by Wayne Hill
“Dad, how did you...?” She turns to see Tommy there.
“How the hell did you get int—” Marie-Ann stops talking. She stares at Tommy’s glowing right arm and up into his smiling, tear-soaked face.
“What, in God’s name, is that Tommy?”
“Come, Marie-Ann. You say that you’ve never done anything, seen anything, been anywhere. Well, then, let’s go. Grab a fucking bottle, stop your fucking balling and come on!” Tommy climbs up onto her windowsill.
“You don’t really believe that this life is the end of your adventure, do you? Death isn’t the end. It’s weirder than that. Life is never what you expect,” says Tommy stepping from the third story window and disappearing.
Marie-Ann rolls off her bed and rushes to the window. She hops up onto the window ledge herself, the winds of the storm blowing her long, black ballgown-like dress tight against her body. “Tommy! No!” She looks down expecting to see her love in a broken heap on the ground below but, when she hears his voice, it is not from below her — it is from above.
“Oh my God, Tommy! Come down! What the fuck’s going on!”
“I haven’t done this for a while,” Tommy says, plummeting into Marie-Ann’s vision and bouncing to a stop, in mid-air, just to her left.
“My God, Tommy! What the hell are you?” asks Marie-Ann, the rain plastering her red hair into dark flames against her white face. Tommy thinks that she has never looked more beautiful. His modified arm is now shaped like a large blunderbuss. It is pointing down, towards the ground, and has two step-like pegs protruding from it. Tommy is standing on one and gesturing for Marie-Ann to stand on the other.
“Come on. What are you waiting for? Let’s go and see some stuff.”
“This is —” Marie-Ann shakes her head in disbelief, and Tommy starts to feel that sinking feeling again. “— Crazy!” she laughs, her smile arriving like the sun from behind a cloud, and steps onto the peg, hugging Tommy tightly. “It seems a bit dangerous,” she chuckles as Tommy wheels them around in a slow spin. “Is it safe? Tommy? Is it safe?”
“No,” Tommy laughs. They fly high in a swift surge and then slowly, but smoothly, descend. “This is the first time I’ve made the blunderbuss blaster this powerful, but I’m getting the hang of it,” he explains. “I have a device attached to my arm that’s extremely powerful. Were it to rupture, it could cause a small black hole that would destroy this whole island. I doubt that would happen, though. Even if it does, who gives a shit, anyway? Fuck this place! Are you with me, or what? Want to explore this world, Marie-Ann?”
“This is crazy — I love it! Where are we going? What if I fall?”
Tommy thinks of gold cables hooking around her, like a safety harness, and they spring up around her, causing her to gasp in surprise.
“Let’s go explore,” Marie-Ann laughs, running a gloved hand through Tommy’s hair.
“As you wish, your highness,” Tommy says.
They blast upwards again, shooting through the rain and soaring into the clouds. Marie-Ann’s laughter turns into exclamations of joy as they break through the dark rain clouds and the sun lightly warms her face.
“Stop, Tommy. Stop!”
Tommy stops them. He thinks she is going to say something beautiful, something perfectly in the moment. I’ve got her, thinks Tommy. She’s going to say something beautiful and poetic, bless her heart.
“Oh Tommy —” Marie-Ann says, before turning her head aside and vomiting violently. “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping sick away with the back of a glove. “I’m so sick of drinking. This is so wonderful. I love that you’re a wizard.”
Tommy chuckles at the idea, and he cannot tell if she is joking or serious. She’s completely smashed! he thinks.
“I’m not a wizard, Marie-Ann. This is science.”
“Tell me it’s going to be alright, Tommy. How is this happening? How are you doing this? I knew you were special, Tommy. I wish we had met sooner. In some place better than this. Talk to me, Tommy. Say something to take my mind off this height — I didn’t think I was scared of heights! Tell me about your home. What was it like for you growing up?”
“Right. Okay. Er ... At the Facility, all the lights go off at the same time. Everyone’s expected to go to sleep at the same time. I didn’t want the lights to go off. I don’t like the dark. So, I learned how to build a battery, from bits and pieces, and then I made myself a torch.”
“How old were you?”
“About ... four?”
“Four! What did you do when you were five? Build a spaceship?”
“No. I ...um, well... I reprogrammed the lighting system of the facility so that when everyone’s light went off, mine stayed on. Not a spaceship, but it did the trick.”
“No spaceship, then.”
“No, no spaceship. I’ve never really tried. I suppose it’s like making anything. Getting the right materials and having the time to plan it out and then assemble it.”
“That’s rubbish! You should try harder, Tommy. You’re only letting yourself down, you know. This is great, an’ all, but it’s a wee bit draughty! You need to put a roof on this guy, or build a spaceship, or both ... I love you... You fucking wizard!” Marie-Ann says patting Tommy on the head like a dog. A drunken mauling, but affectionate, nonetheless.
They both stare at the top of the storm clouds, bolts of lightning occasionally illuminating the dark clouds roiling beneath them, their clothes drying in the sunshine.
“This is a sight reserved for God and all his mighty angels, the birds and you,” Tommy says with a smile, brushing a lock of hair from her eyes.
“Thank you, Tommy, for being so sweet.... And ...And fucking weird. You weird, weird, wizard man, you!” She pauses in a contemplative manner. “I wish I knew the things that you do, Tommy.”
“And what would you do with said Gnosis?”
“Have you not been listening?”
“Sooo ... the spaceship thing, right?”
“It would be the bestest craft this island has ever seen. All golden, perfect, and fast!”
“O’ yeah? How fast would you go?”
“I’d go so fast that it would tear a hole through space, and I’d be gone from here. Blasting out into the unknown.”
“Am I on this golden ship? I’d make a good co-pilot.”
“Hmm. No — but, I suppose, I could use a cleaner. This spaceship wouldn’t be like The Weeping Willow. Oh, no. This would be sleek, everything so perfect and clean. My God, I can actually see it, Tommy! Sleek and moulded white. I’ve got my own pilot seat and I’m zipping through the sky, popping through the clouds. I have the finest of gowns on —”
“Green ...?”
“Not this one. This is my battle dress. It’s got all sorts on it — it’s a complicated little number. It shines, metallic and mother of pearl. It has a glow to it. Everything glows on the ship. Even we glow on my ship.” Lost in thought, Marie Ann is beaming, but there is a tear in her eye.
“And what shall we call this craft, Captain Marie-Ann? It needs to have the finest name, no doubt...The Phoenix? ... Dragon’s Wing? ... The Golden Storm...The — ”
“The fucking SS Shit!” says Marie Ann staring hard at Tommy.
“SS Shit? Hmm, okay, you got it! SS Shit, it is! That was going to be my twenty-seventh suggestion, actually. It certainly has a ring to it!”
“I’m gonna die, Tommy” Marie says flatly, swigging from the small flask that she always kept in her bra, more tears leaking from her eyes.
“We are all headed the same place, my love. We’re just a long line of drunks all waiting to get served. You just barged to the front of the cue, punched the bar man in the face and poured your own!” Tommy says, holding her hand and caressing the back of it with his thumb.
“Haha, Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Marie-Ann smiles through the tears, taking another swig from her flask.
“Fucking right, you did! Nobody fucks with the Emerald of this isle!” Tommy says with a wink.
&n
bsp; “What do you think happens when we die, Tommy?”
“Listen, there’s really nothing to worry about. You, your mum, your dad, me — everyone we know — we’re all going to the same place. This is the journey of the ages. We are not these flesh sacks. We are not brains and eyeballs and lungs and fingernails and lips. We are ... like electricity. An undetectable essence — even though we actually can detect electricity. Sorry, bad analogy! This essence flows through all living things. It goes back to source when we die and gets all mixed up with other stuff. Maybe it gets fired back out someplace else? That’s the simplest way I can explain it. We are made from exploded stars, and it’s all fractal and mapped out right in front of us, like some joke.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s right in front of us?’” asks Marie-Ann.
“Well, look at my eyes. Look really close. What do you see?” Tommy leans over so she can stare directly into his eyes. She does ... and jumps in shock at what she sees, leaning back a bit.
“My God, Tommy, I can see it!”
“Everyone is looking out from their eyes and pondering where we are from,” Tommy says. “The answer is in the eye itself. The explosion that sent us out into the universe is imprinted on all our retinas — a snapshot of creation, of nothingness. We are eternal beings. All life forms are. We all contain the same energy, the same soul. Death cannot be the end. Death is no more the end than birth is the start.”
“So, will we be together, someplace else? Will we have different bodies and be different people?” asks Marie-Ann.
“I bloody well hope not!”
“Yeah,” Marie-Ann laughs, “we could be birds in the next life and just live great lives. We’d just fly around shitting on people we didn’t like!”
“Haha, yeah,” Tommy says. “I’m not up for any more of this world. Not as a human, anyway. I’ve spent my entire life lost in thought. I just want silence. That’s my heaven, Marie-Ann. Well, that and you, obviously. And — if I can’t be with you — then oblivion is just fine.”
“Same,” says Marie-Ann.
The two hold hands in the light, happy to have one another, and watch the black clouds boil beneath them. Happy to have nothing but love. Destroying fear with words, as, below, the storm awaits.
The day after their trip above the clouds, Marie-Ann visits Tommy. It is early in the morning when she arrives at his shack, and Tommy is still sleeping. Marie-Ann had not seen the shelter recently, despite Tommy’s requests, as when Tommy came to the pub to see her, she was still too drunk to bother with the half-mile walk. Drunks are lazy and Marie-Ann, like everyone else in the Lanes, is a drunk.
Marie-Ann enters Tommy’s house humming and carrying a wicker basket. Beautiful memories are attached to the basket, as it belonged to her grandmother. Pre-plague memories. Memories of better times. Her footsteps are lighter and more coordinated than they have been for many months: she is sober.
Awe fills Marie-Ann as she takes in her surroundings. It is a beautiful shelter, the finest she has ever seen. She is uncertain whether the beauty is down to Tommy’s elbow grease or her jarring sobriety.
Directly across from her is an oblong metal construct, which looks a little like a bath. The ‘bath’ has a metal lid and, on top of the sturdy cover, is an upturned barrel with wheels, presumably his means of getting water to the bath. She is particularly impressed he has considered hygiene. There are far too many smelly people around these parts, Marie-Ann thinks. She glances over to the snoring Tommy.
“You’ve been a busy wee bower bird,” she says to him, not modulating her volume, sure she cannot wake him from his booze-fuelled stupor. Besides, even the subconsciouses of passed-out drunks are listening for small, furtive sounds — it is a basic survival trait of all animals. She makes her way slowly about the shack, looking around. She is drawn to her old green rug, in the centre of the room. The rug was once hers, but Tommy had taken a shine to it. It is a worn green thing covered in Celtic knot-work patterns. Across from the bath, stands a brand-new wood-burning metal stove. No doubt Tommy has built it for himself. On the other side, hanging on the planked wall, is his beloved bodhran, gifted to him by old Bradach, before he died.
On a makeshift shelf, stand memory plates and her father’s old holographic projector. Marie-Ann knows it has been broken for years, but Tommy is a mechanical genius. She puts down her wicker basket and walks over to inspect the device. Tommy has fixed it. It looks like it has just come off the production line!
Brushing her hair from her face, she bites her bottom lip and smiles. She trembles a little, perhaps the DTs. Noticing a memory plate still in the device, she glances over to the half-naked Tommy, tangled in his patchwork cover and still snoring like a pneumatic drill.
With a shaking finger, Marie-Ann breaks the laser beam of the ‘on’ switch and, projected into the middle of her old rug, a memory inventory appears. The top memory was entitled A Dream in Green. The next, The Girl in the Green Dress. Under that, Emerald of the Island. Scrolling through twenty or so memories she mentally selects one that she wants to watch — Pretty Little Green and Red Meteor — thinking it sounded like Tommy when he was really drunk, so it might be funny.
Marie-Ann lights the stove and puts on some coffee before turning down the volume on the old projector and playing the memory. There — standing, three dimensionally, on her Celtic knotwork rug — was an image of herself, as seen through Tommy’s eyes. She was standing on one of The Weeping Willow’s tables and singing to the patrons, who were all silent and staring with wonder and drunken good cheer.
“What?” she says, mouth agape, quietly flattered and amused. Marie-Ann thinks she looks nothing like the girl in the image. The girl in the image — not her! — is too pretty, in a dishevelled kind of way, and her voice sounds far too good. The voice coming from the projection is ... amazing! Well, she thinks. It is a memory, after all, and everyone knows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty must also be in the ear of the beholder, too!
Over on the pallet, Tommy starts to stir, and she turns the hologram off just before he jerks awake. With one eye open and the other firmly gummed shut with sleep, the waking cyclops tries to focus.
“Wakey, wakey, Tommy boy! Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” says the voice of his true love as she pours out two cups of strong coffee.
“Marie-Ann! What the f —?”
“Now, now. Be nice, or you won’t get any goose-egg-omelette-with-chives. It’s what my grandma made us when —”
“Hang on, Hang on. Wait! ...You’re—You’re sober?”
“Well, aren’t you just the cutest thing, early in the morning,” she says shakily cracking eggs into a frying pan.
“That’s dangerous, Marie-Ann! I have some scotch, someplace. Just let me find it.” He leaps out of bed, feet still tangled in his fur duvet, causing him to briefly hop before diving headfirst at the floor. He puts out his hands, mid-fall, and ends up landing in a push-up position, the impact sending aches up his arms.
“Ooh, ouch!” giggles Marie-Ann.
Tommy looks up at her smirking face and goes into some face-saving push-ups before springing to his feet.
“I always do push-ups in the morning. It’s just routine. Lifestyle choice. Now where’s that bastard scotch? How about we make those coffees Irish?” Tommy says looking around, smiling and rubbing his sore arms.
“Tommy. Please. I can’t do what I came here to do drunk. So, please, for me ... calm down?” Tears are forming in the corners of her eyes. She smiles the sweetest of her sweet smiles before turning and reaching into a wicker pannier for some chives, continuing to make breakfast.
Tommy watches her moving around his hut and struggles for the right words. For any words. His mind is churning. He can build anything, he can harness otherworldly powers of invention, he can fight hordes of monsters that would tear a normal man apart, he can sail around this world blindfolded; but, when it comes to Marie-Ann, he finds himself bizarrely stupid, vulnerable, weak.
“I
just — I ...You ... mean a lot to me — and I don’t want you getting ill. That’s all.”
He notices her smile failing, and her blinking increasing as she fights hard to cage her emotions.
“Don’t be silly! Here! We can have a coffee together, just like real, normal people ... enjoying a coffee.” She passes him a silver tankard, keeping the wooden one for herself, and goes back to the stove.
Tommy shakes his head and sighs as he stares at the black liquid.
“Do you have a table? We need a table to eat my delicious breakfast off.”
“Table, table, table...” Tommy says as, half asleep, he formulates a plan.
He rolls up the rug and sets it gently on his bed — once again thanking Marie-Ann for such a treasured gift — and then drags the heavy-lidded metal bath into the centre of the room. Folding up his blanket, he makes a cushion which he places on the upturned metal barrel he uses for filling the bath. Setting the padded wheelbarrow on the floor he makes a seat for Marie-Ann. For his seat, he uses an empty beer crate, set on its edge, which he fetches from out the back. He does not mind sitting on it without having a cushion because there is no time — and it is the macho thing to do. The table and chairs were ready within a second of Marie-Ann setting the plated omelette down on the table.
“This is amazing. Thank you, so much,” says Marie-Ann. She sits down, smiling, but breaks into a coughing fit. Tommy jumps up and runs around to rub her back — a rather unsubtle opportunity to touch his love. He notices immediately that her heart is beating at an alarming rate, as if it were going to burst out her back. He knows he is a handsome devil, but also that he is not the cause of her unnaturally racing heart.
“No!” she says, trying to ward him off with one of her hands, in between coughs. She starts to convulse — frothy white spittle hanging from one corner of her mouth as she falls backwards into Tommy’s arms.
“It’s okay, Marie-Ann. Shush now. It’s okay. You’ll be fine. Calm, calm — Sshhh...”
“Tommy, I’m sorry,” she croaks as the fit ends and she blacks out.
When Marie-Ann awakes, she finds herself in Tommy’s bed, still fully dressed, with Tommy holding a cold compress to her head.
