Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  Dawn had uncapped the bottle and was trying to pour water into the lid balanced on her knee – but mostly she was spilling it over herself.

  ‘Do you want help?’ I asked.

  ‘Thank you sweetheart, yes please, give us a hand. I feel like I’m fucking losing it. And with this weather. Fuck. Is it raining? No – we’re inside still ain’t we? We’re inside.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  She gave me the syringe. I placed the bottle lid on the bathroom floor and filled it to two-thirds with water.

  ‘You know I was dreaming before you got in here,’ she said, nervously twisting her wedding ring. ‘I saw the moon fall out the sky – the same as that squirrel earlier – and it shattered like glass in the street. It was so small, the moon. Smaller than a bowling ball. And it shattered.’

  ‘I don’t think the moon has fallen yet,’ I said. ‘The Thames’ tides are still there. Apparently the earth wasn’t born with oceans – the waters are from the collisions of millions of icy asteroids. Perhaps something else wonderful will fall on us.’

  I unwrapped the white heroin from its cling-film and dropped it into the water of the bottle lid. With the orange plunger of the syringe, I stirred it into dissolution.

  ‘Were you not intending to use a filter?’ I asked.

  ‘Does that do anything?’

  ‘I dunno. Obviously bacteria isn’t going to be removed. But perhaps glass or something will.’

  ‘Who’s putting glass in heroin?’

  ‘I dunno. Whimsical manufacturers. Do you have cotton buds?’

  ‘Don’t think so darling, just give me it.’

  ‘We can use a tampon?’ I suggested.

  She waved her hand in unconcern.

  I took a tampon from her bag, split open its plastic, and bit off the end. I placed this over the bottle top and drew the solution through it into the syringe.

  ‘In China,’ I said, flicking out the air at the needle’s tip, ‘opium was seen as an aphrodisiac, because it delayed orgasm. In Europe it was associated with asexuality, for the same reason. European civilisation only really overtook China during the opium wars. Perhaps our erotic pessimism gave us an edge. But I prefer that Chinese optimism…’

  Dawn cackled quietly. ‘You never preferred optimism before.’

  I smacked the bluest vein in her arm and stung it with the needle. She didn’t flinch.

  ‘Put your thumb under mine,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For luck,’ I said. ‘I want to do this with you.’

  She put her thumb beneath mine on the syringe. We pulled back the plunger to check for blood – its vermillion sighed into the white – and we injected it into her vein.

  ‘Ahhh,’ she relaxed. ‘Thank you, darling, that’s better, fuck, so much better. Sorry. Sorry, I interrupted you about your poem, didn’t I? Tell me it, go on, tell mummy a poem, please…’

  ‘You mean “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”?’ I asked drowsily. ‘I was saying Kimber could be the demon in the tower. The poem ends with the knight-errant blowing his horn, about to charge at “the round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart,” but we don’t know what he finds inside it. The poem is more concerned with the phantasmagoric journey there. He sees a horse, emaciated and hideous, and says “I never saw a brute I hated so; he must be wicked to deserve such pain.” I apply that line to myself once a week. And then he passes an abandoned torture wheel, “fit to reel men’s bodies out like silk.” It’s a similar image to the one in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” – though Kafka’s machine is described by an Officer as providing a sort of religious transcendence, after six hours of torture. But when the Officer himself climbs into his machine, it breaks and he brutally dies, “without the promised transfiguration”. Then, in maybe the most concise statement of Kafka’s whole philosophy, the narrator says, “This was not the torture the Officer wished to attain.” Both Browning’s poem and Kafka’s story are fantasies of suffering with no redemption; quests with no climax. But instead of despair, there is an uncanny exuberance in the process of perception itself – as though all one needs to do to survive is simply learn how to luxuriate in horror. When you —’

  ‘It’s poisoned,’ Dawn said, slumping into me, breathing too shallowly to shout. ‘You… Kimber poisoned me. This was for you, weren’t it? You knew. But it’s not – it’s not poison, is it? It’s too warm for that, it’s – you’re putting me in a kangaroo pouch? Fuck. You gave me too much, Leander, you know you gave me too much.’

  She was so weak that she could only whisper. I watched her lower into my lap with an abstract fascination.

  ‘I was scared of Kimber being jealous,’ she said. ‘But I should of been scared of you, shouldn’t I? Fuck – do both my sons hate me? Please tell me that’s not what it is. I know the traffic lights was red – but I forgave you. And I forgive you, sweetheart – I did this to you, I did it, I forgive you. Life is about to happen to us anyway. But can you do me one last little favour – just call me an ambulance, can you, yeah? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’

  She sank into sleep. I shifted her head off me onto the floor so I could access the tinfoil again. I sprinkled out more heroin, with the pipe in my mouth, and heated it as I inhaled, wondering what a last breath felt like.

  After a few long lazy runs along the foil, and a few more top-ups of powder, I fished in Dawn’s bag for her phone.

  I rang 999 and asked for an ambulance. ‘There’s a woman dying in the toilets at the Rockway bar in Brixton,’ I said in a monotone. ‘I can’t wake her up. I think she overdosed on heroin. Maybe it had fentanyl in it. Come quickly.’

  I hung up and then rang 999 again, this time asking for the police. ‘There’s a woman dead in the toilets at the Rockway bar in Brixton, and I think there’s drug-dealers here. Maybe a gang. I’ve seen a lot of drugs and I think I saw a gun. I’m hiding in the toilets. There’s a man called Kimber here. I’ve rung an ambulance. Come quickly.’

  I hung up and smoked more, with my eyes closed against the tiles, anticipating the coming chaos with excitement. Dawn’s last words hung in the air with an orange afterglow.

  Someone was beating on the door. I nodded off, dreaming of Brutalist towers combining themselves into mile-high castles.

  ‘My dear?’ Kimber called from the corridor. ‘Might you and Leander consider re-joining our company soon? Have you not yet used the facilities to your satisfaction?’

  I inhaled a last rueful line. The scent of sandalwood oil that I associated with Kimber’s voice dispelled the earthy orange I associated with Dawn’s. I returned the folded foil, pipe, lighter, and pouch to her handbag. The Savlon was still in there; I uncapped it, squeezed a drop of its paste onto both index fingers, and rubbed it into my eyes to irritate them to tears.

  Now appearing to cry, I zipped up her handbag and hung it beneath my clothes – so that its bulk was hidden by my cape and its shoulder strap hidden by my dress. As I waited for Kimber to beat down the door, I drank from the tap. Rust displaced the taste of heroin from my gums.

  The door’s lock was kicked open by the bouncer from the back room. He stepped aside to allow Kimber to enter.

  I was weeping beneath the sink; Dawn was dead beneath the dryer. Kimber released a fox’s screech and leapt to Dawn, slapping her cheek, his ear to her neck, his thumb to her pulse.

  ‘You did this,’ I whispered.

  ‘You did this,’ he said with eyes of vertigo.

  ‘She was dead when I got here,’ I said.

  ‘She’s still warm!’ he cried. ‘Get hold of him!’

  The bouncer pulled me to my feet, locking his arm around mine. I didn’t resist. There was a commotion in the corridor – and other lackeys ran in.

  ‘There’s an ambulance outside saying we’ve got to let them in or they’ll call the police.’

  ‘You!’ Kimber shouted at me, at last discomposed. ‘You!’

  He jumped up as if he wished to rip me from the bo
uncer, but his hands hesitated in mid-air – his face dappling with the shock of renewed realisation – and he crouched back beside Dawn.

  More yells announced the arrival of two paramedics and three of the men in white tie from the back room. One paramedic knelt beside Dawn, the other surveyed the scene suspiciously. To him, I was a frightened black-eyed boy in a dress, among thugs. He approached the man restraining me.

  ‘That’s my mum,’ I said, pointing at Dawn. ‘Please… please…’

  He reached his hand out to mine. The bouncer released me. Curiously, as I simulated the symptoms of grief for this audience, I felt some of my sobs come freely – as though through pretence I was approaching authenticity. The paramedic flashed a torch in my eyes, but before he could say anything, his partner shouted, ‘We need to get her out of here.’

  Kimber’s mask of command was gone. Instead here was a man – who must have seen many corpses before – desperate for guidance. He held Dawn’s legs as the paramedic took her shoulders and backed down the corridor, obsessed by her vacant eyes. The other paramedic kept a hand on my shoulder and steered me after them, flanked by Kimber’s tensed associates.

  We processed into the bar area to find it considerably thinned. Those who remained were in a frenzy of speculation. But before the front door could be opened from the inside, there was a loud knocking – and a file of five police officers entered. The bar erupted, at last, into pandemonium – shrieks spread to the back room; men jumped over tables and scrambled out of booths away from the front. Three police officers sprinted after them, while the other two officers ushered the paramedics, Dawn, Kimber, and me outside. A herd of growling men had assembled on the street in a stand-off against three more policemen.

  ‘Leander!’ someone shouted.

  I perceived the commotion with an aloof factual apathy. Dawn was being lifted into the back of the ambulance. Kimber was still clutching her legs, refusing to accept that he’d been robbed of his possession. The paramedic let go of me to assist in lifting her. I turned to see Francis rushing towards me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘What happened to you? They weren’t letting me in.’

  ‘Dawn OD’d,’ I said. ‘I think she’s dead.’

  A ring of men shoved me along the pavement, away from the police officers. The bouncer who’d earlier thrown me to the floor now grabbed me under my arms and began dragging me down the street. My head bulged like water in a spinning bucket.

  ‘You’re staying with us lad,’ he said.

  Francis charged after us, knocking two men down – and then punched my abductor in the pocket between his jaw and windpipe. I jabbed my heel into his foot and twisted free – dizzied by the scent of benzoin resin. A fourth man struck Francis in the stomach, but he roared in reply and threw him to the ground – and then stunned a fifth to my left with a punch that crunched bone.

  ‘Help!’ Francis shouted, dragging me towards him. ‘Help!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ a policeman shouted, trying to break through the barrier of bodyguards in his way.

  Francis pulled me into the middle of the road. I reached beneath my dress for the handbag and searched within it for the car key – and pressed it – and a white car beeped a dozen cars away.

  ‘Run!’ Francis tried to shout, but choked instead on a whisper.

  A confusion of bouncers, barflies, and men in white tie spilled across the street. Four of them followed us, slowed by their injuries, while the rest surrounded the police officer. The ambulance siren began.

  I raised my eyes upwards – and saw an arched bridge above me, covering the sky, built from the same tiles as had been in the bathroom – and masks were dangling from the bridge, attached to strings – all of them painted with Dawn’s face, in expressions of surprise and disappointment – and as they fluttered, frozen peas fell from their eyes – and where the peas hit the pavement, plants sprouted – though instead of flowers, the plants grew skulls – glowing like neon melons around my feet.

  Francis prised the key from my fist, his arm around my waist, and propelled me towards the car. My teeth were turning brass again – and trying to unscrew me back into ultramarine.

  The streetlamps craned like storks trapped in concrete. The wind smelt of rain that hadn’t come yet, and of the sweetness of damp washing, as we passed an air-vent I couldn’t see. He pushed me into the passenger seat and slammed shut the door.

  ‘I don’t need you,’ I said, as he ran round to the other side.

  He got in and started the engine. I could fix on nothing. Grey-gold spikes sank into my eyes. With a jerk, we reversed away from the pavement.

  ‘We’re going to my flat,’ I tried to order, but my voice was nearly inaudible.

  ‘We’re going my house,’ he said. ‘I ain’t listening to you. I know what’s good for you and you definitely don’t.’

  ‘I had a plan,’ I said.

  ‘Your plan didn’t work.’

  ‘It worked perfectly.’

  ‘You didn’t do that.’

  He sped up around a corner. An off-licence cast an eerie haven of light ahead of us – and I imaged a swarm of night buses – identical to the N109 that nearly ran me down earlier, but shrunk to the size of moths – fluttering around the off-license’s doorway, like a homecoming of the lost.

  ‘You think Dawn died on purpose?’ I asked.

  ‘She had this coming for years.’

  ‘How can you say that about your own mother?’ I asked, trying to smile.

  He braked and I snapped forward – but he caught my arm before I hit glass. He was breathing heavily – enraged by what I’d said, or afraid for my safety, or both – and forced my seatbelt across me.

  At his touch’s authority, I was aroused – and he buckled it roughly, and seemed to be trying to speak – but I was dropping away from him – into an orgasm at the edge of unconsciousness – and into the whispering rustle of a field of wheat.

  ‘You was her son more than I was,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got a mother no more.’

  ACT 3

  Crossing the border

  1.

  A bell brought me back to pain. First it was only a red madder colour – but then came the colour of smalt, then of azurite, then of vivianite – and then ultramarine. Francis was cradling me, erect and naked, mumbling slower than me towards sentience. I unhooked his arms from my chest and wriggled away, but as I tried to sit up, I choked, and bent sideways to vomit – but only a spool of bile emerged.

  ‘Stop it,’ Francis said, fumbling at his bedside as if for an alarm clock.

  His doorbell rang again, longer, above the pattering of the rain. So the weather had turned. I imagined London’s pigeons rising as one to wash themselves in it, as the grey of their feathers changed into a new grey – the grey of security-alarmed scaffolding and concrete and the crowds and clouds around them – the grey of the Thames and the sea that it ended in – the grey of the ever-turning cement mixers of a city remaking itself for the rich – the grey of the docklands and the Olympic village and all the other new-builds that looked like old shipping crates, carrying nothing to nowhere – more like wastelands now than the wastelands they had been built upon.

  As I listened, I thought of the city around me as a body ill with my illness – suffering from the same kind of slow septic shock as me – the initiating infection gone, perhaps, but the crisis state still in effect – so London continued, as I did, in pain, in exhaustion, incurable – allergic to itself – allergic to the very mechanisms that kept it alive…

  I leant over the bedside for Dawn’s handbag and reeled it towards me by its strap. Francis crawled out the other side, cursing, searching for underwear. I found the baggie of heroin and spilled its contents onto a fresh rectangle of foil. The doorbell rang again – into the colour of terracotta, and I thought of the tessellated roofs of foreign flat-blocks in winter.

  I pursed a tinfoil pipe between my lips, and took up the lighter – and vaporised this excessive medicine
into the seat of my lungs. Francis gazed at me blearily, his disapproval distracted by the doorbell. Slowly, my nausea and the clamour in my kidney subsided. I burnt the foil’s underside as I sucked above it with an infant’s greed.

  ‘There’s blood all on me,’ Francis said, drawing back the duvet to reveal a moth-coloured stain the size of my head on the sheets where our bodies had met. ‘Fuck. You’re cleaning that up. But we’re getting you to hospital first.’

  He knelt across the bed to kiss my cheek. I reclined against the wall with narrowed eyelids, in a pause between inhalations, my nerves depressing back into placidity. As he neared, I admired his face in slow motion as if for the first time – his forehead was framed by tousled hair shaved neatly at the sides – his eyebrows arched perfectly into his nose, balanced by thick lips and a wide jaw – and his eyes were recessed behind cheekbones that hollowed his cheeks into right-angle shadows. I received his kiss in triumph – over all the women I’d won him from – but affected sedation.

  ‘Your eye is so fucked up,’ he said.

  The bell repeated. He kissed me again and left.

  The blood seemed dry, but the silk of my dress stuck like a gauze to where I’d been stabbed – so perhaps it was only temporarily stanched. My body in its opiate mist shifted without feeling itself, so I peeled off my gown lasciviously, my own voyeur – craning my head to watch it roll up my thigh and uncling from the gash at my hip. Placing the unfinished fold of foil to my left, I pulled the dress further over my head, until I realised – to my own surprise – that I was naked. The room resonated like a distorted guitar.

  I reclined into the pillow and reviewed my bruises with the curiosity of an impartial observer. The knife wound had congealed into a knot the colour of varnished oak. Most of my knuckles were aubergine. The moles and older keloid scars of my chest had new bluer company. My left bicep was speckled with yellow plectrum imprints. Mauve burnt through the hairs of my shins.