- The Leeds side streets that you slip down

I went out again last night. I’d promised Anna that I wouldn’t. Sat on the train now, surrounded by some grim northern voodoo. It’s been raining all day, raining grey. Train tracks shining dull under the falling water. The train lurched queasily from the station and the gravel-ground sidings passed by. Grey metal fences scarred with gaudy graffiti. Patches of grass amongst that dirty gravel. Small fences, the back gardens strewn with abandoned slides and plastic tricycles, plastic footballs and tiny home-built goalposts. Electric wires overhead, humming, running the length of this beaten country.

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Half an hour later I was sat alone in a bar that I’d never been to before, late, but not as late as him. I emptied the contents of my pockets onto the rickety wooden table top. Mobile phone, keys, cigarettes and lighter, wallet. I put the wallet and the keys back into my pocket and stared at my phone for a little while.

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Rex was so busy backing the Force Adept into a corner that he didn’t even see that the Dark Jedi had thrown his lightsaber at him - let alone notice that its trajectory traced a broad loop around him and that it was now heading directly at the back of his neck. Luckily, even the most sneakily thrown of lightsabers is no match for ears honed for balance and blend by years of choral singing. Rex heard the characteristic thrum of the blade at the last instant, turned a backward somersault over the saber and then leaped sideways, trying to get both Sith in front of him. He reflected idly on how much the two-on-one sucked you had guy on either side of you.

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Huddersfield was lit up in the valley below me. I stood at the top of the long road, old mill owner’s houses to my right set back behind thick ridges of deciduous trees. Wrapped up in my long coat and my scarf with headphones playing ancient songs back to me.

It had been dark for an hour or so. Cars ran past me on the road, past the yellow warning marking of the school, on their way home from work. A modern bus with blue lighting inside pulled up the slight incline and stopped opposite me. A man my age got out, crossed the road, looked at me once, and was down a dark snicket that led to the old ford. An old woman looked out at me from her seat on the bus. There was a green and grey shawl over her head. Next to her a kid with coiffed hair and huge shiny silver earphones, a dark leather jacket. The bus pulled away and they were gone. A motorbike whined after it, the rider in black but for a bright white helmet.

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This weekend the _blacklibrary welcomes webcomic crimefighter of the future Tom Sparks, Atomic Detective and his creators Sean Belcher and Joey LaBartunek.

Saturday March 11th 8:00 pm GMT, that’s 3:00 pm Eastern Time.

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Here, in this balmy shade, I do not feel lonely. The shade is double – one by the low circular roof of the small abode of a God (unknown to me), overlooking the vast barren rice fields, and the other by the Banyan tree, hovering over the roof, like a gigantic green umbrella. Beyond this twin circle, the sun mercilessly scorched the grass and the shy, lonely, wild bushes, with their minute violet flowers in inflorescence, balanced atop long slender necks. Swinging and jerking their drooped heads in all possible directions, the bushes seemed complaining to the breeze, which now and then circled around us. A few yards to the right lay the fading marks of my dream house, unfinished and abandoned. Moss, creepers and a conglomeration of other wild weeds have claimed possession and established their community in that unearthly substratum (ecological succession!). Together they looked greener . . . and happier.

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Four of us, friends of varying degree, in a car, a communal hangover thick enough to almost be a fifth passenger. On the stereo a CD played, the CD I’d bought earlier that day in Oxford Street. We ate the miles north, and as we covered the distance from there to home the sky grew darker. Blue and grey and the orange of streetlight all around. Meadowhall to our left, the gables of it pretty and silly in flickering lights as Christmas lights left up too long. I sighed back into my seat, turned my head to the two girls asleep in the back seat, and drank a little of my lucozade.

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In the shadow behind the old grotesque roadside tree, his nine-year old eyes shone like red coals. Abhilash stood there, looking at the charred remains of the only studio of the village, which silhouetted against the feeble light coming from the temple on the other side of the rivulet.

“He deserves it . . . devil”.

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