Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (18 page)

CS: But their tongues? That must have . . .

MH: Can’t see that impressing the cops either. Just a way to induce them to pack a straight jacket. Besides, if I mentioned finding their tongues . . . I’d been on a steady drunk trying to bury that detail, hoping I was just losing my shit.

CS: So when did you next see Claire and Myra?

MH: Never again. I think the night they came home from the doctor’s was the last time I really saw them.

CS: Matthew, the chronology we’ve established shows the three of you were in that apartment for almost two days before we . . .

MH: Before you decided to bust into my place and stop me from finishing my work? Listen, chief, this is hard enough to talk about. So let me lay it out for you without all of your interjections and then we can clear up your questions later.

CS: [Long pause.]

MH: That’s more like it. So what I’m saying is that I saw Claire and Myra again, but they sure as shit weren’t my Claire and Myra. At some point that night I’d finished my bottle and given up on my phone crusade. I remember thinking, “She finally left me.” And I remember feeling so relieved. No one would expect anything from me after that, you know? I’d cop some menial job, enough to service a studio apartment and child support. I’d push for a few weekends a month with Myra, just enough to not feel guilty when I show some stripper a picture of my kid. I think I’d been waiting for a long time for a chance to fall apart.

CS: Matthew, I need to know more about your wife and child, and time is a factor. We have a staff psychologist you can speak with later if you need to get more familial issues off of your chest.

MH: Courtesy is a short-lived thing around here, huh, chief? All right then, shitbird . . . So I passed out on the couch, if you can believe it. Noble. Noble guy. And when I woke up they were sitting at the foot of the couch, both of them, very quietly and . . . holy shit . . . and Claire was nursing Myra, and her head was tilted, and she was staring across the room at nothing, like she was back on Paxil, and they both had those goddamn seaweed eyes. And Claire had both of her breasts out and the one that wasn’t in Myra’s mouth was . . . it was kind of lumpy, like it had been stuffed with tapioca, and the nipple looked raw, just red meat raw, with these blisters around it, some popped, some filled up with the same dark green that was in her eyes, and . . .

CS: Hold on for a moment please, Matthew.

SEE SEPARATE DOCUMENT INSERT RE: Confirmation of multiple gender-specific intra-species transmission methods as seen in CASE: F-DPD0674. Student population under Sector 6 Quarantine should immediately be grouped same sex for confirmation/testing of all fluids for presence of concurrent microparasites.

CS: Okay, we’re back, Matthew.

MH: [Garbled/indistinct vulgarity.] My tongue is starting to feel numb. [Sound of coughing/spitting]. Aw, Christ, chief.

CS: I’d suggest drinking some water. We need you to finish your account.

MH: Yeah, well . . . suggest in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first. [Sound of laughter/sound of gulping/sound of empty bottle set down on table.] What you have to understand is that I thought I was dreaming, seeing Claire and Myra like that. Between the guilt and the hooch, that kind of nightmare fits right in. But then Claire put one of her bony bird hands on my ankle and she turned toward me and smiled. And I swear to God, these two wiry antennae uncurled from in between her teeth and started swaying in the air. So of course I lost my shit. I rolled onto my side and chucked out my guts on the shag carpet, and it’s just bile and bourbon and I get that post-puke rush where things feel okay for a moment and I’m thinking I’m awake now and then I turn back towards Claire. [Long pause] She’s still smiling at me and this voice comes out of her mouth and says, “Empty. Feed.” And she’s got her other breast cupped and I swear it’s dribbling this shit like fucking wheat grass juice. [Pause] And Myra . . . Myra pulls off of the other breast, or at least her lips move away, but there’s something else pushing out of her mouth, something with those same feelers wiggling, and it’s latched on to Claire, right on her tit, and it’s got these two tiny claws pinched on and its body is pulsing and hunching, and these plates on its back are clicking together and I can see through this thing’s belly, where the skin is clear and its guts are filling up green. And Myra’s eyes look almost black, but I can still tell they’re rolling back in her head . . .

CS: Claire could speak?

MH: They both could. But Myra . . . she didn’t have any words yet, so she would smile and her lips would pull back, but all that came out . . . Have you ever seen that footage of dolphins being massacred in Japan? And Claire’s voice was different. There was a lisp, like her mouth was too full, and there was a sort of hissing to it, like cricket legs or . . . [Pause] And the smell that came from them filled up the room. It was like being stuck in the dumpster behind a seafood wholesaler on a hundred degree day. Made me throw up again. 

CS: So why didn’t you call 911?

MH: Are you listening to me, chief? This strikes you as a rational response fucking situation? I had no bearings. I asked Claire a question, thinking that this time she’d give me a normal answer in her old, sweet voice and I’d be all the way awake, but it came out with no authority and just made me feel smaller and detached and more alone. But I told her I was worried and that I wondered where she was yesterday and she smiled again . . . I’m thinking that’s the only way the thing could move around in there . . . and all she says is, “Work. Feeding.” And I say, “You were at the daycare?” She nods and says, “Feeding. Growing. Most will be born.” Then she looks down at Myra, and her nose curls up like she’s disgusted, and she says, “This one is dying. This one is too small.” [Long pause/sound of soft crying.]

CS: Matthew, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But the more detail . . . 

MH: Details, chief? Go fuck yourself. I did what I did. I tried to save them. I tried to fix it. To fix them before anybody would have to know . . . But it was too late. I could barely stand, but Claire was always pretty frail, and this fucking bug thing had wiped her out. So I tried to help her first and it wasn’t too difficult to get her hands belted behind her, but that thing . . . that thing had teeth or mandibles or whatever and Claire started to shake and even with all the lamps in the room turned on my head kept making a shadow over her face and Myra was squealing and stomping her heels down where I left her on the carpet and I couldn’t tell where the thing in Claire’s mouth ended and the rest of her tongue began and when I cut in with the box knife it started bleeding so bad . . . But for just a moment Claire was looking straight at me, and even with the green lace it looked like her old eyes and then she spit right in my face. Right in my face, and she meant it. And her mouth was half-filled, and I noticed the blood from the thing and my wife wouldn’t quite mix, so there’s your details, chief. Then her lips pulled back and the eyes were still Claire’s eyes and she said, “You did this to us.” 

CS: Matthew, she . . .

MH: She was right. She was right. Even after I managed to finish cutting through, and I’d pulled the goddamn thing out of her face and smashed it under my foot . . . You want more details? The shell of the thing started changing colors and it hissed and sprayed a yellow mist out of its mouth after I set it on the floor. What the fuck does that? Even after I got the thing out of Claire she still had her eyes trained on me, just bullet-eyes, and she couldn’t have hated me any more. And I couldn’t fix her, because she was already weak and I don’t think she could stop from choking on all that blood. But I thought that Myra . . . [Long pause.]

CS: You didn’t try to remove the “crawler?”

MH: I didn’t want her to bleed like Claire. So I thought if I could just kill the bug that maybe it would just detach and . . . and I was thinking of how they cook lobsters, and I tried to keep the water in a tin can and hold her over it, but the steam was making everything slick and I couldn’t get her mouth open at the same time and . . . so I thought that the burns would heal, you know how they say that the inside of your mouth can heal so fast, and then at least she’d live, and I didn’t put the sponge in there for more than twenty seconds, but the thing was hissing and it tried to curl in on itself, and Myra started shaking and making fists and then her eyes were open and they were looking right at me, right into me, and . . . 

CS: Matthew?

MH: They were right. There’s nothing . . . [Sound of empty glass bottle being shattered.]

CS: Matthew, please. There’s no need to . . .

MH: I did this. I did this. I . . . [Sound of Subject 5 collapsing on floor. Sound of wet coughs/exhalations. Faint sound of specimen clicking/squealing from interior of Subject 5. Sound of door opening/boots shuffling/Subject 5 moved to stretcher.]

CS: Goddamn it, [REDACTED]. I said plastic bottles only. Triage? 

DPDx: Subject 5 at ISS 75. Both major sources of blood flow to brain severed, trachea punctured. He was committed to it. 

CS: The specimen?

DPDx: Significant damage. Suggest immediate retrieval attempt.

CS: Agreed. Prepare for transfer to Surgical Theater 8, movement protocol in place.

DPDx: Confirmed. [Brief pause.] Director?

CS: Yes?

DPDx: If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this dead fuck is smiling.

CS: Could be a symptom of the parasite attempting to exit the damaged host. Let’s keep it moving. Perhaps Matthew’s got a second chance at fatherhood.

DPDx: [Muffled laughter] Yes, sir. Rolling out. 

END TRANSCRIPT

——————————

Bruised Flesh

by
Craig Wallwork

The first present the old man ever bought me was a Radio Flyer tricycle, complete with a chrome bell and double deck rear step. Out in the sunlight, it attracted magpies and had all the other six-year-old boys on the Farriery Pass shielding their eyes. It was beautiful, and was my first lesson in understanding the lengths a desperate man will go in nurturing his own selfishness. While loosening the bolt that secured the front wheel, my father turned to me and said, “Try to fall on your head when you land, Jonah. A bloody nose will make it look more realistic.” 

When one of his old buddies from Riversdun got involved in a scheme selling undesirable real estate to old age pensioners in Florida, my father wanted in. All he needed was two thousand pounds to invest. This was way before people caught onto what a pyramid scheme was, or how the eight ball model worked. Under the lure of easy money and the chance to divvy up on overdue alimony checks, he put his name in the hat. The problem my father had was raising the cash. He used to say he had as much luck holding onto money as he did pussy. I once overheard my mother tell Clara Hornthorn of the Appeal of the Women’s Liberal Association that my father was a cheap lousy bastard with a tiny prick. Clara is now my mother’s life partner so if any validity was needed to what my father said, I guess that’s it. 

A week after hearing about the real estate scam in Florida, the old man borrowed a JVC GR-C1 camcorder from one of his friends, the same camcorder Marty McFly used in that movie. A five pack of VHS-C tapes, two breeze blocks and a piece of four-by-ten assured the tricycle’s final moments. Setting down the breeze blocks at the foot of the Cotton Stone track, and making sure the length of plywood was angled at thirty-degrees, he pressed the record button on the camcorder and waved me down. I don’t remember much about that day other than the smell of Germolene and eating a Wall’s Mint Choc Cornetto on the drive to Oxenhope Royal Infirmary. But during the playback later that night, I watched myself fly like an eagle. 

I had to wait until the stitches in my forehead were removed before he fed me lemon segments. He’d seen video clips where toddlers wince and screw up their faces whenever they ate something cold. I ate ice cream all the time so he knew the reaction wouldn’t have impressed the television producers. He stepped it up a gear. I went through two whole lemons and one lime, all marinated in Sarson’s vinegar, before he got the shot he wanted. “Jonah, we’ll go into Riversdun next week and pick up a bottle of peroxide. They’ll get suspicious if they keep seeing the same kid.” Once he was happy the footage looked real, Dad would send the videotapes out from grandma’s place. He’d then alternate it every few weeks by using the address of one of his friends at the pub. For every check received, he’d slip that person a fiver and ask if it was okay to use their address again in a couple of months. No one ever said no. 

A year ago, the old man had reached a Permanent Vegetative State. The doctors tried putting him on antidepressants and then methylphendiate, but they didn’t help snap him back into this world. His quack suggested moving him onto some other drug called amantadine, combined with musicokinetic therapy and social-tactile interaction. For three weeks, they laid him vertically on a trampoline and played
Gravity
by Kenny G repeatedly. If anything was going to get you walking out of that hospital, listening to that saxophone all day would have done it. But not the old man. He just lay there bouncing around that trampoline like a virgin getting banged by a fat guy. I visit him now every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evening after my Stepping Stones Rehabilitation class. Been visiting for years. It started as a sort of requirement, you know? Even though my mother didn’t wear the physical scars like me, he sure left her with enough emotional ones, and even with all that bad feeling between them both, she would drag me to see him sing a silent opera from his hospital bed twice a week. Guess she felt there was some unspoken responsibility she had to fulfill, or perhaps she thought a boy needed a father. She’d done a little research too, found out people in comas can hear stuff, you know, like the voices of people in the room. So every time we visited, I had to pull up a chair beside him and talk about school and all this other crap about my life that would probably send a person into a coma, not bring them out of one. But that was my mother, forever the bleeding heart. It was a chore, sitting there for an hour at a time; the beep beep beep of his heart monitor like some crazy soundtrack to my slowly deepening voice. I would have cut off a limb to get out of going, but that’s the weird thing about routine. However tedious, it slowly becomes the one constant in your life. Whenever I was going through shit with my mother and Clara, or worrying about exams, or getting my heart torn in two by some girl, I would go and see the old man. For an hour, there was quiet. The world stopped spinning. He became a kind of sleeping priest, a mute Samaritan, and I would just blurt all kinds of stuff out at him. It didn’t matter if he could hear it, or that he had no advice to give; it was just about being able to talk and get it all off my chest. Routine became my vice. That was until I hit my mid-twenties. 

Falling through ceilings and down stairs most of your life has long-term side effects. Muscle damage has a tendency to develop into rheumatism when you’re older. It began for me when I reached twenty-six. A shoulder injury caused by being dragged half a mile along Grange-Over-Sands by a kite during a Beaufort Scale reading of nine when I was seven years old would flare up in the night. I was getting through two packs of ibuprofen a day by the age of twenty-two. Solpadeine came into effect when the headaches started, crunching through fifty to sixty tabs and washing them down with bottles of Old Bell’s. I would have continued like this but I began fucking this girl with really bad teeth who played the trumpet for some swing band in Riversdun, and to be honest, that was all that girl’s mouth was good for, blowing things. But she would make me dinner and feed me laxatives when I couldn’t shit out a pebble for days. Combined with the painkillers, the alcohol had pulled me from this world so I had no idea what I was doing most of the time. The small pockets of darkness that shadow your memory after drinking turned into big black holes that sucked in days, not hours. The only thing I remember about that time was when we would fuck. We didn’t do it like normal folk. It was all role-play shit where I’d have to sneak into the bedroom and pretend I was robbing her, or dress up in a boiler suit and drag some piece of furniture out into the hall so she could let me in and then seduce me. One night I went to her place, climbed in through the window and put my hand over her mouth while she was sleeping. I whispered in her ear that if she made a sound I’d slit her throat. Then I pulled up her nightgown and fucked her in the ass. I served six months inside for screwing that old lady and had to attend a sex addicts class as part of my probation. To this day, I still don’t know how I ended up breaking into the Whispering Pines retirement home, or how I got a hard-on, but it was the wake-up call I needed to help get off the painkillers.

I chose the outpatient program here at the Royal because it means I don’t need to listen to those junkies going cold turkey in the night. It also means I can use the time before and after meets to check in on the old man, get shit off my chest, and find absolution in silence. 

 His doctor is an old codger who reminds me of Einstein if he had let himself go. A big grey mustache hides his lips so when he talks you have to rely on your hearing only. Every evening he shuffles into my father’s room, picks up his notes from the end of the bed, scratches his head a little and then asks me how the program is going. I always tell him I’m doing fine because I know he doesn’t give a shit. All he’s really worried about is me stealing meds. One of the nurses told me the doctor’s father was the guy who went crazy studying the cases of all those children who turned up from Black Briar Woods. It was way back in the day, but everyone in Dogmael knows the story. The nurse said the doctor’s father wrote a paper about age repression, or some shit, that was published in a fancy medical journal that normal folk will never read. He then went crazy and shot his brains out. Every time my father’s doctor walks in and checks his notes, I wonder if he’ll write about my father and then shoot his brains out. If it was me, the sheer boredom of dealing with a cabbage would force me to hold a gun against my head.

My father would sit up most nights scribbling in a little pocket notepad about the things he could do with me, everything from simple misfortune to catastrophe. He had ideas for at least double the amount needed to raise the cash for the Florida scam. “If you want something, you have to go out there and get it,” he once told me while stuffing polystyrene into his y-fronts. “Ain’t nobody ever gonna bring it to you, Jonah. Now, kick me in the nuts as hard as you can.” Not many people would physically abuse themselves and their child to chase a dream. Most folk would realize how immoral that is and give up, find a regular job and twenty years down the line wonder how their life may have changed. Not my father. He’d tell me most people take the safe route in life because they don’t want to leave anything to chance. Life was a game of chance, he’d say. By playing things safe, you could still fuck it up: an affair, road traffic accident, cancer. Least if you took risks, you get an instant result, bad or good. Living a normal life, without trying, that really scared the shit out of him. Guess this is why he turned to the stock market. 

Gordon-fucking-Gekko he was not, but the old man watched Wall Street one day and figured himself an expert in stocks and shares. He started buying the broadsheets and checking the FTSE index. One of the sots from the local pub told him he knew a guy who knew a broker who worked in London. At this stage, the alarms should have been ringing, but he believed, or chose to believe, anything that involved making money quickly. In exchange for the scar that runs across my chin, the dislocated fingers, the bloody noses and the hairline skull fractures, my father was given cash from the television company, which he then gave to strangers to invest in stocks. It took him a month, and five hundred pounds to realize that broker was duping him, if he was a broker that is. The only person who truly suffered the loss of money was me because it meant more time in front of the camera. 

Every Sunday morning my mum would drop me off at his place and when she picked me up, I had a new bandage. To deflect any negligence on his part, he told her I’d bumped into the door, fallen off my bike, tripped over the rug. When the cuts got deeper, he told me to go home and drink as much cola as I could. Once I’d finished all the cola, ask for water. I had to tell my mum I felt dizzy, always before dinnertime. She took me to see the GP in Dogmael who, after Mum explained the constant thirst and dizzy spells, checked me for diabetes. The results came back negative, so they figured I had a bad ticker. The old man did his bit and attended all the referrals to cardiologists at the Royal. He would sit with my mum, biting his nails as they drained my arm to check for high levels of lipoprotein. The results were always the same. I was a fit young boy, with no reason to be suffering blackouts. 

The woman from social services reminded me of a bloated aubergine. She wore thick woolen tights that gathered in pleats around a pair of black court shoes, and if there were ever an episode of Tom and Jerry that revealed the upper half of Tom’s owner, then she would be it. During the cardiologist visits, one of the doctors had noticed bruising along my arm where they’d taken blood. This same doctor referred my details over to the social services, and a week later, there was a knock at my mum’s door. She explained to Mum that if any child presents the three stages of bruising, red (fresh), purple (ripe), yellow (healing), all at the same time, social services has a legal right to conduct a full assessment of the household. Clara Hornthorn had moved in with us by then, and being proficient in matters of oral pleasure had developed a tongue that could make the most cutting of lawyers jealous. Accusations of discrimination based on same-sex relationships was a gambit that proved very effective in forcing the social services woman to back off and accept I was in a well-balanced and caring home. Clara’s proactive leaning also helped imply the problem lay elsewhere, and perhaps she should make inquires with my father. To secure the deal, she added that it would be best to visit his house before noon, before he had time to go to the local boozer. Two social workers arrived at the old man’s home one morning to find five VHS-C tapes containing varying degrees of child cruelty and neglect being copied onto VHS tapes ready to be sent to the television company. They also found his notepad, open with a pencil drawing of a matchstick kid falling through a ceiling, and another involving a homemade swing and a small fence. Backed against the wall, instinct took over and the old man reverted to mocking that woman, calling her a fat old snooping bitch. He replayed that scene over and over to me over the phone, choosing to adopt a Deep South American drawl whenever he impersonated her. Clara was pushing for a restraining order, and I’m sure she could have convinced my mother to get one had he not told them he was going to live in Florida. The last words he ever spoke to me were over the phone: “The oranges in Florida are said to be the best in the world, Jonah. Once I get settled, I’ll send a box over.” 

It was rumored he fell fifty feet, but from what Mum told me, I figured it was more like a hundred. The idea was simple: park his Austin Allegro on a precipice near the top of Keighley Crag, forget to apply the handbrake, and get out of the car. The videotape would show him running toward the moving car, grief stricken as it fell over the edge of the cliff. What the tape captured that day was his sleeve caught in the door, and the car dragging him over the cliff with it. It took a helicopter and five men to lift him off that hill. When they removed what was left of the car, his shirtsleeve was still stuck in the door. The doctors told Mum he had bilateral damage to the reticular formation of the midbrain. They talked her through all the machines that were keeping him breathing, and used something called the Glasgow Coma Scale to determine how far into the great beyond he’d reached. Comas don’t last more than two to five weeks, but the old man was like Sleeping Beauty for five years. That coma slapped a gag on his mouth, stopped his hand from scribbling plans, and his brain from formulating them. For the first time in his life, my old man was actually there for me when I needed him. He didn’t judge me when I told him I’d smoked my first cigarette, nor did he criticize my hair or clothes. There was no pressure to go to university and get a career. And he never uttered one word of frustration when I flunked out of school and got a job selling vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He just lay on that cold hospital mattress searching for God in the ceiling. Routine got me through some hard times. Used to be I would envy my friends and the relationships they had with their fathers, all the time spent going out to football games, throwing ball, building models, all while my old man was throwing me down hills or building ramps out of weakened wood. But over time, whatever tethered them together, the pursuit to bond and all that crap, well, it got severed by monotony. Not me and the old man. The tedium of habit brought us together. The longer he stayed in that coma, the closer I felt to him. I told him about the Berlin Wall falling, and how the Americans and British were kicking ass in Kuwait. And every day his muscles weakened and tightened. The atrophy meant he was shrinking, centimeter by centimeter, and I wondered if one day I’d turn up to find him so small I could slip him into my pocket and sneak him home. By the time that junkie rock star in Seattle blew his brains out, the old man finally turned a corner and reached a PVS. To mark the occasion, Clara came to the hospital and handed me a padded envelope containing the VHS tape of him falling off the cliff. She said it was high time I let go of the past and move on.