Banjo felt like he was floating, tethered to the ground only by the grip of his captor’s hand.
The door he stood before was old, scarred, and weathered, as if it had been kept outside for decades rather than inside this room. The ancient paint was peeling like scabs; the heavy grain of the wood looked like burst veins and capillaries.
“Step inside and become something else, something more than human wastage.” Monty Bright stepped back, prodding Banjo gently in the small of the back. Bright didn’t touch the handle, but the door began to open. It moved smoothly, without a sound, and Banjo stared at the ribbon of darkness that grew between door and frame, becoming a black wedge.
“Go on, now. Let’s get this done, son. Let’s get this show on the road. The fucking road to nowhere.” Bright’s voice, along with his accompanying laughter, sounded as if it was reaching him from a great distance.
Banjo stepped into the welcoming darkness and felt the last vestiges of his old fear leave him as the door closed behind him. He thought of his mother, and the way she had wasted her life on drink, her own drug of choice; he remembered his father, turning away and leaving them all behind; he recalled fondly the touch of his baby sister’s hand, the night she had died of pneumonia in hospital. None of these memories upset him — they were like pictures on television, scenes from the videos he used to love. He was free of them now; this room he had walked into, and the drugs, had cut him off from harm.
Banjo walked to the centre of the room, his eyesight now growing accustomed to the darkness. The ground was soft, like mud, and the walls seemed to writhe at the corner of his vision. Soon he realised that he was surrounded.
He stood at the centre of a number of televisions. Each of them was an old model — some of them must have dated back to the early days of the technology. Big dusty screens stared blindly in his direction; dead cables trailed behind bulky sets; large buttons and dials were like mutations on the shells of these machines.
At one level he was aware that there must be something here, for him to see, but at another level, where he stood apart from the scene, he knew that he was so wasted that he could be looking at a bunch of cardboard boxes and moulding the image to suit his mood.
Banjo kneeled on the soft ground. He was not sure why, it just felt right, like an act of communion. His entire life had been spent in thrall to these things as they pumped out images and lifestyle choices, so why not worship them now, in a dark underground room that felt so much like a church?
He bowed his head just as the screens came to life.
One after another, in quick succession around him, forming a crude circle of brightness, the screens flared, bathing him in their holy light. Dust swam before his eyes, giving the illusion that he was underwater. The television sets throbbed, a cathode-ray heartbeat, and he watched as pictures began to form from the static. It was like birth: difficult, painful. The forms bucked and writhed, twitched and jerked, and the screens bulged outwards as the figures took shape.
Drug-demons: nightmares snatched from inside his head. He watched them with a sense of wonder.
They were small and they were naked. Their skin was the colour of static; their eyes the grey of the dusty concrete that had surrounded him his entire life. They emerged like grubs from the television sets, their substance formed of the material of the screens as well as the nebulous static and the ghost of the heroin in Banjo’s blood. They left behind their empty TV shells as they rolled away, their legs lengthening in sudden thrusts. The fronts of the television sets looked like a series of kicked-in faces. The things that had hatched from these wounds lay curled on the ground before them, twitching occasionally; sleeping dogs dreaming of the chase.
Then, simultaneously, they sprung up from the ground and stood erect, uncurling swiftly and almost mechanically. They stood before their televisual eggs, rocking back and forth, torsos without arms, long, back-folded insect legs lacking a midriff, flat, featureless heads unsupported by anything even resembling a neck.
Their concrete-grey eyes were big and square and blank. Their mouths were just stretched ragged holes, lacking teeth or gums. They were tubes, those mouths, and Banjo didn’t want to see where they ended. He raised his hands to these new gods, these entities sired by the great glass tit of television, and opened his mouth to pray or question or perhaps just to scream. His drugs high had reached a new plateau: never before had his dreams become flesh.
They were upon him within seconds, flowing through the space like a rogue signal, moving in the syncopated jinks and jerks caused by a faulty transmission. Banjo felt his cheeks expand as his mouth was filled with their flexible tubes. He tasted burnt copper and charred wires. He felt pregnant with emptiness. Then, without warning, the effects of the drugs abated. Banjo’s fear resurfaced, finding a way back inside the crowded schedule of his TV- learned emotions, and he felt the channel inside his head change forever.
PART TWO
People Under the Influence
“Self-delusion is often just another coping mechanism.”
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS EARLY morning and Tom was running again.
He had no idea why he was here, skirting the edge of the Grove, but he knew that he had come to some kind of decision. He ran at a steady pace — jogging really — and tried to give himself time to think about what he was doing. Last night had been a tipping point, where he had been forced to confront a truth he had hidden for years. He did not like the man he was becoming — betrayal was not something that came easy to him — but this constant mask-wearing was taking its toll and he was rotting away inside.
Tom had not loved Helen for so long now that he could not even remember when his feelings towards her had changed. Even before she had been injured by That Man, his emotions had confused him. They had grown apart steadily, without any major problems causing clean fractures in their relationship, and the result of this gradually increasing distance was that when she went into hospital he was almost relieved to be alone.
His shame at these feelings had forced him to bury the truth, to smother it under layers of forced emotion: duty, empathy, a sense of needing to do the right thing by his wife. Her injuries — her lower-body paralysis and resultant emotional neediness — had served to distract him, and also given him a reason to carry on pretending that he still loved her. Even though she had transformed into the likeness of an aquatic mammal before his eyes.
He thought of this now, as he padded along the pavement. On the surface, he had no idea where he was heading. But underneath, where his real emotions lay, he knew that he was running towards Lana Fraser, and the promise of salvation he had glimpsed so briefly behind her dark eyes.
Last night, as he’d sat in his car watching her flat, wishing that he could spot her silhouette at the window, he had crossed some kind of invisible border. He felt that he had travelled far, and under false pretences, to reach this place, and now that he had arrived he could no longer wear the lies in which he wrapped himself like a second skin. He had shed that skin and beneath its rotting layer had been a brand new being, a man who accepted his own needs and the fact that they had not been met for such a long time.
Before he knew it he was running along Grove Drive, past the tract of waste ground where derelict factories stood like the repositories of nightmares. Small fires burnt across the bare earth, smouldering and sending up black plumes into the pale blue sky. Someone was incinerating old tyres. A thin man walked between his private pyres, prodding them with a long stick. Tom paused by the fence, staring through the railings, and watched the figure as he traipsed back and forth, tending the sputtering flames.
The black smoke broke apart and rose in tendrils, like skinny arms reaching towards a liar’s heaven. Tom felt strange, as if he were being given a glimpse of another world. The figure was too thin to be human, and the long
