It still looked down at her.
“Now you know,” it said, lost.
“This is you—”
“This is the body I once occupied, yes. His name was Barberio. A criminal; nothing spectacular. He never aspired to greatness.”
“And you?”
“His cancer. I’m the piece of him which did aspire, that did long to be more than a humble cell. I am a dreaming disease. No wonder I love the movies.”
The son of celluloid was weeping over the edge of the broken floor, its true body exposed now it had no reason to fabricate a glory.
It was a filthy thing, a tumor grown fat on wasted passion. A parasite with the shape of a slug, and the texture of raw liver. For a moment a toothless mouth, badly molded, formed at its head end and said: “I’m going to have to find a new way to eat your soul.”
It flopped down into the crawlspace beside Birdy. Without its shimmering coat of many technicolors it was the size of a small child. She backed away as it stretched a sensor to touch her, but avoidance was a limited option. The crawlspace was narrow, and further along it was blocked with what looked to be broken chairs and discarded prayer books. There was no way out but the way she’d come, and that was fifteen feet above her head.
Tentatively, the cancer touched her foot, and she was sick. She couldn’t help it, even though she was ashamed to be giving in to such primitive responses. It revolted her as nothing ever had before; it brought to mind something aborted, a bucket case.
“Go to hell,” she said to it, kicking at its head, but it kept coming, its diarrheal mass trapping her legs. She could feel the churning motion of its innards as it rose up to her.
Its bulk on her belly and groin was almost sexual, and revolted as she was by her own train of thought she wondered dimly if such a thing aspired to sex. Something about the insistence of its forming and reforming feelers against her skin, probing tenderly beneath her blouse, stretching to touch her lips, only made sense as desire. Let it come then, she thought, let it come if it has to.
She let it crawl up her until it was entirely perched on her body, fighting every moment the urge to throw it off—and then she sprang her trap.
She rolled over.
She’d weighed 225 pounds at the last count, and she was probably more now. The thing was beneath her before it could work out how or why this had happened, and its pores were oozing the sick sap of tumors.
It fought, but it couldn’t get out from under, however much it squirmed. Birdy dug her nails into it and began to tear at its sides, taking cobs of it, spongy cobs that set more fluids gushing. Its howls of anger turned into howls of pain. After a short while, the dreaming disease stopped fighting.
Birdy lay still for a moment. Underneath her, nothing moved.
At last, she got up. It was impossible to know if the tumor was dead. It hadn’t, by any standards that she understood, lived. Besides, she wasn’t touching it again. She’d wrestle the Devil himself rather than embrace Barberio’s cancer a second time.
She looked up at the corridor above her and despaired. Was she now to die in here, like Barberio before her? Then, as she glanced down at her adversary, she noticed the grille. It hadn’t been visible while it was still night outside. Now dawn was breaking, and columns of dishwater light were creeping through the lattice.
She bent to the grille, pushed it hard, and suddenly the day was in the crawlspace with her, all around her. It was a squeeze to get through the small door, and she kept thinking every moment that she felt the thing crawling across her legs, but she hauled herself into the world with only bruised breasts to complain of.
The abandoned lot hadn’t changed substantially since Barberio’s visit there. It was merely more nettle-thronged. She stood for a while breathing in drafts of fresh air, then made for the fence and the street beyond it.
The fat woman with the haggard look and the stinking clothes was given a wide berth by newsboys and dogs alike as she made her way home.
THREE: CENSORED SCENES
It wasn’t the end. The police went to the Movie Palace just after nine-thirty.
Birdy went with them. The search revealed the mutilated bodies of Dean and Ricky, as well as the remains of “Sonny” Barberio. Upstairs, in the corner of the corridor, they found a cerise shoe.
Birdy said nothing, but she knew. Lindi Lee had never left.
She was put on trial for a double murder nobody really thought she’d committed, and acquitted for lack of evidence. It was the order of the court that she be put under psychiatric observation for a period of not less than two years. The woman might not have committed murder, but it was clear she was a raving lunatic. Tales of walking cancers do nobody’s reputation much good.
In the early summer of the following year Birdy gave up eating for a week. Most of the weight loss in that time was water, but it was sufficient to encourage her friends that she was at last going to tackle the Big Problem.
That weekend, she went missing for twenty-fours hours.
Birdy found Lindi Lee in a deserted house in Seattle. She hadn’t been so difficult to trace: it was hard for poor Lindi to keep control of herself these days, never mind avoid would-be pursuers. As it happened her parents had given up on her several months previous. Only Birdy had continued to look, paying for an investigator to trace the girl, and finally her patience was rewarded with the sight of the frail beauty, frailer than ever but still beautiful sitting in this bare room. Flies roamed the air. A turd, perhaps human, sat in the middle of the floor.
Birdy had a gun out before she opened the door. Lindi Lee looked up from her thoughts, or maybe its thoughts, and smiled at her. The greeting lasted a moment only before the parasite in Lindi Lee recognized Birdy’s face, saw the gun in her hand and knew exactly what she’d come to do.
“Well,” it said, getting up to meet its visitor.
Lindi Lee’s eyes burst, her mouth burst, her cunt and ass, her ears and nose all burst, and the tumor poured out of her in shocking pink rivers. It came worming out of her milkless breasts, out of a cut in her thumb, from an abrasion on her thigh. Wherever Lindi Lee was open, it came.
Birdy raised the gun and fired three times. The cancer stretched once towards her, fell back, staggered and collapsed. Once it was still, Birdy calmly took the acid bottle out of her pocket, unscrewed the top and emptied the scalding contents on human limb and tumor alike. It made no shout as it dissolved, and she left it there, in a patch of sun, a pungent smoke rising from the confusion.
She stepped out into the street, her duty done, and went her way, confidently planning to live long after the credits for this particular comedy had rolled.
RAWHEAD REX
Of all the conquering armies that had tramped the streets of Zeal down the centuries, it was finally the mild tread of the Sunday tripper that brought the village to its knees. It had suffered Roman legions, and the Norman conquest, it had survived the agonies of Civil War, all without losing its identity to the occupying forces. But after centuries of boot and blade it was to be the tourists—the new barbarians—that bested Zeal, their weapons courtesy and hard cash.
It was ideally suited for the invasion. Forty miles south east of London, amongst the orchards and hopfields of the Kentish Weald, it was far enough from the city to make the trip an adventure, yet close enough to beat a quick retreat if the weather turned foul. Every weekend between May and October Zeal was a watering hole for parched Londoners. They would swarm through the village on each Saturday that promised sun, bringing their dogs, their plastic balls, their litters of children, and their children’s litter, disgorging them in bawling hordes onto the village green, then returning to “The Tall Man” to compare traffic stories over glasses of warm beer.
For their part the Zealots weren’t unduly distressed by the Sunday trippers; at least they didn’t spill blood. But their very lack of aggression made the invasion all the more insidious.
Gradually these city-weary people began to work a gentle but perm
anent change on the village. Many of them set their hearts on a home in the country; they were charmed by stone cottages set amongst churning oaks, they were enchanted by doves in the churchyard yews. Even the air, they’d say as they inhaled deeply, even the air smells fresher here. It smells of England.
At first a few, then many, began to make bids for the empty barns and deserted houses that littered Zeal and its outskirts. They could be seen every fine weekend, standing in the nettles and rubble, planning how to have a kitchen extension built, and where to install the jacuzzi. And although many of them, once back in the comfort of Kilburn or St. John’s Wood, chose to stay there, every year one or two of them would strike a reasonable bargain with one of the villagers, and buy themselves an acre of the good life.
So, as the years passed and the natives of Zeal were picked off by old age, the civil savages took over in their stead. The occupation was subtle, but the change was plain to the knowing eye. It was there in the newspapers the Post Office began to stock—what native of Zeal had ever purchased a copy of “Harpers and Queen” magazine, or leafed through “The Times Literary Supplement”? It was there, that change, in the bright new cars that clogged the one narrow street, laughingly called the High Road, that was Zeal’s backbone. It was there too in the buzz of gossip at “The Tall Man,” a sure sign that the affairs of the foreigners had become fit subject for debate and mockery.
Indeed, as time went by the invaders found a yet more permanent place in the heart of Zeal, as the perennial demons of their hectic lives, Cancer and Heart Disease, took their toll, following their victims even into his newfound land. Like the Romans before them, like the Normans, like all invaders, the commuters made their profoundest mark upon this usurped turf not by building on it, but by being buried under it.
It was clammy the middle of that September; Zeal’s last September.
Thomas Garrow, the only son of the late Thomas Garrow, was sweating up a healthy thirst as he dug in the corner of the Three Acre Field. There’d been a violent rainstorm the previous day, Thursday, and the earth was sodden. Clearing the ground for sowing next year hadn’t been the easy job Thomas thought it’d be, but he’d sworn blind he’d have the field finished by the end of the week. It was heavy labor, clearing stones, and sorting out the detritus of out-of-date machinery his father, lazy bastard, had left to rust where it lay. Must have been some good years, Thomas thought, some pretty fine damn years, that his father could afford to let good machinery waste away. Come to think of it, that he could have afforded to leave the best part of three acres unploughed; good healthy soil too. This was the Garden of England after all: land was money. Leaving three acres fallow was a luxury nobody could afford in these straitened times. But Jesus, it was hard work: the kind of work his father had put him to in his youth, and he’d hated with a vengeance ever since.
Still, it had to be done.
And the day had begun well. The tractor was healthier after its overhaul, and the morning sky was rife with gulls, across from the coast for a meal of freshly turned worms. They’d kept him raucous company as he worked, their insolence and their short tempers always entertaining. But then, when he came back to the field after a liquid lunch in “The Tall Man,” things began to go wrong. The engine started to cut out for one, the same problem that he’d just spent £200 having seen to; and then, when he’d only been back at work a few minutes, he’d found the stone.
It was an unspectacular lump of stuff: poking out of the soil perhaps a foot, its visible diameter a few inches short of a yard, its surface smooth and bare. No lichen even; just a few grooves in its face that might have once been words. A love letter perhaps, a “Kilroy was here” more likely, a date and a name likeliest of all. Whatever it had once been, monument or milestone, it was in the way now. He’d have to dig it up, or next year he’d lose a good three yards of ploughable land. There was no way a plough could skirt around a boulder that size.
Thomas was surprised that the damn thing had been left in the field for so long without anyone bothering to remove it. But then it was a long spell since the Three Acre Field had been planted: certainly not in his thirty-six years. And maybe, now he came to think of it, not in his father’s lifetime either. For some reason (if he’d ever known the reason he’d forgotten it) this stretch of Garrow land had been left fallow for a good many seasons, maybe even for generations. In fact there was a suspicion tickling the back of his skull that someone, probably his father, had said no crop would ever grow in that particular spot. But that was plain nonsense. If anything plant life, albeit nettles and convolvulus, grew thicker and ranker in this forsaken three acres than in any other plot in the district. So there was no reason on earth why hops shouldn’t flourish here. Maybe even an orchard: though that took more patience and love than Thomas suspected he possessed. Whatever he chose to plant, it would surely spring up from such rich ground with a rare enthusiasm, and he’d have reclaimed three acres of good land to bolster his shaky finances.
If he could just dig out that bloody stone.
He’d half thought of hiring in one of the earth movers from the building site at the North End of the village, just to haul itself across here and get its mechanical jaws working on the problem. Have the stone out and away in two seconds flat. But his pride resisted the idea of running for help at the first sign of a blister. The job was too small anyhow. He’d dig it out himself, the way his father would have done. That’s what he’d decided. Now, two and a half hours later, he was regretting his haste.
The ripening warmth of the afternoon had soured in that time, without much of a breeze to stir it around, had become stifling. Over from the Downs came a stuttering roll of thunder, and Thomas could feel the static crawling at the nape of his neck, making the short hairs there stand up. The sky above the field was empty now: the gulls, too fickle to hang around once the fun was over, had taken some salt-smelling thermal.
Even the earth, that had given up a sweet-sharp flavor as the blades turned it that morning, now smelt joyless; and as he dug the black soil out from around the stone his mind returned helplessly to the putrefaction that made it so very rich. His thoughts circled vacuously on the countless little deaths on every spadeful of soil he dug. This wasn’t the way he was used to thinking, and the morbidity of it distressed him. He stopped for a moment, leaning on his spade, and regretting the fourth pint of Guinness he’d downed at lunch. That was normally a harmless enough ration, but today it swilled around in his belly, he could hear it, as dark as the soil on his spade, working up a scum of stomach acid and half-digested food.
Think of something else, he told himself, or you’ll get to puking. To take his mind off his belly, he looked at the field. It was nothing out of the ordinary; just a rough square of land bounded by an untrimmed hawthorn hedge. One or two dead animals lying in the shadow of the hawthorn: a starling; something else, too far gone to be recognizable. There was a sense of absence, but that wasn’t so unusual. It would soon be autumn, and the summer had been too long, top hot for comfort.
Looking up higher than the hedge he watched the mongol-headed cloud discharge a flicker of lightning to the hills. What had been the brightness of the afternoon was now pressed into a thin line of blue at the horizon. Rain soon, he thought, and the thought was welcome. Cool rain; perhaps a downpour like the previous day. Maybe this time it would clear the air good and proper.
Thomas stared back down at the unyielding stone, and struck it with his spade. A tiny arc of white flame flew off.
He cursed, loudly and inventively: the stone, himself, the field. The stone just sat there in the moat he’d dug around it, defying him. He’d almost run out of options: the earth around the thing had been dug out two feet down; he’d hammered stakes under it, chained it and then got the tractor going to haul it out. No joy. Obviously he’d have to dig the moat deeper, drive the stakes further down. He wasn’t going to let the damn thing beat him.
Grunting his determination he set to digging again. A fleck of ra
in hit the back of his hand, but he scarcely noticed it. He knew by experience that labor like this took singularity of purpose: head down, ignore all distractions. He made his mind blank. There was just the earth, the spade, the stone and his body.
Push down, scoop up. Push down, scoop up, a hypnotic rhythm of effort. The trance was so total he wasn’t sure how long he worked before the stone began to shift.
The movement woke him. He stood upright, his vertebrae clicking, not quite certain that the shift was anything more than a twitch in his eye. Putting his heel against the stone, he pushed. Yes, it rocked in its grave. He was too drained to smile, but he felt victory close. He had the bugger.
The rain was starting to come on heavier now, and it felt fine on his face. He drove a couple more stakes in around the stone to unseat it a little further: he was going to get the better of the thing. You’ll see, he said, you’ll see. The third stake went deeper than the first two, and it seemed to puncture a bubble of gas beneath the stone, a yellowish cloud smelling so foul he stepped away from the hole to snatch a breath of purer air. There was none to be had. All he could do was hawk up a wad of phlegm to clear his throat and lungs. Whatever was under the stone, and there was something animal in the stench, it was very rotten.
He forced himself back down to the work, taking gasps of the air into his mouth, not through his nostrils. His head felt tight, as though his brain was swelling and straining against the dome of his skull, pushing to be let out.