BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

As I picked up the phone, Carruthers was squirming in his swivel chair to the Stranglers' paedophile anthem Bring On the Nubiles. Kid Fiddler Cornwell sang I've got to lick your little puss / and nail you to the floor. "LISTEN, CUPCAKE," I warned the voice on the line, which didn't sound entirely unlike the clotted lisp of some pompustulant Hampstead housewife....Nicole? Cindy? Taz?... "LISTENING TO AND DISTRIBUTING EVP RECORDINGS IS ILLEGAL, YOU ARE ASKING ME TO BREAK THE LAW". Chipped teamug with a ziphius smear. Stuffed dolphin's head on the wall, dopey rictus smile like a goofy, subnormal, hydatoid rape fiend. The time Brian from accounts pushed a cigarette into its gob for the office photo. The day, that sunless day, when someone etched an arrow towards the quacker's decapitated bonce, and scratched out "TERRY'S WIFE". In glyphs.

"The finest pipe shandy crack!" muttered the old bearded coot, he's never stopped dribbling about Suez since they kicked him out of the Navy for touching up little girls in 1960. Enough grime on the lunch pub window to filter out a small nuclear sun, glitterball FX as shards of piss-weak light try to cut through the tar clouds. Endlessly bleery spitoon bullshitters work over congealed black onion baps and the slop from out of date kegs. A pint of sand. A cancer stick waved at floating tits, "Corked that back in my day!" he sniggered when another bag of damaged goods shuffled past to purge herself in the bogs.

Six dates; six bladder infections. I didn't even get as far as asking Number 3 her name before I'd sicked up over the table. "Eat!" I shouted as I skewered a pile of inedible fungus and forced myself to chew. Watched her eyelids bruise and ripen like toadstools. Date 5 had a cute tattoo, "I LOVE ME" across her left cheekbone - she fell under a cycle courier, and I pissed myself laughing as she tried to separate her hair from the spokes. We fucked all night after that. Date 6 wanted to listen to the EVP tapes, but I wouldn't risk a razor up the arse for a couple of minutes of feeling swell. An imparter of underground ephemera AKA: show-off! But she wouldn't stop hassling me, ringing all the time...Carole? Nicole? Cindy?

So I got down with the programme. Lobotomised myself with porn. Japanese courtesans bedding down with winking squids, beaks poised to suck and violate every inch of skin they could get their greedy maws 'round. The Sexy Secrets of Sabrina's Submarine. Yellowing old scraps of shiplogs, pirate goth erotica, deep-throating eels. Come on coral.

Coral....that was her. Last memory - her fumbling around with the tapes, having laced my green tea with drugs. Thinking I was knocked out, paralysed. But actually still conscious and trying not to laugh. Coral wincing as she tried to make out the faintest of sounds. Do ghosts really roam the earth or do they only emerge to perform to an audience. Willing herself scared. And then screaming BOO!, the bedsheet wrapped around my head, her fainting and farting a streak of 'fear poo' into her sky-blue knix. Norway '99. A drunken Catholic granny with shingles feeds a terrapin a biscuit. And YOU'RE A VERY, VERY WICKED LITTLE BOY. JESUS DON'T LOVE YOU NO MORE, SON. Shoplifting a card for Coral's funeral, a paean to guilty regret. But accidentally bagging a "HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU ARE NINE " card. Her old man introducing Mr Fist to my guts, a boot in the bollocks - right over her open casket. Her horse-faced sister chewing gum, sexy knife jaws and come to deathbed eyes, hate-sucking me out of my skinsuit and into the gaping magnetic throb of her womb. Birth backwards.