Nowhereville, p.24
Nowhereville, page 24
“No card in here, Pad. No fucking thing else either.”
Patrick stared at the yawning beak, the pink entrance to a woman, the way back into a womb, and fought to concentrate. “Someone must have taken it.”
“Who are you calling a thief now?”
“I can’t say, can I?” Patrick struggled not to let his gaze stray across Mel and the children in case it looked accusing. Surely it made sense to ask “Who was it for?”
Mel glared at the envelope and then at him. “Looks like you, Pad.”
Since he didn’t move, Patrick had to venture back to him. As Mel turned the envelope towards him he spat on it—no, a large raindrop fell on a line of handwriting. The line was all Patrick had previously seen, and now he saw it was the whole of the address. To the Pad, it said. “You’re right,” Patrick told Mel. “It must be a joke.”
“Who’s having one of them?”
Patrick watched the letters settle down from writhing and assume a final shape. The scrawl looked childish, which made him think Kiera or Kieron was responsible. Might they have slipped the envelope into the trolley while Mel’s father had diverted him away from it? He could equally suspect any of a number of his workmates. “I can’t say that either,” he said.
“Bet you can’t. More like it’s an excuse for you to come sneaking back.”
“Why would I want to do that?” Patrick saw the answer in Mel’s eyes, considerably worse than a warning. If he’d been closer to escaping through the gate he mightn’t have lingered to be rational. “Don’t be paranoid, Mel,” he said.
“What’s going to make me that, Pad?”
“What you had before. You won’t say you aren’t stoned.”
“So are we,” Kieron said.
“It’s our birthday,” Kiera said as if this hadn’t been made plain.
“I’ve got to say I am a bit myself.” In case it helped, Patrick added “In honour of the occasion.”
“Don’t try making out you’re like us.” Some element of the exchange had infuriated Mel. “Pity I didn’t run you over,” he said, “while I had the chance.”
“You can’t really mean that. There are children listening.”
“And don’t you fucking tell them what I mean. Here’s your message.” He thrust the envelope at Patrick and turned to the children. “Watch out for him,” he said. “You wouldn’t like to be him if he came back.”
Patrick dropped the envelope in the compartment that wasn’t occupied by the empty can and made with a defiant series of clanks for the gate. From the pavement he saw the children watching him like guards. On his way back to the barbecue Mel shouted “You’re not kidding us you didn’t write it, Pad.”
How could Patrick have been responsible? Where would he have found the envelope or the opportunity to write on it, or a reason? Mel’s suggestion had left him feeling that his memory was wrong—that his whole mind was. He needed to show Eunice the item in the hope that somebody owned up. As he headed for the main road he grew anxious to locate a bin where he could bring the clatter of the trolley to an end. The dark sky looked too burdened to keep hold of its rain, but so far not a drop had touched him. Lightning flashed as he passed the Watch—no, the security camera caught him once more. He turned the bend that brought Dogs Home in sight, and Gutter started barking. Patrick wasn’t about to be driven off the pavement, and he was marching past the gate when a man called “Hi there, postman. Just wait, will you.”
His voice was as clipped as his grey hair and moustache. He was waving an envelope—the first item Patrick had delivered. “This isn’t ours,” he complained. “It’s not remotely like.”
The Doberman sprang up as Patrick took the envelope, and the dog’s jaws clicked shut only inches from his hand. “Down, you brute,” the man said. “It doesn’t care for strangers.”
Patrick had to squint hard at the restless letters to grasp that the house where he should have left it was called Boosome. Even if the name made no sense, how could he have misread it? Mel hadn’t affected his mind then, but Patrick felt as if their encounter had undermined time. Though the savage antics of the dog gave him little chance to think, he seemed to recall having seen the name somewhere on his round, surely not just on the envelope. “Sorry to have troubled you,” he said.
As the dog bounded at the gate again its owner strode back to the house. For long enough to let the gloom droop lower overhead Patrick tried to think which way to move. He felt as if he was attempting to look down on Garden Mile, still at his desk and searching the map. How distant was the address he had to find? The Doberman was leaping higher, snarling through its teeth, and he had a sense that the entire suburb was growling at him. It wouldn’t stop him performing his job. He wasn’t going to give anyone an excuse to criticise him, and he tramped back along the road. At the bend he turned to bid some kind of farewell to the dog, which seemed to need no breath to bark. He’d hardly met its eyes when it vaulted over the gate and raced after him.
He wasted seconds in fancying this was his latest hallucination, and then he fled. The Watch greeted his clangourous approach with another flash of lightning, and the pavement around him broke out in a nervous rash. More of the rain streamed down his face, unless that was the juice of his panic. It blurred his vision while he dashed towards the Pad, where he saw faces at an upstairs window. As the dog appeared at the bend in the road Patrick rushed the trolley to the open gates. He hadn’t reached them when Kiera and Kieron came out of the house.
They had been at the window, and he thought they’d been watching for him. Kiera was jigging to a repetitive ditty on her phone, and her brother had a gun. Patrick floundered through the gates after the trolley, and the boy pointed the toy at him. “Is that a birthday present?” Patrick said. “It looks real.”
“It’s our grandad’s and you have to piss off.”
Kiera continued to jerk like a puppet as if neither she nor the phone felt the rain. “You come in,” she warned, “and you’ll get what dad said.”
Patrick heard claws clacking on the tarmac and a snarl that grew lower but closer. He flung back one of the lids of the trolley to see just his envelope and the Boosome item. “Not them,” he pleaded and found the empty can to shy at the dog. It bounced off the animal’s head, and the dog gave a yelp before redoubling its snarl and padding towards him. “Let me stay,” Patrick begged the children. “I’ll make it right with your father.”
Through the house he saw Mel and others busy erecting a shelter beyond the crowded kitchen. He took another step, and Kieron raised the pistol. “Not me,” Patrick blurted. “The dog.”
He stooped to yank the bolt of the left-hand gate out of its socket, and was shutting the gate when he heard his vehicle backfire. It couldn’t, since it had no engine, but he’d been distracted by a dull punch on his back. He clung to the gate while he stumbled to face the children. Kiera was continuing to prance, and her brother had him covered. “He’s not gone yet,” Kiera said.
Patrick tried joining in the dance as he lunged at the other gate. His capering impressed neither of the children, and might even have provoked the blow his chest took. Somebody behind the house—Mel or his father—wondered loudly what had just happened, but nobody came to look. “All right,” Patrick said with more dignity than he’d realised he possessed, “I’ll take my chances with the dog,” and staggered past the gates. Perhaps he hadn’t made himself heard, unless it didn’t matter, because he received a parting thump on the back of his skull.
It carried him into the road, where he sprawled face down on the tarmac. The sky collapsed on him—the downpour did, at any rate. Perhaps that was why he could barely see the dog until its muzzle met his cheek. He couldn’t move enough to flinch, but in any case the dog was only licking rain off him. Was it merely rain that was inundating the road around him? Dance music grew louder as the children came to view him, and he thought lightning had accompanied them until he heard the whir of a shutter on a phone. In the distance a man gave a cry of disgust or frustration about him if not the weather. As Patrick felt himself begin to spread through Garden Mile, he could only wonder if this would help him deliver the last of the mail.
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The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature.
Tends to Zero
Wole Talabi
When the sun rises, so do I. Through the curtains, filtered dawnlight kisses my eyes. I wake.
It’s 7:05 a.m., and I should still be fast asleep. After a long night of drinking, first at Freedom Park and later at Quilox Club, ending in a deeply unsatisfying threesome with Chiamaka and Ronke—runs girls I’d picked up from Swe Bar—I’d finally drifted off into dreamless slumber at about five. Now I am awake. Laying in this soft bed, in the softly lit executive suite of the InterContinental Hotel, nestled between two soft, naked bodies, I find myself thinking of last night, of the early minutes before the start of Afropolitan Vibes at Freedom Park, the only part of the evening that I genuinely remember.
We’d arrived early—Asiru, Lekan, Chris, and I. In the cloudy sky, the sun had taken on an orange halo as it sank against a field of dizzying purples, red, blues, and yellows. We found a nice table near the stage where the air was scheduled to vibrate with loud, live music in a few hours and settled down with two bowls of pepper soup, a plateful of suya, and a calabash of allegedly fresh palm wine. A young man who looked like a vagrant with a goje was sitting on the sand at the edge of the stage, playing softly. I’d watched the sun slowly drown in the horizon while my old friends from university, whom I hadn’t seen in months, tried to distract me from memories of my dead brother. They meant well, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about their words. When they realized I wasn’t really paying attention, they slowly pivoted their discussion to arguments about football and politics.
Sitting there silently in the strange light of sundown, I momentarily regressed into a sort of dream state and, in so doing, found myself free of sadness for the first time since my mother had called screaming into the phone that Tunji was dead. But as the sun finally fell, I became aware of the thick white wall surrounding the park, and the memory of its history, which I had learned about in the process of failing my first year at university, poisoned my mood.
Freedom Park was built on the old, colonial-era Broad Street Prison, the first prison set up after the British seized Lagos in 1861. Originally built with mud and thatch, it was repeatedly arsoned by anti-colonial freedom fighters, so the British rebuilt it with brick. Thousands were imprisoned and executed by enforcers of the British colonial will, including many of Nigeria’s founding fathers, but after independence, Nigeria took control of her own destiny and became responsible for her own cruelties. Many people were kept incarcerated there in the years following, including highway robbers and separatists that had been on the losing side of the civil war. The prison was finally pulled down in 1976, and Freedom Park developed over it. Imprisonment was replaced by artistic expression. A history of pain was overwritten with the promise of regularly scheduled pleasures.
Perhaps I was sitting in the exact spot where someone had been kept in chains like an animal for resisting foreign invaders, perhaps I was eating from a table that stood where someone had been killed, offered as a sacrifice on the altar of law and order in the new republic. Freedom Park was a palimpsest, and whatever fragment of happiness I’d glimpsed in the drowning sun could no longer be perceived clearly through its history. I wished then that I hadn’t known anything about the park and its history of pain and violence, perhaps I’d have been able to hold on to that feeling longer. History is a burden, knowledge is misery, and I know too much about this city where I was born and where I, like my brother, will probably die. I’d spent the rest of the night in a blur, and more money than I reasonably should have, blunting my mind and memories with marijuana, lust, and alcohol in an effort to recapture the feeling. I failed.
I rise, lift Ronke’s perfectly manicured hand off my chest, push Chiamaka gently until she rolls over, and slide out from between them, underneath the covers at the end of the bed. I put on the fluffy white robe, with a stitched gold emblem, and comfortable straw slippers provided by the hotel. The lights are off, but immature daylight illuminates the clothes, condoms, receipts, underwear, bundles of cash, and bottles on the floor. The slick, modern decor of the room that I had admired when I booked it seems tainted by what we did here yesterday, three people caring nothing for each other, licking, rubbing, and slapping flesh against flesh desperately. The place now seems sleazy.
I catch my dim reflection in the large rectangular mirror set in an old mahogany frame, carved with leaf and flower designs, and notice that my entire body somehow seems substantially smaller, somewhat shrunken and skinny, like I have lost a sixth or so of my weight in the last few days. I choose not to think about it too much. It’s probably just an optical illusion, light and shadow playing games at dawn. Or the result of a residual high. I grab a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels from the floor and walk over to the window. The sun glints over the lagoon, making it shimmer like liquid silver, and for a moment, I forget just how filthy the water is beneath the soft waveforms of the surface.
I take a large swig of the whiskey, throw the bottle on the bed between the girls, and sink to my knees. Tears roll down my face. I kneel there, weeping softly, watching the sun rise over the water until the sudden trill of my phone drags me back to the present.
I rise from the floor, wipe away the tears, and walk to the dresser where my phone sits insistent. The caller ID reads “Mum,” and I instinctively reach for it before pausing. I gaze at the screen, my hand frozen. On the other end of the call, she is probably sitting on her bed, morning prayers just completed, bible in her thin hand, and her hair bound up in a silk scarf. I would love to talk to her now, to share memories of playing with Tunji in the sand at Bar Beach, to tell her how desperately I wish I could bring him back, but I know she will only cry and wail and tell me how terrible my life is and that I should come with her to church before God takes me too. Often, I find myself wishing he’d done just that.
I can’t talk to her now. Not when I’m like this. My body thaws, I pick up the phone, swipe to dismiss the call without answering, and put it on silent. My skin feels too tight, my legs unsteady. Ashamed, I walk to the bed and fall back into the valley between the two naked women, narrowly avoiding the bottle. I feel like Adam, hiding among the trees of the Garden of Eden.
I am alone. I mean, I have always felt alone, living more in my head and in the bottle than in the world, keeping most of my thoughts and emotions to myself, but Tunji’s death has triggered something. I have been feeling a new kind of aloneness, a deeper and more complete kind of aloneness that has suffused every thought and emotion I have. It hurts. I don’t want it.
I wrap my arm around Ronke’s waist and pull her to me. Her voice, sultry with drowsiness, drifts to me, “Ah ahn, you’re awake already?”
She moans, pulling a pillow to her chest as I rub myself against her. She sighs.
“Let me put you back to bed. Try for a little pleasure before the end.”
I ignore the strange conclusion to her sentence, not understanding what she means by it, and we have joyless sex for a quarter of an hour while Chiamaka pretends to sleep. When we are done, I fall asleep again, exhausted and empty.
By noon, we are all awake. I give them ₦125,000 to get back to their campus and take care of themselves when they get there, slipping an extra ₦25,000 into Ronke’s hand while Chiamaka is putting on her makeup in the bathroom. She rewards me with a wink but doesn’t take the money, pressing the cash and my hand back against my chest. Her long hair swishes as she shakes her head and adjusts her dress like a second skin.
“It’s okay. I really don’t need this,” she says before she kisses me on the cheek and looks at me with something like pity in her impossibly grey eyes. Ashamed, I look away and say goodbye without returning her gaze.
I take a shower, slip into my T-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses, which all seem a bit too big, and then check out of the hotel and drive back down to Swe Bar in Onikan where music with incomprehensible lyrics set to bass as thick as the heartbeat of a decadent god and the cloying smell of whiskey welcome me like a womb.
With dawn comes sharp flares of pain, red needles of light beneath my eyelids.
I turn away from the rapidly rising sun, my hands instinctively covering my face as the hangover begins to blossom in my head. My hands are the familiar wet of vomit and dew. My back is sore from sleeping on the unforgiving concrete sidewalk leading out of Tafawa Balewa Square, less than a mile from the bar. A woolen echo fills my head, silencing the world. My bones press against my skin, making my body feel small and not quite fully developed. I feel like an accident.
Peeking out from between my fingers, the upside-down city smiles back at me in the fading twilight, its badly maintained buildings and hastily constructed steel towers like uneven teeth in a yellow-grey mouth of sky.
There is a bus stop near me. I can tell by the tangle of traffic—mostly beat-up danfos and molues, secondhand motorcycles and scratched cars. Old men sit by the roadside on low stools under brightly colored umbrellas, their hands moving rapidly as they ready their stalls and kiosks for the day into which I have clumsily emerged. There is a carnival of bright plastic buckets and metal trays carried by women, children and young men hawking wares. The colors are too bright, the silence in my head too unnatural.
