Pulp Crime
“A quiet word in your ear,” he said. Almost a stranger, I still thought I knew him better than most.
He brushed my cheek with that grizzled mask of his as if to kiss my ear: and I felt something cold and slimy slip inside; slimy yet hard and set in shape. I fully expected it to be withdrawn as soon as he relaxed back into the coach seat next to mine. However, as he turned away with his attention wrapped in a newspaper that had just appeared, it seemed, in his lap, I sensed the object still lodged in my hearing chamber; louder now, because the quiet word he’d spoken was gaining in confidence; whistling or throbbing now with some staccato bravado; not exactly strident, but relentlessly static in a radio’s mistuning sense. It squirmed. Or I imagined it squirming, because there was no feeling of movement within my ear. Just a cold whine.
I watched him watching the landscape urgently fleeing towards our destination. As if it knew we were late. The coach window however did not help, being steamed up. He dropped the newspaper to the floor where it sat among all the other detritus of a journey. The words were spoken for me. I don’t usually describe a common coach trip with anything like such over the top tactiles of speech. I even found myself mis-using words I’d never heard of before. Staccato was not a usual inhabitant of the tip of my tongue, given even the most fluid spontaneity of a dream-like state. I was usually leadenly tongue-tied; wooden like a wooden actor who’d not only lost every cue-line but corpsed at every opportunity.
I was laughing, too. Johnny – I recall his name now – was infected by the hum of humour. A motorised thrumming that made the wheels part of our own bodies, with eventual belly-laughs or outright black comedy tights instead of skin. He was a surly man at the best of times, and even on honeymoon, he’d forgotten to shave as well as to whisper sweet nothings in my ear. I’d fallen out of love with him, even before I’d met him. The coach trip was the final straw. Strange how one can be slid into concertina situations without even realising one had stepped on the skid-row in the first place. I recalled his mother. A bat with huge butterfly wings and a veil that solved many problems of incipient ugliness. My own mother was a picture, by comparison, a canalscape by Canaletto, if you could examine the many tiny faces with a microscope, in search of the beauty that most resembled her.
By now, no amount of counteractive thinking in slipstream or slowmotion retrenchment of a personality I thought I’d started the day with could deflect me from thinking of the creature in my ear. I feared it would eat my brain. I’d suffered travel sickness in a coach before. I saw Johnny reaching for the bowl we’d brought in case of any eventuality of emission or evacuation: a green tupperware one which gave plenty of splatter grace, should I vomit in cinemascope. Canaletto would have made a great film director, I guess. I felt more like one of Bacon’s screaming popes, though, at the moment.
The coach pulled into the terminus, having decided the driver was past his sleepover limits; yet the bus station was very little different from the interminable mountainless sameness of hard highway shoulders we’d just transgressed with our overheated minds. A lay-by, then, not the Hotel called Heaven we’d hoped to reach. The cold pellet – it used several words for itself like pessary, egg, chrysalis, enema – had also reached its own dubious destination. Like a bullet. Suicide or murder. The police spent little more than days investigating. There was nobody accompanying the poor woman on the coach, the window seat having been left vacant or, rather, bestrewn with the pathetic leavings of a life. Magazines open at pages about rich people, exclusive wedding photographs, starlets in their natural setting, beefcakes dripping in diamonds.
The driver could not help. Gave his name as Johnny something or other. Nor were the eye witness reports of the other passengers at all reliable. Many had already alighted at various way stations or outposts along the way. The rest sported ear-plugs for ease of dozing. What remained certain was the wide-screen vista of life’s journey with its manifold crimes – accidents of intention and misdetection that never reached all those discarded newspapers before becoming mountains of pulp.
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