Leon Craig - Parallel Hells

Leon Craig is a writer from North London. She studied English at UCL, Medieval Literature at Oxford and Creative Writing at Birkbeck. Her writing has been published by the White Review, the TLS, Another Gaze and the London Magazine, among others. Leon is a member of the LGBTQ+ writing collective The Future is Back.

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

Copyright Leon Craig 2022

The right of Leon Craig to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer) from Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, translated from the French by Paul Schmidt. Copyright Paul Schmidt 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Cover illustration: Kebba Sanneh

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 9781529371437
Hardback ISBN 9781529371420
Trade Paperback ISBN 9781529371741

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

For Alice

There are enough of us damned down here! Ive done time enough already in their ranks! I know them all. We always recognise each other ...

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
(translated by Paul Schmidt)

The butterflies were beginning to form a paste. They blew across miles of motorway in white and yellow garlands, before joining the carpet of dying eyes staring back at us from the windscreen. Every so often, my father would flick the wiper, and our view of the road would become clear again, frilled by single wings whipping back and forth in the air.

Wed been trapped in our hotel room under thick fever dreams, but today we could finally make our escape. Little pyramids winked and receded in the darkness behind my eyes. The butterflies were not helping. When I tried to look beyond them, all I could see was endless grey underpass and overpass, the road twisting round itself.

Im thirsty. My throat still ached and tickled from the sickness.

Theres some water rolling around in the back.

I stretched out an arm and caught it. Ugh, its warm. I want a cold drink, like a Coke.

I dont know where the next service station is, my father said, looking at me out the corner of his eye.

On either side of us was nothing but the dark green jungle, roughly hacked back but ten feet high at its edge. Every so often, there would be a car, or several cars, and a police van; drivers and passengers on the sides of the road opening their boots or handing over papers. We were going too fast to tell if they were being searched or just shaken down.

Can I have some of that water if you dont want it? he asked.

Too late, sorry. I scrunched up the bottle and chucked it into the footwell.

I could see the white bones of my fathers knuckles pressing up through the tanned skin of his hands. They were bald from wrist to finger, as he habitually rubbed his crossed thumbs over one anothers backs. We had gone to Mexico in order for him to have an adventure, but that hadnt gone to plan. I was up to little enough at home it was usually possible to winkle money out of someone for a couple of months fun, but of late Id had less and less luck. I wound down the window, reaching in my bag for my cigarettes.

You cant smoke in here. His stubble looked grey in the glaring light.

The wind will whip it right out, I said.

This is a rental car, therell be a surcharge.

How much is it? I replied. My father could afford almost anything when he wanted to, but was impossibly stingy about trifling sums.

Im not paying for you to smoke.

But how much is it?

He still blamed me for insisting we eat the fried crickets. They came with a dark, chocolatey sauce and tasted like prawns with the shells left on. I didnt see the point in travelling halfway across the world to eat the same food I could find in a chain restaurant. The sickness had come upon us suddenly. We had been in the National Museum, surrounded by obsidian knives and clay statues with hungry smiles. I had looked at the quetzal headdress given to Corts, gleaming in the low light, stretching wider than the wingspan of the bird itself, and had felt my stomach contract into my lungs.

I wound the window down a little further, lifting the lighter to my lips.

It stinks up the car ... Were nearly there.

The road was straight from now until the coast and we did not turn off for any of the signs to ruined cities my father had so eagerly circled in his guidebook. We arrived in the blue dusk, led up to the hotel by soft lighted spheres placed in the sand. The bar was closing and there was no food except stale nachos, but they made me a margarita to take to bed. The rooms were all wooden cabanas on stilts, each one flanked with palm trees and ringed with balconies that overlooked both the hotel grounds and the nearby ocean. My father tottered up the ladder and went straight inside to collapse, but I stayed out on the balcony drinking and swatting myself. I hadnt realised wed be right beside the sea, I heard it murmuring and lapping like a great blind mouth. The lime juice was so sharp it made me wince with pleasure. Too tired to read, but wakeful from doing nothing, I watched a little light getting larger and larger, until another one appeared alongside it and they became headlights, before turning again into a single still beam.

A tall man got out from the far side of the car and stood in the full glare as it crept forward. His features were erased by the light. The window wound down just enough for a womans hand with long and sharply pointed nails to emerge and beckon him over, then it shot out and encircled his wrist to pull him close to the car again, as if to ensure he was listening to her instructions. The man went round to open the boot, slowly pulling out a bulky-looking oblong tightly wrapped in dark cloth, as wide and long as he was himself. He shooed away the porter who had rushed forward to take the other end. Was he really going to climb the ladder carrying that? My trance broke when the car door began to open and the woman stepped out, her smooth white face shining with reflected light, heart-shaped and fine-boned. She paused and turned to stare right at me, pale eyes locking into mine with an expression of amusement and displeasure. I scurried back into the cabana, feeling it enough to be out of her line of vision, like an ostrich or a frightened child. I shut myself up in the silky fortress of the mosquito netting and let my sleep transform the whirring of the fan into giant winged insects just beyond the curtain.

The next morning on the veranda, my father could not cope with the eggs. Hed put a forkful into his mouth, expecting the blandness of home, and had to return to bed, which put paid to any of my plans for the day. As soon as hed re-ascended, I had them bring me a fresh packet of cigarettes and the magazine rack. The sea dazzled and birds that looked a little like crows were hopping intently among the dunes. A white man with dreadlocks in his beard was playing a little wooden harp while his two tanned babies danced naked before him in the sand. The blue-liveried hotel staff stood at the perimeter, observing him. In the daylight, the tables and chairs on the veranda had a sandblasted look and much of the wooden decking was in need of replacement. It sat between the main lodge and the cabanas like a stage on which the scant events of the day were to be played out for an unseen audience. Id risen late, like I always did, and the only other visitor stood on the corner of the deck, his back to me. The waiters were trying not to pounce on our plates before we had finished, and talked among themselves in Spanish to fill the time.