He had fallen back onto the bed then, his body shutting down for a couple of seconds, the muscles and tendons which had never really been used before having to recharge. Even his lungs had begun to work, and he breathed oxygen for the first time, taking large gulps of air until he became acquainted with this new function and began breathing regularly.
As he lay there he sniffed the stale air, could smell what he somehow knew internally was a mixture of dust and decayed skin and hair and laundry detergent. He knew other things internally now too, as if a door to new information in his brain had just been opened.
Somewhere below him now, probably in the kitchen, his parents continued their argument, though there was less intensity now, less gargled and guttural shouting. He knew what they were arguing about. His father wanted to send Steven away for psychiatric help, while his mother wanted to just ignore it, pretend like the entire thing hadn"t happened. Eventually they would arrive to a decision and come to see him. And when they did, what would they find?
Their sona monstrosity, a crime against nature.
A zombie.
He shuddered at the thought, feeling a chill race through his soul, and found it both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. It was a feeling he"d never experienced before, and he wanted to feel it again. How many more feelings were there? How many more colors? He remembered the zombie mentioning something about smells and tastes. How many of those were there?
A gasp pulled him away from his thoughts.
He glanced down the stairs to find his parents standing at the bottom. Unlike Steven"s skin, which had become pale and smooth, theirs was decayed and brownish gray, their eyes and hair pitch black.
Steven"s mother had been the one who gasped. She held her hand to her mouth and stared up at him with wide black eyes. His father stood beside her, slowly shaking his head.
"I"m very disappointed in you," he said, his voice scratchy and rough. The sound of his words caused another shudder to pa.s.s through Steven"s body, though this one wasn"t as pleasing.
"Oh sweetie," his mother said. "What have you done?"
When Steven didn"t respond, his father said, "I have no choice. I have to call them."
He turned away and disappeared from Steven"s sight, leaving only his mother to stand there with her hand still to her mouth. She shook her head, her dull eyes expressing no emotionthough Steven thought that if she were alive they"d show sadness, maybe even tears.
She opened her mouth to speak. Steven expected to hear her gargled voice again, but nothing came out. She shook her head and waved him toward her.
He started down the steps, taking them one at a time, finding the sound his sneakers made on the wood pleasant in a strange sort of way. When he reached the landing his mother fell to her knees. She gripped his shoulders, wrapped her arms around him. Her body reeked of rot and decay and Steven tried to step out of the dead embrace.
"I"m so sorry," she said, holding onto him tightly. Her breath, he knew internally, smelled of rancid fish. "Your father"s calling the Hunters. They"ll be here any minute. Why would you do this? Didn"t we raise you properly? Didn"t we give you everything you ever needed? Why, Steven? Why?"
He stared into her dead eyes and tried to find something there, some kind of life. He had no answer for her and simply shook his head.
His father returned.
"They"ll be here soon, Steven. Make it easy on yourself and don"t try to fight them."
Body now trembling, he felt wetness underneath his arms and something churning in the pit of his stomach. His mother"s dead hands squeezed his shoulders briefly once more and he glanced back into her dry colorless face, into her black depthless eyes.
Her cracked lips moved, forming just one word, and though she didn"t use her damaged voice, he heard the word clearly in his mind: Run.
Steven hesitated. He glanced at his father and saw that his father had seen what just pa.s.sed between mother and son. His father"s black eyes became impossibly large. "No," he said, and started forward, and Steven backed out of his mother"s embrace, bolted for the door.
The first thing that struck him outside was the sunlight, and he had to pause, had to allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden brilliance. He lifted his face to the sky, closed his eyes, enjoyed the warmth for only an instant before he remembered he should be running. Opening his eyes, he saw that indeed the sky wasn"t gray but blue, lighter than his tee-shirt, speckled with white puffs of clouds, and all around him was greenin the trees, in the gra.s.s, even on some houses.
Scents wafted through the air, mixed scents his new internal mind picked out and pieced apart and gave names to: fresh gra.s.s, motor oil, dog s.h.i.t, dandelions.
Across the street, two dead children played in a front lawn. Steven had once known their names but they, much like his own parents, were now strangers to him. They"d been running around, using large plastic broadswords to play Henry the Hunter, neither noticing him until one paused and stared across the street, then said something to the other and pointed.
Two sets of wide dead eyes stared back at him.
The door behind him opened. He heard his mother"s voice, begging his father to stop, to please let her baby go. His father told her to shut up, that he would deal with her later. Then there was the sound of his father"s heavy footsteps on the porch, his father yelling at him to stop.
Steven ran.
The two children across the street saw him coming and screamed, their voices harsh and flat as they scrambled away.
He reached the street and paused, uncertain where to go next. He thought about the zombie from last night. It had been old, about Steven"s father"s age. How had it survived so many years?
Sunlight glinted off of something shiny down the street. It was an SUV, one that he had seen only hours before when it had brought him home. The Hunters were coming.
He turned and sprinted in the other direction, hearing shouts from houses where the dead inside saw him and cried out. Sweat ran down his face, as did tears, tears he now shed because he knew it was hopeless, that he wouldn"t outrun the Hunters, that he could never outrun them.
The street came to an end, a bright red stop sign signaling that the driver must either turn left or right. Beyond the bisecting street were trees and bushes and tall gra.s.s.
Steven continued forward.
He glanced back after he"d pa.s.sed a couple dozen trees, saw the Hunters back there, all spread out, all heading in his direction. Before him the woods stretched on for miles, seemingly endless, taunting him with the promise of freedom. He tried keeping his focus on what lay before him but he kept glancing back over his shoulder, each time finding the Hunters gaining more and more ground.
Steven ran, tears and sweat in his eyes, until suddenly there was no ground beneath him. A rut, a simple hole, and it twisted his ankle, caused him to fall.
He tried getting up but fell back down, his ankle denying him any support. He glanced back, saw that the Hunters were even closer.
Fresh tears came, forced by the painby real painby the realization that he was soon going to die, but also forced by a surreal form of happiness. He didn"t know how many minutes had pa.s.sed since his body had absorbed the life inside that cube, but he wouldn"t change it for anything, even if given the chance.
The sound of thunder grew stronger as the Hunters neared.
Steven tried getting up once more before falling back down. He looked around him for some kind of help but only saw the gra.s.s, the trees... and he noticed a bush he hadn"t seen before, a green bush covered with many small white and yellow flowers. Something inside him whispered they were honey-suckles, and without thinking he crawled the few yards to the bush and reached out, took one of the flowers from its branch and brought it to his nose, to his tongue.
The Hunters surrounded him, their broadswords drawn and ready. The lead Hunterthe one that had taken the zombie"s head only hours beforestepped forward.
Steven hardly noticed. The sweet pure scent and taste of the flower was more than anything he had ever wished for. Despite the pain, despite the tears, despite the knowledge of his impending death, he closed his eyes and tried to keep this moment fresh in his mind, tried to keep it with him forever.
Nowhere People.
GARY McMAHON.
The night seemed to press against my windscreen like a thick fluid as I drove towards the town centre, one eye on the radio recessed into the dashboard as I attempted to tune it to an all-night Jazz and Blues station. Charlie Parker"s horn pierced the bubble of stale air inside the cab, and I let myself lean back into the driver"s seat, the music washing over me and bringing calm to my mind.
I was tired: dog-tired. As the Beatles once said, it had been a hard day"s night. I was at the back end of a ten-hour shift, and my lower back was singing like a chorus of crippled choirboys from being locked into the same position for so long. These suicide shifts were killing me, but it was the only way to make any serious cash in the taxi game. And I needed real money more than ever now: after Jude"s birth, Tanya had gone part-time to enable her to look after our baby daughter, so I was the only major wage earner in the household.
Streetlights flashed past, blinking like sodium strobes before my weary eyes, and the night folk prowled the avenues looking for mischief. Low rent prost.i.tutes paraded the footpath outside the Mecca bingo hall; tired, overweight beat coppers watched them from shop doorways and ate chips from greasy bunched newspapers. Clubbers and pubbers staggered like somnambulists towards generic fast food outlets, craving empty calories to help them sleep the sleep of the p.i.s.sed.
The two-way radio in the cab belched static, then Claire"s deep growling voice cut in: "Karl... Karl, where are you? Number 27? Karl, dammit, come back!"
I smiled, lifted the plastic mouthpiece from its perch, and told her that I"d be picking up in ten minutes. This seemed to placate her, and she even told me the latest asylum seeker joke that was doing the rounds back at the depot. It was unsurprisingly crudevulgar, evenand I couldn"t be bothered to force a laugh. Claire called me a humorless b.a.s.t.a.r.d, then hopped off the line, leaving more of that empty ululating static to take her place.
Two girls who looked far too young to be out this late crossed the road without looking on the zebra crossing that suddenly appeared before me, causing me to slam on the car"s brakes. Their thin anemic faces slowly turned to look at me without really registering my presence, and I glimpsed a profound emptiness in their blank, l.u.s.terless eyes. One of them was mechanically pushing pieces of rolled up kebab into her lipstick-smeared mouth; the other was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. Both of them looked lost, half dead before the age of twenty. I thought of my own newborn daughter, and made a silent promise to myself that she would never end up like that, walking the streets at two a.m., cruising for randy drunks with money in their pockets. In less than an hour these two girls would be bending over in some grimy back alley, or sucking d.i.c.k in a cheap B&B along the Coast Road. It was just too d.a.m.ned depressing. I felt ice lock around my heart in a sculpted fist.
The girls reached the other side of the road, and a big Mercedes cruised up to the curb, the driver leaning out of the side window to whisper sour nothings from behind a cupped hand. The girls smiled dead smiles and climbed into the back seat, too-short skirts riding up over pallid thighs bereft of muscle tone. All that remained on the footpath when the car pulled away was the discarded kebab wrapper and some pale, dry sc.r.a.ps of meat.
There was a huge advertising h.o.a.rding stapled to the wall at the corner of Mylton Road and O"Reilly Street, selling rampant consumers some new brand of alcopop. Graffiti had been daubed across it in thick red dripping lines; I glanced at the slogan as I drove past it.
a.r.s.eylum seekers out! Kill em all!
The viciously droll message was unequivocal, fuelled by impotent rage and directionless tabloid-driven jingoism. The hatred behind the words was terrifying, bland and unfocused, ready to turn on anyone different from what was considered the norm. The people who had written the words operated under the a.s.sumption that all immigrants were money grabbing scam artists, even the honest ones. It was at once sickening and heartbreaking.
I thought of Jude once more, fearing for her future. I prayed that I was strong enough to educate her to the dangers of such narrow, uninformed thinking. Hoped that I was man enough for the daunting task that lay ahead. It dawned on me yet again that raising a child was the most difficult and risky undertaking of all: if you screwed it up, you were just adding to the dumb herd, producing another mindless follower. The enormity of it all made me want to stop the car and run into the night, screaming until my throat burned. But I drove on, heading towards my last pick-up of this harrowing shift. My final few quid before going home to flop lifelessly into bed alongside my sleeping wife.
The man was waiting by the curb outside the Pound Shop when I drew up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He seemed nervous, but I a.s.sumed that he was just riled at me for being late. He lifted a small brown hand and twitched a little half smile as I stopped the car, then jumped into the back seat, slamming the door behind him as if in an attempt to keep out the night.
"Sorry I"m late, pal. Bit of confusion back at base camp."
"S"okay, my friend. No problem." His accent was certainly foreign, but I couldn"t place where in the world he could be from. Asia? The Far East? My ignorance of such things truly knows no bounds.
"Where to, boss?"
"Wishwell, please. Palm Tree Way.
s.h.i.t. I could"ve done without a trip to that part of town at this hour. Wishwell was the worst estate in the borough, and the vermin who were housed there would still be up and about, fighting with each other, playing loud music on stolen stereos, smoking weed and drinking illegally imported French booze.
"Good night out?" I asked, making small talk.
"No, no. I"ve been working. Cleaning offices. I go home now, tend to family. Sleep."
So he worked the graveyard shift cleaning town centre offices: doing the jobs n.o.body else would do, just like so many other immigrants in this country. Oiling the hidden wheels of commerce. Paid s.h.i.tty wages under the countertax-free, but with no additional benefitsjust to enable him to feed and clothe his family. This hardworking man was exactly the type of person the graffiti on the h.o.a.rding had been aimed at: a man just trying to get by, to do right by his family. I had more in common with him than I did the sc.u.m who had painted the vitriol. I pitied him for living in Wishwell, but it was probably the only housing the council had offered.
"Tough shift, eh?" I glanced at him in the rearview mirror: small face, ever-blinking eyes, creased brown skin.
"Yes, mister. Just like you, I work hard to make something of myself and my family."
I took the quick route in an effort to save him a quid on the fare-down by the river, past the dark and abandoned shipyard and the flat-roofed clothing warehouses. The man had lapsed into silence. He sat staring out of the side window with those nervous blinking eyes, his thoughtful features bathed in a wash of sodium light from the lamps that lined the curb along the riverbank. I wondered again where he had come from, what he had given up to come here and feel safe. But was he really safe? I didn"t think so. Persecution comes in many forms.
I dropped him at the outskirts of Wishwell, refusing his offer of a tip and bidding him goodnight. He smiled at me, shook my hand and wished my family well. I watched him as he darted across the road, ducking into a narrow alley lined with battered green wheelybins behind a low block of flats. Tom Waits croaked near-tunelessly from the radio, and I reached down to let off the handbrake.
Long shadows detached themselves from some ragged bushes that overhung the mouth of the alley, slow moving but purposeful: three stooped figures, nothing more than dense silhouettes, drifted into the alley, following the man who"d just left my car.
There was something not quite right about the figures, and my internal alarm bell started ringing. They moved clumsily, without natural rhythm, and their limbs looked too slack, as if lacking any proper working joints. I opened the car door, set my foot on the curb. Listened. But there was only silence, underlain by the dry rustling of dead leaves and empty crisp packets in the gutters, and the usual distant estate sounds of ba.s.s heavy dance music, crying kids, shouting spouses.
I waited for roughly thirty seconds, and when nothing happened I closed the door and drove off into the night towards a promise of warmth and safety that could only be realized when at last I curled into my sleeping wife"s soft and welcoming back.
It was only when I saw the television news two days later that I realized I"d been expecting the report. A local asylum seeker, Jalal al-hakim, from Iraq, had gone missing. He had last been seen leaving the city centre offices he cleaned as part of a five-man crew at one-thirty a.m. on Sat.u.r.day morning. Police were treating his disappearance as suspicious; Mister al-hakim had only been in England for eight months, after fleeing persecution and torture in his own country. He was an outgoing, friendly, family man, liked by both his workmates and his employers, and had no known enemies.
Al-hakim"s face flashed up at me from the screen. It was a recent photograph, probably taken by his wife, in which he played with his two young daughters. He was laughing; he looked happy. But still a shadow seemed to loom over his small frame, shading his features.
My insides churned as if I had an ulcer, and my skin p.r.i.c.kled as if stung by nettles. I had been the last person to see this man before he"d vanished; I was a potential witness. So I rang the police without finishing my morning coffee and told them what little I knew, agreeing to go down to the station to make a statement later that morning. But still my conscience wasn"t clear: I had driven away after watching those shambling figures follow him down the alley. I felt ashamed, cowardly in an almost abstract kind of way, and desperate to make amends.
I left the house without telling Tanya about what had happened. She couldn"t help but notice my reticence, along with the fact that I was more withdrawn than usual, and stared a silent question at me as I kissed Jude goodbye. I shook my head, smiled sadly. She brushed her dry lips against my forehead, blew hot stale morning-breathe against my hairline, winked at me as I drew away and opened the front door.
I went to the police station in my lunch hour, not expecting much and receiving even less than that. It was fruitless. I informed a disinterested uniformed officer of what had happened that night, and about the shadowy figures I"d seen slinking into the alley; then I left, feeling utterly disillusioned. n.o.body cared about these people, not the public, the police, or the politicians. All they were was an election tool, a way of faking interest in the community. Local councilors would bleat on about asylum seekers and their attendant problems all day long, but when it came to caringactually doing somethingthey suddenly clammed up and found some more pressing business. It seemed that n.o.body wanted to get their hands dirty.
There was more graffiti visible on the flyover abutment behind the High Street on my way back to the depot: Get shot of immigrint s.h.i.t!
Charming. And these people thought they were so much better than everyone else? They couldn"t even spell in their own language, while the people they despised so much could speak it if not better then certainly more politely than these restless natives.
By the time I got back to the depot Claire was on a break. She was pouring herself a coffee as I walked in, and made me one with an air of faked irritation so I didn"t feel like I was getting special treatment. We sat at the chipped Formica table in the cramped office at the rear of the tiny building, and I told her about my visit to the police station.
"Are you really that surprised?" she asked me in a tone of mock incredulity, that broken gla.s.s growl of hers coming from somewhere down near her boots. "C"mon, Karl, n.o.body gives a s.h.i.t about anybody these days. It"s dog eat dog out there, and if you aren"t a consumer you just get consumed." She sipped at the awful coffee, her large bland face forming a grimace around the rim of the mug.
"I s"ppose you"re right," I relented, then blew on my own drink, watching with a faint nausea as the skin that the milk had formed on its surface rippled like an oil slick on a park pond. "I was just hoping for more, y"know?"
"And that"s what I like about you: you"re different. You give a s.h.i.t. But don"t let it go to your head, because I"ll deny ever saying it if it comes out." She smiled one of her rare sunny-day smiles, then went back to the coffee. I felt numb, empty. Ghost-like.
"Anyway," said Claire, disrupting my bleak thoughts and attempting to change the subject. "You heard the latest?"
I hadn"t, but knew that I was about to; Claire was the woman to see if you wanted to know what was going on in Scarbridge. She was better than the local newsmore up-to-date, and her sources never failed her.
"Which is what?" I asked, wondering if I"d soon regret it.
"Well, it seems that about four months ago half a dozen corpses went missing from the town morgue. Those kids who died from smoke inhalation in that warehouse fire down by the old Dock Road... the silly sods who set it alight while they were trying to rob it? Them. Their bodies. Stolen."
I glanced up at her, looking for any sign that this was one of her morbid little jokes. Her face was rigid, blank; she was telling the truth.
"f.u.c.k," I said quietly, placing my mug on the scarred tabletop. "Some people will steal anything."
She smiled; a sad, tired expression. "It was all hushed up by the authorities, of course. Too embarra.s.sing to let into the public domain. People are finding out though; they always do. Nothing stays buried for very long round here. Someone spoke to someone else after a few too many pints, and the news is breaking out like little fires all round the estates. Just like always."
Four months ago. Just about the same time that the attacks on immigrants had begun: foreign families being burned out of their low rent council housing, kids spat on at school, a pregnant woman pelted with fruit in the local supermarket, one or two people even going missing, just like al-hakim... there had even been a picket line outside one of the town"s three primary schools, the parents in the area refusing to allow a couple of Turkish children into the building. One of their fathers had been hospitalized when someone had thrown an engineering brick at his head. It was all so wrong... such a f.u.c.king mess.
I wondered if the incidents were linked: whether some right wing group was about to implicate the immigrant community in the theft of those boy"s bodies, laying claims to all kinds of voodoo and necrophilia. Breeding even more fear. More violence.
I didn"t want to think about where it all might end.
The chill early hours again; midweek in Scarbridge, when all the smart folk are tucked up in their beds, wrapped in sleeping yoga poses around their loved ones. I was returning to the depot from a drop-off in Newcastlea nice little earnerand decided on impulse to take a detour.
The urge to return to Wishwell came upon me unannounced. Now, with the aid of hindsight, I can put it down to shame, guilt, the need to do somethingto do anything. I didn"t know what I would do when I got there, but I did know that I had to go back to the mouth of that alley. To inspect the place where I"d dropped off al-hakim for his final truncated journey home.