Astonished Dice Read online

  ‘Seldom have I seen such a yummy physique,’ said Betty.

  Hot dogs. Candyfloss. Rising through the night in the Ferris wheel’s chill gondola, Barrett and Betty were grateful for one another’s warmth.

  Barrett gave Betty’s mittened hand a squeeze. ‘We’re all in recovery from having been children,’ he told her. ‘We must learn to desire with guile and without hope.’

  viii) Barrett received a letter from Jones of Zenith Drains.

  Dear B.,

  Can I interest you in a smallmechanical digger of purple and green? Come and take a look and make me an offer. Fact is, I’m off to Nebraska, the ‘cornhusker’ state. It’s the home of the Western meadow lark. Ditto the cottonwood and the goldenrod (a tree and a flower, respectively).

  Cheers etc., Taffy

  ix) Betty took Barrett to a movie. The girl vending popcorn was wearing a T-shirt that read AND THUS I CLOTHE MY NAKED VILLAINY.

  The film was the work of a celebrated Indian master. The women of a dusty Indian village … were being terrorised by something or someone. A rapist? A tiger? Barrett couldn’t decide. It was far and away the worst movie he had ever seen, in every respect.

  Said Betty, ‘I’d like you to take me to your place and bonk me silly.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Barrett.

  x) A taxi ride. A scramble. Barrett unlocking a door and lighting a candle.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ Betty said. ‘You’re living in this hut we’re standing in?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Betty surveyed the clutter of picks and shovels and wheelbarrows in Barrett’s smoko shed. Beneath a mechanical digger of purple and green, Barrett had installed a mattress and an alarm clock. ‘But how do you cook?’ the lady wanted to know.

  ‘I eat out a lot,’ Barrett conceded.

  ‘I’m shocked,’ said Betty, ‘that you should bring me here.’

  ‘I don’t know what came over me. Can I take it that that fuck is out of the question now?’

  xi) With freshly shaven head and new tattoo, Kiszco took advantage of the open mike at a blues club to make his début as a singer and songsmith.

  Barrett had drunk thirteen tequilas. ‘Break a neck,’ he said as Kiszco rose to perform.

  ‘Oh hear me comin’ baby,

  My love’s a big choo-choo,

  I’m aimin’ down the tracks a mile

  To couple nice with you.

  ‘Oh hear me comin’ baby,

  My heart’s a big freight train,

  I’m figurin’ you’re hot to pop

  My whistle once again.’

  This was the song Kiszco sang to the folks at the Blue Mushroom. Barrett sculled tequilas fourteen, fifteen and sixteen … in rapid succession.

  xii) No more Betty, no. But Barrett was the lucky and sentimental owner of one of her forceful wee abstracts (oil on board). He hung it in the gloom of the smoko shed, where it blazed like a single lambent sunflower.

  The purple-and-green digger proved to have been a canny investment. It could brew a pot of tea and iron shirts, and it ate its baked beans nicely, using chopsticks.

  A single lambent sunflower.

  Down Through the Pines

  CHAPTER 1

  A postcard from a friend visiting Cedar Rapids, Ohio. It shows Einstein at the beach, a beach somewhere. And Einstein looks exactly like Einstein, Albert, physicist and Nobel laureate, but is wearing shorts and sandals. The Einstein face is graced by an expression of mildly amused braininess or pleasant imbecility, take your pick. The Einstein shorts are unremarkable, not particularly dated to look at, and the legs are OK legs, not too bad at all if somewhat hairless, but oh my God the sandals. They seem to have something of a heel; the peekaboo toes consist of dome-shaped apertures, vents like Turkish domes in silhouette. Onion domes or twirly confectioner’s kisses.

  Yes: the Einstein sandals of 1945 … are almost certainly a woman’s.

  CHAPTER 2

  My friend the postman has travelled to the four corners of the world. Travels every year on his meagre postman’s pay to some fresh destination, there to revel in fresh discomforts and inconveniences.

  I leave the travelling to others. I stay at home and read and watch a bit of telly. When one’s own habitation provides a sufficiency of annoyances, why go abroad? Letterbox and telephone furnish all the alarms I can cope with.

  My name is Bruno Swan. Some sixteen years ago, I was coming to an end. The lights were going out all over Bruno. Today, I live a posthumous sort of life, one nonetheless replete with quiet satisfactions.

  CHAPTER 3

  My friend the postman is beginning to limp like a knackered dromedary. ‘Seen anything decent recently?’ I ask him.

  ‘I haven’t been to a film in months,’ says Martin.

  ‘No? My late father used to boast that he’d seen every movie made before the end of World War II.’

  ‘Quite. Some people simply swear off the cinema. Give it up, like smoking.’

  ‘They do. But retreat perhaps to the reeking wasteland of television.’

  As well as being a traveller, Martin’s an omnivorous reader. His long brown face is handsomely lined, and has about it something of sage Arabian dignity, the wisdom of the oasis. ‘Television? I’ll tell you who likes television,’ the weathered Bedouin says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Poor old Johnny Bray. Poor old Johnny Bray has taken to knocking on my door from time to time.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It’s late in the afternoon and there he is. Can he come in and play the piano? Can he come in and watch Spongebob Squarepants?’

  ‘He’s apologetic, but.’

  ‘He laughs so much it’s almost a delight. He laughs so hard at Spongebob fucking Squarepants, it’s almost a pleasure to have him in the house.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Neil Young has a heartbreaking voice. Neil Young has a heartbreaking voice.

  Somewhere back in the 80s, I stood in a bottle store and watched a video clip of Young performing ‘Like a Hurricane’. There he was on the screen above my head, singing and strumming while being blustered silly, stormily mauled by a wind machine, I wanna love you but I’m getting blown away …

  The guitar work on ‘Hurricane’ is astral, titanic. Time and time again, I sit in the dark and let it do its thing, sit in the dark and let it take me apart.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’m stopped in the street by a bronzed, a blond young man. Levis, T-shirt, designer stubble. ‘What’s that over there?’ he asks.

  His accent is English. ‘It used to be a museum,’ I tell him, ‘and to the left you’ve got your carillon and war memorial.’

  ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

  I walk along Arthur to the top of Cuba. On the corner is the house in which I spent the first few months of my sobriety, living above an empty shop.

  It remains a sooty, dim, Dickensian address. Soon to be stomped by the new, obliterating motorway. In a bedroom at the rear, I finished writing Tartan Revolver, the first of my three published books. I’d bought for the purpose a fat little manual in two tones of grey; when you pushed the plump red lozenge of a certain mysterious key, its carriage would track from right to left with an oily sort of thrum: yoddle-oddle-oddle-oddle-oddle.

  Behind that window up there, I completed a vivid, skinny novel, yes. And it might be fun to get a picture, take a photo of those doomed, disappointed-seeming panes. A Fujicolor disposable would do the trick, but I’d have lots of film left over.

  CHAPTER 6

  My present address is temporary. No sleek savvy cat dozes on the fire escape, nor are my neighbours prostitutes and members of Black Power, but I like and use the peace and quiet here. If I duck down through the pines to Wallace Street, I can be in the city in twenty minutes.

  I keep the joint uncluttered, low on visual noise. The spines of a hundred books and a Chinese wall-hanging—I confess to finding colour enough in these.

  CHAPTER 7

&nbs
p; With regard to my worthless Chinese banderole: in search perhaps of balance, centredness, I sometimes contemplate its ghostly torrents, its floaty crags.

  The Chinese seem to manage not to rear psychopathic monsters. The Chinese are sane and nicely made (I’ve noticed that the young men tend to have good legs).

  The truth of the matter is, I like the Chinese. I like their restaurants and cafés; I like their tanks of goldfish, their glossy black enamel, their lanterns with scarlet tassels. I like the sweet and sour of their temperate, amusable demeanours.

  As the coal-burning city steams its way toward nightfall, I picture myself living in some muggy Chinatown, renting a room above a busy kitchen, playing noughts and crosses on a grimy little board of teak and porcelain. Smoking my opium.

  ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ says Martin. (A dollop of clarification: my friend the postman is not of course my postman. We meet in town, if we meet at all, only when he’s completed his route and is making his way home.)

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘Forget the opium.’

  ‘I’m not depriving you of your narcotic. It’s just that you’d find the Chinese world too populous and hectic.’

  ‘Probably. What with all that gambling, all those tong vendettas.’

  ‘Quite. So what are you reading, at the moment?’

  ‘Don DeLillo’s Underworld. For the fourth time. Underworld is the book for me.’

  ‘The one you take to the desert island?’

  ‘Absolutely. There are more stories in Underworld … than are actually in Underworld. DeLillo’s Underworld … extends to infinity in all directions.’

  CHAPTER 8

  I seem to be forever buying milk. Buying milk or thinking that the blood-vessels in my right leg are collapsing. And yet I’ve had my picture in the paper, been on the radio.

  CHAPTER 9

  My dream goes something like this:

  Good Friday in a detox ward somewhere. The sweet, metallic smell of Wattie’s canned spaghetti.

  A pathetically sweaty Greek gangster has the bed next to mine. ‘I’m shaking like a jelly over here.’

  ‘Just hang tough,’ I tell him.

  ‘When’s our next medication due?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘I can feel some kind of seizure coming on. I’ve wrought some fucking havoc in me time, but I don’t deserve this.’

  ‘What goes up must come down. Or something.’

  ‘Them Nazis out the nursing station—the filph is toffs compared!’

  My dead but ageless father appears. Suit and tie, hair parted wetly, familiar gold ring. ‘I’ve always liked this town. Denny Mahon and I were stationed here during the early part of the war. I thought I’d take the bus out to the old aerodrome, have a look around.’

  ‘Do that, Dad.’

  ‘Will I see you at all, you know, when you grow up? Will there be a number I can ring?’

  Dr Mephisto is next. Earring, three days’ growth, soap-scented hands. (What do they want with me, these attractive young men?) ‘Your pancreas is inflamed. Likewise your already fatty liver.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Ever had a shot of benzoethylcryptotriplicate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hurts like hell, believe me. What are your thoughts on Dreiser?’

  ‘I’ve never read him. The last ten minutes of Carrie were terrific.’

  ‘You’re referring to the William Wyler film?’

  ‘With Laurence Olivier, yes. With Laurence Olivier being utterly tragic.’

  ‘I put it to you that Don DeLillo is not the totally groovy, funky and together, hip wizard seer you think he is.’

  ‘He’s merely very good. Is what I think.’

  ‘Don DeLillo sucks. Ditto Bruno Swan and Tartan Revolver. I’m tempted to reach for the hurty stuff.’

  Sacraments

  1

  The city has Finnish-looking trams. Ferries, helicopters and Finnish-looking trams.

  A tennis court stands next to a cathedral. A sandwich bar embarrasses a Theosophical temple.

  Some of the smaller banks have tinted windows, science-fiction panes the colour of petrol. And the Yohst and Kubrick Centre in Bilton Square wears copper epaulettes; at night, it’s painted by floodlights of lime and guava-pink.

  As three a.m. approaches, the station settles down, achieves a degree of equilibrium. It loosens its belt (as it were) and breathes a little easier. And the mad and the bad and the sad in the cells downstairs? They admit defeat and shut up—finally.

  Detective Mark Traven rises from his desk. Time to empty the bladder and stretch the legs. In white shirt and loud floral tie, Mark looks like a shoulder-holstered Mormon, trim and youthful and smoothly truculent.

  He drifts toward Stella Greybill’s desk. She’s up to her armpits in files, her messy hair a storm of golden wisps. ‘Cut your crap, Traven.’

  ‘I haven’t said a word.’

  ‘This place stinks of fries and hamburgers.’

  ‘Yours and mine,’ says Mark, ‘but mostly mine.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

  ‘We should be the subject of a study. The scientists should study us long and hard. Nutritionists with clipboards, probing the mysteries of our bright eyes and bushy tails.’

  ‘Grow fucking up.’ Is what Stella says.

  ‘I’m closing fast on my next cigarette. I’m cruising stealthily.’

  ‘Not me. Not this detective. What I want is beef tea, if you’re passing the machine.’

  ‘Beef tea? Since when? These are questions the machine itself will ask.’

  ‘The secret is not to bully it. The secret is to let it do its thing.’

  2

  The convent is that of the Sisters of Abiding Comfort, a dwindling community of tough, cheerful souls. The nuns have their business in the city, with the desperate, but their home stands on the side of a bushy vale in a quiet eastern suburb.

  Convent and playfully Gothic chapel: few people know of their existence. A circumstance that Robert Sharland does his best to perpetuate.

  He’s here again this morning, in the first pew but one. He likes the altar of white marble, the lilies and the candlesticks of blond brass. Enjoys the windows and the watery stains they impart, palest tincturings of lemon and rose. His bodyguard is armed and wired for sound and sits one row behind his principal, apparently unfazed by the dour Latin mass.

  Bread and wine are at hand. Chalice and ciborium. The sacrament achieves its overcast plateau, and the priest says the occult words of consecration. How does Matthew have it? ‘“This is my body. But behold the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.”’ Something like that, Sharland thinks. And Matthew’s is a painterly effect, with candlelight and gloom interpenetrating.

  The nuns like Sharland to breakfast at the convent. Swap pleasantries with the visiting celebrant.

  Two places have been set at one end of a long table. The room itself (a small refectory?) has plastered walls, a floor of reddish tiles. Sharland’s bodyguard seats his employer, places a cellphone beside Robert’s plate and retires to a chair just inside the door.

  Stripped of his vestments now, dog-collared Father Conway makes his appearance. ‘It’s toast and jam and boiled eggs, I see. The sisters seem to want to feed us up.’

  ‘Good morning, Father.’

  The smiley little priest’s as plump as a sparrow. And layman and cleric are by no means strangers. ‘You turned in a brisk performance this morning.’

  ‘Did I now,’ says Conway. ‘Perhaps I’d counted the house.’

  ‘You’ll have noticed that I never take Communion.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that your minder sometimes does.’

  ‘I’m a product of my education, Vince. I believe in the mass without believing.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘I believe in the mass. Without believing.’

  ‘Well I wonder now how that can be. I do.’

  A nun arrives with more triangles of toast.
Orange juice in a stainless-steel jug. ‘Shall I do you another egg, Father?’

  ‘I think not, Sister Joan, on this occasion.’

  Sharland waits until the nun has gone. Resumes his ‘confession’ in a somewhat cooler tone. ‘I’m a powerful man, Vincent. I make things happen. My puissance flows out into the world to sink and saturate, penetrating systems from top to bottom.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I trickle down. Through structures, institutions. I might be likened to the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Hubris. Blasphemy. To say nothing of the lesser sin of rank hyperbole.’

  ‘I export and import and rake in dividends. Power begets wealth and wealth begets power. But among my hobbies is dealing in pictures. It’s well within my competence to anoint struggling artists, and this it amuses me to do. I make their reputations and begin to sell their paintings for surprising new sums. I feather their nests while also upholstering my own. Does this make me virtuous, or am I merely acting out of self-interest?’

  ‘Both. You’re having a bob each way, like most of the rest of us.’

  Robert’s cellphone trills. He picks it up and jabs one of its buttons. ‘You’ve reached Sharland. Speak.’

  The bodyguard approaches and addresses Conway. ‘The Rolls will soon be brought to the side door, Father. Can we offer you a lift anywhere?’

  ‘That’s thoughful of you, Taube.’

  ‘Sell sell sell,’ says Sharland. Talking of course to his coal-black Nokia.

  3

  It’s Tuesday morning, and this is Eric Jones. He’s sporting the maroon thumbnail, the big black shapely fuck-you Druid’s hood. Yes, hooded is exactly how he likes to feel.