Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  He retrieves a lighter from his pocket and clicks it. There’s a black spark and a black flame appears, wavering, liquid like ink. He snaps the lighter and the flame disappears. The end of the cigar is a black hole. He sucks on it contentedly and the black hole crackles, growing stronger. I feel its gravity.

  Charlie, he says. Colombian snow. Bogotá marching powder.

  I choose this moment to slam my knee into his groin as hard as I can. A satisfying thud and as he starts to go down, groaning, I turn and pound my right fist into the face of Juan. A squelching sound as his nose flattens and white blood jets into the air and across my face. I turn for the other one but he’s already pulled a revolver and he rams the muzzle into my face. Yelling. He wants me to kneel on the floor. Kicks my legs from under me, shoves the gun against my forehead and cocks it. The other two are righting themselves, coming up from the floor. The third man still shouting. He’s going to shoot me. I lie very still and wait for the supernova, for the black hole. It doesn’t come. Instead, they start kicking. I draw myself up into the foetal position to protect my internal organs. They work me over, kidneys, face, knees and ankles. I notice somewhere here that my vision has righted itself, that dark is dark and light is light. Dull pain, mounting like a tide that comes over the sea wall and rushes towards the houses, sweeping away the cars, sweeping away houses, people clinging to flotsam. I’m tired of clinging. I discharge myself into the water.

  And Kate spills from my chest and I’m on top of her, lips and tongue miraculously springing to life and racing across her breasts. I ram her into the tired grass. Her heels against my buttocks, teeth in my shoulder.

  *

  Yan-a-dick, the town. A stamp collection wrecked on the estuary, sherds of brightly coloured roofs ripped along the river, pages rifling in the constant wind, green fields in a thousand colours smeared across the sky. Matted flames of the sea. Coal, iron, steel, chemicals, shipyards. People springing from the stubble fields where their fathers were sown and cut down and burned.

  Tean-a-dick, the demolition. The houses where we were born, the nests we lined with black trinkets. Ripped down in piles of rubble. Twelve weeks. The Cape of Good Hope standing like a sentinel on the corner, almost alone. Concrete, rubble, brick, cinder, bulldozed away like crumbs. Oh god oh god oh god, she shouts.

  Tether-dick, the sky, in thirteen shades of steel and glass and iron and concrete and chemicals and rain. And rain. The biggest thing I ever saw, heavily muscled and kneading like a pair of buttocks. The sand and the sea and the fields and the roads glistening in the wet weather, all bleeding into the sky. Blood dripping from my head and down to the clouds where it splashes in clots.

  Metherdick, blood dripping from my head and down to the sky where it splashes in clots. No, that’s already happened. What is metherdick?

  Blood dripping from my head and down to the stars where it splashes in clots. I smell cigar smoke. Another lash of cold water across my body. I start to shiver uncontrollably. Get him up again, says the voice. The oily aromas of cigar smoke and shit mingle. I need a cigarette. That’s it. Cigarettes.

  Metherdick, cigarettes. Fourteen left in the crumpled packet when I offered one to Kate. We were in her bed upstairs in the pub while her dad lugged barrels in the cellar. She flicked ash at me, playfully. I looked at it, grey and dusty on my pale skin. Dabbed some onto a fingertip and smeared it on her forehead. A star drawn from ash, against her brown skin.

  A star drawn from ash, against her brown skin. She had a funny cloak thing, dark green and rounded. I suppose it was some sort of sixties poncho. I put it around her naked shoulders. You look like a lapwing, I said, a green plover. Unlike most girls, she knew what I was talking about. Plover is an old nickname for a whore, she said. Did you know that? But I like them, I said. The wings are so round and soft, they hardly make a sound. Like green owls in the daytime.

  She reaches over and jabs the raw end of her cigarette into the side of my neck. Somebody else is pinning my arms behind me. Pain rises up like the snout of a mole. My flesh is burning, like a tallow candle.

  So, says Kate, in her sexiest voice. Are you going to tell me that name, or am I going to play some more join-the-dots?

  I want to tell her that there isn’t any name. And I want to tell her that I’m sorry. About leaving her, not once but twice. But the cigarette sears into my cheek. She keeps it pressed there while I scream.

  Why do we have to play this game Yan? she says. You’re always the same. You have to follow your nose. I went through hell when you left me, when we were eighteen. It took me three years to work you out, and when I’d finally done it, you came galloping back from Belfast and I fell for you again.

  She drags on the cigarette and blows the smoke into my face. I feel the caress across my eyeballs.

  Shall we burn off your eyelashes? she says. I feel them scorching and shrivelling. Shame if we slipped. We could burn a hole in your eyelid.

  She stands there, framed in the stark light which pours from a single electric bulb above our heads. No doors or windows. The floor is concrete, slippery with my own ordure. My blood and my piss.

  Kate, I manage to say, imploring. And then I can’t say any more, because I don’t know the answer.

  You have this streak of piss through you Yan, she says, laughing. Everyone thinks you’re the big man, because you’ve got the brains and the looks and the reputation and the fucking blarney, and you’ve read all them books until they’re coming out your jacksy. You’re everybody’s mate and nobody’s, aren’t you? But it all counts for nowt when you disappear, like some migrating bird, with this electricity in your head that no-one else can hear. You can’t help it. It’s just faulty wiring.

  She kicks me, hard, in the groin and I double up with pain.

  You’re going bald, by the way, she says. The thing is big man, you’re a fucking coward. You play at being married, you play at being a father, but it’s not enough for you, is it? You probably think it takes courage to take off on a wing and a prayer. But maybe it would have been braver to stay put. Sticking at our marriage, being there for Dan. Saying no to the wiring in your head. That would have been real courage, and we could have done all that together, the three of us. But it’s okay. Me and Danny are moving on without you now.

  Tears are running down my face. I tell myself it’s because she’s burned my eyelids.

  Anyway, a side issue, she smirks. Those drugs Yan, darling. Four foreigners turn up in an unregistered boat. You and Horsey and Fat Dave and Stupid Joe. The four stooges. What are we supposed to think? Just tell us who your contact is?

  It takes a moment for me to realize. Four of us.

  Juan, give him a caning, she says.

  Four of us. She steps back and another woman takes her place. I’ll be buggered if it isn’t big Janet from the Red Lion. She’s wearing a cotton dress and a pastel cardigan.

  You’re looking bonny Janet, I say.

  She smiles, then takes a rubber truncheon from behind her back and smashes it into the side of my head. My eyes explode and the room stretches sideways like an elastic band. I’m on the floor, shaking violently. She stands astride me, legs encased in beige tights. She carries on whaling me with the truncheon. The room becomes still more attenuated.

  Four of us. She doesn’t know about Fabián. They haven’t got Fabián.

  Yan, the pylon, walking out with a kit-bag on his shoulder.

  Tean, Kate Murphy, sitting alone in her room. Many-paned windows, light flooding in from the enormous sky.

  Tether, the boyfriend, dead on the road with his face burned off.

  Mether, the river, jammed with silver fish, gaping for breath.

  Pip, the towers, falling in one graceful curve.

  Lezar, my father, kicking the legs out from under me and cocking a cigar against my head. My father, on the bed, gasping for breath.

  Azar, death. White wormholes from a man’s nostrils. Black flame from a lighter.

  Catrah, the cards. I’ll turn th
em over now love, she says. You have a gypsy look about you son. If I was a few years younger. She flips them over, one by one. The hanged man. The hanged man. The hanged man. The hanged man. That looks fairly conclusive then, you say.

  Borna, the magpies. They like to collect black things. Black jewellery in the nest. Whitby jet, like Queen Victoria. Hopping through the hedgerows in spring flipping the naked chicks from the nests and swallowing them in one.

  Dick, the army. They like to collect black things. Rifles glittering in the black sun.

  Yan-a-dick, the town, sinking into the marshes. Tean-a-dick, the houses of Haverton Hill, sinking to their knees. Tether-dick, the sky, with thirteen ripped holes in its face. Metherdick, the cigarette, burning a hole in my eyelid.

  Bumfit, the sheep. Straggling over the marshes with dirty shaggy fleeces hanging off them. Wild yellow eyes with a black slit at the centre. They browse on the salty grass, on the mounds of rubble and nettles, on the angular towers and flare stacks and refraction columns, on the bright river and the metallic sky, on the crumbling houses blasted by the breath of the North Sea, on the metal flowers of the pylons and the high-voltage brambles coiling across the country. I imagine grabbing the greasy wool of the belly, hoisting myself into the forest of fleece, white wires springing from the pink and bulging abdomen, ticks and lice as big as birds, bulging with blood. I notice my hand grabbing a tussock of nettles and wrenching it from the ground and feeling nothing. Kate is banging the back of her skull against the ground.

  Mr Thomas, my name is Colonel Barriga.

  It’s the same mild-mannered voice as before. He sits on a chair in front of me. Look, he says. There is nothing extraordinary about me. I’m just doing my job. I’ll go home in an hour and play with the children and bathe them and put them to bed. When I was younger I excelled in swimming, so much so that my teacher once called me a true son of Poseidon. But I was never quite good enough to reach the national team.

  He chuckles with pleasure at the memory.

  I look at Barriga. He is indeed, average. Average height and build, podgy around the stomach and thighs. Black hair, cut short with a side parting. A round face with full lips, clean-shaven. Cigar smoke swirls around us, harsh and guttural.

  Look, he says again. Nothing extraordinary about me, and nothing extraordinary about your situation. Don’t take the fall for the big guy. He is the one we want. Not insects like you. Help me out with some information and I can spare you a great deal of torment. Otherwise, I will turn you over to Juan again. I understand he finds particular enjoyment in feeding people their own genitals.

  I begin to weep because everything is clear. I feel the burns on my chest and neck and face beginning to blister and suppurate. Every inch of my body is livid with purple bruising. Fingers on my left hand are black and obscenely swollen. They must be broken. I work my dry tongue into holes where the stumps of teeth have been wrenched out. The stench of my sweat and excrement is terrible, lacerating. I begin to weep, copious and unashamed. I cannot even raise a hand to my face. The tears crawl down my cheeks like slugs.

  Bumfit, the sheep. The flock has gone and I can’t get any further. There’s no more hope. I’ll just lie down on the ground and let the sand settle over me, grain by grain, until I’m buried and forgotten about. I will sleep. Yes, I will sleep.

  But now comes a piping call in my head, that nobody else can hear. Brimming from numberless throats, high and fluty with that husky quality, that sweet tang of seaweed like a bourbon whiskey. I open my eyes and see them flopping above the fields on rounded wings, black and white wings, stroking the air like eiderdown. They begin to alight all around us, sunlight fizzing from the bottle-green backs and white-furred bellies, bobbing crests expressing curiosity. Lapwings. Green plovers. As restless as the sea, furrowing as they feed, like the dark earth turning under the plough. And every few seconds one will flip into the air, owl wings jerking randomly, at once spastic and masterful, scrawling a fool’s parabola with that whiskey-bitter cry. How many of them? I begin to count, Kate jerking beneath me. Yan, tean, tether, mether, pip. Lezar, azar, catrah, borna, dick. Yan-a-dick, tean-a-dick, tether-dick, metherdick, bumfit. Yan-a-bum, tean-a-bum, tethera-bum, methera-bum. I feel my balls clench and know what’s coming.

  Jiggit. Kate springs a leak and the air rushes out of her as she shrivels up like a dying balloon and thick fluid roars from my cock in pulse after pulse. And the lapwings take to the air as one, sherds of green glass in a thousand colours smeared across the sky, the sun leaping from their throats. And I’m lifted up with them, above the green field where a naked girl lies, above the brown river and the bright and tattered roofs, above the towers and the pylons and the ragged powerlines. There’s a cumulus cloud like the belly of a great sheep. I have only one chance. I grab the white fleece as it passes and climb into the foetid darkness.

  The tears crawl down my face like slugs. I’m lying on the floor again. The furniture has gone. I wonder whether I imagined the conversation with Barriga. Juan is above me, pissing into my face. His cock like a rubber truncheon.

  Okay, I say, I’ll talk. Get Barriga.

  *

  I’ve been thinking. About your dream. The one where –

  The one where I die.

  Aye.

  What have you been thinking?

  You said the smallest thing can put you on a different track. Well, how would you know if your destiny switched tracks like that? You could be alive one moment and dead the next.

  Or vice versa.

  Yeah, obviously.

  You don’t know. When you are dead you have always been dead. When you are alive you have always been alive. The box opens. Daylight floods in.

  It’s a week since any of us have seen daylight. I blink at Joe Fish and Horse Boy, the rips in their faces, cigar burns weeping liquid from the angry centres. Dave looks suspiciously unharmed. I scowl at him and he flinches. We’re in the yard of the detention centre, high blank walls all around. Barriga cuffs our bruised wrists and opens the back of an unmarked van. There are no windows. We pile into the stuffy darkness and the door slams and then we’re driving, the suspension tormenting our bruised joints.

  Yan, says Horse Boy.

  He’s just a voice in the dark. Like a kid calling out for its dad.

  Aye.

  How did you get through? he says.

  Counting.

  Counting what?

  Sheep, I say. Lapwings. How about you?

  I thought about South Georgia. When I fell off the roof and stopped breathing and then Sarah brought me back. I was dead, wasn’t I? Dead for two minutes. And then I opened my eyes and saw you all against the sky, looking down. Like I was born again.

  Alleluia, drones Joe. The lad’s found God.

  That got me through, says Horse Boy. The thought of being reborn.

  Come forth Lazarus, says Joe. Crackles with bitter laughter.

  We bounce around in the back of the van and the air gets hard and close and sour with petrol. It goes to your head.

  Where are we going? says Horse Boy.

  Somewhere quiet, says Joe. Where they can put us against a wall and then bury us in a lime pit.

  No, I say. We’re going to the hotel.

  When we get up to the room Barriga takes the key and locks the door behind us.

  So, he says. We’ll wait for your contact. This is where we find out whether you’ve been a truthful boy or not.

  What did you tell him Yan? hisses Joe, and I don’t reply.

  We wait, and down below us the city crawls with life and cloud shadows move across the buildings. The room is panelled in orange varnished pine boards, garish and tasteless. I’m breathing heavily and sweating and every part of my body is grumbling with pain. It would be heaven to lie down, here and now, on this bed, and go to sleep. Let Barriga shoot the lot of us. Sleep. Instead I look down at his patent leather shoes nestling into the electric blue shagpile like a pair of scarab beetles.

  You’re running out o
f time, says Barriga. He glances at his watch and I see that he’s sweating too. Takes that little Mauser machine pistol out of his jacket and cradles it in his arms, like a new baby. Time dribbles away down the plughole. When you’re in the southern hemisphere, Decko said in the pub one night, water swirls down the plughole in the opposite direction. Been here all this time and I never took the trouble to check it out.

  Okay, says Barriga. No more time. He’s not coming, is he?

  He brings the Mauser down and runs his fingers along the top of the barrel.

  Look, I say. You want money? I sit on the bed and open the bedside drawer, rummage for the screwdriver. Barriga levels the gun at me and clicks the safety off. I raise my palms to reassure him. Then I insert the screwdriver between two pine panels above the bed and pop one of them out and reach behind it into the hole we scraped into the wall plaster. Slowly I bring out Joe’s thermos flask. I look at Joe. His hand is flat and mine is forked.

  Scissors cut paper, I say. He shakes his head and laughs silently.

  I slowly twist open the cap and place it on the bed, followed by the inner seal. Barriga looks bored. I reach inside and find the bankroll of notes and toss it onto the floor by his feet. He looks down, then one of his shoes comes down on the roll like he was crushing a snail.

  You have no respect, he says. He bends and picks up the roll, holds it between thumb and forefinger. Pulls out his lighter and sparks up the end of the bankroll like it was a Havana. Tosses it onto the bed. Then he levels the Mauser at me and swings it round to cover the other three.

  I’m afraid I am going to have to kill you now, he says. Be so kind as to move over there against the wall.

  His voice is mocking, fleshy mouth twisting. I swallow, hard.

  You didn’t think I was really going to let you go, did you?

  He smiles, apologetically.

  We’re herded together in the corner of the room, the four of us. The bankroll smoulders on the bed, black smoke frothing from the counterpane. I can’t look into their faces. Instead I stare pointedly out of the window, at the sprawling town, the changeable sky rolling towards the Pacific. Think of my unfinished bowl of caldillo, down at the Canta Luna. I would give anything to finish that bowl, those few mouthfuls of steaming food. Time moves like a key turning quietly in a lock and a door breathing open. My attention is taken by a flock of birds, spiralling over the streets. For a moment I could swear they are lapwings, shifting points of iridescence loping over the unfamiliar streets. Are there lapwings in Chile? The cry comes, like the hand of a small child slipping into mine, tears springing to my eyes.