New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

THE AIRPORT GORILLA Stephen Volk

So, this.

I see him. He sees me. Thinking these black-bead eyes unknowing, he gets an ape’s grin back from the stack of cuddly toys in the bin next to the checkout at Duty Free. He fans and counts the last of his Euros, joke money to him that looks like it came with a game of Monopoly.

Boarding pass?

Certainly.

He thinks the Dutch speak better English than he does. Always felt his Aussie drawl embarrassing. Damn thing still made him self-conscious several degrees and doctorates later, called upon to talk at international conferences on matters that save lives. Still, to him, the snarl of sheep dip and hats with dangling corks, and he hates it.

Screwy-angled, I scrutinise him back.

Above his ears I see lines each side made by the arms of glasses he’s not wearing. Atop, blond beach-bum waves now fading to the colour of his scalp. Aeons since he felt sand between his toes. House brick jaw he got from his dad. The twinkling eyes, his ma. Sky-coloured.

He stares down at me with something between curiosity and incipient affection.

I recognise that look.

I’ve watched it day in, day out, in the myriad glances that slide over me. The micro-glimmer of tears that accompany flashbacks to hearth and home.

Most turn away, not wanting to acknowledge that inner surge of sentimentality. Not him. He lets the guilt and separation anxiety rise in his chest and I feel in my complete-lack-of-bones his pang for the child he left behind.

The one he will see at the end of his journey. Soon, but not soon enough.

The one he’ll sweep up in his arms. No weightier than a toy herself. Who snores now somewhere in her suburban Melbourne dreamsleep. Yet he cannot hear that. He is robbed of it, that moment, that silly, cherished everyday nothing as the flight announcements drone.

His wife and nipper, waiting for Dad to return, miss him with an indescribable ache. This is the real currency of the airport—longing.

And so. I am here to be touched, loved, adored. Made for it, and he knows it. I am the salve to the pang he feels in his heart—and I have been waiting.

He touches my plastic ear.

Air from his nostrils.

I amuse him. Hey. No problem with that.

I’m not a serious figure. My lips are too big. My mouth sticks out like an over-size bagel. I’m covered in black fur. My legs are short. Wouldn’t stop a pig in a passage. Toes like fingers and thumbs. My arms reach way below my knees. I wear a T-shirt with the name of the city we’re in and a logo of a tulip. I’ve got a comical, idiotic expression. My grin mirroring the one he dreams of seeing on his daughter’s face.

He squeezes my tummy with his thumbs. Turns me over. Examines my behind.

(Ignominious, to say the least. Come on, people! Animal rights and shit!)

Made in China, he reads.

(Okay. Nobody’s perfect.)

Anyway, he loves me, or knows someone who will.

So, this.

I’m face down on the counter and the tag on my ankle gets scanned. Ping.

Have a nice day, sir, and have a pleasant flight.

Thank you.

He lifts me up like he lifted her as a babe. A trophy, a triumph.

My face inches from his. What is he? Thirty-five, forty max. He laughs again, and though it’s still soundless, it judders his whole frame in a way that’s appealing.

Nice person. Good person. Come on. His kid. Gimme a break.

And here I go, under his arm now—parallel to the Famous Grouse, the overpriced chocolates, bagged and dangling from his other hand. His elbow tight across my abdomen, reassuring, protective. I feel secure.

Now he’s sitting on a plastic bench, waiting for his gate to be called. Props yours truly beside him, righting me up when I droop. Some Asiatic fool chuckles. The fool would droop too if he had my legs—bandy and boneless. But I try not to get bitter. (I have a permanent fucking smile painted on, so that helps.)

The board flutters like so many call girls’ eyelashes. The gate and flight number appear.

He gathers his bags. He gathers me. Flat of his hand splayed against my back, my face pressed to his chest, mashed to the buttons of his Mambo shirt, loose for travelling in, more him than the suits the conference required.

We ride the travelator. Yippee.

Children giggle. My one eye that’s not mashed into Mambo psychedelic colours sees them wave and pull faces. Fuck them. We’re on our way.

I’m feeling a sense of anticipation, of excitement. A new owner and a new experience ahead. Got to be good news, when you’ve been in a Special Offer bin with a lumpy giraffe and a pink kangaroo for weeks on end. (Glad to see the back of that fucking giraffe, let me tell you.)

First impressions? He seems an okay guy.

I think we’ll get along. Not that I’m hard to get along with. I’m adaptable. Hey, I take the path of least resistance. What can I say? It’s who I am.

All right, I get attached. I know I shouldn’t. I know because it always ends in tears. I can’t fucking help it.

As we enter the airplane the flight attendant, orange tan and grinning (because she got fucked raw the night before) pretends to talk to me. Oh, so funny. Never heard that before. Says she hopes I’ll enjoy the flight. My guy laughs out loud, like it’s comic genius. He goes down in my estimation a tad.

Whoa! I think for a horrible moment I’m going up there with the hand luggage. No fucking way. What is this, some “Premature Burial” fucking bullshit?

Phew! The suitcase and the raincoat go up, but not this simian. Praise the Lord! I don’t know if my man is afraid of damaging me before I even reach his precious daughter, but whatever. I’m on his lap like a baby as he leafs through the in-flight magazine.

On board, the safety demonstration. The whole Marcel Marceau.

We’ve got an empty seat next to us and a vastly obese person next to that. This is how vast. She even asks for an extension to her seat belt. Jesus Christ! I give thanks for that middle seat, unoccupied. I look at my man and think, you ducked a bullet there, compadre!

I end up on the floor for take-off, his Caterpillar boot on my groin. (I think orange face has a hand in this, I swear.)

I’m starting to regret he didn’t choose one of those painted clogs or a bottle of advocaat.

I grin all the way up his jeans and Mambo shirt and chin to the reading light spot-lighting his chest. He isn’t nervous, even when the massive weight of the plane leaves the runway, lifting like a feather. He doesn’t grip the hand rests. His eyes don’t leave the in-flight magazine.

I think the son of a bitch has forgotten about me, immersed as he is in first-rate journalism about foreign climes.

Then, just when I think I’m a fucking afterthought, he picks me up and I’m on his lap again like a ventriloquist’s dummy and Schiphol is history.

The obese one gives a raised eyebrow. A hideous hello.

My guy flickers a smile back. Neither wants conversation. Good. There are some things these plastic ears are not built for.

As the plane levels he settles and I settle too. He’s pretty comfortable, after all. Pretty well sprung as mattresses go.

Enjoy the rest of your flight, blah blah.

Melbourne-bound, he gazes down at me, thinking of his child. The idea of her expression greeting him changes his. It lightens, almost blooms. I’m thinking this is looking optimistic, but I know it’s not, and can’t be. That’s not the nature of it. Not the nature of me.

So, this.

It’s got to happen, but I’m never quite sure when it will. Sometimes it comes out of a clear blue sky, so to speak. You never can tell. Sometimes my buttocks clench and I can feel it coming. Other times, it’s a sucker punch. And you know what? You never get used to it. It’s never easy.

This time, I kind of know.

Kind of.

That way he looks like he is drifting off to sleep. Those heavy lids. The memories. The desire. Then it’s like a big church bell chiming in my head, through my body, and it’s like he’s pressed a button he didn’t even know existed.

I wish this flight would end quickly.

No. No, don’t wish that, you fuck. You idiot. But too late—it’s done. The die is fucking cast. No going back. (I fucking hate my job sometimes.)

For the technically minded, it’s an SA-11 Buk surface-toair missile system down there. A dot in a field, invisible from thirty-two thousand feet. Recently trundled over the border into Eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian rebel fighters.

I’d like to tense but my innards are cheap foam.

The missile hits.

My man’s arms lift from the arm rests.

He feels the boing, the Boeing do press-ups. Everybody does, terror escaping like a puncture, a slashed tyre.

It hurtles. Dropping. Knotted stomachs in the air. Grumbling not from airline food. Not from stomach complaints. Compliant in zero-g.

Lockers spring open, clacking Jack-in-the-boxes. Oxygen masks dangle and sway in rhythm, like choreographed marionettes, kicking like the feet of can-can dancers then streaming back at the plunge.

He looks back.

Someone is horizontal like Superman, spectacular green-screen work. Outside the tilting window green fields rise to meet us at a rate of knots. Knotted loops in the bread basket, as bread baskets spin like tumbleweed from Business Class.

Blue collar, white collar, all get their top buttons undone. All get their Adam’s apple freed to gasp breath and scream.

He wished for the flight to end quickly, and so it does.

Brace. Brace.

He whimpers, hunches, forearms helmeting his head. Buries his face in me the way a child might at beddie-byes. I give him warmth. I feel his pulse galloping. But I’m grinning. Always grinning. Can’t stop it. Can’t change.

As the metal casket dives and dives and dives he prays to God, which he never has since kindergarten, remembers the chickens they kept and fed, and how one pecked him once and he didn’t think that of chickens.

Little does he know there is no God listening, just an ape.

God, please God, please God, let me see my daughter one more time before I die!

His second wish. And it’s almost too easy to oblige. It has happened before I even think about it.

The locker above springs open. Luggage vomits out, spilling exuberantly across the seat backs. His coat a swirl midair. His mobile phone spat out of its pocket, hitting a head rest and landing randomly in the space beside him, which he misconceives as luck, snatching it up and switching it on.

It glows into life and colour, showing the child, gaps where her adult teeth haven’t come through yet, freckles she always gets in warm seasons. His eyes. His wife’s sarcasm.

There.

You’ve seen her one last time, I say to myself.

I’ve given you your first two wishes—what’s your third?

His fingers, wrapped round the phone, tremble.

All about him reigns blasphemy and chaos. The fat one’s bowels have vented. Which is only a microcosm of it.

God comes into it again, both of him and the hundreds of others, in unison and yet each alone, they call out, inwardly, to their fictions and comfort blankets.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, please let me die quickly and without pain.

And so.

Impact.

He does.

We hit the cold grey field of the Donbass and his third wish eventuates.

We spread in a million fragments over a nine-mile radius, a galaxy forming of trash, belongings, chunky airport paperbacks, playing cards, letters home, old vinyl records, internal organs, hopes, and in-flight beverages. And what part, or parts, of it are him I don’t even know any more. It’s not my business.

Your story is over, Mambo shirt. My involvement in it, ditto.

I’m lying on broken metal, maybe wing, maybe fuselage, its heat slowly cooling like a body after sex. Nothing clinks or clanks or breathes or moves or mutters or prays any more.

I lie on this sun bed considering the musicality of distant rooks, which is non-existent and ultimately, fucking irritating. Not much I can do about that. It’s always a waiting game between one host and the next and you get used to being at peace with that. But it’s a fucking bore.

Passage of time I’m not great at.

I hear a tractor.

Voices. DPR insurgents, so possibly not a tractor, more likely a jeep.

Ho hum.

Military boots, the kind that lace tightly halfway up the calf, crunch through the debris. Somebody picks me up. Behind him, the devastation. Not a pretty sight.

Bodies lying everywhere, decomposed, burned, others mangled together, indistinguishable. Nobody is removing them, even touching them. Not from reverence but from indifference.

The one holding me in his fat hand wears a camouflage cap, cigarette dangling from a slug of a lower lip. Seven o’clock shadow like he just bathed in charcoal. Belt heavy with ammo and tools of war. The others wear balaclavas but him, not. The others have shaved heads. Him, no.

He turns to people with cameras. Holds me up, a soft toy gorilla, flappy-limbed, my fur coated with dust and ash.

I hear the lenses clicking. If lenses click. They probably fucking don’t. I have no idea.

Ratatatatat.

He walks around with me hanging from his hand for a while. Then for a longer while I’m tucked behind the leather strap across his chest.

A toe prods this. A toe kicks that. This continues. Someone beckons. Someone shrugs. Someone yawns. One fans a wallet out, plucking cash and credit cards with crow-beak hands. Another hyena’s jewellery. The radio in the jeep crackles with sibilant authority but it’s unintelligible. Maybe ghosts swim between the syllables. Who knows?

In semi-slumber the paramilitaries are not good at using their own initiative. They’re waiting for orders but nobody is in a hurry to give them.

As the sun sets he climbs into the back of the jeep—Land Rover, whatever the fuck it is. What do I know about cars?

Air thick with the smell of body odour and tobacco, I jostle, as he does, like we’re doing a routine together as we traverse the farmland terrain. They talk, him and the others, but to me it sounds like the yapping of dogs.

I think he’s forgotten about me, militia man. Oh well. I may as well sit back and enjoy the trip, because I’m thinking right now I’m going to end up in the nearest dumpster. Every day a fucking adventure.

Outskirts of a village, he leaps off onto the mud of a track.

A gate gives, and then a door into warmth.

The Kalashnikov is propped against the wall, in the manner you would an umbrella.

The burden of the belt unbuckled, divested.

He genuflects in the manner of the Moscow Patriarchate before washing his face in a bowl. I bend and rise with him, accidentally anointed. He remembers being in Slovansk when they shot a Protestant priest, needing to turn the Drobray Vest Church into an armoury, but he hates the Evangelicals even more. Spawn of the USA and the West.

But enough for today. He is home. Enough death.

He aches of it and wonders the purpose.

Then he remembers the flying of the tricolour of the Donetsk People’s Republic over the police headquarters in the city. He remembers throwing that city councillor in the river.

Without touching or approaching his wife he eats from a ladle dipped into a broth on the stove. The drips sizzle where they fall. She knows better than to show affection at times like these. Finding those moments is an art beyond Michelangelo these days. Her father dug coal. She’s no longer sure what this one digs.

So, this I deduce, lying splayed like spatchcock on the kitchen table, this dribbling dog of a man is too preoccupied to have wishes. Too untroubled to have dreams, because dreams open doors.

He’s too tarred and withered to allow imagination. He leaves that to others, the leaders, men wiser than him. Those with a vision for the future. Something he cannot create, but can cling to in his desperation for certainty and purpose. He’s a lightning-struck tree that no longer sucks in the light, but he can do that.

He can build a house or knock it down. For the cause, for the flag, he will be told more things to do and he will do them because he knows in his heart they are right. The meat on the table, the gasoline in the car, the roof over their heads, the angry fire in his guts that won’t be put out—that is what matters. Beyond that, there is nothing. You might as well think what is beyond the stars.

The oil and filth under his fingernails negate the need for optional extras. His fear sneers at the possibility.

But to have no wishes—none? That’s something.

A first, for this hairy ape, who thinks himself unshockable.

So now I’m picked up and he regards me in the glow of the fire, as his other hand delivers three mouthfuls of vodka, then a fourth, more from habit than requirement.

He takes me to another room and in the flickering almost-darkness crouches beside a small bed.

He wiggles me in the air. Nods my head using his index finger behind my neck. Dances me on the edge of the mattress.

I’m being introduced to her, and her, me.

She emerges, so.

Tiny, elfin concoction, itchy blanket tucked under her chin. Under the blonde fringe, scissor-cut by her mama, the too-tired eyes of a five-year-old unable to close until her father gets home, now wide and sparkling. Mouth agog, half in delight, half in disbelief, as she beholds me.

I’m adorable. I can’t help it.

He holds me out, closer. He smells of onion broth and aviation fuel and burnt plastic.

The stupid grin, she loves to bits.

She takes me in her arms, snug as a bug in a rug. Then it’s my chin that pokes over the blanket. And I love it that she kisses the back of my furry head. Especially as she doesn’t know where I’ve been.

Seriously? The softness of me, it’s a slam dunk.

I’m hers now. Official. I tell ya, this one is an impressive hugger. From one who knows. If I had a spine it would be broken. The hell. Spines are overrated.

From the first cuddle, I’m a keeper. I know it.

When her father has diminished and the light is lesser then lost, and she’s alone with me before sleep, she looks at what’s in her little hands.

Monkey’s been in the wars. Monkey has blood on him, look.

I can say nothing.

Monkey needs a wash. Monkey needs to be clean.

I have no doubt she’ll wash me in the morning. I’ll have a good old wash, old Monkey will. Old friendly, funny Monkey will. She’ll see to that. I like this one already. Then again, I’m easy to please.

And I’m waiting.

As Papa says his prayers by his piss-pot.

It may not be tonight, and it may not be tomorrow, but I’m waiting.

It might not be while she sleeps, and it might not be when she wakes, but it will come.

And I’m here for when she makes those three wishes. The ones that come with love and trust and pain and life and primates.

She’s a child. She is the future. She will have wishes. I know that for sure. Children do.

All I have to do is lie in wait and enjoy the hugs.

What does she really want and desire, this babe in arms? I have no clue. I never do. It’s a mystery. It’s a wink from a stranger. A stiletto in the ribs. It’s a monkey up a tree. It’s a painted grin.

Her mind is roaming. In her dreams she swings from branch to branch on the back of glee, clinging to her saviour, this circumstantial cousin, pink-eared, long-limbed, one of her evolutionary brethren, button-eyed, holding it together as buttons do, then tearing them apart. The way the universe does.

What will her first wish be, I wonder?

So, this.