Limbo 56 - Mike Morris (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📗

chickens. “That’s it, then,” he said to Arthur.

“Where’s the rest?” Arthur demanded.

“That’s the last of them,” Fred told him. “You don’t think I had an endless supply, do you. I just kept them for the eggs. Nice doing business with you,” he said on leaving.

A few days later, they heard that he died, suddenly, of a brain tumor. The local newspapers had a field day with the story of a chicken farmer with no chickens, and a bucket full of industrial diamonds under the bed. Geoff never came up with any other ideas, and supplies from the outside world dwindled to nothing.


Chapter 14 – Soap Opera Stories
The Governor was visiting an unusually large influx of undead who had come wandering, bedraggled and wet, through the tunnel. They were a mixed bunch, but mostly disinclined to work in the grimy, gloomy foundry that dominated Arthur’s Limbo. The only thing they had in common was that they had all, reluctantly, spent time in the gloomy town that was the real-world counterpart of Limbo56. A hooker, sexy as a Marine sergeant demanded extra scrip for clothing for when she went back to work. “We don’t allow that sort of work in Limbo,” he told her, and she told him where to stuff Limbo and disappeared down below. In fact, quite a few of them slipped down through the cracks into Hell when he gave them the standard sales pitch regarding his ragged domain.

Only one of them insisted that he was innocent. “You know, I should not, truly should not be here in Limbo. I know that this sounds Rather like an old movie, where the prisoner keeps telling everyone that he’s innocent, and no-one believes him, except his friend the Governor – ha ha – and right up to five minutes to midnight he’s walking down the corridor and the chair is waiting, and at the last moment the real villain confesses on his deathbed. I know this sounds unbelievable.” This was from a small, scholarly man who looked like a tax accountant.

His last house call that afternoon was the old couple. They had just moved into his small kingdom from St Kitts. The man was seventy-four, his companion was sixty-nine, and they both had earned a small pension from their previous lives in the UK. These were no good now, of course, but at their age, they were a tiny minority in Limbo, and would be looked after by the Angels, according to their assets when alive. Arthur had saved them for his last visit, because by late afternoon, he’d usually had enough of shouting matches, mind games, and bizarre tales of misfortune.

Arthur trudged up the old staircase, and stopped at the door. It was an old, very battered door. It looked as if someone had been throwing furniture at it all day. He knocked. Through a split in the door, he could make out a man, sitting on a bed, and someone else lying down. The room was silent. “Maybe they’re both deaf,” he thought. He knocked again, louder. This time there was no mistaking the fact that they heard him. The figure on the bed moved a fraction, and the sitting man gestured for silence. Arthur was tired; he needed to get home.

He pounded on the door. “Hey,” he yelled. “I know you’re in there. Open the door.” Still no movement. He rattled the doorknob. “I’m coming in!” Then all hell broke loose. There was a shriek and a roar, the door opened, and a woman flung herself at him, followed by a knife and fork, which just missed both their heads, and a plate, which smashed against the wall behind him.

“He gonna kill me,” she said, ninety pounds of skin and bone, covered in nothing but a nightgown, arms wrapped around Arthur.

“I gonna kill you,” he yelled at Arthur, “if you don’t get your hands off of my woman.”

She hung on like a leech, bony arms around Arthur’s neck. “Damn whore.” he growled. “Which boyfriend this then?”

“I’m the Governor,” he told them. “Don’t you remember me when you first came through the tunnel?” Arthur didn’t think the man believed him. The woman wriggled against him as if she were trying to get inside his skin. She smelled of dust and autumn leaves, and ghostly perfume. He disengaged her gently. The words must have registered with the man because made no move. He stood in ragged clothes, looking as if he had lived for a hundred years on beaches, under hot sun. Still, for seventy-four, he looked quite strong.

“Damn whore,” he mumbled.

“Oh, Marlon,” she said. “He a young boy. He say he the Governor of this place, remember.”

Marlon looked doubtful. “Sides which,” she said, “he smell like a wet chicken.”

“It’s been raining,” Arthur said. The interview was already getting out of hand. “Look." he told them, "I need to take down some details, how you got here, stuff like that.”

“She got her fancy men to see to her,” he said sullenly, and she shrieked and clawed for his face.

“Calm down.” Arthur was standing between them, and they looked set to tear him apart to get at each other.

He sat between them on the bed, and they glared at each other. “He’s a crazy man,” she said in her best accent. “He thinks I got boyfriends sneakin’ around while he’s looking for work, and…”

“Shut your trap, woman,” he shouted, and Arthur stood up.

“If you two don’t listen, I’m going, and you’ll both have to wait a long time to get a job and some scrip.” Marlon’s mouth shut with a click, and she smiled sweetly. Arthur opened up his case and turned to each of them in turn. “Who’s going to give me the details?”

“He’s good at talkin’” she said immediately. “Talks all the time, yells and shouts, accuses me of doin’ all sorts of dirty things…”

“OK,” Arthur said hastily. “Mr. Blount, I’ll talk to you then.”

The preliminaries were easy. There was furniture in the dusty old rooms and they seemed to have no needs. They were remarkably healthy for an aged couple who regularly did bodily harm to each other. Marlon had worked at a good job, saved a lot of money, and they had set sail for St Kitts. Now they were in Limbo and he was broke. “An he needs some extra for clothes, so he can go to work in the foundry,’” Mrs. Blount chirped.

“Ah, yes,” Arthur said. It wasn’t unreasonable. The man was still trying to work. “Do you have any money at all from the real world, to exchange for our scrip” he asked them. “No,” they both answered at the same time. Arthur looked at his notes. “You worked in construction in the outside world for seventeen years,” he said.

“Good money,” he replied. “Still, it was nice, go back home.”

“So.” Arthur looked at the man’s statement. “So, you saved £154,317, but that’s all gone now.”

“All gone,” he sighed.

“Hm.” The statement didn’t say when they had left the UK. “So, there’s nothing left now? Do you have a house in St Kitts?”

“No nothin’,”

“An’ he needs clothes,” she piped up. “An’ I need clothes. Ain’t got nothin’ but this old nightgown, an’ a raggedy dress.” She smoothed the nightgown over her bony chest, and he glared at her.

“What you gotta do that for?” he asked. “He ain’t interested in your bosoms. Are you?” he demanded, glaring at Arthur.

“No, no,” Arthur said, and she pressed her leg against his. “So when did you go back to St Kitts,” he asked hastily.

They looked at each other. “Nearly four months ago,” the old man said.

“Four…” Arthur shook his head. “Four months ago you went to St Kitts, with £154,000 and now you’re back, with no money and no clothes? I can give you some credit for the money you had saved when you died, you know.”

“Yes,” he said. “No money, and I don’t even have a decent shirt to wear."

“And I got one raggedy pair of knickers,” she chorused.

“I can’t help you. What about all your money.”

“Gone,” he answered. “An’ our clothes, and the few things we bring with we.”

“Gone?” Arthur echoed.

“When the ship sank,” he told the Governor, as if ships sinking in the ocean were an everyday thing. “We had a big crate with our clothes and our money, and it sank.”

“It sank.”

Marlon pulled a newspaper from his tattered pocket, a copy of the Miami Herald. The San Sebastian had sunk in a storm. The article even mentioned their names, amongst others. It was almost a week in an open boat, before they had been picked up, not far from Puerto Rico. The old man told the story as if he was talking about a stroll down the road. They had been going home like millionaires, until the boat sank, and they were broke, friendless and homeless, on an island where Spanish was the language of choice. They had lost everything, including their passports.

“So I got me a job on the waterfront,” Marlon said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world for an old man with no papers, and no command of the language.

“And I got a job in a bar, right around from where he worked,” his wife said. “Weren’t much help, though. When he was through with his job, he’d come sniffing around the bar, spending money fast as I could earn it, insulting the customers.”

“They was sniffing round you,” he interrupted.

Arthur calmed them down again. Marlon seemed to have spent most of his anger. He told the Governor that after a month they had enough money to go to Miami.

“How did you…” Arthur began.

“Hired a boat,” he said shortly.

“I liked it there,” she said.

“Yeah. With that big fat boyfrien’ of yours with his fancy car an’ his hands all over you.”

Arthur calmed them down again. It was getting easier. They were reminiscing about their life together as if they were talking about a holiday they had enjoyed, with a few bumps in the road, but quite pleasant really.

“We saved air fare money. British Consul got us our papers,” he finished.

“He was a real nice man,” she said reminiscently.

It was getting dark. Arthur told them they would be paid, in Limbo scrip, Marlon for Maintenance in the foundry and Lizzie for a job at the pub, and that he’d get them some extra scrip for clothes. They thanked him, and Marlon assured him that they would be on their feet in a week or two.

“Now you two, don’t go throwing things at each other,” Arthur said as he left. “No fighting.” They looked at him as if he was mad.

On the landing, he stopped to put his papers in order. He heard the bedsprings squeak and she let out a shriek, and he almost went back, but the cries came fast and regular, and it was pleasure, not anger that he was hearing. A couple of weeks later, Marlon sent some scrip, with a scrawled note that said they were ‘up with the Angels’, and didn’t need no more money, and thanks for the help. He never heard from them again.

Chapter 15