Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. Realising how stupid I must look, I finished my whisky, and then looked around to summon the waitress to bring me another. She was lounging on the bar, talking to the young man who had set up camp there and washing the fake brass trappings with a ragged cloth.

  I kept staring until they noticed me. I could feel Polly's eyes burning into my cheek, but didn't want to turn towards her. The waitress nodded, poured another double, and brought it over. "Sorry," she said. Then she walked back to the young man, swaying her hips like a catwalk model.

  "You don't have much to say for yourself."

  Finally I turned again to face her, my eyes stinging with tears. "Would anything I said change your mind?"

  Her eyes were shiny with moisture, too; they glimmered as she slowly shook her head. "No. I'm afraid my mind's already made up. I have to think of Danny – we have to think about our son." She pressed her lips together, just like she used to when she put on her lipstick before we enjoyed a night out. "It's not like it's another country. Just a couple of hundred miles away. You can come and visit. He can visit you for weekends. You'll probably see more of him than you do now."

  We both knew the lie of what she said, but I was too tired, too body-shocked to point it out. If I was honest, even if I had not been so worn out and hollow, I would have said nothing. We never did. We always kept quiet, letting the pain burrow inside like a grub, working its way deep into our bodies where it would be smothered and gradually digested.

  3

  When I got back to The North Bar it was shortly after 8 p.m. Polly's blows hadn't taken long to fall, and the damage they did was quick, sharp and precise.

  I kept drinking whisky and listened to the maudlin tunes on the jukebox. Diane came back just after nine. By that time I was shit-faced, could barely even stand up. She was drunk, too; her gait was unsteady and she bumped into a table, spilling drinks, as she wove her way across the room to where I was sitting.

  "You look like I feel," I said, placing a hand on her bare arm.

  "I feel like a fuck," she countered, winking at me and settling heavily onto a stool. I began to realise that she was probably the local barroom slut: everyone certainly seemed to know her, the other clientele nodding and smiling and making dirty little quips as she passed by their tables. But I didn't care. Meaningless sex on a night like this was all that I could hope for.

  "Let's drink first. The rest can come later." I got up and went to the bar; returned to the table with two fistfuls of liquid damage.

  "It looks to me like you're a man on a mission." Her words were slurred, her cheeks were flushed.

  "I'd say it's already a case of mission accomplished." I raised my glass.

  She belched quietly, and then raised her own. "Cheers."

  I recall having a few more drinks in there before moving on to somewhere else. We walked by the canals, down from the train station, and she clawed at my arse with those strong, hard hands.

  We kissed clumsily and almost fell into the water. I watched a shopping trolley float by over her shoulder as she licked my neck.

  There were other bars – lots of rough rooms with odd graffiti daubed on the inside walls and wooden planks across the broken windows. Someone started a fight in one of these places; I got caught up in the scuffle, pulled into the crowd. When we left there we were laughing, me with a bloody nose, and I remember trying to fuck her up against a rough brick wall with my trousers around my ankles. Her tongue was pleasantly gritty, like that of a cat, and her body trembled as if she feared me...

  Then I was alone. I had no idea where Diane had gone, or when she had left me. When I opened my eyes I was sitting in a lightless alley, an overflowing trash bin to my left, ripped plastic bags disgorging their contents onto the wet ground.

  It was raining again. I raised my head and opened my mouth, enjoying the cold wetness against my face. The stars looked improbably distant; I strained to pick them out against the rippling black sky.

  Leaning against the metal bin, I climbed to my feet. There was a rip in my trouser leg; my left shoe was hanging off my foot and the sock was soaking wet. I dusted myself down, feeling dizzy and still very drunk. The world tilted sharply, and Polly's brutal decision still rang in my ears like the distant pealing of a funeral bell.

  I staggered towards the mouth of the alley, planning to orient myself as soon as I could see the street lights. God knew where I was – none of this looked even slightly familiar. The walls of dirty tenements leaned over me, windows smeared dark with the muck of sin and poverty. Again I heard music; everywhere I went , music seemed to find me – just like having a personal soundtrack. Somewhere far off, a car engine roared. A firework went off but when I searched the sky for its trail I found nothing but darkness. Darkness and rain.

  Something behind me – a sound, the suggestion of being watched? – made me turn around and stare back along the alley. I looked beyond the bin, ignoring the bags that bulged like soft and monstrous bodies from its gaping maw, and my gaze fell upon a lone figure. It was a woman, and she was watching me.

  "Hello," I said, narrowing my eyes, trying to make out her features in the sketch of night. The woman did not move. She stood with her hands by her sides and her legs slightly parted, the toes pointing outward.

  "Could you help me? I don't know where I am."

  I took a step back into the alley towards her, hoping that she might at least tell me where I was and give me directions back to the main drag.

  Within a few steps I began to recognise her face in the shadows. It was Polly, and she was wearing a long dark coat with a turned up collar. Her legs were bare and her fists were clenched. She had let her hair fall out of the hair band, and it lay against her shoulders like strange moss. Her face was slightly elongated, narrow, the cheeks sunken. Her mouth was open; it was a perfect black circle. I could see no teeth. There was little evidence of a tongue.

  "Polly? What are you doing here?" I increased my pace as I moved heedlessly along the alley, aware that I was leaving the light far behind. Something wasn't right, but I ignored it. Maybe Polly was in trouble and had been searching for me. The senselessness of this thought didn't even register in my confused mind.

  Slowly, she began to move. She raised one of her arms, stiffly, as if it was injured, the range of movement diminished by a debilitating wound. When the arm reached chest level, she twisted her wrist so that the thumb faced upwards. Then, one by one, she opened her fingers to show me what she was holding in her fist.

  I tripped on a mound of rubbish, going down into a mass of soggy cardboard boxes, evil-smelling waste and sharp-topped tin cans. My legs slipped on the uneven road surface and I sprawled like an old lady slipping on an icy path. When I looked up, Polly was gone. The air shimmered with the rumour of her recent presence; pressure built up in my ears, threatening to pop.

  It was only when I regained my feet that I realised I was weeping. My shoulders shook, my cheeks were wet, and my chest hitched as I sobbed for a reason that somehow eluded me.

  4

  Next morning I woke in a state of shock, as if roused from uneasy sleep by violent motion. The night before came back to me in crude snippets, snapshots from a gallery of shame: the dodgy bars, the awkward sex, that final nightmare vision in the alleyway and my tears of... what? Regret? Loss? Even now, the reason for my breakdown was out of reach.

  I knew I was drinking too much, and that it was becoming a problem, but I was beginning to rely on the buzz to get me through the day. Drink is a subtle lover: it whispers to you of other lands, of distant pain-free places, and offers you shimmering glimpses of how things can be. Then, in the morning, it hits you with a hammer and laughs in your face.

  I managed to get out of bed and made it to the bathroom. In the mirror, my face was a ghastly mask: pasty skin, hol
low cheeks, and bloated flesh around the eyes. I looked exactly like I felt, and within moments I was bending over the toilet bowl emptying my gut of yesterday's indulgences. There was a burning sensation in my stomach, as if I'd swallowed poison, and after a short while there was nothing left to vomit up but my stomach lining.

  I cleaned my teeth but still could not get rid of the bitter, acidic taste in my mouth. The toothbrush kept slipping from my grip because my hands were weak and uncoordinated. Even the bland routines of daily hygiene were becoming chores.

  In the kitchen, I drank endless cups of coffee and tried to bring myself around. It didn't work, and I kept thinking about the bottle of Jack Daniels in the cupboard. The bottle, I knew, was over half full. Just a snifter, I thought. A cheeky double to get me back on track.

  I walked over to the cupboard and opened the door. Then I took out the bottle, grabbed a glass from the draining board and poured the drink. I smelled it before I tasted it, and gagged. But that didn't stop me. I closed my eyes, lifted the glass, and downed a small measure of my own damnation.

  Later, sitting on the sofa and trying to remember what it was I had to do that day, I became gradually aware of the telephone ringing. I wasn't sure how long it had been ringing, but the tone had probably taken some time to penetrate the fug of my hangover – which was nowhere near as bad as it should be since I'd headed it off at the pass with the JD.

  I loped across the room and picked up the phone. It felt odd in my hand, an alien artefact I may once have dreamed of.

  "Hello."

  "Daddy. Will you bring me a present?"

  It was the Little Man. Suddenly a series of cogs and mechanisms clicked into place: today was my time with Danny. Every other Saturday I got to see him; take him to the park, feed the ducks, eat lunch in an awful Fun Pub.

  "Hey, Soldier. How's my boy?"

  "Fine. When will you be here?"

  I blinked away tears. This was wrong; this was shitty. I couldn't believe I'd allowed the drink to get in the way of the only quality time left in my life. "I'll be there in an hour, mate. Daddy got held up, but now he's on his way. That okay?"

  "Will you bring me a present?"

  "Yeah, Danny. I'll bring you a present. And we can go and feed the ducks in the park."

  "Yay! I like ducks." Then he hung up the phone. I imagined Polly standing behind him, knowing all too well why I was late. I checked my watch: 11 a.m. I should have been there thirty minutes ago. Shit. This was the first time I'd ever let him down, and because of last night's flashpoint meeting, Polly would be only too eager to remind me of my responsibilities.

  I took a quick shower and left the flat, hoping that traffic would be light. The route to the M1 Motorway was relatively clear; families in little hatchbacks and delivery trucks steered by mostly overweight middle aged men crossed lazily between lanes. The M1 towards Wakefield had become a road I was familiar with, so my attention wandered as I drove.

  I didn't want Polly to move south. My time with Danny was precious and I wanted to keep him as close as I could. If he was living two hundred miles away rather than twenty, I'd see him less and less as the years passed. By the time he hit his teenage years, I'd have become a duty, a bloke up in Leeds he visited briefly twice a year. Whereas if he still lived in the area, we might at least stand a chance of salvaging some kind of father-son relationship.

  A tiny car overtook me on my right, the driver gritting his teeth and glaring through the windscreen. I turned and watched him, wondering why he was in such a hurry. Was he late for weekend father duties, too?

  The rain had stopped at some point during the night but the roads were still black with moisture. The sky was low and leaden; it undulated with a strange slow rhythm, and I was put in mind of some glacial ocean. The clouds looked like whales, shifting lazily across their domain; a few of them might be sea monsters left over from a time before man had lost his ancient beliefs and superstitions.

  I switched on the radio but the mindless bleating of regional deejays failed to inspire me. The last CD I'd played was still in the stereo slot, so I pressed play and waited to hear what it was. There was a slight pause before Thom Yorke's unearthly tones crept in over sonorous guitars. The music suited my mood so I let it play.

  A private hire bus was parked on the hard shoulder. The passengers stared desultorily through the smeared windows while the driver bent over the open bonnet. Smoke poured from the engine, forming a little dissipating cloud above the front end of the vehicle. The driver's beefy hand moved through the air like a fat fish as he tried to clear his view of the damage.

  A little further on the sky darkened; more rain threatened to pour from its depths. I glanced to my left, at a parking lay-by along the side of the motorway. There was a broken wooden bench, an overflowing litter bin, and stunted trees were gathered round the area in a sulky group. Halfway up one of the trees, arms and legs wrapped around the bare autumn branches, was a man. He sat on a wide bulge in the side of the tree trunk, his head turned towards the road. Beneath the grumbling sky, his face was dark and troubling. His mouth was a large black, glistening circle, forced open to a point well beyond the range of natural motion. I could not see his eyes, yet I felt his gaze upon me. His right hand slipped from its branch, and as he opened his fist something dropped to the ground below the tree.

  Who were these people, and why was I seeing them? My first thought was that they were ghosts, wandering the world in search of release. But if that were the case, why had I seen Polly? She was alive and real, not a figment of my stressed imagination. Just what was her connection to these frightening figures, and what had she been holding in her hand?

  I strained to see some kind of sense in these visions. Was it just the drink playing tricks on me? I was certainly consuming enough hard liquor to force me to hallucinate; I was already having blank spots and acting out of character, so why not add a dash of delirium to the cocktail?

  I looked in the rear-view mirror, the parking place by now far behind. I saw the trees, the bench, the sullen sky... but the man was no longer there, or perhaps the angle was wrong and he was simply out of sight.

  By the time I reached Wakefield it was raining again. It always seemed to be raining or about to rain, and any respite was always brief and filled with a doom-laden sense that the rain would return some time soon.

  It was impossible to make plans, to sensibly organise anything involving being outdoors, without having a back-up plan to enable you to retreat and take shelter.

  I stood on the doorstep of the house where I used to live, the home I used to own. It looked different, altered, even though nothing had changed. The transformation was on a level more fundamental than was immediately obvious: the bricks and mortar had evolved into something I didn't recognise; the windows reflected the light from a world I could no longer enter without permission; the plants and flowers in the garden had grown in soil upon which my feet had never trod.

  Polly opened the door and stood back from the threshold, as if daring me to cross. "He's been waiting for you."

  I was caught on the doorstep, stuck between two worlds, neither of which I fully understood. "I know. I'm sorry. I lost track of time..."

  "You were drunk."

  I had no answer; she knew me – even the recent me, the changed me – far too well. Panicked and grasping, I diverted the course of the conversation: "I saw you last night. Late on. Where had you been?"

  She looked at me like I was something she'd brought in on the sole of her shoe. Her eyes widened in what for a terrifying moment I suspected might be disgust. "What are you talking about, Simon? I went home right after our pathetic little meeting. If you want to know the truth, I sat up until midnight crying into my fucking coffee."

  Words failed me; they slithered around my mouth like worms, unknowable, ungraspable, beyond my control.
"I... what I mean is... well, it looked like you. I thought it was you."

  "Are you still pissed, Simon? I mean, I fucking refuse to let you near my son if you're still drunk."

  I shook my head, took a single tentative step forward, my hands raised in neither defence nor attack, and gaped like a fish: my mouth opened and closed on dead air, decayed promises, and my breath was toxic.

  "Get in here," she said. The disgust on her face was now apparent. Was I really so pathetic? Had I sunk so very low in her estimation that whatever affection she had once felt for me was gone, banished to the brittle edges of memory?

  I followed Polly through into the living room, noting that the pictures hanging on the walls were ones I'd never seen before. They were not to my taste, nor could I recall Polly ever being drawn to this style of art. Again, it was a demonstration of how little we really knew each other; an example of the way we'd failed utterly to communicate at any level.

  Danny was sitting on the floor in front of the television, his eyes locked on the screen. Tom and Jerry chased each other across a fully laden banquet table, using utensils as weapons. My son failed to notice me as I stood in the doorway.

  "Daddy's here," said Polly, entering and leaning down to kiss him on the top of the head.

  He stood and turned in a single graceful movement, then ran to me, smiling, laughing, with his good little heart full of love and life and energy. "Daddy! Yay! You got me a present?"

  "Yes, Little Man. I have a present for you." I caught him as he leapt into my arms, swinging him around and pulling him to my chest. His hair smelled clean and fresh, his skin was silk-soft and slightly chill to the touch.

  "What you got, Daddy? I want my present. Pleeeeeease."

  Laughing, I fished inside my pocket and pulled out the toy I'd bought in the petrol station. It was a stuffed beanie version of Spongebob Squarepants, with suckers on the palms of its hands where you were meant to attach it to the car window. A simple thing, costing no more than a few pounds, but Danny loved it. Spongebob was his favourite. I was a good enough father to at least retain that pointless snippet of information.