The trees stood around the canal where it appeared out of the tunnel under the hill he had just walked over. Graham went through a small gate and down a path to the old towpath, through grass and flowers. Some distant part of his mind seemed to whisper to him that he had followed the line of the tunnel over the hill that he had walked from the house in Half Moon Crescent, which was over the tunnel, to here, its mouth.

A sudden, quite physical pain made his guts constrict as he remembered the day he had stood in the street, talking up to her about secret passages down to the tunnel... he shook his head to dislodge the thought.

He found that he had to breathe deeply, more deeply than he had been, to clear his head and quell his stomach. He stood on one bank of the canal, looking over to the far side and the bank of grass there, over the calm, still water. He listened to the distant noises of the traffic; another wailing siren, perhaps the ambulance he had seen. He looked around for a place to sit, and walked along the path a little way, until he came to a place where some tarmac had been scattered and there were black drops of what looked like dried blood lying on the dusty surface of the towpath; flies buzzed.

In the grass he saw a magazine lying, torn. He looked more closely at it, saw a woman's buttocks, over a pair of hairy knees. The woman's bottom was reddened slightly; there was a hand poised, too obviously posed, not in motion, over her. A small breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine for him as he looked, as obligingly as any Hollywood wind-machine stripping a calendar between scenes. The pictures in the rest of the magazine were almost all identical.

He turned away, disgusted with something other than the pathetic but relatively harmless fetish of the magazine, and saw a flurry of flies swirl into the air from something dark in the grass; it looked like an animal's leg.

He closed his eyes, willing tears to come, some final part of him giving in only now, wanting the surrender to animal emotion which until now he had fought against, but as he stood there he could feel no tears coming, only a son of resigned, ugly bitterness, a comprehensive revulsion for everything around him, for all the people and their artefacts and thoughts, all their stupid ways and pointless aims. He opened his smarting eyes, blinking angrily.

Here it was; this was what it all really meant; here was your civilisation, your billion years of evolution, right here; a soiled and tattered wanking-mag and chopped domestic animal. Sex and violence, writ small like all our standard fantasies.

The pain in his belly which had afflicted him earlier returned, sharp and fierce as a rusty blade.

It swelled in him then, like some wildfire cancer; a rapid disgust, a total allergy syndrome directed at everything around him; at the filthy, eviscerated mundanity of it all, the sheer crawling awful-ness of existence; all the lies and the pain, the legalized murder, the privileged theft, the genocides and the hatreds and the stupefying human cruelties, all the starveling beauty of the burgeoning poor and the crippled in body and brain, all the life-defying squalor of the cities and the camps, all the sweltering frenetics of the creeds and the faiths, all the torturingly ingenious, carefully civilised savagery of the technology of pain and the economies of greed; all the hollow, ringing, bullshitting words used to justify and explain the utter howling grief of our own cruelty and stupidity; it piled on him, in him, like a weight of atmosphere, that awful mass of air above for those moments no longer balanced by a pressure within, so that he felt at once crushed, smashed inside, but swollen too; bursting with the sickening burden of a cheap and tumid revelation.

He turned towards the canal, his belly like a lump of lead inside him. His tongue felt swollen; there was a thickness in his throat, and his tongue, that instrument of articulation, felt like a great poisoned sac, some gland caught full of all the body's wastes and debris, tight with putrid volume, ripe as any bloated carcase. He fought the urge to heave, tried to ignore his trembling guts. He took his portfolio, and by the side of the canal he opened it and drew out the large sheets of paper inside.

They were drawings of her face, done in hundreds of small lines to make a maze within them, all carefully penned in thin black India ink. He thought, still, even now, that they were the best work he had ever done.

He looked at them, swaying as he stood, feeling sick, sick to the stomach, sick to the brain, then one by one he dropped the drawings into the slack, limp waters of the dark canal. They slipped and side-slipped through the air, some falling together, some landing all by themselves, some landing face up and some face down, some obscured by others, some gazing up at the clear sky or down into the cloudy water. He watched as the water penetrated them, making the ink run blackly over the many versions of her face, while the slow current of the canal gradually took them, moved them, swept them away from him, towards the mouth of the tunnel, back under the hill and the houses and the distant traffic.

He watched them go, standing there, less sick now, the pain in his guts still there, his eyes unable to cry, then he zipped the portfolio up again. He was about to go, then he changed his mind; he went back to the grass bank, picked the spanking magazine up, threw it into the canal too, then waved the flies away from the bloody stump of black and white furred leg, picked it up by one still protruding claw, and slung it in the water as well.

He watched it all float towards the tunnel mouth; the great flat rectangles of paper like black-stained leaves from some strange winter tree; the magazine, like some dead bird, its spine sunk, pages like limp wings; the barely floating stump of leg, a couple of determined flies still hovering over it.

Then he kicked the blood-spotted dust off the towpath, sending it into the canal, stones sinking, dust coating the water. And as the dust floated in the air and on the water, and settled slowly on the path again, he walked off; away down the canalside, back up towards the little gate, towards the city again.

END