This close to Christmas, his attention began to turn toward the inevitable. That he hated children and took the utmost pleasure in terrorizing them beyond words was no real compensation for the tireless slog of dragging himself about a planet that seemed to get bigger every year. The chimneys narrower too, and the mince pies as likely to be passed their sell-by date as home-made, sour and brittle as opposed to sweet and crumbly, decomposing in the mouth like rotting pig’s trotters. Really, the people got what they deserved. The festive season was over. Now little more than a commercial opportunity, its underlying cynicism had rubbed off. Santa had called it a day; the elves were redundant and his sack contained not presents, but nightmares, gifts of the dead distributed by a man in a red suit who liked nothing better than to lick the sleeping faces of sons and daughters, sucking the warmth from tiny noses and chilling fingers and toes.
But it wasn’t enough. Even in the past, when innocence was real and flues agreeably smoke-filled, his dissatisfaction with the annual practice of jollification was simply exacerbated by the empty months between, cooped up with little helpers in the frozen north. He’d turned to drink to alleviate the boredom, venturing south to the more stolid of British public houses in an effort to cool the days…
‘Is this seat taken?’
She batted her eyelids, one hand round a pint of beer, the other holding a cigarette captive between assiduously manicured nails.
She didn’t wait for an answer, but leant her weight to the chair, which groaned.
‘You look like you need a friend,’ she told him, exhaling. Then: ‘What ails thee, fat man? Too much of the wrong thing, I dare say.’
His sweetheart.
She bled him dry.
But the reward was a life a crime…
In conservation with Michael, one day in a past he no longer recalled with any conviction to accuracy, he wondered about the significance of it all. Revenge was no real motive. He could never really hurt Columbine, not in any visible way he might understand. She was the joker, and as such would always have the last laugh. She manipulated everything. No man, living or dead, could no her mind. But it was the dynamic of evil that it serve no end, and as such his efforts went to feed the flames, the fire itself a greater thing as it kept the whole world warm, and without heat there’d be no cold.
Without pleasure?
‘Pain,’ spake Michael Tomatoes, in the full throes of a hangover. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’
‘Easy,’ Redbear explained; ‘you just never sober up completely. That way you avoid complications.’
‘Like daylight to vampires…’
‘Precisely.’
As conversations went it lacked direction, the reason the artist whose struggle to focus and debilitating need for self-indulgence led him to wander, verbally and mentally, sometimes entirely off the stage. That his genesis was ambitious had something to do with it, he supposed, Michael being the product of a toy industry whose roots were more Pinocchio than Terminator. The elves though, had done him proud. They’d sourced a template and – the original transposed – installed this changeling without alerting the neighbours, some of whom, Santa conjectured, where in the business of business underground.
It was to be expected. Nothing in Hell went unnoticed. There were myriad ongoing plots and schemes. Columbine was involved in any number, the whore who had as many fingers as there were pies. She was at the centre of everything, a black widow whose keep resonated with the luggage of telegraph wires.
The reason he was here; he liked to think of his own accord; but where his once beloved was concerned all remained obfuscated, each detail disguised, endlessly tormenting to the investigative eye. To outmanoeuvre the whore was nigh impossible. Part of the game, the joke whose punch-line was an epitaph – yet it was up to the individual how they came from the grave.
And returned?
He shivered. Too warm.
Rolling a cigarette, he yawned.
The machine had that inspired look, meaning a creative process was underway. What was it this time? Puppy chequers? Okay, that had been fun, especially with stuffed animals in a hotel conference centre prior to the launch of a range of beauty products whose testing was, to say the least, suspect. The politics didn’t really interest him. The ensuing chaos did; an embarrassing medley of polite corporate spin-doctoring and off-camera intimidation that had the big man in stitches for weeks. But Redbear struggled to find entertainment value in say, painting lamp-posts luminous pink.
Michael sighed and folded his arms.
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘I haven’t said anything yet.’
‘I know, and it worries me. I hate these pensive silences. I need a drink.’
Michael scratched his chin. ‘Red…’
He couldn’t remember when exactly. His memory pickled. He couldn’t say for sure, or describe in detail. More a case of how things felt. It was all there somewhere, the pertinent facts, only his mind was like a used teabag: however hot the water less and less flavour leaked out. On bad days he sat in his chair and let the elves feed him cakes. They trimmed his beard and polished his boots. And on good days he rubbed his palms together deviously, enjoying the illusion of success.
But it wasn’t enough.
He took up the unspoken challenge. Attending the feast, arranged about the giant table, he crooked his arms and dislocated his shoulders in order to feed himself using the obligatory six foot long utensils.
The meat was good. Tasty not stringy. And for dessert?
Reminiscences, false memories and unrequited love. It was what they programmed into him, scenes from a life not truly lived, yet experienced nevertheless, made real by a surfeit of emotion, what every genuine flesh-and-blood human being carried around inside him or her, regardless of their own Existence Map.
It enhanced and confused, burdening Tom with what for want of a better description was a soul.
Only not his…
Thirty Two: The Nature Of Events