The combinations, p.40
The Combinations, page 40
squill — birthmarked, a reddish five-pointed blotch, shaped like an infant’s
outspread hand, staining the top of his forehead, a pink scar now bisected it…
Hello, remember me?
He soaked a towel in hot water & wiped the soap & hair away, then
pealed his rags off, piece by piece, soiled & damp with sweat (the sum of his
worldly possessions in that department), & regarded the alien body that
presented itself in place of his own reflection — that broken & reformed
shambles of a self. Němec was that thing. It was he, too, who’d authored it. Both
that golem & its creator. Glory unto thee. He scrubbed the stinking wreck till all
his skin burned, then took the razor & shaved off everything that was left,
244
scraping away the dead cell-structure, never so naked since the unremembered
day he’d been dragged kicking & screaming from that bloodied hole into the
alien atmosphere — the breathable air stinging every inch of him, till the nerves
dulled, cauterised, sealed-over by an invisible membrane, cocoon, that eventually
smothers you without you ever knowing it’s there…
R
The Bugman’s suit was where Němec had left it in its newspaper wrapping.
Unfamiliar trousers, shirt, jacket — If the shoe fits… — strange against the raw
flesh — like a newborn undertaker, red-eyed, hands postnatally soft, the
disfigured forcepsed skull, but fullgrown, shaped & moulded for the task of
burying himself. He thought of Blecha — the Bugman had been there that
night, when it happened. Cleaned up the mess afterwards. With his
disappointed eyes, spitting into the snow, rubbing his hands to keep warm,
blood frozen to his boots. Afterwards, he’d’ve come back up here & locked the
window, switched off the lights, thinking maybe about life’s little ironies, like a
caretaker in a cinema after everyone’s departed, so to speak.
Němec couldn’t help thinking of the joke Blecha had told him when he’d
first found his way up to the old guy’s eerie, getting the lay of the land, sussing
out the situation, sizing up the Bugman in his legionnaire’s cap & surplus anorak
for the hard sell. The old guy’d been peeling an orange with his fingernails,
offered his new tenant half of it — an awkward kid, as he still was then, in
handmedowns with head too big for his shoulders, quiet type, not what usually
came in off the streets, standing there broom-in-hand. Němec had done what
he’d been told, swept out the apartment, swept the hallways & stairs as well. The
orange, he remembered, had tasted bitter, but who was he to complain in a
situation like that? The old guy told him to pull up a chair. And while Němec’d
sat there silently eating the orange with one hand, while still clutching the
broom in the other, Blecha had started in on this long story, about a political
prisoner from Teplice he’d shared a cell with once, at Jáchymov — had some
sort of vitamin deficiency made his skin go a kind of reddish-yellow colour,
which this political turned into a gag, kind of disarm anyone before they had a
chance to taunt the shit out of him.
It went like this:
245
The Joke
Man walks into a village pub, pulls up a stool at the bar, waits for the barman to
serve him. Half-a-minute goes by. Man looks down at the other end of the bar
— there’s the barman chatting away to a group of blondes straight out of a
magazine, no bother on him. Thing is, the barman’s head is like an orange —
shape, colour, like an orange. Man can’t help staring. It’s about now the barman
stops chatting with the girls & glances over. Man immediately looks down at his
hands, fidgets, embarrassed-like. Next thing the barman’s standing right across
the counter from him, coughs. Man glances up. Barman says —
‘Couldn’t help noticing you starin’ at me.’
‘Oh no, no,’ man says. ‘I wasn’t staring.’
‘Yes you were,’ says the barman.
‘Alright,’ says the man. ‘So what. I only came in here for a pint. Don’t
want no trouble.’
‘That’s okay,’ barman says, ‘I understand. You were wonderin’ about my
head, weren’t you?’
‘Minding me own business, I was,’ man says. ‘It’s just a pint I’m after.’
‘Come on, no need to be embarrassed about it,’ says the barman, ‘you
wanted to know why I’ve got a head like an orange.’
‘Jesus,’ says the man. ‘If you insist. Go on. What about it? I was a little bit
curious, that’s all. I just came in for a bleedin’ pint.’
‘Well that’s alright then,’ says the barman. ‘Would you like me to tell you?’
‘Can’t a man be left to mind his own business no more?’ edging back from
the bar by now, thinking perhaps he ought to make a dash for the door.
‘It’s okay, really,’ says the barman. ‘I’m not blamin’ you, it’s an entirely
natural response. I’ll tell you about it if you like.’
‘If it’ll make you happy,’ man says, gaze half-averted, ‘& if you, you know,
don’t mind ’n’ all.’
‘No,’ says the barman. ‘Not at all. I don’t mind tellin’ you one little bit.’
‘’Cos I just wanted a pint. Minding my own business,’ man says.
‘That’s what I like about you,’ the barman grins.
‘Eh?’ the man starts getting all nervous again.
‘Well what’ll it be, then?’ asks the barman.
‘Um, Black-’n’-Tan,’ man says.
Barman takes a glass from the shelf, holds it under one of the taps, then
246
under another.
‘Here you go then,’ says the barman, setting a pint of half-’n’-half down on
a coaster in from of your man.
‘Cheers,’ man says.
‘You’re welcome,’ says the barman. ‘Anythin’ else I can get you? Crisps?
Peanuts? Pretzels?’
‘No thanks,’ man says, ‘just the pint.’
‘Fine,’ says the barman. ‘All settled then?’
‘Ready when you are,’ man says.
‘Good,’ says the barman. ‘Now it’s like this,’ he says, lowering his voice,
getting all confidential-like, resting his elbows on the bar so he’s leaning close to
your man, whose curiosity, it has to be admitted, has by now got the better of him.
‘One day,’ says the barman, ‘I was walkin’ down a lane, just outside the village,
when I heard a chirpin’ sound comin’ from the hedge. I stopped & listened &
there was the chirpin’ sound again. I went to the hedge to see what it was. And
there, trapped in a hole in the hedge, was a little blue bird. I’d never seen quite
such a bird before, sky blue with a purple beak. It turned its head sideways to look
at me with its little black eye, plaintive-like, so I reached in & untangled its foot
which was caught in a vine, & off it flew. Up & around it went, little blue wings
flapping, & then it came down & landed on my shoulder. Right here,’ says the
barman, tapping his right shoulder, where a dirty dishtowel hung. ‘Then the bird
started to talk. It was a magic bird, you see. It said, “I’m a magic bird. An evil
witch cast a spell that trapped me in that hedge, but now that you’ve broken the
spell & set me free, I shall grant you three wishes.” “Three wishes?” I says. “Yep,”
says the magic bird. “Let me think. Okay, first things first, I’d like to be rich &
own me own pub.” “Done!” says the magic bird.”’
Man gives barman a sceptical look.
‘It’s true,’ says the barman. ‘This’s my pub. I’m the owner. Everythin’ you
see here belongs to me. King of all I survey! It’s just I love being behind the bar,
you know how it is. Always have. Gettin’ to know all the regulars, the local
community, a sense of camaraderie, the generally festive atmosphere, life’s little
dramas, the odd bit of melancholia, a good punch-up once in a while.’
‘Okay, okay,’ man at the bar says, shaking his head. ‘So what was your
second wish, then?’
‘That was easy,’ says the barman. ‘My second wish was to be irresistibly
attractive to members of the fairer sex.’
Man gives him an even more sceptical look —
247
‘Now you really are pulling my leg.’
‘Nope,’ says the barman, jerking his thumb at the far end of the bar.
The magazine cut-out blondes were all still there, sipping their cocktails,
five of them, eyelashes at halfmast under the weight of too much mascara, lips
pouting, eyes for old citrushead here only.
‘That’s just for starters,’ the barman winks. ‘Come back after six. Place’ll
be full of ’em. Ladies Night, Every Night — that’s our slogan. The lads get to
drink at the back lounge, front bar’s reserved.’
‘Okay,’ man says. ‘Get on with it. What was your third wish, eh?’
Barman blinks —
‘To have a head like an orange, of course.’
248
19
___________
ALL THE MISCREANTS OF MELODRAMA
From behind a onesided game of checkers laid out on the shop counter, the old
Chink barked orders at a couple of dull-eyed coolies in earsplitting pidgin. The
coolies rushed about the aisles balancing hessian sacks & tin cans & looking
generally harassed. Němec told the Chink good morning & not getting any reply
handed over a wad of meal tickets, courtesy of the Invalid Plan, waiting to see if
the Chink’d cash them or not. The Chink scrutinised him through yellowed
eyes, running a Braille-reader’s fingers over the slips of paper as if to divine what
quality of fake he was dealing with — sniffed them, held them one at a time up
to his right ear & listened, then snapped the wad under a black light & shuffled
them around.
‘You want take cash? Twenty percent. Credit good.’
Němec negotiated down to fifteen percent & added a jug of ersatz whisky
for Blecha & for himself a packet of carbonised Arabica from the Sierra
Maestra. The coffee came in a yellow packet that showed a Cuban with a sack of
coffee beans on his back working the endless Five Year Plan of their till-recently
Comrades-in-Arms. A vision of paradise — the whole world turned to one
enormous collectivised plantation. God bless Khrushchev.
The Chink screamed in pidgin to one of the coolies who scampered up a
ladder to get the whisky down from the top shelf, where they kept only the best
stuff obviously. The jug had about an inch of black dust clinging to it. The
Chink screamed some more & the coolie went to work polishing it with a rag,
then split open the coffee packet & dumped its contents in an antique mill.
While the coolie sweated at the handcrank grinding beans, Němec scanned
across the day’s headlines on the news rack. Nothing much seemed to be going
on anywhere. There was a story about ancient lizard eggs in the Gobi desert, but
that was about it.
The Chink coughed to get his attention. The coolie had vanished,
Němec’s purchase sitting in a plastic bag on the counter, a fortune cookie thrown
in gratis. The Chink pushed a stack of crumpled notes across the zinctop with
the tip of an overgrown fingernail. He leered at Němec —
249
‘Confucius say, Man too much reading no see mosquito on tip of own nose.
You gonna buy or just looking all day?’
There was a wise man from Peking,
whose member was long but quite thin.
He used it to scribe
all day and all night,
till he’d whittled it down to a pin…
The fortune cookie was stale, but then they always were, no mystery in that.
Stuck inside was a slip of white paper with oriental characters printed in red, an
accompanying translation for the uninitiated, A bird is entangled by its feet, a man
by his tongue. Beneath the witticism was Lucky Number . Němec stuffed the slip
of rice paper with the remainder of the cookie in his jacket pocket & slouched
back down to the intersection. Instead of crossing it, he stood there leaning on
his stick surveying the fourth floor corner window of the building opposite, a
black rectangle cut into a wall of grey. Just another cave in the endless
escarpment. Prehistoric rivers had weathered away at the canyons since time
immemorial, dead now, a black slurry of tarmac & busted cobblestones. And the
sky, like a grey reflection of it all, veined & marbled, weighted with eternal
optimism.
Maybe in the back of Němec’s mind he expected to see somebody up there,
watching him. A ghost maybe. A child’s puppet-face. A bit of poignant
confectionery out of a haunted past. But there was nothing. The windows looked
all the same, grimed with decades of unwash. Moulded in the crumbling stucco
beneath them was a collection of gargoyles, rictus-mouthed, eyeholes drawn into a
picture of exaggerated woe, sprouting from the façade with the unconvincing
hilarity of a clown’s deathmask All the miscreants of melodrama, accursed, damned and
fatally marked with a smirk that runs from ear to ear. Fume-streaked, randomly
punched-through with gas heating vents, the gargoyles ogled the world blindly, as
they’d continue to do till the façades crumbled away entirely.
Down below on the pavement, a man in a felt hat was walking his dog. It
was a mottled brown dachshund with grizzled ears. The dachshund paused,
hind-leg cocked, gaze forlorn, snout aimed back up at its master — pissant
gardant — sniffed — jerked forward on a length of chain, resuming its laughable
dog-trot. There was nothing else to see. No human stain, no stigmatum.
Standing where he was, Němec felt nothing, only the residual ache of a body
that would always remind but never quite remember, dulled by anticipation of all
250
the rheumatoid winters yet to come.
Once inside, Němec took the elevator up to Blecha’s private bower on the
top floor. The elevator was a small, boxlike affair, with old First Republic wood
panelling. A mirror whose silvering had tarnished & bubbled, making reflections
warp & dissolve, gave the illusion you could’ve fit more than one person with the
door shut. The whole thing reeked of machine oil & rat bait, but at least it
didn’t stink of piss like every other half-wrecked tenement on the street. The
Bugman kept a clean house.
The old guy was getting ready to sit down for lunch when Němec rang
the bell. Blecha stood in the doorway, giving Němec a going over with those old
grey eyes of his while he stood under the light in the hallway, secondhand suit,
sockless in a pair of dull black shoes, nominally white shirt with the collar folded
wrong & a black tie knotted to one side. The Bugman reached up &
straightened it.
‘Better,’ he said appraisingly, ‘but you stand still too long, maybe a
pigeon’ll make love to that egg or yours, hehe. Come in.’
Němec stepped inside. The door wheezed shut behind him on one of
those pneumatic arms they have in offices designed never to work properly.
‘Wait here,’ Blecha said, waiving an index finger, ‘I’ve got something
might just do the trick.’
He disappeared among the clutter of his bower & returned a few minutes
later, clutching a bowler hat in one hand & beating the dust out of it with the
other —
‘Try that on for size.’
‘I’m supposed to be Charlie Chaplin, or what?’
‘You can be Neville Chamberlain for all I care, still be an improvement
over that Humpty Head routine you’ve got going.’
Němec shrugged & put the hat on — it fit, just as the old guy knew it
would. Němec gave his walkingstick a twirl for effect.
‘At least this way you won’t get pigeon crap on that dome of yours.’
Well if ever the money got tough, Němec thought, he could always go
down to the Square in clown-face & do mime routines for the tourist trade. The
hat would come in handy for collecting change.
‘Is that whiskey I see?’
Wordlessly, Němec extracted the blue jug from his shopping bag &
handed it over. Blecha read the label.
‘Hill’s Finest. Jindřichův Hradec. Only the best, eh?’
251
Němec made a Marcel Marceau face indicating heights of unattainable
ecstasy, then stuffed the bag, with the coffee still in it, into his jacket pocket.
‘Well,’ Blecha grinned, ‘you only die once, at least that’s what they say.
There’s ice in the fridge. While you’re at it, bring some glasses out to the roof
with you.’
There was a young man who was ill,
whose head was shaped like a squill.
It gave quite a fright
outspread hand, staining the top of his forehead, a pink scar now bisected it…
Hello, remember me?
He soaked a towel in hot water & wiped the soap & hair away, then
pealed his rags off, piece by piece, soiled & damp with sweat (the sum of his
worldly possessions in that department), & regarded the alien body that
presented itself in place of his own reflection — that broken & reformed
shambles of a self. Němec was that thing. It was he, too, who’d authored it. Both
that golem & its creator. Glory unto thee. He scrubbed the stinking wreck till all
his skin burned, then took the razor & shaved off everything that was left,
244
scraping away the dead cell-structure, never so naked since the unremembered
day he’d been dragged kicking & screaming from that bloodied hole into the
alien atmosphere — the breathable air stinging every inch of him, till the nerves
dulled, cauterised, sealed-over by an invisible membrane, cocoon, that eventually
smothers you without you ever knowing it’s there…
R
The Bugman’s suit was where Němec had left it in its newspaper wrapping.
Unfamiliar trousers, shirt, jacket — If the shoe fits… — strange against the raw
flesh — like a newborn undertaker, red-eyed, hands postnatally soft, the
disfigured forcepsed skull, but fullgrown, shaped & moulded for the task of
burying himself. He thought of Blecha — the Bugman had been there that
night, when it happened. Cleaned up the mess afterwards. With his
disappointed eyes, spitting into the snow, rubbing his hands to keep warm,
blood frozen to his boots. Afterwards, he’d’ve come back up here & locked the
window, switched off the lights, thinking maybe about life’s little ironies, like a
caretaker in a cinema after everyone’s departed, so to speak.
Němec couldn’t help thinking of the joke Blecha had told him when he’d
first found his way up to the old guy’s eerie, getting the lay of the land, sussing
out the situation, sizing up the Bugman in his legionnaire’s cap & surplus anorak
for the hard sell. The old guy’d been peeling an orange with his fingernails,
offered his new tenant half of it — an awkward kid, as he still was then, in
handmedowns with head too big for his shoulders, quiet type, not what usually
came in off the streets, standing there broom-in-hand. Němec had done what
he’d been told, swept out the apartment, swept the hallways & stairs as well. The
orange, he remembered, had tasted bitter, but who was he to complain in a
situation like that? The old guy told him to pull up a chair. And while Němec’d
sat there silently eating the orange with one hand, while still clutching the
broom in the other, Blecha had started in on this long story, about a political
prisoner from Teplice he’d shared a cell with once, at Jáchymov — had some
sort of vitamin deficiency made his skin go a kind of reddish-yellow colour,
which this political turned into a gag, kind of disarm anyone before they had a
chance to taunt the shit out of him.
It went like this:
245
The Joke
Man walks into a village pub, pulls up a stool at the bar, waits for the barman to
serve him. Half-a-minute goes by. Man looks down at the other end of the bar
— there’s the barman chatting away to a group of blondes straight out of a
magazine, no bother on him. Thing is, the barman’s head is like an orange —
shape, colour, like an orange. Man can’t help staring. It’s about now the barman
stops chatting with the girls & glances over. Man immediately looks down at his
hands, fidgets, embarrassed-like. Next thing the barman’s standing right across
the counter from him, coughs. Man glances up. Barman says —
‘Couldn’t help noticing you starin’ at me.’
‘Oh no, no,’ man says. ‘I wasn’t staring.’
‘Yes you were,’ says the barman.
‘Alright,’ says the man. ‘So what. I only came in here for a pint. Don’t
want no trouble.’
‘That’s okay,’ barman says, ‘I understand. You were wonderin’ about my
head, weren’t you?’
‘Minding me own business, I was,’ man says. ‘It’s just a pint I’m after.’
‘Come on, no need to be embarrassed about it,’ says the barman, ‘you
wanted to know why I’ve got a head like an orange.’
‘Jesus,’ says the man. ‘If you insist. Go on. What about it? I was a little bit
curious, that’s all. I just came in for a bleedin’ pint.’
‘Well that’s alright then,’ says the barman. ‘Would you like me to tell you?’
‘Can’t a man be left to mind his own business no more?’ edging back from
the bar by now, thinking perhaps he ought to make a dash for the door.
‘It’s okay, really,’ says the barman. ‘I’m not blamin’ you, it’s an entirely
natural response. I’ll tell you about it if you like.’
‘If it’ll make you happy,’ man says, gaze half-averted, ‘& if you, you know,
don’t mind ’n’ all.’
‘No,’ says the barman. ‘Not at all. I don’t mind tellin’ you one little bit.’
‘’Cos I just wanted a pint. Minding my own business,’ man says.
‘That’s what I like about you,’ the barman grins.
‘Eh?’ the man starts getting all nervous again.
‘Well what’ll it be, then?’ asks the barman.
‘Um, Black-’n’-Tan,’ man says.
Barman takes a glass from the shelf, holds it under one of the taps, then
246
under another.
‘Here you go then,’ says the barman, setting a pint of half-’n’-half down on
a coaster in from of your man.
‘Cheers,’ man says.
‘You’re welcome,’ says the barman. ‘Anythin’ else I can get you? Crisps?
Peanuts? Pretzels?’
‘No thanks,’ man says, ‘just the pint.’
‘Fine,’ says the barman. ‘All settled then?’
‘Ready when you are,’ man says.
‘Good,’ says the barman. ‘Now it’s like this,’ he says, lowering his voice,
getting all confidential-like, resting his elbows on the bar so he’s leaning close to
your man, whose curiosity, it has to be admitted, has by now got the better of him.
‘One day,’ says the barman, ‘I was walkin’ down a lane, just outside the village,
when I heard a chirpin’ sound comin’ from the hedge. I stopped & listened &
there was the chirpin’ sound again. I went to the hedge to see what it was. And
there, trapped in a hole in the hedge, was a little blue bird. I’d never seen quite
such a bird before, sky blue with a purple beak. It turned its head sideways to look
at me with its little black eye, plaintive-like, so I reached in & untangled its foot
which was caught in a vine, & off it flew. Up & around it went, little blue wings
flapping, & then it came down & landed on my shoulder. Right here,’ says the
barman, tapping his right shoulder, where a dirty dishtowel hung. ‘Then the bird
started to talk. It was a magic bird, you see. It said, “I’m a magic bird. An evil
witch cast a spell that trapped me in that hedge, but now that you’ve broken the
spell & set me free, I shall grant you three wishes.” “Three wishes?” I says. “Yep,”
says the magic bird. “Let me think. Okay, first things first, I’d like to be rich &
own me own pub.” “Done!” says the magic bird.”’
Man gives barman a sceptical look.
‘It’s true,’ says the barman. ‘This’s my pub. I’m the owner. Everythin’ you
see here belongs to me. King of all I survey! It’s just I love being behind the bar,
you know how it is. Always have. Gettin’ to know all the regulars, the local
community, a sense of camaraderie, the generally festive atmosphere, life’s little
dramas, the odd bit of melancholia, a good punch-up once in a while.’
‘Okay, okay,’ man at the bar says, shaking his head. ‘So what was your
second wish, then?’
‘That was easy,’ says the barman. ‘My second wish was to be irresistibly
attractive to members of the fairer sex.’
Man gives him an even more sceptical look —
247
‘Now you really are pulling my leg.’
‘Nope,’ says the barman, jerking his thumb at the far end of the bar.
The magazine cut-out blondes were all still there, sipping their cocktails,
five of them, eyelashes at halfmast under the weight of too much mascara, lips
pouting, eyes for old citrushead here only.
‘That’s just for starters,’ the barman winks. ‘Come back after six. Place’ll
be full of ’em. Ladies Night, Every Night — that’s our slogan. The lads get to
drink at the back lounge, front bar’s reserved.’
‘Okay,’ man says. ‘Get on with it. What was your third wish, eh?’
Barman blinks —
‘To have a head like an orange, of course.’
248
19
___________
ALL THE MISCREANTS OF MELODRAMA
From behind a onesided game of checkers laid out on the shop counter, the old
Chink barked orders at a couple of dull-eyed coolies in earsplitting pidgin. The
coolies rushed about the aisles balancing hessian sacks & tin cans & looking
generally harassed. Němec told the Chink good morning & not getting any reply
handed over a wad of meal tickets, courtesy of the Invalid Plan, waiting to see if
the Chink’d cash them or not. The Chink scrutinised him through yellowed
eyes, running a Braille-reader’s fingers over the slips of paper as if to divine what
quality of fake he was dealing with — sniffed them, held them one at a time up
to his right ear & listened, then snapped the wad under a black light & shuffled
them around.
‘You want take cash? Twenty percent. Credit good.’
Němec negotiated down to fifteen percent & added a jug of ersatz whisky
for Blecha & for himself a packet of carbonised Arabica from the Sierra
Maestra. The coffee came in a yellow packet that showed a Cuban with a sack of
coffee beans on his back working the endless Five Year Plan of their till-recently
Comrades-in-Arms. A vision of paradise — the whole world turned to one
enormous collectivised plantation. God bless Khrushchev.
The Chink screamed in pidgin to one of the coolies who scampered up a
ladder to get the whisky down from the top shelf, where they kept only the best
stuff obviously. The jug had about an inch of black dust clinging to it. The
Chink screamed some more & the coolie went to work polishing it with a rag,
then split open the coffee packet & dumped its contents in an antique mill.
While the coolie sweated at the handcrank grinding beans, Němec scanned
across the day’s headlines on the news rack. Nothing much seemed to be going
on anywhere. There was a story about ancient lizard eggs in the Gobi desert, but
that was about it.
The Chink coughed to get his attention. The coolie had vanished,
Němec’s purchase sitting in a plastic bag on the counter, a fortune cookie thrown
in gratis. The Chink pushed a stack of crumpled notes across the zinctop with
the tip of an overgrown fingernail. He leered at Němec —
249
‘Confucius say, Man too much reading no see mosquito on tip of own nose.
You gonna buy or just looking all day?’
There was a wise man from Peking,
whose member was long but quite thin.
He used it to scribe
all day and all night,
till he’d whittled it down to a pin…
The fortune cookie was stale, but then they always were, no mystery in that.
Stuck inside was a slip of white paper with oriental characters printed in red, an
accompanying translation for the uninitiated, A bird is entangled by its feet, a man
by his tongue. Beneath the witticism was Lucky Number . Němec stuffed the slip
of rice paper with the remainder of the cookie in his jacket pocket & slouched
back down to the intersection. Instead of crossing it, he stood there leaning on
his stick surveying the fourth floor corner window of the building opposite, a
black rectangle cut into a wall of grey. Just another cave in the endless
escarpment. Prehistoric rivers had weathered away at the canyons since time
immemorial, dead now, a black slurry of tarmac & busted cobblestones. And the
sky, like a grey reflection of it all, veined & marbled, weighted with eternal
optimism.
Maybe in the back of Němec’s mind he expected to see somebody up there,
watching him. A ghost maybe. A child’s puppet-face. A bit of poignant
confectionery out of a haunted past. But there was nothing. The windows looked
all the same, grimed with decades of unwash. Moulded in the crumbling stucco
beneath them was a collection of gargoyles, rictus-mouthed, eyeholes drawn into a
picture of exaggerated woe, sprouting from the façade with the unconvincing
hilarity of a clown’s deathmask All the miscreants of melodrama, accursed, damned and
fatally marked with a smirk that runs from ear to ear. Fume-streaked, randomly
punched-through with gas heating vents, the gargoyles ogled the world blindly, as
they’d continue to do till the façades crumbled away entirely.
Down below on the pavement, a man in a felt hat was walking his dog. It
was a mottled brown dachshund with grizzled ears. The dachshund paused,
hind-leg cocked, gaze forlorn, snout aimed back up at its master — pissant
gardant — sniffed — jerked forward on a length of chain, resuming its laughable
dog-trot. There was nothing else to see. No human stain, no stigmatum.
Standing where he was, Němec felt nothing, only the residual ache of a body
that would always remind but never quite remember, dulled by anticipation of all
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the rheumatoid winters yet to come.
Once inside, Němec took the elevator up to Blecha’s private bower on the
top floor. The elevator was a small, boxlike affair, with old First Republic wood
panelling. A mirror whose silvering had tarnished & bubbled, making reflections
warp & dissolve, gave the illusion you could’ve fit more than one person with the
door shut. The whole thing reeked of machine oil & rat bait, but at least it
didn’t stink of piss like every other half-wrecked tenement on the street. The
Bugman kept a clean house.
The old guy was getting ready to sit down for lunch when Němec rang
the bell. Blecha stood in the doorway, giving Němec a going over with those old
grey eyes of his while he stood under the light in the hallway, secondhand suit,
sockless in a pair of dull black shoes, nominally white shirt with the collar folded
wrong & a black tie knotted to one side. The Bugman reached up &
straightened it.
‘Better,’ he said appraisingly, ‘but you stand still too long, maybe a
pigeon’ll make love to that egg or yours, hehe. Come in.’
Němec stepped inside. The door wheezed shut behind him on one of
those pneumatic arms they have in offices designed never to work properly.
‘Wait here,’ Blecha said, waiving an index finger, ‘I’ve got something
might just do the trick.’
He disappeared among the clutter of his bower & returned a few minutes
later, clutching a bowler hat in one hand & beating the dust out of it with the
other —
‘Try that on for size.’
‘I’m supposed to be Charlie Chaplin, or what?’
‘You can be Neville Chamberlain for all I care, still be an improvement
over that Humpty Head routine you’ve got going.’
Němec shrugged & put the hat on — it fit, just as the old guy knew it
would. Němec gave his walkingstick a twirl for effect.
‘At least this way you won’t get pigeon crap on that dome of yours.’
Well if ever the money got tough, Němec thought, he could always go
down to the Square in clown-face & do mime routines for the tourist trade. The
hat would come in handy for collecting change.
‘Is that whiskey I see?’
Wordlessly, Němec extracted the blue jug from his shopping bag &
handed it over. Blecha read the label.
‘Hill’s Finest. Jindřichův Hradec. Only the best, eh?’
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Němec made a Marcel Marceau face indicating heights of unattainable
ecstasy, then stuffed the bag, with the coffee still in it, into his jacket pocket.
‘Well,’ Blecha grinned, ‘you only die once, at least that’s what they say.
There’s ice in the fridge. While you’re at it, bring some glasses out to the roof
with you.’
There was a young man who was ill,
whose head was shaped like a squill.
It gave quite a fright
