Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

(He tried to send his thoughts across the noise to the man.)

The conflict would be an intergenerational one, crudely speaking. It would not simply be between a younger age group and an older age group but between those who chose to affiliate with one generation or another. On one side were the harvesters and users of information, the people in control of the systems of society. On the other side were the latecomers, the pussyfooters and the intransigents. The first side seemingly had all the advantages; it had, in the main, the advantage of youth. The combatants of the other side — human beings, as opposed to beings — at least housed all of their insubstantial components, but were none the cleverer or more organised for it. In fact it would have done them good, somewhere along the line, to have offloaded, or uploaded, some of these components. How and ever, they were where they were.

Many might have said that Rickard, as a forty-one-year-old — on the threshold of two generations, or belonging to an in-between one — had a decision to make. He had no decision to make. The decision was already made. He saw his stand as a stand against the proponents of a new and awful definition of beauty. Their aim was to sublimate our diffuse and random and damaging inner lives to another dimension, leaving the world of solids as a zone of calm perfection. Their watchwords and gospel were ‘streamline’ and ‘synchronize’ (absolutely with a ‘z’, pronounced ‘zee’). Those damaged inside and out and living in the zone of calm perfection would not be tolerated. Rickard and this man who carried so much of the old world still with them were targets. The complicated and carbuncular, the flabby and the jagged, even the sublime, were incompatible with these tyrants’ ideals. Incompatible formats were, needless to say, also incompatible. Their logo and livery was a pure and infinite field of white. It symbolised the blanching out of opposition.

(Now he caught the man’s eyes on the full with his own. Instinctively the man moved his hand to cover his eyes and, in the same movement, collapsed to the ground.)

Rickard glanced about the plaza. The tourist shoals giggled and bowed among each other as if nothing unusual had just happened. Rickard advanced the twenty yards or so to the man. He was enormously pudgy, and wearing a huge leather coat that creaked as his weight and shape rolled him slowly on to his back. His face looked dead but retained its flushed colour. He was at Rickard’s feet, and Rickard guessed that it was his responsibility now to see that he was all right.

He went down on his haunches and put a finger to the man’s nose, detecting the faintest movement of breath. The man had passed out, Rickard surmised, on what was the first truly warm day of the year. Oddly, there was not one bead of sweat on his face. Rickard pressed the backs of his fingers to the man’s cheek and felt a sort of dead warmth, as if the flesh, like the granite slabs, had been heated only by the sun and not by a source inside. He took in the whole face and decided it was the most hideous face he had ever seen. There wasn’t a specific hideous feature on it, but taken as a whole it had the look of a face constructed by a ham-fisted forensic anthropologist on a skull.

Now Rickard, meaning to antagonise the man to life, took a good pinch of cheek and felt it slide and squidge like goo between his finger and thumb. When he released his grip the ridge of cheek retracted slowly, like a snail’s head. He was so disgusted by the sensation and sight that he did it again. This time he accidentally pulled the cheek beyond its elastic breaking point and a tuft of flesh — more or less the entire cheek — tore away. At the bottom of the pit was another tract of skin, blotchy with a white marshmallowy glue. The man’s eyes beat beneath their lids, then opened.

He gathered Rickard’s hand into his own, which felt gloved.

‘Not here! No, not here!’ he said in a distinct north-of-Ireland voice, slapping the ground — three times, in a fluster — with his free hand. When he tried to roll on his side Rickard made to stand up. The man gripped Rickard’s hand tighter, and Rickard, feeling himself pulled towards the ground and not wanting to make a scene, hauled him to his feet. Then the man shuffled away, across the road, with surprising speed, towards Bryant Square proper, where he collapsed on the far side of a bush.

‘Why the disguise?’ said Rickard, catching up with him, only to find that the man had fallen unconscious once more and was heaped on the gravel. Again Rickard looked around, worried about the commotion. The square was stippled with shadow and light: light made brilliant by the mirrored glass high above but softened and scattered by the gently moving leaves. The effect was woozying.

Rickard guessed that the man was stewing to death inside his padding. He pulled at the already-displaced bowl of blue-grey hair to find that it was rooted in a rubber cushion. The removal of wig and cushion left a crater exposing a bald scalp daubed in tracks of this marshmallowy glue, which was melting with a film of sweat into a suncream consistency. Rickard worked his fingers under the edge of the prosthetic forehead and yanked, ripping away most of the rest of the face in a single flap. The face underneath was a mess, mottled with the adhesive pith and damp with perspiration. Something about it surprised Rickard. It was a similar version of the face that had been, but altogether more human: pinguid, distended with the heat and by age. Rickard had expected a face that was less human: a lizard, or a robot.

Now he found he was joined by a homeless man.

‘Hello,’ he said almost inquisitively to this hobo by his side, who was ransacking the north-of-Ireland man’s shirt, ripping at the underarms and patting — almost punching — the shoulders.

The north-of-Ireland man twitched and grunted again.

‘Wait,’ said Rickard.

Hands shaking, he began to unbutton the front.

‘Fucken hurry up, bitch,’ said the homeless man.

Underneath was a cushion, covering the whole of the front of the torso, made of the same rubbery material as the wig-plinth. The homeless man slipped the cushion out and scrambled away, mumbling vaguely about conspiracies.

Rickard tried once more:

‘Why the disguise? Were you following me, Irishman?’

‘Irishman?’

The man’s pupils at last settled on Rickard, contracting to tiny holes. He said, ‘Irishman — yes, you’re the Irishman.’

‘And so are you, by the sound of it.’

‘I’m not you.’

‘No — who are you?’

‘I’m … You’re the singer, aren’t you?’

‘I’m … Yes .’

The man stiffly jacked up on his elbows and surveyed the square.

‘Yes. You see plenty folk these days playing cat or horse for some Eastern earth deity but that which you were doing there on the plaza was a diaphragmatic exercise. You’re a singer, I’m guessing. Were you getting ready for a performance?’

‘Who are you?’

‘On the street too. I can spot a singer a long way off.’

‘On the street?’

‘You asked was I following you. I saw you on the street and said: “That’s a singer.”’

‘Am I so obvious?’

‘To most people, no. But I’ve known a lot of singers in my time. I know your type. They are conscious of the fluid around them. Air is a fluid too, and that’s a fact. It’s very heartening seeing your kind.’

‘And this was why you followed me?’

‘I wasn’t following you.’

‘You said that you were.’

‘Are you a solo tenor or part of a group?’

‘Part of a group.’

‘Named?’

‘Listen —’

‘Named?’

‘We’re called the Free ’n’ Easy Tones.’