Desolation

by Tim Lebbon

  I can see why kids love them so much, he thought. But at the same time, a very adult fear rose from somewhere deep inside, a fear of anonymity and disguise, of inhumanness, and he remembered reading somewhere that everyone is afraid of clowns.

  “Nice day!” the clown said, jumping up and spilling rice across the ground. She danced over to Cain, long shoes slapping on the pavement, arms waving high and low. “Lovely day for catching a sunbeam—shall I get you one? Oh, I see you already have one!” She reached for Cain, tickled his ear, and pulled her hand back trailing a long piece of yellow crepe paper. “Put them in your ear and they’ll burn your brain,” the clown said. “Singe it. Scorch it. Melt it, and then someone will smell the burning and come along and eat it!”

  Cain was speechless. His heart thumped, everything told him to back away and leave, but at the same time he found the display compulsive. Such sensory overload from one person, and Cain knew the siren was nowhere inside him, no threat at all. Maybe I was meant to come this way, he thought. Maybe this is good for me.

  The clown turned and bent down in front of him, pulling her baggy trousers tight and wiggling her rump. Then she stood again, performed a perfect forward roll straight through the spilled rice, turned to face him and stuck out her tongue, blowing a shower of glitter into the air.

  Cain looked around to see if anyone else was watching. There were a few shadows in the window of the grocer’s, but he could not see their faces. Some cars passed along the road, but none of them stopped. For now he had this moment to himself.

  What would my father think of this? Cain thought, and he laughed out loud. Right then, the sense of being his own person was very strong.

  “Fuckity-fuck, my tits wobble in this getup,” the clown said, slipping hand over feet in an impressive display of acrobatics.

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard!” She paused, panting, and Cain saw beads of sweat smearing her complex makeup.

  “That’s not much of a show for children,” he said.

  She shrugged her padded shoulders. “I adjust my show depending on who’s watching. Don’t you?”

  “I’m not a clown.”

  “Not what I meant at all.” She sat down again, kicking the rice container aside, and leaned back against the window of the takeaway. “I’m fucking exhausted. You have no idea how much energy a little stunt like that takes. Fuck!”

  Cain was dumbfounded. He heard a door open and two old women came out of the grocer’s shop two doors down, glanced at the clown, and walked the other way, twittering like birds. A car came to a standstill at the curbside and disgorged three teenagers. Cain saw the father leaning across the front seats to get a look at the clown. The man caught Cain’s gaze, glanced away quickly, floored the accelerator, and pulled off. The three boys smiled, pointed, and started jeering. But then the clown stood and walked their way, and they turned and ran.

  She looked back at Cain. “Everyone’s afraid of clowns.” Her true smile twisted the painted one into a grotesque grimace, as if she had been struck across the face with an ax.

  “Who are you?” he asked, because he could think of nothing else to say.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the clown said, wiping her hand on her outfit and offering it for him to shake. “I’m Magenta from Flat Three.”

  Cain looked blank, trying to absorb what she had said.

  “Flat Three, downstairs from you,” the clown said, frowning, smiling again, shaking her hands and spraying Cain with water from false fingertips. She laughed.

  “How do you know me?” he said.

  “You’ve been wandering in and out ever since you arrived yesterday,” she said. “I make it my business to know who’s living in the same building as me. That’s only sensible. It’s only safe. I wouldn’t want to share a building with a mass murderer, now, would I?”

  “I suppose not,” Cain said. Had she been standing behind her door all along? he thought. Watching through the peephole as he passed by, sizing him up, her feet turned at right angles so that her ridiculous shoes did not scratch the door and give her away?

  “Well, are you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “A mass murderer?”

  Her appearance had thrown him completely, and now she was playing word games. Surprised and confused though he was, Cain had spent years of his life talking to himself, often not knowing what he was going to say next. Sometimes, it was almost like talking to someone else. He could do word games too.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m still studying the theory.”

  “Ah!” she said, her fake smile startling some pigeons aloft. “A comedian! Excellent. I like a man with a sense of humor.”

  His gaze was drawn to her chest again, as if her comment had made her womanhood more visible beneath the baggy clothing.

  “Humor is one thing that building lacks. There’s George, I suppose . . . but I laugh at him, not with him. Peter has a sense of humor, but he doesn’t actually live there.”

  “No, he lives in Heaven,” Cain said. Magenta froze. Even her suit was still beneath her outstretched arms. For a second, she was a statue.

  “Have you been in there?” she asked, and her question carried so much import, the weight of his answer obviously of great concern to this strange clown.

  “No,” Cain said. She seemed to relax a little, but the playfulness had gone. Even her suit seemed deflated, more scruffy and stained than before. “Have you?” he asked.

  “Coffee? There’s a little café around the corner—they do a great latte, and peach cake to die for.” Magenta turned and started walking away without waiting for an answer. Cain followed. As he walked he thought about whether or not he wanted coffee and cake, his eyes were drawn to her shapely behind, and he realized with a strange stab of guilt that right here and now he was no longer afraid of the siren. With everything that had happened over the past couple of minutes—the colors, the shapes, Magenta’s strange talk—it would have struck him by now if it was going to.

  Where it had gone, he did not know. But the last thing he was about to do was question it. This was his first full day alone. He was still terrified, but already he was seeing some good signs. This clown woman calmed him in some way he had yet to understand. Perhaps because, other than Peter, she was the first person he had really spoken to.

  “Or maybe I just want to fuck her,” he muttered, and she spun around and glared at him as if she had heard. But a car was passing and he had barely whispered, and so no, she could not have heard, never.

  His vague guilt at turning away from the challenge of the bustling city was lifting. And his confidence had already taken a boost from this strange encounter. He no longer felt scared, and that was something new.

  A car screamed by and tooted its horn, and Cain shrank back against the wall of the café. He cursed himself for the reaction and his eyes watered from sheer anger. The siren remained silent, but it was still taunting him from deep inside, deeper than he would probably ever be able to dig. On his own, at least.

  He looked through the café window and saw Magenta at the counter. And he decided that, yes, right now he really wanted coffee and cake.

  Cain’s father had told him that Pure Sight was the ability to perceive truth. It was not actual sight, but rather knowledge, experience, and certainty. As a concept few considered or knew of it, and of those who did even fewer found themselves anywhere close to possessing it. It saw through—and stripped away—all facets of humanity that tended to bring us close to “civilized.” Civilization, his father said, was an unfortunate by-product of the power of reason. Do you think we’re really here to live together peacefully, spend all our time considering everyone else first? he asked. A pride of lions will attack another pride if they intrude on their territory. He never explained his statements, as if eager for Cain to make out their meanings for himself.

  Cain was his father’s project. His father wanted him to achieve Pure Sight. He talked about it incessantly, trying to pump its wonde
r into his son, but Cain was only in his teens when his father died. He was confused, disoriented, badly damaged by the deprived state he had been kept in for all those years. As such, Pure Sight was as remote to him now as the concept of fatherly affection.

  Still, since his father died and Cain was taken away from that house, he often wondered just how diligently his subconscious still sought Pure Sight of its own accord.

  Cain carried his latte and slice of peach cake to the window seat next to Magenta. She had snatched a handful of paper serviettes from the counter, and now she wiped at her makeup, smearing vibrant colors across her face into a single bland mess. She wiped and wiped, spitting into the paper towels, her hand moving faster.

  “Careful,” Cain said, “you’ll wear away your skin.”

  “There’s always new skin,” she said, closing her eyes as she rubbed at her forehead.

  “So where have you been?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “To play the clown?”

  “Oh, nowhere. Here. One show’s over, the next could begin at any time.”

  “Street performer, then.”

  “I’m an impersonator, Cain. Always working.” She grinned, and he saw her real smile for the first time, the clown’s face having been rubbed into oblivion. It was challenging and attractive, confident and brash. It dared him to talk back.

  “So who are you without the makeup? Still Magenta?”

  “I’m always Magenta.” She dropped the paper towels, sighed, leaned to the side so that she could see her reflection in the window. She looked for a full thirty seconds, as if it was the first time she had really seen herself. “That’ll have to do for now.” She took a long sip of her coffee.

  Cain drank, looked around, but his gaze was always drawn back to Magenta. Her eyes pulled him in, green, gorgeous, intelligent, sparkling with wit. And she was strong, he could see that. She intimidated him. He glanced at her breasts and away again. She smiled.

  “So how do you like your flat?”

  “It’s fantastic!” he said, pleased for the distraction. “Much better than I expected from . . .”

  “From the outside? Yeah, everyone says that. It’s a shit hole from the outside, but I think Peter does that on purpose. Keeps away the undesirables.”

  Cain shrugged. “It’s the inside that matters.”

  “You think so?” Magenta asked, staring with an intensity that made Cain shift in his seat. “You think the facade is unimportant? Surely it’s part of the whole effect?”

  Word games again, Cain thought, but he only shrugged again. He wanted to chat to this woman—his neighbor—not enter into some deep philosophical debate.

  “Well,” she said, but her sentence fizzled out in the smoky café air.

  They sat together and drank coffee, ate cake, stared from the window at the few people walking by, and only when the silence started to become awkward did Magenta ask Cain where he came from.

  He had no wish to answer. If she knew his background, it would surely scare her off. She was pretty unique, of that he was sure, but she was a woman with a job, an income, and a flat of her own. Cain was, as the kids in the street had greeted him, another fuckin’ nutter.

  “I’ve just come here for a change,” he said.

  Magenta smiled and nodded. “Another fucking nutter, then.”

  Cain sat back and blinked at her, shocked as much by her brashness as what she had said. The siren, he thought, it’ll bear in and take me down soon, so much input here, so much to see and hear and smell and understand about this strange woman. But the siren remained silent, and when Magenta laughed it was a pleasant sound, and he knew that she was not really mocking him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, still giggling, “that’s really fucking awful of me. I’m so sorry. It’s just that Peter makes a living hiring out his flats to people who may not be able to get accommodation elsewhere. He’s much more . . . open-minded.” She raised her eyebrows and sat up straight. “How polite is that? I’m even complimenting myself, considering what I’ve done.”

  “What?” Cain asked, but she ignored him again.

  “So please accept my apology, Cain. Don’t want us to start off on the wrong foot. It goes for an entertaining time living in Endless Crescent—and there’s a name! You don’t seem all that unusual to me, to be honest. Nice guy. Something about your eyes, though . . .”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t like the way I look at you,” he said, not really meaning it.

  “No, not that, not at all. I mean, there’s something powerful in there, deep, and deep down.” She leaned across the table, knocking over her cup but ignoring the rush of coffee into her lap. She moved so close to Cain that he could smell her, strangely muted traces of coffee and the tang of something more elusive. “It’s as if you know so much more,” she whispered, and for the first time Cain thought he was hearing her true voice.

  “I read a lot of books,” he said.

  Magenta snorted, sat back down, wiped at the spilled coffee. “Right, that’ll be it, then.”

  They fell silent for a couple of minutes, Cain picking at his cake, Magenta scratching at the remnants of makeup and smiling at him. “Not much of a conversationalist, are you?”

  “I haven’t had much experience of it,” he said.

  “Was it so bad, the place you came from?”

  Cain wondered which place she could mean—his father’s house of torture and deprivation, or the Afresh home with the Voice and the Face doing their best to make him better—but then he realized that she knew neither.

  “Only as bad as my memories make it,” he said.

  “Oh, very profound.”

  “Memory’s changeable, don’t you think? You ever had a dream that you thought was a memory, or a memory that may have been a dream?”

  Magenta stopped picking makeup from the corner of her eye and nodded. “Oh yes.”

  “What’s happened to me is like that.”

  “And what did happen to you?”

  “You’re very forthright,” he said. She smiled, but did not withdraw her question. “Well, I’ve told you as much as I want to,” Cain said. “As much as I’ve told anyone since . . . Well. And here we are, only just met.”

  “I’m glad you’re living in Flat Five!” Magenta said, and she sat back and picked at her cake, embarrassed.

  “So when is your next impersonation job?”

  “It’s not a job, it’s my way. And I have no idea. The urge has yet to take me.”

  “You still have makeup on your face.” Cain was suddenly tempted to reach over and touch Magenta’s skin, wipe away the paint and feel how hot she burned beneath. But that would be far too familiar. The siren had once blasted him every time he touched something. It lasted for a week.

  “I’ll wash it off later. Cain, it’s been a pleasure, and now I have to go. I’ll get this.” Magenta stood and threw a five-pound note on the table.

  “Hang on!” Cain had no idea why he was asking her to wait, or whether he even had anything to say. She raised her eyebrows, inviting him to continue. “You’re right,” he said at last. “Everyone’s scared of clowns.”

  She nodded and left, and he wondered just how much of himself he had revealed in that parting shot.

  He remained in the café for a few minutes, finishing his cake and taking a few guilty bites from the slab Magenta had left on her plate. He hummed to himself, that familiar tune he knew but had never been able to name, and looked around as if expecting to find someone staring at him from another table.

  After paying with Magenta’s money, Cain bought a Mozart CD from a small music shop several doors away. He took his time walking home, still humming that tune, hoping against hope that Mozart would put a name to it but knowing that, as usual, it would remain a mystery.

  He had memories of a time when his father tried to operate on him.

  Cain is directed into a small room in the basement of the house, a place he has never been or seen before. It has a stran
ge new feel to it, as if it has been added to the house or opened up only recently. Perhaps his father has just discovered this room. Its bright surfaces glare under the highwattage lighting, the walls polished and gleaming, ceiling white and reflective, the few pieces of functional furniture all chrome and plastic sheets. If the room has not actually been built as an operating theater, then it must have taken little effort to turn it into one.

  The furniture consists of an operating table—with channels for blood and fluids along either side and straps and buckles for tying the subject down—and a simple trolley covered with a surgeon’s paraphernalia. Cain sees scalpels and saws, probes and clamps, gauze and stitching. He also sees more esoteric equipment, such as several acorns sharpened to a point, a large feather apparently dipped in molten metal, and a selection of pickled eggs of various species. He has no idea what purpose any of these could serve, but they are mingled with other equipment as if a natural part of any operation. He goes to ask his father, but the old man is washing himself vigorously at a sink in the corner. Not only his hands but his face, neck and shoulders, his arms and chest, scrubbing with a chunk of rough soap, scrubbing so hard that the flesh of his saggy stomach and hips wobbles with each movement. His skin is red-raw where he has washed, and Cain is sure that the surface will split at any moment.

  Eventually, his father turns around, pink and glowing from the wash, hands held up, fingers splayed, and smiles down at his son.

  It’s all for the best, he says. Sometimes a process has to be accelerated. You have to be helped along. How can you gain Pure Sight when your eyes pollute your mind?

  He sends Cain into the next room to strip and prepare for the operation. (Cain—eleven years old then, maybe twelve—can remember that room in detail, even though in reality he is quite certain that none of this has ever taken place.) There is a gown laid out on a bench, paper underwear, a paper hat with a ridiculous painted smiley face, as if to grin away the terror. There is also a toilet in the corner of the room, unscreened and without a seat. He needs to go before the operation—the thought of fouling himself under anesthetic is awful—but he cannot bring himself to sit down and try. There is no privacy here. There is also no one else in the house to see, but with that thought comes a low, variable humming noise from elsewhere in the room. There is a definite tune to this, and although Cain is sure he has heard its like before, it is unfamiliar. He looks around and there is no one with him, only shadows where light should fall.