by Matt Wilven
“Dead.”
“Sure. Sure. Your dog’s dead. Do you hear all that birdsong?”
The old man looks up at the empty sky, screwing his face up. I close my eyes and wiggle my fingers about, trying to capture the cadence of the sound.
“Ubu!” the old man shouts. “Ubu!”
His Jack Russell is running back towards him. He’s standing up to leave. When he looks back at me he has a different face. I try to ignore this and look at the bright squiggles of light drifting along the surface of the water on the boating pond. After a couple of minutes everything I look at drifts sideways in both directions. The world is just a surface. Everything that connects up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, is just random nonsense that easily comes undone.
I’m lost in golden light and birdsong, everything twittering and unreal, when a muscly gym freak with tribal tattoos and a head like a rock tears through my world with an angry voice. He’s shouting into his mobile phone. I can’t hear the words but I find his anger fascinating. I stand up and start following him.
His vest has the slogan I could bench you on the back. His neck and both wrists have chunky silver chains hanging around them. He’s holding a rope that could be a dog’s lead but there’s no dog. He walks with a swagger (it’s unclear if he does this because of the nature of his bulk or because he wants to possess as much space as possible).
Once he enters a path through the woods and puts his phone back into his pocket I walk fast and catch him up. Now that we are beneath the trees the birdsong is even louder.
“Why are you so angry?”
“Get fucked, bro,” he says, mildly startled by my sudden appearance. “I’m seriously not in the mood for a whack job today.”
I look up into the nearest tree. Blackie’s up there, looking down. The giant demented song is all around me, becoming noisier and more confounding.
“Sure. Sure. Sure,” I say, speaking louder so that I can hear myself over all the noise. “But was there even anyone on the other end? Does it matter? Where’s your dog?”
“Get the fuck away from me, yeah?”
He shoves me away. I almost fall but keep my balance. He’s marching away. His vest now says Blackbirds protect you so I spring back towards him.
“Sure. Sure. Sure,” I say. “Pure, unmotivated, irrational violence: the unifying element in all mankind. Inescapable aggression until the end of time.”
He stops, raises his head to the sky and turns back towards me wrapping the rope for his non-existent dog around his fist.
“Listen, psycho. I’m gonna snap you in two if you don’t stop following me. Get me?”
He walks on.
“You’re the boss,” I say, continuing to shadow him.
He tries to speed up but I’m quick on his heels. He stops and turns, stamping down his left foot and raising his right fist.
“Have you got a death wish or summink, bro?”
“Now, Blackie,” I cry into to the trees. “Attack!”
He ducks his head with a slight flinch and slowly looks up to where Blackie is standing on a tree branch. He sees nothing of note. The anger in his face disperses into exasperated disbelief.
“Last chance, nutjob. I mean it. Wrong guy. Wrong day.”
He lowers his fist and carries on walking. I’m quick to his shoulder.
“Sure, sure, sure. Maybe you’re grieving. Anger is part of that. Maybe your dog died and this is our big cosmic coincidence that’s going to create a perfect collision of meaning.”
He pivots towards me. A powerful right hook smashes into the side of my head. Everything goes black. I fall to the ground. A huge thudding pain begins to throb on the side of my head and in half of my brain. A foot slams into my gut.
“You don’t know when to quit, do you?”
Crimson drool connects me to the floor. London’s subterranean world vibrates through the liquid strand, ancient and overloaded.
Another kick, this time the toe of his running shoe flies piercing into the left side of my ribcage. A squealing wheeze involuntarily surges through my throat.
“Sick fuck,” he says. “You wanted this.”
I roll onto my back.
Four or five more kicks. I loose count. Kidney, ribs, shoulder, neck, ribs. I’m in foetal position after the second, trying to protect my head. I feel swells of pain that could be kicks but might just be aftershocks bouncing through my body.
His rage is quelled once I’m limp. He spits on the ground next to me and walks away. I catch a glimpse of the rope he’s carrying, hanging like a noose.
“I thought you were protecting me,” I mumble, incoherently.
– tck-tck-tck-tck-tck-tck –
(He’s ready.)
My mouth is filling up with saliva that tastes of copper. Everything looks different when I close my eyes. My pain has patterns, symmetries. I can see it. A woman asks if I’m alright, if I need any help.
“Pain is terrible,” I mutter.
She repeats herself.
I shake my head and hold my hand out, implying that I don’t want her to do anything. She walks away, looking back at me, taking out her mobile phone. This brings me back into a more present state. I remember that there are eyes everywhere. If they see me like this they’ll take me away, lock me up, force-feed me chemicals.
I manage to lurch onto the grass verge and crawl far enough into the trees that people on the path can’t see me. It’s cooler here, but darker. The musky scent of insect life is in my nostrils. My skin itches. My face bleeds slowly. Birdsong stabs at my ears. I can’t see any birds.
I struggle to sit up, my back against a tree trunk. My spine jars against the hard nubs and wrinkles. Tiny, silent midges float around like hyperactive lint. A grey squirrel scurries up a distant tree. My right eye slowly swells shut. The birdsong reverberates with the pain in my head, a migraine made of tinnitus.
It’s been such a hot summer that the leaves are all limp and lifeless. These floppy edges have created lots of little gaps where thin shards of sunlight shoot down to the undergrowth. I pass a hand through the warmth of a couple of them and, as I do this, Blackie swoops down and lands on the toe of my right running shoe.
He jumps and turns one hundred and eighty degrees and all the foliage behind him blurs and turns into a gold-and-green blur. He jumps and turns one hundred and eighty degrees again and I see faces everywhere, evil green faces made out of leaves, flat, monstrous, screaming in agony.
Blackie jumps to face me, still perched on my right foot, both yellow-ringed eyes looking at me. His bill opens. I can see down his throat. A message is coming from inside him, from the deep beyond. It pierces my skull and splits through my brain:
Nothing is connected.
An intense electric pain rips through my nervous system. I hold my head and close my eyes. The pain crashes and explodes, smashing around in chaotic clusters. I writhe and twist. My body judders and flinches, jerks spasmodically. I weep. Twitch. Flinch. Gravity is crushing me. I’m falling. Everything is broken. Everything I care about is gone. There’s nothing left. The despair is bottomless.
THIRD
TRIMESTER
ONE
Many of the unification theories in scientific discourse accept the universe as a series of inevitable occurrences caused by the underlying laws of nature and the initial conditions of life. In this sense, science’s crowning achievement, its theory of everything, might merely add credence to one of humanity’s most ancient ideas: that the universe is governed by the principle of fate. If true, people will come to see their lives as part of a grand cosmological equation, predetermined by the initial conditions on the tip of time’s arrow. Questions about the nature of freewill would be resigned to history but the feeling of freedom would continue to confound.
I spend the day slowly tidying up the attic and bringing all my things back down the ladder. My body is weak and sore. I have to take long rests between journeys. I feel lost and lonely, starved of contact with people and the wo
rld, afraid that things will never feel as connected or as meaningful as they once did.
Putting the cushions from the centre of the moon back on the couch, I receive a text message from Jamal asking me to pop over. Jamal never sends texts. Sometimes he doesn’t even answer his front door when I’m knocking on it. His rare invitations always inspire a sensation of amused validation in me; being chosen by somebody who chooses so few. In this state, with my face swollen and bruised, my reality shaky and delicate, the pride aroused by this invitation rises through me with unexpected power. Jamal is suddenly the exact person I want to see. His message seems like a fated gift.
As always, Jamal answers his front door with an unlit joint hanging out of his mouth. His cautious, socially awkward eyes don’t meet mine. He just stands aside and gestures for me to enter with a subtle smile on his face.
Inside, all the newspapers and engine parts are gone. The curtains are open. It almost looks like a normal person’s house. The odours of oil and cannabis smoke still cling to the air, but not as intensely.
“Where’s all your stuff?” I ask.
He shuts the front door.
“You’ve seen it like this before.”
“No. I definitely haven’t.”
I walk into the centre of his living room and look around.
“I didn’t even know you had a carpet.”
“Shit, man,” he says, catching sight of me. “What happened to your face?”
I touch my swollen eye gently.
“I tripped.”
“Isn’t that what victims of domestic abuse say?”
“This whole house used to be a victim of domestic abuse. What’s going on?”
“I do this sometimes,” he says, eyeing me quizzically. “I time it so all my projects end together, so I can cash in and focus on one big thing for a while. I take it you don’t want to talk about it? It’s okay. We don’t have to.”
“We’ll get to the bruises. Give me a chance.”
“Sorry. Your face is a real mess though.”
“I’ve definitely never seen your house like this,” I say, forcing the shift.
“You have.”
“I haven’t. It’s so tidy.”
“Come on,” he says, frowning at my bruises and forcing himself not to mention them again. “I want to show you something.”
He jogs upstairs, almost excited. I follow, intrigued. There are no carburettors resting on top of newspapers. I can walk straight up the middle of the staircase. It feels oddly freeing to lack constraint in Jamal’s house. I’m used to tiptoeing around.
At the top of the stairs he turns right instead of the usual left. I notice that even the bathroom is clean. There are no giant pieces of scrap soaking in noxious liquids in the bathtub. The tiles are white. The sink lacks its faded black oil stains down the sides.
“Have you started seeing someone?” I ask.
Jamal’s standing in front of the spare room which he uses as his workshop.
“God no,” he says. “I wouldn’t know where to start. Come and see.”
I approach the doorway and look in. This is where all the mess is hiding. Shelves full of rusty pieces of metal line the two sidewalls like a library. The back wall’s window has been covered with hardboard and has tools hanging on it. In the centre of the floor space, on a purpose-built workbench, there is a large, freshly polished engine.
I walk into the room.
There are bigger, stranger parts than usual: giant springs, huge bars of steel, long bending tubes, tyres, sheets of glass, a pile of black metal slats stacked against each other.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
“An original 1965, one hundred and seventy-two horsepower, six point two litre, eight-valve Silver Shadow. Engine, chassis, body. The whole thing. I’m getting the upholstery redone with a specialist.”
I look at him, none the wiser.
“It’s a vintage Rolls Royce.”
“Is this the thing that was in your bathtub last time?”
“Some of it. Look at that engine. Isn’t she a beaut?”
“It’s definitely an engine…” I say, walking around the workbench. “Is it worth much?”
“Money? After all the overheads, not really, no. More of a passion project. When you learn about all the relationships these pieces of metal have with each other… it’s hard to explain. Let’s just say, the Silver Shadow is a beautiful machine.”
“Silver Shadow,” I say, inspecting it and trying to see something special. “Sounds like a superhero. Is this why you invited me over? I mean, I’m sorry I’m not more impressed. I’m sure it’s a big deal.”
“No, man,” he says, still smiling, looking at the engine. “I just wanted you to see why I’m buzzing about like a bee in a flower shop. I actually wanted to see how you were doing, after last time. You know? It’s been a while.”
He glances at me, concern simmering beneath the robotic flicker of his eye muscles.
“Who installed your empathy programme?”
He walks out of the room grinning and shaking his head. I follow him to his bedroom. He climbs into his usual cross-legged position and relights the unlit joint in his mouth.
“So? How are things?” he asks. “Besides the bruises we’re not talking about.”
I think about playing it cool and trying to enjoy our friendship without thinking or talking about everything that’s going on (and Jamal would let me without probing) but sorrow rushes to my eyes and throat and I have an overwhelming need to be honest with him.
“She left me,” I admit, trying to breathe slowly.
Jamal forces himself to look into my eyes.
“For good?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not, at first. But I think I’ve messed up my chances. I was stupid. I kept too much back.”
“She found out about the lithium?”
“She figured it out.”
“But she left you in the house?”
“For now. It was a good job she did, to be honest.”
“Is she staying at her sister’s?”
“No. Her mum and dad’s.”
“Shit.”
“I know.”
Jamal’s knees are beginning to bounce up and down. His eyes are wide. The emotional aspect of the conversation has made his muscles rigid, but he is still answering with sound empathy.
“Just give her time,” he says. “She’ll let you know what she needs. You don’t want to see her whilst you look like this anyway.”
“Can we talk about this later?” I say. “I was doing okay for a minute there.”
“Of course. What do you want to talk about?”
I stand up and look out his window, down at the patchy, overgrown lawn. Jamal, though struggling with it, is being unusually receptive and I’m uncomfortably aware that this reflects that I’m on a low ebb, and that it’s clear, even to him, that I need care and attention.
“Do you believe in signs, or messages, in nature?” I ask.
He shifts his weight on his spine and furrows his brow, but he nods slightly, motioning that he will move forward with this strange subject because talking about it might be the thing that helps me.
“I believe in a guidance system,” he says, “a genetic memory, I suppose. Signs and messages can be a part of it. Like black and yellow for poison, or red for danger. It can be more complicated than that, obviously.”
“I mean, more like spirit guides, that kind of thing.”
“Why, what have the sprites been whispering?” he asks, trying to grin.
“Nothing I can explain without sounding crazy.”
“Try me.”
“No. It doesn’t matter.”
“Seriously. I know loads about that sort of stuff.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. I’m constantly reading anthropology.”
“You are?”
“You know I am.”
“I thought you just read car manuals and newspapers these days.”
“I was reading about the difference between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens this morning. Look.”
He reaches down by the bed and hands me a book with a badly designed cover and a terrible title, Monkey See. Monkey Do. Man Imagine. It looks like it had a print run of about fifty. There’s a picture of a professor on the back dressed like a hiker who wants to die a virgin. I hand the book back to him, dismissive of its content.
“It’s too hard to explain,” I say. “I made friends with this blackbird. It was following me around, telling me things, warning me, guiding me… Sorry. This sounds insane. Talking about it ruins what it was.”
“Not at all. I was reading a book on Palaeolithic religion before this one, about totems and rituals. It’s all fresh in my head.”
“If you’re about to spend half an hour calling me a Neanderthal…”
“No, man,” he says, leaving his joint resting in the ashtray and picking up a squat tube of metal and some wire wool, starting to scrub. “Neanderthals were atheists by nature. They weren’t capable of symbolic thought. At least, not to the extent that we were.”
“Isn’t the whole point of atheism the choice?”
“When Homo sapiens started believing in things they couldn’t see, that’s when they became human. It had nothing to do with their intelligence. Well, it did, but this book argues that the modern world has misconceived what human intelligence is.”
“Enlighten me.”
“So, most people think intelligence is like focus, or alertness, being objective, being able to measure things quickly and accurately, all the qualities that are valued by science, but this book says that Neanderthals were more intelligent than us in this primary way.”
“So why aren’t they sitting here having this conversation?”
He puts down his chunk of metal and lights his joint again.
“Think about it. Discoveries come from inspiration, visions. If Homo sapiens had objective minds there would be no culture or invention, no science or technology. We’d still be living in alpha-dominated packs.”
“Why no science?” I ask.
“Because first you have to invent a theory, conceive a method, put two and two together. That’s not how an objective mind behaves.”