Klaxon City (part two)

Greg lived with Beth in London, but they also had a beach hut at Clacton on the coast about 90 minutes’ trainride from Liverpool Street station. They were an ordinary couple, unmarried and childless. Yet nobody made that judgement about them, because nobody knew enough about them to warrant such a view. Greg thought he was ordinary. He worked in Waste Management as a lorry-driver. Beth thought she wasn’t ordinary at all. She was indeed ordinary, if in that thought alone. Both were malleable, but one of them fought against being malleable, and each thought the other to be the one fighting that particular fight. One of them was right.

If they thought about it at all.

Beth worked in Klaxon City – an amusement arcade near Soho – a sight better-class than the arcades in Clacton, where saucy hats and bingo were more the rage. In Beth’s arcade of work, there were high-prize jackpot fruit machines as well as mock-casino games with real tellers. Robot croupiers were not too far-fetched in the sort of computerised world that amusement arcades had now entered, following the miniaturization of machines everywhere – even in Clacton. So there were tellers who handed out chips and made masquerade of gambles being unforethought … mingling with robots who smiled wickedly, giving the punters confidence that all was random, because how could thinking machines not deliver the chance one always seeks in life: the pure chance? Only humanity snags the wheels of chance, with their intentions and misintentions of subconscious thought.

Many fought against thought.

Beth was one who fought against thought. She just dreamed of that ultimate chance where she could safely say that she was full of unmixed happiness. A dream she forgot immediately she woke up from it, although sleep was not the necessary prerequisite for thus dreaming. Not a sought happiness, because that always failed. But a found happiness. One that simply enveloped one, given the lack of forethought or ambition that the very act of seeking it would have entailed, given self-consciousness: a self-consciousness that women of Beth’s ilk luckily lacked. Meanwhile, she simply plugged on. A pretty face neatly sunk on skullbone.

A plug makes things work. An electric plug. A bath plug. A rawl-plug. Even an advertising plug. The latter made a name into a catchword and the circling businessmen would cause manufacture of anything to match the catchword and made it work in tune with the catchword’s neatly fitting its round peg in a round hole whilst making square holes of us all, without us noticing.

In modern screen drama there are swishes of sound to alleviate the changes of scene, large noisy tractions of vision that overwhelm the quiet reflective scene with an abruptness that life never really has in retrospect: all misery is gradual, such as lives are gradual, never fast-changing, even if one can destroy a marriage with one simple act, but it takes days, often, to percolate and reveal its repercussions. Never in drama. Never in fiction. We need the swish of the curtain. A single alert. A sudden siren set off to indicate a change of scene, a change of dream. A false plug. Where amusement is taken from not knowing where things were or who people thought they were.

****
The man juddering with a Klaxon City joystick told me that The Plug was his real name.

"You heard what in the dark?" I asked.

"Voices."

The one word answer which The Plug had given me failed to explain why he had opened the conversation with a non-sequitur about hearing things in the dark. That day I had actually spoken with The Plug; previously I had just eyed him in the corner as he spun the fruits just like one of the unemployed, which, by the law of averages, he probably was. Although he failed to recognise me, I knew we had met before in the dim and distant past. There was no mistaking those two stitched scars that met on his forehead like tug-of-war teams, missing his eyes by a hair's breadth.

He was not alone. Beside him at the Fruit Machine, there stood someone he called The Wife – a meek and mild looking woman with a penchant for floral head-scarves and coats too long for the rest of her. A pointy face with seeking eyes. And, if not exactly a humpback, she did appear as if surgery had stuffed things inside, instead of removing them. As for The Plug, he had not changed much since those days when we both worked in Pensions for an Insurance Company – he a charmless office clerk and me, well, did it matter? I assumed the Plug had continued working there after my own departure – but probably possessing more useful administration experience than they had the resources to exploit, he had no doubt been abandoned in the lay-by on the great trunk road to Business Heaven. Matter over mind, I often said.

I could not recall his name from those heady office days, when grey was the only colour and time didn't seem to pass so much as fleet by like an immoveable rock. So when I introduced myself as the person to whom he used to assist, The Plug merely said:

"I could only hear them in the dark."

"You heard what – only in the dark?"

"Voices."

The strange conversation repeated itself in my memory many times.

"What voices?"

"Haven't we met before?" he asked, pointedly ignoring my own question as well as the introduction I had previously made regarding our past acquaintanceship. His body was swollen to the seams and I wondered whether his flesh had met a diet head on and won hands down.

"Yes, as I said, weren't you at...?" I asked.

"Yes, I was there."

"You did back-up for me."

"I could only hear them in the dark."

"Voices, did you say?"

"Yes, voices. Nightmarish ones with words on edge like blades."

"What was your name?"

"My name is The Plug."

I smiled at The Wife, who was staring down at her bare share of the gambling-chips. I suppose I was sympathising with her lot in life with such a smile.

"Me and her, we got married so that we could live – how you call it? – together."

I couldn't imagine how they had ever decided to do this, unless it had been utter inertia – which probably meant they had always lived together for longer than either could remember. A dead-end marriage ... dead at both ends.

What happened next was a matter of record. I was seen following them out of Klaxon City and, even by my own evidence, The Plug had invited me to his home which, he said, was only a few roads away in the Clacton backstreets. The time was 3.30 pm and the evening was closing in with winter darkness. A sense of a seaside’s suicide at the end of each season. The Wife did not exactly accompany either of us – merely leading us ... in Indian File.

"When it gets dark, I can hear..."

He left me to continue his sentence as if we were part of a stage play where cues were the currency of exchange. I shook my head, denying all knowledge of the next line. We passed the end of the pier. The house itself was more distant than 'a few roads away'. I felt 'a bus-ride away' was the least of it: several red ones passing us in either direction as we paced the salty pavements. Eventually, however, we reached what I could only describe as a chalet bungalow-house, one with dark yellow stucco walls – and pointed roofs more in keeping with a larger establishment.

The Wife unlocked the front door from inside a huge porch. It eventually opened with a groan, after she had seemingly tried every key on her ring before hitting upon the correct one. The hallway, beyond the door, looked more inviting than the pursuing darkness outside, if only because it hid its own personality with wall mirrors. Indeed, I was soon ensconced upon a sofa, having been ushered into a room that The Plug called The Parlor (the American spelling, he insisted). The English chintziness, when combined with the American East Coast memorabilia and Wild West knickknacks, made me feel more at home ... being a man of no place myself.

I sank into the sofa as if it were a warm bath. I had been armed with a cup of tea and a toasted muffin. The Wife had quickly prepared these comestibles – quicker, indeed, than time allowed, especially as the kitchen's noise of clinking crockery and clanging pans seemed to come from a distant outhouse or, even, cellar ... perhaps an attic, give or take the odd sense of direction on my part.

The Plug switched on a wireless – one of those heavily-valved beasts with a glowing console – and he tuned in, with some difficulty, judging by the whining and screaming of static, a programme playing old Charleston dance music. Despite its evident age, the beast must have run on batteries as I could see no tell-tale flex coiling from it to the skirting-board. The wireless played, indeed, with an autonomy quite distinct from any back-up of broadcasting – a local radio station so local it sounded designed simply for The Parlor. I can't say I was impressed with the wife's dancing to it, her slow hands moving from knee to knee: a sluggish jerking that the Twenties had remaindered for the present.

After being taken inside the house, there were no further witnesses to my movements, nor to those of The Plug and The Wife – so the rest was hearsay. If memory was the only determinant, then they took me down some stone steps for a torch-lit visit to their cellar which had in fact been converted into a dark kitchen. If in retrospect, I was simply asking for trouble. A bungalow-house with a cellar? Seemed too improbable to be safe. Alarm bells rang in my head, but I ignored them. I risked becoming yet another missing corpse, another human gap in the ongoing history of existence's entries and exits ... buried forever beneath their cellar floor. But no – they were nice as pie, both of them.

"We keep the cooking things out of the way down here," announced The Plug. The Wife, as if to prove the truth of the matter, proceeded to fill a kettle with water from a rattling old tap – a tap which had evidently served other purposes many years before when cellars were truly cellars. The cellar's personality, however, could not be concealed by the greasy cooker, visible only by its own gaslight – the hastily put-together cupboard Units from Texas – the giant hummming fridge smothered with scrawled post-its – and the bottles of wine in their laying-down racks returning us full circle to the dank, lugubrious cellar, one that literally screamed out for cobwebs and a silence more in keeping with something called The Cellar.

The Plug waved his torch around and said:

"The voices are always here ... cos it's always dark."

"I can't hear anything but the kettle boiling."

If non-sequiturs could speak with their own voice, then one did: using The Plug's mouth as a medium:

"The Wife and I try to make pension schemes unnecessary."

There was an unnecessary stress on the last word, because I could see exactly what was meant. The wine bottles, pointing from their racks, were corked with human thumbs, nail-ends outward. I had already, with some stealth, pressed the pad of my own thumb against one of them to see if my eyes deceived me – and, yes, there was a pliable stiffness that only old fleshy stubs upon a bed of flattened bone could provide.

I winced, knowing that my fears of my host's madness were fast becoming substantiated. I did not want to show such fears, however, as I would become yet one more statistic for later generations to make a hue and cry about when mine and others' remains were discovered in these very premises. I had to be cool. Just like The Cellar. Cool and inscrutable.

I continued conversing with The Plug as if I hadn't heard his comment about pension schemes.

"Food keeps nice down here, even without a fridge," I suggested.

He nodded and responded with the merest throwaway line:

"Vermin and pests and insects steer clear of The Cellar, cos they don't think there's anything to eat – only an old mangle, they think, or trunks of clothes, disused things of all sorts ... like in other cellars."

He was trying, for my satisfaction, to reconcile the presence of the untouched food I saw all around me. He nodded again – non-commitally. He shrugged and torched me into a neighbouring room. The Cellar had indeed been partitioned to provide two spaces. I was not surprised to find that the second one was a bathroom – of sorts. I wondered who had managed to plumb pipes this far into the foundations, but The Plug demonstrated the shower device which aimed down into what seemed to be a double bath. The water-spray, although making various splutters, seemed to work well enough.

"I get fed up with showers," said The Plug, "cos there's nothing like a long hot soak..."

And he pointed to the huge enamel pit that I had mistaken for a domestic bath. Well, it was a bath. Probably, The Bath. The Platonic Form of Bath – one of which Heaven or, more likely, Hell would be proud.

"I agree," I said. "You can't get the scales off under a mere sprinkle." I should not have been shocked at the way my laughter echoed more than in a normal bathroom. It was as if The Cellar itself laughed, laughed back at me, louder and louder...

"Step inside it – see how roomy it is," offered The Plug, a smile playing round his lips. The torchlit tongue twirled a red rubbery hula-hoop. The Wife could be heard clunking in the nearby kitchen – talking to herself – or to the cellar wall, like Shirley Valentine. The words were too empty to mean anything. Meanwhile, I tentatively stepped over The Bath's rim and into the deep body-length crevasse. Either I had a death-wish or I still believed The Plug to be decent at heart. We had worked together, after all – in an Insurance Company.

Either he forced me to take all my clothes off or I decided to do it anyway from some misplaced exhibitionism. I nodded towards the gold fittings at one end of The Bath – its jewellery, as it were, shown off to the fullest effect in torchlight. They were over-large mixer-taps which I wondered whether he was going to turn on for my soak.

"There's no..." He indicated the plug-hole.

No stopper. No cork. No plug. I nearly said it for him. Yet I hesitated. I would only be playing into his hands, if I went along with the natural cue-line. The Wife entered the bathroom section of The Cellar, wielding a knife that would, on better days, have been used to carve huge Sunday joints. The blade winked wickedly. The House shivered in anticipation, unless it had been merely an underground train. And memory was haunted with the strangest people.

"Once seen, sawn off," said one flourish of their blade's slick snicker, as The Wife and The Knife did their work. And the missing plug for the bath had been solved in one fell swoop – followed by a hot, soothing soak without recourse to the taps. And death was the final witness. The Death.

****
The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.

(KLAXON CITY continued here: part three)

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