1

It’s a snowy night in late June, and milk is spilling from the broken world’s murdered head.

I wake up in the glass house. Outside my window lamplighters climb glass ladders and lick the lamps alight. Inside, moths tussle pointlessly in corners.

But I’ll know already. Because of the taste on Dad’s dick.

It happened in the school toilet. Schott and his boys kicked in my cubicle door. They stood there sneering in a circle. My trousers were around my ankles.

“Do you want to die peacefully in your sleep like your grandpa,” they asked me, grabbing me and making to push my head down the toilet, “or screaming in terror like his passengers?”

It was a rhetorical question. No, it was a joke.

The joke was a short one, but there was time and space and scenery within it. You could stop inside the joke and delay the punch line for long enough to smoke a cigarette, chat to the other passengers, take a pee, look out the window.

Inside the joke, I stretched out across two seats in my grandfather’s coach. The fabric, a blend of rubber and synthetic cloth, was Orlon acrylic fibre. I knew it was called Orlon because my grandad, the driver, had once told me.

The Orlon was comfortable. I could see the top of Grandad’s head in the chink between seats. His eyes, visible in the rearview mirror, were still open.

I would leave the joke before the fatal crash, but for now there was no hurry. I felt like a player of video games who abandons the action-packed plot and just wanders around looking at polygonal trees in peaceful, bitmapped parks filled with sampled birdsong.

“How are you doing?” I called across the aisle to a mother and her plump daughter.

“Very well, thank you,” said the mother, a little stiffly. Her daughter gave me a bulgy-eyed stare.

I started daydreaming. I dreamed of shepherds playing panpipes, of Scottish Expressionist paintings, of golf courses and stables and Edith Sitwell. I began to feel drowsy, but quickly jolted alert. It was vital I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of the joke. If I slept I would die.

I turned to the mother and daughter. The mother was producing cucumber sandwiches from a plastic box.

“I’m the grandson of the bus driver,” I called above the drone of my grandfather’s engine.

“Ah,” mouthed the mother, “very nice!”

“The grandson of the man driving this joke . . .”

But my words were drowned out by the revving engine. We swung around a particularly treacherous corner. My grandfather ground into low gear.

The plump little girl grabbed a mirror built into a compact case containing orangey-pink foundation powder and lifted it to the window. I knew the game: with the mirror held to one eye and angled forward at forty-five degrees to the glass, you could imagine you were sitting in the cockpit of a pointed vehicle rushing into an exhilaratingly symmetrical landscape. I’d done the same at her age.

But she would never live to be my age. She was in a joke involving a coach crash. I wondered whether to broach the subject, to warn the passengers, to alert my grandfather. Should I feed him coffee from the thermos flask I knew he kept in his military canvas bag?

Then again, what was the point? This version of my grandfather only existed to crash his bus in this joke. The entire landscape was synthetic; everyone and everything here had been created for a laugh. There would be other chances to meet my grandfather, in other jokes.

I glanced again at Gramps’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were drooping, closing. In a few seconds the bus would mount the hard shoulder, explode through the safety barrier and jackknife—slowly, slowly—into the jagged ravine. It was time to leave.

Raucous laughter rang around the stinky toilet. I didn’t smile.

“He doesn’t get it,” shouted Ben Nelson, Schott’s loyal lieutenant.

“He’s gonna get it all right,” said Schott.