Bob Dollop
‘Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’
Bob Dylan – ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’
Chapter 1
A message for Bob
Sixteen years previous was the speech of a radical fundamentalist and his performance of a brain-wallet heart bypass on Bishop and all-round good egg (such was his head shaped) taped, old-style, on a tape, to exclusion of digital media destroyed since inception of nuclear dosage. On tape, with Velcro beard and musk tones, the fundamentalist proclaims, when observed objectively from the genius of retrospect, the end of civilized London. It is a moment of fire, the initiation of proclivities fielded amongst terrorists for the embellishment of the supposedly free world, a call to arms for firebombing of Nelson’s column, a syphilitic flaming rash gathering around the lions that roar stone in pain, the decimation of the British Museum and, indeed, its name, the stirring of the Thames with high explosives, grenade-influenced fish bobbing to the surface, in death unable to avoid piercing bullets of AK47s, the sky bloated, anaemic fireworks struggling from Earls Court to explode in black on red sky background, leaving barely amused crowds scattering in lieu of the underarm stench settling over the high ground, the legacy of cheap detonations.
The high Bishop, lynched by self-perpetuating guilt, a state of fundamental thought bartering thought for feeling, climbed the spire of the cathedral a day seven years post-transaction, the heady boudoir inside culminating in furious group masturbation, the height of society, a debauched debacle that refused to die in spite of his highly convoluted plans to reclaim the sanity of man. Above the drone, maracas and trumpets lilting on the rising smoke, the accumulation of fat men’s cigars punching a very real hole through St. Paul’s dome, boring a hole into his own dome, and he clutches the spear and humps his grievances away, crying like a fresh born child. The high Bishop forgets his own name in favour of remembering the young boy he sent away with pen in pocket and guitar slung round back down dirt track off one side of London into the countryside the day before the bomb hit Big Ben and the clock imploded and time and its markings fell on the ants of the city and stabbed and squashed them, glass shards ripping eyes in half, golden debris crushing the heads of children, and the unfortunate gentlemen who received a second hand through the chest, which, quite deliciously for the soon-to-gather media, stopped his heart ticking. Yes, the Bishop wishes that boy would return a man and do something about the awful, awful fucking mess he’s gotten himself into.
It was a coincidence, nevertheless, that in a pub, now a museum but still, quite the working pub thanks to the curator who curated specialties including fine ale, clouds of rolled tobacco and pork scratchings the size of one’s fist. Hidden in the corner, stroking a battered acoustic guitar, was Bob Dollop, a man of a boy who ate nothing but peanuts and drank nothing but gin, and it had to be in a mug, Bob as he was apt to do claiming allergies to glass and poncing about with spun sand.
‘No one to talk to for me tonight,’ said the curator, dropping hefty hints left right and centre, until he let one too many go, tripped on it, and smashed skull against oak table.
Bob stepped over his whimpering body, dragging guitar behind him. ‘I’ll get you some ice for that.’
‘Just leave the fucking guitar over there,’ curator states, in a right state, touching head for blood, rolling onto his fat belly so his wig falls off and he says, quite reasonably, ‘shit!’
‘Leave your piece on the floor and I’ll leave my guitar by the door.’
‘Don’t speak in rhyme tonight, Charlie Charles is not in the mood for fucking rhyming. Jesus my head is hurting.’
‘No good calling for Jesus,’ says Bob, wrapping ice in a towel, ‘best you can hope for now is some kind of Saint. Jesus left with the plane what hit the Eiffel Tower.’
‘Got to admit, that was one hell of a shot,’ said Charles.
‘The Eiffel Tower?’
‘Shut up and serve me some of that whisky.’
‘Your measures are as big as your dick,’ says Bob, vocal dull growls punctuated by squeaking tugs on the upturned near-empty bottle. ‘It also begs the question of who drinks these drinks.’
‘Every time I screw your mother she pours me another shot.’
‘You know I don’t have no mother.’
‘Whisky is good. It’s soft and gentle and it rubs the throat like smooth sandpaper.’
‘Why’d you ignore everything I say Charlie?’
‘Because I don’t get you. You’re over my head. I don’t have anything to teach you that you didn’t know the moment you popped out of your mother darling’s womb. Now go sit in your corner so I can shout at you.’
Minutes turn to hours, pages in newspapers are turned by Bob, he catches fingers on certain articles and loses threads of conversation, a problem easily solved by virtue of Charles weaving identical tapestries every night, like he’s got one picture to paint and that was given to him by the uncle who buys things off the bloke down the pub. Charles is chatting about the non-existence of the economy, the invasion of states rendering America no longer ‘United’ or ‘Of’. Mostly he talks about London, how his wife was murdered in an alley by assorted radicals taking turns to rape her whilst, as he always claims, someone, somewhere, was looking for a red crayon to draw fake blood. Bob’s assumptions lead him on each occasion to believing Charles to be protagonist and storyteller, until tonight some weird dichotomy is establishing and he turns to I.
‘I wish I could find that cunt.’
‘You said the “c” word Charlie.’
‘And?’
‘You never say the “c” word when you’re telling that story.’
‘What do you mean ‘when’ I tell the story? It’s the first time you’ve heard it.’
‘No you tell the same story every night Charlie, I just pretend I ain’t heard it before, it makes you feel better so you drink less. You say it exactly the same way every night, except just now you said something different, about killing the guy with the red crayon. See I always thought the red crayon person was you.’
‘No, no, the red crayon person is the guy, what’s the word, who instigated the whole thing. See, he was round our house. I can’t remember how it happened, even when it happened, it’s a blur inside a brown glass bottle. All I know is that my red crayon, my favourite red crayon went missing the same day. I was a painter back then, borderline artist she said, but then she would say that because she loved me. I think. I drew this big arm, a massive arm with a bicep like a barrel, and I drew a big anchor on the bicep and then I needed my red crayon to draw the big veins that come out of the arm see, and I was looking for it and I couldn’t find it and then there was a knock on the door and these coppers came and told me what had happened.’
‘I’m sorry Charlie.’
‘Don’t be sorry, it’s a stupid expression, people apologising for things they don’t care about.’
‘What’s a copper?’
‘Oh, they used to have these things called police, way before you were born. They were people paid to keep things in order. There were things called laws, which were like rules for everyone to abide by, and when they didn’t the police would come and take them away see, and put them in something called a prison, where they would be kept as punishment.’
‘They kept them in a room as punishment?’
‘Yep.’
‘What’s so bad about that?’
‘It took away their freedom.’
‘What’s so good about freedom?’
‘Do you want a drink Bob?’
Bob drank, swilling prisons in gin washing machines, the concept disintegrated, scribbled over by big red crayon. Ennui overcomes him, lying back in his chair and thinking more about the big red crayon. Perhaps, in haphazard craziness he does ponder, the relinquishment of the implement, brought forward by first locating then apprehending said rapist, could bring Charlie Charles, of the famous Charles Brothers establishment (brother deceased through violent connection with cretinous wrought-iron gate spears) a fulcrum of happiness from which he could take a hose of enlightenment and force, through sheer pressure inclination, his demons away, back into the hell toiling through fire and conflagration of brimming stones.
‘I could find the guy what took your crayon and, like, bring it back,’ said Bob.
‘I tried that, couldn’t find where to start, never mind the end. Look, have another drink, we’ll get a little merry then I’ll walk you home, walk back here, wash up this one mug and this one glass, then I’ll get some sleep and tomorrow I’ll wake up and think about shutting the pub like I do everyday,’ chasing with whisky.
‘I don’t want to do that no more,’ said Bob. ‘We do that every day. I want to get out and see the world, do some stuff. I want to go back to London or something.’
Charles floats a Glasgow kiss of a glare across the bar, inflicting actual bodily harm on Bob, force of pupil, iris and retina alone. Wiping crooks of mouth with wrist of sleeve, he turns to spirits and allows them to enter his body, each carrying a story forgotten in the icy glare of sunshine sobriety. Then, a darker man, he turns and broods at the man of a boy, and claps a hand on his shoulder.
‘You see this here,’ said Charles, ignoring the stranger entering the pub, ‘I’ll open my shirt – I’ll be with you in a minute mate – I’ll open my shirt here, and show you this scar,’ runs from kidney to kidney across belly, making a tube line of his belly button and hairy pale bum fluff gut, ‘this is what I got from my last time in London. Opened me right up, two darkies in the dark, had to carry my intestines to the hospital, lucky to be alive. Everywhere’s lawless now, but London’s where those who take advantage of the lawless go. You don’t want to go to London. It will tear your fucking heart out and leave a big red crayon in its place. Trust me son, stay with Charlie and you’ll live out your life and no one will be none the wiser that you died a peaceful man.’
The stranger removes a wet hood, revelation of spectral beauty, her lips as pink as fresh salmon, her eyes the colour of grassy malnutrition, her hair corpsing either side of her ears, broken, lifeless. Inside his heart, Bob is captivated and instantly falls hopelessly, desperately in love. He would stick a poker down his throat and brand I Love You inside his own stomach just so she knew how he felt when she cut his belly open and she would read and then, if he was lucky, maybe she would sew him up and he and she would make a he/she in some midnight frothy copulative act.
‘Bob, the lady’s talking to you… Jesus, Bob!’
Bob starts, then stops.
‘My name is Mindy,’ she says, a voice crackling with liquid honey. ‘Mindy Rottweiler. I have a message from a man who says he was your father’s best friend.’
Atop the spire, weeping judders and moans he pencils the note and wraps it into a paper aeroplane, the kind he used to make when the Bishops were patrolling and he desperately needed a wank. As the hordes expel another enjoined orgasm below him, he spits the plane from his perch and it floats, and spells words in the tarnished bracken of the air, and lands in her hand, the only one he can trust, and as someone shouts below him that the Bishop is climbing the spire and everyone cackles, she rides away on a horse and he smiles and hopes the message, in all its simplicity and bare, naked want, reaches his dear boy.
Chapter 2
A chance confrontation with the electric lady
Nelson’s column embellished light polluted sky with flaming licks, four surrounding lions now statued with Mohawks of flame, last bastion against vandalism torched against the black sky. Horse and carts plonk by. Inside, Bob sits by Mindy, stifling an erection with apprehension. Who was this enchantress, this epic gorgeous creature beside him? Affront, the horse tumbles onward, blood riddled with lymphoma, its master a wretched, crude facsimile of well-adjusted gentry, his beard neat yet riddled with lice and year-old breakfast cereal, his teeth perfectly aligned, as yellow as a New York taxi, if known what New York had been he would’ve not post-destruction of the world’s capital. New York, decimated by a single device some eight years ago. Those in the know can only agree it to be something speculative, most certainly nuclear, yet quite unlike anything they had ever known before. Now, empiric, London once again regains the crown, and she stands proud against the flames atop Nelson, the demolition of the British Museum and the permanent scaffolding around Parliament.
‘Pisspots,’ says Mindy.
Bob replays her voice, the slinky tones as her tongue wraps around the sibilant “s”, the plosive “p” and the steady half-lisp muffling the plural. She is perfection, aglow, like fire, with some angelic aura, and he can but stare at her and devote – perhaps his whole life – to the pursuit of an embrace. Bob and love betwixt never have come, liaisons absent in light of the whoring of women into prostitution, feminism riddled now with armour-piercing bullets, suffragette a blank word physically snipped from the dictionary. He struggles for an opener.
‘Charlie says London’s dangerous.’
‘Who’s Charlie when he’s at home?’
‘The gentleman behind the bar.’
‘Oh. Well he’s right. It is, if you’ll forgive me French, fucking dangerous.’
Curses spilled from her throat coated in cherry wax.
‘You live there?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes I head up to Manchester, or down to Birmingham, wherever takes me fancy. It’s easier to dance between places; you can land in debt and then skedaddle. Come back when it’s all calmed down. It’s about the only thing I’m good at. That and riding horses. Speaking of which, that horse looks on its last legs. Driver?’
‘Yes mam,’ the driver said, welsh accent obscured by toxic wheeze.
‘Something wrong with your horse?’
‘He’s got cancer mam, like myself. Enough fallout around Trafalgar Square to give a false leg a tumour. You stay safe in there now you hear? Lead-lined carriage see, makes it harder for Charlie here to pull the old thing but he knows what’s good for his customers.’
‘That horse is named Charlie too,’ said Bob, biting his nails.
‘Poor thing,’ she said, spilling a tear onto the lead floor. Evaporation removed evidence and stoicism failed to burn up on re-entry. ‘Another casualty. Not many people left like you and me not to be casualties. Spend enough time in London and you get cancer in the end. No one’s immune to it. Even Bishop Franklin has some moles that look larger than’s healthy. I tell you… Bob is it? [She remembered his name.] Bob, I don’t know what the Bishop wrote in that letter to you, he wouldn’t show me. All I’m going to say is, you get in and get out as fast as you can, because London… it sucks you in like a whirlpool; you think you can swim against it, and for a while it feels like you’re fighting the currents. Then you realise you’re going in circles, and no matter how hard you push you can’t get past the edge. Eventually you’ll let yourself go, and you’ll fall into that big black hole in the middle and drown. So get out before you get caught, okay? Promise me?’
Promise. Her. Anything. ‘Of course. I just need to visit the Bishop for a day, that’s what he said anyway, and I need to get myself one of those red crayons.’
Quizzical response. Damn, not desired.
‘I mean, like, Charlie, he has this thing about a red crayon, I dunno whether he’d want me to tell no one about it so I won’t, all I’m saying is that if I get him a red crayon then he’ll probably feel better about it, so long as I tell him it’s that particular red crayon from the, you know, what I can’t tell you.’
‘Whatever. You mean it’s a particular red crayon? Something to do with his past?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well you can’t get him any particular red crayon. It has to be the right one. Doesn’t matter what the story is.’
‘He won’t be none the wiser.’
‘He will. People know. Don’t ask me how, they just know if what you give them is what they were looking for. It’s like an aura, something unique to what they were looking for. Most of the time it’s because they don’t actually know what they were looking for and when you get it for them it’s not what they wanted – it’s something to do with what they were looking for, like a person, or a memory.’
‘I see. You repeat yourself a lot.’
Swallowing the insult, Bob mentally castrated himself, repeating the process three times as self-punishment. His propensity for vocalising observation had led to several street fights (most of which he had won, being an excellent street fighter (though put him in gloves and he fell from his horse spectacularly, being destroyed by teenage boys and, on one humiliating occasion, a laughing Charlie Charles)) and put pay, now, to an already remote chance of conjugal relations. Almost creasing face between hands, settling for staring blinkless out the thick carriage window, his heart fresh cleansed now by laughter, quite effortless laughter, and a hiccough, then more laughter. Her face, now he stared at it, laughing himself, filled his stomach with air and his heads with blood, crossed legs now a necessity.
‘That was good,’ she said approvingly. ‘Just the way you said. It was a moment. You ever have moments? Like times when things are funnier than they should be, because of circumstance?’
‘All the time.’
‘Good. We’re here. Damn, things were getting fun too.’
Graffiti shook the outside walls of St. Paul’s. Cherubs tattooed with “mother” on oversized biceps; Methuselah incantations, “The Oldest Man Who Ever Lived And He Died Before His Father” inscribed upon incredibly detailed black panther notations; astonished mosque portraits, conflagration consummation, concluded with lines from various versions of the Bible; irrepressible dirt slapped on the walls by constant, low-lying black fog smog. Bob tired looking at it.
Inside, more murals were violated, dildos strapped to sculptured innocence, pools of dried vomit collating the latest incantations of the wizardly cocktail makers at the cocktail bar, spinning dirty shakers like circus jugglers, pouring absinthe and whisky into filthy glasses. Everyone was fat and grotesque, barely able to walk, fudging puddles of messy flesh around assorted gambling tables, algae swimming pools of wealth surrounded by sunless loungers.
‘Place stinks,’ said Bob.
‘It gets worse the further you come in. I don’t know where Bishop Franklin is. I hope he’s come down from the spire. Gets scared sometimes. You can’t blame him, he’s so innocent.’
‘Purple nonsense!’ shouted a fat woman with chicken fat around her lips. ‘He’s undoubtedly doubling over a young youngster now to bugger him. I’ve heard stories you know.’
Bob moved to say something, was silenced by Mindy’s finger.
‘These are powerful people,’ she whispered, lukewarm breath condensing inside his ear, giving him chills, ‘Smart enough not to have to walk anymore. They can ruin lives with the click of their chubby fingers. You won’t believe the things they do to people, in front of everyone, and you just have to take it because you can’t touch them. Insult any of these people and you’re life won’t be worth living. Now, you can’t loiter in here, it’s against house rules and one of those men on the balcony will be escorting you out unless you sit at a table. So choose one, sit down – you’ve got money – yes, you have, good, sit down… don’t say anything unless they ask you a question. If they do, answer, keep it as short and as inoffensive as you can. I’ll try my best not to be long.’
‘Can’t I just tag along?’
‘Not until the Bishop has given you permission.’
‘I’m pretty sure he’d be none but too pleased to see me judging by his note.’
A look of pity? ‘Just: wait here. I won’t be long. I promise.’
Buzzing through the sea of flesh, she disappeared in the brown lacquer haze. Perturbed, calculating provinces, he coupled with the single empty chair in the vicinity, sitting opposite the fat woman with cleavage like tectonic plates, generating enough static electricity with every guffaw to send visible lightning bolts between herself and her tiny, ratty husband, hiding behind her girth, a gallant knight with an impenetrable shield of blubber. To Bob’s right, a smartly dressed overweight gent with slicked back hair and impossibly greasy cheeks, looked all Nazi, like. Rounding off the quartet, literally, was a sleeping giant of matted grey hair and failing pulse, a woman so complete in her roundness that she resembled a globe, the continents in place through pus-filled buboes and bedsores. Credit to her, she seemed content enough, holding her cards like a bastardized T-Rex, her hands crony claws. Often she would moan, a signal for the rat husband to manoeuvre her chips into pleasing positions.
‘What would that be on your back young sir?’ said the electric lady, her dimples vain struggles to contort kilos of cheek into a smile resulting in an altogether Gremlin complexion.
‘A guitar, ma’am.’
‘A youngster of manners… excellent. Perhaps you could dispose of it for this game?’
‘I’m afraid not ma’am,’ said Bob, drawing the acoustic well closer.
‘Deary, do not make a question into an order. Please relieve yourself of the instrument.’
‘I can’t be doing without my guitar ma’am, that’s the truth.’
‘Albert, this youngster is not listening to me.’
‘Listen to the lady boy,’ said the rat husband in a guttural wild west drawl. ‘Know your place, know what’s good for ya. I don’t know whys you came in here, but it wasn’t the smartest move you made in your life. Put the geetar down.’
‘With all due respect sir, ma’am, I’d rather lose my legs.’
‘What a thoroughly intriguing proposition,’ said the electric lady, licking her lips.
Bile rose, his toes clenched to fists, events were turning for the ugly and Mindy, sexy Mindy nowhere to be seen. She wouldn’t be long, right? Fuck. Electric lady kept rotating her tongue in inhuman circles, saliva coagulating into gum around the corners of her mandibles, rat husband now in throes of excitement. Something was going to happen in the most negative of ways.
‘What is your name, boy?’ said electric lady.
‘Bob.’
‘Sounds like a fag’s name to me.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
‘I see. Well, are you to play or not? Do you have anything to bet?’
‘I have a twenty, ma’am.’
‘Twenty?’ peals of inglorious gloating snorting. ‘The minimum bet, on this table on which you have sat, nay, on which you must now be appealed to play – say, could it be compulsory – I think it could! Compulsory bets of five thousand! Place your bet young man.’
‘I only got a twenty, miss.’
‘Now, I’m sure your guitar is worth more?’
‘I ain’t betting my guitar.’
‘Ah yes, you claimed it was worth more to you than your legs, correct?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Then bet your legs. I am sure they are worth at least five thousand each. If you win, you may take five thousand from my palate with impunity. If you lose, I shall have you taken away and disabled, cauterised and bound, then you shall return to my table where you will watch me eat your legs.’
The rat husband was spastic with insane cackling.
‘Or… you may bet your guitar,’ said the electric lady.
Bishop Franklin circled her legs like a dog chasing its tail, head bowed, pitisome (until he rounded on her rear, where sneaked looks were solidified on gluteus maximus, oh if only he were thirty years younger, what a specimen) grabbed her about the knee, sobbed into his kerchief, hands lacquered with tar and inspired bird shit.
‘Praise the Lord you’ve returned! Did you find him?’
‘He’s outside,’ she said, picking her teeth.
‘You left him outside, with the rapists and muggers and thugs?’ said the Bishop, resuming circling.
Two stares at her arse later: ‘No, he’s inside, outside. I had to leave him with the gamblers.’
‘Why, that’s even more dangerous that leaving him outside!’
Bishop Franklin, elderly as oak rings, waddling like an emperor penguin, round-housed on her, filthy finger expelling excommunications, powerless promises of unfaith. Powering through a black curtain from whence she had come, he soon whence came himself, cowering between her legs once more.
‘They looked at me. Three of them, from the left. One of them was definitely about to rape me, I could see it in his eyes.’
‘Might do you some good.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing. Follow me, I’ll take you to him.’
‘Oh no, no, we can’t possibly go out there again. Too dangerous. We’ll have to signal to him somehow.’
‘Bishop Franklin, I just came from there. I left him in there with Madame. She’ll eat him alive, literally.’
‘Madame. She is a despicable creature. A lump of flesh, that’s all she must be. She has friends Mindy, huge friends, physically and financially. Perhaps she has torn my poor boy to shreds already. You know she eats people. Chomps them down like a shark gobbling smelt. And her smell! She stinks like faggots and peas from all the grease she misses when she wipes her mouth with the same hanky she blows her nose on. Truly despicable. Her husband surely wishes to rape me. Most definitely. I cannot go out there and face them both. Bring him here. Bring Bob to me.’
Revolver in the small of her back, she cocked with “click” sound, Bishop cowering behind curtain, simultaneous total fear and sentient voyeur. Quickly she moved, through the curtain. Bedlam, guns firing everywhere, blood on the floor, semi-automatics unloading into fleeing sapiens, unique odious gunpowder, clinging to the back of the throat, she coughs, doubles over, bullets zip above her head, she turns and looks, a fat man with a Lugar interesting himself in her body juice. She falls, spins arm with gun pulls trigger at exacting moment, to the eye instantaneous impact, small hole in his forehead, exit wound sized by the grapefruit rippling outwards in singularity flash of molten hypothalamus and scattered magnolia skull.
Dispatches two more with double taps to the nose, impenetrable sound emanating from nexus of conflict, a single table, already familiar black Stetson hat capping the crowd, a man on the edge of desperation, holding a guitar above the pack whilst blows fall upon his ribs, cutlass punches, smeared bruises blossoming on his cheeks, and all the while screaming:
‘Two strings! Where am I gonna get two strings?’
Another man with a pierce bolt as big as a pencil through his septum levels on her and is not about to miss. She fires before he fires and dives as he fires into the air as the bullet knocks a trajectory that would have taken her head clean off had it not been for the initial shot by herself, a ruling by fate that she felt should be recounted in pubs across the land if she made it out alive. She was sure she heard St. Paul screaming.
Violence descends, as entropy inevitably doth lead, to mass confusion. With lack of bullets, the mob are reduced to scrapping, one soul hung from the rafters with astonishing coordination of purpose at a speed in which tying a noose would have been considered an achievement, forgoing the heinous employment of the simpleton’s execution. Rapidity was favoured on all sides. Spying an opportunity, she cleared two men with her deceptively strong arms, discovering a pulped Bob amongst detritus of human tissue, the table cleared of chips so a rat-faced husband may stand upon it and mourn the death of the cold blob of tissue dribbling phlegm onto the holy floor, an electric lady earthed, become earth, earthen, enough to sate the appetite of satisfied worm generations to come.
‘You!’ the rat husband shouts, pouncing at Bob.
Mindy slaps the feeble lunatic into unconsciousness, grabbing Bob’s shirt collar without breaking the flow of her movement.
‘What the hell did you do?’ she said, pointing not looking to the hanged man.
‘I won,’ said Bob.
Chapter 3
The curious vignette of Barry Peppermint and Professor Jackson
Barry Peppermint banged on the Professor’s internal cranium like jackhammers fucking marble flooring. Professor Jackson hoofs it up tortured escalator, alighting on the first floor, where they used to keep all the pens and pencils and crayons.
‘Bugger off, leave me be. You journalists and your propagandist, jingoistic hokum. Call yourself a newspaper? You’re run by the same man who turned the Thames toxic. I have no time for you, leave me be.’
‘T-t-that was a mistake, he didn’t mean it… can I just ask you a few questions, if I could please sir? I understand you’re a busy lady.’
‘Indeed. Cock off. Drink my butter.’
Unsure of the intended percipience of the latter retort, he continues his pursuit under the kosh of constant insult. Be assertive, said the editor-in-chief. Overstep the mark, he said, but make sure you know where the line is. Let your experience guide your gut instincts, not t’other way round. So easy, he thinks, for someone unlike himself, a blathering, pathetic excuse for a writer. Wonder no one wants to wander with him, to talk sense for paper and express, for the Express, what the river has heard for the last few decades, undoubtedly a depressed mess that would make, in spelling and grammatical terms at the absolute very non-best, that which would impress the reading public. Which numbered less than five hundred a day. Many could no longer afford paper.
This freak was worthy parchment fodder. Since St. Paul’s held flag at half mast, institutions fell like dominoes across the cityscape. Professor Jackson had, five years previous, allocated the space once known as Hamley’s toy shop in hopes of studying the effect of abrasive chemicals on human skin. For these purposes, she purchased orphans from mainland Europe, brought them and kept them in cages, gave lucky few a ragged teddy to hug when dew-eyes found prominence amongst the general atmosphere, before cataloguing the effects of hydrochloric acid on cartilage.
‘Can you show me the, uh, the children for just a few seconds ma’am?’
‘They are not sideshows, they cannot be brought out and put back again like toys.’
‘I understand that-’
‘Then cock off, I am very busy.’
Barry reaches out boldly, holds Jackson to crab pinch ransom. Two halt.
‘Please, Miss, five minutes, then I will leave your store.’
‘It’s not a store, it’s a laboratory. You’re lucky I let you in, as lucky as I am unlucky for letting you in. You have three minutes to ask me a question I find interesting. If you do, I may consider a formal interview, on my terms, and perhaps a brief glance at the subjects. Your time has already started and I shall not break my stride.’
Parched, she marched him to a water fountain, a rusted ill-metal contraption that dispensed contaminants at undisclosed velocities to the drinker, her lab coat a drunken soaked mess upon conclusion.
‘Better,’ she said, pushing up another escalator to a floor full of computers, old, ancient beasts practically wheezing with processor fatigue.
‘Are these all networked?’ asked Barry.
‘You must try harder if you wish to remain in my company,’ she said, shafting a bony finger to the tip of his nose. ‘None of your pedantry, you hear?’
Repulsive. He would scratch that word in his notebook later, big fat red marks across the page, r.e.p.u.l.s.i.v.e. She sickened him. She stank like hospitals mopped with beer, her hair bobbed in shock ginger, freckles overcoming unblemished skin, toothpick legs and eyes further apart than her massive cabaret horn-rimmed glasses suggested. He scrambled for a question.
‘The children, how much do they cost?’
‘Five hundred thousand each, cash payments only, so they cannot be traced.’
‘That’s illegal.’
‘Illegal? You’re beginning to interest me, employing such archaic terminology. I dispensed with secrecy ten years ago, when the last chubby policeman asked me, very politely I must addend, if I would cease and desist with my activities. When I told him no, he asked me out for a drink.’
‘I take it from your tone that you think society functions better without law.’
‘Such a student! I tell you, bugger the law. The law was made by the people who broke it. You see how that works? If you are strong enough, you will survive in this city. Keep yourself to yourself like myself, and no self will come to harm.’
‘You harm the children.’
‘I harm them once. Yes, it’s painful. But I am always quick to give them money and send them out on their merry way. Their pain – it’s a connection I forge with them. I give birth to them, and they share the pain with me. For every child I burn, I burn my own skin.’
Shuffling white sleeve up left arm, she reveals a succession of lemony lesions, each pus-swollen more than its predecessor. A leper’s arm, a deadly concoction of body vileness. Gosh, she was repulsive.
‘I burn them, document their reactions, ensure their wound is dressed suitably – hence the lack of attendance to my own – and let them into the world. There, with the resentment they feel towards me, they will grow strong and they will propagate and prosper.’
‘What do you hope to learn from these experiments?’
She cackles, and it echoes off LCD monitors. ‘Learn? How quaint. I’m not learning anything. I do it, I see what happens, I write it down and that is that. I burn the documents every New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square. Though it appears someone has decided to commence conflagrations without me, does it not? What with poor Nelson on fire and all. Deary me, what is the world coming to? You are doing well, you may continue.’
‘If you’re not learning anything, what’s the point of the experiments?’
‘There is none.’
‘Then why do it?’
Downturned mouth. ‘I am bored.’
She leads him following through to the other escalator, the final escalator, up to the top floor. As it moves, this one oiled, slick, maintained flawlessly, cries fade in, weeping, sobs, moaning, screaming, a dismembering sound that chills the adult soul, cores it like an apple, leaves it empty. He begins to feel frantic, to want to move up the escalator, to push past the deadly wench and rescue the darlings from their cages. Yet one look through those magnifying glasses emasculates him. She removes a revolver from her pocket, cocks it.
‘I understand what you may be about to see could qualify in lesser minds as… distressing. So I keep this with me. You will walk two arm’s lengths in front of me at all times. You must keep moving. You will not look back at me, you will not speed up or slow down, you will not call or respond to any of the subjects. The room moves in a circuit, around the wall, with the capsules in the centre. The subjects cannot touch you if you stay within the white lines, a suggestion I would adhere to. I have killed two women and one man already for not complying with my stipulations. I would prefer to keep it an odd number. You may document whatever you see in that room. However, you are allowed no photography or audio-visual recording of any kind. Only words escape my laboratory. You wish to proceed?’
Considering the six months of effort expended to arrive at this juncture, the choice was difficult, almost impossible. Curiosity gagged against every other facet of his character. Inside was a hell. Did he want to see hell. Did he want to see hell. Did he…
… ‘Let’s get on with this,’ he shivers, pushing a black curtain aside.
Inside was gagged black shivering impossible hell. Muggy, like jungle, smell of shit and piss, fungal infections, lining his throat like orange juice film on unbrushed teeth, darkness, peering loom, screams pinioned against eardrums, deep hertz moans, hurting, every kind of ordinary and special despair.
Cages, hundreds of them, stacked like cattery cats, sized like the back of a car, and inside, black children, flies buzzing around their heads, stomachs bloated like party balloons, nostrils flared with hunger, smelling chocolate in his pocket. He tosses the bar and it is snatched at by gnarled claws, fought over, scratched, gobbled whole wrapper and all. Another child screams and the Professor calls for him to move on. Hundreds of black children, coupled together with nuts and bolts, capsules in a windowless tablet packet, drowning and gorged on sorrow. Barry peppers Oh Gods Oh Gods as he waddles, falling with every stumble into new nightmares. Never, never to imagine this would be too much. Yet never does he forget the gun pointed at his back. It is ever-present, emaciates altruism, nourishes the incalculable fear in every sweaty pore until he relinquishes the ability to do anything but walk on past, feeling for them and nothing more, until feeling itself becomes some kind of sick joke, a thanks-but-no-thanks to these children and their thoughts of imminent salvation. She tells him to keep walking to the end, and so he does, walking to the end, momentarily before the end he catches one untied shoelace on another, trips, head outside exit curtain, legs inside, violating white lines to reach black hands, a black hand does grab, teeth clamp round ankle, he screams like a kid and then she is on top of him, gun to his head, dragging him from the room and the curtain closes and once more the screams are quietened, out of the sight.
‘Oh God, Oh Christ, Oh God Christ ah fuck my leg ah damn shit god fucking dammit that hurts!’
‘Idiot!’ she levels at him, pupil of gun in face. ‘Tie your shoes like a man! Rabbit ears I’ll be buggered! Drink my butter. Out, now, out, before I shoot you in the eyes and feed your corpse to them. Out!’
Pushing him down open escalator, down next open escalator and out into breath air condensed night, sock red with blood, ankle punctured by crooked teeth. Moving a safe distance from the mad woman and her subjects, he tends exclusively to the wounds, a diminutive traced portcullis of less than ideal forced broken skin indentations.
As he angles shoeless foot in face, his other, blemish free sock deposits a small, stained rag of paper onto the pavement. It nearly blows away before he scoops it, pain nearly forgotten, if only for a little while, whilst unfolding this tiny masterpiece, a minor incantation of artistic genius, a small boy, a boy with flared nostrils and purpose, the light and shading a work of alchemy, for the boy stands in what appears to the eye to be total colour, yet it is all a trick of tone, the boy, standing as he is beneath a crystalline sun, posing like the broken Statue of Liberty beside a small dog rubbing his head against the boy’s naked leg, straddling, as it is, an old crone woman, her hands tied and her mouth gagged, he poses, complete, a picture as vivid in the mind with paper closed as it is real with paper open – a composition conceived completely in red crayon.
Chapter 4
A visit to Café Nero, wherein Bob encounters several strange predicaments
…would not leave her. Like a limpet the phrase sucked against inside of skull, revolving tongue, man petrified, his face chalk with gutless panic, nursing the edge of a spindling bullet hole in his left shoulder. He turns to her, in that time, and again he does say:
‘That guy’s fucking crazy. He bet his legs. His legs!’
Bob was opposite, nursing pregnant pockets filled atop with bullion, pecuniary beneficiary in golden crème brulee format. Bishop Franklin is physically salivating into his lap. A stranger, who stole upon the horse and cart in the rushed departure from the (now on fire) cathedral, puckers her legs and paints her lips a hefty scarlet to match her corset, dulcet frame, lady cap and bunned hair. She gawps at the Bishop.
‘What thoughts are you entering apropos your, new, investment, Bob my son, my dear dear long departed son?’
‘I never really thought that far ahead,’ said Bob. ‘I just didn’t wanna lose my guitar [He turns to her… ‘He bet his legs!’] to the fat lady and her weird husband. Seemed like a shame, and Mindy told me to stay outta trouble so I thought it best to just go ahead and play the game.’
‘And you won,’ Franklin says, grit teeth, squeezing Mindy’s bicep. ‘Won all that money off the electric lady. Bob, my dear son, I had forgotten how far fortune will follow you. So much money. Real money. I am so very happy for you son, and of course, in these times it can become quarrelsome to forget those who have guided you along the way when issues of fiscal propriety arise.’
Bob considered this, shrugged. ‘I gotta look after Charlie, I know that much. I owe Mindy some for saving my life. I guess I should pay for the damage to the church, what’s the word… reparations? I wonder if her man’s alive, I should hand him some notes for killing his wife I guess. You know, you can be tight as brothers and then you kill a man’s wife, and it’s strange how something like that could stop friends being friends. I wasn’t even his friend to begin with. He must hate me.’
‘She was a fat bitch and she deserved to die,’ said Mindy.
Bob stares at her. So feisty, he feels himself grow with the vibrations of the cart and crosses legs, embarrassment radiator in the room. Now Bishop Franklin is free of most likely turned to ashes cathedral, he seems more interested in seeing his pockets than seeing him. Bob shifts and the Bishop’s eyes dart to follow the rummaging coins like a bi-focal chameleon following a fly, and Bob feels sorrow, like someone dropped sand in his eyes and grit in his throat.
Outside the cart, guided by a further lymphoma-riddled elderly gent and a blind but surprisingly healthy horse, passes a dilapidated shop as the smokeless carriage draws towards the Thames. Inside the cart, the stranger woman smiles and turns to Bob, plush tones, vocal coherence, lips like jelly.
‘You are not from London are you young man?’
‘No ma’am.’
‘The midlands, perhaps?’
‘I dunno exactly. Somewhere that ain’t here.’
‘Are you liking London?’
‘It’s different.’
‘That shop, that we just passed… you found it interesting?’
‘It had something to it.’
‘Such as?’
‘Some kind of weight of history. I dunno, I ain’t never been good with words except when I’m singing, and then it all seems to fall into place. Felt like it was important, like people were leaving alone. Looked old, not as beat up though.’
She leaned into him so he could feel her breath on his ear. She smelt like pipe smoke and public toilet water, belying her outwardly feminine Victorian glamour. Smelt like a relic, an ancient, someone who knew history ‘cause they’d lived it. At least, that’s what Bob’s thinking.
‘That shop contains the London stone. The first stone laid in the creation of the greatest city, by the Romans a few thousand years past. They say to misplace, or to destroy the stone, is to murder London, to find its beating heart and squeeze it until it runs dry of blood. No one, not even those who brought about these changes, dares touch it. Inside is a small old man, and he never moves. Urchin children steal him food and he lets them sleep in his shop. He guards the stone, though it needs no guarding. Would you like to see it with me? I could order the driver to turn us around.’
‘We’re on our way somewhere,’ said Mindy.
‘I’m sure it could wait.’
‘No, it couldn’t.’
‘It don’t matter, I’ll see it another time,’ said Bob.
‘So,’ said the woman, settling herself, ‘where are you taking this young outsider?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that, he’ll be fine with us,’ said Mindy.
‘Oh, I’m quite content to accompany you wherever your destination may be,’ said the woman.
Surreptitious movement of bare foot rubbing against Franklin bare ankle, ankle shuddering with decades of repressed sexiness, celibacy one big cork in a big fizzy shivering bottle. Bob spots it, Mindy misses it.
‘I’m not sure the Bishop would be too happy about that,’ says Mindy, smug. ‘Would you Bishop Franklin. Bishop Franklin?’
‘Dear. I mean, dear?’
‘I’m sure you’d much prefer to take this lady to wherever she needs to go.’
‘I would?’
‘Honestly, thank you darling,’ says the woman, her eyes liquid fire blowing hot wind in Mindy’s face, ‘it’s very kind, but I am really quite all right spending some more time in this wonderful company,’ the leg moving higher up the Bishop, near checkmate, ‘until such time as I have calmed down from that awful shock back at the casino.’
Mindy turns her body expectantly, ‘Bishop?’
‘Dear? I mean, dear. No, I mean… yes?’
‘Bishop.’
‘Yes?’
‘I really think we should take this lady where she needs to go,’ almost a growl.
Foot moves again.
‘Nonsense!’ he yelps. ‘Let her stay. We’re almost there anyway.’
The women exchange smiles.
Turbans were de rigeur at Café Nero. Mindy claimed – it placates the aesthetes. Bishop Franklin struggled with bound heads, knocking Bob into the mystery lady. Falling downstairs, catching sight of the South Bank, monumental burning eye like a Catherine wheel, junkies and druggies and six form mugs climbing the disfigured pupil, caterwauling implications of this year’s major events, the cull of bureaucracy, knee-jerk dismissal of all conventional good and wisdom, punk to the nth degree. And so they fell, and burst through the door.
“Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine…”
Some mystical sound blared from oscillating paper cones, his head felt like an apple without the core, something was booming in his head, women and men smoking pipes and cigarettes, reading blank-faced books with tiny titles gold embossed: Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Catch-22, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Fight Club, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, classics from a lost age all spun into one as Bob continued to tumble, wrapped in the piss-sweat staleness of the Victorian mystery lady, he really had to learn her name before he died, which was to be too soon as head made contact with the bony wood of bar, large man with biceps as wide as a hippo’s open mouth collecting his nose in his fist.
Mindy mopped the swollen side of his face.
‘Oh I absolutely agree with your notion of a post-postmodern ethical dilemma, a cultural dictatorship triggered by fundamental flaws in society introduced by the combined further cultural dilemma of a post-postmodern ethical dictatorship. It follows, does it not, that one must, if one is to maintain any sense of freedom, push forward with hostility, for how is one’s voice to be heard above the rabble unless the rabble is silenced? It does puzzle me. This absinthe is fucking top notch.’
‘Bring it down to a list Bobby boy,’ said Charlie. ‘Bring it down to a list and then you can tick boxes off. You’re a bright boy, brighter than I’ll ever be.’
Turbans, cigars, cigarettes, smoke, whisky, bourbon, alcohol, no lager, all spirits and wine, everyone drinking – little finger raised – concludes with smug grin and sly comment, many reading, all books, walls lined with books – made of books, a large man behind the bar, smiling, wears a turban the size of a beach ball, turns, looks, grins at Bob, says “Sorry”, sorry, no one else apologising, everyone in sharp suits, the ladies dressed like Victorians, like the mystery lady in the horse and cart, she was there, occupying Bishop Franklin’s lap, Bob looks up Mindy by his side mopping the swollen side of his face, inside of his cheek feels like it’s a bubble about to burst blood into his throat. He sits up slowly, fumbles for his guitar.
‘My guitar,’ he says, Mindy hears Muh hihar.
‘You know I had always heard of this place,’ said the Bishop, helping a cigar into his mouth, ‘I believed it to be an urban myth, last bastion of culture and all that, thought it was the talk of those stolen trolley despots. In extremis one is inclined to fantasise all the more, is one not?’
‘Why Bishop,’ said the mystery lady, harlotting his chin, ‘you are the very definition of an intellectual. You must stay, we shall find you a suit.’
‘It is rather tempting. I am sure Bob will see me good for a few English pounds, will you not my dear boy? How are you feeling?’
Muh hihar.
‘Still a bit faint poor boy.’
Bob inhales blood and throws up onto the floor. Men with pencil moustaches turn away and impossibly thin women moan with disgust. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift, look out kid, it’s something you did…
Snippets of conversation:
‘…a dream I had, terrifyingly lucid I tell you. An obelisk, as tall as the tallest skyscrapers in New York, before the accident you understand, oh I must take you there some day, there is still the sense of grandiose overexposure that once titillated the senses, but I digress – incredibly powerful. An obelisk, shaped like a knife with the point broken off, seemingly as thin as a blade yet as thick as any other building ever built, such was the illusion of proportion. It backed on, as it were, to the tallest waterfall imaginable, all spray and mist, a foggy mystery hanging below. Somehow, from my vantage point, I knew the exact depth of plummet. It would take a thrown stone minutes to reach the bottom. I stand on a precipice, overlooking this vista. A black crow flies too low to the water, caught by a lapping wave that turns into a monster, tossing its feathers until flight is impossible, drowning beneath the waterline before it has reached the edge of the fall. And then, as it tips over the edge, a thermal catches the edge of its exposed wing, and it is sucked out of the waterfall into the mist, and it flies… it is beautiful, like you only can imagine in dreams. Then, quite suddenly, I took am falling, and I reach the bird, and I touch its wing, and we fall together and…’
‘I know a gentleman who knows a gentleman. This gentleman, the latter being the referenced gentleman, knows another gentleman, and this gentleman has access to a vault, a secret vault hidden deep below the Swiss Alps. Its precise location is known only to a select few, chosen Illuminati. Inside this vault is a glass wall. The glass wall is fifteen miles wide and a mile high. The glass wall is constructed from billions of small glass cubes, each of them the size of a fist. Inside is a piece of parchment, rolled and sealed with red wax. To reach the parchment you must break the glass – each vessel is moulded around the message inside. Each parchment is identified by a code, and each code refers to a record on a database, the contents of which are known to a select few completely different from those with access to the vault. Each code matches to a name, and each name matches to a date, and that date, written on the parchment inside the glass cube, is the date on which the name in question will expire.’
He laughed like someone laughing at someone else laughing.
‘You better get him outta here. Don’t want no sick puppies in my cave.’
Bob entered sleep onside, pipette dreams, plop, plop, plop, ripple imaginativeness. Opens his eyes, atmosphere spin, someone shouts ‘ozzie pissbolt’, crumples head between knees and dribbles on shoes, a hundred shoes, a zoetrope of shoes. Feels ice cold feminine hand on his forehead, temporary relief, then further pain, vomit, blood inside vomit, feels poisoned, surely it takes more than a bang on the head to feel this bad. Then he tramples on himself and colds out.
Waking again, now total disorientation. A weed of a man enters, thick glasses perched on puffin nose, rhinoplasty wet dream, sputum-coloured suit with puffy shoulders and winklepickers pinching so hard he nearly tripped with every step.
‘Dylan,’ whisper screaming, ‘whatever you got.’
Beach-Ball-Turban Man screams a whisky chaser into a miniature silver goblet and pushes an invisible weight into the air, tilting the geek’s head like, “drink, man, drink.” The nerd obliges and sinks in a wrestler’s armchair, crippling under the weight of a tome, Midnight’s Children, undoubted source of gnomic inflections and atypical genius. Bob feels a need to read.
‘How are you?’ says Dylan.
‘Feel like someone beat up the inside of my head with a lead pillow.’
‘Good. Drink this. Gin in a mug, best drink to clear an absinthe hangover.’
‘I ain’t drunk any absinthe.’
‘Never said you drank any. You had some though. The mystery lady you walked in with made off with the old priest’s jewellery and your guitar. She pushed you down those stairs man. Took you for a ride. You’re not from town are you? Somewhere out in the country, I can smell it on you like fucking beeswax or something. As you fell she patched you. See?’
Small peach-coloured sticky label in Dylan’s hand, stinks like liquorice. Under his fingernails are filthy, palms rough and perturbed.
‘Patches, see. They got drugs in them. This one’s absinthe flavour, knocks you out straight so they can rob, rape, pillage, fuck you then steal everything you own and all they leave you with is a massive hangover and a desperate need to drink some gin in a mug. Here, take it.’
Bob swung it, tasted good. Instant betterness.
‘That worked.’
‘Don’t sound so surprised. You’re looking at the best barman in London. Hell, maybe in the world. What’s left of it. You hear about Singapore? Whole thing’s gone, massive nukes. I don’t mean just the cities either. The whole thing. Like God came along and wiped the landscape clean, took trees, hamsters, worms, everything living in a hundred mile radius. A big sore on Earth’s arse. That was three years ago apparently. News travels slow now we’ve gone back to the carrier pigeons. You should read the contraptions in some of these books.’
Half-listening, respondent mainly to lack of acoustic instrumentation, a total fucking situation of intense, fairly impossibly stressful proportions. Bob patted himself down, found broken cigarettes, lit a half-butt and smoked it to nub in solitary drag. Then he stood, and made to go.
Dylan barriers doorway, quite literally with assistant headpiece. Arms outstretched like a mummy.
‘Can’t go yet Bob. Mindy told me to keep you here until she got back.’
‘Where’d they go?’
‘Trying to find the mystery lady.’
‘Where’s Bishop Franklin?’
‘She took him with her. Was crying like a shit-kicking bastard, never seen a man shed tears like that. I’m not joking, he was puddling in the damn things, thought I was going to have to get a mop. Anyway, she dragged him out. Spirited girl, Mindy. Don’t screw with her either. She used to be a hangman, could quite happily kick your balls into outer space whilst juggling mine. Get on her good side though, and there’s no better friend in this life. Don’t tell her I said that though, she’s got a big face.’
‘I need my guitar back.’
‘If Mindy doesn’t find her then don’t bother looking yourself. More gin? On the house, I’m feeling in a gregarious mood for my old new pal who got rogered by a middle-aged bint with an apparent penchant for religious iconography and folk music.’
Bob sat at the bar. Felt good sitting up. Beside him, the geek engaged fierce concentration with his chosen story, knees up to chin with book in between as if in possession of glassless glasses.
He cranes over to have a look.
The nerd defends his position, book pulled to vertical angle.
‘Touchy,’ Bob growls to Dylan.
‘Who, Barry? He’s just a big fucker, aren’t you Barry?’
Barry curls into a hedgehog, novel magically lost in slender frame.
‘Doesn’t mean no harm. Shy as a mouse and completely unprepared for anything the world has to throw at him. Got a right sly bitch of a boss too, sends him out on all these weird assignments. Guarantee that the night after a day on the job he’s in here glugging and reading his woes away. Seems to calm him down and he tips well, and he wouldn’t make trouble if you slapped him in the face and called his mother ten tonne Tesse from Tennessee. He just wants to be left alone.’
‘I’m feeling that.’
Another stranger descends into the bar. Dylan turns from genial host to paranoid schizophrenic. Silent speech abounds.
‘Bob.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know how you feel pretty shit at the moment?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s about to feel a lot worse.’
The stranger walked in the room with a briefcase in his hand, Bob turns to Dylan and says, ‘Who is that man?’ Dylan turns to Bob and says, ‘No one will understand what you say when you get home, because something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – that’s Mr. Jones.’
The stranger raised his head up and asked: ‘Is this where it is?’ And Barry pointed to Dylan and said, ‘The bar is his,’ and a man reading Frankenstein said, ‘Where who is?’ And Dylan turned to Bob and said, ‘My God, we’re alone.’
Explosion.
Powerful sensations: ears chocked of Morris dancers, nose filled to nooks with ashes and soot, face as black as minstrels, throat on fire spit-lined so thick like fly paper, consistent reign of confusion, and an instant replay: Mr. Jones, face like Santa’s favoured elf, slid finger red buttoned and boom, skin impedance of flame nil, fire like brimstone and brimstone like fine wine, the indignant impudence scribbled tarred burnt face all over the wall, books exploding like chestnuts on a Thames-side tramp’s barbecue, speakers melting into high-fidelity screams as exothermic backdraft engulfs a selection of readers, toasting to a screaming crisp, terror and -ist, the gobbling fury of famished impartial fire.
Potassium on water reaction from Dylan, launching beach ball turban at impending death, ambushing flames unawares, suffocating, salvaging the life of Bob, Barry half-fried, right side of face turned colour of molasses and boy is that lad screaming. Foundations battle ceilings and Dylan drags new friend and screaming acquaintance up wobbling stairs into exit-land up wobbling stairs and turns as witness on malformation of his dream into some fucked up Van Gogh painting. All is fucked in war.
‘Sonofabitch!’ Dylan yells, launching fists at brick wall, knuckles blooded, skin screwed into grazes. ‘Everything, gone, like diamond dust in a strong wind. My whole life, up in flames.’
Barry is moaning, burnt, on concrete paddles.
‘Take a look Bob. He looks bad. I’m too angry to tend to the wounded.’
‘What about the people inside the café?’
‘They can wait. I don’t think they’re concerning themselves too much with anything at the moment. Making a concerted effort to be dead. I’m going to punch this wall for a while longer.’
Stoops to char grilled half-corpse, Barry burnt in half, yin and yang, left side smooth pale talcum skin, right side like bark from dying tree, leper skin peeling epidermis, falling from flesh in chunks, fresh horror hollers with every involuntary twitch and yet, burning through the pain, he coughs on Bob’s face when pulling him close.
‘I broke this place,’ he wheezed.
‘Hell, I don’t know why anybody did this but I’m pretty sure it weren’t your fault.’
Barry nods, draws intimate. ‘My fault. Here,’ pushes scrap of parchment to him amidst shuffle of sweating palms. He said, ‘I know where the red comes from.’
‘Where’s the fiddling emperor!’ bawls Dylan, hitting red brick.
Chapter 5
In pursuit of the mystery lady
Franklin puffs mid kinetic chase of Mindy, herself picking the paves between the cracks in pursuit of the mystery lady. Rind cobbles and sweat-packed eyebrows trigger a succession of uber-fragrant fartage, a piquant nasal assault that inspires his pace in fearful escape from lingering atmospheric fungus. London at night is a beast, a rogue succession of tramps and no-do-gooders amidst oil-lit lamp light, tarnished post boxes once red now blackened tarred with unclean fingers, abandoned double-deckers on three wheels populated by squat simian refugees, pecked at by crippled pigeons and lopsided Fagins swatting loose change from garbled darkness. Outside the bus, a fat holy man runs past.
She is but a speck on the lens zooming out of perspective’s reach, hope of rendezvous expires with perspirating heart and then slip and she trips and even from here he can hear the curse and up he gets with new fire in his chest and impinges on the grey pain wall barrier blessed unholy wrath, though he would never admit, this blasphemous vow on his brow he doth writ.
The trio form a constellation along the Victoria Embankment, galloping alongside the river, a trembling frozen night patching micro-ice caps, insular black ice on which Mindy has slipped, she feels fresh adrenaline with the pain and now she is up again, hearing the panting breathless exhortations of a tired sub-monk roll running behind her like a white floating flatulent marshmallow.
Under a bridge runs the mystery lady, guitar weighted, the breadth of crinoline sponging spit textured acid rain, bracing shin wearing skin down to red-baleen sores. Lifetime of pick pocketing stands in stead her understudy virtue, barely fatigued, cheeks reddened like robin red breasts. Oliver twisting it between ivory streaks on a void transportation network, an artful dodge pushes her down an alley, and she is sister with her shadow and embarks on a shimmy up guttering (might as well have been a flagpole, dearest) and paunches on the rooftop, hands and knees in moonlight avoidance.
The blind eye wheels on the south bank, unmanned, perpetual motion driven, it seems, by pure magic, observing its hollow, depressed, obelisk home, city monument. Near the top, the last of the office businessmen, a long-dying breed now, in bureaucracy terminology, and none other counts in such spheres, and so he neglects to salute because no witness signed his saluting form, and falls from the eye, smashing like Humpty Dumpty and does the eye blink?
Entropy is a keyword, Franklin’s pale countenance turned chef coat white terror, a loss, caution! wet floor mistake, a harsh observer perhaps exclaims: ‘Wow, that looks like it must really hurt,’ skidding good ten metres along dead leaves and dirty ground, tramps holler and belch at luge-insipid figurine, like a rag doll grabbing some air. As well, Mindy shuffles up flagpole and experiences realistic falling sensations as drainage cuts loose of its moorings, flinging a voracious predator into deep undergrowth.
“It’s simply too difficult to lift myself from this absurd position. Continue this absurd masquerade! I’d rather lose myself. Wait, I must keep sight of Mindy. If not, I could be hunted down by those slobbering, insane pyromaniacs with their hairspray and cheap lighters. It would be like hellfire itself. Oh, I may be raped!”
‘Get up,’ Mindy yanks him to a start.
‘Mindy! Oh Mindy, my precious dear, you did not leave me.’
‘Shut up. I only get paid by you to make sure no one shoots you in the back of the head, and to be honest, I’m struggling with that moral dilemma myself. Look at you, you’re so fat. No wonder you couldn’t keep up.’
‘My money.’
‘I don’t know. She’s gone somewhere over that roof.’
‘Well go after her then.’
He nurses the crystalline slap for several minutes hence.
‘We need to go back and find Dylan and whatever his name is.’
‘Bob.’
‘Whatever.’
‘What about his guitar?’
‘Have you not listened to a word I said? His guitar is gone. Your money is gone. Chances are one has been sold and the other spent by now anyway.’
‘Bob will be very upset.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘He loves that guitar more than you can imagine.’
‘Well it wasn’t my fault it got stolen. Maybe if you’d taken your dick out of Madame Butterfly’s ear long enough to listen to me you would’ve realised you were being taken for a ride.’
‘How dare you!’
‘What are you going to do, stop paying me? Looks like you’re fresh out of cash. Maybe someone stole it. I’m going back to tell Bob I couldn’t get his guitar back, and then I’m off to find a new client. You can follow me if you’re too scared of making your own way back. You never know, someone might rape you. If I’m lucky.’
Inside an immense cylinder, under shattered glass roof tiles, nose diving pigeons and copycats pouncing through splintered cracks, mog fur balls splatting vermillion mess on white marble faux-ancient floor tiling, the mystery lady clambers foot by foot up ladders in laddered stockings, library ladders, stairways to bound paper ramblings and cough drop sentimental endings, none such for double-figured lacklustre textbooks, survivors amongst plundered multitudes once bottom warming dustless shelves, presently caked in unpleasant goo, dog dribble and cat piss, this epicentre of London, the city compacted like garbage, ground into prehistoric exterior, monolithic columns and demolition site crevices between brick, opening, internally, on itself, into a great white snow blanket court, copied from history, once hiding within it belief, and torture, and ever-present knowledge, eroded by war and fearlessness.
Eyes scanning limited availability: The Endless Cycle Of Her Mystery by Thomas B. Cribbins, Colonic Irrigation: A Passing Fad? by Diana Rector, Genius And Cool: A Brief History Of The 21st Century by Elma Monk. Catches the membrane between iris and pupil: The Moai And The Mystery Of Easter Island by Hubert Gosling.
Angles welcome fresh memories – a seat at home with grandfather, toffees and spankings, opening cellar doors holding red-spined gold leaf children’s encyclopaedias, the utter finality of knowledge, like the blind holding door handles, this is all that is known and must be right for if not I am lost. Cryptic dedication:
To the Bank of England.
Flicking, impatient constraints of lack of time, appointments to keep beneath broken sky so gotta get a move on, this text is fresh, she breaks the spine to a page folly with dense icicles of informant panic, spreads paper and absorbs:
On closer inspection, the evidence revealed a startling and somewhat chilling outcome: the people of Easter Island were decimated by total deforestation of their relatively small home. It must be assured that the gentleman cutting down the last tree to make the final canoe to row to the middle of the ocean to find food would have known this to be the last tree, and would have taken his axe to it nevertheless. Such butchery led, inevitably, to starvation, a population cull driven onwards by hunger, the looseness of human morality, and resulting civil war. By the 18th century, a vast number of inhabitants had perished. Society, as is often the case, dictated a spontaneous reinstatement of ritual.
The 19th century saw the rise of a curious phenomenon, a coup forming a cult based around an insignificant god, Makemake. The cult of the birdman took hold (Rapanui: tangata manu). Every year, the fittest of each warring clan would gather to swim through shark-infested waters to reach the neighbouring islet of Moto Nui in search of the first egg laid by manatura, or sooty tern. It was a harsh and dangerous trial of physical exertion and exceptional stamina. The victor was the first to return to Easter Island with the egg. He would then be crowned birdman of the year, and secure control over the islands limited resources. Until the arrival of the western world in the 1860s, this yearly competition held sway over the population, and thus did Easter Island survive. In times of strife, it seems, man turns once more to the survival of the fittest ethic in tracing out a path of continued existence.
Reading made her ill, tossed the slipshod exposition over shoulder and returned to the bread and butter guitar, food source for six weeks, should she be paid a promised sum. Picking it up, picking at the strings, feeling a stirring of deep lust for this sound, the memory of a singing man from an exploded cafe, hesitant plan engaged by her employer to distract from true purposes. Pluck a tune, void composition of slow-burn apocalypse, half terror songwriter attempting a melding of melody to physical capacitance. Gosh, that line, the pump won’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles. It stirs in her, melts her belly, and she strums and accompanies with hums and natural talent spills out, playing remembers her name is Mary, then, easily, it passes. Silent now, cupping arched back of neck in bony flanges, twiddling d’s and tweedling dum, overcoming rushes of creativity, maintaining discipline, reverting to job description, cold nylon strings cupping hands for more, a single wing for a prayer, it must be done, coincidentally so must this waiting for high heels on rice paper. Leaning to adjust straps on scuffed chase-screwed patent pumps, a thud echoes the acoustic chamber of the guitar, a leaden twang pimping the strings to a tremble, discordant arrival of secret goods. Peering darkness, tough vision, something most definitely has been birthed, perhaps the end result of cheap adhesive lining inside walls. Slender hands reaches under strings, scrabbles for the solid object yet always evading her grasp. Considers unwinding strings for easy access, commences dismantling instantly halted by those shoes. The buyer is at the till.
The buyer is circuitous, insistent on simultaneous purchase rituals. Mary, lady of mystery, reduced to rapscallion pupil during detention, climbing mythical mountains of useless, pointless, bitter knowledge, so many abandoned burned thieved volumes. Guitar, object of pecuniary inflections, kept tight tucked in cranny of arm, Mary’s favoured appendage for minutes yet. Something’s rattling in there and she’s trying to keep it quiet.
Word of the day, of the life: umpteenth. Hieroglyphic fragments of broken culture, like paving stones, Rosetta fondly recalled by this bint, hag of turmoil hair, eyes of irradiated newts. She pontificates, procrastinating upon acquisition of chosen artefact, encouraged instead by this oldest of broken institutes to insinuate cold, implacable philistine virtues. She reiterates La Louvre, haven reduced conflagration, burnt incredibly the night of the Eiffel crash. An astonishing loss, she says, like a bride left at the altar, and Mary feels like a Pip and the whole thing’s coming crashing to the ground round her, she doesn’t care about Norse gods or middle age tapestries, she’s got a pregnant craving for what’s inside that guitar and this repugnant specimen is deprivation personification.
Trawling more, a depressing implosion, this white-coated knackered carpet licker with her own particular brand of eau de camelpisse, dominating and aiming random accusations designed as recollections:
‘Unbelievable. The ransacking of history… it cripples me. A young philistine approached me this evening and could barely stay on his own feet, because I exposed him to the past. I wish you could, in your enfeebled insignificant little brain, comprehend the loss you are party to, here, the greatest collection of artifice womankind ever salvaged from the implacable coldness of war and atrocity. Are you listening to me?’
‘Are you going to buy the guitar?’
‘Of course I am going to buy the guitar. You think I would step away from my vital work for a second more than I have to? I am science. Without my presence, this city is empty. It would be a scar. Bugger them all.’
Back entwined in scattered books, each inflating on the floor, sponges holding their fill of water. Mary sparks the guitar in the buyer’s direction, waddling simple fury in icy glare, masking intrigue as fiscal dissatisfaction. Tossed a purse by the buyer, a bye-bye later she is once more lonesome, choked curiosity, intimate acoustic secrets snatched in exchange for currency and recreational drugs. Quiet, sniffing white powder from varnished angled study plinth, clogged mucus membranes encounter cigarette smoke, no, more pure. Outside, in the great court, a book by Hubert Gosling in death throes, another Great Fire Of London, pages curling like a jester’s boots, burning print up a broken glass chimney.
Chapter 6
In which our company encounter a festival
A bandit nursing the last harp manufactured by the civilised world smiled at the rag-tag landlubbers. A merry queer lot. At the front a brutish gawper with a mawkish face and ripped musculature, head attacked by ripe pumpkin turban, protective arm around young woman sporting a post-coitus flush in her cheeks, red riding hood robe and filthy trainers, swotting at a squat fat little birth defect whose attire raced by clergy in favour of aspirational papacy. Behind, a short distance by, a kid with a cowboy hat, sucking London air through a harmonica, a half-man Newton’s cradled over his shoulders, half black and half white. A bunch indeed.
What once was Notting Hill spilt blood with veracity, a vociferous concatenation of contiguous merriment, sewage of the city turned kings for the day, a cast of comedy characters breeding mirth like rabbits. Bells and whistles jingled between bongos’ rapid clapping, occupants of the parade rarely spending their time stood on both feet, a timeless morass of colour, a spectrum of joy, pink feather boas, pearl beads, cerulean garters, glinting peacock headdresses challenging the balance of their owners, movement and glory in the act of noise, back slaps, hugs and the occasional innocent revelation of titillating titties.
It soaked Bob like buckets of rain. Deep melancholy pervaded the vivid scene, his tired shoulders, nibbled flakes of burnt skin engrained in his knuckled creases, a longing for the normalcy of Charlie, a lack of purpose. Why was he here? Bishop Franklin fawned no longer in consequence of the subtle mugging. Bob was neglected, a dollop, a surname on a rotten scone, complete in his irrelevance, and yet he soldiered, burdened now, a regular St. Christopher with his own personal Jesus and no guitar to articulate the ruthless despair and reckless inspiration this place banqueted upon. He had never felt so alive and so unhappy, and craved the familiar and familial. Mindy, his lighter in the west-facing crowd, stood stolen with Dylan, the big man’s hand dangerous in its ass crack proximity, her own palm massaging his east love handle, Bob ostracised from all but his patient, who moaned like a bitch. The implacable others disregarded Barry as if he were lint, inconsequential, as likely to be saved by Bob as he was to be spun into death by some hidden static charge.
‘Hey Barry, you awake?’
‘Yes. Third degree burns over fifty percent of your body have a tendency to induce insomnia. Bob, right?’
‘Yeah. You got a real way with words. You a writer or something?’
‘Something like that. Ah fuck this hurts so much. I feel dead.’
‘You should be, looks like someone stuck you in a toaster and forgot about you.’
‘I know this stuff. I should be dead.’
Bob halted, allowed the rest of the party to pull away, lolled Barry against a non-descript brick wall. A rat galloped over Barry’s lap. Surveying the wounds, a miracle ostensibly active, severe burns, yet cauterized, pain sewn up. As if lying on a bed of nails; don’t move and you won’t feel a thing. Maybe bomb compositions encouraged immediate repair, healing, living scimitar slashes, walking beacons of terror, messages that dared not stare in mirrors.
‘I ain’t gonna lie to you Barry, you’re pretty burnt up. Like, crispy.’
‘Yeah I figured. I did sit next to an exploding bomb.’
‘You’re taking this like a man.’
‘Got no choice. After what I’ve seen today, I don’t know whether I want to keep living anymore. Doesn’t seem to matter. Have you ever seen kids in cages?’
‘Nope. That a figure of speech or something?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Nothing does. I sound like Sartre. You don’t happen to have some aspiring on you, do you? It feels like someone’s drilling through my skull.’
‘Aspiring?’
‘Aspirin. Tablets.’
‘No. Got some gin if you want it. Some cigarettes too.’
Some gin and some cigarettes later, Bob sat against the wall, inhaling precious secondary smoke as Barry shivered in the night air, procession still processing through streets, lanes, alleys, abandoned roads, bypassing them, party poopers.
‘Maybe God saved me.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I dunno. I believe whatever gets me through the day.’
‘I wish I could be like you. You seem – so – relaxed.’
‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘You almost died.’
‘So did you.’
‘Doesn’t dying bother you?’
‘Sure, all the time. Just doesn’t worry me.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘Sometimes. Being scared’s different from being worried.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You got a cup on you?’
‘A cup?’
‘Yeah, a drinking cup.’
‘No.’
Bob produced a greasy harmonica and commenced spontaneous composition. He unfolded notes with his tongue, pockets of air forced into vibration, tracing rhythm through Barry’s fag dragging, feeling blues in those burns, malformed epidermis, mutilated beauty in failing self-repair. Barry cried through the music, a cathartic blend mixed with nicotine and alcohol, and minutes later, when tears had stopped, so did the player.
‘We should find the others,’ said Bob.
‘Why? They don’t care about us.’
‘I think Mindy might. A little.’
‘Who’s Mindy?’
‘The girl’s always slapping the Bishop.’
‘Oh her. I haven’t seen her properly yet. Is she pretty?’
‘Yeah. Pretty as hell.’
Cupid, fired arrow (arrow on fire, hot-foot above prostate fireplace, lick-spitting) a warm hearth, micro kiln baking aristocrats two-by-two partaking of shah-mat, the indefinite pursuit, a game of possibilities, myriad configurations numbering greater than the infinity starscape. An old man farts and rubs his nose.
‘Checkmate in four moves,’ he grumbles.
‘Bollocks and tosh. I spy your defeat.’
Pair after pair, conjoined hobby checkerboard twins, hemming the way, stuck to walls, shag pile rugs sucking feet in like quicksand, worrying Franklin, tip-toeing through strategic bravado. Mindy and Dylan gimble impunity, rolling with stolen knights and castled rooks. The place stinks of whisky and formaldehyde.
‘We should leave this infernal club immediately,’ muttered Franklin.
Infernal, how the couple groped, caressing smalls of backs, nuzzling like… like dogs! A display, attention seeking, pathetic. In this infernal gentleman’s club, yes, refuge from the impish Mephistophelian racket ruining streets and lining cambers outside, but in here was insidious, a living scam, all these fogies playing ancient games without a motive?
Commotion rattling chandeliers, berate that daring stevedore and spangle his banner, gravels of disapproval, parliamentarian “yuh”s and “huh-huh”s. Franklin, question mark neck, quibbling with colostomy students wired to urine gulped satchels, as this curious varmint introduces his inimitable, unbeatable, invincible grandmaster.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that includes you gents at the rear end there, oh did I speak rudeness? Roll up roll up, or shuffle, dependency is such an awful thing, let me free you of your meagre lives if only for a tragic instant. Allow me to introduce, beneath this veil, the most amazing, truly revolutionary, unique machine you will ever encounter, the freak of a thousand minds, The Turk!’
Fake human, brown skin true wood, polished whorls cheeks, whirlpool fingerprint chin, a carved cadaver, sculpted and sanded, ornate turban bedecked with artifice, robes to the ground concealing red leather piano stool, on which, perched, The Turk embellishes a plane, innocuous chess board, checkerboard patterning melting into cloth covered table sized like a pool table, a table with no legs, solid wood box on which triptych serpent licks, fangs withdrawn, the pace red apple. The Turk smells like varnish, and those who reach to touch are batted away by golden-fisted cane, tibia lengthened power whip of the showstopper, an aged man with scrotum-wrinkle skin, teeth yellowed like vanilla ice cream, fingers tango orange from immense nicotine consumptive apprehension distillation. He stinks like a pipe, his voice amped, the sound of put away plates clattering in echoing wooden cupboard.
‘Who will challenge The Turk? You? You? You? You? Who! Who is brave enough, dare foolish, to compete with this immortal, this transcribe of bloodless war, keeper of devilish stratagem! Be fooled not by the serpent, for this mechanized marvel truly is a work of science, though… and let this not venture beyond these four walls – some say The Turk is possessed, the spawn of something foul, an unfair ripper disembowelled by a prepared wench wielding a sickle, across the belly like this, a scar! A scar. Let this not dissuade you: The Turk plays a fair game, and welcomes the weakest challenger as a worth opponent, though I fear, and perhaps this presumption will put upon me a certain lightness of pocket – there is not a man alive who can defeat this contraption.’
Elderly aristocrats queued, kids at lunch, to savour the battle. One by one they fell to The Turk’s sword, shuffling arms quibbling pieces, knocking down opponents like standing coconuts.
‘I’ll get you for this!’ one gent shouted.
‘His eyes, they move,’ whispered another.
‘Soul of the devil at work here.’
‘A gambit played like a true gent, never a finer machine crafted.’
One astute pretender issued a stipulation: expose the table to inspection, and he would play. Being the most promising post-war grandmaster, a rival to Kasparov perhaps, though arguments raged long and often as to how good Kasparov was, of what lineage he could be measured against, and whether he was, in fact, a chess player, this deep blue heir to the throne watched, stunned, as a magnificent array of fission-gold cogs bathed his face in coke machine glow.
‘As you can see young man, there be no trickery at work here, unless you define trickery as the perfection of the mechanical device. Not since Babbage has such craft been described by human hand. Now take your seat and let us begin.’
Barry and Bob, filled with firework air, lingered at the back of the crowd. Bob divided competition between the chess match and Dylan’s hand doodling on Mindy’s back. Felt like something inside him fell apart. Copping a feel. Barry collapsed against the back wall, falling unconscious. Bob felt his pulse and moved to the front, alongside Mindy and Dylan. Mindy smiles. Bob watches the match.
‘Scariest shit I’ve ever seen,’ says Dylan, stroking herself. ‘Man, if I knew how that was done I’d go out, get me one, set it up outside. That’s where to make the money, outside. Telling you, could make more money than a widow out there. Bet this guy’s making a mint off these codgers anyway. What you reckon Bob?’
‘He’s got a little guy hiding in that table, all curled up. Got himself a torch and some magnets. Them chess pieces have iron cores. Moves the magnets on the underside of the table so’s the midget can see what he’s doing. Got some little puppet hands there, that’s why he keeps knockin’ the pieces over. Check out the cane on the old guy, keeps moving slightly to the left and right, looks like it’s floating like a pendulum but he’s telling his tiny friend where to move the arm so’s he doesn’t make The Turk look like a retard. I seen this show before.’
‘The Turk seems to think you have a bad bishop,’ said the old man to the young man.
‘Cheat!’ cried Dylan.
‘Seems we have another disbeliever,’ the old man laughs, the crowd barely registering.
‘There’s a fucking midget in the fucking table and he’s probably fucking lacking in some fucking breath so you’d better fucking let him out so he can take his fucking applause and then you can fucking give us our fucking money back you ancient swindling fucker!’
‘How dare you employ that language in abuse against me,’ said the old man. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Do I look like I care?’
‘Ah shit,’ said Bob, escaping the jeering minions.
A dwarf materialises behind The Turk, bandy-legged, head like a light bulb, eyes wide apart and independent, chameleon, ejects into the air, falls on Dylan’s face, rains down micro-fist blows upon his head, grown men scream like girls and soil themselves.
‘Run master!’ the chimp man helium squeals.
Some divine being casts a colossal stone into this pond, ripples like tidal waves, knocking gents into each other like Turk-pushed chess pieces, falling about as midget attempts mandible castration of Dylan, a colobus monkey with enhanced faculties, the men push and bitch-fidget to the door, tailing Bob sliding Barry out of the narrow gap before the crowd hit, Bishop Franklin creaming at Mindy to ‘Do something, oh please my dear do something he has him by the testicles,’ because they cannot be seen in the same post code as this super freak, this naked killer dwarf with teeth sharp like icicle.
Clutching at puppy fat love handles, Mindy tears the midget, clobbers him against the wall, head like inside of a rung bell, drop kicks him onto the balcony twenty feet above. Franklin mid-congratulation of field goal when the midget reappears unscathed, flying through the air like a flesh lollipop, landing on Mindy. Dylan, now recovered, repeats process, sexes reversed, the midget once more unharmed, a living bullet, intent on maim.
And so the play continues, for an hour. At terminus, the midget, Dylan and Mindy exchange pleasantries. Franklin, long ago voice cold. No winners, mutual en passant, three pawns twisted by wistful lost king. Dwarf is to rendezvous, claims of always happens, manky lips unable to share locations for the old man has the dwarf’s beer money, his livelihood, and nurtured by minor injuries and life-affirming war of attrition, Dylan tips his turban, unable to begrudge a worthy foe of prize money. Midget man departs. Behind them, stone cold, The Turk promotes a pawn.
Chapter 7
In which two exchanges are made
Looming chimney. Turbine hall. A gloop, photonic corruption, stacked cardboard boxes as mountains, not to be touched. Still on her mind: that guitar. An object fixed inside, undoubtedly property of the buyer by now. Above, a yelp, c’mon up, an art dealer, catgut tie and awesome bulbous schnozzle.
‘Las Meninas, Velazquez.’
She detects a ten-out-of-ten rating in his quaver, seats taken at an oversized mahogany desk, inept arrangement of scatterbrain post-it notes in pregnant spider scrawl. Behind him, blocking St. Paul’s through the high-rise glazing, the painting, once priceless, now cleaned, handled, protected, betrothed to a weed in a mothball suit employing the working day in task of creating a noiseless nail file. He knocks hot coffee onto his keyboard, mops it with a man-sized tissue, wipes his brow with same tissue, staining the creases in his forehead, a sealed, varnished totem pole of idiocy. Looks in the mirror of the painting, unable to see through the window to see his reflection in the mirror, glances in return, smiles, sharpens his pen in motorized pencil sharpener, judders, stops.
‘Right, um, where were we?’
‘I was unaware of the availability of such… gorgeous property,’ crosses her legs.
Gulp. ‘Do you know about this painting?’
‘One must consider oneself cultured if one is to engage in such arrangements.’
‘Yes, quite. Now if I could just-’
The art dealer loses his balance, spins on castors, lower back support entails angling of elbow into centre of painting, a monumental tear, the end of breath as he knows it, stoppage, pushing of pinky finger through painting in painting, leading edge of tear imprinted in code microdots depreciation reaching into hundreds of millions. A realm, uncharted, of embarrassment, fear, irreconcilable differences between ego and id, a specious venture into unreality, boy oh boy he had…
‘Oh shit, look what I’ve done,’ continuing to poke through the painting, too-perfect porthole, mocking cathedral framed by torn frame within frame. As if she had not seen it, ‘You’ll never believe what I’ve just done.’
‘I will purchase the work regardless of its condition. It can be repaired – these costings will be accounted for in addition to the vastly reduced offer.’
‘I couldn’t possibly sell it to you now.’
‘You will.’
‘But it’s broken. Look, there’s a big hole in it, right where his face was.’
‘I will pay you one third of the pre-arranged price.’
Taken aback, a bear caught shitting in the woods, he turns, lights a cigarette and coughs a smoke ring up into the pavement sky. Glossy, it seems to him now glossy, though this impression had been disrupted, made innocuous by the inoculating effect of the composition’s perfection, now ruined, artist’s face defaced. Truly, self-convincingly, it would be a bargain to dispose of this elitist sucking claptrap, intellectual bourgeois pretension on a near astronomical horizon. Perhaps this to be a blessing disguised as many other curses in his life –lost soap, unspreadable butter, windowless rooms.
She sighs, ponders, speculates. Mundane, a bag of sugar, the echo suggests pliability, a bean bag, why a bean bag, precious object(s) cuddled in cotton wool, platinum tuning fork, dizzying drawing pins affixing owner’s visage to cork boards in closed down university lecture theatre corridors, describing a forthcoming night before coming forth, so innocent he was, complexion of pastry, face moist, dried not yet by the city’s pollution. Naïve and yet knowing, when they tumbled she slapped, hit him with absinthe, imagination incapable of dreaming for him, they surely would have vivacity, this city despoils all it touches, murders grass, despises green, then grows anew altogether uncouth beasts who pillage and create beauty in compensation foreshortened life spans.
‘Then we are agreed?’
‘Agreed. Delivery to the British Museum tonight. No accomplices. You have coffee on your forehead. I must be going.’
‘Would you like to have dinner sometime?’
‘I eat alone, at all times. Are you aware of where one might purchase instruments?’
‘What, music? They don’t make them anymore. They’ve stopped making everything. Last computer rolled off the production line three years ago. The only industry still going is the media, and that’s because they’re making money out of reporting everyone else’s misery. Best bet is to find a second hand shop, though most of those are out of business too. People only want new things, so it’ll take a while before they realise there’s no new things left. Blind to it, see. Like denial. I haven’t seen a guitar for at least a year. Can barely remember what a piano looks like, though I hear they’ve got a nice one down at the gentleman’s chess club. Hear about the commotion down there last night? It was in The Day. Crazy, some wild-eyed midget scrapping with some guy balancing a beach ball on his head or something. I’m still waiting on that interview with the crazy bint who lives on Oxford Street. I heard that she studies the effects of ultraviolet light on horses, well that dinner invitation is open if you want to anytime just call my number…’
Consummate nervousness, a bona fide legendary rambler cloaking anxiety behind platitudes. This work line tired her, unwholesome for the soul, lacking in decent human contact, based around contracts, quid pro quo and occasional bedroom liaisons. Facile prey here, available for further scavenging needs arise. The sycophant’s proclivity for high contact to weak constitution ratio invited exploitation. She would return here one day, perhaps for a Hirst. As rare as atmosphere.
Scrolling pastward, ambient tryst of spiritual father and surrogate son, mock temptation in darkened room, blackout curtains and wicker chairs, anachronisms and dirt bombs. The Bishop tenders him, contacts his arm, electrolytes exchanging information.
‘My boy, I am so very glad you came. I am sorry I have been unable to explain myself these past few hours, what with the gunfight and the drugging and the mugging and the chasing and finding you exploded and then the battling midget… it has all been rather a strain. Still, we are here now and my boy you look well. How is Charles?’
‘Been better.’
‘I see, I see. Tell me, did you get my note?’
‘Yeah. Brought my guitar, then it got stolen.’
Franklin drinks air pulls close, curtains inhale.
‘My dear boy… we must make the retrieval of that guitar our foremost aim. Labouring this tack of needing my money back will spur that boy Dylan on, he has his eye on only two prizes, one of which he already has his arm around. Detonations tend to enclose. Money is currency in both life and love, and a handsome reward will appeal. It is the guitar though, and only the guitar that I wish to have possession of.’
Double-bed fog, pillow for Bob, pillow for guitar. Charlie, youthful, shoulders mid-sag under minted responsibility, a fearful Bishop hiding light in the doorway, silhouette gobbling strings and neck and luxuriant body. ‘Keep him safe.’
Was it him?
Knocked door opened, a new silhouette, Mindy blankets them in bare light, bulb swinging with force of enlightenment, smells of bath salts. Bob notes grazes, cuts, lacerations, scabs on hands, arms, forehead, chin, cheek, where skin meets urban battleground, yet still in jeans and t-shirt graceful, starred, glitter complexion and those eyes green as dollar bills.
Dylan and Barry languish in the hotel bar, a bitch-ridden game haven where old losers come for shits and giggles. One ancient, viscous un-gent cops at Mindy, she threatens returns with a swift backhand.
‘Never seen anything like it,’ said Dylan, poking Barry’s burns. ‘They don’t hurt?’
‘Not anymore, like hell to begin with.’
‘That shit’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. You look like a chessboard.’
Their hands rub as Mindy passes, Bob experiences a vicarious rush of shared history, the possibility of future entanglement and the ever-present urge to crush Dylan’s skull so he may have her for himself. A letch, he felt, watching her describe air pockets with nonchalant hair flicks and legs crossing with muscles hidden denim. Yet this was more, this was love, he knew now this was love and he longed for his guitar so he may sing and speak and teach of love what he knew of love, for this was love and the headiness was intoxicating.
‘Hey Bob,’ says Barry. ‘You hear about this midget?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That shit’s crazy,’ said Barry. ‘Like some indestructible wee man. Nuts.’
The arrival they await of a spurious spiv, a man Dylan’s exposition portrays as gaudy, a walking gimmick, the motivation for their trip to the ill fated gentlemen’s club, that being his haunt, like a ghost he stalks the rich, flogging handkerchiefs and microchips for skyrocketing prices, a cultural terrorist striking fear into good artists. Not the other week he sold a Hirst for several million and a striking work by Velazquez to a dealer on the South Bank. Connections, survival relied on them. Now the breadcrumbs lead to a ramshackle hub in Earls Court, a retarded micro-village bereft of hot water and flushing toilets. Already Bob is too tired to stand, though sensing the disengagement through apprehension on Franklin’s part, he maintains alertness. Pocket fiddling, a scrap of paper is found, bestowed by Barry on death’s door. Hiding in the crook of the chair, he opens, gulps, sees in vivacious, desirable red crayon a drawing of a young boy, a dog, and an old crone, and knows he must now chase music for father one and art for father two, and hopes somewhere they will collide, for he is exhausted like empty, overwhelmed by fear-turned-fatigue in this underwhelming semi colon of a bar.
‘Let me and Mindy do the talking. This guy doesn’t like new people, he might even take offence to you lot sitting here, so if he tells you to get out don’t say anything, just do it. This guy’s got balls big enough to make him walk funny, so no retorts. I mean no retorts. Tell you the truth this is more than my time’s worth, but Mindy’s asked me to help out and Franklin’s agreed a cut of his stash with me, and seeing as my bar’s a big crisp I’m brassic at the moment so the cash could come in handy. But, seriously, any of you make trouble tonight and I’m off. I can’t be arsed. Everyone okay with that?’
‘I’d like to stay if possible,’ said Franklin.
‘Course Bish. I’ll do my best. Like I said, if he tells you to fuck off, you’ve got to fuck off and trust me.’
One hundred and twenty minutes and forty-six seconds slothed by, bringing midnight by paddle steamer, drunken conversation wafting from bar direction, aural stench, Bob closes his ears and concentrates on chord progressions, hammers and frets, underarm dent caused by lazy posture overarching wood, absence of tool to exorcise inspiration. Something deepened. A rewind of the event, passing of turban into path of fireball, nanosecond instance of reaction, snaps into cold sweat, a fit buzz, the detection of sleep rejected interference in this reactive melody, actual physical explosion of volatile chemicals, the possible ending of life bringing with it no epiphany or flash, only the simple, given right to die, though never truly on one’s own terms, death is always forced, an absence of choice in some gift or other. With cold sweat comes the spiv, stealthing between the crack of bar doors and making muted introduction middle of them all, location derived by incantation or teleportation. He does not move, he floats, never fidgets, everything deliberate, long vanilla raincoat and spongy handlebar tache.
Another stranger befuddles by, felt tip aftershave and bare-shined winklepickers, disposable copy of The Day see-sawing on Barry’s head, who tilts, gnarls bottom lip, considers confrontation, steps back like fire turning beach sand to a glass wall between itself and ocean. Stranger brushstrokes spiv on way to bar, hits bar, hits landlord for a long island tea, landlord hits him with stare and spares him a pint, stranger mock glares and claims to be in possession of powers that can single-elbowedly demolish masterpieces of fine art, mentions a man called Velázquez and rice pudding’s his head into the bar, where he will spend the night.
Bob combs to a text heavy page.
Something Is Happening Here And We Don’t Know What It Is
words by Dan MacGuffin
I was in the bath the other night. The bathwater was warm, and reminded me of my father, who would often say in moments of more pertinent inflection: boy, there’s nothing quite like war. How true those words ring this very day, like giant bells atop the church of warning. It is now four decades since initial annihilation, year zero, ground zero, the birth of scum culture and the death and simultaneous rebirth of the beatnik.
In a society as poisoned as ours, as strangulated as we are by lead-lined carriages towed by cancerous horses, horses who remind me of my mother, always struggling on, bearing the brunt of governmental force during that post-nuclear fugue, that desperate attempt to hold on, to switch back to what we knew amidst the feuding and rioting, the assassination of the prime minister, the eventual collapse of the prison system and the flooding of crime, culminating in marshal law, itself a failure, and now we live lawless and powerless, unless we too disobey the laws we can only remember as some kind of distant utopian vision.
With the raising of Singapore, such questioning of this venomous, misplaced judgement of civilisation becomes ever more vital. Still, it becomes difficult to argue the place of democracy when it was the machinations directly resultant from the largest democracy created in the history of mankind, a supernation declared sacrosanct by all two billion citizens, the subsequent $7 000 000 000 000 experiment to create a continent sized particle accelerator. Democracy’s decision to activate that accelerator, instantaneously manufacturing a stable black hole that in its picoseconds of existence stole with it a sizeable chunk of mainland Europe, the devastation whipping all who witnessed it into a frenzy of speculation, the equivalent of ten, maybe twenty million atomic bombs goes the first account of the devastation, a hole visible in the Earth’s crust from our fair Moon, brought many miles closer by the intensity of the black hole. In the panic, as we humans are so apt to do, a knee-jerk reaction from the other eight billion citizens our fair planet led to the launching of a massive nuclear arsenal on both opposing sides.
This is where we now find ourselves, on the cusp of extinction, restricted to safe zones, with primary and secondary industries reduce to third world production levels. The children born are murdered on the streets by distant relatives, London is burning, a great fire levelling all in her path, the last great fort of our culture following the glassing of Paris and the decimation of New York, a city on the brink of collapse, a civilisation on the brink of extinction, and we, here, at The Day, bringing you daily coverage of our one last hurrah, the New Year to end all New Years, on the banks of the Thames. Be there to witness the final celebrations of humankind.
Festive borders, clipart green holly, red berries smudge pulp quality paper with pink rain stain. It makes oblique sense. Flicks the pages, every one an essay, every one an advertisement, statistical examinations of fabricated rising fertility copulates purchase of prophylactics, where men, empty as magic top hats, follow white rabbits, dog-eared essays on the rise of capitalism in the east, a silent communism, encouraging greed and selfishness, castration and altruism, pigs. Bob lights some touch paper.
‘I write for that,’ said Barry. ‘Well, used to.’
‘They’re just adverts.’
‘Yeah, I know. Adverts for things you can’t even buy. There’s no product left, but someone’s got to write about them.’
‘Heard you had problems with a midget,’ says the spiv.
‘Killer midget,’ said Dylan.
‘He does the rounds. Pies. Mechanical Turk guy, never explained to me who he was by anyone, got this thing, pies, this thing right, comes down over my head like that and into my eyes, big laser beams, tells me everything, except that Mechanical Turk guy. Can tell you something about that bomb blowing up your place though. Everyone’s dead, saw it on my way here, that guy over there got a face like a hot cross bun, he in there too, can’t believe three of you got out alive, well, pies, two and a half. Like laser beams, like black fists. Now, I can tell you some things for free and then you pay and then I go away and then, pies, I come back and tell you some more, and the whole arrangement repeats upon itself until we’re all happy. Very happy. First thing I’ll tell you is that woman who stole your guitar and your money is well known, especially amonst the aristocratic types, the ones who’ve got enough money to buy the belief that they still live in a proper city. I can also tell you that she has been on the lookout, and has been looking on the lookout, amongst those that matter, for the guitar amongst these artistocratic types on behalf of a buyer, a buyer who as yet I am totally unsure of but who, apparently, is well known. I can be told of their well knownness, pies, and then I must expel, from the place where I have been told, and the rest is up to me. I can also tell you this lady has been purchasing, for pie sums of money, a collection of art in the value of well over a hundred million pounds, adjusted for deflation. Now, allow you to be pre-empted by me, when I suggest that you will now ask for the purchase price of this woman’s whereabouts.’
‘Of course.’
‘Excellent. The bid?’
‘Shall we sit?’ said Dylan.
‘We shall,’ said the spiv.
Pretenders gather around oppositions, circular fatigue introducing tension, dismissed with barman sighing, a portentous mitigation of monumental sums of money altering hands, changing owners, new paper and old debt.
Dylan was quick off the draw. ‘The inverse square law dictates an imbalance in both start point and destination between Lambeth North and Surrey Quays. Hence in an equation where Bermondsey is equal to the route of St. John’s Wood and a Shadwell, it must be taken that Aldgate left open would leave Bermondsey in for a good Wapping.’
‘Pies, pies, you play often?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘The song of the Gospel Oak, heard only when crossing the Stonebridge Park, plucking Highbury from the low-slung Shepherd’s Bush, yes, pies, to be understood only when Sloane Square, root of the Chorleywood. Split Elephant & Castle to explain a New Cross through East Acton Monument.’
‘What’s going on?’ Bob cranes to Barry, a light fragrance of burnt body fat rinsing inner nostril, inducing mucus gland hyperactivity.
‘It’s called Maida Vale. It’s a betting game. Invented by old cancer-ridden men lacking proper cash. Decided to play a game to decide how much they would bet if they had anything to bid with. It was after the whole no-money-for-the-over-fifties movement, the one where they burnt all the cash. You remember that don’t you?’
‘What’s cash?’
‘…Money. Anyway, that’s the game.’
‘How do you play?’
‘No clue. Something to do with an underground train system they used to have. Remember that old boarded up building we walked by? That used to go underground to trains, would take you all over London.’
‘Sounds useful.’
‘It was until someone irradiated it.’
‘What are the rules?’
‘There are none, that much I do know. Game play is dictated by rhythm, style, and acceptability of causation. You can say anything you like as long as it sounds right. There is no winner, only a loser. The loser accepts defeat by handshake when the opposing player includes the words Maida Vale in their offence.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘It’s a game of honour. Play it with the right people, and they will know when they’re beaten. Besides, the game is only ever played to decide on the bet, or, in this case, the bid. Dylan is playing to save as much cash – money – as he can. If he wins, the other man will reduce his asking price by a pre-determined amount, if he loses, the sum is addenda to the fee. Whichever way it goes, we get our woman found. This is just for honour.’
‘Too much trouble for me.’
Clocks became singularities, banana time curving back on itself, tired second hands pausing for interminable convalescence atop the hour, minutes long-fingered mutations into old codgers popping open pocket watches whilst black holes stole swan-white hankies askance and trundled off into the Thames barrier sunset, twiddling synchronicity as they go. Names, names, names: Croxley, Dollis Hill, Dalston Kingsland, Snaresbroke, Pudding Mill Lane, Tooting Bec, Perivale, each a dead movie star, spiv deep-set wrinkle head, Dylan’s turban balancing like a mattress on a bottle of wine. On the table drinks do ballet and tapping fingers grow cobwebs, night sky turns to half-dawn, caught like Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night, two men talking of Old Streets and Banks. Someone caught on something called a district line and the train seemed to stall.
‘Hmm, stalemate,’ says the spiv.
‘A continuation. Brook the Northern Line and call in the Bakerloo brigade.’
‘Dylan, you’re a brave fool, a court jester. I am on the crosswalk between the Circle and the Central Line, I have Marble Arch’d you and now, like a child, you are crawling towards me with pathetic clause. Forgive me as I cough, pies. Continuation is reliant on a substantial amendment of the asking price.’
‘Done.’
‘You have not heard my terms.’
‘I don’t care. Done.’
‘Dylan, don’t be stupid,’ said Mindy.
‘I think it a marvellous idea. Think of the profit!’ said Franklin.
‘Mind, I know what I’m doing,’ said Dylan.
‘You never do,’ Mindy retorts, ‘always barging in, having to win.’
She mopes at Bob, like she’s in the love or whatever, and he mopes back and wants to shout, “Yes, I never want to win, I love you, we are one and the same and I should climb on top of you right now and make sweet love to you,” amongst a thousand other gurning clichés, he spies an imaginative scenario, necking her as she fumbles for purchase on the table, glasses smashing on the floor, and he stands watching the game nursing a semi as Barry threatens to pass out once more after a single shot of gin.
‘Hanger Lane presents the illusion of Angel floating above Golders Green, the very notion being Barking, a dog fond of East Ham smoked over Oakwood. Lit by the Hackney Wick, the Arsenal fires Cannon Street after Cannon Street through the Tower Gateway and hits Theydon Bois, killing him instantly.’ The spiv leans, confident. ‘Maida Vale in two.’
‘You have to move now,’ said Mindy.
‘I know, I know,’ said Dylan.
‘You have ten seconds thinking time remaining,’ says the spiv, diligent pocket watching.
Dylan’s countenance becomes one of a soldier tortured by pickle inhalation. Combination locks align and a golden suitcase opens to reveal an ingot manufactured by those present in Raphael’s The School of Athens. My, crippling inspiration suffocates him, interjecting the moment of defeat:
‘The murder of Theydon Bois at the hands of the Prince Regent leads Royal Albert to Cyprus, all on one line in one line, over a Redbridge to a Hornchurch, where Victoria waits with the Royal Oak. It is here, overlooking the Parsons Green, in the face of Royal Albert’s death, that Victoria Maida Vale to spite her face in the blinding light of grief.’
Spiv man shakes his head and shakes hands with the opposition. ‘Pies, pies, a quite astonishing turnaround there. The implications of your tactics are far reaching. I must analyse this. One day is all I need and you shall have your mystery lady. Meet me in Westminster Abbey exactly twenty-four hours from now and I will have your answer… for half price. Adieu.’
‘Did we win? Did we?’ Franklin vibrates.
‘We won,’ said Mindy. ‘No gunfight this time.’
Chapter 8
The scene of an underground chase
Post-shootout, St. Paul’s a golem mollusc, a hermit without a crab, the assailed conquered electromagnetism and punished communication lines. From London a signal coppered to Dover, wherein a ramshackle shack a cobbled old man depressed a Victorian button, transporting the signal twixt sea and bed, surfacing in Calais, shiny fibre optics, final collaborative effort of the European Union preceding its dissolvement, bouncing toward Hungary at light speed, there capturing tram wheel wires to a non-descript Mosque, a church by any other name.
COME QUICKLY, THINGS ARE FUCKED.
So they did. Boarding a light aircraft, retracing steps to burning steps of a once grand cathedral, welcomed by men with bullet holes in their heads, castrated women and tortured fat people. A rat-faced man cocks a shotgun, informs movement, leading the trio of carefully nurtured assassins by the hand through the streets of London, expounding the cathartic bliss of revenge, his dead fat electric wife, a pound of her flesh swinging around his neck on a D-lock, love handle memento, this tryst of assailants, mercenaries for the beating heart of a man called Bob.
The spiv had been gone not ten minutes when the first hand grenade dropped through the window. Senses barely regained from previous exposure to bomb-type experiences, Bob was somewhat shocked, quite in the electrical sense if such things are believed to compound through the vexations of vicissitudes, to find himself once more on the floor, view obscured by Mindy’s hair. The situation was bleak, but her hair smelt fresh and… vermouth. Gorgeous.
Dylan registered a formidable hand cannon from some bodily crevice, unloading six fresh ones into the boldest of the three ambushers. Behind the two remaining pins was the ball, a rat-faced cock with slurry skin and vendetta plaster. Bob wondered if, in some cosmic collision of misfortitude, this rodent was in possession of his guitar. Money was merely a collectible in this city, a factoid lost on every occupant. It was paper expansion upon ego, a way to fatten the pockets to hide how small one’s member had become, how hairy the armpits were hidden behind swollen handbags. It was sad that this man wanted him dead over cash. Bob doubted the validity of rat man’s love. Faintly pathetic to pursue extermination in lieu of lack of love from the gluttonous beast whose greed had destroyed.
The barman plus several were dead, anonymous casualties fallen before twilight air. Sprint into street, metal slugs zipping through air, accumulating ice fragments, killer hail. Barry, struggling for depth perception, loses footing on boggy curb and falls, rupturing blood vessels in his good eye. Only Bob halts, combs backward, drags forward, some weird hairdo in the aggressive zephyr, Dylan and Mindy turn-taking at removing planks barring the way into the abandonment of Earl’s Court tube station, all peeling paint and hidden dirt that festers under the fingernails until your hands are as dirty as toilet seats. Within exhales the smell of old trains and grandfathers, all dust and forgetfulness, moonlight dappling shadows of escaping dust, trapped like prisoners for over fifty years.
‘Wait, thith plath ith radioactive,’ said Barry, nursing cut swollen tongue.
‘It’s a long or short death. Take your pick,’ said Mindy, climbing inside.
‘Does anyone have a torch?’ said Franklin, trembling.
‘I got one right here,’ said Dylan, holding air. ‘Get in there.’
‘But I’m scared!’ said Franklin, vanishing into dark.
‘You came back for this cunt?’ said Dylan.
‘He looked after me,’ said Bob.
‘He can’t even look after himself.’
Half-tripping down rigor mortis escalators, like demented eyeless Daddy Long-Legs’, coughing phlegm and bile out of dust-ridden lungs, walking like chimney sweeps with nails in their feet.
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Saturday 26 January, 2008 