Communion Town (11 page)

He told her to keep going, and climbed through the gap. It was already evening under the trees, and his feet hit the earth in silence. He had left the sound of cars and buses behind. He moved through his short cut, clasping the wet mossy fingers to slip under them where they hung low. He reached the canal and began to run along beside the silted water.

Then he skidded to a halt. The way ahead was blocked. He was too slow to do anything but gape, unable to tell what he was seeing.

The canal boat was the same as ever, with its round windows, its algae-streaked hull and the row of old tyres roped along its flank, but beside it somebody was sitting in the middle of the towpath: sitting in a folding canvas chair, like a man out in his own back garden, with his head tipped back, mouth open and eyes closed. The man wore oil-streaked jeans and a towelling dressing gown which, long ago, might have been white. It hung open to show the pot belly and the creased indentation of the chest. The boots were missing their laces.

The man appeared to be asleep. The face was half-hidden by lank hair which was coloured grubby yellow-white, like teeth. The hands rested in the man’s lap. Perhaps he could slip past.

He took a step forward, but straight away the eyes opened.

‘There you are,’ said the man. ‘You took your time.’

The voice was groggy, the flesh of the face bloodless and stiff. The arms and legs had a jumbled look, as if this were a dummy slouching immobile in the chair.

‘Joking.’ The upper lip revealed the pale gumline. ‘You’re here now, though. There’s reasons to these things, that’s what I say.’

The man made as if to rise from his chair, but fell back again. The wooden joints creaked with exasperation.

‘You can see I’m bad,’ the man said, pressing a hand into his lap and wincing. ‘It’s worse now than before.’

On the ground beside the chair, among heaps of old newspapers and crumpled tins, lay a tubular metal crutch. The man’s hand seemed to drift towards it, then to retreat again. He settled deeper into his chair.

‘I have a story to tell you,’ said the man. ‘It’s very important. It’s a secret.’

The flat roof of the canal man’s boat was piled with an assortment of things: broken crates, plastic buckets, oil cans, tarpaulins, planks. Crouched among them a small tabby cat watched with great vigilance.

‘I’ve never told anyone else. But I need to tell you. I can’t say it out loud, in case anyone hears. You’ll have to come closer.’

He had no answer. Dimly he grasped that he was involved in a mistake. The man’s hand was reaching for him, palm upwards, fingers curling and uncurling.

‘You’ll hear my story, won’t you? I need you to listen.’

The cat watched carefully. He could not move. Time had closed around him like a membrane and he could not break out. The hand was beckoning with more agitation now.

‘You’re not scared, are you? To come closer? Look, I have something for you. A present.’

The man cast around. Showing his teeth, he stretched down beside the chair and snagged one of the newspapers. He flourished the front page with its big black capitals – RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES – and then collapsed it between his hands. His fingers twisted and folded the paper, moulding it into a shape. Soon on the man’s open palm stood a small paper person, grey and smeared with newsprint but so cleverly made that it could stand up by itself.

‘This fellow is special.’ The man was holding it out towards him. ‘He’s for you. But only if you’ll come and listen to my story.’

The figure’s torso and limbs were just twists of newspaper, but they seemed ready to move. He could see the way it would walk, gracefully on its tiny pointed feet but unevenly because one leg was thinner than the other. As he looked at it he had a thought so private that it felt shameful: he imagined putting the figure in his city. Before now, the city had always stood empty and had not needed inhabitants, but the paper figure was exactly the right size to walk its streets.

‘You want it, don’t you?’

The man was quite wrong. He did not want to touch the paper figure, let alone accept it. The thought of adding it to the city was unwelcome, invasive, but he did not know how to refuse it now that it had been offered. There was a catch in time, here beside the canal, and there seemed no other way to move forward.

Then his head broke through the oily surface of the moment and he took a step backwards. The man’s face grew ugly. The hand began to claw at the ground, the fingertips brushing the metal of the crutch.

‘Why did you come, then, you little sneak? You big girl’s blouse. Go on!’

Before he could explain himself, he found that he was retreating, running all the way back through the short cut, with the grey water below and the wet twigs flicking at his eyes. His shoulders crawled. He blurred his vision on purpose and urged himself towards the green wire fence, but the foliage sprung back, not letting him through. He pried the branches apart, pushed deeper and twisted his body through the gap in the fence. Seconds later he was back on the road, already forgetting how the vindictive trees had fixed their fingers in his clothes and tried to drag him backwards into a world of damp wood and foul water.

Springing from the towpath to the boat, the upstairs boy hooted with an invader’s triumph. This was what he had come for. He stood at the stern and jumped up and down, doing his best, without success, to make the boat rock in the water, then yanked on the unmoving tiller before scrambling up to the roof and kicking things into the canal. Empty cider cans and shards of plywood began to drift towards the opposite bank.

The upstairs boy motioned for him to jump across as well, and, when he failed to do so, shrugged and slid down into the cockpit, to rattle at the hatch leading into the cabin.

He looked at the boat and at the towpath. It was the same scene he remembered from that time, so long ago, but he was disoriented by having approached from the opposite direction: it was as if the upstairs boy had brought him through a back door to visit the vacant stage set of an old dream. The spot was deserted. The canvas chair stood just off the path, empty and cockeyed. The once-white dressing gown lay thrown across it. Even the paper figure was still there, lying flattened but intact on the ground.

What he did next would be a puzzle to him later, and already, as he reached out to take the paper man, he could not have explained why he wanted it so badly. He shrank from the memory of the man’s blotched fingers folding the figure into existence, but he reached out. As he picked it up he noticed the tabby cat crouching in the long grass, watching the trespassers with flattened ears and bottle-glass eyes.

At the same moment the upstairs boy yelped and tumbled back to the bank. The hatch had been flung open from the inside and the man was clambering into view, supporting his weight on the frame and on the metal crutch. The upstairs boy was already crashing and giggling away into the distance, but he stood there, slow to react, with the stolen figure in his hands.

‘You could have listened.’ The man did not sound angry. ‘I only wanted to tell you.’

He used the crutch to swing himself, clumsily but fast, to the bank. He took a step forward, moving with an unbalanced, three-legged gait, and there was nothing to do but run.

And now, with the theft complete, he has crept down the corridor and into the City Room.

Ramifications knit in his head as he examines the stolen figure. The limbs and the head move slightly as the screwed paper eases. The face has dents for its eyes and mouth, but he can’t tell what the expression is.

He wishes there was some way to give it back, but he knows he can never confess what he has done. Discovery is unthinkable. He can only imagine the world would burst into flames and vanish like paper in the grate. He sees now how events have unfolded: how, unrecognised, the choice has been made and the action taken, and how all he can do now is follow the consequences through. Obeying the logic in which he has netted himself, he picks his way across the floor to the very heart of his city. In the central plaza, he stands the figure on its feet.

It is only now, as he places the figure and steps back to judge the effect, that he fathoms what he has done. He doesn’t know how, but the presence of the tiny paper man has changed the whole meaning of the city, to the smallest house and the farthest street. All that secret joy has gone, and all that possible magic, gone in an instant and replaced by another kind of secret. It would be useless to remove the man: far too late for that. He may have made the city, but the laws that govern it are not his to alter.

In the corridor the doorbell rings. He hears his grandmother run the kitchen tap, then begin to climb the stairs. He lies down, presses his cheek into the carpet, shuts an eye and sights through one of the gates, along a boulevard towards the centre of the city. Glimpsed like this, the paper man seems to be on his way somewhere, absorbed in some errand of his own.

He can hear grown-up voices above. His grandmother and someone.

He notices, as he often does, the clumped, near-transparent strings that seem to float inside his eyeballs, tumbling and darting around when his attention shifts. He wonders why they are there and whether he can get rid of them one day. He knows he must not let himself be found like this. The time is coming soon when he’ll take it all apart, knock over the walls, bulldoze the wooden bricks with his palm and heap handfuls back into the box, and his grandmother will come in to find a clear, spacious floor. But it’s not that time yet.

He hears the feet descending the staircase and moving along the corridor. His grandmother’s familiar tread, and another tread too, heavy and halting, which he can easily imagine as the sound of someone walking not on two legs but on three. But it is too early for him to be sure of that, and perhaps he sees already that it makes no difference. He lies there, looking with a narrowed eye into the city, until the door opens.

Gallathea

Let’s try this one more time, kid. Let’s get this straight.

Why did you do it?

1. Breakfast with Violence

That day, the day the Cherub boys came looking for me, I was down at Meaney’s. It was summer: hard summer. The city was chafing in its sweat and had been for weeks now. Nights, the poor devils of the Liberties slept on the roofs of their apartment blocks. Daytime, you ventured into the street, your necktie wilted and your shirt glued itself into your armpits. Walk as far as the corner and you were coated with grit. Dust hung in the air like it had no place else to go. Come mid-afternoon, heat thickened, fell in slabs out of a purplish sky. Shadows scored themselves into the pavements behind every lamp post and railing. The alleyways were heaped. They buzzed. No one had seen a refuse truck in a month. Down at the quays there was nothing but dried mud and the reek of hot rotting bladderwrack. You had the needful, you were out of town until things improved.

In Meaney’s it could have been any afternoon, any joint. Overhead the fan stirred the air like a listless cook. The starch was oozing out of my collar. The bouncer, his belly straining his braces, studied a newspaper: some psycho was carving people up nightly down in Glory Part so we all had to have the details. The potboy, propped like an elderly broom, had no custom but a gaggle of doxies perched at the end of the bar. They were leaning in close, clucking, their heads together, passing round some secret recipe. As I came into the place they all went still for a moment, then broke up in giggles. Dolly leant away from the others and called over to me.

‘Hey Hal,’ she said, ‘ain’t you hot in that wrinkly old suit?’

The rest of them giggled again. I tweaked the knot of my tie, rapped on the bar to wake up the potboy, and slid into one of the curtained booths along the back wall. My hangover was the kind where your mouth’s a bandolier of spent cartridges and your skull’s filled full of dull lead. It wanted all my attention.

When the old fellow came over I told him to bring me the special and a hair of the pitbull. But a minute later the curtain scraped back and I found myself looking not at a nutritionally trivial breakfast but at the faces of the Cherub brothers. They grinned in unison.

‘Wotcha, Hal.’

None too pleased to see them, I nodded back.

‘Hello, Don. Dave,’ I said. They pushed their way into the booth, their trouser-seats squealing on the leatherette. Don pasted me up against the wall. Ever had a refrigerator share your seat? Dave sat opposite, looking about as reassuring as a vending machine in a lift. The table complained.

I ignored the special as the potboy slapped it down in front of me. Don Cherub snagged the glass from the old man and tossed the spirit away in one pop-eyed swig. Dave sniggered at a high pitch.

The potboy withdrew. By the door the bouncer was perplexed over the small ads. Don twitched the curtain shut.

‘You look well, Hal,’ he said, pressing me flatter against the inside wall. ‘Tie goes lovely with your shirt. It don’t match that hanky in your top pocket though.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to overdo it.’

Don’s eyes slid over to his brother and back to me.

‘Anyhow, Hal, we stopped by in hopes of finding you. And what do you know. First time lucky.’

‘Hur hur,’ said Dave, picking a mushy pea off my plate.

Don lit a cigarette. Dave pulled the plate over to his side of the table, doused the peas in ketchup and started forking them into him. Sweat was crawling down my chest and my arms were pinned to my sides. I waited for the Cherubs to get to the point.

Then Don said a single word. It was your name. That was the first time I heard it: it meant nothing to me then. I gave him a blank look and he repeated it, making the syllables careful and clear, his eyebrows hitching up.

‘Don, you’ve lost me. Your diction’s really come on, though.’

Dave’s snigger started up again.

‘I’m talking about the girl,’ said Don, slowly, watching me. ‘You telling me you don’t know her?’

‘Like I said. Can’t help you.’

Dave licked the plate, his eyes above the white disc rolling from me to his brother and back again. Don sizzled his cigarette down to the filter in one draught. My ribs felt him inhale but were in no position to raise objections.

‘Don’t signify,’ he said. ‘Fing is, we know this certain brass is looking for you. Got a job she wants done. We come here to tell you you ain’t doing it.’

As it happened, it was true what I’d said. I didn’t know your name, back then, and I didn’t know what the Cherubs were talking about. But of course that made no difference. There are rules in this business. There’s decorum.

I hauled an arm free, fished out my own crushed cigarettes, knocked one from the pack and lit up. I tugged the bitterness down into my chest, then, with the burning paper twist bobbing on my lip, I gave Don my coolest eyeball.

‘You’re wasting your time, boys.’

‘Awful sorry to hear that, Hal.’ Don’s brows were kissing caterpillars. ‘I always fought you was a sensible man.’

I shrugged as well as I could. Then, reckoning it couldn’t hurt to try, I tipped my head so much as to indicate that the civilised move would be to let me out of the booth.

‘You know it don’t work like that,’ Don said.

Dave reached across the table. Next thing I was on my way out of the joint, the fist of a Cherub brother clamped on each shoulder like it meant to separate ball from socket. On the up side, the journey cost me nothing in shoe leather. Those boys move fast when they want to. We were through Meaney’s in a single lurch of mirrors and bottles, the bouncer’s bored sweaty face and the powdered, surprised faces of the whores, then we were out in the frying-pan street, and down an alley where I was pinned against hot brick, my toecaps waving clear of the tarmac.

2. A Street Named Pain

I glanced down at my shirt-front, bunched in Don’s fist. Laboriously, Dave unbuttoned his cuff and began to roll up his sleeve. I noticed a big lizard, black with gold stripes, on the lip of a bin opposite, motionless and wilting in the heat. I’d never seen one like it in the city.

‘This is the way it works,’ Don was saying, ‘as you well know. We give you a friendly warning. You got to say something clever. We end up out here.’

Dave’s fist coasted at my face. Everything went haywire. My eyes were swingballing in opposite directions but I was aware of the fist, at the end of its trajectory and beginning to fall back, a wrecking ball on its return to the ragged gap in the masonry. He clocked me again. Either that or the alleyway turned a somersault all by itself. Beyond the silent splashes of black and blue, he was shaking out his fingers and rotating his shoulder.

I was still suspended against the bricks. Dave wound up one more time and opted for the solar plexus. I dropped off the wall, curled up and took some time to myself. Footsteps receded.

At length I rolled over and opened my eyes.

The alley walls were two cliffs of clay-red shadow, leaning towards a strip of acid bronze sky, burning and still, far and close all at once, hard-pencilled with the lines of fire escapes. Rubbish sizzled softly all around me. I drifted off. When I looked again the shadows had ticked a few degrees across the brickwork and Dolly was leaning over me, her lower lip bulging in the gap between her front teeth.

‘Dammit, Moody,’ she said. ‘This is how you handle your problems?’

She made me sit up. My jaw didn’t seem to fit together. Something began to flow freely in my nose.

She clicked her tongue. ‘Looker this.’ She rummaged about her person and pulled out a big piece of white cotton, which she folded up and pressed to my face. She tipped my head back. I meant to tell her to leave me alone but I couldn’t seem to get around to it. She sat away on her haunches.

‘Why’d you make trouble with the Cherubs, Hal? I don’t know what business you got between you but I know it ain’t worth it.’

She eased the sticky cotton off my face, and brushed damp strands of fringe out of my eyes. Her big features kinked sympathetically. The sweat had cut through her powder, leaving a runnel of dewed skin down the side of her neck.

I stared at her. Then I stumbled to my feet, lurched into the opposite wall, and blundered away through ripe milk cartons and a drift of deliquescing vegetables. As I turned the corner she was getting up, the heel of her shoe twisting under her.

3. Beauty with a Concealed Blade

I headed towards the quays. A couple of blocks that way, the stink of fish rose up like the neighbourhood was getting sick to its stomach.

On the opposite pavement, among the jumble of tenement fronts, I passed a white door just as two figures ducked out. They wore duster coats which dragged on the ground, close-fitting leather skullcaps and leather masks with elongated snouts. Their hands were gloved to the elbows. I sweated harder just looking at them. They rummaged in their kitbag and one of them did something to the door. When he moved, I saw he had painted a cross, two diagonal red streaks.
This house has been visited
. Next, he got to work on the door with a nail gun, while the other figure began to swing a hand bell up and down, shoulder to hip, up and down. I pulled my handkerchief from my breast pocket and held it to my nose and mouth as I went by.

All I wanted right now was to soothe that throbbing you only get from a week-old weapons-grade hangover followed by a meaningful discussion with the Cherub brothers. I wished to be where others were not and I knew just the place. A few doors further along I ducked off the street and down a constricted staircase into a cellar room.

The light was low enough it didn’t thrust white lances down my optic strings. That made a change. It was even cool.

I stepped up to the bar and put down a coin. The barman put down a shot glass and filled it. I knocked it back.

The place was near empty. No Cherubs and no skirt. Only one shadowy customer propped at the other end of the bar studying a shot glass of his own. I raised my finger to the barman and, as he poured, I caught my eye in the mirror behind him. Not a pretty sight. The eye in question was purple and black, and closing up so fast I couldn’t blame it for preferring not to watch. My reflection and I returned to our drinks, neither of us looking for any trouble.

My appearance. I’d give a wide berth to that ugly character. Now and then people tell me I have a resemblance to someone, a rasping musician who had a bit of success in the last century with deconstructed gothic blues and macabre chanson. I saw a picture of him once in a magazine. A gargoyle in a hunch hat and a postmortem suit, dustbowl stubble, set of teeth you’d find on a bar room floor. Is that what you saw when we met for the first time? You never said. I don’t know.

I tipped the spirit into the back of my throat and choked appreciatively as it burned all the way down. The swell at the other end of the bar was taking a sidelong interest in me. He was a skinny kid, his oiled hair and snakeskin boots winking out of the shadow. The chalkstripe suit was cut boxy and expensive and his fedora lay upend on the bartop.

‘Run into some trouble, Hal?’

The kind of question that recommends silence. The wise guy slid closer, put his elbows on the bar and revealed his face in the mirror. Fine down glowed on his cheek where it caught the light. I noticed the slenderness of the throat extending from the snowy-crisp collar, the rounding of the chin and the moulding of the mouth. My upper lip curled of its own accord and my fingernails scraped the bartop.

‘This was a decent joint,’ I muttered.

The person beside me grinned and fitted a boot to the footrail.

‘What’s the matter, Hal?’ she asked, in a contralto I couldn’t mistake. ‘You ain’t pleased to see me?’

‘I’m not in the mood, Moll.’

‘Ouch, let me guess. You ran into the Cherubs.’

‘You heard what I said.’

She drew back, mock-offended, then unbuttoned her jacket and stuck her hands in her pockets, flashing the points of her braces. Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl of the Liberties. I’d heard it said she’d been twice engaged to be married: once to a man who owned three factories out in Kinsayder Fields, once to an inexperienced heiress from Rosamunda. She booked both weddings for the same day, then left them standing at their respective altars and fenced the gifts for a tidy profit.