Comma Translation

Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man

by Alex Campbell

The city is changing. I can tell, even from down here, that the mood, the feel of the streets has changed and I don’t like it. The dead don’t like change.
I am dead and so I bury myself down here. These tunnels are my haven, where I can live a step away from two different fiery hells. A precarious existence, poised between the devil and the sunlight, but I trust the old earth above my head to keep me safe; the earth that covers me, like a bulb that will never sprout, like the old dead bones that I am.

I live a half-existence. Like a diver, spending my days submerged, in a world of dripping caverns and pale, blind creatures afraid of the sun. I only surface at night; not for air – the dead don’t need it – but for food. One human body contains roughly eight pints of blood. You can loose one, maybe two of those easily and walk away. I need just over a pint a night to survive.

The closest I get to a heart-beat is the moment I pull someone into the shadows, tilt their head to one side and drink deep. The regular pulse of the blood flowing down my throat as I swallow gulp after gulp is almost like the beating of that organ I no longer posses. It soothes and sustains but it is borrowed life. I live on borrowed time. The old century ended, and at times I get the feeling that I should have ended with it. Made way for the new. I’m getting too old for this.

I take from drunks, mostly. Those who stagger into the back streets and empty doorways to piss or to vomit. The ones who won’t remember, tomorrow, the slight pinch of skin and the sight of teeth. They’ll think they glassed themselves, got cut in a fight. It used to be easier: people didn’t notice so much. You could rip the throat out of some dead broke docker, drunk on his dole money, and there’d be few to miss him, fewer who’d mourn the loss. Now the press crawl like flies over every corpse that finds its way to the sunlight. Even down here there’s always a slim chance they’d worm their way in and then there’d be no stone big enough to hide under.

I worry that one day they will break this place open like an egg. They’ve already opened up a section of the south tunnels. There’s a visitors’ centre and a café. I have almost run into a swarm of school kids a few times. Tiny, loud, wriggling things in hard hats and smiles with missing teeth. Each time I think I’m going to do it: squeeze and pop them like a mound of maggots; like whole prawns, break open their bleached white carapaces, suck out the insides. I never do. I can never bring myself to make that headline. Not even that one little lost girl, so young I can’t remember ever being her age. I led her back, pointed her towards her party. And later no-one believed her story of the “nice man with the funny-looking smile.” Years ago I would have pitied myself to be so weak.

So much has changed. Time was, I knew every rat in this city by sight. I could sniff their hide and tell you where they had come from. Now there are too many, and not all of them are small and furry.

They brought another kind of beast down here once. A strange concrete creature, like a sheep with a sail. A fitting bedfellow for one who never sleeps and so cannot dream his own nightmares. I saw more of them that night as I ventured out. Silent ranks of staring, eyeless faces: a fleet of un-living ships. I felt a certain kinship with them, and a hollowness when they left.

There was a woman came down here, not two weeks ago. She was slight and wiry, with chestnut hair that shone, even in the torchlight. She wore a fluorescent vest and a hard hat, and carried a clipboard. She had a friend with her, a man, but it was as if he wasn’t there. She had so much life in her, so much vitality that she filled all the space there was. She was like air and sunlight: weightless and expansive, pushing everyone else to the edges. Deadly to me.

I should have felt that life coming. There must be something wrong with me – me, who could hear a mosquito out of place, hear the heartbeat of a dying mouse – I didn’t sense her until she was almost upon me.

‘It’s time we put something down here,’ she said. ‘A museum, perhaps, or a gallery. Join all this lot up to the Heritage Centre. It’s a whole space that’s just going to waste otherwise.’
Her companion nodded.

‘It’s dead ground now,’ she continued, staring up at the arching stone. ‘I’m glad we’re expanding. This place has such a history, it’d be a shame not to do anything with it.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Did you know, they speculated that old Williamson built these tunnels because he thought the world was going to end? Some sort of religious extremist, apparently. He thought Armageddon was coming, so he had all this dug out for him and his friends to hide in till it was all over. Then they could come out and repopulate the earth.’

‘Funny what people will believe,’ her friend said.

‘I mean, there’s got to be something to it, I think. Look at these vaults, the shape of the arches. It’s like a church down here in places.’ I followed her pointing finger, felt suddenly possessive of the landmarks that make this place feel like home to me; each gothic curve of the sandstone, each shadow. Mine. My home for almost two centuries.

‘It’ll be something to tell the tourists,’ said the man.
‘It’s a labyrinth though,’ she said, studying her clipboard. ‘You could get lost for days if you weren’t careful.’

Right then I wanted to do it.

There are no eyes in the darkness, save mine. No one but the rats would see if I left their drained corpses in a heap of rubble for the parasites to dispose of later. Down here a scream would only echo around the crumbling masonry, gradually losing momentum, to become barely a vibration when it reached the surface. I would take him first, I thought. Snap the neck and drop him. She would run. And like the photo negative of an avenging angel, an expanse of darkness eating up the tunnel behind her as she fled, I would come after her.

‘It seems to be structurally sound, at least round here,’ the man said, whacking his palm against the wall a few times. ‘And you’ve certainly got the makings of a good plan. I don’t think the board will have many problems with it.’
‘Do you really think so?’ she asked.

I willed myself to strike. She was the life force behind whatever expansion they were planning. Without her they wouldn’t have the drive to go ahead. The headlines of their disappearance might even keep people away. They will learn, it’s too dangerous to come down here: you’ll be lost without a trace. Down here in the heavy darkness with the weight of all that earth over you. You’ll be buried like a dead man. They were so fragile in those paper white bodies, so terribly mortal, it would be the work of a moment to tear up all the plans they had made. I imagined her in a nightdress; flapping, thin cotton; as vulnerable as I felt. I had to do this. It was a question of survival.

But things have changed. I can’t be the nightmare of melodrama that I was. Like black and white cinema, with it’s black and white morality, I am fading into obscurity; just another, darker, shade of grey. A shadow, ever shrinking in the encroaching light. I am phoenix ash, dead matter that composts, rots so that something else might grow. This is not my time anymore, and I sense it.

‘I have so many ideas, so much I want to do. I have such a good feeling about this project!’ she said, gesturing expansively with her clipboard. ‘It really epitomises what this whole year has been about: taking something that’s been there for centuries, and remaking it for the new millennium.’

I still heard her talking as I slunk off into the dark.

‘It’s about renewal, rejuvenation and rebirth,’ she said. I could hear the smile in her voice. She said it like she didn’t know: in order to be reborn, first something has to die.