Aubrey Mousehead is 68 and alone, watching television with the sound off, seeking the voice of God in the images of detergent and death:"Mousehead turns his back on these crumbling relics of his past. He has sought answers and has found instead only the mocking whispers of vanished years. He feels as if his life has been snatched - as if all these days and nights have been drained of their marrow by the Black Flower, leaving him stranded in the present without history or future. He walks away from the blank screen, from the old dry bones, from the written words which his pitiless years have dried to powder, shutting their voice and shrivelling their veins. He closes the door upon them. Perhaps the television is at last speaking, but he knows he can never understand its tongue of disjointed images, of detergent and war." He is young Aubrey, an only child, growing up in a house full of Art books and dust in 1950s Cornwall, gazing into the dark labyrinth of his imagination:Little Aubrey "put down the book and remained sitting on the rug, seeking the microscopic. Motes of dust suspended in the dry summer air; flecks of plaster drifting from the ceiling; cat-hairs in the pile of the rug. An ant appeared from a crack in the skirting and stood as if in an anguish of spirit, transfixed by the sudden sunlight, feverishly waving its antennae, seeking reassurance in the familiar. Unable to find any it retreated back into the gloom. He followed it."He is Mousehead, 20, long-haired and utterly weak, seeking FUN among his friends - those reckless sons and daughters of impossibility- while the dream of Love collapses around him:"FUN was reverberating through the tiny, chaotic bars of the Duke - an oasis of insanity in the desert between Goodge Street and Soho Square. Here the demented Emperor Madness reigned. Here pushers and gangsters, pimps and prostitutes, drunks, junkies and wanderers jostled for position at the Juke Box to hear Nina Simone sing Plain Gold Ring as if she spoke for every torn heart in the joint. Laughter clattered from wall to wall. Overhead hung row upon row of severed ties - the dusty, embarrassing memories of pranks played upon earnestly-bearded bohemians by the dear departed Landlord. Above the bar bottles from all over the world gleamed green and blue and ferociously red, labelled with coincidental English obscenities in a dozen different languages. Behind the bar the formidable Sophie wore her elaborate dyed black hair like a sail before a kind wind, and ruled with a rod of iron. Here Mousehead was on sure ground."He is The Patient- a fiction - nameless and amnesiac, swathed from head to toe in bandages, stalking the empty corridors of a deserted hospital while outside oily waves fall onto a beach strewn with erotic constructions of zippered and buttoned PVC: "Fifty feet or so below, waves the colour of dirty washing-up water were falling limply onto a strip of pale yellow sand which stretched in either direction as far as he could see. Randomly scattered on this beach were a number of ambiguous constructions in what appeared to be pink PVC - padded, rounded, buttoned and zippered like erotic metaphors.He fell back from the window and stared into the room at his unmade bed; at the white, functional sink and its levered chrome taps; at the machine in the corner with its dials and switches and lengths of maroon rubber hose; at the grey, worn linoleum and the walls so light green they were almost white. Everything held a question.He put his head through the open door and looked down the passage. Stained mattresses and dismantled beds were stacked against the walls. Sheets lay scattered over the floor. His bandaged hand went to the hole where his mouth was. He stared into the silent hospital..."All four threads of this disjointed, surreal book lead eventually to the sea - to that place where all things begin and end.