Prototypes

Tube, sewer pipe echo, hands supporting your balance, protecting your head on the damp curvature of the culvert moving between tributaries beneath the bypass. Looking back at Alfie. His hair's too long for a boy, but his silhouette like frame of withes sluicing through the run-off.

It's been an odd year for rainfall, a meniscus nudging up the baize on the reservoir with every wipe of rain across the map, like an over-tilted glass of water. Now in June, we're three days off being underwater and Alfie reckons we'll make a good camp on the island. And he's got hair like a girl's.

A silt gutter to the river's edge and twelve square feet of ditching topped with brambles comprises a 'good camp', and Alfie's right: there's discarded lighters, skeletons of magazines and humanshit. A great camp.

Alfie's mum: a blonde triangle and sodastream. She's maybe got a neck-scarf on at an angle, and a man's white shirt on, like an air hostess or a Charlie's Angel. Evel Kneivel whines and flywheels across light wire stairs and parquet, the banana bunch and someone else's sun-streamed Saturday mornings, the traces of thirties modernity, pine and the coos of collar doves on the island, flat roofs and curved windows as Alfie's mum smiles and passes them face-size beakers with saccharine-bitter squash drinks and light from half-plyed patio doors. She, a prototype for Alfie's friends' ideals: not a mum, but a girlfriend; nights at the yacht club bar, double diamond.

In the morning they discover a body in the silt, in the afternoon a cetaceous man with alopecia exposes himself to Alfie's sister and her friends on the riverside. They run back, laughing, to the bridge. The guy in the 24 hour wonders at the man in the anorak with bare legs and waterproof shoes. In the morning; there'll be half-day closing later, so they need to get to the spar 'pretty sharpish, young men,' and they're becalmed in the harbour with a row at the club and cocaine on empty melamine, tops as 'Rumours' echoes through the bar.