David Mitchell - Slade House

“Your African lodge could not have been a cornier ersatz mishmash, Brother, if Tarzan had swung in on a vine.”

“It wasn’t sup posed to be real: it only had to match the bushvelt the guest i mag ined. Anyway, the boy’s mentally abnormal. He hasn’t even noticed his lungs have stopped working.” Jonah now looks at me like Gaz Ingram does.

It’s true. I’m not breathing. My switched-off body hasn’t raised the alarm. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die .

“Oh stop snivelling, for Christ’s sake,” groans Jonah. “I cannot abide snivellers. Your father would be ashamed of you. Why, I never snivelled when I was your age.”

“ ‘Never snivelled’?” snorts Norah. “When mother died—”

“Let’s reminisce later, Sister. Dinner is served. It’s warm, confused, afraid, it’s imbibed Banjax, and it’s ready for filleting.”

The Grayer Twins make letters in the air with their hands. There’s a slow thickening in the dark, above the candle, at a little above head height. The thickening becomes a something. Something fleshy, lumpish, fist-sized, pulsing blood red, wine red, blood red, wine red, faster and brighter, the size of a human head, but more like a heart as big as a football, just suspended there. Veins grow out of it, like jellyfish tentacles, and twist like ivy through the air. They’re coming for me. I can’t turn my head or even shut my eyes. Some of the vein-things finger their way into my mouth, others into my ears, two up my nostrils. When I see my reflection, I’d scream if I could, or pass out, but I can’t. Then a dot of pain opens up on my forehead.

In the mirror, there’s a black spot there. Something …

… oozes out, and hovers there inches from my eyes, look: a clear cloud of stars, small enough to fit in your cupped palms. My soul.

Look.

Look .

Beautiful as, as …

Beautiful .

The Grayer Twins lean in, their faces shining like Christmas, and I know what they’re hungry for. They pucker up their lips and suck. The round cloud stretches doughily into two smaller round clouds … and splits. One half of my soul goes into Jonah’s mouth, and the other into Norah’s. They shut their eyes like Mum did the time we saw Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Royal Albert Hall. Bliss. Bliss . Inside my skull, I howl and my howl echoes on and on and on and on but nothing lasts forever … The big beating heart-thing’s gone, and the Grayer Twins are back kneeling where they were before. The flame’s stopped flickering. Time’s paused again. The brownish moth is frozen an inch away from it. Cold bright star white. The Nathan in the mirror’s gone, and if he’s gone, I’m—

“Good evening, here are today’s headlines at six o’clock on Saturday, October the twenty-second. Speaking at a press conference in Downing Street today, the Home Secretary Douglas Hurd rejected criticism of the government’s ban on broadcast interviews with members of the Irish Republican party, Sinn Fein. Mr. Hurd said—” I switched off the radio, got out of my car and looked up at the pub. The Fox and Hounds. A memory came back to me, of me and Julie popping in for a drink here one time. We were house hunting, and we’d viewed a place on Cranley Road, one street up. It’d sounded all right in the estate agent’s but a right bloody shit-hole it turned out to be — damp, gloomy, with a garden too small to bury a corpse in, it was so depressing we needed a liquid pick-me-up just to face the drive home. Five years ago, that was. Five years, one wedding, one dismal honeymoon in Venice, four Christmases with Julie’s godawful CND, tree-hugging relatives, fifteen hundred bowls of Shredded Wheat, two hundred and fifty bottles of wine, thirty haircuts, three toasters, three cats, two promotions, one Vauxhall Astra, a few boxes of Durex, two emergency visits to the dentist, dozens of arguments of assorted sizes and one beefed-up assault charge later, Julie’s still living in a cottage with a view of woods and horses, and I’m in a flat behind the multi-story car park. Mr. Justice Jones said I was lucky I wasn’t booted out of the Force. Thank God me and Julie’d never had kids, otherwise she’d be shafting me for child support as well as compensation for her “disfigurement.” Grasping bitch. Five years gone. Blink of a bloody eye.

I set off down Westwood Road, eyes peeled. I asked a woman in a miniskirt and ratty fake fur coat — on the game, I’d bet a tenner — if she’d heard of Slade Alley, but she shook her head and strode by without stopping. Three Asian kids went trundling past on skateboards, but I’d had enough of our curry-munching cousins for one day so I didn’t ask them. A jogger ran past in a blur of orange and black but joggers are tossers. The multy-culty brigade bleat on about racism in the Force, but I’d like to see them keep order in a town full of Everywherestanis whose only two words of English are “police” and “harassment,” and whose alleged women walk about in tall black tents. It takes more than holding hands and singing “Ebony and Ivory.”

The streetlights came on and it was looking like it might rain; the sort of weather that used to give Julie her mysterious headaches. I was tired after a long and stressful day and at the “sod this for a game of soldiers stage,” and if our chief super was anyone but Trevor Doolan I’d have buggered off home to the remains of last night’s tandoori takeaway, had a laugh at the Sharons and Waynes on Blind Date , then seen if Gonzo and a few of the lads were up for a pint. Unfortunately Trevor Doolan is our chief super and a walking bloody lie-detector to boot, and come Monday he’d be asking me some rectal probe of a question that I’d only be able to answer if I’d really followed up Famous Fred Pink’s “lead.” It’d be “Describe this alley to me, then, Edmonds …” or some such. With my appraisal in November and the Malik Enquiry due to report in two weeks, my tongue has to stay firmly up Doolan’s arse. So down Westwood Road I trogged, looking left, looking right, searching high and low for Slade Alley. Could it have been blocked off since Fred Pink’s day, I wondered, and the land given to the house-owners? The Council do that, with our blessing: alleyways are trouble spots. I got to the end of the road where the A2 skims past a park and dropped my fag down a gutter. A guy with a busted nose was sat behind the wheel of a St. John’s ambulance and I nearly asked him if he knew Slade Alley, but then I thought, Bugger it, and headed back towards my car. Maybe a swift beer at The Fox and Hounds, I thought. Exorcise Julie’s ghost.

About halfway back down Westwood Road I happened upon an altercation between a five-foot-nothing traffic warden and two brick shit-houses at least eighteen inches taller, wearing fluorescent yellow jackets and with their backs to me. Builders, I could just bloody tell. None of the trio noticed me strolling up behind them. “Then your little notebook’s wrong .” Builder One was prodding the traffic warden on the knot of his tie. “We weren’t here until after four, gettit?”

“I was ’ere,” wheezed the traffic warden, who was the spit of that Lech Wałęsa, that Polish leader, but with an even droopier mustache. “My watch—”

“Your little watch is telling you porkies,” said Builder Two.

The traffic warden was turning pink. “My watch is accurate.”

“I hope you’re a good performer in court,” said Builder One, “’cause if there’s one thing juries hate more than traffic wardens, it’s short, little Napoleon, privatized traffic wardens.”

“My height’s nothing to do with illegal flamin’ parking!”