Davey Mercator watched a kid fall down from a second-storey window. It was the house opposite and it belonged to two of his old school friends, who shared it as roommates along with a kid from one of their failed young marriages. The marriage had decayed in the boredom of familiarity and the kid needed a home. A lot of people thought they must have been queer, these roommates, or mentally retarded, Davey Mercator did too some of the time, but simple truth be told they had never gotten out of their high school circle, their futures swallowed by the small southern England town they had grown up in, knights of the catchment area. After so little luck in life it made a good kind of sense to live together, like the old times. As teenagers changing for swimming one had seen the other jerking off, peering over the synthetic cubicle wall despite it seeming intrusive and inappropriate. It had been embarrassing, the thin sperm trailed out on a beach towel, defiantly ejaculating with no hands, that entirely involuntary rhythm, like breaths or blinking, as they locked into meaningful eye contact. Despite the shame and their physical awkwardness it pushed them closer together, cemented their friendship in a strange way, and while neither mentioned it, fifteen years later, it still played a big part in their living together, unconsciously at least.
The kid had fallen because Davey Mercator’s American friend had been throwing a large inflatable bullet to him back and forth between the second-storey windows in their respective houses. The bullet was about two feet long, black and shiny, and it smelt like a new beach ball. They threw it to each other across the gap between their houses and caught it, threw it back. It passed the time and the kid laughed at it. After a few throws the kid leaned out too far to reach the bullet and lost his footing inside the house. The sound was terrible as he fell. Like scraping brick. He followed the bullet down to the ground below. The sound was terrible.
*
Weeks before the kid had been at the old hospital with his friends. Davey Mercator heard about it from somebody’s brother. The old hospital housed the outbuilding, past the security gates and the warning signs and the fragile buildings whose foundations sobbed in the night. Thick trees surrounded the grounds, but they were fenced off and labelled as private and led eventually to the manor house that had once formed a political centrepiece of the apolitical town. People didn’t venture into the trees, despite how appealing they looked. The outbuilding was underneath the shade of the foliage, it was damp and full of rubbish and birds, who cooed oddly like a strange choir, and from the constancy of the animal sounds would occasionally burst a frenzied flap of wings, started by one but then mirrored by all the birds who nested around the ceiling, an avian Mexican wave in the darkness. There were piles of furniture but it was all broken or burnt in some historical time, relics of a former comfort. One pane of glass remained in the rotting wooden window frames – a final semblance of a civilization left behind but almost worshipped, the glass had been cleaned, cared for, and all it looked onto was a moss-stricken fence panel that somehow still stood – the others all smashed through and piled in dirty shards amongst the empty bottles of once flammable liquid.
The boys changed in the outbuilding, their legs bare amongst the splintered wood and the stench of waste, their breaths heavy in the stifling air. They didn’t want the vulgarity of their voices to infringe upon their explorations. With trembling hands they removed t-shirts and noticed how soft their skin was.
They still felt young, and each of them lit a candle to see by, and in the flickering light they smiled and felt illicit and excited and odd. They cautiously pulled down their shorts and bent over to see better the cocks of the others, a new life. Hands reached out, impulsively, unavoidably, and touched them as if they were expensive glassware, the kid pulling at the boy next to him or pulling at himself.
They were kids but felt like wizards conjuring alterations and manipulations to the very flesh. It was dark and they felt a part of the world. At first they panicked when it came out, just the tiniest amount. The kid looked around, reeling, he wanted to sit down, to lay down, to feel it again, but he was afraid of what he saw on his fingers, the fluid sticky like a snail’s slow path. He looked at his friends and held his hand up for them to see, and in a collective release they all emitted the same, a trophy for their efforts.
They dressed quietly and could hear a breeze in the trees outside. The sun was still beating down.
*
Now the kid had fallen. The sound of it was unhealthy. He hadn’t really yelled but his body cracked, the American could hear it. He walked out of the room and banged on Davey Mercator’s door, then went down the stairs towards the garden.
*
Two hours before Davey Mercator had met a girl. She was quiet and her skin was incredibly white, and the only time Davey Mercator had heard her speak was to talk about the depression she had had in Sheffield. They went straight back to her mum’s place because Davey didn’t want her to know where he lived. They grabbed a glass of orange juice each and went up to her room, which was decorated pink. A lot of girl’s rooms are like this when they live with their parents. She closed the curtains and they undressed each other and Davey Mercator started to fuck her but he felt weird knowing her parents were downstairs and that this was their house and so he concentrated hard on what he was doing and they both had serious facial expressions, which was odd while they fucked. Her skin was warm and after a while Davey Mercator came inside her and rolled off and lay next to her with his head on a corresponding pink pillow. They agreed that it had been fun and watched his dick drooping like it was a TV show and she squirmed a little. He asked what’s wrong and she said I can feel your spunk dripping out of me. He picked up her orange juice and passed it to her and then picked up his orange juice and they both drank their juice and he got dressed and put his shoes on and kissed her on the lips and told her he would see her again tomorrow. She said okay and picked up her phone and dialled a number and he left the room and went down the stairs and could hear her talking and laughing on the phone. He said goodbye to her parents and then went into the street to meet his American friend.
*
The American walked through the living room towards the back door. Another of Davey Mercator’s friends was standing at a flip chart that he had erected in the centre of the room where the coffee table had used to be. The coffee table was turned upside down and left on top of the sofa. He was presenting two ideas that he had written on the flip chart in thick-tipped black marker pen, even though there was no one else in the room and he hadn’t noticed the American’s entrance. Few of the words he said were making sense. He clutched the marker pen in one hand and had a telescopic pointer in the other, which he slapped forcefully against the pages of the flipchart. There were four words written on the flipchart and they had been broken down into two points.
1. Food seed.
2. Soil cucumber.
The American remembered the words and walked past unnoticed, heard Davey Mercator’s door opening upstairs. The room smelt like that cheap instant coffee which is like powder instead of granules.
*
The American had come to England a few years ago to study. On the first night they met, which was his first night here, he told Davey Mercator that before he had left he had heard his mother crying in the room next to his and so went to investigate. She had been pregnant, even though she had gotten divorced and was too old to safely have another baby, and she had pushed a chest of drawers up against the door but he managed to force it open all the same, scraping its legs along the carpet. He says he knew that she must have given birth. His mother was on the floor and sobbing, and the American said he had a real sinking feeling, and she was pleading with him, begging him to leave the room. He asked where the baby was and she says she doesn’t know what he means, but he noticed streaks of blood on the bottom of her nightdress that went in a trail along the beige carpet and right behind another cabinet. The American told Davey Mercator that he went to peer behind the cabinet and there was the baby, spluttering and red and dying, and hideously mutated, although he couldn’t remember its mutations clearly. It had been dark in the room, lit only by one lamp, but he saw its eyes looking at him inquisitively, or desperately, the tiny bloody mutated baby. He wondered how long it would survive and wanted to touch it but he was too afraid. His mother was crying and still pleading with him to leave, and he couldn’t look at her or touch her or kiss her goodbye, just got his backpack and left.
That night Davey Mercator and the American slept on a sofa bed at a short Jewish girl’s house. Davey Mercator kissed her in front of her refrigerator, had to bend down to reach her comfortably. He would dream about it for years afterwards.
*
Davey Mercator’s two old school friends were already in the garden when the American came out. One was reassuring the other, patting his shoulder. They looked like lovers. The kid was on his back on the grass at their feet, his white t-shirt soaked in blood, but he was still whimpering and so must have been alive. The American walked over. A combination of the kid’s blood and the rain of the previous days had made the ground very soft, and the impact of the kids fall had pulped the mud into a paste. Whenever the kid convulsed he seemed to sink further into the wet mud, his face almost unrecognisable under the red and brown stains. The American didn’t know which of the two men was the kid’s father. The inflatable bullet was on the floor next to the kid. It seemed to be in good condition. He thought how easy it would have been to walk away but instead he squatted on his hams, next to the kid. He didn’t want to take his hand, it didn’t seem right with the two school friends standing there next to him. They asked him to do something, to help them, but the American didn’t know what to do. Davey Mercator knocked on another door on his way downstairs, which Mudchute answered. He was reading an essay about Indian philosophy aloud. Mudchute was his stage name. He was the front man in the cuntpunk band “Mudchute and the Gynaecologists”. Davey Mercator didn’t know his real name. They went downstairs together.
*
Mudchute had used to help organise a civilised lynch mob in a Sussex town. Otherwise law-abiding people would set their own agenda for the lynchings, which tended to be agreeable, good spirited and arouse no police investigation due to their peaceful intent and meticulous organisation. No complaints were lodged. It was a middle-class mob operating well above the law. Town meetings were held to nominate potential candidates for lynching, usually those kinds of people who lacked community spirit or were known troublemakers in the area, but who because of family connections or legal loopholes were safe from conventional punishment. After the nominations had been received the town would hold a chaired debate, assessing the evidential veracity of the claims made and the predicted urgency of lynching all nominated parties, and once the arguments had been heard a democratic voting process would be used to finalise the utilitarian selection of the town’s most desired lynchee. Posters advertising the event were displayed around the small town and appeals were welcomed up to two days prior to the lynching. Appeals seldom materialised.
Mudchute helped with the event itself. He would load up folding wooden chairs onto a bus, which drove the townspeople and the lynchee out to a clearing a couple of miles away where the lynching happened. They all sat on the wooden chairs, which Mudchute would organise semicircular in accordance with town policy, then ate a picnic together then hanged the elected party from a gallows constructed from local fundraising initiatives. It was a community act. Everybody in the town cheered when the neck snapped, usually even the relatives. You can’t argue with the democratic process.
*
Davey Mercator and Mudchute stopped in the living room. His friend with the flipchart noticed them and stopped his presentation. He had drawn the soil cucumber and was considering the food seed equation, finding sense in his own madness. His name was Jason Harmony, but people called him Jason A-Adrenal as a result of his crushing conversational apathy. The three of them went outside together. The American was still squatting by the kid, and the two school friends were watching in silence. Nobody looked up at Davey Mercator, Mudchute and Jason A-Adrenal. It looked like the kid had been badly buried but it was just the wet mud swallowing his extremities.
*
Jason A-Adrenal, tormented by the infinite in the stasis of his own life, ruminates on potential at times of sexual exchange. His legs were sunburnt on the beach, he lay there for hours in only his boxer shorts. He ate Bavarian cheese, smoked and processed, slimy in the heat. The girl he was with had had thrush and was using vaginal suppositories. He fingered her when he said infinity was the product of language, and there was a pinkish chalky goo left on his fingers. She had blamed the thrush on him, for going down on her and then rushing her out of the house without a chance to wash. So okay, he said looking down at his fingers and her cunt, God the infinite is the product of human language. She was laying tanned in sunglasses reading. He only pushed her pants to the side, didn’t take them off. If there isn’t a God it’s because I didn’t create one yet, he said. When they fucked it felt odd to him, granular because of the suppositories, and she felt self-conscious because they were on the beach in the daytime, even though they both had their pants on and he just let his dick come through the slit in his boxers. He moved with such tiny thrusts that no one could have noticed. He told her they would destroy divine concepts, whispered it like a sweet nothing. She wouldn’t come like this. He didn’t notice the sunburn until later when his legs rubbed against the denim of his trousers.
*
Eventually the American tried to pick the kid up. Everyone was worried, because they had all seen those programmes where they tell you never to move them, but no one said anything because it seemed like the only thing to do. He carefully slid one hand under the kids thighs and the other between his shoulder blades. He slowly eased him out of the mud and felt his blood sticky on his hands, but it already felt cold, and there was resistance, the mud slurping around his arms, trying to hold him down. The two school friends realised it first from the angle they were standing. As the American lifted the kid his head started lolling backwards, his throat somehow slit in the fall. The angle of his head to his body was all wrong, and blood was coming out of the wound. The school friends screamed no language and the American looked at the kids head, saw the neck oozing, heard a sound like clutching raw meat. It was the neck tearing with gravity, further around its circumference. He slowly put the kid back down into the mud and stood up, wiping his hands on the grass.
He looked at Davey Mercator. They were supposed to be meeting the short Jewish girl, who Davey Mercator was still friends with and who was all he had been able to think about. He kept having dreams where her face had lost all of its flesh and contours and was just the bare bone of her skull, only with the hair still attached, long and dark as it was. She cried from her eye sockets and asked him not to look at her.
He picked up the inflatable bullet and carried it inside. The others followed him. There was nothing else they could do.
