Copyright © 2020 Maddy Hamey-Thomas
A happy mess of people, arms waving. Tom finds every one of them a soft and wonderful distraction, lulling him where he doesn’t want to go, bothered by their charm. He watches each guest revel in their storytelling prowess, thinking that the collective are also generous listeners for their youth, so forgetting to listen himself. He keeps thinking he might shout something suddenly, out into the crowded room, but minutes have passed and it hasn’t happened.
He gazes over at Lib, who is silent. Tom frowns like a hurt puppy at this, until he thinks he can detect an inching twist to Lib’s mouth. It is hard to make him out, as his face is hooded by a dark, billowing piece of fabric someone has taped to the wall, absorbing all the light and certainty. Even a possible smile, though, feels like the sticky hot centre of a chain cinema ice-cream sundae.
Then someone is laughing. Raucous, vicious, loud laughter. Who was that? Tom moves his head slowly, partly because he doesn’t want to look away from Lib. Partly because he keeps losing his train of thought and thinks stasis could fix this. Marcia, with her jaw slack and her head down is laughing like a zombie at the end of its braindead, body-slumped life but somehow still pretty about the eyes: because you think that zombie might have been your friend’s neighbour from across town. When they were alive and walking and purposeful, and you remember their fresher, original face.
‘Oh my god. That’s disgusting,’ she’s saying.
‘How could she talk about that on a public bus? People have no shame. That’s hilarious. You can’t just apologise and then just carry on talking about it! Like, that’s just acknowledging that you assume everyone’s listening to your stupid life story because you’re the latest bloody Mail sidebar star, wow.’ She half-guffaws. Shakes her head and shivers.
Lib leans forward and with a forceful gesture using the heel of his hand, scoots a glass across the table. Somehow, amongst the general din, it’s more like he skipped a stone on water. They’ve all lost interest in the glass and the game and the idea behind the gathering. Tom tries to pretend he didn’t see Lib move from the corner: Lib has unfathomable reams of talent, but he’s not yet built for leadership. There’s no point rallying behind him.
‘Yeah, and then after she ended the call, she was just clearly so embarrassed. Nobody made you do that! I mean, what a boring fucking performance.’ She leans into her boyfriend’s arm and bounces at the static shock she receives. ‘Are you trying to jumpstart our relationship?! Have things gotten that bad? I mean, ouch! On a number of levels!’
Someone else says –
‘I saw this guy on the London tube, right, the other day and you know how like, every so often someone sits on someone else by accident, like, the train brakes and they fall and they’re just sitting on top of some little old lady… It happens, yeah… I saw this guy and he fully lay down across a bunch of people and he was just so relaxed – he wasn’t drunk! – he just said “hello, fancy seeing you here” or something like that… It was just brilliant. Then they were all talking!’ Everyone’s waiting for more. ‘It was actually kind of cute.’ They all laugh at Joe’s sudden, inebriated sentimentality.
But Tom is stuck in the half an hour before this, when they were quietly sitting, all faces turned into the centre, all faces focussed and not themselves. It was a time of a great levelling of personas. And a stage of drunkenness that feels exactly like morning sobriety. The glass tumbler moved them to make sentences that navigated the future. Okay, sure … again everyone had dismissed this and grown tired and silly with it. Probably, Tom thought, the rum had started to drag them onwards to less sombre pursuits. But this was an opportunity missed. Tom is thinking about it still, and everyone has moved on. This always seems to be the way with him. It makes his brain violently itchy.
One of the sentences had said: Jerk, you don’t have time for arguments. So, possibly Sam had started that one, but Sam was neither a peacekeeper nor a troublemaker, and not someone concerned with timekeeping either. So, what did that mean? Another phrase that followed soon after that was: Air over fire. Tom tried to determine his astrology sign.
He can still feel the weightlessness of the tumbler even now, how something tugged him, right through to his shoulder socket, to get that message out. He had felt a sudden heat stinging his cheeks. In the centre of Tom’s trance was a faint, pink disappointment at being found unprepared.
***
Marcia’s boyfriend Colin had brought up the Ouija board as a throwaway comment when they were smoking on the school drive in the Thursday frost. Tom didn’t notice he’d become talkative on hearing about Colin’s weird Christmas gift. Merrily holding forth for once, he wondered aloud about the changing place of the occult and of the spirit world in cultures past, how witchcraft might still be a socially useful, if ceremonial, activity. He forgot the normal convention of waiting for a response from his peers.
He’d just bumped into them by accident, and desperately needed a cigarette that morning and had left his pack in another coat at home. Colin knew Tom’s cousin, so Tom stopped, and asked for that universal, quotidian generosity. Can I bum a cig… After the Oujia board was mentioned, the nicotine surged down the top of his shoulders and along his arm hair.
When he lifts the spongey end of the roll-up to inhale, he prides in the pure mountain-white joy of his nail-polished fingertips. Etched with pearlescent shards, next to sooty ash drifts from the burning fag, they make him feel like an exquisitely decaying Miss Haversham.
‘Hey, you know what,’ Marcia had interrupted, wryly amused. ‘We all know you’re talking to the dead most days in your mind anyway. You don’t need a mass-produced game to get yourself off! What you do in your own time, in your own bed…’ She rolled her eyes, letting tobacco embers fall onto passers-by.
But somehow, despite her teases, the box had been retrieved from under Colin’s futon in the attic where that lot often met up to drink. Tom wandered along to join them and they were surprisingly unsurprised. The box came out, not even reluctantly, not even at Tom’s request. It appeared in that beautifully organic way that doesn’t quell the perpetual motion of a good night.
***
Tom was quiet and still. Colin was frowning, thinking, biting his inner lip. Deciding how to begin. You could hear the sound of someone downstairs clattering metal pans. Closer, a stifled giggle.
‘Yep, o-kay. Anyone there?’ Colin announced the question and the glass moved instantly. There was no drama. If anything, it was the same as when the shower head slides down to an inconvenient height, or when you rearrange the fridge magnets and your Post-It notes pile to the floor. Unremarkable but undeniable. The door frame had been wadded with rolled-up T-shirts, but it smelt strongly of cooked eggs in the room.
‘Where are you going?’ Tom whispered to Marcia, haltingly, inquisitively, seeing her muscles contract as she clutched an armrest, ready to stand.
‘No, no, I’ll stay,’ she nodded. She was resolute now. By the time Tom looked back, Sam had already scrawled a stripe of text across his sketchpad. He was marking where he thought the words began and ended with a forward slash. Nobody interfered when he started writing across one of his art class homework assignments, first by accident and then later he made the text climb the watercolour painting with confidence, matching its distressed intensity.
There were five hands on the tumbler, cemented by a thin layer of perspiration. Tom fancied he could tell whose hand was touching his, where and how, without examining the clasp. Tested himself. That was the bottom of Marcia’s bulbous designer ring plugged in between his pinkie and his ring finger. Lib’s thumb was hooked on tight to the underneath of his rough palm, where sometimes it tickled. They all moved together as a hockey puck across ice. Lib had dipped his sleeve in gloopy béchamel from his microwaved tagliatelle.
He’ll wear that again on Monday, Tom thought.
He’ll wear that again on Tuesday, in fact.
Tom had seen him exiting toilet cubicles, head down and sullenly apologetic till his shoulder collided with the waiting mass of Tom. It was an insult and a greeting all in one. This particular evening, Lib rolled up his sleeve, unwittingly drawing attention to the sauce stain. It felt like there could be something slowly winding inside Lib that might spring out and take you away from other people permanently. Something he can’t help, something transcendent: something that would explain the shoulder slam and make it tender.
It’s far too hot in the room, the marijuana is making Tom’s eyes bulge. The paper lampshade is glowing orange and out of control, it makes his hands involuntarily tense.
What if one day we just can’t breathe, he thinks.
Is Libarid okay. Where did he stay over the holidays?
It’s warm but there’s wind rumbling into the room from somewhere and there’s rain on the outside of the windowpane and condensation sandwiching the glass and mould spotted to the apexes of the room. It’s a tropical storm and it’s unhealthy, polluted air. It’s constrained, we can’t live like this.
‘Listen,’ Colin scrawled, whipping the paper around so everyone could see, but they had already concluded the same from moving the glass and so collectively chanted the word with him.
‘Be kind.’
‘Show willing.’
‘Listen,’ Colin repeated. They all repeated the trio as it cycled back around.
Finding space on the paper was getting more and more difficult. Everyone’s chanting became monotonal and chimed a unity into the gathered speakers. The afterlife’s voice was pre-prepared, or else it was on a live loop that you simply needed to tune into. The instructions prescribed endless duplications of similar sentiments. Inarguably reasonable. Un-ghoulish. Later, the messages became testier, had more personality: Tom sometimes thought it must be one unmanageable entity filling every space available and at other times several characters squeezing past each other to speak. One of them, or alternatively, all of it, started to repeat something about the elements.
It moves. From ‘up there’, to sit by Tom’s feet. Its arms wind around its own legs so that its back curves and the bumps in its spine protrude. Its face is swollen and convex, but other parts are anthropomorphic and familiar.
He sees the creature’s body for what it is, has a total confidence in its existence; does not feel alarmed. Listens to the echo in his memory of its words. He hooks his arms around his knees too and brings them in close, lets his eyes rest on the creases in his wrist. Wonders, briefly, if his thoughts are his own, feels like he could expel his whole body and then what would he be? A stranger’s thoughts. Oh, aha, well. He sees an image of the webbing between his own toes, and another of the nape of his neck.
He remembers having a tiny child body, running, flying after his cousin on a coastal jaunt. His hair is salted up straight, a sand dune-inspired Mohican. The cold soon-to-be gale only makes limp dents in the seaside styling, drifting over and away from the boy disinterestedly. It’s vivid now, how much he treasured the fact they discovered a new bird every single trip – or else his father lied about the eclectic range of bird life there – it was unreal to see a novel species each time, impossible. He saw his family then as being forged in the breeze, made real as the birds were unreal: the kids told that that was a rare ‘Silly-Twit’ and another time an unusually coloured ‘Fred’.
The curled-over body by Tom’s feet spreads its arms slowly, feathered-palms down, rough fingers reaching for uplift in the hot room. Something bright surges inside Tom’s chest, it hurts beautifully as a tight embrace. Even though he sees the tumbler knocking into the lettered tiles still, it feels more distantly related to him, impersonal now.
The avian thing is on Tom’s feet, anchoring and insulating him. He can feel the gentle undulations of its breathing. Tom breathes calmly to the same tempo. Wild, velvety hair has depths unseen; Tom’s eyes fall deep into the spirit’s crown of luxurious auburn strands which bend into shoreline waves. Tom knows he is madly, wonderfully alone with this one being, who sees the icy beach day waiting for the appearance of wings. It moves through him and out the other side and then, gone. Yet nothing has changed. Clock, click, clack, the glass moves.
Weighted, Tom leans back with a steadfast assurance. He descends into the uneven terrain of couch cushions, little by little; singing internally – a hum so deep you can’t hear it reverberate – until sound travels up through tight spaces and hollows, and finally billows out the top of his head.
He’s in a place like delicious silk, delicate but tightly and expertly crafted, bespoke, a womb of spun-sugared sleep. Then he’s looking out of a crack in the wood of a fast-moving freight train.
***
The landscape view blurs into streaks, his hands that are gripping the shaking sides are covered in a glowing gel that feels like Deep Heat and looks like a comic-book illustration of a nuclear incident. The softest tissue paper is lining the floor and Tom senses it also touching his arms, the roof of his mouth. A paper petal dissolving in spit. It absorbs his saliva, and somehow his sweat too, leaving him thirsty. Tom explores the length of the carriage and the tissue paper catches and perforates below his feet. He sees that they are heavily calloused, adding a second scratch-scratching noise to the splitting, tearing layers of paper.
Tom finds that the end of the train has come to a stop. The compartment opens out onto a long street, where many people were once gathered and have since disappeared. The tissue paper here is dirty, trodden into pellets by a crowd of bare-footed citizens. Tom hops off to see it clogging the gutters, lie strewn across the empty boulevard alongside scattered sawdust. He hides his lurid hands in his pockets, looking around.
Behind the houses sit grand heaps of what could be sand, or maybe the mounds are built from the sawdust – they are the same dun hue – which rise up into the distance. The moon shines on these dry mountains, so they seem dense but two dimensional. Tom starts to climb a nearby craggy pediment that reaches behind a squat cottage of rough lumber, with carved shutters and scarlet curtains made from linen. He’s so, so tired, but lifting his aching thighs feels easier and easier the higher he climbs. When he looks back down on the town from up high, he can’t see the buildings clearly, but he thinks he can discern tiny, pale, brittle crustaceans crawling over and under each other. A moon hovers close over the mountain crest pooling an oval of luminous turquoise. From this vantage point, the panorama of regular sawdust heaps and identikit moons, over and over repeated, reveals itself.
Underneath his moon he pitches his tent. It proves a difficult job to do solo, and Tom gets frustrated often. But with each phase of irritation comes a refocussing of efforts. He gets lost in the puzzle, forgets embarking from the train, the abandoned town. He locates all the duplicate parts and puts them in tidy corresponding piles. Then he connects the poles to form the skeleton of his temporary home, sliding them through the correct routes stitched into the inner fabric and fitting the ends into holes at the base. He adds a protective outer layer, even though rain looks unlikely. Tom circles the tent, methodically securing the guy lines with pegs. The sawdust underfoot gets more compact as he walks, so that knocking the pegs in makes a harsh, crunching sound. He notices that a week-old layer of dust has settled on the tent. Tom gives it a shake, studying the sky for more debris. He walks backwards to see the completed structure. The canvas sides suck inwards in the breeze, then release. Tired, he unzips the door – that friendly squeak, its pitch oscillating – lies down and rests with his feet hanging on the porch sill.
He knows that Lib is sitting in the corner. He doesn’t look, but sees Lib’s outsized hands and broadening shoulders anyway. Lib is holding a tin of something, shaking it angrily, growling low. It should be ridiculous – someone shaking a tin can, expecting to gain access, feeling rage when not achieving it – but Tom is tangled into Lib.
‘What the fuck is this?’ he exclaims, blowing a dark forelock out of his eyes. ‘I’m serious! Who made this, why is this what I’ve got to deal with? I don’t accept it!’
Tom readjusts so he’s lying on his side, twists his head to look at Lib, reaches out to hold his wrist steady.
‘It’s Heinz Baked Beans. You probably need a tin opener.’
‘I don’t need fucking nothing!’ He shakes the can yet more vigorously. ‘And you’re sitting on my stuff!’ Lib roughly pulls an anorak out from underneath Tom’s hips.
Tom moves backwards to let him take the coat, and bumps his head on a gas burner. Somehow Lib’s knocked the tin circle lid down into the can, so he immediately looks more hopeful. Eyes bright, he moves past Tom to the stove.
‘Excuse me.’
Tom tries to move out of his way again, but this time there’s a rucksack where before he lay resting, and another two bags of Lib’s taking up the space on the other side from the gas burner. Tom exits the tent. Sits down on his haunches and watches Lib make dinner. Despite the debacle with the beans, the tomato aroma is less synthetic than you would expect. There’s rosemary, honey and a more plummy tomato smell drifting from the tent opening. Tom senses chicken too, the skin getting crisp. Lib’s singing to himself, something Armenian, Tom thinks, because he doesn’t understand. It gets loud and boisterous and suddenly a cacophony of knives being sharpened is added to this. The chicken’s about to be carved.
Pleased with this unfolding scene, Tom leaves Lib to his life expanding inside the tent. It will break through the fabric, most likely, and take Lib and his culinary offerings elsewhere. Find him a buzzing place.
The blue pool left by the moon is still, surprisingly, just as glistening and vibrant as earlier. Standing at its edge, Tom discards his clothes. He reaches and dives for the light-ocean, becomes submerged. Every splash he makes sends a burst of froth up and around him that lingers, fizzing before it melts into the depths. He works to make each side of his crawl smoother, hands flipping at the zenith of each arc and slicing expertly down again. Each cell of his body thrills in the cool light-water as he swims to the centre, collecting goosebumps. So that he can see the mountains all around, he switches to breaststroke, gliding and at ease but feeling the dim weight of his body. He turns to look up at his moon; sees how it’s etched with pearlescent shards that sparkle and wink. Though he will wake to join the others, he won’t quite remember the dream till the morning. In the pool, he rolls, stretches into star shapes; sniffs eggs, rum, weed and panic on the breeze.