Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

The crazy people had won. The crazy people had called an election and voted for themselves. Theirs was the only party. Only crazy people were allowed to vote, so the majority was large. Absolute.

  There was a curfew crazy people alone violated.

  Vanessa was one, by her own design.

  Hubert Mason’s during the day wasn’t much changed, if you ignored the armed guards and the new, faceless money. There was rationing, but not for all. Her supervisor now wore a pink shirt and a shiny pin. Not even Van dared cross him, although she did forget to sweeten his tea. Each morning the assembled staff were lectured on behaviour and deportment, on how to spot interlopers, undesirables and reactionaries whose purpose was corruption. Once spotted the guards stepped in. There was much screaming and occasional bloodshed. She kept her wings folded and grinned. Her boss, the sometime floor-walker, had taken to stroking her thigh.

  At night she was avenged.

  She had access to the fridge.

  So much had changed, she thought, not least herself. She’d never had a purpose before, much less one as violent. She never would have imagined herself capable of dealing in death.

  At night she seduced with a passion, and destroyed with a kiss.

  There was a reward on the head of this temptress, who the official media belittled and scorned, pretending their madness to be hers. But she was above such fulmination, employed after dark with returning the dead to their graves.

  By the score, which she kept, nudging three hundred by September’s close, the sky still frosted and the earth packed, autumn on the horizon, its thunder stolen by forces most would regard as hot, not cold.

  She lived in that world, holed up in Michael’s attic when not at work, surviving on a paltry diet of cheese and cress sandwiches and cleaning her teeth with wire. The man downstairs knew nothing of her. She eavesdropped on his telephone conversations. He mumbled yes and no down the line. He talked in his sleep as she sat on his chest, and she heard his confession, afterward cooling his brow. He looked like Michael. He painted canvasses to the glory of a state deranged, including among the phallic symbolism and subliminal imagery tiny irreverent messages of his own. Looked at closely, a button might reveal an arse, an earlobe a tit, a perfect smile the ingress of worms. Like her, he was a counter-revolutionary.

  Biding his time. Through fear?

  He had a lot to be scared of, his dark past for one.

  Puzzled by the contents of his home, those feminine touches she’d failed to retrieve or still had a use for, like the ironing-board.

  Usurped…

  That intrigued her. There was more of a picture, his nightly ramblings - now that she paid more attention to his words than his gonads - offering clues to what ailed him, his pain the result of deletion, or separation, a schism like that of twins divided at birth.

  Had one died? Was this Michael’s resurrected brother? Sylvester’s paintings bore the love apple’s moniker. But whose talent was in the hand? It seemed like too simple an explanation, long on trash novel plot and short on plausibility. The idea amused her though: disunion, of a soul…

  Michael’s whereabouts were a mystery. Vanessa had put him from her mind. As she drained blood from veins his image crept back. Seen in crimson puddles and glimpsed in fading eyes, the face of her lost love, agitated and bemused, running wildly, flailing arms, scooping dog shit in crisp packets and chasing her for miles.

  Anyway. She checked her nails. There were rendezvous, appointments to be kept and assignations arranged.

  Sailing from the dormer, filling her lungs, the painted lady fluttered, all girlie and lost as she descended on a city ill-prepared, toothed with steel but unprotected, falling as each night, the men and boys, to her innocent smile.

  Twenty Nine: Being Being