And once, and recently, it was: married man: police line: DO NOT CROSS. But look – that’s all gone.
The Land Rover is caked in mud up the sills and the doors, even up onto some of the side windows; a lucky screening in that. On the dashboard are some of those nodding toy animals that sit on suckers like gastropods and have heads on small springs. They’ll be nodding away like mad bastards soon, they will. Dive. Dig. She finds a cleanish patch at the front of the vehicle between the grille and the headlamp and the mass of the planet accelerates into her and pushes her hip into that space to lean, and to itch, and to wait.
LIKE ONE FOOT is in light and the other in shadow. Sun and shade. Time enough, space enough. There’s always been enough of each in which to fuck everything up.
He’s awake because he’s thinking, even now, the brain basted in putrid broth. Bashed and battered yet behind the lids it spins and will not stint and he wills it all to stop. Better if he opens his eyes; because then the visual stimulus. Help him shut it down. He sees his naked torso, supine, the date inked into the skin of his chest; last night she asked him if it was the birthdate of a child and he is not a dad but that’s no indication of how he responded. He is not a father but that’s no indication. And she asked him what the scars were on his legs, the puckered craters, and he cannot remember if he told her the truth – that they are what abscesses leave behind once healed. And anyway what truth. Another murdered thing.
Other senses, now; sleep’s milky whiff and the cloy of sweated drink. A soft snoring. Behind drawn curtains is a pinky-grey light that suggests early morning to him. Pictures on the walls. A dressing table. Clothes all over the place and a wardrobe with a mirror at the end of the bed that gives him back the shock of his own face and a messy head on the pillow next to his, blondeish, the face all hidden. That’s all there is to be seen, just the tatty hair entirely one mask. Or, no, a bit of ear, when he turns his head to look; a white lobe with a blue stud in it. His first shag in ages. That tiny turning of the head really fucking hurt.
God, God. Half in, half out of the world. The blue fur that sprouts from rotting food, that’s what he’d see if he looked in the mirror and opened his mouth. He gathers his will in a monumental steeling and in one movement he sits and swings his legs out onto the floor. The woman grumbles a little. He looks down at himself and sees a ring of calamari around the base of his dick. What? He plucks at it with a thumbnail, pulls it out and lets it twang back against the skin. It’s the ring of rubber from a condom. He clearly remembers going in bareback. Now he wants to weep for them both, for himself and her, and for the terrible paleness of his own long toes. He removes the ring of rubber and flicks it onto the carpet. Here we fucking go again. Only this can be honed so sharp. Only this can burn so bright. Can float and glow like it does.
But there was only the drink, wasn’t there? No rock, no powder. Only the drink and the things it brings. Stand up now.
He imagines opening the curtains onto the blasted red dunes of Mars but when he does all he sees is the backlands of Borth; the wide splat of the bog with its ring of distant hills. A faint taxi-memory returns. It is green out there and bright with a blue rumour anterior to the hills, a gauze of which they solidly shimmer within. There are cropping horses on the bog with their beautiful heads bowed at grass. A dark church on a plinthy rock. A bilious surge threatens to erupt but he swallows it back and slams a sphincter shut on it like the cap on an oilwell. A geyser of puke. Don’t think. Get dressed.
It will be warm out there. The windowpane was toast against his face. What it should be, for his mood and the matter inside him, it should be a dank winter dawn, dreary and all a-drizzle; or it should be a starless dark. It should be of a piece with his jeans, the clam of them when he puts them on; did he piss himself? There’s no urinous lift when he drags them over his cratered calves, but there is the vinegar of long-spilled drink. His legs feel horrible inside the denim, like sea-squirts that wish they were something else. His movements set off an internal commotion, liquidy grumbles inside, and a full sentence of farts is unleashed; a verb and a noun and a splattery cadence and he clenches his arse against a follow-through. The noise stirs the woman on the bed and his name emerges from that briar of hair:
—Adam?
—It’s alright. I’m going to get some tea for us. Go back to sleep.
—What’s that horrible smell?
—Must be the bog. I’ll be back soon with some tea.
He stands, the moist jeans low on his hips, watching the woman, waiting for the shape of her body beneath the duvet to lift and recede again in sleep’s breathing. When it does, and when small whiffles and sucks are sounding from beneath the hair, he quietly finishes dressing and looks around for the handbag, or the purse, and sees it on the floor at the side of the bed. On the side he slept on. He squats and unclasps the catch as softly as he can.
Money, first; a few notes and some change. He pockets the lot. A few keys on a fob, a wooden wide-eyed owl with I NEED A HUG on it. Tissue-balls, cosmetics. No phone. A photograph of two children; smiles and party hats. A boy and a girl, the girl in a pretty pink dress, the boy in a yellow t-shirt with a dinosaur on it. Caught in mid-laugh, they are; maybe the photographer made a joke. Or maybe there’d been some joyous surprise. Adam studies the picture for quite some time then returns it to the purse and returns the purse to the floor. Stands and leaves the room.
He is in a hallway, on the ground floor. Evidently a shared house; by the front door is a low table with a mess of letters on it, many different names on the envelopes. Amazing this, really, to blackout so soon into the binge; he cannot remember what he drank or who he drank it with or even for how long but the quantities of all must’ve been sizeable. That, and the old junk-damage, the general ruin; easy it is to tap back into the empty wells. There is little of the woman in the crawl of his recall; a neck-bruise, a garbled story of a fight with a boyfriend. Nothing of a meeting, or much conversational stuff, or emotional click, not even a flash of sex, if anything resemblng that had taken place although it must’ve because of the ring of rubber. Addicted from an early age, only hostages have ever been taken. And true there had been no rocks or powders but derangement brings about a levelling. All that is not ‘I’ is made same in that state and in a world never to be tamed or understood or managed in any degree but that which can, at the same time, be tucked into a pocket or concealed in a sock.
He shuffles through the letters, holds a few up to the light, but they all look like either bills or promises of easy credit, all the same thing, nothing that looks like, say, a birthday card. No treasure, no booty. He takes the cloud of himself outside into a cloudless day, already sowing heat. Over the sloping concrete sea defences, on the other side of the road, will be the sea, but there is nothing in there for him. Just wet and smelly it is. He takes his phone out of his jacket pocket but it is lifeless; battery dead, then. This is how it starts, the falling apart – with forgetting to charge your phone. Something so small. A necrotising microbe, and only when the meat starts to shear off the bones do you realise what’s happening.
The sky above the sea remains flat and blue so he turns away from it and turns left, towards the train station. Here, low above the bog and borne from its weathers, some small clouds hang, buds of fluff that offer no faces or figures, no matter that he studies until the dry sting of his eyes forces him to blink and look away and cool his face in a cupped palm. No shining light, nothing hominid, neither a voice; not even a mutter of zephyr through the couch-grass, so breathless is the morning. Some birds, that’s all. Maybe if he had’ve stolen that photograph. That of the happy children. Ripped it up and put the torn pieces back in the bag. Wiped his arse with it. Burned it. Drawn hideous—
His headshake is vigorous. He tightens the focus of himself around the needing core that he both orbits and emanates and takes his body onto the station platform. It is empty; only he stands on it, in his stinks. This morning should be dank. The sky should be full of angered
shadows and spitting rain, but the summer shows no intention of decelerating its intensity and the planet and everything on it is pinned in seared space.
Jetsam:
A vegetable furl of sea lettuce and dulse and bladderwrack’s grey grapes and a traffic cone and a plastic crate marked SALMON and a corpse. Some starfish going mushy, quick-rotting in the heat, the orange ocarina of an empty spider-crab carapace and this corpse. Here between the sea and the dunes in which once a little boy was made and next to the giant yam of a log is this body. Crabs at it, picking on the blood-pudding fingers and the black face. Sand-fleas flicking around this dead human shell. Gulls descend, the light from the sun in their reptile eyes, land and tuck and begin to bow and stab. They raise their curved beaks as they gulp. When the child scampers out of the dunes and disturbs them they rise and cry, those cries the keenings of shame for what they’ve just done, the big and bloodless wounds they’ve inflicted. For a moment a small shadow is cast over the carcass, laterally across the midriff bulbous and gravid with gases. Crabs raise their claws in defence.
—Mam! MAM!
—What, cariad? What is it?
Sounds of puking.
—Oh God! What is it? What’s wrong?
—It’s a man! It’s a man! Stinks!
More retching. The crabs fold themselves down and resume their picking, or most of them do – a few scuttle off the body and scurry towards the vomit – their claws at delicate work, a harvesting of exquisite dimensions. The plates of their mouths plap moustachioed across each other, minuscule chunnering below the stalk-eyes.
—Come here. Stay with me. Come away. I’ll call the police. The woman’s voice getting fainter. —Police please … Ynyslas sands. There’s a, there’s a body …
Further words lost in the squabbling skrikes of the re-descending gulls. One, big and black-backed, rips a shred of scalp away, a frill of white hair attached and for an instant this bird gives itself a wispy goatee beard.
IT FEELS TO Cowley as if, at the peak of every thrust, his bell-end bangs against a half-digested Chicken McNugget; there’s something gristly up there. He can feel it. He’s aware of the urban legends about the sweetcorn kernel but he imagines something much worse when he withdraws. A chicken-skin hood: an onion ring: Jesus fuckin Christ, the horrible extrusion of a limp French fry like some kind of parasitic worm.
And plus there’s Bernie’s toothy leer opposite, at the other end of Jac the Bird’s back. Biting his lower lip with them grey fangs, his hands buried in Jac’s shoulders and oh Christ is he holding a fag in one of them? Cowley closes his eyes. Hears Jack the Boy somewhere behind him blosh over his own hand with a heurgh and then, after a bit of panting, the whining begins:
—That’s enough now, boys bach … let’s leave it there now eh …
Jac the Bird tilts her head back, away from Bernie’s crotch, and words leave her in a screech:
—Shut the fuck up Jackie! Don’t listen to him boys! Carry on! Give it—
Other words plugged as Bernie thrusts again. Cowley opens his eyes. Hears his own grunty breath. And there’s also the telly on, what is it, must be Stars in Their Eyes or something because is that Harry Hill dressed as Morrissey? Singing ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’. The air in the room thickened with salty smells and kind of gloopy as if they’re all caught in a long-neglected goldfish bowl. Bernie goes a-huh, a-huh, and Jack the Boy starts to sob somewhere in the gloom. Here we go again; returned. The vile mud into which you hammer, way up inside, the grease and bits of gristle. Cowley closes his eyes. Just think of the friction. His hips slam forwards three times, bringing a loud HO! from Jac the Bird and Cowley catapults some slippery bit of himself up inside her and he pulls out and settles panting back on the heels of his trainers and he will not look down at himself but there is a lifting whiff. He doesn’t look, he can’t look, but he can feel Bernie’s grin and thumbs-up at the other end of Jac’s jerking back. Jack the Boy’s voice comes out of the haze:
—Why do I do it … I can’t help meself … why do I do this …
Another a-huh from Bernie again. Welsh hillbilly Elvis. For an instant, in Cowley, it is all okay, it has worked – there is a level smoothness, a landscape for the birth of him and the death of him and the inevitability of both, released from any needs, from those that shriek most of all. This is detectable in the electric snowflakes that can be seen blizzarding on the insides of his eyelids but then he opens his eyes once more and he sees, on the screen, a figure appearing from light, obviously a man dressed as a woman because the shape is all kinds of wrong, a special sort of inaccurate, but there it is, the surrounding glow – a taunt and a haunt, both. Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be … gone away. Offski. Out of this fuckin place.
Cowley wipes his dick on the sheet and gets off the bed and pulls his jeans up. Jack the Boy is slumped forward in his seat, his face in his hands, muttering to himself. Bernie gives a holler, horrible to hear, and Cowley sees Jac the Bird rolling away and wiping her face with the back of her wrist. She finds half a spliff from somewhere and lights it. The satiated 8 of her Buddha-ing the bed. Whatever it is on the TV starts to sing ‘Lady Marmalade’.
—A moment, Cow, says Jac the Bird.
—Na says Cowley and shakes his head, although whether her words were a request for him to stay a short while longer or just some kind of observation he does not know.
—This you off then, is it?
—Got something to do I have.
Jac the Bird blows out smoke. —See you next week then. Same time. And tidy, that was, by the way.
Bernie’s hand rises from behind the bed, where he’s collapsed, in a drained farewell. Cowley just leaves, without even checking his pockets for his things but he can feel the weight of them against him – the coins and the keys at his hips, the clunk of the song-machine against his left pectoral. Outside the house it is a humid night-time and the street lights’ glow hangs syrupy-thick. Gulls call in the upper dark. Leaning against a van Cowley rolls a smoke, old bubble-neck again, what are the fucking odds. His thirst is massive. Distract: everything comes down to that. Maybe it always did. Even before.
This is the part of town, drenched in a molesting presence and arm-pitty in the heat, rows of close-packed terraces spoking around the church, that is big in Cowley’s dreams, and he does dream, Cowley, badly at times, the size of him, the scars on him, brute back to boy sometimes just before dawn and all alone in bed whether she sleeps beside him or not. He has woken whimpering out of these streets down which he runs and the church which has loomed at him from fog. And the man in the cape like vampiric wings. The man with the everywhere-hands and the meaty bludgeon beneath his cape, the man gargantuan on the church roof. Always this dream; not every night but always to return. And too the hyperventilation condensing on the slick windows bordered by mildew, the bedroom high on the hill and forever kept damp by the shadows of Pen Dinas. Shame in that room, burning, and impotence. So deep that it has been known to bring vomit, in that deeper darkness just before dawn. In a silence torn by the yelps of vixens in the sharp tangle of the hillside’s gorse.
At the doorway to the pub Cowley finishes his smoke and enters. Telly on in the corner above a small loud crowd at the horseshoe benches. Steve behind the bar.
—Brains Dark Cow?
Cowley nods.
—Can’t, mun. It’s off.
—Why bother fuckin asking me then? Feelin Foul.
Steve puts a glass beneath the Felinfoel pump. —Missed you the other night we did.
—Did yew?
—Them Lavins. It all kicked off just after you left.
Cowley gives a look around the small room. —I see no boards up, Steve.
—Na, well, it didn’t go that far. But you were needed. Could’ve done with a bit of back-up like.
And there are some marks on Steve’s face; a graze above the eye, a faint discoloration on a cheekbone. Nothing that cannot be forgotten about and dismissed with a snort.
—I was neede
d somewhere else. Cowley makes a big dent in the pint. Thinks of what he’s just done, where he’s not long had his dick and makes that dent bigger. —Another one, butt. This one’s not touching the sides.
They’re a loud bunch, beneath the TV. They’d fallen quiet when Cowley entered but now they’re at it again, laughing loud and in that teeth-baring way of mockery. Four of them, one with hair the colour of copper. These four and Cowley and Steve in the small pub, nobody else. Ynyslas sands on the TV screen and a man looking serious at the camera:
—What’s going on yur?
—Darts team from Llanbadarn. Night out. Well, day out. Been in here all afternoon, they have.
—Eh?
—Them four. Darts team from the Gog.
—Na, mun, on-a telly.
—Oh. Steve puts a full glass on the bar. —Body washed up at Borth. Some old feller. Reckon it’s the same old boy that fell off Trefechan Bridge.
Cowley drinks. The word, or the sound of the word, out of the copper’s gob – sabotage – flashes once in his mind, in pink bulbs. —Ey questioned me about that, ey did.
—Who did?
—Fuckin coppers did. Cos I worked on it for a bit, didn’t I? Tightenin bolts n stuff. Cunts called me in for questionin.
—Why? What did it have to do with you?
—That’s what I said. Tried to say I’d vandalised-a fuckin thing.
—Why would you do that?
—I said that as well. Arsked em what’s a fuckin point. Told em it’d been put up fuckin shoddy in-a first place. Cunts.
That laughter again, a blurt of it. The red-headed one’s voice has gotten louder and sloppier and he’s leaning over the table in a gesture of quiet intimacy that is at odds with his volume:
—Fuckin insssssatiable, boys. Four fuckin times, tellin yew. Fanny, gob, arse.
—That’s only three.
Broken Ghost Page 18