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worms. He could dig with talons. There could be earth in his talons. He would gladly be a badger. Bad ger. Even the word is lucky. It is only half bad. Magnus himself is all bad. He was bad all along though he didn’t know it. He believed in his own coherent light. He was wrong. He was bad. He was bad all through. He is like a rotten fruit hanging off a branch. If anyone picks him, splits him open, they’ll see. The world with its Tuesdays, holograms, whales, fish, dogs, frogs, snuffling wet-eyed badgers, reels away from him. It reels away by itself as if he is watching down the telescope an old-fashioned film of a foxhunt in old England, all jolly hunting horns in its fading soundtrack as the fox disappears then the backs of the horses, the backs of the huntsmen recede. Hologram Boy smiles a boyish smile, waves his handkerchief as if goodbye, then all the Christmases, Easters, half-term breaks, summer holidays flicker away, gone. Magnus pulls the duvet off the bed. He rolls it, heavy, over his head but he can still breathe, even against the weight of it. Worms are eating her. There is earth under his nails. The bone, the muscle that held her body on her head were snapped. The end. It is because of him. He showed them what to do. They did it. They put her head on another body. They sent it round the email list. She killed herself.
    Magnus is shocked every time he thinks it. What really shocks him is that nothing happens. Nothing happens every time he thinks it. Didn’t it matter? Doesn’t it? They took her head. They put it on the other body. Even though it was a lie it became true. It became more her than her. When he got home that Tuesday he checked his mail. The message flashed up. He was on the email list too. He clicked on her. There she was. It was funny. He laughed. He thinks of it now. He gets stiff. Up he comes, up he goes. Every time he thinks of himself standing looking at the picture they made, on his own, in his room. He was in on the whole thing. Every time, up he comes again. Ah. He is so fucking monstrous. He can’t stop. He has tried. Try harder, ha ha. It was hilarious. The way her head was on the neck. The way the breasts were angled. The way hardly anybody knew. But he knew. Now he is laughing again, stiff as hell. He is foul. He changed himself when he changed her. He snapped his own head off without even knowing. It transplanted itself on to a body he doesn’t know. If he looks in the mirror he looks the same as before. But he isn’t the same. It is a shock to see how like himself it looks. She saw herself changed too. She never knew who did it. It was him. He did it. Magnus is God. There is actually no God. There is only Magnus. Hologram Boy believed God probably existed. Hologram Boy saw God as more human than human, moving among subhuman beings like the weekly celebrity among the Muppets on The Muppet Show. Hologram Boy was the form captain. He made the speech in Assembly on Remembrance Day for the dead soldiers in the world wars. It was Hologram Boy’s job to lay the wreath, lead the squeaking prayers, lest we forget. But Hologram Boy was all forgetfulness. He was lucky. Hologram Boy’s brain was all blank light. There will be no forgetting now. There will be no forgetting ever again. The remembering is like the darkening. The darkening is now happening more. It is like the way having the flu made light go dark. It is almost exactly like when he had flu in December 1999 January 2000. The old series about the Germans down below in the submarine was on tv every night, the pressure, whether or not they’d survive being that low. The first time it happened was two days after he knew she’d done it. He was standing, just standing, by a bus stop by a tree. The tree had a sticking-out branch. Above the tree, round the branch, the sky got darker. Then everything got darker. But nothing had changed. The sky was blue. There were no clouds. There was no change in the air. It just carried on, getting