Hemispheres (19 page)

Come now, he says. You really must eat. Especially after Juan has gone to all the trouble of producing your meal for you.

Without warning I’m slammed down onto the concrete floor on my back. I’m gaping like a fish slapped on the dockside, my spine
bruised. Can’t move.

Open your mouth, he says, gently.

Something else begins pushing at my lips, nudging towards my teeth, something hard and metallic. A star explodes inside my
head, goes supernova, swallows the world in blue fire, and just as suddenly shrinks to a cold walnut. He has a cattle prod
in my mouth.

Eat him up, he says. There’s a good boy.

Another burst of energy, colder than the moon, and my jaw bounces around in rictus, in spasm after spasm. I can no longer
close my mouth. It sags open like a burst stomach.

That’s better. Feed him Juan.

The one called Juan mashes his shit into my idiotic, paralysed, sagging mouth, sniggering as he does it. Must be the best
entertainment he’s had in years. My tongue lolls as my mouth fills up, and when the glutinous material touches the back of
my throat the reflex kicks in
and I swallow. And then I’m vomiting, hot and sharp like desert sand being ripped from my body in waves. I could puke the
Sahara desert. Lie there doubled up, jack-knifing.

I’m starting to drift, like one of them sand dunes.
Yan
, the pylon. It comes from Hartlepool now, the power. The nuclear facility squatting like a concrete gnome on the estuary.
They think the pylons are frying the kids, giving them brain cancer.
Tean
, Kate Murphy. That was it. These numbers have an end, you see. They don’t wank on for ever like the integers. They only go
up to
jiggit
, twenty. If you get to
jiggit
there are no more.

There’s another squeal of electricity, this time in the side of my neck. My vision comes back and the room flashes into negative.
I see black faces and ghostly white darkness. A man holding a white wand. Black sparks of power dribble from it.

Get up, he says, the inside of his mouth glowing white like a phosphorescent cave.

I wait for the hands to haul me up again to my feet.

Deserters, he says.

Dave has really spilled the beans. Console myself with the fact that he doesn’t know where I hid the thermos.

Really, you should have gone home, the voice continues. Why did you have to come here?

I hear Juan clear his throat, and try to pinpoint him. Behind me, to the right again. Close. The other one is to the left.
He’s much quieter, much harder to find.

You know, now we are into the endgame, he says.

I look at him, for the first time. Moderate height, snowy white hair and grey skin. His eyes are large, with jet-black irises
and white pupils. Wormholes of light pour from his nostrils. He takes something from his breast pocket with a dark grey hand.
A cream-coloured cylinder. He snips one end off, then takes a lighter from his pocket. He puts the cigar in his mouth.

Just tell me who your contact is, he says. One name. Who were you
going to buy the drugs from? You can do it now and die painlessly, or we can stretch it out for an unbelievable long time,
and we can pump you full of antibiotics to keep you alive while we do it.

What drugs? I try to say. My voice formless in the dark.

He retrieves a lighter from his pocket and clicks it. There’s a black spark and a black flame appears, wavering, liquid like
ink. He snaps the lighter and the flame disappears. The end of the cigar is a black hole. He sucks on it contentedly and the
black hole crackles, growing stronger. I feel its gravity.

Charlie, he says. Colombian snow. Bogotá marching powder.

I choose this moment to slam my knee into his groin as hard as I can. A satisfying thud and as he starts to go down, groaning,
I turn and pound my right fist into the face of Juan. A squelching sound as his nose flattens and white blood jets into the
air and across my face. I turn for the other one but he’s already pulled a revolver and he rams the muzzle into my face. Yelling.
He wants me to kneel on the floor. Kicks my legs from under me, shoves the gun against my forehead and cocks it. The other
two are righting themselves, coming up from the floor. The third man still shouting. He’s going to shoot me. I lie very still
and wait for the supernova, for the black hole. It doesn’t come. Instead, they start kicking. I draw myself up into the foetal
position to protect my internal organs. They work me over, kidneys, face, knees and ankles. I notice somewhere here that my
vision has righted itself, that dark is dark and light is light. Dull pain, mounting like a tide that comes over the sea wall
and rushes towards the houses, sweeping away the cars, sweeping away houses, people clinging to flotsam. I’m tired of clinging.
I discharge myself into the water.

And Kate spills from my chest and I’m on top of her, lips and tongue miraculously springing to life and racing across her
breasts. I ram her into the tired grass. Her heels against my buttocks, teeth in my shoulder.

*

Yan-a-dick
, the town. A stamp collection wrecked on the estuary, sherds of brightly coloured roofs ripped along the river, pages rifling
in the constant wind, green fields in a thousand colours smeared across the sky. Matted flames of the sea. Coal, iron, steel,
chemicals, shipyards. People springing from the stubble fields where their fathers were sown and cut down and burned.

Tean-a-dick
, the demolition. The houses where we were born, the nests we lined with black trinkets. Ripped down in piles of rubble. Twelve
weeks. The Cape of Good Hope standing like a sentinel on the corner, almost alone. Concrete, rubble, brick, cinder, bulldozed
away like crumbs. Oh god oh god oh god, she shouts.

Tether-dick
, the sky, in thirteen shades of steel and glass and iron and concrete and chemicals and rain. And rain. The biggest thing
I ever saw, heavily muscled and kneading like a pair of buttocks. The sand and the sea and the fields and the roads glistening
in the wet weather, all bleeding into the sky. Blood dripping from my head and down to the clouds where it splashes in clots.

Mether-dick
, blood dripping from my head and down to the sky where it splashes in clots. No, that’s already happened. What is
mether-dick
?

Blood dripping from my head and down to the stars where it splashes in clots. I smell cigar smoke. Another lash of cold water
across my body. I start to shiver uncontrollably. Get him up again, says the voice. The oily aromas of cigar smoke and shit
mingle. I need a cigarette. That’s it. Cigarettes.

Mether-dick
, cigarettes. Fourteen left in the crumpled packet when I offered one to Kate. We were in her bed upstairs in the pub while
her dad lugged barrels in the cellar. She flicked ash at me, playfully. I looked at it, grey and dusty on my pale skin. Dabbed
some onto a fingertip and smeared it on her forehead. A star drawn from ash, against her brown skin.

A star drawn from ash, against her brown skin. She had a funny
cloak thing, dark green and rounded. I suppose it was some sort of sixties poncho. I put it around her naked shoulders. You
look like a lapwing, I said, a green plover. Unlike most girls, she knew what I was talking about. Plover is an old nickname
for a whore, she said. Did you know that? But I like them, I said. The wings are so round and soft, they hardly make a sound.
Like green owls in the daytime.

She reaches over and jabs the raw end of her cigarette into the side of my neck. Somebody else is pinning my arms behind me.
Pain rises up like the snout of a mole. My flesh is burning, like a tallow candle.

So, says Kate, in her sexiest voice. Are you going to tell me that name, or am I going to play some more join-the-dots?

I want to tell her that there isn’t any name. And I want to tell her that I’m sorry. About leaving her, not once but twice.
But the cigarette sears into my cheek. She keeps it pressed there while I scream.

Why do we have to play this game Yan? she says. You’re always the same. You have to follow your nose. I went through hell
when you left me, when we were eighteen. It took me three years to work you out, and when I’d finally done it, you came galloping
back from Belfast and I fell for you again.

She drags on the cigarette and blows the smoke into my face. I feel the caress across my eyeballs.

Shall we burn off your eyelashes? she says. I feel them scorching and shrivelling. Shame if we slipped. We could burn a hole
in your eyelid.

She stands there, framed in the stark light which pours from a single electric bulb above our heads. No doors or windows.
The floor is concrete, slippery with my own ordure. My blood and my piss.

Kate, I manage to say, imploring. And then I can’t say any more, because I don’t know the answer.

You have this streak of piss through you Yan, she says, laughing. Everyone thinks you’re the big man, because you’ve got the
brains and the looks and the reputation and the fucking blarney, and you’ve read all them books until they’re coming out your
jacksy. You’re everybody’s mate and nobody’s, aren’t you? But it all counts for nowt when you
disappear, like some migrating bird, with this electricity in your head that no-one else can hear. You can’t help it. It’s
just faulty wiring.

She kicks me, hard, in the groin and I double up with pain.

You’re going bald, by the way, she says. The thing is big man, you’re a fucking coward. You play at being married, you play
at being a father, but it’s not enough for you, is it? You probably think it takes courage to take off on a wing and a prayer.
But maybe it would have been braver to stay put. Sticking at our marriage, being there for Dan. Saying no to the wiring in
your head. That would have been real courage, and we could have done all that together, the three of us. But it’s okay. Me
and Danny are moving on without you now.

Tears are running down my face. I tell myself it’s because she’s burned my eyelids.

Anyway, a side issue, she smirks. Those drugs Yan, darling. Four foreigners turn up in an unregistered boat. You and Horsey
and Fat Dave and Stupid Joe. The four stooges. What are we supposed to think? Just tell us who your contact is?

It takes a moment for me to realize. Four of us.

Juan, give him a caning, she says.

Four of us. She steps back and another woman takes her place. I’ll be buggered if it isn’t big Janet from the Red Lion. She’s
wearing a cotton dress and a pastel cardigan.

You’re looking bonny Janet, I say.

She smiles, then takes a rubber truncheon from behind her back and smashes it into the side of my head. My eyes explode and
the room stretches sideways like an elastic band. I’m on the floor, shaking violently. She stands astride me, legs encased
in beige tights. She carries on whaling me with the truncheon. The room becomes still more attenuated.

Four of us. She doesn’t know about Fabián. They haven’t got Fabián.

Yan
, the pylon, walking out with a kit-bag on his shoulder.

Tean
, Kate Murphy, sitting alone in her room. Many-paned windows,
light flooding in from the enormous sky.

Tether
, the boyfriend, dead on the road with his face burned off.

Mether
, the river, jammed with silver fish, gaping for breath.

Pip
, the towers, falling in one graceful curve.

Lezar
, my father, kicking the legs out from under me and cocking a cigar against my head. My father, on the bed, gasping for breath.

Azar
, death. White wormholes from a man’s nostrils. Black flame from a lighter.

Catrah
, the cards. I’ll turn them over now love, she says. You have a gypsy look about you son. If I was a few years younger. She
flips them over, one by one. The hanged man. The hanged man. The hanged man. The hanged man. That looks fairly conclusive
then, you say.

Borna
, the magpies. They like to collect black things. Black jewellery in the nest. Whitby jet, like Queen Victoria. Hopping through
the hedgerows in spring flipping the naked chicks from the nests and swallowing them in one.

Dick
, the army. They like to collect black things. Rifles glittering in the black sun.

Yan-a-dick
, the town, sinking into the marshes.
Tean-a-dick
, the houses of Haverton Hill, sinking to their knees.
Tether-dick
, the sky, with thirteen ripped holes in its face.
Mether-dick
, the cigarette, burning a hole in my eyelid.

Bumfit
, the sheep. Straggling over the marshes with dirty shaggy fleeces hanging off them. Wild yellow eyes with a black slit at
the centre. They browse on the salty grass, on the mounds of rubble and nettles, on the angular towers and flare stacks and
refraction columns, on the bright river and the metallic sky, on the crumbling houses blasted by the breath of the North Sea,
on the metal flowers of the pylons and the high-voltage brambles coiling across the country. I imagine grabbing the greasy
wool of the belly, hoisting myself into the forest of fleece, white wires springing from the pink and bulging abdomen, ticks
and lice as big as birds, bulging with blood. I notice my hand grabbing a
tussock of nettles and wrenching it from the ground and feeling nothing. Kate is banging the back of her skull against the
ground.

Mr Thomas, my name is Colonel Barriga.

It’s the same mild-mannered voice as before. He sits on a chair in front of me. Look, he says. There is nothing extraordinary
about me. I’m just doing my job. I’ll go home in an hour and play with the children and bathe them and put them to bed. When
I was younger I excelled in swimming, so much so that my teacher once called me a true son of Poseidon. But I was never quite
good enough to reach the national team.

He chuckles with pleasure at the memory.

I look at Barriga. He is indeed, average. Average height and build, podgy around the stomach and thighs. Black hair, cut short
with a side parting. A round face with full lips, clean-shaven. Cigar smoke swirls around us, harsh and guttural.