his shaven skull, spread down his back like the triangular fin of a
shark, ended (the back of his white floppy shorts cut away in a V) at
his coccyx. Tigershark’s implants were so generous, so rigid, that
he could not easily clothe his upper body. That did not matter; it
merely encouraged him to take up a job in Brisbane at the end of
each summer.
W ith a studied, almost ■
ritualised movement, he placed the
chunky sea-green knife in his left palm, closing his fingers about it
so that only the blade was uncovered. Deftly, he sliced up the
underside of his right wrist and forearm, crossing the inward bend
of the elbow and over the flat bicep.
The movement was graceful and safe. Tigershark had no intention of injuring himself. The cut was little more than skin deep, and hardly bled. It was enough to display the ongoing miracle of his
own body: shallow wounds ceased to bleed within seconds, closed
up scabless within minutes, within hours were gone without trace.
Passing the knife to his right hand, Tigershark turned his left
wrist, applied the knife to the base of his left palm, and slashed
upwards with an artist’s grace.
‘T hat’s it, folks.’
The lead muso stepped back into the shadows. No longer exalted
by the music and the lights, the band appeared diminished to
86
Russell Blackford
Gabby Loerne. They seemed almost chastened as they walked from
the stage to the wings.
M omentarily there was silence, then strong whistles and cries of
‘More!’ The stage lights stayed down, but no house lights came on
in the Searoom. Gabby looked about, feeling alienated as the other
members of the audience whipped themselves into a frenzy of will,
the older youths, the real estate agents and clerks, more vocal than
the teenage sharks and roe, but all eager to bring Glass Reptile
Breakout back on stage. The cries of ‘More!’ rose to a raucous clap-
reinforced chant. All eyes fixed upon the stage as if such staring
could set in train mighty engines. Perhaps it could.
‘More! More!’
Everything around her had become unreal: the butts and fragments of discarded filter packets on the deep red carpet about the walls, a dangerously broken beer glass on the hard centre floor. She
lowered her feet to the carpet, palms pressing the sill. W hat she
really cared about was not the show (she had seen many others,
hoped to see more), but Alderson’s reaction.
‘Do you want to take a breather and talk about it?’ she said to
him.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether any of this helps at all.
Maybe we should wait for the encore.’
The band returned to the stage, carrying their brainwave
crowns. They fiddled clumsily for a second, bowing their heads to
fit the apparatus, which began to glow again. Looking up, the lead
musician waved at the audience. He leaped into the air as the amps
let out a preliminary guitar-like chord, and a hot pulse of yellow
light novaed across the stage.
A tentative voice said, ‘I recognise you two.’ Gabby turned. It was
the girl who had been dancing close to them, the girl with the hair
that was pink ostrich plumes.
Gabby said to Alderson, ‘Why don’t you talk to a miracle fan in
her natural environment? It might cure you of this Satan
nonsense . . . ’
‘You’re two of the people that want to stop our music aren’t you?’
the girl said more excitedly. ‘I’ve seen you on holo. Why? W hat do
you have against us?’
‘We’re not going to ban your music,’ Gabby said, raising her
voice to cut through the music she was not going to ban. ‘We just
want to know more about it.’ She was being indiscreet, she knew.
Still, by now it was an open secret, certainly to the media, that the
Glass Reptile Breakout
87
Wallace Inquiry was unlikely to recommend anything so crude as
an outright ban on the miracle groups. Alderson seemed less convinced. Disapproval registered clearly on his face even in the dim light. Gabby smiled to deprecate the importance of what she had
said. This plumpish pretty girl would hardly be talking to the
media anyway, and even if she did the media would not take her
seriously. And Alderson already knew Gabby’s position, so he
could not take offence at that.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the music,’ the girl said. ‘It’s healed
my fin tonight. Look. It was all swollen before. My back was.’ She
turned to show them her back. The brown flesh cushioning the
dorsal fin was completely whole, as if she had been born with the
addition to her spine. Gabby believed her, though, about the
swelling.
‘Come with us,’ Alderson said decisively to her as the decibels
increased. ‘W hat’s your name?’
‘Bianca.’
‘We’ll both talk to you, Bianca.’
‘There’s something I had to say to you,’ Bianca said, reaching inside her for something lost. ‘But I don’t understand it, and I can’t quite remember . . ,
‘Come on, then.’
They struggled through the rhythmic swinging arms. Gabby
was glad to reach the hotel’s top foyer, through the Searoom’s rear
exit. Wide stairs with thick rails of brightly-polished wood went
down to street level. ‘W hat does profane mean?’ Bianca asked.
Alderson opened his mouth, closed it.
‘Clairvoyance in action,’ Gabby said to him. ‘Why?’ she asked the
girl.
‘Is there a book . . . or something . . . somewhere where God
says: Who are you calling profane? W hat does it mean?’
‘The Devil quotes Scripture — ’
‘But more exactly, I imagine,’ Gabby said.
‘W’hat if he’s subtle?’
Gabby felt the predictable burn of exasperation before she
realised that Alderson had actually cracked a slightly self-mocking
joke in his deadpan way. He was a man of contradictions, after all.
She recognised the joke as Alderson’s attempt to deflect his all-too-
real anxieties.
For Alderson, such anxieties were unavoidable: there was a
question for every certainty — always a deeper ambiguity to wrestle
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Russell Blackford
with. Amused by his casuistic misgivings, Gabby gave up on arguing with him. ‘You’re getting absurd,’ she told him without heat.
H er line from Coleridge had been a good one, but Saint Luke had
done better: What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane. ‘It
means the opposite of holy,’ she said to Bianca. ‘We can all talk later.’
She. gave Alderson a sympathetic smile, made a jerky movement of
her head in the direction of the Searoom. ‘I’m going in to hear the
last set.’
They followed her.
Tigershark looked with horror at the cut under his chest. It hurt,
hurt terribly, throbbingly. And it was not closing. The most recent
wounds under his arms had begun to bleed freely. He could not
express any pain; it would be the ruin of his act, his art. As if he
could avoid forever drawing attention to the blood which would not
stop, he lowered his maimed hand to knee height, and dropped the
knife, flicking it away from his vulnerable feet, and kept on
dancing.
Baker, like the musicians, could affect only latents. Unlike them, he
had been trained to manipulate the healing effect directly and with
purpose. And he could reverse it.
He concentrated his unhealing hatred on the flick-dancer. Blood
oozed. The boy’s wounds would never stop bleeding. And next
Baker would turn to older wounds —the knife lines of his dancing
and of his extensive surgery— opening them afresh.
The Signals U nit strategists had game-analysed the outcome.
They had tags to plant with the m edia—‘Black.Stigmatic’, ‘Blood of
Satan.’ There would be an immediate outcry, and a fruitless
investigation — and that, at least for the interval needed, would be
the end of the music in one State.
Deliberate hatred vomited out of Baker; he conjured the demon
in his mind as he had been coached. H atred spewed from him to
the flick-dancer, and now old incisions were opening, tattoos of
proud flesh rising like initiation scars on his smooth body, welds of
pink flesh starting to tear open like wet paper, and the blood falling
in a pool at his feet. In an eternal moment, the boy was draining
white and falling in his own blood.
Glass Reptile Breakout
89
What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane. Alderson
lurched into the room, trying to hide his shock. The girl’s words
went right to the point of difference between natural and cultural
law. But —he had debated the issue with Gabby —where to draw
the line?
He looked heavenwards.
And saw, in the cage, the bleeding flick-dancer.
No.
He had despised the boy; seventy times seven times that evening
he had, in his heart, called the boy profane. ‘Dear God, no,’ he said
aloud, falling to his knees. The girl Bianca must have m isunderstood his action. She knelt in front of him, pressing his pressed hands. Others were looking up, and there was a screaming of terror
or outrage. The band played on, the musicians sightless in their
trance-world.
The crowd and the band were gone. The boundaries of Alder-
son’s identity were breaking up. Where was the girl who clenched
his hand? The boy? There was only the triad, transcending music
or identity, united against the suffering. Alderson spat away blood
which seemed, irrationally, to stream down his face, nauseating
him.
He had misplaced the home of evil; he understood that now.
That part of the triad which had been Alderson was in error. Evil
was in the Searoom, but it did not come from the miracle band.
They had to push the source of evil, thrust the evil away, push the
shadow right out of the dim room. Pushing back . . .
The boy’s shorts were soaked in the same blood which had pooled
at the bottom of his cage and spattered its walls, thrown by his frenzied efforts. He was terrifyingly white, fallen half-fainted to his knees —but his wounds had stopped bleeding. Baker desperately
recalculated the situation: an effect had already been created, a
macabre dose of grand guigno l to terrify the superstitious and delight
the media, but the boy had to die to hold the public’s distracted
imagination, to sustain the repugnance and loathing demanded by
the Signals Unit.
Baker redoubled his effort of hatred, but the black acids had
sucked up out of him, were now ebbing away. He forced his protesting ego back into the depths and found . . . nothing.
Dimly, he sensed that it was he who screamed —lurching out of
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Russell Blackford
the parting crowd, flailing claustrophobically with desperate arms,
not knowing why he ran to the stairs outside the Searoom and
stumbled mechanically down them towards Fitzroy Street, his
assignment forgotten. He knew one thing only: that he must escape
the room where he was obliterating himself, unwinding his self like
a dark thread from a crazy bobbin.
The show was all over; the house lights came on, but the night was
left ragged and uninterpreted. The crowd was not dispersing; it
gathered closer, hushed, to the flick-dancer’s cage racheting on its
golden chains to the floor. A pair of bull-necked T-shirted bouncers
shouldered their way through. One jerked the cage’s front panel,
snapped it open from the top. It hinged down, a transparent jaw
full of bleeding ulcers. ‘Go home folks,’ the other man told them.
‘Go home now—it’s all right. Show’s finished. The boy’s gunna be
okay.’
Alderson was numb, drained from his ordeal as if he had been
bled white. He remained on his knees, his mind silent.
‘It was horrible.’ Bianca’s voice: she sounded so young and
shaken. There was no demon here.
He stood and shoved his way to the boy, who swayed rubberlegged and glass-eyed. ‘Let me through —I have to see him.’ No one cared enough to block Alderson’s way. He gripped the lad by both
skinny shoulders. Tigers hark—that was his name. Tigershark’s skin
was criss-crossed with scars, a lacework of shiny pink raised flesh,
and his unbleeding body was stained with drying blood, his shorts
drenched with it. His eyes looked on Alderson’s with sudden recognition, a smile of victory. Victory shared. Alderson hugged him, taking the red stain on his own flesh and clothing.
‘We’ll take care of him.’ The bouncer spoke gently to Alderson,
perhaps in deference to his grey-headed authority. ‘There’s an
ambulance coming.’
Gabby and Bianca were both there. Alderson turned to Gabby as
the bouncer helped Tigershark to a seat at the bar. She watched
intently, silent as the crowd dispersed. Soon they were almost alone
in the Searoom. ‘You’re a latent,’ she said at last. ‘Bianca proved it.’
‘W hat happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ She looked him frankly in the eye. ‘You know it
wasn’t the music?’
He nodded, knowing better than she could.
Glass Reptile Breakout
91
‘It was like . . . black magic. Not something of the Searoom:
something invasive. Rival sorcery.’ Rival sorcery. ‘I’m not speaking
scientifically,’ she added. She laughed quickly, then choked it. ‘In a
tribal society, I’d expect them to say an evil sorcerer had been here,
someone powerful and evil.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘Something horrible was in the room,’ Bianca said. ‘It wasn’t in
the band.’
He remembered the darkness, the shadow, focused on Tiger-
shark, palpable to Bianca and himself.
Gabby put her arm around the girl’s shoulders, just above the
grafted fin where it anchored in her upper spine. An ambulance
siren pulsed. ‘But where did it come from?’ Gabby said. He was
glad to see her tremble with emotion.
The last of the crowd had gone. A business-suited young man
with black wavy hair w'as speaking to Tigershark—probably the
hotel manager — as the ambulance crew arriv
ed with a stretcher.
One of the bouncers had found a bucket and mop. He scrubbed
dispiritedly at the cage’s ugly floor, wiped its walls with a fat square
sponge. Alderson turned to Bianca.
‘Let us take you home.’
The girl smiled at him, her hand now in Gabby’s,
Baker staggered along the seedy street. He recoiled from the glaring lights of a tram like a frightened beast. He rushed along the footpath, brushed a threadbare drunk. A gang of barechested
sharks jeered at him. He had no idea of where he was going, or who
he was. All he knew was the darkness. He ran towards it.
After the B eow ulf expedition
©
NORMAN TALBOT
I like to watch them shake. From the back I mean.
‘Worth it, huh?’
That move, it’s as unique as voiceprint, earprint, fingerprint,
retinaprint, any of those. The voice, incidentally, is Old-American,
maybe black.
‘H ard to get used to.’
Only problem’s what to call it, to get the Force to systematise it.
Urinal-drying-off-shake-print is just that little bit too long. The other
one’s voice is Old-American too.
‘T hat’s the point, anyway.’
Take these two, for example. Both full of tension, the black neck
more than the white one. Both sort of childish. They both shake neat.
‘Yes, you’re right. Exactly the point. Though I’d hoped there’d be
certain, shall we say, spiritual benefits, self-knowledge — you know—
instead of just the selfish stuff?
“Watch your mouth, punch! You’re only saying what you think you
oughta think.’
They’re turning, abstracted, like big uneasy kids.
‘Probably, Slatecoat. What now, though? Look at what’s happened
to the others.’ Vera, the O.C., says all males sulk. This one’s sulking.
They both finish turning away from the urinal at the same moment.
Spacers, and big punches at that. The black one would be really well-
hung, the other pretty good. They’re nice and slow stowing things
away; that ought to be a sign of confidence. So why so tight, punches?
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After the B eow ulf expedition
93
‘What now is talk. Talk and check the hatches. And just for the four
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 12