Communion Town

by Sam Thompson

  As I left the Market, rubbing my head in agitation, I found that nothing had changed inside. The same pictures looped over and over, the two figures swapping places and swapping back again. I had learned nothing: or I had learned that scratching at the surface of the city would not answer my questions. Going back to my lodgings I knew less than before.

  I MET THE FLNEUR AND LIVED

  REVENGE HAVOC FEARED

  WHO LET HIM IN

  I stood in the shadows at the edge of the loading bay, waiting for Fischer to finish up whatever it was he did in the supervisor’s office at the end of the night. In the dark my pulse was slow. He stepped into the prism of the security lights and locked up the exit behind him. He was wrapped in his overcoat with his face muffled to the cheekbones. I waited until he reached the far side of the tarmac, then followed.

  I did not like what I was doing. I could not have justified it if anyone had asked me, and, worse, I suspected that I was violating the principle of the good slaughterman: that when the shift is over he must cease to exist, must pass through the streets as an absence, without intention or desire. But I had to take the risk. It was a decision I had made.

  Most of the workers used the shuttle bus into the city centre, where they could catch the early trams home. But not Fischer, who preferred like me to go on foot through Glory Part. We passed through the gate in the plant’s chain-link perimeter. I followed him as if I were tethered to a weight and falling through dark waters. Up ahead his form tremored on the edge of visibility, but I kept pace and did not let him out of my sight. I did not know how sudden or how subtle it would be when it came, the transformation of one figure into the other.

  He paused under a lamp for no reason I could see. A column of drizzle drifted above his head. He flinched and moved on. We passed through lanes where, for all I could tell, they had pulled down the route back to my lodgings and used the pieces to mock up Fischer’s way home instead. A patch of cobbles, an archipelagic puddle, a low overhead arch, a triangular storm drain, a tree in an iron cage, a peeling green door. I could have sworn these featured, differently arranged, in the journey I walked each morning.

  Pre-dawn light was up by the time he turned on to a steep residential street with identical front doors set close together, each one stone step higher than the pavement. Each would open directly into the downstairs room, in the way that had been thought best for the factory workers of an earlier generation. He dug around in his coat pocket. Those were his keys, two linked strips of metal, clinking once. As he addressed his latch he peered back the way he had come, doubting something in the corner dark.

  Once he was inside, I withdrew to the mouth of a pedestrian tunnel on the far side of the road. I could just make out his door. The cold clamped inside my boots and gloves didn’t trouble me, nor the smell of urine. There wasn’t much difference between his lodgings and mine. It hardly mattered whether we’d come this way or that through the district. In there, I thought, he probably had the same bed frame and table and chair as me, arranged another way on the same worn carpet. I watched the door as if it might still prove something one way or the other.

  I WILL KILL AGAIN

  VIGILANTE ATTACKS RISE

  WHO IS SHELTERING THIS DEVIL

  Halfway through the night an animal slipped from its shackle and fell eight feet from the bleed rail, striking two of the workers. All three sprawled on the concrete, but it was the pig that got up first. It spasmed, its whole body a single muscle, and sprang to its feet, its head bobbing. It was bigger than any of us: its belly alone, strung quivering in its frame, was bigger. Coarse blond fur bristled along its back. A glancing wound had creased its skull. From its mouth projected a jumble of bloody tusks.

  Rolling crimson eyeballs, the creature lifted its head into the side of a fallen worker and scooped him clear of the floor. It shook him free and charged off, scattering the onlookers and demolishing a rack of tools. It headbutted a safety rail, then clamped its teeth into a steel sink which with a shake of its head it wrenched loose and dropped. White strings of froth eased from its jaws. Urine poured rearwards from its bright pink funnel and began to crawl through puddled blood. The workers had retreated to the edges of the room.

  Fischer watched without surprise. After a minute’s chaos he had stopped the conveyors so that the machine din lifted and only the clamour of beasts and workers remained. He folded his arms, and for an instant he caught my eye.

  One of the fallen workers was curled on the floor, cradling something fragile in his side, his face turning grey. The pig approached him, champing as if the knocker’s work had stripped away a layer of its evolutionary history. The worker was taking quick, shallow breaths, with one hand pressed under his ribs and the other searching for a finger-hold in the texture of the concrete. The pig’s breath streamed into his face. Heaps of muscle mounted across its shoulders as it lowered its head.

  Then Fischer was straddling its back with his heels deep in its sides. It thrashed and raked its tusks across the floor, trying to strike sparks. It crashed into another section of conveyor belt, but he hung on, hooking his fingers into its nostrils. Steel blurred and he stepped away from the creature as it exhaled and collapsed.

  Workers came forward, pulling off their gloves and removing their earplugs. Throwing glances at the pig, they gathered around the fallen man. The floor looked like the nest of a carnivorous machine. Fischer cursed softly. He was drenched. As the workers carried their comrade towards the exit he caught my eye again, and for once I did not look away. I was reading the message there and piecing together what it meant, adding it to the account along with everything else I had seen: the way he had grappled the animal, the nuance of his technique with the knife.

  Others were fixing chains to the pig’s front legs, hauling it upright to expose the taut, blond-furred length of its belly. They didn’t wait for the machinery to start. This was more pressing. Someone accepted a knife from his fellows and moved in close.

  In the booth at the back of the Rose Tree, Bill leafed through today’s paper. It was the Flâneur again. Just when they had been losing interest in the story, he had fed them fresh material. It was a young man this time: no more than a child, out with his friends in one of the back streets near the Market, far too late at night.

  Finally Bill looked up at me.

  ‘What kind of city is it,’ he asked, ‘where we sit here and gobble up this stuff, then shake our heads and do nothing? And tomorrow we buy the paper again for more. How do we explain it to ourselves? Tell ourselves we’re not responsible? Doing nothing has its own cost.’

  There was no patience in his face, no indulgence.

  ‘But you know that,’ he said.

  I wanted to explain myself to him. I wanted to tell him how much I cared for the welfare of the people of Glory Part. I felt that at birth I’d been given the duty of protecting them. I didn’t ask for anything in return. This morning, as I walked by the laundrette, the women leaning in the doorway had fallen silent to watch me out of earshot. I had crossed to the other side of the street where men were blocking the pavement, joshing each other, slapping hands and bumping fists. I had passed by like a duke in disguise as a beggar. I couldn’t imagine how life went for them. What we had in common was this cold day. Its failed light. The rain throwing itself away on the tenements.

  ‘Have you heard the story of the Sibyl?’ Bill asked, speaking more to himself than to me. He drank the last of his coffee and turned his face to the window. The daylight seemed to be filtered through the yellow-grey newspapers the Market’s fishmongers used to wrap their wares. We were not quite alone in the restaurant, but Dilks was keeping to the kitchen and the fat man sitting at the corner table looked away when he caught my eye. Without warning I was gripped by the conviction that I had forgotten to do something terribly important.

  ‘She wished never to die, and that was granted. But she neglected to ask for eternal youth to accompany her immortality. Her body grew old and more than old, bu
t she lived on until she was a shrivelled, unrecognisable thing. In the end, she vanished from sight, turned to dust; but still her voice could be heard. Think of what it must be saying by now.’

  A few raindrops began to crawl across the window. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was examining the paper again, scowling and kneading his belly under the table. I looked up at the big electric clock that hung above the counter, but as always the hands were stopped at a quarter past five.

  ‘These kids,’ he said, ‘these kids were out in the Market every night. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. For all they knew, this city was the whole world.’

  I had to go, I told him. I knew it wasn’t true, but I could not shake the idea that I must leave at once. Bill didn’t respond. He only went on talking to himself.

  ‘I can’t imagine the boy was surprised, when it happened,’ he said. ‘Poor child. He never doubted the city went on forever. And now he knows.’

  Printed on a slip of pink paper, formed in faint grey dots, was my name, and a few numbers, and the information that my employment had ceased as of today’s date. I should remove any personal items because after vacating the premises I would not be permitted to return. My responses are slow at the end of a shift, and I stood there until the locker room had emptied around me and the implications had soaked into my brain. So this, I thought, is how it feels to reach a decision. This is how it feels to enter into an action: to become a person who, very soon, will do something good. It feels like receiving a slip of paper informing you of a change in your situation.

  The good slaughterer can’t live in two places. He has to choose between the city and the abattoir. He has no story of his own: that’s something he has to do without, because he has no place in the world outside. I had been resisting the choice, I saw now, but I couldn’t do it any longer. The moment comes to say goodbye. I stood for a long time with the paper in my hands and my eyes unfocused, and allowed myself a last farewell. I let myself remember an afternoon, not long ago, when I had walked down to the Strangers’ Market. I remembered the polyvinyl awnings with their broad blue and yellow stripes growing hot, the crowd thinning and thickening and the sun moving in and out behind a trailing curtain the colour of zinc. Everywhere hands felt in pockets, rubbed notes and coins, and strayed towards dark green melons, second-hand pots and saucepans, racks of leather coats, cheap clocks and watches, jewellery, sweets, medicines, bath salts, chestnuts in scalding paper bags. The avenues between the stalls were solid with browsers. I imagined the Flâneur here, moving through the crowd, patrolling the heart of his principality incognito.

  I had loved the Market when I was younger. The women at the greengrocery stalls would look at this boy towering over them, his face implanted with sore lumps, and crow that I needed some meat on my bones. I used to browse the tables in the plaza, and had a compulsion for crumbling paperbacks. Later I gave it up, but for a time I would devour everything I could get, always in cheap, obsolete editions. I had a great need for all those stories. Once I bought an old novel for a few pence and for months came back to the stall to check for more by the same writer, feeling that if I searched through all she wrote I would discover something crucial. Thinking of those times, I was filled with the memory of mad excitement bottled secretly inside, the world succulent, rinsed and lit. Back then everything astonished me. I could be dumbstruck by the smell of rain and the slow gather of light on a green stone wall.

  A viaduct cut across a corner of the marketplace, creating several deep arches in which stallholders had their pitches: vegetarian curry stands, coffee stalls, specialists in dyed silk scarves, purveyors of art posters. On the bricks above, a weatherbeaten sign spelled out the Market’s name in circus lettering. Inside one blue and white kiosk, three handsome black-haired young men in striped aprons, winking at their customers, ducked around under the strings of cured sausages and the dangling plastic bags in which pale balls of mozzarella floated. They trimmed the meat into deft, bloodless pieces, weighed them out and wrapped them in waxed paper before handing them over in elegant rectangular bags.

  I remembered the day, soon after I had started working at the slaughterhouse, when I visited that stall. On the white refrigerated slabs, the cuts were displayed in their shades of lavender, plum, pastel and candy-pink. Someone spoke to me. I looked up. The young man flicked his fringe out of his eyes and asked again how he could help. When I didn’t answer, the crease in his brow deepened, but he pointed at sliced bacon of the palest coral.

  ‘How about this, sir? It’s rather special today.’

  I nodded, and watched his gloves peel the floral tissues apart. I wanted to let him know who I was, so he would understand that we were both part of the single great scheme that linked my bleed rail and his blue striped canopy. He and I were brothers dedicated to the hunger of the city. But I couldn’t work out how to tell him and in the end I said nothing. It was only as he rung up my purchase on the till that I found I hadn’t brought my wallet.

  You can go out among your fellow creatures but you can’t stay out there forever. You have to come back in. It’s not so easy to leave your account once you’ve begun it. It always wants you back. The pink slip is in your hands: rub the paper between finger and thumb. Think of Fischer. Think of the Flâneur.

  One of his eyes is looking out between the first and second fingers of my gauntlet, and the eye is asking me a question. This won’t take long. There will be no suffering. I’ve said what I can, I’ve given my account, and what happens afterwards is not my concern. The good slaughterer knows his skills have their place. He does the work.

  Three Translations

  Dawn was walking home along the seafront when a voice called her name. As she looked around, a tall, fair-haired girl hefted a rucksack on her shoulder and started forward, shading her eyes against the hard sunlight, almost colliding with a cyclist as he zipped by. The tall girl, whose name was Andie, called out again. A man selling treats from an icebox slung across his chest was watching with interest.

  Dawn returned the greeting with a small smile and a wave of the hand which, she felt at once, must look badly lacking in surprise or enthusiasm, or even as though she’d made an instant, calculated decision to be rude. She had been at school with Andie in another country and the last time they had spoken to each other they had been fourteen years old. For a while they had been well known to others and themselves as best friends. They had both stayed at the school until they were sixteen, when Andie had left. But after the last time, they hadn’t spoken.

  Andie had just arrived in the city, she’d literally walked here from the station, she hadn’t even found a hostel yet or anything. What a coincidence that Dawn should be here and they’d met like this! She’d only been backpacking a fortnight so far, but she was having a great time. There were six weeks more on her ticket but she could see herself extending it further. She’d had no idea Dawn was in the city. How long? Two years so far. What doing? Teaching assistant at a language school. This was amazing. Andie wanted to know everything. She could hardly believe she’d found Dawn like this, it had to be more than a coincidence. She loved travelling but the only problem was not being able to read the signs or get people to understand you. But Dawn practically lived here! She could tell Andie everything. Andie had only been planning on a night and a day in the city, two days at most, but now she thought she might stay longer.

  Dawn was already conscious of a desire to unfold the city. She wanted to claim the blinding ingot of the sea and the men hauling their nets up the wharf, and to present a city more true than the one mapped out in Andie’s brand-new guidebook. At the same time she felt how little she knew, even now.

  They continued along the seafront, picking their way through the preparations for a public event of some kind. Long trestle tables had been set up on the broadest stretch of the promenade, and young men were shinning up the lamp posts to hang bunting. Dawn explained that her apartment was not far from the Boulevard Mino, just a few minutes’ wal
k away. Andie could easily come back there if she wanted, if she didn’t have anywhere else to get to. She could freshen up, even leave her bag for a few hours. If she liked?

  In the apartment, Dawn watched Andie unshoulder her rucksack and let its tail thump into the floor, then knit her fingers, stretch her arms and rotate on the balls of her feet to take in the apartment. Despite the fairness of her skin, the sun had not burnt her. Instead, it had given a healthy rose-and-gold varnish to her face, throat and arms, paled her blue eyes, and turned her thick fair hair silver. It suited her, and only heightened the Nordic look that, it was already obvious, made her conspicuous here. Dawn herself represented a more common physical type in this part of the world.

  What a nice place, Andie said, so bright. (It was bright; a textbook lay on the windowsill, and the inpouring light kicked a spray of buttercup yellow from its cover across the white wall.) Did Dawn live by herself? Dawn explained that her flatmate, another assistant at the school, had given up her job a week ago and moved out without warning. It had left Dawn short for the month’s rent.

  Andie was shocked to hear this, but then delight broke across her face. What if, listen, she’d stay here. Not for long, just for now, for a while, the rest of the month at least. It was the perfect idea. She could change her ticket no problem. Dawn needed someone to help with the rent and Andie was sick of staying in hostels, she’d love to see what it was like to really live somewhere. They’d be flatmates.

  Dawn didn’t know what to say. But, well, why not?

  Once Andie had changed into a white summer dress that, she said, she had not yet worn, they went back out. It was late afternoon, and the town was full of foreign backpackers and families on holiday. They walked down to Tall Quays, where Andie exclaimed appreciatively and held Dawn’s arm as they looked over the parapet, then back up the seafront to where rollerskaters stitched around pedestrians and prams, occasionally pointing their toes in opposite directions to whirl to a stop. Dawn and Andie left the path and picked their way down the stony beach.