It was my first day working at the bakery.

The soft dough folded beneath my fingers—Shas showed me the proper technique, like stroking the fluff of a cat’s skirts as it rests with its paws tucked under its body.

She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, leaving a dusting of flour on the lobe.

I had been in town for a week and I was still acclimatising myself to its strange geography. The streets nearest the coast flooded at high-tide—awash with seawater almost without warning—and the buildings were raised a meter or so off the ground on metal stilts. The centre of town was below sea-level, situated on the banks of an enormous crater.

At the centre of this crater was the midden—a heap of fossilised garbage with its rank odour of old fish.

Whenever the crater flooded—at least once a week—the midden would release a pungent blue-black ooze that stained the interior of the crater the colour of a tropical lagoon—over-bright and artificial, like cheap acrylic paint.

The flooding of the midden was a signal for the townsfolk to begin the festival. They would congregate around the lip of the crater in cagoules and wellies—the only type of footwear sold in town—to dance and drink. Merchant stalls would pop-up on every street corner, their wares denoted by the colour of their plastic tarpaulin awnings—plump anemones at low-tide.

I wondered what the midden would smell like in the summer sun—the sky was always the pale grey of goose-down and the sun was a myth—a tourist attraction in a neighbouring town, or some old god they had abandoned in their rush to embrace the fertile sea.

Walking home from that first day at the bakery—dusted with flour and confectioner’s sugar—I got hopelessly lost and ended up wandering near the coast.

There were no beaches, just sweeping platforms of volcanic rock, washed by the waves and untouched by weeds or marine life of any description whatsoever—the whole town was the same, as if the barnacles and kelp shunned it—as if the town were somehow bald.

These igneous platforms were quite extraordinary—they undulated and rolled like little hills and, spaced at regular intervals, ovoid indents were dug into the rock as if it had once been the jelly medium for a clutch of eggs.

I took a wrong turn and found myself clinging to the side of a white-washed house—a narrow defile of slate tiling jutting out from the side of the house over the gurgling sea. The building stood atop four metal pillars that plunged down into the ocean, anchored somewhere beneath the waves.

Across a narrow inlet—about a hundred metres away—another of the dark stone platforms began a ponderous journey further east, before the coastline turned sharply north and disappeared into a blanket of mist.

I turned north myself and joined a narrow residential road. Halfway up the road there was a small estate of red-brick town-houses. A white plaque was appended to the car-park entrance but the name of the estate had been scoured from it—I call it a car-park but I hadn’t seen a single vehicle since moving in, apart from the grubby train that deposited me there a week previously and even this had been sequestered on the edge of town, as if the townsfolk reviled the idea of transport.

On the opposite side of the road, a swollen river rushed uphill, frothing at it edges—white foam, like spittle, harassing the brambles entrenched in their verge.

I felt faintly unsafe. The pavement was extremely narrow and there was no fence between me and the river.

Further on, I crossed a stone footbridge the colour of rye flour and found myself on the road into the centre of town—a broad cobble boulevard flanked by willows.

That night, I went to one of the brothels on the west side of town where I had sex with a young prostitute named Milly. She had a complacent air and my use of her seemed an entirely uninteresting phenomenon to her—as though I had simply asked to borrow her umbrella for a while.

My first experience of the midden festival would come the next day.

Shas had shown me how to make a kind of fish pie—made with samphire and mackerel—and she had left me filling greased pie-tins with discs of puff-pastry while she prepared the filling on a wood-fired stove opposite me.

Quite suddenly, she turned and led me from the bakery and out into the street.

Outside, a mass exodus was in progress—people were pouring from their homes and shops, all heading in the same direction.

Water ran through the streets in a broad emulsion like Vaseline. I was yet to purchase a pair of Wellingtons and my shoes were immediately soaked through. To my surprise, the water was milk-warm and were it not for the uncomfortable feeling of my wet socks rubbing against the heel-cups of my shoes, the experience would have been quite pleasant.

As we neared the midden, I noticed the first of the market stalls—bric-à-brac constructions of white pine and tarpaulin. Behind a shelf of oak barrels, a rosy-faced old woman was handing out cups of spiced ale—the stuff smelled delightful, with its nutty hint of burnt butter, and I couldn’t resist purchasing a cup from her as Shas and I passed.

Nearer the edge of the crater, the scent of the midden rose into the air in a thick spoor—a scent like that should have been too heavy for the air. Though it still smelled strongly of fish and garbage, I didn’t find it particularly unpleasant—instead, there was something stimulating about it—a sensuous quality that it lacked when dry, as if the saltwater activated a dormant pheromone deep in that fossilised pile of crustacean shells and dead molluscs.

Far below us, the inky ooze secreted by the midden sloshed like coloured oil in a broken snow-globe. As more water poured into it from the sea and the surrounding rivers, the ooze rose higher, agitated into azure froth.

Shas took me by the hand and we joined a group dancing their way along the lip of the crater—it was as though the midden formed an integral part of some neuronic electrolysis—the fuel cathode to the town’s flesh anode.

The moon shone through a tiny gap in the clouds—the first time I’d seen it since my arrival—and turned all it touched to silver.

After the festival was over—some time in the early morning—I walked home alone along a deep trench. High escarpments of black alluvial soil rose to the height of my shoulder—to an observer, I must have appeared as a disembodied head, floating over the grassy verge.

My house was in the northern part of town and I had to pass the train-station to reach it. The station was starting to feel like a dual symptom, with its skeletal awning like the dessicated membrane of some monstrous fish. The symbolism eluded me—it had been scrubbed from my brain as completely as the lettering on the plaque outside the housing estate.

The connection made me pause.

As it hovered on the cusp of forming a cogent thought, I turned around and started heading back the way I had come.

The station recalled the long journeys of my youth, to and from another coastal town where I had once studied at the local university—an accretion of memories presented themselves to me in an indistinct lump—impossible journeys completed in mere seconds as I strolled along the dark streets of the town. The bitter twinge of nostalgia merged with the rotten scent of the midden and the sweetness of the spiced ale like poison.

Stood outside the estate, I had the feeling I had been there before as a child—that I had once played on the black iron fire-escape with another boy—a green plastic revolver, a cap-gun of the kind sold in corner-shops—the Covent Garden piazza and its street performers—stewed tea in polystyrene cups and canary-yellow paella on paper-plates…

This neuronic dystrophy continued to progress over the following weeks and I was soon lost in the amniotic sea of fragment-reminiscences—a deeply comfortable position, milk-warm as the tidal bore that flooded the midden and its crater each week.

I was beginning to feel like a native, with my cagoule and wellies, but I was yet to develop their sense for when the festival was due to begin—this strange impulse which defined their community. Shas and Milly both assured me it would develop eventually—they had been the same when they first arrived in town—but when it would, neither could say.

It took the best part of a year, but I was finally ready for the ceremony.

Shas and I were making cheese-twists, folding filo and rough-puff pastry around parcels of shredded cheddar and parmesan when I felt it—a tug at my navel, as if I were tied to a winch by my belly-button.

Without a word, we left the bakery and made our way up the flooded road. The water swirling over my Wellingtons still imparted its warmth through their vulcanised rubber, but it was distant now—a secondary current. Heat radiated from every surface, as if the entire town were inflamed by a viral contagion.

On the fire-escape of the low-rise estate, two young boys played with plastic guns, firing imaginary bullets at each other. One collapsed, clutching an imaginary wound in his heart—his companion paused and then pounced on him and the pair rolled around laughing, oblivious to the festival and the lure of the midden.

An alley gushed water, chuntering like an old faucet.

An old woman passed us with a dachshund wearing a life-jacket.

The edge of the crater loomed to meet us, wading over the sloping ejecta where the gutters had overflowed.

At its rim I began my descent.

It had started to rain and the midden slime rose high—a dark, indigo-black like ink, pungent with its crustacean reek, it seemed to stain the air itself.

Stepping into the ooze at the crater’s floor, I felt a tingling sensation in my feet. The great mound at its centre seemed to pulse with an electrical current, as if it were plugged into a giant battery, discharging energy through its electrolytic soup. The tingling spread from my feet, through my legs, up my chest, down my arms and into my head.

I stopped to undress before continuing—with the midden’s slime against my naked flesh, I felt as if I were in direct communion with the entire town—as if I had slipped into a psychic ocean containing their thoughts and feelings. All was warmth—a lustful fuzz that burned in their minds—a soft brightness that co-opted my will to this marine psychosis.

The ooze was soon up to my neck and I could taste it in my mouth—sweet and salty, bitter and metallic. I took a breath and submerged myself, kicking out with a strong breaststroke for the midden itself.

On reaching it, I discovered it was soft, like silt or the sandy mud of a river estuary. Warmth pulsed from somewhere deep inside it and I decided to tunnel my way into it, searching for the source of this heat.

As I tunnelled, the midden sealed itself behind me.

I dug until my arms grew tired and the silt burned my fingers.

At its centre, I found only a small kernel—a black bead no larger than a fingernail.

I wanted to reach out and grab it—to feel its smooth black surface on my skin—but it was too hot to touch.

Instead, I curled myself around it like a cat lying down beside a radiator and let myself melt into the midden.

Outside, the town bloomed—barnacles blossomed like budding flowers on iron stanchions, mermaid’s purses and purple dulse washed ashore in great heaps, ribbons of glassy kelp and all the fertile things of the ocean returned to claim their tithe.