An enormously obese woman of mixed race, swathed in a diaphanous, vaguely ethnic-looking garment, was sailing on a miniature catamaran in a lagoon infested with sharks. It had been a hot day, and the evening sun irradiated everything with a rich light so intense as to be hyperreal. The tiny translucent ripples on the surface of the water could be seen in the clearest photographic detail.
I was persuaded to take a turn at sailing one of the small, agile watercraft myself. They told me that it was perfectly safe. Despite my inaptitude for handling the small craft I felt pleasure in the achievement and in the unfamiliar motion. But at one point as I negotiated a tack the immense nose of an enormous shark dipped itself wetly and languidly above the placid surface just in front of my bow, sinking away just in time to avoid a collision.
Having returned to dry land I surveyed the lagoon, which was circular in shape and circumscribed by a rim of concrete, a gap in which led out to the open sea. I was shocked to observe that the entire lagoon was literally boiling with sharks. The surface thrashed and frothed with the agitation of huge numbers of the carnivorous fish, while a number of monstrous Great Whites flung themselves twisting above the water in a synchronised balletic display. I was struck both by their immense mass and by the fleshy whiteness of their upended bellies.
Somewhat relieved to thus have left such a dangerous environment, I was shortly thereafter distressed again by the emergence, from the lagoon onto the beach near me, of a bizarre creature. The creature was manifestly in some way of human design, being extremely symmetrical in form, and having a plastic-looking skin or surface. I can only describe it as a kind of cyborg sea-serpent; it gave the impression of being the result of some horrible marriage of the biological and the technological, having been bred or manufactured, perhaps, in some secret corporate or government laboratory. It moved like a snake, and was mostly white, with blue markings or logos. It was as clinical as a tube of toothpaste. It had no eyes or mouth, nor any head distinguishable from the rest of its body; instead, its cylindrical body ended abruptly as if chopped off flat, and a smaller, flat-ended blue cylinder protruded from the aperture in the white ring which served it for a snout. This cylinder I took to be a weapon of terrifying power; indeed, the whole creature conveyed a strong impression of the most implacable malevolence, so that I was extremely glad of the vantage of the curved concrete sea-wall on which I now perched. While the two of us thus regarded each other – I with growing trepidation, the creature with a sinister bionic stillness roughly approximating that of a snake about to strike – I became aware of the arrival of Tony Blair, dressed in a black suit and dark glasses. He, I was given to understand, would save me – although his means for achieving this end were, so far as I could see, uncertain.
