“Maybe it's a coach party, come to attend one of your poetry recitals. Apparently they're very popular amongst the more cultured elements of Liverpool's joker population.”
Jay stopped. He shrugged off his backpack.
“What?” said Pepper.
“Speakers,” said Jay. “I saw some before. Those little ones you plug into a computer. I saw some. Where?” He pointed to the desk from which he'd filched the can of dandelion and burdock. “There. And I need some tape as well. Find some.”
“Yes, sir,” said Pepper and began scouring desks and dragging open drawers.
Jay grabbed the speakers, yanking them free of the computer. He gathered up the cables until the jack was in the palm of his hand. He examined it. “Perfect.”
He opened his pack and took out the personal CD player. He unplugged the headphones, plugged in the speakers and pressed play.
The same voice, the same warm, measured Scouse accent, spoke.
“I wander thru’ each charter’d street, near where the charter’d Thames does flow, and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe.”
He pressed the skip button a couple of times. Then turned the volume up as loud as it would go, on the CD player and the speakers.
“Of the primeval priest's assum'd power, when eternals spurn'd back his religion, and gave him a place in the North, obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.”
Jay pressed stop. He retrieved the rifle from the top of the filing cabinet, where he’d inadvertently flung it.
The hyenas were on the final flight now. Jay imagined he could smell their foulness, like the rush of exhausted air that precedes a train in an underground station.
Pepper returned to the desk at the same time as Jay. He handed two rolls of tape over, both half used up.
“It was murder finding them. White-collar reprobates always stealing the fucking stationery. Never saw any of those bastards in prison.”
Jay laughed and took the rolls of tape. “Should be enough,” he said.
Jay taped the speakers to either side of the end of the barrel of the rifle. As he worked, he said, “What about football? You never mentioned it in your little why-Liverpool-is-so-fucking great speech. You know, while you were kicking the steaming crap out of me? How come?”
Pepper smiled, but it was a serious smile. “Because football’s too pure to mix up with all this shit. The Spasm, jokers, the end of the fucking world. Football’s too pure. It deserves to be left out of it. Maybe, when things have settled down a bit, me and whoever’s left standing can have a little kick-about. Might even get a bit of a league going. I can think of worse foundations for a new civilisation.”
“Fair enough,” said Jay, taping the CD player close to the trigger. “But you could have used football to bring people together, instead of The Beatles.”
“Too divisive, red or blue, all that,” said Pepper. He laughed. “Besides, everyone I met was a fucking Bluenose, like you.”
“How’d you know I’m a Blue?” said Jay.
“You’ve got that look of ground-in disappointment. Can’t mistake it.”
“Fuck you,” said Jay, grinning.
When both rolls of tape were finished, Jay lifted the rifle and gave it a shake, to make sure everything was secure.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me, lad,” said Pepper, but he was smiling as he spoke, his voice shaded with both disbelief and admiration. “Well, it's a plan. And it's a fuck sight more than I've got to offer.”
“It'll work,” said Jay. He smiled weakly. “It’d better work.”
A chorus of barked laughter, only slightly muffled, told him the hyenas were here. He looked toward the reception. Through the frosted glass of the double doors he could see the twitching, ragged silhouette of several hyenas. The silhouette grew larger, and then filled the glass.
The door shook.
There was a click as Pepper pulled back the hammer on his pistol.
“Don't use it unless you have to,” said Jay.
“That's going to be a tough one to judge.”
The doors flew open and the hyenas spilled in. The first couple fell to the floor and were trampled by the seven or eight that poured in after.
They spotted Jay and Pepper immediately and charged toward them, a couple of them, the frontrunners, leaping up onto tables.
Before the doors could fully close, they flew open again, and more hyenas fought their way through.
“Jesus,” said Pepper. He lowered his gun. There was a quaver of fear in his voice. “If this doesn't work, we're fucked.”
“It'll work,” said Jay. “Trust... Shit.”
One of the two frontrunners had taken the lead. Jay recognised her. A surge of nausea strained to empty his already empty stomach.
It was Alice Band. Her bare arms were evening-gloved in red. She'd lost a clump of hair since Jay had last seen her, muscle gleaming wetly where a chunk of her scalp had been torn away. Her hair band was still in place, somehow obscene next to that glistening sore.
Jay remembered her punching her way into her victim's skull, effortlessly it seemed, and he thought: It won’t work on her, the Blake. It won’t work.
Her face was contorted with rage, a bruised and scratched and bloodied mask of savage hatred. It couldn't possibly work on her.
Her? Jay reminded himself. It wasn't a 'her' it was an 'it', a vicious, brutal 'it'.
He wanted to turn to Pepper and scream, Shoot it! That one! The nearest one! Shoot it!
Instead, he pressed the play button.
“Eternals! I hear your call gladly. Dictate swift wingèd words, and fear not to unfold your dark visions of torment.”
As one, the hyenas paused. Then, almost tripping over themselves, they stopped.
Except for Alice Band. Alice Band kept coming.
Pepper raised the gun to shoot her.
“No,” said Jay. He wasn't sure what the noise of the gunshot would do to the hyenas whose faces had already lost their fury, replaced by a kind of thuggish reverie.
Alice Band's fury had remained in place. She was only a few yards away now and Jay could see every rage-induced groove in her face, like cracks in sun-baked mud.
“Christ, Jay.” Pepper's hand was shaking so much, it looked like he was trying to conduct an orchestra with the barrel of his gun.
“... self-clos'd, all-repelling. What demon hath form'd this abominable Void, this soul-shudd'ring vacuum? Some said it is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted, brooding, secret, the dark power hid.”
Some of the hyenas were sitting down, attentive as school children. A few seemed to have discovered the rhythm and melody of Blake's words and had begun to dance, a jerky to and fro. The rest stood motionless, staring, half smiling.
Alice Band continued to bound across the desks.
Any second now, she'd slam into them. The CD player might get damaged. Jay couldn't risk that.
He turned to Pepper.
“Shoot,” he said.
Pepper lowered the gun.
“Shoot! Jesus!”
Pepper grinned at Jay, then look at Alice Band.
Jay followed his gaze.
She, it, she — Christ, it was hard to know what to call them anymore — was standing on the desk nearest them, swaying and smiling, like a drunk at an office party that had got shockingly out of hand.
“...ninefold darkness, unseen, unknown; changes appear'd like desolate mountains, rifted furious by the black winds of perturbation.”
“Now what?” said Pepper.
“We just walk out of here, I suppose,” said Jay and, keeping his steps slow and steady, he made his way toward the reception.
Pepper fell in behind Jay, Alice Band behind Pepper, the remaining hyenas behind Alice Band, until a procession had formed.
There were more hyenas on the stairs, emerging from the gloom, heading up, snarling, but as soon as they heard Blake’s words read aloud in that soft Liverpudlian accent, their savagery evaporated. Swaying, sta
ring, some giggling like children, they stepped aside, waited for the procession to pass, then attached themselves to its tail.
“...rolling of wheels, as of swelling seas, sound in his clouds, in his hills of stor'd snows, in his mountains of hail and ice; voices of terror are heard, like thunders of autumn, when the cloud blazes over the harvests.”
The stench and heat on the stairwell were almost overwhelming, a foetid sweat lodge. Jay kept his breathing brief and shallow, suddenly convinced that the hyenas would take offence if he started retching uncontrollably, and then all bets would be off.
“Earth was not, nor globes of attraction; the will of the immortal expanded or contracted his all-flexible senses; death was not, but eternal life sprung.”
One of the hyenas, a stocky teenager who appeared to have modelled himself on James Dean, sidled up to Jay, smiling dreamily. He placed a hand, hot and crusty, flat against Jay’s face. Jay managed to flinch only slightly.
“Jesus,” Pepper muttered, his grip on the pistol tightening.
Contact made, James Dean seemed satisfied and rejoined the parade.
They had just passed the landing to the first floor and begun the descent to the ground floor, when Jay noticed the small red light flashing on the edge of the CD player.
He turned to Pepper, mouthed “Fuck!” and flicked his eyes at the red light. Then he mouthed the word “Battery.”
Pepper rolled his eyes and almost seemed amused.
“Here alone I, in books form'd of metals, have written the secrets of wisdom, the secrets of dark contemplation, by fightings and conflicts dire with terrible monsters sin-bred, which the bosoms of all inhabit: seven deadly Sins of the soul.”
At the bottom of the stairs, they pushed open the door and stepped out into the foyer. The place was packed with hyenas.
“How much longer before that thing gives up the ghost?” said Pepper.
“A couple of minutes, maybe. Probably less. Any thoughts?”
“Okay. Thoughts. Right. As soon as we get outside, find the deepest bit of snow you can. Plant the rifle in the snow. The jokers carry on listening to Poetry Please with Roger McGough and we fuck the fuck off. You to your boat, me back into the city.”
“You could come with us,” said Jay.
“Thanks. But no. No, I couldn't. This is it now for me, until it's finished, until, one way or another, I'm done.”
“Fair enough.”
“Rage, fury, intense indignation, in cataracts of fire, blood, and gall, in whirlwinds of sulphurous smoke, and enormous forms of energy, in living creations appear'd, in the flames of eternal fury.”
They paraded down the steps of the side entrance and out onto Water Street, Jay, Pepper and the hyenas. Jay wasn’t certain why, but he continued around the building to where Dempsey sat, somehow as determined and carefree in death as he was in life. Feeling as if he were planting a flag in some unexplored territory, Jay gently eased the butt of the rifle into the deep snow drift at the bottom of the stone steps close to Dempsey’s feet.
The snow was falling heavily now, a swarm of white. Jay could only just make out hyenas emerging from the Queensway tunnel across the road. As with the hyenas inside the Liver Building, they charged forward, intent upon harm, but their viciousness faded as soon as they fell under the spell of Blake.
“Okay,” said Pepper. “We need to back away now. Slowly.”
“But not too fucking slowly.”
“Yeah, not too fucking slowly.”
As if they were retreating from a watchful tiger, they reversed away from the rifle-mounted CD player, which looked oddly totemic to Jay now that he was no longer holding it, now that it was a thing on its own, the hyenas staring on with something not unlike reverence.
The low-battery light flickered red.
“In fierce anguish and quenchless flames to the deserts and rocks he ran raging, to hide; but he could not.”
Jay and Pepper backed through swaying, transfixed hyenas, down the side of the Liver Building, toward the Mersey.
The red light flickered.
“...in howlings and pangs and fierce madness, long periods in burning fires labouring; till hoary, and age-broke, and agèd, in despair and the shadows of.”
The red light winked out.
The silence following the CD player’s death was somehow intrusive, worming its way into Jay’s ears.
Pepper saluted then sprinted off upriver, toward the Cunard Building and the lifeless black wedges of the Mann Island Apartments. A second later, Jay headed pell-mell in the opposite direction, toward Princes' Parade.
Behind him, there was silence from the hyenas and for a moment, even though he knew it was ridiculous, he thought the hyenas had died, that the sudden cessation of poetry, of Blake, had proved too much of a shock and their hearts had stopped.
Silence.
Silence.
Then, an explosion of rage. Jay wasn't entirely certain he only imagined the outer rim of its shockwave pushing against his back, pressing him forward with such urgency that it was an effort to stop himself from lurching ahead of his own feet and falling over.
Before
“Make us a cuppa, eh, son?” his dad asked as Jay closed the front door behind him. “I’m gasping, but you know how it is.”
Jay took off his jacket and draped it over the bottom of the banister.
“Okay, Dad. You want anything else? Toast? Biscuits?”
“No thanks. How’d it go at the job centre?”
“Shit. I’ve got a new Employment Guidance Officer, or whatever the fuck they’re calling them now, and she can’t quite grasp the fact that every job requires at least some degree of literacy. Even when I told her about that cleaning job I lost because I couldn’t fill in the audit sheet, she was like, ‘Well, there must be something,’ all exasperated as if I was just being awkward.”
“Well, you probably were being a little bit awkward, knowing you,” his dad replied as Jay stepped into the living room, grinning.
“Maybe a little bit. Can’t help it. They wind me up. I’ve had nearly five years of this shite.”
His dad looked terrible. Thin, grey and practically hairless. There was a faint stink in the air that Jay could only think of as sickness.
“Did you do the other thing?”
Jay sighed. “Yes. I’ve done the other thing.”
The Other Thing was arranging for someone at Social Services to come around and assess Jay’s ‘special needs’ because his dad — who never tired of reminding him — was not only not going to be around forever he wasn’t going to be around for long.
“They’re coming next Tuesday,” said Jay. “Half eleven. Have you taken your pills?”
“Will do once you get a wiggle on and brew up.”
As he made the tea, Jay noticed, as if for the first time, the alien squiggles on the side of his dad’s mug that said, World’s Greatest Dad. At least that was what his mum had told him it said when they’d bought it in Woolworths all those years ago. It could have said, European Body Popping Champion 1986, for all Jay knew.
When he brought the tea in, his dad was up from his armchair, checked green pyjamas hanging limp on his sticklike frame, shuffling over to the computer desk by the bay window.
“Where do you want the tea: computer or armchair?”
“Armchair. Just getting this.” He pressed a button on the PC, a tray slid out and his dad removed a CD before pressing the button again and sending the tray back once more. He took a marker and wrote something on the disk then returned to his armchair. “Here,” he said, holding the CD out for Jay. “I made it for you.”
Jay took the disk and sat down on the settee, moving blankets aside that were still a little warm from his dad’s afternoon nap.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s Blake. Well, it’s me reading Blake. I recorded it on the computer then burnt it to disk. Took me a few weeks. I get tired.” He smiled. “I’m no Alan Bates but, you know, it’s better than a
kick in the teeth.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing, really. Dads, eh? We’re a pretty useless bunch. Mums do all the real work. Dads are only there to save your life if you do something really stupid.”
Jay looked at the disk, at his dad’s writing. He recognised it even though he had no idea what it said and, for a moment, he felt a hot fist deep in his chest, tears threatening, and it meant everything to him that his malfunctioning, fucked-up brain had allowed him that one small mercy, the ability to recognise his own father’s handwriting.
And then he thought how like his dad’s voice the handwriting was. It undulated gently. There were no angles, no sharp peaks or jagged troughs. There was a warmth to it. It looked like a series of interconnected smiles, all expressing varying degrees of amusement.
The hot fist in his chest opened up and he started crying.
“It’s alright, son. It’s alright, lad.”
An arm around his shoulders, thin, almost muscleless, but strong all the same.
Chapter 27
Princes' Parade seemed suddenly endless, the Alexandra Tower concealed, despite its boastful height, by the whipping, twitching fabric of the snow.
Behind him, the snarling and snickering of the hyenas seemed to coordinate with the frenetic, jerky movement of the falling snow, a conspiracy of sound and motion.
He filled his lungs with icy cold air and tried to transmute it into energy by force of will. Then he mentally pushed that real or imagined energy down into his legs.
It actually seemed to work. He could feel himself picking up speed. The hyenas' din was falling away. But with the roar of blood in his ears, he couldn't be sure.
Flakes of snow, fat and wet, stuck to his eyelashes, further blurring and confusing his vision. If it wasn't for the river to his left, its rolling surface greasy with snow, he could easily have strayed off course. Even without looking, he could sense the Mersey, a different quality of air, more lively somehow, against the left-hand side of his face. He felt energised for the first time since... The truth was he couldn't remember the last time he felt this strong, this focused, this able. He threw each foot down and pushed it back as if he wasn't so much driving himself forward as turning the Earth, a mammoth treadmill, bringing his destination toward him, one step at a time. There was a pain in his side and the insides of his lungs felt scoured by the icy air, but he could take it. It was no big deal.
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