‘You know what happens to people when they die, Frank? They go to the butcher's shop to be chopped up. Old people become mince and sausages. The middle-aged are beef. Women, incidentally, make the best steaks. The younger adults are pork - that's bacon. You like bacon? Thought you would. Teenagers are lamb chops. Kids are mushed into those meat pastes; pates and the like. And chickens, Frank, chickens are babies with their heads cut off.’
Vernon ruffled the boy’s hair. He reminded him of a young Pagan. The octopus, Rudi, sat nearby munching on a plate of Yorkshire puds. If he wasn’t Cherry’s son, and a tool for use in the maintenance of Vernon’s business interests, he might have adopted him, particularly now that that other had gone. Pa Kowolski had reclaimed Pagan, much to the frustration of Valery, Veronica and Violet. Pagan though, tramping the streets like some murderous urchin, had a chip on his shoulder the size of a house. Vernon laughed. His wives liked this child, but he was more of a curiosity to them. They played at being aunts, which they most assuredly were not (in this version anyway; the truth being more complicated), spoiling him with presents and pinching his cheeks, but there was no escaping the fact that the son of sweet Cherry Molasses - sometime model, lousy actress - was the reincarnation - after what seemed aeons of committee hearings - of Guiseppe Guido Gonaldi, undoubtedly the world’s greatest ever pizza chef. Naturally, he’d been paroled on the quiet. Vernon, however, had contacts even Jones would envy, deep in the foulest darkest reaches of the most torturous bowels of rat infested perdition. Within the Other People section, no less.
It was a coup. And Vernon was more than a little proud of himself.
Stage Managed
Once more outside the hotel, with the Ventura nowhere to be seen, Henry scratched his head, decided he had nothing to lose, and wandered back in.
The city was a blur, a fast fading montage of buildings to his rear, its noise as if filtered through cushions, one clamped over each ear. Ileum held distant and at bay. He entered under a high marble portico, red-veined and glossy. To either side were pillars, singular, paired and in threes. No longer dark, the interior opened up like an air cavity in some exotic cheese. The floor was marble, deep blue and grey, carpeted in places by narrow vermilion rugs with long gold tassels either end. Worn through in places, he noticed, as if there was usually a long queue of shuffling feet approaching the reception desk, a black semi-circle of stone jutting out from the wall at the far end of this magnificent lobby. It was empty. Chandeliers hung in discreet bunches, like translucent grapes. Henry walked up to the desk and looked behind it, pulling himself over the green marble top, hinging his thin frame across its gold-painted edges. Nothing. The hotel was deserted. Entirely? he thought. Maybe there was a fire drill or something. There had to be guests; only there was no evidence of such, no paper evidence, no guestbook he could see, no memo pads or telephone directories. No telephone. No writing implement. Just the desk, which reminded him of a cheap ashtray.
And the inevitable door. Behind it, an upright rectangular crack. No handle.
Half a dozen elevators were ranked either side. Henry ignored them. Not wishing to be taken for a second ride, he clambered over the desk and faced the inevitable.
He walked down a long passage into an ante-room where burned a fire in an oil drum, newspaper on the floor and placards scattered, their legends succinct: ABANDON ALL HOPE...he read...THE DIE IS CAST...words painted in blood and phlegm, crudely scrawled on canvasses of stretched skin. Whoever had warmed themselves here had disappeared. Not long since, as the flames still licked through and sparks lifted from the beaten container.
Henry shivered, holding his nose against the smoke. He crossed the room of placards to a mesh fence, barbed wire coiled at its top, giving home to many volts. Beyond the mesh was a field, daisies poking cautious heads, and past the field a factory whose chimneys gutted, whose silence deafened, to one side of it a string of brightly coloured trucks. He had no way of guessing what was manufactured here. The trucks bore logos, but he failed to make them out. The words were too small, although he could see a smiling face.
Wait a minute. That face was familiar, it went with a tune in his head, the music he’d spent summer days chasing across busy roads into neighbouring regions, foreign parts little Henry Eels wasn’t meant to know existed. Dodgy council estates where nobody ever washed and children ran the risk of being lost up chimneys. But, but...Mr Jolly’s Ice-cream! That’s whose face, one huge smile with two eyes and a curl of hair atop. Why so many secrets? Mr Jolly did look a bit sinister, come to think of it. Had his parents been right? What was in that frozen dairy product? Strange how everyone suddenly wanted it when it was hot. Hot as Hell, that particular summer, he recalled. Henry turned left and followed the fence to a gate.
From inside, a limousine approached, long and black with acres of mirrored glass and menacing chrome.
He stood like a beggar outside some rich mansion, hands in pockets and collar turned up against the cold.
The gate was twofold, like those in a safari park, the outer not opening till the inner had closed.
The limousine entered this cage, paused, then continued, exiting in a calm flow of steel. Rubber sucked the road, brake-lights bringing the sleek vehicle to a halt a short distance hence. One of the rear doors popped. A hand emerged, velvet gloved, and a finger wagged. Henry stayed where he was. The hand retreated, reappearing seconds later holding a video cassette and shaking it like a box of cat food. His whiskers twitched. A leg emerged next, high-heeled and long. The hand dragged the cassette up the thigh, laddering the stocking. Both hand and leg then moved back inside the car. The door closed and the sunroof opened, a sliding black panel. Henry watched, fascinated. The hand was extended. It waved. And the leg, dancing on air, lithe and inverted, both after a few seconds dropping from view.
The car reversed closer. Something shot from the roof a hundred metres toward the misted grey ceiling, what purported to be sky. It spun madly, taking his eyes while the limousine stealthily edged away. The object reached its nadir and seemed to hang a moment before tumbling back to earth, Henry sucking breath as he manoeuvred to catch. But he missed, slipping on a cigarette pack, and the head, as such it was, splashed face down into the tarmac.
The car stopped abruptly. Henry toed the skull, its blonde hair matted, rolling it over with his shoe.
Smashed beyond recognition.
He listened as the limousine's engine revved angrily. The door opened again.
Running for it, he instinctively new what he'd find. Spread and smeared across leather, the very limbs that had gestured, separated from their torso, which was held upright by a seat-belt, wearing a black cocktail dress and a spray of old man's fingers.
Henry rifled the various entertainment and drink cabinets, finding what he wanted in the shape of an instamatic. Held at arm's length, shoulder to shoulder with the dismembered corpse, he took a snap just as the car lurched forward, causing her neck to bubble and her breasts to jiggle, the leg with the laddered stocking to roll onto the lushly carpeted floor and the door slam shut.
Number seventy-seven.
Henry leaned forward and rapped his knuckles off the darkened glass separating them from the driver's compartment.
No reply.
The door-pads contained no switches, no buttons or levers for opening or lowering windows.
There was a TV, which he also failed to operate, and a radio. This issued cello music from hidden speakers, a sound big enough to fill an amphitheatre, huge swathes of tortured noise that raked up the back of his throat like a sneeze. Each chord was a unique and delirious virus, stirring his brain and liquefying his nasal tissue, clots of it dangling like pizza cheese, soaking his newly bloodied clothes, adding snot and his own peculiar odour to the already saturated environment of his travelling companion and her ingredients.
Accelerating, they struck a soft bump in the road, followed by something hard and metallic, which jammed under the front of the car. Whatever it was punct
ured the radiator and raised the grill in a snarl, like a lizard choking on a cricket.
The engine stalled.
He managed to push the door open. Its mechanism released, the steel and glass hung on its hinges like a broken pinion.
Outside, the sun shone. There was a beach, an esplanade with coin-operated telescopes, a boardwalk with litter and lifebuoys. The signatured remains of an old pillbox sat atop a reinforced concrete dune.
Henry squinted, taking in the fabulous light, the colours of ocean and waves, sand and flesh, decorative awnings, souvenir shops and umbrellas. Children ran along the shore toting plastic buckets and spades, wearing nothing but floppy hats. Parents in swim-suits walking after, stepping over sun-worshippers, spreaders of creams and ointments who held books over their faces, who loosened and tied bikini straps. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. The beach curved away in either direction, a smoothly undulating crescent whose populace crawled and swam, sucked in guts and flirted, ate from wrappers and re-sealable containers, disrobed under towels and played sports with nets and goals of sand-castles. Wedged under the front of the limousine was a motorbike, petrol streaming round its fins and exhaust. He thought about the juncture of machines a moment before skipping down a flight of concrete steps. Their meeting seemed relevant in some arcane way, like star-crossed lovers here grabbing a few moments before they were separated forever.
Wriggling his toes in the fine mica, washed for centuries, pushed and dragged and moulded, Henry felt strangely disenchanted. The beach was a vision of things how they might have been, he reckoned, the good life built on these unsettling foundations. That he had turned his back on such an existence, supposing it banal, made it no less easy for him to reject its reality. If he was to walk along this sandy length he would no doubt encounter himself soaking up rays in the company of beautiful ladies, smiling grandly at passers-by, a picture of success, portly and satisfied. He'd feel jealous, and rightly. His present self would look like a failure. Henry walked over to the nearest stall, dressed as a giant sausage, and bought himself a hot-dog, strings of mustard adding to his shirt-front Jackson Pollock.
The girl serving showed plenty of cleavage. In this idyllic summer, she was most probably available.
A kid rolled toward him on roller-blades, shorts to his brown knees, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and blue-tinted sunglasses. He dangled a bag of goodies. Henry chewed with his mouth open, pretending not to notice. He felt like an undercover detective, adopting the pose in order to dissuade the pusher. But the kid just grinned, shaking the bag, offering it to him. So wiping his mouth with a napkin, Henry took it, waiting for the kid to roll away before looking inside.
In the bag was a strip of photos, the kind you get from seafront booths, fat lady and bald gentlemen in striped Edwardian swimwear, a crab nipping one hairy toe, a beach ball bouncing suggestively, in the background a lighthouse and a pair of lissom beauties. The faces pressed through paint and plywood were both female, one winking slyly, the other with her tongue stuck out, tasting the salt air like a python.
He knew who they were. Not their names, their true names, but their nature. They brought him two steps closer. Of the initial eighty, now only one thing remained.
The sound of a prop brought his head up. Henry shaded his eyes, descrying a rickety biplane, a woman wing-walking and a banner trailing. Words written large: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY!
He felt a lump in his throat. How could he have forgotten? How could they have known?
The sun shook, jostling shadows.
Finally losing its balance, the bright orange orb crashed into the ocean, plip...dissolving like a vitamin C tablet.
Everything, every man, woman and child, fell silent. The night sky crowded in from either side, black drapes drawn across a firmament at whose heart was a conspicuous absence, a window that looked through you rather than you it.
The temperature dropped. He climbed back into his socks and shoes and rolled down his trouser legs.
He stashed the photos in an inside pocket, then fumbled around in the dark until he found a way out. Henry hadn’t been in this game so long and not learned a thing or two. Playing the game meant bending the rules. He pictured a monkey hand-cranking an ancient projector - that was all it took to undermine the illusion and step outside the default view. Naturally, another view replaced it, another monkey. And so on, etc. An infinity of monkeys busily monkeying away, doing what monkeys do.
He was in his parents' living-room. There was the piano, the aspidistra, the urn. There was the portrait of his aunt, stern and gaunt. There was the antimacassar with the cigarette burns and the claw-marked feet. No sign of either his parents or the cat. He had last seen this room when he was six. It was no coincidence, he conjectured, them being in the hotel business. There were forty two rooms for rent beyond the half dozen they occupied, all en suite, most with a sea view.
Music came from next door, an old vinyl recording. The gramophone played in the library, a room he was forbidden to enter. Once, he'd opened the door a fraction, and seen his father naked, a chambermaid on his knee, holding a feather duster and a cake slice. He'd heard his mother's voice, talking calmly of jam sponges while changing the record, one of hundreds his father brought home in cardboard boxes, each in a square brown envelope. The scene, barely glimpsed, had frightened him, a disturbing vignette of adult life; what grown-ups did behind closed doors, deceitful and unkind, a face they held away from youngsters. Thenceforth Henry believed his parents to be damned, their deaths in a boating accident doing nothing to change his mind, reinforcing the image of corruption stolen that day. Listening to the music now made him queasy. Hadn’t he gorged on Mr Jolly Lollies post funeral? He couldn’t eat anything warm for weeks, spending hours peering into the walk-in freezer while the chefs hunched their shoulders and folded their lips, expressing sympathy for the boy the only way they knew how: Black Forest gateau. It made him sick. He felt sick again. But the room drew him strongly. He and it were connected. Anyway, it was just his beloved playing hard to get, part and parcel of his ensorcellment.
In Fabulous Technicolor
‘According to this,’ said Nancy, ‘the year is nineteen eighty-two.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I'm still at school!’
Swene had to think about it; just not too hard.
‘Don't you see?’
‘No,’ he replied, more interested in the pictures than the dates. ‘Please clarify.’
She scowled menacingly. He wasn’t taking this seriously. She was supposed to be leaning on him, not the other way round.
‘All that's happened hasn't happened yet,’ she told him. ‘We appear to be at some crossroads, a point in history - and we can argue about history later - where the probable and the possible hold equal weight.’
Swene needed a shave. They were in the office of a taxi firm, the office doubling as a waiting room. Judging by the prices displayed in the vending machine, this was an enclave of the past; there was even a Space Invaders. But who was to say what decade prevailed beyond the taxi firm's door?
A toilet flushed, the receptionist returning, straightening her skirt and sliding on heels toward a desk with a mike and a phone.
‘Five minutes,’ she said without them asking, lipstick smudged and teeth tobacco stained.
They could have caught a bus, only Nancy felt that left them exposed.
And returning to her apartment didn't? Swene had lost the argument, however, conceding the need for her to communicate with the world by fax and phone, via email, that if she was correct in her assessment of the current time-frame didn't exist outside of academic circles, like her apartment didn't exist, like all they would find was an empty warehouse, dank and dark, rats in the stairwell and broken glass in the yard.
He mentioned this, worried she was losing the plot.
‘It's not important,’ she answered. ‘I just need to get home.’
A grid reference, h
e supposed. Those didn't change. Nothing altered up and down, east and west, left and right. What she sought was a compass point, an anchorage from which to orient herself and the rest of reality, a starting position consistent with her perceptual language, the nomenclature of Nancy Kowolski as understood by Nancy Kowolski and nobody else. He supposed he had his own. Nancy was tired of slaying demons, although she would never admit as much. She was nine years old in 1982, old enough to start asking awkward questions. As a joke Pa had given her a pencil and notepad, something he came to regret as she followed him about the house and garden, quizzing him over details of her sketchy past. It was her mother she wanted to talk about. The one subject Pa was reluctant to broach. She understood she was different from the other kids, yet all she got from her old man was the occasional oblique reference: she did this, she did that, she did another thing. And now? ‘She went away, kid. She was always meant to be some place else.’ Nancy chewed her lip and stamped her foot. Pa shrugged and rubbed his hands together now the garage extension was near complete. ‘I’ll take you on an adventure one day, Nance,’ he promised. ‘To Venus by steam train. You just see if I don’t.’ She guessed now was too late. Or was it? She just needed to get a fix. On her step-father, her sister...her mother even. And hold her breath. Tune in to that ghostly wavelength and follow it back when...
Static came over the mike. The receptionist waved with her nail file.
Another cab ride, thought Swene, I must be nuts. Was this any way to tackle life’s problems? Galumphing around a dissolving universe one step ahead of an invisible, pyrotechnic nemesis.
Nancy was unusually quiet. The traffic too, slow-moving and torpid, afflicted by some peculiar automotive lethargy, as if driving through air the consistency of shampoo. The city slithered, moving gel-like outside the windows, its citizens open-mouthed with effort, their expressions smudged. The sky was pale green and orange, a sickly citrus beverage. Recognizable landmarks appeared alien, coated with a translucent skin, shops and homes and monuments like cadavers embalmed and painted with a preserving varnish, a necessary glue. Without it the city would fly apart, separating into layers, flakes of concrete and wood, flesh and steel crumbling like old bones or dried seed pods. Both fertilizer and plant, future growth from this reluctant medium, here adhering to the past, refusing to move, to put forth or even germinate. Perhaps the result would be fungoid, all soft velvet folds. Perhaps cactaceous, lush and spiked. Either might produce a cocktail of hallucinogenics.
The taxi deposited them by the river, Nancy paying with crushed paper money dug out from the back of the seat. Scrapyards dominated, each corrugated steel shed resounding with the toil of dismembering motor vehicles, pools of oil leaking out from under heavy roller doors. The water was pink.
A newspaper blew along the quay, wrapping itself round Swene’s leg. He picked it up and smoothed the front page.
Missing Girl Found, it read.
He recognized the face.
He turned to show Nancy, but she was away in search of a future, a hundred metres distant and fading.
Swene let her go. He took off the bike jacket and unfurled his cape. He ought to catch up with Owen and Mickey, he reckoned. Maybe organize a Super Hero convention. Seemed apt somehow, given this super-violent, cartoonish landscape.
Hence:
Revolutions Per Minute
At the end of the record, as the needle lifted, Henry opened the door. In the library were no books, the shelves, wall to wall, containing sleeved recordings, voices of the living, the once living and the dead. A child cranked the gramophone, its huge trumpet a metal orchid coiling shell-like to a point, hinged upward between musical interludes, orchestral pieces or monologues. The sounds this instrument made, brought forth, laterally reproduced, had haunted him when he was this child's age. The stylus in its spiral groove produced sound waves via a diaphragm which were amplified by the divergent horn, reverberating through the air, the plaster and paint, gnawing in his ear like tiny burrowing insects. Human voices, etched in plastic, crowded his skull, an elevator in which he was trapped. Henry had no choice but to listen. The melodies, happy and sad, longing and tragic; the discourses, arguments, rebuttals; they were catalogued in the library, stacked in alphabetical order, by category. Similarly in his brain, a panorama of loss and hope and anguish. Music, crackling, straining to be heard, made a museum of life and death in his head, its institution shaping his development. He was the curator, a post he'd inherited and subsequently neglected, the guardian of past and present selves, all of which might be replayed, all of which might be scratched.
Henry Eels was home, but not by choice. And the child? A girl of about four, she carefully selected a title, sliding the plastic disc from its cover and placing it centrally on the plate. Next she delicately lowered the needle and stepped back, no fear of loss on her face, staring at the skinny man as if poised with some truth. The seconds were longueurs, empty passages of silence before the pertinent facts, an eternity Henry used to contemplate ear-muffs. He had no wish to hear, but what he heard brought him to the conclusion of his quest. Her voice, frozen in time, singing to a piano accompaniment.
Epilogue
She checked her makeup in the vanity mirror. Outside the sun shone, impaling the world on tines of heat that stripped the clothes off people and burned their shadows into the pavement should they stand still too long. Black marks meant victims, people whose souls were dilute, thinned to this residue by the actions of a star high and close. Those souls would grow back in time, swelling like summer fruit, one day to fall or be plucked, landing in hers or others' buckets. Death herself, in person at the bedsides of strangers, those souls given over to the library by natural causes.
There was just too many for her alone to cope; thus the hired help. Not that the hiring and firing was ever straight forward. And those political animals were increasingly determined to flout her jurisdiction. Although to be fair they always shot themselves in the foot.
Hypocrites.
Puckering, the silent girl touched up her lipstick. Men, she knew, were enamoured of her; or at least the idea of her, which was probably more important.
Thorp though, was giving her funny looks.
He’d wondered at that knocking in the TR7’s boot, she guessed, and taken a peek.
‘Yes?’
deuce
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