Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

SUBVISION

  by Andrew McEwan

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  Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

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  Cover design by Sue Shone

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  1

  Early Sunday morning, what light there was in the room circulating only dimly, void, like the air, of any firm ideas, Scherzo sat quietly reading: eyes strained to the imperfect silhouettes of stains, registering their shapes, their meanings as he would the printed text of a bent-spine novel whose themes were similarly varied and whose letters arranged themselves on every page to the design of a long dead author in a kind of spontaneous conception of words.

  A white knuckle rapped on the dirty window, smearing false initials in the grime. Breaking his silent reverie, it transformed the stains, losing them to the sombre totality of the square room. Glancing up, a figure crouched on a rooftop across the street resolved into a chimney; its bolted aerial quivered, the physical echo of a bird. The knuckle and its brothers composed a wave. Scherzo got to his feet a little shakily and stood before the thin glass. The man on the other side bled from the nose. He was smiling, gums pink and teeth yellow. The world around him appeared disturbed. ‘Open the window!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, Scherzo, open the fucking window! It's freezing out here. Let me in, eh?’

  ‘It's stuck,’ Scherzo replied.

  ‘What? Come on!’

  ‘The window's stuck. It won't open,’ he reiterated. ‘You'll have to use the door.’

  The bleeding man, Wilson Hives, frowned. ‘Your mother would've got it open,’ he complained later, disgruntled, sat plaintively in front of the fire, sucking at its warmth like some satanic calf. ‘Your mother would've gone to the ends of the earth to help me. You know that? You know why, Scherzo? Because she loved me. She was special, a rare kind of person, your mother, the kind of person that would go out of their way to open a window. Stuck or not, she would've found a way.’ He wiped fresh blood from his nose, getting into his stride, a fondness for preaching that had involved him down the years in countless, pointless fist-fights. ‘You know what I'm saying, Scherzo Trepan?’ He was like a mina bird, thought the younger man: stupid and predictable; you always knew what was coming. ‘Your mother's one mistake was you...’

  Scherzo ignored him, filled his water bottle and kept his cage clean, but otherwise behaved as if the avian impresario didn't exist. But it hadn't always been so.

  Scherzo never had dreams. His sleep was impenetrable by such. Often though, in years past, his sister Annie would share her nightly wanderings, wide-eyed over orange juice and cornflakes, tales of monstrous proportions that seemed as vivid to Scherzo as if he'd dreamed them himself, curled like a new leaf in his bed. Sometimes he'd be jealous and convinced she was making it up. But the strength of Annie's dreams lay in their strangely tangible colours, leaking from her ears and nose as she talked, pausing to sip coffee, check the time, hug her pink dressing-gown more tightly about her, its excessive frills jewelled with plastic sequins and edged in fake pink fur.

  ‘There were all these weird shapes crashing into each other. They were ships, on the land, in this ploughed field full of freshly harvested potatoes. It was a battle or something, and they were firing cabbages in place of cannonballs. Anyway, one of the captains, a big grizzled man with a long beard which hid his body, he jumped overboard, right at me. I was caught between two of the ships, a red one and a blue one, and he started waving his cutlass at me, saying he was going to cut me in half. I dodged out of the way but he came after me. Then the ships all melted away, some turning into birds, others into worms, still fighting, struggling back and forth like me and the captain. I threw handfuls of air at him and they exploded like grenades, making chips of the potatoes. There were all these feathers too, I remember, falling like snow until the field was covered and it was like running on a huge duvet. I found this telescope growing out of it and I picked it, turning it on the captain.’ Here she fell silent, as often she would when primed with some choice detail. He could do nothing but sit and wait while she got up, turned a few brisk circles, dressing-gown a-swirl, then sat again, leaning across the breakfast table with a smile. ‘And you know what, who that captain was with the cutlass, threatening to cut me in half?’

  Scherzo had no idea. ‘Who?’

  Annie cuffed her little brother. ‘Him,’ she stated. ‘That man. You know who I mean.’

  ‘Wilson?’

  ‘Him,’ Annie repeated. ‘I wanted to kill him, but all I could do was turn the telescope the wrong way round and look at him through it so he was really small and far off and I could step on him. But then I woke up.’

  Scherzo was angry. He liked Wilson. Wilson had given him a football for his eighth birthday just this week past and not even shouted at him (his mother had) when subsequently he'd burst it after having to climb onto the school roof to fetch it down and tearing a hole in his trousers. He knew Wilson wasn't his father, and Annie resented him for that. But what had his father given either of them? His mother? Scherzo couldn't remember him. Perhaps Annie could; only she wouldn't say. She'd tell him her dreams but not her memories, say, ‘Our Father Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name...’ And glare at Scherzo to sign off with her at the proper moment.

  Together, ‘Amen.’

  Monday arrived. The sun shone. Outside his window rested a builder's van, aluminium ladders tied with nylon string to its chromed roof-rack. The metal frames gleamed dimly, distantly oiled, removed from the new light by a film of dirt and perspiration, shadowed in myriad overlapping veils of boot, thumb, finger and palm prints. Scherzo closed the curtains, strapped on his watch, left the house via the front door. He ran a short way down the narrow street, then cut through a fallen metal fence and a stand of leaning ash trees, the morning breeze in their upper branches like the actions of invisible flying squirrels. Beyond stretched a field, large and green, its fresh grass emerging in clumps, the corroded soil hacked by generations of football boots, cricket balls, shot-puts and javelins. The field was deserted this early. Scherzo crossed to the incinerator plant which rose obliquely from the earth half a mile from the trees, across the river. Camouflaged, contoured and screened, the locals were both ignorant and hostile to its being, no longer sure in their own minds as to either its reality or its position. There had been protests to mark its birth, the population marching, placards raised, slogans devised and acronyms formed, symbolic coffins draped in black plastic daubed with white emulsion skull and cross-bones at the proposal and planning stages, demanding at worst the plant's relocation, out of their backyard, away from their children. And Scherzo had marched with them, in full agreement; but the building work was already underway, the incinerator taking shape below ground, rising imperceptible inches after dark, until eventually it broke the surface, masked and anonymous, subtly shifting the gentle folds of the land. Its presence was quiet. The protests ebbed with time and the availability of accurate information. Public and private concerns evaporated.

  Recruitment was secret. Scherzo was approached in the street one night past eleven, eyes snagged by the siren gleam of a shilling. There followed a lengthy induction, a process often bizarre, always challenging, that climaxed in a vow of mortal silence, the cover of false documents and used notes, cash in hand each Thursday.

  If you were to dig beneath one of the random gorse bushes, chopping at shallow roots and dispersing orange-yellow blossom, puzzled as to the origin and constitution of the increasingly plastic clays, dizzy with effort, you believed, and weary of the search, you would, if you were obdurate, come ultimately upon the brittle hardness of wax-shielded concrete. Not that any casual treasure seeker ever got that far. The top few inches were rich in metal, sown with coins and curiosities, baited with interesting yet valueless objects on
the rationale of open concealment, the lesser surrounding the greater, the certainty of greed over prudence, the knowledge and conviction of deceit.

  It worked beautifully, the unfortunate explorer both dazzled and gassed, departing with minor trophies and a headache.

  Scherzo arrived at the bunker entrance this side of the river and began shuffling his feet. Entry was gained via a series of ritualistic movements, coded steps, pressure points in the earthwork's superficies it was necessary to excite. A silver cage emerged from the fishless water, its roof the bed, shingled and muddy, sliding from the frothed liquid like a diseased refrigerator dumped long ago and here reclaimed, as every weekday morning and occasionally at weekends also, through the medium of Scherzo's beelike dance on the strand. Some morning, he knew, this ritual would fail him; but until that day he would ride the glistening elevator down amid the glutinous loam to his work in the incinerator's caustic heart, there to wrestle with waste and oxygen, to stoke the fires and clean the flues in accordance with his karma. It was dark inside, a perfect blackness. The elevator came to a barely discernible stop, its door slid wide, and in poured the disreality of subterranean lights. The improbable fastness. He shaded his eyes from the inferno and sidled rightward, feeling his way, reading the temperature and coarseness of inlaid pipes and peeling walls, tickled by motes and irritated by sound, noises of men and machinery, indistinct patterns of shift and function, with the latter overwhelming the former, a god to the assembled penitents and worshippers. Scherzo found a handle and turned it, entering the creamy demesne of the rest area, its placid atmosphere soothing. He headed for his locker, number eight.

  ‘Hey, Scherzo, want a coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he replied, fumbling with the peeling locker's catch.

  ‘Three sugars, right?’

  ‘Three,’ he echoed, gaining access, ‘right.’

  He pulled on overalls, stepped into boots, carried gloves and goggles in his moulded hat, red and plastic and shaped exactly to the peculiarities of his skull. Everyone had their own. They varied in shape and colour as well as size and thickness, relief moulds around which the hats were baked relative to the wearer's job and situation within the labyrinthine plant.

  ‘Here,’ Ruth said, passing him an equally plastic mug. ‘You're early this morning. I only just got off.’

  He shrugged and drank.

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘What makes you ask?’ queried Scherzo, face misted by coffee fumes.

  ‘You look tired. I've never seen you look tired. Your expression is fixed somewhere else, like there's something in the world you'd rather not know about.’

  ‘What if there is?’ he rejoined, irritated by her stabbing truths. And he hadn't even been thinking about anything in particular...

  She sat on the table, upsetting used, discarded mugs and greasy plates, a fork clattering to the bare concrete. ‘I can help you with it,’ she said. ‘But you have to want to tell me. You have to be honest, holding nothing back, or whatever I say or do will prove useless.’

  ‘Another time,’ Scherzo urged, gripping his mug.

  ‘Now you're being deliberately evasive.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Come on,’ she purred, ‘tell auntie Ruthie all about it.’

  ‘There's nothing to tell,’ he stated.

  She squeezed her lips tight, then smiled widely. ‘You don't trust me, Scherzo. Is that it? But you know you can.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘That's not fair,’ admonished Ruth. ‘Come on - what's preying on your mind?’

  Her eyes were like drills, diamond tipped. Her hair was pushed back, uncovering her white brow, a line where her hat had been, a subtle shading of sweat and dust. He held her gaze, shared no words, imagining her spread naked across the table, the purer tones of belly and hip. Maybe she would pick up on it and fold, Scherzo thought. Or maybe not. Ruth was not so easily out-manoeuvred. Such crude tactics as he employed served only to harden her resolve. She'd get her way. He began to tremble; his face to redden. Her eyes dropped briefly to his feet as if to undermine him and that smile illuminated him like a spotlight, the future writ large and in teeth.

  ‘You finish at six?’

  ‘Six,’ he confirmed, defeated, the coffee tepid when next it touched his lips.

  ‘I'll meet you on the outside, Scherzo Trepan. We can talk then,’ she instructed, regardless of cameras and recording equipment. ‘In the park, by the big oak tree. I can soothe your nerves and you can tell me everything.’

  His blushing was out of control now.

  ‘Seven-thirty,’ Ruth concluded. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Seven-thirty.’

  The bitch.

  Steam enveloped him, cut him adrift from the interior world of the incinerator and its nebulous occupants, those companion souls he seldom encountered. The soot-laden air spun voiceless frenzies before being sucked clean, the vents whistling all round, housed in every available surface. Through these holes, temporal passages to the Other Side, Scherzo could hear and see the conveyors, snatches of motion between the omnipresent pipework, heavy with refuse on its way to be screened and sorted, its usefulness measured, sieved and shredded at the behest of independent, self-programming computers, by robots, so as to maximize the efficiency of the waiting ovens.

  The hours went quickly, a blur of vignettes: revelling, demonic clouds and vaporous cavorting, pallid goblins and sweltering flibbertigibbets, disembodied bugaboos, imps, ogres, lycanthropes and ghoulish familiars, all paramours of Satan. Energy switched in every corner of this distended environment, in hands and lungs, the magnified, intense howl of the furnace as heat was crushed from matter, pressure from heat, electricity the sole means of survival, a totality of sparks that was non-stop and yet motionless as everything moved at the same speed, in the same unstated direction, a wonderful confusion of sequence that served like Scherzo and his brotherly co-workers the whim of official momentum.

  It came as a welcome respite, the perfect blackness of the elevator. Riding in that wall-less box, separated from either dimension, neither on earth or in space, Scherzo could relax, allow his corporate body to unwind and ultimately disassemble, to step from the river a less encumbered creature than that of seconds before. He'd glance at his nails then, striding airily up the field toward the goalposts and buildings, wondering at their ragged shortness. He'd come to his front door and it would be opened, the ghost of his father extant in the hall. He'd prepare a meal, bathe, watch television, still with the elevator's quietude cloaking the axle of his mind, the wheels turning smoothly, disguised as ears. And he'd fall asleep eventually, in his own bed under floral sheets full of spring odours courtesy of the washing-machine on any other night but this, any night that wasn't, from the outset, to be different.

  But he wouldn't dream; so maybe it was worth the trip. He'd keep his date with Ruth and extend the bounds of his evening, take a chance and dip his fingers in the magic tombola, twist his fork in the plate of spaghetti that was fate and perhaps, if he was lucky, win a goldfish or a balloon.

  2

  Doctor Mood looked in on his patient a little after seven, fresh from the theatre where he'd been to see the final dress rehearsal of a new play he hadn't thought funny and as such had had to sneak out near the end. The play had been written by an ex-colleague, Ambrose Peters, whose sense of humour and timing (heart in! heart out! what's this left over?) appeared to have suffered since their days together at the hospital. It was some years now since they'd gone their separate ways, Peters into writing full-time after winning a competition the theme of which escaped both Ambrose and the judges, Mood into the lucrative realms of private practice, screwing his mostly elderly patients for every penny he could. He was constantly amazed at their willingness to cough up more than blood, pay cash in advance, listen attentively while he explained the necessity of signatures to terminal cases, cheerfully accept the exorbitant prices he routinely charged, and generally fall at his large
feet such was the demand for his somewhat unorthodox, not to say controversial services. It was not unusual for him to treat a patient at home. He owned a sizeable property, detached and crumbling on the outskirts of town, lived alone but for a tribe of cats he wasn't sure belonged to him, had an arrangement with a local couple whose names he always forgot, who cleaned and tidied his abode, inside and beyond, the garden, he felt sure, gateway to another planet, in return for his maintenance of their corns. To these he applied linseed oil, baking powder and the occasional sweep of a file.

  Presently the doctor administered to his newest patient a carefully measured dose of home-made chocolate, the recipe for which had been his grandmother's dying secret, revealed to him under the knife of his lone presence. Mood had never liked the old witch, but had long coveted her store of remedies, a pharmacopoeia the mass of which still eluded him. Essentially, the chocolate was a means of transference, as it was the secret ingredient that mattered here, as specified by grandma. He'd made sure of her burial; that was his promise, to position each of her limbs and organs in the place of her choosing, at the exact depth and map co-ordinates, in the precise orientation of, she explained, her rebirth. Fear had ensured his compliance. Fear and satisfaction. Thinking of her, sat at this other woman's bedside, reminded him oddly of the play. A predictable commentary on the times, its subject matter might be seen as a leitmotiv for much contemporary art and literature, a crude dissection of alien minds and motives whose purpose was to degrade, to exploit the fascination the world understandably had with its visitors, by chance to entertain. An invisible enemy, the aliens had been given more shapes than a child's year old cache of Plasticine, more names and misnomers than any bodily function. June 20 would be the second anniversary of their landing. And, reasoned Doctor Mood, they had yet to lay waste a single city. On the contrary, there were rumours, officially denied, that repair work had begun on the Amazonian forests, that hitherto lifeless deserts had sprung tender green shoots - only to be trampled by a clique of African governments who cited locusts as the reason behind their shelling. But it was the knurled inhabitants of these same deserts who dropped like new rain, as locusts, quite inexplicably, had dwindled to nothing.