‘They pulled you out of the sea,’ said Vanessa, ‘at a reputed cost of seven thousand five hundred pounds.’
She’d brought him grapes, which she sat eating, spitting the pips into the brown paper bag.
He’d been flushed, she delighted in telling him; expunged from the land along with his duffel bag.
‘Did they find it?’
She shook her head. ‘No budget.’
Damn.
‘If it’s any consolation, I lost my shoes.’
Michael decided to ignore her. He knew who she was, after all. And himself? Yes, although a look in the mirror would, he believed, surprise him.
‘You really did it this time.’
‘Thank-you. Now go.’
‘You want me to leave?’
She appeared genuinely hurt. Sadistically, he nodded.
As if this was her cue a nurse came round. Smiling as Vanessa departed, dangling grapes, she pulled the curtains to.
‘I need a blood sample.’
Michael refused. He did not wish to leak.
‘Mr Tomatoes…’ Her tone dismissed argument and he rolled up his sleeve. ‘Not afraid of needles, are we?’
‘No. No – I like them.’
‘Good. And I like rupturing veins. Sorry if I’m a bit clumsy: got the shakes.’
She took the blood, spilling none, and looked at his chart.
‘The doctor will be here soon. If you want, you can ask him for drugs.’
Comedian, he thought, peering at her black shoes.
So this was a hospital. Did it have a name? The curtains back he could see other beds, other patients reading books or cutting toenails, a few with visitors, lineaments at once concerned and bored, babies in laps and toddlers on reins, older children having vanished into some medical laboratory to be the subjects of experiments, the practitioners of which having nothing but the best intentions. There were jugs of water and fruit bowls in abundance. Cards, newspapers. A sign. Handmade.
WELCOME TO WARD 9 – HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY!
The sickoes…
Encouragingly there were no muscled security guards, or bars on the windows, to prevent unscheduled departure
He’d see what was for dinner (breakfast? lunch?) then escape.
In the time and place that was Byrd’s current location, overlooking a dark mass of mangled trees and twisted metal stanchions, the result of an implosion, the adjudicator stroked his chin, peered at the wreckage, twisted a finger in his ear and shrugged.
‘What’s it mean?’
The man questioned shrunk.
I don’t know, was his answer.
‘Puzzling,’ opined Byrd, feeling pleasurably cruel. The man was in extreme discomfort. Probably enjoying it though.
‘Come along.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Let’s take a closer look.’
It was a theatre, or had been, a raised stage in a clearing on whose blood-soaked boards had stood the paraphernalia of execution, the audience crowded in the surrounding boughs or clumped together on the grassy apron, viewing the play from every angle, clapping at each axe stroke and guillotine resonation. The executions were for the most part historical re-enactments. Kings and queens, bishops and revolutionaries who shared a fate strode forth in full regalia or empty skins, calmly tipping their heads, arms and legs into straw-filled baskets, or else screaming dementedly, offended by the act of dying, pleading unfinished business, unresolved love affairs or simply innocence. Always good for a laugh, with the outcome inevitable. Only here something particularly odd had occurred. And seemingly there were no survivors.
Herschel was perplexed; the man, his sole witness, apoplectic.
The committee, any committee, would want answers. Who was behind it and why? Was this an accident?
He certainly hoped not. That really would take some explaining. There were no accidents – officially – in Hell. Just consequences.
Those destroyed by the implosion, and presumably part of the wreckage, would turn up eventually, no doubt miffed at the inconvenience; a blow softened by the uncovered facts of their dispatch, and how clever a plot or cunning an enterprise it was to so remove them. To be involved then would be an accomplishment, something to boast of to friends and neighbours. Accidents, on the other hand, equalled social embarrassment. And the naïve could not be tolerated.
No.
He needed a new identity. Swinging from bedclothes knotted, wondering at the proximity of rose bushes, was probably not the best time to be thinking thus, but the question could not be avoided. It was essential to his future well being. He required a persona both convincing to the world without and commodious to that within. He needed himself not to be himself but someone else. Someone sensible in fact; who he could live with.
Two floors up a knot came undone. Shitty viscose sheets, he thought, lying in manure, winded and with his backside scratched.
Strangely, he lay there counting windows.
Thinking of names. Faces. He missed his duffel bag. He wondered if Mr Unger-Farmer could swim. If there was an ocean in Hell, surely it had evaporated. So no need for life-jackets, snorkels or non-nylon swimwear. A rustle in the bushes turned his head, a hedgehog out stalking worms.
He got to his feet and brushed himself down. His hospital pyjamas were a bit of a give-away, so he ditched them, leaving blank flesh. Paisley was never his thing. He would do well though to find some alternative, and soon. He’d also need money. But a name came first.
He had to think hard about his name. It needed to be the right name, a moniker that was acceptable to his conscious state, that he could use without thought, a reflexive tag allowing no give-away pause. The pyjamas abandoned at his feet were warm, shapeless stitched sections of cloth he raised, examining them more closely as if hunting for clues. There, inside the collar…
Sylvester Orange. Sounded like a cat and a piece of fruit. Sounded like a writer. A poet. A bad one.
Yeah, he liked that…
Poorly rhymed.
Running from the hospital grounds past a somnolent car park attendant, he steered for a nearby public house, flashed through, grabbed a coat and some loose change and got himself part way decent. No repeat arrest, anyhow. The coat covered his balls but not his knees, and despite the month (July by the calendar glimpsed behind the bar) it was chilly. His stomach was full of dumplings and jam roly-poly, complaining bitterly now it was being put under some stress, and Sylvester was forced to evacuate in a derelict bus concourse.
He hoped the tramps didn’t mind. Where did they get their trousers? Maybe he should have asked; but didn’t like to outstay his welcome.
Finding a half-eaten burger he wiped his arse on the carton.
The burger might have been currency in trampdom. Or the tramps might have been vegetarians. Too late now. He would have to learn to recognize underworld commercial opportunities.
He felt his best bet to be the city centre. As the hour progressed and the pubs emptied there were bound to be unconscious individuals of his dimensions. All he had to do was lurk in shadows, loiter in back alleys, until a likely candidate presented himself, too drunk to stand up and too stupid not to lean against a wall under the full glare of main street illumination.
Nature provided.
A little baggy perhaps, and stinking of vomit. But the shoes, now, he dug the shoes.
Open-toed. Karmic…sandals a prophet might wear, a man verbose and challenging. Not in a loud way, but subtle…deeds leading to a future role as possible bishop of Utopia.
Words he could make a career out of, pelted with eggs on street corners, his soap box a cornucopia of wonders…
If he stole a guitar he could busk for silver; if only he knew how to play. Sleeping among pigeons and frightening children, the local constabulary would take it in turn to offer him stern looks. Not wanting to get their hands dirty, they’d truncheon-twirl in accompaniment, threatening yet impotent, as he knew and they knew that t
he pigeons were his, and pebble-dashed helmets were dangerously undermining to the effectiveness of the force. People would take the piss. There’d be a stand-off, birdman and brainwashed in uneasy partnership, citizenry none the wiser, the unclean and the washed each pretending ignorance of the other till one day one or the other forgot the plot.
Sylvester knew no chords, however. He just laughed.
Laughed at the drunk offering him change. Laughed at the sober shaking their heads and rolling their shoulders. Laughed at himself, yet without a spiel. What manner of poetry was that?
Scratching himself intimately, he sighed.
For his part Byrd was pragmatic in the extreme. How many years, what proportion of eternity he had spent in this theme-park-cum-institution, he had no way of knowing, calculating or recalling. What it was that had earned him his tenure was only marginally less obfuscated. Nothing here was relative, an irksome fact if you were given to introspection, but one, under the circumstances, that was for the most part irrelevant.
Who’d want such information? The denizens of Hell were largely concerned with abiding.
Not all. The majority. And majorities counted, even in this perverse democracy.
Everything was discussed openly among those who wished to discuss everything.
The Devil was busy. Upstairs, maintaining his image.
No fun terrorizing the dead.
That was the adjudicator’s job; the threat being eviction.
Byrd couldn’t remember much of his former life other than it had ended violently, arguably prematurely, and that he had expected no soft option. That he’d landed on his feet only kept him moving. Whether his name was even his own was open to question. More likely an epithet a committee had accorded him, their reasoning affected by ennui or self-flagellation. No matter, something had been seen among the remains.
Eighteen: The Oracle
Imbroglio Page 17