K - Hi ho

It's four in the morning, let us say seven days deep in digs, two
weeks before Hen's laundry room trip in his dressing gown.

Who has ever cared for digs? They are priestholes for children and
dehumanising warrens.

Hen is seven days deep in his dig, part of a concentrated mass. There
are eleven to a corridor, four corridors to a block and ten blocks to
the terrace.
The outside is all curtained windows. You can just yell for help any
time you feel, and someone will hear you.

Hen is lying on his front in his bed, the sheets thrown aside and the
night like a girl's body on his back. The air is so thick that if he
makes an arc with his hand it feels as if he is cutting through fine
cobwebs. But how's this for room - Hen is happily dismembered. His
limbs have been everywhere but his body in the past week. Who ever
cared for digs, where the walls are almost naked but for fingerprints?
Now they're a base, now they're a tether, now they're grotty little
priestholes. At the bottom of the desk drawer, past occupants have
scribbled their names. Hen added his there before getting into
bed.

His diary of the days spent here is tattooed invisibly across the silk
pillow of his small biceps where he nuzzles his face. He is flitting
across them, skipping back and forth between Saturday and Tuesday and
Friday and today.

He can read about the living arrangements again: living in
block H, floor 0, room 15, the corridor a litter of male misfits,
living like demi-dervishes, with girls occupying all three floors above
them, in H1, H2 and H3. Women are kept off the ground floor because
they're considered more vulnerable to rapists..

He can read about meeting Manley and, with the green shadow of the
light that stains his eyes, he can tattoo more details onto the bicep
as he comes across them. Tattooed there tonight are the following
notes: 'Manley is tall and thin, son of a wood sculptor. Lives
two doors down from me. Topped with cropped wheels and ringlets of hair
that he refuses to let me sophisticate for him - sophistication by
means of sweeping the curls of the fringe to the side with a palm, so
that he looks like a choirboy. Ergo, doesn't want to look like a
choirboy. Can't see why.

'Seems to care little for verbal warfare on the front line.
Wears winter gear, gold and ash (like the man's hair,) his head is
acorn-like and Asian-eyed (thorn-tipped, the pupils purple grapes,) and
he keeps his room pretty clean.'

Hen adds the following: 'Judo black belt and sensei, comes
from Trigon, Dorset, born in the year of the dog,' then rolls
over onto his back and wonders what some other person would have
tattooed on their arms about he, Hen. He scans the dark for strewn
possessions and ropes them into the character:

'Born in the year of the pig - grim, long-haired scrap poet,
Midlander, thin and bony beneath a ten-season old Derby County football
scarf - Super Rams Baseball ground - an army surplus Russian hat -
Offizier NVA Winter Mutze - complete with Soviet badge, and a raincoat
he wears like a kimono - all the time. Armed with bamboo-handled
countryman umbrella, lofty cheekbones, jumbled teeth and permanent
frown. Looks like a handsome camel. His room is a battleground of
cereal shrapnel and sock corpses. Electric-acoozy guitar within easy
reach.

'Sometimes drinks. Recently awoke in the middle of the woods,
though he puts that down more to tiredness and a drunken desire to find
what lay on the other side of Waveney Mountain, which is little more
than half a hill. Half a hill, that is, because the inebriated soldier
finds, when he reaches the apogee of the hill, that its opposite side
is absent, and in its place there lies a near sheer cliff face. At the
bottom of this cliff face lies the woods, so Hen woke up roundabout
here with leaves in his tangles, mud in his boots and a loada
lacerations.

'Dizzily he returned to H0, collected his guitar and came back
to the spot where he came to, making use of the rest of the morning to
scare the dog-walkers by appearing before them as a musical wood
sprite.

'He has a Little Miss Sunshine mouse and mousemat for his
darker moments.'

Hen considers that this is perhaps too much to fit over one arm, and
condenses it to the outfit. The hat makes the man, after all. He puts
his hands behind his head and exploits the blank stare of the ceiling,
writing a whole scenario across it. This would later lead to his
remarking to Manley, "I'm going to write a scrapbook novel about the
two of us." His eyes spin out letters, and the following page comes
staggering out into the blind heat:

'So then: this Manley, and Hen. Born in the year of the dog
and the year of the pig respectively. Their legs are long sticks with
gizzard strung from them. A humble loiterer and an arrogant sloth - Mr.
George Bernard Shaw's reasonable man alongside his unreasonable man -
fortifying the last great fortress of childhood for the next three
years stubbornly, courageously.

'"After this," Hen told Manley, "it's heating bills, bad
shirts, hair gel, house insurance, a subscription to the tabloids and -
God - dating lines. So let's enjoy this while we can, even if one of us
should end up living under a bridge after the first year."

'"Agreed," said Manley, though Hen doesn't think he was taken
very seriously.

'That's Manley and Hen for you. Take a bow,
boys.'