Strip the Willow Read Online Free PDF

long after the glaciers are gone.
    Ye played a stormer, Alison said afterwards.
    Yes, I was afraid I’d come out with drip and grape the city, said Lucy. Like Swinky might have.
    Or trip an rape, said Alison.
    Indeed, said Lucy.
     
    Lucy had known that, by a quirk of rhetoric, it is always tough for your opponents to put the case for garish octopi.
    But she suspected none of the LeopCorp UbSpec Total people were serious anyway. On grounds of expense alone. They had just lashed out on pavementette. Most of them abstained. They had probably just been playing a dummy, flushing out oppositionists to lull them with a meaningless victory.
    What was the pavementette really for, though? When pressed, all Guy said was that it was the coming thing. It had a thrilling top speed, apparently, still awaiting trial.
it’s aabody’s show
    Alison arrived on the balcony briskly, shaking her hair like a retriever fresh from a bog, and knocking moisture off her sweater.
    – Hi, aa. Hi, Luce, she said, nae coat me, wish that rain wid pack it in. I micht as weel hae come by flume.
    – Right, said Guy, I’m messaging the Fastness now. And, by the way, ladies, inaugural Spectacle or not, this had better be good.
    – Weel, laddie, said Alison. It’s nae jist us, it’s ye as weel. It’s aabody’s show.
    – Canton, can do, said Lucy, deliberately glib, to Guy’s face. But can they? she thought. Can the cantons do?
lightly pregnant
    In fact there was quite a history to them, as Lucy was in prime position to know. The city’s natives, in so far as natives still had meaning, she had divided, from the electoral roll, into a dozen cantons. A bright informative card to that effect was sent to every door. She should have known her people. Most seemed built for durance, being on the stocky side of slender, the dark side of light, and the hornyhanded side of delicate and effete. The natives were not to be confused with Athenians, Venetians, or Ancient Egyptians, and seldom were. Only precocious recent arrivals fell for the canton trick.
     
    In the main thoroughfare, what had been once been the odd Victory Parade or Going Away to Iraq, what had once linked hearts and minds in a May Day march for the working class, or had wiggled a fishnet thigh in the annual Charities Procession for the relief of conscience, was now maturing, morphing was probably the word, towards a series of regular Spectacles.
    The plan was this. Each of the dozen cantons was allocated a month. Some apparently random word or phrase, as though arriving by junk mail or fortune cookie, would set the canton fretting . If there must be Spectacle, thought Lucy, they should be good ones. Lightly pregnant with art, politics, science and history, they should embody a call to action. For example, the first one: Calving Glaciers.
     
    A large sheet of paper was procured, for the sake of argument white, and laid along the length of the Prep Hangar, which had been plonked in the vacant quad of Marischal College.
    Tables with substances, tea, coffee, vodka, cocoa, were ranged along one long wall. Under the table, coke was available. For human consciousness, unjolted by chemicals, was deemed to be a waste of time, and on the boring side of banal.
    Along the other long wall was a series of perspex cages, deliberately kept dark, then suddenly and singly illuminated by strobe lighting for about fifteen seconds, to reveal some icy phantasmagoria . Many and zany might be the notions hooked from the unconscious , frantic and furious the dreamings.
     
    Music was thrust from speakers at the far end, just enough bars to infect the spirit, never enough to soothe. Alternate bursts from the pair of scherzos in Maxwell Davies’s Antarctic Symphony were favourite.
    Scents, naturally, were not neglected, and were hurled into the hangar space by blower. They had consulted their Attenborough. Essence of emperor penguin sweat, extract of polar bear cub poo.
    The temperature was the one thing that never, or