He breakfasted on toast and tea at a café patronized by yellow-jacketed construction crew, long-distance lorry drivers, and staff from the various offices nearby. At 9:30 a.m., he walked to a car park around which were arranged a carpet show room, a garage and an old factory that had been converted into a second-hand bookshop. A bicycle had been padlocked to a security gate in front of the old warehouse roller door, a door that had not seen use since the factory’s closure, some fifteen years before.
Now it was rusted and, in all probability, sealed shut. Access was via a side door plastered with political slogans and stickers and cuttings from local newspapers bemoaning Oxfam’s impact on independent booksellers. Malpas tapped on the glass twice and opened the door.
Clive Grealish was sitting at his customary spot behind the counter, his hands—shaking violently with Parkinson’s disease—attempting to fish a teabag from a mug.
“Good morning, Anders,” he said, as Malpas placed the package on the counter, amid the usual detritus: receipt rolls, books that needed pricing, paper bags, pencils. As usual, Grealish did not look up to acknowledge his old friend. Malpas saw only the top of his head, the upper edges of his brown spectacle frames.
It was quiet in the factory; the thousands of books had dampened sound so that it fell dead at the moment it was made. Beyond the walls, Malpas could hear plenty: the slam of a plastic bin lid, the rattle of an extractor fan, a muted radio, traffic roaring up and down the main road.
Grealish took the bird and hurriedly concealed it within a drawer beneath the counter. Malpas fancied he saw his forehead gleam more sharply; was the man sweating?
“You never look at me, Clive,” he said, “when we talk. And, come to think of it, when we don’t talk, either. When we stand together in ... companionable silence.”
“What of it?” Grealish said, fiddling with his teaspoon.
Malpas gazed off down the narrow aisle that ran through the factory. Every window had been blocked out by volumes.
“Nothing,” Malpas said. “I just wonder, sometimes, if I, well, if there’s something about me that ... unnerves you.”
“Your line of questioning,” Grealish said, and attempted a chuckle that sounded like something ill living just inside his mouth. “That unnerves me.”
“Why?” He was struggling now to remember when or how they had become friends, and whether, after all, “friends” was an inaccurate way of describing their relationship.
“It doesn’t matter,” Grealish said. He opened his wallet and dug out a fifty-pound note. “No more birds, please.”
Malpas was shocked. “But this is my livelihood. You’ve always told me that you have no problem selling them on. And I’ve never asked you for more. I know you must make quite a bit of profit on these—”
“No more birds.” And now he did look at Malpas, and although light glinted off the lenses of his spectacles, obscuring his eyes, Malpas could sense the fear in them. “There’s nothing more I can do for you.”
“What do you mean? I never saw myself as a charity case.”
Footsteps shifted across the floor above. The unmistakable sound of a book being slid from a shelf. Grealish recoiled, as if struck. “I didn’t hear anybody come in,” he said.
“Relax, Clive,” Malpas said. “This is a shop. The door is unlocked. People come here to buy things, don’t they?”
“I’ve been sitting here since I opened up. Nobody came in.” Again he was averting his gaze, as if a small sun had suddenly exploded within Malpas’ face, too bright to behold. He seemed eager to keep talking though, now. It seemed he was fishing for some sort of explanation from Malpas, but he couldn’t give it. Not one that satisfied, at least.
He said: “Maybe you locked him in when you closed yesterday.” It was meant light-heartedly, but Grealish did not take it that way. He stood up, then sat back down, wiped his face with a creased blue handkerchief snatched from his pocket. Malpas was irritated that the focus of their discussion had shifted. He tried to steer Grealish back to the matter of stuffed crows and regular payments, but Grealish was transfixed by the upper floor. His gaze followed an imagined route taken by this phantom customer.
“Clive, it could just be a trapped bird—”
Grealish shot him a hot look then, as if he had said something accidentally profound, but did not answer.
“—or a collapsed bookshelf. You overstock them, you know.”
Grealish agreed, or at least allowed himself to be ameliorated by the suggestion. He said, with a graveness that Malpas found odd: “There are words in this old bookshop that might never be unearthed.”
“We have to talk,” Malpas said. “You can’t just release me like this.”
“Release you,” Grealish said, weakly, his voice barely containing enough air for the words to carry upon it. He said more, but the sense was lost upon the older man. Was it something like If only it were so simple?
“I can’t, I won’t talk now,” Grealish said. He was staring at the puckered, long-sealed wound on Malpas’ hand with grim fascination. “Maybe later. Yes, later. Come back when I close, at seven tonight. We’ll go for a drink.”
He reached out and shook Malpas’ hand in an action that was almost savage; later, Malpas would notice that Grealish had left scratch marks in his skin. There was nothing for it; Grealish had become a closed door, his eyes fast on his accounts ledger, his hands moving ceaselessly, like a cellist applying vibrato to a note. Outside in the weak sunshine, Malpas turned and stared back at the bookshop’s upper floor windows, hoping to catch sight of a warped shelf, or a pigeon fluttering at the glass, trying to escape.
He thought there was a shadow for a second, but noticed that a cloud racing across the sun might have caused a similar effect.
He fingered the crisp banknote in his pocket as he walked back to the bus stop. Where would the money he needed to survive come from now? He shook his head; he simply must force Grealish to U-turn on his decision. He thought of nothing else on the way home and, as he approached the concourse beneath his block of flats, felt a jolt of shock. There, lying by the entrance, was a dead crow. It was as if the ferocity of his concentration had summoned it.
He laughed, a papery little thing. He rubbed his lips and bent over the carcass. The scar on his hand throbbed, as it did whenever he was in the vicinity of these dead birds: some psychosomatic trigger, some sympathetic twinge.
The body was intact, there was no spoiling, no deformation. The bird was almost inviting him to resurrect it, to rediscover its menace and might. Quickly, Malpas scooped it up and placed it in the pocket of his raincoat. He would put his all into this job. He would show Grealish that skills such as his were rare in the extreme. His customers would not find artistry again so easily. He would give them this chance to reconsider.
In the lift up to his floor he paused, felt a moment’s panic. Something Grealish had said, something in the mess of nonsense he had spouted. No more birds. Was that some kind of disguised invitation to carry on, but to bring ... differently? Malpas’ fingers twitched with the key in the lock as he dwelt upon the possible significance of what had been said. Might desperation have muddied his interpretation? Given it a weight that he hadn’t grasped at the time? Was Grealish leaving the door open to him to deliver more ... exotic fauna?
He shook away the thought and strode to the door. Inside, he felt instantly comforted by its old smells of coffee grounds and whisky and soap. He placed the bird on his work surface and shrugged off his jacket. He was tired. It was edging into late afternoon already. He couldn’t work out where the day had gone. He fixed himself a plate of sandwiches and a strong whisky and soda and ate the food standing by the window, looking out at the encroaching dusk.
Movement, something other than the usual winding-down machinations of the buildings and roads that surrounded him. Something that didn’t sit happily with him. He scanned the windows and streets, looking for the awkward, or the ill-fitting, or the plain wrong.
A woman
shook a rug out of her fifteenth-story window. Two men with gelled hair laughed on their way to the main road, shoes buffed, shirts open to the throat in defiance of the chill. A man in a suit cycled past. He imagined it to be a father hurrying home to play with his son. Sometimes, Malpas dreamed he could feel the warm magic of a boy’s scalp beneath his fingers, but he would always wake alone, cheated of such fancy, and would feel diminished for it.
Movement again. This time he latched on to it. In the concrete mandala that formed a centerpiece to the three towers, he saw the blind man from the previous day, mooching around near a bench. His movements were jerky, as if Malpas were watching a poorly rendered sequence from a stop-motion film. He seemed to be staggering. Malpas wondered if he was all right.
He raised his fingers to his tired eyes and rubbed, gently. He heard the gentle susurration of his eyebrows as his knuckles brushed against them. When he opened his eyes again, the blind man was staring directly at him. Malpas stepped back, involuntarily, as if the heat from the man’s gaze had been palpable.
He reached out a hand and switched off the lamp. Presently, he felt brave enough to return to the window. The blind man was gone. But gone where? And why should it bother him so? He had seen him twice in two days. That was hardly grounds for suspicion.
Perhaps he was not so blind. Dark glasses and a white stick didn’t mean that he didn’t have some vision. Blindness never really meant total blindness, did it?
He looked down at his hands to find them shaking, an awful parody of Grealish’s disease. He could not work like this. He fixed himself another, weaker drink, and turned on the taps in the bathtub. He fetched the radio and tuned it to a channel broadcasting political debate. He needed other voices; it didn’t matter what they were talking about.
When the water was just this side of uncomfortably hot, Malpas undressed and immersed himself, by gasping degrees. The heat and the background babble and the whisky helped to loosen the tension in his shoulders and back. He was aghast at the extent of his unraveling. Every day he must be drawn tight as an over-wound watch. It was no way for a man approaching retirement age to live his life. He must do more for himself. Find time to relax. Make time in which to treat himself like this.
He laid his head against the back of the tub and allowed the water to come up around his ears. He closed his eyes and placed a hot, sodden flannel over his face. Blind now, like you. What do you see? What do you think of? What extra do you hear?
The lift doors opening on his floor. The scuff of shoes along the corridor. The push of air as the swing doors are opened. That’s what you hear.
He sat up, abruptly, in the bath, his buttocks squeaking on the acrylic. He pulled away the flannel and cold air assaulted his skin. He felt his flesh pimple, despite the hot water. Malpas thought he could hear the door being tested. The hinges creaked, the letterbox inched open and closed. He imagined hands pressed against the wood, feeling for weak spots, measuring resistance. Or it could just be the remnants of this stressful day, jangling around in his dark places.
He got out of the bath and wrapped a towel around his torso. He gazed at the line of light beneath his front door: unbroken. There was nobody out there. To confirm this, he strode over to the door and yanked it open. The corridor was empty. Malpas stared for a while at the area in front of his door, where a faded sisal mat haltingly bade WELCOME, as if he could see the footprints of another, a heat signature, shimmers in the air to suggest a recent presence.
He was about to close the door when a jinking shadow on the wall at the end of the corridor caught his attention: its author was descending the stairs. Malpas’ courage was such that he almost called out a hello to halt the intruder and invite him back. Have it out. Bring about a resolution. But even as he thought this, the shadow grew still, as if it had caught the flavor of his intent.
It spooked Malpas. It was as if, although it could only be coincidence, he was being read, anticipated.
Malpas closed the door, and, as an afterthought, trying to shut his mind to the ludicrousness of the situation, shunted all thought of who this person was, or might be, from his mind.
If you cast him out, he can’t ... smell you.
And that was the nub of it, the thing that bothered Malpas most. He felt as if he were being subtly hunted. And that his exposure was down to him. His own behavior had allowed this proximity. Someone was tracking him down.
He dressed quickly and approached his work area. Routine and familiarity flooded him with calm, with confidence. Work would drive out the fear from his body, at least for a little while. As before, he positioned the bird, stretched out its wings against the jealous clench of rigor mortis, and reached for his scalpel. In the second his eyes were averted from the carcass, there came a voice, cracked, tiny, filled with loathing:
Don’t you touch me. Don’t you cut me.
Malpas did not look again at the crow. He put down his tools and stood up straight. He wiped away a tear and went to the door where he shrugged on his raincoat. He stood there, in the dark, for a few seconds, but there was only quiet now.
It almost might not have happened, but the voice was like soil under the fingernails, difficult to get out. He opened the door and a figure shrouded in shadow peeled back its hood, and a layer or two of what writhed within it, to show him the decaying mouth that he would spend forever being crammed into ...
If only. Death, suddenly, felt like the sweetest release from this tiring life.
He closed the door, wondering for a mad second if he should not have opened a window so that the bird could find its way home, and shuffled off in the direction of his pursuer, down the stairs, into the street, where mist was piling in off the canal and the streetlights were splintering with all the moisture in the air.
He walked for two hours, avoiding the buses, wishing to stave off the various unpleasant possibilities for as long as he could. Finally, he reached the industrial wasteland. No cars or people around now, just acres of lonely concrete and steel and glass. Exotic weeds—that would have been ignored during the day—shivered in a cracked forecourt, becoming something alien, something out of faerie. Through the fear, or perhaps enhanced by it, grey, uninteresting things could be seen to possess beauty.
He stood for a while, freezing cold and stiffening already from his marathon walk, but rapt at the coils and flutes and spines that frothed from every acid-green nub on its slender stem. There was a pattern here, as there was in everything in nature, he thought. Fingerprints on everything. A cipher beyond the skill of any master code-breaker.
For a moment, he thought he had it. A maddening glimpse of what it meant to be alive, but then a shroud was drawn back over the answer, and perhaps that was for the best, for what mind could cope with such knowledge without going utterly mad?
Roused from this torpor, he cast about him, trying to get a sense of where he was in relation to the factory. Everything seemed different in the dark, without people and traffic to provide some kind of milling compass. But there was an angle of office block, and the zig-zag of a fire escape attached to it, that snagged on his memory. Up ahead, in a building he could not yet see the edges of, lights burned in the windows still, while all around was absolute black. His heart jumped at this, and he took it as a good sign.
The door was still unlocked. Not so good. Not so good.
“Clive?” he called out. His voice seemed to alter the balance of the factory. A dozen different creaks and groans and sighs came to him as the shop’s walls realigned itself around this sudden acoustic assault. But none of them, he was sure, were organic. “Clive?”
He stared at the counter. It was an object lesson in chaos, as usual, but it seemed there was something else about it, something violent. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about that layout told him that his friend and patron was dead.
There was no blood. No scorch marks from a sawn-off shotgun. No smell of eroded leather and wood from a beaker of flung hydrochloric acid. Just ... something in t
he crazed arrangement of papers. Perhaps Grealish’s hand, as it slid back across the surface, making its final adjustments, had the signature of death about it.
Whatever it was, Malpas approached the counter expecting to find the worst. Instead he looked down upon an empty seat. Grealish did not lie beneath it, his face slackened by the immense boredom of eternity. A half-finished mug of tea was cold on the countertop.
He made two tours of the factory, calling Clive’s name every few seconds. There was no sign of him in any aisle. The airbrushed faces of celebrities in the biographical section grinned at him at the things they had witnessed. Paperback jackets in the crime and horror section offered every possible suggestion as to what might have happened. The dust in here had been disturbed and redistributed, added to by whatever had come to take Grealish away. For surely, he had been kidnapped. Malpas’ panic would not allow any rational alternative.
He went behind the counter—the floor was covered in newspapers and invoices and dockets—and reached for the phone, intent on allowing the police to sort out the matter, when he saw himself disappear into the corner of a small, black-and-white screen.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 37
