Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  Dirck inhaled violently; the redness faded as quickly as it had arisen. He turned round.

  ‘I have no idea what you are blabbing about Morris.’

  Morris removed the envelope from his jacket pocket and laid it on his thigh. It felt like he was unzipping a monster schlong and placing it crudely, unignorably on display.

  ‘I have proof Dirck,’ he said. ‘Affidavits. You’re so fucked it isn’t even funny.’

  ‘This is all nonsense, Morris. I don’t know what imbecilities you have transcribed from the mouth of that foolish old woman, but I can assure you they are of no relevance to my position here at the Hub. That you, apparently, imagine they are testifies only to the tenuousness of your grip on the real world. I have friends, contacts, colleagues. You, Morris, as if I need to remind you, have nothing.’

  Morris nodded.

  ‘Zoe said you would say that. The initial denial is exactly what we expected.’

  At this mention of Zoe, Dirck flinched. His nostrils ballooned.

  ‘We don’t expect you to cave, Dirck,’ Morris went on. ‘That will come later. What you need to realise now is that your balls are in our hands, and we are prepared to squeeze as hard and as often as is necessary. That is the message I am passing on.’

  ‘Both of you are utterly disgusting.’

  ‘Oh come on, Dirck, give up the high ground. It really doesn’t suit you. Between you and me, the wheelchair stuff is wonderful, very creative. We’re prepared to let you keep it going, but you need to make a deal. I know you’re thinking you can blag it, freeze us out, smear us. If it were just me of course that would be easy, but Zoe changes things. She’s still a player. We have two affidavits and a certified copy of your medical record. I’ll be back in a week.’

  He stood up. As he did so he worried for a moment that his head might bang on the ceiling rose, so vast and unending did he feel. He had flattened Dirck van Camper. It didn’t matter what Dirck said now, what he pretended, Morris remembered the blinking Belisha beacon of his skull. It had been as good as a confession. Sister Darian was kosher.

  Once outside, he phoned Zoe.

  ‘We’ve got him,’ he said. ‘He’s ours.’

  Zoe whooped.

  ‘You, Morris,’ she said, ‘are a vengeful fucking god.’

  ‘He denied it all of course.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘He took the high ground.’

  ‘Except there is no high ground here. Morally we’re way below sea level. He needs to realise that. Did you mention my name?’

  ‘He nearly barfed.’

  Zoe giggled. ‘Come in Mr van Camper, your time is up.’

  ‘What will he do now?’ asked Morris.

  ‘His first thought will be the Crocodile, but then he’ll realise of course that that would be suicide. He can’t turn to the Disability Studies community, they’ll rip him to shreds. We’re all he has.’

  ‘I gave him a week.’

  ‘He’ll phone me tomorrow. We need to finalise our demands. Come over. We’ll have dinner and so on. I just discovered this extraordinary new gastrodrug.’

  ‘Snail, yes you told me about that.’

  ‘Did I? Short-term memory wipe-out, I’d better write that one down. They’ve asked me for feedback. I’m their pilot scheme.’

  ‘Do you really want me to come over?’

  ‘Of course. Why not?’

  Morris looked up at the screed of traffic on Sheffield Road: the airbrushed buses, the bilious minicabs, the black-market mountain bikes and filth-slicked motorcycle couriers. Above them all the pumice-stone sky was cross-hatched with early evening rain. Morris could feel its coldness speckling his lips. Could he really leap over so much so easily? Could they really continue (‘dinner and so on’) as if none of that had ever happened?

  ‘I was thinking of Underseel,’ he said.

  There was a gap.

  ‘That was yonks ago, Morris. This is a new day. You’re the angel of death, remember.’

  The angel of death, right. Morris turned up his coat collar against the drizzle and set off walking against the beige-grey tide of grumpy-looking students. It was the ease of it which shocked him, that so much could be retrieved with so very little trouble. Five sheets of A4, half an hour of vicious threatening and he was back. Morris paused for a cigarette beneath the pressed concrete awning of the university shopping precinct. Was it a form of survivor’s guilt, he wondered, settling on a bench, this sense that now he had made it, now he was once more safe he shouldn’t be, that it was all somehow wrong? Wrong? What kind of an idea was that? As if being jailed, as if losing his wife and job and family were somehow right.

  A tall, bearded man of middle years with NHS specs and a page-boy haircut sat down next to him on the bench and smiled.

  ‘I know you,’ he said.

  ‘I really doubt that.’ The man smelt overpoweringly of patchouli.

  ‘No, I have a very good memory. Some have called it photographic.’

  ‘That must be quite a pain.’

  ‘Ah, you’re suggesting that a certain element of the unknown, or at least the unremembered, is vital to keeping things interesting?’

  Morris, although surprised by the stringency of this response, didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, that’s what the future is for in my opinion,’ said the man. ‘You’re Morris Gutman.’

  Morris turned to look at him. He was wearing winkle pickers and skinny black jeans. When he smiled his enormous eyebrows almost merged with his hairline.

  ‘We met at a party in Bangor in 1992. We were drinking Hofmeister, you were debating the merits of veganism and you had a girlfriend: E-something.’

  Morris remembered, ‘You’re Victor Morley-Brown.’

  They shook hands. There was half a minute of weird silence.

  ‘Have you heard about the Alderley revival?’ Morris asked.

  ‘Oh that. Yes. I sold all my Alderley stuff, years ago unfortunately, it might be worth a bob or two now. I’m more into sci-fi now.’

  ‘Sci-fi? Underseel told me that you were still active, an independent scholar.’

  ‘Conrad’s a compulsive liar – I’m sure you’ve realised that yourself – as well as being generally bonkers. I only really did the Ph.D. to pass the time. I was living in Beaumaris with a law professor. It was all rather intense and academic, a lot of cocaine, a lot of lipstick, a lot of live jazz, but we split up just before my viva. I thought about applying for lecturing jobs, but Conrad gave me a long absurd speech about scholarship so I said bollocks to all that and went down to London.’

  ‘You gave it up,’ said Morris as much to himself as to Victor.

  ‘I joined a band, I started a youth theatre company, I imported Levis, I sub-edited, I plumbed, I packed cucumber, I drove a bus.’

  ‘Underseel told me you were at Safeway.’

  ‘That was very temporary.’

  ‘You gave it up?’ Morris said again.

  ‘It was a phase really, a particular time. Judith had this astonishing cottage overlooking the Menai Straits. On a fine day you can see Snowdon from the bedroom window. ‘See Snowdon and come,’ she’d say. It was that kind of relationship, there were a lot of allusions. And I was quite keen on the late novels – you know, The Scent of Horseradish, A Flag for Veronica – I thought I could really do something with them. In the end the dissertation was a bit of a bodge.’

  ‘Yes, I read it,’ said Morris.

  ‘Did you really?’ Victor laughed. ‘There should be a prize for that. Anyway, yeah, I pretty much lost interest, but old Conrad convinced himself that it was the seed of something major. That’s what he said, the seed of something major, another ten years of research and it might be publishable. Ten years, yeah right.’

  ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘Herbal highs and drug paraphernalia. I have a stall.’

  ‘Do they work?’

  ‘The herbal highs? They’re like paddling-pool drugs. You get your feet wet, but there
’s no danger of drowning.’

  He began to roll a cigarette.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  Morris thought about it.

  ‘I married E,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm. Good choice.’ The end of his cigarette flared briefly. He waved the pouch at Morris. Morris took it. ‘She was very attractive, very sharp, I remember that. She had sort of Madonna thing going, didn’t she?’

  ‘Briefly, yes.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Molly and Hedda.’

  ‘Fantastic. I’m kidless myself – that’s my one regret.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I envy you that.’ Morris glanced across at him. There was a pebbledash of acne scars across his neck. A curlicue of wax lay athwart the fuzzy bunker of his outer ear. He seemed actually sad. ‘I mean, what else is there,’ he said, ‘really?’

  Morris nodded. He remembered Molly in her cot at night, so quiet and motionless it was like she had been cast in Latex: her knuckled, hairless head, her short, overstuffed arms raised in surrender. To know she was still alive he had had to lean down and place his ear against her mouth to hear the hot give and take of her micro-breathing. And once he had not heard anything, nothing at all, and it had taken him a deep, ghastly second to remember he was wearing earplugs because of the party next door. Just a second, but it had occurred to him in that bottomless moment of silence that there were certain things too terrible to live through, certain events he would not wish to survive.

  Twenty minutes later, as he said goodbye to Victor Morley-Brown, Morris felt the long white envelope rub up against his chest like a holstered weapon. How odd it felt to him now in the quotidian afterglow of their unexpected meeting. What would Victor have said, he wondered, if he had told him the whole story: the plagiarism, the adultery, the separation, the assault, the imprisonment and now, at last, the brutal bullying revenge? Would he have taken even that in his stride? It pleased and comforted Morris, as he left the sheltering wing of the precinct and returned to the flashing wetness of the Sheffield Road, to think that he might have, to think that Victor’s heroic casualness might be capacious enough to include even him.

  As Morris reached the bus stop, raindrops rattled across the pavement in front of him like seed. They herded down through the early orange lamplight like sad, slow sparks. While he waited, with the wetness sponging up his socks, he thought of Zoe Cable, high in the Casa Urbano, scheming and setting traps, of Dirck van Camper at his wrap-around smart desk erecting barricades, preparing rebuttals. It was what they lived for, he knew that: outsmarting other people, being clever, cleverer, cleverest. He closed his eyes and lost himself, by way of contrast, in the warm memory of Victor Morley-Brown and his life of cheerful underachievement. Morris had finally had, he realised with some amazement, more than enough of cleverness. He removed the long white envelope from his jacket pocket, knelt down at the kerbside and posted it, without hesitation, through the curved metal ribs of a drain.

  Epilogue

  ‘Do you remember your Madonna phase?’ he said to E. They had finished dinner. Molly was in her aardvark pyjamas; Hedda was gooing and laaing in Morris’s arms. The darkness of Kidney’s living room was gilded and softened by ponds of pale uplighting.

  ‘It was hardly a phase.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. The crucifixes, the corsets – I’d say it was a phase.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ E was on her knees, tidying Lego. ‘You liked it.’

  ‘I liked its parodie quality.’

  ‘You liked the corsets.’

  ‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘I liked the corsets.’

  He told her about Victor.

  ‘He gave up!’ she said.

  ‘He grew out of it. Not that he grew into anything else. He seemed younger now than then. I hardly remembered him, but he remembered you.’

  ‘I was obviously memorable. Did you say Judith Carmel? I knew Judith Carmel, she was a friend of Graeme and Bert – she went to their parties. She had the most fantastic house.’

  ‘You knew everyone. You were in.’

  ‘It was Bangor, for Christsake. It was too small for anyone to be out. Everyone was in.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘No that’s true, you weren’t.’ She smiled. ‘I had to bring you in. Under the cover of darkness on occasion.’

  Half-asleep, Molly stumbled headfirst into the sideboard.

  ‘There, there,’ said E, pulling her up, kissing her ear. Then more briskly, ‘Well I suppose those days are behind us anyway.’

  ‘The corset days you mean?’

  ‘No, the corset days may well be ahead of us. I mean, look at me.’

  Morris looked at E’s body. Everything was bigger, more dangly. In her jeans and sweater she was thick and wifely, but it just gave him a keener sense of loss. Should he tell her that?

  ‘I was thinking more of the other stuff,’ she continued.

  ‘The fun stuff?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, maybe the fun stuff.’ She swallowed and rubbed her neck, her face seemed to harden and recede. Molly was tugging Hedda’s feet.

  ‘Sweet Hedda,’ she hissed creepily, tightening her grip. Morris could hear her tiny teeth grinding.

  ‘Molly, stop that please.’ E clattered the last lumps of Lego into the box.

  Molly tugged harder; Hedda turned red and squealed. Morris stood up and tried pulling Hedda away from her sister, but Molly hung on for a second then bounced off the armchair and on to the floor, screaming.

  ‘Bath time!’ E shouted.

  Morris lowered Hedda into the kitchen sink. E was upstairs with Molly. After the bath, they would swap places. He would brush Molly’s teeth and tell her stories. E would feed Hedda and put her down. That was the bedtime ritual. She had explained it all over dinner. On this occasion he was playing Nick Kidney, who was in New York for three days, or perhaps more precisely, he was playing Nick Kidney playing him. He was, he thought, a father twice removed, a copy of a copy.

  Hedda stiffened and splashed. She opened her mouth and winked as though she had just cracked a good joke. She was a chubby child: her thighs were like lumps of Battenberg; her pale sinless flesh flared fattily above ankle and wrist. She started to pee; it rose out of her like the arc of a drinking fountain. Morris picked her up and wrapped her in a pale yellow towel. The pale yellow towel had been Molly’s, he recognised it. There were things like that throughout Kidney’s house: toys, rugs, a vase. It made him feel oddly at home there. He put Hedda down on the kitchen island; she pawed the air and strained like an overturned tortoise. Morris rubbed her with skin cream, then put the nappy on and then the sleeper. The thought of Kidney doing this every night filled him with rage. He could feel his face heat up, redden. Tears sprang to his eyes. Hedda’s eyes widened, she smiled. Morris picked her up. She was heavy now, not like that first time when it had seemed she might easily fly away, like she was immune from gravity. She had real heft to her now. She was weighty. Morris noticed a clot of breast milk like a smear of cottage cheese on his shoulder. He could hear Molly calling from upstairs: ‘Milk please Daddy.’ Kidney’s stainless-steel fridge was crudely edged with foam rubber. So were all his other appliances – Molly was just the right height for kitchen disaster. He poured the milk and went upstairs.

  Molly was in her bedroom, looking at herself in the mirror. She had a Barbie bed, an ironic dressing table, space hoppers, tricycles, shelves of toys he had never seen. Morris felt like a burglar.

  ‘Am I lovely?’ she asked him.

  Morris’s face felt numb, nerveless. She was lovely he realised, horribly lovely, much too lovely to bear.

  ‘Just joking,’ she said with a big fake grin. She lifted up her arms and span lopsidedly on one foot. Hedda shuffled against his neck, burped. He thought for a moment that everything in this house was a source of pain.

  E came in. She smiled. It was a half-smile, a smile that threatened to snap shut if he reached too far into it.

  ‘Changeover time.�
�� She reached for Hedda. Molly rushed at his thigh and clung. For a moment he had both of them pressed against him clinging. He felt big and perfect. He passed Hedda over to E. She started rooting madly. Morris noticed the milk patch on E’s blouse; he worked to suppress his memory of her breasts, but even the suppression seemed exciting, breast-shaped. He picked up Molly with a grunt. Looking at E, he raised his eyebrows and puffed.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s incredible. Remember when we washed her in the sink?’

  ‘In the sink?’ said Molly. ‘No.’

  Now she smelt like a person, Morris noticed, not like a child. She had the fusty bedtime smell of a fully-fledged human being.

  He brushed Molly’s teeth. They were like tiny railway arches. Someone had taught her how to spit.

  The problem is timing, Morris thought. The problem is having one thing but never having the other. He thought of Dirck rising from his wheelchair, healed against his will by the power of prayer: Dirck the destroyer, Dirck the redeemer. What did Morris expect? What did he really want?

  He carried Molly back into her bedroom and tucked her into the Barbie bed.

  ‘Tell me a story,’ she pleaded.

  ‘One day …’ he was lying on the floor beside the bed, his head resting on a beanbag.

  He told her a story about bears, about the difference between bears and people. Bears don’t eat cornflakes, he argued, bears don’t wear clothes. Molly looked sceptical: she had always been a doubter. He could see, in the luminous yellow whisper of the night-light, that groove between her eyebrows. He closed his eyes. Don’t doubt me, he thought, not now.

  ‘Isn’t that right,’ he said, ‘about bears and people?’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘Of course it is,’ she said, ‘of course it’s right.’

  She believed him after all! They were in accord about bears and humans, about their differences. He and his daughter saw eye to eye on that at least. He lolled back into the beanbag as if that were the only truth that mattered at all: the one about bears and humans, clothes and cornflakes.

  ‘It’s perfectly true,’ he said out loud.