EIGHT
IMAGO
On the doorstep, my landlady-wrapped in a pink dressing gown with fur collar-nailed me and pushed a scrap of paper into my hand. She was holding a spatula and tapping its broad end against her neck, which was sullied by a lovebite.
'Dint hear you come in earlier, chuck,' she said, through the lipless puncture she sported instead of a mouth. 'But then there was a hell of a to do over the rowd, wasn't there?' She wagged a piece of paper. This un cowled et abort foivish. Oi envy yow yongsters gowin out at this toim onoit.' It took a while, and I wasn't sure I'd translated all of it, but I thanked her anyway and closed the door, hushing Eve who was trying not to laugh. 'What did she say?'
I opened my eyes. Wasn't it obvious? She said: "The hermaphrodites have invaded Upton-upon-Severn-quick, divest the guinea-fowl of their cutlasses".'
Through her laughter she pointed at the piece of paper. 'Telephone message. From your girlfriend.'
'She's not my girlfriend.'
Who's not your girlfriend?' Her eyes were egg-large, smug with the knowledge that she'd tricked me.
'Helen. You thought this was from Helen.'
We walked to her car, a dun-coloured Golf parked halfway down the street. All laughter gone from her voice now: 'Helen's poisonous. You're so blind. If you'd stayed clear of her you wouldn't be so sad, so threatened.' This last was accompanied by a squeeze of my hand.
'Well I think I've got the measure of Helen. The balance of power is shifting.' Was it the guarded play of light from cracked streetlamps that made her look so pitiful as she ducked into the driver's seat? I buckled myself in alongside her.
'I saw you last night, after you'd gone,' I said. 'You saw the fire? It was horrible.'
'I did,' said Eve, 'although I didn't really pay much attention.'
'I don't believe you,' I said, stunned. 'It was a terrible fire. How could you not pay attention? People died.'
'I was in a daze. I felt I had to be near you. But I didn't know where to look for you. I can't explain. It was like I was trying to find you by means other than sight. I felt manipulated, forced to move in the dark.'
I held her leg; the muscles responded and I stroked her, moving my hand under the hem of her skirt, between her thighs where she was sweating up.
'I tried to find you, afterwards,' I said. 'But you'd gone.'
'I'd gone, yes.' She moved her legs so I could reach down and curl my hand beneath her thigh. Her skin was soft and smooth, tight against its cargo of flesh. 'I felt very distant. It's happened before. At the party. While you were lying right next to me, I was trying to find you. I felt sick and dreamy and lethal. I felt like a beacon, calling danger towards me. And yet, at the same time, I wanted to protect you. I knew you were in my arms, but I was blind, snuffling around the house in the dark, trying to find your scent.'
'A girl died that night,' I said. 'She was murdered in the kitchen.'
'I know. I could almost believe that it was this sense of violence following me around that did it. I felt as though I was attracting it to you, then deflecting it away. Eve Baguley, a right old push-me-pull-you.'
I rescued my hand, but not before Eve thrust herself against my retreating fingers. She wasn't wearing underwear and a streak of fluid painted my little finger.
'I want you, David,' she said. 'I feel sick with the need for you.'
Excited by her admission, I leant over to kiss her neck. I felt twisted and uncertain inside, an alien passion fuelled by the shock of the fire and her strange talk of stalking me in her unconscious. For the first time I saw Eve as a threat, but a vague one, without a specific agenda, powering through life with all the arbitrary destruction of weather.
She parked in virtually the same spot Seamus had chosen that first night we went out together and led me, at speed, up Moor Lane past the Dukes Playhouse and Cinema on to a narrow road. Thin sounds of a band tuning their instruments clung awkwardly to the air: the tattoo of a snare drum, the glissade of an electric guitar and a toad-like fart of bass.
'Their current single?' I asked and Eve kicked me gently.
We angled into a backstreet suffused with light. People were spilled on to the cobbles like strange litter, necking wine bottles and beer cans. A dog on a rope leash regarded the gathering with weary, cataract eyes. Everyone had remarkable hair, be it shaved (with or without pony-tail), dyed or teased into dreadlocks. I felt ridiculously conservative, settling my backside against a brood of wheelie bins while my eyes grew accustomed to the splintering light. We numbered perhaps a dozen but it seemed like many more.
'What are those things?' I asked Eve, whose face was bleached, free of any shadow. 'Arc lights? Isn't all this a bit over the top? The neighbours are going to go doolally, it's two in the morning!'
She shrugged then smiled and waved as a bearded figure emerged from the glare: Deep Pan. The chain between his nose and ear gleamed like a weeping scar.
He waved back before grasping the microphone which squealed its feedback protest. 'Shut the fuck up,' he growled, butting the mike, which sang even louder. 'We're The Front Bottoms. And this-Deep Pan raised his arms as a chord vomited from the speakers (the vibrations of which were enough to spill an empty gallon can of Duckham's Hypergrade to the cobbles)-is "My Fat Arse".'
'Oh my God,' The lights went down, replaced by a garish flood of purple. 'They've done a good job of it. But The Front Bottoms?' I said. 'My Fat Arse?'
But Eve couldn't hear me. The intro was coming to an end, Frank and Tonka suddenly statuesque as their chords reverberated to silence, arms raised, steel plectrums glinting. Then, over feeble harmonics:
What I lack in pitch I make up for in punch What I eat for breakfast I bring back up for lunch You might hate my haircut You might think I suck Well come and kiss my fat arse 'Cos I don't give a fuck
This last syllable was strung out for as long as Deep Pan's lungs could accommodate it. The song went on in a similar vein, ending abruptly. They went on to sing songs where only the titles seemed different: 'Prostitute You', 'Bone', 'Milk My Love Udder'. When the neighbours started howling complaints from upstairs windows and the police made their presence known at one end of the alleyway, The Front Bottoms turned to acoustic guitars and played a passable cover of an old Lou Reed song, Deep Pan's voice surprisingly melodic now it was devoid of any anger.
The floodlights killed, I sat with Eve towards the back of the alleyway, behind the modelled heads capped with vague light falling in from bathrooms and pale silvery streetlamps that had escaped a bricking. She leaned against me.
'You'll stay with me tonight, yes?' Eve asked, the words hot against my neck.
'I'd love to.' I felt her lips curl into a smile, her tongue press against my throat and move there. When she pulled away, cool air shaped the journey her tongue had made. She was looking directly at me. In this uncertain light her eyes were black.
I stared into them until nothing else mattered: the band became a meaningless dull constant; the people might as well be somewhere else. Eve's tattoo threatened to bloat and fall from the V of her bottle-green jumper. And then a scrape and a click and I was distracted from the kiss I was about to plant. I knew the noise-that scuff of boots with good, solid soles. She was walking away from the band, her half-length leather jacket catching the light poorly in its battered material where it gleamed like a skin of wax.
'I'm just going… for a piss,' I said, fighting to keep my voice even. Eve's hand took an age to free itself from mine; her nails clung to my cuticles with cattish tenacity.
I ran after the girl, who had already rounded the corner. The cobbles reduced my speed to an ungainly limp and threatened to send me sprawling into a bed of tired nettles running adjacent to the alleyway.
Our past keeps coming back, (sang Deep Pan) You know she'll do for you. His face is burning black, There's nothing you can do.
I cast a glance back and Deep Pan was standing outside the garage, watching me. The audience were smothered in darkness but it seemed t
hey were looking too: eyes glinting like chips of coal in a thick, black seam.
I could see Eve, wrestling with something that was spreading, stain-swift, across her chest. Or was she just dancing in and out of the shadows? The music seemed to cut off as soon as I put the corner between us. The girl was standing on the main road, looking up and down, as if checking for traffic. As I approached, she turned round and favoured me with a crooked smile. She looked just as I'd dreamed her, down to the shallow arch of her eyebrows, the burnished sheen of the buckles on her leather jacket. It was the woman who had died at the party. She showed me a number of deep wounds on her stomach and thighs. Out of her jacket pocket she pulled a claw hammer, which she buried, without ceremony, into the meat of her left eye. Then she-or rather, the driving force behind the illusion-came for me.
I ran back to the gig to find the audience vanished and a handful of people sitting on bins, smoking and sucking on bottles of beer. A cymbal shivered as it was put away.
'What took you?' asked Tonka, his eyes underlit by the orange rind of his cigarette.
'I went for a piss,' I said.
Eve lurched into me. She was thick with the smell of cider. 'David, where have you been? You were gone for an hour and a half.'
'Some piss,' said Tonka and shuffled away.
'Oh,' I said, trying not to display my shock. 'I ran into a friend and we got talking. You know.'
'Take me home, David.' She pushed a knot of keys into my palm.
'Just a sec,' I said, pushing past her. Deep Pan was alternating between fastening his mouth to a can of Red Stripe and the mouth of a girl in a catsuit.
'Pan?' I said. And then, 'Um, Deep Pan? Those lyrics, the line-'
Deep Pan's hand rolled like the closing slatted lid of a writing bureau over the jut of the girl's breast. He whispered something in her ear which made her nostrils flare and flatten as she snorted laughter.
'The line, Deep Pan, where you go-'
'Which song? Tell me the song.' His voice was oily and rough at the same time. Smooth bastard.
'Well, I don't know. I heard it as I went after… as I went off for a piss.'
Deep Pan flicked something or nothing from my lapel. Either way, the gesture surprised me and then filled me with a kind of diluted panic; I was suddenly in the night club again, surrounded by threatening people with non-committal faces. 'What song? How can I tell you if I don't know the song, Daveness?'
' "She'll Do For You", or something like that. You sing a line that goes, "Our past is coming back", or something. And "You know she'll do for you".'
Deep Pan eyed me indulgently, smiling like a father watching his son achieve something almost impressive or worthy of comment. 'Me know no song of that description. It not in my repertoire, chumly.'
'But-' I said.
'No.' He squared up to me and his face screwed slo-mo into a moue of incredulity. 'You fucking hear me?'
Frank leaned over and touched Eve on the arm. 'Stick around. We're having a party. It wouldn't be the same.'
'I'll stay if David wants to stay.'
I shrugged, trying not to appear browbeaten by Deep Pan's swaggering. 'I'm easy.' Eve forced a look upon me. 'But I suppose I'm a little tired. It's been a long day'
'So be it,' said Tonka. We'll catch up with the both of you soon.'
I led Eve back to the car park. She was very drunk. Once I'd strapped her into the passenger seat I stood a while, watching my breath mist and the curve of traffic as it sought the town centre or moved away towards Skerton Bridge. In a house somewhere near there, Seamus would be sitting with Helen, wondering why I hadn't come to visit them. Or maybe they'd be fucking each other senseless on the living room carpet. It wasn't a scenario that distressed me, perhaps because I was with Eve, perhaps because Seamus wouldn't be physically up to it.
I thought of the girl I'd dreamed-all of it; this clotted feeling that I was being pursued and the persistent threat of violence moving about beneath the surface of everything I felt or looked at. Increasingly, I believed something was trying to defeat my memory and remain hidden while my brain fought for it to be recognised. I was projecting all my suffering on to innocent objects-the nuts and bolts of it basically. It was doing my head in.
'Wake up Eve. You'll have to direct me.'
'Sorry,' she mumbled. Her eyes were all over the shop. 'I like you.'
'And I like you. Let's get you to bed, hey?'
We managed to get back to Eve's without too much trouble. 'Sweet,' she said, turning inside the circle I'd created with my arms and stepping closer. When she kissed me it was with an urgency that was almost frightening. I opened my eyes and saw hers screwed tightly shut, as if she were passing on something painful via our intimacy. 'You're so sweet,' she said, moving away.
We quested precariously through the caravan in the dark, guided by the thin light bleeding from the jamb of a door at the end.
Her room was lit by a pyramid candle resting in a tall, spiral bronze holder. A poster of a prison interior hung next to a circular mirror framed with chipped plaster, its glass misty and scarred. The ceiling, threaded with cracks and cobwebs, jerked away from us as the shadows messed with my perspective. I left her to slump on the bed and went in search of coffee. Waiting for the water to boil, I watched, through the cataract of grease and mist on the plastic window, night shift across the rooftops. In every new configuration of cloud I glimpsed a face but at the moment of recognition, they folded into something different. I poured water into two mugs of instant and carried them back to the bedroom. Eve was twisted into her duvet, in a posture only the intoxicated could find comfortable. Her legs were tucked underneath her so it seemed the knee marked her body's lower extremity. Her arms were pushed together into a Y-shape, wrists trapped between her thighs, forearms bared. Her head was pushed back into the pillow so that her throat made a rippled bridge between chest and chin. I sat on thin cushions beneath her window and looked out at the rooftops, dingy and matt in the moonless night. Drinking her coffee as well as mine, my backside growing ever more uncomfortable as it was chilled by the floor through the flimsy material, I let my focus blur and tried to tease out the last memories I could of school. There was a hazy area there, though I couldn't determine its origin-memory's capriciousness or drunken blackspot-whichever, I was stumped. I tried another avenue in: people with whom I had shared classes in the last year.
Lisa Strasser. A year or so younger than me. Her sibilants were juicy as I recall; I used to love hearing her introduce herself, as if she were salivating over the name.
Janine Gosden. Left a month before her exams because her boyfriend asked her to go to Alaska with him. She had a scar on her cheek in the shape of a key. Lovely beige skin.
And there's someone I know I'll not be able to remember, even as I tick off each of these names. Male-I know that much, but I can't conjure a face or a name. He sits in the corner of our sunlit seminar room, the yellow walls host to his shadow, so motionless it might have been painted there. Liz Bohanon. Mmmm. She wore halter tops after school. How did Seamus describe her bum now? Like two cocks fighting under a blanket? Something like that anyway. She was really nice. Boyfriend was previous year's Head Boy. Her dad was something big in toothpaste.
Iain Copestake. BO like a pan of boiled onions. His favourite word was eclectic-he certainly used it often enough. He liked to wear bandannas around his head. And sometimes circular-framed spectacles without lenses. The twat.
Daniel Hoth. Ginger hair. Hard bastard. Bit of a bully, but then, weren't we all? And a cunt when it comes to night clubs.
Me. Helen. Seamus. And… this other. Another mouthful of coffee. Cold. God I was tired. Quite why my hand should curl to a fist so readily is beyond me. And my breath thick, as though I'd just entered a sauna. I looked over to where Eve lay, contorted still, her chest now swollen, now flat. I remembered something.
The tattoo's tip, little more than a wisp of gold, writhed at the edge of her cleavage. I pulled back the hem of wool; t
he sweep of her breast was not enough to distract me.
I stared at the tattoo for a long time. Eve's eyes flicked open, no longer muddied with drink. She caught me by the wrist and eased me alongside her, reaching down with her other hand to unzip me. Her mouth locked on to mine and she sank the broad edge of her tongue between my teeth. Her free hand found another task and once her T-shirt was off, her bra unhooked, she moved away and swung over me, the shadows in their frenzy making unstable the geometry of her face. She dipped in to kiss me again, her breath fast and thrilling. I felt her cunt bounce against my balls and shift clear. She was still wet. I reached down to touch her and her thighs tightened and shook. She took me into her mouth and things started to go wrong. I couldn't look down at her because as she slowly moved up and down on me, her eyes were pinned on mine and I was suddenly certain that they weren't Eve's. She sidled around and I saw her heavy breasts trip across my stomach, her nipples snagging on my skin. The sight of the moth relaxed me a little as shadows descended.
I tried to enjoy myself and worked her energetically, hoping that exertion would get rid of my doubts. She perceived my athleticism as desperation and stopped sucking me.
'Not yet,' she said, and turned once more. Light flashed off her sweating back, giving the illusion of iridescent wings folded into their housing, delicate raphs spinning the light in cords of silver and green. A strange, chitinous rasp fled from her mouth as she descended on me with the precision of an insect craving nectar. Engulfed, I raised my hands to caress her breasts, trapped in the glare of those massive, compound eyes, fractured by the light. My hands mashed against her and she burst, covered me with billions of chirring spores. I was peaking, the nerves in the pit of my gut on fire. When I came, I realised that everything I'd seen had been a fiction, conjured from the splintered light ricocheting around the room. I was crying.
'Follow me towards the light,' Eve murmured, collapsing beside me and blowing out the candle. But not before I'd fallen for another trick: I appeared to be covered with gold dust from her body.
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