Jog On Fat Barry (19 page)

My heart missed a beat. I spun around. Shanley was right in front of me; Kaelem and Leena stood beside him, giggling because I was naked.

“What’re you talking about?” I said. “I’m not dead.”

“Sure you are,” Shanley replied.

“Check your pulse,” Kaelem said.

I pressed three fingers against my wrist but couldn’t feel a beat. I started to panic: tried to think back. I was able to remember making love to Poppy; we’d finished the champagne; I fell asleep; a clock striking twelve woke me up.

“We’ve been sent to get you,” Leena said, opening the oven door.

“We’re leaving through that?” I asked.

“What did you expect?” Shanley asked. “Bright lights?”

I looked inside: there was nothing but darkness.

“Come on, Exposer,” Kaelem said.

He reached up and took my hand.

“They’re waiting for us.”

I took a step toward the oven but then stopped when a monstrous scream filled the room.

“Throw him in,” the voice cried. “He belongs to us.”

Kaelem shoved me forward and I stumbled. My hand went into the oven and burst into flames. I screamed and fell backwards. There were things hovering in the oven: hideously deformed bodies with flesh hanging off bones. They were clawing one another. A stench began to fill the room. I started to retch; couldn’t catch my breath. I knew that stench all too well. Every monster I ever caught had reeked of it. Shanley told me you always get fucked when you try to do the right thing and lunged at me. He rammed his thumb into my ear. At the same time Kaelem dropped to the floor and sank his teeth into my calf. Leena grabbed my cock with one hand and my balls with the other. Then she wrenched them in opposite directions and I howled while Shanley, Leena and Kaelem all shrieked with delight. They were wrestling me into the oven, and every part of me they got into it burst into flames. But then the oven door slammed shut. Shanley and Leena dropped to the floor and cowered beside Kaelem. Light began to spill into the room from the hallway.

“I thought we were friends,” Kaelem whimpered, pawing at my legs. “You said we could trust you.”

The light grew brighter and brighter until it was so brilliant, I was forced to shield my eyes from it. For a few moments I was blind, but then I started seeing shapes. A man was standing in the doorway. He was like a starburst: beams of light shot out of him in every direction. Hideous howls and wails shook the room and Shanley, Leena and Kaelem began to growl.

“Vanity was his own undoing,” a voice cried out.

“I don’t make the rules,” the man in the doorway said.

I recognized his voice: it was the blue-eyed man. I was going to speak to him but the oven door suddenly blew off its hinges and something was hurled out. It landed beside me. I glanced down and saw a child. There were sockets where its eyes should have been; every inch of its skin was horribly burnt; it started convulsing. Things squirmed inside its stomach; the skin cracked open; a maggot wriggled out. The crack got wider; more maggots followed until the floor was seething with them. Then the room began to pulsate as maggot turned to fly. The air was swarming with them. Something else appeared by the oven. Pus was oozing out of the ulcers that blotted its body. Maggots, cockroaches, spiders and silverfish tumbled out of the cracks that festered its skin. A carpet of them crawled over me. At the same time flies flew down my throat, and up my nose, and around the crack of my arse. The creature at the oven giggled manically and clapped its hands together.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,” it crooned. “I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she’ll die.”

The room grew darker and darker until the blue-eyed man became lost in the dense, black, swarming cloud of flies. And fire raged within the oven. Flames shot out, burning the hair off my legs, arms, chest, eyebrows, and eyelashes. The creature grabbed me by the wrist.

“The prodigal son returns,” it purred. “Come to mummy.”

In less than a heartbeat it was back inside the oven and dragging me with it. I slammed into the cooker. My collarbone snapped and my arm burst into flames. Fire sizzled my skin and turned it black. I tried to break free, yelling that I didn’t belong to it.

“I gave up my life to better the lives of countless children,” I said.

The creature roared with laughter. I could feel what little strength I had left ebbing away. And then, just as I was going to give up, just when I was about to yield, I heard the blue-eyed man: heard his voice cutting through the hum of insects. And what I heard wasn’t exactly clear, but it did sound like the man was saying, “Just ask.” I tried to call out: tried to say I couldn’t hear, but every time I opened my mouth, the flies flew in and I started to gag.

Whoever said lightning couldn’t strike twice didn’t know what they’re talking about. The Empire State Building gets struck twenty-five times a year on average, and once got struck fifteen times in fifteen minutes. About two thousand people are struck by lightning each year, and 20-33% of them die because their lungs roast and their hearts explode. Your standard bolt carries a current of thirty kilo amperes, and transfers a charge of five coulombs. It has a potential difference of about a hundred megavolts, and dissipates five hundred mega joules. It can last milliseconds and reach temperatures of 50,000º F. That’s five times hotter than the sun’s surface, or hot enough to fuse sand into glass.

Now, I don’t know how many mega joules were in the lightning bolt that struck the kitchen wall. It happened too quickly and I didn’t even really see it. All I know is, I said, “Help me,” and the next moment, zap, a million gold and silver sparks shot across the room. The sparks killed every insect in their path. Flies fell like rain. Burnt-out black husks quickly rose up past my knees, and, as they did, the blue-eyed man was a starburst once again. The creature in the oven was still trying to jerk me toward it, but I could feel its own strength slowly ebbing away, until it finally released its grip with an injurious grin.

“Another time perhaps,” it said.

A moment later it was gone, so too were the flies, but Shanley, Leena and Kaelem still cowered on the floor. I asked the blue-eyed man what was going on, but before he could say anything, Shanley, Leena and Kaelem reared up off the floor and began to morph: their faces mirroring every rapist and murderer Shanley and I had revealed. It was a slide show played in perfect time to the howls and wails of the damned and demented. I watched their clothes and flesh fall away until nothing but bone remained: yellow bones twisted and gnarled like the roots of a decaying tree. Then moments later, pox-ridden flesh crept across those bones and rotting black hearts appeared inside their chests. The hearts bubbled with maggots while their empty eye sockets blazed fireball red. They tore and scratched at one another to be first through the oven. And then they, just like the creature before them, were gone.

The blue-eyed man and I walked onto Venice beach as the dawn of a New Year began to break. We sat down near the shoreline and watched waves breaking gently on the sand. Fingers of iridescent light broke through the clouds and glistened above the Pacific as stragglers, still out from the night before, wandered aimlessly by.

“Van de Kleek said that one day his comic strip will be known by every kid in the world,” I said. “I wish Shanley could’ve seen it.”

“Tell him when you see him,” the blue-eyed man said.

“He’ll know we didn’t live and die for nothing.”

“No one does, Pilgrim.”

My thoughts drifted back to Poppy. I made love for the first time in eight years; had been alive again after living like a dead man. But now that my life was over, I wanted it back more than ever.

“I guess a life without love is really no life at all,” I said.

The blue-eyed man was gazing out across the ocean at sunlight that sparkled on the water like millions of tiny sequins, but the call of a seagull carried on a gentle breeze caused him to stir.

“Time for us to go,” he said.

Moments later another seagull called out from behind us. I turned to watch it lift up off the sand and flutter past us. It flew out over the water. Then another seagull flew by, followed by a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and still more, until, as countless wings fluttered by, I too took flight, up and out across the vast Pacific.

mo blake

Mo Blake never had no mum: at least, not that we knew of. My dad said he did, only one day she got up and fucked off out of it. Mo said otherwise, and since he was my best mate, whatever Mo said was good enough for me. Mo never once complained, about him not having one, but I always got the feeling Mo would’ve liked one all the same: someone to blow his nose, and wipe his arse. He often said my mum would probably be the first woman I ever saw naked, on her way to the khazi after my dad had given her one. And he’d grin and giggle at the thought, saying that even though she was my own flesh and blood, I’d end up getting the horn all the same. Never had the heart to tell him I didn’t get the horn when I saw my mum naked: didn’t see any point in it. Mo had no mum to love; no mum to love him back, so he searched for affection elsewhere and found it in the arms of a pound note. He fell head over heels, but the relationship was doomed from the start. Obsessions always are. Because all the money in the world could never take the place of the mother that Mo never had.

Mo spent much of his youth in boys’ homes. Weather permitting he slept rough, but the weather seldom did, so Mo spent the majority of his life banged up in one penal institution or another. But in doing so, Mo acquired a firm understanding of criminal law. More often than not, he’d represent himself in a wide range of cases that included: absconding from local custody, aggravated burglary, drunk and disorderly, handling stolen goods, possession of a class A drug and possession of a class B drug, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, perverting the course of justice, criminal damage, driving whilst disqualified, obstructing police, making off without payment, robbery, malicious wounding, wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm, forgery, wasting police time, possession of a firearm with intent to cause violence, theft, and witness intimidation. He was something of a minor celebrity in the London court circuit. One judge said it was a great pity that Mo had dedicated himself to a life of crime because, to his mind, squandering talent was perhaps the greatest crime of all. Another said that while some in the dock never told a lie, and others never told the truth, in his learned opinion Mo was a criminal who never learnt to distinguish one from the other. Sentence after sentence got handed down, and time after time Mo got bundled off to gaol. But every time Mo sauntered from the dock, he did so with a
fuck you
and
have a nice day
, and he always repeated the same six words in that carefree manner of his: “You win some…you lose some.”

Sigmund Freud often argued that the contents of dreams were wish-fulfilment desires. He said they came from the childlike part of the unconscious called the id, and at times contained material that might be unacceptable to our sense of self, called the ego. Now I don’t know much about that, but I do know Mo said he’d never had a dream until he was twenty-two, and from that time onwards, he always had the same one. He was naked and standing in the centre of Wembley Stadium. Some 127,000 spectators packed the stands, and the pitch was carpeted end-to-end with pound notes ten feet deep. Mo said seeing all that money made his head spin. His heart raced, he couldn’t catch his breath, lost his footing, took a tumble, and began to sink into that great ocean of money. It was worse than quicksand as it sucked him under. Everything went dark, and ever so quiet, and perhaps even peaceful. Then someone grabbed hold of Mo and pulled him out. Mo said it was Father Fayhee. The Father lifted him up. Mo filled his lungs with air, and the crowd cheered so loudly the very ground shook. And as it was shaking, this pound note, six foot tall with curly red hair, rose up out of it. Mo said the pound note had tits and an arse, and was wearing lots of makeup, and he felt his cock go hard, and Father Fayhee grinned and said, “I wonder whom might be fucking who.” And the next thing Mo knew, the pound note was on him, and the crowd were leaping up out of their seats. Mo said he could see film and pop stars, sporting legends, three royals, visiting dignitaries and politicians. He said TV crews jostled with reporters for prime positions. And while they kept at it, Mo kept at it too. Fighting like mad. Determined to do the pound note doggy-style.