50
Us back on different sofas, in Vengeance Street. Me and him on the chintz. One of their printed Vengeance Streets that was slightly smaller, chemical-smelling, made from their hardened goo. Him in black tracksuit leaning back against the crochet, the Chinese map that was Britain and inner flow behind him, another collared him also in black tracksuit kneeling in front of him, looking down at the rug, the one that was supposed to be Chris.
‘He comes with,’ Don said. ‘Wherever I go these days. Insurance. Whatever happens to me happens to him.’ He looked at me with his flecked gold eyes. ‘Do you know?’
I knew very little, I knew that by now. I looked around, at the copy of the room in Barrow that was the copy or original of the inside of Alan’s Scritchwood Covert bus. Their printed copy of the original Alan had replicated in his bus and made me memorise so I had a version too: the mind bus in my head. Their copy, real Vengeance Street, Alan’s bus, my mind bus. Four versions. And there were four of us there too really: me and the kneeling one who might be Chris and Don-in-Sean’s body, poor lost Sean who’d tried to save me. Plus Alan, hovering in the background somewhere, who’d made all this and taught me some of it. And one more really, also with us: the other one who’d been me before.
Quite the team.
I had a quick whizz round, at the patterns on the rugs, the floral wallpaper, the ceiling rose, the books and the mantelpiece, the crammed space packed with games and meaning, from the set-up I’d called my childhood. That had also been Chris’s childhood, if this kneeling one was Chris.
‘Sorry,’ I said to Don, from the bottom of my heart because we spoke from there now. ‘I don’t think I know anything. On the level. I’d help out if I could.’
‘Come on,’ he said, nodding at the swans that were twos, the snowmen that were eights.
‘Yes, there are numbers,’ I said. ‘But I’ve told them to you before,’ to him, to Ramona, to the Antarctic servers. ‘I’m sure you’ve tried them out.’
‘Try again.’
I sat there some more, looking around. Then I closed my eyes, in case I did solve something, though I didn’t feel I knew anything. But who would want to risk it: me the destroyer, the goo-spewer, Ms Crack and Hedgehog of carnage and quakes.
‘No destruction,’ he said. ‘We’ll do it gently. All that was just for…motivation. When you needed it. Before.’
I sat there, with my eyes closed. There was no pain. I opened my eyes, looked round at masks and Toby jugs, felt dumb, shook my head. ‘What about him?’ I said, nodding at the Chris. ‘Can’t he help? If he is Chris? Have you done something to him?’ because the Chris was just staring at the floor the whole time, pretty vacant. The holes they cut out of their heads.
‘He’s fine. Just…resting. We’ve done him, got less than we got from you. And he never knew as much as you, did he? It was you Alan gave it all to. Relax. Sit back. Or walk around. Feel things, don’t force them. Close your eyes, go back in time, be with Alan again. Catch what he’s saying to you. Her secret, that he had to pass on. The last one to know, after I destroyed her home, the rest of her people.’
I got up, did a trundle, touched the made books on the bookshelves, drew them down, leaved through a new fake Little Key again, found no note there, wandered on more among the bits of printed foam.
‘No offence,’ I said, some whispering knowledge rising up, ‘it’s very impressive, your…transvestite magic? But I don’t think it’s best conditions. I can’t…feel things. This…version. If you really think I might know something. I think we have to do it in the real place.’
Don-in-Sean watched me. The Chris knelt there.
‘I thought you might say that,’ Don-in-Sean said.
‘It’s not because…I’m trying anything.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s just, you know. How the energy flows. Real objects.’ ‘Things with souls.’
‘Exactly,’ though I didn’t really know what that meant. ‘When you interact with what you didn’t build,’ remembering something from somewhere. ‘Or I don’t know. We could stay here.’
‘No,’ he said.
We sat on the chintz in a different Vengeance Street, the collared one still leashed at our feet.
I took a breath: the smell, the light. The different objects. The dust. The real place, you just knew.
Or not.
How did they knock me out, whizz me there?
What did he do to me when I was conked out?
Did I care?
I got up and walked round, parted the net curtains and looked out the window at what seemed to be the empty real street. Where actual dumdums lived and walked, perhaps. Dear people, trundling on, who I’d once been one of. And now what was I?
‘One of us,’ he said.
I turned back to him and walked round, trusting myself, trusting something. I opened the door to the kitchen, went in there. I tried the back door but it was locked shut. From the open door into the other room he shook his head at me. I came back in and went up the stairs, saw the neat ugly bedrooms, the plain bathroom. I even went to the loo, like a regular person. The toilet flushed.
I came downstairs and walked round the room, picked up the real peacock feather. Remembering the last time I’d really been there, with Sean when he was falling apart because it was the end of his time. When he was supposed to be Chris but wasn’t and I’d known that in my bones for a while. Stump Chris, Sean, who’d been a healed Chris come back to me, a Chris who’d been through things and come out the other side, learnt the lessons.
‘Oh,’ I said, looking at Don and the kneeling Chris that Don said was real Chris, whom I’d grown up with, who’d been cruel, who might have been up to things himself.
Kneeling there, his head bowed. Who was he? What had we been through, had that even existed? I’d been so angry. Was it all some story spun to me on the Skidblad?
‘You still don’t know.’
‘I still don’t know.’
‘About the numbers.’
‘About anything. I don’t think I know things, sorry.’ I sighed. I really wanted to help, to solve things once and for all, to work out if I was a useful object. She would have been able to sort it, if it was her here, not me. A botched realm copy. But I was fine with that.
‘I used to feel like this,’ I said. ‘Back in the day. When we played it. Not good enough. Like he wanted more from me, expected more from me. Now I know why.’ And for a moment I was really there, on a cold afternoon in the bus, Alan watching: can you solve it? ‘Often I couldn’t. I really wasn’t that good.’
‘You were,’ he said, the kneeling Chris looking down at the floor. The kneeling Chris who’d been there in person, maybe, all that time ago in my childhood in the real bus when we’d played it, seen me fail. That Chris who’d meant everything to me once, who I’d loved and who’d betrayed me, maybe to save me, who’d come back to me first that night in my flat so cold, maybe to keep me hating him, for my protection.
The pair of us, fetched up like this. Who’d have thunk?
I walked the room again, trying to sense if they’d tampered with it, smeared it with their male tech that was the fightback against nature which was female and magic like I was even if I didn’t feel it, and was a trap and had to be said no to.
‘Where were the special places, that you should never open? In your mind bus. Some cupboard or cold box. Where would he put it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe I need to be in the bus, the real one, in Scritchwood.’ That bus was burnt. But maybe their tech could magic it back. Since it could do so much. ‘The Little Key?’ I went again to the bookshelves, brought it down and flicked through its real pages, the missing note. ‘Maybe it was there. Maybe Sean ate it?’
‘Maybe. That would be a bummer.’
I went back to the mantelpiece, felt the objects there, the snowmen that were eights, the Chinese men. The drum and the curved dagger we called the scimitar sheathed in cheap cracked black leather ador
ned with plastic jewels, old hard glue coming apart at the seams. I pulled out the dull blade, felt its point in my palm. Some kind of souvenir you couldn’t do damage with.
‘Do you want to do damage?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I feel it’s the books. Are they all the same as the ones he had in the bus?’
‘Not really,’ I said, back at the shelves again. The Bible, a few football and Rupert the Bear annuals, guides to plants and minerals, some atlases.
‘What’s different? Maybe it’s about what’s different.’
‘I’m not sure,’ looking round the shelves.
As I did I caught the kneeling Chris giving me the stare with his flecked eyes, for a fraction.
‘What’s he doing?’ Don pulled at the Chris’s spiked leash, pricking blood into his neck. ‘What’s he trying to tell you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Nothing? Can’t you tell from your… tech? Maybe he wants to look at me.’ Why not? It must be weird for him, if he was my Chris, if he was anything, kneeling there, his brain scraped out maybe. Let’s be frank: it was weird for us all. I didn’t know what to do. If you don’t know what to do then do nothing. I looked at the Chris kneeling there at the floor, blood at his neck. I looked down at the floor where he was looking, at a splotch on the carpet. I tried to reach inside, sense what she would have done, felt nothing. I saw a line of ants crawling up the wall.
Crawling up from where? From the earth below the manufacture, they didn’t control everything, there were ways out, if you were small enough. I wanted nothing, for this to end, for the floor to open up big enough to drag us all down into earth and black till we ended up recycled in the cauldron at the centre, parcelled out into the microbes he was so keen on for that democratic enlightenment, that end of death.
Outside, somewhere, a dog barked. A sudden bad pain hit me in the head. I looked at Don, whatever he was doing to me.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ he said. ‘Do you feel bad? This may be part of it. What are you looking at? The clock?’ meaning the carriage clock on the mantelpiece I seemed to be staring at, the hands showing ten to three, Roman numerals.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was a clock, it was full of numbers, they seemed to be in normal order. ‘Maybe.’
‘What’s happening?’ Don said. ‘Is something happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, remembering maybe a Polaroid of this quartz clock that real Chris had brought me the first night in my flat. I watched the long line of ants. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the fuzzy shape of a flock of seagulls circling in the sky beyond the net curtains. A pressure was rising up inside me that I couldn’t put into words. I wouldn’t look at the leashed Chris. I looked back at the mantelpiece, at the carriage clock. ‘Quartz’, it said on its white face. Quartz carried its own electric kick that could power motors, Alan had once explained it to me. But something was wrong with this quartz clock: the second hand going round too fast, much too fast.
‘Is it the clock?’
Like in Zita.
‘Like what in Zita?’
But I couldn’t hear him anymore in the changed air. Everything felt stopped, very cold, a force broiling my innards. I turned my eyes slightly, to the leashed Chris raising his face to me.
Don watched us, looking from one to the other.
I’d had enough of this. I closed my eyes but kept them open, felt something warm bubble up my back, felt a sudden brilliant white light as a low hum came from below.
Don ran his whole index finger down his nose, then got up. ‘No.’ He pulled at Chris’s leash, the spikes in the neck. But it was too late. We slipped, everything shuddered, what was inside came out, a huge bad crack split the air and wrenched the room apart.
‘No.’ Don trying to reach for me.
But I was OK, already up on the stairs in the terrible roar, my mouth full of sweet-tasting liquid. The quartz going too fast, the Cwyd, jumping aside, like in Zita, without thinking. Me up on the fifth stair looking down to see Don and leashed Chris and whatever else had been on the floor of the room—dusty carpets, sofas, lamps, bookshelves—crumble down deep into the endless black roar that had just opened beneath the house in—what?—the quake that had just happened, that I’d seen in my mind, that I’d caused, maybe, or communed with or rehearsed for, the setup I’d unleashed, my Zoo Wang? The end of Don, made by me, set up by who? Alan? Tibet? My real Chris, who’d crumbled down there too, sacrificed himself to kill Don once I’d led him there for this moment?
Around me ground roared, walls swayed, earth like sea, cracks appearing, objects and pictures chundering down, dust and noise and black stuff spewing up: deep rocks, a deep new smell of earth and nature blasting forth, a sense the whole place was about to blow.
Robot guards, surely, about to leap in here, roofs to come off, something to happen to save him.
But there was nothing. The walls swayed but held. Only the floor was gone, my precision hit, a black hole where there had been stained old carpet. A fortified structure, built round this chasm to withstand it, planned from the start with this moment in mind? I laughed: no decoding. All I’d had to do was fall for it, build the bonds, bring it here. Lay in wait for someone to press that trigger point, with drums or hedgehogs or jumping monks, the trigger point that was already known, that opened up this Vengeance Street crack. Ancient knowledge. Possibly. Made by me and my thoughts, projected from my head?
There in the dust and dark smell, a dumdum like me, shielded by my ignorance, slaying the world king and my Chris with him due to my acceptance, the ground opening up beneath them.
‘Nim,’ a voice called from down in the abyss.
51
‘Nim,’ they said.
I stood up on my stair, at the edge of the black hole, in the swaying room. Below was nothing except a brown utility pipe stretched across the entire span of what had been the room. A pipe from under the street, a water or gas pipe perhaps five metres down, stretched from under my stair across the hole and out under the wall directly in front of me. And, near where I stood, hanging at each side of this pipe, balanced and connected by the leash, were the two Chrises: one that was Don Thabbet, tiny old reborn world king in Sean’s body, and one that was perhaps my Chris. They balanced each other, suspended above the maw.
All electrics gone, only natural light from the broken windows, nature paying a call. Both caked in mud and rubble, you couldn’t tell one from the other, at first. But the Chris still had the spiked collar round his neck, was dangling by his neck from this collar attached to the leash, his hand inside the collar, grappling the collar away from his throat, from his Adam’s apple. On the other side, the leash tied round his wrist, holding onto the length of the leash and pressing his feet against the pipe, was Don, with the yellow eyes. My more recent ex.
Only the strength of the leash keeping them from falling, made as it must have been from some techno-fabric. That and the balance of their bodies. If one of them fell or jumped, down the other one fell.
We looked at each other. I waited, for robots, sand, the ceiling to splice off, needles. Guys, I wanted to say, it was me. I thought it and it happened.
‘Well done,’ Don said. To me or Chris? Then he pursed his lips and made a weird sound, like a very high whistle. Shock and admiration? Calling for rescue?
‘They won’t come,’ the Chris said.
Don stared at him across the pipe, nodded his head. Then a new noise and the ceiling above us crumbled and a bed whizzed down, just missing them and the pipe and total oblivion, followed by a long tasselled lampshade which nearly hit me on my stair. But it crashed and came to rest so the heavy metal base was almost at my feet and the light fitting lay squarely on the pipe between them, just out of their reach.
The pipe swayed and juddered.
A silent frozen moment, the three of us waiting for the pipe to crack, for more furniture, for aftershocks, for all of us to crash down there. I didn’t breath, didn’t move, looking down
at the pair of them balanced so perfectly and the lamp like a path bridging them to me.
Don started to try to strain himself towards the lamp base, stretching out the unleashed hand, trying to inch the leash down along the pipe to shunt himself and his Chris ballast towards the lamp, towards the stairs and me. As he did, as small movements happened—the Chris pulling at its collar to stop it getting strangled, its hands bleeding, the back of its neck pushed into spikes, its head pushed back so far, its legs kicking, dangling, its eyes lolling far back in their sockets, its neck bleeding, the vertebrae surely about to snap—I saw the collar beginning to fray, beginning to release the body, send Chris tumbling down and Don in his wake.
‘Chris,’ I screamed. As I did the room shook again and I leapt up two stairs as a new bad crack opened in the wall next to me and more bricks and bits and timber cascaded down into the hole, this whole room movement giving the Chris of the fraying collar below me somehow the impetus, the last desperate energy to buck and leap and grab for the leash itself and coil it round its arm, to hang on as the collar broke.
Terrible silence, the two of them swaying, adjusting to this new movement, this new balance, both now holding onto the length of leash formed of hard impossible threads. Both now with their feet up and pressing against the length of pipe which couldn’t be that strong, laid by dumdums, filled with water or gas, that would surely soon explode. Leash flexed, hands torn, lashed together, arms bleeding, in perfect balance for now, in the hand of one other, covered in dust and blood and mud and rubble, bearing each other’s weight above the void.
‘Well done Nim,’ the Don said, speaking steadily, turning his head slowly to me, looking at me with its yellow eyes. ‘You avenged her. You avenged yourself and Sean and your friends and Alan and whatever else. Now help us out,’ nodding at the lamp at my feet that I could shunt out to save them, one of them, maybe. If I was minded.
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