Harboil: Part VI.

The thing is: the payphones are always ringing.

Below ground, the Princess Miriam is sat on a gondola, finding romance on the bad canal. Arnold, her gentlemen guide, is punting them gently, standing at the tip of the boat, knees bent, leaning against the pole as it digs in to the soft sewerbed. Miriam is holding her nose.

“Where are we going?” she asks, sounding a little fluey.

“We’re going to the hairdressers, my dear,” Arnold says.

The princess nods. Her hair is leaning and misshapen but still structurally sound. Her neck hurts.

“Are you a friend of Francois?”

“Oh I used to be. Francois and I are pen pals, really.”

“You should visit his villa.”

“I’d like to.”

“Oh it’s lovely, you should summer there one time.”

Under the warm hum of the tram generator, an old dentist’s chair is lit by a circle of hand-made candles, the wax set in industrial-size Baked Bean tins. The gondola emerges from the sewer tunnel into the cavern. With a careful push off the slimy wall, Arnold slows the boat and docks it against a make-shift jetty, built from fruit pallets strapped together with rope.

Arnold steps off and holds his hand out for the Princess. She takes his hand and steps on to the gently-bobbing jetty. Arnold picks her up at the waist and lifts her on to the concrete floor of the cavern. The netted trail of her dress has been dragging in the sewage and, in a fairly typical haul, it has trawled a large brooch, a couple of bottle tops and a suicide note.

“This way, my dear,” Arnold says, leading the Princess to the dentist’s chair.

“Lovely,” she says.

The candles are noisily spitting fat.

“Little fireworks,” she says, slipping in to the heavily reclined seat.

Arnold strokes her arm and calmly attaches the restraints. He clips the metal arcs over her calves and locks them in to place.

“These candles are made from human fat,” Arnold says.

“Lovely,” she says. “Sparklers.”

He takes a pair of large hedge clippers and snips off the trail of her gown. He rolls it up and stores it with the netting and chicken wire, tucked beside the generator.

Arnold claps his hands. The candle flames shimmy.

From the cavern’s abundant shadows, the other Ballastrians lope in to view: big gappy grins, hopping from foot to foot, applauding. Arnold takes a graceful low bow.

“Princess, meet my friends and colleagues. We’re going to be looking after you for the next few days.”

The Princess’s eyelids bat slowly. She believes in romance and, above all things, that one should expect a well-dressed man appearing from nowhere to deliver you from peril.

The Ballastrians are staring at her clean ankles, her collar bones. The Princess cannot quite understand what these midgets have to do with her honeymoon. The Princess cannot understand what rusty shackles have to do–

A scream. Not entirely sure of it itself at first, but growing in confidence and shrillness, rising like a kettle. Arnold with the gaffer tape and her mouth trapped in a perpetual soundless O. The Princess, ill-prepared for the experience of breathing exclusively through her nose, is struck by the pong, jolting around in her shackles like the Governor of Texas had just thrown the switch.

Marcia, a kind-hearted woman, addicted to recreational methadone, with a face like a plate of marshmallows, is cutting the princess’s hair with a pair of hedge trimmers. The princess is perfectly still, listening to the snips.

“That’s it, deary,” Marcia says, “if you wobble around you might lose an ear.”

Clipping away at the roots, the whole haircut collapses as one. Arnold standing underneath with a catcher’s mitt. He holds the diamond up. He offers it around the group but nobody wants to touch it. They’re not comfortable with its cleanliness, its perfection. The anxiety of holding a new-born child.

Marcia speaks for everyone.

“So. How do we get rid of it?”

- The Meeting -

The Ballastrians are sat on the floor cross-legged, like story-time at a primary school. Arnold Hutz is acting as chair. He paces back and forth, tossing and catching the diamond in his baseball mitt.

Behind him, the Princess writhing in her shackles, her regal Mohawk: blonde spikes in a crown.

Arnold speaks: “Well, friends, we have completed the first stage. I’m so proud of us. But there is more work to be done.

“At this moment, every criminal in Harboil is looking for us. We can expect jet skis in the sewers, tear gas canisters lobbed through open manholes. There’s not a gangster worth his nickname who isn’t willing to get chest deep in shit just for the chance to get their hands on what we’ve got our hands on. Time is a factor. So, the big question is: how do we turn this mineral deposit into used five dollar bills?”

“We need to find a buyer, Arn.”

“Right!” Arnold points toward the voice.

“Good idea Dana. So who do we know that can afford to buy a diamond this big?”

Arnold taps his foot and stares up in to the gloom.

The sound of thinking.

“Arnie, who’s the richest person in Harboil?”

“That would be Francois Gallas.”

“Yeah but we can’t exactly sell him back his own diamond, can we?”

A glint of recognition then, a familiar sentence:

“You know what, maybe that’s not such a crazy idea after all.”

“Arnie, you can’t be serious.”

“We know he wants it. We know he’s got the money.”

“I don’t know, Arn. He’d be pretty angry.”

“Not as angry as if we sell it to someone else.”

“Yeah, but we’d have to go overground.”

“Yeah Arnie. We’ll get found out as soon as we step foot in the daylight. They can smell us coming.”

Arnold looks crestfallen. His head drops.

“Yeah, that’s a problem,” he says. “We just don’t fit in up there.”

A long creaking silence. Well, not exactly silence: the sound of the princess’s hinges rattling, the generator purring.

“Hang on! Hang on! I’ve got it. Arnie, why don’t you take the diamond overground? You can go unnoticed!”

A chorus of approval.

“I don’t know, you guys.”

“You can do it Arn! We believe in you.”

“Well, I suppose it does make more sense for just one of us to go.”

“Yeah, you’ll be great. And we’ll take care of the Princess.”

“Are you sure you think this is a good idea?”

“Yeah!” they yell.

“Well alright then. Let’s do it!”

With that, Arnold tosses the diamond high up toward the cavern ceiling. It hangs for a moment, glowing like a moon in the half-light.

- Jason Lemon -

Earlier, Gill phoned to tell me that if I hear anything about any diamond or anything, I’m to tell him first. He says that half the cities gangsters are waist-deep in faeces trying to find this bastard.

The Princess has either been kidnapped or saved, nobody’s quite sure. They were expecting her to reappear, but she hasn’t. Some people are saying that she had a diamond on her head, whatever that means.

According to HBOL News, Francois Gallas has called off the wedding reception. They spoke to the Police Chief who said: We are doing all we can and, I promise the people of Harboil, we will find the Princess. Francois said: I am devastated. Obviously, the reception is cancelled. My heart goes out to Big Don.

I knew Moira was supposed to be going to the reception. So I wondered what she was going to do with her spare time. Gill was busy organising a team to scour the sewers.

Moira, dressed in a dank brown jacket, left their house unnoticed. I followed her out to the edge of town. She took a tram on to Averly. I trailed her on my moped. Finally, she sat at a deserted bus stop. After a minute, a blacked-out car pulled up and she got inside.

I followed the car to Gallas’s villa in West Averly.

Dumping my bike in the woods, I scaled the perimeter wall and crept through the gardens on hands and knees.

All the decorations were still up: trees spiralled by tasteful silver lights, gas flames lit the driveway, the statues holding clumps of balloons. And when I climbed up my chosen drainpipe, and got to my spot at the skylight, I saw that the huge feast was still going ahead.

The guests seem completely oblivious to the situation occurring in the city. Less than oblivious. They seem positively thrilled.

Sometimes I think I’m paranoid. Othertimes, I think I’m intuitive.