Pursuit

It is a place of heat and light, this part of the city, flung out towards the north, spread about its three main thoroughfares that are slashed through clean like dagger cuts in a parchment map, parallel, taking a sudden angle together, veering across to reach the sea at the same time.

But it is also a place of huge extents of useless shade that do not reach quite far enough to provide respite from the heat that hacks down onto the unprotected, south-facing walkways, and seems to open them up and blister them, like wounds left unprotected from the elements, as now, in the high afternoon, he struggles along, bareheaded to defy the prickling rasp of the sun into his unprotected skin, going nowhere, and doing that slowly, because this is the way it is for him now, and this is what passes for destiny.

To his side, undershadowed by him, the slugged-out water barely raising a slurry of movement.

He looks up. Ahead of him, a lank-haired girl drifting down the path, unnoticed and unnoticing, dressed in black, cramped against the wall, immersed in her own portable pretence at shade.

He looks down: in the sidelong water, two fish have met in a fight, a domestic skirmish melted into a collision, a fish biting into another fish, one slightly larger than the other, a male and female of the same species, mouth to mouth, like a kiss of death, the bottom jaw of one trapped within the two jaws of the other, the top jaw of the other trapped the same way, neither letting go. A slow fight. A slow bite, their combined shape melded into that of a single, larger fish.

He walks, because walking is all he has to do. Meaningless pursuit in pursuit of the meaningless.

And ahead of him still, the same lank-haired girl, slowly roasting in the blackened portable oven of her clothes, her marrow and connective tissue seemingly melting into perspiration.

And he keeps his route into a groove behind her, maintaining a deferred collision through the lines of men and women striding along the paths of their work, through the gaggle of uniformed members of the sisterhood who are pregnant with silent advice in every glance.

And now two of them are stood still, two nuns standing skulked in the shadow of a scrawny tree, shaking their heads at him, pushing the air back with the palms of their hands, as if they could thrust him back to where he belonged with a gesture strong enough to sculpt the air into a cold front.

But he keeps going. Seemingly forever. But small black birds smear in above his head, small black birds crashing into nothing like hitting a wall of ice and falling down ahead of him, small black birds plummeting down to feet above the ground and exploding, crashing outwards in a paintball puff of blood that bleeds to powder and falls to ground between the two of them as a smear of dust so the air is strafed with airborne lumps of feathers burning to blood.

And still ahead, the lanky scrawl of a girl with the hair that looked as if it had been slashed down into ragged pieces from a solid clump of follicle, glued like a penance to her ever-bobbing head, the two of them yoked to each other’s separate ways.

And now, with every step there are fewer people walking with any purpose; with every step, the more frequent are the loungers and the wastrels, leaning on parapets, hiding from the heat in the occasional porches of stone that act as awnings, cleaning their nails with knives with blades as curved as fish-hooks that they have sharpened in stone-wall grooves older than centuries, betraying nothing, not even curiosity, their wasted-eyed apathy throwing into more acute contrast the dead-eyed precision of the perpetual procession of him and his heedless quarry, like a race of two competing migrations taking pursuit to the ridiculous logic of its conclusion.

The sun continues to hammer on the outside of his skull, then pick into the pulp of his brain. A distant humming lies on the air, seeming to curdle the atmosphere.

Two more nuns stand in the heat. They allow her to pass, then hold up their hands as if to stop him further. His closes his eyes and trudges forwards and their hands brush against his cheeks like snakeskin.

All clouds have been erased from the sky. And the humming is overwhelming, though it has no apparent source.

And the lank-haired girl has now reached the narrow channel along the convent wall and in the water now, there is a lazy snake of laid-out souls, a rope-linked procession of wooden trays, each with a man or woman inside, all in rough-cloth uniforms, drooling and ululating, hunkered down supine, eyes opened but motionless, hand cuffed to the other hand, both legs cuffed to a single ring in the woodwork.

And the nuns look down on the waterborne procession and sprinkle urine from their bedpans on the passing trays. Their lips seem to be chanting, but they make no noise. They smile with their eyes. He stands, and his bile rises and falls as each prisoner passes.

The third one in the procession cranes his neck around, seems to swivel his eyes and look at him with opaque red irises until he floats from view. The fifth one sketches the sign of a cross with two cross-pieces, her two-armed gestures firm but languid like the conductor of an orchestra. The ninth one drools out a bubble of such viscosity that he can see his reflection in it, his features slowly dissolving into nothing but a smile as the crystal ball of sputum subsides.

Nobody else passes by: they all stand in attention along the edges, staring. He moves on, walking backwards behind the disapproval of their backs.

And when he turns, ahead of him still, slowed down in the distance, a lank-haired girl, drifting straight, bent-backed sideways into the succession of buildings, sucked towards its emanated heat dragging him through the stifled afternoon, all along the bleached walkways that lie like the thin white strings of skin in a scruffy wound, as the dark starts to thicken and the day starts to drag itself back to its ending.

And wherever he goes, there is water. And wherever there is water, wherever he looks, there is still the splashed-together pairing of two fish, gripping like terriers in the undertow of his shadow.

And she leads him through a bedraggled park, her frazzled tresses teasing out a resonance from the dishevelled clumps of grass where mosquitoes hail in horizontally, slapping against his skin, suicide taken flight. And he swings his arms like a helpless signal of distress and the mosquitoes disappear but the bites do not.

And when he looks up, she has gone.

And he emerges, shaking free the cloying dust from that twisted scrap of desolated ground, and again two nuns block his path, solidly this time, locked at the elbow, and the two nuns cover their eyes with their hands, growl from the backs of their throats as he is forced to edge around them, growl so deep they produce overtones so high his ears feel like they are leaking pain.

But up ahead, she is still there, lank hair creating slashes through the air as thin and unbending as thoroughfares in a forgotten northern quarter, moving with reptilian grace, dragging him away from home and health, pursuing him from the front, as if she were easing him into the endangered niches and disturbed recesses of that part of the city that was uniquely hers.

And now the pain has gone from his ears but has been sucked down through his body spread across every bone in his feet – liquid pain like the pus from a burst blister.

And he smiles to himself, and he feels the corners of his mouth crease in the heat.

And he rounds the corner.

And there were seemingly no witnesses, save perhaps the clutched pair of fish, still hanging on to each other like shared memories in the dark.

And that was it. And that was him then. Much as before, except motionless, except horizontal, with a sliver of flesh severed from his neck like an otter bite in a sea trout.

And around him, a strewn cross with just one cross-piece, a cruciform heap of grounded wooden vessels, still speared by their metal rings, but free now of their ironbound prisoners, just bits of wood scattered about him like an outstretched echo of a human form. And a single word, cut from his clothing, belonging to no recognisable language, an illiterate scrawl of his skin against the shadow. And a friendly bubble of blood, stuck to his mouth, reflecting nothing, as the chop and slurp of water grew bigger in the cooling wind and silence like a conspiracy reached for cover.

Because then, nothing. Nothing but the silent and pointless healing of scars.

Because then, as was only to be expected, this part of the city covered its tracks. No-one found out anything. No-one knew anything. No-one saw anything. No-one remembered anything. Investigations simply evaporated through the porous walls. So there was nothing left to be done with him but to bury him.

Ten years equals one hundred and twenty months, one hundred and twenty waxings and wanings of the moon, one hundred and twenty blood-shifts in the seasons, one hundred and twenty graveyard visits by a lank-haired woman with bouquet smears of pollen from trails of hibiscus in her fingers before his bones are dug up and taken to the ossuary to be ground down to a powder that is indiscernible in texture from the sun-crumbled stucco of this damp-stretched and heat-bubbled quarter of the city, flung out to the north, scarred by thin walkways, healed-over in the inward depths of its secrecy.

And by then, in the stretch of water between this part of the city and the island reserved for unknown, unexplained and foreign burials, two bony fish-heads will still be there, not a flake of flesh on them, still interlinked, still mouth-grappled together, still bobbing in unison on the rising scum of the tide.