The Folded Man (22 page)

21.

Juliet brings them home in the Transit. She has directions and maps, a semi-auto pistol nestled in her lap.

It works like this, the slip. You're loaded in. You sit damn still. You strap up, shut up. Say your byes and keep that chin up.

Brian closes his eyes on green fields and silver glass –

The van slips. Explodes across every colour of the rainbow. He opens his eyes. They roll about in the swill of black limbo. Brian sees galaxies and belts of frozen stone, majestic comets off the stern that sail over, so close you can see colours, fine crystal, the treasures inside. It's some private vision of heaven, without worldly things at all. His hands look funny, like mousse, a froth of pink on liquid bones. They float on a sea of absolutes. Brian closes his eyes. Brian hears his heartbeat swell –

Opens his eyes to fire and hell.

Juliet dials something in. Unbuckles and turns fully round.

Welcome home, children. You might feel nauseous – can't account for turbulence.

Turbulence? asks Noah. Where are we?

Same place. Just forty-seven floors over your memorial lamp.

 

Stripes of orange mark the
grid of Manchester's plan. Juliet wrestles with yaw to
position the Transit, swearing mildly.

Okay, she says. You're good. You're set. Town hall's a straight stone down.

The whispers in the back: And you definitely want this?

That was Noah.

Brian nods. He smoothes the stubble on his head.

You know they're really bloody interested in your changes.

Stands to reason, doesn't it, goes Brian. To look at me. But yours too, Moth-boy. You can stay in touch.

I look a damn sight worse than you, pal.

You're not wrong.

What's going to happen to the shoe shop? asks Brian.

Only bricks and mortar.

Got an answer for everything, haven't you?

The van doors open. Noah puts a wet finger out into the air, checking the wind.

Of course, he says.

I won't miss you, Brian tells him.

Noah drops, blowing a kiss.

 

Already the tarmac has gone to weeds. They've crossed the dusk yards; the shapes of the Pennines sharpening ahead. Manchester is a smashed lava lamp in the Transit's mirrors, an orange-yellow smudge bleeding into the cloud above it.

It looks gorgeous, Brian's city in flames.

Juliet swings right at Flouch roundabout.

She doesn't say a word.

22.

Brian means to accept himself.

The cloaksuit he asked for ghosts his hands, but not the noise. The walker frame, for all its precision-machined parts, for all its greased bearings, still clatters like a maraca tossed down a well. He throws the bolt cutters under a bush. He pockets the foot of sharpline he's taken out of the fence.

Birds scatter and chatter the second he pushes through the shrubbery and onto the back lawn.

On the lawn and panting, sweating. The smell of fish and the smell of dew.

After every
sharp movement, pause for thought.

He counts three lads on patrol. Same style Salford boys they met first time round. He locks the legs, these skinny legs on either side.

If you're on open ground, go forward a metre
, wait a minute –

The bandstand is just over there, its roof the shape of a deflated church bell. In the house, Ian's fortress, all the lights are off. This early in the morning, there's a dull sheen to everything; that cold filter that casts your skin in grey.

If someone spots you, remember they haven't. They can
't see you. And if they think they've seen
you, keep still: they'll soon think they haven't
.

Brian ambles, totters, wheezing through exertion. It's absolutely a shuffle, this – he isn't quite used to the ­gyros, the rolling motion, the feeling he's always at the edge of his balance. That's because there's a pivot at his waist, and his fused feet form the central leg. He's a kind of biomechanical tripod, now, so when he's got his meat forward, the two steel legs compensate behind. It makes for slow progress.

But
it's progress.

 

Under the bandstand, pondside, Brian steadies himself in the walker unit. He can smell the water now, can see the carp as they rise, scatter and regroup. A spirograph of orange and silver, black and mottled brown.

Brian pours a lot of salt into the koi pond. He hears the filter grind, or thinks he does.

At first the fish thrash and scatter – working faster than any temperature would make them. They dart here, rolling on themselves, crashing in blind panic.

He watches the fish working harder.

He watches and pours the salt.

He keeps pouring. The fish rise to the surface, rolling about on their sides, their gills turned a deep red.

He unstraps himself. Turns off the cloaksuit and has a word with the buckles. He unwraps his tail. He runs a hand around it, up and down. The scales here have turned to rainbow – pearlescent golds and purples caught in this scant light. He's wearing nothing for a top, and his chest hair has long since come off.

The fin on his back, the wound that's flowered, unfurls as he leans away from the walking frame.

Naked, he slips into the water – as elegant as he's never been. He parts the dead and dying fish gently; brothers now, sisters now, family from another time. A shame they were not sharks, marine flounder, some other kind, else he'd have swam here with them. His tail reacts to the salt, gently rippling as the powerful muscles adjust.

He raises his arms so that his shoulders crest the water line. He feels his gills begin to suck.

He dips his head; breathes it in.

A last breath, more out of tradition than necessity, and he's under. Maritime man, with his gold-gilded tail.

To wait.

 

Through the floating fish, Brian sees the shimmer-silhouette above. The length of the man, warped, distorted by the surface, and outlined by the dawn light. He sees the frozen limbs of a baffled man, and it comforts him. He hears shouts, muffled, and lets a single bubble go with a grin. In his hands, that foot length of sharpline.

He pulls it taut.

Good strong wire for great, noble deeds. Because this is the final myth. It's what a mermaid is for; what a mermaid does. He is the siren on the masthead, the fate of drowning lovers, the figure by the rockpools.

If his mother could see –

Ian leans in and bulges large; leans in to pick out his dead children from the pond. His head shimmies across the pond's skin. The surface tension breaks.

And Brian, clever Brian, rises to meet him. Not as half a man, but fully a mermaid.