Contemptuous of the fallible police force (Mike has already filched a police hat from an accident scene), two 11-year-old boys - the cold, manipulative Leo, and his weaker, more impressionable friend, Mike - arrange a staged knife fight outside a football stadium with the aid of a bag of stage blood and a real blade.

A traveller by the name of Crossley forces himself upon a musician and his wife in a lonely part of Devon, and uses the aboriginal magic he has learned to displace his host.

In a future world where the disease has been finally defeated and everything can be sold, even the crude spectacle of death, the rare case of a dying woman becomes the morbid theme of a revolutionary reality show, broadcast through the curious eyes of a peculiar camera.

A quietly unhappy housewife finds a stranger in her house and is raped at knife-point by him. But when she turns to friends, neighbours and her parents-in-law for sympathy, they all seem preoccupied by other matters.