Dollywagglers

Dollywagglers

Frances Kay

www.tenebrisbooks.com

‘Frances Kay’s vision of a decimated, dystopian Britain after a modern-day Black Death is both riotously funny and wise to the frailties of humanity. A ruined landscape beset by homicidal tribes, prissy serial killers and priapic Suffolk farmers, seen through the eyes of an itinerant puppeteer, is rendered in roaring, poetic prose. A Swiftian odyssesy that skewers the darkest nightmares of our times.’

- Cathi Unsworth, award-winning author of The Not Knowing, London Noir, Bad Penny Blues, and Weirdo.

Copyright © 2014 by Frances Kay

Smashwords Edition

Frances Kay asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is available in print and e-book from all leading online retailers.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-909845-51-0

Epub ISBN 978-1-909845-53-4

Kindle ISBN 978-1-909845-52-7

Cover photograph by Tim Hunkin. Puppets by Meg Amsden

Cover Image Copyright Meg Amsden

Cover design by Ken Dawson

E-book design by Book Polishers

Lyrics from ‘Sally Free and Easy’ are used by kind permission of the copyright holders of the estate of Cyril & Rosemary Tawney.

Tenebris Books

An Imprint of Grimbold Books

4 Woodhall Drive

Banbury

Oxfordshire

OX16 9TY

United Kingdom

www.tenebrisbooks.com

Affectionately dedicated to

Meg Amsden and Francis Wright

 – dollywagglers par excellence

One

I am having a wank, but my thoughts aren’t rhythmic – (strange, the bed hadn’t been looted like the others) – up down up down up – remember cooking? Putting dough in pans to rise? Remember bread? – stroking, disconnected; do I feel this? Would I like to? Is it significant?

Under the layers of winter clothes, the old bagman’s brown overcoat with holes in the elbows, the agricultural corduroy trousers held up with string, the unspeakable greyish Y-fronts – a grudging warmth is breeding, a feathery flickering of something oily, hopefully sensual . . . If only the nostrils would filter out the stuff that explodes in my brain, as visceral as bowel contents, with the same jocular, offensive intimacy.

Now, there’s a word. My hand stops in joyless mid-gland-stroking. I close my eyes, squinting pig-like along my snout, and turn on my belly.

Outside, it is getting dark. Under a bilious moon, her subjects gibber and puke around the unlit streets, somewhat reduced in number, but for all that, a tribe, a species still.

Face pushed into the mattress, it’s easier; I can pretend another hand is fumbling through the layers while I lie, half asleep, half-acknowledging the drowsy spasm that eventually spells release.

Morning has broken and I am woken by impatient, furry dogbreath on my cheek and the feral, faecal warmth of canine canines meeting efficiently around my earlobe. In a masterful (though strangulated) whisper, I establish superiority:

‘Hello! Good dog! good fucking boy, down boy.’

Maybe the dog thought I was dead. He raises corrugated eyebrows, then, puppet-like, is jerked backwards, his face comically surprised. I note a glossy studded collar round his tree trunk of a neck. An old – possibly senile – man stands by the bed, his coat the twin of mine, his toothless gob grinning with pleasure; why shouldn’t he be happy? The dog has all the teeth this old man needs and, no doubt, some spare brain cells to help out those tricky Alzheimer’s moments. At least I know one thing: this ancient gaffer won’t be wanting money. (Okay, two things. Or sex.)

‘You a Ref?’ he quavers. It’s a question that requires an answer.

‘Fuck, no.’

‘Prove it.’

I roll up my sleeves and show my arms. He nods, satisfied. I don’t really want to know, but the strange new etiquette of our times demands a response.

‘You?’ He does the same and I inspect his scrawny inner arms for the tell-tale tattoo, or, more desirably, its absence.

He sits on the bed and the dog begins a soft, low, droning growl, his glittering black eyes fixed on my throat. Oldie, relaxed and powerful, snaps his fingers in my general direction. ‘Got any fags?’

I feel in my pockets. Exciting, this lifestyle where one genuinely doesn’t know from one day to the next what one will find in them. My fragrant fingers close around a packet. Fags! (only slightly damp). Oldie produces matches. We light up, like old front-line comrades.

Dawn has tried to break and we are in the basement of a one-time furniture store. Mine is the only bed left. Oldie, stiff-necked, checks the ceiling approvingly.

‘Good kip here.’

‘Why didn’t they take the bed?’

Patiently, he holds the filthy skirts of my coat to one side, nodding at the mattress. ‘Parped on it, didn’ ‘e?’

Quick as a baby’s reflex, I leap up, and the dog, even quicker, has my coat between his teeth. Oldie slaps him playfully over the eyes.

I look down at the mattress by dawn’s early light. A faint, viscous outline of a human body merges unspeakably into the ticking. Where last night my comfort-seeking mouth was babyishly pressed, my fingers trace a dried, greenish-khaki-ish stain with crusty edges.

Oldie cackles. ‘Had to scrape ‘im off in bits. Parped right there, ‘e did.’

I take a long drag on my cigarette, feeling the blissful antiseptic smoke freshening my lungs as a young nurse in the dear, dead NHS days used to clean a hospital ward. Breathing out a bedpan of detritus I cough my way, recovered, into the day.

Oldie leads me upstairs to his place, gummily garrulous and far from senile. Somehow, he has the puff simultaneously to monologue and, goatlike, hoof his way upward. I listen to his wheezy resumé, brain in attendance, in case he might give me a memory test later. It’s all, of course, about his present situation, and mercifully, it doesn’t take long.

We breakfast together on some sultanas, avoiding any references to our pasts; it’s the kind of taboo one delicately observes on first meeting, in the new scheme of things. All I tell him, unprompted, is that I’ve just arrived in town. Maybe, if the friendship were to ripen, we could exchange names and histories. But I don’t intend to hang around that long.

Oldie has taken up residence in a bookshop; after the Eppie, when society as we knew it melted down, only the youngest and strongest holed themselves up in supermarkets and warehouses, wherever the food was. But since he acquired the dogs, he’s become upwardly mobile in the sense that people give him whatever he wants. He has a mattress, blankets – even though he doesn’t need them, sleeping, as he always does, with a pile of dogs on top of him – matches, attractive rustic-style log baskets of books for fuel, even some wine in the cellar. His other calorific needs are met by a few friendly visits (with dogs) to the new acquaintances he’s made who still have access to food shops. He’s not as dim as he looks, Oldie. Doesn’t take over a food shop himself, because he knows he’d be in a constant state of siege. He’d have to kill a lot of people if he was lucky enough to live in the Sainsbury’s collective, for instance. You’re only allowed to join that particular élite if you have a gun and a year’s supply of bullets.

I could see that if I stuck with Oldie I could learn quite a few life-enhancing skills. He’s a little short on contemporaries, most of whom parped immediately, oldies being particularly susceptible to the Eppie, but he’s coping admirably.

I halve the packet of fags with him, and in return he arthritically proffers books:

‘Whatever you like. Pick of the shop.’

Narrative won’t cut it. I crave poetry, the nourishing metaphysical nipple. But he’s already burnt the Byrons, Drydens, Tennysons, Wordsworths, and the gorgeously flammable moderns – the paperback Heaneys, Duffys and Hugheses, along with the Shakespeares, the dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Dan Brown, Ian Fleming, John Grisham and other pillars of DickLit, he’s touchingly saved till last. They’ll go soon, as winter bites down. And thus, all over the world, I imagine.

With absentminded optimism, I select a tiny A-Z of the old, alive London. How Oldie cackles as I tuck that into my rucksack, which holds merely matches, candles, printed emails, a postcard or two, and a packet of dillisk or dulse – dried seaweed from the West of Ireland. Though I’m not Irish, that seems to be where I hail from now.

As I make to leave, I stub my toe on a book, unexpectedly propping up the leg of a moribund fireside chair. It’s a hardback, and in the dim light I can’t read the title, but who’s in no position to be choosy? Into the pack it goes; a tasty surprise for later on, or, more usefully, a firelighter.

Oldie, festooned with disappointed dogs, sees me to the door. Rottweiler No. 2 gives me a farewell drooling laceration on my calf, easily piercing the dung-stained corduroy, as I wait with old-fashioned courtesy for a parting blessing. The ancient geezer puffs up his skinny chest and clears his throat. It’s a nostalgic moment; a throwback to the days of the forties he probably still remembers, when the older generation passed on nuggets of oral wisdom to their respectful young folk.

‘If you have to crap, son, dig an ‘ole. Don’t do it nowhere else. Ain’t safe.’

Stupid old fart – he’s actually serious. I nod, as one receiving enlightenment, and successfully lift another box of matches from his pocket before leaving.

*

He, the patient, didn’t expect it would be very long now. Another cheerful fucking sunrise – why he’d picked this room, where the midwinter sun slanted its long fingers from bullying morning light to sullen, purulent evening shadows, he couldn’t remember. Now he was too fucking fucked to move. Maybe he’d strike lucky and go blind soon, as some of them had done before they parped.

A few nights ago he’d had company. They weren’t exactly friends, but they knew his name and maybe his face, which was nice for them, because then they knew what to look for.

‘Look! It’s him!’

‘What you got for us, De-esmondo?’

‘Look around you, brothers. Nothing.’

‘We’re not fucking stupid.’

‘And we’re not your fucking brothers.’

He’d been too tired to bother with fear. ‘I don’t care who you are. Just do what you came here to do. Kill me, trash the ward, take what you like.’

But that was too much like bloody hard work, wasn’t it? People nowadays simply weren’t prepared to put in a bit of physical effort to earn their living. What could be easier than shitting on the sheets, setting fire to the lockers and slashing the mattresses in the abandoned hospital?

They grabbed his hands, two of them holding each hand, grinning.

‘You tell us, tell us, Des-mond, Desmondo, Dezzy, Dez—’

One of them had looked under the pillow. ‘Look who we’ve got here!’

He practised not breathing. Couldn’t they see he was dying?

They began moving his fingers forward and back, gently at first.

‘You must be a fucking millionaire. Must have stashed it somewhere. Must have cashed it and stashed it, like it said on the telly.’

‘If I had anything, anything at all, you could take it. What can you do with money? No one wants it.’

‘You know the telly, don’t you, Desmond?’

Every time they said the word, they pulled his fingers further. Backwards. Forwards. Apart.

And all the time the little mouth was silent.

*

I begin to hate the A to Z. It hasn’t adapted to the new demands of the situation at all. Of course, I have the benefit of dramatic irony. But somehow, that fails to soothe. As I go south and east, I jaggedly tear out the pages that particularly annoy me. The A to Z is nothing but a self-important museum piece enthusing about dead London as it was, even up to the dying months of last year, bustling with multi-coloured people, traffic, shops and one-way streets. One-way streets! In four days I’d completely forgotten why we once needed them. Only the Underground map with its earnest primary school tidiness still commands my respect, a visual requiem for a city that believed it was immortal.

Some hours later, I found a tube station that was still open. I walked down the steps of Warwick Avenue (I think it was) where the wind always blows and a kindly, hand-scrawled notice still hung there telling you the wind still blew and the steps ‘can be dangerous and slippery in wet weather’. A stiff, black, parped figure in the ticket office showed me hospitable teeth and fingers crooked in a money-taking attitude. I lit a candle and for some crazy reason began to walk clumsily, anticipating movement that didn’t happen, tripping, swearing, down the silent escalator, knowing I would have to walk back up again – still can’t get into the habit of conserving energy – and stood on the southbound platform. Dead. Nothing. No one. Quiet.

Hands up all you kiddies who were born and raised in London. Remember those recurring nightmares about falling on the tube line? The pulsing rail that hypnotises you to stumble across the steely track, the jolting buzz that shocks you awake? No risk, no dare, we used to say, before everything blew apart. It took me all of fifteen bladder-loosening minutes to step down from the platform and put one foot one the rail, even though I knew there was no electricity. Conditioned to a palsy of fear, I could not put my hand on the rail. Not my hand! Not my left hand!

A contemptuous, baby-faced rat watched me quietly as I, farting with terror, stood undecided in the gap which we had always been asked to mind, and then he, or she, skipped along the rail, fixing me with a telepathic eye.

(Black Death, Room l0l, Pied Piper. I had a friend, surely now dead, whose opportunistic burglar father, previous to his life of crime, helpfully had the tips of his baby fingers gnawed off by rats, as a result of which he had no fingerprints.)

I hopped off the rail and scuttled,