Conrad Williams's Blog, page 8

Advent Stories #16

SLITTEN GORGE

Ellis dreamt that night of the forest. He was treading through it in darkness, subtly aware of the conifers and the heather. His feet knew this territory well and he moved quickly, ignoring the sounds of the wildlife: the nightjar, the siskins, the snipes. He was trying to find something, or someone, but no matter how close he felt he was to capturing his quarry, some caprice of the dream would send it far away again. It made a creaking sound, this subject he tracked. Like old leather being twisted against itself, or of floorboards under continual stress. Now and again he thought he caught a glimpse of part of it through the crenellations of the ferns, or the splintered bole of a tree felled by lightning. But before his mind could apply itself to finishing off the picture, the scenery had moved and he was as blind as before.

He woke up, hungry, frustrated and afraid. It was that soft, uncertain time of morning when night and day argue over their own borders. Pale light hung in the sky like something too damp to ignite properly. Although it was late June, summer had failed to establish itself. The days were often a wash out, the nights cold enough for woollens. He sat trembling on the edge of his bed, blankets curled around his shoulders. The shower awaited him like torture. There had been no hot water in his flat for six days. At least after a cold wash his clothes felt so much warmer on his body. The colder you got, the less you felt it. The dead don’t shiver.

Through a window looking out on to the communal garden, he watched as a female blackbird chirped incessantly, playing a wild hopscotch upon the cracked flagstones of the porch, pausing a moment to shit what looked like the kind of electric white found only on artists’ palettes. He had never felt easy around birds since he read about how closely related they were to dinosaurs. He felt uncomfortable about their lack of weight, their thin, hollow bones. He disliked the way they moved so nervously, so spastically. How cold and alien their eyes. They seemed propelled by nothing more than instinct, and that vexed him, in a vague way that made him feel queasy.

His unease followed him to the kitchen where, despite his hunger, he was unable to eat one spoonful of the cereal he prepared for himself. Barely a sip of coffee made it past his lips without causing him to retch. He couldn’t remember the last meal he had consumed, yet he must have eaten within the last few days. Had he not, he wouldn’t have had the strength to turn the taps in the bathroom. He dressed without thinking, grateful for a job that didn’t demand a suit and tie. Then he went out, trying to avoid the bookcases lining the walls as he approached the door. But, as always, he had to look. The narrow space between them forced him to leave his flat sideways. The spines demanded his attention.

Birds of the Welsh Coast, The Red Kite in Wales, The Raptors of Europe and the Middle East, Birding in Snohomish County, Skuas and Jaegers, Chickadees, Tits, Nuthatches and Treecreepers.

There were so many books. He felt ill thinking how many he had, how much money he had spent on them. On the drive to work he wondered again if he might not be mad. That was the thing about insanity. You didn’t notice it yourself, only the people closest to you grew aware. But there was nobody who shared his life from day to day. What did being mad mean? Storing your own faeces? Posting letters to people long dead? Collecting books about birds when they scared you to the core? But you had to know about them, you had to have the knowledge. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.

At the gas works, he checked in with Reynolds, the site foreman, and Hinchcliff, the independent chemist who was to be attached to the demolition crew for as long as it took for the defunct purifying tanks to be dismantled. Ellis pulled on his overalls and checked the air line on his breathing apparatus. It was hot work, and while he was standing in the reinforced concrete tanks removing the spent iron oxide, he was grateful that summer was in abeyance. Hinchcliff had explained at the outset that six thousand tonnes of toxic waste had once filled these tanks – now transported to a secret, secure landfill site in north Wales – and the residue they were cleaning away might contain upwards of eight per cent cyanide.

At times within his mask, his breath amplified and alien to him, he imagined pulling off his protective headgear and sucking in a single, pure lungful of death.

*

—Death is painless, she said.

—Don’t talk wet, I said. —I seen them pictures of German tanks on fire, and the driver trying to get out, but his foot was stuck, or shot off or melted into the metal or whatever. He wasn’t whistling when he went, I can tell you.

—Well, I think it’s painless. The actual moment of it. Maybe not the lead up, but the moment you bow out? The body sheds all of its endorphins. Massive headrush. Absolute pleasure.

I laughed. She had this way of talking sometimes that was like poetry. Funny poetry. She had a killer line, Karen. It didn’t work with everyone, but she hit my spot and that was all I was bothered about.

She said —You never see birds dead, do you?

—Tell my mum that, next time she nips into the village for a chicken.

She rolled her eyes, thumped me. She was trying to get the ringpull off a can of cider but it was rusted or something, and wouldn’t budge. —I don’t mean like that. I mean you never see birds lying about on the road, dead.

—I suppose you’re right, I said. I was getting bored of this talk. I wanted some of that cider in me before I had to get back home for tea. The gorge rose up around us like a big green throat. I loved it down here. It was only just behind the row of shops on the main street in Lymm village, but it could have been some Amazonian ravine. It had everything, this place. Cool shadows. A heron that came to fish in the weir. Secrecy. You never had any grown-ups come down this way, either because it was quicker to take the village path, or they were scared of us yoofs, or they didn’t even know it was here, I don’t know. I snatched the can off her and used my penknife to ease the ringpull off. I had a big drink and passed it back, offering her a huge belch to accompany the ceremony. Karen drank too, tilting her head way back. Her shape changed. I found myself staring at her.

She said — Can you smell me? I’m bleeding.

*

Ellis did not join the others for a drink after the shift was completed. He drove through the centre of Warrington, trying to avoid the construction crews that were tearing through the heart of the town, slotting new department stores into the gaps left by failed developments. It all seemed like an affront to the faces of the old shops that clung jealously to the main streets. There was always a new generation of town planner, no doubt living far away from the place being redesigned, eager to leave a mark in history. Ellis was happy to leave it behind, but even though he pushed the Jeep hard until the soulless urban spread became rural patchwork, he did not find himself relaxing. So much green was a shock to him, even though he made this journey every weekend. It was as pervasive, as smothering as the threat of poison gas. But he could not understand how staying at home in his cloying flat could be any better for him. He turned on some loud music, but nothing could reclaim him from the slow panic filling his chest. It became so bad he had to pull over shortly after he passed the Ruthin signpost on the A494. His breath seemed to fail in his chest; he could not expel it properly. He felt as though he were recycling something old and stale, that any hope he had for a fresh start was stillborn.

Crumpled in his pocket, the letter from Pippa postmarked a few days previously helped him to refocus. Cav reckons he saw a lynx coming down across the scarp near the caravan late last night. He’d had a few though. Ha ha. The only lynx he’s seen lately is in the can he sprays his armpits with.

There had been several lynx sightings reported in the Clocaenog forest over the years. It was also one of the last bastions of the red squirrel. There were other animals too that benefited from the area, forty square miles or so of natural, native woodland. Deer, black grouse, pine martins, Welsh mountain ponies, polecats. Others that he could not bring himself to think about. But having begun a list that he daren’t finish drew the fear from the shadows into the real meat of him. It lay against his skin like sweat. He put the letter back in his pocket and felt his hunger deepen. He scrutinised his eyes in the rear view mirror while his hands played against the corrugation of his ribs. His breathing steadied. The sky over Wales was bruising, as if siphoning the resentment from the earth and describing its colour. A flurry of birds blurred the edge of his vision and were gone before he’d had chance to identify them. He started the engine and got back on the road. His hunger was so keen it wouldn’t allow him to envisage any kind of meal that might assuage it.

*

The caravan was empty when he arrived, just under half an hour later. Pippa and Cavan must have gone to the local pub, a mile or so further along the main road. He felt slighted, as if his arrival was nothing for them to get worked up about. Maybe it wasn’t. But they were the nearest he had to friends and it pricked him that they hadn’t waited; they could all be sinking pints now. What did they want to talk about that was so important it couldn’t wait? He thought about catching them up, but he didn’t want to be seen behaving like an eager puppy. He could give as good as he got, they’d see.

Quickly, he unpacked – he hadn’t brought much, just a change of clothes and a couple of books, his old Nikon, a long lens and some fast film, a pair of binoculars – and checked the small cupboards, but every tin he picked up made his stomach roll. He drank some water and paused, bent over the sink, waiting for it to come back with interest, but this time it didn’t. He washed his face, and tried to swab the angry red nubs on his shoulder blades with cotton balls soaked in witch hazel; he would have to have a word with Reynolds about the ill-fitting protective gear they were issued with. He switched on the radio and settled down with one of the guide books from his holdall.

Ellis saw straight away, from the uneven blocking of its pages, that the book had been damaged. He turned to the section that had been torn out, a few pages between the Orioles and the Corvidae. It was not immediately clear from the contents list which birds had been removed; only a general heading – Family and Species Descriptions – was provided. He had to trawl through the weighty index before he spotted the relevant page numbers. And then he closed the book carefully, almost reverentially, and placed it back in his bag, deep enough so that he could not see its cover.

Someone was trying to tell him something. He thought about who might have had access to his bag, his books, but nobody ever visited him at his flat. He had ignored the opportunities to stop at service stations along the way; he shied away from hitchhikers. He stared at the bag as if it alone was responsible for the vandalism. He would mention it to Cavan and Pip when he saw them; they were the only ones who knew of his passion, and his fear. Yet even as he gave credence to his suspicion, he was questioning it. They respected his love of books, and shared it to some extent. He had seen them handling volumes in the secondhand bookshops they occasionally visited, and approved of the care they displayed. Cavan had even warmed up a brand new hardback by gently opening the book at various points to prevent the kind of immediate stresses that can damage the spine.

Ellis tried to read about the grasshopper warbler but hunger worked on the words, sucking them back into the cream paper. Music was of some comfort now as he lay back on his bunk, but he found before too long that it distracted him as he strained for the sound of his friends returning. He turned the radio down to a level where there was really no point in leaving it on, but it meant the illusion of company remained. Wildlife inched around the caravan, its sound as natural as weather: the miniature crash of mammals in bushes, things taking flight, or coming home to roost. Something cried out, as he trembled at sleep’s door. He tried to identify it but it was beyond him. For a dreadful second before he sank, he thought its author must be human. The screams went with him, lifting out of the confusion to find a clarity in the night of his own mind. Fear puddled out of Ellis. He was weak. The caravan had melted away and he was in a clearing with trees rearing up before him as if startled. He felt light, weightless. The pain in his shoulder blades was gone, he felt free and easy there, somehow disburdened; his hunger had been sated. The screams were coming from his own throat, a dry, desperate sound that seemed to make the uppermost leaves shiver. Something lay ahead of him, beyond that line of trees. Something waited.

*

Ellis showered, wincing as he knocked his sore back against the walls of the tiny plastic cubicle. He wondered if his anger at not being woken by his friends when they had returned from the pub was misplaced. Was it fair that he should react to them for what, on their part, must have been an act of charity? God knew he needed his sleep. But he craved some company too. Already the weekend seemed chewed away. Tomorrow he would have to return to Warrington and the skeleton of the gas works. Nevertheless, pride would not allow him to go to them now. He crashed around the kitchen preparing a phantom breakfast, and noisily exited. He wondered if Pippa and Cavan were fucking, and why it didn’t bother him if they were. Hunger prevented him from remembering if he and Pip had ever been involved – he dimly recalled a long embrace, hair in his face, a heartbeat within her warm breast filling his hands – but it might have been several lifetimes ago. A different woman, even.

Good luck to them, he thought, glancing once at the curtained window of the bedroom. This weekend was about fauna, not fornication. He laughed bitterly, a blast of air through gritted teeth, and plunged into the forest.

*

The light changed down here. It became green. I couldn’t back that kind of claim up in the physics lab at school, but I swear that was how it looked to me. It was dappled light, and it lay around your feet like coins furred with verdigris. The air was different too. It stuck in your chest, but in a good way. It was as if it were heavier air, cleaner, and your lungs didn’t want to give it up. The spaces beneath the trees seemed to fizz with darkness; you could see it moving around, and I was sure that if the trees were to suddenly leap away, exposing it all to hard sunshine, it would remain, squat and earthy, like the ghost of a giant toad.

The red in the green, the red against the milky square of Karen’s exposed thigh, was some contrast.

— Fucking hell, I said. — Doesn’t it hurt?

— No, she replied. — Some people get period pains but I’ve had none of that.

— What does it feel like? Is it like having a nose bleed? Do you feel it trickling out of you?

— Don’t be a mentoid. There’s hardly any flow. Enough for a dessertspoon, my mum says.

— Mmm, yum. Raspberry Angel Delight. So there’s no danger you’ll bleed to death?

— The worst case scenario is that I’ll leave a tammy up there, forget it and die from TSS.

— TSS?

— Toxic Shock Syndrome. Not a nice way to go.

— Well no, but, as you said, death’s a top pastime.

— I didn’t say that. I don’t have a death wish.

— Me and you, suicide pact? What do you say?

— I say have some Angel Delight.

And so on. We spent all summer like this, every summer I can remember, ribbing and teasing and flirting, although we didn’t know it, couldn’t have put that word to it at the time. But that day was different. Suddenly I was aware of Karen as being someone with an inside as well as an outside. She was a girl-shaped blood bag, barely contained. Walking home for tea after that weird, green-red evening, I couldn’t pass anybody by without thinking of them as taut balloons, ready to explode. Something had turned, maybe just the world, maybe some switch in my mind that had never been touched before, but things were irrevocably new now, and I couldn’t understand why.

That night, I thought of Karen, the way she had filled out as she stretched, her body dipping and curving. I thought too of that slick of blood on her thigh, her fingers smearing it to show me how dense it was, and the way her knickers were eased to one side, the material tight against her bottom. I ejaculated in my sleep – my first wet dream – and I woke to feel my own thighs sticky and warm, and things, I felt, were set now. My life had been propelled in one direction. One only. There was to be no divergence. No turning back.

*

He lost all sense of who he was after a while. He kept thinking about his name, Ryan Ellis, how ridiculous it sounded the more he repeated it to himself. The sun’s intensity was lost beneath the tightly meshed canopy. It might have started raining; it would be hours before any of the water broke through. He felt protected. He felt utterly at home. In this bubble he slowly became more than he believed he was, an incremental adding or improvement. Doing physical activity in such raw surroundings pumped you full of hormones. It created a sense of the self as immortal. He felt he could achieve anything. It was seductive to deem this euphoria a result of the fresh air, or the overload of natural green, or the plain, animal sounds concerned with territory or sex. He felt a part of it, his reptilian brain itching with lost or distant connections. He was a member of that natural order, one of billions of everyday miracles. The knowledge that his existence was a fluke, the odds stacked heavily against him, was an inspiring and exhilarating epiphany. He mattered, in his own small way, and what he brought to the proceedings was as relevant as that from anybody else. He was real, and his name was something like rya nellis.

The trees seemed to solidify ahead, yet whenever he reached a point where they must crowd him out, there was the same strange sense of space. A visual anomaly, he thought, but once he’d witnessed it, it was difficult to shake off quite so easily. The ground underfoot was becoming more spongy. He guessed there must be some kind of stream, or that the water table passed close to the surface here. Beyond that thick mesh of shrubs and branches, Ellis thought he saw movement. It was desperate, trapped movement, the spasm of something that knows death might be the only release it will see. He wondered if a deer had been caught in a poacher’s trap, perhaps, or a person, shocked to silence by the pain and the outrage. He fought through the weave but the clearing beyond it moved only with occasional ferns or tall grasses. Dizziness piled through his head, as if someone were bending his mind. He saw a spiral of patterns: the trees, the star-shaped tunnel of sky above them, the ground as it met him coming the other way. He tried to get up but the vertigo relocated itself each time. After three attempts he gave up and let himself be cradled by the earth. The cool, cushioning moss and the comfort of a deep blue sky fringed with cloud helped to right his thoughts. He thought of the hide at Foel Frech where he had observed birds in the past. He had seen an owl take a grasshopper warbler in mid-air there last December. He remembered the sudden release of the smaller bird’s cloaca as the talons raked through its body. Blood was a black rip in the silver sky. It had dropped like something solid, and he had exited the hide, convinced the blood had frozen as it fell to the ground. He had failed to find the blood, but had searched for it until the light diminished and the other birdwatchers had gone home. He found something else that night, though. He was about to give up, feeling foolish at his mad conviction, and had turned at just the moment that the moon eased out from behind a bank of high cloud.

Something had gleamed.

He closed his eyes now, and remembered the fragility, the lightness of the skull. It was like holding folded paper, like holding nothing at all. Every shred of flesh had been picked clean from the boss, the orbits, the maxilla: the bird grinned at him, the shadows of its ghost eyes so black it was if the memory of blood and the method of killing was still fresh within it. The beak, the sharpness of it, the colour of ash, emerging from the bone like a creeping stain. It was its own whetstone. The shredding of bodies, the atrocities it had committed. How many? So much blood had gushed through those calcium chambers that the bone itself was tinged mahogany.

He still had it, that skull, secreted away in a little wooden box at the back of a drawer. Sometimes at night, when loneliness curled itself around his shoulders, he took it out of its box and inhaled whatever breath lingered in the fossae of its nasal cavities. He had never believed that something so dead could smell so alive.

*

He caught sight of his eyes in the mirror when he returned. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but it was late, it was dark all over the sky, no pallid edges to suggest that the evening had just left or that dawn was close. For a moment he believed his eyes contained some inner luminescence, as if the humours of his eye had ignited like paraffin. They reflected orange; he resembled something startled, something unnatural. An image came to him, of his body pushed into clothes and then into a metal box. Keys turning, an engine leaping into life. At the end of that routine was another called work. Another set of clothes. Another metal box. The sweat and steam and stink of decayed tanks. Chemical salt extruding through concrete. The heat of it through his protective suit. It all seemed a dream, an illusion. He looked down at his naked body, bathed in a diffuse glow from the moon. His life was so many layers of the same thing but at this moment, his blood up, he couldn’t recognise who he was or what he did. There didn’t seem to be any room for ritual. Instinct crowded him like a smell you couldn’t escape from. All he wanted to do was run through the tall grass and feel the cold mud suck at his feet. He sensed the warm bodies in the undergrowth frozen at his approach, watching him go by with perfectly round eyes, perfectly black. Heartbeats filled the air like rain.

He slept hard and deep and wakened to a light drizzle. He moved through it to the Jeep, feeling it misting his skin. He sat in the driver’s seat waiting for knowledge. Eventually it came to him and he turned the key, pushed the gearstick to D.

He didn’t remember the journey back. Too often his eyes strayed to the rearview mirror; the forest filled it all the way home.

*

In the gorge. She showed me how dark the blood was as she poured it from the warm body.

— Venal blood, she said. It’s almost the colour of chocolate.

The wood pigeon had been trapped in the crook of a tree, its mangled foot – injured in some previous accident – stuck fast in the fork of a branch. The harder the bird fought to get away, the more it twisted its leg into the crevice. By the time we got to it, following the sounds of flapping, the strangled sob that sounded almost human, it had broken the leg so badly that it was close to wrenching it off completely. A nictitating membrane was a momentary film of milk across the brilliant black bead of its eye. Nothing could be read in that speck. It looked the same alive as it would dead. Black, bleak code filing through the lens one way or the other.

Karen gently pulled the bird free and, holding it upside down, threaded its thin neck through her fingers, pulled and twisted it away from her body. The sound of bones powdering drew my skin into pimples. She coughed and spat, wiped her lips, the dead bird hanging limp from her fingers like a thin bag. Her eyes were bright, filled with a fluke light that had snaked its way through the green and sat fatly in her eyes.

I slept that night and the wood pigeon came back to life, spreading its wings. The pattern of Karen’s irises was woven into the soft grey span. The bird, stretching out against the sky, was more like Karen than its own species. It opened its beak to sing and blood drizzled from it, freezing in the air like a necklace of rubies that has been snapped.

I found myself back on New Road and I couldn’t remember how I had got there. Karen had kissed me. Her tongue had moved against my own, her eyes open, locked with mine. We didn’t hold each other. The bird hung between us, emptying itself on to my shoes. My hands were similarly useless, growing cold as she moved her face into me. I tasted blood in her mouth. I felt the dark at the very centre of her eyes seeping out to join with the shadows of the gorge.

I remember walking home, having to look back every few steps because I was sure the depths of the gorge were somehow rising, plateauing, sweeping into the streets to pursue me. When I got back I avoided the tea that had been laid out for me and went straight up to the bathroom. I vomited about a gallon of what looked like mulligatawny soup into the toilet. The smell and taste of copper was all over the place. She was in my mouth, she was in the crevices of my fingerprints though I couldn’t remember touching her. The flutter of her heart in her breast. The fragility of her bones. She unfolded like a flower, like a chick fighting against the membrane of an egg.

The colours around me were dull, despite the sunshine. Life existed in the shadows. Everything you needed was there. True meaning was in the word undergrowth. It was no coincidence.

Her finger in the bird’s crop. The elegance of something without life to prop it up.

*

The heat was so great that small puddles of sweat were forming at the base of his goggles. He had not eaten for so long he felt he was in danger of forgetting how to. His hands held the tools that scraped at the walls of the redundant gas chambers and he could almost believe that the work would never be done, that his hands would never be turned to any other task. His landscapes were filled with tars, nitrates, sludges and phenolics. He lived in toxicity. An hour later and he was pulled away from the face by Hinchcliff, who wanted to give him a spot check. He traipsed back through the rubble, the ceramic retort fragments, the clinker and scurf, broken bricks and ash. Hinchcliff tested his blood and his breathing. They talked about his diet and his exercise regime. Ellis lied steadily. At the end of the shift he bundled his clothes into the sealed laundry skip and took a hot shower. Hinchcliff waved a sensor over him in the changing rooms and he was given a green pass. The day was over. Ellis felt as though he were wearing contact lenses fashioned from lead. He drifted home and the colours of his work followed him down into sleep. Lampblack. The glitter of ash. Spent lime was known as blue billy. Cyanide trembled in the waste as Prussian blue.

The green of Slitten Gorge moved like scarves of weed caught in deep current. Sometimes its colour grew so concentrated that it was indivisible from black. You could survive a nuclear winter down here, she said. This is a place forgotten by time. The mapmakers keep missing it. Die here and your body would turn to dust before you were ever found.

Her thighs in his hands had shivered as he lowered his face to her cunt. She blooded him. Her hands fluttered at the apex of his shoulder blades, the bird turning in her fingers; he felt its dead weight flop against his back. He thought she was losing control, but she was performing magic.

Faces grew out of those forbidden colours. Hard-bitten profiles of his grandfather. He unbuttoned his shirt and swept it open; his skin came away with it. His lungs glowed in the pit of his chest, the pleural cavity thickened by plaques. His grandfather had contracted misothelioma, a rare, insidious cancer, the result of a decade of unprotected demolition. Ellis had seen photographs of him dismantling a factory during a blizzard, but the snow had been black asbestos.

Wanna bang on this? his grandfather had asked him, lying in his hospital bed, pulling off his oxygen mask and offering it to him. The mask had been stippled with bloody sputum. His breath came and went in staggered clouts, like an assault.

He had not seen her again after the end of that sultry, fractious day. He remembered a storm had climbed the sky that night as he lay in bed with his metallic flavours and erased the heat from the land. He didn’t know where she lived, but even if he had he wouldn’t have gone knocking. He understood that there were reasons, there were patterns. The storm might well have swept her away too. He had nothing tangible of hers to fasten her to reality. As the years went by, he started to question his reading of those events, and of the gorge itself.

An instinctive twitch of the steering wheel. He sent the Jeep on to Kingsway. At the swing bridge over the Manchester Ship Canal he turned left and followed the road into Thelwall. Memory scraped at the walls of his mind, trying to make itself known. He remembered these streets, although he hadn’t set foot on them for the best part of two decades. They had cadged drinks off the locals in Grappenhall village. They fished for perch in the Bridgewater canal. They sucked and blew on mouthfuls of hot, greasy chips from the fish bar by the Dog and Dart. Summer nights when the gorge waited for him and the sky contained a pale, soft grain that prevented complete darkness. The sodium lamps bleached the street of colour. Her lips were grey when he kissed her. It’s all right, because so are mine. She tasted of red and green. He dreamed of flight after she left his life.

He parked the Jeep outside the stationer’s at the point where the road sweeps left into Lymm village. Behind the rank of shops – the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, a hair salon, an estate agent – the land forgot how to be level and plunged into black. People had been hurt here over the years. The sound of the weir was a subdued roar. Ellis gathered himself at the rails. He felt his hair move although there was no breeze. It felt as though the gorge was sucking his flavour into its depths, tasting him, remembering him after so long away.

He thought of Clocaenog, and the way its trees seemed compressed. Running through them, he had never tripped or jarred a shoulder against a trunk. He seemed to know their patterns, he understood the physicality of the forest. What he couldn’t work out was why he was running, or what he was running from. He felt the same paradox here; he knew Slitten Gorge as intimately as he knew himself yet he had not been as close as this in twenty years. He had loved this place, but associated it with decay, and an end to things.

He knew he would slip through the gateway and descend those treacherous stone steps furred with moss and moisture, as if they were sweating at their proximity to the place. He gripped the rails more tightly, looking down into the area where he had once observed a heron frozen as it waited for something to swim past. And then he was sinking into the strata of greys and blues and greens, his hands still clenched as if in an attempt to fool himself into thinking he was still at street level.

Someone else had appropriated this sacred space. Beer bottles and polystyrene cartons littered the floor; graffiti referred to Helen smoking cocks, and doing anybody who happened to be here next Monday night. Ellis looked around for something that might bolt him to a sultry evening in 1987, but only the colours remained. He felt the cool air move in his chest and wondered if his grandfather might have benefited from some time down here.

There was a shock of movement in one of the trees. Ellis turned to see a hand snatched up, or snatch itself up, into the higher branches; the leaves in its wake glistened with a colour darker than the shadows within which they shivered. He watched the tree, his heart beating hard, unsure of what he had just witnessed. Kids larking about. Some bruised fibre of memory. He didn’t know. He called out, but nothing responded.

He walked deeper, until the shadow of the slitting mill rose out of the darkness. The sun struggled to illuminate it, the dark ivy and moss growing on its stone absorbing the light. Nails had been produced here, and then the cutting of steel bands for the cooperage in Thelwall during Victorian times. The windows were scarred with dust that no amount of polishing could now hope to remove.

Hunks of Wilmslow sandstone peeked out from the greenery. Ellis pressed himself back against some; it was cold against his palms. She had led him into that place and scratched the end of a nail, a six-inch piece of iron perhaps as old as the village itself, into the hard curves of his shoulder blades.

If you had wings, she said, this is where they’d be.

She withdrew his prick and he felt it both trying to shrivel in the cold and thicken in her tight grasp. He felt his own blood trace lines across his back.

I want to show you blood that isn’t dark. I want to show you blood so bright that it lights up a room.

She had leaned close to him, her thighs bracketing his own. The nail in her fist traced a line along his throat. Fear had him at the point of vomiting, but before he could protest, she slid his penis inside her. Her eyes seemed to reduce somehow, as if she had a contrast button that had been turned right down. She fucked him hard and fast, hard enough that he thought she was going to damage him if he slipped out. Her movements were so violent that he missed the winding up of his orgasm. He was climaxing almost without realising. He cried out and she yelled his name.

Spread your wings, she said, and buried the nail into the side of her own neck.

*

Time jagged around like vicious pieces of broken glass. It was too dangerous to stop and try to pick them up. Ellis was in the Jeep. He might or might not have tried to call Pip and Cavan on his mobile phone. He might or might not have charged the battery before leaving work. He might or might not even own one.

He said, ‘As Ralph Hoffmann suggested, in Birds of the Pacific States, from 1927, “One cannot have too many good bird books.”’ He said it once, maybe one hundred times. By the time the eastern shoulder of the forest was muscling up against his car, it was dark. Breathing was becoming difficult. He thought of himself tearing pages from his books, trying not to focus on the photographs of Lanius excubitor. Death was easy around him. People dropped as if they were born to it. He wished he had been able to help his grandfather to spread his wings.

He found Pip and Cavan an hour later, once the forest had settled coolly in his thoughts. His hunger was something animal in him, turning his pupils black, filling his mouth with juices. Other animals had visited this place, this shrike’s larder, but had been put off by the stink of their survival. He stood before them and flexed his shoulder muscles. Shadows leapt away from them, into the shocked heights of the trees. They were trying to reason with him, clinging on to hope. Ancient nails rammed through their wrists and ankles had become encrusted with blood and sap. Their lips were white and cracked. Ripe tongues swelled in their mouths.

I fly, he might have said. Karen’s blood was orange behind his eyes. He could smell her, like something forged in a foundry.

He reached out and tore off some wet strips of meat for his belly, even though the bodies providing it begged him, haltingly through welling throats, not to. The screaming was so close to that of his own voice, and so loud, that he was not aware until much later of what had arrived, and was amassing on the branches.

Dust and Desire finds favour with The Rap Sheet

The venerable Ali Karim, one of The Rap Sheet‘s writers, has included Dust and Desire in his list of favourite crime fiction for 2015. You can see what else he likes here.

Advent Stories #15

O CARITAS

Monck realised he had been here too long when he glanced down at his hands to find the knuckles turned blue. The flyover fled off to the left and right of him. Everything else was just scenery. An acid blue sky was crocheted with vapour trails. There were half a dozen jets up there right now, scraping the troposphere, edging 600mph while their inhabitants grazed on plastic trays of trans-fats and overcooked starch. The air shimmered with particulates. Blue tremors made the surface of the road uncertain. He stared at his hands, clenching and unclenching them, watching the tendons crawl beneath the skin. He remembered, when he was active in this city, that he had suffered from narcolepsy. He wondered if, now he was back, it would return too. Then he pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket and stared at the name. COLLEEN MALLORY.

He headed east. This section of road between Marylebone and Kings Cross had always been busy, as long as he had lived here, as long as he had been aware of the capital. The buildings that muscled against it were scorched with product: advertisements, tags, fliers, exhaust. Monck moved like something set free from a cage. His lungs burned. What passed for fresh air up top seemed much cleaner than anything he had sampled below stairs for the past five years, although he knew this was not the case. The pollution in Beneothan was oil-based, natural; not this chemical cocktail that twinkled in the lungs for a lifetime.

The tiny screws on his sunglasses were weak; he kept having to press his fingers to the frames to ensure they did not fall off. Midwinter, the sun like a torch fuelled by a failing battery was still strong enough to cause white-out and tears. And he must see; he must not be caught napping.

The city had healed, much better than he had ever imagined it might. Everything seemed sealed, glossy, like scar tissue. The rich had risen. Structured gossamer, the new form of transport among the moneyed, was sailed between buildings hollowed at their summits to receive it. Ground level was becoming ghettoised, a grid of poverty being redrawn in tar and carbon monoxide and soot.

Where is everyone going? Monck thought. The cars ground and bit and squealed around the peeling tarmac, surging along the Euston Road like some Roman army with its shields raised. Fewer people than he remembered were walking, perhaps because of the dangers. As the city grew taller, the light went with it; the depths were gloomy all the time now, lit up only by the ochre stabs of headlights or some reflected glory chicaning down from the heavens. Though he was tempted to stop and stare, Monck kept moving, remembering that he had a job to do.

Despite his years away, and the changes that had occurred, he still loved his city. There was enough of the old face left behind to offer reassurance, comfort even. Occasionally he happened upon ghosts. Bends in the road that he had swept down in a car with a girlfriend. Zones that pricked at him with meaning until he realised that he was standing where a park used to be, where he had read a novel, or eaten a sandwich in the sunshine, or met someone for a chat and an ice cream. The idea of food found a mate in his gut; he was suddenly ravenous. He hurried along a huge street, wishing for some of the old London kebab shops to still be around, but there was nothing but glass and resin and high-tensile steel. There were no doors. No neon. No human buzz. There was no way in.

Skimmers had delivered reports to Beneothan of gangs roaming these streets. There were horror stories connected to the elite in their penthouse acres high in the clouds. They were hiring muscle to rid the streets of old Londoners, the people who had existed here before the cataclysmic earthquake that collapsed forty per cent of the capital. With the streets cleansed, the rich could spread out, move into some of the big piles that sat idle in the suburbs, regain control of the roads and engage with the earth once more, instead of drifting around like chancing spiders. The rich liked their penthouses, but they liked their mobility too. They did not like to feel restricted in any way.

Monck could care less. Silk linings or age-shined viscose; it made no difference to him.

‘In here, quick.’ The voice was panic-scarred, and frothy with nicotine. Monck spun towards it and saw the grey blade of face sink back into the dark like a shark’s fin. Monck remembered when he had teetered on the brink of discovery: his true identity, his connection with the tribe that lived beneath the city, his talent for melting into the scenery. Fear had been behind it all back then; had partially fuelled the epiphanies he experienced. His scare threshold had receded much in the intervening years; when you spent your life scurrying around in true blackness, this twilight, this daylight, was hardly a place for nightmares to exist.

It was Jermyn, one of the Skimmers. He smelled of burnt grease and air fresheners. Monck saw him flaring his nostrils, perhaps in yearning for the underground. ‘Your shift over soon?’ Monck asked him.

‘Another twelve hours. My tripes are sweating, being in this shit pit. I’ll be glad to be back in the soil.’

Monck nodded. ‘Have you an in for me? Is there anything doing, this area?’

‘This used to be Marylebone,’ he said. ‘Very swish. Very Swedish, in its day. Over there, where the road bends off the main drag, Homer Street. There was a very good bar on the corner. Overpriced, but good.’

‘Anything doing?’ Monck pressed. ‘Anyone who’d look good in white?’

‘You think I’m here to grade skirt for you? I’m a waterboatman, Monck. Not a matchmaker. I’m here to make sure Beneothan remains beneath. Unsullied.’

‘I’ll cover for you. Last twelve hours of your shift. Go boating up the Fleet with your sweetheart. I just need a lead.’

‘You’re on,’ Jermyn snapped. ‘This arterial road is cut off at the top by what used to be Edgware Road. It’s grim as graves that way now. There’s a possible breach at the mouth of the old tube station. You have to make sure nothing gets in. I’ve got a few dogs on it at the moment, while I check the other weak point at the corner of Once Upon a Baker Street. Old video shop boarded up and ostensibly sterile. But don’t fall for it. There’s a storage room underneath. Something’s been at the foundations. Anything enters those hotspots means Beneothan is compromised.’

‘What about below stairs?’

‘Facers are working on the inner sanctum as we retreat. Strengthening the important sections to make sure we aren’t pierced, weakening others at strategic zones to ensure major kapow should any spelunkers get too warm.’

‘Do you really sense a threat? Aren’t we beyond that now? We’re burgeoning. Population’s on the rise. Slowly, I admit, but stil… I doubt anyone up here even knows about us any more.’

‘As long as Odessa breathes, there’ll be a garrison at the limits. No harm ever came from being cautious.’

Monck smiled. ‘You say that, but you’re getting chilblains.’

Jermyn touched his hat. ‘When you’re done, you might consider taking a shower before presenting yourself at the alleyways behind what was once Park Lane. The great hotels are all bandaged up like sore fingers, but you’ll find what you need inside them. Go tall. Enjoy the view. There’s nothing happening below the fifteenth floors.’

He was gone, then, as if the shadows had dismantled him. Monck thought he heard something by way of a farewell, but he couldn’t work out what it might have been. It sounded too much like Ivy for it to be anything like a goodbye.

Monck breathed into a stiff bowl made by his fingers, tried to work some feeling back into them. The light, such as it was, was failing, but still it was too painful to remove his sunglasses. As the dogs were on guard at Edgware Road, he decided to check on the video shop first. His mind filled with confetti, he headed east.

*

A darkness in waiting. A darkness with poise. The air here has not changed in half a decade. It sags like the final breath in a dead man’s lungs. A shoal of post lies on the welcome mat. Shelves prop up cinema ghosts. Anime. RomCom. Adult. Faded labels stained with perished Sellotape: Video Box Sets Half Price. Sopranos Season One Five Pounds!!! A different kind of shadow where the cash register stood. A corner of the poster carousel taps gently against its mate, spurred on by a draught, the only sound this space has known until the jemmy splits the halves of the entrance and pops it open.

Monck moves into this, knowing this species of dark as if it were something that might be alive, kept in a vivarium. The rods and cones on his retina spring awake: recognition of a friend. He breathes deeply and tastes air that would have fresh when he too was known to these streets more readily than the tunnels gouged beneath them.

He freezes, his hands behind him, pressed firmly against doors he has closed again. It’s as if no change has occurred. Behind him, cut-up voices in the street. A mish-mash of questions, challenges, rejoinders, but he can’t apportion them to separate mouths:

one seventy/scalpel/over/get that light close in/twenty/fifteen ccs/incision/clamp that/prep/black lung/reinflate/city boy, this is a city boy/bleeder

Street code. Gang slang. A patois of the pavement. He struggles to understand it while his eyes take in the denuded stacks. A few discarded DVD jackets lie on the floor. A price gun. A box that once contained deep fried chicken. The darkness deepens in the south-west corner of the room.

Stairs lead down to a tiny staff area: a sink, a chair, a counter. A box of PG Tips and a bowl of fossilised sugar. Fingers of mould wrap around the edges of a mini fridge. On the wall is a calendar from 1998. A stock room behind this is contains a single, empty pallet in the far corner. It is cool in this room. There is a padlocked fire door. A staff whiteboard bear the words Return stock by April 9th and Jenny says yes to Jake!!! and Someone else get the biscuits this week, please. Monck moves cautiously to the pallet and toes it aside. Here lies the breach, or one of them. A narrow blue-black throat sinking into another place. Top to bottom. Head to toe. Monck ducks to the edge and breathes. There is a smell of home, but of danger too. This tunnel is being used for something other than access. What was Jermyn playing at? Had he not been inside this building? Did he think, just because the main entrance was sealed, that there were no other crevices? He had lived for long enough in the city’s bowels, Monck thought he might have taken on some of the skills of rats by now.

Carefully, with the green stick of chalk he used to indicate area of danger, he ringed the fissure and scratched a line on the wall above it. He made another mark on the wall outside the shop too, after closing the doors.

*

Back along the old Crawford Road. He remembered many of the shops along here, and the people who lived in the flats. There had been a chemist with stained glass windows, a Middle Eastern sandwich shop that advertised FRESHLY SQUIZZED JUICE. A man with dreadlocks in his beard pushed a shopping trolley filled with televisions and cardboard; he drank chocolate milk from a carton and smelled of turpentine and plaster dust. London was coming back into Monck, reanimating him. He was almost running by the time he reached the Westway again. Ahead, the dilapidated entrance to Edgware Road’s Bakerloo line was a riot of broken masonry and lurching, concertina steel. He saw three dogs sitting on the pavement and knew there was something wrong straight away. These were not Beneothan dogs. They were bullets of muscle, all jaw and forward motion: bull mastiffs, bred nasty. They spotted Monck as he was backing away; they tore after him immediately.

Monck hit diamond link and climbed savagely, feeling the snarl of salivating chops at his trouser legs. He swung his leg over and dropped into a basketball court. Painted lines ruptured by tectonic upthrust, the aftershocks of the quake. The mastiffs were trying to chew through the fence and Monck spent a panicked few seconds checking for gaps they might have missed. He ran to the far end of the court and climbed the fence there, then doubled back in a large arc, hoping that he was downwind of the dogs and that their stubborn idiocy would keep them at the fence, waiting for him to return.

Inside the station, he slid over the ticket barriers. The lifts were buckled and powerless. The Beneothan dogs had been strangled, hoisted up on their leashes and left to hang on the exposed strip lighting cables. Monck took the spiral staircase into pitch, his mind thick with foam and bulging eyes. It was as if he could taste the secretions of foreign bodies in the air; feel the heat from their footsteps through the soles of his boots on these cold, stone steps.

These tunnels had not known trains for half a decade. On the southbound platform, Monck found discarded briefcases and handbags, umbrellas and newspapers fluttering in the breezes that funnelled through the underground network. How old was this air? It had no way out. It was being constantly recycled, a stale miasma, a memory. Monck stood and listened to its song, trying to detect something more sinister within it. His mind wandered. He thought of his long dead mother, and of his father, of women he had loved: Nuala, Laura. He had to bite hard against a sudden compulsion to cry. You could not live in Beneothan and entertain thoughts of visiting friends and family. It was too dangerous. It was too uniting. This city beneath the capital was insular, jealous and proud. It was the hypochondriac fearing infection.

From the tracks, a sudden sizzle of intent. A mechanical exhalation. A death rattle snaking its way along the dust-clogged tiles. Monck steeled himself for revelations, but none came. Only half-formed sentences, techno-babble, more of the argot he had eavesdropped at the video shop.

Swab/Clamp/Suture/I need 5 milligrams/

Frustrated by a lack of stimulus, Monck checked the other platform and the staff only zones, before repairing to the spiral staircase. He ascended swiftly, mindful that the mastiffs might return. He chalked lines on the ticket barriers and entrance and left a mark to convey that basic checks had been undertaken, but a more thorough search was needed. How many failed pressure points like this across the city? How many were accidental, unknown? How many had been created by invaders?

The constant burble of traffic on the flyover. The scurry and rush. Where was everyone going? Why was anybody still here?

At a Skimmer node – the private park for residents in what was previously Connaught Square – he passed on the details of his search. It was out of his hands now. The Skimmers would contact the Web, at the heart of Beneothan, and sealing manoeuvres would be coordinated within 24 hours.

‘Jermyn,’ he said, as he was leaving. ‘Have any of you seen Jermyn?’

Goldhawk and Frith shook their heads. Delancey suggested he might be in one of the midway zones – a central tunnel, platform or storage unit – catching up on his sleep before his next shift began.

Monck nodded, unable to shake off doubtful feelings. He hurried into what had once been named Stanhope Place and crossed the old Bayswater Road into Hyde Park.

The sudden vastness screamed into him and he felt afraid for the first time in so many years that it was almost crippling. Tired as he had grown of the enamelled feel of the new buildings, their brutal aloofness, that claustrophobia was preferable to this. He had forgotten about space. He began to sprint, unable to stop himself, like some newborn animal having found its legs. It was directionless, terrifying, thrilling. He ran until he saw a massive blade separating the park, glittering in the moonlight. He tore off his sunglasses, disoriented. Time was important up here. It was something that could be measured. Underground there was just the work and the sleep and the love. The compression of time up here, the compulsion to follow it, to be dictated to by it, reminded him that all those things he enjoyed now, he had to place into little boxes before. Life had been a series of tasks. Shape, format, rules, laws, all had been imposed on him. Time was all of those constrictions, and more. It ate through your mind from birth. Your first kiss was defined by how long you mashed your lips against someone else’s. We were at it all night long. How many years did you devote to the company you worked for? How many birthdays? How many anniversaries? The watch. The clock. The time, sponsored by Accurist.

The blade gleamed, clean and long, like an arrowhead that has fallen free of its spear.

Serpentine. He had boated on this with Laura in a year he couldn’t begin to give a number. They had drunk cappuccini and watched children chase pigeons. Looking back, you forgot about how time controlled you. You could erase it from the scene, but it was always there, tutting at you, pointing a finger at its own face.

He angled across the park, conscious of how conspicuous he was under this brilliant moon. He saw a fire up ahead, and shadows pass in front of it, running fast. He would have to negotiate the broad drag at the west edge – Park Lane as was – before he could search The Dorchester or the Hilton. There were enough distractions. A family had taken refuge in a black cab; the father was jabbing something like a poker out of a hole in one window, trying to ward off the pack that were trying to get at them. Someone ran through the wall of fire and gave the flames a piggy back. A horde took off after the screaming figure, although it was gone before Monck could discern whether a rescue was taking place.

He hurried across the road, dodging overturned vehicles and grinning cracks in the tarmac. A trio of children were sitting by the entrance to The Dorchester, playing with dice, or teeth or pebbles. He slipped past their upturned, hollowed faces and into the hotel lobby. He could hear music. There was a signal of some kind, too. It sounded like the pips of a timecode, or the indecipherable beats that untangle themselves from surges of static on a shortwave radio.

As with everywhere else, the lifts were no longer functional. He put his head down and trotted up the first seven floors before he had to rest. His breath came ragged and hot, deafening him. He crouched in the corner of the stairwell until his lungs had calmed, and then proceeded more carefully, rattled that he should have made himself vulnerable at the end of his search. At the seventeenth floor, he found corridors festooned with crepe decorations, silver and blue balloons, the mineral hit of champagne. At the other end of the building, as he turned a corner, he glimpsed a blur of white, heard the shush of silk rubbing against itself. Music came from an unknown source: it crackled with the warmth of vinyl. Cat Stevens, Sitting.

…if I sleep too long, will I even wake up again…

He pushed a door open and saw a room that could not be there. It contained a pine wardrobe with thin metal handles. Inside, the smell of the wood had been lost to time, and the things that were stored within: magazines and bottles of malt whisky; old sweet tins brimming with photographs; a cardboard box of births and deaths and marriages. A cricket ball. A tin of Kiwi boot polish.

A dressing table against which his mother had died writing a letter. Her perfume. For a moment, in the triptych of mirrors, he thought he saw her. The arm of her bottle green bathrobe swung clear of the door, stiff enough to contain her. He stepped back, his throat constricting. Those photographs. He could remember them without having to look again. Mostly from when he was a baby, a toddler. For some reason, his father stopped taking pictures once he had grown beyond the age of four. Maybe he was too busy. Maybe his camera had broken; they weren’t so easy with money that such luxuries could be replaced. The novelty of children wearing off; but he couldn’t believe that. His childhood had been happy, secure, until the seizure that carried off Mum. Cat Stevens was singing about a boy with a moon and star on his head. If he were to move deeper into the room, he might find his father reading a book about hostas, sipping at his Laphroiag.

A cork popped from a bottle.

‘Colleen?’ he called. He wondered where they had found her, and why they thought he would be a good match for him. Odessa had warned him of the population’s mismatch. Seven men for every one woman. Beneothan would die out within a couple of generations if they did not attract more females.

A door paused in the shutting. He hurried towards it. Inside, the hotel room was a riot of decorations. A partially devoured wedding cake stood on a pedestal. The window gave a view of Hyde Park that made Monck feel dizzy. He had to put his hands flat against the wall; he felt his toes try to dig through the soles of his boots into the carpet.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. She was sitting on a bed large enough for a small family to share. Her face was slashed shut by shadows.

Monck shot a look at her before his gaze was dragged back to the window.

‘Long way up,’ he said.

‘Long way down, too,’ she said.

Spanish guitars were still playing from the hotel room further down the corridor. Cat Stevens sings Latin. He imagined his dad nodding his head to the hand claps, the insistent pulse of the strings. Give me time forever, here in my time.

‘Will you come with me?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been with you all day,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you for as long as it takes.’

Monck watched lights coil around the vast body of the park. Occasional fires burned at its perimeter. Gossamer drifted past the window: a man was pouring wine for two female companions while a Spider steered them towards some penthouse or another.

Colleen approached him, but the shadow would not slip from her features. He smelled apples on her, and her breath was spiced with nothing so exotic, or so intoxicating, as fresh air. It was as if she had drawn a lungful of the winter countryside into her and transported it here to pollution’s carbon-scorched heart. She plucked the piece of paper from his fingers and a shift occurred in that knot of darkness, a stretching, a settling. She was smiling.

‘You need to remind yourself who I am?’ she asked.

‘This is unorthodox, I know,’ Monck said.

‘Well, I’m here, ready. My big day.’

She returned to the bed and sat down, patted the area next to her. He stumbled towards it, certain that his vertigo was going to tilt the room as well as himself, and spill him through the glass. She did not reach for him, nor him her. They sat together like would-be lovers in the presence of a chaperone. His eyes would not grow accustomed to her darkness. But he felt very strongly that he knew her. The way she sat, the way she talked, the way she moved. Her fingers were busy with the paper. She folded it and refolded it. Sometimes it disappeared between her fingers, but then she unfolded, and the square grew. At one point, busy with it again, it fell from her hands. She didn’t pick it up.

‘We ought to go,’ he said. ‘Places like this, they’re vulnerable. Easy for street levellers to come up here.’

She leaned forward. It was only at the last moment, as her lips found his, that he realised she meant to kiss him. He thought she was about to share some grim secret. Shock reeled around his body.

‘Nuala?’ he said. But Nuala was dead. She had burned in a graveyard for trains. Everyone from his past died or faded away. He was like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle whose interlocking parts had become torn off.

When he pulled away, the kiss becoming at once too cloying and too insubstantial, the dress was lying on the bed, old and scarred. The walls of the room were peeling, the window starred with concussions from rocks or metal bars, which lay on the floor before it. Red paint had been sprayed around the walls. Outside, Hyde Park was a mass of smoking bodies, a disaster scene trying to be contained with man-sized pieces of charred tarpaulin.

The static in his head resolved itself into a sequence of beeps, of beats. He looked down at his arm and saw his blood’s motion, synchronous in the raised bulge of a vein. As if he had just drawn his arm clear of water, he saw it gleam, saw the shift of his face reflected in a glint millimetres wide. He was reminded of the Serpentine, but when he lifted his head to search for the water, everything went grey. He turned, his heart thrashing, and knew he had to get out of the hotel. It was a trap of some sort. Jermyn’s shark fin face leered somewhere out there. Monck was on his knees, scrabbling for the door, when his hand brushed against the paper Colleen had been playing with. Its folds seemed unfinished; her name was obscured. Well, part of it. The initial letters of her given and family names were mashed together. As he was cloaked by the strength of his own astonishment, he saw the word: COMA.

*

A tube leading from the cannula sunk deep into the meat of his forearm snaked into the soil. Wires turned the shaved mass of his head into a study of fractures. Trying to move, he noticed he was naked. A monitor beep measured the strength beep of his life and played beep along.

Colleen shifted into his line of sight. He knew it was her because of the smell. He wanted to ask her how she managed that, how she could retain the freshness of the surface after so long in the stale belly of the city.

‘Are you smiling?’ he asked.

‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Don’t speak. I have to give you something.’

‘What?’

He heard rumbles move over his head from left to right, dull, distant, but onerous. Trickles of soil fell from the ceiling. A large bang from somewhere. The room, and Colleen, shivered in his eyes.

‘You shouldn’t have woken up.’

‘What do you mean?’

Other figures crowded around him. He recognised one as Odessa. ‘Put him under, quick,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

He found strength to fight her as she made to release the seal on the anaesthetic. He tore the needle from his arm with his teeth and spat it out. He sat up. The others shifted uneasily, moving away, unsure.

Odessa said, her voice softer now, imploring: ‘Don’t leave us. We’re nothing if you go.’

‘What is happening?’ he asked.

‘We captured you.’

‘I’m with you. There’s no need to hold me prisoner.’

‘We captured your narcoleptic… other. The you that exists when you have an attack, when you sleep.’

Monck tensed himself for another rush at him, but everyone was keeping back. He wished they would attack him; it was something he could at least try to deal with.

‘Why?’ he asked, barely able to summon the breath required by the question.

‘We needed you up there, but we need you here too.’

‘Why?’ he asked again. He felt he might never be able to say anything but.

‘Storage. We’re in trouble. We’re under attack. We need to keep our functioning males safe. We’re building special, sealed hives. We have cryogenic technicians…’ Odessa’s voice petered out.

‘And what about this… other?’

‘Reconnaissance. We could read what was happening up Top without needing to imperil ourselves.’

Monck rubbed his face. ‘I remember a ruined hotel. Colleen was there. Hyde Park was burning.’

Odessa nodded. ‘We know. The city is dying. After the quake, well we hoped it would divert attention. But there were breaches. People came looking. There were deaths. No order after a cataclysmic event. No law to speak of. It was required elsewhere. Scum poured in. We were caught napping. People who lost everything in the trauma up Top found succour in the stores we had built down here. We are being routed and reamed. We are retreating so hard we’re meeting ourselves coming the other way.’

‘I have to go.’

‘No, we’re not finished. We need to find the other breaches. We have to repel and seal.’

‘Get Jermyn to do it. Or one of the other Skimmers.’

‘Jermyn’s dead. They’re all dead.’

‘I have to go. I’m going. I have to see for myself.’

‘Come back, then. Soon,’ Odessa said, and then something else, as she moved out into the tunnels.

He was pulling on his clothes, wiping his needle punctures with sterile tissues, when he realised what she had said.

At least one of you.

*

London was like a model for tectonic realignment, for climate change, for urban terrorism, all rolled into one. Fires and gangs roamed, seeking fuel. Monck noticed his lack of shadow, but it was night; what light there was came as a jittery, uncertain thing. He chided himself for allowing himself to be spooked, and chivvied himself along the old Oxford Street, with glances into the vandalised acres of glass and steel that flanked him, where at least his reflection – a pale craquelure – kept pace.

He approached the Dorchester from the rear, feeling strange at the knowledge that this was his first visit to the hotel, despite what his dreaming self had suggested. He felt light, reduced somehow, and wondered how long he had been lying on the bed. His legs were foal-weak.

He entered via a staff door that linked to the kitchens. The refrigerators had been raided. All of the knives and cleavers had been stolen from the hooks above the work surfaces. Dinner orders were still clipped to a carousel. A waiter’s bow tie hung limply on the back of a tea box filled with mouldering potatoes. He knew that there was no hope for Beneothan. You couldn’t put a finger in every hole; blocking it up only increased the pressure elsewhere. London was too big to police. It had accrued breaches for millennia. It was sieve city. It was groaning with collapse.

Monck methodically checked every corridor off the fire escape as he rose. On some levels he was unable to open the doors because of bodies or barricades. At the seventeenth floor he found cold sterility. Any evidence of the party had been cleared away, or had existed nowhere other than in the crevices of his sleep-brain. All of the rooms were open. All of the rooms were empty. He found the shadow of what might have been a wedding dress across the counterpane of a neatly made bed but when he pressed his fingers against it, shadow was all it was.

He heard something back down the corridor and turned to see a hand slide out of view, leaving a track of black in the wall that its nails had gouged.

He hurried after the figure, Colleen’s name on his lips, gritting his teeth against the feeling of faintness swarming around him. In the stone chasm of the fire escape, he heard hard, fast footsteps ascending. Monck stared at the risers as he pursued, expecting to see craters. Someone crashed through the emergency exit at the top of the hotel. Monck arose into a silent span of stars. Smoke smudged the horizon. London reared away from him, a mandala of fire, a thousand square miles of potential being forged in the flames of creation. It seemed. The truth was more prosaic, more dangerous. Distance did that for you. Whether temporally or physically. It prettified. It defused.

He/Monck said, ‘Long way up.’

Monck/He said, ‘Long way down, too.’

He was sitting on the edge of the world, a figure so utterly dark it was as if it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself. It seemed to tremble, on the verge of sucking itself inside out. It felt strange, saying the things that this narcoshade was saying, yet it didn’t for a second make him feel as though he were being manipulated.

‘I’m tired,’ He/Monck/Monck/He said. ‘I’m so tired.’

There could be no trickery here, no surprise ending. He knew what was coming. So no need to ask the reason they had come up here. No need to ask what kind of future they might share. No more why. No more who. No more where. No more when. The how of it was the easiest part. Monck/He reached out his arms and began to run. Like a mirror made of oil, He/Monck opened up for an embrace. It lasted for as long as it took Monck to wonder if they would create one impact mark on the road, or two.

Advent Stories #14

63˚07’N, 52˚34’W

Stars wheeling at his back, Captain Low comes on like bad weather, like something separated from Nature, a different kind of force, one driven by rum and pain and vengeance. Steel in his teeth. Blood on his hand. His own? He’s not sure. He doesn’t really care. No time to stop and think about injuries, men felled, kills made. Two weeks out of Liverpool on The Pride o’ The Mersey. The stink of gunpowder raking his nostrils, the sour taste of fear in his throat. Madness rising.

Fetter’s in his brain, scouring it out with smoke and shadow like a smithy’s iron. Jacob Fetter, the ocean’s bowel, the bottom-feeder, the shitehole. One month previous, on a rain-sodden November night, some dark harbour south of a moon they couldn’t see, north of wherever, hell most probably, Jake Fetter and his crew slithered in and butchered Captain Low’s men. All good men. All hard, mahogany men, weathertan and muscleknot, able to take their grog, maybe they’d have taken a keelhauling with barely a grunt.

Seven and thirty of us. Now we are but one.

That harbour ground, that battlefield… ice chased off by hot blood, turned to brown syrup by morning. Barrowloads of sawdust wheeled in. The corpses wheeled out, some of them in pieces. Fetter had stolen every man’s tongue, and done for every eye with a wooden fid.

Low had chased Fetter’s shadows from Plymouth to Portugal, from Brest to the Bering Sea. His new crew, a ragbag of scurfy rats handpicked from the dregs of humanity, fallen from a brothel half-cut, eager for work, know his name. Know his past. He has that pull. No strong men left. So he has to invite wraiths on board his ship.

Seven and thirty of us… still we are but one.

The crew talks and he drifts among them, learning, understanding, finding out. First Mate, Mr. Gray, makes his introductions while Low tries – and fails – to avoid the noxious blasts of air that shoot from between his teeth.

‘See Mr Kidney there, Captain, with the ulcerated leg that will not heal? He won’t have it taken off. He might be on his way out but he throws himself into every battle, first man up, first man in, a red flag wrapped around those weeping sores. “Shoot me,” he cries. “Shoot me and have done.” He wants his gold from you for that leg off, see. Amputation means no pay. Anything else, death for example, would be a bonus. This man has a great debt of pain to his past. And mark my words, Captain. He’ll never fall. He’s weak, but he’ll fight till his seams part. That dog’s drenched in bad luck. His leg will rot with him still using it before he gives up the ghost.

‘Mr Tamsin next, Sir, at the quarterdeck, folding the colours. Made of tar and wood and salt. Cut him, he’ll bleed seawater. Been a brother to these waves since he were a nipper. Survived a fall into shark-infested waters, once. Big one bit him in the chest, ripped his breathers open. He was so close to death he could have touched the ragged hem of Its cloak. Came back though, somehow. Came back and now you know whenever he’s near, for there’s the sound of the ocean as he pulls in another breath. Some round here won’t have it. They steer clear of him. Reckon he’s a ghost, or a warning.

‘This is all fascinating, Mr Gray,’ Low says, closing his eyes. ‘All fascinating and of great help to a man who likes a bit of character. But, see, and don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Gray, but, see, only man I care about, asleep, awake, only man I think about is Jacob Fetter.’

And Mr Gray slinks back, bowing his head, as they all do. He knows how they mutter behind his back; the deep corners of the ship’s waist contain a fug of gossip and concern.

He’s obsessed, he is. It’ll be his undoin’. Fetter’s won afore a vengeful blow’s been aimed.

He doesn’t mind the chatter. No crew of his have ever dreamt of mutiny. As long as they keep the decks swabbed, keep their eyes on the horizon and their hearts cold. Low claps his hands. Heads turn. Tired, soulless eyes, dogs’ eyes. Sharks’ eyes.

‘Word has it you lot are worthless,’ Low says. ‘Word has it your best days were ten years back. A shambling crew, you lot, now. Sleepwalking. Readying for your final bed. Well I’m not having any of that. You come work for me, there must be some steel left in your blood. Youth? Muscle? Means nought to me if there’s no fire to fuel it. And I know all about fire. I can see it in you. You might be tired, ready to drop even, but I know rage when I see it. I won’t ask you to do anything I’m not ready to take on myself. I’ll wash with you, eat with you, fight with you. And when we fight… Oh Lord, men. When we fight, it’ll be with the force of the Atlantic at our backs. I promise you ten gold doubloons each and a lifetime of rum, a ship to rival Queen Anne’s Revenge, if you help me run Jacob Fetter to ground. One last, great task. A defining time. History is upon you men, each and every one of you. What say you to that?’

He turns on his heels as the cheers pile against the sails, yet as swiftly as a mask torn from a face, his smile is gone. His heart has a fathomless chill.

*

The water, at night. Might be oil. Might be black ice. Might be blood. A gruel of dreams. A froth of souls, of brave men too afeared of showing the truth of their feelings. Men who died hard and did not cry. Did not scream for their mothers. As you will, Jacob Fetter. As you will.

*

33°09’N, 24°06’W

We hit glass. Sea becalmed. I can see the reflection of the gleam in my eyes when I lean over the side and look into it. I give the order for the powder room to be cleaned and the sails to be taken down for repairs. These men might be damaged, but I’ll not need to talk to them again; they don’t need me telling them where to put their noses when there’s no foam at the bow.

‘Those sails down, Cap’n, there’s going to be a lot of hot necks in an hour or two.’

I stare at the man addressing me. I don’t remember where I dragged this one from. Some cobbled street running with wine and blood in Lisbon? A beach filled with nets and bodies on the toe of Italy? His skin is like stewed tea. His voice marks him out from one of the ports of the south-west of England. Plymouth, perhaps. Or Bristol. His eyes will not fasten on me.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robert, sir. Robert Greenhalgh.’

‘Mr. Greenhalgh, I’m grateful to you for your concern. At midday, the crew can go below decks for two hours. You, on the other hand, will stay here with me, monitoring the weather and watching for raiders. Do you understand?’

‘Clear as this water we’re sitting in, Cap’n,’ he said, though again I couldn’t shake the feeling that his pronunciation of the word was muddied with sarcasm or disdain.

I was about to take my leave of him when he shifted his stance. He squared up to me. I felt the hairs prickling at my neck; my wrist brushed the handle of my cutlass. He was unarmed. He wore a curious smile, though that might in part be helped by the scar that wormed up from his jaw across his left cheek.

‘The men are with you,’ Greehalgh said. ‘For now. But already there’s talk. How’s he know, this Captain Low, where Fetter is? How’s he know which way to turn?’

‘I’m captain of this ship,’ I said. ‘That’s all you need, by way of an answer.’

Greenhalgh closed his eyes deferentially. I was unnerved by the sight of open eyes sinking into their position. A tattoo, not uncommon among pirates. I had seen it before. A reassurance, that they might continue to keep watch, even as they slept. Greenhalgh nodded, backed away.

‘Mr Gray!’ I shouted. I was angered by the nervousness this man had unearthed in my gut. I did not like him. ‘Mr Gray!’

It turned out Greenhalgh was not a direct acquisition of mine. I tried to keep my temper in check as Mr Gray explained how he had come to be on board at the time of our casting off from Liverpool. None of the men knew him. He’d been asleep in the crew’s quarters and gained favour by handing out pieces of dried mango.

‘He sailed with Captain Rainey out of Hull a dozen times,’ said Mr Gray. ‘He’s brought back heads from the Barbary Coast and some say he has a fortune in Chinese silver. He’s an experienced salt. He could be of help to us.’

‘He’s a stowaway,’ I said. I stared at the horizon, flatter than the underside of the rulers I used on my waggoners. I imagined Jacob Fetter out there, smoothing the water with his hands. ‘Watch him.’

*

Do I fear him? I sense him sniffing the waves at some dark prow, all the light from the stars hurtling into his eyes, giving him the vision of angels. And no matter how many miles divide us, he can see me. He can see the loose threads on the scarf at my throat, the beard, the long hair and the tricorn. He can see the tremor in my left hand, where the ligaments and nerves never quite healed after the brawl in Sour Heart’s Hollow. He can see the sweat in every pore. He can see the cloud over my eyes. He can see deep into the chambers of my heart where the blood moves cold and sluggish as slob ice in Antarctica. He sees me better than I see myself.

*

Doldrums.

The turtles we brought on board have all been devoured. We’re having to eat hard tack in the dark of the hold so as not to see the weevils in our food. Mr Tamsin caught an old porpoise. He argued that it wasn’t bad luck because it had risen to the surface to die anyway. He boiled it in the cauldron but it was bad eating. All other attempts at fishing have been in vain.

I cornered Mr Greenhalgh and asked him if he had any of his mango strips left. ‘No sir,’ he said. He offered me a piece of coconut.

‘Quite the larder, aren’t you sir?’ I said.

I challenged him about his illicit boarding of my ship. He apologised fulsomely and said that it had been an ambition of his to sail with me. ‘You are gaining a reputation throughout Europe,’ he said. ‘A fair man, a good Captain. A brother in a fight.’

‘You served under Captain Rainer?’

‘Yes sir. For eight years.’

‘And did you make good hauls in that time?’

‘Yes sir. In 1794 we overwhelmed a crew of seventy-five belonging to The East Wind, a schooner from Baltimore returning from the Orient. Spices. Silks. Ivory. Wine and olive oil. There were twenty of us in Captain Rainer’s sloop.’

‘Red Freedom, no?’

Greenhalgh smiled. ‘Yes sir. You know your history.’

‘I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘And flattered. Where is Captain Rainer now?’

Greenhalgh smiled again. I was irked by it. The man was able to convey his emotions without making them explicit in the things he said. He was patronising me. ‘I can’t tell you that, sir. Captain Rainer swore us all to silence.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s Fetter I’m interested in. No clues there, I expect?’

A shake of his head. ‘The last I heard regarding Captain Fetter, he was alternating between the Mediterranean and the north-west coast of Africa. He works hard, sir.’

I nodded. ‘I work harder.’

I was about to take leave of him when he touched me gently on the elbow. I swallowed the urge to lash out at him.

‘Pardon my tongue, sir. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, nor to sow a seed, but Jacob Fetter captains a warship, the like of which has not been seen since Blackbeard’s day. He has a crew of one hundred and fifty. Young, hungry men. Fit men. You might well be obsessed with catching Fetter’s tail, but I suspect you occupy merely a tiny portion of his brain.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘You’re a memory. Not a concern.’

His heavy-lidded eyes. Eyes on eyes. Scar or no, the maddening suggestion of a smirk at his lips. I leaned in close. ‘Be careful, Mr Greenhalgh. As a stowaway, you’ve contravened the law. And I might, at any moment, decide to punish you for that.’

‘I am here to serve you, sir,’ he said. ‘If I have spoken out of turn, then I apologise. My words, always, are intended as an aid, nothing more.’

I sent him with Mr Horrocks to the cannon. ‘Prepare the ship for battle,’ I told them.

*

End of the fifth day in sleeping water, Captain Low, alone on the poop deck, watching the stars, remembering a day on a bluff overlooking Port Kincaid. His father teaching him how to find the Pole Star. How to navigate across oceans using only those points of light in the sky. They had built a fire together, Low impressing his father with his knowledge of tinder, of siting. He had knelt close to a knot of dry grass, sheep’s wool and down. Breathed gently upon the centre of the heat he had driven into the wood with his whittled stick. The barest tremor from his lips, a ghost’s kiss: the smoke thickened, its core a sudden yolk.

He feels that tremor now. Low opens his eyes to the fingers of air touching his face. The stars in the water turn suddenly indistinct, like chalk marks softened by a thumb.

‘Mr Gray!’ he calls, pulling off his shirt and unlashing the great halyard of the mainsail. ‘All hands on deck!’

*

They left us for dead, and Death had His fill. He took His time and picked the boat clean. But some of us He missed. The ones you’d have thought were first on His list: the crippled, the diseased, they slipped through His fingers. Fetter had six days on us. Six days before we got the sloop repaired and making a wake. We buried many dead. We swabbed the decks of a lot of blood. We put our brothers in the water. We drank ourselves to oblivion singing their names under a storm.

*

48°18’N, 29°47’W

The ship plunges on. The wind in our faces. A mist of spray in the air. Getting colder. The sweat of the lads on the ratlines. The occasional hit of tar, of strong wood, of spanked sails beating out our intent across the sea. Dolphins glint like bodkins sewing our route into the water. Hunger has sharpened our minds. No cloud. No land. Five days adrift, as still as corpses, a long time to lose yourself, to let him get away. But I was on to him. I knew we were heading the right way. North. Always North. He had no other direction in him. I saw his face in the powder of the stars and the strange rash of light in the deeps. Even as my hands and feet grew numb, my breath shocked to white, I could sense how he would feel as I crumbled him under my fingers. There was nothing to him. He was akin to these icebergs muscling up against my ship. He had an intimidating air, but he was drifting. And if I chipped away at him, bit by bit, one day he would collapse, reveal his cold, blue heart.

A noise from up in the nest. All eyes turned to the north-west. From the horizon, after a minute or so, a pale red colour bled into the night.

‘Mr Gray! A change of course if you please. Thirty degrees port.’

The light was dying by the time we were able to identify it. A ship on fire, its bow blasted into burned, black fingers. It was leaning hard on its starboard side, the keel lifting out of the water and all I could think about was an old, diseased whore I had visited in Rangoon when I was a young man, hauling herself out of a stinking bath. I sent out a party of six to investigate, led by Mr Gray.

They returned just after the sun slipped the horizon. Mr Gray was standing at the prow, his hands cupping his mouth. No survivors. No survivors. A report of what he had seen. A prediction for all of us on board The Pride. I don’t know.

All of the heads had been emptied of tongues, their eyes dashed out. I imagined a man in a room unfolding a sopping, crimson handkerchief.

*

In the dark and the rain. The swell and bottoming out of the ship. The fists of iced wind. Nothing to do but huddle and think. Sup the ladles of rum and gunpowder. You piss where you sit to keep yourself warm. You wonder how life might have gone had you made another turn as a boy on the shadow-line. The fingers of your hands are task-hardened, so calloused you can slice the ball of your thumb with a blade and you will not bleed. No chance of such luck with the heart. Still tender as a lamb’s. No great love arcs to strengthen it. No matrimonial blows. A novice in romance. You never married. You never had sons. Well, not that you knew of. Down in the bilges, away from the crew. Through the maggot-infested seams of the ship. Into the stench-black pits of wood and saline. Here you feel it is almost safe to cry.

*

Morning emerges. An albatross keeping pace off starboard. Stiff breezes from the south-east. Mist. A bone-coloured sun. Clean air. Mr Tamsin cooks one of the turtles rescued from The Clarion. We convene beneath the mainmast. I thank the men for their efforts. For their trust. I tell them the weather will not hold and that conditions will deteriorate. Some of the men are smiling at me as I speak, with genuine affection. I know these lads will follow me to the waterfalls at the edge of the Earth if I were to ask. Some are expressionless, determined. Others cannot meet my gaze, but they nod their heads. They know me. They believe in me. Their belief in me props up the sagging belief I have in myself. Was it ever there? Was it ever there?

The ship turns. The soft shadows realign themselves on deck. A black hand skids elongated over the devil’s seam, fingers splayed, unGodly, as if reaching for something it never deserved. A cry. A surge of bodies. Men grappling at the broken body of Mr Lerner tied against the bowsprit.

‘Cut him down,’ I call out, needlessly.

He spills to the deck. Somebody says, Mosey’s Law. Mr Lerner’s eyes are squint-tight shut. The tan in him has turned the grey of whaleskin. His teeth are clenched, protruding from the peelback lips as if making an attempt to escape. Perhaps it is a scream behind them that has created the shape. You might almost lever the ivories open, reach in and pluck it from the tongue. A glassy, fragile thing cast from the branches of the lungs: the outline of terror.

‘Turn him over.’ Your voice, but you’d swear you never opened your mouth. Mr Greenhalgh scoops his bare foot under the cadaver and flips him on to his guts. You bite down hard on a rebuke at the man’s insensitivity, because here’s madness. Mr Lerner’s back has been so thrashed by the cat that his spine shows through his swollen, lacerated flesh.

‘This was done after he died,’ Mr Greenhalgh says, picking at his teeth with a bent nail.

‘I’d have thought God the only being who might divine that knowledge, Mr Greenhalgh. Or are you keeping secrets from us? Do you want to tell us something? Do you want to confess?’

‘Dead men don’t sing songs,’ Mr Greenhalgh said, then turned his back on me, began scooping rope into his thick arms. ‘We’d have heard him squeal like a harpooned humpback. We’d have been able to do something.’

‘Then how did he die?’

Mr Greenhalgh turned around, that maddening ghost of a smile. The slow unblink of his eyes. The pale, staring tattoos. ‘I’m not the ship’s sawbones,’ he said.

‘Mr Lievesley!’ I did not take my eyes off that insubordinate rat.

The ship’s doctor assessed the body, and, nervously twiddling with his pince-nez, told me there were flecks of pink, bloody froth around Mr Lerner’s mouth, consistent with death by drowning. ‘I can’t confirm whether it’s salt water or drinking water.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. I called the men together. I told them that the person responsible for this murder would escape the death sentence if they came forward immediately. ‘In that case, my trust has been abused, as has that of the rest of the crew. Mr Gray, organise a watch. On deck and in the sleeping quarters. When the cuprit is unearthed, it will be Davy Jones’s Locker for him.’

*

Did my voice break, a little? As I was standing there, my hand shaking like some old man with the palsy, as I voiced my hard threats, was part of me trying to tell me that the murderer would never be exposed? That it was Fetter who had somehow transported his evil, by way of a storm cloud, perhaps, on to The Pride, and walked among my men without being detected. Perhaps the crew felt a prickle of cold as he passed, or a jag of pain behind the eyes. Perhaps they found they could not focus on his shadow as he moved. Their gaze slid away, repelled by his monstrousness. I had never set eyes on him. But he filled my mind like some inoperable canker. Sometimes I imagined him beneath the sea; its surface nothing but the vast acres of a billowing black cloak. When the storms began to blow, he would rise and, at some awful moment, he’d swing around and show me how the features sat on his face. And I believed upon seeing him, my eyes would simply turn to dust and trickle from my head.

*

Two days since we buried Mr Lerner at sea. The food is all but gone, save a stinking batch of coconut husks already gnawed to the quick. I gave the order to bring down any seabirds, but the skies are emptying, this far north. When the albatross returned, none of the crew were prepared to lift their muskets at it. My own misfired in the cold. I was barely strong enough to lift the weapon in my hand. Another two bodies were found in the evening by Mr Greenhalgh and Mr Rees. Rees told me that he had spent the whole day with Greenhalgh, making nets to see if they could catch some fish. Mr Rees is a good man, too thick for deviousness. I believe him, which lets Greenhalgh off the hook for Mr Lievesley timed the death at some point that afternoon. The dead men, Mr Abbott and Mr Lucy, were naked, their ribs gleaming through the mess of their chests like pieces of ivory buried in rubies. They had frozen to the cannon they had been draped over. Mr Horrocks had to use an axe to release them.

*

63°28’N, 29°47’W

While I was discussing weather systems and charts with Mr Carver, Mr Gray sidled up to me, in that way he has. He drew me to one side. I covered my mouth and nose, pretending be disgusted by the grisly show. I smelled Mr Gray’s carious words, regardless.

‘Mr Low. Sir. We’ve drifted a little. Down to this hard patch of weather I suspect. But we’re still on course. Give or take.’

I nod. Look at him. ‘All very good, Mr Gray. But there’s something else stuck in your throat. And it’s not ship’s biscuit, I’ll warrant.’

‘No sir.’ He appeared nervous, embarrassed even. ‘This Fetter, sir. Jacob Fetter. I don’t know him. I wondered if you might tell me a little about him.’

‘No reason why you should know him, Mr Gray. He’s my rogue, not yours.’

‘With respect, sir, we’re on this ship chasing his shadow. All for you. He’s as much a part of our nightmares as yours now. We deserve to know the shape of our quarry.’

I chewed on this for a while. But I could not disagree with him. ‘Jacob Fetter was born at sea. His mother was a shark. His father was a raft of dead coral. Some January night, in that unreserved glacial darkness that smothers the Earth perhaps once a year, the coral gave up its unHoly seed and the shark drifted through it. By the time she emerged from the fog, she was dead, and Fetter was fully formed in her belly. His mother, the shark, did not give birth. Fetter devoured her inside out. He has gills, Mr Gray. He is cartilaginous. His eyes roll back into his head when he takes a bite of his supper. If you get close enough to him, while he sleeps, and look into his black throat, you’ll see row upon row of serrated teeth reaching back into his gullet. He cannot eat anything that is dead. At the first hint of night, he must slip into the water. He must constantly be on the move. If he stops, he sinks to the sea bed and dies of suffocation.’

‘Mr Low…’

‘When he makes love, he rips his women open with a razored penis and slakes his thirst on their blood. When he prays, the moon turns red. If you see his shape in the clouds at midnight, you will go to sleep in fever and wake up blind. His breath is carrion. The wake of The Iron Mantis churns so mightily that typhoons emerge from the sea. I have it on good authority that when Fetter relieves himself overboard, the steam of his piss turns into phantoms that dissolve the skin.’

‘Mr Low…’ Whispered now.

‘I don’t know, William,’ I said, and he seemed more shocked by my use of his Christian name than anything previously uttered.

He stepped in closer to me, as if we were spies conspiring on a street corner. ‘The men, they are with you,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how strong your credit with them will prove. They… we are pirates. We live for the chase, for the fight, for the silk and the sovereigns. We want to get drunk, and not on this watered-down piss. We want to fornicate and eat fresh food. We’re not stupid, Mr Low. We know this life, it’s either feast or it’s famine. But our pockets are deep. And there’s nothing at the foot of them. And you telling me you don’t know this man. You don’t know his size or his colour. His creed or his needs. It doesn’t put steel in my heart.’

‘He is where we are going,’ I said. ‘The burning ship must convince you of that.’

‘There are more pressing matters, sir. In my opinion. We have a killer on board. Where are the investigations? Where are the suspects?’

‘We are all suspects, Mr Gray,’ I said, staring into his sun-blasted face. ‘At least the body proved to me that at least one of us has some bite, some animal in him.’

‘Murder?’ said Mr Gray. ‘You condone it? Among our own?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘But this is no treasure hunt. This isn’t a year of festivities, all mates together drinking and whoring all the ports of the western seas. This is a blood hunt. This is vengeance.’

He was about to protest, but this time it was I to duck into his space, to drive the point home. ‘What would you have me do, William? Spend a day or two rooting out the bad apple? Mete out some brutal justice? And then back on to a cold trail, the men more resentful, more hungry? You say they’re with me, for now. Then let me strike while I have a backing. We can rootle through the muck after the deed’s been done.’

‘A backing, you say?’ Mr Gray’s voice was suddenly tired, breathy. ‘How many of us will be left once our bow is chopping at Fetter’s foam?’

‘One body, Mr Gray. One murder. There is no guarantee there’ll be more killing.’

‘And, Captain, there is no guarantee there won’t be.’

*

He comes for me, but not at night, not when I am alone, struggling to sleep. He comes when I’m in the middle of my toilet, or pinching my nose to drink down the slime of our water in the galley’s barrels. He comes when I’m sharing out the hardtack or stepping in to halt a squabble between shipmates. I see his shadow slide across the wall of my quarters like tar drawn into spiderish lengths. His breath is scentless; the cold has burned out all traces of his interior. He touches the skin of my throat and I feel every shred of me become the chill sludge of every dead thing found on the ocean bed. I can’t wake up screaming. No such relief. I have to bite on the panic. I have to force the smile. The men see one speck of this madness in me and we are all done for.

We go on. We must go on.

*

Mr Gray is up aft with the ‘bring ’em near’. He’s convinced land is less than a day away. Clouds on the horizon. I’m too weak to get off my bunk. I can no longer tell which of my hands is the damaged one; both shake like fury. Another body this morning. Mr Tamsin, frozen so hard to the deck that even Mr Horrocks’ axe would not shift him. Red splinters flew out at every blow. I saw Mr Kidney drooling.

Mr Dendy, in the crow’s nest, calls out. There is a clamour for the port side. Mr Gray points a confirmation. A little while later, a white line trembles above the horizon. Land. I’m barely able to hold myself upright, but now I’m cheering with the other lads. Where there’s land there’s food. Where there’s food, there’s scavengers. And where there’s scavengers, there’s Fetter.

It takes an agony of time to reach that solid, icy bluff, and another hour or two to find an access point where we can drop anchor. I order the armoury to be opened. Muskets for everyone. I doubt any will work in this cold, but the men deserve to have their courage bolstered. I feel only the slightest pang of doubt when I realise a gun is being passed to our secret killer. But events have overtaken us. Gun or no, the bodies will pile up.

I choose a landing party. Myself, Mr Greenhalgh, Mr Dendy, Mr Burbidge, Mr Taylor and Mr Horrocks. I am tempted to take Mr Lievesley with us, but again I must think of those left on board. I pull Mr Gray to one side.

‘William, I apologise. I know you would want to come with us, and God be my witness I wish you were at my side, but the truth of the matter is that I need you to be my eyes and ears back on The Pride. I trust you with my life. And it vexes me to say that you’re the only person I do trust right now.’

‘Then if that’s the case, we ought to turn around and sail back to Liverpool. Forget all this. Forget about Fetter. We are dead men, Captain.’

‘If I go back without facing him, death would be the least of my worries.’

‘Sir…’

‘My decision is made, Mr Gray. You have command of The Pride. If we are not back within a single arc of the moon, you may cast off.’

I do not look back. Mr Greenhalgh and Mr Taylor take up the oars and row us into a cathedral of ice. The hollows of the bergs flicker with the palest blues and greens. A pirate’s eye is well-trained for prettiness; yet all the treasures he has plundered over a lifetime of robbery and violence cannot prime him for these sights. The bluster and blague of the ship has been shed; we drift in awed silence. I wonder about Fetter, about his eyes trawling these same lofted ceilings and glittering buttresses. I wonder if his soul might have lifted. If he might have felt the cold splinter of his own mortality.

Is he running away or drawing me in?

The colours change. Blood frozen into the snow as we clamber on to the ice shelf. Something has been ripped apart here: blood has hosed in lines over twelve feet away. No man was the author of this atrocity. We fan out.

Mr Burbidge finds what remains of the corpse a little while later. His tarred petticoat breeches had been torn open. A blue and white checked shirt was similarly ravaged; a few feet away, a woollen cap and some shoes contained a mush of blood and fat and bone. Mr Horrocks is copiously sick. I order the men to follow me.

I feel panic that we might have arrived too late. I don’t want my confrontation with Fetter to be nothing more than my feet scuffing through his remains. But some glint in the clean knife of the air tells me he lives on. Two hours of tramping through snow, the cold numbing our edges, and we find his ship. We stand in shocked silence. There is a hole in the hull and the mainmast has been downed. The ship leans against the ice shelf as if pausing for breath.

‘Careful, lads,’ I advise. We watched the ship for some time, but there was no movement. A hundred and fifty men. Nobody on board? I couldn’t swallow that, yet I bid my companions follow me and approached that crippled vessel.

Once we had found a way on to the listing deck, we quickly searched for food. There might have been crew below decks, but the smell of fresh meat and bread was too great to resist. The doors hanging off their hinges, the blood on the ropes, told us that if any crew were on ship, they were no longer alive.

A wet, growling sound rose into the torn sails.

‘Bear,’ said Mr Greenhalgh, as if he were casually describing something passing along the harbour in Hull.

I followed his gaze down to the ice. Two large polar bears were circling, wagging their heads this way and that whenever they reared up on to their hind legs. Their muzzles were sopping and pink.

We ate quickly, but sensibly. Too much and we’d suffer stomach cramps which would be the death of us out here. We packed as much as we could carry for our mates on The Pride. And then, as we were preparing to leave, Mr Burbidge touched me on the arm.

‘Begging pardon, Captain. I thought I heard something below.’

With the food inside me, I felt my daring return. I bid Mr Taylor accompany me. He unsheathed his musket. My instinct was to examine the captain’s cabin first, to see if any trace of Fetter remained. I wanted to inhale his stink, top up the hatred, but the cabin was empty of anything to damn the man. It had the air of a room seldom used; perhaps Fetter’s disdain for the British Navy ran to a refusal to inhabit the quarters of the officers he had usurped. In that, I felt a grudging admiration.

‘Captain Low!’

It was mr Horrocks, although I hadn’t recognised his voice: it was crippled with shock. I found him leaning over the officer’s padlocked water barrel, trying to keep his gorge in check. The cold had prevented the bodies from decay, but the carnage here was worse because it appeared stylised, rehearsed, even. It did not possess the randomness, the savage fingerprint of nature. There must have been a dozen men entangled. I could not work out where they began or ended.

‘Pull yourself together, Mr Horrocks,’ I said. ‘What did you expect to find down here? Tea and cake?’

Mr Greenhalgh on the stairs, calmly picking his teeth. ‘No polar bear did this,’ he said. ‘And those outside have been planted. Bite marks post-mortem. Not the cause of death.’

‘Mainsail mast was taken down with an axe, sir,’ called Mr Dendy from midships.

‘And that hole was blown from the inside out,’ Mr Horrocks observed, rising palely from the belly of the vessel. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘No cannon fired upon this ship.’

‘This is a trap,’ said Mr Dendy.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This is a diversion.’ I gazed at the bodies before me. The ship’s hauls were scattered about them. The coins, pearls and emeralds were densely coated with the eructations of the dead. It was like some ghastly confection, something one might be served in the dining rooms of palaces in Vienna or Versailles.

‘I for one,’ said Mr Horrocks, ‘would be happy to be diverted. Can we go back to The Pride now?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. And, suspecting that his body would not be here: ‘We must find Fetter’s remains.’

I don’t know why I passed this profane, unactionable order. I had no more idea of what Fetter looked like than the others. But I reassured them that I would identify his corpse, should the others’ doughty redistribution of the bodies unearth him.

We worked hard and fast, unknotting limbs, stacking the dead like firewood. We none of us touched the loot; they seemed unreal, unimportant, although there was enough wealth here to see the crew of The Pride, and their families, into dotage and beyond.

We moved through the ship. The gold and the gore strewn with equal abandon. By the end of it, Mr Horrocks was whistling.

‘Fetter did this,’ I said. ‘He did all of it.’

‘Why?’ asked Greenhalgh, his cool little smile suggesting he knew the answer.

‘He’s afraid,’ I said. ‘He’s been looking over his shoulder fo so long he’s got a crick in his neck.’

‘Afraid of you?’ asked Greenhalgh.

‘He’d be wise to be,’ I said.

‘Our time’s almost up,’ Greenhalgh said. He blinked slowly. Time turned into something ice-coated. The tattoo became his gaze became the tattoo. I know longer registered which was which. Maybe he had eyes in the back of his head. He could see me at all times.

‘I’m sending the crew back to The Pride,’ I said.

‘What about you?’

‘Us,’ I corrected him.

‘Us? I don’t follow.’

‘That’s right, Mr Greenhalgh. I’ll be following you. We go on alone. Until Mr Fetter turns up.’

I sensed the others staring at us.

Despite the cold, the breath from our throats furring the air, the temperature in that cabin felt tropical.

‘Sir?’ Mr Dendyburbidgehorrockstaylor said. I don’t know who. I didn’t care. There was just me and Greenhalgh and his butterfly eyelids.

‘Go back to the ship,’ I said.

The light might have faded. The others might have gone. We might have frozen to death and what I was looking at was the last thing the back of my eyes registered. But then…

‘After you, Captain.’

‘No, Mr Greenhalgh. I insist.’ I waved him to the door with my musket.

Once upon the ice, he hesitated. He did not look at me when he asked: ‘Which way, Captain? I see no footprints to tell us Mr Fetter passed this way.’

In his shadow, I looked down at the snow. ‘Oh, but I do, Mr Greenhalgh,’ I said, and prodded him. North.

 

Advent Stories #13

TIGHT WRAPPERS

Mantle stopped a taxi on the Edgware Road and piled in. He was breathless and, as always, a little panicky that he’d dropped something, that he was missing some essential part.

‘Holland Park,’ he said, patting the pockets of his raincoat. The hand of another pedestrian, cheated by Mantle’s claiming of the cab, slapped against the back window as the taxi moved off, leaving behind an imprint that took some time to fade.

Mantle had stolen the coat from a theme park staffroom a couple of decades previously, attracted by the numerous deep pockets, the better for storing his lists, address books, notes and clippings, his maps, an urban disjecta membra, the city in leaves. At times he felt as though he were a disorganised filing cabinet on the lam. Occasionally he fell asleep on his bed in his coat. He felt naked without it, or more specifically, that special form of insulation that his papers provided.

The day was a blur in his thoughts, as most were. He struggled to remember what he had breakfasted on, only that it had been in a coffee shop on Old Compton Street, half an eye on the newspaper, his notebook with its codes and descants, the phone in his fist. He had gone on to sell a couple of Fine/Fine Iain Sinclairs, doubles from his own collection, in a sandwich shop at the north side of Blackfriars Bridge before scuttling along the Jubilee Walkway to the National Film Theatre where he met Rob Swaines, his ‘Southwark Mole’. Over the years Rob had fed him some great information on the underground book networks of SE1. He had learned of a Graham Greene first sitting forgotten in a plastic washtub of an Oxfam in Stamford Street, an early Philip K Dick in a Fitzalan Street squat, a news vendor by the tube station at Lambeth North carried in his pocket a copy of HG Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau containing an inscription to its recipient from the author not to read it at night.

The rest of the day was a smear of motion, of buses caught at full pelt, of observations written in the corner of a fried chicken cesspit, of phone calls, hot and cold leads, rumours of a Bradbury unclipped, Dark Carnival, in a Battersea pub that came to nothing, hastily scribbled ideas for a book hunt in Edinburgh, catching up with the tracings of his route on the OS maps, marginalia he had forgotten about but that, freshly discovered, sparked more calls, more possibilities; there was no such thing as a closed door in London, he had learned. Every shelf was a display for him; it was just a matter of time before he got round to cherry-picking the best of the best from each one.

He’d received a text from Heaton, his main bloodhound, his in, not five minutes previously, alerting him to a rare Very Good/Good in W8. It was pleasing that he was already in the area; if the traffic favoured him he could be on Aubrey Road within minutes. He pulled out his battered Moleskine and slipped off the elastic binding. Inside he flipped through alphabeticised jottings, references to books he had in his sights, rare tomes, the jackets of which he sometimes felt under his fingertips in the moments before he became fully awake. Here was his file on Mick Bett, the thriller writer whose first two novels, Black Iris and One Man On His Own, published in the early 1960s, had been turned into quirky cult films starring George Kennedy. Bett had killed himself in 1967 when he had become blocked on his third novel, working title The Mummer, at a time when the James Bond franchise had hit its stride and a year after Adam Hall’s first Quiller novel, The Berlin Memorandum, had been turned into a successful film. Mantle wondered if the Sunday Times encomium on the front cover of the Pan paperback of One Man On His Own (“The best, after Deighton and Le Carré”) might have contributed to Bett’s decision to leap from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Mantle owned a signed first edition, first printing of Black Iris that he had bought at a Brighton book fair in 1976 for a wallet-bruising thirty pounds. The very same book was now worth seven thousand pounds. Mantle’s assessment of a book’s future worth was rarely off the mark. He had no compunction about spending a lot for a Fine/Fine now if his hunch whispered that there’d be a few more noughts on its value a decade hence. Heaton’s digging had led to this evening’s revelation; a copy of OMOHO sitting on a shelf in west London, its spine having probably never known any strain.

The traffic was snarled around Marble Arch; Mantle felt blisters of sweat rise on his forehead. He couldn’t relax despite the knowledge that the book, having occupied its place on the Aubrey Road shelf for the last twenty years, wasn’t going anywhere in the next ten minutes. His gaze was snagged on a criss-cross of scaffolding clinging to the face of an Edwardian house facing Hyde Park. Light snaked along the tubes and died on the dirty orange plastic netting. The house seemed diminished by the complexity, the aggressive sprawl of the construction. Scaffolding bothered him, it pulled at his vision like a scar.

‘What are you reading?’ Mantle asked the driver as he shoved the notebook back into its nest. A thrillerfat paperback rested open-bellied on the dashboard. Mantle had learned to quell his disgust at the way other people treated their reading matter, forced into supine positions they did not deserve.

‘That Dan Brown guy,’ the driver said, eventually, predictably. Mantle could dismiss him now. Him and his Very Poor, his Reading Copy. But it was something he had to know. He had to know what was on the cover, what was being sucked up into the eyes. On the tube he would crick his neck to catch a glimpse of any title. He was about to return to his notes, to trace the latest leg of his years-long journey through the capital on his OS map, when the driver came back with a question of his own.

‘No,’ Mantle said, trying to keep the bristling from his voice. ‘I’ve never read “The Da Vinci Code”. It’s… not my thing.’

He’d been offered a signed Mint in April, but he wouldn’t have forgiven himself, could never have allowed it to rub shoulders with his Lovecrafts and Priests, his M.R.s and his M. Johns. It was snobbery, to be sure, but the very act of collecting, serious collecting, was snobbery anyway. Mantle was too old, too alone to care what anybody thought of him or his obsession. All that mattered to him were the pencil webs he spun across his map of London, the treasure he was tracking from Shepherd’s Bush to Shoreditch.

The taxi disgorged him on the corner of Aubrey Road. A light rain, so insubstantial as to be barely felt, breathed against him. He looked back at the Bayswater Road and saw it ghosting across the harsh sodium lighting like the sheets of cellophane he wrapped around the jackets of his hardbacks, to further protect them. He darted away from the main drag, patting his pockets, fretting over the corners of reminders, receipts, appointments, all the clues that frothed dangerously at the lips of his pockets.

He found the address he needed and rapped hard on the front door. He smoothed down his hair and hoped the occupants wouldn’t be able to smell his odour, a mix of stale sweat and old paper, not really that bad, but perhaps offensive to those who were not used to it.

A well-dressed woman with professionally styled hair answered the door. She was in her late-fifties, it seemed to Mantle, although the way she was turned out made her appear quite a bit younger. Her expression was cold; she was chewing something, a chicken leg, nub of white gristle gleaming, clutched in her hand. He cursed himself. She had been drawn from dinner. She wanted him gone; no amount of charm would work now.

‘I apologise for disturbing your dinner,’ he said.

‘Quite all right,’ she snapped. ‘What is it?’

‘A book.’

‘A book?’ Now her expression did change, to one of bafflement.

‘My name’s Henry Mantle. I’m a collector, a diviner of text. I’ve got friends call me Sniffer.’

‘You’ve got friends,’ she said.

Mantle’s smile faltered as he wondered if she were belittling him, but he pressed on. ‘Anyway, I understand you have a copy of Mick Bett’s novel, One Man On His Own, published in 1962. I’d like to make you an offer for it.’

A further change. The woman, consciously or not, closed the door a fraction. ‘How did you know I had that?’

‘A receipt in a ledger in a Bloomsbury hotel. A book fair in the ’80s. A purchase traced to you.’

‘But this is… this is invasive,’ she said.

‘Not at all, Mrs Greville,’ he said. ‘I can assure —’

‘How do you know my name?’ Needle in the voice now. An aspect of threat.

‘The receipt. The book fair.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t like this. Please leave.’

She was making to shut the door and in his desperation he shot out his hand to block it.

‘I’ll give you twelve hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘In cash, right now, if you say yes.’

She paused, just as it seemed her anger would overflow and she would start shouting. The breath seemed knocked from her. Mantle refrained from smiling; he knew he had won.

‘Twelve hundred? For a book?’

‘I’m a big fan of his work. And copies – nice, well-looked after copies – are scarce.’

She seemed to change her mind about him. Maybe she was thinking of all the other unread copies of books on her shelves, perhaps the result of buying sprees by a dearly departed, or something inherited that she couldn’t be bothered to take to the charity shop. She drew the door open wider and ushered him in, insisting sharply that he could have five minutes of her time, no more.

He barely took any notice of the hallway he was walking along; the smell of books was in his nostrils. He patted his pockets, felt the comforting scrunch of bus tickets, pencilled symbols and hints, directions and directives etched on paper napkins, beer coasters, cigarette packets. His whole life was in these pockets; he couldn’t bear to throw anything away. He supposed it described a weakness in him, a form of psychosis, but he was helpless. He felt emboldened by these layers, these graphite and ink ley-lines. His wallet was fat underneath all of this. He ached for something to happen.

She introduced him to a room whose darkness was penetrated only by a soft, low lozenge of orange light; a cat was curled around the base of the lamp, glancing up unimpressed at Mrs Greville’s guest.

‘Here’s the book,’ she said, reaching up to tip a volume into her left palm.

He winced as she handled the book. She wouldn’t pass it to him quickly enough, and kept hold of it, turning it around in her fingers as if searching for some clue as to why it was worth what he had offered. She gave him a look; her tongue worked at some shred from her rapidly cooling and forgotten dinner.

‘You know, this was my husband’s, my late husband’s, favourite novel. I really don’t think I would feel happy letting it go. It’s become something to remember him by.’

Mantle smiled. He had prepared himself for this. It always happened. ‘I fully understand. I’m willing to go to sixteen hundred. Which is way over the odds for a book of this sort.’

He could see her scrutinising him, wondering if she could wring out another hundred, wondering how to play the game. But she didn’t know anything. She was sold.

‘I suppose there’s no point in hanging on to the past,’ she said. ‘My Eddie would want his books to be appreciated by readers rather than gather dust on the shelf.’

Mantle pursed his lips. His mobile phone went off, vibrating against his leg.

‘Then you’ll take the sixteen hundred?’

‘I will,’ said Mrs Greville, in a voice of almost comical reluctance.

She passed him the book once the bills were in her hand. He was hastily wishing her good night, wrapping the book in a brown paper bag after a swift, expert appraisal of its jacket, boards and copyright page. ‘Very fine, very fine,’ he said, his little joke, his signature.

He barely heard Mrs Greville asking if there was anything else he’d like to look at. He fumbled the phone from his pocket and barked his name before the answering service could kick in.

There was no reply, just the sound of air rushing down the line, as if the caller had contacted him from a tunnel, or a windswept beach. There was a pulse to the wind; he was put in mind of the white noise of shortwave signals on his old radio.

‘Hello?’ he said, his voice thick in his throat. He heard the faint echo of his own greeting, that occasional anomaly of mobile phones. It sounded as though, for a second, he was talking to himself. He might as well have been; nobody replied.

That radio. He wondered where it was now. It had been his father’s, but Mantle had spent more time than he twisting its knobs and dials. He would zone in on the pulses and bleats of what he had believed were signals of intent from distant aliens, try to decipher their insistent tattoo. A few months later, after the violent death of his father, he believed they were the frantic, distorted echoes of his last breaths; scorched, impatient, encoded with a meaning he could not extract.

His father had worked as a builder’s mate, hod-carrying, mixing cement, making the bacon butty runs. One night he had met a girl in a pub and smuggled her into the site after closing time. Mantle had dramatized what might have happened on many occasions, running sequences and dialogue through his mind like a writer planning a passage in a novel. There were never any happy endings.

*

He lights cigarettes for them; she tastes the sticky residue of whisky and Guinness on the filter. She watches him lark around, his steel toe capped boots crunching through glass and plaster; the odd, metallic skitter as he kicks a nail across the floor. In here are great mounds of polythene wrap, packaging for fixtures and fittings, looking to her drink-addled mind like greasy clouds frozen into stillness.

He’s opened the windows. Outside, the sky is hard with winter. Goodbye cruel world as he lurches into the night. A breath catches in her throat. She rushes to see. Tricked you. Step into my office. He’s giggly, foolish, reckless. Unlike the man who skulks at home, the taciturn man, incapable of tenderness, of affection. The scaffold bites into the building’s face like an insect, all folded, fuddled legs. His steps shush and clump on the wood. The angles of metal look cold enough to burn. Come inside, she says. She’s nervous. This is an unknown, unknowable world to her. It’s a sketch of a home. There is no comfort here. She unbuttons her blouse, lets him see the acid white bra, the curve of what it contains. Come inside.

Fumbling. Stumbling. An accident. A flame from a match, from the smouldering coals of the cigarettes. A fire leaps, too swift and strong to stamp out. A drunken attempt. The surge of molten plastic. In the flickering orangedark, before she runs to escape, she sees him twisting in the suffocating layers, wrapping himself in clear, wet heat as it melts through his flesh. His fingers fuse together as he tries to claw it from his face. He stands there, silently beseeching, loops of his own cheeks spinning from his hands. The black fug from burning plastic funnels out of him and he staggers to the window, toppling on to that cold, black edifice.

*

He sees one now. Like an exoskeleton. A riot of violent shapes. His father had never been a great reader, unless you counted The Sun, which was never off his dashboard. He had always snorted his derision whenever he found Mantle leafing through an Ian Serraillier, or a David Line. There was always something else to do, in his opinion, as if reading for its own sake, and reading fiction especially, was a waste of time. The scaffolds were erected – that arcane, mysterious practice – and dismantled. They were the means to deliver repair, but Mantle could not, would not see that in them. Whenever he chanced upon them, he saw only his father cooling on the duckboards, black sheaves lifting from his face.

Bitterly, Mantle closed his phone and assessed the road. He couldn’t see any taxis but the bus stop across the way was busy; there’d be a 94 along any moment. He joined the queue and extracted the book from his pocket. He sucked in its brittle breath and traced the tightness of the head, the embossing of the title and author on the front cover. Twice what he’d paid would have still been a modest price. Quickly, before the cold air, or the pollution, or his excitement could have any adverse effect on the pages, he slid it back into the brown bag. Books and brown paper, well, there was a perfect marriage. Yet an increasingly unlikely one, in the bookshops he haunted throughout the capital. Flimsy plastic bags, one molecule thin it seemed, were used to package books these days. He’d talked to some of the booksellers, suggested returning to paper, that the books might sweat under plastic, that they could be damaged, but had only ever received blank looks. He liked the snug way the brown paper folded against, into the book it was protecting, as opposed to the slip and slide of the plastic, as if it were trying to shun what it sheathed. It was too much like smothering.

A sudden gust of wind; a smack and clatter in the deep dark behind him. He flinched. Nobody else seemed to notice. He stared again at the scaffolding as it snaked up the face of the church. The light was good enough only to see a treacly gleam trace the geometry of the struts and tubes and platforms. It waxed across the netting, creating the impression of a series of rhomboid mouths opening and closing against the night. Mantle mimicked them.

The bus arrived; he boarded, feeling the air condense at his back as if someone were hurrying to catch the bus before it departed, but when he glanced back there was nobody. The doors cantilevered shut. On his way home he noticed so many houses and shops masked by aluminium that he had to reach up to his own face to check it wasn’t similarly encumbered.

*

Mantle’s flat: bookshelves everywhere. He had the spaces above the doors adapted to take C format paperbacks. There was shelving in the bathroom, although he had spent a fortune on air-conditioning to ensure that the steam from the shower and bath were negated to ensure his books remained in pristine condition. The floor was a maze of literary magazines, reviews, photocopies of library archive material, letters from booksellers.

He unwrapped the Bett and placed it next to Black Iris. The covers hissed together as if sighing with contentment. A completeness there. A job done. He could imagine Mick Bett himself nodding his appreciation. Here was somebody who cared as much for the decent writer of bestsellers – and there were some around – as the leftfield scribes, the slipstreamers, the miserablists. There were writers he adored who had never sold well when people like Jeffrey Archer, Dan Brown, Martina Cole were coining it. Forget clitfic, or ladlit, this was shitlit. He’d rather stick with an arresting, original writer who deserved greater exposure, a writer who cared about the craft, a writer who lived for it – a Joel Lane, a Christopher Burns – than some twunt who could hardly write his or her own name, but whose name was gold because of some other supposed talent: Rooney, Jordan, Russell fucking Brand.

He drew a bath and pulled a bottle of Magners from the fridge. Food was nothing more than a thought. Already he was considering the following day; Heaton had mentioned possibilities in Crystal Palace: an 1838 Elizabeth B Barrett, ‘The Seraphim and Other Poems’, with an inscription. You were looking at 2.5K plus for that. He took the drink over to his desk and looked out at the city. Books under every roof. Most of them forgotten, badly looked after, unread. He felt the weight of all his own literature bristling behind him, smelled that all-pervading tang of ancient pages.

Something shimmered under the caul of city light. The reflections of red security lamps crept along the wet scaffolds like something alive, determined. Mantle was suddenly shocked by the mass of spars and supports cluttering the skyline. It seemed as if the whole of London was crippled, in need of Zimmer frames and callipers. The night breathed through it all, a carbonised, gasping ebb and flow. A miserable suck, a terrible fluting. He thought he saw something move through the confusion, shadow dark, intent, clumsy. Before it merged with a deeper blackness, right at the heart of the scaffold, he saw, thought he saw, deceleration, the wrap of a hand around a column, black fingers that did not shift until his eyes watered and he had to look away.

Mantle remembered his bath and stood up sharply, knocking over his drink and bashing his knee into the underside of his desk. His foot skidded on the open pages of a magazine and he went down awkwardly, an arm outstretched to stabilise himself serving only to swipe a cairn of novels to the floor. Pages riffled across his line of sight, a skin of words in which to wrap his pain. They wouldn’t leave him alone, even after he had managed to wrestle a way into sleep.

*

His alarm didn’t so much bring him out of sleep as rescue him from a desperate conviction that he was about to suffocate. He felt as though he were in the centre of a world of layers, and all of them were trying to iron him flat, as if he were some crease that was spoiling the uniformity of his dreamscape. He wore a tight jacket that was like a corset, pinning his gut back. The city was similarly constricted; he couldn’t see brick or stone for the weight of aluminium, slotted with mathematical precision into every available square metre of space. It caused him to feel sick at his own softness; he felt arbitrary, ill-fitting. The books he was carrying seemed to sense his otherness and kept trying to squirm from his grasp. Pages fluttered. He felt the bright sting of a paper cut in his finger. Blood sizzled across onionskin. He gazed at his hands and saw how the print from the books had transferred to his flesh, a backwards code tattooed on every inch. He was ushered into a series of ever-narrowing streets by faces smudged into nonsense by the speed he was moving at, or the lack of oxygen reaching his brain. A building up ahead stood out because of the presence of an open door, a black oblong of perfection among the confused angles. He was fed through it. Shapes, presumably people, gestured and shrugged and pointed. He was shown a gap in the heights, a section of hammerbeam that had rotted and was being prepared for repair. Ladders and platforms were arranged around the workstation like props in a play.

He was cajoled and prodded up the ladder until he reached the ceiling. He was manhandled into the slot, he screamed as his neck was twisted violently to accommodate the rest of his body. Great cranes positioned at either end of the hammerbeam slowly rotated a mechanised nut, the size of a dinner plate. The two ends of the hammerbeam were incrementally forced together. Pressure built in his body; he felt blood rush to his extremities. He bellowed uncontrollably, a nonsense noise, a plea. He felt bones pulverising, unbearable tensions tearing the shiny tight skin of his suit, his stomach. At the last moment, as breath ceased, he saw himself burst open, everything wet in him raining to the floor. It looked like ink. It looked like a river of words.

*

Coffee. It burned his lip but he was grateful for anything that reminded him he was still alive. His fingers shook a little as he replaced the cup in its saucer. Heaton’s last text was burned into his thoughts, helpfully chasing away the remnants of the dream. He spread out a fan of notes on the table, sucking up the gen on this new quarry. Tucked away in a Stoke Newington studio flat was a Mint/Mint of Bryce Tanner’s first novel, Noble Rot, published by Faber in 1982. According to Heaton, the studio had been abandoned by the occupant, some failed venture capitalist who had needed a temporary base while he searched for his Hoxton warehouse. Rumour was he’d drowned himself in one of the reservoirs in N16. The flat had been left as it was while his nearest and dearest were sought, a process taking longer than had been expected. Armed with a hammer, Mantle had cased the building an hour previously, and had been encouraged by the lack of humanity; the building seemed little more than a shell giving the come-on to the wrecking ball and the softstrip crews. The jitters Mantle was suffering on the back of his dream, and a need to be sure of what he was about to do, had driven him away in search of caffeine. Now, sitting on a hard metal chair outside a deli in Church Street, the call of the book too great to resist any longer. He tossed a handful of coins into his saucer and retraced his steps to the High Street. A block sitting back off that busy main drag contained more boards than glass in its window frames. Mantle negotiated the buckled front door and the inevitable climb up the stairs. Broken glass was scattered across every landing; dead insects provided a variety to the crunch under his shoes. The door he needed was padlocked – cheaply – and his hammer dealt with it after a couple of blows. Inside he paused in case his attack had brought any remaining residents to investigate, but either the building was deserted or apathy reigned. It didn’t matter – he wasn’t going to be disturbed.

The studio was well maintained, leaning towards minimalism but with enough books, CDs and DVDs to suggest that it was a life choice that wasn’t being taken seriously. There was nothing to suggest that its inhabitant was likely to take his own life, but Mantle was no psychologist. He didn’t care one jot. All that mattered to him was that couple of pounds of paper and board.

He located the book almost immediately. It seemed to call to him from among all the dog-eared paperbacks. It had presence, gravitas. He slid it clear from the shelf and hefted it reverentially.

The book turned to ash in his fingers.

He stood there for a while, as the air seemed to darken around him, his mouth open, trying to keep himself together. The notes in his pocket lost their insulating properties. He was in a cold room, bare but for a bucket filled with a dried meringue of shit.

The boards across the window had collapsed; wind flooded in. He moved towards it, the flakes in his hand rising up like angered insects. Scaffolding bit deep into the pebbledashed skin of the block. Through the shapes it created he could almost imagine he could see the muscular City architecture, the Gherkin, the old Nat West tower and, further afield, Canary Wharf. The aircraft warning lights they pulsed might shine in the tubing outside this very window, but also, deep within him, matching the insistent thrum of his own heart. He heard the creak of the broken door behind him and he acted upon it, not wanting to turn to see what had followed him up here. Falteringly, he clambered out on to the platform and edged along it until he had reached the end. His hands, coated with the dust of a book he could still smell, clawed at the brackets that kept the entire structure married to the block. They were so cold they scorched his skin.

He heard something struggle out of the window frame and on to the duckboards. Whatever it was had no grace, no balance. Its weight sent stresses and strains along the planks to his own feet, lifting them a little. The song of the wood might have been the keening that played in his throat. He smelled the high, narcotic smell of burned plastic. There were no books. There were no notes. No text messages. No Heaton. No wallet filled with cash. No Mrs Greville. No Mick Bett. No Gherkin. No past, no future. No nothing. Mantle’s love of books was desperate, a wish never to be fulfilled. He reached up to his eyes and pressed his fingers against the dry membrane that filmed them. Pockets of interior colour exploded. He could never know what it meant to be able to read a story, no more than he would ever learn what colour his own eyes were.

The lie these books contained. The fictions. It had a face, it had a fury. They infected your life, it was a contagion. You built up your own monster from the deceptions you invented. And Mantle was all about deceit. He’d managed the most horrid of them all, tricking himself. It was second nature, now. The blind leading the blind. Fear unfolded in every pore of his being. Nevertheless, he turned to confront what had chased him all this way, all these years. Not being able to see him gave Mantle a Pyrrhic victory of sorts. He was able to smile, his mouth finding an unusual cast even as the sum of his trickery leaned in close. The hand over his mouth was little more than crisped talons. He felt as if he were becoming infected by that alien flesh, growing desiccated, so sucked dry of moisture that his face might disintegrate. His chest muscles ruptured with the strain of trying to draw a breath. Millions of capillaries burst, flooding his inner sight with red. He heard the stutter and gargle of his own breath, or of the thing silencing him. White noise. Explosions of crumpled paper. In extremis, he managed to kiss the hand, to reach out and hold tight, to imagine that this was the hug he had craved for so long.

 

 

Advent Stories #11

KNOWN

Povey watched white paint unfurl in chains along riveted steel shanks bordering the tracks. The Network South-East from Lee had been late again this morning and there had been no unoccupied seats. He’d stood hunched against the door, slow fire moving through his back, looking out at a colourless skyline as veils of rain hung motionless against the thin wash of buildings.

One word — KNOWN — endlessly repeated, blurred by broken obliques of moisture on the windows. The capital letters formed harsh angles which bracketed the soft middle ‘O’. He couldn’t decide whether it was the result of a brainless ego, or an attempt to impart something more significant. Whatever, he felt drawn to the uniformity of the letters as they dogged the train across Hungerford Bridge.

Only since leaving the centre of London in favour of commuting in from the limbo of its outer districts had Povey begun to appreciate the ingenuity of its engineers and construction workers. Any available space was filled in with new flats, shops, entertainment arcades. Staying with his uncle, in a grim conurbation on the South Circular, he yearned to be in the heart of the city once more, to feel its pulse through his feet. He was looking forward to viewing the flat that evening. It seemed to call at him from over the rooftops, across the miles, like a desperate request from a distant lover.

Povey walked the Strand to Aldwych where he turned left. He liked the rain, the way it cleansed the buildings and turned them into glittering spires and domes. He imagined the city’s detritus being washed into the Thames. The rats drowning, the pissy alleyways and door recesses polished. All those channels and creases scrubbed clean.

But not the graffiti. Somehow it clung, tenacious as tattoos. Even in this fresh, burnished light, the crude slogans and signatures looked vital and new.

At work, the feeling fell away from him, as if this office was somehow insulated against the banal miracles of the city. He discussed layouts with Lynn and blithely complimented every letters page and fashion spread she showed him. He wondered if his apathy shone through. Lynn was the editor of a ‘secret’ magazine project. She had contacted Povey via a chief sub-editor from the parent company. He had done some work for her last summer and even though it was interminably dull — subbing real-life tragedy stories offset by ‘humorous’ articles and tips to make household chores that much bearable — it paid well. He’d leapt at the chance of five weeks’ employment, an opportunity to be nestled in London’s centre, even though Lynn’s overtures to him on the phone prior to his first day were almost comical.

‘So can we book you until the end of March?’ she had said, having explained that this was all hush-hush and that he would need to sign a document guaranteeing his lips to be sealed.

‘Certainly,’ he had said, ‘what will I be doing?’

‘Can’t tell you,’ she had replied, ‘it’s a secret.’

It turned out the magazine was a downmarket version of their market leader. Called Chinwag, it was aimed at a teenage readership, hence the appearance of words such as ‘shag’ and ‘willy’ and ‘cum’. The problem pages were a lifesaver amid grim copy-proofing and fact-checking. MEN ONLY screamed the banner in 108pt Soupbone. My little man bends the wrong way… am I abnormal? And the Top Tips: Clean venetian blinds with L-shaped pieces of crusty bread.

They were based at the top of a building in Holborn, in an office big enough to host a game of five-a-side. Golf. Along with Jill and Lynn, there was Yvonne, on features and Sally and Fran designing the pages. Friday lunch times they nipped down to the Sun Tavern on Long Acre and talked about dreadful magazines they had worked on in the past. All the same as this one, save the name.

An hour or so into his work, Povey received a phone call from Sutton, his best friend. He was in the Smoke for a few days, visiting from the south-west, but he sounded strangely on edge and asked Povey if he could meet him that evening — he’d be in the pub from about three-thirty. By four o’clock, the skittish nature of Sutton’s call had infected him and, in a mild panic, he went to the toilet, affecting a pained look and rubbing his stomach. In the mirror, he was surprised to find that he did not look well. The colour had fled from his cheeks, giving him a greasy complexion. His eyes seemed to have sunk away from the flesh of their sockets: red filled in the gaps. He felt as though the real version of him hadn’t caught up yet, that he was just a ghost, a sliver of the real Clive Povey. The real Clive Povey was stuck on a train staring at the codes and tag-lines sprayed on the portals to the capital.

‘Lynn?’ he said, cracking his voice just right. Jill, the assistant editor looked up too, which was fine by Povey. He knew she liked him and the concern that darkened her face told him that he’d pitched this correctly, even though he was only partly acting. ‘I’m going to have to go home. Sorry. I feel dreadful.’

Lynn looked aggrieved that she was losing him, clearly of the opinion that freelances sold their souls when they agreed to work and had to sit at their desks even if they were to suffer an arterial bleed.

‘Okay,’ she sighed, finally. And then: ‘Hope you feel better, tomorrow’ with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Hardly reached her lips either.

Povey limped back to his workstation and closed the file he had been using before copying it back on to the server from his hard drive. The dummy lay-outs he returned to their trays.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said. Sally looked at him acidly as if he had just stolen her plan for the day.

In the lift, Povey felt stitches of guilt about bunking off early and stared at the graffiti on the doors. He hadn’t taken his lunch hour, so that supported him in mitigation but didn’t stop him feeling like a school truant. They needed him; there was no need to worry about being sacked.

He seemed to descend too far, further than usual, but when the doors opened, there was the sliding glass entrance and beyond, Kingsway’s mad rush. Although it was barely half past four, the sky had blackened and the rain angling in over the forbidding roofs showed no sign of stopping. Bruised light loitered behind the thinnest junctions between clouds; the streetlamps were off and the cars on the road drove blind.

He plugged his ears with a pair of headphones and depressed the play button on his Walkman. A grim and epic loop of sound instantly drew something immanent from the deflated sky, the constant traffic. Holborn Tube was closed off; a huge scrum of commuters stood with their backs to him, staring bovinely at the concertina gates and the ticket barrier beyond. Two fire engines ticked over in the centre of Kingsway, lights flashing.

Povey made a series of turns into ever diminishing streets — High Holborn, Southampton Place, Bloomsbury Way, Bury Street, Little Russell Street, Streatham Street — until the traffic’s voice was toned down to an asthmatic gurgle. A crocodile of diners spilled out of Wagamama, thickening his sense of claustrophobia. Snazzy fucks in soft leather pants and white tee-shirts and linen jackets. Fifty pound haircuts. A woman fingering her pearl necklace while talking to some pin-striped goatee who made expansive gestures with his Nokia. Everyone seemed to be travelling somewhere and never arriving. He brushed past and ghosts followed: CKOne, Fahrenheit, Dolce & Gabbana. Stuff he recognised from the peel-off strips in his magazines.

He caught the Tube at Tottenham Court Road and travelled north, imagining his colleagues belittling him behind his back. His lack of spine. Such an insular man, a cold man. He bristled, imagining them, and jolted the arm of a woman reading a newspaper. She clucked her tongue and rattled the pages. He remembered acutely the embarrassment he’d known as a child when everyone’s attention had been reluctantly drawn to him. He pressed himself against the seat, reining in his claustrophobia as it tried to deal with their distance underground, the way the train was just big enough for the tunnel, the optimum exploitation of space.

At Kentish Town he surfaced, gulping air. At the Tube exit he watched the rain splinter the white and red exchange of car lights as people trundled home. A bus crawled by, its windows misted with condensation. Dark lumps filled every square of light. Each seat taken, every foot of Tarmac used, shoes secured pavement slabs as far as he could see.

The nest of lights on the underbelly of a jet shone through the barrier of cloud; through his feet he felt the chunter of trains worming north and south. By the time he crashed through the doors of the Academy Rooms, a hundred feet away, he was exhausted. It was as though there was no space for him to move. Every umbrella had wanted to do for his eyes; every briefcase clouted his knees.

He found Sutton squeezed on to a settee near the pool tables. He signalled: a pint. Povey bought drinks and moved unsteadily towards his friend, casting a glance at the pool tables where a woman was playing a leather clad boyfriend. Behind them, a huge screen formed a backdrop: footballers glistening under floodlights in a derby match.

‘Hello Frank,’ said Povey, ‘have a drink.’

Conversation tumbled around them. Povey perched on the edge of a stool that was being used as a footrest by a heavy piece of beef wearing sunglasses and combat fatigues. He heard the word ‘known’ used twice in quick succession by different people, and tried not to let his anxiety show.

The girl at the pool table pirouetted around her opponent, tipping him over with her thigh as he lined up his shot.

‘You sounded a little bit wired when you called me this morning,’ said Povey. ‘What’s up?’

Sutton flattened his lips together and shrugged. ‘I’m having a bad time of it, Clive. I needed to see someone I know. Someone who would look at me instead of through me. Jesus, one of those days I’ve had, when everyone tries to walk over you like you’re not there.’ He took a long swig of his pint. Povey wasn’t sure how many of the empty glasses arranged around him were his, but he bet it was a fair few.

‘Another thing,’ said his friend, staring blearily at the football match. ‘Perhaps the main thing. I tried to do a few things yesterday — simple things,’ he huffed what might have been sour laughter. ‘Sort myself a loan and find out why I wasn’t sent a voting form for the local by-election. Same response on both occasions. Didn’t know anything about me, couldn’t track down anything to do with my history. They were very apologetic but it sounded like they were talking to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t exist.’ Sutton leaned over and whispered the last three words conspiratorially.

‘Come on, Frank, you’re just having a shit day. I’ll send you an application form to join the club. You might have to hang on a while though, there’s a fuck of a long waiting list.’

Sutton was shaking his head now. ‘No, Clive,’ he slurred, ‘you are not yet in full possession of the facts. Today I opened the newspaper and found this bastard.’

He passed Povey a crumpled copy of that day’s Guardian. Sutton had ringed a section and Povey had to put his glass down before he poured it into his lap. Below the strapline Death Notices he read:

SUTTON, Frank Stanley died sadly on 31st March 19– aged 34. Fondly remembered by many friends and family. Beloved father of Gillian. Funeral at Broadclyst Parish Church, Exeter, 24th April, 2pm. Family, flowers.

‘My God, Frank. But this is a joke, surely?’

‘Yeah, I’m splitting my sides over it.’

‘This is awful,’ Povey said. ‘I’m really sorry. What are you going to do? I mean, you must go to the funeral, sort this out. Imagine their faces!’

Sutton seemed to have withdrawn from the animation of the crowd and Povey blinked to bring his edges back into focus. Too much smoke and heat. He watched the girl playing pool as she appraised the table. Standing over her shot, bouclée grip, her right breast collapsed around her cue like the slow unhinging of a snake’s jaws as it envelops a rabbit’s hip. She looked up at him through a dirty blonde fringe and took her tongue for a trip around the waxed O of her mouth. Flecks of white ringed her jumper sleeve.

‘Not sure if that’s a good idea, Clive,’ mused Frank. ‘I might turn up and spoil everyone’s day. But I suppose there are some advantages. If I don’t exist, I can’t be harmed can I?’

Povey smiled. ‘I suppose you’re right. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen though.’

‘Right.’ He drifted into his own thoughts and Povey had to reach out to steady him when it seemed he was about to lean back against a couple reading Time Out.

‘I don’t know how you stick it in this place, Clive, I really don’t. Everyone I see here looks pasty and frightened. They look like… you know those transfers we had as kids? You rubbed them with a pencil and they came off the tracing paper? Well it’s like that. People having their essence crushed out of them as they enter the capital so that all that remains are features, the husk.’

‘Yes, Frank,’ Povey smiled, patting his hand. ‘Have another drink, won’t you? I have to go and view a flat.’ Povey tried to affect nonchalance as he waved goodbye to his friend and forced his way into the teeming night but his hands were shaking. I know what you mean, he should have said. But he was worried that Frank’s left-field logic might insinuate itself. He felt vulnerable and unsupported. He didn’t like the drifting aspect to his life, the way he could sometimes believe he was a ghost trapped on the conditioning thermals of a dull prior existence, doomed to live every day as an exact replica of the one that went before. Commuting now took up so much of his time that his life seemed to be truncating. Every day was like standing on a succession of edges. His nerves were permanently tensed and shrieking: a slew of violins in a Bernard Herrmann score.

It was happening to everyone around him, this thing they labelled routine but which deserved a less innocent name.

Rain had slapped the city awake. It pinched her cheeks and cleared snot from her nostrils; showered the rheum from tired eyes, rouged her cheeks. London in a night-black cocktail dress: sleek and sexy and switched on. Eschewing the bus, Povey walked up Fortress Road past tired shops flagged with hopeful FOR SALE signs. Accommodation blocks sat squat in the misting rain; pale squares of light played hopscotch into the sky. Ceaselessly motile, the traffic zipped closed the tracts of the road, barring his view of the opposite pavement. He wondered if he should have asked Sutton to come with him.

Povey had received the details of the property — a converted one-bedroom flat — on Crayford Road that morning. The thought of moving back to north London spurred him on, despite his fatigue and the prospect of an awkward trip back to Lewisham. He paced the orange-blue street to Tufnell Park Tube where he turned on to its namesake road leading down to Holloway. The fifth turning on the right, according to the estate agent, was Anson Road. First left off that was Crayford Road. He wished he’d remembered to bring his A-Z.

The neon streetlamps fizzed, teasing his shadow. Broad streets spliced with the arterial road; Povey counted them off. It took longer than he’d anticipated, the blocks of houses between each turn-off proving to be substantial. Maybe he’d miscounted because this, the fifth, was Carleton Road, not Anson. He spent the next twenty minutes trying his luck down various side streets until, by chance, he found Anson Road. But the first turning on the left was not Crayford, it was Dalmeny Avenue. The first left at the other end of Anson, just in case he’d got it arse about tit, was Melvyn Close.

Okay, he calmed himself, you’re late now. Stop panicking and just ask someone.

But there was nobody to ask. Povey found his way back to the main road, intending to hail the first taxi he saw when he spotted an old man with a carrier bag walking on the other side of the street.

‘Excuse me!’ Povey called, trotting across the road. The man lowered his head, bringing the rim of his hat across his face, and hurried away.

Another man came out of his front door, saw Povey and hesitated, as if caught red-handed.

‘Do you know where Crayford Road is?’ asked Povey, before the man could retreat.

‘No, sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know this area.’ He slipped back behind the door.

Povey stared after him, confounded by what was happening. He returned along Anson Road, hoping he’d made a mistake and Crayford Road would reveal itself to him although he was late for the viewing now and the occupants might have gone out for the evening.

He rejoined Carleton Road and asked a woman wearing earphones if she could help. She seemed affronted, as if the earphones were a signal not to be disturbed, but waved vaguely in the direction of Tufnell Park Road with an umbrella speckled with white. Without bothering to thank her, Povey stalked away. It was as if he’d failed some test that prospective home-owners had to take before being accepted into the neighbourhood.

Now he could see how the estate agents had got it wrong. They had mistook Anson Road as the junction road with the main drag, when in fact it forked off Carleton. The fools. Here was Crayford Road, first turning off Carleton Road. Carleton. He dug in his bag, which was beginning to put a strain on his shoulder, and pulled out the property details. He underscored their false directions savagely. If he lost this flat it would be down to them. Should he hurry, he might catch the incumbent residents before they went out.

Povey ran past an estate on his right, all low, red-brick balconies and strip lighting. There was a figure moving slowly in the stairwell’s dark pools. Povey glimpsed a whitish inverted cone flicker past the frosted glass where a head ought to be. Then it was forgotten as he reached the row of Victorian houses where he might set up and be happy. The light was on; his hopes soared. A woman’s voice crackled over the intercom when he rang the bell. He tried to apologise when the buzzing of the lock drowned him out.

On the second floor he smoothed his hair and was attempting to dry his face with the sodden sleeve of his mac when the door opened.

‘I’m glad to catch you in,’ he said. ‘My name’s Clive Povey. I’m sorry I’m late.’

The woman blocking the wedge of light stepped back, although her eyes seemed to be fixed on a spot behind him. As he stepped through, her face set in a basic mode of recognition.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘the stairwell is so dark. I didn’t see you for a second.’ She led him into the living room where a swarthy man was drinking from a huge mug. Povey raised a hand and the man swivelled his eyes just as steam from his drink clouded the lenses of his spectacles.

‘As you can see,’ said the woman, who, Povey now saw, was heavily pregnant, ‘it’s quite small.’

I wouldn’t say that, he suddenly wanted to blurt, and clamped his teeth against a shock of laughter. It was very hot in the room; every bar of an electric fire glared. On a stuttering television, a news reader told of a Royal visit to Kuala Lumpur. It must be the faded screen that caused the cuffs of the waving Prince to appear stained white.

‘Through here,’ said the woman, ‘is the kitchen, which as you can see, is a bit tired but there’s a surprising amount of storage space. The bathroom’s just next door. Don’t worry about the cracks, they’re superficial. Nothing a dab of Polyfilla can’t handle. And here,’ she gestured with her hand; the other rested against her tummy, ‘is the bedroom.’

Giddy with the warp and tilt of the flat, Povey ducked into a bizarre room that seemed to taper away from him in terms of height and width; not so much the Cabinet as the Cubby-hole of Dr Caligari. The far end was little more than a sharply-angled recess. To sleep in this room, it would be necessary to quickly evolve a needle-shaped head. He tried to mask his disappointment and mumbled something about being in touch. The television mumbled something about ‘suicide’ and ‘train delays’ as the door snicked shut on him.

Outside, the rain was muscling more intensely against the houses. It stung his face as he returned to the main road. The figure in the stairwell was across the street from him now, the cone shape revealing itself as the peaked hood of a grey track suit. He was spraying white paint from an aerosol on to the side of a black van and had got as far as the middle ‘O’ before stopping, his head twitching at the sound of Povey’s gritting footsteps. Povey felt breath snatched from his lungs as the figure began to turn. He did not want to hang around to see the vandal’s face. He sprinted towards the road, trying to ignore the tattoo of following feet.

‘Taxi!’ he yelled, hurtling into the path of a black cab. The driver seemed to take an eternity to set off for Charing Cross once Povey had blundered into the back seat. As soon as they were away, he chanced a look behind him but the drenched street had diffused the light spilling from the lamps to such an extent that the entire avenue was concealed by a core of liquid fire.

*

He lay in bed listening to the uncertain squish of valves in his chest. It was hard to believe there was any blood in his veins for the coldness, the enervation he felt. He was scared to close his eyes in case he faded completely away. At least while he was awake he exerted some kind of physicality, despite the illusion of the blankets reducing his body to two dimensions.

His uncle was in the bedroom next to him; a muffled radio play moved through the wall by Povey’s ear. Over dinner his uncle had twice looked up startled, as if surprised to see his nephew sitting across from him. His uncle told him, as Povey had flapped his way out of his soaked clothes in the bathroom, that a body had been found by the deltoid spread of tracks leading into the depot at King’s Cross. There had been some consternation when the authorities had been unable to find its head, his uncle explained, somewhat tactlessly Povey thought. Initially, they believed it to be a murder. But then someone had discovered the head rammed deep inside the chest cavity, which suggested that the victim had been kneeling on all fours, facing the oncoming train. A witness had since confirmed this theory.

Povey slept fitfully until his uncle brought a cup of tea in for him at 7am. He had already decided not to go into work. Rather than wait until Lynn was in the office, he rang and left a message on the answerphone. If they wanted to find someone else to do the work, he couldn’t lose any more sleep over it than he was already.

After breakfast, tired of his uncle’s gory speculation as he scanned the newspapers and watched the morning news, Povey opted to go for a walk. He negotiated the lethal rush of traffic on the South Circular and headed north, the wink of Canary Wharf like a beacon ahead of him, pulling him into the heart of the city.

He reached Blackheath half an hour later and wandered without much conviction among the shops and across the fields where, even in the rain, kite enthusiasts attempted to launch their vivid array of wings, boxes and scimitars. At least here there was space to think. On three occasions he caught sight of that simple, wise word: an expression of vigilance or the boast of an omniscient entity. He saw it sprayed on the coping stones of a bridge wall, on the back of a road sign, a bench. Almost everyone he saw was streaked with white. What was going on? Was it paint? Those that weren’t daubed seemed to be like windmills without sails; all purpose drained from them. He saw faces in windows gazing at the totemic needle of Canary Wharf, flesh etiolated by a lack of association. Povey sat on a bench, numb to the seepage of rain through his trousers, and tried to remember what the word ‘community’ meant. Terrible thoughts were gravitating towards him since he’d heard about the suicide. He had once believed that the culmination of all his love and ambition would manifest itself in his nurturing of a child. But the compulsion behind this need had mutated recently. It might be because he had failed to establish any precious links with the women he met, but he suspected it was more a crisis of identity. The fear that he might look into the mirror one day and not recognise the face staring out came from the same black source as the voice persuading him that giving birth was nothing more than the laying down of an eventual death sentence.

The rain had stopped. He watched the band of mist retreat across the greensward and tear the wrapper of shade from the towers ranged across the capital. His jacket smelled musty and his shoes rested in a thin gruel of pigeon droppings. Maybe he would feel better if he took a long bath and rang some more estate agents. Invigorated with a plan, he caught the bus back to his uncle’s flat. There, he took the local paper and had a long soak, ringing possible flats with a red pen.

By the time his uncle returned from market, Povey was clean-shaven and dressed in a fresh suit, a list of addresses and accompanying times clasped in his hand. At the top, enclosed in a box, he’d written: Clive Povey — potential accommodation.

‘I’m off flat-hunting,’ he said, as his uncle pushed by, dropping an Evening Standard on his armchair. Povey saw the words: ‘TRAGEDY OF LOST SOUL’.

‘Right you are, lad,’ his uncle said, picking at a blotch of white on his coat. ‘Although, by the look of you, you might as well be off courting Royalty.’ He laughed thickly and set about making a pot of tea.

Povey was tempted to read the lead story in the newspaper, but he would be late for his first appointment. He trotted to the station and made the platform just as the train pulled up. At this time of day it was empty and Povey enjoyed the luxury of sitting wherever he pleased. In the aisle, the pattern of cleats from a pair of trainers took a journey in white paint towards the front carriage.

Soon, he was spotting fresh instances of the graffito. Now it was in black paint, now red. Sometimes it appeared with a suffix: a colon or an arrow flying away from the final ‘N’ as though an urgency had developed in the author’s craftsmanship, a need to convey the promise of something to follow.

It lifted Povey. His reading of the signs came as an epiphany, much like the sudden break in the weather. For the first time in weeks, his flesh seemed to sing and his nerves were attuned to every twitch of his clothes, each minute change of tack in the breezes that swept through the window vents.

Approaching London Bridge, he saw, plastered against the brickwork of a defunct printers, Known’s acme of achievement. An oblique of lemon-lime letters, each a foot high, parallel to the fire escape’s slant. The evidence of such industry seemed to match the sprawl of the city and the commitment to obliterate the concept of space. Povey had to believe that the word existed elsewhere in the country, and for many other people, not just the glut of girders and bridge panels here or the isolated jottings north and south of the city centre. He wasn’t sure he could cope with the possibility that the word was for his benefit alone.

At the terminus he passed through to the station concourse and checked the clock against his watch. He had half an hour to get to Finsbury Park. There wasn’t much of a wait for a northbound train. Quick change at Warren Street for the Victoria Line and he’d be at the first address on his list with time to kill.

He sat opposite a man in orange tartan bondage pants and wraparound shades. He was reading the Standard and Povey stared for a long time at the photograph on the front page. It showed, beneath the same headline he’d read at his uncle’s flat, a picture of railway lines. To the right was a cluster of policemen and railway staff in reflective clothing. To the left, stark and arresting, a white blanket failed to cover a body: its left arm poked out from beneath, the hand upturned and relaxed. It wasn’t this that shocked Povey, nor was it the faint but legible word punctuating the containers on a goods train as it travelled out of the borders of the shot. It was the inset picture of Sutton.

Povey couldn’t move his eyes from the page. When finally, the man folded his newspaper and stood up, Povey was left with the negative flare of the words on his retina, a red shriek of truth to jolt him from the black and white sobriety of the newsprint. A streak of white paint flashed before him as the train slowed for the platform; he’d overshot. This was Camden Town.

In no mood for the task he’d set out to achieve, Povey took the escalator, barely feeling the other passengers as they barged past him. On Camden High Street he was sandwiched by two men running to catch the same bus. His notes were knocked from his hand into a puddle. He watched as his name was washed away before moving off towards the Lock. Dusk was mottling the sky over the canal. He plodded down to the towpath, ignoring the street vendors as they plied him with stained glass light bulbs and kaleidoscopic knitwear. The buildings hunched their shoulders against him. Blocks of life piled on top of each other. No space left on the ground, take to the skies. High-rise and basement, purpose-built and luxury, maisonette and houseboat. Real-life soap in length and width and depth. If Povey had deviated by half a dozen steps from any roads he’d walked upon today he’d have ended up on somebody else’s property.

Further along the towpath, where the bridge on Oval Road passed over the canal, a hushed gathering moved against each other like a knot of snakes. He saw a grey hood slipping swiftly in between the limbs, keeping the crowd’s energy motivated. As he approached, he heard the people hissing, as though condemning a theatrical villain. But then he realised what it really was. He truffled around the drifts of litter at the towpath’s edge and grasped a thick blade of broken glass, in case he needed to defend himself. He moved forward and prepared himself for a battle against the tangle of bodies as they vied for position in front of the wall; there wasn’t much virgin space left on the brickwork. But as he tensed himself to enter the fray, the limbs unlocked and moved away from him, allowing him passage. Eyes assessed him, gracing him with a respectful nod to his physicality. His foot kicked against an aerosol and he bent to pick it up. For the first time in what seemed like weeks, he felt his mouth trying on a smile. Was there real blood surging through his veins after all? Might there be a portion of this tired, knowing city that could be his?

He clenched the glass and readied himself with the aerosol as white palms fed him to the wall. One way or the other, by God, he would reaffirm himself.

 

 

Advent Stories #8

OUTFANGTHIEF

At the moment the car slid out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband’s car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah’s panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the centre of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the 130 miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognise some of its own and allow them some anonymity.

‘Are you all right back there, Laura?’

In the rear view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

‘It’s all okay, Laura. We’ll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you.’

All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn’t go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness, on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Headlamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.

‘Can you see that, Laura?’ she asked. ‘What is it?’

It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the speedometer edged up to 80. They would have to dump the car somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.

‘Keep a look out for a B&B, okay?’ She checked in the mirror; Laura’s hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently.

Sarah fumbled with the radio button. Static filled the car at an excruciating volume. Peering into the dashboard of the unfamiliar car, trying to locate the volume control, she perceived a darkening in the cone of light ahead. When she looked up, the car was drifting off the road, aiming for a tree. Righting the swerve only took the car more violently in the other direction. They were still on the road, but only just, as the wheels began to rise on the passenger side.

but i wasn’t drifting off the road, was i?

Sarah caught sight of Laura, expressionless, as she was jerked from one side of the car to the other and hoped the crack she heard was not caused by her head slamming against the window.

i thought it was a tree big and black it looked just like a tree but but but

And then she couldn’t see much because the car went into a roll and everything became part of a violent, circular blur and at the centre of it were the misted, friendly eyes of a woman dipping into her field of view.

but but but how can a tree have a face?

*

She was conscious of the cold and the darkness. There was the hiss of traffic from the motorway, soughing over the fields. Her face was sticky and at first she thought it was blood, but now she smelled a lime tree and knew it was its sap being sweated on to her. Forty metres away, the road she had just left glistened with dew. She tried to move and blacked out.

*

Fingers sought her face. She tried to bat them away but there were many fingers, many hands. She feared they might try to pluck her eyes out and opened her mouth to scream and that was when a rat was pushed deep into her throat.

Sarah came out of the dream, smothering on the sodden jumper of her daughter, who had tipped over the driver’s seat and was pressed against her mother. The flavour of blood filled her mouth. The dead weight of the child carried an inflexibility about it that shocked her. She tried to move away from the crushing bulk and the pain drew gray veils across her eyes. She gritted her teeth, knowing that to succumb now was to die, and worked at unbuckling the seatbelt that had saved her life. Once free, she slumped to her left and her daughter filled the space she had occupied. Able to breathe again, she was pondering the position in which the car had come to rest, and trying to reach Laura’s hand, when she heard footsteps.

When she saw Manser lean over, his big, toothy grin seeming to fill the shattered window frame, she wished she had not dodged the police; they were preferable to this monster. But then she saw how this wasn’t Manser after all. She couldn’t understand how she had made the mistake. Manser was a stunted, dark man with a face like chewed tobacco. This face was smooth as soapstone and framed by thick, red tresses; a woman’s face.

Other faces, less defined, swept across her vision. Everyone seemed to be moving very fast.

She said, falteringly: ‘Ambulance?’ But they ignored her.

They lifted Laura out of the window to a cacophony of whistles and cheers. There must have been a hundred people. At least they had been rescued. Sarah would take her chances with the police. Anything was better than going home.

The faces retreated. Only the night stared in on her now, through the various rents in the car. It was cold, lonely and painful. Her face in the rear view mirror: all smiles.

*

He closed the door and locked it. Cocked his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.

Downstairs, he read the newspaper, ringing a few horses for the afternoon races. He placed thousand pound bets with his bookies. In the ground floor wash room, he took a scalding shower followed by an ice cold one, just like James Bond. Rolex Oyster, Turnbull & Asser shirt, Armani. He made four more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in the Jag in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she’d meet him in London. And then Chandos, his police mole, to see if that cunt Sarah Running had been found yet.

*

Sarah dragged herself out of the car just as dawn was turning the skyline milky. She had drifted in and out of consciousness all night, but the sleet that had arrived within the last half hour was the spur she needed to try to escape. She sat a few feet away from the car, taking care not to make any extreme movements, and began to assess the damage to herself. A deep wound in her shoulder had caused most of the bleeding. Other than that, which would need stitches, she had got away with pretty superficial injuries. Her head was pounding, and dried blood formed a crust above her left eyebrow, but nothing seemed to be broken.

After quelling a moment of nausea when she tried to stand, Sarah breathed deeply of the chill morning air and looked around her. A farmhouse nestled within a crowd of trees seemed the best bet; it was too early for road users. Cautiously at first, but with gathering confidence, she trudged across the muddy, furrowed field towards the house, staring all the while at its black, arched windows, for all the world like a series of open mouths, shocked by the coming of the sun.

*

She had met Andrew in 1985, in the Preston library they both shared. A relationship had started, more or less, on their hands bumping each other while reaching for the same book. They had married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Laura then, too. Both of them had steady, if unspectacular work. Andrew was a security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few favoured neighbours. They eventually took out a mortgage on their council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing machine and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs within weeks of each other. They owed £17,000. When the law centre they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically, she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first time.

His back to them, he stepped out in front of their car at a set of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew’s favour. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He was wearing a long, newbuck trenchcoat, black Levi’s, black boots and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His hair was black save for wild slashes of gray above his temples. His sunglasses appeared to be sculpted from his face, so seamlessly did they sit on his nose. From the trenchcoat he pulled a car jack and proceeded to smash every piece of glass and dent every panel on the car. It took about twenty seconds.

‘Mind if I talk to you for a sec?’ he asked, genially, leaning against the crumbled remains of the driver’s side window. Andrew was too shocked to say anything. His mouth was very wet. Tiny cubes of glass glittered in his hair. Sarah was whimpering, trying to open her door, which was sealed shut by the warp of metal.

Manser went on: ‘You have 206 pieces of bone in your body, fine sir. If my client, Mr Anders, does not receive seventeen grand, plus interest at ten per cent a day — which is pretty bloody generous if you ask me — by the end of the week, I will guarantee that after half an hour with me, your bone tally will be double that. And that yummy piece of bitch you’ve got ripening back home. Laura? I’ll have her. You test me. I dare you.’

He walked away, magicking the car jack in to the jacket and giving them an insouciant wave.

A week later, Andrew set himself on fire in the car which he had locked inside the garage. By the time the fire services got to him, he was a black shape, thrashing in the back seat. Set himself on fire. Sarah refused to believe that. She was sure that Manser had murdered him. Despite their onerous circumstances, Andrew was not the suicidal type. Laura was everything to him; he’d not leave this world without securing a little piece of it for her.

What then? A nightmare time. A series of safe houses that were anything but. Early morning flits from dingy addresses in Bradford, Cardiff, Bristol and Walsall. He was stickier than anything Bostik might produce. ‘Bug out,’ they’d tell her, these kind old men and women, having settled on a code once used by soldiers in some war or another. ‘Bug out.’ Manser had contacts everywhere. Arriving in a town that seemed too sleepy to even acknowledge her presence, she’d notice someone out of whack with the place, someone who patently did not fit in but had been planted to watch out for her. Was she so transparent? Her migrations had been random; there was no pattern to unpick. And yet she had stayed no longer than two days in any of these towns. Sarah had hoped that returning to Preston might work for her in a number of ways. Manser wouldn’t be expecting it for one thing; for another, Michael, her ex-husband, might be of some help. When she went to visit him though, he paid her short shrift.

‘You still owe me fifteen hundred quid,’ he barked at her. ‘Pay that off before you come grovelling at my door.’ She asked if he could use his toilet and passed any number of photographs of Gabrielle, his new squeeze. On the way, she stole from a hook on the wall the spare set of keys to his Alfa Romeo.

*

It took twenty minutes to negotiate the treacherous field. A light frost had hardened some of the furrows while other grooves were boggy. Sarah scuffed and skidded as best she could, clambering over the token fence that bordered an overgrown garden someone had used as an unauthorised tipping area. She picked her way through sofa skeletons, shattered TV sets, collapsed flat-pack wardrobes and decaying, pungent black bin bags.

It was obvious that nobody was living here.

Nevertheless, she stabbed the doorbell with a bloody finger. Nothing appeared to ring from within the building. She rapped on the door with her knuckles, but half-heartedly. Already she was scrutinising the windows, looking for another way in. A narrow path strangled by brambles led around the edge of the house to a woefully neglected rear garden. Scorched colours bled into each other, thorns and convulvulus savaged her ankles as she pushed her way through the tangle. All of the windows at the back of the house had been broken, probably by thrown stones. A yellow spray of paint on a set of storm doors that presumably led directly into the cellar picked out a word she didn’t understand: scheintod. What was that? German? She cursed herself for not knowing the language of her elders, not that it mattered. Someone had tried to obscure the word, scratching it out of the wood with a knife, but the paint was reluctant. She tried the door but it was locked.

Sarah finally gained access via a tiny window that she had to squeeze through. The bruises and gashes on her body cried out as she toppled into a gloomy larder. Mingled into the dust was an acrid, spicy smell; racks of ancient jars and pots were labelled in an extravagant hand: cumin, coriander, harissa, chilli powder. There were packs of flour and malt that had been ravaged by vermin. Dried herbs dusted her with a strange, slow rain as she brushed past them. Pickling jars held back their pale secrets within dull, lustreless glass.

She moved through the larder, arms outstretched, her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. Something arrested the door as she swung it outwards. A dead dog, its fur shaved from its body, lay stiffly in the hallway. At first she thought it was covered in insects, but the black beads were unmoving. They were nicks and slashes in the flesh. The poor thing had been drained. Sarah recoiled from the corpse and staggered further along the corridor. Evidence of squatters lay around her in the shape of fast food packets, cigarette ends, beer cans and names signed in the ceiling by the sooty flames of candles. A rising stairwell vanished into darkness. Her shoes crunched and squealed on plaster fallen from the bare walls.

‘Hello?’ she said, querulously. Her voice made as much impact on the house as a candyfloss mallet. It died on the walls, absorbed so swiftly it was as if the house was sucking her in, having been starved of human company for so long. She ascended to the first floor. The carpet that hugged the risers near the bottom gave way to bare wood. Her heels sent dull echoes ringing through the house. If anyone lived here, they would know they were not alone now. The doors opened on to still bedrooms shrouded by dust. There was nothing up here.

‘Laura?’ And then more stridently, as if volume alone could lend her more spine: ‘Laura!’

Downstairs she found a cosy living room with a hearth filled with ashes. She peeled back a dust cover from one of the sofas and lay down. Her head pounded with delayed shock from the crash and the mustiness of her surroundings. She thought of her baby.

*

It didn’t help that Laura seemed to be going off the rails at the time of their crisis. Also, her inability, or reluctance to talk of her father’s death worried Sarah almost as much as the evidence of booze and drug use. At each of the safe houses, it seemed there was a Laura trap in the shape of a young misfit, eager to drag someone down with him or her. Laura gave herself to them all, as if glad of a mate to hasten her downward spiral. There had been one boy in particular, Edgar – a difficult name to forget – whose influence had been particularly invidious. They had been holed up in a Toxteth bedsit. Sarah had been listening to City FM. A talkshow full of languid, catarrhal Liverpool accents that was making her drowsy. The sound of a window smashing had dragged her from slumber. She caught the boy trying to drag her daughter through the glass. She had shrieked at him and hauled him into the room. He could have been no older than ten or eleven. His eyes were rifle green and would not stay still. They darted around like steel bearings in a bagatelle game. Sarah had drilled him, asking him if he had been sent from Manser. Panicked, she had also been firing off instructions to Laura, that they must pack immediately and be ready to go within the hour. It was no longer safe. And then:

Laura, crawling across the floor, holding on to Edgar’s leg, pulling herself up, her eyes fogged with what could only be ecstasy. Burying her face in Edgar’s crotch. Sarah had shrank from her daughter, horrified. She watched as Laura’s free hand travelled beneath her skirt and began to massage at the gusset of her knickers while animal sounds came from her throat. Edgar had grinned at her, showing off a range of tiny, brilliant white teeth. Then he had bent low, whispering something in Laura’s ear before charging out of the window with a speed that Sarah thought could only end in tragedy. But when she rushed to the opening, she couldn’t see him anywhere.

It had been the Devil’s own job trying to get her ready to flee Liverpool. She had grown wan and weak and couldn’t keep her eyes off the window. Dragging her on to a dawn coach from Mount Pleasant, Laura had been unable to stop crying and as the day wore on, complained of terrible thirst and unbearable pain behind her eyes. She vomited twice and the driver threatened to throw them off the coach unless Laura calmed down. Somehow, Sarah was able to pacify her. She found that shading her from the sunlight helped. A little later, slumped under the seat, Laura fell asleep.

Sarah had begun to question ever leaving Preston in the first place. At least there she had the strength that comes with knowing your environment. Manser had been a problem in Preston but the trouble was that he remained a problem. At least back there, it was just him that she needed to be wary of. Now it seemed Laura’s adolescence was going to cause her more of a problem than she believed could be possible. But at the back of her mind, Sarah knew she could never have stayed in her home town. What Manser had proposed, sidling up to her at Andrew’s funeral, was that she allow Laura to work for him, whoring. He guaranteed an excellent price for such a perfectly toned, tight bit of girl.

‘Men go for that,’ he’d whispered, as she tossed a fistful of soil on to her husband’s coffin. ‘She’s got cracking tits for a thirteen-year-old. High. Firm. Nipples up top. Quids in, I promise you. You could have your debt sorted out in a couple of years. And I’ll break her in for you. Just so’s you know it won’t be some stranger nicking her cherry.’

That night, they were out of their house, a suitcase full of clothes between them.

*

‘You fucking beauty.’

Manser depressed the call end button on his Motorola and slipped the phone into his jacket. Leaning forward, he tapped his driver on the shoulder. ‘Jez. Get this. Cops found the bitch’s car in a fucking field outside Leicester. She’d totalled it.’

He slumped back in his seat. The radio masts at Rugby swung by on his left, lights glinting through a thin fog. ‘Fuck London. You want the A5199. Warp Factor two. And when we catch the minging little tart, we’ll show her how to have a road accident. Do the job properly for her. Laura though, Laura comes with us. Nothing happens to Laura. Got it?’

At Knowlden’s assent, Manser closed his eyes. This year’s number 3 had died just before he left home. It had been a pity. He liked that one. The sutures on her legs had healed in such a way as to chafe his thigh as he thrust into her. But there had been an infection that he couldn’t treat. Pouring antibiotics down her hadn’t done an awful lot of good. Gangrene set in. Maybe Laura could be his number 4. Once Dr Losh had done his bit, he would ask him the best way to prevent infection. He knew what Losh’s response would be: let it heal. But he liked his meat so very rare when he was fucking it. He liked to see a little blood.

*

Sarah woke up to find that her right eye had puffed closed. She caught sight of herself in a shard of broken mirror on the wall. Blood caked half her face and the other half was black with bruises. Her hair was matted. Not for the first time, she wondered if her conviction that Laura had died was misplaced. Yet in the same breath, she couldn’t bear to think that she might now be suffering with similar, or worse, injuries. Her thoughts turned to her saviours – if that was what they were. And if so, then why hadn’t she been rescued?

She relived the warmth and protection that had enveloped her when those willowy figures had reached inside the car and plucked out her child. Her panic at the thought of Laura either dead or as good as had been ironed flat. She felt safe and, inexplicably, had not raged at this outrageous kidnap; indeed, she had virtually sanctioned it. Perhaps it had been the craziness inspired by the accident, or endorphins stifling her pain that had brought about her indifference. Still, what should have been anger and guilt was neutralised by the compulsion that Laura was in safe hands. What she didn’t want to examine too minutely was the feeling that she missed the rescue party more than she did her own daughter.

Refreshed a little by her sleep, but appalled at the catalogue of new aches and pains that jarred each movement, Sarah made her way back to the larder where she found some crackers in an airtight tin. Chewing on these, she revisited the hallway and dragged open the heavy curtains, allowing some of the late afternoon light to invade. Almost immediately she saw the door under the stairs. She saw how she had missed it earlier; it was hewn from the same dark wood and there was no door handle as such, just a little recess to hook your fingers into. She tried it but it wouldn’t budge. Which meant it was locked from the inside. Which meant that somebody must be down there.

‘Laura?’ she called, tapping on the wood with her fingernails. ‘Laura, it’s mum. Are you in there?’

She listened hard, her ear flush against the crack of the jamb. All she could hear was the gust of subterranean breezes moving through what ought to be the cellar. She must check it out; Laura could be down there, bleeding her last.

Sarah hunted down the kitchen. A large pine table sat at one end of the room, a dried orange with a heart of mould at its centre. She found a stack of old newspapers bound up with twine from the early 1970s by a back door that was forbiddingly black and excessively padlocked. Ransacking the drawers and cupboards brought scant reward. She was about to give in when the suck of air from the last yanked cupboard door brought a small screwdriver rolling into view. She grabbed the tool and scurried back to the cellar door.

*

Manser stayed Knowlden with a finger curled around his lapel. ‘Are you carrying?’

Knowlden had parked the car off the road on the opposite side to the crash site. Now the two men were standing by the wreck of the Alfa. Knowlden had spotted the house and suggested they check it out. If Sarah and her daughter had survived the crash – and the empty car suggested that they had – then they might have found some neighbourly help.

‘I hope you fucking are,’ Manser warned.

‘I’m carrying okay. Don’t sweat it.’

Manser’s eyebrows went north. ‘Don’t tell me to not sweat it, pup. Or you’ll find yourself doing seventy back up the motorway without a fucking car underneath you.’

The sun sinking fast, they hurried across the field, constantly checking the road behind them as they did so. Happy that nobody had seen them, Manser nodded his head in the direction of the front door. ‘Kick the mud off your boots on that bastard,’ he said.

It was 5:14 p.m.

*

Sarah was halfway down the cellar stairs and wishing she had a torch with her when she heard the first blows raining down on the door. She was about to return to the hallway when she heard movement from below. A lot of movement. Creaks and whispers and hisses. There was a sound as of soot trickling down a flue. A chatter: teeth in the cold? A sigh.

‘Laura?’

A chuckle.

*

The door gave in just before Knowlden was about to. His face was greasy with sweat and hoops of dampness spoiled his otherwise pristine shirt.

‘Gun,’ Manser said, holding his hand out. Knowlden passed him the weapon, barely disguising his disdain for his boss. ‘You want to get some muesli down you, mate,’ Manser said. ‘Get yourself fit.’ He checked the piece was loaded and entered the house, muzzle pointing ahead of him, cocked horizontally. Something he’d done since seeing Brad Pitt do the same thing in Se7en.

‘Knock, knock,’ he called out. ‘Daddy’s home.’

*

Sarah heard, just before all hell broke loose, Laura’s voice firm and even, say: ‘Do not touch her.’ Then she was knocked back on the stairs by a flurry of black leather and she was aware only of bloody-eyed, pale-skinned figures flocking past her. And teeth. She saw each leering mouth as if in slow motion, dark lips peeled back to reveal teeth so white they might have been sculpted from ice.

She thought she saw Laura among them and tried to grab hold of her jumper but she was left clutching air as the scrum piled into the hallway, whooping and screaming like a gang of kids let out early from school. When the shooting started she couldn’t tell if the screaming had changed in pitch at all, whether it had become more panicked. But at the top of the stairs she realised she was responsible for most of it. There appeared to be some kind of stand-off. Manser, the fetid little sniffer dog of a man, was waving a gun around while his henchman clenched and unclenched his hands, eyeing up the opposition, which was substantial. Sarah studied them properly for the first time, these women who had rescued her baby and left her to die in the car. And yet proper examination was beyond her. There were four of them, she thought. Maybe five. They moved around and against each other so swiftly, so lissomely that she couldn’t be sure. They were like a flesh knot. Eyes fast on their enemy, they guarded each other with this mesmerising display. It was so seamless it could have been choreographed.

But now she saw that they were not just protecting each other. There was someone at the heart of the knot, appearing and disappearing in little ribbons and teasers of colour. Sarah need see only a portion of face to know they were wrapped around her daughter.

‘Laura,’ she said again.

Manser said, ‘Who the fuck are these clowns? Have we just walked into Goth night down the local student bar, or what?’

‘Laura,’ Sarah said again, ignoring her pursuer. ‘Come here.’

‘Everyone just stand back. I’m having the girl. And to show you I’m not just pissing in my paddling pool…’ Manser took aim and shot one of the women through the forehead.

Sarah covered her mouth as the woman dropped. The three others seemed to fade somewhat, as if their strength had been affected.

‘Jez,’ said Manser. ‘Get the girl.’

Sarah leapt at Knowlden as he strode into the pack but a stiff arm across her chest knocked her back against the wall, winding her. He extricated Laura from her guardians and dragged her kicking back to his boss.

Manser was nodding his head. ‘Nice work, Jez. You can have jelly for afters tonight. Get her outside.’

To Sarah he said: ‘Give her up.’ And then he was gone.

Slumped on the floor, Sarah tried to blink a fresh trickle of blood from her eyes. Through the fluid, she thought she could see the women crowding around their companion. She thought she could see them lifting her head as they positioned themselves around her. But no. No. She couldn’t accept that she was seeing what they began to do to her then.

*

Knowlden fell off the pace as they ran towards the car. Manser was half-dragging, half-carrying Laura who was thrashing around in his arms.

‘I’m nearly ready,’ she said. ‘I’ll bite you! I’ll bite you, I swear to God.’

‘And I’ll scratch your eyes out,’ Manser retorted. ‘Now shut the fuck up. Jesus, can’t you do what girls your age do in the movies? Faint, or something?’

At the car, he bundled her into the boot and locked it shut. Then he fell against the side of the car and tried to control his breathing. He could just see Knowlden plodding towards him in the dark. Manser could hear his squealing lungs even though he had another forty metres or so to cover.

‘Come on Jez, for fuck’s sake! I’ve seen mascara run faster than that.’

At thirty metres, Manser had a clearer view of his driver as he died.

One of the women they had left behind in the house was moving across the field at a speed that defied logic. Her hands were outstretched and her nails glinted like polished arrowheads. Manser moved quickly himself when he saw how she slammed into his chauffeur. He was in third gear before he realised he hadn’t taken the handbrake off and he was laughing harder than he had ever laughed in his life. Knowlden’s heart had been skewered on the end of her claws like a piece of meat on a kebab. He didn’t stop laughing until he hit the M1, southbound.

Knowlden was forgotten. All he had on his mind now was Laura, naked on the slab, her body marked out like the charts on a butcher’s wall.

*

Dazed, Sarah was helped to her feet. Their hands held her everywhere and nowhere, moving along her body as soft as silk. She tried to talk but whenever she opened her mouth, someone’s hand, cold and rank, slipped over it. She saw the pattern in the curtains travel by in a blur though she could not feel her feet on the floor. Then the night was upon them, and the frost in the air sang around her ears as she was swept into the sky, embedded at the centre of their slippery mesh of bodies, smelling their clothes and the scent of something ageless and black, lifting off the skin like forbidden perfume. Is she all right now? she wanted to ask, but her words wouldn’t form in the ceaseless blast of cold air. Sarah couldn’t count the women that cavorted around her. She drifted into unconsciousness thinking of how they had opened the veins in their chests for her, how the charge of fluid had engulfed her face, bubbling on her tongue and nostrils like dark wine. How her eyes had flicked open and rolled back into their sockets with the unspeakable rapture of it all.

*

Having phoned ahead, Manser parked the car at midnight on South Wharf Road, just by the junction with Praed Street. He was early, so instead of going directly to the dilapidated pub on the corner he sauntered to the bridge over Paddington Basin and stared up at the Westway, hoping for calm. The sounds emanating from that elevated sweep were anything but soothing. The mechanical sigh of speeding vehicles reminded him only of the way those witches’ mouths had breathed, snake-like jaws unhinged as though in readiness to swallow him whole. The hiss of tyres on rain-soaked Tarmac put him in mind of nothing but the wet air that had sped from Knowlden’s chest when he was torn open.

By the time he returned, he saw in the pub a low-wattage bulb turning the glass of an upstairs window milky. He went to the door and tapped on it with a coin in a pre-arranged code. Then he went back to the car and opened the boot. He wrestled with Laura and managed to clamp a hand over her mouth, which she bit, hard. Swearing, he dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it in her mouth, punching her twice to get her still. The pain in his hand was mammoth. She had teeth like razors. Flaps of skin hung off his palm; he was bleeding badly. Woozy at the sight of the wound, he staggered with Laura to the door, which was now open. He went through it and kicked it shut, checking the street to make sure he hadn’t been seen. Upstairs, Losh was sitting in a chair containing more holes than stuffing.

‘This was a good boozer before it was closed down,’ Manser said, his excitement unfolding deep within him.

‘Was,’ Losh said, keeping his eyes on him. He wore a butcher’s apron that was slathered with blood. He smoked a cigarette, the end of which was patterned with bloody prints from his fingers. A comma of blood could be mistaken for a kiss-curl on his forehead. ‘Everything changes.’

‘You don’t,’ Manser said. ‘Christ. Don’t you ever wash?’

‘What’s the point? I’m a busy man.’

‘How many years you been struck off?’

Losh smiled. ‘Didn’t anybody ever warn you not to piss off the people you need help from?’

Manser swallowed his distaste of the smaller man. ‘Nobody warns me nothing,’ he spat. ‘Can’t we get on?’

Losh stood up and stretched. ‘Cash,’ he said, luxuriously.

Manser pulled a wad from his jacket. ‘There’s six grand there. As always.’

‘I believe you. I’d count it but the bank get a bit miffed if they get blood on their bills.’

‘Why don’t you wear gloves?’

‘The magic. It’s all in the fingers.’ Losh gestured towards Laura. ‘This the one?’

‘Of course.’

‘Pretty thing. Nice legs.’ Losh laughed. Manser closed his eyes. Losh said, ‘What you after?’

Manser said, ‘The works.’

Wide eyes from Losh. ‘Then let’s call it eight thou.’

A pause. Manser said, ‘I don’t have it with me. I can get it tomorrow. Keep the car tonight. As collateral.’

Losh said, ‘Done.’

 

The first incision. Blood squirted up the apron, much brighter than the stains already painted upon it. A coppery smell filled the room. The pockets of the pool table upon which Laura was spread were filled with beer towels.

‘Soft tissue?’

Manser’s voice was dry. He needed a drink. His cock was as hard as a house brick. ‘As much off as possible.’

‘She won’t last long,’ Losh said.

Manser stared at him. ‘She’ll last long enough.’

Losh said: ‘Got a number 5 in mind already?’

Manser didn’t say a word. Losh reached behind him and picked up a Samsonite suitcase. He opened it and pulled out a hacksaw. Its teeth entertained the light and flung it in every direction. At least Losh kept his tools clean.

*

The operation took four hours. Manser fell asleep at one point and dreamed of his hand overpowering the rest of his body, dragging him around the city while the mouth that slavered and snarled at the centre of his palm cupped itself around the stomachs of passers-by and devoured them.

He wakened, rimed with perspiration, to see Losh chewing an errant hangnail and tossing his instruments back into the suitcase. Laura was wrapped in white bath towels. They were crimson now.

‘Is she okay?’ Manser asked. Losh’s laughter in reply was infectious and soon he was at it too.

‘Do you want the off cuts?’ Losh asked, wiping his eyes and jerking a thumb at a bucket tastefully covered with a dishcloth.

‘You keep them,’ Manser said. ‘I’ve got to be off.’

Losh said, ‘Who opened the window?’

Nobody had opened the window; the lace curtains fluttering inward were being pushed by the bulge of glass. Losh tore them back just as the glass shattered in his face. He screamed and fell backwards, tripping on the bucket and sprawling on to the floor.

To Manser it seemed that strips of the night were pouring in through the broken window. They fastened themselves to Losh’s face and neck and munched through the flesh like a caterpillar at a leaf. His screams were low and already being disguised by blood as his throat filled. He began to choke but managed one last, hearty shriek as a major blood vessel parted, spraying colour all around the room with the abandon of an unmanned hosepipe.

How can they breathe with their heads so deep inside him? Manser thought, hypnotised by the violence. He felt something dripping on his brow. Touching his face with his fingers, he brought them away to find them awash with blood. He had time to register, as he looked up at the ceiling, the mouth as it yawned, dribbling with lymph, the head as it vibrated with unfettered anticipation. And then the woman dropped on him, ploughing her jaws through the meat of his throat and ripping clear. He saw his flesh disappear down her gullet with a spasm that was almost beautiful. But then his sight filled with red and he could understand no more.

*

She had been back home for a day. She couldn’t understand how she had got here. She remembered being born from the warmth of her companions and standing up to find both men little more than pink froth filling their suits. One of the men had blood on his hands and a cigarette smouldered between his fingers. The hand was on the other side of the room, though.

She saw the bloody, tiny mound of towels on the pool table. She saw the bucket; the dishcloth had shifted, revealing enough to tell her the game. Two toes was enough. She didn’t need to be drawn a picture.

And then somehow she found herself outside. And then on Edgware Road where a pretty young woman with dark hair and a woven shoulder bag gave her a couple of pounds so that she could get the tube to Euston. And then a man smelling of milk and boot polish she fucked in a shop doorway for her fare north. And then Preston, freezing around her in the early morning as if it were formed from winter itself. She had half expected Andrew to poke his head around the corner of their living room to say hello, the tea’s on, go and sit by the fire and I’ll bring some to you.

But the living room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she couldn’t remember what her face looked like.

When she revived, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house. Outside, in the tiny, scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding frost. The women were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with owlish eyes. They didn’t speak. Maybe they couldn’t.

One of them swooped down and landed by the box. She nudged it forward with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet. Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the gap between them all. Then they were gone, whipping and twisting far into the sky, the consistency, the trickiness of smoke.

*

Sarah took the box into the living room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt herself become more and more peaceful. She loved her daughter and she hoped Laura knew that. As dawn began to brush away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid. She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

In the end, she didn’t need to. Whatever remained inside the box managed to do it for her.

 

Advent Stories #7

f/8

Up ahead, the trees gave way to a field edging the final row of cottages before the Derbyshire hills and the brittle January night took over. The road was visible for a little way but there was no moon. Behind him, the lights from Manchester formed a thin meniscus of pale orange. Tommy felt the pressure of the clouds; they seemed close enough to grasp. Like matted strips of iron they’d be, warm to the touch, buzzing with unknowable energy. He struggled with his backpack over the mud and stones. The flashlight secured to his headband ranged wildly around that final barrier of trees. Once he breached it, the darkness ahead deepened, as if the field had become flooded with oil. The trees had acted as a windbreak; now he was almost felled by the hard gusts whipping across the flat. He righted himself and moved on, feeling the hair on the back of his neck tingle. He closed his eyes to it for a moment and breathed deeply through his nose. There was a smell, he felt, of something organic and flawed, like the metallic edge that was present in a cancer ward, or a delivery room. The ruins were maybe sixty feet away. Tommy had rehearsed this walk in good weather and daylight, counting steps, ticking off landmarks. The headlight was for hazards only, really, although it was powerful enough to pick out the gleaming, broken spire of the church. Now Tommy felt the first, fat spots of rain.

He quickly made his way to the location he had chosen earlier, a corner of the field sheltered by an overhanging hawthorn tree, where he hunkered down against the drystone wall to assemble the tripod. Once his Nikon was attached to its head, he switched off his flashlight and drew up his hood; the rain was sheeting down now. Fingers of it stroked and restroked the same channels in his skin, reaching for his eyes and mouth. It patted against his waterproofs like some insistent knuckle at the door, demanding entry. He heard the voice of the storm, far away, but coming on. He made a few test exposures and decided to dial in a shutter speed of thirty seconds at f/8. Now it was just a case of waiting for the moment.

He knew about waiting. During the past month he had sat by two beds, waiting for his father to die and his son to be born. Neither had happened. He was unsure how he ought to feel and as a result felt nothing. Louis had eventually been removed, dead, from Jessica’s womb; his father had slipped into a coma. Rain drummed his hood. He stared at the dark green grass of the meadow. He thought about the terminology, the way the doctor had presented it to him, as if his father had decided to go for a relaxing swim in some deep, warm pool.

Jessica, his wife, deciding to spend a week with her parents had spurred his journey out here. She had looked through him, her eyes unfocused, soft, as if she was something newly hatched. He asked her questions and she grunted in reply, sometimes minutes later. It only dawned on him after she had gone that he was reacting in the same way. They were ghosts in the same house, only aware of each other long after they had vacated the rooms they’d inhabited. He watched her being driven away by her cement-faced father – Tommy’s not and never will be good enough for my girl – and worked his way diligently through the onlytwo bottles of alcohol in the kitchen: port and gin. He came to in the living room, an empty pizza box he couldn’t remember ordering, much less eating, on his lap; an album of photographs; the keys to the Jeep.

He showered and shaved and drank three cups of black coffee. He slotted a recharged battery into his Nikon and pulled out some maps. Keep busy. Fill your mind with other things. Don’t give it any space.

He couldn’t remember driving out here, or where exactly here was. The Jeep he’d parked in a public layby near to a farmhouse with one amber light burning in an upstairs window. Cloud massed behind it like something steeling itself for attack. It seemed he might play those last few days over and over in his mind; it was as if nothing he did from now on would possess enough acceleration to escape the restrictive atmosphere he was breathing. He swung his head up towards the sky and the rain fussed into it like a swarm of cold steel wasps. He regarded the camera on its tripod as if it were some kind of exotic farm animal ruminating by his side. Then there was a flash of lightning that corkscrewed out of the leaden ceiling, close enough for him to feel its heat. He felt his flesh draw in, as if instinctively trying to make itself as small a target as possible. He knew the risks. He knew the myths. Lightning could strike twice in the same place. Stay away from the trees. Make yourself flat on the ground.

Suddenly he was within the thickness of the storm. The wind punched him. The rain seemed more substantial than it ought to be; seamless, almost. It billowed and swirled like a sheet on a washing line. Tommy’s fingers sought the shutter release button and depressed it. He felt, rather than heard, the click of the mechanism. A thirty-second exposure. Nothing but the dark and the rain and the howling of the wind. He closed his eyes. He could feel a fizz in the air, a crackle of energy. It was all around him. It was right on top of him. But no great spark. He released the shutter again. This time, fifteen seconds into the exposure, the lightning came. Thunder surrounded him almost at the same moment. He jumped, lost his footing. He put out a hand to steady himself, but wrenched over to one side when he realised the exposure was not yet completed; if he touched the tripod the shot would be ruined. His foot sank in mud; he felt water turn his sock heavy and cold. A fresh barrage of rain. It was getting through his supposedly waterproof clothing: determined weather. There was a flask of coffee back at the Jeep. One more shot and he was gone.

He checked the camera settings and waited, his finger on the shutter release. The storm was moving on anyway; he could sense the belly was full. The dense heart of cloud had softened, reared away. Pale light was sifting through. He depressed the button. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. He’d missed it. He’d —

(Max)

One hundred million volts entered Tommy’s body at the V of flesh where his thumb met the rest of his hand. He received an exit burn from the sole of his left foot. The contact temperature, in the 1/1000th of a second in which the lightning bolt travelled through his body, touched thirty thousand degrees centigrade. He lost consciousness immediately. It was another nineteen hours before he was found.

*

The first words he heard after the strike were delivered to him by a doctor at his bedside in Intensive Care. The doctor wore a Stockport County lanyard around his neck and a well-trimmed goatee as white as his coat. He said: You’re lucky to be alive, Mr Clare. You cheated death by a whisker, somehow.

The nurse helped him upright in order to drink water. Tommy heard the creak and whisper of what at first he believed to be the sheets, but it was his cindered flesh. He tried to speak but nothing travelled on the sirocco of his breath.

‘Shush, Mr Clare,’ his nurse said. ‘You need to be patient. It will all come back to you, in time.’

He lay on his back staring at the saline solution as it drained from its plastic sac into his arm. He felt too hot inside. He couldn’t hear properly. He was still unsure as to what had happened.

You cheated death.

He had a vision of someone with eyes blacker than boiling tar tearing up a betting slip in a shadowed corner, it blazing to ashes before touching the ground. He remembered the burnished chaos of the sky, and the trees, aghast. The worn edges of the ruins clung to the skin of the Earth. He seemed the only unattached thing for miles around. Tommy and his camera. He felt a deep stab of concern; what had happened to his camera?

He dreamed of his dead son. His wife was on the bed in the delivery room, sweat wicking off her, teeth clenched, eyes rolled back to whites. The anaesthetist was standing next to her with a needle the size of a baguette.

You want the epidural now? he kept asking, wagging the needle in her face. How’s your pain? Now? You want me to go in now?

The midwives were sitting still in plastic chairs, facing the wall. They wore red gowns with hoods. The hoods were too collapsed to suggest that anything as substantial as a skull lay beneath.

His wife had been induced. They had been told what to expect. Tommy had not wanted to be there, but he felt, because Jessica had no choice, then neither should he. A plastic tub lined with blue polythene lay at the foot of the operating table. There was a saw in it. Whenever Tommy asked the midwife what the saw was for, she giggled and told him to stop being so cheeky. She was coughing like a consumptive. Her words became a red surge against the cotton of her mask. Her eyes were shark-dead. She leaned into him, conspiratorially, and said: ‘I know how to joint a chicken like you would not believe.’

*

He snapped awake. His eyelids felt like scraps stuck to a barbecue grill. Over the months that followed, he suffered countless operations to enable his drawn-in limbs to extend once more. Plastic surgery wrapped him in tissue that was discoloured and alien. ‘Function over fashion, hey?’ the consultant said, on a drearily regular basis. Tommy’s hearing improved a little, but he was warned that it would never come back to the way it had been before. Occasionally, when he was drifting into sleep, he might be shocked awake by the sudden smell of vinegar, or hot oil, but nobody was cooking on the ward, nobody had brought in any takeaway food during visiting time. His senses wee still dealing with the insult of the strike, he was told. He ought to be prepared for lots of little surprises like that. How else had the lightning changed him? he wondered. In moments of rest, between skin grafts and sutures, he would close his eyes and watch the cosmos of his thoughts tumble in soothing, mordant colours. Ochre. Maroon. Carnelian. Into them frequently stepped a figure. Steeped in shadow, yet surrounded by a thin corona of crackling white light, its back always to Tommy, it would pulse in and out of true, as if being hunted by the automatic focusing system on a DSLR. Sometimes the head was a shaggy halo of loose, unkempt hair; sometimes it was smoothly combed back into a ponytail. Tommy became fascinated by this elusive figure. He wondered if he had created it, or if it was a memory of someone he no longer recognised. He began to look forward to periods of rest, when he could forget about the physiotherapy exercises and return to his pursuit of it.

He lay in the dark and touched the raw scar – arborescent, sprawling – that covered his entire chest. It was as if somebody had laid a network of branches against his skin and pressed down until their pattern was transferred into him. He listened to the faltering suck of his breath and understood what it was to be an old man. It had reduced him, this incident. He wondered how many years it had sheared from his span. Whatever it was, he decided, he was grateful. If things didn’t improve, he didn’t relish the thought of as much as four more decades of pain.

*

‘You’ve changed.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ The words tumbled out over the sandpaper of his tongue. He was always thirsty now, he found.

‘I’ve changed too.’

He nodded. Jessica’s face was bowed, trembling, knitted. What followed was quick, and full of the phrases he’d heard in any number of Hollywood break-ups, or read in novelised splits. I just thought… we’ve grown apart… best for both of us… fresh start… remain friends… keep in touch…

He didn’t even notice she’d gone; he thought she was still talking, but the voice was different. It struggled to be heard, and it was deeper, gravelly. It seemed to be rediscovering itself, little more than a mumble as he struggled to understand its rhythms and intonations. Closing his eyes helped. When he closed his eyes he could no longer see the fork of scar tissue on his chest. The figure seemed to step through a seam in his inner darkness, as if it were an actor just off stage, waiting for his cue. It trembled there in its lambent cocoon, perhaps waiting for a sign, or for Tommy to act. A word broke through the human static: South.

*

Tommy was allowed home a few days before his birthday at the end of May. His flat was stale, stuffy. There were no traces of his wife. She had removed the photographs of them together from their frames and left them in an envelope by the door. She didn’t want them, but she didn’t want them on show either, was the implicit message. He hobbled through the rooms, reacquainting himself with the layout, but it was as alien as his own body. It no longer felt like home. He didn’t know if that was because Jessica was no longer around, or that he himself felt that he had become someone else, a kind of imposter. It took a few moments to establish that the kitchen was not where he felt it should be, nor was the bedroom. It wouldn’t come back to him, his old life. His heart stuttered as if echoing his panic. He sat down on a sofa he could not remember buying and wished for a drink. There was an old yellow Selfridges bag on his desk chair. Inside it were the remains of his camera, and a note. This was found nearby when the emergency services picked you up. It’s a write-off… but I thought you’d need it for insurance purposes. J.

Tommy cradled the blasted remnants of the Nikon. The lens was cracked. The body of the camera had warped and opened, the plastic buttons melted and fused with their housings. All of it beyond repair. He turned the camera on its side and thumbed open the memory card slot. The card inside seemed to be intact, although the images it had stored were surely fried. He tried loading them anyway. He did not feel any pleasure or relief to find that all of his exposures uploaded without any sign of corruption. He stared at the final shot: the lightning that had passed directly through him. There were no jags in it. It was really quite beautiful. A viciously straight beam of blue-white light, turned to a soft, powdered explosion in the bottom left corner where the lens had flared. And where he had received it. He was about to turn away, sweating with the terror of the event’s documentation, when he noticed the little blue bar at the side of the application’s viewing window. There was space beneath it, indicating that this was not the final shot. He stared at the small gap, trying to understand how that could have happened, and resisting the force drawing his fingers to the mouse to reveal what his camera had recorded after the strike. Would he see himself lying in the grass, a smoking body swollen and ruptured within his clothes?

Turn it off. Dump the files. Grind the card to dust.

He swept the mouse across the mat until the cursor filled the gap. Click.

A translucent human shape: black, glistening rags hanging from its shoulders, hurrying away from the viewfinder, long hair whipping about it in the wind. The fist of meat at the centre of its chest glowing like an ember disturbed at the heart of a dying fire.

*

Later, after whisky, Tommy opened up his email accounts and read messages wishing him well. Before he knew what he was doing he was punching the word ‘lightning’ into his web browser. He read about what had almost killed him. It was as if he were witness to a car crash; he couldn’t look away. He read about the path of least resistance – something he had been a part of (wouldn’t Jessica have found that a hoot) – and the return stroke, which taught him that the nearest point of lightning to the ground – the stepped leader – built up a charge in whatever it was going to hit and that, at the last moment, an upward discharge flew out from that object to meet it. I embraced the killer, he thought. I might as well have flung open my arms to Death.

After much self-admonishment and coaxing, and a light meal, he felt better, well enough to think about the figure and the voice and what ‘South’ might mean. He wondered if this person might be the embodiment of his own spirit, here to jolly him along the long path to recovery. ‘South’ couldn’t mean death, in this case, which had been worrying him a little. He felt better, he was on the mend. The doctors had told him he was out of the danger zone and that it was up to him now, and how much work he wanted to put in to getting himself fit again.

When night came, Tommy let it. He ignored the light switches and the curtains and allowed the moon to fill the rooms with its pallor. He found these to be the best conditions in which to entertain the figure, whom he realised he was beginning to rely upon, perhaps a little too much. There was no improvement in definition or sound, yet Tommy had come to prefer it this way. With clarity would come epiphany, he felt, and he liked the mystery. If the presence revealed itself as someone he knew, was even a younger version of himself, disappointment would follow. Now it shivered into view again, as if it had been waiting for the moment Tommy invoked it.

It moved a little easier this time, as if, like Tommy, it had been undergoing physiotherapy. There was less of a hunch in its posture. Less hesitation in the reconfiguring of limbs. It seemed looser, suppler, more at ease, with itself and Tommy too, perhaps. What’s your secret? Tommy willed at it. Show me how to improve.

It seemed to react to his imagined words. The glimmer of surrounding light broke into disconnected seeds as it turned its head, then rediscovered its uniformity. The struggle to hear what it mouthed at him; deafness had followed him into his daydreams, it seemed. A hiss and crackle of nonsense. Black clods fell from lips that seemed to have forgotten how to move properly. And then: Dead tree.

*

Headaches. The doctors had warned him about these, but nothing could prepare him for their severity. It was as if a little portion of lightning had become trapped inside him at the moment of the strike, and was jagging around his cranium, searching for a way out. Pills did not help. Tommy decided to go for a walk, hoping that the fresh air would scour the pain from his head. As he opened the main door to the block, though, his legs buckled and he felt sweat stripe his spine as if someone had painted it upon him. There was a bank of light cloud obscuring the sun, but no low pressure, no reason to fear the weather today. He realised, bar the struggle from the taxi to the front door on the day he returned from the hospital, he had not ventured outside. He wasn’t sure he could do it, but then the figure was there, behind his eyes, coaxing him, its arm outstretched, bathed in benign blue light. Tommy shuffled down the steps and across the gravel forecourt. He kept his head down, as far as the stiff, unresponsive meat of his body would allow. Sometimes he was convinced the strike had cooked him through, that he was a dense, overcooked joint of meat, moistureless and tough. Good for nothing but the bin.

He walked around the block, pausing often. He ached the following morning, but it was a recognisable pain, one he was used to. It almost, but not quite, took his mind away from the constant burn of his scars. He walked again that evening, the figure accompanying him once more. By the end of the week he was able to walk two miles. The soreness was inevitable, but he managed it with painkillers and by calling on the figure. Its presence dulled his discomfort. It was as if it took on the burden, so that Tommy could sleep.

He wakened in the middle of the night, after the longest walk yet, a three-mile hike that had taken him all afternoon to complete. He lay still, wondering what had roused him. It wasn’t the fallout from his exertions, and it wasn’t the figure. Well, not directly, he realised, as he sat up and swung his legs gingerly out of bed.

South, he thought. Dead tree.

He went to his filing cabinet and tugged open the top drawer. Inside were folders of contact sheets, indexed by location. He sighed and pulled out a handful. These photographs represented half a lifetime of endeavour, with little reward. He had won the odd competition, and seen a few of his shots from a trip to China used in a travel guide, but he had never made a living from his work. Perhaps that was down to his lack of direction. He wasn’t a specialist, in the way that, say, Joe Cornish focused on landscapes, or Steve Bloom worked in nature. He photographed what was there on the day, whether it be cars at an antique fair, portraits, macro work at a flower show or dawn seascapes during a spur-of-the moment weekend away at the coast. Here were thumbnails of ex-girlfriends in candid poses, long-dead pets, friends gurning for the camera, and shots he had taken at Manchester Airport’s aviation viewing park.He placed this last batch on a lightbox and gazed at each exposure through his loupe. The memories came flooding back; because they were of a time before his accident, they seemed somehow brighter, more colourful. They seemed close enough for him to reach in and become a part of again. He remembered he had a Nikon with him that day, but not the DSLR. He had been using a film camera, an old F-801s, so he hadn’t been able to check each shot after taking it. He clung to the old technology because it was getting cheaper now that that film –inconvenient, unforgivable film – was less desirable. It kept him sharp. You couldn’t just point and keep your finger depressed. You had to think carefully about composure and exposure, or risk wasting a frame. He had been confident in his shooting that day. There was some amazing light, low and bronze, which underscored swells of seemingly solid cloud. There were a lot of small intercontinental passenger jets coming in to land from the north on runway 2. After twenty minutes, Tommy had realised he would get a better shot if he positioned himself on land south of the runway when it was being used for take-offs, especially if one of the big jets that operated out of here – a Virgin Atlantic 747, an Emirates 777 or one of the China Airlines freight Jumbos – opened its throttles. From this vantage point he would only get a three-quarters profile of a take-off, and that from the rear. Not good.

He remembered getting on to the A538 and winging it. Head sticking out of the window, navigating by the sun and the trajectory of the jets and whichever road seemed to promise to take him closest to where he needed to be. He had abandoned the car on a lane by a small farm and clambered over a fence into a field. He saw the airport perimeter, and about sixty feet shy of it, a single, dead tree, utterly nude and pale and smooth, like polished stone. He got to the tree and it was perfect. Sunlight gave it the illusion of life; the colour of it might convince you there was blood in its roots. If he got down low enough, he could make the forbidding perimeter disappear. Then there was just that amazing welter of cloud, the tree, and whatever came roaring up off the tarmac. Tommy had attached a 24mm wide-angle lens to the camera body and waited.

He had used another two rolls until it became clear that there was a hiatus in the traffic. By then the sun was overhead and the clouds had assumed a flatter aspect, anathema to the photographer.

Now, in his study, the pain uncurling in his limbs like a frightened cat regaining its confidence, Tommy pored over those photographs again, surprised that he had not viewed them properly since getting the contact sheets developed. The lone tree was a cliché in photography. But there was something about its juxtaposition with those cuneiform monsters lifting from the runway that excited him. It was fate and hope in the same picture. Death was all over it. He studied the tree, trying to find some message in its branches that would open up the mystery of the figure to him, but there was nothing. He almost expected to see a human shadow thrown upon the field from behind the trunk. A face in the portholes of a fuselage. Pareidol in those rampant clouds.

He was about to file the pictures away when he did spot something. Off to the left of the tree, at the very edge of the frame. Something in the undergrowth that mirrored the exposed wood of the tree: sun-bleached, weather-sanded. A branch, perhaps, lopped off by strong winds. But there was something lacking the arbitrary in its shape. It possessed a form that suggested function, as opposed to the random reach of a tree’s limb.

Tommy went to the filing cabinet and extracted the corresponding negative. He scanned it into his computer and booted up the image manipulation software. He opened the file and magnified it to a point just before it would begin to pixellate. A little noise, a little fringing, but he could see more clearly now. A white hand.

*

The following morning Tommy went back to the field. Driving produced its own new set of agonies; the peculiar dipping of the clutch he felt all the way from his foot up the left side of his body. He was drenched in sweat by the end of that twenty-minute jaunt. The climb over the fence and the halting passage through briars and over the scuffs and dips of uneven ground translated every jarring inch through his body. A journey he had made without thought before, now it made him feel old, worn out.

He found the body almost immediately. He couldn’t understand how he had missed it previously; his brain had been no doubt addled by the fumes of aviation exhaust, and blinkered by the tunnel vision encouraged by that lens barrel. The body wore no clothes. Little soft tissue too. He wondered if scavengers, in digging for that, might be responsible for removing the other. Most of the flesh had been pilfered, or had disintegrated into the loam. Here was the fatal wound he had inflicted: a heavy blow with a blunt instrument

you know it was a cold chisel

just behind the left ear. Jets were still taking off, profanely, the hundreds of souls on board oblivious to what was being played out beneath them.

I did this, Tommy thought, and: I did not do this.

He went home, but did not remember the journey. He went to bed and slept for sixteen hours. The figure watched over him, baleful, intent, for every single minute.

*

The police were sympathetic, grateful even. They told Tommy that the girl, Molly Case, a 26-year-old waitress from Hyde, had been missing for two weeks and all their leads had dried up. Her boyfriend, Max Leinster (I knew that… I knew that… how did I know that?), 40, a Leeds musician, had vanished shortly after her disappearance and they had no idea where he was. South America, most likely. Either that or Molly’s hefty brothers had caught up with him and he was now slowly feeding the fish at the bottom of some lake. Perhaps they told Tommy that to assuage his fear that he’d be treated as a suspect. Clearly, as their barely concealed scrutiny of his ruined flesh suggested, there was no danger of that. They didn’t even want to know why he had been rooting around in the fields south of the airport. How dangerous could this shrivelled old man be?, he could read in their faces. He’d struggle to murder a salad.

But he had felt her squirm in the dirt under the weight of his hand pressing down. He’d held the chisel high, waiting for her to be still enough to enable him a clean impact. He just… hadn’t been there when it happened.

He took the bus home – the police’s goodwill had not extended to a lift – and wrangled with the contradiction. His heart beat slow, despite his agitation. It seemed to fill his chest. He had never really been aware of his heart before. He pressed his hand to his chest and felt its pulse beneath the new raised flesh of his scar. Sometimes he dreamed that the scar was real, a fire tree growing inside his body from a seed planted there by the lightning. The sense of something filling him up, something inhabiting him, or stripping him away from the inside out was a real and constant persuasion. The lightning seemed to have erased who he was, or thought himself to be, and magicked an intruder into the space he had once filled. He stared into the mirror and it was him, generally, in shape and height and physique, but there seemed to be nothing left in the face that spoke to his memory or his sense of recognition. ‘You could be anybody,’ he said.

He woke up and it was dark and his innocence screamed inside him, even as he felt the rough, dense weight of the chisel, and the meaty, repetitive smack of it at her head, vibrating through the marrow of his arm, causing his teeth to clack together and pinch the flesh of his inner cheek. He had dreamed of his own burial, an event he was sure ought to have happened. He had read about the victims of lightning strikes, how rare it was to survive them. And those that did live, well, ‘life’ wasn’t really a description for what they endured. Perhaps he was dead, and all of this he was experiencing now was the aftershock, the closing down of the brain, the random emission of data as synapses failed, as cells sparked out. But this was no normal graveyard service…

In the dream, he had been alive during the interment. No coffin. Just black bin bags. Nothing so grand as a coffin for something as worthless as him. He lay in the plastic listening to the skitter of grit across layers. No heartfelt platitudes of a vicar who had never met him. Just the grunt and toil of two men, matching the rhythm of their spadework with curses thrown his way. They’d stabbed him so many times there was little shape left to his body, but the fatal blow had not come till near the end of their assault. A knife that penetrated his sternum and tore a hole through the wall of his right ventricle. His pleural cavity had filled up with blood like a bladder. He had listened to his own wet breath in that cramped, pitch-black space, and felt the air turn warm from it. Panic gnawed, but he had withstood the urge to scrabble at the plastic, scream to be let out. He felt the pressure of tons of earth pushing in on his body, deforming it further. Cold descended. Time passed. Someone must come to find him. A man with a dog. An early morning jogger. It always happened.

Something else was coming, though. He could sense it, even here, locked underground. It signalled itself in the rise of individual hairs all over his body. It built up and built up, like the charge in a cell. Tremors of thunder. His senses so attuned that he heard the slither of earthworms as they moved against his wrapping, eager for depth. Here it came. Here it came.

He felt the lightning hit the earth as if in slow motion. Its heat reached through the cold soil like relentless, searching fingers. It entered the coffin and it entered him. It did not stop until it had penetrated his heart. He closed his eyes and the figure he had come to expect at such moments was no longer the hunched, long-haired spectre-within-a-halo he expected, but himself.

*

f/8 and be there. It was what the old pro photographers said whenever talk turned to the latest accessories, the flashguns and carbon fibre tripods, the fast zooms and software. You could have as many expensive add-ons as you liked; if you weren’t in the right place at the right time, it counted for nothing.

The place where he had almost lost his life seemed too tame without the bad weather to enhance it. The hill and the ruins were as inoffensive as anything found on a greetings card. Tommy had grown accustomed to the pain in his back and legs, had learned, if not to master it, then to accept it. He wondered if it was in fact lessening, but more likely his threshold had broadened. The weight of the spade in his hand felt good. It emboldened him, despite his suspicion that he would not be physically up to the task.

The area where the lightning had struck was still black. He found one of his shoes poking from the grass, a molten twist. He knew he was standing at the point where he had been hit without acknowledging the frisson that ran up his spine, like some ghostly aftershock of the event. Ignoring the complaint in his muscles, he began to dig.

It was getting dark by the time the blade hit a density that was not simply more soil. He fished his headlamp from his pocket and strapped it on. He knew he had been getting closer; the earth, where the lightning had passed through it, had created fulgurites, delicate glass tubes that carried within them visual echoes of its searing assault. Petrified lightning. He wiped his face with a sodden coat sleeve and worked at the soil, digging it away from the ragged edges of the bin bag coffin. He didn’t need to clear a path all around it: much of it was torn away. Rats. Worms. Christ. The despairing teeth of whatever lay inside? Tommy scooped handfuls of dirt away from the interior. He flinched when his hand met something that did not yield. Gently he swept it away from the face, wincing when his fingers became entangled in the long, lank hair. He positioned his head so that the beam of light would not pick out a single shred of the corpse and kept digging, wishing he had thought to bring some heavy duty gloves.

He found the chest and peeled away the cheap edges of the jacket that contained it. The ribcage had been blasted open. He smelled the faintest aroma of roasted bone. Tommy shut his eyes and reached inside the hole. He felt a waft of sour air caress him as the thing sighed, but it could not have been that. Just some pocket of foul air released by his digging, that was all. There was something here. It was small and hard, like a pebble. What he had mistakenly believed to be his own heart cried out in recognition.

 

 

 

Advent Stories #6

THE WINDMILL

As they drove past the gutted skeleton of the Escort, Claire tensed.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jonathan, easing off the accelerator.

‘There was someone in that,’ she said, twisting against his seat belt to look out of the back window. ‘Stop. Go back.’

He shook his head. ‘Will you stop messing about Claire? I can never tell when you’re being truthful. You should have been an actress.’

The car diminished. It was standing on its hubs, the tyres having melted, in a pool of oil. Claire squinted at the driver’s side: a black shape was bolt upright in what remained of the seat.

She turned round.

Jonathan was fiddling with the tuner, trying to find some music. The only station that cropped up on the automatic search was a thin grainy hiss, punctuated by a slow ‘whump… whump’ sound.

‘Welcome to Radio Norfolk,’ said Claire, trying to forget. He’d had no lips. Just a gritted sheet of white. His fat had oozed through the black shell of his skin and hung in yellowish loops, like cheap pizza cheese.

The Fens reached out beyond the hedgerows muscling against the car, green fields splashed with red poppies and sprigs of purple lavender. Claire wound down the window and breathed deeply, trying to unwind. This was meant to be a relaxing weekend but already she felt that she’d made errors. And that riled her.

‘Norfolk? Why are you going to Norfolk?’ they’d asked her back at the office. She’d felt the need to defend the place, even though the nearest she’d ever been to the county was a day trip to Mablethorpe as a child.

‘There’s lots of unspoilt coastline,’ she said. ‘I want long, windswept beaches to walk along. And there’s a stack of wildlife. Apparently.’

‘You should try Suffolk instead,’ a colleague, Gill, had said, almost desperately, while her deputy looked at her with an expression approaching pity.

Jonathan had suggested they go to Paris but she quashed that idea because she didn’t want to spend too much money. And anyway, what was the point of going away for a weekend to another busy, polluted city? But that wasn’t strictly true. Her negativity had more to do with the fact that the break was Claire’s baby: she wanted to come up with the plan. Now, as they swept through mile after mile of flat, sunbleached land, she was beginning to wish that she’d thought of Paris first. And she was also thinking of Jonathan’s disappointment and the ‘told you so’ triumphs of her workmates once she got back.

Jonathan was aware of her frustration. He rubbed her leg. ‘We’ll stop for a drink, hey?’ he said. ‘Next pub we come to. We’ll try some good old local brew.’

‘There was someone in that fucking car,’ she snapped.

‘Fine,’ he said, braking hard. ‘Get out and go and save him.’

They sat in silence, the heat building. Claire strained for some sound to massage the barrier loose between them but none was forthcoming. They hadn’t seen a car, a moving car, for an hour or so. The buildings they’d passed were gutted and crippled, the life seemingly sucked from their stone into the sallow pastures that supported them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just – it’s work, you know? It’s been getting me down. I just want this weekend to be perfect. I need this break and maybe… maybe I haven’t realised that you need it just as much. You’ve driven all the way from London and… ’ she trailed off, lamely. Work excuses were crap, she knew that and so did he.

Jonathan didn’t say anything. He started the car and moved off.

‘Put a tape on then,’ he said. ‘Anything. I’m getting antsy with all this bloody quiet.’

She dug for a cassette from the pile on the back seat. Most were hers although there were one or two tapes from his past, recorded on blanks by ex-girlfriends and scribbled over with red kisses. Alexander O’Neal. Luther Vandross. He had some new stuff, Fugees and Skunk Anansie but she couldn’t get the irritation out of her where those older albums were concerned. It wasn’t so much the music – it was shite, that went without saying – it was thoughts of what he’d been up to while she listened to it. Why would you play Luther Vandross if you weren’t doing what he was singing about?

Her fingers settled on a Pavement album they both liked. The tension between them relaxed a little but Claire was glad to be able to point out a pub – it would be good to get out of the car and make the distance between them an optional thing.

‘Where are we, navigator?’ Jonathan asked, parking the car in the gravel forecourt. Behind them, a stone building with no discernible purpose was the only other sign of life around.

‘Um, Cockley Cley. Just south of Swaffham.’

‘Right. Let’s get re-fuelled. Hungry?’

A man wearing sunglasses and a padded Parka uncoiled from the corner of a bench outside the pub, where he had been sunning himself. He snaked out a hand to the adjoining picnic table and withdrew a pallid sandwich from a paper bag. His flask was attached to a sling around his shoulder. Jonathan nodded as they walked by but if the man reacted, Claire didn’t see it.

Inside, three men were hunched over their meals, whispering conspiratorially. A cold meat buffet under hotlights reminded Claire of a Pantone chart of greys. To their left, the lounge was empty: two men were sitting at the bar, exchanging lowing, long-vowelled words. Claire wanted to leave.

‘Jonathan – ’

The man facing her wore a shirt opened to his navel. His gut lolled there, a strip of sweat banding his sternum. His nose was a sickening chunk of discoloured flesh, bulbous and misshapen, hanging down almost to his top lip. She watched, fascinated and repulsed, as he dragged a handkerchief across it, threatening to smear it even further. It looked as though it was melting. His companion was dressed in a cheap suit with a purple shirt. His hair was greased back, one blade of it swung menacingly in front of his eyes. His grin was loose and slick with spit. She could see his dentures, behind the pitted white flaps of his lips, clacking loosely around his mouth.

She edged towards her boyfriend as the landlord appeared from behind a gingham curtain. She was conscious of movement behind his arm: a swift descent of something silver, a hacking noise. She backed into a chair and sat down.

‘Pint of Flowers. And, er – ’ Jonathan looked at her and she saw a little boy lost. The men eating their dinner had looked up at his softly blunted northern tones. They looked confused, as if they ought to act upon this invasion but didn’t know what course to take.

‘Glass of fresh orange,’ she said, her voice too loud.

The landlord poured their drinks and took Jonathan’s money. He had the look of a pathologically strict Sergeant-Major. His moustache and his accent were violently clipped. His eyes were unpleasantly blue.

 

They took their drinks outside and sat on the bench adjacent to the man with the flask. He was still eating his sandwiches. He gave them a cursory once over and zipped his Parka closer to his throat.

‘Jesus,’ whispered Jonathan, downing half of his drink. ‘Jesusing Christing piss.’

‘Did you see that man’s nose?’ hissed Claire, fidgety wth nervous excitement. She was close to guffawing. ‘What do you think it was? Syphilis? Cancer?’

Jonathan polished off his pint. ‘Demonic possession,’ he said, standing. ‘Drink that, bring it or leave it. We’ve been here seven minutes too long.’

They spewed gravel getting out of the car park. Claire looked back and saw the Sergeant-Major step out of the door, his hand raised, a stricken look on his face.

Neither of them said anything until they hit the relative bustle of Swaffham. Even then, their relief could only manifest itself in gusts of laughter.

‘I love you,’ she said, surprising herself. It seemed easy to say after the minor trauma of the pub. It was a comfort.

‘I love you, too,’ he replied, although she hadn’t meant it as a cue. ‘I thought we were goners. I thought we were going to end up as part of a very disappointing Scotch egg.’

She laughed again and then suddenly felt like crying. Her upset was nebulous, there was no real reason for it, no rational reason. They’d just been people, strange only because they were slightly more different to her than she was used to. Must be exhaustion. She closed her eyes and through the reddish dark of that unshareable interior, she immediately saw the measured sweep of a deeper blackness across her vision. She opened her eyes but there weren’t any boringly equidistant trees to cast their shadows, no houses since Swaffham now lay behind them. She shut out the light again and yes, here it was, a slow black glide from the top of her eyes to the bottom. And again, And again. Again.

Her heartbeat then, she reasoned, not without some discomfort. But before she could offer any satisfying alternative, she was asleep.

*

She swam out of the dark, panicking that she wouldn’t grasp Jonathan’s question and be able to answer it before he lost patience with her. But it wasn’t a question, he was merely talking to himself, loud enough for her to infer that he was pissed off with her sleeping while he did all the work.

‘Sea view, they said. A sea view at the hotel. Oh yes, certainly, if you’ve brought the Hubble telescope along with you.’ He looked at her and she could tell why; both to check she was awake and that she appreciated his joke. God, he really could be a minor irritant sometimes. ‘Wells-Next-The-Sea, they call this place,’ he continued. ‘Mmm, and my name’s Jonathan-Two-Dicks-Chettle.’

‘We’re here then?’ Claire stretched in her seat, and blinked against the late morning sunshine. A clutch of beached boats seemed to cling to each other in the distance. Well beyond them, a silvery grey line – like a mirror seen edge on – marked the leading strip of the tide.

‘Yes, arrival can usually be said to be on the cards when the driver is in parking mode. And hey! We’re in a car park. Well done. Super.’

‘Oh shut up, Jon,’ Claire sneered. Twin glints of light drew her gaze towards a range of thin trees forming a paltry windbreak against the sea’s muscle. Someone was looking in their direction with a pair of binoculars.

‘Birdwatchers,’ Jonathan said, with a mock shudder. ‘This place’ll be crawling with them. Come on, let’s go and christen our room.’

They checked into the B&B and were led up a grand staircase past mounted blunderbusses and badly stuffed seabirds. Their room looked out on the car park but was only slightly higher up, giving a better view of the acres between the hotel and the sea. Jonathan pressed up against her while she took in the tangy air. She let him peel down her jeans and panties, take her from behind even though she was dry. His pleasure, transmitted into grunts and selfish stabs, did nothing for her, but it was better than arguing about sex. She wondered why she had suggested this holiday as he withdrew and came on her buttocks. She wondered if, as he wiped himself against her, it was to prove to herself that she didn’t want him any more.

‘Quick walk before dinner?’ he said, tucking himself away and kissing the back of her head. ‘I’ll wait downstairs. See if they can recommend some good restaurants.’

She masturbated herself to a swift, shallow orgasm, then cleaned herself up and pulled on a pair of shorts. Jonathan was leaning against the door outside, absently sniffing his fingers. He looked at her, obviously irritated that he’d had to wait so long, then motioned with his head and set off for the road before she’d reached him. They followed its uneven surface towards the boats then struck out across the fields, past dun coloured cows. Thick reeds nestled in a gulley off the track, hissing.

The quick, unexpected smell of camomile pleased her, a scent she’d always associated with long summer walks as a child with Dad through the woods behind their house. She’d ask him where they were going and he’d reply: ‘The land of far beyond.’ They never arrived, though she’d soon lose her excitement of that unseen place in favour of his soft words as he told her about the plants and the buildings and the animals they saw. More often than not, she’d end up in his arms, too tired to walk, as twilight drew around them.

‘What are you smiling at?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Sorry,’ she said, reluctant to share her memory. He’d probably only scoff. ‘I thought this was a holiday. I thought I’d be able to smile without being invited.’

‘Do you have to be such a snidey bitch all the time?’

‘Only when I’m with you, lover.’

Violently quiet, they approached an expanse of mud. Riven with trenches and pits, its scarred surface stretched out towards the sea. At this landlocked end, dry, stunted plants sprouted from its surface sheen. The acrid smell of salt was accompanied by something cloacal: oil bound up in its organic processes, farting silently through moist fissures.

‘Jesus,’ said Claire. ‘Fucked if I’m wading through that.’

‘This holiday was your idea, kid,’ Jonathan sang. ‘We could have been sipping serré outside Café de la Mairie by now.’

It took the best part of an hour to cross the mud, by which time they were hot and cross with the way the mud sucked their feet in easily enough but was reluctant to give them back without a fight. Eventually the land solidified and gave itself over to a tract of well-packed sand. They squelched towards a band of shallow water and rinsed their feet. At the other side, they headed towards the boats, parallel to the path they’d taken. Two hundred yards away, a man collecting shellfish in a carrier bag cast featureless glances at them while a dog scampered at his feet.

The journey back seemed free of obstacles and they were able to relax and enjoy the walk. The sea breeze flirted gently with them, taming the sun’s heat. Claire was able to laugh at one point, at some lame crack or other that Jonathan came out with. She didn’t care. The water that they’d crossed had broadened and it soon became apparent they’d have to re-cross it to get back to their hotel. It seemed much deeper, with a fast running spine.

‘Shit,’ Jonathan spat. ‘We could swim it.’

‘I’m not swimming anything. I’ve got my sunglasses on and money in my pockets. And my watch isn’t waterproof.’

‘And God fucking forbid you should smudge your fucking make-up!’

Claire flinched from his rage and inwardly threatened herself not to cry. She wouldn’t do that in front of him again. She wasn’t happy with her silence – a mute response might only goad Jonathan further – but if she opened her mouth she’d start bawling. She couldn’t remember how their relationship had started. It was as passionless and inexorable as a driver grudgingly picking up a hitch-hiker on the road.

While he judged the depth and keenness of the water, she watched the tide in the distance, creaming against the slate-coloured sand at a tempo to match the beat of her resentment towards him.

‘I’m going to try this, try walking across. To show you. Then you’ll be safe.’

Do I hate him? she thought, bitter with her redundancy in this situation and angry that he should be illustrating her uselessness by making such a sacrifice. My hero. Suddenly, she didn’t care if he disappeared into the sand and drowned. She wouldn’t dive in to help him, she wouldn’t scream for assistance. She might just sit down on the sand here for a while and count the bubbles.

‘Nah,’ he said, waist-high in water. ‘Sand’s giving way. Too dangerous for you.’

She gritted her teeth and looked back along the course of the water. She saw a place where the water chuckled and frothed and padded over to it. Shallow land. She’d skipped across to the other side while Jonathan was still struggling to free himself of the beach’s suck. She had to turn away from him to conceal her laughter. He caught up to her, red and soaking.

‘You might have told me, you twisted little cunt,’ he hissed into her ear, and strode off.

Yes I do, she thought.

*

Shocked and hurt by his attack on her, more than she wanted to admit, Claire rinsed her feet in the sink while Jonathan languished in the bath. It seemed his good mood had revived somewhat. His hand was gripping the head of his straining cock.

‘Hey, baby,’ he said, in a mock cowboy voice. ‘Why don’cha mosey on over here ‘n’ milk my love udder.’

‘Fuck off,’ she muttered, leaving him to it.

She dressed and went downstairs. Ordered a drink from the bar. An hour later, Jonathan was with her. Her distress was a palpable thing, spinning out from him like hooks on umbilici to become embedded in her flesh. She felt subsumed by his personality, as if he were trying to ingest her. Maybe it was the drink, but she was convinced his feelings for her were as shy of respect and concern as she’d suddenly come to realise for him.

‘Sorry about that whole “cunt” thing. Bit strong. You know I love you. What shall we have for dinner?’

She picked at a chicken and apricot pie while he polished off a bowl of mussels. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘This sea air! I’m knackered!’ He looked at her hopefully.

‘I’ll stay down here for a while,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready for bed yet.’

He saluted and trotted upstairs. She swallowed hard. It seemed an age ago that she’d been able to think of him as attractive and warm. As – God, had she really? – a potential life-partner.

She took a drink with some of the other tourists, middle-aged women in oatmeal coir jumpers and Rowan bags. They tolerated her presence although she could tell she unnerved them for some reason. The hotel owner came in and lit the fire, asking everyone if they wanted brandy and she was going to start a game of whist if anyone was interested.

Claire bid everybody goodnight and went up to her room, the skin of her nape tightening when she heard the word ‘blood’ mentioned behind her, by one of the women. Did you smell the strength of her blood? She thought maybe that was what she’d said.

Jonathan was snoring heavily. The TV was on, a late night film starring Stacy Keach. She switched it off and went to the bathroom where she undressed quietly. And stopped.

Her period had begun.

Did you smell the strength of her blood?

‘Oh,’ she said, feeling dizzy. ‘Okay.’ She cleaned herself up and slipped into a pair of pyjamas. Stealthily, praying she wouldn’t wake Jonathan, who’d read her clumsiness as a prompt for sex – or an argument – she climbed into bed and willed sleep into her bones before her mind could start mulling over the steady, sour creep of their relationship. She failed. She was awake as the full moon swung its mocking face into view, arcing a sorry path across the sky that might well have been an illustration of her own trajectory through darkness. Jonathan’s ragged breathing ebbed and flowed in time with the tide of disaffection insistently eroding her from within.

As dawn broke, she managed to find sleep, although it was fragmented, filled with moments of savagery and violence that were instantly forgettable even as they unfolded shockingly before her.

Gulls shrieking as they wheeled above the hotel woke her. Jonathan had left a note on the pillow:

Didn’t want to wake you for breakfast – you were well out of it. Nipped out for a newspaper. Enjoy your toast. Love, J.

He’d wrapped two pieces of wholemeal toast and marmalade in a napkin and left them by her bed. The gesture almost brought her back from the brink but she guessed he considered it a chore. If he mentions it to me later, she thought, I’ll know he’s after a reward, a pat on the back. I’ll know it’s over. She giggled a little when she thought the death of their relationship should come down to a few slices of Hovis but that wasn’t really the case; it was just a tidy way to cap it all, a banal necessity to make the enormity of her realisation more manageable.

An hour later, they were piling along the A149 coastal road, Jonathan singing loudly to a Placebo song. The sea swung in and away from them, lost to bluffs and mudflats before surprising Claire with its proximity once more. She didn’t like the sea here. It appeared lifeless and sly. Where it touched land, grey borders of scum had formed. It simply sat there, like a dull extension of the Norfolk coastline.

They pulled off the road for a cup of tea at a small café. While Jonathan argued with the proprietor, who was loath to accept a cheque under five pounds, Claire watched an old woman attempting to eat her Sunday lunch. Her hands shook so badly that she couldn’t cut her meat; her cutlery spanked against the side of her plate like an alarm. The winding blades of an old-fashioned fan swooped above them all. Something about its movement unsettled Claire.

‘Come on,’ said Jonathan, imperiously. ‘We’ll have a drink when we get to Cley.’ He turned to the café owner, who was now flanked by his waitresses, alerted by the fuss.

‘Suck my dick, Fatso,’ Jonathan said, and hurried away. Claire raised a placatory hand but the proprietor only looked saddened. The woman raised her jerking head and showed Claire what she was chewing.

*

‘Jon! How could you say that? How could you embarrass me like that?’

‘Us Chettles don’t suffer fools lightly, Claire. I’m not about to start now.’

She wanted to leave him, to just go home, but it was his car and she didn’t know where the nearest railway station was. Sheringham, probably, a good twenty miles away. She hadn’t seen a bus or taxi since they were in Ely the day before yesterday.

‘I don’t feel as though I’m on holiday, Jon. I haven’t been able to relax. All we’ve done is drive and argue. And I really needed this break.’

‘Hey, it was your choice.’

‘Oh, like it would have been different if we were in Paris?’

He was nodding. ‘Paris is the city of romance. It’s impossible to have an argument there.’

She snorted. ‘There’s a word for people like you. Dumbfuck, I think it is.’

He let that one go, but she could see his jaw clenching, his knuckles whitening on the wheel.

She saw the windmill first. It rose up from a coppice beyond a low range of roofs, its naked, motionless blades seeming to pin the sky into position. She pointed it out and Jonathan nodded, turning the car on to a gravel track. They crested a small humpback bridge over a stream choked by rushes. The windmill was white, tall and solid. Some of its windows were open; lace curtain wagged in the breeze.

Jonathan parked the car and got out without looking at Claire. He walked through the heavy wooden door at the windmill’s base. Claire collected the bags and stood for a while, looking out towards the dunes. On the path, a cluster of birdspotters in brightly coloured windcheaters alternated their focus between her and a clump of gorse. Occasionally, one of them would raise their sunglasses and favour her with a brilliant stare. One of them trotted further down the path and the others followed. Claire laughed. They looked intense and foolish.

At the door, she paused. She couldn’t see anybody inside.

‘Jon?’

There was a visitors’ book open on a bureau next to a coffee cup. A small jar of lollipops on the windowsill had been discoloured by the sunlight. ‘Hello?’

She left the bags by the door and headed towards the room to her left. The door was ajar; an old woman was turning back the covers on the bed.

‘Oh, hello?’ said Claire, raising her hand. The woman looked up and smiled.

‘Hang on dear,’ she said, fiddling with her ear. Claire saw she was wearing a hearing aid. ‘I keep it turned off when I work. Nice to have silence every now and again.’

‘My name’s Claire? Claire Osman? I booked a double room for tonight.’

She moved past Claire and checked her name in the ledger. ‘Yes. Room for two. Where’s your partner?’

‘He went in ahead of me.’

The old woman gave her an askance look before shuffling towards the other end of the room. She twisted the handle on the door at the end but it was securely locked.

‘Nobody came in here, my love. Are you sure?’

‘I’m certain!’ Claire blurted. ‘I saw him come in before me. He must have gone through that door.’

‘Aye, if he was a spirit. That’s the door to the windmill. It’s always locked unless we have a party of schoolkids come round, or enthusiasts, you know.’

‘The other guest room then. He must be joking with us.’

‘There’s someone already in that, my love.’

‘He must be in there.’ Claire felt sick. She’d have been happy to see the back of Jonathan in any other circumstances but this was just too weird. Suddenly too final.

She pressed up close against the old woman’s back when she disturbed the other guests, who were sorry they couldn’t help, but no, they hadn’t seen a soul in the past half hour. Claire felt her head filling with grey. She smelled Trebor mints and Lapsang Souchong on the woman’s cardigan. The next thing she was aware of, she was sitting on a high-backed wooden chair in the dining room, her eyes fixed on a cut glass bowl filled with boxes of Kellogg’s Variety. The old woman had her hand between hers. The other guests – a woman in a pair of khaki shorts and a fleece; a willowy woman in a track suit sucking vampirically at a cigarette – watched, concerned from the corner of the room.

She introduced herself as Karen and looked as though she’d smoked herself thin. The type of woman who hurried a meal, picked at it really, just so that she could have the cigarette afterwards. Claire wondered if that was the way she had sex too. She drew the smoke so deeply into her lungs that it was almost without colour when it returned.

Her partner, Brenda, offered to call the police and look around the dunes outside. ‘The tide here is pretty innocuous but, you know, water is water.’

Claire sat in the room, looking at Jonathan’s travel bag. It hadn’t been zipped up properly; a corner of his Bolton Wanderers flannel was sticking out of it. Two WPCs arrived. She told them what she knew, which was nothing. They made notes anyway. Checked the car. Told her to relax and there’d be someone to talk to her in the morning. Best not to go anywhere tonight. In case Jonathan should return.

‘He’s got the car keys anyway,’ she said. The policewomen laughed, although she hadn’t meant it as a joke.

She watched them go back to their car. They talked to the old woman for a while, one of the policewomen turning to look at her through the window for a few seconds.

She ate with the other couple at the ridiculously large dining table, Brenda quick to let her know what a sacrifice this was as they’d aimed to go to The Red Lion in Upper Sheringham for food. Karen puffed before and after courses and during mouthfuls. Her cheeks seemed permanently hollowed.

‘Has he ever done this before?’ she asked.

Claire started to cry through her food, something she hadn’t done since her childhood. She’d forgotten how hard it was to eat and cry at the same time. It was quite interesting to try, really.

‘I can’t talk. I’m sorry.’ She left them and went to her room. She drew a hot bath and soaked for twenty minutes, tensed for his knock at the door and his impatient, stabbing voice. She never realised she’d miss him so much.

Later, she watched the dark creep into the sky. Mars clung, a diamond barnacle, to the underside of a raft of cloud. The birdspotters were still out there, a mass of coloured Kangol clothing and Zeiss lenses. There was even a tripod. Cows stood in a far off field like plastic toys.

Pale light went on outside. A soft looking young girl carrying a hose slowly drifted around the perimeter of the windmill’s grounds wetting the plants and the lawn. An overweight dog ambled alongside her. Claire listened to the fizz of electricity until it calmed to a dull murmur and then went to bed.

Sleep claimed her quickly, despite her loneliness and the alien posture of the low-slung room. Her dreams were edgy, filled with savage angles and lurid colours, as though she were a film director trying too hard. She was in a car too big for the road, ploughing through a village where there were no men. She was heading towards a windmill in the distance that didn’t seem to get any closer. Occasionally she’d drive over some indistinct shape in her path. Before long, the roadkill became larger. Some of it wore clothes. It didn’t impede her progress; she drove straight over it.

whump… whump… whump

Shanks of flesh squirted up on to the windscreen. The engine whined as it bounded through the bodies.

whump… whump… whump

*

Awake. Grainy blackness separated into the lumpen shapes of furniture and pictures on the wall. Imperfect light kissed at the curtains, turning them into powdery tablets of neon.

‘Jonathan,’ she whispered, softly, hopefully.

whump… whump

A deep creaking noise punctuated that heavy sound. The window filled with black, then cleared again after an age. Blackness once more. Then soft light.

She opened the curtain. A blade of the windmill swung past her, trailing ragged edges of its sail. Down towards the end of the lawn, a huddle of people sat, a pinkish mass in the gloaming. Were they having a midnight party? Why hadn’t she been invited? Maybe they wanted to leave her to her grief.

She shrugged herself into her towelling robe and picked her way through the shadows to the main door. The air was sharp with salt and still warm. She followed the path round to the garden, stepping through an arch crowded with roses. The windmill creaked and thudded, underlit by strange, granular arcs from lamps buried in the soil.

She was halfway across the lawn when she saw they were naked. They were surrounding something, dipping towards it and moving away. She recognised the young girl who’d watered the lawn, the old woman and Karen, who was lying back, cigarette in one hand, Brenda’s thigh in the other. Brenda was talking to some other women. Claire realised she hadn’t seen a man since the pub in Cockley Cley. The Sergeant-Major bustling out of the door. Holding up his hand. Mouthing something.

whump… whump.

The windmill hadn’t born sails when they arrived that morning. She took another, hesitant step forward when she was spotted. One of the policewomen pointed at her. They all turned to look, peeling away from the dark, wet core of their interest. She saw their bodies were painted with blood. The old woman wore feral slashes of deep red across her forehead and neck.

Claire felt a thick, hot release against her thigh as she turned to look at the blades of the windmill, wrapped in the still wet hide of her boyfriend.

She turned back to the women, who were advancing towards her now. She reached beneath the folds of her robe, smudged her fingers in her own blood and began to paint.

 

Advent Stories #5

THE DIMINISHED

There was something purple in the corner of his eye.

Ethan tried to blink it away but when it started to move he realised it was beyond his window, the glass of which was becoming spoilt by rain. He watched her leave the church and pull the collars of her coat round her ears before following the gravel path to the gate where she paused to look into a bag. Away she moved again, and this distorted glass, the swollen, dark shape of her made Ethan think of slow suns at dusk. The distortion seemed something more though, specifically belonging to her in the cruel warp of her features. In that instant he knew he must follow her.

He switched off his computer (the dying sigh of its fan bothering him as always) and snatched his greatcoat from the hook upon his study door. Outside he saw that the rain was not as bad as he’d anticipated. His face was wetted, but only by errant spits. Puddles and dripping trees showed him he’d missed the worst of the weather.

He glimpsed a meniscus of purple as she dipped out of sight down stone steps which led to the high street; he must hurry or she’d lose him in the throng – it was market day in the town and not satisfied with its rank of retail shops, out came the stalls and legged suitcases. The scrum for fresh cabbages, cigarette lighters and all things Minecraft did not last long but it would surely be at its most hectic now as lunchtime shoppers drifted into the streets. He followed at a discreet distance, fingering a display of fruits or eyeing a new range of wristwatch straps if she punctuated her journey. The seedy manner of his pursuit he pushed to the recesses of his mind; that she was something rich and rosy on such a discouraging day was reason enough to shadow her. It beat designing Boucher’s database into second place, that was for sure – but then, so would cleaning toilets with his tongue. When he thought about it, as he did now, ducking into the alleyway from which she was only just emerging at the other end, he was finding all manner of distractions to take him away from his VDU and its alien face of equations. He’d neglected to tell Boucher of his limitations when it came to programming. He’d scraped his Computer Studies GCSE at school thanks to reproducing a model written in Forth he’d cribbed from a late night Open University course on television. Boucher’s use for the database was modest; he only wanted a system that would add up statistics from records he was compiling for the local water board and present them in a tidy array of boxes. How hard could it be? Well, so far, about as hard as licking your own forehead. The only thing which kept him going was the promise of his three figure cheque on deadline day – if he met it, which was becoming ever more unlikely, especially as he now spent so much time watching re–runs of The Clangers and Paddington Bear or nipping out to buy bottles of Ribena to ensure he received his RDA of Vitamin C. Yesterday he’d spent ten minutes trying to trim his nostril hair with the kitchen scissors.

He was burying himself so deeply in whys and wherefores that he strode past the cafe into which she’d stepped. He left it a moment, listening to the babble of vendors doing themselves a grievance by offering state–of–the–art water filters for a fiver, before strolling back to the entrance. Inside he was clouted by a wall of smoke. A cluster of students were leaning over an ashtray choked with butts, heads almost touching. Dishes of half–eaten lemon meringue pie congealed in front of them. Beneath the reek of nicotine he could just detect a smell of all day breakfasts and coffee. Music leapt from hidden speakers: warm crackling vinyl supported a tepid beat and guitars that sounded tight and spangly. It halted soon after, victim to a scratch which brought half–hearted boos from the students. Ethan sat by the door and looked into the fog, trying to spot the girl. She was sitting by herself at a table by the sweet trolley, purple coat curled over the back of her chair. He chanced glances at her when her attention was diverted by somebody entering or leaving, or by the pulse of noise from the large table. She pushed reddish hair from her brow and nodded to the waiter who presented her with a jug of water. From her bag she pulled a strip of paper and studied it, her fingers moving against the skin of her wrists, her neck and temples. She looked fragile and lovely in the light, which only just managed to penetrate this far from the street. He watched her through the slowly shifting bank of blue smoke till his order arrived. She seemed insubstantial, as though the cafe and all it contained were of a vitality alien to her, almost appearing of the smoke rather than beyond it.

He sipped hot, weak coffee till his lips grew sore. The students were talking about a demonstration in London they would support if only they could afford the fare. Another round of Marlboros, more cappuccinos. They resembled bedraggled crows – huddled, black, nested down for the afternoon. One of them, a young woman with dreads and a leather waistcoat, shared Ethan’s interest in the girl, turning round to look at her when the conversation broke for laughter. Something in the precious way she guarded her gloved hand with its naked counterpart told him the limb was false, and recently acquired. He wondered why that should bother him.

The girl with the purple coat finished her studying and bagged the paper. When she raised a sputtering match to her own cigarette he saw that her eyes were different colours: one green, one brown and that with a stubbornly dilated pupil. The light cast unusual patterns on to her skin and it was only later, when he lost her in the glut of people tip–toeing around severed heads littering the floor by the fish market, that he realised the patterns were caused not by the flame, but by the web of scar tissue that portioned her face.

*

That night as he bathed, he became acutely aware of his body and found himself grateful for its petty imperfections. The way his penis curved slightly to the left when hard; the naevus that stained the skin of his right armpit; the soft wart on his scalp. All were slight when compared with the disfigurement she sported. That she did so openly was laudable but he didn’t know whether grim acceptance or defiance was her spur. He guessed the latter; there was a steel in her posture which belied her scant frame.

Head immersed, he listened to the call of his heart and concentrated till he was rewarded with a sense of himself as something other than a brain with chunks of meat attached. He followed the rush of blood and the peculiar rhythm of his organs till his chest ached and his extremities tingled. This heightened self perception froze him seconds later when he told himself something he’d thought about many times but which carried little punch when touched upon, as was usually the case.

I’m going to die one day, he thought. There’ll come a time when all this will stop and I’ll cease to be. He surfaced and the lurch in his chest, the roar of water in his ears made him think for a moment that he’d splintered into a million pieces.

*

He slept shallowly and rose with the birds, pulling the curtains open on a morning the colour of the girl’s coat. He gazed at the church for a while, willing her to appear but there was nothing to suggest life inside the building yet.

He switched on the computer but when he saw the soup of letters and numbers as he’d left them he killed the power and padded downstairs where he drank orange juice and listened to next door’s radio through the walls and the yapping of some dog in the park. An hour or so later, as he returned from the shop with milk for his breakfast, the church bells pealed. Ethan watched his neighbours dance to its tune, sucked into the blackness of the church doorway as smoothly as water to a drain. More people than he thought possible entered the building and a little while after its doors were shut he heard the organ spring to life. As if on cue, she stepped from behind a wall and came towards him from the top end of the cemetery, stopping half way to lean against a gravestone, her head cocked, listening to the music. What he’d guessed was sassiness in her stance now occurred to him as something unnatural: her legs seemed stiff; the arch of her spine was too pronounced and her head seemed too small for her body. Ethan blinked and pushed this growing attention to anatomy away, aware that it was beginning to rub off on him as an irrational need to preserve his own completeness. Hadn’t he just walked back from the shop facing oncoming traffic so he could anticipate and possibly dodge any cars skidding on to the pavement? And having looked right and left then right again, hadn’t he sneaked a look skyward? He remembered the footage of the Lockerbie and Amsterdam air disasters. Just because the chances of a jet falling from the sky on to a town were minuscule didn’t mean they couldn’t happen. Caution was a small price to pay in order to keep your flesh whole, to remain normal. He realised how self–important his definition of that word must seem: everybody was ‘normal’ in their own eyes but it was important to the majority of society that most people be more normal than others, despite the fact that such a desire for homogeneity spawned the bigoted and blinkered.

Daydreaming, he almost lost her again. This time she moved away from the high street, walking a path that led to the dingier parts of the town where the canal made a border between terraces and semi–detached life. She walked with purpose though her gait was leisurely or so Ethan thought as she turned into minor roads without hesitation. The cantilever bridge was a series of black strokes against the sky: it looked worthy of its stance as the town’s favourite suicide haunt. At the gates to Ethan’s old school, she stopped to watch the cranes and the JCBs tear at classrooms where once he’d sat, dreaming of such a demolition. Now, the sight saddened him, if only because it meant a part of his past, a part that contributed to his reality, was being taken away from him. Even in recognising an opportunity to talk to her, he felt some of his self being erased.

‘I don’t remember you,’ he said. ‘What year did you leave?’

Though he hadn’t meant to startle her, he was disappointed that she didn’t jump. ‘I wasn’t a pupil,’ she said, without looking up.

Of course, she meant she wasn’t a pupil here. Ethan leaned against the gate and introduced himself. Her scars revealed themselves as the ghosts of stitches that knitted her face together with thick bands of white. The one eye he could see from here was black and lifeless as a shark’s. The skin that curved away beneath her collar seemed a different colour and complexion. What had she suffered, for God’s sake? He wanted to ask if she’d had skin grafts; if her mutilation was by design or accident. She must have sensed his scrutiny.

‘I’m Emma. Stare if you must but your eyes will get tired.’

‘Sorry,’ he managed, turning his attention back to the crumbling school. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘No. I don’t drink.’ Her voice was measured and low, the words spoken so carefully Ethan was led to think she’d once had a stammer. Or perhaps it was her facial injuries which caused her lips to squirm in so guarded a fashion.

‘Well come and sit with me while I have one.’ He smiled and she looked at him fully. He was pleased that his smile didn’t falter, even though she looked so intimidating with that grotesque glare of hers. She seemed to consider him for a while, till a smile warped her face even further. It was a disconcerting effort, as it couldn’t reach her eyes, halted as it was by the barrier scars lining her cheeks.

‘I’m busy.’

He sighed. The broken clock above the main hall (which had read 3:17 since he first noticed it, fourteen years ago) came down in a plume of red brick–dust. A heap of rotten timber and steel girders concealed the spot where he’d once kissed Caroline Hulce in the third year.

‘This is bothering you?’ she asked.

‘Of course. I was a senior prefect at that school.’ He laughed. ‘All those marvellous teachers. Mr Meikle. Mrs Dunabin. All gone. God, can you smell that? Is it chalk dust?’

She shrugged. ‘What’s wrong with a little surgery now and then? All they’re doing is cutting away something that doesn’t work anymore, something rotten. To make way for something pure and new.’

‘What? You call a housing estate pure?’

‘Why not? It’s giving something to the community. What’s that school given, apart from poor marks and vandalism?’

He felt compelled to defend his past but he could see she was right. The school had suffered from dwindling attendances and a terrible sequence of exam results over the years. It had been doomed for a long time.

‘It’s true isn’t it, that it’s better to give than to receive?’ She walked away. ‘I might see you again.’

‘Why do you visit the church so much?’ The question blurted from his lips before he had time to check himself. He felt he was prying but she treated him to another non–smile.

‘My parents are buried there.’

*

He walked home, noticing how bare the trees looked. Not only had they been stripped of their leaves but the bark was weak and crumbly, hanging like scabs from trunks which didn’t seem strong enough to bear their branches. The faces he saw in dimming windows or passing him in the street were ravaged and grey. Everybody seemed to have a defect or a limit: a stiffness in gait, a stoop. Spectacles, hearing aids and inhalers. He felt cancers trying to gain purchase on his delicate innards. By the time he reached his doorstep, he was inflated with panic, certain he could feel the cells of his brain collapsing at a rate of one hundred thousand deaths per second.

*

Monday crept over him like a stale, unwelcome lover. A shower and breakfast did nothing to refresh him; the thought of his body as a shell full of dead tissue made him feel ill and scared. The polio which lurked in every human bowel, the inability for cells in brain and heart to rejuvenate themselves distressed him as he knotted his tie and listened to the DJ talk first of multiple pile–ups on the M62 and then his love of Farley’s Rusks. The heel of Ethan’s hand rested on his chest as he smoothed the tie against him. He felt his heart’s tap: between each beat he was certain it had stopped. A leathery muscle trapped in his ribs, becoming more worn every day.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed, and went to catch the bus.

He sat in the office, drinking tea and watching the shiver of shirts and blouses as his colleagues typed and faxed and photocopied. The thought of all those fatty, squishing valves sickened him; he had to spend a while in the toilets till he calmed. But even as he rinsed his mouth and looked at his face in the mirror – bleached by an unflattering splash of light – an insistent voice urged that bodies were flukes of nature, not perfections of it. That the designs were haphazard and mutated, not convenient or practical. He was struck by how fragile this configuration of flesh and bone and offal really was. Suddenly, even his saliva tasted unfamiliar and offensive. Vomiting only compounded his misery.

His boss, Melanie, took one look at him when he returned to the office and sent him home before he’d had a chance to ask for the rest of the day off. He dithered outside the cemetery, looking up at the stained glass windows of the church, then entered the grounds, sure that he’d not bump into Emma today. Presumably she had a job of her own. He found it strangely comforting here in the clipped, unobtrusive graveyard – there were bunches of flowers leaning against some of the more recent marble tombstones; messages too, which he stopped himself from reading. Ethan tried to imagine which of the plots contained Emma’s parents but without her surname he’d never know. It hit him then, for some unfathomable reason, that she’d lied to him. He didn’t know why he should be so positive about this but he felt it had something to do with the lacklustre mention of her parents. Surely someone who visited the grave of loved ones so often would speak of the dead in a more sombre way? Was she really so comfortable – to the point of being blasé – about the circumstances in which she found herself? And when he cast his mind back he couldn’t remember seeing her there before despite his renting the flat for a good fourteen months. Then her mother and father had died recently? No, it didn’t ring true. But why should he care a damn? He entered his hallway split between thinking she was just giving him an answer to shut him up and suspecting she was more interested in him than she let on. The thought that she was dogging him chilled him as effectively as these recent wintry mornings.

He spent the rest of the day with comfort foods: Cadbury’s Caramel and Strawberry Nesquik, and tried to make sense of the mess which was Boucher’s database. A little before six, as the sky lost its colour and was smothered by night, he packed a canvas bag with clothes and strolled to the launderette, his head aching with the twin assault of numbers and eye strain.

His luck was in: only one other person was using the machines, tucked away into the corner like a pile of old clothes. Ethan fed the washer nearest the window and poured in a measure of detergent before ramming a couple of coins into slots eaten by rust. Parking himself in an orange plastic seat relatively free of cigarette burns or splits, he took out a paperback and tried to lose himself in its words.

The pile of old clothes shifted. Ethan swivelled his eyes so he could watch the man over the corner of his page. The man’s eyes were egg–large, too big for the face in which they nestled. They were fixed on a section of linoleum, but from his expression it was obvious he was seeing something else. His hands raised to his face and Ethan’s heart clattered – he was sure the man was going to sink his fingers into the skin of his temples and pull away the face, but they only settled lightly and rubbed. Flakes from his scalp drifted to the floor. His hair moved, clearly a wig, and Ethan tried to satisfy himself that the squirming he saw beneath was of the light’s making. It wasn’t, and now he was finding it hard to swallow. It was as though the man’s skull was so thin beneath the etiolated skin of his head that Ethan could see the brain, grey and swollen, fluttering slightly as a fresh supply of blood and oxygen sped through it. Then the man was still once more, his attention drawn to the journey of his clothes through the dryer’s window. Ethan looked at the man’s wrists for a long time, trying to work out why one was covered in thick hair and the other was bald.

Thankfully, footsteps outside provided him with a release. He watched as the girl he’d seen in the cafe walked by, wearing the same leather waistcoat and a large velvet cap from which her dreadlocks hung like tails. Ethan stuffed his paperback into a pocket and stepped into the street; maybe she could tell him more about Emma, if indeed she knew anything of her at all.

The school was little more than a series of black blocks; the cranes towered above like dinosaur skeletons. The smell of the canal stained the air round here, he could almost see its green vapours rising from the bushy dip into which the girl now tramped, the road narrowing, interrupted by sleeping policemen. A mist so thin Ethan thought he was imagining it moved sluggishly off the water beneath the bridge. Perhaps unseen figures walking the towpath were causing the edges of the mist to curl and shiver away from dry land. The water behind him, he plunged into darkness, wondering when the road had been subsumed by this cobblestone thoroughfare. Up ahead he could hear an acoustic guitar perform some brisk melody which was over almost before it had begun. Candlelight surprised him as he broke through a layer of trees bordering a field. The dim squares of terraced houses at the opposite end contained flashes of TV light. The burnt–sweet smell of barbecued meat swept down with a hot cloud of smoke and ashes from beyond the first of the caravans and now he heard voices; something about their rhythm, though he couldn’t detect specific speech, was wrong. He remembered the deliberate way in which Emma had spoken and felt the temperature drop.

He couldn’t progress too far past the bank of trees for fear of being noticed but from where he was standing, he was privy only to the dance of waxy flames and, now and again, the foot of someone stretching out on the floor. The girl with the waistcoat had stepped into the circle of light and was sitting cross–legged in the grass. The black glove on her hand trapped the light and made it seem molten. An arm snaked out from the caravan’s edge, palm upwards. Into it, the girl placed her hand. The glove was peeled away and Ethan saw not a synthetic replacement, as he had forecast, but a proper limb. It was pale though, and withered. The hidden party inspected the flesh with probing fingers, lingering at a black band at the wrist which Ethan had thought was a bracelet but which he now saw was a course of stitches. The girl with the waistcoat smiled. The hands made a gesture Ethan didn’t understand but it prompted the girl to stand and shrug off her clothes. He found his fingers pressing themselves into his mouth to stop him from gagging. One of her breasts was deflated, trapping shadow in a series of deep wrinkles around the nipple. The other was pink and firm. The sweep of her stomach was scored with scars and he could see that one of her arms was shorter than its mate. A tattoo in gold of a moth stretched across her left buttock but was interrupted by more scars and a sweep of virgin flesh. Again the hands reached out from behind the caravan and touched the slack breast. Its owner nodded. And again. And then said what sounded to Ethan like: ‘I can make do. Till something better turns up.’

As she turned her body to give her arm easier access to its sleeve, the candlelight made her translucent. He saw her entrails resting in the broth of her belly; the shivering bird of her heart in its bone cage. The arms behind the caravan grew a body: Emma moved to help the girl dress. She was bald, which delayed Ethan’s recognition of her; her head was blue with veins. Here and there they had broken, becoming craters of bright red. At the nape of her neck a series of rivets were punched through the skin, which looked shrivelled and ill–fitting. Clusters of black stitching beneath the ears glistened; Emma wadded a tissue into the crudely sutured wound to dam any further seepage.

Ethan closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing. He strove for some kind of explanation but his mind was barren, blown empty by shock. Had he stumbled across some kind of cult who found an aesthetic in the brutalising of their own bodies? Or were they sick, forced to create a ghetto in which their suffering could take place without fear of outsiders snooping?

A thick voice carried to him: ‘They’re ready.’

He watched Emma lead the girl, and a man on crutches, to the edge of the field where a gate opened out on a dirt track. Ethan might have left then and returned to his chewing gum whites in the warmth of the launderette but for the flux of shadow creeping through the trees behind him. He heard footsteps slumping and a strange sound, like the rasp of nails on an emery board: the man in the launderette? Ethan imagined him trekking all this way just to give him the clothes he’d left behind but it wasn’t a thought that amused him. He took off across the field, pausing at the gate to look back at the lifeless caravans glow in the halo of hot coals and candle flame. When the gloom beneath the trees began to adopt a shape, he hurried along the path, clenching himself against the threat of his quarry lunging from the banks of trees on either side. He couldn’t see them ahead. He slowed to walking pace and tried to hear their progress above the hassle in his chest. A square of orange flashed into life away to his left, hanging in the midst of trees like a new sun. He made for the window, recognising the shape of the house as he neared, looming from the sky’s camouflage like subtle detail in a painting. They’d left the front door open, presumably for those who had encouraged Ethan’s flight earlier. How could he spy on their business if others were due? Boots scuffing in the dirt confirmed his suspicions. He crept on to the veranda and peered into the hallway which was lit by gas lamps on the wall. Lengths of wire peeled back to expose their copper core were scattered like strange hair in a corner. Before the second party could spot him he slipped inside, already berating himself for his foolishness but filled with a confidence that, should he be undone, Emma would step in to defend him. Buoyed slightly with this optimism, he moved towards the murmur at the end of the hall. He was in luck. Rising above the kitchen, which spat shadows from its doorway, a staircase travelled. Just before the landing he ought to have a view of part of that room without new visitors stumbling across him.

Through the balustrade he watched the man lean his crutches against a chair before his trousers were taken from him. Ethan waited for the bodies that lifted him on to the dining table to move so he could see the man’s left leg was missing. Emma moved into view. She held a knife against the puckered stump and cut into the flesh till it was sheened with blood. The man’s face remained static though Ethan hadn’t seen anybody numb him with a needle or gas. Concentrating to keep himself from vocalising his distaste, he watched Emma make a gesture. Somebody tossed her a polythene bag. Out of it she pulled a leg mottled with blue patches; its thick end ragged, containing a nub of bone which Emma shaped with a chisel before marrying it to the man’s thigh.

‘You ought to lose a little weight to improve the join,’ she said, and held the limb fast while the girl shot a few staples from a gun into the meat. Emma watched her stitch him up. When the job was complete she opened a cupboard and unwound about three feet of wiring, each length of which was tipped with a gold needle. These she slid into the leg, on both sides of the join. Ethan found his capacity for shock had deserted him, even as she threw a switch and the air was filled with the smell of charring. The man’s thigh darkened, bubbling at the seams. When his new toes began to twitch, Emma clapped her hands together.

Movement at the front door. Half a dozen figures slouched and staggered across its threshold but instead of moving to the kitchen they lingered in the hallway.

‘You know I said my parents were buried in that churchyard?’ Jesus, was she speaking to him? ‘Well, I was telling the truth. All my mothers and fathers are there.’ She wiped her hands off against a bloody apron hanging from a hook on the shelf. Now she looked directly at him and he felt the blood fall from his face so quickly that his cheeks smarted. For a while things looked grainy; he might have struggled against the hands that helped him downstairs if his muscles hadn’t betrayed him and turned to mush.

‘Leave me alone,’ he breathed. The sharp reek of Dettol slapped him out of his stupor. ‘Don’t you cut me.’

Emma raised her eyebrows as best her skin would allow. ‘Take heed of what I said to you Ethan. Better to give.’

Bodies hustled him to the kitchen. He was lowered on to the table, which gave slightly. His fear-fogged brain realised it was not due to any weakness in the wood rather than the syrupy movement of blood which sheened its surface. The mealy smell of a butcher’s shop rose around him: he couldn’t tell if it was from the spare limbs that were stacked like bleached firewood against the wall or the breath of these harlequin bodies crowding out the light as they struggled for a vantage point.

The pain was fresh and bright and endless but soon, it reached such a zenith that the only sensations that could ensue were gradations of dullness. Some time before morning, as a rind of light peeled away from the treetops, Emma snatched his eyes.

*

He walked back to the school, trying to gather a sense of himself from the torment in his head. Just now, he’d had the urge to piss but couldn’t remember how. Unzipping himself because the pain was so great there, he’d discovered a smooth, shiny portion of skin tattooed with tiny words: Catheter till Wed pm (fresh attachment). Further explorations had revealed the absence of his left nipple and loose skin, as of an elbow missing a bone, where his shoulder had once been uniform muscle. His entire was lined with stitches as though he’d been wrapped in webbing. From groin to throat, thick rope sutures prevented him spilling to the floor. He was so far removed from experience that he couldn’t even begin to acknowledge what pain or colour or smell was. It wasn’t the complex web of catgut that appalled him. Black, bloated thoughts swelled in his head, memories he couldn’t lay claim to: all of his real scars lay inside.