Decay Inevitable

“Now then,” she purred, leaning over to kiss Will’s cheek with her bloody mouth. “Come back to my place.”

“I saved your life, Sadie. I came after you when you went missing.”

“Pah.” Sadie dismissed the claim with a flap of her hand. “I was prospecting for a mate. You were strong and resourceful. And your arse looks good in jeans. Now. Home.”

He could hardly object, not when two of the bouncers moved behind him, casting long, long shadows across the bar.

“Meet Kynaston and Drinkwater,” Sadie said. “Evil bastards the both of them.” The two bouncers saluted him.

Joanna murmured as they brushed past her.

“Who’s this?” Sadie asked. “Got some competition, have I?”

Will said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Sadie smiled. She reached out and flicked the end of his nose. Her fingers smelled of cold, old things. She nodded at one of the bouncers. “She’ll do. Take her.”

THEY WALKED THROUGH the seething streets, but nobody jostled them. Bodies parted in Sadie’s path as though she and the oncoming throng were repelling magnets. Eventually, the strip clubs and dive bars and street corners haunted by junkies dwindled. The traffic shook off its insanity. Will followed Sadie along a series of ever-narrowing corridors in a mangled spread of housing that seemed to have been jammed together like ill-fitting Sticklebricks in a child’s playpen. Flues and drainpipes, vents and fire escapes clung to the superstructure, little more than add-ons or afterthoughts. Some people were on the fire escapes, drinking tea or watching the stars or fucking. Cardboard boxes, tarps and plastic sheeting had been arranged on some of the landings, makeshift houses for the wretches who couldn’t find themselves a toehold. Will wondered about them, what their lives beyond coma must be like. So-called lives.

It grew so dark in the rabbit warren that Will had to listen out for the sluicing of the foetus in its membrane. At least, in here, he didn’t have to look at it. Nevertheless, his mind settled upon the developing child, and he imagined it rotating in its vital jelly, watching him as he followed Sadie through passageways so thin he could feel the cement of the walls muscling in against him. He smelled Juicy Fruit on the breath of the bouncers marching behind him, and when he looked back he could just see a reflected gleam off the insectile lenses of their sunglasses. They walked until they came to a set of storm doors set into the floor, at a point where the walls actually converged. All around them, lifting into the night, were sheer edifices of urbanity: greasy windows filled with dirty yellow light, a jungle of satellite dishes and TV aerials, telegraph wires, and cables. Will saw figures using these as a monkey might use a vine in a rainforest. It seemed a safer option than using the streets. As if in confirmation of this, the rooftop horizons were spoiled by the shape of tents and bivouacs.

Kynaston pushed past Will and grappled with the storm doors. Sadie descended, but paused when half of her body had disappeared to look back at Will.

“Welcome to my palace,” she said.

SHE SAID, “I need you.”

He knew he ought to be impressed by what she said, and at some level he knew he was, but for the time being his eyes were too busy to allow anything else to bother him. They kept returning, despite the opulence of the surroundings, to the head on the stage behind him. One of the eyes was only half-shut, as if trying to trick people into thinking it belonged to a dead person. At any moment, the mouth seemed as if it might open and sing-song: “Fooled you!” The head had begun to shrink, and the skin had tightened into an arid mask, but the hair was still lustrous, the thing that helped Will identify it as belonging to Elisabeth.

Sadie’s palace had turned out to be an underground theatre that had been gutted by fire. Seated in the auditorium, either slumped with decay into the burned seats or erect with rigor mortis, death grins, and clenched fists, corpses blankly contemplated the stage with its craters and its mountains of ash. Joanna had been draped across the laps of one of these bodies. Her arm was around its shoulders. She twitched in sleep and nuzzled up against its puffball throat. Up in the gods, bodies twirled slackly on ropes, swollen necks bent bonelessly over the slipknots.

Whatever fire had scoured clean the theatre had done for the curtains too. Immense runners hinted at their extravagance; Will could almost imagine a great weight of maroon velvet and gold brocade sweeping across the stage to consume the players. He could almost hear the clamour of the ovation, the hands blurring as they clapped beneath the smoky floods. The flowers. He could taste, behind the coarse, carbonated bones of the theatre, the electric clash of sweat and nervous excitement. He clung to those ghosts. Knowing they had been real once helped him to cope with the atrocity that had been visited upon Elisabeth and the madness that was devouring Sadie’s mind.