July 2001

I awake in Pat's bed. Details of the night before feel hazy, but there is an overall smell of blood hovering through the air. Wracked with nausea and confusion, I stagger off towards the dining hall for nourishment with Clio and the boys. Meghan is munching some dry Ryvita at a table with Steven, Bobby and some odd Germans. Rebecca is nowhere to be seen, but nobody really minds because we don't really like her anyway. I wonder vaguely if Xander will keep his promise and not show her the pictures I drew last night of her getting crushed to death in the jaws of a monster, of her without a torso, of her dashed against cruel, jagged rocks but then I realise that I don't really care.

We see Charlotte Craven, or it could be Georgia Fareham, and she asks Clio why she's covered in blood. Clio replies that it is the result of one of her ritual wrist slashings, and Charlotte, or it could be Georgia, says, 'Wow, that's real cool, Jenny.' Over our bowls of stale cornflakes, Clio confides to me that she lied about the wrist slashing, although I was quite prepared to believe it.

'I stabbed Rebecca,' she says. 'Then I put her in a binliner and caught a taxi to the harbour.'

This account of events is slightly more believable than the wrist thing, and so I congratulate Clio because if she hadn't gotten rid of Rebecca then I would have myself.

Breakfast is cold, dull and quick, and so I return to my room and get changed from my navy blue loose Gap sweater and purple polka-dot pyjama bottoms into a black shirt, black tight-fit trousers and a red fleece in memory of Rebecca. I sing "Summer Holiday" by Cliff Richard at the top of my voice and grin moronically at anybody who meets my manic gaze. I am sick of people confiding in me. I don't care if Xander really likes Tony or if Clio did kill Rebecca, all I want is peace and quiet for some quality Stevie time to contemplate who's next to go. Carol Marrow is a distinct possibility, but she might be too high profile. One of the Seconds might be a better bet - the one sleeping with the chunky percussionist could be fun.

Later on, I find myself boarding the coach with Clio and Meg, who are enthusiastic at the prospect of two concerts in one day. Halfway to our first concert at Flom, which sounds like a bodily fluid, there is a disturbance in the middle of the coach. I turn around kneel on my seat to see what is happening. Bobby is standing up, screaming at Steven, and he takes an uzi out of his bag. This is why it hurt so much when I kicked it yesterday, I determine. Bobby fires at the coach window until it shatters and cascades downwards and only a gaping hole looking out at a tunnel through a mountain is left. He screams again, I can't work out what, and all of a sudden he's picking up Steven and he's throwing him out of the adjective window. Frank the coach driver notices what has happened and slams on the breaks and we come to a screaming halt.

Soon, Morris has come out of the other coach and gotten hold of Bobby and he is scolding him outside. We listen to them through the broken window: Morris is so livid that he is not even noticing that there is a hole and he's demanding that Bobby apologise. Bobby refuses, and Morris is forced to call him 'Roberto Nicefield.' Even this does not work, so Morris locks him in the other coach's toilet until we get to Flom, where he is put in a taxi with Carol Marrow and they are to go to the nearest airport and catch a flight back to England, where Bobby will surely be imprisoned indefinitely. I think that this is funny, but I don't grin in case I get sent back with them as well, because by now Morris looks as if he will send anybody back if they say even the slightest thing wrong.

Meghan has been tending to Steven since the unfortunate Bobby-uzi-window incident, and her sweetness is sickening. I'm not going to kill her, though, because despite her downright goodness, she has declared her love for Tony for telling her that her piccolo solo was better than the whore who used to play it, and I am quite interested to see what happens because I like Tony due to the fact that he doesn't talk. It would be funny if these two ended up together, if only for the consternation on Xander's face if he found out. I am still adjusting to the whole 'Xander-being-a-fag' thing, and I want to test how much he really likes Tony. If I push too hard then maybe he'll fall over the edge, and that could be an experience because Xander is so adjective well-adjusted that he can pick up Radio Berlin with perfect signal.

The Flom concert is dull dull dull and it's raining throughout. We are outside and Fern and I get extremely wet. I slip on the slicked grass and land on the floor and Pat offers me his hand to help me get up again. Mr Boy-Next-Door is really verbing me off, and I decide that I will spike his next drink with e-numbers, which will raise his pulse, put him completely on edge and make him very susceptible to outside influences. I could probably encourage him to jump into a fjord, which is a very attractive prospect, but then he can probably swim because he's the Boy Next Door and he needs to be able to jump into frozen lakes to rescue dogs and his girlfriend's stupid little sister and crap like that.

I find myself a job handing out bottles of mineral water on a rare break in our coach trip, and when nobody's looking I crumble three-and-a-half Refreshers into the water that I'm going to give to Pat. He takes it trustingly and willingly. The boy is far too na�ve. I watch him glug the whole lot down because the air is very dry on the coach. After fifteen minutes of travelling, he is still showing no signs that the e-numbers have kicked in yet, so I move to the vacant seat next to him so that I can witness events as they happen. He lets me sit beside him because he's a good boy and he doesn't know how to turn down psychopaths who want to sit next to him. After a mind-numbingly stupefying conversation about which university he is attending next year, he is finally becoming and jumpy and keeps on eyeing the lack-of window created by Bobby, which has only been covered up by some cardboard panelling, as if he wants to jump out of it. Beads of sweat are appearing on his forehead.

'Feeling hot?' I ask him.

'Yeah,' he replies, and takes off a red fleece similar to mine to reveal yet another Pink Floyd shirt.

'So am I. I wish we were off this coach and out in the open air,' I say meaningfully.

He is staring at the cardboard again. Still no movement. Being more obvious, I say: 'Wouldn't it be cool if you could just jump out of that window and be outside, while the coach was still moving. It's just ground out there. You wouldn't get hurt if you hit.'

'Yeah,' he says again. Can this boy only agree with you? Without warning, he's jumping over me into the aisle and making a break for the window. He tears the cardboard away from the hole and he has one foot poised on the ledge to jump.

'Don't do it Pat, I love you!' cries Jim Winterbury, who thinks that Pat is joking, but even if Winterbury was serious it wouldn't have worked anyway because Pat has just passed out and hit his head on an ashtray protruding from a chairback. Not as good as the whole jumping-out-of-hole thing, but equally pleasing in my eyes.

Our second concert is in a town called Voss, which is completely dead. The concert is to take place at 7 pm in a Methodist church hall. We are all clustered in a classroom in a school next door to the hall, which is being used as our green room. That afternoon, I had gone into the town and bought five bottles of absinthe, which I plan to use to torch the school when everybody's warming up. Whilst everybody was shopping for some desperately needed food because the sandwiches provided by the Youth Hostel that day were adjective awful, I soak the dump in absinthe and some kerosene that I found in a store cupboard, pausing occasionally to drink from one of the bottles of absinthe that I decided to keep on discovering the kerosene. I am now standing outside the school. I have blocked all the doorways so that nobody can escape. I strike a match and ignite.

It is a shame that I couldn't get Morris and the percussionists as well, but they are sound-checking in the hall. Briskly, I walk away, too lazy to get caught whilst listening to my fellow-orchestra members screaming from pain and eventually perishing, though the thought is rather attractive. In town, I catch the last bus back to Bergen. When I arrive in Bergen, I buy myself a pizza from the place in town and catch a taxi back to the Youth Hostel. I wonder vaguely as to what happened to everybody back in Voss, but as the Youth Hostel people have asked no questions, nor will I. In the morning, I buy myself a ticket back to Newcastle on the next ferry, which turns out to be surprisingly easy to do, and at 5.30pm I am boarding and heading back to England, this summer's work already done.

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