One. Hello. I don't want to say something I'll regret so.
Tell them. Out of nowhere, a green wall of water.
In 5 minutes. You won't remember what I said to you so long.
That's okay. Greenwich. Sweet Thames.
Run softly till I. And. I woke up, my skin was the colour of cigarette ash.
Whatever I touched decayed. So tell them I woke up.
Stone cold. Shuddering as the ocean kissed my belly button.
Tell him. I, i, um, i, i, um, I, um.
I was outside an office block in Greenwich. Everything was flooded.
The current took me. See the Millennium Dome.
Like the barnacle humpback of a whale. A giant ping pong ball.
It's, um, submerged half was a lost Atlantis.
I beached on anchoring. Wet my fingers, gripping tent poles as I wrestled out of the salty brine.
Other survivors lie stretched comatose on its greasy canvas.
I, who have sat in Shoreditch in a barber's and seen a man stabbed to death in the street.
I have stood on London Bridge, Russia, and clipped the yellow toenails from my feet.
I stole a boat. Made. I jumpstarted its outboard motor.
Chopping out to sea from while not that the engine died, but say that I erred on.
Only with the cadence of a creaking boat. Of all the things that I had done to others.
Knowing them and knowing and for nothing.
I deafened myself. Let's say that London was catching my drift.
Pretentious. Arrogant. Insincere means it.
Mate. I've done such evil things, I can recount them only as cheap gags stick.
Let me apologise. I'm dying of air. Not that I know what goes on in the world.
Not that I deserve it, but have mercy, friends.
Forgiveness. Realistically abandoned.
Is not [INAUDIBLE]. Not always.
Not even. Not quite. Not only.
It took me time to say that. Actually, someone else had to say for me.
Sort of. William Blake.
I should say I was rowing when just then ghosting in a creased seat.
He hovered. Like a sheet of Greaseproof paper.
His eyeballs were glazed over like a salesman. Double glazed is the truth.
Blake looked like a villain from a comic book. Obviously, he said as I wrote over, there's no rush.
As with Steph economy of movement, he spirited into the dinghy.
He grinned. He was smoking a cheap and brown cigar and one.
To. Blake sat lazily like a child in the bath.
No one is owed anything or deserves anything.
Storm clouds kidnap the sun. The city great. Say a basking shark mimicked a Nazi U-boat off our prow, airing its skills at us deadening.
We climbed in knee deep in Tidewater on a cafe's veranda.
Only a loose flutter of nervous pigeons. Waded round the flotsam of plastic cups.
Silverfish started. Bottled water, packets of ginger biscuits, sugar, salt, ultimate.
I sat down to eat. Never had such rubbish.
Tasted so good. It was raining. Find a stairwell.
Climb up. It exhausted. See Blake glide up gripping the bannister.
Go on without me. London is an ice cube.
In a chipped mug of ersatz instant coffee.
Don't talk about it. Only those things which I cannot forget.
Storm the ocean vomited a boiling cloudburst.
Like I heard last of Brian say, I forgot.
Survivors set green, held under water until their lungs burst.
I loosened the wet laces of my Klim soles. Waves obscured the city.
Blake was loving that purgatory.
Strained his side. It was trash talk. It's banter.
It was like a hippie who'd fried his brain on ketamine.
And I just. I just ignored it, to be honest. I mean, what the [INAUDIBLE] was he doing there, anyway?
[INAUDIBLE] sake. Blake was saying I had no faith, and now I cannot doubt I suffer.
Shut your eyes. I'll story us out of this storm and drang of London.
Of global warming. Of Heat magazine.
Of thawing ices. Of a squalid terms cramped with barrier.
And of its fall ad under us. Listen.
And before I could stop him, he had started. And two.
Three. William Blake story. Emerald grass on Albion's ancient druid.
Rocky shore burned, waterless and charred in the heat.
Think now. The atmosphere grew hot as a gas oven sweltering,
so the seas absorbed its heat and the heat poured in through the magnifying lens of the skies until the Arctic ice floes began to crack.
Think now. Low coastal villages were left to drown.
So they engineered a great ocean barrier. But Stillwater's built up.
Still ice caps melted. Still, we did nothing differently until with a great cry.
Pigeons flapped up hastily to thin air like grey parrots scared out of a
rainforest as billions of tons of brackish water surged in the city's streets.
Sunken and muted. Stolid.
A green sound on the seabed. I can remember it.
At Greenwich. At Deptford.
At Waterloo. Think now.
Nothing looked into its face and lived.
And three.