The Clown [Incomplete] by Alex Davies

Gutterscape

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man
It

The Clown tossed back the tarpaulin and led It into the gaping black mouth of the tent. Somewhere, redness made an appearance, like light, and someone in another part of the world busied themselves finding the right shade of red for their pastel drawing whilst this clown led It down into a dungeon where the Seven Deadly Sins sat, lay, crouched, squatted and curled in thick-barred cages.
Cage bent, gnarled, barbecued, a folly of mashed metal still strong holding against Ira Bear, man mountain, descender, iconoclast of righteousness, globules of muscle and copious ribbons of veins jungle vined around benchpressed neck. He, spitting phlegm wads at It, igniting face with acidic wretching.
‘It burns!’ It shouts.

 ‘Pay no heed,’ said the clown. ‘Genuflection it is his craving, curtesy in servile atonement and he,’ said the clown, bowing both It and himself, ‘shall let us pass till next his bleeding glare trenches us.’
Outside, in an alley, women were having their heads shaved by males wrapped in black fabric and despicable intent. Knives and razors drawing blood in unanticipated bumps and moles on expected perfect skulls. It is the Clown’s doing.
Rounding the back of the tent in a giant spiral leading to the entrance or to the exit, dependent on direction of travel, a mahogany staircase. Atop the top step, a man in an ankle length black suede jacket, lighting a white shaft, sucking on its golden barrel, grey particles and depthly nightshade shadows streaking across his lungs, spreading toxins and pleasure through internal organs, prescient failing kidneys and hammer toes collapsed into shined winklepickers. He emerges into sodden, humidified air, taxis splashing puddles passing over the heads of passers by, reptilian warmth from them. His breath condenses around exhaled smoke and he feels not-quite-rain rivulet down the gaps between his combed, slicked back hair. He hails a taxi.
Downstairs, It watches Gula, the Fattest Woman In The World, consuming several buckets of fried chicken at once, the heaving mass of flesh pulsating like an unpopped blister, bleeding fat and sweat into all corners of her too small cage. Her hands, gnarled winglets, scratch at the air, wrenching pathetically at her own body weight, and suddenly It knows how Tyrannosaurus Rex must have felt with those diminuitive weedling forearms.
‘She wants to eat you,’ The Clown giggles.
A taxi pulls up with a screech and a woman having her head shaved down the back alley next to the brothel screams and he is compelled to investigate. Abandoning cigarette, he draws a revolver from his jacket pocket and pinches a glance off the corner of Main Street. Inside the alley a man is inside the woman, her fists beating on his chest empower him with raucous energy, he is being rough and thoroughly ungentlemanly and Leon, being his name, is consumed by catalytic retrospection and fires three brass barrels into the perpetrators skull, which explodes over the woman in cataclysmic red, a rainbow of felt predation.
‘Five more to see!’ says The Clown, excitable and somewhat irascible.
The fabled Bearded Woman lies prostrate in a puddle of piss and shit, writhing occasionally in lieu of bedsores covering sternum and tibia, humerus and flange. She, or he, or it, but not It, yawns, denotation of spectacular effortful acknowledgement of this unimpressive, demotivating being come to see she, or he, in its cage. It almost stumbles at the wreak, and rubs the spines on its knees with the back of its callused hands. It is scared, and wants to go home, but The Clown is precise and hurrying.
‘Four more to see!’
Outside, the baldly embraces Leon and snuggles against his shoulder and pledges allegiance to his favour. Caressing the bruised flesh between her thighs, feeling for bleeding edges and STD inviting lesions, he copies her stare and enquires as to convalescence via ice cream. She loves ice cream but really isn’t all that hungry, she just wants to go home, but he says it will do her good because he’s hungry too, but he doesn’t mean ice cream, but she doesn’t know that. They head off Main Street into Sweet Street, an ice cream parlour patient with dazzling lights, venus fly trap for the teeth indeed. Inside Leon takes her, soon to take her inside.
She is surrounded by gold coins, some made of chocolate, which she keeps the other side of her cage to avoid the tiny prying hands of Gula. Avaritia, her name goes by like this off the tongue, she would sell you both for the right price to buy new ones, then insured and torched inside her own mouth apropos additional buck. Her hands wrapped in rings, wealth bands and necklaces weighing her neck to deformative degree, so now her body is shaped like an S and every move around the cage is a painful process of litigation against gravity and its incumbent nuclear forces between the atoms in her lower vertebrae. Her cage is made of gold.
Her name is Lucy, and she likes strawberry ice cream, lick off the spoon like her mouth is unviolated, Leon berates the fawning malevolence of the hardened scabs on her shaved head and someone, somewhere, searches still for the right shade of red. A woman with a bulbous nose observes their moves, impunity granted by barrier of counter, contemplation inflating her head with thoughts of obeying ideals of picking up that black telephone. She knows he is wanted by authority. But the girl is so cute! Dilemma.
The Lizard Woman is all scales, a vicarious amalgamation of Superbia, pet iguana, and her mirrored cage, sealing her image in from all sides, a reptilian overflow of visual influx, visages destroying themselves, tropes of what reflections reptile and vile become her head with the iguanas, an anthropomorphic metamorphosis. It sees her through a peep hole, and because she is told she is always watched to keep her docile, she continues like she never stopped, brushing hair that falls out in clumps with scales and mats her cage like a nest of reptilian earthworms, and she strokes her pet Superbia and applies her fifty first layer of varnish so her nails look like oil paintings.
‘I don’t want to see anymore!’ It cries, recoiling against the ashen canvas wall.
‘You’ve come far, further than any. Only one – I mean two, yes, two, left,’ says the Clown, grabbing It by the spines, dragged along to the penultimate freak.
She is barefoot, and shivering, outside the ice cream parlour on Sweet Street. Inside, the woman with the bulbous nose entertains the notion of shutting shop and taking the ladel backstage to think about the shaved headed girl she ratted on. Outside, Leon holds Lucy by the biceps and tries to be romantic, but in the end he ends up taking her up the back alley and taking her, and despite herself she enjoys it but feels dirty come dawn and takes morning after medication and nursing her bruises in the shower. Leon hands her a twenty and tells her to get a taxi, licking his lips and they taste of strawberry. Someone, somewhere, finds the right shade of red.
‘He’s the ringmaster,’ says The Clown, bouncing up and down as Sir Cuss jerks off in the direction of It.
It screams and jumps for freedom, Sir Cuss bouncing off rubber walls in masturbatory revelation, all maniacal cackling and flotsam jizzum, his cage a clingfilmed mass of fluids and discordant variations on the theme of self-love. The Clown mirrors Sir Cuss’s bouncing and Sir Cuss cums, not once, not twice, but thrice, everywhere, and It screams again and Sir Cuss catches It’s eyes with the steely bald, naked, eyelash-less ball and races once more from the top to a heady climax, and now It is mad with vulgar hysteria and throws its spiny body against the canvas cloth, puncturing it yet no way still out.
‘And this,’ says The Clown, dragging It’s braindead semi-corpse to an empty cage, ‘is my home, now yours, and no longer shall I see you walking a world that belongs to me and no one else,’ and The Clown throws It in and slams the rusty bars shut and drives the bolt home. Outside, Leon hails a taxi, deaf to screams.

A big, fat, veiny sausage

Bent cops played dirty jazz, crazing from a puffy-faced tin ghetto blaster, exchanging cards and precious cusses, staring across at him with occasional avarice. Clinging to the bars, he dreamt of cocktail lounges and dynamic skirts, the kind that spread over bare thighs after hard days.
‘Music you can fuck to,’ said the first bent cop.

Simply, she was legs spread over him, piledriving bumper to bumper in their non-pre-nuptial marital bed, and there he was in doorway, an oaf in a pinny with drawn on boobs doing their jiggly thing the way dads make fools of themselves, blade in hand, tainted with raw red meat, and they humped like this: ‘Uh,’ ‘Huh,’ ‘Uh,’ ‘Huh,’ as if privy to a conversation neither understood. Grip tightening around black handle until knuckles roared white hot, he stood over their pelvic thrusting and cried, and the tears he cried landed on her soft back and she looked up and screamed and the guy shouted ‘Oh shit,’ and things were over.

Sat at his worked on desk, Leon bawled shards into a soaked handkerchief. Spinning on his swivel chair, the foggy city view, the ground seventy floors beneath a white fluffy blanket to float onto. He thought. A short thought, punctuated by incandescent fury, unmanageable mortgages in several third world countries and the promise of a Pulitzer pulled from his vapid, bosom-less grip like a dog stealing a sausage from a master it had once faithed itself to. A big, fat, veiny sausage.
Lifting the chair, punily gripped, he chugged it at the bay window, and it bounced and fired back at him, intoxicating his senses with the exuberance of its own velocity, forcing a duck and a roll, carving chunks of damage into irreplaceable antiques acquired in various flung places, most probably whilst his wife flinged. Broken heart, broken office, intact window, punching the floor, snot dribbling from a face wet flannelled with saline solution. A knock on the door.
‘Bugger off!’
‘Sir I need to talk to you right now.’
‘Go away Donny!’
‘Sir, we’re going to press in four, we need a headline.’
Leon smarted. ‘How about! My! Wife! Fucking! Left! Me! But! First! She! Fucked! Another! Guy! And! It! Probably! Wasn’t! The! First! Time!’
Feeble, from behind the expensive door: ‘Uh, ok, we’ll run with the rabbit. Can I, uh, get you anything sir?’
‘A different window! And some alcohol. Now piss off!’
Horrid, undistorted, like inside his head his paranoid sequences come rife. Often his imagination had run away, blinking lazy during late night staring at low quality paper, her at home, precious her, watching movies alone, eating ice cream, drinking, dreaming life with better men, and then, a hero, and a quick one in the kitchen whilst he headlined death at work, and then another shove, this one in the bed up the jacksy, and ba-da-bing everyday until discovery. Vomit fell onto the shagpile rug and he rolled into the recovery position, lying in lies before the next knock came.
Her name was Mindy. Recommended as crucial front page-age by a Donny who wouldn’t respond to pejoratives, she locked crossed legs, long bronzed legs terminating in screw-me boots, and fixed him steely glared, determinative.
‘I have a front page for you.’
‘Don’t you all.’
‘You have some mustard on your lip.’
He wipes. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m in love with you and I want your sex.’ ‘I have headline news in my bra and I’d like to share it with you.’
‘Excuse me?’
Nonchalant-like, removing crumpled wood pulp from cleavage, she entertains his hand with cat and mouse playfulness before he snatches from her. Unfolding it, there lies his wife, blushed and pleasured, printed poorly on dirty paper with someone else’s penis inside her.
Leon threw up over his desk, then vaulted it onto Mindy, a woman in a white suit with long bronzed legs and screw-me boots and, well, what was Donny supposed to think?

‘I remember this one time,’ the cop gobbles, fetching extra beer for his gut, ‘she was screwing me so hard I couldn’t even remember where I was.’
‘Shut up!’ shouts Leon. ‘Shut up!’

Soul man

…smelt like wet dog. Slinking onto black seat, acknowledgement of action too late for door closing on him, bang. Locks go down, light goes up and taxi starts moving with all the wrong drivers on duty. Leon’s left shoe style crippled by flecks of dog shit from some phantom pooch with a vendetta against his self-esteem.
‘Agh, joke,’ he said, when he saw who sat opposite him.
‘Was she good?’ belches the fatheaded man, Quinn.
‘Who?’
‘The whore you took down that back alley. I saw you. Leon Spinks, the hero, getting his jollies off some innocent who can’t see past the red cape and sunglasses. You’re a dark man Leon. A very dark man.’
Outside streetlights ignite to sparklers, blurredly hurriedly scrawling fire. Leon captured a self-made reflection in the window, holding with a stare, no discernable road markings outside, possible one-way system, swift caress of the lock, handle open, hit with the shoulder, roll, keep rolling, possible. Quinn carries a weapon at all times, takes it to the toilet with him and aims it at the door when he's squeezing one out. There would be flak to seek cover from. Yet, inside, the excitement died. He fed on thrills; escape provided few, over too soon. Best to stay, to see.
Beside Quinn, a woman, mature, replete leg length and wheat hair, wearing sunglasses complimenting the tinted windows. Worn paper fascinates her - she squeezes it, balls it in fist, tumbles it through the air, catches on the tip of her tongue (boy he bets that tongue could do some stuff he hasn't seen for long times) unfolds, glances, smiles, folds, tucks between her breasts. Leon knows better than to ask her name.
'What happened in there,' Quinn breathes.
'It wasn't anywhere.'
'You didn't look properly.’
'I did. And it wasn't there.'
'Not anywhere.'
'I did look.'
Exasperation in the exhalation. 'It takes time to get the information I gave you tonight. Effort. I expend the kind of effort you haven't expended for a long time on a daily basis just to get close to what I told you tonight. They're a travelling circus. It means they move around. Only they don't advertise - they're the only fuckers in the world who don't advertise and they're the ones I need to get to. And by now they're gone, to who knows where. They travel faster than light. I have to be in this car at all times to keep track of where they were. For me to know where they are... that takes sacrifice.'
Quinn lifts a left hand, a four-fingered revelation, a bloody scabbed stump where it's gone wee wee wee all the way home. Bronzed legs reach across the fathead's lap and lips linger on the wound for interminable seconds. Leon contemplates the lock. Traffic is now two-way, expansive and overtly velocitized. Motorways do not provide stop off points for those escaping high-speed vehicles. He would tumble, then crushed, his head a past-ripened strawberry, exploding mulch. The finger is hidden.
'You go too far Quinn,' Leon whispers, head shake/shaking.
'No! Always I am told this!' the accent gives. 'They took what is mine and I want it back. I am willing to pay - huge money - wealth you shall never know, to bring back to me what is mine. They steal it without motive, a catastrophe, cato-fucking-strophic you see here, here, this finger here, no because it is gone!' Finger shows. 'For what I told you tonight I hand over the finger.' Finger gone.
'There was no one there. Whores and pimps. Nothing more.'
'Did you check downstairs?'
'There wasn't a downstairs.'
'There's always a downstairs.'
'Not here there wasn't.'
A sound best approximated as gah!
Fizzing illumination outside timely dissipate, and taxi-borne soft light commandeers his vision. In a tunnel, perhaps, or an aircraft hangar or some such gigantic structure, for tyre squeal is amplified, as an underpowered microphone in a town hall, or church. For instance, the taxi halts, the driver leaves, and growing dim over the diminuitive light as battery power is drawn unsated. Leon, reaching for his gun, bumps elbow against the barrel of a comically large shotgun, aimed, cocked and burning for the shot is the lady with the bronzed legs. He spells f-u-c-k-e-d in his head. Cool despair sits in and he leans forward. The closer he is the more mess he'll make. If he's lucky, he'll leave a stain.
'I love you Leon. More than a brother. Like one soldier to another who's seen things no man has to see. We've seen plenty of those things for a long time. I grew old, and I trusted you. And when I needed you, right now, to do things for me that I could trust no other with, you failed. Not failed only - you disappointed me. And it hurts in my heart and my head, my business, it tells me to kill you. Right now. But I cannot, because I love you. So I will give you one more chance.' Gun uncocked. 'But first, you will be punished, because you did wrong.
The woman pulls two crisp notes from her tit cleft, hands them to Quinn.
'Whilst you were busy,' says Quinn, language mangled by cigarette placed in mouth courtesy of bronze woman, 'I bought these.'
Bond-quality paper, verging on fabric, purest white, luminescent, absorbing darkness it does seem to the commoner eye, though optical illusions account for much of what is seen in the wanting moment. Printed, faint grey lines too small to read, borderline dots bordering whatever written. Quinn, grin warm like Christmas feelings.
'You know what they are. You have two souls, Leon. This is the second - your soul after you fell in love. I shall let you keep this one, for now. This, the first-'
'Don't do it. Please.'
'-the first, is your soul before you fell in love. It is your childhood, your crushes, the initial stirrings of ambition and ego. On this page are memories, reduce to rudimentary code responsive on the quantum level to the neurons in your mind.'
'Quinn, I'll do better next time, I promise, don't,' says Leon, sliding down the seat, snatching at paper snatched away before he can snatch it.
'Leon, I love you, I want you to know this. But such things as eliminating my authority cannot be allowed to happen. If it did, we'd all go to hell. Half of you is a small price to pay.'
Quinn touches purity with a cigarette, woofing into ash, less than instant. Leon screams, slides to the floor of the taxi, shakes uncontrollably, his insides torn out, spilling embarrassingly, staining forever, then a reversal and outside becomes inside once more, with the insides of the insides still outside, leaving a shell inside a shell, moon without sun. The shaking continues.
'Hush,' tenderly. 'It will be over soon. Then you will feel like a new man,' says Quinn, stroking his lover's head.

Jimmy Hitman

Tall skyscraper. More of a hollow obelisk, monument to bought things, unnecessary stuff, manufactured in extraordinary intensity by disabled parents bereft of methodology for further income. Some choose gutters and red light corners in lieu of viable employment. Jimmy Hitman has a proud moustache and an incestuous mother. Pig snorting hayfever mucus into his aveoli, he retches, coughs a wad into gutterscape, invades the building.
Twelve security guards, clock face marks dispatched like cardboard cutouts, alarm disable with wrench of bicep, tricep, intensity visible in sweat eroding micro-rivers in one piece skintight red jumpsuit, hitting fat black trainer bouncing to marble floor, floor extending into ether, immense height, two hundred strides of atrium straight up, dizzying to the stood still. Precision movements, each previous a catalyst for its successor, economical, cold. Thinking of nakedness, nudges lift button baby-like, waits, enters air-conditioning and formaldehyde disorientation.
He dreams of mummy. Lift halts and door expands onto expansive floor, planned for giant glass jars of genetic fuckeroony. Inside jars, smudged, brimming with chemical juice into what sex buddies are dunked. Twisted malformed malcontents, two-men combo, one bent over, skin grafted together as one perfect sexual elational experience after another. Light low, smells like hospitals, turgid stale food semi-reek clinging to nostril hair. Wipes moustache and gobs on floor second time. Another figure, caught mid-wank, fierce expression on lopsided face. All of walking abortion, murdered post-birth from tanks of adolescent foetal fluid, marks of crimes untendered by governmental agency. Jimmy was aware of them, had been made aware of them, but was not there for them. Business lay on the penthouse suite, sole preserve of Chairman Lint McPhee.

'Ah man, why'd you do that?'
Under Bobby Van Carcass's glass, crushed ladybirds, two-in-one, pulverized red eggshell exoskeletons spewing caustic bad taste blood over the bar, "don't-eat-me-because-I-will-make-you-vomit" evolutionary tactics decimated by transparent melted sand. Van Carcass and Jimmy Hitman, in a bar, keyword: dingy. In the dark corners the blues are being sung and there is spit on the floor. This is the arena into which no worthwhile man or woman steps.
'You ever wear anything other than that jumpsuit?' says Van Carcass, bloated frame munching pistachios.
'On my days off. I haven't had a day off for a while boss.'
'It won't be soon.'
'I got enough money to go away now. I won't be any trouble. It'll be like I ain't never existed, you can kill me next year, just a few months off please.'
'I've got a problem.'
Jimmy hung his head. Van Carcass had a propensity for copious expellation of verbiage, his indulgence gearing up, intimidating mandibles cogging up like a train running on bar snacks.
'There's problems Jimmy. Big problems everywhere. Since they passed the genome disclosure bill fifty years ago, people got bored. They got bored knowing that someone, somewhere, is writing down the thing they want to know most and least at the same time. There's nothing left when you take the mystery away. Worst thing is, there's nothing left when you know someone else has had the mystery taken away. It only worked when we were all in on the joke. No one knew when they were going to die so they made the most of it. We banded together. Now it seems wrong. Futile. Pointless. So we screw. You know the average output of the middle class couple is seven kids now? Seven. That's a magic number. People with money are starving. Things are going to hell. We still fuck though, because that's what we're made for. When you take away the chaos of death, all people want to do is make more life, because somewhere someone might be filing them away in the "tomorrow" cabinet. Everything else - work, play, sport, art... it's just passing the time. We're built to make more of us.
'See this guy here?' Bobby unfolded crumpled image of dishevelled ill-looking man coated in gold rings and expensive creased red silk dressing gown. 'This is Lint McPhee. He's the Chairman of Superbia. They used to be a pharmaceutical company, massive, massive profit margins. He was standing on a pile of gold. Then some guy in a lab hit the big red button and the bill was passed and suddenly people didn't care about getting ill anymore, because we had scientific proof that when it's your time, it's your time. So they let themselves get sick and they let themselves die and someone ticked a box and filed them in the "yesterday" cabinet. See where I'm going here? This man was way ahead of the game. He took the genetic engineering techniques they used for advanced drug research and turned it into the world's biggest illegal enterprise. He doesn't just make sex toys - he grows them. In jars. Real people, men with horrendously oversized cocks, women with tits like basketballs, and three of them, women with big lips and deep mouths, men with arseholes tighter than my purse strings. Some guy even asked for him to make the seven deadly sins so he could be raped by each of them in turn. They ran away with the circus.'
'Nice.'
'No, really. The made a circus and ran away with it. They're still trying to track them down now.'
'Who does this McPhee guy sell to?'
'These things are rare. Most of them are fuck ups. Lab parlance is 'fail'. They fail. They fail in their job to be living sex toys. It's a whole new kind of slavery. The ones that manage to get by with whatever excuse they have for internal organs are exclusive objects. Pretty much any trillionaire has one. You just don't hear about it. See, part of the sale guarantees total protection against revelation. Got a problem with someone poking their nose into your private affairs with that midget hooker boy with two assholes? Call McPhee, he'll sort it out for you. He's a murderer, and he's messing with God. I don't want you screwing up on this one Jimmy. No hanging around. Get in, tell him, get out.'
'Yeah yeah.'
'Listen to me,' Van Carcass slaps him, 'get out, you hear? No time to watch reactions on this one. He'll hit that red alarm button faster than you can start screaming. And don't wear that fucking red jumpsuit. Get some normal clothes boy. Lose the moustache too, you look like a gay alien.’

Jimmy unleashed providence on McPhee, uncovered in self-same red silk gown, cloying bulbous frame in jacuzzi, surrounded by bevy of triple-breasted shemales, taking turns to dunk and suck.
‘What would mummy say,’ said Jimmy.
McPhee wax-dummied and genetic experiments scattered naked round furniture.
Jimmy: ‘Lint McPhee, in accordance with contraventation of the genome disclosure act, I am here to tell you that you will die precisely five years from today’s date, the result of a severe stroke. I bid you good day.’

The Lawyer

Barry Peppermint was shy. Shy to breaking point. School accused his lack of ambition, parents ceaseless intolerance of misunderstood apathy, the phone too much, handshakes carbon monoxide in nature, nurturing acquaintance a heinous gothic rite. Barry Peppermint was shy because he was scared of dying (people who keep death records, Barry is one of them). Solitude his single fit state, communication via written correspondence if possible, fellow-ape contact kept minimal and behind red line on apartment so as to prevent interruptive negative vibes when painting.
Barry Peppermint worked in The Brick. The Brick: sky obelisk, crux of politics, moneyed by governmental corruption, blackmailing, black marketing, sheer dimmed glass rising 5.6 kilometres skyward, touching cloud base, black block, flat horizon, termites scurrying through revolving doors, up escalators down elevators, tense with daytime fluster.
Below The Brick, subterranean tunnels extensions miles in directions, roots cast out, bleeding black osmosis on a citywide scale. Termites down here too, transparent, running off silicon – not sun – no not sun down here. Barry Peppermint, as pale as eponymous essence, confined to squat cubicle in the root of the record keepers. Privy to grim reaping temporal incursions, spoilt brats fly-dropping at a violent rate, coronary triggered by too much children chocolate chomping. Old women dying in heatwaves, old men dying because their old women have died, occasional surprises like the college jock with the hole in his heart who can’t find a university to take him on because they’ve all paid for the privilege of knowing he’s going to die in precisely four years time. Barry ponders them all, choked by some. His shyness has found him, through squirreling and fear of deadlines, demoted to the promoted position Chief Record Keeper. Access to all records except his own and those of his colleagues.
‘Sir,’ a young woman, bridled in halo of infatuation.
‘Oh, Emily, [cough] hi [cough], jesus, can’t [cough] seem to stop [coughing]…’
Paroxysm of diaphragmatic expulsions, redness in cheeks embarrassment over discomfort, her soft, sweet-smelling forehanding slaps on back dislodging butterfly breathed in. It flies, gently away.
‘Look at that,’ guard temporarily down she is bold, ‘it’s still alive. I thought down here was meant to be a clean environment… sir.’
‘Uh, yes, me too,’ emBarrysment.
Gorgeous, raised eyebrows in general direction.
‘Oh, did you want something Emily?’
‘Well, not me exactly, I mean, what I mean is, there’s a man upstairs, a lawyer, he wants to speak to you about a man named Leon Spinks.’
‘I know that name.’
‘Yes, he was the editor of, you know, The National. His own newspaper said he went crazy or something, totally schizo, and tried to kill this woman who wanted to sell him a story. Anyway, this lawyer guy asked for you by name, and he must be doing something right because the Director has let him into our wing and he’s sitting in the canteen now.’
‘The Director never lets anyone in our wing.’
‘I know, weird isn’t it. Anyway, he says it’s urgent so you have to come.’

Leon Spinks’s lawyer, tall spindly character accompanied by brutal handshake, pungent aftershave. Stood, like a chess piece, on black and white chequered floor, largest indoor space in the world, The Wall. Blank grey concrete on three sides, bunker-style foundations thousand feet tall. One wall, main wall, biggest glass pane constructed by humankind, devoted into centimetre wide unlockable windows. Inside each window, a glass cubicle, sized according to palm print of designer. Within glass cubicle, red document, four-folded, sealed. Each shiny red micro-pamphlet, a date, innocuous font, cold, sterile, the end for each of those who must never see, unique record, the only one kept in the world, why kept, no one knows, kept nonetheless. The lawyer stares, a man in awe not often, now in awe. He revolves before Barry’s name.
‘Mr. Peppermint, so glad to meet you finally.’
‘H-hello.’
‘This [points] is… well, it’s a hugely impressive facility.’
‘Five years to construct,’ the ‘uct' hitting teenage broken voice flatulence.
‘I see,’ commanding, impressive. ‘Tell me, if you wouldn’t mind – why do you not keep all of this information electronically?’
Barry grows confident addressing the familiar. ‘Well it’s um, a matter of security. Databases can be hacked, and they can be hacked without anyone knowing. This wall here, this is physical. Each note in each cubicle is irreplaceable. Another one will never be made. And as you can see, the entire wall is made out of glass and monitored both by camera and the naked eye, constantly. The only way to break in would be to break the glass. Even if you had the key to the cubicle you wanted to access, you would still have to undergo a palm print scan, a retina scan, and be accompanied by another person authorised to view this information. It’s about as fail-safe as you can get. We don’t want these dates open to the public sphere.’
‘I see. So why exactly do you keep these records, if no one is allowed to look at them?’
‘Um, I, um, certain people are.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Come now.’
‘I… really can’t.’
‘I see. Well, this room is beginning to bore me somewhat. Do you have somewhere, preferably with soft furnishings and a hot beverage, where we could discuss my reasons for coming here? If possible I would prefer it to be completely private.’
‘Can I ask why?’
Lawyer smile. ‘Not until we’re alone.’

Two steel chairs, steel tables, steel smiles, steaming coffee, security camera and whitewash walls, interrogative. Lawyer man stalks his prey.
‘You are aware I have a rather high-profile client.’
‘Leon Spinks.’
‘No. A rather high-profile client.’
‘I thought, you know, Leon Spinks was the high-profile client.’
Lawyer sighed. ‘Are you familiar with a woman named Mindy Rotolo?’
‘I, uh, never heard of her [cough].’
Nervousness conjured suspicion, thoughts of caught red handedness, egg on face, high-profile indeed. Barry spends the remainder of the conversation stuttering badly, drops spilt coffee on table flicked flecks onto immaculately pressed Lawyer suit, thoroughly unimpressed.
‘She works for a man named Marcus Quinn. She has a street name – Mindy Rottweiler. Do you recall hearing either of those names before?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good. It will make things a lot easier. My client needs some information concerning Miss Rotolo. She visited him unannounced a few days ago, and showed him some, shall we say, sensitive documents.’
Strange, the lawyer looked past him, over his shoulder, to the pinhole in the wall holding red soft light sensor and lens. Light dims, the lawyer he smiles and Barry his eyebrows they push together, uncomprehending.
‘The camera’s off,’ softly.
‘Is it? I did not notice. Neither did you. Now, you will notice, if you pay attention verbatim to what I say to you, which I doubt you do Mr Peppermint as you seem like a man who finds it difficult to make eye contact, that I explicitly told you my client needs this information. It is not a request. He is willing to pay a large sum of money to you for what he wishes to procure. Failure to capitulate with result in punishment, of either yourself or those you hold dear.’
‘You’re threatening me,’ softly.
‘No, I am outlining the terms of a business agreement, and I would thank you to refrain from hyperbole for the remainder of our transaction.’
Barry stares into a coffee whirlpool, a hydrokinetic induction of nostrils directing angst. The lawyer’s jaw percolates, a peregrine falcon stooping for pray, and Barry realises the unfairness of his situation. Better not to talk to anyone, to respond to no requests, for it seemed the slightest geniality resulted in blackmail. Thoughts fired through his head: a hypothetical wife announcing pregnancy, he goes to work, he receives a package, his stillborn child, bloodied and battered in his hands and screams; driving home after work, a hired killer smashes into his vehicle, killing them both in some kamikaze manoeuvre, additional innocuous statistic uncalled homicide. Breathless tornadoes of anguish sweep through his consciousness and he commences blubbering.
‘Mr Peppermint, I am merely a conduit for these dealings – a broker, if you will. It is, how do you say, a fallacy that all men have a price. Not everyone can be bought. However, people can be bartered with. Exchange. Something you need, for something we need. All I need you to do is take this slip of paper I am handing you now, and to read it. Then, you can either carry out the instructions on the paper, or we will kill you. I think you will agree this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. Now I must go, I have another appointment. Thank you for your time.’

Milkman

Quinn is gobbling boiling air.