The Qliphoth

The Qliphoth

Paul A. Green

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SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY: Paul A. Green on Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Paul A. Green grew up in South London, studied at Oxford and the University of British Columbia. He has worked as a freelance writer/broadcaster in Canada, college lecturer in Devon, supply teacher in inner London, and used-book operative in Hay-on-Wye. He is currently Lecturer in Media at the Royal National College for the Blind, Hereford.

His plays have appeared on BBC Radio 3, CBC Radio Canada, RTE Ireland, Capital Radio and Resonance FM London. His poetry has been disseminated in magazines, anthologies and, increasingly, in audio formats via alternative radio stations, podcasts and on-line journals like www.culturecourt.com. His Selected Poems are scheduled for publication in 2011 by Shearsman Books.

The enigma of the paranormal has been a constant theme in his work, exemplified in plays like The Dream Laboratory, Ritual of the Stifling Air, The Voice Collection, and Babalon, his speculative drama about occult rocket scientist Jack Parsons. The Qliphoth probes still further into these eldritch realms …

An End-Time fabulation in the lineage of Burroughs and Ballard: complex, fast-twitch language spasms, loud with interference and radio static. The voices of the new dead transmit warp knowledge. Straight-blade satire. Deadpan humours. A word quest launched from the edge-lands of arcane knowledge.

~ Iain Sinclair

Lucas sets out to find affinity with his demented Dad, a drug casualty of the sixties - or visionary - in Oakhill, sunniest hotbed of sanity in Devon, where Dad, old Nick, is buried like a rusty drum of plutonium, irradiating the depths of the Qabala or the arcana of old Brit rock’n’roll. There is a mysterious black box with the Lore of the Brazen Head in it, opened in a stream of the funniest, most hip and haunting prose, where the DNA dialogue and descriptive powers of Ken Kesey, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell and JD Salinger are fused into the tissue of the fiction.

~ George McWhirter

From intense narration to first-person hallucination, it's a book that draws you in and leaves you gasping for air... each sentence drips with fantastic imagery.

~ Dan Whitehead

It really is wonderful to read such focused, beautifully paced, freshly minted writing.

~ George Amabile

THE QLIPHOTH is magnificent, both in range and depth of arcane snoopage.

~ J.Michael Yates

For Cathy, Tristan, Titus & James

1. LUCAS / PAULINE: CRACKING THE SHELL

2. NICK: SPECIAL WITHDRAWAL UNIT

3. LUCAS: GRAND JUNCTION

4. PAULINE: ASTRIDE THE VOID

5. NICK: THE ORDER OF THE BRAZEN HEAD

6. LUCAS: IN TRANSIT

7. NICK:THE MUTANT GEOMETRIES

8. PAULINE: A RECONSTRUCTION

9. LUCAS: THE ENCLAVE

10. NICK: A PROJECT OF HORUS

11. LUCAS: LOVE UNDER WILL

12. LUCAS: LOVE UNDER WILL II

13. PAULINE – A TOTAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE

14. LUCAS: THE SCRIBES

15. NICK: FORCE FIELD

16. LUCAS: KELPHAVEN

17. NICK: ROAD MOVIES

18. PAULINE: RESEARCH AND DESTROY

19. AN EXCHANGE OF SOULS

20. THE DEEP MIX

21. OUR LADIES OF BABEL

22. THE CHAOSPHERE

23. YESOD TO MALKUTH LIVE AND DIRECT

24. AFTERMATH

"Cosmic evil is called in the Qabalah The Qliphoth ; which literally means shells. The origin of this term is twofold:

The first origin lies in the concept that the Universe is made like a series of nutshells... each sephiroth, each World encloses the one above, and is enshelled itself by the next and lower World... at the very last is the densest, most metallic shell of all... only a dim spark of divinity resides here.

The other meaning of the term is that anything - event or being - can become Qliphothic... if its central axis or raison d'etre of consciousness is removed. If such a situation occurs, the demonic realms... can gain a hold and so use and feed off the undirected Force or Form. An example of this is seen in the mental disorder of manic depression..."

(from A Qabalistic Universe by Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi)

A feature common to recurrent dreams... is the narrative shell. A landscape forms a matrix in which are embedded locales, each with a specific ambience, a mood or flavour that determines the nature of the plot that unfolds within that locale. Each shell is an archetypal narrative.

(from The Immaculate Perception by Christopher Dewdney)

Whether or not the Qliphothic forces exist, the Universe behaves as if they do.

(J.G Brodie-Innes, Hegemon of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn)

1. LUCAS / PAULINE: CRACKING THE SHELL

Fast-forward: images blitter non-stop across the tube - brown-bellied children scrabbling at a desert water-hole/a smart missile blitzing the wrong bunker/the famous blazing palm trees of LA - but these aren't the icons that Lucas is searching for. Pause.

He wants his mother. Or, rather, his father, that notorious mysterioso old scumbag - or so everybody says. Lucas doesn't know, his father is virtually terra incognita .

But he's certain his father is hidden somewhere, on one of these dusty VHS-180s that he's found stashed behind her bedside cabinet. The tapes must have been there for months, since the last time Pauline The Mother of Battles (why is he feeling so violent about her?) visited this dank so-called holiday home (how can a Marxist Mum have a holiday home?); and if she's been bringing down old tapes to record over (why does she tape every doomstruck documentary even in her holidays?) she's possibly erased this family showpiece.

He's not even sure what the show was called. One of the words was definitely two syllables, like - The Blah Blah Show. That was his father's rhythmic mumble, whiskery husks of words in the ear, as minders hustled visitors out of the ward . Watch your mother on the Blah Blah Show - she told them the same old story...

Lucas wishes he could forget the dribbly mouthing of that phrase, just let it go. But there must have been a show. Lucas was almost in it, if not in on it. It was at home but it wasn't a home movie. It wasn't a fun'n'games show, either. As far as he can remember.

Nevertheless, thousands of people may have seen it - when he was too small to know better. That hurts, Mummy. What have you done with Daddy? Perhaps this is going to hurt, so fucking what, he wants the gut truths hanging out, there's nothing left to lose, nothing left.

He ejects the unlabelled cassette, puts it to one side on the coffee-table, on top of his most recent disaster, supposedly receiving his earliest attention. The important documents are crumpled, wine-stained. Still shell-shocked, he blankly scans a paragraph: `If you have not achieved the prerequisite grades for any of the provisional places you have been offered, fill in the attached form immediately and send it to the University Admissions Service at ...'

He carefully repositions the cassette to conceal his Results Slip, already three days old, with its catalogue of Advanced Level fiascos - everything E or worse, even Media Studies. I hope by the time I'm back you'll have finally decided on your next quantum leap... Mega-Pauline, ever the teacher, in control, had pursed her lips tartly as she strode to the door an hour ago, off on one of her motorised Great Treks into Social History - around Abbotsburton, of all places, with its folksy BMWs and healthfood stores...

What is he doing in this post-modernist Devon village, under picture-postcard thatch? Why is he in this over-loaded world? He's stuck in the middle of August. Despite the haze and the ramparts of dark cloud massed above the high crooked turrets of the old Priory (now the Abbotsvale Personal Growth Centre) his clothes are bags of sweat. There's bio-electricity in the air. And he can't stop shaking. How can she expect pro-active educational self-management, all that crap? As if there was a miraculous future he could magically salvage, her order out of his chaos, that's what she wants. He decides to half-close the curtains, and crouches in the protective gloom. The screen glows.

It's the past he's trying to sort out, the hidden order. Nine more cassettes are spread out on the rug in front of him, and somewhere in the ferric particles on one of them there are patterns that will tell him the secrets of how and why and when, in dancing pixels... That's the great distraction, only a trivial academic detail - Was your dad mad or bad or both? Give reasons for your choice and dates as required. He shuffles the cassettes around like dominoes or toy building blocks.

Pauline hasn't taught him very much about his father's grey matter, this greyish subject area. She'd rather go out for some purposeful activity on the last day of her holiday. Says she needs to relax before going home to London W9 to psych up for the latest teaching job. At bloody Westway Community School, for God's sake. She says she wants to escape from his messes. But she'll be going back to the site of his criminal failure. It's insane.

He selects another cassette, at random. Or maybe because it's more worn and chipped - but has obviously been relabelled. Pauline's neat ballpoint says `News Clips 10.' And indeed, the VCR trundles at slapstick speed through more prime-time fragments, all of them bad news. He mutes the volume.

The images shiver, blur, skip, all over the place: a derailed train like a broken snake; a black beach of burning oil; white males in shell-suits compressed against chainlink fencing; helicopter gunships landing amid scattering kids; and, popping up like arcade-action targets, the relentless chattering heads, the anchormen and continuity-women, yammering away like his mother in their compulsive mission to explain, analyse, justify, rationalise, as if that could stop the mad planet. Except Pauline won't explain his dad's little bit of the action.

Joining his mother down here for a cosy post-exam-results holiday has been a fatal error. Guys he knows are hitching round Hungary or driving down Route 66. Why on earth has he made this West Country retreat? The whole notion of being-in-time is deeply obscure. He's been going in circles, but his centre is nowhere. He tried to tell Katie this but she wouldn't listen and ditched him a month before the exams for a trainee accountant, which didn't help, he couldn't/can't focus on anything, but it's no excuse. This tape looks like another dud. Keep it rolling just a little bit longer.

There goes an hairy old rock band; and something about a drug trial. He never knew his mother cared about such things, not these days. But there's layer after layer of items on the tape, the years keep cutting into each other - he can't place them all - and now some of them look like dubs of dubs, the picture breaking up as it goes down the generations.

But here's a BBC2 logo, and rolling titles. Hang in there, bump up the volume:

...In tonight's edition of The Lifeskills Show we look at the problems of living with mental illness, taking a dark journey into the nightmare world of manic depression. We ask - what can it do to a marriage...?

Oh shit. Holy holy shit.

Long shot: an institutional garden, Victorian gothic buildings. Autumn oaks, drained greenish skies, brown bushes where someone loiters. The camera starts to zoom in, slowly but relentlessly. His scarecrow father, his actual grey-faced father Nicholas Oscar Beardsley, stands under the big tree. He is shuffling his feet through dead leaves. Then, perhaps dazed by the lens, the sudden attention, he waves a hand feebly, in a purely gestural shielding of his face, like a criminal celeb arriving at court. The shot slowly dissolves into a montage of still snapshots, underscored by sixties fuzz/wah-wah rock.

Lucas can hardly believe this. There's his handsome aquiline daddy, no more than twenty-five with long curving locks, headband, beads, epaulettes, saffron shirt; and Pauline, hardly seventeen, has her auburn hair cut like a warrior's helmet. She's striking, almost pretty in her floating blue robe. His parents are apparently immortal, smiling as they silk-screen posters together in a white studio, ignoring naked flower people thronging the doorway. Perhaps this is a Love Happening. Which fades into wedding pics , everybody grinning in kaftans and flares outside the registry office.

The voice-over intrudes - male, charged with synthetic urgency and portent:

Nick and Pauline were filled with the heady optimism and vibrant energy of the sixties generation. After their marriage Pauline did her teacher training and plunged into the hurly burly of inner-city schooling, while Nick, with his art-school flair, entrepreneurial drive, and the help of a small legacy, started a life-style shop - The Great British Time Machine...

A grainy monochrome archive snapshot: Nick, in tiny heptagonal smoked glasses, poses proudly under a giant pop art sign. Pauline, his smiling fellow-conspirator, is putting up a poster inside the sunlit shop window. Lucas suddenly feels wildly protective towards these funny silly people - and simultaneously enraged. All that rich energy. How did they blow it? What went wrong?

Outside there's a distant rumble. The picture wobbles for an instant, as if there's a glitch in the power supply, the sudden gust of breeze smells oddly saline - Abbotsburton is miles from the coast - but Lucas mustn't lose anything, even the pontifications of the commentary.

...less than a decade later was permanently hospitalised. How did Pauline's nightmare begin?

His mother's face fills the screen, against a background of bookshelves. She's backlit, face in shadow, but he can discern her sharp nose, firm lips, large anxious eyes. Her chin was more cleary defined then. And she's wearing one of those red t-shirts with a message. She's staring through the screen, waiting for the right words to form. Lucas can confirm now that he was, indeed, almost there himself, off-camera, in his little bedroom at the end of the corridor, Uncle Larry minding him, and special new cars and trains to play with.

This has always been puzzle corner, this dazzling fragment of memory. How old was he? He'd blundered into the beginning of the shoot, had flinched from the heat of the lights, had walked right into the anxious squint of the cameraman, until women with smooth voices and clipboards had steered him back, promising sweeties, better than grown-ups' boring chat.

No sweeties for him now. He pauses the tape for a second, kneels with his face only inches from the curve of the screen. He has to go through with this ritual, there's no going back...

Playback. Yes, that's her voice, bright, edgy, slightly nasal, like a soprano sax, solo: It's hard to pin-point the beginning of the end...Nick had always been a little obsessive, a bit impulsive, his moods swung on a big pendulum, as it were. You had to anticipate the motion. Either I was a fairy princess or a hag fit to die in a garbage bin. In the first few years I was mostly the do-good fairy on the Christmas tree, as long as I stayed in the confines of that role it was fine... And believe it or not, I think I wanted to please...

She's almost managing a bitter smile, as the take fades. This nuance matters to Lucas but the presenter, off-screen, brisk as a toothpaste advert, has left the rest of it on a cutting-room floor and sticks to the rhetoric of his script.

Did Pauline recognise those all-important early warning signs of mental disorder?

Pauline leans forward into the camera. It's confession time. In a way I blame myself. When you're in close proximity with someone who's innately unbalanced, you tend to see things from their warped perspective. I'd got used to him talking to himself all the time, smoking dope with his mates until all hours, or suddenly disappearing in the middle of a meal, to see a man about some futuristic scheme, usually to buy a lot of old tat and tart it up. Or he'd go off and spend a whole night away at the shop. He often slept there. Perhaps he was already having casual affairs. I didn't want to know. I was just trying to keep myself together. The invisible presenter makes sympathetic murmurs.

Lucas can't bear to watch. Yet he's compelled to. However, the next shot is some goggle-eyed balding expert who starts a lecture about the nature and nurture of mania. Lucas speeds him on his way, but the programme keeps jumping between other interviewees, more experts, the smug presenter, clever graphics, graphs, brain-maps. Frustrated, he fast-forwards it yet again, and again, searching for more glimpses of his mother - and his father, that vanishing beast.

His skull has its own home movies. . A gawky stuttering man who made him laugh by setting fire to the garden and then got taken away. That must have been here, at the Pink Cottage. And there was one more calamitous experiment in community care, one icy Christmas, at the flat in Chesterton Crescent, when Father Nicholas started digging up the wiring looking for a secret junction box behind the telly, and blew out the festive tree. Or maybe that was one of the stock infant nightmares, he can't be sure.

For there were worse dream scenarios, that kept on coming... a dream of beetling brains, the lobes on tiny legs, hiding in a scrapheap in the cupboard, waiting to leap on his back. And more. And more. Not to be contemplated. What kind of childhood writes these sequences, who makes these bedtime stories up, is it really you, Daddy Bogus?

STOP. There she is, La Mama, in dark profile, her lips moving, making up her secret part. I suppose sex was another kind of early-warning system, to prepare me for the worst. We'd had what you'd call quite a normal healthy sex life. Although I was worn out half the time from housework, homework and the rest. But he became very obsessive . A bit , ah, fetishistic..

She's giving too much away. She's rushing on. Lucas can read the signs.And it was all meant to have some vast cosmic significance. For him, of course.. .and I got bored with his ridiculous business of `let's pretend this, let's pretend that...' About this time I joined a women's group and started to question these assumptions of patriarchal male sexuality, these fantasies of omnipotence...

Lucas recognises that harsh overtone in her voice. It always seems directly beamed at the plexus of his male being. But what has he actually done to deserve it, - apart from cocking everything up? And how did Dad the Lad become Mad Dad, so mad they keep him tranked up to his sad bloodshot eyeballs, even now, in this very county, as this tape is running... He has to pause again. This is an excess of home truths.

There's at least twenty minutes of the tape to run. Pauline is presumably still studying old industrial sites across the Moor, or even the disused railway line. Who knows the workings of his earth-mother's mind? Perhaps she'll be almost relieved that he's found The Lifeskills Show - revelation will clear this stifling air, stale exhalations of dead time. Press on with it.

Her face is now lit from below. Everything else is darkness. As she opens her mouth, there's an odd rattling sound, an irregular percussive din that threatens to over-ride her voice, she's been mixed way down by those docu-drama idiots - then he feels the draught from the billowing curtains and realises the noise isn't a superimposed sound-effect, it's real balls of ice, hissing rain, hailstones crashing on the flagstones outside.

The copper-grey overcast is split by a blinding slash of forked lightning. And, almost instantly, wave-fronts of thunder roll over his mother's testimony. He manages to pick up the end of a crackling sentence:

...that was how he discovered his allegedly transcendental knowledge. His so-called Lore. He was a Lore unto himself, of course. It wasn't just the money and time he'd spent on all this - although it was my boring job that was subsidising his hip shop - it was the hours you had to spend listening to the visions, the utterings, the conspiracy theories. But that was only the beginning...

Light shivers, thunder rumbles again from its epicentre, rain spatters through the open windows, a few silvery pellets of hail roll across the carpet. But Lucas ignores them, he shuffles along on his knees to grab the control, turn up the volume, or perhaps he should freeze and rewind, catch her in mid-act, he mustn't miss a tiny thing.

There's a sudden click. He turns. For a second, Lucas sees double. On the screen, there's his pale mother, hollow-eyed, blurred, immobilised, hand poised to brush away a long strand of hair, maybe tears...

And, framed in the doorway, wiping beads of water from her brow, there's spiky-haired Pauline in her old bomber jacket and jeans, panting as she's just run up the path from the gate, mission aborted, ready for a cup of coffee, maybe a fresh start. She's actually smiling.

Lucas, what is this weird junk you're watching? Have you really made up your mind to go for the re-takes, at last? I do hope so, because -

And then she sees, really sees. Her face becomes a blank ovoid. He looks away. It's a panic attack for both of them. Her voice flattens with disbelief.

Where did you get hold of that? Where? He just kneels there stupidly, clutching the remote control like a protective talisman. You've been scavenging in my bedroom. My personal space. You've been going through my things... Her voice swells with anger. I don't believe this, Lucas, it's really hurtful, my own son fingering through my private stuff, it's horrible. You've no bloody right. What the hell's got into you these days? Why do you do these things?"

I was just looking for a used tape. To record Solaris. I didn't bring any of my own tapes with me. For a moment he is feeble with pretence and self-loathing. But he's right, he has a basic right to know, doesn't he? Doesn't she support the universal right to knowledge? Isn't that her business? He's going to put it to her but she's already away, firing on all cannons.

I suppose you just found it accidentally. On purpose. Maybe you're compiling a dossier on me. Parental failures you have known...

I just remembered bits about the show. As a kid... Look, I only wanted to know...

You didn't have to watch this far. You could have had the decency to stop, couldn't you? She's quivering with anger, hurling down her jacket and bag as she paces furiously about the room. She starts to snatch up books, magazines, papers - and as she swings round and thrusts his tattered college applications into his face, he can see she's in tears. It's not as if you didn't have more important things to do. That is, if you want a future of your own. Instead of rummaging about in other people's utterly finished business.

But it is my business. . And Dad's, as well. Look, Pauline, I'm not trying to take sides... He's not sure if that's true. His parents can't both own the truth. Maybe somehow they're both wrong, and nothing is true. But somebody owes him an answer. Something that will structure his shadow.. This dark matter is clouding his life, it's in his blood, so what the hell are the material facts?

She's gone into the kitchen. She's lighting a cigarette, the first for months, and her small fingers are trembling - but to hell with her fragile game, sometimes you have to break heads, break the silence. He's sorry, sorry, Mum, but he can't let her get away, not now.

I just don't get it. You could talk about Dad, Nick, call him what you like, to thousands of invisible TV voyeurs. That's what you'd call them now, isn't it? You could share him and his illness, no, let's get it right, his madness, his `obsessive cosmic sex mania', those were some of your words, you could share him, warts and all, with all those TV vamps - but years and years later you still won't tell me, your son, anything, not one damn real thing. I'm not a camera, I guess.

That film was a violation, Lucas. A travesty. It misrepresents me. I'd been promised greater control, but -

It was your choice. I can remember those lights in the living room. Who are you kidding?

She stubs out her fag and composes herself. You know, Lucas, if you were a single working mother with a little boy - just like you - who was trying to sort out her life after divorcing a very destructive man, and somebody offered you some really useful money to tell your side of the story, to help other people, I think that even you would kid yourself that it was worth a go.

She watches him squat down on the circular rug, amid the scattered video cassettes. It's sometimes best to play it cool with Lucas. Although she's still hot and cold all over, in shock, a very nasty after-shock. After all these years the dread vibrations won't stop, the business of Nick goes on exhuming itself.

Now Lucas starts to shift mechanically through his overlapping papers - the exam results slip, his college prospectuses, the list of phone calls he hasn't made - as if some emerging permutation of words will spell out the secret knowledge he's craving, or dreading. But he's not going to give up.

Surely as your only child I have a right to know…

Lucas, I've told you all you need to know. I'd like it to remain my problem, please. She's keeping extremely busy and business-like, tidying away the half-empty bottles of red wine, Lucas's scattered socks, last week's Guardian and the new workscheme she hasn't even started. She must assert her control, no more tears, keep up the balancing act.

Neither of them look at the telly, which now seems to exist in its own isolated space in the corner of the darkened room. The shimmering image of Pauline is suspended there like a watery reflection of the moon. There's an odd tang in the air, not the freshness of summer rain, but a faint ammoniac taint. The storm rumbles on.

Lucas wanders around the furniture in circles. He's both unpredictable, and relentless, like the weather. All you've said, in effect, is `Your father's been a horrible embarrassment to everybody, especially his ex-wife, but if you're ever so good you'll be able to visit him annually and watch him taking his big purple pills and going gaga...' That's been the idea, hasn't it? Containment. A father-free zone. What's this creature you're protecting me from?

Last year that gaunt bespectacled figure in pajamas was too doped to do anything except grin vacantly on a cue from beefy orderlies. It was all stage-managed. There's your fine upstanding lad, Nick. How about a smile for Lucas, then? After fifteen minutes of watching that empty grin, those wandering eyes, Lucas couldn't take any more, he was close to screaming. But Dad could still slur mysteriously in his ear. Which made them fellow-conspirators.

Pauline sits up and folds her arms. She must look her problem pupil in the eye. I've been through hell. So that you could grow up in some kind of sanity. Now, as far I'm concerned, hell is deep-frozen, packed away, and that's that.

Well, you may have packed him off, but it would help me if you were more open about things. Does he need help? Katie had told him he 'needed help', his tutor told him he seemed helpless, quite hopeless, faced with choosing the right questions... Fuck them all, he doesn't need `help' - he needs an input of strength, a power-base in this world. From minute to minute he doesn't know what he needs. If you'd kept the lines of communication open, it might have helped Dad.

Your father is beyond help. He's an old sixties drug casualty...

So what's new? You've fed me all that before, it's meant to explain everything. `He was on drugs...' Lucas mimics the solemn baritone of a government health warning.

Will you let me explain? He was a mystic junkie. A junk mystagogue. Mystic and mystifying. Who wouldn't come to terms with the politics of everyday life. Especially other people's everyday living. . He was willing to believe just about any kind of second-hand warmed-over lunacy you could think of, but he stopped believing in my autonomous existence, he refused to hear me, to respect my rights as a human being...

The rage, the outrage is still there, but she's already saying too much, no bloody tears please, she can't risk resurrecting Nicholas Oscar Beardsley's monstrosity, not now when it's under strong wraps.

Now Lucas is staring at her as if she'd become the buttoned-down maniac. How can she force him to abandon this suicide probe? Only by risking the use of deadly force, a maximum deterrent. For his own good.

He didn't even want to accept your existence, Lucas. Not at first. Not until later. When he thought you might have your uses... Listen, Lucas, just listen... You don't need to watch the tape, I can give it to you right now, live. He doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us. Fundamentally, he doesn't give a shit for you. And never will. Isn't that obvious? This is megaton overkill, she hates herself, nevertheless it's true, surely.

Lucas starts to exclaim - but the hazardous sky flashes a warning, thunder rumbles over their heads as if gigantic iron spheres were rolling through channels of concrete - the gods play pinball like wanton boys - so Lucas, negative status zero confirmed, the Rancid Boy, the Lost Youth, Daddy Bogey's Reject, can only make a secret act of will: this fake rustic nest, the whole tottering shite-house, must collapse on his mother's head, must fall in and crush the pair of them, mother and son, once and for all, get it over with...

For a few minutes he's a nameless nothing in the middle of the floor, head between knees, rocking to and fro.

Pauline has gone up to the bathroom, to clear the blocked sink he's forgotten about. She's always found it best to work through a traumatic matter by doing more work. If only Lucas would do the same. He's very quiet, no thermo-nuclear reaction. She regrets the crudity of her statement. But it's safer for everyone if Lucas accepts that version of the situation. The monster sleeps, it is reasonably quiet, its dreams must not be triggered by well-meant tamperings. She can't face any more retro-visions, or visitations. Her fragile peace is hard-earned.

Lucas listens to the splatter of the rain as his mother creaks around upstairs. So he's a complete waste of space-time, superfluous to all social requirements, so his sex doesn't fit anyone (Katie didn't even want to talk about it), so he fills the dead blank spaces with wrong words, so he's the non-existent child of an un-person, Son of Nowhere Man.

He's gripped the remote control so hard that the tape, muted, has started to fast-forward again - Pauline's mouth, extreme close-up/Pauline talks/talks/talks/Nick cakewalks around supported by male nurses/his eyes are pools of blackness/Pauline talks/he's trapped in oversized trousers/Doctor points at fat handful of tablets/stabs finger in palm/Pauline talks/CLOSED sign over the Great British Time Machine/Pauline talks /the presenter wags his head/this scratch mix almost over, rolling credits...

He's going to rewind and review. Until Pauline physically stops him, if necessary. But can he really face an ongoing war of attrition?

Then he stands up, and switches off the box. The solution is obvious, he's been lost in this video twilight, when the simple actuality is out there, in the raw world.

I'm going out, he shouts up the stairwell as he grabs his jacket.

Where on earth are you going? She starts down the stairs, bewildered. She'd expected him to hole up in his room for hours, blasting the house with his portable (robot house, metallic grindcore, digitised lunacy) but she's lived through these ambient moods before. There's nothing for him out there. It's not as if they were back at Chesterton Crescent, where he could just huff off to some all nighter, like he did every night after he split up with that soppy Katie. There's only one mock-Tudor pub in Abbotsburton, he won't like it there, and he's going to be saturated by the freak weather...

Out. O.U.T. The Outer Limits. OK? He laces up his DMs, looks in the hallway mirror at his thin peaky face under a wedge of glossy black hair. Bite the lip, don't give anything away. The Oakhill Clinic can't be more than ten miles. He thinks he remembers the route. After all, the visits used to be part of his summer routine. He'll walk all the way, if need be. Never mind the bollocking thunder.

Lucas, there's no need for histrionics. You've got enough to do without storming around on the blasted heath like an extra from King L.ear...

I want the keys to the car. He doesn't want to know what he ought to be doing, he just wants to do it.

You're crazy - you're still on L-plates, you don't expect me -

I don't expect a bloody thing, Mother, I just want the map from the car, that's all, nothing else, you don't have to bother about a damn thing, just the keys to the map, nothing else.

She's never seen him so wired up. Or so obsessive. For a second, as if under remote control, from another distant decade, she's about to open her bag and surrender the keys to the VW. Then the truth dawns,

You're not going to Oakhill. To see him. No way. She tries to block the doorway, but he's elbowing past , eyes glaring through her. Suddenly they're stumbling side by side down the overgrown path against the slanting rain, yelling through gaps in the thunder.

If you get your father all worked up in some ridiculous confrontation, after all we've been through, I'll never speak to you again... Anyway, you need an appointment, they'll never let you in without an appointment, without proper consultation...

Which triggers sirens in his head. Out it comes, in burning tongues: she'd falsified whatever was left of Dad, she'd always have some pretext to stop him visiting the Clinic by himself, she's full of bullshit lies, typical teacher, he's sick of her homegrown demonology, he has to know. He's hoarse, but she's still gripping his sleeve, she won't let go, she's trying to steady herself against the gatepost.

Please, Lucas, please, you don't know, you've no idea... But it's too late now, condition red, she recognises that tautness around the eyes, the hardening of facial tone, he's got that flash/flicker radiating from his eyes, you can't wash it out of the genes, even in heavy weather. He's going to go.

Her arm is a limp prosthesis. He's already walking down the wet gravel road, hunched against the rain. He shouts something through the storm, something like forget the bloody map, I'll make up my own story, there's no answer to that and then he's turning the corner by the old Priory, and he's gone.

Back in the hallway she's shivering, but her automatic crisis-management mode has started operating. Phone Oakhill, ask for Doctor Jago - Sorry to trouble you, Doctor, but I'm very concerned my son is on his way to the hospital demanding to see Nicholas he seems very overwrought I don't want him to cause trouble perhaps you could - the sentences are forming neatly, as she dials - and re-dials...

The earpiece is dead. This damned telephone must have been struck by lightning. All the lines must be down.Gulping back tears of frustration at the bloody stupidity of everything, she turns into the living room. Her frozen image is still hanging there on the TV, like a miraculous electronic shroud. It's a nasty joke, this reality.

She switches off the set, but as she tries to eject the tape from the video recorder, she jabs far too hard, the whole thing slips sideways and topples off its cheap cabinet, crashing down on the floor, so that the plastic casing fractures with a sickening crack, and the little hatch at the front flies off into the dust under the sofa. Jolly Abbot Video-Vu do not expect their rental sets to sustain this kind of treatment. She tramps in a panic through the wreckage - splitting the corner of The Lifeskills Show which has slid across the carpet. Loops of shiny black tape spool in all directions.

2. NICHOLAS: SPECIAL WITHDRAWAL UNIT

I have to get it all down. For the record, the Akashic Record of the Aeons, naturally. Wherein all our phantasms are inscribed, squiggles of amoebic neon in the starry darkness, every damned thing we've done radiating across eternity like an old broadcast of Journey into Space on its way to the Pleiades.

And I have to set the angelic record quite straight. Writing very carefully. Not my usual psychedelic scribble - letterforms in doodles of wild purple, loopy loan-words on the run - but disciplined blocks of sensible words, arranged thus, line after neat line in my black-and-red Notebook, made in Taiwan but purchased for me at the hospital shop right here at Oakhill, sunniest hotbed of sanity in all Devon, as Doctor Jago says, whenever he tries to jolly us along.

It's very civilised, ...considering, after all, Mr. Beardsley, it is a locked-up ward, yes? He allows me the privilege of unlocking my old word-hoard in its frumpy box of smelly brocade, my little shop of curious relics. I'm permitted this verb therapy, joining up my grown-up writing. Better this, certainly, than farting in the day-room all day, like old Beddowes, or wandering about strumming a cardboard cut-out guitar, which is the preferred pose of Rog, or Rod, or Rob, or Ron - I haven't yet made out his name, because our mass dosage of Largactil makes everybody's speech slurred.

In fairness to Beddowes, such drugs doth make great farters of us all, our sulphurous bursts of bad air permeate the lower heavens... Perhaps it's really Beddowes' high boredom quotient that's against him. His preferred interpretation of reality is that he's Headmaster of a large inner-city comprehensive school, that our day-room is his staff-room, and that we, fellow-clients of the Special Withdrawal