Echoes. Laura Dockrill
telling everybody to remain calm; what did he know? What did he know when there was fire to play with? Linda twisted her ankle, the weight of her meat-and-two-veg body crashed down on it, pinging it to the side and it flopped loose like a runner bean, her howl sirened through the corridor. Hurrying everybody along until they pressed the release bar and out. Fresh air, alive, alive, alive…
‘Fire? What fire?’ Sue blurted.
‘I was trying to tell you…’ Mr Hurt shushed everybody. ‘The building is fireproof anyway and it has smoke signals. It was highly unlikely that there would have been a fire without us knowing about it.’ He twitched, taking his coat off from the imaginary heat his mind had created.
‘So where did this come from?’ Linda sobbed, cowering, her tights bloody from the scrapes. She needed an answer.
Everybody needed an answer.
They all looked to Albert. Like waiting for answers at a quiz.
‘Your silly fabrications have done you no favours, you have disrupted everybody’s mental stability one time too many. Besides, there is photocopying to be done, that is not doing itself, now get you…’ He was getting nervous about speaking out loud now that everybody was listening. ‘Now take your…now take your…Just get inside, will you?’ He slung his jacket over his shoulder, huffing, tutting, shaking his head in anger. The others slumped after him, the noise of the sirens already coming as some bonehead had taken the trouble of calling 999. Just in case. Just in case. Just in case.
Albert walked home that night. The last thing he wanted to do was cram himself on a tube with a bunch of grey nobodies, the odd whacky character trying to stand out with a crazy-coloured tie would depress him. He got himself three cans of Coke and drank them straight, one after the other. He had never done drugs; lifts like this made a world of difference.
‘Albert,’ his father opened a conversation. ‘Son, how’s work going? Sniffed out any news of a promotion yet?’
Albert put his fork down, ready to spill, he had stories to tell, to ignite, to fabricate, to embroider the truth, to spin, to say but a clear ‘Yes, I think they’ll promote me in the next few weeks’ would be easier to digest, especially around the dinner table, especially now. His mother clamped her hands onto her chest, a deep heavy puff of relief gushed out of her, her eyes rolled to the ceiling and then to her husband, who patted her on the knee in pride.
‘We always knew you had it in you, son. Now we can put those silly nonsense stories to bed.’
Yes and maybe they could. Albert was twenty-five and his room read as a child’s, a loner, a weirdo. He would never get the kooky girl with the funny shoes when he lived in a land of make-believe. He would be alone forever, always, wouldn’t he?
The next day at work he kept his head down. Plonked, stared, tapped, mumbled, shuffled, ate a cardboard chicken wrap. Felt sick, took a chalky dusty pill to make everything better.
The day after that, at work, he did the same. Plonked, stared, whistled, remembered whistling was barred so stopped, shuffled, awkward, went to the corner of the room to fart, ate a cardboard sandwich. Tap, tap, tap.
The day after that, he did the same, plonk, plonk, plonk, stare, stare, stare, thud, thud, thud, ate a cardboard salad, wasn’t enough, licked the air, thud, thud, thud, watered the plant in the gaffa-taped pot, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, fucking tap.
I’m going to get coffee.
It was a good-looking day, why didn’t they have a window? It was unbelievable, who decided that this was how the world worked? That you just missed the sunshine? That it was okay to ignore it? They needed fresh air, those pasty faces in that office, their skin like tracing paper could do with a splodge of daylight, could do with a…
A swarm of people came flooding through the streets, screaming. What was going on? Cars in upheaval, and then that noise, the road rippling, churning, cracking; cars and shops snapping like the body of a Coke can giving in to the swelling and the people turning into the air, scooping and falling like a scattering of confetti. It was unlike anything Albert had ever seen; different from his stories, his pictures, a…well, it was a monster. An actual monster. Oozing sticky, navy in patches, dark deep green in others, diabolical, sludgy, dripping after it was a transparent tar-like residue, like a globby snail trail. It had a tail too, this creature, sweeping the road as though the city were a calm lake and his tail the oar. It bat the buildings, knocked down street lamps, post boxes, people, animals, in long hard savage waves and it had these chunky arms covered in scales like a sea monster, that led on to mammoth hands and long spindly fingers and at the end of each spindle sat a stretched claw that was now blood-splattered and was doing the exact same job a spear would do, gutting anybody that came into its vicinity.
Albert, too afraid to even utter a word, scrambled, quick. He had noticed that although this thing was big and fucking scary, it seemed to be slightly…dim. Albert watched its drowsy, glittery eyes fazing over in long slow sleepy blinks and saw it seemed to be plodding, destroying with little sense of direction or care, it was though it didn’t really want to be here. Swaying, fumbling, lost, sort of. Albert knew if he began to run now he would be all right, he could get home, get his family, do what he needed to do but then what about Limps? They couldn’t even hear the carnival floats as they sailed by last year, they couldn’t hear a storm, they couldn’t hear a bird tweet, a fox cry. Why, they were trapped in their stone cube where they tapped and pushed buttons and waited for hundreds of copies of the same hundred copies to be copied. They wouldn’t have time to escape, time to leave, would they? Would they?
So Albert thought quickly, he typed his key code into the security pad and launched himself up the concrete staircase, his flat shoes tapping out his urgency.
He blew open the wooden door and screamed at the top of his squeaky voice, ‘THERE IS A FUCKING MONSTER OUTSIDE. HE’S GREEN AND HAS CLAWS AND A TAIL AND TEETH–HUGE TEETH–AND HE…IS…KILLING PEOPLE. ANYBODY, ANYTHING. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE, YOU HAVE TO ESCAPE. NOW!!’
Tap. Tap. Plonk. Print. Zuuuoooom. File. File. Shuffle. Shuffle. Bleep. Bleep.
‘DID YOU HEAR ME? I KNOW IT SOUNDS STRANGE. IT’S MAD, I KNOW. I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT MYSELF, BUT PLEASE, IT’S BIG AND IT’S SCARY. PLEASE.’
Plonk. Plonk, blip. Blip. Flick. Flick. Tap. Tap. Tap. Stare. Stare. Stare.
Albert clawed his hand desperately through his hair, as though something were creeping up behind him. He spoke again, his eyes frolicking about, rattling in his skull, fantastically psychotic, as though he were a main part in an excellent sci-fi film, ‘PLEASE!!!!’
‘Go home, Albert. Just go home.’ Mr Hurt gave up.
‘Go home? Go home? But there’s a…’
‘It’s because of ignorant people like you that things like war happen,’ Mr Hurt croaked out.
Albert frowned. Confused. Bit harsh. ‘Fine. Fine,’ he managed and went to leave, turned around again. Tap. Tap. Tap. Mr Hurt and his stupid face turned back to the screen. And then he saw his plant on the desk, now gaffa-taped up, rescued. And he took it with him, turned to the room and its grey contents and said, ‘And it’s because of negative people like you that nobody believes in a story anymore, and for that, Mr Hurt, I will never forgive you.’
And he plunged down the stairs, hurtling forward, catapulted himself out of the door and then changed his flurry into a casual stroll, whistling as he popped into a paper shop, then into Costa, and got that coffee he was after. He watched the road, the mums with pushchairs, gossiping, trotting past, the man on his mobile in a rush, the schoolboys laughing with their bags of chips, the cute girl with the beret. Albert picked up his pen and began scribbling down all the ideas he possibly could, excited, he spewed out phrases so wickedly; he could barely get a grip on the pen and he scrawled…