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The only pen pal I would ever have is Adelia Braun. She was twenty-nine and lived by herself in a little town called Burnhouse, in Connecticut. I got her name from the Internet, surfing at my uncle's house, in the summer of 2004, before those things started coming up out of the ground and the world pretty much ended. I fell in love shortly after her first letter back. Fell in even though it was the last thing I could have expected or imagined wanting to happen. Or wanted to happen. The eight pages of closely written script burned their way into my chest like a coal resting on a telephone directory. I wanted to scream at the pages, to beg her to stop what she was doing, but all I did, all I ever thought to do, was write her back. With barely two pages of words in me I filled it out with stories I had written mixed with poems cadged from the books my mother had left me.

I lived alone in a little house in the shit-hole of Beatley, St Catherine, Jamaica, West Indies. I hated Beatley with a deep and perfect hatred, the kind of hatred you use for someone who has wronged you too many times to count and with whom you have no hope of redress, only a desperate, slowly dying dream of escape. Built on money from the alumina that the Canadians had filtered from the red dirt in the 70s Beatley was boomtown going bust, depleting with its soil, I was there unemployed, wallowing in the vomit of its drunken despair. More accurately I was sitting off to one side on the bar top watching the other flies suck the slop. Beatley's population was whores and men who dug dirt for a living and were happy to dig it because they had never dreamed in their most ambitious night-time, young-boy longings that they would ever be able to drive big machines and make twenty thousand Jamaican a month with health benefits. My mother read t me when I was little. Frederick Forsythe, Chaucer, M.R. James, Ogden Nash, Rex Stout, TS Eliot. She read everything she could find to buy while slogging her way through reams about dirt qualities and dirt amounts and the processing of refining dirt. She latched on to foreign fiction and foreign conversation with the greed of one struggling for a heroin syringe. Being read to, and then reading means that you can never become a true digger of dirt. You will go mad if you try.

I lashed my little imagination to the words of Adelia Elizabeth Braun of 9 Macon Street Connecticut and begged her gas the engine and take me from this little town.

"Hi baby." She said. Her voice drew me into the phone, into a dark little cell of echoes and breath sounds that was like bleeding, madness and warmth. It was sex. Sex apart from the flesh and the wet. It made me dumb and breathless the way they say an explosion can suck the air from a room. I could taste her fingers and smell her breath. "Give me a minute." I said that first time, sitting on the floor and squeezing the plastic handset till I heard the crackling sound of cheap plastic just about to break.

Nineteen weeks came and died with the rapidity of AIDS patients in a government hospice, nineteen phone calls, each frighteningly intimate, like being sucked into sucked into a dark void and probed there, and probing there.

Revelations His mother. Her Stepfathers. His loneliness. Her Depression His mother's death. Her abortion. His writing. Her paintings. His suicide attempts. Her rape.

Scars were examined, secret places stroked, and in between the formation and then hardening of that umbilical will people call love.

I watched the news nightly, listened to the shortwave, because I wrote to organizations about the shit they said, that being my hobby. When the floating worms and crystal scorpions began to crawl and fly up from the hole in the St Ann mines, what I thought about was getting to see her. I was so detached, so attached that when people began to die it was her body that mattered.

The spin was that they had spilled something and caused the air and the dirt to be polluted, and that the deaths and the hallucinations and illnesses that no doctor had ever been lectured about, those were because of the chemicals. Everyone would be compensated. They stopped saying that after about a week because by then nobody cared what it was. There never any pictures. People I had never met called me up n the late hours to tell me stories of ghosts they had seen and asked for my prayers. Obeah men were called in to war with demons, Pentecostals did exorcisms and castings out in the little houses on government land, only to be taken away with bites writhing and babbling and shitting themselves. Very suddenly the world began to collapse, to wind back into a loose, diluted chaos. Only a handful knew what was going on over there in St Ann. When the power was on he sat in his living room watching celebrity news on TV and eating crackers as he wrote his letters.

The young white men at the supermarket and post office in street clothes had been US marines, it was something you could know without having met marines before. In any case, white, muscular American youth tattoos had never been common in Beatley. Socialists on the radio spoke of American plans "to kill out black people", as Jamaica died in its hundreds, and then thousands.

"I will come to you, tell me where you live." "It's not safe." "I will come." "There are no planes flying." "I will come." "22 Carlton Crescent, Beatley." "I will come." She said.

THE END