One way or another, Paul was determined to prove he existed. His girl often tried to comfort him by whispering sweet nothings in one of his ears. Lacking the conviction of her actions, she failed to put her mouth where the words were. And, to Paul. she was a ghost pulling invisible shrouds around like hissing silk.

Paul was born into a Northern industrial town, from a family whose babies afready emerged from the womb with coal-black faces: given mother’s suckers, the milk was frequently thin as spittle.

He soon learned to fade into the background, the school blackboard was suitable for such self-denial. The family had so many upturned faces yearning for the ladle, just one was never missed: and that one was ever Paul. The teachers, too, could hardly keep control nor count, by rule or under thumb, so one less was neither here nor there. Although budding child artists drew chalk around Paul’s shape upon the board, as if investigating a whodunnit, the teacher soon rubbed it off: thus, the period became double history where all that was taught was the fading past.

As soon as Paul was old enough in the tooth to leave home, he left a note in the ticking parlour:

‘Never coming back - Paul.’ He never questioned the fact. Nor did those who managed to read it. How could they mourn the passing of one who had never arrived in the first place?

The school closed its gates with a resounding clang. Not enough teachers.

Not enough pay. Those who remained, they huddled in the staff room like old dufflecoats. Some even crawled into the dark mine tunnels at the blackboard’s maw. Absent kids clambered back through the barred windows and marked themselves into the mouldy registers. Then snuck under the desks, rather than have to watch the black-turning wheels that lowered their fathers and elder brothers to the coal-face: golden sunshafts spinning, slicing slowly between the spokes from the sky’s screaming edge. The dark infant shapes imperceptibly silted into the floorboards as spilt ink would.

But, Paul, he was off to the big smoke.

He became a silent cog in a vast meaningless machine. His brilliantined face bobbed behind a new desk, a different desk, one with screens and buttons, speaking-tubes and useless filing-clips. He was known as a clerk: inadvertently discovering viral blanks in computer programmes and enigmas in aborted dreams. He looked down at his feelers and saw them drip: so much melting flesh and bone. His father had chipped inside the Earth to pay for his upkeep: for THIS?

He would force himself back into a realler existence come hell or high water. But at the desk was no longer Paul, but the pretty girl with the sweet way of whispering to herself of ghosts and lost love.

But which dream was whose?

Night has hidden cranes to pluck us from our beds.

(published ‘The Tome’ 1990)