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 draughts 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 centre 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 symbolise big abstract qualities that skirmish and manoeuvre 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 smoulders. 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 colour-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 spectres 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 prioritises: if she can regain her feet she can pull up her underwear and flee, a difficult manoeuvre 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 draughts 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-grey vapour 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 haemorrhage, 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 utilises 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 gurni
ng 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 sulphurous 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 colour.
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 paralysis and shock. Because it’s easier stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, grass theatre 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 oesophagus. 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 panelling, 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 arse. 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 grey 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 vapour-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 gabardine sieves of his pockets all the grievance of the outraged neighbourhood 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 colour.
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 cosy 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-colours, clots of shine and shade resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she knows from somewhere, f
ramed 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 grey 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.