by Greg James
“You paid for this,” John said.
He hurried down the stairs, not crying, and caught the bus home. Sleep eluded him that night until he brought the Polish woman’s perfectly sculpted feet back into his thoughts and masturbated until they went away.
This has to stop, he thought. I have to stop.
Chapter Thirteen
John found himself looking at dawn beginning to lighten the sky over Chalk Farm; all was soaked to a dirty amber hue by light pollution. Why couldn’t he remember the world as it had been before he’d met Daria Lee? Why was he compelled to go on searching for her, to need her, one of the dead, rather than a living woman?
The streetlights illuminated showers of flaking dust, and the city air smelled dead. The Old Lock Hotel was closed, its windows caked with dirt and the door shut against retreating night and approaching day.
This must be another place Daria had been.
John felt as if he was being watched and shivered despite the warmth of his jacket. The feeling of being tacitly observed scraped at his nerves, making his chest tighten as he caught each breath. A damaged plate of glass hung askew in one of the hotel's window frames on the first floor, like the broken lens of an eye. John stared defiantly at the rectangle of blackened glass. As he did, he caught a sense of shadow there, a notion of movement, in much the same way one might perceive the momentary twitching of an eye. Reason told him there was nothing there, that it was merely a ghost of moonlight playing across the glass, but the moon was not out. The sky was obscured by clouds, and the tones of night were past showing themselves fully. Instead, they were stretching, laying themselves down to rest, across the road and pavement. The taste of carbon monoxide tainted his breath as London’s ceaseless, murmuring traffic went by. John tested the door of the hotel, not caring if he was seen. The door opened after some persuasion from his shoulder.
The interior was unlit. He passed the empty reception desk, thick with dust, and ascended the stairs. Paint peeled away like dead wings from the walls and ceiling. In the first floor’s corridor, John counted along from one door to the next, taking himself towards the one he sought, the one that would match with the broken window staring down at him outside. He paused along the way to try the loose black bulbs of door handles. They rattled uselessly in his hands, the mechanisms catching whilst not giving at all.
He tried the last door handle on the left, and felt an opening click as the lock gave. It swung inwards, and he knew, without setting foot in there, without crossing the threshold, that this abandoned space had been patiently waiting for him, as had the hospital on Hampstead Road. Washed-out, rectangular patches showed on the beige carpet where the bed and furnishings had been. An elaborate outline sketched in darkening lines on the wall revealed the spot where a mirror had once hung. John looked over these traces of the past and felt there was nothing in the room, as one feels warmth, or cold, or the absence of either. He could feel it silently eating away at itself, gnawing the emptiness to the bone. It was a remnant in its own way, and John watched it resolve into fragile pictures of her: a powder-thin sketch of Daria’s face with mouth pulled open, almost distended, as if to scream. Her fingers fashioned themselves from plaster and dust as they moved through the air, not quite touching him, and then there was pain inside. She’d pierced him somehow, cut open a hole in his heart. He could feel it bleeding. It brought sharp tears to his eyes, and he opened his mouth to say something, but another voice spoke as a breath in his ear. “Leave me alone.”
She turned away and dissipated. Her dust covered the room like a discarded skin.
The pain faded with each breath he took. And John withdrew, retreating from her, the thing he wanted most, because he’d seen what was in her eyes, which were cracked like damaged glass, and how her tears had left something else behind: traces of blood from long ago. Outside the hotel, he got on a bus when he saw its destination.
Where else could things end now, except in the places where they began?
*
In the dark of Madame Jo’s , John found the child waiting for him. There was no music, and one lonesome spotlight illuminated centre-stage. Daria was bound naked to the chair with shibari ropes as before. John felt a tugging at his sleeve. The child offered him a knife.
“I had my turn,” the child said. “Now it’s yours.”
John looked at the knife. It was mapped with small, crude continents of rust and the teeth of its serrated edge seemed bent and dull. “I can’t use this on her.”
“Yes, you can,” said the boy. “You know you want to.”
He saw himself in the child’s eyes: some part of him, lost long ago in the wilds of Richmond Park, in the pages of a scrapbook, in an old, battered box at the bottom of the cupboard.
“No, I don’t want to,” John said. “I don’t want to do it now.”
“You will. You have to. We can wait.”
Remnants creaked and sighed their way out of the shadows, a blind, faceless crowd of unflesh and hollow bones. They would not move and let him through. They would wait until he was done. John could see their fingers, how they twitched, moved, and grasped at the air, desperate to feel. He remembered how they’d touched him that night on the tube. How it would hurt to have them touch him again. How deep they would go inside him. They would take their time with him as well, make it last as long as they could.
John heard an ominous click and saw the child was holding a gun. It looked like it was almost too heavy for him, but still he pointed it at John and said, “Do what you have to do.”
John mounted the stage and walked across to the chair. He looked down at Daria. She was blindfolded and breathing lightly. She’d not been gagged this time. The ropes – he could cut them, couldn’t he? His fingers shook as they held the knife. The crowd came closer. The child was watching with eyes clear and innocent as marbles. The gun watched John with a dead, black eye. There was no other way.
“I’m sorry.” John said.
“Don’t worry. It’s not my first time,” she said. “Don’t be gentle.”
His breath caught wetly in his throat and he fell to his knees where he rocked for some time, until the child and the crowd grew restless. He looked out at them. He looked up at the bare light above. He looked at Daria and the sweat pebbling on her skin.
“Get on with it, John,” she said. “You don’t want to keep them waiting.”
A gunshot startled the silence and a bullet tore its way through the bare planking of the stage. The child smiled and nodded. He might miss the next time. He might not.
John hung his head, took a deep breath, and began. He cut through her with feeling, not sure if it was good or bad. His hands shook violently and each stroke was ugly. The same smooth effort of the child was lost to him as he carved out notched pieces of meat and muscle. The unclean knife caught and scraped on tendons and bones. There was no blood, but that didn’t stop John from seeing it there, from feeling it on his skin. Daria’s breathing didn’t alter as he worked away. No tears wet the soft cloth of her blindfold. It was as if she was feeling nothing, but this had to hurt. Her calm acquiescence began to get to him. It wasn’t right. Pain should not be taken so lightly.
John stopped to catch his breath, soaked through with sweat, trying not to slip on the flayed lengths of flesh and skin around his feet.
“Continue,” the child said.
John went on, though the smell of ripe meat made his stomach turn. He pared her away until she sank into the chair as a body without organs. Everything hung, loose and flayed. She had no breath left for the screams she hadn’t made, as her lungs rested beside her feet. With her head slumped forward as it was, she could’ve been sleeping. He thought of their first, and only, night together after they made love. He’d watched her sleep then.
“Don’t forget the head,” the child said.
“Daria ... ” John whispered.
Her near-severed head seemed to nod, acquiescing once more.
The only sounds, for what felt l
ike an age, were those made by John’s breathing as he hacked his way through throat, cartilage, neck-skin, and vertebrae. Her head hit the stage with an unceremonious thump. John left it where it fell. He didn’t want to touch the blindfold and have to look into her eyes.
“Don’t forget the feet,” the child said, with a smile. “They’re for you.”
John took each foot in his hand and cradled it. He kissed them, moving his lips softly and drily over the insteps and arches, treasuring the salt-and-grit taste of the toes in his mouth. There was no lust or desire in the gesture, rather a leftover exhaustion that was long past worship. It was something blacker than feeling and deeper than his own death.
The sound of someone crying. It wasn’t him. John looked up and saw the child, his shoulders hitching as he sobbed. He also saw the crowd of remnants had gone.
“They’ve gone away,” the child said. “They always go before the end, and leave me alone. Why am I alone? Why’d they leave me there? I don’t understand. I want to, but I don’t.”
John found himself moving towards the child, reaching out. The child turned the gun on himself, opening his perfect mouth wide enough to push the barrel inside. His eyes met John’s. He said something, which was choked off by the gun.
Despite everything, John said, “No. Don’t do it to yourself. Not again.”
The child pulled the trigger. The back of his head erupted and he fell to the ground. John ran to him and found his fingers touching the small, broken corpse he’d abandoned at the bottom of a stairwell in a hospital not so far away. Its flesh and bones crumpled in on themselves, quietly falling to pieces.
Left behind, John thought, remnants. Old photographs waiting to fade away. That’s us, that’s what we are, in the end – all the living and all the dead.
Chapter Fourteen
John waited in the bushes of Hampstead cemetery, wrapped in his thickest coat. The waning moon arose as a ghost at twilight, exchanging its cold glance with him. John thought of Mum in the last months of her life, unable to speak, and how she’d looked at him then; those looks so cold and unkind. How could someone go on living with so little warmth inside them? It wasn’t natural, although according to the doctors, it was as natural as breathing.
She’d died on that grey morning, alone in bed, as rain ran down the windows, having forgotten the name of her only child who sat at her side, day by day, night by night, as the disease ate her brain away, leaving behind coral crusts and the vacant staring eyes of a meat puppet. She died alone, because he’d gone out. He’d needed to be away from her, just for a few hours. The cost of those few hours had weighed on him ever since. The mother he’d loved had been gone for months, and he’d not been there as her body joined her soul, taking its failing impulses, nonsense words, and weak bladder with it. He should have been there, but he wasn’t. The need for space and air and other voices, overcame him in the end. He wasn’t there, so she died alone.
He’d lived with it as best he could, but now he wanted no more of it.
A shape stood in the chapel’s porte-cochère , dressed in darkness, and followed by a second figure, and then a third and a fourth. Their pace was slow, and he couldn’t make out their faces. He wanted to dash out and tear at each one of them until he found the face he’d seen the last time he was here, but at the same time he had no wish to see it ever again. However, he continued to be patient, to watch and to wait. The figures came to a vault and stopped, seeming to regard the structure in a penitent manner. John watched, his hands and feet aching with cold, as the figures clustered around the vault’s door and made passes with their hands over the weathered stone. John couldn’t tell what their gestures were, with the distance between them, but he didn’t want to move closer to them yet.
He adjusted his position to prevent his muscles from cramping, and as he did so he heard stone grinding on stone. He saw the vault open and each of the figures pass into it with bowed heads, as if they had come to pay their respects.
If he wanted a closer look at them, this was the time – but the memory of the face made him stay. Sounds came from inside the vault – sounds of something being disturbed. John arose from his hiding place, taking quiet, stealthy steps towards the vault. A movement at the door. He shouldn’t have looked.
A figure was there, waiting. It looked at him with his mother’s eyes. In its hands, it held a piece of something dry that could have been gnawed bone. Its fellows emerged; they held hands with those they were leading out of the vaults. This was a gathering of the departed, and she came to him dressed as she had been buried.
“Mum,” he said.
“John,” she replied.
She reached up, cupped his lean chin in her fingers, as she had done since he was a little boy, and kissed him gently on the lips. Her lips were dry and soft as old paper. “Time for you to go on, my soldier. Time for you to see what’s next.”
John turned and walked away, feeling something settling inside his breast in the same way dusk quietly settled over the cemetery.
*
John went back to where it all started. It was an inauspicious place for it all to end, but it was the right place, and the right time. He was standing in the backyard his bedroom looked onto. Through the same window, he could see the night when he first met Daria was taking place – playing over like the last reel of film flickering across a cinema screen. He looked and saw himself with her; remembering how his unknowing hands had explored her, how his tongue found ways to taste her skin.
How cruel the universe was when it came to love, he thought, to the one thing that could possibly be called good: a fragile, grey flower occasionally broke through the world’s asphalt only to be quickly ground down into dust and scuffed away. It was too much. It was not enough.
John Greyerson undressed himself and turned his back on the one good night of his life; bidding farewell to its last moments. Daria was waiting for him, as naked as her feet. She gestured for him to come closer. When he did, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear, “Have you seen them, John, the alluring lights? Have they shown themselves to you?”
“Yes, I’ve seen them,” he said, remembering his dreams. “They’re cold and they’re beautiful and I want to be with them, Daria. I want to be inside them, always. They hurt so much, but it’s a hurt that’s good and right . Take me to them, please.”
John had lived, and he had seen what there was to see. He had seen enough.
“Of course, I will,” she said.
He knelt to kiss her bare feet one last time. They were as cold as sculpted stone against his lips.
“Close your eyes, John,” she said. “There’s a good lad.”
He thought of childhood mornings spent watching the rain run down windowpanes, the way each small pebble of water caught the London lights and could turn the world into a wash of petroleum colour. He thought of riding through autumn leaves in Richmond Park on a bicycle, feeling the crunch of dry, dead matter underneath narrow wheels, seeing the deer sketched out in charcoal against twilight. Faint laughter. Christmas snow. Old photographs lost in a fire. Mum’s laughter fading away, edges turning black, curling into brittle, unforgiving tongues. Memories becoming ashes, becoming nothing, becoming dust. He thought of life and he thought of death. The first breath and the laboured, last gasp. Every breath, every moment; he could taste them all, and they were bittersweet on his tongue.
John Greyerson closed his eyes, and then came the alluring lights as a silent, white immolation, flowing out of nowhere, lapping like tongues around him and around her, washing them clean of who they once were, spending themselves without leaving a trace of smoke or fume to stain the air. And so, they were gone, onto somewhere else, leaving behind no hopes, no dreams, nor the faces, thoughts, or voices they once possessed. Winter branches stood out like black veins against the pale flesh of London’s early morning sky, and the world went on without them – as it does.
The Clowns Outside
Dedication
This
one is for Emma, Ann, and Dianne.
‘ ... send in the clowns ... ’
Chapter One
Emma Ashley was alone in the house. The boys were away visiting Grandma and Grandad. The house felt very empty without them. She could feel the silence as a weight in the air; aching to be broken by young, high voices – none came and the silence went on with her as its witness. She’d needed this weekend though; a break from the boys. She loved them more than herself but there were times when she felt how much time and space they took up, and how little she had left to herself. She was Mummy now more than she was Emma or Emms.
Jacob was autistic and had his needs; she often thought on how he would live in this world as she watched him sleep; only a scraggy tuft of his dark blonde hair showed from under the duvet as if he were hibernating in there, desperate to keep warm. The world was a cold place, and its people, colder still. She hoped he would be okay because that was all she could do – hope. Liam was a wiry monkey next to Jacob’s quiet, reserved gentleness. Maybe he would watch out for Jacob as they grew older. Again, she hoped knowing it was all out of her hands.
In the pressing quiet of the house, Emma looked down at her hands, turned them over and brushed the fingertips against one another. They were a mother’s hands and sometimes she couldn’t believe they were hers. Mother. Mummy. Emma. Emms. She was all these things and yet sometimes she felt like none of them. She tried not to look but her eyes were drawn to the pale circle of skin at the root of her left ring finger. He was gone now. She’d left him and was starting over again – and she’d needed this weekend alone before taking the first steps along the path ahead.
