by Jeff Noon
For the first time, a Napalm failed me.
At 1.00 p.m. I tuned into Radio YaYa once again, expecting to hear Belinda telling the story of her life, my life. I must have been very desperate.
Gumbo YaYa is grinning through his layers of hair. ‘Excellent broadcast, Belinda. For a beginner. Now watch. Shit, I haven’t felt this good in ages.’ We are travelling back to 11.46 a.m. on the morning of that same Saturday.
Gumbo and Belinda are alone now, Wanita has vanished into some deeper corridor. Gumbo is well-zonked on Cherry Stoner, and he looks almost normal as he points to the walls where the Xcab roads are flickering. ‘This is the Hive-map up and running. The yellow dots are the cabs, the black web is the roads.’ Gumbo works the controls so that the whole map tilts through 180 degrees. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? We can view it from any angle, any position. Keep your eyes on the road, driver.’
Now Belinda is travelling down Oxford Road just like she used to do inside of Charrie. This time at a distance. ‘Where’s Columbus?’ she asks.
‘Columbus is the whole thing taken together. That’s his weakness, you see?’
‘Why?’ Belinda is intrigued.
‘The Switch has become too powerful. He can no longer see the wood for the trees, the road for the cabs.’
‘You know that he’s calling up some big changes to the map?’
‘It really gets to me that Columbus is doing this, you know? It’s like we’re both messengers, the Gumbo and the Cab King. Communication is power. We’re both duty-bound to carry the message to the people and that bastard goes and abuses the power. So then, we work quickly, Belinda, yes?’
‘What can you do?’
‘Watch…’ Gumbo works the switches again, so that the image focuses on one particular Xcab. ‘You see that cab there, Belinda?’ he asks. Belinda nods. ‘That’s my cab. That’s the Gumbo YaYa Cab. The Magic Bus.’
‘There’s no such thing,’ Belinda says.
‘Officially, no. But that old hippy-cab is there anyway. You saw the Magic Bus outside the house, yes?’
‘I saw it.’
‘That’s my version of the Xcab.’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘Well, it’s happening. Watch…’ Gumbo works the controls and the hippy-cab makes a left on the map, from Oxford Street onto Whitworth.
‘But who’s driving it?’ Belinda asks.
Gumbo laughs. ‘I am. No one is. It’s an imaginary cab. This is where I get my map-knowledge from. Columbus doesn’t even know the magic taxi exists.’
Belinda feels like her head is exploding with this knowledge, this denial of everything she has known the map to be. ‘It’s unnatural,’ she cries.
‘Exactly. I can do the same for you and Charrie.’ Gumbo looks at the clock again. 11.52 a.m. ‘We’ll have to move quickly,’ he tells her. ‘You want it, Belinda? The map, once again?’
‘Yes. Yes, do it. I want it.’
Gumbo is playing at the clacking keys of an antique typewriter, from whose broken back wires lead into the lover’s tangle. He reaches out to pluck a silver feather from the air, doesn’t even have to look for it, despite the sneeze that ripples from him. He pushes the feather into his mouth, sucks it deep and then removes it. He pushes the wet feather into the socket of a crooked transformer. A new message scrolls over the Xcab map on the wall: WELCOME TO SLITHERING SILVER. THIS IS SHAREVURT. PLEASE BE HONEST. PAY THE REGISTRATION FEE. ‘Fuck that shit,’ the Gumbo announces. ‘Information should be free.’ He makes some adjustments until the map is overlaid with a floating menu and then says to Belinda, ‘At 11.59 a.m., every morning, the Xcab map gets updated from the Council info. This is the moment of weakness. This is the door we go through.’ Gumbo’s fingers are dancing over the keys. ‘Aaaaaaccchhhhoooooossshhhhh!!!!! Pardon me. Shit, this fever is killing me. Give me a new street name, please?’
‘What?’
‘Belinda, I’m not kidding. This window is tight. A new street please…’
‘Shaky Path,’ Belinda answers, dragging the name from darkness.
‘Done.’ Gumbo’s fingers bring up an inset window on the map screen. The time is reading 11.57. Fingers dancing. In the window a new street called Shaky Path is floating over the map. In another window Gumbo has called up the Authorities’ Info-bank. Their latest updates to the map are packed in tightly to that space. Gumbo moves the Shaky Path window over to the Council window. Then he merges the two together, with a smooth move on the keyboard. Shaky Path is then registered as a new road to be opened that day. ‘Don’t worry,’ Gumbo says to Belinda. ‘All this info has a black scrambler on it. Tell me Charrie’s Xcab number, please.’ Belinda tells him the number, and then Gumbo YaYa drags up an Xcab icon from the toolbar at the top of the screen. He merges the icon with the number and then places them both on the Shaky Path imaginary road. The time is now reading 11.59 a.m., and Gumbo and Belinda watch in silence as the Xcab map sucks down the Council’s update. ‘Okay, rogue driver,’ Gumbo says. ‘You’re back on line.’
Belinda moves closer to the screen. Bright yellow icons are buzzing around the Hive-map. Over to the east of the city there’s a new street called Shaky Path, where no street ever existed before, and her very own cab icon, Charrie, is sitting on that street, dark and waiting for a driver. Gumbo tells her that the icon is dark because the real Charrie is off-map at the moment, but as soon as she drives him over the barrier, that marker will be as bright and as lively as all the others, only in secret colours. ‘I’ll be able to talk to you over the system,’ he says. ‘Mister Big Switch won’t even be listening.’ Gumbo starts to laugh then. Belinda asks him how it works. ‘It’s easy, really: a Trojan Horse. You build a new but imaginary street into the update, put your cab on it; Columbus thinks that street is up and running, but it doesn’t really exist. And your cab is riding that invisible street. It’s a viral street. My Magic Bus rides a road called Strawberry Fields. That’s where this house is living on the map…Strawberry Fields. That’s why the Authorities can’t find my address. The cops and the Xcabs and the Authorities, Gumbo is laughing at all of them. The map is yours again, Belinda.’
‘Thank you,’ Belinda says to Gumbo, her head refilling with the Knowledge. ‘But I’m no closer to Columbus. You promised me a closer ride.’
‘There’s only one way.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Welcome back, my love.’ Gumbo is looking over Belinda’s shoulder. Belinda turns around. Wanita-Wanita is standing in the doorway, holding the hand of a child. The child is dressed in a swimming costume, and her hair is shiny with moisture. Bedraggled feathers are knotted here and there in the wet locks.
‘She was in the pool, Gumbo,’ Wanita says.
‘Excellent. Cool as fuck.’
‘Blush…’ Belinda’s voice. ‘It’s you?’
‘It’s me.’
‘You know Gumbo?’
‘I know everybody, Boda.’
‘Belinda…the name’s Belinda.’
‘Crazy. We’re all in this together.’ Blush is holding a black feather in her dripping hands.
‘That’s Black Mercury?’ Belinda asks.
‘That’s my beauty.’
‘That’s a universal beauty,’ Gumbo announces.
‘Through this we can reach Columbus?’ Belinda asks, thinking that maybe this was the same way that Coyote had spoken to the Cab King.
‘Only you can do this trip, baby,’ the Gumbo replies. ‘Because ain’t you the good driver?’
I tuned into the Gumbo wave at 1.00 p.m., expecting my daughter’s voice to come calling once again. Instead I got the hippy pirate’s voice, telling me to hold tight and keep listening…
‘People, people, people! Keep listening, and tell your friends. At two o’clock this afternoon we are going to make a trip together, over the wave. We will be descending into the Vurt, in search of the fever and its cure. Yes, indeed. Belinda Jones herself, ex of t
he Xcabs, will be making that journey. She wants to meet Columbus in the dream. We believe the fever is coming through Columbus from a world called Juniper Suction and Columbus is making the pick-up and the drop-off. Belinda will be driving her rogue cab towards that rancid source. Once there she will be confronting Columbus with his crimes. Stay tuned and tell everybody. This will be like a moon-trip. The first of its kind. Close all hatches. You know that only the good Gumbo can take you this far.’
I switched off the radio.
It felt like my Shadow was closing down. How on earth could Belinda travel into the Vurt? She was a Dodo, an Unbeknownst. Unless she had somebody like Tom Dove in tow, a feather-person. Would my daughter really take that risk?
All over Manchester the people are gathering towards the news. They are listening in bars and shops, in newsagents and supermarkets. Even in the streets, broadcast from overhead speakers, the voice of Gumbo YaYa is talking to them, calling them forth from their daily occupations. This voyage has brought them back onto the streets. The people are feeling reckless. Here they stand in groups, masked-up and sneezing, surrounded by flowers.
At Piccadilly Fast-track Station, and at Victoria, the booming voice travels forth over the systems. Travellers postpone their journeys, in fear of missing the broadcast.
In Bottletown, Twinkle and Karletta are perched close to the radio. They know that Blush is involved with Gumbo, and that she would have something to do with this trip. Twinkle moves her arms around Karletta, wiping the puppygirl’s nose when she sneezes.
Zero Clegg is listening to the radio from the security of Fortress One, Namchester. Tom Dove is sitting beside him on the plush sofa.
Kracker is at his home, his squalling children all around him, making a fearsome noise. He tells them all to shut the fuck up, as he listens…
1.15 p.m.
The radio…
People are lining up in Market Street and Piccadilly Gardens. Almost all of them covered by masks. The flowers entangle every building and car. The jam-parked cars fill the streets bumper to bumper with hot dazzling chrome. The Gumbo wave plays from a thousand speakers all over the city. Some have got a Gumbo feather in their mouths, but most are content to listen in public. It’s a collective experience. Nobody dare move for fear of missing it.
On the wasteground in front of Gumbo’s palace, a tribe of dog-crusties are gathered, perfectly still, some on two legs, some on four. Ragamuffin tepees billow softly in a slight breeze. A fire burns. Over the flames a pig-size lump of meat is roasting. Spindly iron sculptures raised to some mutant canine goddess leer through a glaze of sunlight. Old vans and a blistered ambulance are parked in a circle leading to a multicoloured transit decorated with the words Magic Bus. This is Gumbo’s own transport, and these dog-people are his disciples and protectors. Thick, germ-ridden droidlocks hang halfway down their backs. None are speaking. Most of the tribe are wearing pollen masks, and their pattern of upturned goggles reflects the sun, time and time again. All of them are listening to a loudspeaker fixed to the side of Gumbo’s Palace.
Inside the Palace, Wanita-Wanita is leading Belinda by the hand towards a room on the second storey of the Palace. A door opening onto darkness.
Gumbo’s music playing from the interior, over speakers, softly, softly…
Belinda’s eyes adjusting to the darkness. Soft slitherings. Wetness moving across the floor towards her.
Zombie-breath.
That room is covered, wall to ceiling, with the half-dead. Fat bubblings. The dark children of Manchester. They explode from the nostrils, a raining shiver of snot.
‘Jesus!’ Belinda’s breath.
Wanita’s voice: ‘Gumbo makes a home for the lost.’
‘Please…please save us,’ says a deep Zombie voice. It makes Belinda think about Bonanza, the Zombie who helped her escape from Country Joe’s Motel in Limbo.
1.30 p.m.
Stirring slowly at the deep centre of his web of roads, Columbus the Kingcab is waiting, waiting, waiting…
On Deansgate and Cross Street, the Oxford Road and Wilmslow, on Rochdale Road and Princess, Moss Lane East and Blackfriars, the people are gathered in their thousands, listening to the music coming from shop doorways and the scrolled down windows of stationary cars. Roberman is somewhere in that tangle, his cab-wave tuned to fuck, tuned instead into the song, the universal song.
1.45 p.m.
Belinda Jones is now dangling her bare feet into the swimming pool that laps gently around the basement of Gumbo’s Palace. Blush the Vurt-child is with her, also with bare feet dangled, and she’s telling Belinda that all things will come to pass if the correct path is taken and stuck to. ‘You’re very special, Belinda,’ she says, making a wave. ‘You’re very much like Coyote. Crazy and naive. But strong and fiery. Good drivers, the both of you and well suited. Never to be consummated now, of course, but what else can you hope for than some kind of revenge?’
‘I’m feeling weak, Blush,’ says Belinda, letting water play around her ankles like cold hands grabbing her to pull her under. ‘I don’t know if I can make this trip. I’m scared of the Vurt.’
‘I’m scared, you’re scared, the whole of crazy Manchester is scared. You got a choice, really? I think not. You’re one of the good few, Belinda, you just don’t know it yet. You, me, Gumbo and Black Mercury feather; if you can envision a better way to visit Columbus, please tell me about it.’
Silence. Only the slow wave of deep shadows through the basement of the Palace and a lapping of water at the ankles of a not-so-good hero.
1.50 p.m.
Gumbo is playing Riders on the Storm by The Doors, and the dark, brooding melody rises from the collected radios and public address systems to form a cloud of music over the city.
Gumbo and Boda; twin riders of the dream.
Who else could save the city?
Stop-time and the sun hangs suspended. The world of Manchester turning on a pirate feather, waiting for a cure.
1.52 p.m.
Zero Clegg gets a call on his telephone. It makes him angry to be drawn from the waiting, but there’s only one person he knows who still uses the phone.
‘Smokey, that you?’ he asks.
‘It’s me,’ Sibyl replies.
‘What you after?’
‘Can you find Tom Dove?’
‘He’s right beside me.’
‘Bring him over.’
‘Sibyl, you okay?’
‘Let’s do the trip, Zero.’
Inside the secret Palace of Gumbo, the hippy pirate has the Black Mercury feather in his hand. Its flights are sparking off flames from the slew of electrical equipment. Belinda wants to run from the sparks, and also run to them. Her Shadow is split. The time is 1.56 p.m. ‘Okay everybody,’ Gumbo cries. ‘Let’s get ready to ride.’ His eyes are addicted to the Black Mercury feather. Even through the layers of tears and snot, there’s a secret vice in his look. It speaks volumes the lost years from the 1960s, when free love was a viable proposition. ‘This feather is so lovely. I want to have sex with this feather.’
‘I’m scared, Gumbo,’ Belinda says. ‘I’m a Dodo.’
‘That’s right. But the young kid…’ He patted Blush on the head. ‘She is the feathers. Your Shadow will be travelling with her. Good driver and feather-rider, riding together through the Vurt. What a sweet combo you are. Hey come on, driver, you’ve ridden roughshod before now. I’ll be following you all the way. Also, the people of Manchester. I’ll be your sweet narrator. Just remember Hobart’s Law: if you take anything from Vurt, then Vurt will take something from you.’ Gumbo sneezes. ‘Okay, let’s find the man behind this fever, people. Wanita?’ Wanita kisses Gumbo as she takes the feather from his hand. He throws some switches, takes another good dose of Cherry Stoner for reason’s pathway and then leans into a bakelite microphone…
‘People of Manchester! Are you all gathered? Are you hungry for love? That was The Doors singing Riders on the Storm. The time is dead on two and this is Doctor Gum
bo with a cure for all of your ills. Hallelujah! I’ve got a good crew with me. I’ve got Wanita-Wanita on tech back-up. I’ve got a Vurtkid called Blush. I’ve got the rogue driver, Belinda Jones. I’ve got your own good listening selves. We are gonna ride this storm down!’
Wanita feeds Black Mercury into one of the sockets on the messed-up bank of equipment, surges it with Gumbo Juice, and then holds the feather out towards Blush. Belinda sends her Shadow into Blush, at the same time as the young girl takes the black feather to her deep throat.
A burst of roadness, then, and a new world opening…
The trip spreading over the city. The good citizens listening in via the Gumbo. ‘This is the YaYa talking. I’m taking you all on a voyage of discovery, into that strange world called Planet Xcab. This is a radio first. This is a happening, my friends. A real cool, dead and gone trip. And what better soundtrack for our adventure than the main cat himself. Purple Haze! Take us there, Mr Jimi.’
Tom Dove moved his hand towards me. Surges of revulsion. Pulses in the Smoke. My Shadow almost leaving my body, so terrified it was. The whole room swaying from the madness. The dream was in the room.
‘This won’t harm you, Sibyl,’ Tom Dove said. ‘There is absolutely no way you will catch the fever from this. Understood?’
‘I don’t give a shit about catching the fever.’
‘Don’t be scared, Sibyl—’
‘I’m not fucking scared!’
Inside I was wilting from the nerves. My Shadow felt shredded. Gumbo YaYa was still broadcasting from the radio. That pirate had taken my daughter into the Vurt world. He was calling it a monumental trip, the first case of a Dodo visiting the dream world. He was comparing it to a moon landing, a journey into the remotest climes. ‘One small step for a girl, one giant leap for Dodokind.’
‘You’re not really going into the Vurt,’ Dove was saying. ‘You will send your Shadow into mine. I will then transport my body to the Vurt. Your mind will be inside my body. If all goes according to plan, we will visit the Vurt together. Juniper Suction. But the hole’s got some kind of one-way lock on it; it’s letting the pollen out, but nothing can go in. I made an attempt. It repulsed me. It hurt. I’m telling you this now, Sibyl, so that you’re warned. I think I can sneak your Shadow through. I think you just might be…well…smoky enough. Nebulous. Do you understand?’