Vurt 2 - Pollen (30 page)

“I’m a lover, not a fighter, and this new world will still need a guaranteed shit-detector.”

“I’m still a cop and you’re still breaking the laws of broadcast.”

“I’m taking you into static.” He had an electronic knife in his hands, wired into his equipment. Fire was shivering from the blade. I brought my gun up tight on his forehead but that pirate never even wavered. Belinda was screaming at me over the Shadow, and I was trying to make a homing signal. Gumbo thrust forwards.

A burning sensation in my stomach.

I made a swinging motion with the gun, glancing against the hippy’s head. It just made the blade turn slightly in the wound; I could feel feather waves entering me from the implement. It felt like I was being spoken to, deep down. Like I was full of feathery voices. The edge of chaos. I shot a cop-bullet into the heart of Gumbo’s equipment, which brought a lessening of the pain. Gumbo ran to his circuits, shrieking at the dying of the lights. He was working the switches like a madman, even as the feathers creamed at his touch. Gumbo was shouting over the dying waves, telling the world he was still fighting, still willing to give everything for the people of the dream. “This is the Gumbo calling the world. The cops are at my tail. Don’t believe the hype. We can still find ourselves in the map. This old hippy will always believe in you…”

I slipped a pair of cuffs onto Gumbo and fixed him to a steel bracket on the floor. Then I was slipping away along underground corridors, clutching the wound in my stomach, chasing the Shadow of my daughter, and the glimmer of water reflected on a marble wall.

Around a labyrinth of stone until a locked door came up close. I found Belinda’s Shadow in there, rippled with pain, and then the stranger’s—shiny red it was, coloured with anger and fear. Male Smoke. And the intent: his troubled need to kill. And then the name of that Shadow: Kracker. I brought out my tube of DoorVaz, poured some into the lock, and then tried my cop-key. The lock slipped a little, the tumblers complaining. More Vaz, that slick releaser, and then one well-aimed kick. The door banged open.

Steps leading down. Shouting out: “Police! Don’t do anything!” The Shadows of love breaking. Fury. Screams. Please… Swearing. Christ! A sudden thrust in Kracker’s Shadow as he reached towards his climax. My feet falling on the pathway.

That picture I dropped into: my daughter taking a full drink of wine, her body naked and floating in a pool of shivering water, the Chief of Cops paddling towards her, cop-gun outstretched. The Shadows were dancing in fear and delight. I was feeling my daughter’s pleasure for a second, before the pain came to me. Not knowing what to do except to shout out, “Hold it right there!” I was acting like some kind of soap-cop. That useful. Kracker was moving slow through the water, towards Belinda. Shadows dripping all over his thin body. That gun was going to make a big hole…

I did it. I managed the job. My one and only cop-job. I shot my chief.

The rules kicked in at the last second, causing me to aim wide. His gun arm folded up into a wing-like shape and then collapsed under him, blood-rich as he plunged into the water. My daughter’s head was disappearing under the surface. The glass was bobbing on the surface, loading with water, and then following her down. I jumped into the pool, to grasp Belinda’s body to mine, up to the surface, her body of maps…

“Belinda…”

No answer. Her eyes were glazed with joy, far-off and wandering. Kracker was making sad noises from the side of the pool, his legs thrashing the water into waves, his arm painting the water red.

I turned my head quickly. “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted. “You’re under arrest, Kracker.” Kracker’s eyes full of panic, his Shadow jumping with fire. He couldn’t stop twitching, moving the water into scarlet waves, words from his slack mouth…

“It was Boomer,” he breathed. “Boomer. She took some Boomer. Too much Boomer. I was trying to…”

“Is this true?” I had turned back to Belinda now, taking in the sinking glass.

“I was trying to stop her,” Kracker said. “That was all. I’m sorry, Jones. I’m really sorry. Columbus made me do it. He was blackmailing me… my crimes… my petty crimes… what could I do?”

Everything was cool and slow, like a bad memory that was only just happening. Everything was struggling towards life. Everything was losing.

Losing it…

My daughter in my arms as I clung to her tightly, willing the breath back into her quiet flesh. Her eyes flickering for a second and then closing. And then the very Shadow of her drifting away into the water, into blood-reddened water. I lifted her up lightly, just like when she was a kid and had taken a fall in the back garden. Kracker was struggling towards the surface, clutching his mess of an arm with one good hand, shouting at me…

“What about me! What about me!”

I carried Belinda out of that cellar, away from that sad noise, out of that warehouse. Her body… the breath of a ghost. My daughter’s life floating away in slow waves.

Coyote’s long legs are loping along the Princess Road towards Manchester Central. He no longer feels troubled by the fever. The map is changing constantly as he runs, but that’s no problem to his flowering soul. He feels like a road himself, like a part of this new world. Coyote is a flower; the road opens up to him with parted petals. This is the travelling he has always dreamt about. But still something is missing, some vehicle for his desires. The scent of blossoms from Platt Fields Park makes his hind-stalks grip the pavement. The flowers are growing out towards him. Coyote is walking through their perfumes, adding his own sweet message to their throats. It is only then that he realises. It doesn’t have to be like this; I can travel freely. The flower in me is still growing, still learning. It’s easy. So easy. No one need see me. I can just… you know… just grow…

So then, Coyote just folds himself into the new flower map of Manchester, moving his patterns from stem to stem. He is living in the vegetation, remaking himself again and again like the seasons changing, from the flora that he meets upon the way. This is the coolest route he has ever travelled. Coyote Flower Dog is conjuring himself out of the petals and the leaves and the thorns, turning that greenery into a black-and-white Dalmatian plant. The Little Sir John seed is still growing inside his body, running with the sap; he can sense him there. All along his long and growing journey, the man in the root is trying to redirect Coyote. Coyote shrugs him off, or tries to; in fact all he can manage is to send him spinning back down into the deepest stem.

Now the city is opening up to Coyote’s patterns.

How it has changed. He remembers it as a dark place of wet desires; now the world is floral and choking. Coyote can journey anywhere through the green veins of Manchester. Flowers are cascading from every building, vines are clinging to lamp posts. A pink rain of blossoms is falling on Albert Square, brightly lit by lasers from the top of the Town Hall. The city is deserted, as though in quarantine. There are cop-cars on the streets but they seem to move like lost souls, screaming through the morning, making embroideries of noise with their sirens. A few Xcabs here and there; only these vehicles seem to be making any kind of progress. Coyote is blooming his shapes into a small bush growing to one side of the square. From there he pushes himself through lichens clinging to the pavement, through mosses growing on walls, through the very pollen that is breezing through the air above Manchester. By these routes he makes his way towards the back of Bootle Street cop station, where the impounded cars sit like fossils behind criss-cross wire.

Here Coyote finds his first lost love. His Yang.

The black cab.

Everything comes home to him: where he has come from, and where he must go.

Coyote sees a light shining from a room in the back of the station, a lone cop sitting at a desk. He works his essence through the sap-streams of a willow tree that hangs over the locked gate to the car pound, drops down onto concrete, working his stalks into strong, fast legs that take him towards the office. He knows by now that he can change his appearance at will; he can make a mask out of flowers. He knows he must make himself look like a cop. Coyote extends an eye on a green stalk until it can see over the window’s rim. From this vantage he watches the cop for a few moments, and then realises who he must become. He taps on the glass with a branch from his body. The cop looks up from his paperback novel. He has plugs up his nostrils, but his pollen mask is lying on the desk. It takes less than two seconds for Coyote’s face to regrow itself into a new shape. Then he lets one of his branches bang against the office door, making it sound like an urgent call. The cop puts down his book with a sigh, gets up from the desk, walks over to the door, opens it. “What you after?” he says to the cop standing in the shadows of his doorway. “You need a car? What is it? Somebody paid a parking fine?” The cop at the door doesn’t answer. His face is obscured. “Spill it out, buddy. There’s trouble exploding all over town and I’m halfway through a sex scene.” The figure at the door moves forward into the light, bringing his face into the picture. “Christ Almighty!” says the car pound cop. “No, no! Jesus, no!” Then he falls silent, his breath caught in his throat. He is reaching for the gun in his holster…

Coyote steps into the office.

The car pound cop feels like he is falling into a bad mirror. He screams, his gun slipping from his fingers, slick with sudden sweat. “Who are you?” he manages to ask.

Coyote answers, “I’m you, of course.”

Coyote has formed his petals into a perfect replica of the cop’s face.

The cop cannot take the sight.

“Shit!” His only response. “Leave me alone!”

Falling back…

Coyote shoots out a strong branch-like arm, knocks the cop some times in the face until he falls to the floor, unconscious. Taxi-flower-dog lets his cop-shape drop away. Now he is just drifting, growing. His twig-like claws reach over to where a bunch of keys are hooked on a steel pin. This is what he wants. He makes his loping way back to the gates, tries each of the keys until he finds the opener. He releases the wire gates from their tight coupling. Now he is strutting back to where his black cab lies waiting.

Black cab!

He lets his leaves brush along the cab’s scratched paintwork, making a soft music from the contact. It feels like foreplay. And then Coyote forms a twig into the remembered shape of his cab key, twists the lock, opens the door, slips inside.

He is home.

He shapes the twig into the exact pattern of the ignition key, works the clutch, turns the engine. He’s full of juice. Petrol. The cab is humming with life. He guns it down until the city is swirling all around in flowers. Coyote is howling now, turning the road into liquid so he can glide down its throat. Towards Boda, wherever she may be. His last known chance at love. His Yin. He would find her if it took the rest of his life, his second life.

Work it good, taxi-flower.

I was hugging my Belinda child ever so tightly, as though I could force her into a new life. I was carrying her through from darkness to light, fluid smoke dripping away, gaps between my fingers. Hospital starkness. Manchester Royal Infirmary. The journey over to the hospital had been a nightmare ride surrounded by crashed cars and twisting streets. Only my Shadow-hold on the story unfolding had managed to bring me this far. Somebody in white took my daughter away from me. My second child… was I to be doomed with wayward offspring? Was I always to be the mother of death? I was holding my heart back from the losing of my daughter once again. A pain was resting in my stomach. I watched until Belinda disappeared into whiteness, and then I collapsed to the hospital floor. Darkness falling in ribbons of smoke…

Waking. Another room, another world…

Belinda. A bed. Instruments. But there was very little of her left. So very little.

A doctor was searching deep inside Belinda’s flesh for messages; some small, hidden moment of life. He had already sealed the slit in my stomach taken from Gumbo YaYa. It was a superficial wound anyway, in the sense that nothing else mattered now except my daughter’s life.

Nothing to say or do, but to hold my daughter’s folding body so tightly that the flesh was squeezed into a semblance of breath. Only an illusion. Belinda was dying; I could no longer feel her Shadow. Everything was at a loss; myself, the world, my case. Instruments sending out a sad, slow wave.

My child…

Pulling back the sheets from her coma…

“Help her! Help her, please!”

“We’re doing all we can, Officer Jones.” A cold doctor’s voice. I ripped the sheets from my daughter’s bed…

Hugging her.

Hugging her to death.

Daughter… daughter…

“Save her!” I had turned my face towards the doctor, who was busying himself with instruments. “Save her, please.”

“Officer Jones…”

Shaking her. Shaking Belinda.

“I killed her. It was my fault. I misread the Shadow. That’s… oh God… it’s never happened before… Please. Please save her.”

The doctor looked on impassive.

Shaking and cursing.

No response. Holding on to Belinda. Holding on to air.

Instruments pulsing into silence. My daughter dying…

“She’s gone.” The doctor’s words.

Please, no…

I went deep. Deepest ever.

Sailing…

Belinda… Belinda… Belinda…

My Shadow was breaking into Belinda’s body, searching for the root. I was travelling through a dead part of town. Her unmapped body. Shadowless. I saw a clutch of Boomer snakes wrapping themselves around her heart.

Belinda… Belinda…

This is the moment… the worst moment of my story…

I will not have this!

I sent my own Shadow into her, forcing it deep into the veins, the heart, the brain, the skin. All of her.

Come on. Do this! Show me some fucking love for once…

A small movement… her chest…

Please…

I was drifting down through layers of muscle, hoping for one last lingering trace of smoke. Finding only dead meat, a stopped heart, a shrivelling brain. Belinda’s mind was giving room to the ghost. No hope. No hope…