Beyond

I have to admit, that last occurrence did shake me up. I just kept running. I ended up at one of the highest towers in London. I probably shouldn't say which one. I needed to get as far off the ground as I could because I was concerned that my vibrations were giving me away. I was having trouble walking without rhythm and was worried about that clown.

This tower has a bank based in it and I still remembered the names of some of the slickly glib and spickly obsequious bankerbots within. So I decided to call in a favour from times past and get them to let me up the tower. I managed to contact someone I knew from the structured products group and he met me in the foyer. I explained that I just needed to get high up, as far from the ground as I could get. So, after signing me in, he let me wander around with his magnetic pass card.

I took an elevator all the way to the top floor. I remembered being there before, long ago. Aside from meeting rooms, there was some unused space. In one of these unused rooms, the leveraged finance guys had set up one of those games which used to be in arcades and piers - right by the air-hockey table. The game with the long thin length of metal which was curled up into lots of funny bends, rather like the font of a 'Curly Wurly' bar. At one end, held on a bit of wound-up gaffer tape, there was a stick with a little metal loop, just slightly bigger than the diameter of the curly metal wire which passed though it. You had to very carefully guide the metal loop all the way along the curly wire, around all the loops and turns without touching it. If you touched the wire, it completed an electrical circuit and rang a loud buzzer. Man, those things were tense, weren't they? In this room, they had set up one of these games and connected it in series to two giant stacks of amplifiers so that if you touched the wire, the buzzer sound was deafening. They used it as a sort-of initiation device for new team members. I was told that interns had frequently soiled themselves from the shock of setting it off.

There were some glass doors out to a very small roof-top terrace almost at the top of the building. Sometimes, smokers would go up there for a cigarette but it was usually empty. Just inside was a set of soft benches, a vending machine and two flat-screen TVs showing Bloomberg and Reuters. I just went and sat down on one of the benches. It was a big rectangular cube covered in burgundy-coloured faux-leather. Soon after, two young Japanese women came in to the room. One was very slim and one had quite a round face but they were both pretty. They sat down on the soft bench next to mine and started studying a fold-out tourist map together. They clearly weren't dressed in business clothes but rather wild party clothes like only the Japanese can muster and I wondered how they had got in the building.

It was then that I felt a fart build up. I casually let it go. I let it slip out silently but regretted it immediately as soon as I had done so. I could smell it's ripe pungency rearing up almost immediately. Why had I done that? I should have held it in. There were only the three of us sitting there and they'd know it was me. There was no way I could pretend it wasn't me. It was obvious that it's provenance was a caucasian anus - it reeked of a western diet of dairy products and greasy fried animal fats. (In fact, I'd had breakfast at the 'Southern Greasy Fried Animal Fats' by Liverpool Street station.) I wondered whether to get up or not but it wouldn't make any difference - they'd still know it was me and I would be really embarrassed.

But just then I noticed that there were people outside on the terrace. Well, not actually on the terrace but, incredibly, hanging off a bar which was suspended from the top of the building and jutted out over the side. They were attached by safety harnesses but, still, they were sitting on the bar with nothing below them all the way down to the ground. My legs tingled from just seeing them there. There were four of them and they were all going through the same acrobatic motions on the bar - not quite in unison. I saw this as my chance to distract the Japanese girls from the smell of my rancid gas before it reached them and move them over to the window, so I leaned over and called to them, then pointed at the window, through to the people on the pole. The girls both gasped in high-pitched tones then each drew a sharp intake of breath through their teeth in a similar fashion. We all walked over to the window to see better. I was glad just to get us away from the stink cloud and to save my blushes. When we got to the window, we could see that the people on the bar were trying to copy the same acrobatic manoeuvres of another set of people on a bar below them - though this one was safely over the terrace itself. It looked like those on the bar nearest to us were making up the movements which the ones on the overhanging bar then had to try to emulate. It was extraordinary.

I felt a touch on my arm and looked down to see that the very slim Japanese girl had reached out to me to get my attention. On her wrist I could see what looked like a watch but it had no clock-face - only a matrix of multi-coloured LEDs which blinked cryptically. Her skin was pale and I could see a number of pink healed-over cuts on her arm. "This squid-smelling world should be completely destroyed" she said to me. I wasn't sure if she'd understood the English words she'd just said. Her friend pulled her away from me and sounded like she was scolding the thin girl in Japanese - something about "oyaji" - then the two of them rushed off quickly but with tiny, shuffling steps.