The Maggot People (9 page)

They went down a wide corridor ending in big glass doors sliding open automatically, then crossed a courtyard through a wicket gate onto a walled terrace shielded from view in every direction but open to the sea. Here one could persuade oneself that nothing else existed in the world but the clouds passing over and the sea like a dark band between the white walls.

The terrace was in immaculate order.

There were cushioned chairs, teak tables decorated with fresh-cut flowers, tea lights lowered into glass lanterns. There was fine china, which must have been carefully collected by a connoisseur. The tableware was strikingly elegant, perfectly balanced in the hand and solid silver. There was Sardinian sheep cheese, also imported Stilton from Harrods and shortbread biscuits from Fortnum & Mason and tropical fruits imported from only God knew where, guavas and horned melons and papaya and guarana berries. Raku-fired bowls, each a small masterpiece in its own right, were filled with açai and bergamot preserves or freshly churned unsalted butter, and there were baskets of toasted white bread under starched, very clean linen napkins.

By now, Michael was familiar with the tendency. If one must live as a maggot, one's available pleasures are severely limited. Everything one does must be calibrated for maximum pleasure. The guiltiest pleasure of all, of course, is to lose oneself in artificial stimuli. To this end there were sealed plastic bags scattered everywhere, each containing three syringes pre-loaded with the very finest pink Afghani heroin. The trick was to dose oneself until a small portion escaped into the brain, inducing a pleasant high lasting no more than ten or fifteen minutes. After that, the maggots pushed out the toxins.

Even as they were settling in, he saw the deranged figure of the Mama, sitting to one side on a sort of throne at the edge of the terrace. She was in a world of her own, her hooked nose fixed like a compass needle on the setting sun over the sea.

Every half hour or so, a group of attendants with sponges and bowls of hot water entered the compound. Gently they undressed the dozing people and swabbed them down. The heroin, forming a glistening film on their skin, had a sticky quality, like crystallized honey.

“It's all recycled,” Janine whispered. “Everything is recycled here, even people…”

Michael was too tired to ask her what she meant by that. He returned to his hut farther down the slope, where, if he opened the window, he could hear the waves lapping against the rocks below. The bed was crisp and comfortable, and when he lay down he noticed that also this ceiling was made of split bamboo canes. There was a shelf of books by American beatnik writers: Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr. He leafed through a book by Allen Ginsberg, then threw it at the wall. It landed with the sleeve photograph of the poet with his big black beard and melting eyes staring at him and his smooth voice in Michael's ear:

No sooner had his words guttered than Michael felt a smoke of heavy drowsiness lifting him, almost levitating him off the bed slightly, so that he lay there hovering. His mind was pleasantly distended. Sleep! For the first time in many days the maggots let their host lose himself.

At some point in the night he was awoken by a click of the latch, the door creaking and the weight of someone sitting down at the foot of his bed. There came a whisper: “Are you awake?”

“I am
now.”

He turned on his bedside lamp and saw a young woman sitting there, about twenty years old, more or less a carbon copy of Sophia Loren, only slightly less buxom.

“Yes. I know,” she said. “I'm eye-candy, but who cares? God gave me my looks for nothing. And what's the real advantage of being good-looking, anyway? All that happens is you get guys swarming all over you until you can't tell the rotten apples from the good.”

“I suppose you must be Elvira?”

“Yes, I suppose I must be.” She hung her head, then added, “
By their deeds shall ye know them.”

Michael cleared his throat, slightly guarded. “Sorry, but what are you doing?”

“I came to see you. I thought I could talk to you. Is that so wrong?”

He shrugged. “I guess it's okay. To be honest I don't know what to make of this place. What is it? Where are you from?”

“Oh,
nowhere.”
Elvira pouted like a child deprived of her will. “Rome, of course. Everyone's from Rome. I never thought I'd end up serving some old bag who pinches my butt and makes insinuations all the time. But I'm used to bitches. When my mother wasn't having her nails done or lunching with girlfriends she was on tranquillizers—it's just a polite word for drugs, isn't it? She never gave a damn about me.”

Elvira shifted in the bed, pulling her foot up against her buttock. A good girl does not open her legs, Michael remembered his own mother used to say. Nor does she show a white gleam of cotton covering her fuzzed pudenda. As he lay there watching her, Elvira got out a piece of semi-melted chocolate and broke off a piece for him. “You know something, I actually
like
you. I was watching you earlier, you seem like a nice man, not completely sex-mad like all the others.” She put the chocolate in her mouth, with a simpering look. “I never chew chocolate. I
suck
it, to make it last longer.”

There was a pause. Baby talk, was that supposed to be sexy? Or was she just habitually seedy? Michael asked: “How old are you, Elvira?”

“Oh, old enough, you'll find,” she said. “Old enough to do what everyone else does, only a hell of a lot better. Basically I go out and find fresh meat for Mama. I bring it back for her and they fuck it.”

Michael reached down into his bag for a bottle of Courvoisier. He took a stiff gulp at it, then rolled himself a reefer.

Elvira continued: “Mama gives me hell all the time. She fancies me. She likes to be clear about it, she says I mustn't work up any feelings for her. As if I would. Feelings, what a lovely word. What does it really mean? Having feelings actually means you only care about yourself, your own precious emotions.”

“So Mama's a lesbian?”

“No, she's a maggot woman;
that's
what she is. It's the old Sapphic dream, the Kingdom of Women, right? The problem used to be that lesbian women needed men so they could have children, hence the impossibility of an all-female world. Boys could be thrown in the river, of course, but they'd have to keep one or two. For breeding. But now women really don't need men anymore. With the maggot tank they can live for ever. They don't have to bother with childbirth.”

“What's the maggot tank?”

“Mama says I have to treat her well, she says I'm not the only half-decent looking cunt in this world. I guess she's right. There are a lot of cunts in this world, Michael. Most of them are not worth bothering with.” She stood up. “Put something on. She wants to see you; that's why she sent me here.”

“To ask me to come?”

“To tell you.”

17
.

“I expect you're wondering why you're here?”

Mama Maggot, stooped in a high chair like an old and twisted parrot on its perch, seemed to hover above Michael, who found himself semi-reclined in a leather armchair, blinking up at her face.

She looked unassuming and reasonable and he knew he was supposed to believe that maybe she actually was unassuming and reasonable. Except he didn't believe it. She was acting, and actors have to make it clear what they are doing or they become sinister or just plain odd.

The room was refrigerated; their breath came out in puffs of steam. Mama Maggot luxuriated in a white fur coat, though her skinny pale legs stuck out at the bottom like sticks, which rather spoiled the effect. On either side of her stood a small girl also dressed in a white fur coat, balancing on gold-sequined high-heels. From time to time, if Mama Maggot grew agitated, one of them would totter forward and kiss her cheek to calm her nerves, and whenever this happened Mama Maggot would turn to the child in question and kiss her full on the mouth, whilst intermittently shaking her head in wonder and whispering, “Thank you, my child, thank you.” As if their concern came from the goodness of their hearts.

Michael had only thrown on a cotton slip when he left his room. He was already shivering. “Do you mind my asking?” he began.

“Yes, I do mind!” said Mama Maggot, doing her best to maintain her benevolent smile. “You're to be quiet, I require nothing but two words from you and those words are ‘yes' and ‘no'. Just occasionally you may say ‘I don't know.' Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And don't talk to Elvira again. She's very mixed up.”

“I didn't talk to her. She talked to me. There's a difference.”

“To me you're nothing but a sack of glorified fertilizer, so shut up and don't try to impress me!” After her venom had spurted forth, she slumped with deflation and received a volley of little kisses. Then, to his amazement, she began to talk like a normal person. “The truth is I do love Elvira. She's a little miracle, the way she's made. Like a Swiss watch; everything works so well. But what good has it done me to love her?”

“I don't know.”

“No. You don't know. When God looks down at you he sees a little man peering round at not much. Mr. Michael. What a tragedy is Mr. Michael. He meets Ariel, who's been sent out to capture a fool of his sort to bring back here. Then she dies in shame. And Mr. Michael meets Janine, a stupid little self-propelled cunt tiptoeing about fearing for her pathetic life as if anyone cared whether she lived or died. As if it had any consequence. But at least the self-propelled cunt does as she's told. She brings Mr. Michael here. And now we are going to teach him. Do you know what we are going to teach him?”

“No.”

“That's right, you don't. We are going to teach him to do our bidding. And stay alive until we say he should not be alive. I am responsible for you and many others; I am not autonomous. I must cull the lambs and I must lop the branches of the trees. Not by my own choice, but for the good of my community.”

“Yes,” said Michael, although he didn't much understand what she was talking about.

“Janine brought you here for a reason. She was told to bring you and she brought you. Now I have you. Do I have you?”

“Yes…”

“You are a fairly competent liar and this bodes well. With time you will improve; we will remove your scruples. Emotion is nothing but self-glorification. You will not suffer from that sort of rubbish; you will be a clean person. You will not be looking for self-advancement or personal power or in other words the workings of the ego which is the twisted impulse at the evil core of corporeal humanity. The world is doomed, you are doomed, even I am doomed; we are doomed by time so we may as well jig our bones about and feed our appetites. Do not come here speaking of goodness or charity. These things are for the lambs; these things are sparks rising from the fire, but the wind scatters them.”

“Yes.”

“The wheat is all chaff; we must eat chaff because there is nothing else. We like you, Michael. We like your puzzlement. You are weightless and empty like cheap white bread. Ariel liked you, too. She was told to find a lost sheep. A simple thing, you might think, but there are not quite as many lost sheep around as one might assume; one does require a little intelligence to go with the confusion. An intelligent human who is lost, that's an unbeatable combination. And Janine succeeded in this, at least.”

He was silent, resentful.

“Yes.”

“We need broken people to do our work; we need broken beings willing to do bad in the name of good. And if they are not already broken we are quite willing to do that bit for them. That is the name of the game, my little man. The church is about making moral judgments, nothing else. It can hardly ever be easy. And how can we be moral if the very fabric of the world is a blasted shroud in which we wrap ourselves? You must learn to see that all things are evil even if they seem good.”

She pressed a switch. With a humming sound, a large glass tube rose smoothly out of the floor, until she sat entirely encapsulated within. The two pixies at her side had stepped away; there would not have been room for them inside. One of them fetched a bulky silvery gun, which she fitted into Michael's frozen hand. He could hardly bend his fingers and the metal was so icy to the touch that it stuck to his skin.

The cold had got to him. Not only the cold of the room, but the coldness of her words, the cold realization that Ariel had sought him out, had picked him for all the most unedifying reasons. He had put his foot into the noose she had held up for him with the very same forced smile he was seeing now, plastered extravagantly across Mama Maggot's face.

“In case you get the measly idea of trying to shoot me, please be informed that this is a bulletproof screen,” said Mama Maggot.

The other girl fetched a Labrador puppy. She patted its golden yellow head and put it down on the floor, where it started flopping about and prancing playfully. Michael looked at Mama Maggot and somehow it did not surprise him that her smile had grown even sweeter.

“This is a very inconsequential exercise, Michael. But I love it more than any other. It is a sort of demonstration. An inversion. In a moment you will kill that thing. You will point your gun at it and you will pull the trigger. Why, you might ask yourself? Why do this to a little innocent thing only just setting off on its journey through life?”

Michael decided that his available list of retorts would not do, so he kept his eyes on the old bag and waited.

“Because this little thing is an illusion, Michael. In fact it is an evil thing, a brutal thing with no morality, no soul. It absolutely must be killed.”