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‘She’s a fucking cracker. And she’s been giving me the eye all night.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I was wondering … will you introduce us?’
Cal looked at Elroy’s panting eyes. ‘I think you’re too late,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘She went outside –’
Before Elroy could voice his irritation Cal felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned. It was Norman, the father of the bride.
‘A word, Cal, m’boy?’ he said, glancing across at Elroy.
‘I’ll catch you later,’ Elroy said, retreating in case Norman nabbed him too.
‘Are you enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes, Mr Kellaway.’
‘Less of this Mr Kellaway shit, Cal. Call me Norm.’
He poured a generous measure of whisky from the bottle he was armed with into Cal’s lager glass, then drew on his cigar.
‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘How long before I have to give my other little girl away? Don’t think I’m pushing, son. I’m not. But one bride in labour’s enough.’
Cal swilled the whisky around the bottom of his glass, hoping for a prompt from the poet. None came.
‘I’ve got a job for you at the works,’ Norm went on, unfazed by Cal’s silence. ‘I want to see my baby live in a little style. You’re a good lad, Cal. Her mother likes you a lot, and I always trust her judgment. So you think on it …’
He transferred the bottle to his cigar-wielding right hand, and reached into his jacket.
The gesture, innocent as it was, brought a chill of recognition. For an instant Cal was back in Rue Street, gazing into the enchanted cave of Shadwell’s jacket. But Kellaway had simpler gifts to give.
‘Have a cigar,’ he said, and went off to his duties as host.
2
Elroy picked up another can of beer from the bar then headed out into the garden in search of Loretta. The air was considerably cooler than inside, and as soon as it hit him he felt sick as a flea in a leper’s jock strap. He tossed the beer aside and headed towards the bottom of the garden, where he could throw up unseen.
The coloured lights stopped a few yards from the hall, where the cable petered out. Beyond was a welcoming darkness, which he plunged into. He was used to vomiting; a week in which his stomach didn’t rebel through some excess or other was poorly spent. He efficiently discharged the contents of his belly over a rhododendron bush, then turned his thoughts back to the lovely Loretta.
A little way from where he stood the leaf-shadow, or something concealed by it, moved. He peered more closely, trying to interpret what he saw, but there was not sufficient illumination to make sense of it. He heard a sigh however: a woman’s sigh.
There was a couple in the shelter of the tree, he decided, doing what darkness had been created to conceal. Perhaps it was Loretta, her skirt up and her knickers down. It would break his heart, but he had to see.
Very quietly, he advanced a couple of paces.
On his second step, something grazed his face. He stifled a cry of shock and put his hand up to find strands of matter in the air around his head. For some reason he thought of phlegm – cold, wet threads of phlegm – except that they moved against his flesh as if they were a part of something larger.
A heart-beat later this notion was confirmed, as the matter, which was adhering now to his legs and body, pulled him off his feet. He would have let out a cry, but the filthy stuff had already sealed up his lips. And then, as if this were not preposterous enough, he felt a chill around his lower belly. His trousers were being torn open. He started to fight like fury, but resistance was fruitless. There was a weight bearing down on his abdomen and hips, and he felt his manhood drawn up into a channel that might have been flesh, but that it was corpse cold.
Tears of panic blurred his vision, but he could see that the thing astride him had a human form. He could see no face, but the breasts were heavy the way he liked them, and though this was far from the scene he’d pictured with Loretta his lust ignited, his little length responding to the chilly ministrations of the body that contained him.
He raised his head slightly, wanting a better view of those sumptuous breasts, but in doing so he caught sight of another figure behind the first. She was the antithesis of the ripe, gleaming woman that rode him: a stained, wretched thing, with gaping holes in her body where cunt and mouth and navel should have been, so large the stars showed through from the other side.
He started to fight afresh, but his thrashings did nothing to slow his mistress’ rhythm. Despite his panic he felt the familiar tremor in his balls.
In his head half a dozen pictures collided, becoming one monstrous beauty: the ragged woman, a necklace of coloured lights hanging between her sister’s breasts, raised her skirts, and the mouth between her legs was Loretta’s mouth, flicking its tongue. He could not resist this pornography: his prick spat its load. He howled against the seal at his mouth. The pleasure was short, the pain that followed, agonizing.
‘What’s your fuckin’ problem?’ somebody said in the darkness. It took him a moment to realize that his cry for help had been heard. He opened his eyes. The silhouettes of the trees loomed over him, but that was all.
He started to shout again; not caring that he was lying in the muck with his trousers around his ankles. Just needing to know he was still in the land of the living –
3
The first glimpse Cal had of trouble was through the bottom of his glass, as he upped it to drain the last of Norman’s malt whisky. At the door two of the printers from the Kellaway factory, who were acting as bouncers for the night, were engaged in friendly conversation with a man in a well-cut suit. Laughing, the man glanced into the hall. It was Shadwell.
The jacket was closed and buttoned. There was no need, it seemed, for supernatural seductions; the Salesman was buying his entrance with charm alone. Even as Cal watched he patted one of the men on the shoulder as if they’d been bosom-buddies since childhood, and stepped inside.
Cal didn’t know whether to stay still and hope that the crowd would conceal him, or make a move to escape and so risk drawing the enemy’s attention. As it was he had no choice in the matter, A hand was over his, and at his side stood one of the aunts Geraldine had introduced him to.
‘So tell me,’ she said, apropos of nothing, ‘have you been to America?’
‘No,’ he said, looking away from her powdered face towards the Salesman. He was entering the hall with flawless confidence, bestowing smiles hither and thither. His appearance won admiring eyes on all sides. Somebody extended a hand to be shaken; another asked him what he was drinking. He played the crowd with ease, a smiling word offered to every ear, all the while his eyes ranging back and forth as he sought out his quarry.
As the distance between them narrowed Cal knew he couldn’t long avoid being seen. Claiming his hand from the grip of the aunt he headed off into the thickest pan of the crowd. A hubbub drew his attention to the far end of the hall, where he saw somebody – it looked to be Elroy – being carried in from the garden, his clothes in filthied disarray, his jaw slack. Nobody seemed much bothered by his condition – every gathering had its share of professional drunkards. There was laughter, and some disapproving looks, then a rapid return to jollification.
Cal glanced back over his shoulder. Where was Shadwell? Still close to the door, pressing the flesh like an aspirant politician? No; he’d moved. Cal scanned the room nervously. The noise and the dancing went on unabated, but now the sweating faces seemed a mite too hungry for happiness; the dancers only dancing because it put the world away for a little time. There was a desperation in this jamboree, and Shadwell knew how to exploit it, with his stale bonhomie and that air he pretended of one who’d walked with the great and the good.
Cal itched to get up onto a table and tell the revellers to stop their cavortings; to see for themselves how foolish their revels looked, and how dangerous the shark they’d invited into their midst.
But what would they do, when he’d shouted himself hoarse? Laugh behind their hands, and quietly remind each other that he had a madman’s blood in his veins?
He’d find no allies here. This was Shadwell’s territory. The safest thing would be to keep his head down, and negotiate a route to the door. Then get away, as far as possible as fast as possible.
He acted upon the plan immediately. Thanking God for the lack of light, he began to slip between the dancers, keeping his eyes peeled for the man with the coat of many colours.
There was a shout behind him. He glanced round, and through the milling figures caught sight of Elroy, who was thrashing about like an epileptic, yelling blue murder. Somebody was calling for a doctor.
Cal turned back towards the door, and the shark was suddenly at his side.
‘Calhoun.’ said Shadwell, soft and low. ‘Your father told me I’d find you here.’
Cal didn’t reply to Shadwell’s words, merely pretended he hadn’t heard. The Salesman wouldn’t dare do anything violent in such a crowd, surely, and he was safe from the man’s jacket as long as he kept his eyes off the lining.
‘Where are you going?’ Shadwell said, as Cal moved off. ‘I want a word with you’
Cal kept walking.
‘We can help each other …’
Somebody called Cal’s name, asking him if he knew what was wrong with Elroy. He shook his head, and forged on through the crowd towards the door. His plan was simple. Tell the bouncers to find Geraldine’s father, and have Shadwell thrown out.
‘… tell me where the carpet is,’ the Salesman was saying, ‘and I’ll make sure her sisters never get their hands on you.’ His manner was placatory. ‘I’ve no argument with you,’ he said. ‘I just want some information.’
‘I told you,’ said Cal, knowing even as he spoke that any appeal was a lost cause. ‘I don’t know where the carpet went.’
They were within a dozen yards of the vestibule now, and with every step they took Shadwell’s courtesy decayed further.
‘They’ll drain you dry,’ he warned. ‘Those sisters of hers. And I won’t be able to stop them, not once they’ve got their hands on you. They’re dead, and the dead don’t take discipline.’
‘Dead?’
‘Oh yes. She killed them herself, while the three of them were still in the womb. Strangled them with their own cords.’
True or not, the image was sickening. And more sickening still, the thought of the sisters’ touch. Cal tried to put both from his mind as he advanced, Shadwell still at his side. All pretence to negotiation had vanished; there were only threats now.
‘You’re a dead man. Mooney, if you don’t confess. I won’t lift a finger to help you –’
Cal was within hailing distance of the men.
He shouted across to them. They broke off their drinking, and turned in his direction.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘This man –’ Cal began, looking towards Shadwell.
But the Salesman had gone. In the space of seconds he’d left Cal’s side and melted into the crowd, an exit as skilful as his entrance.
‘Got some trouble?’ the bigger of the two men wanted to know.
Cal glanced back at the man, fumbling for words. There was no use his trying to explain, he decided.
‘No …’ he said, ‘… I’m all right. I just need some air.’
‘Too much to drink?’ said the other man, and stood aside to let Cal step out into the street.
It was chilly after the suffocation of the hall, but that was fine by Cal. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his head. Then, a familiar voice.
‘Do you want to go home?’
It was Geraldine. She was standing a short way from the door, a coat draped over her shoulders.
‘I’m all right,’ he told her. ‘Where’s your father?’
‘I don’t know. Why do you want him?’
‘There’s somebody in there who shouldn’t be,’ said Cal, crossing to where she stood. To his drunken gaze she seemed more glamorous than he’d ever seen her; eyes shining like dark gems.
‘Why don’t we walk together a little way?’ she said.
‘I have to speak to your father,’ he insisted, but she was already turning from him, laughing lightly. Before he could voice a protest she was away around the corner. He followed. There were a number of lamps not working along the street, and the silhouette he dogged was fitful. But she trailed her laughter still, and he went after it.
‘Where are you going?’ he wanted to know.
She only laughed again.
Above their heads the clouds were moving quickly, stars glimmering between, their fires too feeble to illuminate much below. They caught Cal’s eye for an instant, and when he looked back at Geraldine she was turning to him, making a sound somewhere between a sigh and a word.
The shadows that embraced her were dense, but they unfolded even as he watched, and what they revealed made his gut somersault. Geraldine’s face had dislodged somehow, her features running like heated wax. And now, as the facade fell away, he saw the woman beneath. Saw, and knew: the browless face, the joyless mouth. Who else but Immacolata?
He would have run then, but that he felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his temple, and the Salesman’s voice said:
‘Make a sound and it’s going to hurt.’
He kept his silence.
Shadwell gestured towards the black Mercedes that was parked at the next intersection.
‘Move,’ he said.
Cal had no choice, scarcely believing, even as he walked, that this scene was taking place on a street whose paving cracks he’d counted since he was old enough to know one from two.
He was ushered into the back of the car, separated from his captors by a partition of heavy glass. The door was locked. He was powerless. All he could do was watch the Salesman slide into the driver’s seat, and the woman get in beside.
There was little chance he’d be missed from the party, he knew, and littler chance still that anyone would come looking for him. It would simply be assumed that he’d tired of the festivities and headed off home. He was in the hands of the enemy, and helpless to do anything about it.
What would Mad Mooney do now, he wondered.
The question vexed him only a moment, before the answer came. Taking out the celebratory cigar Norman had given him, he leaned back in the leather seat, and lit up.
Good, said the poet; take what pleasure you can, while there’s still pleasure to be had. And breath to take it with.
V (#litres_trial_promo)
IN THE ARMS OF MAMA PUS (#litres_trial_promo)
n the haze of fear and cigar smoke he soon lost track of their route. His only clue to their whereabouts, when they finally came to a halt, was that the air smelt sharply of the river. Or rather, of the acreage of black mud that was exposed at low tide; expanses of muck which he’d had a terror of as a child. It wasn’t until he’d reached double figures that he’d been able to walk along Otterspool Promenade without an adult between him and the railings.
The Salesman ordered him from the car. He got out obediently – it was difficult not to be obedient with a gun in his face. Shadwell immediately snatched the cigar from Cal’s mouth, grinding it beneath his heel, then escorted him through a gate into a walled compound. Only now, as he laid eyes on the canyons of household refuse ahead did Cal realize where they’d brought him: the Municipal Rubbish Tip. In former years, acres of parkland had been built on the city’s detritus, but there was no longer the money to transform trash into lawns. Trash it remained. Its stench – the sweet and sour of rotting vegetable matter – even overpowered the smell of the river.
‘Stop,’ said Shadwell, when they reached a place that seemed in no way particular.
Cal looked round in the direction of the voice. He could see very little, but it seemed Shadwell had pocketed his gun. Seizing the instant, he began to run, not choosing any particular direction, merely seeking escape. He’d covered maybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister’s children. He was glad of the darkness; at least he couldn’t see their deformities. But he felt their limbs upon him; heard their teeth snapping at his neck.
They didn’t intend to devour him, however. At some cue he neither saw nor heard, their violence dwindled to mere bondage. He was held fast, his body so knotted up his joints creaked, while a terrible spectacle unfolded a few yards in front of him.
