Novahead

‘Steve Aylett is without doubt one of the most ambitious and talented writers to emerge in England in recent years. While his work echoes the best of William Burroughs, it has the mark of real originality. It's hip, cool and eloquent.'

Michael Moorcock

 

‘Aylett is one of the great eccentrics of British genre fiction.'

The
Guardian

 

‘Aylett's prose is like poetry.'

The
Independent

 

‘Utterly original'

SFX

 

‘The most original and most consciousness-altering living writer in the English language, not to mention one of the funniest.'

Alan Moore

 

 

Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967. He
is the author of
The Crime Studio
,
Atom
,
Bigot Hall,
Fain the Sorcerer, Slaughtermatic
,
Rebel at the End
of Time
,
Toxicology
,
Shamanspace
,
Smithereens
and
Novahead
– all of which are available vi
a the
Serif Books website
.
His
work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Russian and Japanese. He is a bitter man.

www.steveaylett.com

 

 

 

NOVAHEAD

The final Beerlight novel

 

by Steve Aylett

 

 

 

 

Serif
London

 

This e-book first published 2015 by

Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA

 

www.serifbooks.co.uk

 

First published in print by Scar Garden Press 2011

Copyright
©
Steve Aylett 2011, 2015
Cover copyright
©
Steve Aylett 2011, 2015
e-book edition copyright
©
Serif 2015

 

Steve Aylett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

 

ISBN: 978 1 909150 42 3

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

 

e-book produced by Will Dady

 

 

 

 

“Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.”

- Luis De Gongora

 

 

“They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist –”

-General John Sedgwick, American Civil War

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
'
d just flicked a spider off the desk, sighed and prepared to rise when the shadow of someone
'
s head and shoulders appeared on the floor like the edge of a jigsaw piece. A galoot entered. His vibe was blank - I could see aura waste falling away from him like dead seeds. He even went with
‘
Prepare to die, Mister Atom.
'

‘
Right this minute?
'
I asked, dubiously.
‘
It
'
s not particularly convenient.
'

His smile was incoherent, a dent in a sandbag. Maybe this was his favourite thing to do.

‘
Being bored by you better be worth it,
'
I told him. Probably my face bore the sort of amused and scornful look that people never like.

‘
You don
'
t get to meet the Heber kid,
'
he said, then drew a sender like a riveted slab of tar. It was actually a Birch gun, the muzzle shored about with functionless flanges and baffles. He started firing the kind of bullets I preferred to see going the other way. Spent shells were flying like air quotes as I pulled the emergency cord and descended, the floor closing again above me. I
'
ll open the ground when I choose.

I was surprised though. It had been ten years and I
'
d almost forgotten that stories still happened here, as if this world hadn
'
t ended.

I
'
d known the town was finished when I put a phone to my ear and found it was a cockroach. I used to think rain sounded the same everywhere, falling on dead and undead. Before I got away and heard it on palms, reef ocean and blue air. And I should have stayed on the island. Now only a few hours back in town and I felt again it didn
'
t matter where I was.

The one thing I hadn
'
t considered was the risk of getting curious.

By the time I slanted the Mantarosa out of the parking lot the gun ape was ducking into a car consisting mainly of ribbed armour and roller bars. He headed portside and I followed with deadlights and a nightvision windshield. On the way out of Saints Street I sent the cleanup signal, at which my office jumped and settled into the ground, leaving only the sculpture of a construction site which a friend had fashioned on the roof. I
'
d miss the old place maybe.

Suddenly I was feeling cheerful. Neon was arcing down my spine and the scenery was springing out of my way. In a car like a straight razor, my rearview reflection backed by a pouring firewall that used to be my workplace. Trouble-bound under clenched heavens. Night windows like aquariums as I followed the cage car through the beginnings of rain toward the dead waterfront, centre of fish nostalgia and water canneries. I saw blue sparks kindling between my teeth.

He parked by the harbour wall and walked down a wooden ramp to a small shack which half-hung out over the sea. I stopped a way back and sat a while listening to the motor pinging as it settled. Cars with portholes are cool.

Rain was pouring into the sea and slashing off the vinyl roof of the hut. Under moonlight the walls were leaking silver. I walked over and took a look in the window. A fly-strip encrusted with bullets and a glass-fronted box on the wall with a sign saying FOR BROKEN GLASS BREAK GLASS. A little flaking wreck of a table. The only thing on it was one of those plastic plants that dance to gunfire, looking creepy in the weird light. But three fellas were propped around the table like carved dolls in a murky tank of turpentine. The gunsel was one. Sat on either side were a bucket-jawed giant with club bones and a little compacted guy with a round head and side-impact ears. And I thought,
What is it now
?

The button man was getting a dressing-down so elaborately phrased he probably thought he
'
d done good. The little guy was precise and petulant.
‘
We asked you to put him around a bullet, understand? To shoot him. And it wouldn
'
t be unusual for him to die thereafter. If you haven
'
t tried that experiment before you
'
ll find there is something almost uncanny about the result.
'

‘
That old detective front probably had a zero approach alarm, Mr Ract,
'
said the giant thoughtfully.
‘
He knew something was up the moment our verb-free associate entered the place.
'

‘
What did you use, show me. What
'
s that, a Birchy? Loud charm but slow on the uptake - it damn near fires by osmosis. If it had to be an ammo-guzzler why not a Barisal? Doesn
'
t anyone use room-brooms anymore? Give it the once-over?
'

The galoot looked sad.
‘
I can
'
t have a big frenzy just like that Mr Ract.
'

‘
My god, that
'
s exactly the sort of frenzy you
'
ve
got
to have, man! I think this hitman of yours is some sort of manatee, Mr Darkwards. He
'
s certainly never been proven otherwise. And I haven
'
t the patience for the gang talk.
'

‘
It
'
s how they get by,
'
said the giant calmly, nodding a head like a foundation stone.
‘
Mobster psychosis. It gives them a social structure, of sorts. Better than the wasteland outside, maybe.
'

‘
Well we needn
'
t really do it Beerlight style. Camouflage be damned, this is too important to leave to a - what do they call it here ... cleaner? Need I remind you if Atom and the boy meet it will be catastrophically interesting for me, you, and everyone in a five-hundred-mile radius.
'

This gave me a bit of a start. I presented myself to this world as if by chance, the same as everyone else. Why such suspicion? I stood frowning in the smell of melted and rain-solidified rubber as the sad city went on losing its flavour like gum. Well, it didn
'
t matter at this late stage. Something was leaping in me like old times.

Water murky as potion. A meeting of skulls behind a sizzling window. The gunsel hung back like a doughy robot, his eyes opaque and eager. I
'
d got a swatch on his aura. His mind was strange, thinking one thing at a time.

‘
He
'
s getting near the city,
'
said the small man Ract, taking what looked like an elaborate jungle compass from a pocket and propping it on the table.
‘
According to the atomic clock. Where
'
s our Mr Pivot? And has he selected an alternative conjecture or is he adamant?
'

‘
The choreography of failure is infinitely varied,
'
drawled the giant.

‘
Does he understand the moral component of the exercise?
'

‘
Is there one?
'

‘
The hole where it should be is the right shape. It
'
ll do.
'

‘
Relax, Mr Ract. I
'
m told if you listen to one of his excuses while watching
The Wizard of Oz
it matches up in profound and hilarious ways. Anyway, since our willy-nilly friend here has failed by an order of magnitude we hadn
'
t thought possible, we
'
ll have to put Atom out of the game from another direction. Discrediting him with a bullet
'
s all very well but -
'

I ducked out and leopard-crawled unnecessarily back to the car, setting off through streets gummed with melted cellphones like cowchips.

Why was I rattling around Beerlight again? Its most precocious souls had escaped. Its colour had desaturated. It was mouthing old lines. Banal, undirected explosions were going off here and there. The city was crying out for the specific-rich carnage so beloved of the old-time accelerati. The days when crimes were written across the city like formulae, answering each other in a seemingly endless, dendritic conversation. But it would never see that inventiveness again, I thought.

I
'
ll try to describe the beautiful ways I was wrong.