Salt Snake and Other Bloody Cuts Read online

  Then there was silence. Emmerson’s jaw stretched wider and never made a single chewing motion; his throat muscles alone seemed to be dragging the man down, remorselessly engulfing him in that pink cavern that had once been the thin-lipped mouth of a skinny drunk. Emmerson’s eyes, now set at either side of the deformed face, were closed; as if he were savoring this delicious, wriggling morsel.

  Momentarily, the throat which had been loosely flaccid stretched tight. It was like watching a rubber inner-tube being overinflated. The throat was distended into a single huge blister—white, bloodless white—the skin turned shiny and the thick arteries, liked parasitic worms, were visible wriggling beneath the tight skin. I saw a straggling shape. Like swollen glands, two lumps appeared at either side of the neck where Pinner’s two fists pushed uselessly. Then came the face. Frantically it thrust against the elastic skin. I saw the outline of a forehead, a flattened nose, a chin, and then a mouth—wide open in a silent, agonized scream.

  The skull and crossbones T-shirt slipped out of sight.

  Emmerson straightened up, with Pinner’s legs still frantically kicking in the air, the brown boots just a blur. He began to jerk up and down as if trying to shake down what he was swallowing. His lips stretched tight as the huge mouth opened even wider until his jaw dislocated with a gigantic crack that echoed shockingly in the empty carpark. Suddenly, the legs and those brown cowboy boots slipped out of sight. Just for a second, Emmerson’s stomach distended hideously through his open shirt then contracted sharply, crushing the lump out of existence.

  White and I watched everything in a kind of rigor-mortis of horror.

  Emmerson looked round. His eyes were alive and intelligent now. A deep throbbing bass sound came from his throat. Satisfaction. Pleasure.

  I heard a groan. Jock was pulling himself into a kneeling position, his black suit covered in white patches from the gravel. The man coughed and spat out gobs of blood, gravel and splintered teeth.

  Emmerson’s crimson mouth opened grotesquely. Although he may have been grinning, it looked more like an injury caused by an axe. There was a sharp click as his jaw relocated.

  His dark, shining eyes fixed on the floored bouncer.

  Then, swiftly, he swung his thick arms down and easily hoisted the dazed man up into the air above his swollen head.

  Holding up his prize, Emmerson began to run, passing straight between us and jumping onto the black Porsche like it was a stepping stone. His now bare, feet with their over-large toenails smashed down, crunching the gleaming black roof and shattering the windscreen. Then he was running downhill, feet splattering the gravel like two great hammers.

  “Emmerson!” I shouted desperately “Come back! Come back! Don’t you see? There’s nowhere to run! Emmerson, Emmerson!”

  I called until my throat was hoarse. Then, furiously I turned on White.

  “This is your fault, you bastard! Not mine! I looked after him. I kept it under control. It was me who sacrificed everything. I had a wife, you know. A little boy—four years old. Hey! Are you listening?”

  I lashed at White, catching him on the cheekbone. It wasn’t a hard blow but he yelped pathetically and fell cowering by his car.

  “I left them both to look after Emmerson. He cost me my family, my money and all my bloody life. But we were getting by. Things were working out. Not now though! Not now!”

  Whimpering, White tried to huddle tighter against the wrecked Porsche, his ears blotching purple, face shining wetly like it had been smeared with margarine—he looked like a man a heartbeat away from thrombosis.

  For a moment I wondered whether to run after Emmerson. There was no point. I knew I could never catch up with him now. Already he was climbing the spoil-heap a mile away. He appeared as a gigantic figure, gleaming as white as a bone against the black slag.

  Above his head, the limp body of the man swung like a rag doll. Then, as I watched, they vanished amongst the black hills.

  Feeling like I’d seen the coming of the Apocalypse, I turned back to White who still clung to the wreckage of his precious car.

  “See what you’ve gone and done?”

  He winced. My anger fired my words like bullets.

  “Just what the hell am I going to do now?”

  Eyes Like a Ghost

  I found the cassette in the boxful of books I’d bought at the cancer shop. I never even realised it was in there until I’d brought the box home, balanced on the PVC hood of my daughter’s pushchair. Elizabeth would have played merry hell about that. The hood was already splitting in three places. Well, at the time, Elizabeth would be hammering at the till keys in the supermarket, so what the eye doesn’t see…

  “Dad! A computer game!”

  My seven-year-old son, who had been rooting in the box, rattled the cassette box excitedly above his head.

  “I shouldn’t think so, Lee,” I said, pulling my gloves off. “Someone’Il have left it there by mistake.”

  “Oh… music.” He pushed “music” out from his lips with disgust.

  “Probably.”

  “Music, crap music.” He threw the tape back in the box and returned to the television. Bart Simpson was spraying “EAT MY SHORTS” on the school wall.

  “Someone phoned up,” called Lee, swinging his legs over the arm of the chair. “They said, ‘Can I speak to Martin Price?’”

  “Well, that’s my name,” I said. “What did you tell them?”

  “I put the phone down.”

  “Didn’t you ask if you could take a message?”

  Lee didn’t answer. The television had greater pulling power than me.

  I toyed with the idea of delivering a lecture on manners but apart from the likelihood of it failing on deaf ears, the tape Lee had pulled from the box caught my attention. For some reason I felt pleased. The tape hidden amongst the books seemed a minor bonus. I intended a closer look but an annoyed yell from the kitchen signalled my daughter wanted release from her pushchair. And a biscuit… And a drink… And toys… And…

  The tape would have to wait.

  * * *

  YOU CAN’T SEE ME, BUT I SEE YOU

  I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

  I ride with you on bicycles I have painted golden, to where the trees paint the watery face of the river that shines beneath the sun. There we drink wine, eat sandwiches and you describe your paintings: tight, tight canvases all covered with ice-cream smiles, cats and gnomes and fishes and laughter.

  Later, I play my guitar as you lay across the blanket and look up at the sky.

  The sky is as blue as my guitar and full of music.

  * * *

  “The man on the telly said it was going to snow.” Lee gleefully bounced up and down on the sofa while looking out of the window. “Snow, snow faster. Ally-aily aster.”

  “Lee, stop bouncing. How many times have I got to tell you?”

  He ignored me. “Can we get the sledge out?”

  “If it snows. Have you seen my slippers?”

  “Saw Jug chewing them.”

  “Oh, bugger. Did you stop her?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks a lot, Lee.” Barefooted I crossed the room to where I’d left the box on the sideboard. The wood’s scratched to high heaven as it is… Elizabeth would scold. Not that she really minded. I knew she loved me and the kids more than anything. A long time ago she’d stopped worrying about pristine furniture and spotless carpets. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as, a houseproud parent.

  On top of the box lay the cassette. It might as well have been calling my name. I picked it up. Someone had turned the inlay card inside out as if ready to make a contents list but for some reason had never got round to it. Pencilled very firmly in the comer of the card were the letters JL.

  I glanced across at the stereo. A few minutes remained before Elizabeth returned home. I tapped the cassette thoughtfully against my chin.

  I’d taken three steps toward the stereo when I stopped suddenly. My bare toes san
k into wet pile.

  “Lee.” I sighed. “Did you spill your pop this morning?”

  “No,” he replied innocently, then continued his snow watch.

  Kids make you philosophical. I dropped the cassette back in the box and went to hunt for a cloth under the kitchen sink.

  * * *

  MILES OF SMILES

  I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

  “This is for you,” I say. I give her the ring with a diamond. She puts it on the third finger of her left hand. On the middle finger of her other hand is another ring set with an emerald as big as a man’s eye. She looks down at her new ring for a while; her hair the colour of Turner sunsets falls across her face. Then she sits on the end of the bed and cries. I put my arm around her shoulder. These moments, I think, are precious.

  Later she stands and tells me she will make a stir-fry.

  I lean back across the bed, play the guitar and sing. It sounds like the golden bells that hang in the smiling trees of paradise.

  I know I love her, because they told me so.

  * * *

  “See you tonight, Martin. Chops all right?”

  “Perfect, love.” I kissed Elizabeth, then Lee, then Grace, sitting so warmly wrapped up in her pushchair that only her eyes peeped over the blanket.

  They waved me good-bye in a line as I drove away from the house. I watched the figures grow small in my mirror, still waving like a family from the Waltons.

  My hand groped across the back seat amongst the toys and my plastic sandwich box, then closed over the small, sharp cornered box of the cassette. I snapped the tape into the car’s stereo.

  For a second nothing much happened, just the hiss of the old tape. Then emerging from the hiss, almost growing from it rather than a recording came a voice.

  “Yeah.” A male voice; in his twenties perhaps. No accent. You could imagine the man nodding as he spoke, as if acknowledging he was ready.

  More tape hiss then in a flat voice, “This is it.”

  I was ready to eject the tape in favour of the radio. My surprise find was turning out to be a non-event. Then the music started.

  A guitar, slightly out of tune, as if the strings lacked the proper tension. I’d played electric guitar in the youth club band as a teenager, but I wasn’t even sure if I was listening to an electric or an acoustic.

  The strumming chords were fumbling, hesitant. A pause. Then the guitar started again. This time vigorous, with a newfound sense of assurance.

  When the man began to sing I nearly switched off. The voice sounded fiat and very nearly tuneless.

  A wannabe pop star, I decided, with all the talent of a nohoper in a tailspin, had simply been filling a Sunday afternoon. But my hand paused on the switch. The dirge had almost been laughable, yet as I listened to the lyric a quirky kind of charisma began to shine through.

  The first song sounded faintly psychedelic with repeated reference to “the black bear that sleeps by my head”, and “I may be tall but I feel so small”.

  I became so engrossed in the songs, their stark beauty so unearthly, that I drove on a kind of autopilot, not noticing the queues of traffic over the bridge into town.

  The strange lyrics and hypnotic guitar filled the car. I upped the volume. There was a trembling tenderness and sincerity in the voice; the words wound their way around my brain like spiders’ webs. They stuck. The songs made me think of a child who had seen or experienced something profound; something they did not understand, yet which they desperately, desperately tried to describe using the only imagery they had available to them. The effect was of an attempt at communicating a transforming experience but failing. Yet even in failure some essence of the message filtered through—and its power winded me.

  * * *

  SMILE? THIS MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU

  My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:

  “There’s one! And there’s another!” cries Sophie excitedly.

  “How many’s that?” I ask.

  “Have you kept count?”

  “Have you, silly?” she laughs. We are both giggling. The cat watches us; it jumps from the sofa to the drawers then back again. She knows.

  “What do you think they are?” She holds my bare arm under the table lamp. “Can you feel them? Do they itch?”

  At first I’m not sure. “No… Not itch. No, but I felt a tingling.”

  “Hold still, silly.” She looks at my arm so closely her hair washes over my skin like cool silk. “They are on both arms. Look. There must be… four, five… Six. That’s just on this forearm… Here. Oh! I think they really are, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Ancient writing. Yes! Sumerian cuneiform.” She looks up at me, her eyes shining. She is beautiful.

  Then I gaze at my arms. They are covered with white marks under the skin, like tattoos without colour. It started yesterday as I lay on the bed playing my guitar. This morning my arms are covered with ancient cuneiform symbols—stars, squares, spiky pennants, snowflakes, crooked crosses, tactile swastikas: ghosts’ tattoos. Something marvellous is happening to me.

  “I recognise this one.” says Sophie. “This is Ishtar. A Sumerian goddess.”

  “Ishtar,” I whisper.

  She looks quickly up at me with her eyes shining like diamonds. “She is sending you a message. We have to copy these down and take them to someone who can read them.”

  On the little table in the corner of the room the television shows a film in black and white. A ghost with sparking eyes and graveyard teeth plays a violin as the gates to a thundering hole in the earth open. There is movement behind the gate. The ghost plays faster. I recognise the music. Because it is mine.

  * * *

  “I’m going out on site,” I told Brian. “I’ll be about an hour.”

  Brian, his mouth crammed with a sausage sandwich, could only manage a nod.

  I didn’t switch on the stereo until I parked my car at a rural paddock surrounded by trees without leaves. In eighteen months it would be buried beneath executive homes. Now it looked bleak.

  I listened to the tape from end to end. It had its hooks deep inside of me.

  More songs, some spangled with bizarre surrealist imagery. Some very plain. These plain ones were perhaps the most effective. They were sparse descriptions of what the singer might have been seeing from his window at that very moment. But all the songs carried this potent charge that was electrifying. And always the plod, plod, plod of the guitar. Often the songs did not end in the conventional way. They simply fell apart as if some joker had stolen the last sheet of music; then the singer faltered to a halt. Sometimes you thought the songs would continue as a change of key seemed to herald a new verse. Then the song would abruptly end. As I listened, gazing at the bare winter fields I thought of God at the eggcrack of creation, rehearsing making Man and Woman only to break off in failure to toss away a part-formed torso, a fragment of head.

  The collection of songs ended in a scrabble of fretwork sounds followed by the ringing thump of the microphone falling on the floor. The singer spoke for the last time; the voice weary, defeated: “That’s it. There is no more.”

  I listened to the tape one more time before driving back to work.

  When I walked through the door I thought I’d walked into the wrong office. I saw my name plate, MARTIN PRICE, on my desk, I knew the names of the dozen people sat at their desks, but just for an instant they looked like strangers.

  Brian, peeling the wrapper from a Mars Bar, looked out of the window.

  “It’s starting to snow,” he said.

  * * *

  CONCRETE HANDS CLAP THE FUNERAL CLOWNS

  My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:

  I know there are people who are suffering and who are unhappy now, while I, happy, warm and at peace, sit and play my guitar. Sophie stands at the kitchen table, buttering bread, slicing red cheese. She looks up and smiles at me. Sad people thoughts push roughly into my brain.

  I try to forget. I c
annot.

  All over this world people are suffering pain. Someone must be to blame. My thoughts spill into the song. Maybe with the stars on my arms I can help.

  “A sad song,” says Sophie, licking butter from her ring with the green stone as big as a man’s eye. “Oh, look. Don’t cry. Don’t be sad.” She walks to me, her bare legs look pale beneath her tasselled skirt. Her hands that touch my face are cool and buttery.

  The sorrowing voices of all the people that suffer fill my head. I imagine them crying out to me. Only I can save them. Only I can save them. They cry and they cry.

  And that’s when I know Sophie must die.

  * * *

  I think you’ll find this interesting. I found the tape in a box of books in a charity shop. God knows who the singer is, but there’s a weird kind of charisma there, almost hypnotic. When you hear it you’ll know. I thought you might consider it for one of your special limited edition albums. Anyway, have a listen, Bob, and let me know what you think. In the meantime I’m going to try and find the guy. I’ve got a couple of leads. Christ! Now I know what it feels like to be a detective!

  I posted the copy of the tape to Bob Finch, an old school mate. He now owned three record shops and did some record producing. Very small time but his records were highly regarded.

  Then I drove to the area of town which can adequately be described as “bedsit land”. Tree-lined Victorian avenues; redbrick houses sub-divided into fiats and bedsits. From some windows red bulbs glowed.

  I parked the car and pulled an envelope from my jacket pocket. One of those brown municipal ones that litter drawers in every household. This one had fallen from a children’s illustrated book of fables I found in the box of books from the cancer shop. Pencilled on one side: Ishtar—Sumerian goddess—arrives at the gates of the underworld—threatens to break down the gates and set the dead upon the living. On the reverse, a computer-printed label gave an address in this street. Flat 7b, Park View. The name, Joseph Lawton. I felt a rush of triumph.