BONELINES
Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead
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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.
In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light. It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. (You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.) |
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Bonelines
Instalment 1
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith
1
The heat stank of panic. The Everglades spoke no longer of England; they had flipped. The bony bodies of summer kids, wracked with an energy they had no use for, pumped sheens of perspiration down their bare chests. Young enough to get up to stuff and not worry their patriarchs, they had assembled; siblings had been sharply brushed off, mothers told they did not want the beach today, uncles and aunties promised long games of dominoes and re-viewings of those tapes of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ stewing in their creaky VHS boxes. The whole resort reeked of overheating motherboards.
In tins marked KESTREL, sat upon antique formica tables that were cracked like the floors of empty lakes, lager was warming and flattening.
In the Everglades, however, there was a painful kind of cool. Whatever it was it had settled its clammy hand on the unreal paleness of the children’s torsos, patted their feverish brows, and kept the salted sweat from out their eyes. The seven kids were unworldly calm, pin-prick aware, self-possessed, and attentive to the words and actions they had been rehearsing on and off over three summers now. Every year, sneaking away and gathering for stolen time in the Everglades; a strip of surplus land on the edge of the camp, bordered by the industrial estate, separated from the sun-cream and dodgems world by a dank grey stream; linked by a greasy overflow pipe which only the initiated knew how to try. Here they could talk up a place of their own.
Under a relentless sun that day, adults got lazy, more lax than usual, let things go that at other times they forbade. The stale beer befuddled their afternoons. Minds were winding down from their industrial routines, further than usual, never looking forward. They had no idea what was coming, no idea what it might be, no idea how to respond, no idea at all. Never would.
The boy had been the first to arrive. He carried more flesh than the others; he had a kind of fixedness to him, even then. He collected things, amassed himself; dutifully he prepared the space, clearing some crisps packets that had blown across from the caravans, pocketing a crumpled Top Trump and sweeping a few dried leaves aside. His father would have been amazed to see him take charge of a space like this; he would never understand or value this son who thought so hard and sounded so dumb. When the boy looked over at what he had done, he did not breathe for a while. He knew he was no spark, yet he assiduously cultivated a dim and unquenchable slow glow of thought and care that recently had become a fire under the hot sun. He could perpetrate a humour that others rarely caught before it was too late; leaving them guessing. Everyone had assumed the worst about him, but he was coming through; more sophisticated than either they or he yet knew. Though he had found no ways to protect, nurture or sell himself. People laughed at his accent; even those who had the same one. He was the flesh he stood in and the things he felt. No one had ever given him the means to express any of that; but now he was making a means of his own. Ever since he started following the owners’ girl.
She was strung like an electric fence; she didn’t look that much but she could sting you, sheep or stallion. Her long black hair rocked about her face, and when she spoke it was in little bursts of smoke and chunks of glowing ember. She scared the adults. Not just because her Mum and Dad owned the camp, but there was something unnatural about her sureness of foot and mind. She thought like a mountain goat, springing from speculation to speculation.
He had spied her making furtive little dashes between the trailers. He knew she had the run of the place, yet she moved like someone who was prohibited. The boy had no way to express that, to himself or anyone else, but he felt it generously; that sense of being at odds with the things you should have been in harmony with. In music class he opened and shut his mouth; he dare not sing. But when the impulse came to follow the girl with the black hair, he had no way of denying it. Something drew him; and when it came to singing the rhymes he could not help himself. Or curses, or spells, or whatever it was people said they were.
She was lither than him, of course, and for a while he did not know where her runs ended. Something told him he should wander forever aimlessly and somehow find her that way; but after a few days ‘goin’ round the Wrekin’ he was rewarded with a glimpse of her, the owners’ girl, skittering over the overflow bridge. He knew he would fall in, so he waded. He had expected her to laugh at him, or run from him, tell on him to his parents or hers. Instead, she indicated a lump of wood for him to sit on, threw him a blanket to dry himself on, and then she had started straight in on him, as if she had known all along that he was coming to the Everglades. She taught him three of her songs and one of the most important ‘stories’ before she told him her name.
They were not the usual stories.
And now they were coming true.
On the particular day in question, the day when the shadows broke loose from the things, the gang numbered seven; old hands by now, they knew by heart the stories and the rhymes. Some had been coming for three years, others for two. The Sett was well known for being a holiday resort to which families returned year after year. Something had been established here, between the place and the English Midlands, by the railway company; that was long ago, maybe a century and a half, but not long enough for it to run its course. Though it was unlikely that what those engineers and whiskery shareholders had in mind was a weird feathery thing with soft tendril-like nether regions.
The girl, the boy and the five pals barely and yet deeply knew what they were invoking; yelling and gesticulating to it to break the surface from a sclerotic past that had rarely given up anything. They didn’t seem to mind either way; just to speak the words was bostin’.
“Muddy Mary!”
And they began to dance on the spongy undergrowth. Even on a day when white flesh was seared pink around the edges of bra straps and shoulders scraped raw by a raking sun, there was a looseness in the Everglades. There was a space for things to get through, there were pores opening in the tree trunks and moss carpets loose enough for an oily moisture to squeeze through.
“Muddy Mary!”
And the trees began to dance with them. Not that familiar dancing in soft winds, not the soft swaying from side to side, but this was the jerky dance when the whole Everglades would all shift a caravan’s length one way and then, bending, the other. It pulled a brain out of shape.
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
The girl bade them with open arms, her thin forearms cutting upwards like a flash of blades, her big hands paddling the air, and they scrambled to their feet and threw themselves as high as they could. Pogoing on the mush and bouncing their heads at the patchy canopy of summer leaves. They chorused silent gulps as they tried to catch their breaths between leaps. Somewhere over the railway tracks a ride was creaking; music no one had paid royalties for was blaring, mixing with the throb of a generator and the swish of a sprinkler. Someone cursed at a football commentary. Sausages and burgers sizzled flatly, cobs were sliced. So much filled the air around their grove, acrid blueness was crowding it in.
It was the tiny boy who first registered that something else had entered their magic circle. He had not felt this thing before, and at first he was unsure that he felt anything at all. Indeed, he was at that age when he was feeling so many things for the first time that he tended to treat novelty as part of the routine. It was only when the softness beneath his feet became an ultra-violent seething and shaking, when the gentlest of breezes ripped the green canopy wide apart and brought it careening down towards him, and, finally, when the ooze at the bottom of the stream rose in squirming intestines of mud, that he felt the familiar cold tingle of stinky fear.
The large boy caught the young one out of the corner of his eye; unsure if the snaking chords of grey shitty matter were rising out of the stream and into his throat, or vice versa. The leader swung her diamond-blue eyes from one boy to the other; what she saw was a sheet of light, tight and bloodless fingers shaking it for all it was worth. Glistening sprays of energy floated from the smeared sheet and revolved around the heads of the other six junior disciples. They all began to jerk violently in time with the thicker trees. One of the other girls bent over and the green-brown ground came up to meet her in curdling cord-like forms; strings of mud and moss rose up only to be battered down by the sudden expulsion of brown vomit from her throat. Beside her the fourth boy was rigid, his mouth drawn back in a terrified smirk. A tiny worm of blood was crawling from under his trunks, running down his leg and into a flip flop.
Space folded like a screwed up ball of bad drawing. The rest of the camp that had seemed so far away now concertinaed in on the Everglades. A red top newspaper was lowered, a can laid carefully on a concrete slab, a piece of kebab spat on a plate. One by one, men began to howl and bark. Practical mothers wiped their hands and set their legs in motion; a bottle of pop was upended and it sputtered across a porch. Inside the swampy corridor of the Everglades the discipleship of the fleshy boy grew thicker and more earnest; his eyes darted about his sockets looking for meaning, his frantic mind stitched together all the fragments and then cut them apart: the gushes of fluid, the swaying of the ground, the feathery chaos of a darting wren and an escaping egret flashing its orangey-yellow warning-signal feet as it scampered out of the water and over the path. And in their places, deep things made themselves plain; hidden things came out of their dens and showed themselves.
He didn’t know if he spoke to invoke, or whether he was simply describing and worshipping, whatever that was:
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
“Jesus Christ, did you hear that!”
There was something strange coming across to the Everglades. The owners’ girl raised an arm against the approaching smear. Billows of barbecue smoke rose behind the rushing colours.
“Muddy Mary!” she cried out.
In answer a great tide of dark light, as if from inside a cave, swept into the trees, and then rushed out again; the way that waves would come in and out on the beach. This tide did not come in again; it had fled the stumbling, sprinting, gibbering and hairy-toed mob-thing that was crossing the fringes of the holiday camp, shedding pool sliders and baseball caps, stubbing toes and pressing dead skin on pebbles and twigs.
“She’s raising the devil!”
It was confusing. The voices of the jumbling thing were adult. They never came here, and yet now they did. Just at the moment the deep seemed to be rising up, just as the deep seemed to be possessing them from down in their stomachs and up to the top of their faces, only now – when they were frothing at the mouth – were their mums and dads interested.
One of the younger girls went down in a heap. The little boy tried to cry for help, but his words were drowned by a snake of yellow and brown strings. It was the strangest magic. They were part of the weirdest tale; stranger than anything they had told each other. True oddness, it seemed, had to come from somewhere else, from afar, from beyond the gates of Lost Horizon, from some other thing and some other place.
“Get an ambulance, someone. Get the owner!”
She felt her insides melting. She felt the ground flooding up towards her. She felt the running together of their minds. She felt the fear of the young ones and the faith and angry fortitude of the big sweaty boy. She felt exhilarated; she was taking them all on a journey, in her mind she was leading them into a dark cave, dragging them through layers of the wet universe, and they were following. They were like a shoal of grey-brown stingy things, spewing themselves into the earth, striking out for the approaching darkness... all of them saw the same thing, and knew they did. And just before the last of them lost consciousness, there they were, all seven of them, swimming in the warm Devonian sea, while around them alien cephalopods and odd indescribable marine insects, gods in sea hare form and angel creatures that spasmed elegantly through the minty blue, floated in perfect harmony; each stroke in time with the others. The seven swam toward a ledge, then stood fluidly on the horizon of fruitcake rock, below which lay the deeply dark. To which, with a shared look, they took their first step.
Rough arms reached for them, muscled fingers grabbed at their ankles holding them back. Scooping embraces lifted them high and into towels in football colours, ufo and unicorn designs, engulfing them and they were swept away. They flew across the stream and path and, in formation, they zoomed and swerved through the camp; they saw all this, if they saw anything at all, through emptying eyelids. They, maybe, felt themselves laid on the ground; while all around them in barking and chanting choruses, frantic priests and priestesses were conjuring and exorcising and cursing.
“That little Jezebel has been trained!”
“Groomed!”
“They’ve all been groomed! It’s satanic abuse, I thought so! Satanic abuse!”
“Where the fuck are those owners? They are going to do time, somewhere where they know how to deal with nonces!”
“Calm down... look at my poor bab! Her donnies are all covered in shit...”
“The ambulances are going to be here in ten to fifteen minutes...”
“Jesus!”
“They ‘re bleeding from the backside!”
“Please God, no...”
“Can you all shut the fuck up, and quietly.... these children are seriously sick...”
“Seriously sick? Seriously sick? There’s one little witch here’s seriously sick! Sick in the head! Where are the frigging owners? Someone hold me back before I...”
“I heard what they were saying, it was... what do you call it.... heresy...”
“What?”
“No, blasphemy!”
“I heard that too.”
“Against the Blessed Virgin, I heard her, she said Our Lady was mucky!”
“Mucky the little tart!”
“They’re Satanists, they as good as admitted it to me the other day... New Age...”
“Whatever the difference, they’re going down!”
“Call the police. This is a fucking crime scene.”
“Can you gawbies cool down, our babs are poorly here...”
“This is some weird thing she’s called down... it’s some sick magic...”
“O shuttup, Frank, you don’t believe that...”
Even those who were wiping sweat from the feverish brows on the limp bodies, and wiping drool from the edges of lips, held their breaths. The ‘witch’ opened her eyes, but they did not focus.
“What did she see in there?”
He coughed; it was Frank. The stage was his.
“There was a black thing around that little witch, I saw a black thing like a... like a parachute billowing but black, and the strings were moving ... like... like they knew...”
“What do mean, ‘billowing’?”
“Can we stop listening to this yampy.... our babs are properly ill here...”
Though the eyes did not focus, still they took in the panorama, the whole wide dome of the camp, the giant heads and jowly necks bent, drawn faces, sunken eyes, giant-bellied men on their knees bending over the gang, tall piles of soiled wipes, and in the corner the flames that were beginning lick around her home...
“Those half-soaked...”
“No, let them. No one believes in the Devil.”
“Not their house...”
“Couldn’t care less if they’re jedded...”
At the rim of her vision, beyond vomit-covered pietas, two men in floral shorts, bellies and cropped heads, massive babies, were piling dreamcatchers and gothic pottery, poems, crystals and wooden spoons onto a blazing pyre. Through the flames the blue lamps of a queue of ambulances were rolling into the camp, rising up and down in the potholes. The ‘witch’ could not hear the sirens, but she saw them: streaming flags of torn rags and screams with ruined mouths. On top of the bonfire the men had put the billboard; scorching heat was already searing off the words LOST HORIZON and a hand-made painting of a distant and better land of beaches and a simple, ancient people waiting by the sea; for a moment they blackened and then they pulled away in a dismissive gesture of smoke.
Go on to Bonelines Instalment 2
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The heat stank of panic. The Everglades spoke no longer of England; they had flipped. The bony bodies of summer kids, wracked with an energy they had no use for, pumped sheens of perspiration down their bare chests. Young enough to get up to stuff and not worry their patriarchs, they had assembled; siblings had been sharply brushed off, mothers told they did not want the beach today, uncles and aunties promised long games of dominoes and re-viewings of those tapes of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ stewing in their creaky VHS boxes. The whole resort reeked of overheating motherboards.
In tins marked KESTREL, sat upon antique formica tables that were cracked like the floors of empty lakes, lager was warming and flattening.
In the Everglades, however, there was a painful kind of cool. Whatever it was it had settled its clammy hand on the unreal paleness of the children’s torsos, patted their feverish brows, and kept the salted sweat from out their eyes. The seven kids were unworldly calm, pin-prick aware, self-possessed, and attentive to the words and actions they had been rehearsing on and off over three summers now. Every year, sneaking away and gathering for stolen time in the Everglades; a strip of surplus land on the edge of the camp, bordered by the industrial estate, separated from the sun-cream and dodgems world by a dank grey stream; linked by a greasy overflow pipe which only the initiated knew how to try. Here they could talk up a place of their own.
Under a relentless sun that day, adults got lazy, more lax than usual, let things go that at other times they forbade. The stale beer befuddled their afternoons. Minds were winding down from their industrial routines, further than usual, never looking forward. They had no idea what was coming, no idea what it might be, no idea how to respond, no idea at all. Never would.
The boy had been the first to arrive. He carried more flesh than the others; he had a kind of fixedness to him, even then. He collected things, amassed himself; dutifully he prepared the space, clearing some crisps packets that had blown across from the caravans, pocketing a crumpled Top Trump and sweeping a few dried leaves aside. His father would have been amazed to see him take charge of a space like this; he would never understand or value this son who thought so hard and sounded so dumb. When the boy looked over at what he had done, he did not breathe for a while. He knew he was no spark, yet he assiduously cultivated a dim and unquenchable slow glow of thought and care that recently had become a fire under the hot sun. He could perpetrate a humour that others rarely caught before it was too late; leaving them guessing. Everyone had assumed the worst about him, but he was coming through; more sophisticated than either they or he yet knew. Though he had found no ways to protect, nurture or sell himself. People laughed at his accent; even those who had the same one. He was the flesh he stood in and the things he felt. No one had ever given him the means to express any of that; but now he was making a means of his own. Ever since he started following the owners’ girl.
She was strung like an electric fence; she didn’t look that much but she could sting you, sheep or stallion. Her long black hair rocked about her face, and when she spoke it was in little bursts of smoke and chunks of glowing ember. She scared the adults. Not just because her Mum and Dad owned the camp, but there was something unnatural about her sureness of foot and mind. She thought like a mountain goat, springing from speculation to speculation.
He had spied her making furtive little dashes between the trailers. He knew she had the run of the place, yet she moved like someone who was prohibited. The boy had no way to express that, to himself or anyone else, but he felt it generously; that sense of being at odds with the things you should have been in harmony with. In music class he opened and shut his mouth; he dare not sing. But when the impulse came to follow the girl with the black hair, he had no way of denying it. Something drew him; and when it came to singing the rhymes he could not help himself. Or curses, or spells, or whatever it was people said they were.
She was lither than him, of course, and for a while he did not know where her runs ended. Something told him he should wander forever aimlessly and somehow find her that way; but after a few days ‘goin’ round the Wrekin’ he was rewarded with a glimpse of her, the owners’ girl, skittering over the overflow bridge. He knew he would fall in, so he waded. He had expected her to laugh at him, or run from him, tell on him to his parents or hers. Instead, she indicated a lump of wood for him to sit on, threw him a blanket to dry himself on, and then she had started straight in on him, as if she had known all along that he was coming to the Everglades. She taught him three of her songs and one of the most important ‘stories’ before she told him her name.
They were not the usual stories.
And now they were coming true.
On the particular day in question, the day when the shadows broke loose from the things, the gang numbered seven; old hands by now, they knew by heart the stories and the rhymes. Some had been coming for three years, others for two. The Sett was well known for being a holiday resort to which families returned year after year. Something had been established here, between the place and the English Midlands, by the railway company; that was long ago, maybe a century and a half, but not long enough for it to run its course. Though it was unlikely that what those engineers and whiskery shareholders had in mind was a weird feathery thing with soft tendril-like nether regions.
The girl, the boy and the five pals barely and yet deeply knew what they were invoking; yelling and gesticulating to it to break the surface from a sclerotic past that had rarely given up anything. They didn’t seem to mind either way; just to speak the words was bostin’.
“Muddy Mary!”
And they began to dance on the spongy undergrowth. Even on a day when white flesh was seared pink around the edges of bra straps and shoulders scraped raw by a raking sun, there was a looseness in the Everglades. There was a space for things to get through, there were pores opening in the tree trunks and moss carpets loose enough for an oily moisture to squeeze through.
“Muddy Mary!”
And the trees began to dance with them. Not that familiar dancing in soft winds, not the soft swaying from side to side, but this was the jerky dance when the whole Everglades would all shift a caravan’s length one way and then, bending, the other. It pulled a brain out of shape.
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
The girl bade them with open arms, her thin forearms cutting upwards like a flash of blades, her big hands paddling the air, and they scrambled to their feet and threw themselves as high as they could. Pogoing on the mush and bouncing their heads at the patchy canopy of summer leaves. They chorused silent gulps as they tried to catch their breaths between leaps. Somewhere over the railway tracks a ride was creaking; music no one had paid royalties for was blaring, mixing with the throb of a generator and the swish of a sprinkler. Someone cursed at a football commentary. Sausages and burgers sizzled flatly, cobs were sliced. So much filled the air around their grove, acrid blueness was crowding it in.
It was the tiny boy who first registered that something else had entered their magic circle. He had not felt this thing before, and at first he was unsure that he felt anything at all. Indeed, he was at that age when he was feeling so many things for the first time that he tended to treat novelty as part of the routine. It was only when the softness beneath his feet became an ultra-violent seething and shaking, when the gentlest of breezes ripped the green canopy wide apart and brought it careening down towards him, and, finally, when the ooze at the bottom of the stream rose in squirming intestines of mud, that he felt the familiar cold tingle of stinky fear.
The large boy caught the young one out of the corner of his eye; unsure if the snaking chords of grey shitty matter were rising out of the stream and into his throat, or vice versa. The leader swung her diamond-blue eyes from one boy to the other; what she saw was a sheet of light, tight and bloodless fingers shaking it for all it was worth. Glistening sprays of energy floated from the smeared sheet and revolved around the heads of the other six junior disciples. They all began to jerk violently in time with the thicker trees. One of the other girls bent over and the green-brown ground came up to meet her in curdling cord-like forms; strings of mud and moss rose up only to be battered down by the sudden expulsion of brown vomit from her throat. Beside her the fourth boy was rigid, his mouth drawn back in a terrified smirk. A tiny worm of blood was crawling from under his trunks, running down his leg and into a flip flop.
Space folded like a screwed up ball of bad drawing. The rest of the camp that had seemed so far away now concertinaed in on the Everglades. A red top newspaper was lowered, a can laid carefully on a concrete slab, a piece of kebab spat on a plate. One by one, men began to howl and bark. Practical mothers wiped their hands and set their legs in motion; a bottle of pop was upended and it sputtered across a porch. Inside the swampy corridor of the Everglades the discipleship of the fleshy boy grew thicker and more earnest; his eyes darted about his sockets looking for meaning, his frantic mind stitched together all the fragments and then cut them apart: the gushes of fluid, the swaying of the ground, the feathery chaos of a darting wren and an escaping egret flashing its orangey-yellow warning-signal feet as it scampered out of the water and over the path. And in their places, deep things made themselves plain; hidden things came out of their dens and showed themselves.
He didn’t know if he spoke to invoke, or whether he was simply describing and worshipping, whatever that was:
“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”
“Jesus Christ, did you hear that!”
There was something strange coming across to the Everglades. The owners’ girl raised an arm against the approaching smear. Billows of barbecue smoke rose behind the rushing colours.
“Muddy Mary!” she cried out.
In answer a great tide of dark light, as if from inside a cave, swept into the trees, and then rushed out again; the way that waves would come in and out on the beach. This tide did not come in again; it had fled the stumbling, sprinting, gibbering and hairy-toed mob-thing that was crossing the fringes of the holiday camp, shedding pool sliders and baseball caps, stubbing toes and pressing dead skin on pebbles and twigs.
“She’s raising the devil!”
It was confusing. The voices of the jumbling thing were adult. They never came here, and yet now they did. Just at the moment the deep seemed to be rising up, just as the deep seemed to be possessing them from down in their stomachs and up to the top of their faces, only now – when they were frothing at the mouth – were their mums and dads interested.
One of the younger girls went down in a heap. The little boy tried to cry for help, but his words were drowned by a snake of yellow and brown strings. It was the strangest magic. They were part of the weirdest tale; stranger than anything they had told each other. True oddness, it seemed, had to come from somewhere else, from afar, from beyond the gates of Lost Horizon, from some other thing and some other place.
“Get an ambulance, someone. Get the owner!”
She felt her insides melting. She felt the ground flooding up towards her. She felt the running together of their minds. She felt the fear of the young ones and the faith and angry fortitude of the big sweaty boy. She felt exhilarated; she was taking them all on a journey, in her mind she was leading them into a dark cave, dragging them through layers of the wet universe, and they were following. They were like a shoal of grey-brown stingy things, spewing themselves into the earth, striking out for the approaching darkness... all of them saw the same thing, and knew they did. And just before the last of them lost consciousness, there they were, all seven of them, swimming in the warm Devonian sea, while around them alien cephalopods and odd indescribable marine insects, gods in sea hare form and angel creatures that spasmed elegantly through the minty blue, floated in perfect harmony; each stroke in time with the others. The seven swam toward a ledge, then stood fluidly on the horizon of fruitcake rock, below which lay the deeply dark. To which, with a shared look, they took their first step.
Rough arms reached for them, muscled fingers grabbed at their ankles holding them back. Scooping embraces lifted them high and into towels in football colours, ufo and unicorn designs, engulfing them and they were swept away. They flew across the stream and path and, in formation, they zoomed and swerved through the camp; they saw all this, if they saw anything at all, through emptying eyelids. They, maybe, felt themselves laid on the ground; while all around them in barking and chanting choruses, frantic priests and priestesses were conjuring and exorcising and cursing.
“That little Jezebel has been trained!”
“Groomed!”
“They’ve all been groomed! It’s satanic abuse, I thought so! Satanic abuse!”
“Where the fuck are those owners? They are going to do time, somewhere where they know how to deal with nonces!”
“Calm down... look at my poor bab! Her donnies are all covered in shit...”
“The ambulances are going to be here in ten to fifteen minutes...”
“Jesus!”
“They ‘re bleeding from the backside!”
“Please God, no...”
“Can you all shut the fuck up, and quietly.... these children are seriously sick...”
“Seriously sick? Seriously sick? There’s one little witch here’s seriously sick! Sick in the head! Where are the frigging owners? Someone hold me back before I...”
“I heard what they were saying, it was... what do you call it.... heresy...”
“What?”
“No, blasphemy!”
“I heard that too.”
“Against the Blessed Virgin, I heard her, she said Our Lady was mucky!”
“Mucky the little tart!”
“They’re Satanists, they as good as admitted it to me the other day... New Age...”
“Whatever the difference, they’re going down!”
“Call the police. This is a fucking crime scene.”
“Can you gawbies cool down, our babs are poorly here...”
“This is some weird thing she’s called down... it’s some sick magic...”
“O shuttup, Frank, you don’t believe that...”
Even those who were wiping sweat from the feverish brows on the limp bodies, and wiping drool from the edges of lips, held their breaths. The ‘witch’ opened her eyes, but they did not focus.
“What did she see in there?”
He coughed; it was Frank. The stage was his.
“There was a black thing around that little witch, I saw a black thing like a... like a parachute billowing but black, and the strings were moving ... like... like they knew...”
“What do mean, ‘billowing’?”
“Can we stop listening to this yampy.... our babs are properly ill here...”
Though the eyes did not focus, still they took in the panorama, the whole wide dome of the camp, the giant heads and jowly necks bent, drawn faces, sunken eyes, giant-bellied men on their knees bending over the gang, tall piles of soiled wipes, and in the corner the flames that were beginning lick around her home...
“Those half-soaked...”
“No, let them. No one believes in the Devil.”
“Not their house...”
“Couldn’t care less if they’re jedded...”
At the rim of her vision, beyond vomit-covered pietas, two men in floral shorts, bellies and cropped heads, massive babies, were piling dreamcatchers and gothic pottery, poems, crystals and wooden spoons onto a blazing pyre. Through the flames the blue lamps of a queue of ambulances were rolling into the camp, rising up and down in the potholes. The ‘witch’ could not hear the sirens, but she saw them: streaming flags of torn rags and screams with ruined mouths. On top of the bonfire the men had put the billboard; scorching heat was already searing off the words LOST HORIZON and a hand-made painting of a distant and better land of beaches and a simple, ancient people waiting by the sea; for a moment they blackened and then they pulled away in a dismissive gesture of smoke.
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