Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Chinks of light or slivers of dark? An elephant out walking an ostrich. Or was it the other war round? The bellicose frogs of the fourth dimension. All these things could be viewed from under a railway arch.

  Cars snaked on and off the neighbouring bridge, its paint flaking, the heads of rivets exposed and rusting.

  Smoking once extinguished cigarettes he sat cross-legged on a sheet of polythene, raising a can of Special Brew to his lips infrequently and marvelling at the generosity of masons, long dead bricklayers, their legacy both a roof and a thoroughfare, cemented in a preceding century with the casual abandon of erectile philanthropists. Hey, we can afford it! They stuck stones together magnificently, generous in their art, contoured and geometric, each with a secret history.

  The cars lit up a vault of stars. Trains tested their security.

  Victorian…

  Nearby, on a similarly locomotive wall, was fastened the number 7.

  The first of his eight visitors arrived.

  Shirley, she said her name was, gap-toothed and bedraggled, with a tattooed breast and a limp, yellow fingers and a purple orbit.

  ‘The minister socked me,’ she told him, adopting a little-girl-lost accent, sniffing through one nostril at a time. ‘Couldn’t remember me vows.’

  ‘Yes, but what is it you want?’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Just an explanation…’ Tearful, even, wearing her thumb on her lighter.

  ‘You were too young to marry, and too wicked,’ intoned Sylvester, cadging a flame from her torch. ‘God has another purpose.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Who else? You’ll find it…’ he paused, ‘…under a nineteen-eighty-nine Ford Escort; blue with cloth seats and sports trim.’

  Thanking the oracle, she departed.

  Next came twins. Boy and girl, Colette and Steve, teens, difficult to say which was which either vocally or facially. Only the girl had tits. Displaying them, their means of income, that and her pubescent rhubarb patch, the pair appeared proud, if only chemically.

  ‘I’m keeping a diary,’ she said. ‘There’s too many names to remember. And all the faces look alike; same twisted expression.’

  ‘Fucking guilt,’ her brother chipped in. ‘But at twenty quid a throw, better than knobbing the babysitter.’

  All very interesting. But what did they want?

  ‘I’m pregnant. Don’t know whose, so blackmail’s out of the question. Want to know if I should I have an abortion?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he replied, not having to consult the bones.

  The twins talked behind hands.

  ‘That’s it?’ inquired sister.

  ‘You don’t have to pay me anything,’ answered the man cross-legged.

  ‘But…’

  ‘The father’s a racehorse owner from Doncaster,’ he gave up reluctantly. ‘And yes, I’d appreciate some of the action. Next!’

  Drug dealers and cat burglars and suicides. Sylvester dispensed advice gleaned from the scaffold of a chicken, laying his hands on and charmingly deflecting abuse. They whispered crimes, threatened violence, left puzzled but satisfied. Payment was optional. He had no use for stolen watercolours but was sympathetic toward cold hard cash. Each story was a misery, balanced between the innocent and the scatological, an unpleasant theatre of lives crushed and perverted; often through choice, misuse of resources, the sad result of too much or too little information.

  He ought to write a book about it, he thought. Knowledge, false or true, had the power to both expand and diminish.

  ‘Mr Orange?’

  He’d counted eight, surely.

  The twins were one it seemed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My life has been short,’ she said. ‘And now unresolved.’

  She frightened him, this child.

  He found himself without words.

  An insect buzz reverberated round the arch. Loudest behind his right ear, an electric hammering of wings, the static of fear coated him in bristles which the insect’s unseen presence then stroked, spines buried deep in his flesh like the electrodes of his soul, positive and negative growths here shorted, crackling and warm. Smoke drifted about him. The girl stared wide-eyed.

  ‘Mr Orange?’

  She wanted an answer.

  He perspired.

  She parted her blonde curls, fastening the curtains behind her ears.

  ‘I can get it for you,’ he said. ‘I know a path, a way over.’

  It was a promise. Listening to himself Sylvester wasn’t sure what he’d said, what that entailed. It was fear talking, a fear he’d forgotten but which hadn’t forgotten him. Its voice was his own.

  ‘Thank-you.’

  The buzzing lessened and the girl departed.

  He gulped the remainder of his Special Brew.

  She wanted her resolution and had charged him with the task. But how to find such a thing and where to begin to look? Had he lied just now? He didn’t think so. He had the words; they had been his. Wasn’t he the prophet? Sylvester had to justify the mantle. This was a test. But the only path he knew was down to the river, and the river led out to sea.

  He lit another foreshortened cigarette. There were tunnels under the water, passages composed of bricks. And the ghosts of masons? Perhaps, or miners, stout men like pit props, candles on their helmets and canaries, ponies as companions down among the glittering coal. He could trust those, blackened children dragging bogies while their father’s swung pick-axes, generations of men poisoned and choked. That would be his route, beneath the river, following crumbling sewers, exhausted seams, the restless dead to guide him.

  ‘Who is this character?’

  ‘Some man’s psychoses…’

  ‘Living or unliving?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Not sure?’

  ‘We don’t have him on record. Most likely a manifestation, the consequence of trauma and bad blood.’

  Thus the mayhem. But Herschel remained sceptical; as was wise; his fellow adjudicator might easily be playing him for a fool, the naked sword-wielding fellow a resident (he fitted the profile) and therefore up to no good.

  Tread carefully, was the maxim. His collar felt tight.

  ‘Any idea where he is now?’

  His peer just shrugged. ‘I wash my hands of it,’ he said.

  ‘Most kind.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to step on your toes, Byrd, now would I?’

  The plot thickened. Herschel was intrigued, assuredly, but couldn’t help thinking he was being targeted somehow. That glint in the whore’s eyes, an expression captured in her portrait; these were clues to his fate, if obfuscated.

  If it was true this man had fought his way in, was he at the vanguard of a greater force, an invasion? That might wake the committee - had it yet been formed - from its complacency. An attack on Hell could only be launched from one place, Earth, the upstairs living world, a notion so bizarre as to undermine every tenet of miscreation the Devil Himself regarded as set in stone. He might only guess at the aggressor’s motives. Revenge, as ever, was applicable. Incursion as a result of rejection? A failed applicant? Bizarre. Byrd had though to go with the idea that the man operated alone. There would have been rumours otherwise. A greater force would have alerted those agents on the upside.

  Nineteen: Misnomer