"Time to swallow, Mr. Scroop."
And they gulp down each other's labels.
She pulls her drivishes apart.
"Well, Mr. Scroop, what can I do to hurt you, yet please
myself? One thing to bear in mind, Mr. Scroop, is that I have become aware that
this has temporarily become an unfortunate time of the month for you. The
change occurred as soon as the labels were examined."
She kisses him.
"We have to kiss each other very gently, Mr. Scroop. We
don't want to impair each other, do we? But first, I need to examine your
tongue. Please stick it out."
He obeys.
"Oh, Mr. Scroop, they shaved your tongue very nicely, didn't
they? Most effective, and very acceptable. Nice and smooth. Nice and pointy. A
nice badge of admission, in more sense than one. I shall enjoy that, Mr.
Scroop, but unfortunately, there is nothing for you to enjoy here - you did
choose your own state of affairs, though, didn't you?"
She then looks up at the mirrors. "Ooh, Mr. Scroop, I know
you can't see your own aura, but, as predicted, you've got lots of little
blackflies in it. I can see them, dotting around, like little polluted flecks
of you, circling each other. Like little scraps of corruption. What can that
mean, I wonder?"
And his aura clears, and she can see the
scene. Long shot: a tapering view
shadowed by mountains up a long street of terraced houses stretching into
moorland, with the houses constricting towards where the tarmac peters out, and
just there, there is a group of children waiting for him, shirt-sleeved in the
summer sun. There is a ring leader. Red-headed. Rheumy-eyed. He stares across.
There seems to be steam in his breath as he opens his mouth. "Hey, what
you looking at, mummy's boy without a mummy?" They start singing:
"Here comes no-mates - no-mates smelly,
Can't-fight - won't fight - your legs have turned to jelly
Your mum's in the ground
So she can't make a sound
And who's that got his hand on your belly?"
And his eyes sweep past them, ignoring them, and look only at the widening countryside.
"Here comes no-mates - no-mates smelly,
Can't-fight - won't fight - your legs have turned to jelly
Your mum's in the ground
So she can't make a sound
And who's that got his hand on your belly?"
And his eyes sweep past them, ignoring them, and look only at the widening countryside.
She looks into his aura
again. Medium shot: hands removing a framed picture from beneath a mattress.
He looks at her aura in
the mirror, but it remains fogged. The music fades. A train horn sounds. No
vision. A male adult voice: "Look, it's just not working, is it? I thought
that having a child would make a difference, but it hasn't."
Medium shot: A boy
fishing in a mountain pool with no one else around. A fast-moving stream
strikes into a static wide pond like fisted hands, and the silted slivers of
current turn briefly to elvers made of dirt and can be seen spreading out and
separating like thumbs and fingers before the weight of water falls away, further
onwards down the mountainside, dragging them down in it. Close-up: a boy's
reflection in the pool. Close-up: a child's hands removing a framed photograph
of a woman with the glass broken. The broken glass echoes the shape of the
stream, splitting it up into different elements, and breaks up his reflection
into disconnected strands.
The music fades. A train
horn sounds. No vision. A female voice: "It's not that we don't love you,
you have to understand."
Her looks at her aura again
and it now clears. Long shot: a small girl zig-zagging across the moors. Frail
knock-knees waddling up the hill. Close-up: eyes determined. There is a
double-exposure of her shape, as it something is being remembered. She scuttles
through a fence, and sits next to some train lines. A train whistle howl. A
train erupts from a tunnel and speeds past her. She does not flinch.
Panning shot: A man and a
boy watching two men boxing on a television. The boy's right hand and the man's
left hand stretch out simultaneously to each other. The man's hand is blemished
by work, but not scarred.
The light dapples, as if
it is being projected through a waterfall into a cave.
There is the sudden
sound of a muddied squelch that sounds like the knock of a fist on skin. The
music does not stop.
Medium-shot. A sudden
start. A sudden tug. A close-up of the fishing line: the float has not been
disturbed. Close-up. A scarred adult hand on a child's lap.
Her aura mists over. A
male voice: "Look, you can't keep running away from one of us to the
other. We have to work this out between us. Especially as I'm going further
away. But it's somewhere with a station. So you'll spend time with one of us
and then travel to the other one and spend some time with them. Do you
understand? And don't worry, someone will travel with you. Someone we have -
employed."
Her aura clears. Close-up:
a woman's face and a man's face. The woman's face is younger than the man's.
And he looks at her,
sprawled on the sofa, exposed, the bow adrift on her loin covering, but the
single knot still holding, like the clinging knot of a rope that prevents the
dinghy drifting from the harbour wall. He looks at her checking the state of
her nethers with her fingernails black as a mine. She stokes her thumb across
her teeth and smiles. Her teeth are reddened.
Long shot. A boy running
away across moorland, carrying a fishing rod.
He half-opens his mouth.
He goes over to her couch.
She lets him approach,
and then she skin-deeps her fingers into his back, the flesh curling beneath
her nails like lard under a knife.
Medium shot: A man in a
coat, leaving, waving. Close-up: a child's thumb, waving in front of the
watching eyes.
She lets him recover,
then smiles and tooth-carves his torso-meat and sucks, just as if she is
siphoning his brain. And his blood dribbles from her mouth.
Medium shot: a small girl
kicking her legs on a train seat. The view from the train window reveals that
she has her back to the engine. An adult woman's voice: "Why do you always
face that way, child?" "I'm facing the home I'm just leaving."
"Not the one you're going to?"
"No." "Poor child, I don't know whether this direction is coming or going, and neither, I suppose, do you."
"No." "Poor child, I don't know whether this direction is coming or going, and neither, I suppose, do you."
His mouth attempts to
part the skin-lips of the gibberel. She says "Remember, Mr. Scroop, no
attempt at talking. If you get shocked when you're attached to me, I shall feel
it, and I shall certainly have to take you to task. And you certainly will not
like that."
She takes a mulberry,
puts it in his mouth, then takes another and stretches her hand below, and puts
it into her.
Long shot. A boy being
dragged back across moorland, still carrying a fishing rod. Close-up: bruises
on his face.
His aura mists over. An
angry male voice. "You're lying: he wouldn't do that. Lying little
scumbag."
Then she says
"Pain, Mr. Scroop, pain." She scratches the top of his torso with her
ring, gently, elegantly, but purposefully. She digs her nail-impairings into a
tiny portion of his flesh, just by his left shoulder. She pulls at his
ear-impairing, almost scouring a valley through the skin of his ear.
She digs the finger in
and sucks the blood out. "Shared riparian rights, Mr. Scroop. Shared
riparian rights. Don't forget. Read the instructions, if you don't believe me.
Although at this stage of the proceedings, I would hope that you wouldn’t need
to read instructions."
His aura clears. A door
opening. Shadow turning to light turning again to shadow as the door closes. A
man entering. Black streaks on his pale face. He is swaying. He is breathing
hard.
His aura mists over. A slurred
voice. "She died because of you, you worthless little cunt. You robbed my
life!"
And she greases herself
below with honey. "Right, Mr. Scroop, time to find the fruit."
Careful how you like down there, Mr. Scroop: find the red thing in a sea of
red." And she parts, and his giberelled mouth is at the gummy mass of her
nethers, and it is as if they can both feel the
hard-beast-skin-on-soft-beast-skin abrasion as she is nethered by his captive
tongue.
An adult male voice:
gentle. "Look. Maybe I was hard on you. Please be kind to your uncle. He
used to work down below, with me and the rest of the lads, but he got sick, so
he had to leave. He was unlucky as well. They don't like that. Things happened.
Trouble is, things kept happening to him - little accidents, like, but the
trouble was they endangered everybody else's safety, not just him, so they had
to make him an offer to leave, and that's what he scrapes by on now. This was
before you were born. So that's why he's been helping me out, looking after
you. Remember, he's my brother - you need to be kind to him. I know you don't
understand these things, but it's still true."
Medium-shot: the view
through the window of the train, and the reflection of a child's face. A man,
waving goodbye. The reflection of the child's face, smiling.
And she shudders around
his mouth.
Close up: two hands,
locked together. Shaken by the movement of the train. Fused. A small hand with
a cloth bandage, a larger one with the freckles of age.
She squeals, and the lid
of her opera hat opens, and three skuas scream out, carving the air of the room
in their sharp-beaked haste and they then hover, and each of them dives and
hacks a minute parcel of him out and disappears into the fetid air apparently
just below the invisible ceiling.
His aura clears. Medium
shot: a boy fishing in a mountain pool. Panning-shot: there is nobody else
around. There is a tug on the line. Close-up: a perch grabbing the bait.
Close-up: a pike grabbing the perch. Medium shot: scrawny arms moving the
fishing rod in different directions, flexing and seeming to grown more muscled
with each sweep of resistance and each further winding of the spool until there
is no more resistance and the pike is wound in. Close-up: the rows of the
pike's teeth, descending away from the mouth, like a tunnel. The perch is shredded.
The sound system
squeezes out distorted train sounds like jelly being squeezed from a bag, and
he makes an involuntary belch and a fleeting expression of disgust creases his
face, as if a bite-size spoonful of bitter nausea has filled his mouth, then
retreated. And then he makes a strangulated, grunting sound. She looks at him.
"No need to attempt to speak, Mr. Scroop. These things are known: there is
no need to say them."
She sucks the mulberries
from the wormcloth pasties, then tears the pasties from his nipples and then
she rouges his chest with spat blood. And his eyes seem to broadcast pain
spreading up from his body like a contagion, and the way he hollows his chest
suggests that the pain has also burrowed deep inside.
Medium shot: the view
through the window of the train, and the reflection of a child's face. A silent
woman, waving goodbye. A view of a hand, then a view upwards to a close-up of
the woman's eyes dry but starting to moisten. The reflection of the child's
face, frowning.
"Oh, Mr. Scroop, it
looks like you are hurting in your side. Is it an old injury, Mr. Scroop?"
He nods. "I thought it might be. It looks like the squeezy abrasion of
your chaperoon isn't helping either, Mr. Scroop, squelching up your right side.
I'll wager your liver feels like it's secreting bile throughout the miles of
tubes within your body, doesn't it, Mr. Scroop?" He gasps, and nods.
Her aura mists over. A
woman's voice."What you have to remember is that you've got two places you
can think of as home." "No - home is the train. Home is only the
train!"
He rests. He strokes his
fingers across the surface of the table. He scowls at the dirt on his fingers,
mingling with the dried blood from his cut finger.
She parts her drivishes.
She checks his body. "Mr. Scroop, all the spilt blood –
from every relevant wound and orifice - has miraculously been healed away. This
is usual, but you wouldn't have known that. But isn't that useful? Yes, Mr.
Scroop, everything is healed. And everything is ready to roll again. So let us
continue."
She replaces his pasties, and replaces the mulberries in them.
She takes him by the face with her hands and stares into his
eyes.
"Exhausted, Mr. Scroop, or do you want another go? Would
you like another little burlesque tart, and another little drink, Mr. Scroop?
Remember that if you do, and we draw the same instructions, we will do the same
thing again, and you won't remember it. I shall remember, but I shall pretend I
don't. Of course, if we make another journey, a different journey, we shall probably discover more about both
ourselves and each other. So, tell me, Mr. Scroop. I know that you know how to
move your head, so tell me with your head, Mr. Scroop: tell me with your head. "
Choose:
Or:
He nods his head.
They return to the table, and each grabs a tart, gently picked
up with his restrained and her unrestrained hands, and each devours their own.
Easily.
She pours spirit into their glasses.
She says "Up your brain again, Mr. Scroop. Time to taste
the treewormy medicine one more time," and they down them in one, she left
handed, he two handed.
She pulls the label from her mouth and hands it to him, pushing
it into his drivished hands.
She pulls the label from his mouth and examines it.
No comments:
Post a Comment