.

But then one day the chaos which they had caused was suddenly brought to an end, as the brothers were trapped by a canny old wraith named Clive under the surface of a planet called Earth in a patch marked out by a field of silver dandelions in the mighty shadow of the Aquamarron Mountains.

Jagalath and Marukash spent several millennia buried away in their underground jail, stewing bitterly and plotting their revenge on the race of wraiths who had devised their downfall.

Yet the two terrors were not without hope, for, when he had imprisoned the demons, Clive had cunningly left a method by which their dungeon might be opened, should any future warrior come up with an ingenious plan by which the dastardly twins might finally be banished from the universe for good.

The key to the prison door (blowing every seed off the head of a dandelion flower picked from the field) was passed down through the generations lest the demons be inadvertently set free before a plan to destroy them had been devised. Thus the dungeon remained closed for thousands and thousands of years...until one day a hapless young buffoon by the name of Jefferson Marlowe blundered in and sprung open the prison door.

With the red carpet rolled out by Jefferson, the twins might both have emerged there and then, but they opted instead to hedge their bets; Jagalath came out first, whilst Marukash lay in wait to see what would befall his brother.

Once Jefferson had atoned for his idiocy by slaying the first demon himself (an experience so traumatic that he immediately forgot all about it), Marukash chose to lurk still beneath the surface in his freshly re-bolted cell, waiting for some fresh imbecile to blow on another dandelion and let him loose to avenge his brother's miserable demise.

A Breath Through the Window

Jefferson Marlowe was settling down to some cross stitch when an unseasonably chilly breeze blew in through his kitchen window. He bristled, wearily rose and flipped the porthole shut.

He dropped back down into his armchair, took a couple of puffs from his pipe and returned to the nascent tapestry. But, just as he had rethreaded the needle, the cool draught wafted through once more, chilling his hands and tickling his patience.

He looked across. The little window was firmly closed and he could not see how the breeze was still getting in. He stood up to inspect the wall, but, as he did so, the flame of his stubby little candle was blown clean out and the bungalow was suddenly as black as can be.

The breeze came again, but now he could hear that it was not simply a breeze but a breath, ushering out a fragile but gently coercing voice.

He listened intently.

"Jefferson...", it drawled sweetly. "Jefferson..."

"Yes."

"Jefferson..."

"Yes, yes, it's me," he answered impatiently. "Who the hell is this?"

"An old friend..."

"An old friend?"

"We need you, Jefferson...We need you...Soon...We will come back for you soon...Marukash is awaking...It is not safe for you just yet but you must be ready...Soon, Jefferson, soon..."

The breeze stopped and the lights flashed back on. Jefferson felt a dull shiver of recognition. He knew not whose voice it had been, but he knew he had heard it before, a faintly familiar murmur from his past, a past which he had almost totally forgotten, but which now he knew was destined to come again.

The Most Important Amnesiac

After six months working for the Quinto Rock Mining Collective, Jefferson Marlowe had become a little restless. Chipping away at a coal face for fifteen hours a day was not wholly unsatisfying, but it was nothing compared to the thrill of rescuing Princess Yolande from the implausibly tall belltower at Stankingham Castle or hunting for diamonds hoarded by the legendary five-eyed giant Lorcando in the Jungle of Chrysling Grub.

But Jefferson knew that such adventures were a thing of the past. Which was fine, for the most part. It was a relief not to be freelance, no longer to have to hunt for work, to have a more straightforward tax return, to be settled in one location with a recently-established regular girlfriend and three flat viewings planned for next weekend.

Jefferson was sure that this current pang of restlessness would pass - it was time, he knew, to resign himself to the fact that he wasn't particularly special, that there wasn't anything extraordinary about him at all. He was just a bloke - an unusually handsome bloke, but a bloke nonetheless - with a straightforward haircut and a modest talent for chiselling.

Yet, at that very moment, less than fifty miles away, just on the other side of the Aquamarron Mountains, a statue of our humble hero was being unveiled by a grateful race of wraiths. It was a monument to the man who had rescued their community, the man whom they desperately needed to come to their aid one final time: Jefferson Marlowe - in truth, a far from ordinary bloke and the most important amnesiac the world had ever known.

A Tolerably Short Bulletin

Eddie Berwick splashed into the middle seat of the sofa and flicked on the TV. It was the news - he was early - a tolerably short bulletin before the start of the cricket.

He brought up his whisky to his mouth and sipped just a bit, then reached out to the little table and left the glass there. He thought about some crisps.

A few seconds passed. No crisps. Whisky was bad enough.

Then Eddie's attention was interrupted.

He looked at the screen. His face had been pointing towards it all along, but now, for the first time, he looked. He really looked.

A woman, a young woman, was standing in the middle of a mass of dried mud, her face exhibiting no easily defined expression. She was trying to recover her bearings, said the reporter, but failing.

The mass of dried mud was her hometown, said the woman, clumsily dubbed. It was where she had grown up, where her family had lived, her mother and her father and her brothers and her sisters, where her family had lived until yesterday. When they all died.

Eddie felt the whisky burn at the back of his throat. He had to swallow to relieve the soreness where the whisky had tickled.

Soon the woman was no longer standing in the hard mud. She had gone, maybe never to be thought of again, replaced by the weather and, in a minute, the cricket.

Eddie was no longer thinking about the woman or the weather or the cricket. There was not a thought in his head, just a futile tear falling from each of his eyes and a tight stiff swelling trapped somewhere in his chest.

Michael's Column

Michael wrapped his arms around Admiral Lord Nelson, using the great man to shield himself from the full force of the wind as it buffeted up the rubbish around Trafalgar Square.

He peered over Horatio's head and across the rooftops of Whitehall towards Big Ben. It was quarter past two in the morning. How had it got so late?

One minute he'd been curled up in front of the snooker after a slightly over-indulgent supper, watching Peter Ebdon compile yet another frame-winning break in meticulous and monotonous fashion, the next he was one hundred and sixty feet above the pavement, eyes pinched half-shut by a gale, shouting frantically and almost blindly at hopelessly inebriated passers-by.

No-one down below could hear him. The storm swirled around the square, scooped up his shouts and whipped them off away from their intended targets.

Michael grimaced, pressed his face up against Nelson's, just as Hardy had done two hundred years before, and cursed his bloody sleepwalking.

Bathtime

Maxwell Dandy peels off the facemask and blinks into the bathroom mirror. Widening his eyes, he feels the remnants of the mud crack in the grooves of his forehead. He wipes them away with a fluffy white hotel hand towel, rolls his shoulders and peels off the dressing gown.

It has been a long day's filming.

The bath is nearly full behind him - he reaches out through the steam and turns the taps to off. The salts fizz in the water below and spread out into the bathroom air, as if it is being hot-boxed with Friar's Balsam.

Maxwell dips a toe fearfully below the surface, then, with growing confidence, a foot and a calf. He reaches across, opens the window a crack and commits his other foot to the tub.

He lowers his bottom below the surface and sighs as the water crackles against his skin.

There is a telephone beside his head. He reaches across and dials nought for reception. Oysters and champagne will be delivered to his suite in twenty-five minutes time. He wonders belatedly whether Janine likes shellfish.

Better Words

There are better words around, somewhere - I know there are - more imaginative vessels which bear meaning below their decks in a manner which is both thrillingly ingenious and pleasingly succinct.

But they are not so easy to find...

There are plenty of new ones, sure, but the majority are quite unexceptional. They are all over the place, eager for exposure and the chance to be assessed.

Sometimes I look, I rummage about in the back of my brain and find a few original words and phrases scattered around, but they are largely of little use and are swiftly redundatised. They are malapplicable and hypervoluted and I cannot envisage a context in which I might come to incorporate them readily into my everyday discourse.

Yet I will continue, I will forage for fresh expressions, for, somewhere in this mess of newly minted words, a little gem will be lying, hiding away in a quiet cramped corner, waiting to be prised out and carried across into the cool light of conversation.

Sand Between My Toes

I hobble to the point where the last wave broke to rinse the sand from between my toes. Shoes and socks in my left hand, my right free to pick away the grains when the water rolls in.

The wave breaks. I fumble at my foot well enough and stretch the sock over the cold clean skin. Then straight down into its trainer, almost overbalancing as I plunge it into the hole.

I look up from the sea. Moira is lying on a hotel towel, just over fifty yards away, peaceful, probably asleep, a single still presence in the bedlam of the weekend beach.

Tonight I will ask her to marry me.

A second wave breaks.

I hadn't moved my foot. My shoe is filled; my sock is sodden.

Clues

At the very bottom of the box, beneath a jumble of Leeds United caps, was the signed photograph of Lee Chapman, which he had collected outside Elland Road in May 1992.

It had taken him a lot longer to find it than he had expected.

He had been distracted for hours by the array of school photographs which he had encountered on the way, re-familiarising himself with his sixteen year-old hair and his six year-old glasses, looking along the lines of classmates and wondering how he had lost touch with so many of them so soon, at the ones who had already died and the ones who had already married, at the ones whom he sometimes saw across the road at Holborn and at the ones whom he had not seen at all since he was eighteen.

He had been distracted by the mountains of old exercise books, by the volumes and volumes of exuberant but indecipherable drawings which he had produced between the ages of four and six, by the books full of strange stories which he had written, by the short clumpy sentences and inexplicable spelling mistakes which marked their ages, the errors like the rings of a tree trunk guiding him back to their birthdates.

He had been distracted by the fragments, by the UCAS forms and exam certificates and CD racks and cuddly toys and poems and songs, which were written on scraps of paper and stuffed underneath piles of socks and shin pads and boots, by the hats which he had bought when he was fourteen, by the posters of once beloved rock stars now long-forgotten, by programmes and fliers and badges and folders and tickets and boxes and letters and cards, all providing clues, all adding to and solving the mystery of the story of his life.

Russian Dolls

Jennifer Parker scrolled back up to the top of the page and perused her composition. It was a fair assessment of an above-average entertainment, she thought. Not too generous, but not unkind by any means. She had picked up on all the obvious points of interest - the continuous use of iambic hexameter, the elaborately constructed overhead set, the controversial casting of Maxwell Dandy as the eponymous vivisectionist...

The content of her evaluation was not in question, but her chosen style would inevitably be a matter of concern. She hoped her reviewer would look kindly on her overuse of the semi-colon and the Oxford comma, and instead enjoy the smoothly continuous flow of her prose. Of course, his or her concerns would be affected by the spectre of his or her own reviewer, although surely that individual could not be too harsh for fear of being critiqued in turn.

Jennifer read through the piece one final time, then pressed "Send". The cogs of the critical machine creaked ever onwards.

Viennese Waltz

Stanley stiffens his quiff with a last blast of spray and steps out onto the floor. Glenda is waiting for him, leaning on the banister at the foot of the spiral staircase and looking across expectantly in his direction. He glides over, stomach slightly tensed, and reaches for her hand. She very gently places hers in his.

They briefly take each other in.

She rests her other hand on his shoulder. They are now in hold and will not exchange eye contact again for the duration of the dance.

A pause, then the music kicks in and the pair sweep away, painting precise patterns on the floor, swirling in Viennese circles, looping and looping and looping their way around the perimeter of the room, slicing through the areas where an audience might be. They fleckerl and spin on the spot, wrapping themselves in a imaginary coil, ravelling and unravelling and setting off again.

Stanley smiles blankly, no sign of the familiar excitement which is whisking itself up within him. Glenda's smile is serene, unflinching, unrevealing.

They need not communicate anything more. This is their dance. This is how they will remember each other.

The Foxes' Orchestra

The foxes are tuning up on Hampstead Heath; their rehearsal is about to begin.

Reginald is the first violinist. He is extravagantly talented, not to mention very popular with the vixens.

He sits on his chair, tail poking out of the hole in the back, and bashes out a quick arpeggio.

He flexes his paws and looks around, peering back into the mass of assembled musicians. Wesley is there on the timpani and Jerome on the euphonium. Reginald waves hello. Possible post-rehearsal drinking buddies, those two - always up for a trip down to the pond after practice.

Reginald is distracted from these thoughts by the chatter of the choir assembling, choristers greeting each other warmly before going through their complex personalised warm-up routines.

The rehearsal will soon be underway so Reginald settles himself and waits for the conductor, Augustine, to appear.

Tonight, the foxes will play Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in its entirety. It will be note-perfect and exquisitely phrased. Reginald will lead the orchestra with distinction. He always does.

The Supporting Cast

I am not the main character in this movie; I am in the background of every shot, loitering blurrily, out of focus but always in the picture.

Everywhere I go, so too does the camera, filming Maxwell Dandy's every move in crystalline close-up; every hair, every pore is meticulously explored.

In the café, as I sip my cappucino quietly, I look up and into the lens. Maxwell Dandy is at the next table, delivering a devastatingly honest and crushingly moving monologue, soliloquising like a tragic hero with his unfeasibly well-defined jawline and his Roman nose and his sensational rhetoric. He improvises most of his lines, you know.

They are filming him now, and me, as I type. He's crying. He's lighting a cigarette. He's looking around. He's looking at me. The camera is rolling still. I'm going to have to stop now. He's walking over. He's calling my name. He's shouting. Maybe my part is bigger than I'd thought.

Jasper's Eyebrows

Jasper sat down, crossed his legs and propped the mirror up against his bare calves. He picked up the tweezers, leaned in towards his reflection and started to pluck at the thick hairy streaks which rested sullenly above his eyes. He had really let himself go over the last year, let himself become fat and unhealthy and unnecessarily hirsute. It was time for some discipline, he thought, as he tweezered his first target.

The process was excruciating, each hair stubbornly refusing to budge unless and until the necessary explosive aggression was applied. The pain was shocking at first, but, once he had become accustomed to it, Jasper enjoyed the associations which it evoked. He thought back two years to the last time he had rededicated himself to personal presentation, to the familiar pain of the plucking and to the burst in self-esteem which he knew would result from the rigorous application of the regime.

He finished the first brow, put down the tweezers and looked inquisitively into the mirror. The left side of his face was jaded, worn out by months of failure, but the right glowed in cocky acknowledgement of a successful new era to come.

Jasper smiled. The right side of his face winked back. 2011 was going to be his year.