Underlay

by Andrew McEwan

There had been a flash of light. He'd fallen down the stairs. Darkness had briefly overwhelmed him, then sound, a low keening sigh, scary and yet blissful, like fear transmuted into pleasure; the unknown becoming instantly familiar.

  There was no more Mingis. No more Nancy. Only the stench of burnt carpet. Henry was disappointed, yet ecstatic. The preternatural afterglow of this encounter dripped from his irises for hours.

  Weeks later, drooling over the footage he'd taken of Jane Kowolski (in those shoes!), he had the peculiar feeling that the snowflakes even now falling from the morning sky were identical, not an individual among them. A new order was settling over the world, one without room for difference. Yet frozen water was more easily de-characterised than people. People would offer greater resistance. With seventy-four things in the bag, Henry refused to worry about the possibility of not reaching his total before reality, by whatever name, crystallized into an overly structured uniformity. There remained so little and so much between himself and his inamorata that such misgivings were an unnecessary distraction. You might as well ask: what if the world ends tomorrow? What if this day is the last? But this day is always the last, for the time being.

  The past he had on tape. The important bits, anyway.

  Nancy was there, and now Jane. Who next? he pondered. Another woman? The shape of his quest was looking decidedly female. Coming, as it were, into focus. Driving through the city he stared at a million faces, youthful and ancient, girls and women and crones, smiles virginal and prosthetic, breasts the dimensions of which were false, elastically cramped and cradled. They were strange, he thought, all of them magical. Seventy-five might be any one. The trail, like the weather, had turned cold.

  Not paying enough attention to the road ahead, he collided head-on with, of all vehicles, a Ventura.

  Identical. Too much of a coincidence. The two scratched and dented cars were enmeshed in a street oddly deserted, either side part-derelict buildings, sheet and glass-sided warehouses and factories that appeared undecided. Falling up or down? Henry blinked through the snow at the driver sitting diagonally behind the large steering wheel, broken cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, sunglasses disguising eyes that were undoubtedly scrutinizing. He wondered if he ought to get out and confront the man. Hadn't the accident been his fault? Henry wasn't too sure. He hadn't seen the other vehicle. He'd drifted, much as the snow, collecting about undistinguished brick and concrete structures, kerbside and in gutters.

  The decision was taken away from him.

  Thorp rapped on his window with a Pilsener bottle. ‘Our grilles are joined,’ he offered prophetically.

  Hmm, thought Henry Eels.

  ‘And she didn't?’ he added later, in the company of Death's waste disposal technician.

  Thorp shook his head in drunken agreement, trying to recall the last time he'd experienced such weird inebriation. Such…misunderstanding. A perverse and peculiar empathy. The First World War, he remembered sullenly; gin and tennis at the Kowolski's, Pa and Anna in whites, he in khaki, what happened after, on a caftan, flooding back with unbidden ferocity. A bedroom floor strewn with dresses, Anna face down, her pleated skirt raised, brass buttons in the small of her back and his trousers round his ankles. The war though, had swept him away, led him off along uncharted avenues. He never saw Anna again. Hers was a long and complicated pregnancy. Fifty? Sixty years? And Nancy's sister? Thorp didn't know who her mother was, although he had his suspicions.

  ‘You love her,’ Henry stated, slurring a bit, not sure any longer to whom he was referring.

  ‘Who?’ Confusion parted the curtains, but the window remained dirty.

  ‘Your Orange woman - who else?’ As if he was in no doubt.

  ‘Oh. Yes. I think so.’ Somewhat under the influence himself; the influence of madmen and brewers.

  ‘You think so!’ said Eels disgustedly. ‘You mean you don't know?’

  Thorp found himself on the defensive. Quickly, he gave the glass a wipe.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I'm alive because of her,’ he told the thin man. ‘At least in theory...’ She reminded him, that was it. There was so much he had put to one side, so much that had happened in a comparatively small frame of time, back then in his Edwardian prime, before the century truly went mad. It was that bloody conflict, he thought now, it had destroyed so many lives. Only his had been redeemed. Because of Anna or the child? Perhaps neither. Maybe it was her brother’s revenge. Pa had forgiven him within hours. He knew into what he’d married. Jones, on the other hand...

  Henry squeezed his lips together, then pressed a bottle to them. ‘This is good stuff.’

  ‘Czech.’

  Nodded. ‘You've excellent taste; can't see why you're vacillating.’

  Thorp tapped out a Woodbine.

  ‘Nobody's that difficult to find.’

  Lit it.

  ‘All it takes is perseverance.’

  ‘What are you, some kind of detective?’

  ‘More an investigator. I could find her for you. Maybe that's why we bumped into each other. All part of the grand scheme of things.’

  ‘You think so? What's in it for you?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Henry. ‘The last person I shared that with came to a sticky end.’

  Thorp laughed. ‘Perish the thought!’

  ‘Okay then...’ He told the story of the grand piano.

  Tears welled in Thorp's chromatically challenged eyes, lenses beyond which the world was made anew.

  ‘We've mutual friends.’

  ‘I'd suspected as much.’ Henry drained his bottle and Thorp magicked another.

  ‘Here's to a small world,’ toasted the documentary film maker.

  The Witches

  Uncoiling from each other, skin tearing away from skin, hair pulling through hair, squealing steely like the tines of forks, limbs de-coupling, double-jointed, unfurling insectlike from a puzzle embrace, they stood.

  They gazed at one another and smiled...glinting eyes, wetted lips, hands stretched ceilingward, fingers opening up round convex palms, dry now and cooled, fastened in flesh. It was a pleasant awakening; they were in a fine mood, moving farther apart, then to dress in different rooms, to apply gloss and matt...faces mirrored in glass, subtly altered, features having crossed, eyes slipped from sockets and noses uprooted, flowing off cheeks moistened and heated, nostrils and ears lent again or borrowed back. Fair exchange. All the prettier for it. They thought as one in the huddle, minds equally motile, bodies uniform as a single heart beating: Valery, Veronica and Violet. Each moved away from the others, taking a different direction into the city, bright Ileum surrounding, noisy with the night's traffic, cars nudging, buildings gawping, losing warmth to the streets with a profligate madness. And how they revelled in it, the night's excess packed into bars and cafés, ensconced at theatres, taking in movies or plays, an opera, the ballet, consuming great quantities of food and beverages, mouths full between sentences that are never finished, a law of language hiatus. They love the city. It swamps them. Standing on street corners, under bridges, they offer themselves, amuse themselves, swap fluids with strangers. They fuck against walls, in the back seats of autos, on wasteland, in bushes. And on occasion they kill the recipient; purely for the pleasure, a silent thank-you to that blissful phallus. But such peaks are rare. Mostly they drink sweat, man sweat from groins and armpits, pricking the skin with a suddenly pointed tooth and colouring the salt water. It is a comedy. They enjoy the laughter. They will exchange stories, too, later.

  Valery relaxes amid ice-skaters. She is drinking a martini, twirling the olive. People dance on the frozen surface, illuminated beneath the stars, the air temperature low enough to gauze, high enough to remove coats. Couples hold hands, one always more poised, surer on the blades, coaxing the other about the rink. She smiles at them benignly, at all the girls and boys in their skirts and trousers, muscled thighs trembling, balanced on blunt knives, accomplished individuals she lik
es to give a nudge.

  Oh, such red cheeks! Arse and face, face over arse, languid lady in short pink dress, crotch trimmed and competent, now with a wet patch, getting to her feet and squeezing her hands, smoothing the tops of her thighs in a vain attempt to disguise the dampness. Impossible to cover that dark smudge round her prim anus with the scant flap of her neat little costume. Shame.

  She drew the olive off with her teeth, wrapped her tongue round its small body and crushed it before finishing her drink.

  Veronica gazed in at a sleeping Pagan. Vernon had been cruel to him, she thought. She wished to mother him as of old, his mouth at her nipple while she stroked his hair. He was such a strong boy, yet he had need of her. Her breasts full, she stole in through the window, catching the sleeve of her cardigan on the Christmas tree, green spines falling to the floor and hanging like tiny darts in the wool of her garment. She was all deliberate buttons tonight, undoing them from the bottom up as she manoeuvred, sliding her hips in behind Pagan, rolling his shoulders, raising his head, biting her lip and batting her lashes, fanning the boy with somnolent tremors of air. She doesn't want to wake him, simply nurse him, the caress of her nipple enough to start him sucking, the weight of her breast in his face a comfort to them both. She rocks gently the slow minutes, the milk pulled from her in tune with the softly ticking mantle clock and the snores from the man upstairs. She feels the tug lessen, his mouth slip away. She watches him breathe, wipes his chin, kisses his brow. Then, impatient, she pushes her other tit in his mouth and begins rocking again.

  Seagulls, half a dozen, fell hundreds of feet onto the heads of shopper. All it took was a sneeze. She laughed afterward, unconscious of the error, but finding it amusing covered her mouth with her hand in an effort to appear surprised by this grisly hail, the coats and shoes of men and women blood-smeared and shit-stained. Quite a kerfuffle, she thought. One man was knocked out cold, the beak of his assailant wedged in his cranium, flapping roadside like the plume of a fallen cavalryman in the moments before it expired. Pedestrians stood aside, she noted, next to step over the prone man, excusing themselves by imagining ambulance sirens or the person behind them to be a physician. Wasn't he wearing rubber gloves? Didn't she carry a black medical bag? Anyway, what could I do? Violet was disgusted. She knelt beside him and gently slapped his cheek. The bird rustled drily. He'd die of cold, she told herself, and so heaved the man up over one shoulder and carried him, seagull and all, into a nearby department store.

  ‘Bedroom furniture?’ she asked an assistant.

  ‘Up the escalator; second floor.’

  Thanking the woman, Violet adjusted her burden and traipsed in the given direction, grimacing as she clambered on the moving stairway at the thought of blood ruining her new moleskin cape. But there was nothing for it. She was the cause of his misadventure and obliged to make amends. She would have that beak out in no time. Hadn’t she only recently sharpened her machete?

  Wonderful, it had started to rain.

  She watched it bounce off the glass dome and run mazelike down the sides, water distorting the night sky. Not smoothly, an evenly distributed curtain of liquid, but in globular rivers shaped by imperfections in the structure, grease stains and vomit splashes, fast food launched from one of the numerous gaudily outfitted gyrocopters available for hire in the vestibule. All you needed was an insurance waiver and two feet to pedal.

  Sign on the dotted line...

  Preening, she decides against another martini, puts on her coat and heads for the nearest exit. It's a train ride from here to the conference centre, her favourite haunt, and already past nine. The choicest delegates will be filling the more expensive bars, the more expensive whores in the more expensive dresses with the more expensive nasal habits just now filling the more expensive chairs, their more expensive thighs glowing with the more expensive hosiery and the promise of the more expensive pleasure. These ladies swipe credit cards between their legs and issue receipts that dry limply on their manicured pudenda. Valery, on the other hand, will do it for nothing, preferably in the gents. Which is bad for business, you'd agree?

  She swallowed just as there came a crash from the kitchen.

  Damn, put him away, straighten the cushions. Investigate, blouse flapping loosely: man on floor cradling photo, family group. Hey, isn't that? I wonder if he knows?

  ‘Violet?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Can I have a toffee-apple?’

  Such a polite child.

  ‘But you've just had an ice-cream.’

  He scratched behind an ear.

  ‘It's not for me, it's for Rudi.’

  ‘Who's Rudi? Keep tight hold now.’

  The roller-coaster wound backward, steadily rising, all the fair crowded in beneath them as they climbed higher.

  ‘The octopus,’ he answered.

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded, recalling his tentacled guardian. ‘Of course. Why not? I expect he deserves it. He hasn't tortured you or anything, has he? He's under strict instruction not to; but it's not always easy being nice, as you'll appreciate given the circumstances, what with your mother and all...’

  His mother. Franky scratched again. He didn't understand about his mother. His aunts had come to collect him. He was to stay with them for the holidays. His mother was ill, they told him. She had a disease.

  ‘What kind of disease?’

  ‘A political disease, silly.’

  A jolt, a pause. Then gravity. Aunt Violet's face goes all mushy. She thinks sticky thoughts, but it's too late, and the octopus has to pull bits of her out of candyfloss machines and hot-dog fryers, trouser turn-ups and haircuts various, bundling everything in her moleskin cape, now ruined, until Vernon comes for the boy, around midnight, and being tailed, he reckons, ‘...by some fluorescent character and a guy with a head like a balloon.’

  Ventura-ing

  ‘Why don't we take your car.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘You've all your equipment,’ argued Thorp, already feeling the pain of separation. But it was a lesser pain, he reassured himself. The greater was as yet largely subsumed.

  Henry shrugged. ‘Whatever you say.’ He'd rather drive alone. Thorp looked strangely out of place in the passenger seat. He fired the engine, the car relatively undamaged by their previous coming together. What was a broken lamp, a dented bumper among the catalogue of accident memorabilia his Ventura sported?

  A thick fog had descended, a gloaming to smother the afternoon. Henry realized he didn't even know what time in was. Two? Three? No matter. Ileum was the colour of fog now, steel dull and breathing. His kind of town...

  The sky was grey, the illuminated grey of evening. He cast his eyes askance at Thorp, shadowed behind the upturned collar of his trenchcoat, face blossoming suddenly as he pressed the cigar lighter's hot-swirled filament to a Woodbine. It was expressionless, a countenance left to its own semi-elastic devices while the brain ordering its message sojourned. Henry could only guess where. Yet they seemed headed in that unspoken direction, Eels driving, Ileum without, teeming then empty, switching at every junction, unrecognizable under gaslight and neon, the colour of faces and dress repressed, the populace automatons. He accelerated, but the road was unending. He steered the Ventura down long winding avenues and up horizon-rolling embankments, the number of lanes growing left and right, the traffic streaming in both directions without road signs or speed restrictions, metal blurs whose impetus was noisily chemical, hummingly electric, wheeled and unwheeled, carriages and sedans, coupes and buggies, all manner of locomotion filling the highway from which there appeared no exit. Henry drove with his foot on the floor, setting the wipers in motion to clear horse shit from the windscreen, ordure kicked up from the tyres of the articulated truck preceding. Its back doors read: Photo Scenery. He made to overtake. The truck was a quarter mile long, a road train whose many trailers boasted of Trees and Architecture, Extinct Species, Warfare and Discoveries, New Worlds, Phenomena, Industry, Mus
ic, Crime and Punishment, Diseases, Parties and Funerals, Holocaust...thirty or more elongated boxes containing all the knowledge of man, all the beauty and misery. He had to wonder what this would look like in an accident. Apocalyptic, maybe.

  But the Ventura was past and the road divided, separating strands of history wending through the city, a nervous centre sensitized by those experiencing it, it providing the stimuli; strangely backward, a reversal of roles that was necessary to the experience. Death there was aplenty, grim and repetitive. And living, fountains of it, great gushing geysers of creation, a non-stop amusement park of fucking. There was birth in every pore. On every corner kissing, pawing, masturbation. Like the exchange of currency, flesh rigid and floppy. Even dead flesh in some precincts, counterfeit money, rape imitating passion, a precursor to extended torture - the market sustained by orgasm, special police squads dispatched to murder the ever inflationary pressures: bursting erections, dismantling swollen organs, stitching reddened labia and cutting away nipples, jars of them in a back room labelled EVIDENCE. Nothing, however, could stay the city's seeping expansion. Ileum was uncontrollable.

  Visible.

  Unchecked, but no longer unmanaged, the streets rose and fell daily, feeding until starved, squeezing time from bricks and mortar that when empty turned to dust. Skin and bone too, human and animal, milked of time and then discarded.

  Romance and Death, thought Henry Eels, in reverse. Parking, he got out and peered over the edge, where, moments later, Thorp joined him.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Life.’

  This amused the sometime gatherer of souls relinquished by accidents and suicides.

  ‘How come you don't count?’ Henry asked him. He’d been doing a lot of thinking among the traffic, mostly without realizing. His kind of town...

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You're not one of my eighty objects. I know you should be; after all, you're fantastical...’ Thorp's eyebrows rose. He lowered them. ‘And yet, you don't fit. You already have your niche. You're overly significant.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Sure - it's your Jenny Pith that counts. But somehow it should be you.’

  Thorp dragged the cold seabed of his memory for facts pertaining to earlier, drunken conversations. Of course, he drank to forget, so could only shrug at the irony of his forgetfulness. He found his knowledge of Henry Eels was sketchy, although he had a pretty good idea of the man's goal and direction. It was one he'd shared, he couldn't help thinking, and perhaps still did. Henry though, was a deliberate adventurer. Thorp had never actively sought the object of his affection. He was more for sticking his head in the sand. Or the shit and the mud in regard to his to particular corner of a foreign field. To have been dug up felt like an insult. What use a sacrifice if it was to be undermined by some well-meaning uber-being? And why him? His seed that had succeeded. He had been prepared to ignore that fact. That is, until now. Only now the object was different; necessarily so, as the woman then had not required seeking, only finding, the clue of her waved underwear unmissable. And her brother? he mused, recalling, the mist sweeping up and over him, the dark slabs of streets and buildings replaced by the bleached grass of summer lawns, the smell of cut flowers and fresh pastries, the tuneless gramophone records and the snapping of cards onto felt tables. Then had begun a competition between himself and Jones, who that afternoon he'd beaten at tennis. Jones who never lost at anything, whose temper frayed, who afterward trounced all-comers at gin rummy and billiards, who discovered Thorp atop his sister, dear Anna amid her dresses, who held a power over them both that did not last past morning. The cuckold, her husband, was largely absent, lusting through his telescope; John Kowolski, whose sole jealousy orbited the green planet he lacked the technology to inhabit. Off he was under that pale orange sky while his wife was similarly explored. Thorp though, had earlier arranged to meet Jones in the long corridor between the trophy room containing the billiard table and the library containing, among other things, a butterfly collection of Anna's assemblage and an array of objects collected by family past and present, souvenirs from around the continents. A duel was to have been fought, a contest of swords whose tips were corked; only Thorp failed to keep the appointment, preferring another, the company of Anna to the contempt of Jones, whose defeat at tennis was to drive him a little closer to the edge he was so determined to flirt with, a flaw in his high-ranking trencherman psyche the future keeper of all appointments had helped make real. Like he had helped make everything real since, the transposition of souls via Purgatory (for cash), the upswelling of the underworld, the dead world, the past and future world that was Ileum, seeping to the surface like an overflowing sewer.

  All that pissed Czech lager added to the water table...

  Jones embodied revenge. It filled his veins. He was jealous of everything, every man.

  ‘Ahhhhhh-hhhhggg-ggghhhhaaa!’

  Thorp remembered his words.

  No, sadly, a passing suicide. Things were back to normal in some regards, only he wasn't up on the roof to collect the frilly leftovers, but a mere witness, from two floors down, to the fall.

  ‘Oh, shit...’ said Henry, wrinkling his nose. ‘Quick! Downstairs!’

  They made it to pavement in time to see men in white forensic overalls close the zipper on a black bag, their appearance uncannily instant.

  A last breath hung in the air. The crowd watched these vapours, each tempted to inhale. Like a ghost they hovered, circling the scene as if to choose a new host, a body to occupy. But all the bodies here were full. This ghost was damned, a frozen roadside to haunt. Both Eels and Thorp watched intently, their own breaths still, the lights of ambulances and police cars strobing the dark air. Glimpses of colour flashed across the stark faces of onlookers, gloaters, party-goers and pub-crawlers, late night shoppers, man, woman and child...parting, opening, funnelling, the ghost paused at the possibility of redemption, its former nebulous state coalescing into a tight white ball, a single bright globe of energy that then shot away. A hundred breaths released in its wake, obscuring the trail, causing Henry to curse, his own frosted gases mixing with those of Thorp as he set off in pursuit, determined to find the body upon which the ghost had focused, crying, ‘Follow that...eh...’

  Thorp understood. In fact he was ahead, pressing through the milling public in the vague direction of a café cum erotic book store, kneeling thereafter to cradle the head of his newly beloved under the steaming taps and vents of a pyrotechnic samovar, odours of a thousand teas crowding his senses along with an entire spectrum of coloured glass cups reflected in and off the towering stainless steel. She had swooned, he saw. Her face was as red as a tomato, a love apple whose cheeks he dare not touch, whose flesh he was as close to now as he had ever been, the wind in the branches the draught from the café doors, the moment that before his own precipitous fall...

  Henry captured it using a borrowed Polaroid.

  Number seventy-five.

  Thorp waited for Jenny Pith to open her eyes, scared as to what they might hold. He replayed the death scene over in his mind. The scream, the plunge, the zipped black bag; yet nowhere was there a clue to the victim's identity. That soul, uncollected, had successfully found a new home. He was truly redundant. And with good cause. Her eyelids flickered like the butterflies before the pins. Orangepeel...

  ‘See you around,’ said Henry, who stole a provocatively shaped bun from the counter and made his way outside.

  Right slap bang into Jane Kowolski, who nodded without understanding why.

  She was posting a letter to a friend, a letter she'd written anonymously, addressed randomly, begun: To whom it may concern. A letter composed of letters, amassing vowels and consonants in a medley of invented words, formulating sentences and paragraphs utilizing a method of comprehension she herself did not understand. She just hoped someone out there did. It made a kind of sense, expeditionarily.

  The stamp bore a likeness she d
id not know. She'd got off the bus amid a commotion, an excited press of people that dispersed at her arrival.

  Jane felt as if she had spoiled the show, disappointing all those who had congregated in the expectation, she knew, of seeing her sister, Nancy floating wasplike to pavement. But this was Jane's birthday party! As ever, her entrance provoked nothing but indifference. She didn't even know any good jokes.

  Posting her letter, she looked around anxiously. The city had a menace about it, an incestuous feel of wrongdoing that made her - guiltily - comfortable. She was to meet Roger in the Libido Café. Her choice of venue. But she stood outside instead, shunning the safety of polished plastic and chipped Formica for the insecurity of the pavement. She was a new creature, one determined to fill her sister’s shoes, as she had filled those of fish skin her father had secured the loan of. Here she was, enjoying her anxiety as if it was excitement, leaning into shadows with only her legs showing. Whether or not she was up to the role, Jane was undecided. The letter was a symbolic thing, the posting to anywhere of her past self, so that the future model might have pride of place.

  Men paused, briefly.

  One Way Of Looking At Things

  Jones lit on the roof of the Metrodine building. Across the vast plaza, pigeons sleeping, litter blowing, obscuring the marble outlines of the statues of the heroes, lay Parliament. There was a chain on its doors, twin portals whose brass-handled openings were crudely shackled; from the outside, sealing those within that had elected to occupy its chambers. The action seemed suitable to Jones, who had ordered it. The elected representatives, those would-be effectors of change, in all their noisome clamour, were here contained. Ergo: the situation was under control.

  He scratched his belly. The morning air was clear, fresh and silent as it moved about the plaza, chilled by stone and concrete, water and metal, oozing a confidence to mirror his doubts and rebound them. The air would warm. He felt sure of it. Fountains sprang from the saved and the fallen.

  An alliance of Quod and Trenchermen was perhaps inevitable, but he hadn't bargained on it coming about so soon. His own power, although well established, was still young enough to be vulnerable. Jones had yet to wholly weed his garden. And besides the weeds there were worms.

  He had his spies, naturally. Yet for every spy there was a traitor.

  Jones sighed self-mockingly and squeezed his lips. It was naive to expect things otherwise...

  ‘You've grown so serious,’ Anna had said earlier. ‘You ought to learn to lighten up.’

  ‘Sound advice from a serial back-stabber.’

  ‘Yes,’ she countered. ‘But I don't deal in life and death, only love.’

  Jones shook his head. ‘How sweet.’

  ‘If you don't think it credible, why turn to me for advice?’

  ‘I search for metaphor.’

  ‘Really...’ She stroked the somnolent penis in her lap. ‘A metaphor between love, life and death. I can't imagine there are any left. Maybe you should visit with poets.’

  ‘Your sarcasm isn't helpful.’

  ‘It isn't meant to be; I merely indulge it, brother. I just know your problem won't be anything specific. Your vision has always tended toward the grandiose.’

  ‘And yours the grotesque.’ He regretted it immediately. Even the cock woke up.

  But she only smiled, patted its head and put it back in her pants. ‘I have to go now. I've plans afoot. You don't need me anyway. Just change the rules if you don't think you can win by them. I thought that was the whole idea.’

  Law and order, essentially subjective, were here made elastic. Yes, in playing the game, any game, there could be no room for argument. And playing to win meant enforcement. Of course the rules changed all the time, by means fair and foul, whether democratic or demographic, by a show of hands or a count of heads, the former a mockery as people rarely understood what it was they were voting for and the latter a devious means of shepherding the masses into the appropriate corals, and thence to the slaughter, suitably tagged and bagged. Power involved such crude processes. The more complex assemblies (socio-political) came under the heading MANUFACTURE. Invention was the difficult part. Promotion, sales, these were far simpler tasks. Once you had a thing it was easy selling to the masses. Never to individuals. Always groups, conglomerates, the larger the better, organizations whose composition might be as varied as summer weather, but at whose core - even if you had to put it there - was a common set of values, a selfishness engineered to provide just the right amount of antagonism toward an opponent, sufficient blind zeal and reactionary dis-humour to ensure the acceptance of whatever speech or pitch one cared to make. Ileum was Jones' ideal. The city's populace, in all its diversity, housed in its manifold precincts and juxtaposed - if any cared to look hard enough - with all time and no time, past and future discontinued in favour of here and now, be they dressed as night or day, warm or hot or wet or dry, the countless citizens of this tangibly infinite metropolis breathed a commonality induced by Jones and made manifest in a search, a quest not for self but another, friend, family or loved one, real or imagined, a person beyond themselves and yet reachable, attainable, the yearning of hearts and minds given shape, identifiable as a cause. And where there was a cause there was an effect. All those conscious felt it, and were thus preoccupied, accepting the breakdown of reality as they did the shifting of seasons: one outlook verdant, the other defoliated, but both composed of trees. Not that reality past was displaced completely; only the emphasis had changed, the light itself filtered to reveal the new world at the expense of the old, reality future introduced at a canter, then reined. Here and now, as Jones would have it. But to keep it so? The bending of rules had suited him before. Their malleability was partially the reason for his success. Now he'd succeeded, it was necessary for a few rules to become firm. Not quite how he'd pictured it. But it was important to compromise. Wasn't it? The more he thought about it the less sense it made. It was dangerous to be too much in control. Better to lurk in the shadows, he considered. Play things by ear. The risk being another might come to the fore, destabilizing all he'd struggled to achieve, usurping his control, challenging his dominion over this creation, this ideal, this Ileum whose dynamic was cold as stone.

  Counter Culture

  East shuffled on his pew. Sweating in his robes, he attempted to at least appear serene, surrounded as he was by a hundred other graduates and their folk gathered in nervous anticipation of the Passing Out ceremony. Rumours had abounded for days regarding the nature of the forthcoming proceedings, but facts were few and far between. It was widely understood that graduates would be returned to the living world until such a time as death overtook them, a period more probably lengthy than short given their innate experience of the hereafter and their intensive tutoring, which, for all its brevity (a few weeks!) saw them equipped for survival beyond the usual. To return prematurely would see a person shovelling lime for eternity in some sticky backfires nether region. A poor career move. To be successful among the living, on the other hand, might get you a fearsome red tan and a toasting fork.

  Ambition was everything. But ability counted, too.

  Given the current political situation, East was surprised to see that the entire ceremony was to be broadcast, although whether live, and on what obscure channel, he couldn't say. It gave him a strange pride, nonetheless, the thought of friends and rivals tuning in to view him among this elite. Those Frenchies would shit in their boots. He was one of the chosen, and as close now to spiritual fulfilment as at any time in his death. He was also, he had to admit, scared.

  That he had always been a radical was obvious. Hadn't he blinked at his own funeral? Not that it was much of a funeral, a common grave and an English toe to roll him in it. And what of Lotta Dosh? Belle of the ball, her chicanery had glued his arse to this wooden bench as much as any free thinking. He ought to look her up. Even if only to dispose of her. Yes, the prospects from here on in where most appealing. He’d show them,
those arrogant cavalry bastards...

  There was a gavel rap. The person next to him farted.

  ‘Graduates! Fame and glory to thee!’

  ‘FAME AND GLORY!’ the hundred chorused.

  Applause rippled from the galleries.

  ‘The purpose of this gathering is clear,’ rang the high voice of the Archbishop, resplendent in his stone pulpit. ‘It is to bless these messengers before a most terrible journey.’ Head shaking. ‘A journey to the most terrible of places.’ Mouth slack, tongue protruding. ‘Back to life they venture, and with such willing bravery.’ He consulted his notes now, as if refreshing his memory. ‘The enemy has a new face, and it is terrible. Vile and hideous are its features. Terrible is its purpose and terrible its methods, more terrible than even the Trenchermen...so terrible, in fact...’ The Archbishop looked up confusedly - there were a few Trenchermen in the audience, he remembered. ‘Terrible...terrible is the fate awaiting these brothers. But their sacrifice is blessed. Theirs shall be everlasting fame and glory.’

  ‘FAME AND GLORY!’

  ‘Indeed,’ nodded his eminence. ‘Fame and glory!’

  ‘FAME AND GLORY!’ East bellowed, ignoring the fact that the fart still lingered.

  There followed a pause while various dignitaries arranged half a dozen collapsible tables, piling scrolls atop the inlaid leather and seating themselves, after much pushing and shoving, in roughly hierarchical order.

  The old man glared crossly from his pulpit until one of the priests in attendance helped him down, then walked somewhat leadenly over to the tables and picked up the first scroll. Waving it triumphantly, he smiled at those assembled.

  Removing the ribbon the Archbishop unfurled the parchment. He read the name thereupon and that person rose to collect it.

  ‘Congratulations, my son. I wish you well.’

  East gagged. The fart smell was overwhelming. How many names before his?

  A second and third scroll...

  This was taking far too long. And where were the graduates being led to? What awaited backstage? What was the mode of transference?

  He couldn't stand it any longer. Clambering over those in the pews ahead of him, he rushed onto the stage and began rummaging desperately through the scrolls. There were no names on them! He took a guess at alphabetical order and tore open the scroll he thought approximated the letter E. It belonged to Winston Crowpowder, that blond kid with the big nose he'd sat next to briefly during one typically intense lecture on the right and wrong way to comport oneself at public meetings and how best to a) attract attention, b) deflect criticism, c) deliver opprobrium, and d) (especially for East) not snore loudly unless you've a question and this is a diversionary tactic. Reverse alphabetical order? First or last name? East screamed. A table collapsed, taking three bishops with it. There was much fluttering of ermine. He tore open a second scroll, a third, eyes drilling and bottom squelching as an awful realization slid down inside his trouser leg. He froze, momentarily. Too late now to do anything. He seized scroll after scroll, his superiors foaming at the mouth hysterically, gibberingly effervescent , until he eventually found his own, and clutching it to him advanced (absolutely NOT running) wet-shoe'd behind the curtain...

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ asked Jenny Pith, languid and headachy in her skimpy waitress' uniform.

  Thorp's heart sank. Didn't she remember?

  ‘Help me up. I need to get out of here.’ She peered down at her ankles, then examined her hands, her wrists. ‘Oh, wait a minute; this isn't what I had in mind.’

  ‘There may have been a transmigration,’ stated Thorp, switching to past professional mode. ‘What you're experiencing is most likely the result of possession.’

  Jenny turned her face to look at him out of one eye, deep and shiny in its blushing frame, steam and perspiration having caused her lashes to curl. ‘Don't you think I know that?’

  Thorp reached for his sunglasses.

  ‘At least I smell good,’ said Orangepeel.

  The cluster of onlookers receded, sitting once more or hiding their smiles behind soft-backed erotic landscapes, feeding themselves such ambrosial delights as Fellatio Frappe and Coconut Cum Cake. They watched with flagging interest the night's events behind the gushing samovar, all spangled pipes aglitter...the man in the blue trenchcoat walking backward, the girl with her hands on her head and her skin inflamed picking her way awkwardly across a beach of broken glass, gingerly, as if on hot coals. The café door opened as nobody entered, the man exiting as if this were film footage in reverse, his car parked blackly at the kerb, driver's door hinged outward, receiving driver, who folded himself into the vehicle and drove with neither hand on the wheel, clipping several lamp-posts before foregoing the road altogether and somersaulting gently moonward like a bin liner on the breeze.

  East watched from the doorway, a little terrified, a little overawed. But proud. He understood the mode of transference now, only he couldn't help wondering on the one hand whose body this was that it be vacant, and on the other, what had become of his own, of which he'd grown fond. He took a moment's pleasure in the female form he'd adopted, only to gaze at its radishlike visage in a polished coffee urn, the backs of myriad spoons, and, worst of all, in the half dozen slatted mirrors decorating the Libido Cafe’s walls.

  Pain. Physical pain, struck him. But it was good pain, he told himself, likeable pain, far removed from Russian shrapnel. Such agonies, diluted by death, seen under a different light, were to be commonplace in the living world.

  ‘Miss Pith?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Do you require medical attention?’

  ‘No - no, I'm fine.’

  ‘Are you sure? Only I've no-one to cover.’ He fanned her ruddy complexion with a cardboard menu in the shape of a pair of breasts, pushing air at her like an over-endowed pole-dancer. ‘Table three would like their bill, I believe.’

  ‘Yes,’ East replied. Wasn't he about to leave? And go where? ‘What's my first name?’

  The manager, so she presumed, crossed his eyes. ‘I don't recall.’

  ‘You don't?’

  ‘I'll have to check your application.’

  East smiled, he hoped, winningly. ‘Please.’

  ‘Very well. Table three?’

  ‘I'm on it.’

  ‘Thank-you, Miss Pith.’

  Right, thought East, extemporize.

  He had no idea how long it would be before his target was identified, or for that matter how he'd go about executing those orders on arrival. His training had largely consisted of Correct Procedure and How To React In A No Win Situation. Being a volunteer wasn't the same as being head hunted. There was a lot of elitism in the priesthood. Chosen, he may have been, but East himself had done the picking. These were strange days, they'd taught him. Exceptional circumstances bred exceptional people. East had bought into that idea. He held it close still, hugging himself and his pinny.

  ‘Miss Pith!’

  ‘Okay, I know: customers.’

  ‘Jenny Pith.’ He handed him a piece of paper with an address on it. Hers?

  The manager winked conspiratorially.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We close at one,’ he added.

  ‘In the morning?’

  He didn't answer.

  Waitressing came easy. He tip-toed, all girlie, in shoes not entirely uncomfortable, laughing off lewd remarks and swatting stray digits, occasionally squirting whipped cream down shirt fronts and dismissing his flushed complexion initially as sunburn, then more colourfully as the consequence of hiccups and fire-eating. A clock behind the counter dripped wetly toward twelve, which every regular customer knew to be the hour of orgasm, numerals crushed and moaning, the clock framed in vulvalike folds as it heaved from the elasticated wall, then sank back with a groan, the second-hand sweeping all curly to cheers and orders for half-price Buttock Butties and tonight's special, Ejaculate Rolls.

  In The Neighbourhood
>
  Smoke poured from chimneys, pumping skyward from iron-clad fires the temperature of which moulded great brass bells, cathedral ornaments it took forty dray horses to shift. Pulling ropes whose braids shone golden in the fresh morning light, the horses' breaths steamed, adding to the gaseous tumult. Their neck muscles strained beneath studded leather yokes, the ropes attached by steel links, fibres cracking under the weight as the bells moved slowly through the foundry arch toward a much delayed meeting with winch and scaffold.

  It was a gargantuan effort, thought Egon, who then switched off the TV.

  ‘What's this?’

  ‘There's a reward,’ said Owen.

  ‘A reward?’

  ‘A substantial reward,’ said Mickey.

  ‘“For information leading to the capture of...”’ read the distinguished gentleman. ‘So?’

  ‘He works for Vernon. Or did.’

  ‘This Pagan character? He's just a kid.’

  ‘A mean kid,’ Owen clarified. ‘And Vernon wants him. And we want Vernon, right?’

  ‘And Vernon is Jones' nephew and Jones wants me. Boys, tell it as it is: one fucking great big conspiracy. Okay; suppose we nab the kid and claim the reward, what then?’

  ‘That gets us in with Vernon. Close enough to Jones to do some real damage.’

  ‘Which is exactly what Jones wants. Vernon too, probably. Nothing in this world happens by accident.’

  Owen rolled his eyes. ‘Don't you think I've thought of that? The problem here isn't the obvious one...’

  ‘Getting us all shot.’

  ‘...rather how best to play our hand. Vernon's simply fishing; Pagan's convenient bait.’

  Egon reached for his putter and rolled its shiny heel over a ball. ‘How convenient?’

  ‘We recently took a small donation from the lad. Drop money it was unprofessional of him to give away.’

  ‘Oh.’ The ball was propelled toward a glass. ‘Think he'll remember you?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  Mickey laughed, stretching in his lycra.

  ‘I don't know,’ said Egon. ‘I'd prefer to, you know, lay low for a while.’

  Owen was nonplussed. Mickey regarded him strangely.

  ‘Wait a minute. Why the sudden change of heart?’

  ‘Up the revolution!’ shouted Mick, thumping the ceiling. Silently, he apologized.

  Owen wafted plaster dust from his eyes. ‘You're not going soft on us, are you? Me and Mick have taken a lot of chances on your behalf, what with the fundraising.’ And why are we doing this anyway? Until a few days ago it had seemed the sensible option; they needed each other. Owen and Mickey, not being political creatures, needed Egon, who represented a higher authority, a standard-bearer for their own as yet ill-defined morality. They needed to raise him up, to idealize. He was a figurehead, the banner about which they and their compatriots could gather, rallying to the cause. Which was what exactly? They were on this side entirely because they weren't on the other. And the money? To date they’d procured nothing more harmful than takeaway Chinese. ‘About the war chest, Egon,’ intimated Owen, winking at Mickey, who frowned.

  ‘What's that you say?’ The ball missed the glass by a good two feet, instead finding its niche in the hoover nozzle.

  ‘Mick...’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘You've got ten seconds, Egon.’

  ‘Boys!’

  ‘Five...’ On which count Mickey put the distinguished gentleman's head through the TV screen. ‘A little premature there, my friend. Never mind. Grab what you need and meet me in the car.’

  He should have suspected something wasn't right when Egon shaved his moustache. But all that was behind them now. There would be no guerrilla activity, no hostage taking or blackmail involved in this campaign, all of which made Owen feel better about not having a plan. More plaster dust fell, followed by Mickey's foot through the ceiling.

  ‘Hurry it up, will you!’

  He wondered who they'd done the bigger favour in eliminating Egon, themselves or Jones? Maybe he had been a fake all along, M and O court jesters to a pretend king. The politics disgusted him. Too many distractions. Too much opportunity for compromise. What they needed now was a return to earlier values, a reappraisal of which brought to mind the absence of their old buddy Swene. They ought to swing by his place, buy him a beer. Then go after that scumbag Vernon, through Pagan if needs be. Both were wrongbodies, evil-doers of the worst kind.

  Mickey appeared at the foot of the stairs toting a bowling bag, his toothbrush in his spare hand.

  ‘Ready?’ Owen lit a cigarette, coughed, stared at the hotly glowing end.

  They stepped outside. Paused. Someone had stolen the car.

  ‘Repossessed,’ said Pa Kowolski. ‘At least that's what they told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Four o'clock this morning. I was putting the milk bottles out.’ Adding, ‘They had the keys.’

  A door opened across the road, twenty metres past crooked rose bushes and clumpy grass verges, a few stray wraps of mist giving the tarmac-rivered panorama the aspect of a miniature Somme.

  Two men stepped out. More accurately, a man and a boy.

  Pagan reached inside his coat.

  Owen's eyes narrowed.

  ‘Hey, looks just like the kid in the picture,’ said Mickey.

  Stack, closing the door behind, turned in time to see Pagan disappear over a fence. He froze in surprise. Across the street were a couple of strange individuals and John Kowolski, who Cherry always called Pa. He waved tentatively. One of the strangers ducked behind a bin and the other produced a bowling ball.

  Kowolski cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘It's okay, they're unarmed. Come on over. Both of you. I'll put the kettle on.’

  ‘Don't listen to him!’ Pagan hissed from some nearby bushes.

  ‘Why not? Maybe he's seen Cherry and Frank.’

  ‘That's what he wants you to believe. For fuck's sake, those two clowns with him are more dangerous than they look.’

  Stack could make out the top of a rapidly balding pate behind the corrugated waste receptacle.

  Kowolski was approaching, wearing a jovial grin. ‘Morning.’

  ‘Morning,’ Stack replied.

  ‘Sorry to bother you. I know we haven't talked much before, but then we haven't really had occasion.’

  ‘I can take you down, old man!’

  ‘Yes. Now why don't you get up off your arse before you catch your death?’

  ‘How do I know this isn't a trick?’

  Pa cocked an eyebrow. ‘Because you'd have shot me already. I didn't bring you into this world to take unnecessary risks.’

  Pagan had to think about that.

  ‘You know him?’ quizzed Stack, wishing he knew more himself.

  ‘I'm his father,’ Pa confessed. Then to the boy, ‘Ungrateful whelp!’

  ‘I don't have a father! I'm an orphan!’ Cracks began to appear in Pagan's reality.

  ‘Oh, if you say so...’

  ‘And those other two, I suppose they're my uncles?’

  ‘Now you're being ridiculous, George.’

  Stack smiled. ‘George?’

  ‘His mother's choice,’ explained Pa. ‘Now would you come over? You people should really meet.’

  Pagan, shielded by frosty undergrowth, couldn't stop shaking. It wasn't fear, he told himself, but something far worse, something he recognised in the man's features. They seemed familiar, but in an unfamiliar way, like eyes, a mouth and nose he'd glimpsed in a mirror, flashes of an older self come back to haunt him, to mock his surety, his youth. Or perhaps they were a memory dredged up from the primordial mud of his earliest days, this the face that had deserted him. In which case he should shoot it, the parent here declared, and right that wrong.

  Surprisingly, he couldn't.

  Sat one side of a kitchen table while Pa fussed with mugs and filled the sugar bowl, Pagan felt only slightly l
ess ridiculous – but less ridiculous, all the same. Things just weren’t as they used to be.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, water boiling, a cluster of tea-bags between his fingers like see-through knickers, ‘life's one long party when you've friends and relatives!’

  ‘Have you seen my wife?’ Stack wanted to know.

  ‘Left you, has she?’ Pa answered, nodding. ‘Don't take it too badly. Probably not your fault. Biscuits?’

  Mickey put his hand up.

  ‘Nice shirt!’

  ‘Thanks. I think I've got blood on it, though.’

  ‘Well, let's not go into that.’ He poured following the whistle and placed a tray of mugs on the table, together with the biscuit tin. ‘Help yourselves.’

  ‘Might I be right in thinking you know more about us than we do about you?’ Owen inquired casually. He crossed his legs and stirred his spoon, having lifted its quota from the silver bowl, gilt peeling round its edge to reveal plastic.

  ‘I strive to keep abreast of events; but things have been difficult lately,’ Pa replied. ‘It was a lot simpler in the old days, before this craze for reactivism.’

  ‘You're telling me,’ said Pagan, sulking.

  Pa thought it best to ignore him a while. ‘Used to be all a dead person had to do was lay low, bide his time. Sleep for eternity? That's okay! But now?’ He shook his head.

  ‘You're dead?’ inquired Stack, drawing his own conclusions from amid the general insanity.

  ‘Strictly speaking - well, no.’

  ‘I don't get it. Did Cherry say anything to you before she left?’

  ‘She dropped off a card. Jane saw her.’

  ‘Your daughter?’

  ‘I have a sister?’

  ‘Ah, let's think. Yes, I believe she is.’

  Pagan felt sick.

  Stack said, ‘Is she home? Can I see her?’

  ‘She's in bed...’

  Stack bolted from his chair, out the kitchen and up the stairs.

  Pa pulled a face. ‘Hope she's in a good mood,’ he joked. ‘Now, where were we?’

  ‘Reactivism,’ said Owen, sipping brew.

  ‘Right. A more efficient use of resources. A leaner, fitter Hell. About the only thing the mud and the water ever agreed upon. Of course the results were disastrous. There was no overall control so nobody knew what was going on. The bureaucrats had a field day. Not to mention the black market. It was only a matter of time before a character like Jones stepped in.’

  ‘You know Jones?’

  ‘He's my brother-in-law. Very competitive type. But the real tragedy is he couldn't have children. Not legitimately, anyway. And he has a strong sense of continuity, Jones; not to mention a foul temper.’

  There was a crunch. Stack first moaned, then picked himself up off the floor.

  ‘Don't you have any manners?’

  ‘I'm sorry...I didn't mean...’

  ‘Would you step outside? I'd like to get dressed.’

  ‘Yes...I'm sorry.’ Pinching his nose he stepped back through the door and leaned against the wall. ‘Your father told me you'd seen my wife.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My wife. And Franky.’

  ‘She had to go away,’ Jane told him, realizing who it was that had burst in through her bedroom door.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But she said Frank was staying with you.’

  Stack slid back to the carpet, a thick mucus shuffling in his nostrils. Maybe cartilage. He made some minor adjustments. ‘With me?’

  ‘Yes. She said you were better able to look after him.’ Her head came round the jamb, curious. ‘Only?’

  ‘I haven't seen either of them.’

  He was crying, she saw. She was having that effect on men lately. She had entered a phase of accidental and deliberate emotional brutality. Just ask Roger. She'd left him at Nancy's apartment, handcuffed to some furniture, bruised about the torso following a sex game that had turned into an interrogation...

  Kneeling next to Cherry's husband (what was his name?) suddenly made her feel soft and womanly, and the temptation was to use it, to use him, squeeze from him extracts of pride, lust and jealousy.

  Sadly, he was pathetic.

  ‘Look, I don't know where she is or what's happened to Franky, but if it makes you feel any better I'll sleep with you.’

  It at least got his attention.

  ‘I'd better start looking for my son,’ Stack reasoned, all but immune to the offer. ‘But thank's anyway.’

  There came a loud metallic groan as the garage door was opened, a sound Jane hadn't heard in ages.

  ‘Well, what do you think? Two careful lady owners.’

  Mickey grinned enormously.

  Owen wondered if his head wouldn't hit the roof. Said, ‘It's perfect.’

  ‘Come back some time and I'll show you what's in the extension,’ Pa promised.

  ‘We'd love to. Wouldn't we, Mick?’

  ‘Can I drive?’

  ‘Sure you can, buddy.’

  Hands were shook. Pa jovially advised the pair to steer clear of trouble.

  ‘As if!’

  Then, back in the kitchen, having introduced a still trembling George, aka Pagan, to Jane, he turned to Stack, fingers wrapped round a third mug of tea.

  AA

  Swene. He did push-ups. They didn’t help, just filled his nostrils with carpet. He was no longer who he used to be, which came as a relief; but part of the package was coming to terms with a new self. Scary stuff. A bit like going nuts, he thought, forehead pressed against a stone arch, part of some Victorian railway bridge. Behind him, a man sat amid chicken bones. He knew the future, or so he claimed. A prophet. And Swene? Swene, it transpired, was the Avenging Angel.

  As destinies went it sounded okay, but the usual suspicions remained.

  ‘I don’t get it. Why me?’

  The man looked irritated, like he was tired of people asking stupid questions.

  ‘I mean - how come?’

  ‘You’re asking the impossible question.’

  ‘Isn’t that the whole point?’

  The man fell over laughing.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I only cast the bones...’

  All he could think of was Clint Eastwood, that film where he painted the town red.

  He zipped his jacket, stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked, once more shoe gazing. He walked across a glass ceiling, old couples gyrating, arm in arm to unheard music. Across wasteland, bones in the earth, the music different but the dance the same. Then onto pavement, stepping on the cracks, under a ladder, dancing his own dance off a kerb and into the road...

  He was lost, he realized. He was teetering.

  The sun came up. Desultory figures in overcoats slid down to the nearest Railstation, bus stop or fluid fill. They boarded trains, buses and the speeding air-bubbles that were drawn underground by the actions of distant turbines, hydroelectric megaliths perched on concrete islands off the coast. Clouds lined up, ready to be wrung like giant dishcloths over the funnelled mouths of the power stations' sluices, fat gaseous cows that for days previously had grazed the fickle ocean.

  Riding a bubble, bouncing fitfully along the subterranean tube, you could see everything and nothing. The only light was your own. The lights of a thousand others crowded you, but they were for the most part a blur of refracted images. Very occasionally, another's bubble would become attached to your own, held fast by surface tension for as much as a few seconds, your face up close with theirs. Perhaps an old man. Perhaps a beautiful women. Swene longed for these encounters. He rode the fluid daily in the hope of recognizing features in the maelstrom, those of past friends with whom he could exchange fleeting glances, enough for him to believe in the reality of self, of consciousness.

  He lived in a fridge underlooking the crystal-ball floor of the Specimen Hotel, its patrons gaudy smudges through the glass and water, residents who dined in colourful opu
lence, in heat and dryness, observed by the poor in their sea-bottom dwellings, refrigerates in near quietus. Work was a factory building fish, perch, carp and trout whose gills and vents were all alike, production line vehicles whose bone structures, a jigsaw of many pieces, he trailed from the press shop and, lineside, delivered.

  Each day was the same. The hope of seeing a familiar face in the fluid sustained him, kept his dreams of escape alive. All that remained of his pre-life was his brother's leather jacket, his sole possession. They were allowed one, a small identity fast across his shoulders whether he be hot in the factory or cold on his slab.

  The fluid delivered him each morning. Evenings, too, the swing shift identical in every detail.

  At work his colleagues griped, complaining at overtime or the lack of it, spending the long hours in cynical bemusement, laughing and joking and baiting and playing cards, drinking coffee, each activity regulated, or not, by the buzzer, the shrill noise of shift a constant backdrop, the deceptive slowness of the part-assembled fish clanking ceaselessly through the day or night or weekend. Bones added, flesh coated, innards fitted. Swimming away...

  Innumerable. Traffic. Schools swept out to sea. A person slammed into him, their bubble breaching, spilling light and air as it collapsed. Swene witnessed their horror magnified through the lens of his own pressured skein, then that too gave way, snapping him free. But to drown? It was not the escape envisaged. The person grabbed his collar, heaving him backward before he could swallow. Together they tumbled, forced along at enormous pressure, their outstretched limbs puncturing bubbles left and right, people torn from them like foetuses, the disintegrating sacs of their commuting bursting in a chain-reaction that eventually blocked the plastic vein of the fluid fill and created an air pocket full of bruised and jabbering people.

  Saved, thought Swene. It couldn't last. The vein itself tore, and he and his fellow travellers were sown like so many water-borne seeds from the flailing hosepipe of the fill, ejected with blinding force into a rush hour heavy with whales and porpoises. The fish-spangled ocean slowed him, his breath caught once more in his lungs. A shark bus swerved to avoid him, nearly tipping sideways, but the sea-horse-cyclist behind had no chance, mowing Swene down with a slow inevitability. Its rider was catapulted into the path of an oncoming haddock, which in turn slewed into a bass whose fins, in their confused array, flipped it over completely. Another fish slammed into it, adding to the chaos while Swene fought to orient himself. Only a few seconds had passed. He caught sight of the horse-cyclist and kicked for him, grasping the man's helmet and pressing his face to it. Battered and desperate, he pulled the helmet off, its owner floating deadly, and pushing his own head inside, bloody behind Perspex, he breathed at last, salt-water snot dribbling into his mouth and a sudden violent headache causing his whole body to go rigid with pain. Round him all motion ceased. Bones protruded from scales. Those vehicles with ruptured swim-bladders sank slowly, their occupants either unconscious or clawing madly behind exaggerated lenses, eyes looking through eyes at the crash scene where floated fins ventral and dorsal. Swene, approaching panic, searched the wreckage-strewn sea-lane for the horse that had run him over. It was jammed head first between two cod, the driver of one screaming inaudibly, gesticulating with angry fingers at the other, who sat passively, smiling at Swene as he freed the cycle, tearing the colour-coded lip-bumper off the screaming man's fish to do so. It didn't appear too badly damaged, starting second time, the blue flashing tails of electric eels pulsing into his lava-filled brain as he rode through the frothing aftermath and escaped down a service tunnel.

  In the darkness he accelerated, a stream of foam behind. He could hear nothing but a music station, a mermaid's high chords slicing between his ears, strangely soothing. The tunnel ended, beyond it a semi-circular expanse of advanced military hardware, crabs and molluscs at parade. Above them on a broad terrace, flanked either side by an octopus like some alien spaceship bristling with antennae, was gathered the top brass, uniforms decorated, hats on heads, olive drab coral. The generals were taking the salute. Swene hovered, conspicuous. The octopi twitched, their sonar locking onto him.

  Collared.

  He woke with his face in a puddle.

  ‘Your nose is blue,’ she told him, blowing on it. ‘Better?’

  The mermaid, surely.

  ‘Come on, up you get!’

  Swene's legs worked without him asking. Upright, he breathed suspiciously, as yet unsure of the surrounding medium.

  She was holding his shoulders. Blonde hair fell over her eyes. She removed it.

  ‘I met my husband in similar circumstances,’ she said, waving the wig absently, twirling it round a finger.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘By running him over,’ she clarified. ‘Only I didn't, you know, run you over. That was someone else. We were just passing.’

  ‘Oh...’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘I don't mean to be rude, but you could use a bath.’

  ‘Fish oil,’ rejoined Swene, brushing himself.

  ‘Do you need a lift anywhere? If you're okay, that is...’

  ‘Not necessary,’ he argued. ‘I'm the Avenging Angel.’

  ‘You are?’ She smiled at him sweetly, knowlingly… ‘What are you avenging?’

  Swene remained puzzled. ‘Not sure yet.’

  She shrugged her shoulders, looked over one. ‘There’s an awful lot out there, injustices every place you look. All manner of misdoings. Sounds like a job for life. Anyway, I have to go; they're calling me.’

  He nodded, standing now on his own two feet. Or were they? The places they’d taken him lately those feet might have belonged to someone else. And he’d followed them slavishly, knuckles swinging...

  She smiled again and put the wig back on, its lemon glow swamping him like a tide of butter.

  Clear Meat Soup

  Understanding nothing of the inner workings of the machine, Pagan nonetheless found himself engrossed by its complexity. It was new to him, this fascination with the mechanical, and he was enjoying every minute, awash with a boyish happiness he hadn't known possible, wide-eyed and attentive as he handed his father a spanner.

  He admired Pa's patience, he realized, rubbing his chin, keen for the few hairs their to sprout a familial likeness. Pa used the spanner to loosen a copper nut, then tighten it again. The tightness of nuts was important, Pagan saw; although, as yet, he didn't understand why. The locomotive filled the garage extension, its boiler polished and its footplate gleaming. Its twelve wheels rested on a short section of track replete with gravel-spaced sleepers.

  Nervously, he glanced over his shoulder at the half open boiler door, taken suddenly with the dread image of its closing. Trapped inside, he and Pa might become a consommé, pressure-cooked until the flesh left their bones.

  But it was Jane's face he saw there, his sister with her arms folded and her lips pressed, her hair brushed forward and her collars turned up to make a tunnel of her lineaments, pale and dark. She held his gaze a moment, satisfying herself of something, then walked away.

  Pagan was unsettled. It was too much for him. He wasn't convinced he believed in the reality of the situation. He had only Pa's word that he was his son, placed into care as an infant and thereafter fostered by Vernon Jones and one or more of his wives. Whereas he had always considered Vernon the closest thing he had to family, he had no memory of their relationship beyond that of the day to day collection and distribution for which he displayed such talent. His earliest memory was of money. Of counting money. Of spelling names and addresses. Of learning through business transactions the value of any currency, be it skin, steel or paper. It came as a surprise to him to discover a connection other than that between employer and employee. He wondered if Vernon had actually cared for him. His wives certainly had, but not necessarily as mothers.

  So why had Pa given him up? It was a tricky question.

  ‘Your mother left me. She was transient.’


  ‘They weren't married,’ Jane had chipped in, back from spying on the departing Stack, departed with the mysterious Henry Eels. ‘We're illegitimate. Eggs mugged by sperm in dark alleys. Accidents. A pair of bastards. Although it's kind of nice to know I'm not the only one. There's Nancy - or was; but she's only a half sister. Right, Pa?’

  He looked appalled, but not for long. It was nice to know she could do that to him.

  Pagan was uncomfortable. Too many revelations made him so.

  ‘The past catches up with you...’

  ‘You and your enemies,’ he qualified. ‘Not that you'd know of any, my girl.’

  Her nerve went. She washed the dishes…more than a little enjoying the sharpness of knives, the spiked tines of forks, all manner of cutlery impressing her skin. There was a focus to be found in pain, she thought, a desire.

  Pa Kowolski took Pagan outside.

  Pagan couldn't believe it. There was the garage, empty now, Owen and Mickey having driven off in the yellow Triumph TR7, and built on to it a space twice as wide and as deep again, stretching into the adjacent field and forming part of a sand-trap at the back of the ninth green. The locomotive, he was led to understand, less by words than gestures, was important to Pa, vital to his plans and to both their futures. And it was nearly finished. ‘Just a few outstanding expenditures, a couple of kilos of tektite and several thousand gallons of water to get her rolling.’

  Which Pagan interpreted as him having run out of money.

  The Marvellous Factor

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Eleven fifty-nine.’

  ‘Place?’

  ‘Outside Swene's flat.’

  ‘Mission?’

  ‘See if he's home.’

  ‘And if not?’

  Mickey searched for the right answer. His balls were all squelched up in his cycle shorts.

  ‘Well?’ prompted Owen.

  He guessed. ‘Drive round to the off-licence.’

  ‘No - not right away.’

  ‘Ehh.’ It wasn't his balls, he realized, it was the ball, the round box he'd stashed with his gonads. Something was up...something important. ‘Force an entry, search the place for clues to his whereabouts.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Find him, before it's too late.’

  ‘Exactly. Only we shan't be forcing an entry. I know where he keeps his spare key.’

  Rescuing Swene from whatever peril had become a priority with Owen for reasons that weren't entirely understood. It had to do with the bigger picture, he supposed. Swene was vulnerable. Their friend was in danger. It was down to them to locate his person and save his arse. Which was their job, after all.

  He got out of the car and walked up to the door, rang the bell. There were traces of snow in the sky. No answer. He felt under the door bottom. The possibility of Swene being at work crossed his mind, but in that event his flat would appear lived in and it would be a simple matter of waiting for him to come home before the rescue could begin. Owen located the key in its neat woody recess and raised it to the brass lock. Inserted. Turned. The door creaked inward. There came a musty smell. The smell alone though didn't signify desertion; an absence, mysterious or otherwise, of Swene. He waved to Mickey, who levered his bulk pavementward.

  ‘There may be booby-traps,’ warned Owen.

  Shadows lay thick in the hallway. There were car parts, tools, an old pinball machine.

  Mickey's eyes lit up.

  ‘Not now,’ the short man admonished.

  The curtained front room was stacked wall to wall with computer hardware, consoles bleeping, screens flashing oscillating patterns of red and orange. It looked like airport traffic control, thought Owen, only more sinister. Aeroplanes weren't tracked, not with this equipment. It was technology more sophisticated than any he'd seen, surveillance furniture of a Top Secret genus. He backed out, slid round into the living-room. The shadows looked immovable here, solids that spilled like cooled lava from the kitchen. Mickey, at his shoulder, mumbled something he didn't understand.

  Everything went quiet.

  The absence of sound, its earlier presence subtle, took Owen a few seconds to recognize.

  Shades dissolved like stains in a washing-powder commercial.

  Owen squinted at Mick, who was holding a three-pin plug by its flex like some odd plastic flower.

  ‘Let's get out of here.’

  Mickey dropped the plug and followed.

  The door was blocked, a figure silhouetted against snowflakes the size and shape of lettuce leaves.

  And they'd left their guns in the car...

  ‘Quick, the back way!’

  They rushed into the bedroom, took out the window with whatever came to hand - a chest of drawers, a pair of underpants - and made their escape over the garage roof and along the back lane, circling round the terrace to rendezvous with the car, thankfully unmolested, outside Swene's now closed front door.

  ‘Drive!’

  They drove. Owen checked his shoes. Mickey wrinkled his nose at the dog turds.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Yeah...’

  ‘I mean - we must be getting soft. Christ. Fuck. Damn. I mean, not having any explosives to hand. Can you imagine?’

  ‘You want to go back, O?’ Mickey enquired.

  ‘No, too dangerous now. We'll post a letter-bomb or something.’

  ‘What about Swene?’

  Owen took his shoes off, wound down the window and threw them out. He opened the ashtray, fished out a lipstick'd butt and depressed the cigar lighter. ‘First things first. We need to get tooled up. Stop at the next post-office.’ The cigar lighter popped. He pulled it from the dash and pressed the element to the stump of tobacco, paper and nicotine-stained foam. ‘I've been saving this,’ he told Mickey, ‘for just such an occasion.’

  Mickey observed the speed limit, confident they weren't being tailed. He glanced across to see Owen grinning behind a giro cheque.

  ‘You're kidding!’

  ‘Not so, my elasticated friend. And look here, I've juggled the numbers; even added a nought or two.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Mickey, squeezing the word out slowly.

  ‘Thank-you. Now turn around and drive back to the post-office we just passed.’

  East wondered at all the commotion. He stepped back outside momentarily and checked the flat number. Yup, this was it. Having spent the night at the Libido Café, sleeping on and off, drinking coffee, he'd pulled on Jenny's big coat and big boots and taken a nostalgic stroll round the old town. Everything appeared different given a living perspective. Time was once more a component. Using his tips he rode a bus and played the tourist - only he seemed to be the only tourist, the greater metropolitan area wholly deficient in camera toting outsiders in loud clothes, souvenir carrier-bags over their shoulders and inadequate maps to hand. Must be the off season. Everybody, whatever their constitution, looked at home.

  He re-entered the hall. Closed the door behind.

  Opening the boot, chewing gum, Mickey found himself transfixed. Owen too, walking round the car to see what was keeping his partner. Their gazes were sucked from their skulls by an assemblage, interlaced, grasping, shaking, gesturing, pointing, depicting, severed at the wrist, neat stumps, some bearing jewellery, watches, charm bracelets, fingers adorned with rings, tattooed, bitten, painted in their hundreds, clipped and filed, ragged, tight and loose skinned, hands. Children's and adult's hands. Old and young massed in the boot like crabs, all joints and knuckles, frozen in their aspect. They appeared fresh, at least those the two men could see. There was no discernible odour other than a vague smudge of rubber from the spare wheel buried under so many digits. The flesh was somehow preserved.

  ‘There's hundreds,’ Mickey said.

  Owen scratched his chin. Were they individual or in pairs?

  ‘Do you think he knew?’

  ‘Kowolski?’ Owen wasn't sure. If he did, there was surely some purpose to it.
Pa hadn't struck him as the kind of man to do things without a reason. Of more immediate concern was where they were going to put all the dynamite. The car was only a two-seater. Owen already had Mickey's bowling bag behind his seat. Not to mention the carbine under it and the small armoury housed at his feet and in the glove compartment.

  Mickey was looking to him for an answer.

  At school Owen had been taught that God had no hands, that people were His hands, set on Earth to do His work for Him. Aged eight, he hadn't known what to make of such a statement. It seemed peculiarly relevant now, although he still didn't understand. Were these spares? Hands of God for emergency use only? To whom did they belong? he thought, closing the boot lid. ‘Let's hope we don't get a puncture.’

  ‘What about the boxes?’

  ‘We'll strap them to the roof.’

  A stupid idea, Mickey's expression suggested. But he couldn't think of a better one.

  Owen began hunting around the Enormomart car park for odd bits of string, tie-bands, Sellotape, anything.

  Mickey came up trumps with several square metres of plastic webbing.

  ‘Where'd you get that?’

  ‘Off the back of a lorry.’

  They secured the half dozen boxes of high explosives, disguising the various high explosive symbols with pieces of newspaper, flattened pizza boxes, crisp packets, even an old banana skin.

  ‘That ought to do it,’ said Owen. ‘Now to find Swene and cut him in on the action.’

  East put the plug back in. Died in agony. The shadows, reanimated, looking suspiciously dashing in their deeply polished riding boots and heavily braided tunics, shredded his person. Tore him asunder.

  Or so it seemed. To his electrocuted eyes the agony of appendage separation was very real. But to the eyes of the body left in Swene’s flat the dislocation was altogether not the same.

  She blinked, did Orangepeel. She sat up and was groggy. She needed answers, she thought, and fast. She stood, wobbled, wandered outside. There was a taxi waiting. The woman driver smiled.

  The priests congratulated themselves on a good piece of forward thinking. Quodian philosophy, they reminded one another, was all about forward thinking. Well executed (ergo, no living witnesses), it appeared that fate alone had arbitrated, deciding the outcome by random factors. Re-energized, their equipment could quite miraculously go on crunching, dismantling information, digesting variables, plotting subtler means than those already at their disposal. It was hands off, beautifully legitimate and truthfully hypocritical. No-one could accuse them of breaching their own tenets and get away with it. They had Eyes in unusual places. They had Ears and Noses.

  Their new trenchermen allies didn't trust them. But neither told the other secrets.

  Trust belonged with the living. They'd argument and suspicion, were unable to agree on a joint approach to the problem of Jones and so carried out their own plans behind each other's backs, plots and schemes which often failed, the consequences of which Quod could explain away with little effort. Random factors again, gentlemen, we're unused to this forced intervention, we're new at the arts of manipulation. Frankly, sirs, we find it undignified. Trenchermen are well practised in getting their hands dirty; so leave the dirty work to them. They've more excuses than a Satyr in a harem. Jones, in his arrogant amalgamation of Before and After, will come unstuck eventually, we assure you, and when the inevitable happens and the sky unhooks itself from the ocean, then we'll be well placed to fill the vacuum. Of course, our quodian consciousness won't let us impose order from chaos; quite the contrary. But those damn trenchermen mustn't be allowed to either! We must oppose, fellows, and yet maintain our distance. We must conquer, but not vanquish. We must rely on the mistakes of others and express our surprise and astonishment at the way these things work themselves out to our advantage. It must be the weight of our morality tipping the cosmic balance, don't you know.

  Marvellous.

  The Twins

  Mingis looked at Mingis looking at Mingis. They had identical desks. They shared an office deep within the labyrinthine Metrodine building. They were its chiefs. Their business was pain. They had a monopoly on pain, as they administered both its application and its assuagement. Theirs was an incorporated body. They had grown from one foetus.

  Part Three: BEYOND GEOGRAPHY

  Chapter Six: The Words And Deeds Of An Attractive Single Girl In Her Twenties