Grasslands

by Andrew McEwan

  ‘Very.’ She winked and pouted.

  ‘Then I'm lucky.’

  ‘Very,’ Lucy echoed herself.

  ‘Luck ain't free,’ Vern concluded, pretending seriousness, feigning death. ‘What have I contracted?’

  ‘I've marked you, claimed your soul.’

  ‘You're a witch?’

  ‘A devil.’

  ‘You eat people,’ he said. ‘Is that it, the price I pay?’

  She smiled. ‘If you like.’

  The Vikings were Norsemen. The sailors were drunk. The angels twanged harps and lit cigarettes.

  Almeric discovered a horde of screws in his toolbox and began the reassembly of doors and furniture.

  He cut his thumb.

  My name is Broken. I fix things. It's what I do.

  My home world is to be filled with a dreadful sight. The weak and the strong shall succumb, despite my ministrations, to the growing pressure of noise and wheels. Arrows I will pluck like stiff feathers from paling flesh. Bones I will set and wounds I will tend, unless...

  Three

  19 - ELVES AND ROPE

  Do cockroaches have lungs and believe in God? Does a can of paint know what colour it is? And does white gloss occupy a privileged niche in the hierarchy of emulsions? Such things concerned him at this late hour as he watched the elves untangle themselves from the roadside verges and go off in pursuit of fun and games. They gambolled over the tarmac, contemptuous of the madly gyrating wheels that threatened to crush them, quietly oblivious of the many exhausts which rumbled above.

  He waved to them, the bright elves, but they didn't wave back.

  ‘What day is it?’ asked Vern.

  ‘What day was it yesterday?’ Lucy replied.

  ‘I don't remember.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘What day is it today?’ Vern sat up, fingering a zit on his forehead.

  ‘Thursday,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Then yesterday was Wednesday,’ said Vern, squeezing.

  Vern stared at Kevin from inside a disused freezer where he couldn't be seen. They were salvaging copper wire and cute little transistors from a derelict butcher's shop prior to its conversion into a wine-bar called, of all things, Edgar's. Kevin was busy stripping down the meter-box. He bobbed silently as if to unheard music, tunes in his enigmatic skull.

  Vern was sick in a bored sense.

  Kevin paused to unwrap a Mars bar. He folded the warm sticky chocolate-covered slab into his big mouth and tossed the wrapper away.

  Vern sneered.

  Kevin said, ‘Arm-ummph-baa-hg-jomb.’

  Vern pulled back from the hole he'd made in the freezer's crumbling insulation, surprised and appalled. He spoke, the sly dog talked, he thought. But what did he say? What did it mean? Was Kevin an alien spy? Perhaps a Venusian after Almeric's secret dough recipe or an agent like the man-thing or an under-cover cop working on the Nex case in which case he'd be seeking evidence to implicate Vern in some loathsome conspiracy, the murder and subsequent disposal of Stan's wife's body whose name Vern didn't even know.

  Perhaps he should confront Kevin. But that would make him look guilty, like he had something to hide.

  Perhaps he did have something to hide. After all, hadn't he harboured a known criminal?

  He should have called the police. But the pay-phone was broken, wasn't it?

  Kevin opened the freezer door, pliers in hand. ‘Have you got a spare balloon I could borrow, Vern?’

  Vern froze, literally. ‘Why?’ he muttered.

  Kevin smiled. ‘It's my lungs,’ he said. ‘I have this rare respiratory condition and need to take samples of the air I exhale every few hours.’ He shrugged like he was frightened Vern would laugh. ‘Doctor's orders.’

  Vern melted. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah - it's weird, I know, and sometimes my voice goes, too.’ Kevin pointed at his throat.

  ‘I'm paranoid,’ Vern confessed. ‘I don't carry balloons. I'm afraid they'll inflate in my pocket and burst.’

  ‘That can be scary,’ Kevin acknowledged. ‘I know. Onetime I had this rubber glove explode in my face.’

  ‘A rubber glove?’ Vern started liking Kevin. He wasn't so bad, he reasoned, if bad things happened to him.

  ‘Sometimes it's necessary to improvise.’

  ‘Like now?’

  ‘Right, if you don't have any balloons.’

  Vern shook his head. ‘But I did see some sausage-skins lying around,’ he added.

  The sky turned blue and the sun ascended. The clouds paraded like yachts at a regatta, their grey-white hulls and sails crewed by spinning birds. He stood on the sea-bed amidst green coral, metal fish and variegated crustaceans, some of which were houses and shops, the people therein hermit crabs, their soft, shell-less hind parts protected in the flexible cast-offs of looms, needles and presses.

  ‘Harriot?’

  ‘No, Cindy.’

  ‘Cindy?’

  ‘I live downstairs,’ she said.

  ‘You look like Harriot,’ Vern said. ‘Do you have a sister?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘What's her name?’ Vern was determined to get to the bottom of this.

  ‘Lucy,’ said Cindy, edging towards her door.

  ‘Ha!’ said Vern. ‘I knew it; Harriet's sister's called Lucy.’

  ‘What a coincidence.’

  ‘It's no coincidence,’ Vern told her. ‘You're her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Harriot.

  ‘No, I'm Cindy.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘I came out to answer the phone.’

  ‘It isn't ringing,’ said Vern.

  ‘It stopped just as you came in,’ she protested. ‘It often takes me a minute or two to hear it.’

  ‘You must be deaf.’

  ‘A little.’ She had her door open now and was disappearing behind it.

  ‘You're a terrible liar,’ declared Vern. ‘If you live here why haven't I seen you before?’ He squinted, one foot on the stairs.

  ‘But you have,’ she replied, only her mouth visible. ‘I came up to tell you you were wanted on the phone.’

  Vern peered harder. ‘When was that?’ he quizzed.

  ‘Wednesday,’ said Cindy.

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Vern. ‘Couldn't have been.’ He had her, he was sure.

  ‘No, not Wednesday yesterday, Wednesday last week, I think.’

  She's cracking, thought Vern. ‘I don't remember,’ he said.

  ‘Well I did,’ she confirmed. ‘There was another man in your flat.’

  ‘Stanley?’

  ‘No, Cindy.’

  ‘Cindy?’

  ‘I live here,’ she said, the mouth retreating.

  ‘He was called Cindy?’ Vern persisted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man in my flat last Wednesday.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you just said...’

  ‘My name's Cindy!’ she bellowed. ‘I don't know the name of the man in your flat.’

  ‘Last Wednesday?’

  ‘Any Wednesday.’

  ‘I thought your name was Harriet?’ Vern said.

  She slammed the door. The phone rang. Vern sat on the stairs and waited, but Stanley or Harriet or Cindy or whatever her name was didn't come out to answer it

  ‘Liar,’ Vern said again.

  ‘What?’ said Lucy, crashing through the door.

  ‘Nothing. ‘

  ‘Who's a liar?’

  ‘The woman who didn't answer the phone,’ Vern told her. Then, ‘What's the rope for?’

  She had a coil of orange rope over her shoulder that clashed badly with her red hair and long grey Mack.

  ‘A hammock,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Us? But we've got a bed.’ Vern was dumbfounded.

  ‘I know,’ said Lucy, ‘but I've n
ever slept in a hammock before and I want to see what it's like.’

  The door of the downstairs flat opened and the woman who didn't answer the phone stepped out.

  ‘It's all right,’ said Vern. ‘I told them you'd moved.’

  ‘There was a call for me?’ she asked, incensed.

  ‘If your name's Cindy,’ he said.

  ‘I told you it was!’

  ‘Then you don't live here anymore.’ Vern stood, triumphant. ‘You're not who you seem.’

  The woman burst into tears. ‘I was expecting a call,’ she said between sobs. ‘My cat's gone missing and I put a card up in the post-office with this number on it.’

  ‘It's dead,’ Vern announced, feeling suddenly wicked. ‘If it's the same cat I think it is then it was kidnapped and tortured.’

  The woman screamed hysterically.

  ‘They cut it into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet where the remains were eaten by giant rats.’

  The woman fell back against her door, which had locked.

  ‘What colour was it?’ inquired Vern.

  The woman clawed blindly for the door-handle, weakened by her tears, her tragic loss.

  Vern, remembering she was a little deaf, repeated the question, adding, ‘The man you saw in my flat killed his wife. He was on the telly. They arrested him three times.’

  She trembled, obviously horrified. ‘B-b-black,’ she eventually whimpered.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Vern replied, ‘wrong cat. This one was ginger.’

  The woman fainted, cracking her head on the banister rail.

  ‘That was rotten,’ Lucy said a while later.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Vern. ‘I don't know what came over me. I couldn't help myself. It's not like me at all. I've been corrupted.’

  ‘I won't buy anything there again.’

  ‘I just got carried away, that's all.’

  ‘The grapes look okay though.’

  ‘I've changed...’

  ‘How's yours?’

  ‘Will I ever be the person I was?’

  ‘Vern?’ Lucy shimmied her legs into red hosiery.

  ‘Lucy?’ He bit into his apple.

  He pulls a face. Lucy laughs and straightens her seams. She goes out. I hide in the kitchen a time, entirely solid...

  20 - BEACH FRIENDS

  Friday sees Vern fixing a drinks-machine in a beach-front cafe, his shirt off. Kevin tinkers with the ice-maker...

  ‘Vern, let's take a break and go for a swim.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘It's too hot to work,’ said Kevin.

  ‘In a minute it'll be even hotter,’ said Vern.

  ‘What's the problem?’ Kevin looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Leaky dispenser.’

  ‘Stick something in the hole.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Kevin scratched his cheek. ‘Chewing-gum,’ he suggested. ‘Or will that dissolve?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Vern, ‘it just goes hard.’

  ‘Yeah. How d'you reckon that?’

  Vern held up the plug of chewing-gum he'd removed from the dispenser.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Kevin. ‘It worked before though.’

  Vern said he was correct and they stole a pack of chewing-gum from the cafe, plugged the dispenser, reassembled it, and went running into the cold ocean.

  Two girls in a canoe nearly ran them down.

  ‘Hey, watch out!’ shouted Vern.

  Kevin turned a funny colour and sank. Vern dived under and fished him out. The two girls beached their canoe, dragging it up the sand.

  ‘Is he okay?’ asked one.

  ‘Graaah-hsst-ydo-kluaaaaf,’ Kevin answered.

  ‘What did he say?’ the second girl wanted to know.

  ‘He said he's all wet,’ translated Vern.

  The girls stood with their hands on their hips, as if to say: we can see that.

  ‘So why did you ask?’ said Vern, acerbic. And the girls walked off, careful to place on foot directly in front of the other. They spun their canoe round to face the water, and paddled.

  Kevin belched. He said nothing more that day, only waved his arms impatiently as he drove the work's van along the beach at a speed incompatible with the terrain.

  Vern jumped out in time to see the vehicle disappear below the foamy hooves of white horses.

  He phoned the depot.

  ‘This is Vernon Planes,’ he said. ‘Listen, I've got some bad news.

  ‘In that case,’ said Rita, ‘I'll put you through to Finchly; hold on.’

  Vern held. He didn't like Finchly. Finchly had given Stan the boot.

  ‘Hello. Planes is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vern. ‘I have to tell you that my partner, Kevin something-or-another, just drove the van into the sea and hasn't come back.’

  ‘Into the sea? Are you mad?’

  ‘No,’ Vern replied. ‘But I am worried.’

  ‘Worried!’ Finchly yelled. ‘Is this a joke, Planes? Because if it is you're...’

  The line went dead. Vern shrugged and, hands in pockets, sloped off down the beach.

  A clock somewhere told him it was eleven thirty. The sand in his shoes made his toes itch. He'd lost his shirt. It had been nearly clean, recently ironed. People were avoiding him for reasons they kept to themselves, shielding their children behind their fatty thighs and drooping breasts, pot-bellies, pipes and picnic baskets. There were palisades all across the beach. Hidden in the grassy dunes were snipers with tennis racket ray-guns and tennis ball hand-grenades.

  Vern crouched over a rock-pool and watched the life within, its complex motions of survival. He tossed flat stones, skimmed thin rocks on the breaking waves. The sun tugged at his shadow and he realized it was past noon, a whole hour flown by.

  His reflection in the water was disturbed. Beneath it, the yellow sand gave no hint of the many footprints that had been erased.

  The salty air made his mouth taste bad. His skin burned. He thought his neck was on fire. There was no sign of Kevin. The van never surfaced like a submarine; no matter how much he wished it, there was no dramatic rescue scene. Vern saw the two girls in the canoe, but they weren't looking for sunken vehicles. The gulls chased each other and snapped up fish. If they were larger, Vern told himself, they could've snapped up his partner, choked and regurgitated him whole. But the gulls were small, like the few people he could see, and far off.

  The time washed past, relentless in its stalking, its hunger great, preying on lives.

  The sky filled and emptied.

  The tide came in. Vern kicked it. It didn't care. The ocean flecked him with spittle, rolling mockingly, hugging its beach in a possessive manner and eating more at each fresh incursion.

  Vern was forced to back-pedal. The water cast a chill at him, its frosty breath drawn from square miles of landless H20.

  It would suck him under, drown him like Kevin, his work-mate's oxygen limited to what was trapped in the van. Vern recalled its special springness - air infused and rarefied, sharing the fate of its kind, drowned in its turn, pumped, adhered to haemoglobin, transmuted, respired, used, carbon-dioxide its surrogate, which was waste to man and ambrosia to plants and trees.

  He sighed wistfully.

  A pink figure appeared next to him.

  I stand by Vernon and prepare to offer advice in exchange for specific information. I ask if his friend can swim. He says he thinks so, but not too well. I ask if he knows of a way to stop an object of unknown but immense size, one that runs on an unknown but vast number of wheels, in its tracks. He ponders this a moment and replies: put a similar object, one of equal or greater mass, in its path; or dig a big hole.

  A trench? I inquire.

  Yes, he says. Or get out of its way.

  He is extremely perceptive...

  ‘Hey, Vern!’ Lucy, running down the beach, trailed her grey Mack behind her like a kite, its string her slender arm.

  I d
isappear. Above the grasslands the crows circle, readying themselves for the coming feast...

  ‘How did you find me?’ said Vern.

  ‘I looked,’ Lucy replied. ‘Who was that you were talking to?’

  Vern gestured ambivalence. ‘I didn't ask and he didn't say. I was...’ He turned his palms up.

  ‘Dreaming,’ provided Lucy.

  ‘Yes,’ Vern confirmed; ‘dreaming about submarines and wondering how far it is to Sweden or Denmark.’

  Lucy stared out to sea, her Mack draped over her naked shoulder, her high-heels undermined.

  ‘How can you run in those?’ queried Vern.

  ‘Practice,’ she said. ‘You keep on your toes.’

  ‘Mine itch.’

  ‘So wash them.’

  Vern guessed how far away the horizon was and said no. He had read somewhere there was a road beneath the ocean, a road flat and long, lined either side by fields. Every place was on this road; it went through every town.

  21 - TONS OF ICE

  Vern and Lucy caught the bus home. On the front seat on the top deck they found a weird shirt, still in its original plastic bag. Vern put it on, regretting the loss of his work's jacket, which he'd left in the van.

  ‘It's you,’ said Lucy, pleased with herself.

  Vern pulled his shoes off and rubbed his toes. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

  Almeric chipped away at the freezer compartment of his fridge with his screwdriver, amassing a pile of splinters and crystals, green shards and blue starforms to go with the white ice-cubes he'd weighed carefully and stacked on the table in place of his pilfered bomb. He smoked a Union cigar. His eyes mirrored the wet ice's wet glare. He made notes as to the quality of this latest batch on a memo pad. The light-bulb swung mysteriously, casting moving shades amongst the slowly melting fortification, and the carpet soaked up the run-off.

  The colours told him nothing.

  ‘It's too warm,’ he said.

  He needed more ice, tons more.

  ‘It should be winter,’ he declared. ‘Then I could open the window and let the cold in.’

  The fridge laboured dutifully, its freezer compartment full of water-filled cups and containers.

  As they froze, Almeric tapped them out like sand-castles and added them to the stack, rebuilding as was necessary. But the pile failed to grow, its wings and buttresses sadly transient, gloriously spangled.

  He reached seventy pounds at two in the morning. The floor was saturated. The phone rang.