Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  which creates small traps and impasses

  Her left arm was behind her back and her left cheek was squashed softly against the pillow. It was like a Kodachrome of a kid sleeping or a cherub but it also wasn’t. First, I needed to mop up the blood on the pillow beside her, because it seemed the tender thing to do, and I always try to do the tender things. I don’t think at this point I had finally decided on my total project. I took a bath towel and laid it on the blood. The white terry cloth became maroon. And I was thinking that maybe this was the first time I had ever seen another person’s blood, I mean blood that wasn’t a minor wound or a girl’s period but proper flowing gore. I didn’t want to touch it but I knew I had to. I had this fear of someone else’s blood, like I had the vaporous fear of coming inside a girl without a condom. I don’t think that’s unusual. I took the towel up and tried to rinse it in the bathtub – which meant that I was leaving a tiny trail of blood on the bathroom floor which was tiny, sure, but also gruesome and repulsive. Then, kneeling on the side of the bed, I gathered Romy in my arms, from behind, and gently lifted her chest and it felt wrong, touching her breasts like this, and the paradox was momentarily intriguing but then a cry of horror overtook me. I couldn’t help it. It came out of my mouth much quicker than I knew. I was trembling. I held her there, as if I were performing some slow-motion Heimlich manoeuvre: first gazing at the pillow, which was a mess of polyester and vomit and possibly more blood, a total horror show, then gazing sideways at what once was Romy’s entire expression, but all the expression was gone. I held her there. I bent to her face and her mouth smelled like vomit but also it was warm and that, I had to admit, was a very good sign. If I concentrated very hard I thought that also she was still breathing and I wanted to concentrate on this more, but I couldn’t. Because, to return to you, Mr Chat Show Host, if you want to know what Fate feels like, it feels like this. You are holding a body in your arms, and then you hear a brisk knock, followed by a key card being slotted into place. That’s how it feels. I would possibly argue that maybe it would be nice if just one time Fate used a more original ringtone. So I dropped Romy, gently, to the pillow again, and ran to the door. The maid was facing me, with her headphones in, and carrying a mop and brushes. I didn’t have time to check if I was bloodstained. I probably was. Maybe people don’t care any more. Maybe in the modern world blood is no surprise. But me I was always old-fashioned.

  — Housekeeping, she said.

  — But I’m still here, I said.

  — This room is not occupied.

  — But I’m here, I said.

  I was trying to sound very hopeful, like I always do. She looked in and I suppose she maybe saw a pair of naked feminine legs. She looked at me. It was just about plausible that I was a mini donjuanish type, or at least I’d like to think so.

  — They said you gone, she said.

  — We’re leaving, I said.

  — Ten minutes. Ten minutes, mister.

  It was probably then that my plan became obvious to me, which I still believe was a plan of carefulness. I was thinking that there were maybe two or three things that were true. That I needed to get Romy some medical help, that I needed to do this unbeknown to the hotel authorities, so that possibly it would also remain unbeknown to Candy and my parents, and that speed was very necessary. It was a difficult trio but maybe not impossible. I wanted Romy to be OK and I wanted to return to my ordinary life, or at least the possibility that such an ordinary life existed.

  in the manner of many catastrophic myths

  I suppose other people have their ways of thinking this through. I know that in such a situation my father would calmly acknowledge the presence of the Devil, for although he is not so devout he has his symbolic moments. For him there is a prosecuting spirit everywhere. I think this is in fact one of my earliest memories, standing in my water wings, waiting for my father to return from shul so that he could take me to the swimming pool. My father very softly and very secretly believes in devils, and while I have never managed to be quite persuaded, as I say this it does occur to me that I often fear many monsters. I call my devils monsters and in the end perhaps there’s no big difference. I remember the ancient mutant monsters in the national museum and they make me very fearful still, those pictures of the green god and his dog-god of judgement, the devouring god with his crocodile head and the single feather of truth. Although at least the dog-god stays down below, in his alabaster hall. Whereas this scene in a hotel room felt more like what happens when the gods decide to lope up their ladder to earth, and when they do, they kill you. Have you ever met a god? It’s like this. They just can’t help themselves. They’re very sorry, the gods, but they are going to fuck you up. Like the child-eating goddess who would very much like to but just cannot, really cannot stop herself from guzzling your little daughter. Or like the gods who once demanded that three temples should be built for them in one night. But dawn, so goes the record, came too soon – and therefore these aforementioned deities appeared and smashed the scaffolding up, like gang-rape footballers.

  but nevertheless he does his best

  So I began the crazy project of delivering Romy’s body privately to the care of trained professionals. It was kind of the time desperation of being on a Game Boy with the battery run down to zero when you’re poised to triumphantly enter the Hi-Score table. But obviously also worse. It was like time was gone, but also stretched. As gently as I could I dragged Romy, under the armpits, so that her legs flopped onto the floor beside the bed, then lowered her torso to the ground. It wasn’t totally easy but still it was easier than dressing her in her dress again. That was like dressing a difficult toddler, like maybe a toddler who’s overtired and isn’t wanting to leave the dance class. Her arms were difficult and her legs were suddenly longer than seemed possible. Still, I dressed her in a way. But before we could leave I realised that first I also needed to make the room look neat. So I slipped off the bloodied pillowcase, and also the sheet with its vomit and saliva. I think if I could have spoken my voice would have been much lower, a proper bass, like when they put voices in slow motion in the horror flicks, or when the batteries ran down, in the tape recorders from my childhood. I didn’t know what to do with this sheet and pillowcase and the previously mentioned sodden towel. I had a shopping bag but it, I now discovered, was punctured with two holes, and I also had my backpack but if I could avoid it my backpack would not get bloodied and smeared because then I would have to abandon it, which did not worry me for the backpack but for its possible future existence as evidence against me in case Romy did suddenly die. I looked at the bin in the bedroom. The bin in the bedroom was a bucket of stainless steel. But in the bathroom the pedal bin contained an unused plastic liner, neatly folded. With my hand inside, I made it unfurl, like those bags for picking up dog shit. Then gently – maintaining the bag unfurled – I squashed the pillowcase and sheet inside it, and then the bloodied towel, but the bag was now gaping open and the blood was very much visible. So I took the shoelaces from my sneakers. In my worry and terror I couldn’t tug the laces out: the laces stuck, the laces were dirty, and so I scrabbled at the interlacing and was going to cry. Finally two laces hung from my hands. My feet sort of wallowed slackly in my soft shoes. I strangled the bag with my laces, then gently placed it on the floor. And I know that in some way the theft of a sheet and pillowcase and towel was definitely a crime, and a crime that no doubt would be discovered, but it also seemed quite miniature, the kind of crime that just leads to something extra on your credit card – and this was definitely a better crime than the discovery of blood and then the consequential thinking on the part of the authorities. But with the sheet removed I now also noticed that not only the pillow but the mattress had this formless stain, a sort of horrible discoloration. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. I can’t compare it. It’s like trying to compare kapok, or tundra. That’s how simply a kind of formlessness can infiltrate a life. And in these situations I think my mother would always say that yo
u should just do the best you can do because that’s all that anyone can expect, and so I decided that I would try, which meant that I would turn the mattress upside down. But a mattress is bulky. And I am only small. I do mean this. I am no Gorilla Monsoon, or Brutus Beefcake. Whenever I see a personal trainer, which is not often, they tend to regard me with tender awe, the way ordinary people regard ill-fated dwarves, for in the end everyone must consider their place in the endless chain of being. When moving a mattress, therefore, I sweated and heaved. I manipulated the dense sprung mattress so that it moved through a nondescript circle. I curled it up over itself where the mattress stalled, for a moment, on the crest of its sodden wave. Then it collapsed from under itself and flopped to horizontal. I dressed it again in the duvet. Which meant that the problem remaining in the four minutes I had left before the housekeeper returned was to try to manoeuvre Romy’s body out of the door and into my car in a way that looked as normal as I could manage. First I went to the basin in the bathroom and tried to scrub my fingernails, but it seemed to have no effect. I still needed the toilet very much but this was no longer an option. Nothing in this room could ever help me again.

  & disappears from the bloodied scene

  I wonder if because this is the era of mass calculations is maybe why I managed the situation. There are so many calorie counts and fitness reps and email checks in the average day that in fact it’s much less strange, this manoeuvring of bodies, than you might think. It’s just a different way of thinking tasks through in detail. I dragged Romy to the threshold. I tried to do this gently but in the end of course I didn’t really. Then I was having to make sure that I could hold her up to about the level of my shoulders and I was regretting suddenly the many hours of news aggregators and YouTube videos. The entire history of my wasted time seemed sad to me, like it turned out to be a menace where no menace seemed to be visible, and I berated myself that, vigilant as I always was for signs of menace, I had not noticed that the true menace was right there, when I had been doing nothing more than just existing. It was daylight and this isn’t an easy condition for introducing a comatose body upright into a car. I was also thinking that in my usual attraction to the taller woman I had possibly overreached myself. But still, the maid was gone somewhere, to call her son or just stand and look at the cars on the motorway while rolling a brief cigarette. No one else was there. For one moment, Fate was off buying itself a burger or apricot juice. I was trying to open the passenger door of my car, and I could see the entire sequence of future events unfold and then it was like those moments in the stories of the saints when the sage who has lived all his life in the desert or maybe forest receives a lunatic bath of light, a deep revelation. I would like to call this vision love, or something like it. It was just as if very sleepily I could feel my wife breathe beside me and again I thought I was going to cry but I gradually didn’t. There were a few dead trees around, possibly palms, and they were making dry clickings; the palmettos were a sequence of old clocks. A brand of butterfly I thought was long extinct seemed to shudder past on a sweltering breeze. I pushed Romy inside, with my hand over her head, very gentle, like a halo. Then a shoelace loosened on the bag that I was holding and the towel became visible, a slack red wet dense smear. I thought that the whole thing was going to fall open and it made me panic but in the most fragile way it paused. I sort of slung the passenger belt over Romy and fixed it and shut the door. And I was walking round the car and was just sort of paused when I started to shake. I couldn’t easily match my hands to what I wanted them to be doing. I suppose, I told myself, this happens. This shit happens. Then I realised that Quincy was regarding me from a cigarette break. Because there’s no reason why a life should not come complete with a laugh track, none at all. Although I say cigarette break but of course I have no idea. She was just standing there, at the restaurant door, and she was starting up this middle-distance conversation.

  — Want a cigarette? she said.

  — Sorry? I said.

  — Want a cigarette?

  — I don’t know.

  — You don’t know?

  — I mean no.

  We paused on this obviously not satisfactory conversation. I was hoping it would mean she’d stop but she didn’t.

  — What’s your name? she said.

  — My name?

  It’s sometimes useful to look like me, or at least the way I look to certain people, which is younger than I am – I have this face that’s wide-eyed and also innocent, and this was one of those occasions when it had its useful aspect. So I just stared at her. I let the silence enlarge itself until it began to freak her out.

  — Well. No harm done, said Quincy.

  And she wandered away in this weird dazed perplexity while I was left in a state of envy or melancholy for her condition as a blissful and morally unstained employee, even if this state of mine was also still totally panic. By which I mean: was it right for me to be so punished? Events will become much worse but still, I think it’s right to posit this question now. All I’d done was wake up – for the very first time in my life – beside a woman who was not my wife. Is this so untoward? I really didn’t think the grand things are real – like murders and death and destruction – it never occurred to me that such things could really happen in a life, and now that something like this was happening it was making me amazed and also confused. Yes, I think it was about then that the first inkling began to occur to me – like the way you see a cat drift through some amateur porn footage and just sit there, it occurred to me as backgroundly as that – that I might be doomed. It was like the moment you look up in the air at some distant passing plane and just think for a sad moment that its engines might possibly be failing. I really did feel that this was unfair. I dislike harm in all its forms. I became a vegetarian because I had a vision of a bleeding cow, stripped of all its skin, and bleeding, and bleeding from the eyes. My favourite meal I ever had was this vegetarian goose dish which I appreciated above all for its noble ingenuity. I am trying to teach myself the banjo. Reading want ads makes me sad. I have no meanness in me. Whereas just make sure, Fate was telling itself, as it contemplated the picture, like a connoisseur, that no level spot of ground isn’t trampled over with blood. I don’t think this is an exaggeration. It fits the facts as I see them. I would have preferred it if Fate had concentrated more on the future of – I don’t know – Aldebaran but it seemed that no, it preferred me. And in response I would like to say that this was in no way fair. Or I mean, no, this is what I was thinking. Elsewhere they are in their black ship somewhere, your enemies, the pirates are floating out there in the port, and drinking champagne. They are in the dark tanker. That is everyone else. But you are here and you are on your own. And you are no longer into the poetry of the Buddhist sages, or movies filmed on handheld cameras or whatever. The whole culture is not the point. It is no longer yours – the culture. Because now, against your will, you have undergone a metamorphosis. I was feeling suddenly empty, like I was the Windsor Plantation that with just one careless cigarette gets suddenly converted and becomes the Windsor Ruins. I was pulling out of the car park in a car whose steering, I was now thinking, was shonky, and needed to be seen to, before something went haywire on the road and then I died, but if this was a problem it was not as much of a problem as the possession of an unconscious girl with whom you may be illicitly in love. And I was saying to myself: Kid, you are currently the least talented gangster in the world. Or, in other words, you were always way-out innocent. Your mother used to say it was your sweetest characteristic. And now look at you.