Those who arrived at a compelling and uncluttered view on this issue aren’t around to record their views. For most of us, arriving at such a view would oblige us to jump some hurdles before we vaulted that rail: religious dogma, physical fear, emotional attachments, every instinct we possess. We should discount mere cries for help; an unsuccessful suicide is generally just a successful gesture. Those who mean it, do it, either without fanfare or having ensured they can’t be interrupted by other people’s instincts or their own.

We all die, most of us alone and afraid no matter how fit or unfit, old or young, loved or loathed we are when the moment falls. There is no consensus on what awaits us when our last breath rattles its way out of our carcass. Whether we anticipate umpteen talented virgins or oblivion without end, one thing is certain: we will all find out very soon.

So is it really so wrong to hasten this process if logic is on your side? Doctors do so every day, whether we choose to admit it or not. For every court case in which a terminally ill patient kowtows to the judiciary for their suffering to be ended without criminalising anyone, scores of less complex and more critical cases are brought to an informal end with a generous shot of morphine or a DNR notice.

Focussing on those so near to death doesn’t necessarily clarify matters, partly because freedom of choice and the medical profession’s commitment to preserving life overlap unavoidably. It is however instructive that the most vocal opposition to the lethal exercise of mercy tends to come from religious quarters. Supposed creeds of love always manage to find some fire and brimstone dogma to prolong suffering in the name of righteousness, while in centuries past those who had died by their own hand were denied hallowed ground in their local cemetery. Can such callousness in extremis really give the desperate the answers they need?

Should we all have an entitlement to suicide, regardless of age or health? Should the degree of freedom we enjoy include the right to end our own life? As participants in a society, we should come to the rescue of those trying to throw themselves from bridges or under tube trains. Typically, the suicide bid will be a result of depressive illness or huge emotional trauma. The act is patently logical to the subject but their problems are seldom insurmountable. Death might be a cure, but it might not be the right or best cure.

Yet some emotional problems are practically insurmountable. Some depressive illnesses are so profound that misery is a constant and unreasoning companion that cannot be fended off by the most inventive psychiatrists. Some physical illnesses promise their hosts a lifetime of escalating pain with none of the joys most of us take for granted.

Some states of depression have deep and rational roots that cannot be plucked. Following the death in 1985 of 520 people aboard a Japan Air Lines 747 due to a botched repair, maintenance manager Yasumoto Takagi took his own life rather than live with the shame. Such a burden would be positively cancerous for anyone to bear, particularly in a society where the act of suicide isn’t necessarily seen as dishonorable or immoral.

It is a matter of finding a healthy tension. A civilized society values and seeks to preserve life. Yet to dismiss suicide as sinful is unhelpful and irrelevant to anyone desperate enough to be contemplating it. The victim shouldn’t be condemned out of hand; life is finite after all. We should accept that it is not sacred enough to make any burden worth carrying; certainly not if it is only being carried to pander to dogma or moral squeamishness.

There I slept through my own thin night. Some operatives could surrender themselves happily to oblivion, trusting their hard-wiring to banish the shadows when the crisis had passed, then returning exhilarated to life and light, grinning secretly or howling like shamen. I am afraid of the dark. Not the mere dimming of light when the sun goes down or screens go opaque, but the utter absence of sensation and energy, the brute silence of the void. I use more oxygen than I should clutching the image of a strand of burning silver. It is the fire seared by a low sun across a horizon choked with sea-ice. Matter is energy and energy matter. Where there is light to be warmed by, there is rock to stand on and a universe to exist in. I can illuminate the infinite absence and define it. A nonsense mantra, of course, but a good comfort blanket.

Then I returned. Two hours had passed in seconds. Something prevented me opening my mouth to yawn and I remembered the fifty feet of salt water above my head. The day was dissolving, the surface of the water blushing with the sun's last efforts, the blackness of the deep rising to embrace the night. Warning signals competed for my attention. My medical suite had all but repaired my skin but, like a good physician, reminded me I needed to eat and drink and get plenty of rest. It wasn't able to suggest a convenient hotel or spa in keeping with my usual style. A new crop of stubble was already replacing the incinerated hair roots on my scalp.

I allowed myself to feel in the raw. My skin throbbed with heat and fitted tightly at the joints. I supposed sunburn felt like that. A body's worth of seared dermis was detaching itself in sheets with no more resistance than shrinkwrap to be fussed over by fish. I tore at my chrysalis with fingers and nails, discovering smooth, healthy skin beneath.

Then another warning signal, a jab of adrenaline, and I chose to feel rather than see the invisible shape approaching. The darting movements of the scavenging shoal felt like a gentle rain. The thing closing on me brought a pressure to bear on my torso, squeezing my lungs, increaing smoothly and relentlessly; it was bigger than me, faster then me and knew exactly where I was.

Monday 24th March

We flew BA from LHR to SFO. My extreme height and my cantankerous spine obliged me to shell out for a premium economy seat, or whatever the BA corporate euphemism is for seats allocated to the lowest rung of the bourgeoisie. The extra outlay entitled us to a modicum of deference from staff, miniature toothbrushes, sleeping masks, hot and cold running movies and a seat pitch you could just about swing a mouse in. When the dullard in front of me fully reclined their seat ten minutes into the flight, I could retain feeling in my legs and had to stretch to read their choice of newspaper. I could also amuse myself by blowing gently onto their hair.

The booze also flowed freely, almost taking the fear out of scudding through the stratosphere at 500 knots in an aluminium tube packed with jetfuel, strangers and complementary copies of the Daily Mail (Note to Flaming Cross: Why would anyone want to read about the wretched and banal minutiae of life at home when they're supposed to be on holiday?)
In a mere eleven hours, we were transported in a soaring arc across the Atlantic Ocean, the Canadian tundra and the Pacific North-West. 40,000 feet feels high over ocean and prairie. When the flat patchwork quilt of Alberta suddenly stops at Calgary and the Rockies leap up to meet you, it feels less so.

Having experienced immigration officials at Chicago, I'd braced myself for more of the same; balls-out aggression with the possibility of water-boarding and invasive searches from paranoid sociopaths in uniform, none of whom could find the UK or Iraqistan on a map. Perhaps something of the Summer of Love remains in SF, however, as the border turnkeys were almost cheerful in their approach. Our papers were processed and our fingerprints scanned in a heartbeat, and nobody wanted to search my bags for RPG's or wish me, 'Gut luck, Tommy.' I was almost disappointed when noone gave me a flower to wear in my hair.

We were met in San Francisco by our Bay Area fixer, Rachel. An expat Brit, her accent is still somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, inching slowly westwards. The glottal stops are still firm, but each sentence ends with an upwards tweek as if a small current has just been applied to a delicate area.

We'd rented a SUV in order to truly savour native culture. We wanted a vehicle as obese, ostentatious and inefficient as possible in which to cover thousands of miles. Naturally, and true to our fixer's prediction, the airport Alamo man tried to mumble and humble us into an unnecessary and pricy upgrade to an SUV big enough to carry an infantry platoon into Basra. I don't quite remember the reasons, but it had something to do with the holiday period, stock rotation, snowdrops on petals, whiskers on kittens and the fact that a guy my height would look out of place in a vehicle weighing less than three tons and incapable of towing a bus.

TBC

Greater London is home to about seven million people, a fair proportion of whom must actually want to live there. Arriving at Kings Cross from the sticks is always a culture shock. It's not that Lincolnshire is some bucolic idyll, all sun-dappled lanes and ruby-cheeked farmers raising their cider jugs to you as you amble past on your straw-hatted nag to nowhere in particular. It's just that London is at the centre of our culture in the same way that the colon is at the centre of the human body. Yes, it has art, culture, old buildings, big buildings, history, a marathon, Sir Alan Sugar and so on. But it also has astonishing property prices, obliging even high earners to live in the kind of squalor that homeless people in Hull would scoff at. It has teeming multitudes all vying for the same pavement space, bus seats and stale oxygen on the tube. It has high crime and poor air quality. It has lots of exciting and appealing jobs, if you don't mind spending four hours a day commuting and having your first coronary at 39. And the tap water tastes like it's passed through every Eastenders cast member since Anita Dobson, without being treated.

I'm glad they elected Boris, mainly because I don't live there. And don't get me started on the expansion of Heathrow. Oh, go on then. It's getting more and more difficult to get a long haul flight from anywhere other than Heathrow. This despite the fact that Heathrow is just about the least convenient UK airport for anyone not from London. And don't get me started on the Heathrow Express, whereby the unwitting traveller can find himself paying five times the price of a Ryanair ticket to Nice to get from Waterloo to Heathrow. Welcome to London.

Like any professional traveller to a conflict zone, I employ a local fixer whenever we hit London. I can't reveal his true identity for fear that he'll be ejected from his Pearly King troupe or spurned by other metrosexuals, so I'll just refer to him as Bill. We'd never blend in by ourselves, possessing neither cockney, mockney or Australian accents, nor the kind of exotic foreign tongues that make the average London Burger King kitchen sound like the UN General Assembly.

Bill tried to help us blend in. We spent the afternoon roaming Hampstead Heath but failed to spot any trouserless Tory MP's or tell George Smiley that the pike had flown north at midnight. We spurned Highgate Cemetery for the tourist trap it was, although I secretly wanted to pop in and search for the grave of Dan Dare. On the local high street, we drooled over estate agents' windows before popping in to a local hostelry where the Norwegian barmaid served us Belgian wheat beer. We then retired to Bill's pied-a-terre where we listened to light jazz, warmed our cockles with cucumber vodka and a fine Gewurtzraminer, and enjoyed a home made southern Indian marsala made from scratch using ingredients picked by Bill on a special trip to the Punjab, sorry, the local Waitrose. Which was nice.

TBC

This travelogue isn't going to take me to the heights of the Hindu Kush, nor to the depths of the Marianas Trench. I won't be sharing the sputum of wild boars with cannibalistic pygmies from the Ribble Valley, nor navigating the Sahel with only a skateboard and a piece of string. No account of this trip will give the reader much that they couldn't find in a travel agent's window, and I won't deviate much from my usual solipsistic style. But it's about time I started to keep a journal, and you're most welcome to indulge my peripatetic ramblings.

My first fatuous foray into fiction has taught me that the medium burns through small details like an American car burns through fossil fuel. Besides, memory is a fickle friend, and a mind as crude as mine will soon push aside any notion that doesn't lead to food, sex or sleep (read on, and I promise at least one of those will come your way). So, I feel the need to record the gems we uncovered in case all I actually remember is coal, or, in the case of Las Vegas and South Yorkshire, slag.

So, I'll be serialising our US trip, not to immortalise my searing insights into that enigmatic and shy nation, but to give myself a break from grown-up writing which I'm starting to find ruddy difficult. Expect verbiage, parenthesis and unfocussed asides. And sentences poorly structured.

Saturday 22nd March 08

Our trip to San Francisco begins with the No. 2 bus from Branston to Lincoln (via Washingborough). I put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the 1981 Leyland Wayfarer twin-deck, so to speak. As with most of the vintage buses on this route, I have to touch my chin to my sternum and crouch to walk around, and the upholstery smells like three generations of old, wet retrievers have died on it.

We eventually find a train that will take us to London Village and boldly display our multiple advance APEX deluxe power ranger first class tickets. These allow us to make our way to the hallowed halls of the first class compartment; there, we can sit in slightly bigger seats and enjoy a single tepid beverage of our choice in the knowledge that we could plan a conference with our wi-fi equipment should we so desire. As I nibble my complimentary shortbread petticoat, I know I've struck another mighty blow in the class war.

TBC

Like a blithering, dithering Hugh Grant character, I must apologise once again, on this occasion for failing to resume blogging at the promised time.
I am fully engaged on a writing project which has an astronomically small chance of making me some money, rather than the non-existent chance that blogging affords me.
So, on the advice of my writing tutor (I can do joined up letters now), I'll be blogging much less often.
So keep watching, but weekly or monthly should suffice.
Or you could tune in to FlamingCross as he's looking for a good row.

I'd like to offer my appreciation to the surprising number of people who tune in to this blog on a daily basis, particularly those who join in now and again. I should add that dissent, feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

As for the Liberian reader, yours is a love that should not speak its name. To answer your questions, I'm a lady of advancing years, I suffer from necrotising halitosis and I live in Inverness with my retinue of sporran-flinging highland assassins.

In a day or two, we'll be off to California for three weeks, during which time I'm not likely to be posting. From 10th April I'll be back, refreshed and ready to rant, so please tune in again from then.

Matthew, if you're reading, you owe me a long reply. Sorry I put your name in my last post. I don't really want to trap you in a burning barn, but that could change if you don't send me something to read quite soon.

The sky was yellow and grainy like old newsprint. Every few minutes, an airliner would traverse it, drawing an arc of noise and grime all the way from Torremolinos to Ringway. The whining would swell into fierce pressure that flattened the world and receded as slowly as the day’s heat. There was no room for simple heroism in these skies, no silk scarves and goggles, no delirious vapour trails as heroes in Spitfires and Hurricanes slashed across a blue and better sky to fend off the evil Nazis.

The blonde boy screamed a throaty, twelve-piston roar as the Spitfire in his hand swooped and rolled in pursuit of Matty Henderson’s Messerschmitt. Matty flung the yellow-nosed craft into an inverted loop but the pilot’s efforts were in vain when Matty’s toe hit a stone and he crashed to his knees. Matty rolled onto his backside, knees glistening with blood and ribbed with peeled skin, the 109 still held heroically aloft. The silence thickened and Matty’s eyes glistened as he considered whether or not to cry.

“Gerrup, you puff,” said the blonde boy. Matty nodded at him, sniffed and stood. Eight year olds don’t cry. “I’ll give you a head start.”

“Oi, Pyro, why am I being chased all the time?”

“’Cause you’re the Jerry. Good guys win. We won, stupid. Anyway, don’t call me that. ”

“Why not? That’s what my dad calls you. I’m not supposed to play with you ‘cause you’re a pyroniac and dangerous.”

“Why not? ‘Cause I’ll give you a dead-arm times ten, that’s why not.”

“Oh, ok. Anyway, why am I always the Jerry?”

“My aeroplanes. My rules. Look out, achtung, Spitfire out of the sun.” The blonde boy brought the plastic killing machine in a high arc down towards Matty’s head.

“Catch me first.” Matty ran, one leg stiff at the knee and smeared red. The blonde boy followed, machine-gun noises and flecks of spit flying from his mouth.

A Maxi was labouring and spluttering up the track towards them at crawling speed, windows open, radio belting out some nonsense about a brand new combine harvester. Tethered to the wing mirror an old greyhound lurched along, no more than bones and gristle knotted together by overstretched skin. The boys knew the old man at the wheel would have something to shout about because he always did. They could already see his lips working soundlessly beneath that famous nose, wide and blossoming red and purple.

Matty took a leap into the weeds, kicked another brick out of the farmer’s wall as he half jumped, half fell across it and set off through the nettles towards the field thick with yellow stubble and the barn beyond. The blonde boy followed, pausing when he was safely over the wall to flick the V’s at the old man. The dog yelped as the car’s brakes dug in and its lead was jerked to a stop. Whatever the old man shouted was lost as another airliner churned the air into noise and grime.

“My plane is faster in a straight line, you pyro divvy,” shouted Matty as he sprinted across the field, stubble crackling under his Dunlops, once white now grey like old chewing gum. The blonde boy pelted after him, knowing his gangly legs would close the distance quickly. The familiar throbbing in his temples had returned.

They both slid to a stop as they found the corrugated cement of the farmyard. The barn doors were open, a safe darkness lay within and it wasn’t overlooked. The air carried the sweetness of hay and the tang of dung, a distant rumble of generators, the slow lowing of cattle nearby.

“It says not to trespass over there,” whispered Matty, Battle of Britain forgotten.

“Been here lots of times. That barn’s haunted or something. No-one ever comes. You scared?” Matty shook off the question as though it were an inquisitive wasp.

“Right then.” The blonde boy sprinted towards the barn. “Last one in loses the dogfight.”

Shadow embraced them as they lurched inside, Matty trailing yards behind. This shadow should have felt cool but it nursed towers of baled hay, reeking of heat and cut grass. Stalks and cut twine were strewn on the floor and the corrugated roof and wooden beams ticked and groaned above them.

“You lost the dogfight.”

“Not fair. You didn’t say go.”

“Doesn’t matter. Shot you down in flames.”

Matty dangled the plane by its tail and let it pirouette to the floor with a rising howl followed by a phlegm-filled explosion. He laid it down gently without even bending a propeller blade. “Let’s go back, it’s nearly time for my tea.”

“Not yet. I shot you down in flames so that plane needs to burn.”

“It did. I made an explosion and everything.”

“No, I mean like really.”

“But you made this one.”

“I’m a bit sick of it. Anyway, I’m getting a Focke-Wulf at the weekend.” The blonde boy handed Matty his Spitfire and pulled a plastic lighter from his hip pocket.

“You are tapped. And a pyro or something.”

“What you afraid of? A few cows? Just watch this Nazi burn.” With a practised motion, he struck a flame and held it to the plane’s tail. Both boys watched goggle-eyed as the fuselage blackened then drooped and refused to catch light.

“Thought you knew all about fires then?”

“Not my fault. I thought all that glue would burn. Just give us a minute.” The blonde boy picked some long stalks from the floor and wrapped them around the plane with a length protruding from the tail. He flicked the lighter again and the length embraced the flame.

“Watch him go down in flames now then.” He tossed the plane earthwards, trailing orange flashes and pungent smoke. The moment it left his hand and moved beyond his reach, a new knowledge moiled in his guts. Even before it fell to earth, he saw in a flash of flame and destruction and heartache what he might have done, and knew he no longer wanted to share a body with the prattling fool who made him do these stupid things.

The plastic plane crashed and splintered onto the hard floor and slid into a bale, no longer aflame but blackened. Matty’s mouth twitched into the ghost of a smile. For a second, the blonde boy breathed again. Then the parched straw found the heat and let out a grateful gasp of white smoke.

“What did you do that for? What do we do now?” Matty was shifting from one foot to another, still holding the precious Spitfire.

The blonde boy pinched his eyes hut and slapped himself once then twice. “Can’t have this again. Go get water.” Matty’s eyes were beading and his lower lip trembled. “Go on. Just get water.”

Matty ran, his Dunlops slapping the concrete hard. Matty stood and watched, willing the bale to stop. The sweet grassy air was turning into something hot and bitter, something that tickled the back of his throat and squeezed his eyes. He grabbed the smoking bale, tried to move it, felt it crackle and breathe heat at him, dropped it and stood back, trembling.

He shouted for Matty and the water and slapped himself again, harder. Minutes passed, or seconds, and Matty didn’t come. He couldn’t see the roof and the high beams were receding from view, shadows dissolving in gauzy heat. Smoke and flame were leaping from more bales as though they’d been waiting there all summer for this chance to escape. He plucked the lighter from his pocket, swore at it, dropped it and stamped it until it smashed.

Then he ran, the way Matty must have done. Lungs working like bellows, drawing the smuts and the smoke and the taste of his own wicked stupidity deep into his lungs, he reached the tree-line, hunkered down in the weeds and turned and watched. Help must come. Farmers had hoses and water. Only the old man had seen him near here. What would happen? Would his life end? Would he go to jail?

Tiny compared with the stocky farming lads he wanted to see, Matty staggered into view, lop-sided with an enormous grey bucket in one hand, and lumbered into the smoking maw of the barn. He didn’t come out until after the beams crashed in, after the farmer in his blue overalls had tried and failed to defy the flames, after the fire men had hosed it all down. Then the ambulance men turned up with a stretcher and a red blanket to bundle up something the size of Matty.

This conspiracy goes deeper than you thought. Fox Mulder, high priest of UFO conspiracy theory, was a triple agent all along. The faded poster always in shot during heated debates in Mulder’s basement office proclaimed the fatal fallacy at the heart of the UFO creed: ‘I Want To Believe’. If a belief is based on need, it is unlikely to be based on objective fact. Or, as any science student will confirm, if a scientist sets out to prove a predetermined theory, it is all too tempting for them to embrace facts that support that theory and jettison the rest.

The very term UFO has been abused; an unidentified flying object is just that, rather than an interstellar voyager which must be knowingly referred to as a UFO in case The Man is tapping our calls. UFO theorists tend to be creative and sensitive people, so sensitive that they’re afraid of cutting themselves on Occam’s Razor. To paraphrase that principle, to stand any chance of being truthful, a theory should dispense with as many far flung or bizarre assumptions as possible. It is one thing to see strange lights in the sky; it is an outrageous leap to suppose that because we can’t explain them they must be extra-terrestrial tourists.

Not that extra-terrestrial visits are impossible; they are just wildly improbable compared to the mundane truth of most sightings. The list of suspects is long and distinguished: hallucination, collective or otherwise; weather balloons; satellites, falling or orbiting; aircraft of all shapes and sizes; atmospheric, magnetic and solar phenomena; meteorites; our own spacecraft. From time to time, a sighting will defy explanation, but that doesn’t entitle us to pin a fantasy to it. For example, can we really presume to know everything about how our own atmosphere interacts with our solar system?

As for a military conspiracy, is there really anything strange or sinister about cutting edge military contractors not sharing their latest findings with the world? Secrecy in matters of defence technology is de rigueur and always has been. Some now familiar aeronautical marvels were once jealously guarded secrets whose outlandish appearance might have sparked all kinds of yarn-weaving before their public debut. The SR71 first flew more than forty years ago, the B2 more than twenty: military science doesn’t stand still and doesn’t shout about its achievements. Any public servant or defence contractor who signs the Official Secrets Act is in on the conspiracy, if you feel compelled to call it that.

Besides, don’t conspiracy theories of all kinds give too much credit to governments? Considering the intelligence failures, whistle-blowing, and domestic and foreign policy disasters of the last decade alone, can government as we know it really be capable of stage-managing the kind of labyrinthine and delicate conspiracies that Mulder used to be so fond of? How can it be that the nation which salvaged a bone fide spacecraft at Roswell has only just managed to create a supersonic VTOL fighter and is still soldiering on with the crude and dangerous Space Shuttle?

Perhaps I want to disbelieve in UFO conspiracies. Am I just as guilty of cherry-picking facts to fit a preconceived case? Maybe. Yet I believe wholeheartedly in extra-terrestrial life. Such is the incomprehensible size of our universe, it seems inconceivable that we are entirely alone. However, UFO theorists should think hard about spacetime rather than space in isolation. Not only could we be separated from other sentient life by millions of light years, we could equally well be separated by millions of calendar years, and that’s without considering travelling time. Even if another sentient species had mastered FTL travel and propelled itself in the right direction, the odds against them occupying a sufficiently proximate niche in spacetime to happen upon us are, well, astronomical.

And if such a mighty civilisation managed this feat, would they have done so just to probe the gullible, molest cattle and tease airline pilots? I wouldn’t presume to know how an advanced xenoc thinks or feels about such matters, but the activities usually ascribed to them don’t seem to justify the effort involved in getting here. Having said that, the Apollo programme cost $25 billion in 1969 dollars and the benefits might not be obvious to an outside observer: one unsatisfactory game of golf, an extreme sports holiday for 21 Americans and a quantity of interesting rocks moved 250,000 miles.

The most objectionable aspect of UFO conspiracy theories is the old fashioned geocentric hubris behind it. We can’t resist seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe and therefore the most fascinating thing in it. Even when we colour in the vast blank spaces left by UFO sightings, we create spacecraft crewed by humanoids who reflect the cultural preoccupations of our times. In the white heat of the Cold War, they’re obsessed with our technological advances. In a more climatologically aware age, they’re fleeing a barren homeworld for our blue-green oasis. Choose whatever fairy tale suits you.

As some good and bad sci-fi writers have suggested, for any xenoc race to go to the time and trouble of getting here, they’d have to have a very good reason. We wouldn’t be shaking hands and staging light shows with frail, benevolent humanoids interested only in curing cancer and swapping CD collections. We might find ourselves quite reasonably regarded as vermin by superior and incomprehensible beings who want our real estate. We should be careful what we wish for.

If you want to believe a thing before you’ve even seen it, the chances of your seeing the truth are slim indeed. I must sign off. The Man is buying me lunch.

On the lip of the depression, a hand was splayed on rough stone, lopped off and cauterised in a precise cross-section at the wrist joint. I knew I hadn’t lost that much of myself, nor do I wear violet nail polish or a ring on the third finger. Fedora man had a matching ring, a thick band of unadorned gold. It seemed Portal had been laughing because it didn’t know. If it condescended to speak to its new guest, I wonder if she’d have been reassured to hear that she wasn’t far from home in purely spatial terms.

With a bulge of vertigo, I sensed slo-time winding down. I shunted all thought of our first victim to the back of my mind and took in my surroundings. I was on a wide esplanade in a world made of sandstone. On one side, an ancient wall rose from buttresses of dark silica which jutted into a sea of dark blue shimmering into green; rasping and sucking as it mauled the rock. On the other, buildings jostled for space on the shorefront and climbed uphill away from it in a jumble of terracotta rooftops, hotel balconies, crucifixes, aerials and satellite dishes.

What I took for tourists with skin tones ranging from snow-white to lobster-red crowded the street cafes. A police car idled in traffic a hundred metres away, the sole occupant’s gun hand tapping out the Morse code for boredom on the roof while the index finger of his other hand explored a nostril. At least a dozen people were looking at me and would start to react in half a second. I had my explanation for why a vermillion giant was standing naked near the dismembered hand of a respectable married woman and her screaming husband. The onlookers would no doubt find their own.

With the active camouflage utilities in my suit, I could have become nothing more than a thickening of the air and slinked away in my own good time. Still, I wasn’t without resources. As I snapped back into real time, I launched myself at the seawall, registering only a chorus of screams and the flicker of a policeman’s shades in a rear view mirror as I took flight. Whipcord muscles allowed me to fly as far as I fell, and I hit the unyielding silica hard. The shock reverberated through my endoskeleton and my vision blurred. I carried some of the shock into forward momentum and, inflating my lungs and pinching closed my lips, I pitched myself into the spume.

Pain warnings whined at me again as the salt found my scorched skin. I acknowledged and silenced them all as I dragged myself down. I was lucky to find no shallow littoral but an abrupt shearing of the land into dark depths. Schools of fish flitted and flickered around me, group minds with dumb curiosity. At fifty metres, I lodged myself in a rocky overhang, willed my heart-rate to a near standstill, and waited for dusk with a drip-feed of oxygen from my over-inflated lungs.