Dreep just huddled deeper into his coat, blind and deaf and regrettably neither.
‘I took some pictures a while back,’ Shin was saying, lighting up. ‘Me and Poorman. That's the commandant. We sneaked a camera into her quarters, wired for remote, and took a whole roll of this fat Finnish bastard's mollusc, blurred like a propeller fan he was banging so fast, screwing the top right off our preferred subject. Poorman was gutted. I'd loaded the camera with twenty-four exposures rather than thirty-six; so the final moments, when he glued it in her, were lost forever.’
‘How far is it?’ Dreep inquired weakly, voice squeaking.
Shin exhaled in his direction. ‘We'll get it on video next time. Who knows, maybe you'll even get a front seat!’
And now he had to share a room with a black man. Theodore was beset by injustices.
Elsewhere on station Poorman turned over playing cards and peered
intermittently at the ranks of monochrome screens that cast flickering ghost lights around his office. He was thinking about sleep and pictured Ralph, his girl at present, two thousand miles away in Ottawa, bent now where he liked her, at the waist, thighs at ninety degrees, shoulders limp and hands trailing between ankles as Felix the fearless drove his cock inside her.
Forget sleep, he told himself, I need it sucked. ‘Hey, Shin,’ he called, finger depressing intercom button, ‘get your skinny yellow neck in here, pronto!’
Dreep, meanwhile, made grunts and stretches.
‘What's that you're doing, soldier?’ the black man queried from the shadows.
‘My exercises,’ Dreep answered, tensing, sweat like old chewing gum in his armpits and slung like a hammock beneath his frozen gonads.
‘Why not take your coat off; I'd be a lot easier.’
Sure, sure, thought the reporter, searching for his dog-eared notepad midst the gangrenous folds of his clothing. And what then, eh?
The black man rocked forward, snagging light, his eyes on stalks of pure whiteness.
Dreep manoeuvred sideways, out of their line of fire, slid quietly into his bunk, under the protective sheath (another defensive layer) of the covers. He was, not for the first time, reminded ominously of the irregular visitations of his hirsute sire, the pacification and buggery that followed.
‘The name's Woodtoe,’ said the black man. ‘But you can call me Blinder.’
Theodore said nothing at all.
15
Affixing the final limb, glue tube between teeth, blue-green and yellow-white fumes ascending greedy nostrils, Taylor stood back to admire his work. He wasn't happy with the coloration, black shading upward through purple, red, turquoise, indigo, black once more at the pate, wrinkled and seamed like some Frankenstein spin-off - and too large, that head, anomalous to the careful balance and proportioning of the torso with its multi-jointed directional appendages. But he had his brief. And there were other considerations, not least among them his life, the cessation of which Taylor was promised should he not deliver.
In his cramped office, calendars layering the bare plaster walls, no adjoining shire horse or cute blonde thing displaying the same month or with the same day ringed, machine parts and kittens impaled by darts, a few not opened to January, February, March at all, covering a territory of years, Taylor picked the receiver from its cradle and punched Molhenny's number, that which had been beaten into him one rainy Friday (Tuesday?) afternoon as he sat in a squeaky chair in another office. Even seedier than this, the night air reeking of violence and gun-smoke, the heat oppressive, the pictures displayed on that occasion not mere fantasy but the representative stranglehold Tony Molhenny had on Taylor, a reality measured in goons. ‘It's finished,’ he said when his call was answered. ‘You can pick it up right away.’
Molhenny put the phone down, licked his lips. He buzzed Rita, his secretary, and instructed her to meet him outside with the car.
‘Where are you having me chauffeur you this time, Tony?’ Rita wanted to know, voice trebled, quick. ‘If this is another one of your surprises...’
She was playing hard to get. He said, ‘Now, Rita, would I do anything to upset you?’
‘You know you would. Frequently.’
‘You're not intrigued?’
Silence. That's what worries me, he could imagine her thinking.
The door hinged inward and there she was, nineteen and superior, wearing a flower-print dress.
‘I don't trust you, sir, Mr Molhenny; you pay me too much.’
‘Just get the car, Rita.’
16
Doctor Mood was rapt in his garden. He hadn't realized it was so big. Surrounded by rhododendrons, having lost one shoe to the mud and the other in a drainage ditch full of manure, cut himself with the secateurs, torn his shirt and bruised his thumb, he had just about had enough. What had brought him out here in the first place amounted to a sudden bizarre craving, a thing mostly beyond his experience, which he could not explain, but a powerful desire to have freshly cut flowers, an arrangement he'd felt confident of gleaning, fern leaves and all, from what he now acknowledged to be a separate dimension. He wandered in useless circles, abandoned by brickwork and windows, house features of any recognizable sort, gazing sheepishly at the too yellow sun and wishing he owned a watch that worked as the face on his wrist had stuck at ten minutes to two. It smiled at him now like clocks do in jewellers, its spring, unlike the spring presently overawing Mood, having quit its function.
The elderly couple whose names the doctor could never remember, his housekeeper and gardener, had vanished mysteriously. Apparently no longer in need of his chiropody, their corns cured and gratitude limited, they'd given him over to the wilds of flora and domesticity, dust and season. Grimacing, he threw down the secateurs. He was already appreciably late to administer to horny Mrs Fry. Was that a rabbit? Did it carry a pocket watch and should he follow it? These questions taxed his mind. Doctor Mood was feeling unusually sullen. The world had deserted him. He'd lost his way and there was no-one near, no-one visible, to guide him back. Those who were invisible, crouched amid roots and suspended from branches, laughing into palms and up sleeves, were of no immediate assistance. Mood had long suspected their presence. They rode through the house on the backs of cats. Long suspected the presence of this other realm, too, inhabited by talking fish and pouting lilies, lugubrious moles and squirrels with gold fillings.
He decided, despite himself, to explore.
17
Scherzo Trepan met Lewis Charmer in the Odd One Out, where, coincidentally, both had travelled for a beer.
‘There's this all girl band playing at Blood's,’ Lewis informed him, moustache foamed, glasses steamed, nose pierced and jeans ripped. ‘Want to go?’ They'd attended school together on righteous days, blazer'd and tied, using their dinner money to buy cigarettes.
Scherzo was reluctant initially, a workable ploy to get Lewis to buy the drinks.
‘What are they called, this band?’
‘The Tyres,’ Lewis answered. ‘They're the rubber chicks from Hell.’ He worked in the meat market, pimping on a part-time basis, managing bands and forging cheques whenever things got tough, the police too closely involved or his elder brother, Spike, drunk enough to want to beat the shit out of him Saturday nights.
‘He's still doing that?’ questioned Scherzo. ‘Why don't you hit him back?’
Lewis shrugged. He would always shrug in response to such avenues of inquiry, a shrug residing at the bloated centre of his unwholesome existence, a universe pervaded by strings of indiscretion that radiated out from this obese core in countless directions. Lewis was content to float, unwilling to swim. ‘And make him angry?’ he replied. ‘Are you kidding?’ Like it were someone else's fault.
‘Right,’ said Scherzo, unable to cogitate, alcohol wearing through his mind-script at this point...
Blood's was floorless and packed. Lewis knew the doorman, so it cost them nothing to get in, although a swift body search depriv
ed the spectacled man of sinsemilla, Rizlas and glowing pink pills.
‘Sweet revenge,’ muttered Lewis cryptically, the last coherent sound Scherzo was to hear for a while as the babble sucked them in.
Nobody could tell you whose idea it had been to take the floor out, but all agreed it was an improvement. You wandered the crowded balconies like mountain goats, packed the high-rise bars, arranged like gravel in flower-boxes, and clung on for dear life, no safety net to catch you if you dropped, eating the sugar glasses to boost your energy and sweating like microwaved chocolate as a result, losing what friends you may have arrived with and making fresh acquaintances this side of the oval doors, transient investments of saliva and attention you'd shed like old skin once you were washed back outside by the flood, those lingering couples ensconced in mountain niches hosed free by cleaning ladies in full combat kit. The place was huge and thronged like a bait bucket. The fire exits shone. Scherzo toted a Jack Daniel’s in each hand so as to maintain his delicate equilibrium, hoping he wouldn't be required to visit the gents, which, it goes without saying, would be compact and intense, treacherous underfoot and stinking of diseased shellfish, vomit and dope.
He matched one glass to his lips just as the band exploded, falling out of the invisible ceiling, dancing on thin elastic wires and strumming wildly, possessed of writhing chords, all flailing limbs and vocals, lowered and raised and spun to the electronic whim of an evil computer whose program had originally been designed to create worst possible scenarios of nuclear desolation.
Cavorting with the lead guitar, enmeshed in its vibrant strings, was Ruth.
Scherzo leaned dangerously over the balcony rail, its metal warmth stolen from flesh along its entire snaking length, a wire between batteries that perhaps fed the lights. He caught Ruth's dizzy, revolving eyes, out of synch, with his oscillating own, and they were hooked.
‘You went to school with Lewis Charmer?’ she said later, on her elbows, wrapped in sheets, in bed.
He nodded, replied, ‘And you play the guitar.’ Groin abutting hip.
‘Coffee, Scherzo?’
‘Love one.’
‘Three sugars? Right - you know where the kitchen is. Mine's black.’
Scherzo stood in his Pluto underpants waiting impatiently for the kettle to boil, listening while host to a puzzled expression as Ruth crashed out of bed and thumped a wall, disarranging more than hair, the previous night's gig no doubt catching up with her, affecting her inner-ear as she attempted a landing beyond the security of the mattress with the flowers on. Music arrived in Scherzo's head. He tried to shut it out, forgetting the cat-flap as he struggled with chain and lock. Thus occupied he spooned rich dark coffee into two chipped mugs and added milk to his own so as not to scald the instant, then poured boiling water, adding to Ruth's a little cold, before stirring in crystal motes.
Ruth was gone when he re-entered, forcibly removed from the premises. Neither did his giro arrive Thursday, a fact which shifted the abacus beads to the detriment of his former employers. He would gain access to the incinerator plant, he decided, unleashing desperate forces and effecting the lead guitarist's rescue.
Said guitar he first liberated, a symbolic dry run.
18
‘Here, put this on.’
‘What is it?’
‘Radiation suit - hurry.’
The prisoner complied. He had no choice; they made his decisions for him, had since birth, the mundane and everyday as well as the more important if similarly attired vital hinges of destiny, his and others'. He was possessed of only sham discretion. When encased in white plastic, noded by yellow tubes and red valves, clear pipes containing graded powders, they opened, from a safe distance, the hatch. They wanted him to crawl down there for a purpose the importance of which was stressed. They instructed him to do it, perform this task like it were any ordinary duty, and he was powerless, unwilling even, to hang back. So over the edge the prisoner went. There was no true ladder, but a series of metal rungs embedded in slick and leafy concrete. The hatch closed above, locked automatically, sealing him in darkness.
A light came on. ‘Okay, you can take the suit off now, you're through.’
‘Uh?’ The prisoner gazed around, astounded.
‘You heard: take it off. Go ahead, this is it, what you've been preparing for all these years, a world outside the world. You're free. Free of freedom. Get it? We're releasing you to your task, child of adhesion; and luck to you.’
He took off the burdensome suit like they told him, wondering what his task might be.
The voice of years was no more in his skull. Beside him was a tree, a massive oak, and in the distance, lined in rows, were houses. Or, more accurately, homes.
The word gave him a strange feeling inside. This was it, he realized, the actual.
19
Scherzo could no longer ignore the pain in his sinuses, an escalating pang of zero hope that poured hot wax down his throat and melted his adenoids. He'd sat around for weeks as if waiting for a new month, a new moon, a new slant in the evening, the sun to hang limp in the sky and bleed for him. Lying flat on his bed he refused to answer or even tweak the curtains aside when Wilson hammered on the window. He thought about locking the man out altogether, throwing away the keys or moving house. Once, he'd taken a bus over to Ruth's; but her flat was empty, stripped of everything, bare to the boards and plaster which in places was fractured or missing chunks as if the emptying and stripping had been overly zealous. All trace of the girl was erased. Despite his avowal he had yet to approach the incinerator, deeming it too risky and making much use of increasingly suspect rationales.
‘How do I know she's there? How can I be sure?’ he demanded of the scratched guitar. It didn't answer, answer enough under the circumstances, the slackness of its strings testament to Scherzo's inexpertness and Ruth's absence, measured in greasy fingerprints and dust. ‘Easy for you to say,’ he accused the silent instrument. He emptied his piggy-bank and counted his money, toyed with the idea of pawning the guitar as he had his stereo (70's silver knobs and chrome trimmings), his record collection (no details) and photographic equipment, inclusive of camera, enlarger, developer, filters, tripod and lunar vehicle with optional fifth gear, anti-lock brakes, sunroof and air-conditioning, but without power-steering. It was the first of May and the day of judgement. He left via the back door, climbed the hedge, scaled the fence, discovering beyond these borders another, a set of railway tracks no ageing dipsomaniac with a painful gall-bladder had recently used for a pillow. Scherzo Trepan put his own ear to the rusting metal and heard a distant train, the host of it trembling his fillings.
20
The painter of exotic, transvisual landscapes slept next to his fitful wife. He dreamed of conversations with his agent, her office hung bright and square, steeped in moving and static canvasses, none of them Benedict's, her desk likewise tidy and fluid, composed of inky blue water. ‘You need fresh experiences,’ she was telling him. ‘Go somewhere contrasting, Roy, chase the light and bring me colours I haven't seen before, colours that exist in forgotten corners and hidden realms, places where the natural balance has yet to be corrupted.’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I'll do that.’
‘It's frustrating, Roy. What is it with you? What's this creative block? You paint rotting fruit and overturned dustbins spilling garbage and expect me to rummage among it for scraps of innovation, some nuance of brush only Roy Benedict can iron your shirt, Roy! How many times do I have to tell you? Iron your shirt!’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I'll do that.’
‘So you say,’ bleated his mother, tugging her beard. ‘But does it ever, Roy, ever happen? Do those creases vanish? No, they accumulate, they look at all this shit and search for something polite to say, some way of avoiding the inevitable.’ She folded her arms. Bubbles rose from her nostrils. ‘What is this? they're thinking. What am I being asked to buy? Is this a joke? Has the real Benedict died?’ His blue c
otton was swept into the air. ‘Creases!’
‘I am trying,’ he said. ‘You have to believe me. It just keeps going wrong, right at the end.’ He slapped at a liquid fly. ‘Don't worry.’
‘Worry?’ responded his agent, exasperated, parts of her drifting away. ‘Roy, I care about you. I care about your work. I care about my commission. I hate to see you like this.’ But her words were gurgled.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I'll do that. Starting tomorrow.’
‘Roy?’
‘What is it?’
‘I heard a noise,’ Rebecca whispered. ‘It came from the bathroom.’
Benedict got out of bed, naked, cloy with sweat, and padded out the door into a shaft of steel-blue moonlight. They were waiting for him, grabbed his arms and pushed a coiled length of string in his mouth. The frayed end slipped down his throat, his reflexive swallowing dragging more and more of it toward his already protesting stomach. Curiously, he was reminded of Indian Yogi, of how they would pass a strip of cloth through their digestive tracts as a means of (spiritual?) cleansing. Benedict, however, choked on acid bile and failed to meditate. He could see no faces around him, only dimly register hands, fingers sharp and strong, like children's, divorced from their parent limbs in the shadows. Rebecca screamed. Again, higher, and Benedict remembered his wife telling him mornings past of sounds she'd heard through the floor of the house.
When next his eyes opened all was quiet, the day perfectly still, the swamp and its insects sleeping, taking their turn as he had his. He lay on his side, feet dangling over water like bait, a second wetness in his ear. He didn't want to get up. He knew what he'd find. The night before had climaxed. Benedict hadn't expected it - it had surprised him. He grew forgetful prior to the event and yet recalled every lurid detail afterward: the brutality of the attack on his wife and the connection that assault had with her illness, the fact of her ailment displayed in the viciousness of her often protracted death. He didn't want to look, but knew he must; to look was necessary, if he wanted her back. Clawing at the planks he sat and blinked in the sunshine, stood and turned into the electric shade of the house. Rebecca was in the bathroom, face at a crazy angle, smashed, cut, slipped to her shoulder, hands broken and twisted, bunched, legs wrapped in the torn shower curtain, the shower's articulated hose round her collapsed throat. Benedict knelt beside her, brushed her hair, shorter now than yesterday, as if retracted, a doll's synthetic crown.