"We can soar like eagles or scamper like rabbits," said Matus. "We can swim like the dolphins, be kings and queens, or even be ourselves, for eternity."
The old Nagual nodded his head slowly, his milky blue eyes half closed, as if lost in deep thought. After a moment or two, the boys sitting cross-legged before him on the dry sand began to wonder if he was meditating or merely sleeping, and whether there was really any difference between the two once you reached the great age Matus claimed to be. The midday sun was warm without being unpleasant though, and the breeze rolling in from the desert kept the air in motion, so most of the students waited silently, attentively, for the lesson to continue. Seeing his chance, Blue risked a quick glance around at his fellow novices, then slipped a chocolate bar from his shirt pocket and took a large bite. He ducked his head again and munched contentedly, until the boy sitting beside him reached over and slapped him harshly between the shoulder blades. Blue sprawled forwards, his legs twitching like a dreaming dog, a thick drool of melted chocolate bubbling from his lips. The other students scattered in surprise, scrambling around and away to watch this strange turn of events from a safer distance.
A pair of guards, teenage girls in drab olive fatigues, came running over from their post outside the camp administration building, raising their rifles and shouting warnings at Blue's attacker. The boy merely turned and smiled at them, and they faltered and lowered their weapons.
"And we must beware at all times," said the boy, his voice that of the ancient Indian, his milky eyes twinkling with mischief, "for there are many dark actors playing games here. We must never let our guard down, no matter what the temptation."
He reached down and took the half-eaten chocolate bar from Blue's pocket and broke it into three pieces, offering two to the guards and popping the third into his own mouth. The dark haired girl smiled and accepted her piece meekly, while her fairer companion pointed at the still-convulsing Blue.
"Where is he Master Matus?"
The boy grinned, looking around at his stunned, curious students.
"Our sweet-toothed Tonal is wriggling down in the dirt, churning through the soil, blind and deaf, barely more than an eating, shitting machine. You see, we can be anything we wish to be, even a humble earthworm."
The bell by the mess hall door rang suddenly, and the Nagual returned to his own body, climbed stiffly to his feet and wiped the sand from his ass. The boy he had possessed blinked uncertainly at the armed girls before him, then frowned, spat out a lump of melted chocolate and peered at it in confusion. The other students laughed and chattered amongst themselves as they rose and made their way towards the mess hall, leaving the guards, the old teacher and the dazed student standing over the prone Blue. Matus shook his head sadly.
"Five more minutes and he would have been eating lunch. This one will always have trouble with his appetite, cihuapilli."
He looked over at the fair haired soldier girl and grinned.
"You will have to watch that, I think."
Before she could object, the old Indian had turned away to see to his other student, who was beginning to piece together the last few minutes. He looked up at his teacher, frowning.
"What just happened? Was someone else in my head?"
Matus smiled and placed his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Help me to the canteen and I'll explain everything."
They slowly shuffled away, the student supporting his master as he learned what had just transpired.
Finally, just the guards remained. Sighing, the dark haired girl grabbed Blue's shoulder and rolled him roughly onto his back.
"Why does he always leave us to clean up after him?"
Her colleague shrugged.
"He probably thinks we're learning something from it all."
She squatted beside Blue's empty husk and gripped his head firmly in both hands, her thumbs at his temples.
"Wax on, wax off and all that shit."
Blue's eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they were a dirty off-white, like the flesh of a creature which spends it's entire life far removed from the sun. Then they rolled wildly as the irises gradually reappeared, before finally settling on the girl leaning over him. Looking up at her, with the desert sun shining through her short, boyish hair like a golden halo, he felt an uncontrollable urge to smile.
"You're lovely," he said thickly, pushing up onto his elbows. "Are you an angel?"
The girl stepped away, shaking her head.
"Not another one..."
The dark haired girl laughed.
"You love it when this happens. You play on it. You'll have him trotting after you for a week at least, until you get bored with it."
The blonde girl pulled a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, lit one and tossed the pack down to Blue.
"Okay, here's the deal," she announced, blowing a sigil-cloud of smoke to imbue her words with power over him. "I will allow you and one of your friends to take me and my friend here out on the town this evening. There will be no physical contact unless I initiate it, which is so unlikely that you might as well forget about it now. You will pay for everything, which will include at least a meal, three drinks and a movie. At the end of the evening, you will bring us back here to the camp and say goodnight like gentlemen. The only thing you will take away with you is that fag packet, which you will treasure as a souvenir of our time together. You will often wonder what might have been, especially when I begin my meteoric rise to stardom, but you will always know that I was too good for you and you will be eternally grateful for the brief hours you spent in my company. Understood?"
"Fair enough. So what's your name then?"
"She's Christa Paffgen," said the dark haired girl, "and I'm Fata Morgana, although you couldn't care less about me."
Blue lay back on the warm Earth and blew a wreath of smoke around his head.
"Christa... That's nice."
The girls exchanged smiles and shouldered their rifles, ready to move on and leave him with the lie.
"Course, if you don't mind, I'll just call you Felicity."
He sat up again and grinned at their stunned expressions.
"Is that alright with you Ari?"
Felicity looked down at Blue, lost for words, then turned to Arihaily.
"I don't think we'll be getting rid of this one that easily."
Notes
Saturday, 1 August 2009
Saturday, 18 July 2009
The Girl On The Factory Wall
"Cool as."
Stepping back out into the road for a moment, Marg Cornell surveyed her handiwork critically, then shook the silver spray can and moved back in to continue. The high wall surrounding the chemical plant was scarred and pitted, loose bricks and crumbling mortar struggling to support the weight of two decades worth of graffitti. Most of the earliest examples had long since been painted over but some were still visible, tucked into corners too difficult to reach, too small to be worth the extra effort for the average tagger. Others seemed to survive the years through sheer artistry; The word Lovecraft had filled the archway above the main gates for at least fifteen years, outlasting the band it commemorated by more than a decade. There was something perversely beautiful in the way the letters were slowly being torn apart by the grasping tentacles of a faceless, eldritch horror and no subsequent artist had felt confident enough in their own work to paint over it. Elsewhere, less successful tags were covered by fresh paint on an almost weekly basis, regardless of the longevity of the bands they paid tribute to. Floyd's prismatic beams were bisected by a scrawled Never Mind The Bollocks, a poor rendition of Jim Morrison had been partially covered by Marley's Lion and the current crop of Madchester bands were well represented in dayglo bubble-lettering, just waiting for the next big thing to come along and obliterate them. Like the strips of compressed Earth in a geological sample, the layers of paint could be tied to distinct time frames, with rocky spurs and outcroppings breaking the surface of the present.
The wall had become a living history book, with each generation making its own mark, wiping the past from sight, believing that all that mattered was now. Their music, their art, their time. But Marg knew that this was rarely true, that painting on the wall was like writing in the sand, that only the wall and the factory would remain. She was painting for a different reason.
For one thing, her painting had nothing to do with music, at least not on the surface. She loved the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and Northside, but she saw beyond them, back into the rich history her mother had taught her since before she could crawl. She could pick out any band in the scrawled mass of tags and sing their best known songs - Even Lovecraft - and could probably sing several lesser known ones too. She knew the meandering paths which lead from Hawkwind to Doctor And The Medics, from The Velvet Underground to Primal Scream. The warp and woof of the aural tapestry was all laid out before her as her mother struggled to make sense of the world in the only way she could.
Throughout her childhood, Marg's mother had slowly drifted further and further away from her, her illness dismantling the sweet young woman and leaving only a shell in her place, a worn out husk full of brittle glass and rusty nails that squealed and scraped as it fought to stay alive. But at those times when her moods stripped her of speech, when the slightest touch from her daughter would send her into spasms of rage or enfold her in icy fear, she could still find the tune to express her innermost thoughts. Locked out of her mother's room, Marg still found a way into her world through the muffled music playing on her battered old portable record player. At ten years old, when an elderly relative had brought her a cassette player of her own for Christmas, she had sat on the landing outside her mother's room and played the first track from an album of Christmas songs, the only tape she owned. She had hoped simply to involve her, to bring her within earshot of a normal family Christmas, but as the song ended, another started up from behind th locked door. As each carol ended, another would fill the silence, alternating back and forth between mother and daughter; In many ways, it was the first true conversation they ever held together.
In the six years since, their secret shared vocabulary had deepened and expanded to the point where the opening bars of a song could stand as shorthand for a feeling or sensation, and the overall mood of an album chosen over another could indicate the tone of an entire day. Even when the drugs were working and her mother resembled a mostly functioning human being, they still fell back into the musical dialect they were most comfortable with, neither one speaking but filling the silence with song after song. The advent of compact discs meant they could skip straight to any track that expressed their mood and miss out any that threatened to shatter it. With her weekend job in Woollies, Marg earned enough to bring home two or three new albums every week, and she often had to fight the urge to run all the way home, just to hear them a few minutes sooner. Sometimes, if her mother was still at the clinic when she got back, she would lie on the living room floor, her head between the stereo speakers, listening to each one from beginning to end. She was looking for the hook which would bring the whole album alive for her mother, the one song or phrase or note which would snare them both. Sometimes, it never appeared, and the disc was taken to the Simms Cross junk shop to be traded in for another half dozen scratchy old 45s. Other times, she would chance across a gleaming jewel in the heart of an album, a track which meant so many things to them both that they could use it to bridge a week of awkward silences. She wondered if that meant she was as bad as her mother, that a song which prevented them from speaking for days on end was seen as a good thing must be some measure of their shared psychosis. But mostly she just accepted that this was the way her life was going; this was her mother, this was her world, same as it ever was.
For now. Exhausting her spray can, she wiped a stray strand of hair from her eyes and stepped back to view her progress. The figure was well proportioned, clearly defined and highlighted by the silver haze which shimmered around it. The silhouette was a blank space on the wall where she had painstakingly painted over the accumulated graffitti with layer after layer of natural brick red until not even the barest trace bled through. With a fine brush she had drawn in the lines of soft grey mortar, until the final effect was achieved. In the midst of the chaotic jumble of tags and countertags stood a void. Shaped like a sixteen year old girl in baggy jeans and an Inspiral Carpets tee-shirt, it was an absence of artwork, as if she had stood there for forty years while several generations of artists had drawn around and across her. Now she had stepped away from the wall, revealing the bare brick beneath for the first time in decades. Lighting a cigarette, she took up a can of white paint and quickly gave it a title, the first thing to enter her mind. Pleased, she slipped the cans back into her satchel and checked her watch. Almost half past twelve; time to go.
As she turned the corner at the end of the street she passed a couple of guys she knew vaguely from school and nodded in greeting. They nodded back and continued on towards the factory.
"The horse in her bedroom was Shadowfax." said one, "I went back and read the description and it was spot on."
"I haven't got a clue what's going on," admitted his comrade, dripping tippex thinner onto the cuff of his jacket and taking a deep breath. "It's fucking great."
They paused for a moment, looking at the freshly painted words beside the figure of the missing girl, reading it aloud, giving voice to the question the whole town would soon be asking;
"Where is Marg?"
But neither they nor anyone else had an answer, and the girl on the factory wall was surrounded by music and saying nothing.
Notes
Stepping back out into the road for a moment, Marg Cornell surveyed her handiwork critically, then shook the silver spray can and moved back in to continue. The high wall surrounding the chemical plant was scarred and pitted, loose bricks and crumbling mortar struggling to support the weight of two decades worth of graffitti. Most of the earliest examples had long since been painted over but some were still visible, tucked into corners too difficult to reach, too small to be worth the extra effort for the average tagger. Others seemed to survive the years through sheer artistry; The word Lovecraft had filled the archway above the main gates for at least fifteen years, outlasting the band it commemorated by more than a decade. There was something perversely beautiful in the way the letters were slowly being torn apart by the grasping tentacles of a faceless, eldritch horror and no subsequent artist had felt confident enough in their own work to paint over it. Elsewhere, less successful tags were covered by fresh paint on an almost weekly basis, regardless of the longevity of the bands they paid tribute to. Floyd's prismatic beams were bisected by a scrawled Never Mind The Bollocks, a poor rendition of Jim Morrison had been partially covered by Marley's Lion and the current crop of Madchester bands were well represented in dayglo bubble-lettering, just waiting for the next big thing to come along and obliterate them. Like the strips of compressed Earth in a geological sample, the layers of paint could be tied to distinct time frames, with rocky spurs and outcroppings breaking the surface of the present.
The wall had become a living history book, with each generation making its own mark, wiping the past from sight, believing that all that mattered was now. Their music, their art, their time. But Marg knew that this was rarely true, that painting on the wall was like writing in the sand, that only the wall and the factory would remain. She was painting for a different reason.
For one thing, her painting had nothing to do with music, at least not on the surface. She loved the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and Northside, but she saw beyond them, back into the rich history her mother had taught her since before she could crawl. She could pick out any band in the scrawled mass of tags and sing their best known songs - Even Lovecraft - and could probably sing several lesser known ones too. She knew the meandering paths which lead from Hawkwind to Doctor And The Medics, from The Velvet Underground to Primal Scream. The warp and woof of the aural tapestry was all laid out before her as her mother struggled to make sense of the world in the only way she could.
Throughout her childhood, Marg's mother had slowly drifted further and further away from her, her illness dismantling the sweet young woman and leaving only a shell in her place, a worn out husk full of brittle glass and rusty nails that squealed and scraped as it fought to stay alive. But at those times when her moods stripped her of speech, when the slightest touch from her daughter would send her into spasms of rage or enfold her in icy fear, she could still find the tune to express her innermost thoughts. Locked out of her mother's room, Marg still found a way into her world through the muffled music playing on her battered old portable record player. At ten years old, when an elderly relative had brought her a cassette player of her own for Christmas, she had sat on the landing outside her mother's room and played the first track from an album of Christmas songs, the only tape she owned. She had hoped simply to involve her, to bring her within earshot of a normal family Christmas, but as the song ended, another started up from behind th locked door. As each carol ended, another would fill the silence, alternating back and forth between mother and daughter; In many ways, it was the first true conversation they ever held together.
In the six years since, their secret shared vocabulary had deepened and expanded to the point where the opening bars of a song could stand as shorthand for a feeling or sensation, and the overall mood of an album chosen over another could indicate the tone of an entire day. Even when the drugs were working and her mother resembled a mostly functioning human being, they still fell back into the musical dialect they were most comfortable with, neither one speaking but filling the silence with song after song. The advent of compact discs meant they could skip straight to any track that expressed their mood and miss out any that threatened to shatter it. With her weekend job in Woollies, Marg earned enough to bring home two or three new albums every week, and she often had to fight the urge to run all the way home, just to hear them a few minutes sooner. Sometimes, if her mother was still at the clinic when she got back, she would lie on the living room floor, her head between the stereo speakers, listening to each one from beginning to end. She was looking for the hook which would bring the whole album alive for her mother, the one song or phrase or note which would snare them both. Sometimes, it never appeared, and the disc was taken to the Simms Cross junk shop to be traded in for another half dozen scratchy old 45s. Other times, she would chance across a gleaming jewel in the heart of an album, a track which meant so many things to them both that they could use it to bridge a week of awkward silences. She wondered if that meant she was as bad as her mother, that a song which prevented them from speaking for days on end was seen as a good thing must be some measure of their shared psychosis. But mostly she just accepted that this was the way her life was going; this was her mother, this was her world, same as it ever was.
For now. Exhausting her spray can, she wiped a stray strand of hair from her eyes and stepped back to view her progress. The figure was well proportioned, clearly defined and highlighted by the silver haze which shimmered around it. The silhouette was a blank space on the wall where she had painstakingly painted over the accumulated graffitti with layer after layer of natural brick red until not even the barest trace bled through. With a fine brush she had drawn in the lines of soft grey mortar, until the final effect was achieved. In the midst of the chaotic jumble of tags and countertags stood a void. Shaped like a sixteen year old girl in baggy jeans and an Inspiral Carpets tee-shirt, it was an absence of artwork, as if she had stood there for forty years while several generations of artists had drawn around and across her. Now she had stepped away from the wall, revealing the bare brick beneath for the first time in decades. Lighting a cigarette, she took up a can of white paint and quickly gave it a title, the first thing to enter her mind. Pleased, she slipped the cans back into her satchel and checked her watch. Almost half past twelve; time to go.
As she turned the corner at the end of the street she passed a couple of guys she knew vaguely from school and nodded in greeting. They nodded back and continued on towards the factory.
"The horse in her bedroom was Shadowfax." said one, "I went back and read the description and it was spot on."
"I haven't got a clue what's going on," admitted his comrade, dripping tippex thinner onto the cuff of his jacket and taking a deep breath. "It's fucking great."
They paused for a moment, looking at the freshly painted words beside the figure of the missing girl, reading it aloud, giving voice to the question the whole town would soon be asking;
"Where is Marg?"
But neither they nor anyone else had an answer, and the girl on the factory wall was surrounded by music and saying nothing.
Notes
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Loss
The house smells of stale smoke and strangers. The police left a little while ago, Bill shortly after. He asked if I needed him to stay, bless him. He looked so relieved when I said no. Now it's just me, sitting in the dark in the empty parlour.
I get up to make a drink, pick up his mug from the draining board, pour milk into it before I even realise what I'm doing. I can't seem to put it back on the shelf, but finishing the job, making his milky tea and leaving it to cool in the mug seems even worse. I can't go on and I can't go back.
Instead, I sit at the kitchen table, in his chair. Looking at the world from his point of view, seeing what he saw. The scarred table top looks like the surface of the moon; Old burn marks for craters, the criss cross marks of the bread knife, jagged teeth tearing deeply into the old teak. I lie my hands on the raw wood and stare at them for an hour. Maybe I fall asleep. Maybe not. The hour passes. My hands age. The skin tightens, the knuckles swell and thicken as the fingers lose their nimble dexterity. It doesn't show on the outside. I stare at them untill my eyes sting, but I don't see it. No-one could. But with every hour that passes - every minute and second - we get closer to the end. To the last walk into the night.
Mustn't dwell on it. Got to keep thinking positive thoughts. They don't know for certain. Think it through: They only found his jacket. The Legion is nowhere near the canal. There's no need for him to go anywhere near it. There was only a little blood. Dad was in the army. Old soldiers don't just fall into the canal.
I know; He was attacked on his way to The Legion. Someone attacked him, they fought and dad got a black eye and a bloody nose and lost his coat. His attacker ran away with it, went down to the canal to rifle through the pockets and throw anything incriminating into the water. Any moment now, dad will come staggering through the front door, singing his awful old songs, shivering in his shirtsleeves, wiping his nose on a scrap of bloody tissue and trying to roll a cigarette with one hand. He'll shout at me for sitting in his chair, and if he ever finds out that Bill sat in the parlour holding my hand then I'll really be for it, and it would all be worth it just to hear his voice. Even if he lapsed into German, which just makes him ever more angry because I don't understand it...
Except it's almost three O'clock and dad would never stay out later than midnight, even on a weekend. The Legion closes at half past eleven, and even in his worst states, it would never take him half an hour to make his way home. It's not like he's got any friends to visit. I don't think he ever did, even back in Germany.
I notice that a couple of my fingernails are starting to bleed. I've been scratching the table top; there are tiny splinters in my fingertips, under the nails. I can't feel them, but I can see them. Everything's numb. I bet I could take the bread knife and...
I see where the thought is heading and push my chair away from the table, legs scraping on the bare quarry tiles, screeching loudly in the silent night. I stand and head back into the parlour. The policeman smoked those terrible liquorice paper cheroots. The room reeks of them, the wet, twisted butts sitting in the ashtray look like miniature dog poops. I think of tiny poodles walking around the glass dish, doing their business, and I can't hold my laughter in any longer. After a good five minutes I realize that it wasn't laughter. I look up and find that I'm kneeling on the hearth rug, my face wet from tears which have soaked the seat of dad's armchair. I stood here, on this same spot, when I was a little girl, clinging to his trouser leg, listening to his stories. I didn't understand a fraction of what he was trying to tell me. Now I never will.
Back then, when I looked up at him, I saw a giant, his head in the clouds, with a booming voice and great rough hands that would scoop me up and lift me into the smoky nimbus which hung around his shoulders. We were in a different world up there. I can still smell the strange home mixed tobacco he bought from the old woman in Cooper Street. Sometimes there was a trace of cherrywood, sometimes something more like tar, sweet and rich or thick and black, all tangled up with the smell of his hair oil, the axle grease ground into his hands and the occasional nip of whiskey on his breath.
I crawl up onto the armchair, close my eyes and press my face against the worn material, breathing deeply. I can almost believe that he's still here. I can smell him, feel his warmth. I press myself into the indentation of his form on the cushions, trying not to think of the fact that it's a hollow, a negative space formed by his absence. For now it's enough to get me through the night.
I sleep, finally. The dreams respect my boundaries, for one night only. No silver stars, no burning fields, no steppenwolves or soldiers. Just oblivion. Peace. I sleep in the space carved out by my father's life, the echo of his arms around me, the ghost of his breath on my face. And then I wake to a new world.
The sun is rising and my father is dead.
I get up to make a drink, pick up his mug from the draining board, pour milk into it before I even realise what I'm doing. I can't seem to put it back on the shelf, but finishing the job, making his milky tea and leaving it to cool in the mug seems even worse. I can't go on and I can't go back.
Instead, I sit at the kitchen table, in his chair. Looking at the world from his point of view, seeing what he saw. The scarred table top looks like the surface of the moon; Old burn marks for craters, the criss cross marks of the bread knife, jagged teeth tearing deeply into the old teak. I lie my hands on the raw wood and stare at them for an hour. Maybe I fall asleep. Maybe not. The hour passes. My hands age. The skin tightens, the knuckles swell and thicken as the fingers lose their nimble dexterity. It doesn't show on the outside. I stare at them untill my eyes sting, but I don't see it. No-one could. But with every hour that passes - every minute and second - we get closer to the end. To the last walk into the night.
Mustn't dwell on it. Got to keep thinking positive thoughts. They don't know for certain. Think it through: They only found his jacket. The Legion is nowhere near the canal. There's no need for him to go anywhere near it. There was only a little blood. Dad was in the army. Old soldiers don't just fall into the canal.
I know; He was attacked on his way to The Legion. Someone attacked him, they fought and dad got a black eye and a bloody nose and lost his coat. His attacker ran away with it, went down to the canal to rifle through the pockets and throw anything incriminating into the water. Any moment now, dad will come staggering through the front door, singing his awful old songs, shivering in his shirtsleeves, wiping his nose on a scrap of bloody tissue and trying to roll a cigarette with one hand. He'll shout at me for sitting in his chair, and if he ever finds out that Bill sat in the parlour holding my hand then I'll really be for it, and it would all be worth it just to hear his voice. Even if he lapsed into German, which just makes him ever more angry because I don't understand it...
Except it's almost three O'clock and dad would never stay out later than midnight, even on a weekend. The Legion closes at half past eleven, and even in his worst states, it would never take him half an hour to make his way home. It's not like he's got any friends to visit. I don't think he ever did, even back in Germany.
I notice that a couple of my fingernails are starting to bleed. I've been scratching the table top; there are tiny splinters in my fingertips, under the nails. I can't feel them, but I can see them. Everything's numb. I bet I could take the bread knife and...
I see where the thought is heading and push my chair away from the table, legs scraping on the bare quarry tiles, screeching loudly in the silent night. I stand and head back into the parlour. The policeman smoked those terrible liquorice paper cheroots. The room reeks of them, the wet, twisted butts sitting in the ashtray look like miniature dog poops. I think of tiny poodles walking around the glass dish, doing their business, and I can't hold my laughter in any longer. After a good five minutes I realize that it wasn't laughter. I look up and find that I'm kneeling on the hearth rug, my face wet from tears which have soaked the seat of dad's armchair. I stood here, on this same spot, when I was a little girl, clinging to his trouser leg, listening to his stories. I didn't understand a fraction of what he was trying to tell me. Now I never will.
Back then, when I looked up at him, I saw a giant, his head in the clouds, with a booming voice and great rough hands that would scoop me up and lift me into the smoky nimbus which hung around his shoulders. We were in a different world up there. I can still smell the strange home mixed tobacco he bought from the old woman in Cooper Street. Sometimes there was a trace of cherrywood, sometimes something more like tar, sweet and rich or thick and black, all tangled up with the smell of his hair oil, the axle grease ground into his hands and the occasional nip of whiskey on his breath.
I crawl up onto the armchair, close my eyes and press my face against the worn material, breathing deeply. I can almost believe that he's still here. I can smell him, feel his warmth. I press myself into the indentation of his form on the cushions, trying not to think of the fact that it's a hollow, a negative space formed by his absence. For now it's enough to get me through the night.
I sleep, finally. The dreams respect my boundaries, for one night only. No silver stars, no burning fields, no steppenwolves or soldiers. Just oblivion. Peace. I sleep in the space carved out by my father's life, the echo of his arms around me, the ghost of his breath on my face. And then I wake to a new world.
The sun is rising and my father is dead.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
The Word Is...
Hearing the front door slam, Sarah slipped into the front bedroom and peered through the smoke-tinged net curtains that hung over the grimy window. Her father was already at the front gate, shuffling out into the night. He had a flat cap clamped down tightly upon his head, a ratty old scarf wound around the lower half of his face, leaving only the hawk nose and the dull eyes exposed to the cold. It was a safe assumption that he was out for the night then; He wouldn't wrap up for a simple trip to the corner shop, but The Legion was right across town.
Sarah fought the urge to race straight to her own room and waited until the old man lit a cigarette and drifted to the end of the road, around the corner and out of sight. As soon as he disappeared from view, she ran across the narrow landing and pulled her tiny record player from its hiding place beneath her bed. She was running late already, and she still had to change, but there was always time for music, especially when she had the house to herself and no need to worry about the volume levels. Rubber Soul was on the top of her record pile, as it had been for the last few months, and she once again slid the shiny black disc from its stiff paper sleeve and lowered it reverentially onto the spindle. On her knees, she wiped the stylus with a square of yellow cotton to remove even the faintest trace of grit which might damage the precious LP, then lowered the needle into the groove with practised ease. She still tensed herself against the harsh crackle of a mis-cue, but there was only the slightest hiss as the diamond stylus slid into the silent valley between tracks. Then the driving beat and throbbing baseline of her favourite cut began to reverberate in the plain plaster echo chamber of her room. She turned the volume up as high as it would go without distorting and began to bop her head in time to the music, singing along as best she could.
Have you heard, love?
It was hard to keep up, and if she tried to mimic John's snarling disdain for too long she started to cough, but something about the song caught her up and dragged her along in its wake. This was real music, the purest, strangest sounds around and the exact polar opposite of the maudlin old German love songs her father murmured to himself when he staggered home from The Legion, when he'd had one too many and got to thinking about Sarah's mother. For a moment there, kneeling before the red leatherette altar, Sarah had a momentary glimpse into her father's mind; For the first time, she understood the way the half-remembered melody could lift him out of the world and carry him back to a better time. It shook her, a shock of recognition; In her own way, Sarah knew, she was just like him, spending six days of every week in stasis, holding on for those few hours when they could live, when the music set them both free. The rest of the time they were trapped in the house together, back to back, her father with his gaze fixed firmly on the past, Sarah looking ahead.
That was the difference, she decided. She was facing the future. Her father's hatred of the modern world, with its long-haired singers and coloured actors on the telly, it was all part of his desire to hold the past as tightly as he could, to claw his way back into it. Always back. Back to the war, to the time when he had a job, a purpose and a wife, to the days when he did more than smoke an endless series of cigarettes and wait for Friday nights. Sarah was heading in the other direction, straining for a tomorrow which hung just beyond her grasp, racing towards the future at thirty three revolutions a minute.
Deep in thought, her forehead dipping towards the threadbare carpet, Sarah felt rather than heard the music, a pulsating beacon in the centre of her mind. Lamplight on the bridge of thoughts as the way opened once more. She rolled to one side, sprawling on the floor, gazing up at the cracked ceiling, focussed at some point far beyond it. A blink of her eyes and the point was internalized, deep within. Another blink flipped the perspective and put the point somewhere out beyond the stars, and in an instant she was travelling with it. She felt the familiar weight on her chest, the heavy presence of a Mara pushing her physical form back even as it drew her soul upwards and out. Her muscles locked in place, a hypnagogic paralysis that would restrain and protect her body until she returned to it. Drifting away, she glanced down at herself, appraising and examining her sleeping self from a fresh vantage point, then turned and headed out into the higher realms.
A knocking at the front door brought her back with a bump. Her mind reeled in the backwash of departing dreams; A silver star, a red forest, the zones of alienation and isolation, an earnest young man sitting on a lonely hillside clutching a book of poetry. The moments drifted apart and she pushed up onto her elbows, looking around uncertainly. Had she been asleep? The steady thrrrp... thrrrp... thrrrp... of the stylus at the end of the LP suggested that at least ten minutes had passed, and her back ached as if she had been lying on the floor for a good deal longer. The knocking came again, louder and more insistent, and she struggled to her feet and made her way down to the hall. She should never have allowed herself to be tempted by the music, she thought. She was already running late when her father had left, and then she went and fell asleep! She knew that it would be Bill at the door, ready to give her a dressing down for standing him up, and she almost turned and crept back up the stairs. Then the hammering began again, and she heard an unfamiliar voice calling her name.
With growing trepidation, she slipped the chain onto the door, then opened it a crack and peered out into the darkness.
"Yes?"
The policeman standing on the doorstep looked down at her with mute despondency. His colleague held up a warrant card which might have been cut from the back of a cornflake packet for all the attention she paid it.
"May we come in miss? I'm afraid we have some rather bad news about your father..."
Sarah fought the urge to race straight to her own room and waited until the old man lit a cigarette and drifted to the end of the road, around the corner and out of sight. As soon as he disappeared from view, she ran across the narrow landing and pulled her tiny record player from its hiding place beneath her bed. She was running late already, and she still had to change, but there was always time for music, especially when she had the house to herself and no need to worry about the volume levels. Rubber Soul was on the top of her record pile, as it had been for the last few months, and she once again slid the shiny black disc from its stiff paper sleeve and lowered it reverentially onto the spindle. On her knees, she wiped the stylus with a square of yellow cotton to remove even the faintest trace of grit which might damage the precious LP, then lowered the needle into the groove with practised ease. She still tensed herself against the harsh crackle of a mis-cue, but there was only the slightest hiss as the diamond stylus slid into the silent valley between tracks. Then the driving beat and throbbing baseline of her favourite cut began to reverberate in the plain plaster echo chamber of her room. She turned the volume up as high as it would go without distorting and began to bop her head in time to the music, singing along as best she could.
Have you heard, love?
It was hard to keep up, and if she tried to mimic John's snarling disdain for too long she started to cough, but something about the song caught her up and dragged her along in its wake. This was real music, the purest, strangest sounds around and the exact polar opposite of the maudlin old German love songs her father murmured to himself when he staggered home from The Legion, when he'd had one too many and got to thinking about Sarah's mother. For a moment there, kneeling before the red leatherette altar, Sarah had a momentary glimpse into her father's mind; For the first time, she understood the way the half-remembered melody could lift him out of the world and carry him back to a better time. It shook her, a shock of recognition; In her own way, Sarah knew, she was just like him, spending six days of every week in stasis, holding on for those few hours when they could live, when the music set them both free. The rest of the time they were trapped in the house together, back to back, her father with his gaze fixed firmly on the past, Sarah looking ahead.
That was the difference, she decided. She was facing the future. Her father's hatred of the modern world, with its long-haired singers and coloured actors on the telly, it was all part of his desire to hold the past as tightly as he could, to claw his way back into it. Always back. Back to the war, to the time when he had a job, a purpose and a wife, to the days when he did more than smoke an endless series of cigarettes and wait for Friday nights. Sarah was heading in the other direction, straining for a tomorrow which hung just beyond her grasp, racing towards the future at thirty three revolutions a minute.
Deep in thought, her forehead dipping towards the threadbare carpet, Sarah felt rather than heard the music, a pulsating beacon in the centre of her mind. Lamplight on the bridge of thoughts as the way opened once more. She rolled to one side, sprawling on the floor, gazing up at the cracked ceiling, focussed at some point far beyond it. A blink of her eyes and the point was internalized, deep within. Another blink flipped the perspective and put the point somewhere out beyond the stars, and in an instant she was travelling with it. She felt the familiar weight on her chest, the heavy presence of a Mara pushing her physical form back even as it drew her soul upwards and out. Her muscles locked in place, a hypnagogic paralysis that would restrain and protect her body until she returned to it. Drifting away, she glanced down at herself, appraising and examining her sleeping self from a fresh vantage point, then turned and headed out into the higher realms.
A knocking at the front door brought her back with a bump. Her mind reeled in the backwash of departing dreams; A silver star, a red forest, the zones of alienation and isolation, an earnest young man sitting on a lonely hillside clutching a book of poetry. The moments drifted apart and she pushed up onto her elbows, looking around uncertainly. Had she been asleep? The steady thrrrp... thrrrp... thrrrp... of the stylus at the end of the LP suggested that at least ten minutes had passed, and her back ached as if she had been lying on the floor for a good deal longer. The knocking came again, louder and more insistent, and she struggled to her feet and made her way down to the hall. She should never have allowed herself to be tempted by the music, she thought. She was already running late when her father had left, and then she went and fell asleep! She knew that it would be Bill at the door, ready to give her a dressing down for standing him up, and she almost turned and crept back up the stairs. Then the hammering began again, and she heard an unfamiliar voice calling her name.
With growing trepidation, she slipped the chain onto the door, then opened it a crack and peered out into the darkness.
"Yes?"
The policeman standing on the doorstep looked down at her with mute despondency. His colleague held up a warrant card which might have been cut from the back of a cornflake packet for all the attention she paid it.
"May we come in miss? I'm afraid we have some rather bad news about your father..."
Saturday, 6 June 2009
Ghost Town
In the morning, after the riot, Mark made his way down to the town centre to see if there was anything he could make use of. He found a shard of bloodied glass from one of the Wimpey's windows and a dented bobby's helmet, but neither of them spoke to him, and he left them to other, less discerning scavengers. Not that there were any about yet - Most of the younger boys would still be in bed, unaware of the booty going unclaimed, while the big lads would be feeling too fragile to face the light and the truth of what they had done.
Even so, it was still dangerous to be out on the streets alone, and Mark wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been driven by necessity. At twelve and a half, he was almost too old to be under anyone else's protection, and the chances of him finding an article of power for himself were fading every day; Soon they would just be random objects, bits of broken plastic and copper wire. He wouldn't feel the raw violence and anger which had formed them, wouldn't sense the stories that kept them alive, and he couldn't be sure that they would hold him safe from the others.
Heading into the high street, where the panda car had been burnt out, he felt the first stirrings of recognition deep inside, like a finger curled through the soft meat of his mind, pulling him forwards. He crossed the roundabout, then squatted at the point where the car had mounted the pavement and gone into Rumbelows TV display window. A burning tyre had left a short strip of melted rubber on the road, like a flattened black snake. He carefully peeled it up and was gratified when it came away in a complete foot long strip. He swung it experimentally, slapped it against the palm of his hand; It would do, if nothing else came along. He tucked it into his knapsack, stuffing it down at the bottom, beneath his Empire Strikes Back tee-shirt. It wasn't the greatest hiding place, but at least if he was picked up by the Spruce Street gang, arguing over the nearly new shirt might distract them enough to make them miss a tatty strip of rubber. Whether he would escape such a confrontation was another thing, but it was best not to think about that; The Spruce Street gang and the St Luke's boys were mortal enemies, and the rumours of what happened if you strayed into the wrong territory were the stuff of nightmares.
But he was convinced there was still something better out there; He could feel it, like an itch behind his eyeballs. He allowed his mind to go slack, unfocussed, and wandered aimlessly down the high street. His innate small boy trouble compass soon brought him to the cinema, the epicentre of the previous night's fighting. Crunching across broken glass and stale popcorn, he found himself drawn to the Forthcoming Attractions boards. The frames were splintered and cracked, the glass shattered like almost every other pane in the town, and the posters had been ripped out and shredded long before, but somehow, a single 10 x 8 still remained caught in one of the frames, and it was this which had called to him. He reached up and pulled it loose, wincing as a thin sliver of glass slid into the meat of his thumb. He transferred the photo to his other hand and inspected it intently as he sucked at the wound.
The photo was black and white, without words, a single shot of a man's face. He was handsome enough, with dark eyes and a scruff of beard and dark, wavy hair, but he was no movie star that Mark had ever seen before. It was hard to judge though, as his face was striped with thin rivulets of blood which trickled down from a wound above his hairline. But he showed no pain; His olive eyes were calm, serene, almost forgiving as they stared back at Mark. There was the trace of a smile on his lips, and as he contemplated it, Mark realised that he was hearing the man's voice inside his mind, a voice which said, "I know you child."
And then the man had him. Mark felt him in his thoughts and memories, rifling through his innermost thoughts and most shameful secrets. He tried to fight it, but as his muscles locked in place, so too did his thoughts. He was unable to move, to look away from the photo or to steer his thoughts in any other direction. His thumb throbbed and swelled as if it was filling his entire mouth and he gagged on the hot rush of blood which ran down his throat. He felt a warmth at his crotch and the backs of his legs and realised absently that both his bladder and bowel had given way. There was no shame left in him, even for such a public humiliation, as the man was leading him through the worst moments of his life, and all of his pain was needed there.
He saw the older boys back at the house, felt their probing fingers, their sharp teeth and rough, stubbled chins. He felt dirty and degraded, used and cast off, to perpetrate the same foul acts on boys smaller than himself. He saw the look on his own face as he tore into them, and he understood that there was no pleasure in it, just a faint hope of clawing back some power, some self respect, some strength from another boy's weakness.
No, that wasn't quite true; There had been one time when it had been a pleasure. He saw that now, though he struggled against it, screaming through locked jaws, teeth still clenched ever tighter on his shattered thumb. His legs buckled at the pain and he fell heavily against the steps of the cinema, his face pressed against the wet stone and fragments of glass, cloaked in the smell of old Butterkist and fresh shit. He didn't want to see what the man was showing him, but he couldn't look away, and the face which swam up before his inner eyes was as sweet and kind and gentle as he remembered.
Humbug Billy had been sixteen, a brighter spark than all the other boys in the house put together. Single handedly, he had done for the whole Vicky Park mob with poison and sweets, wiping them out in a single afternoon of boiled innards and retching, suffocating on their own offal. He had been the hero of the house that day, until the older boys in the attic had decided he was too much of a threat to them, now that they had armed him and sent him out against their enemies. He had too much power now, and he couldn't be counted on to stay in his place in the cellar; They had to deal with him while they still could, so they sent Mark to keep him occupied, while they rummaged through his scavenged laboratory, mixing sugar, gum and household cleaners in crude imitation of his own masterful design.
All night, Mark and Billy had lain together, talking, loving, sleeping in each other's arms, and there had been no pain, no anger or force, just tender kisses and soft words, warm skin and deep, affectionate eyes. And in the morning, when he was presented with a hero's breakfast, Humbug knew exactly what was happening, and he had looked at Mark with sadness and pity before he pushed the tray away and leapt for the kitchen door. Boys of all ages brought him down and dragged him back, and he was thrown onto the kitchen table and held down by many hands as the foul smelling muck was forced into his mouth. He coughed and choked, spitting poison and insults with burning lips, until the mixture hit his stomach. Then there were no more words, as his back arched and his hands clenched in a death grip, drawing blood from the arms of the boys who still held him. His legs thrashed uncontrollably, catching one boy in the stomach and sending him crashing to the floor. Mark stepped in and helped hold the dying boy down, clinging tightly to him until Billy gave a final push and spewed a thick mass of melted tissue across the table top, milky white and marbled with blood, steaming and bubbling as it dripped onto the old lino and began to eat through it. There was no more fighting, no more movement, and the mob began to move away, drifting back to their own worlds, their own lives, leaving the mess to the younger boys. Mark withdrew with them, stunned into silence, thinking of how he had held the same body in such different ways and how neither of them had been completely unpleasant.
Lying on the steps of the Imperial Theatre, his body convulsing, legs twitching like a dreaming dog, Mark left his body entirely, lead onwards by the man in his mind. He howled silently as he understood where they were going, what he was to see next, but he was powerless to resist as they drifted further and further back, moving in time and space until they were at the edge of town on a cold winter's morning, and he found himself looking up at her once more.
"Mum?"
Every detail was etched in his mind with perfect clarity, but seeing the scene afresh, seven years on, he saw so much more than ever before. He saw the lines carved into her face by worry and fatigue, the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the premature strands of grey in her ratty, unstyled hair. He saw her work clothes, the stained blouse and the skirt with the cigarette burn hidden by a cheap plastic belt, the coat that never really kept her warm, and he noticed the way her hands shook as she lit a fag, the constant shivering which was caused by much more than the cold. He fought against it, but with every moment he looked at her, he saw her less as his mother and more as just another person, with all the weaknesses and frailties he had learnt to exploit since that day all those years ago. He felt the cold touch of her shaking fingers on his cheek, and the only feeling it stirred in him was disgust. What was worse was the sudden understanding that these weren't new feelings; He had felt utter contempt for her even then, and it was only the intervening years, the long separation, which had sainted her and turned her into the one thing he wanted more than anything, a good, caring mother.
Standing at the gate, he curled his tiny fingers through the chicken wire and took his last look at the useless old whore. She barely glanced at him as she signed the papers that turned him over to the State, and when she did, she couldn't hold his accusing gaze. There was no sadness in her eyes, no regret, just a tired, burnt out relief that she was rid of him. She gave him a faint, jittery smile and a half-hearted wave goodbye, and the son she had never wanted turned his back on her for the final time.
Back on the steps, returned to his own body, Mark screamed in agony as his grinding teeth finally severed his thumb, sending a spurt of blood across the crumpled photo, releasing him from its spell. He lay there, silent and unmoving, feeling his life ebb away with every breath, while the rats and pigeons moved in to fight over the sticky red popcorn. The man was gone from his mind, and all he saw and heard was a high white noise, a blinding, deafening roar of silence that battered his ears and scorched his eyes. He could move once more, but he made no effort to try. Really, where would he go? What was the point? Better to die on the Imperial steps, like all the others, like Humbug Billy, just one more ghost in Boys Town.
Notes
Even so, it was still dangerous to be out on the streets alone, and Mark wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been driven by necessity. At twelve and a half, he was almost too old to be under anyone else's protection, and the chances of him finding an article of power for himself were fading every day; Soon they would just be random objects, bits of broken plastic and copper wire. He wouldn't feel the raw violence and anger which had formed them, wouldn't sense the stories that kept them alive, and he couldn't be sure that they would hold him safe from the others.
Heading into the high street, where the panda car had been burnt out, he felt the first stirrings of recognition deep inside, like a finger curled through the soft meat of his mind, pulling him forwards. He crossed the roundabout, then squatted at the point where the car had mounted the pavement and gone into Rumbelows TV display window. A burning tyre had left a short strip of melted rubber on the road, like a flattened black snake. He carefully peeled it up and was gratified when it came away in a complete foot long strip. He swung it experimentally, slapped it against the palm of his hand; It would do, if nothing else came along. He tucked it into his knapsack, stuffing it down at the bottom, beneath his Empire Strikes Back tee-shirt. It wasn't the greatest hiding place, but at least if he was picked up by the Spruce Street gang, arguing over the nearly new shirt might distract them enough to make them miss a tatty strip of rubber. Whether he would escape such a confrontation was another thing, but it was best not to think about that; The Spruce Street gang and the St Luke's boys were mortal enemies, and the rumours of what happened if you strayed into the wrong territory were the stuff of nightmares.
But he was convinced there was still something better out there; He could feel it, like an itch behind his eyeballs. He allowed his mind to go slack, unfocussed, and wandered aimlessly down the high street. His innate small boy trouble compass soon brought him to the cinema, the epicentre of the previous night's fighting. Crunching across broken glass and stale popcorn, he found himself drawn to the Forthcoming Attractions boards. The frames were splintered and cracked, the glass shattered like almost every other pane in the town, and the posters had been ripped out and shredded long before, but somehow, a single 10 x 8 still remained caught in one of the frames, and it was this which had called to him. He reached up and pulled it loose, wincing as a thin sliver of glass slid into the meat of his thumb. He transferred the photo to his other hand and inspected it intently as he sucked at the wound.
The photo was black and white, without words, a single shot of a man's face. He was handsome enough, with dark eyes and a scruff of beard and dark, wavy hair, but he was no movie star that Mark had ever seen before. It was hard to judge though, as his face was striped with thin rivulets of blood which trickled down from a wound above his hairline. But he showed no pain; His olive eyes were calm, serene, almost forgiving as they stared back at Mark. There was the trace of a smile on his lips, and as he contemplated it, Mark realised that he was hearing the man's voice inside his mind, a voice which said, "I know you child."
And then the man had him. Mark felt him in his thoughts and memories, rifling through his innermost thoughts and most shameful secrets. He tried to fight it, but as his muscles locked in place, so too did his thoughts. He was unable to move, to look away from the photo or to steer his thoughts in any other direction. His thumb throbbed and swelled as if it was filling his entire mouth and he gagged on the hot rush of blood which ran down his throat. He felt a warmth at his crotch and the backs of his legs and realised absently that both his bladder and bowel had given way. There was no shame left in him, even for such a public humiliation, as the man was leading him through the worst moments of his life, and all of his pain was needed there.
He saw the older boys back at the house, felt their probing fingers, their sharp teeth and rough, stubbled chins. He felt dirty and degraded, used and cast off, to perpetrate the same foul acts on boys smaller than himself. He saw the look on his own face as he tore into them, and he understood that there was no pleasure in it, just a faint hope of clawing back some power, some self respect, some strength from another boy's weakness.
No, that wasn't quite true; There had been one time when it had been a pleasure. He saw that now, though he struggled against it, screaming through locked jaws, teeth still clenched ever tighter on his shattered thumb. His legs buckled at the pain and he fell heavily against the steps of the cinema, his face pressed against the wet stone and fragments of glass, cloaked in the smell of old Butterkist and fresh shit. He didn't want to see what the man was showing him, but he couldn't look away, and the face which swam up before his inner eyes was as sweet and kind and gentle as he remembered.
Humbug Billy had been sixteen, a brighter spark than all the other boys in the house put together. Single handedly, he had done for the whole Vicky Park mob with poison and sweets, wiping them out in a single afternoon of boiled innards and retching, suffocating on their own offal. He had been the hero of the house that day, until the older boys in the attic had decided he was too much of a threat to them, now that they had armed him and sent him out against their enemies. He had too much power now, and he couldn't be counted on to stay in his place in the cellar; They had to deal with him while they still could, so they sent Mark to keep him occupied, while they rummaged through his scavenged laboratory, mixing sugar, gum and household cleaners in crude imitation of his own masterful design.
All night, Mark and Billy had lain together, talking, loving, sleeping in each other's arms, and there had been no pain, no anger or force, just tender kisses and soft words, warm skin and deep, affectionate eyes. And in the morning, when he was presented with a hero's breakfast, Humbug knew exactly what was happening, and he had looked at Mark with sadness and pity before he pushed the tray away and leapt for the kitchen door. Boys of all ages brought him down and dragged him back, and he was thrown onto the kitchen table and held down by many hands as the foul smelling muck was forced into his mouth. He coughed and choked, spitting poison and insults with burning lips, until the mixture hit his stomach. Then there were no more words, as his back arched and his hands clenched in a death grip, drawing blood from the arms of the boys who still held him. His legs thrashed uncontrollably, catching one boy in the stomach and sending him crashing to the floor. Mark stepped in and helped hold the dying boy down, clinging tightly to him until Billy gave a final push and spewed a thick mass of melted tissue across the table top, milky white and marbled with blood, steaming and bubbling as it dripped onto the old lino and began to eat through it. There was no more fighting, no more movement, and the mob began to move away, drifting back to their own worlds, their own lives, leaving the mess to the younger boys. Mark withdrew with them, stunned into silence, thinking of how he had held the same body in such different ways and how neither of them had been completely unpleasant.
Lying on the steps of the Imperial Theatre, his body convulsing, legs twitching like a dreaming dog, Mark left his body entirely, lead onwards by the man in his mind. He howled silently as he understood where they were going, what he was to see next, but he was powerless to resist as they drifted further and further back, moving in time and space until they were at the edge of town on a cold winter's morning, and he found himself looking up at her once more.
"Mum?"
Every detail was etched in his mind with perfect clarity, but seeing the scene afresh, seven years on, he saw so much more than ever before. He saw the lines carved into her face by worry and fatigue, the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the premature strands of grey in her ratty, unstyled hair. He saw her work clothes, the stained blouse and the skirt with the cigarette burn hidden by a cheap plastic belt, the coat that never really kept her warm, and he noticed the way her hands shook as she lit a fag, the constant shivering which was caused by much more than the cold. He fought against it, but with every moment he looked at her, he saw her less as his mother and more as just another person, with all the weaknesses and frailties he had learnt to exploit since that day all those years ago. He felt the cold touch of her shaking fingers on his cheek, and the only feeling it stirred in him was disgust. What was worse was the sudden understanding that these weren't new feelings; He had felt utter contempt for her even then, and it was only the intervening years, the long separation, which had sainted her and turned her into the one thing he wanted more than anything, a good, caring mother.
Standing at the gate, he curled his tiny fingers through the chicken wire and took his last look at the useless old whore. She barely glanced at him as she signed the papers that turned him over to the State, and when she did, she couldn't hold his accusing gaze. There was no sadness in her eyes, no regret, just a tired, burnt out relief that she was rid of him. She gave him a faint, jittery smile and a half-hearted wave goodbye, and the son she had never wanted turned his back on her for the final time.
Back on the steps, returned to his own body, Mark screamed in agony as his grinding teeth finally severed his thumb, sending a spurt of blood across the crumpled photo, releasing him from its spell. He lay there, silent and unmoving, feeling his life ebb away with every breath, while the rats and pigeons moved in to fight over the sticky red popcorn. The man was gone from his mind, and all he saw and heard was a high white noise, a blinding, deafening roar of silence that battered his ears and scorched his eyes. He could move once more, but he made no effort to try. Really, where would he go? What was the point? Better to die on the Imperial steps, like all the others, like Humbug Billy, just one more ghost in Boys Town.
Notes
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Another Girl
Sitting on a bench in the shadow of the war memorial, Sarah pulled her mac tight against the early evening breeze and lit another cigarette. She had been waiting half an hour now, and there was still no sign of Bill. She thought about giving up and going home, but the idea of one more night in her room playing her 45s so quietly that her father wouldn't get annoyed seemed worse than being stood up. At least on Fridays he went to the Legion so she could increase the volume enough to hear the words.
But this was a dreary Tuesday night, and her father would be sitting up at the kitchen table like always, listening to the World Service news and rolling his cigarettes one after another, lining them up like little soldiers, a regiment to be consigned to the flames at five minute intervals. So she sat out by the cenotaph, smoking her own shop-bought fags and waiting for Bill.
What made it worse was the fact that she didn't even know where he was taking her; If she had, she could have gone there and waited for him. She checked her watch and mentally crossed off another activity from the list of possibilities. Half past seven - Too late for the main feature at The Imperial. That left the danceclub or the coffee bar at the church hall. The excitement was positively underwhelming. Not for the first time, she wondered if she really belonged with Bill. They had been together for so long now that it just seemed like a habit instead of a relationship. She knew that the films weren't real; She was no Doris Day, and Bill wouldn't pass for Rock Hudson even at a distance in the dead of night, but shouldn't there be more than this? Wasn't there a world where people lived real lives, full of excitement and passion, aspiring to something more than a job at the plant? Sometimes, she could almost feel it, reaching out to her, drawing her to the gateway. Every Saturday, when she got paid and the plant let out at lunchtime, she would head straight to Woollies and then rush home with three or four fragile plastic discs under her coat, hidden away from her father who would want to double her keep if he found out how much of her wages went on records. Smuggling the precious 45s and long players up to her room, she would pull the tiny record player out from beneath her bed, feeling the static tingle in her fingers as she opened the lurid red leatherette case. It was the greatest sadness of her life that she had to wait a whole six days before she could move the volume dial up beyond two, but even so, she would drop the needle into the groove and roll onto her back, lying with her head next to the speaker, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling as she strained to listen to the latest tune. Sometimes, if it was an LP, she would gaze at the cover and imagine the faces smiling at her, singing the songs just for her. She read the song titles over and over, reciting them like magic words; Help, The Night Before, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away... They were more than songs, more than words; They were a key to another place.
"Penny for 'em?"
Sarah jumped, startled out of her thoughts by the voice behind her. She craned her neck to see who it was and groaned inwardly when she recognised the intruder.
"Hello Cynthia."
Cynthia Wilson smiled and tottered around to join her on the bench, dropping heavily beside her and letting out a belch and a drunken giggle.
"Whoops a daisie. Y'alright duck? You were well away then. Your fag's burnt down to the cork. Got another?"
Sarah looked at the filter which she still held, forgotten, then tossed it into the gutter and took out a new pack. Cynthia watched with great interest as she lit one, then beamed at her as she passed the pack across.
"Ta love. So what were you thinking about then? Must have been good - I shouted you from across the road and you didn't budge."
"I'm not sure. Just daydreaming about music."
She shrugged, then held out a hand for her cigarettes, which Cynthia was about to slip into her handbag. Cyn smiled and handed them over with a sheepish grin..
"Sorry, forget my head next. You really like that stuff don't you? I don't know how you tell them apart. That Freddy and the Peacemakers fella looks just like Buddy Holly to me."
Sarah winced at the mistake, but she knew there was no point correcting her; Cyn had always been the same, ever since they had been in infants school together. She wasn't stupid, just scatterbrained, far more interested in her own happiness than anything else going on around her. They had been the best of friends up until Sarah got into the Grammar School and Cyn didn't, and they had gradually drifted into different worlds in the six years since. Sarah occasionally saw her about town, usually from a distance, and she sometimes wondered if their paths would have continued along similar lines if she hadn't done so well on her eleven plus. Seeing the stain on Cynthia's blouse, the clumsily re-applied lipstick and the cigarette burn on her far too short skirt, she gave silent thanks that she had done so well.
Cynthia waved a hand in front of her face.
"You're off again!"
"Sorry. I'm just really tired. I was up half the night listening to the new Beatles LP."
"Now there's a bloke I could go for, that John Lemon. I know a girl who worked in the Cavern for a while and she says she went into the dressing room by mistake one night while he was in there. The sort of mistake any woman would make if she had the chance, right? Apparently, he's got the biggest John Thomas you've ever seen!"
Sarah turned crimson at the thought of her greatest idol in the altogether. She wasn't the sort of girl Cyn had turned out to be, but it wasn't exactly the first time she had pictured it.
"Oh my God! What did she do?"
Cynthia leered.
"She didn't do anything, but he turned round to her and said, have yer come to change the barrel, or d'yer just want a look at the pump?"
The two girls erupted into gales of laughter, and for a moment or two, they were almost best friends again. Then Cynthia straightened up and smoothed out her blouse, ran her fingers through her peroxide-brittle hair and sighed, looking up at the cenotaph standing stark against the darkening sky.
"It's a shame, what happened. People just change. They leave, move away, start new lives, you know?"
Sarah nodded soberly, thinking of how true that was, how one test result had dictated the course of their lives. She naturally assumed that Cyn was talking about them.
"That doesn't have to be the end of things though, does it?" she asked.
"No, but you wind up on different sides of the world, it gets harder and harder to get in touch, to apologise. You live your life, seeing where it's all going wrong, seeing what your old friends are up to, and you can't get it back on track. You can't get back to where you used to be. And then one day, on your own doorstep, it ends. No more second chances."
She smiled ruefully, took a final drag on her cigarette, then held it up to watch the line of orange burn down to the filter.
"I know what people think of me. What you think of me."
Sarah started to protest, but Cynthia shushed her with a wave of her hand and carried on.
"Don't pretend that you don't; I know you too well for that. You pity me, and you wonder how I could have wound up like this. You wonder what it would take to put you in my place, and it scares you that it might be so easy. But it's not so bad, being me. All the choices you make for the best possible reasons, all the decisions that are forced on you by other people... You just have to try and live with them the best you can. This world wants to grind us all down, force us all into little boxes with our names on - Mother, Father, Soldier, Slag. But names aren't who we are or what we are. I'm not proud of some of the things I've done or some of the men I've been with, but it's alright. Whatever gets you through the night. Remember that Sarah. You might think you understand it now, but give it a few years and it will start to make a whole new kind of sense."
She flicked the fag butt into the gutter, then stood up and pulled the hem of her skirt down to somewhere approaching modesty. She placed a hand on Sarah's shoulder and squeezed it gently. "Take care love. I'll see you later."
Then she turned away and tottered off across the road on her wobbly heels, weaving slightly as she made her way through the saloon doors of The Feathers, off to look for someone to buy her a nightcap. Sara sat in stunned silence, watching her go, then just staring at the empty street until Bill finally turned up. He was an hour late, full of beer and apologies, but for once, Sarah couldn't bring herself to blame him. For now, it was enough that he was there.
Notes
But this was a dreary Tuesday night, and her father would be sitting up at the kitchen table like always, listening to the World Service news and rolling his cigarettes one after another, lining them up like little soldiers, a regiment to be consigned to the flames at five minute intervals. So she sat out by the cenotaph, smoking her own shop-bought fags and waiting for Bill.
What made it worse was the fact that she didn't even know where he was taking her; If she had, she could have gone there and waited for him. She checked her watch and mentally crossed off another activity from the list of possibilities. Half past seven - Too late for the main feature at The Imperial. That left the danceclub or the coffee bar at the church hall. The excitement was positively underwhelming. Not for the first time, she wondered if she really belonged with Bill. They had been together for so long now that it just seemed like a habit instead of a relationship. She knew that the films weren't real; She was no Doris Day, and Bill wouldn't pass for Rock Hudson even at a distance in the dead of night, but shouldn't there be more than this? Wasn't there a world where people lived real lives, full of excitement and passion, aspiring to something more than a job at the plant? Sometimes, she could almost feel it, reaching out to her, drawing her to the gateway. Every Saturday, when she got paid and the plant let out at lunchtime, she would head straight to Woollies and then rush home with three or four fragile plastic discs under her coat, hidden away from her father who would want to double her keep if he found out how much of her wages went on records. Smuggling the precious 45s and long players up to her room, she would pull the tiny record player out from beneath her bed, feeling the static tingle in her fingers as she opened the lurid red leatherette case. It was the greatest sadness of her life that she had to wait a whole six days before she could move the volume dial up beyond two, but even so, she would drop the needle into the groove and roll onto her back, lying with her head next to the speaker, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling as she strained to listen to the latest tune. Sometimes, if it was an LP, she would gaze at the cover and imagine the faces smiling at her, singing the songs just for her. She read the song titles over and over, reciting them like magic words; Help, The Night Before, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away... They were more than songs, more than words; They were a key to another place.
"Penny for 'em?"
Sarah jumped, startled out of her thoughts by the voice behind her. She craned her neck to see who it was and groaned inwardly when she recognised the intruder.
"Hello Cynthia."
Cynthia Wilson smiled and tottered around to join her on the bench, dropping heavily beside her and letting out a belch and a drunken giggle.
"Whoops a daisie. Y'alright duck? You were well away then. Your fag's burnt down to the cork. Got another?"
Sarah looked at the filter which she still held, forgotten, then tossed it into the gutter and took out a new pack. Cynthia watched with great interest as she lit one, then beamed at her as she passed the pack across.
"Ta love. So what were you thinking about then? Must have been good - I shouted you from across the road and you didn't budge."
"I'm not sure. Just daydreaming about music."
She shrugged, then held out a hand for her cigarettes, which Cynthia was about to slip into her handbag. Cyn smiled and handed them over with a sheepish grin..
"Sorry, forget my head next. You really like that stuff don't you? I don't know how you tell them apart. That Freddy and the Peacemakers fella looks just like Buddy Holly to me."
Sarah winced at the mistake, but she knew there was no point correcting her; Cyn had always been the same, ever since they had been in infants school together. She wasn't stupid, just scatterbrained, far more interested in her own happiness than anything else going on around her. They had been the best of friends up until Sarah got into the Grammar School and Cyn didn't, and they had gradually drifted into different worlds in the six years since. Sarah occasionally saw her about town, usually from a distance, and she sometimes wondered if their paths would have continued along similar lines if she hadn't done so well on her eleven plus. Seeing the stain on Cynthia's blouse, the clumsily re-applied lipstick and the cigarette burn on her far too short skirt, she gave silent thanks that she had done so well.
Cynthia waved a hand in front of her face.
"You're off again!"
"Sorry. I'm just really tired. I was up half the night listening to the new Beatles LP."
"Now there's a bloke I could go for, that John Lemon. I know a girl who worked in the Cavern for a while and she says she went into the dressing room by mistake one night while he was in there. The sort of mistake any woman would make if she had the chance, right? Apparently, he's got the biggest John Thomas you've ever seen!"
Sarah turned crimson at the thought of her greatest idol in the altogether. She wasn't the sort of girl Cyn had turned out to be, but it wasn't exactly the first time she had pictured it.
"Oh my God! What did she do?"
Cynthia leered.
"She didn't do anything, but he turned round to her and said, have yer come to change the barrel, or d'yer just want a look at the pump?"
The two girls erupted into gales of laughter, and for a moment or two, they were almost best friends again. Then Cynthia straightened up and smoothed out her blouse, ran her fingers through her peroxide-brittle hair and sighed, looking up at the cenotaph standing stark against the darkening sky.
"It's a shame, what happened. People just change. They leave, move away, start new lives, you know?"
Sarah nodded soberly, thinking of how true that was, how one test result had dictated the course of their lives. She naturally assumed that Cyn was talking about them.
"That doesn't have to be the end of things though, does it?" she asked.
"No, but you wind up on different sides of the world, it gets harder and harder to get in touch, to apologise. You live your life, seeing where it's all going wrong, seeing what your old friends are up to, and you can't get it back on track. You can't get back to where you used to be. And then one day, on your own doorstep, it ends. No more second chances."
She smiled ruefully, took a final drag on her cigarette, then held it up to watch the line of orange burn down to the filter.
"I know what people think of me. What you think of me."
Sarah started to protest, but Cynthia shushed her with a wave of her hand and carried on.
"Don't pretend that you don't; I know you too well for that. You pity me, and you wonder how I could have wound up like this. You wonder what it would take to put you in my place, and it scares you that it might be so easy. But it's not so bad, being me. All the choices you make for the best possible reasons, all the decisions that are forced on you by other people... You just have to try and live with them the best you can. This world wants to grind us all down, force us all into little boxes with our names on - Mother, Father, Soldier, Slag. But names aren't who we are or what we are. I'm not proud of some of the things I've done or some of the men I've been with, but it's alright. Whatever gets you through the night. Remember that Sarah. You might think you understand it now, but give it a few years and it will start to make a whole new kind of sense."
She flicked the fag butt into the gutter, then stood up and pulled the hem of her skirt down to somewhere approaching modesty. She placed a hand on Sarah's shoulder and squeezed it gently. "Take care love. I'll see you later."
Then she turned away and tottered off across the road on her wobbly heels, weaving slightly as she made her way through the saloon doors of The Feathers, off to look for someone to buy her a nightcap. Sara sat in stunned silence, watching her go, then just staring at the empty street until Bill finally turned up. He was an hour late, full of beer and apologies, but for once, Sarah couldn't bring herself to blame him. For now, it was enough that he was there.
Notes
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Little Boy Blue
The small boy stood at the water's edge, wrinkling his bare toes, making soft impressions in the warm sand, waiting. His hair a halo of golden curls, his face free from guile or care, he was an innocent at play for the last time. As the tide rolled in to meet him, he dared himself to stand there until the very last instant, then turned, shrieking and laughing, running ahead of the wave. Later, further up the beach, his thoughts turned to construction. Podgy fingers scraping a moat around the central hub of his sandcastle, pouring a half-bucket of seawater into the shallow dip, watching it soak into the sand and dry away to nothing. Somewhere high overhead, gulls wheeled and cried. Mum lay on a towel nearby, reading her book of Ern Malley, looking over occasionally to check that he was still there, but really not all that often; There had been stories on the news, children buried on the moors of England, but they were half a world away, at the least. So she read her poems until the afternoon sun began to sing soft lullabies and the book lay forgotten in her hand, the words unread, sleeping beside her.
Beyond concern, safe in the knowledge that she was always there, Blue played on, barely looking up from his endeavours as the afternoon wore on. He built a fort, a castle, a palace. He crafted spires and arches, roads and bridges, a city of sand and seashells, a temporary testament to the potential that existed within him. Freed from the tethering gaze of the real world, from the restrictive observation of his mother, he built into four dimensions, into time, creating an edifice which would always stand, had always stood, yet somehow never will. As he mapped out the swirling maze of backstreets and studded the tenement walls with shiny sea-smoothed pebbles, he populated the secret world with tiny people, each with a name and a thought and a dream to cling to. Releasing them from his control, he laughed excitedly as they set off upon their miniature lives.
"That's a fine thing you've built there Blue."
The boy looked up, startled. Above him stood a tall, thin man with a bald head that steamed slightly in the heat. He wore black jeans, a thin black tee-shirt and, despite the sun, a black leather jacket. The man had come from nowhere, without warning; How much had he seen? Smiling, he hunkered down beside the suspicious child and held out a friendly hand.
"Morgan T. Norris, Psycho Killer, at your service."
Blue shuffled away from this strange intruder, placing the teeming sand metropolis between them. The man made a sad face, an exaggerated cartoon of rejection and pain, then shrugged and sat down, cross-legged, the way Blue and the other children did at story time.
"Don't be frightened Blue, I'm not here to hurt you; I'm here to tell you about the world."
Blue remained wary, glancing over to check that his mother was still within earshot. There was something wrong about the man, but at the same time, he felt an overwhelming need to hear what he had to say. Still frowning slightly, he maneuvered himself into the same position on the other side of the city, looking up at the man all the while.
Norris grinned and clapped his hands.
"Well done! So you're a brave boy as well as clever. What else can you do Blue?"
Blue shrugged, secretly pleased at the compliments but still not willing to give too much away.
"Nothing? Not a single solitary sausage? Hmm..."
The man cocked his head to one side, dissecting the child with his strange gaze. Looking back at him, Blue noticed that the man's eyes were flecked with darkness, black dots in the off-white orbs, like crows against the winter skies. He shivered, feeling himself drawn ever closer as Norris smiled, his irises rotating slowly, pupils turning to horizontal slits.
"Aha, I see what the trouble is."
Blue felt a wave of nausea suddenly rise in his stomach as the world seemed to lurch onto its side. Leaning forwards, he vomited into the outer suburbs of his silicate citadel, but all he produced was a thick mass of clear jelly. Sitting up, groaning, Blue found that the man had moved around to sit beside him, a hand resting on his shoulder. The man's touch was cold and smooth, with a slight static tingle.
"Not feeling so good there are you? Let's see what we can do about that then."
Still smiling, he gripped Blue's shoulder tighter and tighter, grinding the young bones together, shivering slightly as he pushed the boy onto his back on the sand. Blue tried to open his mouth, to scream, but something had come unstuck between his mind and his mouth; He managed a pathetic mewling, then vomited another thin trickle of the strange gel. It rolled back across his face, filling his nostrils, suffocating him. Still pushing him to the ground, Norris used his free hand to wipe the muck away.
"That's a good boy. Get it all out. That's it. That's it."
Another spasm in his guts, another geyser of clear emesis, the strongest yet. His stomach was cramping, tightening like a rubber band, but as he reflexively brought his knees up, Norris grabbed his ankles and pulled his legs straight out again, holding him flat on his back.
"Don't fight it. Relax. Let it go."
Looking up at him through a haze of tears, Blue saw the man as the sun, a radiant shape in a clear blue sky, beaming down upon him. He wanted to know why this was happening, why the man had chosen him, what he was going to do to him next, but all he could do was lie there, shaking and puking and whimpering , until the retching and heaving finally subsided.
"All done now?"
With a start, Blue realised that he was free to sit up, had been for some time, but he somehow hadn't registered it. His attacker was a few feet away, waiting patiently for an answer, and the inexplicable vomit had long dried into the sand. All that remained to prove that it had happened was an ache in his stomach and a flaking crust which had dried on his face and chest. He sat up and looked around uncertainly, wondering exactly how much time had passed. His mum still lay on her towel, asleep in the sun, and the same familiar figures could be seen playing in the surf further down the beach. Seeing them, Blue's heart leapt, and he felt the urge to run to them, to wake his mum and hold her tightly.
"You don't want to do that though Blue. Not really. Because I would have to come over and introduce myself to her as well, wouldn't I?"
Norris grinned at him, pulling aside his jacket to reveal a long bladed knife which hung upside down in a webbing holster beneath his left arm. Blue slowly shook his head. For all the man's strangeness, for all the vomiting and heaving, he was no longer scared.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Well now, that's the question isn't it? Who do you think I am?"
Blue concentrated hard on the question, frowning. Various thoughts flashed through his mind - God, the Devil and James Bond amongst them - but in the end, he went for a much more down to Earth option.
"Are you my dad?"
Norris threw back his head and laughed.
"That bastard? Gods no! Heh."
He scrambled to his feet, brushed sand from his jeans and held a hand out to the small boy.
"Fancy a paddle?"
Blue looked up at him, then shrugged and took his hand.
"Will you tell me who you are?"
Norris grinned down at him.
"No."
At the water's edge, the man stood waiting, rocking lightly on his heels, making soft impressions in the warm sand. The small boy stood beside him, waiting expectantly.
"Do you ever feel like you've done everything there is to do at least twice?" Norris asked.
Blue shook his head and the man shrugged.
"No, course not. What are you, five? You haven't even done most things once yet."
He looked out to the horizon, where the darker blue of the Southern Ocean met the paler blue of the sky. Two vast expanses of seeming emptiness, without which the whole world would keel over and quit. The line separating them seemed so arbitrary, unreal. The sea could flow on into the heavens, and the sky could roll on down to cover them all like a blanket. One day...
"One day," he announced, "you'll know what all this was really about."
Blue said nothing, merely watching as the man withdrew his long knife, the blade shimmering in the sun. Leaning forward, he used the tip to trace a line in the sand at his feet, drawing a circle just below the high water mark.
"In the next couple of months, people will begin to disappear. Old men wandering home, children playing out in the sun - Three of them will go from this very beach. And no-one will notice, really. No-one's looking at the big picture. They'll make a lot of noise about each individual case, but no-one will dare put them all together. That number of disappearances couldn't be put down to one or two crazies. There would have to be an organisation, a global network of kidnappers, to vanish that many people."
He paused to light a cigarette, warming to his topic, becoming more animated as he spoke.
"Of course, you don't half make it easy for them. There are so many places where abduction and torture are part of the culture that you could take half a city before anyone questioned it. A couple more years, you'll get a man on the moon and every stoner in the free world will be looking to the skies and singing Good Morning Starshine, actually inviting them to come and make contact with you! You're all looking in the wrong places anyway, but still, what a way to bring on the end of the world..."
He grinned down at Blue, drawing back the veil of normality for an instant, allowing a fraction of his true face to peak through once more. But Blue's nausea had long passed and he simply looked back at him, until the man who called himself Norris felt compelled to look away.
"You can feel it." he said. "You know why I'm here. Places have power. The spot on the beach where the missing children were last seen playing; The point where the tyre tracks mount the pavement; The flower bed outside the convent, where the secret plantings will never blossom."
He looked down at the line in the sand, then stepped across it, into the circle. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and distant, a whisper across the void.
"These are places of darkness and strength, full of violence and shame, anger and lust, pain and terror. These are the scars torn into the Earth by the ragged blade of humanity, where the surface is peeled away to expose the chaos at the heart of it all."
Out in the bay, a dark shape moved beneath the waters, something vast and ancient turning in its slumbers, tossing up larger waves and disturbing the other denizens of the deep, sending them racing for the beach in the rising swell. Norris raised his hands to welcome them to the land.
"These are the places where your world rubs against theirs, where space gets thin and worn away. This is where you fall through."
The wave washed past them, thick with writhing, splashing life, struggling to escape from the thing in the bay. Blue felt their fear, their drive towards life, transmitted through contact with his skin. Plunging his hands into the water, fingers outstretched, he stroked and touched all the darting fish and sightless worms he could, communing with the turtles and shellfish. He could feel them in his mind, and he knew then that they felt him too, reaching out to meet his thoughts with their own, straining for this most basic of contact.
The water was barely up to his knees, but the roiling mass of life piled against his legs, building up to his waist, his chest, threatening to topple him. So many lives. So many creatures. All the small things of the Earth, swarming around him, eager for his touch and the safety it seemed to provide. Blue struggled to remain upright, leaning into the wave of shell and flesh as it battered against him, but he could feel his legs weakening. Then he felt Norris' strong, cool grip on his shoulder once more, and the solid, steady touch calmed him for a moment. Here was a contact which didn't threaten to overwhelm him, a life form with no claim upon him; A creature with no urge to exist. Realising this, Blue looked up at the man, only to find him looking back down at him, face frozen in a rictus grin like a freshly bleached skull.
"That's right little monk. I bring you greetings from the tomb world. See?"
The wave was receding, taking the swarming mass of life with it, returning the swimming, crawling, drifting beings to the depths. Looking down, Blue noticed a great red welt across his stomach, the mark of a jellyfish which had clung to him for comfort and burnt his skin with its desperately grasping tentacles. It was the worst pain he had ever experienced, and the mark would remain until beyond his dying day, but for the time being, there were more important things to attend to.
The circle Norris had drawn in the sand was no longer visible, but its shape was clearly marked in the ring of dead fish which surrounded his feet. Piled up to his shins were crabs and turtles, jellyfish and a baby shark, strangely coloured squid and shapeless lumps of muscle and bone. Peering closer, Blue saw that their flesh was already rotting, revealing needle thin bones and rusted clockwork gears within. The brittle carapace of a lobster cracked under its own weight to disgorge a matt of twisted ribbon wiring. The baby shark flicked its tail listlessly and vomited up a clotted lump of broken radio tubes and motor oil.
Falling to his knees, plunging his hands into the animatronic charnel pit, Blue struggled to find a single biological impulse, but the ersatz beasts were dead. Worse, they had never been alive, and it had taken the true presence of death on their beach to reveal them to him.
"What are they?" he demanded.
Norris shrugged.
"Who knows? You go to their worlds, maybe something comes back here. Maybe they're the outriders for an army, scouting for prime landing sites. I honestly don't know."
"Then why are you here? What was the point?"
Norris lit another cigarette, watching the horizon, smiling sadly.
"It's not always easy," he sighed. "It should be, if you've done it as many times as I have, but there are times when it just doesn't seem right. So maybe I try to give something back for a change. Maybe I don't just take, take, take."
He crouched down in the circle of decay, his cold, lifeless hands on Blue's shoulders.
"When you were sick, that was them. You were full of their filth, and I got it out of you. I woke you up, for the first time in your life. You won't remember it, once I go, but things will be different for you now. My gift to you. My apology."
He straightened up, stepped out of the circle and shook flakes of rust and fish scales from his jeans.
"Right, time for me to go."
With that he turned and walked away, up the beach, towards the ruined jetty. After a moment, he could no longer be distinguished from the jutting support struts and charred crossbars. A moment after that and Blue didn't even remember the man had ever been there. He was just a small boy, on his knees on the beach in the late afternoon. There was a black slimy circle in the sand, a sticky, putrid mess which caked his forearms, and his chest was enveloped in a dull, throbbing pain. He stood up uncertainly, tears forming in his eyes as the raw, coruscating pain began to block out all other sensations.
Sobbing, he ran wildly back down the beach, towards the spot where his mum had settled down for the afternoon. As he drew near, some silent, deeper part of his brain registered the fact that mothers don't just lie there when their children are in pain. Mothers don't sleep through screams of agony. Mothers leap up from their shallow slumbers, to sweep their child up in their arms, to kiss the pain away and soothe the fever dreams. Mothers are always there.
Faltering, understanding, the pain in his chest forgotten, subsumed by the greater agony of loss, Blue came to a stop at the edge of the towel. Looking down at the still, sad form of his mum, his halo of curls casting a dark shadow across her face, he knew why Norris had been on the beach that day, why he had felt the need to apologise.
Kneeling silently, one small hand resting on her shoulder, little boy Blue lowered his head and gently kissed his mum's brow, then slipped the book from her hand and closed it, the words unread, the poems unfinished.
Notes
Beyond concern, safe in the knowledge that she was always there, Blue played on, barely looking up from his endeavours as the afternoon wore on. He built a fort, a castle, a palace. He crafted spires and arches, roads and bridges, a city of sand and seashells, a temporary testament to the potential that existed within him. Freed from the tethering gaze of the real world, from the restrictive observation of his mother, he built into four dimensions, into time, creating an edifice which would always stand, had always stood, yet somehow never will. As he mapped out the swirling maze of backstreets and studded the tenement walls with shiny sea-smoothed pebbles, he populated the secret world with tiny people, each with a name and a thought and a dream to cling to. Releasing them from his control, he laughed excitedly as they set off upon their miniature lives.
"That's a fine thing you've built there Blue."
The boy looked up, startled. Above him stood a tall, thin man with a bald head that steamed slightly in the heat. He wore black jeans, a thin black tee-shirt and, despite the sun, a black leather jacket. The man had come from nowhere, without warning; How much had he seen? Smiling, he hunkered down beside the suspicious child and held out a friendly hand.
"Morgan T. Norris, Psycho Killer, at your service."
Blue shuffled away from this strange intruder, placing the teeming sand metropolis between them. The man made a sad face, an exaggerated cartoon of rejection and pain, then shrugged and sat down, cross-legged, the way Blue and the other children did at story time.
"Don't be frightened Blue, I'm not here to hurt you; I'm here to tell you about the world."
Blue remained wary, glancing over to check that his mother was still within earshot. There was something wrong about the man, but at the same time, he felt an overwhelming need to hear what he had to say. Still frowning slightly, he maneuvered himself into the same position on the other side of the city, looking up at the man all the while.
Norris grinned and clapped his hands.
"Well done! So you're a brave boy as well as clever. What else can you do Blue?"
Blue shrugged, secretly pleased at the compliments but still not willing to give too much away.
"Nothing? Not a single solitary sausage? Hmm..."
The man cocked his head to one side, dissecting the child with his strange gaze. Looking back at him, Blue noticed that the man's eyes were flecked with darkness, black dots in the off-white orbs, like crows against the winter skies. He shivered, feeling himself drawn ever closer as Norris smiled, his irises rotating slowly, pupils turning to horizontal slits.
"Aha, I see what the trouble is."
Blue felt a wave of nausea suddenly rise in his stomach as the world seemed to lurch onto its side. Leaning forwards, he vomited into the outer suburbs of his silicate citadel, but all he produced was a thick mass of clear jelly. Sitting up, groaning, Blue found that the man had moved around to sit beside him, a hand resting on his shoulder. The man's touch was cold and smooth, with a slight static tingle.
"Not feeling so good there are you? Let's see what we can do about that then."
Still smiling, he gripped Blue's shoulder tighter and tighter, grinding the young bones together, shivering slightly as he pushed the boy onto his back on the sand. Blue tried to open his mouth, to scream, but something had come unstuck between his mind and his mouth; He managed a pathetic mewling, then vomited another thin trickle of the strange gel. It rolled back across his face, filling his nostrils, suffocating him. Still pushing him to the ground, Norris used his free hand to wipe the muck away.
"That's a good boy. Get it all out. That's it. That's it."
Another spasm in his guts, another geyser of clear emesis, the strongest yet. His stomach was cramping, tightening like a rubber band, but as he reflexively brought his knees up, Norris grabbed his ankles and pulled his legs straight out again, holding him flat on his back.
"Don't fight it. Relax. Let it go."
Looking up at him through a haze of tears, Blue saw the man as the sun, a radiant shape in a clear blue sky, beaming down upon him. He wanted to know why this was happening, why the man had chosen him, what he was going to do to him next, but all he could do was lie there, shaking and puking and whimpering , until the retching and heaving finally subsided.
"All done now?"
With a start, Blue realised that he was free to sit up, had been for some time, but he somehow hadn't registered it. His attacker was a few feet away, waiting patiently for an answer, and the inexplicable vomit had long dried into the sand. All that remained to prove that it had happened was an ache in his stomach and a flaking crust which had dried on his face and chest. He sat up and looked around uncertainly, wondering exactly how much time had passed. His mum still lay on her towel, asleep in the sun, and the same familiar figures could be seen playing in the surf further down the beach. Seeing them, Blue's heart leapt, and he felt the urge to run to them, to wake his mum and hold her tightly.
"You don't want to do that though Blue. Not really. Because I would have to come over and introduce myself to her as well, wouldn't I?"
Norris grinned at him, pulling aside his jacket to reveal a long bladed knife which hung upside down in a webbing holster beneath his left arm. Blue slowly shook his head. For all the man's strangeness, for all the vomiting and heaving, he was no longer scared.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Well now, that's the question isn't it? Who do you think I am?"
Blue concentrated hard on the question, frowning. Various thoughts flashed through his mind - God, the Devil and James Bond amongst them - but in the end, he went for a much more down to Earth option.
"Are you my dad?"
Norris threw back his head and laughed.
"That bastard? Gods no! Heh."
He scrambled to his feet, brushed sand from his jeans and held a hand out to the small boy.
"Fancy a paddle?"
Blue looked up at him, then shrugged and took his hand.
"Will you tell me who you are?"
Norris grinned down at him.
"No."
At the water's edge, the man stood waiting, rocking lightly on his heels, making soft impressions in the warm sand. The small boy stood beside him, waiting expectantly.
"Do you ever feel like you've done everything there is to do at least twice?" Norris asked.
Blue shook his head and the man shrugged.
"No, course not. What are you, five? You haven't even done most things once yet."
He looked out to the horizon, where the darker blue of the Southern Ocean met the paler blue of the sky. Two vast expanses of seeming emptiness, without which the whole world would keel over and quit. The line separating them seemed so arbitrary, unreal. The sea could flow on into the heavens, and the sky could roll on down to cover them all like a blanket. One day...
"One day," he announced, "you'll know what all this was really about."
Blue said nothing, merely watching as the man withdrew his long knife, the blade shimmering in the sun. Leaning forward, he used the tip to trace a line in the sand at his feet, drawing a circle just below the high water mark.
"In the next couple of months, people will begin to disappear. Old men wandering home, children playing out in the sun - Three of them will go from this very beach. And no-one will notice, really. No-one's looking at the big picture. They'll make a lot of noise about each individual case, but no-one will dare put them all together. That number of disappearances couldn't be put down to one or two crazies. There would have to be an organisation, a global network of kidnappers, to vanish that many people."
He paused to light a cigarette, warming to his topic, becoming more animated as he spoke.
"Of course, you don't half make it easy for them. There are so many places where abduction and torture are part of the culture that you could take half a city before anyone questioned it. A couple more years, you'll get a man on the moon and every stoner in the free world will be looking to the skies and singing Good Morning Starshine, actually inviting them to come and make contact with you! You're all looking in the wrong places anyway, but still, what a way to bring on the end of the world..."
He grinned down at Blue, drawing back the veil of normality for an instant, allowing a fraction of his true face to peak through once more. But Blue's nausea had long passed and he simply looked back at him, until the man who called himself Norris felt compelled to look away.
"You can feel it." he said. "You know why I'm here. Places have power. The spot on the beach where the missing children were last seen playing; The point where the tyre tracks mount the pavement; The flower bed outside the convent, where the secret plantings will never blossom."
He looked down at the line in the sand, then stepped across it, into the circle. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and distant, a whisper across the void.
"These are places of darkness and strength, full of violence and shame, anger and lust, pain and terror. These are the scars torn into the Earth by the ragged blade of humanity, where the surface is peeled away to expose the chaos at the heart of it all."
Out in the bay, a dark shape moved beneath the waters, something vast and ancient turning in its slumbers, tossing up larger waves and disturbing the other denizens of the deep, sending them racing for the beach in the rising swell. Norris raised his hands to welcome them to the land.
"These are the places where your world rubs against theirs, where space gets thin and worn away. This is where you fall through."
The wave washed past them, thick with writhing, splashing life, struggling to escape from the thing in the bay. Blue felt their fear, their drive towards life, transmitted through contact with his skin. Plunging his hands into the water, fingers outstretched, he stroked and touched all the darting fish and sightless worms he could, communing with the turtles and shellfish. He could feel them in his mind, and he knew then that they felt him too, reaching out to meet his thoughts with their own, straining for this most basic of contact.
The water was barely up to his knees, but the roiling mass of life piled against his legs, building up to his waist, his chest, threatening to topple him. So many lives. So many creatures. All the small things of the Earth, swarming around him, eager for his touch and the safety it seemed to provide. Blue struggled to remain upright, leaning into the wave of shell and flesh as it battered against him, but he could feel his legs weakening. Then he felt Norris' strong, cool grip on his shoulder once more, and the solid, steady touch calmed him for a moment. Here was a contact which didn't threaten to overwhelm him, a life form with no claim upon him; A creature with no urge to exist. Realising this, Blue looked up at the man, only to find him looking back down at him, face frozen in a rictus grin like a freshly bleached skull.
"That's right little monk. I bring you greetings from the tomb world. See?"
The wave was receding, taking the swarming mass of life with it, returning the swimming, crawling, drifting beings to the depths. Looking down, Blue noticed a great red welt across his stomach, the mark of a jellyfish which had clung to him for comfort and burnt his skin with its desperately grasping tentacles. It was the worst pain he had ever experienced, and the mark would remain until beyond his dying day, but for the time being, there were more important things to attend to.
The circle Norris had drawn in the sand was no longer visible, but its shape was clearly marked in the ring of dead fish which surrounded his feet. Piled up to his shins were crabs and turtles, jellyfish and a baby shark, strangely coloured squid and shapeless lumps of muscle and bone. Peering closer, Blue saw that their flesh was already rotting, revealing needle thin bones and rusted clockwork gears within. The brittle carapace of a lobster cracked under its own weight to disgorge a matt of twisted ribbon wiring. The baby shark flicked its tail listlessly and vomited up a clotted lump of broken radio tubes and motor oil.
Falling to his knees, plunging his hands into the animatronic charnel pit, Blue struggled to find a single biological impulse, but the ersatz beasts were dead. Worse, they had never been alive, and it had taken the true presence of death on their beach to reveal them to him.
"What are they?" he demanded.
Norris shrugged.
"Who knows? You go to their worlds, maybe something comes back here. Maybe they're the outriders for an army, scouting for prime landing sites. I honestly don't know."
"Then why are you here? What was the point?"
Norris lit another cigarette, watching the horizon, smiling sadly.
"It's not always easy," he sighed. "It should be, if you've done it as many times as I have, but there are times when it just doesn't seem right. So maybe I try to give something back for a change. Maybe I don't just take, take, take."
He crouched down in the circle of decay, his cold, lifeless hands on Blue's shoulders.
"When you were sick, that was them. You were full of their filth, and I got it out of you. I woke you up, for the first time in your life. You won't remember it, once I go, but things will be different for you now. My gift to you. My apology."
He straightened up, stepped out of the circle and shook flakes of rust and fish scales from his jeans.
"Right, time for me to go."
With that he turned and walked away, up the beach, towards the ruined jetty. After a moment, he could no longer be distinguished from the jutting support struts and charred crossbars. A moment after that and Blue didn't even remember the man had ever been there. He was just a small boy, on his knees on the beach in the late afternoon. There was a black slimy circle in the sand, a sticky, putrid mess which caked his forearms, and his chest was enveloped in a dull, throbbing pain. He stood up uncertainly, tears forming in his eyes as the raw, coruscating pain began to block out all other sensations.
Sobbing, he ran wildly back down the beach, towards the spot where his mum had settled down for the afternoon. As he drew near, some silent, deeper part of his brain registered the fact that mothers don't just lie there when their children are in pain. Mothers don't sleep through screams of agony. Mothers leap up from their shallow slumbers, to sweep their child up in their arms, to kiss the pain away and soothe the fever dreams. Mothers are always there.
Faltering, understanding, the pain in his chest forgotten, subsumed by the greater agony of loss, Blue came to a stop at the edge of the towel. Looking down at the still, sad form of his mum, his halo of curls casting a dark shadow across her face, he knew why Norris had been on the beach that day, why he had felt the need to apologise.
Kneeling silently, one small hand resting on her shoulder, little boy Blue lowered his head and gently kissed his mum's brow, then slipped the book from her hand and closed it, the words unread, the poems unfinished.
Notes
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