The demolition of Trinity College also continued apace. The bronze globe that has sat outside Trinity’s Berkeley Library since 1982, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere with Sphere,’ was worked loosed from its plinth and rolled across Front Square where it was then used as a wrecking ball to demolish Front Gate and splinter the wooden doors into firewood, crushing twelve people along the way.

The fact that different versions of this same sculpture can also be found in the Vatican and the Headquarters of the United Nations was a wonderful irony not lost on the NotBeSpeak as they oversaw this perverse transformation from an existing artistic statement to a new statement of an altogether very different kind.

Imagine how long it would take to dismantle a length of iron railings with your bare hands.

Or take down a wall of granite blocks with only a screwdriver.

Cobblestones are reasonably easy to get up but what about doing just this for days and nights on end and the only tool you were given was a broken tablespoon.

Windows of any size are always simple to break but collecting all that broken glass with no gloves and bare feet is not a job that anyone would undertake unless forced to at gunpoint.

Two days later and the Minot Tower was finally destroyed and the debris rained down upon the toiling crowds like a deadly blessing. The group responsible for achieving this goal all perished in the collapse except for one (un)fortunate woman who was able to grab a handhold as the Tower fell.

She hung from one arm for another sixteen hours before she too lost her grip and fell wailing to be impaled upon the railings.

This death mattered for as long as it took the crowd beneath this woman’s fall to pull her body from the railings and place it in the park next door with all the other corpses so that they then could carry on uninterrupted with their toil.

Forced to continue working beneath powerful searchlights and volleys of gunfire the hapless group on the Minot Tower made a major breakthrough the next day when the foundations of the spire itself were worked loose and the Tower began to come away from its perch. With ropes and crowbars the group began to remove the struts of the spire and as the dark day progressed some headway was made. Not without accidents, of course. Six people fell to the ground when another ladder was moved by the high winds. Another eight lost their lives when the rope they were pulling on came undone from its mooring and catapulted them all backwards off the Tower.

Thousands of hands all hammering and hurting as the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral put up their greatest resistance to the throngs now forced to pulled this building to the ground.

Crowds swarming forward, climbing high and falling from ladders. Blunting chisels on the bricks but not stopping; using the handles to get the job done.

Searchlights and armed guards make sure the work doesn’t halt. The exhausted stepping over the fallen. The fallen crushed beneath panicked feet.

Families forced apart.

Children scattered everywhere.

Helping. Helpless. Howling. Ignored.

Nothing matters now.

Only futile labour.

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.’