Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘They’re dangerous and they’re full of horrid, slimy things,’ one of the Mothers added, a moonfaced creature with her hair in braids. She was wearing a Hans Christian Anderson smock embroidered with a cartoon crocodile. She pouted a Charlie and stuck out her chest. The crocodile flexed its rubbery jaws.

  ‘They’re my ponds!’ Charlie shouted. ‘I’ve planted them and stocked them with fish.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’ve stocked them full of flaming flamingos, you stupid selfish bastard! I want them filled!’ Baxter screamed. ‘They’re death traps. I’m going to have this wilderness paved—I will not have my children crawling about in the dirt! If you thought more of your career and less about your stupid hobbies you could have been a junior board director. Daddy had plans for you. He was going to make you something important.’

  ‘I quit!’ Charlie shouted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said he quit,’ a tall, cadaverous girl in a mottled rabbit skin coat shrilled at Baxter.

  ‘I’m no longer working for Pangloss!’ Charlie shouted. ‘I’ve quit! I’ve finished. I’ve walked out.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Baxter said nervously. ‘He never mentioned anything to me… ‘

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘But what about your wife and child?’ another of the Mothers demanded. ‘You can’t leave them to starve. Get a grip on yourself, man. Have you no common decency?’

  ‘They won’t starve!’ Charlie said. ‘I‘ve planted my early potatoes. We can cut the winter spinach and kale. I‘ve already lifted the leeks and potatoes.’ If the year went as planned they’d be harvesting beans and carrots, cardoons and onions, melons and quinces, bunches of chervil, chives and lovage. They’d be making sweet cordials, fruit wines and vinegars, sauces, chutneys and relishes.

  ‘I’m not eating that filth!’ Baxter shouted. It was preposterous. He was joking. ‘Are you joking?’ He must be joking.

  ‘We can be self-sufficient!’ Charlie shouted back at them. ‘We can feed ourselves.’

  ‘He’s trying to grow his own food!’ the cadaver shrilled and was suddenly convulsed by a high-pitched twittering laugh.

  Charlie lost his patience and shook his spade at the Mothers. He was trembling. The fury swelled in him, stretching his spine, and gave him a sinister strutting gait as if he were walking on tiptoe.

  ‘Look out!’ the cadaver cried. ‘He’s found a shovel. Quickly, someone, phone the police!’

  ‘He’s gone crazy! He’s gone crazy!’ the moonfaced Mother shrieked, clutching at her braids.

  Her companions grew alarmed. They conducted a ragged retreat through the middle of the bramble patch, snagging their skirts and scratching their arms and legs.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ the moonfaced Mother wailed triumphantly. ‘Are you satisfied? I’m bleeding!’ She held up her arm and punched at the sky with her fist. Wounded. A savage attack on an innocent woman. She could probably have him arrested and forced to pay damages.

  ‘I’m going to call daddy!’ Baxter shouted and the Mothers started running for the safety of the house.

  ‘You want me to sit here all day sugging my fugging thumb?’ the bulldozer driver called after them.

  ‘No!’ Baxter shouted. ‘Start working!’

  ‘If you start that machine again—I’m warning you—I’ll take your head from your shoulders!’ Charlie roared, raising the spade to his chest and advancing on the machine.

  ‘Do me a fugging favour,’ the driver grinned.

  He switched on the engine, jolted the bulldozer forward and knocked Charlie to the ground. The spade went spinning into the brambles.

  When Charlie tried to stand up again he found the driver looming over him, snorting and sweating, his fists raised against his face. They circled each other for a few moments, heads thrown back, chests puffed out, feet stamping the soft soil, like a pair of clumsy storks engaged in a courtship dance. Then the driver took a swing at Charlie and caught him a glancing blow on the chin that rattled his teeth and made him bite his tongue.

  ‘You fugging fugger!’ the driver leered, encouraged by the sight of Charlie bent forward clutching his face. ‘I’ll fugging kill you.’

  ‘Get out of my garden!’ Charlie hissed, wiping his mouth. The back of his hand was smeared with blood. He lunged at the driver, slamming both fists against his chest and knocking him to the ground.

  The driver struggled into a sitting position, shook his head as if he were checking that none of its contents had shaken loose, looked up at Charlie and laughed. He was a man who enjoyed a fight.

  He was destined to have the fight of his life when the time came and a firestorm swept through his lodging house. Stupid with sleep, he’d wrap himself in a wet sheet and blunder onto the smoke-filled staircase, find himself trapped by flames and fall to his death through a broken window. If he’d known what waited for him in the future, he might not have wasted his strength fighting Charlie.

  ‘You caught me by fugging surprise!’ he whistled, clambering to his feet. He was full of admiration. He limped forward and stretched out his hand to congratulate his opponent.

  Charlie accepted the hand, the driver jerked him off balance and smacked him smartly on the nose.

  Charlie sneezed blood and sank to his knees. The driver grabbed him by a hank of hair and pushed his face in the mud. Charlie started to suffocate. He thrashed out blindly, clutched at the driver’s legs and managed to pull him down. They rolled together through the holly hedge, kicking and punching, scratching and biting, until they fell into a pond.

  The shock of the freezing water seemed to finish the battle. They broke the surface and floated together like drowned lovers, tangled in each other’s arms.

  ‘Get out of my garden or I’ll set the dogs on you… ’ Charlie croaked at last, slapping the water with his fist. His knuckles were raw and swollen. His face was covered in blood.

  ‘What fugging dogs?’ the driver panted. ‘I don’t see no fugging dogs!’ He struggled painfully to his feet, dragged Charlie ashore and kicked his head.

  57.

  Where was Einstein when Charlie needed him? Where was the whiskery warrior while his master was tilting at windmills? He had stolen into the house and was scampering lickety-splick up the softly carpeted stairs. He knew what was wrong. He understood the cause of the uproar and the reason for the destruction. It was wrapped in a cotton vest and a bonnet of antique lace. It was sleeping safe behind the prison bars of its fancy cherry wood crib, dreaming its mammaphile’s dreams.

  He tiptoed into the bedroom, leapt at the crib and dragged the blankets to the floor. The baby blinked at the dog and blew a string of milky bubbles. Einstein seized him by the leg and tried to haul him overboard. But the baby was heavy and his limbs seemed to stretch like elastic. The dog pushed him into a corner and tried to nudge him through the bars. He balanced himself on the top of the crib and attempted to pull him to his feet. Nothing seemed to work. The baby gurgled and bared his gums. He enjoyed this tug o’ war. Finally Einstein braced himself, clasped the baby’s head in his mouth and flipped him into the air like a rabbit. The infant somersaulted from the crib and tumbled into the waiting blanket.

  Einstein jumped down, seized a corner of the blanket and hauled the baby across the floor. To the dog’s sensitive nose, the child stank like a Camembert. But he could be thankful, at least, that Victor didn’t put up a fight. He planned to take the repulsive gnome and throw it into the nearest pond. He saw nothing wrong in this murderous kidnap attempt. He was a dog. He knew the fate of unwanted litters.

  He had dragged the baby from the bedroom and was trying to work out a method of rolling the burden downstairs when Baxter and the Mothers came running into the house. They glanced up at the dog and the burbling baby and all together they started to scream. Einstein crouched at the top of the stairs and snarled down at them.

  He watched Baxter move, very slowly, to the staircase and clutch at the banister for support. She seemed to
glide forward floating on air, and a strange light came into her eye. He recognised that light. It had shone in the eyes of the waiters in the kitchen of the Trumpet Hotel when they’d found him curled in a corner with Arnold’s hand in his mouth. It was cold, malicious and full of murder.

  He stopped snarling and folded his ears. He shifted his position slightly and pretended to study the opposite wall, as if he hadn’t noticed the baby caught in his paws.

  Baxter was barely an arm’s length away and he was about to launch himself over her head and into the arms of the waiting Mothers, when she stopped her advance and squatted down on the stairs.

  ‘Good doggie,’ she whispered. Her voice sounded cracked and dry. ‘Good doggie.’ She held out her hand. Her fingers were shaking. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’

  He gulped and slapped his nose with his tongue.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she whispered as her fingers grazed his whiskers. ‘Stay there.’ And she bared her teeth in a ghoulish grin.

  Her fingers snapped at his throat and he vaulted over the banister. He yelped as he hit the floor, sprang to his feet and scuttled towards the front door.

  ‘I’ll kill it!’ Baxter screeched. ‘I’ll kill it!’

  One of the Mothers kicked out at the dog and very nearly cracked his skull. He whistled with pain and fell in a heap. He lay there, dazed and trembling, while the others ran forward to trample him.

  ‘Don’t let it get away!’ Baxter shouted as she came running down the stairs with the baby in her arms.

  ‘Someone fetch some rope!’ one of the Mothers cried, snorting like a buffalo.

  ‘Hit it with something!’

  ‘Get the animal into a sack!’

  Trapped in a circle of kicking legs, Einstein surrendered, quivered, whimpered and died. He closed his eyes and his jaw fell slack. His tongue unrolled on the floor.

  ‘I think it’s dead,’ the Mother in the Hans Christian Anderson smock said with satisfaction. She poked him cautiously with her shoe. ‘It must have thrown a fit or something.’

  The Mothers looked rather disappointed and turned their attentions to the infant who, exhausted by so much excitement, had puked down his vest and fallen asleep. While they simpered at the sodden blanket, Einstein seized the advantage, sprang back to life and shot through the open door.

  The garden was ruined. The bulldozer was cutting a trench around the house, churning the turf into thick coils of mud, smashing down shrubs and hedges. The driver, stripped to the waist, his body streaked darkly with mud, saw the mongrel dart through the garden, threw back his head and laughed. He’d expected a rampaging Rottweiler or a team of bone-brained Dobermans. Einstein scrambled across the battlefield, through a tangle of roots and the choking haze of diesel fumes, towards the summer house. Behind him he could hear Baxter running in pursuit and the Mothers shouting for revenge.

  58.

  Charlie, retreated into the summerhouse, was crawling under the makeshift bed. He wasn’t seeking a hiding place among the scraps of food and the cobwebs. He was searching for his old metal cashbox.

  The battered black box had lain undisturbed for many years at the back of a bedroom wardrobe. Baxter, if she had noticed its existence, had never expressed curiosity about its history or contents. When Charlie had taken up residence in the garden, the box had followed him. He prised open the lid to reveal a few yellow newspaper clippings announcing the opening of the Church Street Gallery; thirty small nude studies of Baxter, completed during the days of their courtship, watercolour, charcoal and pencil; the only letter she had ever written to him, green ink on perfumed paper, declaring everlasting love; an unframed photograph of his mother as a young woman standing in her father’s grocery shop, a bundle of Skirt Lifter magazines, a woman’s shoe and a .380 Beretta automatic. The weapon felt clumsy and cold in his hands. His father had kept the gun, hidden away in the barber’s shop, as a defence against intruders. It was heavier than he expected and he wasn’t sure how to use it.

  There were voices shouting from the house and Baxter stood panting at the summerhouse door. She glared around the room. During the chase across the garden she seemed to have grown taller and more terrible, like an uncorked genie, her body inflated with rage. Her hair had been blown into wild tufts that stood from her scalp like a head-dress of feathers and her mud-stained dress was splitting its seams.

  The sight made the fugitive Einstein whimper and cringe beneath an armchair.

  ‘Get up and get out!’ she shouted at Charlie and her wattle shivered with indignation.

  Charlie looked at his wife and said nothing. His eyes were empty. His face was a scratched and bloody mask.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Baxter shouted. ‘We’re finished! I‘ve had enough of you!’ She waved her arms and clenched her fists. Her breasts heaved like barrels on a tossing sea.

  Einstein squeezed out a bloodchilling howl, poked his head from beneath the chair and snapped at Baxter’s ankles. Baxter yelped and kicked back at him.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Charlie said softly. He lurched forward with the gun in his hand. His feet felt heavy, dragging against him.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Baxter demanded. She was looking at the Beretta but she didn’t believe her eyes. ‘What is it?’

  Charlie wasn’t listening. He had more urgent business. She tried to hold him back but he somehow pushed past her and staggered onto the wooden veranda.

  The bulldozer was turning in clanking circles, its rusty tracks throwing out sprays of wet gravel, its shining blade cutting a trench through the garden. The driver glanced at Charlie from the safety of his cab, shook his head and bellowed with laughter. What a fugging performer. He didn’t know when he was beaten.

  ‘Switch off the engine!’ Charlie shouted at him.

  The driver took time to peer down at Charlie, caught sight of the weapon and scowled. 'Drop that gun, you fugging lunatic!’ What a fugging lunatic. He’d found himself a fugging shooter.

  ‘Switch off the engine! I’ll shoot, I swear I’m going to shoot!’

  ‘Fug you!’ the driver yelled. He swung the bulldozer around in a cloud of diesel smoke and rumbled towards the summerhouse.

  Charlie watched the heavy machine accelerate towards the veranda. A group of Mothers were running forward, spilling from the safety of the house, shouting and screaming for Baxter. The air was filled with smoke. The ground vibrated beneath him.

  Charlie raised the Beretta, took careful aim at the face behind the mud-splattered windshield, braced himself and squeezed the trigger.

  59.

  ‘Is that it?’ the Deep Time Mariner asked him.

  ‘That’s it,’ Charlie whispered.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Charlie said. The gun wouldn’t fire. I don’t suppose it was even loaded. I stood there pulling on the trigger as the bulldozer hit the veranda and made the summerhouse capsize. The whole damned building blew apart, the walls burst and the roof came down.’

  After that terrible morning he had taken Einstein and fled the ruined garden, driven away by Baxter and the Militant Mothers. He’d been too proud to ask Fat Harry for help, so he’d picked these gloomy rented rooms and settled down to salvage what remained of his life. He knew he’d been wasting his time. He knew that he’d made some big mistakes. His life, to that moment, had been a rapid downhill struggle. But everything was going to change. He’d found himself work cleaning tables at a Haughty Hamburger Restaurant™ and as soon as he’d saved a little money he was going to travel, he was going out to explore the world. He didn’t know that the world wouldn’t wait for him.

  ‘This little life!’ the Mariner hissed in disgust. ‘The planet trembles on the edge of disaster and this is all you have to show me?’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Einstein growled fiercely. ‘Did you hope to lay all the sins of the world at his feet? The world is made of men like him, scratching a living, marking time, regretting the past, dreading the future, all of them clinging to little
lives of quiet desperation.’

  The ghost of Charlie’s mother came floating through the back of a chair. She had found her missing shoe. She skipped lightly across the room, smiling a secret smile, and embraced the ghost of the barber who had just emerged with his arms outstretched, through a bulge in the opposite wall; and together they vanished, hand in hand, dancing down through the garlands of roses in Charlie’ s threadbare carpet.

  Einstein, suddenly maddened by the pressure of the barometer in his skull, began to bark and run in circles. The storm had returned to crush the city. The sky swept down like a boiling ocean, breaking in waves against the buildings, bending windows, squirting through keyholes, drenching attics and swamping cellars. Flagstones buckled and walls were collapsing. Asphalt and stone broke like icing sugar. The furniture, floating through basement windows, was shipwrecked in the foaming streets. Alarm bells clattered, sirens wailed, horns were blaring and men were shouting.

  Beneath the city the sewers exploded, rattling all the manhole covers until at last with a deafening roar, they were borne aloft like dinner plates on spouts of sour brown gravy. Along parades and avenues, through every wretched street at alley, the underworld threw up jets of turds that jumped like ornamental fountains.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this weather,’ the Mariner said, tearing at the ivy to peer through the shivering window.

  After the flood came the fire. Gas pipes, loose in the oozing clay, began to rupture, fuel tanks fractured and started to burn, electrical circuits were snorting sparks. For a hundred miles the cars, trucks, buses and squads of emergency vehicles, trapped in the terminal gridlock, were promptly abandoned by their screaming drivers as fires broke out all around them.

  A chemical warehouse caught alight and silently spread a blanket of poison over the northern suburbs. To the east and the west gas explosions ripped up streets and brought down terraces of houses.

  Somewhere in the south of the city, in a painted house behind a tall security fence, the wife of Ambrose Pangloss burst into flames inside her life support machine. The conflagration triggered all the fire doors and sprinkler systems, trapping Ambrose in his study and drenching him with rusty water. When he broke down the door to reach his wife’s bedroom, it was too late. The love of his life had turned to ashes inside her steel and glass coffin.