Pollen

by Jeff Noon

  Coyote slobbered into his plate. Jewel sneezed into his bowl, and then laughed, delighted. Belinda guzzled down the wine.

  John Barleycorn had a hold on us. A spell had been cast.

  ‘Yes, a spell has been cast,’ he said, reaching deep into my Shadow for knowledge. ‘I’m so glad you could make it this far, my dear Sibyl. You cannot believe how lonely it gets, inside these feathers. These stories…they are like dungeons. And to have human company, if only of a tepid kind. Really…it is most delightful.’

  Coyote and Jewel were fighting over a piece of steak, and Belinda was just in love with the party. I felt I was the last voice of reason. The rain was falling over Belinda’s mapped-out skull.

  ‘I would like to be free, of course,’ Barleycorn continued. ‘Free from the tale. This is why I sent Persephone and her fever to you. You think I enjoy this? You think I like being trapped here? You really believe I like being just a part of one of your petty tales?’

  ‘Persephone is a murderer.’

  ‘Is that the word? Murderer? Of course you mortals hold such store by it. Life, I mean. And the clinging on to it. Oh dear, how you love to cling. Really, it gets quite tiresome. Have you ever heard a plant complaining about death?’

  Persephone slithered over the table towards Barleycorn’s lap. Once settled there, she ran her fingers through his hair. Shining blue like dark lanterns, his hair seemed to be moving. A thick glistening strand of it rose into the air, and then settled on the pink steak in front of him. It was feeding, his hair was feeding! Barleycorn’s hands were wandering over Persephone’s body, the left to the budding breasts, the right hand reaching down between her legs. Persephone was giggling.

  I pushed Belinda’s plate aside: ‘I don’t know how you can eat this. It’s rotten.’

  The man’s eyes were catching black fire: ‘Oh I am sorry. I like my meat well hung and raw. Sibyl, my dear, I assumed you would have the same tastes…’

  I didn’t answer. No smile, no laughter.

  ‘Coyote certainly seems to be enjoying his meal,’ Barleycorn continued, looking over to where the dog was guzzling down another pink lump of pork. ‘Yes, your friend would make a fine guardian. I mean, old Cerberus, well he’s a little…a little creaky these days. You noticed? But I want to tell you about my penetration. I’ve got the wanderlust, you see, the need to infect. The need to be the teller, not the tale. There is a slight problem. If I should ever leave this Vurt-story of Juniper Suction, this tale shall fade into a sad ending. Miss Hobart herself wrote this into the feather’s workings. She wanted to make sure that every story had its centre. My great desire for your world will be eternally unrequited. I mean, who would invite the devil to dinner? So, I had this idea that I could send something into your world, and who better to travel than my own dear, sweet wife, Persephone? And from her seed would a thousand, million tales grow forth, and all of them my children.’

  ‘You’re scared of me, aren’t you, Sir John?’

  He paused in his breath for a moment. For the first time he actually seemed to be considering something that I had said. I wasn’t going to let this go. ‘You’re scared of me because I’m a Dodo,’ I said to him. ‘You can’t infect me with your stories. You can’t harm me.’

  ‘Your life’s story will end in your death.’ He smiled then, before continuing: ‘Whereas, the more stories that you tell, the longer that we of the dream world shall live. And whilst your sorry flesh decays and dies, we of the dream shall never die. There will always be another mouth to feed. A story is like food, is it not? Food for the tongue. And a tongue should be well hung. What are you planning to do, Sibyl? What is your purpose in coming here?’

  ‘I want to destroy you.’

  ‘And how would you do that?’

  ‘I want to destroy you for the pain you’ve brought to my world, my friends…’

  ‘How would you kill a dream? It would be like killing your own head. There’s no way out, Sibyl. I am a tasty story that your ancestors once dreamt. The story of the world under the world. Of your fear of death. Out of that fear you made me. Oh, it was quite simple in the early days. Stories were told, and then they vanished. Into breath.’ He took another drink of wine before continuing. ‘I do believe this blood-hued elixir to be the very first example of Vurt. Only through its transformations could your ancestors imagine another world beyond the everyday. From the gulp of wine flowed the books and the pictures, the cinema, the television—all the ways of capture. And with Miss Hobart, and the feathers, the Vurt, and the shared dream of it all, now we live on. The tale has turned. The stories keep growing, even when you’re not telling them. We no longer need to be told. And one day we will tell ourselves. The dream will live. This is why I brought the fever to your world. I want a grip on the world. I want to infect you with my love.’

  Something very strange happened then, if I can use the word strange in such a context. Four bullets appeared out of nowhere at the far end of the dining room. They travelled slowly along the line of the table, missing each of us. They crept through the air above the fourth and empty chair, and then vanished into the mist. John Barleycorn watched their passage with disgust. ‘You know, it really angers me when people do that,’ he said. ‘Firing bullets in the Vurt. Don’t people realise that those bullets are just going to travel through every tale until they find a worthwhile target? Nothing is lost in a story, only exchanged. That was Columbus’s seat. He was invited to the feast. What can I do? Such rudeness.’

  The slow drift of the bullets brought me back to task. ‘Please…you have seduced my children and my city with your love…but can you not save my son?’

  Barleycorn sighed. ‘Here we are, inside my golden palace. Which lies inside the garden. Which lies within the dream, the story. The story inside the Heaven Feathers. Inside the Vurt world, which is contained by reality. We are nestled within story within story, and all you can squeal about is the life and death of your firstborn. Really, Sibyl, I expected more from you.’

  ‘There isn’t any more. That’s my story. Give me back my child.’

  Barleycorn waved my words aside. ‘Having succeeded in releasing the dream from the body, Miss Hobart realised that the body was mere vessel. Dreams could live on in the Vurt; the body could die. Et voila! Heaven Feathers. If you have the resources, these days…well then, death is no longer the end for mere humans. Your dreams can live on in a choice of settings, worlds, religions. A choice of stories. This is where Miss Hobart herself lives now, having died many years ago. She lives on in the heavenly Vurt. Nobody knows where, of course. She has chosen her own safe and secret story.’

  ‘Please…cure this fever.’ I was becoming desperate. ‘Cure my Jewel.’

  Barleycorn swept aside his mug of wine and brought his fist down onto the table. ‘Will you not have done with your pathetic desperation?!’ His voice was scalding, and the look in his eyes burned deep. ‘Is this all you can desire? Is it? A life for your death-riddled child? What’s wrong with you? Please…show me some strength.’

  ‘This is what humans want, Barleycorn.’ I said it coldly. ‘They live on in their children. Your stories are children. Our children are our stories.’

  Barleycorn breathed harshly, bringing himself back down from anger. He looked deep into Belinda’s eyes. ‘My father was called Cronus, Sibyl,’ he said. ‘He was the clockmaker, the maker of Time. He did not want me born. This is where my particular story begins. A fortune teller had told Cronus that his children would kill him one day. My, how seriously he took that cheap trick. He killed off my older brothers and sisters at birth. He swallowed them. Myself also, he swallowed. It was only by sheer cunning that I managed to live on inside my father’s stomach. That stomach of soft tickings and tockings, the days measured out in drips. Juice was flowing down into darkness, marking off each moment. It was very like dying, I suppose, but I managed my escape from death. I was reborn. Can I be blamed because you humans have not yet managed that task?’

  ‘Some of us
are doing it,’ I answered.

  Barleycorn’s eyes turned onto some distant scene, far off through the rain.

  ‘This story of yours,’ I continued. ‘It sounds like—’

  ‘This story of mine! How dare you?’ He had turned on me suddenly, his face twisted with pain. ‘You think I make this up? You make it up. This is your story, Sibyl, and all of your sorry kind. What puny stories you tell, at the same time insisting that we be happy with our lives within their confines.’

  ‘We created you.’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. And one day we will leave you behind. Can you blame us, can you really, if we desire to carry on? To be better than you?’

  ‘All I want is a cure for my son.’

  Barleycorn looked at me for a second, and then away, his eyes flooding into sadness again. ‘Miss Hobart is so disappointed. She really is. Now there is a human being worthy of the name. A true creator.’

  John Barleycorn fell silent. He sighed and then looked at me again. And when next he spoke, it was with a heavy, saddened voice: ‘Wandering for all those years alone, inside my father’s dark stomach, what could I do but think about escape? And having made my escape, what else could I do but plunge myself into the dark earth? I made my life below the earth, feeding off the roots. Lonely, so very lonely. Until I heard a young girl’s feet scampering over my ceiling of grass. I reached up towards her, overcome with desire. I made her my own. My flowering bride. I fed her with pomegranate seeds, in order to keep her faithful. Isn’t that so, my sweetness?’

  Persephone’s long, purple tongue was licking at John Barleycorn’s neck. His hair shifted slightly, of its own accord, buzzing hair, in order to give her access. The young man smiled, his eyes closed in pleasure. Time moved slowly whilst the girl lapped at the dark skin. Thin rain was falling onto the table, making pools of water between the dishes of food. Worms were moving through wet meat that Coyote, lost to the spell, shovelled into his jaws. Jewel crunched on a wriggling beetle he had found in his creamed rice, the moisture running off his greasy skin. Belinda’s head: I could feel the rain flowing through the streets of Central Manchester, and then running down her neck, along her body under the robe. I tried once again to make her body stand but the weight was overbearing. Belinda shivered, and with the shivering John Barleycorn’s eyes opened again, this time fuelled with dark hatred. ‘Persephone’s mother was very angry, of course,’ he said. ‘Very angry. Her precious daughter, and all that shit. Pardon my language, Sibyl, but Demeter deserves the cruellest words. She wanted her prize back. Demeter was so angry that she sent a deadly flower to your world, making the ground as dry and as cold as her own heart. Of course, you’ve met Persephone’s mother, Demeter?’

  I told him that we hadn’t.

  ‘You have, you have! Keep listening. That poisonous flower she sent to you, you called it Thanatos, I believe.’

  ‘Thanatos came from the Vurt?’ I asked.

  ‘A good name, if I may be allowed? Thanatos. The god of death. Of course you are quite au fait with Death, am I right, Sibyl? Oh yes. Quite enamoured. Your mother, for instance. That putrid corpse. Your father’s cock, stinking from a graveyard fuck. The Shadow inside you, which is the soft kiss of death. This half-dead son of yours. Your daughter’s suicide, which was a love affair. Your own long fall from that hotel window. And look at you now, pretending at life, inside a dead puppet you still dare to call by the name of daughter. How else have I allowed you access this far into the Vurt? Thanatos and Sibyl, I now pronounce you man and wife…’

  He laughed. It made me angry. Also, the feeling of having journeyed so far and all for nothing; the frustration of being totally controlled by that which you foolishly believed you could one day destroy. ‘I don’t want my son to die,’ I cried. ‘There has been too much suffering.’

  ‘Ah yes, of course. I was forgetting—the mother’s love for her children. The suffering. The urge towards resurrection. They will do anything, anything…’

  Persephone had climbed from his lap, back onto the table. She was now stroking at Jewel’s puckered skin, whispering tendrils falling over damp hide. Barleycorn was gazing sweetly at his wife, his voice speaking over the soft drizzle of indoor rain. ‘Her mother wanted her back, of course,’ he said. ‘And the plague that Demeter sent to England…well, to be honest…it quite pleased me. I was never a lover of life, as such, for how could I love that which had served me so barbarously? It was Miss Hobart that changed me. Yes, she came to visit. It was first time I had ever seen her. Of course one had heard stories, rumours: she was the original creator, the maker of the feathers, the bringer of joy. The first dreamer. To meet her in the flesh, so to speak, well it was altogether too much. What could I do but give in? The strangest thing, she thought I was more powerful than her. Imagine, if you can, God saying that Adam was more powerful, you will understand my feelings. I allowed Miss Hobart access to pluck a green feather from one of the birds that flew in Demeter’s forest. Fecundity 10 you called that solution. A terrible name, may I be so bold? But the wonders it created. And so we agreed, according to the story, my wife would spend two-thirds of the year with her mother, only one-third with me. And so the seasons were made. Isn’t that more than fair?’ Barleycorn laughed then, briefly, his hair rising from his head into a smiling wave of deep blue smoke. He stood up from his seat and walked around the table to stand behind me. I could feel his hands resting on Belinda’s shoulders from behind, the fingers gently massaging my despair. I could neither move nor speak just then; the devil had my soul in his grasp. I could smell burning. I could hear the buzzing of the flies. I could sense his voice penetrating my Shadow…

  ‘Because I was tired,’ he sighed to me. ‘This is why the pollen came to visit. Because I was tired of being only told. I want to live, Sibyl. Like yourself. I want a flesh and blood life. A life of surprises, a life of pain. A life ending in death. I am jealous, yes, I admit it. Death means so much to your species. Without it where would you be? Death is your fuel, the parent of your desires, your art. I want to feel that hunger, but Miss Hobart has deemed it so that I must remain forever in the dream. I must never die.’ His hands were now stroking at Belinda’s skull-map. ‘Persephone was my attempt at death-after-life. There will be other attempts, and from more powerful demons. The Vurt will one day make an entrance. Come, let me show you the future…’

  Barleycorn curled his fingers around my daughter’s neck, squeezed, hard and gently, and then brought his wine-red lips down to brush tenderly against her neck.

  And then he bit me.

  The bite travelled right through Belinda’s flesh until it had a hold on my Shadow’s breath. Barleycorn tugged at my smoke with his mind so harshly that I actually bled away from Belinda’s flesh. My amorphous Shadow danced around the room at the bequest of John Barleycorn. I felt dissipated and homeless. Blown apart. Barleycorn played with my shapes for a few seconds, displaying his effortless power, until finally letting me coalesce into a perfect, imagined sculpture of smoke; a younger woman’s body I now became, ripe and lovely in her curves but composed only from the grey swirling wisps of my unleashed Shadow. I looked down at my daughter’s empty flesh. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ Barleycorn said to me. ‘She will be looked after until we return.’ And with a single wave of Barleycorn’s hands the dining room vanished into hot, shimmering air. I was transported by his wishes to a small clearing amidst the tangled entrails of a jungle.

  ‘This is my vision of the new world, Sibyl,’ John Barleycorn said, now moving through the verdant growth like a slow, cool warrior. ‘Columbus has got the future totally wrong. This is my Manchester, my picture of what it will be. Regard it well.’

  All around us, as I struggled to keep up with the dream-creature, a myriad of strange characters were fighting and dancing and kissing amidst the trees and the flowers. The Grendel was there, Achilles was there, Robin Hood was there, Gargantua and Pantagruel were there, Vladimir and Estragon were there, Tom Jones was there, Humbert Humbert was there, Popeye
the Sailor Man was there, the Spiderman was there, Jane Eyre was there, Dave Bowman was there, Eleanor Rigby was there, Jesus Christ and the Tin Man were there, Leopold Bloom and Rupert the Bear were there; all the fictional characters of human endeavour were planted in that green world, and all of them were tumbling and loving and cussing in a story-go-round of intimate chaos.

  Whilst being clutched at by various rampant dreams including Sherlock Holmes and the Famous Five and King Lear and Mickey Mouse and Joseph K and the Venus de Milo and Dick Dastardly and Mutley and Holly Golightly, I was also aware of the John Barleycorn figure turning around to ease my Shadow-flesh through the clutches of a network of story-blades.

  ‘This is the world I am struggling to bring forth,’ Barleycorn said to me. ‘A globe of stories infecting reality. In these stories my children will live forever and, who knows, perhaps one day they shall die in peace, at last…at last…like normal.’ He paused then for a moment as the elaborate jungle-narrative spun a covering of flowers around us. And then off he stepped towards a glimmer of light in the distance. ‘Come quickly, my dear Sibyl,’ he urged. ‘The gates to the city are just ahead. Quickly, quickly. There’s somebody I want you to meet. Can you not be more nimble, Sibyl?’

  He took hold of my hand.

  The story took hold of reality’s hand, imagine.

  I tried my best against the weight of the engulfing stories, and eventually we came to the vine-wrapped iron gates. It was only then that I placed myself, these being the very gates to Alexandra Park where first I had seen Coyote’s body. I followed Barleycorn through the gates out onto the streets of Moss Side. But the jungle encroached all over the streets, making a dense canopy for the deserted shops and houses. Here and there a few humans could be seen, a few dogs and robos, but mostly the tree-roads were occupied by characters from fiction. It was as though Manchester had transformed itself into a tropical paradise in which the usual exotic birds and animals had been replaced by figments from the human mind. What was the nature of this world? Was I moving through Barleycorn’s mind, visiting through the Shadow the dream of a dream? Can a dream really dream? And whilst walking along these dreamt-about streets I took the chance to examine this body of smoke that Barleycorn had fashioned for me. I was a random map of shadows formed into grey shapes: hips and breasts, neckline and stomach worlds. And in the pit of my stomach there rested a glistening black beetle of carefully folded wings, waving legs and antennae, crunching jaws: the Dodo insect. The dream-eater. That presence within me that stopped the dream from entering my system. Never before had I seen the Dodo in my flesh, and I felt that I could almost reach inside myself to pluck out that offending creature.