Ink (8 page)

The Jack in us says, no.

Well, what it says is…

Fuck that shit.

Jack dances out across the stage.

“Come, all you women who left the battlements of play to follow me far from your foreign homes, to revel, to run riot by my side and be my company, my merry band. March round the royal halls of Pierrot, lift up the cymbals from your native land, up to the skies, and clash them, crash them against the walls, until this town of Pantaloon's decides to open up its eyes.”

He stops to glance at me, offstage.

‘As for myself,” says Jack, giving a sharp and toothy grin and fondling the veins carved in his wooden wand, each snicking inch of him a Harlequin, “I think I'll head up to the hills,” he says, “to join the dance.”

He lifts the wooden wand up to his lips and, with a lick of them before beginning, gives an eerie toot, this twinkling-eyed pied piper with his somewhat phallic flute. He skips offstage, playing his tune.

And that's my cue.

“From distant mount of timeless ashes, we run with the spirit of laughter. All our work becomes a joy, our weariness so sweet, when it's a song for Harlequin! Who can stand in our way? Who in their house can stay? Shift! Shift, I say. Or hush. Let every lip be shushed in solemn silence while we raise a hymn to Harlequin.”

I sing, wearing a dress again, as ever, lipstick, rouge and eyeshadow, playing the Chorus to Jack's hero, Joey's villain; even Guy and Don at least get to perform with trousers on. Not me, though. No, apparently my rosy cheeks and cherub lips are much too saucy sweet to play a Pantaloon or Scaramouche.

‘And then, of course,” says Guy backstage before the show, “there's those long lashes over your doe eyes that flutter in the hearts of all who see them. Thomas, my dear boy, how could you
not be
Chorus, kouros, darling kore of our comedies?”

Harrumph.

——

So I walk out onto the stage in soft white silk, sheening and sleek and flowing, blowing in the gentle breeze, a slim-hipped maiden—with an angel's voice, I'm told.

“Let us begin,” I sing, “within the secret sanctum of the curates of the holy cave where every day is born, where dancers with their crested helms pound for our sensual delight the ox-hide drum, building wild rhythm into the rapture of their shouts of song, and wind round it the sweet sound of the flute.”

Jack's air floats in from offstage, distant and soft but fluttering, quick as a darting swallow's wings between the beats of Don's palms on his doumbek, Joey on the bongos.

“Now satyrs steal it for their own,” I sing, “to play in dances in triennial feasts which lift the heart of Harlequin.”

The Duke looks unimpressed but the Princess is smiling.

‘And who is Harlequin?” I sing.

Quiet and gentle, genteel as the priciest courtesan, I reach out to the audience an open hand, an offering, a question. The Duke leans forward in his seat, chin on his fist. The Princess cocks her head, a vague and dreamy look on her face.

“Before his time,” I sing, “this bastard boy was born in cross-fire hurricane when lightning flashed, flew from a storm god's hand and lashed his mother in her pain, to strip her of her life. Sooth, son of crow or corn, however, found the child a womb within his thigh, fastened it shut with golden safety pins, to hide him from the Queen of Heaven's eyes. And when the Fates had fully formed this horny child, he brought him forth and crowned him with a wreath of wild and writhing snakes just as his followers now wear. We hunt these serpents everywhere to weave among our hair” [I sing it breathy like it is sheer ecstasy] “to be like Harlequin.”

Oh, but there's no one quite like Jack, I think.

“And that, mis amigos, is the subject of tonight's call-in. Empires and their enemies. Did the sun set on the Great Brutish Empire or is it just behind a cloud? Who's to blame and who's to flame? Is anarcho-terrorism too extreme even if we're living in a fascist regime? So give me a call if you got something to say. This is Deep Dark Don Coyote, getting down till dawn on the
astral airwaves. You can wear your tinfoil hat, you can rip out all your fillings, but you can't stop the sound of the suburban subconscious.”

We look up at the concrete wall of the Rookery, the jumble of roofs behind, the tower rising, but the voice comes from higher still. From the fiery clouds? From somewhere high above them?

“So for all you sleepers just awaiting to awake, oh yeah, for all you would-be enemies of the state, here is the late great Lord of Lips himself, with a song dedicated to the man of the hour, our blachshirt-thumpin, orgone-pumpin, lumpen-humpin Jumpin Jack Flash…”

Our metaphysique stabilizes, a quicksilver shimmer into flesh, flesh enough that as we step onto the bridge some sensor trips; four floodlights pin us in a cross-flash. A sentry, in armor longcoat swirled with swaths of camouflage flickering patchwork shades of khakis, desert sand and jungle green, rock grays and icy whites, lowers his chi-lance toward us. A shining silvery steel conflation of crossbow, rifle, spear and staff, like a six-foot retrofitted crucifix, an angel's sword of fire, the chi-lance gleams white in the night like the little round nightshades through which he scrutinizes us.

We wonder why you fill your dreams of life with sentries, wars, heroes and villains, but we begin to understand, we think. You are afraid of us, afraid of the dark and of the fire also. We are only what you make us but… it makes more sense as the skinsuit tightens round us.

“Rook or… pawn?” says the sentry through his air filter. The methane and sulfur stench of the scar of river underneath the bridge does not concern us—we smell psychology more than chemistry—but it must smell rank to him.

Behind the man, the gates of the Rookery rise on the other side of the bridge, a sledgehammered hole in a concrete wall that speaks of Berlin and Jerusalem, gulags and ghettos—our goal. Beyond is the place where Jack belongs, where
we
belong.

The sentry is in our way.

“Jesus,” he says. “Who… or
what
the fuck are you?”

We stop and hunker down, sniff at the air. He reeks of slow sordid solidity. We grin a glittering of white, a constellation of teeth.

“The spy who came in from the chaos,” we say.

We catch an imaginary firefly between thumb and forefinger, study it, let it go. Out in the Hinter, the firefly would have flicked into existence at our whim; here there are rules of sorts, rough physics lacing the anarchist metaphysics of the Vellum. We feel a shiver of self slither down our back: existence. We feel it close now.

“Who are we?” we ask the world.

We feel it close, fluttering crows of thought and memory, black wings of our identity. Me me me me me.

“I'll ask the questions, mate. Just don't you fucking move.”

We look up at the sky…

I
look up at the sky as a wireliner steams overhead, its Cavor-Reich ray tanks luminous blue-green in the night sky. I'll be fucked: it's Kentigern. It's 1999. I'm back, I'm—

“
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ by the Rolling Stones, and tonight's topic, for those of you who just tuned in, is just exactly that: the Angel Assassin, Public Enemy Number One. Is he a gas, gas, gas and, if so, are we talking oxygen mask or hydrogen bomb?”

His chi-lance aimed steady with one hand, the guard unclips a mobile from his shoulder with his other hand and flips it open to call back to base. I smell soldier on him, dead dog. Me no likee.

“So tell me what you think, my friends; I'll be right here through the wee hours. The Powers That Be might try to blast me from the sky, but there's no reason to be scared. Oh, no. They seek us here, they seek us there; they'll never find the pirate's lair. Yes, this is Mad Bad Don Coyote, cruising high over the city in the airship
Lollipop,
coming out over the ether to you dreamers of the city, and just waiting for your calls. So until my psychic switchboard starts to light up like a ladyboy's boudoir, here's another little number for a city in slumber. This is the Iguana of Pop and I Wanna Be Your Dog.’ “

“Rrrrruff!” I say.

And pounce.

Jack leaps from backstage onto the roof of our ramshackle wagon, to dance above it all, an elvish dervish, impish sprite.

“Happy is the man initiated to his mysteries,” I sing, “his life made holy, heart and soul in unity—in ritual, purity—in revelry upon the hills. A witness to the rites of mighty mother nature, crowned with ivy, flaunting his staff, he gives his reverence to Harlequin.”

I pick the Princess as my audience. The Duke's a philistine, it's clear; he has that look upon his face that says he doesn't like his entertainment weird, that says all actors are, in his opinion, queer. I sing to her.

“Come, come, dance in delirium! He has come home, down from a frozen
mountain to these broad and burning streets, hotter than hell, the child of Sooth, spirit of revel and rapture, Harlequin!”

“Come on,” says Jack. “Ow.”

“Well, get off,” I hiss. “We don't have time.”

I stagger as his arm hooks round my waist, pulling me backward, grab his pinky, bend it back.

‘Ah! Fucking—”

Wriggling free, I shush him, nod out at the hall filling with courtiers now, out past the screens that mask the backstage and the wings of our jerry-rigged theater. Joey sticks his head out of the wagon door, looking like some mad Japanese tranny with his whiteface on.

‘Are you two fucking ready?”

“Twenty-four seven,” says Jack and grabs my hand. “Come on,” he says.

And following him, hopping, trying to stay upright as he drags me off against my weak will, I end up behind the wagon, back pressed into wood, my hands cupping his ass, my lips against his throat.

“We've got to get changed anyway,” he says, hands loosening my belt.

Jack blows his flute, whirling and twirling, birling with the tune itself. I turn to sing for him.

“Where is there more delight than in the hills, where milk and wine and streams of luscious honey flow out of the earth, and incense billows, where a man wrapped in his robe of fawnskin can fall out of all the revel and the riot, sinking to the ground to rest?”

I take a breath.

“Or better still when the wild hunt roars on, with him right in its midst, hair tossing in the wind, a blazing torch of pine held in his hand, hounding the goat, to drink its blood, to feast on raw flesh ripped from its red flanks? And just to crown the revelry, he raises his voice high, exulting with a cry of lo, lo, as a man possessed, ecstatic, as a Harlequin.”

I take a breath. Then another, short and sharp, mouth open like I'm catching rain. His hair between my fingers and his nails sharp in my flesh. You cunt, I think, try not to laugh, to gasp, as his hand cups my balls and wraps—a blazing torch of pine—and his mouth wet and soft and me—right in its midst—as he leans in to—feast on raw flesh—take it all the way and—lo, lo—drink its— lo, lo—oh, you fucking bastard, Jack …

I take a breath, a long and deep one. Let it out.

I let my fingers run out of his hair and down his cheeks as he leans back, looks up at me, limbers up out of his squat, grinning with wicked pride.
Enjoy?

“Delirium,” I say.

Crouching, I run my fingers through the grass beneath me—valley grass, park grass, thick moist stalks of sanitized greenbelt nature, heavy with the predawn dew. Somehow the park, even if it has gone wild, seems like an artifice, just another barrier to keep the dissidents of the Rookery within their enclave. The smell of latter-day fops in leather frock coats, maidens in PVC corsets, lingers among the statuary overgrown with brambles. Fucking Goths in flouncy white shirts, top hats and canes for swiping at the grubby little urchins in the street, coming here to thrill at the louring closeness of the Rookery. Children of the Iron Lady, New Romantics, New Victorians rank with puritan prurience, playing at decadence, while the factories, the airshipyards, the adamantium works and or-gone refineries lie dead and broken. Fuck that shit. Cravats instead of neckties? Real rebellious.

I nip off a blade of grass with thumb and forefinger, flick it away, and flex my fingers as if playing a flute. I clench my hand into a fist and snap my fingers. Threads, I think. Threads and toys.

I prise the chi-lance from the sentry's cold dead grip, its feline buzz a purr so sensual soft I feel it in my boner. Nice. I swing the weapon up and blast the floodlights to a shower of sparks. OK, so I do admit a part of me is hoping that I haven't been a little rash, that Dead Dog here
was
actually militia or SS, some Circus goon watching the Rookery for gypo raiding parties out to rob the banks and bungalows of the bourgeoisie. He
might
just have been Thieves Guild, stationed here to stop the blackshirt spooks forever trying to sneak inside, but… it's not
that
likely, honest. Fuck it, I think. The night is young and so am I. Can't blame a boy for being keen.

I strip the longcoat off the body, flip it round and over and on with a flourish of flap—an agent needs cover, after all—but I leave the corpse his clothes for decency, and because the stench of his psychic sweat on them might confuse me, what with the skinsuit still a little ruffled and riding wrong on me like a boyfriend's underwear shaped to the snook of another's nooks. I don't have the most coherent identity at the best of times, you know. As I stretch into a stance,

I feel my body rippling like an acid vision, like hot air shimmers over tarmac in the summer sun.

I trace the scar of contradictory identities on my chest. So many pasts, so little space to fit them all. Jack Flash who went over the top in 1919, gunned down by the Bosch on the fields of Flanders. Jack Flash of 1939, scourge of the Futurists, hurtling in a blasted Lancaster down into Dresden's furnace. Punk rock icon, flyboy of the Gulf Wars, Jack Flash—oh, this one feels peachy: Jack Flash who was here in ‘69, helping the Sexual Revolution along with orgone bombs aimed at key members of the old-boy network. Yes. We won that one, I think, taking them right back to their jolly days as public schoolboys rutting in the dormitory—got them all so horny for a good rogering that they just had to legalize their own perversions. So now all the fairies in the villages get to fly their rainbow flag from shops and bars—hell, it makes them easier to firebomb—and they get to wear their shaved heads and pink triangle badges, wear them with pride.