He was able to explore the city at his leisure, impressed by its simplicity, wondering what the people of neighbouring worlds would make of such a dearth of resources. How would they fare on this limited diet? Memories aside, it was time to be elsewhere. Gently then, Pearce levered the delicate controls. Next stop Pulchritude. Late summer roses. Soap.
35
Blinder and Theodore cooked over an open fire. They hunched nervously under the trees listening to the dry crackle of logs and the movements of exotic animals. They had come a long way from the ice's glare. They had bypassed the pole, its candy stripes seals’ blood, continued down the slope of the frozen ocean until they met an unfolding shelf of tundra, then on through the firs and the drizzle, across the steppe and into the unknown. Was the planet still turning? they wondered, holding down food and faces. Where were their enemies hiding? Something disturbed the night. Footfalls approached the fire. They swapped glances, hunkered lower, Theodore Dreep the college journalist in his zip-fastened parka, and Woodtoe the surgeon wearing a thick coat of moss-lined bark.
The flames snatched wholly gratuitous images from the void.
36
‘There is a child.’
‘A child?’
‘A boy child. I read of his birth in the river-bed and had the news confirmed by an eagle.’
‘Who was this eagle?’
‘A bird. I mended its broken wing. It had been knocked from the sky and fallen heavily to earth, hobbling for days in search of rodents.’
‘And did it find many?’
‘No: the bird was too slow, too cumbersome with its damaged pinion dragging behind it, growing weaker until eventually it lay down to contemplate the expediency of expiration. I found it by chance one morning. I was out for a stroll, clomping through the bushes, taking a short-cut to the lake where I'd left my fishing tackle the previous evening. The poor eagle was near starved. As thin as a cloud! I stood before its dull eye and could barely see my reflection. There was no hint of its breath. Its wing was jammed between two boulders. The eye was cold and empty. It had almost given up. I fed it the apples I'd picked for my breakfast, then rushed back home to fetch bed sheets for use as bandages and a gallon of my thickest creosote for a poultice. Finally I bound the wing, employing tree trunks and three fifty foot lengths of rope.’
‘And the break was fixed?’
‘Yes. But more importantly, I filled the belly and eased the pain. You should have seen that eye brighten! It positively glowed with stars.’
‘What of the child?’
‘The eagle was a messenger. It carried warning of a plot to pervert good to evil. It seems this babe has many foes, some of whom had touched him.’
‘The boy was hurt?’
‘Sick; a venomous malady - a poison. He was taken north to a secret place and hidden in the hope of gaining time in which to locate the remedy.’
‘The bird told you this? In truth?’
‘The bird would not swear to it; but birds are less practised than men at lying. Perhaps it was afraid it had told me too much, for it next tried to sow doubt in my mind.’
‘Only you saw through it.’
‘Of course. I'm a thief and a poacher!’
‘What is this child's name? Is it common or rare? Tell me that I might one day recognize him.’
‘His name?’
‘His name, yes.’
37
In a secluded wing of the hospital painted an unappealing white, Hammond sat reading a pornographic magazine. He searched for inspiration among the glossy vulvas, but tonight like so many nights found only perspiration in the unglossy leaves of his skin.
Suddenly made aware, he jerked coldly as the pearly bulb expired.
A faint blue light bubbled in a cracked porcelain sink, its sides steep and its chrome plug-hole corroded. The curved rim was licked with tongues of indigo. The light stained everything it touched. Hammond jumped to his feet. The blue glow detached itself from the chrome like a gas flame set too high; but rather than blow itself out this amorphous creation floated gently toward the ceiling like a slo-mo ball of fart to the surface of bath water or a coloured amoeba in one of those oil lamps popular in the seventies. A second globe took its place, coloured green. It rose also, converging with the first to form a larger globe of sunny yellow. Next there emerged from a stainless steel tap a thick orange mass, clinging like mucus as if the tap's volcanic innards had fallen victim to some igneous virus. Watching it, Hammond expected the mass to turn white and superheated, but the stubborn orange remained, growing steadily larger, until at about ten inches in diameter it detached itself completely and began to glide serenely across the room. The kitchen assistant was struck by its reflected beauty, its glow off knives and hobs, its swimming over work surfaces, chopping boards and pans of every shape and description, like joke fairground mirrors. It was the most appealing thing he had ever seen. All the naked gloss and paper fantasies which embellished his dreams, waking and sleeping, paled under the orange's sweeping luminescence. The blue and green combination yellow gave it centre stage. Through the window blinds was glimpsed a purple moon.
The kitchen door hinged open, flooding Hammond in stringent white tones, arriving late and undigested, a brilliance against which a shadow loomed, warped and sucking the extinguished bulb's consequential darkness. This negative illumination was made animate, engendered via death, vacuuming each hidden, recessed shade and drawing it into the silhouette's oblivion. The white tracked the visiting colours by their footprints extant in Hammond's locked shut eyes and expunged them, wiped them, tidal fashion, from the vulnerable sands of his flesh preoccupied mind, hunted them down and slaughtered them on the firm-buttocked, perk-breasted strand. But their memory escaped. The white slammed against the blinds, garish and total, rattling the thin slats in defiance of the moon cloaking its boastful shades in cloud.
‘Hey,’ said Morrison. ‘What's up?’
Turning to face the shadow Hammond smiled. ‘The bulb went, that's all,’ he replied. The intruding male nurse seemed to expect more. Hammond struggled, sought equilibrium, felt self-conscious. ‘You're working late. Me also.’
‘Yeah,’ Morrison said, straightening his plastic uniform. ‘They shit twenty-four hours, you know? I don't need much sleep. I wanted to talk to someone about roughage.’
Hammond relaxed. ‘Well, I'm your man.’
They sat on chairs in the passage, Morrison twirling strands of dark greasy hair, the kitchen assistant oily-eyed with visions, pristine images, fresh memories of orange nipples and yellow vaginas. Something terrible passed between the two men. Made physical, Morrison indented Hammond's thick skull with a red peeling fire bucket, emptying brains, litter and sand.
And thereafter made good use of a spatula.
‘It's my job. I don't pretend to enjoy it. But then who would?’
The patient, the special case, complied.
‘Okay,’ Morrison told him, ‘you're clean.’
He held the shiny bauble in his palm. Disbelief, buried in his mind, slowly surfaced, glowing hotly behind the doors of his deep-set eyes as his fingers closed round that fantastic, excreted ball. It was the size of a marble. It had, Morrison thought, taken leave of its host without the host knowing, rolled into his hand like some extraordinary gift from the rectal world, a sunlike pearl from between the pink cheeks of innocence; subjective innocence, half moons belonging to the reluctant patient before him.
And Morrison had witnessed its birth. More, he'd aided its passage, provided it with the means to continue its journey.
The ex-host regarded the television as he slipped away. A few seconds down the corridor, having abandoned his trolley, and Morrison was suddenly immersed in blackness, absolute even as he kept walking. Then reality flashed back in. He longed for the experience to repeat itself, for during that lapse he had sensed many secrets, wonders in the void. He gripped the marble tightly, licked his lips to moisten them, filling the cracks.
He did not continue on his rounds as dictated by his schedule but locked himself instead in the farthest stall from the urinals and pissing hospital personnel. Trousers dropped to nervous ankles, heels perched on the toilet seat, one hand shifting genitals, Morrison peered for the first time since childhood curiosity at his own peculiar anus, alike and yet so different from the hundreds of others he observed in the course of his undervalued profession. It reminded him, his arsehole, of very little. The sight of it left him feeling strangely passive. Had he expected more? We all like to think we're unique. He rubbed the opening with the tip of his thumb. The muscles in the backs of his legs tensed uncomfortably, the hairs that sprouted from them curling like weeds at the bottom of a murky river. It was dim in the stall and the orange sphere glowed faintly. He rolled it in his palm, grinned and inserted it slowly. A growing sexual urge led him to masturbate. His own balls moved independently, contained in their wrinkled sack that shrank coldly, then loosened as the orange disappeared beyond reach of his finger, determined encouragement to his waning cock resting for a moment lazily against his thigh, held fast by Morrison's pronounced knuckles.
An hour later by his watch, its second hand counting, keeping tally, a fist rapped on the cubicle door.
‘Is there someone in there?’ the fist asked.
Morrison flushed. A pause - footsteps slunk away. Morrison emerged felling refreshed. He imagined the tiny world to have ascended his colon as far as his small intestine. Soon it would pass into his stomach, next up his trachea, climbing the wet length of his tongue like a mountaineer an ice wall, to that tongue's rooted summit, taking the slide in reverse, all the way to his mouth where it would rub shoulders with his filled teeth, artfully caressing the swell of his gums as if flirting at a party, inflating (it had to inflate) until it squeezed at last from the flaccid embrace of his lips to float in the weak night air above his bed, where he slept, where he dreamed of just such a moment and the possibilities it would, ideally, represent.
If only the excitement didn't keep him awake. Like Christmas, only ten times as good.
In the supermarket, car parked near the electric doors, white in the late sun, Morrison hefted cans of vibrant South American fruit, their logos brash stars, wondering if the globe he'd accessed needed to eat, and what. He pushed his trolley along every crammed-with-produce aisle in sequence, up and down their clustered lengths, labels and prices like symbols on a route map, finally making the checkout where he discovered all he had collected in his silver cage on wheels was a jar of wobbly bubble-bath and three frozen chicken wings, a frost on their packaging like the rime on a dead man's lips. The checkout girl cleared her gaunt throat and the icy landscape receded. Morrison shivered. It was as if he'd been there. And the dead man? He located his money in a pocket and paid, forgot his change, two of the chicken wings and the jar of wobbly bubble-bath. Maybe the checkout girl shouted after him, employing for the purpose her gaunt throat. He couldn't remember. Maybe he walked home and his car followed. That was likely; his car was obedient and did most everything he told it. The one time it had gone off on its own it had got as far as Durham, within honking distance of the cathedral whose stone mass made it feel metallic and small, before breaking down and phoning him. Morrison recalled the way his car had sounded over the line. It was sorry. It would make amends. It would never go off like that again. It had learnt its lesson. Please would he come and fetch it. It was frightened and alone. The cathedral was so beautiful, but it missed the architectural simplicity of its humble brick and timber garage.
Reluctantly, Morrison agreed, the rescue involving bus and taxi rides. He'd tried to persuade the errant vehicle to find its own way home; however, it was too emotionally overwrought, panicked and guilt-ridden to face the inevitable sneering traffic. His car was a big softy at heart, a timid machine whose dreams, like those of many, where a bit too awkwardly shaped to fit into the unforgiving puzzle of Father Reality, the old man stern and indifferent...
Inside his fridge was a stash of magic mushrooms concealed in a plastic ice-cream tub in the freezer compartment and outside his fridge was the kitchen and contents of Morrison's rundown flat. He kept his car keys here, among the ice, the better to wake his car come morning. He switched the kettle on and the news. There was a false report (all reports were false in Morrison's eyes) of alien activity at a working man's club on the outskirts of town. The report, which consisted largely of home movie footage and shaky soundtrack, detailed the supposed extraterrestrial cover version of an old Cliff Richard hit. Disgusted, he dragged the TV from the wall and tipped it on its back, buttoned for an empty, static channel (all those millions of ants, he believed in them) and imagined the orange like a queen in the centre of a pageant, her coronation, as she was the star in this production. And then the tea. Right, he thought, sipping mushroom. He squatted on the mantelpiece and filled his loosely fastened head.
It was a swimming pool, the orange a lilo. It was a city in space, a gaseous planet ball, the orange just gone nova. It was an eye, an unhuman eye, the orange the perfect image of a glimpsed and captured arsehole intelligence. It was inside him. Nothing alien. Forget that. Wherever he looked the orange centred his vision. He gazed out the window, through the twilight; descried a man in a call box, targeting him as if with a laser.
And Morrison then occupied what was left of that man's life.
38
‘Renny? What? The car broke down. Listen...’ The sound of the wire, the colour schemes of the red-framed street, the myriad scratched phone-numbers and the litter. ‘No, I haven't. I'll be there; promise. Myrtle Grove; know it. I'll catch a bus...’ The eerie sensation of speaking to yourself: so few replies. They might be echoes. ‘Renny? I'm sorry. Red or white? White? Okay...’ The fact he could have guessed. Why call at all? For an answer, an answer to a particular name.
Something burned in his skull. He cradled the receiver and pushed open the door on its creaking hinges and stepped onto pavement, glanced round like Doctor Who, this the oddest of worlds to find oneself in. Motionless by the curb was the car. He shrugged, wedged his hands in his pockets and with the left caressed the cold pistol whose previously incongruous touch now seemed natural enough. His right hand dipped into a bloody handkerchief. The handkerchief baffled him. He dragged it out. The blood wasn't his, he realized, smiling. The car wasn't his either.
It got darker and started to rain. There were seven people at the bus stop. Its roof leaked. He didn't have long to wait. He guessed the fare. Suppose this was the wrong bus? But he thought not, he'd been this way before. The bus pulled up at the next stop and six people alighted. He was alone, the driver invisible, the rain falling harder as it struggled to erase everything beyond the flat window glass. He needed a piss; all that water, and he needed a piss. How many more stops? He squeezed his cock and gritted his teeth. The invisible driver made a point of not looking at him when he advanced down the aisle. The vehicle halted coincidentally. His destination thus reached, he got off. Nobody got on. The invisible driver, he intuited, wished not to believe in him. The feeling was mutual. He watched the bus dissolve into the blackness and wetness. He pissed behind a hedge. He searched for the correct street and appropriate door, the latter yellow and ajar, rain bouncing off its hard gloss. Within, the party either hadn't happened or the record-player had died. The people appeared uncomfortable. They drank from a variety of plastic, metal and glass containers. Missed their mouths. The people looked scared. By the way they tried to ignore him and pretend he didn't exist, he knew that in truth they recognized his presence as solid, unshakeable fact. They had no choice but to believe in him.
And yet what did they see? He parked himself before a mirror to better find out.
‘Mike?’
He made no reply.
‘Mike, the wine. How could you forget the wine?’ Renny tugged on his wet collar.
I'm her brother...
‘Crap party, Mike. Even the aliens are boring. Why invite them
at all? What ever happened to parties that started at midnight and went on till dawn?’
Wait a minute, reasoned the man in the mirror, didn't I just piss? Then how come I've wet myself? He produced the gun. ‘This is mine,’ he said. ‘It belongs to me. There's a shop on the corner, yes? I can hold it up.’
‘Mike?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mike?’
Some fancy dress party; he had a craving for jelly.
Pushing past Renny he stumbled into the living-room at the exact moment the music sprang to life and the celebrants became flick-of-a-switch active. Out of control he circulated, using the cold pistol to salute people he knew only as strangers, their elongated smiles comical on such disproportionate faces.
He was okay, they said. Look, he hasn't come as himself after all. And doesn't the gun look real? Nice touch. A regular villain, the long and wide faces told him.
It was ten o'clock.
Got dark early?
‘Mike?’
Where the hell was Arthur? Renny wondered. Angry, she went in search of her brother amid the party throng. Things were really swinging now, the alien dancing with the aboriginal and the sailors armwrestling the nuns who won four from five. She caught sight of a gangster, but it wasn't Mike. This gangster groped a zombie in a Pulchritude Promotions T-shirt soaked to cling. Nipples shone through black; too black, as if coloured with mascara. Renny headed for the kitchen where she arrived in time to witness an explosion of green bottle glass.
Instinctively, she ducked.
Mike shrugged.
‘It went off,’ an insect said. ‘The gun went off.’
‘Mike...’
He turned through the back door and Renny tripped after him, pausing to hitch up her cape, the red velvet lining damp, a flash of it disappearing Renny into a wash-house chill with concrete and suspended garden implements choked with last year's and the years' before garden detritus; more insects, these to scale and dead, victim to fist-sized spiders whose glittering webs drooped like net curtains in Renny's vampiric wake.