Dreamers, Lovers, Absentees - Mark Piggott
A plane drifted slowly across the window above the roofs of Camden Town. I knew something terrible was going to happen and it did: another plane emerged from nowhere and both planes disintegrated in a silent flash of fire somewhere over the West. Traffic decontrol, a privatised catastrophe.
The telephone rang and I woke up sweating. Above my head luminous stars were stuck to the ceiling. At night they glowed but no-one had yet remarked upon them.
“Nick, it's Nick,” said Nick, unnecessarily.
“What you doing ringing up at this time?”
“It's two in the afternoon. We're all going to Hampton Court and I wondered if you wanted to come.”
“Where's that?”
“Out of town.”
“Not really Nick.”
“It'll be a laugh. We've got some mushrooms. And whiskey.”
“Who's going?”
“Everyone: me, you, Frank, Fergus, Huw and Sarah.”
“Where shall I meet you?”
I was in love with Sarah then. Theoretically she was Nick's girlfriend but flirted incessantly, especially with Frank, which annoyed me. In fact, I had fought Frank for her honour a few months previously, while she looked on amused. Frank had won. Nick hadn't been happy. She was crazy of course, like all the rest of them, but unlike the rest of them she looked like the woman off the Scottish Widows ad, only fatter. I arranged to meet Nick at the overground train station. I went looking through the heap of laundry to find some clean pants, but realism set in.
Nick was waiting at the station, hands in his Puffa jacket. I'd never known him to be early before. He gave me a can of Tennants Super and grinned. He was short, with black teeth, and the whites of his eyes were yellow. He had a smoker's fingers on his one good hand, though he never touched tobacco. He was posh and yet somehow I didn't think of him as yet another class tourist (like Sarah): he was too far gone.
“Apparently,” said Nick, with an unusual look on his face, “you can travel overland all the way to Richmond .” The awe with which he said it - you'd think it was the Trans-Siberian Express. Suddenly I recognised the look: excitement. Nick was never excited about anything. It was a hot day and we were both drinking Tennants. From the streets below I could hear sirens, sense the tension. Bombs were being planted in pubs. London was going bad.
“I've got one for you,” said Nick as we sat in an eerily empty carriage. All the chickens had left the roost till things calmed down. I sighed impatiently. Deep inside I felt like joining them, but I came from London , so I had nowhere to go.
“Go on then.”
“A bloke comes in from a long walk. He sees the ansaphone machine is flashing. So he presses the button. What he hears next kills him instantly. What was it?”
“You bastard.”
He was always doing that. I started it, with the one about the bloke who passes a window and when he hears it ring he screams, but Nick's got hundreds. I think he went to a private school. There's nothing to do in those places except bugger each other's arses and minds. He emerged with nothing but an accent, and it's all he needs: he gets by.
After being expelled and to annoy his parents Nick worked in a spike factory on a lathe, till one sunny afternoon he got mushroom flashbacks and fed his fingers into the spinning metal, giggling like a girl as fingers span back over his shoulder, teardrops of blood scattering on the dirty linoleum of the factory.
Before the doctor came to assess his mind he took to pissing in the bath for a while. The night before the doctor's visit he soaked his clothes in piss and dried them out overnight, then put them on before the doctor knocked. For good measure, he scraped some of his own dried shit on the mangled hand. In came the little Muslim doctor, Nick goes to shake his hand, the doc took one look and he was away. He still boasts about how he pulled the wool over the little man's eyes, but I'm not so sure.
Then again - he might be on the DLA (dreamers, lovers, absentees) but he's got Sarah and what else do you need? And him only about five foot tall in his weird platform shoes. They call it style. But he's still a fucking alkie like all the rest of us. He's a hero in the group just because he came up with a new name for dope.
West London sneaked by. I grimaced.
“I hate West London .”
“You're a fucking snob.”
I allowed Nick to speak like this because he had a posh accent. And I was a bit scared of him. Once he showed me the pocket knife he'd made for himself, out of glass and gaffer tape. These people don't get their dosh by being soft. I took Nick to the estate where I grew up once and he just laughed and laughed. I continued with my diatribe about West London. I don't really want to know anywhere that's out of my patch: Camden , Islington and Hackney, the North London strip, a slice of Haringey and a smidgeon of Westminster if you're feeling lucky. I pursued the matter.
“There's a diamond, with rough edges: its four points would probably be something like Kenton, Kingsbury, Perivale and Alperton. The centre's Wembley. The Mullahs should blow it all up, turn it into a great big rollercoaster for the people.”
“That's a weird shaped diamond. I went to school in Harrow on the Hill.”
“Is that in the diamond?”
“I've no idea.”
At Willesden Junction we bumped into morose Huw and mad Fergus. They'd travelled together from South East London which was funny, because they hated each other. Basically Huw wanted to wear suits and buy houses and only hung about with us because he perceived that we had a bohemian air. He didn't even do drugs, just said he did, which was asking for it really.
Fergus was the other extreme. He was from Scotland and he did it all. He lived mostly on medical experiment payments from dodgy private clinics. Sometimes he wouldn't eat for a week to see what generosity of insights were proffered. Today he was topless and looked disorientated, blinking, shovering, his scrawny torso unused to this sort of exposure.
“I've given up the booze.”
“Jesus.”
I knew that look. Last time I met Fergus was in a pub in Stokey and he was lecturing me about my drinking. When he left for a piss the bar man said he'd had seven double vodkas before I'd even arrived. He was a shark, a fucking shark, Nick Cotton: “Gawn maw, ‘ave some more tea.”
“So you aren't on anything?” asked Nick impatiently, disbelieving.
“Well - just ketamine.” Fergus looked pleased with himself. Trike on a bike. Nick laughed at me and nodded at Huw in that way you just knew something was coming.
“Hey, Huw, what do you call a Welshman who's into big fat old slags?”
Huw looked all serious again, and I felt sorry for him. He was frowning and rubbing his big fat bald head. Fergus was wandering round the platform looking for something to do. Our train came in.
“I dunno,” said Huw reluctantly.
“Aberfan.”
Huw did his best to laugh. He hated the Welsh because his father was Welsh and he was a bad man. The first time I met Huw was in the student union bar in Kentish Town. He was trying to tell Slasher Sarah about his father:
“I sighed as he hit me, yawned as he buggered me. I mean, the thing about these child abusers (and let's face it, they aren't all bad - give us something to talk about, and vile lynch mobs something to shout about, papering over their own cracks as it were) is that they're just so boring . You just know that when they say, “shall I read you a bedtime story?” or “let's go for a drive” or “shall I help you dry yourself?” or “fancy an ice cream?” all they ever end up doing is sticking their dick somewhere predictable. Bor-ing.”
He didn't get off with Sarah and good job too. I heard she once had a boyfriend who she loved. One morning she found him dead, overdose. She loved him so much she got a knife from the kitchen, slit open his balls, rubbed her fingers in his sac, and shoved them up her cunt, the better to have his offspring by. But he was sterile, like we all are. We liked her. Even if she was a Yank.
I was starting to wish that I'd had something to eat before getting on the train. Apart from fresh mushrooms, that sourdung taste of raw beansprouts. The movement of the almost empty carriages as they stuttered over the cracked old tracks was making me feel ill. Nick gave me some speed and I washed it down with lager. Huw was getting angry about his old man and taking it out on Fergus.
“Why don't you put your fucking jumper on? It's not exactly midsummer weather is it?”
Actually it was; but Fergus had no interest in discussing the weather. He looked out of the window, mouth wide open, as if about to cry. The last time I'd seen him, when he'd had the seven doubles, he'd looked just the same. That night we'd gone to the student squat where he scored and went “a-one, a-two, a-three!” and chucked a road sign through the front bay window.
Then we were walking down Kingsland Road and two attractive girls up ahead narked him for some reason so he threw a bottle of Pils at them. The glass exploded on the roof of a bus shelter and rained down on an angry queue. We just about got out alive. If Huw kept bugging him I knew it was a fight. I glanced at Nick, who was smiling at some middle aged woman. She smiled back. He just had something the rest of us never would. Class.
“So Nick, where's Sarah and Frank?”
“They're meeting us there. I rang her on her mobile and she was with Frank. She's borrowed her father's car for the day.”
I said nothing. All I could think about was Frank fucking Sarah. Everyone knew his technique: get them fucked on crack or trips then rape them in the toilets. But Sarah was a smart girl. Ish.
“I didn't know she could drive.”
“She can't.”
Huw and Fergus were friends again. It was hard to keep up: the day was changing colour all the time, like a chameleon in a disco. Huw was telling Fergus his big idea for a novel. I'd heard it about a million times, we all had. He never touched speed, didn't need to. He got over-excited in company. I made the mistake of catching his eye and he included me in this one-way conversation. Nick went and sat with the middle aged woman. She was fat, but she had a nice dress on.
“Ten ,” said Huw proudly. “Ten. It's a world just like this one, but everything's ten times bigger or ten times smaller. So London , for instance, is ten times smaller but has ten times more people.”
“So its population would be a hundred times bigger,” said Fergus breezily, uninterested. He was a fucking nutter but he had a brain. He had “confided” in me once that he'd been unmasked a genius aged six, and never really recovered. I was classed bad news and lived down to it. I laughed into my drink. He might be a dick head but he's smart somewhere deep down in ways Huw will never understand. Huw ignored him.
“Cars are ten times bigger, so are cats and dogs. But tellies are ten times smaller, planes are ten times smaller. The only things that are the same size are people.”
“That's bollocks,” said Fergus. “ Eggworld . That's what you ought to write. About a world that's shaped like an egg, so instead of our being defined by race we're defined by height.”
“That's a crap idea,” said Huw. “Isn't it, Nick?”
His wearying, constant reassurance, which of course is necessary because you never receive it. I ignored him and watched Nick follow the woman into the toilet.
Brian . That was his new name for dope. Brian.
***
Outside Richmond train station Frank and Sarah were sitting in an open topped sports car. Frank was grinning that fat smile that reminded you it was a long way from Limerick. Sarah had that freshly fucked look, but then again so did Nick. I hadn't seen Frank since we had squared up to each other in the gallery in Whitechapel, and he grinned maliciously as he grabbed my arm.
“Here's something I bet you didn't know: In 1956 the US air force took eighty spastics from their hospitals and sanatoriums and put them in a big double deck bus with sealed edges. They drove it into a big old plane and took it to a height of 40,000 feet over the Sierra Nevada and dropped it. There were live cameras at every angle, filming the unfortunates. These films are still around. Why? In case any more planes went down unexpectedly, so they'd know what to say. They have plenty of UFO footage. Every BBC reporter has been told if he ever speaks about what he's seen and heard he'll go in the acid bath even Michael Buerk. Jill Dando know what I'm saying? And since 1956 every plane has had videos in the cockpit, the original spy in the cab, and the pilots (or most of them) know nada. So every crash is on a tape somewhere, even nine eleven. My friends, I have access to such a tape. What's it worth to you sharks?”
I knew perfectly well that a) he didn't have a tape and b) he was speeding his fat tits off. Sarah was out of her face and I wondered how she'd managed to drive across London. I'm generally a nervous passenger because I didn't sit in a car until I was twenty five, but I trusted her. Unwisely, it must be said. After various misfortunes we scrunched onto the gravel outside Hampton Court. Fergus hopped out and danced around. Nick nodded at his writhing form.
“Imagine if they ever do bring in cloning and they experiment on him first. There'd be hundreds of topless Ferguses wandering the streets of London , all laughing.”
Sarah paid with some sap's credit card. We wandered round the halls trying to get interested. I hated old paintings, all I wanted to see was Henry's bed. We loved old Henry, he was one of us. The Ray Winstone thing helped me identify I guess. Scum. But the more the mushrooms wore in the longer the corridors got. The old toilets looked like torture chambers, whereas the torture chambers we used to piss in. I looked out of the window of Henry's bedroom and the unease got worse, and I remembered that plane crash in the sky.
There were loads of old people outside, dressed in mediaeval garments. I nudged Fergus and we watched as they performed a strange ritual. Sarah came over and stood beside me, and I could feel her breasts against my back. Frank was over by a big fire waving an axe around. A man in fancy garb knelt and a man in a black hood chopped off his head.
Sarah screamed and we started to run. Frank thought it was all a big game and chased us with the axe. We ran outside and into the maze, Frank's mad laugh terrifying behind us. Fergus stripped off completely, and I would catch glimpses through the thorny bush of his naked scrawny body. I had lost everybody and stood still in the centre of the maze, trying hard not to breathe.
Turns out it wasn't a real beheading. Just for the tourists. But we saw it, so it was. On the train home as I started to come down Nick finally told me the answer.
“The man goes walking in the rain and gets soaking wet. When he gets home there's a message on the ansaphone. He's been waiting for a long time. He's impatient. So he presses the replay button and gets electrocuted. The message was from a publisher, who had just bought the rights to his first novel. He dies not knowing.”
That was the year he strangled Sarah with her own tights. In prison he hung himself. Things fell apart after that. I stopped taking drugs and turned to Creationism: I stayed in more and watched TV. The best thing I watched was about these two blokes who went to some remote mountain in Afghanistan. Took them about two weeks just to get there. Then they found this cliff, some sheer wall two miles high, and jumped off. They both had cameras attached to their helmets and I was flying with them, skimming the surface of the earth at the speed of acceleration, just missing outcrops and laughing. Sometimes I knew what they meant.
But more frequently I feel like that woman I read about in the paper, parachuting down from some plane, and soon enough realised that she was going to land on a helicopter's rotor blades, and she started tugging at the strings of the chute like an unruly puppet, but knowing that in the end (when it came down to it) she was going nowhere but all the way down, into the bacon-slicer.
We're free to fly - and free to fall. Mostly it seems we fall.
~~~~~~~~~~
Mark Piggott has had dozens of articles published in national UK newspapers and magazines, plus some short stories, poems and an online novel he says is too depressing to discuss. He is halfway through an MA in Novel Writing at the University of Manchester. Website: www.markpiggott.com
