Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  I put Dawn’s phone on charge and played through its speakers a sixteen-minute-long song called ‘Sheep’, to prevent me from thinking about anything else. And as it played, I detached a ladle from the magnetic strip beside the stove, and tried the wine with it – and judged it too meek. So, I searched the cupboards for supplements – and added a few dashes of two different rums and a splash of blueberry liqueur. To allow these final notes to brew, I prepared an entrée meanwhile; on a clean sheet of tinfoil, I upended half a half-gram of heroin, rolled a foil pipe around the handle of a wooden spoon – and then repeated the healing heating ceremony that had begun my past few passages of consciousness – sucking the powder’s vapour into my lungs until my blood was dumb and there were fewer whispers in my head.

  At last, I strained my breakfast through a sieve and drank a litre or so of mulled wine directly from the bowl. For dessert, I ate four slivers of smoked salmon from the middle shelf of the fridge, with dill. But that made me thirst for more of the main course, and so I drank the rest of the bowl of mulled wine, and then risked three more huffs of the heroin entrée – completing my meal in reverse.

  I was full. And despite the music, I was unable to avoid my own thoughts any longer. So – what did I think? Well, where the fuck were the police? Surely a neighbour had heard a gunshot? Surely Francis had made some kind of complaint? Well, evidently not. How dull, again, to be the sole agent of confusion! I had alienated myself from my substitute families, systematically – until I had become king of this highest tower, with nothing to rule and nowhere to go.

  I recalled the bell-tower I’d dreamed of a few days ago, in the police car, when Francis had been beside me, and still wanted to be beside me – and I saw again a chain stretching from the bell towards a second tower, over the horizon – and the chain was now also a tongue that could speak – and it told me that the bell-towers I was dreaming of were the high-rises lived in by Dawn and Kimber, who were my mother and father – the addict and the dealer – or the endgame of the Enlightenment and the revenge on the Enlightenment, respectively – perhaps, hahahaah – but if I was their son, then who was I? I asked – and the tongue between the bell-towers couldn’t say – it just knew that I’d been raped in both and seen death in both – and had the keys to both towers – and that neither was my home.

  I knocked over the soup ladle – and the kitchen resumed itself. I picked it back up.

  ‘Maybe I can only love when what I love is absent,’ I said to my reflection in the curved steel. ‘Another convex mirror to confess to, Leander. Who are you now? I promised to quit my act on Francis’ doorstep. But that was just another act, wasn’t it? I take back my palinode, then. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s letting me in. So let me be my worst self instead. I want fire – so I’ll end this with fire.’

  I turned on the camera and watched Nikolas rape me. Kimber’s cinematography wobbled, obscuring the point of entry – perhaps to hide Nikolas’ lack of erection. Or perhaps he was erect. Onscreen, my paint-filled hair whitened the wall with each thrust – reducing my body to a paintbrush. Perhaps Nikolas was weeping, or perhaps he was being forced to act out a fantasy he’d long forbidden from his own imagination, and so was actually being cured of a repression. Perhaps we had helped him realise himself. There was an inverse dramatic irony here, too – known to the participants, but unknown to any audience – that the violation of consent was the opposite of what it seemed: I had, more or less, consented to being raped for the camera; but Nikolas had not consented to raping me – he was doing so under duress. He was certainly too pure to have infected me; he hadn’t injured me; and he’d promised to put me on the cover of a magazine in return. So really, this had just been another transaction and he had just been another client.

  Half-convinced by this conclusion, and inspired – I set aside the camera and scrolled through Dawn’s phone, to see if her client list had been transferred from her old simcard. Happily, ‘Andrew Rich Newspaper Cunt’ survived. He’d already beaten me with a belt for £1,500 – and thus arguably begun the whole narrative that led me here – so he could surely assist me with its ending. I texted him: ‘its leander – pick up.’ And then, after letting the wine and heroin and music lull me awhile back towards confidence – I rang him.

  ‘H-hello?’ Andrew answered after one ring.

  At his voice, the whip wounds along my back twitched in pleasure – I remembered his touch, and its kingfisher colour, but not his face.

  ‘Hey – I was just thinking about you,’ I said, trying to sound fragile. ‘And, and I wanted to say I had a good time on Wednesday. Perhaps you’d like to do it again?’

  ‘You didn’t… you don’t – you weren’t hurt?’ He was timid in his sobriety, but could easily be returned to his lust.

  ‘Your belt was the best thing to happen to me all month,’ I said. ‘I like that you can be honest with me. I like feeling fantasies becoming real.’

  ‘You were… you seemed scared. Are you sure that…’

  ‘I was scared,’ I said, quietly. ‘But I like to be scared. I liked you scaring me. And scarring me. You can give me more scars, if you want.’

  He was moving somewhere quieter.

  ‘I’m not normally like that…’ he said at last. ‘I didn’t mean to be so —’

  ‘I liked making you feel good. And I thought… I could tell you something you might like to hear?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, almost intimidated.

  ‘Since you’re a newspaper man and – I thought you might like to hear – I’ve got a role in a film.’

  ‘Did you?’ His surprise shifted. ‘Um… what kind of film?’

  ‘A real film. The director’s Lars Vasari.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of him.’

  I leaned back against the wall, drooping in a wave of sedation as more heroin bound to my brain – and I glimpsed the ceiling of a chapel – a lapis lazuli sky with gold leaf stars – and I heard a hymn, sung by children – of peace, harmony, war, and death – and these contradictions were solved by the music, but not by the building – whose walls, I now saw, depicted angels enslaving each other with manacles of ice and leashes of snow.

  ‘I’m one of the leads. But we’re trying to keep the details quiet.’

  ‘How did you… get this?’

  ‘I wanted to do something that would impress you,’ I said. ‘So I auditioned – I used a friend to get me an audition. It was quick, I was replacing someone. And I thought you might like to know. And I thought maybe you might want to help me...’

  ‘I can help,’ he said, his voice finally paternal. ‘We can get you more… I can get you some press, maybe – what do you want?’

  ‘I just want to see you again. And I want… I —’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I see you again?’ I asked, more tentatively.

  ‘You – yeah…’ he stammered. ‘I will need to… work out a timetable. But um…’

  ‘That’s good. I just want… That. But can I say another thing? It’s separate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard a…’ I hurried towards the front door to read Kimber’s address off the junkmail on the mat. ‘I don’t want to do anything else with the police – but I was, I got scared and so I rang you. When the – I’m staying in a bad place. And last night, I heard a shot – next door. I think it was a gun. But I don’t want to report anything so… can you – do it?’

  ‘Who are you with? Where are you?’

  ‘I want to leave but I’m too scared – to go outside in case there’s… I don’t know who’s there. It’s flat 45, Alverton Tower – it’s near Victoria. Can you just tell the police there was a gunshot? I’m alone. And I didn’t know who to call. I’ve got Dawn’s phone so I can’t call her. I feel like somehow there are all these bad men around me, I dunno… I just, I wanted to call you and thought maybe you could help me.’

  ‘Do you want me to come get you?’ he asked, his concern pleasingly possessive.

&nbs
p; ‘Just tell – I just want – can you just tell the police to get here? But don’t tell them I’m here. I don’t want there to be any… coincidences. And then I’ll feel safe. And then I – I want to see you properly, not like this.’

  ‘Ok. I’ll do that. You don’t have to worry. I’m —’

  ‘And then can I see you?’ I asked again, hamming up my helplessness. ‘You just have to say when you’re free. And I’ll tell you when I’m safe.’

  ‘Yeah, tell me when you’re safe.’

  ‘Ok…’

  ‘Ok.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Ok. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Ok.’ I held my breath until he hung up.

  I deleted the call from Dawn’s history. On Kimber’s burner phone, I sent a group text to the same dozen recipients as his previous one, saying: ‘R. 7pm tonight PUNCTUAL, emergency, offline only, no plus-1s’. I deleted this text, too – and then put Dawn’s and Kimber’s phones into the microwave to spin until all their data was burnt away.

  Inebriation was overcoming me, reducing my present to a series of tasks whose climax I was hiding from myself. While the phones sparked, I washed up my breakfast. I binned the heroin foil. Beneath the sink, I found a bag of plastic bags and selected the most inauspicious one – red, logo-less, from an off-license – and tied up inside it the set of keys labelled ‘Rockway’.

  I returned to Kimber’s bedroom and flung the bag out of the window. It fell into street-side shrubbery. My motives reeled through the outskirts of my thoughts, almost unconsciously, like I was obeying muscle memory rather than logic.

  As the heroin’s effects increased, I collected the rest of Kimber’s belongings – and the handcuff keys, and Dawn’s handbag, and my snitch phone – and put them back among his clothes. For tradition’s sake, I dabbed some of Dawn’s Savlon onto my stab wound. Finally, I removed Kimber’s dressing gown, resuming my nakedness, and hooked it back up to his door with a bow. It was time for my last seduction.

  I entered Francis’ former room and handcuffed myself to his former bed. And so self-imprisoned, ready for the police, I began pissing over the bed and over myself – and fell asleep.

  2.

  I was drunk when a policeman woke me. In my dream, my shoulders had been sawn off – and so, waking, I believed the policeman was digging his nails into their stumps. I yelled until I vomited, scrambling backwards – only realising that my arms were intact when the handcuff on my wrist halted my roll. Wine splashed over my skin. The cinnamon scent had soured into suet. But the sensation of throwing up was itself satisfying – like a gush through a gullet of fur.

  I wanted to shit myself too, but the constipating heroin had diminished my capacity for spectacle, sadly – and so my audience had to content itself with vomit. I twisted onto my knees, simulating terror at the entrance of two more officers. They tried to calm me with outstretched hands, but I screamed again, stood, and slammed backwards into the headboard, slipping in a puddle of my own piss.

  The adults stepped back, successfully appalled. I imagined them genuflecting before me as to a boy king: a chained whipped stabbed beaten naked bloodied painted drunken black-eyed cum-stained piss-soaked sick-spattered boy king. Never had a costume suited me so well. Kimber had said that seeming already caught was the most cunning disguise – but he hadn’t added that it was also the most euphoric. My pin-pupilled stare searched the faces of my saviours – unblinking, to goad new nausea from my sensitivity to light – and as I vomited again, I felt like I was confessing to them my true identity. I finally looked as tormented as my nerves had claimed to be for twenty years. Externalised for all to see – at last, here, my pain was valid!

  I could see that they were speaking – but the air swarmed with cawing ravens, and I couldn’t hear them above it.

  ‘The cuff!’ I shouted. ‘The handcuff key is in his pocket – find the key!’

  One of the policemen left in quest for this key, and another two parted to allow a policewoman to come through towards me.

  ‘He’s got a gun!’ I warned her. ‘Don’t go in there!’

  ‘It’s ok,’ she said.

  She rounded my bed to open the window. Cool air entered, the cawing quietened. Slowly she crouched beside me until she was equal to my eye level. She was young – maybe almost my age.

  ‘There’s nobody with a gun anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s ok. Focus on my voice. You’re safe. You’re ok. Can you tell me what day it is?’

  ‘Is it your birthday?’ I asked. ‘Or is it mine? There was an eclipse. Have you seen the supermoon? Today is the last day of the industrial era. In my opinion. We’re done with childhood, mommy! There’s a gun!’

  ‘Listen to my voice. My name is Constable Carr. It’s ok. I’m part of a specialist unit – you might have heard it called the Sapphire unit, and I’ve been trained to help you through this kind of… situation. Can you repeat after me – it is Sunday and I am safe.’

  Her words did not entirely conceal her revulsion – and somewhere beyond the heroin and the wine, I could sense my own fear – a fear that she might be too well trained to believe me, a fear that she could catch me somewhere in a lie – but still, I had to play on.

  ‘I am Sunday and it is safe,’ I said.

  ‘Can you tell me your name?’

  ‘That would be improper at this stage in our relationship. You may only know my star sign – I’m a sea-urchin, born under the meteor shower Daz, between the months of August and Laugust – with a mongoose-shaped scar on my tongue. Though you can call me Sunday if you wish.’

  ‘Ok Sunday, can you tell me how old you are?’

  ‘I’ll be thirty-four in a few years.’

  ‘How many years is a few years?’

  ‘That’s a question for small-print lawyers. I’m a big-print boy – or should I say man, legally speaking? – twenty-one years and none of them over! Although maybe you just have to arrange a sufficient ending for your childhood – and then the obsessions go. What do you think? Or what I mean is – I only read headlines. I can read your headline if you want.’

  ‘Ok,’ she said, with condescending patience.

  ‘“Constable Carr Builds Nest Inside Womb of Dying Dog.” That’s your headline.’

  ‘Do you feel like you’re…’

  ‘Dying?’ I asked. ‘Sundays can only die. That’s the secret to their vitality.’

  Her colleague returned to the room with the cuff-key and passed it to her, gagging from the reek of my sheets. I remained supine after she unlocked me – as if I was too unfamiliar with liberty to use it.

  ‘He’s not going to hurt you anymore,’ she said – and cautiously patted me near the knee.

  I shrieked in alarm and backed off the bed.

  ‘It’s ok – I’m not here to hurt you.’ She turned to the other police officers. ‘Can you step outside for a bit?’

  They left. I hugged my knees against the wall under the window, itching my wrist. My body was a raft adrift. Nothing was still. A wind curled around me till it clung. The sky was reflected in a mirror on the wall; the afternoon had nearly returned to typical British stalemate – its sleet had settled into mist, though thunder still threatened the edges.

  Constable Carr crouched by an armchair, two arm’s-lengths away. ‘Do you know how long you’ve been here?’ she asked.

  I met her gaze suddenly. ‘Ring Detective Sanam, there’s a Detective Sanam, he knows how long I’ve been here, I’ve been here for him.’ I imitated the rhythms of hysteria. ‘There’s a phone – he gave me a phone, in my clothes – next door. With his number. Ring Sanam. I’ll talk to him. Detective Chief Inspector Sanam. He did this to me.’

  ‘Ok. I can try to get him. But I’m going to need your name first. So can you please tell me your name?’

  ‘My name is No-one, but you can call me Elagabalus if you like, or Sunday, or… Anacoluthon, but nobody ever wants to see me, or be being seen seeing me.’

  ‘What do your friends call you?’ />
  ‘The catamite.’

  ‘What does the Detective Chief Inspector – Sanam, you said? What does he call you?’

  ‘Leander.’

  This seemed to exhaust her patience – she rose to re-open the bedroom door and stepped out to the other officers.

  ‘There’s a phone in my pockets next door!’ I shouted. ‘Check my pockets. The black trousers. Chief Inspector Sanam will answer me. He’s saved as “X”, he’s my only contact. He did this to me.’

  The officers conferred together a while longer, and then the constable returned – with blue gloves, a green case, and a camera.

  ‘This is a bit hard, but I’m going to need to take some photos of you,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to need to take a few samples. And then we’re going to clean you. Is that ok? I’m going to need to come closer to you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘I’m very photogenic.’

  ‘Can you stand up for me?’

  I stood, shakily – and in my dizziness I retched, but nothing came out. I shook against the sill, unable to meet my eyes in the mirror. As she photographed me, I thought of being in front of Iris’s blank wall – playing the predator, for her camera, half-hidden behind the façade of the gleeful beaten orphan. But here, in front of the window, for the police, I played the prey, with no glint of mischief or knowing grin. I winked into this lens because I had to wink – my eye was bruised shut without meaning.

  ‘Can you turn around please?’ she asked.

  I obeyed – and bent forwards, angling my body out into the air to gaze upon London from my privileged height. London wasn’t as overburdened by its past as other European cities, perhaps because, in order to become a citizen here, you had to master the art of suffering – which was an art of the present, since all suffering brings with it a softening amnesia – an amnesia that makes past suffering seem less real – but then also makes present suffering seem like it’s the worst it’s ever been.