Underlay

by Andrew McEwan

Cherry put down the phone. They'd been no answer, not even from the machine. The guilt of separation, herself from Franky, ached in her bones. Strange, she thought, how it was possible to rationalize your own shortcomings, and so easily. She blamed Stack, of course. Stack the determined provider. Better he had stayed at home. Why else had she bought a dishwasher? It was all the fault of her husband and his career. How he could work for those Metrodine creeps was beyond her. They made her skin crawl.

  Billy was leaning on the phone-box. He had that lurid smile of his. Possessed, she described it.

  ‘Come on, sweetie, we're losing the light.’

  Billy Producer. He claimed it was his real name.

  ‘Okay - where do you want me?’

  ‘By the car,’ instructed Billy, reversing his monocle. ‘What's the matter?’

  ‘Looks familiar.’

  ‘What? The car?’ He was impatient. It was three-thirty.

  Cherry shivered.

  ‘I don't give a fuck. Just perch your arse on the bonnet.’

  Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, she thought. Maybe Stack couldn't manage. But she'd been offered the part and taken it. Seized it, the first serious part to come her way in ages. The shoot was a projected three weeks. She hadn't seen an entire script yet, was given her lines either verbally or on scraps of paper, strange missives passed out of a pick-up with the legend Molten Lead on either door. A monochrome flick then. Great for her cheekbones, but the bags under her eyes would be a problem.

  She posed obediently, a chill winding its tongue up her short skirt, the man approaching heavy-jowled under a Homburg that shaded his eyes.

  ‘Kowolski?’

  Her mind went blank. His eyes twinkled. She'd thought the name a coincidence, nothing more. But the car, she had seen its like outside Pa's.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ She smouldered, despite the cold.

  ‘A friend of a friend,’ he answered, leaning closer to whisper, all dead breath and flat gaze ‘of a friend of mine.’

  Nancy. It was her name. Pa's other daughter, the character she was playing here, in this peculiar biopic. It was, she reckoned, as if someone (the film’s backer, the invisible money man) was reinventing history. To what end remained to be seen. Often though, the version brought to your local multiplex was more convincing than anything recalled as actually having happened. Not that she was clear on that, on the reality or otherwise of these jumbled events. There was nothing linear bout shooting a movie, and Billy seemed determined to keep everything, the plot included, to himself. Obviously Nancy Kowolski had got herself mixed up in something. But what? Would the celluloid version bare any relation to the facts? Probably not. Films were always shot in a different light. It was always necessary to dress things up. And directors liked to play God. Which left producers, executive, to don the horns of Beelzebub.

  Spooky. She could see Billy Producer with his face in his hands. The camera moved behind her, framing her silvered hair against the blackness of the man's chest.

  They hadn't been previously introduced.

  He pulled something from his pocket. A knife. He touched it to her chin and she could feel it was sharp.

  ‘You don't scare me.’

  ‘I don't mean to.’ He turned his head sideways, ducked and kissed her.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘For being a good girl.’

  ‘What if I'm not? What if I'm bad?’

  The knife returned to his pocket, he stepped away. ‘Just remember who you are, Kowolski; and what brings you here. You know you can't resist a conspiracy.’

  No, thought Cherry, never could. We have a lot in common, you and I, girl.

  ‘What about Silo?’ she pleaded.

  ‘He'll be in touch.’

  ‘Through you? That's not good enough.’

  He laughed as if to himself, walking off toward the Railstation, leaving the road silent, the air itself unnerved.

  Motion Sickness

  It was unnatural, decided Roger. Whatever was going on, whichever side of the lens, had been corrupted by TV. The small screen was a quick fix, the easy option, a money up front and who cares so long as the station's happy.

  He was jealous. Insanely.

  Jane had left him with bruises, almost symmetrical thumbprints and high-velocity vegetable echoes. Not that he minded, spending hours admiring these faux tattoos in the mirror of an evening. They spoke of love, he reckoned. What more could a man ask for? He thought he'd seen Nancy in a shop window and froze to the damp pavement, squinted through the frosted glass, past the naked mannequins. She was floating among lipsticks and eyelash pencils, not a few disappearing into her pockets. Could it be? No, another, more beautiful yet less alluring, an actress he recognised cast in the role of the missing person. He stalked her through what turned out to be a break in filming a TV movie with Nancy as heroine. Only not Nancy...

  The story? Roger was nervous. Perturbed. Miffed, as he was sure there was a copyright infringement somewhere. Should he get a lawyer? Best gather some video evidence first. He felt he ought to know the storyline, but didn't. He recognized the laundry van as Silo's, the thumping from within as Silo's and Nancy's. But who were all the strange orderlies? Some in black with guns.

  Tyrone, thankfully, came crawling through the undergrowth.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Fracture clinic.’

  ‘Shit. Never mind. See if you can get some close-ups.’

  Tyrone slid off, sloughing his white overcoat to reveal a camouflage jacket.

  Roger watched him go with a sense of panic. Were the mediCINEMArtyrs to be upstaged? Was the previously unknown Molten Lead even now recreating that last scene where Nancy Kowolski had her love in a painful-looking head-lock?

  The entire scenario was depressing. He squeezed his eyes shut, pushing the cold from his face in an effort to compose himself, sucking breaths that left his teeth feeling stripped of enamel.

  Tyrone, glimpsed through bushes, filmed the film makers, agitated now by some discourse that to Roger Coaltrain was inaudible. There was an argument on set, arms flailing, fingers pointing, limbs blurred, gesticulating madly. He needed Jimmy Head to be in the midst of it, immortalizing noises, himself hovering in the background, chin on palm in an attitude of greatness. He needed to be in control of this production. That it was happening without his special touch was a peculiar heartache, a chest pang, as if that other director, whoever he was, had stolen his girl. It was Roger’s day off, however. He had no reason to be within a hundred miles of the hospital, other than having nothing better to do. Doctor Jimmy was straightening limbs; which left Tyrone creeping through the short grass, actively suspicious. The van doors opened and closed in quick succession. Someone who looked like Silo walked round the vehicle, trailed by a cameraman. He bumped into the someone who looked like Nancy and they exchanged words. He slapped her. He kissed her. He collapsed at her feet, face turned upward, questioning, a knife in his belly glowing hotly, redly, the cameraman back-tracking, Nancy stepping away, blonde hair blowing in her eyes. And all Roger could think was: what will I tell Jane this evening, everything or nothing? Was truth fiction? Whose version?

  There was more shouting. Someone had spotted Tyrone. Guns were aimed. He came out with his hands up, leaving the camera in the grass. Roger hoped the Molten Lead crew wouldn't see it. But no, one of the orderlies picked it up, holding it over his head like a trophy. They ushered Tyrone inside, leaving only Silo, his back to a wheel and his features vacant.

  Squelch

  Stack didn't like what he was hearing. Henry's monologue had him worried. Not only was the weedy man telling him his wife was in great danger, but his son had most probably been abducted by devils.

  ‘Listen, if it's any consolation, I've a one hundred percent detection rate.’

  Stack's stomach rumbled. He thought about calling the cops. Not a great idea, he told himself. He could go direct to Metrodine for help, but they’d likely a
sk for his signature on some dotted line. He was in enough debt as it was. And Metrodine, what he knew of its machinations, its slimy, far-reaching tentacles, all the things he had done his best to ignore before...well, Cherry would never forgive him if he got them involved. Or were they already?

  Henry unwrapped a boiled sweet and put it in his mouth.

  Gazing out the car window, Stack couldn't tell if it was day or night. He understood this to be January, but he failed to recall which day of the month it was, or whether it was Tuesday or Saturday. He remembered listening to the football results on the radio, but not when. Henry Eels appeared to be thinking. Perhaps he had a plan; or maybe he too was ruminating, undecided, playing back a tape in his mind, freezing frames and indexing, taking particular note of colours and shades, angles of reflection, contrasts, the juxtaposition of people and place. The buildings looked glazed, painted over with some thin syrup. Light spilled from every orifice, doors and windows both emitting and receiving an abundance of rays, waves of an invisible sea constantly pummelling the city, shifting it in time and space. The inhabitants mingled on floors and through corridors, in rooms full and empty, empty and full with the passing day, each separate hour unique in its composition, broken down into separate, unique minutes. You could repeat a second. You could blink and miss it. Nothing longer endured in Ileum. There was only the moment that lasted forever.

  Stack, thought Stack, was filled with paranoia. Justifiably so, he reasoned.

  He had a picture of Franky in his head. The picture told him he was alive, vibrant, confused, but too young to worry over absent parents. Franky was on a tyre swing. It was a summer's day, the sun gently pounding, igniting the child's hair and face, gleaming, smiling, leaning forward toward waiting arms. Perfect. The image was burned into Stack's memory. Only there was something else in the picture now. There, in the background, standing by an oak tree. He couldn't make it out. A figure, watching, waiting to steal the child away.

  There was a loud thump on the roof of the car. Stack and Henry both gasped, wrenched from their private worlds by the dull impact. Seconds later came another, and a third, a percussion roll...

  Everything beyond the windows appeared to suddenly moisten. They looked at each other. Henry shrugged.

  ‘Hailstones?’

  ‘More like snowballs.’

  Wet, greasy snowballs. One hit the screen and slid bloodily down to rest on a wiper arm.

  ‘That's a frog,’ said Henry.

  ‘No,’ replied Stack; ‘a toad.’ He had dissected hundreds during a brief stint as a green activist undercover at a leading cosmetics firm. So he knew the difference.

  Ah, the exuberance of youth, he thought.

  Henry grinned. ‘Exceptional!’ He opened the driver's door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I want to see if it's localized.’ A bloated amphibian hit him on the arm and he laughed theatrically.

  Stack just shook his head. It was all getting too much, the Jack Daniel’s and Marlboro route looking increasingly inviting. Why should he give a fuck? So much easier to let go, to blame.

  Henry disappeared into the toad storm for a few minutes. When it subsided he trudged back carrying a distended plastic bag. ‘Yep, pretty local. Look.’ Besides toads there were fish and...

  ‘Ergh...puppies!’

  ‘Indeed. Everything in about fifty square metres. That's pretty accurate. Pretty flattering, too.’ His grin was sickly now, the grin of an obsessive. ‘Certainly someone knows we're coming.’

  Supposed Reality

  Pa wasn't her father, he said. Jane wasn't her sister. Yes, she'd murdered Silo; at his behest. This was how it was, he said.

  Did it have to be?

  The question lingered. They all did...

  ‘Things happen for the smallest of reasons,’ Jones told her. ‘The end result, be it ineffectual or catastrophic, is what defines existence. Still,’ rubbing his front teeth with the pad of his little finger, right hand, ‘outcomes can be manipulated.’

  Spiel, thought Nancy, squirming under his thumb; it's fucking political speech time.

  But for once the tyrant was less than forthcoming.

  How was this for a story?

  Mingis and Mingis, her aborted sons. It was herself in that room, up those stairs, down that corridor with the floral wallpaper. She lay on the bed, her belly swollen way beyond her memory of it. This was Nancy's life, the Jones' edit, the termination on the cutting room floor. They exploded from her, ripped her, tore open her womb. Jones' boys, those he chose to protect. He'd had to take the world on to do it, move Hell and Earth, change all the locks and shift all the doors. And he had, determining the end result. The consequences of it were far reaching; any fool could see that. Yet his motives, in the end, were human. It had been her decision to abort the pregnancy that had forced him to act. She'd never been able to admit the error, the pain of it stowed deep. Nancy viewed the entire procedure, from start to finish, as a tactical call. Her sexuality was her strength. She couldn't afford to have it undermined. There was her career. Although in expressing it, she recognized the flimsiness of that particular rationale. It was disgust, really; disgust had forced her hand. Disgust of Jones. She’d met him on the balcony of her apartment, two in the morning, a transparent figure, almost how she imagined Death - not a scythe gripped in his left hand, however, but the throat of a man. She was about to be murdered, he claimed, strangled with one of her own stockings buy this amateur burglar, a puny-looking lad. He was here to save her. He was breaking all the rules. Did she realize just what a risk he was taking? And why?

  Nancy understood only the threat. It would take everything she had inside to forget his presence, there on her balcony, later in her bed, the bed she never shared.

  It would take another man.

  She stepped out into the road, was nearly run over by an express delivery vehicle, its form as its logo, indistinct, a varicoloured blur. They didn't stop for anything. Not in Ileum. The few things Nancy understood about this city - next to its all-pervasiveness - appeared trivial next to the impetus of express delivery personnel. They fed the bureaucrats and the bureaucrats returned in kind. It was always the mundane that undid you.

  Settling herself, smoothing herself down, imagining herself a little girl, Nancy looked left and right and skipped off the kerb. There was a cathedral opposite, spires lost in clouds. But it wasn't the cathedral that interested her. Nancy had never been one for architecture; or religion, for that matter. Stained glass windows she liked though. There was something romantic about coloured light, as if it had yet to be purged, yet to be melded. Holding their individuality to the last, those stubborn wavelengths were a reminder of how beautiful it was to be different. How real and unique was the experience. Their contribution was more than a token celebration of spectral independence. It was, Nancy realized, a fulsome endorsement of all that she herself held close.

  Jones was her uncle, he said.

  Fine. But nothing, absolutely nothing more.

  Boomers

  Owen couldn't keep the calculations out of his head. Peering at his baldness in a mirror, he could see formulae superimposed over a brow large and bloated, grossly babylike in proportion. He didn't find his appearance unattractive. A bit Elmer Fuddish, perhaps, only not as dumb. It was all this particle physics and continuum mechanics criss-crossing the silvered glass that annoyed him. It was as if his brain was projecting its inner workings, vortices of numbers splashing from his head like water put through a sieve; streams of consciousness he had no control over, no understanding of; the workings of his thought engine alien to him in all but context. Something strange was happening. He saw it in Mickey, too, a gentle restlessness, a readying.

  The toilet flushed.

  Magnificent Mick rolled out, holding his guts, the giant M of his T-shirt stretched like some rippled balloon. ‘Phew!’

  Owen tapped his foot.

  ‘Sorry, was I long?’
>
  Owen shrugged. ‘Come on, grab the cases, there's still some way to go.’

  Mickey had devised a kind of yoke to carry the dynamite, so that he resembled a burly milkmaid. He had to turn sideways to pass through doors. And doors there were aplenty: doors opening onto corridors, into rooms, some no more than cupboards, others the size of orchestral halls. Not one was occupied, or furnished beyond the occasional chair or row of chairs, all of them bolted down. The bathroom had come as a surprise, a useful amenity with hot and cold running water and toilet-roll. Owen had no idea where they were going or what they meant to explode. He just knew that if they kept on their quest would be resolved. There’d be a giant flashing X or something, some sign reading PLACE BOMB HERE. Meantime, the calculations zipped past his eyes, strobed in his orbs, burst like tears composed of numbers each time he blinked, seeding the doors and walls with fractions and integers, a whole digital code, streams of complex mathematical runes that increasingly occupied his world. He tried to think of them as co-ordinates, which in a sense they were, but not only to his space and time but the space and time of every interactive being, routes and issues his brain disgorged as if sifting information, searching for an individual's whereabouts midst the jumble of a trillion souls, the living and the dead of Ileum and Earth.

  A roll call.

  Mickey walked uncomplainingly behind. He knew their direction to be true, regardless of where they might end up. The motion in his cycle shorts had ceased upon entering this room and corridor realm, the round box wearing his balls as a hat asleep now in his pink lycra pants. He thought fleetingly of his bowling ball, tucked in its bag behind the yellow Triumph's passenger seat. He worried about all those hands in the boot, the fingers that might be tempted to penetrate wood. Ingresses lubricious with sweat, the oils of his bygone youth. Three holes. ‘Just like a woman,’ as Egon had said.

  A peculiar jealousy. Turning sideways once more, Mickey entered a room more brightly lit than any before, so bright it was impossible to gauge its extent. The walls melted to either side. Owen was in silhouette, one hand up to shade his eyes, the other rooting in a jacket pocket for sunglasses. Finding some, he handed Mickey a pair.

  They didn't help. No new detail was offered up. The light, although filtered, remained all there was.

  Antimatter

  The sun shone. It hadn't done that in ages. Ileum took on a new aspect, reflecting itself in glass rather than puddles. Its edges were sharpened, making its joins stand out, welds and rivets like those in the hulls of ocean liners. Seams of cement like digital fingerprints. Fields of steel and stone, upright and angled, transfixed by iron. So much detail. Swene couldn't help but absorb. He was truly a citizen of this grand metropolis, lost somewhere in its maze of streets and underpasses, cold and hot, wet and dry, stealing from fast food outlets and sleeping in supermarket trolleys. He spied on courting couples in the parks, benches slippery under trousers and skirts, fingers moist under hems, tongues bouncing in mouths from which steamed breath. Conversing with squirrels, Swene's own breath passed through his nose. He could watch the couples for hours. The squirrels teased him. Shouldn't they be asleep? They didn't hibernate, they told him, they had central heating and 24 hour shopping. They didn't even hoard nuts. Berries came fresh from warmer climes. They drank beer and watched videos.

  Then there was one girl alone. Always one, he thought. Was this why? Why he was here, involved? Perhaps she had the answers he craved.

  Missing...

  Swene followed her. She walked endlessly. He had no idea where she was headed. It suited him, this aimless wandering. Day and night, outside of time, her feet meandered, through retail outlets - she bought a long frock coat - and restaurants - she ate expensively, never seeming to pay. He collected the scraps from her plate, salivating in her wake, eating salad leaves and oysters, drinking wine and coffee as he skipped between tables, too slippery for waiters, too blurred for surveillance cameras, resuming his pursuit, the girl not once glancing his way. That she knew she was stalked Swene thought obvious. It was in her smile, her body language, the way she lingered in malls, sauntered about galleries, deliberate and mannered. She avoided cabs, buses and crowds. She read pages at random in books and magazines. She stayed in hotels, always leaving the lights on and the curtains open in her room. The sunshine gave a citrus hue to her hair.

  She'd asked him for help once before, he realized, only her eyes had been empty on that occasion. He wondered what it was she wanted now. Had he helped then, he wondered, might he have escaped the greater debt, been let off with a warning? Like his mother, had she gone to the doctor’s sooner. The cancer she bore might not have had such a lethal grip. She might have escaped it. Lived another ten years. His father might have stuck around. His brother might not have gone “off the rails”. His leather jacket that Swene now wore.

  A cause without a rebel. So far.

  ‘Seduction,’ Nancy breathed into her Dictaphone, not trusting it to record. It hadn’t before, there in Burger King before that knock at her door. ‘The obedience of men and the respect of women...’ She sat in bed with a cup of tea. It reminded her of her father, of Pa, who it transpired was only playing the role. He was very good at it, she thought, not saying that out loud. He'd fooled her. ‘The apportioning of blame,’ she continued, a destination in mind but no route planned. ‘The counting of the dead, each corpse a score. Plots and schemes; some deliberate, some accidental - consequential, taking shape through action, never intended to be employed as a means to an end. Delivered clumsily or proclaimed majestically, each action determining the actions of others, changing and shaping others, the actions of others, the acts themselves, all tumbling helplessly toward a fall.’

  Blah, blah...

  Her tea was getting cold.

  She gazed out the window. There was light, muffled noise, images and sounds that might be the result of a million things, incidents in the city's life reverberating off buildings until eventually they found their way to her ears and eyes. She was taken with the sudden idea that she was the control in an experiment; others out there, perhaps billions, suffering every manipulation, indignity and consequence.

  ‘Coincidences shape history,’ Nancy intoned, then smiled. ‘History...men, violence and guns.’ She paused long, emptying her cup. It was too easy to blame them for everything. They were weak. Given the option they’d rather make love than war. But which was more dangerous? ‘History is sex, two people fucking in order to shape events, orgasms spilling pleasure over flesh, deciding upon a relationship, an alliance of sticky body parts, seminal fluids, juices and blood. If orgasms coincide, then so too can events. History is born. The world is redefined. Cause and effect.’ Her features squirmed. Did she have a plan of her own? She slid from the bed and walked to the window. Peering out, she could see him. He looked cold, shoulders hunched under bruised leather. Opening the window, Nancy signalled for him to climb the drainpipe.

  ‘You're a cold-blooded killer, Nance. Face it; you enjoyed it, the penetration, the knife going in. You're the perfect mother, an example to your sons...’

  Her own voice, coming from the Dictaphone, frightened her more than anything.

  But it wasn't her talking. Not Nancy.

  She lay on the floor with Swene. His sleep was total, occupying him as if by force. She almost felt she loved him. Perhaps she had to love him, or else slip away. She needed that warmth.

  If only she could be good she wouldn't be bad.

  This Nancy, she thought, feeling her heart, feeling his; not that. Thinking of that Nancy made her heart fade, his also, slowing in his chest like her Dictaphone when the batteries were low.

  Good Nancy, not bad.

  Hearts quickened, recharged.

  This was what she needed him for. What if he didn't love her? Was just fucking her, using her to engender history, a past with her face and breasts, her open legs, her wet mouth. What if neither of them could love at all? She needed his forgiveness, having told h
im, in brutal detail, of her involvement, her very particular relations with these shenanigans. Things she could no longer ignore. Did he think her complicit? Was she to blame for his own misfortune? Swene didn’t see it as that though.

  He wasn’t terribly bright, she thought. Swene’s Ileum might still be fun.

  Jones, his seed refreshed by foul means, a course of witch therapy and excruciating testicular injections, had impregnated bad Nancy, filled her womb with twins.

  Good Nancy was forced into hiding.

  Here now, engaged in some hiatus, she rocked gently, nudging his somnolent form, wanting the world back the way it was before. The good world, the world without murder in it, the world of Palmersville and a private clinic, the world before history itself got fucked, where plots and schemes were smaller and she was in control. It had to be out there somewhere. Finding it would be difficult, but it was where she was headed all along. Jones gambled on her loyalty, on her good self being overwhelmed. The city would devour her. The city had too much to offer one of her tastes. And Nancy had tasted, dipped her tongue and swallowed whole. The delight of it was a recent memory. A disturbing journey. The first of many. No coincidence.

  She’d murdered Silo, he said. At his behest? For her mother’s sake, he said. Her mother? That dark mysterious creature. Who was Silo anyway? Just a man, one of billions, one whose heart she could not recall…

  Her palate had altered, though.

  The Light Of Day

  He decided to tell her everything.

  ‘That's preposterous,’ she said. ‘What happened to Tyrone?’

  Roger didn't know. Shamefaced, he made some lame excuse about a fire drill.

  ‘Well, haven't you tried to contact him?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Give me your phone.’

  ‘They'll come after me!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Molten Lead productions! That's who.’

  Jane calmly assessed his paranoia. Perhaps it was justified. Certainly something peculiar was going on. ‘Okay - we'll go look for him.’

  ‘At two in the morning?’

  ‘Why not? Jesus, Roger, he's your friend.’

  ‘I'm not sure I can go back there,’ he admitted. ‘It's no longer the same place.’

  ‘The morgue?’

  ‘Right. It's full of dead people.’

  Jane's mouth puckered. ‘I thought you liked dead people.’

  ‘Not these ones. They walk.’

  ‘Well, too bad. Let's get going.’

  It took forever to drive to the hospital. She didn't bitch or complain. Roger was just being circuitous.

  The place seemed unusually quiet.

  The only noise was the rush of the incinerator; hospital waste, human remains, parts of sterile packaging and bits of people fuelling the oven.

  Everything was dark, from the lamps in the car park to the windows visible in the hospital's east wing.

  The double doors to the morgue were open.

  Roger Coaltrain was terrified of what they'd find.

  Jane had brought a torch. She shone it, opening the gloom, light bouncing off stainless steel and porcelain. There was the familiar carbolic smell, an odour deathly clean. And a lot of blood, black and shiny under the artificial light.

  ‘Can we go now?’

  But Jane was curious, excited. The danger here present aroused her, bottom lip swollen as she picked her way between tables. Dragging her fingers in the blood she found it sticky. She smelled her fingers. They smelled burnt. She licked them. Tasted fear, her tongue interpreting the chemical shock of a victim's last seconds. He'd been severely beaten, naked and vulnerable, blunt instruments and sharp. Tortured into some confession. Tyrone? Something told her no. There was a noise, a shuffle of feet behind her. She turned. Roger had disappeared. Perhaps of his own accord, she couldn't say. Her torch flickered, its life spent. She gripped it tighter. Shook it a moment, then ceased.

  The darkness intrigued. She moved through it without difficulty, pushing aside soft doors, walking silent passages, pipework clutching their ceilings. She passed through wards whose patients were memories, their physicality removed, through treatment rooms and theatres whose walls still echoed joy and pain, birth and death, separation from organs, the stark realization of cancer cells, amputation, sewing, mistakes too easily made. Silent apparatus, desks, tables and chairs littered the hospital corridors, along with posters advising contraception or warning of infection, their language subtle or blunt depending on the message thus conveyed. The floors were carpeted and tiled, alternately rubbing and squeaking under her shoes. There was a steel basin clatter, sound cutting like lightning as a rat scampered across her toes, others climbing over one another as each took a bite from the mound about which they swarmed. She could hear their teeth tearing, cloth and flesh. There were the scrapes of claw on bone. Not lingering, Jane passed through another door, entered a large open space, a canteen emptied of furniture. Moonlight filled it, streaming in the tall windows, shades of blue-grey casting long rectangular tongues over a fractured linoleum surface. Beyond was the city, mile after mile of it, galaxies and constellations separated by vast tracts of dark. Was there life out there, or was everything dead? She was at the centre of one such void, she realized.

  All the lights would be extinguished in time. Or drowned by greater blazes. It was a question of feeding fires.

  Her torch came back to life.

  A door opened at the canteen's far end, and in rushed a tide of workers, white-coated doctors and blue-banded nurses, a great babble of conversation decking them like tidal foam. They made for the serving benches, polished steel and glass shelves behind which staff in net hats and pinafores ladled from scratched containers foods from across the globe. The smell was overwhelming, rising from pots and casseroles, swelling like a new day, tea and coffee odours, breakfast and lunch bouquets, clouds of steam from dishes cracking the restored light into rainbows.

  This was a different hospital, she saw, as full of life as death, a place where miracles could still occur. If she wandered back down to the morgue what might she find? Would Roger be waiting there? Jane didn't think so. He was a coward. She extinguished the torch and slid between trestles and chairs, dodging people balancing trays. The sun rose over Ileum, introducing a fresh set of circumstances, one as full of possibilities as the last, chock full of events in a myriad of lives, good and bad and indifferent, every second framing love and hatred, nurture and murder, the vast majority of its performers unknown to her, scenes from their lives she would never witness, stories that would go unheard. Jane could only touch so many. People, events could touch her, affect her in a multitude of ways. She had no control over that. But she as an individual still had the right, if not always the option, to choose. And what she didn't like she could rationalize. She could invent names for things too frightening to be called by their own. She was a human being and she could pretend. Reality had no hold on her. She could go with the light or the dark. Both were equally valid. And she could interpret either in any way. The day was at her discretion, to succeed or fail as she wished. It was as she perceived, only her experiences to date left her incapable as yet of determining how that might unfold.

  Outside it was raining.

  Mundane.

  ‘Shit.’ Snatching a newspaper from under the arm of a man in a suit, Jane ran to the nearby Railstation holding it over her head. The pages ran with ink, oily and thick like spilled Guinness. Words stained her fingers with the previous day's misnomers and killings, fact and fiction interspaced with advertisements and cartoons. She didn't dare read the front page. That was someone else’s interpretation. The newspaper was binned under the terminal arch.

  Commuters shuffled on a platform spotted with chewing-gum. Jane sought anonymity among them, bodies functioning independently of others, alone in the city that housed them, ordered them, grouped and dispersed them. Each had his or her purpose, whether instilled or
primal, ambitions and goals they'd either attain or compromise. They collected here awaiting transport, avoiding eye contact with people they'd seen every day for years, as familiar as house plants. Most would sit in the same seat on the train, powering underground in a work-day ritual at once fixed and changeable, governed by a fear of the unknown. Change might liberate them, she thought. A bomb in a suitcase would make them over, alter their physical and mental states. She toyed with the idea, liking it, to be stood here primed to explode, to enforce chaos, the rule of chaos a contradiction - but routine was just chaos contained. Released, its power was manifold. Jane tasted that power. It was the taste of the blood in the dark morgue, the memory of what had happened their alive in her bones.

  She boarded without a ticket, lingered in the gangway, soliciting with her gaze.

  Men were troubled. Less so boys. She chose at random, he nondescript and middle-aged. She made him sit on a toilet and spooned her breasts from her blouse. He tasted her then, tongue washing her nipples, small and sharp. Would she strangle him with his own tie? She couldn't decide. Perhaps it wasn't necessary. She could feel the pull of it, however, that stygian desire. He began unbuttoning her jeans and she angrily slapped his hand away. His eyes shone. Doubt crept over her. He was too strong, too hungry. Pulling her head down he kissed her, biting her lip. She felt his teeth against hers and pushed her tongue against them, tasting the blood, warm and thin in her mouth like wine. He pulled at her jeans again and this time she didn't countermand. They were round her hips, and his thumb inside her, upturned, the knuckle of his first finger rubbing her clitoris. Breath left her hard. She reached round his neck, took hold of his tie and yanked it with all her strength while pushing his head to one side. His skull connected with the aluminium sink. His neck twisted. His thumb locked in her vagina, hooking her like a fish. She beat his head against the sink repeatedly, not loosening her grip; but his own was as fast, even in death, his thumb curled and rigid, embedded in her soft flesh. Jane searched her pockets for a means of cutting it, but found nothing but paper handkerchiefs, bus tickets and loose change. Pushing him upright she went through his jacket, his wallet with the family pics, details of a life ended. A messy respite. There was a nail file and she began cutting away at his hand with that, stabbing the joint, blood collecting in the crotch of her pants. Desperately she hacked, reaching bone and sinew, two fingers over her slick pudendum holding the thumb while she tugged at his wrist. Flesh stretched, eventually tearing, the joint coming apart like a chicken wing. Quickly she mopped up the blood, stuffing his hand in his shirt and hauling her jeans up. Her jacket came half way to her knees, but still there were visible stains.

  The train slowed to a stop. She had no idea where she was. How long did she have? His thumb inside her moved. No, no, it couldn't. She looked at herself in the mirror. The face was Jane's, her own. She recognized it, although it had changed.

  What would Nancy do? she thought. In seeking to emulate her sister, had she gone too far?

  The thumb rubbed her as she walked. She felt compelled to climb an escalator rather than stand and ride the moving stair. It was pleasurable, building slowly, moving her toward orgasm. Emerging into daylight, the rain suspended, Jane pushed her way through crowds of travellers and shoppers. She had to find a doctor, she told herself. But she couldn't; she had no way of explaining this. The thumb would have to come out sooner or later. It would rot in there, poisoning her. A filthy root in her wet soil, it would have to grow or wither, establish itself or drop from between her thighs. Then what would she become? To have this digit sprouting inside her like a worm. It made her feel nice. She accepted that. But it was just part of the invader's rouse. It would feed off her, devour her, and yet calm her at the same time. It was a successful parasite. It had evolved.

  Didn't she deserve it? Hadn't she been bad?

  As a punishment, this lacked hurt.

  She'd compromise...leaning on a stanchion by a kiosk selling multi-vitamins and herbal teas, fresh basil and thyme, bunches of fennel like barbed wire...no she wouldn't. She'd deny the pleasure, forego its rewards, throw herself down a flight of stairs.

  But, ahhh...Janey, Janey...only one man had made her feel this way, New Year's Day, belly sweat-painting a table.

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

  Was she? Perhaps she’d imagined everything, and thinking it smiled. She hadn’t imagined Benny’s cock inside her. No. But this...thumb? It belonged elsewhere, didn’t it? There had been no murder, no crime.

  ‘My love,’ she whispered, eyes watering. She had to find him, Jane decided.

  The woman attending the kiosk spoke to her but she failed to understand. Various tinctures passed under her nose. She was made to sit down.

  ‘Eighty.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Eighty objects,’ the woman repeated, her big eyes knowing. ‘That’s what lie between you and what you crave.’

  One more than seventy-nine.

  Yes, she had her first.

  ‘Relax, dear...’

  He’d had a shaving rash and a side parting.

  ‘Don’t grip so!’

  Odd shoes...

  ‘There now.’ Swishing something round in a pickle jar minus the pickles. Suspended in pale vinegar.

 

  Entertainment Being Illegal

  Cherry smiled her best Molasses smile at Billy Producer. The movie, peculiar from the outset, had taken on a sinister aspect. Still, it was a movie, she told herself, hopelessly reassuring, and Billy Producer had stated the project's oddness, if only recently, as if he'd just realized it himself. ‘We have to be careful...but not too careful.’ Cherry was experiencing the emptiness of Frank, that was all, she was missing her son. Deliberately, she wiped a tear away.

  ‘Okay,’ said Billy, enthusiasm spilling from him like foam out of a pan of boiling milk; ‘what I want you to do now, girl, is demand an explanation.’

  Chance being a fine thing.

  ‘He's your boyfriend!’

  This cartoonist?

  ‘Just what the hell does he think he's doing?’

  His voice was so high Cherry's face felt as if it was being sucked forward.

  Some of the crew were holding their ears.

  Billy, though, just kept shrieking. ‘It's corrupt! He's disgusting! You can't let him get away with this, sure-ly! The man's a criminal, a peddler of filth and misinformation! He's a social disease! He has to be stopped, you hear me, he can't be allowed to go on poisoning the body politic! He must be an-nihilated! And soon...’ The last two words were whispered, soft echoes off a fractured door mirror, glass falling like sharp petals from a chrysanthemum dipped in liquid nitrogen. ‘Get the picture?’

  ‘But what did he do?’ Cherry wanted to know. Of all those present, close and peripheral, acting, pretending, she felt the most at ease at that moment with Billy's temper tantrum. He was trying to frighten her, she supposed. The more he did that, the less vague her situation became. She understood shouting all too well; was, in fact, a bit of a screamer herself.

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Billy grabbed Sam Delaney by the shoulder. ‘Tell the lady.’

  Sam looked puzzled.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Eh, I drew hideous caricatures of those in political office and made a mockery of the achievements of those individuals responsible for, among other things, the betterment of mankind and the advancement of the state in a time of crisis against a background of corruption and repression which said individuals fought with all means at their disposal and at great personal cost to themselves and their families in order that ingrates such as myself might sleep at night safe in the knowledge that those of a higher moral standing were committed to the ideal of democracy and the rule of law and that those base enough to want to undermine the state in whatever fashion would be singled out for correction and/or rehabilitation in accordance with the values of a society as adm
inistered by those very politicians whose sacrifices had earned them the dubious right to be so grossly portrayed, in all absence of decency, justice and truth, by the likes of me.’

  Oh, thought Cherry, that cartoonist.

  ‘Okay, okay...’ said Billy Producer. ‘Enough. It's redemption time, sweetheart; you're in the newspaper game, so's he. Disgusted by his actions, you confront the little shit, demand an explanation, an end to his sick ways, or else you'll expose him for what he is, bring him down in flames.’

  Sam was quaking in his boots.

  There was a commotion a short distance away.

  What, again?

  Men were shouting, running back and forth. There was a scream, a screech of tyres.

  ‘CHERRY!’

  Huh? Stack?

  ‘Fuck!’ Billy nudged Sam Delany's forehead with a pistol and pulled the trigger.

  Cherry vomited, buckling like a hinge.

  A black car thundered by, a man hanging out of each front window, one holding a video camera, the other her husband, mouth held wide by the wind.

  ‘CHERRY!’

  Billy Producer squeezed off a number of rounds.

  The car skidded, slewed, disappeared behind a brick wall.

  Her head spun. The sky revolved about an axis horizontal to a nearby telegraph pole. She felt her arm pulled, was dragged bodily round the pick-up, where Billy unhitched the tailgate and rudely lifted her onto the metal bed, cold with rime, slippery with fluid. Cherry lay back, nausea turning her skull to stone. And yet some part of her was willing to enjoy this. The engine fired and the clouds shifted in a new direction as the pick-up took off, trailing a pall of dust.

  Camera equipment jostled her for space, none of it secured, rolling as she rolled as the vehicle changed direction, throwing buildings up into her eye frame, snapshots laid indelibly across her consciousness each time she blinked.

  Managing to turn, Cherry focused successfully on the beaten steel bed, its scratches and indentations matching those she herself felt, transportational scars gleaned over a lifetime of such journeys undertaken without knowledge of destination, shambolic episodes, adventures on film and in kinema. She'd been in a commercial once where the director had required her naked flank to lie in juxtaposition with a crocodile's snout. That hadn't scared her nearly as much. That was fantasy, the croc sedated with two morphine-saturated sheep. This was very different. Real life had a way of coming awake and chomping down on your arse with the least amount of finesse. Reality knew nothing of foreplay. Consequently, one had to act.

  Billy was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, loosing faster than sound death knells at the car in front, taking out shop windows and passers-by. They appeared to be catching, the black car hitting traffic, mounting kerbs and side-swiping other road users as it snaked its way. Cherry, kneeling, held fast onto the guard at the back of the cab, peering over Billy's shoulder, through two layers of glass. She could see Stack was driving, his passenger in the back seat with the video camera repeatedly falling to the floor, or forward, banging the camera lens off the window. They had to be mad, she decided. Her stomach was steely calm now, her mind razor sharp. There were sodium lamps in the back of the pick-up, a battery, all sliding from side to side in a jumble of telescopic limbs and strangled wires. If she could connect a lamp and shine it in Billy's eyes...

  They collided with something, a person, a soft impact that brought a body slithering over the top of the cab and into her lap. Its face was missing. Cherry shut her eyes and wriggled out from under this newest encumbrance. She wasn't about to be distracted now. Sirens. Blue lights and screaming. The dead person clung tenaciously to a white plastic bag.

  They crashed.

  Cherry and the corpse flew through the air, overtaking Billy as he had to first negotiate the windscreen. Braked by glass, his body tumbled slower than theirs, falling short of the flower stall into which they were flung cleanly and with the extra push of the pick-up as it levered to forty-five degrees on impact with the Ventura, itself having nosedived into a delivery van. The two drivers, Stack and an unknown woman, met in the van's passenger compartment, the woman's neck bent over backward by the weight of Stack as he passed through not one screen but two, crashing in over the her deployed air-bag.

  Henry Eels, having relinquished the wheel and clambered into the Ventura's rear, found himself sandwiched between the back and front seats, trapped amid cardboard boxes and recording equipment, video still running, camera jammed painfully against his right eye. Through the bloodied lens he peered at the pick-up's torn innards, the stump of an arm knotted round the steering wheel. The limb was Billy Producer's, the remainder of him having cleared the Ventura only to land on the roof of the van before sliding, breathing yet, into the gutter.

  Also sucking air were Stack and Cherry. The corpse even had a healthy glow to it, although this was more due to the buckets of dahlias it had fallen among, a colour palette to paint its broken features, reassembling them from petals and plastic fern stems. Cherry lay on her back, legs tucked under her, the fractured uprights of the flower stall about her like a wedding-night four-poster. The base had shattered, softening her protracted descent, for which she was grateful, aromatic and soaked.

  In the van, Stack blinked. He could smell the unconscious woman's breath, hanging in her mouth like the gas cloud in a volcano. He hurt all over, especially his face. Henry had goaded him so much he’d felt he had little choice but to rescue Cherry from whatever it was offering her threat. At high speed, necessarily. He’d show those Metrodine bastards he was a match for any cop.

  A second Ventura pulled up.

  Thorp, all nostalgic, gazed out.

  Floating to earth, an empty angel, came a white plastic bag. He watched it dance, pale and fitful, as if forgetting its moves, or deaf to the music of breezes and car horns. Blue lights reflected grey in his orbits. The bag turned end over end, quiet above the commotion of policemen and fire rescue crews as they set about disengaging the victims of this collision. They went at Henry's car with giant hydraulic pincers, severing the roof from the body and spooning him out, still filming, an insider's view of automotive carnage. Bandages, whiter than even the plastic bag, were wrapped round the skull of the other man, plucked like a root vegetable from the metal and glass growth medium of the delivery van. He was tied to a stretcher under protest, unable to speak properly or to see much beyond the gauze.

  Henry escaped, however, dodging medical help as he ducked under a police officer's grasping arms and began exploring the wreckage, hunting for his subject, tripping over something that moved, a gun in its hand, but not the strength to fire it, enabling Henry to pan around.

  He found what he was looking for and angled for a close-up. Thorp, out of the car now, used his greater elevation to descry a woman, bruised yet conscious, roses in her hair. She looked vaguely familiar. Henry had an ecstatic mien. She was a milestone to him, just like Orangepeel...who Thorp would rather not think about. Not yet. He distracted himself, turning his attention to the man on the ground. One of his arms was missing. He was clearly trying to get up. The raised gun swayed, threatening, but none of the officers crowding round at that moment appeared concerned. They recognized him, despite the blood. Two plain clothes detectives exchanged words on the subject. Billy protested, spilling froth, his mouth awash with white foam. The two suits elected to help him to his feet. Behind them, Henry lifted the woman over one scrawny shoulder, staggered, got his balance and sloped away unseen. He is one lucky bastard, Thorp said to himself, before following the pair, electing to help.

  Stack, meanwhile, was livid, energized by pain. Rolled on his stretcher into the back of an ambulance, he struggled against the restraints, flexing every muscle in an effort to free himself. He had a very bad feeling about the paramedic with the syringe. Her uniform didn't appear to fit. She had a maniacal glint in her eyes. Fury boiled in him. One of the straps broke. She shook her head, admonishing, wa
ving the syringe from which shot a fine jet of liquid, recipe unknown. Stack screamed, tearing himself free as the ambulance pulled away, only to fall back as she stuck him expertly in a finely worked manoeuvre, feinting left, dropping to one knee and bringing the syringe up in a single fluid motion, sticking the long needle in his arse and depressing the plunger before he even knew he'd missed with the rabbit punch he'd aimed at her, collapsing face down on the stretcher, mouth agape and tears spilling, the pressure of fingers at his wrist the last thing he was to feel for a while

  You must be cra-zy, ba.by

  to feel the way you do;

  I must be mad as Hell

  to feel it as well,

  but I know this feeling is true.

  The noise in his brain was at least comforting. And there were pictures, too, scenes from his past he barely recognised. Different.

  He serenaded Cherry, kissing her between versus.

  The world could never be the same again.

  Someone was shaking him.

  It was Frank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who's the lady?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘What lady?’

  He nodded toward the shape under the duvet.

  Stack scratched his face. He needed a shave.

  Franky prodded him, impatient.

  ‘It's your mother,’ he answered, sucking his bottom lip.

  The boy just looked confused. He thought a moment before saying, in his best grown up voice, ‘But isn't she dead?’

  Stack was horrified. He couldn't take his eyes off their son. Franky was too young for jokes, especially sick ones.

  ‘Go to your room,’ he instructed.

  ‘But...’

  ‘Please - go now.’

  The boy traipsed off. Outgrowing his pyjamas, Stack noticed, before sliding out of bed.

  The shape, for that was all it was, lay unmoving. Asleep? Cherry usually came awake at Franky's voice. Perhaps she was ill. He took hold of the edge of the duvet and inched it back. There was her hair on the pillow. At least it looked like her hair. His memory of it was suddenly muddled.

  Now what?

  Franky entered the room again. Clutched in both hands was a bread knife. ‘You have to kill her,’ he said, approaching his father with the blade. ‘She's not mummy anymore.’

  Stack, though, was frozen stiff.

  The figure in the bed shifted, let out a sigh, turned under the cover to expose her face.

  It was his wife. It was sweet Cherry Molasses. How could Franky think otherwise?

  She opened her eyes, deep pools of brown, squinting dozily at her family at the foot of the bed. ‘Is it morning yet?’

  ‘Just gone six,’ Stack replied, glancing at the clock.

  Cherry wiped a hand over her mouth and smacked her lips, grimacing as if at some unpleasant taste. ‘I had the most awful dream,’ she said. ‘I’ve got goosebumps the size of strawberries’

  ‘Huh?’ It was the one sound he felt able to make.

  She seemed puzzled, dismissing it with, ‘I don't know. What's the boy doing up?’

  Stack stared down at his son, the knife pointing up at him.

  ‘Did you have a bad dream too, Franky?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well?’ Cherry prompted.

  There was a long pause, during which Stack's bowels began to tighten and relax.

  ‘Oh, for Heaven's sake!’ blurted Cherry. ‘Haven’t you figured it out yet?’

  Franky dropped the knife. Climbing onto the bed and into his mother’s arms, he cried.

  I must be mad as Hell

  to feel it as well,

  but I know this feeling is true.

  Stack woke up, nausea swilling in his brain. He felt an incredible weight of guilt squashing him. He could hardly breathe.

  It was him the boy ought to have been accusing. Stack the terrible father. When had he last seen his son? he wondered, shame oozing from his every pore.

  ‘Visiting time,’ said a woman, ‘...begins in five moments.’

  His head was hanging off the back of a table, he realized. He was peering at a pale green radiator.

  ‘Hell-o?’ As if getting his attention. ‘Anybody in?’

  Stack gritted his teeth and brought his head up, coming face to face with an enormous tentacled jelly.

  ‘Don’t mind Rudi,’ the woman piped, hovering to his left in her ludicrous nurse’s uniform. ‘He’s mostly harmless. Just no sudden movements, hmm?’

 

  Chapter Seven: The Missing Chapter, Extraordinarily Enough