Flesh and Wood - a new novel by Roger Frederick

five

Wrapped in a blanket Jemma sat on the bench on the back veranda and watched moonlight spill across an inky sea. Cindy’s gift spliff rested on the mould-smudged wooden arm. Strange girl, Cindy - sitting there in the pub all evening listening to her flowing forth with wave after wave of personal revelation.

Why had she told Cindy so much? Why had Cindy sat and listened with such rapt attention? Did she like her? Or did she just enjoy the drama of it all - gossip she could tell her friends in the Dolphin Café. ‘Hey you know that weird loner women with the limp and the scar. I had a drink with her tonight in the pub. And you’ll never guess what she told me!’

Cindy was several years her junior and had precious little in common with her (other than dwelling in the village of the caravanette corpses, Cymllynion’s walking dead). Yet Jemma had just told her stuff she’d never told her friends, her mum or anyone. Maybe it was the wooden hand and heart, casting a spell on her, loosening her tongue. Where had those words suddenly come from? For the past 18 months she’d struggled to string two sentences together. Why this sudden verbal cascade? Maybe the girl was a witch’s apprentice, and had slipped some concoction in her Chardonnay (powdered bat and tongue of goat, tail of rat and spleen of stoat).

Jemma picked up the spliff and laughed inwardly. I hardly need you.

She had taken drugs before; cocaine to be precise. She’d snorted it with Seb, one of her not-quite-so-aged paramours (hand-stitched brogues, a black Carrera, and Harley Street orthodontist). For some reason the coke was always wrapped in torn porn. It was tradition, explained Seb, who always kept a new £50 note in his wallet for hosing up the lines of white powder. Sometimes, for a joke, he’d stick the tightly wrapped pink and red note right up his nose - like an artery sprouting from his nostril - as if he’d evolved some nasal extension expressly for the task in hand. It was revolting really, but it always made her laugh. Jemma was ashamed to admit she’d been impressed the first time Seb pulled out that crisp fifty - back in the day, when coke had been an expensive yuppy drug (now that school kids could afford a wrap with the money from their paper rounds, a stripy drinking straw might be more appropriate).

One evening, shortly before they’d split up, Jemma had answered the door to Seb’s flat to find a teenage boy in a tracksuit astride a mountain bike. She thought the kid must be selling raffle tickets for a local youth club. It turned out to be Seb’s dealer. That put her off. Besides she’d seen what charlie did to people like Seb. He was snorting every day in the end. She heard he’d lost his job through it. He did a few weeks in some trendy rehab place, but his fiancee still gave him the elbow. What was cool about that?

Still, what have I got to lose? thought Jemma. My livelihood? My lover? My sanity?

She lit up the spliff and took a long hard toke. She could almost hear the Rizzla sizzle, as the loosely packed tobacco burned bright orange. Unused to inhaling without a cellulose filter, she spluttered and choked and dropped the roll-up on the bench, leaving a curved white crescent of ash across the salt-stained slats. Having coughed up her guts, she took a few shallower puffs then leaned back, shut her eyes and drank in the cool dark air.

Jemma picked her way across the beach in the moonlight, damp sand and shell-grit between her toes. The waves spilled through the air, liquid blue lizard tongues. In a circle of rocks, like a mini Stonehenge, was a pool. And rising from the centre of the water, mouthwash blue, was another wooden sculpture - a proud nine inches of polished mahogany into which every vein and wrinkle and curve was perfectly carved. She looked around embarrassed. The beach was cloaked in darkness, woolly and comforting. She reached out to grasp the wooden member, but it started to grow outwards. She held it in both hands, but still it grew like some giant stinkhorn fungus, the leafless trunk of a palm, growing and growing so that she had to embrace it with both arms, until all of a sudden it broke out of the pool and hurtled into the stars, and she clung on like a koala and rode it up into the darkness. After a while the trajectory levelled, and she sat astride the vast wooden missile as if a witch on a broom and looked down at the yellow grey sand.

More wooden growths emerged from the beach like fungi from a woodland floor all perfectly detailed in different woods - sapele, maple, walnut and lime - until the beach was covered in them - a forest of giant wooden erections like some surreal painting by a perverse disciple of Dali. A small crowd gathered at the harbour’s edge to watch her. She spotted Cindy and wobbled slightly as she waved. Beside her scowled the disapproving grockle couple from outside the pub, while Peter and her mum looked up concerned.

“What are you doing darling? You know you’re not well enough to ride that thing! Come down”

Her mother was chastised by the gay honeymooners. “Oh just leave the girl alone. She’s having fun!”

Dutifully, Jemma glided down to the beach and landed smoothly on the sand. After she’d dismounted she found her feet were still hovering six inches above the ground.

“That happens sometimes,” said the gay honeymooners. “It won’t last long. You’ll soon be back down to earth!”

She managed to glide along just above the surface, pass the watching crowd and up the slipway like a ghost to the Parade. She felt her toes begin to drag against the moonlit tarmac. And as she ground to a halt outside the clothes shop, she awoke with a jolt - her head on the bare mattress, pillow on the floor, her feet pressed hard against the end of the bed. She felt as if a heavy weight were on her chest, and she could no longer move her arms and legs as if she were neither asleep nor awake.

She thought she had died, her dream one final mental brainstorm before eternal lifelessness gripped her and dragged her down through the mattress and the carpet and the wood and the concrete, deep down to the wormy damp choking black earth.