Girl Seven

by Hanna Jameson

  The box wasn’t decorative and it was wrapped in several layers of bubble wrap, but it had a sheath to protect it. There were two of them. Not true Tanto¯s; they were too expensive for me. But they looked like the real thing: about thirty centimetres long and the front third of the blades were double-edged.

  They were brilliant. Perfect for hiding in boots or under a jacket.

  I held one of the daggers in my lap for a while and imagined jamming it straight into Alexei’s eye and out the other side. The thought gave me a sharp physical thrill, not dissimilar to what I’d felt earlier when I was reading the later paragraphs of Crash.

  Making a mental note to track down some kind of strap to carry the daggers behind my shoulders, I slid one under the sofa bed and another under my pillow.

  I slept in the living room with all the lights on. It didn’t make much difference. In fact it made me feel worse, being able to see what I thought was coming.

  The second time my mother forced me to talk to a therapist was the second time we moved to London and she complained I was becoming withdrawn, as if I hadn’t been inclined to introversion my entire life.

  Mum was the sort of person who viewed introversion as a personality flaw that needed to be eradicated. Her ideal world was one in which everyone spoke to everyone else at parties in increasingly hysterical levels of volume until you could no longer distinguish words. Ironically, what she saw as confidence I’d always seen as cowardice. Extroverts engaged with the world in a never-ending barrage of small talk and superficiality, shunning the opportunity for any real connection or feeling. Introverts, when they did engage, shared things that mattered, and listened in return. Anything else wasn’t worth the energy.

  Shoot me if I ever have a conversation about the weather, or anything else that could be interpreted by simply bothering to look at it.

  More in an effort to shock than anything else, I told the man, the same one as before, about the time an American tourist tried to drag me off a subway train in Roppongi. I didn’t tell him the whole story, but he attributed enough importance to it to claim it was why I distrusted other people so much.

  I couldn’t be bothered to tell him I’d always been uninterested in most people. Not much in my life had ever been changed by some cataclysmic event. At least, not that I could tell. My personality was a constant. It had become less forgiving, harder and less capable of shame and tolerance and, sometimes, fear. But it felt much the same to me. I’d never indulge in anything as childish as an epiphany.

  It was one of the only times during my teens that I’d gone to another classmate’s house for a party. I was sober but mildly happy, having spent the whole evening sitting on the floor talking to Seiko. Later on I had bumped into her coming out of the bathroom and I’d kissed her in the hallway because I was feeling brave and because she was drunk and didn’t mind.

  I was still wearing my school uniform. At the age of fifteen I resembled a twelve-year-old, but I’d learnt not to mind. I figured I’d appreciate it when I was old.

  Just before we passed through Roppongi, having missed my original change in a daydream, a drunk American guy staggered on to the train and announced he was trying to get to Shinjuku.

  I didn’t understand why tourists found our metro so hard. Were they all fucking colour-blind?

  ‘Change at Aoyama-Itcho¯me.’

  ‘Where are you getting off?’ he asked, sitting down next to me and slinging an arm around my shoulders.

  I took his hand off my shoulder and moved away without a word.

  ‘Hey... bitch, I asked you a question.’

  Oh fuck off, I thought, ready to get off at the next stop to distance myself from this whining asshole, even if it meant hanging around in Roppongi for a bit with the tourists and foreign businessmen who had no interest in ever learning our language.

  There were only three other people at the opposite end of the carriage and one was standing up to leave.

  The doors opened.

  I was grabbed by the back of the neck and dragged forwards and off the train. It took me a second to realize it was the American guy. Up close he had overgrown eyebrows and smelt of pungent leather.

  ‘Fucking... ignore me...’ he was snarling.

  I ducked and tried to twist out of his grasp but he yanked a fistful of my hair and groped for my legs under my skirt.

  He shook me like a kitten and screamed into my face, ‘The only reason Asian sluts like you exist is so we can fuck you! Fucking bitch!’

  I was covered in alcoholic spit. This time he made a grab for my underwear and I parried his hands, kneeing him hard in the stomach. Grunting, he seized me by the collar of my jacket but I leant back and kicked him in the chest. When that didn’t make him let go I whipped my penknife out of my blazer and stabbed him in the kneecap with it, hard enough for the blade to stay embedded in his leg when he howled and dropped me.

  A little musical jingle was playing across the platform, signifying the train was about to leave.

  I sprinted back on to it and the doors slammed shut.

  I sat down, shaking, and realized I’d lost my penknife.

  The American was still on the ground when the train pulled away, blood on his hands and crying out for help.

  There was a ring of bruises around the top of my thigh and the tops of my arms for a week or so.

  No one around me had done a thing. They never did. But at least it wasn’t as bad as London. The last time Daisy had been sexually assaulted by some prick grabbing her on an underground train she was told to shush for causing a scene. She’d kicked him in the testicles to make him stop and left the train. When she told me about it later she had become angry at herself for crying.

  Maybe it was easier to become more hardened to the fucked-up state of the world if you were a girl? We had to become accustomed to our own harassment and public invasion on a day-to-day basis. I suppose it’s easier to remain unsurprised and unshaken by the repulsiveness of others if you live a daily war to keep your body your own.

  21

  There was someone in the house when I opened my eyes. I wasn’t sure if it was the noise of them breaking in that woke me, but I grabbed my unsheathed dagger from under my pillow and rolled off the sofa into a crouch without even thinking about it.

  Looking back, if it had taken him one kick to open the door rather than two, I’d probably be dead.

  If the lights had been off and I hadn’t been able to see him at the moment he appeared in the living-room doorway with a balaclava over his face, I’d probably be dead too.

  He was holding a machete.

  The sofa separated us and we stood there for what felt like a long time, waiting to see which way the other would run.

  He made the move, to the right.

  I leapt over the back of the sofa and ran for the front door but he backtracked and cut me off, swiping at me.

  The machete swung into the wall.

  There was nowhere for me to go but back, as the blade was ripped out of the plaster and I rolled sideways back over the sofa on to the floor.

  He lunged after me.

  I picked up a pillow and it was almost sliced clean in half in front of my face. My dagger jabbed upwards and there was a grunt of frustration as I sliced open his hand.

  ‘Fuck!’

  He dropped the machete but wrenched me back towards him with a strength that almost dislocated my shoulder. Grasping my neck he threw me down and pinned me there, crouched over me like a child with an insect. Blood from his wrist trickled on to my shirt.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Air rushed into my mouth and out of it but nothing was happening.

  His eyes were pale and too far apart.

  I found the handle of my dagger and rammed it through his trainer and into his foot.

  Suddenly my lungs were full again and I was free.

  While I had the chance I kneed him in the balls.

  He sank to his knees beside me, legs together, shouting and cursing
with no accent.

  I scrambled to my feet as he clutched at his groin and this time I shifted all my weight on to my back foot and side-kicked him in the chin.

  His head snapped back with such force I thought I’d broken his neck and he fell to the floor, rigid like a tree.

  I reached under the sofa bed for the other dagger and slammed it with all my strength into his chest. It sank in, through the breastbone. I pulled it out and did it again, wrenched it out again, stabbed him again, and again, and again, until I was sure he was dead. Blood ran from his mouth and he jerked as though he was having a seizure, before lying still.

  I let go of the dagger’s handle and stood up, breathing too fast and too hard.

  Barely able to walk, I stumbled through to the kitchen and found a paper bag from a coffee shop to breathe into, until my body was flooded with enough carbon dioxide to stop fitting. The bag filled and emptied, filled and emptied, and I sat down on the tiles with my back against the cupboard and the cold tiles against my legs.

  ‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit... oh... oh shit...’

  I put the bag down and looked back through at the living room. The man was still there, part of a red blade and ornate green handle sticking out of his stomach.

  But it was meant to be me lying there, just like before.

  After years of suspecting it was coming, for whatever reason, this had been my time to go.

  I started counting before I could stop myself, glad there was no one there to see me, and remembered the front door was wide open—

  ‘Shit!’

  I was up on my feet again, running down the hall and doing my best to wedge the door shut again. But the lock was shattered, more fragile than I’d thought. I sat against it for a while, hands over my face, unable to stop the adrenalin pumping through me.

  Why now? Why had it been my turn now? Who would have found me? The Russians? I imagined them doing the same thing I had, picking their way through the remains of the front door and finding my mangled body, skull cleaved in two...

  My face felt puffy and flushed.

  I stood up, after an unknown amount of time had gone by, and walked slowly to the living room. These felt like the normal emotions one experienced when seeing a dead body: the urge to throw up, the urge to run...

  Instead I stepped over his huge bulk and, with my eyes shut, pulled the dagger out of his foot and then, retching, out of his stomach. It made a sound like a blade slicing through lettuce.

  I took the daggers through to the kitchen, washed the blood off them as if they were dirty plates, dried them and sheathed them again.

  That was the easy part done. I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with the body.

  I sat on the sofa and stared at him for a bit, and only when I decided I would have to call Mark did I think to take the balaclava off.

  He was foreign, in his late thirties maybe, huge...

  It didn’t make a difference.

  There were no familiar features.

  I had never seen him before.

  I had absolutely no idea who he was.

  I couldn’t have called Noel or Ronnie, not with the money and drugs still in a bag pushed to the back of the wardrobe. Mark probably did this sort of thing all the time and, furthermore, this wasn’t coincidence. The longer I thought about it while waiting for him to arrive, in the shower and then finding a change of clothes, the more I understood this was a sign. This was a sign that we had got close to something, somehow, without even realizing it. It wasn’t random, not just my turn to die. It meant that whoever was responsible for sending men up to my flat in Tooting almost three years ago was close enough to have seen or heard of what we were doing.

  In a bizarre way, it was a good thing. We were on the right track.

  It was almost three in the morning when I’d called Mark, but he didn’t sound as though he’d been sleeping. He also didn’t sound panicked or surprised when he was asking for my address, but I guessed that it was his professionalism kicking in.

  ‘Keep yourself armed and don’t move. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Jam the door if you can, I’ll knock ten times.’

  Anything less than ten, he’d said, and it could be anyone knocking.

  My hair still wet, wearing a skirt and faded grey Slayer shirt with the sleeves cut off, I sat cross-legged on the kitchen worktop smoking and smoking until I heard Mark at the door.

  ‘Where is it?’ he said, striding in with a rucksack on his back and another in his hand.

  It.

  He took a look at the man on the floor in the living room and then turned and put a hand on my arm.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t even looked down at my own body in the shower. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just, um... No, I’m fine.’

  ‘Really? No need to be macho on my account.’

  ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  He searched my face. ‘If you say so.’

  Mark paced around the body with an appreciative expression on his face, as if he was wandering around an art installation. There was no indication of disgust, just a desensitized silence.

  ‘Big, isn’t he,’ he remarked.

  ‘Is this the most common thing you get paid to do?’ I asked, arms folded, watching.

  ‘Yeah, it is actually.’ He smiled. ‘It’s so much more common than you’d care to speculate. But it keeps my pay regular.’

  ‘It must be the same guys,’ I said, trying to stop myself from speaking too fast to be comprehensible. ‘It’s the same everything – the machete – it can’t be a coincidence, right? I mean, this isn’t just random, this has to be because you’ve been close to finding something out?’

  Mark had crouched and given the body a small shake with gloved hands. He looked up at me, as if he was deciding how much to say. ‘Leo Ambreen-King.’

  ‘Really?’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Why him?’

  ‘I was thinking about it in the car. Who else would it be? If he was paid to do something for someone then it stands to reason they would still be in touch. If you want someone to sacrifice a chunk of their childhood to commit murder for you then you’d surely come up with some sort of arrangement. Compensation for when they’re released? Something like that. Unless it directly jeopardized his future prospects in some way, why would he be so fearful of speaking to us or being seen speaking to us?’

  I took a step back. It seemed obvious and that was why I didn’t like it. ‘And this didn’t occur to you before?’

  He paused. ‘Did it occur to you that this might happen?’

  ‘... No.’

  He stood up and pulled a face. ‘Truth be told, it did occur to me. But I got the impression that that was a chance you were willing to take simply by asking me to pursue this for you in the first place... What did you stab him with?’

  I was about to tell him when I remembered the bug, and gestured at the kitchen. ‘A knife. I just grabbed it when I heard someone kicking the door in. Mark... How would he even know I was living here?’

  ‘Your name not on anything? Bills? Internet?’

  ‘Yeah, everything. But normal people can’t just get that information, right?’

  ‘Well, maybe. Someone working with the police would be able to find out easier though.’ He nodded at me. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound incredibly patronizing but... speaking objectively, you’re a very small woman and you should be dead. In a close-combat situation as well, I’m amazed you’re OK. I mean that as the highest compliment.’

  ‘Thanks. Well, it’s thanks to my dad.’ It was the second time I should have been dead, really.

  ‘OK, pack any stuff you’re going to need and go wait in the car. I’ll drop you somewhere you can stay for the night and come back here.’

  I gestured at the body. ‘But—’

  ‘Trust me, this part of my job isn’t a spectator sport.’

  22

  I spent the day sleeping and pacing and feeling lost, really fucki
ng lost, in the sparse flat that Mark had taken me to, and didn’t go into work the following night. I’d wanted Mark to get back to me but when he had, in the early afternoon, he had nothing to say and nothing to add. He didn’t tell me what he had done with the body or what state the flat had been left in.

  I’d showered, dressed in clothes that would cover the bruises running up my sides and down my arms, and walked to the Underground in time to watch Daisy leaving, but not locking up.

  That was a sign that Noel was still in there.

  It was never Ronnie at this time of night. He had too much to return home to.

  For the first time in a while I felt fragile. I’d become all too aware of everything that could break, shatter, puncture, die. My eyes were hot and loaded with fatigue.

  Consciousness was a bitch.

  I crossed the road to the front entrance and let myself in through the black featureless doors.

  The Underground was so calm and welcoming when it wasn’t polluted with sad and desperate men. Nearing four in the morning it had the sweet smell of the aftermath of a wedding reception, hopeful and innocent.

  Noel was sitting on the floor with his back against the bar, mixing himself a Whiskey Mac. He looked up and, thank fuck, his first instinct was to smile.

  ‘Thought you were Daisy,’ he said, patting the floor. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Fancied someone to talk to.’ I sat down on the floor also.

  The walls, tables and drapes loomed around us.

  ‘Daisy made up a new word for me today,’ he said, snorting. ‘It was getting busy about midnight, and she comes up to me and says, “It’s totally rammo-jammo in here.” You ever heard that phrase? Rammo-jammo. It really tickled me, that one.’

  ‘That’s not new,’ I said, prodding one of his feet with mine. ‘You’re just old.’

  ‘Watch it, whippersnapper. You’re not too old to put over my knee.’ He smirked and shot a filthy grin in my direction. ‘Darsi speaks very highly of you, by the way.’

  I adopted my best impression of coyness. ‘Why did you think that with Darsi I’d make an exemplary house call all of a sudden? You know me, I make small children cry.’