it started with a smell and a warmth around my feet. Without leaning back I reclined further into the cracked imitation leather of the restaurant booth. I mopped the sweat from my brow and waved to the waiter for the third time. It worked.

‘sir?’
‘this water. I asked for flat, not sparkling.’
‘I understand sir, but it isn’t sparkling.’

I looked at the bubbles.
‘Come again?’
‘it isn’t sparkling, sir. It’s boiling.’
‘oh’

it seems I had spontaneously combusted. This would explain the alarmed looks I had been catching from across the room. The polite coughs growing louder and less and less polite as a thin layer of smoke spread like a soiled bedsheet and hovered beneath the electric lights. I tried to maintain control.
‘I think my steak is overcooked.’ A small pile of ash in the centre of my plate. Cutlery wilting like the stems of plastic flowers.
‘well done, sir. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering sir an ambulance, it will be here shortly. May I ask that sir wait outside?’
I hadn’t been paying attention. The flames had spread in waves across the tablecloth parted only occasionally by the screams of the clientele. ‘Hmm?’
‘this is a non-smoking establishment sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

I shrugged, sending fresh flames chasing one another up the curtains. ‘Very well’. I reached into my pocket and poured half a pint of change into the waiter’s hand. The skin of his palm hissed like a snake dragged across hot coals. Dimly I could hear the wail of an ambulance siren announcing that it would arrive too late. The waiter had disappeared along with the furniture.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the chef, peering around the kitchen door. His eyes moved from me to the specials board, from the specials board back to me. A fire extinguisher dangled from one hand, and in the other a cleaver.
‘Glad I’m not eating here next week,’ I thought to myself. And after that, I don’t really think I thought anything else.

For these sick bed poems
These bed sick poemoans
With my mannequin swagger,
I couldn’t catch her if I tried,
She’s waltzing round a weathervane,
Hanging wet dreams
Out to dry.

The paint bubbles on the window sill, as outside old men die beneath steep cathedral walls; and the peel of blue church bells replaces the cry of marble lambs. This heat is impossible, autistic, the surface of the roads and the roofs of the houses all welded to the face of the sun.

And so I received a call from the taxidermist. He was branching out in new directions.
I had spent all afternoon in the hotel, awaiting the call, suffocating, the numbers sweating down the face of the clock on the wall. I had given up trying to read the thermometer and was busy slapping at flies with the lethargic headlines of a folded newspaper. Flies: the first to arrive after bad news hits a human, and faster always than human bad news.

I look down at the dog, asthmatic with all the windows open, tongue unfurled like a red carpet across the floor.

The phone rang. I picked it up and immediately dropped it again, the imprint of the receiver branded into my palm. Cursing, I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the thing and answered.

‘Everything all right there, Mark?’
‘Yes sir, the phone was boiling, that’s all’
‘mmm. You alone?’
‘Me and the dog’
‘hmmm.’ A rasp like snake skin over hot coals. I should have kept my mouth shut.
‘how is the dog, healthy I trust?’
I shudder. ‘We’re both fine’
‘Pedigree or mongrel?’
I put the phone down.

I had only been once to the Taxidermist’s place. An ark of still life, every creature you can imagine, many now extinct, stared down from the walls. A tiger on hind legs, dead bears dancing to no music. Eagles cast motionless shadows from the ceiling, as smaller mammals froze, petrified upon the mantelpiece. All business in that house was conducted in front of a captive audience of thousands, with a glass eye at every window, every keyhole. To stand in the centre of that place you felt yourself followed by entire constellations of glass eyes that glittered in electric light.
As I say, I had only been summoned there once, and once was enough to supply a lifetime of bad dreams.


One hour later the phone rang again and I had my instructions. It had been a long hour. You don’t put the phone down on a man who collects the dead like other people collect stamps. A strain of greed shared only by locust mandibles, busy, all consuming. The obsession of cancer cells, voracious in the dark. An animal rights activist posing as one of the Taxidermist’s employees had taken an entire portfolio of compromising pictures of the inside of the compound and was threatening to leak them to the press. He wants the informant dead. More than that, dead and mounted, minimum damage to the exterior.
And so I decided that if I couldn’t kill flies I may as well try my hand at humans again. The journey to the centre of town is five minute’s walk away, another ten minutes from there to the target. I check the gun. A railway tunnel loaded with late applause arriving early for one Benjamin Calloe , 39 years old, to clog his loose tongue forever. I pat the dog, grab the lead, and leave the flies to court the unwashed dinner plates.

***

It took six love letters to bring the bastard down in that redbrick alley that felt like a kiln, and finally he sank face first into a bag of broken dolls left at the backdoor of a charity shop alongside unwanted toys and linen shirts from long gone relatives.

The first two ricocheted off the walls, the third burrowed like tic into wood paneling.
I was out of breath all ready and the idiot was STILL RUNNING with a blood hound in hot pursuit and this rusty old gun emphysemic in my hand,. God, and the metal’s hot.

I turned a corner and caught a glimpse of him as he stamped on the dog’s head, fired at me, and continued running.

Shit, no time to check on the dog. Poor thing’s dead for sure. It occurred to me that it takes a particularly cruel sonofabitch to do that to an animal. After all, he was only following odours.

Long story short he got as far as the alley and it was a poor choice of alley, wide and straight a\s a wind tunnel, as the barrel of a gun, and all I had to do was aim once and fire oneclicktwoclickthreeclickclick love letters all signed and witnessed by the potwash boy on a fag break.

Even then it wasn’t straight away.
Knees first.
Pious type.

I could read the scrawled childy words on the door through the hole in his back:

‘HELP WANTED’

Then he was down in the dolls and wasn’t going to get up again. I put the gun in my pocket and felt it burn into the flesh of my thigh.

I put my hand on the wall and that burned too. I looked at the potwash boy and he looked at me. We both looked at the gun on the floor and I shook my head:

‘Clumsiest suicide attempt I ever saw, mate’

Expensive habits.

That boy’s cigarette cost me 124 pounds, all I had on me, but you can’t put a price on peace of mind.

This is a poor climate for murder. In cold blood. My arse. It was the sweat that gave me away, about to burst into his hotel room when my hand bloody slips on the door handle and instead of smooth, easy contained I actually FALL through the door and already he’s on his feet and running down the flight of stairs as I try to grab the desk to steady myself and slip on that too. What a shambles. Had to release the dog early to make up his head start. Release a dog too early and the thing gets too far ahead, gets too involved. Nature usurps years of training. Wouldn’t have heard me even if it wanted to.

Mad dogs and English men, dead in the midday sun. Time to go back to the hotel and make the call. The Taxidermist won’t be happy about the condition of the corpse. Perhaps the dog will smooth his temper.

I first began to suspect that Tom was trying to kill me as I tumbled past the potted plants and over the balcony. Bougainvilleas, they were. Need watering. It wasn’t yet dark and the sun still bounced in the glass of the building around. 57 stories up. 57 stories down.

Falling Positions:

1. Armchair Position

The railing caught me at hip height in my lower back. At some speed. As I fell, my legs curled upwards. With my arms in front of me, I looked like a man seated on an invisible couch.

Now, why had he done it? I was drunk, glaring around the room with one eye shut to cope with double vision. I was spinning before I hit the air. I must have insulted him. Him or his wife. Mae. I’ll miss Mae. Happy as a lightbulb sparrow is happy. With bonfire hair and pillow soft skin.

I couldn’t breathe, the wind roared like a motorcycle in hundred forty mile an hour night chaining my breath for fuel. I don’t know if I was screaming. I think Mae screamed.

I had turned, now like a dog swimming, arms paddling towards the accelerating earth, legs scissoring above me. 2. Front Crawl.

I had insulted them. Both. A party. Mae’s Birthday. I didn’t know anyone there and so I drank and wandered round the apartment, eavesdropping in a crowd. Finally I found the seat where I was to spend the majority of the night. A woman with fake tan in December engages me in a conversation about tanning. Do I?
‘Only when I’m in the sun.’
No laugh.
‘Sun beds?’ I suggest.
‘Yeah I’ve heard about them. Some of it sounds a bit dodgy though. Our friend Jackie went to one of them tanning salons and when she come out the doctor told her she’d got of them, them’ her eyes scrolled the ceiling for clues, then, snapping back to me. ‘Misnomers, that’s it!’
‘Melanomas’ I corrected. She wasn’t convinced, but I’d shot her with my dictionary and the conversation never really recovered. I blew smoke at my thighs. I looked at her thighs. I looked at the armchair. I could see her future in that armchair.

3. Man on a Beach

34 stories at a guess. My legs have caught up with me. I’m facing down and almost flat. My jeans ripple, I can’t close my eyes.

I had a wingman. My reflection in the plummeting walls of glass to my right, falling with me. He looked awful.

So Mae and I had a past. And I decided, after I awoke in the armchair, to bring it up. I was the last guest. I was surrounded by glasses, ashtrays and cold snacks.

I hadn’t noticed the cold. That feeling of being thrown into the sea ran all over me, all through me. My arms made the spastic right hooks of a dying toy. Some people feel self-conscious about their weight. They have never felt this heavy.

Tom suggested I step onto the balcony and clear my head. Then he walked over to Mae and gave her a full embrace, and I couldn’t bear it. I stood, leering and reeling like an Admiral kicking at sand castles, hurling insults and taunts like sour confetti, finally trying to kick over the barbecue that held the ashes of lunch.

The apartment’s out door parking is getting closer. What started as shimmering specks have become postage stamps. I can see a small shadow dancing on top a sports car roof like an animated crosshair, and, like a bulls eye drawn out straight in front of me, I know exactly where I’m aimed.

I brought up a secret. Since I was already trading in the past I thought I may as well bring out a shared past between me and Tom, unwanted proof. I let it out. Mae looked at Tom and burst into the tears I thought I’d wanted to see from her. Tom ran at me, maybe I had it coming.

4. Belly Flop

The cement peach coloured in late afternoon. My fall has not gone unnoticed. Scared faces pouring over ornate laundry and dirty banisters. I don’t mind the screams, it’s quieter now. Her smell lingered in the bed sheets and draped itself across the pillows for six days after she left. Below they are running, sharp fish into shadow. I recognize Tom’s Jaguar.
‘That’ll do.’ I thought.

by the taxi rank outside Terminal 2, sheltered from view but not the wind by the stone wall smoking area.
People from every corner of the world, brought shivering together by a common vice.
Every 10 minutes, a calm computerized woman reminds me that my baggage will be destroyed without warning. By whom? Who are these mysterious bag-snatchers? Perhaps they want my duty-free. My pulse quickens. I tighten my grip on my rucksack.
Fat tubular jets, hurtling into the air, gobbling sky, blow tuberculosis on the motorway.
It strikes me as odd that the world’s busiest airport operates such a strict an humiliating non-smoking policy, given that it daily dumps tons of fumes into the air.
Ah well, my hands are cold writing this, the dog-ends are swept up with the caffeine, the bags, and the passengers. I’ll wait here and splutter with the traffic.

The repetitions of the night
Repeat themselves before the night
A cascade of fragrant anvils
Evaporate like the olive beads of prayer sweat
And the repetitions of the night
Are forged as easily,
Your vagrant knee caps evaporate above
And close my eyes
To a cascade of children’s’ shoes
Tap dancing in a field
And drowning moles
With ease.

Today never really began and now the cups of tea are endless.
Next door saw us dancing in the kitchen and shut the curtains on us, and shivered in their fancy dress.
The clay soldiers gaze out the window of the China Star begging with empty terracotta fists for small change,
And the wind throws down pocketfuls of rice at the clientele, me, on my way to get drunk and later borrow money for a pizza that didn’t go down well by the river,
Swollen to the steps of the steakhouse, fat under the Iron Bridge, greased glass rushing and reflecting the lights of the lonely London bound train to make shimmering pillars that burst out the water,
bursting to Waterloo.