Archie only just managed to grab hold of the swinging strap as the tube ground to a halt between stations, the lights flashed once and then completely went out. He was the only passenger, he remembered, in this particular carriage, but that would not explain why he was standing up in the aisle. Perhaps the train was on the approach to his brightly lit destination: indeed the train had been gradually reducing its speed at the point of sudden braking.

Like a drowning man, life seemed to pass him by... Breakfast that morning had been a rushed picking at last nights leavings. He had decided to wear women's clothes today - he was in that particular mood which, of late, had been more and more common - and cursed when he spilt cold prawn curry down his blouse. He wouldn't have minded so much if it had been the shirt he wore on other days.

But there had been more to life than just breakfast. He had been through a number of jobs, since leaving school in the mid-sixties all of which tipped him back into the same endless dead end road, with uniform lines of terraced housing either side, faces tweaking at the curtains and his parents in each other's clothes both watering the flowers in the postage stamp garden at the front of the endstreet semi-detached.

Funny now dreaming creates dreams out of real memories.

Further back, his youth was at first just a fog, but as he floated quickly back he caught sight of other people in the sea constituting the wreckage of his childish fears. He grabbed the limb of one old man who had befriended Archie: they both sank, amid the snarls of others around them...

Childhood, and further back,

emergnd with even greater clarity, as he finally found himself truly floating in a dark warm belly of pulsing liquid.

The train was starting to move again or, rather, stopping and starting like a temerous bull in the ring. The lights flickered revealing nobody in the carriage ... only a small pool of yellow fluid, slopping back and forth, where Archie had pissed himself.

It is rumoured that God enjoys cold curry breakfasts and Archie is enjoying being one of His angels.

(published 'Cloth Ears'  1990)