Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  ‘I don’t know what video you mean,’ I said.

  ‘It is… distressing. I think for now it would be better if you just tell me what you can remember.’

  I took the camera from the table and switched it on, to play back Nikolas’ and my performance as if I had never seen it before.

  ‘I don’t remember this,’ I said.

  The chief inspector closed his hands around mine and covered the screen, though Nikolas’ grunts still played through its speakers.

  ‘Do you remember going into that house?’ he asked.

  ‘I remember phoning you from the toilets at the Rockway. I was with Kimber. He forced me to inhale paint thinner. I hallucinated. Then he water-boarded me with paint – a European twist on an American classic. What more could a young hung Londoner ask for? But I don’t know who this man is. I can help you catch him if you want, I can be bait again. I caught Kimber for you. And I escaped alive. As you said – I always escape alive. I can catch again.’

  ‘Definitely not. It would have been better if I’d never said that to you. And it would have been better if Kimber had been caught. His death is… complicating. You should not have gone to him. You escaped, with this drunken-boxer style of yours, but… you only just escaped, Leander. This was never what I expected you to do.’

  ‘Of course it was. You knew I’d find him. I’m an ulcer and I need flesh to disfigure. It was easy. He was at the Rockway. He could hide from you, but ghosts can see each other.’

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Yes?’ the chief inspector called.

  Constable Carr opened the door. ‘Ms Vasari is here, sir,’ she said.

  Sanam nodded. ‘Go home, Leander,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’ve done enough. And I’m sorry for it.’

  ‘Go home?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t there a whole gang out there that knows who I am? Aren’t I in danger?’

  ‘Kimber’s operation is over,’ he said. ‘They’re not in a position to be endangering anyone. The best thing that you can do is get some rest. So let Ms Vasari take you home.’

  ‘I don’t have a home!’ I said, inciting myself to anger. ‘You wanted me to be a weapon. You said I was a threat! And now I’m being dismissed? Fuck you! You don’t even know who I am, do you? You didn’t even fucking look me up. I’m in your database. You didn’t even look me up. You’ve taken my DNA enough times to build a fucking twin. I have thousands of twins, anyway, thousands of girls and boys forgotten in the same backstreets, for the same reasons. Am I not worth searching for? Or was it all wiped clean when I turned eighteen? Was I just deleted again? Shoved off the end of the last waiting list, pushed across one too many state in-trays – until the ink was worn down and I was massaged out of the statistics. You didn’t even look. I was thrown away! I was too young for your nets, that’s why I fell through all of them – and that’s how I learned to get away – you taught me – you’ve seen me so many times before, and you’ve forgotten, you’ll keep forgetting, you’ll always forget. I’ve seen you before – even though you had different names, and you had different faces – I’ve been abandoned before. But you should know who I am by now. I can’t go home. I don’t fucking have a home.’

  ‘Stop shouting, Leander.’

  ‘I don’t want this. I don’t want your forgiveness. I want a resolution! I want an ending!’

  ‘We can speak again when you’re sober.’

  ‘Can I at least keep the snitch phone?’ I asked, switching to comic plaintiveness.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. But Ms Vasari has my number if you wish to get hold of me.’

  He ushered me out of the kitchen. I hugged him goodbye, he pushed me away. Past the huddle of cops, Iris was waiting – in a red wide-brimmed hat and darker red overcoat. I stumbled to her. Wordlessly she took my hand and pulled me towards the lift. Constable Carr followed us and forced a string-bag of satsumas into my hands.

  ‘Stay safe Mock Turtle,’ she said. ‘I’m not forgetting you.’

  I smiled as the lift closed, and rested my head on Iris’ shoulder. Her coat smelt of shea butter. I gazed at her shoes – dark red leather with gold buckles. She hooked her arm around mine, steadying me down in silence. I heard no warble or cawing now – the drone in my head was neutral – and reflected nothing back at me. In my fatigue, I did not know whether my anger had been real or pretend.

  The street was steeped in fog the colour of tea. As we walked towards a car whose lights answered Iris’ key, we passed the bag I’d flung from the window. I retrieved it from beneath the bush.

  Iris did not react, but as I fingered the Rockway’s keys through its plastic, I began to feel apprehensive – as though everything was now more volatile. Nothing was resolved. There were threats without faces at the edges of my future. And the police had discarded me just as Francis had – into an unfinished crisis.

  Iris helped me into the passenger seat – and as she rounded the bonnet for the driver’s side, I lent back my head, alone – and inhaled slowly, to orient myself within my sloshing half-thoughts. Almost unknowingly, I was opening the bag in my lap – with a compulsion that felt the same as a suspicion – like I was completing a design that I’d been obeying for days, and that this was the final step – after which, it promised, I could attain my own kind of closure.

  4.

  Iris reversed from the tower.

  ‘What’s the time?’ I asked.

  ‘Nearly six.’

  ‘How’s it that late?’

  ‘The hours had other things to do.’

  My mind was ajar. The realisation that I had fooled the police – that it was over and I was getting away – was only slowly dawning upon me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘You know where we’re going. Francis wants you to come home. Because contrary to your outburst in the kitchen, you do have a home. Francis wants you to come home – to him. Eva’s there as well.’

  The teal in her voice had an amphibian dampness now – and as I stared at the windshield, I imagined this colour stamping pentagrams on the glass.

  ‘Francis thinks I’m disgusting,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to see me.’

  ‘He didn’t know what he was saying,’ Iris said. ‘He didn’t know what you’d been through. You didn’t explain yourself. I had to show him the video of you on his doorstep. And he saw you were trying to get back to him. Eva could have turned him against you, but you’ve seduced her as well, haven’t you? She was begging him to believe that you loved him. It was the most twisted emotional knot I’ve ever watched being tied. And you were the one tying it and you weren’t even there.’

  ‘I don’t always have the energy to be in two places at once.’

  ‘But I’ve seen you do it!’ she said, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘Like at the gallery. You were so upbeat with me there, you were so – there … but at the same time you were dealing with this whole other human trafficking counter-narrative. I’m impressed.’

  ‘It wasn’t a counter-narrative,’ I said. ‘It was the same narrative. Your industries are the same.’

  She didn’t reply. I tried to look out of the window – but it had thickened into the white walls of a gallery, the gallery of Iris’ exhibition – and it was dimming upwards into the curve of a planetarium, with Saturn on the ceiling – and, as before, the projection became real – and we actually were on Saturn – and soot around us clumped into graphite which lightning turned to diamonds – and the diamonds were raining over us, as swift as bullets, riddling our bodies into mince – and I thought of how little I feared ageing, and how annoying I found those who did – and we were diamonds too – until Saturn became a car again.

  ‘Can we drive somewhere else?’ I asked. ‘I have a meeting in Brixton. Francis doesn’t want to see me. I’ve burnt that bridge – and burning bridges is only satisfying when you want to get back to the other side. And can’t. He’s seen what I am and he doesn’t want it.’

  ‘That’s such bullshit. He’s seen… ugh, wha
tever – I’m taking you to him and you’re going to explain yourself. That’s that. Who are you supposed to be meeting in Brixton?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But just drive towards Brixton station. Please.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then you can do whatever you want to me.’

  ‘Ok.’ She moved into a lane that led to Lambeth Bridge. ‘But then you’re going home. You know… I should want to strangle you.’

  ‘You should want – but you don’t?’ I smiled.

  ‘I should, but I’m really just amazed. How did you manage to do all the ridiculous shit that you did while doing everything else?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘You come onto my set and within days the police are shutting down my film – and my producer has her laptop seized as evidence relating to the same gang you and Francis were abducted by.’

  I giggled at the colour-change in her voice – its teal was colder now, more reptilian, and stamping faster on the windshield.

  ‘What wrong with a little police raid? Sounds exciting for you.’

  ‘It delayed our shooting schedule.’

  ‘So now you have more time to use me.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Did you not like my scene?’ I asked, with an even more cloying innocence. ‘Don’t you think that you could get more out of me?’

  ‘Your scene in the kitchen just now with the police was even better. I didn’t realise you could do anger.’

  ‘Give me the right room and I can do anything,’ I said. ‘I’m already in your film – I want to be in it more.’

  ‘I know you do. But I don’t like being manipulated.’

  ‘You’re not being manipulated, you’re being seduced. This is what I told you I’d do.’

  ‘Is that what that is? When my agent congratulates me for somehow getting the star of my film on the cover of i-D magazine? And my film isn’t even half-finished? And he doesn’t mean Eva – but he meant you! How are you the star?’

  ‘Yes, that’s being seduced. What a delightful surprise. And not the star yet – but you can make me one.’

  ‘How do you even do that? Like what the fuck does that mean? Nikolas sent me an email saying he’s done an interview with you. But he’s not answering my calls. What did you do? This is so unnecessary. I hire people for their talent, not for their machinations. You can’t change my mind with random disruptive acts.’

  ‘My machinations are proof of my talent,’ I said, with a grand hand gesture. ‘The more unnecessary the better. And disruption is never random. I wanted to get your attention. I don’t need to change your mind – you already want me – I wanted to extract your desires, and startle you with them.’

  ‘By wrecking the lives of my co-workers?’

  I let my eyelids close – and imagined we were driving through the suburbs of a different town – in Italy, say – after a storm had churned up the cemetery and turned loose its graves, into the summer heat – so that the streets hung with crematorium smoke and the odour of rotting bodies – and I knew that the sound of crying widows would follow us a long way out of town, until a sea wind cleaned the air – and recalled to me the scent of the hospitals of my childhood and the hate I felt only in summer.

  ‘It was only one man,’ I said, leaving my reverie. ‘And Nikolas’ life isn’t wrecked. It’s just going to be more complicated now. And Amélie was only a little shocked, she’ll get her laptop back. Nothing that happened to them is as bad as what happened to me.’

  ‘You’re so ridiculous. Was this all planned? Was Francis a target to you? Am I just a target? And is being in my film even your endgame? Or am I another middle step in some insane staircase that only you can see?’

  ‘You think I had a heart attack on purpose?’ I asked, feigning anger. ‘You think I got chained up and raped on purpose?’

  ‘Is that… what happened?’ she asked, her aggression instantly gone.

  ‘That’s part of what happened.’

  ‘Is that what they found on Amélie’s laptop?’

  ‘Among other things,’ I said. ‘She should be happy to host some of my earliest video work. And your camera cares about similar things to Kimber’s – the exploitation of youth and youthful sexuality. And anyway – I was high. Do you really think I put it on her laptop purposefully to get at you?’

  The car crossed Lambeth Bridge – and with no buildings around us, the streetlights looked like upside-down narwhals, screwed into the stone by their horns, with the night sky as their bodies – or, reflected in the Thames, like blind whales’ eyes – glossy and impalpable, with the memory of distant centuries. Lambeth suited the autumn best, since this was the season it seemed to have been built for and out of – and more so now that so many of its houses were ghost houses – sold off fast within a few years to foreign trusts, which kept them unoccupied until their value doubled and they could be sold on again.

  I thought I saw a woman beside us in a dress of blue and white check, like an alpine milkmaid, with a sunbonnet and an apron – though in the cold darkness, her clothes seemed much sadder than mourning. She walked the other way.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Iris said. ‘The police explained some of this gang to us – but Francis isn’t talking, and you’re not a reliable narrator, so how am I supposed to know where my sympathies should be?’

  I sighed insincerely. ‘You’re the one who made an exhibition called TRAUMA DREAM!’

  ‘DREAM TRAUMA.’

  ‘Whatever. I was traumatised. And you choose instead to imagine that I’ve been strategising my way into your film? I’ve been making the best out of a bad situation.’

  ‘I didn’t think that… I knew that you – I don’t know. I’m sorry. There definitely would have been easier ways for you to get my attention.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Though they wouldn’t have been as exciting. Just take it as another testament to my skills that I can make you believe that everything that happened to me was actually about you.’

  ‘Alright!’ Iris said softly, subdued but amused. ‘But even if I do – why should I change my plans for you?’

  ‘Your film is malleable. It’s more malleable than before. You can make changes.’

  ‘And how do you know my film won’t be terrible?’

  ‘I’ve seen your photos – you know how to extract a performance. I can modify your script. Come on. Let me win. Let the villain win.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re so incoherent – you’re claiming both no responsibility and full responsibility for ending up in this position.’

  ‘Of course. Contradictions keep me alive. Life doesn’t happen in tidy little diagrams. The diagrams come later, and they don’t always overlap.’

  ‘Then you need to draw a better diagram,’ she said. ‘How can you say you’ve burnt the bridge to Francis, but want to work with me? Those things overlap. What are the rules here?’

  I paused a moment, allowing myself to lower into the opiate’s ambience, until the motor throbbing below us sounded like a clock being unspun at the edge of a black hole.

  ‘I want to be stimulated by people,’ I said at last, with mock self-pity. ‘But I never am. So I have to constantly replace them.’

  ‘That’s just narcissism,’ she said. ‘You could let yourself be loved. That would be harder, that would be more radical than this posturing.’

  ‘I’ve done love. Love is just giving in to another perspective. I want the opposite, I want to find someone who’s stuck in the same perspective as me – like a spider in a CCTV camera, forced to watch the world from high unpleasant corners – out of too many eyes, with static across the lens. Love is a shared self-absorption – I want something more mysterious.’

  ‘You want yourself twice?’ Iris asked. ‘That’s the standard autoerotic fantasy of the narcissist. That’s not mysterious.’

  ‘Yes it is. And it’s not autoerotic – that’s the whole point. I want to meet me-but-not-m
e. For most people that wouldn’t be difficult – most people find their peers easily. But I can’t.’

  ‘You found us, you found friends.’

  ‘That’s just love again. All friendships are romances. I don’t mean that.’

  ‘So what do you mean?’

  The green of twin traffic lights tripled the green in her eyes.

  ‘I want to be beaten on my own terms,’ I said. ‘I want a psychological equal.’

  ‘You haven’t understood love if you think only an equal can beat you. And even if there is an equal waiting for you out there, he’d never satisfy you.’

  ‘That might be true,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather find out for myself. I grew up alone for too long. I had to extract myself out of myself when I was a teenager – without anyone else there – and once you’ve warped into this kind of shape, you can’t straighten out properly. Love can only take you so far. I want to meet someone else who had to be their own saviour – someone else who had to break into themselves when they were young and got wounded in the process.’

  ‘You’re sitting next to someone who did that. Most teenagers are lonely. It’s not that rare. Your wounds don’t have to be permanent. When I started taking female hormones, I didn’t know they were going to make me sterile so fast. None of my sperm was saved. I was fifteen when I broke into myself, as you’d say – and it left me sterile. That’s permanent. I had to extract myself out of myself for years. Imagine how much I had to say in my own head before I could say out loud to my parents – “Hi, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl, I’m not Lars, I’m Iris, and I need surgery and this isn’t a phase”? But I didn’t romanticise myself into an island like you did. You should allow yourself more vulnerability, then you might find peace.’