5
Confidential Transcript

Laszlo Sinclair is twenty-three and works as a theatrical electrician. He was the subject of surveillance from June to September of this year. A number of charges have been laid (see attachment).

Detective Stella Greybill:

I'm sitting here. I'm waiting.

Laszlo Sinclair:

(Inaudible.)

Greybill:

Fill me in, Laszlo. Illuminate this mess.

Sinclair:

(Inaudible.)

Greybill:

You don't think you can? So make like a thing with a spine and give it a shot.

page 149 Sinclair:

Xylox is very kind to one at first, but it soon becomes this total preoccupation.

Greybill:

Now there's a surprise.

Sinclair:

I went to Larsen's Crossing in the early hours of Sunday morning. I'd swallowed a tab at final curtain, and I went to Larsen's Crossing with a member of the cast. And in this actor's shitty little fat, with a neon sign for beer just outside the window, I saw the gods.

Greybill:

You saw the what?

Sinclair:

Ken plays Mungo in Walking Tall. We'd gone to a neighbourhood bar, slurped some suds and walked back to his place. Thunder and a deluge just as we got in.

Greybill:

And?

Sinclair:

Kenneth crashes out, goodbye and thanks a lot. Just me and the cat and the beer sign after that.

Greybill:

Just you and the cat. Go on.

Sinclair:

I look at my watch and it's four o'clock. When I look again, it's ten minutes earlier, the second hand's adopted an anticlockwise sweep and it's welcome to psychosis Lasz' you sorry fuck.

Greybill:

Xylox. The good shit, right? A Day-Glo-orange tablet with a wee X on it.

Sinclair:

The beer sign stops flashing and the cat stops breathing. And I myself am dead, stopped and null like a disused abattoir. And then I see the gods in their hundreds, the brown gods in their thousands. Tier upon tier of them, back and back to infinity, a sort of tessellation of sage brown faces.

Greybill:

(Inaudible.)

Sinclair:

Sage brown faces, back and back and back.