Watching the Wheels Come Off (11 page)

M
ark arrives back in court as the coroner takes her seat, bangs her gavel, and announces the continuation of the inquest. The ensuing silence is immediately broken by muffled sobs surfacing from behind the witness stand, followed by an ominous clank. Lugosi, still hooded and clamped in the chain, rolls wearily into the centre of the court room for all to see. The court clerk removes her glasses and rubs her eyes, while the coroner keeps blinking with disbelief.

‘It seems Mr Lugosi has had no lunch.’

Somebody titters in the public gallery.

‘Mr Miles, can you account for this oversight?’

Mark turns bright red, stands and stutters, ‘I… I… I… forgot him.’

‘You forgot him? A man you had previously bound with a chain and padlock and wearing a hood? Really, Mr Miles.’

Mark is tempted to air his theory about maggots in the brain, but wisely desists because the coroner seems an unlikely customer for revelations engendered by the
ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. He chooses, instead, to try another medical route by way of an excuse.

‘The tragic circumstances of Mr Turpin’s departure have severely effected my health.’ He points to the carotid artery on the left side of his neck. ‘Apparently the flow of blood in this artery is only intermittent. I am, in fact, due for a brain scan to assess any consequent damage to my memory cells.’

His eyes remain resolutely fixed on the coroner, to see if she swallows this excuse. She doesn’t.

‘Are you suggesting that Mr Lugosi was located in those cells that are now temporarily deprived of blood?’

‘It’s the only explanation I can come up with at the moment.’

Lugosi whimpers again, and Mark looks at him but does nothing.

‘And the location of the key to Mr Lugosi’s padlock? Is that in the same affected cells?’

Mark wearily searches all his pockets. Finding no key, he looks up at the coroner and shakes his head, close to tears.

‘I think you’ll find it on the table: Exhibit D, next to where your left hand now rests. But before you use it, Mr Miles, let me say that any further cogitation on the reasons for Mr Turpin’s disappearance is pointless. Mr Lugosi has given us a graphic demonstration of
why
Mr Turpin is undoubtedly still in his trunk at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.’

She bangs the gavel. ‘Death by misadventure.’

The coroner rises, as if about to leave. On a sudden
impulse she turns back, angrily silencing the court with the gavel.

‘I must say the part played by Mr Miles in this sad story is less than pleasing. It brings to mind what my namesake, Cordelia, says in
King Lear
: “That glib and oily art to speak and purpose not.”’ She points at Mark. ‘One can only hope that in future Mr Miles will direct his glib and oily art into a more fertile endeavour than adding to the legions of worthless celebrities and fodder for the tabloids.’

Mark looks up at the smirking hacks scribbling away in the public gallery. He himself will be tomorrow’s fodder.

As soon as Cordelia retires to her chambers, Dickenson raises his flask to Mark and shouts, ‘You’re toast, Mr Miles!’

Mark flees.

The maggot has a lot more work to do.

The old adage that today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s lavatory paper no longer holds good. Not just because it’s now called ‘toilet tissue’ but because a couple of cute puppy dogs, frolicking with fluffy rolls of the stuff on TV, has helped wean us away from the newspaper’s traditional secondary function. As a result they tend to hang around longer than is healthy for those they have traduced.

That’s why Mark stayed off the streets for the next two days.

His mother slept that same night on the sofa, leaving her large double bed for him to rest up in. The day following the inquest, she went out to buy all the papers, local and national, that she could find. The nationals totally ignored the story and the tabloids were preoccupied by a millionaire footballer’s diminutive penis, as reported by a lap dancer he had consorted with.

Whilst the local rag did carry a report of Cordelia’s hatchet job, it was abbreviated and buried on a back page. The front page, luckily for Mark, carried a story that broke the same day. A prominent town councillor had been arrested for indecent exposure in the esplanade’s public lavatory.

On the Friday, rested and refreshed, Mark returned to his office and prepared himself for his induction into the Personal Improvement Institute.

Earlier that Friday morning, Snazell had watched Alice Honey leave her room for breakfast. As before, he let himself in with ease, only this time he had to work fast in case Alice returned or one of the chambermaids arrived. He anticipated that the name tags for the students would be already prepared.

They were.

Displayed on the desk in alphabetical order, it took him no time to locate the one for Mark Miles. At the point where the cheap metal chain was attached to the
tag itself, he clamped a microphone no larger than a pinhead. The whole operation took less than a minute before he slipped back into the deserted corridor and returned whence he came.

A
convoy of three liquorice-black Cadillacs with mirror windows glides through a storm that would have impressed even Richard Wagner. Travelling nose to tail, and each abnormally stretched, they take an eternity to pass.

Like a funeral cortège.

Pedestrians, trapped in doorways while sheltering from the torrential rain, bow their heads out of respect for the dead. Forked lighting reflects in the waterfalls pouring off the vehicles’ roofs. Cannonballs of thunder roll in from the Atlantic.

Herman Temple and his entourage have hit town.

For Herman
every
second of
every
minute of
every
hour of
every
day of
every
week of
every
month of
every
year of his life is, in his own words, ‘power productive’. His mind is a thought-processing plant. Like any other commodity – cars, clothes or candy –
thoughts
equal dollars, and dollars equal power.

That simple.

The first two limos carry Temple’s assistants. He sits alone in the third.

Inside this limo, the storm can be seen but not heard, baffled as it is by the pea-green, tightly stuffed upholstery. Temple is talking into a tape recorder. He has the soft voice of someone who is hard: when he speaks, people listen. His life is a never-ending tapeworm of spiel. Seeking – and finding – inspiration from the deluge outside, he continues his dictation.

‘“And when they saw Jesus walking on the sea, they were terrified; thinking Him a spirit.”’

Lightning briefly illuminates his face.

He nods his approval at this cosmic intervention and continues: ‘“But he spoke to them straight away, saying: ‘Be of good cheer. It is I. Be not afraid.’”’ Temple presses pause on the machine, briefly, then releases it.

‘And it is I, Herman Temple, who now speaks to you, students of the PII, saying: “You, too, will soon be walking on water. Be not afraid, for I am here to take you into the land of milk and honey.”’

Again he pauses before adding: ‘And money!’

The leading Cadillac carries Temple’s three male assistants. A trio of crew cuts on chiselled heads top the hard, muscular bodies sprawled on the back seat. Rip Kubitschek, Randy McMingus and Biff Paretsky are all ex-US marines. Now they work for a private security company, constantly circling a planet wrapped in America’s military might, happily doing the Pentagon’s
dirty work. It is more fun being freelancers, as the bounty is bigger and there are no sheriffs in sight. Then there is another bonus: the occasional cushy tour of duty with the Personal Improvement Institute.

Sucking a can of beer while intent on a porn video, Randy lives up to his name. On the small screen, a team of big-breasted women set about each other with simulated enthusiasm that involves a lot of ululating tongues and not much else. Randy’s taste in porn extends only to coupling women. The sight of men screwing discomfits him. Since he is unwilling or unable to articulate his reasons for this, his buddies have concluded that super-sized cocks undermine him.

For Randy porn is an addiction. On a recent mission to the Horn of Africa, a drug dealer in the kasbah sold him a hot video called
Virgins Only
. The cover showed women in burkas who, when up and running so to speak, turned out to be rampant Arab faggots. Randy was so disgusted by the ensuing scenes of buggery, he sought out the dealer the very next night and broke his neck. He now deals exclusively with a website back home that barters porn for photos of torture and massacre. He’s taken plenty of those on American bases around the world, so Randy now finds himself in porn heaven.

The limos float like black bubbles across the countryside and glide through towns and villages. The limo windows
reflect but don’t reveal. Their uniformed chauffeurs, dark figures in sealed cabins, are cut off from their human cargo as effectively as an undertaker driving a hearse from the occupant of the coffin behind him.

The scene in the second Cadillac would have been very much to Randy’s taste. Alice Honey’s two female assistants, Marjorie Negroponte and Loreen Rutter, are currently locked in a sexual configuration. They lie end to end across the back seat, with Loreen on top. Their various limbs move slowly and in different directions so they look at first glance like some form of large crustacean. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that their faces are totally hidden from view, with their mouths clamped over each other’s excited vulvas.

For Marjorie this is a first-time experience. After a couple of beers, Loreen came on to her and young Marjorie is game for anything. Besides, it was a way of passing the time, since she doesn’t much like reading.

It so happens that Loreen and Alice Honey worked once together as cabin staff for American Airlines. When Alice left to become a dental hygienist, Loreen found employment as a guard for a company running a chain of prisons for women. Only then did she recognise her true sexual orientation, and thus shed the shackles that restrained her. Unfortunately, whilst she was doing duty on Death Row, the sheriff and his execution party
arrived one early morning to find her and the condemned woman engrossed in a sexual act that involved the electric chair.

One was fired; the other was fried.

Loreen, finding herself out of a job, was, of course, a natural for employment in the private-security sector now burgeoning in America. It was pure chance only that she had been allocated to the PII contract.

Alice Honey is in for a surprise.

When the muffled groans finally stop and their faces surface, they smile at each other knowingly.

Marjorie blushes. ‘Not a word to Biff?’

‘No way, sweetheart.’ She kisses her. ‘Biff? How the hell did he get a name like that?’

‘At high school his nickname was “Beef Steak”. That got shortened to Biff.’

‘Has Biff boffed you yet?’

‘No way,’ says Marjorie, shocked. ‘We’re waiting till we get married.’

‘Oh yeah? Wise up, sweetheart: Biff’s a faggot. That’s why he hasn’t boffed you.’

‘How could he be a fag? He’s an ex-marine?’

‘Shit-loads of marines are fags. All those buddy-buddy macho guys are fags. Look at footballers, for instance. All that bending over with their butts stuck in the air, like baboons in tight silk pants, right in your face - what do you think they’re up to?’

‘You’re crazy, Loreen.’

‘And you’re dumb, Marjorie. Biff’s a fag name, just like
Tab or Rock.’ She can see doubt spreading across the other girl’s face like poison. ‘Sweetheart, Rip told me he’s happy to fuck Biff’s butt when he can’t get no woman.’

‘Rip said that?’

Loreen nods and looks out of the window. The convoy turns a corner and it seems they are suddenly on the edge of the world – tracking past white railings, weather shelters and an angry ocean crashing silently over an esplanade. Out of the other window Marjorie sees the Grand Atlantic Hotel looming out of the storm, grim and gothic, and she is suddenly afraid.

Alice Honey addresses the students, who are now all gathered in the hotel foyer.

‘None of Dr Temple’s thoughts go unrecorded.’

Mark chips in, ‘Like Richard Nixon?’

Alice ignores him. She’s already beginning to regret allowing him on this course. She continues: ‘There are tape machines in all his cars, notebooks at strategic points in all seven of his residences, with formica boards and grease pencils ready in every shower.’ She is irritated when some students giggle. ‘You’d all do well to emulate Dr Temple’s discipline. Ideas are like butterflies – pin them down immediately or they will flutter away.’

She fixes them with a steely look. ‘At the end of each day, all Dr Temple’s tapes, notepads and formica boards are
collected by his assistants and word-processed throughout the night. For posterity.’

Her phone vibrates, then tinkles cheerily.

She connects. ‘Thanks Biff. We’ll be right out.’

Snapping the mobile shut, she holds up her hands to silence the chattering students. ‘Dr Temple’s cavalcade is approaching. We’ll now congregate on the steps to form a welcoming committee.’

Alice and the students wait under the canopy at the top of the hotel steps. As the convoy draws up, they start applauding. Biff is the first out, followed closely by Randy and Rip. It’s a well-oiled routine. They are in place even as Temple’s car reaches pole position, right below the flapping canvas banner.

Biff opens the back door, while Randy and Rip both open umbrellas. The wind catches them, snaps their insides out and their well-oiled operation abruptly falters – as does the applause. The two ex-marines now have a fight on their hands. Watching anybody trying to tame an umbrella in a high wind always has comedic potential. Rip and Randy don’t disappoint. Up and down, in and out, grunts and groans, spokes in eyes and ears, they battle on, bursting to contain curses they dare not let out.

Alice douses the laughter stuttering into life among the students with a look from hell. Biff, rain pouring from his crew cut down to his trainers, has to watch in horror as
his two drenched assistants finally capitulate. All three then turn to look into the darkness of the limo’s interior.

Temple does not physically emerge, only his voice.

‘“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go
back
and made the sea
dry land
, and the waters were divided.” Exodus 14.’

His soft voice rises in tone. ‘Alice, are you there?’

Alice grabs Mark’s raincoat from his hands and runs to the open door. A tubby little man appears, ducks under the sheltering coat and climbs slowly up the steps.

Alice hisses at the stunned students: ‘Applaud, you assholes.’

They respond, but it’s all a bit ragged.

Dr Herman Temple pauses on the top step, turning as if to bless them.

‘It is I, Herman Temple. Be not afraid.’

And he disappears inside the hotel.

But Mark
is
afraid. Randy caught him smiling during his bout with the umbrella, and fixed him with a venomous look.

The maggot sits up, ready for action.

Pain is on the horizon.