45
The predatory creature languished in close proximity to death. The skittish watcher left its footprints in the shallows, but understood the danger of venturing deeper into the cooling waters of the lake. The sky darkened. Fear trickled through the dusty air and confusion emanated from the wavering dialogues of the swamp trees and dry-land grasses. Black clouds, absolute in hue and depth, lacking symmetry, slowly blocked out the orange sun. The days grew dimmer, less distinct, one from the next, night spreading between, and the frost on the earth grew heavier with each addition of fractured dew. The predator’s fate was sealed. It was to become one with the mud in which it was trapped. The watcher's future, until recently lunch for the big fella, was no longer so sure, as the wind and the rain were no longer so sure, as the air became palpably thicker and the temperature dropped, bringing weight to hearts and limbs, installing ice where once roamed breath, reducing living things to bone hills too stupid to knit gloves. And the swollen night? In the night the mad howls of beasts whose tenure was up, whose necks were too long, whose feet were too big, whose eyes rolled, seized and popped...
Watching, the smaller, faster, suddenly better equipped animal ran to hide under a rime-laden bush as the absolute sky caved in, there chewing leaves and roots and finding a combination of these made a passable hat.
46
‘You shot him dead?’
‘Of course dead.’
‘Shit!’ Hugo Lupid scratched his nose, which itched, lit a cigarette, which glowed, stubbed it out in a gilt-edged ashtray, which rattled on the table-top. Molhenny was a fucking psychopath; he'd blow everything. ‘And Rita? Where's she at, Tony?’
‘Who?’
‘Rita. Your secretary. The one you stole from me.’
‘Oh, Rita's fine. Just wasn't feeling too well. Let me worry about her.’
Hugo was foaming at the mouth. ‘You shot him dead?’
Tony shrugged. Pressing his feet into the lush carpet he answered, ‘How else?’
47
Renny lowered her binoculars and sat down at his table. The nurse regarded her strangely.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You work here?’
Morrison didn't care for the black glint in her eye. Or maybe it was the silver in her teeth he took exception to. Whatever, his first impulse was to vacate his seat. She disturbed him.
The young woman forestalled any action with a word. ‘Mike,’ she said, adding, ‘He was spying on you, him and another man. But you'll know all that. I won't go into details. Am I right?’
Morrison thought she resembled a plucked bird. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I work here.’ Then, ‘You're Renny.’
‘Correct.’ He heard her cross her legs. Stockings rasped. He'd been on a near empty train once when a woman had boarded and sat opposite, loaded with books. A teacher, he remembered thinking. She'd worn a loud red blouse that mirrored his shirt, similar to the one Renny was wearing now. Had stringy blonde hair and no tits. Morrison would never forget the sound her wrapped thighs had made when she'd crossed her legs. It still turned him on, that tight-netted swish, connecting the back of his mouth by a length of shortening elastic to his trembling groin.
‘What do you want?’
‘Oh, come on!’ She leaned across the unstable table, spilling his thick coffee, feeling she'd done this numerous times before, in numerous prior, future or contemporary lives. The man on the other side was always this stubborn reliable type. ‘I want what you want, what we've both lost.’ So much she gleaned from his expression. ‘And I mean to find it before somebody else does.’ She allowed her hair to fall over her eyes, diffusing their glare. ‘I want your help.’
So many partnerships...
Morrison couldn't believe his ears; but his skin tightened and every hair on his body turned into a compass point.
‘You must have some idea where it went,’ suggested Renny.
And, Morrison now realized, he did.
They left the canteen together, neither speaking, heading toward the rear of the hospital and Renny's parked car, a fatuous Mini the front end of which boasted many dents. She drove the car through town and Morrison through his seat, over a narrow box-section bridge, the river silent below, the sky clearing above, swung incautiously onto the bypass and continued west into greener country. Morrison relaxed and watched the trees multiply and the traffic thin out. He wondered at the time, not wearing his watch, took furtive glances at Renny's blurred wrist. But the hands twitched with temporal constipation, making it hard for him to get a fix. He'd replied to her last question in the canteen by saying, ‘I need some air.’ To which she'd answered, ‘Yes - and ice-cream.’ It was two-twenty when he leaned against the bonnet, found a dent to match his arse, and ritualistically shoved the Flake down into the cornet. The car was parked overhanging a wooded river valley. Snaking through the admixture of foliage were a number of wood-chip paths, arrowed walks for directional ramblers; that is, ones without a map. Renny yanked a crushed pack of cigarettes out of the jeans she'd changed into in the car, tip-toeing on the pedals and steering with her knees. ‘Smoke?’
Morrison declined, satisfied as he was with his 99, the Flake cold and safe inside. Renny had wolfed hers already. No style.
‘Okay, where from here?’ She lit up, was on the verge of saying something more when the ice-cream van resumed its summery chimes, exhaust belching pollution as it lurched from the car park.
Renny waited for it to leave. ‘What's your first name? You know mine.’
‘Renata,’ he said, eyebrows raised.
She frowned.
‘Tom,’ he said. ‘My name's Tom.’
She smiled. Liking him? ‘Pleased to meet you, Tom.’
No shake of hands.
Smoke drifted over the barren landscape. Shapeless greys rose like massive slugs into the day-lit canopy. Shadows twisted and doubled repeatedly, darkening vortices of gas and ash wrapping the yellow-orange heat of blossoming fires as they coursed upward from countless rumbling explosions, shrouding the bird. He gripped the seat webbing as the air shook, rattling bones in flesh, every man bleary-eyed. The fear tangible in the belly of the craft matched the fear knotted in his own soured gut. The pilot's voice raised itself along wires from the cockpit, calm but indistinct, as if removed from the turbulence by design.
‘Cigarette?’ offered the man next to him over the din.
‘No,’ Tom replied.
The man shrugged, grinned inside his protective helmet. ‘Plenty of smoke down there, eh?’ His lighted match seemed to draw the violence toward it, a Siren to the greater flames below. Tom read that the man's name was Franklin. Soon this Franklin's lungs would be seared, his helmet dented. No burial for him.
They landed two hundred metres from the nearest building. No cover. Tom dived out in turn and ran left, weapon pointed at a smashed window; only broken light behind it; no faces: masks this side and the enemy hidden. What was going on? Rebellion? Invasion? One hell of a party? It didn't really matter. He was instructed what to do, how to perform. The explosions had been no accident. So much wreckage. He fell prone and shuffled like a sand-crab, dusting his armour as gunfire streaked and clanged, Tom making himself as small a target as possible. No orders rushed in his ear. The straps of his backpack were over tight. Panic visited briefly. There'd been such hurry. And now? A noise that was almost quiet. The outside air throbbed. Dust and debris showered him. Forms dropped alongside, opened fire, exchanged looks that were unreadable plastic. The impression was one of confusion, genuine bafflement. One of the forms slumped, bloody, and Tom took shelter behind it. The smoke began to coil downward, smothering, displacing the unknown buildings. Some vague ghost returned to occupy the ruptured carcass. Shrillness, then static, then at last a voice in his ear. ‘Get up, Tom, it's finished.’
‘Already?’
‘Don't be funny. And bring...’
That volume of silence.
‘Renata,’ she said, confirming. ‘Renata Shelme
rdine.’
She and Morrison both crunched wood-chips beneath their cautious feet; cautious, as the scene before them undulated with horror movie deliberacy. Renny's gauche blouse, far from seeming vivid and out of place among the prevalent greens, lent Morrison's eyes a reassuring focus. And Morrison, Renny had to admit, did look rather fetching in his white plastic nurse's uniform.
‘Have you been here before?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither; I think.’ The sudden doubt surprised her, an ephemeral ray through the heavy foliage of her waking mind. ‘What do you think we're looking for?’ she questioned, broaching his thoughts.
He smiled, wondering (equally briefly, the shifting light fickle) at the entry, so badly sign-posted, she had gained to his inner self. It was Renny he could feel moving around, getting comfortable, as if preparing for a long stay in some psychedelic cinema seat, adjusting to his volume, contrast, colour. The film showing was that which brought him here; brought them together. He knew she must be experiencing something similar. She'd known the orange too. And that roused a pang of envy.
But there were others. ‘A trail,’ he said, needing to speak, those words close to hand.
‘Say again?’ Renny kicked a stone and disturbed a pigeon. A flurry of wings beat the air. Her response, like the bird's, was a reaction, a reflex to the impossible, to the inherited confusion set deep in her brain.
She understood. The pigeon understood. The question was whose move was wisest.
‘There must be a pond down here,’ Morrison continued, forcing a passage through undergrowth, leaving their designated path. ‘Smells like a swamp; not running water.’
Renny ducked under a branch. ‘I can't swim.’
‘But you can float.’
‘If I have to.’
Morrison stopped and peered at her through a spider's web, an oiliness in his eyes as he held his breath.
His face behind the lattice of spun silk became more real, more definite to Renny in that moment than the memory of either Art or Mike. Memory was a habit of the past, she appreciated, and it was the future Morrison represented, what they both felt strongly about, the multiplex future a piece of which had manifested in her front room. That future, unlike the past, unlike the present, possessed an immediacy not found anywhere else, a rarefied taste having its source at the very roots of her teeth.
After some bramble scratching they came upon a river neither stagnant nor flat, but a rocky paradise secretly winding between trees, an old established route onto which the generous sun projected a maze of images, as if there were not a single river but many. Debris, refuse, bits of animal and vegetable floated down these channels, down those ages which conspired to form history. Things unheard of and unseen for millennia passed with impunity, borne along on the current or navigating tiny rafts. Most remarkable though was the discovery of a boat with two oars, its nose wedged into the soft bank, its boards the hue of ancient ivory, its odour that of long-drained seas, its seams oozing protective moss and its joints knotted like rope. Morrison suspected it contained no nails. The boat was a craft unnecessarily afloat. It had risen from below the ever-breaking waves and come to ground on innumerable sand-bars and estuary shores. It brought to Renny's cleared mind a dream of stuffedness, of an elevator crammed with pillows, of impractical reality, for this was a boat designed for one purpose only, and that, from aquatic floor to aquatic floor, beach to beach, was to sink.
48
Having dug non-stop for sixteen days through sixteen layers of concrete, clay times eleven, gravel, sawdust, and now a stone floor that was possibly a road (Roman), the unearther at last scraped his spade, which shone like the Milky Way and had cut more worms than any rotavator, he at last scraped his spade, the handle of which was worn to match thickness and the rivets of which had been replaced several times over by nails scavenged from the loam, mostly rusty, he at last scraped his spade, its shaft buckled and twisted like a witch's limb, at last scraped his spade, this extraordinary implement - for no ordinary tool could have taken such punishment - at last scraped his spade over the still solid lid of a - wait for it, focus and concentrate, do all those breathing exercises - lid of a lid of a coffin. He alone knew who was buried in it, an exaggerated number of metres beneath the sun. It was his sister, encapsulated in wood.
The lid was screwed down. Rather than hack away at it as he had the concrete, etc., he clambered back up the rickety ladder and stood unknotting rope beneath the stars, puzzled that one knot remained. What was that knot for? It was only small. He'd construct a wooden framework, he decided, find a block and tackle in the shed that was always nearby to suspend from it, and haul the coffin to the surface. But then the rain started and he recalled the meaning of that last small knot, the knot he'd chosen to ignore. He grew soft about the edges, as did the trench he had spent sixteen dry days digging. The unearther, the shed, the rescue were all demolished by pacifying globules of innocent water, dispersed on this or that subterranean byway. And the coffin? That wonder-filled capsule would be elsewhere, replanted and waiting to be discovered and dug up again.
49
He loosens his brocade scarf and tosses its tassels over a shoulder as he steps onto the grassy pavement. ‘Good luck,’ says a face through the window, red and white, its owner pink beyond glass like a lobster. Scherzo Trepan waves and the bus pulls away slowly, as befits such a vehicle, gaining speed, rolling on its black rubber tyres, turning the bend, shadowed by lesser cars and leafy trees, the latter shitting on the world, the former busy trying to catch it up, on this road or another, any of millions, determined that that world be flat, hoping for an opportunity to overtake the lumbering omni, skirting roundabouts with islands at their core, entire continents - gratifyingly level - of daffodils in spring and council workmen with lawnmowers in summer, broken bottles in autumn and the purest snow in winter, the kind of snow where only the footprints of faeries and suchlike make any indentation. Islands where strangers meet to wander, oblivious of the moat of grey-black asphalt and the circling trucks lost for an exit, creating in-roads and out-roads, rediscovering old roads and forgotten roads, stopping jerkily at the lights. Islands over which the moon hovers, about which the horn-blaring stars turn, some of which have been known to fall, to crater the island's cambered superficies and knock over the odd bollard while the night-sun sits impervious atop its steely pole, safe in the knowledge of council workmen (its acolytes) and the availability of replacement bulbs, its pole bolted in concrete and bending in the wind. Nothing grows on this moon but mould, mould dead insects adhere to, as meanwhile Scherzo leans on a fence. His co-star in this production is none other that Roma Palmer, only begotten daughter of the well-known futurist, fish-eater and flautist, Ernest, whose works have inspired millions to ignorance. Roma is a blonde young thing with breasts like melons and a liking for Player's Navy Cut. It takes a team of horses to wash and dress her of a morning, to squeeze her into her Levi's prior to each performance. A nice girl, his agent has reassured him.
Scherzo enters via the gate where a stone security guard whose uniform is too small for him gives our hero the once-over, pokes him electronically and gestures.
‘Trepan, eh?’
‘Yep,’ says Scherzo.
‘Movie star, eh?’ The guard isn't impressed, thinks our boy a weed.
‘Yep,’ says Scherzo, practising a few rapier strokes.
‘Going to rescue the maiden, eh?’
‘Yep.’
‘Free her from the slimy aliens, eh?’
‘Yep.’
Seen the play, eh? Saw the ad in the paper, eh? Think you can act, eh? Well, let me tell you somethin', buster...’
‘Is there a problem, Sam?’ Whoa, it's the director or some such; least ways, imagines Scherzo, adopting a stance, angered by this fellow's attitude, this oaf's resentment, bruised by his security manner, least ways some such as can lube the rails an' git this vehicle rollin'...
So what he do, our hero,
when Rapunzel let down her hair?
50
The cat rises from its nap and hunts around the dark space. There's warm sweat between its furred cat cheeks, under its cat tail. There's warm sweat between its cat ears, enfolding its cat tongue. It hunts around the dark space for its underpants and T-shirt, jeans and training shoes of the Velcro sealing kind as the cat has yet to master laces. In the light, any light, its cat coat is unmistakably marmalade. And in the light, any light, it dreams of impossible sloth and perfectly slanted windowsills. Its cat name is Staples; just Staples for now, as we're on first name terms. Its cat hero, naturally, is Behemoth of Moscow flat fame, and its favourite foods, this marmalade cat's, are Sugarpuffs and chocolate.
Purring, betimes like a machine.
51
Scherzo Trepan stared long and hard at the address on the paper, printed in black ink and torn from the Evening Chronicle, handed to him by Wilson Hives who had not given up smoking and who still demanded to be let in via Scherzo's jammed window. Scherzo himself had moved out of the house on several occasions but always felt more comfortable and relaxed when he was in, being, he reasoned, closer to Annie, who had dropped dead, closer to his father who he could not remember. The bus pulling away wrapped him in choking blue-grey smoke. He felt like he was in a movie already, abandoned on a lonely station platform sometime in the forties, just back from the front, etched out in monochrome, the light of stars painted and the buildings scissored from cereal packets, reversed, vague doors and windows drawn on, a token drainpipe straw, some cotton-wool, the hero a shell-shocked soldier (say that fast) coming to terms with his life after death, weary of adventure, propelled by a wicked uncle into the unforgiving, celluloid night. There was a hum of electronic wizardry, cameras rolling, his train pushed out of shot to the sound of a tin whistle, his thoughts likewise receding round a bend - but perhaps when this day was over he might catch that same bus home.