Three Moments of an Explosion

  The main butcher was digging at the inside of the animal’s head, gouging and scooping out tissue. He cut it away and lifted it by the ears—you could see how heavy it was. To a redoubled cheer, he danced with it as if it was a partner.

  “Who’s ready?” the presenter shouted. “Who’s ready? Prepare the yard!” he shouted. “East London, are you ready?” There was a rush and a counter-rush, people jostling to get closer to the stage, others to get farther away.

  “Well?” said Tova, but Charlie was already gone. She laughed and looked around, shouted his name. He was tall: she found him easily. “No way!” she yelled, to see him. He was moshing in the stage-front pit, his blond head swaying.

  “Who wants it?” the presenter shouted. “Who wants it?”

  The crowd bellowed.

  “Are you scared? Come on, don’t make me come looking!”

  The head butcher swung the head. The crowd shouted and waved their arms as if it was a bouquet to catch. “You want it?” the presenter said. “You want it? Do you?”

  He muttered off-mic to the butcher as they scanned the dancers. They made as if they were going to throw the head one way, then another.

  “This guy?” Tova heard the presenter say, and she screamed in delight because she could see that he had chosen Charlie. She leapt up and down, laughing in disbelief, and she could see that Charlie was doing so too, howling himself. He craned his neck, stood as tall as he could. The butcher hefted the head by its ears.

  “Oh God,” Tova said, laughing and screwing up her face and wincing with disgust. “No fucking way, Charlie.”

  Two stagehands hauled him up onto the stage and the butcher muttered to him. Charlie looked uneasy. He looked as if he was trying to be excited.

  Just as Tova shouted, “Fuck’s sake, Charlie,” there was a chance lull in the shouts and the band’s playing so she was perfectly audible and it raised a big laugh. Charlie smiled and looked for her.

  “One Step Beyond,” said the presenter, and the bass player riffed on that tune for a second. Together, the butcher and Charlie raised the meat. Charlie’s sick look left him suddenly, and he grinned at the crowd. Charlie lowered the wet pig’s head over his own.

  It took Tova half an hour to make her way to him. When he was led down from the stage the crowd thronged him. He steadied the big head on his own with one hand, gripping the shoulder of a stagehand with the other. A cameraman followed him and Tova followed the camera.

  Security in dark clothes kept people away from Charlie so he could dance ridiculously, tottering under the weight of the bloody head. The presenter kept up a stream of commentary.

  “Christ, Charlie,” Tova kept shouting as if he could hear. Spit and blood dripped onto his clothes.

  He kept bending backward and tilting the pig head up, as if it looked at the sky. Tova could see that Charlie was trying to see out of its mouth. Stagehands kept wiping the head.

  Charlie was a good pig head. He danced with everyone he could. Tova heard the leader of the stage crew yell into the pig’s mouth, “Are you up for a little walkabout then?” and Charlie made the head nod.

  They took him out of the square and up Malvern Road where music from another party mixed with their own. A mass of new people came to join them.

  Surrounded by a crew of organizers like the one around Charlie, followed by a second boisterous crowd, another tall figure came stepping carefully forward. A thick, blunt, dense head rose from a man’s muscular shoulders and wobbled over the scene. An ugly grinning mouth and dead eyes staring up. The man was wearing the decapitated head of a porpoise over his own. He squinted through eyeholes cut in the neck.

  The two crowds cheered and merged. The mask-wearers met and danced. Their shoulders were very bloody and the flesh they wore dripped. The pig head and the porpoise head bounced up and down and circled each other for a few minutes until their entourages led them on in different directions. All around them, lights were coming on.

  The crew led Charlie a long way. The whole of this area of London was full of partying crowds. Tova could hear celebrations everywhere. It took a long time to walk the length of any street.

  “I’m his friend,” Tova shouted to the leader of Charlie’s crew. “How much longer?”

  “It’s fine,” he shouted. “The ram’s over that way, and some others. Little while.”

  At the corner of Richmond and Queensbridge roads, his crowd behind him, Charlie met a man wearing a horse’s leering head and a woman bloody under a bear’s, and the three danced together to chaotic overlapping music.

  Tova followed as closely as she could. Several minutes passed until she saw the pig crew receive instructions into their radios. They all shifted into a different mode, moving at the same moment. They stopped Charlie and shouted and turned off their music.

  “Alright, folks,” shouted the leader. “Time, ladies and gents, please.” There were loud boos from all over. “I know, I know. Say goodnight to the pig. Don’t shoot the messenger. His pigness is tired. Say goodnight, everybody.” The man kissed the damp cheek of the pig’s head and grimaced and grinned. People bayed for one more song, but they began to disperse, heading back toward where they’d seen the other meat-headed figures, to find a late-night sound system.

  “Doesn’t take much,” the man said. “The ride’ll be here in a sec. You said you was with him?”

  Tova nodded.

  The man turned to Charlie. “Can she come?”

  Charlie pig-nodded.

  They sat in the van with a strange kind of shyness. Charlie kept touching the head on his own. Tova laughed. The crew members with them filled out paperwork.

  “You fucking nutter,” said Tova. Charlie said something from within the head that she could not hear. “This is so disgusting.” She grinned at him.

  This time she made it out. “It was great,” he said.

  The laboratory was in the basement of St. Mary’s Hospital in Shoreditch. An orderly led them. It was past nine and the snack shop and florist were long closed but there were patients and staff in the corridors. They stared. A few cheered. One little boy in a hospital gown screamed with delight. He and his mother smiled at Charlie’s muffled shriek back.

  “Mr. Pig.” The doctor was brusque and posh and about thirty years older than Charlie and Tova. She greeted him by the traditional sobriquet with autopilot heartiness. “I’m Dr. Allen. Do come in.” Two much younger doctors waited by the steel door of a refrigerated chamber with a wire-glass window.

  “Do you do all the animals here?” Tova said.

  “Oh, hardly,” said Allen. “They’re all over. We just do this fellow and Mr. Jag. Who has already been sent happily if rather damply home.”

  “A jaguar?” said Tova.

  “You didn’t hear? New this year and rather popular I’d say.” Allen slapped the pig’s head. “And how are you in there?”

  “Good,” Charlie said through the mouth. He gave her a thumbs-up.

  “And as you come to the end of your tenure as Mr. Pig, what do you go by the other days of the year?”

  “Charlie Johns,” he shouted.

  “Righto. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, then off you can toddle. I’m sure the chaps from the news will want to talk to you. Are you squeamish?” Allen asked Tova. “If you’re quite sure you’re not you’re welcome to watch.”

  The doctor had laid out tools on the side. “Let’s just pop this off,” she said.

  “Who does the porpoise?” Tova said.

  “I think that’s Central London Hospital. Why?” When Tova said nothing, she said, “You needn’t worry, it’s all jolly sustainably done. Can you take the ears please, Derek?” One of her colleagues stepped forward. Allen and he gripped the meat. “Upsadaisy.”

  They lifted together. There was a wet sucking noise.

  “Sure you’re alright?” Allen said to Tova.

  “Hold on,” said Charlie, muffled through the flesh. He shifted in his chair and said something inaudible.
They let the head back down again.

  “All right,” Charlie said. The doctors lifted again, a few centimeters. “Ow,” he said. “Ow.”

  When they replaced it this time Dr. Allen reached into the pig’s mouth and felt Charlie’s face. “Does that hurt?”

  “My chin a bit,” Charlie said. Allen’s face did not move. She picked up what looked like secateurs.

  “Now do stay still.” She put the blades to the corner of the animal’s mouth and cut, extending its grin. She peeled back the sides of the slit and looked in.

  “Oh, bugger,” she said and quickly snipped more. “Derek, get hold here. Sally, sluice please. Now, I don’t want you to worry,” she said to Charlie.

  “What is it?” said Tova.

  Charlie made noises.

  Her colleague handed Allen something like a turkey-baster, which she pointed into the pig’s mouth.

  “I need you to keep your eyes and mouth tight closed, Charlie, alright? This is going to feel cold.”

  “What is it?” Tova said again. She could hear Charlie grunting out of the pig’s mouth.

  “I know, I know,” said Allen. “Derek, hard up on three.” She squirted, and cut, and counted.

  The doctors lifted. The pig’s head rose slowly from Charlie’s white face. He blinked in slime.

  His chin was bleeding. The skin of his cheeks was wet and rucked and oozing. Swellings spotted him as if he had a disease. Tova put her hand to her mouth. Charlie blinked.

  “Now, Mr. Johns,” Allen said.

  Tova looked into the pig’s head. “Oh what the fuck is that?” she shouted.

  Lining the inside of the cushion of meat in the pig’s skull, extruding from the tissue, were thousands of little black worm-like stubs. They wriggled frantically. They clutched at nothing.

  “Now, Mr. Johns,” Allen said, and Charlie screamed and stared into the meat.

  Tova swallowed back vomit. Charlie’s lips dripped with what might be pig-ooze or might be his own spit.

  “Now, there’s nothing for you to panic about,” Dr. Allen said. She spoke quickly. She picked up the pig’s head with its new slit and its finger-like extrusions and handed it to her colleagues.

  Tova saw filaments flailing from its tongue. She saw blood on the pig’s teeth. “What are you doing with it?” she shouted.

  “Tests,” said Allen. “Will you please settle down? I’m speaking to Mr. Johns. Mr. Johns, clearly something’s gone a little wrong but it’s important you know there is no long-term risk to you. I do understand of course that it’s a rather unsettling sight …”

  There was a raw patch on Charlie’s chin, ringed with patches like pustules. He touched it gently, breathed heavily.

  “Let’s get you washed up,” Allen said. “I must say it’s highly unusual for this sort of thing to happen so quickly.” She led him to a high sink. “Give yourself a good scrub,” she said. “Use the soap here, and then a little of this gel, just put a good bit of that on your poor old chin, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Now I really don’t want you to worry. It’s a very simple little course I have in mind. And as I say, really, everyone could very reasonably have had confidence that nothing would go wrong.”

  “Who gives a fuck about that?” Tova shouted.

  Dr. Allen turned and demanded she shut up and Tova was startled, and did, in fact, go quiet.

  It was a bad year. Later, Tova and Charlie discovered that there were four other cases of intrusion that night. Those affected were the wearers of the crocodile, the cow, the gorilla, and one of the two wearers of the hippo. Each of those skulls—or its forward half, in the last case—ended up infected with dark vermiform suckers.

  In the other cases, the revelers had worn the animal heads for a little longer than guidelines suggested. Charlie, though, it was agreed, had been unlucky. His crew had been careful.

  Allen and her colleagues looked after all the intruded.

  “It’s OK,” Charlie said. It was three days after the festival, and he and Tova were having lunch in the Pizza Express near his house. He fiddled with some garlic bread. “She’s a bit of a blowhard is all. But those other two, they were saying to me that she knows this stuff better than anyone.”

  “How do you know they’re not full of shit?” Tova said. “What do you have to do? You look rubbish, mate.”

  The lines and shadows around Charlie’s eyes were deep. His skin was not good—it was still very raw. There were no holes visible where the little filaments had probed and entered it, and few scabs, but his face looked, rather, as if it did not fit him quite well, as if it was a bit too big. He blinked and was distracted. His skin was still raw.

  “I have to take these pills for like a month or something.” He looked down. “I go in every day, we all do—”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, that’s what they want. And she weighs me and asks me what I’m eating. And, and they do experiments on the heads, I think, they have them on ice. They have us all, sort of, talk about what happened.”

  “Do they … Charlie, have they made you put it back on again?”

  “Made me? They can’t make me anything.”

  “Have they?”

  “There are tests,” he said. “It’s research.”

  “Do you know how weird you sound?” she said, and before he could answer, continued, “Would you put on any of the other heads?”

  “No.” He almost shouted. “Jesus Christ, are you mad?”

  “Do I need to be worried?” Tova said at last.

  “No. No. Did you look up about it online?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Well, so, you know as long as you get it quickly it’s completely curable.”

  Charlie watched two women walk past the window beside their table. He eyed the big dog one of them restrained, a dog too big for London. “And they couldn’t have got it much more quickly.”

  Tova considered asking him what it had felt like, but did not. “What are you eating, then?” she said. “And how’s your work?”

  “You mean are they pissed off with me going in to hospital all the time? They have to put up with it, really, don’t they? Imagine if they started giving me shit about it.”

  The intrusions had maintained press interest for longer than in a traditional year. Tova kept seeing articles asking whether safety had been too low a priority. Politicians complained, as they did every year, as they did after the Notting Hill Carnival. Charlie texted Tova that he had turned down an interview with the London Evening Standard.

  She called Charlie every day and was concerned whenever it took him any time to answer or get back to her. Sometimes it was hours.

  “I’ve been a bit all over the place,” he said a week after their lunch.

  “Where are you? Are you in work right now?”

  “Calm down. I was, I was just there but then I went to the lab. I wanted to see … I can hear you’re worried … I’m on my way back home, though, I’ve got stuff I need to …”

  “Can you hear me, Charlie?” she said. “The line’s terrible.”

  “It’s fine for me. I’ve just been talking to the others.” She knew he meant the others who had been intruded. “We were talking, after the session.” Their appointments overlapped. Sometimes Allen and her colleagues saw several of them together. “Just, you know, talking about what happened. It’s interesting. That’s all. Everyone sort of remembers different bits, sort of has a different feeling about the way it all happened, you know?”

  “No,” she said. “Obviously, no.”

  He told her thank you but no, she couldn’t buy him lunch, and he promised to call the next day. When he did not she went to where he worked, an administration department in a publisher of trade magazines.

  “We told him last week not to bother coming in for the next week or so,” his boss told her. “He needed to get his head together. I’m not blaming him, I’m just saying.”

  “He was here yesterday, though,” Tova said.
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  “I didn’t see him.”

  Charlie was not at home. When she texted him Tova could see her messages went through, but he didn’t have the settings activated that let her know whether or not he had read them.

  The young doctor Derek Jansen whispered down the phone, so Tova knew that his boss was in the room.

  “I shouldn’t really be talking to you,” he said.

  “I know and I really appreciate that you are. I’ve been a bit worried about Charlie.”

  “Yeah, I get that. I know he’s a bit … It’s just, doctor-patient stuff, you know? It’ll just take a while for him to get back to himself. Slow and steady. Some people respond slower than others.”

  “Is he slow?”

  “I’m just saying. It takes everyone however long it takes them.”

  “Did you ever work out what went wrong? For an intrusion to happen so fast?”

  “Sometimes it just happens. It’s not like there’s anything odd about this specimen, really. I mean, we are taking a look. We’re working as quickly as we can. Charlie and the others are patient with what we do, which is helpful, so we can do comparative stuff. More than patient, they’ve been volunteering to come in every day.”

  “Volunteering?”

  “But we have to be quick: preservative can sort of mess with your results, so we can’t use that on the specimens. Hence the fridge, although even keeping them in the cold store, this batch of heads is going off quicker than I’d like. Hello? Are you there?”

  “Sorry,” said Tova. “You got me thinking.”

  The next day she took a taxi to the hospital in the late afternoon. She felt absurd, huddled in her warm coat in the tiny park across from the sunken entrance to the lab, a direct entrance from the street. She sat disguised under layers. She waited.

  First the patients left, then the lab staff. The sky grew dark. She saw a squat man in his thirties, a woman, and Charlie himself come up in a group and nod to each other and walk briskly away. Minutes later Derek ascended, wrapping a scarf around his neck. A short while later Dr. Allen, talking loudly into her phone.