Sin City 
                                                           Year Dot 
	Roses are red 
	Violets are blue 
	I get horny 
	Thinking about you

	I am bleeding. Ludwig just pierced my ears four times.
	He used a frozen chicken to make them numb.  We both
	got tattoos done last week. Ludwig now has three pairs 
	of nipples down his stomach like a dog. I have an angel 
	flapping his wings on my back. I can't wait for you to 
	see it. Mister A went apeshit.  Have you written anything 
	yet? The pet shop burnt down. The noise of the animals 
	woke us up. The pet shop man has gone mad.  How is
	your friend? When she dies, why don't you come back?   
	Mister A sends his regards. 

	LoveVladimir 

	ps  These are my fingernails. 
	pss  Send me  some earrings - gold, please.

	I held the letter up to my nose, hoping to capture a trace of his breath or the smell
of his hand. But the paper was odourless. I folded the letter and returned it to the
envelope. Looking up, I thought of Vlad's question. Was Dawn dead yet? Hardly. She was
painting her nails. How long, I wondered, does anyone take to die. But that was for her to
know and me to find out.
	"More than life itself," she sighed, catching my eye in the mirror, "I would love a
sundae. Just for the nerves." 
	The floodlit pier was emptying now. It stretched before me, a silvery causeway over a
darkening sea, strewn with abandoned deck chairs. Waves were heaving against the forest of
pillars below.   A couple  were wrapped in each other's arms,  faces buried in falling
hair.  A skeletal hand beckoned  from a tattoo parlour window,  a needle-gun wedged
between the wired joints of its fingers. Husks  of dead wasps lay in drifts  across sample
charts. Do Or Die, proclaimed a curling paper banner. The ice cream parlour was closing up
for the day as I entered, a newly  mopped floor reflecting the overhead strip lights. A
lone customer sat hunched over an empty sundae boat. The waitress sighed  deeply as I gave
Dawn's order. She gouged each flavour from its tub with her scoop and  slapped them  onto
a paper  plate. I was sure Dawn would taste her malice.
	She  was  applying  lipstick when I returned, the air around her  a thickened web of
hair spray and perfume. The circular mirror reflected  a burnished face with a beeswax
nose and poppy red lips. Through the window a setting  sun was dripping, yolk bright, into
a crumpled sea.  The cliff top hotels looked like rows of honeycombs. Gull shadows circled
the walls of the room. 
	"Well, how do I look?" she asked, turning her face  towards me. 
	The whites of her eyes  were a  sulphurous  yellow, her smoke-stained  teeth  amber. 
	"Like Fu Manchu. Only worse," I replied. 
	"You fucker." 
	"Ok.The bee's knees, then." 
	"Thank-you. And the scars?" 
	They crisscrossed the moist skin of her chest like initials  carved in sand.
	"Unnoticeable." 
	"Liar," she cried, leaning over the mirror to inspect them. "That bastard
doctor. I'll make him pay yet.What about the eyelashes?" 
	"Perfect," I said. 
	She was no longer listening. I cleared her make-up away and  placed a cash box on a
table near the door while she ate her melting sundae. 
	I asked  if the dead were still trespassing.
	"They're all here," she said, rolling her eyes skywards, "ready and waiting."
	Then it's business as usual, I thought, turning on the chandeliers. There was little
time left.  We could hear muted coughing  and the shuffling of feet on the stairs. A queue
had already formed.  Dawn slid behind the drapes to the side of the stage and, as the
first ticket money fell into my hand, had vanished from sight.
	The room was barely a quarter full. Just thirty-three people, mostly tourists. I could
hear Dawn clearing her throat as I dimmed the lights. The only other noise was the dull
thudding of a jukebox below. When the room was completely dark I flicked on the spotlight.
	To the rattle of  applause, Dawn stood revealed before us wrapped in her  moth-grey
cloak. She looked much taller on stage.  Her eyelids were a lustrous  turquoise, her
cheeks hectic with rouge. Squeezing past the drum kit, she brushed  one of its cymbals and
a hiss of  shivering brass accompanied her to the microphone. 
	"Good evening, believers and non-believers both. My name is Dawn Giaconne. I am here
tonight to make contact with those who are seemingly dead. In this, my last public
appearance, I shall prove  conclusively that we live after death. But please be patient.
Spirit intercourse can not be rushed." She closed her eyes  and let her head fall
forwards. Her  arms hung  at her sides, limp as ropes and tasselled with golden bracelets. 
	"I hear a voice. A male voice," she said slowly. " He wants to come through. He says 
his name is Matthew." 
	No one stirred. Dawn bided her time. 
	"That's my husband's name. " 
	The voice came from the row in front of mine.
	"There is pain," Dawn continued, raising her face and cradling her brow with both hands. 
"Yes, much pain. But the passing was  easy. Am I right?" 
	"Yes," came the  almost inaudible reply, "it was an easy passing." 
	"And he is laughing now," continued Dawn brightly, her seahorse earrings casting coiled
shadows down her neck. "He says...Wait a minute..." She closed her eyes, concentrating
intently.  "He says 'Look after Prince.' Does that mean anything, my love?" 
	"Yes." 
	"Good." 
	The medium's face was  expressionless. She took the microphone from its stand and 
walked to the edge of the stage. 
	"You all realise," she said, her gaze sweeping over the faces raised in expectation,
"that life is the property of death. You all know that, don't you?" 
	No one spoke.  Her breath broke in softened gusts against the microphone's head. "But
death itself is not the end. The earth plain is only our temporary home. It is elusive and
shifting. We pass to spirit and the spirit plane has room for us all. No one is sad there." 
	Someone murmured in sympathetic agreement. 
	"Now," she continued, "I have someone else wanting to come through.
	She paused, her face turned up towards the ceiling.The spotlight  picked out the galls
 beneath her skin. 	
	"I see a little girl. What are you saying, darling? Speak louder." She stooped  to hear
the  voice at her side. 
	All heads craned forward in an attempt to see the invisible child. 
	"She comes to us with a cut down her hand. She comes despite much pain." 
	A woman clambered to her feet."Yes," she cried hoarsely, "my daughter cut herself. 
You are speaking to my daughter."
	"That's right, darling. She is telling me that the spirit plain makes her very happy. She
says...she says that she loves you very much and not to worry anymore." 
	"No, I wont worry." 
	"The suffering is ended; the torment passed. There is only light." 
	"Yes." Dawn was in full flow. My fingers settled once more on the envelope in my pocket. 
Vlad's fingernails prickled like thorns. I slipped one under my tongue. 	
	"Now I see a baby in a beautiful robe. Does the name Samuel mean anything to anyone here?  
He says his name is Samuel..." 
	No one replied. 
	"Something beginning with S?" 
	She was struggling. 
	"Susan is it? Or Simon? Someone here has lost a baby with an S-sounding name." 
	The microphone transformed her voice into a rain-soft hiss as she plucked  names from
the air. Then a man spoke out. The name of his grandchild edged its way  into the night to
hang stillborn over our heads. Death was  in the air we breathed 	
	"Was it a white coffin?" Dawn asked. "Or covered with something white... lace, maybe?
I see white. Carnations, perhaps... White flowers?" Her voice was troubled. 
	"Yes, I remember now," replied the man. "Silk flowers from the family."
	We were drifting on a tearful sea.
	Do or Die. I thought of Vlad, raw eared and drunk, looking out of his attic window, 
the pet shop owner on the street below clawing among the salvaged corpses of puppies and
parrots, his life strewn in charred notation around him, his world at an end. I would have
myself tattooed, I decided, as protection against sickness and misfortune. Dawn was still
on stage, a sequined door between life and death. Disembodied voices were still pleading
in her ear.  I had seen her x-rays, had seen the  lantern of her heart  through the fog of
her  ribs. The earth plain is only our temporary home. It is elusive and shifting. When I
looked up a full moon was hanging over the sea. The  pier glowed harshly beneath it, a
wedge driven  into the night, its strings of lights swinging in the wind. It was deserted
now. The room crackled with applause around me. The evening had been a success. Dawn was
taking a bow. 
	"Death holds no dominion over you, " she was saying. "Go in safety and be healed." 
	I sprang to the light switch and plunged the room into darkness.


*

	Dawn screamed through the wind that death was out pacing us. Desperate to lose it, she
slammed her foot on the accelerator. Rain rushed in through the open window to lash the
hair to her face. She could never go home, she kept shouting, her voice barely audible ,
she had to drive  until she lost the voices  in her head. If that meant all night, then it
meant all night. The tunnels to the dead had remained open when she left  the stage. It
was too late to close them now.
	She was wild with a dream of escape. We tore  through the empty  town in flight, a
comet hurtling beneath the false moons of streetlights.She was driving for her life while
the world slept on unawares. I sat at her side in silence. I felt no fear. If planks had
been thrown down to the future I could not see them. It was thrilling to race with death. 
If we crashed, so be it. The evening's takings rattled back and forth across the dashboard
among her capsules and pills, spilling in our laps at each  turn  in the road.  There was
no town left to contain us. The night and the road were merged in our spray. The evening
had cost her her life, she screamed again. Her scars were coming apart, the stitches were
being drawn through her pores. She tore her blouse open to  show me her chest but I saw
nothing, blinded by the flare of approaching headlights. We hit something. It bounced
blindly across the bonnet and into the dark. She was dying. There was no escape from that.
No car could carry us fast enough away. 
	"I blame you," she cried, rocking wildly back and forth in her seat.  "You dragged me
to my death tonight. For that I will kill you. I will send you to hell. " 
	But I was already there. She did not love me any more. 
	I raised my  hand and slapped her  sunken cheek with all my might. 
	"Don't die," I heard myself pleading. "Not yet. I love you.  You are a coward to leave.
You hate things ending, I know you do. You always said  you would dig your way out. Don't
die." 
	Death in the desperate yellow suns of headlights. Death with the sigh of tyres. 
	She stopped the car, but her hands still gripped the wheel, her knuckles white fossils
beneath the skin. She treated all I had said as if somehow important, as if truthful. She
stared unblinking at me.  She was older than I had ever imagined. 
	Everything was suddenly stilled.  Crows were coughing through the mist, grey trees
materialising softly, a sun  rising over bare fields. 
	"Get out,"  Dawn whispered, her breath fire in my face. 
	She leant across me to open my door, her golden bracelets shivering like running water
in my ears.

*




(c) David Kirkup. 1999