SHOWCASE EXTRA 'The Sunshine Club' was David's original story that I featured on the showcase. It was also a prizewinner in the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest
'THE SUNSHINE CLUB'
by David VeroneseI was sitting on a bench in Trafalgar Square eating a sandwich from a paper bag. The sky was oyster grey, tweaked with white fissures, like a piece of oddly coloured cake. The pavement was loaded with people, most had no apparent relationship to one another. There was motion all around me, troops of buses and automobiles circumnavigating madly, as if they were caught on a magic circle, a whirling mandala, an LP record, an eye of God.I was down to my last few pounds. In an hour or so I would have to start begging again, so as to ensure myself a proper dinner. Renata, my well-meaning, long-suffering girlfriend, had unaccountably succumbed to treachery and stolen my violin; I wouldn't be able to hustle up any change fiddling Mozart and Brahms down in the tube. Downtown Bob was supposed to have shown an hour ago with a bindle of the nasty matter, but he wasn't exactly someone you could set your clock to.
I will need to take notes, I thought. I kept telling Renata that there was a plan, a series of lines of different colours that intersected each other, somewhat like the diagram for the Hamburg subway system. The colours of the lines, the points of intersection - none were products of coincidence. Every fucking pigeon in London, scrabbling among his mates for a piece of bread, every lost dog, every particle of trash, every missing sock, was party to this great and awful scheme.
I crumpled up the paper sack and considered carrying it to a dustbin that lay three meters to my left. But it seemed like a task that was too great, and beyond the scope of my weakened powers. I dropped the bag to the ground. It landed as soundlessly as a piece of popcorn.
Then, at once, as clear as an Old Testament prophecy, the unmistakable figure of Downtown Bob emerged from the sea of floundering souls agitating in the vicinity of the square. He stood a good half-foot above the man of average height, and though his shoulders were notably sloped from thousands of hours spent languishing on beat-up couches consuming illicit substances, it was no trick at all to spot him in a crowd.
‘Trips to you, Luther, you unnatural abomination,’ said Bob. ‘Holy fucking trips. Let me sit down here, you miserable plankton. I can't walk another step.’
Bob took himself uncommonly serious, you had to hand him that. There he stood, hunched over like a willow branch, thin as a spindle, wearing a little green sweater four sizes too small, his jeans riven with tears and holes of all description, the leather of his boots worn down in places to the thinness of newsprint. His eyes were red as ladybugs, his pupils the size of coffee beans, his hands chapped and dried, looking as if he laved them with sandpaper several times a day. And yet he seemed to adjudicate himself on a sacred, never-ending mission, on a par with the Grail search, or a hand count of the infinite names of God.
‘Well, certainly, Bob, my son’, I said, moving over an inch or so. ‘Have yourself a chair. Go right ahead. Naturally, I've saved you the best seat of the house.’
A flock of birds appeared suddenly overhead, darkening the sky further, circling in an ominous pattern, mirroring uncertainty while they surrendered to the great desire for flight; then flew off in the direction of Westminster Abbey. Bob paid them no tribute whatever, and draped himself over the bench, letting his long arms dangle behind the bracing-boards, his legs stretched out to full length across the pavement. He coughed, raising some awesome glob of matter in his throat, then swallowed - he couldn't be bothered to spit.
‘Lady Luck hasn't been my confidante today, Luther. ‘ His voice was tempered with the phlegm. ‘In fact, wherever I turn, I get shagged up the bum. Some curse seems to be hanging over my head. Despite my reputation for honesty and good-will, I can't come up with a bleeding half-penny worth of stock.’
‘You haven't found anything to relieve our burden is what you mean,’ I said glumly. ‘That's raw stuff to lay at my feet, Bob...’
At one of the myriad bus stops that ringed the square, a group of hoodlums were jostling each other with uncommon ferocity. They all wore black leather jackets, cracked and faded, adorned with endless rows of shiny zippers, with black jeans and large, ugly, doltish boots.
‘Well, see there yon, Luther,’ said Bob. ‘Cheer it up, someone's flipped on the telly for us. Yers needn't have worried yourself about lack of entertainment, after all.’
He massaged his wrist with his fingers; they were long and rubbery, appearing like the serpents that twisted out of Medusa's head.
‘Aye, Luther, those lads look poised to hand out a frightful shit-kicking.’
I took not the time to respond to Bob's observation. I was no longer interested in watching people beating the crap out of each other; spectacle, no matter its magnitude, had ceased to provide diversion. There actually was no such thing as entertainment: the word had dropped from my vocabulary like a jar fallen off a shelf in an empty room. Everything seemed to be losing its flavour, as if I'd bitten into a succulent piece of steak, and after a few chomps it began to taste like a piece of boiled lettuce. Meaning itself, identity, substantiation, were being irrevocably leached from the air in wholesale increment. Major polarities: good and bad, light and dark, happy and sad, were being neutralized and neutered, powdered into mush. Nothing resonated, a striking of the tuning fork produced a dull and aching thud, instead of the ringing clarion sound of A major.
‘We need some money! Bob,’ I said, ‘Not tickets to a matinee at The Globe. You remember money, Bob, the stuff that hardly grows on trees.’
Bob continued to stare in fascination at the young toughs scrabbling at the bus queue. His tongue hung out of his mouth, not from wonderment, but perhaps because the muscles that were meant to keep it moored behind his teeth had atrophied along with the rest of him. One of the lads was pummelling his fellow about the head with his fists; a spasm of blood erupted from his nose. A crowd began to gather around them, fain not to miss out on a rousing bit of family violence.
‘Lightning strikes, Luther. Get off yer arse. Do you follow?’
‘It is the will of Allah,’ I replied, suddenly grasping Bob's intent.
We rose in concert from the bench, and wormed our way into the crowd, attentive to our mission, to the Way.
We sat in the back row of the upper deck of a bus headed for Victoria. It was caught in a clot of lunchtime traffic, and it was unlikely that anyone else would be ascending the stairs before the next stop. And if they did, well, we might deal with that.
True to Bob's instincts, a full-scale riot had flared up among the hooligans, a melee of heightened rigour and emotion. The crowd, entranced by this sudden display of blood-lust and primordial behaviour, had respectfully inched up toward the theatre of action. Bob had managed to boost five wallets in the crowd, and I had come up with three.
A number of women, clad likewise in leather and denim, partisans apparently of one of the gangs, were putting on a display of their own, hooting and screaming their lungs out like a gang of chickens with their tails on fire. One was sporting a nifty handbag, and Bob, caught up with his easy successes, gave her the trademark bump and snatched it from beneath her arm as we raced toward the bus. I didn't get a look at her, forced as I was to hook her ankle with my own, and send her sprawling among her frenzied fellows.
Safe now in our aerie, rolling through the streets of London, we pushed our knees together and spread the booty out upon our laps. Bob performed the ministrations, his serpentine fingers wending their way in and out of the leather folds, like the tendrils of a squid probing the dark mysterious terrain deep beneath the sea. Like a magician, he extracted all the bills and slipped them into a tube in his hand which disappeared up his sleeve.
‘Shall we do any credit cards?’ he said, his voice deadpan, his eyes fixed on the insides of the wallets as if they were emitting rays.
‘What's the take thus far?’
‘We've grabbed the golden ring today, you bastard,’ he said. ‘It's over four hundred lovely stinking filthy quid.’
‘Hm, brilliant, I said. ‘It's been all too easy. Let's not trample on the gods of fortune. I say toss the flotsam.’
‘Done.’
I looked out through the window and below me a man with a fine gold-knobbed cane in his hand was jumping off the step of the bus as we slowed for the next stop.
‘I'll just finish with the bag, won't I?’ said Bob. He unzipped a tiny pocket within the handbag, and scooted a finger within like an eel. ‘Ouch!’ he exclaimed.
With his thumb and forefinger he lifted up a pin that was hinged to a brooch and lay it in his palm. It was a beautiful little piece, of antique silver formed like a helix, with tiny rubies and sapphires set along its perimeter.
‘That little wench will be likely missing this a bit,’ said Bob, a doleful smile crossing his weathered lips. ‘Even were it hardly necessary, that was a brilliant move on yers part, Luther, lamming her into the crowd like a fucking bag of tatties.’
I continued to stare at the brooch. It had an uncommon power over me. The beauty of the stones, the architectonic message that inhered in its design, gave to it a persona that exceeded the mere sum of its parts.
‘Let me have that one, Bob. You know how Renata has been casting the evil eye my way these days. Maybe this will buy me back some luck with her.’
Bob held his palm up to nose level. The bus was about to stop.
’I don't think so, Luther. It's share and share alike. But how about fifty pounds against your take? That's on the cheap...’
I pretended to be thinking about it.
’You leave me no options, Bob. My heart is set upon it, as you can see. No sense going through the drill...’
Bob waved his fingers about as if he were performing an act of hoodoo or santeria. Suddenly there were one-hundred fifty pounds and the brooch in my side pocket and Bob was making his way down the winding stairwell at the front of the bus. I waited a few moments, then followed behind pushing my way gently through the crowd that had ascended at the stop, jumping off onto the pavement as the vehicle pulled brusquely from the curb.
Victoria Station was a madhouse. If one magnified an ant-pile to human proportion and lined it with tony boutiques and money-changing outlets, it would no doubt bear some resemblance to the scene at hand. I stood dumbfounded twenty paces from the doorway of W.H. Smith booksellers, trying to think of a book or magazine that I might want to read. None came to mind however, dissimilation of reading capability is one of the principal signs of advanced progress of the disease. All the titles, all the words, if fact, streamed together in my mind, compounding themselves with the names of soups, of the Icelandic town of Keflavik where lies the main airport, of viruses, of farmhouses that I had passed in my youth riding with my father and uncle from Pennsylvania to New York, of the names of St Xerxes and St Veronica, the colours of the spectrum, the titles of all the poisonous snakes that habited North America - the rattler, the coral, the water moccasin, the cottonmouth. The names of God were too numerous for inclusion; I needed short-list them: Jehovah, Allah, Jesu Christu Rex Inri, Brahma, Jupiter, Kali, Junior Wells...
I sat at the table of a little restaurant. With my back at a certain angle, I could imagine myself in Gatwick, awaiting a flight to Budapest or Sophia. I took out the brooch and studied it. Although overwhelmed by its mystery, I knew it had real-world value as well, it would look neat and prim upon a Christie's catalogue page. It was certainly antique, of the 18th century perhaps. I tried to remember the face of the woman Bob had snatched it from, but I stopped myself. A sudden wave of paranoia washed over me: police line-ups, messy fingerprinting, the stink of the holding cell.
I returned the brooch to my pocket and headed for our flat. The pulsating mobs that filled the station appeared like droves of giant amoebas; I was easily engulfed by their cellular matter and rode the rail enmeshed in protoplasm until I reached the exit at Earls Court Road.
Renata was sitting upon the couch, looking at a mirror propped upon the coffee table, weaving her hair into tiny braids. Some melodic noise was emitting from the stereo, perhaps it was Jane's Addiction or The Smashing Pumpkins. A pile of beads was spread out next to the mirror; at intervals she'd slide one up the braiding, then perform some unidentifiable action with her fingers. Women's hands were fearful little things, performing inordinate actions upon inanimate objects with merciless speed. They weren't like machines, exactly: they trembled and wavered at times. No, they were machine and animal at once, one couldn't fathom it, not properly.
’Oh, look who's here,’ said Renata, her voice too bright and cheery to merit definitive accusation of sarcasm. ‘Back from the fields of battle.’
I stared at her with grave countenance.
’Where's my fucking guitar, Renata?’
She scowled at herself in the mirror and undid a few knots. She dipped her thumb into a bitty tin of pomade, and delicately rubbed it along the ruffled strands, then twirled her thumb and forefinger, clockwise and counter-clockwise.
’I pawned it.’
’Did what?’
’Yes,’ she said, ‘Pawned it for ten quid. You can retrieve it whenever you want for up to six months. It's a shop off the Portobello Road – the ticket's on top of the bureau.’
I sat down at the table, disheartened, confused, my left eye attempting to rotate towards my chin.
’But why have you done that?’
’I told you I would,’ she said matter-of-factly. Her finger probed among the beads, searching for the proper colour. ‘You owe me over a hundred pounds - you admit that don't you?’
’I admit only to zealotry and indecision,’ I said without thinking. ‘And you inspire both in me...’
Her ears pricked up, she set down her beads. She looked at me with cautious interest.
’What does that mean?’
Few things under heaven and earth can prevent a woman's interest in engaging in conversation, particularly if she be the topic, it seemed to me. I steeled myself for an exacting, indeterminate interchange of words, that would lead nowhere as it led everywhere, like a system of vines gone haywire on a summer wall.
’It means that giving must be as gift. It means, Renata, that if your heart opens your hand, and you pass what is yours unto me, as I would reciprocate and pass my love back to you.’
’Love!’ she exclaimed. ‘Passing me love! The only thing that passes through you is piss and lies! You've sunk to nothingness, really, to nothingness. I'm so ashamed of myself, I don't know how I can put up with it. The drink and drugs, the awful friends, the stories and fabrications, one more fantastic than the next...’
’But Renata, you can't be upset about this.’
She looked at me oddly, I didn't like it a bit. There was something saved up in there, about to come out, a hive filled with half-slumbering bees, awaiting the first sign that winter had ended.
’I mean you can't be upset with yourself,’ I continued rapidly. ‘The fault, the fault manifest, the mainstay of all problem, lies with me exclusively... I'm incohesive. Do you understand?’
’Incoherent, you mean.’
She allowed the tracing of a smile to undo slightly the bitter lock upon her lips.
’No, no, incohesive,’ I said emphatically. ‘The inability to understand what I say is not due to slurring or advanced learning disability, to alcohol or dyslexia. The problem is the thoughts themselves. They've come unglued. My mind is a matrix of dots and stars, and where once they fit into a wondrous pattern, the pulls of this disjointed erratic society, the lack of normative experience, has thrown them terribly out of alignment, as if someone had pounded a typewriter keyboard with a ball-peen hammer. My words, though putative lies, are the best symbols of my thoughts that I can come up with for now. Do you understand...?’
Renata blew a gust of air through her teeth and over her bottom lip. She pushed back her braids and shook her head erratically, like a doll being tested at the factory. Yes she was very pretty, she knew all about that, she used it as one might use a knife or gun, but she didn't rely on it for survival, not like some American girl.
She stood up and came over to me, her eyes troubled but wary, you could read them no better than a cat's. She ran her fingers through my hair and pushed my nose with the index finger of the other hand, as if it were a button or a doorbell. I could feel a bit of the pomade upon my skin, and absorbed its smell, sweet and waxy.
‘What did you do today?’
’Who me?’ I said. ‘I was out looking for work. It's rough out there, girl. The competition is stiff...’
’You can turn off the phonograph,’ said Renata. ‘The bullshit about incohesiveness is a lot more entertaining... I'm sorry about your guitar. That old bitch downstairs was at me again for the rent money...’
She started crying. She was motionless as the tears swiped down her face falling like raindrops to the carpet. And here I was, flush with cash, I thought. But that would all be needed for a rainy day. And every day is a rainy one, I'd often said.
She hadn't moved yet. Her eye makeup was bleeding down her cheeks. She didn't make a sound. I remembered it then. I reached into my pocket and removed the brooch I'd knicked at the melee with Downtown Bob. I stared at it again. It was possessed of forceful power, no doubting. A ray of sun happened to breech a crack in the curtains of the flat, catching the inlay of jewels right where they lived, creating a smear of spectral fire.
’For you.’
Renata stared at my hand. The last time I'd given her a gift was some two years past, marking the occasion when I'd inopportunely and accidentally shot her cousin in the foot with a derringer. The stupid little nit had tried to grab it from me. A few roses I'd borrowed from the neighbor's garden. Rather nice specimens actually.
’Oh, pook,’ she said softly, a few tears catching on her lips. ‘It's lovely. I don't believe this.’
’Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘It's an aberration, you might think. But that’s what I'm saying. It's what I'm always saying. If anyone could just translate me decently. All my words would look like this.’
She hugged me for a long while. It almost felt good like it did a great time ago.
A few days later Downtown Bob and I were riding at the top of the bus heading down Charing Cross Road. We'd no doubt spent every penny of the loot we'd copped, on Kentucky bourbon, on skunkweed and Ecstasy, on dogs and horses, darts. I think we lost some of it too somewhere, but we couldn't remember. We were drinking the last swills off our last half-pint of the Kentucky bourbon, watching some grey-suited bastards walking down the sidewalk like constipated ducks.
’It's only Keith I'm concerned with,’ said Downtown Bob. ‘Yers can take that Mick the Fag and Tory tit-sucking Ronnie Wood and embalm them once and for all. But that Keith can still play licks on his guitar, man. Have yers heard his solo stuff. It rips, it snorts, it kills. He puts the other boys together every few years - stands up their corpses, so to speak, glues them somehow to the stage - to top off another 100 million pounds. It's understandable, I suppose, in a freakish, money-grubbing way...but it's not fair to us real fans, who've been with Keith all these years, through his hard time, through that ugly puffing Nina Van Palooka, having to deal with those other gruesome grey and dead wanks... Yers hear me?’
I took back the bottle, just salvaging the last few drops. Despite Bob's uncommon eloquence, I didn't give fuck-all about that music stuff. Or football, or the drivel that was passed off as litra-choor, for that matter. It was all just a bunch of molecules misbehaving themselves, eluding the great plan by trying to distract us. I threw the bottle out the window; it struck the edge of a post box, and went shattering in a wee storm of glass about the pavement.
As we came close to Leicester Square, Bob suddenly grabbed tightly at my upper arm. I hadn't much blood left there, I felt a bit woozy.
’Quick, mate,’ he said. ‘We must move like panthers. It's those hooligans again - the ones we did so well with in Trafalgar the other day. It looks like they may be getting ready for another go at it.’
We raced down the staircase, twirling around the pole like streamers at the May Day. We jumped off the bus landing like cats in the middle of an intersection; brakes squealed, horns went honking like flocks of angry birds.
We made our way through the traffic and walked toward the marquees of Leicester Square. The hooligans were at it sure enough. Taking fake punches at one another, stomping their dirty black boots. Bob and I stopped, waiting for the juice.
A group of schoolboys were approaching from across the square. And although they wore the coat and tie, they didn't look like nancy-boys or anything. Au contraire. They looked like they could wield a mean lacrosse stick and hold their own at a good scrum of rugby, crew down the Thames at high speed.
’It's just what the doctor ordered,’ said Downtown Bob. ‘Get your fingers ready, and watch out for knives. I think I spotted something flashing in the sun just now.’
We crept a bit closer as the school lot approached the hooligans. The school lot could feel what they were coming at, but they didn't flinch, no, they weren't no nancy-boys. The hooligans seemed a bit curious actually, they were more used to folk giving them a wide berth.
One of the hooligans, obviously just a bit more drunk than all the rest of us, stepped forward of the pack. He seemed to have a bit of the weave in his step, as if falling flat on his nose wasn't a terrible long distance for him to go.
’You little faggot scumbags,’ he called out, exhibiting not much artistry in his address.
It was here that Downtown Bob seemingly erred. For in fact it appeared that the schoolboys grew taller and wider as they approached, a fact as clear to the hooligans as to myself, and all other self-respecting witnesses. In fact, assuming that the Marquis of Queensbury rules would not be adhered to in a stand-up between the two groups, there was all possibility that the schoolboys, by reason of their robust and healthy nature might wallop the ever-living shit out of their pasty-faced coevals.
It was true. They would have passed by without incident. Then said Bob: ‘Yeah, you filthy rotting scum.’
It was this sentence that no doubt prompted the weaving hooligan to turn his cross-eyed gaze from the pack of approaching academics and place it on us.
’It's them!’ he screamed. ‘The ones that gommed off with Julie's handbag at Picadilly. It's them!’
If you've ever been trapped inside a life-size pinball machine while four or five of the metal balls came speeding one by one directly over your head, the lights beneath the glass going off like the outtakes of some Vietnam war flick, before the whole thing is beset by some well-placed Molotov cocktails, you can imagine the state of things that followed.
I closed my eyes and rolled myself into a tight ball. They were on us like a swarm of bees. Two well-placed fists landed squarely, dead center of my ears, sending paths of lightning directly to my brain. The words "these are the end of days" resounded, as if from the mouth of the preacher, as I passed into unconsciousness.
Next I knew, Downtown Bob and myself were sitting against a wall - a huge placard announcing a nouvelle-cuisine Chinese restaurant pasted above us. We were covered in torn rags, spitting bits of tooth and blood, modestly surprised at being alive.
Apparently the hooligans had jumped us like a pack of hyenas, tearing us apart ostensibly in search of the contents of Julie's purse, and frustrated, or invigorated, by their lack of success, they thought they'd get in a good trouncing and breaking of rib and leg-bones while they were at it. Ironically, it was only the intervention of the academics, who began pulling the frenzied louts off of us, that saved us from a one-way ticket to perdition.
But they were all gone now, and only one police car remained, its overhead bulbs spinning needlessly in the stark daylight, as consciousness, unwelcome and uninvited, crept back into the pores of our brain stems.
Finally Downtown Bob, his face a rather comical imitation of the one he'd had an hour before, managed to utter between his swollen lips.
’Do yers have anything?’
’Nothing. We need high-class anaesthetics, Bob, of pharmaceutical quality. Morphine, Demerol...’
’I know, I know. I'm dead-piss broke. Skint.’
’Think...’
I thought and thought. And then I remembered. It would be in the top drawer. In the black ebony box lined with velvet. It would be side by side her beads, her gewgaws, her little silver rings, the turquoise earrings she had received when she was whoring about with the indigenous groups of New Mexico and Arizona, some thousand years back. The brooch. The life-giving, resurrecting brooch. She would have put it there, as sure as rain, as sure as the sun falls into the western ocean at dusk.
’It's the gift, Bob.’
’Whaz..?’
’The hidden meaning of the gift,’ I admonished solemnly.
A trickle of blood rolled from my forehead, splashing on my lips. A hexagonal image, like a snowflake, fluttered before my eye. Yes, there was a plan, an awful scheme.
’It means,’ I said, ‘that just as giving must give meaning to the gift, so too shall taking. Otherwise...’
’Otherwise...?’
’Otherwise it means nothing, Bob. And that would contradict, or else it would substantiate, everything that we know. And that would be fucked...’
’Take back the gift,’ said Bob solemnly.
’Aye, mate. Back and back, and then again.’ And we rose to our feet as certain as the Magi, realizing the folly of their deed.
© David Veronese
Reproduced with Permission
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