XV

The next three days were quite possibly the longest, and the most emotionally charged of my adult life. I have no biological children of my own, but after getting together with Corinna in the spring of 2005 I soon began to love her two daughter a if they were my own. By the time that we got married two and a bit years later, I was thinking of them AS my own, and to be honest I don't think that I could love either of them any more than I do, even if they had been my own flesh and blood.

Although I was terribly excited at the prospect of becoming a grandfather for the first time, I was also acutely conscious of the fact that I was the only person in the family who had a qualification in any of the medical sciences, and as my nursing qualification was to look after handicapped people, the only obstetrics that I knew anything about we abnormal ones, and although I tried to continually remind myself that the human race had been successfully giving birth for hundreds of thousands of years with a fair amount of success, I was only too aware of what could go wrong. The text from Aaron which had cheered and encouraged the others, had done the complete opposite to me, and I was frankly terrified. However I didn't want anyone else to know that so I kept my own council, and went outside for as many cigarettes as I truthfully thought that I could get away with.

Just outside the main entrance of the hospital was a huge, stainless steel doughnut shaped sculpture. There was an engraved brass plaque below it explaining what it was meant to symbolise, but it was so encrusted with pigeon shit as to be illegible. I assume that because it was positioned outside the main entrance to that part of the hospital which housed the Maternity Wing, that the huge doughnut was meant to symbolise the female reproductive tract, but even to my mind that seemed a little crass, and laid it open to all sorts of amusing nomenclature of which the Latin Cloaca Maxima was the least offensive.

It was also the place where all the smokers of the hospital patient community congregated. There was a thing that resembled the racks on the bicycle sheds at my old alma mater but which held heavy duty wheelchairs, there were a couple of the large freestanding ashtrays like the one that they used to have in the old dole office at Magdalen Road in Exeter back in the days that the powers that be believed that it as more than their lives were worth to deny cigarettes to the great unwashed. The presence of these ashtrays, which were overbrimming with soggy fag ends, was incongruous as there was also a notice proclaiming that Norwich Hospitals were a smoking free zone. And every time that I went out there, even when it was pissing down with rain, there were patients in their dressing gowns, some with fairly major disabilities and some heavily pregnant puffing away on their rollups. 

The constant stream of apocalyptic messages from 'Lynnette' were beginning to wear away at the fragile barriers of my mental health: 'Xtul Lives Xtul Rules', 'No Sense Makes Sense', 'In my mind's eye I see fires in your cities' and 'healter skelter is coming down fast'! The stream of Xtul propaganda and misquoted pearls of wisdom from The Gospel according to Charlie kept on coming, and at one point I was having a hard time deleting them off my iPad as fast as they were coming in.

I chainsmoked, and tried to use music to boot out the increasingly tormented and tumultuous sensory input, but as I could only get hold of two albums from my Dropbox account, that weren't actually by Xtul, and they were a collection of Irish rebel songs sung by a tenor in a voice tremulous with emotion, to the accompaniment of an accordion player, a mandolinist, and a bodrhan player who were struggling to stay in time and in tune, and a bootlegged copy of Scott Walker's almost entirely unlistenable 'Bish Bosch' album, this was not really a successful experiment. Then my headphones packed up, and I found myself watching the hustle and bustle of a busy general hospital at night through a haze of cigarette smoke whilst Epizootics blared out as loudly as I dared from the speakers of my little tablet.

This served as a suitably surrealchemical backdrop to my increasingly frantic prayers.

I believe in God, but in a truly pantheistic way. To me, God is the universe and everything in it. "Thou art God" said St Foster to St Michael in SIASL. But as St Michael replied...who isn't. But the fact remains that I believe in a deity, even though I find it hard to explain my conception of the nature of the deity. But as I very much dislike organised religion, and will describe myself as a Christian Anarchist vaguely after the fashion of St Francis, and even then only if pushed, and believe that worship can only be as part of a 1:1 relationship between the supplicant and the deity, I don't really talk about my beliefs in such matters. But I do pray, although I don't think that I have ever prayed as hard in my life as the night that I sat out in mild drizzle beneath the foggy sky asking that my darling stepdaughter and her baby girl would both  come through the experience of childbirth unscathed.

The biggest cultural event of late 2014 had been Kate Bush's return to live performance, and - totally unwittingly - I found myself mirroring one of her songs and trying to make a deal with God. If Olivia and the baby were OK, I told the Almighty, would h/she please take my life instead of theirs. But once again there was no answer.

Then suddenly I noticed that I was no longer alone. If I was the sort if writer who write fairy stories, this would be the point that there would be a clatter of little hooves, and little Panne would have trotted out from behind the giant stainless steel doughnut to tell me that everything was going to be OK. If I was the sort of writer who wrote messianic fantasy stories, this would be the moment that the sky would open, and that a voice of the apocalypse would speak to me out of the riven clouds to tell me something important for good or for ill. But nothing of the sort happened. What dir, however happen, was that I heard a squeak of a wheelchair, and looked around to see three extraordinary and apparently ill matched people there besides me.

In the wheelchair was a middle aged man with long, matted hair. He was wearing a long white bloodstained nightshirt which completely failed to hide the fact that he had no legs. And the wheelchair was being pushed by a tiny man with an ancient, wizened face and an enormously fat woman. All three of them were smoking and a halo of tiny insects appeared to be flying around the head of the man in the wheelchair, who was lolled to one side, and was muttering continuously. All throughout the evening the procession of expectant mothers had been punctuated with a few amputees and other people who seemed not to have been dealt a very good hand of cards by a beneficent providence.  I assumed that there was some sort of post operative physiotherapy department or something of that sort which shared a hospital entrance with the Maternity Department, and as statistically more people have babies than have limbs surgically removed, it would explain why there were more smokers out there in the drizzle by the enormous steel vulva than there were amputees.

Under other circumstances I would have been intrigued enough to try and find out what these three strange people were doing here, and who they were.

The simple fact that there appeared to be a slowly spreading bloodstain on the front of the wheelchair man's body itself merited investigation, and the fact that more and more tiny insects; mostly diptera and pyralid moths were circling his head should have intrigued me as both a fortean zoologist and an entomologist. But it didn't. I was simply so steeped in terror at not knowing what was happening upstairs in Delivery Suite C12 that I just didn't give a toss about anything else.

Then the man in the wheelchair began to speak, and in a cold, lifeless voice as solemn as a marble gravestone and as still as a corpse, he spoke words that I knew very well indeed:

"And a message flashed in the sky by the sun,

Be careful this is only a game"

And the fat woman then leered at me with the sort of smirk that looked just like when a small girl pretends to be an adult, puts on makeup and does what she thinks is a sexy voice, but which just turns out to be mildly disturbing:

"Listen to him, he knows what he is saying"....

Just then my iPad beeped again. I looked down just in case it was a message from Aaron or Corinna about Olivia's progress. But it was another message from Lynette.

Without bothering to read it, I typed an answer: "Fuck off you mad bitch!", wondering why I hadn't thought of doing that before. Then I looked up to speak to my three strange companions. It had only been about thirty seconds, but they were gone, and there was no sign that they had ever been there, except for three half smoked cigarettes on the ground, and a cloud of small insects in the air.

I finished my cigarette and went back inside the hospital and limped down the corridor to the canteen where Corinna, Mother, Shosh and Gavin had set up camp in a small semicircle of comfortable armchairs around a round table. I sat down, joining them, and a few minutes later Corinna received a text from Aaron. Olivia had finally given birth and I was now a grandfather.

Whispering up unspoken prayers of thanksgiving to every deity I could think of, I joined in the general festivities which were still going on twenty minutes or so later when an exhausted looking Aaron turned up to fill us in on what had happened. It turned out that my worst fears had been justified and that it had been a difficult and painful birth, but that both Mother and baby Evelyn were fine and completely out of danger.

The next forty eight hours went by in a blur. We took Aaron back to the house he shared with Olivia, and then went to my brother-in-law's house thirty miles away where we stay d the night on his floor. I am mildly feral, and the idea of sleeping on a floor wrapped in a blanket and using my old leather jacket as a pillow didn't phase me one instant.

After another day at the hospital, during which we went up to see Olivia on the Maternity Ward, and I met my granddaughter for the first time, we went back to my brother-in-law's house where we slept a second night on the floor.

The next day Olivia and the baby were discharged and we drove her home, and then left them to it, as we drove back to Oakham in Rutland, and then back to Devon. It was half way back to Devon that I realised that since I had written back to Lynnette telling her to fuck off, I had received no further IMs from the Xtul camp, not indeed from anyone else who wasn't family or friends congratulating us on  having attained grandparenthood.

The journey home was uneventful, and we arrived home to a maelstrom of wagging tails and joyful barks from the dogs. Once we had got all our things in from the car, I was sitting in my study drinking a cup if tea, smoking a meditative cigarette, and reading the last few day's post when my old friend and business partner Graham came into the room.

Graham and I have been friends for a quarter of a century, and have worked together on various projects for nearly as long, and he probably knows me as well as does any other person on this planet with the possible exception of Corinna and my cousin Pene. I asked him whether there was anything that I needed to know about the various animals in the CFZ, or about anything else that might have transpired during our absence.

"Not really", he replied, "but there was one weird thing. This evening at about dusk I was in the garden and what looked like a young girl came up to me. I say looked like, because she was wearing a long black cloak and I could not see her face at all. She gave u a message. She asked me to tell you that she had to go away, but that you need to go to Britannia to ask why. I suppose that is something to do with your mortgage. That's with Britannia isn't it?"

I suddenly felt an extreme rush of guilt. I had forgotten all about Panne, and even before I looked in her cupboard I knew that she was gone. But before I could think, or even say anything there was a thunderous knock on the door. I shouted "Come In!" And to my shock there were two uniformed policemen and a sinister looking man wearing a long, dark, overcoat standing on the doorstep....