… behind the reception desk: a young Asian woman with the high-browed demeanour of Virginia Woolf, wearing a tartan turban.
“Who are you?” she demands in a refined voice, rich and plummy with strong overtones of Merlot. “You don’t belong here. What could you possibly want?”
“Well,” Q explains, “entanglement is weaving a path through time, very strongly, rather like an incendiary device… I do have some graphs and charts and other illustrative material to demonstrate this point… but outside of the investigation, my life is an empty canvas minus myself and prior to this I was desperate, down-on-my-luck, back against the wall, hand to mouth, mouth to hand, always questioning myself: what am I saying? who am I? what is my destiny? why won’t she answer my calls? has she rekindled her relationship with a former saxophonist? because in essence, you see, I have been sucked into a vortex by all the beautiful absences in my own life, so many beautiful absences I couldn’t possibly list them all, well, maybe I could, but it would take a very long time…”
– only partway into one of the longest sentences he had ever attempted, Q notices the young Asian woman striking her turban violently against the hard, glossy edges of the reception desk. She pauses momentarily, gazes around, forehead glistening purple. Realizing she is still conscious, she repeats the action until almost completely concussed…
… in the steam of the communal spa, the unusually tall man in heavy-rimmed sunglasses and yellow rubber gloves reclines on a long pinewood bench: naked except for a trilby hat now, his body improbably misshapen. The man signals with expansive homosexual mannerisms towards a half-raised portcullis framed by two portable cannons. Inside the gates: a stone-cold cold stone room, malevolent scarlet wallpaper, the smell of tepid piss, the ambience carcinogenic. Volumes of unread books line every wall, a dark archive of unremittingly obscure easy reading tomes. Over a grand piano, the vast imprint of a swastika, surrounded by a series of portraits, minor Scottish poets lounging indignantly in the semi-nude…
… suddenly: the fearful drone of traditional bagpipe music… 12 figures dressed as Judas Iscariot expressing a slight feeling of bewilderment via a Highland jig… behind them, a gnomic man in sparkling jackboots and the habit of a nun. From inside his habit an epic pause ensues. Lowering the hood he reveals: the over-sized head of Princess Margaret. On her face a severe expression. Q having seen a similar expression on the faces of several other people lately. Friends. Family. Lovers. Lawyers. Paramedics. Magistrates.
There’s another pause, not quite as epic as the last…
“My name is Herr Schmaltz!” cries Herr Schmaltz, visibly demented. “/ have recently undergone a complete face transplant and – during the same procedure – had my colon medically revised. However, originally I came from Newark, New Jersey, where I trained to be a violist. But when I moved to Leipzig and became the world’s smallest basketball player, they accused me of decapitating my nephew during a violent sex call… then proceeded to arrest me for something I didn’t do… then questioned me about my relationship with a comatose futures trader… then offered me cocaine, an incredible pay rise, and a part-time shot at redemption in the Scottish hills… I quickly became very Scottish and having a head for business I quickly became a millionaire too… now, having returned in partial disguise, I shall awaken dormant memories of love and crime and death… and nobody shall penetrate the heart of my dark secret…”
… dialing the emergency services at the bottom of the fire escape, Q briefly ponders the significance of the incident…
… that evening, staring down at his manual typewriter, drinking camomile tea. In front of Q: a blank page. Six months later, the same blank page still in front of him, an empty teacup in his hand… the telephone spluttering in the ever-dimming dimness. Q picking up, as is his custom. A voice answering like a diseased hooker from a recent weekend in Amsterdam. “If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck and walks like a duck,” the voice advises. “Then, in all honesty: it probably is a duck…”
Q considers the words carefully, one by one, their residual meaning lingering in the upper reaches of the ceiling for several minutes afterwards…
THE MUMMY by Peter Turnbull
Wednesday
The body was found in the shrubs, next to the towpath, beside the York to Hull canal, out in the country, beyond the suburbs where the landscape is flat, and that year, courtesy of a rainy summer, the foliage was lush, lush enough to partially conceal a human corpse. The body in question was wrapped in a heavy-duty plastic sheeting like a rolled-up carpet and had been laid by the canal side, in long grass. It was found by a jogger. He had noticed it rather than found it. It had first caught his eye on the Saturday as he ran past. It was still there on the Sunday, when families walked the towpath. It was there on the Monday and still there on the Tuesday morning. But on the Tuesday evening the man, the jogger, found his thoughts turning on the length of rubber sheeting. It nagged him with a growing realization that the item in question was just the right length and width to be the grossest form of fly-tipping. The realization stayed with him, hovering in his mind like an annoying fly which by its noise took up a disproportionate amount of space. So that on the Wednesday he set out on his normal morning run taking with him a pair of gloves and ran until he reached the spot where the roll of plastic lay, slowed to a walk, and finally stood over it, and waited until another jogger going in the opposite direction had passed by. It had not been moved or disturbed in any way since he had first seen it: It was clearly his fate to find out if it contained what he feared it contained. The plastic was old, stiff, fragile to the touch. He took the edge of the roll and peeled it back.
He saw a hand. Human. Male, he thought.
He replaced the plastic, slowly, reverentially, and carried on jogging. There was a phone box on his route, and it was the closest phone to that stretch of the canal that he knew. He ran at a steady pace, until he reached the phone box. The box was occupied by a middle-aged lady, chatting excitedly, and the jogger sat on a dry stone wall until the occupant had finished talking, whereupon she replaced the phone and exited the box, holding the door open for him, saying she was sorry and hoped his call wasn’t urgent.
“No urgency at all,” replied the jogger. “No urgency at all.”
But he made it a three nines call nonetheless.
The towpath was cordoned off with blue-and-white tape, white-shirted constables politely but firmly turned back the joggers, the strolling, the anglers, and the just plain curious. The plastic, once unravelled, revealed the body of a small, finely made middle-aged man, the sort of man who in life would attract nicknames such as Shorty or Half-pint. He was dressed in a heavy winter jacket, heavy woollen trousers, and winter shoes. Yet he looked as though he had died only recently.
Detective Inspector Hennessey stood over the body, pondering it with a police officer’s eye for detail. Doctor Louise D’Acre knelt by the body, pondering it with a pathologist’s eye, but also searching for detail. Detail of a different sort. Hennessey sought details to answer his question “Who?” Dr D’Acre sought details to answer her questions “Why?” and “What cause?”