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Saturdays, white jets slashed the sky like sharks on their way to London, Paris, Edmonton. Saturdays he wished he could travel somewhere, but he had no passport and would never get one until he produced a birth certificate, which was out of the question. Although he had flashes of memory, his amnesia was still his closest companion next to the little cat. Sometimes he felt that his was a privileged condition; it gave him a rare insight into the nature of time, which was circular rather than linear - (only the animals grasped the true nature of time) - but for the most part it was an affliction, nothing more.

July succumbed to August; the summer light drove on into evening. Crazy little squirrels appeared in the branches of the great tree outside his window, and every morning at seven, dozens of them went racing up to the top branches, moving as one body. Ten minutes later they all fell asleep at precisely the same moment, each occupying a separate junction in the tree. Then they'd all wake up together and go charging back to the ground. All the animals of the world were whirling around in their incomprehensible business. Sometimes he awoke to find little gifts left in his armpit by the cat to show its appreciation and goodwill - a bean or a pea or a walnut. Or the little thing would drag cushions into dark corners, purring to them dreamily, uttering heaven knew what words of love, licking them and bumping them with its nose and paw. Sometimes it would squeak and run around in circles or dash up and down the curtains in pursuit of some invisible companion. Out on the lake rabid waves frothed at the mouth, crazed with summer

In this country the seasons were the lords of the land. Everything would perish in the long whiteout of winter, and in the breathless space between winters everything was held in suspension and one was often a prisoner in the absolute present. This summer, on Saturday afternoons at exactly twenty after one the rays of the sun turned everything gold - his hands, his shoes, his hair; time stood still and he learned all he needed to know of eternity. Then from down the street the clear tinkle of the old scissors-grinder's bell would summon him back to the fluid present, to world time. The scissors-grinder was one of those who came from places like Warsaw and Kiev to sharpen knives in the capitals of North America. He had pulled his little green contraption around the neighbourhood for forty years, and now you didn't often hear the whirring of the wheel at its work, only the bell's note growing louder, then softer, then dying.

This Saturday afternoon he went out for a walk. It was a bright day and the Tower was more than usually there, poking a hole in his vision, giving him a pain in the east side of his head, snatching a huge chunk of the sky from his sight. There was something decidedly obscene about it; it was a sort of Up Yours to the rest of the world. It was not, as some thought, a monument to the future, but to the past. He hated it. Towers could only diminish and humiliate you. (He'd read that when it was completed, some workmen had celebrated the event by pissing from the absolute top, all over the metropolis.)

In a park old men lay on benches, their slack bodies wrapped in the distinctively nondescript clothing of the poor - coats and pants the colour of stagnant pools, or pigeon grey and shit brown and moss green. He wished they would all fall to the ground and turn into poppies. It was disgusting to be poor. He wasn't poor. He could pay his rent and keep himself and the cat alive; he could keep his trenchcoat clean and wear decent clothes.

But the city was a city of carnivals. Turn any corner and sooner or later someone would come at you beating a drum or dancing and singing and pulling the brilliant chariots of Lord Jagannatha. Or the Chinese would be having a dragon festival, or the Shriners dressed up as ancient Egyptians or Turks would be having a parade. Today there was music coming from a block away. He turned a corner and in a flash the street filled up with magic black children holding balloons and paper roses. The music drove every thought from his head. It was a steel band pounding a melody out of the guts of metal drums - the West Indian Caribana parade. Dancers with sequins on their eyebrows emerged from nowhere, some strapped into costumes which were so heavy that they had to wheel themselves down to the street.

Leading the parade was the Sun King, a great golden disc about ten feet in diameter moving very slowly, followed by an entourage of lesser suns. When he got close, Noman saw that his face - a tiny black circle in the center of the disc - was bathed in sweat. The Sun was exhausted, so exhausted that he couldn't pull himself around the corner, and one side of his marvellous disc collided with a popcorn cart. The Sun cursed and the owner of the popcorn cart cursed back. The lesser suns started shrieking, for now the whole parade was being held up.

'Is there any way I can give you a hand?' Noman asked the gleaming face in the centre of the orb.

'I would be obliged, mahn,' said the Sun in a booming baritone, 'if you would do just that. My knees have resigned from weariness, mahn. Resigned. If you would grab onto one of the ropes on the side of this thing, mahn. And then pull like Hell, mahn.'

Very slowly he pulled the Sun around the corner. The people laughed and cheered and the band coaxed its maddening glorious music out of the drums and hammered it in long steel spikes into the ground behind them. Then a sudden awful silence settled over everything, and it became as black as night. Noman stood trembling in the chill of the air.

'Who are you?' he asked the Sun.

'I am,' said the Sun, 'the king of Barbados. I am Lord of twenty-four countries and slave to no man. Yes indeed, mahn, yes indeed. You may have noticed that I am black as the Earl of Hell. That is because I am the Earl of Hell. I am also Lord of the Eclipse, and these are my associates the Sundogs. Now you know who I am. And I know who you are,' he added, flashing him a dazzling smile.

'Then tell me, tell me!'

'No. I have to get this day on the road. Remember this day, mahn. The Twelfth of Never. At twenty past one. Goodbye.'

Then the light returned and the Sun and his associates crept away. He watched the rest of the parade writhe by - little girls in oval costumes which turned them into eggs, dancers drowning in silver sequins, kings and queens and fairies and demons in a long glittering line which danced its way down to the Tower and the lake where there were ferries to take them to the island across the bay. For a moment he considered joining the tail end of the parade, but the moment passed. Instead he wandered off on his own when the last of the black dancers had dissolved and the golden disc of the Sun was a lone dot in the distance. At the end of the day it was joined by that other sun, and there was a spectacular double sunset as both suns slid below the far horizon.

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