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empty reservoir near Staines. The ripped up rafts of human figures flying actually
inside
the disintegrating plane, achieving true weightlessness at last, just at the point at which their burial anticipates their burial.
    And once this canvas had come to him, the others had followed. They were all depictions of the safest and most urbanely dull of modern environments, but subject to an horrific destructive force which shook, stirred and ultimately shredded their human cargo. The interior of the Stock Exchange beneath a tidal wave; the booking hall of King’s Cross tube station on that November night in 1987, at the very instant the fireball erupted; the car deck of a ro-ro as the green gush rolled in, and the red and blue cars were flushed out; instant Ebola attacking Ikea, the processing hordes of young newlyweds purchasing flat-pack furniture liquefying, still hand-in-hand. And so on, twenty canvases in all.
    And while at the point of conception Simon had imagined that these paintings would be satiric, concerned with the futile impermanence of all that was held likely to last, as he worked on them he saw that this was not so. That the paintings had nothing to do with the settings, the backgrounds. That these were little more than montages, depictions of crude massifs and underwater reefs, on to which children might rub celluloid transfers of suitable human figures. And that it was those figures that were the real subject of the paintings.
    The human body had – Simon felt – been pushed out over a purely local void, an overhang of time; it dangled there, a Navaho on a steel girder, pitting its head for headsagainst the sheer cliff of just-constructed, concretised techno. The wind had changed and left Simon’s human subjects distorted in the attitudes required to live in this world of terminal distressing. A crick had run through the Tower of Babylon, leaving language communities on all five hundred floors with wrenched shoulders and necks. This was what he wanted to express, but had the deregistration of his own body preceded, or followed from this? He could not tell.
    At around the same time he had met Sarah. But he wasn’t sure that that was working, or that the working was working. All that he knew was that in the last year the days had got longer, had been filled with painting and the new people she introduced him to. That the hangovers had come, a hopeful sign because before – in the caesura, the and between Jean and – there had been no over, only hang. Further, that his children had in some way come back to him, felt comfortable with him once again. Sensed that the parasites eating him from within were, at least for the moment, sated.
    Where was he? He was in Oxford Circus, standing outside Top Shop smoking an unfiltered Camel, looking across the arena of tar towards the reef of Regent Street, which curved away to the south. He was standing back from the pavement, against the plate-glass window. His temples thrummed and he felt claustrophobic as he envisioned the whole scene dumped upon by a giant ape. A post-imperial Kong who smashed the windows of the department stores and pulled out wriggling handfuls of humans, twined between his digits and caught like the termites they were in the cable-thick fur on the back of his huge hands. Thesepeople were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist.
    Mmmm …! Crunchy … and yet chewy. The clacking and gnashing of this car-park of a mouth filled the precincts, bio-noise greater than mechanical tumult. He paused, spat out a traffic warden whose reflective bandoleer had caught between his lower seven-and-eight. Inappropriate dental floss. He flexed his mighty arms, drummed on the roof of Hamley’s and let out a massive “HooooGraaa!”, which seemed to mean: I am body. I am
the
body. Sod