Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  A LOCK-UP GARAGE in the south of the city that he had broken into. A bottle of cheap wine. The remains of a bad chicken sandwich from a petrol station’s shop. Was this all he had left? Everyone with whom he came into contact had left him or died. Everything he owned had been reduced to rubble.

  Will spread the tabloid on top of the crate and shifted his position on the cold, uncomfortable stone floor. There hadn’t been a car in this garage for years, although a black oil-stain proved that it had once been used for that purpose. Now it seemed the garage was used primarily by tramps, or crack-smokers. Someone had tried to set fire to the garage and succeeded only in blackening the walls and leaving behind a permanent sour-scorched smell. There was a sleeping bag in the corner, but it looked too ragged and stained to offer any comfort. Inexplicably, a garden rake and a broken hockey stick leant against the wall. The only other object in the garage was a cardboard box filled with swollen, mouldy paperback books.

  The death toll from the previous day’s accident had reached a thousand. Of those, around six hundred had died on the ground. The number of victims was apparently increasing by the minute. Emergency crews weren’t rising to the questions asked of them by grisly reporters as to the likely final total. The newspapers had gone ahead with their guesstimates anyway. There were a lot of noughts.

  Had Parliament been in session... they fantasised, lustily. If the crash had taken place at rush hour...

  Will’s thoughts turned to that beautiful rippling mass at the centre of the inferno. It had resembled a wall of water, or of molten steel. He wanted it so badly. He could almost feel what it would be like to immerse himself in that thing. He might displace the surface without breaking it for some time, like the dimpling that a waterboatman’s legs create on the surface tension of a pond. He might suddenly burst through its pellicle in a sudden implosion of silver bubbles. He could taste a bright, fresh flavour – what an apple might taste of if it were a hybrid of fruit and steel – feel the gush, a slight astringent sting, through his nostrils. Brilliant shivers against the skin. What might there be to see on the reverse? He had to have it.

  But there were no more dates from Christopher. The Graham Greene novel’s dark itinerary ended with this crash. He rubbed at the inked appointments as if believing that some final secret date might reveal itself from the smudges he was creating. He sat for a long time, trying to remember what Catriona’s laughter was like or how her lips felt on his body. He couldn’t do it. His memory wasn’t up to the task. Or was it that, as he shed the people who connected to his life, they became intrinsically, essentially unimportant? They didn’t have immediacy any more. They were memory. And memory faded. When Will died, he thought, Catriona would cease to exist for anybody anywhere. It would be as though she had never set foot on the planet.

  Will pushed himself away from the crate, suddenly aware of the panic in his breath and the restive knock of his heart. Had Catriona existed at all? What proof had he that she had been there? If he met a stranger and tried to convince him of the reality of a woman that he had loved, that stranger might be as unmoved as the garden rake by the wall. He wouldn’t have to believe in her because he didn’t care. Whether she had existed meant nothing to anybody who had never met her.

  Will jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes. She means something to me. But how could that be true, when remembering the colour of her eyes, or which of her breasts bore a pair of freckles, defeated him? He spent more time now thinking of the perfect stillpoint that announced itself in the midst of chaos than he did the thousands of seconds he had spent with Catriona.

  He flung the Greene at the cardboard box and grabbed the rake. If Catriona did not matter to him, then how could anybody else expect to?

  “IT’S DIFFERENT,” SHE said.

  “How?” he challenged. “I can’t see any change.”

  “Look.” She took his hand and led him along the path. The black sun burned fiercely in a white sky scratched with black chalk clouds. “The last time we were here, just for those few seconds, these buildings here were fine.”

  Sean looked at the buildings, then looked at Emma. He didn’t get it. Patiently, she described how the windows of the building, the last time they were there, were clean and whole. Now some of them bore cobwebs and greasy smears. Some of them were cracked or missing. Others had been boarded up.

  “So?”

  “So nothing. So something. So what?”

  They walked on. It was too new an experience and too much of a relief to have cheated death to allow a coldness to develop between them. Sean apologised.

  “It’s okay,” Emma said. “It’s been a bad day.”

  Had he been disappointed to find a humdrum city through such a magical, awe-inspiring door? It had not been high on his list of expectations. He found himself wondering if they had passed through into a different place at all, when he saw the people on street corners chatting while they toted carrier bags rammed with food, or dogs crouching in the gutter, emptying their bowels. It didn’t appear to possess anything to mark it out from the place they had departed. No angels. No dragons. No Cheshire cat.

  “What’s this place called, do you think?” he asked. “The Zoo, as Pardoe said?”

  “We could invent a name for it, if you like.”

  “I’m sure it already has a name.”

  “Why? It might not. Just because it seems familiar to you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be called something like Stoke or Liverpool or Hull.”

  Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of the nuances to which she alluded. It was a little bit like playing spot the difference. A police car might flash past and it would be a full minute before he suspected, the image catching up with him, that the C in POLICE painted on the bonnet was actually a K. POLIKE. But it was after the fact that he had these intuitions. He couldn’t check them out. The next time he saw a police car, the letters were spelled correctly, but after the car was long gone, he started doubting there had been anybody sitting inside it. A bird flitting from the branch of a rare tree was gone before he could ascertain whether or not it owned a beak. They turned a corner just as the corner of his eye insisted that a woman walking down some steps to a wine bar was shedding little pieces of her body. A bus roared by, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust, which blinded him to his initial sighting of a man in the window taking bites out of a badger.

  By the time they reached the end of the long, busy street, his head was pounding.

  “I need to slow down a bit,” he said. “Can we have a rest?”

  In the rear of a coffee shop, well clear of the entrance, Sean rubbed his head and sipped hot chocolate from a large mug. Whatever else was out of whack about this place, his drink was real, almost life-affirmingly hot and sweet. He warmed his hands on the mug and looked around him, catching his reflection in a mirror that eclipsed one entire wall. His eye had recovered well and a surreptitious peeling back of his cuff revealed a completeness about the flesh, where it had been riven. Only a slight discoloration remained, the razor’s route outlined in white.

  Emma was resting her head in her hands, regarding him across the table through the steam from her green tea. The bullet’s path through her throat had left scarring but already the wound was sealing itself. Being here seemed to have changed her, slightly. Her eyes seemed to contain less white; the iris was fatter here. When she spoke or breathed, tiny, almost imperceptible vibrations spoilt the air around her lips. Sudden movement caused a similar disruption. He saw it as he stirred his drink with a spoon. He saw it too blur a woman’s head behind the counter as she sneezed. Watching for too long made him feel nauseous.

  “I can’t believe that the hill we dreamed about will be a part of this place,” he said. “It all seems too busy.”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “It’s busy, but it seems manageable. Best we don’t give up on it before we’ve started. We’ll get there in the end.”

  Sean nodded and drained his mug. He had
noticed another subtle upheaval: the change in their dynamic. Before arriving here, Sean had definitely driven their progress and felt, sometimes, that he was shielding Emma. Now the balance of power had shifted. He felt good about that. He felt comfortable. She reassured him as much, he hoped, as he reassured her.

  “It doesn’t seem so noisy, outside, does it?”

  Emma picked out her tea bag and discarded it on the saucer. “Well, we’re underground.”

  “I know, but still. The din up there was awful.”

  The din, when they returned to street level, was still awful, but Sean couldn’t shake the belief that it had been reintroduced as they came back to it. As if it was all for their benefit. Something about these people too, so vital, so vocal, hinted of only recent animation. When he voiced his concerns to Emma, she seemed uninterested. “You might be right,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sinister. It’s just different.”

  They continued down the street, happy for now just to absorb the newness of this experience. It was nice to not have a direction in mind. To not have immediate purpose. “Do you think she can come through too?” Sean asked. He didn’t feel he needed to qualify the “she”.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if she does, she’s different too.”

  Sean fell into step beside Emma. He held her hand and tried to accept the differences around him. He couldn’t accept that there might come a time when they would never seem alien to him. He turned his head, too late, as a door snicked shut. He looked at Emma but she hadn’t seen. Or if she had, she happily accepted that a man could reach into his own chest, pull out his beating heart, put it to his ear and return it, seemingly satisfied, back inside.

  THEY CORNERED WILL in a school.

  He had been shot in the leg and he could feel blood still seeping out of the wound, even though he had tied his belt around the calf, just above the bullet’s point of entry. How had it come to this? He didn’t understand. It was frightening, really, to consider how far, how rapidly, one could fall from what had been, on the face of it, an unassailable position.

  It had all gone wrong so quickly. He had stalked up the high street with his rake, but all his intentions had been spirited away the moment he started trying to choose victims. Should he take the lives of the old or the sick? Might he get the same result if he killed a dog? The beggar sitting outside the bank? Who would miss him?

  In the end, his choice was taken from him. He accidentally tripped up a man of about twenty with the handle of the rake that he was dragging along behind him. The man’s mouth was full of the anaemic pie he clutched in one hand. The other was stretched around the shoulders of his girlfriend, an older woman on the heavy side, with features that seemed to be concentrated too much at the centre of a large face. It was as if someone had fed a hook through the back of her head and was trying to pull the face inside. She wore a large, billowing white T-shirt and leggings that emphasised podgy, orange-peel thighs.

  “Ot the uckinell jaffink...” the youth began. A blue tattoo teardrop clung to a cheekbone. Across the knuckles of the pie-wielding hand, more blue: LUVV.

  “Paste him, Teddy. Go on.” The pinched singularity of the woman’s face made little tremors as she spoke. A rouged pinhole at the centre was plugged with a cigarette that she sucked violently.

  The man looked at his girlfriend, looked at his pie, and looked at Will. Then he dropped the pie and extravagantly slapped invisible crumbs from his fingers. Then he swaggered forwards, rotating his shoulders, lifting his arms, and waggling his hands. “Kincomonden! Come on!”

  Will raised the rake and slashed it across the youth’s face. He saw the tines bite into the flesh and lift it clear of the boss of his skull before the tissue tore and the rake came free. The youth screamed and dropped to his knees, clasping his face to stop it from dribbling clean off the bone. Blood made red gloves for his hands. The pinched face on the girl relaxed and the cigarette dangled from her mouth, threatening to ignite the fuzz on her chin. She looked suddenly vulnerable, but then she breathed deeply and screamed for the police.

  Will hit the youth on the back of the head, but had to stop to be sick when the teeth were hindered on their way out by the grinding of bone that he felt work its way through the handle of the rake. The youth was squealing, his face ashen. His eyes were closed.

  Wiping his mouth, Will yanked again on the rake, which came free with a sucking noise. Something was spitting and bubbling out of the back of the youth’s head. He didn’t wait to see what it was, but swung the rake a final time, forcing the tines through the youth’s throat. He might well have been dead before that moment, but now Will was certain of it. He looked wildly around him. The street had filled up quickly, to rubberneck.

  “Come on,” Will beseeched the sky. “Come on!” Blood from the rake, held aloft, splashed on his forehead.

  The spectators drew back, thinking he was addressing them. A siren came to them through the streets and all heads turned in its direction. Will ran. Where was it?

  In the playground of the school he had grabbed a girl and dragged her into a classroom. He sat on the floor with her while the evacuation went on around him. He heard lots of sirens wailing in the distance and cars pulling up on the road outside the school. There was a helicopter too. Someone said something he couldn’t understand through a loudhailer. He ignored it and soon they stopped trying.

  They played Snap. She told him her name was Fiona and described what she had received for Christmas. On the way back from a visit to the toilet, he was shot in the leg by a police marksman. Now Will and the girl were sitting in the corridor, with their backs to the wall, beneath the window through which he had been fired at.

  “Does it hurt?” Fiona asked him. Her brown hair was in bunches. On her finger there was a plaster that she was now picking at.

  “Only when I go jogging,” he said. She laughed.

  He wondered if Catriona might have given birth to a girl. They both had hoped for a daughter. Cat had said it felt like a girl even though it was her first child and she wouldn’t have known if a boy felt any different.

  “Do you want to do some colouring in?” he asked her. He was so tired.

  She brightened at this idea and nodded her head. She said, “You can help. I’ve got a farmyard to do. Can you colour in the chickens?”

  He nodded. “Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

  She ran back to the classroom. He heard the static of radios going mad as the snipers reported this. A minute later, he heard a door clicking open and footsteps in the corridor. He didn’t look up.

  “I have a gun,” he said. “In my pocket.”

  A calm voice, surprisingly young, told him to lie on the floor, face down, with his hands on his head.

  “I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

  “It would be more helpful to us if you did,” came the voice.

  “I’m tired of being helpful. I didn’t kill my wife, you know. Everyone reckons I did. But I didn’t. I didn’t do quite as much as I might have done to help her, but I didn’t kill her.” Now he looked up into the face of a young man, a ridiculously young man, holding a Heckler and Koch submachine gun. Will remembered running around a playground like the one outside when he was little, pretending to be a British soldier, or, if he drew the short straw, a German. Pretending to hold a Tommy gun. Pretending to spray the enemy with bullets while you made that noise with your tongue and your teeth: Ddddrrrrrrrrraaa! Ddddrrrrrrra!

  The armed policeman said, “It doesn’t bother me what you did or didn’t do. We can sort all that out later. You need some rest.”

  Will nodded. “Lots of it,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: KATHEUDO

  HE OPENED HIS eyes and the sound was all around him. Incessant whispers, nervy bleatings, a cacophony that set his teeth on edge. The tree behind him bore a mass of black parrots chiding him like bitchy next-door neighbours. The stench from the parrots scratched at th
e back of his throat. White guano streaked the tree and turned its tarry bark into a nonsense emulsion, gleaming as it ran and set in the midnight sunlight. It wasn’t the parrots making the noise. He couldn’t see where the noise was coming from. Or what it meant, for clearly they were words: sibilants and fricatives multiplied by the many voices until form was lost to a hellish, snake-like hissing.

  Will sat upright. He was perched on the edge of a path. Behind him, an ocean he couldn’t put a name to exploded repetitively on a shingle beach. On the other side of the path, a rank of houses turned tawny-coloured, peeling faces to the view. Made from tired wood, with overgrown gardens and gates that sagged like Friday-night drunkards, not one of the houses looked remotely habitable from Will’s vantage point.

  Will too felt a little inebriated. Gathering himself, he rose, which brought a fresh, sarcastic chorus from the parrots. They flapped their wings, exposing deep-red feathers, and points of wild light, as if they were dotted with sequins or bits of broken glass. The air was warm and sweetly spiced, much like his mother’s kitchen had been when he was a boy. She made apple pies on Sunday mornings. Bramley apples that collapsed in a pan with a little more sugar than was strictly necessary. She put cinnamon in the pies, an idea that she pinched from the Americans. They were good pies, especially if they were served hot, with vanilla ice cream.

  His mind on pies, he crossed the street to the houses and tried to remember what had happened in the seconds before he became aware again. It was no use. All he could picture was a childish face being obliterated by a black hole that became suddenly, intensely white, splintering like glass in his eyes.

  The houses, as he had believed, were uninhabited. Through the windows he saw sofas that sagged with invisible bodies, and tables laid for a coming meal. Coats were piled on the newel post of stairs littered with childhood gear. Now and again, Will would blink, thinking that he saw movement. A hand on the banister; the shadow preceding a body, approaching along the hallway; a dog’s tail wagging. But it was all periphery. Whenever he jerked his head to catch the mote, it would be gone. A flaw in the eye, then. A blight on his focus.