These Demented Lands (15 page)

‘Ah, and you intend to post me the money when you reach your destination?' he raised his eyebrows, virtually as if reading from an auto-cue positioned out on the sunny gravel through the dirty glass behind me.

Now, gambling everything on those instincts as to what he would do – perhaps even sharp enough in those days to see all that lay before us, she said, ‘I have no destination.'

‘In that case how do you intend to make good your debt?'

‘Could I no do some dishes?'

Brotherhood swole out his bottom lip and with his fingers, pretending he couldn't recall the figure there, turned the chit slowly so it faced him. ‘Mmm-uh,' he mused, lifted up the bit of paper, leaned over and, so it must have made contact with
her left breast, he snugly rustled the paper into the little front pocket that hung on the man's shirt she was wearing. ‘Follow me,' he said and walked towards the front door; stylishly, so I wasn't expecting it, without looking at me he muttered, ‘You too.'

Macbeth's junk was piled outside in the sunshine and he was transporting it through the paths of the pine plantation to the far end of the room extensions using a cement-stained wheelbarrow.

‘On you go Macbeth, son, no more damp transistors for you, room 16. You two can fight among yourself what one you want, they're both rotten. You can work on your self-loathing together out here. Thank me that summer's coming.'

‘Brotherhood,' I said, ‘My work?'

‘What work!' he shouted. ‘Jesus Christ, man, I prefer the freedoms of my dreamscapes as well, but you're crazy.' He looked at the girl; repeated, ‘He's crazy: Japan, Boeing, tensile steels; he's lying, all an extension of the rubbish you tell inquisitive barbers in a city you'll never return to . . . such a bullshit artist it's coming out his collar.' He laughed and strode away shouting as he went, ‘you can have showers when there's a spare room if no one is moving in. Macbeth'll show you the ropes in the kitchen and you,' he pointed to the girl, ‘Can have a shot at changing those new marital sheets every morning.'

One hour later the girl and I were flitted to our respective caravans. Sat on the back-breaking cot, running my palms
over the bristles appearing on my shins I could hear the thumps and creaks as she moved around next door, pathetically arranging her few things in order.

THE PURPLE BRUISES
of bluebell banks had begun to appear on the slopes above the hotel.

I moved in through the fake Mexican portico, the morning walk from my caravan marking the distance that was set up, in a revolutionary manner, between myself, the girl and our former fellow-diners up in the Observation Lounge, each couple unable to assimilate the sudden inversion of status that had taken place, aware that such revolutions could be lurking for them in life ahead.

When I moved out to the caravan I had nothing to take. A few tunes clanged around my brainbox, a few worn shoes and shirts are all I've left the world to remember me by, but I've learned something, she is better than this world, better.

I walked beneath the balcony, hearing the moronic, frenzied clicking of cereal plates. Smiling, enduring the latest shatting from fate, I heaved in the kitchen swing-doors, saw the sluice of light that came in the horizontal window slits, saw the dishes she had stacked after dinners the night before, saw the cheerful, colourful wires, sprouting from the rear of the new and un-fitted deep-fat frier.

She would have been upstairs since eight a.m. in the new, short skirt and thick-weave stockings and the jumper she insisted on wearing: all of which Brotherhood loved to call ‘Your uniform'. She would be serving the breakfast buffet, mainly just tea and coffee.

I removed the large butter chunk from the fridge and put it down by the butter-cube cutter. I lifted the two aluminium securing pins and the cast top then dropped the butter chunk into the casing. I replaced the top, re-fitted the securing pins then, using both hands, slowly but firmly turned the handle. The screw would be pushing the butter chunk up against the end of the casing where two small holes with serrated edges squeezed the butter out in long, drooping poles which were severed by a wire, turned in unison by the compressing handle. The severed butter cubes plopped into a Pyrex bowl of water.

When I'd squeezed in the block I returned the bowl to the fridge after tipping in a tray of ice cubes. I crossed to the deep and hateful old sink, shaped with dents and bevels, turned the hot tap – so deep that she, with her straight back, was almost unable to reach it with a pink, rubber glove. I filled the peeled-grey plastic sink with scalding water and then cooled it with cold. When I placed the parts of the butter-cube maker in the basin, archipelagos of iridescence floated when the bubbles of cheap washing-up liquid dissolved.

The kitchen held in a sweet odour of butchers' shops on a summer's day: the same sweetness as when the rows of shoes, their grips caked with meaty chilli sauce had been put out for cleaning all along the corridor. (Brotherhood had taken the
lot over to Laundromat Blues at Far Places, put all the footwear in a washing machine then stood with his back against the door of the tumble dryer as the shoes crashed around.)

Fresh from my old room Macbeth walked in and nodded to the tattie sack.

‘Aye-aye,' I said.

The girl entered from the side door and started clearing the clean dishes from the sinkside.

‘Three-pan Macbeth, do you have to use a different pot each time you do scrambled eggs?'

‘You just bend your arse. To the work. And you, tattie-hoiker.'

I heaved the bag over to the sink and began lifting tatties under the ice-cold stream of tap-water, thumbing the clayey coin-sized mud from the white and pink flesh. I dropped the cleaned with a bang in the sink.

The girl looked over at me. I carried the clean potatoes to the peeler, tipped them in from the basin and to shut off Macbeth who was sneering, I jerked the switch that started vibrating the potatoes around the sandpapery interior.

‘Don't think yous can lord it over me . . .'

Late, after dinners, the sound of her coming back to her caravan: she will be breathing in deep the real poverty of these lands, but breathing at a controlled speed, with which she's learned to steady despair and not allow it to swarm over her, like a cluster of orange fish eggs clinging to the lens of sunglasses – as in some of her most recent nightmares which
she mentions to me when we sit on Schweppes crates at her caravan door, mild summer rains manoeuvring around the mountains, the position of the Devil's Advocate's new camp visible, her fingers twisting grass-stalks into little balls and tossing them at nothing. She will cover herself with the rugs, the door secured shut with a length of wire. Though I didn't understand then I now know. She will lie looking up at an identical curved ceiling to mine, smiling, biding her time, the borrowed alarm clock ticking beside her.

Editor's note: poster sellotaped to manuscript:

ANOTHER SUMMER CAME,
summers I had once known how to go about loving. The black dot of Macbeth's radio-controlled aircraft climbed higher than ever into the cloudless sky. Across the Sound, peaks that had been invisible all winter became clear in the brilliant distance. Brotherhood mowed the airfield, riding, shirt off, on the machine; honeymoon couples flew in and out, the bright coloured aircraft moved above white froth from the summer ferry as it crossed the Sound several times a day.

In my foolishness, sequestered with the girl in our caravans, her hair tied back because she couldn't wash it that often, wearing the clumsy pullover despite the mildness, Brotherhood's mower buzzing in the distance – in those foolishnesses (as she would say) I almost believed happiness a possibility!

On the evening of the midgie competition the hotel population gathered, some wives and husbands soon retreated to watch the on-going endurance from the Observation Lounge windows.

‘No women? No women?' Brotherhood was shouting. He turned to look at the girl who was standing by a tree, disinterested, ‘Let me allow you to pay off your debt, lassie.'

She scowled, pasty, as if Macbeth's infinite stodge had filled up her cheeks: it was a teenage glare from beneath dark eyebrows, ‘Get bosoms out and driven demented by midgie bites so you can hide up the stair pulling off the gander's head?'

I laughed and a few of the couples nervously tittered. Brotherhood tilted his head, smiling with a terrible mock affection at the girl in her deliberately tawdry jumper.

She's still young; can endure and survive the desolation she's got stuck in temporarily.

‘How about our kitchen porter?'

I shrugged and pulled the shirt, the orange, rough-cotton one I still believe belonged to my father, tugging over the head, so even as the collar came free of my ruffled hair my stare was still directed at Brotherhood, who, without breaking the stare, as if we were in some movie that entertained yet still threw around a few noble ideas, thumbed open the buttons down his front and walked towards the centre of the concrete paths.

I also stepped forward where Shan stood with the ropes. Shan had no cigarette in his mouth: he had coated his face in paraffin: Danger of Explosion.

‘You're a bunch of spoilsports,' I scowled at the fucking young husbands standing (‘stood' as she would say), looking on.

One of the young men piped up, ‘He said guests couldn't join in,' and nodded out to Brotherhood.

‘Well, I so wanted to play with you and her, this lot might ask a refund if they get bit bad,' Brotherhood placed his hands behind his back and Shan started to tie them. A spray of midges were already blowing around me.

Brotherhood sank to the grass in a lotus position, I copied – facing him. In minutes a mist of little insects cluttered up my nostrils as Shan kneeled, smelling like the hurricane lamp we used to light our hut up in Devil Woods when we played commandos. Shan tied my hands and I sat.

As Shan stood back more midges swarmed about my ears, darted about on my tender, closed eyelids, formed a carpet on my back, raced and tickled and bit across my chest and stomach – where the skin was softest.

I opened my eyes. In the dusk light you could see the living clouds around Brotherhood's naked torso and the head: a circling, dark mask coated his face and I realised mine too must be like that: a black sheet of frothing little lives. I gritted teeth, knowing from experience that you might get furiously bitten, but only the mysterious few exit points of your own blood would blossom into the little pink blotch used in the counting at the end.

You could hear the cringey moans of the remaining and impressively sadistic onlookers, smoking and waving their hands furiously over by the big, oldest pine.

Suddenly I saw Brotherhood's head go back (his eyes open all the time) and the mouth wide – clear red/pink and the draw of white teeth in a dry, cruel laugh – a foul quilt of midges plumed upwards about him then his face fell still, dead-seeming.

When the whistle sounded Shan whacked me with a towel, untied the hands and I rubbed all over me as a cheer came from behind the glass of the panorama window above. Brotherhood raced down to the creosote fence, legged himself over, raced across the runway and down the embanking so he disappeared.

‘I saw it,' Brotherhood whispered up in the Observation Lounge. I didn't hear him at first, walked closer; his hair was flattened down with the water and for effect he held a limp sliver of seaweed that touched the orange carpet. His nipples were shrunken in the coldness – couples applauded – he had so many bites they almost conjoined to a single blotch. His lips mumbled so I stepped closer. Several people were talking to him at the same time; he stumbled slightly as Mrs Heapie pushed him to and fro, marking off the bites with felt-tip then Shan notching them in the book.

‘Sixty-seven . . . sixty-eight . . .'

Brotherhood moved his mouth near my face, ‘I saw him, blue-faced . . .'

Macbeth stuck the pen deep on to my skin as he began the count.

‘You saw him?'

‘I chucked myself into the seaweed by the jetty, stood up and shook my head, when I turned round he was there, walking away into the vapour. Like you described.'

I nodded sharply, looking sideways to see what my score was.

‘Amazing feeling.'

The count was done. The girl left before the figures were announced. It was obvious. Brotherhood had 67 to my 43.

‘I could've done with that smash.'

‘Oh, don't be ridiculous, you know you can walk out of here when you want.' He was leaned against the bar, shirt on but unbuttoned, its ribbed fronting concertina'd under his arms, ‘You're living this farce as I do: I won't call the police, I despise the police; you're enjoying it as much as me, this game, as much as she is. Now,' he started doing up his shirt-front, ‘I'm away upstairs to talk to my daddy.'