Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (4 page)

So the insects whirled in front of and behind Jonathan's grey eyes; and he walked on unseeing. Beyond the thick hedging bordering the lane, the pylons kept pace with him, their cables thrumming in the late-afternoon heat.

The cottage reposed at the bottom of what passed for a combe in this relaxed landscape. A stream-cum-drainage ditch ran alongside the garden hedge. When there was any rain it burst its confines, flooding lane and field. On all sides of the cottage the fields swept up at a modest angle for some hundreds of yards, on two sides meeting the pylon lines, on the third a liner-shaped copse, and on the fourth the paddock of tumbledown jumps and dried-out pits where his landlord's tinkly-voiced daughters rode their ponies.

Jonathan's cottage pinioned this awning of fieldscape, weighed it down at its centre. He debouched from the lane and walked the hundred yards of his landlord's drive to the cottage gate. Arbuthnot – the landlord – was away. Jonathan could tell this from the pile of black plastic bags set at the end of the drive. As he passed by them, the black bucklers the bags formed palpably radiated heat, and then a cloudlet of scintillating flies, gold and blue, arose from them to dance on the tiny thermals.

Jonathan entered his cottage, went through the breakfast room to the kitchen and unloaded his rucksack on the work surface by the fridge. The fly-paper dangling by the window was full. So full that the gooey corpses of its victims entirely covered it, like an advanced chancre on a tongue. As he watched a fly homed in on the thing, circling, dipping and finally alighting on the back of one of its conspecifies. Jonathan watched, only slightly sickened, as the fly applied its nozzled proboscis to the chink betwixt the head and thorax of the corpse and began to feed.

Then the repulsion did come, and Jonathan found himself moving from room to room, fetching chairs so that he could rear upwards, prise out the drawing-pins in the ceiling and take down the tacky mausoleums. Such was his hurry over this loathsome work that on two occasions the fly-papers came down on top of him, gifting him a head-dress repellent in the extreme. He ran from the house, hunched over, head and arm angled as if he were a Pompeian, about to receive a lava bath; and then ran back in again, mewling; there was no succour abroad. He had to wash his hair before he could resume work on the index.

In the study a gold beam lanced down from a chink in the curtain, to spotlight a patch of wear on the carpet. On the screen of the Macintosh, small pellets ricocheted about like insects in a killing jar. Jonathan sat down in his swivel chair and clicked on the Anglepoise. He flicked the mouse and the screensaver dissolved into a body of text.

Jonathan had reached the term ‘nef” before going out to do the shopping. It was an obscure term meaning the nave of a church. He plugged the three letters into the word-search and hit the control key. The computer went about its work, chomping through the text, looking for instances. He felt himself relax into the machine's labour. It made its clicks and whirrs companionably, this clean thing, this ergonomic thing. Jonathan honed his appreciation, concentrated, tried to ignore the deeper zzzing undercutting them . . . the deeper, more organic, more moribund zzzing.

A fly was dying in the lea of his mouse mat. As Jonathan watched it span out from the thin, hard-edged shadow and into the full glare of the Anglepoise. The fly was on its back. Must be propelling itself with its wings, thought Jonathan, as it span to a halt like a minuscule merry-go-round, the wings, the hairs, the compound eyes, returning from blur.

Was the fly a victim of Vapona? Jonathan had erected the little venetian-blind slatted units, one to each room, but done it in the spirit of magic, not really believing that they worked. How could the poison affect the flies – and not me? Or the earwigs for that matter? It started up twirling again, buzzing again. The upside-down fly moved top-like across the desk, batted off the edge of a piece of paper and came to rest among some breadcrumbs. How long, Jonathan wondered, will it take to die?

And this query sent his febrile mind spinning into an orbit of twisted, insect supposition. Why? Why were flies’ bodies full of what appeared to be pus? From where Jonathan sat he could see the smear paths of two of his earlier executions. Was it perhaps an adaptive response to parasitising humans? Making sure that the act of killing was an unpleasant, if marginal activity? And why did killing flies need to be unpleasant at all? Why couldn't it be made into some kind of pastime, or sport even. That's it! A solution to the need for blood sports and the need to kill flies. Perhaps miniature needle-guns could be developed, able to achieve the pin-point accuracy necessary for targeting flies?

Jonathan tilted back in his chair, imagining the ramifications of his new idea. A fully functioning hunting field contained within the compass of a single Axminster carpet. Beaters – or rather beetles – moving through the pile, flushing out the grazing flies. The huntsmen sitting motionless at their workstations, needle-guns at the ready. The quarry has broken from behind its cover of lint and fluff. It's in the air! And the guns lead the flies, their muzzles moving sharply up, down, obliquely, tracking the erratic paths. A slight pressure on the trigger and the needle flies fast and true, skewering the droning bluebottle precisely through one wing and its bulbous abdomen. Crunch! It falls to the twistpile, bounces, settles down into death, like a slo-mo film of a wildebeest dropping on the veldt. Small wicker cages are opened by the guns, and specially trained wasps fly out. They bank, right themselves, lose altitude to the carpet, move in to retrieve the quarry.

Outside the summer afternoon droned on. The sun drummed on the hard, cracked earth. The cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers chafed and stridulated, rubbing leg on leg, wing-case on wing-case, or else popping a rigid tegument of their bodies, so as to produce noises like a child's toy. The land pulsed, as a woman's vagina does in the aftershocks of orgasm: holding the hot air to itself, and releasing it; holding the hot air to itself, and releasing it.

Jonathan's head fell back, jerked forward, rolled some, righted itself, fell back. His eyelids fluttered, then fell. He slept. In his dream Joy returned to the cottage. The taxi from Saxmundham station dropped her in the lane. She looked tremendous, her high, pointed shoulders enveloped in clear, veined wings. She had – he was amused and titillated to see – three, dear little pairs of hands. Her hands, so small, he found the thought of their childish grip on his thickening penis insistently erotic, even as he pitched and yawed in sleep, and the computer's screen-saver enveloped the recondite text.

‘Look,’ Joy said, gesturing with three hands towards her lower body, and twitching the drapery of wings to one side, ‘I bought it at Harvey Nick's, it's the very latest in abdominal sacking.’ ‘Darling!’ he exclaimed. ‘It's tremendous.’ And it was. Alternate filleted panels of silk and satin, in two shades of blue, ran from her thorax, down in smooth and sensual slickness, to where a simple tassel hinted at the delights within.

In the bedroom Jonathan stripped nervously, like an adolescent, hunching up to remove his trousers and pants, as if he could somehow hide his ravening erection. She stood by the window to disrobe, and as she removed epidermis after epidermis, the sun streamed through her wings, creating a jalousie pattern on the ceiling. Her six hands moved rapidly, speeded by her own, insistent appetite. Then they were one writhing thing on the sheet. She arched above him, her multifaceted eyes capturing and scattering the light. He groaned – in awe and pleasure. Out of the line of his sight, her modified ovipositor pushed smoothly from the tip of her abdomen, each one of its barbs dripping with Cacharel. She arched still more, bending herself back underneath him. The ovipositor nuzzled his anus; and then the sting oozed up, killing him at the moment of climax.

Jonathan awoke, his mouth full of glutinous, mucal crud. It was ten thirty in the evening, and he was now living in Flytopia.

This he realised on entering the kitchen. Silverfish boiled up from the crack at the back of the sink and spread out over the draining-board. Their myriad bodies formed some comprehensible design. Jonathan leant down to see what it was. It was writing; the silverfish had formed themselves into a slogan:
WELCOME TO FLYTOPIA
. . . it said, the leader dots being, as it were, the fifty or so stragglers who couldn't make it into the final leg of the ‘A’. Jonathan rubbed his eyes and exclaimed, ‘Well, this is a turn up. Tell me – if you can act in this fashion presumably you can understand my speech – what does being in Flytopia entail exactly?’

The swarm of silverfish fused into a single pullulating heap and then fissioned back into readable characters, spindlier this time, which ranged across the corrugations of the draining-board, as if they were lines on a sheet of paper:

IN FLYTOPIA HUMANS AND INSECTS LIVE TOGETHER CO-OPERATIVELY. WE HAVE UNDERSTOD YOUR ANXIETY AND REVULSION FROM US, BUT WISH NOW TO LIVE AT PEACE WITH YOU. YOU ASSIST US – WE WILL ASSIST YOU.

‘That should be “understood”,’ said Jonathan, ‘not “understod”.’ The silverfish rearranged themselves to correct the living typo. ‘Hmm;’ Jonathan continued to speak aloud as he got a beer from the fridge and opened it, ‘I suppose you want some kind of quid pro quo then?’

IT WOULD BE KIND IF YOU GOT RID OF THE VAPONAS AND THE FLY-PAPERS – INCIDENTALLY, SINCE YOU WERE WONDERING, THE VAPONAS EMIT A KIND OF NEUROTOXIN THAT PARALYSES US. IT'S NOT A NICE DEATH.

‘I'm sure . . . I'm sure . . . but you must appreciate, I don't want to relax my campaign against you until I have more evidence of your goodwill.’

WE UNDERSTAND THAT. IF YOU CONTINUE ABOUT YOUR DAILY EXISTENCE, WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO ACCOMMODATE OURSELVES TO YOUR NEEDS. I THINK YOU WILL FIND THAT WE CAN BE SURPRISINGLY USEFUL. YOU ARE TIRED NOW, WHY NOT GO AND SEE WHAT WE'VE DONE IN THE BEDROOM?

Jonathan went upstairs and snapped on the overhead light in the bedroom. The bed, normally a slough of damp and disordered sheets, was not only neatly made, but peculiarly clean in appearance, clean as if burnished from within. A four-inch-wide rivulet of mites was flowing off the plumped-up pillow, down to the floor, across the intervening strip of carpet, up to the window-sill, and out the window itself. ‘What's going on here?’ Jonathan asked, taking a slug of his beer. The back end of the stream of tiny insects quivered, detached itself from the larger body of its kine and began to form characters on the pillow. Within seconds a slogan arranged itself:

WE ARE THE DUST MITES WHO HAVE BEEN LIVING IN YOUR BEDROOM. IN THE MATTRESS, THE PILLOWS, AND THE CARPET. AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL FROM OUR ORDER WE HAVE THOROUGHLY CLEANED YOUR BEDDING AND NOW WE ARE DEPARTING. SWEET DREMS.

‘That should be “dreams”,’ said Jonathan pedantically, but the dust mites, paying no attention, had already reformed their column and were completing their ordered withdrawal.

It was the first night of dreamless and undisturbed sleep that Jonathan could remember having in weeks. But when he awoke the following morning the bedroom was humming with insect life. As he opened his eyes he saw that the ceiling immediately above him was carpeted with flies. DO
NOT BE ALARMED
! The flies quickly and quiveringly arranged themselves into the words:
WE WISH TO ASSIST YOU WITH YOUR TOILET.

‘Fair enough,’ said Jonathan, heaving himself blearily up on to his elbows.

A beautiful flight of cabbage white butterflies then came winging into the room, for all the world like a host of angels. Before Jonathan could react they had blanketed his face with soft, faintly damp wings. He felt their tiny mandibles pluck and nibble at the crusted matter on his lips and eyelids. He lay back on the pillow and let the insects give him what amounted to an entire facial. When the butterflies lifted off, regrouped and flew out the open window, he arose, refreshed and ready for the day.

All morning the insects proved as good as their command of words. Whenever Jonathan needed something, a pencil or a computer disk, he had only to point to it for an insect formation to arrange itself in the air, lift the required object, and port it to where he sat, labouring at the Macintosh. Once their task was completed, the flies quit the room, leaving him with blissful quiet. No noise of miniature timpani, as tiny heads butted giant panes.

The sight of a clump of blue-black flies, holding within their midst such quotidian human artefacts, was also, in and of itself, a kind of displacement activity. Jonathan found that with these little breaks in the work to entertain him progress on the index was effortless. He was on to ‘rood’ before the end of the morning.

At lunch he had a protracted dialogue with the draining-board. ‘OK,’ he told the silverfish, ‘I accept that so far you have acted in good faith. I will throw the Vaponas away!’

HOORAY
! wrote the silverfish.

‘I will also remove the spiders’ webs I have allowed to be established around the cornices and the architrave.’

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! WE WILL CONTINUE TO SERVE YOU.

Jonathan was using the broom to knock out the last of the webs in the spare bedroom when Joy rang. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine, fine.’ For some reason he found the very sound of her voice, vibrating in the receiver, intensely irritating, as if she were somehow trapped there, her nails rap-rap-rapping against the Bakelite.

‘Insect life not getting to you then, is it?’ She laughed, another tinkly, irritating noise.

‘No, no, why should it?’

‘Well, it's been bothering you all summer. And frankly I can't tell you what a relief it is to be in London, away from all of that bloody nature . . .’ She paused, and Jonathan bit his lip, restraining himself from pointing out that ‘bloody nature’ could just as well do without her. ‘. . . Still, I'm sure I'll be longing for it by Friday. I'll be on the three-forty train, would you get a cab to pick me up from Sax?’

Jonathan filed this request away, but as soon as he hung up, Joy vanished from his mind. He was finding Flytopia an exhilarating place to live in. They left him well alone in the study, but whenever he emerged he found orderly teams of insects going about their business of assisting him elsewhere in the house. Neat phalanxes of beetles trundled across the carpets, their mandibles seeking out whatever detritus there was. Similar teams of earwigs were at work in the bathroom, and in the kitchen all signs of his breakfast, right down to the ring of coffee powder he had left by the jar, were eradicated by the industrious ants.