‘ – need blood money from those bloodsucking –’
‘ – the Royal Academy refused to take Conjoined. No one will buy –’
‘ – fuckers!’
‘ - the Pillars of Hercules, or Danaë, or any of the others, and you nearly got arrested when you showed them bloody Leda. We haven’t had a Chinese takeaway for two years. Please –’
‘No!’
‘ – Fred I’m begging you!’
‘Hello Fred,’ said the tiny bull. ‘I think I’m going to like it here.’
Sheila had collected the little bull beast earlier that day from the subterranean part of the Bankside Border Patrol headquarters. In the building that used to be the Tate Modern and before that was Bankside Power Station.
There were hundreds of abandoned hell-children there, in a basement that had once held tanks of oil for the power station before becoming a gallery space; and was now a monster pound. Most of these caged hell beasts had been wandering the streets of Demon City like feral cats in Rome; though some had tried to flee across the bridge. And now the order had come from the London Parliament: exterminate all under-age undomiciled other-dimensional entities, or find them foster homes.
And so Mammon, with untypical generosity, had established a fund for foster parents. Anyone could apply, be they human or demonic. Very few demons, however, gave a toss about these lost demonic children. It was not, after all, in their nature to care.
‘I’ll call him Thomas,’ Sheila told Fred.
‘My name is Mithrai,’ said the tiny bull.
‘I prefer Thomas.’
‘I prefer Mithrai,’ said Mithrai, stubbornly.
Within two years, Mithrai was almost the size of a rhinoceros. But he was the kindest, gentlest creature Sheila ever knew.
Sheila’s second foster child was a little ball of feathers small enough to cup in your hand. Sheila had shown him to Fred at lunch and he assumed that the bull demon had been moulting.
‘Bin it?’ he suggested.
But then the yellow ball had chirruped.
‘It’s a bird demon,’ said Sheila. ‘They get a lot of those. Birds can be ruthless. Tipping their chicks out of the nest kind of thing. A lot of them drown trying to swim across the Thames. This one was found nesting in the giant fir tree next to St Paul’s, living on bark and chocolate bars left by tourists.
‘How much?’
‘The same. Three hundred a week. That’s a living wage for us now, six hundred a week in all. I can give up cleaning.’
‘Can it speak?’
The feathers sang.
‘It’s empathetic, apparently. You’ll know what it wants, when it wants it.’
‘Will it grow?’
After two years, Alazu had a wing span as large as their next door neighbour’s Chrysler Grand Voyager. Like Mithrai, Alazu had an electronic tag, but it allowed him to fly freely within two blocks of their house. And when Alazu soared through the sky on a hazy summer’s day - ah! – for Sheila, it was poetry in images.
When Sheila brought Jacob home, he was appallingly deformed. No arms, only one leg. His head was squashed flat. And his body was like dough that had failed to rise. But the authorities were adamant his injuries were survivable.
So Sheila laid him out on the kitchen table, next to an illustration from an ancient Jewish tome that she had downloaded from the internet. And she began to mould his flesh.
It took her six hours. Fred advised her occasionally but wasn’t prepared to give any hands-on assistance. He did however admit he was impressed at her sculpting technique. Jacob had been beaten and crushed by his father, then ripped into fragments, then put in a weighted sack and thrown in the Thames. After a few years his body had washed up on to the foreshore and been taken to the Border Patrol. He was still alive but it had been assumed he would always be a deformed freak.
Sheila had more confidence. First, she dampened the clay as if it were bread dough. Then she tugged out two legs and two arms with her fingertips. Then she moulded hands, and broke the hands into fifths and shaped out fingers, then fingernails. She patted his midriff area down to create a robust belly, but didn’t bother with a belly button. She made his chest broad and strong. She moulded him a child’s penis, with a bare glans to replicate the effect of a missing foreskin. She etched in his muscles with a palette knife. She used her thumbs to mould his head into something more spherical, then carefully created a face and eyes and a hooked Jewish nose and a mouth and finally a smile.
Then she made the clay creature a tongue and it spoke. ‘Thank you,’ it said. Sheila realised it had been awake for the entire re-modelling process.
‘I’ll call you Thomas,’ Sheila said. It had been her grandfather’s name.
‘My name is Jacob,’ the baby golem said, stubbornly.
Sheila sighed.
The baboonesque demon Thea was a live wire right from the start, and it took Sheila months to house train her. She shat in every room in the house and hid up the chimney when Fred raged at her. Within a few days the house was like a toilet, and Sheila seemed to spend most of her time with Dettol cloths wiping up the wee. The shit balls however dried quickly and were easily retrieved. And Thea didn’t, initially, throw them at Fred and Sheila.
Troy, the talking baby, was one hour away from his death sentence when Sheila took him in. She didn’t actually like him – he gave her the heebie-jeebies – but she couldn’t bear for a tiny baby to be wholly extirpated.
A demon at the pound had tried to explain to her the Christian rationale for the damnation to limbo of unbaptised infants who had not yet committed a sin. But frankly, it all went over Sheila’s head. As far as she was concerned, a baby was just a baby: innocent and in need of care. Except that this baby was eight hundred years old and had learned to talk and read and debate philosophy during its long tenure in the hell dimension.
‘My name is Troy,’ Troy had told her. ‘And these toys you’ve chosen for me are extremely idiotic.’
Sheila had bought a bright red ring that a baby could sit in, with buttons to press which made moo-moo cow noises or sheep baas or siren sounds. Plus a dozen or so plastic green and grey dinosaurs of varying sizes. And a wooden train with wooden carriages that you could move with your hands though you had to make your own ‘choo choo’ noise.
‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Sheila, ‘about the age thing.’
‘Just buy me books,’ said Troy, with a cheeky grin on his pudgy baby face. ‘Philosophy books, Plato and Kant and Kierkegaard and Popper for starters, plus any books you can find on modern physics, some of the up to date stuff. The only physicists I ever got to meet died in the 1960s and I’m sure plenty has happened since then. And novels, plenty of ’em. Ideally, thrillers. Old fashioned thrillers, the stuff with all plot and no character. And definitely no sex. Per-lease - sex scenes just annoy me. Do you have any idea how – forget it. And an iPod! I like music. R & B and soul since you ask: although you didn’t. Ha! And I’ll need a computer, too, so I can set up an ITunes account. Am I going too fast for you? I may have the body of an infant, but I’m a hell of a lot smarter than your average dumbfuck refugee from Hell.’ And Troy grinned again, arrogantly, his large head tipped to one side of his tiny chubby body.
‘We can’t afford a bloody iPod,’ said Fred, who was listening to all this with mounting rage.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Troy judiciously. ‘I may be pushing the pace here, let me reassess my approach to your parenting strategy.’
There was a quiet moment.
Then Troy bawled.
His face went bright red. His scream was like having a fire engine siren implanted in your forehead. It felt as if it would never ever stop.
When it did eventually stop, Fred and Sheila were both dizzy with deafness.
‘Don’t ever,’ said Fred, ‘do that again.’
‘Then don’t ever,’ said Troy slyly, ‘thwart me again.’
Sheila smiled.
‘Right, that’s it,’ fumed Fred.
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‘Leave it to me,’ said Sheila calmly. She fixed the baby with her nicest smile. ‘You’re so sweet, aren’t you, my little hoochie-coochie ?’ she said.
‘I’m not sweet, and skip the baby talk,’ said Troy nastily.
‘You really deserve to be happy.’
‘Give me what I want, then I’ll be happy,’ Troy explained.
‘Oh I don’t think so. We don’t allow tantrums in this family, you see. House rule. No one family member is more important than The Family.’ There was a hint, just a sliver, of steel in Sheila’s tone now.
‘What blinking hokum.’
‘It’s not hokum.’ Sheila said, in the Sheila voice that meant: this means war.
Fred was utterly silent. He knew, only too well, not to meddle when Sheila got stern. But Troy, with the overconfidence of the born bully, and assuming that Sheila was just a silly woman who could be pushed around, began to bawl again.
Sheila got up. She took Fred by the hand and led him out of the room. She locked the door.
Two days later she went back and found Troy sitting in soiled nappies, with eyes that were red from crying. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in two days, though Sheila knew for his kind, that was no real hardship. But there was, she saw instantly and with relief, a sad and remorseful look to him.
‘I was lonely,’ he protested.
‘Then that serves you right.’
‘But –’
‘There are rules in this house,’ said Sheila. ‘No being selfish. No tantrums, well some tantrums, but nothing excessive. If you obey those rules I will love you with all my heart. If you continue to be a selfish pig, if you bawl, and bully, and eat the flesh of other demons as I know you have done in the past, then I will take you back to Demon City and there you will almost certainly be, well.’ Sheila trembled at the thought of what would happen to Troy. But she couldn’t afford to lose this battle. ‘Your choice.’
‘You’re blackmailing me.’
‘I’m refusing to let you bully me.’
‘I always get my way. I always have. I always will. That’s just how I –’
‘Do you want me to love you, or don’t you?’ This was Sheila’s special gift: her ability to pledge utter, unconditional love. She didn’t give it lightly.
Troy thought about it.
‘Yes,’ he conceded.
The tantrums stopped. Sheila gave the unbaptised baby her love; and got it back a thousandfold. The Family now had a beautiful and witty and erudite infant as its smallest and much cherished member.
But Fred, a bigot to the bone, never stopped hating Troy.
Veda was the last of her adoptive children, to date anyway. And she really was easy to love. An eight-year old Indian girl-demon with five heads and ten arms; beautiful, symmetrical, adorably sweet-natured.
Bath-time with Veda was a particular delight because she used her ten tiny arms to tickle Sheila as she was being mopped down. And to see Veda smile: that was the greatest of Sheila’s delights. A quintuple dawning smile. Five radiant faces full of joy. It made Sheila’s heart melt, without fail.
These were Sheila’s children. She loved them more than anything, or anyone, Fred included. And that’s why she was doing what she was doing: to protect her kids. That’s why she had no choice but to lie to the cops.
And so, after deceiving Davies and Tindale for nearly half an hour, she ushered the two detectives into the hall. But still they lingered. She didn’t know how to get rid of them.
She was starting to panic.
‘Thank you, Sheila,’ said Detective Constable Davies, eventually.
‘You’re welcome.’ Her smile was getting taut.
Did they suspect anything?
‘Come on let’s go,’ said Tindale.
‘For the tea, I meant. Thanks, love,’ said the Welsh one.
‘Oi. Shift your arse, Taffy.’
‘I’m shifting, I’m shifting.’
The two detectives finally stepped out on to the porch, and she was able to close the door on them.
Sheila took a deep breath. She climbed the stairs. Three flights, up to the Fred’s studio.This was the staircase that Fred had built himself. It was circular, with moulded wooden balusters and newel posts decorated with acanthus leaves, and it wound its way artfully up from the ground floor to the studio.
By the time she reached the top floor of the house Sheila was dizzy with all the turning. But she pushed open the carved bronze studio door and stepped through into Fred’s private sanctum.
The studio comprised the entire fourth and fifth floors of the rambling late Victorian house, knocked through to create a single skylit space. But now the skylights were shrouded with black tape to prevent anyone seeing in, and the blinds on the dormer window had been drawn shut. The studio was dimly lit by table lamps and floodlights, because Gogarty didn’t like the bleached clarity you got when the main studio lights were switched on.
Sheila walked through the gloom, her eyes adjusting. One end of the studio was dominated by Fred’s brass replica of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. It was a commissioned piece, but after six years Fred was nowhere near completing it. He was too much of a perfectionist, he argued; though Sheila suspected it was because he hated to copy anyone else’s creation, even when there was money at stake.
His huge Conjoined sculpture was next to the Rodin. Conjoined was much bigger, many times life size; the male model’s erect cock was as large as a man’s torso, and Sheila’s nipples were the size of dinner plates. Her open howling mouth was large enough to put your head inside.
Pillars of Hercules was also here, as was Danaë, though Leda and her rapacious swan were banned by Sheila and lived in a lockup down the road. These major works were clustered together with half a dozen of Fred’s other nudes, their flesh and earth-coloured tones blending with the bare wood of the floor.
There was a Brancusi-style brass bird here too, an experiment that Fred later disavowed, though Sheila found the bird’s formless aerodynamic curves oddly erotic. And also there were a few of Fred’s freaky experiments from his Giacometti phase, with rows of tall men and women cursed with knobbly heads and skeletal torsos.
And in the middle of the studio space, Naberius sat motionless upon the floor, lost in meditation. His vast scaled red body dominated the room like a blood stain. He was twice the size of a normal human, and much too big to get through the studio door. Which means he must, so she assumed, have shapeshifted into a raven when he went up the stairs all those weeks ago.
And there was Gogarty. Sitting in an old armchair, peering intently at a squalid porn movie about vampires in Victoria’s England on Fred’s old TV set.
Fred was close to Gogarty: motionless and sad. Sheila could hardly bear to look at him.
Sheila had always felt dismayed at the way Fred’s once lithe and sexy young body had turned over the years into a fat and middle aged body. And now it was turned to cold marble. Fred’s eyes rolled whitely in their sockets when Sheila entered, but he was unable to speak.
Gogarty still bore the scar on his throat where Fred had nearly killed him with the palette knife.
It had been a bold and brave move on Fred’s part – and cunning too. A few days after Gogarty moved into the studio, he’d calmly asked the bald man to touch one of his statues - the bronze Fugit Amor on his replica Gates of Hell - so that Gogarty could feel the purity of the rendering of the two naked lovers failing to embrace. And when Gogarty did so – whilst he was distracted by the sensual touch of Fred’s cold and poignant allegory of transitory love – the sculptor struck the fat bald man with a knife slash to his throat. The blow was fast and hard, and it almost killed Gogarty; but it didn’t. An instant later, Fred was spell-bound into stasis. And the lovers were chunks of molten lava spilled out of their frame.
Then Sheila was summoned to the studio to confront her husband’s sins. And as the blood had oozed down his neck, Gogarty had whisperingly offered Sheila a choice. She could either allow him to boil Veda’s bl
ood, and, thereby let Fred go unpunished.
Or, alternatively -
Gogarty hadn’t needed to finish the sentence.
‘Sheila, sweetheart, I love you,’ Fred, had said to her then, for the first time in many years; with fear in his eyes.
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do. Bloody hell. You’re my – everything. I love you with all my being.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ she’d said, honestly. ‘Doesn’t matter. I do love you, Fred.’ Sheila looked into his eyes, concealing nothing. ‘Always have, always will. You are my -’
‘No more talk, decide,’ said Gogarty.
By this point, Fred could speak but he couldn’t move; for he was held in a binding spell so tight it crushed his ribs. He just stared at her, his eyes imploring.
She remembered him as he had been – his beauty – his passion - his genius. She remembered their years together. The bad times, and the good times, and the many moments of utter joy. And she looked at him now: breathless and spell-bound, the palette knife at his feet, the studio floor he stood on stained with Gogarty’s blood. Her heart broke at the thought of his courage in attacking Gogarty.
Then she looked at Veda, her daughter.
Tears trickled down three of Veda’s cheeks, but all her ten eyes were focused down, and she wouldn’t meet Sheila’s stare. She was trying, Sheila knew, to make it easier for her adoptive mother to abandon her to this terrible but necessary fate.
‘Sheila,’ said Alfredo softly.
‘Decide!’ Gogarty barked.
‘My darling!’
‘Decide!’
Sheila decided. ‘Take Fred.’
The rest was inevitable, and viciously ironic.
Sheila looked now at the eternally trapped Fred: a man of genius turned into a sculpture with marble bones and marble skin; and she saw hate in his marble eyes.
As she approached, Gogarty glanced up. He muted the sound on the TV, leaving images of silent carnality on the screen. And he smiled at her. His smile was a terrible thing. It made the wrinkles spread across his face and forehead and round his bald head. More like scars than mere wrinkles. And the bags under his eyes were dark pits, and the corners of his eyes were cracked with laughter lines from laughing at things that no human being should ever laugh at.
Hell on Earth Page 42