by Max Porter
And stitches me an autumn coat for my journey
Lick sap. Pack a bag.
Get ready and wait
The mixture will sing your plan.
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She sits in the garden all afternoon reading them over and over.
I overhear one of them saying, Won’t forget today in a hurry.
People come and go.
All these experts and journalists and kind strangers all shivering and flinching from the loudly abnormal nature of this.
Ideas in his head.
Look at them now.
I overhear one of them saying, Bizarre doesn’t cover it mate.
The tone of speculation has shifted completely. There’s hitherto been a child-catcher in all our minds, a stealer, a man harming Lanny. He’s grown every day, grown fangs and sadistic skills, grown miraculous law-evading powers and travel agent expertise. The letters seem to have banished that man.
I overhear one of them say on his phone, Encourage the volunteers to think like a child, like a very strange child.
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Old man’s beard and ivy and moss, pass through hundreds of seasons unharmed.
The world isn’t ruined if you’re planted in it. Trees are in charge.
Rain finds a way around me, runs off me,
I’m waxed leaves and hard flint, storing tomorrow’s sunshine in my bark, invisible.
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I go and sit out there with her and we read the letters together and we don’t say anything.
+
None of us said a thing, just watched them. Just utterly bizarre. Rick was stood there with the Achieving Best Evidence Guidelines in a plastic folder like a total lemon muttering ‘what the actual fuck’ again and again.
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I was thinking: what a shapeless life. I miss my commute. I miss going back and forth. I turn an idea over in my mind, secretly, gazing at Lanny’s strange words, Rain finds a way around me. The idea, chucked between the hands of my mind like a hot baked roll, is that I don’t miss him, that I don’t have any feelings about him. If I wasn’t central in the drama of his being missing, would I actually care that he’s gone. Is this taboo? Is this some scandalous truth about me? It’s awful, this secret. It’s possibly the only clear thinking I have ever done, out here, alone with my bereft wife, reading these weird spells or plans or whatever they are that Lanny’s left us. Yes, I tell myself, this is the truth. I am thinking clearly. I am privileged to know this now, about us all. None of us actually feel anything for anyone else. It’s all pretend.
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Those morbid folk seem to have cleared off, probably moved on to a fresher tragedy somewhere. Tribulation chasers.
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Carla, please, we are dying of thirst here. Missing child or no missing child, we shouldn’t have to wait six minutes for two pints of Foster’s.
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OK, monsieur moral high ground, let’s suppose you had Jolie’s manuscript, would the value of that book not increase with every column inch about young Lanny? Is she not the most bankable unpublished author in the country today save for a royal?
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Property prices in the greenbelt, my friend. Immune to troubles. Recessions come and go, children are born, go missing, grow up and die. It is our job to build. Here’s to our green and pleasant land, for what it’s worth.
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The very idea of a safe place is tyrannical.
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We all feel foolish.
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Gravitas and rebellious gaiety, I pray.
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Faith in signs.
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If you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.
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Charmless times.
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Still looking.
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Peggy’s back at her antique gate. Rubbing the worn wood. Holding on.
Listening for endings.
Waiting.
I was caught up in the duvet, Jolie wasn’t with me, and whatever stone platform this part of the world was built on had rolled in its bed and we were on the tilt, and hidden things were poking through, breaking the surface. I looked out of the window and saw the prow of a huge chalk ship edging into the garden, hundreds of feet high, glowing in the moon.
I was caught up in the sheets, Robert wasn’t with me, maybe I was on the sofa, and the house had been turned inside out, gravel on the floor, ivy on the walls, a thick wedge of pine needles lodged in my throat, choking me. I looked down at my body and saw that it was glistening wet and dappled like a slug; convulsing, shining and sticky.
I was caught up in my clothes, asleep at the kitchen table, soft and forgiving sleep, and I had been enjoying my dreams and the table was warm and I realised it was made of living human skin, clean-smelling, podgy-pulsing alive, whispering wake up Pete, soft expanse hot against my cheek, young and alive against my old face, wake up Pete.
Peter Blythe looks down in the ripe dead-of-night and sees that on his kitchen table, right where he’s been sleeping, is a small card. It’s an invitation. He reads it and the shock of it makes his flesh tighten and his tired heart beat faster. Pete doesn’t hesitate, he splashes his face with cold water at the kitchen tap, he hurries into the bathroom and pisses, and then he pulls on his coat and boots. He is muttering to himself and doesn’t even take a key or turn off his lights or close his front door, he hurries out of his house, hurries to where he’s been invited to go.
It is moonbright, hardly dark but very much middle of the night, and there is a dead-ish smell of duck or goose shit, some waterbird’s droppings, mixed with diesel or grease. Strange evening, thinks Pete, as he hurries up the road to the high street. How odd. Pete stops. He’s coming to the village street as if from the other side, as if returning home. As if he’s walking in the mirror image or reverse impression of the village. I get you, thinks Pete, the village is a woodcut print, and I’m walking here in the cut block itself. No matter, he’s half asleep. It’s cold. Just some trick of the night. Pete blows his breath out neat and funnelled, cut through pursed lips like a smoker or a flautist. He stamps up the street as if a strong excitable dog is leading him. He’s confused, again, because it’s all reversed, because he’s coming down towards Peggy, rather than up towards her, leaning on her gate, but he hasn’t passed the hall. She should be on the other side. Someone has turned this bloody village inside out, Pete thinks to himself, but he doesn’t mind, he’s too busy to mind. Peggy looks young and beautiful and her gate is not yet worn with most-of-a-century’s rubbing, and her soldier brothers are knocking a ball about in the moonlight behind her. Pete walks over to greet her. ‘Go,’ she says. ‘Go, Peter, no time to stop, you’ve got to get there, he won’t want you to be late.’
So he smiles and waves and hurries onwards, up what should be down the hill, to the village hall.
The lights are on but he’s nervous, suddenly, and wishes he knew the time, wishes he knew what to expect. He’s never involved in the village shows. What time of year is it? What could it be?
There are hurried footsteps and Pete flinches, as men recently beaten are wont to flinch, but it’s only Jolie. God, he’s pleased to see Jolie.
She holds, crumpled in her grasp, an invitation.
More steps, and towards them through the clean platinotype sharpness of the night comes Robert.
‘Robert?’ says Jolie.
‘Pete?’ says Robert.
They all hold out their small pieces of cardboard.
DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT PRESENTS
LANNY: THE ENDING
VILLAGE HALL
TONIGHT
They go in, clustered and shuffling like three nervous children. The heavy wooden door clunks shut behind them.
Slicing through the village hall’s usual smell (dried modelling clay, pensioner dust, flower arranging foam, urine, smelly plimsolls) is a powerful stench which each of the three invited guests can’t quite place. It’s almost the oddly pleasing smell of molten asphalt, but it’s natural
, ripe, green-on-the-turn, sweet, with something dead or decaying within it. All three guests wobble there in the entrance, as if drugged, measuring memories against the smell, acclimatising themselves.
They have plastic cups of red wine in their hands, and little pink raffle tickets. The hall lights are harsh strip-lights, buzzing.
The three guests find themselves seated. Nobody has said a word.
‘Welcome,’ says a voice from the stage. ‘Well, here we all are. So: Ticket number 1? Pink number 1 anyone?’
On the small stage is a six-foot-high drawing of a man. He is Lanny’s shoulderless man, from the very first art lesson with Pete. He is swaying slightly, with empty legs and sloppy oblongs for feet. He has a box-like chest. He has no neck, and atop his smiling face are a dozen neat strands of hair standing anti-gravity tall and spiked. Out of the middle of his body, at nipple height, shoot two long arms ending in circles with podgy fingers barely attached. He waggles his stiff horizontal arms.
‘You’d recognise me anywhere, right, Pete?’ he says.
He speaks in Pete’s voice.
Jolie and Robert turn to look at Pete, who is seated in the middle, and there are tears making glistening progress down Pete’s old cheeks, but he says nothing.
The man beckons at Pete clumsily with his rigid and flat badly drawn hands.
‘Pink ticket 1? Come here, Pete. You’ve got the first ticket. Peter?’
Pete does not move, cannot move.
The smiling face is fixed and says again, in Pete’s own voice, ‘Come now old man.’
Slowly, as if the chair legs are attached to invisible winches in the drawn man’s eyes, Pete’s seat is dragged towards the stage. Pete is sobbing, soundlessly. His feet slide across the floor, caught backwards under his chair like the feet of a dead man. Hopeless. His hands lie pathetically crossed in his lap. He is shaking his head.
He is hauled steadily to the platform upon which the drawn man stands. The chair bumps against the stage blocks.
Pete peers up.
‘Fix me,’ says the drawing.
Pete shakes his head.
The smiling face of the child’s drawing speaks again, as if playing a recording, and Pete hears himself speaking to Lanny, that first afternoon.
‘Right, Lanny. Where do your arms come out? You’ve got this bloke’s arms coming out the side of his body, what do you reckon?’
Pete shakes his head.
The drawing shouts:
‘FIX ME!’
Robert and Jolie suddenly crack into shrieking yelps of encouragement; ‘Fix him!’ ‘Fix him!’
Pete gets up and climbs to the stage, his knees cracking with effort, sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve.
‘Fix him!’
He grabs one of the drawn man’s arms and wrenches it off. He drops it and yanks off the other arm.
The drawing sways and grins and sticks his tongue out, but it’s not a tongue, it’s a thick builder’s pencil. He spits it onto the stage and Pete bends to pick it up.
‘Fix me, Mad Pete.’
Pete looks back at Jolie and Robert but they’ve become shiny-faced dummies, plastic sports fans, grinning and jiggling in their seats.
He raises the pencil and draws a line. It holds. He works away around the box of the man’s chest, good clean lines, and sure enough the marks appear, are real, are joined to each other and suspended, are growing, drafted growth from the shoulders of the man, one arm, two arms, well-drawn arms, and the drawing bends and flexes his new limbs as they appear. From the flat crudity of Lanny’s drawing rises something modelled, accomplished and true to muscled animated life. Pete works fast.
‘Go, Pete!’ says plastic Robert.
‘Go, Pete!’ Clap clap clap, Jolie smacks her thighs robotically. ‘Go, Pete!’ Clap clap clap.
The drawing speaks again, as Pete once spoke:
‘Now the head, Lanny. Might I ask you to consider your own self and see if there’s anything between your head and your chest?’
Pete reaches and tugs the head up, decapitating the drawing momentarily, holds the face aloft with one arm while he sketches in a good thick neck, the bump of an Adam’s apple, the slight suggestion of sinews, and he drops it back on and shades the chin and neck together.
‘Thank you!’ booms the hybrid giant – half child’s doodle, half accomplished life-study – throbbing and more-than-three-dimensional, ‘oh yes!’ and he reaches down and closes his arms around Pete, embracing him, and Pete cries, shaking, with his arms by his sides, clutching his pencil. The man squeezes him with strong new arms, proper arms, and he presses his powerful chin down, and Pete is wheezing and struggling for breath, trapped in the embrace. He is constricted and powerless and the drawn man starts to sing the song that Lanny sang that day, and the shrill imposter Robert and not-real-Jolie’s voices join in unison, from behind, and Pete can’t breathe, he can only listen, and it sounds horrendous in the adults’ voices, a child’s absent-minded song turned into a feverish chant, turned into something threatening, and he starts to feel sleepy, he is being squeezed so hard, he feels like a child in the grip of a circling fever, and he starts to slip off, he starts to slide into the warm place beyond this brutal hug, towards the comfort he feels is there inside the song somewhere, inside Lanny’s song.
‘Limmon aah, bitter car, lemmen arr, fennem arr, mennem are, witter kah, fitterkarr,’ they sing. The living drawing squeezes him and Pete is limp now, hanging in the hug, diminished, like an empty costume of an old man. Jolie and Robert are loudly, brashly singing, ‘Limmon aah, bitter car, lemmen arr,’ stamping their feet, clapping their hands, and the drawn man leans down and whispers in Pete’s ear, in Pete’s voice, ‘You can see him, can’t you? As a teenager? You hope, don’t you, Pete. You HOPE! You can see Lanny, a bit embarrassed to see you, maybe with his mates at the bus stop, a bit of stubble, a broken voice, and he doesn’t say hello, but he nods, and there’s a conspiratorial glance, a bond of sorts, yes? All right Pete. Can you see teenage Lanny, Pete? Is this one of your endings?’
Pete is fading, slipping into darkness, the hall is a memory, the dark is wrapping him up, and he smiles at the suggestion, because yes, that’s exactly what he’s seen, what he’s yearned for, and so he answers,
‘Yes.’
And they are plunged into darkness, all three guests back on their seats, terrified. Silent, frozen and mute.
There is a rustling, squelching, a snapping sound of footsteps on plants, of stalks being squashed.
‘Let there be light,’ says Toothwort, in the voice of a young English woman. She chuckles, a bubbling flirtatious laugh. ‘A good start, tip-top work from old Mad Pete!’
The lights come on and Robert sees that she is perfect. Painful for a faithful bloke to behold.
‘Now, pink ticket 2? Robert, are you ready to play?’
Toothwort beckons with a floral finger.
Robert leaps up from his chair. He is wearing expensive Lycra jogging gear. Jolie and Pete are gone. It is just Robert and Toothwort.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ he says.
Toothwort teeters over in six-inch hollyhock heels, unsteady on the spongy floor of parasitic plants. She almost slips but Robert catches her by the elbow. Her smell is dizzying.
‘Thanks,’ she squeezes his hand damply. ‘Now concentrate, babe,’ she whispers, breathing wet musk onto his neck, ‘time for your first test.’
There is a mobile phone floating at head height in a pool of its own blue-screen luminescence.
Robert stretches his calf muscles and steps forwards. His elbow grazes her breast as he passes and his penis throbs slightly in his tight sports leggings.
‘Ready!’
He plucks the mobile phone from mid-air before him. He knows his way around a device like this.
‘Now, Robert Lloyd,’ says sexy Toothwort. ‘Look at these images. Is this one of your endings?’
He gazes at the screen, brow furrowed, occasionally flicking it with his finger. He
is not pleased with what he sees.
Toothwort is quietly panting, hissing, releasing grassy aromas.
‘Robert? Is this one of your endings?’
He shakes his head and turns the phone away. ‘No, oh no.’
He straightens and turns to Toothwort, ‘Please, no …’
‘Say what you see, Robert,’ says Toothwort, whose smooth flesh has started sprouting small shoots and petals. Her pretty teeth are softening into bruised white berries; her lips are mottled runner beans.