Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Drowning in thirst, he approached the bar with a fresh melancholy. All had been well until a few minutes ago, when dancing he’d stepped on the toes of a bridesmaid and scraped her nail polish. This exploded images in his head of a patient blacksmith’s apprentice given the task of polishing an endless stream of newly fashioned wire nails, each six inches long and freshly made, extruded from a machine like spent bullet casings. He took each in turn in a cloth and wiped them down, burnishing their shafts to rid them of oil and bundling them into rough hessian sacks, each of a hundred. The nails would find a variety of uses, from fixing fence posts to - secreted in the bellies of credulous goats - choking serpents.

  Nervously, he ordered another pint of lager.

  Vanessa was nowhere to be seen; there was just a maelstrom of people, all ages and races moving their bodies disconcertingly, some coy, some openly flirtatious, swinging hips and arses to a rhythm of Greatest Hits and badly covered classics. The house band wore tuxedos, as did the waiters. The guests ranged in style from Sunday morning gardening to Royal garden party. The reception had been going for hours, with those present at the nuptials having already consumed massive amounts of food and alcohol, later joined by less intimate friends and more distant relations, resulting in this witches’ brew of co-conspirators…

  At least one of which was out to get him. He just wasn’t sure whom. The old lady in the pink saffron dress with the pearls round her neck and in her ears had been a prime suspect, insisting, as she had, on kissing every guest. The bride’s mother, no doubt, lush and florid, massaging her palms to warm them up before shaking the hands of revellers. Taking prints, Michael thought, vetting those who dared approach the door. Or were the guests slipping her notes? He couldn’t decide. It might look odd if he offered her a fiver, so he made to sneeze as he was ushered inside, holding his hand then in a manner to suggest it was occupied. She waved like a chorus line girl, fingers to ceiling, and he was through. Next was the barmaid, her position critical. He could drink from bottles; it wasn’t unknown; but if she had advanced intelligence the bottles would be doctored, or she’d insist on opening them herself, handing them over with a pickpocket’s smile. He chanced it. Draught beer. Sucking the foam he detected no knowing glint in her lenses, nothing to betray her allegiance to an enemy without a name. Don’t take unnecessary risks, he told himself. But beer was necessary. No way to avoid it. After that, and several quick pints, things quietened down. Vanessa found him, crushed him to her breast and offered to introduce him around. His confidence rising, Michael said, ‘Sure, why not…’ and she dragged him from his stool, at an increasing pace to circumnavigate the arena. ‘Phew!’

  ‘They’re nice people, don’t you think?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Roger and Alison.’

  ‘Which ones were they?’

  He wasn’t being sarcastic. He didn’t think.

  ‘The bride and groom! The ones on the cake!’

  ‘Not very tall, are they?’

  She smiled indulgently. ‘That’s an old joke. Next you’ll be saying, “Looks nothing like them.”’

  He pointed to prime, thought better of it, said it anyway, giving his finger a jab. ‘How do you know it is them? Maybe you went to the wrong wedding. Maybe you got your dates mixed up. Do you know the people on the cake?’

  Her hands were on her hips. ‘Are you going to be like this all night?’

  ‘I’ve had a rough day,’ he said.

  She folded her arms. ‘Not yet you haven’t.’

  It was true, his day had been rough; he’d got mixed up with the time, thinking he was supposed to be here at two, when it was seven, which left five hours to account for, an entire afternoon of dysfunction.

  It had started in the park, bending ash trees into a pagoda, then moved on to the supermarket, where he arranged an entire aisle of pet food into the likeness of a border collie, using the variously coloured tins, sacks of kitty litter and bone-meal as pixels before being asked, politely, to leave. After that he took a bus to the airport, pretended to lose his luggage, spilled coffee on an air hostess, got into a peanut fight with a bunch of jabbering Scandinavian teenagers, photographed his arse in a booth, presented the result to said air hostess by way of a gift, an apology for ruining her blouse and scalding her tits, and got his face slapped, narrowly missing arrest before dodging back onto the bus, which, by pure chance, stopped right outside the hotel in whose Pacific Ballroom he now stood, Vanessa lost to him as he handed the barmaid a twenty pound note.

  She looked at it suspiciously and he started to sweat.

  She passed it under an ultraviolet light.

  Someone, the bridesmaid, tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Buy me a drink. A double vodka and lime’

  It was an instruction. Michael grimaced, not daring to look down at her toes. They’d be steel and sharp, he knew, garishly shimmering tines.

  The barmaid appeared almost sympathetic, delivering his change before taking half of it back again.

  The bridesmaid, whose name was Alice, clanked her ice off teeth and glass, tipping her head back while keeping her eyes on him, the music and lights swarming about her in a corona of stroboscopic sound. It made him feel sick. She licked her lips after each swallow, soon emptying the glass, peering at him quizzically until he ordered another.

  ‘You trying to get me drunk?’ she enquired, adjusting her strapless ball-gown.

  Before he could answer she hitched her skirts up and retrieved twenty Regal King Size from behind a garter, black with red trimmings, like another part of her.

  ‘Because if you are…’ she continued before not finishing.

  Michael bolted. Ducking under a conga line and straddling a bench seat he found himself in a peculiarly dark recess, the music muted, the wallpaper 3-D, a cigarette smouldering in a tin ashtray the only movement.

  ‘Got a light, big boy.’

  All he could do was scream.

  His clothes burst into flame.

  The blacksmith’s hammer rang down, casting sparks like fireworks, the iron tongue of his giant anvil resonating with a shrill, piercing cry. Ramch stood laughing. His horse shook its head and stamped its feet at each strike, throwing red dust into the baked air that spun in vortices of heat.

  ‘Eh, are you okay?’

  Michael flapped like a chicken in an effort to beat out the fire. The smoke in his eyes made them bleed.

  The bridesmaid pushed him into the men’s room and stuck his head under the cold tap.

  Someone pissing splashed a neighbour’s shoes.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Ungh…’

  ‘You freaked out.’

  So many bodies. So many dead.

  They just wouldn’t stay in the ground.

  Giant loopers stirred them up, their rolling caterpillar gaits and ploughshare, stumpy limbs. Forward they arched in the hunt for leaves, dragging their modular rear ends, uncovering hundreds of corpses as they traversed this desert of coarse red sand. The wind would bury the dead again; it had buried them the first time. The loopers, oblivious, paused to chew on shields, thinking them their favoured metal flowers. Ramch liked the machinelike caterpillars. He admired their single-minded assault of these faux oases, the way they blithely sucked armour and munched weapons reminding him, he told Michael Tomatoes, ‘Of a child at a mother’s breast: knowing nothing else and trusting only that which feeds.’

  Succinct…

  A slap. Not the first Vanessa had given him, and probably not the last. He kind of liked it, he confessed to himself, keeping it in his head, making sure to appear hurt and surprised.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘Being a pathetic shit,’ she quietly told him.

  He shook his face and, one eye shut, looked around.

  It might have been beneficial if he could see a clock, as he wasn’t sure what had been and what was yet to be. Was the bridesmaid past or future? He couldn’t say. On the other
hand, clocks and Michael didn’t get along; he had a strange relationship with time, being entirely suspicious of it, as it was no doubt of him.

  ‘What did I tell you this morning?’ She was angry, that much was obvious, but it was the kind of anger that barely suppressed a laugh. ‘On the phone, remember?’

  He said he didn’t.

  ‘About behaving yourself,’ Vanessa reminded him, accentuating the point with a nail (oh, God, not those!) in the ribs.

  Michael tried to think what it was he could have done, what heinous crime he might have perpetrated in the name of his own callous amusement.

  He couldn’t.

  ‘Bastard…’ She kissed him; a wet one.

  It must have been good, though, for all that tongue.

  Which ended abruptly, as someone dragged her away. Not quite kicking and screaming, but with a certain disappointment evident in her body language, the kind that displays itself through fake broken limbs and a resigned, crooked shrug. The third party, a man taller than himself, led her off like a stray dog, or disobedient child, which suggested he was known to her and she had neither been arrested nor abducted. But his displeasure at her departure was aimed largely at her and not the unknown rogue who’d usurped his place, bringing him to the conclusion that he was miffed by his memory loss and the fact Vanessa had not filled in the gaps.

  He looked around again. He was at the bar. Still? He couldn’t tell which was his drink, so raised the fullest glass, only to find a cigarette end floating like two drowned squirrels following a particularly violent bridge-edge wrestling match. Red and grey; lipstick and ash, they bobbed together, locked in death amid the froth.

 

  Precise…

  A punch. At least an attempted one. He’d seen it coming, puzzled as to why, but with the forewarning a dumb assailant provides his victim, along the lines of, “Shit teeth!” or, “Fancy a knuckle sandwich?”

  Swaying, taking a half step to one side, Michael watched in bemused amazement the follow-through, involving as it did the bride’s mother and a cabal of aunts, all of whom wore the same dozen ivory slips beneath their saffron, all of whom kicked their feet like inverted beetles, lying on their backs in a display of sixty’s underwear fashion and advanced liver spots, the mother herself wearing no knickers Michael could see and with the tattoo of a raging bull where once her pubic hair had been, snarling angrily in folds of pink flesh between navel and clitoris. Several onlookers fainted, but not the bride, though what she was still doing here the love apple didn’t know.

  Screaming, gesticulating, she waded through her upturned relations and hooked the man at their core, her new husband, his assailant, whose fingers pointed roughly in Michael’s direction, but whose voice was choked as she lifted him by his tie. Their faces met, both beetroot. He desperately clawed for air.

  They did look a bit like the people on the cake, after all.

 

  Enduring…

  He was a mushroom.

  As patient and steady a fungus as any before seen or known. He had his mulch, his brothers in the dark, an underground system of communication to rival any large metropolis, and the smoothest, roundest dome.

  He was rightly proud of his dome. Its subtle discoloration and shy flaking was the envy of his neighbours.

  Clinging to the ceiling, behind the lights and above the noise, he surveyed the throng with a detachment born of perspective, an upside-down world of heads, shoulders, breasts, arses and toes. The throng milled like seabirds, stabbing their beaks at scraps of food and conversation, shuffling their elbows in time to the music, mimicking one another, in and out of focus, part words and partial sentences exchanged like foreign currency, foreign soil between their ears, brains in which germinated ideas only half their own. They spoke these out loud and others took them up and added to them, interpreting as they may. They chattered, beaks in random motion, talking and chewing as one, mulling and masticating both metaphorically and factually as about them feathers were preened and talons brandished in a dance that had no name.

  Just life. A situation. The living interacting. A ritual. A binding. A joining of flesh and souls, belongings, even wardrobes.

  Michael observed each nuance, giving every gesture, be it direct or vague, equal scrutiny. The unspoken was more real, he felt, suspended from a ceiling high and shadowed…

  ‘That one there,’ a brother asked. ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘Of what?’ Michael enquired. ‘Of the fact he’s had too much to drink, or the fact he’s clearly stoned?’

  ‘If he’s aware of anything…at all…’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The brother was confused. He was having difficulty understanding the nature of the upside-down.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ offered Michael. ‘The only reason he’s here is to have a good time.’

  It didn’t help. His fellow mushroom shrugged and fell quiet.

  While the birds went on jabbering, tossing their heads and shaking their tails, feathers ruffled and smoothed, jokes caught and dropped midst the planetary interplay of vocal chords.

  They’d be gone by morning, but he’d still be here, entrenched in the mulch of his forebears. The ceiling was rotten, a perfect foundation, always close to collapse yet held firm by the very thing that corrupted its fibres, the mushrooms themselves simply products, the latest invention of Life and Death as they swapped roles, manufactured via chaos, here, in this ballroom, of this eve, given form. Speech too, that borrowed from those below, patterns of a language common to all living things, shapes and constructs to be found in skin and bone, those same shapes and constructs as dictated the mushroom’s innards, aligned his vertebrae and stretched his dome. He had water like they. He had substance. He had reality, though flawed.

  He had a tremendous headache, a huge ugly pain exasperated by the image of HER, in the mirror and out of it, before him as he dripped coldly, HER painted face and bestial smile.

  The bridesmaid.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Eh, yeah – I think so.’

  ‘Good. You panicked. What was that all about? I didn’t know what to make of it; you just,’ she juggled invisible balls, ‘ran.’

  He nodded. ‘I know. I had to be somewhere. I’m sorry.’

  Why was he apologizing? It didn’t make any sense.

  She didn’t either. She said things like, ‘I was in the supermarket the other day and the tins of beans looked so scared, like they were afraid I’d buy them.’

  I can imagine.

  ‘Can you imagine? One fell right off the shelf. Fainted…’

  Black closing in from either side.

  57 varieties.

  ‘I put it back, of course.’ She laughed. ‘Upside-down.’

  Vicious…

  The nails going in, the stench of burnt horn, the pliers. The blacksmith’s chest and back were scarred, thick hairs coiling from around old wounds and through new contusions. He looked as if he had been beaten with his own tools, hammered and filed. The victim of torture, he raised the black horse’s hooves one at a time, burning the hard foot with the fresh shoe and driving home the nails, polished by his apprentice who sat wholly in shade, with only the gleam of burnished steel to see by.

 

  Six: Columbine