webs

The Neurasthenic Detective - let's call him ND or else JLP - comes to in his own bed in his own flat above the premises of a dental technician called Doobov on the wrong side of the tracks at Croydon. His head hurts and when, for the nth time, he searches with his fingertips for the source of the pain, he finds again the raised, bumpy cut just back of the hairline, some centimetres beyond the advancing line of his widow's peak. Stitches. But not as in he laughed until he was in. He tries to remember where and how he received the wound but cannot. Just a vague memory of orange. Lilies? Or carp? Or ... his flat is both achingly familiar and strange to him. Such foul clutter and neglect cannot be his, fastidious, indeed compulsively tidy as he knows himself to be. Or is that someone else? These thoughts make him tired and so he looks out the window instead, hoping for relief. A trapezoid of blue sky, the outline of some kind of tree, a cypress or a conifer, the red tiles of the roof of the building next door. The window glass is a brown yellow, it's stained, somewhere he remembers someone alleging that the marks are at least partly made from tree pollens blown against the glass and melted into place. He notices that the accretion is thicker towards the base of each pane and wonders if it is true that glass is actually a liquid and flows imperceptibly down in obedience to gravity? Probably it's dust, not pollen or nectar or sap or whatever; probably the glass isn't thicker at the base and anyway who cares? What does it matter? The cobwebs in the window are larger than he remembers, and dirtier, and the one directly in his line of sight has a kind of open hollow tube at the heart of it, no doubt where the spider itself, black and malevolent, hides waiting for any stray insect to blunder and fall. Indeed, given the fecundity and variety and extent of the webs, they seem to be in the process of swathing his small and so uncharacteristically untidy, also grimy, flat the way the pristine white bandage swathed his head in the hospital he has so recently discharged himself from. Pristine, yes, when newly swathed but then the red insinuated itself, then it turned that rusty orange brown of old blood ... the thought of orange, the colour, nauseates him so he quickly changes the subject of his meditation. Current projects include the first ever Dyslexics Dictionary; a website called Virtual Manhattan that will be fully negotiable in all four dimensions; and a Compleat Register of the Ghosts of Croydon. All by their very nature are works in progress and none, at this particular time on this particular day in this particular place, seems plausible or even possible. He sighs. The webs, ragged, dirty, faintly malevolent and redolent of abandonment and neglect, seem to echo or at least rhyme with the tattered state of his mind. If only he could recall something apart from that nauseous orange. And then it comes, so slight, so fugitive, almost imperceptible, but nevertheless a trace. Hibiscus, he whispers to himself. Yes, on a black ground. And a girl ...