‘You thoroughgoing-’

‘You said that, yes.’

‘Wife,’ I said. In a hopeless little voice.

‘Yes, wasn’t that a laugh? The memories will all return. You won’t enjoy them. And you didn’t get any sex. Your life has really been a bit of a waste of time, hasn’t it? If you were to go outside now and throw yourself under the first car that came rushing by – an old Ford Sierra, that would be, imported from Croydon – then who would blame you? You would be doing the right thing. And you really should do the right thing, shouldn’t you? After doing so many wrong things for so long, the right thing would make a pleasant change. What do you think?’

And the Homunculus looked at me. Deeply at me. Intensely at me. Completely at me.

‘It would be the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t it?’

And I nodded bleakly. It would be the right thing to do. It really would. I had been a total failure in life. Everything I had ever done had come to nothing. Life had failed me and I had failed life. I would be better off out of it. Death would be better than this life.

Anything would be better than this life. Death especially.

And so I got up from my bar stool. And I walked across the bar, opened the shatter-glass door and walked out onto the sidewalk of 27th Street.

And stood there.

And a Ford Sierra came streaking towards me. It ran straight through the lights. An old woman was driving it and I saw her face clearly. And she saw mine also. And we looked into each other’s eyes.

And I flung myself into the path of her on-rushing motor car, which struck me with deadly force.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick.

My life all ticked away.

And had it been worth it? Something to remember? Something to be proud of? Would I have made my mother proud? Or my father? Had I achieved anything? Anything?

I looked deeply into that woman’s eyes and felt a sense of ultimate betrayal. The Homunculus had governed my life for the last twenty years. I had been his puppet. My life had ticked and tocked away and I had walked through it as a somnambulist. And I looked into her eyes.

And in slow motion, as it always is, that car ploughed into me, breaking first my ankles, then one hip bone as I struck the bonnet, then several ribs and a right arm bone or several. And then my nose as my head passed through that windscreen. And much glass dug in well and deep, into my forehead and cheeks.

And then, as the car swerved and slammed to a halt, momentum shot my body forward, into that lamp post, shattering further ribs and doing all manner of horrible damagings deep internally.

This was not one of those accidents where someone was going to walk away with a bit of minor chafing and a good-luck tale to tell. No, this was one of those statistic jobbies, another one chalked up dead.

And then I watched it all happening. The crowd that formed, the eager helpers who knew nothing of first aid and caused more damage through their helpfulness. The arrival of the emergency services. Those flashing beacon lights and banshee-wailing sirens. And the policemen, stringing up that ‘DO NOT CROSS’ tape. Asking questions, taking notes.

The woman in the car did not walk away with a bit of minor chafing and a good-luck tale to tell. She was decapitated. Her head rolled across 27th Street and came to rest in the doorway of Fangio’s Bar.

Fangio had watched the whole thing happen. He stood gnawing a bar cloth.

‘That is very sad,’ he told another eyewitness. ‘But on the bright side, the bar will no doubt revert to me.’ And then he went back into his bar, carefully stepping over the fallen head.

They had to use the jaws of life to free the rest of the driver’s body. Jaws of life? That was a bit of a joke. And no one really troubled much to rush over and gather up my Earthly remains. What with me being twisted up into such a dire-looking Gordian knot and everything.

And if it hadn’t been for a lady in a straw hat who drew the attention of one of New York’s Finest to the fact that I was still breathing, they would probably have just tossed a tarpaulin over me and carted me off to the morgue.

The fact that I was still breathing caused much excitement amongst the paramedics, who had been standing around, sniffing the oxygen and smoking cigarettes, and they fell upon my helpless body with great enthusiasm. They were clearly delighted at having an opportunity to use all of the equipment. All the different Band-Aids and braces. All the splints and pads and drips and dual monitors, LIH vascular packages, en-mode image intensifiers and portable nebulisers. Not to mention the hydro-colloid dressings, wound-closure strips, tubular bandages, Hemcom haemostatic bandages and chest-seal tapes.

Which I, in my present state, was quite unable to do.

And once they had transformed me into a passable facsimile of King Tut’s mummy, they loaded me onto a gurney, pushed this into the back of an ambulance, hooked me up to all manner of tubes, wires, chest-drains and whatnots, and then got the driver to drive away fast with flashings and hootings and wailings. And I watched all this happening. All of it. Even though my eyes were bandaged over. I watched it from outside my body, kind of hovering above it, free of gravity, as if in a dream and unable to feel the pain that the mash-up me below was clearly suffering.

And then we hit the ER. And my gurney was rushed along corridors and bumped through double doors and then surrounded by shouting surgeons, all of them shouting at once.

And they shouted all those things that they shout in movies.

‘Give me one hundred ccs of sodium bi-pli-nick-nack, hook up the defibrillator, bring a line in on the pulse oximetrical poliscope.’

‘Hand me a phase-nine sphygmomanometer and chips.’

‘We’re losing him. We’re losing him.’

‘Charge up the defibrillator. Full power. Stand back. Stand back.’

And then wallop went that electrical shock right on through my body.

And wallop I was no longer out of my body. I was back. But then I was out again.

‘No response. Stand back, I am going to shock him again.’

I was now hovering well above my body. I was drifting, in free fall, but falling nowhere. And I could see what was going on outside the Emergency Room. I could see folk in the corridor. I could see Fangio. He had come along. Which was decent of him. Although he did keep going on to passing medics that he had something really important that he needed me to sign before I snuffed it.

And there was someone else I knew. Although now this someone was truly a face from the past. It was Mr Ishmael. And he was remonstrating with medics, demanding that they save my life. That was nice of him.

Then wallop again.

And again I was back in my body.

‘We’re getting something,’ I heard someone say, not too far from my ear. ‘I’ve got a heartbeat, or something.’

And I was back in my body and I stayed.

And they said it was a miracle. But also that I’d never walk again. Nor speak, nor do anything much, really, other than impersonate a vegetable. And I lay there, saying nothing, doing nothing, but hearing everything.

And feeling it, too.

All those operations they did with the minimum or no anaesthetic, because, after all, I was in a coma, so what was I likely to feel?

Well, everything, really!

The cuttings, the probings, the sewings-up. The knittings together of bones. But I lay there saying nothing, doing nothing, unable to move, or to speak, just being.

As tick tock tick tock, my life went ticking by. And then all feeling left me.

One day the members of The Sumerian Kynges came to pay me a visit and sing me a song. The only member from the days when I’d had some involvement was Andy. And I could see him, even though my eyes were closed, as I seemed to be developing some very strange abilities within my vegetative state. Andy looked well; he looked older, of course, but he still had his hair and he still wore that hair in the ever-stylish mullet.