Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘And that is what?’

Rickard described his vision of a future war — the Sharks, the Owls.

Jeremiah swilled and inspected his coffee. ‘I know nothing about women. But what you say there does not seem, any of it, the wise and fructifying thing to be telling them.’

‘Yes, you’re right, you’re right, that’s the wrong approach. The thing … The thing is — I know what I want to do, I know what I want to represent, I know the outcome I want. I think.’

‘Maybe you think too much.’

‘I must inveigle myself.’

‘Let what happens happen.’

‘And be damned.’

‘A man can be thinking too much. Actually,’ — Jeremiah clunked his mug down on a shelf — ‘can I come and observe?’

‘No, Jeremiah. No. But if you’d remember please this exchange, and my motives.’

***

By eleven o’clock most of the tourists were gone from the plaza. A light spring rain had fallen and the granite surfacing gleamed. Not a droplet of water clung to the Puffball dome and its green laser spider. Rickard had worked his way down to the bottom pretzel in a stack of five. The foil was opened in his hand like a tawdry moonflower. He was on his third paper cup of coffee, and his heart was bouncing.

The girl came to the door of the building, stopped, and zipped up a black leather jacket. He was certain it was his girl, though her hair was different this time — tied up at the back. She looked straight in his direction. He dipped his head to the centre of his flower. All he had to do was let her know — soon, but not now, and somewhere private — and his martyrdom would be assured.

He came to the back of the store, on to 39th Street, and looked right, then left. He spotted her across the road, a hundred metres away. He was happy to leave this gap: it was narrow enough so that he could keep an eye on her, wide enough so that if she turned around he could sidestep, duck his head, become just another head in the crowd.

She led him down through the old business heart of Manhattan, under the bulk of the Empire State Building and the other mud-coloured ziggurats. Something about the area always made him shiver and speed along. Half of it was lost to the night — hardly a light was on above, the mud of those ziggurats dissolving in the oily dark — but on the streets was madness contained. Steam hissed from the ground; magnesium sparked in grilles and catch basins. Many times in the past he had strolled these unfaltering streets without any purpose at all. How had he kept going? Walking in Manhattan without purpose was boring and exhausting. Only romance had kept him going: songs about this or some other avenue and cross-street, The Severe Dalliance and the hope of that dream in his head and this in reality converging.

Occasionally the girl was lost in the clusters, reappearing with a zing of bright yellow — her jacket had a lemon stripe across the shoulders. His eye was tricked more than once: tiger stripes rippling through the backlit vapour; dazzle-ship taxis with their chequered flashes. It became a game of keeping pace: taking ninety seconds to reach the end of a block, running a light when he could. How before now had he not thrown himself under a bus with boredom?

On to Broadway, then the strange lonely Bowery, with its pot-and-pan shops, its procession of domestic dioramas. A clatter of windblown litter brought echoes of skid row. At a window she halted. Catching up, he noted a fan of spatulas, knives on a magnetised strip, sharpening rods. On she led him; left again on to Houston Street and southwards; eastwards. Was this Alphabet City? East again of Alphabet City?

As the streets condensed so he had let the gap narrow. Now only fifty metres separated them, with no one else this side of the empty street. She stopped again and turned around.

‘Hey!’ he shouted.

She went on, quickening her pace.

Into a courtyard in the middle of a squat housing project, each building just five storeys high. Two rusty basketball hoops craned at either end of the space from chipped, rotting backboards. Many windows in the buildings were broken, the walls sprayed here and there with graffiti. From the windows in one block soot streaked up the brickwork. Behind him a fire escape rattled.

He turned to see a line of … six, seven, eight people emerge from high in the building. They spread out along a horizontal gantry, spaced themselves evenly apart, and leaned by their elbows on a handrail, taciturnly observing him. Below them, on another gantry, a further eight people appeared and arranged themselves in an identical pattern. On the steps between the gantries others sat and slouched and eyed him also. They were all the same; that was, the same age: young, in their early twenties. And all were clothed identically, he saw now: in grey scruffy one-piece boiler-type suits, with concertina sleeves and red piping around the shoulders, elbows, waists and knees. Every one of them, boys and girls, wore his or her hair in messy spikes, and every face was lightly sponged with smut.

‘Hey, yo!’ he heard from behind. He turned back around.

Fondler was standing in the courtyard. She was still dressed in her black Puffball uniform and leather jacket. Her hands sat defiantly on her hips and her feet were planted in obdurate firmness and widely apart, in a puddle.

A voice called from a gantry:

‘Who’s your friend, Fondler girl? He one of the newbies at work?’

‘I don’t know who he is. But I know his face.’

‘Ooh là là!’ somebody else called. ‘I want to hear that face speak! Let me see that face again!’

He turned to look back at the gantries.

‘Speak, Proteus Boy!’ called a boy with bright blond hair.

‘Speak!’ called a girl with lurid red hair.

‘Speak!’ screamed somebody else.

‘Speak! Speak! Speak! Speak! Speak!’ came the chorus, at once harsh and deep and high and shrill, getting louder and louder, as upwards of twenty pairs of arms banged the scaffold in perfect time.

Then suddenly, on one of the beats, the noise cut out, leaving the ring of resonant metal in the air.

In unison, eight legs were slung over the handrail of the bottom gantry, and eight legs over the top gantry, as the youths on the stairs began to twist downwards through the helix of metal like jungle cats in the branches of a jacaranda. Then the second in each pair of legs came flying over the handrail, and the two troupes of eight each dropped gantry by gantry to the courtyard. In less than a minute he was encircled, the dead centre of an anticlockwise-moving formation. All eyes were on him. Each left arm in its concertina sleeve quivered like a rattlesnake, the hand open, the fingers splayed.

‘Hisssssss!’ went every mouth. ‘Hisssssss, hisssssss’, and then –

‘sssssssssssssssStop!’

Fondler, outside the circle.

It broke to allow her in, then split at the opposite side so that now two straight chorus lines were formed. Rickard stood facing his erstwhile quarry in a silent stand-off.

‘Who is he, Fondler?’

‘Yes, who is he?’

‘Why has he come?’

‘What is he doing here?’

‘Pray, tell!’

Fondler remained silent, and kept her gaze fastened on Rickard. He detected a minute trembling of her sockets, a tic of the pupils. Yes, she must have recognised him; he had been on stage, under bright lights, for nearly an hour the night before.

‘Come out with it now! Give us the truth!’ came twenty-four sing-song voices all together.

Now the open left hands, which had never stopped quivering, were joined by twenty-four quivering right hands, and each pair of quivering hands rose from its owner’s side to chest height and became jazz hands.

‘Stop goofin’ around! We need to know: