Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  ‘And you have to convince Iris you’re worth the trouble,’ Eva said, dispelling the dream.

  ‘But she secretly thinks I’d be good?’ I asked.

  ‘Directors don’t usually change their idea of a film in the middle of a shoot.’

  ‘Of course they do. That’s how all films are made. And I’m an exception. Your shoot wasn’t going well. You invited me. You need something more unpredictable – I can provide that. I just have to convince Iris that I can bring value to her film both on-screen and off.’

  ‘I’d be happy to watch you try,’ she said. ‘But you have everything else to deal with. You need to rest. You need to… I don’t know. Maybe you do need a distraction. Iris does want to talk to you. She took a good photo of you by the way – do you remember doing that? In her studio – your shoot, smiling with your eye bruised shut. I told her to email the best one to you, I thought it’d cheer you up.’

  She took her phone out of her handbag and selected an image to show me. In it, I posed before a blank wall – topless, winking, black-eyed and impish. Iris had succeeded in capturing a heightened version of the me I most often pretended to be. This me loved pain above myself – my bruises were my delight, and my confidence came from the damage.

  ‘She is good at that, isn’t she?’ I said in awe. ‘That’s the best picture anyone’s ever taken of me. I love it. But I don’t have a phone that can get emails anymore – I’ve got a snitch phone now.’ I took it out and waved it at Eva with a sarcastic cheer. ‘The policeman gave it to me… I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with it. I should just send him emoticons and ignore him when he rings me back.’

  Eva examined the tiny screen with curiosity. ‘God, it can’t even count calories. It has a very old-school crack-dealer aesthetic.’

  ‘I know, the police probably confiscate them all the time. Shame they’ve wiped the contacts – we could have bought ourselves the finest crack in London.’

  She handed it back. ‘I think it’s for the best that you can’t access crack just yet – while you’re still recovering.’

  ‘Who said I couldn’t? Just not the finest crack. I can make-do with mediocrity.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that go against your whole elitist ethos?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of demi-god, watching humans suffer from your hammock? Demi-gods don’t settle for mediocre crack.’

  ‘How did you develop such a flattering conception of me?’

  ‘I’m just repeating what you told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you came back to mine,’ she said. ‘On Tuesday. When this all began. You made me look up the definition of Epicureanism.’

  ‘I’m so embarrassing,’ I smiled. ‘But you were supposed to be drunk. You’re not allowed to pay attention to the things I say.’

  ‘I’m not going to forget any of it. It was fun. Even though you were stealing Francis away behind the scenes – and you were the reason I was miserable. It was fun. It’s a better plot twist than anything Iris has come up with.’

  ‘Plots twists are so bourgeois,’ I said. ‘You did what you did and I did what I did because of desire. It wasn’t actually a surprise. Everything should happen with a sense of inevitability. I like doom. Not just conflict or hope or transformation – I want doom.’

  ‘You are kind of a doom,’ she laughed.

  ‘Not anymore, I’m a changed man.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I had a vision of myself dead in the snow.’

  ‘That actually happened.’

  The taxi had come to Wandsworth Bridge. The Thames had turned the colour of skinned seals – and was as elusive and fat as a seal after yesterday’s snow – though the snow had been too alien to last long in autumn, so the sky was only spitting now – and I thought of crossing the same bridge with Dawn a few days ago – when the sun had flashed in my eyes and I’d had the sudden urge to injure her – and, in a kind of delirium, I’d obeyed the urge.

  ‘But I have to unfreeze myself somehow,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in an airlock for too long. I need to let my sense of self become co-dependant, so that other people can affect me, otherwise I will always just be in the snow, outside. I want to be… I dunno. I’m not sure yet.’

  ‘You should want to feel safe. I don’t feel safe. I don’t want to end up like Francis…’

  She had tried to be jokingly callous – but her last sentence tripped in her throat, and tears returned to her eyes. I stroked her thigh with the back of my hand.

  ‘Humour is ok,’ I said. ‘Everyone needs something terrible to happen to them at least once in their lives – to make them interesting. Disaster will improve him.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said, crying. ‘We don’t even know if… we don’t know what’s happened to him.’

  ‘Fine, tell me about… tell me how you met him. Give me a living memory.’

  ‘I met him on a shoot,’ she sniffed. ‘It was on a beach in Brighton. Nearly two years ago. It was very cold. I had to get the train there at 5 a.m. And I can’t remember what the concept was but it was really basic, like forbidden love during wartime or some shit. And there was a massive team. I think it was for… I don’t remember. It was a massive budget – and there was all these different archetypes – like I was the up and coming actress – so stupid. And when we took a break, I was tired so I walked down the beach, around sunrise, it was still pretty dark, and I was dreaming of turning the sea into coffee and swimming in it. I don’t think I’d had sex in like eighty-five years. And Francis was sitting on a wall ahead of me. And he had loads of make up on – like a heroic bruise to look like he’d come back from the war with conveniently handsome injuries. Like yours. And he was so cocky. He was singing to himself and when he saw me he sang even louder and he kept eye contact with me when he stood up and reached out his arms – and made me dance with him when he was singing. And he chatted me up. I said I didn’t know anyone on the shoot and he said he did but they were all shit so it was good that I’d come away to keep him company. He was the first model I met who didn’t make me long for his euthanasia – I mean, he still had the arrested development you get with all pretty straight men – or straight-seeming, whatever – but he was actually funny, and not just gormlessly boyish like the other guys there – and they were from a different agency anyway, called like Tomorrow Is Another Day, though it should have been called White Mediocrity because I’ve never been more underwhelmed – but Francis was actually attractive, and he made me laugh – he probably made me fall in love with him right there – and I think I told him, I wasn’t even trying to be coy, I told him I’d been having more sex on screen than in real life – and he said we should change that. And the shoot went on till about four – and afterwards we were all supposed to take the same train back, but him and me stayed behind and walked around Brighton, up the little hill-streets – and we fucked in the toilets of a Cornish pasty shop. It was fun. It was the opposite of the glamorous lies of the shoot. And then he messaged me loads – and we started hanging out.’

  ‘What was he singing?’

  ‘I have no idea. Some Sixties song. He has a terrible voice – but that made me like him more. And he had this cocky smile when he was singing – waving his head around, looking at me with this cocky smile, like he knew how easy it would be to make me like him.’

  ‘He’s never sung to me,’ I said indignantly.

  She smiled. ‘He’s less self-confident around you. He was all ego till you showed up. Maybe he never loved me.’

  I wanted to say that Francis was just a fantasy, like any model – to be exploited for his youth and height and symmetry – and preyed upon, just as he was preyed upon by the older men of his industry who’d been poisoned into resentment by the illusions they themselves were spinning – I wanted to say that Francis was an impossible body – to be starved, drained, and spat out once his few years of usefulness were over – a replaceable part in an endless production line – and I
wanted to say this, but I couldn’t, because I didn’t believe it anymore. Or, I still believed this – but I also believed something else – something about myself, too, perhaps – that Francis was no longer simply a screen for me to project onto – that the screen had rebelled and become a projector too – while the projector, me, had become a screen – and so I’d been altered.

  The taxi had stopped – we were back at Francis’ doorstep. I got out, supressing a smile – because Francis had indeed loved her, or thought he had – but did no longer, since I’d made him into someone else. He’d been altered as much as me. But my sense of triumph was swiftly dispelled by the knowledge of his absence. My muscles felt like whisked egg whites.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought you wanted to pick something up?’ she said. ‘He’s not in. There’s no point.’

  I swayed towards the hedge and found beneath it the camera I’d stolen from Iris. But among the leaves were thorns – and on one of the thorns was the impaled corpse of a goldfinch.

  I recoiled – from behind me, a larger bird with grey and white plumage hopped out – unafraid, its eyes masked in black. I thought of the crow that had killed a squirrel on our car – and wondered whether it had been inspired by this shrike – this butcher bird, impossibly rare, perhaps the only one in London this autumn. Maybe it had strayed here from Wandsworth Common, drawn to the aftertaste of my heart attack.

  The shrike disappeared – and I couldn’t be sure it had ever been there – but as I stood up, a jab of orange crossed my blood-brain barrier, like I’d snorted a line of paprika – and ‘shrike, shrike, shrike’, repeated after it around my head.

  I shivered to the front door and rang the bell, twitching as the sound brought back memories of dissolving here. Nobody answered.

  Eva beckoned to me from the taxi, but I refused to fail again. So I picked up the brick that held the gate open and walked round the house to the lane beside it. I struck the utility room window with the brick until the glass shattered and the frame bent inwards. Now unlatched, I swung the window open and jumped up to it to pull myself in. No alarm went off. I vomited from the exertion – my stomach wailed and grew fangs – but still I dragged my legs over the washing machine, and dropped onto the floor. The smell of washing powder overcame the vomit – and I was pulled into a memory – of Francis hugging me on Dawn’s bed at gunpoint, my face in his chest. And this association brought with it the scent of gunpowder – the same as the phosphoric residue left in the air by fireworks – not quite metallic, not quite nostalgic, not wintry, but nearly all three. I forced myself to stand. The scent dispersed. I limped into the corridor and opened the front door from the inside.

  Eva paid the driver in uncounted notes and leapt out and ran towards me.

  ‘What did you just do?’ she shouted.

  ‘I did what I should have done ages ago. I broke in.’

  ‘You’re fucking bleeding – you just ripped your stitches open!’

  ‘Whatever, we have a house now.’

  ‘Did you – how are we going to…’ She was too shocked to form sentences.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘We can fix the window later. I saw a shrike! Come inside. I needed some stuff.’

  ‘What? Is that Iris’ camera?’

  I removed the memory card from the camera and put it in my coat pocket – and then hung the camera around Eva’s neck.

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘And you need to give it back to her.’

  She closed the front door. ‘I can’t believe you just broke in.’

  ‘I try to violate every space I enter,’ I said. ‘Something to do with not having a home of my own.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I dunno. Come upstairs.’

  We glanced in passing at the kitchen, and both had the same memory – of Eva’s scorned-woman performance a few days ago – when she’d hurled cutlery at me before fleeing with bleeding wrists.

  ‘Quite a lot has changed since we were last here,’ she said dryly.

  Walking upwards sent shocks across my ribcage – I bent into the pain, tackling myself, tasting grapefruit, as a grapefruit-pink filter passed over my eyes. My muscles were refilling with ultramarine. I shoved Francis’ door open with my shoulder.

  ‘We were enemies and now we are allies,’ I said grandly, trying to distract myself.

  ‘Not really,’ she said, following me inside. ‘It was never that equal. I lost Francis and now you’ve lost him. But it’s not neat.’

  ‘So… we should stop looking for patterns and just do heroin.’

  I fell onto my knees and crawled around Francis’ bloodstained bed towards Dawn’s handbag. Eva stopped.

  ‘Is that why you broke in?’ she asked, disgusted by this evidence of my addiction.

  ‘It’s only partly why. And don’t moralise at me. You try having scarab beetles inside your intestines your whole life – you would kill for a temporary cure.’

  The topmost fold of foil still had a fat trail of residue left from the last time I’d used it. I took out a pipe and a lighter, perched on the bed, hunched, and heated the remaining heroin resin – to breathe in the familiar tainted fume until my stomach hushed.

  I remembered the taste of the rust of the Rockway bathroom tap, drunk from as Dawn died and the door was kicked in – but this taste slipped sideways, invigorating the other hospital opiates in my blood – towards a bitterness similar to grapefruit – but closer to grape seed. I closed my eyes to think in one colour – the thin white green of a grape. And after three inhalations, I was restored.

  Eva lay on Francis’ side of the bed.

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer me some?’ she asked.

  I passed her the lighter and the foil.

  ‘I kind of hoped there would be someone waiting for me here,’ I said.

  ‘You mean Francis?’ she asked, heating her own dose.

  ‘No, some henchman. I thought I’d be abducted. That would make life a lot easier.’

  ‘What are you talking about? How would that be easier?’

  She put aside the foil and leaned over to kiss me. Our lips shared the taste of tar. I lowered alongside her and let her move over me as her hands moved under my coat. A cello string began plucking in my head. I felt like I had someone else’s body. I unbuttoned her jacket, encouraged by her smile – but turned my head away – into Francis’ pillow, into the scent of his coconut oil.

  She kissed me. ‘What?’

  ‘I… don’t want to,’ I said.

  ‘But this is… isn’t this exactly the kind of perverse shit you like? We’re in Francis’ bed…’

  ‘I know but…’

  ‘Your paper trousers aren’t hiding anything.’

  ‘Yeah but… I can’t.’

  I tried to roll away from her, but she held me down.

  ‘Isn’t this why we came here?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, it was, but —’ I kissed her slowly and sat up under her. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Don’t tell you me you’ve developed a conscience.’

  ‘No – I’m attracted to you,’ I said, pulling off my trousers in proof. ‘But my will is stronger than… My body is my enemy. I have to…’

  I didn’t finish my statement, perhaps because I didn’t have a statement to finish – and instead took a pair of trousers out of Francis’ drawer and dressed in them. Grapefruit-pink and grape-red and grape-green marbled around each other in front of me in a curtain, dizzying me. I managed to find two grey sweatshirts as well and a pair of socks and black boots.

  Eva stood up, swaying between anger and distress – and rushed into the bathroom. She slammed open the toilet and vomited – her concerns soon erased by the heroin’s nausea. The plucking of the string was fading into the sound of rustling wheat.

  I picked up Dawn’s handbag and crept away – down the stairs, out of the front door, across the road to the car. It answered to the keys in her bag. Bubbles of grape juice rose up my spin
e, cold, tingling like nettles – until I imagined the taste of nettles too, boiling in water that was somehow still cold. I climbed into the car and my senses jolted, remembering my last drive in it, with Francis – roughly pulling my seatbelt across me as we fled the Rockway. I shuddered – thinking of the shrike and the crow.

  I was the driver now, though this journey wasn’t really my own decision – and I drove away, back to where I had to go.

  4.

  As I neared the Rockway, my thoughts became septic. To find Francis, I had to catch Kimber – and to catch Kimber, I had to summon all the poison in me to the surface until it seethed. All the predatory games that I’d played in rage at my own broken body, all my lusts, lies, sleights, tricks – all these had been rehearsals for this seduction. Perhaps I could atone for the pain I’d passed on to others, by making Kimber my last victim.

  What were his weaknesses?

  His failing sanity. His grief. And – his curiosity about me.

  Had I not told Iris – seducing bi-curious straight boys was my speciality? And had a stripper not once told me – there’s a difference between seduction and creating a desire to fuck? Both are manipulations of energy – but seduction is more multi-purpose, and that was what was needed here.

  I had to arouse Kimber enough for him to make a mistake. It would be a mistake for him to agree to play a game on my terms. It would be a mistake for him to get as high as he’d been yesterday. Ultimately, I needed to return him to the state he’d been in on meth – vulnerable, guilty, obsessed with family and fatherhood – and then, perhaps, I could get him to take me to Francis.

  But before then – sex, like all good advertising, had to stay subliminal.

  Though first I had to find him – and the only place I knew to start looking was at the Rockway.

  I got out of the car and floated across the street. The same steroidal bouncer guarded the door as before.

  ‘You’re mad coming back here lad,’ he said.

  ‘Your boss would have found me anyway.’