The Inflatable Volunteer

by Steve Aylett

  ‘And just what does that really confirm,’ I said into a beer, ‘except that you have the red ear of the devil?’

  And I fell to thinking of the eight times in my life I’d met the devil and the very particular boredom it caused me. The first time was in Eddie’s gallery and the last was in Eddie’s shed.

  Paintings plagued that gallery.

  ‘Get rid of ’em Eddie,’ I bellowed. ‘They’ll bleed you dry and leave you choking in your mess.’

  Eddie tried to describe the function I’d misunderstood—that they weren’t here to prevail against sense and actuality. That’s how far gone he was, and of course I lost no time in banging him round the face with a rolled up hand—he fell in a corner so precisely I thought for a moment he was agreeing with my argument—then I realised he was out like a light—then the devil came. Well you know the rest.

  Next day Eddie said he’d leap off a building and naturally I spectated from below but a shower of birds, monkeys and cats descended instead of that lying bastard. Some dead before and all dead after. The birds in particular had been strangled and the chimps punched senseless. That’s the sort of work I’m claiming he performed. And he asserted I should be ‘enriched’ by the experience. ‘I suppose you’ll want paying then,’ I shouted, and when I saw his gob moving to form the affirmative I kicked it hurriedly in the other direction.

  I didn’t want to be lumbered with this nonsense my whole life—especially a life as short as mine was plainly to be. So I searched for a reason to leave the continent entirely, and having settled upon an excuse—demonic possession and exotic cure, if I remember correctly—I quit the land of my birth and set off in a boat made of dead wood and ignorance. Both the wood and the ignorance kept me afloat. There’s a lesson I learned early.

  Bereft of the support systems of alcohol and bloody vengeance, however, I was reduced to stoning gulls and small surfacing pilchards—for two months. Built a crude effigy of Eddie which I propped in a corner of my cabin and used for the receiving of darts by the painful end. I was so bored I could have gazed at an ornament.

  I swear all the terror later on was justified—blood spattered a wall but I was perfectly intact. A spider’s web carried away my tears into the shadows. Footsteps without anyone riding them entered and departed.

  Finally I stopped thinking I was a normal man. Looking at the facts, I feel quite comfortable with this assessment.

  So anyway I arrived. And wished immediately I was back with the bastards who’d urged me I shouldn’t leave in the first place.

  Skulls everywhere for a kick-off—and not recognisably human. Snouted like a pike. Looked at you wherever you sat in the room, that sort of thing. Which was the last thing I needed in m’darkness, I can tell you.

  Smashed them—every one with a hammer, big one that fitted over my shoulder as a hammer should. And those mothers exploded like crockery, fragments flying like the stumped notions of poets. I laughed to fulfil my contribution. I hadn’t eaten or thought clearly for weeks.

  I salvaged a few things to be proud of in that wrecked land. Bellying out in a way that frightened the natives and made the already running ones stop suddenly and stare. Loving the sky as much as the earth, I told them so and made them know I was watching their response, oh so close. Shaking with fear, some of them. ‘Ghosts,’ I said—just the one word. And they were fleeing.

  You’d think this paradise of billowing delirium could last forever, but it did end one spring morning. I was having a sparse picnic under a varicose tree. Ratcheting a new trap, I laid it down and hoped I’d catch something bigger than an actor this time. Eleven minutes later I had concrete proof that some spiders have enough meat to throw the mechanism—this one was so heavy it started shouting as I picked it up, claiming I shouldn’t waste time trying. I must say I agreed. This bastard looked intent on being a dead weight, giving me not a bit of help. And could anyone hope to fry it into a meal worth the crunching?

  Renewed and wily, I came home glowing like a dashboard saint. Bearded and staring. Built a building flighty and ramped, soldered with cheese, scabby with windows, nothing its number, guilt its foundation. A cabin in a hill, inset like an eye from which I could survey louts as they went their way screaming and holding hands. Sailing kites which they thought were fun and blameless, but which I knew and sometimes informed them were inadvertent signals to the devil himself. Hot scenes would ensue and I’d have to run like the clappers because they supposedly knew it all. Nothing ever entertained people as much as me—not even circus acrobats who fell just so when shot in mid-air. Only the elephants seemed to find it amusing like I did. Just me and the elephants.

  Went back the other week—heard it had been turned into a school for midgets and wanted to see. Nothing had changed except it looked bigger.

  So I was stood savouring my past when someone came up and punched me eighty times on the front of my face. ‘But try lunching on it,’ I said nervously, trying to be a lad. Next thing I remember is the doctors telling me I was lucky to be alive. ‘You mean I’m intact for indoctrination?’ I sneered, and was still sneering when they pushed me out the doors. Well anyway, I told them. Got home and wrote a huge treatise on geese, about which I know nothing. ‘It’s a routine bird,’ I concluded, lighting a cigar, ‘I can take or leave it.’

  Next day I was putting a match to a car in Epping Forest and a badger came near. ‘Get away you bloody gobshite!’

  But it was too late—everything went up and he was off calling the police. I had some explaining to do they said. A lot of explaining.

  What I told the police

  It all comes down to my unbeatable charm—that’s the reason for everything that happened with the badger back there and so on. Don’t interrupt. Just don’t touch me you bastard. See this here—tattoo of a dead git. That’s where we’ll all be, in time. Write that in your book, if you can. Now where was I—

  Talking to Eddie in the bar I was. ‘Penny for your thoughts brother.’

  ‘The clockwork quality of the human female bomb,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Shelled pride and candied anger.’ At this point I necked some beer and knew I’d done so. ‘I trust you’ve a plan.’

  ‘Logic and temperature are joined somewhere—when I find out where, I intend to stand on it.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Explain to everyone what I’m doing.’

  ‘Because it might just look as if you’re standing idle.’

  ‘Exactly. And you?’

  ‘I will balance stone deities on my arse until they’re all retired.’

  ‘You’ll be balancing stone deities on your arse a long time.’

  ‘Don’t count on it.’

  It was a routine argument, existence adoring strife and psychic mistakes.

  ‘An earpopping roofdive Eddie—there’s your end.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Tarmac blur and a smack you’ll barely register. Merciful really. Or a hanging. You’ll dry all right.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Coleridge’s deck withered his officers. Why not you? You’ll change for the clock in your skin.’

  ‘Not likely.’

  ‘Only yesterday eyes and all, to die and unweave with the dead.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Summers without pictures.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Kicking madly in a wind.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Knotted witnesses.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Banging tense against a gibbet.’

  ‘You go too far brother.’

  ‘Sacred bargains—that’s the key Eddie. To your existence at any rate.’

  ‘No deals,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Oh really,’ I said unconvinced. ‘You’re just unconnected with everything else then. Look at these gems Eddie—don’t you feel hungry?’

  ‘Not me.’

  Eddie’s bare assertion that he was above it all filled me with a rage like boiled poison. Frien
ds rallied round. Kill him when all his eyes are closed and his arms are in an anti-punching position. Then his death’s assured. But I stared out the window and considered the effect of these negligible actions. So here was their understanding of the wiring under the boards. Bottle-brave and fronting off. Seeking to overwhelm me with impoverished paradigms I’d always dismissed as the ghoulish instinct of chefs. Changing opinions like a gator thrashing its weight.

  Should I stop here and let these dime-a-dozen bastards shout pointblank into my eyes? Or go home?

  New skeletons with still-oiled joints are almost soundless—old ones clatter and have poor luck when creeping up on you. Just one of the lessons I learned in the front room of that strange house at three in the stagnant morning. Braille wallpaper, meaty flies and attic drybirds.

  The room was so icy I couldn’t shift the furniture.

  ‘Is this glue or am I in the worst place I’ve ever been?’ I asked the suicide line.

  ‘The worst place so far,’ they emphasised.

  ‘I feel better,’ I said—and I honestly did. There’s something about morons on the line that creates perspective—what could be worse than being the other fella?

  That building was radiant with neglect. Beautiful gargoyle over the door but it started shouting at me with the spooky black hole of its mouth—saying I was ridiculous, a failure. And that within a year I’d develop gills.

  Draped it in kelp. I saw seaweed as the answer to everything in those days. What a fool I was. Someone had allowed me to go that way for years and now I was seeing for myself.

  So I stopped at the bar.

  Through mere conversation a while back I’d caused a previously mild cleric to become dangerously insane and as I glanced across the bar now I saw him thunderously bargaining with a pinioned victim. ‘Do you care to live more?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Are ye sure now?’

  ‘Yes, yes I—’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I—yes I do please.’

  ‘Well there’s wisdom. There’s wisdom eh boys? Aye, they say aye. You’re a small man. Small men need to remain silent or know the power of my legs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes padre.’

  Preggers with grim knowledge, I turned to Eddie. ‘How smallminded can a man be and remain a punching target Eddie? Just how bloody small?’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean brother.’

  ‘You know all right—you know.’

  ‘Not me.’

  That was Eddie. The one time he tried growing a beard it turned out green. Fingered something out of his ear which struggled and scarpered—finally cornered by police in an alley and shot eleven times. Media blackout and Eddie in quarantine for six weeks—there’s the sort of man he was.

  ‘Every moron and wreck knows more than you Eddie—for example that pigs can be turned inside-out when very young, before their bones harden.’

  ‘All bones are hard.’

  ‘There—that’s how much you know today.’

  ‘Yes it is—and I’m right.’

  ‘Won’t admit a mistake. Doomed to failure and the indefinite delay of anything you might enjoy, do you understand what I’m telling you? Do you get my meaning?’

  ‘Ah you’ve a meaning now?’

  ‘One I’ve had with me since a youth plagued by swivel-head statues and leg-dangling ceiling parasites. My god you’re a babe in the woods.’

  ‘Did you ever return home brother?’

  ‘When my father died. The Reaper warned me in advance you know.’

  ‘You really believe you’re acquainted with him.’

  ‘The Reaper. Didn’t I take you to the very depths of hell proving the point.’

  ‘Oh so you did. I always remember it as a kind of holiday or surgical procedure. Nearly died on the table. Pool table that is—ha ha ha.’

  ‘Quite a joke Eddie,’ I stated, and regarded my pint closely. ‘Yes, quite a little joke there.’

  ‘Oh so you liked that eh.’

  ‘I know you’ve been planning it for some time—and I wouldn’t knock a man in his finest hour now would I.’

  ‘Oh I get your full meaning now—you’re casting asparagus is that it.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well that’s your way, I know.’

  ‘Each to their own Eddie, that’s right.’

  ‘Each to their own. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Hell yes it’s the only way.’

  ‘Now what were we discussing again?’

  ‘Lard Eddie.’

  ‘Lard. Unbeatable.’

  ‘You sad fool.’

  Like I say, I could understand only so much per day about Eddie—but Bob was a different language altogether. Charm bounced off him like rocks off a bastard. Even Ruby couldn’t get him to release the hen he’d caught one time in an alleyway—and he said it was because he intended to shave it before releasing it back into the wild. ‘Then we’ll see if nature takes care of its own or stamps on its face and calls it outcast,’ he whispered, stroking the animal.

  ‘Bob why interfere with the natural order of this rubbish?’ I said, gesturing at the trees.

  ‘Measured against death, weeping for a very long time can seem like a political observation.’

  Ruby disagreed, saying tears were too full of nourishment for that. She’d done a whole bunch of experiments whereby a diet of tears had accelerated the regrowth of lobster arms torn off in seafloor combat.

  Back in the bar Empty Fred was taking bets as to how many people could fit into the pub before they’d start evolving—he meant into a creature which hung from the ceiling by a sucker, with one arm for the pint and a gob for expelling bullshit. ‘Only three,’ I said, giving him a tenner, ‘if they were all like you.’

  Everyone froze, staring at me as if I’d committed the last and worst of a catalogue of crimes. My laughter abandoned me like a viper leaving a dry victim.

  ‘You hear?’ I bluffed nervously. ‘Rotfaced discoveries in Charlie’s wall—wife on long holiday indeed.’

  ‘You’re a smooth one aren’t you. How do you keep from besotting us all.’

  ‘I use a charm filter.’

  At that moment the barman staggered up from below with a roasted pig on a platter, rosy-flanked, apple in its gob. Thank god, I thought—a feast for distraction.

  ‘Look what I found,’ the barman shrieked. ‘Bloody murder.’

  ‘Dead—and pumped with deadly venom I daresay.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I shouted hopefully, but was met with glares of disapproval as the whole bar gathered at the corpse.

  ‘Some monster put it through torture before the end.’

  ‘Look at that expression—if you can.’

  ‘What was the cause, d’you think?’

  ‘Auto-erotic asphyxiation,’ I said. ‘Look at the apple.’

  ‘That’s satsumas brother.’

  ‘Any idea who bothered to do it Eddie.’

  ‘That one,’ said Eddie, pointing at me as though at a passing silver aeroplane. ‘That murdering bastard over there. Doesn’t know his own desires. Talks about the dry-tissue-clung eye sockets of dead birds. Can’t keep his mouth shut about his mother. Bedroom’s a front. Radar screens and illuminated continent behind a flip-up wall. There’s the bastard.’ And he pointed again with more emphasis on the malevolence.

  A minimum of eight people said I deserved worse than they could imagine. The barman yanked up my sleeve.

  ‘How’d you get the scar brother.’

  ‘Brown turbulent sea, jellyfish out of nowhere, end of story.’

  ‘End of story.’ The bar reverberated with scornful laughter. ‘Yeah I bet.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Story of your life eh—end of.’

  ‘Yeah—end of, yeah, my life er…’

  ‘No story brother—no plot but the one against us, no conflict as we’ve no defence.’

  And what did that leave
me? Only a set of evasive maneouvres the subtlety of which would blow the ears off an adder.

  What I told every last bastard in the bar

  Right then lovebirds, simmer down—that’s right, that’s right. You’re all my little babies eh? You with the knife—just you try it. And stop with the pocket billiards Eddie.

  Now there’s compelling reasons for realising this here isn’t a pig like you say. This is a spaniel in the last stages. You’ll notice the snout here is bevelled and made of cardboard, as we can all hear if I strike it. Hear that? And see the remnants of hair? The smile on its face? See the large canines? D’you even speak English you bastards? Think you’re clever eh? Now I see it all. Jellied eyes broadcasting their disapproval by the energy of their belief that I care. And you seriously consider I do. Well that’s your right, of course. And one smile from life forms a rope for showing where your head ends.

  Truth is I’d like to light the fuse of every dog’s tail and watch them shout. That’s right fry the monsters till they understand how I hate. Nothing can help me to feel better so quickly as the enterprise I just described. Get frowning now you bastards, I won’t change my mind.

  Frown and you’re using your best wares for something that truly expresses what you feel. When I do so I’m proud I haven’t given way to thoughts of light and endearment. My rule for life is to be desperate one day at a time. The roof exists only to conceal what the world is about to heap upon me. Like yesterday at Fred’s we heard the ceiling creak and having squatted into a starter’s-orders sprint position I felt I was way ahead of him, right. But the ceiling banged open and dumped four tons of insects on to us like a glittering rubbish heap.

  Empty Fred was laughing. I was so aggrieved I tried wading over to punch him but he was already being overwhelmed by the brittle masses.

  The insects started raising their preystick arms and throwing quivershadows on the wall. ‘Their way of showing disapproval,’ said Fred, choked with hilarity.

  Examined a few, but I never could identify animals. Last week I was flooding the banks with saliva, slivers of gill and drifting snot, paddling hell-for-leather away from a harmless seal. Wet old hags told me I was to be king and I was so bored I dunked their heads in the cauldron. Frighten them at their own game brothers.