Book 3, Chapter 11 :
Go See Now This Cursed Woman
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People :
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Author : Alan Moore
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GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN
Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his
billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land
below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of
their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on
a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday,
May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts
with their dreams.
Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map
which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of
long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters,
flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory
diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague
opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to
an impasto skim.
War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in
the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The
continually adjusted now – a hairline crack between the stupefying masses
of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked – is a hot
interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of
Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh
epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former
Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening
crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to
interior, night.
Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying
to minimize the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign
staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding
nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine
on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummeled by the working week
just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic
mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal
crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means
and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored
games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and
self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas
that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain
thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides
lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlors reconfigured as the stylized paths of
palace gardens wherein varicolored button dynasties conduct their patient
courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big
sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the
moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his specialty and he is
thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic,
rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an
angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of
vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with
spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It
strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of
this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the
odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty
Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That
can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box.
Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in
he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting
calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the
consideration of annoying games. New angle.
Levering by stealth onto his back he fancies that from overhead he must
resemble one of those stone medieval knights, asleep on cold sarcophagi
with petrified retrievers at their feet. There must have been a Middle Ages
battle game at one point, he supposes, keeps and castles, jousting and the
rest, although he can’t call one to mind. Among the various John
Wadham’s pastimes of his younger days, historically-themed entertainments
had been thin upon the ground, the focus mostly on a modern world then
trying to compose itself from out the bombsite rubble of the 1940s. He
remembers one called Spy Ring, plastic head and shoulders busts of men in
trench-coats and fedoras inching between foreign embassies, an accurate
embodiment of Cold War machinations in that rules of play were by and large
impenetrable and made no apparent sense. Alma and Mick had given up on it
almost immediately and consigned the whole thing to an oubliette beneath
the wardrobe, an effective and achievable detente. Monopoly, he thinks, has
always been preoccupied with a hard-nosed modernity, a compensatory ritual
to suit those long years of postwar austerity, imaginary Weimar
wheelbarrows piled with confetti-colored currency in which to lose your
ration book, if only briefly. In his childhood play, he realizes, he’d
been largely quarantined within the present day. He thinks he can recall
Napoleonic stylings to the packaging of Risk, the game of global strategy
that made world domination by Australia seem unavoidable, but then
megalomania, he decides, has always been more timeless than historical.
It’s like a leather jacket, never out of date. Tight close-up.
Blinking lids descend like long exposure shutters on the slate-blue irises,
silicate debris swept discretely to the corners. Pupils expand, saturated,
blotting up the midnight ink. It comes to him that all human endeavor is a
game of some sort or, more properly, a great compendium of games that are
obscurely interwoven and connected, a confounding complex of pursuits with
pre-set difficulty levels where the odds are always with the house. A game,
he thinks, is surely any system with an arbitrary set of imposed rules,
either a contest which results in many losers and a single winner or some
noncompetitive arrangement where the pleasure of participation is its own
reward. And obviously, unless the rules are those of physics they are
arbitrary in one sense or other, made up by somebody, somewhere, sometime.
Capital and finance are quite clearly games, probably poker or roulette, at
least to judge by those Enron executives who’d featured on the evening
news before Mick went to bed, trading in future markets they’d invented
out of thin air and were trying, unsuccessfully, to will into existence.
Actually, that kind of play, rogue traders and all that, it’s not like
poker or roulette so much as it’s like Buckaroo, seeing how many
gold-prospecting pickaxes and shovels you can hang on the spring-loaded
donkey of market credulity before, inevitably, it explodes and startles
everybody.
Status, reproduction and romance, political maneuvering or the
cops-and-robbers interplay of crime and legislation, all of it a game. His
sister’s exhibition in the morning which he’s partly dreading, partly
looking forward to; all of the paintings, all the art, it’s just a
different sort of game that’s played with references, nods and winks to
this or that, the highbrow clever-dickery that it alludes to. Bed-sheet
creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it
strikes him that civilization and its history are similarly bagatelles,
deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess
match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddledywinks. It’s ludicrous,
as if the species had developed higher consciousness in order to invent a
more elaborate form of naughts and crosses. When is everybody going to get
serious? Even when people are engaged in slaughtering one another like in
Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s just Cowboys and Indians run disastrously out
of hand. The last time Britain had been twat enough to interfere in Afghan
matters, with the British and the Russian Empires staging their almighty
pissing contest in the hundred years preceding World War One, they’d come
right out and called it the Great Game. Perhaps the toppled pawns back in
their flag-draped boxes for a final toytown tour of Wooton Bassett could be
viewed as forfeit tokens in a game, although he can’t see what’s so
great about it. Wearying of this internal shuttlecock, this back-and-forth,
he opts to take another run for goal, the goal being insensibility. Closing
his eyes is purely aspirational as he commences the commando roll onto his
right side. Pull back to a streaming, howling stratosphere.
Below, invasive species move from continent to continent, from chair to
chair, according to the music of an altered climate. Avocados thrive in
tropic London. The percussive clash of particles is registered in delicate
quantum cartographies, ferns of explosion and decay, beautiful spirals to
annihilation mapped through concrete time. Everywhere information, seething
as it nears the boil. The U.S. president George W. Bush and prime minister
Blair discuss their deep fraternal bond, admitting errors in their handling
of Gulf War II. The disagreement of Megiddo percolates through every
culture and in Palestine the car belonging to Islamic Jihad leader Mahmud
al-Majzoud erupts in lethal traceries of hurried metal and projectile
mortal splinters, disassembling the insurgent along with his brother Nidal.
Black and red, such are this spring’s prevailing blossoms, vivid scarlet
hearts in petals of oil-colored smoke or bruises offset by an open cut.
Cross-fade to vehicle interior.
The shadowy Ford Escort rocks and squeaks in hateful parody of Marla,
kneeling in its back seat with her red mac and her halter top pushed up to
show malnourishment-honed shoulder blades, the micro-skirt that’s rucked
about her waist worn as the black belt of an inverted karate, an exacting
martial discipline of victimhood. Her self, the kicked-in and fragmented
personality she’d thought she was, is frozen in proximity to her
approaching end, frost-welded to this unrelenting moment, her last wretched
stretch of here-and-now before a terrible big baby staves her skull in and
ends all of her, stops the whole world forever by eliminating that pathetic
and pained little rag-end of it which she’d stupidly assumed was hers.
Her future has always been such a miserable and stunted thing that she’d
thought nobody would bother taking it away from her but now it’s
happened, now it’s happening: his pudgy cock-stub punches up inside her
dry hole from behind in a ridiculously hasty silent film staccato so that
she’s afraid she’s going to start a kind of hideous and open-ended
laughter. Marla’s seen his dead-eyed cherub face. She’s seen his
license plates and knows this is her finish, with her bloody forehead
bumped against the Escort’s right-side rear door by each angry thrust,
every resentful bayoneting. This is the worse-than-nothing that her
life’s amounted to, the thing she’s always dreaded, always known would
happen and she only ventured out tonight to pay for rock. She’ll never
have another hit now and she doesn’t care. It’s not important, never
was important and she’d give it up without a second thought, she’d go
and live back with her mom if only that meant that she’d live and not be
killed in this garage enclosure, whimpering and paralyzed on her arrival at
the universal terminus. Nothing she ever wanted as a child will now be
hers; no one will ever say she’s special, just another shitty story in
the local paper, one more useless scrubber nobody will miss, raped and,
what, strangled? Oh, no, please not that. Just one blow. One blow to the
head and this is over. No last drink before the gallows, no last cigarette
before the squad start firing. Blood and snot, she understands, will be her
only balm. New point of view.
Dez Warner stares, his eyes those of a hot and snorting horse, at
tonight’s catch with his magnificent erection going in and out of its
mud-colored cunt. He’s sizzling like a god or an unstoppable machine and
the all-powerful chemistry that’s in his head reduces everything to this,
the back seat of his motor, to this situation he’s created. When he’d
driven into this enclosure it got worried, didn’t it, and started all
that stuff trying to make him see it as a person. Telling him its name was
what had got him started with the smacking and the punching, all of that.
If you don’t know the name it could be anybody, couldn’t it, the one
off Countdown, anyone at all. It could be Irene. Even on the wedding night
when both of them were pissed she wouldn’t let him fuck her tits, she
wouldn’t suck him, nothing like the stuff you get in mags or DVDs,
nothing like that. Nothing like this. All his awareness centers on that
tingling last inch of his mighty ramrod, squeezing up inside a frightened
fanny, feeling so electric that it must be glowing like the sticks they
have at festivals or like a red hot poker when the end bit looks
translucent. He can smell the sex, the fear, the tangy and exhilarating
soup of it, oh yeah, oh yeah. He’s crossed the line with this and can’t
go back, he knows that, but this new thing, this is everything that he was
always meant to be, not marching into banks with a crash helmet on and
strongbox handcuffed to him, trying to look like Terminator for the girls
behind the counter, that’s not him. This, this is him, the king of night,
the king of fuck and it’s so easy, why don’t people do it all the time?
White noise behind the eyeballs, there’s a sort of faulty strip-light
flicker and he’s still got pop-up phantoms at the corners of his vision
but he doesn’t care. He owns this creature’s life. He can do what he
wants. It’s like a doll, it’s like a fly you’ve caught but better for
the crying, better for how scared it is. He’s stiffer than a bolt, never
as big as this before and pumping up and down like mad. He can’t remember
the exact point when he’d made his mind up to put it out of its misery
when he was done, or even if there was an exact point. It’s more of a
continuum, to be fair; a sliding scale where he’s not come to a decision
as such but he knows it’s going to happen, definitely. Just the thought
of it excites him and he’s banging harder but his nerves are kicking off
like popcorn and he’s trying to shake the feeling that there’s someone
else there in the car with them. The window-glass is gray with scalding
breath. Dissolve to satellite perspective.
Underneath its shredded wedding dress of cloud the naked globe sweats
electricity, stale beads of light most concentrated in the armpit cities,
trickling thin in breastbone valleys. Limned with glitter the black map
below persists in its unhurried process of evaporation, borders that were
only ever topographical conveniences made irrelevant by new communications
media, an ongoing negation of geography with threatened and belligerent
nationalism churning in its backwash. Gym-fit viruses take longer run-ups
to the species barrier. Unkempt taxonomies of novel and more finely graded
madnesses are diagnosed, while in Berlin, Chancellor Merkel’s wrapping up
the opening ceremony of the Hauptbahnhof as Europe’s biggest railway
station when a stabbing rampage is commenced in the attendant crowd, more
than two dozen persons wounded and six of those critically so. It’s
discovered that one of the earliest knife-victims is HIV positive, to
further complicate the tally of postponed fatalities. Newly accreted
islands of volcanic matter rise unnoticed. Insert footage, black and
white.
An angry smudge of chalk and charcoal, Freddy Allen draws a line across the
street plan with his passage. Streaming in a dishwater stop-motion queue of
doppelgangers the indignant spectral tramp splashes unnoticed through brick
barricades and bollards, through the gaseous blur of fleeting automobiles
and the ground-floor flats of the disabled, a fog bullet, die-straight in
its murderous trajectory. Evicted in his flickering wake the dislodged
ghosts of fleas seek new accommodation, vampire jumping beans in search of
other unhygienic apparitions, plentiful in these parts. Raging thunderous
and splenetic as he stumbles, even in the muffle of the ghost-seam his
unbroken howl of ghastly epithets and curses is the unrelenting rumble of a
derailed freight train hurtling dirty through the sleeping district,
dragging a funereal scarf of smoke and spitting hot sparks of pejorative.
With panting locomotive rhythm Freddy damns the lot of them, rapists and
rent-collectors, councilors and curb-crawlers alike, all vicious fishes
circling the depleted bait-ball of the neighborhood. The anthracite which
keeps his fury stoked, he knows, is mined from bile directed at himself and
the appalling thing that he once nearly did, the guilty weight that keeps
him mired in this monochromatic wraith-sump and eternally unworthy of the
color-drenched emporia Upstairs. He fumes and fulminates in an expletive
storm-front, rattling among the sulking residential slabs named after
saints and over atrophying streets sealed off from traffic to deter the sex
trade. As a ragged chain of paper dolls cut out from folded newsprint
Freddy is reiterated in school classrooms, in conspicuously shriek-free
moonlight corridors, exploding from prefabricated walls adorned with genial
crayoned grotesques to surge down Scarletwell Street in an avalanche of
countless flailing limbs and spite-contorted faces.
Cutting off the blunted bottom corner of Greyfriars House he’s like
another line of grubby washing strung across the empty court within,
flapping and damp, and in his billiard projectile rush he at last
understands the full weight of the Master Builder’s loaded gaze, earlier
on at the ethereal snooker parlor: it’s him, Freddy. He’s the trick
shot, the archangel’s cannonade, skittering on the Boroughs’ dog-fouled
baize, the full force of that mighty circumstantial cue propelling him, and
all to save this skinny little girl? She must be so important to the play,
a black or mistily-remembered pink at least, but why would he, would anyone
suppose she wizn’t? That’s not right or fair, dismissing her because of
what she does, because she’s not a doctor’s daughter. Everybody wiz a
baby once and innocent of all their future. Trembling ectoplasm born of
wrath and tenderness wells up in soot-creased sockets as the long-cremated
indigent swirls into Lower Bath Street, rippling like eyestrain through
pitch dark a foot above the sagging tarmac and, as ever, with no visible
means of support. Stretched silver beads pass through him like neutrinos as
it starts to rain. Resume full color and cue montage.
From this vantage, features of the natural landscape have been superseded
by abstraction, where the spooling ribbon rivers are replaced by fiery
canals of routed information, sluicing from one lock-gate server to another
and oblivious to mountain, ignorant of sea. Data that previously drizzled
escalates to an extreme weather event. The fathomed knowledge rises past
its hastily-drawn plimsoll line and populations find themselves out of
their depth, clutching for straws of dogma or diverting novelty as they
commence their surface struggle at the rim of an e-maelstrom. Seen in
overview Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square is an old-fashioned color blindness
test card, swimming with pale tinted dots despite the pounding rain.
Fledgling Pope Benedict the sixteenth makes his first major appearance in
the homeland of his predecessor, tannoy mutter sputtering against the
downpour as he references Pope John Paul’s prayer of some twenty-seven
years theretofore, asking that the Holy Ghost descend and change the face
of Poland, this plea widely held to be more instrumental in dismantling the
Soviet Union than the acted permutations of the world’s implacable
equation. Species disappear and new discoveries are introduced with the
breakneck turnover of soap-opera characters. Newfoundland crows develop
secondary tool use, implements for modifying implements, and on
Kilimanjaro’s slopes uncounted lightning bolts sow precious tanzanite,
fulgurant echoes in a cobalt glass. Conflicts move on from place to place
like homicidal drifters, changing names and altering appearances while yet
retaining signature brutalities. Theories proliferate. Repeat interior,
night.
Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick
Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless
gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening. Game-plagued as he flips his
pillow in a vain search for its fabled cool side he has now progressed to a
consideration of the playing card. Before the board games with the
satisfying creak of their unfolding or the mystique of their top-hat
tokens, cards had been the staple recreation of his childhood in St.
Andrew’s Road. At some mysterious adult signal, passed between his gran,
his parents and such aunts or uncles as were present, it would be decided
that a round of cards was called for. The white tea-time tablecloth would
be replaced by the far cozier deep rose one which was Mick and Alma’s
favorite, and then from the sideboard drawer that was its ritual resting
place the battered and revered familial deck was next produced. He realigns
his problematic knees and tries to conjure up a tactile memory of the
talismanic pack, the waxy box worn by the handling of at least four
generations and declining like the then-traditional extended family unit
inexorably towards disintegration, folds becoming perforations. Like the
converse of the weathered pasteboard tiles inside, this fragile packaging
had been predominantly purple on a ground of twilight lilac, where a
silhouetted schoolgirl in a long Victorian pinafore-dress bowled her wooden
hoop among midsummer poppies through the gathering violet dusk. Beneath the
child’s capering shoes this image was inverted so that for some years
Mick had been under the impression that it was the ingénue’s reflection
in a puddle at her feet, before he’d noticed that the lower girl was
running in the opposite direction. Even as a maroon outline she’d looked
pretty, and with hindsight Mick supposes that she might have been his first
crush. He’d been faintly anxious for her safety, he recalls. What was she
doing out so late to make her race home under darkening skies, across the
overgrowing summer meadow? He knows that if she’d got into any trouble,
if there’d been somebody waiting in the tall mauve grass for her or for
her bouncing, trembling circlet he’d have wanted at the age of five to
rescue her, this being then the limit of his amorous imagination.
Ninja-quiet in his determination not to puncture Cathy’s well-earned rest
he shifts once more onto his back, face up and freshly dealt. New angle.
Supine, the chalk-outlined posture of a Cluedo victim, he remembers Alma
telling him about Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Band, stretched out flat
on stage before an audience and talking to the rafters: “Hello, God.
Here’s what I look like standing up.” It strikes Mick that imagining
ourselves as seen from some superior elevation, some projected and
omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, old as
civilization; Harryhausen’s Greek gods at their fatalistic chessboard
peering down through tattered cirrus. Perhaps modern skepticism and the
consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras
necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of
invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our
arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or
at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play. Mick rests a
blond-fuzzed forearm on his brow and shimmering among the shoal of slippery
night-spawning ruminations in his catch there is a fugitive impression of
how everything is flattened when perceived from overhead, from the
perspective of the player. Fleetingly he wonders if these hypothetical
celestial gamblers would see everyone as being two-dimensional, as
hieroglyphs with no more depth or substance than the inversely reflected
royalty compressed onto the court-cards, but the thought melts to the slap
of trumps on a red tablecloth. The things they’d played down Andrew’s
Road were exercises in precisely regulated tedium – Whist, Sevens,
Draw-the-Well-Dry – though he’d found them all sufficiently engaging at
the time. Just as each wireless, motorcar or socket seemed to have a face,
so too had every card possessed its own distinct charisma, from the almost
military formation of the fives to the precariously stacked crates of the
nines. The aces, in their abstract grandeur, had been the four archangels
or maybe the quartet of fundamental forces constituting spacetime, spades
bewilderingly singled out by an impressive Gothic filigree. This
attribution of a personality to each design reminds him of the tarot images
his sister maintains both precede and serve as basis for the ordinary deck,
the stack of archetypal bubblegum collectibles that Alma drags to Mick’s
house every year at Christmas dinnertime so that she can read Cathy’s
fortune or at least pretend to; Hanged Man, Chariot and all the rest of the
unsettling crew, as if that’s any sort of proper seasonal tradition. To
hear his crow-scaring elder sibling tell it, Draw-the-Well-Dry is derived
from divination while all board-based pastimes are descended from those
tricky magic squares where all the rows and columns add to the same number,
as though every innocent and commonplace pursuit were only a degenerated
form of sorcery. She has a willfully Carpathian worldview, Alma, although
now he thinks about it games might well have had some metaphysical or more
important human function back at their inception, judging from the
terminology found everywhere in language. Hunting some animal down and
killing it, that makes it game. Being prepared to carry out some act is to
be game. Something that offers easy opportunities for exploitation is
regarded as fair game and then of course there’s prostitution, going on
the game. Game face, game on, game over, plays of light and sports of
nature, Einstein making out God does not dice with matter. Mick’s not
sure about the last of these, suspecting that not only do the powers that
run the universe do a fair bit of shaking, rattling and throwing, but that
generally they do this so the die end up behind the settee and you have to
take their word about the double six. With a dismissive grunt directed at
the certainties of physics and religion he elects to take another punt on
slumber and begins to gradually roll the bones onto his left side, facing
Cathy’s curled back. Come on, come on, just this once be lucky. Insert
jump-cut sequence.
Spread below, an oriental carpet realized in fiber optics, there are causal
curlicues; there are affray motifs. In Scotland a humanitarian award
commemorating Robert Burns is given to a youthful relief worker in Baghdad,
albeit posthumously. In Peru a clash of adversarial supporters at the
run-up to elections ends with injury and gunfire, and in Hereford West
Mercia Police appeal for witnesses after a man is violently assaulted by a
group of teenagers. With Mandelbrot self-similarity, structures repeat at
different scales throughout the system and there remains ambiguity
regarding whether harm is percolated up or else decanted down. Wrath boils
and steams, where soon thereafter cold and ruthless condensation is
precipitated as a trickled legislation. The resultant culture, internal
combustion driven, is a clown car only jolted forward by a series of
explosions, without any linear progression and no entertainment value save
in the anticipation of the vehicle’s inevitable knockabout collapse. A
pin-mold creep of neon media adorns the planet’s carcass ideologies,
metabolizing incoherent chaos into palatable narrative, an edited awareness
of experiential deluge. In near-extinct newsrooms still perfumed by
cigarette smoke, telephone calls of the newsworthy are intercepted,
victim’s family or adulterous celebrity alike, while in the Congo brutal
territorial disputes are waged over the mining of the necessary tantalum
required by every trilling mobile and, like Tantalus, the world discovers
its anticipated banquet future disappeared. Predators more accustomed to
the higher reaches of the food chain are compelled to shin down several
blood-oiled links in search of alley-scraps. Zoom in through icy
flight-paths and cop-copter altitudes on Lower Bath Street.
When he comes, she goes, or at least that is Marla’s numb appraisal of
her likely schedule. The abrasive and continual penetration going on behind
her is remote, just as persistent hammering in another room becomes
ignorable, inaudible with the monotony of repetition. Dried peas rattle on
the vehicle roof above and she is distantly aware that it has started
raining. Rare even among the ranks of her impersonal clientele there is no
intimacy or involvement in this frenzied pummeling, this punishment clearly
directed at somebody other than herself, a private ritual from which she is
excluded. Hanging down around her damaged face the braids swing back and
forth, a final curtain, jolted by each incoming percussive impact. There is
something in the situation that is horribly involuntary, as if neither she
nor her rosy assailant are participating of their own free will, both of
them clattering and jerking in an ugly puppet drama which is simply
happening because it is. She has no choice except to sit through this
lackluster recitation to its unambiguously bitter end, a captive audience
to this man’s mute soliloquy, this statement through the medium of rape.
Detached, without a speaking part, she affords the production her
attentions only intermittently. She almost recognizes the performer on her
knees in the supporting role, the concave cheeks tracked with mascara and
the disappointed little face, eyes staring fixedly into the dark of the
Escort’s interior and filled with flat acceptance of this miserable
denouement, this abrupt and meaningless conclusion, except who is this that
makes these observations, and from where? Someone who isn’t Marla,
evidently. Someone with a different name, with clear thoughts unencumbered
by the clamors of anxiety and need, somebody looking on with only dull
regret, as though reflectively, at an event transpired already. This
unprecedented night, has it occurred before or is it in some fashion always
happening, these giant final moments that seem so much bigger and more
absolute than they appeared from further off? The leatherette beneath her
sticky palms, the garish and sensational pulp colors of car dials and
instruments delineating the scenario, each vivid element as resonant and
hauntingly familiar as Miss Haversham in flames, as the big Indian patient
smashing the asylum window with a water-cooler, as those images from
literature or film that blaze in stained-glass hues outside of mundane
time. With animal obeisance she advances on her dismal ending, doggy-style,
on sore knees friction-burned by the seat-covering towards the precipice,
the edge of death. There is no tunnel save the focused clarity of her
perception, no white light except for an occasionally wakeful motion-sensor
fitted to one of the garages. Life fails to flash before her eyes and yet
she finds herself preoccupied with the most insignificant of details from
her earthly drama, the Diana scrapbook and the morbid library of Ripper
memorabilia. Her previous fixation on these subjects, with such
specificity, is now incomprehensible and sits more like unconscious omen
than the random hobby she’d presumed: she is about to join the sorry file
of doxies in their petticoats and bonnets, victims of essentially the same
man down across the ages, always Jack, and furthermore she is to suffer her
protracted, painful termination in the rear seat of a car. This mean
enclosure with its stammering illumination isn’t a Pont de l’Alma, is
no bridge of souls, although in the confining brickwork and haphazard
paparazzi bursts of brilliance the distinction all but vanishes. All places
are distilled to this place just as all of history reduces to these last
few precious and excruciating minutes. Every human story, though it be
biography or wild romance or primal narrative of old, boils down to her and
this, her present situation. Well aware that each breath represents a
countdown she sucks in the backseat atmosphere of souring shock and
copulation gratefully, exulting in the soon-curtailed delight of
inhalation. Watering, her eyes refuse to blink, to miss a single photon in
this last parade of light and eyesight, staring at the inside handle of the
car door only inches from her streaming nose but, in the process of her
disengagement from the world, unable to remember what it is she’s looking
at. New point of view.
Mechanically he pulls half out and pushes in, the action looped, but
something of the magic patina is gone, as subtle as a change of film-stock
or a shift from digital TV back to plain analog. Outside the lurching car
it’s pissing down, although he can’t recall the onset of the shower.
He’s starting to feel moody out of nowhere, thoughts and that, most
probably connected with the powders that he’s on. Thoughts like
‘You’ll be cut off from other people after this’, not if he’s
caught because that isn’t going to happen, but because of what he will
have done that makes him separate from everybody. Thoughts like ‘After
this you mustn’t be yourself with anyone’ because after tonight he’ll
be a different person in a different world and nobody must ever know him,
who he really is. The real Derek James Warner, 42, will be excluded from
all normal interactions with his mates, his kids, with Irene, and will only
properly exist on nights like this. This is the end of who he was, but he
can’t stop. The thing he’s doing now, the thing he plans on doing
afterwards, sooner or later this was always going to happen, ever since he
first learned of the concept as a schoolboy. Dez is in a foaming, charging
current of events with nothing he can do except surrender, bow to the
inevitable. All his life thus far was leading to this moment just as all
his future will proceed from this same point, indelible in memory so that
to all intents and purposes he’s always going to be here, here and now,
at least inside his head and this is always going to be happening. He’s
like a fly in amber, eyelids squeezing to a crayon scribble, nose
compressing into ridges like a collapsed paper lantern and the awning of
the lower lip rolled down. He shoves his cock in and he shoves his cock in
and at the peripheries of vision catches sight of dashboard glints in green
and red. He knows that only chemicals are causing the illusion of
mismatched eyes watching him dispassionately through the ambient blur, yet
cannot shake the sense of a third party bearing witness from the driver’s
seat, an unintended and unwanted passenger he can’t remember picking up.
He’s never been a drugs man, Derek. He’s not used to all this, with
things shifting everywhere and how he feels about stuff shifting along with
them, like a lion one minute and the next he’s got the horrors, the
unbearable sensation something terrible is just about to happen or, worse,
is already happening. He holds the bubbling incipient panic down,
concentrates on the job in hand. Lowering his gaze he looks at what he’s
doing, at the hairy dagger plunging in the slimy wound, his thumbs holding
the negligible ass-cheeks open and apart. There’s a minuscule
punctuation-point of shit clinging to the exterior of the clenching
sphincter where it’s not wiped itself properly, the dirty fucking animal.
He hates it, hates it for just having stood there on the corner in its PVC
coat waiting for him; for participating and for letting him go through with
this. The hatred makes him harder, gives him focus, and he’s just
beginning to consider how he’s going to kill it after he’s done fucking
it when out through the front windscreen’s beaded glass he notices that
there appears to be a fire or something in one of the nearby garages, with
smoke escaping out from under the closed … no. No, that’s not quite
what’s happening. He squints and frowns, bewildered, pausing his
convulsive pelvic back-and-forth while struggling to make sense of what
he’s seeing. The gray smoke – not smoke exactly, being slow and viscous
– seems to bleed out through the corrugated metal of the garage door and
its surrounding brickwork like an exhalation, an expression of the damp and
misery that soaks the walls in neighborhoods like this. Curdled and
seething in the oil-stain gloom the sluggish vapor looks to be collecting
in one spot, rotating languidly an inch above the tarmac and much like one
of those litter-whirlwinds that he’s sometimes seen in car parks,
cyclones of discarded rubbish. What the fuck is going on? Put off his
stroke he softens and slides out, slips off the nest almost unnoticed as he
gazes through the trickling glass into the gradually revolving and
resolving front of ugly weather, so unnaturally localized. The shifting
crenulations arbitrarily take on a host of momentary semblances like the
white, Persil-laundered clouds he thinks he can recall from childhood only
grubbier, more hurriedly, and with less room for whimsy or interpretation.
There’s a cone of filthy fog by now and up towards the top – “Fuck!
Fuck, what’s that?” – towards the top slim ashen threads and tendrils
writhe like bile in toilet-water, accidentally curling to the contours of
an agitated old man’s face. Then suddenly there’s lots of faces, all
the same and screaming without making any noise, eyes multiplying to a
string of hostile, glistening jellies. Several mouths identically decayed
and toothless open in the plethora of smoldering heads, and flocks of
unwashed hands rise fluttering like oversize factory butterflies. He finds
he’s making an involuntary plaintive noise high in his sinuses and at the
same time notices the night air splashed on his perpetually blushing cheek
in a cold water gust. What’s … fuck, it’s got the door open, it’s
getting out. It had been frightened at the start, did what he told it and
he hadn’t bothered with the lock. Fuck. Fuck! It slithers on its belly
like a seal taking to water, tumbling face-first from the car into the
tarmac black outside and though he lunges for a stick-thin ankle all he
comes away with is a Cinderella shoe.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
Forgetting in the fugue and fury of the instant the hallucination that had
so distracted him, he scrambles awkwardly out of the vehicle into the rain
after his bolting prey with flies undone and murder in his boots. Cut to
new point of view and insert footage, black and white.
Through brick and metal only fifty years thick at the very outside boils
the incorporeal moocher with his kettle scream of anger rising even through
the corpse acoustic of the ghost-seam. There is his faint, sudden scent of
damp and mildew everywhere as with gray cemetery eyes he drinks the dark of
the enclosure with its spitting puddles and makes out the fuck-sprung
vehicle stood rocking at its center. Edge stitched with pale
phosphorescence in his wraith-sight he can see a stout man, perspiration
streaming on his choirboy cheeks as he kneels upright in the rear seats
shunting back and forth repetitively, a stuck dodgem. Freddy doesn’t need
to see the frightened girl crouched like a dog in front of him to know
exactly what he’s doing, oh the cowardly little speck of shit, the dirty
bugger and the worst thing is there’s two of them, two of them to one
skinny little lass. He’s got his mate there with him, sitting in the
driver’s seat with a big titfer on and staring straight out through the
windscreen so that if you knew no better you might think that he was
glaring right at Freddy with his different-looking peepers, one dark and
the other … oh. Oh, bloody hell. It’s not another man at all. It’s
something a sight worse and Freddy’s bowels would turn to water if they
weren’t already steam. The motor has a fiend in its front seat, one of
the grander and more frightening ones, the kind much talked about yet
rarely seen and gazing fixedly at Freddy with mismatched eyes and a knowing
smile that’s all but lost among the curls of his bindweed mustache and
beard. It’s the same look the Master Builder gave him earlier up at the
snooker hall: an exchanged glance, a mutual acknowledgment that this is it,
this is the crucial incident that Freddy’s whole existence, both in flesh
and fog, has been in aid of. He has a profound conviction that the smirking
devil isn’t here for him tonight, unless in the capacity of an amused
spectator. It won’t harm him if he tries to interrupt the shameful
business going on in the back seat, he knows that. It’s almost as if
it’s granting him a special dispensation to do all the things which
specters shouldn’t really do, without fear of reprisal. He’s allowed to
haunt, to be a charnel terror of the most extravagant variety, and if this
should indeed be Freddy Allen’s moment then he isn’t going to fluff it.
Peering past the infernal celebrity into the black Ford Escort’s rear he
is encouraged to observe that the perpetually-blushing perpetrator has
abruptly ceased in his compulsive thrusting, kneeling motionless and
squinting in belligerent bewilderment out through the misted glass,
apparently at Freddy. Is it possible the man can see him somehow, through
the agency of drink or drugs or psychiatric ailment? By way of experiment
the smoldering vagrant shakes his head and waves his arms around so that
his foliage of persisting after-images blossoms into a fag-ash hydra, pale
hands a fast-breeding nest of blind white spiders and a rheumy frogspawn
clot of eyes, rewarded by a deepening of the rapist’s puzzled frown, a
further slackening of his blancmange jaw. Oh, yes. Oh, he’s on something,
right enough. He’s got the sight, the deadeye, and it’s put him off his
stroke, this gray grotesque, this inability to make out what he’s looking
at. It’s like he’s seen a ghost. Flexing his ectoplasm Freddy feels the
bilious thrill of unaccustomed potency diffusing through his dismal vapors,
an acceptance of the terrifying, ragged thing he is reflected in the plump
man’s shriveling pupils. As he gathers up the dire cumulonimbus of his
countenance for an assault he realizes something is occurring in the car,
events to which his presence may or may not be connected. There’s a
click, faint in the auditory muffle, which the scruffy phantom
retroactively identifies as a rear side door opened from within. The dazed
assailant breaks from his fixed scrutiny of Freddy to survey his victim and
immediately gives a bark of thwarted rage.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
That isn’t right. That’s not a word you use about a woman. Freddy rolls
in crinkling crematorium billows, churning forward for a better vantage but
immediately brought up short by what he sees. The girl, there’s not two
penn’oth of meat on her, slithers from the partly-opened crack in her
condemned cell with her face a sticky mask of blood, newborn into the
night. At Freddy’s back, erratic flashes from an inexplicably disabled
garage light pick out her desperate escape-attempt in a distressing series
of Box Brownie snapshots, scrabbling on her stomach, trying painfully to
climb onto her hands and laddered knees with scarlet scabbing on her
careful plaits, crawling towards the distant mouth of the oil-stained
corral which she must know she doesn’t have a hope in hell of reaching.
From the car the blustering villain lunges, navigating the haphazard bright
and pitch dark with a ladies’ shoe in one hand like a tomahawk and his
old feller hanging out, an overheated dog-tongue, from his gaping trousers.
Surging in a sooty, viscous streamer through the demi-world’s near
silence, Freddy Allen and his trailing scrum of lookalikes flood in to
occupy the dwindling space between the crawling, keening woman and her
persecutor, baby-faced with dark hair plastered to his forehead by the
downpour’s brilliantine, a sputtering and indignant old-style bully.
Through a hushed and flickering realm of scratchy black and white, the
little tramp rushes to save the heroine. Pull back to documentary material,
reintroducing color.
On a turntable of gravity the planet spins, just over halfway through the
eagerly-awaited new millennial long-player’s opening ten year track, the
critical response as yet divided on the merits of its noisy plane-crash
introduction or the strident nature of the vocals; theists and
cosmographers in bickering counterpoint. Jehovah is eroded by the tree of
knowledge’s alarming exponential growth, by paleontologic scrutiny,
resorting to a fortified Creationist denial in result: visitors’ centers
serving the Grand Canyon are reported to have concealed references to the
chasm’s geologic age or origins in favor of a biblical scenario evoking
the deluge of Noah. Carolina legislators argue that authentic rape cannot
result in pregnancy based on the two-seed theory of conception popular two
thousand years before. Conceptual centuries collide and in the deafening
impact are belligerent Zionist assertions, fundamentalist crusades and
detonating martyr vests.
Besieged, the secular response is militant, an atheism volubly affirmed
that in its dogmas and its certainties approaches the religious, although
armed with nothing more substantial than established scientific fact,
itself a changed constituency of shifting ground. The classical and quantum
models are persistent in rejecting all attempts at reconciliation, with the
string by which they might be bound proving thus far elusive.
Insufficiently grasped gravity engenders multiplying entities in its
support, exotic states and substances, dark energy, dark matter, necessary
beasts arisen from mathematics yet escaping observation. Faith and politics
ferment, aided by a fast-propagating yeast of theory and device, and all
the architecture of the world’s traditions seems erected on an
information floodplain, vulnerable to every fresh downpour of data or the
bursting banks of ideologies too narrow and slow-moving to accommodate the
surge, the inundation of complexity. Despite its evident fatigue, afraid of
missing some vital development in this incessant and incendiary pageant,
culture dare not close its eyes. Resume interior, night.
Unable to be rid, now, of his sister’s oddly memorable tarot images, Mick
finds them strewn all over his cerebral carpeting as the surcease of
thought continues to avoid him. Circumspectly levering onto his back he
hooks his left foot over his right knee in what he realizes belatedly is an
unconscious imitation of the deck’s mysterious Hanged Man, a figure
signifying an uncomfortable initiation if Mick’s memory serves correct.
He doesn’t understand the Hanged Man or the other twenty-something
‘trump’ cards even slightly, not the Chariot or Lust or the High
Priestess, none of that lot; can’t imagine any game elaborate enough or
of sufficient scale to utilize them all and so discards them from
consideration. Nearly all the other pasteboard pictures, though peculiar,
are what he thinks of as the ordinary ones, the ones that have an obvious
correspondence to the pack with which he’s most familiar. There are four
suits with ten numbered cards in each, the suits roughly analogous to the
existing quartet but called different names with diamonds become discs and
spades now swords, hearts turned to cups and clubs made wands, his sister
stubbornly insisting that the tarot suits came first. The court cards,
similarly, are almost identical to the more regular monarchical arrangement
with the queens unchanged but knights and princes substituted for the kings
and jacks respectively, these three joined inexplicably by a fourth flat
aristocrat, a princess having no equivalent among the hard-eyed and
mistrustful-looking royals of convention. Mick is unsure how this
last-named personage is meant to fit into the play, no way of knowing if
she beats a prince or what. Like the Hanged Man and his unfathomable pals,
Mick finds she functions only as an irritant in an already irritating
set-up. Tarot, to be blunt, gets on his nerves. With different occult
iconography on every card it would be near impossible to even manage a
quick hand of snap, and so for any grown-up purposes the concept is
completely useless. Feeling suddenly annoyed at Alma, albeit obscurely, he
negotiates the move onto his right side without auditory incident. New
angle.
The whole problem with his sibling, he decides, is that she judges her
successes by such baffling criteria that she can even claim unutterable
disaster as some kind of victory, with everybody too uncertain as to what
she’s going on about to challenge her preposterous and yet
authoritative-sounding proclamations. The most reasonable objections will
be flattened by an insurmountable artillery barrage of quotes from sources
no one else has read and which are very possibly invented on the spot. Any
debate is a rigged contest held according to a manual much like the Book of
Mormon, to which Alma evidently holds sole access. Rules of play change
seemingly at random as though one were arguing with the Red Queen from
Alice Through the Looking-Glass or possibly Alice in Wonderland. Mick
always gets the two of them mixed up. In fact, now that he thinks about it,
Lewis Carroll is almost as aggravating as his older sister in the
author’s patently deliberate attempts to puzzle and confound the punters.
Why else have a Red Queen in both books, both with the same abrasive
personality, when they are plainly different characters with one derived
from playing cards and one from chess? In fact, with an intended audience
of children, why involve chess in the first place if not as a way to
intellectually intimidate the spiteful little buggers? It’s a tactic
which would definitely work with Mick, who’s always found the very
mention of the subject petrifying. Chess – there’s something else that
seriously gets on his tits. All of the fancy and entitled pieces with their
fussy, idiosyncratic ways of moving are no more than obsessive-compulsive
drafts when it comes down to it, the bishops sticking superstitiously to
either white or black squares and the knights continually turning corners
that aren’t there. Then there’s the game’s neurotic aristocracy,
apparently dysfunctional royal couples who are usually the center of
attention; kings restricted in their actions to the point of constipated
immobility with queens free to go where they choose and pretty much do
anything they want, despite the fact that it’s their powerful husbands
about which the wheels of intrigue turn. Mick’s class-based supposition
that the chessmen’s quirky movements have their root in mental feebleness
resultant from inbreeding notwithstanding, he’ll admit that the
distinctive figures have their own mystique, their own minimalist charisma.
There’s a sense about them that they stand for something more significant
than just a knight, a horse’s head or a game token with a strange
waltz-step trajectory. It’s more as if they symbolize big abstract
qualities that skirmish and maneuver on a higher board, a field of play
that’s far into the ultra-violet of Mick’s comprehension. Kings,
queens, princes and princesses, whether you’re discussing playing cards
or chessmen or real flesh and blood heirs to the throne, it isn’t who
they are or what they do that makes them seem important, but the huge and
formless thing it feels as if they represent. It’s what they signify.
It’s what they mean.
Deciding that a supine strategy might be the answer after all, he’s
halfway through the necessary repositioning when it occurs to him that
that’s why everybody made such an extraordinary fuss about Princess Diana
with Kensington Palace wrapped in cellophane, swaddled by teddy bears. It
wasn’t her. It was what people understood by her. Against the bedroom
window a soft fusillade announces scattered showers. Cut to panoptical
perspective.
Church and State, in bed, share a post-coital cigarette and now the quilt
of nations smolders. The intelligence community’s perpetual shrill alerts
begin to seem those of a broken smoke-detector, generally ignored but not
without a gradually accreting residue of jitters. Terror-stricken in a war
against their own emotional condition, snapping fretfully at shadows they
themselves are casting, western powers attempt to color-code a nightmare.
The white rucksack-flash is prism-split into a spectrum of diurnally
adjusted dread, a heat map of anxiety that never cools below Guantanamo Bay
orange with the icy blue of safety a forgotten hue that’s out of vogue
and isn’t coming back.
Friday, May 26th, 2006. In Washington D.C. the governmental buildings which
comprise the Capitol are locked down while the U.S. Senate is in session,
voting to confirm Michael V. Hayden as the new director of the CIA, after
authorities receive accounts of gunshots heard in the vicinity and of an
armed man sighted inside an adjacent office gym. Police identify the sharp
reports as probably those of pneumatic hammers and the putative gymnasium
gunman as one of their plainclothes operatives. Across the planet fresh
security initiatives fail to keep out the resolute insurgents of the mind.
With each explosion the wraith population also booms, new sheeted forms
arisen wailing out of idle chat and propaganda, tricks of media light and
hulking Brocken specters flung on pools of fog between stark summit
headlines. Pepper’s ghosts with headscarves and bandannas loom in popular
imagination’s steeply angled glass to stage schoolboy commando-rolls
through grainy training footage, mythically disfigured clerics wagging a
remaining finger heavy with grim emphasis. Concepts of nation first spun as
religious parables or else dime-novel daydreams in less nuanced centuries
play out on multiplying modern platforms as ensanguined pantomime; fond
re-enactments already nostalgic for the slaughters of a simpler world. Cue
rapid intercuts.
Across the soaked enclosure’s pittering surface skim of wet she slithers,
legs conjoined by the entangling tights and knickers dragged around her
thighs, a landed mermaid flopping in the shallows. Blind with blood she
hears her cheated captor bellowing as he explodes from out the mobile
dungeon at her back.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
Somewhere amid the panicked rat-run of her consciousness the previously
unsuspected part of her prioritizes: if she can regain her feet she can
pull up her underwear and flee, a difficult maneuver best accomplished
without thinking. Managing to lift both knees at once she finds that she is
moving forward, partly toppling and partly running in constrained and tiny
geisha steps while trying to claw the fishnet waistband back above her
hips. With both her high-heel shoes now gone she hurtles splashing through
the pools collected in depressions, visual continuity reduced to blackout
skits by nearby motion-sensor lights in spasm, too concerned with gulping
back great sobbing drafts of air to think of screaming and unable to
believe he hasn’t grabbed her yet. New point of view.
He’s had enough. He’s had enough of drugs, they’re fucking weird. He
wades through seizure light across the walled-in yard and tries to catch
it, tries to get it back into the motor so that he can finish but the stuff
he took is giving him the horrors, things he hadn’t been expecting.
It’s there right in front of him, just a few paces off and struggling to
get on its feet but when he takes a step towards it there’s this wind,
well, not a wind but a stale gust of something that slams into him and
knocks him back. The smell is all like dosshouses, all alky sweats and
meths-breath and damp pants, derelict buildings with shit up the corner and
all that, an aromatic fogbank he can nearly see. Fingers of slum-gray vapor
curl around his ankles, trickling like albumen along his arms and running
down his back and even though he knows all this is in his head and only
happening because he’s on one, he can’t help recoiling. The
hallucination squeezes in until he’s struggling with a cloud of phlegm,
but in the slithering mucous tendrils there are bits of face, chin-swarms
and ornate frills of glistening lip. Worse, there’s this faint sound that
he catches fleeting snatches of, like a transistor radio tuned between
wavebands, an enraged tirade that’s unintelligible as if coming from a
long way off or a long time ago. Some of the squirming, insubstantial stuff
is in his mouth and tastes like sick, or is that him? For all he knows this
might be a brain hemorrhage, an overdose. He might be in real trouble here.
New point of view, reintroducing black and white stock.
Furious in his resent, the threadbare dead man presses his advantage with a
flurry of attack which utilizes every ghoul-display that’s in his clammy
repertoire. He tries the frightening stilt-walker elongation that results
from levitating upwards with a string of doppelgangers dragged up after
him, and executes a miserable spider-dance of multiplying limbs. He shoves
his hands inside his own head so that wriggling fingers poke like crab’s
legs from his gurning face, gob widening impossibly into a scream of filthy
polyps. He does his inflating eyeball trick or with an awful kiss performs
disgusting sleights of tongue; reaches to cup the reeling sexual
predator’s exposed and dangling testes in one mortuary palm; extrudes a
finger of cold ectoplasm past the clenching sphincter and into the bowel.
Human ideas of fighting dirty, well; they’re nothing to a ghost. With
eyes screwed shut and baby face in a tomato crumple his opponent swats the
night, as if at bees, and takes a solitary backward step towards the motor.
There is now nobody sitting in the driver’s seat, the ghetto-wight
observes with some relief, its sulfurous former occupant having apparently
moved on to other matters, demon business being surely plentiful in such a
morally uncoupled world. Swirling his head about and momentarily
accomplishing a Saturn’s ring of ears, he reassures himself that the
young woman is now up and staggering for the enclosure’s mouth before
resuming his assault on her tormentor. Barking inarticulate profanities the
besieged rapist yields another yard in his retreat, a spook-punch landed in
the frontal lobe and fingering for the amygdala. New point of view,
reverting to full color.
At the exit of the killing yard she risks a glance across her shoulder just
to see how close he is behind her but he’s still stood by the car, hands
flapping at the air, having a fit or something though he could be on her in
a minute. Every step a burning ache between her thighs she plunges out
through Lower Bath Street’s black, propelled by bad adrenaline and
mindful of the coming crash into paralyzes and shock. Because it’s easier
stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of
Scarletwell Street, grass theater of her late abduction, steeped in
piss-pot sodium light. An only sign of life is the diluted lemon filtered
through drawn curtains from the solitary house down near the corner and she
limps across the road in its direction, gravel gouging at her tender soles,
breath bubbling in her throat. Please, please let there be someone home,
somebody capable and unafraid to come to their front door on a wild Friday
night, although she’s crushingly aware of the unlikelihood. Off to her
right the isolated home abuts upon the yawning mouth of a since-vanished
alleyway, the memory of its cobbled ribbon spooling down into the dark
beside the chain-link fence that bounds the lowest edge of the school
playing fields. Ahead, St. Andrew’s Road is bare of any traffic
whatsoever, let alone police cars, and the murderer of her imagination is
now panting like a beast and close enough to scald her neck. Her legs seem
disconnected from volition suddenly, nerveless and unresponsive as if made
of cake, and then the ninety-year-old slabs are hurtling up to punch her
knees and slap her stinging hands. She’s down, she’s down and dripping
blood into a gutter where rain gurgles through the stone esophagus. Abject
and crawling, a thrashed dog, she scrabbles whimpering over inundated
pavement, levering herself half-upright at the doorstep to thump her
exhausted fists on the wet paneling, surely too limp and ineffectual for
anyone to hear. The seconds stretch excruciatingly, barbed with the
premonition of his any-moment grip descending on her shoulder, of
fuck-scented fingers bunching in her braided, bloodied hair. Please,
please, please. From somewhere indoors slow, slipper-muffled steps approach
along an unseen passageway. New point of view.
He isn’t scared as such, he’s not that sort of bloke, but he can feel
something attacking him, some big junkyard Alsatian when there’s nothing
there for him to see, for him to swing at. Worse than an Alsatian. Yank
their back legs open and they’re dead, he’s heard that, but this is
like fighting congealed custard and the mess goes everywhere, inside his
clothing, up his nostrils, up his ass. He can’t take any more. He
doesn’t know if this is just what meth does normally or if he’s gone
mad or been grabbed by aliens or what. Slicing through an occasional
illumination, raindrops fall as razor cuts. Inside a whiny voice he
doesn’t know, more like a woman or a panicked kid’s, is pleading with
him to get out of here, get in the car, just go. The loose skin on his
balls is cringing, Jesus Christ his flies are still undone, and there’s a
dismal avalanche of hats, a dozen vacuum-cleaner orifices ringed with
rotten teeth that he can almost see. Unfathomable images persist in the
uneven dark, electric filaments burned sizzling onto his retina, these
visionary floaters coruscating at their edges where the radiance has a
grain of teeming maggots. Everything is wrong. Fumbling behind he shoves
the rear door of the Escort shut while trying to find the handle on the
front one, swiping with his free paw at the flock of ugly flying heads
assailing him. With flapping hands as bony pinions sprouted from the
temples, snapping their decaying jaws and grimacing, like monstrous charnel
hummingbirds they come, preposterous and terrible. His frantic fingers
finally locate what they were seeking, the cold metal button underneath his
thumb, and making noises meant to be a snarl he flings himself into the
driver’s seat, slamming the door closed after him. A surf of dirty
laundry suds is launched against the wound-up window, leaving a gray
residue of viscous facial features sliding down the glass outside. Twisting
the key in the ignition, for some reason he meticulously checks the
dashboard clock and notes the time as almost twenty to eleven. Out beyond
the rain-streaked windscreen something putrid that he doesn’t understand
tries to get in. New point of view reprising monochrome.
In headline black and white through stammering, convulsive light the
skirling deadbeat churns around the vehicle, a rancid cyclone. Car walls
being nothing but a flimsy tissue three or four years thick at most, the
vagrant vapor-trail could easily reach through them to continue the assault
but it’s deterrence and not punishment on the agenda here, much as he
wishes it were otherwise. Just scare this tubby little bugger off and then
make sure the woman’s safe, those are the things he needs to keep his
petrifying eye on. Never mind what somebody who’d do that to a young girl
might deserve: that’s a decision better left in larger hands than his,
although with half a chance what devastation wouldn’t he bring down upon
this animal, this wretched failure of masculinity that he so nearly could
have been? He’d do a Banquo, do a Hamlet’s dad, a Tam O’ Shanter with
his ghastly oppoes from the Jolly Smokers drafted in to help, a ragged
locomotive smoke of pitiless and violent dead men shadowing this mucky
fucker through his every waking moment and his every dream, for the
remainder of his worthless life and then they’ll just be getting started.
There’s no Hell, no merciless retributive Inferno save for the
Destructor, but the bilious spirit is convinced that with the inspiration
of a life and death transacted in the Boroughs one could be arranged, to
beggar Dante and to make blind Milton look away.
Pulling a train of chalk and charcoal sketches in a falling domino
progression he encircles the throat-clearing automobile as it starts, his
eerie Doppler howl pursuing him through the flash-punctuated and torrential
night, his floating coat a rippling funeral banner in his wake. An
aggregate of dust and retribution, in the gaberdine sieves of his pockets
all the grievance of the outraged neighborhood is carried, the deferred
affront viciously vented as a steaming horse-piss stream on the intruder, a
malign deluge to sluice him from these wounded streets until him and the
other knicker-rippers learn to keep away. New point of view, reverting to
full color.
Smeared across a stranger’s doorstep in the pounding torrent she’s a
broken toy, discarded with torn seams and every bit of psychic stuffing
gone, one button eye obscured by sticky cordial. All of her hurts. She
doesn’t care if the dull footfalls in the hallway that she’d heard were
only wishful thinking, doesn’t much mind if her persecutor catches up and
finishes the job. She just wants this to end and is less fussed about the
manner of that ending by the moment. Treacherously cozy lassitude descends,
every last vestige of intent or motion drained out with the contents of her
emptying bladder. Self and personality are a retreating tide strained
rattling on synaptic shingle and she barely comprehends the light that
strikes pink through her lowered eyelids; can’t remember the phenomenon
or what it means. At length the lashes unrestrained by blood-glue flutter
open and she squints up into puzzle-colors, clots of shine and shade
resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she
knows from somewhere, framed by the now-open door. Against a ground of
patterned wallpaper and mismatched carpet, limned in sixty watts of
Pentecostal fire stands an old woman built from long and knobbly bones and
crowned with white hair like ignited phosphorous, one thin hand pressing on
the lintel. Veiled in gloom by incandescent blaze beyond, the tallow
contours of an Easter Island face hang heavy on the bone and oh, her
screech-owl eyes. Pale gray with golden irises they stare down, reservoirs
of depthless fury and compassion, on the smashed child at her threshold.
Gaunt cheek tracked by angry brine the occupant stoops, creaking, crouched
on leather haunches to cup Marla’s chin while a free hand tenderly
smooths the bloodied braids.
“All hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem,” pronounces Audrey
Vernall, and her voice chokes with an all-redeeming pride. Pull back to
planetary mosaic, abruptly edited.
Bulbs pop and data effervesce. Wigan police release footage of car involved
in fatal hit-and-run with cyclist. Reefs quietly disintegrate. Convicted
Enron fraudster Kenneth Lay says he believes good will come out of his
predicament. The stars of supermarket magazines change shape, change
partners. Arctic ice recedes. A paralyzed Welsh rugby player calls to ban
contested scrums and startlingly tenacious tubeworms offer hope of life on
other worlds. Quantum or nation, states collapse when looked at. Oil chess,
fiscal figure skating and the tendency of Homo sapiens to fuze with its
technologies. Australian mountain climber Lincoln Hall is briefly believed
dead. A badger harasses sports center staff in Devon. Mice glow and grow
joke-shop ears. Racism fears dog World Cup buildup. Budgets shrivel and
reality shows relocate their target audience inside the television, closing
the ouroboros. New forms of carbon and new scales of manufacture. An
ethereal scrapyard orbiting the world. Popular culture, formerly
disposable, dragged to the curbside for recycling and art residing solely
in the pitch. Internal interregnum. Double helix turns informant.
Touch-screen intimacy. Algorithms of desire. Bespoke need, and text
messaging a carrier pidgin. New, new, every second bigger than the last.
The populace recline obese with novelty yet consume ever more
enthusiastically, as if to master the onrushing future by devouring it; to
drink the tidal wave. Cut to interior, night.
Flat on his back, Mick listens to the rain against the glass and thinks
about Diana Spencer. It’s a natural extension of his restless thoughts on
chess or chase-the-ace or tiddledywinks, with the whole Princess Di
phenomenon a game – or a compendium of games – that had apparently got
badly out of hand. That almost literal unveiling in the newspapers, a first
glimpse of the nursery assistant standing in a cheesecloth skirt with
pouring backlight, prurient X-Ray specks illusion of gray silhouetted limbs
caught by an opportunist snapper to be sure, but who was playing who? For
all her shy fawn glances from beneath the fringe, a strategy established
even at that early stage, this was a scion of the Red Earl whose name was
writ in road, estate and public house across the face of working-class
Northampton. Dodgy dynasties had been reduced to bouillon in her blood,
from fifteenth-century livestock farmers passing themselves off as
relatives to the House Le Despencer, through to five or six authentic
bastards sired by Stuarts and thus a genetic conduit to the lines of
Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach and Hanover; of Sforza and Medici.
Chromosomes not to be trifled with, and this before an admixture of
Churchills are infused into the Northamptonshire family’s already-potent
genealogical concoction. Poisoners, tacticians, bloody-minded warrior
kings.
Born Althorp in 1730-something and one in a lengthy line of Johns, the
first Earl Spencer proper fathered Lady Georgiana, later to be made Duchess
of Devonshire and famously alluring doppelganger of her later
tabloid-teasing relative. The fifth Earl Spencer, born around a century
thereafter, was the red one if Mick has his local history straight, a mate
of Gladstone’s named after the color of his ostentatious beard. As Lord
Lieutenant out in Ireland it appears he’d done his bit to play fair with
the Fenians and even came out for Home Rule, which saw him ostracized by
everybody from Victoria down. However, earlier in the 1880s he’d had
people hung for murdering his secretary and Gladstone’s nephew, so the
nationalists all hated him as well. Mick glances to his left, at Cathy’s
soft topography beneath its turf of duvet, and observes not for the first
time that there’s no pleasing the Irish. Dull discomforts start to mutter
in his hips and shoulders – none of us are getting any younger – and he
essays the maneuver to his port side, curls himself about his sleeping
wife’s turned spine like fingers round a hand-warmer. New angle.
By the century just gone, Mick’s century, the Spencer family’s genetic
creep had moved like Burnham Wood, unnoticed, ever closer to the hubs of
power and history. The Spencer-Churchills had slipped into Downing Street
with Winston and then, shortly after that, returned with Winston’s niece
Clarissa as Anthony Eden’s missus; the Suez crisis prime minister’s
trouble and strife, although by no means all of it. Meanwhile in 1924 back
home at Althorp, Eighth Earl Johnny had arrived, and yet Mick’s only
mental image of the man is as a rubicund and seemingly concussed attendee
of official openings, someone with a prize-fighter mumble, to be seated
furthest from the microphone. Though to be fair he’d pulled a
decent-looking woman in that first Viscountess Althorp, Frances, even if
her dynasty-dispenser seemed obdurately to only turn out healthy babies of
an inconvenient gender. First came Sarah, then came Jane and then at last
the hoped for Ninth Earl, yet another John, who died in infancy a year
before the advent of a further disappointing daughter, this one named after
a week’s procrastination as Diana Frances. During his occasional lucid
moments Johnny Spencer starts to see his wife as culprit in the inability
to sire an heir and the humiliated Lady Althorp is dispatched to Harley
Street in order to determine just exactly what her problem is, the
difficulty clearly being hers alone. Mick can imagine how that might have
put a strain upon the marriage, even after the arrival of Diana’s younger
brother Champagne Charlie Spencer just a couple of years later. When the
future people’s princess was just eight years old in 1969 her parents
were divorced amid some acrimony following her mother’s extra-marital
affair with Peter Shand Kydd, whom she’d soon thereafter wed. Despite the
unreliability of hindsight, Mick supposes that some of the fateful
architecture of the youngest Spencer daughter’s life might have been
loosely sketched in by events around this time, although he can’t help
thinking that by subsequently marrying Barbara Cartland’s daughter Raine
her father had recklessly introduced an element of overheated gothic
romance to the mix that would eventually do most damage. Fairy story
expectations without due acknowledgment of all the things that fairy
stories bring: the poisoned apple and the cradle curse, the glass shoe full
of blood. He feels uncomfortable. If Cathy is a roasting hedgehog, Mick is
wrapped around her like baked Gypsy clay. Evading her inferno he once more
essays the shift onto his back. New angle.
He’s not really certain how it had all worked, the courtship and the
marriage into royalty. Presumably Diana had been drafted into service as a
brood-mare, like her mother, to produce the necessary male successor while
allowing her new husband to continue a longstanding dalliance with his
married mistress. Did she know that on her way in, or find out about it
later? Mick supposes it depends on how informed about each other’s lives
the aristocracy, as a community, might be. Even if she’d entered into
marriage in a state of blissful ignorance, she must have tumbled to it
early on. That first press conference with the two of them stood by that
gate, the distant and laconic tone that he affected when he said
“Whutever love eez” and you saw her look uncomfortable at this obvious
disclaimer. But whichever way it went, once all the cards were on the table
it was guaranteed that there would be a messy end-game.
When the fault-lines started showing it was in the form initially of a
schoolgirl rebellion, turning up with Fergie at some fashionable and
exclusive club disguised as WPC strippagrams, but by the time it got to
Martin Bashir you could see that she was wheeling out the big guns and that
her campaign didn’t appear to have retreat among its options. It was
clearly going to be hard-core attrition all the way. The tactical component
became, literally, more naked. The ostensibly intrusive but surprisingly
composed gymnasium rowing-machine picture. The abbreviated swimsuit on Dodi
Al Fayed’s boat, deliberately teasing the long lenses to erection, on the
same day that her former husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles were due to meet
the press and public. She’d got game, you had to give her that. And then,
and then … that week or two before the bridge, before her crossing, the
queer British admixture of clammy lust and lip-curling contempt had humped
its way to a vituperative climax: they despised her. They despised the
future-king-humiliating Arab-shagger, and the AIDS patients and landmines
came to seem an unconvincing camouflage for a new Catherine de Médicis, a
new Catherine Sforza; some Renaissance vamp with no elastic in her knickers
and a cyanide ring. Loathed her all the more for having wanted so to love
her, but she’d let them down with all her gallivanting and her diet
disorders, hadn’t been the person that they’d wanted, that they’d
needed. It’s so hard to love something that’s moving, changing;
something that’s alive. The marble memory is more dependable. Mick
wonders, his thoughts starting to fuzz up at last, if it was that great
weight of disappointed expectation that had suddenly descended on her like
a prehistoric mudslide, fossilizing her forever as the perfect tragic
Hitchcock blond, leeching the human color out and freezing her into the
black-and-white monitor image at the Ritz, the half-smile ducking out
through the revolving door into eternity and outside chauffeur Henri Paul
called back on duty at short notice, maybe catastrophically attempting to
offset his after-hours imbibing with a few revivifying blasts of white line
fever. Rolling highlights, glints, refractions. Obscure scintillations in
the Paris dark beyond the glass. Pull focus to kaleidoscopic torrent of
found footage, interspersing full high-definition color with unstable
silent film stock.
Rural roads can be most deadly, a report suggests. Abandoned turtle
sanctuary to open at a sea-life park in Dorset. Russia jockeys for control
of three Siberian oil pipelines currently in Western hands, and Nur-Pashi
Kulayev, the surviving perpetrator of 2004’s Beslan school siege is found
guilty on specific counts of terrorism, hostage taking, murder, but steers
clear of the death penalty by virtue of a current Kremlin moratorium on
executions. Lucky breaks and random tragedies, the acted permutations of
Newtonian physics with its endless knock-ons and its circumstantial
cannonades; stochastic popcorn for tomorrow’s papers. In the Indian Ocean
some sixteen miles south-southwest of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of
Java and more than six miles beneath the seabed the Australian and Eurasian
plates, tectonic sumo wrestlers, slap powder on their palms and close
together for their seventh or eighth bout this year. It’s fourteen
minutes to eleven, Greenwich Mean Time.
She can barely feel the bony hands that help her to her feet, and briefly
has the thought that she might be ascending. Distant from the instant, in a
snowglobe glaze of settling shock with all the painful parts of her a mile
away, she registers the tissue-paper whisper of the fragile woman gathering
her up into the doorstep’s light only remotely. Something about saints,
she thinks, and calmly wonders if she’s dead, if she’s not really
managed to escape the car or vehicle enclosure after all. Nearby in the
torrential night an engine starts to angry life before its growl moves off
uphill away from her, a disappointed and receding snarl which, like the
spattering deluge or murmurs of her elderly deliverer, seems to possess a
new dimension; a cathedral of unprecedented resonances ringing in her
blood-caked ears. Through this celestial tinnitus her rescuer is speaking
now with a fresh force and sharpness that she gradually comes to understand
is not addressed to her for all that Scarletwell Street, other than the two
of them, is bare.
“See ’im off, Freddy. See ’im all the way off.”
There’s an eyestrain shimmer in the rain and then there’s something
that’s the opposite of wind, a howling gust that’s sucked away from
them into the Boroughs dark in an indecent hurry, as if late for an
appointment.
Derek sweats and skids and swears and can’t get out. The neighborhood’s
a labyrinth and he’s like a bull at a gate, his chemically assisted
courage burning away with the rubber to leave a black residue of acrid
panic. Out of the enclosure with that flapping and horrifically
proliferative thing behind him he swings right and into Lower Bath Street,
but he doesn’t know the layout of the place and halfway up there’s
concrete bollards blocking off the road, the district’s blunt and jutting
teeth, where the compulsory left turn past a despairing local pub, the
Shoemakers, delivers him once more to Scarletwell Street. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
A right, another right and the corroding wall-fixed sign informs him he’s
in Upper Cross Street with those ugly tower-blocks looming over him like
oviparous doormen. At the end, what’s he to do? He can’t turn uphill
how he wants to, he can see more bollards up the top there, but when he
looks downhill to his right he realizes his hallucinations are still with
him: on the corner there’s a – he can’t even find the words – a
monstrous cog of fog rotating in the margin of his eye but if he looks at
it dead on, it’s gone. He screeches into Bath Street, trying not to see
the grinding phantom gear, and then almost immediately left to Little Cross
Street. What is it with all these Cross Streets? What’s the big deal
about crosses around here? Careering through a blacked-out warren the black
Escort hurtles straight across the roundabout and into Chalk Lane. Veering
left around the funny chapel with the doorway halfway up one wall he finds
he’s in St. Mary’s Street, with at its end the lights of Horsemarket in
joyous conflagration, the illuminated exit to this haunted maze. He’s
made it. He’s got out. He’s got away with it. He drives on into
glowering taillight fire.
It’s black and white as Freddy sees it, sizzling in a pale fuze over the
school playing field, through still machines and empty benches at the
factory and across Spring Lane.
“See him off, Freddy. See him all the way off”, that’s what Audrey
Vernall had instructed him to do. Orders are orders. The chain of command
is simple and straightforward: builders, fiends, saints, Vernalls,
deathmongers, then the rough sleepers. Everybody’s got their job and
this, at last, is Freddy’s. Frilled with fifty repetitions of the same
old coat and leading a great fleet of hats he smears through the deserted
business complex that was Cleaver’s Glass once and before that Compton
Street, heading by moocher instinct for the ragged area’s northeast
corner, the skull pocket near the pinnacle of Grafton Street. That will be
where whatever’s going to happen happens, he knows this in his remembered
water, in his absent bones. That’s where they immolated the enchantresses
and heretics. That’s where they spiked the heads, like settled bills. A
fatal gambler’s spray of playing cards, all violent clubs and spades, his
centipede of selves pours over what remains of Lower Harding Street and
skitters at unnerving speed into the monolithic crossword blank of empty
courts and blazing windows on the other side. Saint Stephen’s House,
Saint Barnabas’, buildings with lightless landings, several dozen front
doors and one roof that stand where whole streets used to be yet still call
themselves houses, canonized high-rises in a disenfranchized litany, an air
of nominative sanctity to mask the scent of urine. Dirtying the televisual
stupor in the ground-floor flats with angry-out-of-nowhere thoughts on
homicide, the sepia stampede of Freddy Allen fumes through other people’s
Friday nights trailing a cloud of baseless argument, lapsed conversation
and stalled DVD in its infuriated wake.
At seven minutes to eleven Mick essays a stealth-turn onto his right side
and into a position that seems promisingly soporific, thinking of that
final August night nine years ago. The black Mercedes screams through his
increasing serotonin levels down the Rue Cambon towards its date with
twenty-three past midnight. In the back, no seatbelts on: they’re young,
hormonal, unaware that alcohol and their chauffeur’s anti-psychotic
medicine are contraindicated. Vampire fireflies in the rearview but the
heavy Gallic lids sag and he knows he’s crashing. Touching seventy he
slips down Cours la Reine along the right bank of the river, into the Pont
de l’Alma underpass.
And even on its seismologic Ring of Fire, Java shivers. In Galur,
shrine-ornaments begin to jingle, small and delicate percussions as an
overture to cataclysm. Nearly seven thousand people are awakened by the
sound with slightly quizzical expressions on their faces for the last time,
and the birds don’t know which way to fly in this gray wolf’s tail,
just before the dawn. At 7.962˚ South by 110.458˚ East one of the two
diastrophic combatants yields but an inch and all five million souls within
their sixty mile-wide sumo circle are spontaneously and suddenly at
prayer.
Suspended in an aura of averted ending, she finds herself in the kitchen of
the woman with magnesium-flare hair. A blessedly warm flannel dabs away
coagulated burgundy from her closed eye, at intervals squeezed into a
half-full enamel bowl with fugitive pink clouds diffusing in hot water.
Perfectly sweet tea is set beside her on a beautifully frayed tablecloth,
and at her ear the anciently accented voice continues its account of
saints, and corners turned, and the impossibility of death.
He’s flying up Horsemarket and across the Mayorhold into Broad Street,
horrors vanishing behind him, face first, washed with gold in the oncoming
lights. He buzzes with adrenaline and luck past the Gala Casino on his
left; keeps laughing to himself with the exhilaration of it all. Just
before Regent Square, and without slowing, he takes the abbreviated turn
for Grafton Street.
In chessboard chiaroscuro Freddy streams through empty premises, dragging a
pennant smoke of faces over Cromwell Street and Fitzroy Terrace, bursting
through the brickwork and into the path of the approaching traffic. Only in
the headlight glare does he appreciate that it’s stopped raining.
Mick forgets exactly where his limbs are. In his faltering mind a
hypnagogic limo disappears into the tunnel mouth, abruptly lurching to the
left of the dual carriageway as Henri Paul loses control.
Measuring 6.2 upon the Richter scale the earthquake ripples across Java.
Through an unglued eye she notes the woman’s kitchen clock: six minutes
to eleven.
Something dreadful scuttles over Grafton Street in front of him. He screams
into the swerve.
From Freddy’s monochrome perspective the black Escort mounts the curb
almost in silence.
Mick imagines the Mercedes as it smacks into the thirteenth pillar under
the Pont de l’Alma.
Houses fall, more than a hundred thousand, and some one and a half million
homeless stumble out into erased streets wearing bloodied nightclothes,
staring, calling people’s names.
In its enamel bowl the water is now carmine, she observes, concentric rings
dilating from its epicenter. The old lady’s rung the ambulance and the
police; asks if there’s anybody else that should be contacted, and in a
voice she doesn’t recognize she soberly recites her mother’s number.
Up onto the pavement and straight at the lamppost in a series of bejeweled
saccades, he impacts on the steering column with his breastbone smashed to
flakes of chalk, his heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp.
Head punching through the windscreen, for an instant he believes that
he’s been flung miraculously clear until he notices that he’s now deaf
and colorblind.
Idling towards the wreckage of the car, unhurried now, he glances from the
driver’s body half emerged across the crumpled bonnet to the duplicate
that stands amid a pavement spray of shattered glass and stares at the
black bloodstains soaking its white shirtfront in incomprehension. Someone
else lurks at the end of Fitzroy Terrace, looking on, who Freddy takes at
first to be a mortal passerby until he spots the mismatched eyes.
“It looks like he could use a drink”, says sympathetic Sam O’Day.
Against his twitching eyelids Mick screens a montage, commencing with the
buckled vehicle at rest against the tunnel wall, almost immediately lost in
a dissolve of swarming flashbulbs which resolves to snapshot images
highlighting the events of the next … had it really only been a week?
Kensington Palace bleeding flowers and cellophane, New Labor’s rush to
spin the shroud, newspaper editors demanding a response from those they’d
helped bereave, the whole fast-forward flicker of activity concluding with
a still shot of Westminster Abbey, hushed in dull September light.
At the approach to sunrise thousands clog the Solo-Yogya highway, fearing a
reprise of the tsunami two years previously and fleeing inland, leaving
ruptured homes to opportunist burglars who, in districts high above sea
level, nonetheless spread tales of an impending tidal wave that never
comes. Almost six thousand dead, six times that many injured and along the
highway’s teeming margin in Prambanan a collapsing ancient Hindu temple
complex spills its god-encrusted pinnacles into the dust below, cracked
deities become unmoving obstacles for the incoming surf of refugees to flow
between in curling eddies, with so many in pajamas that it all seems a
bewildering mass dream.
As though time isn’t really passing, she sits motionless beside the table
while green swirls of paramedic and fluorescent yellow surges of police
orbit her in a gaudy palette of concern, bright twists of color artfully
embedded in the great glass marble of the moment. Audrey – that’s the
woman’s name – Audrey is telling the attending officer that she’s a
former patient of St. Crispin’s Hospital up Berry Wood turn, relocated to
this halfway house during the care-in-the-community initiative. Marla’s
not really listening; not even really Marla anymore. The capable and
unafraid perspective from which she’d viewed her backseat ordeal has not
receded alongside the threat of imminent annihilation, and whoever she is
now it’s somebody considerably older than eighteen. There in the vastness
of the tiny kitchen objects are illuminated in church window hues: the
muted turquoise label on a tin of beans, her forearms bruised to plush
cinema-seat maroon and Audrey’s slippers, pink as sugar-iced flamingos.
Every detail, every sound, each thought that passes through her mind is
outlined with the glorious blood and gold of martyr-fire. She hears her own
voice answering the policewoman’s questions and it’s strong, it isn’t
weak. It isn’t ugly.
“No, he had a chubby build, with rosy cheeks and dark hair graying at the
sides. I didn’t see his eyes.”
And all the time there’s part of her that’s still there in the
juddering Escort; still there on the doorstep looking up at Audrey with her
head all filament-glare and combustion, speaking that peculiar name from
J.K. Stephen’s doggerel and a dozen spine-lined ripperbacks, as if
she’d known it would be recognized. A brandied slur of syllables or an
elaborate sneeze, a name that nobody was ever called just lying around
empty, waiting for the individual singular enough to put it on:
Kaphoozelum. New point of view, resuming black and white.
Wet tarmac glints in an abrupt theater shush, as though some drama were
about to start. The boot’s been sprung by the collision – fuck, what
will he say to Irene, say to the insurers – and the children’s beach
toys and inflatables are scattered in the road as pale and gray as uncooked
crabs. Exasperated and confused he tries to kick a punctured armband to the
curbside, but he’s either seeing double and he misses or his foot goes
through it like it isn’t there. Given his probable concussion he decides
the first of these alternatives is the most likely, although this still
leaves him with the problem of that mangled body sprawling through the
absent windshield. Did he hit somebody? Oh, shit, he’s in trouble now,
but then how did they manage to go through the screen feet first, that
isn’t possible, and finally he glimpses the glass-freckled ruin of the
face but still can’t quite determine where he knows it from. That’s
when he notices the two old boys stood watching him from further down the
street, both of them wearing hats, which isn’t something that you very
often see these days. The nearer of the two comes up to him, asks him if he
could use a drink and Derek says yes just like that, grateful for anybody
who might let him in on what’s just happened. The old dosser tells him
there’s a place nearby, the Jolly Something, where he’ll have a chance
to get his bearings now the sat-nav’s fucked. They start to walk together
back up towards Regent’s Square and, actually, this could all still turn
out okay. Remembering the tramp’s companion he asks “What about your
mate?” They both pause and look back. The other man – one eye looks
like it’s got a cataract or something – smiles and lifts his hat, at
which point Derek understands exactly where he is. He starts to weep. The
vagrant near him quietly takes his arm and leads him, unresisting, off into
a soot and silver Friday night. New point of view.
As Freddy sees it, once he’s led the sniveling new statistic down
Daguerreotype walkways to the Jolly Smokers, that’s him done, his duties
and responsibilities discharged. Puzzlingly, at the ghost-pub there are two
men made of wood that seem to have arrived from somewhere, one of them
embedded face-up in the worm-drilled floorboards while the other one, more
corpulent but similarly naked, stands beside the bar with tears of varnish
rolling down his grain-whorled cheeks and Mary Jane’s initials gouged
into his arm. As Freddy makes excuses and slips out the back door, he looks
round and sees the distraught new arrival being introduced to the likewise
disconsolate fat manikin by Tommy Mangle-the-Cat, fragments of a brutal
smile sliding across his juggled physiognomy. There’s no need to see any
more; no need to know the precise nature of the justice that’s
administered above the streets. He smolders out into the sodium-stained
darkness at the top of Tower Street, where above a fast-disintegrating
overcoat of cloud are stars that look the same to dead and living. He feels
differently about things now, not least about himself. Some of the stains
have gone from his escutcheon, blots evaporated from his copybook. When it
came down to it, he’d done the right thing. He’s been better than the
man he thought he was, the man who was resigned to an ink-wash eternity,
too guilty and impoverished in his character to ever go Upstairs. He’s
paid the district back for all its pints of milk, its loaves of bread, its
disappointed doorsteps. Much to his surprise he finds his worn-out shoes
are leading him down Scarletwell Street to his friend’s house, Audrey’s
house there at the bottom with its crook-door, with its Jacob Flight.
He’s hurrying now, past the deserted playing fields. He thinks he can
remember yellow, thinks he can remember green. Cut to interior, night.
His breath so regular that he’s forgotten it, Mick falters at the brink
of dream, that overcast September afternoon nine years ago replaying in an
emptied cranial cinema. They’d watched on television, him and Cathy and
the lads, and it had all seemed stage-managed and strange, more like a
Royal Variety Performance than a funeral beneath its Cool Britannia
branding. Needing something three-dimensional and more authentic than a
screen could offer they’d all climbed into the car and Cathy drove them
out to Weedon Road, where they could watch the cortege on its way to
Althorp. All the people that were gathered at the roadside there, as quiet
as ghosts, nobody really certain why they’d come except the sense that
something old was happening again and that their presence was required.
Almost asleep Mick starts to misplace the dividing line between event and
memory. No longer horizontal and in bed he’s helping Cathy shepherd Jack
and Joe between spectators on the verge, somnambulists with tongues stilled
by mythology. Finding a clear spot in the threadbare grass beside the curb
it seems to him that these exact same people must have turned up to remove
their hats for Boadicea, Eleanor of Castile, Mary, Queen of Scots and any
dead queens who have slipped his slipping mind. An engine is approaching in
the distance, loud for want of any other sound, even the birds remaining
mute for the duration. It glides past them like a ship, imagined bow-wave
rippling the asphalt, floral wreathes like lifebelts on the bonnet, bound
for its pretended island grave. Having attended to her homecoming the crowd
and vision both begin to break up like commemorative crockery, melting into
the throng at Alma’s exhibition that’s tomorrow morning. Letting go of
everything, Mick sinks into another of his five-and-twenty thousand nights.
He fades to black.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
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Book 3, Chapter 11 -- Added : January 24, 2021
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