THE IMAGINATION THIEF (mini-chapters 1-98)

95 Spanish baboons and tiny creatures

VIII   Saturday: Alaia in hiding

95   Spanish baboons and tiny creatures

I rise at half past one, and though there's sunlight at my window I can smell a storm: there's violence in the air. I bathe and dress, then before I leave my room I lie upon the bed again and tune in to Evelyn ... and there, where you sprawl in a similarly luxurious Saturday lie-in, while Rik clanks around in the kitchen making breakfast, you drift back into a half-sleep, dreaming of your garden of water and loveliness contained in its circles of balustraded terraces. Down on your left is the flowering jungle, where a stiff-nosed anteater halfway up a palm-tree pecks at the palm's trunk. Down on your right is dry land, where the lemon-trees flourish in the bright cool sun. Up the hill towards you Flames Alleyne stalks, carrying a crowded world of Spanish baboons in a sack, which he swings through the sunrays. You wave, to invite him up. He nods with animal seriousness and flips a control beneath the terrace, which you haven't seen before: up comes a nozzle right in front of you and shoots a peeled hard-boiled egg tightly up the water chute inside it. He clambers up the nozzle to your garden, you embrace and evening falls. A rabbit in the moonlight beckons to the two of you and leads you to a lake upon whose surface little creatures caper (ponies, zebras, unicorns), flowing through the silken water; tiny bunnies slide down the slopes of the wavelets. A waterspout of tentacles is sprouting and shrinking at the centre of the lake, while white-eyed lungfish wheeze in the mud around the shore. You and Flames tiptoe and peer into rock-pools, where underwater micro-cities teem with pulps and jellies. Baby yales and sea-ears scuttle through the shallows, past sea-mice, sea-cows, sea-pigs, seahorses, sea-eggs, sea-cucumbers, dogfish, sea-oranges and sea-lemons ... and you wake!

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Imagination Thief, in The Guardian and elsewhere, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/synopsis-and-characters-list-the-imagination-thief/

For the 12 Films in The Imagination Thief, see http://www.rohanquine.com/video-books-films/12-films/

For the Audio-book version and the Video-book version of each of its 120 mini-chapters, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/audiobook-tumblr-wattpad/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/ and http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/

And for its Amazon pages, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909

The Imagination Thief is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. It celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.