The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  In the lobby a naked fat man was veering from wall to wall, screaming, slapping blood from his huge stomach and face and chest. Peer sat down heavily and began to shake. The distance was still there, but while she was one step removed from what was happening, she realised that the shock of what she had seen had finally forced through.

  There was blood all over her flat, probably leaking through the floorboards into the room below, and something had crushed Kerry without actually being there.

  She shivered; Kerry’s blood on her T-shirt had cooled enough to kiss coldly onto her skin. She peeled the shirt from her chest, wincing as it stuck there momentarily.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked suddenly, surprising herself. The fat man continued to shout, gradually bruising himself against door handles and the fire extinguisher, paying her no attention. She was sure she could see the whites of his eyes. The blood did not appear to be his own.

  What was going on? This couldn’t be happening everywhere, it was too crazy, too unbelievable. But here she was, sitting on the staircase just before dawn with a dead person in each flat upstairs, a madman slowly trying to batter down the lobby, blood drying on her clothes and skin, and she hadn’t even rang the police.

  There was screaming in the street. The woman, kneeling in front of her house. Shouts from further away, the surprised clamour of a world waking to a nightmare.

  Jenny. Peer had to go to her place. They could help each other understand what all this was about, hold each other, sit and wait for the police and ambulances to arrive at the flats to take away Kerry, and Keith, and this fat man’s wife.

  And the Stapletons?

  She glanced at the four doors on the ground floor, handles greased with blood from the screaming man. She wondered what scenes they hid this morning.

  The man seemed to be tiring. He slumped as he hit each wall, winding down, before forcing himself away and onto the next one, slowing every time, panting, the screams quieter and higher pitched.

  Peer stood and stepped unsteadily down the last few stairs. “Please stop,” she said, “calm down, keep still, stop.” The man looked at her and his eyes rolled in their sockets, like those of a fighting dog appraising its next target. Peer stepped back, ready to turn and thump up the stairs if the fat guy did so much as raise a hand. But his unsteady gaze went right through her, eyes dilated in the semi-dark, still seeing whatever it was that had driven him to this state. His mouth slowly opened and he began to wail, and Peer took her chance and ducked past him.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” she shouted, just in case he could hear her. But when she opened the heavy door from the lobby to the street outside, she guessed that the ambulances were busy this morning.

  The street was lined on both sides with three and four storey Victorian buildings, most of them converted into flats of varying quality, from squalid upwards. The council had tried planting trees last year, with a view to adding an ‘Avenue’ to the street-name to make it sound more exclusive. Local kids had enjoyed a brief period of tree-swinging and now the pavements were pocked with weed-infested squares, out of which stuck sad dry stalks like paupers’ gravestones.

  About one out of every twenty lights was on. The remaining windows were dark, exuding an aura of death. Pigeons sat only on unlit windowsills. The screaming woman had vanished, presumably back into her own flat, but the light remained on. It still retained its red tinge.

  There were several people in the street. One man was calmly walking his dog along the opposite pavement, whistling softly, the only indication that something was amiss the fact that he was still wearing his pyjamas. The dog was marking corners and wagging its tail in delight at this unexpected early morning stroll. Opposite the local shop, two people stood hugging and crying, both of them talking incoherently in an apparent attempt to comfort each other. Peer headed towards them, only realising now that she had forgotten to find a pair of shoes. Her bare feet made slap, slap sounds on the pavement. Dead fish hitting a worktop.

  “Hello,” she said when she reached them. Two women, both middle aged, both tightly wrapped in nightgowns. One of them had curlers in her hair, and Peer felt an irrational compulsion to laugh. She tried to hold it back, but it came out as a groan and turned quite naturally into a stuttering sob.

  “Oh, no,” one of the woman, the one with the curlers, said. “Not you too.”

  “My neighbours are dead,” Peer said through fresh tears. Maybe the distance is closing, she thought. Although now was when she needed it – whatever it was – most of all.

  “I know, dear, I know,” Curlers said.

  I know?

  “I’ve got to phone for an ambulance, though, because, you know, it’s remarkable what the human body can withstand.” She remembered Keith’s ribs pointing at the ceiling. Kerry’s eyeball sitting like a billiard ball on her living room floor.

  Curlers broke her hug, but kept one hand on the shoulder of the woman next to her; she was staring at the ground and shedding a steady rain of tears at the pavement. “I’ve already tried that, dear. No use. I’ve been getting engaged for an hour.”

  “I tried,” the other woman said suddenly, looking up and presenting Peer with a face devoid of any colour save the bright red smudge of hastily applied lipstick. Even her eyes were like a sepia-tinted photograph. “I got through, too. But when I asked for an ambulance, the lady at the other end said they were too busy. She asked me for my number, then hung up.”

  “Too busy? How can the emergency services be too busy? My friend’s lying in a pool of guts, her boyfriend’s dead and there’s a naked fat man in my lobby, covered in somebody else’s blood. Shouldn’t the police be out trying to find out who’s doing all this? What if-”

  “I think it’s happened everywhere, dear,” Curlers said. She leaned over and whispered just as loudly as she’d been talking. “I heard Mrs James here crying, knocked on her door. Her husband was dead in the living room, with the telly still on, watching one of those nasty films, you know? There was lots of blood. Awful!”

  “What about you?” Peer asked.

  “Not married, dear. I just like to help. I think my work’s cut out this morning, don’t you?” She nodded over Peer’s shoulder at a group of people walking up the street, many of them bloodied, some carrying dripping bundles of clothes which could only contain children. The blood contrasted with the other colours, fading them into weak background tints.

  “I have to see if my friend’s all right,” Peer said. “When they get here, could you tell the ambulancemen that there are people in the top flats at number thirty-eight?” Curlers nodded, then guided her friend past Peer and towards the shuffling group of stunned humanity.

  Peer should be joining them but the remoteness was still there, as if she was watching a well-made film and becoming so engrossed in the story that she imagined herself within it. She felt no real connection with these people. No real link. But still, she had to find Jenny.

  The streets were mostly quiet, but Peer could hear crying behind locked doors. A pack of dogs fought over something in an alleyway and she hurried on, not wanting to see what it was they were scrapping over.

  Whatever had happened had seemed to turn the streets into a place of extremes. The silence was deep and profound, but when it was broken by a scream or a shout the noise would reverberate between buildings like an explosion. Once or twice Peer heard sirens, but they were from a long way off and she saw no blue flashing lights. Cars passed by occasionally, some of them obviously being driven in a blinding panic: one had both back doors open, displaying a bloody bundle on the rear seat; another was using other parked cars and lampposts as guides, coughing out showers of sparks each time it careered across the road to bounce from the opposite side. Its windows were smashed in, and Peer could only see the shadow of a driver. It looked like a kid.

  She stepped back into a doorway in case the car found a gap and mounted the pavement, but it scraped by, giving an old Beetle a screeching kiss as it passed. Gears
crunched inexpertly as the incline dragged at the engine. The hospital was on the other side of the hill. People were taking matters into their own hands.

  She tried to imagine the scene at Accident and Emergency this morning. She closed her eyes to shut out the image, but sightlessness sent her imagination into overdrive.

  Overhead a helicopter thumped its way across town, coming from the direction of the rising sun. It was low and quite slow, and Peer recognised it as one of the local police choppers brought into use recently to track joy-riders. Waving her arms she stepped out between parked cars, checking both ways beforehand. The helicopter slashed the silence into angry fragments, cruising above the street at a hundred feet, dark against the dawn. Its dead searchlamps hung like bombs either side of the cockpit. It was nearing her and she continued to wave, swinging her arms back and forth over her head as she had seen desert island castaways do on television a hundred times before.

  The machine passed her by. She saw the passenger staring down through the glass panel in his door. The police markings were plain, as was the fact that they had no intention of helping.

  Peer felt abandoned, spurned, just like those desperate desert island dwellers. She watched in dismay as the helicopter followed the road up the incline towards the cathedral, then veered away suddenly and disappeared across the rooftops.

  They were heading away from the hospital now, towards an emergency more important than her own. Where were the ambulances, and the police? Where was order? They were supposed to be ready for things like this, have contingency plans to put into effect any time there was a major accident or disaster. They were supposed to help. Peer had worked in a hospital for a while, answering the phone on a casualty ward, making appointments, taking complaints, and she had seen two major accident practices.

  Day patients were cleared. The unit was flooded with nurses, some of them wearing triage vests. Doctors hurried in wearing golf clothes, shorts, jeans. Beds were cleared, gurneys were lined up like horses set for the off. There was control there, organisation, an adeptness at handling the unthinkable and the terrible which had both impressed and comforted her.

  The police had passed her by, even though she’d been waving her arms for help. Surely that was an offence?

  Peer realised with a sense of emptiness how much the everyday person relies on the faceless They in times of upheaval. And if They chose not to deliver the goods – or could not do so – then the masses were left on their own.

  She decided to walk along the canal path to Jenny’s house. It would take slightly longer but it was away from the obvious danger of the roads, and it passed through one of Peer’s favourite places, the park. Maybe that would calm her, ease her worries, because surely things couldn’t be as bad as they seemed. There must be a disease or something, one of those exotic hot viruses from Africa that caused a rapid bleed-out, no time to help, nothing to cure. She recalled a film she had seen on that subject; the final solution they had to the problem then was a big bomb.

  She walked quickly towards the canal, her own bare footfalls echoing behind her as she passed through the narrow alley leading to the towpath. A dog scampered ahead, sandy snout darkened and wet, eyes frenzied. Away from the shouting, and the wandering people, and the dangerous driving, she tried to imagine normality. But she could not. Even this alley had changed, or rather the things in it: the moss on the old brickwork was rank and foul; pigeons sat quietly along the tops of walls, observing her progress with pinprick eyes; the dog, well-groomed and sporting a thick collar, looking like a wild animal after the kill.

  Peer hurried through the alley and came out onto the towpath. There was a body in the canal. A man, floating face down, a long coat billowing around him. On the opposite side lay a bloodied parcel of sheets, hair splayed from one end like spilled straw.

  She stared down at her bare feet, set off towards Jenny’s place, dodging dogshit and trying so hard not to look around and see what was happening. She was breathing fast and her heart thumped in her chest, and she knew that it was not entirely from the exertion.

  She emerged into the park, but the feeling of reassurance she often had when she walked among the bushes and trees was absent today. On the contrary, her sense of displacement, of not belonging, increased dramatically. The trees seemed to grow closer to the canal than before, and mean twigs scratched perforated lines of blood in the skin of her bare arms. Soon she was running, certain that other footsteps followed in exact synchronicity with her own, too afraid to look back and see. Her feet hurt as they pounded down into the dirt, but it was a numbing pain, flaring briefly then settling into a background throb. She tried to dodge sharp stones or puddles of broken glass, but she could feel and hear the wet slap of her bleeding feet as she sprinted for the next bridge.

  The canal was unused and unkempt, a clogged artery through the sickly town, and rushes grew in abundance. Just before Peer reached the bridge they parted, and a knot of ducks flew straight at her. She stumbled in their midst, lost her footing and started to fall, positive that she felt several cruel prods from angry beaks in the flurry of waving limbs and dancing feathers. The birds careered low across the park and disappeared over a clump of shrubs towards the lake, calling loudly back at her. Peer rolled to break the fall, but still she cried out as her knees and elbows took the brunt of the impact. Her teeth clanged shut, her limbs hurt. Spots of blood were already bleeding through muddy skid-marks on her arms.

  The park seemed to laugh. Birds sang in triumph. Trees whispered their pleasure with a breeze from nowhere. Squirrels sat at the bases of trees, watching her dispassionately, turning nuts in their claws as they gnawed.

  Even the grass looked sharp.

  Peer stood and ran the last few paces to the bridge, clambering up the well worn path and hauling herself over the stone balustrade. Only when she was out of the park, safely surrounded by faceless concrete and glass façades and aware once more of the shouts of desperate people, did she stop to assess her wounds.

  She was Girl Friday on this terrible Tuesday morning, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her on the pavement. She lifted one foot to look at the damage, and could not bear to look at the other. Her elbows and knees were cut and bruised, she could feel the cool dribble of blood running down her left leg and out onto her bare foot, the world was going mad around her …

  She should get to Jenny’s. Then she’d sort herself out.

  Jenny was dead.

  She was lying naked on her Laura Ashley duvet, a cigarette burnt down to the filter between her fingers. It had raised tiny heat-blisters on her skin. There was a faded rose tattoo on her left breast, the prickly hint of dark hairs on her shins, and biscuit crumbs nestled in the nape of her neck. The television was still on, emitting an uncomfortable hiss. There were no other marks on her body at all. But she was dead, pale and cool. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth stretched into an everlasting grimace of terror. Whatever had killed her, she had known it was coming.

  Peer did not want to touch her, but she had come this far and she felt she owed her friend that, at least. She sat on the bed and stroked the dead woman’s cheek.

  Later, she stood suddenly and fled the room, thundered down the stairs and somehow did not fall. She opened the front door and ran into the street. Now, she was just another running person.

  Peer had nowhere to go.

  8. What’s in a name?

  “Be glad that I need you,” the voice said, and Mary was glad.

  The woman walked into the room accompanied by the rattle of chains. At least, Mary thought it was a woman. The voice was androgynous, deep and dry, and it must have hurt to speak. There were two fine chains, hanging from pinched skin at her temples, curving past eyes and over cheeks and passing into the corners of her mouth. They had been there for a long time, because they had rusted. The chain Mary heard rattling was the one they had used to flay the horse’s flesh that night. The woman swung it by her side. It dripped fresh blood, even though they had been ba
ck for hours.

  Her hair was long and thick, may once have been blond but now hung mousy and grey with dirt and grease. Her face seemed scarred by time, wrinkles clustered around her eyes and mouth like dried noodles. When she walked, her shapeless clothing whispered around her, offering no clues. But she carried herself as a woman, stood like a woman. Pouted like a woman when Mary began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said quietly, “were the horses yours?”

  The woman laughed, a dry cackle which completely failed to manifest itself in her expression. “In many ways, I suppose so. Yes, you could say so.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I’m glad,” the woman continued. She nodded, pursing her lips as if contemplating a timeless work of art. She stroked the chain against her leg, the sharp blades pricking threads from her loose trousers. “You did a good job.”

  Mary glanced over at Roger, still swimming behind her tears. The woman followed her gaze.

  “He did a good job, too, I suppose. But it’s you I wanted, Mary. You’re the one I need. You’re the one I decided to … wake to your potentials.” She sat on the foot of the bed, unconcerned at the blood-spattered sheets. “I admire you.”

  “Me?” Mary felt her shaking subside, the fear diluting in the presence of this strange woman. She did not want it to happen; she wanted to be afraid, if only because she could not bear change. But already, the bloody mess on the bed was losing meaning. Just as the steaming bodies they left in the stables and fields and pens lost meaning so soon after they had seemed so important. Roger was fading to a dead memory; he just happened to still be here.

  “You.” The woman leaned forward, and Mary realised that the chains were not pierced into her temples. There were small, rusty bolts holding them there, apparently screwed into her skull. Unreality swept across the moment, changing how things were now, altering things, for Mary, forever.