by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith
"Yay! Spongebob! Yay!" He danced around the room, hugging the silly little toy. Polly smiled at me, but it was a brief gesture and not one that I could afford to read anything into: just a sad, slightly tired smile. I noted the dark smudges beneath her eyes and her unwashed hair. Guilt rose within me; I was responsible for her having another late night, just like the ones she'd gone through when I was out drinking when we were together. Back then, I'd never called to let her know where I was or who I was with.
I would have given anything to take it all back: my eyes, my arms, my legs. My dirty rotten soul.
The rain had turned to drizzle, so we decided to go to the park anyway. I helped Danny into his winter coat and held his hand too tightly as we left the house and walked to the car. Polly stood on the step waving, her face a small pale blob in the dour air. I sat behind the wheel and watched her, wishing that just for a moment the clouds would clear and we might see each other as we really were, naked and unadorned, all armour stripped away. The sky darkened; the clouds massed, huge leviathans grouping together for protection in an unruly sea.
We fed the ducks and Danny played on the wet swings, the soaked slide, the damp roundabout. There were no other kids around, and when the rainfall once again intensified, we went back to the car. His grip on my hand was a reminder of everything I had lost, and was still losing. I didn't want him to ever let go.
Thank God the rain hid my tears; it isn't fitting for a boy to see his father weep.
5
I didn't get home until late, and when I entered the flat my answer phone was flashing to indicate that I had a message. No one ever rang me; I had no friends. Who the hell was calling, and what could they possibly want from me?
I took off my coat, poured a large whisky, and pressed the button to receive the message.
"Simon? Hello, mate, it's Mick. From work. Listen, I heard about what happened with you and that wanker Brendan yesterday. I'm going to a party tonight at my girlfriend's place, and thought you might like to come along. No pressure. Here's the address..."
I listened to the message twice, both annoyed and grateful for Mick's invitation. We'd worked together for five years and this was the first time he'd asked me out anywhere outside of the office. There had been a few lunchtime pints, the occasional after work social event, but never before had he offered me any kind of genuine friendship. Was I now some kind of charity case, the type of man whom colleagues felt sorry for and tried to throw a lifeline?
But Mick was a good guy. His heart was in the right place. I checked the fridge for beer and discovered that I had only one bottle left. The whisky was dwindling, the vodka gone. It was a choice between popping out to the off licence later or going to the party and getting drunk with other people rather than sitting alone.
I decided to attend the party, more out of a vague sense of desperation than anything else: I figured it was less sad to drink with people you didn't know than it was to drink yourself into a lonely stupor.
The place was in an area not far from where I lived but I didn't fancy the walk, so I ordered a taxi and finished off my alcohol supply while I waited for it to arrive. The taxi drove through streets I wasn't that familiar with, past derelict high rises and a burned out church; cars were propped up on bricks, their wheels stripped; gangs of youths hung around on corners outside wire-wreathed shops with dusty window displays. The driver never spoke; he hummed along instead to whatever weird music was playing on his radio.
I got out of the taxi outside a terraced house on a dingy street. A handful of people stood on the dreary lawn smoking cigarettes in the drizzle, a light with a red filter shone bleakly in the small front room, dance music spilled out of the open front door.
I made my way along the path and entered the house, ignored by the smokers. A tall, pale woman sat on the stairs talking quietly into a mobile phone, not even bothering to compete with the music. She looked up at me, smiled. She wore a stainless steel dental brace on her front teeth. I raised a hand and continued along a narrow hallway into what I suspected was the kitchen. Here were cans and bottles on every available surface. A tubby man was bending over to open the fridge. He took out a can of lager, turned, smiled, and walked through another door into the room with the red light.
"Hi." I turned to see the tall woman from the stairs as she entered the room. She was wearing a long, flowing hippy-style dress and no shoes. Her feet were magnificently long, the toes slender and elegant. She had long red hair and light eyes. Her skin was so pale that it was almost white.
"Hi," I said again, grasping a bottle, any bottle, from the table. "I'm a friend of Mick's."
She looked at me with a quizzical expression, tilting her head to one side and pursing her lips. She looked achingly cute, but I knew that was the alcohol speaking to me.
"Mick who?"
I searched my brain for Mick's surname, but it wouldn't come. "Erm... shit, I forget. I work with him, at Gleason's"
She shook her head, the expression now one of mild amusement. The light caught her braces, glinting off the burnished steel wire when she opened her mouth.
"Bishop. Mick Bishop. That's his name." I drank vodka straight from the bottle, grimaced at the taste. When I looked at the bottle in my hand I didn't recognise the brand.
"Thirsty? Here, take this." Her thin hand took a small shot glass from a nearby shelf. She walked over, towering above me, and handed me the glass. She really was the tallest women I had ever met. In that weird moment, when our hands touched, I thought she was beautiful.
"Thanks." I poured the no-name vodka onto the glass, my hands shaking. I drank two shots before I was able to even look her in the eye.
"I don't know anyone called Mick Bishop." She was still standing before me, right up inside my personal space. I didn't want her to move away.
"Oh. Fuck. Have I come to the wrong party?"
"No," she said, smiling, touching my hand again. "There's no such thing as the wrong party."
As was becoming my habit lately, I didn't know what to say, how to respond. So I took another drink. What was going on here? It seemed that suddenly, in the depths of my desperation, I had become irresistible to women. No, not every woman: just a certain type, someone equally as damaged as me. I glanced at this girl's bloodless lips, the ugly braces, the tattoos on her calves, the faint, white and almost unnoticeable – unless you were looking for them – scars on her wrists and forearms. "What's your name?"
"Names don't really matter. They aren't important. What matters is how we connect, how we communicate." She moved closer, our hips touching through the thin material of her dress. Her hand – so thin, so elegant – came up and she brushed her piano-players' fingers against my stubbled cheek.
"Yeah," I said.. "I suppose so."
The nameless woman rubbed her lower body against me; her sheer height alone felt like a sexual threat. "Do you know the best way to communicate?" Her face seemed suddenly huge, monstrous as it lowered towards me, snatching away my view of the ceiling.
I stepped back, shocked and appalled by my reaction to this attempted seduction, lost in a moment over which I had no control. "I think I should be going now. My friend – he'll be expecting me." I ducked under her outstretched arms and made for the door, still carrying the vodka bottle. It was almost full; no way was I going to leave it behind.
At the end of the hallway, clustered around the front door, was a group of people. They were deep in conversation, animated almost to the point of aggression. Two men stood face to face; their mouths were twisted into snarls. A few women stood at the perimeter of this ensemble, trying to calm things down. I fled up the stairs, looking for the bathroom.
She stood at the top of the stairs, watching me. She had been watching me for some time – perhaps ever since I'd entered the house. The patterned wallpaper was ugly and out of dat
e, the carpet was filthy, dead flowers littered the windowsill behind her, their dried-out leaves spilling onto the floor.
"Diane?"
It was the kind of coincidence that only ever happened in stories or films, and for a brief moment I was taken out of myself and saw my entire existence as the plot of a book, with some obsessive writer tapping away at the keyboard to create every scene that made up the sordid little story of my life. It was a strange moment, surreal in its intensity; I shifted sideways out of myself, turned and looked at the jaded man who stood before a woman at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs, lost in the weird fiction of his life.
"What are you doing here?" She took a step forward, coming out of the shadows, her eyes wide and bright. "I never expected to see you again." She held out one of her broad hands, the fingers splaying open, drawing me in. The snake tattoo wriggled under her chin.
"I don't know. I was supposed to be somewhere else, in another place. It's like a cosmic communication breakdown: everything I'm told has another, entirely different meaning."
"Come here." Her eyes held a sadness that was beyond my ability to fathom; its depths swam with strange things, otherworldly thoughts and images.
I went to her, my arms at my sides, my face thrust forward. She leaned in and kissed me, her lips dry, sticking to my teeth as I opened my mouth to accept her tasteless tongue. We moved towards a closed door at the far end of the landing, our movements driven by a force bigger than us both,
"They tell me no one ever uses this room. It's been locked for years. Somebody once died in there – a previous tenant. It's supposed to be haunted. I got the key from a girl downstairs, a tall, pale girl who talks in riddles. She has metal teeth, like a cage for her words."
Diane opened the door. It swung inwards, pushing back a mass of dusty darkness; a million silent screams were caught up in that web of airborne particles, desperate to be unleashed upon the world. Diane gently pushed me inside, sticking close, her breasts pressed against my back, her arms straying around my waist from behind to fumble at my crotch.
She closed the door, trapping us there, in the dead dust and the heavy air and the atmosphere of neglect.
The bed was dusty, too, a fine layer covering the bed sheets. She pulled back the sheets and slipped between them, pushing her skirt down over her hips. She undressed lying on her back, shrugging of her clothes as if they were a second, unwanted skin. I watched her, entranced, taken in by the smooth curve of a thigh, the musky promise of the damp thatch between her short, wide legs.
I followed her down, still fully clothed. She fumbled with the zip on my jeans, loosening my belt, wrapping her sturdy legs around me and tugging down my pants with her agile feet. I was already hard; I had been hard forever, ready for her since our last barely remembered meeting.
"Don't speak." She whispered directly into my ear. Her breath was warm and wet. The words were maggots crawling, burrowing their way inside my skull. "Say nothing. Just fuck."
At first our rhythm was off and I kept slipping out of her, but she quickly guided me back inside. After several minutes something clicked and we moved together, our bodies singing the same debauched tune. I grasped her hard buttocks, raking the flesh; she held the sides of my head, pulling the hair above my ears so hard that it hurt. Our desperation created something that held a rude beauty, a nasty poetry that only we could hear. The silence in the room thickened; even our breathing was quiet, as if heard from behind a barrier.
It lasted forever and was over in minutes. I rolled off her, strangely elated. Her leg rested against my thigh; one of her hands held onto my dwindling prick, unwilling to let go of the heat radiating from my core.
Several figures stood in the grubby darkness, gathered around the bed and staring down at us. I couldn't be sure if the image was real or just a continuation of the same set of visions I'd been experiencing for days. The figures' outlines were blurred, almost bleeding into the blackness that still filled the room like a thickening fluid.
Each of the figures was locked into a familiar silent scream. Huge black toothless maws that seemed to breathe in the night, or perhaps exhale it like a vapour. They were unmoving, like shop window mannequins. I strained to discern individual features, but it was too dark and my eyes were watering from exertion. Just as I began to think that they were indeed real, the figures were gone. They did not fade, nor did they pop out of existence like cartoon phantoms.
They simply became a part of the darkness, as if returning to their natural state.
Diane got up and padded naked across the room. She looked in the mirror that hung on the wall near a closet. I could see no reflection in the glass; the mirror was dark, like a window into another world. She combed her hair with her wide, clumsy fingers, and then patted it down, flattening it where it stuck out in bunches from the sides of her head.
"Diane?"
She did not respond. There was something strange – something awful and almost obscene – about her movements. I could not pin the sensation down, but it felt wrong to observe her in this way, a little like watching someone die.
"Diane."
Slowly, smoothly, as if on casters, she turned to face me. Her hands were held fisted at each side of her face. Her mouth was wide, a perfect black circle. She stood there, nailed to the spot, as I struggled out of bed and pulled up my pants, and fastened my trousers. When I glanced back at the bed, Diane lay sleeping where I'd left her; I looked again at the spot next to the wall-mounted mirror, and the silently screaming effigy had not moved.
I don't know how I found my way downstairs, but the next time I was able to think clearly I was stumbling along an ill-lit street, following the white line in the middle of the road. There was a bottle in my hand. It was almost full. When it was empty, I'd find an all-night store and restock. There was always somewhere open; always someone willing to sell you a bottle of slow suicide.
I drank, demanding that the spirit inside the bottle erase the memory of this night.
6
The news of Polly's death reached me early the following day. Once again I'd pre-empted a hangover by drinking my breakfast. I resisted the urge to try whisky on my cornflakes and opted instead to forget about the cereal and head straight for the bottle. I didn't even bother washing a glass; the feel of the bottleneck against my lips was becoming something of a comfort.
I answered the phone, and before I could even speak Polly's mother launched into an angry tirade:
"Are you happy now, you bastard?" I'd never heard her swear before, and it startled me. "You've done it. You've finally killed her." Choking sobs, a muted cry that she was struggling to control.
"Debra... what is it? What's happened?" My mind churned; it felt like someone had upended a blender in my brain and switched it on at full blast.
"She's dead. Haven't you heard? A hit and run late last night. She was on her way back from trying to see you."
I thought it was a joke, a stupid fucking set-up. Mick getting back at me for not attending his girlfriend's party, or someone I didn't know choosing me as some kind of random victim for a terrible prank.
"Debra..."
"She went to see you at your place. To sort things out, to get things settled before she moved. You weren't in – probably out getting drunk or stoned, or fucking some whore. So she turned around and set off back home." Again, her use of profanity almost floored me. "She was hit by a car when she crossed the road. Still had her car keys and her mobile phone in her hand when they found her, lying in the gutter with her bones broken and her skull smashed!"
I couldn't grasp this, not any of it. Everything was moving too fast; the wheels were falling off whatever crazy fairground ride I'd stepped onto without knowing.
"Debra..."
"Is that all you can say? Is there nothing else? You sad, selfish little prick.
I wish I could kill you. I wish I could stab you in that cold, black heart and watch you die!"
The phone went dead.
Polly was dead?
It couldn't be true.
"Fuck you," I screamed. "Why have you done this?" I railed at the imaginary author of my life, the stupid little god of my stupid little tale. Was he smiling, pleased with the scene he had just created? Did my pain please him? Was he, even now, thinking about where it might be published?
Unable to communicate even with myself, I grabbed the whisky bottle and began to drink. I didn't stop until I'd forgotten my own name, until I'd pissed myself and shit myself and murdered myself inside my head a thousand times.
* * * * *
It was dark. Night. The front of my shirt was covered in vomit. My trousers were dirty, the knees torn and bloodied. My hands were bloody, the knuckles scraped; my face ached, bruises forming around my eyes. I suspected that my nose was broken.
I had no memory of anything after the phone call from Polly's mother. There was just a huge blank, dead space: a period of rage and insanity from which I'd only just emerged. I was amazed that I was even alive; my body hurt so much that I assumed I'd been in a fight – or several fights.
Nothing mattered. It was all just so much nonsense.
I looked around me, unsure where I was. The landscape was urban, ruin tearing at its edges. Empty buildings loomed over me, their jagged sightless windows not even registering my presence. I looked at my watch, but my wrist was bare. I was not wearing any shoes.
A man sat on a concrete windowsill halfway up a tall derelict building. He hung onto the narrow ledge with his feet, like a bird, yet remained still as a statue. A weird urban gargoyle, he was showing me the by now familiar silent scream. One hand rested against the outside of the window mullion; the other was clenched tightly in his lap.
"What do you want from me?" As expected, there came no reply. He just sat there, that terrible black mouth open, a fleshy tunnel leading down into a night far darker than any I had lived through.
