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HERE I AM, somewhere in Time: Typo Blod, a man devoid of nationality. I find the notion of Time an elusive one. It and I make for uncomfortable bedfellows. But I think I could provide a history of myself, if necessary. At once, I am at London’s Liverpool Street Station bidding farewell to a lover (there is only ever one that counts); on the shores of Lake Geneva looking at an eagle soaring on a thermal current (the bird of prey dissolving without trace into an impossibly blue sky); squinting at startling sand dunes in the sunshine at Hokianga Harbour in the far north of New Zealand. Or here: Standing alone in the dark somewhere, it doesn’t matter where. An out-of-work hack, out in the cold. A struggler, that’s what I am and what I always have been. I light up the last of my duty-free cigarettes. The crackling of the dry tobacco fills up the night. My smoky breath turns to vapour and my heart seems to curl at its edges. What am I doing here on this star-salted night of my soul? I am living my dream, a dream to live from my writing. But there’s no work. No prospect of being able to earn a living. You’re going to have to buck your ideas up, laddie! screeches the manic careers master of my Inside-Head, an ancient vessel that receives and transmits disembodied images and voices independently of my mind. This one sounds like a stick of chalk dragging on a blackboard. I grimace at the sky, which glitters like a lump of coal, hoping to shed some of the blame. A dream! Who would have thought that the dream would turn out like this. *
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