Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  ‘There were other videos on the memory card. They may be… they could be on a laptop belonging to a woman called Amélie – she works on the film that Eva works for.’

  ‘This was at the Lux Studios? I have two statements about what happened there from Ms Eva Ravel and Ms Iris Vasari – I know that you appeared there around seven in the morning, and were described as distressed, and then after some… acting – you left suddenly and were followed by car to Mr Cole’s house where Ms Ravel and Ms Vasari found you unconscious on the doorstep. Is that correct?’

  ‘I have no idea if that’s correct. I was unconscious. But you should check whether the contents of that memory card are on Amélie’s laptop.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that you managed to take away the memory card?’ he asked. ‘And what happened to it?’

  ‘I don’t remember – I was too high by then. I couldn’t see properly. Maybe I imagined it. But you should check her laptop – there were other videos of other… people. I was watching them. Maybe clues.’

  He patted my shoulder. ‘I will send an officer to follow up on your information immediately. Thank you for cooperating with me, Leander. I know that you’ve… been through a tough time. But we need to keep working together. You are a resourceful young man. You’ve managed to get out of… difficult situations.’

  ‘I don’t think I got out of anything. I don’t think Francis got out of anything.’

  The creams and greys of the cubicle were becoming hideous. I was responsible for Francis’ suffering, or death – and this knowledge gave my wounds claws – and they burrowed into my flesh until my sweat was so hot that it simmered.

  ‘My point is that you… have helped us get further with our operation than anyone else,’ he continued. ‘And I admit, there have been significant shortcomings – but this is still a very time-sensitive investigation. We must find Kimber. And we want to find Francis. So… we need you to – to keep alert.’

  ‘What do you mean alert?’ I asked. ‘Is that a euphemism? You mean you want to me to walk into more traps?’

  ‘You’ve been through a lot. But you have a different approach to what the police are capable of, and so —’

  ‘You want me to be bait again?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t you have witnesses, and CCTV footage, and tips and data and investigators? I’m not going to help you do anything. I want – I don’t… I… I just want to know what’s happened to Francis. What about Constable Floris? Don’t you care? She has a – she had a son called Oscar! She was… kind to me… I can’t do anything else for you.’

  I was nearly in tears. There were no ideas in my head – just a loud stupor, more nullifying than darkness or silence – I despised my own brain, I despised my own voice.

  ‘I don’t entirely believe that, I’m afraid,’ he said with a sudden sternness to his tone. ‘It’s too late for you to hide behind innocence. The loss of Constable Floris is a… great loss, but we must focus on preventing other losses. You are more street-wise than you want me to think you are. You could be much more helpful than you’re being.’

  ‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ I spat – and in my anger, my synaesthesia spiked – the mouthwash-coloured lights of the ceiling swooped into the taste of mouthwash, and my blood cooled towards phlegm the same lurid yellow as Sanam’s voice. ‘I know the police are supposed to be the lowest error of western civilisation but I didn’t realise that you were this sadistic.’

  He took his hand off my shoulder. ‘Let me summarise your situation in another way, then. Yesterday, you stole a police car and crashed it into public property while under the influence of Class A drugs. You have also fled two crime scenes now, and been involved in two deaths in as many days. If these… unfortunate facts are going to be interpreted in a positive way, in a way that diminishes your responsibility – then you are going to have to help us, Leander, however you can. Otherwise, we might reach a less favourable interpretation of these facts – which in less urgent circumstances would unquestionably require me to arrest you right now.’

  ‘So. You’re blackmailing a boy who just a heart attack into being bait for his rapist?’

  ‘I’m offering leniency in exchange for you doing whatever you were going to do anyway. I just ask that you tell me what you’re doing when you do it. And to that end – I want you to use this phone.’

  He dropped a brick phone into my lap. I looked at it listlessly.

  ‘We are pursuing every lead that we have,’ he said, quieter, but still stern. ‘With as much haste as we can – in order to find these people. And I understand that you are reluctant to… share information, or really to do anything for me. But we both know that you aren’t just a damsel in distress. You’ve escaped twice now. If you have any insights, or if you see anything or find anything out… I want you to ring the number in the contact book – or text it – and you’ll get through to me. That’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘What’s the… what?’ I tried to reply, staggered by his audacity. ‘And even if… How can I know that your… interpretation of my facts would stay favourable after I helped you?’

  ‘I give you my word, Leander. I know the real interpretation – you are caught up in something beyond your control and you have nothing to do with it. And I want what you want. I want to catch the people that did this to you.’

  ‘I want Francis.’

  ‘That’s our priority too. I’m going to leave you now – but as I said, any information that you remember, any sudden flash of insight – you ring me. The number is saved as “X” in the address book. Do we have a deal?’

  He stood up to leave. Again I saw a lavender cloud forming above him – though now its fragrance was sick – like a pouch of dried lavender leaves left in a drawer for a decade, among wills and stale medicines – and again the cloud took on the shape of a lemur – but its tail had been bitten off in a fight.

  ‘Well you certainly know how to charm a dying man,’ I said, trying to calm myself into irony. ‘Your bedside manner has removed me from the trauma of my past few days. I feel cured.’

  ‘You’re not a dying man, Leander. I’ve never seen someone cling to life so tightly. I’m looking forward to your phone call.’

  He nodded in farewell and left. The lavender lemur dissolved. I felt like a rubber band stretched across a street, too tense to snap.

  There was a struggle beyond the curtain. Quickly, I unpeeled the tape over the needle in my wrist – but before I could extract it, a nurse slapped my hand away. Eva stumbled in after her, her hand stretched forwards too.

  ‘No, this stays in,’ the nurse said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘It’s coming out,’ I said. ‘I have to leave.’

  ‘You can’t leave – there’s no way you’re leaving.’

  ‘I’m signing myself out,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve had enough hospital. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Listen to your body,’ the nurse pleaded, gripping my wrist with her other hand. ‘Your body needs you to stay here.’

  ‘I listened to my body for twenty years – and it was a mistake!’ I said, still angered by the chief inspector. ‘I had no friends and I did nothing. I lay on my back for weeks, I exercised and I ate well, but I never got better. My pain got worse. I’ve been through all the diagnoses – psychological, physiological, psychosomatic, whatever. All useless! I’m not at home in my own body. So I’ve learned to stop listening to it – and now I have friends, I have desires and delights. My body was holding me back. There’s a late Yeats poem that everyone quotes where he calls his body “a tattered coat upon a stick”, and says he’s “fastened to a dying animal” – but his hatred of old age feeds off a nostalgia for his youth. And I never got to have a youth – I never got to feel virile and young and immortal – I’ve always been fastened to a dying animal, I’ve always been a tattered coat upon a stick. And I’m bored of it. I’m bored being an incurable wound. I’m bored of being unhappy. There
’s no name for what’s wrong with me and that’s part of the torture – but there are ways of adapting to torture. I’ve come to understand myself in terms of revenge. And that’s where my happiness waits for me – in revenge on my body.’

  ‘This is you happy?’ the nurse asked, gesturing at the life-support machines around me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And this environment is precisely why. I can wallow in my injuries elsewhere – staying at hospital hurts me more than leaving. I know this from experience.’

  ‘Where are you going to go?’

  ‘Um…’ I looked to Eva with a fake smile, trying to pass off my anger as joke. ‘Does your sofa need any more of my blood?’

  She groaned. ‘Yeah you can stay with me, but I don’t understand why you insist on resisting recovery.’

  ‘I will recover quicker out of here… I can’t heal in a cage.’

  I reached to extract the needle in my wrist; again the nurse stopped me – but then she slid it out herself, shaking her head.

  ‘Complaining about not having a youth is just youth,’ she said. ‘You’re being stupid.’

  My retort was halted by the scent of coconut oil. I closed my eyes and the scent remained in a rumour – fading into confusion. I opened my eyes and there were tears in them.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Francis,’ I said. ‘I could remember his pillow…’

  She began crying. Released from the drip, I pulled back my sheet and lowered myself from the bed. Unused to being upright, I nearly fell. Standing felt like floating; the pain-cancelling chemicals parading through my circulatory system were of a far higher quality than I was accustomed to – they made my nerves into mandolins.

  ‘Where are my clothes?’ I asked.

  ‘They weren’t really clothes you were wearing – but I took them back to mine,’ Eva said, dabbing away her tears. ‘But I have your coat and… maybe just keep on these trousers.’

  She dressed me in my fake fur coat, dried since it had followed me into the canal. Its stab wound lined up with my own. I had barely any thoughts.

  ‘Is it true what you just said?’ she whispered. ‘About… about being ill for your whole…?’

  ‘Yeah – I’ve had to grieve for a whole life I’ve already lost – because I can never have it. No one really knows what my disease is – even though it’s quite common. Maybe it’s a mutated polio virus that attacks the brain instead of the spine – or maybe it’s an autoimmune thing or… I dunno. I just know it’s draining me away into a ghost stuck inside a body-shaped hell.’

  ‘That’s… horrible.’ She was crying again. ‘I didn’t know. You never… Because you look – you look tired, but not – and… and they can’t help you?’

  ‘No, in England we’re fucked – cos the government guidelines on my disease were written by a quack psychiatrist who thinks that all we need is a little bit of exercise and a little bit of positive thinking – and then our agony will just go away. Imagine telling that to someone with any other autoimmune disease. They haven’t cured anyone, obviously – but they have driven thousands of teenagers to suicide.’

  ‘How… is that allowed?’

  ‘Because it’s an invisible illness.’

  The nurse returned with a self-release form. I smiled in apology as I signed it. She gave me two orange pots of medications and told me to take one from each a day. I nodded. She left.

  ‘But… does Francis know?’ Eva whispered, still shocked.

  ‘I can’t… I… don’t ask me that,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. I hate people knowing I’m ill. I told Iris for some reason. But Francis… he’d… there might not be any chance anymore anyway. But… even if he isn’t… if he’s still… I can’t tell him. It would drain him and he’d resent me.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. He’s in love with you.’

  ‘I dunno. It’s happened before.’

  ‘With who?’

  I said nothing. I was overwhelmed by these conversations – with the nurse, with Sanam, with Eva. I was frail. Eva hugged me. I leant into her, trying to shake the words out of my head so I could regain some clarity. But this movement filled my blood with grit. My mind narrowed. I have never had clarity. But in the ambiguity of Francis’ fate, my pain was displaced into ambition – to regain him, or avenge him.

  3.

  Leaning on Eva, I floated out of the ward – down the glass lift, across the glass lobby, and out into the wider air of the afternoon. My muscles whirled, but my mind had flattened into a mantra – find Francis, find Francis – superseding everything else.

  Eva hailed a cab and helped me inside. My paper legs were glad to leave the wind.

  But as she said her address, I interrupted. ‘No, can we go to Francis’ house? Please. I want to check.’

  ‘I’ve been back twice… he’s not answering his phone.’

  ‘I left something there,’ I said. ‘Outside. And let’s just check for him again anyway.’

  She acquiesced and gave the driver his address. I was restless in the back seat, uncomfortable lying in her lap, uncomfortable sitting up – simultaneously dulled and stimulated by the hospital painkillers. Eventually I stretched out my feet alongside hers, and reclined diagonally across the seats, my head cushioned by my collar into the side of my door. So constrained, I fidgeted less, and closed my eyes.

  ‘So… what did the policeman want?’ asked Eva. ‘What did everyone want? Can you give me the plot summary? And spare me the one-liners.’

  ‘My sister and I were abandoned in a forest by our stepmother and we came across a house made of gingerbread and inside was an old woman who looked like our stepmother in disguise begging us to cook her in an oven but we refused, so instead we swung in her birdcage until she had fed us well enough for us to grant her request. When we had cooked her, we ate her, and later we converted the birdcage into a boat to float down the river out of the forest and into the city. My sister found love and I found melancholy. And then I got into this taxi.’

  ‘I said no jokes.’

  ‘You said no one-liners.’

  ‘Ok, no jokes either.’

  ‘Francis’ mum seduced a violent man and then she died, which made him more violent – and so he ambushed me and Francis in my flat and injected me with meth and raped me, and eventually we overpowered him and I fled, but Francis got re-captured and the violent man escaped. So I’m probably also a hunted man. The police were useless.’

  ‘I… don’t know what to say,’ Eva said, her voice quivering like she was trying not to laugh as much as not to cry. ‘I preferred the first story. Are you… you’re obviously not ok, but how do you… feel? About the whole thing?’

  ‘I just need to know where Francis is. I don’t care about what happened to me, I’ve been on worse dates – I already knew uppers weren’t chic. But I can’t finish forming an opinion until I can be with Francis.’

  ‘I know. I’m not… I just can’t live knowing that the last thing he can think about me is showing that fucking video at Iris’ exhibition. It was so childish. I hate who I was for that whole drama. You two made me crazy. But it’s my fault, it’s not yours – I chose to hurt him. And now that might be the last thing I did to him… I hate it.’ She was crying again.

  ‘There’s no point thinking about it until we know what happened,’ I said. ‘Tell me something else… tell me about my starring role in your film. How was my performance? Did you enjoy acting with me?’

  Eva sniffed into a laugh. ‘Other than you charging off in a stolen police car and then dying – you were very easy to work with. Iris loved your energy, she was almost heartless about it – though that’s just how she deals with stress – she sounds much more cruel than she is – but she said it’s the best breakdown she’s ever filmed. She kept watching back the footage of you running away. And she was shooting you passed out on the doorstep in the snow. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘What about our actual scene?’ I asked. ‘Before the three Ring
os showed up. Did they like me?’

  ‘They wished we’d gone on all day. Amélie kept saying “he’s perfect, he’s perfect,” even after we thought you might never regain consciousness. It’s the best scene in the film. I mean Iris is a genius – but she needed someone who could really howl.’

  ‘So don’t you want to invite me back?’

  She laughed. ‘Amélie was pushing for you to be given more to do, but Iris can’t just change the film she’s planned – and we’ve already shot half of it.’

  ‘So? I can be in the second half.’

  ‘That’s what I said. But we’ve booked stages and locations and planned scenes already, we’ve got actors and extras and advertisers lined up – Amélie is adaptable but Iris is stubborn – she hates changing her plans, even when it would be good for her. And as she has pointed out – you’re unknown. So basically – we need you but we can’t have you.’

  ‘No…’ I said slowly. ‘What you’re saying is I have to become known. That’s easy.’

  I turned my face to look out of the window – and saw a procession of wagons coming the other way, loaded with stage sets painted the colours of a warmer climate. The wagons were being dragged by giant grey-green pigeons, their wings clipped, their beaks muzzled – and on them rode little beggar girls, too small for the reins, singing songs so sweet that they seemed somehow despairing. They were part of a troupe of actors, perhaps – that had mastered illusion so completely that their plays had the energy of nightmares – romances between beasts and spirits, hyenas and women, rivers and children – that combined slapstick with elegy and pastoral with porn. Perhaps these actors did magic tricks, too – and turned their audiences into rats, but never turned them back – and had no eyes – and had bones made of the songs the girls were singing – or were even entirely made of songs, and make-up, and masks, and not flesh at all. Their performances sometimes started riots, perhaps, and lasted weeks – or were over in a few minutes, after which none of the spectators could remember their childhoods. A girl threw a ticket at me as she passed – but it hit the glass and blew away.