Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  He cuffed my collar exactly as he had three nights ago and pulled me into the Rockway’s interior.

  ‘He’s not looking to find no one,’ he said.

  ‘Wait – is he here?’ I asked.

  He pushed me against the wall and patted me down, searching each pocket before searching Dawn’s handbag.

  ‘You’ll wish he weren’t,’ he said.

  ‘I thought I’d have to make you summon him from somewhere,’ I said, with the confidence of opiates in my blood. ‘This is much easier.’

  He grunted in reply, and escorted me towards the bar. We passed a booth in which two of my canal-side attackers were sitting, their faces still mottled by our meeting. I waved enthusiastically – they jumped up. The bouncer shook his head at them and they did not approach.

  ‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve died enough times for one week, I think. I’ve come to offer my services.’

  ‘What’s they going to be then?’

  ‘That’s for Kimber to learn,’ I said.

  There was no money or guns on any tables this time, but somehow the Rockway felt even more alien than before. The atmosphere had thickened, or darkened – like the empire that was run from here had begun to corrupt it – into a hostile epicentre, haunted by spirits of the vengeful dead.

  He pushed me down the corridor towards the toilets. ‘He’s gonna eat you alive.’

  I walked, unworried, into the scent of stale ale and urine – and knocked on the ladies’ door. ‘It’s Leander,’ I said. ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Enter.’

  I stepped sideways into the gloom. Quickly the door shut behind me. Kimber was pacing in a circle, illuminated only by the bulb above the sink. He had washed and groomed, and dressed in a pressed maroon suit. His body had none of the focus of our last meeting – he seemed diffuse. He looked briefly at me and then returned his gaze to the space beneath the hand-dryer where Dawn had died, as though imagining her body there still. His eyes lacked the metaphysical fervour of his meth personality, but his pacing suggested he had not regained full control of himself.

  ‘Hi Daddy,’ I said, smiling. ‘I hoped you’d be harder to find. Isn’t this –’ I gestured around the bathroom ‘– a little over-obvious?’

  ‘Leander, welcome back. You… surprise me. I did not expect you to be so… buoyant.’

  He sounded like he couldn’t yet accept that I was in the same room as him. The sandalwood in his voice had soothed from an oil to a lather. And there was a flicker of another uncertainty in it, too, which I read as desire – or shame at desire, or shame at a sexual past far from his present mood. I crossed the room to sit beneath the sink, in the posture he’d discovered me in after Dawn overdosed. He stopped and stood against the dryer with his hands behind his back. I noticed the lump on the side of his head where I’d struck him with the bottle. It matched the wound I’d given Dawn.

  ‘Why should I not be buoyant?’ I asked eventually. ‘You think an hour or two of unsolicited penetration is going to unsettle me? It was vanilla by my standards. I’ve been tortured by my own body for ten years – anything else is fun in comparison. I’m only worried that you don’t remember all of it – how is your head?’

  He lifted a hand to stroke the swelling in his skull. ‘I’ve never been in this much pain before,’ he smiled. ‘On the inside and the outside of my head – you’ve done more damage than my competitors have managed in decades. It’s impressive.’

  ‘Being the sole agent of chaos is so boring,’ I said, trying to imitate his speech patterns. ‘I’ve been unstimulated all my life. And then you came along with your “canal-side initiation”, and your job offer – and I decided to make a bid for your attention.’

  Kimber patted his head wound as he worked out how to reply. ‘My attention has never been less acute. I can think only of one woman… And you’re not even an echo of her. You don’t understand what you took from me.’

  He sounded exhausted.

  ‘Do you have to claim I took anything?’ I asked. ‘Now that we’ve calmed down, can’t we agree that the only person to blame was Dawn? We should be each other’s way of remembering her. I needed a father figure, you need a son – and you’ve already articulated this, in more intoxicated terms… but our dynamic remains the same. We are compatible. And that should be cherished.’

  ‘That is… an unexpected angle,’ he said. ‘How do you stay amused? You come to me at my most abandoned. But you are the reason why I have been abandoned.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be high enough to come here,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d have to follow a trail.’

  ‘My dear, I am invisible when I need to be. The police raided a few times. But everyone else has dispersed. I stay because I require rituals. This is my wife’s last resting place. I came here to mourn, although there is no body to mourn – her son has committed her to ash. And he cannot be forgiven for that.’

  ‘That’s partly what I needed to talk to you about,’ I said. ‘The other son.’

  ‘Only partly?’ he asked, his tone ironic for the first time. ‘It was cruel of you to leave Francis to my employees.’

  ‘Possibly too cruel,’ I said. ‘While I think you deserved your concussion, I don’t think Francis deserved his… abduction, or whatever you’ve put him through.’

  ‘I haven’t yet had the heart to punish him. But… there have to be repercussions. It is strange that you thought it wise to come here.’

  ‘Is it?’ I asked, with a bolder sarcasm. ‘Turning up before you found me puts me at an advantage. I need your help; you need my help. Yesterday we helped each other emotionally. Today, we need to help each other economically.’

  Kimber wiped his mouth with his sleeve, unsure how to answer. ‘You have… nothing,’ he said at last. ‘You have walked into your tomb.’

  I grinned. ‘I have a gift for you. A token of goodwill.’

  I removed the memory card from my pocket and held it out to him. He stepped towards me and took it with an eyebrow raised – and his touch passed into the taste of a banana-like ester in my mind – and then into the colour of an unripe banana’s skin. Similarly, my touch evoked a change in his posture – as his skin remembered our intimacy.

  I knew his resolve could be loosened. He took out a camera from his pocket, inserted the card, and stepped back to the dryer to study the footage.

  ‘You deleted nothing?’ he asked.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘You… have preserved your video,’ he said, pressing play and releasing Francis’ screams from the camera’s speaker.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘This could have been a bargaining chip. You should have demanded something for it.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t. I need you to trust me – and so I need you to have a little bit more power over me. And that’s what this is.’

  ‘But, my dear, you have allowed me this power. As my wife warned me – you want people to think they are driving you, when you are being driven to where you want. I do not trust this gift.’

  ‘Well I made copies.’

  ‘I’m not sure you did. You like high-risk gambles. That is not appealing in a business partner.’

  He put the camera in his pocket.

  I closed my eyes to think of a reply – and was immediately among the castles that I often saw on heroin – the sky-bridges and buttresses that built themselves out of nothing – and tessellated into each other to form parapets and battlements and dungeons and domes. Neither humanity nor its physics were present in this city – it was living alabaster, without foundation or finish – immortal – until, one evening, say, a fireball appears from behind the stars, and falls – annihilating the air.

  ‘Let me be more appealing, then,’ I said. ‘I have the personal number of the detective chief inspector who heads the task force currently hunting for you. I propose to entrap him and kill him. Would that quell your suspicions? My allegiance is not to the police.’

  ‘I exp
ect not. But how would that prove your allegiance to me?’

  ‘I brought this task force to your doorstep. But I have not revealed your identity to them – yet. They want me to, and that’s why they have given me this.’ I slowly drew the snitch phone from my pocket and held it up for him in my palm. ‘I am proposing myself as bait.’

  Kimber looked at the phone and then at me – as though in fresh disbelief that I was even here, speaking to him so playfully, so unmarked by the violence he’d inflicted upon me. My lack of fear intrigued him. His body language was changing – his muscles tensing in a different way – no longer in suspicion, but in the alertness that precedes arousal.

  ‘They have other evidence,’ he said. ‘Killing him will stop nothing.’

  ‘Killing him would be a start.’ I said, adjusting my position beneath the sink, with my hand still held out – cricking my neck to seem bored of this conversation, convinced that it was going to go my way. ‘We would then need to provide a different suspect… But I shall present my proposals in stages, to protect myself – until you trust me.’

  ‘This is all rather rococo, don’t you think?’ he said, slipping into the eastern European accent he’d had at the height of his intoxication. ‘I prefer simplicity. For instance, I kill you, I disappear. No baiting, no double-crossing, no wasting of time.’

  ‘Killing me now would be the waste of time,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome to do so. But it would be dull. As Chekhov points out in every short story – life is difficult and uninteresting, and only docile cart-horses put up with it for long. But life does not have to be uninteresting today. You don’t know how much the police know. So why waste an opportunity to mislead them? Let me prove my worth.’

  I held his gaze. He said nothing, but I could tell his will was weakening. He was ready to be seduced – not sexually, necessarily, but emotionally – enough to let me take him on a dance…

  ‘I know you want to see what I can do,’ I said. ‘You’ve been the master too long. You know how to conduct and control. Let me try. Let me surprise you. And then you can shoot me as many times as you want.’

  He looked away – but then took the phone from my hand, against his better judgement, and slowly reviewed its menus.

  ‘How do I know that this number can call who you say it can call?’ he asked.

  But his words were just formalities now – he was letting his reason be overruled.

  ‘Who else could it be?’ I asked. ‘I’ll set him a test if you want. He needs to hear my voice, though, if we’re going to lure him somewhere – we can’t just text him.’

  ‘How can a policeman prove he’s a policeman?’

  ‘I can ask him about “The Rockstar”,’ I said sweetly.

  Kimber stiffened – finally appreciating that I had more hooks in him than he’d thought.

  ‘Is that why you chose to buy a bar called the Rockway?’ I pushed. ‘You could have gone anywhere in London. But you couldn’t resist a bit of wordplay…’

  ‘All right…’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can… be useful. Provide me with the name of a rat and I shall allow you to play your game.’

  He passed me back the phone. His finger stayed on mine.

  This was the end of our foreplay. And now that I knew he’d give in, it was time for a provocation. I selected my contact and called it on speakerphone. In four rings it was answered.

  ‘Yes?’ asked Detective Chief Inspector Sanam.

  ‘Hi, it’s Leander. Can we talk?’

  ‘This is sooner than I expected.’

  ‘There is some information I need from you, before I can give you my information,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Kimber crouched, two fingers on his lips, listening in calculation.

  ‘What alias did you use when communicating with “The Rockstar” on the dark web?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t reveal that.’

  ‘I need to seem to have information, to gain their trust.’

  ‘Whose trust? Where are you?’

  ‘Just tell me. I need it.’

  ‘I can’t reveal that,’ Sanam said. ‘But… I can tell you that “The Rockstar” has spent the past three weeks trying to sell a fourteen year old girl named Cherry.’

  I looked up at Kimber. His eyes had widened above a sly smile. He nodded.

  ‘Ok, that’s good enough for me,’ I said. ‘The information I wish to give to you is – you’re on speakerphone and I’m being held in the toilets of the Rockway bar again, by a man who wants to kill me, come quickly —’

  Kimber, tricked, kicked the phone from my hand and punched me in the nose so hard that it cracked. My blood flushed with a havoc of astral purples – purple blues, solar blues, collapsing stars. I tasted marzipan, and in the back of my mind a belt glinted with my sweat – blending towards a latex taste that remembered the semen he’d forced in my mouth.

  ‘Wait wait wait wait,’ I stammered, shielding my face.

  He was panting. I wanted to reach for his crotch and gently clench it – but I did not. The tension had to remain unaddressed – perhaps until he was no longer sober, or perhaps indefinitely – since sex would not be enough for me, anyway – sex would be much too straightforward.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let me ring him,’ I said. ‘It would be pretty stupid to kill me now… We’ve got five minutes to get out of here.’

  Kimber took his gun from his pocket and cocked it. He was shuddering in an anger indistinguishable from arousal – I’d returned him to the memory of the room we’d shared, his blood surging as he thought of me on the floor before him, cuffed and naked, his foot on my chest.

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘It would be poetic to kill you here.’

  ‘The police will be here before you could hide a body or murder weapon. There’s no time for poetry. We have to leave.’

  I risked a full meeting with his eyes – his face was flittering uncertainly. I had the advantage.

  ‘I said I’d surprise you,’ I said. ‘Every seduction needs some surprise… a little titillation, a little fear. And though I do prefer my acts to have symmetry – killing me here wouldn’t be symmetrical enough.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, more quietly. ‘Beauty is dented symmetry. And you deserve to die beautifully.’

  But he did not shoot. I closed my eyes and imagined a marble statue beside me – it looked like me but without my wounds – and it had two faces, though the face on the back of the head could only be seen in shadow – so I held up a mirror to see both of the faces at once – and in this mirror I saw also my own face – and our three faces together – marble and shadow and flesh – became one face, of neither marble nor shadow nor flesh – and this new face was somehow not me at all, but an other – and this other was called Beauty.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but there’s another act to go before then. It’s in your interest to leave with me. You already said – I have unique skills. You could use them for your work. Look at how I just tricked you. I can help you elude the police. I can help you get back your empire. I can help you expand it. Everything I’ve done was just to make space for myself in your world. I’m as ambitious as you. I want to be your protégé. I want you to teach me how to rule men, I want you to teach me how to be invisible. I want to be your son.’

  He twitched at this last sentence, but didn’t say anything. He lowered his gun and lifted his face to the ceiling – like he knew he was making a mistake but was choosing it anyway.

  ‘I’m a wanted man,’ he said at last, with a voice of softer sandalwood – not a lather any more but an emollient, smooth and intimate, almost soothing, almost sad. ‘I can’t come anywhere.’

  ‘Who says you’re wanted?’ I asked. ‘The police don’t know your name. They don’t have the body of the officer you shot. The only witness they know about – is me. And I haven’t named you – yet. But they have their suspicions. And so when you leave, you need to be disguised.’

  ‘
I have disguises,’ he said, nearly at a murmur, arching towards me with his eyes closed.

  ‘We need to be quick,’ I said, with more authority.

  I stood.

  ‘You… really believe you can be the one driving?’ he asked.

  His tensions were resolving into compliance. I almost smiled at how easily I’d won him. Perhaps his concussion had impaired his reason.

  ‘I parked out back,’ I said, taking his hand. ‘But you’ll be doing the driving.’

  He pocketed his gun, but hesitated. I opened the door and tugged him out after me. We ran, our arousal elevated by the threat of the police – away from the bar, down the corridor, and through swing-doors into a kitchen – and a brightness stunned me, and I halted.

  Kimber overtook me, pulling me to the left of a stainless-steel table, past a row of stoves, dishwashers, and sinks, to a tall steel cupboard. Within hung an array of uniforms – riot cop, fireman, paramedic, plumber. I gazed at them in confusion, my hand over my eyes to lessen the glare, the opiates in my blood stirring time into a series of skipping triangles. He briefly fingered a blue boilersuit, but unhooked a motorcycle helmet instead, and chose to wear that only.

  His actions had an after-trail as my vision tried to keep up – the kitchen was accelerating. His eyes were concealed now behind a visor that mirrored mine instead – reducing my reading of him to touch alone. But touch was enough to read his desire.

  We ran past a row of red propane tanks, to the back exit – opened it with a push bar – and ran out into the cold. I reached the car before I felt the rain. The ground snow had slurried to a dirty curd, though the drizzle above us still flirted with ice. I threw Kimber the keys from Dawn’s handbag. He unlocked the car as I rounded the bonnet.

  A police siren advanced from a few blocks away. He started the engine. My bones were sunbeams.

  ‘Drive east,’ I said. ‘Before you kill me, you need to make me immortal.’

  5.

  Kimber accelerated away from the police siren. Again I remembered Francis buckling this seatbelt across me, on the night we first escaped from here. Our roles were nearly reversed now – but still, like then, I refused to simplify my operation into a mere rescue. There were other gains to be made.