Imbroglio
Page 28
Consternation quickly turned to apathy, the people resigned to a new order as if at the turn of a page. The past was rewritten or faded. The nation was boxed. Of other nations less and less was heard. The newspapers grew thinner and the TV became home to parades and documentaries designed to explain…
Tom worked the nightshift in a bakery. He had a talent for cake decoration and for arranging cherries on tarts, a real eye for detail. He spoke to no-one and kept his nose clean. The bosses nodded approvingly.
By day he walked the streets, marvelling as time appeared to roll backward. Cars grew more primitive, shop windows more austere. The city took on a siege mentality, anxious and inward, a nervousness appeased by a lack of ambition, the weariness of pedestrians mirrored in the sluggishness of traffic. Colours were drained from faces and clothing, reds, blues and greens that were then concentrated in the faces and clothing of others, brightly garbed individuals who amassed an intensity of pigments so radiant ordinary folk had to look away. Tom was able to stare, though, tinting his vision at will and focusing on these characters, who strutted like peacocks and drove convertibles the rain never touched, the rime never dulled, as colourful as themselves, brimful of luxury and intoxication.
They were his target, he knew. But he lacked a passion, a willingness to kill that was a flaw in his programming.
Tom observed. Nothing else. He watched the people pale and the city decline. He worked at the bakery, where the cakes were always bursting with rich ripe fruit and the pastries sparkled with sugar. He didn’t sleep. He floated absently on the outside while on the inside he was energized, active with glazes, flaked nuts and whipped cream.
Negative and positive.
The bosses nodded approvingly and presented him with a reward, a commission no less, a birthday bash whose sweet trolley he was to design, thick with chocolate and sumptuous with brandy, rolling and wobbling with jelly and blancmange. And what was more: ice sculptures, a cake huge and tiered, jam sponge embellished with ribbons of varicoloured icing, adorned with frosted scenes from Selected Histories, Myths & Legends, picturesque and painted, raised like a ziggurat and flowing with delicate liquorice streamers, its architecture classical and its aspect mouth-watering, precise in scale and elevation.
‘A real chance for you to shine…’ they told him.
An IMPORTANT occasion.
Tom was only happy to please. He wouldn’t let them down.
They nodded approvingly and slunk away.
He cracked his fingers, dabbed his brow, and took to mixing.
If it was a masterwork they required, they’d get one.
Sylvester answered the door to an ursine man with a plastic bag full of beer and a ruddy complexion, who invited himself in.
‘Shit,’ said the bear. ‘Did they have to bury me so deep?’ He peered at his nails as if lamenting the waste of a good manicure.
‘Hey,’ said Orange. ‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Under the earth, stupid.’
They drank and talked…
‘Haven’t seen you in ages.’
‘That’s because I’ve been missing. Visiting with elves.’
‘A-ha.’
Danny sat in the crushed can chair and appeared right at home as he rolled cigarettes, handing one to Sylvester.
‘Ah…now that’s better.’ His body spread to fill the metal furniture. He raised a finger, recalling something, dug inside his denim jacket and retrieved a spectacle case. ‘You forgot these.’
There were still gaps in his memory, it appeared.
Sylvester cleaned the lenses on his T-shirt and slipped them on.
The world came into focus.
‘Wow…’
‘I don’t know what’s been happening,’ stated Danny. ‘But…’
They went back a long way, to a school playground and a sandpit in which a passive Danny Delfinger was routinely baited. Twice the size of any of the other kids, he was as soft as warm-day raspberry nougat and just as florid. Sylvester, in a rare moment of temper, had broken another boy’s nose.
His knuckles still tingled. Regarded as a loner, an obvious, studious target, most kids left him alone on account of his parents’ reputation, built on phone box sex and off-licence scuffling.
‘The things you do to get along,’ the bearded man lamented, at once humorous and cynical.
They smoked in silence a while, under the scrutiny of roomgoyles, those denizens of four corners quietly malevolent…
Like wrestlers. Boxers and their seconds.
‘Eh, Michael?’
But he wasn’t listening. He was taken with detail.
Of unconsciousness – a drug flashback, immersion in the fabric of his surroundings, their deeper currents and colours. Reality concentrate, it said on the label. Use with extreme care.
Who was she again? A girl be barely remembered. There, on the edge of vision, her hair in his nostrils, her smile in his testicles; lost to him, a creature organized and deliberate.
‘My spaghetti is cooked while yours is still in the packet,’ he’d told her, glibly self-indulgent.
She liked straight lines.
He wasn’t one.
She regarded him strangely.
Danny was laughing, tickled pink.
He’d once repaired washing-machines for a living. Then survived on disability, having got his tie stuck in a spin program. Until the new regime.
‘They’ve put me to work cleaning houses. Bagging evidence mainly. Everything and anything into blue plastic bags. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff. I turn up on someone’s doorstep, sometimes alone, sometimes with a crew, and I bag them, their whole life.’
‘Criminals?’ asked Sylvester, worried.
‘Kind of,’ said Danny. ‘What are you working on at the moment? Any chance of a preview?’
He felt threatened, was perspiring.
The bear extinguished his cigarette in an empty can.
‘Michael…’
Yes?
‘Michael, Michael.’
She used to call him? And he used to call her?
‘What’s the matter – got a headache?’
Close to panicking. Too sharp through these lenses. Being…
…in hospital, not allowed visitors.
He’d escaped.
But to where? he thought.
Danny’s eyes bulged. The roomgoyles tongues lolled like dogs’. Wrapped in a blanket of his own sweat, guzzling lager, he looked through 360 degrees without moving.
‘Why don’t you take a drive,’ his companion suggested. ‘I know how much you like to.’
Get outside, grab a coffee.
‘Here.’ He held up a bunch of keys. ‘Take my car. It’s the red one.’
Being…
Streams of unconsciousness whistling past, oranges, pineapples and lemons, vague orbs whose understanding of reality was limited through experience - or a lack of it. Bright and cheery electric personas travelling at speeds unknown, no mathematics in their genetic make-up, no predilection to forces governed by an intractable nature or tied to the apron strings of Physics with a capital P; not governed by Laws invented by Scientists, these amorphous wonders, but wholly independent, orbs fashioned from chaos, ideas given substance and substance set alight.
They sought homes in heads, minds engaged in a frenzy of interpretation, what was and what only might be balanced across a universe stretched between ears. Burning slow or fast. Detonating with the force of dying stars or the release of bowel gases. Positive and negative energies vying, shoving electrons, poking quarks, bullying their neighbours and corrupting their associates in a dance of creation without beginning, middle or end.
Dread anarchists, the orbs drank and laughed. They dismantled nothing. Who? Us? You must be kidding!
True.
Does the tree blame the axe?
No; it was the woodsman, his deed. Lemons, pomegranates, tomatoes…thes
e were innocent.
Tools.
The men in bright shirts employed them. Their subordinates also, those who danced with insects, friend and foe, wasps and beetles ever wary of long sticky tongues. Ideas crazy and sane.
Being…
Electromagnetic radiation whose waves, electric and magnetic, varied, but not simultaneously.
The pulsed for fun.
Being…
October, no snow on the ground, yet the earth still frozen, the food in the shops in cake bars the constitution of which was not detailed on any label.
Being…
Alone, he realized, intemperate and overheating, systems breaking down. Perhaps he should have stayed off the red wine, used more of it in the glazing of cherries, less in the assuaging of fires.
Alcohol burned, as did tuxedos and tablecloths, bright shirts and party-poppers, flags, pennants and folded napkins, representations of cliques and chickens, heraldic devices consumed, origami transmuted to ash, those still animate running, some headless, all affected by chemical processes, internal conflagrations and external attack, the love apple sharp and melted in the midst of a flaming cake, its remains dissolving and his fingers stripped to the bone…metal…glass…
The fire he’d unleashed was green.
Minutes earlier, having circled the table slitting throats, the revellers paralysed via the ingestion of oddly stuffed mushrooms (there was as much death in the kitchens; a good climate for fungi) and all but the guest of honour with their necks slack and tongues protruding (she sitting, amused, thinking this some birthday surprise), he had felt in control. Now events were out of his hands. Now the flames had taken over, a party of their own unfolding, gorging, rampant, gatecrashers whose rationale was greed.
And?
She’d smiled, given a cheeky wave.
And?
High fives among the technicians who’d brought us this far, not withstanding poker games.
Their cards were on the table…
Mr Unger-Farmer looked in, gave silent thanks, before straightening his tie and getting back on his sleigh.
And?
The silent tumult of riven souls.
Being…
The liquid in the join, what it takes to attain some movement, a lubricating fluid; blood or wine; words, sweat, spit; what it takes to get a thing moving, to motivate, to energize, to demonstrate an action. Love. Sex. Death. Each perhaps an end in itself; combined, a powerful hallucinogen.
Being…
Some intermediate madness. Alive and dead.
BOTH.
That place in the road where no car passed, over whose surface no rubber had ever impressed. Immaculate tarmacadam.
Being…
‘A dangerous situation,’ posited Herschel Byrd. ‘One for which you hold a certain responsibility.’
‘Harrowing,’ replied Columbine, flagrantly unconcerned, ‘I’m sure.’
Being…
The length of a piece of string.
A talisman against drowning. What every sailor wished, as the ocean was life and death and each wave might be his last.
Stood at the prow, Ramch surveyed the water. Blue and white, glassy green, it shifted as a million separate parts, yet as a single mass, swelling and sighing like a lung, folding and crashing with a force that would tear it apart. It spilled into itself. Dragged east and west by the moon, pushed north and south by the sun, the sea mixed knowledge and confusion. It soaked him. Dressed against its onslaught, he chose not to fight back. It was a scabbard to his sword. The ferocity of its surface was balanced by the calm beneath. Home, that deep place, past where the light reached, to the hero’s true identity, lost one silent afternoon to a mermaid who promised his sails a wind. He hadn’t understood the price at the time. It hadn’t seemed important. Whoever he had been had bargained. What choice was there? They had drifted for days. Food was scarce. Fresh water locked in clouds beyond the horizon. They would all die. Go mad first, become a brother’s accuser. But die, of thirst or another’s hand. So he’d given his name to the mermaid, that she might keep it or use it in any way, and a storm was conjured up. Too much wind then, a violence from which he alone was spared, washed up without a memory in a strange land, people there whose speech he failed to recognize. He had to learn, and quickly. He had to fight, surprised at his liking for it, a talent in his bones that were sometimes broken but fast to mend. He had to find himself, over and again.
Thirty: Repair Man