Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Vanessa wasn’t speaking to him. Redbear too, had vanished. Perhaps he’d found a cheaper off-licence, or changed his schedule. Whatever, his disappearance, along with Vanessa’s umbrage, left Michael feeling lonely. Not that he wasn’t alone already. But this was different.

  He was bored. And boredom was a dangerous, cross-country stage.

  There was no telling what he might do, no guessing in which direction his mind might jump, what fanciful creation or dread vengeance his imagination, in its coarse sensualism and involute madness, might conjure up for him to wrestle with. Ennui was no end in itself, alas.

  He had to keep busy, employ his hands in a constructive process. He picked up scissors and paper and cut out zebras and elephants, lions and giraffes, all of which refused to stand on their own two legs. Crushing them into a ball he tossed this out the window, thence to be attacked by a neighbour’s cat. The paper animals unravelled, and gave as good as they got.

  He couldn’t bring himself to drive. He had no wish to leave home, even for his car and the motion of the road, the blur of traffic and trees. There was something inside he had to do, a necessary thing he was almost aware of, but which kept slipping away, eluding him like thin girls chocolate.

  Like the last piece of an Airfix kit.

  Like paradise…

  Instead he had this: a vista of blue rocks stretching to a horizon not the product of a curve. On each rock an inky pillar, a piece of fruit: apples, bananas, pears, drupes the size of castles, great fleshy edifices whose worms beavered away like monkeys at typewriters, little interested in the world below their feet; smoke rising from chimney stalks and skins shimmering under the fitful, varicoloured light.

  Ramch, at the edge of a desert of bricks, nodded appreciatively.

  Behind him and his army (Michael, the war-horse and a ramshackle of infantry) was a dry expanse of hard red dirt fashioned into elongated cubes by the combined forces of geology (microbes with slide-rules) and weather (precipitation with a central computer).

  Like cigarette smoke, the memory of it – or more properly nicotine – floated in his brain, awaiting, the impatient irregular, its call-up.

  Your Craving Needs You, he projected, huge coloured letters in the grey June sky.

  He’d succumb for sure; it had been less than twenty-four hours. Abstinence motivated by guilt.

  But it was the guilt he was confused by.

  The memory of that, or lack thereof, as his recollection of Saturday was plagued by holes.

  All he could remember was Columbine.

  The masked girl; a superhero. The wife of Harlequin; a fool’s bride. The love apple’s once betrothed…he hadn’t thought of her since she’d failed to return, twelve months now and not a word. At first he’d waited, but as the days passed it became clear she was either dead or unwilling. There was no ransom demand, so that ruled out her abduction by all save aliens – which she believed in, being a Faerie Queen. Michael simply respected her absence. He did not get the police involved, phone all the hospitals or maintain a vigil. She went as she came. No trace of her remained. No photographs, no clothes. Not a razor or a toothbrush. Everything had faded away. There was only the occasional smell. In the bedroom, her hair. In the kitchen, her burnt toast. In the living-room her feet, as she did handstands against the wall, and in the bathroom her elbows, which smelled deliciously of roses.

  He loved her, he realized. He’d told her so and she’d cried. They’d married on a Thursday in the rain. And she’d dissolved, her elbows’ telltale odour smothered by a bouquet of wild onions, cat mint in her hair and parsley between her toes. Michael asked himself if she had existed at all. But yes, in another place and time. Her face was there somewhere in his mind. Her smile, sweet Columbine, found of a morning on a pelican crossing, lost of an afternoon just outside Gretna. The spontaneity of their union was now like a dream.

  A knock at the door split his head open. A second glued his skull back together again and raised him from his chair.

  He answered without thinking, not suspecting a neighbour, Mr Unger-Farmer - or so he claimed - steepling his fingers and chewing his lower lip like an anxious rodent, just the one desire his motivation, the parcel he’d come to claim.

  Michael swallowed hard.

  ‘You have it? Yes?’

  The air behind Mr Unger-Farmer appeared to ripple, as if he had an exhaust.

  Michael lied.

  ‘It’s not here?’

  His eyes were hypnotically big.

  Michael blinked rapidly, countering their glare.

  ‘Are you…sure?’

  Of course he was sure, he replied, fluttering his lids, editing through their shutter action the accuser’s glower.

  ‘But my information…’

  ‘Information?’ he blurted. Someone had informed?

  Mr Unger-Farmer stopped chewing his lip and stood with his mouth open. A change came over him. He was rumbled.

  Phoney, thought Michael. What information? Where was the card from TNT stating the whereabouts of the delivery? Where was the proof of identity, the blood and tissue samples, the retinal scan? Did they think him such a fool that he’d hand over the box without question?

  ‘You, eh, don’t have it then?’

  It was pathetic, this attempt to fool him into handing over private property; even private property that weighed nothing.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  The pretender backed away, visibly shaken. The heat haze intensified, seeming to almost lift him from the pavement.

  Michael closed the door.

  He would have to leave. It was dangerous here. He was being watched. He had to find somewhere safe for the box until the real Mr Unger-Farmer could collect it. In this he could not fail.

  Seven: The Castle Of Victor Formica