A Guardian Angel Explains Blood on Pavement (after Francis Bacon)

This is a chav town: long life is a luxury here. Never forget that.

But now, things are calm. The wind is too lazy to get up yet.

Look down there at the footpath: there it is – can you see it? That single painted paving stone is what will give you the clues to allow you to know everything you need to know about this place. Look at it: you can see it hemmed in by the port-town greyness of the blank ones around it. Look at the edge-curls of its ageing paint waving in the rain. Listen carefully, and you can hear them scratching wetly against each other, mingling like blood in a violent friendship.

It just appeared. Nobody saw it happen. Somebody must have chosen to paint it, throughout one night, but nobody knows why.

It must have been created on the night of the blood-moon: look at the way that whoever it was smeared a horizon across the middle of the painting, then hurled a blood-moon onto the horizon, and made the blood-moon instantly tatter into roughness, unravelling beneath the black-painted sky.

But if you look carefully at all those mashed-together pigments, they all seem to be rotting away - they seem deciduous. Red flakes to purple, and purple to brown.

It's not all paint anymore, either. Time has added its own substances to it.

Look there. There are incidents scratched into it, if you look closely. Depictions of short-fuse stand-offs. Short-term cowardice. More minglings of fluids. There are outlines of fists in the wash, invisible unless you look closely. There is evidence of at least two events there. And at least six people. There were none to start with, when it was first painted, but it's stained with the real stuff now. Stained with the things that appear in the curl of the night.

Go on - check it out! Feel it. You can sense the demarcation of feuding fields of energy; you can see the archaeology of conflict smeared horizontal: you can see the strata of booze-fouled ego clashes and nocturnal petty tribal bellowing fights.

Somebody must have chosen to paint it, and what they painted is all pain.

Lie down there and make sure you avoid the dog turds and the glass from the bottles – go on, do it – there's nothing of you, and there's more than enough space! Now you can hear it speak, hear it whisper of the raised voices. Now you can hear time imposing its date of destruction.

I am fading away now, and my guiding hand will soon be withdrawn, and you will soon be on your own. Time for you to stand up and be recognised.

I can feel the wind finally getting itself up. Soon it will be hurling itself up from the port and soon its rickety tongue will be in everything, and then red will flake to purple, and purple to brown, and brown will flake away into its soot-soaked clutches. Wind. Time. Erodes us all in the end.

I am fading away now, and eventually the remains of this painting will also dust itself away into nothing but flecks of pollution in the already pollution-saturated air, but the disagreements that caused its creation will not, and they will still hum across the paving stones, and that is what you will need to watch over, but not interfere with, because this is the jurisdiction that you have accepted, and please never forget: this is a chav town, and long life is a luxury here.