DEATHLOOP (53 page)

“I’m past caring, but if you do die, I’d be soon to follow.”

“What about Clarissa? Where is Clarissa?” said Zack, disengaging from Sam and suddenly remembering.

“Helping Veronica at the gallery, she’ll be back soon,” he said, debating whether to hit Zack with more bad news, but Zack was off on another tack.

“It was me that told Gerald Rosenbloom that you’d been killed in a car crash all those years ago.”

“You think I don’t know that? Who the hell else would it have been? I gave up on him because of you.”

“Don’t lie! You played golf with him, Clarissa said.”

“Well of course I did, to piss you off, you tosser.”

“What would you have done, Sam, if I hadn’t broken that door down all those years ago?”

“God knows,” said Sam, who didn’t want to think about it.

“I beat up two guys to keep them away from you.”

“You never told me that.”

“Then there was Nick Mallik, but
why
were we like that?” said Zack, desperate to understand. “No one else was like that, so why us?” Zack shot over to the window and tried to open it. “I could fly home from this window, watch me…”

Sam grabbed Zack and pulled him away. “No you can’t mate, maybe you think you can fly but you can’t, trust me on this.”

“I can, I know I can.”

“Shut the fuck up about flying you dingbat! I’m warning you…” said Sam grabbing his cricket bat. “Go near those windows again and I’ll knock you out, and I mean it!”

“You think I’m making this up.”

“Only birds fly, mate,” said Sam, “and angels.”

A deafening silence fell between them, like a discord. Neither dared move, or speak or even breathe.

“And call me old fashioned,” said Sam, finally, “but I’d say your less than perfect past precluded that somehow.”

They shared a swift smile, but Sam could see that Zack was still grappling with the idea.

“Angels have wings, Sam, just like me.”

“There’s no such things as angels, mate.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I’ve got to get home. I need to sleep.”

“I can’t drive you,” said Sam, indicating the booze, “but I can call you a cab.”

“It would be quicker to fly,” said Zack.

“But not as safe,” said Sam, firmly.

Zack allowed Sam to get his transport organized and paid for, watching him closely as he spoke on the phone, drinking him in, knowing that he didn’t have long left to do this. Within a very short time the bell informed them that Zack’s driver was waiting outside. Sam walked with him to the door.

“You were the best thing in my life, Sam. Nothing else and no one else came near. Thanks for being you, mate, and for everything you’ve done.”

Fighting tears they embraced, and although Sam didn’t know this, Zack knew that they had embraced for the very last time.

As Zack got out of the cab at Claremont, his phone rang. His phone had been ringing incessantly since he’d left Creed Mill Bridge, but he couldn’t be bothered to answer it. When he was unsure where he lived or very much else he considered speaking to someone to find out, but he decided against it in the end in case it provided him with more trauma. He answered the call, just as Jason crossed over the street towards him.

“Veronica, are you okay?”

“I’ve been trying to call you,” she shouted back at him, “why the hell don’t you ever pick up! Do you know how worried I’ve been? Have you got any idea?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the gallery.”

“What the hell are you doing at the gallery?”

“It’s been broken into and everything’s been trashed,” she said, starting to cry. “It’s not just my work here, Zack…
how could she do this
?”

“Is Clarissa with you?”

“She left a little while ago.”

“Leave it, nothing you can do there now, come here,” he said, before ringing off.

“What’s wrong?” said Jason.

“Why are you still here?”

“I’ve packed everything up so I can move in.”

“Move in where?”

“Move in here of course, with you.”

“You can’t move in here, Jason, you can’t,” said Zack, suddenly so exhausted he thought he might keel over.

“Why not?”

“Because Veronica is moving in and she wants her own room, and there’s no space,” said Zack. “But look, when things quieten down, we’ll talk and I’ll find you somewhere, somewhere decent, I promise…”

“I want to live here with you.”

“Well you can’t, okay, you just can’t. Veronica wouldn’t allow it.”

There was a delay while he took this in, then something ignited in Jason and he started yelling. “Fucking streams of fucking pigs Angie brought to the house, and she said you’d had that too and you were so fucked up about it you didn’t even want to see me!”

Zack put his key into the lock and opened the door, when Jason pulled at his sleeve he turned on him and pushed him so hard he fell with a thump onto the pavement. Zack darted inside, slammed the door behind him and crossed to the lifts. When he looked back, Jason had gone.

At the gallery Veronica was locking up, acknowledging that it was a pointless exercise as there was nothing left to steal or to vandalize. As she set off along Puddlewell Lane, she saw Jason looking like he was coming to find her.

“Zack said you wouldn’t allow it.”

“Wouldn’t allow what?”

“You wouldn’t allow me to move in to Claremont.”

“Well… I don’t know if the flat is quite big enough for all of us.”

“I should come first, not you,” he said. “I’m his son, I’m Angie’s boy.”

Veronica gazed at him, barely comprehending. “What?”

“She told me that he wouldn’t want anything to do with me, and he still doesn’t, even though he’s my Dad. Tell him I can move in, phone him now, tell him,” said Jason, with a dazed calm.

“I’ll speak to him and we’ll give you a call, but not just now, we’ve both had quite a rough day,” she said, fumbling in her pocket for her phone that had just started ringing.

“
Had a rough day?
” he said, snatching her phone out of her hand and chucking it hard against a wall. “
Had a rough day? You don’t know what a rough day is!
”

As soon as Zack had closed his door he felt uneasy. Although he had no desire to get caught up in another confrontation with Jason, he was worried for Veronica. It was after midnight and Puddlewell Lane would be deserted at this time. He should have told her to stay where she was, that he would come over and bring her back. Or he should at least have sent a cab. He tried phoning but she didn’t pick up, and that made him even more uneasy.

Veronica was trying to get past Jason but he was barring her way and was in her face again, pushing her.

“Please, Jason, don’t do this… you’re frightening me…”

“Now you know what it’s like. I’ve been frightened just about every day of my bastard fucked up life!”

“Please, Jason, don’t cry…” said Veronica, putting a hand up to his face, touching his tears.

In answer to Veronica’s show of compassion Jason pulled out a knife from his pocket and plunged it into her without a second thought, the blade slicing through her thin top and through her soft flesh with ease. He pulled it out again as she screamed and fell forward, so he stabbed her in the back this time, once, twice, enjoying the sensation, satisfied that this was the right thing to do. After all, Veronica would no longer need a room in Claremont if she were dead.

When Zack appeared at the top of Puddlewell Lane he stopped briefly when he saw the slumped body right outside the gallery, then he shot forwards frantic to reach her, grabbing Veronica, turning her over, his hands already wet with blood.

“Oh Jesus Christ… no…”

Then from the shadows, Jason loomed up. “She won’t need the room in your flat no more now she’s dead, so I’ll have it. You can give it to me.”

Zack turned to find the voice, straightened up, and flew at him, grabbing Jason’s head he hit it against the wall with a hollow clump. Jason made one movement in reply to this and one movement only, and that was to bring the knife up and to stab Zack in the neck so deeply and so firmly he didn’t even consider pulling it out again, it would have caused him too much aggravation. It was a good knife, a sharp knife, but he would just have to leave it behind sticking out of his father’s neck and get himself a new one - there was nothing else for it.

Jason strolled away, turning for a moment at the top of the street, watching as Zack staggered, then sagged, then fell onto all fours, only then did Jason turn off along the main road and out of sight.

Zack’s arms kept buckling as he crawled off to find help so it was a slow journey to the end of Puddlewell Lane, but as he got there his knees gave way and he sank flat on his face. A couple waiting at a bus stop saw him almost at the same time and after a hesitation came over. He recognized them straight away. The young man made a call on his phone as the girl who jumped from the roof of Jericho Mansions cradled Zack’s head in her lap.

“I think I know this guy,” Zack heard the young man say as his eyes were starting to close, “I’m sure I do.”

It was then that Zack saw all the deaths again, but this time he saw other things as well.

The girl’s diary that fell from her bag in Brunswick Street, the newspaper sticking out of the man’s pocket in The Mango Tree, the registration number of the lorry in Upper Street, the t shirt of the boy behind the cab office advertising dates of a pop tour, the calendar on the wall in the office where the nurse died, the date and time on the wrist watch of the woman who fell out of the car in Stoke Newington, and the date of manufacture on the side of the railway engine following the crash, all of them documenting days and months and years hence, years into the future.

Zack felt no pain now as his life force rushed out through his head, sloughing off the dead weight of his body at the same time, released from the cumbersome carcass, weightless, without breath, and without form. He recognized this feeling, this was how he felt each time he came across the dead and the dying but the sensation had no fear for him now.

It was his soul that drove him and in that moment he knew so many things. He knew that in his most recent life, the one just ended, he had taken more shaky steps towards enlightenment, but he also knew there were many lives and many deaths to go. He also understood those golden pathways as they spread out into the future hundreds of years hence, and he could see a goal there too, a twinkling blur of light that seemed to obscure his head, his face, a vision of who he used to be and would be again. It was our purpose to reach that state and here he was, one death closer.

There was no avuncular figure waiting for him to judge his frailties and to absolve him, no judgement day, but despite feeling part of a gigantic soup of souls, he was acutely aware of a singular intelligence in attendance. It was separate and also as one, so fluid it was actually anything it wanted to be. He knew instinctively that whatever or whoever this was they could call up every thought that he had ever had and every breath that he had ever taken. (This presence had always been there but it took his death for him to sense it.)

He knew now if he had ever doubted it, that the human race needed a measure of ego to survive but in death it had no role to play. In each life the erosion of this sense of self would be as slow as if a butterfly wing had worked away at it, gradually dulling its sharp corner. His ego had been jettisoned moments ago and he was glad to be rid of it, because he saw now how it had held him back, preventing him from what really mattered – an understanding of creation, the human condition and the relief of suffering.

Zack looked back at his life and saw it as a patchwork landscape of fields viewed from the air. Each field was many sided and each and every decision he made was a lifting up of one side, all the other sides remaining where they were, the discarded choices. Each side he lifted up brought about another field underneath it and another endless list of possibilities, on and on. He knew now that life consisted simply of choices we made.

Zack knew his dying task now, and perhaps others at some historic point had sensed this task too and given it a name, because others would call him The Angel of Death. Not the ‘grim reaper’, the mythical personification of our fear of death, but a special envoy pulling people clear of pain and suffering, cutting through the dread of death, the giving up of a much loved existence and escorting them through no man’s land into the next dimension.

He had seen himself during the regression carrying out this task with the old man many deaths ago and his memory of it had been enough to herald chaos. This was the ultimate piece of classified information that had tangled itself up in his real life until the moment when Jason put an end to it. And like many myths surrounding our understanding of death, the humanised image of an angel was far removed from what he now sensed he actually was. There were no wings, no flowing robes, but a liberated potent energy that was him absolutely and always would be, Zack Fortune eternally.

His suffering as a child he had handed down, not from ignorance, but in thrall to his sense of self he had swept others aside and trampled all over them for his own ends. These were the actions of those new souls who still knew nothing so just as he had said in life ‘I should have known better’, he didn’t, but maybe next time he would.

His abandonment of Angie and of Jason had the effect of ending his life, but that had been his decision too and no one else’s. He had picked up the wrong side of that particular field and here he was dead at 39 because of it. He knew at that moment that every side of every field we pick up meant something and was a force in itself, and those decisions like tennis balls thrown against a wall rebounded and had their own particular consequence, nothing we ever did was in isolation.

Zack also knew that everything he had learnt in the last few moments would not travel back with him to his new life whenever that was – years or centuries ahead. All this was for him to find out for himself in his next life, he would unlearn all this in birth. This life had been another step on the ladder, another outpost towards true enlightenment – our quest. He still had a journey to make, he wasn’t there yet, this was an interim stage, a stepping stone to another place. He stood in this ante chamber waiting, waiting for an access point, waiting for his final release.