by Iain Scarrow
“One other thing you should know about him. John used to jump off of high walls as a kid, arms out style, as if he was trying to fly. He even managed to knock himself out a couple of times in the process, too. So, maybe some of these strange stories of his are a result of old head injuries. You never know. It’s as good an explanation as any,” the pastor said blowing out one last stream of smoke.
He flicked his cigarette end at a passing starving mutt.
“Fucking vermin,” he said yanking open the fire exit door and stepping back into the kitchen.
Hansson shook his head.
“Nice attitude,” he said under his breath.
6
“That’s John over there at the corner table by the window,” the pastor said holding open the swing door. “He’s just had his hair cut, trimmed his beard a bit. You wouldn’t think he lived on the streets, now, would you? He doesn’t have that hollow eyed desperate junkie look.”
Hansson stepped through the swing doors into the eating area.
“Good luck, the pastor said stepping back into the kitchen.
Hansson walked between the tables, felt awkward. Compared to some of these guys Hansson was overdressed.
“Mind if I talk to you?” he asked pulling out a chair.
John looked up at him.
“Do I have to stop eating?” he asked.
“No, no problem, you go right ahead,” Hansson said sitting down.
John held up a lump of bread in one hand and a spoon laden with lentil soup in the other.
“I’ll pay for it,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Hansson asked.
“What I’m eating,” John said. “I’ll find a way to pay for it.”
“That’s not what I want to talk to you about,” Hansson said. “But first let me introduce myself. My name’s Mark Hansson.”
“John,” John said.
He spooned in more soup, swallowed, and nodded at the same time.
“I’ll talk to anyone except another shrink,” he said.
“I’m not a psychiatrist,” Hansson said.
“You look like one,” John said.
“I’m a journalist.”
“Not interested,” John said, tearing off another lump of bread and stuffing it in his mouth.
“An out of work journalist," Hansson said.
John spooned in more soup, swallowed.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why am I out of work?” Hansson asked.
“Why does it bother you to be out of work?” John asked, looking at Mark.
Mark was lost for words. He wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of probing questions.
“I never thought about it like that before,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the way I am. I feel I need to work, to make my contribution to society. Is it that obvious that it bothers me to be out of work?”
“You have that scared look,” John said. “You try to hide it but you’re scared.”
Mark was taken aback by John’s forthright statement.
He blinked.
“What am I scared of exactly?” he asked.
“The money, not having it, running out,” John said. “Money eats like battery acid at a guy’s life.”
Mark raised his eyebrows.
“You could be right there,” he said scratching his head.
“It does,” John said cutting him off. “I’m right.”
“There’s no two ways about it, huh?”
“No.”
Mark shifted in his seat as he reached into his pocket.
“Actually,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about this.”
He put the item on the table between them.
“It’s a pan scrubber,” John said, mopping up what was left in his bowl with the last of his bread roll. “They have high silicone contents.”
“Pan scrubber?” Mark asked. “I didn’t know that’s what they were called.”
“That’s what they used to use them for in the old days,” John said, “scrubbing pans.”
He belched. “Sorry.”
“Horse tail plants,” he went on. “Find them all over the place, along riverbanks. Folks see them as a pest now, weeds, cut them down, kill them.”
“And you?” Mark asked.
John smirked. “Me?”
“Yes you,” Mark said.
“They’re a plant,” John shrugged, “just like any other living thing, mister. A living thing like the rest of us struggling to survive for as long as it takes.”
“And where did you pick this particular one up?” Mark asked nodding at the plant pod he’d placed on the table between them.
John looked at it. “How’d you know I picked that one up?”
“Because,” Mark said, “I saw you drop it a couple of days ago.”
John scooped up the last of what was in his soup bowl, sucked on the spoon, then dropped it into the bowl with a clatter.
“Following me, where yah?” he asked sitting back.
“Why would I be following you?” Mark asked.
John looked at him.
“Answer another question with another question again and you can just go away,” he said. “You’re lucky I even said that much to you. Normally I never explain everything. It’s pointless. No one understands anything. Forgive them Father for they know not what they do. That’s just a shit way of letting them off the hook. Besides, I don’t have to explain anything to anyone. And if you can’t figure it out for yourself …”
“Okay, okay,” Mark said holding up his hands. “I get the picture.”
“So, you were following me.”
“No,” Mark said picking up the pod. “I just happened to be walking behind you and I saw you drop this.”
“Right,” John said.
So much for the guy talking the back legs off a racehorse, Mark thought.
He sighed.
“Mind if I call you John?” Mark asked.
“Yes,” John said.
“You don’t mind?”
“I do mind,” John said “Now get lost. You’re taking up my clean air.”
The pupils in John’s deep brown eyes shot wide open on the word clean.
Hansson himself jump inside, an instinctive jerking back. It had been like watching a lizard’s neck membrane shooting wide open around its head. He hoped the way he felt didn’t show and looked down at the table wondering what he’d just seen.
“But the pod,” he said.
“Big deal,” John said. “It’s a pan scrubber, like I told you.”
“Well,” Mark said, “here’s the thing about this particular pan scrubber.”
He picked up the pod again and held it up between his fingers.
“I know where the thing is,” John said “It’s right there in your right hand.”
Hansson swallowed, tried not let it show, and determined not to let his voice shake.
“I know a guy at university,” he said trying to keep himself from being thrown off-track. “We went to college together. He’s a biologist now. I couldn’t really get into the sciences, which is why I dropped out and went for journalism instead.”
“And?” John asked his eyes remaining wide, never blinking as he kept a steady gaze in Hansson’s.
His pupils shot back down the width of pinpricks as if they’d just homed in on a target.
“And I took this with me,” Mark said, “when I went to speak to him last night. He knew what it was right away. Except there’s something strange about this particular pan scrubber, as you call it.”
“Yeah?” John said pushing his chair back.
A guy came up and placed a mug of tea in front of him.
John said thanks and spooned sugar into the mug.
“Yeah,” Mark said turning the pod around in his fingers, staring at it in the sunlight streaming through the window. “There’s something very strange about it.”
John slurped his tea.
“How long are you going to bore me with this?”
John asked. “Because I’ve got important things to do, like help with the dishes to pay for this,” he said holding up his mug. “Either get to the point nosy journalist man, or get lost.”
John’s pupils shot wide again. So wide it made his eyes look black.
Mark’s face turned red. He looked at John, at the wide open pupils of his eyes.
As a journalist Mark had heard worse said to him. And as any other kind of normal human being would have done, including a saint, he probably would have started sniping back at John. But Mark liked to think of himself as a hardnosed journalist. But if he said anything stupid now he would be in danger of losing out on a good story by cutting his own nose off to spite his face. So he had to stick with it. He had to keep cool. There was a story here. And he needed a story bad.
“My friend at university had to go through a lot of files to find anything like this specimen,” he said, starting to talk rapid-fire. “Checking and double checking. By the time he got back to me he was screaming down the phone at me at two in the morning.”
“Get to the point, will yah?” John said.
“Ever heard of the coelacanth?” Mark asked. “It’s a fish.”
“What about it?” John said.
“They used to think it was extinct,” Mark said. “But there it is alive and well, never changed in millions of years, a real living fossil.”
“Oxymoron,” John said.
That caught Mark off guard.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It can’t be a fossil if it’s still swimming around,” John said, “now can it?”
“You’re right,” Mark said holding up the pod," which brings me back to this. My friend did a DNA analysis on it, and you know what?”
“It’s a living fossil,” John said.
Mark’s skin crawled. His heart thumped.
“And you dropped it,” Mark said. “I saw you drop it. That’s when I picked it up. I don’t even know why I picked it up. Maybe because it’s not the kind of thing you see in the city these days. I don’t even know why I kept it. I almost threw the damn thing away. Do you realize how much this is worth?”
“I don’t care,” John said.
He stood up, finished his tea and picked up his soup bowl and spoon.
“I’ve got dishes to wash,” he said, walking away.
Mark stuffed the pod back into his pocket and raced after John.
“Where did you find it?” he called after John.
“Where it was growing,” John said, pushing open the swing doors to the kitchen.
“But where?”
“The old Brock estate,” John said.
The doors swung back at him.
“And where the hell’s that?” he yelled.
Mark pushed open the swing doors.
And before he knew it the pastor was in his face.
“Staff only,” the pastor said. “Access denied.”
And the doors sprung back in Mark’s face.
7
Collins, the now ex-non-estate agent, woke up with the biggest sledgehammer of hangover this side of the universe and clutching at his head as if it were about to crack.
A zillion lights whizzed around inside his brain as neurons and synapses sprayed out dopamine and serotonin as old connections were severed and new ones formed. And like cables zapping arcs of blue-white plasma streaming free electrons from their severed ends, ideas, thoughts, and distal fractals of purple and yellow sought out sympathetic companions inside of Collins’s skull. And Jesus Christ! But it felt like it was going to explode.
“Get it out of my fucking head!”
He grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the floor in front of the couch.
It was empty.
He threw it at the wall.
It smashed into bits in the corner.
“I need a drink.”
He pushed himself onto his feet, his legs wobbling, and staggered into the kitchen where he yanked open one grubby cabinet door after another.
Nothing.
“Fuck it!”
He slammed the last door over and over, breathing hard, his skull ready to melt.
“Oh shit!”
And now he needed to pee badly.
He ran off to the bathroom, but he was already flooding his pants before he got there. And by the time he lifted the toilet seat he was soaked in his own Day-Glo orange, bilirubin sedimented, liver-wrecked, urine.
Then his nose started to run with snot, and his eyes burn like acid as fireworks exploded everywhere he looked.
He struggled out of his wet pants and dumped them on the bathroom floor.
“God the pain,” he yelled, rubbing at his forehead.
He wobbled over to the bathroom cabinet for a pain killer. Maybe he still had some smack left.
But there was nothing in the cabinet except empty tubes of Perpetration H.
“Jeez-zuzz fuckin Christ the pain!”
He grabbed the cold edge of the wash hand basin, closed his eyes tight, then bent over and started to crash his forehead onto the hard edge over and over as a bluebottle crawled up the grubby bathroom tiles.
It buzzed its wings as Collins wept and blubbered bubbles of blood down his face and chest, before he dropped down onto the floor in a whimpering heap of mush.
The insect flew from the tile it was on and landed on a clot forming on the floor next to Collins, and stabbed its proboscis into it as its wings vibrated into a blur.
After feasting the bluebottle flew out of the bathroom and made its way into a dark corner of the front room leaving Collins to slither around on all fours in his own blood and snot on the floor
Reaching up Collins up grappled for purchase on the edge of the wash hand basin and used it to drag himself back onto his feet.
His right heel skated through a puddle of red, and, without thinking, his arms shot out instinctively at mirrored bathroom cabinet door for something to hold onto. But with his eyes screwed shut against the pain inside his head his fingers kept missing.
He forced himself to open his eyes, only a crack, but it enough for him to see his own slit-eyed reflection looking back at him. And that’s when he screamed like he had never screamed before.
8
Mark Hansson waited around outside the Grass Market Mission of the Lost, chewing one stick of gum after another draining the flavor out of each stick, and cursing the day he ever started smoking. And the day he decided to stop even more.
He doodled on his notepad with his pencil until it wore down to a blunt shiny nub, then gave up and snapped his notebook shut, before he thrust his hand into his pocket to feel at the pan scrubber again. The equivalent of a coelacanth, right there in his pocket, and the world wasn’t cheering.
Life as a reporter has got to be easier than this.
No, scratch that. Life itself has to be easier than this.
Right.
The guy has to come out sometime.
Yeah, but when?
The waiting is killing me.
A side door in a plain red brick wall suddenly opened. If Mark had been looking the other way he’d have missed it.
John stepped out onto the street and walked away. He hadn’t even noticed Mark who had been standing there chewing gum waiting for him to appear and gaining nothing but jaw ache for his efforts.
It’s now or never.
He caught up with John at the street corner.
“John?”
“What?”
“Mind if I talk to you again?”
“Why? Looking for a new pan scrubber?” he said, walking tall, striding without losing speed and forcing Mark to keep pace with him.
“I know you don’t trust me,” Mark said.
“It’s not that.”
“Then why won’t you talk to me?”
John stopped dead.
“Because I’m beyond talking, he said. “I don’t need to talk anymore. I know everything I need to know. And I don’t have to tell anyone else about it.”
John walked away from Mark.
Mark stood his ground and watched John swagger away, and his story of a lifetime swaggering away with it. He decided to give it one last shot.
He caught up with John again. And when he did John hitched his little cloth bag higher on his shoulder.
“But you haven’t told me anything,” Mark said, “not much anyway, not anything really.”
“But everyone else has,” John said. “So now you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, that it? Hell, why don’t you just go behind my back. Everyone else does. I know you have. They’ll tell you everything you need to know, want to hear whether it’s true or not. Isn’t that how it works these days? Lies sell, don’t they? Plenty of guys will talk to you about John the long lost loony boy. Did they have a lot to say?”
“It’s not like that,” Mark said.
John stopped and dropped his bag on the ground.
“I don’t like being talked about,” he said.
“I just asked around, that was all.”
“And they couldn’t stop laughing at me, right?”
“No one laughed at you.”
“Then why? Why do you want to talk to me?”
“Because,” Mark sighed. “I want to hear your story from you. It’s as simple as that.”
John picked his bag up from the ground and slung it over his shoulder.
“I’m all out of talking,” he said. “I’m all out of telling anyone anything. Too many people acting all sincere and then they go tearing me apart like a lab rat. That’s what it feels like. As if they’re cutting me into tiny little pieces, sharing me around, then passing the buck of responsibility for what they’ve done to me onto each other, to anyone but themselves. They don’t want to help me. They only ever help themselves. I can only be spread so thin. So now I’m all out of talk and explanations. Get it? Now go away and leave me alone.”
John walked away and left Mark behind with a feeling akin to sun-sweet forest breeze passing through him. And by the time he had time to think the young vagrant had vanished around a corner.
What just happened?
For the first time in his life Mark found himself lost for words to describe someone. He tried but everything he could think of was contradictory – lightening without thunder, earthquake without movement, mass without substance, or even light without illumination. Nothing made sense.