He turned to see a line of … six, seven, eight people emerge from high in the building. They spread out along a horizontal gantry, spaced themselves evenly apart, and leaned by their elbows on a handrail, taciturnly observing him. Below them, on another gantry, a further eight people appeared and arranged themselves in an identical pattern. On the steps between the gantries others sat and slouched and eyed him also. They were all the same; that was, the same age: young, in their early twenties. And all were clothed identically, he saw now: in grey scruffy one-piece boiler-type suits, with concertina sleeves and red piping around the shoulders, elbows, waists and knees. Every one of them, boys and girls, wore his or her hair in messy spikes, and every face was lightly sponged with smut.
‘Hey, yo!’ he heard from behind. He turned back around.
Fondler was standing in the courtyard. She was still dressed in her black Puffball uniform and leather jacket. Her hands sat defiantly on her hips and her feet were planted in obdurate firmness and widely apart, in a puddle.
A voice called from a gantry:
‘Who’s your friend, Fondler girl? He one of the newbies at work?’
‘I don’t know who he is. But I know his face.’
‘Ooh là là!’ somebody else called. ‘I want to hear that face speak! Let me see that face again!’
He turned to look back at the gantries.
‘Speak, Proteus Boy!’ called a boy with bright blond hair.
‘Speak!’ called a girl with lurid red hair.
‘Speak!’ screamed somebody else.
‘Speak! Speak! Speak! Speak! Speak!’ came the chorus, at once harsh and deep and high and shrill, getting louder and louder, as upwards of twenty pairs of arms banged the scaffold in perfect time.
Then suddenly, on one of the beats, the noise cut out, leaving the ring of resonant metal in the air.
In unison, eight legs were slung over the handrail of the bottom gantry, and eight legs over the top gantry, as the youths on the stairs began to twist downwards through the helix of metal like jungle cats in the branches of a jacaranda. Then the second in each pair of legs came flying over the handrail, and the two troupes of eight each dropped gantry by gantry to the courtyard. In less than a minute he was encircled, the dead centre of an anticlockwise-moving formation. All eyes were on him. Each left arm in its concertina sleeve quivered like a rattlesnake, the hand open, the fingers splayed.
‘Hisssssss!’ went every mouth. ‘Hisssssss, hisssssss’, and then –
‘sssssssssssssssStop!’
Fondler, outside the circle.
It broke to allow her in, then split at the opposite side so that now two straight chorus lines were formed. Rickard stood facing his erstwhile quarry in a silent stand-off.
‘Who is he, Fondler?’
‘Yes, who is he?’
‘Why has he come?’
‘What is he doing here?’
‘Pray, tell!’
Fondler remained silent, and kept her gaze fastened on Rickard. He detected a minute trembling of her sockets, a tic of the pupils. Yes, she must have recognised him; he had been on stage, under bright lights, for nearly an hour the night before.
‘Come out with it now! Give us the truth!’ came twenty-four sing-song voices all together.
Now the open left hands, which had never stopped quivering, were joined by twenty-four quivering right hands, and each pair of quivering hands rose from its owner’s side to chest height and became jazz hands.
‘Stop goofin’ around! We need to know:
Why has he come here among us?
Did Townsend send him to snuff out our plans
To smash up the smooth white fungus?’
The chorus lines swapped sides, slicing through each other in cartwheels.
Rickard grabbed at his heart. He felt light-headed. He felt himself slipping away.
***
Fairy lights and candlelight were the first to meet his sight before his eyes adjusted to a room gutted to the bare brick. But the occupants had made the most of it: the candles gave off a smell of sandalwood, red and orange Moroccan floor mats hung on the walls, and toy spaceships from the merchandising line for the eighties film Privateers of Orion dangled by fishing thread from hooks in the ceiling.
‘The heat rising from the candles makes them spin,’ said the boy in the chair. ‘Cool, huh?’
‘What am I doing here?’ said Rickard. ‘Who are my captors?’
‘You nearly hit your head on the ground. One of us caught you.’
‘Did you use the power of embarrassment to try and kill me?’
‘No. We used a blowpipe, and a dart dipped in mescaline. But only to disable you. My name’s Slipper. Those are my ships. I tied them up for you. Sorry for calling you Proteus Boy earlier. It’s just that your head reminded me of Proteus, Neptune’s irregular-shaped satellite.’
‘We like asymmetry here,’ came another voice – Fondler, standing in the doorway. She was wearing one of the grey outfits and her hair was now in spikes.
‘Where is here?’ said Rickard.
‘We like old stuff too,’ said Slipper. ‘We bought a VCR last week. It took us a long time to find one. We don’t buy things online. Maybe you know how to work a VCR?’
‘I share this room with Slipper,’ said Fondler. (There was one single bed in the room. Rickard lay on a sofa that smelt strongly of body odour.) ‘Let me show you around.’
She brought him into a tight dark corridor and pointed towards rooms – none of which had doors in their doorways – where other gang members slept. The lower floors were much the same: corridors of crumbling plasterboard or bare brick with doorless rooms off them. The only illumination in the corridors came from garlands of fairy lights, gaffer-taped to the walls and ceilings. In every corridor at least a couple of the grey-suited youths loitered, some of them smoking. All of them cheerfully acknowledged him.
‘I’ve explained to them who you are – that you were in the singing group with Denny Kennedy-Logan, and that you once came to the Bryant Square store and appeared very confused about the machines,’ said Fondler.
She seemed a leader among the people here; they took care to nod back to her. From her body language – by where she stood and in the way she stood squarely to him – he was never in any doubt that he could not go up any of the corridors to look in the rooms, and her manner suggested she was not simply keeping to house rules. He found her certainty and her power, and the subtlety with which she wielded it, an attractive quality. She was so subtle with her power, and so certain and so brave, that he felt her manipulate the space between them. It was only then that he noticed again the dense black eyes, and also her pert figure that still managed to assert itself under her loose grey boiler suit. He felt helpless and acquiescent despite the conviction that she was using her allure to break him down.
Taking him by his limp hand she led him into a large basement. This, it was clear, was the main communal area in the building. Walls had been knocked down to make the space open plan, and iron girders were wedged vertically under sections of ceiling that had lost their support. Beanbags were thrown about the floor, and a long and shabby sofa curved with one of the corners. The area was filled with junk – on battered, mismatched tables, on rickety shelves, and on any space that could contain it. There were many commonplace items from the recent past: naked dolls and other children’s toys, office toys with steel balls and blobs of coloured oil in them, a broken ‘ghetto blaster’, scuffed ice-hockey sticks. There were also older items: brass deep-sea diving paraphernalia, a phrenology bust, wooden crutches and prosthetic legs, a stuffed baby warthog. And there was a framed picture, executed largely in airbrushed paints, of a naked black man and a naked black woman fornicating under a full moon and a bolt of fork lightning in front of a waterfall with a black panther stalking the upper rocks. Rickard, awed, felt a compulsion to comment, but did not say a word. To speak, he feared, would have been to disturb and complicate something delicate; delicate and a
lready complicated.
There were three others in the basement – two girls on the sofa and a boy on a beanbag. They were smoking. The windows were all shut; Rickard tried to swallow a cough. He stood awkwardly among them, then was bidden to take a beanbag, as Fondler went to a kitchen area and fetched him a beer. The bottle was welcome coolness in his hands.
‘So I can tell you,’ she addressed her fellow gang members, ‘that he’s no threat to us. He may well even be on our side.’
She already knew his name: she’d picked it up from the bill poster for the concert.
‘I take it’ – now she was addressing him – ‘that you followed me here because you assumed I was on their side.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he whispered tragically and wonderingly from his supine position.
‘Well you assumed wrong. I may be on the payroll of Puffball but I’m actively working against Puffball. From the inside.’
She went on to describe how all the members of the gang – they called themselves the ‘Fungicides’ – were disgruntled employees of Puffball who worked across the company’s ten retail branches in New York City. The initial cause of their discontent had been their low wages and long hours, but all of them had developed a loathing of the company’s workplace culture and political aims. Its workplace culture, Fondler explained, was a kind of slavery obscured by a language that took from Zen Buddhism, Sufism, white witchcraft, the idealism of the kibbutzim movement, and lifestyles associated with sixties rock music. Its political aims were domination of the world via the accumulation of a vast proportion of its wealth and replacement of all of the world’s machines with its own technologies and the control of the content that flowed through and among these technologies, and ultimately the control of all people’s minds. Again, to achieve its political aims, it spoke a language to the world that drew from movements and religions whose main concern was with universal welfare and happiness.
Before she had finished explaining this Rickard had sat up with excitement from his beanbag thinking of how it all corresponded with his own ideas. He wanted to tell Fondler and her friends everything he had thought about but found the ideas jamming in his throat at once, and he became breathless.
Fondler slammed her beer on a table, bent down to him on her haunches and said, ‘Let’s talk outside.’
He followed her up some steps and out to the courtyard. She turned to him suddenly, and stated:
‘You want to make love to me.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ he whispered pitifully.
She pursed her lips and looked to the ground. He stared at hints of her scalp at the base of her spikes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘about the bluntness of my language. I’ve become very plain speaking. It comes from having to talk mumbo jumbo all day at work.’
Rickard, trembling, managed: ‘Tell me what I need to hear.’
She leaned back on the concrete pier beside the steps to the basement and began smoking a cigarette, tucking her free hand in her armpit. She had a habit of pronouncing her esses as ess haitches and she spoke with a stern crease in the brow.
‘Well, look, it’s like this: the more fully we integrate with Puffball, take their crappy little wages and do what they ask us to do, the better placed we are to bring them down, you must understand. Last night I was told that I was needed to help carry your friend away. There was a risk he was going to pass out, they said – always a risk. I didn’t know he was going to die. I think they knew he was going to die. I think he was programmed to die. They’d set the machine in his mouth to explode. But not before it had gathered all the information they needed. I don’t know where that information is now. I know that Denny Kennedy-Logan’s body is with Puffball, though. They’re going to use his remains and all the information they’ve gathered from him for some kind of secret development. Your friend has become Townsend Thoresen’s last great project, some vital component in that. The guy behind me on the gurney last night said, “This one’s Townsend’s baby.” I suspect it’s to do with the power struggle. You’ve heard about Townsend Thoresen, that he’s dying? Yeah, he’s really sick. He’s going to die really soon. The board already have a new CEO lined up: John Thomas. Thoresen and Thomas hate each other. I mean, they’re talking, prepping for the handover, but Thoresen knows Thomas has different ideas. Thoresen operates from the right side of the brain and he doesn’t trust Thomas, he thinks he’s a left-side-of-the-brain person. So whatever this thing is that Thoresen has your friend for, it’s going to be this seismic happening to keep Puffball in line with what he wants. That’s what I suspect.’
Rickard, who thought of himself momentarily as ‘Velily’, and thought of a former atmospheric railway in the old country where he used to play, that stood between breeze-block walls between gardens and constituted a very real no man’s land, where cypress trees used to overhang and insects became trapped in their resin, and the tracks no longer remained, and where he had hidden once with the girl next door, and had attempted his first kiss but failed to open his mouth, but from which mistake he had learnt when finally – finally – he got to kiss Toni, forgot what he wanted to think about.
‘How was our concert for you?’ he said. ‘Were we very very good? Did you enjoy our singing?’
Fondler, who was reaching behind her to stamp out the butt on the top of the pier, paused in mid-stub as if trying to catch some faraway sound.
After a moment she said, ‘Yeah,’ and nodded, creasing her brow in even sterner furrows, but smiling. ‘Yeah, you know, you guys were great. That’s just the kind of shit we’re into right now.’
The doors at the bottom of the steps swung open, with Slipper between them. Golden light flooded from within. ‘Can you try and fix this VCR now, Rickard?’
He spent the night in the Fungicides’ rookery. They made up the couch for him in the basement, and despite the humid disgusting stickiness of his bedspread he fell into the most contented sleep he’d had since he arrived in New York.
11
Clive bought a cup of tea with milk in it from a horchata vendor on Verdi Square. The vendor had to be told to put milk in his tea, and that the tea he wanted was not maté, but –
‘English breakfast tea?’ the vendor said, pulling a sachet from a box she’d discovered in the hold of her trolley.
He took the tea back to the bench. He’d not tarried here before, Verdi Square, but it was a pleasant spot, open to the late afternoon sun. Noisy, though. He lifted his face to the heat.
With his eyes closed, he tried to imagine an email. Did they roll in the air like coloured scraps of paper? Did they come in colours? Did they fall off trees and plop into dark pools? The man Quicklime’s card had an email address on it. He tried to imagine a fairy with an email and could not even imagine an email. When he opened his eyes he was looking at Giuseppe Verdi himself’s greening white head and the milk in his tea was cooling to a little ghost. Once, the Virgin Mary decided to show the Protestants in America that she was divine by turning a river into tea. But this river of tea had milk in it and the Americans had never before seen milk in tea and thought the river was polluted from a part of a mine that had been closed off. Jean Dotsy had liked that the Americans thought like that. Magic did not enter their minds. She had longed to go there – the fortunate isle.
In a mad fit she had even once suggested to Veronica, her best friend and colleague, that they run away to America together. She was more than half serious. When Veronica, who was otherwise dumbfounded, managed to get out, ‘And do what there?’, Jean proved that she was serious. ‘We’ll become freedom fighters,’ she said, and she showed her a booklet, In Defence of a National Imaginaire, that she had taken from an event at an old guildhall in the Liberties in the forgotten heart of Dublin and that was written by a group that called themselves the Davy Langans. The addresses at the back were a catalogue of some of the most exciting places in the world. ‘We’ll go to New York,’ she said. But Veronica ran off in a tizzy, and things were not the same again betwe
en them.
So she came here on her own and it was a young and modern and man-made country as she had hoped and dreams were made with rivets and documents and wishing wells were oil wells and what have you and so forth. She had hope for a while and to look at the young now gave hope. You are wonderful, he thought at a boy passing. You are wonderful, he thought at a girl passing. The young, in this young time, seemed so in control of their souls, as she had not been in an older time. It was the young people’s time and the young people’s country, and he wondered if he was better off out of both. For a while this was what he had been thinking. Since he had met with Quicklime, or perhaps that had crystallised what he had been thinking. He could talk to Quicklime about this. He could at least talk to him. There was no one here in America to say that his body should be disposed of in this or that way. He would be found, a heap in a room, and he would be buried around the back of a clapboard hall in sand and chalk dust.
(Look at Denny, he thought. Gone. Whoof. And the body taken before even the devil knew.)
It lifted his heart now, the idea of finally being the master of his body and of his soul, of wrestling her to the ground with the body she had made, and of freeing that soul. And it would be a ground of his choosing: he would be buried in Ireland, as Jean Dotsy, and have a place where someone could leave a flower. A decent church burial would put paid to the hoodoos and the good hungry soil would put his body beyond use for ever more.
But there was the greater problem, he thought – the problem of what might happen to his body was not so great, or pressing. The problem of what to be done in the dying days was the one that needed, now, to be taken head on. A man or woman could not stay still in these days. It was beholden on every person to have his affairs in order. You could not beat the decline but you could still win, it was all still there to be won.
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