Night Trip

by Peter Ackers

  "…MY EX-GIRL'S BODY BUFFER EXFOLIATING LIQUID…"

  I headed up the creaky stairs, turned left at the landing and entered the only room based in that direction. When I pulled the cord for the light, the bulb winked on and off with a bright pop. I reckon lightbulbs hate dying alone. They wait for someone to try using them – then they go out in a blaze of glory, showing their death spectacularly and memorably. The dark faded quickly as my eyes made do with the meager moonlight coming in the bathroom window. Everything had a monotone look to it.

  The bathroom was tiny and the wallpaper looked old enough to hail from Jehovah’s Proterozoic Period of artistic creativity. I wondered if it might have turned to ash under the trace heat from the lightbulb, had the bloody bulb not gone into hari-kari mode with me as its sole audience. The toilet sat behind the bath, facing it, looking almost like the little trailer behind Axe-wielder’s Goldwing. Except these were in matching grimy peeling white. The toilet seat was missing. I splashed piss on the cistern, since my aim was off because the gin was starting messing me up. Right then I realized I needed a dump (nerves boosting me prematurely into the home straight, I suppose). I threw down my trousers, swiveled, sat, and almost as if the sudden check of my downward momentum threw feces down my rectum, I opened up for a thick sausage to exit. I put my hands out in front of me, resting them on the edge of the bath. My eyes roamed over the trash littering the floor - everything from empty biscuit wrappers to used tins of paint stuck to the floor by paint that had dribbled down the sides. People had attics tidier than this place. And bins. This toilet really was a toilet.

  I noticed something peculiar. The bath was a quarter-full, but not with water. Instead, it contained a thick, gloopy liquid or jelly, pretty clear, or at least translucent, but with little pellets or things in it. It reminded me of my ex girl’s Body Buffer Exfoliating Liquid, which was a body shampoo with little apricot stone extracts in it, for conditioning and smoothing the skin to leave it healthy looking and invigorated, with a PH balance that was suitable for all skin types, and if you returned it to the shop where it was purchased, this didn’t affect your statutory rights. This was that shit on a grand scale, as if the Jolly Green Giant lived here and had recently become vain about his blackheads. There was the bottom half of a two-piece pool cue sticking out of it, and lying on the floor were a pair of thick gloves and a welder’s mask. The smell came to me as I stood staring. It wasn’t the bloody aroma of apricot, that was for sure. What the fuck was this stuff? You couldn’t bathe in this!

  Just then there was a knock on the door. Teeth-bloke’s voice asked how long I’d be.

  “Just a minute,” I said, feeling like some trespasser. I felt nervous, eager to please. If he’d asked me how long my link of shit was, I think I might have bent over the toilet to measure it.

  “How you gonna kill her, then?”

  I froze. There was a plop as a piece of shit dropped into the water. I wondered if Teeth-bloke had heard it.

  He knocked again. “You fell in?” He cackled like a man trying to laugh around toothpaste without spitting any out - probably trying not to dislodge his gnashers, actually.

  “I’m okay,” I said pathetically.

  “Hey, you know, we can do this a quicker way, if you want.” He waited, perhaps for an answer. I took a wad of bog roll and stuffed it between my legs, down into the water so it would catch and kill the splash of the next link of shit that was oozing out of my arse.

  He knocked again. “Your girl, I mean. If you want her dead. That idea to bring her to the gay march, kill her along with those faggots and stuff - you like that idea?” When next he spoke, his voice was a bit strained, concerned. “Hey, you ain’t pissing on it, are you?”

  I didn’t like the idea. But I said I wasn’t sure. When was the march?

  “Bout two weeks from now. That’s the thing. Two weeks. You want her walking round, breathing air some priest could suck down instead, for two weeks? Want her foul carbon dioxide going into people’s faces for the next two weeks? Shitting into our water system for two more weeks? Blah! No. I can help. How much money have you got?”

  “Not much,” I said before I could think.

  “We can set up a bank standing order or something, if you’re short. See, with me you don’t have to wait two weeks. I can kill her for you tomorrow, perhaps. What do you say? Ten grand, and she’s dead this time tomorrow. I'll carve shit on her, if you want. What do you say?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Was this really happening? I wanted to wake up. I wanted to open my eyes and see the motorway rolling under me at eighty miles per hour. My girl’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me; her voice, soft and mesmerizing with its slight but sexy lisp, saying, “Babe, wake up, we’re nearly there.” And I would say, “Where? Nearly where?” And she would say, “At the cottage, dopey,” because DOPEY was an insult you could throw at anyone and get away with, because it wasn’t really an insult at all, it was one of those cushioned words used to describe someone who’d done something ever so slightly-whitely silly-willy. And then I’d remember all of it after that, and I’d trip into despair and begin wailing like a child, moaning about the tape, the dreaded tape that was going to cut my heart in half, and she would say there was no tape, what was I talking about, and she’d kiss me, and even though her eyes were off the road, we wouldn’t crash, because people only crashed in worlds where looking away from the road was dangerous, and in this world of dreams such an action was not dangerous, only silly-willy, or DOPEY, and we’d drive on over the last few miles as if guided by angels, our lips locked; and they’d remain locked all night as we made love, and I would not end up in a pub toilet with some weird toothless bloke banging on the door -

  Bang bang!

  “Hey, what do you say?”

  A flash of annoyance, like a sneaky cold wind that zips into your shirt, trickled down my back, perking my adrenaline up just enough to force “Go away and I’ll think about it” out of my throat. I tensed, awaiting shouts, harder banging, threats, violence.

  “Hey. The guy with the axe…you don’t…you don’t like him, do you? Like him that way, I mean?” A pause. Movement outside, as if Teeth-bloke were fidgeting, moving from one foot to the other. Nervous. “Cos we’re…me and him…we…well, I would like to…” The last word was barely audible.

  I heard the stairs creak as Teeth-bloke went down, away. I unleashed a big, loud fart-shit that sank the wad of paper and splashed my balls with water, but I didn’t give a hoot. I had stood my ground, and I hadn’t been hurt. Confrontational successes like this could toughen a man. Or was it the gin kicking my ego up another gear?

  I shook myself. That was when I remembered the ring. I wasn't wearing it; it was still downstairs on some other girl's finger, and no way was I going to go back down there, into that room, and ask for it back. Anyway, I didn't need it now, did I?

  I stood, finished. As I was buttoning up, I glanced down at the bath again. “Hey, you ain’t pissing on it, are you?” I heard Teeth-bloke say again, this time in my head. I remembered that Axe-wielder had uttered some similar piece of cryptic crap, which wasn’t so cryptic now.

  Pissing on it. My brain was like a spider spinning webs to bridge a gap. I felt the numbers and the pieces coming together, like in one of those fast-forward videos of people building a film set, the kind of thing featured in DVD extras. And as my brain weaved and built in fast-forward, I saw the picture knit into view, felt the knowledge coming to me, expanding inside my head.

  I realised with horror that the gloop in the bath was some kind of explosive material. At first I thought it might be something like napalm, which is a jellied fuel the Americans still use despite the fact that's it's banned all over the shop. (Didn't the Americans also drop the only nuclear bomb on an enemy - twice, no less?) Napalm sticks to the skin, burning through; it also sucks oxygen out of the lungs. Nasty shit. I really thought these lunatics had created some napalm (I later learned that polystyrene soaked in petrol also becomes a
jellied substance that sticks and burns).

  “Don’t agitate it, it’ll go up," Teeth-bloke said from right outside the door, his voice full of concern. He hadn't gone at all. Had he tried to make me think he had? But then I heard his footsteps heading down the stairs for real, and I wondered if he was fleeing. I stared at the volatile gloop as you might glare at a dangerous wild dog: with extreme caution.

  I know now that the stuff in the bath was potassium chlorate that had been mixed with petroleum jelly. No need for wires or booster charges or anything complex with this stuff. A small shockwave would set it off, maybe even a hard blow from the pool cue. My “informer” said the best thing about this stuff, when mixed exactly this way, was that you could share it out; you could pack it into just about anything, since it was a jelly. For fun you could paste a little bit onto the underside of a toilet seat and gently lay it back down and wait for someone to come and sit down on it - scare the shit out of them, he he. You could fill your pockets, put it in your hair like moulding wax, smear it all over your trousers if you wanted. The petroleum jelly would lock in the smell of the potassium chlorate, and no one would know you were loaded with death. In this era of backpack-wearing suicide bombers, you could step on a plane and not turn heads. You could coat the bottom of your sock with this shit, and when the time was right, stamp down hard to set it off. The whole lot would go up, and a Boeing fireball would hiss and roar into the sea, or someone’s house. You’d have to be careful during the trip to the airport, though - one collision with a rushing pedestrian loaded with shopping and you’d flash-roast her frozen chicken right in the street.

  I saw Axe-wielder just then, in my head. He was on his bike, cruising around a roundabout close to a town centre. Some hundred metres away, as he well knew, a train was disgorging the away fans for that night’s football match. A hundred idiots in their team's strip staggering off the carriages and up the ramp and out onto the street. I saw the cops, some of them on horses, some on foot and in cars, but all watching the fans with a wary eye. People, people, people. A hundred and fifty of them, amassing on the bridge; and below it, the train was pulling out of the station, about to pass under that bridge, that bridge that was reinforced by scaffolding that Axe-wielder and his team had been analyzing for so long. More people. Oh, so many people. And Axe-wielder, bike and body coated in slime, bringing death their way.

  He takes the roundabout slowly, leaning the bike around the curve like a pro. He isn't scared, he isn't nervous - and he isn't the opposite, either, isn't over-eager to go get his Fate. He's like a man heading into town to visit a shop he knows is open all day. No rush.

  A bus is parked, taking on passengers. He declines overtaking it, preferring instead to let the double-decker pull out so he can follow it to the bridge and include it and its passengers in his mission. Some punk with red hair and his pin-cushion-faced girl on the top deck throw him some mouthed insult he can't hear. He just grins, knowing the last laugh is to be his.

  And now he cruises up onto the bridge. He can hear the whistle of a train from beneath that bridge, a train whose driver doesn't know he's already reached the terminus. He's surprised he can hear the whistle over the bellowing of the football fans, many in football shirts with some other guy's name stitched on the back. They roll out of the station with all the flair of royal visitors, singing and chanting and making damn sure everyone knows who they are and why they're here. Like the Nazis rolling into France, believing they're welcomed. Invaders and marauders, the lot of them. Axe-wielder almost wishes he could take out a few with a pistol first.

  So, he bets, do the twenty or so police, many of them unpaid Special Constables, that mill around on both sides of the bridge, keeping a wary eye on these invaders. Two policewomen on horses look on without emotion, silent. Perhaps, Axe-wielder wonders, they hope that the pet fouling-charge doesn't apply to horses that leave stinking dollops of shit in the road, as these two have. Some kid's trying to drag his younger sister closer to the animals, and she's moaning that she doesn't want to have her face rubbed in the poo, but her brother's insisting that everyone has to have their face rubbed in horse poo at some point, and today it's her turn. But these are the only two people who don't seem to mind the police presence here, or to wonder why. The other shoppers and pedestrians pass by quickly and without looking at cop or hooligan. Because you never know when some psycho will see malice in your glimpse, or some cop will see guilt.

  Now Axe-wielder remembers the gel coating his entire body. He feels the chill wind in his eyes and hairline and all the other places where he hasn't fully smeared the gel; he's hot everywhere else. He feels his thickly pasted hair trying to dance in the breeze but failing, hanging limp and heavy. He feels the wetness on his legs and arms and on his sweaty back, under his glistening jacket. He feels his bike trying to slip out from under him, so coated is it in the slippery substance. And he can feel the weight of the Harrigan Trailer attached to the rear. It is loaded to the brim with this shit.

  And now it is time.

  He detonates. Maybe he just claps his hands together to do it. That little impact is enough to set the whole lot off. Basic workings of any explosive: an increase in molecular size at a speed beyond that of sound, hence the noise you hear when the sound barrier goes, a boom that will be heard for miles. Air pushed aside to accommodate the bigger molecules. Imagine a wind that blows at over a thousand miles an hour and you get the picture. This breeze doesn't just ruffle hair and invert umbrellas - it opens stomachs and crushes bricks. Throw fire into this mix and things heat up - literally.

  The stone arch bridge is already weakened. A large portion in the middle crumbles under the shockwave and is thrown downward. Bricks and shredded lengths of the supporting scaffolding in the tunnel below, pushed ahead of that shockwave, thud deep into the rail tracks and the train, passing easily through the roof and impaling or crushing people in their seats. The shockwave hardly dissipates by the time it's travelled four metres to the train's roof, and so still carries the power to flatten the roof of one carriage, pushing it right into the people below, further mutilating those already injured by bricks and pieces of steel piping. Stones on the railway are blasted downwards hard enough to bounce them right off the ground and into the sky. Some pock-mark the train and what's left of the bridge, while others soar high towards the Saturday sun.

  The shockwave rolls across the bridge in all directions, swatting people and cars aside. Detonated close to the lower midsection of the double-decker bus, the bomb sweeps the vehicle off its wheels like a karate master kicking out some virgin's legs, then bends the vehicle almost in half down the middle, creating a boomerang shape. The rescue teams will arrive to discover it sitting atop the ruined bridge on its side, looking just like some abstract art tent that a man could walk tall through, if he didn't mind having to dodge the bloodied arms and legs dangling down through broken windows. The bus breaches the torn bridge like a bridge itself.

  The bus provides a barrier against most of the blast for the police, mostly amassed on the pavement. Many die still, thrown hard against the retaining wall. Others suffer shrapnel wounds from glass and bits of the number 32 Circular.

  The football fans, crowding the opposite side of the bridge, which is open to the explosion, fare worse. Some are crushed where they stand, their corpses blown into other people and into the retaining wall, which breaks apart like a Lego barrier; bricks and bits of people hit the station down below, some forty metres away, like a meteor shower.

  Then comes the part that would make people go "aaawwwww" in the cinema - not the destruction of dozens of people, but the unfortunate rending of horse flesh. Never did a geegee fly so fast across a finishing line at Aintree, or win by a liver instead of a nose.

  Thirty metres down the road, people are flung to the ground with bruises, some with their hair catching fire. Another thirty removed and shirts and skirts are ruffled. Thirty more metres away, some stone deaf guy staring in a shop window slaps the back of his neck,
thinking a fly had landed.

  Then the dust settles. But my heart is leaping. I -