the house by the sea pt. 3: mad tom

In the morning they were in the back garden preparing the tandem. The alley behind his house was wide enough to cycle down and less full of abandoned vehicles, and he unlocked the gate to check it for safety. There were a handful of bodies each without heads and in varying stages of decomposition, and one of the dead was on the floor between them, very emaciated, the flesh of its cheeks attached by only odd bits of discoloured skin and hanging like pieces of macabre jewellery from the bones beneath it. It jerked its head toward the sound of the gate opening but he approached it quickly and holding its head still by the thickly blood-clotted hair carefully pushed a pretty useless knife through the left eye socket and all the way into the brain. It stopped moving right away and he left the knife in place and inspected the truth of what he had done. It had been much easier than he had imagined, in fact he had felt almost nothing apart from a certain kind of generic resentment of the world itself and not the individual parts that comprise it. Like everything it needed doing and that was it, he thought. Freed from the mundane spectatorial sanctuary his windows had afforded he felt at least as though he existed in a more reasonable, widely understood sense, outside of himself but within something substantial, as though he were cause or effect or both and not only unspoken witness and preserver, always seeing but never doing, more dead than the dead who strode those streets. He lifted the bodies to one side of the alley so they could fit the tandem past and went to fetch Linda. He told her all was clear and they mounted the bicycle; he would do the majority of the cycling if he could and took the front position, leaving her to handle any dead they might encounter, and she practised thrusting and swinging the metal pole several times while keeping one hand on the handlebars. Although she didn’t feel particularly comfortable with a weapon of such limited range they both agreed that it was their best option and that they had to make use of the things they had to hand, and that it would disable their potential assailants enough to at least give them sufficient time to make their intensely physical get away. They hoped that the same ancient primordial instincts and motor functions that motivated the dead into the dreadful perpetuity of their insentient hunger would slowly draw them away from the sparsely populated coastal regions where food source would be at a minimum and like rats towards the urban areas to scavenge on the half-gone and the trapped, fates cemented by the crushing sprawl of their cosmopolitan surroundings, by the rife almost viral transmission of ruin amongst municipalities so populous.

The day was warm when they left. The bike ran very quietly apart from an occasional rattle from the provisions in the trailer. It was arduous picking their way through the devastated streets and they made their way slowly north on quieter routes out of the city, but weirdly it was already difficult to remember it ever having looked any different. Dozens of corpses interrupted the landscape like crudely symbolic art installations, their placement seeming somehow deliberate and considered with lengths of intestine stretched like party streamers from torsos and into gutters, and faces gnawed and stripped back to just stark teeth fixed in rictus smiles, as though the humour in even this compromising and degrading public exhibition of the frailty and the hopelessness of the flesh was unavoidable and rich and immeasurably more permanent than the flesh was itself, which would and did rot in the great gaseous eruptions or viscous liquid oozings of escaping life that marked the concrete slabs of the pavement with an obstinacy unknown to all but the most archaic specks of discarded chewing gum, returned to the very nothing that had borne it, had made it of this world, the nothing it was always destined to become again. They were unmoved by the abundant dead, whose gnawed appendages and visible decay, whose sunken craniums and richly bruised surfaces depersonalized them somehow, their humanity belittled by perhaps the most human of all processes, left them remote and almost otherworldly, a kind of flawed mimicry of expectation. It was surprising how quickly the boundaries broke down, how quickly they adapted this pathologists detachment, how quickly death became meaningless on such an incomprehensible scale. The problem had undermined the sanctity of death that civilization had spent thousands of years constructing and left it instead with just the inevitable and organic occurrence that it unashamedly was. Without the social cohesion that death had always provided the near-instant decline of any shared morality or decency was remarkably efficient.

They turned into a street where one of his friends had lived and where they had as children played in the fading light of summer evenings. He can’t have been on this street for ten years at least but it was incredibly familiar. They had called the friend Mad Tom, everyone had; an ironic nickname, he supposed now years later, not because Tom wasn’t mad but because instead he was so mad that nomenclature so tentative seemed massively insufficient. He stopped the tandem outside Tom’s house, the front lawn trodden in roughly circular patches right down to the soil and scarred relentless with brittle yellow patches from dog’s piss and still littered with the bits of bike and cloth and coloured plastic that he so clearly recalled, and out of a compulsion he couldn’t explain to Linda he opened the flimsy wooden gate – all the struts but three were absent, stripped for who knew what reason – that had been conscientiously closed against the swell of the problem and took four or five steps up the path. He remembered breaking his foot in this garden in a foolish accident in the rain, and Mad Tom carrying him back to his parents’ house with the strength of a father, clutched against his sodden t-shirt and the intense smell of his underarms which even then he had found improbably comforting and full of life and promise. He remembered Tom falling in love incredibly hard with foreign exchange students, and how he had followed a particular German girl religiously from class to class and spoke to her in the most embarrassing and fractured kind of Anglo-German that made him sound like a villain in low-budget film, and tried to woo her with a discordant song of questionable lyrical content, the full version of which extended to about five A4 sides and was wholly sexually inappropriate and weird, and how when she got on the bus back to Germany without even a word and the inevitable failure sank in he would beg tearlessly to be hit as though without that stimulus he wouldn’t ever feel at all. He remembered the dangerous ramps that Tom built out of lengths of wood stolen from building sites over and around an old red car long-abandoned on his street that had weeds growing out of the grille of the radiator; fearlessly he would ride his bike over them, a different ramp each weekend, and it would always end badly but with Mad Tom smiling above the wheels that were buckled by the impact. He remembered schooldays where Mad Tom siphoned vodka and other clear spirits from his parents kitchen into the miniature glass booze bottles he had collected for years and then brought them into school in his bag, drank them down in determined swallows one-by-one right by his locker, and then ran frenzied from classroom to classroom howling with delight. The memories felt like falsehoods now, tainted like everything else by the problem.

He looked at Linda, who had dismounted the tandem also and was waiting impatiently, peering from one end of the road to the other, her knuckles white from holding the metal pole. The front door was detached, just jagged hinges and an open space where it once would have been, and from the corner of his eye he saw a figure walk past it inside the house. “Tom,” he called without thinking. It just came out. He had no real reason to think it was Tom but it was, it had to be. The figure shuffled hastily through the doorway with the urgency of a drunk at a wedding buffet, still tall, his stomach grotesquely distended, his flesh rotting away as though the skin was a burden all of a sudden too heavy for the body to bear, his very tissues foamed and frothing with verve from great gouges in his flabby skin and from open orifices; he saw there was a bite on his neck that rippled and throbbed with swollen larvae, and a kind of resolute authenticity about his expression that for some reason made him feel incredibly sad to think about. Tom grasped at him and groaned quietly and answered to only one authority, and sank to his knees from the force of Linda’s pole. She hit him a second time across the chest and they heard the rotten ribs crumble beneath the impact, and Tom slumped down onto his back, and Linda positioned the end of the pole just beneath his clavicle and slowly pushed it through the skin and flesh and bone to hold him securely in place. “Come on,” she said. Tom’s hands ran from only the purest instinct and even as caged as he was they continued to reach for the two of them, driven by something so incredibly fundamental it was impossible to understand. They both looked at him and for a moment the whole of the problem was crystallized in this one Norwich garden: the young man dead, the necessary violence, the fractured memories, the empty future. He picked up a bike wheel that was left on the grass, its tyre long-removed, and brought its metal-sharp circumference down hard into the centre of Mad Tom’s face. It went through easily just below the eyes, the soft tissues of which had for some reason remained remarkably intact through the decomposition process if cold and kind of inky black, and stuck fast into the damp soil beneath, and Tom’s hands were limp at his sides with a stillness that felt somehow more frightening. “It’s what he would have wanted,” he said, struck by the banal absurdity of the bicycle wheel, and laughed alone for seconds that felt like a lifetime or thought he did. Linda rested a hand on his shoulder. They could hear the groans of the dead carried through the streets like football chants, like threnodies. They were at great risk there. It was about twenty miles to the coast. They remounted the tandem. They rode on.