by Killip, Alan
“I know you have. That’s why I’m here,” croaked Lachlan from behind the curtain.
“What?” Henry looked up with an exasperated frown.
“To stop you from being spineless.”
For the first time in years, Henry started to cry. Not just weeping, but proper convulsive sobbing. “Oh listen to that!” hissed the voice from behind the shower curtain. “Shameful. Pathetic. A spine of pure jelly.”
Henry got up again and went into the kitchen, put the vodka back in the booze cupboard, and opened a bottle of Merlot. He spent the rest of the evening sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, with the remote control and the telephone on his lap. He flicked through all the channels, eventually finding an interesting looking French film. Lachlan sat next to him, applying Elaine’s nail polish to his claws. He kept grabbing the remote, switching over to the Freeview porn channels and chanting “Lively breasts and quivering buttocks!” as though it were a hallowed mantra. Henry frequently had the urge to phone Elaine, but Lachlan would whisper that she thought he was useless and would never return, so he didn't bother. After a second bottle of Merlot, he started to feel drowsy, and it became harder to read the subtitles, so he let Lachlan have the remote. Eventually, he fell asleep.
He was woken by a rhythmic scraping and ringing.
After a few seconds gauging the strength of his hangover and wondering what fresh horrors the day would bring he heaved himself from the sofa and looked around for the source of the sound. Lachlan was standing in the kitchen area, dressed in a light grey suit, a white shirt and a tie. Blotches of black viscous liquid from the bath last night had soaked through the shirt. He was briskly scraping two large knives together. “Morning, sleepy head,” he growled.
“What are you doing?”
“Your knives are not nearly sharp enough.”
“Why are you wearing my suit?”
“It is a big day at the office today. Lachlan must look neat, like a wage slave.”
Henry sighed. “Are you coming to work with me, Lachlan?”
Lachlan’s eyes flashed. “Fuck yeah!”
Henry shook his head and went to shower. As he washed, he tried to rehearse what he was going to say to Alex. For months he'd been trying to pin Alex down on when they would have a fully functional product, and get him to stop freelancing, but he'd always ended up being crushed by Alex’s withering sarcasm. Alex seemed to enjoy implying that he wasn’t qualified to question anything. Henry knew that the situation had become a big road block in his life. He was on the verge of losing his wife, and he was being tormented by a six foot lizard. Now he had the ammunition to force Alex's hand. Either Alex would come up with a credible response to Julian's report or he'd shut the company immediately. But what if Alex couldn't come up with a credible response? And how would he know if the response was credible or not? What if Julian was spot on, and the whole thing was a disaster, a mistake, a pipe dream? This last thought gained traction in his mind as he scrubbed himself. He tried to quash it but it would reappear in the train of thought he tried to replace it with. It terrified him almost as much as the thought of confronting Alex.
He dried and dressed, aware that Lachlan was in the flat, but vowing to ignore him. He gargled for an extra long time with mouthwash to try to expunge the Merlot fumes, and swallowed two tabs of ibuprofen. When he was finally ready he exited the flat into the crisp spring air and slammed the door behind him.
At Tooting Bec station he heard Lachlan behind him, chanting “Wait for me! Wait for me!” He looked around and saw the lizard striding along dressed in the suit and stained shirt, clutching a blue Oyster card wallet in his right claw. People walked by either ignoring or pretending to ignore him. This was the first time that Henry had seen Lachlan in the presence of others. He looked as vivid and real as ever in the spring sunshine.
Henry was shaking when he entered the office. Alex greeted him in his usual offhand manner. Their two desks were in the middle of the small room, facing each other. When he was there, Alex worked behind a couple of flat screens that protected him from having to make eye contact. For all Henry knew he could have been playing Sudoku.
Henry sat down and adjusted his chair as high as it would go, so he could see Alex’s forehead. He heard Lachlan wheezing behind him, hissing “Lazy Alex, spending your cash on a big expensive bullshit machine.”
“Alex, we need to talk.” Henry’s voice sounded brittle and croaky.
Lachlan walked around to the side of the desks, his eyes focussing on Alex’s head. “He glazes our eyes with his cryptic runes,” he hissed.
Alex continued to click his mouse and clack his keyboard behind his flat screens.
“Alex?” Lachlan scuttled round and stood behind Alex, opening and closing his claws.
“What?” said Alex.
Henry reached forward and used both hands to part the monitors, revealing Alex’s frowning face. “What the fuck?” Alex glared through the gap, confused and hostile, then screwed up his face in disgust. “Jesus Henry, you look awful. And you reek of booze. What’s happened? Elaine finally thrown you out?”
Henry felt a hot surge inside. He looked up to see Lachlan change. Glowing coals bulged from his eye sockets and singed the surrounding flesh. His lizard jaws sprang open, revealing serried ranks of steel spikes. His chest swelled and burst his shirt, shooting asunder buttons which clacked against the ceiling and floor. He flung his arms wide and splayed his metal claws. Alex’s neck-flesh looked vulnerable.
Henry remained calm, but this time he did not swallow his anger. He looked at Lachlan’s contorted, snarling face and shook his head. “I’ve got to handle this my own way,” he said softly. Lachlan deflated. His eyes became small and yellow again, he retracted his claws, and let his hands hang limply from the ends of his arms. He jerked his head from side to side and chanted in a high pitched effeminate voice. “I’ve got to handle this my own way.”
Alex looked puzzled, cross and slightly concerned. “And what is your own way, Henry?” he said sarcastically but softly, with pity.
“I’m going to take the day off.”
Alex smiled sympathetically. “Yeah, you should.”
“I'm going to take forever off. It's over, Alex. Whatever gravy train you think you've been on. I can't believe I've been so dumb.”
Alex looked like a freshly caught fish drowning in the air. “What?”
The hot blood had cleared Henry’s head, and he found the words he needed with ease.
“I did a minimal, cursory amount of auditing. Just checking what I've been paying for. Something I should've done ages ago.”
Alex's head slid to one side. “What auditing? What are you talking about? You've commissioned work on Copyware without consulting me? God, Henry I really wish you'd told me about your issues before we got involved in business. You've no idea how hard it is having to carry the can for a nut-job.”
Lachlan’s eyes glowed red again and Henry thought he heard a deep rumble and felt the room shake, as if a tube train was passing underneath. He took a deep breath, then continued. “Copyware's a toy. A fantasy. And you're a fantasist. And so am I to some extent...” he paused, part of him relishing the baffled, helpless look on Alex's face and part of him starting to feel pity. “... but the difference between me and you Alex is that I know now I've been a fuck-wit, by falling for your spiel. Whereas you still believe your own crap.”
Alex blushed. “You are so out of your depth. You have no idea what you're talking about.”
“I'm going to email you a professional report by an industry luminary. He's someone I trust. Well, trust more than you anyway. As far as I know he doesn't wear harlequin pantaloons, or describe himself as a Zen Master of the Digital Renaissance. He doesn't feel the need to constantly prove himself and suck up every cliché of the day. And I doubt he has time to massage his testicles while he's in his place of work.”
Alex’s face shrank. “God, mate, you've really lost it haven't you?” Then he was quiet. He lo
oked at his lap, then at the ceiling, his lips hanging open. When he spoke again his voice was slow and reedy. “But what about all the work I’ve put in so far? What about all the work you’ve put in so far?”
Lachlan was opening and closing his claws, using them like a couple of glove puppets, miming their conversation.
“It's all been a pipe dream. I believed it because I wanted to believe it. But it's cost me in more ways than one. So now I'm putting it right.”
Alex's features hung slack. He stared at Henry, as if waiting for further explanation. Then he pulled the flat screens back into place, and muttered something about looking after number one.
Henry was glad to leave the claustrophobic little office. He was drained and exhausted, but also calmer on the inside than he'd been for months. As he walked towards the tube and he heard Lachlan behind him, singing.
“Henry’s found a back – bone! Henry’s found a back – bone!”
Henry stopped at the top of the steps down to the underground. Lachlan sidled up and leered in his face. “What now?” he hissed.
“I’m going to walk back home. I need to think of how I’m going to make it up to Elaine…”
Lachlan nodded energetically. “For being spineless!”
“For being... an idiot really...” he trailed off. “What are you going to do?”
Lachlan was now dressed in black commando gear. He held a large barbed hook in one hand and a thick length of rope in the other. “Oh... I think I will travel under the ground to the Dock – Lands then return to the surface and leap from roof to roof and feast upon the money lenders, and I will suck fresh hot blood from their live pulsing flesh.”
Henry was not sure how to respond to this, so he said “Well, er, enjoy…”
Lachlan cackled. “Oh, always!” he croaked, then scuttled down the steps, hissing obscenities at the people he passed. No one looked him in the face.
Sarah's Dad
Sarah’s earliest memory was the sunlight scattered by the frosted glass of the toilet window. She never knew her Mum and the house was often filled with the rich smell of solvents used by her Dad to make the model gliders he flew up on the moor. She hated the gilders, because they looked ugly and useless, they took up too much space and they broke very easily. The only time that Dad hit her was when she was six. She remembers picking up a glider and breaking one of the struts, and then trying to hide it and mangling it even more. The scene that followed is still replayed in her dreams in various guises. Before she wakes up, the monster looms and the thunder descends. For many weeks after, her Dad spoke even less than normal.
Dad knew that she watched TV when he was out, but forbade her to do so when he was in. She felt this was hypocritical, because she knew that when she was at school he watched a lot of TV himself, but in the evening, after the news, the TV was turned off, and she was confined to her room where the only the only things to occupy her were the radio and her homework. She was allowed to see friends on weekends and twice during the week. Outwardly she railed against this inflexible regime. But her mind flourished. She was socially skilled enough not to flaunt her good results, and she had a good bunch of friends.
Now, aged twenty-two, she has a good degree and a starter job in TV. She spends most of her waking hours working or mixing with the friends she makes at work. She doesn’t have much money, but she has enough to do what she wants. Today she is driving back to London from a meeting in Newcastle in an ancient secondhand Mini that her Dad helped her choose and buy. It’s only a small detour to drop in on her Dad at the concrete estate were she grew up. He isn’t in. A man with leathery skin, piercing eyes, and the whiff of booze about him appears from nowhere and asks her what what she is doing there. His face comes alive with a thousand crinkles when he recognises her. It’s Joseph Sprunt, a man of regular habits who believes he will die if he desists from his daily ration of rollups and premium lager sucked through a straw for optimal impact. He tells her that her Dad is at the glider club.
“What glider club? He was never a member of a club.”
“He is now. He’s entered a competition,” he says, as though he's talking about someone being made a knight of the realm. He tells her the name of the club.
She gives him a kiss on his leathery cheek and wishes him a happy day. “Sarah!” he calls after her as she walks away.
She stops and turns around.
“I thought it was your Mum come down from the clouds!”
She smiles and continues on her way, noticing the whiteness and gleam of the huge clouds hanging in the sky.
A couple of minutes fiddling with her smartphone brings up the club contact details and the postcode, and forty-five minutes later she's at the glider club. It’s a large hut with a car park in the middle of a field. She has to be back in London in the evening, but she should have time for a drink and a chat with her Dad. She hopes they don’t argue.
The gliding appears to be over for the day and all the competitors are gathered inside the hut snacking, drinking and making a lot of noise. A number of models of varying size and complexity are positioned upon trestle tables at one end of the hut. She wanders amid the hubbub until her Dad spots her, and greets her with a quizzical grin. He looks lean and tanned. There’s a little glimmer in his eyes that she hasn’t seen before.
“Did you manage to get airborne Dad? Now there’s nobody to break your planes before they’ve even left the house?”
He laughs a little, then sips his ale. “Do you want to stay tonight?”
“I’ve got to be back in London later on.”
“It’s good of you to spare the time.”
Clever Dad, voice free of bitterness, but making her feel guilty.
“I’ve got to meet my boss.”
“Really? In the evening?”
“Of course. I don’t just clock on and clock off. And she’s kind of my mate as well.”
“You’re boss is your ‘mate’?” he smiles a little as he says this, and sips his pint of ale. “It’s a topsy turvy world, TV.”
“You’d prefer me to have a normal job.”
“Whatever makes you say that?”
“I was never allowed to watch it at home.”
“So that you didn’t grow up stupid.”
“And you didn’t let me go on that program when the lady came knocking.”
Dad narrows his eyes a little. Then something clicks and he nods. “Oh, she was horrible.”
“Why, just because she worked in TV, like me?”
“No, because she thought we were all scum.”
“Rubbish, she was really polite and nice to me.”
“I know.”
“So why didn’t you let me go on the show?”
“Well I went to their den.”
“Their what?”
“Their headquarters, that address the woman gave you.”
“And then you told me it was a program about modelling gliders, and I knew that it wasn’t.”
“Ah, is that what I told you?” he smiles again.
“So you admit it was a lie?”
“When I knocked on the door of the house, someone let me in. I sat at a desk for a while, waiting, so I got up to stretch my legs, and looked around the office, at the stuff they had on the walls. There was an open door through to the next office, which was also empty. And there was a map of the estate, covered in little yellow stickers. And the stickers told me what they really thought of us.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’d found plenty of fodder for their freak show. The labels were all things like ‘psychopath’, ‘alcoholic’, ‘drug addict’, ‘malnourished’, ‘obese’, ‘neglected’, ‘poor personal hygiene’, ‘self harm’. All these labels with a question marks or exclamation marks next to them. I think they found them funny.”
Sarah received a text from her boss: call me when you escape from butt fuck nowhere She got up off the stool, walked round and gave her Dad a hug.
“I’ll call you.�
��
“I hope so.”
“Oh, and Dad…”
“Yeah?”
“Did you win?”
His face was motionless for a second, and then he grinned and nodded. “I think I did ok.”
Tapestry of Joy
On June 30th 1908 an earnest, sweet natured woman called Joy sits in a back garden near Hatcham in South London, breathing the summer air and contemplating the sources of the deep contentment she feels. The house she has lived in with her husband Robert for thirty five years stands behind her, and five miles to the north she can see the dome of St Paul's through drapes of green. Robert has risen steadily in his career at Whitehall and is now about to retire. Their son David has been raised as a Englishman and a Christian, and is now travelling the world combining entrepreneurial and missionary endeavours. She regards the wider world with awe and fear, and is glad that she has remained here at its civilised hub. She is proud of the efforts of her husband and her son to tame the chaos and savagery and bring the rest of the world closer to agreeable harmony, and so to God.
Her mental image of the wider world comes from her education augmented by dinner party conversation and her son’s letters. The uncivilised fringes of the world contain hot sweaty forests teeming with hazards where black savages express bestial urges in lascivious rituals. Widows are burned alive and animals worshipped. In her mind Hell, the lowest rung of existence, is a distillation of these things. As Christians, it is their duty to tame them. Heaven, the highest realm of existence, is the summation of efficient, firm but fair governance, ingenious engineering, and meticulous diligence. It is these qualities that set the forests and the fields and the rivers to productive use, and raise the people of these islands closer to Heaven, which is probably a vast stately home set in a carefully laid out garden with acres of perfectly trimmed hedges, verdant but neatly mown lawns and immaculate flower beds.
She is working on a tapestry that is to hang in the parish church. It is a picture she has composed herself: a young blond girl in a white dress standing in a field in a green valley dotted with trees with slightly rocky hills and a river. The girl is looking towards a resplendent sun. Shreds of white cloud surround the sun, and Joy has tried to make it look like they have caught the sunlight. The rendering of nature through the medium of stitched cotton is neat but perhaps a little gauche. Joy is not quite satisfied with the blues that she has chosen for the river, and thinks that it looks a little like a carpet. Robert has remarked that the trees look like hat stands bedecked with holly and that the grass looks freshly mown. In spite of this, she is proud of her effort, and feels that what really fills it with life is a quotation from the Book of Revelation in golden brown lettering against the blue sky:
