Subvision

by Andrew McEwan

  The future was still there to be built. Scherzo did not agree with the obvious propaganda. What had the aliens done to deserve such a bad press? Newspapers were one thing; but a film, admittedly low budget, supposedly documenting their heinous crimes? Would he get to wobble about in a rubber suit raping virgins? Wow, cute.

  He needed the job, the money. Since his cheques had dried up he'd lived off gold fillings accidentally swallowed, unknowingly evacuated by anonymous commuters onto the railway line situated in the wilds to the rear of his kitchen window, in that half-formed space yon side of the hedge which in places resembled an aeroplane and a walrus.

  But what was here, about him now? Images of the incinerator plant stirred in his head. Derelict, a victim of recession, huge piles of contaminated rubble, metal and brick. Black dust of coals, closed worlds of compacted jungle, stood in the air like the shadows of ages past. Scherzo walked the fallen length of a rotten fence, wire-tangled and decomposing, releasing its soul of wood, ducked under a sign at a gate and knocked where the sign instructed. A stone security guard poked a square face out of a cracked window. ‘You an extra?’

  ‘Yes,’ Scherzo replied, uncertain.

  ‘Follow the yellow arrows. Don't touch anything. Shooting starts at nine.’

  There had once been coke ovens, a furnace. Suppressed animosity, coaxed from its hole by these reminders, interfered with his forward vision.

  Shaking loose the reverie, logging that animosity's burrow, he followed the yellow indicators, tripping once over a strung rope before finding himself sat one side of an unstable wooden table in a dingy, equipment-stacked tent.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Trepan.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘What's this movie about?’

  ‘Do you play any instruments? Harmonica? Piano?’

  ‘Guitar - a little.’

  ‘No good. Pay's eight-fifty an hour.’

  ‘Eight hours a day?’

  The man on the other side of the table smiled. ‘Seldom.’ Then, ‘Any infectious diseases? You'll appreciate we have to ask.’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Okay.’ He chewed his pen, mumbled, said, ‘You're on time; that's something. Follow the red arrows to the fitting tent.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Trepan.’

  ‘Height?’

  ‘What's this movie about?’

  ‘A hero. What else?’

  ‘And all the aliens get killed, right?’

  ‘Right; they're the bad guys.’

  ‘And the good guy?’

  ‘He's tall, blond, tanned, muscular, looks great in shorts - if you know what I mean. Stand still will you. You here to act or rewrite? Troubles, troubles!’

  This must be movie talk, thought Scherzo, as the tape-man rambled and jotted notes.

  ‘Here, try this on.’ A gangrenous mask, something that moved nosily in a bucket.

  Scherzo peered out through gill slits, a cork bung wedged tight up each nostril and a mouth full of antiseptic chewing gum. His worst fears realized, but there was worse to come. The set afforded outlines of bloody invasion, was strewn with corpses in various states of disassembly, stinking (why so much odour for a movie?) of death illegal and imported. There were inflatable cars inflated with combustible gases. No-one was without matches. Scherzo kept his between his toes. Follow the blue arrows, they'd instructed, and stand on the X.

  For five hours he waited to be run over by the hero in a smoking orange Transit van with the windows blacked out and the wheels sporting metal dentures.

  And that was the end of Scherzo's film career. Maybe.

  52

  ‘Here, put this on.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Radiation suit. Hurry.’

  The prisoner complied. He had no choice; they made his decisions for him, had since birth, the mundane and everyday as well as the more important if similarly attired vital hinges of destiny, his own and other's. He was possessed of only sham discretion. When encased in white plastic, noded by yellow tubes and red valves, clear pipes containing graded powders, they opened, from a safe distance, barricaded behind thick glass, the hatch. They wanted him to crawl down there for a purpose the importance of which was stressed. They instructed him to do it, perform this task like it were any ordinary duty, and he was powerless, unwilling even, to hang back. So over the edge the prisoner went. There was no true ladder, but a series of metal rungs embedded in slick and leafy concrete. The hatch closed above, locked automatically, sealing him in darkness.

  A light came on. ‘Okay, you can take the suit off now. You're through.’

  ‘Uh?’ The prisoner gazed around, amazed.

  ‘You heard: take it off. Go ahead, this is it, what you've been preparing for all this time, a world outside the world. You're free! Free of freedom. Get it? We're releasing you to your task, child of adhesion. And good luck to you.’

  He took off the burdensome suit like they told him, wondering what his task might be and whether to bury it. The voice of years was no more in his head. Beside him was a tree, a massive oak, and in the distance, lined in rows, were houses; or, more accurately (the word gave him a strange feeling inside) homes.

  This was it, he realized, the actual.

  But where to go from here?

  He started walking, at once excited and nervous, marvelling endlessly at his good fortune, at the blueness of the open sky and the greenness of the abundant grass. Never had he been sandwiched between two such things.

  It must have been early morning when he arrived, as the sun climbed and the shadows shortened as he wandered, dragging the bulky radiation suit behind him like a security blanket. His feet became increasingly sore, not having shoes. He wore short trousers of blue cotton and a flouncy cream shirt. He walked through built up areas, the battered outskirts of an industrial town, new developments and old coagulating into streets that tasted first of brick dust, second turpentine. All this the ex-prisoner took in, absorbing light like a leech absorbs blood. Passers-by smiled at him as they would any small child. One old lady even went so far as to ruffle bony fingers through his curly brown hair. But none of these actions, unfamiliar as they were, puzzled him. What did puzzle him was Scherzo, who he found face down among some shrubs, apparently hiding from several tall men in black uniforms. The child was attracted by his frightened stare, the expression of sheer chaos that had moulded his unpleasant features into the semblance of a telephone. You could dial his teeth and lift his nose, the child thought, climbing alongside the prone, you could press his ear to your own and listen to the ocean.

  ‘Sch...’ Scherzo whispered, an index finger to his mouth. ‘You'll give me away.’

  After a while the telephone sighed and turned to regard the boy with X-ray eyes. ‘What's your name, kid?’

  ‘I don't have one.’

  ‘That's too bad. Where do you live?’

  ‘Inside - or I used to.’ He scratched his head in much the same way as the old lady had.

  So did Scherzo. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I don't know.’

  ‘You don't know?’ By now, however, Scherzo had noticed the white suit and its yellow nodes. ‘You must be a spaceman,’ he said.

  That sounded about right to the child, who nodded, satisfied that he'd discovered one sufficiently confused to be able to see the truth for what it was. ‘Are those men after you?’ he asked, making himself comfortable on the soil.

  Scherzo frowned, a strange business for a telephone. ‘I'll tell you later.’

  ‘How do you know I'll be around later?’ inquired the child, planting overheated toes.

  ‘I don't,’ Scherzo told him. ‘Now go home.’

  Tears welled to spill down those cherub cheeks.

  Scherzo groaned.

  But you can always cure a kid with a hamburger, and this kid proved no exception, gluing the meaty remains to his face and licking his greasy fingers. Then he farted. ‘Ani
mal protein, right? Never tasted anything like it.’

  ‘You've never had a hamburger before?’

  ‘Not that I remember,’ the kid replied, gazing longingly at the counter with its menu board. ‘I knew they were made from cows, but I'd never tasted one until now.’

  Scherzo leaned back in his chair. He'd met weirdoes before; best not to act surprised. ‘You want to try a kebab,’ he said. ‘They'll really blow your mind.’

  ‘Well,’ answered the kid, slurping his Coke, ‘what are we waiting for? Let's go.’

  53

  Saturday arrived. Saturday April 20. Scherzo, whose favourite day had always been Saturday, awakened warm and stiff among cardboard, toilet roll, plastic bags and sundry - polystyrene and other - packaging, breathing hoarsely the wasted air that circulated through an entanglement of fish 'n' chip wrapping. Verily, he thought, a nest.

  The light was pale and yellow and crept about him as if mixed with honey. His skin itched uncontrollably. He wasn't convinced his eyes were all the way open. He scratched, stabbing his flesh with blunt curls of nail. He sneezed and his bed, the brittle crust of it, disintegrated, turning in part to a crystalline powder, sugarlike sleep from a giant's eyelids, noiseless as it shattered minutely against the hard bare boards of the floor.

  Scherzo Trepan chewed his nails and unplugged his ears and nostrils. Sound was mostly absent, but the smell, his smell, was moist and repugnant. He shook his head, sorting his senses, electrocuted his brain and made for the toilet. That out of the way, flushed unsuccessfully as the water had become one with everything green in the universe, Scherzo attempted to run a bath. The walls shook. There were no carpets, no furniture. All had been disconnected. He returned downstairs and sifted through the litter of his marathon hibernation. Newspapers lay inches deep behind the front door. He examined the latest, recognizing neither the language nor the composition; only the date. The words were alien, the pictures dark and confusing, the quality of both print and paper abysmal. Searching through back issues it was possible to trace the journal's depreciation over two decades, the earliest copies brown and faded, yet more legible than the latest. And they numbered in the thousands. There was a stack of colour supplements in the corner, the last edition unread like the first, now a stone tablet due to the sedimentary pressures above.

  Scherzo moved to open the mildewed curtains. Taking one in each hand, the material tearing, he hesitated, then opened them a notch to view through grime and desiccated insects the imposing turbulence of the hedge. Craning his loud neck he saw this vegetation to be as tall as the house. At its base, boles like elephants' ankles rehearsing ballet steps, was a sludge of tinfoil take-away receptacles, dead cats, part consumed fruit, traffic cones, feathers and beer cans, boots, moccasins, flippers, two crash helmets and a tennis racket. The occasional coin glimmered in this omelette. Batteries, condoms used and unused yet stripped of their packets (parachutes that had failed to open), ring pulls, cigarette ends, baby soothers, sweet packets, cassette tapes, broken and unravelled, and even a viola made their home here among gnarled feet and wooden toes, the hedge obviously thriving on a rich mulch of cast-offs and imaginatively served up passers-by. No graveyard spruce of longbow-potential yew was better sited.

  He closed the curtains, shutting that world out and giving closer scrutiny to this. There was only the bed, its mattress buried like late night shoppers and stray children midst the roots of the external fortifications, beneath layers of dire, productive rubbish. Nothing else. The air was dry. His was the sole occupying force. The chimney-breast was naked brick, the fire surround scraped of varnish, leaving painful scars in the oak. As if it had been decontaminated, Scherzo thought. Dressed in improbable pyjamas, he left to explore the rest of the house.

  Annie's room was empty, missing footprints and shelves, fossils and books. He sat on the creaking floor and scratched his face. He had not grown a beard. The room he had last seen Wilson occupy possessed not so much as a door. A gust of wind rattled the window, loose in its square mooring, a bleak outward reality shaking itself in readiness for the full cloak of spring, the fragrance of daffodils, the splendour of damp foliage and the rising of ghosts.

  He couldn't get the front door open and the back way seemed a poor bet, so, dressed in remnants pulled cautiously from the airing cupboard, Scherzo broke his downstairs window and exited through that, tackling the Great Hedge full on and sinking in it, a quagmire about his feet. But he found shoes large enough to skim across the swamp's thin veneer and a rusty spanner among the death which he employed in the dismantling of twigs and branches, assailing the hedge from its vulnerable, unarmoured rear. Skeletons of lost explorers lay herein, hanged on the scaffolding of cobwebs.

  Much abused, he fell to the pavement and gazed round at the rubble. There was certainly a lot of it: houses collapsed onto cars, cars pinning plastic tricycles and once flesh and blood pets. Scherzo walked as if going to work at the incinerator plant, slipping clumsily through the metal fence, between the leaning ash trees, discovering concrete and tarmac where once had undulated school fields and teenagers drunk. New houses stood here, abutting the fallen old, occupying blocks of the once grassy space Scherzo had crossed countless times as a lad, both in uniform and singular employment, always working for some government he failed to understand, enjoying pilfered cigarettes and, he imagined, sophisticated gropes. Nothing else. He soon lost his bearings, unprepared as he was for this development, shoulders hunched and soles a-flap as he wound between spotless, de-personalized dwellings, eyes peeled for any visible landmark between smooth-walled garages and mock Tudor facades. Anonymous and somehow disturbing; due, he supposed, to the width of their doors. Finding a downward path he followed it to its conclusion at a blank wall eight or ten metres high and topped with shards of green bottle glass and gleaming razor-wire. There were no signs to suggest what lay beyond the frontier. The houses had been constructed in such a manner that even from a distance it had been impossible to see the wall for what it was, much less past it, say, if you had known it to be there and stood on a dustbin several hundred metres up the road. There was no gate, no opening. The barrier rose impassively at the edge of the world. The edge of human dominion? he wondered. Which side? It had to be negotiated. Scherzo had already seen off one impenetrable fortification that morning, his first in so long. It was still early and he was willing to bet no human or unhuman eye peered as yet at any emulsioned ceiling. Time had slowed to a crawl.

  The wall stood before Scherzo, thick and defiant. How was he to get over? Pole vault? Stretch elastic between lamp-posts, the nearest glowing dimly, and catapult himself across? Tie springs to his new old shoes? No, he reasoned, too comic-book; too difficult. He wouldn't go over the wall, but under.

  To that end Scherzo raised a manhole cover. Feet and hands to the metal rungs embedded in slick concrete he began a descent, dragging the metal cover back in place above and sealing his body in absolute blackness, iron blocking light, flesh adhering to cold steel as gingerly he made his way inward. The abrupt lack of anything tangible to focus on was disorientating. He was forced to pause more than once to convince himself of his body's direction, that gravity wasn't playing tricks on him. His fingers numbed. After a few minutes he had to slap the rungs in order to feel them. His feet seemed distant, as if they'd gone on ahead. He listened for water but heard none. He doubted the tunnel's verticality. Colours assailed his mind, glossy blotches which echoed the hedge and disturbed his stomach. He grew dizzy. Air left him in bubbles. The water he'd listened for had slipped unnoticed over his head.

  54

  Benedict heaved himself over the gunwale and flopped into the rocking boat, exhausted.

  He'd tried to kill himself, by drowning. But there was no escaping Rebecca and her death, the time and moment of it, no way of scaling that overhanging face, the wall he hit and rebounded off. The river would always bring him back, pump him out, leave him alive.

  Face it, Roy, you don't want to die, you ju
st want to know if you killed your wife, if you're guilty of that crime. You want the memory returned, to be certain one way or the other if you had such a memory in the first place.

  Missing an oar he paddled upstream. Multicoloured birds exploded from the crowded trees on either bank, the sun painting the tips of branches and wings.

  To be greeted by lamplight, Rebecca in her rocking-chair glimpsed through the screen doors.

  ‘Rebecca?’

  ‘In here,’ she called, reading.

  ‘I had the strangest feeling,’ Benedict told her, stepping wetly inside. ‘I was on the river, drifting, when I suddenly felt something pass overhead; like a shadow, only denser. It shook the boat. I was scared for you.’

  His wife peered over the rim of her book. ‘You're soaked, Roy,’ she said calmly; ‘you're dripping.’

  Benedict was frozen by her eyes, impaled on their haunted lustre.

  ‘Why don't you take a shower,’ she suggested.

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  Rebecca's eyes dropped once more to the page. ‘Really, Roy, don't be such a baby.’ Then, as he made his way to the bathroom. ‘I'll bring you a clean towel.’

  55

  Doctor Mood stood in awe of the library. He had come upon it by accident, followed a draught through the normally draughtless castle, gathering up leaves. Something about the square room reminded him of his grandmother, its books wrinkled and its breath metallic, her spine prominent beneath leathery skin, her skull containing as many tight-printed pages as were assembled here, crammed into volumes of varying thickness like stained, ancient teeth on bowed, gumlike shelves. Was there a gap here corresponding to grandma's pharmacopoeia? Would he be held accountable for any fine, that book overdue by years? Lifetimes? The doors closing of their own accord the doctor walked to the library's centre where rested a writing desk distorted by age, replete with ink and pens. He perched on the adjacent stool and took a sheet of paper from a drawer. There was nothing specific he wished to write. Anyway, the dull gold nib tore the paper, which, on examination, appeared pressed from white sand, crumbling like a wafer biscuit under his thumb.