Burnt Tongues Read online

  “You don’t understand, sir . . . Plant. I’m feeling sick. Physically sick.”

  “Physically sick.”

  “With love.”

  “With love. Yeah.”

  “I get queasy. Not in a good way. I want to vomit.”

  “You get the feeling you’re about to puke out everything you like about her, like it’s a kind of poison, right. It’s scary. I understand it,” Plant said and covered his mouth with his dirty hand. “But I’m telling you, you can’t . . . well . . . you can’t . . . Who is this girl?” He put his hand on his knee and gripped it.

  “I couldn’t tell you that.”

  “Hmm. It’s embarrassing to say.”

  “I was thinking maybe you could give me some tips.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to have her.”

  “Have. Good word.”

  (You know, Plant wanted to say, when I was over there fighting little gooks and getting my fucking limbs blown off in the name of a place I’ve never felt a part of anyway—oh yeah, you don’t have to feel at home when you’re here or anywhere; you don’t have to love where you are ever, ever—there wasn’t much time for romance and girls. But you did have to ejaculate. Yes. As if there could be war without semen somewhere in the balance. So you know what we did? We fucked what we found. We found whores to fuck. And sometimes we didn’t pay them. That was when we were lucky and they were lucky and there was no battle to fight. Deep in the jungle, there weren’t any whores. You had to learn to love your blue balls for weeks on end or take advantage of nearby villages, where you could just grab a pretty girl and stick yourself inside her, your knife at her neck. It’s nice to like somebody across the street. It’s nice to have a crush.)

  “You know what that teaches you about romance?”

  “What . . . what teaches who about romance?”

  (And these old fucked-up hands of mine, crusty with all this mud from picking at pretty flowers and twisting grass until it’s nothing but dead matter—back then—you know this. You can sense what this is, what I’m telling you, because when you don’t get her, when you can’t impress the girl, you’ll want to go to war. Where you can mean something to someone, and hey, your whole country will fuck you if you go to war. But my hands are as dirty now as they were then, of course. Being at home doesn’t change that. Putting myself, not so delicately, into them. The women. You know what that would be back here, that action? Your mother would call it rape and would ask you to call it rape, too. But that’s not an issue over there. There are no issues there. There’re no pressing concerns. And everyone is so unbelievably grateful for the fine work you did over there. You’re just a fucking little kid, with your crush on a pretty girl from school.)

  “You know what I learned over there?” Plant said, speaking not really to Raul, not to himself, but to the void. “I learned about love. I learned that love means many things. Well, I learned that many things mean many things. And one of the things love means is the ability not to kill the person you’re fucking because you’re so frustrated by all the other things going on around you.”

  “I don’t understand.” Raul winced and tore the blade of grass apart and sprinkled the aftermath onto the dirt below. “What are you talking about?”

  “I need to make myself clear. I’m not saying you should force anyone.” No. But maybe, maybe, Plant continued, it’s better to take what you want and get it over with. Was he talking aloud? The boy didn’t seem to hear. “What the hell are you supposed to do? And me? It’s not like I’m ever going back there. Jesus. I was told to avoid stress, you know. Told to avoid stress. Avoiding the perils of stress is really pretty easy when they’ve taken your fucking weapons from you, and all that matters is that they get handed to someone new with two legs and a God-loves-ya golden smile. That’s what it was there. That is what we were. Over there. And over here everyone’s very grateful and will tell you so. Just don’t say what happened over there. Because it’s about manners, you see.”

  “You mean Vietnam?”

  “So . . . I did what I needed to do. Trust me. Sometimes you have to fuck them very, very brutally if you want to stay manly enough for your fucking superiors. You fuck until you feel your balls overflowing with testosterone, and your heart is racing as though someone were holding a knife to your neck. Didn’t they do that? And no. Not all the guys at the top were like this. Just the ones who come over to tell you maybe you’re not fighting hard enough. Your friends depend on you. You depend on yourself. Don’t you?”

  “What . . .”

  “Don’t you want to be a man? Isn’t that what gets you by? If everyone needs your strength, can you deprive them of it?”

  Raul, baffled: “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, I want you to stay.” And listen to me. Nobody listens to me. I don’t shit myself, do I? I’m not an invalid. “See the wheelchair,” he said, pointing somewhere behind him. “That is me. That’s how I move around. You know what you need love for? You need to find it before you lose part of your body, so you can pretend to be whole again in the arms of your lovely, caring wife and she can scuttle you over like the world’s most important cripple. Bring the wheelchair over. Hurry.”

  The boy opened up the wheelchair and pushed it along the porch and stopped near Plant. “And now?”

  “Now,” Plant said, “I want you to kick the fucking thing. It’s okay. Just kick it.”

  “What for?”

  But the soldier wasn’t listening anymore. It made perfect sense—kick the wheelchair for a minute. Kick the thing and watch it roll. It’s not going to hurt anybody, and you’ll see what I mean. Just as suddenly, it made no sense at all; the point eluded him now. So he said, “Raul, let go of that. Come here.”

  Raul sat and stared.

  “Listen. You want a girlfriend, you need to be able to give her something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something. Not material stuff. That only works some of the time. You need to make it win-win. Always make it win-win. If you don’t, then she’ll resent you in the end. Don’t let yourself be someone else’s big resentment problem. You know my . . . You know Gordon’s mom. Now she resents me, and I can’t do anything about it. I didn’t make it win-win. I mean, I fought for her once to win her heart, and that was fine. I got her in the end, and I made her happy. Then I went off to fight those little fucking monkeys, because I believed it to be the right thing to do. The right thing, you know. Leave and go kill people, that was the right thing in my head, and it was the right thing, because how else do we keep those fucking little monkeys in check? How do you keep yourself in check? How can you keep a family if you can’t hunt an animal? It’s not even about the little people out there; it’s here. It’s the . . . aggression in me. Us. Aggressive children. Like you. You’d be a good soldier because you hold everything in. People mock you, and you want to show them you don’t give up. Me too. And I come back without a leg, can’t satisfy my lovely, caring wife in any way, and she starts to resent me. She’s impatient, even when she’s being patient. She hates me because she has to love me. See? Everyone around her tells her how glorious it might be to have a hero sitting on her porch. A man who goes beyond himself. But all I really do is sit around and tell stories and complain about politicians and piss myself wet every once in a while. Gordon is scared of me. So the situation isn’t exactly win-win, is it?”

  “No.”

  “What you have to do is work on yourself. Make yourself attractive through the things you do, the principles you hold dear, and the goals you’ve set for yourself. Then you can try to get a woman. You can’t expect her to love you just because you love her back. That only happens when the woman is weak. And my fucking God, women are weak—they’re as weak as we are. Don’t kid yourself about that. Nobody’s going to save you. But if you want a good one, look for someone you have to work towards. Work on yourself as much as possible while you’re young, because habits get harder and harder to break. Fuck! Once you’ve
sorted yourself out, the women will flock to you. Believe me. Do you believe me?”

  Raul was staring at the ground. “No. Can you help me? Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “Make mistakes. Make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them.” Don’t go into the wild. The wilderness of the city or the ocean or the battlefield. Don’t take a knife with you. Don’t be armed when you see the women in the village. Because you see one of them trying to teach herself to enjoy it as you fuck her (ha! yes, that happens; I saw it), your knife to her throat, and you feel so much self-loathing that you want to give her the knife and have her cut your own throat. “Cut it! Come on. Rip my heart out. Go, go, go. You can have your revenge.” And you’re about to do it. You’re about to hand her the knife. If she’s so angry, why not just let her kill you? But now you want to win. Now that you’ve seen her fighting back and yourself in that desperation, you only want her to despair more than you. It’s not the war that brings out the worst in you. It’s anyplace where nobody can know what you’re up to.

  But he wasn’t looking at Raul anymore. It was something, someone else, a stranger—fat, stupid, getting paler by the second. A shapeless thing. Not again. Not this. Falling like a hammer on himself. He forgot where he was, and everything around—the environment, the fields or roads, this wretched place called home—forgot him. The sun grew brighter; everything went silent, cold, illuminated. He could barely make out what the thing was saying.

  “Mr Vanderloo?”

  Yeah, his name. The explosion of light, talking to him. The sun. He morphed out of himself, dropped the role of husband, father, mentor, soldier. The great message of life had been presented to him in a language he couldn’t read. All at once the grandeur of the world seemed a joke, the innocence of youth was a self-serving lie, and he knew the shape before him sought no more but its own demonic self-gratification, not advice. Not a bond. It cared nothing for Plant Vanderloo, Hero. It was sheer and simple mockery that had brought the stranger to him, walking to him on those little chubby legs. “Raul, what the hell?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What the hell?” But the sirens were wailing again, the fire of machine guns, the earth turned to mud and blood, the jungle . . . Get a grip on yourself. Get a grip.

  “Go get my wife.” He drummed his fingers on his temple and looked at the shapeless thing, almost ready to plead, squinting in the light. “Get my wife.”

  Raul hesitated, said, “She’s at my house. With my mother.”

  “Oh, good fuck,” Plant murmured. “I’m hallucinating. This isn’t real and I . . . I know that. If you want to help. Something isn’t here. You’re not here at all.”

  “What?”

  “You son of a bitch,” Plant said. “With your girl problems. Girl problems. Grow up. Lose some weight. And stop fucking with people’s heads. Do you understand? Stop fucking with people. Stop fucking with them.”

  “I’m sorry,” the shape said, edging away. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “Well, neither do I.” He was crying. “Neither do I. This happens sometimes, it . . . I know I’m hallucinating. I’m not crazy. It’s a bunch of symptoms, and a doctor can help, yeah? You see? I don’t have to take any kind of medication because this is my truth and I am right. You see that, don’t you? This is me. An unfortunate fucking thing. I just . . . for God’s sake, Raul, go get my wife.” I’ll kill him. I will kill him. I will. He’ll die. He will die. “No, come here. Come here.”

  Tentatively, the shape loomed closer and knelt beside him. He will die.

  “You want to know what I’d do, if I were your dad?”

  “I don’t really know my—”

  “If I were your dad,” Plant said, wrapping his fingers around the shape’s neck and squeezing, “I’d be embarrassed.” He pressed deeper and deeper, feeling the thing’s throat gurgling. “So damned embarrassed. I’d be ashamed. I’m already ashamed. It’s little fucks like you that make things happen to the rest of them. Little fucks like us, we’re in this together. We’re the reason things go wrong, and I am fucking ashamed of you.”

  The shape resisted. Its fingers were clenched around his shoulders, and it tried to push him away, made repulsive noises, tried to swallow, to breathe.

  Plant knew what he was killing. The void pretending to be someone. The void wearing a mask. There had been nobody there to begin with. His fingers were digging into the boy’s flesh, clawing and prodding and throbbing with the ecstasy he’d always suppressed. Where’s the knife? Where’s my knife? I’ll cut your fucking throat open, you see. You and your little games. A big blade of grass and nothing more and I will crush you until the world is rid of people like us.

  Screaming all around. Someone clutched at his back, slapped him in the face.

  Plant tightened his grip, and the colours of the boy’s face deepened, a beautiful red, those fat lips.

  And the voice of his son rang through the neighbourhood, Gordon’s deep, vacuous voice for once charged with real emotion: “Dad? What’s happening? Dad?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Plant said, staring at Raul’s empty face. Then he looked up and saw his son, that other shape approaching them, throwing his glasses off and grabbing Plant’s arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The boy,” Plant said, looking down. “Raul.”

  “What did you do?” Gordon Vanderloo screamed.

  “Plant?” A woman’s voice.

  “Mom.” A boy’s voice. “What’s happening?”

  Plant felt himself slapped across the face but barely, numbly: he was aware of things—of events unfolding, of sanity unraveling—but couldn’t ride along: his wife kneeling beside Raul, holding his head up, stroking his hair, Gordon simply staring on in perplexed (or admiring?) horror at his father who within seconds would understand what he’d done or hadn’t and resume.

  Pluck at the grass some more.

  Ingredients

  Richard Lemmer

  The nurse nearly falls flat on her arse. She’s half jogging down the corridor, misses the yellow cone that says, Warning, and slides like she just stepped onto an ice rink. She reaches out and grabs a window frame to stop herself from falling. A lucky nonbreak.

  The confused and heartbroken man, he watches as the nurse jogs past and out of sight. Out in the hospital corridor, he sits down on a plastic bench and holds Morris’s left hand in his right hand.

  “Why . . . why didn’t you tell me about this before? Did this happen when you got the scars?” Finally, he sighs, rubs his stubbly chin, and says, “How did this happen?”

  His eyes look wet. Not because he’s upset. Because he never blinks when he is being serious. It’s a conscious choice. When you love someone, you think you know all their dirty secrets—the fluoride content of their water, the cyanide content of their apple pips, the fat content of their Happy Meals. You think you know all their marks and cracks—their haemophilia, their crooked teeth, their allergies.

  He grips the left hand. He really wanted kids, his kids. He wanted to shower them with ethically sourced cotton jumpers, blues for girls and pinks for boys, fighting gender stereotypes one item of clothing at a time. Feed them baby food made from organic, locally grown spuds and carrots. Treat them with fair trade, traditionally crafted toys from the developing world.

  Now all he wants is to hear a story that’s been buried for a long time.

  In the silence of the closed store, a bored and uniformed checkout girl walks to the foods of the world aisle carrying a still cold pallet of chicken satay sticks. Packs upon packs of chicken satay sticks.

  They were a big seller before the Eurocup final. Prawns, farmed for pennies by semi-naked men in Bangladeshi swamps, sold well. From the deforested Amazon basin, burgers sold like hotcakes. Lager, transported by truckers across Europe’s endless motorways, sold well—but it always does.

  From behind the pallet, the girl’s face blocked by pack upon pack of chicken sticks, she says in a slow, deep northern accent
, “I thought he was going to hit me.”

  Most people, buying and buying and buying, they’re oblivious to all the bodies scattered across the globe, the bodies that slave away so one happy customer can host a summer BBQ. All the effort, all the produce—spoiled by rain. A storm made a thousand feet above the Atlantic.

  Some people, busy buying and buying, they’re oblivious to the bodies that serve them at the checkout.

  “But I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir, no receipt, no money back. It’s store policy.’ But will shit for brains listen? No, just on and on about this, that, and the other, and get this—customer rights! Arsehole,” she says as she disappears down the cooked meats aisle.

  The four girls restocking the foods of the world aisle laugh. They all know where Jen is coming from.

  “Sometimes don’t you wish you could spit on their three-for-two onion rings?” Jen says when she comes back to lean against a shelf of pasta products.

  From the healthy lifestyle aisle on the other side of the foods of the world aisle, someone says, “Funny you should say that.” The voice, coming through pack upon pack of sugars from far, far away, says, “Hold on one sec.”

  Sugar is a necessity that sells well constantly. Sugar from Fiji and Mauritius and Swaziland, where the plantation workers earn next to nothing while the king, owner of the Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation, can afford a BMW for each of his ten wives.

  A pack of Swaziland sugar, it says, “I’ve got a story for you girls.”

  The pack of sugar, the voice, Anita explains The Game. Anita’s sister, Margarita, works in the Safeway down in Staines where the checkout girls play a game passed on by a friend of a friend called Stock Movement. Anyone competing has to put in a tenner. There is only one winner, who gets all the money. You have to spend the day, racking up points by the hour, with your chosen object buried inside yourself. You have to bury it inside yourself in the way only a woman can. If you throw in the towel, you have to put your object back—where it belongs on the shelf.