Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash.

The Set Up

“In the morning, woken in the morning, bright lights came and went in the night and I awake with a pounding head. Scars on my wrists and legs and as result of apathy with decisions and the broken rule of the bourgeois. The Roman Empire never ended. We are all still locked in the iron chains of the Holy Roman Empire. It lives under another name now, the Imperial Republic of America. The Fatherland has been stolen by the Nazis, the Motherland stolen by the left-wing commie bastards so what could they choose? Homeland, homeland security the secret police of the NEW WORLD AMERICA and we are beguiled into this bisociation of freedom and entrapment without an understanding of our place in this socio-economic state.”

Homeless man, spittle around his mouth, one eye swollen shut and the other feverish stands on the corner of Wine Street and shouts to anybody that cares. He is dressed in rags and stolen trainers and a t-shirt that reads: “You never see a SHIT HAPPENS sticker on a Rolls Royce.” What he says is probably the truth but there is nobody around to listen. It is 4am. Morning has not started yet. It is pre-morning, the embryonic state of everyday that most of the world misses because they’re all too busy cataloguing the previous days events in stage 3 REM sleep.

Without an audience, he is no performer. Suddenly sullen and silent he moves on, the space vacated scraped clean.

51' 27" N 2' 35" W, just up from the mouth of the Avon where the channel cut has been bridged by Brunel in 1864, Bristol is what it is. A teeny tiny city with delusions of grandeur, from the top of the hill Georgian terraces look out over post war slum housing. The Luftwaffe thoughtlessly reconstructed the old city during their attempt at recreating the 1000 Year Reich past the White Cliffs of Dover. In return, Bristol though it might be nice to cover up this mess with badly designed tower blocks and architectural monstrosities. But we’re lucky really, Bristol is a beautiful city no matter what people say, these people usually don’t look up and see the buildings.

The homeless guy heads along Wine Street towards the shopping centre of Broadmead. The shops won’t be open for hours but if he’s lucky there may still be food to steal out of the bins of Marks and Spencer, freeganism is the homeless way to living.

Already he has been watched by a security guard in an office block only 100 yards away through the city security cameras. But he’s harmless. They’ve got better fish to fry, when the students wake collect their loans from the cash points dotted about the city they never realise that these same cameras are recording pin numbers typed in and storing them for security purposes.

“It’s a dog eat dog world and we’re the fucking wolves,” the fat man in the suit snorts another line of coke off the girl’s chest. She’s still warm even though he drowned her in the bath two hours ago. It’s the way the wolves like it.

Our homeless man ducks right and leaves the Eye of our Big Brother.

Bristol was created on the proceeds of slavery and tobacco, ‘all shipshape and Bristol fashion’ comes from the fact that shipbuilders of Bristol were the best in the world. Not any more, there are no longer ship builders in Bristol. Bristol used to export more slaves from the Dark Continent to the New World than anywhere else in Britain. There is an irony here, Bristol has the largest population of gun-toting, drug dealing, pimp killing Yardies outside of Kingston. But we’ll leave that part of the city alone for now. The great Wills Empire bought up most of Bristol, built the foundations of what is now the University of Bristol. Tobacco companies are still prevalent around the Bristol basin, but they don’t like to advertise. Plus, they have a no smoking policy.

Our homeless man crosses past the Pip ‘n’ Jay church, across the end of Victoria Street and onward towards what could well be Redcliffe. He’s no longer limping and he’s discarded his coat in the bin in exchange for the luxury collection of chicken wings somebody had thrown out.

All around this part of Bristol and the Station are huge tower blocks, businesses of a financial bent, the controllers of modern society, we’re no longer in a government controlled by the people, we’re the pawns of a government controlled by the major financial houses, and a lot of them have grown up around here.

He looks up and clocks every security camera within the area. Out of the five of them, three are watching him. He takes several paces to the blind spot that Liber Exegesis had told him about.

The day is 23rd May 2003.

Towards the south west of the city is The Barrow. The Barrow Hospital was based at Maudlin House, a manor house in the country side. Once owned by Lord Mowsley, after his death it reverted to the Local Authority in 1951.

Lord Mowsley was part of the London Set in the early 20’s, but his eccentric behaviour eventually ostracised him from the set and sent him back to Maudlin House where he spent the final years of his life building a real-life Xanadu, which was never finished. There are many other rumours about the strange house and the, previous, stranger tenant, but we will not get into detail with this for many pages to come.

The Barrow is a hospital for people who are at odds with the world they perceive. Once, they would have been shaman, voices of the gods. Nowadays their gods are not understood by our society and they are classified ‘mentally divergent’ and are locked up all over the country in places like Barrow Hospital.

Mason Dixon takes off his glasses and massages his temples. He looks at the sheets of paper in his hands. More pages from Room 23. That man does not stop writing. Ever since he came out of his catatonic state and asked for a pencil and paper he has done nothing but write and write and write. Sometimes it is poems, sometimes plays, novels, speeches and essays on a vast range of things from causality to how scientists know dogs dream in back and white

They bought the John Doe in way back in 1983. He was catatonic; reports said that he had walked out across the M1 motorway wearing nothing but a dressing gown and tears streaming down his face. Police picked him up and he didn’t say another word for another 13 years. Most of the time he lay facing the wall with that lost, sad look in his eye. No amount of therapy had cajoled any further information out of him. He would sometimes pace by the windows of the day room, sometimes even — after five or six years — have a violent tantrum or two. But other than that… nothing.

Mason was on duty when he first spoke. He wasn’t director of the clinic then, just a doctor and was walking the wards. The John Doe (as he was then) was sitting in an old battered armchair beside one of the windows looking out over the lake and the hills beyond.

Mason wandered into the day room, nodded to Nurse Bird (previously Nurse Bird had been an exotic dancer and after an almost consistent series of heart attacks by her clients had decided that perhaps nursing would be a better career to follow) and wandered over to Mr Parks.

Mr Parks was an old man who had been in and out of places like this since the late 1930’s. His case files were like reading a history of mental health treatment. He had had everything, ECT, anti-depressants, ice-cold baths, herbal remedies, pain therapy, colour determination and mood smells. But he was a failure to the history of mental health. He was in that group of incurables. Some even suspected that there was nothing wrong with him and he was just enlightened, but the Society for the Advancement of Psychiatry had known better.

Mr Parks had a condition called Decker-Jannick Syndrome. In laymen’s terms, he knew stuff he couldn’t, or shouldn’t, know. He knew that John Stafford, the porter, would have a son called Jeremy who would have a cleft palette and excel at chess before John Stafford’s son was born.

He know that before Stafford had got married, before Stafford started work at the clinic. More importantly, he knew this before anybody else at the clinic knew about John Stafford.

The Executive board liked to keep Mr Parks quiet, keep any unnecessary attention away from him, he could be a problem to the Local Authority, the Government, Whitehall, even the goddamn world. So it was ‘suggested’ by an anonymous yet incredibly important source of funding that he was locked up, drugged and kept quiet.

He was ill; this ‘enlightenment’ had nearly killed him many times. Spasms, mild strokes, blood vessels bursting in his eyes and brain and bowels, leaking blood from every orifice, the price was high. But Mr Parks could do nothing about it. It was an illness, an illness that neither the Clinic, nor any other clinic could cure.

“Morning Parks,” said Mason with a little wave to the old man as he hunched over a table full of solitaire. In his hand he held the 5 of clubs.

“I knew you were going to say that,” cackled Parks. A bubble of blood formed at the corner of his mouth and he sucked on his portable oxygen mask.

“Very good, very good,” Mason smiled. He often wished there was more he could do for Parks, but the old man seemed fairly positive with his lot.

“Mr Kowalski will want to talk to you later today,” said Mr Parks. “There is darkness all around him and I know not much about him, only something real bad. Felt nothing like it since that Bay of Pigs thing.” Parks started coughing enough to alarm a nurse who adjusted his drip to ease the pain.

“Take it easy Parks,” said Mason checking the old mans pulse and wiping blood from his face. “Who is Mr Kowalski?”

Parks nodded towards the silent John Doe in the armchair.

Mason went to the silent Doe. “Your name Kowalski?” he asked.

Nothing.

“Maybe later,” he muttered to himself and wandered off to check Miss Plath.
That wasn’t her real name, but she was a poet that had tried to commit suicide, only it didn’t work and she had found herself here with horribly scarred arms and insisted that was her name. So it stuck.

“How are we today Sylvia?” asked Mason.

“Bloody awful oh doctor of mine. This place gives me the creeps. What are we but the living dead? Destined to die between these four walls with nothing but the trappings you give us. All we wanted was an exit and you took it from us and keeps us in purgatory.”

“Now Sylvia, we won’t have you talking like that in front of the others,” said Mason. “You know that we are here to care the very best for you and make sure that your… you are looked after and well.”

“Doctor doctor doctor, I am well… Aware that you only care the best for us, but I want to care the best for me and to do that is to let me die. This place is no longer happy when all the colour is drained from it.”

“When was the last time you wrote anything?”

“Long long long ago I wrote poems about the light and about the leaves and the sun, but these days they have taken all the blackness from me and corrupted what I want to say into something else. So I’ve trapped them. I write nothing and the poems can’t steal my thoughts to show anybody else.”

The medication wasn’t working, thought Mason and made a mental note to change the prescription.

“Can I have a Pencil and some paper please? I would like to write a poem.”

It was the John Doe.

He was sitting in his armchair, smiling tiredly as if woken from an extremely bad dream.

It was the 23rd April 1997, six years before our homeless guy evaded security on the streets of Bristol.

Two weeks late Mr Parks had died. Something he didn’t predict.

“Can I have a Pencil and some paper please? I would like to write a poem.”

“Is your name Kowalski?” asked Mason.

“Jacque is my name, can I write?” the voice sounded tired with a wavering timbre like a vibraphone. This vocal chord had not been used for so long that there was a rusty edge to it.

Mason smiled. “You can have anything you want Jacque,” he said.

Nothing so special about the time Kowalski started talking, well… nothing that anybody else noticed. For Ferdinand Stringer it was a significant part of his life’s work. When Kowalski spoke the time, he noted, was 10.22 am precisely. He had been following the second hand around and heard the wavery voice just as the red hand crossed the twelve on the clock on the wall of the day room. 10 + 22 = 32, 3+ 2 = 5, or to put it another way: 1 + 0 + 2 + 2 = 5. Five. Again, there was the synchronicity he had noticed in everything.

This caught his attention; he listened to the ensuring conversation to see if there was any significance.

“Is your name Kowalski?”

“Jacque is my name, can I write?”

“You can have anything you want Jacque.”

“I would like some paper and a pen, a pen so I can write.”

“Sure Jacque, sure. Tell me, why have you started talking?”

“It was time.”

Stringer’s eyes lit up, THERE. There it was… 10.22, it was time. He slapped he thigh in glee and scattered the tiles of the scrabble game he was playing with Susan Durant.

“What do you mean, it was time?” asked Mason.

“I had not felt like talking until now.”

“You do realise that you have not spoken for fourteen years?”

Fourteen. That was too easy. 1+4 is 5 there was the magic number again. But he had missed something, there’s a nagging in the back of his head. What was it? Where was it?

Today was the 23rd. Two plus three is five. There is it.

“I have not felt like talking up until now. I am sorry.” Kowalski smiled wanly and turned to look out of the window. It had begun to rain, blatting against the glass.

“Are you planning on talking for a while now Jacque?”

“I believe so.”

Stringer caught Kowalski’s eye and Kowalski winked at him.

“For the next five minutes at least,” said Kowalski.

Stringer paled and walked out of the room.

The number five is a mystical number. It is a magic number. In numerology it means the master of change and curiosity. It is made up of two prime numbers 2 and 3. These two numbers are hyper-mystical if you wish to clash cultures. You can blame William S Burroughs and a loving relationship with morphine for awakening the cult world to the hyper-number of 23. You will find it everywhere, to the point of cliché we could voyage around the I Ching and “Things Fall Apart”, Hexagram number 23, then via the Bible and straight to the heart of mathematics.

“If you could, you would throw away your laptop and television, but you can’t we’ve made it so you can’t. The onslaught of suggestions we’re subject to is incredible. Advertising has reached an all time high. Subliminal advertising is dead. The stalwart of the 1950’s is dead. Humans are too intelligent to be deceived by subliminal messages for too long. Early studies also found that although a subliminal trigger to buy a product such as —

Interestingly everybody in the conference room hears a different brand name. All except the speaker and a man at the back who has one green eye and one grey eye.

“ — Would make the subject buy the said product they would be left with a feeling of emptiness and dislocation which is excellent for subjects such as Mark Chapman, but for advertising purposes, a complete failure.

“What we’re suggesting is a proto-advertising. In our post-modern world, everything has been done to death. There are no longer new ways to advertise unless —

Here the speaker laughs

“ — Unless we can rewrite the alphabet and create new words that directly suggest to the deepest subconscious without all that bothering around with language and logic. But since there’s no… ha… no chance of that happening we’ve come up with proto-advertising.

“It’s interesting that you present here have all bought the same drink from the canteen. And hands up who bought the chicken salad sandwich bought to the meeting?”

All hands raise, even the vegetarian lady sitting near the front who is nervously picking at the frayed hem of her skirt. She has eaten the whole sandwich. The man at the back was already aware of the proto-advertising technique and ordered the food as to not give himself away.

“Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations. You’re the successful subjects of proto-advertising!”

The room fills with applause. The man at the back of the conference with the different coloured eyes backs out of the room and reports back to a man who needs to know about things like this.

“I’ll now explain how proto-advertising works…”

We’ll leave the speaker to his explanation of proto-advertising because it is long, dull and uninteresting to the most of us.

Unfortunately, this was also a cover for something else.

Several audience members of the conference had been subject to other forms of subliminal brainwashing. One man went home and killed his family because he believed that they were no longer his family, but emotionless replacements left there by a race of giant lizards that David Icke knows more about than he is letting on.

Another woman immediately caught a train to London and doused herself in petrol and lit up the front entrance of the Home Office. Somebody tried to put her out but the burns were too bad and she died in hospital in the bed next to Gerald Oswald who was only in for a kettle burn.

Finally, the young man that was drawing circles in the corner of his brochure went home, shaved his head, set fire to his flat and found himself homeless on the streets of Bristol. He was rescued and given a book called Liber Exegesis by a man with different coloured eyes who had spiked his brand drink with an unusual red powder.

Nobody knows about Prince Charles’ older brother. He will never marry.

It’s an inside job, I’m telling you. Somebody is trying to ruin our economy. Cash points used to let you have five-pound notes. No more, ten pounds is the minimum these days. This is inciting us to spend more money just to float the economy. The only reason spending is up is because they’re not allowing us to save. We’re more likely to spend the rest of that tenner than we are to save it up and put it back into our accounts. The ‘big five’ banks have control of our lives in ways we don’t even think about. I’ve heard it’s something to do with a new form of subjective advertising that’s come out.

Very soon the man with different coloured eyes, the bald beggar and Jacque Kowalski will meet again for the first time for many, many years.

In the meantime we’re lumbered with the body of the dead prostitute that the fat man (known in some circles as Gerald Oswald) had drowned in his £2000 a night hotel suite. Her body was found at 8am the next day by a man walking his dog along the wharf by the Bristol Industrial museum.

A week later, Avon and Somerset Police knew she was called Mary Lester and lived in a squat in St. Paul’s, which was regularly cleared out by the results of Operation Atrium.

Another week after that they released a press release claiming that her death was the result of inter-gang fighting around the Black and White café and normal god-fearing white folks North of the river really had nothing to worry about.

Underneath Bristol are miles and miles of subterranean cellars, rivers, sewers, caves, bomb shelters, basements, vaults, crypts, and catacombs. Not many people know about the full extent this underworld, but there are some.
One of these is a scruffy-looking homeless guy with a shaved head and a t-shirt that claims: “You never see a SHIT HAPPENS sticker on a Rolls Royce.” He’s just leapt down to an area of Bristol down by the area now called Temple and into acres of ruined cellars. These grow out and around the foundations of newer, post-war buildings like roots. Over the years like-minded people have cleaned them out, strutted them up and made them all look nice and suchlike. Some point they were forgotten except for only a few and have become the haunt of all sorts of misfits. The homeless guy is one of those people.

He lights up an old Davy lamp and wanders through various rooms until he finds a room off the main area and slumps into a battered chair. He places the lamp on a nearby table and takes a deep sigh. His eye has been hurting since a smartly dressed young man in a currently fashionable shirt disapproved of the way his girlfriend was being looked at punched him in it. Several times. It was understandable of these types to show untoward aggression in an alpha male dominated society. He was already corrupted, the homeless man thought.

Believing that the way forward was through the smug knowledge of anger and bullying. He had been programmed well. There would be no breaking of him. This fashionable young man would punch his way through life until he realises on the point of death that he had done it wrong. Maybe he might get another chance. Pick a god, roll the dice.

The homeless guy takes out a wallet out of his pocket and examines the ID card inside. It says Nathan Bailey. The picture looks very little like that animal that punched him last night, but since it was taken from his coat as he slumped against it, Occam’s Razor dictates that it was the very same fellow.

Our homeless guy smiles.

Some people say that JFK was assassinated; truth was he was already dead. It was only a matter of time that they had to dispose of the double…

That night the living Sylvia Plath wrote a poem. She had stopped taking her medication by coughing it up when that Doctor Dixon wasn’t looking. It made her feel dizzy for a while but then there was a moment of clarity and she wrote, scratching her old scars active with the tip of a pencil in the pauses between inspirations.

Pools of eyes watching their reflection
The door is dark, the entrance bound
With chains of night
Futility caught like moths in a candle’s flame
Out here we are all alone

By the time they got to her, the pen had let at least six of her pints of blood out onto the floor.

Over the next few weeks Nathan Bailey’s life took a turn for the worse. If he even had the concept of superstition he would have though that the world had suddenly conspired against him. If he believed in reincarnation he would have realised that in a previous life he must have been extremely bad (turns out that he was a Franciscan Monk from near Venice who was murdered after an abortive robbery). Because he believed in very little, or had spent very little time contemplating this sort of this, he was just plain pissed.

“What do you mean I can’t withdraw out any fucking money?” he shouted at the cash point. He had two hundred quid in there yesterday and it can’t have all vanished. A phone call to a call centre in the Indian Subcontinent gleaned no help.

“You fuckin’ arseholes,” he screamed down the phone when they told him that all the money in the bank had been removed earlier that day. And that’s all he could find out; whatever fuck had done it had also closed the account and changed all the security details. They only rang him the other day to double check the details.

The weakest link in any security system is normally human. The 4096bit encryption on most banking transactions worldwide would take, if the brochures were anything to believe in it would take all the Kray supercomputers on the planet 25 times longer than the age of the universe to break. So there are easier ways. Some people call it social engineering. Others call it blagging.

Make a telephone call to your mark claiming to be the security department of the mark’s bank. Its best to ring him at work, reception will put you through and his number is easier to find. Babble on about data protection, security breaches and the suchlike. Put him into a pressurised situation, give him his account details, and say that there could have been a virus or something and can we check other important security information. What is your mothers maiden name? What is your date of birth? Etc… etc…

Next, ring the bank and change your address, answer all the security questions that the mark in the interests of safety has already given you. Change your address to an apartment block. If there are 4 flats there, say your address is now flat 5. If they ask what the current address is, you know that either from information in the wallet of by following your mark for several days and posing to be a door-to-door salesman. While you’re there, change security details so the previous ‘owner’ cannot answer any of them when they ring the bank to complain.

The next day, ring up a different branch, or the wrong department of a call centre branch and request a new pin number. Get it sent to the new address.
By the time you have gone round to the block of flats, rung the buzzer claiming that you used to live there and want to check the hall for mail, collected your pin number, gone to the nearest cash point and cleaned out the account, it will be far too late for the mark to do anything.

Nathan Bailey’s week got even worse.

On Tuesday his girlfriend left him, something about photographs posted to her showing him in compromising positions with several prostitutes. It was his cock that she recognised since it twisted to the left rather alarmingly. He explained that it was a set up. But by then she had gone. Two weeks later she had shacked up with Jason Spearman, a professor of sociology at the University of Bristol. Two years later he died of lung cancer and she inherited over a million pounds. She looks back on the day of the photographs as ‘the best thing somebody could do.’

On Thursday, Nathan Bailey lost his house. A phone call from his housing management service gave him until the end of the month to vacate the property. No reason was given. Under protestation the agency gave several neighbours complaints about loud noises from his property during the day.

“Listen, I wasn’t me… I am at work during the day, they must be mistaken. For fuck’s sake, can’t you reconsider? I’ve had such a bad week.”

They didn’t reconsider. And the 3GB of child pornography they found on his computer after a tip off topped off his Friday.

Bail was set and he was out on Sunday night. Monday morning his body was found in several places down the Portway underneath the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The moral of this story? Don’t fuck with the homeless. You never know what they used to be.

Gaucho isn’t really homeless though. He just fits into the gaps of society and exploits them to the benefit of his little group and their eternal battle. Gaucho isn’t really his name either; he chose it because it sounded good. It is the name of a group of Argentinean Poet Cowboys; they believe in all the right things: love, freedom, folk law and the complete and utter disapproval of the ‘white collar thieves’.

He can’t remember his real name; it took a course of self-hypnosis, meditation, three spirit quests and the skills of a corporate cult deprogrammer from Washington. He believes that without a proper name he is a step closer to freedom.

“Look, some names have associations with them thus limiting other people’s perceptions of them.”

“Bollocks.”

“Serious… think about it. If I asked you to describe somebody called Norman? What have you got? Kinda geeky, kinda grey, still lives with mum?”

“Yeah, I suppose…”

“And if you know a girl called Chardonnay?”

“Fake lips, fake tits and nothing between her ears except cheap champagne bubbles.”

“Now you’re getting it!”

Gaucho was in the Plume of Feathers, a slightly suspect ‘olde style’ bar down by the water in the Hotwells part of Bristol. He’d got into conversation with a guy at the bar. He’d reckoned his name was Chris, and he was right.

“So names are labels, they identify you to a certain class of person, a character mould. They can define how you survive in this society. People whose names are nearer the beginning of the alphabet are more likely to be successful than others.”

“Means I’m more successful than you,” Chris smirked into his pint of Best.

“Probably, but I’m taller and not named after the Son of God. You haven’t seen a guy in here with different coloured eyes have you?”

Somewhere deep in the English Countryside west of London a more sinister conversation was taking place. The location? Gerald Oswald’s country retreat, Brampton Manor.

“Yes Sir Rodger, there is something going on in Bristol. It’s new and it’s sending out a beacon a mile wide.”

Oswald waited as the voice on the other end of the antique telephone spoke.
“I’ll have to send down a team to find out if it’s the boy or not. I’ve a feeling that Bowie is behind this.”

The voice on the phone spoke again.

“Sir Rodger, you have nothing to worry about. It’s just going to be a blip. We’ll do an advert campaign and see what that brings out.”

There is another theory that you should never trust people who have two first names: Diana Spencer, Bruce Lee, Philip K Dick. Look at the evidence; Lee was killed by an underground group of Shaolin monks for releasing secret martial arts techniques to the enemy Americans. Philip K Dick was habitually investigates by the FBI because of his left-wing sympathies and his style of writing that regularly denounced the American institution and current reality models. Official verdict of death was a massive heart attack, but it has been know that the FBI and other ‘unsavoury’ agencies have used certain drug mixtures that can induce heart attacks and leave no residue. Look what they did to Danny Casolaro…

And Diana, where shall we begin? The fear that Dodi Fayed, an Arab might wield undue influence over the future king of England, Prince William. They would be the power behind the throne. A muslim? So the Royal Family had MI5 set up the ‘accident’.

Something was certainly ‘going on in Bristol’ the night of 23rd May 2003. A plane from Amsterdam carrying a man with two different coloured eyes landed at Bristol (Lulsgate) airport, the pilot was promptly arrested for being blind drunk and on duty. The authorities were notified when the Head Steward had overheard him babbling about the thoughts being put into his head by the bright lights following the aircraft.

In a converted rectory south of Bristol two men wearing suits entered through the backdoor and injected a clear liquid into an unopened pint of milk in the fridge. The owner of the house, Jeremy Peters, would later go out and beat the owner of the local pub to death, then throw himself under the wheels of the 0304 to Weston-Super-Mare.

Bristol’s Chinese community locked their doors as night fell and spent the evening praying at their ancestral shrines for strength and protection. It seemed to work.

Strange lights were spotted on the Downs; there was at least one fatality with somebody following the dancing light over the edge of the cliff to the Avon below.

Unusual power cuts flashed across the city spelling out occult symbols across some of the larger commercial buildings.

For those in the know, it was an important night that would change the destiny of one young lad.

His name is Alisdair McAllister.

“I’m telling you, the banks and corporations have the control these days, not the governments. Look at it; Even out chancellor has to borrow money for the country. That means he’s made me personally in debt at an interest rate of an unknown quantity for an unknown period of time. Is that a way to run your finances? And I will have to pay him back in these taxes at his rate and his period of time. I also know that the interest rate will never go down, it will only get more and more expensive, but that’s okay because our banks have a free licence to print money now it’s no longer redeemable for gold. Best way to get out of it? Don’t have any possessions or money, that means they don’t’ have a grip on you. Here’s who I’m waiting for, it’s been nice talking to you.”

The limousine left Bristol Airport and headed like an arrow to an area of Bristol known as Hotwells after its therapeutic springs. The driver barely acknowledged the passenger as he weaved through the light rain and the lighter traffic. It was a weird night, he thought. He could feel it in his bones. It was a night that people like him stayed home because people like his passenger were out.

“Stop here,” said his passenger outside a particularly disreputable pub called the Plume of Feathers.

His passenger got out and thrust a wad of twenty-pound notes into his hand.
“Go home and stay home until the sun comes up. Your loved ones will need you.”

The thing that the limousine driver noticed more than the unusually large tip was the fact that the passenger had two different coloured eyes, one green and one grey.

Deep in St. Paul’s at exactly the same time the door of the limousine slammed shut Tintin was just getting herself out of a fight.

“I’m not out for trouble.” She hated having to put on that accent.

She is a large black woman, well over 6’6, pretty skinny with neat quiff.

Her opponent is a Yardie the size of a policehorse who rules the Inkersman public house. One of the most dangerous pubs in Bristol, its clientele is almost exclusively illegal immigrants, yardies, foreign prostitutes and eastern European gangsters.

“Y’ fukin’ stranger. Bitch, hand me da blood clot ting.”

A girl with a pierced lip takes a butcher’s knife out of a plastic bag and hands it to the Horse. She spits on the floor by Tintin’s foot, a globule collecting dust.

“I is gonna carve you dry.”

Tintin has to act fast; she needs to be somewhere else real quick. Her informant was wrong about the location and, at a later date will have a whole world of trouble of his own.

Gaucho and Bowie sitting in the Plume of Feathers:

“We need to regroup the team. Me, you, Tintin, Kowalski and the boy.”

“What boy?”

“Somewhere in Bristol is a young man called Alisdair McAllister and we need to recruit him before they do.”

“So he’s pretty important then?”

“Think this current reality construct might depend upon it.”

To: hannover5@aol.com
From: A.McAllister@bristol-city.gov.uk
Subject: RE: The Matrix
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Who the hell are you? And why are you sending me these emails?

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

To: A.McAllister@bristol-city.gov.uk
From: hannover5@aol.com
Subject: The Matrix
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A,
Thought you might find this article from July’s edition of VT. Thought it might be right up your street.
Hannover5

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“We all know about Keanu Reeves and his humdrum hero Neo that starts off computer geek and then ascends to Godhead, but the Watchowski Brothers may have bitten off more than they could chew when they came up with several of the concepts of their blockbuster Matrix trilogy.

Scientists and Computer Technicians are fully aware of Moore’s Law. Every 18 months computers double their capacity. This theory has been correct since the early home computers of the 1980’s and for the foreseeable future.
Dr Martin Glazer, Program Director of Project Minto at MIT has come up with an interesting theory: “At some point in the future computers will become so powerful that they will be able to generate virtual reality that is indistinguishable from ‘real’ reality.

“Statistical analysis indicates that the probability that this has already happened is far greater than the fact it will happen. Ergo, we are all plugged into a super-Matrix, and what we call reality is just a construct of someone, or something.

“We are, in essence, all in the matrix.”

Professor Hans Raoul, Chair of Anthropology at Oxford University continues, “An interesting concept, a modern take on the justification of the unknown. No longer do angry gods explain thunder, now we have a simulation. The software is reality, viruses and glitches in programming explain out all the supernatural events and the creator… it is almost too simple.”

What does than mean for us? Nothing really, although we’re all plugged into reality, isn’t that just another metaphor for life itself?

“What about Kowalski? Last thing I heard he had gone nuts trying to work out the world and they had him locked up somewhere.”“Think that was a setup, although I’ve got no proof. They’re moving in increasingly odd cycles recently. I think they’ve been aware of McAllister and may already have him.”
“That’ll make our job more difficult.”

Tintin grabs the Yardie’s wrist and smacks it against the bar. It is a convenient time for the stereo to fall silent.

“I don’t want any conflict here,” Tintin repeats.

The Yardie lunges at her with the knife. It scrapes along the side of her jacket.
Tintin crouches down as if she is sitting on an invisible chair and starts making a hypnotic back and forth, side-to-side defensive movement.

All of a sudden she throws her body round reaching out to the floor to propel her leg round and up into the face of her attacker. By the time she spins back round the Yardie is unconscious on the floor and the girlfriend looks on with her jaw open.

“I’m not after any trouble. I’ll leave you be,” Tintin says and walks out the door.

For someone who has never seen the dance of Capoeira before, it is an amazing sight.

The next day Mason Dixon gets a telephone call from one of the executive board, a Mr Oswald asking about the condition of Mr Kowalski. Dixon informs the caller that he is awake an animated. He mistakes the sharp intake of breath as a sign that this is a good thing. He tells Mr Oswald that if there is no change to his condition and the psychiatric evaluation concurs then they will have to release him. That can’t hold people when there is nothing wrong with them can they?

Mr Oswald tells Dr Mason Dixon that he would like to come down and visit Mr Kowalski personally as he is a friend of a relative and has a personal interest in the well-being of this particular patient.

Warren Hawkins was a journalist for the Bristol Post and was currently bedded down in the Salvation Army hostel out in Easton. This part of Bristol was full of charitable agencies, social services departments and cheap housing. Smack was cheap round Easton too, so all the ne’er-do-wells eventually drifted to Easton.

The Salvation Army kept a homelessness hostel in the back streets of Easton. It had over 150 beds, all of which were filled every night of the week. Many new faces, though mostly the same old faces. The council had statistics claiming that there were only 400 homeless people in Bristol. Most of the dependant upon drugs, particularly methadone and heroin.

How wrong could the council be?

Warren Hawkins knew only too well, he had gone undercover a month ago to see first hand what the homeless of Bristol had to deal with day in, day out. He put on his grubbiest clothing, and went out and spent all his money getting really, really drunk. He then put his ID, keys and spare change in a bag and buried it in a safe place. Warren was a perfectionist.

It only took him 5 days to realise that there are no homeless people in Bristol.

His first conversation was with a tall Scottish man with wild hair and an equally wild beard. He was working for the South Gloucester News, a special on abuse within the Salvation Army. The guy in the bed next to him was from Delhi Chronicle. He was finding out how life was not always roses for immigrants to England. He had a hotel in London and the paper flew him out.

He soon found that every ‘homeless’ person that he met was another undercover journalist pretending to be homeless for an inside scoop on something or other.

This, in itself, would have been a great story. Except he couldn’t remember the safe place where he buried his ID, keys and money. And nobody believed he was who he claimed he was. Even the security at the Bristol Post turned him away with a pleasant “fuck off scum.”

He was trapped, and, currently, the only homeless person in Bristol.

Tintin’s informant was none other than Nathan Bailey.

Mason Dixon has got a hangover the size of a bus and there is no concentration in his eyes. Today will not be a good day for him. One bottle of wine too many and the next day has cancelled all over it. It was the call from Oswald. It had disturbed him. He wasn’t sure why, but it had. The sudden interest in Kowalski seemed odd.

“I mean Kowalski’s okay, there’s not actually anything wrong with him. He just shut down one day and then just came up again later.”

Veronica Dixon was intrigued. Over dinner they often spoke about patients and cases. She was a barrister for Dixon Valentine Chambers in the old part of Bristol, A very successful company.

“What woke him up? There must have been some indication.” “Apart from Mr Parks,” Mason sipped his wine and looked at his wife. They’d been married for 14 years

One plus four is five.

And she looked just as beautiful as the day he married her. And just as distant.

“No,” he said. “Nothing. He just asked me for paper and a pen because he wanted to write.”

“That’s it?” Veronica smiled. “What did he write?”

“I’m not sure, some story about an eternal war against order and chaos.”

Mason popped another two painkillers and waited for his headache to subside.

Proteus was naked, the rough skin covered in a thin condensation that reflected the constant temperature of the room. The workings of its body lay exposed in one corner of the room whilst a thin, thin man with a vicious looking implement fused parts together with a bright flash. Sinews rolled into taut muscles all greased with layers of artificial fat. Eyes rolled in sockets. Damaged goods. All car accident victims or ‘missing’ children kidnapped from the streets. Difficult times to create perfection, these days it was stolen dogs and missing children. All those ‘lost cat / missing dog’ signs? Not for the kebab man as legend goes. Normally they come through one of these ‘processing units’ before treatment with the necessary dogma for survival. When complete, the thin man thought, this WILL be the greatest. Mohammed Ali will have nothing on this. Although why Sir Rodger wants such an infernal creature set up here I’ll never know.

He lowered the fleshy mask onto the face and began to stitch.

Tintin meets up with Gaucho and Repton Jones standing in the centre of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. At one end lies Bristol, growing like a stain on the hillside. As the view opens out to the south so does the city until it suddenly stops at the hills beyond. Only a couple of car lights and twinkling farms lurk there to show any sign of life.

Northwards from the bridge lies the darkness of the downs and onwards to the mouth of the Avon and the Bristol Channel. It is well known that, to save electricity, they only light the south-facing side of the Suspension Bridge. From the north it looms like a derelict ghost.

“Where’s Kowalski?” asked Tintin. He was supping on a fat cigar and blowing smoke towards Bedminster.

“Right where he was.”

“Is he better?”

“We don’t know,” replied Bowie. “I’m getting sub-pituitary interference around the Estate where he’s being held. I don’t like it at all.”

“And I’ve spotted a couple of Dogboys lurking in the parks.”

“Shit. That means the Company’s interested in Bristol for some reason.”

“The boy?”

“Probably, but we don’t know that for sure. So be on your guard.”

“We need to get the boy before they do.”

“What if he doesn’t want to join?”

“He will have to take sides at some point. There’s no place for anybody to stand and watch. When the war heats up, everybody will have to take sides. We just have to persuade the boy that our side is better than The Company.”

“Somewhere in there I think you have a plan.”

“Damn right. But we need Kowalski out of there.

“And what about Book?”

“Last seen in North Africa. Her cell had some issues with a CIA raid that mistook them for Islamic fundamentalists.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. CIA have shut up about their North Africa exercises for the meantime and all UK embassies have been put on alert. It’s a sit and wait.”

“We may need her.”

“We’re gonna need everybody. Even the clown.”

“Shit.”

“Right.”

And as they speak Gerald Oswald is in his car tearing down the M4 towards the distant lights of Bristol. He shudders as they cross the M25. People — terrorists — in times past had damaged this part of the world. And we never knew until it was too late, he thought.

“You know that, Kensington?”

His chauffer glanced in the rear-view. “Know what, Mr Oswald?”

“Know why there are so many road works round the M25?”

“No, sir.”

“Interesting state of affairs. We never found out that our plans for the ring-road had been tampered with. Tampered by them. You know who I mean. Enemies of the Company. They’d changed the plans for one of their own. They struck gold. Chaos. The sheep in their rows and rows of cars could do nothing but boil like a pressure cooker. Ever since we’ve had anarchy in and around London. People sitting in traffic are allowed time to think, possible even get a little independence from the suppression we have laid upon them, and they think and they get frustrated and the get angry. Then they fight back. In their little petty ways. They fight back against the system. Against us. We are the system. We are in control. Never forget that.”

“Sir.”

“With one foul swoop they had exercised a tiny little twitch of anarchy and we’ve been fighting the fallout ever since…”

“...fucking work of genius, said the homeless guy next to Warren Hawkins. He’s not really homeless, he’s investigating the theory that there are poetical anarchists dotted all over the country fighting in their own weird way against the system. He expects Life to pick this story up.

“They switched the plans for the M25. this causes chaos and traffic jams and no end of trouble for The Man. People get stuck in jams and go loco. Resigning by the thousands, fleeing the country for a quieter time in… in anywhere else, having nervous breakdowns, beating their friends to death with the stress of it all. There are always side effects. Some of the more creative people spent time thinking, plotting, creating. They’d go home are write, sing, collect strange fetishes, draw a new vision, think outside the box. They’d waste work time creating a perfection all for themselves. They would no longer look upon authority as a giant thumb keeping them in place. now it looked more like a bag they could tear out of. To tear out into a brave new world.

“Ever since the opening of the M25 The Man has been slowly trying to revert the M25 back to its original plans of frictionless activity and maximum authority. New lanes, controlling how fast people must travel, road works everywhere.”

“You’re shitting me!” the guy in the laughed at his companion. “All that stress to make a few people to think differently. What cock.”

“Worked for me,” said Gaucho. He’d left the other two on the bridge and needed another pint. Something to take the edge off tomorrow.

“Think about it, the people need a little push once in a while. Otherwise we get a nation of ‘I wonder what’s on after the news’ and that means they have won.”

The man swigged the dregs of his drink and ordered another two. The smoke of the Cadbury House weaved around the forms of uber-cool students who had no idea that the machinations of the world we being discussed mere feel away.

“They?”

“Y’know, the usual. Them, the Government, the Financial Institutions, the Banks, the Big Players, Companies, hidden cabals of intellectuals bent on controlling the way we think. Take your pick.”

“It’s all a conspiracy.”

“Apparently so, but they always exist until they are disproved. If we can’t disprove them, then there is nothing indication that they don’t exist. Therefore they do.”

“But to stress people out using the traffic jams of the M25 to achieve some form of enlightenment is just daft.”

“Nevertheless, we have to assume it is true because there are no facts stating otherwise. Now if we take that further we can safely assume all manner of weirdness is true.

“Have you ever heard of the vision of Mary at Fatema in 1913?”

“No. Was it some Jesus thing?”

“Sort of. Three French peasants in Fatema, France claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to them in a vision and told them 3 things. The first two we know about and pertain to such things as predicting the Second World War and the death of Elvis or something, whereas the third message was hidden away by the Catholic Church as being too inflammatory. I think their exact words were along the lines of ‘they are not ready for this yet’. They hid the final message after the Pope read the message, paled and went into a week long prayer to recover.”

Gaucho pauses to sup on a pint.

“What was on the third message?” asks his companion.

“Nobody knows except the Pope and he ain’t speaking.”

His drinking partner looks crestfallen.

“But there is a rumour amongst some of the less ordered staff of the Vatican that claim they have read the message.”

“And are you going to tell me what they reckon it says?”

“‘Best before 22/11/1963’”

The chauffer drove through the gates of Barrow Hospital. Security was never a problem for people like Gerald Oswald.

Mason Dixon was waiting for him at the front entrance with Nurse Bird.
“Couldn’t this wait until morning?”

“Dr. Dixon. My understanding is that Mr. Kowalski could be a witness and therefore I have here a court order to have him removed from the building immediately. I came here in person to nothing would go wrong.”

“But Mr. Oswald, this is most unusual.”

They hurried up the ornate staircase in to the foyer then through reception to the ‘secure’ ward. Oswald knew exactly where he was going.

“I hear that you have the opportunity to become one of the great board of Directors for this fine establishment. Would be a pity to fuck that up.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“Yes, and I know it will work. Professor Dixon. Nurse, this way!”

And with that, Oswald was off leaving Dixon bobbing in his wake.

It doesn’t make a squat of difference what you do. They’ll always have their claws in you. Always. The freedom we perceive which is taught to us and has bound us from a bright and early age is not freedom. It is the representation of freedom, the same way a circle is a representation of a circle. We do not know what free means.

He’d run away to get free. School was doing his head in, his parents always telling him what to do. He had his own ideas, theories, creations ready to sprout forth and every day he felt them slowly being rubbed away. The forced routine of reality programmed into him from all angles. Eat now, sleep then, drink 8 glasses of water a day. Somebody somewhere came up with all these things and now they’re gospel. Nobody looks beyond now and see how some things can be changed for the betterment of humankind.

He rubbed the scar on his cheek where his father’s sovereign ring carved its furrow during a particularly vicious bout of drunken anger. It coiled like a question from his eye to his lip.

His father was no more a human than the next one. All caught up in their petty rules of living and order and the how’s and when’s. Nobody every thought to question they why’s and the what if’s.

A New World Order was coming down and nobody could see well enough to prevent it until it was too late. You had sides to take and wars to fight, but a new season of our favourite American TV import is on tonight so we’ll do it tomorrow.

And we all know that tomorrow never comes.

He was thinking too hard to notice the truck pull up behind him. By then it was too late, rough hands grasped him around the face and Danny Goffey was dragged out of the sidelines of the war straight into the ranks of the ‘processing units’ and the thin, thin man.

Tintin was packing belongings. Time to ship out of the squat into one of the hotels down by the Barrow Hospital. Tomorrow, she and Gaucho would have to rescue Kowalski from the nuthouse and see what had happened to him. Shame Bowie wasn’t gonna be with them. He had to talk to the boy, and if we’re lucky, that will be it. But, she thought, I have this feeling that we’re not gonna be that lucky.

It was only after Oswald had left with the patient Kowalski that Nurse Bird finally realised what it was that had been bugging her since Oswald first stepped in the Barrow. He was one of her long string of heart attack victims.

One that hadn’t survived.

The security cameras glance over Bristol like a lazy mother. The citizens to wrapped up in their TV land to come to too much harm. Just the usual vibrations in the right places. Everybody is doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but the vibrations are all wrong. It is as if reality has been worn a little thin tonight and things are trying to push through. Maybe it’s just the jitters, everybody gets them once in a while. A whole city with the jitters, unnerved and jumpy waiting for whatever electrical interference is about, to go off and bother a less important city.

Down in the centre by the fountains townhounds and club girls in the latest fashions still tread the walk from the coolest of clubs to the cheapest of burger bars. There’s never any consideration for the cold. Minis are in again this year and coats are too troublesome for the hot, sweaty crotch of Club Creation. That twin strip of leg between the fuck me boots (“fuck me!” “fuck you!” “fuck off!”) and the bottom of whatever trendy length of skirt, blue and pimpled and drunkenly shaved is a Mecca for all those horny drunks that are scared of sleeping alone tonight.

Later on it would usually get rougher and there would be more blue flashing lights, but tonight there’s something funny in the air and most return to the false security of their homes to wait for a less unusual night.

Further afield, up by the Gloucester Road, drunks scatter to their hidey-holes as the muggers and their victims stride the streets. Again, it’s quieter than usual.

Nothing to worry the security cameras here, it’s like a nature documentary, the unwritten rule of not interfering. This is nature at work. The cameras observe and record.

Two guys nick the purse of a girl and beat her partner. Nothing to see here. 5 grammes of crack change hands under a street light up near Stokes Croft. Move on. Through the break in the curtains an apartment room gives up its guilty secret. Three men, one girl and a video camera, feeding their debauchery to the world via www.one-night-stand.com. You can see the girl is lapping the three of them up as they ooze and drip and slide in and over her. She takes it like she’s been taught to. They laugh like its all a big joke.

Move along now.

Up by the Suspension Bridge a lone jumper stands. She’s ignored the signs pleading to call the Samaritans. They can’t help her. Neither can they change what is about to happen. The cameras have picked her up as she’s climbed the wall at the far end. It’s too late to help so they record her fall and store it away in case tomorrow’s paper lack a photograph.

The cameras sweep across empty playgrounds, deserted graveyards, silent housing estates. There’s something in the air. A crackle you can almost see, and certainly feel. Most of the city has decided to stay in and leave it to the foolish to venture out on such a peculiar night.

Even though, that night 380 cars get broken into, 28 houses get burgled. 12 people die (only 3 of old age, and 5 with ‘complications’), there are 2 near-fatal crashes, 144 ecstasy tablets were consumed, 4,096 reefers were smoked, 14,093 cigarettes get smoked, 492 fathers beat their children for being naughty, 489 undercover journalists obtain community beds.

And one 26 year old realises that tomorrow will be just another drudging day in an already drudging life.

He doesn’t yet realise that he will become the centre of a new type of war, a war that he doesn’t know even exists yet.

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To: A.McAllister@bristol-city.gov.uk
From: hannover5@aol.com
Subject: Sleep Well Alisdair…
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…for tomorrow we ride for Isengard.

Cazart,
hannover5

This story will continue as a concept album. Watch MrSkinnyFeels.com for its release.