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"Gibson could be a visitor from outer space"
- The Weekend Echo
EINSTEIN
Charlie is woken one night to be told that the world is about to end. Oddly enough, that’s where the story begins. An urgent novel about the environment that is also a comedy of high anxieties and low morals, an adventure embracing everything important from modern art to motherhood, from battery chickens to the Meaning of Life. And then there was the dog . . .
1
Charlie Nelson was watching TV when the stranger appeared on the roof. It was a cold night in late September and the streets were shining with rain. All day the wind had roared through the dirty city, snatching at rags and hamburger wrappers, newspapers, beer cans, plastic bottles, sucking them into the shimmering sky where they sailed like flocks of fabulous birds. Handbills swarmed over Piccadilly. A flight of empty cardboard boxes turned and tumbled over the river. After the wind came the rain, exploding from clouds the colour of gravy, drowning the city in darkness.
Charlie was slumped in his favourite armchair watching a woman in a cocktail dress flirting with a dancing pig. The pig wore spats and a jaunty topper. They were singing in praise of a microwave dinner. They were singing, laughing, dancing in circles. This tasty microwave miracle was an Instant Gourmet Pork Surprise. It would certainly be a surprise for the pig in the jaunty topper.
Charlie yawned. It was hot and crowded in the room. The walls were loaded with books and pictures, pencil sketches, watercolours in cheap gilt frames. Beneath the window a large pine chest supported trays of dusty houseplants, pots of exhausted cactuses, twists of ivy, a faded myrtle in a china bowl.
CHAPTER ONE