Zero Bomb

by M. T Hill

  * * *

  Safely back indoors, Remi hangs the dead Gilper in its charger mount and runs himself a near-scalding bath. He climbs in. Martha’s falsified face fills the cabinet mirror. He is very still. Her older face is open but insincere. She’s pale and freckled and dead, just as she is in his strongest recollections of her.

  When the weight of grief becomes overwhelming, Remi holds his head under the water and wills himself to breathe.

  * * *

  Remi can’t sleep. The Tube and the power cut and his racing pulse. Martha’s face, older and thinner. He’s so awake. Her nose had looked harder, sharper, and her gaze was hollow.

  He throws off the sheets and goes to the sink and pours himself a water. The bug is winking in its mount to say it’s charging. He angles its projector to the wall and turns it on. The wall, a screen from corner to corner, reads MEMORY EMPTY. He goes to the bug, takes it down, shakes it. Hard reboot, try again. There’s no available footage, and nothing else in the root folders either. The bug didn’t only lose power – something wiped it.

  Remi sits on the end of his bed. A mocking reflection in the floor-to-ceiling: balding pate, striated fat beneath each nipple, a greying pubis. He claps feebly and the television flickers on – again the full span of the wall, a bachelor’s toy or impulse buy, intended once to shore up a defence within. He hops from shopping channel to sports round-up to interactive porn. He flops back on the bed and tries to get an erection. The woman on the screen says, ‘Hey, Remi.’

  Later he wakes up with a pillow over his crotch. The TV is still blaring but the light outside has changed. Dirty pink, earliest morning. Certainly the wrong side of his alarm. Remi realises he’s listening to an automated news report. A burning car at Watford Gap services. He claps once to turn off the television, and the television stays on. Remi claps again. The volume increases. Remi doesn’t remember changing the channel over. Remi doesn’t watch the news because Remi hates the news. He claps a third time, and the image flickers and resharpens.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ he says.

  He searches for the remote under the bed, and the news rolls on. Something in the reporter’s tone, the inhumanness of it, has started to distress him. Not the bleached wording, nor even the false sympathy. He can’t find the remote, and he sits back down on the bed, dizzy. He’s started to sweat.

  Where’s the remote?

  Responders have not ruled out the possibility that the driver’s daughter was in the car.

  Remi faces the screen, and with it comes a weight. The sensation is fast upon him, worse than panic – more an unfeeling. It’s paralysing. A lightless helmet closes around his head, covering his mouth and ears and eyes. It’s suddenly hard to breathe, and a confusing, caustic pain racks his chest and arms. There comes the sound of crackling meat, then a blaring blue light. It’s like his limbs are being slowly stretched out. He’s watching a fire, and the television gets louder. The first body was found at close to twenty-three hours last night. The body was a man. Remi can suddenly smell gas, strongly. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. Responders have not ruled out the possibility that the driver’s daughter was in the car. And now Remi comes off the bed with his hands over his ears. ‘No!’ he screams, as the volume only rises. ‘No!’

  And soon the sound distorts. The treble into white noise. The blood runs thickly in him, and his gullet burns, and he kicks at the screen, which immediately discolours. His foot has left a rainbow wound. The volume is still increasing, and Remi stuffs his hand behind the screen and swipes at the wires; but the wires are hidden in the walls by design, and what’s happening to him here must be deliberate. This is another attack on him. He kicks the screen until the membrane tears, and little islands of pixels blacken and die. The speakers roar. Remi’s body is a slick, tautened mass, and he collapses into himself, numb and empty. He’s remembering something. He’s remembering more than he wants to. The memory is a parasite whose anaesthetising venom has worn off. Remi can sense its teeth, or a proboscis, deeper in him than will ever be safe to extract.

  * * *

  Remi comes round when something heavy hits the window. The sun is half up, and his morning alarm is sounding.

  Remi gets up from the floor. The TV is off. The fine details of a bird’s splayed wings are imprinted on the glass. He gathers his sheets about him and goes to the window. He’s naked, and he can smell blood and vomit. He rubs the glass behind the bird print, expecting some sort of grease or dust to come away on his finger. The glass hums. It wasn’t a small bird. Wingspan more than a foot across – maybe a pigeon. He goes on his tiptoes to get a view of the ground, lest there be a bird lying dead out there, some sort of omen. There’s no bird. There is, however, a movement on the periphery. Down low, across the bottom of his view, a flicker of reddish brown. Bin bags rustling in the steel-fenced rubbish store. He touches his face in thought. He draws his glass-chilled finger across his eyes. He closes them. He opens them. The red-brown thing is staring back. It’s a fox. The fox is in the communal bin store. Two eyes, alert and bright; not yellow-gold as Remi might expect, but silvered, almost electric blue. He pushes himself against the window. The fox’s face is slender and conical, and its ears are pricked and twitching independently of each other. Its feet are stretched out in front, playful as a pose, weirdly exact in their symmetry. Its brush and coat are streaked with brown. The fox is probably a metre or so from coal snout to white bob, and it’s watching Remi carefully.

  Remi slaps the glass, leaving a wet smear. ‘Get away with it,’ he mouths. ‘Go.’

  As if it heard him, the fox slides out of the bin store, smooth as spilled oil, shoulders rising lazily with each step. It stops itself, directly below Remi’s window, squarely in Remi’s view. Its head is cocked upwards yet the eyes are no longer fixed on him. The fox’s brush rises and settles. The wind breathes once, twice, through the fox’s coat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Remi asks, and realises on the last syllable that he was holding his breath.

  The fox moves in a circle and coils up on the ground, chin over one forepaw. Its tail rises and falls again, seemingly its own creature. The fox glances at him, and then it yawns.

  Remi slaps the windowpane. ‘Get out of it!’

  The fox immediately stands up and slinks out of sight. Remi turns away, angry and cursing the lot of it; cursing the state of his television and the fragments of a night now repeating in his mind.

  There was a news report. He’d remembered something. He’d forced the memory back down for now.

  A bark, and Remi swivels back to the glass. The fox is still there. This time, though, it’s partially out of sight, its brush extended rod-like and hind legs wriggling and struggling for traction. As Remi watches, he realises the fox is dragging something heavy with its mouth. Remi swallows. The bed sheets feel heavy about him. A large green sack slithers into plain view. The sack is marked CLINICAL WASTE.

  Here the fox stops and curls itself around it. It looks up with a kind of certainty. Remi can’t shake the feeling the fox wants him to have seen all of this.

  ‘What?’ Remi asks, as the fox places a paw on the sack.

  Did the fox just tap it?

  Remi goes into the bathroom and washes his hands. He feels ill. He goes back to the window and the fox is still down there with the sack marked CLINICAL WASTE. Remi pulls on his jogging pants and goes back to the bathroom, where he washes his hands again.

  He wills himself to face the mirror. The mirror has isolated and highlighted an area of sun damage on Remi’s cheeks. Sallow eyes, a tungsten sheen to his skin. He’s living inside a stranger with thick grey hairs about the shoulders and a dark mole on his chest.

  Remi leaves the bathroom and checks the window again. The fox is there. The fox is waiting. ‘Right,’ he says. He pulls on his dressing gown and leaves the flat. He goes down two floors to the block’s yard door. Two breaths in. Three breaths out.

  * * *

  Remi has walked London’s streets long e
nough to recognise a fox’s signature. A heavy waste smell, at once human and gamey and archly sour. He knows the calls, too: they are part of the Hackney fabric, and in Hackney the fox is everywhere.

  The back door is open a crack, and through this vent comes the smell in earnest. Only this fox doesn’t smell exactly like the others. Beneath the common scent, the primary notes, there is mint, not fresh or bright but there nonetheless – a light menthol that comes and goes with each inhalation, almost easy to dismiss each time. The fox rises to its feet and slinks to the crack in the door, waiting for Remi to open it fully. It’s larger than Remi had first thought: broader in the shoulders, more squat than lithe. A big fox. A powerful-looking fox, with a black-tinted pelage on close inspection. More than this, though, Remi sees with clarity the keenness of its face. The creature is plainly intelligent – the silvered eyes carrying a sort of half-smile, a knowing grin. When it re-angles its head towards the hall light, its pupils flash green.

  ‘Come on,’ Remi says. ‘Clear off.’

  The fox moves away only far enough to nudge the waste sack with its forepaw. It returns to the door.

  Remi shakes his head. His palms are itching. His breath sticks. How often do you stand this close to a fox? How often will a fox let you?

  Despite himself, Remi takes a step forward. The fox stays still. Remi opens the back door fully. The fox darts in and across the carpet, turning to Remi with its teeth bared. It starts to salivate. Its spittle rolls from the corner of its mouth and on to the carpet in heavy globs. Remi’s too stunned to speak, or react with any grace, and now finds himself outside, in the fox’s place, nearly tripping over the waste sack as he backs away from the door.

  In the foyer the fox squats and begins to piss on the carpet. Remi yelps and remonstrates but the fox goes on with it, a loud and heavy stream. Remi covers his mouth as the fox uses its front legs to drag itself around the carpet, still going.

  Finished at last, the fox pushes back outside, rubs its flank along Remi’s rooted legs, and takes the knot of the waste bag in its jaws once more. It drags the bag against Remi’s shin, where it sags around his leg with a liquid-seeming weight. The fox returns to the front door and waits there indifferently.

  Remi leans and opens the door without a word. The fox scampers away over wet gravel, and then there’s silence. Remi can’t take his eyes from the carpet. He can’t even blink.

  There, glistening, is a fresh message for him.

  8

  In a stupor, Remi takes the clinical waste bag up to his flat. He accepts that it belongs to him. He’s unbound, the wrong side of a border. To look at his broken television is to hate and hurt, to loathe and shame himself. The only recourse is to look at the opposite wall – the one without windows, achingly bare and typically new-build, a crackless magnolia. It seems the most non-threatening surface in his world. He lies on his bed and stares at the wall for a long time, the fear being that anything more complex will cause him to break down entirely. Only when his palpitations fade, and his hands and feet feel somehow detached from him, does he allow himself to close his eyes and picture the fox once more: the flecked and rain-matted coat; the deranged grin playing on its chops; the sight of it marking the foyer.

  A message. Unless Remi is fully adrift, the fox came inside and pissed a message on the carpet. Deny it, and Remi risks cutting all tethers to the real; might need to admit – and submit – to greater hallucinations, including the picture of Martha shown to him on the train. Embrace it, however, and the circuit breaks anyway. No animal has the capacity to communicate with humans like that. Yet Remi saw it, still smells it, and there’s a sack here in the room as proof of the encounter. He shifts on the bed and stretches a leg down from the bed to touch it with his toes. The contents of the bag are heavy, malleable, hard to define. He’d carried the bag up into the flat, pushed open the door with his back. He was there with the fox and now he’s here, chill-blue in the morning glow.

  You’re beached, Remi. The dunes are wet. There is a figure in the breakers.

  There was a message written in fox piss.

  There was an exchange.

  Sleep deprivation can feel like being inside a translucent tunnel, of course. He’s only dimly aware of the flat, of London stirring and coming to life around him. Inside he’s screaming: What do you remember? Was it about Martha? Why can’t he remember? And so he tries: Martha was born breach, with one eye swollen closed for the first fortnight. A lot of hair. Joan said to him, ‘She has your brow.’ Tongue-tie noticed after a week of painful latching, Joan’s nipples ‘like a war zone’, and Martha’s tongue clipped the next day. She sleeps well enough and rarely cries. She starts to walk at thirteen months. Her first syllable is ma. Her first recognisable word is teeth. She enjoys screens too much, and she notices planes going over long before they do. She’s prone to angry outbursts, a fault Remi quickly attributes to himself. She’s affectionate, unselfconscious, inquisitive. She finds comfort in holding Joan’s breasts, whose bronchial veins have by then faded, and whose areole have returned to their paler, pre-birth colour. Martha insists on walking even when she’s too tired to walk. By four she’s losing an early interest in books, and the nursery staff can’t always contain her moods. There are incident reports. A possible diagnosis or concern, some term he can’t recall – though the threat is vague at first, and so unbelievable. Did she soil herself too often? Joan’s mother would say, It’s just a phase. Forever a phase. Google, Martha’s third parent, is filled with increasingly desperate search terms. Martha wets the bed, too, see. She stops Remi and Joan removing insects from the house because they are welcome there. She prefers to be around Joan, most of the time. Sometimes you can see that Joan resents it.

  Then Martha is seven. A smell of gas. A smell of burning. Thin fabric catching and quickly consumed. A column of heat, with the figure of Martha frozen in fear or fascination before it. Is that it? Is it all that’s left? A fire? Where was the fire?

  It must be closing on rush hour now. The mauve sky is streaked with pink and orange-rimmed cloud. Remi can’t decide what day it is. Is he working? Is he on rota? He slips uneasily from the bed and pulls on a pair of thermal leggings, a fleecy top. The waste sack carries the musk of the fox. Dung and acrid sourness. He’s with it once more, because the smell has transferred to his hands, is seeping into him. He’s staring down the fox in his mind, willing it to turn or never turn – to make a choice, because those eyes have snared him. And now Remi wants to open the sack almost as much as he wants to burn it. Burning might yet be the answer. He kneels. The knot is crudely tied but good for its purpose, tight and small. He picks at it with trembling fingers. He’s watching from outside himself again, curious to note how uncoordinated and skittish his hands seem. He persists, solves the knot. He sits back and watches the ties unfurl. A fresh smell, camphor and ferns. He thinks of embalming a body, he thinks of sterile things. When you try to mask a bad smell you often draw attention to it. The sack’s ties are settling. The neck of it has opened. Remi weighs the situation and goes to fetch his Marigolds from the kitchenette sink.

  He digs in. Inside the sack are several smaller, opaque bags, sealed with ziplocks and labelled with handwritten notes, like those you might find on a prescription bottle. He takes out the nearest bag and squeezes it. Liquid. A faint grease mark near its sealed opening. He reads the label, which says OILED PUDDLE, followed by a ‘date of collection’ – yesterday. He rotates the bag, and his skin prickles.

  He takes out another bag. A little heavier, less fluid. He holds it up to his face. The label carries scruffier writing, perhaps another writer’s. It says TALLOW GREASE, and he places the bag very carefully on the floor and stares at it emptily for a few minutes.

  The third bag Remi removes contains liquid, too. MANNED LORRY SPRAY, followed by TERMINAL ROUNDABOUT APPROACH, BRAKE FLUID MIX. The fourth and fifth are also marked MANNED LORRY SPRAY, modified by ORBITAL HARD SHOULDER and FLYOVER ROADWORKS respectively.

  Remi swallo
ws as he lifts out the last bag. It’s so light it could be empty, and there’s no label to define it. One corner of its sealing edge has come unstuck, and he realises that this must be the source of the bag’s smell. He winces and puts a finger into the gap, then pulls. The bag rips, and the contents spill out. It’s hard to understand them, at first. Duster-ends spring to mind, a misfiring connection taking the easiest route. Remi doesn’t blink. His ears are roaring. There are two of the things, tartar-white and bangle-like in thickness. They are dark and slightly wet-looking on their inside edges, and feathered on the outside. Threads of red cotton hold each of them together.

  ‘Wood pigeon collars,’ Remi whispers. And in his mind’s eye the fox’s maw is bloodied and dripping. Sated, the fox turns and retreats to the void at the centre of Remi, a den for the oldest and worst of him.

  Remi closes his eyes.

  9

  Surprisingly, Remi sleeps so well he wonders if death has taken out a short loan on him. He wakes around midday, surrounded by the contents of the clinical waste sack, and by pieces of the television. He goes to the toilet, showers unthinkingly, and gathers the small bags back into the waste sack. A single pigeon feather lingers on the floor, tremulous in the aircon stream.

  Dry and dressed, Remi phones his main despatch agencies and signs himself out for the rest of the afternoon. (Facing the changing tech landscape, most of his clients choose nostalgia as a coping strategy, and continue to use the otherwise redundant copper telecoms grid.) He takes care to sound calm and measured on each call. This way, voice frequency analysers won’t detect stress tells or signs of illness, will automatically chalk him down as absent or taking unplanned leave. He also sends two direct messages to the only client with whom he maintains a drinking relationship. Reading them back, he sounds diffident but firm, no bad thing when over-explanation arouses suspicions.