Furious in his resent, the threadbare dead man presses his advantage with a flurry of attack which utilises every ghoul-display that’s in his clammy repertoire. He tries the frightening stilt-walker elongation that results from levitating upwards with a string of doppelgangers dragged up after him, and executes a miserable spider-dance of multiplying limbs. He shoves his hands inside his own head so that wriggling fingers poke like crab’s legs from his gurni
ng face, gob widening impossibly into a scream of filthy polyps. He does his inflating eyeball trick or with an awful kiss performs disgusting sleights of tongue; reaches to cup the reeling sexual predator’s exposed and dangling testes in one mortuary palm; extrudes a finger of cold ectoplasm past the clenching sphincter and into the bowel. Human ideas of fighting dirty, well; they’re nothing to a ghost. With eyes screwed shut and baby face in a tomato crumple his opponent swats the night, as if at bees, and takes a solitary backward step towards the motor. There is now nobody sitting in the driver’s seat, the ghetto-wight observes with some relief, its sulphurous former occupant having apparently moved on to other matters, demon business being surely plentiful in such a morally uncoupled world. Swirling his head about and momentarily accomplishing a Saturn’s ring of ears, he reassures himself that the young woman is now up and staggering for the enclosure’s mouth before resuming his assault on her tormentor. Barking inarticulate profanities the besieged rapist yields another yard in his retreat, a spook-punch landed in the frontal lobe and fingering for the amygdala. New point of view, reverting to full colour.
At the exit of the killing yard she risks a glance across her shoulder just to see how close he is behind her but he’s still stood by the car, hands flapping at the air, having a fit or something though he could be on her in a minute. Every step a burning ache between her thighs she plunges out through Lower Bath Street’s black, propelled by bad adrenaline and mindful of the coming crash into paralysis and shock. Because it’s easier stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, grass theatre of her late abduction, steeped in piss-pot sodium light. An only sign of life is the diluted lemon filtered through drawn curtains from the solitary house down near the corner and she limps across the road in its direction, gravel gouging at her tender soles, breath bubbling in her throat. Please, please let there be someone home, somebody capable and unafraid to come to their front door on a wild Friday night, although she’s crushingly aware of the unlikelihood. Off to her right the isolated home abuts upon the yawning mouth of a since-vanished alleyway, the memory of its cobbled ribbon spooling down into the dark beside the chain-link fence that bounds the lowest edge of the school playing fields. Ahead, St. Andrew’s Road is bare of any traffic whatsoever, let alone police cars, and the murderer of her imagination is now panting like a beast and close enough to scald her neck. Her legs seem disconnected from volition suddenly, nerveless and unresponsive as if made of cake, and then the ninety-year-old slabs are hurtling up to punch her knees and slap her stinging hands. She’s down, she’s down and dripping blood into a gutter where rain gurgles through the stone oesophagus. Abject and crawling, a thrashed dog, she scrabbles whimpering over inundated pavement, levering herself half-upright at the doorstep to thump her exhausted fists on the wet panelling, surely too limp and ineffectual for anyone to hear. The seconds stretch excruciatingly, barbed with the premonition of his any-moment grip descending on her shoulder, of fuck-scented fingers bunching in her braided, bloodied hair. Please, please, please. From somewhere indoors slow, slipper-muffled steps approach along an unseen passageway. New point of view.
He isn’t scared as such, he’s not that sort of bloke, but he can feel something attacking him, some big junkyard Alsatian when there’s nothing there for him to see, for him to swing at. Worse than an Alsatian. Yank their back legs open and they’re dead, he’s heard that, but this is like fighting congealed custard and the mess goes everywhere, inside his clothing, up his nostrils, up his arse. He can’t take any more. He doesn’t know if this is just what meth does normally or if he’s gone mad or been grabbed by aliens or what. Slicing through an occasional illumination, raindrops fall as razor cuts. Inside a whiny voice he doesn’t know, more like a woman or a panicked kid’s, is pleading with him to get out of here, get in the car, just go. The loose skin on his balls is cringing, Jesus Christ his flies are still undone, and there’s a dismal avalanche of hats, a dozen vacuum-cleaner orifices ringed with rotten teeth that he can almost see. Unfathomable images persist in the uneven dark, electric filaments burned sizzling onto his retina, these visionary floaters coruscating at their edges where the radiance has a grain of teeming maggots. Everything is wrong. Fumbling behind he shoves the rear door of the Escort shut while trying to find the handle on the front one, swiping with his free paw at the flock of ugly flying heads assailing him. With flapping hands as bony pinions sprouted from the temples, snapping their decaying jaws and grimacing, like monstrous charnel hummingbirds they come, preposterous and terrible. His frantic fingers finally locate what they were seeking, the cold metal button underneath his thumb, and making noises meant to be a snarl he flings himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door closed after him. A surf of dirty laundry suds is launched against the wound-up window, leaving a grey residue of viscous facial features sliding down the glass outside. Twisting the key in the ignition, for some reason he meticulously checks the dashboard clock and notes the time as almost twenty to eleven. Out beyond the rain-streaked windscreen something putrid that he doesn’t understand tries to get in. New point of view reprising monochrome.
In headline black and white through stammering, convulsive light the skirling deadbeat churns around the vehicle, a rancid cyclone. Car walls being nothing but a flimsy tissue three or four years thick at most, the vagrant vapour-trail could easily reach through them to continue the assault but it’s deterrence and not punishment on the agenda here, much as he wishes it were otherwise. Just scare this tubby little bugger off and then make sure the woman’s safe, those are the things he needs to keep his petrifying eye on. Never mind what somebody who’d do that to a young girl might deserve: that’s a decision better left in larger hands than his, although with half a chance what devastation wouldn’t he bring down upon this animal, this wretched failure of masculinity that he so nearly could have been? He’d do a Banquo, do a Hamlet’s dad, a Tam O’ Shanter with his ghastly oppoes from the Jolly Smokers drafted in to help, a ragged locomotive smoke of pitiless and violent dead men shadowing this mucky fucker through his every waking moment and his every dream, for the remainder of his worthless life and then they’ll just be getting started. There’s no Hell, no merciless retributive Inferno save for the Destructor, but the bilious spirit is convinced that with the inspiration of a life and death transacted in the Boroughs one could be arranged, to beggar Dante and to make blind Milton look away.
Pulling a train of chalk and charcoal sketches in a falling domino progression he encircles the throat-clearing automobile as it starts, his eerie Doppler howl pursuing him through the flash-punctuated and torrential night, his floating coat a rippling funeral banner in his wake. An aggregate of dust and retribution, in the gabardine sieves of his pockets all the grievance of the outraged neighbourhood is carried, the deferred affront viciously vented as a steaming horse-piss stream on the intruder, a malign deluge to sluice him from these wounded streets until him and the other knicker-rippers learn to keep away. New point of view, reverting to full colour.
Smeared across a stranger’s doorstep in the pounding torrent she’s a broken toy, discarded with torn seams and every bit of psychic stuffing gone, one button eye obscured by sticky cordial. All of her hurts. She doesn’t care if the dull footfalls in the hallway that she’d heard were only wishful thinking, doesn’t much mind if her persecutor catches up and finishes the job. She just wants this to end and is less fussed about the manner of that ending by the moment. Treacherously cosy lassitude descends, every last vestige of intent or motion drained out with the contents of her emptying bladder. Self and personality are a retreating tide strained rattling on synaptic shingle and she barely comprehends the light that strikes pink through her lowered eyelids; can’t remember the phenomenon or what it means. At length the lashes unrestrained by blood-glue flutter open and she squints up into puzzle-colours, clots of shine and shade resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she knows from somewhere, f
ramed by the now-open door. Against a ground of patterned wallpaper and mismatched carpet, limned in sixty watts of Pentecostal fire stands an old woman built from long and knobbly bones and crowned with white hair like ignited phosphorous, one thin hand pressing on the lintel. Veiled in gloom by incandescent blaze beyond, the tallow contours of an Easter Island face hang heavy on the bone and oh, her screech-owl eyes. Pale grey with golden irises they stare down, reservoirs of depthless fury and compassion, on the smashed child at her threshold. Gaunt cheek tracked by angry brine the occupant stoops, creaking, crouched on leather haunches to cup Marla’s chin while a free hand tenderly smooths the bloodied braids.
“All hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem,” pronounces Audrey Vernall, and her voice chokes with an all-redeeming pride. Pull back to planetary mosaic, abruptly edited.
Bulbs pop and data effervesce. Wigan police release footage of car involved in fatal hit-and-run with cyclist. Reefs quietly disintegrate. Convicted Enron fraudster Kenneth Lay says he believes good will come out of his predicament. The stars of supermarket magazines change shape, change partners. Arctic ice recedes. A paralysed Welsh rugby player calls to ban contested scrums and startlingly tenacious tubeworms offer hope of life on other worlds. Quantum or nation, states collapse when looked at. Oil chess, fiscal figure skating and the tendency of Homo sapiens to fuse with its technologies. Australian mountain climber Lincoln Hall is briefly believed dead. A badger harasses sports centre staff in Devon. Mice glow and grow joke-shop ears. Racism fears dog World Cup build-up. Budgets shrivel and reality shows relocate their target audience inside the television, closing the ouroboros. New forms of carbon and new scales of manufacture. An ethereal scrapyard orbiting the world. Popular culture, formerly disposable, dragged to the curbside for recycling and art residing solely in the pitch. Internal interregnum. Double helix turns informant. Touch-screen intimacy. Algorithms of desire. Bespoke need, and text messaging a carrier pidgin. New, new, every second bigger than the last. The populace recline obese with novelty yet consume ever more enthusiastically, as if to master the onrushing future by devouring it; to drink the tidal wave. Cut to interior, night.
Flat on his back, Mick listens to the rain against the glass and thinks about Diana Spencer. It’s a natural extension of his restless thoughts on chess or chase-the-ace or tiddlywinks, with the whole Princess Di phenomenon a game – or a compendium of games – that had apparently got badly out of hand. That almost literal unveiling in the newspapers, a first glimpse of the nursery assistant standing in a cheesecloth skirt with pouring backlight, prurient X-Ray specks illusion of grey silhouetted limbs caught by an opportunist snapper to be sure, but who was playing who? For all her shy fawn glances from beneath the fringe, a strategy established even at that early stage, this was a scion of the Red Earl whose name was writ in road, estate and public house across the face of working-class Northampton. Dodgy dynasties had been reduced to bouillon in her blood, from fifteenth-century livestock farmers passing themselves off as relatives to the House Le Despencer, through to five or six authentic bastards sired by Stuarts and thus a genetic conduit to the lines of Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach and Hanover; of Sforza and Medici. Chromosomes not to be trifled with, and this before an admixture of Churchills are infused into the Northamptonshire family’s already-potent genealogical concoction. Poisoners, tacticians, bloody-minded warrior kings.
Born Althorp in 1730-something and one in a lengthy line of Johns, the first Earl Spencer proper fathered Lady Georgiana, later to be made Duchess of Devonshire and famously alluring doppelganger of her later tabloid-teasing relative. The fifth Earl Spencer, born around a century thereafter, was the red one if Mick has his local history straight, a mate of Gladstone’s named after the colour of his ostentatious beard. As Lord Lieutenant out in Ireland it appears he’d done his bit to play fair with the Fenians and even came out for Home Rule, which saw him ostracised by everybody from Victoria down. However, earlier in the 1880s he’d had people hung for murdering his secretary and Gladstone’s nephew, so the nationalists all hated him as well. Mick glances to his left, at Cathy’s soft topography beneath its turf of duvet, and observes not for the first time that there’s no pleasing the Irish. Dull discomforts start to mutter in his hips and shoulders – none of us are getting any younger – and he essays the manoeuvre to his port side, curls himself about his sleeping wife’s turned spine like fingers round a hand-warmer. New angle.
By the century just gone, Mick’s century, the Spencer family’s genetic creep had moved like Burnham Wood, unnoticed, ever closer to the hubs of power and history. The Spencer-Churchills had slipped into Downing Street with Winston and then, shortly after that, returned with Winston’s niece Clarissa as Anthony Eden’s missus; the Suez crisis prime minister’s trouble and strife, although by no means all of it. Meanwhile in 1924 back home at Althorp, Eighth Earl Johnny had arrived, and yet Mick’s only mental image of the man is as a rubicund and seemingly concussed attendee of official openings, someone with a prize-fighter mumble, to be seated furthest from the microphone. Though to be fair he’d pulled a decent-looking woman in that first Viscountess Althorp, Frances, even if her dynasty-dispenser seemed obdurately to only turn out healthy babies of an inconvenient gender. First came Sarah, then came Jane and then at last the hoped for Ninth Earl, yet another John, who died in infancy a year before the advent of a further disappointing daughter, this one named after a week’s procrastination as Diana Frances. During his occasional lucid moments Johnny Spencer starts to see his wife as culprit in the inability to sire an heir and the humiliated Lady Althorp is despatched to Harley Street in order to determine just exactly what her problem is, the difficulty clearly being hers alone. Mick can imagine how that might have put a strain upon the marriage, even after the arrival of Diana’s younger brother Champagne Charlie Spencer just a couple of years later. When the future people’s princess was just eight years old in 1969 her parents were divorced amid some acrimony following her mother’s extra-marital affair with Peter Shand Kydd, whom she’d soon thereafter wed. Despite the unreliability of hindsight, Mick supposes that some of the fateful architecture of the youngest Spencer daughter’s life might have been loosely sketched in by events around this time, although he can’t help thinking that by subsequently marrying Barbara Cartland’s daughter Raine her father had recklessly introduced an element of overheated gothic romance to the mix that would eventually do most damage. Fairy story expectations without due acknowledgement of all the things that fairy stories bring: the poisoned apple and the cradle curse, the glass shoe full of blood. He feels uncomfortable. If Cathy is a roasting hedgehog, Mick is wrapped around her like baked Gypsy clay. Evading her inferno he once more essays the shift onto his back. New angle.
He’s not really certain how it had all worked, the courtship and the marriage into royalty. Presumably Diana had been drafted into service as a brood-mare, like her mother, to produce the necessary male successor while allowing her new husband to continue a longstanding dalliance with his married mistress. Did she know that on her way in, or find out about it later? Mick supposes it depends on how informed about each other’s lives the aristocracy, as a community, might be. Even if she’d entered into marriage in a state of blissful ignorance, she must have tumbled to it early on. That first press conference with the two of them stood by that gate, the distant and laconic tone that he affected when he said “Whutever love eez” and you saw her look uncomfortable at this obvious disclaimer. But whichever way it went, once all the cards were on the table it was guaranteed that there would be a messy end-game.
When the fault-lines started showing it was in the form initially of a schoolgirl rebellion, turning up with Fergie at some fashionable and exclusive club disguised as WPC strippagrams, but by the time it got to Martin Bashir you could see that she was wheeling out the big guns and that her campaign didn’t appear to have retreat amongst its options. It was clearly going to be hard-core attrition all the way. The tactical component became, literally, more naked. The ostensibly intrusive but surprisingly composed gymnasium rowing-machine picture. The abbreviated swimsuit on Dodi Al Fayed’s boat, deliberately teasing the long lenses to erection, on the same day that her former husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles were due to meet the press and public. She’d got game, you had to give her that. And then, and then … that week or two before the bridge, before her crossing, the queer British admixture of clammy lust and lip-curling contempt had humped its way to a vituperative climax: they despised her. They despised the future-king-humiliating Arab-shagger, and the AIDS patients and landmines came to seem an unconvincing camouflage for a new Cather
ine de Médicis, a new Catherine Sforza; some Renaissance vamp with no elastic in her knickers and a cyanide ring. Loathed her all the more for having wanted so to love her, but she’d let them down with all her gallivanting and her diet disorders, hadn’t been the person that they’d wanted, that they’d needed. It’s so hard to love something that’s moving, changing; something that’s alive. The marble memory is more dependable. Mick wonders, his thoughts starting to fuzz up at last, if it was that great weight of disappointed expectation that had suddenly descended on her like a prehistoric mudslide, fossilising her forever as the perfect tragic Hitchcock blonde, leeching the human colour out and freezing her into the black-and-white monitor image at the Ritz, the half-smile ducking out through the revolving door into eternity and outside chauffeur Henri Paul called back on duty at short notice, maybe catastrophically attempting to offset his after-hours imbibing with a few revivifying blasts of white line fever. Rolling highlights, glints, refractions. Obscure scintillations in the Paris dark beyond the glass. Pull focus to kaleidoscopic torrent of found footage, interspersing full high-definition colour with unstable silent film stock.
Rural roads can be most deadly, a report suggests. Abandoned turtle sanctuary to open at a sea-life park in Dorset. Russia jockeys for control of three Siberian oil pipelines currently in Western hands, and Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the surviving perpetrator of 2004’s Beslan school siege is found guilty on specific counts of terrorism, hostage taking, murder, but steers clear of the death penalty by virtue of a current Kremlin moratorium on executions. Lucky breaks and random tragedies, the acted permutations of Newtonian physics with its endless knock-ons and its circumstantial cannonades; stochastic popcorn for tomorrow’s papers. In the Indian Ocean some sixteen miles south-southwest of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of Java and more than six miles beneath the seabed the Australian and Eurasian plates, tectonic sumo wrestlers, slap powder on their palms and close together for their seventh or eighth bout this year. It’s fourteen minutes to eleven, Greenwich Mean Time.
She can barely feel the bony hands that help her to her feet, and briefly has the thought that she might be ascending. Distant from the instant, in a snowglobe glaze of settling shock with all the painful parts of her a mile away, she registers the tissue-paper whisper of the fragile woman gathering her up into the doorstep’s light only remotely. Something about saints, she thinks, and calmly wonders if she’s dead, if she’s not really managed to escape the car or vehicle enclosure after all. Nearby in the torrential night an engine starts to angry life before its growl moves off uphill away from her, a disappointed and receding snarl which, like the spattering deluge or murmurs of her elderly deliverer, seems to possess a new dimension; a cathedral of unprecedented resonances ringing in her blood-caked ears. Through this celestial tinnitus her rescuer is speaking now with a fresh force and sharpness that she gradually comes to understand is not addressed to her for all that Scarletwell Street, other than the two of them, is bare.
“See ’im off, Freddy. See ’im all the way off.”
There’s an eyestrain shimmer in the rain and then there’s something that’s the opposite of wind, a howling gust that’s sucked away from them into the Boroughs dark in an indecent hurry, as if late for an appointment.
Derek sweats and skids and swears and can’t get out. The neighbourhood’s a labyrinth and he’s like a bull at a gate, his chemically assisted courage burning away with the rubber to leave a black residue of acrid panic. Out of the enclosure with that flapping and horrifically proliferative thing behind him he swings right and into Lower Bath Street, but he doesn’t know the layout of the place and halfway up there’s concrete bollards blocking off the road, the district’s blunt and jutting teeth, where the compulsory left turn past a despairing local pub, the Shoemakers, delivers him once more to Scarletwell Street. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A right, another right and the corroding wall-fixed sign informs him he’s in Upper Cross Street with those ugly tower-blocks looming over him like oviparous doormen. At the end, what’s he to do? He can’t turn uphill how he wants to, he can see more bollards up the top there, but when he looks downhill to his right he realises his hallucinations are still with him: on the corner there’s a – he can’t even find the words – a monstrous cog of fog rotating in the margin of his eye but if he looks at it dead on, it’s gone. He screeches into Bath Street, trying not to see the grinding phantom gear, and then almost immediately left to Little Cross Street. What is it with all these Cross Streets? What’s the big deal about crosses around here? Careering through a blacked-out warren the black Escort hurtles straight across the roundabout and into Chalk Lane. Veering left around the funny chapel with the doorway halfway up one wall he finds he’s in St. Mary’s Street, with at its end the lights of Horsemarket in joyous conflagration, the illuminated exit to this haunted maze. He’s made it. He’s got out. He’s got away with it. He drives on into glowering taillight fire.
It’s black and white as Freddy sees it, sizzling in a pale fuse over the school playing field, through still machines and empty benches at the factory and across Spring Lane.
“See him off, Freddy. See him all the way off”, that’s what Audrey Vernall had instructed him to do. Orders are orders. The chain of command is simple and straightforward: builders, fiends, saints, Vernalls, deathmongers, then the rough sleepers. Everybody’s got their job and this, at last, is Freddy’s. Frilled with fifty repetitions of the same old coat and leading a great fleet of hats he smears through the deserted business complex that was Cleaver’s Glass once and before that Compton Street, heading by moocher instinct for the ragged area’s northeast corner, the skull pocket near the pinnacle of Grafton Street. That will be where whatever’s going to happen happens, he knows this in his remembered water, in his absent bones. That’s where they immolated the enchantresses and heretics. That’s where they spiked the heads, like settled bills. A fatal gambler’s spray of playing cards, all violent clubs and spades, his centipede of selves pours over what remains of Lower Harding Street and skitters at unnerving speed into the monolithic crossword blank of empty courts and blazing windows on the other side. Saint Stephen’s House, Saint Barnabas’, buildings with lightless landings, several dozen front doors and one roof that stand where whole streets used to be yet still call themselves houses, canonised high-rises in a disenfranchised litany, an air of nominative sanctity to mask the scent of urine. Dirtying the televisual stupor in the ground-floor flats with angry-out-of-nowhere thoughts on homicide, the sepia stampede of Freddy Allen fumes through other people’s Friday nights trailing a cloud of baseless argument, lapsed conversation and stalled DVD in its infuriated wake.
At seven minutes to eleven Mick essays a stealth-turn onto his right side and into a position that seems promisingly soporific, thinking of that final August night nine years ago. The black Mercedes screams through his increasing serotonin levels down the Rue Cambon towards its date with twenty-three past midnight. In the back, no seatbelts on: they’re young, hormonal, unaware that alcohol and their chauffeur’s anti-psychotic medicine are contraindicated. Vampire fireflies in the rear-view but the heavy Gallic lids sag and he knows he’s crashing. Touching seventy he slips down Cours la Reine along the right bank of the river, into the Pont de l’Alma underpass.
And even on its seismologic Ring of Fire, Java shivers. In Galur, shrine-ornaments begin to jingle, small and delicate percussions as an overture to cataclysm. Nearly seven thousand people are awakened by the sound with slightly quizzical expressions on their faces for the last time, and the birds don’t know which way to fly in this grey wolf’s tail, just before the dawn. At 7.962° South by 110.458° East one of the two diastrophic combatants yields but an inch and all five million souls within their sixty mile-wide sumo circle are spontaneously and suddenly at prayer.
Suspended in an aura of averted ending, she finds herself in the kitchen of the woman with magnesium-flare hair. A blessedly warm flannel dabs away coagulated burgundy from her closed eye, at intervals sq
ueezed into a half-full enamel bowl with fugitive pink clouds diffusing in hot water. Perfectly sweet tea is set beside her on a beautifully frayed tablecloth, and at her ear the anciently accented voice continues its account of saints, and corners turned, and the impossibility of death.
He’s flying up Horsemarket and across the Mayorhold into Broad Street, horrors vanishing behind him, face first, washed with gold in the oncoming lights. He buzzes with adrenaline and luck past the Gala Casino on his left; keeps laughing to himself with the exhilaration of it all. Just before Regent Square, and without slowing, he takes the abbreviated turn for Grafton Street.
In chessboard chiaroscuro Freddy streams through empty premises, dragging a pennant smoke of faces over Cromwell Street and Fitzroy Terrace, bursting through the brickwork and into the path of the approaching traffic. Only in the headlight glare does he appreciate that it’s stopped raining.
Mick forgets exactly where his limbs are. In his faltering mind a hypnagogic limo disappears into the tunnel mouth, abruptly lurching to the left of the dual carriageway as Henri Paul loses control.