he felt the need to fertilize the land himself and stepped in to grab the bog roll and trowel.
Admittedly, the man had certain ideological objections to toilet paper. Indeed, a few years back he’d flirted with leaves and brush but, truly, that was an unspeakable martyrdom. Even so, he wished someone had the good sense to make the stuff more biodegradable or even a credible shade of natural green. He’d read somewhere that the steep face of Everest was little more than a morass of human excrement and sheets of toilet paper. All of it suburban pink, he’d bet. Still, pub bogs only ever stocked white rolls or that medicated grease-proof stuff, so he guessed he was stuck with it.
Yantra opened the van up and leaned inside waving what was left of the spliff.
‘Oy, Jayne. You want some?’
‘Save it me, darling,’ she murmured and nuzzled further into the blankets.
‘Can’t do that, Jayne. This is a dawn doobie. A vampire smoke. A mayfly that expires with first light.’
‘Did you see it then, Yan?’
‘Mu.’
‘Call again.’
‘Yeah and no. I experienced the experience, but the experience wasn’t what you might call an experience.’ She laughed half-heartedly.
‘But it goes on the map, yeah?’
‘The corporeal map, certainly, the map of my incarnation, no change.’
‘Right. Well do us a favour then, Yan. Take your incarnation out for a stroll with Endy and let me get a bit more dreaming done.’
As yet, not much of the morning’s colour had been filled in and Yantra could feel the mu-rain (the cold highland steam which though not rain is equally competent at drenching a person) begin to descend. Even Endometrium who was usually a lesson in life appreciation seemed pissed off. He prized Biddy back open and Jayne made a little grizzling sound.
‘Sorry to drag you up from the underworld, babe, but how do we stand in the dog food stakes?’
‘Well it won’t be in here, will it?’ she said with restrained irritation.
‘No, right. You’re right Jayne. Yeah.’
Yantra moved round the vehicle and awkwardly opened one of the front doors. It reeked of dog food which was a good sign. Then again the whole van did – amongst other things. Endometrium jumped in.
‘Lend us a nose, Endy.’
Within moments the dog located it and dug his wiry body under the Babylon bibs. Yantra leaned over and retrieved the half-full tin. He moved out and Endometrium bounced after him. Yantra dug out a couple of clumps of the cat food with his hand and managed to scrape out the remaining collops with a screwdriver. He wiped his palms vigorously up, down and along the dog’s coarse sides and skipped back round to join Jayne.
She made no noise as he entered the van. He smiled at the lump bedecked with patchwork blankets, only a pair of boots and a hint of suedey head poking out. Kneeling, he began to caress her fuzzy scalp, then comb his fingers through the thin blue fringe at the front. He drew the blankets down a little way and saw that her face smiled drowsily. Lazily, he traced a finger along the arête of her nose.
‘Dog food,’ she mumbled.
‘Cat actually,’ he told her, bowing and kissing the small knob of shoulder that escaped from her shapeless black jumper.
Jayne rolled around to meet him and opened her arms slightly. He manoeuvred in and ran his tongue up along her coil of earrings. She took one of his ginger dreadlocks in her mouth and sucked at it like liquorice, then she pulled gently at his sparse beard and gave his nose ring an affectionate flick. Clawing tenderly at the shaven sides of his scalp, she jerked him down and rammed her rheumy tongue into his polluted mouth.
They glutted on each other’s face for several seconds, rapidly working their hands under layers of greasy fabric. Abruptly Yantra broke away.
‘What is it, baby?’ she drawled.
‘Time.’
‘An a priori synthetic concept, an illusion of mortality. Fuck time, Yan. Just fuck me.’
‘Jayne, we’re out of provisions. We gotta do a milk round.’
‘Just a quickie. A wam-bam-thank-you-Yan. Time can take a breather for ten minutes for us immortals.’
‘Near immortals. I mean we’re good.’ He kissed her briskly. ‘But not …’
‘We are good though, aren’t we?’
‘The fucking best.’ He dived down and kissed her more definitively. ‘But, babe,’ he said drawing himself up, ‘hunter-gatherers must do their stuff.’
He kicked open the doors and flew out with a whoop. Jayne followed him with the trowel and paper.
‘Roll one for the road,’ she shouted and disappeared behind a tree.
Still intoxicated by the strange charm of his morning dream, Sheridan Entwhistle propelled himself from the bed.
Then he remembered and padded across the room with the supreme care his condition warranted.
He opened the bathroom door and was greeted by the sweet coconutty scent of his daughter. He smiled. It smelled good. Unlike Jennifer’s Alpic fusion of spices, there was something touchingly honest about Folucia’s coconut.
Sheridan stared at his face in the mirror. The greying occipital strip of his hair was fluffed out on one side and pressed flat on the other. It looked daft. So he ruffled out the flat bits to match and thought with a grin that if he was ever invited to a fancy dress party he’d style his hair in this way and go as Saturn.
He wiped his hair back down into its rightful place and sneered at his officious appearance. If he was being honest, which he rarely was about his hair, he bloody detested it. Of course, he’d taken his father’s baldness for granted. It had never occurred to him that it might mean that each of his hairs also possessed the genetic instructions of a lemming. Initially it began to go at the front. Then a circle, that seemed to expand by the month, developed in the middle. And throughout his late teens his hair continued this patterned exeunt with all the precision of a syncopated swimming troupe. When Jennifer had met him, she’d said that he was twenty-one going on fifty. His suicidal hair doubtlessly contributed to this impression.
1969, Sheridan figured, was not a good year to be bald. Indeed he held this to be largely responsible for his denial of free love and virtually everything else that was on offer at the time. Too young to bop and too hairless to turn on, tune in and drop out, he wondered whether he hadn’t perhaps inadvertently traded his youth for a head start in business. Indeed at twenty-one he was the advertisement manager for a successful pharmaceutical weekly in one of the fastest growing publishing firms in London.
His procurement of a wife was also a rather unglamorous, inadvertent, and he supposed, businesslike affair.
At the time he was living at home with his mother in Edingley. This however was not through choice. It was a matter of obligation. And sharing a flat in Pimlico or Bayswater with other young business lights would have to wait until his mother’s concatenation of motley ailments finally reached some sort of consensus. To this day, the guilt of half wishing his poor mother dead could deal Sheridan an upper-cut.
Each evening the dread of entering the oppressive, rancorous house would virtually push him to tears. Of course, he loved his mother comprehensively and would never have suggested a home – still, walking through the doorway and merely bidding her good evening was doing something terrible to him. Something that he didn’t, and still couldn’t, understand. Something physical. Something that he had no say over. Yet it was something indubitably wrong and selfish. Something, he was in no doubt, that had much to do with his father who, at times, seemed able to defy the grave and take up disdainful residence on Sheridan’s shoulders.
‘I must say,