by Steve Aylett
Of course it fell to old muggins here to categorically deny everything at a press conference amid the flashbulbs and all—you can guess what I told them.
What I told the press
Good evening—let me start by saying you can hide nothing from my all-seeing eye. Not even you sir, with your stupid vest. Or you there, with your lust for murder. Look at the heatwarp of cowardice roaring off every bastard here. My advice? A bed made of steak and a flower from the brow of a hen—establish these and you’re well on the red road to the laughing academy.
But if you don’t happen to have those things, form a giant larva in a cupboard—the airing cupboard, say—and make it pouch out like a bladdersack, breathing, heaving and steaming like a thing full of long-suppressed rage and straining to burst out finally in retribution and bone-splintering carnage. This mucus-glistened organ will sometimes quiver but don’t let it worry you, that’s just its way of showing its love. Cart it out and throw it on the bonfire when it’s taller than you. That’s all there is to it—and the smoke will be yellow.
But I know you’re all creaming yourselves to know about the Mayor and his madness.
I can tell you the campaign glories were funded by the cartel and its leatherwinged demigod, which unfurled itself from a cabinet during boardroom meetings and silenced those who’d speak dryly of statistics. Gloves and hoods, ropes in the briefcase, that sort of thing. Homoerotic rituals and enforced suicide if you reveal how boring it all is. But Skinwing had a private life when not presiding over this dour executive gloom—one that’d separate your face and your expression. He’d occasionally settle down in a pinkwall cottage to paint sleds and fishing fools and snared fish and apples and wicker baskets in one-way sunlight with the gleam on the apple just so. Nuns and rangers and strange galloshered boatmen would queue up to be copied on to canvas with their bones stuck out all angles—why he never sold the stuff’s a mystery but everyone thought he would. When their heads cleared they set light to him while he slept—he rose up like a falcon and bit someone so hard they shouted with a piece took out of them like a biscuit.
Black with soot, Skinwing admitted everything including how he planned to duff up the grocer till dead. I admired him for that. The only time I had a crack at offing the grocer was when I saw him walking in front of a car and urged the driver to make it snappy. There’s the measure of my skill in that area.
Biting enemies seems to be acceptable in a surprisingly narrow range of circumstances, or so a ninja shouted at me once. So clearly Skinners had his flaws. Larks are the same—beautiful wings but no ear for music. I knew someone who shot them on sight. ‘Tigers’ he called them, and shot them quickly, screaming the whole time. Fell into the large gap next to a mountain eventually. Found his bones and face picked white in a holly bush, and so didn’t reach in. You can’t be getting torn up retrieving colleagues from the mayhem of their recklessness. Because that’s what it was of course—sheer bloody-minded recklessness on his part. Even left me a sack of dung in his will.
Which got me thinking of my father’s doctor as he slammed the sickroom door, my mother darting at him frantic. ‘How is he doctor?’
‘Dead as a doornail.’
‘Stone dead?’
‘As a dodo—better bury him quick.’
‘Did he suffer much?’
‘He made me suffer—that’s enough. With the most appalling practical jokes. Throwing the medicine, that sort of thing.’
‘He must have been distraught.’
‘That’s not the half of it, he was barking mad as a hare at the last. Pointing at Caesar.’
And I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes—and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it.
Older and recalling this I naturally ran at once to the bar, folding myself over it and asking for something to cry about. They told me they’d give me that, and soon enough Eddie started to claim he was a roaring boy. He’d take apples and roll them along the floor, saying it proved he was a troublemaker. His latest cash cow was the ‘steel underpants for bears’ idea. Think about that. Bears. Underpants. Steel. I asked him how he’d advertise it and he said he’d ‘create’ a poster of himself putting a pair of steel underpants on to a grizzly. He said the ad would play off the mutual apprehension of himself and the bear during the procedure. And that’s all she wrote.
‘Eddie,’ I told him in the snug, ‘you’re as slow as a tortoise humping a hardhat.’
Why did that bastard feel the need to stand and announce that evil was beauty, beauty evil? The whole bar fell silent and thus I myself became audible in a corner, relating the time I’d strangled a badger. My attempts to run played merry hell with the tables, chairs, people and bottles which stood so stubbornly in my way. I’d like to pretend I can laugh about it now but the truth is I laughed more then than today.
So I had to bluff it. ‘Hens scream when they lay eggs,’ I told them, edging toward the door, ‘but it takes a finely tuned ear to hear that quality in their noises—in fact hens are screaming constantly, if we only care enough to translate them.’ And I was saying goodbye solely by means of my legs.
But not everything round here’s high drama. Ancient dangers are none the less dangerous. The element of surprise is available to those who either appear suddenly or have always been there. Thus the shock on the gran’s face when the ancient boulder fell. The incident provided talk for a full five minutes, and then songs for ten. We boomed as though charm and a lusty aspect were enough to keep our fears at bay—and for a moment they were.
Then there was the time Eddie was savaged by saints. During the procedure these saints couldn’t stop laughing and this was the main thing he recalled about the incident. ‘How could they not stop?’ he asked time and again, frowning at the memory. ‘What am I, a comedian?’
‘Nobody can decide that for you Eddie.’
‘Well am I?’
‘Patience.’
So that should show the general level of shiftiness we’re dealing with. The shunt-thud of blade to block’s the nearest you’ll get around here to a square shoulder or the nod of a head. Fashion and lawnmowers come out shining and everyone tightens their fists. Apart from stamping on the animals that grow in bushes and feel it’s their right to appear on the path, there’s nothing to occupy us. And I mean nothing. Not even a shooting gallery with silhouettes of the royals. Put an ad in the paper once: ‘Upset by fiends? Shrieking fogs speed through the room? What do you expect?’ Not one reply.
Take Bob, now—there’s a man who knows which side of the world his toast’s buttered on and shrieks about it in the streets. Got a trick of magic which means he can call you from behind and you turn and just keep on turning, spinning like a bastard till exhaustion and insanity drain your head and structure. I like a man who can make his presence known. Nothing bloody provides a lesson for children—but call it a sauce and you’ll have them screaming.
When I was a kid the devout sang a chorus of subordination and villains wore masks to keep off the glare of our envy. Born into a din of admonitions and yelling at the inconvenience, I was cruelly allowed not to know the half of it. Siblings were all over me, more boldly than spiders, dust or skin. I remember my aunt grew bonces in the garden, hid among the rockery—but there was never full development. You could stamp on them and not feel over-guilty.
What I grew best were the hydra-heads of resentment, which I fed and sang to every day. The only people who appreciated my skill were trolls, whose opinions I therefore decided to respect. I thought things couldn’t get any worse—that’s how young I was.
Ambition was never my strong point, and by the time I was an adult I’d deserted the normal channels of investigation which led others to decide which consolation they wished to demand from the mistake of this dry world. For my part I wanted nothing more than to grow small heads like my aunt, and cook them to ash and sell them, as ash-heads. I tried over the ye
ars to sell this idea of ash-heads to businessmen in high glass office towers but when I came to the critical point in my pitch their expression would alter completely. Nameless men would put me on to the street and continue to hold me down as if they feared I would otherwise float away. And afterward, looking up, I would see the executive staring down at me from the twentieth floor, his expression a concentrated dot of incredulity.
Then there were the talking apes I grew in the cellar of Eddie’s place—they told me everything I needed to know about apes, sand, cars, death, cheap hotels, ferns, hate, fear, hail, flamelike love and betting nags. A dossier, it turned out, was the source of their knowledge, kept in a cabinet—that’s why they asked me to leave a moment, after I asked them a question, and when I returned they knew it all and were eager and precise. Annoyingly precise, as it turned out—I couldn’t stand them and their smug bastard attitude. It got so I couldn’t bear to feed them and they went berserk, breaking out of the depths and inflicting wounds before I’d properly awoken. And to think in the past I’d cast around looking for a horror worthy of my attention. Breaking the law to that end. Careful what you wish for brothers—it may come a-shrieking out of the bloody night with a curling lip and perfect teeth, making you know what you’ve done to deserve it.
‘Nothing ever happens in that cellar,’ Eddie declared.
‘What about the wounds, the belligerence of those chimps Eddie? Are you sailing into the port of my life and telling me that’s not enough?’
But Eddie closed his eyes in a way which suggested he cared to see no other possibility.
Merging with Eddie on the furnace deal was the worst mistake of my life. He described everything as a daring speculation so why did I consider this madness any different? He described his own dull trousers as a daring speculation. His capacity for self-delusion burnt me.
Ghosts were involved in the enterprise but only because they could wraith around the oven door and make it look like cooking-smoke without us using energy or food during the baking process. In fact that was the lynchpin of the whole deal. How could I be such a fool?
So I got a job making wreaths. But I made them out of ears and was arrested after only four days. In that time I’d sold nine hundred wreaths at a profit of £560. Which I wasn’t allowed to keep of course, it being defined as ‘illegal earnings’.
And that’s the last job I had before getting into that shitstorm of controversy with the Mayor and all. Went for an interview last week as any poor sod could see the ship was sinking and the bloke asked why I hadn’t looked for a proper job in years. So I turned on the old waterworks and said last time I’d considered the idea all hell broke loose in me head. ‘I shamed myself quite frankly,’ I said. ‘Learning things I already knew and wasting years on the process. Last time there was a dog in the way—nothing more but I used that as my excuse not to proceed. Well in fact there was no dog—that’s how uncommitted I was. But I said there was a dog. I can’t repent enough.’
‘There’s nothing on your CV regarding hobbies,’ he said.
‘Well I crave abomination and so attempt to invoke the devil in my free moments. With varying degrees of success, of course.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘The devil. I invoke him. Summon him up as it were. Surely you’ve heard of this.’
‘Heard of it. Yes, I have.’
‘Well there you are. And I’ve gained some measure of notoriety by my efforts.’
‘I’m sure. Yes I.’
‘Yes. Well is there anything else you needed to know? Tell you what, I’ll explain my position, all right? It’s a maze of sickness and blunder, now that I think about it—but I see where to begin.’
What I told the interviewer
Roadkill intercourse—yes, those precious obstacles are the main event in my life and it’s a form of love so obscure nobody’s ever reviled my activities or dragged me into the hay-strewn square for the purpose of flogging amid toothless hags and poultry. I’m thankful for that and for a clear understanding of my good fortune, because a lot of bastards in this world don’t know when they’re getting away with a good thing.
This was years after my bust-up with Rube, who had hair like the silk off a sweetcorn and a brain like the sweetcorn itself, multiple-sectioned and each section running a different personality. Her arse was poised precisely one and a half miles above sea level.
Nobody approved, least of all Bob. ‘Ruby’s a scorched-earth murdering bitch surely. Those stitches down the middle of her face.’
‘She had an accident.’
‘Stop laughing at least. God Almighty.’
Barbs were hurled at me as mere words of condemnation and slander are hurled at common men—and I collected them all in my back like a porcupine. Because that’s the kind of cowards these bastards were—no sooner had I turned away than they were carefully considering what I’d said and done. As if it were jaded knowledge I dealt in hundred-horsepower bullshit.
We were once sat having a meal in a smoking ruin. A masterpiece of arson actually, produced out of a nearby cathedral—went along to spectate the black Atlantis of its remains. Charcoal and coloured glass—I felt no more blessed amid this mess than amid the original construction, and there’s a lesson in that. We were discussing Ruby and defence, and Empty Fred said he’d left his trousers in a hero-guarded shrine at the end of the universe.
Eddie remarked that this was rare and unfortunate.
‘Eddie it happens all the time,’ sighed Fred witheringly.
‘Not you though Eddie,’ I stated. ‘You’ll end the low way. A skull and a few hair-wisps brother, that’s the truth.’
‘Ah so that’s the truth is it—I can stop questing now.’
‘Oh questing, is that the fresh song?’
‘It is.’
‘Redeeming your exploits by slamming a moral template over ’em like a sandwich toaster eh?’
Bob uncorked his soul and stood. ‘When man cannot effect cannibalism, can only be judged by evils, as distant cities go quiet in collapse and trouble, I will make toast by the river, and remember the warning I gave you this day.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘You heard.’
‘Perhaps their hands’ll go out like cigarettes,’ I chipped in.
‘He understands,’ said Bob, pointing at me.
‘Well, not really,’ I said uncertainly.
‘Fancy playing tennis with a spider monkey’s head anyone?’ asked Empty Fred, producing one, and Bob lunged at him with his entire body.
An hour was worth an hour in those days.
Latex and bigotry was all the rage and I couldn’t get enough of it, punching team players every chance I got. Thought I was blameless because of the trend—but oh the suffering and guilt I felt later when Fred told me I’d ruined his day the time I torched his car and floated a dead wren in the bath as he tried to go on holiday for the first time in years. Have a beer on me I said, and ran. Guilt’s such a red pleasure.
Fred was fated to die like a hero with a missing advantage. Tumour on his uniform. I like to think if we’d known we would have all behaved differently. Minotaur visited his stable and started snogging the horses—said they wanted it as much as he did. ‘Look at ’em,’ he laughed, gesturing at the row of long faces. ‘Batting their lashes. I’ll save one for you, brother.’
‘He’s using each individual stable as a kissing booth,’ said Fred, appalled. ‘He can’t tell right from wrong.’
‘But I can snog with the best of ’em,’ laughed Minotaur, flushed, his arm round the neck of a mare. He and the horse looked at me and this became a snapshot I’d carry through life.
Hunting was the pastime I always returned to and soon it was bears I was after, thinking they would be as small as their pictures in the books I had. I took with me a wicker basket in which to keep the doll-limp bodies. Suffice it to say I returned after five weeks of bleeding in the mountains and biting at rats, with a new philosophy which involved sitting in the corner
of an uneventful room and saying nothing. Drawers were filled with the guns and other bastard implements I was sure I’d never use again, and there was a locked door to keep women from grabbing me. Soon I was cured even of whispering, and ladders appeared at my window surmounted by the ruddy faces of the scornful and incredulous, all a-veiled with nose-steam. Someone tied a beggar to a pole and pushed him at the upper wall, making him relay messages of support—but he was from Sweden or something, the words were repeated phonetically and you know what that means. Complete bollocks and I felt worse than ever.
A white drop of holy water exploded on my forehead like a snubnose bullet. The eyes which claim and have always claimed to belong to my head sprang open and some bastard was stood there administering the last rites and stealing a shirt. ‘Three guesses,’ I choked, decent and appalled, ‘is more than you’ll get as regards my response to this.’
Sweetness and spades kept the funeral civil. The closing earth, a white hand tucked away as an afterthought, and roses. And no memory among the locals of the holy man’s visit—he had asked for this and they had prayed for it.
The sky clotted with angels.
My journal records it as such, as you can see here: ‘Broke out of the straps and punched guard—watched him fall all the way down before I ran, that’s how cool I was at this most desperate and extreme moment. They shouldn’t have expended energy on considering that a bastard like me could stay silent that long without perking up and going on the rampage.’
And that’s one of the milder entries. Search me, if you’re not afraid of scorpions.
Eddie, by the way, looks like one of those mummified frogs you find in a coconut if you’re lucky. From the very start we’d meet regular and discuss current affairs.
‘Will they reel in surprise at the next disaster Eddie or will they learn?’
‘I think they will reel in surprise.’
‘Are you sure now?’
‘Five of these confirm I am.’
And he counted out five coins on to the dark table. Each one sprung legs and fiddled away out of sight with a spider’s swiftness.