Free Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human Page A

to reason.
    I squeeze my hand tightly around the tooth and wheel my bike back through the mud, grass and litter next to the canal.

    It’s one o’clock in the morning before I admit that the insomnia has won. I wait until I can hear the familiar hiss of my parents’white-noise machine and then take my bike out of the garage and pedal slowly through the suburbs. A thin dog slides through the shadows in front of me like an eel. I aim my bike at it and it disappears into the night.
    I freewheel down a hill toward the canal and the smell of kids smoking joints in the corners curls around me like a cloak, reaching the old oak tree that looms over the canal. I lean against the gnarled oak and run my fingers over the scarred bark. This is where I kissed Jody Fuller.
    Jody Fuller is dead. I try to imagine her empty body and can’t. All I can think of is the milky taste of her mouth and the aloof look in her eyes. I wonder how many other people kissed her. Am I alone or part of an exclusive club that know what her lips tasted like? ‘Please don’t let Esmé be dead,’ I whisper to the tree.
    ‘
Jy
,’ a whisper comes from inside the canal like the sound of a bicycle tyre deflating. I stare down into the dark concrete channel and see a man slumped against the wall of the canal. ‘Give me an
entjie
,’ he says, putting his fingers to his mouth in the universal gesture for ‘cigarette’.
    I move a little closer and see that he is sitting on an old paint tin, grinning up at me toothlessly. His face is covered in the grey-green ink of prison tattoos, an esoteric infographic of rank, affiliation and brutal misdeed that I’m glad I can’t decipher.
    One of his eyes is milky white. He hoists a battered three-stringed guitar onto his lap and widens his gummy grin. I pull my cigarettes from my pocket and toss one down to him, keeping one foot on the pedal and ready just in case he is meaning to continue this conversation with a knife.
    He takes the cigarette and I throw him down the lighter. He cups over the cigarette and his face glows orange as he lights it. ‘Who don’t you want to be dead,
laaitie
?’ he murmurs around the cig.
    ‘Nobody,’ I say. ‘Can I have my lighter back?’
    ‘You remind me of a girl I once met. On a battlefield long ago. Who are you praying to?’
    ‘I wasn’t praying,’ I say.
    He takes a drag of the cigarette and plucks one of the strings on the guitar. It sends a discordant note jangling into the night. ‘You see down there?’ He waves the cigarette in a circle to indicate an area further downriver. The light from the coal burns a chaotic pattern on my retina. ‘That’s where two young men were stripped naked and executed by gangsters as part of an initiation.’ He takes another drag. ‘And further down a Congolese refugee hanged himself from a tree because he couldn’t get a passport. Strange fruit for motorists to gawk at on their morning commute. And the world forgets but this black river remembers and carries the memories. This is where the lost spirits of the dead come to cross. I am the singer of souls. I lay to rest the spirits of the dead and make sure their memories remain alive,’ he says softly, his milky eye rolling back in his head as if examining a part of his brain.
    ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Does that pay well?’
    He ignores me and begins to sing a wordless song, his voice low and guttural like the gurgling of one of the sewage pipes that empties into the dark water of the canal. The tone rises and falls and then he begins to chant:
    ‘
At the beginning of time two brothers, the Mantis and the Octopus, travelled the depths of space searching for a place to call their own. They came upon a planet, untouched and virgin and they each claimed it for themselves. In order to settle the dispute they had a contest. Whoever could give birth to the best creations would claim the world for their own
.’
    He strums another chord as if to punctuate his words; a jangling, rattling