The smell creeping into the car is the sulphurous stink from the Shotton steelworks rising above the flat wide bog on their left, chimneys and towers charred and blackened between marsh and mudflat like some odd settlement, some city, oneiric and liminal, peopled by shapes of flame and smoulder which exude the blooms of oily smoke departing the scorched towers for the contused sky above. Slim and close-stacked citadels whose purpose is to percolate from the mud of mire and estuary some semblance of those who through rot and dissolution assiduous and saline made such mud, this shit, re-distil into traceable shape what flesh as has liquefied and glooped into what choking approximation or facsimile asthmatic as these upward-drifting reaching great wraiths of greasy steam. These sky-bent and cloud-prone precipitates seen only nocturnally in their honest forms - tremendous balls of flame.
- Ey, Alastair.
No response; Alastair is gazing out at the distant steelworks. (...)
Darren elbows him not gently in the ribs.
- Ow! What the fuck was that for?
Если я это переведу, буду молодец и возьму пирожок с полки...