Disko

By Andrew McEwan

Samuel Bluck is having a crisis, Life has moved in with him. Life is large, pink and fat with a squeaky voice.

Elsewhere in the universe Skidmore Shuffledeck is puzzled by the seeming disappearance of his ship's navigator, a gestalt being named Sara. He climbs aboard the stricken water buffalo he's claimed as salvage, a frozen ocean its cargo, only to wake up on the floor of the toilet at a Hawkwind gig.

Brutus traverses a stretched Earth with his father and a company of circus folk. Separated from all he knows he encounters first a quagga, then a mechanical alien, before undergoing a metamorphosis unlike any he has previously endured.

At least Sam has the internet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew McEwan
• Release date: Jun 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476029290

Andrew McEwan

Van driver from Newcastle. My work divides opinion. Look me up on Goodreads and Twitter. I welcome all reviews.

Book preview

The Beach At Reality aka Disko

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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PART 1: THE LAST QUAGGA

One

The beach at reality is wide and long. The surf rolls in crescent shaped, reversed like a new moon, resembling the white of a fingernail. It is deserted. There are only empty shells, exoskeletons washed up from the world beneath. One such is mine, only about this shell there is something different, as held tight within is my still soft flesh. The sun bakes me. The sand dries hard and crusty over my eyes, rendering this new place a blur. Sound comes as before, only faster, sharper, less muted. Clouds swim in the sky.

Why am I here?

I know where; at least the name presents itself. Here. Reality. Thinking on it makes it absurd. But I'm unable to deny the evidence, albeit fragmented, of my own enthused and investigative mind.

I just can't decide whether this place merits a proper noun.

i.

Disko is cold and black. Cold because of the weather, the wind and snow, black because of the coal. They mine coal here. They cut it like cake. Christmas cake, I like to think, with a white frosting on top and a layer of marzipan.

Disko is an island largely inhabited by lost souls. Ghosts, doppelgangers and seldom seen indigenous folk populate the land mass, each here for a reason, all confused as to the last time they were anywhere else. The mine is largely automated these days and the miners typically idle, time as vague as seasons, gatherings like this one near permanent social outlets for gossip; scandal and misadventure a must.

Right now, Freddy Ungo is boiling water to make tea. He looks pissed off. And who can blame him? His wife has left him. His lettuce has wilted. Last night he lost four thousand Canadian dollars at poker. Ah, poor Freddy. But he has a trick up his sleeve.

Arnold Freight and Gilbert Snow are sat in exploding armchairs awaiting the brew.

'It's the absolute truth,' insists Freight. 'There in the Heavens for all to behold, there for a few fleeting seconds was the face of the Virgin.'

'How many times is that?' asks Snow, a man whose smallness of stature has never impeded his bigness of opinion. A man whose migration north was some kind of pre-emptive karmic strike. 'Ask around and you'll find such sightings are everyday. Nothing to get excited about.'

Freight ignores him. Freight is a large man with a sad looking beard. Freight believes in extra-terrestrials and just about anything anyone whose first language isn't English tells him. Excepting French, but that's another story. Freight believes in seals that play chess and frozen kingdoms under the ice - under, in fact, the coal.

The armchairs are exploding, I should clarify, due to having been shot with a four gauge a few weeks back, an act to which no one has yet to confess. Stuffing protrudes like frozen steam.

Freight saw God's son’s mother’s face in the Northern Lights.

Not a brand of cigarettes.

The trick up Freddy Ungo's sleeve is this: C20H26N2O

Tee hee hee.

Going to be some fun and games in this cabin, I can tell you. I leave them to it and take a walk round the compound. As ever, it is lit up like a Christmas tree. A dilapidated sign at the entrance reads: SANTA'S WORKSHOP. The entrance gate itself is lying in mud the consistency of margarine. A peculiar olive colour; piss and vomit mixed with diesel oil and antifreeze. There are vehicles everywhere, tracked and wheeled, of every size and description. All of them leaking. The compound covers approximately half a square kilometre and is ringed by a three metre fence designed to keep polar bears out. That there are no polar bears on Disko makes it, like the unhinged gate, redundant.

There's a security hut, torched a year ago, on top of which is a growing pile of rubbish. Mostly plastic bottles in plastic bags in plastic bins. Beyond this containers of every hue offer the aspect of ancient fortifications. Piled six high in places, they sit rusting, mostly empty, a few dozen crammed with baked beans and assorted culinary misfortunes. An unknown number of redundant miners live in these steel caves, unable to tear themselves from the ice and snow of this black island, unwilling to return to civilization. They'd rather freeze than co-mingle with folk from warmer climes.

Fires poke through buckled oil drums. I don't know what they find to burn. No coal comes to the compound. It travels to the docks via conveyor and is swallowed by waiting ships.

Most buildings are prefabs. Most corrugated iron hemispheres. Most single-storey and most inhabited by degenerates.

Smoke and steam rise in equal volumes, strange ghosts to inhabit the eerily glowing night sky. The aurora dances to an unheard tune, its varicolored oscillations like a gigantic screen-saver.

Approaching once more the cabin I hear screams coming from inside, quickly followed by laughter.

The company has swelled to six, with the addition of Velma Pearson, Pamela Verspotten and Giorgio, the base orangutan, who winks at me conspiratorially as I enter. The men are in hysterics; Arnold and Gilbert especially, neither seemingly able to control various motor functions, while Freddy is more or less catatonic. It's unclear whether he's sampled his own lysergic acid diethylamide.

The women smoke cigarettes.

'Crazy fucks,' says Velma. She hasn't seen her kids in maybe three years and sometimes forgets their names. I have no idea what her job is. She may no longer have one.

Pamela is an electrician.

Giorgio, the base orangutan and onetime company mascot, is wearing an enormous sealskin poncho. He was the sole survivor of a helicopter crash that killed the company's chief marketing executive, a film crew and a former glamour model named Tiffany whose breast implants are nailed to a plank over the bar at Gugson's, Disko's sole hostelry, situated midway between here and the mine perimeter.

At least that's what I told everybody when I hung them there, thus sowing the seeds of my notoriety.

ii.

Come rushing, my friends, to where the wind strums the water and the rocks sweat great globular melons of light; come rushing into the fall's sweet, cool embrace. Watch through its tears the buffeting of spring leaves and orbiting insects. See through the flashing lenses a fractured creation made whole. Experience the heady delirium and be refreshed by this sparkling cascade's ordinary, peace-filled, magnificent reason. Observe; all the water observes, the passage of time; time caught but not overtaken; time held in seasonal transience; time in the shape of stream and glacier. Come rushing, my friends, with positive abandon, and give to this instrument, reassembled from shattered clouds and bounced perspiration, the freedom of your hearts...or if not your hearts, then your ears.

Listen.

It is the voice of the last quagga.

'The what?' queries Brutus.

The last quagga.

'Oh.'

He's spear-fishing in a coastal inlet, the ocean to his back a vast blanket. The land is his pillow, he thinks. The covers rise and fall round his chest and neck. Some days he gazes down, in the rough direction of his toes, and the sheets look completely flat, nought but a few ripples to show there's anything under them. Other times the creases fight for space, climbing over one another, leaning on each other's shoulders. It's as if his dreams, day and night, transmit their undulations, or lack of them, to the coverlet. He shakes his head at the absurdity. Hurls his spear and misses.

Once there were many pillows, his father has told him; the bed was shared. But places had different names then. The world, '...was a lot smaller.'

'Or people were bigger.'

The old man thinks about this, one eye squeezed shut, its neighbour puzzled.

'Maybe that's it,' he says eventually, scratching his chin. 'Maybe the world's the same size as it always was and it's people who've shrunk.'

He seems to like the idea. Brutus feels pleased with himself. It isn't often he gets one over his father.

'On the other hand...it's not just the world that's bigger now - and everything looks the same as before, mostly, from a point of view of perspective.' He pauses. 'The days are bigger, too; much longer than they used to be.'

Brutus slots his hands behind his head and lies back to gaze at the stars.

'There's still twenty-four hours in a day, and sixty minutes in an hour, yet somehow those minutes and the seconds that compose them are longer. Everything is much farther apart...'

'Tell me about the city, dad.'

The old man laughs. 'Which one?'

To Brutus there is only one city. He doesn't know it's name, or if it ever had one, but as he's never seen a city, let alone been in a city, to him they're all the same.

He imagines the world as a child, still small. You could walk across it in a few days. Nowhere was very far away. You could drive there in a car. Wherever there was. Wherever you wanted. His father professed to owning a car in that unknowable past. Ironically, he wasn't a traveller then.

Grown now, the world adopted a new aspect. Stretched.

'Time for bed.'

And three or four months sleep? Old months, when seasons were not distant memories.

How old would that make him? he wonders, just gone 19. Ought he to be dead?

Of course he's seen cars. There are still a few on the road today. Only the road is longer and straighter. Like his father says, 'Life isn't that different; there's just more space.'

Brutus reads books. He thinks maybe he'll write one.

The world as seen through the pages of these novels is fantastical, a place of many wonders. Many dangers, too. There's men on the moon and pirates on the seas. People do amazing things in books, he thinks, curled up tight with assassins and adventurers; they conquer strange sounding lands, wrestle with inner conflicts, love and lose and love again. Everything is compressed, just the way it used to be. Whole lives are detailed in a few chapters. Great cities rise and fall inside a thousand words - not centuries, as if the novels themselves are time concentrated, much as he imagines the past, crushed up tight by the weight of history. Only the very present has room to stretch its legs, to live and breathe. And it is the cities that fascinate him. The city, that of countless names.

Their caravan, dragged slowly along the highway by a tractor the size of a house, passes through many a village and town, but these are not the metropolis he imagines. That is on a far grander scale, all flashing lights and buildings in the clouds. There traffic hums by overhead and underfoot, the people move in a blur, and life is actioned at pace within a milieu of frantic detail. On the road things come and go at a much slower rate. The caravan trundles between destinations hundreds of miles apart, sometimes snaking round the entire girth of a place, laying siege to its occupants, who come pouring their pennies into the waiting throats of the entertainments, buying minutes and hours of comedy and tradegy, shooting at metal ducks and tossing rings over fishbowls. The world comes alive then. You can see it in the many faces. Brutus likes nothing more than to don a costume and smile at the girls.

Morning comes with apparent swiftness, despite the supposed long tenure of night. He just can't grasp its dimensions, lacking his father's memory of times past. Even the old man is puzzled by the phenomena. Like anyone of his generation, all he can do is shrug.

'A day is a day,' he says. 'The memory adjusts.'

Brutus, washed and chomping a lump of bread, finds his dad gassing the tractor, its interlocking caterpillars an inch thick of steel wrapped about giant drive wheels and lesser pathway cogs. He's wearing a grin and whistling, dropping the white gas tablets into twenty gallon cans, waiting for the water to fizz with its distinctive rush of sound and cheap perfume odour before spinning the cap down and heaving them onto the gantry at the back of the vehicle.

'Give us a hand then!'

Brutus squashes the last of his breakfast into his mouth, barely able to work his jaw until the bread softens.

His father, The Incredible Peeling Man, aka Faraway Jones, shakes his head.

A theatrical