Bag of Weasels

Once upon a time in a land I've mentioned, it was hotter than the sun and the water was cut off. .

I was out on the scavenge, a long trawl up along the Barking creek, round the stumpy brown box buildings and across the A13..

Back in the time when my world had unravelled and my life spun away, I was taken to a building, all battleship grey and electric lights, to be fixed up, measured, watcheded and labelled. And in there was Ralph: unapproachable Ralph, the Mad Maori, furious angry and dangerous. He was tough guy big, a natural born lump, they came in mob-handed when Ralph fetched up, kept him by the security door and braced themselves for violence. He could scare people shitless with just a look, pin them to the spot with his energy, but when he rolled up on the wrong side of the door he looked over his new domain and just smiled at his keepers. He dwarfed them all.

So it was off to the South and the crumbly slums and the bad-name districts and depots, eating the finest from the skips of giants. It was an easy zigzag route.

Flea, flames, Didgy and Doinky and the morning man.

I held up the last page. It had been folded and screwed up so many times it was turning to tissue. The words across its surface were hardly legible, but unlike all the others they were typed. "What's this?

I'd got the frights. I didn't want in. I didn't want to get sucked in, and go wallowing into something monstrous that would take me to places downright scary; I generally did my best to keep well clear of the twisty side of life. .

For the right now though I was stuck, wedged in tight all shoved up shoulder to shoulder, and it was livening up a treat.

"I ain't got no bleedin' letter of yours, fraggle,

"So it's the old heave-ho,"

The windows rattled in their frames and clouds slid over the moon.

Right about now I reckoned Ralph would be stamping out his mission-from-god, daily crowd clearing path up Richmond Hill, holding up his precious object like a piece of the true cross. London has its ways, and some of those ways - the less trodden, the hidden and meandering - are now mine: and so I weaved my own way down.

"How shall we go? "How did you get here? "I came through the streets. A different route would be prudent under the circumstances. "We'll go back, Ralph decided, " by river.

For what its worth...

Another day, another weasel...