So I turned the key, released the handbrake, and immediately lurched into the bumper of the car in front of us, setting off its alarm. Dawn shrieked and slapped me. I stamped the car to a stop, shaking, my confidence gone.
‘Let me get in my seat first you fucking psychopath!’ She slammed my door shut and sprinted to the passenger side. ‘The fuck is wrong with you? Get in reverse! Quick! Drive!’
I obeyed, trying to adapt to the vehicle’s rhythms, my mind narrowed, and backed out into the street – and then pushed the stick into ‘D’ and accelerated forward. Ashamed that I’d failed to maintain my performance, my cheeks flushed – and a taste like over-sweet strawberry jam came over my gums. I hadn’t been the master illusionist, I’d been clumsy. I was ashamed of feeling ashamed – of still having a pride that could be pricked. I tried to cough the taste away.
She reached behind my seat for her bag and retrieved a bottle of sparkling wine. The alarm of the parked car faded behind us as I familiarised myself with the controls, speeding up a little to turn the corner.
‘Don’t speed round a corner sweetheart, you got to go slow for a corner.’
‘Shit yeah,’ I said, flushing less as I regained command of my indifference.
I wondered whether she was humiliating me on purpose – in the same way she’d had me whipped on purpose – as part of some wider ploy to empower herself in a coming negotiation.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You got to go in the deep end. We’re big thinkers now, sweetheart. Take a sip of this –’ she lifted the bottle to my lips and I obediently sipped its lukewarm wine. ‘We’re going Wandsworth – go down there.’ She waved vaguely to our left. ‘Get over the river.’
‘Why?’ I moved into the lane she’d indicated.
‘Not telling you.’
‘So is this car stolen?’
Her face deflated into a sneer. ‘Don’t be such a fucking fun sponge.’ She punched me on the arm. ‘You think I know how to steal a fucking car? No. This car was an act of love. I’m in love now and I’ve got a man that’s in love with me.’
‘Who – that new guy? Is he rich?’
She laughed and drank again, shaking her head. ‘You know who he is, bitch – Kimber’s the man of my dreams, the love of my life! – I met him down the Rockway the same night you ran off sulking – cos you was jealous of him, weren’t you sweetheart? Ah my sweet sulking little gremlin, you got jealous, didn’t you?’
She lifted up her hand and waved it in front of my face until I noticed the silver band around her ring finger.
‘Is that an engagement ring?’
She cackled. ‘No, not telling you. My story needs to build. Talk to me about something else first. How you going to spend your money?’
‘I dunno… I need to buy a better edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I don’t want any editing. She had her own type of dash, and —’
‘You’re really talking to me about dashes? No. Sweetheart, we’re in a brand new car, we got champagne, we’re in the Royal Fucking Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Sweetheart, no. You got to think bigger now.’ She turned the radio on again and baroque orchestral music began shaking the metal beneath our feet. ‘You’re going to buy something stupid what won’t last. You’re going to buy expensive olives and expensive wine – cos we’ve got a new place to live! We’re out of the hostel forever – it’s done, we can’t go back – all our worldly possessions are in the boot of this car, and we’re moving in today.’
‘What?’ I braked in surprise. Car horns honked behind us. ‘Shit, what?’ I released the brake. ‘How?’
‘I know! Ah, but you’ve made me feel bad now – don’t feel bad about the dashes, sweetheart – I should be more supporting, sorry, sorry. Course you can buy your poems, tell me about them, I’m listening.’
‘What? Stop changing the subject.’
She laughed, tapping the side of the bottle in applause at her own performance. ‘This is how you build tension! But really babe, tell me why Emily should get your money. What’s her best line?’
‘I like “soundless as dots on a disk of snow”,’ I said, choosing to play along. ‘It’s about civilisation collapsing. She has a perfect verse about snow as well:
“This is the Hour of Lead —”’
‘Ok shut the fuck up, you win. No more poems, no dashes, I’ll tell you everything.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t last.’
‘Alright, have a drink first,’ she said, lifting the bottle up to my mouth. ‘But keep your eyes on the road. Oi! Breathe through your fucking nose you amateur. How many shit blowjobs you given with that technique? What the fuck? Breathe through your nose – there you go – I’m not taking this away till you drink all of it –’ I tried to lean my head back, groaning in protest. ‘No, drink it all,’ she laughed, and kept it there until I choked.
The alcohol could provide a little relief, perhaps – for the welts across my back – but these competed with the deeper pain a decade old – of my myalgia – which no alcohol could help. That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors – it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me – and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness.
I coughed up Dawn’s wine until the taste wove into the sound and scent of sycamore trees brushing each other’s branches – and she settled back into her chair, preparing her story.
In her silence, I wondered whether I belonged to an invisible epidemic – the greatest epidemic of the twenty-first century, perhaps – since my disease afflicted tens of millions of people, but most of them hadn’t even heard of it – a multi-system sickness of pain and exhaustion and immune dysfunction, a metabolic crisis – that left no signs on the body, yet depleted its victims more severely than late-stage cancer, and lasted for decades – and yet made no appearances in films or books, received almost no funding or research, and had no known cause and no known cure, and no fixed name – a sickness that afflicted colder countries more, and northern Europe and America the most, like it was somehow the repressed remorse of imperialism, or the rest of the world’s revenge…
I moved the car into a lane towards Wandsworth Bridge.
‘So,’ she said. ‘I get home last Tuesday – you’re still gone, so I’m still heartbroken – and the bitch with the ADHD kid has stole all our pasta so there’s nothing to eat except fucking instant coffee and I’m about to have a full-on breakdown – and then Sandra comes in and she says I’ve got some post, and its an envelope just saying ‘For Dawn’ on it – with a key inside. It’s a car key. And Sandra’s being so fucking nosey but she’s saying she can give me some rice so I’m humouring her and I’m chatting to her about Kimber and about how I met him down the Rockway a week earlier, and I’m saying you’re sulking cos I’ve met a new man – and how he’s very attentive to me – and how I fell asleep at his flat and that’s what made you jealous, weren’t it? But what I didn’t tell you was that his flat is fucking fancy so I knew he’s got money – and I didn’t even fuck him, and the next day I see him again after you’re gone and then the next day again and then I’m seeing him every day like we’re teenagers. I was saying to her, I was saying it was overwhelming, but it was something that he needed and that I needed, and it felt like very child-like, it was just nice, you know? Until there’s a night when he has to go to work, so I come back and you’re still gone, and then here’s this car key in our kitchen, and I’m thinking this can’t be him, but who else’s it going to be? So I just go into the street and Sandra’s behind me and I press the car-key button and this fucking white beauty flashes at us across the road. And it’s got petrol! And there’s this phone inside with a text from him saying ‘happy new year’, even though it’s autumn. Like, what the fuck?’
‘He sounds like a serial killer,’ I said. ‘What does he expect in return?’
‘Don’t you get bored being this cynical? It’s a gift. It’s love. He knows we’re stuck in a hostel – I told him I
got a son, and I gave you a fucking five-star review sweetheart, even though you’re a little shit – and he speaks fancier than you and he’s attracted to me, so fuck you. Life is about to happen to us!’
‘Why do you keep saying that? You sound like a televangelist.’
Sunlight flashed from the Thames as we crossed it. Ahead of us rose the advert sculpture of Wandsworth Bridge roundabout – a model atom with electron paths of white steel and four billboards for a nucleus – a microcosm of all London now, perhaps – the nucleus sold for the sign.
‘So fucking what?’ she said. ‘It’s my motto now. And it’s true. You’re torturing me with this negativity! It’s not civilised!’
I imagined swerving into an oncoming car so that it crashed into Dawn’s door. Our soundtrack climaxed in a fanfare. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
‘Everyone knows civilisation comes from torture,’ I said, with the sun still in my eyes. ‘Millions of bodies maimed and broken. Cruelty is the agent of progress. Perhaps it didn’t need to be, but it was. Think of all the different kinds of labour, in war, in slavery, in revolution – in industry and agriculture – over the last three hundred years, or the last three thousand years, it doesn’t matter – from the mines of the bronze age to the skyscrapers now – temples, railways, harvests, factories – they were all worked on by bodies under torture, minds reduced to screams… Just so a few men, in comfort, could speak about iambic pentameter and the speed of light.’
‘Where’d that come from?’ she laughed, swigging from the bottle.
The traffic lights ahead went red. Thoughtlessly, I pressed on the accelerator. The sound of a flag flapped around my ears, as the wind sped up – and my muscles turned to gold – and then a trumpet blast, a punch – and the car was shunted sideways.
I snapped into my seatbelt, as metal hands clapped once beside me. There was a wail. But I drove on – into the wind, uphill, as the city split open and a sea spilled out of me – and in the mirror, the car that had hit us continued behind us, a little blackened – and the trumpets changed.
The sky was the hull of a ship – a whaler with sails of living lions – and as the lions roared, gems fell from their mouths, mingling with flowers – carnations and carbuncles – in a wave of red that washed over the car.
Dawn, dazed, lifted the bottle to her lips, and drank – though most of the wine had spilled out over her. Then she turned to me, slowly, in wonder – with a mask of blood on the far half of her head. I wanted to scream out of the window, ‘Nobody’s strong enough to be loved by me!’ But I laughed instead.
For a second, London seemed an unknown city – and I braked with my eyes closed, offering myself to the sun.
Dawn drank again from the bottle, still stiff with shock. The blood dribbled like sweat from her hairline, where it had hit the edge of the door – and I looked at it like it was mine, more than my own blood was mine – or rather, I looked at her wound like it was mine in the same way that the wounds on my back were hers.
‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.
‘We’re going to our new house,’ I said.
‘Oi, how d’you guess that?’ she asked, disorientated, dabbing at her cut in disbelief.
‘You just told me,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah, ok yeah – he’s got us somewhere to live, Kimber’s got us… it’s not a council flat, but we knew that dream weren’t coming true, sweetheart, this is as good as it’s going to get, it’s…’ She was speaking too quickly to keep up with herself. ‘It’s fucking good – we just need a… a five hundred pound deposit – and that’s insanely small, you got to admit, he’s in love with me – and then the contract’s legit, then, then, then that shows the contract’s legit.’
‘So we’re putting our entire lives in the hands of some guy you met a week ago?’
‘You want to be in a fucking homeless hostel forever?’ she shouted, at last reacting to the crash with anger. ‘It’s been two years, Leander! I can’t live like that anymore – and you weren’t even living.’
‘I could have found a —’
‘We’ve been fucking trying! You found us fuck all. Being pretty made you lazy, I told you – you’re stuck, and I don’t want you fucking stuck. I love you, alright?’ She was anxiously smearing her own blood across her face. ‘I done us a good thing, sweetheart, admit it – I got us out that fucking misery nest. Don’t try and get outraged at me, it’s too late, I signed the contract. It’s done.’
‘Ok, ok,’ I smiled, and drove on. ‘Ok. I can pay the deposit. I’ll give you the five hundred.’
‘Baby!’ Nearly weeping, she kissed me on the cheek, forcing an arm behind my back to wrap me in a hug, pressing her bleeding head into mine – aroused by the intensity of our shared shock. ‘Fuck,’ she said, as she shrank back in her seat. ‘Fuck… That cunt drove into us.’
‘He wasn’t looking,’ I said, knowing she hadn’t seen the traffic lights change.
She peered out of the open window, dripping blood onto her door. ‘He dented us!’ she shrieked. ‘That fucking cunt. My new fucking car. Fuck! Your fucking squirrel – I told you that was an omen. I fucking told you. Cunt!’ She fell back. ‘But still it didn’t get us good enough, did it? We’re still alive. Didn’t fucking work.’ She cackled. ‘Actually can I have six hundred pound please? For dinner as well.’
She reached distractedly into my tracksuit pocket and took out the stack. ‘All fifties! I love it.’ She counted. ‘This is only five hundred though? You said eight hundred.’
‘Wait.’ I took my right hand off the wheel and dug into my pocket, careful to take out only six more notes. ‘You can’t have all of it.’
‘Ok babe,’ she said, counting it and returning me four fifties, ‘I’m going to cook us a banquet, alright? You made money, I got us a place to live. We’re back on track! But I knew you’d try and sulk so I had to arrange it while you was away, didn’t I? And I could only tell you while you was busy driving for me, otherwise you might of got too angry and run off. I can be cunning when I need to be.’ She spoke with a nervous rapidity, like she was trying to deny the severity of her own injury – or perhaps because she was too drunk to understand it. ‘I know how to cook, you know – and turn down that road – yeah that one,’ she pointed. ‘And head to the right.’
‘Wait, where are you driving me to?’ I asked, as if I’d only just realised what she was doing.
‘You’re the one driving,’ she said innocently. ‘And not very fucking well.’
‘Didn’t Francis move around here?’ I stopped the car.
We’d reached the tip of Wandsworth Common. Beside us, the outlines of a football pitch had been painted white onto the grass – and this paint had been churned up by schoolchildren in the mud – into a Morse code that had stiffened overnight.
‘You fucking know he did,’ she slurred. ‘And you know you’re being an evil little shit to him. He came badgering me banging down our door when I was packing us up – so I had to tell him where we was going, so he’s going to find you anyway. And he’s got my number now and he’s been ringing me every fifteen fucking minutes even though he hates me – and I know he’s ringing you and you’re ignoring him. So fucking sort it out. I know you think you can hide your feelings from me but you can’t. So you’re going round his house and that’s that.’
She was wrong, of course, but I wanted her to believe that she knew what desires I was repressing. I had assumed that by ignoring Francis’ calls, he would contact her, since he knew I lived with her – and that she, in her sympathy for us both, would force me to see him. What I hadn’t predicted was that she would make me drive to his home, while gloating about her powers of manipulation. I turned to the window to hide my smile, sighed in cartoon exasperation, and drove on. Across my chest, a new welt grew from where the seatbelt had cut into me in the crash – a counterpoint to the lashes along my back.
‘Good boy!’ she said. ‘I’ll text you our new address. And get there for dinner, ok, cos
I’m going all out. I’m going to go Kimber’s first and I’ll get us some of his painkilling, which is better than —’
‘What, is Gibbon a heroin dealer?’
‘Fuck off, his name is Kimber – who are you, trying to mock someone’s name?’
‘How dare you? There’s a long history of heroes named Leander.’
‘Shut up, you’re not a hero. Kimber’s a hero. And no, he’s not a dealer, or he’s not just a dealer. Either way, whatever, he has a link. And it’s good. Actually, can I have another twenty?’
‘No, I’ve only got fifties.’
‘Leander, please! Please. We’re here now anyway. Come on, I’m your fairy fucking godmother.’
I parked, gave her another fifty, mock-begrudgingly, and got out. Squirrel blood scarred the bonnet in four lines like giant claw-marks. Dawn staggered round to my side, unbalanced by concussion – and hugged me.
‘Be brave for mummy, alright? Ah, is this hurting your bruises? I’m sorry,’ she said, without much sorrow in her voice. ‘Fuck that man and his belt, babe – we’ll fix that later, alright? I’ll get us the heroin, just don’t lie down on it, yeah?’
‘You too,’ I smiled, touching the wound on her forehead with my thumb. ‘We’re matching almost.’
‘I know, we’re a right pair – but yours weren’t an accident and you don’t deserve nothing like that – so you go in there and you go be nice to that boy waiting for you – cos you can’t fucking throw it away like I did just cos you think you don’t deserve love. I’ll see you later, alright – don’t keep my banquet waiting.’
I withdrew from her embrace with my eyes to the ground. Dawn laughed at what she saw as a rare apprehensiveness on my part. Really, I was excited, and not for the reasons she supposed. She didn’t know that Francis still had a girlfriend – a girlfriend I’d been systematically goading towards breakdown.
‘Love you!’ she yelled, embarrassingly loudly, and tottered to the car, combing a hand back through bloodied hair.
Drunkenly she drove away, into the end of the afternoon. The crash had made me bold, and my new scars felt like an exoskeleton – a defence against any next attacker. So, boldly, I shivered towards Francis’ doorstep, hoping I was entering a fight.
Carnivore Page 2
