Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

Finding was easy, reading the smoke trails, the spark and flash, and the heady scent. Gathering was hard, landing the bugs just before they cracked their wing-cases open, let spring the folded treasure, took flight.

Zzzzs!

'Here! Here!'

'No. Here!'

'Got it! Yes!'

Eliot was a whole three years older than me, and a wounded veteran of these fields; his hands already scarred with countless burn marks. His jar was forever filled with fire, mine only with a spark or two, and I didn't mind one bit, happy to play tag to his shirt-tail. We both lived on the nearby Shakespeare Estate, and to there we would descend, two grass-stained warriors, carrying our booty. I don't know, I guess this all sounds like kid's stuff, but I couldn't help feeling it would all soon be over. Eliot was already talking about girls as though they were something special. There was one girl, this Valerie he was always going on about. I guess I was clinging on to something, keeping him interested in the bug hunts.

Eliot's uncle would buy the candle bugs off us, so many pennies a bug, depending on the exchange rate. Uncle Slippy, Eliot called him, I don't know why; just that he never seemed to be where he was, I suppose.

'OK, how many you got today?' he would ask.

'Fifty-seven,' Eliot would answer.

'Five,' would be my reply.

'You lose, Scribble,' says Eliot. 'You'd better buck up.'

'Leave him be,' says Slippy.

It was Eliot that started calling me Scribble, ever since I'd shown him some of my nonsensical rhymes. Bad move, I know, except that I wanted him to realize I was good for something at least. It was one of those things, I liked it when he laughed at me. And it was strange that he made up nicknames for everybody, everybody except himself. It was a way of staying in control, I suppose, but that's only me looking back.

'Here's your money, boys,' Uncle Slippy would then say.

'Cheers, Uncle.'

'You both go on now, get out of here.'

We never wanted to go, of course. Uncle Slippy lived alone, in this becurtained old house at the end of our street. He seemed to live in just one of the rooms, a bedroom. It was full of assorted wonders, most of which had no explanation or purpose, I'm sure of it. He was a collector: of broken alarm clocks, and of exotic birds' feathers, but mainly of insects. An entomologist, he called himself. It was the best word I'd ever heard. Some of his prize specimens were mounted in glass cases on the walls, vividly painted monsters from all over the world. Others, the live ones, he kept in various murky fish tanks. I would press my face against them, better to see the mysteries involved. The dark flutterings, the sudden movement of what you thought was a leaf, say, or a flower head. Sometimes he'd tell us stories of the insects, and their strange powers, and how they were quite the most beautiful and intelligent species on the planet.

'I thought I told you two to get out.'

'What's this one, Uncle?'

'That one? Oh, now that's the Compass Bug.'

Once we got him started, you see, he just couldn't stop.

'The Compass Bug. It's a male. I've been looking for a female for years now. Want to breed them. I tell you, if you ever find one of them for me, my, would I be generous!'

And then he'd laugh out loud, as though we'd never catch anything that brilliant, not in a thousand years. So we'd look in the tank, at this hideous beetle. Must have been at least two inches long, coloured black and orange, with the black in the shape of a cross on its back.

'You find one of them,' he'd say, 'you'd never get lost, not ever. You'd be on the needle, my boys!'

So we'd ask why, but the lesson would be over for the day. Sometimes though, if we were lucky, if Eliot had brought in a good batch, Uncle Slippy would give us a candle bug of our own to keep, a tame one that is. He had a way about him, a secret way of making the bugs do what he wanted. That's how he made his living. He clipped the wings of the candle bugs, but that wasn't all, there was something he did to them that made them burst into flame only when you wanted them to.

Eliot and I would take this bug with us, and the money we'd earned. Usually we'd buy ciggies with the money. Then we'd go back into the field, and we'd use the tame candle bug to light a ciggie each. You had to hold them just so, between the forefinger and thumb, and squeeze, and then the fire would come out of their arse. And you could light a fag with them! That's what Slippy would sell them as: living cigarette lighters. He made a nice little profit out of them, and Eliot was always going on about the money we could make, if only we got to know the secret of taming the bugs ourselves.

'How do you think he does it, Scribble?' he would ask, sucking on his fag.

'Don't know.'

'I reckon it's something to do with them feathers.'

'What, the birds' feathers he keeps? Why's that?'

1 reckon they're Vurt feathers.'

'Vurt? No way. Not Vurt.'

'Got to be, I reckon. What do you reckon?'

'Don't know what I reckon. Not yet.'

We'd read a whole lot about these Vurt feathers in the papers, how they were supposed to be the best recording medium ever, even better than fractal cassettes. How music sounded more than alive on them, how they contained the best games of all time, how you could record all kinds of knowledge on them, knowledge that nobody yet knew about, even. There were loads of rumours about them. How you had to put them in your mouth, just to get the feathers to play back. So they said, anyway, the papers. I don't know, it all seemed a bit silly to my mind, but Eliot was always getting hooked on crazy rumours. Anything to get out of his head, and into some other kind of dream. He was growing up so quickly.

'But they have to be blue, don't they?' I'd ask him. 'Vurt feathers, I mean. That's what I read anyway. And Slippy ain't got any blue ones, not that I've ever seen.'

'Nah, they don't have to be blue.'

They don't?'

'Nah, that's just the legal ones.'

'You mean there's others?'

'Sure. Black ones, for instance- Don't tell me you've never heard of the black feathers.'

'No.'

'Black ones are the best. They're pirate copies. Illegal, like. Real snazzy. And Slippy's got loadsa black ones, hasn't he?'

'Sure, he's got loadsa black ones, doesn't mean they're Vurt feathers though. Vurt feathers aren't even on the market yet, not unless you've got a ton of cash anyway. And Slippy ain't got that kind of money, no way. Where's he gonna get a Vurt feather from? I reckon they're just normal feathers, like a blackbird's feathers for instance.'

'You reckon?'

'Yeah, that's what I reckon.'

'Well I think they're Vurt feathers, and I think that's how he gets to control the insects.'

We were just two kids with nothing better to do than lie in the long grass, smoking fags, listening to the candle bugs popping all around us, and playing with our very own tame candle bug, making its arse catch fire again and again until it was all used up. Just two kids talking about stuff we knew nothing about.

I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised at what happened next, knowing how Eliot's mind worked. And knowing how he didn't mind stealing things now and then, like comics and stuff, copies of the Game Cat magazine for instance, fags and stuff, or even, on one occasion, a pin-up of Interactive Madonna, just peeled it off the wall, rolled it up, walked out with it under his arm. But that was from shops, I never thought he'd nick things off his friends or his family.

So when he told me to meet up with him, about two weeks later, with the holidays nearly over and everything, I was expecting one last bug hunt before school started up again. I even turned up with the net and a jar. I guess I was right, in a way.