Still life with Volkswagens

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He is dreaming. It is an erotic dream of sorts. It happens. The bombs go off. The balloon goes up. The car is blown apart from within. It is all slow-mo and freeze frame, a carnival of special effects, brightness dancing and hanging in space, shimmering, spinning tinsel, particles that curl and leapfrog, fragments of vehicle that shuffle and reshuffle, furling and unfurling in the dented air; electrical components, shards of glass, slices and slithers of upholstery and optional extras, tatters of fabric and machine. It is all fallout. There is a great levelling, a loss of organisation, a bringing down to size.

He stirs. He wakes up. He is not sure who he is. He is not sure who is the owner of the dream.

♦

At the Milton Maynard Mercy Seat — one of the home counties’ more discreet and unostentatiously fashionable asylums — a group consisting of a dozen or so inmates is playing I Spy. They are a varied though unexceptional group of patients. They display a predictable set of symptoms. There are a few medical or psychological surprises to be found in their amalgams of depression, schizophrenia, neurosis, compulsive, obsessive and self-destructive behaviour. A couple of them claim to be receiving messages from other planets but that too is par for the course.

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