Underlay

by Andrew McEwan

Benny Zine, the indefatigable being, thumped nosily down the boulevard wearing a vest and Y-fronts. The patrol car in hot pursuit mounted the kerb and sent pedestrians scattering, narrowly missed a hot-dog stand and an old lady selling flowers - who did not gaze up from her crossword but did drop ash from her cigarette - coloured lights blazing, siren loud, before colliding head on with three police motorcyclists, part of the District 17 stunt 'n' trick team. Bodies floated acrobatically, somersaulting into newspaper stands and litter bins. Motorcycles juddered like dying antelope in the road, scratched steel and grated flesh mesmerizing the boulevard while Benny nipped and tucked away.

  Women loved him. Few attached blame. The newspapers lauded him, as his crimes were crimes of passion.

  Once again, he made the front page.

  Benny Zine, the indefatigable being. But was he human?

  Day Of The Year

  Swene admired himself in the leather jacket. The zip winked and gleamed. The elbows stretched and cracked. It was the day before Christmas. There was snow on the windowsills and a strange air in his flat, an air that was somehow breathed, as if these rooms were lungs. He had two weeks’ holiday, a fortnight’s escape from the car factory’s mundane interior, its sameness that imbued his working self with a slack-jawed indifference. Its music! There, he was a robot, a cog in the machine. It didn’t matter what rolled off the production line; he barely noticed. Mostly all he saw was superstructure anyway, ribs and braces, mountings and brackets, buckets of them welded and welded over and over, screw fixings and bolts protruding, panels matched, dressing the wasted bodies like death in reverse. He still hadn't heard from Owen and Mickey. Their numbers were engaged, off the hook. Holed up somewhere, he supposed, up to their necks. Saturday nights just weren't the same. He'd become nervous of outdoors since a day in November when he'd met a girl at a bus stop, yellow hair spiked through dirt and sweat. She'd pleaded not for bus fare but directions, co-ordinates. He hadn't any. She'd taken hold of his collar and pressed her face to his in what wasn't a kiss, but an attempt to look inside his head. Her eyes garishly close, seeing more than he ever could of the inner workings, the peanut flicking and banana peeling going on in his dream theatre. There was very little between them at that moment, perhaps only time and space. Swene had had no choice but to see into the vacant lot of her skull, feel the tug of that void as it pulled him in. She was desperate, given to accosting strangers in some vague hope of redemption, of finding her way back to wherever it was she’d left. And he'd pulled away, pushed her from him. Lost himself...

  He took the jacket off; put it on again; took it off. Draped it over the sofa. Took a piss, shaking himself for a good five minutes, determined to squeeze out a last last drop. Gave up. Walked back into the living-room and without pause picked the jacket up, threw his arms into it, shrugged and left the flat forgetting his keys.

  Home, defamiliarized, was somewhere else. There was no going back, a voice that might have been his own, might have been the girl’s, whispered to him. In which ear he couldn’t tell. He had a job to do, the voice suggested. Beyond the factory gates, in a world not governed by the clock, by line speed, by sequence, by strange goggle-eyed amphibians...a world in which his place was not submerged, adhered by his own sweat to a forklift truck.

  Standing outside his front door he could hear the phone ringing. Swene put his hands in his pockets and walked off up the street. There was nothing else for it. He had seen the light, and it wasn’t fluorescent.

  Orangepeel

  She tied their shoelaces, wiped their noses, packed them off to school. Not her own children. What if she had those? Was she fit to be a mother? It was at least a part-time job, looking after other people’s offspring. There was no escape from your own brood. She didn't think she could cope with pregnancy. She didn't even enjoy the sex part. All that probing and pushing. The intimacy. Something dead in her just wanted to be alone.

  A fly buzzed, destroying her reverie. Large and black, it settled on the kitchen curtains and rubbed its head confusedly. Jenny sat with her chin resting on her palm, legs crossed under the table. The fly was an anomaly. It was winter, everything mad yet slow, shoppers buying last minute presents, traffic strobed by frozen water being overtaken by those on foot, ankles wrapped in plastic and foam. There shouldn't be any flies, she told herself. At home this morning; that is, in her attic bedsit, as this was the school holidays, so she had no need to ready children and breakfasts, she let her head fill with coffee steam in an effort to clear it. The fly's buzzing puzzled her - but now it had vanished, perhaps to the other side of her square container, living-room divided from kitchen by an invisible forcefield, one that kept rug and sofa-bed and underwear that side, table, chair, cupboard, kettle and sink this. The space over there was dim and grey while over here it was cheery and white, a contrast line acting as a border centrally round the room. Sometimes she spent hours passing from one side to the other. Sometimes moments. But nothing ever changed. There was merely light and dark. It was how she saw herself, in terms of opposites. Where the two sides met was a vague line, neither here or there. Not pretty, not ugly, not brilliant, not stupid, not anything defining as a personality. Not anything much. Just Jenny Pith. Just Orangepeel.

  She was feeling sorry for herself, she thought. She hadn't felt like that when she woke up. Must be the cold. Only it wasn't cold. The house was never that. Too much money to burn. Must be the emptiness. Only it wasn't empty, there were rooms full of family and relatives downstairs. Only none of them were hers. On normal days she felt like she belonged. She had a role, which she occasionally enjoyed. She had the kids, toward whom she was always good and kind. They loved her, and by loving her let her love herself. But it was Christmas Eve. She needed escape.

  She pulled on her big boots and her big coat and stood before the door, terrified of bumping into any one of the dozen or so people currently holidaying at the doctor's. They'd be pleased to see her, she knew, whisk her off downstairs for alcohol and carolling. Jenny turned her back on the door and, standing on a chair, opened the kitchen window and stepped out onto the mansard.

  Her big boots crunched adhesively. Closing the window behind she noticed the latch drop. She'd be returning via a different route then, if she returned at all.

  If, she thought. If she’d been on that plane with her friends and died with them beneath the harbour waters. If she’d jumped as she’d meant to. If she hadn’t encountered a man in sunglasses there on her chosen roof. If he hadn’t spoken. If his voice hadn’t been so familiar. His manner. His face. If...

  Jenny’s soles crunched. She was certain she’d never met him before. As certain as she could be about anything. What he was doing there, his role in her final act, disturbed her; but not as much as it ought to, she reckoned, hands in pockets as the knowledge of Thorp wriggled in her brain like a defrosted caterpillar. He was to collect her soul, that she relinquished voluntarily...only not. She’d been unable. Not, she realized, because she was scared of death, of falling those unnumbered floors, rather because...yes, she was dead already. She had no soul to give up.

  She had no life. That was it. Jenny’s past was mostly somebody else’s. Her sick mother’s, her demanding friends’. She deserved, now that she was alone, an existence to match her expectations. Only she didn’t have any. So she walked, did Orangepeel, and she gazed in many shop windows. She watched others, girls and women, and wondered how they went about being themselves. It was cold, freezing, but the temperature was the least of her problems. That said, she had no money. Chewing her lip having followed her nose, Jenny Pith found herself reading a help wanted in a frosted pane, where the frost was, on the inside, stylized icing sugar.

  She could smell the coffee. She nodded to herself, deciding this was as good a place to start as any.

  She marched inside, quickly filled out an application, the manager looked on, smiling wryly, hung up her big coat, took off her big boots, slipped on the proffered six-inch heels, the too small uniform a
nd frilly pinny...

  It was the first night of the rest of her life.

  Seeing Was

  All the lights that shone shone with a tempered urgency. They knew what was coming, suspended from trees and ceilings, perched on the ends of poles. They shared an urgency with the clocks of the city. The clocks rounded on the hour. Presents rustled and seethed beneath boughs of wood and plastic, seasonal wrapping straining against the ties of ribbons and the adhesion of sticky tape. And then it happened, and the city sighed. Cars let out their breath down still crowded streets. People laughed and smiled, or turned over in their sleep, imagining the faces of children, if they were not children themselves. The city lay pregnant with dreams. Lovers joined. Friend toasted friend. Strangers passed, shadows juddering about their feet. In Palmersville. In a million places. In Ileum, whose cloak surrounded every suburb, be it in Greenland or Gondwanaland. How else might Santa get about? Ileum, a city by every conceivable name. A city of innumerable light fittings, gas and electric; crystals suspended, candles manifold, dripping wax and casting a infinite array of shades, some short-lived, others lingering, nipping at bed socks and investing themselves in skirting, climbing inside ears and ascending nostrils. The light reached everywhere, whatever its source. It used whatever means available, be it natural or manmade. It delivered its spectrum, mostly invisible, unseen by humans, and its spectrum was, without question, recognized. The light was truth. How could anyone question the reality of objects unveiled by their eyes? Only by shutting them, but by then the light was inside, and its version, what it revealed, what it displayed, what it presented of the world, was the default format adopted by both dream and nightmare. Awake or asleep, the light was ubiquitous. What it revealed could not be gainsaid. But just how reliable a source of information was it? Might not the light, the truth, and therefore perceived reality, be tampered with? Jones thought so. Jones knew, in fact…

  The Chimney Brigade

  Christmas Day.

  Detectives Stack, Pot and Cowls stood admiring the wreckage of the light aeroplane. The tail fin was just visible, wedged between a sideboard and a fridge that had presumably been ejected from the neighbouring kitchen by the violent intrusion of the fuselage, which, wings and all, had collided with the sixty-sixth storey apartment of one Vernon Jones at around two minutes past twelve that morning. It was six-thirty now, and Stack wondered just whose pond he had pissed in to get this assignment when he'd a wife and child back home, the latter four years old, the former just at that stage where she was beginning to see his work as a problem. Not that he’d been home a lot lately, and then only to half-remembered conversations, a numbness between his ears that could only be dissolved by TV. Dog tired and itching. Dinner in the oven? No chance. In the past family had been the problem; or the lack of it, as conception for Cherry had been the impossible dream. He juggled his balls, hands in trouser pockets. Was there a second child in them? It was what Cherry wanted now that Franky had started nursery school, a baby to fill her days.

  ‘I thought it was a little too quiet,’ said Pot, hunching his shoulders against the cold.

  ‘Just the usual pre-festive hiatus,’ Cowls explained. ‘Even the crazy people take holidays.’

  And it had been quiet, Stack thought. Too quiet. He'd heard homicide had started playing role games, some lying under sheets in the morgue while others searched for clues under their toenails.

  ‘What's the story?’

  Pot let his shoulders fall. ‘Attempted murder.’ He gauged the other's faces. ‘I know, there're easier ways, but Vernon couldn't have been expecting a plane in through his window.’

  ‘He was home?’

  Cowls nodded. ‘In bed with his wives...’

  ‘Three of them,’ Pot added.

  ‘Three wives?’ Stack felt sorry for the man, then changed his mind.

  ‘He's the nephew of that industrialist, the one kicking up a stink down Parliament Square.’

  ‘Gerrymander Jones?’

  ‘That's the guy; more enemies than a flu bug in June.’

  ‘So you think this was politically motivated? Some kind of revenge attack, only not aimed at Jones himself but his nephew and associate.’

  ‘Right...’

  ‘Or an accident.’

  Stack was confused.

  ‘Freak weather conditions,’ said Pot, shrugging.

  ‘Maybe even suicide,’ Cowls opined. ‘Note the pilot's death and nobody else’s.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  Pot and Cowls stared at each other. ‘We thought forensics had sent you.’

  ‘Yeah, to photograph the scene. That's what you do, isn't it?’

  ‘I don't photograph the scenes of suicides or accidents,’ Stack outlined. ‘I'm attached to the PR department at Metrodine, seconded to police duty.’

  The blank looks were to be expected. Stack hoped he didn't have to go on to explain his detective badge. He knew Pot and Cowls vaguely, from working on other cases; they weren't overly investigative, always choosing the easiest case scenario. Probably they got home of an evening.

  He sighed. ‘Why don't I take a look anyway, who knows what I might find.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ Pot moved away from the door. Behind him were five uniformed officers.

  Cowls tapped him on the shoulder. ‘We'll be in the coffee shop on the roof if you want us, otherwise we'll see you back at the station.’

  Stack nodded and approached the cops.

  They squirmed out of his way, not really interested, a crime scene detachment that fascinated - or had. He worried it was infectious, the empty looks and cynicism. At least he had his camera. Through the lens he could alter perspective without separating himself from the human scale of the awfulness; the mutilated bodies, the broken faces, the shock of lives brutally ended. His detachment was more that of a surgeon than a soldier. He still wanted answers, still needed to piece together what remained. But his secondment, now in its third month, left him full of a soft cold rage.

  Public relations: not what he expected.

  ‘There're using you to smooth over edges,’ Cherry derided. ‘What's so important? Metrodine disgusts me; it's cancerous.’

  She was right, of course, yet he'd gone into it with his eyes open. Only now his eyes had matchsticks in them.

  The apartment was voluminous. The aircraft had almost fitted the window, so there wasn't much structural damage. Neither had there been any fire. The pilot was killed in the crash. He asked one of the cops what had happened to the body. The cop didn't know. And Vernon, nephew of that other Jones?

  ‘Hospital.’

  ‘He was injured?’

  ‘No, he owns it.’

  Three wives and a hospital, thought Stack. Powerful relations. What else? He'd never heard of Vernon Jones until this morning. Now here he was taking pictures of the man's apartment. There was something impersonal about the decor, however. The furniture too was neutral, lacking any individuality. There were no family pictures or quirky oddments, nothing to say anybody lived here full-time. It was like a hotel room, he thought. Or a safe house.

  Stack used a roll of film, wished the officers Happy Christmas and made for the stairs.

  Pot and Cowls were laughing over coffee froth, smoking ridiculously large cigars which they stabbed at the skyline, reminiscing over butchery and incarceration.

  ‘You all done?’

  ‘Yes...’ He stood by the glass wall admiring the view; buildings wrapped in a torpid sack of morning, a huge smoke-filled lung awaiting a new day's illumination.

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Just a piece of wing in a toilet.’

  The detectives nodded, smirking wisely. It was useless Stack telling them anything, at least anything sensible. He was strangely contemplative, as if being roused from his bed at 3AM on Christmas Day had instilled in him a new perspective. Suddenly the camera to him was a thing of truth and beauty, not as Metrodine's PR department saw it, a tool
in the war of reality, a weapon deployed against revolution. No wonder Cherry was cold toward him. She had friends who used cameras, moving and still, image fiends some might possibly consider dangerous. They were truth seekers, he realized, not glamorizers. He had not understood. Metrodine had given him this eye for their own purposes. Stack was quietly pliant, a piece of corporate machinery whose previous incarnation had trawled newspapers for possible libellous statements, ammunition in a conflict he hadn't known existed. He hadn't known anything, come to think of it. Staring out over the city now he felt sick. He trembled. Two thirds water, nine tenths ignorance.

  ‘Vertigo,’ said Pot. ‘Better sit down.’

  ‘Yeah, take the weight off your feet, detective,’ added Cowls. ‘Up here we all get a bit dizzy.’

  He sat. Pot gestured and moments later Stack was presented with a full steaming cup of brown liquid.

  ‘Cigar?’

  ‘No; thanks.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  Pot and Cowls exchanged secrets, dropped huge clustered rings of ash on the floor.

  He foamed his upper lip.

  ‘Is that right your wife's an actress?’ Cowls wanted to know.

  Stack was momentarily frightened to answer. Why was he being quizzed about his wife? Were they pumping him for information? ‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘Kind of. She was in a few commercials; some low-budget independent stuff.’

  ‘Until you knocked her up, eh?’

  He found a pretend smile he hadn't known he had.

  ‘I remember her,’ Pot said, waving his cigar as if at some powerful insight. ‘That ad for dermatological cream. She was sat naked astride a rocket!’

  ‘Wow,’ Cowls chimed, eyebrows raised, ‘yes. She was a model?’

  Pot slapped the table, filling Stack's saucer. ‘That's her! Molasses, sweet Cherry Molasses!’

  Cowls was shaking his head now. ‘You lucky bastard, Stack. How’d you get your hands on her?’

  ‘She ran me over,’ he said without thinking.

  Both men looked at him as if he was stupid.

  I've just given them a fact, he thought. Not what they wanted. But she had, she'd knocked him down outside a pub. It had been the day of his mother's funeral. He'd gone to the pub alone, rather than to the ceremony. She'd been taking part in a low budget feature, the shooting of it illegal. But then why go to the trouble of getting a permit when you could snatch a take in half an hour with no-one the wiser? He'd stepped into the road and she'd run him over.

  ‘I mean - it was an accident.’

  They looked at each other again.

  ‘How come they made you a detective?’ Pot asked, changing the subject.

  Stack was even less comfortable. ‘The badge is for access,’ he offered, peering down at his coffee. ‘I collect information, but I don't act on it.’

  ‘That must be our job,’ joked Cowls.

  ‘Yeah?’ queried Pot. ‘I thought we just fucked around.’

  ‘Oh, we do that; but sometimes we're obliged to solve cases. Earn our pay, so to speak.’

  A look of mock surprise came over Pot's bland features. ‘Hear that, Stack? Some of us have to work for a living.’

  They were on the offensive now, he thought. They'd concluded they needn't be afraid of him. They understood he was just a flunky, not some Metrodine spy.

  He had a beautiful wife. A safe job.

  He was nobody.

  And they carried guns.

  ‘Why don't you pay for the coffees,’ Cowls suggested. Then he and Pot scraped their plastic chairs and left.

  Stack picked up the table phone and dialled. It was close to eight in the morning. No reply. He expected Franky would be up, he and Cherry opening presents Cherry had mostly bought. She knew it would be him calling, he supposed.

  Pagan

  Being an orphan was good for a lot of things. For a start, you owed no loyalty to any family or clan. None of your friends were chosen for you. You could come and go as you pleased. Pagan was only loyal to himself, inasmuch as he wouldn't let himself down, at least not intentionally. His success arose from his efficiency as a foot soldier. It was a role he fitted comfortably, that of mercenary, and one he chose to exploit with a freedom born of not caring in the least about consequences. He lacked a moral code, and therefore a conscience. But his freedom was tempered by Vernon, not to mention Vernon's three wives, Valery, Veronica and Violet. The Witches, he called them, schooled in the dark arts. Often he would act as chauffeur, driving directionless about town, following strangers on whom they'd practise spells.

  Vernon himself would be away on business, his business being organized crime.

  When not chauffeuring the Witches Pagan ran money, dropping fat envelopes through letterboxes, collecting and distributing bribes. It was easy work, seldom violent. He had an excellent memory for detail, a mental prowess Vernon had seized upon in regard to his favouring no written records. Pagan could remember every drop he'd ever made; the amount, the date. Nothing was signed for. Vernon only took Pagan's word. If a body claimed not to have received a donation when Pagan clearly stated it had, then it was Pagan Vernon believed.

  He had the face of an angel. He was sixteen.

  The Witches sometimes played with him, squeezing their breasts into his face, inviting him to lick between their thighs. They'd giggle over his erection and take his seed in their mouths, passing it between them like schoolgirls sharing bubble-gum. They scared him shitless, about the only thing that did. Not that he was afraid of Vernon finding out; Vernon already knew everything.

  People often pointed guns at Pagan. Today being no exception, he sat calmly with his hands on the wheel while the cold steel barrel of a shotgun pressed a circle in his cheek.

  The man holding it was short and curly-haired, receding, bit of an Art Garfunkel type, wearing a suit too big for him. His companion, fair-haired like Pagan, tongue lolling like a Golden Retriever, rifled through the plastic bag on the passenger seat, sliding cash out of envelopes. This man's suit was too small, stretched across back and shoulders and half way up his muscled arms.

  ‘How're we doing over there?’ short man asked of stocky.

  ‘Okay. Should we leave a tip?’

  ‘Sure, whatever makes you comfortable.’

  Stocky man prodded Pagan, who turned his head slightly. ‘Here you go, kid. For your trouble.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Think nothing of it...’

  Then were gone then, vanishing like ghosts, melting into a backdrop of jumbled shop windows and derelict lots.

  He looked at the money, threw it on the dash top. What would Vernon say? He'd been a sitting duck, had offered no resistance. Truth was he hadn't seen them coming.

  He'd lost thirty-six thousand in cash and hadn't seen them coming! He was taken by surprise, a fact which undermined his much treasured invulnerability.

  What now? Vernon wouldn't kill him, he felt sure of that; he'd make a living example of him instead.

  Who were they, he kept thinking, that they could sneak up on him like that?

  It was unbelievable. There were tears in his eyes. He wiped his nose on his fist.

  The Restless People

  New Year's Eve.

  At this time of year, post Christmas, Roger Coaltrain liked to stay in bed. The festive season was too exhausting. There were too many false pictures out there, too many Happy Endings. Everything and everybody had to be nice. It made Roger sick to think about it, all those smiling elves and benign references to Jesus. He longed for February and some renewed cynicism, some honest to God filth and corruption he and his crew could wallow in. Up until about the middle of December things had been pretty normal; there was much madness in the city, chaos aplenty to subvert and interpret. Yet behind it all was a wave of consciousness the full weight of which was about to topple the government. Not that the government had fallen, for its facade remained, but Roger was uncannily aware of a coup unfurling be
yond Parliament's picture windows.

  Its timing was perfect. The city barely noticed, being too involved with coloured lights and pageants.

  He'd phoned Nancy Kowolski at the paper but was told she was off work. Due to illness? Nancy? Whoever he'd spoken to hadn't provided an answer.

  That was yesterday. Today he forced himself out of bed, resolved to call on her at home.

  The world was suddenly an unfamiliar one, he thought, driving through slow traffic, water frozen stiff in gutters and drains. Coldness permeated everything, made thick the air and turgid the minds of men and women, their hopeless meandering about the precincts of shopping centres taking on a robotic gait, bags of polythene and leather swinging through impossibly small arcs from hands and shoulders. He'd worked on a documentary once whose subject was depression; mental and physical, the weight of it all pervasive, a season not unlike this, a weather system that could hold a city under its influence. A large black umbrella, he remembered thinking, beneath which you could no longer tell if it was raining or the sun was shining. Palmersville had that look about it now; swathed in shadow, hidden from itself, gathered about a knot it daren't loosen for fear of flying apart.

  He braked hard, swerved, hit a curb, mounted the pavement, came to a stop by a newsagents.

  His head hurt.

  Palmersville, he told himself. Nancy Kowolski. It had all been there yesterday. He feared it might disappear entirely by tomorrow. The sun came out as if to prove his theory. A stranger smiled at him, young and pretty.

  What the fuck was going on? Properly awake now he turned off the engine and got out of the car, got back in the car and turned on the radio.

  Not the usual station.

  What was that called? Nancy...

  His phone rang. It was Tyrone. Nancy lived in an apartment overlooking the river. If he could find that he could find his sanity.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked if everything was still on for tonight.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Can I bring someone?’

  ‘I thought you were bringing everyone. Isn't that what you normally do?’

  Roger was no longer sure of the word normal. His world had been rearranged.

  ‘What's the address again?’

  ‘Christ, what's the matter with you? Jimmy been feeding you downers or something? You ought to know better.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Shit...see you around eleven.’

  And Tyrone rang off, leaving Roger Coaltrain empty.

  Jimmy was Jimmy Head; he worked up at the hospital. Hey, me too. It was coming back to him now. Jimmy was a trained physician. Roger was...something in administration? Not a doctor. Not in the true sense. He didn't kill people. He got out of the car once more and went to buy a paper.

  Evening News, read the title. Was that Nancy's paper? There had been others, but this looked the most familiar. The front page carried a story about a missing girl. There were countless pages of TV. There was a cartoon strip by somebody called Delaney.

  Sam Delaney? Wasn't he one of Nancy's boyfriends?

  Nancy...

  It took him two hours to drive to her apartment. He buzzed the door and waited.

  ‘Who is it?’ A woman's voice, but not hers.

  ‘Eh, Roger Coaltrain.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Roger - a friend of Nancy's. I was worried about her.’

  ‘She's not here.’

  ‘She's not?’

  There was a pause. ‘You'd better come up.’

  The door opened and he entered the building, its warmth engulfing, its lift slick and bright.

  She was waiting on the landing, arms folded, dark hair tumbling. Her sister. What was her name?

  ‘She's disappeared. I thought everyone knew.’

  He pushed his hair back.

  ‘I live here now; just waiting.’

  Roger didn't know what to say. How long since he'd seen her? He couldn't remember. He felt terrible. He looked at her sister imploringly, before falling at her feet like a suitor allergic to his love's perfume.

  Woke up on the sofa.

  ‘Tea,’ she said. ‘Next to your head.’

  He rolled his eyes in the mug's direction. It still steamed.

  ‘I'm Jane.’

  That was it. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You often faint like that?’

  ‘No. I must be running a temperature.’

  ‘Well, you'd better see a doctor.’

  He swung his legs to the floor and looked at her confusedly. The tea was sweet, just how he liked it.

  ‘I think I'm losing my mind,’ he told her.

  She smiled indulgently. ‘Perhaps you died.’

  The smile took on a whole new set of meanings, none of them pleasant, white teeth and red lips eating into his brain, sucking the juices from his lungs and heart. He put a hand to his chest...felt a beating, fast and hard.

  Relief flooded him with sweat. ‘That's not funny.’

  ‘It wasn't meant to be,’ Jane replied. ‘Merely an observation.’

  ‘Do I look dead?’

  ‘You tell me; I'm not at all familiar with corpses.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘But you work in a morgue, don't you?’ she said laughingly. ‘I remember Nancy saying. You of all people ought to know what a dead person looks like.’

  The cold came back to him.

  ‘Where's the bathroom?’

  She pointed.

  He ran for it, pushing his face against the mirror over the basin, one hand clasped round each tap, hot and cold.

  He was there quite a while, just staring. She was right, at least about him working in a morgue. Up at the hospital. Of course. How could he forget that? He assisted in the dismemberment of cadavers. Not a doctor but a technician. His patients were already deceased.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She'd stuck her head round the jamb.

  ‘Jimmy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He must've slipped me something. Tyrone was right. I'm fucked up. I apologize.’

  Jane folded her red lips into her mouth, scaring him. ‘A-ha,’ she said, nodding.

  He let go of the taps, their temperature differential having restored his equilibrium.

  ‘Want to go to a party this evening?’

  ‘Is it fancy dress?’

  ‘I've no idea.’

  ‘I'm not usually one for parties. Nancy would always show me up; she'd be wearing no knickers or something.’

  ‘But she won't be there...’ he said, grimacing.

  ‘No. No, she won't.’

  ‘You'll come then? It doesn't start till late. We could get something to eat first. What do you say?’

  She folded her arms under her breasts. Her large brooding eyes threatened him, but unknowingly.

  ‘Okay.’ She shrugged, letting her arms fall to her sides and disappearing back into the apartment.

  Roger was clammy. He glanced back at the mirror, imagining Nancy's face in it. Did he remember her correctly?

  A morgue. Fascinating.

  I live among the dead, he thought. Perhaps some of it had rubbed off.

  A short time later, although the distance seemed great, sat looking at Jimmy Head, can of lager in one hand, joint in the other, he hoped not too much.

  ‘Amphetamines, Roger?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Please yourself. Gonna be a long night. Don't come gasping to me later. I'm just the sound man, remember?’

  ‘We're rolling this evening?’

  ‘Don't we always...’ Jimmy sucked nosily on the joint, swilled his mouth out with what remained in the lager tin, and belched. ‘You're the director.’

  So I am.

  Recalling his earlier telephone conversation with Tyrone he scratched behind an ear, wondering what, if anything, was lurking there, burrowing. ‘I'm not sure I'm liking this much.’

  ‘What?’

/>   ‘This New Year's,’ Roger explained, as much for his own benefit as Jimmy’s, ‘I feel like I woke up on a different planet.’

  Jimmy nodded, as was his custom. Been there, the nod said, going back again just as soon as I can.

  Roger left him to contemplate the wallpaper. He had bigger fish to fry. He paused in the hallway of Jimmy's semi-detached and scratched behind his ear again. What was this, this constant need for reassurance? Just where did he get off? There was a fucking party tonight. It was the year's end, a whole new set of dates starting tomorrow. And he was taking Jane out; Nancy's sister. Shit, what had happened to her? He didn't kill people, he reminded himself as he opened the front door. Standing in the street he suffered a moment's panic as he failed to recognise his car. But it was the blue one parked right outside. Thankfully, he got in.

  He was a technician. At the hospital. He placed bits of people in stainless steel trays, weighed and photographed their vital organs, handed them back for reassembly or squashed them into jars labelled by disease. In his spare time he was a film maker.

  mediCINEMArtyrs...

  Roger. Jimmy. Tyrone.

  Others, sometimes, too.

  They were the restless people, out not to get caught. They filmed what they saw and saw what they filmed. Documentaries. Features. Cartoons, if the light was right - and it looked that way now. Advertisements for products unknown.

  Of course they were rolling this evening, and it was up to Roger to assemble the cast, the unpaid yet seldom unwilling friends and friends of friends and their likeable and not so likeable acquaintances to be engaged in a drama not of the Martyrs' making, but one from which all their lives, simple and confused, gathered together in a place and time, jostled and lubricated, would inevitably unfold. At the worst they could hope for fist fights and sexual misconduct. Nothing too violent. Nothing inviting the telescopic limbs of the law. Just your usual raft of misunderstandings and mad panoply of stunt flying, boys falling for girls and girls reciprocating in all manner of styles, from openly flirtatious to disgustingly snide, those unlucky pilots shot down in flames descending through great clouds of perfume, knocking over glasses and bottles and tripping over their own shoes. It was all meat to the lens. Roger Coaltrain gesticulating. Tyrone braving the burning ether. Jimmy Head sorting through the malaise of the dying, snatching last breaths and digitally wrapping sighs.

  The venue was a hall of residence just off the City East university campus. Largely empty due to refurbishment, the hundred or so rooms and their attendant corridors made for the ideal nuit blanche.

  Rear Wheel Drive

  The car had been following him for an hour. Sharp and yellow, it knifed through the grey afternoon, cutting a bright incision in the steel and concrete flesh of the city. It fed his paranoia. He grew sweaty despite the cold, exposed to its blinkered headlights as if alone in streets that were never less than crowded. There was no noise except his own breath, his two shoes slapping, his heart pounding in his chest. The car nosed toward him with a stark inevitability. Always somewhere in his field of vision, reflected in a bus window or streaking through a plant-shaded mirror in the sixth floor café where he sat behind steam and newspaper, fingers ink-stained and teeth chattering, not daring to look left or right. He was stalked by an automobile. It knew him. But did he know it? Who, or what, was behind the wheel?

  Thorp lit a cigarette. The newspaper folded he stared at his fingernails, pale and tarnished. This new world, with its acid etched meanness, its hard and fast reality, left him on the brink of exhaustion. Gone was his previous intoxication with everything fluid, his onetime existence in a realm fantastical, yet ordinary. There was nothing ordinary now about Ileum, the Ileum of Jones and Co., administrators of power, politicians in name only. No longer did the mother of all cities lurch uncomfortably in eye corners, nursing adolescent fantasies and indulging dope fiends, but sat with its legs open, full square. Rules had been written that had no place for whimsy. And the yellow car? In a world he saw in black and white its colour was loud and frightening. It wasn't the happy apple tinge of memory, or the soft glow of the face he'd fallen in love with on a rooftop an ever-expanding universe from here. It was a hard colour, persistent, an indicator of fact. Irrevocable, inescapable, tooling about his consciousness like a vampiric canary.

  Hot or cold, it wanted his blood.

  ‘I was press-ganged.’ Thorp told his cigarette. ‘Not offered any choice in the matter.’

  Ashes glowed at him.

  ‘I haven’t made a conscious...’ one eye shut, calculating, ‘...in a long time.’ Not since he’d gone bravely forth without his rifle, hands in pockets and no real expectancy of surviving the machine-gun hail. His was a protest march, having been corralled into a firing squad that morning.

  At least this way he got to stay out of the decision making progress.

  A waitress brought him eggs he hadn't ordered, two globes smiling up at him from a plate, twin suns radiant in a sky white as snowflakes - yellow stars about which the new world orbited, in a figure eight. There was no escape, he saw. There was no Death with whom to play cards. Hell and its minions had been outflanked, all arguments put aside. Sitting in his trenchcoat as the colours leaked home he thought again of Orangepeel, of how he had failed to find her, of how he had allowed her to slip away. Perhaps the catalyst for all this change, her postponed suicide the proof if it was needed that nothing was prescribed, and yet, perversely, that some things were inevitable. A philosophy neither quodian or trencherman, but the hellish doctrine of Jones.

  Brilliant, really.

  The cigarette burnt his hand.

  He swallowed and took his sunglasses off. Immediately the cafe swamped him with greens and browns, the reds of lipsticks and the blues of soup bowls. His own trenchcoat resounded metallically, an ocean of shifting hues that was partly soup bowl, partly soup spoon. The soup itself, whether meat or vegetable, shimmered in its folds.

  What a wondrous thing, he thought. Suddenly even the eggs appeared less threatening. He looked around for the car and was shocked by its absence. Gone from mirrors. Gone from cutlery. Gone from the street outside when he pressed his face to the window, then stuck his head out. There was yellow in umbrellas and shop signs, but no shark-nosed car. And it was cold. The air was cold. Thorp himself was cold. Not the cold of death, though, but that of winter pressing into his lungs, of life itself brushing against his skin and sliding fingers through his hair, his paranoid skin and hair, still tingling with fear but with the possibility of transformation, of fear becoming excitement, of generating its own heat to combat that of his previous disquietude.

  Might it be? he wondered. Might he change?

  Did he want to?

  He hadn’t been running away that January morning. Far from it. Walking, more like. To Paris. And a girl there. Always...

  Thorp breathed on the glass, steaming it. A waitress, the same as had brought him the eggs, tapped him on the shoulder. She had an insouciant nose.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your food's getting cold,’ she stated.

  ‘Yes...’

  She led him back to his table, where he ate the eggs and drained his cup of coffee.

  He was about to light up again when he read from an inverted V of plastic that this was a NO SMOKING table.

  Rules.

  Rules, Thorp sparked, inviting cross stares: there to be broken. He had something to rail against now.

  The waitress, behind a fern, hitched up her skirt to pull up her stockings.

  Thorp felt a reciprocation in his loins. A memory of lust, estranged.

  He stopped feeling sorry for himself, watching her. He got up and took the stairs, sunglasses pushed back against brow, the last of his money left on the tablecloth. It was a long walk to the street, an even longer one to where he remembered abandoning the Ventura, but Thorp set a jaunty pace, whistling happy tunes to mirror the happier colours surrounding him, to echo the hunger for anarchy in h
is bones.

  Redoubt

  Egon sat counting money.

  Owen and Mickey paced the worn carpet, one naked from the waist up, the other from the waist down.

  ‘I can't find my trousers!’ Mickey complained. ‘Hey, Egon, you seen my trousers.’

  ‘They need mending,’ he replied. Then, ‘Not a bad haul, boys; not bad at all.’

  Owen put his shirt on. ‘This isn't quite what I'd envisaged.’

  ‘Take it easy...’ Egon shuffled a pile of notes and contained them with an elastic band. ‘Revolutions always start quietly. Besides...’

  ‘Besides?’ He could smell the money. Smell the distinguished gentleman, less than squeaky clean. Smell Mickey, who smelled largely of muscle. Pity his brain hadn't grown; but then that was Owen's department, as Egon kept reminding him, ‘You from the neck up, him from the neck down.’

  Special Powers.

  ‘It's a holiday,’ the ex-supremo continued. ‘Nobody practices sedition on a holiday.’

  It still bothered Owen how they'd managed to escape with their lives from an aerial enclave whose security was reputed to be infallible. The only explanation, other than the admittedly likely one, that they'd been let out, was that Mountfield's eyes and ears were all geared to preventing ingress, forestalling burglars and assassins. Once on the inside (they'd been let in, obviously) it was simply a matter of pulling the chain and exiting via the S-bend.

  Certainly they'd been shat on. Who'd shat was arguable. The distinguished gentleman, whose bruises had subsided, whose weight problem had similarly dwindled, wasn't much for enlightenment. Egon was all direct action. He'd been a figurehead so long he couldn't smoke a cigar without crying. Tears for the fallen, he described them, as daily he transmuted into something disturbingly charismatic.

  And now there was no going home.

  Owen turned his shoulders in his jacket.

  ‘Not fundraising today?’ asked Egon, suspicious of his attitude.

  ‘Nope,’ answered Owen. ‘Going shopping. Mick here needs a new suit and I could use some pyjamas. Anything we can get you?’

  ‘Freedom from repression,’ Egon chest-slapped, ‘and some of those alcoholic throat lozenges.’

  Owen rubbed together his fingers, requesting hard currency, pocketed a couple of hundred and turned to stare at Mickey, still half naked. His friend and fellow good guy had outgrown everything he'd brought from his parents' house in downtown Palmersville. It had taken them two weeks to find it, squirreled away in a suburb of a district in an urban sprawl of massage parlours and miniature golf courses, neighbours distant in time and space, linked through sand traps and unguents, Mickey's detached home with a view of the ninth hole and a lady describing herself as Snaky Serena. In the end they'd arrived the easy way, by taxi, but had had to force an entry, something Owen was uneasy about the way you're uneasy about dating your best friend's sister. Criminal, somehow; he found he now had higher standards. Owen stood for law enforcement. Breaking and entering smacked of corruption, of being corrupted, of having to confront the messy reality of your best friend's domestic persona as detailed by the female sibling while you're trying to get in her knickers. But you can't have it both ways.

  Anyhow, it was demeaning.

  ‘It'll be dark soon,’ remarked Egon.

  Owen fastened his eyes on the curtains. Fastened the curtains round Mickey, who posed obligingly.

  It would have to do.

  The house they occupied was an anonymous semi on an undulating estate of near identical dwellings. The neighbours were quietly absent, homeowners whose sorties to the supermarket, the cinema, their places of employment, were carried out with ruthless efficiency. They asked no questions of the men renting, avoided eye contact with any but their immediate neighbours, then exchanging nervous hellos and inquiring only furtively about husbands, wives, sons and daughters. Behind closed doors they might strop leather and watch videos of executions, but out in the real world they were entirely passive, shy creatures whose habits were predictable, always looking the other way.

  The heroic pair got in the car and drove off past the cemetery to the mall. It was New Year's Eve, so anybody curious enough to offer them a second glance would think Owen was driving Mickey to a toga party. Nearing the mall they detoured thru an enormous MacDonald's, deranged customers chowing on enormous mock-cow-burgers, then circled relentlessly until Owen found a place to park. They waited five minutes. Five minutes more and the bus disgorged them at the door. Inside was splashed with light and hung with glitter, festive scenes lifted from myriad Hollywood happy-holiday Yuletide propaganda films lifted from the brothers Grimm lifted from ancient Celtic tradition. Owen paused beneath a huge swage of plastic holly, wondering at his newfound cynicism. If he was honest he would have to say it was born of disappointment, of knowing deep down that history would come to remember him as a terrorist. Being a good guy and not a bad guy was no longer an option, but an opinion. He and Mickey were too tied up with the now smooth-lipped Egon to be anything other than on his side, fighting his corner, championing his cause, be that righteous or selfish. Egon wanted to get back “where he belonged”. Whether he had ever exercised much control, physical or mental, was questionable. And if Owen was honest he was hooked by the idea of being a power behind the throne.

  Steering Mickey toward a sport's store he scratched under his arm. A security guard shuffled nervously. His partner's eyes widened to a display of balls. Owen counted eighteen different sorts, large and small, ribbed and smooth, circular and ovoid. He had no idea what sports some of the balls represented, gaps in his knowledge he was happy to leave unfilled.

  ‘What you need is something stretchy,’ he told Mickey. ‘Something a little big, but not too baggy.’

  There were track suits in a panoply of colours.

  ‘Nah, too urban sporty,’ Owen dismissed.

  There were soft cotton sweat pants and shirts.

  ‘I don't know...maybe.’ But Mickey was off down the endless racks toward figure-hugging lycra, the material of the future stretched across cardboard and over metal frames shaped into athletes.

  Owen had that uneasy feeling once more. He dabbed his brow with a handkerchief and sighed deeply. Something was going to have to be done.

  And soon.

  Critical Mass

  Stack looked at Pagan looking at Cowls, Pot and Stack and said to himself, we have to be kidding.

  ‘You want to sign that?’ Cowls asked the boy, menacing him across the table.

  ‘Fuck off,’ the boy replied, looking disgustedly down at the neatly typed confession.

  ‘It's all your own words,’ Pot said. ‘All you have to do is sign it and we can be out of here.’

  We're out of here already, Stack thought. The kid was innocent. Okay, perhaps not innocent, he was one of Vernon's lackeys, but to suppose he'd had any part in the supposed attempt on Vernon's life was ridiculous.

  This was Stack's fault. He shuffled uncomfortably. He was the weak link and Pagan knew it.

  ‘Why don't you take my picture?’

  ‘I don't do portraits...’ Stack began, eyes averting.

  ‘He only photographs corpses,’ Pot helpfully provided. ‘That right, Stack, you only come after the kill?’

  Stack nodded, disliking the threat, understanding its intention.

  ‘Sign!’ bellowed Cowls, rising, fists on table, tie swinging free of shirt.

  And, ‘Fuck off,’ said Pagan.

  Stack dearly wished he hadn't played the investigating officer. Having established the crime his colleagues now felt obliged to come up with a criminal. Poor Pagan, for whatever reason, was the fated individual.

  Their eyes met briefly. Stack felt the boy knew everything and he nothing. Theirs were very different worlds, here about to merge.

  ‘We found the remote under your bed,’ said Pot, his look sneering (all those boy band posters, the bags of sunflower seeds and countless lipsticks), his tone emp
hasizing the futility of denial. ‘Your prints were all over the aircraft. That little box of tricks in the engine compartment; very clever. But you only succeeded in killing the pilot.’

  Pagan couldn't believe his boss had sacrificed him. Yet here it was; three coppers, one confession. He thought of the milky skin of Vernon's wives, suddenly missing them. They were his mothers, he realized. And Vernon? What made Vernon think he could rely on Pagan's silence?

  Answer: this was only a temporary misunderstanding, a necessary piece of arbitration between Jones and the police department. He'd be out in no time.

  Only Pagan didn't like it. He knew he should sign the confession, speed the process, but he couldn't.

  The guy with the camera, sweating.

  This was his doing. He wasn't even a real cop. Real cops didn't force situations. Real cops bought new cars.

  ‘I need time to think about it,’ Pagan said. ‘Sure you don't want to take my picture?’

  Stack unfroze mentally; he owed the boy. ‘Eh...okay.’

  Pot and Cowls looked at him disgustedly.

  Fuck them, thought Stack. ‘Out in the corridor though, the light's no good in here.’

  Pot and Cowls crushed cigarettes, snapped pencils.

  Pagan smiled jovially.

  What happened next Stack saw through the viewfinder. Again, he felt responsible, but at the same time delighted. The kid moved with the speed of a whippet, slamming an officer's face into the wall, then using him as body armour. The unfortunate policeman took several good blows to the head before he was swapped for a filing cabinet, which Pagan next balanced on a chair, castors sizzling like castanets, his dance along the corridor accompanied by gunfire in short, deliberate snatches, his exit via the sixth floor window an elegant surfing of air and glass that culminated in a finale of trashed prowler roof-light clusters and a curtaining snowstorm, H through M of known paedophiles to disguise, genielike, his exit.

  And it was goodbye Pagan.

  ‘Stack,’ the voice of doom intoned grimly. ‘See me in my office.’

  Party

  Nancy had always been the wild one. What had it got her? Just about anything she liked, along with several black eyes and an abortion. Twins. They could tell? The thought made her shudder. Or perhaps it was this dress that unnerved her, short and slinky, spangled like a moonlit night. Crushed purple, a lush plum, it gave her curves she felt a little frightened of. And a cleavage, a dangerous feminine ravine like something out of an old western along which passed one horseman at a time. She had to admit she was impressed, even turned on by her own sexuality. She wondered blithely what Roger would make of it. What did she make of him? Jane didn't have a clue. She shrugged, which made her jiggle, and laugh. She was a different person in this dress. It had been her mother's, someone she barely remembered; someone who’d walked her to school that first morning and not be around to collect her come the afternoon bell. Pa eventually rolled up, shrugged and lifted her hair behind her ears.

  A knock at the door she answered. Her father in open-mouthed awe.

  ‘Too much?’ Her confidence teetered.

  He drew his breath in. ‘Magnificent,’ he said kindly, wiping a tear from his eye.

  ‘Thanks. What about my hair?’ She had it bunched up, undecided.

  Pa stroked his chin. ‘Looks prissy,’ he opined. ‘Let it fall on your shoulders. That way you can peer at men through it. Drive them wild.’

  Jane thought maybe that was taking things too far, but unsnapped the ties and shook her head in one movement. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Divine.’

  Her father sounded like some effete dress designer. He even had the hand gestures. She wondered if she knew him at all.

  ‘Okay...shoes.’

  ‘Magic slippers,’ corrected Pa, tutting.

  ‘Magic slippers it is,’ amended Jane. ‘I don't have anything remotely suitable.’

  ‘No problem. Just let me make a phone call.’

  He disappeared from her room like a spritely Puck, then moments later stuck his head back round the door. ‘I'll call you a taxi.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I know just the fellow for shoes!’

  ‘A-ha.’ And he was off again, skipping lightly down the stairs.

  Jane followed barefoot, convinced this was all a mistake. She should be at Nancy's apartment, awaiting phone calls, not sweeping seductively toward an evening of merriment and, hopefully, sex. Gratifying, enduring, passionate sex. Nothing less would do. All her previous experiences, from fumbles to instrument-enhanced, had been disastrous. Just once she would like things to rise smoothly, to culminate in a thrusting wavefront of pleasure, to experience a true understanding; not have things fall flat. But sex was Nancy's area of expertise. She'd seen her sister engage men in the most exquisite torture, impressed and jealous at once. Now it was her turn.

  Walking into the living-room she watched as a car pulled up. A dark Ventura, its driver wound the window down. Pa approached and the two conversed. They shook hands, all Jane saw of the driver, who then handed over a shoebox before slewing off in a cloud of smoke. Pa turned, waved to her through the blinds, and quickly returned to the house.

  ‘Shoes,’ he announced.

  Jane took the box nervously.

  ‘Allow me,’ Pa said, removing the lid, unfolding the blue tissue paper and raising the shoes from their grave. ‘Nice, huh?’

  They were beautiful, thought Jane.

  Her taxi arrived. She felt like Cinderella. Bad omen. Her slippers weren't of glass, they were fish skin, silver, blue, green and shimmering. The taxi driver met her at the door holding a golf umbrella. It wasn't raining, she saw, he was merely her first conquest of the evening, all chivalrous and grinning. In the driveway of the neighbouring house two men stood gawping, one short, balding and suited, one tall, wide and wearing virulent pink cycle shorts and a shocking yellow top with a large black M on it. Jane didn't recognise either man, supposing them new tenants. The house had been empty since the autumn when the Beantowers had moved. She walked demurely to the car, folded herself into the back seat and let the driver close the door. Moments later her father rapped on the window. She'd forgotten her bag.

  Roger Coaltrain, alas, hadn't booked a table. He looked at her imploringly, one elbow on the restaurant bar. Already things weren't going to plan, she lamented, twisting the stem of her wine glass. His apologies were profuse, but unimpressive. She silenced him by staring at her nails.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Tyrone. ‘You're a natural.’

  Flattery, certainly, but what did she care? Did they intend to film the entire evening?

  Roger brightened suddenly, pressing together his palms as if at an idea, albeit not a very good one. ‘Tell you what - pizza!’

  She scowled, lowering the lights.

  ‘Chinese?’ he offered helplessly.

  ‘Less of the strangled hissing,’ complained Jimmy Head, twiddling his dials.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Why don't you try bribing the maître d'?’ Jane suggested. ‘That's what Nancy would do.’

  ‘Nancy,’ echoed Roger plaintively.

  Jane had an inkling. ‘Were you in love with her?’

  ‘Once,’ he confessed. ‘Difficult not to be.’

  The crew concurred, mumbling, their own private memories of her sister transposing them in space and time.

  ‘And you filmed her?’

  Roger looked concerned, not sure where she was going. ‘We may have…’

  ‘How, exactly.’ Now she really did want to know.

  The director looked to his camera and sound man for assistance, but they were too busy doing their jobs, which had suddenly become freakishly complicated and requiring their fullest attention. Enjoying his discomfort, although they were as much on the hook as Roger. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We filmed Nancy.’

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘Silo.’

 
‘Silo?’

  ‘Silo...just Silo. He doesn't have another name. He's a friend of ours. A friend of Nancy's.’

  ‘What kind of friend?’

  ‘A very knowledgeable and intimate friend,’ Roger came clean.

  Jane squeezed her lips together. ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was her idea!’ Roger blurted, regretting it immediately. ‘I'll go find the maître d'. Boys, empty your pockets; the lady wants a table...’

  ‘With food on it.’

  ‘With food on it. Come on.’

  She watched him leave with mixed emotions. For a start, she wasn't convinced she wanted to sleep with him now, and not entirely for moral reasons. She wasn't shocked by Nancy's actions; nothing her sister did came as a surprise. Then what? Maybe his ineptitude, or his lack of it. He'd seemed so vulnerable this afternoon. Now, with each revelation, she saw him more as the artful manipulator, beyond trust and therefore unworthy of her vaginal canal.

  A waiter and three kitchen assistants asked them, politely, to leave.

  Roger was waiting outside. ‘Can you believe he took the money, then had us thrown out?’

  Jimmy proceeded to turn him upside down.

  So it was that Jane bought the pizzas.

  They ate in the back of Tyrone's van, midst strange smelling cardboard boxes, stolen road signs and sundry garden gnomes.

  ‘It was a one off. Nancy was just so impressed with Silo. It broke all our hearts.’

  Crunching, crumbs down her décolletage, Jane listened intently.

  ‘It was up at the hospital. Silo worked for the laundry company. Nancy chased him for an interview. She was doing a story on drugs being smuggled out of the dispensary...’

  Jimmy choked on his pepperoni. Tyrone slapped him on the back.

  ‘Anyway, they hit it off. You know what it's like with Nancy; she went straight for his pants. After that they'd meet behind the boiler room most days, frolic in the back of his truck among the stained bed linen and bloody theatre smocks. Very romantic. Only Silo was late with his runs so often he got sacked.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and refused a cigarette, accepting a beer instead.

  Jimmy had opened the bottle with his teeth.

  ‘He disappeared briefly, travelled about. Nancy was pretty sullen after that. Then one day he turned up in the morgue.’

  It was Jane's turn to choke, spewing lager over Roger Coaltrain...as if he didn't deserve it. ‘Don't tell me you filmed her having sex with a dead person!’

  ‘No! Where I work!’

  Jimmy, part way through rolling a joint, tipped over backward, laughing.

  ‘Not funny,’ sniggered Tyrone, stuffing crusts in Jimmy's mouth to silence his mirth.

  Jane breathed a sigh of relief. Some things she didn't want to know.

  ‘Like I was saying,’ Roger continued. ‘Silo turns up, asks me to get in touch with Nancy. Which I do. Says something about this being the last time he'll see her, how he has to go away. Nancy's angry, never seen her so angry. Silo kisses her, begs forgiveness. Nancy says, get Tyrone, get Jimmy, I want a souvenir...’ He was blushing.

  ‘That's it?’

  ‘Everything, in a condensed form.’

  ‘So there's just the one copy, which Nancy has?’

  The boys made no reply.

  ‘You’re disgusting. Does she know?’

  ‘We needed money for a feature,’ Roger pleaded. ‘It was a regrettable act.’

  ‘Yours or hers?’

  ‘Ours,’ he confessed. ‘But she never said don't make copies.’

  ‘And Silo?’

  ‘Never seen him since.’

  ‘You don't think he could have anything to do with her disappearance?’

  Roger hadn't thought about it.

  ‘Well, do you?’

  Jimmy snorted, finding his way back.

  ‘He was weird,’ said Tyrone. ‘No more than that.’

  ‘But they could have run off.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Roger. ‘Then where's the mystery? Nancy, to the best of my knowledge, never did anything without letting everyone know. She's an attention seeker. You know that.’

  So she did.

  Roger's mobile rang, placing a full stop. He listened a moment, then handed the phone to Jane. ‘It's for you.’

  ‘Me?’ Who could possibly be calling her? ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jane Kowolski?’

  ‘Yes - who's this?’

  ‘It's Henry Eels. I just wondered how the shoes were.’

  She looked down at her feet. ‘Fine. Thank-you.’

  ‘That's okay. See you around.’

  She handed the phone back. ‘My haberdasher,’ she told them, extracting confused glances, twinkling her toes in the twelve volt light.

  Jimmy Head blew smoke.

  Tyrone said, ‘Anybody fucking cold?’

  ‘Freezing my tits off,’ Jane said.

  ‘Right.’

  The Silent Girl

  A cold and wintry night.

  Across the frozen rooftops she wandered, a landscape of water and ice, steam from ventilation systems pumping like breath, expelled through vanes and out under valve flaps. Pressures mingled, her footsteps dimpling glassy puddles and skylights, tiny reverberations sounding through the rooms below, echoing on the surface of wine lakes and beer mashes. She walked as she had walked for days, pausing only to watch the polar bears wrestle, the snow foxes gambol and the walrus fill their pipes. In the sky colours danced, reflections of an urban firmament she was beginning to understand, mirrored above a galaxy of stop lamps and traffic signals, shop fronts and advertisement hoarding, great illuminated promises with names like Coca-Cola and Nike, constellations obscured by no clouds. She crossed bridges between buildings that were invisible to the eye, delicate structures of frosted air. And gazing between her toes she saw millions of people, millions of fast-slow, go-stop lives.

  A party of skiers passed her, waving. Dressed all in white they melted with the creeping glaciers that were even now overwhelming gable ends and bending aerials. Children skated on ponds whose fish wouldn't move till spring. A penguin with a notebook sat cross-legged on a gargoyle, scratching its cheek with the eraser end of its pencil, while another, high above, dangled a magnet on a long piece of string in an effort to steal its Thermos.

  She laughed a little at that, but was careful not to give the game away.

  She came upon a parked car, and stared at the figure in it, an unlit cigarette drooping from his cold lips, a second's amber glow poised in his hand, then pressed to the first in a hot kiss that ignited its heart. Heat travelled between them, smoke and fire. He tossed the spent brand away, coiling redly through the open window to expire with a crackle in a drift.

  Happy New Year

  The usual cacophonous sound of the streets transmogrified into a wave-form of laughter and good cheer. Love was born of it, much coupling and slapping together of body parts, from lips to testes, the latter partly frozen. Stack alone was miserable. Out of a job, separated from his camera, he leaned in a doorway, suit lapels turned up, hands in pockets. He had yet to go home, yet to confront Cherry. She'd be pleased, he thought, happy he was out of Metrodine. Only he could never truly be out, merely dislocated. Still on the books, in the files. Counted. Then she'd be angry. What about young Frank? Money was needed for shoes and comestibles, washing-powder and clothing. Stack was on a hiding to nothing. So he hid, nestling amid shades, brick and plastic.

  It was the boy who found him.

  He pushed a gun in Stack's mouth and smiled the other side of it.

  ‘Remember me?’

  Pagan.

  Stack nodded.

  Pagan removed the gun and wiped it. ‘I think we're even; only now I'm redundant.’ He sniffed, looking more ragged than edgy. ‘Vernon would probably take me back - I know his wives miss me - but I'm not sure I want to...’

  He was confus
ed, Stack noticed, unsure of even the weapon he toted, what had previously been an extension of his wrist now grown heavy and awkward among his slightly grubby fingers.

  ‘I was going to kill you,’ he admitted.

  ‘And now?’ Stack had to know. ‘You're not going to kill me, right?’

  ‘Right. Maybe I'll kill Vernon; for real this time, not like what you framed me for.’

  ‘I'm sorry...’

  ‘Yeah. Me too.

  Breaking glass took their attention. Down the street a shop window lay shattered, a fall of unmelting crystals onto the pavement. People skidded on the glass like it was ice, then clambered through the portal, returning moments later with armfuls of computer hardware and sound reproduction equipment. Pagan and Stack, previous tenants of both sides of the law, looked on disinterestedly, strangely distant. It was a whole other world of crime, lacklustre and senseless.

  ‘I'd hate to be a copper tonight,’ Pagan said by way of passing.

  Stack just nodded. Then, ‘Too fucking cold.’ But he was sure if he waited long enough someone off the street would commit arson. Adding, ‘I'll help, if you like.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Kill Vernon. I'm sure he deserves it.’

  ‘Probably he does,’ affirmed Pagan. ‘But I'm not doing it for nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean let's find whoever was responsible for flying that aeroplane into his apartment and get them to pay us.’

  ‘Don't you think they'd find that suspicious, given our histories? I'm not sure they'd trust us. I certainly wouldn't. They'd suppose it was a set-up, a police thing, that you were collaborating.’

  ‘But you're an ex-policeman.’

  ‘No, an ex-PR man. I was seconded from Metrodine.’

  Pagan's face twisted. ‘Then we were working for the same people. Only right we should...’

  ‘Metrodine has no links with organised crime,’ Stack interrupted, still doing his job by reflex. It was his turn to pull a face. ‘No proven links, anyway.’

  ‘Whatever you say. Forget politics. There's a war going on, or hadn't you noticed?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen. Why?’

  ‘You talk like an old campaigner. You have a world weary tone. Just the right side of cynical.’

  Pagan was flattered. People - Vernon - didn't usually listen to what he had to say, when he had something to say. Thought him a baby.

  ‘Now you're blushing. Do your parents know you're out this late?’

  ‘They’re dead.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I imagine.’

  ‘Yes?’ Querying.

  ‘I was abandoned as a child.’

  ‘Oh. You wish them dead.’

  ‘The Jones' are the only family I've ever known.’

  ‘And now you wish them dead, too. At least you're consistent.’

  ‘They abandoned me...’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don't have any money or a place to stay,’ said Pagan.

  Stack daren't refuse.

  They walked far enough apart to be seen as separate, Stack hunched and shoe-gazing, Pagan sweeping his eyes left to right, picking shapes from the crowd and likening them to faces. If he recognized any they were too drunk to notice, faces holidaying, not working, not hired to follow or kill him. They were there, he knew, even when he failed to descry them, eyes concealed and dangerous, cutting across his own like skates over ice, spuming and incising.

  They walked to a Railstation and approached the ticket machine, which Pagan then bypassed. ‘It's free this evening!’ Ordinarily he would have inserted forged plastic. The train whistled thinly, a warm breeze sucking it from its tunnel, and they boarded, stepping over passengers and vomit.

  The journey seemed to take forever, as if the suburbs had receded. The city grew uglier, thought Stack. Unconsciously, people moved away from the rotten centre. No matter that renewal came from degeneration, the metropolis still ran with maggots. The city was rife with diseases. It festered. He remembered when he used to run as a kid in the park near his home, run and run until exhausted. The park lasted forever, or he ran in circles, weaving his infinity. Only good things seemed possible then, and for years after. Everything that seemed bad was recent. He wondered if he had woken up or fallen asleep.

  ‘Next stop,’ he whispered.

  The house, lit up as yet for Christmas, was deserted.

  ‘Cherry?’

  She'd left him.

  ‘I'll put the kettle on,’ said Pagan.

  Stack sort comfort in cigarettes, snivelling as he ignited. ‘You wouldn't understand.’

  Pagan felt guilty. Implicated. Was that the word? Others people's emotional crises were alien to him. Emotional crises were alien to him, he who'd been alone all his life, he who didn’t need anyone...

  ‘I'm sorry.’

  That confused Pagan, Stack apologising. Then he realized the ex-Metrodine PR man wasn’t talking to him. His misery was centred on someone else...someone only marginally connected with the tooled-up-self-professed-loner-by-choice-get-off-my-case-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass-orphan.

  Pagan shrugged. He was secretly pleased his circumstances had altered; saw some scope in it.

  A chubby-cheeked assassin...

  Stack crushed the cigarette out having not sucked. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, confusing Pagan momentarily once more.

  ‘You'll get her back. Perhaps it's even best she and the kid are out of the way.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pagan yawned. ‘Mind if I crash?’ He hadn't slept in days. He didn't wait for an answer, just slid down the sofa and curled up, looking very much the adolescent, his angel face melting slowly as he was overcome by fatigue, eyes static under lids.

  Not dreaming.

  Stack pushed his thumb up one nostril and chased a snot.

  In The Meantime

  Benny kept his jacket on as usual. Even in the throes of passion he seldom removed his jacket. His trousers were down, slim hips thrusting, but his jacket remained zipped.

  The girl's perfume, rising from her loins like steam from a volcano, brushed the fine hairs of his nose, a softly buffeting scent that came at him in waves, pulsing from her vagina at each stroke. Benny flexed his member as he pumped, rolled it from side to side, all the while admiring her wetness. She was all the world to him. His concentration was total. Pelvic arches under his thumbs, he varied his rhythm, taking inspiration from the whorls of grain in the deeply polished dining-room table across which she was laid, her belly pressed to it, her palms leaving sweat stains. She cried out, one hand reaching behind her, and Benny felt himself sink deeper.

  ‘My name's Jane!’ she shouted as he clambered out the window, shinned the drainpipe and made his getaway, leaving her breathless, face up on the table, humming and stroking her pubis.

  Jane was a very happy girl. She wanted him again. He certainly put Roger in the shade. He hadn’t, though, to the best of her knowledge, left his phone number.

  She felt most peculiar. Their lovemaking had awoken a thirst in her soul. Awoken her soul even.

  She arranged herself, found a mirror and leered in it.

  Benny kick-started the Bonneville and tore out the driveway, his cock still restless in his leather pants. Some days he wished he could leave it at home. Some days he just did; or rather it would insist on being left while she went a-jaunting, picking up boys, surrogate cocks she'd learn from. Benny knew what it felt like to be a girl. Her breasts, though small, gave the game away, but the women he seduced and the manner of their seduction, their willingness and molten state made it easy for him to pleasure them sexually and keep most of his/her clothes on. He was Benny Zine, and famous for it - notorious. They, male or female, desired...

  She was something else again.

  Indefatigable Anna.

  She'd recognised the shoes, the shoes worn by Jane that said Henry was one step cl
oser.

  She recalled the grand piano. No man, or woman, had ever come as close to snaring her as had Henry Eels. She should have recognized him for what he was, a trickster, a man obsessed with the obscure, in love with the idea of angels. He toured the world in search of a Godhead, indisputable proof of a divine entity, a search that brought him, through Anna, via Palmersville, to Ileum, the mother metropolis. Hell on Earth, with the fires to prove it. Eighty obstacles she'd placed in his way, tokens mostly frivolous, with the last proof itself, if it existed, of Something Bigger.

  She had to admit he was doing rather well. Reaching home she detached her penis, cleaned and fed it, sat it in front of the TV. It laughed and snickered at cartoons while she bathed, short-haired and boyish. The phone rang and was answered by the machine.

  Jones wanted to see her, on business.

  Things were getting serious.

  The city had woken up to him, innumerable souls whose paths, charted and uncharted, suddenly wound through different neighbourhoods. A mostly bloodless coup, she was assured, but one not without its enemies. There was a thriving industry in spies and assassins. Anarchists now had something to target. Anna pulled the plug as he hung up, towelled herself while shrinking and swelling muscles in the mirror, accepted the weak cup of tea her cock had made her, drank it, then went to sleep for an hour or two in the freezer.

  Chapter Five: Incorpia And Anondyne