The Dull Fire

By Mel Vil

Imagine a world where all terrestrial life suddenly vanishes, except for those airborne at the time. This is the tantalizing starting point for a novel that grips readers from the first page. Sebald, a complex and mysterious figure, lands in this inexplicable new world and is faced with the challenges of survival and leadership.

Journey back to Buenos Aires where Sebald's connections with the humble Jérémie and the enchanting Blanche are forged. Follow their separate but intertwined paths through post-apocalyptic landscapes. Experience Jérémie's harrowing captivity in Bolivia and his fight back to civilization, all under the constant shroud of thick clouds that now cloak the Earth.

Explore a barely inhabited Paris, under Sebald's tenuous rule, and witness the desperate struggles over food, shelter, and control in this brave new world. Choose your side: the preservationists living on tinned food and memories of the past or the pioneers venturing west, seeking sunlight and a fresh start.

Feel the tension in Blanche and Sebald's fractured relationship, tortured by guilt, trauma, and conflicting desires. Discover the tragic beauty of Jérémie's semi-isolation and his slow, absurd rapprochement with his past companions.

As the story unfolds through fragmented storytelling, it becomes a thrilling exploration of the human condition, filled with suspense, emotion, and philosophical pondering. With its richly drawn characters, gripping plot, and profound themes of captivity, survival, and human connection, this novel is not just a tale of a world reborn but a mirror reflecting our own deepest fears and hopes.

If you are drawn to the thrilling, the thought-provoking, and the deeply human, don't miss the chance to dive into this unforgettable narrative. The final macabre scene is a poignant reminder of our fragility and resilience, leaving readers to ponder long after turning the last page. Experience a literary journey like no other, where every page is a new frontier, and the only limit is your imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Villemel
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9791094007228

Mel Vil

Meet the captivating Mel Vil - a poet, free-thinker, and novelist with a passion for exploring the depths of the human experience. Born in 1979, Mel's journey has taken them from the rolling hills of the UK to the colorful streets of Latin America, and ultimately to the cultured corners of Western Europe.Despite their varied travels, Mel's belief system is firmly rooted in Eastern ideas, infusing their writing with a powerful spiritual essence that will leave you breathless. With a voice that echoes with raw emotion and an unflinching honesty, Mel's work speaks to the very heart of what it means to be human.Through their latest novel, Mel invites you to join them on a journey of self-discovery, where the only limits are those you set for yourself. With each turn of the page, you'll find yourself drawn deeper into a world of vivid characters, intense emotions, and transformative insights.So come, step into the world of Mel Vil and experience the power of their writing for yourself. Order your copy today and discover why they are quickly becoming one of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature.

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Copyright © 2023 Mel Vil

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration: DALL·E

ISBN-13: 979-10-94007-22-8

The Dull Fire

Mel Vil

That’s me in the corner…

Part One

London: tonight

IT WAS SEBALD back holding court at the door to SoSho. Autumn hadn’t let up its slow march, and heaters had recently been bolted above the entrance, as if to mark his return. London should have been his Ithaca, only his Molly had moved on and had a kid with one of his crew.

He didn’t bear his cross well. People mistook his broodiness for that of an arms dealer or a mercenary, and anyone who failed to give him a wide berth was doomed to become a sworn frenemy. In response, he continued to trot the globe. Once the club was empty, he had yet another plane to catch, one more lifesaving flight.

Inside the club was a buzzing crowd that, with the passing of time, changed not so much in size but in composition, as insufflating stoics substituted imbibing epicureans. The heaters were there for all five doormen whose job it was to count them in and out. The other four watched Sebald as he stepped out, lit a smoke and stared out from Tabernacle Street and into the heart of Finsbury.

Sebald was a slippery personage, a noble blend of veteran pop star and spry stock broker, whose garb was urban and black. And whilst there were no specifically rodent-like features, his face was pointy, and he exhibited and framed it ways that only accentuated it, for example, by grooming a bifurcating beard.

Soon he would say, [it] reminds me of this [Jérémie] I just met last month in South America… and the night would be lost and our story hardly begun. Now, you too may have backpacked, nurtured a heavy heart through long periods of travel, become lost in the crowd, built up your tolerance of climate extremes, of germs, and, perhaps even occasionally, of people and their beliefs, only to return home to be shunned by your loved ones, turned away from a childhood home and generally greeted by a paradise lost. If you have, then you may be prepared to identify with this nonconformist ‘somehow dragged from the past’ and with his sense of entitlement that had earned him the daily position of head doorman, despite only working a handful of times a year. And if so then you may spare yourself the agony of this framing prologue and head straight to Buenos Aires.

Having moved to declare the door closed for the night, Sebald leant against the wall under a heater and unwrapped another packet of cigarettes, taking great pains to transfer the cellophane from the old to the new box. He looked deliberately around him before sniffing some nose garbage off his thumbnail. He would go cold turkey in a few hours, but in time’s other direction his binge had stretched a long way, leaving him with pallid hollowed-out cheeks.

Returning from inside, one of the team, a roughneck, who’d been redundant since the Frigg gas field had been abandoned, announced that the mood was vulnerable but that the risk was tolerable, given the low residual numbers of alcohol-only. Next to him nodding in approval was an iron founder and son and grandson of iron founders. The other two were both former junior naval officers, with just the one honourable discharge between them. There was a proposal for a group trip around the corner. Sebald laughed at what he called ‘an elf council’ and said that, in their absence, the vikings might sweep in, rape and pillage.

But the streets were abandoned. And despite the dirt, they shined back with pacific majesty. The eyes of the scant pedestrians were untainted with the horror and reflected the tungsten lights benignly, a few drunks staggering down the neighbouring thoroughfare in search of night buses and hackney cabs. As the night wore on they walked slower, each secretly fighting the inevitable descent into sobriety and the impending impact with the surface of the following day.

In the wake of the rejection, the four men embraced their relative relief of duty. The conversation had shifted and sorted all the topics that had ruffled their minds throughout an expiring day. Could Russia ever be trusted? Had Europe expanded too quickly? What was China’s game plan? Did fortune favour the bold?

They’d paid their lip service to the minions who’d hustled and bustled about them as the club had opened and to the punters as they’d arrived, and could now regain their sense of dignity and discuss the ideas and problems they secretly hoped would accompany them to their ends of days. It was a different pair of tinted glasses, not suitable for the short-lived light of a single day, focussing instead on continents travelled and acquaintances won and lost. In that sense, they embodied London’s transition from the Rift Valley of travellers to the watering hole of the global savannah.

Nowhere was it easier for the seasoned and cynical traveller to reminisce of journeys past, and in so doing, simultaneously create abstraction and observe reality, drowning internally in adrenal flows whose origins lay as much in nostalgia as they did in fresh sensorial shenanigans. No better place was there to evoke stories of frays or tangles entered or gates crashed. London harboured a tidal current that regularly evacuated and rehabilitated every edifice with fresh stock, crowding the habitat with collective memories of boats and trains, journeys to and from nowhere. It dashed first-time travellers and internal migrants against the sea defences of Greene, Dahl, and Fleming, who held their courts only for as long as they could hold off visiting Hygieia, Himeros and Hermes.

You can start anywhere, slide your thin frame through the slightest of cracks and head to a major hub, and you’re thrust upon London and have to dive squirming through the thriving masses, unnoticed, lost in the crowd of faces so disparate you never feel alone or different or the same, despite everything. Only those paid to mingle are surrounded by suspicious minds; in London every other soul is granted reckless leeway to gamble and gambol its spirit away in boroughs eternally free of interference. Come to Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Stansted, surface at St. Pancreas, Waterloo, Euston, Marylebone, or appear as if by magic at City or Blackfriars, carrying cash or gilt-edged securities, bearing confidential envelopes and diplomatic valises from Brussels, Paris, Geneva, diamonds from Antwerp, emeralds from Bogota, all gifts for the aristocracy’s aristocracy. Get in a queue, but never fall into the mise en abîme of those in front or be inveigled by those behind, as you attend to align yourself with the scanning of your passport, placing your chip face down and your face chin up: Don’t wiggle the antenna inserted within your personal information page face down, or access every last fear recounting every last tale drenched with the nightmares of a commonwealth, the trojan horses of empire, covid paranoia, drug mule’s intestines, carry-on luggage with false compartments and no actual real idea of what data is being based in fields concerning you.

From tides to tidal waves, the crowd changes. Evenings turn to nights, and the golden hour succumbs to blue illumination. Marauding that particular dusk had been post-code gangs dodging the enforcers of their illegal curfew; trolling crackheads scouring the litter-strewn floor for ten-pound notes and credit card receipts; and pedal taxis clinging on to Selene’s rush hour. The only constant, ever present, shifting less than the city itself, was an inebriated orange glow in the sky, a mirror image of all that stirred below it, luminous radiation drunk on subsidised fossil fuels trapped in the fresh pollution of the last twenty-four hours.

This place, Sebald said out of the blue, has some serious issues that really need addressing, before grabbing at another cigarette.

He wasn’t the only one of them who could seriously be called a traveller, but compared to the others he still had youth on his side. He was neither backpacker nor patriot. He would blend into any surrounding and would stay in flats when others stayed in hostels. His dress was always fit for work, rest or play. Where others would stop for a night, he sojourned several weeks. For them it was ‘a trip’; for Sebald, it was ‘life’.

Nothing was foreign to him, least of all people. Where others cast ignorance in attributing errors, he chased understanding and reconciliation. His goal in life, if ever a man had such wealth in aspiration, was to understand the continuous expansion of humanity, and nowhere was he more at home than when faced with an unknown persona nor more bored than with a long-time acquaintance. If only he’d been afforded an education worthy of his intellect.

He would pound a city’s streets for seven or eight hours a day, eating and resting in its bars, cafes and restaurants and within a week know every last in and out, have a good grasp of local goings on, crime statistics and political trends and leanings, but above all he’d stuff into the sleeve of his parley rich handfuls of titbits about how the everyman saw his or her respective strengths and weaknesses, sure-fire details that struck a chord whose resonance further unlocked archives, coffers, and chests.

While others subjected whoever would listen to adventurous narratives relying on xenophobic crescendos, clashing civilisations and conflicting cultures, lucky were the few who heard Sebald’s grimy drivel on national identity and waxing and waning jingoism that hid gems of local and international history, drew upon nascent memes and contrasted emerging ideologies, his juxtapositioning of ironic over-simplifications and his staging of protagonists acquainted to each other through the most byzantine of circumstances. Although he crafted it all on the fly, it reflected each time an imperfect symmetry based on morals that would probably fall flat under the bleaching light of day.

Yet at night, his stories were rarely analysed in any detail, like stars in a sky of football, cars and women. In fact, his colleagues had taken bare notice of the remark.

And never more so than in Victorian times. There was more resolve this time, and the four snapped to attention. Imagine what it must have been like to have been an industrial spy during the days of the Empress of India. Well, I say days, it must have felt like centuries the way information moved back then. This city. Imagine it how it was, black, dirty, full of ragamuffins and contagion. More than today, that is, mind you. And you’d come here to find facts that you’d then smuggle back home. Worse, think about having to go further north. How would you ever fit in? Perhaps some of the Europeans would get away with it, Scandinavians for example, but the slightest accent and your cover’s blown. If you came from further afield, you’d have to think about clothes, gestures, everything. You could probably get away with it in London for a while, in the pea souper, taking notes, ordering items, as long as you stayed away from the social cream, but that would have meant some serious slumming, think of the food you’d have had to eat, the shitty, rat-infested roofs you’d have taken cover under. Coming from the kind of background where you’d have been educated to speak whatever was the equivalent of the Queen’s English back home, the lap of luxury and privilege, only to end up in Bow, rummaging through the bins of sweatshops and warehouses, resisting all the sordid disease and sickness that would have surrounded you every day just so you could convince someone to give you an apprenticeship. Imagine how many never made it. Lost the plot or picked up sticks and disappeared off back home... Tail between the legs, like, or elsewhere when that wasn’t an option. Got locked up by the taxman. Think of those that made it. Like sleepers laying low in the swamp breathing through straws and waiting for the right moment. Not that it’ll ever come, bless ‘em. I suppose it’s always the same, no matter which seat of empire you’re condemned to, you end up sniffing out an underground movement struggling to lift the underworld from the mud, which itself creates a rat race of exfiltration. But talk about bragging rights, we’ve got it easy these days, you can do it all from home. Except pulling the plug on someone, that is, little way off too, thank god. Otherwise, you can steal most secrets just by learning a few programming languages, you can do it all from the same chair. Some German, a real one like, who’d been plying the canals of Victorian England would have been welcomed home with a fanfare, probably made it into the Reich, you know, tea with Otto. You’ve just come back from a culture whose blood, sweat and tears you’ve stolen and will now feed into the machine that will seek to obliterate that same culture for the sake of its own insatiable quest for supremacy. Talk about from one extreme to the other. Mind you, I suppose you’re in with the fucked up minds either way. Can’t really learn to be poor or rich without having the necessary socio-economic profile can you? Still, would have been a journey alright, talk about getting lost undercover. Reminds me of that Larry Fishburne movie. It’s a thin line you know. The only way you can really pick up the accent is to get into those kinds of social situations that are hard to leave, especially when you live next door. Then, in and amongst the groups that accepted you, you’d have those who distrusted you, whose hearts were filled with a growing hatred for you. You have to associate with them, knowing they detest you. You work so hard to convince them you’re good meat, that you end up convincing yourself first. That’s the jungle. It takes you from every side, fear, fascination, the whole caboodle. Imagine the regret, the ballooning sense of regret, the yearning to escape, the powerlessness, being faced with having to associate with people you disgust, surrendering your own breeding and personality to the scum of the earth.

Sebald paused and stubbed out his cigarette.

Not the same for us, he began again. "Lurking around in chat forums. Internet’s made everything too easy, too efficient, and that’s all we care about these days. What we actually are is citizens. And you know what they say about it being a state’s main duty to protect citizens from liars, you know, people who seize power through the force of language. But then it’s also a citizen’s duty to question received wisdom and return lies to their owners. But when lying becomes the purpose of the state, what happens to the citizen’s duty then? It’s no longer just the protection of him- or herself, but of the state from being plundered, then the citizen has to become the state. But before I get nicked for treason, let me address the larger issue, the diffuse rationalism, the steam-rolling mass media, the decreasing chromaticity brought about by technology, they’re crowding out the private components of thought. It used to just be the radio and t.v., but now it’s the web that’s standardising our dreams and opinions, synchronising us with our neighbours. There’s no more real religion or magic. Then there’s regionalism, don’t get me started, the isolation of communities and individuals breaking everything down. We used to have taboos that were natural keepers and custodians of everything that was slightly spiritual about the way we interacted, now our very will to be different is decaying. It can’t go on, this sloshy idealism and its moratorium on grey matter, how are we going to be able to communicate if there’s nothing regulating stability, we’re just going to get bored one day and go out for a walk only to find we’re unable to communicate any nuance with the people we run into. There’s a complex inner verticality that’s been outright pilfered, without it there’s no way to be sure that your spotless subconscious flotsam and your grubby personal jetsam don’t rise to the surface in public discourse, like. In fact, if I may navigate towards a purely nautical metaphor, there’s just not enough ballast.

No one’s interested in assuming a cloak of cultural disguise, dropping their own patriotic reflexes and bonding with others on a universal level. The internet does all that for you. But then it was all done in the name of cutthroat capitalism and beggar-thy-neighbour neocolonialism, not for the sake of the common good. Can you imagine a Soviet interwebs? No one sees any benefit outside of increased productivity. Bad karma, right? They might have known a good idea when they saw one, but they didn’t have the heart to share it with anyone except their own superiors. Still the inflected ideas have infected vehicles, and that’s what counts. There’s just no glory in that. Information now has a modus operandi of its own. For a human, it all boils down to your social origins. A vertically arranged society at that. And the appropriation of those ideas only led to millions being disenfranchised by an apparatus that offered them the most meagre returns for their efforts, all in return for the broken promise of choice and freedom. It’s a hateful practice, no matter which way you look at it. Splitting up the family to place children in classrooms in uniforms learning textbook answers to textbook questions, thirty plus at a time, only to be promoted into a verticality throughout organised businesses where they apply more factory techniques and push paper around in circles. Then pay according to their family’s status, the neighbourhood they came from. Forced to believe the ideas and perspectives of the controlling class through the use of mass media. And they used to export this idea using brute force. Oh the irony, a mental colonisation that requires arms to be implemented. America’s ended up with so much freedom, it imprisons people to get them to work, and at a fraction of the minimum wage. You know the only redeeming feature of that system is the gall they had to re-enslave the poor and the ethnic minorities on the basis that extremism was threatening the fundamental values of freedom and choice underpinning the system. Fucking hell. Still they had to do something after the bottom fell out of communism, I suppose. When an idea comes about on its own, everywhere at the same time, it can never be exploited in the same way.

He stopped to light yet one more cigarette. The yellow and blue gas flame licked the end of the smoke three times before eliciting the solar ring of orange. A waft of smoke escaped from his mouth and curved up his philtrum, only to be sucked into his nostrils. A solitary character walked by: a young man whose eyes peered out from under a hoody and cap and from an otherwise shadowy face.

For the court, there was nothing to do but wait it out. The club would close at five and they’d have their hands full with work long before then. Yet none dared interrupt Sebald to tell him what worth they’d really attach to his monologue. And, besides, it was already four, Sebald had his plane to catch, and for once there’d be no obligation for them to follow him to an afterparty.

Alternatively, some plucky fool might roll by and try to get in for a last drink. That would most certainly derail Sebald from his train of thought and prevent him from attempting never to reach a finale. Ultimately, he had those baggies of coke in the wrapper of his cigarette pack, potent enough to keep him going and generous enough to keep them quiet, and any attempt to interrupt or question the smallest of facts had a compounding effect on the overall length of his monologue.

"Reminds me of this Frenchman I just met last month in South America: a proper pilgrim’s tale, this one, bound to earn me a free dinner. Although, it’s less about me or him than it is about us. You know me, it takes a lot before I’m shocked by someone, so when I am it’s worth thinking about why. The things I saw in his eyes, that miserable state of soul we’d both inhabited albeit for different reasons, where we were headspacewise when we parted ways. Fucking gringo trail, funny though, you know how it is with human flows, migrants or expats, makes no difference. There’s always a hard-core tucked in amongst all the others, like in Point Break. Sometimes you can spot them, sometimes you can’t. Well this Bodi was on an orbit of his own. Kind of threw the light on a whole bunch of things you know. Not straight away mind either. There was a fair old period of darkness. Showed me what humans are capable of thinking when they put their minds to it. And given the opportunity too of course.

"For him, it seemed like it was the first time he’d spent a really long way from home. I mean, you can’t not have been to Rio and Baires, it’s like not having been to the Apple, but he’d already seen a fair bit of the unknown world too, Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucuses. Me, I’d just been back in Blighty for a bit. Skulking around, sleeping on mates’ sofas, drinking heavily and smoking a fair amount too. Then out of the blue, like, I was being packed off on this mission for some documentary aimed at distracting goggleboxers from their real lives, jobs and responsibilities and head south chasing their own hedonistic versions of themselves. It was fun, but almost entirely unrewarding in terms of results. Jezzer on the other hand had only just figured it was time to set off if he was ever to make anything of this life. He just couldn’t think of where to go. I’m over those stupid guidebooks by now, but for him it’s still a bible. I’ve contributed to them, and I’ll have you know full well there’s no finding anything new by chasing after people who’ve had the time to write books about places. I knew where I was going precisely because, and I’m being open and honest now, I’ve gotten tired myself of my normal life. But that was a long while ago and he was until a couple of months ago a photocopier salesman. Me, I was just hanging around in London’s libraries and bookshops, waiting for the next impulse to travel.

"I can’t for the life of me remember why I chose to study economics before dropping out of college, but it’s left me with the nasty habit of reading the rags. And that was just what I was doing when the idea struck me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, nothing I like more than whiling away the hours of an intercontinental trying to work out what kind of bullshit was behind the latest fuck up on the world stage. And let’s face it, the papers have been full of migration for time. So there I was looking at this collection of infographics, showing all flows of every possible kind: human flows, cash flows, brain flows, data flows. Don’t get me wrong I used to get a buzz from going to hotspots, you know, where civil wars are kicking off, and revolutions stirring. Must have once figured myself for some liberation front leader, machine gun rounds strapped across my chest, cigar butt clenched between the old pegs. What a muppet! Anyway, ever notice how maps still keep on changing all the time, even now borders are pretty static? Like there’s some fidgetiness, a need to keep changing the legends, any of those symbols representing explosions or icons based on rudimentary farm tools being held aloft. Everything’s become the proportional arrow. Frontier, schmunteer. So there I was, dreaming of Afghanistan, out of bounds let’s face it, having to settle with South America. I mean, I’ve ticked a lot of the others off, Tehran, Cairo, Damascus, Palestine, Eastern Turkey, and anyway, a lot of them didn’t show up on this migration map. What was there though was Bolivia. It was the one place that nothing returned to. No people, no money, no ideas, nothing. It was a vacuum created by continuous outflows. Of course, way back when it had been the country that killed Che Guevara, a state of permanent military turmoil and confused relations with Washington, that had since then only moved onto economic incompetence, and they were still in it at that time. Morales, nationalisations, indigenous rights, when they were really taking pressure from international bankers. People couldn’t get out of there fast enough. There was even this story of people coming to Europe on luxury cruise ships during oil price spikes. Imagine that, coming from a land locked country to fortress Europe on an ocean liner.

"So the mythical national liberation armies are a thing of the past, it seems, so what are the mysteries of our time? I’d read this article about the indigenous highland populations and their refusal to move down to the fertile lowlands. Maybe that was it. There was clearly something at the bottom of it, even if it was just uncovering another of my childhood obsessions, train robbers. As legend has it, Butch and the Sundance Kid met their end in the south of the country as they lay in wait for a train laden with silver. It was in a small mining town and I soon fished up some information and images. And there it was, everything I had possibly been looking for. Even this enormous outbreak of crimson red rock to the east of the river that runs through the town. You should see it. It’s this red dragon lying with its belly on the riverbed and its head stretched out resting on its chin where it’s been slain. And when I eventually got there, I realised that the little white speck I could see in the photograph was a cross, implanted in the nape of the dragon’s head. Great trip, wish I’d never told anyone about it though, or I wouldn’t have gotten bribed to go back there again.

Anyway this Frenchman had no idea what he was doing, believed in the green light, alright, but figured he might end up working for a not-for-profit of some description. Do-gooders without borders or something like that. Ironic that part, Frenchman installing pissoirs halfway round the world when they have hardly none at home. To be honest, I’d never have thought of it, let alone done it. That was what got me suspicious and in the end I legged it, did my best not to run into him again, despite the deep-seated feeling I would, but I’ve been in too many close shaves to risk it happening with these toffs in tow. Knowing what I knew already I figured there might have been a political angle. This yank I’d met when we was teenagers now works at Langley, but he wasn’t very forthcoming. The Israelis said they knew nothing, but that doesn’t mean anything. So, there I was, literally openly hitching a lift with Auntie chasing some cover story that I was convinced was nothing but that. It was supposed to be about what our kids really got up to on the Gringo Trail and why there was such a long wait" to get on a trek out of Cuzco. I’m not proud of it, you know, working for the beeb, but it took care of a number of preliminaries.

"So, complete toffs, the crew. They’d known each other at university, but they cottoned on pretty quickly that it was dangerous and that was where I came in, keep them shipshape if things headed south, and, you know, keep my ear to the grapevine, given what it can be like in a place like that. I mean they all know me like you do, that I usually travel under my own steam. There were no hot political issues down that way at the time. Foreign office had no warnings, but there was definitely something brewing, didn’t like the feel of it at all. It was like that Frenchman was coming and as soon as he showed up it would all kick off. Never met a lad with such an aura about him. Anyway, they hand out visas like party treats down that way, so any old fifth columnist could roll in. But these two … enthusiastic supporters … thought they were helping me out. Said I didn’t even have to lift a finger. Couple of old fellows called me first, but they all wanted me to be on the side of the documentary that you can see. I told them exactly why that wasn’t going to happen and they quickly terminated the call. In the end it was some old girl that convinced me. Can you believe it? Old Sebald being sweet talked by the fairer sex. Mind you, she’d have convinced Thomas More, the way she could charm snakes. Blimey was she up for it. Said they would do anything to have me on board, keep the crew and all their gear safe, hand out tips to them you know, keep their noses clean for them. Which was ironic, because the young lad they kicked off to make space for me was embroiled in some drug scandal. Funny that!

"In fact, I ran into the very same lad one day, he was a sound guy if I recall correctly. Hardly had all this happened and he’d forgotten clean about it, reckoned he was stitched up and all, but said it was the best thing that had happened to him. You know, one door closes and all the rest of it. Wish they’d taken the camera operator off the job instead of him, though. I suppose it’s all connected, though, right? He’d seemed alright at first. Especially in comparison with the wimp they’d sent packing. But he turned out to be a right drip and he nearly got us all killed in Buenos Aires when he got all shirty about being ripped off in a drugs deal. Honestly, some men are born angsty, some men achieve anxiousness, and some men have anxiety thrust upon them. We’d only been out there a couple of days and there he was starting to push the locals around, just because he knew a bit in Spanish, let it all go to his head. It was as if he believed that ‘anger hath privilege’. You could just hear it in the way he was ordering them around. Anyway, this drug-peddling fellow, right hippy he was, spoke perfect English anyway and had been the whole time, stepped out to try and defuse the situation, but matey here decided to let his top blow in Spanish and let him have it, but that just attracted a whole bunch of people from