Goatie 29

‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

My head felt fuzzy. I tried to laugh it off. ‘I don’t suppose yeh can get wee apocalypses in the same way you get a wee forest fire, or can yeh?’

She snorted and studied a page on her file, marked memorable by a pink sticker. ‘I’m not really sure what you mean. But we do have a witness.’ She did that middle-class thing. Folk do to indicate quotation marks or some kind of ambiguity, which meant the same thing. You were by definition excluded, too stupid to recognise nuance. Hence the wiggling of index and forefinger around a disputed word like an insect’s antennae. She battered on talking without blinking or thinking. She read out the witness’ name with lip-smacking relish: ‘Christopher Hill’. 

‘He’s got forty-percent burns,’ she read from her report. ‘And had to have a foot amputated. He was put in a medically-induced coma. But they saved him.’

‘That’s nice,’ I replied. Shook my head. ‘I meant that’s no nice, but yeh know whit I meant. My fingers curled into approximations of quotation marks, but I wasn’t confident enough to use them. But I’d one of those moments, like when you get to the checkout and you’ve got a bottle of whisky in your hand and you can’t remember putting it in the basket. Words poured out of my mouth, mental logorrhoea. I tried to catch syllables and stop them with my hand but they spilled between cupped hand and fingers. I didn’t recognise the accent, because it wasn’t mine.

‘The apocalypse arises when grief is the language of the dead. It brings back the old gods. The dead are rising. Angry at the injustice and hate we ferment in our families. They’re taking back their loved ones to the other side.’   

She squinted at me and looked over my shoulder as if checking to see if a guard was available. Pulling her bag over she picked through the contents and pulled out a packet of handkerchiefs. She pulled them open and a few spilled into her lap. Handing me the debris, she daubed at her own eyes. I wasn’t sure if she’d been crying, or for whom.

I saw the beastie perched on her shoulder. Clinging with its talons piericing her skull. A shapeshifter that moved between the living and the dead. Its radiance had me covering my eyes, but its diction was positively coarse and guttural. The gift it offered was a postcard from the future, an unpretty view.

Leslie of Robertson and Robertson parked her car outside the run-down practice. A shopfront on a gable end.  All the available parking spaces were taken. She’d made do. Her latest four-door Golf, parked up on the pavement. Overgrown bushes and shrubs sheltered it from the trampled footpath that ran parallel and led towards Clydebank station. The fob sensor on her key opened the car as she hurried towards it.

The files in her hand, the court-room decorum rules she followed, wrenched from the things she knew. A caloused hand over her mouth. She became the hesitant figure, the half-fledged thing, roughly taken away. Her car keys were in his accomplice’s hand. She recognised him as the partner of a woman, Mary, she’d represented. He was bald, unshaven and stocky. His accomplice was thinner, taller and stunk of booze. Denim clad. Her manhandling was made into a game. They laughed together as they pushed her roughly into the luxurious back seat with that smell of new leather. She whimpered as her resolve ebbed away.

Mary’s husband cackled, ‘Nice brief,’ as he adjusted the mirrors and reversed out onto the road. The thin man rammed his hand up skirt. Threshing around like a fish in a net he tried tearing at her pants, but couldn’t get a handhold. She squirmed trying to squeeze against the door. He brought his head down on the bridge of her nose, bloodying her. Grabbing her hair he pulled her head down to his groin. Mary’s partner straighten his neck and back to get that extra inch. Checking the action in the mirror.

‘Suck me aff, ya stupid cow,’ the thin man grunted. He let go of her hair and stared at the silky strands in his hand. Sliding his knees forward until his knees made an indent in the fabric of the front seat. He popped the garnished gold button of his denims letting his paunch hang out and pulled down his zip. His flaccid cock flopping sideways like an unbalanced mushroom in unwashed hair. He whacked her hard on the side of the face, bruising her eye. ‘Get yer tits oot first,’ he muttered. Adjusting his legs as if waiting for the show to start. Smacking her hard on the back of the head because she fumbled the buttons on her blouse and wasn’t moving quickly enough.

‘I’ve never fucked a lawyer bird up the ass,’ Mary’s partner said in a joshing tone. ‘She’ll be my first.’

‘As I was saying,’ Leslie peered at me and frowned. A querulous note in her tone. ‘Are you quite alright? Or you want me to get somebody?’ She poured me a glass of water and pushed it across the desk.

‘Nah,’ I shook my head. ‘I’m alright.’

She adjusted the frame of her spectacles. Turned a page in her file, glancing across to see if I was listening. ‘Symbols are a fusion of our beliefs. Goat and man, for example, our lower and higher selves. A satyr, part-goat and part-man. The same symbols appearing in different parts of the world, at different times often indicates a direction of travel.’ She laughed, ‘but more often it hints at our sexuality, often repressed’.

Mary’s partner climbed into the back seat of her car after his pal left her cut and bruised, and had finished using her. It was his turn for fun. His trousers were around his ankles. He waddled towards her open legs and bare bony white arse. He pressed his face into her vagina and wiggled his tongue. After tasting her, ‘Turn roon,’ he told her. ‘I want tae take yeh fae behind. Right up yer shiter.’

‘A symbolic fusion of serpent and bird,’ she read from her script as if it mattered. ‘And some scientists do claim that birds are simply lizard forms with feathers. In mythology, simply, the divine breath of life. Heaven and earth meeting and fertilizing the waters.’ She nodded as if something amused her and indulged in melodrama as if she’d been a frustrated actor waiting for the chance to mouth her lines. ‘There be dragons!’  

Leslie had retreated inside herself. When Mary’s partner climbed off her, she was like a pig’s backside, of no interest. She begged hard for her life.

‘Dragons, of course, are creators and destroyers. Think of St George riding into battle with his lance fortified by Christian virtues fighting for an oppressed people, terrorized by the ungodly.’

‘Do it,’ said the skanky skinny rapist. He’d tied her arms to the steering wheel with tie-wraps and doused the car with petrol. He seemed to have a knack for such things as if he’d done it before.

She was enjoying telling me about dragons. It was like a hobby. ‘The Chinese view dragons quite differently from us in the West. Perhaps because they mark themselves as dragon people. Descended from dragons. Those born in the Year of the Dragon are thought to be especially blessed. It brings them good health, great wealth and a long life.’ That pleased her and she wanted me to be pleased too.

‘Torch it,’ said the skanky rapist, cackling. He handed his fellow rapist a rag soaked in petrol.

Two sets of eyes peered through car window at her. She pressed her thumbs and meat of her hand down on the horn. Light exploded as she let go of the noise.