Mr. Bass sighed. ‘That was both unnecessary and ineffective, Ms. Murphy.’
Mr. Pike was livid. ‘You monster,’ he hissed.
Hugo held Jess’ bare arm down on the butcher’s block. Jess struggled to pull his arm free, but Hugo pinned his arm easily with one hand. He held Jess tight against his chest and clamped his other hand over Jess’ mouth and nose. Mr. Bass rose and took a syringe from his jacket’s breast pocket. ‘As we are civilised, we do not want to cause you unnecessary suffering, Mr. DiAngelo. This is a broad spectrum antibiotic, but to ensure there is no infection, I suggest that once our business is concluded that you seek a longer course of antibiotics from your general practitioner or at a local urgent care clinic.’
Mr. Bass donned a long floral apron. Mr. Pike then offered Mr. Bass a heavy cleaver from the duffle bag. The cleaver was a dull grey and curiously warped. The blade zigged and zagged over notches and chips, but there was a bright silver line along its edge. Jess screamed but the sound was entirely muffled by Hugo’s enormous hand. Jess’ veins protruded from his neck and his eyes were wild and bloodshot. Mr. Bass raised the cleaver and paused, ‘Remain where you are, Ms. Murphy. We are business men, fair men, and this is simply a deal all must honour. Either we receive our due compensation or we chop you both into little bits and dispose of you in various locations over the course of a week. Let me urge you not to overlook the pleasures of remaining whole.’
Smiling like a man about to cut his own birthday cake, Mr. Bass brought the cleaver down. There was a terrible sound like green wood snapping as the cleaver passed clean through the bones and tendons of Jess’ wrist. Jess’ blood began to pour over the butcher’s block. A strip of skin still connected Jess’ forearm to his hand and Mr. Bass cheerfully raised the cleaver once again to sever them. In his terror, Jess pulled away and the last shreds of skin connecting his arm to his hand stretched and snapped. Mr. Bass lowered the cleaver. Jess sagged against Mr. Hugo. Dark blood dripped from Hugo’s left hand, but Hugo seemed not to notice that Jess had bitten him. Mr. Pike took a soldering iron from the duffle bag. He attached an adapter and then plugged it into a socket beside the sink. Hugo kept his hand clamped over Jess’ mouth while Mr. Pike cauterized Jess’ arm. Jess lost consciousness. The smell of blood, burning skin, muscle and bone was overwhelming. Mr. Bass turned on the vent over the stove as Pike wrapped Jess’ stump with gauze and taped it. Then Hugo hitched Jess up with one arm and dropped him on Aisha’s couch.
‘Please attend Mr. DiAngelo while we attend to some final details,’ Mr. Bass said. Aisha sat beside Jess and checked him quickly. Mr. Pike had done a professional job. She turned to see what the final details were. Mr. Pike rolled up the sleeve of Mr. Bass’ seersucker suit revealing a perfectly smooth bluish grey limb ending where his hand should begin.
‘He had your hand.’ Aisha said.
‘Yes, precisely. Or more precisely, my prospective hand.’ Mr. Bass said cheerfully. He laid his right arm on the block, sticky with Jess’ blood. Mr. Bass was still smiling as Mr. Pike began to remove the skin at the distal end of his stump with a disposable scalpel. There was a thin trickle of almost colourless blood from his arm as Mr. Pike carefully slid a probe under the skin and pried a perfect circle of skin from Mr. Bass’ stump. He interrupted the procedure momentarily to throw the skin down Aisha’s garbage disposal. Mr. Pike then carefully stretched the frayed skin of Jess’ hand and laid it on top of Mr. Bass’s arm. Once Mr. Pike had it perfectly arranged, he stapled the ragged edges of Jess’ skin to Mr. Bass’ arm. Next, Mr. Pike took a roll of surgical tape from the bag and wrapped it around Mr. Bass’ new wrist several times. ‘The tape will fall off once the graft is completely healed, Mr. Bass. Do not exert the hand until then.’
Jess’ blood trickled down Mr. Bass’ arm and Mr. Pike wiped it down with his handkerchief.
‘All done,’ Mr. Bass said cheerfully. He removed his apron and handed it to Mr. Pike, then unrolled the sleeve of his jacket. Mr Pike carefully folded the plastic sheeting up, placed it in the duffle bag. Mr. Bass stood by the door waiting as Hugo put the butcher’s block back in place. ‘Now that our business is concluded, Ms. Murphy, we shall take our leave. We regret that Mr. DiAngelo involved you in this unpleasant business. You seem a conscientious and hard-working woman. I strongly urge against your contacting the authorities regarding any of our business.’ Aisha could not take her eyes off Jess’ hand and the thin trickle of blood that stained the cuff of Mr. Bass’ seersucker jacket.
Mr. Bass, Mr. Pike and Hugo left, closing the door. Aisha locked it behind them. She turned to find Jess awake, pale and shaking on her couch. ‘Jess, let’s go to the hospital.’
Jess shook his head. ‘They took my hand. They can reattach it, right? We gotta get my hand back. If you help me find it, I’ll pay you double what I owe you, Aisha.’
Aisha watched the blood red fish nibble the small, bluish hand. The flesh broke away from the bone.
Antichristine
James Bennett
From: The Girl at the End of the World, Volume 1
1.
Faith is the new girl. She shuffles into Mr Jaworski’s science class and stands at the front before all the desks and the sea of eyes. She stands under the wooden cross and the clock, next to the teacher’s desk. Already the other kids are judging her. Already they’re laughing. They don’t like her stripy stockings. They don’t like her black dress or her hair that looks attacked by crows. The stockings, dress and hair mean she is different and therefore weird. Weird isn’t good in the 8th Grade. Faith is the new girl and will never be like them.
‘This is Faith, the new girl,’ Mr Jaworski says. He goes to pat her shoulder, thinks better of it. ‘I trust you will all make her welcome. Faith, please say hello.’
Faith doesn’t say hello. Some girls sat up front snigger. One of them, a skinny blonde in a pink tee shirt and non-existent skirt, pops some bubble gum and says, ‘She’s the new girl? I thought she was here for dissection.’
Everybody laughs.
Mr Jaworski doesn’t laugh.
Faith doesn’t laugh.
Mr Jaworski says, ‘Christine Collins, the class comedian. One more peep out of you and it’s detention.”
‘Yes, sir. Sorry sir.’ The girl, Christine, doesn’t look sorry. She crosses her supermodel legs. A smile hangs under her nose job. A lot of money went into her teeth. They’re too white. Too perfect. Almost as perfect as the hate that Faith feels looking at her. Looking at her and imagining her head bursting into flames, her hair crisping, her eyes melting, her smile becoming a sealed line of dripping, liquefied skin.
Christine Collins implied she was a frog. A dead frog. Wars have started for less.
It’s OK. Faith doesn’t need the girl to like her. She doesn’t need any of them to like her. This is her fifth school in as many years and she knows the drill by now. She takes a breath. Gets it over with. Why waste time?
‘Baaaaa!’ she says in a loud voice. ‘Baaaaa!’
She stares at Christine Collins and the other sheep as she takes her lunchbox out of her bag, pops the lid and brings out the cockroach she’s been keeping in there. The fat, bristly monster she found behind the fridge at home. She stares at Christine as she shoves the insect into her mouth, crunches and chews it before the whole class, then grins. The bug’s legs stick out, wriggling, between her silver braces.
Faith is the new girl. She will never be like them.
2.
When you’re thirteen, the world is always ending.
Faith would have begged her dad not to drop her off at the gates in his old pick-up truck. The school is just another pointless building in a pointless town in a pointless state in pointless America. In a pointless world. Universe, etc. Her dad keeps moving, chasing jobs. Or running from something. Faith isn’t sure. She would have begged her dad not to drop her off at the gates if he wasn’t made of stone.
3.
‘We won’t have any of that in our school,’ Mrs Morgan says, a permed mountain sat behind her desk. Her dark dress and white hair make her look like a killer whale. ‘We won’t have any smoking, swearing, spitting, vandalism, hair pulling, skipping class, food fights,’ she takes a breath, scrunching Faith’s resume, her official report, between her chubby hands, ‘and we especially won’t have bugs. What on earth were you thinking?’
Faith didn’t say, ‘I was thinking of Christine’s head on fire.’
Faith hears herself say, ‘They laughed at me. Christine Collins -’
‘Is a straight A student and head cheerleader for the Bulls. You’d do well to get along with her.’
Faith doesn’t say, ‘I want to blow her brains out with my daddy’s shotgun. Watch the smoking mess slide down the wall at the back of the class.’
Faith says, ‘Yes, Mrs Morgan.’
‘We were all young once, Miss Borden. We were all new at some point. Try not to make a nuisance of yourself.’
Faith says, ‘Yes, Mrs Morgan.’
Faith doesn’t say, ‘Fat fucking bitch.’
4.
All told, it’s a cunt of a day.
5.
That night, she eats chicken soup with her dad in the old wooden house that looks sorry for itself on a street vomited straight out of the ‘Hick Street’ manual and watches some TV. She doesn’t tell him about her day and her dad doesn’t ask. He drinks beer and communicates in belches. Punctuates with farts. Men toss a ball around on the flickering screen. Faith consoles herself that a hundred years from now, all of them will be dead. She goes upstairs to do her homework, but only manages to doodle in the margins of her essay. Next to the question about Mr Darcy, she writes:
DIE CHRISTINE DIE
Those teeth. Too white. Too perfect. Too non-incinerated.
Then Faith feels guilty and pulls out the shoebox under her bed. In the shoebox are some bits of her mother’s jewellery. She saved them before her dad could sell them after the funeral. In the shoebox are some dead bugs. She forgot to feed them. A cigarette. A lighter. A hairpin, which she puts in her pocket for later. In the shoebox are three of her daddy’s razors. She wants to use them, but she knows he’ll see. Instead, she lightly caresses the edge of one blade and then licks the tip of her finger. Licks the thin line of blood. It tastes like Monday.
She says her prayers. Her curses.
Later, her daddy comes upstairs and tucks her in. He doesn’t always do this, only when he’s drunk. Faith would have told him to stop, that she’s too old for this now. Faith would have begged him if he wasn’t made of stone.
6.
Thursday and the world is still ending.
Armed with bag, Bible, pens and lunchbox, Faith sits in the back of the class and survives History, Geography, Maths, English and Religious Studies. No one talks to her. She talks to no one. Now and again, she looks up and watches Christine. Tall, blonde, beautiful Christine. Christine who exudes perfume and apparently oxygen for boys, who seem to surround her in a constant ring, hanging on her every sigh, her every hair flick and crossed leg. Faith imagines taking a chainsaw to those legs, the blood spraying from the severed arteries and splattering her face as the girl wriggles and screams in her daddy’s garage. Then she finishes her paper on the Book of John. The class breaks for lunch and Faith sits alone in the canteen. She eats stale sandwiches. Who knows what’s in them? Baloney? Dead rats? Someone flicks peas at the back of her head and Faith ignores it. Just when she thinks she’s survived Thursday, the apocalypse happens.
Gym class.
‘Holy shit,’ the girls say in the locker room, after tossing a pointless ball around for a pointless hour in the pointless sports hall. ‘Holy shit, you’re wearing boy’s underpants.’
The laughter sounds louder here, echoing off the lockers and the cold blue walls.
Faith doesn’t say, ‘My dad bought them from Walmart in the sale.’
Faith says, ‘Leave me alone, you plastic whores.’
The girls grab her crow-pecked hair and push her in the shower. It hurts. Their hands are cruel and the water is cold.
Faith doesn’t say, ‘My dad, he doesn’t care about these things.’ (She has her mother to thank for the braces.)
Faith just swears and struggles and screams.
When they back off – a teacher is coming – she stands in the cubicle and turns off the tap. She sees that Christine Collins hangs back, watching. Christine hasn’t touched her and her eyes look very bright. Faith imagines what her eyes would look like on the end of a hairpin, just poked out quickly at a prayer meet, dropped into the tithe bowl. Doomed to watch the rest of them dancing.
‘Fucking freak,’ the girls say. ‘Lesbian. Weirdo. Pig.’
Faith pisses herself. She does it right there and on purpose. Urine soaks the front of her Y-Fronts. Urine trickles down her left leg and swirls down the plughole, a yellow statement of defiance.
Christine and the girls have no words for this, but they point, mewl and pull faces.
7.
Thirteen is not a lucky number. Mr Rogers told them that this was because at the Last Supper, there were thirteen people sitting around the table, including Jesus, who got crucified, and Judas, who hung himself from a tree. Mr Rogers told the class the special word that means fear of the number thirteen: triskaidekaphobia.
Faith is thirteen. All of the above.
It’s relevant to her, because Faith thinks maybe, probably, her Last Supper isn’t that far away. It comforts her, a little, to know that the end of the world depends entirely on her.
The gym teacher, Miss Howard, doesn’t even look at her. She doesn’t even shout. Instead, she hisses. A snake.
‘Clean yourself up, you disgusting brat.’
Thus Thursday ended.
Amen.
8.
The weekend passes in a blink and for the next week Faith doesn’t exist. As far as the class and the school and the world etc. are concerned, Faith doesn’t exist. Not many people know how ghosts feel. Faith could tell them. She could tell them that ghosts are real and most of them are living. She sits in the arctic winds at the back of the class and survives, a shadow, a ninja, with her secret. Nobody asks her about it.
Faith is the new girl. And she’ll never be like them.
She watches Christine Collins through hooded eyes. Christine texting on her mobile phone under her desk during the monthly exam. Christine isn’t cheating; she’s too clever for that. Straight A clever. No shit. Christine is texting Warren Gray, who has asked her out to see the new Superman film on Friday after school. Faith knows this because how could she not? The boys tease and the girls giggle and it’s the subject on everyone’s lips. They twitter like birds and laugh like hyenas. The school ark. Christine sits and blushes and preens and texts on her mobile phone. Faith doesn’t have a mobile phone. She doesn’t have a date either. Boys smell kind of funny to her.
Faith imagines Christine trying to type with broken fingers, each one crushed, firmly and quickly, with the hammer from her daddy’s toolbox. Or maybe Faith would use the pliers and peel off her fingernails, one by one. Not the fake ones with the painted dolphins, but the real ones underneath. Peel them down to the skin. As Christine whispers behind her hand to the girl sat next to her, passing on some (no doubt amorous) message from Warren Gray, Faith sits and imagines that.
Her dad sometimes drops her off in the old pickup truck and when he remembers, he picks her up. He drives her back home to the old wooden house that looks sorry for itself. That week, he only comes and tucks her in once. Her daddy, the stone. It’s still the apocalypse, but on a minor scale.
9.
On Thursday, Faith sits up at the back of the gym where it’s dark and cool and no one can see her if they were looking. Would they see her anyway? She’s invisible by now. Her special talent. A superpower. She watches the Ho
ly Rollers. She watches Christine Collins bounce and jump and roll and spin, practising her cheerleading. Pompoms ruffle. Beiber blares from the boombox. He whines about love and babies and hey girls and things Faith either hasn’t heard or doesn’t give a fuck about. The other girls bounce and jump and roll and spin and pause for occasional high fives, but Faith is only looking at Christine. Only has eyes for Christine. Christine of the golden hair. Christine with the centrefold legs. Christine who could so easily fall and break her neck.
10.
It’s an obsession, right? Faith knows it’s an obsession.
It hasn’t happened before, not like this, and the obsession snowballs. She dreams that it’s Christine tucking her in and she rubs herself so hard between her legs that she layers bruises on bruises. Then the guilt comes again, a sly, suck up friend, and the razorblades sing in the shoebox under her bed, singing, singing, singing.
Christine lives in her head now. A worm chewing her heart. Faith has got to do something about it.
Her daddy doesn’t wake up in time for school and it’s suddenly Friday. The amount of empty beer cans on the living room floor tell her that daddy isn’t going to work today and bruised or not, aching or not, she has to make her own way to Hell. When Faith looks at the kitchen clock and rushes her grits and hurries out into the rainy street, she’s already late for school. The weather undoes the attack of the crows and turns her dress into a trash bag. Black, wet strands are hanging in her face and she almost doesn’t see the cat, lying there at the side of the road. The thing mewls like the girls in the locker room. There are tyre tracks in its fur. Faith does the noble thing. The right thing. The little crack sounds like a change in the nature of things. In the universe, etc. It sounds like a decision. A choice.
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