Coffin Dodgers

by Gary Marshall

  "You know what I'd do?"

  We've been imagining what we would do if we had a billion dollars.

  "I'd build a time machine and go back in time!"

  "That's amazing, Dave," I say. "Most people with time machines use them to mow the lawn. But you? You'd use a time machine to… travel in time!"

  Dave tells me to get stuffed and keeps talking.

  "I'd go to the sixties, or the seventies!" he yells. "Or the eighties! The nineties!"

  Amy spits out her beer, shouts "flares! Leggings!" and dissolves into fits of laughter.

  Dave isn't for stopping. "I mean it! You've seen all the stuff online, the stuff from, you know, before. They had movies, and raves, and rock clubs. People would go to gigs and surf on each other's heads! Can you imagine that now?"

  We shake our heads, although Amy is still smirking. "You wouldn't be able to hear the music for the sound of hips cracking," I offer. That sets Amy off again.

  "Exactly!" Dave's built up a head of steam and I think he's tuned Amy out altogether. "It's all completely screwed up now. Then, there was stuff to do. There were TV programmes for us, magazines for us, places for us. What have we got now?"

  "Not a lot," I agree. "But then, there's not a lot of us, is there? And even if there was stuff for us, we couldn't afford it."

  Dave takes a long swig of his beer. "This sucks," he says.

  "Yeah," I say. There's a long pause.

  Amy gives Dave a sympathetic look. "It's not all bad, you know. I mean, yeah, they had lots of stuff going on, and yeah, it does suck a bit, but you've got to be thankful for one thing," she says.

  "What's that?"

  "You'd look terrible in flares."

  CHAPTER TWO

  You're probably wondering about all that stuff earlier, writing "old farts" on the bowling green lawn -- and it was writing, not anything else; I know what the paper says, but we didn't cut anything into anything. We did it with weedkiller. The words wouldn't even have appeared for a couple of days, so the photo they ran was completely false.

  It's not the first time we've done something like that (or the first time the paper's exaggerated it to make us sound like a menace to society, some kind of crazed terrorist group striking fear into the heart of the city). We'd never do any serious damage to anything, or do anything that could end up hurting somebody.

  It's like Dave was saying last night. Everything sucks. There's nothing for us to do, so we have to make our own entertainment.

  It's a kind of revenge on the customers, too. You'd think owning everything might make them lighten up a little bit, but it doesn't. When the men aren't creeping out the waitresses they're trying to tell us the secrets of their success; the women talk to us as if we're badly behaved children who've let them down personally. Apart from the really scary ones, who talk about sex. So from time to time, we let off steam by, well, acting like badly behaved children. And it's usually a laugh. The other night was an exception, because we're usually a long way away before anybody spots our handiwork. That's probably the closest we've ever come to being caught.

  I'm not kidding, there really isn't anything for us to do. There aren't many of us, and the few places that did cater for people who still have their own teeth went out of business ages ago. There just weren't enough of us with enough money to keep them going, so one by one they either shut up shop or decided to focus on a different market. As the joke goes, they stopped catering for the hip crowd and went for the hip replacement crowd instead.

  I don't remember things being any different, but things were different, not that long ago. Amy explains it better than me -- she's scarily smart -- but I can give you the basics. If you want to know more, Amy can fill you in later. I'd tell you to Google it, but you know what that's like. Most of the sites that talk about this stuff are written by crazies, conspiracy nuts or both.

  Anyway. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

  Once upon a time, the world didn't suck. The whole climate change thing was a bit of a pisser, I'll give you that, but things carried on pretty much the same otherwise.

  It was something of a golden age, if you ignored the weather. Medicine got better, people lived longer and everybody watched a lot of TV. Everything was just dandy.

  And then women stopped having babies.

  It wasn't that women stopped wanting babies, it was that they stopped having them.

  At first, nobody thought there was anything wrong. Most people thought it was just them, that they'd offended God, or broken a mirror, or stepped on a crack, or done something else to bring bad luck. They changed their diets, cut back on the drinking, exercised more and kept on trying, and trying, and trying.

  It was only when the statistics people looked at the big picture and did things with calculators that they realised something bigger was happening. The number of babies born each year had been on a downward trend for a while, but then it just dropped off a cliff. I don't know the numbers, but it pretty much went from loads to hardly any in the space of three or four years.

  It was ironic, really. The papers had spent years banging on about men's falling sperm counts causing an infertility crisis, but in the end it wasn't men's fault. At least, it wasn't their fault directly.

  They're still not sure about the "why" -- believe me, there's serious money being spent on research into this; whoever finds the problem and a way to fix it will be rich beyond their wildest dreams -- but the consensus seems to be that a food additive or something in food packaging or something in the water supply or death rays from the Planet Zog threw a great big spanner into women's reproductive systems. That spanner meant that women -- black women, white women, Asian women, rich women, poor women -- more or less stopped ovulating. Men's little soldiers could swim all they wanted, but while the lights were on, there was nobody home.

  Not all women were affected. A tiny minority was fine, and that tiny minority became very rich very quickly, selling eggs to the highest bidder. Doctors made a packet too, because the demand for fertility treatment went through the roof. They could charge as much as they wanted, and most of them did. That's your supply and demand right there.

  So, what do you get when nobody's having babies and everybody's living longer? If you answered "a world that sucks", you win the prize. This world is an old world. The elderly run the show, and the rest of us, the massively outnumbered rest of us, run after them.

  It's not a generation gap. It's more of a Grand Canyon.

  I've been on shift for about an hour when Amy comes over.

  "If one more ugly --"

  "decrepit --"

  "shaky --"

  "rheumy --"

  "Rheumy? That’s a good one," Amy says.

  "Thanks. Where were we?"

  "Yellow --"

  "Not the Yellow Man again?"

  "Yep."

  The Yellow Man is one of the regulars. We call him the Yellow Man because he's yellow. That's not a euphemism, or a metaphor, or some other kind of nickname-related cleverness. He's a funny yellow colour. There's something seriously wrong with his kidneys, or his liver, or something like that.

  Amy looks more serious than usual -- and she usually looks pretty serious. "You know he's always been creepy, right?"

  I nod.

  "I think he's been down to the Creepy Mart and ordered a special delivery of Captain Creepy with his Creep Card."

  I nod again. "That's pretty creepy."

  "It is."

  "So what's he done now?"

  "Well, you know he's always giving me the chat about how if he was thirty years younger, that kind of thing?"

  "Yep. I still think you should stab him with something."

  "Yeah. Tonight was different, though, it was worse. He told me that his 'ship' was 'gonna come in' any day now" -- yes, Amy's doing the finger-quote thing. I never said she was perfect -- "and that when it does, he's going to come back here and sweep me off my feet."

  "In those exact words?"

  "Don't
be silly. You know what he's like." I do indeed. "He stood up and did a couple of pelvic thrusts."

  "Ugh."

  "I know! Then he fell over."

  I try to stifle a laugh. I don't succeed. Amy tries not to laugh at me laughing. She doesn't succeed either.

  The rest of the shift was uneventful. Work was steady but not too little or too much, tips were okay but not spectacular, Amy was only goosed once and Dave only had to eject one person. It was hardly a test of his physical prowess. The culprit had sparked up a cigarette at one of the roulette tables. The host asked him to put it out for the sake of the other players' health, and the man embarked on a big rant about smoking Nazis that was only interrupted by a coughing fit so epic that he nearly lost a lung. By the time Dave got to the table he was slumped on a chair, wheezing. "I felt sorry for him," Dave told us. "I think he was just trying to get some attention."

  He isn't the only one. After we've clocked out and started to walk home, Amy is all serious again. "Guys, the Yellow Man is really starting to freak me out," she says.

  "More pelvic thrusts?" I ask.

  "No, creepier than that. He was talking about how his ship was coming in again. He's got a date. It's going to happen this week."

  "Ship?" Dave looks puzzled.

  "The Yellow Man's been telling Amy that his ship is going to come in, and he's going to sweep her off her feet when it does," I explain.

  "In those exact words?"

  "Of course not." I mime a pelvic thrust. Dave cackles until Amy shoots him a look.

  "I mean it. There's something really weird about it."

  We nod and change the subject.

  We see the flashing lights long before we reach the roadblock. The police have shut off the street with sawhorses and tape, and the area behind the blockade is lit by the blue lights of three patrol cars. Behind the patrol cars are two fire engines, an ambulance and a medical examiner's truck. A uniformed policeman calls to us from behind the sawhorses.

  "You'll need to take a detour, guys."

  "What happened?"

  "Car accident."

  We look beyond the patrol cars and see the crumpled remains of what might well have been a car. It looks as if it picked a fight with an office block, and the office block won.

  "Bad one?" Dave asks.

  The cop doesn't answer, but he doesn't need to. The look on his face is answer enough.

  Amy shivers.

  We don't really talk much after that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It's just after nine p.m., and Dave and I are crouched down behind an SUV in the Majestic car park. Way back when, the Majestic was a movie theatre, the place where teens would go on a Friday night. The projectors and the popcorn are long gone; now, it's a bingo hall that's closed through the week and packed senseless at weekends. Amy says it's a special building, a great example of Art Deco, whatever that is. It's a nice looking place, though.

  "Are you sure about this?" Dave asks.

  "We've talked about this a million times," I say. "We'll be miles away before they get to their cars."

  "I feel like I'm eight."

  We're both wearing big overcoats. They're not exactly stylish and they don't exactly fit, so we do look a bit like little children fooling around with a dressing-up box. But we didn't choose them for their style. We spent the best part of an afternoon going through charity shops until we found the coats with the biggest pockets -- pockets that, right now, are filled with evil-looking vials of green liquid. I ordered them from an obscure website about six months ago. Planning is important.

  "Ready?"

  "Ready."

  We walk into the Majestic and wait until the bored-looking attendant takes our money and hands over a pair of tickets. I give one of them to Dave as we walk away from the ticket booth. "I'll take the left," I tell him. "You take the right. And we do it on three."

  Dave smirks and salutes.

  We split up and wait until another bored attendant checks our tickets, tears them in half and hands us the stubs. I nod at Dave.

  "See you in there."

  I'm standing in one of the boxes, looking down over what used to be the main auditorium of the cinema. The cinema seats are long gone, replaced by regimented banks of tables, but the god-awful orangey carpets, drapes and ornate wall coverings remain. All I can see is hair: row upon row of immaculately coiffed hair, some of it bottle blonde, some of it an unholy shade of blue, most of it white or grey. Above the hair, at the very far end of the hall, a clearly bored man of about my age is standing in front of an enormous board of numbers. Every few seconds he hits a button, one of the numbers lights up and he reads it out as repeater screens throughout the halls display the lucky number and red LEDs on the tables do the same.

  He appears to be reading out the numbers to a badly decorated hall full of dead people.

  They're not really dead, but they're doing a very good impression of it. Other than the caller's voice, which is terrifyingly loud through the PA system, the entire hall is silent. Every single head is bowed, its owner staring at her numbers, not moving a muscle. You could probably die here and nobody would notice until it was time to go home. I'm not kidding: one of the cashiers at work used to have a job here, and he told me that during one of his shifts somebody had a heart attack halfway through a game. The person next to them thought they'd won and congratulated them.

  Even if I live to be a hundred years old, I'll never understand how anybody could call Bingo fun.

  This, though… this is going to be fun.

  I look over to my right, and Dave is level with me in the box on the other side of the hall. I nod, and we both put our hands in our pockets.

  "One," I mouth.

  Our hands grab the vials in our pockets.

  "Two."

  We take our hands out of our pockets, making sure we don't smash any of the vials too early.

  "Three."

  You'd think we had a choreographer. First, the right arm, then the left, dozens of vials twisting and spinning and sparkling as they pass through the beams of the downlighters and uplighters and spotlights. As they rise they look like little green butterflies, fluttering away. There's something beautiful and almost hypnotic about it, but only three people see it: Me, Dave and the bingo caller. He's looking at us, his mouth making an O shape.

  The vials' ascent slows, and then stops. They start to fall.

  We're already turning as they tumble to the ground.

  In a patter of tiny impacts the vials smash and the liquid escapes, ready to do what it was born to do.

  Stink.

  I'm no scientist, but I reckon that if one stink bomb is pretty much unbearable in an enclosed space, then a few hundred stink bombs would produce something you'd tell your grandchildren about. Not that I'm going to hang around to find out.

  We're at the doors before anybody even gets a whiff. Dave is shouting and laughing at the same time. It takes me a moment to work out what he's yelling.

  "House!"

  It's Amy's turn to buy the beer, so we head for her apartment. Although Amy's place is physically identical to my one -- second floor, security entrance, one bedroom, a lounge and a small kitchen -- the interiors are very different. My place usually looks like the aftermath of a robbery, with stuff all over the place, t-shirts thrown over radiators and the odd abandoned sock hiding under a cushion. Amy's place, though, is pristine. You know those programmes where they go to some famous person's house and try to guess whose place it is? They wouldn't have a clue if they were looking around Amy's apartment. It's not that she's house proud or anything; it's just that she's not the sort of person who feels the need to fill every available inch of space with stupid porcelain pigs, or to cover the walls with posters. Where my place resembles an explosion in a tramp factory, Amy's apartment is more like a showroom.

  We hit the buzzer and Amy lets us in. She's not her usual self: when she opens the door there isn't a beer in her hand, she isn't grinning, she doesn't say anythin
g sarcastic and she doesn't ask us what we've been doing, even though she's holding the newspaper and I know for sure it'll have been updated with the stink bomb attack by now.

  "Amy? You OK?"

  She gives me a wan smile. "I'm fine," she says. "Just a bit shocked. You know that car wreck we saw? It was Comedy Jim."

  "You're kidding."

  "Nope. It's in the paper." Sure enough, there's a photo of Comedy Jim.

  "Does it say what happened?" Dave asks.

  "It says he was speeding. He lost control, went off the road and hit a wall. Paramedics tried to save him but he was too badly hurt."

  "Jesus."

  Amy looked at me. "Don't you think that's weird?"

  "Weird?"

  "Comedy Jim? Speeding?"

  "Well…" Amy does have a point. He got the nickname Comedy Jim because there was nothing remotely funny about him: everything he did was slow, measured and sensible. He talked so slowly that if he started saying something to you in January, he probably still wouldn't have got to the point by July.

  "The paper says he was doing over seventy," Amy says. "You've both been in his car. Seventy?"

  She's right. We have. We didn't hang around with him or anything, but he tended to turn up to the same parties and -- being sensible -- didn't drink, so we occasionally blagged a lift home from him. Comedy Jim was a lot of things, but he wasn't a boy racer. Quite the opposite. Cautious didn't begin to describe his driving style. Most sensible people stop at junctions and wait until they're sure nobody's coming the other way. Comedy Jim would stop at junctions and, it seemed, wait until the seasons changed. Most people who accepted a lift from Comedy Jim took the bus after that. It might be full of crazies, covered in unspeakable stains and driven by a maniac, but at least the bus would get you where you wanted to go before you were too old to remember why you were going there.

  "Yeah, that's true," I say. "Sounds like his car malfunctioned. The chip, maybe, or the software, or, I dunno, the fuel cell or something. Shit. That's horrible."