Show Me The Sky

by Nicholas Hogg

  ‘You know there are cheap fares for budget travellers on buses and trains these days. Though I bet they’re still expensive for a young man like yourself. What do you actually do anyway?’

  Jimmy lied. ‘I’m a trainee mechanic.’

  ‘Oh wonderful, I’ll have no bother if we break down then. Yes, a practical skill, a trade, that’s the right way to go, isn’t it?’ He paused and tilted his head as though balancing the next question to be spoken.

  ‘I used to hitch myself when I was younger, North Wales, the Peak District, a bit of adventure. Though I wouldn’t do it now, much too dangerous.’

  He paused and repeated the last words. ‘Much too dangerous.’ Then he began a monologue on various subjects including weather and winter, global warming, no more good butchers in his village, the decline of school uniforms.

  ‘What’s your job?’ Jimmy stopped him abruptly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your job?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a teacher, well, headmaster in fact. A primary school in North Wales.’

  Jimmy looked at his thin and bony hands, small on a small steering wheel. They crested the brow of a long hill. Cars passed continuously in the outside lanes. The wipers squeaked, frantically keeping the spray from the screen.

  ‘Well, I’m not becoming part of that mess.’

  The traffic was massed and illuminated, backed close like some terrific singular vehicle that grew by the moment.

  ‘Right, what we’ll do is turn off at the next junction and take a little short cut I know. It’s pointless sitting in this.’

  He inched forward in the haze of brake-light red. Jimmy sat like a mute. He wiped the passenger window with his sleeve and looked out to the ploughed fields. A whole farm was enveloped in the falling rain. The teacher turned off the motorway and drove under drops of falling sky that drummed hard on the Metro roof. Something in the sound scaled down the space.

  ‘Plenty of traffic here too, mate,’ said Jimmy, trying to break the curious intimacy.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed with enthusiasm. ‘Not such a secret short cut after all.’

  He was smiling like an excited imp. All around the car it seemed they were submerged in a world cursed by a constant deluge. It was deafening and the teacher had to shout. ‘I do believe I know another short cut.’

  He turned right on to a road that streamed with water. It was cast in a gothic gloom and they passed under wintered chestnuts, black boughs stencilled on the leaden sky. Slowing down to almost walking pace, the teacher drove on through the daytime dark and asked Jimmy if he could believe it was midday.

  He did not answer.

  When they emerged from the trees the rain abruptly stopped.

  ‘Well, would you believe it? Nothing, just like that.’

  In the sunless noon sheep stood grazing in dim fields. The road ahead was clear of cars and the teacher drove on, twitching and excited by some private thought.

  ‘Maybe you can answer me a question?’

  Jimmy was looking at the lock. The knife was in his pocket, the blade folded. He slipped his hand inside, and worked it open.

  ‘Why on earth, in the middle of winter, would men go out on a Friday night wearing only a shirt?’ He asked the question incredulous at the thought.

  ‘It defeats any common sense. I’ve seen young men in the town when it’s barely above zero in nothing more than cotton short sleeves.’

  A car passed and dazzled them, headlights on full beam. Then there was nothing, just an orange Metro on a country road progressing through limbo.

  ‘They band together like a pack of bloody animals. It’s all so macho, isn’t it? Though I can see you’re not like that at all, are you?’ He looked across, the pained smile. ‘I’ve got a good eye for people, you see.’

  The teacher drove faster than he had yet. The car accelerated along the empty lane as though by its own control.

  ‘Now you’re wrapped up properly, aren’t you? Good jacket, thick trousers. What material’s this?’ He moved his hand over to Jimmy’s knee and took a pinch of material. ‘Aah denim.’ He answered his own question. ‘Nice and warm.’

  He opened his palm and began to smooth Jimmy’s thigh. That white and pallid hand on his dark jeans. His own hand on the hilt of the knife in his pocket.

  The car drifted into the centre of the road.

  Jimmy went for the handbrake. He wrenched it hard. The wheels locked, and the car drifted, coasting on the wet surface until the teacher panicked and turned into the skid. The left wing of the Metro clipped the corner of a banked verge. There was an explosion of mud and glass. Momentum reversed through helpless bodies, flung limbs. The teacher struck his head hard on the dashboard. The windscreen shattered like the birth of a star.

  The only sound after the smash and flexing of metal was the hiss from a cracked radiator, a jumbled cacophony of clicking and ticking from the engine.

  Jimmy undid his seatbelt, shaking, shouting. ‘What the fuck were you doing?’

  The teacher rolled his head, dazed and unaware.

  ‘What the fuckin ’ell were you playin at?’

  The teacher made a low moaning sound. Jimmy swung a blow that caught his mouth with the flat of his clenched fist. Trapped air popped as both his top and bottom lip split. Blood pulsed instantly, dotting the window. The second and third blows left him slumped forward. He looked as though he had fallen asleep reading or watching TV.

  Jimmy got out and looked back into the wreck. He took the knife from his pocket and folded away the blade. He turned and ran, springing over a metal gate into a field of black and white cows that jumped and jerked. He ran from corner to corner and climbed a wobbling fence, slower now, running through the waterlogged field, gasping for air, his lungs burning. He leaned on the top rail and listened. Apart from his own breathing and his beating heart, there was a brief silence, before the sound of a car changing down gears. Fuck it, he said to the huge-eyed audience gathered at the gate.

  He ran down a narrow access track flanked by high hedges and a small copse of cedar and birch. The lane was stained muddy green with manure and harvest spills. Then he ran across more fields. The hedgerows that seamed the patchwork of fields were lined with trees, and Jimmy looked at the land around, mostly flat, except for the occasional gentle hill that lay like the back of a sleeping man. Or a dead man.

  The break in pace came when he heard a diesel engine labouring further down the lane. But where to run? The hedge either side was too high or too thick to clear, so he jumped down into the ditch, squatting in freezing water the colour of cold tea. The tractor juddered past, driven by a farmer who looked neither left nor right. If he had glanced down from his cab he would have seen a boy hiding, ridiculous and prone, like a frog prince exposed.

  But the tractor passed. Jimmy walked away from its chugging engine. He walked against the muddied chevrons the deep tread had left, and picked up a broken branch with withered leaves. He snapped off the smaller branches and hiked culling nettles along the verge.

  Dusk thickened, dissolving the profile of a town he was nearing. However close he got, the more it seemed to stay at the same distance.

  Amber hovered as the dark sifted neon lights to shimmer and flicker below the fading shapes of houses and chimneys, a church spire taller than them all. The lanes shadowed, grew forms from his fear. This quiet and older world, far from a city of factories and shops, tower blocks and canals, the streets and people Jimmy was defined by, his brother and cousins. His stepfather. The darkness turned him inside out and smaller still. His imagination reeled. Fallen trees became sleeping beasts or giants of men, stumbled at the wayside. Nests in higher boughs were thorny heads chopped and posted to mark his progress.

  When he thought he heard his mum call his name from across the fields, he scraped the stick along the ground and sang out loud. Rock songs, dance loops, theme tunes, anything to break the silence. When cars came he hid behind hedges and trees, not sure if he wanted to be found.

&
nbsp; Missing Person

  THE PLUMTREE STUDIO DAT

  Benny Star, the Plumtree Studio manager, has estimated that this recording was made around a month before the disappearance. Billy K had been given a set of keys for the studio, and although unknown to Mr Star at the time, would occasionally escort young women to the upper floors. The identity of Gloria James – this being her name seems unlikely given the context – has not yet been ascertained.

  Billy K – You got it … The green one, probably flashing. Now turn the dial till I’m loud and clear. No need to piss about with the faders. The sky is Sunday, rain on the glass, empty bottles I’m a drunken ass. Ow! Fuck! Told you … You step on a fucking cat? Hey! Stop laughing, could’ve blown me fucking eardrums out. Just set it all in the middle and get in here … I’m getting lonely.

  Gloria James – Hey Loverman … Hey … don’t go drinking all the whiskey. Shit, it’s weird in here, like on a plane when they fuck about with the pressure.

  BK – No reverb. Nothing … Listen.

  GJ – Wow.

  BK – No soundwaves lapping around the room. They get buried in the foam instead of bouncing back.

  GJ – La, la, la, la, la … Fucking strange. No hiding in here. What with that glass booth staring in …

  BK – No hiding. Try and be quiet, silent. Tell me what you hear.

  GJ – My heart a bass drum. Thumping, thumping … So much sound coming from my body. All that gurgling in my stomach.

  BK – If you’re alive you’re making music. Blood marching through your veins, a whole brass band in your stomach, playing and drowning all at once. And the air, rushing around your lungs like a hurricane … The only true quiet I know is before a song, between the fourth tap of a drumstick and the opening note, when the whole crowd takes a gasp of air and the room shrinks … Before the exhale of breath and sound blows it to pieces … Listen … One, two, three, four. I saw you born at the break of dawn, a trick of the light and the sky was torn.

  GJ – Why stop? That was new, yeah?

  BK – There and then. Birth and death of a song. Buried in the foam.

  GJ – You know how fucking sexy you are singing? Even the angry stuff …

  BK – You hear the silence?

  GJ – Take your shirt off, Billy K.

  BK – No Billy K tonight. I came here as Barry. Flesh and blood Barry. Barry Fulton … the original.

  GJ – Barry, Billy, who cares … If we’re playing that game then I’m … Gloria … Gloria James.

  BK – Glorious Gloria James … Whatever you want, beautiful.

  GJ – Want a hit? Something to forget you ever had a label?

  BK – No, no. Put your smack away. Not tonight. Barry goes to heaven playing the guitar and singing … having beautiful, rhythmic sex … with a beautiful, song of a woman.

  GJ – Keep talking …

  BK – Who’s not afraid of the fact she loves to fuck?

  GJ – Especially you.

  BK – Come here.

  GJ – I’m coming.

  BK – Crawl to me.

  GJ – I’m crawling … Now let’s get these trousers out the way. You gonna put that guitar down?

  BK – I’m gonna play while you sing.

  GJ – This is singing.

  BK – Fuck.

  GJ – This how you like it, Barry? How you want it? Tell me, Barry. I’ll do it for you Barry … You say it I’ll do it … Believe me.

  BK – Fuck … This is it. Nowhere else.

  GJ – Right now.

  BK – Come here. Kiss me. Take your pants off … Sit on me … Fuck… Kiss me … Fuck. You’re so fucking wet …

  GJ – Oh shit … I’m staying here … for ever. You want to try and fuck me off you? Think you can?

  BK – Listen.

  GJ – I’m listening.

  BK – No talking, just you, your body, my body, the music of sex, of us … fucking away the world.

  GJ – Whatever you say, handsome.

  BK – Shhhh …

  GJ – Fuck … you nearly lost me there. Thought I was gonna faint … Hey …

  BK – I fucking have.

  GJ – Where are we?

  BK – Not here … Not yet … Pass me the bottle. Fuck …

  GJ – Here … Shit, that tastes good.

  BK – Only this and music. Two places where it all makes sense.

  GJ – Sex and singing. Could be worse… Hey, why the ban on my dirty talk? Thought you liked me getting filthy with you? Worried I was gonna get too crude? Finally shock you with something you wouldn’t do?

  BK– Impossible. Anyway, you know it drives me crazy… hearing your carnal poetry. But just for once I wanted it pure and ancient, pre-language, the body-to-body slap of Mr and Mrs Stone Age going at it in a fireless cave. Her screaming orgasm no different to yours.

  GJ – We got some furs on the floor, I hope?

  BK – Sure, a woolly mammoth bed and some funky cave paintings.

  GJ – I can see me in mammoth fur.

  BK – Before language, before names for things, what’d you be wearing? Not mammoth … maybe a grunt … Music is the oldest art, the original call from soul to soul. Language dies as quickly as it’s born. New words push out the old. This recording might last thousands of years, burnt on to a disc, saved from format to format. But the language? Dying as we speak. They’ll need some professor of late twentieth-century slang to decipher this pillow talk.

  GJ – Not the fucking, though?

  BK – Not the fucking, the music of sex. The screaming orgasm spans time, eons. Especially the volume of yours, echoing across the millennia.

  GJ – Supersonic sex.

  BK – Supersonic sex … I like that. Sounds like a song, but would have to be without lyrics, nothing mortal … In Nevada, the eternally fucked desert of radiation, sculptors chisel and hammer out warning symbols, weld spikes and barbs because the word ‘Warning’ will expire … But the danger of growing a third eye, of melting into the sand, is for ever. Beyond any language of the moment …

  GJ – Fuck the signs and spikes. They should pipe some ear-bursting thrash metal from the cacti … Who the fuck would get past that?

  BK – Ha. The pen is mightier than the sword, but music is mightier than the pen … cool … You ever see the front row at gigs? Kids hugging the amps, bodies throbbing with the sound.

  GJ – You know they’re hugging you, Billy K, not the band, not the songs … as fucking great as they are.

  BK – Thought it was just Barry tonight … and anyway, his real name was something else.

  GJ – Who?

  BK – Who? Billy the fucking Kid, that’s who. Except he was William Bonney, they named him Billy the Kid, the lawmen and the sheriffs. If he’d hitched up his horse and walked into a saloon and introduced himself as Mr William Bonney, he’d have been lucky if the cowboys even looked up.

  GJ – Nothing you can do about it. You’re the man they want, Billy K.

  BK – The man? The man is here, now. They want this impossible being, beyond frailty, beyond hangovers and paranoia and puking blood, beyond mortality, taking a crap in the morning … I had some fucked-up stalkers. Rubbish dippers and underwear thieves, letters describing wedding plans in intricate detail, outfits for pageboys, piping on the cake. I saw the same woman in America at every gig, not dancing, not singing along, just staring without moving, hovering around like a fucking ghost. She looked like your average Midwest mom, big boned, big hair, heavy makeup. I could imagine her picking up the kids from school, baking a tray of cookies with an apron on. But no, she was at the hotels, outside the dressing room doors, on the sidewalk as the tour bus pulled away. She was scaring me. Ricky said he’d ‘arrange something’ if it started affecting the performance. Shit, what a thing to live with if he did.

  GJ – So, what happened?

  BK – I invited her into the hotel and had sex with her.

  GJ – What? Are you fucking joking?