by Steve Aylett
Making enemies is a sculptor’s art, full of fury and patience. The oven should be set at gas mark bloody seven. And stand back or your eyebrows’ll join your reason. Carve out the shape of a barge on a patch of land and tell ’em it’s an ark plan—see the blazing rage of the devout and laugh with a roar like a lion. Sacks of spuds should be stored away because you’ll have to hide for eight months. When it’s all blown over you can emerge anew, take yourself off somewhere and open a small antique shop under an assumed name—they’ll find you one day with a gun in your gob and a thousand incriminating relics in the attic. That’s the way for a man to go, not sobbing at a crossing with a pram and spaniel, shouting your woe and blaming your foe—where’s the shrapnel in that?
Infinitely more interesting to me are those who think nothing of stalking wraiths and, upon snaring one, hurl abuse at it. I find their lack of respect unsettling but their perfect boldness a tonic in m’darkness.
In short, my life’s a blemish on the arse of humanity, unseen and shameful—neither tragic nor a problem under the majority of circumstances. This has never changed, but I’ve learned that a man must go where he’s welcome if he wishes for conviviality, and where he’s unwelcome if he wishes for mayhem and adventure.
Carp can speak—that’s what I really wanted to tell you all this time. Carp can speak and the things they say are so full of justice the average man cannot contain it in his mortal frame.
Drums beat when they speak—like the primitive drums of white-robe druid ceremonies, stone circles, drizzle, smoke and steam merging till nobody knows where they’re standing in relation to each other. Unbeatable.
Carp may have been only pretending to speak, but to me it was real and I had evidence—that of my own senses, and camerawork of a skill rarely seen today, panavision impossibilities they refused to show at the scientific congress when I banged in during someone else’s address to the scientific community’s embarrassment and the sound equipment’s inability to convey my wisdom when the incident was later shown in the early hours to a death squad.
I returned home a damaged man and stained by celebrity. Under the well, in a kind of siding, killer ants held a council and decided I was the man to seek for advice on their next step, as it were—we’re talking here of a little-known attempt among that kingdom to slash and burn mankind before it could do the same to them. I loved their company, they were warm, convivial, honourable, and worthy of anyone’s respect. Stampeded over the lawn when I called them in for dinner—played tennis and flew, sometimes. Give me an ant for that sort of mellow activity. Have one for a friend and you’re set for days—which for them is a lifetime.
Nothing stopped me from reporting it at once to the media. Ignored me of course, as I should have expected. Lavish reports the next day of some fool who fell into a ditch—what’s funny about that? The only time I found that interesting was when a bastard friend of mine fell into a kind of ditch years ago—I’d punched him with a sort of oriental knife I was proud of in those days—and when he fell I shouted his name in order to provide him the last thing he’d hear this side of the Styx. It was a blistering winter and he froze there, the impersonation of Walter Matthau still on his face. This had been the cause of our disagreement and delayed his identification for a long time. I had by then left the area and blazed a trail of savvy and might across the high country.
My skeleton was hoarding blood for a prancing of its own after the death of this flesh, you know how it is. Our first breath in cells is fresh-printed currency, citizens without offence. Then the accusations. The prolonged hostaging of found cats, for tame starters. Next—failure. Then disguises fall away like onion layers and from nothing they fall. Thinkers are temporarily a fringe. Soon it’s rather less temporary. Two sides to every argument and don’t dare suggest a third or eighty-seventh. Till finally events pile lunatic weight on drained ambition. Every man a martyr. The steam from his guts though, to show he meant business. Justice? So explain the burnt vanguard, the rags, the cracked sadness.
You can scoff. Oh, draw knives why don’t you. Can’t you let good fall to good and slovenly behaviour flourish in the few corners it may? Love’s weighted by so many leery bastards it’s a wonder it grew in the flesh loam. Losers cram my door, unaware only two at the most can enter at a time. Juice explodes as they overstep the limit physics allows—the juice of blood and naivety.
Consider this—a man enters a barber’s. Says he wants everything cut away—and I mean everything. They kick him out. Have they done what he requested? To answer that question we have to go all the way back to the fifth century. At that time my earliest traceable ancestor was a barber named Gibby who tried to make it known that shoving a dwarf first one way and then the other was not a fruitful activity, especially if you, too, were a dwarf. History has shown that his views, though scorned at the time, filtered into the mainstream. Bargains were struck whereby latex hooves were placed on sleeping waiters and they were then awoken by the loud banging of kettles and pans, at which they would stand and remove the hooves. This was the only real form of amusement in the Middle Ages. There are twelve explanations for this, each as dismal as the last. And I don’t propose to waste any more time on it now.
Suffice it to say no amount of clapping could disguise Gibby’s death.
So anyway after the ant debacle I went to Carver’s of all places. When I arrived Carver was moving his hands in the air as if he was holding something. Carver could waste valuable time till the cows came home. There was nothing he could do if it was important enough. I walked past the shack once and he was singing something I can’t explain. I’d asked Carver what he thought ‘death’ was and he said it was a kind of soup. He’d somehow I think drawn up his soul and crammed the lot into his skull, leaving his body free to do what it would. No wonder there were cattle and gamblers in his kitchen, letting off steam to beat the band. People were skidding in lard round there. Nobody believes me now but I saw a short man in pure green velvet, stamping on a wren repeatedly in a dim-lit corner. He was shrieking like a major and the words he spoke were so lacking in wisdom I was sick.
‘Oho Carver,’ I hailed as he endeavoured to focus his eyes. ‘I’m over here—by the guillotine.’ Carver had a pintsize guillotine he reserved for elves.
‘Oho,’ he said, and that was all. I repeatedly clapped my hands to get his attention.
Once when I was trying to talk seriously to this man he fell suddenly backwards into an unused well where he underwent an epiphany of unwanted grit.
I left, swearing never to try again.
Back in town, nothing had changed. Leaping into an empty pram amid the screams of women, Eddie tried to reclaim his youth. But the pram began to roll down the street bouncing and telling him it was his punishment—in his mind, like, he heard this said to him, along with advice on furnaces and coal tar, if he’s to be believed at all. Under the pavement at exactly the same time a sewer crocodile was following his course all the way, being the most exciting thing that had happened to it for two years—the last thing being the time a travelling clown was locked under the drains by an unofficial committee, who later said nothing of the matter to each other though they felt a weight of guilt occasionally in the chestal area—the croc, as I was saying, saw the sobbing clown as he tried prising open the drain hat and thrashed toward him with a grin a mile long, as the crow flies.
So what if you’ve heard it before?
What you don’t know is the horrors in Eddie’s basement—and I don’t mean the apes. I was there a few weeks ago. Chains ring from the floorbolt to the wallbolt. All it needs is an Igor with a strong arm and the floorhatch lifts, belching smoke from the underlab. ‘That’s what’s missing round here,’ Eddie said, ‘a real, quality hunchback for your money.’
‘I can see that,’ I scorned, my words reverberating in the scabby chamber. ‘But why pay when you can pretend well enough you don’t need a thing?’ And I turned back to him at the door. ‘Not that I can now.’ And I stamped out, s
lamming the heavy, impenetrable door. It was another fortnight before I saw Eddie and by then he was blade-thin and furious, screaming of rats and their dry attentions.
You should see the stuff he’s got growing round there. Ears. Eyes. Oh yes eyes can grow like anything else brothers—three yards is the record. Like poles of white glass, and as useless if you ask me. But fads will take their course.
Photographed the whole lab. Espionage camera concealed in my arse. Snuck off. Sniggering. Clever. One up for the reds.
Sat in the confessional, developing the film. Heard a voice from the other side of the spyhole. Requesting information. Personal. Sick. Sort of stuff I’d never tell anyone or admit to myself.
‘Is this how you make your sponduliks padre?’ I remarked, smirking in the dark. ‘A man like me lives it, know what I mean?’
‘How many times can a man in such misery dodge a bus?’ said the mournful voice.
‘It’s a good question.’
What I told the priest
Our despair’s so comprehensive round here it’ll take more than your miracles to shift it padre. It’s all very well you firing surface-to-air prayers as time robs cells from your brain and your heart breaks like a wishbone. If joy exists it’s to no avail, maybe on a dead moon. False food and cups filled with concrete. There’s so much trouble in the world flies ought to be praised for being small enough to ignore. Take Minotaur. ‘You’re just gunna have to trust me on this one Belly,’ he shouted the other day, pushing the old ’dozer into gear. ‘Or stand by and let the real men rule.’
‘Don’t call me Belly you gobshite,’ I yelled, priming the rifle. ‘If you think I’m about to let you ride roughshod over my life, you’re putting more planning and effort into your career than I am.’
‘Right again, as usual,’ he remarked, and began trundling over everything.
And Eddie, who once saw fit to criticise my life and abilities. I remember it because the ornamental trilobite on the pub wall behind him was giving birth to a flood of spiders. Spreading like an inkblot on a page.
‘A man always with a ready alibi eh brother.’
‘Correct.’
‘Rizla English and the violence to show it eh.’
‘Too right Eddie.’
‘Making choice remarks on the facial imperfections of others.’
‘Yes.’
‘Telling yarns which are structurally unsound due to their being made up as they go along.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Journeying by the sure aim of your fist.’
‘Is there another way?’
Eddie took a long draw of the pint while keeping his eye pointed at me. Then he said:
’By god brother you’re a sick one. What ya lookin at? Oh Christ shit fuck—insects!’
Bob though—now there’s a scary one. He’d drawn several dozen nerves out of his chin and deliberately tangled them to resemble an ordinary beard. ‘Don’t you understand why I grow this,’ he hissed urgently one evening in the bar.
‘To blur the delineation of where your chin ends and where the atmosphere surrounding it begins.’
‘No you fool look.’ He prodded a finger into each eyesocket and drew off his skin like a rubber hood—the skull beneath was smoothly ribbed like a moulded jelly basin. ‘Here’s what I have to contend with all day every day.’ He began pulling the headglove on again. ‘The more distraction there is from this little nightmare the less crap I have to take from narrowminded bigots.’
‘Did you think I didn’t know about that. Wasn’t I taught to know that sort of thing from my early years.’
‘You mean, all this time.’
‘I just said so. And did you ever take any stick from me about it. Don’t I have better things to do than making fun of your head.’
‘No.’
‘Well, be that as it may…’
Went to his place once. ‘By god brother it’s like the eighties in here.’
‘Sure it’s a grey and airless wasteland of banality suffused with the impossibility of imagination or true creativity and anyone trying to grow in this’ll have a time getting out with a living heart and soul and those who claim to be the way-out-and-wacky ones are as drab as the rest thus lowering the threshold of individuality to somewhere below the knee and in an atmosphere like that is it a wonder the bastards who voted for death took a decade and a half to realise the fucking obvious and who were all the cunts who thought it was a fine old time and now won’t even admit they were there and for those of us with the wit to see in all its horror what we were living through it was like being awake during bloody surgery and no wonder we were offing ourselves left right and centre and now it’s all retrospective and no one’s responsible and what a surprise and we’re all wise now well let me tell you sonny jim apart from a bit of music the only difference now is there’s fuck-all money to be had anywhere and the song’s all caring-and-sharing because after all people like to pretend they’re in control of their withered lives and that they’re poor and ineffectual by their own free will but I can feel the sterility of those times around the edges of my vision brother and it never goes away.’
‘Exactly. Is that Eddie I hear?’
We went to the window and looked down at Eddie on his bicycle in the little yard. He was trying to give the riding of it some sort of sexual connotation. Bob threw open the window. ‘Your tears’ll freeze into thrones for hurricane angels Eddie.’
Eddie twisted round in surprise, and smiled. ‘Oh right brother.’
‘He’s continuing,’ I said, appalled.
Later Eddie came in for some lard and saw me at the table making a skipping rope out of a length of my gut. ‘What have you and Bob been talking so much about?’
‘Oh you know, the sea bubbling a tumble of skulls, forgotten clots of history resurfacing to our shame, a million years emerging, mastheads breaking the surface of the water, running the blades against a twilight sky, thoughts spilling into the sea foam and streaming from flapwind sails, that sort of thing. Eyes slamming open in the bellowing hull.’
‘That room of his eh? Did you know Bob’s father went to the arctic circle, cut his throat in an igloo which stained through like a bloodshot eyeball, then came back as a ghost to boast about it. But the wound had carried over and he couldn’t speak so he had to mime the whole thing. Picture it now.’
‘No.’
‘Picture it a ghost now, trying to say that in gestures. Especially the bit about the stain. I can tell I’m frightening you brother. Love a good ghost story me.’
‘I’ll break your fucking face if you don’t tell me something that’s truly worth the hearing Eddie. Just once do that.’
Myself I never had an easy time finding somewhere to live.
‘Would you like to see the hunk of head we keep here?’
‘Yes if it’s an attraction certainly.’
‘Oh it is,’ said the landlady, and opened a wardrobe to reveal a fragment of the Statue of Liberty’s face and eye, all covered in moss and shite. ‘That’s our pride and joy.’
‘I can see why. Do you get much trouble from the police?’
‘Oh no—they come round as often as the rest. These cables run through a wormhole in space and secure the entire world in position.’
She pointed at nothing at all, then shrieked down at a little drift of ropes which lay, severed, on the floor. The whole building began to subside, windows popping like soapbubbles. I was taking my leave when she grabbed my arm and shouted ‘Oh mister—we’re dead, all dead.’
I’ve noticed this in moments of extremity—bastards barring my way and stating the obvious. Another time I was digging for spuds and hit a skull, which caved like an egg and released some sort of noxious gas. I would have dealt with it in my own sweet way if it hadn’t been for some fork-leaning fatso in the next ditch saying ‘Hit a skull which has released gas eh?’ Naturally I barrelled at him and within minutes was digging him in. So what could have been a curious anecdote became a cause fo
r guilt and caution which is still with me.
A year later the potato-puppies I’d seeded began to clot that yard like white embryos. They weren’t at all like the little squash-heads my aunt had taught me to grow for roasting. These things squealed at a nosebleed pitch and roiled their chubby limbs, which swelled at an alarming rate. No pigmentation in them at all. I was scared and didn’t know why.
You’ve guessed the rest. Went out there with a spade and started denting them in, hacking splits in them and feeling sick at the purple innards. Whole lot started screaming bloody murder, biting my trouser-ends with gummy jaws and looking me bang in the eye like baby seals. No describing my disgust with myself. It’s radishes from now on, I thought. A man shouldn’t be reduced to tears by his hobbies.
Mind you every time I try to make a change around here I encounter greed and avarice, oh yes. Made a huge maggot out of clay on one occasion and everyone made it memorable by dragging it out of the kitchen and setting fire to it in the road. Then everyone acted oh so surprised when a car hit it a glancing blow, scaring the driver and sending sparks this way and that. There was the last time I tried to make my mark in the daylight hours. Later everyone awoke to find everything in the house was made of chocolate. I expected them to be grateful—even flattered. And Eddie pretended to be, but started sobbing suddenly. I’d been too much involved in my own thoughts to realise this kind of enterprise was unwanted. Put everything away and told them it was all right they could come on out. But just then the police arrived and I was blamed all over again.
Speaking of which—and here’s a tale worth the telling—Empty Fred knows his way round a police disguise. But he gives himself away soon enough when he starts the talk—starts laughing and moving his arms quickly in a sort of chopping motion. His arms are too fast for folk around here—backs up his arguments with them and creates headaches from scratch. Wrong to make too much of an argument, people told him at first. Drift into sloth and go peaceably on your way. Fred took it badly—roofed a farmer with his car. Braked in time to greet the fella’s wife a ways along.
