Eddie nodded.
‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’
‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.
‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’
We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.
‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’
I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.
‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’
I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.
‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’
I threw away a chunk of the evening.
I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.
III
In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.
Someone had been sick on me in the night.
Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.
She was at my house, waiting for me. She made me a cup of tea and made me have a shower. After the shower she sniffed me and told me to take my clothes outside and burn them.
‘Don’t bother getting out of them either, you drunken bastard,’ she said.
I had a feeling she was upset about something.
‘I’m sorry I was drunk,’ I said.
‘Drunk? I can cope with drunk boyfriends. They’re easier than sober ones. At least they’re honest. But there’s drunk and there’s paralytic. How did you get home?’
I didn’t know. That had fallen out of my head.
‘I knew it,’ she said, scrunching her face. A scrunchy face on the girlfriend means, Sam’s in trouble.
‘We went to the park,’ I remembered. ‘There were ducks.’
‘Lovely. You and Jack went for a stroll in the park. I was driven home by Eddie Finch, who has always wanted to be a rally driver. How do I know this? Because he drove me home at seventy miles an hour, going sideways for a lot of the time. He has fog lamps and bumper stickers and roll bars. There’s you, puking all over the wonders of nature, and there’s me, being driven home so fast I got there before I went out. Of course, I had to sleep with him. He’d driven me home, it was the least I could do.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘I may be. We’ll have to see.’
‘How many kidneys do you have?’
‘What?’ Judy went to the living room and came back with a cigarette. She had started smoking after going out with me for a few weeks. I’d tried to give up but it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t tried to give up. She claimed she didn’t smoke much. If she didn’t, either my cigarettes were evaporating or we had some woodlice in the wainscoting that were going to have chest problems when they got older.
I didn’t know what wainscoting was. I thought it was something low in the house, around the level of skirting boards. Or was it on the roof? I wasn’t sure. I did know that I shared the house with woodlice. I presumed they were busy eating the floorboards from under me. If you went into a dark room and switched on the light, there would be one or two woodlice in the middle of the room, heading for nowhere in particular.
Woodlice have an interesting life cycle. As I understand it, based on personal observation, there are four stages in the life of a woodlouse. Firstly there is the not-existing stage. You don’t see baby woodlice, perhaps because they’re the size of molecules. You do see them when they get to the second stage, which is pretty small woodlice. Then they become pretty big woodlice, and then they become unmoving woodlice that turn out, on closer inspection, to be empty shells. If you turn them over, all of the workings have gone. They’re empty. No legs, no feelers, just shell. How do they get to the middle of the floor when they’re empty? Why do they go to the middle of my living room floor to die? Where do their insides go?
All of these questions. Woodlice made less sense than women. Silverfish were also peculiar. Every now and then one would turn up in the kitchen sink, zipping about and looking at the leftovers in the plughole. You can’t catch silverfish. I’ve tried. They’re too fast, and if you do catch one, you open your hand and there’s no silverfish. There’s a little patch of silver powder. Woodlice turn into empty shells when they die, but silverfish go one better. They turn into glitter dust. I’ve been plagued by strange insects ever since I moved into the house. Perhaps I was cruel to them in a former life.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Judy asked.
I knew this question. It didn’t have a right answer. If I told the truth – that I had no idea what she’d been talking about because I’d been thinking about woodlice and silverfish – I’d be in trouble. If I lied, she’d ask me what she’d been talking about and I’d be in trouble when I didn’t know. There are a couple of wildcards for this – decorating the kitchen, say, or buying some new curtains for one of the rooms upstairs – but you can’t rely on them.
‘I think I’m going deaf,’ I said, trying a new approach.
‘Going bloody mad, more like,’ said Judy. ‘Why don’t you listen to me?’
‘I have a headache.’
I did an expression of pain and contrition. Judy did an expression of grim disbelief.
‘What, and it’s got your ears? I have headaches and they don’t affect my ears. Is it something peculiar to you? Or a new plague that I’ll be reading about in New Scientist?’
‘I need an aspirin.’ I went to the kitchen cupboard where I store my painkillers. I hadn’t got any. ‘I haven’t got any.’ I sat down again.
‘You haven’t got any because you didn’t get any, and you didn’t get any because you didn’t pay any attention to me when I told you you’d run out.’
‘How did I run out? There was a full box in there.’
‘I had a couple.’
‘You did? Why?’
‘I had a headache. Now, I told Lynn I’d go into work this afternoon. So I’m going into work this afternoon, unless that’s going to put you out. I told you all about it yesterday.’
‘Oh yes,’ I lied, nodding. I didn’t remember that. Perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to her as I should.
It’s n
ot my fault, of course. Men will bear me out on this. Women don’t tell you anything all night long. Then on comes a programme you want to watch and off they go, rattling away, asking you about frocks and wallpaper and other things you can’t make sense of. It’s almost as though they’re interested in it all. I don’t know how their minds work at all. Sometimes I hug Judy and half expect her to vanish, leaving a big powdery stain on my clothes.
She went to work and I went to the shops to get painkillers. When I got back I offered the woodlice some, but they didn’t pay any attention.
‘I know how she feels,’ I told them, and they trundled across the draining board in search of bigger crumbs. I remembered what Jack had said. He’d said we’d murdered five people. He was obviously wrong. He’d got his wires crossed, which was bound to happen given that he was run through with them. I hadn’t murdered anyone. I didn’t have what it took. I got nervous just pushing woodlice off the draining board.
PART TWO
Sam, aged twenty
Chapter Five
I
I’m Sam. I’m twenty. I’ve been twenty for more than eight months now, and it’s been a short eight months. Time seems to be speeding up the older I get. I worry about that. I worry about a lot of things. Time used to run a lot slower. A year used to be a year and now it’s six months. Time’s devaluing. It’s being hit by inflation.
‘Take the time to think about it,’ my mother used to say. Not about anything in particular. She just used to say it. She still does. She’s got a stack of things she says that mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t think they mean anything to her, either.
‘In a bottle on the roof.’
‘Because Y isn’t Z.’
‘You’ve got more books than Jack Robinson.’
‘Take the time to think about it.’
So I took her advice. She says I never listen to her, but I do. I did about this. I took the time to think about time. It’s going faster and it’s leading us the wrong way. I read a lot. This is why my mother told me I had more books than Jack Robinson. I don’t know who Jack Robinson is but if he’s got fewer books than I have then he’s in a bad way. I have a friend named Jack who has a small number of books – ones with bright covers, mainly, thrillers about soldiers outnumbered in the jungle, war stories for boys – but he’s not called Jack Robinson. He’s called Jack Ives.
According to my mother, Jack Robinson hasn’t got much of anything. I have more shoes than Jack Robinson. I have more sleep, nights out, nights in, cheek and bad manners than Jack Robinson.
If I ever meet the poor bastard I’ll give him some of my leftovers.
Trouble is, these sayings came from somewhere. They meant something at one time. Language has got all fucked up. Not in the same way as time, which is going too quickly, or the weather, which passes too slowly, but it’s still in a tangle. We don’t know what it means. We know what we mean by it, but we don’t know where the words came from. Words can do a lot, properly applied. Words can do everything.
Everything is words. Everything is defined by language.
With training you can make words do different things. Point to different objects. Make those objects different.
I think that I can cheat death, to tell you the truth. I’m cutting through some things here. There’s more to it than I’m letting on. This is fair enough. I had to work to know what I know. I’m not going to hand out any details for free.
I came to magic gradually. I used to read fiction. A lot of science fiction, when I was younger, along with the usual dragons and wizards nonsense. I grew out of it years ago.
In all fantasy novels there’s a wizard and his name has one X and one Z and one C in it because all wizards favour the letters on the lower left-hand side of the keyboard. He has an apprentice from the town nearby. The apprentice is an adolescent boy as imagined by a nun; full of the desire to become better and go further and he’s never masturbated.
The apprentice’s father – a blacksmith – was killed by raiders led by a man with more Xes in his name than the wizard. The son wishes to learn magic so that he can go and beat the shit out of the bad guy and his henchmen. The bad guy is one-dimensional, his henchmen are just names.
The apprentice learns magic, goes on a quest, meets a maiden, doesn’t fuck her and doesn’t seem to want to, vanquishes the bad guys and has a chat with a dragon.
Not necessarily in that order.
I was twelve, heading into adolescence. I was reading these terrible novels, which seemed to have been transcribed from the minutes of role-playing games.
Don’t get me started on role-playing games.
I knew that all the dwarf bullshit was of no literary value. I wasn’t fooling myself. But come on, I was twelve and I could read books that claimed to be written for adults. My classmates could barely read the instructions for videogames.
I wondered why I read this nonsense. I studied my motives. If this sounds calculating, fair cop. If there was any point to adolescent angst, it was to motivate you. It wasn’t something to sit on the stairs and mope about. Here was this energy and this growth. What did I want?
What the heroes of those terrible fantasy novels wanted. What their spotty virgin readers, living with their parents at the age of forty, wanted. I didn’t want to kill the bad guys. I didn’t suffer from bad guys. They ignored me. My friend Jack was friends with bad guys.
I became friends with Jack when I was thirteen. I did it deliberately. I’m not going to kid you about that. I saw that he had a lot of friends of the unfriendly sort, and I learned what he was interested in – metalwork, mostly – and I pretended to be interested in it. I knew him a long time ago, my mother used to say. It’s one of the things she thinks I didn’t listen to. I don’t remember Jack before we went to school. Once we got to school, I needed him. Having a friend with bad friends saves you a lot of trouble.
Don’t go after the bad guys. Get them on your side. It’s easier and quicker and they always fall for it. You only need two or three phrases to start a conversation:
‘Call that a dog? That’s not a dog. That’s a fucking poodle. My dog’d fucking murder that.’
‘Won’t go as fast as the rally one, but it is the rally one. Got the same specs. They had to put a limiter on it or it wouldn’t be legal on the roads.’
‘Result. Course, if your lot had a defence it might have slowed us down. Still. Three-nil. Result.’
Once you know them, go out and drink with them. Out-drink them and they respect you. Get steaming and swear at everyone in the pub and they respect you. Get drunk and do anything and they respect you.
You have the bad guys on your side and you’re not sure about the fair maiden.
I don’t know about this. I put it down to teenage confusion, but the fair maiden hasn’t come along yet. Perhaps I want something else. Perhaps maidens aren’t my scene.
So, bad guys vanquished, fair maiden available but unused. So what was all the magic for?
What was magic ever for? Power. Power over reality, because that’s power over everything. Pointing bones and drinking potions, chanting cod-Latin phrases in the cemetery at midnight. All for the sake of power over everything.
I didn’t want to be the apprentice. I wanted to be the wizard. I wanted to be the one the apprentice went to.
I threw away all of my fiction. Both my novels and my personal fictions, my stories about who I was. I gave them up. I looked at myself and kept the essence. I considered where I wanted to go and threw away everything that wasn’t needed on the journey.
This was when I was thirteen. I was not a normal child. Not that I’m saying my family made me abnormal. I wouldn’t want to give them any undeserved credit.
I didn’t want stories about magic. I didn’t want the illusion. I wanted the thing itself. And I knew it existed. I had seen it. We all have. Not stage magicians, with their Charlier passes and their double lifts. Not the David Copperfields or the Siegfrieds and Roys of this world, with their mirror
s and tigers and cocoa-butter complexions. None of that was the real thing and so it was worthless. How could you believe in a magician who wore a wig?
There was real magic in the world. The texts aren’t as difficult to come by as you might imagine. You mention to someone that you’re interested in this or that, and they tell someone else, and you’re quoted a price for a book that isn’t generally believed to exist. The price is never much. I’ve got scars, true. I have done some things that would give a rent boy nightmares. I have done some things that a nightmare wouldn’t put up with. It’s all valuable experience. Everything is a lesson from the right point of view.
Little by little I came by knowledge. The real thing. Under all of the rituals and cults, behind the mask, between the lines. There it was, the true magic.
It is not something you learn in a day. There’s a price to pay. For every spell, a price. Little sacrifices. Cats and dogs. It’s difficult at first and then you come to understand that a cat is a small price to pay for the ability to levitate.
Okay, I can’t levitate, I admit. But I will cheat death. I can do that. I have the methods planned. I have the workflows sketched out and the critical processes shaded in.
There will have to be sacrifices. This is something that’ll take more than dogs or cats. You can’t keep the forces that be happy with the blood of domestic creatures. They prefer things higher on the foodchain.
There’s no room for sentimentality in this business.
I have a library, or a bedroom. It’d depend on who you ask. If you ask me, it’s a library. It has a bed in it, but then, so does the kitchen. My parents are sorting out the house. My mother has decided to decorate and my father is wearing old clothes and wishing she’d settle on a colour scheme some time before the next Olympics.
II
My father works in an office in Kingswinford. Kingswinford is a suburb of Dudley. People there think they’re middle class but the middle classes don’t sound like that. No one else on Earth sounds like people from the West Midlands. No one would want to. Listening to them you think: why don’t they blow their noses? Why do they add extra syllables to small words? Fire becomes Fi-ya. Here becomes He-ya. To even things out they drop chunks of longer words: didn’t becomes Day, wasn’t becomes Wor. Curry becomes compulsory.
Seeing the Wires Page 6