My Idea of Fun (20 page)

‘Who?’ said John, whose attention had wandered somewhat.

‘Tall Tony, of course, not the squint bloke. I wouldn't of wanted to talk to him again anyway, he was off his trolley on whizz, had the horrors. All the time we were driving round this Portis place, laying low to avoid the filth, he kept blathering on telling me how – if he had a long enough line – he could catch ships in the fucking Bristol Channel by casting from the top window of ‘is ’ouse. ‘

Beetle Billy lapsed into silence, as if the point of this story were self-evident. No one broke it. John was staring up at the ceiling, his lips moving as he counted the fire-resistant tiles. The other junkies might have been dead for all the movement they made. They were all quiescent, locked into the private purgatory of withdrawal, save for one, a lank thing with greasy hair and bifocals who looked like an electrical engineer fallen on hard times. This character was smoking a cigarette with great concentration and using its glowing tip to reduce a Styrofoam cup to a charred lattice. The only sound in the room besides a bluebottle nutting the dirty windowpane was the faint fizz the fag made as it touched the flammable stuff.

‘So?’ said John eventually.

‘Well, the story, Johnnie-boy, it's like, it's like . . . err – a whatsit. ‘

‘An example?’

‘Yeah, thassit, an example, cos he said “the stuff’ and I didn't know what he meant. So it can't be true that gear is like whatsit. ‘

‘You mean like the word “Hoover"?’

‘Yeah, thassit, like ‘oover.’

There were several very good reasons why Hieronymus Gyggle had decided to operate from within a drug dependency unit. As he had admitted to Ian Wharton, he viewed the junkies themselves as little more than cannon-fodder to be sent over the top and out on to the battlefields of insanity. However, more importantly, Gyggle needed the junkies the way that a queen bee needs her workers. In their metrical journeyings around the city's dealers and chemists, its shooting alleys and front lines, they collected a property that he required for his more intensive, more unusual incubations.

For the states of consciousness attained by humans in deep sleep or extreme narcosis are not mere brain events, fleeting coalescences of neurones, they are concrete things. Once abandoned by their original occupants these artefacts are left lying about our crowded universe waiting for new tenants to inch into, grubwise. There were plenty of these kicking around the DDU, they were as much a part of the detritus of the place as cigarette butts and the plastic containers used for urine samples. Fortunately they were far more difficult to remove. These cubicles of catalepsy thronged the stairwells and, being negatively buoyant, clustered under the strip lights like invisible cauls.

Ian Wharton, the Omnipom beginning to course through his body, took flight. His dormant psyche drifted up and was netted by the defunct dreamscape of Richard Whittle, one of Gyggle's junkies. It was a fresh reverie, only recently deposited at the DDU, and as such particularly potent, nightmarishly sappy. It acted as a portal, a gateway to the plains of heaven, the awful demesne where his mind – unfettered by identity – could roam where the wild things were.

Richard was struggling towards consciousness but his way was blocked. The world had chosen to interpose some myriads of dynasties of encrusted dreams between Richard and wakefulness. Both dreams that operated within dreams and dreams that were themselves fragmentary evidence of some long lost hypnogogia, which had enabled opaque archaeologists to reconstruct elements of this prehistoric dream, then put it on show in the clear glass cases, that were themselves the relics, the sacrosanct vessels, of another culture that was itself a dream.

Richard lay on his back (as did Ian) and felt the collar of his anorak slick against his neck. (For Ian read paper antimacassar, scratching.) He was gazing through a rain-flecked window. Looked at upside-down the terrace of houses opposite was entirely strange and disembodied. Enormous, its pastel façade shiny after showering, the vast bulk of the terrace, its crenellation of chimneys festooned by spidery antennae, seemed to glide through the sky below. It was moving rather than the ragged cloud behind it. The whole terrace, like an urban liner, was cruising off along the street.

There was the soft sound of sock scuffed on carpet. Richard looked up as Beetle Billy and Big Mama Rosie swam into view. (Gyggle and his corrupted charge nurse were back in the cubicle, the nurse adjusted the spigot on a bag of clear fluid and dangled it from the hook above the couch.) They came into the room and stood – in so far as their numbers allowed it – around where Richard lay.

‘Come on, luvvie,’ said Big Mama Rosie, her very flesh wobbling from side to side, working hard to justify its owner's sobriquet.

‘Martin's here,’ said Beetle Billy and his dumb mouth drooled, his saliva spelling out the implication.

Richard tilted forward until he was upright. By the time he got there the couple had gone. He hadn't heard them leave but now their low murmurs welled up from the kitchen downstairs. Big Mama Rosie and her husband Martin lived in a maisonette of bewildering proportions. Richard thought that the gaff might have as many levels as it did rooms. Long, slightly warped passageways with bulging walls connected dusty half-landings curtained off by heavy drapes of plush and velvet. Progress around the maisonette was mediated by swishing, and each swish brought forth another fluff ball from the train of a drape. The maisonette was close, sultry even, but sultry with swaddling, not with heat. There was never any money for heat.

Richard wandered down the stairs. The bottom half of the staircase was open to the room it entered. Richard sat half-way down observing Martin, Big Mama Rosie and Beetle Billy. They were working around the kitchen table. Their work was hurried but efficient. It involved fire and liquid, crucibles and filtration, yet the impression Richard had was of mechanics at a pit stop, rather than of chemists, such was their mania.

Big Mama Rosie looked up from the syringe she was priming. ‘Wait in the kids’ bedroom, Richard, I'll be right up.’

Richard eased himself back up the stairs on his bum. He made a promise to himself that he would reach the kids’ bedroom without rising to his feet, he'd go the whole way backwards on his bum. Already his wrists ached, it was going to be really difficult but the task was magically important, or so Richard told himself. If he could do it the hit would be good and everything would be all right, the wars would end and the starving children would be fed.

He reached the top, then went up and over a raised landing. He hustled quite quickly down the passageway, scampering backwards on heels of hands and heels of feet, until he collapsed giggling at the door of the bedroom. Richard fell on to the top bunk and lay there. His breath came in disordered gasps, each one dislodging a little nugget of nausea which travelled up his gullet and spilled into the back of his throat. He felt the prickle of sweat moving across his brow and top lip. He wiggled his fundament, pressing it into the thin foam mattress. Was that tortured squeaking the bed springs, or his own rusted pelvis?

Richard's feeble attention wandered off; even the involuntary action of moving his eyes felt hobbled with resistance. They staggered a few inches, then settled on the spatter of sticky decals and cartoon pictures that Big Mama Rosie had stuck up above the kids’ bunk bed. Richard lost himself in the contemplation of Goofy and Pluto's distant Korean cousins. They had bodies the colour of passion fruit and snouts as bulbous as breasts. Their feet were cloven into two rounded toes, and their paws into two soft digital prongs which could surely never oppose or, as in the example of a lime-green creature lingering behind some two-dimensional grass, lift a cup of tea to lines-for-lips.

Richard was wholly sucked into this world of forms. Forms that had set off from the idea of the human body and driven as far and as fast as they could, back towards the moment of conception. Until they reached this world, a world of the foetal. This was the joke bestiary that children could relate to. Creatures with vestigial limbs, omnipotent capabilities and no genitals, only rounded furry mounds, impossible to penetrate.

Big Mama Rosie came into the kids’ bedroom with Beetle Billy's broad brow poking over her shoulder. He was reciting some interminable tale to her back. ‘And then we was, like, wedged into the alley, cos he hadn't thought of that. It was easy to get the cabinet thingy down the coal chute but we couldn't lift it over the bloody wall and anyways the dog was barking, Fucker Finch's dog, a pit bull– ’

‘Shut up, Billy!’ Billy was Rosie's brother. Rosie waddled to the window and yanked the curtain to one side.

Dusk had come like a thick yellow discharge across the sky. Rosie's dark brow reflected this yellow and also the orange of her tubular skirt. She extended jaundiced hands towards the cold glass while flicking the barrel of the syringe she held pinched between finger and thumb. Puny bubbles dislodged themselves from the fluid and floated up to join the scud of scum that rested at the syringe's collar. (Gyggle drew up 5 mls of liquid Valium into the large barrel. He had already inserted the catheter in the back of Ian's hand, taped it in place and stoppered it.) She flicked and flicked, then pushed in the plunger until a pee-stream of liquid arced up to hit the plastic curtain rail.

Beetle Billy hovered dronishly in the background, uncertain of whether to stay or go.

Leaving the window, Rosie came to join Richard where he lay on the top bunk. She mounted the first step of the flimsy midget ladder. She paused, wobbling. One hand held the syringe, the other plucked and then began to hoist the stretchy orange cloth up over her knees, revealing firstly fat calves, secondly fat knees and latterly the tedious gusset of her voluminous pants. A knee came on to the bunk. Rosie straddled Richard and pushed herself down on to his crotch. All he could feel now was the muddled ridged cloth of his trousers; there was no other sensation.

As Rosie unbuttoned the cuff of Richard's shirt, he turned his face away. Beetle Billy had settled himself on top of a white chest of drawers with pseudo-brass knobs. He was reading an old copy of the
Beano
with total absorption. Over the cretinous mechanic's shoulder Richard could see the darkened corridor, bulbless these last four months, and thought – but perhaps only imagined – that a figure lurked there.

Rosie's quick hands, as deft as blind rats in a sewer, had discovered the pit of Richard's elbow and found also his tiny, flaccid, invulnerable penis. She held his penis like the syringe, tightly, and eased both in together, the needle into Richard's arm, his penis over the elasticated rim and into her damp maw.

Big Mama Rosie began to truffle and muffled champings fell from her mouth. She moved over Richard like a planetoid blob, pumping at the syringe with one hand, until his red blood joined the orange fluid in the barrel. He made the effort and lifted his free arm up into the air; it floated away from him, ethereal and unconnected. He pawed weakly at Rosie's T-shirt, pulling the damp fabric away from. her chest. Rosie's breasts were like two sweating blancmanges. They lay on her rib cage, depressed and puddingy – the nipples were recessed. Richard tried to pull these fly-speck currants out of their soft surround, the virulent pink slab of yesteryear's dessert.

There was a ‘lumpa-lumpa’ noise in the air, a deafening heartbeat. Richard looked down at the crook of his arm and saw that a massive thrombus had blown up in the vein; it bulged beatingly, uncontrollably: ‘lumpa-lumpa, lumpa-lumpa’. Richard tried to call out to Rosie, to tell her to cease with her injecting of him into her and her into him. It was no use, her eyes were glazed and rolled back in their sockets, she stared sightlessly up at the ceiling where Spiderman hung from his plastic web. The ‘Iumpa-lumpa’ grew, filling the cold closeness of the room. Outside the streetlamps came on, each one an island. ‘Lumpa-lumpa, Iumpa-lumpa.’ And still the lump grew and grew in the crook of his arm, grew until it eclipsed the arm itself. And still Rosie pumped up and down. Richard tore with his nails at Rosie's breast, feeling the skin pucker and give, like the wrinkled rubber of an old party balloon.

The breast exploded. The thrombus exploded. Suddenly the air was full with a spray of orange droplets; gouts of pussy fluid spurted out from arm and chest. The tattered skin of Rosie's breast fell slack against the exposed radiator of her rib cage. Richard stared down at his arm. Corners of flesh and skin curled away from the ragged hole in the crook of his elbow. Exposed to view, in the very core of his arm, were the crude struts and wonky rivets of his Meccano anatomy, lain bare for all to see.

A huge bald man came in from where he had been loitering in the passage and stood over Richard. He was wearing an immaculately tailored pin-stripe suit. The bald man mopped the orange gunk from his lapels and brow with a silk paisley handkerchief. Then he reached his hand down towards Richard's face, middle fingers and thumb bent in, index and little fingers extended, warding off the evil eye. With the two outstretched fingers he teased down Richard's eyelids and pressed him back once more, down into the orange darkness.

('He's right under now,’ said Gyggle.

‘An’ I suppose you want me to change his bloody pee bag an’ that.’

‘Well, yes. I do think that constitutes part of your duty as a nurse.

‘Usually there's a good reason for why a patient is unconscious for the whole damn weekend.’

‘Ours not to reason why – ‘ Gyggle shot over his shoulder, and was gone, off to interview his volunteer.)

Ian was in the Land of Children's Jokes. His gummy eyes prised themselves open to see a garish room full of clashing primary colours, post-box reds, viridian greens and cerulean blues. It was a large room and the furniture was all fungal. There were giant toadstools instead of chairs and grossly distended puffballs in place of sofas. Tall mushrooms gathered together, their slick flat caps grouping to form the surfaces of what might have been tables. The close air in the room was meaty, yeasty, damp and beefy.

There were two men in the room with Ian. One, who was plump and pink, squatted naked in the corner. The other wore a purple suit of satin covered with large black spots and moved about, stepping between the unusual soft furnishings. Every third step he twirled on his heels and as he did so struck an attitude, the cane in his right hand held aloft at an angle. Ian could hear him muttering to himself, ‘Cha, cha,
cha!
Cha, cha,
cha!
Cha, cha,
cha!’
the emphasis always on the last ‘cha’.