Will washed his face as best he could with the foul water in the basins and dried himself on the sleeves of his shirt. The light in here wasn’t the best kind, hardly flattering, but he knew he would never be able to look at himself again without being able to see that grinning loon pressed against the flesh, trying to break free. The harlequin, the skull beneath the skin.
“HAVE ONE OF these,” Joanna said, reeling against him as he fought his way back to the bar. “They’re really very good.”
Will sipped some of her cocktail and ordered a fresh one from the bartender.
“He must be wondering how he got the raw deal when it came to coma existence,” Joanna whispered, drunkenly. “I asked him his name. ‘Emperor Hirohito’, he says. I like that. I like that you can be whoever you want to be here. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be Ava Gardner, I think.”
A congenial buzz was spreading around the cavernous bar. People were righting seats and using them to sit on for a change. The glazed dancers scurried off the stage as a big band blare stormed from the speakers. A small man with oiled hair came onto the stage holding a wireless microphone with a huge blue muffler at the end, his red, velvet suit garnering a chorus of wolf whistles from the audience. Through squeals of feedback, his voice came at them in crescendos of sleaze. Will found himself wiping his palms on his jeans for the duration.
“Laze ’n’ gennermal. Thanoo, thanoo verr mudge. I’ve been Brad Pitt and you’ve been a wunnerful aujence. Abzlootlwunnerful.” The mic never left his lips. He strutted prissily around the stage, peering into the audience like a long-sighted passenger trying to read the number on a bus. “We’ve got a big, big treat for all you lovely, lovely folks now. All the way from wherever you want her to be, the delectable, the adorable, the you’ll wanna take her home in your pocketable, the one, the only, SiiiiiiiGOUrrrrrney WEAverrrrrrrrr!”
The MC backed off into the wings, his arm outstretched. From the other side of the stage, struggling with her balance thanks to the embryo that was hanging in a sac from her waist, Sadie emerged.
Will watched, spellbound, as she prowled around the stage in a slashed, tight black dress, filleted to allow the watery sac and its hideous progeny to depend comfortably from her abdomen. The foetus within turned slowly in the fluid, its ill-formed face and hands bumping against the membrane, dimpling it. Sadie sang a seductress’s song, baring plenty of flesh, pouting and winking at the shadowed heads dusted with a corona of soft, violet light at the front tables. She swung the umbilical cord that joined her to her baby as if it were a microphone cord. She bumped her hips against it provocatively. When the song ended she bowed and motioned to the bouncers at the back of the bar. Will saw them close the doors from outside and heard the heavy clunk of locks being slid into the place. He eyed the bartenders nervously. They were backing out of the bar and closing doors behind them. Joanna had passed out, her head resting against the chrome handrail.
Sadie walked to the edge of the stage and put her foot up against the highlight deck. Calmly, in the same velvety voice in which she had sung the song, she said: “Every man jack of you get on your knees now and worship your queen.” She whispered, “I want satisfaction. I want a show of loyalty. I want a sacrifice. And I want it now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: KEV
THE ALLOTMENTS ON Longshaw Street were a sad sight in late winter. Some of the rows had not been raked over since the cold snap; the dregs of last year’s crops lay like severed tongues on the soil, withered and brown amid the frigid lines of white. Some hardy vegetables were clinging on: sprouts, chard, leeks, but the majority had given up to the hard frost that had attacked the town in recent weeks.
Most of the plots were in some kind of disarray, except for one. Sean and Emma trudged along the tamped soil pathways towards it. A brief smell of peppery soup laced the chill afternoon air. To the west, over the dead airbase at Burtonwood, the sun was being teased into bloody ribbons by a thin raft of cloud. An upturned wheelbarrow rested against a compost heap enclosed by discoloured sheets of corrugated metal; off-cuts of carpet prevented the rotting matter from drying out. An old plastic bath was being used for water storage. Old window frames, complete with their thin glass squares, were a pauper’s greenhouse making the best of whatever sunshine was available. Halved plastic bottles improvised as cloches. Rolls of chicken wire and endless lengths of cane leaned against scruffy old sheds.
Restive eyes glared out from these retreats. The coals of cigarettes showed when the gloom within proved too great. Wirelesses played bland music or muttered dully. A man in a deckchair with deeply pitted, leathery skin sipped tea from a flask and turned the pages of a newspaper, refusing to acknowledge Sean and Emma as they walked by him. Somebody was leaning into a distant bonfire, feeding it with sticks and paper. Its smoke drifted across the allotments, making them insubstantial, enhancing their wasted appearance. It was hard to believe that this no-man’s land, this demilitarised zone, could cultivate anything so fancy as life. A slumped scarecrow stood sentinel, watching over a strip of ground choked with weed.
Plot number twenty-seven was a tidy strip of land tucked into the centre of the allotments, an exception to the utilitarian rule. The soil here had been cared for; it had been raked over and sieved for stones. Trimmed lengths from black binbags had been weighed down with bricks to protect something growing in one corner. A metal box contained non-biodegradable waste: packaging for organic slug pellets, tomato fertiliser, discarded seed trays, emptied cartons of Murphy’s tumble bug.
The shed was brightly painted and its window possessed a pair of curtains. A weathervane in the shape of a chicken rotated slowly on the roof. From within came a cough, a painful, damaged sound.
Sean called out. “Kev?” The name was brittle in the cold, a non-name, a pointless sound. Nevertheless, it drew a figure from the shed. Clad in a heavy blue greatcoat, a man of around sixty emerged, the bottom half of his cadaverous face swathed in a thick, bottle-green scarf. He looked at Sean first, then Emma, before casting a look further afield, at the allotment that was deserted but for the refugees from fracturing, loveless homes. The eyes came back to them, shadowed and hangdog.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice little more than a shifting of tortured air over dead or mangled vocal cords.
“I’m Sean Redman. This is Emma Lavery. Are you Kev?”
“Yes.”
Sean stepped a little closer. “It’s just that I was expecting someone younger.”
Kev allowed himself a dry little chuckle. “I was younger,” he said.
Sean said, “We wondered if we could talk to you.”
“About?”
Sean was about to answer when Emma stepped in front of him. “Is that a bird’s nest up there, mister…?”
“Blackbird,” Kev rasped.
“Mister Blackbird?”
Sean thought he saw a slight crinkling of the other man’s eyes, but if there was any humour there, it wasn’t reflected in his voice. “Mister Lovesey,” he corrected, briskly. “That is a blackbird’s nest.”
“I see,” Emma said. “Sorry.”