 the castle of the high faces by max dunbar three weeks after returning to the abandoned townhouse in the village of my birth i dreamt of a horned devil in a high castle throwing babies down alternating tubes after tapping their foreheads with a blackened claw and intoning one or other catechism  alone not alone alone not alone i understood then that all the euphemisms we make about one s course through life our talk of a balance between talents and failings and sorrow and joy were all conscious or unconscious lies and the truth was as william blake had recognised it two hundred years ago in his poem auguries of innocence  some are born to sweet delight some are born to endless night i wouldn t have seen it any other way of course being at a point where i felt that the delight had tipped some time ago and the endless night was only just beginning i d been living and studying in london for four years and for the last six months of those i had barely gone out getting my food from the sainsbury s website living off freelance editing and the amazon sale of review copies i had got into political blogging during that time and had had fun but the constant pointscoring and intellectual oneupmanship depressed me the world of progressive politics was a cold second childhood of mockery and derison and i reverted to writing long pieces about romantic poetry and different aspects of romantic love eventually money and fear drove me onto a firstclass train passage bought with the last two hundred on my credit card i never thought returning to the old town would cure me completely in fact it made me worse i believed then that i would be there the rest of my life for not only had the national government driven people like me from the cities the cities of england were now machines working towards the appeasement of the capricious volcano god of the deficit i was now incapable of commuting by bus to stockport or by train to piccadilly without going through borderline psychotic panic attacks halfway down to the bowl there was a train station with services to yorkshire one of the few places i could contemplate without fear as a kid i d see these trains come and go beneath the bridge and i knew that if i could handle myself in the tramlined streets of the seven hills i could work my way back to hyde park get a job at the brudenell social or the picture house there to read and drink and live anonymously and die happily but these days i could go nowhere near this bridge any irregular degree of altitude or angle made me want to scream how good stasis must be a house of ordered lines linear pathways to the job and the pub i wanted two dimensionality over anything and everything else i recognised my state as that of paranoid anxiety something external the result of drugs and booze overwork and undersleep but the head and the heart are very different organisms for food and wine i staggered around dazed and scattered through the tiny precinct in the last hours of light in the evenings i had the facebook newsfeed on for hours drawing strength from the evidence that the people i d known in cities were still out there drinking and watching movies and playing in bands i wandered through the bookshelves of the big house trying to find a book that would bring comfort and carry me down to sleep i usually settled on elizabeth wurtzel or martin millar or stephen king i needed to know about good things of positivity and love people who were into things cute and silly and had no money but enjoyed life nevertheless on the ragged alternative edges of the cities and who risked pretension and weakness yet still had the strength to reject the cynicism of the wider world i believed that people were coming for me in cars still one must face one s fears and towards the year s end i began to run and work out again and got a job in the pub nearest to my house and got another job doing part time data entry for some estate agent on what passed for our high street and got into the habit of walking down to the bowl and up the curve to the pubs that my old gang had used as a child most of them were still around some had got married and actually bought property in this town or ones like it i was friendly enough at these times and bought loads of rounds i wore paul smith shirts and ironed jeans and a thai silk scarf given to me by my father words tumbled out of me and formed sentences like birds falling into flight formation as they are kicked out of the nest it s still a source of pride to me that i looked so good and carried myself with style for if you don t have looks and style what do you have so did it not work out for you in london then this was a small blond runt who was now teaching in a secondary school and engaged to some fool from central stockport well it worked out for a while and then really suddenly it didn t again my tone was jovial enough and so were the feelings behind it the hate i d felt for these people had been exhausted long ago all i felt these days was terror and relief the talk skipped on to other topics and i tuned into the chat of a married man who had been my best friend when we were younger we shared pretty much the same interests in music and books and games and would talk late into the night in pubs and on parks i d looked down on him in recent years first for fucking his degree and then for buying that place in fucking new mills with april barrington but then my own situation broke alone riddled with anxieties and regret and running from real and imagined enemies didn t exactly recommend the road i d walked so where do you see yourself in the next ten years april asked me now christ knows honey i don t know even where i ll be in ten days hand to mouth baby that s where it s at okay then this was a small blonde girl with buck teeth who all the men of the group lusted after for some reason how about all of us where do you see all of us in ten years i see you as a cheshire woman playing golf wearing laura ashley occasionally having sex with waiters and barmen april cut in before she could answer and me where do you see me i don t know maybe you will own that residential home company i just see you and harry continuing to be this positive unifying force of the group i always thought that you would write the book of the group april told me as the year turned and lightened i developed a habit of meeting up with april on friday or saturday nights and having a platonic pint i would walk across the bridge i had walked across so often as a child i could see the yorkshire train over the craggy rim of the bridge at some point just after the clock change i got on it issue 1 max dunbar 