Underlay

by Andrew McEwan

UNDERLAY

  by Andrew McEwan

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  Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

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  Paperback edition published 2007 by Pen Press, 25 Eastern Place, Brighton, BN2 1GJ

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  Cover design by Alexa Garside

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  Part One: EVERYBODY'S FAVOURITE PICTURE

  Chapter One: On The Roof Of A Tall Building, A Tonic For Cats

  Meet Thorp, who has a franchise from Death. Meet his car, a Ventura large and black and dented. He fleeces the city for souls, folding them carefully in the boot, stacking them on the back seat like ironing, clothes no longer worn, put through the spin-cycle of non-living and stretched flat. Thorp is dead too; or so he likes to think. But that truth, like most truths, like everything in the city, is more complicated. The Ventura runs on ice-cream. Thorp smokes copious cigarettes. The dead are manifold. Everything is black and white, paintwork and frozen whip, the flake behind the wheel in his trenchcoat and dark glasses seeing the world in monochrome. The buildings, the cars, the people. Death, where Thorp is concerned, is a colourless experience. His milieu. He steers the Ventura at street level and above. Although you couldn't call it flying, he soars over the city traffic about his work. This is his domain, his territory. And Thorp likes his job. He likes it enormously...

  Right now he's driving at a height commensurate with the first floor windows of homogenous buildings, their homogenous occupants stapling and faxing their homogenous selves and mailing them to the city populace, either directly, by post, or indirectly, via the magic of life.

  Thorp peers in at them. It is not to the first floor he travels, however, but the roof.

  He flips open his appointment book.

  Jenny Pith at eleven o'clock. He hopes she won't make too much mess. Thorp always feels a little guilty about the mess, about the fact he can't take the bodies with him, whole or in bits. Someone else has to take care of that, of the brains and shit. Souls are neat, his to collect. Often he's contemplated branching out. After all, he has inside information on the juiciest flops, the messiest RTAs and the clumsiest gunshots.

  But the dead are the dead. Corpses are incidental.

  The Ventura's engine, although running, is silent. Thorp shifts gear and accelerates. He can't be late. He's never been late. Today though, he’s preoccupied. There's something gnawing at his shins, a vague insistence seemingly lodged in his bones, flexing like cold liquorice, writhing like a pocketful of loose change. His very marrow is itching, a source of discomfort that stirs memories of less simple times.

  Once, as a boy, Thorp had climbed an apple tree. The plumpest apples were always at the top, red and green and lovely as they winked at him in the sun. They cast dazzling spots in his eyes, the dew on their skins tantalizing. He had no head for heights, but climbed the wrinkled tree, breath caught as the greasy bark painted his hands. He reached with his arms and pushed with his feet, ascending through ranks of leaves and lesser fruits, his gaze locked onto one apple right at the top, bending the branch from which it sprang. His mouth and throat were dry. His teeth itched with anticipation. The apple loomed large, its shape perfect, its texture smooth and taut, its rosy hue the sole focus of his mind as his body moved upward against a gravity that would not be denied. The branches were thin this high, thin and bendy. The motion of the tree in the air was exaggerated by his weight. Thorp stretched, fingertips brushing the lush flesh of his prize. His own flesh leaned and strained toward the apple that was his heart's desire. And he fell from the tree, a seemingly endless headlong tumble that left him broken and unmoving on the ground.

  It wasn't the pain he found disturbing, wracked as his small body was with an unquenchable agony exacerbated by his conscious state. It was the disappointment.

  Staring now at the moon, full even in the blue of day, he was reminded of that apple.

  One day he would have it, he thought. One day he would hold it in his hand.

  The moon was silver; and, as Thorp saw it, the sky a liquid grey. He drove the Ventura in the moon's direction, turning aside when the building's vertical face ran out. The car could never make it all the way, was bound to the city much as Thorp was bound to the car, the two engaged in a business of collection and redistribution that despite its ethereal pretensions remained firmly wedded to earth. He parked on felt and gravel and got out, adjusting his sunglasses and the collar of his trenchcoat, as, with a few minutes to spare, he decided on a stroll.

  It hadn't entered his head that he might see her, that his eye might be taken by her dance along the edge. She was an appointment he had to keep, her rendezvous with Death's proxy a routine stop. But she had that apple glow in her cheeks. He could almost see the colour, the green-red of memory tinting her flesh, shining through the preternatural greys compositing his vision.

  Thorp was smitten. ‘Don't,’ he said.

  Jenny Pith looked at him, seeing him as none should, as more than a shade. Her gaze was curious, perhaps alarmed. Thorp was sorry he'd interrupted.

  Quickly, he returned to the car. Angry with himself, he leaned, arms crossed, against the Ventura's wing. It was close to eleven. In a moment he'd walk back to the edge and she'd be gone, her soul a parchment stain guarding the roof from the drop. He'd lift it like a bridal veil and fold it under his arm, her soul her body had left, abandoned like a lover on a cliff.

  It filled him with regret.

  It was, he realized, sadness he was experiencing. Melancholy he was familiar with. Despair and resignation were old friends. But sadness? Sadness he met with a surprised shake of the head.

  The hour chimed by some distant clock, Thorp retraced his steps. The girl was gone. There was a sepia tinge to the air. He looked down at the coarse rooftop expecting to find a soul, but there was nothing. Thorp checked his watch. Eleven. Checked his appointment book. Jenny Pith, eleven o'clock, this address. There was no mistake; only there was no soul to collect. He eased a thumb and forefinger under his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Blinking, the sepia tones were washed from the gunmetal sky, yet still there was no soul for him to stoop and pick. Puzzled, he stared out over the concrete lip, peered to the street beneath, and spying no bloody splash felt a crick in his neck like an electric shock.

  Not dead?

  ‘Don't,’ he'd said. And she hadn't - hadn't jumped? He was sure jumping was her intent. Had soul and body been spirited away? Did he have a competitor? Was he getting slack?

  Questions bugged him. He'd never been one for questions. He did not normally crave answers or demand explanations in the absence of facts. In his profession pragmatism counted for a lot.

  Not dead?

  ‘Don't,’ he'd said. And she hadn't.

  Thorp was responsible for that.

  He wondered at the consequences. Were there precedents? Was he in breach of contract?

  He elected to laugh. It was a ridiculous sound and made him cough. His eyes watered and he saw sepia again.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  Thorp held his breath. He was embarrassed, uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him mute.

  ‘Isn't the view great?’

  The view was always great from high up.

  ‘I wanted to fly, you know? I was tired. Scared, too. Scared won out.’

  Yes, thought Thorp, scared.

  ‘My name's Jenny Pith.’

  He knew. Eleven o'clock.

  ‘My friends call me Orangepeel. Or did.’

  Did?

  ‘They're dead now; killed in a plane crash. Maybe you read about it. In the harbour?’

  He'd been there, he recalled, the Ventura parked on the swell as the aircraft sank.

  ‘It was like my life had ended with theirs. Only now I'm not sure
. Seeing you up here has made me think.’

  ‘About what?’ he asked nervously.

  She shrugged. She wore a purple dress, a simple affair draped over bare arms and shoulders. She wore no socks and baseball boots.

  ‘What changed your mind?’ He needed to know, to establish his guilt or else uncover a glitch. ‘Why didn't you jump?’

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘I have it in my book here,’ Thorp explained. ‘Jenny Pith, eleven o'clock. You really ought to have pavement in your teeth.’

  She was frightened now, retreating bodily.

  Thorp bit his lip. How could he let her leave? How would he explain a soul missing from his list?

  ‘I've got to go,’ said Orangepeel. ‘Nice meeting you.’

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Thorp. But she made a dash for the stairhead, disappearing down the concrete shaft into the voluminous building.

  Mingis

  Nancy laced her boots and got up off the sofa. The street lights dimmed as dawn zoomed in, spilling over rooftops even as she gazed out the curtainless window. She had a hangover and the sofa's rough, worn covers had marked her skin. The cushions smelled of lager, the room of dope, a combination requiring the attentive buzz of caffeine to smooth their pungent edges. His name was David, she recalled. This was his flat. He was asleep in the bedroom, in the bed she'd refused to enter. Nancy loathed to share a bed. Men and beds didn't go together. A lot of things in Nancy’s life didn’t go together, come to think of it, but few of those she had any control over.

  Boiling the kettle, she combed her hair, short and lemon-hued. She made coffee and leaned on a bench to drink, trying as best she could to put a face to the name. No luck. A memory lapse; not unusual. There had been no coitus, she knew that. She remembered him in her hand, limp. It wasn’t important. She just couldn’t help herself, like there were all these men and she could take her pick. It was too easy. They were sickly antelope to her lioness. They were, almost without exception, a disappointment. It, he, whatever his or its name, was never the one, the one to avenge her misery. If that was the right word.

  Seven-thirty.

  The face appeared, groggy. It looked like shit. Best say nothing; keep him guessing. He wouldn't be seeing her again. Nancy was leaving in two minutes.

  Fumbling with a white sliced loaf, he offered her toast.

  Nancy drained her mug, patted his arse and left.

  Her car smiled, languid and yellow.

  It was morning. Yes, the clocks told her that. She opened the driver's door and got in, turned the key in the ignition and fired the rumbling engine.

  But what day was this?

  Sunday.

  Driving, Nancy sang a silent tune, her lips moving to words she neither heard or knew. The tune was in her head, in the car, in the thin traffic as she pulled out onto the main road. It was in the traffic-lights and the somnolent pedestrians with their dogs and newspapers. The fresh sun was in the tune, tickling these early risers. She braked for a child, jerking the car to a halt, its yellowness a blur to the youngster whose running feet were carelessly adrift on tarmac. Boy or girl, she couldn’t say. Little more than a toddler. And in such a hurry. A complicated early life. Nancy breathed deeply and continued, but the tune was lost to her. Her lips shaped no soundless words. The sun hovered accusingly. Reality became stark. She made it home and parked.

  A man caught her eye. He sat on the railing, large feet dangling above turgid water, broad back to the quay. Stall-holders and their ex-utility vans (gas, electric) scampered behind him. There was colour and noise, sounds of preparation for the coming market, dirty canopies and painted signs. None of the people hastily arranging goods and tables took any notice of this lone figure. They didn't see him; not like Nancy. Sat in her car, she peered. And he turned his head, his features, although distant, openly hostile, the eyes intense as they returned her gaze. She doubted he could even see her through the windscreen; yet he knew she was there and that she watched.

  The car door opened, startling her.

  ‘Well, it's about time.’

  ‘Where did you come from?’ Nancy asked, bewilderment like tiredness in her veins.

  Jane rolled her eyes and stepped back, still holding the door. ‘Your place. We were out together last night. Remember? You sloped off.’

  ‘Right...’

  ‘Exactly. I hope he was worth it. Give your father a call.’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Hey nothing. Sort your life out.’

  Nancy shook her head. She got out of the car and locked the door. Her sister was headed for the bus stop.

  She cast her eyes back to the man on the railing, but he was looking away. Nancy trudged the few yards to her building and took the stairs, trying not to think about anything but a hot shower. But she could see him from the window. Pictures were a must.

  Her camera was traced to under the bed. There were only three exposures left on the roll and she had no more film. She could buy some. Hadn't she meant to yesterday? Not enough time; never enough...

  The man was still there when she returned to focus, his gaze fixed to the river as round him a number of strangely robotic characters arranged geographic dishcloths and cheap electrical goods. The distance was too great. She would have to get closer. The closer the better, the surer, what with just three frames to capture the breadth of powerful shoulders, the features like a stained and rumpled pillow. She headed for the stairs, hitting the quay in time to catch the first pale sheets of a drizzle.

  Seeing he'd gone from the rail, Nancy walked over to where he'd sat and peered down at the murky water. There was no sign of him having jumped. She thought it unlikely anyway. The hostility she'd seen in his eyes had not been directed inward. His anger, such as it was, had a separate point of impact, was directed somewhere else.

  Shoulders hunched under the increasing downpour, she remembered a jacket stuffed behind one seat and ran toward the rusting yellow TR7, its faded paintwork streaked with grime. The rain appeared to fall heaviest in its vicinity, bouncing off roof and windows as if intent on punishing the car. She ran round to the driver's side, the camera cradled in one arm as she searched her pockets for keys, only to recall tossing them on the bed. The keys to her apartment, also.

  Closing her eyes, Nancy allowed the rain to drum on her head. It came down in rods, slashing at her shoulders and breasts. She stood by her car in a loose cotton blouse and jeans.

  The door opened from the inside, its mechanism working with a familiar sound, not unlike that of an opened beer can.

  The rain prevented her from seeing inside. She took the handle by two fingers and pulled the door wide, before sliding wetly in.

  It was the man, large and sturdy in the passenger seat.

  ‘The rain follows me,’ he stated.

  Nancy pasted her hair back and licked water from her lips.

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  The man laced his fingers in his lap. His hands were huge and knurled, almost blue, as if once tattooed.

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I'd like your help in finding my brother.’ His voice was soft, unlike his lineaments, which were creased and pain-filled. ‘His name is Mingis.’

  ‘And yours

  ‘That's not important.’

  ‘But I have to call you something; if I'm to help you.’

  ‘There's a story in this. That's all you need to know.’

  Nancy frowned. The windows had steamed up. She could no longer see or hear the rain without. It spooked her, that quietude, like death itself.

  ‘Who put you on to me?’ she asked, fiddling with the camera flash.

  ‘A mutual friend.’

  ‘That could be anybody.’

  He didn't elaborate.

  ‘You're not exactly forthcoming, are you? You're going to have to give me something more to go on.’

  He turned his
head. The vague light picked out his nose and chin, but not his eyes.

  ‘Tell me about your brother.’

  ‘Mingis is a criminal. He kills people for fun.’

  ‘Then you should go to the police,’ she told him, freezing now where she sat.

  He smiled ruefully. ‘I don't want him caught,’ he said.

  Nancy listened to the alarm bells in her skull. Loudly they rang. ‘Wait a minute; there're laws. I can't help you break them.’

  ‘But you are a journalist.’

  She wasn't sure what he meant. ‘Yes...’

  ‘Then help me find him.’

  She didn't think she had a choice.

  The Bacon Savers

  Owen and Mickey were bored. They opened cans of beer and talked of how life was cruel to them. They wanted things to happen in their lives. They put their feet up and supped. If only they had something to do, they moaned, things wouldn't be so bad. Life on the dole had its moments, sure, but they were nearly all alike. There was nothing for it but to drink beer and watch videos. Pictures flickered effortlessly across the screen, a wash of colours and happenings that side of the thick glass Owen and Mickey would dearly love to be this.

  The movie over, beer drunk, cans squashed and filled with cigarette ash, sighs came over the pair. And something else. Some unnatural quality of light. To Owen it was as if he’d been seeing the world in wobbly 3D, objects ghosted, the reception poor on his reality set, only for someone to have whacked their fist on top of the box, miraculously tuning him in. His 3D lenses, shaken into place, suddenly began to make sense. Was that the word? Sense of what, he couldn’t be sure, but it was giving him palpitations.

  ‘Why don't we make a film,’ he suggested, somewhere between worlds, reality and fantasy.

  ‘Are you kidding? What with?’

  Mickey would take some convincing, he saw. ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Then why mention it?’

  ‘I thought it was a good idea.’

  ‘It is a good idea,’ Mickey said, scratching himself. He looked around at the day’s collection of unemployment detritus, his best mate included, eyes darting from side to side, up and down, as if attempting to track an elusive insect. Something was occurring to him. Perhaps he ought to have worked harder at school. Owen was the brains of their outfit; yet lazy with it. But what of this?

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Okay. How?’

  ‘We make it up.’

  Owen had to think about that.

  They sat in silence a while, smoking. The light began to play tricks. It shuffled cards and asked them to take one each. It fanned the deck and cut...

  Owen crushed his cigarette out. ‘Okay, let's do it.’

  ‘What, now?’ The idea of actually going through with an idea that was basically nonsense left Mickey perplexed. He pulled on one ear as if adjusting an antenna; then both, wriggling his nose at some new odiferous spectrum.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’ The idea of actually going through with an idea that was basically nonsense left Owen in a state of near euphoria, one he could not explain. Instinctively, he reached for the 3D glasses sitting on his face. Only they weren’t there. Not on the outside at least.

  They opened the curtains and left.

  It was a short walk to the Railstation, from there an underground run into the meat of the city. Tower blocks shone left and right as they exited the terminal, the bodies of men and women passing about them with purpose. Owen and Mickey moved among the crowd, hands in pockets, boots leaving no indelible mark on this compacted earth. They had three hours of daylight left and nothing to do other than reconnoitre, their target a child, boy or girl they didn't know. How many captors? Another question to be resolved. It was all in the job. They stalked a shoplifter through a clothing store, a middle-aged woman who slipped items of lingerie under her coat, her shoes flat and her glasses wire-rimmed. Owen manoeuvred his way beside her, that casual danger in his stride, and leaning across the woman to a rack of brassieres he let his jacket fall open just enough to show her the heel of his gun, metal and hard under his shoulder. The woman looked at him with much younger eyes than her appearance suggested, her age part of the dissimulation. He smiled and lifted a bra from its hanger, tucking it into his pocket.

  Mickey floated over. ‘Time to go.’

  Rush hour.

  ‘Got the address?’

  ‘Sure,’ Owen replied, chewing gum.

  ‘Okay, we're on.’

  Owen removed the gum and stuck it on the side of a passing bus. He flexed his feet in his socks and stepped off the pavement along with Mickey. They dodged traffic, crossed four lanes to the pavement opposite and followed it down a wide boulevard. Umbrellas began to appear, toted by anonymous commuters, eyes watching shoes. Owen and Mickey swayed between like ghosts, always seeming to know which channel to take through the advancing crowd, cutting cleanly the city's flesh as it poured from foyers and spun out of revolving doors. They were slick and exact, precision machines, lubricious, untouched by humankind as they side-stepped and negotiated the half mile or so to a building housing shops on its ground floor, while up above, stretching a full eighty storeys, were homes. Rich apartments with a concierge, Owen noted, aloof and secure.

  Public access to the lower mall was unrestricted. The mall itself slipped below ground via escalators, swimming beneath the city for miles. The residents above had their own private entrance. They wouldn't use that. There were cameras in the mall, but these wouldn't be focused on the likes of them. Here they could walk with the breeze. They would have to climb a floor before drawing the attention of more discriminating eyes.

  Not that any of it worried Mickey. He seethed impatiently, hungry for action.

  A fire exit, a blank corridor. Concrete stairs wound up the height of the building. They lit cigarettes and laughed and joked about girls.

  Excellent cover.

  On the fourteenth floor the pair curtailed their upward rise and made a sideways move into a corridor carpeted in mauve. And here was the concierge, behatted and scratching his side as Owen and Mickey approached, arms loose and hanging, four eyes slamming between two, walking shoulder to shoulder in a little dance of death that was unmistakable to the concierge whose single-breasted wool-mix flared open and blazed. But his bullets only pocked the wall. His chest smoked as he fell, and Owen and Mickey kicked in a door.

  It mattered not what the cameras rolled over; not now. The door splintered and there was more gunfire. Owen felt his shoulder clipped. Mickey caught one in the thigh. A woman's head exploded, her teeth spinning madly before dropping into a vase by the ornamental fire, its false flames undisturbed by the storm of broken air and furniture.

  Mickey's leg collapsed and he rolled onto his back, seeing upside-down as two men burst out of an adjoining bedroom, one holding a small body to his chest. The men fired wildly, their momentum carrying them toward the interlopers and the shattered door that wobbled on one hinge in the plush entrance lobby. The child was clearly drugged and hung limply. Mickey didn't hesitate. He shot both men, the one with the child first. Owen appeared, having vaulted a coffee-table. He rushed into the bedroom, the bathroom beyond. The men hit the floor, dead, one with his face smeared down a mahogany sideboard, part of his upper lip suspended from a brass handle, the other with the child beneath him, disoriented but unhurt. A girl aged about four, grazed on one cheek, her captor's blood leaking in her ear.

  ‘Can you walk?’ queried Owen, returned from his exploration of the apartment.

  ‘I'll be okay. Take the kid. She's in one piece.’

  ‘No, we leave the kid here. The cops will pick her up. We're running out of time...’

  The light was failing. It flickered. Poor reception again.

  No sooner had they left than a figure manifested on the balcony. He wore a suit and tie, a yellowed bone clip securing it to his
shirt. It was a good start, he thought. The monkeys had performed well. He stepped into the room practising a few tennis swings, winked knowingly at the kid and poured himself a generous measure of gin.

  The bodies slowly dissolved. They had never been.

  The girl sniffed. A good little actor. Real enough. Just.

  Woodbines And Pilsener

  Thorp, at his rendezvous, was uncharacteristically nervous. He shuffled his feet and drummed his fingers on the suitcase. The bar was near empty, the Thursday morning crowd of early lunchers yet to be swollen by the arrival of noon. Absurdly, he felt conspicuous; but to the few patrons he was nothing other than an empty table. The ashtray filled with dog-ends, beer bottles disappeared from the chill cabinet, but Thorp remained invisible, a negative among positives swigging and smoking in an effort to calm his nerves.

  Noon, and in swept sundry office workers, their escapes timed to coincide with hot pastries and cold lager. Jackets were thrown over chairs and legs crossed with rasps of silk and cotton.

  Noon, and an agent of Hell sat at Thorp's table, namely Byamol, large and truculent and staring at Thorp as if he was unfinished business.

  ‘Let's see what you've got.’

  Thorp fumbled with latches.

  ‘What's the matter, a priest stalking you?’

  ‘No. Nothing's the matter.’

  Byamol pressed the suitcase lid shut the better to glare at Thorp, whom he sensed was lying.

  ‘Nothing's the matter!’

  ‘Don't tell me that. It's a priest, isn't it? Is he here? Point him out and I'll take care of him.’

  ‘There's no priest,’ insisted Thorp.

  Byamol removed his hand and opened the suitcase, turning it so the contents, all neatly folded, faced him. He rubbed souls between his horny fingers as if sampling cloth swatches. ‘Nice,’ he said, rummaging, gauging the material. ‘Nice, but there's only twenty-two.’

  ‘That can't be...’

  ‘You're holding out on me, Thorp. What is it? Have you got other buyers? Was there something special in this latest batch?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Don't lie to me. You know that can be dangerous.’

  ‘But they're all there.’

  ‘One's missing,’ Byamol menaced. ‘Explanation?’

  ‘I packed them myself!’

  ‘Then you missed one. You let one get away.’

  Thorp raised his bottle of Pilsener. He struggled to speak.

  The agent grinned malevolently. ‘I'm right about the priest, aren't I?’

  The bottle, empty, hit the table. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it. The bastards are everywhere.’

  ‘They've been following me for weeks. You're right; there's one missing. They took it. He took it, the priest.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Byamol, nodding. ‘A fucking resurrection.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorp agreed, lighting up. He offered the demon a Woodbine, but the demon declined.

  ‘Okay, here's what you do; you go after number twenty-three. I'll provide back-up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Panic crept over his shoes and tugged at his trouser legs.

  ‘I want that soul,’ Byamol whispered. ‘But these priests are tough, so I'll arrange someone to ride with you, for protection.’

  Protection? Thorp wanted to be sick. He thought of Jenny Pith and gulped. They wouldn't let her go so easily. She was dead in their books and they wanted to take her. They took everybody. And the priests? Maybe he could find one willing to intervene. Yet he'd always assumed the priests were weak. No leadership.

  Byamol closed the suitcase and slid it off the table as he stood. ‘I'll be seeing you.’

  ‘What about my money?’

  Hell's minion laughed. His shoulders jounced.

  Thorp's knees shook. He'd lost his composure. Unusually, he felt almost human. Was that a hint of colour in the demon's cheeks? No, the world was charcoal and chrome, tyre rubber and bones.

  ‘C.O.D,’ spelled the agent. ‘Cash on death, remember? And you've short-shipped us, Thorp, so no moolah.’

  He physically drooped, head falling in shame real and pretended.

  Byamol spat a farewell. ‘Stay in touch!’

  Thorp grimaced. Now what did he do?

  He swiped another beer. Smoking, he wondered where Jenny's soul lay, in or out of her body...

  There was a Hell. He'd been there. But Heaven? Heaven was a branch of Hell that took incoming calls only - only the phone was always either engaged or off the hook.

  Thorp took out his diary. Langdon, James, of head wounds inflicted with or by a piano. Accidents and suicides, modes of termination in which he specialized. Not for Thorp your natural causes. He finished his beer and walked out to where he'd parked the Ventura. On the back seat was a midget. Thorp got in and tried to ignore his passenger, but the fiend had breasts like a centrefold and a foot and a half long erection.

  Paper Girl

  Nancy lay on her bed, reading. What she read was incidental. It was the words that mattered. Not so much their meaning, their syntax, but their shape, their sound in her head. They were like a second skin to her. As close as that. As close as a lover. Which was perhaps why she had so many, books and lovers.

  Only she couldn't concentrate, thinking of Mingis. Mingis was DANGER, in capital letters, and she couldn’t resist. Something in her personality (she refused to call it a flaw) drew her to danger, toward the ugly, the undesirable. Nothing shocked Nancy. Perhaps she hoped something, some day, would.

  She had had to chase her sister, thankfully soaked at the bus stop, for a key to get in her apartment. Jane was amused. She held out a while, enough time to ensure Nancy got equally wet before they trudged back.

  ‘I'll drive you home,’ she promised.

  ‘I know you will, Nance. And you'll stay a while, too.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘You will, or your key goes in the river.’

  ‘Bitch. No wonder the old man and you get on so well.’

  Jane grinned benevolently. ‘That's enough of that. Daddy loves you just as much.’

  They made it inside and Nancy arranged towels for them both, Jane taking longest with her curtain of auburn hair, long and glowing, that Nancy hated.

  ‘How come God made you so pretty?’

  ‘He thought it wise to make up for earlier mistakes.’

  Nancy took the towel back, wondering if she actually missed her younger sibling, or merely the act of baiting her. They were so very different. And yet...

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘You'll stay?’

  ‘I have to be back by two.’

  Jane nodded and shook her hair out.

  Driving, the buildings flickering by, tall and short like parents and children, Nancy wondered about the man on the railing. That man had sat in her car much as Jane did now, his brow hanging, shaped by memories she could only guess at, his mission to return his brother. Where? She didn't understand and enjoyed the sensation, the anticipation of turning that next page. He hadn't told her his name, but Nancy thought of him as Mingis too, like his brother. Maybe they were one and the same, those features moulded through killing. Or perhaps the dour mien of the Mingis she'd met reflected his brother's pain, his brother's deeds and the suffering of his victims, their faces twisted and their bodies unnaturally arranged.

  Nancy shuddered, gleefully.

  ‘You should have got properly dry,’ Jane told her. ‘You've missed the turn.’

  ‘I know,’ she lied. ‘I like to come this way.’

  Jane didn't comment. They made it to their father's house, the semi with the garage extension where Jane still lived and which Nancy visited infrequently.

  Nancy and her father were the same in a lot of ways; too much alike. He was crazy, she knew, and was scared by that. Yet like her father Nancy used that madness, let it drive her. Right or wrong, she and he were driven by ghosts.
r />   She found him in the extension brewing tea on a small gas stove, two cups ready, oily fingerprints on both as well as a carton of milk.

  ‘Where's your sister?’ Pa Kowolski asked.

  ‘Inside.’ Nancy folded her arms.

  ‘I made us tea,’ he said.

  ‘You knew I was coming?’

  ‘No - it would have gone cold.’

  He poured and she took a cup, holding it close to her chest. The warmth and smell sent tingles through her arms and head.

  ‘I met someone today,’ Nancy told him. ‘Down by the river. I thought he was going to jump.’

  ‘And you wanted pictures.’

  ‘Right...’ But she’d failed to get any.

  Pa slurped from his mug and wiped his beard on the back on his hand, his hand on his filthy overalls. He was, he told the world and the world believed, constructing in this outbuilding all hours of the day and night, a steam locomotive. The project, as he termed it, had been going fifteen years now and as near as Nancy could tell was near completion. It had wheels, twelve of them. It had had wheels from the beginning. It had a boiler and lots of copper pipe. Pa seemed to spend much of his time polishing.

  He put his mug down gently. ‘Tell me about him. I surmise that's why you came. Is he what you're looking for? I could use some grandsons to help about the place.’

  Nancy thumped her mug down next to his, chipping it. ‘He's a monster, Pa, if that's what you mean. A cold-blooded killer, and I'm helping him. At least I've agreed to. And yes, he's just what I'm looking for, a man to destroy me before I destroy myself.’

  ‘I hope you'll be very happy together.’

  ‘I'm sure we will.’

  Pa chose a spanner and wiped it with a rag. ‘Is there a story?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He nodded sagely and returned the spanner to the blackened tool tray.

  ‘I'll be okay,’ she said.

  ‘That's what your mother told me.’

  Nancy was hurt by that. Her father avoided her eyes.

  ‘Don't forget to say goodbye to your sister.’

  She bit her lip. They avoided arguing only by spending so little time together. Always her mother was the catalyst, his insistence on keeping her in the dark.

  ‘But I’m a grown up!’ she’d scream. ‘I can handle it!’

  Pa though was scared the truth would come as an anticlimax. Should have told her years ago, he supposed. Now, she was armour plated. Better, as the consequences of people’s actions often caused more damage than the actions themselves.

  ‘More bones broken after a storm than during,’ as his old boss used to say.

  Now it was Friday. Unusually for a Friday she didn't have a date. Her phone rang, but she didn't answer, the messages piling up from potential comforters. But it wasn't comfort she needed. Nancy had a number of her own to call. She picked up the phone and dialled carefully. The number ran to thirteen digits and she wondered if she was phoning overseas.

  ‘Hello,’ a voice answered, heavy and cold.

  ‘It's Kowolski,’ she said, speaking quietly, letting the line do the work.

  There was a pause.

  How long was that line? she thought.

  ‘You have something, Kowolski?’

  ‘Questions,’ she replied. ‘I've been doing some digging.’

  The pause again. Then, ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Not like this. I'll meet you…’ suggesting a bar. ‘Ten o'clock.’ And she hung up, not giving him time to reply, imposing the pause before he could.

  She'd had him followed, but unsuccessfully. It came as no surprise. Mingis, the Mingis that had sat in her car, was not of this world. He disappeared down blind alleys, leaving a stench of death strong enough to dissuade even the hardiest of pursuants; and Nancy's pursuants were as hard as they came. No physical violence was offered them, yet she'd used up a lot of favours in the fruitless shadowing of a man who himself was a shadow.

  A stroll through the archives proved more profitable.

  Nancy hated computers, but she had to admit they had their uses as labour saving devices. Like washing-machines. To her, equally glamorous. In she bunged dates and an obscure conglomerate of unsolved murders, flagging for reference the strangest and most disturbing, and the computer went to work, mindlessly correlating information as it dissolved stains and banished odours, graphing and listing facts via its miniature detergent brain. For convenience she stuck to the twentieth century; although she could have gone back to the eighteenth. There was plenty here to disseminate, however, even within the sickly bounds of Palmersville, whose borders had become confused over the years and whose precincts, both ancient and modern, had a habit of overlapping.

  The resulting coil of thin unpleasant paper made difficult reading. She plotted on a map of the city those murders with the most in common, finding them randomly, if evenly dispersed.

  Using a coin Nancy drew touching circles round each locus, circles like smooth gears quietly turning in the earth.

  Mingis wanted her help. Perhaps he was merely approaching his next victim.

  Whose circle would touch hers?

  She'd chosen their meeting place that she might watch him from the first floor of the Burger King across the road. He would stand alone at the bar, she fancied, nursing a pint, those large shoulders making plenty of room either side.

  No chance of him merging with any crowd; but she was mischievous, and fond of BK Doubles.

  He arrived at ten by taxi, dressed in a thick ankle-length coat. He stood with his foot on the rail, dwarfing the barmaid who pulled him something dark with a head and was very deliberate with his change. The whole time Mingis never looked behind him or from side to side, never looked around to see if Nancy was waiting.

  She sat methodically chewing her burger, leaning forward so as not to dribble down her front; not taking her eyes off the big man, finding her mouth with her fries and the straw in her shake.

  Five minutes passed. Someone sat down opposite.

  ‘You have something, Kowolski?’

  Nancy did well to hide her surprise. She licked her lips and set what remained of the burger down in front of her in its carton, dripping sauce. ‘First tell me your name.’

  He frowned, much sorrow in his eyes. ‘I share that with my brother,’ said Mingis. ‘He will kill again soon. He kills every two hundred days.’

  Nancy glanced back across the suddenly congested street, but that brother had disappeared.

  ‘Ask your questions,’ this demanded.

  She laid her palms face up on the table, feeling ridiculously conspicuous in the gilt and plastic glare. Dictaphone in her lap. ‘Where are you from, you and your brother?’

  ‘The city.’

  ‘And your parents? Don't tell me you have none.’

  ‘I don't remember them.’

  ‘They're dead?’

  ‘I don't recall.’

  ‘But you were born in the city?’

  ‘As are we all.’

  ‘Not me; I was born in the country.’

  ‘The country is the city.’

  ‘Okay. Where did you go to school?’

  ‘I went to school in many places.’

  ‘With your brother?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Until when? When did you separate?’

  ‘When he grew hungry for blood.’

  ‘And blood isn't a passion you share? I imagine you're very close.’

  ‘In most things.’

  ‘But not killing. Have you ever killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘More than once?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More than twice?’

  ‘Yes - more.’

  ‘But you've never killed for fun,’ Nancy observed, still licking sauce from her lips, a ruddy emulsion long since washed away. Or had it? What was that
delicious tang? What peculiar flavour? ‘Not like your brother. He enjoys it. You told me yourself. But not you. For you killing's a burden. You view it as necessary, a duty. So where do you go from here? Are you killing still?’

  He failed to answer. She saw the pain etched deep in his skin, a terrifying confession written there. He was a murderer; no different to his brother. He knew no remorse. No guilt. No conscience stayed him. He wanted his brother found not because he was evil, both were, but because he was fulfilled. And this Mingis envied that.

  Convergence

  Saturday night was boy's night. Even Swene, immeasurably depressed, liked Saturday nights. Things lit up. There was the late October dark, dusk like gas pumped in through gaps in the clouds. Swene could smell it. It smelled of talcum powder. He was due to meet Owen and Mickey at seven. At six he wondered what to do with an hour and decided on fish and chips.

  It rained from six-thirty onward. His walls leaked strange hues. Or so he imagined, pacing about the place. He lived alone, worked shifts in a car factory, foot down on a forklift or tow-tractor, distributing parts; hundreds of them, metal bones that offered no clue to their whole. All skeletal innards, they reflected an oily light, an undersea haze off the sodium lamps high in the ceiling, a grid of them interspersed with steel girders and insulated air ducting. He often felt like he was swimming, the day’s or night’s resistance a tangible weight against which his body pressed. It was suffocating. He slowly drowned, bubbles escaping, held under by the local radio station, the pumped electrical echoes of lame DJs and the same half dozen singles between double glazing ads. Somebody ought to torch the station. It had him commit violent acts on ear-plugs. It was to another world he travelled, in which he toiled, a dry wet place outside of time...

  A permanent bad trip. No wonder he was always up for a good one. Exercise for the imagination.

  Swene's ground floor bedroom bloomed with sodden lights, the saturated illumination combined with a damp horn note.

  He rushed to the door recognizing Owen's mother's car, an old Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof peeling where it met the faded bronze paint, the two separated by a thin chrome strip.

  Exiting, hunching his shoulders in his jacket, he made for the rear door, only to find it locked. Owen dived out of the driver's seat and rushed round to grab his elbow. ‘We need you up front!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get in. No time to explain.’

  Mickey was slouched down in the passenger seat, one hand grasping a can of Special Brew. He reached over his shoulder and popped the rear door so Owen could scramble in back.

  ‘Get moving, Swene; it's a matter of life and death.’

  Swene, bewildered, depressed the clutch. There was something not right about the pair, his mates from school whose ways were often suspect. They didn’t seem themselves, somehow - but then again.

  ‘Faster,’ Owen instructed as Mickey slurped.

  ‘Where're we going?’

  Mickey laughed, face rippling as if in a wind tunnel.

  Owen said, ‘Head out of town, toward the airport. I want to make sure we're being followed.’

  Swene had to think about that. ‘Who'd want to follow us?’ he asked, wanting to take Mickey's can off him, metal money in his back pocket causing him to shift on the plastic seat. ‘What have you been doing? Is it the police?’

  ‘Oh fuck. Slow down a minute.’

  He couldn't make anything out via the mirror. Owen's shape, kneeling, obscured most of his rearward vision. The road ahead was only marginally less occluded. He concentrated on driving as the rain glassed the asphalt.

  ‘Pull into the next petrol station,’ Owen said. ‘We've lost them.’

  Minutes later they parked under a neon canopy and got out of the car. Swene stood hands in armpits while Owen trudged to the brow of the hill. Mickey lit a cigarette. Swene could smell petrol. Owen trudged back and shrugged. He too lit up, shaking water from his head. Swene eyed the kiosk and the young girl in it, disinterested by their potentially flammable acts.

  ‘Lost them,’ Owen affirmed. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Lost who?’ Swene wanted to know.

  ‘Graverobbers,’ said Mickey. ‘A whole gang of necrophiliacs. They were going to freeze our arses and shag us.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘Chilling bastards.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Swene's hands came out of his armpits and opened and closed at chin height.

  ‘I told you,’ Mickey said. ‘Graverobbers.’

  ‘Okay.’ Swene scuffed his toes. ‘Okay. But why are they after you? Why are you sorry you got away?’

  It was crazy. It was still early.

  ‘We planned,’ Owen explained, ‘to lure them out of town so that we could jump them. We wanted them on unfamiliar territory. Somewhere quiet; quieter than their usual haunts.’

  ‘Their usual haunts?’

  ‘Graveyards,’ supplied Mickey.

  ‘Mortuaries,’ Owen exemplified.

  ‘Funeral parlours.’

  ‘Beauticians.’

  ‘Charnel houses.’

  ‘Charnel houses?’

  ‘Sure, where they keep dead bodies.’

  ‘There are charnel houses in Palmersville?’ Somehow Swene found that difficult to believe. Charnel houses were to him things from darker ages.

  ‘Nah!’ Owen dismissed the idea. ‘There are no charnel houses in Palmersville.’

  Swene was confused. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. Chimplike, he scratched his arse.

  Mickey opened the boot and got out three beers. Keeping his thumb over the openings but failing to contain their foamy excretions, he passed them one each.

  ‘Me and Mick, we've been doing some exploring.’

  ‘No kidding, Swene. You should have been there.’

  Swene didn't get it. He turned his collars up.

  ‘You're not listening. I said “there are no charnel houses in Palmersville”. Now you say, “then where?”.’

  Swene screwed his eyes shut. ‘Then where?’ He sensed he would regret the coming revelation, the expected punchline looming like a hypodermic. But the screech of tyres and the orange and white shape of a Volkswagen van interrupted, its windscreen filled from corner to corner with unfriendly faces.

  ‘Back in the car,’ said Mickey calmly, tossing his lager can like a grenade.

  Swene wheel-spun, skidded, took out a pump. The cashier certainly noticed, her jaws working her gum as she memorized numbers and flapped for the phone.

  Owen squeezed a fistful of air. ‘Yes! Yes!’ He wound the window down and leaned out, head grazing a lamp-post. ‘Come and get us, you buggers!’

  Swene blinked sweat from his eyes. It had been an ordinary, mundane, boring, tedious week, after all.

  Mickey took Swene's beer and drank it for him.

  Swene didn't know where he was driving. This wasn't like any other Saturday night he'd experienced. His friends, he mused as he went through a red light, were not the type to get mixed up in anything more sinister than a game of strip poker with a bunch of elderly ladies. That they were playing bait the criminal was absurd. Maybe they were just going to a party. In which case, why weren't either Mickey or Owen driving? Swene didn't know the way. No directions were forthcoming so he simply headed out of town. Only town seemed to drag on. The suburbs appeared endless, those landmarks that were familiar few and far apart, a depleted store of reference. In fact, the more he drove and the farther they got from his home, the more the unceasing rain dissolved the city and smeared it into a strange, unrecognizable whole.

  He was lost, he realized. ‘Anyone know where we're going?’

  ‘Don't worry about it,’ reassured Mickey, about to indulge a rare irony. ‘It's only make-believe.’

  Swene regarded him strangely.

  Mickey laughed, lips foam-flecked, the front of his sweatshirt doused with lager.

  ‘They're dropping
back,’ Owen said worriedly. ‘Slow down a bit, Swene. Let them catch up.’

  ‘I don't want them to catch up!’

  Owen slapped him on the shoulder. ‘We're in this together, Swene, you and me and Mickey. Stop at the next Railstation.’

  Railstation. Those at least were familiar.

  It was fifty minutes later, nearly nine in the evening when finally he saw one, looming out of the gloaming as if on cue. He missed the name as he steered the Cortina round bollards.

  ‘It's okay,’ said Owen, ‘they caught the turn. Make a run for the escalator.’

  The three of them sprinted, Mickey holding his guts, Owen's mother's car abandoned and ten or twelve unfriendlies chasing them into the bright subterranean interior.

  They surfed the polished steel down ramp, one foot either side of the luggage stops, accelerating their bodies into the neon-lit concourse and onto a waiting train, its mirror finish unlike anything Swene had ridden before.

  The train was long and empty and they had no tickets.

  ‘What if it takes us back into town?’ Swene asked, gazing round at an interior void of posters, adverts, graffiti.

  Owen smiled. ‘Bingo!’

  ‘Huh?’ Must be a new station, he figured, a new state-of-the-art train. He never watched the news and was therefore ignorant of such factors. Anyway, current events meant something entirely different given his present circumstances.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Mick.

  Their pursuers, whose number had dwindled to six, boarded a few doors back. The train, although divided into compartments, was not made up of separate carriages.

  All six wore dark glasses.

  ‘I hope the others don't trash the car,’ Owen said plaintively, at last sounding sane. ‘My mother will kill me if they trash the car.’

  Swene had the keys, but there’d been no time to lock the doors. He had the sudden impression a horizon was receding.

  The three and the six watched each other, posturing manfully in cinematic vein as the train sped magnetically underground. Shops and arcades flashed by the seamless windows. But no would-be passengers...

  Swene felt peculiar. He enjoyed the sensation.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Mickey asked him.

  ‘Peculiar.’

  Mickey took an automatic pistol out of his jacket where it had nestled with another. ‘How do you feel now?’

  Swene looked at the gun, then at his friends. ‘Err...okay...err...’ He took the weapon and pointed it at the men in dark glasses, but not one of them moved a muscle. ‘They're not convinced.’

  ‘They can see you'll miss. Besides, they crave death. In death they can be buggered.’

  Swene's cheeks itched. ‘You mean they're for real?’

  Mickey shrugged. ‘As good as.’

  ‘And the charnel houses?’

  His friends grinned stupidly. Owen and Mickey, what had they become?

  ‘The charnel houses, too.’

  ‘Only not in Palmersville.’

  ‘Right. We drove out of Palmersville, Swene.’

  ‘Out,’ he repeated.

  ‘Right...’

  ‘And the graverobbers?’

  Owen nodded in a way he imagined aesthetic.

  Swene was miffed. ‘You're full of shit, both of you.’

  ‘Right,’ said Owen, nodding again.

  Mickey grabbed the front of Swene's jacket. ‘Isn't this one hell of a way to spend an evening?’

  ‘It's okay.’

  ‘Okay? Okay? Fucking hell, Swene, it's great! And we, your compadres, your best bosom chums, wanted you to be part of it.’

  ‘We wanted you on side,’ said Owen in a tone that suggested a change of mind.

  ‘I'm sorry. I'm just a little confused.’

  ‘We're all confused,’ Mickey said. ‘It goes with the territory.’

  Swene wondered where he'd heard that line before.

  Owen nudged him. ‘So what do you say?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘I took the gun, didn't I?’

  Mickey spun on his heel. ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Yeah!’ repeated Owen, punching the air.

  ‘So I guess I'm on side, whatever that means.’

  ‘It means you're on ours,’ Mickey told him.

  ‘Smoke?’ offered Owen.

  ‘Nah,’ Swene declined. ‘Tell me about these graverobbers.’

  ‘What's to tell? They rob graves.’

  ‘And bugger corpses.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Swene, ‘tell me about this unfamiliar territory.’

  His friends exchanged glances.

  Mickey said, ‘It's all unfamiliar until you get to know it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Owen.

  The train halted in a station as bright and deserted as the last.

  ‘Right,’ said Swene.

  They rode a glass elevator up five floors to the main concourse. Their pursuers slotted into the neighbouring car, seconds behind. The concourse was bursting with people, a sudden wave of shoppers swirling in their hundreds. The graverobbers were close, the six trailing the three through the bodies of the many out onto the wet pavement where the three turned left and walked at a brisk pace.

  Swene felt the discomfort of having a loaded pistol in the waistband of his jeans. The questions he had refused to assemble into any kind of order. He was some other place, some other where. A surreal kind of twelve pints and a kebab place, only here he was sober. He almost recognized it, he thought. Like a half memory. A place he had been, yet failed to recall in this much detail.

  The evening's deluge had glossed the city, myriad droplets fracturing every shade and depth of light. Neon and flame were intermixed with electric and the whites of eyes. The traffic shifted with a jellied ease, like everything wore a prophylactic.

  They moved into a large café and occupied a table. A waitress slid over with a smile, a life, an existence as real (or otherwise) as their surrounds. His surrounds. Her lips were full and her teeth sparkled. There were coloured spots on her cheeks that intrigued Swene, who supposed them an affectation. The six sat a short way off. Nine coffees were ordered and each man took a similar time to empty his cup of hot bubbling froth. Next they breezed through an arcade of cubby-hole shops, but nobody spent any cash. It was a game, a piece of theatre. They played normality. Owen and Mickey didn't wish to attract attention and neither did their enemies, whose number dwindled to four at the arcade's exit.

  ‘Better odds,’ said Swene, still with the image of the waitress clinging to his retinae, rebounding along his optic nerves, determined to post a message, a warning, some desperate plea to his back-brain. He glimpsed a crudely photocopied poster stapled to a telegraph pole, a face thereupon that was familiar. A girl; another girl...

  ‘Nothing like it,’ Mickey disagreed.

  They entered a tall building by a side door and climbed a winding channel of stairways to the roof. The view was tremendous, the roof-space a football pitch not in use so unlit. The grass was dark and short and full of indentations, as if from a recent match. There was no fence or other barrier round it. Swene wondered briefly how the ball was kept from disappearing over the edge. They stood in one goal-mouth.

  Only two grave-robbers emerged onto the pitch. They stood in the centre-circle in their dark clothes and glasses. They toyed with knives and talked quietly between themselves, a conversation that grew more animate as the minutes passed.

  They appeared to argue. And then one lashed out. The other folded about a wound, blood sliding from his belly to his boots. He fell to his knees and shook a moment before becoming completely still, frozen in that aspect.

  ‘What's happening?’ Swene wanted to know. The standing graverobber had simply walked off.

  ‘They offer us threats,’ Owen told him. ‘They display their contempt.’

  ‘By murdering each other?’

  ‘Most killers are known to their victims,’ Owen expounded. ‘It's m
ore intimate.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘Like sex.’

  ‘So this is a warning,’ interpreted Swene ‘All part of the plan?’

  Owen and Mickey looked sheepish.

  Perhaps, thought Swene, they were out of their depth.

  He raised fingers to his lips, creasing them in thought and smelling vinegar, that odour, sharp and acrid, taking him back to his flat and his past, now both seemingly far away. He couldn’t complain really; it had been a lousy, predictable, monotonous week.

  The three walked over to the centre-circle where Mickey lit up the graverobber's face with a match.

  ‘He's alive.’

  Owen nodded. ‘He's apoplectic. He won't move till gravity claims him. Their contempt is as much for pain as anything.’

  Swene shivered. ‘These are not nice people.’

  ‘No,’ said Owen. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘But this is a nice town,’ Mickey chirruped. ‘Don't you think?’

  Chapter Two: The Language Of Thunder And Bread