Chapter III.1

Soft blackness: warm and womb-like, cuddling and calming. Rest, rejuvenation, sleep. He snuggles down into the blackness, pulling it around himself like a duvet, drifting in its warm liquidity.

Drifting, dreaming images emerge from the blackness: first strange lights and coloured rabbits, then the two happy spaniels, skipping beside him. He sees that they are wearing cream bridesmaids dresses with bluebells woven into their floppy ears. There is also the little animal, emerging from an opened Bible with a white dog-collar round its neck.

'Dearly beloved…' squeaks the Propensity, with uncharacteristic solemnity.

Light of a thousand spectra splinters through the darkness, showering him with petals of colour.

'…gathered here today…'

The soaring song of an organ swoops under the vaulting like an albatross on the wide Antarctic wind.

'…this man and this…'

A hand squeezes his and he turns. His nymph is standing beside him at the altar, white veiled and pure; she smiles sunshine into his soul.

'…and if any man knoweth of any lawful impediment…'

But then the sunshine chills; there is a strange coldness behind him, a presence.

'…let him speak now…'

With the infinite slowness of dreams, he turns.

'…or forever hold his peace.'

At the back of the church, bathed in the coloured splinters of light, stands a woman, flanked by two children. They neither move nor speak, but just watch him with cold and silent reproach.

An icicle slips between his ribs like a dagger and he turns back to his bride. And she turns to him, raising her veil. As the gossamer netting lifts, he recognises the face smiling up at him—it is not his nymph. With inviting eyes glittering coldly, she pulls a silver scalpel from her posy—as she lifts the blade to strike, he turns to flee.

Moving with all the velocity of an ant suspended in syrup, he can already feel the sharp stab between his shoulder blades. He screams silently and suddenly his arms are seized by two sepulchral figures, tall and black, that appear from nowhere. They push him down into a box, a hard, cold box, and before he knows what is happening, the lid is sealed over him, trapping him in the darkness.

Loofah woke suddenly, bursting out of the black chrysalis of his dream. His eyes snapped open and in flooded—more blackness. But though he could see nothing, against his arms and back he could feel the hard sides of his grave-buried coffin. A white bolt of cold fear shot down his spine and, as a bellow tore from his throat, he hurled himself against the lid, battering against the ungiving wood. Suddenly, through his terror, he felt his weight evaporate and he knew he was falling, plummeting into the open pit of hell.

There was a short era of giddy tumbling in the black void of space, then light and noise crashed in and a jolting hardness shook his bones like dice in a horn.

For a moment he knew nothing but the reverberations of the fall that were echoing through his body. Then, as awareness gradually returned, he felt a cold hard roughness under his cheek and hands. He opened his eyes—a plain of concrete, rough and broken, stretched away to infinity and in the V of his sprawled out arms were the steel-capped toes of a pair vast working boots, twin Ayers Rocks rising out of the landscape.

'What the bluddy 'ell are you doin' in my wheelie bin?' asked the caretaker, in a gruff Halifax accent.

Hot sweetness slid down Loofah's throat: tea, the very nectar of heaven. He was sitting on a pile of stained linen laundry bags, drinking from a plastic thermos cup. On the other side of the courtyard, the caretaker picked up the fallen wheelie bin and pushed it back into line with its colleagues.

A sudden spasm of panic gripped him and, for the umpteenth time since tumbling out of the bin, he grasped at his calves and thighs and prodded at his belly, still only half-convinced that everything really was back as it should be. An old style telephone sounded behind a glass panelled door in the opposite wall and, grumbling to himself, the caretaker ambled over to answer it.

Loofah was in some sort of service courtyard, with laundry bags waiting for collection, rows of rubbish bins, and various items of abandoned equipment: metal trolleys, two wheelchairs, a broken iron-framed bedstead. He sipped his tea and gazed up at the cliff-faces of dirt-blackened Victorian brickwork that enclosed the courtyard, each crisscrossed by networks of cast-iron drain pipes and galvanised boiler flues, and pierced by a random scattering of tiny frosted glass windows.

The caretaker returned from the telephone and began breaking up cardboard boxes, stacking them into one of the bins. Yet again Loofah palpated his face and lifted his tee-shirt, checking his belly for non-existent scars. Then, reassured once more, he filled his lungs with the laundry-stale air and let the warm comfort of the caretaker's tea flood through his veins.

'Thank so much,' said Loofah, when the tea was finished, 'I'd best be off now—I don't want to impose on your hospitality any longer.'

The old man pushed the box he was holding into the bin and then turned to face him, picking the smouldering shred of a roll-up from his lower lip with gnarled yellow fingers.

'I wouldn't be going just yet if I were you, my lad,' he said.

'It's OK, I feel perfectly fine now. That tea of yours has worked wonders.'

'Aye, that's as maybe. But you'd best hang on a bit longer.'

'Really?' said Loofah, with a tingle of suspicion, 'Why's that?'

The caretaker eyed him gruffly. 'Because yer mate'll be here soon,' he said, 'That's why.'

The tingle became an itch. 'My—mate?'

'Aye. 'Appen that were 'im on't blower.'

'A gentleman with a—slight French accent?' asked Loofah quietly, hardly daring to let the ominous syllables fall from his lips.

The old man crushed another box under a steel-capped foot, but did not respond.

'But I don't understand. How did he know I was here?'

''Ow did he know you were 'ere?' repeated the caretaker.

'Yes—how?'

'Simple as pie,' said the old man, then grasped the lapels of his overalls and, with a popping of press-studs, pulled open the front to reveal—a low-cut satin top in electric blue. He then took hold of the ragged turkey skin of his old neck and dragged it upwards, his old face crumpling and sliding up over his head. Loofah's jaw swung open like a broken gate and the colour drained from his face.

'Aren't you pleased to see me?' asked the caretaker, with a playful grin.

'G—G—Georgette,' stammered Loofah.

And at that very moment, a door slammed open on the other side of the courtyard and brisk footsteps slapped across the concrete. Loofah spun round.

'N—N—Norbert,' he stammered.

'My friend,' said Dentressangle, arms wide in welcome, 'Are you not pleased to be seeing me?'

For a whole minute Loofah just looked from one to the other—the grinning girl and her joyfully smiling master—utterly stunned by their barefaced effrontery.

'But my friend,' protested the Frenchman, after Loofah had tried to explain why he wasn't at all pleased to see either of them, 'I know nothing about your visiting à l'hôpital. In fact, I did not know even that you had been malade. Tell me, are you feeling now the betterness?'

'Don't be ridiculous, Norbert,' snarled Loofah, 'Do you take me for a complete idiot?'

Dentressangle shrugged, a gesture of injured innocence. 'There is some mistaking here,' he said, 'I am not knowing what I am supposed to have done, but I am sure that I have not been doing it.'

'Norbert, it was you that called that hideous doctor, it was you that sent me away in the ambulance. You can't possibly deny it.'

'I can possibly deny it,' snapped Dentressangle, now with an edge of indignance, 'I have not be doing of these things.'

Loofah rolled his eyes in exasperation. 'Of course you did. Just admit it.'

'I am knowing not of what you speak.'

'Norbert, this is just plain silly. How can you—?'

'Sacre bleu!' cried Dentressangle, stamping an elegantly shod foot on the rough concrete, 'I tell you I have called no docteur and I am knowing rien about any ambulance. But what I am knowing is this: that I have spent all of the day long in worriness about what has happened to you and that when I am at last finding you, I am being accused of strange crimes against you—I, Norbert Dentressangle, who has saved your ham plus fois than can be counted.' The Frenchman tossed back his head in haughty disdain. 'And I am also knowing this: that if you had waited beside the boîte de poste as we were arranging then you would have not got into these illness troubles in the first place.'

He finished with a pout of theatrical accusation and the girl, still wearing her old man's shabby overalls, glared angrily in support. For a moment Loofah hesitated, abashed by the outburst of righteous indignation. But his memory—for once—was clear.

'Norbert, what on earth are you talking about?' he said, 'You know that I waited for you at the pillar box—you met me there.'

'I have met you?' Dentressangle shook his head vigorously. 'No, no, no, your brain is playing the funny tricks. When I got to the place of the meeting, you were déjà gone. It is not moi that you have met; you must be thinking of some person…'

The Frenchman stopped suddenly, his eyes losing focus and his face filling with a strange emptiness.

'Autre,' he whispered, no more than a breath.

'Et le docteur, he has used mon nom?'

Loofah nodded. Dentressangle's face contorted with hollow agony and, wringing his hands, he turned away to continue his anguished pacing around the courtyard, watched by an anxious Georgette.

Loofah shook his head—what he was managing to piece together from the Frenchman's less than coherent outbursts stretched credibility beyond even the most generous limits. And yet what actor could fake the ethereal loathing that glowed in those eyes, or the blank terror that had turned that face into a drained and twisted mask?

'Let me try to get this straight, Norbert. You say that the man at the pillar box was not you, but—.'

'Not man! Not man!' screamed the Frenchman, spinning round in a blaze of fury, 'I am the homme—it is a mockery of a man, un monstre from the arm-pit of hell, a creature of—.'

'And he is the enemy you've told me about?' interrupted Loofah, quickly forestalling yet another venomous tirade, 'The one who brought us here, me and the one like me?'

Dentressangle wiped the flecks of saliva-foam from his lips with the back of his hand, nodded, and then returned to his pacing. But he had covered no more than four strides when he stopped suddenly and turned to face Loofah, his features tautened even further by some fresh alarm.

'Les pantalons—chinos, you say?'

'I think so,' said Loofah, 'Sort of pale yellow, matching his shoes.'

'Ai-ee!' screamed the Frenchman, clutching his face in pain, 'Ordures de bourgeoisie!—and from a catalogue, I know it.' He looked up anxiously. 'And the shirt was red? You are making the joking, I know you are—even it would not wear la rouge avec the yellow.'

Georgette squealed, a hand on each cheek in a caricature of horror.

'Well it wasn't really a bright red, Norbert: more like…' began Loofah, about to make a comparison with Dentressangle's own terracotta linen jacket.

'But how could you be thinking that this—thing was me? How could you be thinking that I, Norbert Dentressangle, would be wearing of this—this—' the Frenchman paused, groping for words '—this leisure-wear for the bank clerks?' he finally spat, throwing his arms in the air. Then he spun away with a grunt of contempt, while the girl shook her head in disbelief.

As Dentressangle stormed about the courtyard, gesticulating and muttering imprecations to himself, Loofah wrestled with the cascade of increasingly bizarre facts that now coiled around in his skull like a nest of adolescent boa constrictors, threatening to crush his tired brain to a bloody pulp. Was it really possible that, like himself, the Frenchman had a double?

As Loofah pondered, an image emerged out of the writhing confusion. It certainly looked like Dentressangle, but the clothes weren't right. No, this one was dressed like a knitting pattern model—well-groomed but bland and cosy.

Then another figure appeared: a woman this time, a woman he knew well. She now wore the military jet-black of the Waffen SS, with the familiar double lightning stripes on each lapel of her immaculately cut jacket. A row of scalpels and dental forceps glittered in her breast pocket and her face spoke of pain, of pain inflicted without a flicker of hesitation, of pain inflicted with pleasure even, a cold metallic pleasure. As she drifted across the mental firmament towards the male figure, the M&S style-slave snapped the heels of his suede Hush Puppies together and saluted, a crisp raising of his right arm. It was then that Loofah noted the discrete badge on the front of his cardigan: a gold swastika. Both figures then turned to face Loofah—the evil twin and his baleful female ally.

The woman smiled a glittering smile and, as a cold shiver slid over Loofah's skin, she pulled open her jacket. Underneath she was naked: a hard body of polished white marble nestling against the black mink lining of the jacket, breasts like a pair of artillery shells, diamond tipped, with the dark shadow at the base of her belly trimmed neatly into a death's head. Would he have avoided the torture at the hospital if he had submitted to her advances by the pillar box—or would submitting to her advances have been worse than the torture?

As Loofah looked from one to the other of the two figures, he felt an uneasy sense that something was missing, that there was another piece to this hideous jigsaw. Then a third figure joined the grim pair—and the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The deadly glittering woman flanked by two men: the bland cardiganed double now united with his fashion conscious original. And Loofah now saw that on the latter's tie a pattern swam in the muddy red silk, a pattern of elegantly interlocking swastikas.

'I am sorry, Norbert,' began Loofah, interrupting the Frenchman's enraged soliloquy, 'It was silly of me to make a mistake like that.'

Dentressangle stopped pacing and turned.

'You're right, I should have known that the man at the pillar box wasn't you. It was just that he looked and talked exactly like you—and you had never warned me that our main enemy was your double. But nevertheless my fault entirely and I do apologise.'

For a short moment the Frenchman just stared, taken off-guard by Loofah’s abrupt switch of tone—then he smiled and opened his hands in a gesture of conciliation.

'My friend, it is not good for dear amis to be in the arguments,' he said, 'and so I am accepting your apologies. Come, let bygones be things in the past, let us bury the chainsaw and—.'

'He's obviously very cunning, that one. And a truly nasty piece of work.'

'Indeed it is, of the very worstest genre. Now come, let us be getting on with the job in glove: the discovering of the heart of blackness, and so to L'Une Qui Est—.'

'And presumably the reason he wants me out of the way is to stop me from finding the double woman.'

'This is naturellement true, but now we are free to—.'

'Which is why he sent me to the hospital—.'

'From the which you have so skilfully escaped.'

'—To be tortured to death—' Loofah paused for effect '—by your lovely friend.'

Dentressangle and Georgette gasped as one.

'My—lovely—friend?' stammered the Frenchman.

'You see, Norbert,' began Loofah, with deadly calm, 'I could have swallowed all that stuff about it being your other one, and not you, who called the doctor. But you can't explain the woman.'

'The—woman?'

'The woman in the fur coat who appeared at the post box.'

The Frenchman shook his head in vigorous denial. 'I am knowing rien about any woman.'

'But she knew about you, Norbert, and she also knew about the heart of darkness and about the carnivorous toilet. And how could she have known all that—unless you told her?'

Dentressangle's cheek twitched and he grinned quickly. 'Oh, that woman,' he said, 'Yes, yes, I am remembering now. An old amie of mine. I did ask her to—how you say?—be popping along, to make sure you were having the OK-ness. But no torture, certainement pas—just un petit peu of friendly concern, no more than this.'

'It was the same woman, Norbert. Your friend in the fur coat—and the evil bitch with the scalpel.'

Dentressangle again shook his head. 'Not the same,' he said, firmly.

'And what's more I'd seen her before—long ago, with the other one, the one like me. She was wearing a bright red dress on that occasion, if I remember rightly.'

'Not the same,' repeated Dentressangle, more forcefully.

'I don't know what you're up to, Norbert, but you're all in this together—you, the one like you and this horrible woman—all trying to—.'

'Not the same!' shouted the Frenchman, his eyes again glowing with the hollow hatred.

'What do you mean: "not the same"?' asked Loofah, quietly.

'The beautiful femme with the coat of minks, she is not the same as the—the créature who has been cutting you in l'hôpital,' said Dentressangle, wincing with revulsion, 'This one—the one avec le knife, the one which you have seen longing ago in the rouge dress—this is un monstre, not even a woman.'

'Not a woman?'

'Une sale parodie d'une femme, a hideous joking of a woman,' spat the Frenchman, 'And not even femelle.'

'Not—female?'

'It is the—the evil one. It is taking the form of a woman from temps to temps, to help it with its foulness, for the deceiving of others.'

'Hang on a minute, Norbert. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the woman with the scalpel and the one who looks like you, the one who called the doctor, were—the same?'

Dentressangle nodded.

'He puts on a woman's clothes?'

'Non, non, non—écoutes moi: it puts on a woman's body.'

Loofah stared at him blankly.

'It changes of the gender,' expanded Dentressangle.

'Just like that?'

'Whenever it has the wanting.'

'What? The whole works?'

'Toutes.'

'How very—fashionable.'

'Terrible, I know. A foul mutating of the nature, twisted et pervertée. Makes a decent person sick to the bowels.'

In Loofah's head, the cardiganed Nazi pulled open his checked leisure shirt: a pair of well tanned breasts swelled and shrank away in time with his breathing, like supplementary lungs. But as well as being somewhat unsettling the Frenchman's account did also seem to suffer from at least one major inconsistency.

'But, Norbert, she—he—whatever—looks exactly like your friend at the pillar box. How do explain that?'

'It copies her,' said Dentressangle, with a grimace, 'You see, by the mimicking of this belle femme it has hopes to be defiling her, to be polluting something pure with its foulness.'

Loofah frowned. 'Then who is she?’ he asked, ‘The lady in the fur coat, I mean.'

'Who is she?' parroted the Frenchman—then, as he pondered the question, a warm delight flooded across his features, dissolving the anguish and horror of moments before.

'Ah! Such a lovely fille, an angel, a saint,' he sighed, smiling wistfully and focusing on the middle distance with misty eyes, 'And so beautiful, is she not?'

'She was very, er, nice,' said Loofah, without much conviction.

'You were seeing quite a lot of her, think I?' Dentressangle winked slyly.

'Um, we spent a few minutes together, that's all.'

'Le visage d'une Helene, the body of a Venus. And such breasts—dites moi, mon ami, were her breasts not so perfect, were you not in great liking of her breasts?'

'They were very—nice.'

'So soft, so round, and avec the firm little nipples. Were you not liking to touch her firm little nipples?'

'Um—yes—I mean no. Actually I can't reme—.'

'Oh, and those thighs,' eulogised Dentressangle, 'Smooth and long and strong. Tell me, can you not be imagining those thighs wrapped with tightness around you as you—?'

'It's definitely a compelling image, Norbert,' interrupted Loofah, 'But you still haven't told me who she is.'

The Frenchman smiled coyly. 'You think maybe she looks a little like me?'

Loofah considered for a moment—and, yes, there a certain resonance.

'Your sister?' he guessed.

Dentressangle grinned broadly, shaking his head.

'A cousin, perhaps? Or maybe a niece?'

'Come, my friend, can you not guess?'

Loofah gave up. 'No, sorry, haven't got a clue,' he said.

Dentressangle winked conspiratorially and then began undulating like an oriental dancer, smoothing his hands over his hips.

'I am very beautiful, I think,' he pouted, pushing out his chest and fingering his left nipple, 'You feel, explore. It is good.'

It was a disturbingly realistic impression and for a long moment Loofah just gawped while strange and unwelcome sensations slithered over his skin. Then, ever so slowly, realisation of what he was being told began to dawn in the fuddled confusion of his brain.

'No!' he whispered.

'My grotto of bliss,' murmured Dentressangle, massaging his groin, 'You may come inside.'

'Norbert, you're not saying it was you, are you?' The other shrugged modestly. 'It's absolutely—astounding!'

'It is rien really,' said the Frenchman, blushing with pride, 'Just un petit talent I have up-picked.'

Loofah, however, was now shaking his head; his overstrained credibility finally gagged and refused to swallow.

'I'm sorry, Norbert,' he said, 'Frankly, I just don't believe you.'

The audience—Loofah—sat on a malodorous laundry bag facing the stage, which was a few yards of concrete in front of the wheelie bins. Georgette, now divested of the overalls and resplendent in her satin blue top and a tight fitting black mini, flashed him a cheesy grin. The magician's lovely assistant, she held up a white sheet, flapping it to and fro to show him both sides. Sadly, the air of theatrical mystery was not enhanced by a yellow stain the shape of Africa covering most of her prop.

The show began. To the sound of an imaginary drum roll, the girl—still grinning—held up the noxious sheet to make a screen and the Frenchman pranced onto the stage, a prima ballerina making his entrance. He pirouetted twice, lifting the hem of his jacket like a tutu, and then flounced out of sight behind the sheet.

The drum roll lowered to a quiet, ominous hum. From behind his screen the Frenchman grunted and strained as if struggling against severe constipation, then after a minute of so began to pant quickly, his voice getting higher with each breath. The drum roll rushed to a climax—there was a little squeal, followed by a long moan as if of pleasure and finally a sigh.

'Da-da!' sang out the girl, sweeping away the sheet.

And there indeed she was, the sultry beauty from the pillar box, posing like an old style beauty queen with one leg in front of the other, hands on hips, and grinning a plastic smile from ear to ear. No fur coat this time, for now she was dressed as a nurse.

'Voilà!' cried Dentressangle, twirling round to show pert roundness of her bottom and the curving sweep of her endless legs.

Unsurprisingly, there were one or two subtleties in the way she wore the uniform of that noble profession that hinted that the Frenchwoman might lean more towards the Barbara Windsor school of nursing, than to that of late nights with a bed-pan. For though her blonde hair was piled under a starched white cap, a few wanton strands were artfully left hanging loose, and the tight white uniform was sufficiently low cut to show off the plunging acres of her cleavage and sufficiently short to reveal a few centimetres of stocking top.

Loofah just gaped, open mouthed.

'I think a uniform is so complimenting of une fille's attractions, do you not?' purred the Frenchwoman, 'And see—' She hitched up the hem of her skirt to reveal more stocking top and inches of cream thigh cris-crossed by bands of black lace. '—The stockings, not the tights. And real silk—the swaddling of the infant insects wrapped around my soft flesh. You see, my friend, I am toujours dressing to please—the sacré duty of every woman. N'est pas, Georgette?'

The girl nodded enthusiastically, while Loofah shook his head in bewilderment.

'But, Norbert, I don't understand. How did you do it? The clothes and—.'

'It is not just les vêtements, my friend,' said Dentressangle, stalking towards him with swaying hips, 'Come, be feeling for yourself, it is all real.'

She leaned forward with a sultry smile, offering her cleavage. Loofah gazed into the softly curving crevice—and gulped.

'Come, my friend, do not be having the shyness.'

'It's OK, Norbert, I believe you.'

'And there is more,' said Dentressangle, taking hold of the tight cotton over her hips, 'You want that I show what I have for you in here?'

The hem slid upwards: cream skin of naked thigh, lace straps, and… Loofah stood quickly.

'I think maybe we should—.' He stepped back, but bumped into Georgette, who smiled him her own invitation from smouldering eyes. Four mounds now pressed against his jacket and musky female scents enveloped him in temptation, warm and humid.

'Come, my friend, relax,' purred Dentressangle, gently taking his hand and leading it to the front of her dress, 'There is pas de hurry, pas de hurry at all. Let us help you to be calming down, to be forgetting the unpleasantness of your recent illness, to be remembering—.'

'The heart of darkness!' exclaimed Loofah, starting forward out of the well-cushioned trap, 'We must find it! There's no time to waste!'