Once on board, I set my eyes on a mysteriously empty seat, one of three unoccupied places around a dozing bulk. It’s a long haul into terra australis incognita, and I’ll be needing my strength later. The instant I sit, I realize why the seats have not been taken up by any of my traveling companions. The man at the center of the exclusion zone smells. No, this barely does him justice. A truly heroic stench hangs around him, displaced each time he moves, sweeping out in almost visible curls before and behind him with every disturbance in his dream.
I deal with it for as long as I can, but eventually change seats (being a good middle-class boy, I wait until I am absolutely sure he is asleep; there is, I reason, no possibility that he is unaware of his miasma, and I have no desire to remind him of it again). From my new vantage point, I see that, in fact, the earlier journey through the tunnels was just a decoy, a warm-up. This, though, is the real deal. There are no signs to help me here, no friendly guides clutching books full of familiar names to ground me. I took my eye off the road and left it without even noticing.
I look briefly at each of the other passengers. Eventually, there is no one left to look at and I am compelled to turn my attention to the man in front of me.
He is sitting back yet leaning forward at the same time. A great buffalo hump squats on his back, forcing his head toward the space between his knees. A woolly brown suit of indiscernible vintage helps add to the air of something bovine. Sagging expanses of flesh the colors of corned beef — complete with waxy marbled patches of fat — droop from an acromegalic frame and turn his face into a system of soft caves. His eyes are almost buried beneath overhanging folds of puffed skin, which threaten to fuse with his cheeks: a waxwork Auden rescued, too late, from a conflagration. Messy spikes of hair protrude from his scalp like a crown of feathers. He is between sleep and waking, and the bus’ occasional stops and starts make him jerk, sending a shudder through his body, which is echoed and enlarged by corresponding movements in the mephitic cloud that clings to him like a swarm of locusts. The breath flaps out of him from behind crimson jowls.
He seems not to belong here, a refugee from a Grosz painting suppressed as too terrible for public consumption. There would be something comical about him were it not for his awesome vastness and the animal reek around him. It’s an ur-stench, building from base notes of piss, shit, and sweat to encompass subtle undertones of days-old baby vomit and rank meat that linger in the brain much longer than in the nostrils.
I find myself rapt with wonder at him, barely able to contain my authorial glee. I am working heavy juju here; I set out telling myself that something worth putting down on the page would happen tonight, and it seems that I have managed to conjure this flesh golem out of pure narrative requirement — a notional space hitherto marked LOCAL COLOR HERE fills out with something truly strange, an authentic and unfakeable encounter that a better author would have the sense to condense to a paragraph or even a phrase.
But I can’t leave well enough alone, and my mind races to find some way I can steal this creature and tame him for my own purposes. The fact that he is clearly dreaming, his physical appearance, his foulness, these are all good. I wonder for a moment if there is some way he can be shoe-horned into some sort of fiction, some easy way I can turn this to my own advantage.
As I wonder on all this, he stirs and begins to gather his belongings to leave the bus at the next stop. Assaulted by the inevitable accompanying spread of his insulating cloud, I turn back to the book I’ve been concealing myself behind (Maurice Leitch, The Smoke King) and desperately try to avoid attracting his attention. He is, after all, my creation and I do not want to be held responsible for the consequences should such a perfect beast gaze by accident into the eyes of his creator.
The bus stops, and as the doors open he shudders toward them, white plastic bags flapping from each wrist, stirring up tornadoes which disperse his spoor to the four corners of the vehicle. I steal a sideways glance at him when he blusters out onto the pavement. As he steadies himself from a sideways lurch, one of the bags swings and hits the glass beside me with with a noise I do not like. A pattern of darkness within momentarily resolves itself into what I pray is not a face, and the minotaur is gone.
Who do you know in heaven?
by Patrick McCabe
Aldgate
Right,” I said, and phoned the cops.
“May I ask who’s calling?” she says.
“Edgar Lustgarten,” I said. “You might remember me from Scales of Justice. Then again, you mightn’t.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” she says.
Not that it mattered, for I was gone.
The next thing you know, there’s Feane on the Daily Mirror with an anorak over his head. But it was him all right — the two-tone shoes.
The worst thing about Mickey Feane was his relentless bragging. “Look at me — I’m super-volunteer.”
Never liked them Belfast bastards. Too cocksure.
He’d have all the time he wanted to brag now — any amount in Brixton prison.
Poor old Feane — yet another in a long line of slope-shouldered Irish felons in Albion, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
In the beginning it had been good — there can’t be any denying that.
I think I’ll go to London, I thought. Off I’ll go and I won’t come back.
“Goodbye cows,” I said, “and streets — farewell.”
Up your arse may they happily go and the rest of this miserable country as well.
After all, it was 1973. The whole fucking place was an outhouse deserted.
“Goodbye, Daddy, Mammy. Goodbye other kiddies. I hope you die,” I said as I skipped.
I had met some very good friends indeed. They really were quite jolly good fellows. They wore zig-zag tops and half-mast jeans.
The very first day I arrived in off the boat, Harrods blew up. Two cops stopped me and said, “Hello, hello.” Believe it or believe it not, it’s absolutely true. I gave them an envelope with the old man’s name on it. They weren’t too happy with that, they declared.
“You could get into a lot of trouble over here,” they went on. “These are odd and hair-raising times, my wide-eyed little Irish friend.”
I was tripped out of my skull for most of the journey. I drank a few pints with an old chap sporting a face like a ripe tomato.
“Do you know what the English did?” he said to me. “Hung decent fellows outside their own doors.”
I had never in my life quite seen such a face. The Incredible Melting Man from Tipperary, that was the only name I could think of which might suit.
“I’ll tell you something about London,” he says, but I never heard what it was, for the next thing, slurp, down he goes right into the ashtray with a sprig of red hair sticking up like a flower.
As soon as I was sure there was no one looking, I reached into his inside pocket and effortlessly removed his bulging wallet. Inside there’s a bunch of in memoriam cards with a small square picture of this big farmer smiling. That, I assumed, was the recently deceased brother.