He took a seat, a black man’s seat, against the wall, in the shadows. From there, he watched and gauged the company under hooded eyes. He pretended to drink, rolling orders of deep spirit, spilling each under his hand and beneath the table. He instantly recognised three of the occupants as assassins. One he could name as Tugu Ossenti, a fellow
member of the same constabulary, before the Possession Wars. Ossenti had been dismissed after allegations of torture. Since then, it was known, but not proven, that he had murdered for money and sometimes for satisfaction. He would not recognise Tsungali, who had been much younger and clearer-skinned then, his teeth unsharpened the last time they were face-to-face.
Ossenti’s consorts were twins. Thin, white and edgy, they had the suddenness of small reptiles, their eyes and hands twitching constantly. Tsungali knew from experience that twins have the ability to think as one, even when they are apart. He had seen it in the village before, observed two working in unison, without a word of discussion or direction. In a fighting situation, such adversaries could be unpredictable and overpowering. The rapid watchfulness of the men worried him much more than their companion’s strength and history.
After watching intently, he allowed his gaze to sweep the smoky, irregular room. A solitary drinker sat in the far corner, in shadows that dissolved his features. Even in the gloom, his posture could be read, and Tsungali looked past him. Four men sat loudly around a circular table in the middle of the room. They looked like drovers. Their worn clothes and thick boots propped them up against their slurred conversation. The mud had dried on their leather gaiters, and fallen in clumps around their sluggish feet. They had been at this table for hours.
At the bar sat a tall, thin man, erect and pitching indifference. His narrowness and clothing suggested clergy; his spine was the straightest thing in the room. Sipping the clear fluid from his glass with a long bamboo shoot, he drank without using his hands, which hung limply at his sides. He gazed before him into the rack of bottles behind the bar, their rears reflected in the mirror that held the slumped room in its cracked, misted eye. His bleached, distorted face floated out of focus in the glass. Apart from him, the barman, a wheezing old man in the back room and a gormless youth with a dog were the only other occupants.
There were no weapons propped in the rack by the door, which meant that everyone carried concealed ones. This was no place for nakedness, but Uculipsa was not here with him. She lay in her brass scabbard, high up in the leaves of the bamboo forest, the patina of her metal matching the colour of the whispering foliage, a charm of invisibility attached to the slender rope which held her in place. In these surroundings, he needed close-range companions; a blunt-nosed, hammerless pistol sat in the folds of his lap, and a long-bladed kris hung beneath his armpit; additional weaponry was concealed under the bridge.
He read the men, then examined the room to measure the dimensions of fight or flight, the exits and angles of possible violence. There was a back door, a window and an open fireplace. The upper stories were connected only by steps outside. As he sat, he projected killing fields into the room, and rotated scenarios of defence and attack. He had no doubt that everybody else had done or was doing the same, except the dog and the old man, who rattled and flinched in other dreams.
One of the twins caught the vibration of his hidden eyes and muttered something to the others. After a suitable but ridiculous pause, Ossenti turned in the pretence of a stretch, tilting his head to look directly into Tsungali’s shadow.
* * *
Charlotte was paid to stay close, to be the lifelong companion to her neighbour in the eighth arrondissement. She did this with understanding and gratitude, and because she was drawn to such stray dogs – even the noble ones.
His mother paid for her attentions, paid for everything. She knew of her son’s weakness, and something of his genius. She doted on him, and
her love would have devoured him completely if she had not had a greater suitor. That suitor was heroin, and it determinedly won all conflicts of emotion and care. So Charlotte was employed to be her stand-in, the visible female pillar to which the Frenchman would be publicly leashed. This way, he could strain against something external, and always have a place to return to, scratch against and abuse.
Charlotte had a face which should have been loved. Her overpowering eyes said everything that was sensitive and feeling, on a level that hurt. Indeed, hurt was what coloured her gaze, not for herself, but for those around her, who pained and leeched their existence into permanent sadness. She was strong because she was quiet. Not silent, but still. Hers was a beauty of listening and a strength of giving; there was knowing, more than understanding, in the smoulder of her gaze. She saw and felt it all, she gave more love than she received, more than she was ever paid for. It kept some of her friends alive, especially those who were born with half their souls in limbo: the frozen ones who wandered helplessly, in poverty or wealth, towards destruction. She was drawn to them, to add light to their irredeemable journey. They could never admit to vampiring her calm and continuity, could never show her the ache they had for her. But they were, in their own way, forever thankful, even faithful, particularly when they died on the other side of their anger and despair. They sent their ghost tongues back, deep ocean fish, transparent and luminous, to whisper gratitudes often, in her long-deaf and then-dead ears.
* * *
Muybridge hated fiction. He saw no point in it, when fact was so powerful and strange. He especially hated fiction about science or discovery. He normally avoided such works of ‘literature’ but, for some reason, people
would continually bestow copies of their ridiculous efforts in that field on his ungrateful person. They seemed to imagine that there was some similarity between these scribbled daydreams and his life’s work of precision and ingenious invention, which only fuelled his disdain. Most of the writing came from France, another good reason to distrust it. Jules Verne had been the first to annoy him, and other imitators had followed fast. He had been forced to become an expert in the trivial nonsense, to make sure that none of it ever rubbed off onto his reputation.
On his return home, H. G. Wells was littering England with stories of time travel, invisible men and genetic mutation. Such tales were only bearable because they were swift and slight, and written like children’s stories. The year before he died, he saw
A Trip To The Moon
. He watched George Méliès’ film corrupt and condemn the moving image to a future of lies, saw his own techniques extended beyond his perceptions.
It was the ease and the conceit of telling lies that he found so indolent in these men of letters, men who did not know one end of a screwdriver from the other. They described things which could never exist, and were applauded for their imagination. The painstaking beauty of his images, with all their care, organisation and science, could have been trampled into insignificance by their kind of reckless fiction.
His new machines would set the mockery right; projecting spinning, tinctured light directly into a spectator’s mind would cleanse them of an addiction to lies and replace the easy stain of fiction with the real burn of art, in all of its unmistakable clarity. The machine was locked in a room on the other side of London; he planned to rescue it and bring it back to Kingston-upon-Thames, but the truth was that the thought of using it again terrified him, even as his understanding of its potential and its purpose had grown. So he had delayed in taking action, again and again. His hands were too old and shaky to remake it, and he had more sense than to trust another and watch them steal it from him. That, on top of the ghosted memory of that woman and the outrage she had perpetrated
on him, stilted every plan he had to move towards its waiting mechanism.
* * *
Sweet pushing inside her pushing pumping the bitch clasped hard by me pushing over and over again held to the ground smelling open pushing sweet the pump of my heart pulsing she tries to move but I hold her fast pumping bending in the middle we turn in the scented dust my teeth on her spine my spine heart-pumping sweet she skidding me going deeper locked inside pushing she flinches against me spins I turn leg slips we spill rolling pushing touching the ground its smell twisted backwards my cock facing out she the other side of me now tail to tail pumping sweet spinning locked snapping Then the cuts the stones the kids throwing stones double-ended so we can’t fight back they know it we circle still sweet pumping locked twisted the stink of kids the hurt snapping pulled both ways fuck bite fuck bite blood from stones my eye pushing spinning stones she yelps I snarl pumping now water over us others touching pulling us apart she runs away full of my spunk I can’t stand still bending uncontrollable reflex air fuck bending bending fucking nothing over and over and over again bite fuck bite fuck bending spine still fucking nothing still still the kids laughing but they run from my jaws claws in the ground teeth searching balls empty sweet she still in my nose mouth cock dripping licking sweet
.
All but the cleric twitched their sight towards the dreaming dog, shuddering under the table. For a moment, their eyes were dissolved of their previous purpose and shed their watch to partake in the flinch that nipped and shook the sleeping animal, unlatching it from its tension to let it swing in forgetfulness. It awoke with a shudder. The table of assassins dismissed Tsungali’s hidden stare and returned to their previous
clandestine conversation.
As he walked to the door, and the semi-fresh air of the street, a single set of eyes followed his movements. Outside, he smelt evening as it settled on the high treetops, the ravine beginning to sing with returning birds. He knew this would be a place of significance for him, though he didn’t yet know when, or how. Optimism flooded his caution and he made a prayer, one hand on the talisman around his neck, the other gripping the pistol in the deep pocket of his canvas and leather gown. He would not kill his prey here; he sensed this place had something else in store for him. He collected the stumpy shotgun from its hiding place beneath the bridge and walked the stream back to his motorbike. He would kill his man further down the track.
* * *
She told Mutter to bring the next case up to the third floor. He obeyed with little relish, panting, huffing and stumbling on each turn of the staircase. At their destination, she instructed him to open the crate and leave. He did so without a word, even as quick, infuriated splinters pierced his hands.
She removed the wooden shavings and other packing, and looked into the box. Stencilled on the inside was ‘Lesson 315: The Songs of Insects’. Forty screw-capped jars nestled tightly in the crate; there were no instructions. Ghertrude gingerly lifted one of the containers and held it up to the lamp. Small air-holes had been punctured in the lid, and a letter ‘J’ printed across its top. An elegant plant cutting shuddered within, a thick brown cricket gripping its stem. She began to remove all of the jars, placing them in alphabetical order on the dining room table. After ‘Z’, the letters were doubled: ‘AA’, ‘BB’, ‘CC’.
All manner of creatures ticked inside their glassy prisons. Suddenly, as if
by some unknown command, they began to chirp and strum as one, their growing voices squeezing through the tin holes and vibrating the glass, until the room shimmered with aural beauty. Ghertrude stood entranced, her hands clapped together in a gesture of spontaneous pleasure. Ishmael watched her, waiting for his lesson to begin. From below, Mutter heard the third floor come alive, shook his head and lit a cigar.
Ghertrude tried to explain the contents of the jars, but soon found she had no idea what to say. She stumbled through the first nine, before running out of words. She asked her pupil what he thought. He stared blankly at her.
‘How would I think anything?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘What are these things, what is their place?’ She blushed in her ignorance and shrank in her failure.
Many of the cases that followed were even more obscure, rendering her speechless before the packing material had left her hands. Salvation came with Ishmael’s change of heart. He decided to give up his petulant student status and listen graciously, without the rancour that had previously spilled over with his hunger for knowledge. It was true that she possessed more experience of the world outside, but he had a sharper mind to examine the facts before him, without the hindrance of their known function blinding their potential. He would try to do it her way, to speculate on the contents of the boxes and come to a conclusion based on each of their contributions.
So it was that they began to open the boxes together, with a newfound zeal, and what she believed to be a rising tide of intimate respect. It became a pleasure: the anticipation, the piecing together of meaning, the guesswork. He was easier in his movement and speech, the angles and corners of previous mannerisms smoothing into softer, more natural alignments.
Weeks passed in this way until, one afternoon, as they excitedly examined the textures and toughness of different kinds of leather, he asked, ‘When
will we practise mating?’
She hoped she had misheard. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, with caution.
‘When can I put my man tube inside your cleft? For pleasure and practice?’
She blushed and became tongue-tied, her hands over-gripping the chamois in her clutch. She averted her eyes, looking down and noticing, with surprise, that his trousers were unbuttoned and gaping.
‘It’s been a long time now, and I miss it.’
‘We can never do such a thing,’ she hissed. ‘It’s unnatural and shameful.’ She was about to explain the moral codes and the potential genetic disasters, when his words finally arrived at her understanding. ‘When did you do that before?’ she asked slowly. ‘And who with?’ Even as the question formed, she knew the answer, a picture of it assembling in the furthest recess of her mind.
‘With Luluwa,’ he said. ‘Many times before.’