The Unblemished (12 page)

All sorts are here that all the Earth yields,
Variety without end.

John Milton,
Paradise Lost

I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the
dream is over ... and the insect is awake.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum),
The Fly
(1986)

Sammy Dyer lived in what he liked to call his eyrie, the attic room
of a top-floor flat shared with three other people in a grand old
house in well-to-do Belsize Park. It was the only way he could afford
to live in the area, a place he liked for its independent cinema, restaurants,
and delicatessen. The England was visible from his room, a
good pub with wooden floors and a basement area packed out every
Saturday night for stand-up comedy acts. Sammy's room was a health
and safety hazard. Because of the narrow, steep staircase providing
access to his room (he doubted there had ever been an official application
to the Planning Department) he could get no sizeable furniture
up there. It was, as a result, a riot of soft furnishings: a couple of large
overpriced bean bags in blue and red from Camden Market, cushions,
throws, blankets. A MacBook and an iPod dock sat on top of an old
detachable wooden desk salvaged from an office sale which Sammy
had plastered with hundreds of discarded images from his photographic
past, all varnished fast. So many books and magazines were
piled precariously against the walls that the futon mattress would
appear to be more comfortable to shelter beneath than sleep on.

Bo Mulvey ascended the punishing staircase at the rear of the
building, five flights of
Jesus
and
Shit
, wondering if this had been the
right choice to make. He felt ill, probably looked less than well too;
his skin felt hot and thin to the touch, his fingertips coming away wet
where they had trawled his greasy forehead. He felt shaky from
hunger, that hollow friable feeling that comes when blood sugar
levels have taken a plunge, but the thought of food made his stomach
convulse.

Sammy was at the entrance to the flat, waiting for him.

'Yo, Blood,' he said, in his best Samuel L Jackson, offering his
knuckles, which Bo ignored. 'God. You look like the proverbial sack
of. What happened? You find out what your real mother was?'

Bo smiled, a tight, toothy grimace. 'I could do with a drink,' he
said.

'Kettle drink? Or something harder?'

'Tea,' Bo said. 'Sweet. Very sweet.'

He waited in Sammy's room, studying the spines of books stacked
almost floor to ceiling without taking in any of the titles. Music was
coming from the MacBook, which was hooked up to futuristic
speakers and a sub-woofer. But it was so subdued Bo couldn't
identify it. The screen was black. That was the thing about computers
these days: they went to sleep when they weren't being used, they
didn't need screensavers any more. Bo missed the old operating
systems that ran mind-bending savers. There were the visuals that
came with iTunes, but who wanted to watch attractive swirls when
PJ Harvey or The Smiths or Kristin Hersh was playing?

He heard the sound of a spoon in a mug, its clatter as it was
discarded in the sink. Bo sat down, then stood up and went over to
the window. The view south took in the BT Tower and the net
enclosing the birds at London Zoo. He could see St Pancras from
here.

He had to make Sammy see that he was normal, not as strung out
or as panicky as he felt. He had nowhere else left to turn. Keiko was
too smothering in her concern for him. It was too much like being
mothered; he needed space now, and time to think about what was
happening to him and around him.

'You working?' Sammy asked, his head rising into view from the
sheer staircase.

'The usual rounds of handshakes and hellos. I could do this in my
sleep. In fact, I think I do, sometimes.'

He took his tea, failing to prevent his hand from shaking. Sammy
steadied the mug with his other hand before letting go. Bo could feel
the heat of his friend's scrutiny but was unable to meet it. Instead, he
said, 'It's not drugs, if that's what you're thinking.'

'I wasn't thinking anything,' Sammy said, levelly.

'What about you?' Bo asked, returning his attention to the
window. The sky was filled with a rain that would not come. Bo felt
the weight of all that pressure behind his eyes. The city seemed to
have been drained of its colour and light, as if someone had stolen
through it, painting every building gunmetal grey.

'I've been busy, visiting cemeteries,' Sammy said. 'I feel guilty. My
grandparents have been dead twenty years and I've been to their
graves, what, maybe half a dozen times? And here I am, in two weeks,
taking photographs of headstones, more than double that amount.'

'More disinterred?'

'What do you think?'

'More bite marks?'

'Oh yes. Laurier's doing his nut. Forensics have come back with –
get this –
seventeen
different bite patterns.'

'Seventeen? I thought they were pinning their hopes on one mad
bastard.'

Sammy was nodding. 'They haven't finished collating evidence yet.

Expect that number to be revised. Upwards.'

'What's the rumour? A cult?'

'I don't know. There haven't been any theories. None that I've been
in on at least. One thing, though. Funniest thing. Every single set of
teeth marks on the bodies produced a completely perfect dental cast.'

'I don't follow.'

'No cavities. No occlusions. Nothing missing. Nothing bent or
twisted.'

'Jesus. Who are they? Americans?'

Sammy laughed. 'That, or an army of denture-wearers.'

Bo looked up. Sammy was still studying him, his expression that
of someone trying to place a name to a face, or recall a word that has
gone missing from the tip of the tongue.

'You deflected yourself, you know that?'

'I know,' Bo said. His tea was too hot, too sweet. He knew he
would find fault with anything he tried to put in his belly at the
moment. He forced himself to drink it. What could be more normal
than drinking tea? 'I'm okay,' he continued. 'I just, well, I'm not with
Keiko any more and I'm feeling a little down.'

He detected a shift in the atmosphere. Sammy slumped a little,
retreated, as if to say
That's it?
and maybe
He's got me to listen to
this sob story?
too. Or maybe even,
I'm not swallowing that, but if
you aren't prepared to tell me the truth, why should I care?

'So what can I do for you? Go home. Eat chocolate. Drink wine.

Watch old movies. Buy a box of tissues.'

'I can't go home.'

'Are you in trouble, Bo? It's not just about Keiko, this, is it?'

'I need a place to crash, Sammy. Just for a few days. I need to get
my head in the right place.'

'Removing it from your arse, you mean?'

'Maybe. Maybe that's it.'

Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the walls in the
spaces the books had yet to invade. Photography – any kind of
photography – suddenly seemed a totally pointless activity. It was too
stylised, too intrusive, too arbitrary. Sammy Dyer's work – portraits,
landscapes, explosive moments from sport – were both naive and
hubristic, at the same time the worst shots Bo had ever seen, and yet
so brave, so good as to make him feel talentless. The flat closed
around him, but he realised that anywhere would feel claustrophobic
to him now. It was inside him that the space was filling up most
alarmingly. He felt like a sponge that was being squeezed but not
releasing its cargo. He felt too small for what was contained within.

'I have to go to Portugal the day after tomorrow,' Sammy said, his
voice bereft of its usual bearing. Everything about him was saying no:
his posture, his tone, his eyes ... but the word wouldn't come. Bo felt
awful for him, and wished he could help him out, take away that
responsibility by walking away, but he was too weak and afraid.

'You can stay until then.'

For a while, as Sammy was turning to leave the room, the collar of
his shirt shifted and, as if in slow motion, revealed a patch of his neck
shadowed into a vague Y. He saw the minute dimples and diamonds
that formed his skin, the silvery hairs, minuscule, lifting or flattening
in response to micro-changes in the room's temperature. He saw, in a
thrilling, guilty moment, how Sammy Dyer's blood moved through its
thin, red prison, coursing in fluid bursts in tandem with the rhythm of
his heart. Beyond that, as if his friend had been flayed, he saw the
dazzling beauty of his entire circulatory system, as if he had been
frozen at the point of some cataclysmic explosion, the capillaries, veins
and arteries suspended, a strange coral, a model in a biology lab.

The illusion withdrew. The moment died. Bo found he was
holding his breath. He slowly exhaled as Sammy sank from view.

The pangs in his gut had vanished. For a short time, he felt normal,
even hungry, again.

The longer he remained in the room, the less claustrophobic it
became. He lay on the floor, looking up at the unshaded bulb of the
ceiling light, and waited for his body to offer some clue as to what it
was becoming. It became easier, now that he was no longer moving –
or clenched by panic – to isolate the problem, but he couldn't offer a
definitive diagnosis. The overriding feeling was of a tightening in the
skin, as if someone standing behind him was taking all of his slack
into one giant fist and squeezing. His eyesight also seemed to be
affected: colours were improved to the point where his vision was
saturated. It was as if the whole world had been trapped on a roll of
Fuji Velvia. It was deep and detailed and gorgeous.

If he opened his mouth, his ability to hear increased by such an
extent that he could pick out occasional words uttered by two men
conversing on the pavement in Eton Avenue, a good hundred metres
away. His body screamed with possibilities.

He sat up and almost immediately something bothered him.
Nothing in the room had been altered – he had been its sole occupant
in the half hour since Sammy left for work – nevertheless, he felt very
strongly that something had changed.

Needled by the imprecision of his thoughts, he moved to the other
window, which looked down on to England's Lane, and at once saw
a woman in the window of one of the flats opposite, staring directly
at him. She was naked, immobile, and as soon as she saw she was
being watched she beamed at him, a smile so broad he almost felt heat
from it, despite the distance between them. He smiled too, uncertainly,
and moved away from the window. He wanted something
ordinary to come out of the day and surprise him, to reaffirm him and
where he was.

A bit heavy on the old numinous
, he remembered a teacher at
school saying, whenever anybody handed in a story during writing
exercises that was even minutely fantastical.

A bit heavy on the old numinous.
Too fucking right.

He wanted a little banality to counter all that old numinous.

Bo felt the room changing as the light left it. The air seemed to
thicken, to become less ready to leap in and out of his lungs. The
books against the wall sucked the darkness into their pages, making
them bloat, become more than what they had been. He watched lights
emerge from the skin of London as it fell away from him to the south.
Menace materialised, became something almost tangible, like the air
he was breathing. The threat sat heavily in the room.

Bo sat on the floor, wishing for some company. He needed to talk
this all out. He was finding it hard to control the feeling that this
person who was a guest of Sammy Dyer was anybody but himself. He
was struggling to prevent the visions that kept tripping through his
mind, flashes of wet redness, of white teeth, the deep, splitting sounds
of bones broken in violence. He was convinced that the sounds were
already happening, perhaps even within his own body, and he didn't
know how to react, or even if he wanted to.

He was checking himself in mirrors at every opportunity and he
looked no different to the Bo Mulvey that had looked back at him at
any moment over the past few weeks. There was no obvious
deviation, nothing that stuck out like a blister or a pimple or a scar
to mark him as separate to others. He felt hunger without being able
to open his mouth; his thirst was unquenchable because water only
nauseated him. He saw through people as if he were wearing magical
eye glasses, the X-ray specs you could buy from old Spider-Man
comics along with Sea Monkeys and offers to turn yourself from a
seven-stone weakling into some man-mountain. People seemed to
shine, to project an aura into the immediate space around them, like
the body's electro-magnetic fields trapped in a piece of Kirlian
photography. But he found himself questioning these subtle turnings
in his body's combination, which suggested that he still retained some
say in how things might turn out. He was not too far gone.
Is it thirst
if I can't drink? Is it hunger if I can't eat?
Only terrible possibilities
remained, but he felt, beyond the panic and the fear, as physically
sound as he had since his teenage years. He wondered if, at the end
of whatever was happening to him, he would be in danger, or he
would prove a danger to others.

Something moved behind the wall. It sounded too big to be a bird,
although it skittered as if it were one trapped in a flue. Bo turned his
head slowly towards the door. The darkness and his being alone
might have alarmed him, if there were any capacity for alarm to begin
with. It had been burned away, quickly, perhaps on that visit to the
cemetery, perhaps on his waking to a sea of rotten hearts. His ability
to be surprised, let alone shocked or scared, had been removed from
him like a diseased organ. At the same time, there
was
a state of terror
to deal with, a steady, almost steadying pulse of dread that he could
do nothing about. It was there and it was either keeping him going
or showing him what quality of life he might come to expect if he
gave up.

After a while, when the sound had not replicated itself, Bo rose
and moved to the wall. There was a door, but it was locked. He put
his fingers to the covered join between the door and the jamb, traced
it around, feeling for any breeze that might suggest a crack in the
paint. He felt the keyhole and the doorknob too. A slight gasp of air
came through from the other side. He wondered if Sammy Dyer had
a key for the door. If he did that might suggest he had painted the
seal. But if he was renting this property, wouldn't he want as much
space as he could get? Was he hiding something? It didn't make sense.
No, the landlord must have created the divide. Presumably the sealed
annex beyond that door was undeveloped and therefore uninhabitable.
Or the landlord was using it as storage for his own things.