17 - Cowper's Castle

The one man who might just have seen things my way was Corporal Cowper, but he was locked away inside a high-security unit.

Wasn’t he?

I had left The Bunker and retreated to my desk on the 3rd floor. None of my old colleagues was anywhere to be found. It appeared to be early in the morning, but even so I would have expected to find at least one of them, trying to find a way to fill his day. I checked our roof garden, but the furniture had been removed, the atmosphere excised and you wouldn’t have known it had ever played an important part in the lives of five arbitrary men. I felt sick to look upon the vast unexploited expanse, stained black by bleeding tar in places, soiled by seabirds in others, but now devoid even of incidental litter. To make matters worse, the view remained unspoilt. Did nobody care?

Back inside, my phone rang. I couldn’t think of a good reason to ignore it. The voice belonged to a woman who was not Captain Small. She spoke confidently, without demanding acknowledgement, but sounded distant and detached and somehow lacking substance, as if she were unsure of her own existence. Her words, when considered of themselves, made total sense, yet drifted across the ether on an air of unreality that sent me lightheaded. I sat down and continued to listen. The whole experience was quite liberating, after the repeated doses of unpleasant reality I had recently taken.

She invited me, for what I was assured would be my own benefit, to come and visit her and her colleague. I scribbled down detailed directions, robotically. And she was gone.

I set off immediately, before the spell was broken. The route was naggingly familiar, as was the weather, although it was only when I had arrived that I realised why: I had arrived at the building where, with Small and Farbrace, I had met Captain McNish. The unfinished one, home to an unknown number of Titans.

Turning down the offer of the architect’s blueprint, I took the lift to the 15th floor, in line with the direction given by the indistinct female voice which still echoed in my head.

If the 14th floor had come across as a desolate wasteland of shiftless semi-enterprise, its near neighbour offered an even harsher vision of disinterest. Mostly a shell of construction steel and flaking concrete, coherent areas of flooring were the exception rather than the rule. Not here the residual signs of labour, no discarded tools or materials. I took it that whatever had occurred to cease output, it had struck when the fit-out of level 14 was in progress, and nothing above had even been begun. The silence, as a result, was profound and primordial. My skin bumped up slightly, even though the wind was warm, almost damp.

Far away from where I stood, out towards the wind-whistled perimeter of the building, I could make out, creeping above the exposed floor structure, tufts of the synthetic insulation material they used in buildings like this. The birds had been picking at it, and fibrous strands trailed over the exposed metal beams like the spittle of a dehydrated runner. I looked around carefully: the sight repeated itself various times, but only at the outer edges. Either the birds found the foam totally unappetising, which was understandable, or they themselves were intimidated by the otherworldly silence which lay deeper in the interior. I listened to it once more. It was not the sort of silence I reckoned they would have found familiar, even in the depths of the long-forgotten jungles they would have called home somewhere in the dark corners of their ancestry.

I, on the other hand, found the unfathomable quiet totally absorbing and developed a liking for it. Each to his own, I supposed. And I was clearly in just the right human frame of mind to fully appreciate it. Whether or not one of those birds could ever find itself in such a frame of mind was a moot point and I quickly dismissed it.

Whatever, behind me ripples of contamination shattered the bewitching silence. I turned, half-angry, toward the source of the relative commotion, but found no clues straight away. I started to move, edging around the lift core until my view gave me more than just a semi-constructed wasteland in the sky.

Somehow, some form of shelter, or network of shelters, had been concocted. A variety of crude plastic and polythene sheets draped against uprights to form three cells, each open on one side and large enough for four or five people to be seated in some comfort. A fourth cell, the closest to where I stood and the largest, allowing standing room, looked to be covered in a patchwork of animal pelts. The wall, if that’s the right word, directly facing me as I approached seemed to form some kind of entrance, and one side of it was slightly retracted, like a curtain. I thought I could make out jerky, scuttling movements from behind the curtain, but the light was not good enough to give any detail. I stopped and the movement inside the cell stopped too. I circled, approaching no closer but attempting to improve my viewpoint, and a figure shuffled around at a similar angle, almost mimicking my actions. There was a not-quite-muffled sound of a throat being cleared, secretly.

‘Hello?’ I called. My voice took off on the swirling eddies of the air at that altitude. I couldn’t be sure if it had made it as far as the mysterious moving form behind the animal hide. I called again, just to improve my chances.

A hand emerged from inside, and it pulled back the doorway or the curtain or whatever it was fully enough to allow its owner through. I could see it was a diminutive man, and it would appear he had some difficulty in standing fully upright. Or maybe he was just nervous about revealing himself. Finally he looked up at me. He smiled enormously. This time it was my turn to mimic.

‘I knew you’d come,’ Cowper laughed, and ran along the beam which separated us. He was the very embodiment of verve and vitality. I held my hand out to shake his, but he swept that aside and embraced me like a long-lost brother. Unbelievably I felt the same. The connection I had supposed we shared on our first meeting was genuine, it turned out.

I was keen to know what had happened to him. He was just as keen to tell me. Rather than contaminate the story with the rumour that had made it my way, I let his narrative flow without interruption. He had been sectioned, it was true, and the episode that McNish had relayed to me was mostly true. Corporal Cowper, naturally, stuck unshakeably to the feasibility of his plan to deliver the goods by air. He dismissed the nay-saying investigations as half-baked and conspiratorial.

He had spent just one night in the madhouse, during which he had realised that immediate escape was his only realistic hope of survival. The place was full of raving lunatics who waltzed around the place smiling and passing the time of day with their fellow inmates. At one point, a pair of well-dressed and jovial men approached him directly and invited him to the film society’s weekly double bill, scheduled for that evening. An inmate with furtive eyes suggested a pint and a game of darts in the facility’s clubhouse. A bespectacled madman asked if the newcomer had located the library yet. The Corporal wisely shrunk from their advances. They were so incorrigibly deranged that not a single one appeared to realise the extent of his own insanity. Cowper retreated and planned his urgent escape.

The next morning, he walked out of the asylum under the accompaniment of two laundry operatives, whose uniforms superficially resembled his civilian clothing, from a distance. He couldn’t believe how easy it had been. There appeared to be no security protocol at all. In fact, one of the laundrymen asked him to close the gate behind him as they all left. Its hinges squeaked and it didn’t take much of a breeze to clang it against the fence, he told him with ironic overstatement.

Since that time, he had been there, on the 15th floor, detached from human contact and refining his master plan. He had just learned that McNish’s tenure had come to an unpleasant and premature end, so he wanted to get his head back above the parapet, see how the land lay.

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ he confided to me in a whisper. There was really no need: not another soul had ever set foot in this part of the building. ‘They want me back. They need me, and they’re looking for me. But I’m not ready.’

‘You heard rumours?’ I asked him.

‘Rumours,’ he nodded, whirling around to ensure nobody was eavesdropping. They weren’t.

‘Who from? Where?’

‘News finds its way up here,’ he assured me. ‘It’s not as lonely as you’d think.’ He looked a meaningful look away to the left, past the shelter and out towards the open air. Two large birds hopped along one of the beams, pecking in turns at the lagging. Each time one managed to free a piece it would throw its grey beak straight up into the air in an attempt to encourage the morsel down into its unsuitable throat. And each time it would snap its idiotic head from side to side several times with increasing urgency before dropping its beak and regurgitating the jammed ball of polymer with a skill that told of a considerable evolutionary specialism. We watched that happen several times and became silent. Eventually the calm reached the birds, who abandoned their scavenging and looked at each other and listened to the silence. They scrambled into the air together.

‘They’ll be back,’ Cowper said.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked him. ‘Are you suggesting that those moronic birds are company? Is it they who bring you the rumours?’

He looked at me like I was as unhinged as he was, then smiled.

‘Mo!’ he shouted into the main tent. ‘It’s OK, love. Coast is clear.’

A doll of a woman appeared from the opening. She was genuinely tiny, had long corkscrew hair and wore what must have been homemade clothing. Her fingernails were grimy, although her skin was perfect, and her top lip sported a full blonde moustache. She introduced herself and I recognised the voice straight away. She had a habit of talking through her moustache, a technique which removed all extremities of frequency from the timbre and just left her with the shallow middle range, like a set of cheap loudspeakers. In person she sounded exactly as she had done over the telephone.

‘Come and see,’ she clanged, depthlessly, and ushered me across to the nearest of the cells.

Inside the polythene walls the atmosphere was clammy. The moist air hung heavy and depressed with no means of escape, and it brought me down just breathing it. We had to drop to our knees, also, due to the low ceiling. It’s likely Mo could have stood, but she appeared in her element and moved like a natural quadruped.

What she moved around was the truly astonishing thing. In the centre of the cell, allowing just enough space for her to circle, was a breathtakingly detailed construction of straws or matchsticks or something. Mo flitted around it and described each element of it at some length, but there was no need: I could see immediately what it illustrated. The format was one with which I was intimately familiar.

‘Did you two build this yourselves?’ I interrupted her flow, staring at the model.

‘Well, yes,’ she seemed bemused. ‘Who else do you think might have?’

‘And you’ve had no outside help, used nothing else as a reference?’

‘Nothing,’ she shook her head.

It was a fully accurate, to scale, model of a landing strip and the associated unloading and processing interfaces. Just like what we had in The Bunker, except without the extra-terrestrial elements. Also, just like ours, it only showed a small part of the warehouse complex – just enough to illustrate how the two came together. The likeness was uncanny, although their materials were nothing like ours.

‘What have you used?’ I shuffled on my knees a bit closer to the delicious creation, which gradated in hue from the deep buttery thin straw-like pieces forming the larger three-dimensional structures, through several shades of not-white to the bright virginity of the landing strip itself, which might well have been made of leaves of fresh fallen snow. I stretched a hand out as if to touch, but couldn’t see it through.

‘Whatever we can,’ Cowper said. ‘There’s a surprisingly rich seam of material in a place like this. That warehouse vestibule, for example, is constructed almost entirely out of rodent bones. Beautiful colour when they’re air-dried, don’t you think?’

I nodded vacantly. ‘How about the landing strip?’ I asked, hesitantly.

He leaned over and removed a piece of the pure white tarmac, which he passed to me. I held it by the short stem and stroked the barbs back and forth. They moved like magic under my touch. It was undoubtedly a feather, although I had never seen one so unsullied or felt one so inconspicuous in its softness. Had I not been able to see it with my own eyes, it’s doubtful I would have felt it against my clumsy fingers.

‘Those moronic birds,’ he said softly. ‘Never seen anything with so perfect an undercarriage. Next time you see one, just stomp around a bit, make some noise while you’re approaching them. They love that. It’s silence they can’t deal with. They’ll hop right up to you. They don’t fuss about the odd feather. Happy to help.’

I turned the feather over and over in my hand. The central shaft reflected the light slightly better than the barbs, and I was able, at certain angles, to distinguish it that way. A marvel of perfection. Chromatic emptiness.

‘Come on, let’s move next door,’ Mo slid past and took me with her by the elbow. I cast a final look back at the boned structures. They seemed more alive than they would ever have done inside a sentient being. In The Bunker we used generally man-made materials. This approach gave the exercise an aura which I found compelling.

The next cell was identical in size to the first, although the scale of the model had been reduced. As a result, it could show the entire spaceport complex and its links to the supporting transport systems. Mo started on a commentary but I raised a hand and she stopped in her tracks. I wanted to take in the tableau myself.

Once again, dried bones formed the majority of the structure. I could clearly make out the new ring road, the simplified railway junctions and the reuse of the land reclaimed from the obsolete systems. Everything tallied completely with the promises Cowper had made to the men we had met on our jaunt such a long time ago. If he genuinely was insane, then his insanity was the sort that was well-conceived and crystal clear in its direction. The workflow within the model appeared as organic as the materials used to build it. In front of this masterpiece, his whole vision came alive. I gasped as I noticed what clearly was an addendum: apparently floating platforms at strategic points, I presumed to address the docking requirements of the low-level shuttle deliveries. An ingenious time-lapse effect showed clearly the effect that such an innovation would have on ground-level traffic. I felt like weeping. I moved round and took it in from every angle. Nothing was forgotten, nothing overlooked.

‘This is quite incredible,’ I whispered. ‘How many rats have died to produce this?’

‘You’d be surprised’ he laughed. ‘There are another twenty floors above this one. The supply is almost endless. I call it our castle. ‘Model’ seems like too small an idea. Do you like it, then?’

‘I don’t know that ‘like’ is the word, either’ I said. ‘It’s amazing, that’s for sure. It’s quite disgusting and terrifying on many levels, and I’m still not sure I can believe I’m seeing it. Is it stable? I’m afraid to go too close, but what happens if you get a gust or one of the rats or birds stumbles in? That’d be a disaster, wouldn’t it?’

‘Is it stable, he’s asking, Mo!’ Cowper found that hilarious. ‘We’ve had a few problems on that front,’ he told me. ‘Every now and then we have a bit of an incident. Man-made. Or woman-made. This morning she destroyed the whole low-level shuttle landing platform structure just by removing one of the obsolete railway maintenance sheds. Amazing how a castle like this can expose dependencies you just couldn’t predict if you stayed totally theoretical. And each time something like that happens, we learn how to make it stronger. Show him, Mo. Show him how you’ve straightened that out.’

‘Beautiful, this one,’ Mo started. ‘There’s no way anybody around nowadays could have picked up on this without The Castle. The shed, and its contents, was acting as the counterweight in a cantilevered system that supports the old helipad that we’re reusing for the shuttles. As long as the shed’s in place, everything’s fine,’ she landed a shuttle, which appeared to be a mobile phone contained within a rodent pelt, on the refurbished helipad. ‘This morning, I removed the maintenance shed as part of our project cleanup. You can guess the rest. Helipad sunk into the soft clay. Entire landing network stability compromised, within about a minute the whole thing was toast. But now,’ she started to dismantle the shed, ‘I’ve added an additional counterweight, to remove the hidden reliance. No…. more……. nasty……. surprises.’ She removed the last section of the floor of the shed with a tiny flourish. The tower began to sink, slowly at first and then with alarming speed, into the base of the model. I was no expert, but that was not what I had expected from the demonstration. Her face rumbled like thunder as the doomed helipad created a weak point in the raised structure, a weakness which radiated out along the entire length. The bones came crashing to the pristine white ground. I looked nervously at Cowper.

‘Let’s try next door,’ he suggested. Mo began to collect up all the fallen bones. She muttered something under her breath.

We moved into the third and final cell. The pattern continued: the model was recognisable as the spaceport and its associated infrastructure, although the scale had been decreased once more and only outlines of the major components were presented. After the mind-blowing detail of the previous creations it was something of a relief. It meant more empty space and considerably less stress for the viewer.

There was more, though. This third example was not just a highlights package. Several installations stood out as alien. South of the main warehouse complex, for example, where the hub of the road network should have been, I found a free-form blob not present in either of the earlier models. It took up around the same space as the largest warehouse; its content was low-resolution, especially in comparison with what I had just seen, but unmistakeably urban. Whilst incongruous and inconsistent, there was something extremely familiar about it. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall what.

‘What’s that, next to the warehousing?’ I asked Cowper. ‘It’s kind of an urbanisation.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ he looked at me with some honesty. ‘This section of The Castle is a little different from the others. You’ll see that much of the detail has been removed. That’s because there’s no benefit to detail in this wing. We’ve left in the major elements, and we’ve added reference points to make sense of the scale. Well-known reference points.’

That did it. I realised what I was looking at. The blob adjacent to the warehousing was our capital city. The whole thing. Its form was familiar to anybody who had spent any time there. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognised it immediately.

‘To make sense of the scale?’ I repeated the words I thought I’d heard him use. He nodded slowly and raised his eyebrows. I looked back at the model. The city was the same size as the largest warehouse. The road hub, left off this particular version, would alone obliterate around a quarter of the metropolis, were it to be built in any proximity. My heart sank.

‘Let’s walk a bit,’ he suggested. ‘My knees are killing me.’

We waddled out, stood and strolled around the exposed steel girders and he spoke, sanely and convincingly. The Castle had become his life. From the very first day of his appointment, he had been hooked up with Mo, and they had hit it off straight away. She had already been using this hideout for some months, building up her collections of bones and feathers and regurgitated pellets of lagging, but lacking a clear idea of how to use them. Then, once he had arrived, everything dropped into place. Nothing else mattered for either of them.

If we turned we could see Mo quite clearly, so light on her knees, so deft of touch and so unbreakably patient as she built up the collapsed portion of the Castle once more. It was a triumph of nature and coincidence that her hard-won skills had finally found a purpose.

‘My wife is going to leave me,’ he murmured. I spun around to look at him.

‘You’ve got a wife?’ I said.

‘She’s expecting another baby,’ he grimaced. ‘It’s our third. But I’ve not been home for a while. The Castle has taken priority. Mo and I work on it for 23 hours a day, sometimes. Often we just sleep where we’re kneeling. Every now and then we get to stretch out in the home tent. We take it in turns.’

I stared at him and said nothing.

‘I think I need a bit of time off,’ he said.

‘You’re not kidding,’ I blurted out.

‘But there’s so much still to do,’ he looked dejected.

‘Like what?’

‘Will you do me a big favour?’ he asked.

‘You can ask. I can’t promise, but ask, at least.’

‘I’ve been ostracised,’ he gazed off into the distance. This was painful for him, I sensed. ‘Those union guys, you met some of them, remember?’ I remembered. ‘They won’t play ball any more. Mo’s been to see them all, tell them the score. I can’t leave here – lying low – so they have to come to me, but they’re refusing. Half of them don’t know her, and the other half do know her, and that’s no better. They don’t trust her, they’ve heard I’ve lost all my influence and they’re cutting me out. I can’t do anything, I can’t turn that,’ he pointed at The Castle with exaggerated disdain, ‘into reality without their help.’

‘What’s the favour?’ I asked after a long silence.

‘Can you talk to them? You can explain it. Some of them know you, but the others will trust you, too. You’re good at that sort of thing. And you’ve got a good reputation now. Be the public face, the acceptable face. You can get them to come here and see what we’ve done. Once they’ve seen it they won’t be able to resist it. Don’t you think?’

He probably had a point. The whole thing was madder even than the pair of vagrants who had created it, and yet it exerted an inexplicable draw over anybody who saw it. At least, it did on me.

‘And there’s one more little thing,’ he added.

‘Which is?’

‘Could you paint it?’

‘Paint it?’

‘It’ll look better if it’s painted, won’t it? Right now there’s just whites and creams and almost-yellows. We need a splash of colour. Maybe some red, some electric blue, even a proper grey for all the tarmac would be a start. Those feathers are far too white. They can’t refuse it if it’s painted, can they?’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said. The Castle did not need a paintjob. And I had no intention of becoming his representative in the real world. ‘Go and see your wife,’ I told him. ‘Give yourself a chance of meeting your next child, and reintroduce yourself to the others. Get away from this castle. I’ve only been here an hour or two and already I feel as if it’s a part of me. I can’t imagine how you must relate to it.

‘The thing is,’ I continued, ‘whatever anybody else thinks or feels about this, your reward is already guaranteed. The kind of artistic achievement sitting over there, in those plastic cells, demands a meaningful end. Nobody can say where that end might be, and the road toward it might be winding and bumpy and treacherous as hell, but it’s only heading one way and it’s only for you and you can’t get off it even if you wanted to. Nobody else might witness first-hand the fruits of your labour, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less incredible or important. And if anybody does see it, I can’t imagine you’ll be a corporal for much longer.’

He embraced me every bit as tenderly as when I had arrived, and he skipped back into the tent to help Mo with the finishing touches. She waved happily as I disappeared into the lift.

I stopped for a couple of drinks on the way back to the city. The pub I chose was empty and neglected, almost to the point of disuse. Perfect. I craved the short-term sensation of cold alcohol, and beyond that I needed some time in solitary silence to consider what Cowper had achieved and compare it with our own output, so similar and yet so wildly different. Our model was no less useful, and possibly more functionally relevant, but at the same time it was impossible to see past his consummate work. Nothing else appeared to have any validity in comparison.

By the time I arrived back at our office, the sun was already well on its way over the ocean and the shadows had taken over everywhere behind the port. Only Alex was at his desk. Mine was empty, but all the others were teeming with bustling Titans. Alex appeared totally unmoved by their presence.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked him. I remained standing, watching the tide of Titans crashing against our space. ‘Where are the others? Who are these people?’

‘They’ve moved in,’ he shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much I could do about it. I can’t hold back the surge any more. They’ve been hovering for weeks. Donnie came back once and swore at a couple of them who had made themselves at home in his spot, but he was gone again before you knew it, and they soon return. I only ever see Bernard now when I’m down at the port. He doesn’t even make token appearances here any more. And I’ve not heard from Chas. I think he might have left the country. It seems dishonest to keep the space from these guys. Their need is so much greater.’

‘So you’re here all by yourself?’ I said.

‘Well, not exactly,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve still got you.’

He might not have meant it totally seriously, but it was the first vote of confidence from somebody never sectioned that I had had in days. I was grateful to him and smiled, despite everything. Our old way of life was a distant memory, and within days, if not hours, we would both find ourselves homeless.

The Titans kept their distance while I continued to glare at them with what I considered defiance. I might have been a superior individual but I was fooling nobody. The siege was irresistible. They would never tire, but wash over me like an advancing dune in an endless desert. There was no point in trying to stop them.

‘Thought I might find you here,’ a voice came from behind me. I was relieved to find a reason to turn away from the invasion. It was Major Thompson. Sweaty and breathless as ever. I greeted him and introduced Alex, who he ignored.

‘I take it you’ve heard about Major-General Pfister?’ he continued. He seemed vaguely interested in the approaching army of Titans over my shoulder. I glanced nervously around to see if they were planning a move right under my nose. They had become as brazen as urban foxes. Survival is a mighty strong instinct.

‘I have,’ I told him. ‘Captain Norris filled us in a little. Do you know more? Do you know when he wants to see us?’

‘Don’t you worry about when he wants to see us,’ Thompson said. ‘Just assume you’ve got to be ready. Are you ready?’

I believed I was ready. It was difficult to know, but I felt ready.

‘This is bad,’ he seemed distracted and continued to look past me toward the Titans. Something about his manner drove them physically back much more effectively than I had managed. The two at Donnie’s desk rose and retreated along with their mates. ‘I thought we’d got past all this. Bad management. Stupid. What? What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything, Major,’ I assured him. Really, I hadn’t. Also, I hadn’t ever seen him in such a state. Pfister’s reputation held great power.

‘No. I should have stayed closer. Never trust anybody. Idiot.’ Alex was spellbound. Thompson had no idea he was there. ‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ he asked me one more time. ‘What are you going to say about the testing?’

I assured him that our plan was almost complete. My blithe acceptance of Scharf’s promises on the subject was perhaps dangerous, but the Major really needed to hear something that would cheer him up.

‘What about Vaurania?’ he snapped. ‘Watson has been on and on at me. He wants to send a team down there and do some stuff at their labs. What are you doing with that?’

‘We’re doing nothing,’ I said. ‘Scharf, Magath, Mortenson, we’re all in agreement that any testing in Vaurania is totally meaningless.’

‘You’re right,’ he nodded absent-mindedly. ‘Pointless. And how about the distribution and retail network? What’s the status of that?’

‘If you remember, Major,’ I reminded him, ‘I told Captain McNish, and Corporal Cowper before him, that I couldn’t be involved in that. There’s too much to do just with the landing of the shuttles. We’ve discussed this on several occasions.’ I stopped short of telling him about the re-emergence of Cowper. Something told me that it was not the right time.

‘Never mind that for now,’ he looked straight at me for a change. ‘What are you going to show him? What’s the plan?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve given it a bit of thought and I propose that…’

‘He wants detail. He wants coherence. He wants real answers. He’s simple, Pfister. He needs to know we’re organised, that we’re thinking of the right things and that we’ve got some sort of a plan for moving in the right direction. It’s not too much to ask. But if he thinks anybody isn’t up to it, he’ll deal with it. He won’t blink.’

‘I think we can give Major-General Pfister everything he needs,’ I assured him.

‘Don’t think. Just make sure you do that. And don’t underestimate him. He knows he’s not going to get what he wants from any Colonel, or even from me. That’s why he has these sessions. Keep it focussed. Keep it relevant, and do not miss anything out.’

What did Pfister really want to know? I thought about our model down in The Bunker. That was not portable, and neither was my run of notes which covered the walls of the cave. I would have to be a touch more imaginative.

Involuntarily my mind ran up to the 15th floor and Cowper’s Castle. What would somebody like the terror-inducing General make of that? To be confronted with the naked truth in the form of vermin remains, the perfect feathers kindly donated by an evolutionary basket-case and the scavengings of a pair of feral genii, all within a zombie of a building; that would be something. I would have given anything to take him there, although I knew it was out of the question.