The Minister for Re-incarnation has a tattoo in place of a regular head of hair. It took a team of twelve Taoist tattooists ten hours to fill it in, and recently featured in a GCSE maths exam.
As a newly freed man of the county, Melon pays little heed to such numerical conventions. Having amassed a molehill into a mountain, the flat interest of the valley floor invites the debtor to linger. Like an inveterate Argentinian Alpinist laid low by the bastards at the World Bank, heady with the abundance of sea-level air, blue sky thinking, and no longer weighed down by aspirations of ascent and domination, green shoots have started to appear. The cycle of climb and descent is evened out by the leveller of economic inaction.
Quite apart from the concentrated politics of the economic war, there is the no less tricky question of where to be and what to become. What psychosis has disclosed to Trolley, psychedelics have revealed to Melon. Once you truly understand the people who inhabit your world are mostly paper-thin caricatures that largely conform to type, life becomes a lot fucking easier.
The Minister has goaded Melon.
"When's the last time you did any activism, then?"
That then hangs off the end of the sentence, a ripe grenade waiting detonation.
"My life is a revolution! The truth I tell is a weapon in the class war. What you got, Minister? Apart from tattoos, saffron robes and stupid questions?
"Well, I ..."
"I got a question for you to meditate on. Why don't you fuck off?"
As the expletives explode, Trolley and Melon continue waiting for Cambridgeshire... to act, to do something, anything.
In Spanish, esperar is to hope, to wait for something to happen. Waiting is just a very patient form of emotionally-managed hoping. It’s a wonder the English don’t have a word.
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