Acid Lullaby (6 page)

Crouch turned to Max. ‘Hear that, arsehole? We are going to kick your head in.’

The teeth were laughing at him. Fallon joined in as the car roared towards the East End. He couldn’t stop laughing.

It was hilarious. He was swimming in the milky ocean and he knew he was immortal. God swam up to him. God had his face.

It
was
hilarious.

The journey took less than ten minutes. Aldo parked in an alley adjacent to Brick Lane. There were people drifting past nearby but none paid them any attention. Crouch dragged Fallon from the car and, with Aldo’s assistance, hauled him giggling into the darkness. At the end of the alley was a yard surrounded on three sides by crumbling black walls.

‘What is this place?’ Crouch asked.

‘Used to be a match factory until the Nazis dropped a bomb on it. Nobody ever bothered to rebuild it,’ Aldo replied.

The two men released their grip on Fallon and stepped back as he slumped to the floor. Fallon was oblivious to their conversation. He was climbing out of the sea, crawling up the side of the muddy mountain. Demons fluttered across his field of vision like butterflies. He swatted and snatched at them; laughing as they fell through his clumsy fingers. A story was playing in his head: a repeating loop that he couldn’t break. At the top of the mountain he lay back and listened to the thunder, flinching as the lightning struck at his body. Then, suddenly, Max Fallon saw the image of his dead mother.

Aldo and Crouch went to work on Fallon with their feet and fists. They soon became extremely frustrated by their failure to make him scream. Max felt numb. He tried to touch the beautiful image before him. His mother’s soft eyes were filling with tears, her face glowing with pride.

‘
You
made
me
so
happy
,’
she
said
, ‘
so
terribly
happy.
’

She
placed
a
tall
hat
on
his
head:
it
was
covered
with
brightly
coloured
jewels.

‘Hello
mummy,’
he
said.

‘Do
you
remember
who
you
are?’
she
replied.
‘Do
you
remember
the
beautiful
little
boy
who
made
mummy
so
proud?’

Fallon
was
confused.
Images
rushed
at
him:
pictures
flashing
past
him
down
the
motorway
of
his
barely
conscious
mind.

‘I
don’t
remember,
’
he
said.

She
reached
her
arms
around
him
and
buckled
a
silver
belt
of
moonlight
glitter
around
his
waist.

‘Do
you
remember
now?’

Fallon
wanted
to
cry.
‘I
remember,
’
he
heard
himself
say,
‘you
made
me
into
a
god.’

‘You
beat
everyone.
You
looked
so
beautiful.
You
made
me
so
very
proud.’

‘Then
why
did
you
leave
me?’
Max
asked
angrily.
‘You
fell
into
the
river
and
never
came
back.
I
climbed
out
of
the
water.
Why
couldn’t
you?’

‘You
were
a
little
god.
I
was
so
proud.’

‘You’re
making
me
sad.’

‘I
want
to
dream
now,
Max.
Sing
me
to
sleep
so
I
can
dream.’

Fallon
felt
himself
sliding
away
from
her;
tumbling
down
the
mountainside,
grasping
vainly
at
rocks
and
plants
to
slow
his
descent.
He
fell
through
the
clouds
and
saw
the
glittering
sprawl
of
London
racing
up
towards
him.

He opened his eyes and stared into the black hearts of his attackers.

Ten hours later, Max Fallon awoke with a terrified start in his shower. He was naked apart from a single sock. He had no immediate sense of where he was. The floor of his shower was stained with his blood except to Max it appeared golden not red. He tried to focus through the lights that flashed across his eyes. It was as if he was having a migraine, areas of his field of vision were swamped in bright, spiralling lights. Max began to feel the pains in his arms and legs. He began to focus on the cuts and bruises that leaked his golden essence into the shower.

After an hour he stood and, feeling more attuned with his
surroundings, took an agonizing shower to wash the mess from his skin. He could only remember fragments of his experience the previous night: sticks flashing around him, smacking into him, faces he half-recognized contorted into terrible demons, itching insects crawling under his skin. He had been swimming at the bottom of a tranquil white ocean and then, as he climbed the mountain, a voice had told him he was a god.

He climbed from the shower and studied himself in the bathroom mirror. His face seemed unfamiliar to him. He had the contours and structure of a man and yet he felt curiously inhuman. He wasn’t even sure if his limbs were attached properly, they seemed to be floating away from him: he had to keep pulling them back.

You
sailed
in
a
ship
with
golden
sails
under
the
milky
ocean.

Max was confused. The voice sounded like his but he knew he hadn’t spoken.

You
sailed
in
a
ship
with
golden
sails
and
saw
the
face
of
God.

The voice was right. He had seen the face of God. God had Max Fallon’s face. He tried to structure his thoughts. Maybe there was another possibility.

After
what
we
put
in
your
drink
I’m
surprised
you’re
with
us
at
all.

That voice wasn’t his, he whirled around almost losing his balance. ‘Who the fuck said that?’

This
is
a
dirty
fucking
cab,
I
’
m
surprised
you
’
re
with
us
at
all.

Max staggered out into his hallway. He knew there was someone in his flat. He could hear them talking.

They
had
put
something
in
his
drink:
something
that
had
turned
him
into
a
god.

He squinted at the unfamiliar shapes of his flat and began to laugh. He could hear everybody. Everybody in the world was having a conversation and some of the things they said were really funny. He stumbled into his living room and listened to mankind chatter in his head.

Max heard them debating what kind of god he would be.
What was His name? He knew that God had a name but he couldn’t remember it.

What
kind
of
god
couldn’t
remember
his
own
name?

At Cambridge he had studied philosophy. Surely he could find an answer.

Socrates
told
Meno
that
knowledge
is
stored
memory.
Five
multiplied
by
five
makes
twenty-five.
But
how
can
someone
recognize
that
twenty-five
is
the
correct
answer
unless
they
already
know?
Max
possessed
the
knowledge
that
he
was
a
god.
But
how
could
he
recognize
that
god
unless
he
already
knew
its
identity?

Unless the answer already lay in his memory?

On Monday morning Max, dressed in jeans and a jumper, walked outside. He had forgotten to put on his shoes and the ground felt very cold. He waved down a cab and gave the driver an address. He found it difficult to speak: impossible to articulate the strange and beautiful sentences that were forming and reforming inside his head. They were the pieces of a jigsaw: splinters of memory and knowledge that were slowly coming together through waves of pain.

Max found the journey through West London peculiar. He felt as if he was seeing everything in negative. The streets and faces seemed drained of colour and expression as if frozen in the white light of an explosion: an expressionless, colourless city. It was a grey wasteland of mobile phones and wandering dogs, crumpled suits and loose change, cheese sandwiches and tube tickets. It bored him and he began to fall asleep dreaming of a temple to befit his new divinity.

The taxi jerked to a halt outside the British Museum thirty minutes later. The connecting window slid back. ‘That’ll be seventeen fifty please mate,’ the cabbie barked over his shoulder.

Max’s eyes struggled to focus on his new location. ‘Where are we?’

‘British Museum. Russell Square. That’s what it said on your bit of paper.’

This
is
a
dirty
fucking
cab,
I’m
surprised
you’re
with
us
at
all.

‘What did you say?’ The cabbie turned in anger.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Max, looking around for the source of the voice himself. ‘Here’s some money,’ he handed over a note. ‘Keep the change.’

‘This is a pony, mate!’ called the cabbie as Fallon stepped outside.

Max tried to filter his confusion. He steadied himself on the pavement and looked up at the huge white bulk of the British Museum as the cab pulled away behind him. He couldn’t see any ponies.

Negotiating the steps up the main atrium was trickier than he had expected. Once inside the vast glass, domed space he found himself at an information desk. There was a middle-aged woman smiling at him.

‘You look lost,’ she volunteered, looking with interest at his bare feet.

Max nodded. ‘You can help me. I am looking for Mister God.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Mister God Expedition,’ he said suddenly finding his own words confusing, before he remembered the impenetrability of the divine language he had absorbed.

‘Oh!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘The Gods and Myths Exhibition. I’m sorry I misheard you.’ She handed him a free programme and pointed across the Atrium, ‘It’s on the Upper Floor. Take the lift. Go through Roman Britain and follow the signs.’

It took Max half an hour to find the exhibition. He had a vague sense of what he was looking for: a fragment from his childhood, a story his mother had told him in India. He needed to fill in the blanks but the specifics eluded him. He found himself staring at fragments of clay pots and strangely
patterned coins in glass cabinets; at carved animal figures and bronze statues. None of them made any sense to him: they were disjointed, like the wreckage of an explosion scattered through time. Coins from Mesopotamia, figurines from Egypt, jewels and sword handles hauled up from the ancient earth and deposited, absurdly, in the London Borough of Camden.

A tour party drifted past him. He decided to drift with them. The obese and breathless male tour guide was talking in an abrasive American accent that cut across Max’s whispering mind like a flamethrower.

‘The last set of artefacts relate to ancient Hindu religious writings and myths.’ He gestured the group to join him around a large display cabinet. Max pushed himself to the front of the group. ‘The British plundered a number of Hindu religious sites in India and Kashmir during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These illegal excavations revealed a number of extraordinary artefacts relating to the religious practises of the Vedic Civilizations. The museum has chosen the artefacts that you see in the cabinet as illustrations of scenes from the Rig-Veda. This was an epic Sanskrit writing produced two thousand years before the birth of Christ.’

Max stared into the cabinet. His attention was focused on a small wooden carving about seven inches high. He had seen it before: a photograph in one of his parents’ books. It was a carved depiction of the Hindu deity Soma. The name was familiar to him. Suddenly he remembered a children’s costume show that had taken place at the English School in Delhi some thirty years previously. Each of the expatriate children had come dressed as a figure from Hindu mythology. His friend Josh Gould had been Indra; little Kathy Desborough had been an implausible Shiva. Max’s mother had dressed him up as Soma, the god of plants and the moon. He had worn a tall hat bedecked with plastic jewels, a white billowing tunic and a plastic belt made silvery with glitter. He had carried a beautiful heavy-headed red flower. He had won the competition. His costume was the best. Max suddenly recalled the dream of his mother,
standing on top of the mountain with pride swimming in her eyes.