CHAPTER FOUR

The spirit that never sleeps and underlies our dreaming. The elusive and restless spirit. Personification of beauty and desire, bending slightly backward from the hips with pelvis thrust toward us as an offering, observing us with penetrating gaze and open lips, panting slightly with a tense desire. Erect and ready. Open to let us in, to lead us into ancient happy sin where is no sin but only fierce desire.

Presiding spirit of the genome, ardently forked. Lips against those lips and breast against that breast. Cupped palms against ready nipples, seeking to arouse. Wet and sliding mouth. The look, the gaze.

Piercing piercing. And receiving our caresses, being pierced.

Dividing into two, then into thousands. Thousands upon thousands, ceaselessly. In itself the One Thing and the source.

First the hand of Atum in the dark upon the swollen phallus, the shuttle ceaselessly weaving, self-creation, self arising from self. The tipping of the vessel, milk and seed. Air and moisture, heaven and earth. The over-arching firmament, the fecund earth. He enters her; she receives his hot thick seed raining down upon her, giving life.

Phallus and womb. Then teeming teeming life.

And even when the world is full of life it seeks to be more full in endless replication of the One, first father-mother fountainhead, the bubbling source.

Each is the first, each of us the One.

Each of us is Eidolos, the first. And each of us is Eidolon, the many.

Eidolon, whose world we enter now, a tenuous, changing world full of colour and music and varying degrees of emotion. Emotion is part of the weather on the Other Side, what constitutes their climate. Their world and our world interpenetrate each other.

When worlds collide, they do not smash head-on into each other, there is too much empty space for that to happen. Particles stream through our bodies daily without causing the least harm. The swift neutrino, entering our atmosphere somewhere above London, penetrates the molten core of the planet and, emerging in the vicinity of Australasia, whips off again into teeming space with not the slightest cut or bruise to either of us. It is oblivious of our presence, even though it has touched our most secret parts, and we are unaware of its passage.

Empty space, huge and empty space. Room enough for all. It can happen, and does happen, that two vast galaxies, uncountable worlds upon worlds of densely adhering matter, will pass one through the other in the course of immense ages of what we sun-struck humans call time. They are changed, of course, both are changed. But there is hardly any contact, or what grosser creatures would regard as such. No tactile experience at all.

A person can promenade the busiest thoroughfares of our teeming cities in their hour of most intense activity when many thousands are afoot in varying directions and never collide once with any single specimen of this mass of humanity.

Murky waters, you might truly say! Mystic murky waters where swims the Seer, the Charlatan beside him and the Fool, stroke for stroke and onward into twilight. But twilight at least is some light and a-glimmer.

Eidolon had found a way to appear before Vivienne as though she were his Magdalene. Of all those on the Other Side who had some contact with the earth, he was the most adept at bending the regulations. He seemed to have especial responsibilities in that direction but could not remember how these duties had come to be devolved upon him nor by whom. It seemed that the island had assumed the aspect of his very-own place by a process akin to that of squatters’ rights, and was now his private doorway to the Strange Sphere (this is how They refer to earth).

His memory, like that of Vivienne and Cosimo and all who entered the island, was subject to fluctuation. Here, Time the river ran in many eddies, congealed in distant pools and glimmering lakes.

Once, long ago, he had been presiding deity to a troglodytic tribe that had arrived from the south and made the place their home. He watched over them for a thousand years or more until they became increasingly civilised and refined a cult to him together with a priesthood and annual ceremonies. He had rather enjoyed all this. It made him feel he had arrived at last. The people were undemanding and were quite content if he guarded their crops from the worst weather and did his best (so far as it lay within his power) to avert impending disaster. He counted himself lucky that the climate was temperate on the whole and the atmospheric conditions placid.

He looked after them as best he could even though he was not, as they seemed to imagine, all-powerful. There were certain things (well, actually quite a lot when he came to count them) over which he had no control at all. Other members of his own tribe, for instance – they were always causing trouble. Other gods, with their own followers, jealous and vengeful gods with vast territorial ambitions. The more devotees they had, the stronger they became.

The Strange Sphere began to be divided up among a handful of these demanding individuals. Intense feuds and rivalries ensued. This was long, long before recorded history and upon another earth complimentary to this one – but these mysteries are not to be revealed to the uninitiated.

Eidolon was to a certain extent protected from most of these power-struggles due to the comparative remoteness and insignificance of his own island. This was before the continents shifted and the island was brought into closer proximity to one of the smaller continents. And before most of the Other Worlders were allowed to fall into desuetude and were abandoned by their devotees, at which time most of them packed up shop and went home.

The greater gods tended to forget about Eidolon while they strutted over vast continents and imposed their will on millions. Those had been very crowded times. Now he was almost the last survivor of the colonisation whose history we have so briefly and sketchily outlined.

The Other Place has its hierarchies, its Princes and Powers, its law and government. No surprise that we of the Strange Sphere have developed similar institutions. In his day Eidolon had been one of the more free-ranging spirits, not bound by palace, conference-table, court or office. He had a particular dislike of the Great Metropolis, the central hub of the Other Place from whence the principalities and powers were governed. He preferred the free and comparatively lawless outer reaches, loved to fly through the emptiness at the speed of light. Dare I suggest, heretically to our physics, that he even managed to exceed that upper limit?

He loved, above all else, to love. From fertility god to god of love to the all-compassionate, he had rung the changes, had been all things to all people and all creatures. He was the half-remembered visitant to innumerable beds and setts and holts throughout the passing ages. He was incubus and he was succubus. (An individual Other Worlder’s sex is not a constant condition but a set of variables shiftingly interchanged.)

Yet freedom, as the Grand Archon never tired of reminding him, came with a large package of responsibilities. They all talked like that in the Great Metropolis. It made his wings moult.

And the Second Archon, Grade Four (S.A.G.F), Eidolon’s immediate superior, would smirk with satisfaction while his insubordinate and incorrigible underling took a dressing-down in stony-faced silence.

Eidolon was well aware who was behind all this – called twice to the Metropolis in just one of earth’s geological ages, and a repeat visit threatening soon; it was none other than his hated rival for dominion of the island, Appeles. Appeles! He spat out the repulsive syllables as he brooded beside the landing-stage whence the revellers had proceeded to the village. He could hear their uproar from afar and could easily guess what sort of depths the celebrations had descended to. He’d be off over there in a short while to join in the fun in a hundred seductive disguises.

With a little shiver of pique at the thought of Appeles who had once been his closest friend, eons ago, before the island had been formed, he involuntarily flew up into the air and turned a couple of somersaults over the estuary now bathed in the bright light of a full moon. Hovering in mid-heaven, relishing the lovely white illumination, he felt someone calling to him, pulling him toward them in the shameless manner of these delightful humans.

I must explain here that my use of the masculine or feminine pronouns with regard to Eidolon, Appeles, or any of the beings from the Other Side, is purely a matter of convenience. Whether they be hermaphroditic or asexual I am not competent to state. But it is certainly simpler to think of them as the former since the latter leaves us puzzling over their undoubted attraction to humans of both sexes. Being attractive to, and being attracted by, we should say, since it is certainly a two-way traffic. One particular human goes so far as to maintain that those from the Other Side, far from being discrete entities, are in fact creations of the human psyche. But this is speculation. We remain in the early stages of observation and cannot yet pretend to any authoritative conclusions.

On the opposite side of the estuary from the landing-stage, having crossed that rusty iron bridge in a contrary direction to that taken by Vivienne and Cosimo earlier, and with his back resting against the bleached wood of the rotting flat-bottomed boat we had occasion to note above, sat a rather splendidly handsome young man, one of the train of Sudja’s own fanatically faithful muscle-Marys.

His name is Gordon and he is desolate, love-struck and apparently by love abandoned, erotically bereft. He sits motionless, staring at the moon’s round and unwavering reflection in the waters of the estuary. The air is preternaturally still as if awaiting some apotheosis near at hand and drawing nearer by the second.

Distant discords of revelry, made sharper by their echo off still water, sound uncomfortably like mockery. He winces and is very close to tears. Love makes children of us all, as someone said. Gordon’s toy has been torn from his hands and Gordon sent early to bed with no supper. It is unbearable, but must be borne. The clash of these two opposites and the reverberations of Gordon’s intense love-thoughts in the air above and around him, draw Eidolon inevitably toward the lax youth pining on the shore.

Gordon, despite his size (6’1", 14st., 32" waist, 48" chest, built like the proverbial brick outhouse), was easily hurt. His emotions were in a constant turmoil. Which came as a big surprise to many since outwardly he appeared impassive. Due to his shyness, some found him lazy and lacklustre.

Neither of these comparisons sprang immediately to Eidolon’s mind since he could so easily read what humans found illegible. Could respond immediately to what they intuited, wrongly, as coldness. Eidolon saw the fire and felt the warmth.

At once he was, unseen, beside the youth, at the most a mere glimmer of extra silver against the moon-washed water. Vampire of the feelings that he most surely was, he took a deep psychic breath of the air of this sacred and magnificent edifice, this huge temple of love and longing. Here was incense, a vast candle-lit nave with mosaic-strewn over-arching dome, thousands singing in white robes, ancient mystery. Gordon, only begetter and source of these wonders, was oblivious of his own sacred music, aware only of misery. All he could think of was an easily replicable pair of blue eyes, a toothy smile and sexual favours once freely granted but now bafflingly withheld.

A huge-winged, beautiful gremlin-butterfly sipping nectar, the ecstatic Eidolon fed upon these naked and nourishing hot streams of affect. The unconscious artistry of the human continually amazed him and aroused his utmost admiration. It was a species of great genius and he loved them avidly. Except for Sudja, his rival, the hated witch. She who wanted his island. She who fought with him for the possession of these beautiful fresh young souls.

The sudden thought of her was a rent in the beautiful canvas. She was too like Themselves and, he strongly suspected, in the thrall of the hated Appeles, once so dearly loved. His paranoia sprang to the fore again while he meditated how he might crush her back into the nothing from which she came.

Now Gordon, having worked his emotions to a pitch of misery, heard the fellowship song of the Companions, sung with the lusty ardour that drink alone bestows together with all the accompanying wrong notes and muddled stops and starts, bellowed out from the hall sufficiently loudly to cause the water to quiver with its reverberations. Or was it tears, tears that now came streaming from his eyes and nose in an overwhelming of misery and self-pity?

Where you and I would have observed one strapping young man apparently overcome by an excess of lonely grief, Eidolon saw quite differently. It is rumoured that some among our co-habitants of this once-lovely planet (by ‘once’ I mean before the evil spawning of that modern devil, motorised transport, before the roads came, and the airports, before nature was despoiled and hideously ravaged) view the place in a literally different light from that seen by homo sapiens.

Insects, fishes, birds and many mammals comprehend varying visual fields which we can only guess at. Sounds too are changed from what we hear according to the variety of receiving equipment used to scan them. Imagine then the differences that lie like a gulf between our earth-only oriented antennae and those of the people of the Other Side.

What did Eidolon see that was so different from our viewing? –This: he saw not one but a congeries of figures.

There was Gordon, tear-stained and pitiful, at the centre, certainly standing out in bas-relief among the other two-dimensional outlines to which he was the foreground. There was another and more shadowy Gordon dominant in the background and apparently Siamese-twinned with a second figure, although not joined at hip or chest. This other figure was of an age and handsomeness to match his own. It was of course the lover whose infidelity he now lamented.

I do but suggest two personae as an aid to understanding. This was not what Eidolon saw. He saw the one in the other and the other in the one. People spending much time together grow into a psychic likeness, strong emotion, whether on the positive or negative side, forming an endurable cement. Think of the proverbial similarity of the man to his dog and of that between man and woman in a decades-old partnership. Even when liking grows tepid and becomes mere habit the enduringness of the bond (something else not visible to the unaided human eye) keeps firm the grip between the two. Where does one end and the other begin? Each has its nodal point but in between is a great expanse of grey and undifferentiated sea.

We have so far sketched the lineaments of three figures, Gordon himself and Gordon-with-his-lover. There was another distinct personality accompanying these three, a threatening shape even though of a handsomeness conformable to the others who seemed constantly attempting to come between the pair of lovers and to whom Gordon’s lover was constantly turning and then turning back in an uneven vacillation. Nor were these four all.

The air above and around them was lively with half-formed or forming ectoplasms, some mere heads or other parts of incomplete bodies, huge pairs of glittering, swimming eyes of an unbelievable depth and penetration, smiles, frowns; enormous spots of milky colour growing or fading; animals; views; houses; rooms. This was all Gordon, his mind, his memory, the living map of himself.

In the midst of this changing panorama stood Eidolon, rapt, as if listening to a great symphony, breathing in all the music and scent and libido of a living creature. He was in ecstasy. These humans, whatever their limitations, produced an unimaginable richness of texture and emotion, each an incomparable work of living art beside which the people of his own race appeared as stunted dwarves.

So which was the god and which the devotee? Eidolon had no illusions on that score.

Vivienne, meanwhile, having been met and greeted by Sudja’s minions and made to feel very much at home and having also taken a drop too much, was mooning with Gordon’s paramour’s new paramour. A most dangerous association since he was also Sudja’s flavour of the month – her affairs rarely lasted longer than that, she being too fickle and too adventurous.

His name was Taki, as was his nature. Yet another magnificent, handsome, well-muscled youth. A fortnight in Sudja’s court caused any fairly normal human being to become sick of the sight of these over-fed and over-exercised stallions. And when most of them were collected together in one place, as now, the body-odour was overwhelming as they all jigged and swung and bragged and strutted.

Vivienne was too far gone to care. She liked him, liked him a lot. And it was not her nature to hide her feelings overmuch. Alcohol, inhibitor of taste and smell as of so much else that constitutes our sensory beings, played its usual tricks upon her apprehensive faculty and anaesthetised her to the whiff of uncleaned stable that emanated from the divine (as she thought) Taki.

Taki-taki had immediately become her tipsy pet name for him, holding her forefinger under her nose and spilling her drink as she giggled with pleasure at her own cleverness.

In fact, it was far from novel for Taki. Half a dozen others had hit on the device before Vivienne came along and he particularly disliked it as being, beside old hat, redolent of a grown-up’s condescension to an infant or a pampered pet. He saw himself as a fully matured human being. He equated maturity (thus showing his lack of it!) with his polyglot sexual activities.

He was a goer, with both boys and girls. Also with Sudja, who was neither, being the wrong sex for the first and the wrong age for the second. Empty minds make for ready rods. And this boy’s mind was as vacuous as they come, a perfection of blankness. This made him very hot. Lust, the default emotion, rushed in to fill the empty bowl of his brain.

But perhaps we do him some injustice. He was more a doer than a thinker. Having been brought up by people who thought rather too much for his own taste, he was not too impressed by this quality and did not seek to over-develop it in himself.

From feeling lost and vulnerable earlier with the disappearance of Cosimo with the witch-woman, Vivienne was now on top of the world. The vin de l’ile was scrummy and she had decanted a couple of bottles of the delicious beverage into herself. She knew that she had come to this party with a very nice man but couldn’t remember who it had been.

Everything was in a lovely jumble and Taki-taki was just the most gorgeous creature and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. The music, and the musicians, were weird. "Islanders," said Taki and grimaced with the corners of his shapely mouth while his eyes flashed deepest black against perfect white.

An older band of minstrels it would be difficult to imagine.

"They are peasants," he added with a certain gusto. "I dunno why Sudja didn’t get a decent disco going. Why couldn’t she have got Russian Roulette to come and play for us? I think she’s trying to econo…econo…" He couldn’t think of the word. "…save money. And look at that," – he indicated the rather pathetic disco light apparatus that stood upon the stage and threw fitful coloured beams about the room – "it’s like a relic from Saturday Night Fever. Or even before that!"

‘Even before that!’ thought Vivienne, feeling guiltily old.

He drew Vivienne’s pelvis into his crotch. "You are pleased to see me!" she laughed.

One of his big hands was in the small of her back and the other went anywhere it pleased. His magnificent chest swelled through his tight white silk shirt. She ran her fingers over his nipples. This seemed to turn him on a bunch and his revolver stiffened horizontally and stabbed her with each jig of the dance.

No one took any notice. They were all at the same thing themselves, mostly boys with boys. Now she thought of it, where were all the women?

One of the boys was dancing with an island crone old enough to be his granny. Whenever Granny caught Vivienne’s eye across the dance-floor she gave a very large wink and a cackle.

A couple of adventurous young island females were loitering on the threshold. Occasionally the centrifugal pull of the crush sucked them away from their moorings and into the centre of the whirlpool of bodies. But they seemed exceedingly nervous and only youthful high spirits assured their short stay – that, and the availability of so many dishy members of the opposite sex who, whatever their preferences, seemed to enjoy dancing with the girls more than with their chance or selected male partners.

It was something to do with ‘leading’ and ‘following’ and male dominance and all that. But what the heck! The girls were having a very good time.

"It just comes naturally," observed Taki-taki, with regard to the matter of men leading. He was full of beer and bravado.

"You better watch out, Taki!" shouted one of the passing boys.

"Whatever does he mean?" Vivienne demanded to know, thinking the remark derogatory to herself.

"He’s drunk," glowered Taki as his gun began to lower. His beautiful dark eyes darkened further and he glanced furtively about the room as if expecting the sheriff to arrive at any moment and cart him off to the clink.

Every now and then another boy, whose inexplicable name was Colditz, tried to excuse himself to Vivienne so that he could dance with Taki-taki, but Vivienne was having none of it and Colditz became really quite aggressive and had to be seen off by the protective Taki.

The name Colditz had been given him by the Companions because he had for long been an impenetrable fortress. Gordon it was who had slipped under his defences (as it were) and lowered the drawbridge across which none other beside himself had managed to scramble until Taki-taki, having taken a fancy to what was forbidden him, managed to ford the moat.

Colditz, originally shy and the shyness constituting almost the whole of his charm, now became relatively brazen and emerging from his shell or chrysalis began to flaunt and shimmer. This appalled Gordon who had had the great idea of raising the boy (like some more glorious sheep) to conform to his own preferences concerning what was desirable in a life-companion. And it also made him seem somewhat less attractive to Taki who, more aggressively masculine than the rest of them, preferred a shrinking violet for a friend.

The shrinking violet now looked more like a flaming red-hot poker. It was obvious to many, especially Sudja who watched all these gyrations with a mature and amused eye ("my boys, they will ’ave their games"), that Colditz, whose nickname began to seem more and more inappropriate, would burn out early.

Sudja was totally ruthless with boys who had lost their charm. She had a horror of finding the traces of time beginning to show on any of her fit little band of fleshy warriors (she was alternatively rather happy to see it in any accompanying female) and without compunction pensioned them generously off at the first signs of paunch or grey hairs.

An ageing companion – unthinkable horror! – made her aware that she too had long since left the appealing zone of the first flush and was come unto the ponderous and sober doors of dread middle age. What was worse, the doors were slightly ajar as if inviting her to pass through into those untrodden and unseen regions beyond. She declined, and swore to herself that kicking and screaming was the only manner in which she would cross that threshold.

The party was past its peak. People drank mechanically, attempting to recreate the first sparkle of the evening. The band grew weary, yawning over their antiquated instruments. The ridiculous disco light display was blinking spasmodically and eventually went out altogether.

Taki had his hand up Vivienne’s clouts. But she hardly noticed any more. He was only half-insistent, for form’s sake, and kept looking across to where Colditz lay in a heap against one of the table legs.

"Oh, go and give him a cuddle," said Vivienne. "You know you want to, you queer bastard."

The bottles of vin de l’ile had done their worst.

"No," said Taki, screwing up his face. "I want you, my lovely Vivienne."

"You don’t know what you do want. Don’t you? Do you?" Her confusion was increasing. Men! Then she remembered. "Cosimo!" she screamed. And started laughing.

At that moment there was a hubbub at the entrance and Gordon came staggering in.

After he had cried himself dry he had repaired to a local tavern to fill up with lethal island spirits. His plan had been to find some congenial company and flaunt it in the face of Colditz. But the inn was full of wizened old fisher-folk, the likeliest lad in the place being at least fifty and weighing as much as a small boat. So, boiling with rage, he had come on here, wading knee-deep through courting couples in the surrounding shrubbery.

The sight of other people making love, while he had none, was too much.

Vivienne felt Taki stiffen, but not in the usual place. She followed his bloodshot staring eyes to the doorway and saw a dishevelled blabbering figure gesticulating to no particular effect.

"Bloody drunks!" she drawled and lay back in her seat to watch the fun, picking fastidiously at a piece of chicken.

After the darkness outside, Gordon was momentarily dazzled by the lights. No one was taking the least notice of him and what he most wanted right now was to be noticed. His Mr Nice Guy days were at an end. Mr Nasty was now in control of the Jekyll and Hyde set-up that constituted his vacillating soul. He was hopping mad. Literally hopping and waving his arms about. Then shouting rude words in a very loud voice. My goodness! What a to-do!

Vivienne began to sober up. The sight of Gordon’s unchannelled passion (he was merely flailing about rather than doing anything constructive with his hatred) brought her down to earth. Everything seemed rather tawdry, including her own actions and emotions.

‘Messing about with boys!’ she thought, ashamed of herself. She would do penance later. If only Cosimo were here. Where had he got to? Was he with that awful gypsy woman? Vivienne did not want to lose him again. This unexpected meeting had made her realise how much she had missed him in the intervening years.

Gordon was shouting with greater vehemence and she found it impossible to think. His swearing was giving her a headache. It seemed to provoke a headache in Colditz also for he had now crawled bodily under the table against which he had previously been only reclining.

‘No guts!’ thought Vivienne irritably. She threw the remains of her chicken onto the table, pushed back her chair, and had a good long stretch. Fresh air was called for, but Gordon blocked the entrance. Why didn’t the silly prick shut up and go away?

Far from going away, he drew nearer, having finally caught sight of Taki who seemed to be trying to hide behind Vivienne. She stood to one side, allowing Gordon an uninterrupted view of his skulking rival. Colditz peeped out from underneath the table like a frightened cat. The other people in the room, their attention focussed by alcoholic tunnel-vision, remained insensible to the ruckus, intent upon their own doings and more discreet amours.

"Who’s this tart?" demanded Gordon, his mad eyes boring into Vivienne.

Now she was really annoyed. "Who the hell are you calling a tart?"

"I dunno. Yer label’s dropped off. Bargain basement I expect, knock-down price." His face was one horrible sneer and he was dribbling.

She turned on Taki. "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he called me?"

Taki could hardly bear to raise his eyes from the ground. "He’s upset," he said, attempting to smooth things over and feeling really too tired for a fight. "He doesn’t know what he is saying."

These emollient words seemed to enrage Gordon to a state of berserker frenzy. Or perhaps he thought they showed a weakness against which he might easily prevail. Pushing Vivienne rudely aside, he hurled himself upon his unprepared rival. She aimed a punishing kick at Colditz’s rear as he went down and struck satisfyingly home against the coccyx.

Eidolon meanwhile, rustling through the hall in this form or that, appearing to each in a different guise, sniffed the conflicting airs of close sex and violence and was near to swooning with ecstasy. He had followed Gordon from estuary to ale-house and had stumbled with him through the island night on his way here.

And behold! here was the delightful Vivienne again, rapt in a beautiful rage and melancholy. On catching sight of this new young man who stepped so lightly and vivaciously across the hall toward her, Vivienne’s sluggard consciousness attempted to grapple with memory but was unequal to the task.

"Come out of the way, honey, and leave these rough men to it," said the kind stranger, taking her arm and leading her from the circle of violence which was the entwined and struggling Taki-Gordon.

He was like a breath of cold fresh air in this very fuggy room. She smiled at him and her mood immediately lightened. "Have we met before?" she asked, still a little fuzzy.

"Probably, this is a small island. You seem to meet all your old friends here. It’s a good place to make new ones too." The stranger’s eyes were really something and she began to feel that the party was to have a very pleasant conclusion.

The row behind them grew louder. Taki and Gordon were now at the stage of stand-up fisticuffs. Colditz had crawled from his retreat and stood shouting at both combatants, recent ex- and recent new lover, not sure which of them to encourage, which to revile. Before long he was embroiled in the proceedings, a chance blow having landed on his temple with a judder that stung and irritated. All three were bellowing and grappling. Others gathered round to watch the fun.

Many bleary-eyed lovers drifted back into the hall hand in hand from the darkness outside to see what all the noise was about. A couple of close friends of the main protagonists, stepping in to help calm things down, also became implicated in the violence.

In a very short while (no longer than it took to roll up a pair of silk or satin shirt-sleeves) there was a general joust and melee, smashed glasses and chairs and windows, screaming women – and men too!

It was at precisely this moment that the Queen and Cosimo rolled up to the hall and from the racket that greeted them began to imagine that World War III had broken out during their absence.

A scene of considerable devastation awaited them, the result not of enemy bombing but of large bodies crashing about and tempers flaring. The boys had had a wonderful time letting off all that steam. Even Vivienne felt refreshed and reinvigorated by these stirring events.

The new man at her side whispered "Why don’t we go and find somewhere quiet?" But she had seen Cosimo and waved to him across the room and he waved and smiled back. When she looked round the stranger had disappeared.

Sudja gave them all a bit of a dressing-down but she was tired and her heart wasn’t really in it. She told one of the Companions to see that Cosimo "and his friend" were safely housed for the night and, dusting down the dishevelled Taki in a maternal fashion, marched him off for a little rumpy-pumpy. As always, chaos made her feel sexy and violence was an aphrodisiac. She soon recovered her zest. Taki was stimulated by his own manly exploits and both had a most satisfying night.

So also did Gordon and Colditz who began by tending each other’s wounds and ended in a more general, even though temporary, healing.

Vivienne and Cosimo were rather pointedly assigned to suites at some distance from each other. Ignoring the hint, they lessened the dividing space to the extent that one large bed was all that was required.

"Cosimo!" she sighed as he climbed into bed beside her.

"Vivienne!" he replied, switching off the light and taking her in his arms.

The villagers straggled back to their homes and night – or early morning – settled down quietly across the island.

Only Eidolon was restive. He had received a message and it was one he did not like.

CHAPTER FIVE

You will already have had occasion to take several rather deep breaths during your perusal of this odd narrative. If indeed you have stayed with me this far and have not been guilty of the unforgivable sin of skipping large sections of wearisome text.

I am afraid that I have yet more demands to make upon your patience and I hope that they will not prove completely unpalatable. An entirely new or exceptionally novel dish is often treated with suspicion on its first reception. But this does not mean that it will not soon become a favourite and appear on the table at least once a week. I keep my cooking fingers crossed.

It’s Eidolon that is (or should that be ‘who is’?) the main trouble and I am afraid that he will continue to plague us for some time yet. Eidolon and the Other Place and what goes on there. Realism versus fantasy – but I hope to show that the versus is not at all necessary and that realism plus fantasy is a more satisfactory state of affairs and much nearer to the truth also.

So let us cease from prevarication and attempt to begin.

Eidolon, in the shape of his human alter ego, Tom Atmos, lived in a square three-storey house that looked like a tower with the top half removed and a slate roof added. Which was exactly what it was.

You may be surprised to hear that he occupied a physical dwelling at all, but it was a necessary part of his cover. You may be even more surprised to learn, after all you have heard concerning him, that he inhabited a regular human body of the usual unimmortal specification and that indeed he dwelt therein like a normal human being. Two places at once, or more, and two or more forms at once presented him with no difficulties. He revelled in variety and change. It was what he was. Whether he carried self-knowledge over from one form to the other or others is however extremely doubtful.

Why the Others, when they come here, have any need at all of a human host is a question I cannot fully answer. It has something to do with the transfer process, as I hope will become more clear later. They need an anchor, you might say, something to hold on to. Also it seems that a stable base is a prime necessity. I suspect that the human is for them additionally something of a hiding place, a shelter at times of storm or stress, as if the Other were the snail and the human its living shell.

I have to admit that my knowledge of the Others is a very patchy compilation of odd bits and pieces forming nothing like a coherent whole. However this is only to be expected since the range of our perceptions and the range of theirs covers such a large but in the main non-overlapping territory.

If I sometimes contradict myself when speaking of these beings I will not say with Walt Whitman that I am huge and contain multitudes but only that my fragmentary understanding is working as hard as it is able.

Eidolon’s house was in Melton and looked down upon the ferry terminal and was thus contained within the boundary of the territory that Sudja, with her keen sense of proprietorship, called ‘the other part’ of the island – i.e., the part not under her vassalage. This other part formed three quarters of the whole and she would have liked to have it all, but the totality acknowledged another and greater Queen and was not to be bought.

Tom’s wife was a garrulous body called Eliza. As is usually the way with long-term couples, she was the bane as well as the stay of his existence, both at once. And I hurry to say that he occupied a similar tenancy in her marital firmament.

When we decide to live together we have to take the whole person and we soon find that the balance between the agreeable and the not so welcome is a somewhat fine one. One day one thing, the next day another. Only if the balance is too far out, and that usually in the minus direction (I never heard anyone complaining about an overplus of marital goodies!) does the real trouble begin.

They had four children, a dog and a cat and an aquarium containing tropical fish. Eliza worked for Sudja, which was of course very useful to Eidolon since he was thereby possessed of a spy at the heart of the enemy camp. (But was he able to access this vital link?)

Sudja, however, was completely in the dark as to the marriage-bond that existed between one of her cleaning-ladies, whose name she did not even know and to whose presence she was oblivious most of the time, including when she was shouting and screaming at her for some small infringement of professional duties, and her arch-enemy in the ferry-town whose name and being she was only too acutely aware of. (Persevere and all will soon come clear!)

"Madam’s been at it again," Eliza would say. Or, "IT has had another of IT’s tantrums today. And who had to clear the mess up afterwards? Yours truly, of course. But next time it won’t be so easy to get round me. And those young men! You’ll never guess – " etc. etc. Eliza could talk for a good half hour at a stretch with no loss of flow. And she would say, when reprimanded for her conversational attainments, that it was because he never uttered a word. Nor did he much, except when in the pub with his cronies. Like many quiet people, he thought a lot but rarely saw any need to share his cogitations. An unbelievably infuriating trait!

Eliza did not strictly need to take any employment since Tom was a fairly wealthy local builder and could easily have provided for all her needs. But she liked to be up and doing and said she couldn’t bear to be restricted to the house. Also she valued her independence.

Besides the wife, the children, the dog and cat and the tropical fish, there was a further vital ingredient in Tom’s domestic furniture. This was the computer, which Eliza called "her upstairs, the other woman in his life," because he was always up in the top room tapping away at the keys and staring at the screen. This room was his sanctum and most definitely out of bounds to all but himself. Except for the cat, Chester, who shared his love of solitude and quietness.

Chester, a slim young tom of aloof disposition who did not encourage promiscuous petting and had been known to scratch the hand that stroked him when he was not in the mood for it, would sit on Tom’s table while Tom worked. Or on sunny days the cat would doze on the window cill, looking out over the small harbour where the ferries came and went at the bottom of the hill, snaggering (this was the noise Chester made and you will not find the word in your dictionary) at the birds that dug around in the gutter above or hopped tantalisingly among the massive and ancient roof timbers, peeking in at the cat.

As we have already observed, he was not Eidolon in this incarnation, but plain and simple Tom Atmos. But we know, as does none other, that there is more to him than that and that a name is only a label, nothing else, as Colditz so rudely reminded Vivienne the day before. We cannot call him Eidolon-Tom, it is too cumbersome. Although Tom Eidolon doesn’t sound bad, it has a ring to it. We will know him, in this aspect of his being, as Tom, Tom Atmos – pleased to meet you! We will however constantly bear in mind (please nudge us if we seem to be forgetting it) that Tom Atmos, unlike Eidolon, is not all, and certainly not only, who or what he seems. Who is? you naturally counter. And I concur. These are still, deep waters and we have somehow to cross them.

Please God when our journey is at its end we shall know more than we know now.

And what did he do? What did Tom do? Well, besides his flourishing building business, there was The Case.

We have already mentioned the fact that Sudja coveted the whole island. There were those among the islanders, with Tom Atmos at their head, who had similar aspirations toward her own portion and who moreover strongly questioned her title to the land she assumed to belong to her. Questioned, more basically, the Council’s right to sell it to her and their assumed ownership prior to the transaction. (Solicitor’s phraseology, not mine!)

The opposition’s legal representatives conceded that the islanders had a point, even though they kept their thoughts on the subject strictly to themselves. It all came down to Sir Ramsey’s intentions in making his land over to the Council and this was the subject of much debate – three whole filing cabinets’ worth of paper in the offices of both solicitors, with more expected at any time. All this, at a cost of mounting thousands, on legal aid and at the general expense of the defenceless tax-payer.

Viewing the bulging cabinets, the solicitors on either side metaphorically rubbed their hands, but the smiles upon their faces were quite real. The money-grabber is always rubbing his palms; it is his favourite gesture of approval. This could go on for years and would see them sitting pretty for decades. Never mind conveyancing, this was the real thing, a solicitor’s dream come true.

"Do you want a cup of tea?" Eliza bellowed up two flights of stairs and through Tom’s closed door.

He looked at the cat. The cat looked at him. He did not respond and Eliza gave up, grumbling into her ample chest at the ensuing silence, or such relative silence as the lower floors of this house ever commanded.

Tom eyed the shut and bolted door with satisfaction. Boarders repelled, Sir! Stand by to come about. He went over to the window and looked down into the harbour. A blue and white day, dirty old fishing-vessels, a few sails in the mid-distance. And, when the ferry came in, as it did every hour, visitors come across for the festival streamed through the town and dispersed themselves over towards Sudja’s territory where camps had been set up for them.

But Eidolon had other refugees in mind.

When would they come? Immigrants from the Other Side, that’s all they were, damned immigrants. Why couldn’t they stay where they were and leave him alone?

By the time he had re-seated himself in his easy chair in front of the computer, he had changed, with only the cat to notice. Chester stirred never a hair or whisker, used to his companion’s double form.

Tom was now Eidolon, naked, bald and slim, master of nude elegance and swiftness. With quick fingers he punched his password (changed twice weekly) into the computer. A wait, a glurp from the instrument, and the message glowed upon the screen once more, headed by the Council’s flashing logo. That is to say, the logo of the Council of the Other Side, not that of the local group of moronic small businessmen who were supposed to assist in the running of this part of Bourne.

The logo aroused its usual sneer of contempt from the creature. No doubt it had taken a small roomful of Others half a year to come up with this piece of tawdry crap!

The message said ‘You will be receiving seven visitors.’ Followed a list of names and some ridiculous photographs – photographs of shape-changers, the photographs themselves evolving minute by minute. It named a date and time which Eidolon knew bore no relation to events down here and said that it expected him to extend a friendly hand as well as anything else required of him to the Council’s representatives.

As always when he renewed contact with his own people, Eidolon was outraged by their lack of knowledge. But he had to admit to himself that this fact acted always to his own advantage.

The name at the top of the list had elicited a prolonged hiss from him when he first read it.

The sound broke through Chester’s somnolent apathy and caused the cat to glare at him with hate-filled eyes and raised back.

It was as if someone had punched him, or rather poor unknowing Tom, in the stomach very very hard. He could barely believe what he read.

‘APPELES.’

This was what came from rusticating on this damned island for so many ages. Other more proactive beings managed to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the Grand Council. And no doubt also into the affections, and bed, of the Grand Archon. Appeles was capable of anything, even of sleeping with an old man three times his age. Eidolon seethed with jealousy and began to feel very hurt and sorry for himself.

And mad!

Chester began to view Eidolon warily as his hatred grew ever closer to the point of incandescence. The creature was shaking and its eyes were starting from their sockets.

And to think what he and Appeles had once been to each other, the centuries they had spent in each other’s arms way out beyond Andromeda. The worlds they had planned to build among the lighter stars of the Crab Nebula. Their last eons together in the wonderful supernova at whose cataclysmic birth they had been wonderingly present; among whose cosmic fireworks they had intermingled. He had thought that they were inseparable, that they would be united forever; or at least until this universe once more gathered up its widely-flung skirts and, retracting the immense arms which in their reaching out had embraced the Nothing and found it full of life, sank in again into its seeded core and on a sudden vanished without trace.

So much for those early dreams!

More noise from below. Shouting and banging of doors. The frame of the house shook. Three girls and one boy (he the Benjamin) whose ages varied from six to seventeen, were ready for the off, they to school and college, their mother to Sudja’s palace and immediate environs where a hell of a lot of cleaning would be needed after last night’s bash.

They shouted their farewells up the stairs and he replied in Tom’s deep basso voice, the sort that could be heard from one end of a street to the other. Was it Eidolon bidding Tom’s family farewell? Or Tom himself? At that moment they were close to being one single entity.

There was a final vigorous slam of the front door, which caused the pictures to rattle against the walls. Crashing of car doors, clashing of gears, a few wild bangs and throaty engine coughs, and then they were gone. He and Chester glanced at each other with relief.

Tom loved his wife and children dearly but was aware that absence made his heart most fond and propinquity could sometimes prove a strain.

"Always ’ave yer own room," he told his mates dahn the pub. "Somewhere where the buggers can’t get at yer. It’s the only way to survive marriage. And make sure there’s a good strong bolt on the door."

"Some of us ain’t got the room, Tom. We don’t all live in castles."

They were always ribbing him for living in a style not befitting his station in life, though when he had purchased the ruin that had been the tower it was at a knock-down price. Being a builder by trade (and nowadays a very successful one) he had done most of the renovations himself. Nouveau riche didn’t come into it.

Eidolon, of course, in himself and through previous incarnations, had over a period of a thousand years or more seen the castle built and inhabited and rebuilt and re-inhabited and finally come upon hard times. Tom-Eidolon, in this very upstairs room now reserved for his exclusive use (in the old days there had been two more floors above this one) had seen quite different people in different dress and had looked down on a harbour much smaller than the one he could see now and from a more lovely eminence devoid of the present-day sprawl of building that clustered up to his walls.

Then trade had dramatically increased in the nineteenth century and a bigger and better harbour had been built just around the headland from here. Ironically that later one was now all but demolished and rebuilt as a modern complex while the smaller continued to flourish in its own private manner now the competition was gone. The smaller retained the ferry trade (it had kept that through the ages, it was much easier for them to land there) which ensured an income.

Talking of the need for privacy, Tom would tell his friends: "You gotta make room somewhere in the house. A garage or a garden shed is just as good. My old dad used to sit out in his shed in all weathers, just to get away from my ma, and he taught me to do the same. They don’t want us under their feet anyway, not really. Prefer to ’ave us out the way so’s they can do their bleedin’ cleanin’. – Not that my misuss does a lot of that, she’s too busy cleaning other people’s houses, especially hers!"

They all knew who she was, the common enemy, Madame Sudja.

"’Ere Tom," cut in Len. "Don’t you agree with that female what-you-may-call-it –" He searched for the word at the bottom of his empty pint glass.

"Equality," said Tom. "I used to, once, when I was a young lad. Now I believe in male emancipation – like when they freed the slaves."

Len laughed, but the rest of the lads looked glum.

None of this meant anything to Eidolon. How weird it must be to be single-sexed and single-bodied! What an awful constriction of the naturally blossoming and changing self. Their limitation in this respect always made him feel delightfully smug. Except for those less limited humans known as ‘gays’ or whatever. They were more like him and his kind.

The island had escaped the worst excesses of the mainland when it came to the so-called rights of women and the landlord of Tom’s local certainly did not extend a welcoming hand to the less hardy members of the female sex. There was no separate ladies’ toilet and never likely to be while he was in charge. Women (as in ladies) and children (as in noisy brats) were given the cold shoulder and rarely returned. Dogs (as in canines, but definitely not the feminine variety) was different, man’s best mate etc. Dogs, or the occasional woof-woof anyway, and it had to be quiet and well behaved or it got booted out and its owner with it, were tolerated as giving the pub a somewhat sporty, masculine air.

Music and television too had no place here, apart from the World Cup of course, that always helped the pints go down at a spanking pace. Mobile phones had to be surrendered at the bar and reclaimed on leaving the premises. People were expected to behave in a sober (!) and civilised fashion and out-and-out drunks soon found themselves manhandled into the street and barred for life.

The Dog and Bull was the name of the pub. These two mammals were depicted in a large oval of somewhat garish Victorian stained glass that adorned the space between the two sets of smallish double doors onto the street. You really had to turn sideways to get in and out since only one of the two leaves was ever open at any particular time – as if the landlord was frightened his customers might escape.

The pub stood in the middle section of the main market street ("Get your strawberries ’ere, gels, all fresh!") and was usually full of street traders, mere glorified barrow-boys and habitual topers. Which is not to say that they were drunks, for they were all too experienced with the intoxicating liquors to degrade themselves thus, and people who did were regarded as amateur drinkers and beginners.

However, they liked to keep well ‘topped up’ during the working day, for which vice any number of plausible explanations were put forward, such as keeping out the cold and it’s supposed to be good for the heart and so on. For most of the drinkers, which meant most of the traders, sobriety was a state known only in their golden youth, the age of lost innocence.

I have said that no women were welcomed in the Dog – as everyone called it, with the English mania for shortening names. This was strictly true only as regards ostensible appearance, not actual sexual status.

Female market traders are in a class of their own and are hardly to be regarded as women at all until they go home and garb themselves in more feminine attire. While at work – that is to say actually and bodily in the street, beside their stalls – they affect trilby hats and corduroy trousers and heavy-soled shoes. Many of them smoke and the habitual fag stuck in the gob means that they must narrow their eyes and screw up their mouths in mobster-fashion.

Their voices, trained by heavy smoking and a continual crying of their wares (a softly spoken barrow boy or girl is of little use to anyone) are preternaturally deep and rasping. So that if you heard one of these females shouting "Lovely mush! Freshly picked! Best in the street!" in that peculiar mantric metre these people use, you would be startled to learn that the owner of the voice was a biological lady.

The surprise is that, presumably to make up for their butch appearance, they mostly sport a tremendous amount of gold about their persons – a multitude of thick gold knuckle-dusters on either hand and solidly linked neckchains hanging across their overalls for all the world like rather superior bondage shackles (S&M!).

And shining luridly above this display of wealth they reveal heavily made-up faces, tremendously powdered and mascara’d. Mostly they give a good impression of transvestite coal-miners prior to donning their drag.

These creatures (as with Eidolon, it was difficult to determine their gender) had free and unhindered daily and hourly access to the Dog – sort of honorary men while on the job.

Not that they sat anywhere, and they certainly did not mix with the guys. They had their own exclusive corner of the bar where they perched on high stools sipping gin and tonic. In this too they were much different from other women who these days think nothing of supping from pint glasses just like men. These ladies would have been outraged by such behaviour. After all, poor dears, they needed to draw the line somewhere. Not that they weren’t the salt of the earth and kind-hearted to an extreme and fawned over their female grandchildren just like any others. Their jobs had made them superficially tough but away from the ‘street’ they embraced their feminine roles (if such there still are in these very changed times) with gusto.

In the Dog they were treated like duchesses, whatever their garb. They had rarely to buy themselves more than one drink per session, and that only on a particularly slow day when the punters were strangely thin on the ground or coy about indulging in carrots spuds and onions and the best fruit this side of paradise. Vince or Justin or Jason, facing them across the horseshoe-shaped bar would always order ‘and one for the girls’ in a loud voice when buying a round. This was kind for they had left their years of girlhood far behind. The boys would always be rewarded with a beaming smile and a raised glass.

Now Tom and his crowd were not strictly of the ‘street’ but they were local and they spent well and kept themselves to themselves and they too quite often supplied the girls with a little of what tickled their thirsty fancy. And they were regular, always three or four of their group most lunchtimes, and people who frequented the Dog were rather set in their ways and didn’t much like to have to watch strange faces nor listen to strange voices while they imbibed their liquor. If you were new it was best to keep very quiet on your first few visits and to remain as inconspicuous as possible. After six months or so of acceptable behaviour you might begin, slowly, so as not to alarm the natives, to come a little out of your shell.

Tom and his lot had been resident here for the past couple of years. Their previous local had gone up-market and had got itself ‘themed.’ All new pubs in these dark times have to have a theme, a concept, something to build an atmosphere around – this after the new vandals have sacked them of all their original atmosphere, have taken away and bodily carted off all the dear old much beloved scuffed décor and put something nastily plastic in its place.

In the case of the old pub this unstoppable theming process, as inevitable and crushing as some new holy Juggernaut, entailed installing a jukebox (nasty American word and ever nastier object) and ripping out the old roomy lavvies and replacing them with appalling shiny steel pig-troughs that made a terrible row when you peed into them, like a tin of lead pellets being poured into an enamel bucket.

The theme, of course, the location being littoral, was those that go to sea in ships, and large brass bells and nets and floats predominated with the odd bit of genuine (genuine-genuine) driftwood thrown casually about the bar, a hazard to all.

As soon as the imitation oak steering wheel put in an appearance Tom and his lot set sail for new quieter waters and hove to at the Dog which suited them nicely thank you after they had received an assurance from the landlord that no plans for up-grading were afoot on board his ship. Here they had settled gratefully and were now completely at home.

They were around half a dozen in number. People came and went, not all as steadfast as the inner core. They were skilled or semi-skilled workers, mostly of middling age. Although there was one young shaver attached to the group, a Bolshie clerk from the local council who fed them all the relevant inside information on Sudja, being every bit as opposed to big business and its machinations as they were.

They had started as an action group to forestall one of that lady’s more outrageous attempts at local acquisition, in which campaign they had triumphed. They had stuck together ever since, united by their love of good beer and fair play. Tom, in charge of The Case, was their ringleader. He was the brains, had his own flourishing business, knew all the ins and outs and had never lost the common touch with which he had been born. There was no ‘side’ to Tom. What you saw was what you got, like it or lump it. Sudja, of course, hated it.

In his now quiet tower house, with only the cat and his purring computer for company, Tom glanced at the latest letter from the Queen of the Isle, his sparring partner. Or from her solicitors, since she never put pen to paper and was possibly quite illiterate so far as English was concerned.

In this assumption Tom was wrong. Sudja was just too cautious ever to commit herself to paper. She left that to her lackeys so that she could always say later that she had been misinterpreted should the need arise.

Eidolon’s spare hairless frame melted back into the more rotund form of Mr Atmos, much to Chester’s relief.

She was offering him money – that was her true native tongue. Tom was totally untempted by this inane and frankly insulting gesture. All his needs were catered for. The only thing he wanted was to get Sudja off the island.

He glanced at his computer monitor again. The screen’s wallpaper showed a photograph of the old dock office just around the headland from the small harbour where he presently lived. It was a view that he had seen every day as a child.

The windows of the flat where he lived with his parents and two sisters (those two had long since flown the island for more exotic places) looked straight out across the harbour road towards the wharves and warehouses.

Old Mrs Robinson lived downstairs, a lonely widow with few relatives and those abroad. His parents rented the upper floor and a half – his sisters’ bedroom and Mrs Robinson’s being on the middle floor.

The dock office had a small tower with a chiming clock or clocks, because a dial was set into each of the four sides of the tower. The cracked bells had told the times and places of his childhood. There was a light in the tower to illuminate the clock’s four translucent dials during the hours of darkness and this mellow light, like a candle diffused and glowing warmly behind an alabaster shade, had shone into the room where he slept.

After the trams had ceased to trundle and clank along the road, around midnight, the only sound would be that of the clock and the occasional ship’s hooter and, in the summer months, the sleepy and incessant long-drawn chirrup of the cricket in the old and crumbling masonry of the adjacent cottage hospital.

His had not been a happy childhood or boyhood but his memories were all precious ones because each was a part of himself.

On long summer evenings he and his mother would sit side by side at the open window gossiping together and watching the business of the docks and the sailors coming and going and the traffic in the road.

The window cill was covered with thick layers of cracking paint, the result, he now realised, of not ‘rubbing down’ at each re-painting, and he would idly pull these off with his restless fingers, dropping the pieces into the small front garden below. What on earth did Mrs Robinson think, he now wondered, to find all these fragments among her plants and shrubs?

In the years spent in that house he had managed to completely strip the cill – early training for his later profession! – so that it at last presented a clean concrete face to the world. Scoured.

Now that cill, that house, the clock, the dock offices, the sailors and the commerce, were all gone with only this scanned computer image to remind him. He had taken the photograph on the day they began to demolish the old clock tower, more than a decade ago.

Sudja’s corporation had decided to build a ‘complex’. Now there were hideous rows of jerry-built houses (already peeling and patched, so high was the degree of workmanship) along the ancient quays, shops miscalled ‘boutiques’, themed pubs selling the hated lager (it gave him wind just to look at it bubbling away in the glasses) and a couple of hundred-storey blocks thrown up against the skyline for good measure as if to say ‘Up yours!’ to the island as a whole.

And did she seriously imagine that her tawdry offer of an insignificant bribe (her finances must be depleted following the crash) could redeem such vandalism!

Chester was stirring apprehensively again but allowed himself to be stroked and purred into submission. Tom’s was the only hand he would willingly accept.

Looking out of the window, Tom could just see the top of one of Sudja’s towers. A light flashed from the top of it during the night, adding insult to injury. Anger gave way to contempt.

He’d have her well and truly fixed one of these days.

In this resolve, Tom and Eidolon were as one.

* * * * * * *

At about this time Vivienne and Cosimo were awakening to each other’s company in casa Sudja, quite their old selves, although Viv could feel the beginnings of a headache.

It was a large room. Their carved and gilded four-poster was more like a boat than a bed – Cleopatra’s barge perhaps, as portrayed by the luscious Alma-Tadema. Cosimo would have served quite well for an Anthony as he bent over his rediscovered love. For all her excesses of the previous night, Vivienne looked good enough to eat, and he told her so.

She smiled up at him from her always half-dreamy grey eyes. "Well, that would do for a start – "

They looked at each other, and through each other, their faces an open-sesame to lands untravelled as well as to old familiar places. Now the four-poster was a voyaging inter-planetary ship intent on finding strange new worlds ("Come about, Mr Zulu!"), searching for spice and slaves and new knowledge, the age of discovery come again; nosing her way among a solar system she had visited once before and finding much that she had missed on her previous expedition.

Finding a momentary gap in the constant rain of Cosimo’s kisses (romantic old thing that he was still!) Vivienne said, "I had the most extraordinary experience yesterday evening. It was a very long and very real dream in which you and I made love in a hundred forms and places. And yet you were not yourself but someone else."

"Well, we did make love," laughed Cosimo. "Have you forgotten already? I realised you had had a fair bit to drink, and that I might be taking unfair advantage. But you were so eager, it was more a case of you seducing me."

She pouted at him. "No, before that. There was a previous episode, after you and Sudja had left me standing. That was a bit naughty of you, to abandon me again so soon after our reunion."

She was half-serious in what she said, and he realised it and felt somewhat abashed.

"I looked round and you were gone and no one had seen your going or knew where you were," he explained. "Maksude assured me that she would have her people look out for you. She was so insistent about talking to me at once that I could hardly refuse. I imagined you must be loitering in the woods somewhere, probably being chatted up by some strapping young man."

"No, actually I had stopped to admire that statue in the clearing. Did you notice it? It’s a fantastic Greek god, somewhat eerie-looking though. At least, I say Greek, but there is something decidedly other-worldly about it."

"I don’t recall it, but everything is a bit fuzzy so far as yesterday is concerned."

He began to wonder again if he were suffering from selective amnesia. Or perhaps it was the onset of Alzheimer’s? But that way lay hypochondria.

"It’s an adorable piece of sculpture," she said, "even though it is just the tiniest bit eerie."

She began to recall, with some intensity, how she and the creature had made love, when there were so many Cosimos. Oh, it was absurd; she couldn’t tell what to make of it. She would think about it later, when there was more time and Cosimo was not so eager – and when she was not so eager.

The previous evening’s experiences, however problematical, had revealed a positively boundless potential in herself. She could now see how in the past she had been much too proscriptive in her attitude to sex, not necessarily toward her partner but above all to herself. She had been over-cautious and had missed out on a great deal. What was there to stop her from enjoying a sensuous renaissance, a late and glorious final flowering, now that conception was no longer a possibility? And who better to help her toward this goal than her re-found Cosimo, toward whom, in the past, she had reached out mere half-hearted hands and so had sent him away?

As her body and Cosimo’s became once more intimately acquainted she seemed to sense in him some traces of that other unknown creature and in herself also responses identical to those elicited by the exotic bald alien with the compelling eyes.

"Eidolon," she said aloud, but Cosimo took it as some garbled message made incoherent by her passion. He could hardly believe how utterly tactile she had become, how exciting. The years had enormously improved her technique, if one could use so cold a word for something so very natural and easy.

She was more beautiful than before; rounded mentally as well as physically. It was as if they were ripe perfected fruit, now at last ready for each other. When they were younger, nothing could have successfully developed from their relationship. But now there seemed so much promise here.

He told himself he was jumping the gun. Then thought receded into the background, overtaken by original, more primal urges. They made each other very happy. Water in the hot desert. A shaded oasis. She was mad about him. He had always been tender, even when young. Now he was very near perfection. They came simultaneously, first teetering on the edge waiting for each other and then jumping off into empty space at exactly the same moment and twisting through the air together. They both felt it was a shared work of art they had created.

After a while she found she couldn’t refrain from commenting "Cosimo, that was wonderful." Then, with her usual humour, "How was it for you?"

He paused, as if to compare it with other experiences, like a wine taster between sips.

"Bastard!"

"Honestly, Vivienne, I don’t think I ever enjoyed it more. I can see we have a lot of catching up to do."

"Yes, I feel that too."

She mentally thanked what she had come to think of as the little green man in the woods.

Breakfast came on a tray, brought in by a somewhat dazed Gordon. It was his penance and he apologised for his rudeness to her last evening.

She waved this away. "How’s Colditz?"

He smiled as he poured the coffee. "Great!"

Cosimo was puzzled but thought it best not to ask.

Gordon was grateful and felt like giving Vivienne a big hug and a kiss but thought the old bloke in the bed might not like it. "You did us both a favour last night."

"I know I was drunk. But I think I would have remembered that!"

Gordon giggled fetchingly and she now found him charming.

"You brought us together again. Thanks a bunch. This time yesterday I felt suicidal. But now –" He glanced at Cosimo knowingly. "Well, I better go." And smiling he departed.

They munched their toast and slurped coffee together in the impressive silence. The room looked out on a beautiful park and Gordon had tied back the curtains before leaving. They seemed to see themselves as newlyweds at Honeymoon Hotel. They watched their own reflections in the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows as though looking at characters in a film. Could it really be them? The ambience began once more to change, to take on that sparkling quality of the previous day, like tinfoil raining down to confuse the enemy radar.

But what enemy they were thinking of they had no idea.

Someone had thoughtfully left a wardrobe of clothes unlocked and rummaging through this a little guiltily they found a large yellow bathrobe for Vivienne and a silk dressing-gown for Cosimo. Thus attired they opened the windows and strolled into the garden.

The air was pellucid, as after a shower; but the ground was dry underfoot. They went unshod across the grass. More statuary. A Martian-looking Diana with elvish face regarded them with her unwavering stare. Of a smooth and bluish metal. Cosimo stroked her thigh abstractedly. Birds unseen sang. The sun was warm upon them, not burning.

"This is the most extraordinary place," remarked Vivienne, meaning the whole island, not just the garden.

Cosimo looked at her and nodded. "You feel all the time as if something is about to happen. What brought you here to Bourne?"

She took his arm. "Well that too was curious. I had not meant to come here at all. I was due to attend a seminar further along the coast. A little place called Mawning, converted country house and so on. I had completely forgotten about the island. And suddenly there it was to my right as I came up over the hill, far out, with the great cliffs rearing out of the sea as if they had been bodily and ferociously hacked away from the mainland by some primeval giant. I recognised it instantly. It was as if it were actually waiting for me. Do you know I don’t remember ever thinking of it since my last visit? It seemed to have disappeared altogether from my consciousness in the interval. Yet I am sure that I must have some photographs or a video somewhere from the previous time I was here. Then when I reached the ferry crossroads the damned car inexplicably stalled. It had passed its M.O.T. just last month and was practically new. A couple of helpful youngsters pushed it offroad for me. I phoned Mawning and then the A.A. The A.A. guy was completely non-plussed, couldn’t make it out at all. He arranged a courtesy car for me and then I suddenly took it into my head to get on the ferry and come across to see the old place. It was quite mad. I am not usually quite so impulsive. Heaven knows what the people at Mawning thought. I shan’t be asked again.

"And then – don’t be too flattered, dear – as I got off the ferry I began to feel absolutely convinced that you too were on the island. I had heard some talk of the festival on the journey over. Some locals were moaning about all the noise and the mess and the uncouth visitors. Understandably of course. Last time was absolute chaos. Drugs and drunkenness, the lot. Fighting in the streets. You must remember it well, as I do. As I do now, that is, but as I didn’t then, if you know what I mean."

He nodded understandingly, knowing exactly what she meant.

"I suppose, Cosimo, that that was our last meeting, until now. Anyway, I just knew that I would run across you here. And I did."

Cosimo put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to him. "Something even more extraordinary, love. I was going to that seminar myself. Decided just the day before yesterday. Keeping up to date with the latest thinking and all that. Old dog learning new tricks. I didn’t see your name on the programme."

"Uncanny. So it seems we were destined to meet, whatever. I was a last minute addition, which is why I didn’t feel too bad about cancelling. So why didn’t you go to Mawning?"

"Same as you. Saw the island. Remembered. It’s a wonder we didn’t meet on the ferry. Must have missed each other by a hair. I thought I’d just come over for a quick shufty and then on to the seminar. But fate decided otherwise. And the memory thing, I had that too. In fact, I have been wondering whether I am growing senile."

"Not you, darling, judging by your earlier performance!" she said somewhat coyly. "So you didn’t know the ‘Queen’ was here?" she asked ironically.

"Hadn’t a clue. To be honest, I’d forgotten she had property here. Always remembered her in connection with eastern Europe. Read about her in the papers of course. Couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid. I even had money invested in some of her companies. Complete wipeout, of course. Hate to lose assets like that. Should have seen it coming."

"I hear she’s a witch," said Vivienne with some satisfaction.

Cosimo had to laugh at that. "No, she’s just not your usual everyday female. She has extraordinary qualities."

"So do witches."

"She’s asked me to work for her in an advisory capacity. Light duties only. And with a very good rate of remuneration! It will enable me to regain something of what I lost due to her carelessness."

"But Cosimo, you don’t intend to work for that awful woman? I’ve heard all about her. She’s a sexual vampire."

"That’s far from unique these days. Well, she talked me round you know. She has a way of doing that. I’ll be more observer than worker. I just have to whisper in her ear, like the man in Caesar’s triumphal car, ‘All this is vanity’. I hope you aren’t jealous, honey?" He was laughing again.

"Well, I might be. Except I’m past all that nonsense."

"No one is past it, Vivienne. I must admit to feeling a little twinge of it myself when I saw you with all those handsome boys last night. Some of them are real Adonises. I could see that twinkle in your eye when you spoke to the hunk who brought in the breakfast."

"But they’re all gay, Cosimo. It’s eerily like the court of that Chinese empress dowager, you know, the one from Victorian times. Except hers were all eunuchs. Eunuchs these ain’t. Why on earth does the witch – sorry, Maksude – surround herself with all these gay lads?"

"I think it’s her repressed mother-complex. On a grand scale."

"Mm! Perhaps I better get one of those for myself. Her boys are really quite dishy."

"Oh," he joked, "so I am no longer good enough for you, I suppose?"

"No darling, I wouldn’t say that."

"Christ, Vivienne, we are starting to talk like two characters in some awful dated play by Noel Coward!"

"I know, isn’t it too, too lovely!"

And so they walked and talked in the sunshine of that splendid garden. Accompanying them, unseen, and all ears, the translucent form of Eidolon, invisible in brightness, hovered above and around them.

CHAPTER SIX

For the sake of the populace, the Seven were despatched with considerable ceremony, the Grand Archon himself officiating, dressed in his most resplendent robes, the pearl cap of authority pressed firmly down upon his heraldic black-winged head-dress.

The Grand Archon, previously Magus Ovsky, and previous to that Pavlus Satiner (to mention but three of his personae) had the appearance of an aged and feeble man, since this would lend dignity to the scene. He walked with the aid of an ornate silver staff which bore a golden representation of the White Vessel at its head, thickly encrusted with massive and sparkling precious stones. Appeles, his newly adopted son, led the tottering old guy toward the dais where the great machine waited to shoot the Seven halfway across the space-time continuum toward Eidolon’s planet, earth. It was a sacred and solemn moment for many attending the ceremony because the shot could not be attempted without considerable risk to all, not least to the Grand Archon himself whose life force would be severely drained by the effort.

Appeles was fetchingly garbed in body-revealing black silk tights and his chest was bare. He wore a long silk robe of watered crimson scarlet that billowed around him in the warm breeze that refreshingly rinsed the somewhat muggy air of the Great Metropolis. His long black hair was tied behind with a huge golden bow the ribbons of which reached to his waist and fluttered with his robe. He looked stunning.

Sinfonia, his latest girl friend, waved down at him from the balcony of a tower block. She was dressed all in white and pink and was as blond as he was black. He smiled and waved back to her. While supporting the archon (his lover and protector) he was simultaneously standing behind Sinfonia, his hands upon her breasts, his lips at her neck. She was delicious. And she thought that he was delicious too. And the time was right. The Anomaly arrived and everything stopped (for Appeles and Sinfonia) while they created passion, a white tornado there on the balcony. For everyone else, the ceremony proceeded.

"I am sorry to see you go, son," the Archon was simpering, holding firmly onto Appeles’ muscular left forearm. "I shall miss you sorely."

"You have the hologram, my exact replica. You will never know the difference."

"But it won’t be the same," whined Magus Ovsky. "It so easily forgets those little extras you provide for me. I shall have to teach it everything."

"It will enjoy the learning process, believe me. Your enhanced powers will make it sing with pleasure."

"You have to go. You need to progress a grade or two, and this trip will see to that. But the parting will be bitter for me. Message me constantly."

"I’d rather be massaging you, daddy, the way you enjoy most. It’s going to be pretty hard for me too." He lied convincingly and the sweet smile of sympathy on his handsome face brought tears to the old guy’s eyes.

Applauding crowds lined the Triumphal Route. Father and son saw many familiar faces, lovers from recent times, lovers from centuries back. Each was greeted individually as time stretched to accommodate the wishes of all. Those on the Other Side are as passionate and playful as a school of dolphins – and very sociable. But the Scene was preserved, as was only polite and proper, while the revels took place discreetly in numerous parallel universes. For Appeles, however, one most important face was missing. One most-desired presence cut off from him. Eidolon. Yet each step he took brought him nearer to his bright companion. There was comfort in that. Soon they would meet face to face and Eidolon would be able to deny him nothing.

The walk from the palace via the Triumphal Route to the dais was a short one. But this is the Other Place and these are the people of the Other Side. In the world of imagination, space and time fold in upon themselves; wish and intention are shuffled together into a different and ever-changing reality.

For some people, the procession took a mere ten earth minutes; for others it was half of eternity. And half of eternity is quite possible in this paradoxical place! This was the realm of the solipsist and the view was inward. There is always the Scene to refer back to. The Scene and the Setting are their fixed points and their outward world a stage. There has to be a fixed point or chaos will cover all. This once accepted, variation is the very lifeblood of the Other Side, as necessary to them as is air to us. Our intelligence and imagination are stretched to even begin to understand their way of life and their peculiar beings. ‘There’ can never be ‘here’ – for us; to them, it is perfectly possible and absolutely desirable.

So, through fields of time, Appeles, acclaimed and dressed as hero, son of the Grand Archon, scion of the Great Metropolis of the Other Side, proceeded in state toward the great machine that was to shoot him and his companions across the endless void to the planet earth.

If there was any hesitation in his mind it did not show upon his clear and untroubled countenance. There were many on the way who wished to know him and none were denied. It was a protracted feast of love as well as a leave taking, sometimes as many as a dozen together, tumbling in communion. An air of festival and triumph. Drums and trumpets and lips and thighs. Rose petals and tinsel fluttering in the air.

Behind the archon and his beloved son came the six companions, three of each sex, bearing in mind the variability of the tribe. All were young and all were beautiful, their beauty highlighted by the archon’s senescence which, as you will recall, was more ceremonial than actual. Their billowing robes and golden fillets in the shapes of leaf and fruit showed off to advantage their robust bodies and fair faces. Like demi-gods, they glowed as they approached one and made fragrant the air in their passing and left eclipse in their wake. The Seven were the very cream of the brilliant youth of the Great Metropolis, each destined for future high office and glorious positions.

So the procession mounts the dais. The archon supported by his son to the front, the other six ringed behind in a radiant half-circle, a raised Olympus of beauty and talent. The gentle breeze ruffles their robes and lifts their long hair lightly. Behind them, the open door of the machine from which they will be so shortly launched.

Then with incense and the ringing of silver bells, with chanted mantra and the blowing of long golden horns, comes the College of the God, devotees of the highest and unknown. A mystic convocation, each a sacred body and untouched; and untouchable. Their lives are pure as central running water, unmuddied by the crumbling banks of existence. Pampered in their youth with every luxury and vice imaginable (or unimaginable), at their thousandth year they put all this away and begin the long journey toward the central light. First satiated, they have no longing for what they might otherwise have missed and lamented the lack of. Their experience was full, and they moved on.

The High Priest harangues the assembled company, both travellers and those come to wave them off on their momentous journey. Attention is necessary here – indeed, enforced – and everyone except the members of the College looks thoroughly bored.

The Grand Archon grumbles quietly to Appeles and is reproved with a sharp look from the officiating cleric, which he ignores. Another mantra, some waving of incense, and they are ready. I emphasise however that most of what is happening is ceremony, a throw-back to the mores of a far distant time in this tribe’s evolution, retained as symbolism which nonetheless still stirs the modern feelings. The archon really does feel tearful and Appeles a little afraid. It is to be such a very big adventure!

The Seven bow and are blessed by both the civil and clerical authorities and then billow off in clouds of rustling silk toward the machine. (It is not a machine, but a living entity.) They turn once, salute amid cheers and the waving of banners and a multitude of caresses and more intimate salutations, and then go through the golden door which closes behind them.

Silence. Pavlus Satiner, the Grand Archon, ascends the throne and looks about him with a certain condescension as the force-bubble is lowered over him. He sits back, stirs a little, then is still. His eyes close. The moment of the attempted shot, retaining still some echoes of its original danger – several ancient archons had literally dropped dead – is now upon him.

The College gathers around the archon in his bubble, his fishlike eyes unfishlike closed. Clouds of incense waft about the concentrated elder. His mind is still and he is one with the College of the God, having indeed spent many years in their cloisters in preparation for his present role. He puts off again the self he so long since discarded and then re-discovered. Limbs unfelt. Breath hardly a whisper.

The living machine, the unimaginably powerful entity, stirs from its torpor and feels the archon’s empty mind approaching its own vast inner spaces. It salutes him as best it can who has no limbs or eyes nor any awareness of its own gigantic form – miles down its caverns reach and rest upon bedrock. Archon and machine flow together like water into water, their purpose one.

The mother-machine feels the seven precious children resting in her womb, reaches out toward them, softly engages with their consciousness: love and compassion are blissfully interchanged. The archon must direct the pool of consciousness and point it against the invisible earth-barrier, he the dynamo to the dammed flood and press of this huge acreage of heavy vibrancy. He feels his own mind – and yet not his – begin to yield and buckle. He must hold it for a few seconds longer until the mother-machine has reached her optimum of power. Only then, at the peak, can he let go and allow the Seven to be catapulted to their destination and through the obdurate barrier, safely winged into that shimmering mind-seen space where clear oceans lap huge continents of teeming life and where Eidolon…

There is no time to think of Eidolon, that extraordinary being. Oh the power! The power! Building into a rapturous symphony, the climax comes!

Resting in their golden sealed sarcophagi the Seven are aware that all is ready and the Shot now immanent. They fold their arms across their chests and wait.

We, who are bound into the very fabric of time, space, circumstance and event and whose lives’ every moment is part of the creation and weaving of the most extraordinary tapestry – subject and king in one, victim and torturer both – can only imaginatively wonder what it is to be unbound: free, as we like to fantasise, of the strings and strands of attachment of the wall-hung composition. (Upon which wall and in what room of what enormous house, we dare not ask!)

And stepping out and down from the one work of art we should only find our first imprisonment superseded by a second larger penitentiary mode among the buildings and walks and gardens – and even the whole surrounding landscape – of the castle upon whose mere wall we previously hung. However more large or more small the gaol, we are still unfree. Nor do we give any thought, in our longing to be rid of these chains, to the terrors, to the bottomless falls from what great heights, of the unshackled mind and spirit.

This latter horror was the one that now confronted the Grand Archon as he slipped seamlessly from his own self, his archonhood, into total freedom, the fire of his release like scorching flame and all his boundaries gone. It was but one moment. Man could stand no more; and even the supramen of the Other Side must needs cling as fast to fact as we do.

What saved him was his remembrance, even amidst the flame and falling and drowning, of the Scene, what to them, like the players they truly are, is equal to our conception of reality. At that he turned and inflicted his Purpose upon the falling and handed that Purpose to the mother-machine. She gladly took it up, as was her function, and, careful of their safety, ejected her children into a different sphere and time and set them down upon the island for all the world as if they had just disembarked from the ferry at exactly the time and on the same morning that Cosimo and Vivienne walked in Sudja’s gardens.

Eidolon felt their coming and was not pleased. Vivienne and Cosimo were aware of a cool breeze blowing across the lawns and retired to their room to wash and dress.

The bubble lifted, the Grand Archon staggered back to his palace, supported by the members of the College of the God and amidst the ringing of bells and the braying of golden horns. Once there, and only when completely alone, he fell into the strong arms of the Appeles hologram and was comforted.

‘Temporal dislocation’ is one of their fine phrases covering a complete lack of evidential knowledge as opposed to high-flown theory. What it means is that the emergence onto the stage of the Strange Sphere by someone from the Other Place is likely (more than likely, some among them protest) to disturb the steady onward stream of time so that it is bifurcated into an unpredictable series of branching waterways; even, or so goes the most outrageous of these rebel theories, flowing backward on occasion so that history itself (the immutably fixed sequence of the past) is fatally disrupted and changed.

Also to be taken into account is the claim recently put forward by Archon Oloshoee that the very idea of a fixed past is a complete illusion whose only merit is that it bolsters the artificial sense of reality so necessary to the apt functioning of the individual psyche.

As was stated at a recent meeting of the Academy, there had been so few excursions into the Strange Sphere, and these few all attended by a complete lack or scientific observation, for any remotely accurate data to be collected. Eidolon, the renegade, had been lost track of for most of the time so that any useful insight he might have been able to contribute had been lost to science.

"In effect," insisted Pavlus, "our people are travelling into the unknown. And we have no way of telling what havoc their arrival might inflict upon the people of that place."

The silence of the Academy was eloquent and the bowed heads of its learned members spoke volumes.

Pavlus was also aware, although this was a concern that he left unvoiced, that the effect of the dislocation upon the travellers themselves had been only partially investigated. He prayed that his dear boy should not be harmed. The guilt would be unbearable, as would the loss. Whether this was his private method of indemnifying himself against any future self-blame we cannot tell, but it seems suspiciously like. There was a streak of iron in Pavlus’s soul, wrapped about in swaddling bands of sentimentality, as with all autocrats.

In the event, whatever shifts there may have been in the temporal fabric went unknown and un-noticed by Pavlus, the scientists, the people of the Strange Sphere (except in minor respects, and those not fully comprehended, as will be seen) and the travellers themselves. Time closed around the immigrants so soon as they set foot upon the earth. They were swallowed up in the prevailing scheme; accommodated in the most inclusive way; provided with personality, history and discrete being.

Whether history was changed, we cannot say. Perhaps it had already been there, awaiting their arrival. Whatever…

The Seven, four girls and three guys, trudged up the hill from the harbour, knapsacks on their backs, and passed right under Tom Atmos’s window. He noticed nothing, and neither did they. Only Chester, watching as they passed, stirred in his comfy windowseat and more intently stared. Tom, at his computer, was oblivious. Where Eidolon was at that moment, who can say?

The Seven are now seven travellers, free spirits of our times, protestors against the building of roads, protectors of the trees and landscape, animal rights campaigners, warlocks and witches, lovers of prohibited substances, fervent attenders of rock concerts. They come too in the disguise of worshippers of Eidolon, the new travellers’ god, whose siblings they are. Not father nor mother Eidolon, but sister or brother and always lover, new Pan for the people; sometimes also child, long-haired and wild, half feral still.

In a circle, naked, chant "Eidolon! Eidolon! Eidolon!" long and plaintive with the stress upon the second syllable. Or, more urgently, as the named one comes among you and begins to join in your revels and is incarnate in your flesh and bone, then you cry his name aloud with the stress upon the first of the three lovely syllables, urgently, as at the peak of your passion, "Eidolon! Eidolon! Eidolon!" faster and more pleadingly, until he appears in all his fiery beauty and stands there flashing before your very eyes!

Bacchus of the West, reborn and re-anointed! Latter Lord of the Dance, the vibrant godhead! Hail to Thee, great Eidolon! Oh come! Come and release your people from their chains! So had the poet of the group but lately apostrophised his sometime lover in a dithyramb that had been printed in the Travellers’ Rag, their own weekly published by their own (literally!) underground press.

And who was the author of this marvellous piece? None other than Appeles, who spoke of what for aeons he had known. It is useless to enquire how and why this poem was published prior to the arrival on the island – and indeed on earth – of the Seven. Sufficient to know that it was done and that their appearance sent shock-waves back and forth through time. The excessively attentive reader may recall the couple that Cosimo saw on the ferry and, bearing in mind what follows, may draw his own conclusions.

Appeles is now the loveable Apple, sometimes Apple of the Valley. His ‘real’ name is Terry, but we are already aware how many multifarious levels constitute our far from single reality and how many other names lie behind the given.

Apple recalls from a previous visit (the strange circumstances of which will be related on another occasion) that there are caves hereabouts, although he has forgotten the exact location; and the Seven are determined to make them their hotel. They have also heard that the caves are closed to the public – but when did that ever stop them? They insist, and absolutely rightly, that the land belongs to no one. They have not yet reached the age of acquisition, but we may be sure that when they do they will hang on to their property as jealously as they now covet that of other people.

Apple is a poet and has moreover penned verses celebrating his far from unique status and emphasising the p’s in his appellation (!) and vocation. He tells everyone that it is onomatopoeia, which of course it isn’t. It is merely repetition. He plays the recorder and wishes that he had two mouths so that he could play and recite at the same time. Someone once rudely suggested he might stick his recorder somewhere indecent and perform in that mode thus leaving his mouth free, but he has never tried it. The recorder is a melancholy and invariable instrument and Apple’s playing is not of the most flexible variety, unlike his piano playing which is brilliant.

He has two distinct modes, Elizabethan (obviously) wherein ‘Alas my love you do me wrong’ figures largely and near to exclusively, with only minor variations. The other, when he is feeling oriental, and often under the influence of opiates of differing strengths, is a fair imitation of a high wind through the crack in a door and is his attempt at the Japanese flute or shakuhachi; but since this calls for large reserves of breath, most of which he dissipates through his nasal cavities due to lack of any technique, he mercifully cannot keep it up for long.

His audience is uncritical and most are in love with him – boys as well as girls, natch – so that he has no stimulus to improve. And who indeed could resist him, seated half naked before a roaring wood fire ("Save the trees, man!") in someone else’s forest clearing, the light upon his limpid, well-shaped flesh, his long hair a mass of black highlights, blowing for all he is worth? The girls went down like ninepins (he was not a patient or responsive lover) and wherever he passed he left behind a trail of fatherless children for the generous taxpayer to sponsor.

Apple’s current favourite was one of the girls in the group, Craven, or Craving as Apple liked to call her since she was always (or nearly so, subject to the lunar cycle) ready for him.

They were ‘sort of’ husband and wife, until the time when Apple should ‘sort of’ change his mind, as he was frequently wont to do. He sometimes shared her with his closest male friend, Marvellous. Craving didn’t object. They had threesomes on dirty mattresses in unsavoury squats, Marvellous behind Craving and Apple in front, both inside her at the same time.

Craving would have liked to enjoy this pleasure on a more regular basis but Apple often grew jealous of Marvellous or of Craving or of them both. They were forbidden to do it together in his absence and they surprisingly toed his line, never once overstepping his mark, despite the fact that they really liked each other.

Once or twice Apple had penetrated Marvellous in Craving’s absence but he disliked the thought of over-indulging in this particular activity for fear that it might make him ‘funny’. Marvellous was always trying to press up against him in tight places but mostly he pretended not to notice.

Another member of the group, Star (a man) so called because (you’ve guessed it) he had a star tattooed in the middle of his forehead at the site of the Third Eye, had come armed with an Ordnance Survey Map, filched from the ferry shop. From this he had worked out the likely whereabouts of the caves which, annoyingly, were not clearly marked. Star was a keen and knowledgeable student of geology.

Craving managed to attract the attention of a sex-starved lorry driver who said he knew where the caves were and would drop them off and the Seven were soon rattling along in the back of the road repair vehicle which smelt strongly of pitch – or rather the Six were in the back and the Seventh, Craving, was more comfortably seated beside the happy navvy.

"So where you lot from? I don’t have to ask why you’ve come." He leered at her thighs with no attempt at concealment, moving his eyes upwards to her breasts as he spoke and drove.

"So why have we come?" she asked archly and as though it were a very clever and witty question.

"Rock concerts, we get a lot of youngsters over here for that. You know that The Regular Gang are playing this year?"

"Oh those old gits are about my grandpa’s age," she said crushingly, unaware that The Regular Gang had been the leading cultural influence of the navvy’s youth. "We come to listen to Greek Things, they are the tops with us."

He’d never even heard of the Greek Things. "Double Dutch to me," he quipped, but she either didn’t hear him or didn’t find it funny. He glanced at the Six in his driving mirror, windswept and dusty among the debris in the back of the lorry. "So who’s that lot then?" he indicated with his head.

"My friends." She stared at the navvy with hungry eyes. He was beefy and eager and she felt quite attracted. He also probably had plenty of cash, unlike her regular admirers. He saw her look and read its meaning with precision since it exactly reflected his own excitement. The cab seemed to close in around them. She was a beauty, a real beauty, and her tits were the tastiest pair he had ogled in a very long while.

"I shall be at the concert too," he informed her, his eyes following the shapely curve of her thighs in her tight frayed jeans, through which the knees peered enticingly. He imagined what it would be like, facing her, his big hands upon her knees, pulling them slowly apart. He was getting hard. He knew her mentality well, having dated girls like her all his life.

"I’m loaded, you’ll have a good time with me. You won’t have much fun with that load of drop-outs." He jerked his head backward again at Apple and the rest.

"That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about!"

"Come on, you can do better than that. You could have anyone you wanted."

It was a thought that had often crossed her mind in draughty squats and on the open road, when she was tired and hungry and dying for a drink and a fag, or something with a bit more of a kick.

She could see the bulge in his jeans which had become alarmingly and excitingly large and she let him see that she saw. Of course, he could be a nutter, but she didn’t think so. It might be worth the chance. She didn’t fancy sleeping in a cave. She flashed him a knowing smile which left him breathless. "You married?" she enquired pertinently.

He said "No," with a straight face, and she could see he did not lie.

She was wrong in this assumption, because his statement had been half-truth. However, it didn’t matter because Stacey, his ‘ex’ was, pending their divorce, far away with another richer man, although still exacting her pound of flesh from himself by way of emotional blackmail and in lieu of proper maintenance, in advance of a settlement.

"What’s your name?" asked Craving, having already mentioned her own.

"Steve."

"It’s nice to meet a bloke with a proper name."

And she actually – he could hardly believe it – put out a hand to measure his erection. He felt himself hotly blushing. She squeezed it once or twice, smiled, and then studied the road as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. For her, of course, it hadn’t. Only this one had been better than most, so far as she could tell through denim.

This was too good to let it pass, best unspoken offer to come his way for yonks. He wondered if there might be any trouble from the lads in the back. The big one with the pony-tail might make a nuisance of himself. He was peeking into the cab right now to see what was going on.

"We’ll be coming up to them caves you was looking for in a minute. Will you be getting out with the rest?" he enquired delicately. "Them caves is damned cold. And the land belongs to the local bigwig, Queen Susan or something. She goes about with a load of heavies."

"What else can I do?" Craving was just waiting and hoping for an irresistible offer.

He leapt at it, like a cat up a fence. "Stay with me. I got a house. I’ll see you all right."

"Apple won’t like it." (This meant that she accepted.)

"Sod Apple!"

He was slowing now. A sign declared this a private road, but he knew there was rarely anyone about in this neck of the woods. He and his mates had played here as children, when the land was free and open to all. Now the place was empty but for the wild life and a few randy couples looking for somewhere quiet to have it off.

Neither he nor Craving was sure what would happen, but both were ready for action. Steve was excited by the prospect of something, anything taking place, even something dangerous. He’d willingly fight the lot of them for possession of the curvy Craving. He knew she’d be a goer in the sack, it was written all over her – voice, eyes, tits, body, the lot. He’d fancied her as soon as he saw her standing by the road. Christ! When he had got out of bed this morning he had felt it was going to be a good day, he just knew it. He’d been right. He was feeling really high at this moment, spaced out.

Craving too was excited by the prospect of a change for the better. Steve was a solidly built hunk and would give her a good time. He fancied her rotten and she’d be able to twist him round her little finger. She was sick of travelling and getting nowhere.

That bunch of losers who were starting to dismount now from the back imagined themselves as some band of happy wanderers who would be together forever, but there were already signs of the break-ups that lay ahead. She wanted out before she got left behind. She didn’t want to end up as a half-crazy bag lady when her looks went. Apple was great of course and she’d miss their threesomes with Marvellous, but Steve was obviously a swinger and there would be other, better opportunities for more of the same.

"The caves are over there," Steve shouted across the cab to Apple who stood on Craving’s side of the vehicle.

"Thanks for the lift, mate," Apple shouted back and held out his hand to help Craving down.

Craving looked at Apple. ‘Farewell’ sang her heart and she suddenly knew this was the last time that she would ever see him. (Whether her heart was sending her dud info or not, time alone will tell.) Then she looked at Steve with his well-fed face, his blue eyes, his ruffled hair, his big arms and hands.

She looked Apple straight in the eye. "Steve’s just taking me down to the shops for a few things," she said.

Apple reached for the handle of the cab door but Steve quickly reversed, turned, and went roaring off back down the road.

Apple knew a brush-off when it hit him in the face. "Bitch!" was all he said. Then, putting his arm affectionately round Marvellous’s shoulders, went marching with him toward their new residence. The other two girls smiled knowingly at each other. With Craving gone, their turn must surely come. Star and his friend Frank were immersed in the Ordnance Survey Map, preferring to remain withdrawn from any drama – and any trouble.

Apple was surprised to discover that the caves and the surroundings looked quite different from the place he remembered; but then that was around four years ago. Funny how memory played tricks on one. Peculiar too, seeing how intense the occasion had been. He shrugged his shoulders. Start all over again!

In the cab of the lorry, Steve slipped his arm about Craving’s gorgeous waist and drew her to him, driving with the other hand. She gave him a cuddle as they steamed along.

Appeles thought ‘Now the Seven are Six already. We’ve only just arrived!’ It was not a good start. He had to get his promotion. Eidolon, winging along behind the lovers’ bumpy vehicle, had a smile upon his hairless face and a bright light in his eyes. Craving was the first victim of his island magic. Craving now, but formerly known to him as Chryseis of the golden hair, they had spent ages together when he had been Apollo to the Greeks, built cities, founded schools, made music, loved.