by Peter Murphy
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘Nothing. Go back to bed. You’re still half asleep. You must have been dreaming.’
Old Crow knows his lives have been no more than dream stories the soul tells itself at the second of death, that delicious alchemical rush as transfiguration occurs and the whatever-it-is essence converts into black light, kinetic heat, and you tilt your wings and slip and shape-shift through to the somewhere-else, transcending absolute black in a death-defying virtuoso act, and all the assembled souls in the halls of eternity go Wow! and Bravo! and Who Is That Daring Flying Machine? and applaud the sight of animate matter transmuted into streams of electrons and—weeeee!—streaking through power lines and telex systems, a strobe of dark lightning slashing the fabric of the sky, senses laser sharp, eyes like Zeiss lenses set to turbo-zoom, its body’s rhythms and mind’s melodies transposed into the thrilling drone of power pylons, the stuff of thermonuclear dreams, an electric ghost whose presence can be divined sometimes by the living, manifest as background radiation in their cell memories, insinuated into their analogues, an inkling, slightly acrid, a sudden pressure drop as its form flits through the white mist of television interference, just about glimpsed when a heavy fall of rain splits the screen into component pixels, its presence faintly sensed as the living dead slouch in their sweats in front of the box, biorhythms at lowest ebb, a hair’s breadth from death, the last metabolic stop before terminus est, the white-noised no-man’s-land where the dead and the living dead intermingle and become one.
X
To enter St Luke’s Hospital, you passed through a trellis embroidered with creepers and hydrangeas that gave onto a modest little garden bisected by a paved path, benches placed around the grass verge, grey blocks of buildings looming on three sides. Inside the main dining room the radio piped incongruously chirpy pop music. A television sat on a shelf bolted to the wall about ten feet off the floor, the sound turned down, Doris Day flouncing around in her pyjamas. Bath chairs and wheelchairs were stacked and folded in corners. The floor smelled scrubbed and carbolic.
The residents were mostly perplexed-looking women, all elbows and angles, like wooden dolls propped awkwardly in their chairs. Some clutched soft toys in hands that were mostly knuckle, and muttered to their shoes when they weren’t casting furtive glances at the pastel-painted walls.
Some were scrawny and spindly, others double-chinned and flabby, their arms and legs as soft muscled as those of infants. A spindly stick-figured woman with bifocals padded around in repetitive paths, her slippers describing complex bee patterns, a security anklet periodically activating the front-door lock with a loud click.
In the couple of weeks she’d been there, my mother had lost even more weight and seemed to retreat to the back of her mind. Her speech became hard to decipher, and what I could make out was vague and befuddled. The nurses tut-tutted to each other about her bloods being like water and speculating as to whether or not she needed to be put on a drip. She spent most of her time strapped into a chair like a toddler at a restaurant, a cup of mush in her trembling hand, eyes dull and glazed.
On the days it wasn’t raining the nurses encouraged me to take her out into the garden. I helped her into a coat and guided her down the narrow corridor, baby steps, stopping every so often as her body was racked with shuddering fits, and the birdwoman with the glasses bumped against our backs like some malfunctioning automaton as we shuffled in slow motion towards the door. One of the nurses came out to poke a code into the keypad on the wall, and when the buzzer sounded she shoved the door and held it open until we were outside.
We’d sit on a bench and watch small birds settle on the trellis. I’d light my mother’s cigarettes and take them from her fingers when they’d burned down to the butt, blathering about the weather, uncomfortably aware that she’d be vexed with me for speaking to her like she was a slow child. Truth was, I didn’t know how to act. I was acutely aware of the nurses watching me, like they were gauging my performance as a son.
Sometimes as I was leaving, my mother would try to manoeuvre herself onto the nurse’s blind side and slip out the door. ‘C’mon,’ she’d mutter, ‘we’ll go home,’ the careful enunciation of each word seeming to require all her energy and concentration. For a moment I’d indulge the fantasy of the two of us sneaking off and maybe stealing a car and holding up petrol stations and living out the rest of our lives as fugitives from the law. But instead I took her gently by the arm and parked her at the nurse’s station.
‘I can’t bring you with me,’ I’d say, feeling like she must have felt when she left me in the classroom on my first day of school. And I’d force myself to walk away, aware of her clear, watery eyes staring after me, burning through my back, my ribcage, right into my rotten little heart.
All I wanted to do after those visits was go out and get drunk, to feel numbed from what was happening. One evening I stopped by Hyland’s off-licence instead of going home. The old man was in the back room watching the soaps as usual. I eased the door open a crack, just enough for me to squeeze through, not enough to rattle the bell, and grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge and stuck it under my coat. I crept out and hurried across the square to the cemetery and prised the lid off a bottle using the edge of a headstone.
Soon it began to batter down with sleet, one of those vicious, vindictive squalls that make your ears and teeth ache. I stuffed the remaining bottles into my coat. Weighed down and clinking, I ducked into Donahue’s and ordered a glass and brought it out into the empty beer garden where I could top it up without getting caught. The big gas heater made my face feel sunburned. Sleet battered the perspex canopy overhead.
Shortly before closing time a girl came out nursing her vodka-and-something. She was alone, and I couldn’t help but stare. You could tell she’d been very pretty, maybe even beautiful, when she was younger. The bone structure was still intact, but a patchwork of smile lines had frozen in place around her huge, starved eyes. She had on a pair of low-riding jeans and a top embroidered with flower patterns. Something about her in that blouse was more affecting than if she’d dressed her age, as if the wish to stay young was enough to carry it off. She shivered from the cold, fumbled with her lighter and cigarettes and caught my eye.
‘Have you seen Gunter Prunty around?’ she said, hugging herself. She spoke with a London-Irish accent. ‘Big chap.’
I shook my head.
‘Good.’
She sat beside me on the bench. I guessed she was more than a little drunk.
‘How do you know Gunter?’ I said.
‘I’m his lover.’
She let the end of the word uncurl off her tongue like some kind of party trick, and took a gulp of vodka.
‘My name’s Maggie.’
She offered me her hand. I took it, careful not to squeeze too hard, and told her my name.
‘Well, John,’ she said. ‘You’ll never get a woman with that handshake.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just let go of her fingers and sipped beer.
‘You used to knock about with Jamey Corboy,’ she said. ‘He was fun.’
She set the tumbler down and nodded at my glass.
‘Want another?’
Before I could reply, she looked around and caught the eye of a young lad clearing tables and ordered us more drinks. When she opened her bag to pay, you could see it was a mess in there, money and make-up and receipts. She gave the boy a tenner and told him to keep the change.
‘Cheers,’ she said, and clinked her glass off mine. We sat in silence for a while and then she said: ‘I bought you a drink. The least you can do is make idle conversation.’
‘Why don’t you talk and I’ll join in when you get going,’ I said.
‘Jesus. A listener.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘How rare. What if I tell you about the time I was abused by my brother-in-law.’
I didn’t expect that.
‘What age were you?’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Twenty-four. That’s not abuse.’
‘Isn’t it?’
She fiddled with a ragged friendship bracelet tied around her wrist.
‘Ask me something else,’ she said.
‘Any kids?’
‘Two abortions. You?’
It went on like that for some time. I told her she had the biggest eyes I’d ever seen on a girl. She said boys like me always fall for the Bambi routine, before they realise girls like her are more trouble than they’re worth.
‘Y’know,’ she said, ‘I used to see you every morning on your way to school. You looked so cute in your uniform.’
I reddened.
‘I never saw you,’ I said.
She lit another cigarette.
‘Maybe I should’ve worn a shorter skirt. Then you might have noticed. What age are you anyway?’
‘Nineteen.’
She ignored the lie, or let herself believe it, and knocked back most of her drink.
The more we talked the closer she sat to me. I can’t remember which of us made the move, or if we both did at the same time, but sitting there in that empty yard among the kegs and the benches, we kissed. Funny how people who don’t even know each other can kiss like that, like it means something. All the time, warning bells were going off in my head about what would happen if someone saw us and it got back to Gunter, but that only seemed to make it better.
When the staff threw us out I walked her to her flat.
‘Nightcap?’ she said. ‘Gunter’s on the late shift.’
In that moment I could see how it all played out. We’d go inside and sit at her kitchen table and have just the one, and just the one would become another one, and we’d move to the sofa, both knowing what was going to happen, we wouldn’t be able to stop it; she’d lead me into the bedroom, both of us too numb to feel bad, there’d be no guilt, it’d feel like we were forgiven no matter what we did, and when she woke I’d be gone and she wouldn’t care either way. It was like the deed was already done somehow, and to make it real would have been just a formality, repeating with our bodies what we’d already pictured in our minds.
‘No thanks,’ I said.
‘You sure?’
Those huge eyes. I thought about Gunter, and what he’d done to me and Jamey. And then I thought about Guard Canavan and how he forced me to rat Jamey out.
‘No, I’m not sure. But I’d better go home. I have to be up early.’
‘Work?’
‘I have to visit my mother. She’s in a home.’
Maggie guffawed but then stopped herself just as suddenly.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’
When I woke my eyes were filled with water and my hands clawed at the sheets. There was a yellow stream of dried sick on my pillow. My mouth tasted vile. I stripped the bed and shambled downstairs, brought up short by the sight of an envelope on the doormat. Jamey’s handwriting. I dumped the soiled bedclothes on the floor and tore it open. There was a postcard inside, paperclipped to a few sheets of paper. The picture on the front showed a trio of musicians sitting on a patterned carpet playing exotic-looking flutes and hand drums. The caption read: The Master Musicians of Joujouka. On the back was a single sentence, printed in block capitals.
I AM ONLY ESCAPED TO TELL THEE.
I sat at the kitchen table and leafed through the papers.
The Ghost in the Machine
by Jamey Corboy
The connecting flight from Barcelona to Boukhalef was delayed by fog. Three hours spent loitering sore-eyed and adenoidal in a harshly lit terminal before boarding. It was a short hop, which was some solace, and when they touched down he shuffled through the giant vacuum hose of the deplaning tunnel onto the travelator, down two flights of steps to join the queue for customs check, freeze-dried by the chilly airplane air.
The guy from the car service was slumped into a chair in the arrivals lounge, wearily holding a sign bearing his name—Mr Fixer.
‘I was about to pitch a tent,’ the driver said as the terminal doors slid apart, admitting a hairdryer blast of wet heat. ‘Wanna put your case in the trunk?’
‘No thanks.’
They walked towards the short-term parking lot. Fixer felt microwaved back to life. Already his skin prickled with sweat. ‘Australian?’ he said to the driver.
‘Kiwi.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No worries.’
Evening traffic swarmed through the medina. The light was unreal. He took out his wallet and checked the thin wad of dirhams he’d bought at the currency-exchange counter, hoping it wasn’t one of those hotels that demanded a credit-card number or deposit on arrival in case you needed to use the phone or the mini-bar. He didn’t mind the travelling so much, but the incidentals ate into his profit margin. A few cent lost on the exchange rate here, a cup of coffee or a newspaper there. It all added up, receipts replacing the notes in his wallet. Expenses will be covered, the client assured him. Well, it was their dollar. He could just as easily have done the job in his lab. They could have Fed-Exed the DAT, could have emailed the file, but no, too cautious. Too paranoid.
The driver dropped him off at the hotel. He checked in and went straight to his room. The lights of his room flickered on and the air-conditioning hummed into life as he stuck his key card into the wall slot. All hotel rooms are the same, he thought. You only pay for the size of the foyer.
He went to the window and gazed out on the harbour. Evening was falling. If not for the grey haze, he might have seen right across the Strait of Gibraltar. Fatigue conjured phantom shapes in the mist.
He placed the suitcase on the floor and took his shoes off and lay down on the bed. Sleep crawled over him, tendrils of mist seeping through the a/c grille, inseminating his dreams with wailing voices like calls to prayer, echoes of past exorcisms. And he fell, as he always did, pushed from a plane or the top of a twenty-storey building, only to jolt awake as if zapped with defibrillator paddles moments before hitting the pavement.
He stared at the ceiling and waited for some integral part of himself to disentangle from the dream stuff and re-enter his body. It was way too early. His body clock was all over the place. He sat in a chair by the window and waited for the sun to rise. In time, the fog lifted just enough for him to see ships in dock. Ports are portals, he told himself. Just like home.
He went through the list of contact numbers in his phone and dialled the airline.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’d like to change my return flight.’
‘Certainly, sir. Can I have your details?’
He took his ticket and boarding pass from his inside pocket and called out numbers.
The American appeared in the lobby at ten thirty. Tall, dressed in a T-shirt and khakis, lantern jawed, beard the same length as his cropped hair.
‘Flight OK?’
‘Fine. Is it far?’
‘We can walk it from here.’
They left the hotel and zigzagged through the market stalls set up in the souk: cobblers, leatherworkers, coppersmiths, fruit vendors, rugs and throws.
‘Sorry they dragged you out here,’ the American said. ‘Management wouldn’t authorise release of the tapes. You know how it is. Piracy.’
‘Big money, huh?’
‘No kidding. Priority release. First single off the album.’
The American explained the urgency of the situation. The track had to be fixed, mastered and remixed for a radio edit within the week. Then there was artwork, manufacturing, release-schedule deadlines, the press campaign.
The American was a producer of some description. Fixer had done a quick internet search and turned up his name on a couple of big records. The American had been in exile here for years, knew all the Berber and Chaabi musicians. A contact in New York had commissioned field recordings; exotic flavour for some big-league act. He’d recorded about half an hour of music, earmarked a twenty-second sample, but when it was inserted into the main track, there was some so
rt of technical anomaly. A spanner in the works. He put the distress call out three days ago.
They ducked into a narrow alley and came to a decrepit building next door to a barber’s shop. It looked like a nuclear bunker. The American took out his keys, unlocked a padlock, slid the door across. They went up a spiral staircase into a cluttered room dimmed with blinds, the air tangible with the faintly cooked smell of kef. Electrical leads coiled like snakes on patterned rugs. Bullet mics and pop shields. A mixing desk that looked like something from the early days of the space programme.
‘I’ll play you the tapes,’ the American said. He sat in a swivel chair before a computer monitor, tapped the keys, wheeled over to the mixing desk and shoved up the master fader.
Beats pounded from powerful speakers. After a couple of minutes the main track peeled apart to reveal a passage of skreeling, ear-splitting sounds, like chanters or bagpipes.
‘What’s the problem?’ Fixer said.
The American stood, palms splayed on the padded lip of the console.
‘This.’
He prodded a series of buttons, silencing elements of the track until he’d isolated the anomaly. A wailing sound, like wind. No matter how many times Fixer heard it, it chilled him. Each specimen differed subtly, a minor variation on the last, as though the sound were a mutating virus, migrating through phantom frequencies, broadcasting from the ether. Fixer imagined he could hear traces of the fog in the sound, troubling the AI dreams of the digital hardware as it had troubled his own.
