Adam Thirlwell - The Complete Short Stories - Volume 1

It was I, not Helen and everybody else, who was riding the merry-go-round.

Jump.

9.07-15.

Helen was standing in the doorway.

‘… down to the … the …’ I was saying.

Helen watched me, frozen. A fraction of a minute left.

I started to walk over to her.

to walk over to her

ver to her

er

I came out of it like a man catapulted from a revolving door. I was stretched out flat on the sofa, a hard aching pain running from the top of my head down past my right ear into my neck.

I looked at the time. 9.45. I could hear Helen moving around in the dining room. I lay there, steadying the room round me, and in a few minutes she came in carrying a tray and a couple of glasses.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked, making up an alka-seltzer.

I let it fizzle down and drank it.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did I collapse?’

‘Not exactly. You were watching the play. I thought you looked rather seedy so I suggested we go out for a drink. You went into a sort of convulsion.’

I stood up slowly and rubbed my neck. ‘God, I didn’t dream all that! I couldn’t have done.’

‘What was it about?’

‘A sort of crazy merry-go-round –’ The pain grabbed at my neck when I spoke. I went over to the set and switched it on. ‘Hard to explain coherently. Time was –’ I flinched as the pain bit in again.

‘Sit down and rest,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll come and join you. Like a drink?’

‘Thanks. A big scotch.’

I looked at the set. On Channel 1 there was a breakdown sign, a cabaret on 2, a flood-lit stadium on 5, and a variety show on 9. No sign anywhere of either Diller’s play or the panel game.

Helen brought the drink in and sat down on the sofa with me.

‘It started off when we were watching the play,’ I explained, massaging my neck.

‘Sh, don’t bother now. Just relax.’

I put my head on Helen’s shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the sound coming from the variety show. I thought back through each turn of the round-about, wondering whether I could have dreamt it all.

Ten minutes later Helen said, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of that. And they’re doing an encore. Good heavens.’

‘Who are?’ I asked. I watched the light from the screen flicker across her face.

‘That team of acrobats. The something Brothers. One of them even slipped. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’ I turned my head round and looked at the screen.

Three or four acrobats with huge v-torsos and skin briefs were doing simple handstands on to each other’s arms. They finished the act and went into a more involved routine, throwing around a girl in leopard skin panties. The applause was deafening. I thought they were moderately good.

Two of them began to give what seemed to be a demonstration of dynamic tension, straining against each other like a pair of catatonic bulls, their necks and legs locked, until one of them was levered slowly off the ground.

‘Why do they keep on doing that?’ Helen said. ‘They’ve done it twice already.’

‘I don’t think they have,’ I said. ‘This is a slightly different act.’

The pivot man tremored, one of his huge banks of muscles collapsed, and the whole act toppled and then sprung apart.

‘They slipped there the last time,’ Helen said.

‘No, no,’ I pointed out quickly. ‘That one was a headstand. Here they were stretched out horizontally.’

‘You weren’t watching,’ Helen told me. She leant forward. ‘Well, what are they playing at? They’re repeating the whole thing for the third time.’

It was an entirely new act to me, but I didn’t try to argue.

I sat up and looked at the clock.

10.05.

‘Darling,’ I said, putting my arm round her. ‘Hold tight.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the merry-go-round. And you’re driving.’

1956

Noon talk on Millionth Street:

‘Sorry, these are the West Millions. You want 9775335th East.’

‘Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!’

‘Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’ll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.’

‘There’s a cave-in down at KEN County! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.’

‘Listen to this – “PYROMANIACS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!”’

‘It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me three hundred dollars.’

‘Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? They take only ten minutes to go up 3,000 levels!’

‘Ninety cents a foot? Buy!’

‘You say the idea came to you in a dream?’ the voice snapped. ‘You’re sure no one else gave it to you.’

‘No,’ M. said. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again.

‘You talked it over with your friends?’

‘Only the first theory,’ M. explained. ‘About the possibility of flight.’

‘But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it from them?’

M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. ‘I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I meant.’

The sergeant laughed. ‘Do you mean they would have thought you really were insane?’

M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded. ‘The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘I’m glad to hear you say it.’ He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.

‘Now look,’ he said confidentially. ‘It’s getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?’

M. looked up. ‘Aren’t they?’

The sergeant turned to the man watching in the shadows by the window. ‘We’re wasting our time,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll hand him over to Psycho. You’ve seen enough, haven’t you, Doctor?’

The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant’s method of approach.

‘There’s something I want to find out,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone with him for half an hour.’

When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.

M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs.

Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.

‘Tell me about this dream,’ he said, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M.

‘I think you’ve heard everything, sir,’ M. said.

‘In detail.’

M. shifted uneasily. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and what I do remember isn’t too clear now.’

The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already repeated twenty times.