White and Other Tales of Ruin

The buildings fell back to reveal a small, shaded park, so boxed in by facades that only a weak, pale green grass grew. Hidden from the sun most of the time, the park was home to escaped pets and carrion birds. Tom had been here before but only once, and only at night. The sights he had seen had chased him away, the gutted dogs and bloated crows too fat to fly, too big and mean to tackle. Here was evolution aggravated and progress tainted.

Now, during the day, it was home to people having fun. They danced and jigged and laughed, and Tom tried to shrink into himself and move away quietly until he saw what the people were watching.

Here was the finger-puppet man.

He sat cross-legged on the ground beside the stump of a long-dead tree. Before him was a wooden box, about the size and shape of a coffin. Along the length of the coffin, back and forth, up and down, danced the most fluid and lifelike puppets Tom had ever seen. They captivated him from that instant, drawing him into the crowd, pulling him through to the front, between hard shoulders and muttered curses from those he shoved aside. His view was better here, and all the more amazing for that.

The Chinaman sitting behind the box was impassive, expressionless. The only sign that he was even awake was the subtle twitching of his cheeks as his eyes shifted left and right to follow his finger performers. It looked for all the world as if the puppets were controlling the man, not the other way around.

Tom looked closely at their carved wooden faces, and he was sure he saw smiles directed at him.

A clock struck one o’clock somewhere unseen, and he realised suddenly that he had somewhere else to be.

He walked around the shaded park twice before he saw the sign for Ashley Street. It was a lane rather than a street, and an alley more than a lane, home to a few squat fast-food shops, a couple of porn palaces and a chop shop that stank of blood and desperation. A couple of its regular clients hung around outside, bad advertising if ever Tom had seen it: the woman had no nose or eyelids, but bled profusely out of open veins above her eye sockets; the man displayed his mutilated genitalia, balls the size of footballs and a dick like a joint of uncooked pork.

“Need something doing?” the man asked.

“Leave him, he’s a fake,” the woman said, dismissing Tom with a bloody glare.

“Doesn’t look like one.”

Tom walked by, feeling their pained eyes on his back. They were wondering what he had, he knew. Secretly craving a look beneath his skin and flesh. Well.. they’d be surprised. In a way he too was chopped. The Baker had seen to that.

He passed Hell’s Bookshop and found the alley Honey had mentioned. Its walls were so close together that Tom’s arms brushed them as he made his way along, stepping over a vagrant who may have been dead. Before him — the shadow at the end of the alley, a great wall of black concrete pointing at the pink sun — stood the whorehouse.

Tom was amazed to find the back door open. It wasn’t as if such a salubrious establishment needed a rear entrance for shady patrons.

As he opened the door and a flush of smells came out at him — the tang of sex, old greasy cooking, smoke, drugs, the sparkle of ozone from an illegal charger somewhere — he realised that he had not yet seen Hot Chocolate Bob.

Not out on the street, working his patch.

Not down in the dead park watching the incredible puppeteer.

Which meant, very likely, that he was inside.

Tom closed the door behind him, but he made sure he knew where the handle was.

He thought he could remember where to find Honey’s room. It was on the third floor, facing out onto the street. He hurried along the dark corridor, stepping on things that cracked or snapped and, in one case, squealed. He tried not to look down because he didn’t want to see, didn’t want anything to mar this moment, this occasion when he would do the most valiant thing of his life: rescue his love from the purgatory she had been created for, and which she endured still. Why she endured it he did not know. It was something he may ask her … one day.

He reached the stairs and quickly moved up towards the third floor. At each landing he sensed doors opening around him; just a crack, wide enough for the inhabitants to see out. A couple of times he heard a relieved sigh when they saw him walk past.

There were many sounds permeating the air, turning the dank stairwell into an echo-chamber for the whole building. A blasting television here, a whining drill there, the screams of a child from far along one refuse-strewn corridor, the grunting of sex, a soft mumble somewhere else, as if someone was trying to talk themselves out of this hellhole. And smells as well, even worse than those that had hit him upon opening the door. Shit, piss, cabbage, saliva, rotten food, death, spunk, cordite, smoke, drugs … very little good, hardly any sweet. Neither belonged here.

Honey was both, and her time in this place was now numbered in minutes.