A Cleansing of Souls Read online

  A Cleansing of Souls

  by

  Stuart Ayris

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2012 by Stuart Ayris

  Edited by Kath Middleton

  Cover art copyright by Rebecca Ayris

  Cover design and lettering by Liam Sweeny

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, brands, media and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people

  England

  1961

  Spring

  Prologue

  Michael Parrish woke up in bed with his sister, Jennifer. He was seventeen years old. She was fourteen and dead.

  There was a smell of dread in the air.

  What do you honestly do at times like this?

  What do you honestly do?

  Well, Michael, he just grinned.

  And he kept on grinning.

  They took him to the Psychiatric Hospital up on the hill.

  He was there for twenty-eight days; time enough, they thought, to get inside his head, his mind and his soul. But a thousand years would not have been enough - not for Michael Parrish.

  So they let him go.

  And he floats and he floats and he floats.

  The world is real and it is not real. It moves and it shifts and it envelopes us. What you see is not what I see. And that is the wonder of this life.

  But time catches up with us all…

  England

  1989

  Summer

  THE SOULS

  Chapter 1

  The sun is high and blazing, swathing the small town below in pure heat. And that town, the town of my birth, can but hang a head of shame on this, the most baleful of summer mornings.

  People tread their weary paths to the station or to the office blocks that rise up, dull and wracked with the remorseless onslaught of monotony. Row upon row of small windows are lit like candles by the burning sun, flickering amidst the charred bricks that so dutifully house them. There are huge buildings that lurch from the dry ground, breathing austerity and throbbing with a dull foreboding. Where once there was a park, lush and tranquil, there is now just all this grime and this concrete and this suspicion. All within a four-lane ring road.

  This town was once just a market place, but is home now to insurance companies, fast food restaurants, bargain shops and pubs that change in façade and content with equal regularity. There are multi-storey car parks in various states of decay, back alleys, gloomy subways, needles and cans and bottles and shattered glass. The market place is still there though, bullish and archaic – and may it always be so. But one day, the traders will arrive in their ramshackle vans and the lads will pull the pallets on wheels upon which lie the bones of the stalls. And they will be all ready to set up only to realise that they have arrived at a place that is no longer there but in memory. And they will gaze unblinking into the void, before scratching their heads and wandering back into the darkening dawn.

  For change happens without you even noticing it. Your memory of what it was like before is not even there, simply because there is no before and there is no after. And the present is just the blink of an eye. What we have about us in this town, this town that is so much a part of me, is an aching, soulless grind to a picture-perfect world.

  It is hard to say whether the people changed as their town changed. Perhaps they just adapted. There can be an intense feeling of safety in the routine, the banal. Those that do not have that feeling are scattered in pieces across the town desperately searching for something to hang on to, to get a foothold somewhere that will deliver them to a safe place to be. For at the core of each man’s heart must surely be a belief in the profound, unconscious truth that the struggles of his existence will one day be replaced by an ease of living that will wash over him like a summer rain.

  So the town and its people begin another day on this humid morning. The ring road shudders beneath its thunderous load and the early blue of the sky is streaked by the excrement of pollution with which it is so often regaled. Fumes rise from the streets as if the pavements themselves are creeping, smouldering upwards and about us.

  Oh talons of dark wonder.

  It is upon these streets that Tom Spanner ambles. Tom Spanner, insurance clerk, a young man with hopes and dreams yet to be fulfilled.

  Tom is just a little less than six feet tall, though his sloping, awkward gait lends him neither presence nor authority. He is slim and gaunt – a man of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. His suit just hangs off him and the tail of his white shirt, even this early in the day, peeks from beneath the back of his jacket like some ignoble gesture of surrender to all that lies behind him. His wide shoulders rise and fall to a tortuous rhythm as he shuffles down the street in the manacles of his own agony. The skin of his face is pale, almost grey in places, but that only serves to emphasise the beauty of his eyes. Those eyes just engulf you for they are the eyes of pain itself - deep, childlike, ageless.

  The grey building looms before Tom now. He affords himself one last backward glance before he is consumed by the lumbering mass of concrete and glass, reality fading away for another day.

  Ah, Tom. Nineteen years old. I remember when you would laugh. The way you used to look up from that tangled dark hair of yours and smile the smile of the devil, your eyes aglow with rebellion and love and a raging fury just to live and experience life in all its glory. I remember those days, Tom, those days before Little Norman. Ah, Tom. Tom.

  The darkness of the foyer was unnerving. They dimmed the lights just as you entered. It happened every morning. It was like stepping bewildered through the rear of a creaking wardrobe. As Tom’s sunken eyes began to adjust to the lack of light, the white desk of the receptionist faded into view. The face of the woman behind the desk glowed in the dull blackness of it all, glowed like a white three quarter moon. Her face was huge and ephemeral, flickering in and out of vision. There was a plug socket behind her.

  The glowing, humming receptionist could receive incoming calls, type letters and admire herself in the mirrored tiles on the opposite wall simultaneously. Being in no way adept at the first two of these tasks, the third was generally considered to be the one to which she gave her most careful attention. Often, though, the mirrored tiles would slice her face in two or four, leaving her to writhe in her rotating seat in complete terror searching wildly for completion. She was sad even when she smiled. And when she laughed, you could almost taste the tears.

  Tom allowed himself to be pulled into the gaping mouth of the lift and closed his eyes.

  So the receptionist was left alone once more. A switch was flicked somewhere up above or down below and her faced began to melt, melt with a velvet ease as all the mirrored tiles became as one. And thus she disappeared from view just as the light of the falling moon does sink beneath the waves.

  Mirrors. Mirrors.

  There were mirrors in the lift too. They followed you. This was their way. There was a camera in the ceiling. Only once had Tom seen it flash, preferring since then to keep his eyes closed. They wouldn’t get him that easily. Among the many things he hated, mirrors were foremost, for it always shook him to be reminded so abruptly of his own complete frailty. He knew the man he was and it was a different man from the one that gaze
d at him with such dismay within the frame of a mirror. There were some people who used this particular lift instead of the stairs purely for the perceived pleasure of their own visible company. At one time, vanity such as this would have made Tom laugh out loud. Not any more. Not since Little Norman.

  The things that once had humoured him now filled him with a dark and debilitating sadness.

  Tom opened his eyes as the lift doors slid gently back to reveal a short corridor at the end of which was a set of thick double doors. It was beyond them that he would spend another long day. He stepped out of the lift and walked along the corridor, peering through the glass at the top of the doors, patches of mist forming on the pane as he breathed upon it. He wiped away the vapour with his hand and saw that the clock on the far wall allowed him three more minutes; enough time for a cigarette and the dubious pleasures of sanity.

  The men’s room was clean and white and fresh and an open window let in a cool breeze. There was a distinct clarity about the air in there.

  Tom took a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lit his first of the day, inhaling deeply as if he were drinking the nicotine through a dirty paper straw, the pale skin of his cheeks clinging to the bones of his face like pastry stretched too far. Gasping, he blurted out the smoke and a rasping cough shook his whole ragged frame. The lungs took note of the burden they were once again to endure and furtively revelled in the sweetness of revenge.

  The smoke curled high to the white ceiling, following a path entirely of its own. And Tom closed his eyes once more, wishing earnestly to remain in this precious state forever, this pure, absent, blissful state. But he knew he could not. For they would surely find him, asleep on the bathroom floor, eyes wide-open, lost in a beautiful daze.

  There was no time.

  There is no time.

  The office was massive. All the walls sloped outwards and the floor crawled up to meet the ceiling. There were no colours – not even shades of grey. And the air was almost too thick even to breathe.

  Tom walked over to his desk and removed his jacket, letting it fall to the floor. He slumped back on his swivel chair and surveyed the mess before him imperiously like a fallen officer gazing upon the battlefield of defeat. Blank sheets of paper had floated down from the sky overnight. Files had arranged themselves across the back of the desk, rotting paper squeezed from their depths by dirty, thick elastic bands. Empty plastic cups lined the tops of these files like ramparts on an old and forlorn cardboard castle.

  Tom switched on the computer before him and it squealed in response with a vindictive cry that seared right through him. Leaning forward mournfully, he gathered up the plastic cups and crammed them into the bottom drawer of the desk. The computer squealed again, waiting for the entry password. Tom told it to fuck off before typing in the same seven letters.

  The morning dragged on interminably. A minute was an hour. An hour was more than a lifetime. Conversations droned on in monotone – unlikely tales of weekend bravado suitably rewarded with contrived interest and canned laughter. Sometimes an argument would punctuate the proceedings or a discussion about politics or religion or some other great theme, during which feigned outrage would soar like a bird of ignorance, leaving honesty itself to lie startled and bleeding amidst the empty rhetoric of the apathetic.

  It was just another day.

  At eleven-thirty, William was crucified.

  William was the Eternal Clerk. He had loved his job for the past twenty-seven years. His work was his life, the embodiment of him as a person. He left the ambition and the aggression to others. His voice was a single on 33rpm, his skin doughy and his eyes a watery blue. Every evening, he would arrive home and tell his mother of his day in the office, of calculations and phone calls, of photocopying and faxing. She would just sit quietly in her damp armchair and listen to her son.

  William was a large man.

  At the appointed time, William’s telephone rang and he answered it in the slow, methodical way in which he did everything, reciting the words like a litany.

  “William Clapworth, Pensions and Deaths, good morning, how may I help you?”

  As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, a red cape was draped heavily about William’s shoulders. The receiver became cold and unwieldy in his hand, dragging him downwards. At last, with a huge effort, he arose, only to stumble backwards like some grotesque, wounded bear. The room enveloped him in a dense silence as he lumbered over to the small man behind the big desk at the far end of the office.

  Lead was licked.

  Mmmmmm.

  Suddenly, the heavy silence was split by a loud, high-pitched whine, like that of a dog with a broken leg. The small man behind the big desk was letting off steam. The whine became a screech cased in glass, glass that shattered, as it had to, splintering into William’s distraught and sagging body.

  Tom saw the blood that trickled from William’s hands and he saw the blood that seeped from William’s feet. And he saw William return to his immaculately ordered desk and stand upon it, his arms stretched wide, his great head lolling upon his chest; the only true sound being the pitter-patter of blood on the crisp white paper below. Tom saw all of this.

  The sun began to burn into the blackness, only to be met by the swift snapping of a Venetian blind in every window. Blind, blind, forever blind.

  William was a large man.

  William is not large any more.

  As for the small man behind the big desk, he will continue to get smaller and smaller, until finally he slips in terror between the cracks of his own heart.

  It was just another day.

  On returning from lunch at two o’clock, a lunch that consisted of two double whiskies and a bag of chips, Tom found a note taped to his computer monitor. It informed him that he should present himself before the General Manager at three-thirteen precisely. He took the note from the screen, screwed it up and dropped it onto the floor. He then spent the intervening hour compiling a meaningless list of all the files that cluttered his desk. It was at small, ineffectual tasks such as this that his aptitude for endeavour was at its peak.

  At ten past three, Tom picked up a withering cigarette from his ashtray and eased it between his dry, cracked lips, ash spraying onto the newly written list. Yellow eyes blinked slowly in the darkness as he walked towards the double doors and there was a low rumble as the floor moved a couple more inches closer to the ceiling.

  In the lift, Tom gazed at his now spent cigarette, twisting it aimlessly between his fingers. He then let it fall and dragged his shoe over it, experiencing momentarily the temporary thrill of temporary power.

  The General Manager’s office was opposite the typing pool and the view through the ever open door was one of which the great man never ceased to be enthralled. They were such lovely young girls. They were so pretty - a blessing from above indeed.

  There glowed within the office itself a light so unreal, so entirely manufactured, that you felt upon entering that you had just stepped into a light bulb. All was brightness. The glass-fronted photographs on the walls were positioned in such a way as to reflect one single beam of light, stronger and brighter than all the others, onto the General Manager himself – as if it that were really necessary. For not only was he a man who illuminated himself, he had actually created himself. Many years of early mishaps and failures had led him in later, more successful years, to assume a figure of majesty and legend. His life had become one great monologue of the gods. Each waking moment laid claim to his greatest performance. And through it all, he ran his company with as sure and cynical a hand as greed this side of the law would allow.

  Charles Grandon – General Manager. This man loved an audience. In fact, he employed one. They worked, of course, or else they would have been cursorily dismissed; but their primary function was to witness the incredible oratory skills of their self-esteemed manager. In his younger days, he had been a truly bizarre member of an Amateur Dramatics company on the south coast and there still resided
in his top drawer a brittle clipping from a local newspaper of the day extolling the virtues of his King Lear – these being primarily eagerness and punctuality.

  Mr Grandon insisted that his employees call him by his Christian name. No formalities with our Charles, fine, down to earth, honest to goodness chap. One of us. Calls a spade a spade and isn’t afraid to get someone else to use one. That’s our Charles.

  Now, Mr Grandon had a limp. When the rumour circulated that he had sustained it whilst fighting on the beaches of Normandy, he of course did little to discourage it. The truth was slightly different. If he had been fielding perhaps deep in the covers rather than at silly mid-off in the Scouts versus Scoutmasters annual cricket fixture, his left knee may well, to this day, still be in one piece. From square cover drives are such heroes born.

  “Ah, come into my light-bulb, lad. Sit down.”

  “Thanks,” said Tom, sitting himself as comfortably as he could on a curiously formed wire chair. “Shall I close the door?” he added, hopefully.

  “No, no, lad. Nice to have a view every now and then, that’s what I say, eh, eh?”

  Charles Grandon chuckled, looking every one of his sixty-five years. “And what’s all this ‘sir’ business?” he continued, “I’ve not been asked to see Her Majesty yet you know, not yet!”

  A large picture of Her Majesty appeared briefly on the far wall and Charles Grandon ran the tip of a bony yellow finger across his thick, grey lips.

  “Well, Spanner, back to business. You’ve been with our little set-up for some time now. Are you happy here? Are you enjoying yourself?”

  Tom yelped and nodded like a small puppy and Charles Grandon looked across the room at him through sallow eyes. Tom felt unable to return his gaze and took to picking at a loose fingernail – click, click, click. And that was when he noticed the complete absence of any other sound. The typists had stopped typing. The telephones had stopped ringing. Just click…. click…click…

  At that moment, the loose fingernail twirled to the floor, twisting in the air like a sycamore leaf before embedding itself in the thick carpet. As this happened, a stage eased itself into view, fronted by reverent footlights that were surely the gleaming eyes of the adoring typists. And with a swish and a clank, a spotlight picked out The Great Thespian, centre stage……….