Extracts from the collection - Night Flight from Marabar

The Beekeeper

The Beekeeper picked up the scent. Unmistakable. The smell of human need. Nothing like it. The fragrance of this one? Freedom. Release from all that reduces, diminishes.

It was late afternoon and the shadows hung long and languid over the fields of the Beekeeper. He walked slowly down through his fields and, on reaching the boundary, he condensed. Smaller and tighter, compressed yet almost weightless he became bee and was carried off on the prevailing wind. To fly. To feel at your centre - pitch, roll, yaw - the dimensions, the axes of flight. If he were a man in flight he knew he would feel it at the centre of his chest. To fly is not intellectual, it is all will and all sensation. To feel one's way through space, to be carried along in the heady warmth of the thermals and updrafts, to feel one's way along the myriad, limitless planes in air. There are no boundaries except earth and the denial of feeling.

He followed the scented thread thrown out by the woman, as it weaved its way through air. A chance meeting with a crosswind - decision - he changed direction. It was uncharacteristic of him to take a detour when he was following a scent. Now was a time of changes. The wind took him southward across the floppy-roofed Byzantine church, Agios Dimitrios. Upwards it surged, and he followed, upwards to one of the highest peaks on the island crowned by the Monastery of Agias Elessis. Centuries before he had nicknamed it the Monastery of Clouds. Here the Beekeeper reclaimed navigation. He veered off the back of the crosswind and, under his own effort, flew to the highest roof at the rear of the monastery. He alighted on the wall and assumed the shape of a man. He sat looking towards the south-west of the island, out across the arrogant blue of the Mediterranean.

'It's coming,' he whispered, and looked west, straight out to sea.

33 Heavens

I'm a bit of a music freak, I just love it - music and reading - my sister says if you could eat them, I'd be one fat amigo. She's the same, she writes. The sort of stuff that makes you want to surface and shriek, bite at the air for breath. She can really get inside the head and walk it round in there. She's something else, my sister, when I've read some of her stuff I've just wanted to cry, not with pity, not the snuffling at the movies crying, no, I mean the sort of cry you make with rage, the sort of tight, dry, tearless cry you feel when you see a kid picked on, or when you see those bodies in documentaries, piled in pits, or rolled over carelessly by the sides of roads, you know, like they somehow just got in the way of the tank - something as sacred as life, pushed out of the way like rubbish ...

...What do I want to be when I grow up? Pretty much what I am now. I live for music, it's my food. It keeps me moving, keeps me breathing. Not just rock or soul, not just John Lee Hooker, or Van-the-Man's 'gardens wet with rain' striding out through green swards, naw, the whole range. I mean, a soul rolls over belly-up at Beethoven's opus 132, hey? If that isn't the sound of a soul peering towards the end of it...

I'm never going to be a Mozart, but then like, he's never going to be me. No-one has that, no-one's got my experiences, lived through what I've lived through. I haven't got Michael Stipe's soul, and he ain't got mine. What I've got to give, through the music I put together, is entirely mine, and almost entirely shareable. You want a piece? It's yours - no qualifications, no conditions apply. You look at me and think 'yeah? So what', but inside this tatty T-shirt, these baggy old jeans, phew, friend, I could give you 33 heavens ...