The Lanyard

Also By Jake Carter-Thomas:

Nineveh Fades, or, The Bomb Shelter

In the Cold War era, a small-town family decide that a fallout shelter is the right thing to add to their house following a visit from a salesman who promises to ease their sleep with a custom cellar conversion. Meet the Braves: father, George, is a New York neurologist, while his wife, Maisie, is stuck at home with the screeching kettle that mocks her failed aspirations and their three children who don’t seem to need her at all.

“A wonderfully written novel that keeps the reader gripped (and guessing) until the last page… This is a novel which will appeal to those who appreciate writing that makes them think -- literary in the best sense of the word -- full of memorable imagery, authentic dialogue and situations that will have the reader asking 'what if that was me'?”

THE LANYARD

      Jake Carter-Thomas

Copyright © 2015 by Jake Carter-Thomas.

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First published, 2015

ISBN:
978-1514787663

Glitch Tree Press

www.glitchtree.com

Cover based on a design by TraeMcNeely.com

“They walk the road of life,

the road fenced in by their tastes,

prejudices, disdains or enthusiasms,

generally honest, invariably stupid,

and are proud of never losing their way.”

-
   
Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

PROLOGUE

Across the hills the weather had already turned, where clouds wrapped the midday sun that held like a welder's flame stuck in the sky, all pale and tinged with orange through the mist, ever losing its lustre over the many stars that appeared down low on the horizon, and in snatches up above, as if the atmosphere had become a mesh rather than a blanket, just countless grey sheets hung in tatters, eaten away like curtains after a storm of moths, of mouths, where the remnants of a comet drifted, over the view of trees, stood bare, reaching across his vision like claws.

Faced by this scene through the glass in the bedroom and shaking, he lifted the cushion joined to the baseboard and opened the hinged bay window seat, pushing back to ensure it didn't fall. The air became scented with citronella and clove. He began to remove some of the towels they had, with excitement, found stowed in the box beneath the seat a month back, stacking them in piles along the floor like feathered slabs of concrete. At the bottom were three sets tied with white ribbon. He thought about taking these too, sliding a finger through the bow and pulling, but then decided not.

He lost his thought for a moment then, lost sight of what he should do, feeling a connection to something natural, something in him, reflected in that window, through it, against it, just gazing out to the sky, remembering how those books they'd found said that life had begun not in heaven, but somewhere below. And he'd thought it was odd even then, how people had counted on this knowledge, and catalogued it, and felt better than it, than all the world around, which he thought on and through, and how it no longer mattered.

He took a step away.

Life might have begun in the oceans. He couldn't be sure. But he knew well that it had ended with an ocean of blue light above the sky. And he could still see it in places as he looked out through layers of dumb glass and strings of dirt, that colour of ink dripped into a glass of chalky milk, swirling, full of a hidden intensity like a soul inside a glass bottle made of light. Ten seconds or so, that's all it took. He remembered. He constructed. He forgot.

On the floor by the seat in the bay window, a piece of paper seemed to reach for him, curling up at the edges, a child's crayon drawing, covered with garrulous lines, picturing within it a picture of a young boy on his knees on the floor, using the side of the bench as a table, cobalt crayon turned long, wrapper pulled so that the edge was exposed, running it across the sheet, sweeping its guts behind it, its wax entrails, those flecks of colour and small mounds that collected the light, to make the sky over a house with a thick black frame, above a garden of green and orange dots, a car that looked like a giant's hat, people with long fingers on the ends of their hands, trapped within the paper, drawn the way children see the world, through touch, through shape, through luck.

He shook his head as he picked up the towels and walked back into the bathroom, closing the door behind him to give them more space. She had pulled the shower curtain across the tub and disappeared. The curtain was mostly white but showed green at the end nearest the faucet, patches that looked like moss. It seemed to have become a translucent ghost, shimmering, shaking with silence, hanging down in the middle because one of the eyes at the top had come free of the rail, creating for a moment the sort of folds that a veil would contain. He could hear her breathing behind it.

He put all but one of the towels onto the side of the sink, pulled the curtain back, and looked into the bath. She was in the bottom, covered in sweat. Her hands had a black liquid on them that he followed back to her legs, skin glistening below her waist, where she wore no clothes. He threw the towel onto her and she used it to dab her body before stuffing it under her back. He bent closer, holding the edge for balance.

"How long do we have?"

"Five minutes?" she said.

He picked up the machete from the checkerboard floor near his feet and took it back to the sink where he ran the flat of the blade over the cracked porcelain as if trying to revive it, pressing his fingers onto the armoured surface as it slid. The blade made a sound suggestive of a metal skin coming off, of a robotic caterpillar finding its form, its wings, though nothing changed about its appearance; its long, silver tongue having long ago turned the colour of burnt expression, with hints of baked-in red, which must have happened back before they found it in that toolshed, behind a different house, locked inside a box within a box, beneath a brass-coloured lock that cracked under the hammer like a skull.

She smiled as he returned to fill the gap offered by the curtain over the bath, then clenched her jaw as if in pain.

"Do you really think it's coming?"

She reached up and motioned for him to show her the blade. He handed it to her, watched her look for her image in the skin, thinking how love, for him, now, for them, for everyone, had become just some black spear in the dark that inched for their hearts. He pictured all those nights where he had sat in a rocking chair in someone else's house, reading poetry by spitting candlelight. How had he been unaware of the tiny glint of the metal tip approaching, drawing close, like the head of a snake wavering as it lifted from a rock, moving towards a sense of heat, as it pushed back his colonial buttons, opening them, popping them off to make the delicate clip on the floor that he could not hope to hear, once hot, burning in the fire of the forge, now cooled and quenched, taking the heat of whatever it touched, holding stock still, dead, for a moment until his skin got used to that little kiss, imagining instead her heart-shaped mouth, holding there, pushing into him with a tongue, exposing blood to trickle down his chest, the first thing that stirred, a wetness in the lap, a bad dream, as he became joined to the devil on the other side of the room, never seeing the red eyes burning from within this thing, his love.

Her arm wavered as she tried to hand the big knife back to him, no doubt thinking what a place this was to give birth: flat on her back in a dried out bathtub with leaf scraps and seed casings gathered around her toes that must have come in with the wind through the hole where someone had pulled the extractor fan from the wall, to use for God knows what. Not a scrap of water in the pipes on the second floor of the house, just some brown puddle by the drain that refused to escape, as if grown from a plastic bag.

"Take it, please," she said. "There isn't much time."

He grasped the machete and held it ready, trying to count in his head but losing track, a fog absorbing his numbers, his numbness. He stood with the grip of an executioner, raising the blade up behind his head, while all she could do was pull at the chrome handles on either wall of the bath, lifting herself forward before she fell back, gripping the only parts of the bathroom that remained untarnished, as if they didn't belong with all the rest, like magnetic c-cores stuck into a wall. She slipped even though there was no place to fall. Her eyes darted around, as if blind. She started to scream.

But it was here or in a dried out swimming pool.

"Look at me," he said. "How long since the last?"

"The last what?"

"Push. The last push."

"I don't know..."

"You're meant to..."

She growled at the ceiling, biting teeth into teeth, hard, as if to devour herself from the top down, the way he had once devoured her, the only way now she had left to disappear, pinned down like this by his eyes. Her legs twisted and turned to keep hold like a hanging man desperate to put a toe on the floor.

"Don't look at me, please," she said.

"I have to."

"Just promise you will."

"I will."

"One swing. That's it?"

"One swing. I swear."

As he spoke, his fingers started to slip around the handle of the blade now touched to the top of his back. He couldn't shake the image of her in a white coffin. He looked towards the halogen moon-spots in the ceiling that no longer functioned, thinking perhaps that if he could just will them to spark back into life and direct all the light onto her then they could make it so bright that she wouldn't see a thing.

He considered the hole in the wall where the fan used to be, a birthing canal filled with blades, might have once been so sharp that they could slice up the air coming through, divide it into small sharp breaths -- the type she was supposed to make -- might chop the wind as he could chop with his blade, at air, at time, at all the insects that tried to buzz for her scent, spraying them with more of the black sluice. Perhaps this would create such a noise, so loud she wouldn't have to listen to any of this, either. So she wouldn't have to listen to the sounds in her head, in his head. So he wouldn't.

Even the dirty curtain, within his grasp, might act as some impermeable membrane, or might at least keep her emotions tight, stop them from leaking if he spun her in it, making her skin go white as it pressed against the plastic, as if devoid of all blood, as if she had been lowered into the bath with two holes in her veins, drained of red and left like a piece of meat. A piece of meat with a maggot inside, hadn't she said?

How long had passed now? How many breaths? He tried to steady the knife, lift it up, but the blade kept stroking his hair, wanting to fall, to give up, and his arms ached.

In his mind he watched as the world outside them burned, as the sun lit those trees outside the house like birthday candles, shining light onto their thoughts. The roof ripped open as if God had commanded it gone, so he could see the threads of fibre from the insulation in the loft up above where the ceiling had split, all yellow and covered in dust, flapping like some sort of sea-sponge against the gravel sky. He watched as boxes of photographs that belonged to his childhood home began to spill, as if he had found his way back to them now, like a fish come to spawn, and then die. He watched those photographs through the gap into the loft, opened by the rip, fluttering over them like a polaroid rain. Pictures of smiles. Teeth. Iced cake. His sister's hair. First dresses, tied with black ribbons. Tourniquets. All blank on the reverse and void of colour.

"I love you," she said through her panicked breath.

Her mouth continued to move, but no more words came, more like she was talking to herself, they way he thought he had heard her when he went to get the towels... But saying what?

"It's better with drainage?"

That was what he had told her.

"In a dried out pool or here."

And she'd shot him a look, a lock.

There was a library of sorts in the house with a decaying book about medicine that had said you have to breath through it. But breathe through what? He tried to remember. It came in another flash. The situation. Yes, that was it. You have to breathe through the situation. You have to listen. They had read the pages together with their fingers on the text, touching type. She had said she had known how to, once. How to touch type. But no more. It didn't matter. The books said that they'd know when it was coming when waves of pressure started to flow over the top, like waves crashing up a beach in which she remained half-buried, open-mouthed. And maybe what she'd said once was right. Maybe all people are just going to eat themselves until all that’s left are pairs of lips, talking, and biting, and spitting up blood because they enjoy the taste.

Don't fight it, the book said, let the tide wash over your head, let the future sand come and hold you aloft. Think of all the people who must have done this before, all those animals born kicking on the plains with their shape yet licked into them, before the blood boiled off at the tongue, and they hopped clear, pursued by tyrant beasts that would sleep in your arms.

Listen. Breathe. Forgive.

"You can't keep it inside," he said, just like the book. It must come out. It must have a life of its own. It must have its face wiped of snot and be encouraged to find its voice, or else die blue and untested. And there was a sense of pity in that, sure, a reflection of something he could see in that blade before he put it above his head to become a sun with blood spots, the sort he could have projected onto all those sheets of music, in the study, in the box behind the piano with no keys. A colder love than what was hoped and joined and pulled away. All this wrapped at his feet into a tiny ball of pain and the compulsion to push, to breathe. One more. Again and again. Don't wait for the tide, he might have said. Command it. Listen to the angels sing, in the air, around the blown beach. Listen to the water sprites come, a million per drip, held in by the tension, yet splashing around in circles inside, rushing into her mouth, and out, down her chin.

So he wished for the end of both their ordeals, to see that fear of the unknown that matured within come and gone, even if it might come out with sharp teeth and a sense of hate, or at the least, a lack of a bond, when they held him up, when they furnished him with praise and then dropped him back. Just breathe. Just gulp it in. He said it again. There were tears in his eyes now, an ocean within, without, where life began just to end. An ocean of blue light. Don't fight it, he said. But also, don't give up.

He dropped the blade with a clatter and crouched down to hold her hand. But her hand remained balled into a fist. He ran his thumb on the back of it, following her veins up and down, wet with droplets of sweat. He stopped. Something was wrong. He turned her fist over and pried open her fingers. She gave in. She let him open them, see the small razor blade she had concealed within, surrounded by a dust of rusty blood, dehydrated, burnt on to her flesh, clinging to the metal. But concealed for what? She let the weapon fall and it rushed down to her side and slid under her skin as if an insect desperate to escape the sun. She exhaled.