Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

Beer and sandwiches.

Screw it, he was going to take the Lower Bristol Road. That way he’d be in front of the fire within ten minutes.

Alex lifted his visor and tapped Staff on the back. He was still taking it slow and the pace was irritating Alex.

“Head for Bristol,” he shouted.

Staff nodded.

Staff’s home held little appeal to Alex, and his own mother’s house seemed light years away.

You can’t go home again.

He’d left the safe, boring confines of middle-class suburbia, in mind if not in body. He was no longer Alex Hurst, he was Alex the Droog. He’d tasted the rare delicacy of the old ultra violence and was reborn. Nothing could touch him. Hougan was gone and so were the old fears. He sensed a change in Staff, too. They’d been into the fire and emerged unscathed.

He put his fist in front of Staff’s face, making a revving motion. He nodded with enthusiasm.

Full throttle.

The bond between them, two spirits mismatched by social class yet emotionally joined, a pair of empathetic siamese twins, was stronger now, unbreakable.

Staff took The Bitch up to seventy-five and Alex smiled.

Nothing mattered. Only speed, men, and machine molded into a ménage à trois of rumbling, accelerating motion.

The houses gave way to factories, and soon the factories would give way to the long, black stretch before the carriageway.

He felt elated. What was the line from that James Cagney movie?

“Top of the world.”

Yeah. Top of the world, Ma.

Alex laughed.

Jamie’s consciousness fractured as he set foot on the humpbacked bridge.

One moment he was looking ahead, the next he was paradoxically gazing down on himself from a great height, a small figure almost eaten up by the dark, and glancing up over the brow of the short bridge toward the traffic lights. His split vision lasted a second, an eternity, then he felt himself dropping out of the sky, descending at an incredible speed, his own body rushing toward him. He heard a rustle of huge leathery wings rippling through the night sky, ancient, unworldly wings not touched by time.

He cried out as something swept into his body, a high-pitched whine shrieking through his ears for an instant.

Silence. Total. Still. Heavy with a strange promise.

Dread and anxiety departed, the stillness a sensation heretofore unimaginable, teasing every nerve ending, every molecule.

It was about to end.

Harry rubbed a hand over his tired eyes as he ploughed down the carriageway at eighty-five.

Sleepiness was creeping up his shoulders. He yawned.

Half a mile to the second set of lights, then the Lower Bristol Road. The lights were red. He braked, hoping they would change.

Jamie saw the Bedford truck coming down the carriageway as he heard the loud rumble of a motorbike behind him, a ways off but growing louder with every second.

The lights went green, and the truck accelerated.

The motorbike’s rumble increased.

Harry saw the bike approaching at what seemed Warp Factor Five. One second its headlamp was a small yellow cyclopean orb; the next, much larger.

The crazy bastard must be doing a hundred, he thought, stifling a yawn.

The light suddenly wobbled. A trace of sparks flew up like crazed fireflies. The lamp angled toward the truck.

Before he could cry out, Harry was thrown against his seatbelt, his head whiplashing as the bike impacted into the truck’s engine.

Harry screamed.

Jamie’s eyes widened. The night exploded with the deafening sounds of 350 pounds of bike melting into the front of one and a half tons of truck.

The Bitch was doing 113 as it hit, the truck 89 — a total impact velocity of 202 m.p.h..

High speed switched to slow motion, and he saw every body-pulping detail with unnatural clarity.

The pillion rider lifted up over the head of the driver and came apart in a spray of red, like an overripe tomato hurled against a wall. Strands of muscle, fragments of limb spreading outward, the body’s impact smashed the windscreen. The bike crumpled in on itself as the engine grill seemed to eat it whole, smiling a big bad wolf grin as man and machine merged into muscle and metal, innards and engine.

The truck continued for ninety feet at a skewed angle, riding up the pavement to Jamie’s left, heading for the wall as metal scraped on tarmac, gouging furrows in the earth’s dark flesh before coming to a stop only a few feet from the stone, sparks vapour-trailing its movement.

Silence suddenly descended with the finality of a theatre curtain bringing the last act to a close.

September 19, 1980.

There had been a severe frost the night before, and the flowers on the graves were dying.

Jamie pulled his coat belt tight around his waist, blowing on his hands and wishing he’d brought his gloves. The cemetery was deserted, although it was midday. Even the birds in the trees were quiet; the only noise was the faint rumble of trucks on Rush Hill.

“Well, Alex, how does it feel?”

His words floated on the autumn air, and he felt self-conscious. If this were a scene in a Brian De Palma movie, he thought, Alex would come bursting forth from the grave in front of him.

But that was impossible.

When the police and ambulance men arrived at the scene, there had been no body: Alex had ceased to exist, his mortal remains spread over a wide area by the force of the crash. If not for the fact Stafford Rivers had been recognizable — albeit impacted into the engine block with such force that it took the medics three hours to cut out his mangled corpse — it would have taken the police days to identify the pillion passenger. Alex had become a pathologist’s nightmare, a minute jigsaw of humanity. Nothing fitted together. The largest part of his body was a section of rib cage and spinal column, but what could it be attached to? There were no limbs. Only fragments of bone, tatters of skin, traces of muscle, a handful of teeth, and pieces of cranium. His brother had been vaporized. There hadn’t been enough to bury, and what little was left filled only two small plastic bags. Alex wouldn’t become worm food, even the morsels that remained; he’d been cremated, all fifteen pounds of him. But their mother insisted on a gravestone, his testament, to be laid beside the plot inhabited by their father.

Jamie was surprised by his reaction to Alex’s death. He’d felt nothing then and felt nothing now, staring at the grey concrete slab with his brother’s name on it. Perhaps in years to come he might — at least that’s what his doctor said. But he doubted it. Though he’d loved his brother in the unspoken manner of male siblings, he’d experienced a great relief after the funeral chaos had subsided. He’d expected the house to be gloomy after the ceremony; instead it appeared as if the three-bedroom semi had been rebuilt.

He, Jamie Hurst, had been reborn.

Alex, he realized, had cast a shadow over their lives, and with his passing, the storm clouds broke up, floating away as a new sun shone forth. The shadow, however, still cloaked their mother. Jamie didn’t think it would ever leave. She’d become too used to wearing black to change her wardrobe. A year to the day and she was still on tranquilizers, despite Julian returning to live with them, having quit his job on a North Sea oil rig. Jamie, on the other hand, had gone from strength to strength. He’d passed his exams with flying colours and was on the way to a place at Oxford. He’d sold his first short story to a prestigious literary magazine in January and was halfway through the first draft of a novel, two hundred pages written in a white heat this summer.

Life made new sense now. He understood how Saul must have felt on the road to Damascus: he’d been blind, and now he could see, though not with the eyes of a seventeen-year-old. No, he saw the world through the eyes of an ancient touched by arcane knowledge. Once he’d felt eclipsed by the darkness his brother drew around himself; now he felt bathed in light, baptized by a grace unimaginable before the accident, untouched by the slings and arrows of adolescence.