“How do you feel,” I said, “in this dream you’re having?”
“Weird,” he said. “I feel weird.” He drank some of his tea. “I’m myself, but I don’t feel as if I’m inside myself.”
“You’re watching yourself,” I suggested.
“I suppose I am.”
“That’s what you’re doing.”
He was watching himself stalk this gloomy industrial city, getting their heads off. One night adults, the next night children. One moment he was in a huge park with silent blackened monuments, the next following a woman and child along a disused gantry. Suddenly he found himself, hours later, in a tube tunnel. “All these kids came on to the tube-station platform—” Or was it a platform? At its shadowy edges it seemed to him to blend into a kind of courtyard, with a ramp for wheelchairs. “It felt like you were on a platform. But at the same time you could feel you were somewhere else.” Anyway, he was with two lads off the hi-tech team, Steve and Paul. He told them to lie down quietly on the ramp out of harm’s way. “Then all these kids came running round the corner—you know, eight-, nine-year-old kids, and suddenly it went really dark, and I just remember squatting down to get the right height and—”
“Footoof!” I said.
“—all their heads off, five or six heads at one go.”
I went and looked at the notice boards where the Sunday school kids had pinned their work up. A recent drawing exercise for the boys had been “My route to church.” They had made light work of it, drawing themselves in red Ferraris and adding commentary: “My house.” “Whooosh!” “Hinchcliffe Arms.” “Screeech!” “Church Bank Lane.” “Bang!” The energy of these journeys undercut the cheap parsonical metaphor they were based on. The girls had done paper samplers that read JESUS IS LORD OF LIFE.
Meredith came and looked over my shoulder. “See that?” he said. “One of them’s written BORD OF LIFE. Little tinker.” He studied his watch. “Hey, time to drop a few more bombs,” he said.
“I’m having a piss first.”
“You can do that if you want,” Sal Meredith said. I went into the lavatory. “Remember, though,” he called after me: “More than two shakes is a wank.”
The graveyard at St. John’s was famous for something, but Meredith couldn’t remember what. I ought to go and have a look at it anyway, he told me. It was worth seeing: there were graves out there the size of super tankers. I went round one lunchtime. He was right. The graveyard was also full of fantastic blackened stone obelisks and gesticulating angels. Insects whizzed through the air between them. Brambles, thistles, and fern had sprung up in one corner. Elsewhere it was the kind of grass you only ever see in cemeteries.
There were more children out there than I expected. The ones that died before 1900 were miniature adults full of some earnest churchy future. They got proper graves, serious graves. The modern kids slipped their moorings in the childish boats piled with toys. They buried them close to the church. If the older graves were like super tankers, these new ones went bobbing along in the wake of St. John’s like condom packets behind a ferry. I had a look down at them, LOVE NEVER DIES. But we all know it does. Clarence and Katherine lose John, their beloved son. Not much later, Clarence loses Katherine. Two years after that the world loses Clarence, and that’s that until Vertical Access arrives. Thrash metal blares from their radio. They hang a yellow plastic bucket out of the belfry, off the end of a hoist made out of scaffolding poles. They bolt everything back together with fucking great bolts. Thinking about this, I went back into the church where Meredith was finishing his tea.
“What do you reckon then?” he said.
“It’s disgusting. People are expected to leave monuments to their tragedies, even though that makes them harder to forget.”
He stared at me uncertainly.
“Here’s that goat’s hair you wanted to see,” he said.
He threw it onto the table, where it settled next to my cup, a dark brown swatch flecked with gray. It was full of goat dandruff, the biggest dandruff you’ve ever seen.
“Thanks a lot, Sal.”
“You said you were interested,” he said. “That’s what they bound the gobbo with. Don’t ask me how successful it was. In the end they just poured a couple of buckets of it down between the tower and the buttresses. Lo-tech fuckers. Sand and cement, bound up with that stuff. They just call it gobbo to distinguish it from structural concrete.” He said: “We could make some up if you like. I mean, if you’re that bothered. Apparently the hair needs to be fresh.”
I was fascinated by the whole idea.
“So do they have to keep a goat?” I said. “The restorers?”
“Feel it,” he said. “It’s just like women’s hair.”
“Fucking hell. What sort of women do you go out with?”
He was right, though. With your eyes closed it felt exactly like human hair.
“We had a chemistry teacher at school called Gobbo,” I said. “But that was because he spat a lot when he talked. Really thick spit.” We were thirteen, we loved that. We also loved the rubber tubes that fed the Bunsen burners. After six months or so, I told Meredith, we stopped laughing at Gobbo’s spit problem and concentrated on setting them on fire instead. “Do they still have Bunsen burners?” I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It was a fair old time ago,” I had to admit.
The thing about the graveyard was this: some of the stones had undergone such mechanical erosion you couldn’t read what they said. Despite that, the words on them seemed to remain beneath the surface, as if now was just water running over them. “In memory”; “also of three infants”; “a glorious eternity.” With the right focus, you thought, you might be able to bring them back. But in the end no meaning swam up into view.
Meredith had done every kind of high-access engineering, from avalanche netting in Gibraltar to cleaning windows in the Barbican; but his fame came from stabilizing the little chalk cliffs at the entrance to Brighton station. The problem was, in that environment explosives couldn’t be used to remove the unstable stuff: so he drilled rows of holes one meter apart that he then pumped full of a fast-expanding chemical grout. “Levered it off nicely. Not a bad solution.” He’d been on the tower blocks too, everyone in that trade has. He wouldn’t go back to it. Gangs of kids wreck your work behind you. The adults steal your equipment: they aren’t much more than kids themselves, and they couldn’t give a toss about where or how they live.
He’d spent years on that. Even so he was quite a lot younger than me. He had a wife and two kids in Preston or Nelson-and-Colne, some backwater like that. He didn’t get on with her anymore, but he saw the kids every weekend. He showed me a photograph of the whole family on some flat northern beach. The tide was out as far as you could see. The wife was nice, a looker if a bit ordinary. One glance at her face and you could understand why they were separated. She didn’t trust him, she didn’t trust the job with all its risks and its foreign travel opportunities; she didn’t trust the tattoos up his arm. Who would? Still, the kids were beautiful—two boys, five and seven, in their England football shirts—and he clearly loved them. In the end that’s why I couldn’t understand the dream he was having.
“So how do you do with it?” I asked him. “I mean, having these kids of your own? You must feel pretty shit about killing children in a dream.”
He thought for a moment.
“I felt like an animal,” he said, “the first time I had it.”
It always ended the same way, he said, that dream. Footoof!—off came the heads of all these kids. One little lad lost only the top of his head, “the top bit like the scalp. I have to give it three or four goes, so it comes off in slices—”
“Christ, Sal!”
“—and eventually I get it. Oh, it doesn’t look like you’re cutting somebody’s head,” he said. “It looks more like a cabbage or summat.” He paused to consider this. “Coming off in slabs.”
After that he always ran for it, in a convulsion
of fear and glee—“I can really feel me heart pounding, every step”—and then the dream seemed to jump very quickly and he was out of the city altogether, with a job selling agricultural machinery in some great prairie farming waste, somewhere where the dust boiled off the landscape all summer. “There I am, talking about experimental tractors to some old bloke in a farmhouse but thinking all the time: “‘I’m going to get caught. I’m going to get caught.’”
He wanted to get caught.
“They’re never my kiddies,” he said. “But I feel like an animal every time I have that dream, and I want to get caught.”
The job went well. We pried the rest of the louvers out and replaced them with brand-new stone a rosy color so faint it was almost white. The church people weren’t up for sandblasting the rest of the building to match, so we started in on the pointing. Good weather was a requirement for that, and we got it. At the same time we needed shade and cool air. Nine in the morning, we’d already been working three hours. We hung off the abseil ropes, pointing as fast as we could, trying to get a section done before the grout dried up in the bucket. We were working in shorts, drinking four or five liters of water a day, gasping like animals. From up on the tower, the surrounding hills resounded with light. By noon it was so baked and airless the only place you could bear was the inside of the church. About four days of this and the job was finished.
“We’ll clear the site tomorrow,” Meredith said. “It’ll be a late start. “I’ve got to go to the dentist in the morning.”
“Ouch.”
“I don’t mind it, me,” he said.
He had an interesting relationship with his dentist, who had once dared him to have a filling without anesthetic. “It won’t take a minute,” he promised, staring steadily at Meredith. The challenge was obvious. Meredith looked steadily back at him for fifteen seconds and bought it.
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It were bearable. But I love those fucking dental drills! Water cooled, five hundred thousand rpm. Shit hot. You can see this fucking aerosol of stuff flying out of your mouth when they’re working. Tooth debris, water droplets, saliva, blood, bacteria. The fucking works.” Seeing my expression, he laughed. “Anyway we’re done here. We’ll have a nice short day tomorrow.”
He got out his cell phone. “I’ll just make arrangements for someone to collect that laminated stone.”
He drove me back to Halifax in his usual way, overtaking people on blind bends as if the van were some Kawasaki he’d once owned. I got him to drop me in the center of town, so I could go round Salisbury’s and buy a few things; then I walked home with the stuff in two plastic bags.
It was nine o’clock by then, a Tuesday night in high summer. Something was different about the air: it was filling with humidity. I could see clouds up over the moor outside the town. I cooked. I watched a TV program about a footballer accepting a challenge to be an interior decorator. After that, the news came on, the usual stuff, children without anything to eat enlisted as soldiers in some fucking African war; kids at home suffering all kinds of abuse. It was dark by then. Outside it had just begun to rain, big slow drops, then smaller and faster. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up at two o’clock in the morning to find it still on. I went over to satellite to get the adult channels, but after five minutes I couldn’t be bothered. I couldn’t imagine having sex anymore. The water was more interesting, sluicing down the windows, rushing down the gutters in front. I got up and switched the light on. The house had been a rental when I bought it, a one-up one-down furnished in the seventies with fitted carpets in swirling patterns of purple and green. The bathroom suite and kitchen cupboards were purple too. Nothing got done because I couldn’t get the energy up after work. There was grease and dust on top of the cupboards that had been there twenty years.
Looking round, I wished I’d done more. Then I thought if I just went to bed maybe I’d go to sleep again. But I lay awake listening to the rain and thinking about the sword in Sal Meredith’s dream. I thought about Meredith himself, and the sense of him I had as feral, full of caution and daring in equal amounts as he went about the city getting their heads off. I thought about him taking the dentist’s bet, bracing himself against the vibration in his jaw, trying to bring on anesthesia by staring up and away from the dentist’s blank intent face into the spray flying up like fireworks through the tight beam of the overhead lamp.
Why did I like his smile so much? He didn’t smile often but when he did it was hard not to respond. All I could think was that it reminded me of my father’s smile. It had the same quality of being too young for his age.
“I’m too old for mine,” I thought.
I was awake most of the night.
It was still wet the next day, Wednesday, which made it hard to wake up. The light was poor. The air had that gray liquid look it gets in West Yorkshire, where the chemists are still filling prescriptions for seasonal affect disorder in July. Meredith arrived ten minutes late. I was already outside the house waiting for him.
“You’re keen,” he said.
“Good time at the dentist’s?”
That got a grin off him.
“Not bad,” he said. “But I had a right epic wi’ the van this morning. Smoke coming from under the dash, all sorts. I can see something sparking back there but I just can’t get at it with my fingers.”
By the time we got to St. John’s the sun had come out a bit. A light breeze was helping to dry things out, moving the leaves of the birch and oak above Church Bank Lane. Church Brook, swollen by the night’s runoff, rushed along in its narrow defile. The porous old gritstone they’d built the church from had sucked up the rain; it looked blackened and fucked, like a ruin in the valley. Meredith wouldn’t have the radio on, he didn’t feel like it. That made us slow. We had trouble getting the VERTICAL ACCESS sign down. Cordless power tools and other tools, locked into the vestry at night, had to be checked into their plastic bins and stacked in the back of the van. Meredith did this on his own, then wandered about the site looking for things he thought he might have missed. He seemed sad the job was finished. “People should look after places like this,” he said. If he had his way, he’d always do this kind of work, restoration work. Looking out at the graveyard I wasn’t so sure. Eventually we were finished.
“How’s that dream of yours?” I said.
“Eh? Oh, that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Like clockwork these days,” he said. “Night after night, getting their heads off.”
“I want to be in it,” I said.
He grinned.
“What?” he said.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I want to be in the dream. I want to share it.”
“Come on, Mike,” he said. “What’s the joke?”
“I mean it, Sal.”
He began to look embarrassed.
I said: “There’s no joke here.”
He laughed.
“Come on, Mike,” he repeated. “It’s a dream.”
I kept looking into his eyes, but he shook his head and walked off. “You’re fucking mad,” he said.
Two hours later I watched him go round the graveyard looking for me. I was on the tower by then, hidden down behind the parapet. Meredith was calling, “Mike? Mike?” The humidity in the air made his voice sound unpredictable, close by one minute, far away the next. “This is fucking stupid,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I’m giving you another five minutes, then I’m going.” He waited slightly less than that. “Fuck off then, you stupid fucker,” he shouted. I watched him drive the van away, then I went back down into the church. I pulled one of the Sunday school drawings off the pin board and wrote on the back of it: “Places like this reek of death.”
I signed that as if it was the visitors’ book and put it on one of the tables next to the careful fan of leaflets. As an afterthought I added, “Anyone can see that.” Then I went out between the graves with the bucket of gobbo I’d mixed that morning and started smeari
ng it over them at random with a pointing trowel.
Little Red’s Tango
Peter Straub
LITTLE RED PERCEIVED AS A MYSTERY
WHAT A MYSTERY IS Little Red! How he sustains himself, how he lives, how he gets through his days, what passes through his mind as he endures that extraordinary journey. … Is not mystery precisely that which does not yield, does not give access?
LITTLE RED, HIS WIFE, HIS PARENTS, HIS BROTHERS
Little is known of the woman he married. Little Red seldom speaks of her, except now and then to say, “My wife was half Sicilian,” or “All you have to know about my wife is that she was half Sicilian.” Some have speculated, though not in the presence of Little Red, that the long-vanished wife was no more than a fictional or mythic character created to lend solidity to his otherwise amorphous history. Years have been lost. Decades have been lost. (In a sense, an entire life has been lost, some might say Little Red’s.) The existence of a wife, even an anonymous one, lends a semblance of structure to the lost years.
Half of her was Sicilian; the other half may have been Irish. “People like that you don’t mess with,” says Little Red. “Even when you mess with them, you don’t mess with them, know what I mean?”
The parents are likewise anonymous, though no one has ever speculated that they may have been fictional or mythic. Even anonymous parents must be of flesh and blood. Since Little Red has mentioned, in his flat, dry Long Island accent, a term in the Uniondale High School jazz ensemble, we can assume that for a substantial period his family resided in Uniondale, Long Island. There were, apparently, two brothers, both older. The three boys grew up in circumstances modest but otherwise unspecified. A lunch counter, a diner, a small mom-and-pop grocery may have been in the picture. Some connection with food, with nourishment.
Little Red’s long years spent waiting on tables, his decades as a “waiter,” continue this nourishment theme, which eventually becomes inseparable from the very conception of Little Red’s existence. In at least one important way, nourishment lies at the heart of the mystery. Most good mysteries are rooted in the question of nourishment. As concepts, nourishment and sacrifice walk hand in hand, like old friends everywhere. Think of Judy Garland. The wedding at Cana. Think of the fish grilled at night on the Galilean shore. A fire, the fish in the simple pan, the flickeringly illuminated men.
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