Ventriloquists

by David Mathew

  But the latter was louder.

  4.

  Camera in hand, Branston was underground, directing the documentary (no mean feat considering the comatose natures of his key players), when he entered the chamber in which Yasser slept on the troubled dozy tides that would sometimes send him so close to the borderline with consciousness that Branston wondered how he failed to cross over and wake.

  Maggie was seated on the end of Yasser’s narrow cot. Although she looked up at Branston’s approach, she did not appear startled or surprised.

  ‘How’s it going?’ She asked in a friendly manner.

  ‘Fine,’ Branston answered, well aware that the response was trite and lacking. ‘Weird’ would have been more honest. Experiencing the burden of confession on his soul, he added, ‘I meant to ask you last night. Would you be prepared to go on the record?’

  There was no need for Maggie to seek much clarification. ‘In your film? Sure; why not? It’s all over for me anyhow.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  Maggie resumed her perusal of Yasser’s inert expression. ‘I’ve sort of burned me bridges,’ she explained, ‘as well as me home. There’s no way to go back – and I doubt I’ll be interesting to Benny forever.’

  She allowed the meaning of this to filter through the stuffy air.

  5.

  ‘What next?’ Benny asked, his voice ominously low. ‘A game of golf with the cunt’s leg? Eh?’

  ‘Sorry, Benny.’

  ‘Sorry, Benny,’ Eva echoed. ‘We were blowing off steam. I haven’t been out of the house in a month. I’ve been filming, injecting… doing everything you want. I needed a break.’

  ‘Not a prison, is it?’ Benny countered, aware of the irony. ‘You can leave when you like. So can you. Gainful employment’s what I offer: there’s nothing to stop you handing in your notice, ladies. I’ll even write you a respectable reference, as far as I’m able. But I will not have a man’s body ridiculed. Not for someone else’s amusement. Too ghoulish. Christ. You’re like a coupla Nazis!’

  As Benny raged on, Maggie tried to imagine what Eva was thinking. Though sure to pay attention to Benny’s empassioned soliloquy (fearful of pitfalls, sudden questions or a test at the end), Maggie was also totting up all that she knew about the other woman, which didn’t take long. But there was no doubt that Eva’s granite reserve had crumbled tonight. There’d been something in the air. And if Maggie’s own disloyalty appeared bad enough (through a lens of objective retrospection), it was the change in Eva’s persona that had seemed nigh-on remarkable, transforming as it had from diligent worker to reprobate.

  Something in the air, she repeated to herself; she mulled as Benny ranted.

  ‘Last night,’ the man said, ‘I granted the poor sod you were playing with a dying wish. He knew he was gonna die and so did I, of course; but how often do I do that? Not often, that’s how often – that’s how much the cunt earned my respect. For the sake of the love of his woman. And I admire that. He fought hard to the end; fair play to the cunt… So when he asks me: Can I see her? Can I see me Bernadette?, what am I gonna tell the cunt? No? You’re a nuisance? Nah. I’ve already cut off his hands – he was no threat. He was weak… Dying wish, I thought. He earned it.’

  ‘I’ll resign if you want me to,’ said Eva, the interruption a risk in itself; but she clearly wanted no more punishment or admonition. She’d rather leave, thought Maggie. Perhaps she has somewhere to go. Perhaps she’ll take me with her…

  Hoping that Eva wouldn’t mention the vodka that Maggie had stolen from the fridge-freezer in the library – the vodka they’d drunk together, while attempting to tweezer secrets from one another’s unconsciouses – Maggie asked, ‘What can I do to make it up to you, Benny?’

  Her voice sounded different, now her nose was busted: more nasal, bunged-up, as if she had a cold: not unattractive actually, she considered. She wondered what she looked like… Karl Malden, possibly. Maybe Benny wouldn’t want to fuck her anymore, not even as a punishment – not even the rough games – and this worried Maggie in an instant. What else would he keep her here for?

  Sounding smug (and now crossing his arms defensively), Benny said, ‘What do you suggest?’

  Maggie made a decision: to give the hint of solidarity with Eva. The word we should do it.

  ‘We noticed something odd tonight, Benny,’ said Maggie. ‘The atmosphere down here was different. Tim noticed something too. Something is not right with the patients.’

  Benny leaned forward slightly, the whites of his eyes bulging like flexed muscles.

  ‘Branston saw you fucking around?’

  ‘No. He was here earlier, filming. He didn’t see anything.’

  Lie. Branston had shot Maggie lifting Chris’s head and left foot from the chest freezer, one by one – the head so slippery that she’d had to cradle it to her breast like a Christmas turkey en route to the oven. Branston knew plenty.

  ‘The word that kept cropping up in their sleep,’ said Eva, thereby accepting Maggie’s show of union – for how long remained to be seen – ‘was the Overlap.’

  6.

  One of the reasons that Branston had entered the profession of education was his love of film (obsession with film?) and his notion that this love could be communicated to a willing listener.

  Another reason was that he had never made much money as a private or corporate film maker. He had never contracted that lovely virus called Luck.

  These two reasons were all well and good; they were long since on the record with Virginia, his future interviewer –

  (No. Biographer, not interviewer. Life had swollen too vast for Branston now to be satisfied with the prospect of future interviews; no less than a life-and-times would suffice.)

  – but another reason existed. Another reason existed as to why Branston had gone into Further Education as a practitioner. The reason was bullying.

  From the age of ten to the age of thirteen, Branston had had the misfortune of being taught Technology by a bully named McGregor. To this day, whenever the word bully was overheard, Branston could not help picturing the corpulent pud-puller; his inexpertly trimmed moustache, his greasy skin, his flatulent fly-attracting aroma.

  From now on, the word would summon up a different face.

  Benny’s face.

  After Branston’s second night in Benny’s house, he sought an audience with his new commissioner. It was seven a.m.

  ‘I’ll need to go home today, Benny. I’ve a class to teach this afternoon,’ he said.

  Fondling a pensive Irish coffee in the library, Benny nodded. ‘Course you have, Tim,’ he answered, as friendly as you like. ‘Come and go as you need to. And tell me is there anything you need from me to make our film? The lighting conditions down there aren’t the best, you don’t need me to tell you. If you need to hire some Kleig Lamps, that’s fine by me. I’ll pay. I don’t want this to look like the fucking Nativity Play at Sunday School. The whole point is to be taken seriously – by the scientific community, among others.’

  Before Benny sipped his drink, Branston expected a kind of punchline; a defining clause along the lines of But if you don’t return I’ll come and find you. Nothing. The man sipped (what Branston took to be Americano) coffee and appeared happy with Branston’s decision to leave.

  Branston drove home and was ill as soon as he spied his toilet.To whom would he report what he’d heard and seen? (Who would believe him?) To whom would he show what he’d filmed up to now?

  The Council?

  The BBC? Channel 4?

  He didn’t know. The question itself felt as frightening as diabetes; the mere contemplation of his hours-old memories tripled his heartrate... Branston stripped to the sweetbreads and repeated ten sets of twenty push-ups and five sets of thirty sit-ups. Practised his boxing in the bedroom mirror. Practised his karate chops.

/>   You have to go back there, Virginia told him.

  There was more to consider than the guests in their states of suspended animation.

  There was Chris.

  Chris. The man with whom Branston had conversed for less than twenty minutes; the man who had led Branston to Benny… The man who had nearly died in Branston’s car.

  Chris was dead. His head in an ice box.

  What am I supposed to do about it? Branston inquired of Virginia (or anyone else listening).

  Chris’s blood would be in Branston’s car. The sooner Branston notified the law, the better… No? Wasn’t this the way these things were handled? The film would have to wait. Chris was his responsibility now.

  While packing a bag (a shirt, some underwear, a wash bag: an overnight stay), Branston hummed a tune that at first he didn’t recognise. Only when he was one leg out the door could he place it.

  ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins.

  And no more than that, Branston promised himself, closing the door and unlocking the car with a sweaty thumb. It took him a few seconds to realise that he was still crying.

  Skull Rendezvous

  1.

  In time, as they knew they would, they came upon other people on their travels. Nearly everyone they met had something missing, whether it was a limb, an eye, an ear or a voice. In one case, a head! The man wandered along tensely, testing every other step with a foot before committing to the next stride.

  What does it mean? was not a question that required an answer: it was obvious. People of varying degrees of importance (to both Vig and Phyllie) had been taken, made missing or killed (the ultimate in absence), and surely these poor unfortunates were adaptations of those real-world events. The once-missing schoolgirl, Jess, for example, was now an old lady with an amputated left leg. There was no one to tell them that this couldn’t be true. Why not? Because, as Vig and Phyllie had swiftly discovered, there were no strict rules to follow (not even their own); and anyone they attempted to engage in conversation exhibited a depth of mystification that made the travellers wonder if anyone here spoke English.

  ‘If we can’t communicate,’ Phyllie wondered aloud, her most recent attempt to engage the attention of a stranger with no nose or lips having failed, ‘how the hell are we getting out?’ Although she had not given up her hopes for the Overlap, these setbacks had whittled away, one by one, at her natural optimism.

  Phyllie felt blue and Vig knew it.

  ‘Two things I’ve considered,’ he replied, with the rare but not unknown recourse to a clipped style of no-nonsense speech that was not quite natural English (or so he believed) and not a translation from the German language either. To Vig, his words sounded like an English man pretending to be a German.

  What could it mean? he wondered (and wondered in parentheses that he could actually see… in the form of silver-coloured bracket-shaped breezes). What does it mean when I stop sounding like myself?

  ‘You look like a dog chewing a wasp,’ Phyllie told him. ‘Don’t zone out on me now, Vig. Or leave me in suspense.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two things you’ve considered…’

  ‘Oh right… Phyllie. Suddeny I don’t feel well.’ Vig saw the crossness on Phyllie’s face and decided to move on lickety-split. ‘But okay – two things. One: they can’t see us, or they only see us… spiritually. As visitations.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Humming an unconscious reason why not – or rather, an affirmation of her scepticism – Phyllie said, ‘And two?’

  ‘Two. Two, we’re doing things in negative. Like the coloured wind and the no-colour animals… Phyllie. What colour am I?’

  Phyllie was in the process of berating herself for that previous non-committal hum (the one that implied: You’re talking wank). Once more she had reminded herself that there existed no rules: or, perhaps a shade closer to the truth (she had thought again), there were rules that neither of them could fathom. So what? So maybe they were ghosts. Life, only recently, had been much stranger, had it not?

  With this in mind, Phyllie took seriously – perfectly seriously – Vig’s question.

  ‘Your face is white. Your hair is brown and your eyes are grey with long black lashes that remind me – I’ve never told you this – of a bear I saw stuffed in a natural history museum in Tring when I was about nine. Your willy is of average length and perfectly pink. It knows its work.’

  ‘Yes yes yes.’ Vig was in no mood for flirtation, though he accepted (even appreciated) Phyllie’s attempt to lighten their psychic load. ‘…Phyllie, we’re the wind to these people. We have too much colour!’

  Voices on the breeze, Phyllie conjectured. ‘Is that a banshee?’

  Vig did not follow the train of thought, but he nodded and shrugged simultaneously. A smile had taken root on his lips.

  ‘Okay we’re banshees,’ said Phyllie. ‘I’ve been called worse… How do we lose colour – one – and I know I’m sounding like you at this point – and two, how come we could see them?’

  ‘They’re not real either,’ Vig answered. ‘They’re lost – like us. They’re somebody’s missing, just like we’ll be. The difference is, those poor sods won’t know they’re actually being held captive in Benny’s dungeon… or whatever we want to call it.’

  Phyllie thought before responding. ‘If you’re right… they’re close enough to us to hear us talking in our sleep, but they don’t know we’re talking to them. I can buy that. We’re sharing parts of the same fantasy: I can buy that too – even though… the missing limbs, I’m not sure about that anymore.’

  ‘I never was.’

  ‘…the question is, where does it get us? We’re still no closer to the Overlap.’

  ‘But I think we are, Phyl.’ He stopped walking. He waited for an animal with no colour to pass his way in some fashion – either airborne or on the ground – but nothing did. He went on: ‘What if it’s not a place? What if we’re being too literal? The Overlap is something that we made up, right? Or you did, to be accurate.’

  ‘My daughter did, to be more accurate still.’

  ‘But how would the other people Benny’s got know about it, other than through our words?’ Vig’s voice, as he thought out loud, had moved from a slow, quiet, almost shy mode, to something more direct and with greater volume. ‘Benny said his prisoners, some of them, under the influence of… whatever we’ve got coursing through our veins at the moment – he said they share parts of whatever existence they create, right? And then talk about things – the stuff he records, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Phyllie, failing to see Vig’s point entirely but not wishing to halt his excited flow.

  ‘It’s telepathic; it’s got to be! It’s more than words, Phyl… or less, I should say. Words are too direct. It’s thoughts we need to create the Overlap. The people who are representations of those in the dungeon – and those who are – you know – the ones we make up ourselves. The moral of the story being…’

  ‘Stop chatting and start noodling,’ said Phyllie.

  ‘Well exactly.’

  2.

  Hand in hand, Yasser and Shyleen stood in a crowd of people, at the top of a hill, waiting for a speaker (a prophet, a preacher) to make himself known by standing up on the rock around which the gathering had taken place. Yasser pictured the man in robes; he was lifting his smooth hands for silence…

  Though the congregation was no more than forty-or-so strong, the energy was palpable – a lynchmob intensity – and something dramatic or violent was about to happen. It had better, Yasser thought - the faces and muscles around him would not be satisfied with anything less.

  Yasser addressed a man to his left – a man stripped to the waist, his modesty shielded only by what looked like a nappy – whose dark skin was prodigiously covered with tattoos of birds, of all
sizes and species.

  ‘Yes?’ the man answered, doing so without moving his lips. The voice came from a tattoo of a puffin on his chest; he had even flexed his pectoral muscle to make the bird’s beak open and close.

  ‘What are we about to see, please?’ Yasser’s eyes were drawn to the puffin’s features.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ the seabird confessed. Different muscles were employed to make its wings flap, an impressive trick, Yasser thought. In the same way that he’d keep a close eye on a cardsharp, or someone betting fivers in a game of find-the-lady, Yasser wished to learn how it was done.

  ‘You know how a crowd begets a crowd.’ The puffin shrugged. ‘But the word on the street is… this’ll be bigger than Elvis.’

  ‘Did someone say my name?’

  A skeleton scarcely decorated with flesh and sinew, standing in front of the tattooed man, turned around. The build suggested a boy; the flayed quality suggested a corpse – it was a miracle that he could stand up, let alone speak. Let alone smile… which he seemed to be doing now, unless the absence of lips was what gave this impression.

  The tattooed man’s facial features didn’t change, but all over his skin the flocks of birds flapped their wings, chirped and squawked. ‘Turn around, son,’ said a parrot inked on the black man’s left shoulder, ‘and don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’

  Looking down briefly, Yasser saw that the ventriloquist was indeed wearing a pair of blue suede shoes… and not a pair of filthy flip-flops. When he looked up again, the flayed boy was holding out his hand.

  ‘I’m Elvis,’ the lad said to Yasser; ‘pleased to meet you.’