Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

Just about the best thing about being a kid is that you get ' to have hobbies. Hobbies are not graded according to how educational they are, and not even by how interesting they are; no, a hobby is deemed good or bad by how many gadgets it involves. Stamp collecting for instance, although undeniably educational, has only the album, the tweezers, the hinges, the magnifying glass, and that's about it. According to the gadget quota, by far the best hobby of all time is angling.

Your average boyhood fishing trip involves hooks and weights, and floats and lines, and reels and rods, and landing nets and keepnets, and strange apparatus like the little tool that gets the hook out of the fish's mouth. And all this paraphernalia gets a carefully allotted place in the various plastic trays that slot neatly into the wicker basket, the basket that also doubles as a canalside seat.

But the best gadget of all, in fishing, is the bait. By this, I mean specifically, the maggots.

You could buy these little creatures by the ounce, usually from the local pet shop. As though a maggot could be a pet. They came in a rainbow of colours, which means that somewhere on Earth, some kid is being asked, 'What does your dad do?' and he can answer, quite proudly: 'He's a maggot-colourer.' You would give the shopkeeper your sixpence, or whatever it was, and he would open the big tub and there they all were, millions of them, wriggling like crazy. The man would scoop out your portion, plop them into a brown paper bag. The bag was warm in your hand, and pulsated slightly, and from there you transferred them to your baitbox, which was plastic, with a lid. Sometimes they would show a natural history film on television, a speeded-up film in which these very same creatures could be seen devouring a dead rabbit in seconds. It took a while to get over the fear.

But pretty soon you did, especially after piercing a few with the fishing hook, right through the belly. And there was so much you could do with them. For a start you could throw a bunch of maggots on to the water, around your luminous, bobbing float. This was supposed to tempt the fish towards your hook. Even better was to put a handful in a catapult, and use this to disperse your bait. Of course this led on to more exciting pursuits; like using the catapult to fire maggots at your friends. Then there were competitions to see who could eat the most maggots. And the best thing of all was to put maggots down the back of girls' dresses.

Of course, angling soon went the way of all hobbies, as you got older and moved on to more grown-up pursuits. And when that happened, all the gear - the rod and the basket, the reels and the nets and the baitbox and all the little gadgets, most of which, truth be known, you had never ever used - all of it went into the garden shed.

The garden shed was traditionally the repository of lost hobbies, and not just yours, but your father's too. It was stuffed to the roof with rusting tools and old bikes, and broken-down lawnmowers, moth-eaten overalls, a spade with no handle, a handle with no spade, unwanted presents, cricket bats and airless footballs, jam jars full of nails and screws, and piles of rotting magazines, and all the useless souvenirs from the holidays in Blackpool.

Discarded dreams.

My father kept his weapons in the shed. When I was growing up, it was still close enough to the war years for memories of the conflict to be constantly on -people's minds. The comic books we loved to read were filled with pictures of storm troopers shouting things like 'Gott in Himmel!' and 'Englisher Swinehunt!' Our favourite game was play acting the great battles, and I was secretly ashamed because my father had actually been on Germany's side in the war. I knew this because the weapons in the shed were marked with the dreaded symbol of the eagle, and any words on them were in the German language.

Of course, I know now that my dad must have stolen these off dead bodies.

There was a gun, a Luger I think. And a bayonet, a pair of binoculars and some bullets, about half a dozen bullets. Sometimes I would creep into the shed to play with these weighted, magical objects. The binoculars I lost on Blackpool beach one time, and for that I was severely punished. The pistol and the bayonet were handed in when the government called an amnesty on any old war weapons. But for some reason my dad didn't hand over the bullets, the six bullets, I still don't know why.

A few weeks after this, it was Guy Fawkes night, and long after the last stragglers had left the glowing embers of the communal bonfire, my father went up there alone. I don't know what he was thinking of, I really don't, because a few minutes later there were some terrifying explosions from the site of the fire, and my father comes sprinting down the street, waving his hands madly in the air.

He'd only thrown the bullets into the embers!

And in the morning, all along a wooden fence, we found the blackened punctures. I think this is when the people in the street really started talking about my father.

Infected as he was now with the cleaning-out mood, one day he attacked the shed with a vengeance, saying he was going to throw out all the rubbish once and for all. He was in there for hours, and the pile of junk grew in front of the door. Us kids soon grew bored with all this, until we heard a sudden cry of alarm from the shed. My father came running out, followed by a cloud, a black cloud of buzzing life.

He'd opened the baitbox. The baitbox that had slept in the shed for weeks, with the maggots turning first into hard-baked pupae, and then into the ravenous cloud that swarmed for a second around my father's startled face, before taking off at last. Scatters of ash, floating away into the sun.

Operate all mechanisms! I am Girlforce 7 of world-famous PERFUME SWORD team. With my special gadget handbag I am best ever invincible. Especially note my deadly poison love ballad! Play game with me. Together we save Moonchester from all contagious evil.

Tonight, the city wears dirty slut perfume and matching outfit. The rain has stopped, leaving the streets with wet greasy hair, strands of pulp blocking the drainage. All the flyers of every party of all time have gathered at the plughole of life. I'm standing on the balcony of Dubtek's nightclub, holding my hand over my mouth. High above me, projected from the roof, lasers paint a dark cloud with colour, chameleon to the beat. I've come out for some air, but even the music has got a serious hygiene problem and there's no escaping it. It's my first ever gig in Manchester, and the place is one giant filthy arse-wipe loudspeaker, zero panache. There's no sign of my challenger. When I walk to the edge, look down, waves of people are streaming out of the club, epileptic under stuttering lights. A purified canal runs back of the club. Some tables, chairs, a couple of sun umbrellas, all wet and soggy but no matter; it's the small gaps between the rain that count, and learning how to live amongst them. Clouds of cheap, shop-bought hormones lift from the young bodies. A girl screams. Another flings her drink at a waiter; the liquid passes right through, creating radio shimmer. Some boy falls in the water. It's all very flesh-core, very human-human, and it's all I can do to stop from retching.

'Would sir be requiring assistance?'

'What?' I turn round: a waiter is grimacing at me.

'Is it the humidity, sir?' His face is twitching badly, struggling like a bad flow diagram.

'I'm fine,' I say.

'A drink? To calm the nerves, perhaps? Courtesy of the management?'

'Leave me alone.'

'Young man, I wish you luck tonight.'

Yeah, right. Put the emphasis on man there, why don't you? A final nod and he's gone, flickering on and off a few times before he manages it. Shit, there's still some bugs in the system, all I need. A gang of lowlife casuals stagger on to the balcony. I'm feeling pent up as it is, and I can't shake the mood, I mean, this is supposed to be the VIP zone, DJs only. The kids are crowding in, pressing close, laughing at me about how I'm gonna be a pile of melted vinyl when the killer housebass gets a hold of me. One of them hits me, a hard testing blow to the shoulder. I wouldn't mind but I'm the same age as they are; just another kid from nowhere. I look up at the opposite roof, over the canal, trying to catch a glint of corporate security, let's have some freezer-beams down here! but the cameras are blind and all the goons on locoweed. More system-glitch. Or else the whole place is against me. There's never any shit when you need some, plenty when you don't. Stick that on my gravestone if I lose tonight.