The car finally burned out around three. The blue beacon of a silent patrol car threw new shadows into the street turning the window into a flickering monitor screen.
I'd seen the kids torch the vehicle before I left on a nightly surfing run to a cybersex site in Chile. It wasn't as if they were getting rid of prints, everyone knew it was them. They didn't give a shit. They just wanted to see the flames, to throw a bit of light on a situation.
I looked up the hill at the spread of the estate. The streetlights glowed like campfires of an army on the eve of battle or fireflies trapped in the canopy of an immense jungle.
Jungle, young mental jungle,
Here in the jungle, in the jungle

Where men don't cry and husbands lie and you never have to justify a kickin'.
When mates jump in to save your skin if a chib is ever pulled out in a square go.

Jungle ride, jungle ride tell me when it's over.
Jungle ride, jungle ride tell me when it ends.
Oh here she comes round again, here she comes round again,
Here she comes round again, here she comes, here she comes.

The glazed eyes of porcelain clowns stare skywards at clouds of goldfish madly circling their own silent plastic worlds, high above the children who stuff ping pong balls like pills in the mouths of slowly rotating heads.