It had been a long trek, but they were finally approaching the DMZ. Blue took another round of photos, the relief and the pain etched in the grunts' faces as they drew closer to the edge of the jungle. Another five kays and they'd be home clear, but not all of them wanted to be there. There were too many ghosts in the bush, friends left behind, calling for them to stay. Saigon was less than a day away, but not all of them would make it. Looking back at the vacant eyes as they attempted to name him, to distinguish him from the trees, the enemy, themselves, he wondered which ones would make it back to the world. In his mind's eye he saw a splash of bright crimson on the lush green jungle and knew that this was one of the bad ones. Too late even to learn their names.
It was Blue's third tour. In eighteen months as a snapper for the Melbourne Daily News, he'd probably amassed more time in the bush than the whole platoon he was shadowing combined, and at seventeen, he was probably older than most of them too. It was eleven years since the US had finally declared war on the North, and all that had really changed since the Tet offensive was the death tolls and the steadily shrinking South. The Cong were dug in as deeply as ever, the Brits were still refusing to get involved and the latest rumours had Nixon kissing up to the Cambodians in the hope that they would finally let him send troops in to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail before the whole NLF rolled straight through Saigon. In the meantime, they were packing off younger and younger kids to war, in the hope that the sheer weight of numbers might finally begin to win through. It hadn't worked so far, but at least they were wise to the fact that it was a waste of time and money training and equipping the cannon fodder. The US now saved millions of bomb dollars every year by sending them out into the bush with little more than an ROTC lecture and a hand-me-down rifle.
Hitting a small clearing, the L.T. called a smoke break and the weary boys dropped their packs and settled against the trees to rest. After a moment, when it became apparent that no-one else was volunteering to take a watch and the fresh-faced lieutenant had no intention of ordering it, Blue took himself into the trees, found a decent vantage point and set himself up to wait for the perfect shots to appear. He didn't know quite what was going to happen, just that something was coming, soon, and afterwards the world would be nine souls lighter.
Down in the clearing, one of the grunts took out a pocket radio and tuned it through the dial until he found one of the punk rock stations coming out of London and the sound of the suburbs ripped through the jungle. No-one objected or even suggested that broadcasting their location was a bad idea, and a couple even sang along in their best nasal whine. To Blue, the question wasn't how did he know they were about to die, just how had they lasted this long? Before he could even begin to think about an answer, he felt the familiar tension across his chest as the lattice of thin welts tightened. There was an itch behind his eyes, the sensation of his third eye opening to take in the spectacle, then a sudden heat in the pit of his stomach as the morning's overpriced PX hamburger began the climb back up to the sunlight. He gulped back acid and raised one of the cameras which hung around his neck.
The telephoto lens brought him almost unbearably close to the unsuspecting soldiers, revealing every tick and twitch, every tremble of fear and exhaustion. The boy with the radio wailing along with the Talking Heads had a shaving cut on his chin but had somehow managed to miss three thick black hairs which sprouted around it. The L.T. had a stringy shred of tobacco stuck to his lower lip from a poorly roached joint. The joint maker himself was stretched out with his head on his pack, mumbling quietly to himself, either singing a different song from everyone else or perhaps just saying his prayers. The zoom placed him right in the centre of the clearing with them, made them look more than ever like children playing dressing up games, but the layers of ground glass held him separate from them, a distant, dispassionate observer. Whenever he looked through the viewfinder time slowed to a barely visible progression of still frames and he used the power now to give the boys what little extra time he could. Feeling like God's own missile guidance system, he focussed on a bead of sweat trickling down one grunt's sunburned neck and sighed. If they didn't even have the sense to wrap a towel round their necks, what chance would they ever have stood?
He pressed down hard on the button and the shutter flickered and clicked as rapidly as the AK-47 rounds which suddenly strafed the clearing. The first bullet to claim a human target sizzled as the hot metal passed through that same bead of sweat and tore into the preponderously vulnerable spine behind it. The soldier with the sunburned neck dropped like a stone, mercifully spared any further pain as the slug disconnected his nervous system and left him lying in the undergrowth, waiting for his heart to finish its heavy labours.
The L.T. died screaming. The first of three bullets to hit him went through his left cheek, ricocheting off his lower jaw and filling his mouth with hot fragments of tooth and bone. The next found his raised hand and tore off three fingers and a thumb, turning the sensitive, dextrous digits into a fine red mist and so many lumps of gristle. The kill shot came almost immediately after, but in the young lieutenant's mind, it might have been an eternity. He had time to look at the ruins of his hand and to set off a high, keening scream, the most expressive sound his shattered face could produce. Then the round with his name on it hit his chest with jackhammer force, twisting him around where he sat, forcing the final breath from his lungs in a reedy whistle.
From his secluded vantage point, Blue took shot after shot, matching the Cong beat for beat, one round, one photo. He saw the young men die, cut down where they lay drowsing in the oppressive afternoon heat, blown onto their backs as they scrambled to their feet, riddled with bullets which made a terrifyingly banal thud as they found their mark. Untouched, unmoved, Blue used up all the film in his four everyday cameras, then pulled his high speed Nikon from his pack and held it to his eye, waiting for the last breath. For a moment or two, the only sounds in the clearing were the soft drip of warm blood and the muffled radio, trapped beneath one of the corpses. Then the trees were hacked aside and three NLF soldiers in regulation black stepped into the clearing. While his comrades swept the perimeter with their Kalashnikovs at the ready, the third made a beeline for the source of the music. Tipping over the dead soldier with his boot, he retrieved the radio and held it close to his ear, shaking his head wildly and grinning witlessly, aping the last actions of the child at his feet. His comrades laughed at the impersonation, then set about stripping the other corpses. Between them, the three VC made short work of it, pocketing rations, smokes, small electricals and arms. They were quick, disciplined and methodical, working clockwise around the clearing with a set structure to their looting, taking turns at standing guard while the other two harvested the booty. It seemed that the communist ideal of equally redistributed wealth held true even when the wealth in question was prised from the still warm fingers of a murdered sixteen year old.
The eight privates had been robbed of all their valuables, leaving only the lieutenant unsullied. As they advanced on his still form, Blue felt his scarred chest twitch anew; this was it. He checked his focus and prepared to shoot as the lead man bent to roll the L.T. onto his back.
The blast was beautiful to behold. As the dead weight was released from the M61, the pin sprang into the air like an advance scout for the coming wave of white hot shrapnel. Glinting in the sunlight, the sliver of metal released in the young man's final moments seemed to hover like a silver dragonfly, floating at eye level before the startled Cong. Before they had time to react, in the instant when they understood what was happening, the grenade detonated, sending out a wide arc of shredded steel fragments which sliced through black cotton and soft flesh with ease. The razor sharp fragments tore through the men, spraying the jungle around them with gobbets of charred, torn meat. One man lost the arm which held his rifle, his death grip firing off a hail of rounds which shattered his own shins and struck one of his comrades in the eye, but both men were dead before the shooting even began. Only the third man lived beyond the initial blast, shielded as he was by the others. A single inch long shard of steel had pierced his left temple, leaving him sprawled across one of his victims, staring up at the deep blue sky, expressing his surprise in a stream of random syllables which he slurred and babbled uncontrollably until his final moment came and silenced his tongue forever.
Blue's finger squeezed the trigger and the shutter whirred, capturing the disintegration of the three men frame by frame as the deadly nova spread out across the clearing. The images were etched with perfect precision on the film's surface, preserving the instant when each man died, freezing their final breaths and trapping them like flies in amber. In the sharp staccato movement of the shutter he thought he caught a glimpse of the one he sought, the man who had brought him all the way to Asia, the being who had awoken the power within him all those years before, but in the next stuttering moment he was gone.
It had been less than a second since the grenade exploded and the corona of blazing shrapnel still expanded like the birth of a miniature universe. Up in his aerie, Blue was safe from any impact, but the tree itself was not so secure. As the shockwave hit, it bent and shook, tossing Blue back and forth. His added weight caused the tree to dip further and further, placing more and more tension on the narrow bole. Finally, with the trunk gouged by dozens of wire flechettes, the tree could support him no longer, and with a loud crack, it gave way and pitched him into the undergrowth.
Landing heavily on his back, Blue felt a wave of pain which spread from his skull and all the way down his legs. His head connected with a thick root and he was never sure afterwards whether he had blacked out. When he opened his eyes again, the sky above him swarmed with squadrons of mosquitos, attacking him like fighter planes. Every inch of him seemed to ache, a thousand cuts and bruises all screaming for relief at once, but when he tried to sit up it quickly became apparent where the worst injury was; for a moment, finding that he couldn't get up, he thought that he was paralysed. Then a pulse of pain spread from his right shoulder, radiating out like an internal frag grenade detonating at a point just below the shoulder blade. He raised his head to see what the problem was and found that he had managed to land on a two inch thick shaft of bamboo which had burst straight though his shoulder, extending a foot or more from the exit wound and pinning him to the ground like a butterfly in a collectors case.
Experimenting, he found that small, slow movements caused the shattered bones to grind together and sent rolling waves of pain down his arm and across his chest. Sudden, jerking motions simply brought a flash of white pain behind his eyes which left him breathless and biting deeply into his own tongue to hold back the mother of all screams. Either way, there was no chance of lifting himself off the post. His right hand was useless, and with his left he could neither pull the bamboo free from the earth nor reach his pack which lay just out of reach, taunting him with its cargo of painkillers, flares and smokes. Whichever way he looked at it, he was stuck until someone came along and found him and considering that he was 10 klicks across the Northern border, it was unlikely to be a friendly patrol that came to his aid.
Lying there on the jungle floor, he drifted in and out of consciousness until long after night fall, watching ragged, untidy clouds carrying the moon across his field of vision. At some point he realised that he had been speaking aloud, holding a conversation with someone nearby who had replied to all of his questions but refused to help him. At another, more lucid moment, he understood that the radio was still switched on somewhere in the clearing, and the only person speaking to him was a DJ in a glass booth somewhere on the far side of the Earth. Sometime after that he found that he was still continuing the conversation anyway.
Sliding along the edge of the blade between this world and the rest, Blue felt a sense of peace and contentment envelop him. It didn't matter which side he landed on come morning, he decided; it was enough that he had been here at all. All the men in all the photographs he had taken were witness to that. In gathering up their likenesses perhaps he had caught something of their souls as well, a fragment of the inner being which illuminated and motivated them. His photos were proof that they existed, that they were living, breathing creatures who loved and hated and won and lost. Now they would be proof that he too had once walked this Earth. Fumbling with the straps which looped and twisted around his neck, he found his Nikon and held it up to inspect it. The lens was still intact, the film safe in its housing, and while he couldn't check the internal mechanisms for impact damage, he somehow knew that there was one decent shot left in it. For several minutes he chewed on the strap until it broke and he was able to hold the camera at full arm's length, aiming back down at him. Waiting for as long as he could, holding the camera in a rock steady grip until his arm throbbed with the exertion, he tried to hold out for the final moment, but it was not to be. He could feel his consciousness ebbing away once more and the tendons in his arm trembled, shaking the camera. He could drop it at any moment, but the skein of jellyfish stings was silent. He had never been able to predict the moment of his own death, and even now, when it seemed so close, it remained tantalisingly out of reach. Instead, he did what all the best photojournalists did; he faked it. Fixing his stare on a distant star, he composed a deep, thoughtful expression, as if he was already gone and gazing into the worlds beyond. Thinking of all the dead men he had seen in the last three years he tried to fill his eyes with all the unanswered questions he had seen in theirs, along with the serenity and acceptance he had seen in far too few. He made a good corpse, he decided, then pressed the button one final time. The shutter clicked and whirred, then came to a dead stop as the camera fell from his hand, the portrait of the dead boy slowly bleaching out as light crept into the aperture for unknown hours.
When he came too this time it was daylight once again and the photograph was nothing more than a milky white frame of overexposed film. The sky was blue and clear, the radio was close by and playing some real music for a change, the plaintive wailing of Janis instead of the screaming anger of Rotten and his mates. The pain in his shoulder had been replaced by a warm, floating sensation which seemed to shimmer through his fingers and toes. Every leaf in the canopy above him seemed to sparkle and glisten with early morning dew, and the whole morning was heavy with the promise of goodness. It felt like Heaven, but for the bamboo stake which still grew from his shoulder.
Withdrawing the needle from his arm and pressing down on the tiny bubble of blood with an icy cold thumb, the man in black leant over Blue, peering into his eyes, looking for signs of awareness. He smiled a gap toothed grin, his ancient, wrinkled face splitting like an over-ripe peach, then held up the morphine ampoules he had retrieved from Blue's pack. Blue saw the sunlight sparkling off the glass, refracted through the clear, sweet liquid like a prism, splitting a single shaft of light into a rain of rainbows which fell across his face. He raised his left hand to grab at the colours but they were too fast for him, too nimble for his graceless, clumsy fingers. Instead, the old Vietnamese placed the ampoules and syringe in his hand, carefully folding his fingers around them to ensure he kept them close. Then he rocked back on his heels and took up a wide, scarred machete which looked like it had been hacking through the jungle since it had first sprouted from the Earth. Holding the top of the bamboo with his left hand, the man swung the machete with his right, slicing it clean through with a single stroke, so close to Blue's chest that it took two buttons from his shirt front at the same time.
The sky was suddenly split by the roar of B-52Ds heading for their daily bombing run above Xuan Loc. Carrying their payload of napalm and Agent Orange, the shiny tins of flying death were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, great flying fish swimming in the deep blue sky. He watched as the hazy vapour trails mingled and crossed, forming the sigil for inner peace in the ether, and he gurgled happily to himself.
Still grinning, the old man stood and moved away towards the thicker trees, his machete raised to clear the way. Before he left, he turned back and looked down at the happy boy, drifting in his morphine stupour, too stoned to realise that he was in the presence of the man responsible for his very existence.
"That's two, little monk. The next time we meet will be the last, so if I was you, I wouldn't chase it."
He raised the machete in a salute, then turned and disappeared into the jungle.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
When You Fall, Fall Properly
"And that was the last time I saw her,
The girl on the Netherly bus."
The poet closed his notepad and lowered his head like a priest leading prayers at a funeral for his own soul. Midge watched him for a moment as he basked in the polite applause of the coffee shop patrons, but she didn't join in. She pegged him to be a mid-thirties office drone, stuck in a job that killed him a little more every day, squandering a talent that never really got off the starting blocks and letting his dreams out once a week in the complimentary soft focus light of an open mic night. It seemed rude not to applaud his efforts, but encouraging him would be even worse.
The applause petered out and he left the stage quickly, his seat taken almost immediately by a Joni - Long blonde hair, floor length skirt, peasant blouse and an acoustic guitar - who launched into Big Yellow Taxi without a hint of irony. Midge shook her head sadly and turned away from the stage as Ari returned to the table.
"One grande skinny mocha latte with a shot of caramel, whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles pour moi, et pour madame, one straight black coffee."
Midge nodded her thanks, took the tiny white cup and sipped carefully at the scalding black liquid. Ari stirred three sachets of brown sugar into her own drink and ran her tongue along the length of the wooden stirrer, her eyes fixed on Midge's. She didn't get the response she was hoping for and sighed, then pointed the cleaned stick at the stage.
"Wailing witch alert."
Midge nodded, smiling in spite of herself.
"Open mic bingo; one fat stand up ripping off old Bill Hicks routines and we've got a full house."
Ari laughed, tossing her long red hair. To someone who didn't really know her it would sound warm and genuine.
"You're nervous," Midge said.
Ari shrugged.
"It's been a while."
"That wasn't down to me."
Ari's face darkened but she held her temper and took a deep drink from her cup. She tipped it up just a little further than was necessary, gave herself a thick whipped cream moustache and grinned broadly at Midge.
"Still friends?"
Midge nodded, unsmiling.
"To the end. Is that why you wanted to see me?"
Ari lowered her gaze, wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and took another, tidier sip of her coffee.
"Do you want a muffin or something?"
"Ari..."
The Joni finished her song but the scattered applause did little to cover the uncomfortable silence between them. As she launched into a passable rendition of One Day Like This, Midge drained her coffee and reached for her bag.
"Don't go."
Midge paused, surprised by the note of desperation.
"Give me a reason to stay."
Ari's eyes brimmed with tears but she wiped them away with her fingertips and composed herself.
"It used to be enough that I'd ask."
Midge had to fight the urge to sweep her into her arms and make it all better, but in the end she went too far in the opposite direction.
"You were one of us then."
Ari laughed, tossing her long red hair, but no-one would mistake it for happiness.
"I was never one of you. Not really."
Midge frowned.
"What the hell does that mean? We did everything together. You lived at the house. We fought side by side then went home and slept in the same bed. How could we be any more of a team than that?"
Ari lifted her bag onto the table and pulled out a tattered paperback book.
"It's more than just acting like the rest of you. Do you remember this?"
She pushed the book across the table. Midge glanced down at the garish cover with its barely legal depiction of Minnie, Mickey, Adolf and Eva.
"Sure. Going Underground. I found it for you in Portmeirion after the thing with the Magister Templi. What happened to it."
"It got trashed when the orb went wild round the house. The last time. Remember?"
Midge blushed, looked away.
"I remember what we did afterwards... But I still don't see what that has to do with anything."
Ari turned the book over. The spine had been torn in two, so that half of the book was missing.
"Today, Artie Love is almost completely forgotten," she read, "a footnote in the brief history of English underground comics, but his greatest creation..."
She waved her hand in the air, indicating the missing words which floated out there somewhere, waiting to be captured and pinned to the page.
"That's all there is. I searched everywhere for the rest of that book. I even tried to find another copy but it's like it doesn't even exist. There's no record of the author or half the people he interviewed."
"So it came through a lesion. So what? None of us have histories here."
Ari pulled the rest of the book out of her bag and laid it on the table, her hand covering the next page so that Midge couldn't read it.
"How many times have you seen Fliss die?"
Midge shook her head as if brushing away an annoying fly.
"What?"
"And how often has Monk OD'd on some god-awful concoction of smack and jellyfish brains and who knows what else?"
"Don't-"
"You died in my arms Midge. You bled out while I held you in a stinking cellar in Prague. I had to close your eyes and leave you in the water and go home and burn my fucking clothes because they were that stiff with your blood that they would never come clean."
Her voice was rising and a couple of people at nearby tables began to watch in the hopes of a full scale meltdown, but Midge just laughed. For the first time since Ari's call she felt relaxed and in control once more.
"Is that it? You're worried about us getting hurt? Oh, you poor, sweet baby!"
She reached out and laid her hand over Ari's, turning it over to entwine her fingers. For a moment she felt the old tingle in her fingertips, the static charge that always seemed to flicker between them.
"We can't really die baby. We're not here. The silver star - "
Ari gripped her fingers tightly and turned her hand over. Midge's words died on her lips as she saw the long, puckered scar which ran the length of Ari's forearm.
"How...?"
"If I ask you, will you come with me? Leave this behind, start over in the real world?"
"Ari, I can't - "
"You mean you won't. Course you can leave. Just get up and walk. Say the word and you'll be free. Well?"
Midge looked at her across the table, remembering a time when they were closer than any two people can get, tears blurring the woman across the table into the girl she had once loved.
"I can't."
Ari nodded, released her hand and began to pull away, then paused with her fingers still covering the page.
"I didn't understand when he brought me the rest of the book. I didn't understand why it was him, or what the book meant. Now I do. Look."
Midge frowned, looking down at the book. Ari pulled her hand away with a flourish and read the remainder of the line aloud.
"Arihaily Ilya lives on."
Midge stared at the page, the words swimming before her like inky fish. She took a moment to digest their meaning, then looked up at the stranger sitting opposite as she covered the book once more.
Ari fired once, the bullet tearing straight through Midge's left eye. As the impact rocked her in her chair, she coughed up a sudden gout of blood that splashed across the back of Ari's hand, staining the pages between her fingers, leaving a perfect hand print of text and yellowed paper..
The Joni screamed and dropped her guitar as the other patrons struggled to back away, turning over tables and chairs in their terror. Ari stood and fired three shots into the wall behind the singer, barely even glancing at her.
"Sit. Down."
The screaming faltered and died, leaving the sound of a barista hiding behind the coat rack whispering frantic directions to the emergency services operator. Ari swung the gun around and fired another shot into the mass of coats and scarves.
"Now!"
The barista stepped out, holding his phone up in his hand, then sat heavily on the floor.
Moving quickly now, Ari stepped around the table, placed her hand against Midge's soft neck and felt the warmth ebb away. She closed her eyes, blinking away a rogue tear, then looked up at the ceiling. As the final laboured pulse faded beneath her tender fingers, the smell of violets filled the room and a soft glow began to shine from every surface. Somewhere a choir began to sing, a song she recognised but could never quite recall. She fought the urge to fall to her knees and bow her head, to show obeisance and piety.
She raised the gun above her head, her arm shaking. The pressure behind her eyeballs grew until she had to cry out, but she gripped Midge's shoulder to steady herself and kept the gun trained on the spot directly above the corpse. The music became louder, shaking the room, rattling cups and glasses and sending them to shatter on the floor. The other customers began to moan in fear and awe as the light became blinding and cold as ice. Ari barely noticed as she turned to one side and vomited.
The gun in her hand felt like an anvil, Thor's hammer raised to the heavens. As the pure white light enveloped her the gun grew cold enough to burn the flesh from her palm. A thin skein of ice formed across her fist and down her arm, her breath clouding in the air before her. The choir became a shriek of feedback, a loop of distortion and glory that blew out the windows and began to peel back the roof like a sardine can. The light rained down like shards of frozen fire, pushing the coffee shop patrons to crawl in the debris like worms, barely able to breathe beneath its crushing weight. Only Ari remained standing, arm outstretched, leaning on her dead lover for support.
As the room shook like a miscued filmstrip,
As the singing reached its crescendo,
As the world opened up like a flower,
As the silver star descended,
As her lover's eyes fluttered open,
She fired a single bullet into god's heart and plunged them all back into darkness.
Midge slumped forwards and began to bleed across the cracked tabletop.
The Joni wept uncontrollably on the floor of the stage.
The barista huddled in the corner with his hands pressed to his eyes.
The poet clutched his broken spectacles and began to crawl towards the door.
Ari wondered if her hearing would ever return, flicked open her mobile and hit send on the message saved in her drafts box.
And somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the world, Elliott opened his mobile, read Ari's message and smiled.
"It's started."
The girl on the Netherly bus."
The poet closed his notepad and lowered his head like a priest leading prayers at a funeral for his own soul. Midge watched him for a moment as he basked in the polite applause of the coffee shop patrons, but she didn't join in. She pegged him to be a mid-thirties office drone, stuck in a job that killed him a little more every day, squandering a talent that never really got off the starting blocks and letting his dreams out once a week in the complimentary soft focus light of an open mic night. It seemed rude not to applaud his efforts, but encouraging him would be even worse.
The applause petered out and he left the stage quickly, his seat taken almost immediately by a Joni - Long blonde hair, floor length skirt, peasant blouse and an acoustic guitar - who launched into Big Yellow Taxi without a hint of irony. Midge shook her head sadly and turned away from the stage as Ari returned to the table.
"One grande skinny mocha latte with a shot of caramel, whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles pour moi, et pour madame, one straight black coffee."
Midge nodded her thanks, took the tiny white cup and sipped carefully at the scalding black liquid. Ari stirred three sachets of brown sugar into her own drink and ran her tongue along the length of the wooden stirrer, her eyes fixed on Midge's. She didn't get the response she was hoping for and sighed, then pointed the cleaned stick at the stage.
"Wailing witch alert."
Midge nodded, smiling in spite of herself.
"Open mic bingo; one fat stand up ripping off old Bill Hicks routines and we've got a full house."
Ari laughed, tossing her long red hair. To someone who didn't really know her it would sound warm and genuine.
"You're nervous," Midge said.
Ari shrugged.
"It's been a while."
"That wasn't down to me."
Ari's face darkened but she held her temper and took a deep drink from her cup. She tipped it up just a little further than was necessary, gave herself a thick whipped cream moustache and grinned broadly at Midge.
"Still friends?"
Midge nodded, unsmiling.
"To the end. Is that why you wanted to see me?"
Ari lowered her gaze, wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and took another, tidier sip of her coffee.
"Do you want a muffin or something?"
"Ari..."
The Joni finished her song but the scattered applause did little to cover the uncomfortable silence between them. As she launched into a passable rendition of One Day Like This, Midge drained her coffee and reached for her bag.
"Don't go."
Midge paused, surprised by the note of desperation.
"Give me a reason to stay."
Ari's eyes brimmed with tears but she wiped them away with her fingertips and composed herself.
"It used to be enough that I'd ask."
Midge had to fight the urge to sweep her into her arms and make it all better, but in the end she went too far in the opposite direction.
"You were one of us then."
Ari laughed, tossing her long red hair, but no-one would mistake it for happiness.
"I was never one of you. Not really."
Midge frowned.
"What the hell does that mean? We did everything together. You lived at the house. We fought side by side then went home and slept in the same bed. How could we be any more of a team than that?"
Ari lifted her bag onto the table and pulled out a tattered paperback book.
"It's more than just acting like the rest of you. Do you remember this?"
She pushed the book across the table. Midge glanced down at the garish cover with its barely legal depiction of Minnie, Mickey, Adolf and Eva.
"Sure. Going Underground. I found it for you in Portmeirion after the thing with the Magister Templi. What happened to it."
"It got trashed when the orb went wild round the house. The last time. Remember?"
Midge blushed, looked away.
"I remember what we did afterwards... But I still don't see what that has to do with anything."
Ari turned the book over. The spine had been torn in two, so that half of the book was missing.
"Today, Artie Love is almost completely forgotten," she read, "a footnote in the brief history of English underground comics, but his greatest creation..."
She waved her hand in the air, indicating the missing words which floated out there somewhere, waiting to be captured and pinned to the page.
"That's all there is. I searched everywhere for the rest of that book. I even tried to find another copy but it's like it doesn't even exist. There's no record of the author or half the people he interviewed."
"So it came through a lesion. So what? None of us have histories here."
Ari pulled the rest of the book out of her bag and laid it on the table, her hand covering the next page so that Midge couldn't read it.
"How many times have you seen Fliss die?"
Midge shook her head as if brushing away an annoying fly.
"What?"
"And how often has Monk OD'd on some god-awful concoction of smack and jellyfish brains and who knows what else?"
"Don't-"
"You died in my arms Midge. You bled out while I held you in a stinking cellar in Prague. I had to close your eyes and leave you in the water and go home and burn my fucking clothes because they were that stiff with your blood that they would never come clean."
Her voice was rising and a couple of people at nearby tables began to watch in the hopes of a full scale meltdown, but Midge just laughed. For the first time since Ari's call she felt relaxed and in control once more.
"Is that it? You're worried about us getting hurt? Oh, you poor, sweet baby!"
She reached out and laid her hand over Ari's, turning it over to entwine her fingers. For a moment she felt the old tingle in her fingertips, the static charge that always seemed to flicker between them.
"We can't really die baby. We're not here. The silver star - "
Ari gripped her fingers tightly and turned her hand over. Midge's words died on her lips as she saw the long, puckered scar which ran the length of Ari's forearm.
"How...?"
"If I ask you, will you come with me? Leave this behind, start over in the real world?"
"Ari, I can't - "
"You mean you won't. Course you can leave. Just get up and walk. Say the word and you'll be free. Well?"
Midge looked at her across the table, remembering a time when they were closer than any two people can get, tears blurring the woman across the table into the girl she had once loved.
"I can't."
Ari nodded, released her hand and began to pull away, then paused with her fingers still covering the page.
"I didn't understand when he brought me the rest of the book. I didn't understand why it was him, or what the book meant. Now I do. Look."
Midge frowned, looking down at the book. Ari pulled her hand away with a flourish and read the remainder of the line aloud.
"Arihaily Ilya lives on."
Midge stared at the page, the words swimming before her like inky fish. She took a moment to digest their meaning, then looked up at the stranger sitting opposite as she covered the book once more.
Ari fired once, the bullet tearing straight through Midge's left eye. As the impact rocked her in her chair, she coughed up a sudden gout of blood that splashed across the back of Ari's hand, staining the pages between her fingers, leaving a perfect hand print of text and yellowed paper..
The Joni screamed and dropped her guitar as the other patrons struggled to back away, turning over tables and chairs in their terror. Ari stood and fired three shots into the wall behind the singer, barely even glancing at her.
"Sit. Down."
The screaming faltered and died, leaving the sound of a barista hiding behind the coat rack whispering frantic directions to the emergency services operator. Ari swung the gun around and fired another shot into the mass of coats and scarves.
"Now!"
The barista stepped out, holding his phone up in his hand, then sat heavily on the floor.
Moving quickly now, Ari stepped around the table, placed her hand against Midge's soft neck and felt the warmth ebb away. She closed her eyes, blinking away a rogue tear, then looked up at the ceiling. As the final laboured pulse faded beneath her tender fingers, the smell of violets filled the room and a soft glow began to shine from every surface. Somewhere a choir began to sing, a song she recognised but could never quite recall. She fought the urge to fall to her knees and bow her head, to show obeisance and piety.
She raised the gun above her head, her arm shaking. The pressure behind her eyeballs grew until she had to cry out, but she gripped Midge's shoulder to steady herself and kept the gun trained on the spot directly above the corpse. The music became louder, shaking the room, rattling cups and glasses and sending them to shatter on the floor. The other customers began to moan in fear and awe as the light became blinding and cold as ice. Ari barely noticed as she turned to one side and vomited.
The gun in her hand felt like an anvil, Thor's hammer raised to the heavens. As the pure white light enveloped her the gun grew cold enough to burn the flesh from her palm. A thin skein of ice formed across her fist and down her arm, her breath clouding in the air before her. The choir became a shriek of feedback, a loop of distortion and glory that blew out the windows and began to peel back the roof like a sardine can. The light rained down like shards of frozen fire, pushing the coffee shop patrons to crawl in the debris like worms, barely able to breathe beneath its crushing weight. Only Ari remained standing, arm outstretched, leaning on her dead lover for support.
As the room shook like a miscued filmstrip,
As the singing reached its crescendo,
As the world opened up like a flower,
As the silver star descended,
As her lover's eyes fluttered open,
She fired a single bullet into god's heart and plunged them all back into darkness.
Midge slumped forwards and began to bleed across the cracked tabletop.
The Joni wept uncontrollably on the floor of the stage.
The barista huddled in the corner with his hands pressed to his eyes.
The poet clutched his broken spectacles and began to crawl towards the door.
Ari wondered if her hearing would ever return, flicked open her mobile and hit send on the message saved in her drafts box.
And somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the world, Elliott opened his mobile, read Ari's message and smiled.
"It's started."
Monday, 19 October 2009
Sweet and Fitting
The sacrificial trail begins,
The lists and scrolls adorned with names and monikers.
Bodies huddle together, naked.
Hands held open.
Mothers, fathers, brothers, daughters. The family eternal.
The heavens open engulfing the waiting party in acid rain,
Eating and biting into their exposed flesh.
Huge globs of tissue and fat splash onto the white tiles - sputtering, popping, fizzing.
The concrete stare of the sentries.
The sulphur stench of disembowelment.
The rotting, farting grotesquery’s of the death factory.
The seeping wounds of the sewer.
A convoy of flesh.
Bodies thrown into the salivating pit.
Bleeding hands dig into the expectant earth.
A complex network of ditches and bonfires protrude.
The fuel of humanity poured into the darkness,
Burned in the inferno and emitted into the hollow skies in ashen billows.
And then he takes us in his nihilistic grip and pisses into the flames,
The Steam rising, crystallizing in the icy atmosphere.
And she finally proclaims:
“Oh brother, seek me and ye shall reclaim the spent soil and we will feed these bonfires no more.”
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Everything is True and Nothing is Permitted
HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN June 15th 2006
The pilot informed us over the intercom system that Air Traffic still refused clearance for take off. Apparently, some big wig US Senator was over to gee up the troops with home-grown moralistic bullshit. We had to wait for his DC-10 to fuel up before we could even contemplate getting out of this shit hole. At least the three hour wait had given me chance to muse over the Intel Report that the MI5 advisor had given me.
This takes us back a few days, to another land, another frontier on the faux crusade for global democracy.
BASRA, IRAQ June 8th 2006
This guy was stronger than all of the others. It wasn’t until we ripped off his toe nails that he started to cry like a baby. He coughed and spluttered his confession to the translator who, in turn, gave me what I had wanted to hear; the whereabouts of the insurgents that had killed four of our boys at a roadside checkpoint. I informed the translator to thank the man and gestured to the Iraqi Service Agent to pull the rest of the remaining toe nails. They had to learn that us Westerners were not to be fucked with. I stepped outside as the tearing sound of nail parting flesh reverberated around the court yard. A gentleman in a lightweight business suit leaned against the outer doorway. “What a lovely sound.” he said as he handed me a manila envelope.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“There’s an itch that they want scratching.”
I handed him the envelope back. “Tell them to ask somebody else, I’m busy here.”
“I don’t think you understand, we need someone trained in the darker arts. She has been sighted in Afghanistan. We want you to bring her to us.” Sweat started to bead down his forehead, the MI5 laky was nervous. I snatched the envelope back out of his trembling hands and gripped his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the start? Is Blue with her?”
“We believe so. We have picked nothing up via the usual channels; NSA, GCHQ have drawn blanks. However, a Medic from the US Rangers made contact with them in Helmand. We’ve also had sightings on the Pakistani border.”
“What about remote viewing via PSYOPS?”
“We’ve tried that. Yet again, nothing from our friends across the pond.” He raised his eyebrows at me and plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
“OK, I’ll need the Chaos Unit ready within 24hrs. Inform their Magister Templi that we need members with experience of the Abyss. She’s adept at dimensional intersectioneering. So, we need our best practitioners.” I looked down at the manila envelope. “Everything I need in here?” “Yes.” He replied
“Excellent. I’ll serve this bitch up on a silver platter.” I gave the MI5 advisor a toothy grin.
“That’s what we were hoping.” He concluded by shaking my hand and wishing me luck. Not that I needed it. I’d never failed before, why would I now?
HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN June 15th 2006
And back to today. The pilot has just informed us that we are clear for take off. I take a sip from my rum and coke and turn to my travelling companion. “The adventures just about to begin Elliot, excited?” I ask
“Fucking ecstatic Mr K.” He replies as the pilot pushes the throttle and the plane lurches forward and arcs up into the afternoon sky.
The pilot informed us over the intercom system that Air Traffic still refused clearance for take off. Apparently, some big wig US Senator was over to gee up the troops with home-grown moralistic bullshit. We had to wait for his DC-10 to fuel up before we could even contemplate getting out of this shit hole. At least the three hour wait had given me chance to muse over the Intel Report that the MI5 advisor had given me.
This takes us back a few days, to another land, another frontier on the faux crusade for global democracy.
BASRA, IRAQ June 8th 2006
This guy was stronger than all of the others. It wasn’t until we ripped off his toe nails that he started to cry like a baby. He coughed and spluttered his confession to the translator who, in turn, gave me what I had wanted to hear; the whereabouts of the insurgents that had killed four of our boys at a roadside checkpoint. I informed the translator to thank the man and gestured to the Iraqi Service Agent to pull the rest of the remaining toe nails. They had to learn that us Westerners were not to be fucked with. I stepped outside as the tearing sound of nail parting flesh reverberated around the court yard. A gentleman in a lightweight business suit leaned against the outer doorway. “What a lovely sound.” he said as he handed me a manila envelope.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“There’s an itch that they want scratching.”
I handed him the envelope back. “Tell them to ask somebody else, I’m busy here.”
“I don’t think you understand, we need someone trained in the darker arts. She has been sighted in Afghanistan. We want you to bring her to us.” Sweat started to bead down his forehead, the MI5 laky was nervous. I snatched the envelope back out of his trembling hands and gripped his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the start? Is Blue with her?”
“We believe so. We have picked nothing up via the usual channels; NSA, GCHQ have drawn blanks. However, a Medic from the US Rangers made contact with them in Helmand. We’ve also had sightings on the Pakistani border.”
“What about remote viewing via PSYOPS?”
“We’ve tried that. Yet again, nothing from our friends across the pond.” He raised his eyebrows at me and plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
“OK, I’ll need the Chaos Unit ready within 24hrs. Inform their Magister Templi that we need members with experience of the Abyss. She’s adept at dimensional intersectioneering. So, we need our best practitioners.” I looked down at the manila envelope. “Everything I need in here?” “Yes.” He replied
“Excellent. I’ll serve this bitch up on a silver platter.” I gave the MI5 advisor a toothy grin.
“That’s what we were hoping.” He concluded by shaking my hand and wishing me luck. Not that I needed it. I’d never failed before, why would I now?
HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN June 15th 2006
And back to today. The pilot has just informed us that we are clear for take off. I take a sip from my rum and coke and turn to my travelling companion. “The adventures just about to begin Elliot, excited?” I ask
“Fucking ecstatic Mr K.” He replies as the pilot pushes the throttle and the plane lurches forward and arcs up into the afternoon sky.
Saturday, 10 October 2009
This Is How It Feels - An Investigation
"Hello and welcome to a Granada Upfront special. I'm Anthony H. Wilson -"
"- and I'm Lucy Meacock -"
"-and tonight, as police search for missing schoolgirl Marg Cornell and parents mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the Moors Murders, we ask, why does the Northwest have the highest rate of juvenile disappearances in the country?"
Sciliton leaned over and silenced the TV; It was bad enough spending all day mired in the case without having to hear Tony fucking Wilson waffle on about it all night a well. As if chucking enough of his fifty pence words at the subject would solve anything; By that logic, they'd do best to ask Stanley Unwin for his searing insight - At least he was a fully accredited Professor...
He picked up one of the manilla folders which littered the coffee table and began to leaf idly through the contents, the illusion of work temporarily distracting him from the fact that the case was going nowhere. Four weeks since anyone had seen Marg, and they were no closer to finding her than they had been on day one. Worse, every possible avenue that had been open back then had gradually closed off. Sightings in Liverpool and Manchester had turned out to be mistakes, the last two people known to have spoken to her could barely even agree on what she'd been wearing and her mother had proven to be a complete basket case. The TV appeal had been a fiasco, the brass were talking about bringing in some outside firm who were supposed to have "specialist expertise in these matters," whatever that meant, and now half a dozen semi-drunks were discussing his failings with a glorified weather girl and a pretentious night-club owner. Even Roger Cook was sniffing around the story, for fuck's sake!
He threw the folder back onto the table along with the flyers, photos, statements and other assorted ephemera, the crap and detritus thrown up in the wake of his trawl through Marg's brief fifteen years on Earth. All the love notes and doodles retrieved from her bedroom, the letters sent to the station by every fruitcake and Dennis Nilsen wannabe claiming some connection to the case, even the letters page from the local rag the week after the story broke; More than one killer had been caught out that way, bragging about their acts in some coded diatribe about dog-befouled pathways or the municipal parks system, but they'd run the selection in The World through the kind of codebreakers that made the Enigma machine look like a prehistoric calculator and come up with nothing. They had gathered every shred of information about Marg's life, the least little scrap of so-called evidence, and so far all it proved was that, yes, she had definitely existed once, but only up till August 7th. Nothing after that could be proven one way or the other. Like Schrodinger's cat, she was in an indeterminate state, hovering somewhere between living and dead, waiting for the active participation of a viewer to release her, either way.
Sciliton removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, frowning. He could always tell when he was too tired; He started to think about missing persons cases in terms of subatomic physics. Always a bad sign. He drained the dregs of his cold coffee cup, then headed into the bathroom to piss it straight back out again. His back ached, his legs throbbed from sitting in the same position for so long, his left foot had gone to sleep and his right arm felt numb, dead. When he switched on the bathroom strip light, the flickering tube hurt his eyes, the buzz set his teeth on edge and the overall impression of a gigantic bug zapper made him think of Gregor Samsa. Maybe this was a sign that they should start searching roach motels and flypaper strips for tiny, transmogrified iterations of Marg.
"Maybe I've just watched too much Twin Peaks." he suggested to his reflection in the mirror.
Looking back at him, Sciliton2 felt the same shock and revulsion he always experienced when faced with his physical form. Locked away behind his eyes, he always held an idealised version of his body in his mind, a barely glimpsed mixture of his teenage self, Bryan Ferry and Robert Redford; Smart, smooth, handsome and sexy, with that lithe, sinewy grace of a young athlete or a male ballet dancer with a well packed pouch. It always surprised him to be reminded of the truth of the matter; Leaning on the sink, staring back at him, was an average fourty-four year old man. Nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Total it all up and you would probably find more debits than credits. A couple of teeth that had been knocked out when he was on the beat, the replacements standing out a little more with every day as they yellowed at a slower rate than his own. His hair was greying at the sides and thinning on top and the longer he left it between haircuts, the worse both problems seemed, although that didn't prevent him from growing it as long as regs allowed. It didn't do him any favours, but his wife and a couple of girlfriends had commented on how well he suited long hair, so he tended to keep it that way even now, when his only regular female encounter was with the canteen lady who had spent five years trying to get his toast the way he liked it. She probably never would, so the chances of intimacy were somewhere south of none. Moving on, he came to the windows of his soul, which were a little bit squinty and bloodshot thanks to too many nights spent poring over files in the light of a single desk lamp in the sad hope that it would impart a little Chandleresque glamour to his sleuthing. His skin was losing its tautness, his pores were large and open, sharing the space on his cheeks, chin and forehead with the residual scarring of mild acne which suggested that his idealised teenage self had never been all that perfect to begin with. The whole smile/hair/eye/skin ensemble was perched precariously on the sort of body which spent most of its time sitting in one uncomfortable chair after another, with short spells in a car or a bed to break the monotony. Doughy flesh, wispy hairs clustered around his groin and armpits and nipples, flat feet from his street years and a burgeoning gut from the desk jobs which followed them. A couple of scars obtained in the line of duty, nothing really exciting or life threatening, just puckered purple reminders of how easy it is to open up a human form and let the inside out. Overall, nothing too bad, certainly nothing that couldn't be disguised by a well tailored suit, but his Man At C&A two piece wasn't quite up to the task,especially as he tended to wear each one untill the knees and elbows were shiny and almost worn through.
"What are you looking at?" Sciliton asked his reflection.
Sciliton2 remained silent, wondering the same thing. The answer came back again; A man. No more, no less. A tired man, frightened of failure, who knew that his motives were more about him than the little girl he was looking for. Still, finding Marg would be a concrete action, and surely they were worth more than any number of unspoken terrors and selfish drives.
"You might think that," offered Sciliton3 from somewhere around the Ajna Chakra, interrupting the unspoken dialogue between body and soul, "but I know what this is really all about. It's got nothing to do with pride in your work or doing your duty as a decent copper; Somewhere deep down inside here, you think that if you find her, she'll fall into your arms like a classic damsel in distress. You'll be the great conquering hero, come to rescue her from the darkness, all strength and virility. And even if she doesn't, other women will believe it, for a while at least. You're a little boy playing at Prince Charming, looking for praise and recognition. You want all the women to throw themselves at you, to cover you in glory, and the saddest fact is that if anyone comes anywhere near, you'll sabotage your chances before they even get a chance to say hello. And you know why, don't you?"
Sciliton gripped the sink tightly, staring back into the abyss. He knew the answer, and as Sciliton4 began to call for his mummy in his high, singsong voice, he closed his eyes and ground his teeth, fighting to regain temporary control of his heart and mind and inner child. These were the worst times, when he threatened to splinter into his component parts and run away from himself. Working by touch alone, he opened the bathroom cabinet and fumbled out a well-worn pill case, popped the lid and downed two of the tiny yellow tablets dry before he dared open his eyes again. When he did, he placed the pill case back on the shelf, closed the cabinet and stared at his silent, obedient reflection.
"I'm a policeman," he announced, confidently, expecting and receiving no challenge. "I'm not in bad shape, I take care of myself and I do a good job of anything I put my mind to. I'm not bad looking, just a little tired, and it's what's inside that counts anyway. I just haven't found what I'm looking for, that's all."
He waited a moment longer to be sure that every aspect of his self was in agreement, or at least in no mood to argue, then switched off the light and drifted back out into the lounge. The scattered files no longer bothered him and neither did the failure they represented. What did get to him was the silence, and he turned the TV back up to drown it out with the comforting noise of people who knew even less than he did. He dropped onto the sofa, put his feet up on the coffee table and settled down to ride out the rest of the evening as the talk show came to an inconclusive conclusion.
"So there you have it. As the poet Bob Dylan once said, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, and as Anthony H. Wilson once said, this one could run and run but sadly, that's all we've got time for tonight. Say goodnight Lucy."
"Goodnight Tony."
"Goodnight."
"- and I'm Lucy Meacock -"
"-and tonight, as police search for missing schoolgirl Marg Cornell and parents mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the Moors Murders, we ask, why does the Northwest have the highest rate of juvenile disappearances in the country?"
Sciliton leaned over and silenced the TV; It was bad enough spending all day mired in the case without having to hear Tony fucking Wilson waffle on about it all night a well. As if chucking enough of his fifty pence words at the subject would solve anything; By that logic, they'd do best to ask Stanley Unwin for his searing insight - At least he was a fully accredited Professor...
He picked up one of the manilla folders which littered the coffee table and began to leaf idly through the contents, the illusion of work temporarily distracting him from the fact that the case was going nowhere. Four weeks since anyone had seen Marg, and they were no closer to finding her than they had been on day one. Worse, every possible avenue that had been open back then had gradually closed off. Sightings in Liverpool and Manchester had turned out to be mistakes, the last two people known to have spoken to her could barely even agree on what she'd been wearing and her mother had proven to be a complete basket case. The TV appeal had been a fiasco, the brass were talking about bringing in some outside firm who were supposed to have "specialist expertise in these matters," whatever that meant, and now half a dozen semi-drunks were discussing his failings with a glorified weather girl and a pretentious night-club owner. Even Roger Cook was sniffing around the story, for fuck's sake!
He threw the folder back onto the table along with the flyers, photos, statements and other assorted ephemera, the crap and detritus thrown up in the wake of his trawl through Marg's brief fifteen years on Earth. All the love notes and doodles retrieved from her bedroom, the letters sent to the station by every fruitcake and Dennis Nilsen wannabe claiming some connection to the case, even the letters page from the local rag the week after the story broke; More than one killer had been caught out that way, bragging about their acts in some coded diatribe about dog-befouled pathways or the municipal parks system, but they'd run the selection in The World through the kind of codebreakers that made the Enigma machine look like a prehistoric calculator and come up with nothing. They had gathered every shred of information about Marg's life, the least little scrap of so-called evidence, and so far all it proved was that, yes, she had definitely existed once, but only up till August 7th. Nothing after that could be proven one way or the other. Like Schrodinger's cat, she was in an indeterminate state, hovering somewhere between living and dead, waiting for the active participation of a viewer to release her, either way.
Sciliton removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, frowning. He could always tell when he was too tired; He started to think about missing persons cases in terms of subatomic physics. Always a bad sign. He drained the dregs of his cold coffee cup, then headed into the bathroom to piss it straight back out again. His back ached, his legs throbbed from sitting in the same position for so long, his left foot had gone to sleep and his right arm felt numb, dead. When he switched on the bathroom strip light, the flickering tube hurt his eyes, the buzz set his teeth on edge and the overall impression of a gigantic bug zapper made him think of Gregor Samsa. Maybe this was a sign that they should start searching roach motels and flypaper strips for tiny, transmogrified iterations of Marg.
"Maybe I've just watched too much Twin Peaks." he suggested to his reflection in the mirror.
Looking back at him, Sciliton2 felt the same shock and revulsion he always experienced when faced with his physical form. Locked away behind his eyes, he always held an idealised version of his body in his mind, a barely glimpsed mixture of his teenage self, Bryan Ferry and Robert Redford; Smart, smooth, handsome and sexy, with that lithe, sinewy grace of a young athlete or a male ballet dancer with a well packed pouch. It always surprised him to be reminded of the truth of the matter; Leaning on the sink, staring back at him, was an average fourty-four year old man. Nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Total it all up and you would probably find more debits than credits. A couple of teeth that had been knocked out when he was on the beat, the replacements standing out a little more with every day as they yellowed at a slower rate than his own. His hair was greying at the sides and thinning on top and the longer he left it between haircuts, the worse both problems seemed, although that didn't prevent him from growing it as long as regs allowed. It didn't do him any favours, but his wife and a couple of girlfriends had commented on how well he suited long hair, so he tended to keep it that way even now, when his only regular female encounter was with the canteen lady who had spent five years trying to get his toast the way he liked it. She probably never would, so the chances of intimacy were somewhere south of none. Moving on, he came to the windows of his soul, which were a little bit squinty and bloodshot thanks to too many nights spent poring over files in the light of a single desk lamp in the sad hope that it would impart a little Chandleresque glamour to his sleuthing. His skin was losing its tautness, his pores were large and open, sharing the space on his cheeks, chin and forehead with the residual scarring of mild acne which suggested that his idealised teenage self had never been all that perfect to begin with. The whole smile/hair/eye/skin ensemble was perched precariously on the sort of body which spent most of its time sitting in one uncomfortable chair after another, with short spells in a car or a bed to break the monotony. Doughy flesh, wispy hairs clustered around his groin and armpits and nipples, flat feet from his street years and a burgeoning gut from the desk jobs which followed them. A couple of scars obtained in the line of duty, nothing really exciting or life threatening, just puckered purple reminders of how easy it is to open up a human form and let the inside out. Overall, nothing too bad, certainly nothing that couldn't be disguised by a well tailored suit, but his Man At C&A two piece wasn't quite up to the task,especially as he tended to wear each one untill the knees and elbows were shiny and almost worn through.
"What are you looking at?" Sciliton asked his reflection.
Sciliton2 remained silent, wondering the same thing. The answer came back again; A man. No more, no less. A tired man, frightened of failure, who knew that his motives were more about him than the little girl he was looking for. Still, finding Marg would be a concrete action, and surely they were worth more than any number of unspoken terrors and selfish drives.
"You might think that," offered Sciliton3 from somewhere around the Ajna Chakra, interrupting the unspoken dialogue between body and soul, "but I know what this is really all about. It's got nothing to do with pride in your work or doing your duty as a decent copper; Somewhere deep down inside here, you think that if you find her, she'll fall into your arms like a classic damsel in distress. You'll be the great conquering hero, come to rescue her from the darkness, all strength and virility. And even if she doesn't, other women will believe it, for a while at least. You're a little boy playing at Prince Charming, looking for praise and recognition. You want all the women to throw themselves at you, to cover you in glory, and the saddest fact is that if anyone comes anywhere near, you'll sabotage your chances before they even get a chance to say hello. And you know why, don't you?"
Sciliton gripped the sink tightly, staring back into the abyss. He knew the answer, and as Sciliton4 began to call for his mummy in his high, singsong voice, he closed his eyes and ground his teeth, fighting to regain temporary control of his heart and mind and inner child. These were the worst times, when he threatened to splinter into his component parts and run away from himself. Working by touch alone, he opened the bathroom cabinet and fumbled out a well-worn pill case, popped the lid and downed two of the tiny yellow tablets dry before he dared open his eyes again. When he did, he placed the pill case back on the shelf, closed the cabinet and stared at his silent, obedient reflection.
"I'm a policeman," he announced, confidently, expecting and receiving no challenge. "I'm not in bad shape, I take care of myself and I do a good job of anything I put my mind to. I'm not bad looking, just a little tired, and it's what's inside that counts anyway. I just haven't found what I'm looking for, that's all."
He waited a moment longer to be sure that every aspect of his self was in agreement, or at least in no mood to argue, then switched off the light and drifted back out into the lounge. The scattered files no longer bothered him and neither did the failure they represented. What did get to him was the silence, and he turned the TV back up to drown it out with the comforting noise of people who knew even less than he did. He dropped onto the sofa, put his feet up on the coffee table and settled down to ride out the rest of the evening as the talk show came to an inconclusive conclusion.
"So there you have it. As the poet Bob Dylan once said, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, and as Anthony H. Wilson once said, this one could run and run but sadly, that's all we've got time for tonight. Say goodnight Lucy."
"Goodnight Tony."
"Goodnight."
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Ritual Streaming of the Gnostic Head God
The switching bubble reverberated at 10 decibels, alternating between pure brilliant light and dysfunctional dystrophic redundancies. A small man, covered in darkened materials, leant forward and inserted the diskette as tendrils of smoke and plasma seeped through blue tinged dragon swirls and danced through the coolant fluid.
“Birthing of the hexadecimal quadrant via haemoglobin electrolytes and toilet plungers will commence in 5 minutes, the might sartorial ebb will proceed” another voice entered through the womb section and delivered another epitaph. “Frothing visions pulsate through the minds edging as crystalline solutions smelt into the coalescence of the one true forming ritual, we are about to hear the field of visions, we are about to rebirth the population, we are the golden tide of the green dawn. Please, let us as one, rejoice through the ultimate star voile. The epoch of uncertainty and the death of the midget frog will at once collide into infinite suns.”
Two planets circle the congregation, emitting diodes of pink Holstein and quim verde through a squeeze prism. Purple notes spread throughout the sermon valve. Washing over the keys with plastic froth and dentine apples. Quickly, they run through the whore church and gather their keep sakes, wishing that their enslavement to commodity circles would wash away through the arterial sewage pipe of leather backed dogs.
The fish fibre stare of the dreadnought head would emit a far greater epoch into which we slither through the whole turgid mess. Bodies of aqua foam and pink, mock the daily routine of the slave devil. We are the children of filth, the forbearers of battlefield salvage machine warriors. The crying hunters of the severed goose are watching, viewing the dance of the osprey tarts in eloquent, stenching uniforms of black and gold. The Runic symbols displayed with father pride and unadulterated genocide.
“Whither, almighty fathers of the skin. Dance O’ Mothers of the harlot queen. Enclose within the fighting clasp of humbug soldiers and death flies. The sugar coated turd will be consumed and the secret acts of the cosmic art will spew forth, ejaculating petals of Turkish delight and caramel.” The donkey announced, as he trotted across Blackpool beach.
The smell of blood and pig flesh horse maggots, mix into the atmospheric smells of the releasing cassette. The dark clothed man, vomiting words at terrifying speed - eating, consuming. The knee jerk principles of empire and the distance lineage of the troll macabre will sweep away the event of apocalypse fruit.
The pubis jester will conquer the runt of life. The dieing scream of the tracer bullet and the soft, soft sound of the rose bug.
And when the makeshift blue of cornellian pain shatters the bough. We will sing to the pear drop king and usher in the joker via a test tube and a bran flake rug.
“Birthing of the hexadecimal quadrant via haemoglobin electrolytes and toilet plungers will commence in 5 minutes, the might sartorial ebb will proceed” another voice entered through the womb section and delivered another epitaph. “Frothing visions pulsate through the minds edging as crystalline solutions smelt into the coalescence of the one true forming ritual, we are about to hear the field of visions, we are about to rebirth the population, we are the golden tide of the green dawn. Please, let us as one, rejoice through the ultimate star voile. The epoch of uncertainty and the death of the midget frog will at once collide into infinite suns.”
Two planets circle the congregation, emitting diodes of pink Holstein and quim verde through a squeeze prism. Purple notes spread throughout the sermon valve. Washing over the keys with plastic froth and dentine apples. Quickly, they run through the whore church and gather their keep sakes, wishing that their enslavement to commodity circles would wash away through the arterial sewage pipe of leather backed dogs.
The fish fibre stare of the dreadnought head would emit a far greater epoch into which we slither through the whole turgid mess. Bodies of aqua foam and pink, mock the daily routine of the slave devil. We are the children of filth, the forbearers of battlefield salvage machine warriors. The crying hunters of the severed goose are watching, viewing the dance of the osprey tarts in eloquent, stenching uniforms of black and gold. The Runic symbols displayed with father pride and unadulterated genocide.
“Whither, almighty fathers of the skin. Dance O’ Mothers of the harlot queen. Enclose within the fighting clasp of humbug soldiers and death flies. The sugar coated turd will be consumed and the secret acts of the cosmic art will spew forth, ejaculating petals of Turkish delight and caramel.” The donkey announced, as he trotted across Blackpool beach.
The smell of blood and pig flesh horse maggots, mix into the atmospheric smells of the releasing cassette. The dark clothed man, vomiting words at terrifying speed - eating, consuming. The knee jerk principles of empire and the distance lineage of the troll macabre will sweep away the event of apocalypse fruit.
The pubis jester will conquer the runt of life. The dieing scream of the tracer bullet and the soft, soft sound of the rose bug.
And when the makeshift blue of cornellian pain shatters the bough. We will sing to the pear drop king and usher in the joker via a test tube and a bran flake rug.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Dead Souls
"In a thousand years time, the remnants of the human race will flutter their gills, flap their flippers and declare this a pivotal moment in the decline and fall of global civilisation. I'm John Peel, he's Kid Jensen and this is Joy Division."
Mark looked up from his second bowl of Sugar Puffs as the camera rose above the crowd and the guitars crashed in. The band on stage looked like they really weren't happy to be there and the singer danced like a spaz, but the man with the guitar down at his knees looked cool. Mark watched them closely until the song ended, his spoon held forgotten in his hand, dripping milk onto his Superman pyjamas.
The rest of the program was pretty dull, but Mark knew that everyone would be talking about it in the playground in the morning so he did his best to memorise the order of the top ten. His mum hadn't gone out the week before and he'd spent the night in his room, and even though he'd listened to the new Top 40 on the previous Sunday, he'd felt left out of all the conversations. In the end he'd wound up talking to some of the younger kids and pretending he'd watched it.
Bucks Fizz were still number one and he waited to see if the girls ripped their skirts off again but it wasn't as exciting now that he knew it was coming, and you couldn't see anything anyway. He thought about playing with himself but Mel was asleep on the sofa and he didn't want to wake her in case she started crying again.
To be honest, he still wasn't sure if he was doing it right anyway. The older lads talked about it a lot but he couldn't just come right out and ask how to do it so he had to act like he knew what they meant, laugh along at their jokes and hope to pick up enough clues to work it out. Thinking about it was giving him a bonkon and Mel was all snuggled up with her teddy bear blanket, but he didn't want to risk it.
Instead, he got up, turned the telly off and switched on the radio. The newsreader was talking about the Russians again and he quickly silenced the volume. The news used to bore him, ten minutes of talking and no music, but now it terrified him. His mum made him show off to her friends by reading the newspaper out loud, and he liked it when their kids tried it and got all tangled up on the words, even though most of them were older than him. It made him feel good when his mum was proud of him, but even though he could read the words some of the stories made no sense. He'd asked his mum what they meant, why they would only get a four minute warning if the war started, and his mum had explained that if they had a war then there wouldn't be anywhere safe to run to so there was no point having any more time. He could still see the picture she'd drawn in the back of his maths book, a circle of shapeless blobs that he knew were the wrong shape for the countries they were meant to be and a mass of arrows criss-crossing from one country to the next. The 4 minute warning wasn't enough time to run away, she explained, but it was more than enough time for each country to launch their own missiles, so that if they had to die then they'd kill everyone else too. His mum said it was called M.A.D. and Mark agreed.
Ever since then, he'd had nightmares about nuclear war. He didn't actually know what the warning signal would sound like, so he lay awake at night, listening for it and panicking at every unexpected noise. He'd even been sent home from school because of his terror when the chemical factory down the road tested a new safety warning siren. While the rest of the class had carried on reciting their eight times table, Mark had started screaming and ran straight for the door. They brought him down in the playground and dragged him back inside, kicking and sobbing uncontrollably. It was only when he felt that a long enough time had passed that he finally calmed down a little and told them what was wrong. The teachers couldn't find his mum, thankfully, so they called his nan in and he went to her house for the night. Things always felt better when he was with his nan, but he knew that he would already be in enough trouble when his mum came home, so he didn't tell her or anyone that it was more than just the siren which had frightened him. Explaining M.A.D., his mum had told him that the aftermath of a nuclear war would be so bad that she wouldn't even wait for the bombs to fall. As soon as they gave the warning, she would kill Mel, Mark and herself so that none of them would have to suffer. When the siren sounded at school, he knew that if he didn't get home straight away then he would be left to die all alone.
But even that wasn't the worst outcome he could imagine. Far worse was the possibility that they would start the war while his mum was out at the bingo or the club and he was looking after Mel. Then it would be his job to look after her, the way he had to wash her hand and face and get her into her cot. He would have to make sure that she didn't suffer, but he really wasn't sure that he could do it; she cried enough when she bumped her head on the table. Like his mum said though, he was the man of the house now so he would have to start acting like it. He would have to find a way. He looked over at the still shape lying quietly on the sofa and made a silent promise to take care of her, whatever happened.
Shaking himself from his daydream, he pulled open the drawer in the living room cabinet and rummaged through the box of cassette tapes it held, a collection he had built up week by week, sitting poised with his fingers ready to press play and record when the DJ announced a song that he liked. More often than not he was too slow or they talked over the start, but the tapes still held enough of each song to be worth keeping. He slipped one of his current favourites into the Hi-Fi and pressed it into place with a satisfying ka-chik. He pressed play, ready for the grinding of gears which said that the ancient Grundig stereo had chewed another tape. The machine just hissed softly as the tape spooled across the heads, so he switched to playback mode and slowly increased the volume to just below the point where it was likely to wake Mel. She didn't even stir as The Jam began to play "Going Underground" and he boogied back over to the sofa, sat down on the floor with his back to his sister and reached for his school bag.
Pulling out a couple of exercise books, he briefly considered starting on his homework, then thought better of it, tossed them aside and pulled out his latest reading book. It was a risky decision though. If his mum came home alone she would go through his school books again, skimming through the pages and looking for the tell tale red ink and demanding an explanation for every "See me." Getting the homework done could save him from another night of screaming and slapping, or even worse, the cold fury with which she told him that he was wasting his potential and just just like his father. But she'd gone out with her hair done up and her new leather skirt on so it looked like she was going straight to the club after the bingo. That gave him an extra couple of hours, and The Borribles was far more exciting than fractions and the industrial revolution.
Later, as the C-90 ran out cutting Visage off mid song, Mark was no closer to doing his homework, and not that much closer to the end of The Borribles either. Instead he lay curled up on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, the book still held loosely in his unconscious grip. He twitched slightly, almost imperceptibly, as his dreams shook once more to the sound of sirens.
This time he dreamt that he was alone in the park. It was night time and the street lamps glittered in the distance, promising warmth and the safety of companions. But between him and them lay the vast black expanse of empty, muddy playing fields, the skeletal remains of the shattered bandstand and the rusty, spiked steel fence which ringed the entire park. In broad daylight it would take him ten minutes to get from one end of the park to the other; there was clearly no way that he could make it home in less than four minutes in the pitch darkness. But as the banshee wail of the siren echoed around the bare trees, he began to run.
His heart pounding in his chest, muscles burning and tearing, stumbling on broken brickwork and sliding in the mud, he ran through the darkness. The sirens grew louder and more insistent, drowning out his pained breaths and anguished sobs.
Then it was silent.
The bomb hung in the air above him, frozen in the instant of explosion like a great silver star. It lit the world like a million flashbulbs and Mark saw a thousand frightened children caught in the glare, running through the park in every direction. As one being, they turned their tear-streaked faces to the new born sun and bathed in its cold radiance.
Instantly, every child became a cloud of drifting ash. In the midst of this swirling maelstrom, Mark knew that he was alone. Standing directly beneath the epicentre of the spreading blast wave, he understood that every speck of ash was another dead child, a floating ghost. Mel, his nan, his mum and every man she ever brought home. All gone. All dead. He had been left behind.
Now that it had happened, it no longer scared him. The light from the star reached every horizon, burning trees and cars and schools to soft swirling ash. The air around him was thick with ghosts and he felt them pressing against him, trying to share a little of his life. The dust cloud rippled as another shade drew near. The clear light and the thick clouds left Mark as blind as the complete darkness of a moment before, but there was a warmth and a sense of recognition to this latest ghost. He raised his arms toward sit and felt it enveloping him, lifting him from his feet and cradling him in its phantom arms.
"Nan?"
The ghost pressed him tighter, every fragment of its being suffused with love. Mark was alone in all the world and he would never be alone again. The world had ended and everything was perfect.
He woke to the sound of screaming, raising his head from the carpet just in time to see his mother's foot swinging towards him. He had no time to avoid it and the kick connected with his head. Everything went white and he raised his hands to cover his face, wet with blood and the first startled tears. Between his shaking fingers he saw his mum standing over him, clutching Mel to her chest. Her hair was a tangled mess and her makeup was smeared and streaked by recent tears but her eyes were dry and blazed with fury. Mel hung limp in her arms, the angry red V where her head had hit the table looking huge and angry against her too-pale skin. The teddy bear blanket had slipped from her tiny fingers and lay on the floor beside him. He lowered his guard to lift it towards her, thinking it would make everything better. His mum snatched it away, planted her foot against his chest and slammed him back against the sofa. As he fought for breath she knelt across his legs, pinning him down without even noticing. She screamed at him, her face inches from his, her breath hot with stale beer, cigarettes and panic.
"What did you do Mark? What did you do to your fucking sister?"
Notes
Mark looked up from his second bowl of Sugar Puffs as the camera rose above the crowd and the guitars crashed in. The band on stage looked like they really weren't happy to be there and the singer danced like a spaz, but the man with the guitar down at his knees looked cool. Mark watched them closely until the song ended, his spoon held forgotten in his hand, dripping milk onto his Superman pyjamas.
The rest of the program was pretty dull, but Mark knew that everyone would be talking about it in the playground in the morning so he did his best to memorise the order of the top ten. His mum hadn't gone out the week before and he'd spent the night in his room, and even though he'd listened to the new Top 40 on the previous Sunday, he'd felt left out of all the conversations. In the end he'd wound up talking to some of the younger kids and pretending he'd watched it.
Bucks Fizz were still number one and he waited to see if the girls ripped their skirts off again but it wasn't as exciting now that he knew it was coming, and you couldn't see anything anyway. He thought about playing with himself but Mel was asleep on the sofa and he didn't want to wake her in case she started crying again.
To be honest, he still wasn't sure if he was doing it right anyway. The older lads talked about it a lot but he couldn't just come right out and ask how to do it so he had to act like he knew what they meant, laugh along at their jokes and hope to pick up enough clues to work it out. Thinking about it was giving him a bonkon and Mel was all snuggled up with her teddy bear blanket, but he didn't want to risk it.
Instead, he got up, turned the telly off and switched on the radio. The newsreader was talking about the Russians again and he quickly silenced the volume. The news used to bore him, ten minutes of talking and no music, but now it terrified him. His mum made him show off to her friends by reading the newspaper out loud, and he liked it when their kids tried it and got all tangled up on the words, even though most of them were older than him. It made him feel good when his mum was proud of him, but even though he could read the words some of the stories made no sense. He'd asked his mum what they meant, why they would only get a four minute warning if the war started, and his mum had explained that if they had a war then there wouldn't be anywhere safe to run to so there was no point having any more time. He could still see the picture she'd drawn in the back of his maths book, a circle of shapeless blobs that he knew were the wrong shape for the countries they were meant to be and a mass of arrows criss-crossing from one country to the next. The 4 minute warning wasn't enough time to run away, she explained, but it was more than enough time for each country to launch their own missiles, so that if they had to die then they'd kill everyone else too. His mum said it was called M.A.D. and Mark agreed.
Ever since then, he'd had nightmares about nuclear war. He didn't actually know what the warning signal would sound like, so he lay awake at night, listening for it and panicking at every unexpected noise. He'd even been sent home from school because of his terror when the chemical factory down the road tested a new safety warning siren. While the rest of the class had carried on reciting their eight times table, Mark had started screaming and ran straight for the door. They brought him down in the playground and dragged him back inside, kicking and sobbing uncontrollably. It was only when he felt that a long enough time had passed that he finally calmed down a little and told them what was wrong. The teachers couldn't find his mum, thankfully, so they called his nan in and he went to her house for the night. Things always felt better when he was with his nan, but he knew that he would already be in enough trouble when his mum came home, so he didn't tell her or anyone that it was more than just the siren which had frightened him. Explaining M.A.D., his mum had told him that the aftermath of a nuclear war would be so bad that she wouldn't even wait for the bombs to fall. As soon as they gave the warning, she would kill Mel, Mark and herself so that none of them would have to suffer. When the siren sounded at school, he knew that if he didn't get home straight away then he would be left to die all alone.
But even that wasn't the worst outcome he could imagine. Far worse was the possibility that they would start the war while his mum was out at the bingo or the club and he was looking after Mel. Then it would be his job to look after her, the way he had to wash her hand and face and get her into her cot. He would have to make sure that she didn't suffer, but he really wasn't sure that he could do it; she cried enough when she bumped her head on the table. Like his mum said though, he was the man of the house now so he would have to start acting like it. He would have to find a way. He looked over at the still shape lying quietly on the sofa and made a silent promise to take care of her, whatever happened.
Shaking himself from his daydream, he pulled open the drawer in the living room cabinet and rummaged through the box of cassette tapes it held, a collection he had built up week by week, sitting poised with his fingers ready to press play and record when the DJ announced a song that he liked. More often than not he was too slow or they talked over the start, but the tapes still held enough of each song to be worth keeping. He slipped one of his current favourites into the Hi-Fi and pressed it into place with a satisfying ka-chik. He pressed play, ready for the grinding of gears which said that the ancient Grundig stereo had chewed another tape. The machine just hissed softly as the tape spooled across the heads, so he switched to playback mode and slowly increased the volume to just below the point where it was likely to wake Mel. She didn't even stir as The Jam began to play "Going Underground" and he boogied back over to the sofa, sat down on the floor with his back to his sister and reached for his school bag.
Pulling out a couple of exercise books, he briefly considered starting on his homework, then thought better of it, tossed them aside and pulled out his latest reading book. It was a risky decision though. If his mum came home alone she would go through his school books again, skimming through the pages and looking for the tell tale red ink and demanding an explanation for every "See me." Getting the homework done could save him from another night of screaming and slapping, or even worse, the cold fury with which she told him that he was wasting his potential and just just like his father. But she'd gone out with her hair done up and her new leather skirt on so it looked like she was going straight to the club after the bingo. That gave him an extra couple of hours, and The Borribles was far more exciting than fractions and the industrial revolution.
Later, as the C-90 ran out cutting Visage off mid song, Mark was no closer to doing his homework, and not that much closer to the end of The Borribles either. Instead he lay curled up on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, the book still held loosely in his unconscious grip. He twitched slightly, almost imperceptibly, as his dreams shook once more to the sound of sirens.
This time he dreamt that he was alone in the park. It was night time and the street lamps glittered in the distance, promising warmth and the safety of companions. But between him and them lay the vast black expanse of empty, muddy playing fields, the skeletal remains of the shattered bandstand and the rusty, spiked steel fence which ringed the entire park. In broad daylight it would take him ten minutes to get from one end of the park to the other; there was clearly no way that he could make it home in less than four minutes in the pitch darkness. But as the banshee wail of the siren echoed around the bare trees, he began to run.
His heart pounding in his chest, muscles burning and tearing, stumbling on broken brickwork and sliding in the mud, he ran through the darkness. The sirens grew louder and more insistent, drowning out his pained breaths and anguished sobs.
Then it was silent.
The bomb hung in the air above him, frozen in the instant of explosion like a great silver star. It lit the world like a million flashbulbs and Mark saw a thousand frightened children caught in the glare, running through the park in every direction. As one being, they turned their tear-streaked faces to the new born sun and bathed in its cold radiance.
Instantly, every child became a cloud of drifting ash. In the midst of this swirling maelstrom, Mark knew that he was alone. Standing directly beneath the epicentre of the spreading blast wave, he understood that every speck of ash was another dead child, a floating ghost. Mel, his nan, his mum and every man she ever brought home. All gone. All dead. He had been left behind.
Now that it had happened, it no longer scared him. The light from the star reached every horizon, burning trees and cars and schools to soft swirling ash. The air around him was thick with ghosts and he felt them pressing against him, trying to share a little of his life. The dust cloud rippled as another shade drew near. The clear light and the thick clouds left Mark as blind as the complete darkness of a moment before, but there was a warmth and a sense of recognition to this latest ghost. He raised his arms toward sit and felt it enveloping him, lifting him from his feet and cradling him in its phantom arms.
"Nan?"
The ghost pressed him tighter, every fragment of its being suffused with love. Mark was alone in all the world and he would never be alone again. The world had ended and everything was perfect.
He woke to the sound of screaming, raising his head from the carpet just in time to see his mother's foot swinging towards him. He had no time to avoid it and the kick connected with his head. Everything went white and he raised his hands to cover his face, wet with blood and the first startled tears. Between his shaking fingers he saw his mum standing over him, clutching Mel to her chest. Her hair was a tangled mess and her makeup was smeared and streaked by recent tears but her eyes were dry and blazed with fury. Mel hung limp in her arms, the angry red V where her head had hit the table looking huge and angry against her too-pale skin. The teddy bear blanket had slipped from her tiny fingers and lay on the floor beside him. He lowered his guard to lift it towards her, thinking it would make everything better. His mum snatched it away, planted her foot against his chest and slammed him back against the sofa. As he fought for breath she knelt across his legs, pinning him down without even noticing. She screamed at him, her face inches from his, her breath hot with stale beer, cigarettes and panic.
"What did you do Mark? What did you do to your fucking sister?"
Notes
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