August, and the start of a new football season, the sky intermittently blue, the earth mostly brown and green - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Only there was a sickness abroad, a degenerative fever.
She’d seen it weeks ago in menswear, the lethargy of women, their indecision over underpants translating into nervous ticks and a sudden drop in the shoplifting statistics. They just couldn’t make their minds up: Y’s or boxers, cotton or lycra? A malaise had descended, a perplexing, nervous undertone that addled their usually focused intellects, casting doubt over the accepted fact that they knew best when it came to their menfolk and the cradling of their genitalia.
What with all the shit Michael was giving her she hadn’t paid it much mind. But now, his disappearance total, Vanessa was quickly becoming obsessed, developing a passion for inquiry and a determination at odds with her burgeoning theory of civilization’s decline.
She alone appeared interested. Her focus sharpened while other’s became vague.
Or so she thought. Thinking was a trap you could fall into, leading in ever smaller circles. That had been Michael’s problem, one he tried to resolve through his art, externalizing his inner conflicts and thus diluting their threat, nailing his demons to paper and reshaping the casualties of an overactive imagination. He was always chasing himself, perpetually confused by the simplest details, reading into everyday occurrences the happenings of cosmic events. Conspiracy theory, it took his nascent paranoia out to lunch.
So thinking was dangerous? Perhaps only to men, who had enough strange ideas as it was. Not to girls of a practical bent. Vanessa would cope…
She’d coped with Redbear right enough. She’d coped with the police before and after Michael’s initial, and ultimately soggy, vanishing act. And she’d coped with Michael himself, her infuriating love apple discovered in a skip amid mouldy seat cushions, a lampshade on his head.
And now? Lunch break, girl talk, all thought of Michael put to one side while she concentrated on the slipping attention spans of her work-mates.
Here was Susan, for instance, previously infatuated with her boyfriend, a man twice her age, divorced with three kids. Susan was moved to love him having admired his skill in coping with and steering two, three and five-year-old boys through a Christmas wonderland of giant snowmen and clockwork reindeer. How well he coped, she’d related, with the voracious appetites of his children, steering them clear of the more breakable displays and rationing their chocolate elf intake. Regardless of need, she’d felt compelled to offer her services there and then. What followed was a romance out of fiction, even down to the great sex and the dozen roses. She began listening to Radio 4 and studying Renaissance art through the medium of the Open University. They’d planned an autumn wedding. Until: ‘He caught me snogging his brother. He’s got a Porsche…’ Vanessa doubted if Susan could even remember the names of the kids.
Mandy, doing her nails, looked up from her magazine to ask what “cunnilingus” meant.
For a girl with her predilections, a crying shame.
And her boss…peering now out of one eye at his watch, back straight and notepad at the ready. His timekeeping was legend.
It hadn’t always been, she recalled; securing a promotion had changed him from a laid-back floor-walker to an even more laid-back supervisor, until around Easter when suddenly he’d developed a keenness for punctuality. Something of a joke at first. But threats of disciplinary action soon followed.
The girls came to order, sweeping crumbs from blouses and cleaning tables, washing cups and arranging chairs in what was now a well rehearsed piece of theatre. Ritual behaviour, everything in its place and a place for everything. Nothing left askew or misplaced, all neatly aligned, tidied away. No personal effects discarded. No unwarranted – non-Hubert Mason’s - jewellery. Things had labels. Impossible to miss the microwave, it had MICROWAVE embossed on it. There were MUGS on hangars, matching. There was COFFEE, TEA, SUGAR. The kettle had instructions. How much water, for efficiency…
As a joke it had been funny.
Vanessa smiled, quickly turning her attention to her shoes, one of which was smeared. Disaster. Should she leave it and be daring, impetuous? Too late, Susan buffed the paled leather with the inside hem of her skirt, adding a cross look and a that’s-one-you-owe-me stare.
Darn, she thought. Van was developing a thirst for rebellion.
Her sisters had found it strange, her asking their help in disposing of a body; her explanation at best disturbing, ‘He’s dead anyway.’ ‘Yes, but shouldn’t we inform the authorities? What about his family?’ ‘Got none.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Absolutely. Look at him…’ as if this were enough. Justification. ‘Just help me bury him, for God’s sake!’
Which they did, reluctantly. What were sisters for?
‘What have you got yourself into?’ they whined. ‘Poor dear.’
But they dug like navvies, the pair of them.
Nobody appeared to miss Redbear, a fact which disturbed her in a way she failed to pinpoint. Guilt had something to do with it. She had never really known him. Not that she felt she ought to; he was Michael’s friend. She had her own friends, those girls and boys she saw less of as time rolled by, falling away like old skin, sloughed as she aged, a process accelerated by the present climate, that viral detachment of which her sisters sang-froid was perhaps a symptom.
In his chair. His chair, Sylvester brooded. But where was he? The phone had rung several times and not been answered. There were no more knocks at the door. A newspaper dropped through it, front page expounding chaos, a strike put down via means necessary and culprits spirited away. Regretfully, he had not checked the date, the ignorance of it gnawing at him, dispelled by a crackle of static.
The TV…
Must have sat on the remote, he told himself, cringing behind the armchair like a baby, the television’s sudden awakening having propelled him out of it, shrunken and humiliated. But not apprehended. The chair back swelled as if pushed, a shape having occupied it. He could only see round the edges, spherical and pink like a bloated pig’s stomach, a giant bubble-gum orb pressing into the seat he had just vacated. And it came from the TV, the screen having bulged outward, narrowly missing him. He felt like the fly who’d luckily side-stepped a frog’s bulbous, sticky tongue. Only to fall foul of a toad? He dared not breathe or look behind him. The static fazed, snapping like an electric current. Then, as if at the flick of a switch, the orb fastened to the other chair. Instantly, he mused. A change in polarity? He could see more of it now. Centring the swollen mass was a flickering white circle, contained in that a darker, striated disc at whose centre noisily shuttered a stygian pupil.
Looking for Mr Unger-Farmer, but not finding him. Veins pulsed in the distended sac, signifying anger.
Blue sparks skipped about the room, igniting some of the newspapers. There was a flash like a welding arc, a high-pitched keening as of rotating machinery, and the eye returned from whence it came…
Sylvester breathed once more. He was glad it had not been a nose extruded through the TV, that might have sniffed him out, some dangerous interloper, nasal hairs agitated prior to interrogation. He crept through to the kitchen and sat with his back to the red fridge.
It hummed invitingly. The noise made him hungry, stomach rumbling. How long since he’d eaten? The clock on the oven, he saw now, had been taped over. Sylvester got to his feet and peered out the window. Beyond stretched a lawn, perfectly flat, either side a hedge as tall and thick as that out front. The garden stretched beyond his vision, which, he recalled, was limited; he simply couldn’t make out its far boundary, the grass blurring into the sky, green into blue.
A clank behind him. That of milk bottles as the fridge door popped, turning his attention from the back garden vista to the intimacy of the appliance whose lulling volume had increased. Feeling his heart he reached for the handle. He should shut it, he thought, smiling nervously as he pulled the bright door wide. Th
e interior was plastic, glass, cold. The intruding air crackled with rime and was quickly frozen, sharp tongues of ice probing the draught, drawing the moisture in like filings to a magnet. Sylvester’s borrowed clothes buzzed with static, each fibre teased forward, coaxed toward the chill in what had to be the coldest fridge in the world. Not a freezer, he understood; the milk was seen to slosh. It’s temperature dipped beyond that, a void in which matter was suspended, impossibly bright and deep.
Vanessa turned the key in Michael’s door and welcomed herself home. Some frantic shopping since his disappearance, the calling in of favours at work, together with a liberal splurge of elbow grease and her sisters’ help in matters grave and personal, saw the house in a new light. There were rooms she hadn’t entered before, doing so with a pang of conscience quickly dispelled by their contents. In one, nothing but plastic containers, bottles, receptacles of every shape and size emptied of contents and scrubbed of labels in preparation for some plastic montage of vessels; a yet to be seen work of the love apple’s contrivance, title unknown, purpose unspecified. In another, swathed in dark, window bricked up and light-fitting missing, shoe boxes, several with shoes, most with doll’s heads or paper clips, black-painted cardboard rectangles containing everything from key-rings to condiment sachets, stacked floor to ceiling in no obvious configuration, pattern or order, simply assembled, objects collected not categorized. A storehouse of ideas, she fancied, imagining Michael foraging in the dark. A place to seek inspiration, opening boxes at random and interpreting each treasure as he may.
She kicked her shoes off and sat in a sofa old as sofas, its smell reminiscent of summers gone, this latest wrapping its gift of odours about the cushions like a tree amasses rings. Probably all that was holding it together. That and the string. The television in the corner was an aquarium.
Jumping to her feet Vanessa plucked a CD at random and spent the next 38 mins. and 6 secs. in reverie, accompanied by Hawkwind and Bring Me The Head Of Yuri Gagarin…
She thought of the first time she’d glimpsed an erection. She was fifteen, and spying on her cousin masturbating. He worked in a bank now, had married a beautician. The sight left her cold, she remembered, having first got over the urge to surprise him, what would have been a cruelty as Vanessa was never very good at keeping her laugh in. Well, men were so serious about their tumescent parts; whereas she found them hilarious, if useful.
‘I love the veins in your penis. It looks like a map. There are A roads and B roads; motorways…sights of special scientific interest. There’s probably a place that corresponds exactly to the patterns of veins in your cock.
‘Now, where’s that atlas?’
She liked to explore, did Van. She had loved him. What she felt now though was more complicated. Not seeing him allowed her focus to shift onto herself, her eyes to see more than eyes in a mirror could. Her life had been predictable; but that was another self; this possessed an increased dynamic, a willingness to pry and probe, together with a determination to secure answers to questions she would never have taken seriously before. Perhaps some of Michael’s paranoia had rubbed off. Perhaps not. She had yet to decide. Not that it mattered a great deal. The world was changed, and a changed world required a changed perspective. Or had her perspective shifted already, giving the impression of a world made anew?
Sophistry, she realized. Thinking too much again.
The conspiracy, such as it was, was subtle. They would not quickly reveal themselves. They being the forces ranged against her. Her being? ‘Fucking hell,’ she said.
She took her clothes off and headed for the shower.
Dressed, hair caught in an elastic band, she contemplated a bacon sandwich, taken with a sudden hunger for meat. A need. A realization of dead cooked flesh that made her mouth water.
She shuddered with it, a taste, a smell that brought to mind Michael.
The phone rang and she answered.
But whoever it was just breathed.
Creepy…
‘…unless a butterfly lands on you’
Huh?
Byrd had gone. The bar had emptied. The horse was nowhere to be seen.
Michael got up and walked to the exit. Walked into a corridor, dull and plastic, polished and scratched, stretching left and right for an impossible distance. It appeared to narrow to a point in either direction, to shimmer into nothingness. He decided to forgo the choice and turned back through the deserted taproom, leaving then by a toilet window.
Into an ordinary-looking back lane. Bricks and mortar, litter, uneven flagstones, the smell of urine; graffiti on shop emergency exits, people in the distance queuing at a cashpoint machine, flesh exposed as the sun was shining, in the sky a wealth of blue and a dearth of cloud.
Normal. Too normal. He even felt normal, which wasn’t normal at all. The city was home, the place where he lived, which he’d left under circumstances he found difficult now to bring to mind. Strolling, unhurried, he peered in windows at goods and fashions, confused insofar as he failed to comprehend what this city was. Real or imagined? Was this Hell or the real world? Both, maybe. He nodded, searching next for clues.
But his own identity was as complicated as any particularity the city chose to show, exhibiting its myriad forms through countless faces, flesh and stone. It was human yet mechanical. Solid yet fluid. Precise yet clumsy in its manipulative arts, those vague and deliberate, with and without purpose, countless feelers delving into the lives of the inhabitants who composed its very soul. A planet, he thought, himself an Earth; skin and bone or iron and glass, it mattered little: the constituent parts had building blocks and street plans, just like the whole. They were inseparable. Identity, like truth, was only a piece, one of many, a fragment of the picture he had yet to behold.
Was that possible? An overview? Could one man truly know himself, sufficient as to understand others? Or would each individual remain guessing, hopeful of an outcome not too deleterious?
A likely compromise; for those given to compromises, anyway. Michael Tomatoes, here, in this guise, might not be afforded that luxury. Indeed couldn’t. He’d be either right or wrong, pay the full price, and…
Someone, a young man, bumped into him, cutting his wrist with a knife.
Michael stared at the blood in his hand.
Danger had made itself known.
It rode the buses and tramped the streets disguised as old ladies and toddlers straining at their reins. Danger was everywhere. It swung past, intimidating, goading, pushing, needing him to react – and he did, subtly he hoped, knocking over coffees and tripping children, shoulder-barging old men and glaring libidinously at teenage girls. Which at least got him a place to stay for the night, a bed in which she practised tongue knots and thigh swirls. Michael lapped it up, feeling dangerous too, saying little and leaving in company with only the smallest regrets. He immediately forgot her name.
The simplicity couldn’t last, however. Sunday…everything quietened down. Shops were open but shoppers few. He sat on a bench in his accountant’s suit and watched the creature approach.
It grinned.
‘I’ve a message,’ it spat, drooling uncontrollably, strings of mucus stretching to its pot-belly, which twitched intermittently as if at a live meal.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re to come with me.’
Michael didn’t think so.
It smirked, holding its discoloured elbows and scratching with yellowed nails.
‘The message is from Columbine.’
‘So?’
‘It could be to your advantage.’
He wondered what he had to lose.
‘This way…’ the creature indicated, waddling off.
And he followed, glimpsing the night’s human debris as it hid from the sun, slouched in doorways and packed into dank alleys, byways of his past acquaintance recalled via another’s memory, one whose presence still lurked in his consciousness, a man at
once kind and cruel. The creature never once looked back, but kept a steady pace, its breathing hoarse and direction seemingly random. Michael recognized buildings that earlier had been unknown. They walked in circles. He picked out motifs, carvings blackened by soot, worn by rain, architectural details and weed-clogged gutters taking on equal significance. Everything had a meaning, every brick a story. History resounded in cornices and the cracked empty faces of clocks whose arms had rusted to stumps, time amputees among whom he was at home, cut from the herd and branded on the inside, so that he tasted his own charred remains…
His feet hurt. Before long it was night. Broken neon struggled to make sense above a portal best described as black.
‘She’s waiting. Ninth floor.’
He smelled it leave.
He stepped inside, through a set of double doors into a foyer carpeted and lush. There were marble pillars and intricate floor tiles, clusters of greenery sprouting from brass vases and urns, shiny leather sofas and coffee-tables of coloured glass. The reception desk curved round one wall, above it a huge oil on wood landscape, an Arcadian scene of garrulous peasants and happily corpulent livestock. But there were no people; no patrons or staff. Not so much as a concierge or a bellhop to help with his luggage, of which he had none, just himself. Twin elevators occupied a central position, their cages at rest, cables taut, wrought iron shafts disappearing into a rotunda whose angels stretched bows or played flutes, inflicting their magic on the mortals beneath.
Michael searched for the stairs, glimpsing them, broad and twisting, through a mesh of fronds.
The elevators’ bronze fittings winked seductively as he circled, but the love apple had chosen his means of ascent.
It had him paused on a landing staring at a corpse. Gunshot to the chest, a bloody hole the size of his fist, ribs and organs disordered.
Michael stepped over the man, who smiled as if asleep.
Screams failed to be contained by rooms.
Continuing up to the next floor he wondered how many such encounters would be his. They failed to deter him. He wasn’t frightened. The death he witnessed, violent and cold, lacked realism. It was movie death, produce of a special effects department, off the shelf and misdirected, for to the likes of Michael only reality was scary. And reality was somewhere else…
Between the floorboards, for example, hidden away in crevices and mined by dust mites, their short lives spent in the excavation of the raw material of a continuum. There was no more valuable commodity. Only the mites were small enough and clever enough to extract it, atoms of space and time passed along a line of mandibles and stacked in rows and columns that neared perfection. From there it was transported by a succession of insects, each devouring the next, the reality diluted the farther up the food chain it travelled; till at the very top, along with beans and carrots, or perhaps a side salad, it found its way into people.
It paid then to consume beetle larvae, to regard the cockroach as a desirable starter, and for main course, a bowl of reality-rich weevils.
A maid approached pushing a cleaning trolley.
He barred her path to the elevator.
She avoided his gaze, waiting for him to move.
Michael studied the assemblage of cleaning products.
The maid blushed crimson.
The hotter she got the colder he became, watching as she turned violet, sweat pouring from her brow, soaking her apron. Her hands twitched on the trolley handle and her tongue protruded, a livid purple. Bottles and brushes tumbled to the carpet, spilling their contents, bleaching the weave.
Curious, he took a step closer. Her ears issued steam and her eyes started to bleed. The skin round her neck melted.
Her bones seemed to dissolve inside her, and she sagged, uttering no sound, a look of terror on her softened mien as she slowly formed a puddle.
Michael proceeded to the next floor.
Only to find it missing.
In its place a ceiling, himself suspended from it, striding over paint and leaving footprints in the plaster - the first man on this moon.
A maid approached pushing a cleaning trolley.
She inquired of his room number and offered fresh towels.
Michael panicked.
Beating her head off a wall, one hand in her hair and the other round her throat, crushing her larynx, he observed as if from a distance her eyes bulge, viscous pink sacs whose pupils were huge and oily, smeared with horrific images, his twisted visage reflected in them, all teeth and gums. Her head misshapen, he flung the maid back down the corridor, her body snagging in a ceiling rose, one arm flapping while the other clawed. She wasn’t dead, he saw. She might come back at him. He half ran, half fell onto the stairs.
Up a floor, thinking momentarily it was down…
But all was not as before.
The maid was dead already, bloody and sagging backward over her trolley, mouth blistered and peeling, the stink of bleach hovering over her face.
A door stood ajar.
Men talking…
The snap of cards.
78 in brass numerals three inches tall.
Voices.
‘Any answer yet?’
‘None.’
‘Try again later.’
The smell of cigars.
Cleaning products and cat mint.
Michael grimaced at the tightness in his balls.
Strangely, he found it comforting, the first spontaneously normal thing he had experienced in a long while, a sensation visceral and yet within comprehension. It made sense, the cramping of his testicles somehow symbolic of another life, an alternate existence beyond these papered walls. He felt connected, adjusting himself as he walked, taking each broad rise as it came and arriving on a very different landing.
Strange how he received no mail, she thought.
She would go to the cinema…
The number 1 bus offered both time and perspective. Seated on the upper deck familiar streets became disordered; along each terrace whole new windows to gawp in, people busy ironing and watching TV in first floor flats while neighbours beneath mirrored their actions. The bus provided a glass tableau of lives being lived, few constructively, most relaxed, unworried for the best part at the turn of events Vanessa suspected, the slow rise of despair a melancholic tide of indifference…phew! Was it really as bad as that?
Yes. She supposed so. Maybe it was her own mood affecting her judgement; whatever mood that was. But no…wait a minute…yes…it was a pretty accurate description. There were fewer smiles than a year ago. A general apathy had descended. No escaping the fact…she was witness to it, her brief months spent with Michael arming her with a battery of sociopathological defences useful in deflecting what was considered normal with a view of turning normal over, upside-down and inside out; gutting normal and inspecting the bits, then to put normal back together and, finally, recognize it.
Vanessa shivered.
It wasn’t cold on the bus.
The flats became houses, the living-rooms bedrooms, curtains open and shut, flat colours and multihued drapes beyond whose thin veneers humans performed a variety of acts, some fun, others painful, upon friends and enemies, acquaintances met hours earlier never to be seen or heard from again. Missing. Boys and girls, men and women whose normal was corrupted, not by themselves - an almost gentle act - but by the likes of…what, who, them, us…participants in a drama unfolding, the torturer and the tortured together in an embrace of fear?
Love, they said. Hurts.
Vanessa shook herself.
So did the trees.
She got off the bus and walked the last few hundred yards.
There was a police cordon.
At eight o’clock at night?
The police had guns…
If she’d read the newspapers and watched the news like a normal person she might have known about the demonstration that afternoon. She might have known what it was in aid of an
d anticipated how it was to be conducted. Most importantly, she might have appreciated the volatility of the situation, understood something of the politics and not got involved in the aftermath.
She’d been the only passenger on the bus. The driver had seemed nervous, more than usually unpleasant.
The casualty ward was no place to wake up.
She was asked her name by a hairy man with a pencil and poked by sexless creatures wearing bright orange aprons.
The curtains now hid scuffles, the use of force to administer drugs and secure confessions. There were the dark silhouettes of what could only be described as technicians, persons whose faces were masked, whose hands were gloved, who were all seven feet tall.
Vanessa didn’t have a criminal record.
They put her out with the rubbish.
Bruised somewhat, bleeding from gums, she found a bus driver to take her home.
Seated on the lower deck by the emergency exit she stared at her knees.
Her mind was disorganized. Flashes of violence interrupted her study of the bony hinges, glimpses of erupting faces and stomachs spilling to the ground. There were dead, she knew; they’d been pointed out to her, bodies draped on gurneys in disused hospital corridors, corpses whose life was bagged, stomachs and faces in the gutter issuing fluids, leaking colours, painting with guts and tongues. The message was clear. The art of death was strewn.
She ran the bath while sitting in it, cold plastic warming her flesh, hot water sucking the pain from limbs.
She was in one piece, she told herself, reconciling the lost hours.
The phone rang. She counted. Fifteen times.
The fridge was impossibly loud.
It shook the kitchen, dislodging hubcaps from shelving and shelves from walls, coating the floor with a rainbow of pasta shapes and a varnish of Worcestershire sauce. Gearbox innards crashed like stalled helicopters from stationary flight-paths inches from the ceiling. Blue paint flaked to reveal red paint and red paint cracked to uncover green. The stuffed otter fell into the sink and the wooden budgerigar broke its beak on the washing-machine. Glass shattered. Air screamed. Tins rolled from cupboard and pans shimmied off the draining board, hitting the varnished floorboards in a cacophony of metal noise.
The bath water remained perfectly calm.
But rime, not steam, coated the walls.
Vanessa’s heart was still. She numbered the seconds it took the silence to imbue the outside world.
As the last cocktail stick rolled to a halt, nudging a pepper mill in the shape of a ballerina, breath invaded her lungs and she felt a stabbing pain in her breast, pulling herself from the bath in that instant and clawing at the towel mat, the towel on the radiator, stretching for her clothes. Ice had formed, scratching her blue limbs as she escaped the tub, melting now as her exhalations clouded the room. It was dark outside.
She dressed.
The light-bulb exploded.
She switched the kitchen light on having picked her way blindly through the debris, and surveyed, post vibration, the scene.
The fridge appeared almost bashful. She had to put her ear to it to hear. Not a book was out of place in the adjoining library; and there were thousands in there, pristine and dusty tomes occupying the wall space, dominating the insulated cube.
The kettle winked.
Vanessa carried it to the sink and filled it with water.
She found coffee by the radiator, mug minus handle near the back door.
The back door?
Opening it presented a drop.
She was upstairs, after all.
And the kitchen?
Her nipples hurt, her breasts heavy inside one of Michael’s T-shirts. The word SCROTUM in letters composed of tiny wriggling, book-reading sperm…
‘The little bastards are obviously programmable. I’m just stating a preference.’ With a facetious glint in his eye, bottom lip curled and soon meshed with her own.
She contemplated the fall.
The back door was closed, by herself. Which left one other, humming softly, white and black, black on the inside till the light came on, always faster than you could operate the handle...
In the fridge – there were, he realized, things in jars.
He ought to examine them, he thought, query their nature. Were they bits or wholes? They looked, some at least, like foetuses. Suspended in space and time. Did they dream? Had they lived lives? They might have names and memories, deposited here until a suitable assignment came along. Angels, or imps. They might be prisoners, held in storage for aeons. Again, until a suitable assignment came along. Agents, or saboteurs. Specialists, this a larder of talents.
Twenty Three: Thinly
Imbroglio Page 22