by David Wood
I wondered what I looked like, dogs eyes set into my skull. Did I look like some abomination? Some surgical creation? I would have to wear glasses when I was outside, if I ever went outside again.
I tried to look past him, saw the dogs and the walls. My brain refused to admit what it saw in those warm stones, blaming the inconsistencies on the untrustworthiness of my fledgling sight, but even then I sensed it was lying to me. I looked away, eyes drawn to the two dogs hovering worriedly behind Malachi. The two dogs I had chosen blindly. The two dogs. . .
I couldn't stand to look at them after I saw the mess I had made of their faces.
Equally, I couldn't cry for them, nor for myself. The Tin Man had made sure of that with his implanted blades.
Too soon, it hurt to see. I shielded my eyes, scared to close them in case the miracle was snatched back, scared to keep them open because of the black and white world they were evidencing.
Seven
Tell him,' one of the children hissed again, only it wasn't a child, not really.
My hand closed into a fist around the stone staff. I think I thought that I was mad, but I don't know whether that was my first thought. Whatever, it was stillborn. I do know enough psychology to get my head around one of the more simple tenets, however; madness is incipient. In identifying something as internal as my own downward spiral wasn't I also defying it? But if it wasn't madness, and my eyes were good enough to tell me the truth, then the children. . . the children were. . .
Trapped in the stone.
I don't mean that they were unmoving prisoners; it was worse, much, much worse. They were of the stone. Made up of the fragments and fissures, as alive as the stone itself was alive, embodied in the walls of the tunnel. As I watched, one pushed out a hand to me. I recoiled from the gesture, unthinking. These same hands had held me up, spun me around to learn who I was, comforted me as I thought of Aimee. The hand came out of the rock almost as if it were pushing through the thinnest veil of cellophane, the fingers and thumb the only points of contact pushing out through the stone. Stretching it until it should have ripped.
It looked like a hand.
The arm that followed it looked like an arm.
The stone offered no resistance.
Faces pressed out of the wall, the stone stretching hellishly over the brows and cheeks of children. When the mouths opened to call again, 'Tell him, tell him,' the skin of the stone didn't split or rupture in any way I could see, but still the words came out clear and crisp.
I knew I was shaking, and I knew it was impossible.
I had no way of telling whether they had eyes. Like the mouth, the skin of stone stretched across cavities bridging forehead and cheek, making a flat plane of the face. They could see me though, I had no doubt about that. They could see me.
'What. . . what are they?' I stammered, terrified because I knew what they were, deep down and with cold certainty, I knew what they were.
'Everything they appear to be. Children. Abandoned. Lost. Hurt. They come here, like the dogs, because they are drawn to us. They feel our pain because they share it in some small way. All of them have been hurt in more ways than should ever happen. They have lost their innocence and all that makes them children, and because of that they are welcome here.' He turned away from me. 'I know them all, even the new faces when they come. They are my children.'
I shook my head, not wanting to believe because some part of me knew it was the ugliest truth about my city and all of the others like it, and I hated the idea of being a party to its sickness.
'Are they ghosts?' I asked, stupidly, waving my flag again.
'Not ghosts,' Malachi smiled indulgently. 'Think of them as reconstructions of the spirit if that makes it easier, emotions unable to let go. They aren't all young, but they appear as children because it is the childhood that dies even when the bodies do not. It is childhood that bears the brunt of society's cruelty. It is childhood that suffers, that bleeds. You could talk to a man but you would see a boy because it is that essence the man retreats to when the world comes down. It is the little boy that shelters in the black room in the middle of the mind and shuts out the rest of the world. It is that part that dies, and yet it is that part that refuses to die.'
I wanted to say he was wrong, but I thought of my own childhood and how little of it I remembered now, and I couldn't say he was wrong at all. I could touch a few memories, but I couldn't feel them anymore than I could re-live them. As memories, they were dead, parcelled up neatly and locked away in a room labelled 'Too Young To Know Better'. I didn't have a key for that archive. Every now and then part of the child would sneak out to taste my life with that enthusiasm that had made growing up so much fun, but the adult inside me would track him down, drag him back to the room and lock him in the darkness, doubly alert now to any attempted escapes. Every new day it became that little bit more difficult to look at life with that same cock-eyed innocence I once had.
Malachi could see how much the faces disturbed me. I wanted to talk about betrayal, to carry our earlier conversation to its natural conclusion, but even with my new eyes all I could see were visions, hallucinations, really, of the most intense cruelty. Children in pain, being beaten, being abused, abusing themselves. I couldn't talk. I didn't have words enough to touch my feelings, so I made silence my retreat, understanding a little bit more of the story etched so heavily into Malachi's face.
I saw now why the old man had called sight a double-edged gift. 'Are they real?'
'As real as you are now,' Malachi said, softly enough for me to gloss over the inference. I heard it, but I wasn't prepared to think about it so I locked it away in another dark room inside my head, this one labelled, 'Do Not Open Until Christmas'.
'Do you mind?' I asked, shaking my old tobacco tin. He didn't answer either way, so I took it as an 'I don't mind' silence and started to roll myself another smoke. 'These things'll be the death of me,' I joked lamely, lighting up. Sometimes I think I'm allergic to silence. I drew deeply, and exhaled a dubious looking smoke ring and a contented smile. 'So when do I get out of here and back into the real world?' The smoke ring dissipated in the air between us, my smile following suite as I registered Malachi's frown.
'Tell him, tell him,' goaded one of the children again. I didn't look its way.
'Yes, yes,' Malachi muttered, irritably. 'In my own time. It is not to be rushed. Now give me time.'
'Tell him, tell him,' the chorus was taken up by more impatient voices.
I felt sorry for the old man, but I won't pretend I wasn't a little disturbed by his reticence. In my limited experience, people don't tend to shy away from giving good news. The kick in the teeth was so blatantly telegraphed that I knew it was coming well before it arrived.
Eight
Malachi kept his silence as we walked.
His chosen path took us on a guided tour of decay. After his reaction to my question, I was surprised our slow walk took us out into the open air.
I lifted my face to the sky, breathing deeply, tasting the air and thinking how fine it was to be alive. It was raining. A fine, gauzy drizzle that stung where it ran into the wounds around my new eyes. I blinked but didn't wipe them.
We emerged from the hill beyond Dog's Leap Stairs coming through a vault-like door set into the concrete that was seamlessly set into an illusion, so I hadn't been wrong in guessing Matthew's route. I descended the one hundred and forty steps with markedly more care than I might have a day earlier while Malachi shuffled ever downward without so much as a second glance, familiarity taking him beyond the need for sight. At the bottom of the stairs I turned to look back up the way we had come. For anyone looking up from The Side the entrance to the underground looked like part of the railway bridge it was set into. There was no indication that there even was a door, let alone what it led into.
It was late. I had no idea what the time might have been, but there were no people and no cars.
Malachi steered me toward an old redbrick office bl
ock on the corner of Lower Dene Street that had been empty for as long as I had lived in the city, and then on to a department store on Grainger Street that had closed down when I was seven. The stone facade was dirty and crumbling, filthy black where the grime of the exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke and acid rain had combined to kill its original beauty. Metal grilles were inset into each window, giving the old store the bleak majesty of a mausoleum. Letters still said WENGERS, but streaks of pigeon shit layered over and above the filthy black made them all but illegible to onlookers who didn't know that was what they said. I had never been inside, but my father had bought his first suite there and my grandfather had bought his first pair of football boots there, back in the days when the football boots came up over the ankles and the shorts down over the knees, so I felt a strange kind of attachment, loyalty, to the empty store. I remember making my parents smile by telling them I wanted to buy my first piano there. It had closed long before I had enough money, of course. I ended up buying a second-hand Bechstein baby grand from a shop in the new precinct – not quite as romantic, but the truth seldom is. It's still in the attic bedroom back at the flat, though I don't tinker about on it half as much as I used to.
That brought me to remembering my family, something I have kind of avoided over the years. Not for any bad reason, or any good one, I suppose. Grandfather used to worship jazz. He made pilgrimages to the Bag O' Nails in the 30's when the No. 1 Rhythm Club used to meet there, and to Café de Paris before Ken 'Snake Hips' Johnson was killed in the bomb blast of '41. He saw Art Tatum play at Ciros, Cyril Blake at Jig's Club and Gerry Moore at the 100 Club. But he never saw me play, and that makes me sad. Dad has seen me play a couple of times, but he hates jazz. He sits there stiffly looking like he'd rather be anywhere else while he nurses a whisky and ice. It's not the same.
From the deserted store Malachi led me through a series of circuitous streets, beneath yet another railway bridge, and then up Arthurs Hill. Our footsteps echoed eerily, the effect made possible by the absence of all other sounds. Behind the wall of new flats an imposing old grammar school building lay shrouded in more of that filthy blackness I was beginning to associate with disuse. The old school must have been quite something in its day, bustling with bodies and smiles and the raucous bravado of boys as yet untouched by the harsh reality of redbrick life.
It looked all the more disheartening for the rain.
Some of the windows had been bricked up, which dated the schoolhouse. There was no way of guessing how long it had been empty. It felt strange. Wrong. Haunted. Places like this shouldn't be left to die all alone, they should be torn down and replaced by something new and useful, where life can be pumped back into the vacant space.
Creepers and weeds choked up the steps, tendrils rooting into the mortar with such alarming regularity I was left wondering if the weeds were ever to die should the old building fall. Gutters made inconsequential waterfalls that spilled from the eaves of the roof, slicks glossing down the tar-black tiles, the closest nature came to perpetual motion, trickling water out over the begrimed stone walls. Puddles amassed in the shadows beneath.
I smelled the freshness of the dew on the grass; it was just one of a lot of things that made me realise just how good it felt to be alive. I remember reading a western novel about a gunslinger. One line always stuck with me. Facing down the end, the gunslinger just shrugs and says: 'Today is as good a day as any to die.' I was experiencing a similar emotion, only in reverse. Today was a good day to be alive.
That set me to thinking about my old school with its prefabricated walls and air-duct heating. How much longer would that monument stand? Five years, ten? I doubted very much it could survive longer. That type of construction harboured its own built in obsolescence. And what would take its place? Another school? An office block? A factory?
From the school we walked back towards the centre. The sun was starting to rise, but the rain showed no sign of abating. I didn't want it to. I liked it. It made me remember I was alive. For every ounce of discomfort it provided a pound of reassurance. We saw a housing estate on Rye Hill where flats and maisonettes were boarded up and dilapidated, layers of inventive and obscene graffiti overlaid by deadbolts and fireguards. Several boards showed the tell-tale charrings of localised fires. It was a fairly common phenomenon, kids high on solvents or something stronger, breaking and entering, arson on their floating minds. The entire estate was a dead-end. A place to be shunned.
We didn't stay long. The next landmark was the burnt out husk of the old Victorian arcade just down from Castle Leazes. Like the school, this emptiness felt wrong, but here the roof timbers were burnt and clinging to each other like frail fingers in a coffin embrace. The tiles had melted down, the sky visible through the joists. A pub sign still hung from the wall, one side charred into illegibility, the other barely readable with its picture of a stern Jewish Mother.
Amid the rubble, skips were full of the detritus of the arcade. Trace memories of the fire still clung to the frame; I could smell them on the wind.
'Why?' I asked, fed up with waiting for Malachi to explain. The old man's self-absorbed silence was starting to annoy me.
He held up his right hand and tilted it into the light so I could see whatever it was he wanted me to see. That was his answer. The light didn't help. For my eyes the streets were still places of no colour; the ruined arcade might have been a photograph from the 1920s, the gaslight snuffed. Light, I realised, or lack of light, made no discernible difference. My vision in the tunnels beneath the city was as sharp and clear as it was in the after midnight dark and the rising dawn. In daylight, I reasoned, it would be somewhat less than it had been before the Tin Man, but in darkness it had already proved itself by far and away superior.
I remembered, very vaguely, a wet Tuesday morning spent listening to a biology teacher talking about rods and cones and the human eye, about how they reacted differently for day and night vision. In there one small answer lay, I had no doubt, but it was locked away as unremembered, and I doubted very much whether I would understand even if by some fluke I could remember.
So I let it go.
There was little to see in the creases of Malachi's hand, or so I thought, until I looked closer. The skin of his palm was akin to that of his face, transparently lacking in any true pigmentation. I put that lack down to years spent locked away underground, out of the light. But that wasn't the confession he was offering. No, like the streets we had walked, the buildings he had taken pains to show me, Malachi's fingers were suffering their own decays, cracks fragmenting what should have been skin. His index finger had crumbled through to the calcite of the bone, though not yet the marrow.
'The estate,' he said. If he was reading my mind, was I really meant to believe that there was some kind of symbiotic link between the destruction of the housing estate on Rye Hill and the leprosy in his fingers? Did he think I was that gullible? 'Not gullible,' he sighed, rolling back the cuff of his smock to expose the length of his forearm. Like his fingers, the muscle beneath his translucent skin seemed to be undergoing the most hideous of dissolutions. Ragged muscle and strips of fatty vein powdered. 'Declan, I am what I appear to be. I don't claim to be anything more. I prosper as the city above prospers, and I suffer as the city above me suffers. I could tear open my smock and show you a cavity in my ribcage that is the result of demolition men in Paradise. I could use that cavity to show you a city within me, where I am tearing open my smock to show you a cavity in my ribcage that is the result of demolition men in Paradise. I could use that cavity to show you a further city within that me, where again I am tearing open my smock. You could fall into me and keep falling through a hundred versions of me. A thousand. You could just keep falling.'
'Bullshit,' I said, shaking my head. Too fucking much! I wanted to scream it into his face. Even after everything I had seen, the idea of a man with a city inside him, with a man and a city degenerating ad infinitum, like a twisted version of the Russian Doll puzzles, was too
much to take in.
I couldn't bring myself to discount it wholly as idle boasting, though. He was a surprising man. Maybe he could show me the place he spoke of, but what would it have been? Mesmerism? A trick?
'You need to see to believe?' He said, pulling open his smock. I looked at his face, but there was no emotion there, no disappointment. I looked down from his face. A thick mat of wire grey hair clung to his breastbone before it caved in on a dark cavity. My eyes were drawn closer, sucked in by the illusion he was carefully weaving. I picked out points of light, felt myself being drawn towards them. Something happened then; something I wouldn't swear to, but it needs to be said. I saw flickers of colour. It goes against everything I have said, but dogs’ eyes or no, I saw colours. Gold, fine filaments that crackled with life, bristled with the dancing currents of electricity, though each one sparked in a closed circuit. There were three that I saw instantly, then I felt the wind streaming through my hair and I was falling. The circles of gold grew and separated and suddenly more colours were racing to meet my eyes; true colours, greens and blues, white, and reds; pockets of angry red. Churches were erected on the gold. I saw streets and people and each owned a colour, not so much a halo as an aura, a radiance wholly their own, uniquely theirs. I tasted waves of hate surging off the red, calm drifting from the blue, goodness from the green, but I fell towards the white and the white was mine. A single spot of whiteness. I snapped back into myself, nausea climbing up from my gorge. It was a struggle to wrench my eyes from the monstrosity of Malachi's stomach, but I did it.
The sudden bout of dizziness was all but over-whelming.
Saying nothing, Malachi rolled up his other cuff. This arm was perfect, the skin almost opaque. I didn't understand what it meant. The significance. I didn't understand any of it. I was out of my depth and drowning, and here was this old man waiting expectantly for me to learn how to swim. As with most people, there is a thick part of bone midway between my temples that sometimes takes a fair amount of bludgeoning before it lets the message seep through. Unlike most people's, my bone is confirmed hydrophobic.