For a moment the darkhaired man’s words stunned him, but then he shrugged and said, ‘I am here.’
Suddenly the hunter had a great desire to shock this man, to whom he was beginning to take a dislike. He decided to tell his self-righteous companion the story of the greatest of all hunts, the greatest of all prey, which he himself had once hunted. If the darkhaired man did not like it, there were others to talk to in the room.
‘I once stalked the most cunning creature on this planet,’ said the hunter. ‘I pursued him, tracked him down, and killed him where he stood. Never has anything equalled the moment when I squeezed the trigger and saw him jerk backwards to lie in the dust, a bullet from this very rifle in his heart.’
The man stroked his dog, not looking at the hunter now, and asked, ‘What quarry would that be?’
‘A man,’ said the hunter.
Now the brown eyes flicked to his face and he felt satisfaction, knowing he had disturbed the owner of those eyes.
‘Yes,’ he told the other, ‘a manhunt. One night we captured...it doesn’t matter who or what he was, except that he was a human being, a man. We let him go, into the wood, then we went in after him. It was my shot that killed him.’
There was a long silence between them, until finally the man stopped stroking his dog and looked up. His eyes were full of sorrow and pity.
‘You killed a fellow creature,’ he said, ‘one of your own kind—for sport. Now I understand why you are here. This will be your only night in the lodge, to give you the opportunity to witness and experience what you might have had, what you have thrown away. Tomorrow you go into the forest.’
The hunter felt a certain fear at the other man’s words, but he said quickly, ‘As you will, yourself.’
‘But I go as a hunter,’ said the man. ‘You will be the prey.’
The newest hunter felt a bolt of terror go through him, at these words, and he looked about him, his mind in a turmoil. He glanced at the other hunters, cleaning their weapons, at the soft rugs on which they would sleep that night, and finally his eyes rested on the cauldron, the great stew that would be eaten before retiring.
A feeling of faint triumph trickled through his mind, bringing with it hope. Something was wrong with the logic of his fireside companion. There were surely errors in the rules, the laws of this place. Perhaps the dead told lies and the truth was still to be revealed? Maybe the mistake was not yet his? Possibly these things were not set in stone, but could be changed by clever argument? He would not accept what had been said to him without further dispute.
‘Ah,’ he said to his disapproving companion, ‘but there’s something wrong here. You told me a moment ago that what the true hunter kills, must be eaten. That means if I am to be the prey, and you kill me, you must eat me. Are you then cannibals?
‘Even if I am changed into a beast, to be hunted and killed, over and over again, for all eternity, I am still in my soul, a man. I may not keep a man’s body, but I will always have his spirit, which can’t be altered because it is me.
‘Do you hunters, you great hunters, do you eat the flesh of your fellow men? Do you gnaw on the bones of your comrades? Do you drink the blood of your own kind? Are you then going to hunt and kill me, then eat me?’
The black-haired man looked deep into his eyes.
‘No, of course we won’t eat you,’ he said, ‘but we have to feed our dogs.’
SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE SOFA
Believe me, this is the future of soft furnishings and sex.
We should never have invited Starkey to the party.
Starkey is wutheringly wild and still youthfully coded, possibly because at three-hundred-something, He’s the youngest and rawest of our friends. You can’t expect someone who hasn’t reached their millennium to act in a rational and decipherable manner, especially at a weekend squall. But then, as Jakoe pointed out to my partner Mica the other week, Starkey had just lost his wife and his vents were blocked. We had to try to open him up a little, let some joy inside.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a storm of a party.
It’s just that, well, the soft furnishings are new and though I didn’t want to change our old flops, Mica likes to be up-to-the-hour fashionable, and she insisted. Hell, it was her money to do with as she liked, so who was I to stand on top of the Zugspitze, dispensing consumer wisdom? Now the strafing sofa’s ruined and we suspect, in fact we as good as know, that it’s all Starkey’s fault. Who else could it have been? He’s the one who slept on it.
Let’s go back to before any of this ever happened, when we first installed our new soft furnishings. Jakoe came round to discuss plans for the party and he was one of the first to try them out. Already sitting on one of the chairs when Jakoe came into the room, I was nestled down onto silk-covered flesh, having my neck massaged by a soft pair of hands. The arms of the chair were, I guess, originally the thighs, but once a person has been resculptured it’s difficult to tell which body parts are where, though obviously some of them are recognisable for what they are.
Jakoe winced as he watched me being stroked.
‘You’re not worried about getting strangled then?’ he said. ‘Like that old woman in the high-rise apartment?’
‘Nobody ever proved that case,’ I answered. ‘It was mostly supposition. Sit down.’
Jakoe did as he was told, but nervously, as if he didn’t trust my new armchair one bit. He was actually sitting in the best chair, the one which had been fed on butter-milk to make it more pneumatic, softer on the buttocks. Some people are never comfortable with live furniture though.
‘I heard a jack came in drunk and beat up his wardrobe the other night,’ Jakoe informed me, squirming on the edge of his seat. ‘Left bruises all over the doors.’
‘What did he do that for?’
Jakoe shrugged. ‘Just one of those aggressive types. They’ve banned him from owning any live furniture now.’
‘I should think so,’ I said. ‘That’s strafing disgusting. I can’t understand where these jacks come from. Is he out of the caves?’
‘It wasn’t as if the wardrobe could run away—not like a table or something with legs—it just had to stand there and take it.’
I relaxed into my own seat, feeling it close around me, warming me with its body heat. I couldn’t understand people like the slab Jakoe was talking about. What satisfaction could they possibly get out of attacking a human being that can’t even answer back, let alone defend itself? That was sick.
Jakoe and I discussed the party, then he made an excuse to go, and left me still comfortably ensconced. It was so quiet after he’d left I could hear the furniture around me delicately breathing, one or the other of them occasionally letting out a barely audible sigh. I was glad we’d bought one of the more expensive suites of flops, with internal waste disposal units, so we didn’t have to worry about the carpet.
Not that any of them aren’t, well, housetrained.
They all have some kind of built in protection, but there are some units you can actually hear working, like softly-gurgling stomachs, and Mica decided that any reminder of what they had once been capable of would display a lack of taste. I think I agree with her.
That got me thinking. What had they once been? People, of course, but what had made them put themselves up for resculpturing? What was in their minds at the point when they submitted passively to becoming pieces of soft furniture? I suppose if I could answer that, I would know the secret of apathy—why it ever struck at all, when we have everything.
What do you do when your interest in life is drained to the last drop?
We’ve banished death, but we’ve never managed to conquer boredom.
Oh, yes, we all say that it’ll never happen to us, that we’ll always be able to pierce boredom to reach passion, that we’re different, that bright becks of consciousness course around our curves.
Some of us think to fend off apathy with a spectacular hobby, but apathy comes to us all, sooner or later—usual
ly later rather than sooner.
So what do you do when you have no ergs left to move or think, let alone work or play? Go into a torpor and stay that way, soliciting spider’s webs, waiting for the day, the hour, the minute that will never come?
There are those however who still have a strong work ethic, and genetic resculpturing has been a cleanser to those of us who want to do something after apathy sets in.
What could be more useful too, my work ethic friend, than being reshaped as a chair, or table, and thus becoming an object in a friend’s or stranger’s lodge? A born-again bedside lamp? A footstool, thus satisfying a long-felt masochistic craving? A chest full of perfumed flimsies? A bookshelf containing all your favourite zip stories? A standing mobile, hands and feet gently waving in the draught when the front door is opened to admit visitors?
As a user I can recommend human furniture to any one of you cave dwellers. It’s soft and comfortable, being fleshy, but durable, having a fine, solid frame of human bones. Your new chair, table, bed or sofa won’t talk or walk, or give you the skits you in the middle of the night, yet it will conform to your personal contours, adjust itself once you sit or lie on it, and its gentle breathing is soporific rather than disturbing, especially if you keep the automatic drip-feed tuned.
I wouldn’t have anything else in the lodge.
It was Mica who persuaded me.
‘I’m always right,’ she said. ‘That’s why you live with me—you love being wrong about things.’
However, there’s always the flipside.
There’s a deeper, more philosophical aspect that strikes us people who like to be wrong. Something which penetrated me instantly, but passed Mica by. It’s this. Once we’d bought flops I couldn’t help wondering about what sort of people the furniture had been, before they had volunteered themselves for resculpture.
I held conversations with Mica about it.
‘The table, for instance,’ I said. ‘Maybe it was a politician? Or a deep-seabed walker? Or some famous zip story author?’
‘Or your great-great-great grandmother,’ retorted Mica. ‘What does it matter? I’d rather think of it as just a table—my table—I couldn’t care less what it was once.’
‘Who it once was, not what,’ I argued. ‘And how can you say that? You might be eating your dinner off the back of the woman who invented the matter shifter, or the self-building house, or the person who discovered the fourth primary colour?’
‘The person who found the new colour was a man. Our table’s definitely feminine.’
‘All right, but you know what I mean. We could have a whole clutch of acubrains here—people who quaked the world with their inventions, or their poetry, or their acting, or their songs? Doesn’t that make you stop and think?’
Mica said it didn’t stop her and didn’t make her think.
Sitting on the sofa, my favourite out of all the flops we had bought, even if it was strafing expensive, I tried at times to imagine how I would feel, if I were one of them. What would I be? I decided I wasn’t joyed about being sat on, not unless there was a choice of owner. I might be sold to some massively overweight, flatulent, sweaty jack not inclined to wash too often... well, it just doesn’t bear thinking about.
At first I thought I might like to be a writing desk, an antique of course, but with special features.
My hands might be left free to hold spare stylos; my feet turned into secret drawers to harbour illicit love-notes; my tongue wet and ready to lick envelopes and stamps.
I abandoned that idea and decided I could be a spinet, or harpsichord, or piano, providing they could fracture me out with strings and keys. A resonant, vibrant smiley box, an antique bash-and-cry. I imagined being stroked by the party egotist, persuaded against his will to charm the guests. Then I remembered there were still kids around, treble-sixers with tacky pincers, brimming with discord, and gave up that idea.
I finally decided on a small Korean tansu, where one might display hologram jars of the early dead. A low, delicate piece of furniture, with simple key designs on the drawers: a centrepiece for someone’s looking-room.
In my recesses would be kept mementoes of unfinished affaires—a vaccy glass containing a preserved rosebud, a slot to the opera, a natural chunk of china from a far-off beach—small treasured objects from the past. There would be tinsies on one end of my surface, perhaps a porcelain bowl containing flutes at the other end, or a pearl-handled nail trimmer, a dish of geoids fashioned from semi-precious stones, a twitch-watch belonging to a many-greats grandfather?
Yes, a tansu.
But how would I feel? What would be my thoughts, if any, as people came and went, touching my surface occasionally, but more often than not ignoring my presence? After all, I would be a thing, not a person. There would be no need for people to acknowledge my appearance, attractive as I might be, for I would not be expected to react in any way. I think I should resent their altitude, albeit I had lost interest in all that went on around me. The fact is, I can only imagine myself as a piece of furniture in my present state of mind, not what it might become, will undoubtedly become, in future centuries.
And what if one day I were rejected by some new owner, a fresh tenant to an apartment, and cast upon the gash pile, at the mercy of spiders, rats, mice, and all the other ghastly indignities heaped upon discarded objects?
Surely that would be too much to pack, wouldn’t it?
Jakoe came to see me after the party was over and this time he was so agitated he sat down on one of my chairs without even thinking.
‘I’m sorry about Starkey,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought him.’
Jakoe didn’t look at the sofa when he spoke, but he was aware the thin silk covering had been damaged, torn away from the back and arm.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I lied. ‘You weren’t to know.’
‘But I feel responsible.’
He went on like this for at least an hour, until I was becoming impatient with him. Mica was due home and Jakoe was not one of her favourite persons at the moment, any more than was Starkey. In the end I told Jakoe he would have to leave and he tried to stand.
‘Hey,’ he said, softly. ‘This chair’s gripping me—it won’t let me get up.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘They’re not supposed to do that.’
‘It’s—it’s squeezing me,’ he wheezed. ‘I think it’s trying to crush me.’
He had gone very white, with red blotches on his cheeks, and his eyes looked scared. I felt he was exaggerating things, but it was useless to remonstrate with him. Getting out of my own chair was easy and I gripped his arm and gave him a tug.
‘Come on, Jakoe, use a bit of effort,’ I said, finding he was really stuck. ‘I think it’s you—you should go on a diet or something.’
‘It’s-not-me,’ he croaked. ‘This strafing chair’s squashing the breath out of me. Oh Christ, help me man.’
At that moment Mica came into the room. I shouted at her that Jakoe was in real trouble, that she was to come to my aid. To give Mica her due she immediately dropped her outwear and assisted me by getting hold of Jakoe’s other arm and pulling with me. There was a moment when I thought we weren’t going to extract him from the chair, but finally he shot out as the chair let him go, giving an almighty yell as he did so.
‘It bit me!’ he cried, rubbing his thigh. ‘The strafing chair bit me!’
‘They’re not supposed to do that,’ I said.
Mica added, ‘I expect it was upset over the sofa—after all, Jakoe, you’re the one who brought Starkey to the party. It was you who insisted we invite him—against our better judgement. I’m really not surprised the chair bit you.’
‘I might sue,’ he said, in an aggrieved tone, as he limped from the room. ‘It wasn’t my fault—it was Starkey’s.’
Starkey—yes, poor Starkey—but not blameless Starkey. I must explain that his wife, the woman he has loved since he reached two-hundred years of age, has become a piece of furniture. She wa
s older than Starkey of course— much, much older—though as beautiful as a mountain rill in early spring. She glistered, she was clear and unclute, she bubbled forth her love for Starkey until one day she simply seared her canals, became a bed of arid dust, and finally volunteered herself for resculpturing, without telling him.
No one, not even Starkey knows what kind of furniture she is now. It must be strafing hell for him, staring at this friend’s table, or that stranger’s chair, wondering if it’s her. It’s driven him to a distraction, I know, because the weekend of the squall he was half out of his hat, depressed yet manic, and he put away dylan knows how many stims in his endeavours to escape thoughts of her, dreams of her, memories of her.
All this does not excuse Starkey’s behaviour.
At the end of the party he didn’t even want to go back to their apartment, so he stayed over with us, sleeping on the sofa.
Our sofa.
My favourite soft furnishing.
What Starkey did was not only inexcusable, illmannered and downright unpolitic—I believe it may also be illegal. That young wuthering wilder has ruined Mica’s most expensive item of furniture and expects to get away with it.
You see, there’s a smooth bulge down at one end, right on place where I normally find it most comfortable to sit.
Something’s wrong with my sofa.
I think it’s pregnant.
EXPLODING SPARROWS
When I was in the RAF I worked some of the time for the Communications Intelligence.
It’s dangerous out there. It’s not even safe to step outside the doorway. Not since they started exploding like flying grenades. Not since our volatile feathered friends became feathered bombs. Not since cock robin was killed and they exchanged their little bows and arrows for internally detonated devices that can take a man’s head clean off his shoulders.
The reports have been coming in thick and fast, from other cities, from other parts of this city. I haven’t been out since they first said it was the sparrows. I don’t want to, though I may have no choice in the matter. There are heroes enough, without me. I mean, the last time I was outside, I heard the explosions, saw the mess afterwards, but I didn’t actually see any of them go off.
Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Page 14
