Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

He’d left his glasses…in the car? He had some sunglasses in there for sure. But his normal pair? They weren’t on his face; failed to recall when last he’d been aware of them sitting on his nose, holding on to his ears. Must have lost them somewhere.

  Vanessa’s, that was it, along with his clothes.

  In a fire.

  A conflagration, the black horse stamping amid raging coals, smoke and steam venting, the ground erupting, baking orange and yellow dissolving in a white-hot maelstrom of…corduroy. Two Japanese delivering pizza menus. Well, that’s one way to earn a crust. Vanessa slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go.’

  The Japanese, boy and girl, regarded him strangely.

  He thought of the pizzas unborn, awaiting an order. A strange mode of procreation; just a phone call away delicious thin-based cheese ‘n’ tomato pepperoni with green peppers and mozzarella.

  Parents, these days.

  He was hungry. There came an ice-cream van, jingling merrily up the road.

  The Japanese shivered. Sympathy for the frozen children, the stillborn progeny of milk and sugar, silent and cold.

  It was sinister, he thought.

  The colours seemed to pale, bleaching away as if sucked. Strawberry, lemon and lime, banana and blueberry leeched from the world as if at the insistence of a mouth and tongue, the ice-chilled reality of flavours bleeding down a throat of fear. Michael felt himself pale. He looked at his hands and they were white. Vanessa eyes were colourless, opaque spheres. She was blind – blind to what was happening around her, at least. Her gaze was fixed on the surface, the shimmering, oily superficies that offered the illusion of depth but was in fact flatness. Safe then, spared the vague realm of the underneath, the subvisual dimension of possibilities in which he was forced to live; or exist; no life as such, just an indeterminable phase of breathing when aware of breath, sleeping when aware of sleep, finding himself herein, discovering himself lost. No place to abide. Best send a substitute.

  Name?

  ‘Hey…or you coming or not?’

  She brought him back.

  To lose her, he realized, would be a mistake.

  But it was out of his hands. The ice-cream man, impatient, drove on.

  He was watching again, drawing, describing what he saw in swift strokes of charcoal, interpreting all and misrepresenting some. It was ever the way; there was no quota for accuracy. The pink man had fought his way through a series of trials, decapitating man and beast, opening stomachs and sharing their contents with the black horse, before reaching these walls, height immeasurable, breadth unimaginable, each stone a wall itself, elongated and rough, like skin cells under a microscope, singular, each possessed of a life of its own, all the information needed to construct the entire gargantuan defence. And he had to scale it somehow, find a way through or over. For this was the boundary wall of Purgatory and beyond lay the precincts of Hell.

  Ramch sat with his back to it, having struck sparks with his sword. There was no cement between the bricks; not as he knew it. There was a coruscated mass of flesh and blood, penitents squeezed from both sides: some trying to escape, others trying to get in. He’d have to fight his way through.

  ‘Angular boy.’

  ‘Van…’

  It was what he called her, waking in her arms, falling asleep in her lap, outside of space and time where the mathematics didn’t count.

  1+1 = 2.

  There was no escaping it, however.

  Like infinity…

  1-2-2-1 or 2-1-1-2; or 1-2-2-1 2-1-1 2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1; or 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2; and so forth. Might as well be oranges and pears.

  Orange-pear-pear-orange.

  Pear-orange-orange-pear.

  Where each value could be represented by a set, the pattern remaining constant.

  O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O; or P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P.

  More simply: oppo or poop; or oppo-poop-poop-oppo; or poop-oppo-oppo-poop oppo-poop-poop-oppo oppo-poop-poop-oppo poop-oppo-oppo-poop.

  Where oppo = 1 and poop = 2.

  Ergo: oppo+oppo = poop.

  No wonder he had a headache.

  Little wonder she thought he was nuts.

  Vanessa had a plan.

  ‘We can borrow my sister’s car; she doesn’t live too far from here.’

  ‘You have a sister?’

  ‘Two actually – but that’s another story. She won’t mind as long as I promise to bring it back.’

  She looked at him sceptically when she said this. Michael nodded.

  ‘Come on. It’s nearly three already.’

  He shouldered the duffel bag and followed her lead. The main street was full of shoppers, variously dressed, gambling on the weather, and they crossed unmolested, cutting through back lanes and side streets until they came to a big house by a cricket ground, some twenty minutes later. Michael spent the time going over the contents of the bag in his mind, a survival kit of tinned fruit and teabags, chocolate bars, clean socks, various T-shirts and lightweight camouflage netting, a false moustache and a Swiss army knife along with a tube of toothpaste, soap, a selection of drawing pens, permanent markers, a compass of his own design (unperfected…) and a packet of condoms, ribbed for her pleasure.

  That was about it really; although he couldn’t remember when last he’d checked the contents, so doubtless some details had changed.

  Nobody home. Vanessa had a key. She made him wait by the garage. Minutes later the wide aluminium door levered open. The car’s engine started. ‘Get in.’ And they were underway, decided…

  In which direction the woods lay, at least; Michael was sure of that. Vanessa too, who’d been dragged through nettles and across streams, mud to her knees, in order to view two trees wrapped entirely in tinfoil, glimmering magically, blue and purple in the late evening sun, dancers poised in metal skirts and slacks, fingers outstretched, heads thrown back.

  The love apple often came out this way. Usually alone, at night. ‘To converse with owls,’ he joked.

  He knew it well, but still couldn’t remember where he’d parked.

  ‘Where do you normally park?’ she quizzed.

  ‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I just stop and get out.’

  So they did, coming to rest by a toppled gate, plagued by midges and inhaling dead bark and live sap.

  Cloud-shadow dimmed the light.

  ‘Now what?’

  He picked up a stick and pointed. Bending one knee he thrust. Sentiment du fer…

  In the space between the stones the bodies lay thick. Not all of them moved; some had long since given up, choosing to rot where they sagged or, more originally, desiccate. Ramch, without his horse, the black beast stationed beyond the wall as it was too big to pass, probed with his long sword, tickling a stench of body fluids and crystalline, stringy guts. The damned rose at him, seemingly out of reflex, and he cut them back like grass. Progress was slow, yet steady, the traffic a maelstrom of decay, increasingly lubricious, the slime of putrefaction a packing grease, the odour of death a surface oil, a suppuration crushed from the pores of all those crammed into this humanly negative bearing race. There were cavities, dark recesses where only smells moved. There were narrow cataracts where it was necessary to separate limbs from torsos and heads from necks.

  Fires and floods.

  ‘Here’s some tyre tracks,’ Vanessa said. ‘Recognize them?’

  He thought it an absurd question, but not wanting to upset her kept his mouth shut and looked. The rubber’s spoor impressed earth once sodden now set, rolling handprints whose palmistry he read with an uncanny depth, picking shaped nodules of soil and crushing them between his fingers, the faecal remains of countless miles, smelling his digits and pursing his lips. It was his car all right. He planted the stick
in the ground and dropped to his knees.

  ‘Yes?’

  Michael imagined himself passing this way, seated eighteen inches above the soft loam and its tell-tale prints. He stepped inside that head, that time; but the image was as unclear as the event. Recalling his portfolio sharpened the focus, only not enough. Lacking in detail if not definition was an impossibly stark outline in the distance, way beyond anything he was accustomed to seeing, the silhouette of a man about whom the world collapsed. A cut, a rent, the figure stared back.

  ‘Hey…’ She prodded him with a foot.

  ‘The other side of those trees,’ he said.

  ‘You can see it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s there?’

  He shrugged. Toting the bag he wandered off.

  ‘Wait!’

  She was ill-pleased, only laughing. Annoyed, if effervescent.

  The clouds multiplied.

  There was a chill wind like breath…the breath of the anti-Claus, the love apple was reminded, a story of childhood terror welling up from his shins; Christmas in Hell courtesy of an aunt who mainlined speed and necked Pernod, the smell of aniseed vomit-inducing…

  Santa Claus the bastard, and his kick-arse reindeer!

  Old Nick in his red boots, drinks blood this time of year!

  (sotto voce)

  All the little children, curled up in their beds

  Better watch the chimney…

  Or they’ll wind up dead.

  Santa Claus the bastard, no presents in his sleigh!

  Just the hearts of boys and girls, beating to this day!

  He shivered.

  That aunt, the inspiration behind a series of anti-Christmas cards he’d produced (Xmas Sucks! Burn the stable!), had hanged herself New Year’s Eve. Not a happy memory; but useful all the same.

  ‘Wipe that smile off your face, young man!’

  Yes, auntie.

  ‘Come walk on my spine…’

 

  Vanessa was waving her hand in front of his blanked visage. It was raining. The clouds, tightly bunched, leaked.

  The car had no windows and was on bricks. The passenger door was missing, as was the rear parcel shelf, the bonnet and sundry engine components.

  But the box?

  Twenty feet away, dented. Michael breathed a sigh of relief, temperature uncertain, turning the multi-stamped and franked parcel over in his hands, holding it to his ear and shaking it. Nothing rattled. As before. Still, it was reassuring.

  Opening the duffel bag he placed the box inside. Vanessa held an A to Z, using it as an umbrella.

  ‘Can we at least get in the car?’

  He was puzzled. ‘Mine?’

  ‘No, stupid; mine.’ She rolled her eyes.

  It sounded like a good idea. But Michael had other plans. Water ran into his mouth, clear and fresh, streaming down his face, neck and chest like coldly pulsing veins, the fluid nourishing, his skin taut, grateful of the speeding life-stream that brought vigour to his muscles and colour to his flesh.

  Inhaling, he felt his bones bend.

  The expression on Van’s face was scything.

  Seeing it he ran away…

  Through streams and rivers, across an aqueduct funnelling semen to a womb magnificent and ordinary, from which sprung the demonic host, familiar yet strange, a species apart, only part of the species, quietly counting their change.

  Toward a pylon, a mile hence, radiating messages in a language unrecognizable to anyone in a vegetable state, pulses intangible to a closed mind, one with no doors, only shutters, electromagnetic voices across a vista of ash, beech and oak, silent words the love apple interpreted as kind – but which might as easily be cruel, like a girl’s smile.

  But what a girl! Charged, this woman, with everything a man could desire, electric in her instance, bilingual in her charm, floating dovelike on one’s arm, the apostle of love laid bare, shaved and manicured, a dizzying waveform given substance through the medium intervening, in this manifestation, air, the ghost of wet-dreams and solitary afternoons, of too much drinking and insufficient…reality…stubborn and life-threatening, the rain hammering on his head, the focus of his desire a fixed structure of painted steel lethal in its work and fastened, by bolts large enough to be clothes’ poles, to the earth.

  He ran through bracken, wetly exuberant, tripped once over a fallen larch, its former self a carcass giving rise to fungus, ants scurrying, leapt twice a stream that doubled back, but which he outmanoeuvred, thwarting its trickery, and in three minutes – or so he reckoned, watchless – made it as far as a field and a fence. The pylon hummed, inviting him near. But the fence was barbed wire. Michael’s lungs heaved. Not to be outdone he looked left and right for a gate or stile. None. The wire ran both sides of stained wooden posts, four feet high. It was not meant to be crossed. He could try cutting it, he thought, only that seemed like cheating. This was a test of the pylon’s making, her metal strung, meshed and tined. Standing on the lowest wire he found it strong enough to take his weight, yet flexible enough to throw his balance. He pictured himself caught like a rabbit in a snare, having to chew his leg off to escape. The fence was an instrument, with strings not for music but torture, chords determined by the struggle of its prey, a fearsome sieve here erected to keep ill-suitors from the warm steel embrace of the goddess. Her electricity wasn’t free.

  She mocked him. She dwarfed him. The rooks on her arms shat their displeasure. He was unworthy, they told him.

  Michael shook his fist at her entourage. He threw stones. They only circled and laughed. They were too high.

  The sun broke through, radiating off her frame.

  The rain stopped, the last drops shattering into a rainbow.

  His heart hurt, he found, losing it in his chest a moment. Did it move around? The pain floated in and out of focus.

  Calmly, he walked, the detritus about him spewing foam. Pieces of meat hung from the sword, its toothed edge with a visceral coating, its straight edge reflecting the gleam of innards ruptured, its runes varnished with excreta and its central channel mired with the clingy residue of skulls.

  Beasts there were, tormentors, ghouls to chase the many, most whose direction was forgotten, if ever known, their drooling nightmares hunting them down twisting stone corridors, byways in the wall Ramch avoided, mindful of being side-tracked by the entreaties of innocent-seeming children, small and afraid. It was him they should fear, the pink man daubed with gore, who even the monsters proved shy of, thinking him one of their own.

  But still the smallest hands were upraised, as if begging water. How did they come to be here? he wondered, recognizing it as weakness. He was not here to defend. He was just passing through. Hell itself, in all its carnal bleakness, was his destination. Hell, where he would be told…

  And the question?

  A stinking reptilian creature snatched a child in its jaws. Singular in years, she did not scream.

  No time.

  He brought the metal down, slicing it in half. But by then it was too late; her pain, now his, was real.

  Magnified, blossoming with detail, the world moved beneath, written in footprints and described by soil, grass and insects as a place where feet might tread, a mutable landscape composed of individuals, assembled from shapes and contours. Crushed, malformed, corrupted. Blighted by too hot summers and too cold winters. Ravaged by disease. Beautiful any time of the day, the light playing off dew drops and butterflies’ wings. Wasted. Rotten. Perverted, thorns made to inflict pain, suffering in a wave of poisons, from a myriad insect bites, swamped by horror as is nature’s law…survival of the fittest.

  Interpret, he thought; or imagined, pacing toward a horizon glittering with yellow broom and red poppies, a circus tent of the afternoon, albeit waning, spangled and mottled, clowns inside, jugglers and magicians, all manner of performers about to perform: what lay over the horizon a curtain call.

/>   Ramch plagued by ideas, haunted by consequences, coming from every side the misconceived, the misinformed, the hollow souls of foot soldiers only following orders, the deaf and the blind, those with excuses and those with shame, those whose skin burned, guilt weighing heavy on their shoulders, those that professed pink to be blue and those who lied about their shoe size, a raft of would-be Cinderella’s choked by conscience, troubled by sisters more worthy perhaps, having lied to their fairy godmother, having claimed what was not rightfully theirs. Souls in torment, here embroiled, a neverness of culpability theirs to enjoy. No wonder they screamed. The air, the voice, the torment was pulled from their lungs. They wished to escape, to pass beyond the wall, to find sanctuary. But the wall was a maze.

  The pink man was deafened.

  He killed and mutilated.

  It made no difference. Not here. Here the dead and lame were commonplace.

  He slept in a ditch and woke to a new day, not knowing its name.

  He had the duffel bag.

  Damp but not cold, he rolled onto his arse and straightened his eyes, focusing on a cow more white than black; easier to look at that than colour, this neutral bovine.

  Something told him he was in trouble, but how deep or bad he was unable to gauge, brow furrowed, mouth askew, wondering at all the things that had gone before, most of which he’d forgotten, the knowledge of his empty memory an irony he appreciated, yet one which poked him as if for fun. The image of a dead man in a garden came unbidden. A dead man with a beard. A woman and a cat, perhaps one and the same. A dark nemesis, determined and strange. They crowded his consciousness. But what pulled at him, what tugged was a feeling of belonging, of positioning, of noise from a stream.

  Water. It marked the way.

  Thirteen: Frequency Molestation