Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

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СКАЧАТЬ right, Clive, all right. Sit yourself down and stop making a holy show, will you? The cold is getting to all of us.’

      ***

      He made it as far as the subway station. He was under no illusions about any of this. He waited by the steps, in front of the MTA booth, where it was said that you should wait for safety’s sake, where behind a pane of glass smeared with scratches a beautiful young woman was absorbed in a magazine. The station was not busy with people. A teenaged boy was spinning a girl around by her haversack and the girl was screaming because she was coming close to the edge of the platform. Three youths watched with awe and amusement something on the track. Beside him a woman and her ward pulled at cords of liquorice from a paper bag. The announcer said a downtown local train was two stations away. The commuters gathered themselves. He moved off the steps and to the white line and stared into the ribbed gullet of the tunnel. Choo choo, he said.

      One station along, at 59th Street, a large crowd squeezed its way on to the train. His carriage filled up with huge shopping bags stuffed with duvets. There was a collective release of breath, and here and there laughter broke out. He looked along all the people on the side opposite him, then he leaned forward to look at the people on his own side. There was no reason to believe that the man in the trench coat had got on at 59th Street. Why not just have done with it further up, out in the open, on the street? He could have caught up with him if he’d wanted to, on 72nd Street, or on Lexington. That said, somewhere between Madison and Lexington he had seemed to lose the man. He most definitely had followed him out of the park, he was sure, but then somewhere on the street he had gone, perhaps ducking into an apartment-block lobby, or crouching in the flower beds in the middle of Park Avenue.

      Or hopping into a taxi. Most likely. Most evidently. This was exactly what he had done: at the other end of the carriage a door opened to a gush of hissing and grinding and slammed shut again. The man stood still for a moment, as if decompressing, or as if preparing to make an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, a few words about safety. It was comical, almost. The enemy/the envoy. Chewing-gum trench coat and trilby, or homburg. Now he was moving again, all deference, tipping his hat to the woman whose bags were blocking his way.

      He sat diagonally opposite Clive, twenty feet away, in clear sight. Nothing was in the section of aisle between them except duvets, folded in quarters. He opened the top buttons of his coat to show a sliver of mould-blue sweater, took off his hat and placed it on his lap. So this was the creature who had staked him out in the Boathouse, had pursued him using all means at his disposal. This physical – yes, physical, Clive was surprised to note – specimen. Thin on top; wispy strands of red backcombed hair clinging damply to the sides of his head. A colour to his skin. It was not quite a high colour and not quite a tan. He had the complexion of a hearing aid, and almost the glaze: something other than blood coursed through his veins. His head turned slowly in Clive’s direction as if on an oiled track, his face set in palsied neutrality. His eyes were watered-down green; they stared into Clive’s, looked through him, to say, ‘There – we are going to there.’ Behind him a poster read: SNUGGLE UP TO APPLEDORN’S HALF-PRICE DUVET SALE. Any second Clive expected the train to derail in a shower of white sparks and feathers.

      They pulled into 23rd Street, one station from home. He would make his exit here. He waited until all who were standing had disembarked and then he sprang from his seat with as much suddenness as he could muster. The doors snapped behind him, nearly catching his coat. But he was safely on the platform, out and away. But – there was the man ahead, stepping out from the other end of the carriage without a glance behind, going now with the main flow of people, but proceeding slowly, with deliberation. The back of his neck glared. The skin looked painted on, like the skin on his face – resin on an invisible surface. Once, when Clive was a tall young girl, his brother had attacked the neck of a football hero with a rod because he had disgusted him, he said. The thought came to him now. He could attack the man’s neck, cut off whatever was feeding the brain. He could ram it with his elbow, then hand himself over to the law. They might be lenient, if he came clean, told them everything, every detail, right from the start.

      Some people were moving against the main current, walking in the direction opposite to the way Clive was facing. They were heading for another exit, behind him. He went with this movement, flipped around, and hurried up the stairs. On the concourse above he was presented with a choice – a choice and a man playing ‘Rest, My Woolly Wolfhound’ on a saxophone. As he hurried up the steps for 22nd and Park he found himself transported. He thought of the pale cone of Errigal and the honeyed scent of gorse. And he thought that if souls and bodies with them could be transported they would have him where they wanted him, and they would surface with bronze hurls from the prickles, but they would not get their milk because he did not have diddies and they would be even angrier.

      ***

      When he first emerged into New York he was still a young woman. Her name was awkward bony Jean Dotsy and her introduction to city life had been a Dublin of livestock sales and Swastika Laundry vans. In New York she had woken into a dream and for a while she experienced a golden time because the city was a place where she could lose herself and at the same time she knew it would tell her everything about herself that she wanted to know. She had for a long time known that she was a woman who loved other women but now she said it to herself and it felt like both the making of her and a declaration. Back in Dublin she was known as an independent girl but in New York she had another word – variant. She was a variant. She got the word from a kind of manifesto in a magazine that another woman who was also a variant had given her. Perhaps she had been magnetically attracted to this woman sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park or perhaps she was simply tired on that day, her first in New York, and had wanted just to observe the assembly of variants who were all gathered to march in support of basic rights for black people. The woman on the bench scribbled down the address of a restaurant where later the variants on the march were meeting. But Jean did not want to promise anything and she was naturally suspicious of being part of groups she did not know much about. And the wet creamy gravel of Washington Square Park patted under her feet in a paste like peanut butter and she had so many things she wanted to experience so soon: peanut butter and Times Square and jelly and jazz and Chew-butter Cracknells and the fish market and the Jews and the diamond sellers.

      Of course she was so tired by that evening that she needed somewhere to sit down or where she could put up her feet. She was not prepared to go back to the hostel just yet, for the previous hours had given her a feeling for and a faith in the community of people. Everywhere was the sense of people exaggerating simple actions for spectacle. The city felt like a film – she recognised the fire escapes from the films, and the way the women walked with a waddle while pulling fabric taut over one shoulder – and as long as the days resolved themselves calmly she could leave aside the fear that had brought her here and could, indeed, be encouraged by the initiative she had shown in coming. They were golden days, those first in New York, when so much was happening in society and music and such and such and such. More recent decades had been drab, which was why everyone was secretly thankful for terrible news events so that they could feel there was excitement and meaning to their days and they could say later: I lived through those times.

      But hers were golden times.

      He codded himself in telling himself this. Hers were times that were given to her by her pursuers and they would want them back. They had given her back her life and she had wriggled her way out of a bargain.

      ***

      There was a trick, there was a trick, to giving him the slip. The important thing was not to be forced by the pattern of the streets. He circled a block and doubled back. He made to cross an avenue, stopped in the middle, and doubled back. He said to himself that he must make his own trails and defy this logic superimposed on ancient lines. In New York people moved in the channels or lay spent in the shadows. He hobbled through gloomy arcades in already gloomy streets: scaffolding had sprouted everywhere. On 19th Street he felt the leer of stone carvings, hideous СКАЧАТЬ