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 pummelling, 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 lacklustre 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 recognises 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 clamours 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 colours 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 focussed 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 analogue. 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 arse-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 grey 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 neighbourhoods like this. Curdled and seething in the oil-stain gloom the sluggish vapour 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 localised. 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 interpreta
tion. 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 smouldering heads, and flocks of unwashed hands rise fluttering like oversized 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 grey cemetery eyes he drinks the dark of the enclosure with its spitting puddles and makes out the fuck-sprung vehicle stood rocking at its centre. 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 amongst the curls of his bindweed moustache 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 spectres 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 smouldering 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 grey 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 vapours, an acceptance of the terrifying, ragged thing he is reflected in the plump man’s shrivelling pupils. As he gathers up the dire cumulonimbus of his countenance for an assault he realises 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 colour.
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’ centres serving the Grand Canyon are reported to have concealed references to the chasm’s geologic age or origins in favour 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 realises 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 utilise 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.