Apex Book Company

Claude

It’s interesting to look back on those difficult times, now that the fuzzy lens of hindsight obscures things: memories, feelings, and all that stuff.

I got the dog before Bea and I ended up together. I needed the physical contact; I guess I was really lonely. So I ended up with a dog.

Relationships are awkward things at the best of times; Easel-the dog-used to go to work with Bea. I eventually overcame my guilt by throwing myself into the future, thinking of my tiny tricky family instead of myself. I went and won some bread, so did Bea; Easel had good days and bad days.

It wasn’t like when we were kids: we no longer had the luxury of open fields and lush woods. Every morning Easel and I would take our exercise together, me on the bike and him running beside, and after the initial novelty of the machine wore off we both came to ignore the Out-sphere, the scents were repetitive, only about a score of them on a monotonous cycle. I could recognise but a few of them: cut grass, mint, a strange earthy odour that for some reason made me think of woodlice.

As the scents were to my dog, so the landscape was to me, like an old cartoon, the same motif over and over again as I pedalled and Easel trotted on the treadmill beside me.

By the time the dog reached his sixth birthday Bea was distraught. She refused to feed him anymore, had little more to do with him other than preparing his meals and curling up on the sofa with him at night, his square head resting gently on her lap as she quietly watched the bland comm. channels. I couldn’t stand it; I knew the place was driving a wedge between us. Instead of working I’d spend hours gazing out at the ocean, imagining the distant, invisible shores at the mouth of the river that viciously cut my city in half. The thought of those banks pulled at my soul, beckoning me. My tie to Easel and Bea waned day-by-day until I began to fear it might just snap.

#

One Saturday in summer, Bea had a conference to attend. I flicked calmly through the phone directory until my finger paused at the name I had been searching for. I checked the display carefully, satisfied that the details matched the ones in the article I’d found, then I pressed enter. The connection was quick; the phone rang only twice before it was answered by a rough female voice.

#

Easel was petrified and he stood shaking at the front door, his huge furry bulk immovable. I remembered the little poodle-cross my grandfather had kept when I was small. How bizarre the changes that had affected the world these last handful of decades. I tugged at my dog’s halter but to no avail. Surrendering with a sigh, I slipped the harness from his muzzle and made my way out without him.

#

The streets were desolate in the grey afternoon. Workers scurried about above me in the tunnels that spanned from one office block to the next. Tramcars slid past on occasion, until eventually I found myself in an area where the glistening edifices thinned. Emerging from the glass and steel forest, the outer structures older and more outdated than their towering peers, like anti-saplings, I was shocked by the strength of the sun: its rays like sheaths of yellow metal, visible through black cloud. I felt almost afraid to step out from their refuge, as if the dark shadows beneath the clouds could injure me in some way. My irrational fear caused my pulse to race. I could hear the blood rushing about my temples. In the sun I was warmed, in the shade I shivered, until finally I cleared the city limits and came to a primitive dirt track.

An old road-sign guided my footsteps. I followed the sign into the wilderness. All around me scrubland swallowed up the outlook. I walked along the path as a shallow wall of heather and junipers flowed delicately in the light breeze.

I stepped across a trail of black army ants marching to some miniature unseen war; the only other wildlife-perhaps not the most apt of terms considering the state-I encountered that afternoon were a dead field vole, on its side, its flanks bathed in the heat and light of the sun, and the agitated horseflies that circled and pirouetted about its head or else rested animatedly, in stop-motion repose, on the rodent’s haunches.

Close to giving up on my quest, I eventually came to a dilapidated wooden hut. A notice hung from a rusty nail above the open door to the shack. In my mind’s eye I pictured Easel running carefree through the wilderness I found myself in. I called out cautiously, not wishing to intrude.

The inside of the hovel was sparse. It was dark though the walls were whitewashed. A slab of yellow light stretched like a battered-down door at my feet. The interior was a chiaroscurist’s paradise, but the stench of old food and acrid cooking spices spoiled the effect. There was a table-lamp in the centre of the shack. Espying it I recognised the loud humming as that of an aged generator. It must have been out the back of the cabin.

On the wall behind the lamp, directly opposite the entryway where I stood was a large portrait-scale poster: some old film or other I suspected: a man in winter clothes, standing in a snow-coated field, his footprints trailing behind. The text was in a foreign language though, and faded too.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark interior I began to recognise other objects: there was a bookcase and in the gloom I noted with interest that it was stocked with actual books - the older type, no doubt yellowed and musty from the touch of time.

Of course I owned books myself, but it was the first time I had seen more than ten or so collected in the same room.

There was a copper pot suspended on a branch above a makeshift fire. A tree! There was a tree inside of the peculiar residence, growing up from a square of earth cut neatly into the floorboards, though over time-as the tree had strengthened and grown-roots had pushed at the boards, leaving the floor uneven, the room dense with the smell of earth.

The leaves at the top of the tree kissed the roof, a single branch obscuring the mouth of a half-finished chimneystack.

"A purple maple," said a familiar voice, from the telephone conversation earlier, "they don’t grow much larger than that. They’re from Iceland originally."

"They do well in shade," I said.

Half of the woman’s home was illuminated suddenly as she clicked on the lamp, spearing the plastic neck with a use-worn rectangular switch. The centre of the room was washed in a cold, sterile light.

"Door," said she, distractedly, walking purposefully across the fractured floorboards in my direction. The door dutifully closed and I was sealed inside the shack with a woman I couldn’t see, a bookcase loaded with antiquities, an Icelandic tree, a shade-less lamp and a… a crow? Or at least that is what I took it for, initially.

The bird hopped down to a lower bough of the tree, awoken by the arrival of light.

"Door!" it croaked in a pronouncement much like the woman’s.

She reached me and turned to the bird, exasperated. I saw a glint of white across its throat as it puffed up its feathery chest. The door slid back to expose stilted daylight. The bird flew out with a single beat of broad wings.

"He’ll be back in good time," my hostess assured me. I saw her face then, clearly for the first time; the intrusive light from outside illuminated her.

"Door," I offered. The portal was sealed once more.

She backed away from me, stretching out a shadowed hand, long finely manicured nails adorning aged fingers; the veins in her upturned wrist glinted green in the semi-lit room.

I had locked gazes with her as the door glided closed for the second time. Her irises were violet, flashing as the radiance altered. As she retreated into the dark, towards a low sofa, I assumed the hue of her eyes the product of contact lenses.

"Please, sit," she instructed me.

I followed her across the room and perched tentatively on the edge of the rickety couch, the third space vacant between us. My shoulder brushed against gauze curtain, the only division between living quarters and bedroom.

She studied me, violet eyes subdued in the gloom, her slender frame a dark silhouette against the cracked grey of the wall. From the arm of the settee she collected a small mirror, grasped it between her two gnarled hands.

"Do you want the-?"

My sentence was interrupted. "Not yet. First we should eat." She stood, put the mirror into the pocket of her jeans. "Stay there, I’ve made a stew."

I did as told, leant back on the dusty seat, revelling at her unhurried pace and also at the state of the place. Perhaps she cleaned once a fortnight at most. It was a refreshing change to the constant gleam of the city, of my apartment and of the breakneck speed at which I ordinarily seemed to exist during working hours.

She moved across the centre of the room, illumined for a moment in the lamplight. From the copper pot over the fire she removed a ladle, long handled and deep-spooned. She served the broth from the pot into two bowls on a shelf beside the chimneybreast. The scent of ginger and meat mingled with the earth at the roots of the tree and the acerbic odour of smoke from the fire.

"So you’re having problems with your dog," she said.

I nodded and supped at a spoonful of hot soup, burning my lower lip.

She enquired if it was to my liking with a raised eyebrow, her face close to mine, and thin lips in a narrow line, neither smiling nor frowning.

I blew on a fresh puddle of soup, a futile endeavour.

"Bisk," she told me. "Pigeon bone, with neck of lamb and ginger." She sipped solemnly at her own watery casserole. There was little flavour to the oily stew, save the trace of ginger stem.

#

She placed her bowl half-finished on the floor at her feet. Tapering fingers stretched from her knees to a third of the way up sloping thighs. I noticed the trace of a scar circumventing her right wrist, as if the hand had been severed and replaced. Gold glimmered: the zip of her trousers. She turned to me, fixed me once more with unnatural eyes.

"What should I do?" I asked her, spoon suspended below my chin, my arm twisted at an awkward angle.

"What do you want to do?" she said.

I thought for a moment, tempted to respond, ‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m here,’ but I held my tongue. My sense of perspective seemed unbalanced.

"It’s okay," she assured me, "it’s just the drug from the soup beginning to take effect."

"Drug?" I was astonished, angered, but the lightest of contacts from her put me at ease.

"What do you want to do?" she repeated. The walls seemed further away; my co-ordination was affected. I dropped the emptied spoon to the ground.

#

I awoke slowly, if such a thing is possible, my sense of reality returning unhurried: first my hearing. I listened to a voice singing, far from melodic, a deep growling: something definitely feminine in the gruff intonation. Next were my senses of smell and of taste, though I barely noticed them. The scent of smoke and the tang of ginger had long departed my system. Penultimate was my sight. I saw my hostess leaning on the mock-wooden doorframe of the shack. It took a moment for me to register she was visible due only to the insipid light pouring liquid-like from the table-lamp, which had been moved from the centre of the room to rest on the shelf above the hearth. So where was the daylight?

"What time is it?" I gasped. Regaining full consciousness, a tactile awareness flooded my body. I was lounging on the couch, hot but shivering, shirtless. My coat was draped over the arm where the woman’s mirror had been before. It was early summer and didn’t start getting dark until at least half past seven-or at least it didn’t in the city.

"It’s almost midnight," she said, not moving, continuing to stare into the night. I was shaken by that revelation.

"Bea’ll murder me! And Easel’s been left for so long!" Had I not finished speaking and begun to collect my clothes my guess is she would have cut me off, maybe insisted that I stay awhile longer. But I had said all I intended to and my outburst was not specifically directed at her. I gathered my coat from the arm of the grubby sofa, then put it down again as I remembered my shirt.

Perhaps guessing at my thoughts she turned and pointed to the fire, little more than flickering embers by that point.

"Gone?" I asked, fearing it incinerated.

She shook her head, no. "There…" I followed the line of her finger.

My shirt hung on a rusty nail wedged in between the grouting of the chimneybreast. I had to squint to see it. Reaching across I hurried to put it on, still buttoned, over my head. The cloth felt damp against my chest. I patted it with a nervous hand that I then held up to the light. Maroon under the nightlight, almost violet like her eyes. I licked at the ball of my palm, a salty trace on my tongue. "Blood?"

She nodded.

I studied her properly for the first time since waking: she had changed clothes. She wore a simple pale shift that reached her ankles and around her shoulders hung a fur shawl. An image formed unbidden in my mind’s eye, prompted by the sight of her exotic cloak: a wolf in a cage. No, no wolf but a cat, pacing around a glowing object. The thing shined, like the blood on her hand, like the colour of her eyes. The cat drew close; still indistinct the object was nonetheless definitely on fire, I felt the heat in my head. I strained my eyes.

A flaming heart! It beat still. Then I noticed the marks on the floor: tracks! My shirt was sullied just off-centre of my sternum, to the left. "My heart?"

"The mynah took it," the strange woman said, coldly.

"So why am I here?"

She misunderstood my question. "The drugs. The effects take time to wear off. Your body didn’t register the absence of its heart. Maybe eventually it’ll reject the new one, during the procedure at least, you were too high to die."

I left without sparing her another glance. Halfway along the trail away from the shack I turned. Her door was sealed tight, barring out the mundane. I stripped off my bloodstained shirt, left it hanging from a squat conifer.

Junipers groped menacingly from the edges of the trail. I kept to the centre as well I could. Nearing home, the starlight was smothered by the resident ceiling of smog that blanketed the city. What had I done? I had turned the idea over in my mind so many times. That morning it had seemed the only solution. Bea would not agree to re-homing Easel but she could no longer tolerate him being around. To keep him cooped all day in the apartment was unfair. I had thought that at least with my considered alternative he would have more independence, but at what cost? Perhaps he was the only thing keeping us together.

My reverie ended upon reaching our building. I took the lift deep underground until I arrived at our floor. As usual it took several swipes before my rickety ID card was recognised. My mood of trepidation caused me to imagine Bea had changed the locks. Finally the door retracted upwards, my arrival announced with a low-key beep.

Bea sat in front of the television, hypnotised by another unnamed glamour comm. about the rich and the beautiful. She turned to me as soon as I stepped in, but left the TV on.

"Where have you been, I’ve been worried sick?" On her lap a bundle of fur stood and transformed into a sleepy silver cat. It stretched and yawned, revealing pointed white teeth.

"This poor thing was in a right state. It must’ve got in as you left. How many times do I have to remind you not to rely on the automatic lock?

"Its chest was covered in blood but I haven’t been able to find a wound."

At last Bea sensed a piece of the picture was missing.

"Where’s the dog?" she asked.

END

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Visit Neil Ayres’ blog at http://pootle-and-rat.livejournal.com/.

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Neil Ayres’ story “The Listening” appears in the Apex Pubilcations anthology Gratia Placenti. Order your copy today!