My dear friend Kemal Mulbocus would have been 40 next week, the 25th of November, instead he died at the beginning of summer, June 22 2007. I remember the day well, I was about to fly to Greece the next day for a gig, listening to Donny Hathaway and doing my ironing when I got the call. That's how this life is sometimes. Kem and I were close, brought together by a love of experimental literatures and Jazz, he was a promising author, with a somewhat eviscerating and cerebral style, concerned with the darker edges of life. In 1997 he published a collection of stories, 'The Spaces between screams', which is now incredibly rare. This is an excerpt from his unpublished novel, 'Tea for One' which he worked on for several years and which he had completed just prior to his passing. O death, where is thy sting.

Chapter One, Tea for One

HE WIPES VOMIT FROM HIS BEARD, holds his head in his hands, drools over a steaming puddle between his legs. Spit falls like lead into a bitter soup. His own thoughts, only recently exiled, clamour, his efforts to quell them a failure. As he witnesses his internal juices, they are translucent, viscid, their motion perpetual, so his head spins, so his sick whispers a stolid tune, agitated by expulsion. A message is repetitive, he has heard it before. He strains for clear air, his nostrils filled with dire scents, closes his eyes. Where cornucopias overflow with cool poisons; he contemplates slaking a thirst, it is enough to make him smile. He looks to a closed door and hopes it is locked. He is anxious, such purges will bring a landlady running for her linen, her reputation, her broom for sweeping away miscreant lodgers. She might be counted on to drop to well-worn knees, to plead with her lord for sufferance. He can imagine her popping eyes, hear her bitter prayers and cannot help but laughter and fear of eviction at homespun hands. His proprietress, his ample flutterer, spinster posing as widow, implacable landlady, his Madame Maladroit; thin, bony lips painted a colour not unlike charity, chastity, wrists wrung at any prospect of iniquity, muttering of an end to society, raising a well dusted icon to ward him away. Shell be arriving, he thinks, right this instant. from the novel, Tea for One, by Kemal Mulbocus