Limbo (Carl Hughes)

 

Jud and his four mates got bladdered on their crawl through the drinking dens of Penton-on-Sea, a resort which on that November night resembled a wasteland of shredded summer dreams. They had a good reason for their piss-up, or at least Jud had. Thanks to his buddies, he’d cheated the law for the first time in his life and that was all the excuse he needed to blow a month’s benefits on a legless night out.

They started at five o’clock with a curry at the Taj Mahal in a backstreet that smelled of dead things from the fish market, then they traipsed from pub to pub and ended up at Mr Tom’s Nitespot, a pit of a place that occupied the crypt of what was formerly a Benedictine priory and that stank like a sumo wrestler’s scrotum. A din of heavy metal swelled between whitewashed walls down which condensation ran in strobe-coloured rivulets, while floozies with ginormous tits and micro skirts latched on to any bloke who’d give them a good time. A couple of heavies, their skeletons made of girders topped by heads of granite, ejected a group of black guys whose only offence seemed to be their colour. The men left with quiet dignity but Robbie, one of Jud’s mates, said, ‘They’ve done eff all wrong – I’m going to complain about them pieces of shit what call theirselves bouncers.’

‘No you won’t, not unless you want to get your nose busted and balls mashed to pulp,’ said Gaz, another of the mates. So they turned away and got on with the serious business of blitzing themselves into oblivion.

Finally, when the club closed, Jud, his mates and all the other piss artists spilled on to the foggy street. The five buddies had the remaining hours of night to kill before they could head for home fifty-odd miles away on a bus that wasn’t due to leave until eight o’clock in the morning. They’d bought return tickets so had the means of transport, even if all their dosh had gone down their throats in liquid form.

‘What now?’ Kris asked, clutching a bottle that he’d secured with the last of his money.

‘God knows,’ Jud said. ‘First thing I’m gonna do, though, is take a leak.’ Which he did against the window of a funeral parlour. His mates followed suit and Paul screamed through the letterbox, ‘Fuck all you stiffs in the chapel of rest – I’m only here for the bier.’ This tickled their funny bones and for the sake of raising the dead, Jud booted in a glass panel in the door. Afterwards they reeled down the street, taking turns at swigging from Kris’s bottle. When the bottle was empty, Kris chucked it into the roadway where it smashed and presently ruptured a late-night taxi’s front nearside tyre.

‘I’m shagged,’ Dave said. ‘There’s hours yet before we can go home and this fog’s freezing my gonads. I’m gonna find a shop doorway to get some kip.’

The fog seemed to be thickening, rolling in from the sea with the stink of kelp and brine. A dog howled in the distance, a lonely note like a siren from a hinterland of the lost. The only other sounds were the slop of sea on shingle and the rattle of a train on the nearby crossing.

Szymon spewed in the gutter, retching so much that it seemed his guts were about to explode. For some reason that seemed to act as a trigger for the friends to break up and wander off in their solitary ways. Jud guessed they’d all find shop doorways but he’d never been able to sleep rough. Once, on a tenting holiday before his old man ran off with that tart from the upstairs flat, he’d scarcely slept for three nights. Tent life and rough sleeping weren’t for him. So he knew he’d wouldn’t manage to doze off in the cold, wet fog, whether he found a doorway or not. But as he wasn’t prepared to walk around for hours, especially as his head felt as if it were starting to detach itself like a bit of Plasticine from his neck, he slumped down by the entrance to the pier and drew up his knees as if he were still in the womb. He felt pissed in every sense.

After fifteen minutes a cop car pulled up and a Plod and Plodess got out. The man had a pockmarked face as if he’d come into contact with a galaxy of wandering asteroids, and the woman looked as if she’d swallowed a rancid trout.

‘What’re you doing?’ the Plod demanded.

Jud stared blearily. ‘Killing time till morning,’ he said.

‘Not here, you’re not. Shift your arse before we run you in for being drunk and disorderly.’

Jud frowned, then immediately wished he hadn’t as it squinched his head into a tight band that felt like pressure to the brain. Still hugging his knees, he said, ‘What the fuck are you on about? I’m not disorderly. I’m just sitting here doing no bugger no harm.’

The Plod and Plodess exchanged glances. Then the woman said, ‘You’re disorderly if we say you are. If you doubt that, see which side the magistrates come down on when we drag you into court.’

This wasn’t a new experience for Jud. Once he’d been beaten up by a couple of thugs in uniform while attending a football match, not because he’d been rowdy (he hadn’t) but because those saints of the constabulary hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at them. It had been the same with some of his mates. None had had good dealings with those supposed paragons of justice. Sure, sometimes it was their own fault but often they’d been set upon only because of who they were.

Knowing better than to argue, and realising Plod would be on his back soon enough anyway, Jud got up and headed back into the town centre. A cold wind had got up, breathing the death rattle into autumn leaves, but at least it was serving to disperse the fog.

‘Don’t think you’re going to get off with this – we’ll nail you for something, you bastard.’ That’s what Police Constable Jackson had said three days ago at the crown court after Jud had been acquitted of robbery and causing grievous bodily harm.

He had his mates to thank for that acquittal. In August he’d mugged a decrepit pensioner in a wheelchair, knocking her to the ground (and unfortunately breaking her arm, though he reckoned that was her own crazy fault for getting it caught beneath one of the wheels), and he’d run off with her handbag. A waste of effort it had proved to be, for the bag contained only a few measly pounds, a laminated bus pass and a lipstick-smeared paper hanky. Yet for that petty misdemeanour he’d faced a long stretch inside, what with his past record; but his mates had come forward to testify in court that he’d had been with them sixty miles away at the time, cheering on their motorhead pal Terry Jesmond in a rallycross event. As the only independent witnesses to Jud’s crime had been a pair of old biddies who’d seized up with fright in court, the judge had ordered the jury to dismiss the case. An excellent reason, therefore, for this piss-up at the coast. And may the forces of law and order fester forever in a stinking cesspit of rectitude.

Jud spent the rest of that night at Penton-on-Sea huddled in the doorway of a crumbling high-rise block of flats: a monolithic eyesore encased in cobwebs of scaffolding. The building probably needed the support of metal to remain upright, he thought sourly. He felt cold and miserable, his head aching as if a gnome with a billhook were scraping away the detritus that had collected on the insides of his skull. A clock on the gothic town hall struck the hours of three, four, five, and the town slumbered in a stillness usually found only in desert tombs or forsaken dungeons beneath the walls of crumbling castles.

Dawn eventually filtered through cloud the colour of unwashed linen and Jud stood up, his joints having seized like rusty joists. Bone weary, hung over, mouth feeling as tacky as a glue factory, he slouched down to the seafront and there he met up with his mates, who resembled things dredged from sewers.

‘I could murder some breakfast,’ Kris said.

‘Christ, the thought of greasy bacon makes me want to spew up like Szymon did last night,’ Jud told him. ‘Anyway, we’ve no skrill – not a bloody sou between us.’

‘What time d’you make it?’ Robbie asked.

‘Just after seven,’ Gaz said. ‘Nearly an hour before the bus leaves. And I hope none of you’s lost your ticket cos it’s a fucking long walk home otherwise.’

With the cold, damp air wafting through the early morning like corpse breath, they made their way to the bus station. Other pedestrians were now out in dribs and drabs, all looking as if they remained half in yesterday. Cars and motorbikes appeared in increasing numbers, their exhaust fumes coiling and coagulating in the murk.

The bus station was a big, draughty place with tattered posters, their messages obscured by graffiti. Splintery benches were set out at intervals while waste paper, cigarette ends and matchsticks had formed a sticky paste on the concrete walkways. Kris delved into an overflowing rubbish bin and came up with a half-eaten hot dog.

‘Anybody want a congealed sausage?’ he asked. Jud for one felt like gagging at the thought. Kris tossed the sausage away and ate what was left of the stale bread roll and onions.

The breeze increased to a frigid weave of rank air, creating a tumble of dead leaves that crackled like the lids of ancient trapdoors. Time passed and eventually their red double-decker bus pulled in, its interior lights as welcome as beacons on a dead sea. The five friends piled aboard and climbed to the upper deck, luxuriating in the warmth that dribbled through the heating vents. Few other people were travelling far at that hour so the bus contained only a dozen passengers when it left.

Stretching out on a double seat, Jud said to his mates, ‘I’m stun-gone shagged. Wake me up when we reach our stop. And don’t fucking forget.’

‘Count on it,’ Szymon said. ‘Didn’t we save you from a long stretch in the pen?’

‘You’re good mates – I owe you,’ Jud mumbled, already drifting into a slumber that carried him on waves of warmth to the arms of Mother Comfort.

Exhaustion, the rocking of the bus and its pleasant growl of engine kept him under for a good long time. He dreamed of wandering through a series of tunnels, always sloping deeper underground, his way lit by flaming torches that revealed cave paintings that may have been left by Neanderthals. He knew these daubings were meant to convey messages but he found them as frustratingly cryptic as crossword clues written in Klingon. One dream morphed into another, he fidgeted, moaned about nothing that he could afterwards remember, and finally turned over.

And landed on the floor.

‘What the fuck!’

The bus had stopped and its lights were off. No more cosseting warmth from the vents. Jud levered himself to his knees and looked around. Apart from himself, the upper deck was empty. Where in the name of God were his mates?

Then he looked outside and saw that during his kip the bus had reached the depot: journey’s end. Which was nearly twelve miles from the stop where he should have got off. Other buses were parked in silent ranks all around, like metallic monoliths. The only illumination came from a few weak striplights in the roof.

Incensed, Jud realised that his mates had left him to sleep on while they’d alighted. The lousy filthy bastards. No doubt they’d thought it hilarious to abandon him, letting him become stranded without the means to get another bus or a taxi home. He didn’t know what they had between their ears that passed for brains but he’d known greater nous in pickled shit. He wished them all the way to Hell in a wankfest wagon.

And what about the effing driver? Shouldn’t he have checked that the bus was empty before he parked the thing up and tootled off for his tea break in the canteen or wherever else he’d pissed off to?

Cursing, damning his so-called mates, Jud nursed his aching head for a few minutes as silence pressed in like dense and sodden cotton wool. At last he got up, descended the stairs and pressed the emergency button to open the door.

An eerie emptiness greeted him. Emptiness as in the absence of humanity. No one was moving about the depot; there wasn’t a sound of a voice or a footfall or even a cough. Just the noise of a frolicking wind outside like some wild beast let loose from a zoo.

‘Hello – is anybody there?’ he shouted. Then he muttered to himself, ‘Stupid bloody question. This isn’t a séance.’ He soon realised it might as well have been, for no one replied. Only the echo of his own voice reverberated around the cream-washed walls.

Beginning to feel spooked, he picked his way between the ranks of buses until he reached the depot entrance. The vast frontage opened on to what Jud judged by its width and clutter of shops to be one of the main streets of town. Cars, buses and lorries occupied the roadway in both directions just as anyone would expect at the height of rush-hour chaos. Yet they were all stationary and driverless. And the footpaths were similarly deserted. Not a soul moved, only a discarded newspaper blew along the street in the lusty wind.

Jud stood, astounded, gazing around. His heart thudded slowly, metronomically, but too loud for comfort. There was about the morning a quality of light that came from the fading year: paler, as though the landscape it revealed were a product of over-diluted watercolours. In this strange and furtive reality, Jud’s shadow stretched long and warped like something misfired from a kiln. Above, the sky was filled with puffballs of cloud that resembled an explosion in a powder factory.

After a minute, he took a few steps to his right then stopped again. His brain pulsed out a furnace of wild ideas, unbridled and coagulated. It seemed he’d entered a ghost town. The wind tore at his hair and rattled through the branches of a withered tree that stood at the roadside like a long-dead sentry.

He took a deep breath and bawled, ‘Where’s every fucker gone? Answer me, somebody.’

Apart from the gusts of wind that harried his voice away, only profound silence greeted him. Evidently the town had been abandoned.

Jud had never been one to handle stress well, and now he found his agitation level rocketing off the scale marked Panic. That metronomic heartbeat had turned into a piledriver working overtime. His breath came in spasmodic bursts, his fingers clenching and unclenching.

He stabbed frantic glances up and down the street. At one end appeared a gabled place with a clock tower and an ornate porticoed entrance. Probably the town hall. At the other end, rearing out of a graveyard, stood a church with a stunted spire, a thing that looked as if its builders must have considered it bad manners to poke holes in the sky.

Swallowing convulsively, he moved on, increasing his pace from a fast walk to a run. He ducked into several shops, screaming for service that wasn’t forthcoming. He even did what previously he’d have considered unthinkable: he entered a police station without being dragged there. The place smelled of sweat, vomit and disinfectant, but of Plod there wasn’t a hint. An incident book on the counter showed that the last entry had been made the previous night.

Outside again, and he came to a ruined office building that had evidently been gutted by fire. Sooty smoke smears and scorch marks seared the stonework around its windows, and the wreckage of what remained of the roof timbers resembled blackened bones. Jud was about to pass this place when movement from an upstairs window brought him to a stop.

A woman was standing there, gazing down at him: a young woman with flaxen hair like summer straw and an enigmatic smile that could have been filched from a mugshot of the Mona Lisa. Hope leaping in his heart, for never had he been so glad to see another human being, Jud was about to call to her when she moved away and out of sight.

‘Hey, you – come back and talk to me, you crazy bitch!’ he yelled. ‘Tell me what the fuck’s going on.’

He waited for only a few seconds before kicking away the panels of plywood that covered the building’s entrance. Inside, he found the dereliction he’d expected. Walls were down, rubble piled in clumbers of wreckage, door frames burned to charcoal. The air hung heavy with the stale stench of smoke and burned timbers. He looked for the stairs that would take him to that upper floor where he’d seen the woman.

The stairs didn’t exist. Neither did the upper floor. It had fallen in, no doubt during the fire that had ravaged this place. Which meant that either he’d imagined the woman or she’d been a ghost. Neither explanation appealed.

Heart heart palpitating, throat gunged with phlegm, Jud worked his tongue around a mouth that had turned greasy. Then, a flittery movement to his left made him jump. He wheeled around and saw the woman moving away from him along what remained of a corridor. A diaphanous gown in silken pale blue floated around her like ectoplasm and her feet made no sound on the rubble.

‘Hey, Miss, please – just stop and talk to me.’ Although the desperate words came out choky and glutinous, they were audible enough in that dead place but the woman gave no sign of having heard. She continued to move away as if on a cloud.

‘Come back, you bitch!’ Jud stumbled after her, having to climb over the debris. One scorched plank almost tripped him up but he kicked it aside and blundered on. The woman didn’t appear to be in a hurry as she merely drifted, somehow unimpeded by the rubble. Not once did she have to climb over anything, or step around it: she seemed to waft leisurely as if on a coil of breeze. Jud kept shouting at her, telling her to stop, but she never faltered, never turned.

They passed from corridor to corridor, through one chamber after another: an impossible labyrinth in which Jud lost all sense of direction. After what felt like an aeon in the convoluted system he told himself that in any normal reality they must surely by now have found themselves outside the building. But the place just went on and on, its dust choking and making him wheeze. He felt he were on a slow-motion track to a nowhere world.

Eventually they came to a passage that seemed scarcely to have been touched by fire. Its woodblock floor was clear of rubble and looked to have been swept recently, while its sky-blue walls revealed only minimal smoke smudges. The air still reeked of burned wood but a cool breeze from the broken windows was doing its best to dispel the worst effects. The woman drifted along silently and serenely, Jud pounding in her wake but drawing no nearer.

The passage ended at a door the colour of sapphire, almost iridescent. The woman reached out for a handle that Jud couldn’t see, and the door opened. She passed into a room of fluttery light that suggested illumination from candles. Jud hurried after her and the door closed behind him with a sigh like a dying breath.

He’d been right about the candles. Dozens of them flickered in bronze sconces set around the walls. The stone-floored, windowless chamber was scarcely bigger than the cells he’d occupied during his sojourns at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and the grey stone walls were just as austere and uninviting. To the right was a door so white that it could have been fashioned from a fresh fall of snow. On the other side was a second door, this one as black as the Devil’s armpits.

All of this occupied Jud’s attention only peripherally. What riveted him were the two people looking him over with cool assessment. One was the woman, of course. The other, infinitely less savoury and squatting like a great ugly toad behind a metal desk, was a man with bulbous eyes and a head so bald that it appeared to shimmer in the candlelight. A cape the colour of Stygian night encased him from neck to ankles.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ Jud demanded. His question emerged as no more than a rasp. Panic had written itself large in his psyche.

The man and woman exchanged glances. Then the man returned his attention to Jud, eyeing him as if he were a diarrhoea-inducing virus.

‘What brought you here?’ the creature asked. His voice sounded as harsh as pumice on broken glass.

‘The fucking bus, of course.’

‘That’s not what I meant. D’you realise where you are?’

‘Grotsville-on-Bollocks for all I care. I want to know where every fucker’s gone.’

The woman spoke for the first time. Her voice sounded as glittery as tinsel, as delicate as a spider’s web. She said, ‘Jud, I’m the Angel of the Future and my colleague here is the Demon of the Past.’

‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean and how d’you know my name?’ Jud took a step towards the desk, then a step backwards. His innards felt like jelly on ice.

The toadlike creature addressed him as if he found Jud as loathsome as a turd burger. ‘You, my friend, have somehow through carelessness and a warp in time entered Limbo – the place where the past has happened and the future is waiting to come about.’

‘Limbo? I don’t want to be stuck in Limbo, for Christ’s sake!’ Jud yelled. ‘I’ve my whole life to lead. Anyway, isn’t Limbo some Catholic crap? I don’t go along with all that religion mumbo-jumbo. I was brought up an atheist, thank God.’

The man drummed his fingers on the desk, setting up a reverberation that frayed Jud’s nerves further.

‘What’re you thinking?’ Jud demanded.

‘What my colleague is thinking is this,’ the woman said. She had a beautiful face, like something Michelangelo might have sculpted in marble. But Jud wasn’t into aesthetics just then. ‘You have a choice to make, Jud. You can accompany the Demon through that black door into your past where you’ll be reborn again and live your entire life once more while remembering nothing of what’s in store for you as the years unfold. Maybe next time you won’t fall asleep on the bus and your life will unfold as it was meant to do.’

‘And what’s my other choice?’ he asked.

It was the Demon of the Past who answered. ‘Your second option is to accompany this lady, the Angel of the Future, where you’ll pick up your life where it left off when you entered Limbo. The future will catch up and you’ll resume your life for however long or short it was meant to be.’ He spread his hands. ‘It’s up to you, my vile friend.’

Jud somehow managed to get a grasp on his scrambled wits. This was no time to dissolve into petrification. He reckoned he’d had a shitty enough life without electing to go through it all again, what with probation, jail, and people always getting on his back when really he wasn’t such a bad bastard.

He nodded, decision taken. ‘I’ll go with you, my darling,’ he said to the woman. ‘I’ll carry on where I left off, stepping into the future.’

‘Which may not be what you expect, of course, as by its very definition the future is unknown,’ the Angel said.

‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Can’t we just get on with it, for Christ’s sake? I’m pretty pissed off, let me tell you.’

‘As you wish.’

‘And good luck,’ the Demon of the Past said with a greasy chuckle that improved his frog face not one bit.

The woman held out a hand and Jud moved to take it, but before he could do so she moved off. He followed her through the white door and then through the labyrinthine ruin. This time the journey took less time than had their progress the other way and within a few minutes Jud was emerging on to the street.

He stared. The place was still deserted.

‘Where’s the fucking future I was promised?’ he demanded. But he was asking his question into a vacuum, for the Angel had vanished.

Frantic again, heart pounding like a pile driver on steroids, Jud raced up the centre of the road, screaming for the future to come and claim him.

Which it did.

Suddenly the buildings and the very air rippled as if seen through a fast-flowing and crystal stream; sounds emerged from the ether, building to a crescendo of rush-hour noise, and then there were pedestrians and traffic on this major thoroughfare.

Jud heard the blast of horn only in the second before a number eighty-four bus ran him over.