Section Thirty Seven

She stirred on the bed. The toilet bowl moaned and gurgled, as if water from the whole building were swilling through it, following some secret twisted network. She rolled away from the American. She grasped tightly to her troll, caressing its purple hair and feeling the reassuring warmth of its rubber body. It seemed to warm and corrugate in her hand. Its features flattened and hardened and softened. It became sticky and pliable. She tried to drop it. It wouldn't go. She tried to throw it into the far corner. It refused to budge. It was writhing now, a little gentle screaming escaping from its now-slightly-parted lips. It started to heat and buckle and contort and blister her hand. It stuck. It wouldn't let go. She ran to the toilet bowl, tried to dowse it in the brackish water, but it clung on, dived beneath the surface and pulled her through, arm-first; she was dragged through convolutions of pipe, banged on her body on either side, constrained and constricted, buffeted by lead, by porcelain, by clanking machines then pitched into an Amazon of human waste.
A wide viscous flow.
In a subterranean space.
She was half-afloat, half-submerged on a thickened, gorged stream, brown and swelling, dotted with newspaper, frayed rags, rubbered traps of air.
It was barely liquid.
Light eased slowly from the end of the tunnel.
She lay back, Dead Sea floating, and gazed at the stalactites of lead and rust and earthenware and stone until they blued out. Blued out to the sky.
She is far out to sea. She looks around. She is still in her own foul-water promontory, but half-enclosed in brine.
Frozen.
Stranded.
Her hand is freed.
The troll has gone.
She looks up and sees the beach, far off, sees the massive dark-grey stones of the sea-wall loom behind.
The troll is skittering down the beach, towards the sea, towards her.
The troll huffs and puffs and grows to human size.
The troll is dancing on the strand.
The troll is standing, still naked, still devoid of penis, flicking its toes at the tideline. It hops and gibbers, backgrounded in granite.
The troll is bending down, fingering the water's edge, feeling the viscosity of it. It clings to its fingers like slow-melting jelly.
The troll dips in both hands. Raises them. It all sticks together. The troll is sheened in jellied seawater. It flings it over its head and lets it collapse over its back and grabs two more handfuls. Slowly it tosses more and more of the sheet back, stilled fish netted in the flat transparency.
The troll is relentless.
The troll is remorseless.
It bends and bends again and pulls on the jellied carpet of sea.
She feels herself dragged towards it.
She is stuck in filth and the filth is stuck in the jelly.
She is within spitting distance now. She feels the warm droplets of its breath. She feels huge horizontal drops of water wing in from behind her, deserting the sea, skimming the troll's still-purple hair, colliding with the stones of the sea-wall.
They start to liquefy; the giant stones by the sea fold up on themselves as the sea recedes, melt and mount each other and pile-up and crawl over each other and roll down the shore.
The sea starts to constrict and crumple and desiccate and dissipate into fragments and blur to a white opacity. It is all salt. It is a grain-store of salt.
The troll is drowning in salt. It splutters and coughs and gesticulates, sending up great white spumes like a great white whale. The sliming rocks creep forward, a huge pincered claw sloping down the beach.
The pile of salt is sucked up, wafted high and reconstituted into human form. It is the American, a colossus formed out of sea-dust. He is transparent. The sea-life floats beneath his skin - weed and fish and plankton.
As the pincer closes he blows away and deserts the troll, who shakes and gibbers within its nakedness on the naked beach, surrounded by the pile-on-pile of superannuated stones gripping around him, by the slow, steady procession as they pile them up, slow giant ant-men carving the wet-soft stone of their own bodies with their bared hands, carving black igloo-blocks of granite-ooze with deft karate-slices, piling the blocks up in prison walls.
They move with blind deliberation. They have no eyes. Ears. Noses. They have no features. They speak no evil.
She is next to them now. They are friends allies aliens they give her their bodies.
They stand like columns, block-spaced like oblong statues. They thin and stretch and send out side-shoots. They start to melt and capillarise. Their jagged almost-limbs flick out and bud stone right-angles at intervals and cross and fuse to form a stone portcullis. The troll is being slowly surrounded, latticed in its despair.
The troll wails, screams like an abandoned baby on a dark moor at midnight. Its voice moans from deep within. "So you like your little construction do you?

BUT I CAN OOZE THROUGH HERE WHENEVER I WANT I CAN HAVE A CROSS-SECTION OF ONE SQUARE INCH I AM ALL RUBBER."

The troll's face puckers up, deep creases slicing far inside its spongiform face the blubber cheeks distort distend thrust at the edges of the stone-trellis force their way through spring back into place and the entire face squelches through the grey-stone grid on a neck as long and thin as a tapeworm and its own giant-sized face balloons out, quivering before her.
She looks away, looks down at the rocky uneven floor and clench-fists the face she can't see but knows is there it has a dry-slime it is like fondling a dead frog she pushes it away it twists and contorts it bends around her fingers it is an octopus on heat it is all eat-rape-appetite it devours with all pain cast aside she has no fingers she backhands the face with her mitten-paw and the rubber-smack resounds across the cave.
The troll wails, screams like an abandoned baby on a clean doorstep at dawn. "Help me! Help me!"
And the American appears and crackles with dry static and crumples through a gap and leaves nothing behind but the smell of the sea which powders and drops to the floor in a dead-man's outline of white and they are both inside and they push with their impotence, push with their strength.
The prison walls weaken, the thin stone crumbles, its grain in peppered fragments - she leans on, grasps loose with her fingerless hands, but cannot hold it.
All three scream in unison as their friction heats the rock.
And the death-white outline moves and he - HE - rises, creaks up from the silt bends into action presses the bars together they buckle and bend and thin to a translucency he spreads them to a melting stone-wash he covers all gaps but his hands stick to the ooze he is fly-papered on the wall he petrifies and the troll salivas the rocky curtain and licks the salts from it and sucks the salts from him and he collapses to a husk and the walled-in troll wails, screams like an abandoned baby an inch too far from the milk-breast.
It screams, "You are useless as a helper, you are only good as nutrition," and through the frosted rock she sees it start to devour the American, lick up the salt, devour the trapped fish and weed and plankton, sees it grow in strength and size and smells its acid spit etch out letters like some demented primaeval alphabet soup and she senses slow, unheard echoes of screaming from the silent creatures tensing and pulsing, fused together.
And the letters harden and focus, and at the end is the word and the word is
HOPELESS
and great circles of stone fall down from the letter O and the letter P and they crash about her feet.
The troll wails, screams like an abandoned troll in a cave and its muttering stuttering rings out clear and it spits the white-sucked bones out of the gaping letter P, saying "Here, take your little partner. I have abandoned him, like I have abandoned all your fingers for you. Now, get in here and leave your hope behind."
He rails in a trinity of discordant voices. "Get in here we are all hopeless in here. Get in here - I have sucked them dry both. They are out the other side. They are through me now - I possess their voices. Now it is your turn. Now you must pass me through."
And the tongue flicks out, chameleon-like, lashes through the letter O, stretches over her face, choking and blinding.
She tries to wail, scream like abandoned hope on a doorstep forever.
But her mouth retches.
And her eyes mist.

and her eyes blinked
and the crust fell from her lashes
and she coughed back into breathing
and her eyes stalked around the room.
She heard snoring.
She looked through the gutter of smoke from the night-light to the inscription over the door.
She opened her hand.
She was clutching the troll tightly with her bleeding fingers - only now did she feel the pain.

"keep the faith"

She sucked the blood off her fingertip. -Oh, God, what have I done?
-DON'T CALL TO GOD, YOU LITTLE SLUT!
-Away, away you've done enough damage already. She wearily waved her hand. The smoke spiralled; the fetid air span.

Awake.
Alone.
Awake-alone.
Two bodies connected but unentwined; no exchange of intimacy.

The American was semi-snoring, whistling through his nose. His breathing was like the ebb and flow of the sea; it seemed to suck in every outside noise; it was like pebbles shifting and sliding, more like Brighton than Naples.
She stirred. She yawned. she scratched.
He stopped whistling, moved, sniffed, breathed more slowly, belched softly.
A chill went through her. Was he awake?
The whistling started up again. The rhythm settled down into a regular pattern - funiculee funicular, it seemed to say, funiculee funicular. The toilet bowl relayed and echoed the sound.
She rolled onto her front. -What have you done? -What have you done? -You idiot. -You little moron! -Damn. -Can't even sleep. -How did I get into this? -What am I going to do? -Can't get back to the hotel now. -What are they going to think? -Can't walk the streets, though. -Can't do that either. -God, why does he have to snore? -Oh, Lord, if I don't get to sleep, I'll die.
She couldn't get the taste of the cigarette from her mouth. She had a starving headache. A hand, embedded inside, kept reaching forward and scraping off bits of the front of her brain.
-Oh, this bloody bed's too small. She felt a familiar tightening of the abdomen muscles. -Oh, no. -Got to go to the toilet again! She reached down; made to loosen the moneybelt. Where was it?
She reached down to a candle. Lit it. Found her watch. -Four o'clock. -Oh, hell! She stepped out of bed. Stepped on a pile of mixed discarded clothing. She knelt on the gritty floor and fastidiously separated them into two piles, breathing through her mouth.
She found the moneybelt. She smelt burning. The candle was singeing the sheet. She snatched it away. The American turned over and yelled in his sleep. Hot wax spilt on her shaking hand.
She staggered over with candle and troll and moneybelt to the toilet. She made a quick search through the moneybelt as she let her waters go. Everything appeared to be there. She thought of flushing the toilet. Too noisy. She thought of rinsing her hands. Too much hassle and a waste of time. She considered the other bed. Too crowded. She crept back into his bed.
She lay very still. -Is it dawn yet? -Who knows? -How the hell would you know in this place? -No windows: no daylight. -Pretty simple equation, really. -What's that they say about where the sun does not enter, the doctor does? -Come on, come on. -Get to sleep. -There must be a way. -What's that thing you're supposed to do? -Synchronise your breathing with your partner, that's it. -Partners, huh, that's a joke. -More like accessories after the act. -Still, let's give it a whirl - anything to shorten the agony. -C'mon, snorey-chops, move over.
She lay her head on his stomach. The undulating pressure of his muscle-wall forced her head up and down she tried to breathe she tried to match her breaths to his but his stomach forced her head up she could never ride-down the conflict...
She opened her eyes.

Two-candle power.
Two shadows.
Two bodies.

She imagined them viewed from above. One flung across the other, a thin straight line cross-cutting a saggy circle, the two forming a sort of lumbering flashy abstract painting, a Miro painted pink, its darkened reflection shadowed on the wall.
She tried again to tie her inhalation to the rasp of his snoring intakes.
She smelt the rut they had made together.
She felt the touch of his baby-smooth skin against her rucked-up hair.
The hangover taste lingered in her mouth - a tongue furred in mould.
Her eyes were led towards the floor, to another reflection, another abstract of straight line through fuzzy circle but this time picked out in tiny moving red specks, skipping between the swirls and whorls of white powder on the floor.
-Oh, no, not ants! -Just stay there, you little red bastards. -Oh, this place is so disgusting. -How can people live like this?

Voices started up again.
-Oh, go away. -Oh, if I could just think you quiet!
The voices stopped.
-If I could think an accident.
There was a roar of brakes outside.
-If I could think a street-crime.
The sound of shouted voices and pursued and pursuing footsteps spluttered through the shutters' gaps.
-If I could think an earthquake.
Nothing. Silence.
-Know your limitations, upstart.
His whistling started again. Her head funiculee funiculared with each bump of his stomach. The smell of her own salts wafted across from the toilet bowl.
-Oh, this is hopeless! -What to do? -Read? She remembered the book slung into the corner. -Oh, God, John, I'm sorry. She collapsed out of bed. Reached down for the candle. Headed for the corner.
She stubbed her toe on something. Startled, she flung her right hand up in reflex and caught something dangling from the beam, something cold, something with many legs, something big as a tarantula.
Something that tinkled melodiously and randomly.
A wind-chime: eight long polished stones dangling and catching each other, striking gentle music from the current of her disturbance.
She looked across at him: no sign of stirring. -Not even that wakes you up?
She stooped. Picked up the object. It was a bible. Placed by the Gideons. -Not placed here, though! -My God, what sort of person would steal a Gideons' Bible? -Has he no sense of blasphemy? She flicked through the pages, from Old to New Testament. She could almost feel whole dynasties arising beneath her fingertips, entire civilisations being massacred by candlelight. There was a piece of paper inside. She opened it out. As the flame flickered, she read the tiny neat green letters:

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