Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

If he were to go back to Dublin he would tell Fondler that their little bit of tomfoolery had been the highlight of his time here and was just the tonic, but that it had to come to an end. No — he would not use the word tomfoolery. He would say to her that their affair had meant the world to him.

And if he were not to go back to Dublin he would take Fondler with him on his adventure west. No — he would not go west. He would go north.

He was certain that the Q in Fondler’s surname (which he still could not recall) had been part of a French name. He felt that she was in denial of this element of herself, and the very element of her Canadianness. He would go north with Fondler and they would become fur trappers. They would bludgeon seals and shoot moose, and start a fur-trading company. He believed that the Canadian Shield and Hudson Bay area was the forgotten wild frontier. He became convinced that if the French had been the dominant European influence in the early centuries of new-world colonisation, then the Canadian fur trapper rather than the cowboy would be the great hero of North American folklore.

The travel agency was closed, and appeared to have been for a long time; its windows were streaked with furrows of paint and its inner windowsills thick with dust.

A few doors up from the travel agency was a shop selling fishing and hunting equipment. Along one wall was a glass display case packed with rifles, pistols and machine guns. In the centre of the floor was a horizontal display case containing antique weapons — flintlocks, swords and a variety of spiked paraphernalia. He asked the man in the shop about trying out a machine gun. He was asked for his licence, told the man he had left it at home, and then was asked which machine gun he’d like to try. ‘Something for about three hundred dollars,’ he said. The man laughed in his face, needing to suck back a string of brown phlegm that had escaped from his mouth. ‘Only weapon you’re going to get for three hundred dollars is an air rifle,’ he said. ‘What’s the most powerful air rifle you have?’ he asked the man. ‘The most powerful one we have,’ said the man, ‘doesn’t fire on air, it fires on super-compressed gas canisters.’ Rickard asked if it could kill, or slow, a bear. ‘Sure,’ said the man. Rickard offered him five hundred dollars, plus the morning star that belonged to the clubhouse that he had recently taken to carrying around with him for self-defence purposes. ‘Deal,’ said the man, after some hesitation, examining the antique.

Back in his room, Rickard went about assembling the weapon. Six pieces locked together, quite beautifully, to make a long, heavy rifle. He loaded a gas canister into a compartment near the butt, and clicked a magazine of pellets into place. He had never had anything like it in his hands before. He patted his left hand to the grip underneath the barrel, and was overcome with the urge to experience immediately the awesome destructive power coiled and packed into this satisfyingly solid hunk of metal and plastic.

He flipped open his porthole window and rested the end of the gun in the window frame. The terrace across the street had a huge gap in it, as if the building that once stood there had been blasted to atoms. He squinted through the gun-sight and turned the weapon back and forth through an arc of a hundred degrees, making explosion noises with his mouth. Several moments elapsed before he realised that his gun-sight was not in focus. Twisting the milled dial, he watched a hazy grey image sharpen until the grain and twinkling mica of the masonry of the building the other side of the gap came brightly into view. He thought of taking a pot shot at a hanging basket, but resisted. He slowly panned the gun to his right again, across a window.

A man was standing at the window, smoking a cigar. Rickard knew this man, had spoken to him: a near-bald pudgy man, with a collar of sandy hair round his head. It was the strange, crazed, north-of-Ireland man, the man who had followed him to Bryant Square.

The man had the window open, and every so often turned his head from his fat cigar to talk to someone in the room, someone lower than himself, seated, or very small. So sharp was the focus of his gun-sight that Rickard was able to observe, in the crosshairs, the droplets of sweat nestled in the pores of the man’s scalp. How very strange and bizarre that he should be looking at this man again, thought Rickard, the butt of the rifle thumping into his shoulder, as almost instantaneously a red hole opened in the man’s forehead. How very strange. Image and sensation were disconnected for a second, in which Rickard pondered: What is he doing? What’s happening now? Then the chill realisation broke, and in disbelief he peeled his eye from the rubber socket of the gun-sight and looked at his finger squeezed on the trigger.

He pressed his eye back to the gun-sight and watched, as his horror increased, the man stagger backwards, deeper into the room, his entire head a ball of rippling, glistening red, like a peeled tomato.

Now he shrank from the porthole on jellied legs, throwing out his hand to steady himself. He dropped the gun with a clunk, and fell against the bed, sinking to the floor, and hugged his knees to his chest. For a long time he remained like this, numb.

Numbly he thought of the weeks ahead. Of what he would do, of the duties and tasks to be taken on. He thought of his parents. His poor mother and father. His responsibilities to them — yes, he could be a sort of herald, of a sort of danger. Inside his head a broken flap of magnetic tape spun furiously on a reel, slapping and slapping the same processes of his skull through each rotation.

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All he had to show his parents for seven months in New York was a gift. All he had bought for his parents was a plastic slide-show machine, a sort of blind-ending binoculars in which could be viewed touristic images of New York — the ‘Lipstick’ Building, the Ulysses Grant Memorial, and others. His mother would find many hours of distraction in this toy. He should have bought more for his mother, but he had thought he would have more time. He would buy more for her now, but he was afraid to leave the clubhouse. Would he try to win back Toni? Yes he would. Yes he would. He would try to win back Toni. How? With a cock-and-bull story about his time in New York. He would fill it with romance and heroism. Perhaps he would tell her about Fondler, and draw out her inner alley cat. And for money? He would approach Robert again about getting back his old job at Verbiage, for the short term anyhow. Yes he had unlearned everything, but he would learn it all again. It would come back to him. He would expose himself once more to the information.

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