Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

White-Headed Boy:

‘I will outline for you in this letter from France

The plight that I see ourselves in.

You must live! my sweetheart, you must take every chance

Of love that your life now might bring.

For away from the trenches

I fell for a temptress!

And you know I cannot sheath my love!

So please do not wait for me,

Be blithe! Go with gaiety!

But hide these French letters you must!’

He waited for an age for the pressure on his face to ease. Finally something cracked. He stumbled forward on to the boards. The fourth wall was now in place, and light flooded in from Prince Albert Terrace through the window. ‘You look perfectly ridiculous,’ she said, albeit with tenderness. She added: ‘But at least not awfully ridiculous.’ He opened his mouth to bark something back, and felt a lump in his throat and his jaw unhinge, and heard a crackle right through his head like burning cellophane. The lump pushed up through his throat, widening it all the way. His head bloated to an enormous extent to accommodate the lump, opening along the fissures of his broken skull. The head only returned to something near its normal shape when at last the lump had fully extruded and revealed itself to be the half-pus pike, now slathered in mucus and bile too. The pike flipped about the floorboards, as surprised as anyone in the room, looking for a hiding place. Then it divided into a dozen eels, which searched for cover too. Each eel split into a thousand earthworms, which each became a thousand white parasites of the gut, which all crawled through the spaces between the floorboards. ‘Where is he?!’ barked Denny, pushing about the newspaper kindling in the range. ‘Where is he?!’ he barked, marching into the bedroom and opening the wardrobe, and looking under the bed. ‘Where is who?’ answered Aisling, as equably as she could pretend. ‘The pike! The pike! You know who! That rotten bastard roe!’ said Denny. ‘And who is this?’ he said, seeing a framed picture of a young handsome man on the mantelpiece, and whipping it into his hand. The face was worryingly familiar. ‘You know who that is,’ said Aisling. ‘That’s your great hero, aged sixteen, the man whose name you have taken as an important-sounding prefix for your own so that people will fall for you.’

White-Headed Boy:

‘Begob I am smitten,

Oh diddle-ee aye.

Oh wirra machree,

Will she be my young bride?’

They lay opposite each other as pictures of cherubs on boxes of sweets. The blue in their eyes was tiny pricks of paint and sharply blue indeed. Their cheeks were rosy and fruity. Their hair was curly. She smelt of wild lavender, Scotch raspberries, Wexford strawberries, the fullest English pears, elderflower, rosehip tea, peas. He smelt of garden gooseberries, blackberries, liquorice, crab apples, sloe berries, pine needles, mint. ‘Oh, do you think we’re in Heaven?’ she said. ‘If we are in Heaven,’ he said, ‘we are going straight to Hell. And I have something here for you. Vulcanised. The better to play in Hell with.’ ‘Do you believe in Hell?’ she said. ‘I think that the most literal elements of that part of the doctrine will be cast off soon enough,’ he said. ‘And what about Limbo?’ she said. ‘Limbo I believe in, whatever happens,’ he said. The boxes sat opposite each other against the umbrella stand. The umbrella stand was circular, representing eternity. Romance was yuck unless you could put it in, or on, a box, he thought. He looked out a window. It was like a loophole in a citadel. Hell was a skyscraper in danger of flaking, from the heat at its core versus the ice on its skin. Hell was hoping. Heaven was seventy Stain Devils at the grocery store, and finding one for black ink.

White-Headed Boy:

‘Hark! Listen to the voice of my heart!

Listen to my cry of love!’

‘Explain Limbo to me,’ she said. ‘It’s a very confusing part of the doctrine. And I think they deliberately confuse it, because they don’t know themselves. Well I’m ready to throw the whole lot out.’ ‘Limbo,’ he said, hating his own tone, but going on, as he’d committed himself anyhow, even if her question was rhetorical, ‘is different from Heaven or Hell, in that spatial time passes. One is given the confusion of the world there, and one is given a test to find the purest form of oneself there, but one knows one will be released once one finds it.’ (What was all this ‘one’ pomposity? Damn it, man.) ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘what you’ve explained there is Purgatory. Isn’t Limbo for babies?’

White-Headed Boy:

‘And by this I have tried to bridge the wide ocean,

My long

Lost

Love.’

Static panning in: thunderous applause.

The line of Denny’s shoulders lay more or less flush with the edge of the stage. Beyond it the first rows of audience members sat splattered in Denny’s blood and brains. Many among them were lacerated by splinters of Denny’s skull.

Immediately Denny’s head exploded some in the audience jumped from their seats with a curious readiness. Rickard retained just enough of his senses — like Clive, he had cramped in shock — to notice that those who sprang into action had all been seated at the ends of rows. They fell into line behind one another — five in one side aisle, five in the other — and ran up the steps flanking the stage. By the time Rickard had limbered back to some measure of mobility and turned around, the stage was empty, save for Jeremiah and a dark gritty track of blood that led into the wings and out through the stage door.

A pity, the whole episode, because up to that point the concert had gone exceptionally well.

Back in Denny’s apartment — Jeremiah let them in with the master key — they complimented each other on their individual performances: Clive had sung high and sharp like a piccolo, Rickard’s vibrato had been so rich and resonant that it was felt through the boards of the stage, and Jeremiah had manipulated Denny’s voice with deftness and virtually perfect timing.

***

Clive made tea, putting eight spoons of sugar directly in the pot, and they sat in silence sipping the astringently sweet beverage. When, after some time, the noise of their slurping was joined by Bit’s purring, Jeremiah called the dog over with a click of his fingers, rubbed it on the chin, and said:

‘So, then. Splat.’

‘Mmmh,’ said Clive. ‘It was a stroke, I fear. He can get very wound up.’

‘I could see that about him all right,’ said Jeremiah.

‘A curse, they are. One day you’re yourself, the next you’re not quite. But he’s in the best hands. I suppose we should think about ringing around the emergency rooms.’

Rickard absently eyed Bit, then fixed on the animal. He whistled and tapped his ankle, but the dog would not move from Jeremiah’s caress. He became aware once more, by a deep ambient silence, of the absence of Denny’s clock, the one that had been cleared out to the skip; and then conscious again of the sound only of slurping, and of the satisfied grunting (and mellow flutings) of a snub-nosed dog, and of the distant cacophony of a New York night.

He remembered the girl in the Puffball Store, with the wolfish grey eyes, and that one of the people who had taken Denny’s body away was this girl. He remembered how the halogen light in the store had caught her name tag and flared.

He got up out of his seat, electrified by a revelation, and made a new pot of tea, unaware that that was what he had done. He saw the thing he would do. He would go to this girl, Fondler, as if she were a white sacrificial slab, or a dark jagged reef, and offer his own self up, fling his own self down, and be obliterated, foundered.