Subvision

  The woman smiled a toothless smile as she stroked the doctor's leg.

  1st Mutant: (wearing a rubber suit, carrying a lantern on a pole) Do you see that star, young traveller, so bright in the heavens?

  2nd Mutant: (dressed as a tramp) Which star is that, watchman? There are so many. Is it the star just risen over yonder chimney or the star pinned like a distant bulb to the depthless vault above my head? Another? A blue or red one? Tell me which or let me on my way.

  1st M: Why such haste? There are many nights to follow this one. Linger while there are no clouds to hinder your vision. Take your time, friend, and study each star as you find it. Then tell me if you can which star it is the aliens come from.

  2nd M: (shaking his head in surprise) Aliens, watchman? What aliens are these of which you speak? I have no knowledge of them.

  1st M: (seeing his bewilderment) You have not heard of the invaders? I find that difficult to believe, young traveller, and can only imagine you have spent the last twenty months in some walled institution where all news of the outside is forbidden. If not, your professed ignorance of this scourge is either a bad joke or a wicked lie. Tell me which, and your name!

  2nd M: I can tell you neither. Sincerely, watchman, I have no memory of these things. It seems to me that I have wandered this same road all my life. Perhaps this is not the first town I have come upon or you the first watchman to have questioned me such. I don't remember. Truly, I can recall nothing of my past.

  1st M: (appalled) It is they! The aliens have warped your mind as well as your body!

  (a burst of noise off-stage, lights in the sky)

  3rd M: (semi-naked woman, body covered in scratches, face a mask of terror) Help me someone. Oh, please help me. They'll ravish me should they catch up...

  1st M: The fiends!

  2nd M: What is this? What can we do?

  1st M: We can fight, that is what. Are you with me, young traveller? Have you the courage to face the beasts or will you stand idle while this poor woman is molested?

  3rd M: Kill them! Kill them all!

  1st M: (calming her) Have no fear, lady, for be there one or twenty this stout fellow and I will defend you. They cannot do this. They are inhuman. We shall die fighting if we must.

  2nd M: (searching for a weapon) Bravo!

  3rd M: You are so strong and valiant. How can I ever thank you?

  (they kiss, a hideous alien lumbers on stage dragging its outsized phallus, the woman screams, faints)

  Alien: (drooling) Here she is, lads; tonight's entertainment. Get it while it's hot!

  1st M: Stand back, foul monster!

  A: (amused) Eh? You dare challenge me, human?

  1st M: Yes, and this other, too. You'll not have your filthy way with this virtuous lady.

 

  A: You think not? You must have been drinking. Come, hand over the wench and I will forget the insult you've paid me.

  1st M: (turning to the audience) Never!

  A: (seeing he means business) Ah, the sun is rising. You planned to trick me. Well, you have failed. See, I return now to my burrow and my mates, another night to grant your wish of death. You disgust me, you puny humans. You're lucky we have some use for you or else we'd stamp you out.

  1st M: Be gone, loathsome creature!

  2nd M: (impressed) You heard the watchman. Leave this place while you can, for one day others as brave as this man will rise up and defeat you in open battle across the planet, and when that day comes it will be your last. So back to your stinking hole. Grovel in the dirt. You have been warned what the future holds for you!

  (the alien slouches off, tail between legs, leaving a trail of slime)

  3rd M: (in her saviour's arms) My hero!

  1st M: (taken with her fragile beauty) My love…

  (end of scene)

  He stopped her at the second button. Patted her wrist. ‘That's enough for now, Mrs Fry - you get some sleep and I'll look in on you later. There are a few papers I need you to sign, all right? Good.’

  Chocolate-coloured spittle dribbled down her chin, gravity hugging it to her loose flesh. ‘I'm getting well, aren't I, doctor,’ she stated in a loud, resonant voice. ‘I can feel it all coming back; my youth, just like you said.’

  ‘Excellent,’ replied Mood. ‘Now go to sleep. It's sleep you need above everything else. Gets the juices moving!’

  She chuckled, tongue rattling like a dry bean in a tin. He reached the door, secured it behind him and padded languidly down the stairs. In the drawing-room he lit a fat cigar, and taking his magnifying glass from its worn leather case began once more the detailed scrutiny of grandma's spidery runes. In the past Doctor Mood had thought of transferring each of the fragile, ancient pages onto photographic plates which would then enable him to enlarge and project their confounding images against a wall; but this had seemed like too public a means of investigation, and so he continued to screen the pharmacopoeia by hand. Its thousand plus pages were his life's torment. Mood often wondered if his grandmother had not deliberately allowed him the smallest of insights by way of a mute revenge on whatever tangle of fates had denied his parents a daughter, sprinkling his mother's womb with nine sons instead, of which he was the youngest and last surviving, the eager if unwanted apprentice his grandma never had.

  It was a scenario the doctor found depressing. He preferred to view the writings, his rightful inheritance, as an outwardly indecipherable puzzle the key to which lay in the whole, some intrinsic and perhaps obvious pattern woven into its deceptively random construct. Two hands, time and application were all he required to crack the code. And then? Then a cat brushed his leg, ginger, as had Mrs Fry, a sometime redhead.

  3

  It was dark when Scherzo left home, darker still by the time he reached the park and the big oak tree whose stygian branches lanced no crooked silhouettes through an absent moon. A match flared, was touched to a king-size cigarette, and Ruth's softened features coalesced out of the deeper solidity of wood.

  ‘Pleased you could make it,’ she commented, an orange glow illuminating her face. ‘Thought I was going to have to put my knickers back on.’

  He stood before her now, enveloped in her aura of smoke and perfume, his penis shifting uncomfortably in his pocket. Ruth was wearing a short skirt and a bike jacket several sizes too big for her, booty from a relationship past.

  The cigarette turned to ash below her wistful eyes, ash that cooled and dropped like exotic silver leaves.

  ‘When you were little,’ she asked, ‘did you ever steal from shops?’

  ‘No,’ said Scherzo. ‘Never.’

  ‘You weren't ever tempted?’ she pressed, head to one side.

  He nodded. ‘Perhaps - I don't know...’

  ‘But you held back. Why?’

  ‘I didn't want to get caught,’ he told her, curling his toes.

  Ruth's expression altered. ‘Not because you knew it was wrong to steal?’

  Scherzo, as that morning, felt manipulated. ‘That too.’

  ‘But mostly because you were scared of being caught.’ She drew long on the filter-tip, then exhaled. ‘And punished.’

  His head moved from side to side. ‘Let's go for a drink. It's cold.’

  ‘What if there was no way of being caught, no chance of discovery, no risk involved at all?’

  She flicked the cigarette away and pushed from the tree, reaching to unbutton his jeans.

  Scherzo no longer recognized her eyes. They weren't Ruth's, but another's, one belonging to uninhabited lands. The sensation gnawing at the base of his gums was a familiar caution, a harbinger of stranger things to come.

  ‘The perfect crime?’

  ‘Not crime,’ Ruth amended, ‘more caper.’

  She was in his underpants now. ‘And?’

  ‘Scherzo...’ seeking his cold lips with her own ‘...fuck me.’

  ‘Here?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Perfect for it. Come
on, don't chicken out now; I've seen the way you look at me.’

  ‘It's freezing.’

  ‘Scherzo - I won't ask again.’

  ‘Shit...’ Holding her buttocks, scraping bark, making crude prints, rubbings with knuckles and arse, her mouth wet against his ear, emptying pleasurable noises, encouragement and giggles, willing an erection as the dark closed about his mind and the woman about his penis.

  Scherzo Trepan was powerless to countermand.

  Besides, he was enjoying this.

  They fell sidelong into the hard grass.

  ‘I think you've cracked my balls.’

  ‘The crying mouse,’ Ruth intoned, ‘has his cheese but wants his pickles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You're always complaining,’ she said. ‘Wasn't it fun?’

  ‘Yeah; but aren't you aware of the temperature?’

  ‘No. You're a lizard, you know that? You want to stretch out in the sun all day catching flies, taking a dip to cool off. Where's the adventure in that? Be daring. It feels good.’

  What am I, he thought, a mouse or a lizard?

  She bit his nose.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what was it you had in mind?’

  He had first encountered the perfect blackness beyond the circular door. Annie had taken him there. It was one of her dreams, she said, one of her expeditions. ‘You pull the swimming cap down over your eyes, squeeze all the light out so you can see nothing, not even spots, and you lie in the bath with the water at just the right temperature up over your nose and ears, your whole body covered and still, like you were dead. Soon you lose all feeling in your arms and legs and they turn rubbery; the rest of your body, too, inside and out. Then you open the door. Not by the handle though; there is no handle. You just sort of focus your mind and it happens. But you have to be careful.’ At this point she uncoiled from her chair and wandered teasingly around the room, as she was apt to do, keeping him waiting, primed on the edge of his seat, sat like a gnome on a toadstool. ‘It was father who told me about it,’ Annie continued. ‘And that same night I dreamt the whole thing: how it worked, how to make sure I was doing everything properly.’ Her hands held his shoulders, squaring them. ‘If you don't do it properly, Scherzo, you might not be able to find your way back from wherever it is you've been. You understand what I'm saying? You can drown.’

  That had frightened him, as Annie knew it must. But there was always reassurance in the eggshell vacuums of her eyes.

  Another morning, Tuesday, and Scherzo was on his hands and knees among the litter of steam and insects, bodies deformed and mutated, searching for a lost spanner but finding only more corpses. He went deeper, the heat swelling in intensity by the second and the degree, threatening to peel, layer after sweltering layer, the skin from his bones. Preoccupied, he'd allowed the tool to slip out of his grasp. It had jangled off a succession of pipes, each clashing reverberation exceeding the last, dropping clean through the grating to the floor to end all floors, the sump. On no map or plan, the sump contained a submerged yet growing island of detritus, sediments hardening into crusty strata amid a sea of dust that moved in a billion separate directions on a zillion atomic legs. And this the one spanner, on loan, sunk in that false ocean, a two month waiting list behind it, he couldn't afford to lose.

  Entrance to the basement was via a circular door. Unlike in Annie's dream it had a handle, ferrous and stuck. The hatch screamed when eventually Scherzo levered it open. A pall of shapeless mist slipped from the opening. He held his breath, shortly to be coaxed inward by the swirling fugue, the prone and the crushed, cadavers and the promise, gum-tingling, of secrets accumulated over years, secrets whose real meanings had their distant origins under a different sun.

  Surfacing, buoyed again in physical time, he peered for counted minutes at the clinical walls, increasingly cognizant of white sheets and disinfectant, a water jug whose pretended innocence matched that of the fruit bowl, between them allowing the presence of flowers.

  ‘You had a lucky escape,’ said Wilson Hives in his best suit, or rather from it as Wilson liked a lot of starch. ‘They tell me you nearly drowned in the river.’ He was smiling, nearly not being good enough. The suit pressed, thought Scherzo, for a funeral.

  He made no attempt at conversation. Falling spanners resonated in his skull.

  Wilson raised one arm like the jib of a toy crane, winched his Stetson with the duck feather onto his slick pate and left.

  As the big hand rested between two and three a male nurse called Morrison appeared at his bedside.

  Morrison wore a plastic uniform. ‘They always shit on me,’ he explained, dragging his trolley behind. ‘Every time - shit, shit. There's just no let up.’

  Scherzo saw his chance and grabbed it. ‘What am I in for?’ he asked.

  Morrison regarded him suspiciously, stretching on a rubber glove. ‘They haven't told you? You must be a special case. I shouldn't even be talking to you.’

  ‘But I just woke up,’ pleaded Scherzo.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ said Morrison. ‘What can I say? I can't tell you. I don't know. I'm here to check your arse. I need you to turn over.’

  ‘My arse is fine.’

  ‘Yeah? What do you know about it? Come on, otherwise I hit my alarm button here and these men in white suits come rushing in and hold your face in the pillow.’ He tapped his foot theatrically. ‘I'm not kidding. I check the arses around here, okay? It's my job. I don't pretend to like it; but then who would?’

  Scherzo complied.

  ‘Okay,’ Morrison told him, ‘you're clean.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don't mention it. All part of the service. See you in eight hours.’

  There was a television set on a bracket in the corner farthest from the bed and a remote on the table by the now anxious looking fruit bowl, a combination of the two, TV and remote, providing him with potentially hours of healthy, fun, varied aural and visual stimulation.

  He watched as aliens landed. There were graphics to assist the dumbest viewer, speculations and protestations to beat that same viewer into submission, and finally a live relay from somewhere in Greenland near the Arctic Circle. They'd cut a hole in the ice, our roving reporter informed us, and flown their ship into the freezing ocean, displacing, it was calculated by a government scientist, a Canadian working for the Americans on a field project labelled Top Secret, approximately 240 million gallons of water and eleven pilot whales, which, quipped the scientist, lived up to their name by piloting themselves an estimated fifty-three kilometres before coming down on an ice floe to the heat-engendering applause of sundry Eskimo.

  The hole, like the one in his arse, the arses of the pilot whales and the Top Secret jokester who'd succeeded in occupying every channel much to the annoyance of his employers who were even now taking apart some Federal building, was circular. A perfect blackness could be found within.

  4

  Moses unzipped his tent, crawled forth onto dewy grass, washed his face and crawled back in again. There were seagulls in the morning air, their mosaic turds spotting the pale orange canvas, a magic-lantern slide - crude scene, cruder figures - projected by the day's sun against his translucent flesh and at points through it, a mystery play whose non-static characters were roving insects. He took a pull of dead coffee from his flask and breakfasted on the remaining half of a cold beef sandwich. Then, once packed, it was off to the nearest pub for a dump.

  Hours in the future, hitching north, he met Rosemary on a roundabout, picking flowers, her hair tied up and her feet bare as she strolled the fresh cut island amid otherworldly traffic. Light beating on her eyes and fracturing, Moses thought her a vision among concrete and litter, some hapless forest deity here trapped by roadworks and centuries, at one with the scrawny daffodils that absorbed her attention, which kissed the joint of her wrist as she plucked them.

  Moses crouched low near the island's perimeter, hazarding his rear until she n
oticed him and smiled.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ he asked.

  She wandered over, offered him a yellow blossom, went to fetch her shoes, socks and haversack.

  He waited for her return. ‘North?’

  ‘Yeah. Newcastle, maybe.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Moses, surprising his inner consciousness. Was that city his intended target?

  ‘Really? Do you know it at all? Only my father's from there. We moved when I was still a baby, so I don't remember. But I've always had this urge to visit; you know, like I left something behind.’

  Moses nodded. ‘Where are you from?’ he inquired, completing the circle, his original question's second half.

  ‘Now? London. You?’

  He ate the flower, didn't answer her query.

  ‘My name's Rosemary.’

  He swallowed. ‘Moses.’

  ‘You're a pilgrim then, like me,’ she said. ‘How far do you think it is to Newcastle?’

  ‘I don't have a map,’ he told her truthfully.

  ‘There're road signs.’

  Moses shrugged. ‘I don't read.’

  She smiled again, broader this time, extending her Earthly realm. ‘Me neither.’

  Together they rode a bread delivery van as far as Sheffield, overcome by scents of cooling dough and chocolate éclairs, wrapped in odours of baked freshness, the driver either a jester or a torturer in whatever prior life had qualified him for this existence, as he furnished their rumbling stomachs with nothing more than a goodbye. The afternoon through evening to night they spent rolling about a golf course, fighting in the bunkers and hanging like windswept parachutists from the trees until the police arrived, spraying light-beams and forcing them to move on. They pooled their cash and counted it over and over before deciding on wholemeal buns, Gorgonzola and cider, the latter stolen from the same dingy corner store where they'd purchased the former. The cheese came from a supermarket shelf on special offer. Then, around two in the morning, the day blanked, a grey man in a green Sierra offered them a lift to the next service- station, which they accepted, Moses catching eye and ear of a large white plastic container under the driver's seat while Rosemary shared the rear with a pond-smelling array of bottles, petrol cans and resealed salvaged milk cartons full of sloshing water. She held her feet off the floor. Next to her on the back seat lurked a sack. Rough, like something coconuts came in.