8

Maria surprises everyone, including herself, by demonstrating a talent for acting. The film is about a woman who's being chased by the mob and by the Vatican. She meets a man who wants to help her. He comes up with a plan to get the Vatican and the mob fighting each other. "They chase wild horses out in the wilderness," Harold says to Maria when he explains the plot on the first day of shooting. "They catch one or two horses and ride away. Let's say two. Or one. The two of them together on one horse, riding happily away into the night. Leaving behind the sound of submachine guns produced from the black cassocks of cardinals, with cigars in their mouths along with grins. Or is it red for cardinals? The mobsters are dressed in dark greys and blacks. Or black. There's only one black. There are lots of dark greys, as many as you can think of."

"Where do they go on the horse?"

"They find an old shack that's been abandoned, or so they think, and they stay there. But then the owner comes back and he's pointing a gun at them too. They barely bat an eye lid at that because he isn't as scary as a cardinal with a submachine gun. If you met him in a dark alley you'd say, 'What the hell are you doing in a dark alley? You should be out in the middle of nowhere, in a shack all by yourself, cut off from the outside world, and with good reason. Kids would stay away from you because of the smell alone. So what are you doing in a dark alley? Get out of here.' They like him when they get to know him and he agrees to help them. He rounds up all of his neighbours. There are hundreds of them -- a lot of them live underground. They form an army. They're big into homemade weapons. The men from the Vatican think it's the work of the devil."

Harold is loud. He shouts through a haze of cigar smoke. "When I was filming 'Land of the Dead Tycoons' I had to punch a man who was over seven-foot tall and he had eyes like pool balls. But if I don't punch him, I lose the respect of everyone. I can't look them in the eye if I don't punch him. I might as well go home if I can't show him who's boss. So I swung and because he's so tall I punched him in the balls, and I thought, 'Aw shit, I've punched him in the balls. Now I've lost everyone. Now I'll have to go home. And I'll have to get married again and start all over'. But he went down like a house of cards. That was his one weak spot. If I had caught him in the stomach I would have hurt my hand and he would have laughed. And then I would have lost everyone and I'd have had to go home and find another wife. But they applauded. I didn't have to say another word."

"That's amazing," Maria said. "So many men have told me about punching other men in the balls. It's becoming a habit."

She loves working on the film. She gets to shoot terrorists and rescue a dolphin from a burning building. When the film is released she's back in the world of parties and premieres, only this time she doesn't need to tag along with her sister to be part of the celebrity world. She's a member of the species that dominate this planet. She knows it's an empty world, but it's an aesthetically beautiful one, like Daniel's paintings.

A man goes to the cinema and watches her performance and there are tears in his eyes. He goes home and looks at the painting over the fireplace.

Maria is busy on a publicity tour. Darren is filming a video with thirty women in bikinis. Daniel and Kirsten go out on the town to get their minds off things. They meet up with some friends of his and they go to see a band called The Piggerels. They both stage-dive. She feels alive again, part of the real world and not the fake celebrity world. It's great to be able to listen to real music. Darren's music sounded real once. She was young then. She loved his music when she was seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds love it now.

The Piggerels have become her favourite band. It's music to jump up and down to. There's nothing fancy, like moving from side to side or spinning around. You don't need lessons. You don't need tuxedos and gowns and ball rooms. Jumping up and down with the idiots feels like a release, like she's been freed from the strait jacket of celebrity society, where even if you jump up and down in the privacy of your home you'll end up in the papers under the heading 'Darren's other half jumps up and down'. Daniel can put an arm around her and jump up and down too, freed from the strait jacket of not being able to put an arm around her.

Someone throws a bottle and it hits the lead singer on the head. He falls backwards. His leg twitches in time to the music. He manages to get to his feet for the start of the next song. He looks as if he doesn't know where he is, but he still remembers the lyrics, all three of them: 'I eat rats'.

The audience spill out on the street, and so does the contents of some audience members. One of Daniel's friends knows someone who's having a party and they go there. The music sounds as solid as the walls. It makes some people jump up and down. It makes others hit their heads off the walls. Others would hit their heads off the walls even if they didn't have a musical accompaniment. Some people are actually talking to each other through the solid concrete of the music, and some couples are lost in their own world, immersed in each other. Daniel's friend introduces them to people. They meet a woman who looks as if her mind is somewhere else. She talks and talks, letting words out into the wild to be killed instantaneously by the music. Kirsten's mind wanders. She wonders about this woman. Is her mind somewhere nice? Does it know where her body is? Does it know that her head has pink hair and that she could stab a cat with the metal in her nose?

Kirsten drinks too much. She knows she's drinking too much and she wants to drink too much. When she wakes up on the floor in the morning it feels as if her head has been pierced and there are cigarette butts in her hair, but she can smile and say, "I drank too much. I wanted to do that." There are cigarette butts in Daniel's trousers. He didn't want that. He doesn't want the pounding headache with music still reverberating around the cold concrete walls in his head, or the black eye or the smell on his clothes that borders on a stink, something he didn't create himself, and he'd prefer to have created it himself because at least he'd know where it came from, but it's all worthwhile when she smiles and thanks him for a fantastic night. That's what he wanted.

They leave, stepping on the stepping-stones of floorboards between the motionless limbs of sleeping or dead people. The woman with the pink hair is still talking, though she may be asleep, or dead.

They go out into the dawn. They don't know where they are, so they walk, and they keep walking until the streets start to look familiar.

7

Hank remains ignorant of Maria modelling for Daniel until he sees the painting in an exhibition, but he doesn't suspect anything about the love scenes that followed the modelling. The painting is bought by an art dealer who's acting on behalf of an anonymous buyer. Maria wonders who this could be when she gets a photo of the painting over a fireplace. It comes with a note that says 'This fills a hole in my life, but only partially'. She doesn't know that Murphy is behind the camera.

Maria's younger sister, Kirsten, has been in love with Darren since he was a boy and she was a girl. They were sixteen when they first started going out and now he's a famous pop star and it's putting a strain on their relationship. She gets to go to celebrity parties and meet celebrities who had previously existed as bright red names before exclamation marks, but now that she sees them in the flesh they're not so impressive. They're just partially concealed flesh and she wants to get away from that world and return to reality with Darren, but he's becoming one of them, like a zombie, beckoning her to join them, asking her to do photo shoots and wear expensive jewellery and knee a waiter in the groin to get in the tabloids.

Darren is the lead singer with 'Future Fog Maker', a manufactured indie band who go on tour with a team of stylists. They have to get photographed smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, so they have people to smoke some of their cigarettes and drink some of the beer before the photos are taken. Darren gets all the attention from the press but the rest of the band don't mind because they get more than enough attention from the groupies. Their latest single makes the top ten in twenty-three countries, and not just backwater countries where dancing sheep farmers can get to number one with hose pipe instrumentals.

Photographers follow Darren everywhere and it's a bit of a strain on Kirsten, partly because he has to phone the photographers in advance to tell them where he is. He punches one of them, but Darren has paid this man in advance. He's diving headfirst into celebrity life but she's waiting nervously at the edge of the diving board. "Come on," he says, "it's fun. It's perfectly safe. Statistically, you're more likely to get killed crossing the Antarctic." She sees shark-infected waters below. Leering sharks, and sharks with sneers. Cosmetically enhanced fish who'd get sick if they had to eat themselves. It's not the life for her -- she knows it's not, but she's always believed that Darren is the one for her. Always, in the past. But does she still believe it?

He loves doing photo shoots with models and singing songs about women who sound nothing like Kirsten. He says it's just an act, part of the character he's created with his management team, but he's becoming that character.

Maria doesn't feel guilty about tagging along because her little sister tagged along behind her for so many years. She knows just how vacuous this is, but she loves this world. If kneeing waiters in the groin was an Olympic sport, she could do it for her country and win because she'd knee all of the other competitors in the groin as well. She leaves big tips for the waiters and she assumes they don't feel any animosity.

Daniel tags along with her. Hank lets his brother chaperone her when he's out of town. He still doesn't suspect anything. Daniel is keeping an eye on her and she's introducing him to famous people, and famous people buy his paintings, and he becomes a famous artist.

Daniel feels cut off from all the celebrity insect-life buzzing around him, but he enjoys observing it. This is what he tells himself: "I'm an observer, an outsider looking in, a man who takes in all facets of life, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and the things that get stuck to my shoes. I process all these things and the result comes out through my pores as art." This is what he tells other people when he tells them about his art. He wouldn't like to go into celebrity party-life on a full-time basis, but he does get a slight thrill from it, a mild electric shock when the latest skeletal starlet walks by or smiles at him, and if she were to wink at him and they ended up alone together in her hotel room he'd do it for the advancement of science or art or whatever it is that goes on in his head when he processes these things.

This is what he tells himself, but the more contact he has with this world, the more he despises it. There's nothing more to see. He's processed everything he can possibly process.

Kirsten finds herself drawn to Daniel because he's the only one there with depth. She inches closer to him all the time until she's just inches away and they're alone in their own bubble at a party.

"I feel like such an outsider here," he says.

"Me too."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I hate it here."

"Darren seems to be enjoying himself."

"I don't know if that's really Darren anymore."

"Right... Who is it?"

"He's a 'character'. He says he's playing a character, and like a character actor he needs to be that character. So he is that character. All the time. And when I say, 'I'm not sure I like that character,' he says, 'It's just a character.' And that's supposed to make it okay."

"Your sister seems to like this life too."

"It's just a bit of fun for her, just a passing whim. She knows it won't last. She's always been able to enjoy things, whereas I always think about everything. I wonder what should I be doing and should I enjoy it. She just does it and enjoys it."

"I know what you mean."

"I envy her. I don't envy Darren at all. He thinks it will last forever. He's becoming part of that world. But Maria can dive right in and get out any time she wants."

"I think you're right about that. Who knows what she'll be doing in a few months."

"She won't be at these parties in a few months. She knows how vacuous it all is. She's an outsider who can enjoy the inside."

"The novelty of this life wears off. I admit I felt a bit excited by it at first, but it becomes wearying."

"I thought an artist as good as you would be way above this sort of thing from the start."

"That's the attitude I was trying to project, that I was far above it all but I chose to join it in the interests of science. Or art. Or mankind. I'm not really sure whose interests I was advancing. Well, no, I know exactly. My own."

Maria walks into a room lit by chandeliers. Her face is illuminated by a smile that dazzles everyone and nearly gives a man a heart attack. The man is Harold, a sixty-year-old film director who's had more heart attacks than hot dinners since he gave up hot dinners in favour of cold liquid ones. He wants her. He needs her. He might even love her. He fires his latest young blonde girlfriend to clear the way for Maria.

After downing a double whiskey to protect his heart he makes his way to Maria and says to her, "I need you. You're the one I've been looking for. For my film. You have to star in my film. You're the one I've been waiting for. I even prayed to God. I said, 'God, sorry about that whole business with the puppy. I need someone for my film. I have a certain face I need, a certain look. I'll send you a fax of what I'm looking for.' You have that face. God sent you to me."

"What's the film called?"

"I don't know. God's supposed to get back to me on that. I'll pay you whatever you want. Twice whatever you want. You're going to be a star."

Maria's smile is so dazzling it nearly blinds a waiter, who drops a tray full of champagne glasses.

6

Murphy, Pkofflunnel and the nurse walk away from the burning house. The nurse's name is actually Dorothy. She says, "I can't believe ye'd do this for me."

"I love you," Pkofflunnel says.

"No, I love you," Murphy says.

"Were you talking to me or to her?" Pkofflunnel says.

"Who do you think?"

"It's probably Dorothy, but with the dress you were wearing and those stories in the papers..."

"You can't believe everything you read in the papers, especially stories about you that you know to be false."

"I love both of you," Dorothy says. "I don't care what paper prints that."

Neither of them can tell if she really feels this or if she's saying it out of honour, seeing as they've both just played the role of the knight in shining armour and she was the damsel in distress. Honour is a suit they need to fit into. Pkofflunnel isn't even drunk when he suggests a duel to settle this. It's part of the knight-in-shining-armour vision he has of himself.

The last time they had a duel they didn't go far enough away from each other before shooting, but this time they go too far. The long walk in the snow clears their heads and when the fog is gone, confusion reigns. They both feel something for Dorothy, but they love Maria too, and there's a slight tinge of curiosity aroused by the newspaper stories. Neither of them has the will to shoot the other.

Murphy keeps walking. He knows he has to find Maria. Pkofflunnel stops and turns back. He finds Dorothy waiting for him. They wait for Murphy but he doesn't return. "This is his way of accepting defeat," she says.

Pkofflunnel has never been one to let go of a victory, no matter what it entails. He takes her in his arms and he kisses her. He enjoys what this victory entails.

Maria is getting bored of the high life with Hank. He leaves for work early each morning and he doesn't come home until eight or nine. He's often away on business, which leaves her with nothing to do but sunbathe by the pool in his mansion by the sea, or sunbathe on his yacht. She has nothing to do apart from doing next to nothing while wearing even less. There are butlers and maids to do everything for her. She misses the joys of making tea and sandwiches, of preparing picnics, of attempting to make cakes and starting fires.

She takes up hobbies, but nothing really interests her. She goes to the theatre and to art galleries. She meets so-called friends who are just as bored as she is, and the ones who aren't bored are entirely vacuous.

She complains to Hank and he buys her flowers or dogs or a Ferrari, and he takes her out to dinner. For a while everything smells of roses again and they walk through the rose garden in moonlight, but on the following morning he's off to work, gone to another country, communicating with her by text and getting delayed with Japanese businessmen who want to get drunk and cry.

She goes to an art gallery with Hank's brother, Daniel. He's an artist. She's been to all of the art galleries many times before. She looks at paintings and it's like looking at walls. She rarely comes across interesting walls these days. When she was younger she loved walls. She was always finding new ones, original creations, walls that were the products of wild imaginations. Even plain beige walls could fill her soul with a gale-force thrill that would leave her speechless for a while. But now walls can no longer leave an imprint on her soul. She looks at them and sees lifeless functionality. She looks at walls and it's like looking at paintings.

But Daniel brings paintings and walls to life again. They spend hours walking around the gallery. The last time she was here it took her ten minutes to see everything worth seeing, but it takes hours with Daniel. The glass wall of his words provides a completely new way of looking at the world around her. She feels cut off from the world when she's with him. They're alone behind his glass wall and everyone outside is ignorant of the feeling she gets inside. They can't see things the way she sees them. A painting of a dog licking a hamster takes on a whole new significance when seen through Daniel's words. She sees deep, underlying truths. She feels a dizzying madness as a new reality opens up before her feet, a vast chasm beneath her and she wants to fall in with him. He brings the paintings to life and then he brings the walls behind the paintings to life.

He enjoys looking at the paintings with her. She's like a blank canvas for him to paint his theories on. They go to see a film and then to a cafe to discuss the film. They talk for hours, constantly digressing and getting distracted and forgetting where they are and laughing at stupid things, like people's hair or kids falling out of trees, and this is the type of conversation she loves. It's the type of conversation she used to have with Hank before he became engrossed in his work. Being engrossed in Daniel makes it much easier to live with Hank. She doesn't mind when he goes away on business. It's a chance to go somewhere with Daniel, to a gallery or out on the yacht or for a simple walk along the seafront or on the beach, or archery, or eating ice creams on a cliff top or standing in an apartment in silence, a beautiful silence late in the afternoon when the sun is heading for the horizon and it fills the apartment through the vast windows overlooking the sea, a silence you could hammer a nail into and hang a picture from and if your hit your thumb with the hammer or hammered the nail into your finger you wouldn't break the silence, you'd just smile and then make love to the person keeping up his/her end of the silence.

They find themselves together when their clothes are elsewhere, and they can't help what follows. They're in an apartment overlooking the sea as late afternoon imperceptibly becomes evening while they're engrossed in the silence, and who knows where their clothes are? Nearby, as it happens, but who cares. He paints her picture while she's draped in the curtains and they make love in candle-light. They can't resist each other after this. They couldn't resist each other shortly before it either. She knows it's wrong, but she feels alive with him. He feels guilty because of what he's doing to his brother, but he feels fantastic because of what he's doing to her.

They nearly get caught once when Hank comes home, and he said he was going away but here he is very much at home and to make it even more emphatic he says, "Hi honey, I'm home." That's his joke but it isn't very funny and she manages a nervous laugh, hoping that in Hank's mind he'll hear that and picture her in the bath or washing the dog or looking at a wall or getting something from the drink's cabinet or looking under the bed, and not desperately trying to un-do the undressing with Daniel, who's deep into dressing, terrified of being caught by his own brother.

Daniel's dressing might be at an advanced stage but it's still nowhere near the end when he leaves through the window with shoes in hands and bare feet having to endure the pain of unidentified sharp objects without the compensation of releasing a stream of obscenities. Maria fixes her hair and her dress and composes her head even though it's ringing like a bell but she smiles and breezes into the living room, looking like someone who's just been talking to the dog or pointing at the wall and saying, "You," or looking under the bed or laughing at something her sister said or polishing glasses or writing a letter of complaint to an ostrich farm. Hank kisses her and the internal bells are ringing, not wedding bells or bells of joy, more like alarm bells. She starts to relax when he starts talking about how his secretary is getting stupider by the day.

"Stupider, is it?" Maria says.

"If I asked her to book me a flight for Tuesday afternoon, I could end up with a Shetland pony on Wednesday night."

"Is that what you ended up with?"

"No, I ended up with a flight on Wednesday night."

"Are you going on it?"

"Yeah, I'll have to. I'll be back again on Thursday."

5

Murphy and Pkofflunnel walk over the rough terrain on the mountainside. Mooney stays behind them with his gun. He talks as he walks. He loves talking, releasing herds of words into the wild, but unlike most people's herds, his lack organisation. Words go where they please. Sentences that start off in the direction of the watering hole end up mating with other sentences next to the tree.

Some of the words he sets free:
"I suppose you'd call it 'France'. I've never called it 'France' myself, but I've heard other people do it. I've heard other people do lots of things. Sometimes you just have to tickle someone with a feather to hear them do something. I know someone who tickled someone else with a gypsy. Only the gypsy laughed. If you could tickle someone with a giraffe you'd probab..."

That word was probably going to be 'probably' but it's cut short by an indecipherable sound that makes birds fly away. The sound is an ideal accompaniment to Mooney's fall. The gun flies out of his hand. You shouldn't release guns into the wild like that. Release bullets only after you've aimed the gun at an appropriate target (preferably not a bird, unless that bird is beating up another bird), but never send your gun out. It may well fall into the wrong hands.

It falls at the feet of a man with the wrong hands. At least they're wrong from Mooney's point of view. They've always felt right on the end of Murphy's arms. The gun feels right in his right hand. His left hand feels naked, but, as we've already seen, Murphy has no qualms about part or all of him feeling naked.

"Well well well," he says. "It seems as if the tables have been turned. "First things first. Where's... what's her name again?"

"I don't know," Pkofflunnel says. "I used to call all of the nurses 'Andrea'. It's easier to remember one name than twenty or thirty. Her name could be Andrea, but then, it could be something else."

"I used to call them all 'Emily'. They thought that was funny. Let's say her name is Emily."

"Why not Andrea?" Pkofflunnel says.

"We'll compromise and say it's Amilea. Where's Amilea?"

"I've never heard of her before in my life," Mooney says.

"The nurse you kidnapped. Where are you keeping her?"

"I was taking ye there."

"Why would you take us to where you're keeping her?"

"So I could keep ye there as well."

"Makes sense, I suppose. Right then, lead the way. And if you don't take us to her you're going to be spending a lot more time with nurses over the next few months. They won't be good nurses like Emily or Andrea or Amilea. They'll be bad nurses, like... Animal. She'll make you eat live chickens."

They walk for hours. Murphy spends most of the time making fun of Mooney's hiking outfit. They come to a valley with a lake at the bottom. It's a beautiful, inviting sight. Come to me, it says, rest by my waters, drink me. They can't resist. They walk quickly towards it. Murphy has the gun. He stumbles on the way and he releases the gun into the wild. Mooney has been waiting for his chance to pounce, and pounce he does. Like a cat with a knapsack on his back, he jumps on the knapsack on Murphy's back. The gun is on the ground in front of them. Murphy reaches out for it. Pkofflunnel runs towards it. Mooney dives for it, and he gets it.

"Well well well," he says. "It seems as if the tables have been turned. How ironic."

"How is it ironic?" Murphy said.

"That's just a figure of speech."

"How is it a figure of speech?"

"'Figure of speech' is just a figure of speech. In other words, take your clothes off."

"You're jumping all over the place here. It's like the film script in your head is getting all mixed up. 'Take your clothes off'. 'How ironic'. 'Yes, Miss Daisy'."

"At least in my script I didn't stumble and drop the gun, letting my arch-rival get it."

"Actually, you did. And you're not my arch-rival."

"Oh I will be. You just wait and see. You'll curse the day you ever made fun of my hiking hat. Now take your clothes off. All of them. Both of ye."

"What sort of films do you watch?"

"You'll see. Ye're going to have to pay twice as much if ye want to see her alive again. But before that, ye're going to be seeing quite a bit of each other."

They un-dress. Mooney makes them put their clothes in a pile, which he sets on fire, and then he throws their camping equipment into the flames. He lets them keep their shoes. "Stay there until I'm over the hill. Ye can stay there for longer, if ye like. It could be romantic. The two of ye alone next to a lake, with all this magnificent scenery around ye, and a roaring fire to keep ye warm. I feel like laughing, the laugh of an evil genius, a typical arch-rival. Aha ha ha ha ha. No, that's not it. Aha, no."

They hear him practising his laugh as he walks away. Murphy says, "Do you think that if we were photographed together without our clothes it would only fuel the fire of those rumours?"

"Shut the f**k up."

"What do we do now?"

"How would I know. How does the film in your head end?"

"Right now I'm just thinking of those rumours."

"We've got to try and follow him. At least we can see where he goes. There's a good chance he'll go to see her."

"Okay then. We wait until he gets to the top of the hill, then we run."

When Mooney gets to the top of the hill he turns around and waves, then he disappears over the other side. Murphy and the prince run towards the hilltop, but it's difficult without shoes.

They get to the top of the hill and they see Mooney about to disappear over another hilltop. "He's heading back towards his house," Murphy says.

"We can't follow him like this. Someone's bound to take a photo, and it'll end up on the front page of some tabloid. How am I going to explain that?"

"We'll just have to find some clothes?"

"Did you see any clothes shops during our hike?"

"When I said 'find' I meant 'steal'. I thought that was obvious. We passed a farm on the way. There was clothes on the clothes line."

They go to the farm. They hide behind a hedge around the garden at the back of the farmhouse and they look at the clothes. One of them will have to wear brown trousers and a shirt with stains on it. The other one is going to have to wear a dress.

"Do you want to wear a dress?" the prince says.

"What do you think?"

"Okay. We'll toss a coin."

"Where are you going to get a coin?"

"Oh yeah... Paper, scissors, stone."

Murphy goes for stone. The prince goes for paper. "Paper covers stone, pauper. Get in the dress."

"You've said that before, haven't you. Get in the dress, pauper."

"Stop complaining and get on with it. At least the dress is clean."

"Typical royalty. Ye have paper and we have stones. In a fight we'd win, but ye'll never come within a stone's throw of us."

"It's the smell that keeps us away. Come on, get in the dress. It's not as if I want to see you in a dress but it's a million times better than seeing you out of a dress."

They go into the garden and take the clothes from the line. The prince puts on the trousers and the shirt while Murphy puts on the dress. They leave the garden, and they run again when they hear a voice behind them, a woman in a dress at the back door of the house, then the sound of a shotgun. "She wears a dress so much better than you do," the prince says, "and she can hold onto her gun too. I bet she holds her drink better than you too."

They keep running until the farmhouse is out of sight. They stop for a rest. "There's no point in attacking Mooney's house before it gets dark," Murphy says.

"Isn't that what we said last night?" Pkofflunnel says. "It didn't do us much good then."

"There was nothing wrong with waiting until it got dark. The mistake we made was leaping before looking. Don't break into a room if you're going to come up against a man with a gun, especially if you don't have a gun."

They wait in a shed on the side of a hill. When darkness falls they leave the shed and they climb to the top of the hill, only to find the cover of darkness shattered by a fireworks display. There's a festival on in the town in the valley beneath them. The town folk hold this festival every year to ward off the evil spirits who spat on their butter.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel link arms as they walk into the town. They're trying to act like a couple, and Murphy is trying to act like a woman. They can drop the act when they're hidden amongst the crowd, but Murphy is in even more danger as a single woman. A man puts an arm around his waist and says, "You're the most beautiful woman I've seen outside of a prison."

Murphy says, "Come with me and I'll show you what I used to do when I was incarcerated."

He leads the man down a dark alley. Pkofflunnel waits at the corner. He hears the sounds of a fight, and shortly afterwards Murphy emerges from the alley wearing trousers. He's buttoning up a shirt. The man lying on the ground in the alley looks dazed, but then a faint smile appears on his face when he sees the dress next to him and he realises he has an excuse to wear it.

By the time Murphy and Pkofflunnel leave the town they've both managed to steal black clothes. They make their way to Mooney's house, and before proceeding with their operation they stop to consult a book called 'The Idiot's Guide to Safely Rescuing Kidnapped Nurses'. Neither of them like the word 'safely'.

There's a light on in the barn behind the house. They look in the window and they see Mooney inside. The nurse is there as well. She's sitting on a chair. Her legs are tied. Her hands are free so she can eat her dinner. Mooney is pacing, talking.

"Do you think he had her here all along?" Murphy says.

"Maybe. She could have been in the house."

"We should have brought a weapon."

"You should have left the dress on."

"We're just going to have to take him by surprise."
"You really should have left the dress on."

"I'll throw a stone at him through the window at the other side and you throw a stone through this window just after it."

Mooney is talking about getting dirty when rolling around on carpets. He's lost in one of his favourite anecdotes. She takes no notice of him as she eats and he takes no notice of the fact that she takes no notice. He's happy in his shell but that shell is shattered by two stones and two men in black. They both have the same man-on-a-mission-rescuing-damsel-in-distress vision. The prince's vision doesn't involve reflective sunglasses. He sees horses and muskets.

Mooney finishes his anecdote when he's tied to a chair. "She thought the dirt came from me," he says.

"Who wouldn't?" Murphy says.

"I see ye've got clothes. I hope ye had a lot of fun before ye got clothes."

"We were going to leave you here tied to the chair," Pkofflunnel says, "but I have a better idea."

They make Mooney take his clothes off and put them into a pile, and then they set his house on fire.

As Murphy and Pkofflunnel walk away with the nurse, Mooney is wondering if he should put his clothes on before trying to put out the fire.

4

Maria falls in love with Hank. They waltz in the ballroom of an Austrian castle, they kiss on the balcony of his penthouse, make love next to a lake in Switzerland, laugh at inappropriate jokes in Monte Carlo and stare into each other's sunglasses in Nice. They travel all around the world. There's a very interesting story about a funny looking dog in Russia. Maria will gladly tell it, if you ask her about it.

She never forgets about Murphy and Pkofflunnel, but her love fades. She believes they're dead until she arrives in Nice with Hank. It's July now, and she sees Murphy and the prince all over the press. The papers report a love affair between the two men. The two men in question haven't contradicted this story because it covers what they were doing in the mountain with the nurses.

Murphy thought that Maria didn't care enough about him to look for him after he went missing. Then he heard about her and Hank and he thought she didn't care about him at all.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel are living together. Pkofflunnel lets Murphy stay in his house, which fuels the fire of the rumours, despite the constant trail of women and women's clothes from their bedrooms. They're always arguing, like the odd couple, but despite this they become good friends.

Breakfast on a sunny morning. "That woman you brought home last night looked as if she'd been doing something to her face," Murphy says to Pkofflunnel.

"They all do things to their faces."

"Something she shouldn't have done. Or something where she thought, 'This might work out really really well,' and then regretted it later."

"I didn't bring her home for her face."

"You're royalty. You can demand the best. You don't have to settle for women deficient in the facial area."

"She wasn't deficient anywhere. It's all in your mind. You've been doing something to your mind."

"We all do things to our minds."

"Something you shouldn't have done."

"We all do things we shouldn't do. Every time we get drunk it's something we shouldn't do, and think of all the things we do that we shouldn't do when we're drunk. Imagine the things we shouldn't have done, but we did, and we can't remember doing them."

"You've done something to your brain with scalpels and tweezers."

"That's what that woman did to her face."

"There was nothing wrong with her face."

"I suppose it depends on the light."

There's a letter for Pkofflunnel in the post. It's from Mooney. The envelope contains a photo of a woman tied to a chair. Despite the gag covering her mouth and the look of fear in her eyes, Pkofflunnel recognises the face. It's one of the nurses. The letter is a ransom demand. 'She told me everything,' the letter says. 'She'll die but her knowledge will live on, unless you pay me two million euros...'

The money is to be left behind a rock near a path on a mountainside. Murphy and the prince go there at the appointed time, five o' clock in the afternoon. They leave a bag behind the rock and then they hide, pretending to be bird-watchers/hikers. They have camping equipment and binoculars.

A hiker walks by. "That's him," Murphy says.

"How do you know?"

"He's not a real hiker."

"He looks real to me."

"He's too real. He might as well be singing 'Fol deree, fol derah, fol deree, fol derahahahahahahaha, fol deree, fol derah, my knapsack on my back.'"

"Fol deree, fol derah, fol deree, fol derahahahahahahaha, fol deree, fol derah, shut the f**k up."

They can hear him whistling as he casually walks towards the rock. "Who in their right mind would demand that we leave the money behind a rock?" Murphy says.

They watch him as he looks all around before picking up the bag and looking inside. They can hear an F word when he realises that the bag is empty.

They follow him back to his house, a long trek through hills and valleys. His song is now a stream of expletives. It's nearly dark by the time he gets to his house. Nearly dark isn't nearly dark enough for breaking into houses. They wait until after midnight before breaking in. Mooney is there with his new friend the gun. He says, "Ye don't seriously believe I'd keep her here, do ye?"

His gun doesn't say anything but they're still afraid of it. He leads them outside at gunpoint. It's a cold night. They look up at snow-capped peaks and stars sparkling in the sky. He takes them to his barn. He handcuffs them to an old plough. "Try to get some sleep," he says. "It'll be a long day tomorrow."

It's a long night trying to sleep on the hard floor of the cold barn. The prince isn't used to cold and hard. Warm and soft are what he's used to. Murphy is has more experience with hard and cold, or cold and hard, but he still struggles to sleep.

In the morning Mooney takes off the handcuffs and tells his captives to go outside. "And take the camping equipment," he says. "Ye're going on a long hike. Carrying all that crap on your back will make it much more enjoyable for me."

He points towards a hill in the distance and tells them to start walking in that direction.

3

Hank arrives in Switzerland. He's a man on a mission. He likes being in his man-on-a-mission mode. He can wear sunglasses with reflective lenses and his facial expression never changes. He'll remain steadfast no matter what obstacles he encounters -- you can see this on his face and in the way he walks. He likes picturing his own face and the way he walks, and the way he runs through the burning wreckage of helicopters, carrying an unconscious woman in his arms, or jumping out of a car, taking out his handgun in midair and shooting a moving target as he rolls when he hits the ground. Most of these scenes are no more than moving mental pictures.

He knows a man in Berne who knows a woman who lives in a basement. She never stops smiling and she's cross-eyed. The constant smiling makes Hank wonder about her mind, but appearances can be deceptive. She has a hand gun strapped to the inside of her thigh. Hank keeps picturing this long after she shows it to him. He tries to marry this image with the one of the cross-eyed smile, but they don't belong together, like him and his wife. Chloe is a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from a different jigsaw.

This woman takes him to another man, a man who looks normal in every way, who lives in a house that looks like any other suburban house, but there are weapons concealed all over the place, which makes Hank wonder about what's concealed in the man's head.

Hank buys one of the guns. This enhances his man-on-a-mission look, the one he sees in his head, the one that no one else can see because he keeps the gun concealed. When he walks down a crowded street he knows he's probably the only one who's armed. It enhances his self-image and the bulge in his trousers will enhance his image in the eyes of anyone who looks closely enough. He hopes that anyone who looks closely enough will be someone that he'd like to look at too.

No one looks, but that's okay. He'd blur his self-image if he got too distracted by the women. He's an arrow and he's heading straight for a barn behind Mooney's house.

In a barn behind Mooney's house, Maria sits on a chair. Her hands are tied, but the gag has been removed. Mooney paces from one end of the barn to the other, telling her his theories on life. "People are always saying one thing and then doing the other. Not that there's just a choice between one thing and the other. There are normally lots of things. But they say one thing, and they can't say any more than one thing, and they do another. And they can't do any more than one thing, that one thing being the other thing. But there could be ten things. Eight of them will remain invisible because only one thing and the other thing will be brought into being. So in every action there are so many possible actions that are cast aside, like people who audition for a part in a film, and they don't get it. They're invisible. I thought I was invisible once, but I wasn't really. I had drunk too much and I looked down at my hand but it wasn't there. It was up the sleeve of my coat. When I saw nothing coming out of my sleeve, I thought, 'Hmm. I'm invisible now. I was wondering when that would happen.' When you're invisible you could try every action. You wouldn't need to say you're going to do anything, and you could do everything. But I'd probably just eat and drink and look at women when they can't see me, and I'd be too lazy to do anything else."

The tears return. Maria is glad she isn't gagged, but she'd like something to cover her ears, or something in her head to stop Mooney's theories from setting up home.

He starts whistling as he paces. Pacing and whistling suddenly cease when he hears a noise outside.

Hank has reached the end of his journey. He's been walking for the past three days, camping at night. He could have just taken a car, but the mountain trek fits in with his mission. Stealth is important. So are the sunglasses.

Mooney stands completely still. He listens. He hears the silence of a silent starry night on the mountainside. He walks on again. "But anyway, Big Bird..."

The silent night is shattered into thousands of shards when the window is broken by an airborne brick that hits Mooney on the back of the head. He falls to the ground. A man jumps in through the window and kneels on Mooney's back. "I've come to pay," Hank says, "but it won't be in money."

"Typical. You've travelled all this way just to steal from me again, just like you stole from me before."

"I didn't steal anything. How was I to know we'd strike it rich."

"You knew perfectly well that 'we' wouldn't strike it rich. You were too cunning to let that happen."

"You need to play out these fantasies in your head to keep the place from falling to pieces, but that doesn't justify kidnapping an innocent woman."

"What justifies conning your best friend?"

"If that's what you want to think, fine, but I'm never going to pay you a cent."

Hank ties Mooney's hands behind his back and then he un-ties Maria. She puts her arms around him and holds on. He lets her.

Mooney says, "If I'm interrupting a party, just say the word and I'll leave."

"You won't be going anywhere," Hank says. He takes out his gun and shoots Mooney in the foot.

Hank and Maria leave. He wishes he'd brought a car now. "I suppose we'll have to walk," he says.

"What are you going to do about Mooney?"

"I passed a hospital on the way here. I'll call them."

Mooney in the hospital. He plays with three words for hours: 'my', 'foot', and an F word in between. He forgets about his foot when he notices the nurses, and notices them noticing him. It doesn't take long before he's able to chase the nurses down the corridor. They run in slow motion so the hobbling man behind them can catch them. They have picnics by the pond. They play croquet in the garden. They organise balls in the ballroom.

He finds out that they've had practise with Murphy and the prince. One of the nurses has a very vivid memory of her time with them because she's recorded everything in her diary.

When Mooney disappears they wonder why he left without saying goodbye. They wonder why he'd want to leave at all. A nurse screams and they all run to her room. Her diary has left as well. They wonder why her diary would want to leave at all, and then they put two and two together.

The nurse is determined to get her diary back.

It's two o' clock in the morning. She's dressed all in black and she's standing outside Mooney's house, looking in through a window. There's a full moon above. Complete darkness would normally be helpful on missions like these, but then she wouldn't have enough light to read. She consults a book called 'The Idiot's Guide to Stealing What's Rightfully Yours'. She'd be happier if the title didn't contain the word 'idiot'.

She puts the book back into her black bag and she takes out a glass cutter. She cuts a hole in the window pane and she reaches in to open the window.

She steps into the room and looks around. A rectangle of moonlight reaches in to illuminate a table and the diary on top of it. She can't believe how easy this is.

A bit too easy. The door opens and the light comes on. She's holding a diary. Mooney is holding a gun. "I bought a gun," he says. "I wondered how I ever got through life without a gun before. There are so many more actions that are brought into being when you have a gun. There are so many more things you can say to other people, and make them do all sorts of actions they'd never dream of doing in a dream..."

While he's becoming immersed in his theory he doesn't notice when she takes out a cigarette lighter and sets the diary on fire. Her firey diary drops to the ground. He jumps up and down on it to put out the flames, but it's too late. The diary is destroyed. She smiles. So does he. "It's action time," he says. He ties her to a chair, takes a photo and sends the ransom demand to Murphy and the prince.

2

Murphy and Pkofflunnel are lying on the mountainside. They're doing their best to turn the snow around them red. But it snows heavily that night, and they can do nothing about the white blanket that's covering them. As dawn approaches their lives are about to leave with the night, but a farmer finds them. He's out looking for dead sheep. He loads Murphy and Pkofflunnel onto the back of his cart and takes them to a hospital.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel are deposited at the doors of the hospital. They're taken inside, and if they weren't so close to death they'd think they're in heaven. Thirty nurses surround them. Each nurse is a beautiful young woman who hasn't met any men in months. The man who set up the hospital was a rich American businessman who once broke his leg while skiing and he didn't think the local hospital was good enough because it didn't have a bar, so he set up a hospital of his own. He hired all the nurses himself. They looked a lot like his secretaries. The hospital got very few patients because it was so expensive and it was in such an isolated place.

It's morning now. Maria suspects that something is wrong when she wakes and she isn't with either Murphy or Pkofflunnel. She spends the day looking for them. Late in the afternoon she goes to the police and tells them who she's looking for. When they hear that one of the missing men is the prince, they laugh. "He often goes missing," the policeman says. "It's practically a hobby. The real hobby is women, and going missing is a consequence of that. Sometimes he goes missing with a woman he meets to get away from another woman he's become attached to, or who's become attached to him -- they can be like limpets at times. No offence. Sometimes he has to get away from the husband or boyfriend of a woman he's become too attached to. The woman often goes with him. He always shows up eventually. He has houses all over the world. He could be in New York now. Or Brazil. Or Sweden."

"But I was the woman in this instance, and he hasn't gone away with me, and my boyfriend is missing too."

"Hmm. That's a new variation alright... Are you sure he hasn't gone away with your boyfriend?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"Isn't it a bit of a coincidence, both of them going 'missing' like that?"

"Why would they be together?"

"A new variation. He'll exhaust the female population eventually."

"That's ridiculous. I don't know about Pkofflunnel, but I know my boyfriend."

"Fair enough. We'll keep a look out for them. But I'm sure they'll turn up safe and sound soon enough."

A week goes by and there's no sign of either of them. Maria hires detectives. She travels from place to place, stopping at every hamlet to ask people if they've seen this man (this man being the man in the photograph of herself and Murphy). Some people say they've seen the woman and she wants to punch them or cry or break something.

She's getting further away from Murphy and Pkofflunnel. She's getting closer to Mooney, just a hundred yards to go. He sits on a rock and looks down on the valley. He's knee deep in the black swamp water of thought, with living things creeping around his ankles, things you'd shoot or stab if your feet weren't in the way. He should be a millionaire verging on being a billionaire. He should be in a Jacuzzi with beautiful women who love him for his money, instead of sinking in a mental swamp, sitting on a rock on the side of a hill. The way he missed out on the big time is the source of the dark mental waters. He set up an oil company with a friend of his called Hank. They had been friends since childhood, but it all changed after they fell out because of a disagreement over a bet about the weight of Mooney's head. They couldn't work together anymore. Hank offered to buy his share and he agreed because he thought the company was sliding down an oil-covered slope to a dry oil-free desert plain. But just weeks after he sold his share, they struck gold, as in oil. Hank is knee-deep in the black stuff, up to his eye balls in sports cars and helicopters and the other things that make the women go weak at the knees, while Mooney is stuck in the black swamp water, wading his way through it each day, and the only reason to keep going is the prospect of revenge. He's convinced that Hank knew about the oil strike. He wants what's rightfully his: enough money to weaken enough female knees to keep him going until he can no longer walk. His money has almost drained away. He bought his house in Switzerland and he has to pay his ex-wife. These things put a serious dent in his account.

He thought about kidnapping Chloe, Hank's wife. Hank might pay a ransom without going to the police because he wouldn't want the world to hear about the way he conned his childhood friend, but he wouldn't pay a cent to get his wife back. He'd pay someone to take her away.

A Short Story Made Shorter: He married her two months after meeting her and then he realised she was mental.

She enjoyed throwing knives at the wall and she found the sound of breaking glass as relaxing as the sound of water trickling over stones in a stream through the woods. Hank had a habit of falling in love at first sight and then sliding from the peak of love into the plain of indifference and on into the hole of hate. Kidnapping her wouldn't work.

Maria meets Mooney and a light bulb comes on above his head. "Have you seen this man?" she says.

He's dazzled by the light of the light bulb. It takes him a few seconds to say, "Yes, I've seen him."

"Where?"

"Follow me."

Hank wouldn't pay a cent to get his wife back, but he might pay for the release of a beautiful woman he's never met before. It's worth trying. It's worth catching a fish when they jump out of the river and land on the bank at your feet.

He leads her to his house. "I found him sleeping in the barn behind my house," he says. "I left him there to sleep it off, whatever 'it' is."

'Don't go into a barn with a stranger' is something her grandmother would have told her if her grandmother ever stopped talking about the time she lost her chicken in a duck race and her aunt Sue was arrested for embezzlement but she got off because she fixed someone's knee. Maria goes into the barn and before she knows what's happening she's tied to a chair. She screams but he gags her.

Hank sees the terror in her eyes. He's looking at a photo of Maria. She's tied to a chair. It's difficult to tell where she is. It's a long way away from the breakfast table in his penthouse where he's drinking coffee. He has no idea who she is, but he has a feeling he's about to find out. He reads the letter that came with the photo. Mooney wants twenty million dollars. "I could have asked for a hundred million," according to Mooney in the letter, "but I'm a reasonable man. Pay me the money or this complete stranger dies. Can you live with the death of a complete stranger on your conscience? She might be evil or she might be mental, but maybe, just maybe, she's an angel. Maybe she's the one for you. Out of all the billions of women out there, maybe your oldest friend is the one who really knows the one you should spend the rest of your life with. She'll spend the rest of her life tied to this chair unless you pay."

The money is to be left in a bin in a park in Geneva. So he's in Switzerland. He always said he wanted to go there. Switzerland is a big country (this is what Hank thinks when he looks at the globe). Where would a man like Mooney go to (this is what Hank thinks as he looks down over the city from his balcony). Norma would know (Hank comes to the conclusion that asking Mooney's ex-wife would be a better way of locating him than trying to figure out where in Switzerland a man like Mooney would go to).

Ten minutes later, he's sitting on a couch in Norma's apartment. She's sitting on another couch opposite him. "He's been in Switzerland for over a year," she says. "He sent me this photo with the last cheque." She hands him the photo. In the background there's a snow-capped Alpine peak. In the foreground there's a raised middle finger. The finger belongs to Mooney, who stands behind it and smiles.

"He's been sending me photos too," Hank says. "And I'm afraid he's going to start sending fingers. He kidnapped a woman and he wants a ransom of twenty million."

"Somehow I'm not surprised. I should be shocked, but I'm not shocked, and I'm not even surprised. Who's the woman?"

"I have no idea. I supposed he realised that I wouldn't be shocked if he kidnapped Chloe. I might be surprised, but that would fade fairly quickly. All emotions would fade fairly quickly if he kidnapped Chloe."

"And he expects you to pay twenty million for the life of a complete stranger?"

"He still thinks I conned him. I was going to let him buy back his share in the company, but when I met him he told me my future wife was so crispy in the head you could hear her brain crunch every time she looked at you. I don't know what that means, but if he said it now I'd agree with him."

"Are you going to pay?"

"If he asked nicely for the money, and said that thing about my wife again, I'd gladly give it to him. But there's no way I can pay him when he plays it like this. I'd rather die myself than pay him a cent."

"Or see this woman die."

"I don't want that to happen. That's why I'm going over there. He won't expect that. He thinks I'll either ignore this or pay the money."

Norma gives him the address. He goes home to start packing.

Murphy and Pkofflunnel haven't forgotten about Maria. Murphy is still in love with her and the prince is still willing to fight for her. This is the official position that they would state if they were asked to state an official position. Unofficially, they're having too much fun with the nurses, but this is the sort of position they'd like to keep under wraps. It's the sort of thing the tabloids would love to hear about.

Being tended to by nurses is much more fun than shooting each other, and the fact that they've recently shot each other is an excuse to be tended to by the nurses. The nurses have needs too. They need tending to. They've been cut off from suitable male company for too long. The only males they come into contact with are ones who smell of dead animals or of the things vomited by animals as they died.

Murphy is well enough to be able to run down a deserted hospital corridor with a nurse or two nurses or three nurses, and find a room somewhere. There are plenty of rooms. On on entire floor of the hospital the wards look more like hotel rooms than hospital wards. There's even a honeymoon suite. Pkofflunnel spends a lot of time in the bar, organising parties in the swimming pool, and then having parties in the swimming pool or in the Jacuzzi with some of the nurses when they get off duty, or when they're on duty and they have to accompany the patients into the swimming pool or the Jacuzzi to make sure they don't drown.

They play croquet in the gardens, get lost in the maze, play billiards in the billiards room, look through the vast wardrobes, put on new clothes or costumes and they stage plays in the hospital's theatre. There's no one in the audience. Everyone is on the stage. If there were people in the audience they'd be men wearing raincoats.

After three months Pkofflunnel can light a cigarette and say, "This is the most sex I've ever had in a hospital."