“What was all of that about, then? Have you got some plan to nick the Puck’s Hats and divide ’em up between you two and your new Blackshirt comrades?”
Reggie started to protest his innocence, but Bill grinned ruefully.
“Well, I ’ave now, I’ll tell yer that for fuckin’ nothin’. If that old cow’s gunna bat me ’round the ’ead for summat I’ve not done yet, then I’m gunna make sure that I fuckin’ well deserve it. I don’t know so much about joinin’ the Nazis, although I’ve thought very often that I’d look quite rock ’n’ roll in jackboots. No, Marge, that was fuckin’ weird, seein’ meself like that. I wonder what I meant about the devil being in the driver’s seat?”
Reggie looked thoughtful, or least as thoughtful as he ever did.
“I reckon as that wiz a trick done with a mirror.”
Bill snorted derisively.
“Reggie, mate, you’re not the sharpest suit in Burton’s window, are yer? How wiz it a trick done with a mirror? They were dragging a great banner full of Puck’s Hats whereas we conspicuously ain’t. And anyway, how wiz a mirror s’posed to talk to us? It’s only light what they bounce back, not voices. Now come on, let’s see if we can get back into Phyllis’s good books by finding lots of fairy fruit for ’er to scoff, the stroppy bitch.”
They were all laughing now at Phyllis’s expense as the three of them strolled around the various confused and fused asylum buildings, peering up into the gutter’s underhang for any sign of the elusive delicacies. A fountain of almost-fluorescent acid green erupted suddenly into the pieced-together heavens from behind a nearby shed or annex, making them all jump, then giggle in relief as the effect subsided and was gone.
On what appeared to be a misplaced slice of the asylum chapel from St. Andrew’s Hospital they found a luscious cluster of ripe Puck’s Hats that the other Bill and Reggie must have overlooked, growing there in the shadowed angle underneath a window-ledge. Reggie removed his hat for use as a receptacle while Marjorie and Bill began to harvest the abundant hyper-vegetables or 4D fungi or whatever the peculiar blossoms truly were. Reaching beneath one foot-wide specimen that was especially magnificent, Marjorie pinched off the thick stalk with her ethereal thumbnail and could briefly hear a high-pitched whine like that of a small motor fading into silence, one of those sounds that you didn’t know that you’d been listening to until it stopped. She held the splendid trophy up, supported by both chubby little palms, and, with a writer’s eye, examined it.
The fairy figures, radiating in their doily pattern like a ring of paper dolls, were in this instance blonde. A golden tassel of their mutual mane grew from the fluffy dot at the thing’s centre, where the tiny heads were stuck together in a bracelet loop, while the minuscule tufts of ersatz pubic hair that sprouted from the intersection of the petal legs was also golden. Even in the colourless dominion of the ghost-seam, you could see a rouged blush on their minute cheeks, a sky-blue glitter in the circle of unseeing pinprick eyes. Except the Puck’s Hat wasn’t really a bouquet of pretty individual fairies, was it? That was only what it looked like, so that it could entice ghosts to eat it and spit out its crunchy blue-eyed seeds. In actuality, the Puck’s Hat was one single life form with its own inscrutable agendas. Trying to ignore the winsome female countenances, Marjorie instead attempted to see the true face of the mysterious organism.
Gazed at without thinking of the creature’s separate parts as miniaturised people, and without the natural sympathies that this resemblance provoked, the meta-fungus was a truly horrid-looking thing, a candy-tinted octopus with squirm-inducing convolutions that were messy and unnecessary. Ringed around the wrongness of its central honeyed top-knot were at least fifteen or twenty tiny and inhuman eyes, many of them disturbingly inverted, with outside this a concentric band of rosebud mouths like nasty little sores. A band of sculpted pseudo-breasts came next, then navels, then the obscene dimpling of the pudenda where the blonde fuzz grew like blots of penicillin. Looked at as a whole it was a frightening iced cake, decorated with unnerving symmetry by a hallucinating schizophrenic.
Before she could develop an aversion to the things for the remainder of her afterlife, Marjorie shuddered and hurriedly thrust the suddenly-alarming ghost-fruit into Reggie’s upturned bowler. What with it being so large, her find immediately took up nearly all the space inside the hat, prompting the boys to improvise by taking off Bill’s jumper with its sleeves tied in a knot, converting it into a somewhat more capacious sack. Marjorie watched them for a while as they continued to collect the riper specimens amongst those crowding underneath the window sill, leaving the immature and bluish spaceman-blossoms well alone. The dumpy little phantom girl did not even attempt to see the alien countenance that these concealed behind their individual skinny foetus forms. They were quite horrible enough when looked at in the normal manner. It was possibly the unborn baby look they had to them, with those enormous heads, but Marjorie had always thought they most resembled some extraordinary pre-natal disaster, Siamese octuplets with their skulls fused to become the petals of a hideous daisy. Marjorie knew from bitter past experience exactly what they tasted like, but always found the acrid flavour maddeningly difficult to translate into words. It was a bit like eating metal, but if metal had the soft consistency of nougat and could putrefy in some way so that it went sour like sweaty pennies. She knew some ghosts who would eat an unripe Puck’s Hat if the adult fairy fruit were unavailable, but for the death of her she’d no idea how they could manage it. She’d sooner do without until the end of time, which was about how long her memory of that first incautious bite would last. Besides, she got that same sense of a hearty meal and spiritual sustenance provided by the Bedlam Jennies from a good book these days. On the minus side of the equation though, a bad book could be left for decades and would never ripen into something sweeter.
Bill and Reggie gathered all the edible mad-apples from the cluster underneath the window and then wandered vaguely off, looking for more and heatedly discussing what their duplicates might have been up to, pilfering the crop of ghost-fruit before Phyllis and the gang could do so.
“Well, it’s gotta be us in the future, ennit? It’s somethin’ what we’ve not done yet.”
“You don’t know that. It might be us in the past.”
“Reggie, wiz that fuckin’ ’at too tight or somethin’? If it wiz us in the past then we’d remember it, you twat. And anyway, ’ow would we know when all the ’Ag’s Tits would be growin’ ’ere? We only just found out when Phyllis told us. No, you take my word, Reg, all that business what we saw, that’s somethin’ what we’re gunna do. All that we need concern ourselves about wiz why and when we’re gunna do it. That, and what the other me meant when ’e said about the devil bein’ in the driver’s seat.”
The two boys had apparently forgotten Marjorie. Engrossed in their discussion they meandered in amongst jaggedly juxtaposed asylum buildings, seeking out fresh pickings. Marjorie wasn’t that bothered, to be honest. Having rather put herself off Puck’s Hats and their harvesting for a few hours at least, she thought she’d take a stroll across the vast composite lawn in the direction of the copse towards which Phyllis, John and Michael had been headed when she’d seen them last. A rippling fan of brilliant yellow opened suddenly above a prefab observation wing, lasting for a short while before subsiding once more into graded half-tones: to the ghost-seam’s different shades of smoke. Marjorie glanced across her shoulder, through the dissipating doubles that were following her, and caught a brief glimpse of Reggie Bowler as he disappeared around a madhouse corner, still stubbornly arguing with Bill.