Feeding time, p.24
Feeding Time, page 24
‘Keep your bone,’ she’d snapped. ‘Although rest assured I’ll be bringing it up with the nurses. It’s nothing against you, Mister Cornish, it’s a question of hygiene. You understand.’
Squinting at the spurned biddy, he’d made a mental note to speak with the nurses himself about how disruptive she had lately become, how her paranoid episodes had increased in regularity and intensity, and how perhaps a higher does of Phlegmolax would probably be the appropriate course of action.
Forgetfulness was assured.
‘Oh I understand my dear. I understand, very well.’
Although by the time the sentence was out, Hortense was back in Ward A, negotiating her descent onto the chaise-longue.
*
Cornish picked at his teeth with the bone once again. Now that he had disposed of the body, stashed the mattress behind the tool shed, for burning later on, and scrubbed the floor of the closet with bleach, the whole mucky business seemed a strange, and strangely distant, memory. Once he stripped, showered and changed his clothes, perhaps, outwardly, it would seem as if nothing unusual had taken place at Green Oaks that day. He certainly hoped that was how Lisa would find things when she arrived. And yet the idea that his dark-afternoon-of-the-soul might fade away into the background of his own memory saddened him. If an experience of that intensity could leave him unchanged, what hope was there for him, really? If – after the initial rush – it merely dented the hard casing of his spirit, not penetrating any deeper than the surface, mildly perverting what lay within but fundamentally transforming nothing… what would have been the point of any of it?
The bone, he decided, he would keep. It was the only outward and visible sign of the inward invisible grace he had experienced in that closet. It would be his fetish, his talisman, his hero’s amulet. He might even polish it up, make a small hole in one end, string it onto a leather thong and wear it around his neck. If anyone asked – not that anyone would, except maybe Harriet – he would tell them he had bought it from that hippy stand in Meanwell market, the one with all the blankets and joss sticks. The idea that this little splinter of bone might be recognised for what it was, and they might get found out, was simply ludicrous. He couldn’t imagine the chain of events that could bring it about.
They might get found out. He insisted on thinking in the plural, because he mustn’t allow himself to forget that, despite it all, he had only really acted as the cleaner of somebody else’s mess, somebody else’s transgression. Whose mess, though? Whose transgression? The whole thing was baffling. At first he had thought it ambiguous whether the Indian had died in that room, or had been transported there after his death. On reflection, however, he had grown increasingly convinced it was the former. Whether that scree of turd was lain before his death, or whether it had been the result of the well documented insult-to-injury voiding that takes place moments after expiration, both led inevitably to the conclusion that the Indian had spent his last waking moments locked in the darkness of that room. But why? And what was the meaning of all those votive candles, all those rotten flowers? Who was mad enough to…
A vibration in his pocket confused him momentarily before he remembered the mobile telephone he had bought to allow the exchange of clandestine messages with Lisa. He never took it home, locking it in his office drawer at night, but slipping it into his pocket first thing in the morning and keeping it close to him throughout the day. There was only one name in the directory: hers. And she was the only person to whom he had given the number – so any vibration contained both promise and fear. The promise of a summons, the fear of a rejection. His fingers tingled as he pulled out the phone. The monochrome screen told him he had ‘1 MSG’. A further clumsy manipulation revealed it:
THX RAY! CAN’T B BOVD 2 CUM 2 GO. HOUSE EMPTY. CUM 2 ME? XX
A summons! Oh rapture! And not only that, but the message was positively littered with porno. Two CUMs and three Xs, two of them clearly – explicitly! – kisses. And he would go to her home, to her adolescent attic bedroom, and lay her down on her single bed and… And maybe it was a honey trap, and he was a dumb bear, but so what! She was sixteen. Today. The law couldn’t touch him… not with this message as evidence!
Another thought, a realisation, suddenly flooded his mind, and with an incredulous laugh he tossed the phone onto the sous-main. It scudded across the leather before turning to a halt on the very edge of the desk.
‘Pointless,’ he muttered, shaking his head with disbelief, before picking up the bone and examining it. He laughed again. ‘The whole thing was pointless.’ Addressing the bone, he went on: ‘I could have just left you where you were… Do you understand that? I could have just let someone else deal with you…’
Cornish stood, opened the drawer and dropped the bone inside. He reached across the desk for his phone, the overhang of his belly dislodging the sous-main an inch, exposing the corner of a folded sheet of notepaper beneath.
Unaware of this, Cornish turned, picked up the towel he had set aside for his shower, and the carrier bag with his change of clothes and headed out onto the landing of the upstairs bathroom. Passing in front of the closet door again he paused, took hold of the knob and threw open the door. Apart from the smell of bleach… nothing! He really had done a grand job, and once he himself was cleansed there would be no evidence left of what had transpired there today.
It really was a mucky business being King of the Crazies, he thought. But nobody else wanted his job, at least there was that. It was his for life. And, as it seemed, it was his job, indisputably so, then he was just going to have to live up to it.
Good for you, Raymond!
Cornish closed the door and made his way to the shower, too pleased with himself to pay attention to the low pitched rumble that seemed, against all logic, to be coming from behind the closet door, or to see the black knot begin rolling in the grain of the wood, churning around the spot of sap at its centre, that resembled nothing more closely than a pitch black rendering of a human eye, blinking.
5
Something extraordinary had happened…
Tristan couldn’t sit still. He was pacing back and forth in the staff room as if with the regular beating of his footfall, the rhythmic lurching of his body, his logic might, somehow, be brought into step. Might make sense. That he might understand…
But it defied understanding! His thoughts roamed and twisted… so that just when he felt he had a hold on them, they eluded his grasp again.
Kalki. He had…
Vanished?
Departed?
Evanesced?
It was ridiculous, unthinkable, idiotic and yet… real!
It was as if he never was, never had been.
Panic had born down on him when he had entered the closet, surging across the plains of consciousness like a tsunami. This was it! He… they… had been discovered. Someone had discovered Kalki and had been too thick-headed to understand. Had been unable to see him for what he was. Had taken him for a what… a cadaver? Heresy!
But how could anyone else have got it? Nobody else had been there from the start. Nobody else had seen what he had seen. Nobody else had watched him transcend life after several weeks in the dark. And to think, Tristan had only moved him there that day because he didn’t know what else to do with him.
The tsunami had hit, but instead of carrying Tristan off, its waters had passed over him, with barely a splash. Then they had subsided, tickling his ankles as they drained away. For a simple truth had dawned – if, as he assumed, Kalki had been discovered, where was the scandal? Where were the recriminations? Where the sanctions? Where the revenge?
Tristan stopped pacing, looked at the last four OxyNyx pills in his cupped palm, where they had been sweating for some time now. He gulleted them in one.
But if he hadn’t been discovered, then what…?
Could Kalki have stood up, dusted himself down, and left of his own free will? Set off to walk the earth, a god errant destined to roll into rural villages at times of great distress or strife, healing ills, righting wrongs, sparing harvests? But he had been blind for as long as Tristan could remember and besides, he wasn’t that kind of prophet. He wasn’t a mover – quite the opposite! Moving was anathema to him… He stood for stillness, for immutability, divorced from the universe of births and deaths, of grotesque, bloody beginnings and shoddy ends… That was his message.
Which left just one logical conclusion:
Ascension!
But why?
He thought back to their final conversation a few days earlier. Kalki had never moved his lips when he talked to Tristan, had never indulged in any of the imbecilic tongue-flapping that more mundane creatures relied upon to communicate. Tristan would lay hands on him and the conversation would flow back and forth between them like an alternating electric current.
You’re distressed, that final conversation had begun.
‘I’m distressed,’ Tristan confirmed aloud.
Why?
He felt ashamed, but there was no use lying. His probe was already planted deep in Tristan’s brain – penetrating to its reptilian core.
‘Everything’s falling apart.’
Everything?
‘Well no, not everything, of course. Not you.’
So let’s start there.
‘I don’t understand.’
A long moment passed without either of them speaking. Then:
You’re afraid you’ll never leave.
Tristan hung his head, as if in confession.
There’s another way.
‘Another way to… what?’
A way for this to continue. A way for you to stay.
‘No!’ – regretting his impetuous tone at once. ‘No. I couldn’t face it. There’s no way.’
There is a way. There is a way you can win.
‘How?’
Another silence. This was how their conversations had often ended; abruptly. Tristan would drop a question and, like a radio running out of juice, Kalki would fade away, leaving the question hanging…
Not this time.
Tristan lifted his hands from his calf and rubbed them together, as if in doing so the connection might be regenerated. Instead of replacing them on the leg, though, he shuffled a couple of feet to the left, and rested them on the balloon-taut skin of Kalki’s belly. He had never touched it before, and was surprised how tight, how springy it was. Still, though, Kalki refused to answer. Without really knowing why Tristan’s fingers then sought out the navel. After circling it several times, the hand straightened and with a firm jab punctured the stretched skin, plunging into the cavity of his gut.
An efflux of fluid forced itself out, past his wrist, and spattered to the floor. It was warm inside. Warm and… alive! His hand moving on full instinctive autopilot now, he frisked until his fingers looped around a section of intestine. His quarry cornered, he pinched it, softly at first, then…
Slay the Hydra.
Tristan almost laughed. He had come back! He knew at once, too, who the Hydra was. Every time you lopped off the Captain’s head, a new one grew back… a stronger, madder one. And yet, eventually, the Hydra had been slain. By Hercules.
Tristan wasn’t Hercules.
‘Impossible’ he said, still pinching the section of Kalki’s gut.
It is possible.
‘I’ve tried and failed before.’
Try again. But succeed.
‘How?’
Whatever one has created, one has the power to destroy.
‘Created? I didn’t…’
Once again he tuned out. And however much Tristan pinched or squeezed, this time he wouldn’t be woken. Whatever one has created? That was unfair. He hadn’t baptised the Captain, after all… His hand set to roving again until the thumb and index came to rest over the linea dentata, the dividing line between the rectum and the anus. He pinched it hard.
He stands for everything you do not.
He pinched it again.
Accepts everything you cannot.
Again.
Accepts everything I am not.
And again…
Destroy him!
Tristan jerked his hand from the belly, bringing with it a spout of warm body-juice. In his upturned palm sat the eleven squirming apostles.
‘How?’
Silence.
‘How?’
But those had been the last words they would share.
Now, several days later, he thought he understood – what the Captain stood for, what he accepted… and why he must be destroyed. What Kalki had taught Tristan was how to refuse the mechanical world, the world of processes, of induction, of action and reaction, of death. Rather his was a world of permanence, of meaning, of categoricals, of full sets of teeth… of everlasting life. And it wasn’t that the Captain had made the other choice – a lot of people did, the world would always need warriors as well as monks – but that he refused to choose at all. He stood with one foot in each world, thumbing his nose at both. He mixed the two worlds… Separate, they were chemically inert. When mixed, they became perilously volatile. He was a Warrior-Monk, the very worst kind! That was how he could use his shit as war paint. That was how he could throw himself, smirking, into the free-fall of life. And that was how Tristan knew that Kalki was right. He had to complete the cycle and destroy what he had created. Otherwise his creation would destroy them both. Destroy them all.
And yet there was some doubt. For, so embodied, did Kalki not also straddle these two worlds? Was his existence not, in a certain sense, even more volatile than the Captain’s? Should he not also be destroyed? He had posed these questions that morning in the closet, squeezing the linea dentata as he did so. But Kalki hadn’t responded.
Standing, Tristan had pocketed the apostles and before leaving the closet had begged.
‘Give me a sign…’
And he had. Today.
Kalki had destroyed himself.
…
Tristan swiped a sealed envelope from the coffee table and headed for the door.
He emerged into the hallway at the very moment the OxyNyx bit, and had to reach for the wall and glare at his feet for a few seconds just to steady himself. When he looked up again, he saw that he wasn’t alone. At the far end of the hall, a woman was hanging from the grandfather clock. Her arms were flung around the clock’s body while her legs slumped uselessly below. A rejiggered mock-up of that famous silent movie scene, the scales absurdly askew.
It was the one they called Olive Oil. Of all the pet names they had for the residents, this one was perhaps his favourite. For not only did she bear an almost perverse resemblance to the paramour of the most famous muscular dystrophy victim to ever sail the seven seas, but her catalepsy meant her feet would often shoot out from under her as if the floor had been greased with…
But what was she doing on the loose? This one had always been fractious and foul-mouthed, was always trying to upset the Green Oaks applecart with an outrageous accusation about something or other. Outrageous? Most of the time, yes… although poke your finger often enough, randomly enough, and it sometimes risks landing on something true. She might have been dangerous if anyone took her remotely seriously, even for a second. Yes she was paranoid, but yes, they were actually plotting against her…
Olive, unaware she was being observed, looked extremely cross with herself. Some months earlier, Ally and Frankie had whipped up a storm in Ward B about the trails of fingerprints the residents left on the clock case as they skirted the hallway. They had threatened them with a parade of ghoulish punishments, the violence of which had increased as gutsy one-upmanship had nosed its way into proceedings. The fingerprints – which they had never cared about one way or the other – had disappeared the very next day.
He wondered if it was this memory that was worrying Olive. She was experimenting with releasing the grip of one arm, so that she could massage her legs back to life. But every time she tried, her body would rattle and shake. After three failed attempts, her features rearranged themselves into an expression of stony obstinacy. She released her grip and thumped to the floor.
‘Meeeee-ow!’ Tristan wailed, as much to his own surprise as hers, lancing the silence of the hallway. The old woman went as rigid as a corpse.
Tristan swaggered towards his victim.
‘Hickory, Dickory, Dock…’ he intoned with a sneer. He was so at ease in the CareFriend smock, and the personality he had constructed around it, that even the most inspired of his taunts now rose out of him unbidden. As if he was a spectator to proceedings, to the unstaunchable flow of his own malign genius, he doffed an invisible hat to the artfulness of the goad.
‘… A mouse has touched the clock…’
He was impending over her sprawled body now. After all this time he was still surprised by the elfin proportions of most of the residents. Even the old fatty he had earlier squared up to possessed an underlying smallness that could not truly be appreciated until physically confronted with the fact. It was almost like coming face to face with another species, similar to his own in many ways, but genetically distinct, like the hobbit creatures turned up periodically by archaeologists on far-flung Pacific islands. He could hardly imagine how he must look to them.
Olive was trying to say something, but her voice, at once reedy and croaking, was not cooperating. Tristan abandoned his improvised nursery rhyme without regret, knowing it would struggle to maintain its previous heights, and crouched to look her in the face.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘Toi-let,’ she managed, her thin lips pushing and curling outwards from her haggard face, a kind of enormous peach stone.
‘And I always thought you pissed yourself on purpose because you liked Frankie sponging you… down there.’
Her eyes puckered. Their black marbles glared up at him.
