1 - BEDROOM

A girl on a bed under yellow sheets to her neck. She has the Plague. Her cousin, a small boy with the same red hair, sits by her. He plays with a black marionette while she dreams. Outside, a city wall three meters thick, its great stones worn smooth, rises up level with the second floor window. Beyond it, beneath grey clouds, beneath grey rain which never stops; the grey sea. It covers the earth. It is risen to the parapet, here in the city at the top of the Earth. Water pours from the low heavens and sea slops into the streets. In the room, the children are quiet.
- boy's version of events (end)

2 - CITY WALL

Perhaps this is the last scene. Perhaps the girl dreams. Perhaps there are four children, all with red hair. They stand hand in hand on the rail-less ledge, two pairs of twins (one pair is taller, older). Careless of the rain they look out to sea. Their eyes rest at the same point on the horizon. They are thin and seem weary, say nothing; and are peaceful.

3 - BUS

The city center. A double-decker bus lodged in traffic on an endless highway of silver-grey cars, windscreen-wipers all thrashing. Countless faces behind countless misted windows, blurred in the downpour - but for one face. The top-deck, observed from a vantage-point without, and the young girl with red hair is staring through a patch she has cleared with her sleeve.
Parallel to the road is a wall, lower than the city wall but curved the same way, which rises to eye-level on the second deck. Beyond it are the trees of a park. The only trees in the city. They fill the distance; nothing is to be seen through the thickness of the broad leaves. At her side sits her cousin, chatting automatically. He pulls out labeled jars of mushrooms and furry-mould from his anorak pockets to show her. Used to her apparent lack of interest, he describes the specimens he is collecting for his nature class. The bus is noisy with children wearing the same blazers. Many of them wield umbrellas with raw potatoes stuck on top: and raw potatoes, used as missiles, divide the clammy atmosphere.

4 - STREET OF 1000 BUTCHER SHOPS

The road upon which the children travel to school is the longest in the city. It begins - or abruptly ends - at the great wall upon their doorsteps (they are neighbours) and spirals center-wards, growing narrow and frantic as it nears the cities hub. It is called the Street of a Thousand Butcher-shops and is dissected at one point or another by all other roads in the city.
The children live with their parents above the two family shops in the semi-detached house at the end of the street. Their fathers are butchermen. They are brothers, twins in fact, but do not speak to one another. Their mothers are sistered to one another, also twins, and each as neurotic as the other. They wear rubber gloves from morning till night and go about their scrubbed and sterilised homes on short wooden stilts. They speak in sign language (but not to one another): the stitches sewn into their mouths at birth were never removed, as is the custom when a child in this place, in this time, reaches a certain age. They are prone to fainting at the slightest disaster.
The young cousins have been barred from speaking to or seeing one another since before they can remember. Having to attend the same school, they leave in the mornings at intervals, walk on opposing pavements and meet at the bus station beyond the curve of the street: out of the sight of their fathers, whose temperaments roller-coaster between sentimental and fisted extremes. To date, the children have never discussed the feud, either within the families or between themselves. Like the three hour bus-ride in walking-pace traffic to the only functioning school in the city; like the one hour lesson and the three hour trek home; like the ceaseless rain and the risen sea - the feud is another fact of life belonging to a world which holds its tongue. There are no answers for children.

5 - PLAGUE

A fact of life greatly discussed these days, among children at least and grey television-ministers, is the Lightening-plague. The city is in the grip of a strain of electric-storm which has weathermen, doctors, priests and defense analysts scrambling for any kind explanation. If the day sees a dozen lightening-strikes, the night sees another dozen children under the age of thirteen sent comatose to their beds. Unburned, frozen into deep sleep, no amount of worry or medical experiment will wake them. For half the victims the coma will last a week, after which time they will awaken with no apparent injury other than a hangover and total loss of memory. Distraught parents might celebrate the fact, though many would prefer the little ones remain comatose indefinitely, as so many do. For those who awaken do so as fully-grown adults. Never to utter a word or to smile, the new citizens are otherwise perfectly fit to eat, to learn a trade, and to watch from an armchair the grey ministers reassure one another and the nation, night after night, on prime-time television.
But there is no defense against the Lightening-plague. A youngster kept home is just as likely to be struck down by the unnatural force through a chimney or a letter-box as one playing out in the puddled streets. However, it is commonly believed by the child population itself that protection from immediate danger can be attained by pressing a raw potato onto the spike of their umbrellas. Indeed, as official reports would have it, no child prescribing to the method has yet been targeted.
Another fact of life to have completely flummoxed the scientists, if not the politicians.

6 - GRANDMOTHER

The two households in the last building on the Street of a Thousand Butchershops have more in common than their related tenants and their businesses. A low attic runs the length of the house, accessed by trap-doors in the floor, in turn serviced by spiral staircases running up from the uppermost landing of each household. Rain beats constantly upon the small, round windows which line the sloping ceiling, built from heavy wooden beams. The dusty furniture cramming the narrow space is wooden, too (wood being a rare commodity) and copper pots dangle from

THE BOOK
Rendezvous
A surprise
A dangerous read

BREAKFAST
(both households)
Porridge, awkward questions, hysterics

BUS
Steaming children

THE ANIMAL
The vision/the fall
The carved wall
Trucks
The iron gate
"Soil & Greens"
The small workers

THE PUPPET-THEATRE
The show-window
Marionettes

THE GARDEN
Junk/The anchor
Toys

LOST
Scale the tree/fall/doze
Another visitation
"The trees go on forever!"
The chase
The clearing
The well & chain
Shoots an arrow

THE BEARDED MAN
Found: back-door of the theatre
The tumble/separation
The room of sacks
The show
Tea and cake
His version of events

BACK IN THE ATTIC
Where is Grandmother?

ANOTHER BREAKFAST
Girls mother's version of events

RETURN TO THE WELL
Rush out of the shop
No sign of the boy

THE DESCENT
The girl goes down
Spiral steps
Deja-vous!
A blast of cold air
7 caverns
The lowest cavern (empty!)

THE LAKE
The boat
The storm
Eyes!
The leap/another visitation/the chain is struck
The trap-door/faint

REUNION
Home and dry?
Eerie Grandmother/her version of events:

AN ANCIENT TALE
Noah's disgrace
Banished
The vineyard
Obsession/his search
Children who wake as adults (the army)
The sanctuary well

GROWING UP
mistrust
the fathers' version of events...