Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  “I know what you mean,” Will said. “I’ve been wandering around as though I’ve been lost, but not once have I panicked about it. It’s like I’ll turn a corner at some point and there will be a lane that I recognise, or a house belonging to somebody I know.”

  “Not this one, though?” Joanna said, pointing to the building that loomed above them, on a small incline that formed a welcome mat to a dense, purple mass of strangled trees behind it.

  “Afraid not,” Will said.

  “Thank you for helping me,” she said, as Will reached up to ring the doorbell. He turned to thank her. And in that second, the light in the window went out.

  Joanna said, “Ah.”

  “That’s encouraging,” Will observed, and rang the bell anyway. They waited but nobody came to greet them. A chorus of rasps fell from the trees.

  “Hahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa. You focken eejit! Knock-knock? Who’s there? Some git. Some git who? Some git who’d be better off throwing himself in the sea!”

  Will picked up a rock and hurled it at the branches of the nearest tree. Three or four of the parrots took off, circled, shat at him, and resettled in the trees to blow raspberries or send him the odd extravagant curse.

  “I have an elevated class of friends here,” he said. Joanna wasn’t comforted by his humour, preferring to watch the door intently as a shadow fell upon the pearlescent glass at its heart. It opened a crack and a child’s face peeked out. It couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven. Will’s first impression was that this was the offspring of Alice and George. It unsettled him to the marrow. But then he saw that the likeness those two had shared was not in evidence here. The boy was on the floor, looking up at them.

  “Did you fall over?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Is your mother in?” Will asked, appalled at his feeble voice. The boy shook his head, and then shook it again when Joanna asked to talk to his father.

  “Can we come in then?” Will asked, trying to sound calmer, for the boy’s sake as much as his own. “Wait for them?”

  “I’m not supposed to allow anybody through this door,” the boy stated, in a cultured voice that belied his years. But the statement sounded rote-learned. His eyes were playful and welcoming, as if he was grateful to see somebody who had come to visit. Picking up on this, Joanna asked: “How long have your mummy and daddy been away?”

  The boy let the inch-wide crack of the door grow to a foot. He raised his eyes to the sky, adding and subtracting, the triangular tip of his tongue peeking from between his lips. “A year or so,” he said, carefully.

  Joanna and Will swapped a glance. A parrot in the tree shouted: “Don’t let him in, kid. The peg-selling freak. He’ll have your Action Man! He’ll have your Tonka truck!”

  Joanna squatted on her haunches and smiled at the boy. Even though Will could see she was scared, she still had a beautiful smile. “Can we come in, please? We just need somewhere to rest. And we need a big, brave boy to look after us. We’re both scared.”

  The boy swung the door wide enough for them to enter. The light was poor in the hallway, but they could tell that he had trouble walking. They saw his head jerk in the darkness as he led them deeper into the house, heard his feet flailing spastically against the floorboards.

  “What’s there to be scared of?” he asked, pushing open a door into another room that was darker than the hall. Will tried the light switch but the bulb was gone. Black shapes formed in the gloom. “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll make a fire.”

  When Will’s hand accidentally brushed against Joanna’s, she clasped it tightly. The sofa that they lowered themselves into didn’t seem to have any upholstery. They sank into cushions that were slightly damp and smelled of laundry that had failed to dry properly.

  “What’s there to be scared of?” the boy asked again, as he set about building a small pyre of kindling and folded paper.

  “What’s your name?” Joanna asked.

  “Luke,” said the boy.

  “Luke. Where did your parents go?”

  “One of them went back. One of them went on.”

  “What does that mean?” Having conquered the tremble in his words, he now found he was close to shouting. He couldn’t find a happy medium; hysteria was close all the time. “Do you have to be so cryptic? A straight answer, from anybody, would be nice. Went back where? Went on where? Jesus.”

  Joanna touched his knee. Her eyes were egg-large in the gloom, straining to swallow the most feeble glimmers of light. Will rubbed his face with his hands. It struck him that, throughout all this, his stubble had not grown any longer. He tried to remember the last time he had had a drink. A beer would be good now. A beer would be outstanding.

  “I have been here for so... long,” Luke said, the words packaged in a long sigh. Tiny flames began to tongue at the bundle of tinder, green and blue. They liked the taste and grew. Shivering light enveloped the boy, outlining his shape for Will and Joanna behind him. His legs had no recognisable form; they looked as though they had been removed, fed through a mangle, and then reattached. They flopped around ineffectually as Luke arranged some larger logs around the heart of the fire, and then the boy slithered backwards as its heat became greater. Will didn’t know what to say. Joanna seemed to be trying to say something, but nothing was coming out of her open mouth.

  “I know this place,” Luke said. “Not everyone finds it. Most only stay for a short time.” The words sounded familiar, like old friends. Perhaps the boy had been internally rehearsing them for a long time, and only now was putting a voice to them. “Some time ago, I remembered where I was before I was here. I was in a car with my mother and father. Dad was driving. He was arguing with my mum about money. I was sitting in the back with my colouring book. I was colouring a dragon. I remember I was angry because I didn’t have a green pencil for the scaly skin. Just this awful yellow. Dragons aren’t yellow.

  “I looked up just as Dad lashed out and struck Mum across the face. She hit back and she was swearing at him, telling him she hated him, ordering him to stop the car. She was getting out. She actually opened the door. We were on the motorway. Dad kept telling her to shut up. She hit him again and his hands came off the steering wheel. The car went into a spin and then came off the road and hit a tree. Mum went through the windscreen. Dad’s head was wobbling like a doll’s. I was flying around the back of the car, but my legs were crushed under the chair in front. And then I was sitting on the doorstep outside this place. Mum and Dad were with me for a little while.

  “Raymond Meadows told me at school about coma. His mum is dying from something in her brain. She’s in a coma. That’s where we are now. This is coma. It isn’t any kind of life. And it isn’t any kind of death. Mum went on. Dad went back. And now I’m on my own. I don’t know how long you can stay in a coma for. Maybe for ever. Coma is what we want it to be when we are asleep. I think death is like that too. We make death the way our dreams want it when we sleep. Nobody could accept death if it wasn’t prettified like that.”

  Luke turned, the edge of his face limned with firelight. He giggled nervously. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

  Will tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. His throat clicked with the effort. Joanna’s eyes were filmed with tears.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked, breathlessly.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I was born in 1960.”

  “How did you remember what happened to you?” Will asked. “I can’t remember.”

  “It comes to you. Eventually.”

  Joanna’s mouth was on the verge of collapse. Fear shaded in all the places in her face where age was making a home.

  “What is it?” Will asked.

  Joanna put a hand to her mouth. “Harry, that’s my husband. We... we said to each other once, if ever we were on life support, if there was no hope... we said we’d switch the machine off. He’ll pull the plug on me.”

  THEY ALL DIE on me, Will thought. I try
my best to care for people but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.

  He and Joanna had left the house when the fire became too stifling. They thanked Luke and asked if he wanted to go with them.

  “Go where?” he asked, not unreasonably. “There is nowhere to go. It’s all the same. All different types of badness. The same old badness dressed in different, horrible clothes. What’s the point?”

  The point for Will was to not let the child’s melancholy infect him. But here it was, stringing out visions of Catriona, Elisabeth, Sadie, and now Joanna, all those who had gone with him and paid the price for it. He had fucked up. He remembered now, wanting to die, knowing that he might be able to make a difference from within, knowing that Catriona waited for him somewhere magical. He had lived like a clown. And now he couldn’t even die properly.

  “I don’t know what happens to time here,” he said, as he and Joanna skirted an inky lake that bore awful salty deposits at its edges that resembled claws and faces stretched into different masks of pain. “Maybe it’s condensed or spun out.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ve got,” Joanna said.

  “Maybe it isn’t all that bad,” Will reasoned.

  “I have to remember,” she said. “I have to, otherwise, I’ll die without knowing how I died. How tragic is that?”

  “Is it? I’d rather not know.”

  Joanna sat on the ground, brushing away the twigs that resembled fingers in rigor mortis, and the tiny leaves that were like desiccated eyelids. “My husband, Harry, God, what if he’s here too? I don’t remember if he was with me. What if he died?”

  “Then you won’t be going anywhere. Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”

  But Joanna had ignored his tactlessness. “The last thing he said to me... I can see his face, he looked concerned. And then the flapping all around me.”

  “Birds?”

  Joanna shook her head. “Fabric. Like someone airing a bedsheet, but all around me, as if I was trapped in a bed while somebody was making it. Silk. Lots of billowing silk. And freezing. I was freezing my tits off.”

  “You were sailing, maybe?”

  Joanna snapped her head up at him. “No. Not sails,” she said. “Parachute.”

  JOANNA’S RELIVING OF her sky-diving trauma helped Will in the remembering of his; a kind of trickling down of horror. He flinched as he remembered the barrel of the police rifle empty its contents into his head. It was as if he could follow the trajectory of the bullet enter his temple. It hadn’t taken his life, though. Just his senses. He fingered the bizarre, proud crater now, and saw how what he’d seen as the coquettish angle of Joanna’s neck had been caused by something far more awful.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said. “If you go back. If you get out of here and you’re okay.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  Will held on to her hand, almost desperately. “Remember this. I want you to find me. And help me to die.”

  “But I couldn’t!”

  “Please. You must. I need to die. I have nothing but that. I want nothing but that.”

  It took hours to persuade her but in the end she agreed. Perhaps her relenting, or the forceful way in which he had put his argument, had helped to colour the scenery; either way, it had suffered more erosion. It was as if the heat of his need had scorched away layer after layer of rock and rubble, a gradual onionskin weathering, until everything was level, sanded, clean.

  “What now?” she asked. Her exhaustion had manifested itself in the papery cracks around her mouth, the stone and glass that had filled her eyes. Her voice was the lonely shifting of wind across sand.

  Will said, “We have a train to catch.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: CONTRABAND

  THERE WAS A mini riot kicking off in Blackwood Crescent. The police had set up a cordon and would not allow Sean and Emma to pass.

  “What’s going on?” Emma asked, trying to see further along the street. An armoured police van was parked on the pavement.

  “Families at war,” the police constable told them. “Are you all right, mate? You look like you’ve just been caught up in something like this.”

  “I’m fine. Look, my gran lives in there. Let me through, will you?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  “I’m a copper too. Down in London. Here’s my warrant card.”

  He showed him the defunct credentials that Sally had sent back to him, and the police constable sucked his moustache into his mouth. “Met, eh? Good pay down there is it?”

  “You get by,” Sean said, giving him a grin.

  “Danger money, isn’t it, though?”

  Sean nodded in the direction of the police van. “You say that, but...”

  “Aye. It happens all over, I suppose. Go on then, before my sarge catches me.”

  Sean clapped him on the shoulder and he and Emma slipped through the cordon. He led her down a narrow walkway parallel to the main road. Tough-looking men and tougher-looking women watched their progress, tight-lipped from bedroom windows and back gardens. Dogs barked at them from behind every gate.

  They caught a glimpse of some of the trouble as they neared Billy’s house. Two factions were pointing at each other and arguing heatedly. A policewoman was trying to broker some kind of peace. Two or three of her colleagues were standing by, sniggering into their hands. On its back, smouldering in the centre of the road, was a Ford Ka.

  Sean rang the front doorbell and, too late, remembered how Billy had escaped the last time. A willowy woman poked her head out of the upper window and asked him what the fuck he wanted. Ash from a cigarette clamped between her lips dusted Sean’s beanie. A child was crying inside with rare athleticism. The sound drew goosebumps onto Sean’s skin.

  “Billy,” he said. “Is he in?”

  “He’s playing fucking footie. Try down the park. Now fuck off.”

  The window slammed shut. As they walked away, they heard the woman berating the child, whose response was to take the shrieks up a notch.

  The park was five minutes’ walk from Blackwood Crescent. They could hear the exhortations of the crowd and the snapped instructions of the players. They found a path through some wintry trees to what was little more than a morass with a few blades of green sticking up through it. Labouring in the mud, two teams whose identities had been lost to the plates of dirt that covered their strip, made the air steamy with sweat and foul language. On the touchline, two desolate-looking girlfriends tried to keep warm with cigarettes and gossip.

  “Which one’s Billy?” Emma asked.

  “I couldn’t say. We’ll have to hang around till they’ve finished.”

  Sometimes the muddied ball seemed to get lost, camouflaged by the grey-blue miasma. But then a player would kick it into the air, more often than not falling onto his backside in the process. Tackles were going in all over the pitch; it didn’t seem important for there to be a ball involved sometimes. Minor skirmishes erupted. The referee blew his whistle but nobody noticed. Both goalkeepers leaned against the goalposts as though waiting for a bus. The lack of interest permeated the crowd, who both wandered off towards the pub. When the referee called an end to the match, nobody seemed to know who had won. Everyone trooped towards the squat changing rooms.

  “Wait here,” Sean said, and followed the mudmen through the door.

  The showers were already on, hot jets filling the changing rooms with acrid steam that tickled the craw. A malty smell of naked, damp bodies mixed with the harsh odours of cheap soap and shampoo. Talk was turning away from the football, to what was going to happen later that night. The pubs they would meet in, the girls who would be up for it, the men they wanted slain.

  “Billy?” Sean called. Three men said: “Yeah?”

  “Billy Morgan?”

  “He’s outside,” said one of the other Billys. “Taking down the nets.”

  The sweat that had been driven onto Sean’s skin by the steam froze instantly when he returned to the freezing pi
tches. He saw Emma mooching under the trees, looking at the flowers and the mushrooms. She waved at him and then shrugged as if to ask: What’s going on?

  A more distant figure was struggling to unhook the nets from the goalposts. Sean pointed at him and motioned for her to stay where she was. Emma threw back her head theatrically but gave him a smile that made him forget all about the cold.

  By the time Sean reached him, Billy had managed to divest the goalposts of their net and was bundling it up into a manageable shape to carry back to the sports centre.

  “Want a hand?”

  Billy froze as Sean approached, the net dangling from his grasp, giving him the bizarre appearance of a cheated fisherman. Billy scrutinised the stranger, the gauze over one eye, the black beanie, the way he favoured one leg over the other as he approached. “Who are you?”

  Sean smiled. If Billy bolted before he was within arm’s length, he’d never catch him. “The name’s Sean. We’ve met before.”

  “I don’t thi–” But now the eyes widened a little and the net fell from his arms. “Fuck off. I’m finished with him now. That Lord. That bastard. I don’t owe him nothing.”

  Sean held his hands up, kept the smile in position. “I know, I know. I wanted to apologise to you.”

  “You what?”

  “Apologise, Billy. I was working for Vernon Lord, but I didn’t know what it was he was up to. I still don’t. I thought he was a debt collector. I swear. That’s all.”

  “He was,” Billy said. His voice had calmed down, but he was still taking steps backwards, keeping the distance between himself and Sean. Sean stopped. Billy stopped.

  “But you said, that day, that it wasn’t money...”

  “It was never money,” Billy said.

  “Then what?”

  “Why should I tell you? You caught me that day. Gave me a hiding. Set me up for that bastard.”

  “I’m sorry, Billy. I was... I’m a private investigator. I was trying to find out who killed a girl.”