'The contract?' Donna asked.
'The signed contract between myself and the writer.'
'Which writer?'
'Oh, he's very famous, miss, and does not like to be named.'
'He only writes a single letter a day? He must be a very slow writer.'
'Each morning he sends word of which letter he next needs. I pick it up from the suppliers, and then carry it across town to the writer's house. For one moment there I thought I'd picked up a W by mistake. That would have been disastrous.'
'Can he not have it delivered, by van for instance, or through the postal service?'
'It is in the contract that I must carry the letter personally, and contained within this box.' The man stood up. 'But now I must be going. I am already late, and the writer must have urgent need of the letter M. He gets very angry, miss, if I do not deliver on time.'
The man picked up the box.
'Wait!' cried Donna. 'You haven't told me what he writes about.'
But the man had gone already.
METAPHORAZINE
Johnny takes Metaphorazine. Every clockwork day. Says it burns his house down, with a haircut made of wings. You could say he eats a problem. You could say he stokes his thrill. Every clingfilm evening, climb inside a little pill. Intoxicate the feelings. Play those skull-piano blues. Johnny takes Metaphorazine.
He's a dog.
Lucy takes Simileum. That's not half as bad. She's only like a moon gone slithering, upside-down the sky. Like a tidal wave of perfume, like a spillage in the heart. With eyes stuck tight like envelopes, and posted like a teardrop. Like a syringe, of teardrops. Like a dripfeed aphrodisiac, swallowed like a Cadillac, Lucy takes Simileum.
She's like a dog.
Graham takes Litotezol. Brain the size of particles, that cloud inside of parasites, that live inside the paradise of a pair of lice. He's a surge of melted ice cream, when he makes love like a ghost. Sparkles like a graveyard, but never gets the urge, and then sings Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! like a turgid flatfoot dirge. Graham takes Litotezol.
He's a small dog.
Josie takes Hyperbolehyde. Ten thousand every second. See her face go touch the sky, when she climbs that rollercoaster high. That mouth! Such bliss! All the planets and the satellites make their home inside her lips. It's a four-minute warning! Atomic tongue! Nitrokisserene! Josie takes Hyperbolehyde.
She's a big dog.
Alanis takes Alliterene. It drags a deeper ditch. And all her dirty dealings display a debonair disdain. Her dynamo is dangerous, ditto her dusky dreams. Dummies devise diverse deluxe debacles down dingy darkened detox driveways. Alanis takes Alliterene.
She's a dead dog, ya dig?
Desmond takes Onomatopiates.
He's a woof woof.
Sylvia takes oxymorox. She's got the teenage menopause. Gets her winter-sugar somersaults from sniffing non-stick glue. She wears the V-necked trousers, in the blind-eye looking-glass. Does the amputated tango, and then finds herself quite lost, in the new old English style! Sylvia takes oxymorox.
She's a cat dog.
But Johnny takes Metaphorazine. Look at those busted street lamp eyes, that midnight clockface of a smile. That corrugated tinflesh roof of a brow. The knife, fork and spoon of his fingers, the sheer umbrella of the man's hairdo! The coldwater bedsit of his brain. He's a fanfare of atoms, I tell you! And you know that last, exquisite mathematical formula rubbed off the blackboard before the long summer holidays begin? Well, that's him. Speeding language through the veins, Johnny takes Metaphorazine.
He's a real dog.
ALPHABOX
'What does he write about?' This was the one question that Donna kept asking the man with the alphabet box, whenever they bumped into each other. During the last few weeks they had become quite friendly, sometimes even taking their lunch together in a small park behind a department store.
He told her stories, stories of his own. Stories of the factory he visited every morning, the way the letters were bred and tamed, and of the writer and his cruelties. He often let Donna see inside the box; the silvery, slippery letters that flowed to the corners as though afraid of the light.
'What does he write about?' the carrier finally replied to Donna one day. 'Ah, that's the trouble, you see. The writer doesn't get out much any more. Not at all, actually. He's very old. That's why he pays me to deliver the letters. Now when he was a younger man, why he was famous for his cruelty and cunning in hunting down the letters. And not these tame little factory-produced letters, oh no; back then, he would track down wild, fierce letters, and drag them screaming back to his rooms. And his books were wild and fierce, in turn. Now, unfortunately, his stories are quite tame, and always about the same subject.'
'Which is?'
'He writes about writing, of course. What else does he know?'
And then, one wonderful lunchtime, in the autumn of the year, with the sun moulded from brass, the carrier showed Donna how to open the box for herself. The secret manoeuvres; the slightest pressure to the wing of a songbird, to a flower's petal, to a thorn. The box opened up for Donna, and she put her eye to the gifted darkness.
It was the letter Q.
A flash of quicksilver, curling to meet inside itself, to flick out a tail.
QWERTYPHOBIA
The trouble began at the christening. The joyous announcement, 'I name this child Quentin Thomas King', was disturbed by the baby boy's sudden retching cough. The holy water in the font swirled red with blood.
During the first years of his life, Quentin suffered daily from this attack. His mother would call out his name, to stop him from doing that naughty thing, whatever it was, this very instant. The boy would start to cough. His father would read him a bedtime story: '"Off with her head!" cried the Queen of Hearts.' The child's skin would inflame. His mother would say to him, 'Oh, you're such a queer boy!' A trickle of blood would flow from his lips.
Experiments were made on his body, checking for all the common allergic reactions. Neither milk nor pollen nor even the household cat made any impression. All the tests failed to find the cause of Quentin's discomfort. Some small relief was taken from the fact that the abreaction was becoming less pronounced as he grew older, with the shock of blood slowly giving way to a severe, burning rash.
For all the tests done by various doctors and experts, it was Quentin's own mother who first discovered the cause of the problem. This came about when she was trying to teach the young boy the alphabet. When asked to repeat the letters after her, the poor child managed all the way to the letter P, quite successfully, only then to go quiet.
'Come on now,' said his mother, 'the next letter is called Q, isn't that right?'
The usual reaction set in. The pupil's skin was livid with his pain. Mrs King immediately made an appointment for her son to see a psychiatrist.
This psychiatrist, a certain Dr Crombie, confirmed the mother's suspicions. 'Mr and Mrs King,' he said to the parents, 'your son, I'm afraid, is allergic to the letter Q.'
Quentin was in the room at the time, and of course the very sound of the pronouncement was enough to set him off.
'Your child is not alone,' continued the psychiatrist, once Quentin was safely in bed. 'I have found a number of cases in the literature. Most of these have occurred in the last five years, which may prove worrying. There was the case of a young girl in 1999, who was scared of the letter E; a rather more serious case, I think you'll agree.'