The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  James looked up to the top of the stairs, and there it was – having returned, waiting in silence, dripping and dead, draining to see. A whitely-crawling form, dressed in layer upon layer of countless corpse-grey flies caught and struggling in its mass, and within, resided a silence with voices, and all of the voices were screaming, screaming and screaming.

  … screaming … for … me …

  *

  And still, these little dreamers sleep, such small children, as fresh as I once was. Not hearing me. Not seeing me. Not knowing me, or what was done to me. Their innocence true. Their innocence pure. There is no time left for us. What I do is a mercy to their hearts. A soft and quiet killing. The kindness of genocide.

  *

  Louise met Clifton in a greasy-spoon cafe by the motorway, just outside of town. It was a grey hour in the earliest part of the morning. The windows of the cafeteria in which they sat slowly developed like smeared Polaroids, revealing only shadows before shape and clarity came seeping into the scene. Around them went the lorry drivers, tourists and travellers that made up the ceaseless rhythm of life here.

  It was coming up to Christmas and people were heading home to see their families. Outside, the thrum of traffic went on and on, back and forth, forth and back, lives on the move, with destinations. All of them had somewhere to go to – unlike the two people at this table.

  Clifton’s face was sallow and hollow. His sleepless eyes shone with webs of worn thread. There was flint glinting in the pupils as he cast his gaze across to Louise on the other side of the table, stirring her black coffee with unsteady, imprecise movements, holding the spoon tightly between her fingers.

  He sipped from his cup. The coffee tasted bitter, of grease and oil.

  Clifton was a man unmade. When he was younger, the Old School had belonged to him. It was his stomping ground. He was free to hurt whoever he wanted, and however he chose. He was in charge then and had remained so until now. Behind the closed doors of offices, through the glass partitions of board rooms, he’d continued to show the world what he was made of. Hard stuff. The right stuff. The stuff a man should be made of. He’s solid as a rock, you’ll never move him or get by him, that was what they said of him at work. Then Felicity died and it all came crashing down. The mountain cracked and Clifton fell.

  “You saw him too.” There was not a hint of question in his statement.

  Louise did not speak, merely nodding. It had been years ago but she was still his, even though he’d moved on, moved away, married and had a child.

  Strange, she thought, how so many years can pass by, so much can happen to a person inside and yet when you meet a certain someone from your past, everything is exactly the same between the two of you – except a part of you is screaming and screaming to get away, to run from this man, but you don’t listen, do you?

  No, you stay. You put up with him. You take the abuse and cry about it later because you know there is nothing better than this and there never will be. You never want to leave because of you can feel his hand on your heart. It’s so hard and so cold and like nothing you’ve ever felt before or since. It’s all you want from life – that, and pain.

  Her father was the first one to teach her these truths and then there was Clifton.

  Was this why she’d gone the way she did? A poverty-line life of flaws, cracks, failures and mistakes. Without Clifton’s hand on her neck; squeezing hard then stroking it softly, she’d not known what to do with herself.

  Clifton and Louise sat there, unspeaking, seeing the deaths of their children playing over and over again in the cinemas of their subconscious minds.

  They saw him as well; those long, thin fingers stretching as shadows should not stretch, suddenly piercing small, precious bodies, right through the heart, and lifting the bodies up on high to watch them writhe and struggle, like impaled insects, little spiders. Their wide eyes lolling, loose as marbles. Their petite open mouths tinged with subtle shades of amethyst and blue. Then, a face, there, for a moment no more, caught by the light long enough for them to know him and know what this was about, why their children were dead. Then, the little lives were gone, snuffed out, cold, and so was he.

  The man who was the boy they once called James, amongst other names.

  Louise’s eyes were as red and raw as her hair. “What are we going to do?”

  “Go back to the Old School. It’s where he is. He’s waiting for us.”

  “But, what is he? How did he do it?” she asked.

  Clifton shrugged. “Who cares? We know what he did. We saw it happen. He killed them and I’m going to kill him for it.”

  “But what about the police? We should call them if we know it was him.”

  “I don’t want the police. I want my hands around his throat. I want to see him die.”

  “Not so loud … ”

  She cast her eyes furtively across to the other people sitting in the cafe.

  None of them were listening. None of them cared.

  “We’re doing this, Louise. You and me. Together, just like we used to be, yeah?”

  His hand reached out and was on her neck, squeezing and stroking, in control. He could see the lines on her cheeks matched those in her eyes. Her nose was starting to colour and blotch from broken blood vessels. Late nights awake, indulging misery, feeding and drowning the pain all at once. She was broken inside, shattered like a glass bottle, just like Kelly. Women wound up like this so easily. That was why she was here, why he chose her to be with him, to bear witness to what he was going to do to the bastard and then to testify in court on his behalf. She would be able to tell the world he was back to his old self, how he should be. He would be seen as made of the hard stuff again. They finished the dregs of their coffees, got to their feet, paid the bill and left.

  Outside, the bleak grey chill of the morning cut into them as it used to when they were younger, getting out of bed, bleary-eyed, with Mum and Dad shouting up the stairs.

  It was time for school.

  *

  This poor dead thing has thrown a rod. This broken old thing will ne’er move again. Let it lie here, let it lie. It wants to go no further. Let it die, please let it lie. Red rain from us will hide this murder.

  *

  The town hadn’t changed. They saw this much as they drove through it. Provincial places in England never do, not like the cities where fashion and facade come and go in the blink of an eye.

  The city is a place of light and colour whereas out here, in the rural Styx, there was only darkness and despair. Soggy grey streaks covered Clifton’s car tyres. The air was murky and foreboding. Louise felt her eyes watering as if they were getting whipped by the bitter salt wind. She tugged up the collar of her coat against it. Something I’ve been doing all my life, she thought, trying to keep out the chill of things and not succeeding.

  So much of her life had been defined by this town, by its black boundaries, washed-out skies, and the embittered, dole-queue people who dwelled there, peering out from behind their grubby windows, gathering at street corners, thin and muttering, their skin coloured like cancer. Spilling out, late at night, decrepitly drunk, from the husks of ageing public houses to vomit, smoke and go on with their struggling from day to day. Struggling to drag each other down into the same long, cold winter of the soul.

  Yes, this place, these people with their lymphoma eyes nestling in their faces. This is what I have come back to, she thought, the place that made me become who I am.

  This place has taken Barry, my boy, away from me.

  She would need something to drink soon. It was starting to hurt again, the memory of the fall. Clifton didn’t care about her dead boy, she knew that much. She was a drunk, an addict and an idiot, unclean, no good, that’s what he thought although he was the same. His vices were allowed, that was all; the thoroughbred, clean kind exercised with office secretaries and at corporate meat-market gatherings. There was something sick in them both being here today and it made her stomach turn over. Some
thing was binding them, drawing them close like seamy, conjoined umbilical cords.

  And then, the Old School was there – as a castle coming into view, a dark wound opening on the horizon. It was Belsen grey; standing hard against the unforgiving stone of the sky, spreading itself across her vision, consuming her senses. A long-buried thing now unburied and thrust, ripe and raw, into the light. It was watching them come closer, watching them without eyes. Her coffee, laced with bile, came rushing up her throat and she cried out, “Stop the car!”

  Before he could, she heaved over throwing up violently across the expensive leather upholstery.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you!” Clifton went on cursing as she tried to say something, to speak, but it was no good. There were no words for what was there, what she’d felt was there, inside the Old School.

  The thing behind the door.

  *

  No gods lie out there, and none we made were ever on our side. We are born abandoned, and so we rot on this ball of smoking black shit, which is constantly careering, like a madman’s marble, through the dead and empty holes of the universe.

  *

  She stood in its shadow in the rain, waiting for them to come.

  Clifton and Louise.

  She knew they were coming – could they feel her as she had felt them? Could they feel what was waiting for them inside the school, and did they know its name?

  In her restless dreams, Jenna had seen this place in transformation; its corridors growing into teeming chasms of nauseating unlife with pale Dachau faces peering out, score upon score of them, strangely human but so wasted and thin. They moved as crawling limpets, skin drawn too tight over bone, over shattered concrete and scorched, marked stone. The classrooms were open burial grounds filled by the sound of bones and teeth clicking like so many cockroach shells. And then, the ceilings surged away into nothingness, revealing the heartless dark beneath – an intangible firmament in which there were great black tides and the depths of those Greater Darknesses she had dreamed of before.

  From the depths, the silence with voices came, so many voices without sound. From humble brick and mortar origins, the Old School was restructured into something hopelessly Other yet still echoing with the witless Lagerstrasse sounds of those who were abandoned, crushed and trodden-down until they were the stuff of society’s foundations.

  Last words were scratched into glass by teenage fingernails. Wills and testaments made unclear before a strangling rope snapped tight. This was the place where harm was done. This was the place where hurt and the pain began. The buses bearing the children in as the cattle-cars once did to the gates of Auschwitz and the teachers herding them inside; loving like Mengele, caring like Rascher. More test subjects for Block 5. Their remains will make the Poplar trees grow. We shall fertilise the earth for a better and brighter world.

  Undercurrents would then draw her deeper into the catacomb-hive of the Old School and she saw those who had gone before; cowering, crippled, blood-shod, beaten and lame. Beggaredly children with heads hanging on limp, loose necks; subjects of scorn, whipped by sticks and laughter, struck by stones and names alike. Strangely, they were all smiling toothlessly at her and pointing their gnawed fingers.

  No, this was not for her. Someone else was here with her. He was behind her and, before she awoke, she heard his laughter and the names he called her.

  *

  I have dreams of them and they are laughing, always laughing. And I can do nothing to silence them. Those grinning faces in the dark. They are gone. They are grown. I know this. They are no more what they once were to me, but it is not enough to know this. Because these feelings; they twist, they bite and they burn. They tie themselves tight and turn inside me, tearing like rotten cloth. And I know if they met me on the street, they would laugh again and I would hurt again, because it would be a sound made guilty and hollow as they tried to pretend that we were once friends.

  *

  They all took it in, the edifice of the Old School, as the rain began to fall.

  Clifton, Louise and Jenna stood under the crushing weight of the downpour – united and yet somehow divided by their shared pain, separated by deep loss. Torrential, the rain dug into their heads, goring their brains, making them bleed abusive words and relive the brute blows they once dealt out, making them remember who they truly were underneath; before growth, before adulthood, before they had children.

  The rain washed the accrued layers of the years away. Jenna and Louise flinched. Clifton did not, but there were tears flowing from his eyes that none knew were falling but him. You killed her, my Felicity. My love. My happiness. My joy. The one good thing I’ve done. I will kill you for that.

  They remained so still, lost in dark communion with things they’d forgotten, with people who were no more than ghosts buried in the lower basements of their thoughts and feelings.

  “I think we should burn it down.” Louise said.

  “Why?” asked Clifton.

  “Because I don’t like the way it’s looking at me.”

  Clifton snorted at Louise’s words.

  “It is, I can feel it, it’s like an old man’s fingers on my skin.”

  “You’d know all about that.”

  “Bastard,” she whispered.

  Jenna’s eyes moved from one to the other, not saying a word. She was not going to fight with him, Clifton could see that. “What about you, Jenna? Boy or girl? Who’d you lose?”

  “Neither.”

  “What?”

  Jenna’s hand was caressing herself through the wool of her coat, fingers describing a slow orbit over her abdomen. “I never found out, never knew. It was too early. It was such a small thing…” Her fingers crept up to the cross at her throat, which she began stroking hard, “…in amongst all the blood.”

  “Miscarriage,” Clifton sighed, not softening his tone or manner, merely stating the fact, taking it in, recording it in his head, “just like the cunt we’re looking for.”

  “Don’t say that, not about him.”

  “Why not, Louise? That’s what he is.”

  “He’s here, in this place, you know why he did it, because of us, what we did to him.”

  Clifton shrugged. “We bullied him. We were kids, we were cruel, we were mean, we were shits, doesn’t matter. All part of being British and growing up. There’s nothing to fear in here but a little dust and dirt and a wanker with a grudge. He’s not a ghost.”

  “Then how’d he do it? How’d he kill like that?”

  Clifton came close to her, making her shrink away, and Jenna, watching, stepped back as he spoke. “I’ll ask him when I find him. This place isn’t the only place where shadows and pain can breed.”

  Louise nodded, breathing unsteadily, needing something to take away what was there, what she was seeing, the black smoke gathering around Clifton’s heart.

  Together, the three mounted the steps of the Old School.

  Clifton tried the door; its hinges cracked, scabs of clotted amber powder falling away to the ground as he wrenched it, protesting, open. The threshold waited to be crossed. It was very, very dark in there. They did not wait for long. They crossed the threshold. The door shut behind them and locked in a way doors should not lock.

  The lessons were about to begin.

  *

  You are waiting for something, yes? Some real ugly shit, right? Some raw, resounding revelation, no? Truth to tell, there is none. This is what we do to each other. This is what we are. We are the heartless ones; men, women and children all. We are the hate that feeds on itself. Gnawing and gnawing away at the root of things. What happened to me was no horror, not really, not to you. But it was to me. What happened to me was the monstrous made mundane. The names. The beatings. The isolation, loneliness and loss. Everyday evils, schoolday evils. The most enduring and most wounding kind there is.

  *

  They walked through the Old School together, in silence, until they came to the stairs hung with spider-web drapes.
The computer rooms were on the next floor along with the old language and cookery classrooms. Clifton’s eyes were set dead ahead; seeing Felicity, no-one else, nothing else. She was there, beckoning to Daddy, leading him on. Leading all of them deeper inside. He didn’t stop, Louise paused for the time it took for a footstep to fall, giving a last glance to Jenna, grasping at the fingertips of the other woman’s hand, before she went into the dark after Clifton. Neither said goodbye though they felt like they should. Her eyes said to Jenna she couldn’t leave him – that she had to go with him.

  Shadows quickly gathered in behind them and Jenna hugged herself, smoothing out pimples of gooseflesh as she looked at the filthy cracked wood of the buckling stairs, and began to ascend them with one hand on the raw flesh of the banister. The other constantly stroked the cross hanging cold against her throat. She thought she had heard something up there, in the dark, a small, wet sound – like a child might make when it founf itself born, lost and alone, in the cold of the world.

  *

  I seal the wounds over with gobbets of mildew and spittle culled from the gullets of all the lonely suicides you helped to create. It is time for the exhibition. The show where you show us what you truly are. This is it; another hanging inaugurated within the meathook gallery.

  *

  Louise opened her mouth, feeling an urge inside to break the weighty silence hanging between them but she could not find the words.

  “Down here,” said Clifton.

  He was still seeing Felicity, though she was becoming less clear, like a strip of celluloid film degrading; darkening, blackening, splitting open.

  The science block was a burnt-out shell left to rot; holes in the infrastructure of the building let in a few lines of light that did little to alleviate the soot-soiled atmosphere of the crumbling space. Blistered and flaking scars from the fire marked the walls, and the ceiling was smeared black and grey as they made their way through the small dust-coated labyrinth.