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“When I was a child, my mother told me often of the bards of Catford and Surbiton, Harrow and Woodside Park, souls who’d ventured into the sweltering interior, the foetid guts, wormed down the city’s gullet, and made it out. Made it out, but only just. Riddled with disease, encrusted with cankers, with scabies, abscesses, and fungal lesions. With sight failing, eyes shrivelled by sunlight glaring off glass and steel. With straggly lank hair, which would keep falling in stringy locks over their eyes and which they would keep pushing back – the gesture of a maniac or illuminé. With long suppurating sores on their flanks or calves, where strips of flesh had been carved, jerky for some corporate gunslinger. They wandered from door to door, weak eyes rheumy and poignant, like the eyes of a doe or an anchorite, plying their tales, burst of brutality and dark eroticism for jaded fringe folk.”