I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
We get the train to Guildford. Sipping coffee and reading books. I am thinking of the recent train crash and the people who died and who would die in this carriage and who I would save and who I would leave behind for the police to cut out. I don't know what Jess is thinking.
"There's a cow," I say once we have finally passed the industrial estates and hit something green.
Jess looks up, "Where?"
"They're gone," I say but they haven't gone anywhere. We have. "There's a horse," but again she's too late and I stop pointing things out.
A girl gets on and immediately falls asleep against her window. I can see part of her face in the 'V' outline between the two empty seats in between us. The inspector doesn't bother asking for her ticket and I wonder if she has one, if the sleeping is a gamble on getting a few miles away for free.
Last weekend we were on another train and as it pulled into Waterloo I notice that there is a man asleep opposite the door we were about to go through. I lean back towards him and gave him the heads up, "Hey mate! Waterloo!"
When he doesn't move I walk towards him and give him a gentle tap on the shoulder but he still doesn't stir. I grab his shoulder and roughly shake it. His head moves enough to tap the window and I do it again harder but he isn't going anywhere. Dead weight. I turn around and see a man in a blue uniform shaking his head at me.
"He got on with friends."
He says the word with 'friends' with such disdain in his voice that I wonder if friends are alien to him. Something to be avoided so that situations like this one are avoided.
I step off the train to let him on, to let him deal with guy, to put his uniform to some use but all he does is reach forward and close the door. Jess and I exchange glances as the train pulls away back the way we had come.
Dead drunk or just dead he's getting the most out of his travel card. Life in the big city.
So. Guildford.
The upper part of the castle is closed by order of the Health and Safety Executive but we just nod at the guy who works the little shop on the ground floor and go on up anyway. There are ropes to keep us from spiralling upwards in case we slip and sue someone on the way down. Jess unhooks them and lets them trail behind her like cat tails.
Once we get to the top we are caged in. Suicides: fun to watch but presumably bad for tourism. We look at the horizon, all sky and trees and it is suddenly good to be out of London. We put our fingers through the bars and are spotted by a group of students sitting on wooden benches in the grounds. We wave and they wave back looking up at us and the dead flagpole above us.
On the way back down we throw our weight around trying to make something give way but everything holds. The Health and Safety Executive are pussies. Back down on the first floor an old man is reading ancient graffiti on the walls. He looks surprised to see us and then more surprised as Jess reattaches the ropes. I open my wallet and quickly show him my press pass.
"Health and Safety," I say. He nods and turns back to the scrawl on the wall.
On the sloping high street I try and pick out the local inbreds from the multitude of college types and city brokers and their girlfriends. An extended brow here, a sloping forehead there. Football t shirts in November and babies wondering how their parents came to be so fucking young. On the train on the way here at the opposite end of the carriage to us had been a baby. We couldn't see it but we could hear it. I turn to Jess.
"Say you've kidnapped someone and you gag them and that's fine. If it's acceptable to gag your victims then why can't we gag babies? Children?"
Jess used to this line of thought carries on reading. "Gagging someone you've kidnapped isn't acceptable. Kidnapping isn't acceptable".
"Kidnapping isn't but if you get caught they try you for the kidnapping, for the abduction, perhaps for being armed, perhaps for breaking and entering, but the fact that you gagged someone is overlooked. It's acceptable. So if it's ok then why can't that baby over there be gagged by it's parents? Why can't you buy baby gags in Mothercare? Cute ones with Donald Duck on them? Mickey Mouse gags. We wouldn't call them gags. We'd call them gaggles."
The baby is suddenly silent again.
We give up trying to find something edible after the last pub we try is practically an abattoir. We find a caf� on the side street of a side street. It is dark inside and I lean through the door and ask the three girls crowded near the counter if the place is open. It is and we are given menus. Jacket potatoes arrive but it's not really what you'd call a meal. One girl now spends her time in the doorway and I am reminded of the doorways in Soho and the girls there trying to entice men and their money inside. Not for the first time today I miss San Francisco.
As we leave, Jess comments on the cold and the fact that I don't seem to feel it. I ask if she saw how short one of the waitresses' skirts had been. How naked her legs had looked. I wonder aloud if some cunts come with some kind of extra hidden setting that allowed heat to travel down the legs, to keep the exposed skin warm like some kind of organic heater.
Jess doesn't bother to reply.
Waterstone's wins us. The Ottakar's opposite looks too much like a toy store and besides I worked in an Ottakar's for too long and I didn't want to see the carpet and the shelves and the lettering and the plastic bags and the booksellers and the manager and the trappings. Waterstones is dark by comparison and feels like a real bookshop. It's staff seem to know what they are doing from the wall of recommendations. A card headed LOCAL AUTHOR is attached under a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The biro tag underneath reads "This author is local to Aspen Colorado". They have also imported a copy of Hey Rube prior to it's UK publication. This was the kind of thing I always enjoyed doing when I had worked in bookshops, although it never pleased the rep who would eventually unveil a new title only to find you had been selling it well for the past two months. Another review said that the above book contained "teenage sex, Italian girls and Jurassic Park". Jess bought it.
The train is waiting for us at the station with sixty seconds to spare. It's the slower service that stops at a million, a million and a half stations before Waterloo but it's cold and there are seats so we get on anyway. Blue uniforms are blocking the aisle talking patiently to the man that refuses to move. He is maybe sixty, unkempt with his shirt ripped open to expose a faded blue cross tattooed on his chest. If this were a Stephen King story he'd be important.
It's not and he isn't.
As we watch, a passenger stands up and sits next to the man, putting one arm around him as his other hand lifts a wallet and flips it open in a well practiced TV cop kind of way. There is a whisper and then he has the man up and is pushing him past the blue uniforms and off the train. The man's fingers grasp weakly at the backs of seats but they are moving too fast, gone before he can get a grip and with a tumble of swearing and layered clothing he is off the train.
The policeman's wife or girlfriend or sister or whoever looks on proudly as her man gets back on and closes the doors behind him. One of the uniforms turns a key so that when the man outside repeatedly presses the button all we hear inside is a soft clicking.
As the train pulls away the man outside shrugs and actually waves us off. A woman walks past carrying a Ribena bottle at arms length towards one of the uniforms.
"He left this behind," she says.
The bottle is half full with what looks like piss but could be lager or both.
We sit down and read again. Too dark now for anything but our reflections and I don't disturb Jess to point us out. I think about how the movies had got it wrong again. About how if the dead came back to life they'd have no desire for eating flesh, for chasing us into shopping malls or waiting for us in the dark. They'd just want to sleep on trains, or shuffle into doorways or maybe just be left alone.
I doubt we'd allow them even that.
Mike is blogging to: Shellac
For years the uncompleted JENNY FINN has been a lost classic Mignola fans have clamored for -- now, Atomeka is excited to announce the end of the saga! If you're new to JENNY FINN, or returning to see the final end to the story, get ready for a tale of classic Cthulu horror in the Lovecraftian tradition...
From Atomeka via the rather fresh and wonderful Kung Fu Monkey belonging to John Rogers.
Mike is blogging to: Turbonegro
She's probably the person I'll be looking for tomorrow to help me tie the damn knot in my stupid black tie.
See the (windows media) ad 
A lot more 
Should I be setting up 
It's not often I get excited about furniture...
Tonight Kris is coming over for what may become a regular 
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One of the poor souls working on her next film, 
