by Steve Aylett
Had a meeting in the bar about it when the mess had been flushed.
‘The smoke and dust obscured even his gun that time.’
‘I saw.’
‘But the kill was prim.’
‘Right—and long bloody overdue.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Then it was off to the shrink to whom I’d been referred by the authorities. No sense elaborating but it all stemmed from an incident involving dogs and intense affection, you know the song. On this visit I only stared in through his window until he jerked the curtains closed—my first and last proper session the previous week had verged on the fatal for both of us. He sat there harping on about how a man like me should just take it easy and say whatever came into my head. Didn’t believe me when I said that was my life in a nutshell.
‘Would you like to talk about it?’ he asked.
‘If it’ll get me off the hook with those bastards at the unit,’ I said, ‘I’d eat my own brittle grandmother.’
What I told the shrink
We’ll skip the childhood bollocks and cut to the mayhem eh? England’s a shower curtain for the modest butcher, as you know. Minotaur’s always saying so long as you evade the spotlight you can learn all you want. ‘Too much bleating and the true spice becomes a bright stew of obsolete crossways,’ he reckons—so in the Shop o’ Fury he hammers tears into coins and spoons strange, articulated soup all the time. ‘Prayer loves detail—slows you down.’
‘And delays the disappointment?’ I offered once, but he just stared at me—face like a scone, you know. There he was, like, surrounded by radiator soil and little self-assembly resentment generators, accusing me.
But I didn’t have anything better to do so I watched him prepare an ache channel in the sick air. ‘Later I soak the bone in the dark,’ he said, ‘failing in rain and silently wheeling my hand, like so—that’s to attract the inhabitants.’
‘In—inhabitants?’
‘Of fiendhouse—there’s one in here.’—And he held up the bone like a telescope to my eye—I saw rich illness and screaming smoke, yellow minds withdrawing and infinite.
‘A crumb is logical, though discarded. Life is life.’
In the dark room ruins entire rushed up the walls, a distance quivering in old windows—then he slammed the bone down like an inverted glass, cutting off the process.
‘Pour ill fate in their face and sew the wound alive.’
I’d heard of this before as Empty Fred had used a similar principle to etherically cut-and-paste a sort of horse stable on to some wasteland near his gaff. It was meant as a place for Godber’s Troops to hide when the cops were after them. Empty Fred had joined the Troops because they were the only bastards distracted enough to ignore him. The downside was at regular intervals he’d be hauled out of bed and propelled through a hull door with only a parachute between him and the slamming palm of god. Reluctantly wore the uniform sometimes, blank epaulets staple-gunned to his shoulders—inverted commas I suppose, raised eyebrows, irony. That’s how he meant it but they looked like banana peel to me, or the aura stain of his imminent death.
‘What did you see in the betsy stick brother?’ he asked, drinking.
‘Scalped abdomen, hypodermic chaos, brains aborted, rope darkness, charring avatars. Mechanical canyon lined with waitresses. Anything pales after that, brother. Stay away.’
And he planted oh so subtly the notion to boost the bone. ‘Boost the bone,’ he said. ‘We’ll be rich. Lobster lunches with the dead etc.’
But when the time came he was off on some practice drop into New Cross—bloody nightmare apparently. Parachutes everywhere, troops sobbing, screech of cars, twenty people dead.
Anyway so I got Eddie into the scam. Him, me and the Rubitron went into town to test the wares in a cinema showing a director’s balls-up of something that had been fine to begin with. No need for remorse if things went to hell.
‘What did you see in the betsy stick brother?’ Eddie asked, drinking.
‘Only beauty,’ I said.
‘That’s nuthin’,’ he laughed as we neared the venue. ‘I once pressed the cheek of a cat and it let out a sort of laugh, like a chuckle or something.’
‘Or something? Don’t you know?’
‘I sort of can’t say if it was exactly—’
‘Was it a snigger then?’
‘Look it was a chuckle okay.’
‘You getting all this Rube?’
‘Every word.’
‘You aren’t a cop right Miss Ruby?’
‘What’s it to you? And anyway I’m not interested in.’ And she fixed me with a stare and said:
‘Little boys’ games.’
Then she strutted off till the magnetic pull to follow her diminished.
‘Suspect convenience re the knife Eddie.’
‘“I had it because I love it.”’
‘That’s your get-out eh? An invertebrate compensates for his lack with a sudden lunge. You’ll fry.’
‘Seated?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘So long as I’m seated.’
‘It’s curious how different fools are when completely toasted.’
‘Different how.’
‘More character. Variegation.’
‘And corrugation?’
‘You’ve got the idea. Darkness to show there’s something unrevealed—like that dog over there. Keeps its mouth closed. So when it springs at you for no reason, gob railed with teeth, you know it all at once through the sudden contrast.’
‘You mean it’s holding something back.’
‘For greater impact at the fine hour, that’s right sonny jim.’
Inside we dunked the frightener in a juice bucket, planted it near the speakers and waited for a reborn breeze to bless the cobwebs. Almost immediately spinelight circled the room and there swooped the downside. Abscess puppets resplendent in trailing gore, each skull as individual as a snowflake. A massive igneous brain dragging wires dumped itself on the front row. The air segmented, squirting blur-trains of spooky muscle toward us, which landed as crone-throated corpses in our laps. Dimmer ones were prowling up the aisle, I could see. The stench of fear and poached blood. Swooping shreds shrieked over our heads.
‘Rude aren’t they?’
But parts were already redissolving to leave only some hardening connective tissue on the walls.
Sniggering on the way out we were brought up sharp by the bloke on the door. There he was, punctate gill flanges and all. ‘Bones is nuthin’,’ Eddie squawked but I shut him up—I could deal with this.
Tried a sort of punching gambit, with shouts and a murderous expression. Stood up to think it over again. Eddie dabbed gore from his muzzle and tried to see.
Reasoned with the bloke man-to-man. ‘So there’s corpses at large,’ I began matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll have a paper face and eyelids like the wings of a moth before you really understand what happened just now. And so what? Spectres echo here anyway don’t they?’
The doorman clutched his speech in bared teeth. ‘Gorillas!’ he said, and immediately said it again louder. He was the sort. Boot you in the gob and bye-bye accent. Luckily just then a few strays whistled out of a vent and tore off part of his forehead. Who had the whip hand on these mothers? Not me. Gave me the heeby-jeebies. Cosmic sepsis, ghost-stream, jellyheads—well that’s all right if you can stand the pace. Everyone reckons spirits are a right laugh to flurry and snort over the houses—don’t you believe it.
‘So you used the core stick eh?’ Bob rumbled later, glaring. ‘There you go again agog at the wrong marvels. Know what I’d have done at your age if a being like Minotaur showed me the way?’
‘Carve your initials on his face? Ha ha ha.’
Bob’s eyes rolled up into his mind.
Of course we stay friends despite all this—just the other day me and the others were in the bar talking about Carver I think it was. ‘The point is,’ I said, ‘a wrinkled brain like his is a geological myster
y, rubber and passive.’
‘For your sake,’ Minotaur remarked, ‘I hope it’s that and nothing more.’
‘And just what the hell do you mean by—’
—and Bob slammed in through the flap-dramatic door. ‘I wish it was autumn, your race weeping by night, embraces up its sleeve and a knife in its hand. Goats stop talking, goats stop talking.’
‘You all right Bob?’
‘Do I look all right.’
‘A drink for my friend Bob here—and one for yourself, we’re all friends here aren’t we?’
‘For a week we are. Then…’
‘Then?’
‘Then spiders flex in the dark.’
‘In the dark eh,’ I said, nodding intensely. ‘Spiders. Well now it’s all becoming clear to me. Isn’t it Eddie. Becoming clear.’
‘Oh yes, clear all right.’
‘Well that shows how much you know Eddie. It’s as clear as my arse, that’s what we know here though none of us has the balls to admit it. Bob here, this man here, he’s as barking mad as anyone I’ve looked at in my life, and I for one—’
‘Yes?’ said Minotaur.
‘You think I’ll be held back now? I was about to say, yes, I for one am getting just the hell out of here before we’re all of us, yes everyone, sucked into this bastard’s game. Out of my way.’
‘You’ll pay for this.’
‘Will I. We’ll understand later who’ll pay, sonny jim.’
So there I was in front of the firing squad and they asked me as they do about the last notion—have you any final notions they asked as they were strapping on the old blindfold.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’d like to tell you about the time I rode on a dog and thought for a moment I was a better man than I am.’
‘Well don’t keep us poised here all afternoon,’ they said, ‘it’s not healthy for any of us.’
What I told the firing squad
I was incredibly horny when I was a young ’un—smoke the colour of biscuit came out of my nose when I saw the curvature on a woman. I was calm only when knocked oblivious by a restaurant swingdoor and how often does that really happen.
Give me moans in bloom any day. Ruby Thunderhead tied her hair back so hard her face split down the middle. Backbone glistened and grew. Bubbling forehead of transformation. There’s a real woman for you. Told her she looked like an explosion and she responded by becoming exactly that. Met her in a mutant salon. Tubes and ducts were shoving out of her face to beat the band. You could do that for a living I said.
‘Earn an audience with nineteen valves coming out of my face? What kind of audience?’
‘The forgiving kind.’
Blinked and she was still there. Morality like a diving board and an arse the angels born in heaven would kill for. Clothing was discarded like pinpulled grenades—frantic isn’t the word.
That was the start. My cool demeanour comes of being used for target practice as a child—all that ducking, wincing and screaming, I got it out of me early.
‘So what d’you do?’
‘I’m serenaded by bullshit.’
‘For a living I mean?’
‘I seek solace in revenge and suspicion. Implode and waste everyone’s sweet time.’
‘And Eddie?’
‘That bastard? Know why he’s so strange? His ears are older than the rest of him. His ears are seventy-eight years old.’
‘Why should that cause such a problem?’
‘He’s known it since he was three. Think of it.’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Well? Three. And so does everyone else know. About the ears I mean, the age. It’s how he’s identified. It’s on all the police records. Become the way the bastard identifies himself.’
‘There’s worse ways.’
‘Like what?’
‘Beliefs?’
‘You must be joking.’
‘Courage?’
‘Not bloody likely.’
‘Betting strategy?’
‘You having me on? If he sees a nag with the right number of legs he stuffs dosh in its mouth. Doesn’t know there’s a better way.’
‘Is there?’
‘A sea monster surely,’ said Eddie when I told him about her.
‘No,’ I assured him. ‘The corpsed soil is always under her, with shameful direct sunlight.’
‘She’ll deflate your stern with a needle brother.’
He was surprised as my real fetish at the time was tying up snort-laughing barmaids with bundles of my own nerves—a restraint the thickness of cotton so naturally their struggle was all pretend. Meanwhile I’d tog up as a camel and set fire to my arse. I was surprised to discover years later that this was considered normal. Apparently if there weren’t at least a dozen silver-painted midgets and a chariot involved the experiment was a non-starter round there.
Eddie told me I should get rid of her by any means available but I was balmy and charmed. ‘You’ll have no physical pain Eddie, not at first. Life measured in tides of snot, whispered like memorial curses. Movement by the tiny privilege stepladder. Dark afflicted years of assignment to the business corridor, then the last.’
‘Explain.’
‘Age Eddie. Veins under onion paper. Bed for a statue and a dead man’s hairstyle.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, yes. Pitifully aproned and weeping, there’s your end.’
‘I’m not replying till you change what you just said.’
‘I mean no harm.’
‘Just don’t try it all right.’
‘Bob’s got so much metal in his face there’s a danger of changing the magnetic polarities of the planet Eddie.’
‘Bob has no metal in his face.’
‘Well he might.’
‘Stick to the facts brother or don’t say anything.’
‘You’ve had quite enough, is that the song? I’ve gone just a little too far this time. Pushed the boundaries further than you ever dreamed possible and now you’re afraid—afraid of your own complicity in the matter and intent on kicking my blameless arse from here to eternity for the crime of expressing myself in terms normally reserved for saints and waiters.’
Eddie merely gulped at his pint and avoided my eye.
‘So there’s the final argument of those who never had enough tit in their early years—bitterness at those who have overcome the trauma in their own unique and personal way.’
‘That’s it,’ he said, and stood like a decided man. Two hours later he was in the same position and other drinkers had come and gone, time called and the doors closed—activity surrounded the statue of this once angry man. Doctors were summoned and tapped him with tiny hammers—turned out the outermost layer of the fool had turned to flint. ‘He’s in there, living in his usual way,’ said the doc, packing his gear, ‘but none of it’s visible to the eye. Feed him plenty of straw and talk to him about the league tables. He’ll soon see his immobile state has no consequence in the world, same as when he’s up and about like a good ’un.’
‘Thanks doc,’ I said, and opened space to visit Minotaur, whose opinions scared me less these days. Voodoo air and autopsy humour. Minotaur wept minnows and laughed poison gas. That’s how much of an impression he made on me and frightened the others when he claimed to know demons and to halve his salary with the devil himself. ‘Killjoys’ he called those who ran. Had a style pedal attached to his arm so he could punch you in the manner of various celebrities. Mother Theresa would deliver a haymaker to the belly and Nixon would slap.
His abode steamed with abominations.
‘Elastic bats eh.’
He poured a drink. ‘Goat water brother. Drink it and your skin will become lace, tearing with dust.’
‘One man’s poison,’ I said, accepting the glass. ‘Now what’s Eddie up to really d’you think, in himself?’
‘Neglecting his studies like a man possessed. And more which I am unable to describe in your simple language.’
‘Am I suppose
d to be frightened.’
‘Respectful brother—of Satan.’
‘Not Satan again—give it a rest brother.’
‘Satan never rests.’
‘No wonder he’s so uptight. Sling me the paper.’
‘At a time like this brother. You’ll learn the hard way.’
‘Yeah the hard way, whatever you say brother—sling it over, there’s a thing in there about lard and creation.’
‘There is nothing in there about lard and creation.’
‘I’m saying there is brother—give it here.’
But every single story in the rag was about Bob—and every one stated that he had been seen strangling a swan and then tearing off its bill to use as a mouthpiece on a black, antique telephone. ‘The type you’d see in an old, cruel film,’ went the story. This event occurred at some big social function and Bob had been there in smart clobber—probably with the express purpose of assaulting the animal. More than forty people saw the attack and each told a variation of the same savage yarn. And so another day’s paper was filled.
The main editorial went on about ‘servitude’ and ‘clemency’, concluding that everything was ‘washed up’ for the poor wretch.
‘The press are always the last to catch on aren’t they?’ I remarked to Minotaur, but he eyed me with doom-heavy disapproval.
I persisted. ‘Headlocked morons I mean. Still reading cloth books probably. About ducks and so on.’
‘Through compromise we travel, through social graces we skid.’
Minotaur spoke of universal gifts. For the grand embryonic wrong, grief. For the operating nerve of god, resentment. For me, exhaustion.
‘The skeleton in the egg eh?’
‘If you like.’
‘If I like—that’s a good one. You never stop do you brother?’
And now I recall the days when just this sort of exchange would make me burst out to the glee of the gutter press—BASTARD MAKES FREE WITH METAL PIPE AND DOESN’T HELP US PRETEND WE DON’T KNOW WHY—that sort of thing.
Bloody murder was still popular then and had everyone guessing, or able at least to pretend. Have another was the cry. Have a double. Then the outrage.
So anyway after discussing Bob and Eddie a while and consulting the Horned One on various matters I left Minotaur and joined Ruby in a primeval swamp, which is what we did for fun at this point in our disastrous relationship. We walked out into evolution and faced one another, the mud-infested drool continuum swarming around us. ‘I can’t believe it began here,’ she began to say but I shut her up. Bats and slow-worms started sniggering. ‘Where’s Bob then?’ she asked.