by Jeff Noon
I squeezed at Belinda’s Shadow until she gave in easily to the invite. It didn’t need much squeezing.
Down amongst the leaves and the petals, down amongst the flowers and the weeds, we made love to him. Coyote pushed us up the shaky path we craved, and then pulled us down into the waving grass, to drown. He was a dog-lover and a half, that Coyote, his penis-stem making itself into the exact shape to please us. I was well pleased with the lengths he could go to. Belinda the same. Each of us crying out. My daughter’s naked atlas of skin. Manchester was trembling with delight. Maybe this was the only map now existing of the old ways. Coyote was moving his branches along our streets. The morning’s soft, early lamp was playing over us. Zombies were squelching through the grass, rubbing their soft tendrils over our naked bodies. We hadn’t told Coyote that I was living inside Belinda, but maybe he guessed. Maybe there was a look in Belinda’s eyes as she came. I felt that I was plant-like myself for a moment there, a tiny moment, when Coyote carefully fed one of his yellow roses into Belinda’s mouth. A thorn dug into her lower lip; a dribble of blood flowed down her cheek. Coyote removed the flower, licked up the blood, and then started to cry. I wanted to ask him what all those tears were for, but then he came, that lover, came inside of us, feeding pollen and sperm to our womb.
Seed tossing.
Receiving it gratefully. Sucking it down. Sweating under the sun. Flowers in our skin, our brain. We clutched that dog to our wet breasts. Time was dripping and slipping. Coyote broke off a piece of fruit from his body, fed it into Belinda’s mouth. It tasted like paradise, ripe and wet, a splash of ebony and green. It brought a taste to Belinda’s tongue, and a picture to her mind. The same world I had half-glimpsed inside the victims, and in the feathery arms of Tom Dove. I knew then that Coyote was to be our deliverer to the world of the dream.
Let us take this.
We were lying naked, exhausted, in the dew-lined garden. Below us and faraway to the South, Manchester was sweltering in a haze of light.
‘We’ve lost our city,’ Belinda said.
‘It’s changed,’ Coyote answered. ‘We are the lucky ones.’
‘Lucky in love?’
‘Lucky in death. Not many will find their way through the new roads.’
‘I feel sad for them.’
‘Sadness is right.’
The time had come. I used Belinda’s voice to explain the plan. She gave me easy access. ‘Coyote, this is Sibyl Jones speaking.’ I began. ‘I’m Belinda’s mother. I’m living inside my daughter’s body. I will not explain that to you, except to say that, like you, I died and was then reborn. Our enemy is called John Barleycorn. He lives in a Vurt world called Juniper Suction. From this realm comes the fever. Juniper Suction is a Heaven Feather. To visit a Heaven Feather you have to die and then be reborn. Like you have, and like I have. And also, like Belinda has. The luggage we are carrying is called Jewel. He’s my first child, a Zombie. The presence of death is very strong within him. What I’m saying is this: we have all been touched by death, and survived. I believe that we can now visit John Barleycorn in Juniper Suction. You will take us there, Coyote, in your black cab, because you are part of Barleycorn’s world now, the plant world. Can you do this for me?’
Coyote nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘I will give no false hopes,’ I continued. ‘Barleycorn is a powerful creature of the dream. He will not take lightly to our struggle. But Belinda and I are Dodos. Barleycorn fears Dodos because he cannot control us with his stories. Now we are doubly strong. Nevertheless, he will make a fearsome opponent. Can I be sure of your commitment?’
I thought that Belinda would’ve been the more doubtful of the two, but, although I could feel her fear over the Shadow, she assented to the journey and I blessed her for that. Coyote, however, was worried by something. ‘Sibyl Jones,’ he whispered, ‘this John Barleycorn…it was he that raised me from the earth.’
‘What?’
‘I have driven here not only for you, but also for Barleycorn. He also has a task for me.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Only that I should come here. Maybe something to do with his—’
Coyote stopped speaking. He was looking scared. The grass and the flowers of our loving bed were shivering in a sudden breeze all around us. ‘What is it, Coyote?’ I asked.
‘His wife…’ Coyote started. The grasses and the flowers around us rose in a wave of knowledge and then spun themselves around us, tightly, until we were powerless to move.
Belinda screamed.
Persephone is dying. She clings on tightly with vines and sticky creepers, but in her green heart she is growing bad with reality’s weeds. She no longer likes being here, she doesn’t like this world. Earlier she had barely managed to escape the noise and the fire of the cops bursting into the palace of the cop gardener. She had sucked her body into the lichens clinging to the damp walls of the house of death where her sweet bed had lain. And, by that desperate route, she had pulled herself free. And now these people have destroyed her dreaming soil. Where is she to go now?
Into the network of flowers.
She had been then a thousand, million sparkles in the blossoming net. Petal messages had spoken to her, leaves coated with decay. Each fluttering a plea: please save me, please save me. Reality was fighting back. Persephone had spoken to all of her flowers, all at the same time, telling them to keep the faith, this world shall be ours, one day soon. Keep on growing.
But the seed-girl is worried. Count Pollen has lodged tight at 2010. Maybe the world is saturated? Is this the point of mutual play-off, when opposing species agree to step down from competition? Is nature turning against her? Persephone is angry and the weeds are clutching at her skin. She feels stunted. A horrible tightening around the roots. The hands of the immune. The Dodos. Maybe this world has finished with her? The soil was dying…
She finds the bad seeds at play in the fields of love. The taxi-flower is doing that crude animal thing, that penetration. The immune girl, Belinda her name, oh isn’t she enjoying his ministrations? And Sibyl, the Mooner-cop, she’s in there as well, somewhere. An unseen presence. Persephone has gathered herself into the grasses they are defiling under their fleshy bodies. She closes the grass over them, smothering them to death, but then another seed comes to her. Let them loose, Persephone. It was her husband’s voice. I want them to come to me. Let them come. I will deal with them in my realm of power. Shall I come back with them, Sir John, Persephone enquires of her roots. Yes. It’s time. Come back to me…
And doesn’t she feel like going home anyway, now? Isn’t this world altogether too much to take, so very parched and sapless? So very immune? She would do nothing to stop these travellers from finding the black garden of her mother and husband. In fact she would guide them there, easing the passage. To this end she releases her grip on the creatures and joins her changing shape to the lichens that grow under the nearby vehicle. She has come into this world by the black cab; she will leave it in the same way.
The creepers unwrapped themselves from our bodies as quickly as they had grown there. ‘What the fuck was that?’ Coyote asked.
‘Some kind of warning, maybe. Come, let us do this.’
Belinda refused to put her clothes back on, saying she wanted to ride it down naked, so when Coyote ushered us back into the black cab, I could feel my daughter’s wet flesh sliding against the hot leather. Coyote told us to hang on tight, this ride was going to be liquid.
A rain started to fall.
A black rain.
The ground turned into mud and the black cab started to sink into the soil.
Belinda Jones’s eyes were damp with tears; this greasy trip was too much for her. Pupils widening. The black mud covered our windows as we slid into deep earth. Coyote was steering us towards the black garden. Sibyl Jones, myself, hanging on tight to the reins. Jewel’s small, weak Shadow crying from his box.
I will save you, my firstborn. Don’t you worry.
The world was dissolving and the new day bled away.
Coyote dug away from the fingers, away from time and loneliness, away from care and woe, safety, the rules, cartography, instruction, shit fares and meta-cops; all the bad things were peeling away. Black cab was sinking towards a small green glimmer in the night-dark soil. ‘Just like breaking through quarantine,’ Coyote said to us. And then we were…
We were…
We were cabbing it down.
We were…
And then we were…
We were descending…the roots growing over our journey.
We were…
We were pushing through to another world. A deeper world. Falling asleep. Dreaming. At last, dreaming. Waking up to another time, a different garden. An underworld garden. Myself inside of Belinda.
We were…
This garden was as deep as night. Flowers of pitch, petals of slow flame. Dark seeds glowing. We were digging into that soil.
Dreaming…dreaming…floating…floating and falling…
Through to pictures. Lilac shadows opening. The cab snarling like a dog, pushing apart the damp tangle of roots, penetrating, coming to rest at last. The thick roots of an oak tree. Stunted and braked. Blurs of seeds slowing down into gardens.
The black garden.
And at that precise moment, 8 May, 4.16 a.m., a young boy named Brian Swallow finds himself released from constricting snakes and vines. He finds himself swapped back into a small bed in the suburb of Wilmslow.
His parents, John and Mavis, are roused from sleep by their son’s cries.
Everything was all together: the plants and the earth and the dog and the moment; all of them fading into motion, and then bursting into stillness. I could feel deep ebony roots drilling through soft soil. I looked through Belinda’s eyes, out of the cab window, into a forest of darkness. It was night-time once again. Time was speeding up into a blur of motion. Where had the last day gone? A bleak moon whispered through the branches. A few fireflies flitted here and there, making thin maps of light between the purple flowers. Coyote got out of the cab, forcing the driver’s door open against the crush of branches. He pushed away a bunch of wild hyacinths to get a good grip on the passenger door. We stumbled out, as you do from a taxi after a long night of cheap barley wine. The two of us, one inside the other, making like a drunkard. I was trying to get a grip on Belinda’s body, but she was too excited, too weak from the journey. She was sniffing at the black-petalled flowers, breaking them up, pushing their dark colours into her mouth, tasting at fecund sweetness. Her naked mapped-out body was rolling around on the ground, pushing down beds of violets. Belinda was suffering from cab-lag, Vurt-style; the shock of moving between worlds. It took all of my Shadow to get even the smallest purchase in her flesh. Getting her to stand up was like lifting a heavy, heavy weight. Coyote helped me, curling a strong branch around our waist. We pulled Jewel’s box free. I let Belinda slump against the taxi’s side, turning her head so I could see where we were.
It was a different part of the garden than I had seen with Tom Dove’s help, but still the overall feeling of despondency prevailed. The air was very thick and grainy, and I could feel it pushing at Belinda’s skin. Heavy globules of black pollen. Moving slowly they were, on the slight breeze. So dense, and the night garden so dark that I could hardly see in front of me. The cab was lodged against the trunk of a large, overbearing oak tree. Beyond this the ground was thickly carpeted with violets, before they gave way to a tight cluster of elms. There were faint glimmers from the darkness, and as Belinda’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could see that two ornamental pillars stood amidst the trees.
Vines crept around them and at the top of each a carved angel, the left-hand statue representing a young boy, the right a dog. Pale ghosts of stillness. Between their winged sleep a faintness existed in the foliage, a slight easing of the sombre mood, as though a path might be lying there. Or more closely, the remains of a garden path long since overgrown.
‘I’ve got luggage for the fare,’ Coyote said to us. He was holding Jewel’s case in his arms. We told him to put it down on the ground and then to open it up. He did so, working the locks with his leafy claws. ‘Cab-shit!’ he barked. ‘First time a Zombie pull one on the black cab.’
Belinda looked at him. ‘He’s my brother,’ she said alone. Alone, she said it, and I was so happy then, I wanted to hug her. Which is difficult from the inside, but I tried it. I could feel her receiving my inner glow.
Jewel crawled out of the box and up the length of Belinda’s body until he was clinging to her breast. Maybe he saw me inside of her. Whatever. Belinda shifted him in to a better position and then turned to Coyote. ‘Shall we explore?’ she said.
I said the same, the same time. Exploring together.
And between the stoned angels we walked, along a thin path through the swaying trees. Coyote was leading the way, his black-and-white Dalmatian flowers flickering ahead of us. Myself inside Belinda following.
Belinda’s black-and-white map of old Manchester was moving through the harsh thorns. They cut into her skin, digging up new roads. Jewel was clinging to Belinda’s chest. Her arms were tight around him. My son seemed at home in this world, this forest, and his fever had let up a little.
Initially it was hard-going. The trees locked fingers above our heads, making a dismal, ink-black tunnel for our trip. Branches swung back at us, prickles stung us, roots caught at our ankles. But eventually the forest started to clear; the trees grew more spacious, the path wider, more pronounced. It was like the path was leading us on, wanting us to travel. A yellow moon was visible now, intermittently, between the branches. It cast a pale shimmer on the leaves. A pack of dogs were howling at the moon; we could hear the terrible baying of them through the trees. Belinda wanted to hang back on account of Jewel, but Coyote was already parting the tangled, ebony fronds of a fern and then stepping through into a luminous glade. We could only but follow.
The pack of dogs were there for us, waiting. At our sight they rushed towards each other, forming their various shapes into one terrible body, which licked and snarled at the air. Each of its mighty jaws dribbled black venom. Snakes slithered through its steely fur. Dog shit covered the ground in a smoking carpet. Beyond the jaws of this beast lay an ornamental wrought-iron gate embedded in a thick growth of pine trees. The fifty-headed dog growled at us, and then lunged forward, foam dripping from its array of teeth.
‘Jesus!’ Belinda fell back, taking Jewel with her.
‘What want, dog-head?’ Coyote asked.
‘My name is Cerberus. I’m the guardian of the forest.’ One of the many heads came close up to Coyote’s face, spat some juice at him, and then said, ‘Flour. Flour and honey. Honey and flour. Cakes of honey and flour? Got any?’
Coyote turned to us: ‘Anybody got cakes of flour and honey?’
We shook our head.
‘Got anything?’ the beast growled.
‘Naked totality, dog-head,’ Coyote answered.
Dog-head snarled viciously, whipping his faces around like a fairground ride.
Coyote growled back at Cerberus. ‘I’ve got a set of teeth made out of Manchester’s maps. You want to take a chance?’
‘We’ll take anything.’
Coyote snapped forward and dug his teeth into the leader dog’s neck.
Cerberus howled like a dog from Hell. And then composed himself into a puppified picture of calm. ‘That will do.’ Whimpering. ‘Pass through to the next gate.’ And then the mighty creature dissolved into its separate parts: a humiliated pack of wolves that slinked off into the darkness, leaving the glade clear for moonlight and travellers.
Coyote opened the iron gates at the far side of the clearing and we entered a bleak pine forest. The air was sharp with the tang of resin, hard needles crunching under our feet. We were walking a well-defined path between the tree trunks. The path curved like a snake, so that we lost all sense of direction. But still, the sense of bein
g led.
We could hear the sound of water slowly lapping ahead of us, and eventually the tree-line gave way to an immense lake of purple water. Fronds of violet mist were playing in half-human shapes over the surface. We were standing on the lake’s blackened shore, watching the moon reflecting in gold on the ripples. At the centre of the lake a small island held a creamy bandstand. Amidst its flowered columns a brass band was playing a deathly, mutated version of the national anthem, Ferry Across the Mersey. This is the land that I love, and here I’ll stay, until my dying day. Shards of brassy light were catching on the trombones and the trumpets as they blew. Beyond the bandstand, over on the other side of the lake, glimmers of light could be seen in the sky, as though shining from distant eyes. In front of us a rowing boat was knocking gently against the boards of a weed-covered jetty. In its bow stood a black-cowled figure, as long and as thin as the boat itself. ‘Good evening, my deathly travellers,’ this figure announced in a cracked voice. ‘Welcome to Juniper Suction. Lost your way in the dark, have you? Well, well, never mind. Quite understandable in these parts.’
Coyote asked him his name.
‘My name is Charon,’ he replied. ‘I am the ferryman of Lake Acheron. Presumably you are seeking passage?’ Coyote said that we were. ‘Oh splendid, I do love a good passage! Have you your obolus?’ Coyote looked at us, we looked back. Coyote asked the ferryman what an obolus was. ‘What’s an obolus!?’ His voice was spluttering now. ‘An obolus! Don’t tell me they didn’t…you mean to say…they didn’t put an obolus in your mouth…when you died? Your relatives? Oh dear, that is most unfortunate. Most unfortunate. How in hell’s name did you get past Cerberus?’ Coyote told him that Cerberus the many-headed dog had wanted hardly anything for the passage. ‘Hardly anything! Outrageous. I shall have to have words. Really, this is against all the rules.’ Coyote asked Charon if an obolus was like a cab-fare. Charon looked puzzled, so Coyote explained to him what a cab-fare was. ‘Yes! That’s it! Exactly. A cab-fare. An obolus is a fare. Now we are finally getting somewhere. So, have you a fare, an obolus? Really, they should have placed one in your mouths. One silver coin worth exactly one sixth of a drachma. Any luck?’ Coyote shook his head. ‘Anything at all then? Anything to give as a…as a cab-fare? Anything?’