The Gone-Away World (39 page)

But no one ever saw Pascal Timbery eat. In all that time we never did, except when he ate Gonzo's chocolate bar in one go. It seems stupid now, but we never wondered about that. If we thought about it at all, we imagined he must have been injured during the Reification—maybe he couldn't swallow properly; maybe his jaw was broken and he leaked. Maybe he'd eaten things which a right-thinking man normally wouldn't eat, and now he was ashamed to eat in front of people. That was a matter for him. There were a whole lot of people round about then with a whole lot of weird problems, the kinds of problems which would have been uncommon or even alarming back before the Reification, but which now seemed just about ordinary.

And then one day Larry Tusk couldn't find his dog. Just couldn't find her. Went walking around the place, calling hither and yon, with a little scrap of biscuit and some cheese. That poor scrawny little dog loved cheese, even the ghastly schlop they made on Piper 90, even Rory Trevin, who was a cheesewright back in the real world, but what the hell was he supposed to use to make the stuff now, when the buffalo were evil and a cow was a distant memory? When even the grass could turn around and bite you with sharp, angry little mouths? So Larry Tusk went a-walking, and as he passed Pascal Timbery's room he heard a familiar yip, and he figured the dog was stuck in there and Pascal didn't know. So in he went. And there, on the bed, was Pascal Timbery, with a great bloated tummy, and from this bulge there came the barking of the dog.

Larry Tusk went crazy. It actually wasn't about the dog. It was about this
thing,
lying there on the bed, a thing which looked human and talked human and hugged human, but which could open up and envelop you like a snake. Pascal Timbery made a noise as if he were trying to speak, maybe to say something like “I'm really sorry I ate your dog,” which might or might not have been a good thing to say, and surely it wouldn't have been the most tactful sentiment at that time. But Larry Tusk didn't give him any opportunity to discuss the dog-eating or the whole business of Pascal Timbery being a monster from beyond the fireside. The thing with the distended stomach was
other,
and Larry Tusk wasn't having any of it. He just up and hit Pascal Timbery in the head with a fire extinguisher, and kept going until Pascal was basically a smear. And then he stuck his hand into Pascal Timbery's corpse and pulled out Dora the dog, all smeared in yuck and most unhappy at the strangeness of it all. We found him in Commissary 3, feeding her little bites of meat which were worth a week's pay to him, each and every one.

Sometimes, the nightmares look like people.

On the upside, the dog was fine. Dogs don't fret. She hadn't liked being swallowed and kept in a stinky, airless little place, of course, and she doesn't like darkness to this day—Larry leaves the light on for her. But broadly speaking she was just happy to see Larry again and delighted to be bathed and fed the best food Larry could get his hands on, and for everyone to be so pleased to see her. On the downside, it raised a question no one was prepared for about the Unreal People and what they were. Because we had
liked
Pascal Timbery, and if someone ordinary and mad had eaten Dora the dog, and Larry Tusk had beaten them to death with a fire extinguisher, that would have been murder, albeit provoked. And the thing is that for all that Pascal was a monster, he was clearly a thinking, feeling monster, and that made him at least most of the way to being a person. And if he'd come clean about his dietary requirements, well, maybe something could have been done. Although we might just have killed him out of fear. I'm not saying Pascal Timbery was wrong to hide what he was. I'm saying that if he hadn't, things would have gone differently.

That night we sat in the Stormside pub and argued about whether the whole thing was more or less awful and imponderable than the fact that the world had come to an end nearly a year ago and most of the people we had ever known were dead. And as we sat there concluding that whichever of these things was worse, both were irredeemably awful and would shadow our lives for ever and ever until the last syllable of recorded time (pubs are not good places for this kind of conversation) there arrived a lumpy, water-stained parcel containing an elderly cherry pie.

A cherry pie is not something which ages well. It is ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven, it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life. But this pie had been subjected to the kind of abuse which no pastry of any kind should have to put up with. It had been tempest-tossed. It had been a brave pie, but ultimately an ordinary one; it was not a pie of steel. It had split and withered. The filling had smeared the outer skin with red, sugary juices; this pie was a casualty. The only thing to be done with it was to put it in the ground with other brave pies and give it honour, and say a prayer for its humble and unselfish shortcrust soul. And that prayer would be well deserved, earned in battle and paid for in confectiony suffering, because this pie, fallible and ultimately unequal to the mighty task set before it—a task beyond what is achievable by mortal pies—bore a message from far away. The letter which accompanied it had run and bleached. Whatever was written on the paper was long vanished. But the pie itself was made of sterner stuff: it read simply “For Gonzo” and underneath “From Ma.” The parcel was stamped with the just-legible frank of Cricklewood Cove post office, and dated just a few weeks before.

Cricklewood Cove had survived the Go Away War.

That night I took Leah out into the roof garden and proposed to her. She said yes. We're doing the deed next week. Tonight, washed of garlic sausage and clad in my finest, I'm going to Matchingham with an L-plate on my chest, and Gonzo and Bone Briskett and Jim Hepsobah (and also, at my insistence and because I value my life, Sally Culpepper and Annie the Ox) and all the boys are going to get me horribly drunk and celebrate my last days of bachelorhood.

Gonzo completes his sweep on the milk-buggy (no monsters, no refugees, just grass and trees) and Sally Culpepper calls time. Stern duties involving makeshift ales and moonshine await us. Good soldiers all, we know how to obey orders.

.                           .                           .

M
ATCHINGHAM IS A SORRY
excuse for a town. In fact, it is not a town at all but a collection of ramshackle houses and hotels and hostels and hostiles which has sprawled together into a sort of disurbation, stretched along the Jorgmund Pipe like towns used to stretch out along a road or a river. It has exactly nothing going for it except that it is the biggest place for a thousand miles in any direction which isn't actually moving along on giant caterpillar tracks, and it is notionally possible to make money here so as to go back along the Pipe to a real town (there are supposed to be real towns, even cities, growing up back west) or even buy a small-holding in the new agricultural areas around the Pipe, and make some sort of life. Every town like Matchingham ever in history has had this kind of
raison d'être,
and few are the people who have actually made it out and done these things. It's like the lottery. Everyone knows someone who has won something. No one actually wins themselves. Somehow or other, the big break, the dream, stays out of reach; people here just get older and greyer and a tad more bitter, and eventually they're not around any more and no one asks why. It is the kind of place where people know how to smash a glass and use it in a fight without getting sliced to ribbons.

It is therefore not the kind of place anyone has a great deal to say about. Matchingham has less history than a Styrofoam cup, and the closest it gets to a cathedral or a historic centre is a grimy cruciform monument on the way in, an advertisement for a blasphemously themed strip club. Matchingham isn't even a feeder town. There's nothing for it to feed.

We are on the back of Gonzo's buggy, destined for a bar called the Ace of Thighs, and from the name you would guess it is in the bad part of town. You would be wrong. Matchingham doesn't have a nice part of town, but if it did, the Ace of Thighs would be in it, and the way you know that is that the name of the bar is a word game (not actually a pun as such, but getting that way), and this kind of elevated humour is restricted to Matchingham's golden elite.

We cruise along the main street, and it's reasonably clear how the good folk here spend their time. The female half dances nude for the male half (with a statistical variation to account for less common orientations) or wrestles in a variety of convenience foodstuffs or performs in cinematic fantasies with simple, pithy titles. Some of the inhabitants engage in unmediated physical commerce of an ancient and simple sort. The porn shops of Matchingham observe a strict progression of obscenity, beginning with an almost fluffy eroticorium (catering either to tourists, if Matchingham ever had such a thing, or to the two or three women here who think of sex as a leisure activity), and moving from the modest HARD CORE! to the more self-aggrandising X-TREME HARD CORE!!! to various delights identified by jargon at least as impenetrable as Isaac Newton's Second Law. The pale, as it were, beyond which one may not go, is a small shop with a faded handwritten sign and quite a lot of dust in the window. It stands just past an emporium sporting a neon outline of a woman swallowing the head of a Sucuri anaconda (the distinctive markings are surprisingly well rendered in lilac tubing) while being beaten by attendant cowboys with what appear to be starfish. It seems that the people of Matchingham have attained, with their limited resources, a jaded expertise in perversity I had assumed was found only in wealthy university towns. Even for this population of mining-town Caligulas, the little boutique to the left has gone too far with its simple sign:
EXPLICIT EROTIC MOVIES—
WITH A STORY
!!!!

Faced with this disgraceful banner, men cross to the other side of the street. Collars turn up and eyes slide away from the dusty exterior. Respectable prostitutes turn up their noses like Salem nuns. Shame! Narrative! Outcast, unclean! A bored and profoundly ugly teenager sits at a desk within, waiting for the first heavily disguised patron of the night.

Beyond this vileness lurks the Ace of Thighs, a sprawling pyramid to the dead god of desire. There's a little alleyway in between the bar and the storyporn shop, and the name of the road actually changes, so the Ace of Thighs is not part of the sliding scale of sin which comes before. It is the beginning of a fresh new innocence, which runs from here to a bend in the road (“Wash the woman of your choice!”) and on into darker fantasies better left unplumbed. A vast papier mâché rendering of a set of meaty female legs is bolted to the side of the Ace of Thighs, a playing card strategically covering the most relevant area. It looks as if a giant strumpet sat down on the building after a tough night, and the wall yielded under her weight, throwing her backwards into the club. Her thick, poster-painted ankles are swollen around her stilettos, the westernmost of which hovers over the crossroads like a diamanté barrage balloon. If I go in the main door, I will be eye to massive eye with the fallen woman, and I have no doubt the great orb will be glassy and bloodshot, and the whole place will stink of her boozy breath. This is the least feminine place I have ever been. Only men think this way, and precious few of them at that.

There's a queue. The guys are big, cattle-shouldered men in blue cloth caps and working men's jeans or cotton trousers. After a moment I realise that it isn't a queue, it's just kinduva huddle, either a fight about to happen or a drug deal or some other thing we don't need. So we walk along the rope line—there actually is a red carpet too, although it looks as if it maybe was ripped from the corpse of a dead hotel—and the bouncer looks me over, pronounces us good enough (Samuel P. seems to know the guy) and we go in.

Curious, I probe the dark corners of the Ace of Thighs with my eyes. There are many of these (corners, not eyes)—the building is designed to provide maximum raunch, after all—but actually once you accept that this is an awful place, it's not that bad. It's clean, in the sense that there is no visible dirt and no obvious bodily effluvia. The velvet couches do not have many cigarette burns. The waitresses are efficient and non-judgemental, distinguished from the dancers and hostesses (and, in a fit of inclusiveness, also hosts) by a severe and defiantly unsexy uniform which accentuates how available the entertainers are. Nudity by implication.

Gonzo hails the nearest waitress, and summons a few hostesses and hosts to distribute themselves around and flash bits of skin and bore us with made-up stories of medical degrees and sexual longings, and generally scam us. This is part of the fun. We sit at a round (red leather) table with bounteous (red velvet) chairs and gold trim. A woman perches on the arm of my chair and declaims that I'm the lucky boy. The muscles in her face barely move as she smiles. Her name, apparently, is Saphira d'Amour. She says it like
da mor,
which would mean “of death.” If you want love, you have to find the letter
u
in there somewhere. Saphira and I do not form a close natural friendship even by the standards of strip club
politesse,
and eventually Annie lifts her bodily and drops her on Samuel P., who is delighted. It emerges instantly that they are the same age, give or take a few years; that they attended different schools with the same name; that they both hated mathematics and institutional lunches; and that neither of them completed the full educational experience before being sent to a borstal. How strange and powerful is the synchronicity of romance in the Ace of Thighs! This calls for a drink. Samuel P. spends another impossible sum of money on Saphira's neo-champagne, and she professes herself terribly pleased. Perhaps she actually is.