Communion Town (15 page)

By evening I was moving through the streets with the ravaged assurance of a man who’s seen it all and now knows everything. A pair of vulture physicians stalked past, their leather beaks ranging balefully towards me. I didn’t bother to cover my mouth. Some bent-faced scrounger with a flower in his lapel came up to me with a story, putting an arm across my shoulders and prodding me in the chest with his forefinger, so I left him curling up in the gutter. A maquillaged damson clattered after me, yowling abuse, but I turned and snarled at her deep in my throat. She retreated, uncertain.

I veered into a bar and knocked back spirit until I caught sight of a ghastly face staring at me from somewhere in the mirror’s shadows. I yelled for him to come out but there was no answer so I hurled my shot glass into the dark room at random. The bartender had his blackthorn out right away.

I picked myself off the stones outside with a vindictive spring that carried me into the next joint, where I swallowed more spirit till I noticed that the poppet serving needed to be told a thing or two about a thing or two. This decision bounced me right into the next place. I reckoned I was making good progress. But the old head was still too clear for comfort. I set myself at the end of the bar and got to work on that problem.

Over at one of the tables a couple of swells were making rowdy. They kept looking at the door. Their bravado faltered, then redoubled, as a sharp-suited chap swaggered in, shepherding a couple of gussied-up polonies, all long white throats and short fur coats. Himself, he was dressed to the nines with cane and crimson cravat –

No, wait. He wasn’t a chap at all. It was Moll Cutpurse, playing her unfair tricks.

She slapped the two dudes on their backs. The painted consorts tripped along in her wake and sat themselves down at the table. Moll made introductions all round, chucked one of her dribs under the chin, and was on her way out again when she seemed to change her mind.

She crossed to the bar, signalled for a drink, and tilted her glass in my direction.

‘Got to say it, Hal, you ain’t looking great.’

I swivelled my eyeballs towards her under a brow like lead.

‘I hear the job ain’t going so well. Hard cheese, eh?’ she said.

My teeth hurt. Moll grinned matily.

‘Your trouble, Hal, if you don’t mind me saying so, is you take things too serious by half. You make life hard for yourself. You should take a leaf out of my book.’

She drained her glass, nodded to the barman for another, and surveyed the room as if to affirm how swimmingly it was all going.

‘But, see, you think you’re something special. Like what you got to go through, no one else ever went through it. Like we don’t all have these problems. We all meet ourselves coming back every now and then.’

‘Just keep talking, Moll.’

‘Settle down, now, Hal, we’re all friends here. Let me tell you a true story. Happened only the other day. As I walked out of an evening to view the sights of Serelight Fair, I chanced on some poor unfortunate creature in the extremity of his human need. So, call me soft-hearted, I slipped him twenty and thought no more about it. But he wouldn’t let me alone: started following me down the road. Said he had a secret to tell me, something of the utmost importance he had to get off his chest. Begged me to listen with tears in his bloodshot eyes. Said he could tell his story to no one else but me.’

Ignoring her as best I could, I ordered a double. I thought it might do something about the ball-peen hammers working on my temples.

‘So what do you think I did, hearing this plea? That’s right. I told him once to scram. I told him twice. Then I tipped him amicably into a convenient refuse bin and continued on my way.’

I downed the glassful. It made no difference.

‘What I’m saying, Hal, everyone has a hard luck story. You can listen to them and you can even buy what they’re selling. But if you decide to make their hard luck into your own, then, soon enough …’

She looked me up and down.

‘But then I’m old-fashioned,’ she said. ‘Straitlaced. Not like you.’

Blackness bubbled at the edges of my vision. I held on to the bar as Moll’s grin slid in and out of alignment with itself.

‘Listen, Hal. Could be the question you should ask yourself is this. How long have you even been in this joint tonight?’

She looked at me like she really wanted to know the answer.

‘Because, Hal, it’s true what they say. Time
is
strange in certain rooms.’

The blackness boiled in from the corners and this time it didn’t stop. I was staring down a tunnel – at the guffawing foursome at the table, at Moll’s cocky grin, at the shaking of my own hands.

I grabbed a bottle off the counter and swung it hard at her face.

She dodged backwards, evading me easy, beginning to chuckle. Spitting a blue streak, I halved the bottle on the bartop and lunged. She stepped out of the way and I cracked a kneecap on the fittings. A sharp blow to my wrist sent the brittle weapon spinning across the floor. My affronted hand sang with pain. She stuck out a boot, and next thing I knew I was down among the broken glass and the sawdust.

‘Outside,’ someone was saying. Hands felt my collar and I was back in the open air with a bloodied chin and a mouthful of grit. I clawed in the gutter for my hat. Some skinny kid with a violin case was gawping and I got ready to correct his manners, but then the Roaring Girl strolled out after me, her hands in her pockets, and sidestepped again as I grabbed for her throat. My knees were shredded and the whole front of my suit was soaked in something vile, but I wasn’t giving up. I steadied myself against a lamp post and raised a quivering, accusatory finger at Moll.

She exposed a tooth. ‘Sleep it off, Hal.’

Turning her back on me, she set off up the street. I wasn’t going to be beaten so, not by her. A chunk of the kerbstone was loose at my feet: I scrabbled it free and, clutching it in one hand, I half-ran, half-staggered after her. I raised the stone, but my feet slipped on the cobbles and I lost my balance.

The stone clacked away and she caught me before I hit the ground. She set me back on my feet. Then she floored me with a right hook and left me there for the night.

11. You May Kill the Bride

‘Welcome, welcome, do come in, excellent, aha, come in, no, please, let us not refer to any regrettable misunderstandings which may previously have crossed our purposes, to do so would be an irrelevance and a transgression of the principle that all is well which advantageously concludes, yes, welcome, it is quite usual and … and … and often indeed beneficial to all concerned for a gentleman to allow a period of reflection before taking as it were the plunge, but in my view for what that may be worth you have made a fine, a very sound judgement in returning to us so promptly, and if I may say so you are looking so very much
yourself
this morning …’

The Captain, his tall brow crimped in the middle, trembling with self-control, urged me down the corridor. Something had shifted in the weather this morning – there was more space in the open air, a breathable coolness, as though the heatwave might be releasing us at last – but in here it made no difference. As he followed me into the windowless room there was a scuffling, and I had the idea that someone else was being hustled out by another door. But all I saw was the same debris as last time: the skeletal screen, the fish tank, the long mirror set up to face me as I entered. The figure in the glass was crusted with foul stuff, and his hat was a tatter in his lacerated hands. Two black eyes were ripening in competition with the purple bloom on the cheekbone. The beard was clogged with dirt and dry blood.

Dolly Common bustled out of the back room, caught sight of me, searched her repertoire of dirty looks and came up with a real beaut. She disappeared again and returned with a bottle and a rag. I stood inert as she dabbed my face and hands with the stinging stuff.

For a while she worked silently. But she wasn’t going to be able to keep that up. ‘Okay, Hal,’ she said as she sponged the gravel out of my chin. ‘You choose to come back here, that’s fine. You do what you’re going to do. I ain’t going to try and discuss it with you. I won’t be doing that no more.’

She shoved the antiseptic into my hands and retreated into the back, leaving the job half-done. Alarming sounds of metallic clangour followed.

‘Dolly?’ I said muzzily. I didn’t investigate what was happening in there, though, because, as if an actor had thrown off one guise for another, she was replaced by Dr Dogg. He was more composed than last time, but he kept darting amused disbelieving glances my way.

‘She’s gone now,’ he said, pointing at the tank. ‘She was a pretty thing after the change. Black as tar and yellow as gold. I let her go yesterday. Took her up into the street and off she went.’

He scuttled around me in a circle, examining me from all angles, his fingers curled under his moustaches.

‘Who knows where she’ll get to,’ he said. ‘Time is strange. In certain rooms, you have to be careful how you leave, or you might meet yourself coming back.’

He peered up at me, standing very close, smirking more than ever.

‘Certain rooms – and this is one of them. Have you thought about that, Mr Moody?’

I didn’t like his tone. I’d have told him to get away from me, but now the Captain’s voice was insinuating itself into my attention.

‘… all quite painless,’ it was saying, ‘and any sensation of, what is the
moe juiced
, of
disorientation
will become, in time, second nature. All that is asked is that you place in us an absolute trust, that you do as we say. No small thing to ask, perhaps, of a man such as Mr Hal Moody, but, yes, yes, I see that it is possible, I see it in your demeanour, I perceive that you are at last prepared to countenance our services …’

The Captain cut himself off with a snort and turned to the wall, his fist jammed against his mouth. At length he got his breath back.

‘Your pardon. There is, I cannot any longer delay to mention, one other matter, the matter of – well – naturally, a procedure such as this involves a not inconsiderable outlay and we do ask as a gesture of good faith in advance …’

He paused, balanced at an expectant lean towards me. Catching his drift, I emptied my pockets. The gold pennies heaped up on the floor. The doctor hissed, scurried out and returned staggering under a cumbersome pair of scales. The Captain weighed the metal meticulously.

‘It so happens that this will cover our fee exactly.’ He made a courteous movement, as the doctor lifted the bowl from the scales and whisked the gold into the back room. ‘No further reason to delay, my dear doctor,’ the Captain said offhandedly as the man returned.

The doctor uncorked his phial of black grue and the smell filled the room. A stiletto rictus carved itself into his face as he passed me the potion.

I thought of you. Or I tried to. I realised with a clutch of dread that I couldn’t picture you or hear your voice. I looked for Dolly, but there was no sign of her. I thought I might be running out of time. The stench was noxious, but it was nothing I wasn’t used to. Only the city. I brought it to my lips, expecting to gag. The strange thing was it had no taste at all.

As I swallowed, the Captain and Dogg watched, appalled but intent, as they’d have watched a performer specialising in self-mutilation. At least I’d wiped their smirks. I took a step towards them, but I was hauling an anvil. I tried to drop the phial but sending orders to my hand was a long-distance call and no one was picking up.

‘What’s happening?’

They didn’t reply. Maybe they hadn’t heard. I didn’t want to see what was going on but my eyes were locked into the mirror. Cold was creeping in from the edges, terrible cold, and settling in my core like dread was a sensation of immovable weight.

So we come to this moment. I am fixed in place and my time approaches a vanishing point, slicing itself by thinner increments and thinner. What’s gone before is a past-tense prologue funnelling into this crux. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I tried to hurt her. I wonder if, in whatever follows, I’ll be able to throw down all these things I carry around with me, all these things I’ve done and wish I hadn’t.

Then what’s happening reaches my mind, and that too turns to metal.

Gallathea

To begin with, I was the world, which is another way of saying I did not exist, because when you’re that way there’s no need to mark lines between what’s you and what isn’t. Then the divisions came, and what was me began to find itself out. Everything I wasn’t broke away, freeing the shape of myself that had waited implicit in the block of the possible. The extraneous matter came off in fine scales as if worked away by a sculptor or a process of erosion. I was aware of the surface, the plane of distinction, sinking in towards my skin, and soon I was able to watch it happening, since the first image that presented itself was, of course, a reflection. I saw the roughly defined figure, stocky and stooped, moulded all out of dull gold. It lost definition as the coin-sized shards loosened and fell. Soon they were a cascade, clicking and jingling as they hit the floor. As the gold encasement thinned it grew translucent and I began to recognise what was inside.

He fell so fast away from me, clothing and hair, skin and superfluous flesh, all translated into soft yellow metal and splitting and opening to let me out. My bare toes flexed in a nest of gold shavings, and I brushed the last fragments from my palms: a first gesture.