Norris found the dead fox in his back garden

The day before Norris found the dead fox in his back garden, he had entered his own version of dreamtime whilst sculpting in his garage. As he had sleep apnoea, which meant that his fat neck sometimes closed his air passages and sent him, briefly to sleep, this was easy to do. Once in a while he was awakened from a momentary micro-sleep by the clang or click of a chisel dropped from his inert paw onto the concrete floor of the artistic garatelier.

But sculpting engaged physical routines and motor controls, which counteracted boredom, the psycho-active bit of Norris’ apnoea, and meant that he seldom lapsed in total unconsciousness. He could dream shapes into the wood that he has on the work bench before him and then he could try to define and suggest them with chisel cuts.

Norris spent about 3, almost 4, hours doing this, he could put this time aside because he had to come downstairs and sit in the garage to let in a plumber who might come to unblock the drains.

Norris thought that he achieved quite a lot this way, but, he might come back the next day and not see the patterns and schemes in wood that he had seen the day before. What he definitely had were numbed hands that felt like claws. He had never got the hang of holding the chisel properly and also, he consistently hit too hard, or sometimes he missed, or partially missed, the chisel and whacked his left hand. So when the Dyno-rod engineer came and unblocked the drain, Norris was glad was glad to stop being so creative, before managing to totally paralyse his hands.

He then locked up his garage, went into his suburban semi-detached and when inside and rebaked baked beans and dreamt again, with others, through his computer.

The next day he embarked on a series of his bus journeys around London. These bus journeys were assuming a quasi-triangular character, in that he seldom returned home, from wherever he went, by the same route which he had taken to get to the apex or notional destination of the journey; aka “there”. This triangularity of movement was a function of several factors: a disabled person’s bus pass, almost constant pain from arthritic knees and diabetic feet, and a relative lack of pressure of time. These, factors were in some way multiplied or divided or somehow influenced by the patchy nature of disabled peoples’ access to London Transport tube stations and bus stations at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

So on a bright, warm, sunny mid-winter’s day, Norris began his voyaging by turning left and uphill at the end of this cracked concrete front garden path. An unusually large flock of twenty or so parakeets flew over heading in a straight line to the north-west, squawking to one another.

Leaning on garden walls, every few yards or so, Norris took about twenty-five minutes to arrive at one of the two final houses at the uphill, northern, end of his road. This building was converted into a GP doctors’ surgery. Here both of Norris’ lower legs were redressed, which involved being washed with anti-bacteriological fluid, smeared with some sort of paraffin-wax based ointment and rebandaged with several layers. Norris conversed with Nora the Nurse who was doing these things to his limbs, they spoke of Bournemouth.

Leaving the surgery supplied with some extra anti-bacteriological fluid, and bandages, to see him over the Christmas, Norris lurched across the road from the surgery to the nearest bus stop, towing a blue tartan shopping trolley. The bus arrived and took him across the rolling hills and dales of North-West London suburbia to massive shed which was full of things arranged in piles and ranked in aisles. Crowds of people flowed like fluid through this retail maze with wire trolleys and baskets; they were aurally bombarded with cheesy carolling. Frequently their anxiety was raised by authoritative tannoy announcements about alleged offers and bargains which might go away forever unless immediately purchased.

Part of the vast shed was set aside as a café for the shoppers; Norris cowered there for a bit, ingesting a potion of sugared grease, as the entire zeitgeist of the place pressured him to consume more. He was able to disobey this because, in an amazing paradox, his own diabetes, itself the consequence of many previous episodes of over-consumption, came his rescue.

This particular mega-store happened to be situated in a pit dug out of a hillside. To exit it and get back home, Norris would have had to haul himself and a laden shopping trolley up a slope with an arm that ached from yesterday’s sculpting, on swollen feet, stressing the few ligaments that remained in his arthritic knees. It was far easier, for once, not to shop, to pull a light, almost empty trolley up the slope and across a dangerously busy road to a bus stop. Anybus could take him to another supermarket, after all, that was the only place where anyone wanted, or could ever want to go. As he came out the mega shed doors Norris felt that he had surfaced after a swim in a swamp full of mad reptiles.

At another supermarket, Norris, emerged frombus onto the forecourt that was jealously guarded by the retail company to prevent any of its customers and/or potential customers having any contact whatsoever with any political ideas purveyed by vagrant pamphleteers. Here Norris met a colleague, candidate who perhaps wanted to be a Green Party Euro MEP. The candidate beamed around and was unusually affable, whilst his eyes were flickering and searching for the camera persons and journalists who wished to depict and publicise him, smiling. There were none there, so they parted, one going north for publicity and the other, east to another supermarket.

Here, unsurprisingly, the noise blitz of Christmas yammered away at consumers incessantly again. Words like “mince”, “pies”,  "reindeer” etc, were dredged up from the bottom of some sort of Dickensian estuary, where most of London’s excrement was dumped out of the hinged hulls of sludge barges. These words were sucked to the surface like some sort raw emotional ooze or pus, then they were reconstituted into signifiers of jollity and sprayed over people in a torrent of seasonal slurry. Grim faced shoppers crouched behind their trolleys and then loaded up their vehicles in the rainswept car park. The attempted brainwashing often left people empty hearted and with an increasing tendency to petty viciousness and avarice, as if they realised that as they consumed more and more they were getting less and less.

Why, just recently some turd had stolen a £35 Donegal tweed cap off Norris when he had nodded off on somebus or other. So when he completed this particular triangular odyssey and went down his back garden to load up his compost heap, Norris was not entirely surprised to discover the rotten corpse of a fox next to the massive clump of pampas grass which the defining feature of this little patch of suburban savannah. Reynard looked flattened, it had hide but most of the flesh seemed to be gone and some bones were starting to show through. Norris initially thought it just be a road kill that someone had thrown over the garden fence , but it could just as well have got there of its own accord and laid down to die, or there might have been a bit of fox-on-fox violence .

The remotest possibility of all was that secretive urban pagans had sent the fox off to ask the sun to come back again after it had run away for the winter solstice.