As is always the way Mac found that his new sleeping arrangements made it impossible for him to sleep and so he spent the night looking up into the darkness of the storeroom that was now his bedroom.

It is an impossible task to account for every little thing that has ever happened to us in our lives but at times like this the mind behaves as if it were reviewing highlights and lowlights of a life in the fragmented style of a documentary series. The flash of a face.

A conversation.

A feeling remembered and then felt again and anew when someone slights you.

Or one that makes you feel safe.

A childhood echo stirring after being lost forever. Disappointment. Regret. Loss.

Longing.

Love.

Always love.

Always loss as well.

‘You are right, of course,’ said Iseult. ‘I have been saying the same to anyone who will listen.’ She smiled at Gilly. ‘But my deciding to do this has been based on the reality of our situation. I have tried to steer clear of everything else.’

‘And so you should,’ replied Mac. ‘You go on doing what you are doing so remarkably well and leave the everything else to me.’

Mac stood up and he was less bent now that he was before; straighter somehow.

‘I must sleep now,’ he said, ‘indoors tonight and not outside under a pile of rotting rags.’ Mac looked at his friends.

‘Please don’t worry; this is not new evidence of an old mania.’

‘I hope not,’ said Gilly to himself. Iseult said the same thing in the same way.

‘But what you makes you so certain?’ smiled Iseult. ‘How can you know?’

‘I don’t know.’ replied Mac. ‘I just know.’

Mac sipped from the cup he was holding.

‘Why clean up this place once the guards left? Why catalogue all the paper that has been blown everywhere? Why comfort everyone here and welcome any strangers who chance upon us?’

‘Because …’ started Gilly and Iseult together.

‘Because,’ continued Mac, ‘this is what we have always done and will continue to do until we can no more.’

The candle sputtered again and Mac looked over his shoulder.

‘What they are doing to the world now is so far beyond our ordinary comprehension that we are better served not even acknowledging what is going on.’

Iseult smiled.

‘I know what you mean, Gilly, but normal for every child now means living on the streets with or without their family and chipping away at a landmark all day with a broken chisel until it is time to collapse again like it was the day before and will be until there are no days left to endure.’

Gilly nodded.

Mac looked at his friends.

‘I have made a life of doubting and disbelieving and my recent errors regarding these infernal beings have shaken me to my very core.’

Mac looked worried.

‘For a while there by the canal I feared that I was falling too far inside myself to ever make it back.’

Gilly was surprised to see Mac walking towards him. Usually Mac had no time for anyone any more but tonight there was the return of a slight light in his rheumy eyes.

‘I need a haircut, old friend,’ said Mac. ‘And a shave too if there is the hot water.’

‘There is,’ smiled Gilly. ‘We have plenty of that and lamb stew for later this evening.’

‘I’ll start with the hair,’ replied Mac and then paused. ‘She will return, you know. She will.’

Gilly tried hard not to look concerned.

‘But what if she doesn’t?’

‘She will,’ said Mac. ‘She will.’

‘Enough’ said a distant voice deep down inside the hole that is Mac’s heart and the old man surprised himself by smiling. ‘You foolish fool,’ he sighed. ‘Still doing what you do best, I see.’

For Mac had inherited a sceptic’s eye from his father but time and habit and heartbreak had forced this eye in on itself where it had eventually transfigured into solid doubt.

‘And what are you going to do now?’ Mac asked himself. ‘Enough with your standing and waiting and watching.’

‘Enough.’

As the loop plays out across the sky people stop working to stand up and see themselves magnified across the heavens as they plead and weep and cry before a lens that doesn’t care. The canned laughter and syrupy music only serves to make the humiliation ever more complete were it even necessary for that to be so right now.

Iseult and Gilly watched in wonder as they stood under shelter in the courtyard of their gulag.

‘What on earth can all this be?’ asked Gilly with a tremble. ‘I cannot begin to understand.’

‘And that is exactly why we should focus on the things we do know,’ said Iseult. She put her hand of the old man’s shoulders.

‘Why focus on the darkness when it is the light that keeps the night at bay?’

The film cuts again and this time an image of Stooky Bill materializes in an enormous close shot and, like the worst excesses of popular television from a time way gone, begins to sing in the most mocking and creakiest of voices;

‘There is no Future now

Nor was there ever before

And with the Past behind us

There is now just Nothing evermore …’

Cut once more to another staple of popular television, the ultimate heart-string-tugging telethon as the video statements made by the doomed begin to play across the sky on a celestial loop accompanied by teary, swirly music and peals of canned laughter.

The streets began to fill with professional comfort-givers; priests, nuns, politicians and television personalities – now with no recognized formal function but determined to try and maintain some claim on events as they unfold.

With a permission based solely on the same cosmic perversity and absolutely nothing else, these comfort-givers were given special dispensation from the labour at hand in order to offer empty promises and visions of a future that cannot possibly exist now. Walking among the weeping, toiling crowds.

Hand-wringing.

Glad-handing.