Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘Well, look, it’s like this: the more fully we integrate with Puffball, take their crappy little wages and do what they ask us to do, the better placed we are to bring them down, you must understand. Last night I was told that I was needed to help carry your friend away. There was a risk he was going to pass out, they said — always a risk. I didn’t know he was going to die. I think they knew he was going to die. I think he was programmed to die. They’d set the machine in his mouth to explode. But not before it had gathered all the information they needed. I don’t know where that information is now. I know that Denny Kennedy-Logan’s body is with Puffball, though. They’re going to use his remains and all the information they’ve gathered from him for some kind of secret development. Your friend has become Townsend Thoresen’s last great project, some vital component in that. The guy behind me on the gurney last night said, “This one’s Townsend’s baby.” I suspect it’s to do with the power struggle. You’ve heard about Townsend Thoresen, that he’s dying? Yeah, he’s really sick. He’s going to die really soon. The board already have a new CEO lined up: John Thomas. Thoresen and Thomas hate each other. I mean, they’re talking, prepping for the handover, but Thoresen knows Thomas has different ideas. Thoresen operates from the right side of the brain and he doesn’t trust Thomas, he thinks he’s a left-side-of-the-brain person. So whatever this thing is that Thoresen has your friend for, it’s going to be this seismic happening to keep Puffball in line with what he wants. That’s what I suspect.’

Rickard, who thought of himself momentarily as ‘Velily’, and thought of a former atmospheric railway in the old country where he used to play, that stood between breeze-block walls between gardens and constituted a very real no man’s land, where cypress trees used to overhang and insects became trapped in their resin, and the tracks no longer remained, and where he had hidden once with the girl next door, and had attempted his first kiss but failed to open his mouth, but from which mistake he had learnt when finally — finally — he got to kiss Toni, forgot what he wanted to think about.

‘How was our concert for you?’ he said. ‘Were we very very good? Did you enjoy our singing?’

Fondler, who was reaching behind her to stamp out the butt on the top of the pier, paused in mid-stub as if trying to catch some faraway sound.

After a moment she said, ‘Yeah,’ and nodded, creasing her brow in even sterner furrows, but smiling. ‘Yeah, you know, you guys were great. That’s just the kind of shit we’re into right now.’

The doors at the bottom of the steps swung open, with Slipper between them. Golden light flooded from within. ‘Can you try and fix this VCR now, Rickard?’

He spent the night in the Fungicides’ rookery. They made up the couch for him in the basement, and despite the humid disgusting stickiness of his bedspread he fell into the most contented sleep he’d had since he arrived in New York.

Clive bought a cup of tea with milk in it from a horchata vendor on Verdi Square. The vendor had to be told to put milk in his tea, and that the tea he wanted was not maté , but –

‘English breakfast tea?’ the vendor said, pulling a sachet from a box she’d discovered in the hold of her trolley.

He took the tea back to the bench. He’d not tarried here before, Verdi Square, but it was a pleasant spot, open to the late afternoon sun. Noisy, though. He lifted his face to the heat.

With his eyes closed, he tried to imagine an email. Did they roll in the air like coloured scraps of paper? Did they come in colours? Did they fall off trees and plop into dark pools? The man Quicklime’s card had an email address on it. He tried to imagine a fairy with an email and could not even imagine an email. When he opened his eyes he was looking at Giuseppe Verdi himself’s greening white head and the milk in his tea was cooling to a little ghost. Once, the Virgin Mary decided to show the Protestants in America that she was divine by turning a river into tea. But this river of tea had milk in it and the Americans had never before seen milk in tea and thought the river was polluted from a part of a mine that had been closed off. Jean Dotsy had liked that the Americans thought like that. Magic did not enter their minds. She had longed to go there — the fortunate isle.

In a mad fit she had even once suggested to Veronica, her best friend and colleague, that they run away to America together. She was more than half serious. When Veronica, who was otherwise dumbfounded, managed to get out, ‘And do what there?’, Jean proved that she was serious. ‘We’ll become freedom fighters,’ she said, and she showed her a booklet, In Defence of a National Imaginaire , that she had taken from an event at an old guildhall in the Liberties in the forgotten heart of Dublin and that was written by a group that called themselves the Davy Langans. The addresses at the back were a catalogue of some of the most exciting places in the world. ‘We’ll go to New York,’ she said. But Veronica ran off in a tizzy, and things were not the same again between them.

So she came here on her own and it was a young and modern and man-made country as she had hoped and dreams were made with rivets and documents and wishing wells were oil wells and what have you and so forth. She had hope for a while and to look at the young now gave hope. You are wonderful , he thought at a boy passing. You are wonderful, he thought at a girl passing. The young, in this young time, seemed so in control of their souls, as she had not been in an older time. It was the young people’s time and the young people’s country, and he wondered if he was better off out of both. For a while this was what he had been thinking. Since he had met with Quicklime, or perhaps that had crystallised what he had been thinking. He could talk to Quicklime about this. He could at least talk to him. There was no one here in America to say that his body should be disposed of in this or that way. He would be found, a heap in a room, and he would be buried around the back of a clapboard hall in sand and chalk dust.

(Look at Denny, he thought. Gone. Whoof . And the body taken before even the devil knew.)

It lifted his heart now, the idea of finally being the master of his body and of his soul, of wrestling her to the ground with the body she had made, and of freeing that soul. And it would be a ground of his choosing: he would be buried in Ireland, as Jean Dotsy, and have a place where someone could leave a flower. A decent church burial would put paid to the hoodoos and the good hungry soil would put his body beyond use for ever more.

But there was the greater problem, he thought — the problem of what might happen to his body was not so great, or pressing. The problem of what to be done in the dying days was the one that needed, now, to be taken head on. A man or woman could not stay still in these days. It was beholden on every person to have his affairs in order. You could not beat the decline but you could still win, it was all still there to be won.

Earlier that day he had left his apartment in Stuyvesant Town and since then had been walking and mooching and jumping on trains. He had borne west (actually plumb north) with Broadway and come north (actually east) with it and had passed through that part of town that once was the Puerto Rican barrio and now was a great campus dedicated to the higher arts. And even after not-so-many years that district was changing again. And now early afternoon had found him here under the statue of Verdi. The ground in front of him was covered in hard round seed for the pigeons. If he stepped on the seed he would roll and would fall flat, feet over ass, and the homeless men on the benches would erupt in laughter. Ha! he thought. There we have it. If you kept your nose out in front of you you would be fine.