The road begins to disintegrate, its surface crazed and sunken under the weight of so many trucks, bound for Dubai with loads of boulders and gravel.
The currents here sort the ocean’s trash and hurl it onto the beach to make strange, apocalyptic waymarkers.
Round the bend is a bend and around that bend is another bend. Madness and despair. Lights in the sky.
Inside, under a large, rusted but still serviceable fuel tank, there is a bouy and a curl of fuel hose.
Inland, jazzy red fairy-lights blink in complex, shifting syncopations: air hazard lights for the transmitters of the BBC World Service.
Now and again a headless corpse is found slumped in a pool of blood in one of the city’s subterranean car parks, and children fishing in the creek watch as a heron rips beakfuls of hair from a human head.
Here a line of shattered televisions; there a pink pool of dead shrimp, over there a shoal of plastic sandals.
