by David Wood
Oh, God. . .
Liar. I didn't know whether I heard it aloud or whether it was inside my head, one more madness for me to wrestle with, one more demon of my own, but I heard it somewhere. I know I heard it.
Spasms wracked the clergyman's tortured body while the word echoed inside my head. Liar. Was this the price of a lie in this game of mirrors and lies? What had he done to deserve this fate? What deceit matched this cost?
He fell to his knees, his hands clawing at the bloody pulp that had been his face, silent screams echoing inside this insignificant reproduction of heaven.
I moved towards him, hoping for all the world that he would give up fighting and die without so much as realising what that hope meant in terms of me.
I could see the substances in the smoke better now, could see the solidity that my brain was desperately trying to deny. They were like hands, they really were. Painfully thin limbs that stretched back to the guttering body of the candles, talons that clawed out of the hands. . .
Ah, sweet God, that I had been a coward and turned to flee. But not this time. Oh, no, not this time. No, I reached his side and without thinking cradled his dying body in my arms, my lips stumbling over the few uncomfortable words my deeply buried religion insisted upon. He looked at me with the eyes of damnation, spasms and the tiny tremors of their aftershocks taking him down deeper.
He was dying and I couldn't bear the weight of my betrayal. I had brought this to him. I had condemned him. And for what?
The coldness of the smoke matched the touch of death it harboured. I felt it against my skin, pulling at the roots of my hair, my eyes.
I pushed him from me and lurched to my feet, aware suddenly of how the smoke seemed to have been cradling our huddled shape; a cocoon or a sarcophagus; no claws tearing at my flesh, though. Always someone else’s.
'Take me!' I screamed then, tearing frantically at my shirt to bare my chest. 'It's me you want. Come on you bastard, take me! I know what you are, you bastard! Come on, rip me apart! Come on! Do it!'
I thumped at my chest, clawed at my own skin, the sudden ferocity of my anger scaring me. My outburst rent the sanctity of the church as effectively as the claws had gone through the dead man's skin, but my goading only seemed to send whatever it was back closer to wherever it had come from. The trailing edge of the smoke had begun to disperse now that the damage was done, the vapour losing its consistency as air worked its own form of magic on the talons.And then the will was gone and the smoke was no more threatening than candle smoke.
We were alone together.
The light in the old church was sickly, tainted by the stained glass to the colour of the clergyman's blood.
I collapsed to my knees, my head in my hands. Part of me wanted to end it all right then, and that same part of me wanted to climb up into the belfry and step out into nothing, to dash my head off the cold stone, but I didn't honestly believe anything so simple could banish this gateway into Hell.
I was damned, my very presence damning those whose lives I touched. An hour ago this man had had nothing to fear, no enemies in this world, and then he opened the door and I walked into what was left of his life.
I had killed him as surely as if my own hands had worked the savagery done to him. My threats, my insistence at finding the truth. God, how hollow that word sounded inside my head. The truth. Like it was something worth dying for. Killing for. Let’s put the crime in context. Like it was something worth killing for.
I couldn't bring myself to touch him, to share contact. Backing away, I turned toward the doorway back out into the street and started to walk quickly. Guiltily. I wiped my hands of his blood, rubbing them on my jeans and smearing dark handprints down my legs, but the stains were ingrained in my palms. Not so easily washed away, my guilt, not so easily appeased. A scouring pad of steel wool and my own blood and still the taint of guilt, the shadow, would be on my hands. His was a face to join my rapidly accumulating procession of dead. The tramp, the bag lady, the evangelist, the boy, and now the clergyman. Faces seared into my palms to contort and scream as I clenched my fists and hammered at brick walls, always with me. My dead.
The door to the street opened and a stooped old woman with wirewool hair and a headscarf shuffled through seeking the comfort of God's house, her straining bags weighing her down. Speckles of rain peppered her shoulders. Her washed out eyes flickered over my face, over my body, over the blood and the ruined body slumped awkwardly against the base of the altar.
There was a moment of hesitation on her part, a moment where her brain refused to piece together the jigsaw of images arrayed before her, but there was no such hesitation on my part. I pushed past her, hitting the busy street at a run, pushed through the bodies, her hysterical screaming ringing in my ears with the echoing screams of my dead.
You're Still Alive, She Said
One
I ran from the end of the rainbow.
The shame, the guilt, was like an incendiary in my temples. I could feel the seconds ticking down. I could feel the nearness of the explosion, that last second where the world went from red to black. I staggered but forced myself on, made my legs work. I was so sure every finger in the street was pointing at me. I so sure that every eye was turned my way. That every eye saw the blood on my hands. That the lips and tongues knew, that the words were chasing me. I knew unreasonably that the blind eyes of the television screens behind the plate glass were reflecting my face, that the deaf ears of the radios in the shop windows were chanting my name over and over. The blood was pounding in my temples, the moment of detonation ever closer.
I felt so alive, and yet I felt so dead. Ripped inside.
I had to force my way through the snail of shoppers. I couldn't run through the press of bodies as fast as I needed to. The blackness of St. Thomas's was hounding me, chasing me, the doubt, the truth, reaching out for my heels to trip me, to bring me down, but I couldn't let it. I ran harder, pumping my arms and legs and not caring who got in my way. I pushed them aside, ploughed straight into backs, shouldered past sides and straining bags, and kept running from the end of the rainbow, terrified that the truth would finally catch up with me.
And every step of the way that voice resurfaced to goad another second out of the timer inside my skull with its one word, Liar.
The word was everything.
It left a sour aftertaste in my thoughts.
Suddenly the street was incredibly claustrophobic and the bodies were there to bring me down. There was no other reason for their being there. My sight was spinning, dizziness swooning up on me. I slipped, thought for one heart-stopping moment that I was going to fall, then caught my balance using the wing of a black cab to keep me on my feet and running.
The cabby shouted at my back. I didn't hear his words, only his voice, a blaring sound that for one heartbeat brayed louder than any other sound in the street.
I felt the wetness of the rain mingle with the blood and tears already damp on my cheeks. My breathing was tearing at my lungs. My muscles burning. And I was slowing. My legs tying up.
I came to the crossroads at a stagger. Wanted desperately to keep going but had to catch my breath. Hands on knees I faced down all three alternatives and didn't like any of them. I didn't see what other choices I had. Left, right or straight on, it made little difference. I forced myself to keep on moving, risking the lights because the road was empty.
I felt horribly conspicuous with a dead man's blood drying on me. I had to prioritise. I needed a change of clothes and a shower, glasses to hide my eyes and somewhere to think – anything else could wait. People were going to remember seeing me, I couldn't help that, and the Police were bound to come looking soon. I had minutes and no idea how many of them. I couldn't afford to be around when the boys in blue descended; that would mean having to explain the inexplicable when the only answers I had were for all of the wrong questions. I could see their doubting faces, and I understood enough to know they would think I was crazy, and that I
had killed the poor priest in St. Thomas's, and how could I say otherwise, who would believe me?
I was a dead man, if you will pardon the pun.
I jogged to the phonebox outside the wine stained canopy of the bookshop on the corner, knowing who I was going to call before I got to the payphone.
Shaking, I fed a palmful of silver into the slot and tapped out my own number back at the flat. Be in, Aimee, come on, I prayed, be in. The phone rang, once, twice, three times. On the forth my answerphone picked up. I listened to my hopeless impersonation of Marvin The Paranoid Android telling me to leave a message if I must, then the tone. I hadn't realised just how awful it was. I felt incredibly vulnerable in the glass box, too exposed. I couldn't stop myself from fidgeting. I must have looked as guilty as Hell. The sooner I was off the streets the better.
'Aimee, it's me. Pick up the phone.' I waited, but she wasn't in. I kept the message brief: 'This is going to sound pretty whacked out but you are going to have to trust me. Get whatever you can carry, clean clothes, stuff like that and bring it around to Ciaran's. I'll meet you there, okay.' And as an afterthought, 'Everything's going to be all right, I promise.' It sounded clumsy and deceitful, but what was one more deceit? Christ, it was going to bad enough for her getting a message from beyond the grave.
A leather-clad kid slammed the glass of the door, trying to impress the wraith at his side. It must have worked because I nearly pissed myself. Leather Jacket leered and licked the glass. My heart was still tripping twenty to the dozen. The wraith loomed over his shoulder, her white skin flaking where the makeup was powdering. She smeared blood red lipstick on the glass and then on her paramour. I turned my back on them both and hung up.
I called Ciaran next. I still didn't have a clue what I was going to say when he answered the phone: 'Hell-oh?'
'Hi, Ciaran,' I waited for the sound of my voice to sink in. I could hear the soft echo of the open space at the other end of the line, movement of other people, another familiar voice asking who is it? then:
'Dec?'
What to say. . ?
'Yeah, surprise. . .'
The was a short silence, far from long enough for him to gather himself after the initial shock of hearing my voice. When he spoke he was slightly calmer:
'Jesus, Declan, where the hell are you?'
'I'm in a callbox in town,' stating the obvious felt so reassuring. Ciaran would know what to do, he was my big brother and for as long as I could remember he had always known what to do. It's the second unwritten rule of our brotherhood. The first being that a big brother acts as friend and protector. I felt a burning need for both right then. 'I need a favour.'
'Anything, you know that.'
He sounded so relieved to hear from me I could have asked for the modern day equivalent of John the Baptist's head on a sliver plate and he would have found a way of getting it to me.I thought you'd beaten me to the punchline for a while there, kiddo. He didn't need to say it, it was there in his voice.
'I'm in trouble way deep. I need somewhere to crash for a couple of nights. Get myself cleaned up. Talk to Aimee.' There wasn't a great deal more I could say over the telephone. I didn't have to.
Two
Jesus, Dec. . . Your eyes?'
I didn't know if it was intended as a question or statement. I touched them tentatively, feeling for the wetness of fresh blood. Nothing there to be scared of, I lied unconvincingly to myself. If anything the scar tissue around the ruined orbs was lessening. The healing process somehow accelerated. Asking no questions, I said a silent thank you.
I needed a mirror, but self-examination could wait.
Ciaran grabbed a hold of me in a fierce embrace. We shared tears and tremors; his tears, my tremors.
I gave him that second, then eased away, holding him at arms’ length. I made him look at me while I looked at him. Saw how frail he was. How pale; waxen. Hollow eyed and gaunt. The scars of his illness had become painfully apparent in the months since I had last seen him, the heartbreak decline had turned his limbs into sticks and bones, the fat and muscle stripped from what had been a lean, taut body. That he had the strength to get out of bed was a miracle in itself.
I think that was the moment when I finally accepted my big brother was going to die.
We had all known for a long time, but knowledge and inevitability didn't lessen the blow.
His sickness mocked him, his fighting against a lost cause, pain-killers an ally he could not have done without.
He was in the teeth of something that was going to shake him until he died.
There was no alternative, no happy ending.
The disease that stalked him was no respecter of youth or beauty, gift or geas.
Words simply weren't enough.
I traced the track of a tear on my brother's cheek before pulling him back into another tight hug.
'I need a coffee,' I murmured, for want of something better to say, leaving so much more to be read into those four words.
Ciaran nodded, able to cope with the reality of strong black coffee far more comfortably than he could the sudden apparition of his drinking partner.
We moved through to the kitchen.
Ciaran had made himself a wonderful home amid a warren of black and white stills and publicity shots for more old movies than could ever have been screened at the old Imperial. I stopped to gaze deeply into the glassy eyes of Rita Hayworth captured in that moment of peeling the long sheer black gloves from her hands. It was an image to stir an emotive cocktail of memories; things shared between brothers: Like the long conversations about wishes and the future that dominated growing up, me obsessed with my music, Ciaran captivated by the images of celluloid, talking about cuts and takes and angles and light in a way that I could never hope to follow. To me, the movies were grand illusions that pretended at depth but lacked exactly that, because when I stood beside the screen as the lights came up I saw that flat expanse of white and knew that my senses had been duped into thinking there was something more there. More to it. Illusion or delusion, it mattered not.
Like most people, we both compromised on our dreams.
Ciaran found his talent in words and became a master of illusion in the one way he could never have expected. A poet for the modern world. He bought himself a movie house and moved in.
Until I saw the Imperial I never understood how anyone could want to live in what was essentially a fleapit. It had been destined to come down after its last incarnation as a Bingo Hall had failed to keep the wolves from the door. Ciaran saw it and fell in love with it. It was as simple as that. Within a month he had taken over the mortgage repayments and had some college friends working on plans to convert the old cinema into the home of his celluloid dreams.
I left Rita to say quiet hello's to Vivian Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, and of course Marilyn. Fliers for Polanski's Death And A Maiden and Demi Moore's latest movies interrupted the gallery of yesterday's heroines. Uma Thurman's black wigged head was a new addition. A life-size cardboard cut-out of Bela Lugosi, arms aloft in classic vampire blood-sucking pose, stood sentinel over the kitchen door. The clash of movie cultures was all the more amusing because I knew how much Ciaran loved to collect other people's junk. Just as long as it had some tenuous link to the movies it had a home in his mausoleum of the moving image.
'What's going on, Dec?'
Three
Do you believe in miracles?'
A look of uneasy confusion toyed with the lie of Ciaran's pallid face. 'Do I believe in miracles? Jesus, Dec, what is this, some kind of joke?'
'I need to know.'
He looked at me, and maybe he glimpsed the real need driving my question. I hoped so.
'Okay, okay. . . Miracles. . . Oh, boy. . . Like the bread and fish trick, you mean?' Ciaran offered a patronising little smile, shaking his head in that annoying little jiggle he adopted when he was humouring me.He was trying to make light of something he couldn't understand; was afraid to understand. Typically Cia
ran. I nodded, but I was thinking more along the lines of Lazarus. I very nearly said as much, but not now, not when he was like this.
'How much has Aimee told you about what's been happening to me?'
'Very little. Nothing that made any sense. The crash. You getting stabbed. She thought you were dead. We all did.'
I took his hand, adding the touch of flesh to the evidence of his eyes. 'This isn't a conversation for the kitchen, believe me.'
'What's happened to you, Declan? You look like shit.'
'Probably because I feel like shit. Look, let’s go and sit down somewhere.'
Four
Do you remember when we used to lie on our backs in the yard and look up at the stars? That big black infinity peppered with dots of silver? We used to think that anything was possible then. We had dreams. We had imagination. Nothing was going to hold us down. The stars were our map to the possible and we were going to float free and drift among them. We imagined walking on the moon and flying faster than the speed of light. We were explorers. We believed things.
'We believed in magic.'
'We were kids, Dec. Kids believe in all that shit.' Ciaran said, dismissively. Ever the pragmatist seeking out the secular explanation. Strange the way his mind so readily embraced celluloid illusion and yet was so dismissive of that innocent magic that was so much of childhood. I imagined him as a father, ticking off a list of fatalities: Santa Claus, dead; the Tooth Fairy, missing in action; the citizens of Oz starving through famine and drought. . .
I pressed at my temples, smelling the fresh coffee and wishing the person in the chair facing me was that ten year old boy who woke up with angels and played imaginary games of tag with King Kong and Godzilla, not the man that the boy had become… a man with the magic drained out of his heart.