Limestone Man (8 page)

II

When his mother asked him that night what he had done to get so dirty, Parry said simply, ‘carbon paper'.

This he discovered, was what constituted duty One Hundred and Seventeen. But he never again heard his job referred to like that.

One Hundred and Seventeen, he gradually learned, was part of The Works' mythology. One Hundred and Seventeen might have been One Million and Seventeen for all it mattered.

But work itself was divided into thousands of specialised separate activities. All were protected by demarcation.

You must have done something, his mother smiled.

What Richard Parry had done was to pull miles of carbon paper from green
-
lined computer print
-
outs used by The Works accounts department.

This paper was to be salvaged as a waste product. The carbon paper had to be incinerated.

There's miles of it, he told his mother. We're as black as this. Like coalminers, because of it. Miles and miles of carbon paper that we have to squash into something called the incinerator.

And no water for washing. Or drinking when you're parched. There's no tap anywhere. My throat's raw.

The carbon paper gang worked in a breezeblock garage. Maintenance might have once been done on Works vehicles there. Yet no one in the gang of six labourers remembered the premises ever being used.

Two of Parry's colleagues were, like him, starting their careers that day. The first was the same age. Parry recognised him from primary school. The second, he learned, was called Bran, a mute young giant.

Blocks of print
-
outs were delivered from the computer department, located next door to accounts, three miles distant.

This occurred at ten every morning and at one in the afternoon. Otherwise, there were no visitors for the team. The carbon paper shift was supposed to commence at 7am.

Parry gradually realised they were in a part of The Works best described as abandoned.

Welcome to Hell, said Daf who had spoken to him first. Smoke?

There were three cavernous sheds. Each was divided into a honeycomb of workshops. Once devoted to vehicle repair, these were constructed on an area of subsiding tarmacadam, bigger than a football pitch.

Each shed was fifty yards long. They held vats of waste oil, carboys of acid in straw paliasses, and inspection pits. Some of these were flooded with filthy rainwater.

The work benches bristled with frozen vices, seized lathes and grease guns, oxy acetylene lances and spraypaint cartridges and nozzles. All were sheathed in rust.

Watch out for them, mumbled Daf. He had nodded towards a corner where glass bottles were stored.

The vitriols, he explained. Watch them vitriols.

Parry had never heard the word used before.

Daf saw he was looking puzzled, and explained.

Watch this, then, he said. If it teaches you something.

He wrapped a rag around his hand and took one of the vials. Then he unscrewed its milled glass stopper. It held an oily brown liquid. On to a heap of swarf in the corner Daf poured a thin stream. The mixture started to smoulder.

See! he said triumphantly. No one told me about this stuff. No one. Had to work it out for myself.

Yeah, myself. He looked toward Parry but his gaze was wide.

But I say, Daf continued, I say, that could burn straight through you. Could burn right through a man. If he didn't know, like. If he didn't know.

He cleared his throat, as if the liquid was releasing fumes.

Aqua Fortis,
they call it.
Aqua
's water. Just water. But water of death, I call it.

Parry looked at the smoke. Why? he asked. Why are they here? These …
vitriols
?

Daf shrugged. It was as if years ago, a full shift had departed for lunch and not returned. Some of their sodden magazines still lay on the benches. Hung on a wall, Parry noted a cap, an overcoat felted in green mould.

In another of the workshops, there were the torn remnants of glossy photographs. Parry stared, but could make no sense. Who were those people?

Girls? Possibly. But hardly men. Rather, monstrous, inarticulate shapes. He doubted they could be human.

Parry thought of an angling journal he had once seen. These had displayed conger eels, fanged, muscular. Immense torsos, wrenched from ancient wrecks. Now, when he touched one of the pages, it crumbled to dust.

There was no glass in the windows. Some were blocked with ivy trunks and purple buddleia.

Entrance to the sheds was permitted by sliding doors. Each of these had been deliberately run off its castors. A van had been driven into one of the entrances and set alight. Its four tyres were quivers of wreathwire.

The whole tarmac expanse was covered in tyres, engine parts, and pools of scummy petrol. There were gear wheels and flywheels on every surface, like iron
-
gilled fungi. Flanges and brackets. Unnameable parts.

On that first day, it seemed to Parry that he spent most of his time coughing. It was scorching weather but a breeze blew in from the sea, disturbing dust from the sinter heaps. These had been spread over the beach and dunes.

The sinter had been flattened by the enormous tyres of the vehicles. When he looked around, Parry saw only a basalt
-
coloured desert.

In the weeks to come he found there were people who lived amongst the waste. Yet he never came close enough to learn about them. Parry was convinced some of the desert's inhabitants were foreigners. He had no idea from where.

What is this place? he asked Daf, the only person who had spoken to him on his first day.

This place? asked the boy in driftwood boots. He looked around with genuine surprise. As if he had never noticed it before. As if he was slowly realising where he was.

The Works, I suppose, he said, squinting. Then he said it again, as if for reassurance.

The Works.

After this, the boy closed his eyes against the sun's assault, its dazzle leaping off the oil
-
stained macadam.

He and Parry lay on the tarmac under a buddleia bush that had smashed through the tarry crust. Parry had never met anyone more at ease with himself than Daf. At least, as undemanding.

Now it was morning break. The two had come back from a visit to the incinerator, one hundred yards distant. They had carried panniers of crushed grey carbon paper on their backs. The salvaged paper he was told would be picked up when a lorryload was ready.

The incinerator was simply a metal cage. All Parry had to do was stuff the carbon paper inside and fire it with a match, or Daf's Rizla lighter. It burned to grey shreds, leaving a filthy ash.

Parry decided to try another tack.

What else will we have to do today? he asked.

This is it.

Burning carbon paper?

Mm.

These miles of carbon paper?

That's it.

Pulling rolls of carbon paper out of the print
-
outs and taking it for burning?

That is it.

Bit boring isn't it?

Daf opened his eyes.

No, he said. It's not boring. It's just work. But last week, last week was great. There was no carbon at all. No burning. No nothing.

What did you do?

I said. Nothing.

Nothing?

Yeah. Nothing. Played football. Went down the beach on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday, we just lay around. Remember that hot day? That was Wednesday. Hottest day of the summer it was.

Parry considered this. There was a tarn of melted polythene, ten yards by ten, in a dint of the fractured tarmac before him. It gleamed a noxious yellow in the sun. A seagull had disintegrated on the surface.

But today we got work?

Yeah. Plenty of work today. But quiet tomorrow. Guaranteed.

How do you know?

You can always tell.

But how can you tell?

You just can.

How long you had a job here?

Two years.

Parry considered this.

Fuck, he gradually heard himself saying. Daring himself. Allowing the word into his mouth.

Yeah, said the boy with driftwood boots.

Fuck.

SEVEN

I

When Parry woke his watch said 15:19. So much of his life was now dreamlike. Anything was possible. Everything impossible.

Parry realised he had been dreaming about a workshop he and his father had sometimes visited. It was owned by a man called Yonderley.

He didn't know how he came to be there. Or for how long he had sat against the sofa. But there was a watchmaker's lathe he needed to reassemble, gravers and collets, chucks and bits to clean. Each had its special place. Nothing else, nowhere else, could suffice…

The light in the room had been on. Someone had switched it off. The fog breathed against the glass. Nitric acid, he thought. In its oily cloud.
Aqua fortis
in the glass bottle. In his right hand was a bloody handkerchief. The blood was new.

II

Glan looked at Parry as he came out of the bathroom.

Just cleaning myself up, said the older man. I feel better now. Nothing like a swill in the bosh.

What's a bosh?

Oh, a sink, I suppose. But yes, restored.

Glan regarded him and looked away.

I better find Serene, he said.

Yes, restored, smiled Parry. Like a painting. And he gently cuffed Glan.

You know, I was talking to my best class in Adelaide not long before I came back. About restoration.

Oh yeah?

There was a painting I'd always remembered. Leonardo da Vinci's ‘St Jerome'. Do you know it?

No.

Dates to about 1480. I think Leonardo was just under thirty. Not far off your age.

I'm twenty
-
three.

And he'd already done extraordinary things. By your age. Learned to think. Developed enormous curiosity.

Serene says you've got a shirt for me.

Oh, I do. Follow me, young man.

Parry led the way into his bedroom. Every surface was piled with clothes.

She said it was dusky pink.

Oh it's pink, all right. I can tell it suits you. But that painting had always fascinated me. Wonderful draughtsmanship, unusual angles, like most of Leonardo's work. What we have of it. But don't think I'm an expert. Because really I'm not…

You taught art, didn't you?

Sort of. But maybe a teacher doesn't know as much as people believe.

Oh, that's true, laughed Glan. My teachers knew nothing. Always down the pub, my teachers. Or getting things wrong, my teachers. Giving the wrong grades.

But I loved this painting, said Parry. Because it was unfinished. Leonardo simply hadn't got round to finishing what he'd started. Maybe he was hoping one of his pupils would complete it. After instruction. That's the way they did things. In those days.

Lazy type, was he?

The very opposite, man. He'd gone on to other projects. Other disciplines. A thousand different all
-
consuming tasks.

Oh yes?

But St Jerome attracted me for that very reason.

That it was incomplete. The saint's right arm, and the lion in the picture, are unpainted. You see, he seems to be taking a thorn out of the lion's paw. Jerome's arm and all of the lion are drawn in. But not coloured.

Maybe he was on a break?

Leonardo didn't have breaks. Or dinner hours. But I've a print of that painting, that cartoon, as it's called. And I've studied that lion. Ah yes, what a lion. No lion in art had ever been so carefully proportioned. Maybe since the cave painters thousands of years ago.

You can see every aspect of that lion, and Jerome's arm too. But to me, it's as though it's a ghost lion. That lion is disappearing in front of our eyes. It's been disappearing since the painting was first discovered. Like Jerome is disappearing too.

Yeah, that shirt.

First his right arm. But the implication is, the rest of the saint will also vanish. A man becoming a ghost. Beside a ghostly lion. Cell by cell. Atom by atom, the man is disappearing. Like the lion has disappeared. And that's what happens, isn't it?

What happens?

To people. To all of us. It's what happens to everybody and everything. Atom by atom. Cell by cell. Till all that's left are our outlines. Which are made up of memories. And eventually, those memories disappear as well.

Glan scratched his stomach.