‘It’s not just your money. I’m a bad mother. But it is the money – I lost your money.’
‘Did Kimber take it all?’ I began to understand. ‘Didn’t you tell him it was for our food?’
Her face became harsher.
‘Did he take the money from you?’ I repeated.
‘No, he’s not like that, he would never be like that to me – he’d been working, he was in a different mood, it was my fault.’
As my suspicions grew, the associations of my other senses were heightened: the taste of soil entered my mouth, and her words gained an orange echo.
‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Did he hit you?’
‘No, you’re getting the wrong end of everything. It’s not like that.’
‘What is it like then? Last week, you were outside his control. But now you’re in his car and in his flat, you’re in his power and you’ve glimpsed something in him that was hidden before?’
She cried quietly.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘He’s a man in a violent profession. He’s jealous. What did he say about me?’
‘Stop analysing, I don’t want to hear it. You’re just trying to sulk again. He’s said nothing about you.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘It was me, I was talking about you,’ she cried. ‘I was talking about you.’
‘And? You’re making it sound like you sold me to him.’
‘I just talk too much, don’t I? I hope too much. I believe people too much. I can’t –’ she pushed me away. ‘I can’t. Don’t look at this. Go and shower, you need to wash. At least you can wash your day off you. I tried to wash. Let me just – go away.’
She covered her eyes with her hands and began rocking herself towards despair.
I left for the bathroom. The shower had no curtain, so it wet all the walls as soon as I turned it on. The sound of the spraying water glittered with blotchy browns and reds, like a cloud of gatekeeper butterflies. As it warmed, I undressed and rinsed the toast from my mouth in the sink.
I stepped in. The water felt like hail on my flayed back – but I experienced this as light entertainment. My body hurt anyway, from my myalgia, so the whip wounds were really a relief. Chronic muscle pain has a dissociative effect – every day, for the past decade, my limbs have seemed severed from each other, hovering discretely in uncertain space. My sense of proprioception is in disarray – my nerves regard themselves as hostile. So bruises and gashes like the new ones on my back simply lift me out of my underlying condition. Flesh injuries are insignificant compared to a half-life spent inside a skeleton of barbed wire – of feeling half-disembodied and half-disembowelled – a cloud of phosgene and a soldier’s scream, at once in the same skin. That’s why being beaten feels like being cured.
The bathroom door opened as I was washing the soles of my feet. I wobbled in surprise. Dawn entered through the steam, staring with an inebriated intensity.
‘I remembered the Savlon,’ she said, holding up the tube of antiseptic.
Again I tasted soil in my spit – though now her voice sounded like it had become foreign to her too. She seemed to be speaking automatically.
‘You’re high,’ I said.
‘Let me look at your back.’
‘Can’t you do this when I’m out?’
‘I’ll do it now.’
I put the soap in the tray and turned around.
Crying, she traced her fingers along my welts, circling the metal buckle’s indents one by one. I rested my head on my arm against the tiles of the wall, letting the water hit the curve of my spine. Briefly she lifted away her hand – and returned it, thick with ointment, to smooth across my broken skin. I closed my eyes and forgot the specifics of the room.
But as she smoothed lower, I realised she was teasing me towards arousal. Her other hand joined the first in massaging towards my hips – and then she stepped into the shower with me, wetting her clothes.
‘No,’ I said.
She pushed her hands down my thighs, her soaked skirt rubbing against my back. Instead of earth, I tasted burnt coffee. I tried to swallow it away.
‘Just let me make you feel better,’ she said. ‘I’m scared I been a bad mother.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Then why you not pushing me away?’
She tried to turn me around but I resisted. She kissed my neck and forced her fingers through mine.
‘This is… unnecessary,’ I said.
‘Then why are you hard?’ She guided my hand in hers towards my erection.
I let her hold me there for moment, but then shook my shoulders.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’
I turned off the water – she clutched to me, trying to kneel down. I pushed her away, and took up my clothes and hurried into the living room.
She followed slowly, drenched, her lips apart but no longer crying, her eyes unclear.
From my suitcase I removed black jeans, black socks, a black polo-neck, and her fake Dalmatian fur coat. With my back to her, I re-hid most of the money in my boxers and my sock. Then, turning so that she could see, I put the remaining £200 in my coat pocket.
‘Why don’t you leave that with me?’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous having so much money on you.’
‘It’s more dangerous to leave it with you. It would disappear.’
‘I taught you how to pleasure a woman!’ she said, as though this was somehow a retort. ‘I taught you! You never knew what you was doing until I taught you.’
‘You taught me nothing.’
‘I’m a bad mother, am I?’ She was weeping again. ‘I can remember how you was when we met. You trusted me, and you don’t trust nobody. Why’d you start trusting me?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’re moving on with life! Everything’s going right, now, ain’t it? I’ve got a man, you’ve got a man, we got a place of our own.’
‘Then why are you crying?’
‘Your wounds make me sad,’ she said – with something closer to remorse than she’d managed in the car earlier. ‘They’re a failing, if I’m your mother.’
‘Then don’t be my mother,’ I said, though I was pleased by her veiled confession –that she’d known in advance I’d be whipped by her client.
‘You asked me to be your mother!’ she shouted.
‘I asked because you needed me to ask.’
‘So you can have feelings! But they’re not enough – you never asked me why I needed it.’
‘It was obvious – you needed a substitute son, I needed a substitute mother.’
‘You don’t know it all,’ she sobbed. ‘I was too young. I was fifteen. Did you know that? Yeah – I ain’t even that old! I had him five years but then I… I weren’t up to it, was I? I failed. My mum hated me, just because she spent all her time thinking what life would be like without kids. And I didn’t want that for me. I tried it but I didn’t want it. I couldn’t take the tasks that never end. She said she felt destroyed – destroyed as a woman. And I felt like that till I got myself back. I couldn’t touch nobody for years. My mum said I made her feel like a nobody. And it was the same with me when I had my kid. My body weren’t for me and I hated it. So I ended it, didn’t I? I tried to put him in a fucking orphanage – but his dad got custody and they only let me see him twice a year. And I couldn’t bear it, so I saw him less. And now he hates me. Do you know what I mean? My son fucking hates me! That’s why I need you. I need a son that doesn’t hate me.’
She lurched forwards tearfully to stroke my face. I pulled away. A reddish flash – perhaps a silent ambulance passing through the street below – got caught in my eye, and I saw a huge fish leaping through the air between us, like a salmon up a waterfall – until it reached the window, and leapt out into the red of the night. Dawn sat back into the table with an expression of opiated wonder – perhaps having had the same vision as me.
‘It’s your turn,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to balance
me out. What happened to your mother? Why’d you need me?’
‘I’ve told you. When I was eleven my dad shot my mum then shot himself. I found the bodies. I had an older sister, but she died when I was six.’
‘Maybe. Maybe I believe you. But you lie about who you want to be, don’t you? You lie so people show themselves to you. I know you think I’m stupid – and I am stupid compared to you, and even stupider now that you got me this bump on my head – but it’s fine, just because I don’t have an education to wear on my sleeve.’ She lifted her hands to stop me interrupting. ‘Even if you gave that education to yourself, sweetheart, but still, for all you want to twist me around – I understand you more than you think I do. And that’s why you like me. You like me because you can’t manipulate me.’
‘I can manipulate you.’
She laughed. ‘Yeah but you can’t control me completely. You can’t predict everything. That’s what you need me for.’
‘And why was now the time for this little soliloquy?’
‘Because life’s about to happen to us! I want you to know what I know. Maybe I like you because you like lies more than people.’
‘I like lies that get people to tell me their secrets,’ I said. ‘But also, my lies are confessions, in a way. Lies are fantasies – and fantasies reveal you much more nakedly than facts.’
‘Go on then.’
‘Stories that aren’t biographically true can still be true – if they reveal something about the teller’s psychology. They are psychologically true. They show what I want you to believe about me. Lies are not as simple as inaccuracies. A lie, as an evasion or a complication, is still a revelation of character – it’s a slanted truth. If I told you I was trampled by a horse when I was fifteen, and the trauma of that incident is the reason why I am now inert and deceitful and constantly in pain – you would learn something true about me. It may not have literally happened, but it gives you an image by which to understand me. Rather than listing diagnoses – like fibromyalgia or immune dysfunction or dysautonomia or insomnia or Lyme disease or myalgic encephalomyelitis or even just poverty – that all only speak to the surface of what I am, I give you instead a metaphor, of a trampling horse. And by that metaphor you comprehend me beyond facts. It wasn’t literally true – it was psychologically true. Lies are insights into the liar, if you read them right.’
‘So when you tell people about me, I’m going to be a horse?’
‘No, you’ll be a blue-ringed octopus. A many-limbed entanglement, overbearing, toxic, and drowning.’
‘You’re a charmer.’
‘I have to go,’ I said.
Worry resurfaced in her face. ‘Let me drive you there.’
‘You can’t drive like this. And I want to be cold for a while.’
‘Please don’t walk there.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ she said.
‘I’ll see you at the Rockway, ok? Do I get a key?’
‘Yeah, course you do sweetheart.’
She removed a key ring from her pocket and put it into mine. She hugged me, trembling as though suppressing an apology or a warning – and waved me away with defeat in her eyes.
I left, disorientated, but impressed – as though she’d managed some master manipulation that I could barely understand.
6.
I strode through unfamiliar streets, my mind widening into the night’s intimacy. The space between the terraced houses had a presence I called ‘indisclosure’: the active sense of a city withholding its meanings. And as I said the word to myself, its sound gained the taste of cotton candy – a too-sweet taste, though I kept repeating it anyway – indisclosure, indisclosure, indisclosure.
The houses had put their wheelie-bins out in the street – for tomorrow’s collection – and they reminded me of a dream I used to have, of waking up inside a black plastic bag, in a dustbin – and feeling content there, waiting for the truck to come and take me away – from the pain I felt then, and still felt now.
Tonight that pain came as a nest of tarantulas – dressed in the smeared aprons of butchers, washing their cleavers in my blood, and promenading along my muscles like avenues in an orchard.
I walked down a bike path to a canal. The wind quickened in its confinement here, so I walked faster, fingering the key in my pocket.
I imagined the wind coming from the old Deptford dockyard, and carrying with it the sighs of sailors who’d left from there and died at sea, younger than me, as long as half a millennium ago – when the docks had been the cradle of a navy that plundered the whole world. And in this wind, in its ghosts, was a reminder that London was still growing from the profits of that plunder.
But also in this wind was an opposite reminder – that London had grown from an army’s camp – an invader’s camp – and the river that army had bivouacked beside was rising. The walls that defended it were invisible now – but they were still here – and they couldn’t hold back the water forever. All camps are temporary – this one would be washed away too.
Two figures approached from beneath the bridge. One was taller than me, but both, in the gloom, looked younger, perhaps sixteen years old. The taller wore a dark tracksuit, dark trainers, and a white snapback hat; his shorter partner had more flair, with a cyan sweatshirt over navy overalls speckled with paint, and cobalt-blue shoes. His cropped hair was shaven in whorls.
‘Mate can you lend us some money?’ the shorter one asked.
I ignored them, clenching the key, and tried to walk past. The taller stepped into my way. I tiredly lifted my eyes to his.
‘Got any money to lend us?’ he asked.
I stared without saying anything. A vein in my leg twitched, and my blood began to flush with anticipation.
The taller one stepped closer and shoved me at my hip. I moved in obedience to his fist, and inhaled, untensing myself, as if about speak – but said nothing. The other shoved my shoulder.
‘You speak English?’ he asked. ‘We need to borrow a bit of money. I need to buy a speedboat.’ He laughed.
I sighed, readying my best impersonation of an action hero, and took two steps backwards.
‘Which of you wants your leg broken first?’ I asked.
Their expressions paused, blank while processing a reaction to this bluff – and then, just as they were both deciding on sniggers, I twisted round to kick sideways at the taller one’s outer leg, my shoe flat in a right angle as its heel hit his knee socket. It dislocated but didn’t snap – he shrieked, hobbling back, rolling his upper body forwards – so I punched into his nose, upwards, and it easily broke. His blood dribbled onto my knuckles like honey and, as I skipped backwards, for a moment I wanted to lick it.
The shorter boy stared in shock. The wall beside us prevented most types of attack, so I span and ducked to kick up in a back-hook at his face – hitting his chin, but not hard enough. The jaw clattered but didn’t snap. I spun to face him again, in a low stance, my fists up. He swiped vaguely at me with his left hand – I blocked it, but saw too late it had been a feint, and with his stronger fist he struck my eye. The side of its socket splintered into steel light – and he jabbed again at my stomach. I was tensed enough not to be winded, but stumbled to the water’s edge. He knew how to box, and pushed his advantage, smacking me in the temple and then the neck – I choked, tasting thickening mango – and tried to weave out of his way on my back foot.
I let him punch my eye again. Verdigris-green shattered into my throat – but I spat it back out into his mouth, sweeping at his front foot, and ducked under his arm to tug him backwards over his other leg. As he fell, I span round to strike my elbow into his cheek. Something cracked – but it might have been me. My nerves were livid. The space around me was splitting, as though allowing a sharper air to replace it. I was more vivid now and, somehow, now – finally now – in my body properly. I gripped onto his arm and stamped on it where it met his shoulder until it broke. He screamed as I stamped. I imagined that I wa
s crunching burnt pinecones – I could smell the smoke of a bonfire of fir and chestnuts – and then I kicked him in the jaw until it, too, broke.
I felt like I had just been born. The shivers of the wind around me harmonised with the waves of wind in my spine. I breathed further than I could formerly breathe. My eyes could see backwards and upwards – the present was balling out into a vibrating sphere. I reached to stroke the boy’s head: its shaved hair resembled velvet – the fringe of a dress I wanted to kiss, or the fur of a foxglove.
I wished to further my assault on his partner, but a punch to the side of my chest winded me – I staggered over his body and looked back. There was third boy, my age, my height, hooded, holding a knife tipped with my blood. My coat had stopped his stab penetrating far. I axe-kicked at his hand to knock it open – he dropped the knife, but the boy on the ground grabbed my heel to trip me. I stamped on him, and the third man lunged to grip me by the throat. I tasted nutmeg, a cloud in my windpipe – and kneed him in the groin, but he didn’t release me – so I stamped again on the other boy to prevent him pulling me down. The night brightened as I lost air – and I embraced my strangler, inhaling his sweatshirt’s tranquil reek of weed, bending his choking arm inwards, surprising him off balance. In my advantage, I twisted into the skin of his neck – in the shadow, it clotted like cream around a pair of freckles the width of my two front teeth – and I bit him there so sharply that I tore off every layer of skin – but not enough to make him bleed. His grip relaxed – I kneed him again in the crotch and spun round to find the knife.
But it was not on the ground; perhaps it had fallen into the canal. This quick search was a misjudgement – the two boys on the ground jerked to grab a foot each, nearly tripping me onto my back. As I squatted, I jabbed with three fingers joined in a screwing motion into his eye – it softened, though didn’t burst into the jelly I wanted; he dug his head into the tarmac to get away – and before I could complete his blinding, the third boy tackled me.
I writhed, excited by the firmness of his biceps, and bit at his wrist, my jaw so wide it nearly detached to reach his flesh with my cuspid teeth – chewing and grinding until I tasted gristle and his arm-hair on my tongue. Yelling, he punched at my head with his free hand – and with each hit, I became younger, larger, more precise; and my teeth kept to his wrist, hopeful of bone; with each hysterical hit, I was resurrected – until finally he knocked my jaw loose, but not without its prize of meat. With my left foot, I kicked against the ground to slide out from under him – and he screamed at his ripped wrist, the tendons exposed, his hand useless, a severed vein gushing onto its unresponsive index finger, pointed in some broken reflex as though in accusation.
Carnivore Page 5
