chapter fourteen

The Ash Field

Douglas stood, frozen in a slight forward stoop that was at first glance one of supplication, but over time eroded towards a calcified heart of calculated menace. The ranked repetition; twelve in a line, twelve tiers produced the appropriate collective noun. Two gross blue-green eyes surveyed the drizzle, thickening to sleet as it fell on the stuttering development of the semi-designed, fully detached houses which now covered the Ash Field. Beside the trestle table stood an easel supporting a canvass. The painting only half worked in acrylics depicted Kay Macnamara as a troubled dark nymph, emerging from a Celtic knot of eternally damp roots and fungi.

Frank inhaled the studio smells with a deep satisfaction. He remembered blissful days in New York in the 1960s when vengeance was his drug of choice. He had gone too far then of course, and the world was still lacerated by his spite. You save the grandest gestures for love, he reflected, but this time it was his own death that had to be avenged and it would be private but poetic. He placed an antique leather bound box on the window ledge and methodically opened the two buckles. This was his father’s geological kit-box. Frank lifted the steel tube with another within it used for extracting samples. He set it on the ledge where it hungrily reflected the pale grey light after more than a century of blind box-bound lethargy. Now he felt the weight of the hammer, imagined his father cracking open balls of silica in the monochrome Arctic; then using the sharp claws behind the head to scrape rich orange mineral from the million drab whites while he, the infant son, amused himself with probability or the wide vowels of the Sami language.

He dropped the hammer into his pocket and felt the immaculate Italian material drag at his shoulder as it accepted the weight. He moved to his chosen spot behind the door and waited for Kay to return home following her day in the gallery. It had been so easy to find her. He could not let her see him of course, and so had picked his moment to enter the gallery and express admiration of her childish models. The temporary assistant possessed all the enthusiastic naivety of the young and artistic and had readily provided him with her address. Now he was only minutes away from what he had termed his final performance; a swan song of elegant murder with a heady entr’act of torture. She had killed him but she was going to make this margin of his life feel good.

The key scraped against the lock before finding its way in and Frank stopped breathing and felt his penis swell with expectation. He heard her drop her coat in the hall and fill the kettle. She lit a cigarette and opened her mail. The suspense and the erection were painful. He followed the ritual of tea-making, the stubbing out of the cigarette, the opening of the newspaper. His fingers caressed the thin metal tube, letting the inner tube run in and out of the outer sheath. He detested masturbation, but this was different. A hot drop squeezed ecstatically from the urethal opening. At last she, too, was coming.

The hair was darker, longer, wilder than he remembered; but of course she would have changed such aspects of her appearance as she built a new life. She stood sharing the ceramic gaze of the one hundred and forty-four elves. Frank calculated the angles of incidence and reflection, respecting the terrifying memory of her retina. He moved silently, yet she had detected something for there was a brief gasp before the metal tube slipped into the skull where the spinal column began and she slumped, paralysed over the groaning table. Frank allowed the weapon to jut from the back of her head as he pulled her backwards into the bathroom. It was only when he rolled her gently onto the floor that he saw that it was not Kay who stared at him with impotent terror. The sexual tension evaporated leaving a grimy discomfort. He had two choices; let this woman live, albeit with permanent paralysis and some brain damage, or improvise. Ever the showman, Frank decided to improvise.

chapter thirteen

Frank's existential nausea is swept away by a chance encounter with a bit of decorative pottery

The Demi-Monde


The bar was situated at the periphery of the newly fashionable docks area. Property developers had bought up the decayed warehouses and tenements along the quays over the preceding dozen or so years and converted them into loft spaces, third generation offices and coffee shops. The school in which the rotten meat that had been intended as Frank VII was a this moment melting, stood like a slightly bewildered dinosaur amongst the raging gentrification because it belonged to a trust the unravelling of which was already occupying a second century of lawyers. Unfortunately for the developers, but happily for Frank, the disused wharf was at the edge of the area farthest from the city centre and the property boom had crashed magnificently only six months ago. The result was an immaculate bar in a superb industrial concrete finish, housing the finest beers, wines and coffees and boasting comfortingly warm jazzy muzak. The only customers were increasingly desperate real estate agents, temporary office workers and four or five characters who thought of themselves as bohemians during the few hours between eleven and two when they were only partially inebriated.

Frank had no such delusions. He had been many things in his several lifetimes, and drunk was nowhere near the worst. He enjoyed the sordid thirst with its utter lack of discernment in satisfying itself as a more pure version of the lusts he had exploited in his victims over his preceding lives. Today, as had become his habit, breakfast was a glass of tempranillo accompanied by chick peas and chorizo. Old habits die hard, and although it cost him the equivalent of a small bottle of Polish over-proof spirits, he still had some standards.

The German sculptor, working on procuring her third husband, a tired American who believed he was using her for sex, approached the bar. Frank was slightly afraid that she would attempt conversation, but fortunately she had forgotten his terse rudeness of the previous night and could think only of wine. He returned to the excellent tapas and then became dimly aware that the sculptor, having received her glass of chardonnay, was engaging the barmaid in conversation about a small model figurine.

“…in Listowel.”

“What were you doing down in Kerry?” asked the barmaid with little interest.

“I was hoping to get some of my pieces into a gallery down there. It’s run by a collective so I went to meet a committee.”

“And did they take anything?”

“Yes, they are showing some children’s furniture, a couple of chairs in ash. While I was there I bought this elf from the artist. Quaint isn’t it?”

Frank looked at the figure, a rotund elf about 15 centimetres in height. It was made with great attention to detail; even the glasses had silver painted frames and real lenses. The face was enigmatic and somehow familiar. He felt cold sweat run behind his right ear. It was more than familiar; it was an accurate image of someone he knew well, someone who was involved in the disaster that was Frank VI. Douglas Hudson was presently serving a life sentence for his part in the cannibal ring that had also included Kevin McNamara and the dwarf known only as Wibz. Now his image, made more disturbing by the fairytale costume, was smiling coldly at the customers in the bar. Frank only enjoyed abstract art and certainly detested this kind of decorative nonsense, but he attempted as much enthusiasm as possible in addressing the sculptor.

“What a charming piece. I have some friends with children who would love one. Do you know how I can get hold of the artist?”

“Just a moment,” she replied, searching in her handbag. “Yes, here’s her card.” Frank took it and one glance confirmed his suspicions: Kay McNamara, Artist, Blue Gamp Gallery, Chapel Street, Listowel, County Kerry. The door was firmly closed on his short career as an alcoholic. Self preservation and the desire for revenge energised him utterly, sweeter than any wine. He gave the card back to the sculptor with a genuine smile. He knew he would never see her or any of the other sad members of the Demi Monde again. Tomorrow he would leave his disgusting bed-sit, but tonight he must plan. It is rare that a man gets the chance to avenge his own murder, and Frank’s genius demanded that his vengeance be beautiful, elegant and magnificently violent.

chapter twelve

The Fishing Hole

In 1866 Frank, then aged five, watched particles of ice form miniature continents on the kitchen window. He had been monitoring the relief map for some months, had named the landmasses, created inhabitants and forms of government for each one. He had also developed histories, cultures, religions and languages but felt uncomfortably aware that these owed too much to his father’s personal history and Norway’s difficult past century or so. In short Frank was already beginning to tire of Art-for-Art’s sake, and wanted to find a more practical arena in which to exercise his imagination.

Shifting his focus he noted that his mother and father continued to fuck upon the permafrost whilst two huskies sniffed at their discarded clothes. After a few more minutes his father stood, brushed ice and grit from his back and ignoring his clothes, marched towards the house. Frank’s mother meanwhile took handfuls of powdery snow and rubbed it into her face, neck, and then methodically into her entire body. It was a post-coital ritual which Frank believed to be common amongst the females of her tribe. His father, although an enthusiast for most things Sami, preferred a hot bath as a way of restoring the circulation to his extremities after love-making.

To his great surprise, and slight annoyance as he was still engrossed in a developing naval conflict between two southern ice continents, Frank’s father called him into the bathroom. The geographical theme continued as his father’s knees and face rose up, islands above the water and beneath the tropical steam; the beard undulating like a mass of seaweed and the pink tip of his penis some kind of buoy.

“I’m sure you agree with me that it is right that domestic duties should be shared equally amongst the family; at least in the modern, enlightened family,” he began, his booming voice echoed by the pine panelling of the walls and at once muffled by the dense steam. “We, that is your mother and I, have decided that you are ready to help in the gathering of foodstuffs.”

“But I do manage the vegetables,” retorted Frank, proud of his herb garden and unique method of propagating root vegetables in gravel under glass-topped igloos.

“I am referring to something rather more active than that!” his father laughed without derision. “Today you are coming with me to get fish.”

Frank thought about the ochre flaps which hung in the pantry. As far as he was aware fish came on the occasional ship from Russia or Norway that made an unscheduled stop at Edgeøya because the captain had been at college with his father. He knew that they once lived; why else were there bones in amongst the tough salty fabric of which they were made?

“Is there a ship coming?” he asked. Again the laugh; warm, protective.

“No, we will find the fish ourselves. I have made a fishing hole. We shall be patient hunters.” The water cascaded from his huge body as he emerged from the bath and reached for a towel. “And we shall go now. Your mother deserves a rich meal tonight. Together we will catch, prepare and cook for our wild empress.”

Frank was astonished at this sudden door opening into his life. He tasted his ignorance and from that moment on savoured the unexpected as the salted herring which hung in the Edgeøya pantry. He rushed to put on his coat, gloves and boots, and within ten minutes father and son were tramping across the impossibly hard ice towards one of the many bays on this side of the island.

They stood on a ridge and watched the ocean smacking massively black into the rocks fifty metres below. Frank was impressed. In later lives he was to meet people who lived by terror, but he would forever be able to anaesthetise fear by visualising that particular spot in the Arctic Sea. His father turned and seemed to disappear into the ice. Frank hurried to see what had happened and saw that there was a steep path; steps cut into the ice leading down to some mysterious destination, and his father standing just below him, arms outstretched, waiting for him to follow.

Frank considered the peril, tried to balance it with the intellectual excitement of discovering what it was to get fish, and then felt himself short circuited by what he later found other people called love and trust. He leant into space and fell, almost senseless into his father’s arms.

At the foot of the steps there was a shelf of rock beneath which the viscous sea boomed ceaselessly. His father took two balls of cord, gave one to his son, and played the other into a dark crack in the ground, fitting steel hooks to the twine every half metre or so. When it was fully unwound he wrapped it about his left wrist, inside the heavy glove, and attached the hooks as Frank let his own line down into the crevasse. Then they sat, breathing, smiling; sharing a common purpose, incredibly safe from the thumping of the sea which produced irregular falls of ice from above.

Frank caught his breath as he felt the strong tug on the line. His father just raised his right hand and the gesture calmed the boy. He relaxed and the line kicked twice. He noticed his father smiling and every now and then mouthing the Sami word for yes. He copied; mouthing the same word each time a new sudden pull was transmitted along the cord. Time passed, It was summer so there would be no night as such, but the faint twilight deepened the blue of the sky which could be seen above the jagged edge of the crevasse. At last his father spoke.

“This place is only accessible for a couple of weeks if the summer is especially kind. We will come again tomorrow should the weather permit it. Now, let us bring in the catch.” He freed his wrist and began to pull up the line, twisting fish after fish from the hooks as he did so. Frank could not wait, he knew his line was likewise heavy with the silver creatures, and he methodically brought them up and added them to the slippery pile that grew between the father and son.

Finally the lines were both clean and rewound. Frank’s father took a knife from his pocket. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, and he slit the belly with one pass of his hand, and on the return twisted to deposit the innards directly into the sea. Frank watched him empty three more fish and then felt a surge of knowledge and power. He opened his hand and was given his own knife. His father was forgotten in the blinding intensity with which a five year old enjoys the repeated process of evisceration. He had loved his father unconditionally for a few hours; this other pleasure was going to last for several lifetimes.

chapter eleven

Kay's father is in a bad way.

Reinforced Glass

From the point of view of the dimensions of light the crystal lattice is neither dark nor pale; it is a sphere where colour is meaningless. Sucking the focus from the glass the disc is immeasurable but somehow sensed; flat, grey. A swarm of jet coalesce into a vertical path, hardening and intersecting horizontals. Reflections now obliterate the glass according to the deliberate imperfections of manufacture; but at the same time the blue definition of the circle appears, and with it the comfort of perceived space.

Within a white grub burrows ceaselessly into the equally white mattress of a wall. It is the patient, a term so appropriate that it has shed its meaning; the patient who rocks his white jacket against the colourless fabric of the air. His life and crimes are recorded digitally, brought freshly into the ward by each visitor like a daily dose of refreshing venom, carbonising his veins, making ash of his neurons, powdering the desiccated material of his brain.

Twice a day he is inspected and his sanitary needs addressed. There is a tube inserted directly into his bladder, but waterproof padding is taped about him to contain other waste. When removed it is always clean, and yet within seconds he evacuates upon the changing mat. The psychiatrists insist he has no sense of external stimulus, and yet it is only the removal of the diaper that prompts the outflow. The nurses feel nothing by profession; they have experienced much worse, and they know he cannot be doing it consciously, it is automatic, not an intended action. It signifies nothing.

Kevin has forgotten his name, his nationality, his aspirations. He breathes, he rocks and twice a day he excretes. He excretes his crimes and his sense of self. He excretes life. He excretes his memories. He excretes guilt and innocence; this is amoral shit. This is not just shit. This is not unjust shit. He excretes tiny ephemeral molecules of Kay. The victims all passed this way years ago, but she can never leave until he himself dissolves in the flames and his ashes float upon the convection currents from incineration to the same place without dimension that only light inhabits.

Kevin thinks of nothing, and in detail that means he thinks of his place on that convection current. He rocks through the falling of the light and the night and the creeping dawn. He rocks with a regularity which stops the clocks; even age fails here. He has already embraced the rising mote of breathless air. He cannot feel, but he feels only the searing heat which strips the bones as he falls.

chapter ten

The Small Square

The café was getting the beginnings of its winter appearance; trying on the drab apparel for the first time. A couple of precautionary raincoats hung by the door, no umbrellas as yet, the real tell-tale sign was the margin of condensation around every window and the necessity to keep the lights on even at ten thirty in the morning. In sum it was a flat, indeterminate weekday in November and Kay stirred her cappuccino with a slow but relentless determination to put some kind of sympathetic spin on her spirits. She should have been looking forward to the next few weeks for a number of reasons; there was more work to be produced, more people in the gallery and most importantly more income between now and Christmas than in all the other months taken together; but today was a bad one, and she knew damn well why.

“What’s bugging you?”

Trisha filled the table with bustling concern and the deeply comforting smell of oil paint. She slapped her notebook down and propped a packet of cigarettes open upon it, removing one and waving it about as she talked, fully aware that Kay and most of the staff were terrified that she would light it and force one of them to tell her to put it out.

“You’re staring into that coffee as if it were a crystal ball. Is this to do with your latest conquest? He doesn’t look that bad, but you can never tell from appearances.”

“No, he’s okay; well quite pleasant actually,” replied Kay.

“Oh, really; do go on,” in her enthusiasm for romantic detail, Trisha almost, but not quite, sparked her lighter. Kay took a long breath of linseed and frying sausages, seeing nothing but the dissolving chocolate dusted foam.

Trisha’s hand, wrist made strong by the multi-coloured fabric woven around it, clamped down over Kay’s, stilling the nervous turning of the spoon. “You know Frank isn’t real. We checked it out, we checked everything out. Frank never existed, he was never your shrink, he had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical company. He’s just more of that shit that you were left with by your parents…”

“By my dad.”

“Sorry, by your dad; but he’s paying for it for the rest of his life.”

“Is he? I don’t think he even knows he’s locked up. Apparently he’s developed some sort of late onset autism. Anyway, what’s prison for? It’s obviously not making him a better person, or any kind of person, and I’m sure society doesn’t care enough about what he… they… did to me to think his sentence constitutes revenge.”

“So?”

“So he knew Frank.”

Trisha was the only person Kay had ever met whom she could read emotionally. Now she sensed the tussle between exasperation and sorrow.

“Drink up. Forget about it. We’ve too much to be doing in the gallery. Your elves are flying out the doors.”

Kay smiled despite herself. “Not literally I hope.” Well done Trisha. Perhaps she was right. In the end, when everything except your memories tell you that someone never existed, and she had to admit her memories had already been shown to be unreliable, perhaps it was better to go along with the general consensus. She shook Frank’s image out of her head and prepared to make more elves. At least they were real.

chapter nine

The Ringstrasse

The medieval roofline seemed defeated now by the infinite expanse above. Centuries of ramshackle storeys steadily rising from the Westphalian earth, seeking to touch the canopy of heaven, suddenly seemed fragile and child-like in the face of the modern scale of the universe and the peripheral nature of those foundations. Frank’s attentions in his third incarnation had turned to wealth, and Cologne had been selected as an industrial centre producing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It was a theme to which he would return, disastrously, in Frank VI.

Now it was cold; cold enough to keep all but the beggars and the insane indoors, but not cold enough for Frank to feel the motherly touch of his remote home. He let the long skirts of his raincoat flap in the slight breeze created by his rapid steps, regular, counted more often consciously than not in sixes or dozens. The turning into the club happened on five. He resisted the urge to recount; imagine an extra pace, even reconsider the starting point. He knew where that led; another infinity, and conceded that he would be cheating himself if he failed to admit that the turn had occurred on five, but that maybe the turn itself was not a significant event, in fact it was six, the first footfall on the new route, that was the special one. Order re-established he was able once more to consider his environment.

At this moment an old woman, made enormous by her coats and need offered him a sparse fist of roses. He made his habitual response to these requests; a smile that was at once recognition of the beggar’s situation and at the same time an understanding of the entire issue; life, not life, space, vacuum and chance. In these days God was dead and Europe was the gateway to the New Order. Naturally he despised the trivial aspirations and brutal methods of the National Socialists, but this was change at a new level and he intended to make the most of it. He had come to make a fortune from scents and now he found politics standing up before him like one of the denizens of the club to which he was heading. The possibilities were equally as tasty. He felt he was at a more significant turning point. Recently it had been wealth that had attracted him but now he wanted to change the world.

He paused in a hemisphere of darkness and briefly checked the street for prying eyes. The paranoia of the era chafed but was necessary. Anyone could find themselves denounced by a jealous neighbour or over-zealous supporter of the party and Frank’s plans did not include dealing with the late-night attentions of brown-shirted thugs. Satisfied that he was unobserved he passed into the Brewhouse. There were few drinkers as the party dictated how workers should spend their leisure time; Frank quickly spotted the over-weight man nursing a glass of Früe Kölsch as an unofficial inspector for Kraft durch Freude. He paid for his own modest dry sherry and moved towards the back room. The security men recognised him and one took his coat as the other opened the door just enough to allow his entry. The sudden lull in the conversation continued as he was examined by each man sitting around the centrally placed circular table. Von Schröder broke the silence.

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Herr Kørner. He shares many of our views about the new Chancellor, and he will be able to help us with his special talents in the field of biological chemistry.”

His audience suitably relaxed, Frank took the stage.

chapter eight

Casa Branco



The cars screamed dust into the briefly dry air; two fat opalescent Cameros already muted and slowed by distance as their tyres dissolved into the haze hanging over the track that led to the forest. Iglesias dropped a heavy arm onto Frank’s shoulders and guided him into the courtyard.

“Now we are alone, Professor Kørner, I want to congratulate you on your excellent way of doing business. If you can convince those hijos de la gran chingada you can convince anyone. We are going to be doing a great deal more business together…. A great deal.”

Frank wondered what the fat Ecuadorian meant by alone. The presence of five slightly jumpy guards stroking Kalashnikovs was making him feel positively crowded. Iglesias seemed to read his mind.

“Hombre! Son Sordomudos! Ciegos! You can do anything and they see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, nada. You can shit in front of them, fuck even! You don’t believe me? Try it, I get you a nice muchacha. I think they make it kind of special.”

“Not just now Alejandro. I’m happy they’re around to protect my ass, not watch it bump up and down,” replied Frank, conjuring exactly the right blend of machismo and humour to see off safely the threat of public intimacy with a female minor. He followed Iglesias’s example and sat to a large wooden table. A maid who Frank believed he could otherwise have found himself performing with placed a decanter and two glasses before them.

“Ribera del Duero,” announced the big man. “I only celebrate with the best vinos de España. These Portuguese tíos would drink my piss and get drunk. How long until we can get another cargo out?”

“Patience, amigo,” said Frank, immediately regretting mimicking the habit of dropping Spanish into his sentences. Iglesias obviously did it as a way of affirming the superiority of his Spanish colonial roots over the Portuguese that provided the language of Brazil. He was surely aware that his own nationals were commonly regarded as the most degenerate of the continent, and for this reason he surrounded himself with tokens, such as this Vega Sicilia, emphasising the refinement possible only to one of a pure Spanish descent. Frank recognised the tang of racial supremacy, and as always it hid the truth that those who promoted such views, like the overweight drug baron before him, were themselves genetically infected by that which they despised. Iglesias’s mother was reputed to be a half-caste whore from somewhere in the mountains and his father a chemist from Sao Paolo who had self-medicated himself into a communal grave in the slums a few months before his son’s birth.

For a moment Frank thought of his own fierce Sami mother, but he had changed himself too much, or not enough, and once more he adopted the role of a lifetime.

“Remember Alejandro, we are not cutting the cocaine. That’s what they expected and they didn’t find it. This is genetic modification of the plant itself. These plants are producing coca at the same rate as normal, but I have increased the narcotic effects by a factor of about sixteen. You don’t cheat anyone, you run no risks apart from those inherent in the business, and yet you make sixteen times the money. Also my adapted plants are even more addictive than the normal. The dealers will listen to their customers and you, my friend, will be the supplier they will all want, so you charge, if you like, a premium rate.”

“You are a beautiful man, Professor Kørner,” said Iglesias, filling his antique glass to the brim. “Chiquita! Venga, taste some churro.” Frank watched the girl bend to her task and counted the days until he could liquidise the fat man’s brain.