Mac knew that every step he took was counted.

Accounted. Noted. Recorded.

Strangers would stare at him.

Fixing their gaze.

Smirking. Mocking.

He heard a silent voice.

‘You’ll never find her. She’s gone for good.’

That may very well be the case,’ replied Mac, ‘but I doubted her once and will not ever again.’

Steeling himself for the task, Mac set out the next morning.

Armed with an umbrella and his politest manner.

Mac walked the crowded streets. Jostled and bothered. Elderly but intent. Miles every day. Following crowds. Peeling back sleeping bags.

Every laneway. And alley.

Each and every twitten.

What with the weeds and the new visitors the city swelled, creaking.

Crowded. Hostile. Noisome. At night the streets are lined with people trying to sleep. Or choosing not to.

Mac watched from his window. A lonely vigil. Scanning the crowds.

Hoping that one face from the thousands would speak to him.

‘I swore I would protect her,’ he sobbed. ‘What use a man like me?’

The city had been a lure for visitors since the Vikings.

Now a new kind of tourist began to appear. Silent in large groups. Congregating. Accumulating.

United beneath a common banner.

Written on walls. Printed on shirts. Posted on sites. Attached to messages.

Inked on skin.

#TheFive

Cities normally return to nature after desertion.

Sand can cover office blocks. Shopping centres fall in on themselves.

Civic buildings lose all semblance of significance. Sewers clog and silt.

Vehicles return their elements to the earth. Or house new tenants.

Fountains fall silent.

Slowly, troublingly, desperately, inexorably the weeds of Priory Hall exerted their cosmic influence on the city.

As he walked across Front Square Mac felt now that the world was only different.

He knew the First of the TheFive was here. The disturbance was now unignorable. The weight of this fact caused the world to spin ever so slightly out of kilter.

‘I knew this was always going to happen,’ Mac said to himself. And he steeled himself for the worst.

It started with the weeds.

Loss hits hard and holds firm and deep and long.

After a lifetime of solitude Mac now found himself unable to deal with a brand-new loneliness.

There simply is no substitute for presence.

‘I’m a selfish cowardly fool,’ he told himself.

‘That a man should send a child to stop the darkness.’

The natural world now meets a new source of energy and the hated hectares of Priory Hall groan beneath the renewed weight of Fallopia japonica, Japanese Knotweed, the curse of the Irish landscape.

In tune with the new signal broadcast. Roots and shoots and rhizomes now assemble with new vigour as never before.

Ready to swallow an island.

According to Wikipedia Stooky Bill was the name given to the head of a ventriloquist dummy that British television pioneer John Logie Baird used in his 1924 experiments to transmit a televised image between rooms in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street, London.

The First of TheFive takes this name.