Golgotha

It started with lights in the sky. They danced over the Fort Withey apartment blocks, over the shoreline and the townhouses, streaming coloured light over the miner’s estate where Geoff pulled his wagon. He shouted “Ragbone!” down empty cobbled alleyways, dappled with strobing purples and red sparks. He pulled sheet metal off roofs, shinned up chimneys and peeled off strips of green mossy lead, while the war in heaven raged on, clashing and pulsing, splintering and breeding in the burning sky.

He made his way home, to his yard and shack, he got his tea mix on, applied a fresh patch. Ma was fixing his proper tea; he could smell the cream in the white sauce and the tang of the yellow fish. He sat on the bench that bordered the kitchenette, he put his elbows on the table.

“Wa’ durst reckon on them lights now, our mother?” said Geoff, his face calm and guarded as a Zen monk.

“Ah dunno Geoff lad, but it’s nae concern o’ mine. A s’l look after me garden and th’animals, and shan’t pay no never mind as to things as cans’t change.”

Geoff feigned a relaxed mood, for Ma’s sake, but seeing her crouched in the scullery like a frightened cat hurt him beyond words. Through the tiny window in the back kitchen he watched the sky crust over into darkness. He went down to the only boozer in town, a windowless and smoky pit called the Drowned Duck. He eavesdropped on the plebs, all stinking of mud and sewage and pure bullshit. A loud voice was issuing forth from behind the bar, from a fat red face. Old Silas was holding court:

“Ah s’l tell thee all wha’s gon’ on if’n you’ll all shut thon fanny lickers fer a bit. Wha’ we’re looking at now is them fat cats out in Luandun, playing us country folk fer idiots. That light show out there’s exactly what I says it is, a light show. Like at thon concerts and stadiums, ‘ceptin’ these bastards ‘av switched it roun’, shinin’ it down from wassname, satellites and such, in orbit around us. Reckon if T.V. were still workin’ there’d be some same occurrence all over the world.”

Another voice cut in from the gloom,

“Fuckin’ nonsense, they’s aliens gon’ blow us all to shit!”

Geoff left the boozer, in dismal spirits, and walked the short route round to see Sadie. The lights were still at play up there, calmer now, but still setting babies to wretched wailings and dogs chained in yards to frantic prancing under the clashing colours. He knocked at her door and Sadie let him in without a word. Her house was a bright place full of women’s things, chiming or smelling sweet or looking dainty. Sadie was the most caring and gentle person in the whole of Fort Withey. She was a real humanitarian. She charged by the hour. Geoff got hard, but he couldn’t finish, even when he set his back into it and Sadie screeched like a cat in heat. He had to stop when he saw her staring at him with a detached fascination, as though she were watching a car crash on television. She let him stay the night, she didn’t charge him.

They were lying in bed together; Sadie put a seashell over her ear, listening to the sea. Geoff tried to hear the sea too, but he couldn’t hear anything. He woke up in the wee small hours and saw Sadie’s face all changed under the morning’s half-light. She looked like something dead underwater and only recently dragged up to the surface. A white hot flash of pure terror gripped his gusset, and Geoff dressed and left in no time at all.

He walked the long way round to get his ragbone cart, but on a whim turned his head into the kitchen to check on his Ma. She was swinging slightly in the breeze, her favourite tea-towel, with the picture of Fort Withey stenciled on it, was looped about her neck, and looped double through the light fitting. Geoff took his pocket knife and cut through the towel, lowered his Ma down onto the pine table. He brought his big rough face down and kissed her forehead, smooth and shiny as crepe paper. He went to fetch the doctor, but the doctor had administered himself a lethal dose of something and was dead at his old dusty desk, a needle full of black blood stuck in a blue arm. Every door that Geoff peeked through held some new scene of disaster, all up and down the seaside bodies floated in the water, stray dogs chewed the fingers off people lying face down in the gutter. He walked down to The Drowned Duck, where it looked like a tornado had hit; people were heaped on top of each other, impaled with pool cues, throats slashed with broken glass. Geoff walked the town all day, shovel in hand, finding a body and burying it, shallow, before he moved on to the next one.

That night Geoff toyed with suicide, walking the edge of the sheer face of Fort Withey, a massive concrete block dropped into the ocean as an outpost and a warning for Hitler’s boys. When the sun came up the warring lights redoubled their frantic dance, casting deep sonorous throbs into the earth and shaking the bones in Geoff’s face with their conflagration. He couldn’t do it, there was some null frequency staying his hand, preventing him from following the other people into death’s embrace.

At noon a white truck turned up. It came in slow from the road to Penrillin, full of men and women dressed in white plastic jumpsuits and white breathing masks. They wore funny hats made of a shiny material and they took lots of pictures. Geoff watched them through his field goggles, as they went from house to house. Through the net curtains he saw a bright muzzle flash and heard the high pitched ripping of a sound suppressor. They were shooting people. They were stacking up the bodies and pouring fuel over them. They were taking more pictures. They set light to the stacks and took yet more pictures.

Later that afternoon the men in white ran into a problem, as they tried to shoot one of the stray dogs that roamed Fort Withey and lived on scraps and hand-outs. Geoff watched one of the men trip on the slick green rocks that broke the tide at the beach, his fancy headgear was smashed into silver shards and the goggles of his suit were cracked and scuffed. The man jumped up suddenly, drew a sidearm from a hidden holster and without further ceremony, shot himself in the mouth. Other men in white showed up presently. They took pictures of their dead comrade, and then added him to one of the burning stacks. They left before nightfall, with most of the permanent structures burning and crumpling down into their foundations. Geoff snuck down to the main road to watch them leave. The body piles had burned so hot that a pool of dull gold had melted and fused into the pavement underneath. All the rings and bracelets and necklaces and teeth had flowed together under the heat, leaving a big shallow oval of beautiful gold.

In the night the lights stopped their dancing, they swooped out over the ocean, heading east. Total darkness descended on Fort Withey. In the distance Geoff could see more fires burning, where smaller lights danced and signaled and winked. And there, right out on the limits of his vision, a tiny glowing face grew out of the darkness. Geoff looked through his field goggles and saw the face shift and flicker, it was Christ Jesus in one turn, the Buddha himself in another.

Geoff heard the supersonic screech of inbound phantoms, as they decelerated for a bombing run. He saw the whole of Fort Withey light up as though the fair had come round early. The high pitched whining sounded like an angel’s choir. He clasped his hands together in imitation of prayer, knuckles clenched white, as the slow caustic bloom of nuclear ordnance wiped his retinas clean, raped his mind, erased his soul. It was the punchline for a joke that lay entirely outside his ken. It was mean and wretched and small. It was perfect.