The Life of Death

by Lucy Booth

  More fool me. For as we know, the Devil Himself is on my side. A voice, speaking on a phone to my left. I turn to see a tall figure – slim build, broad shoulders, longish hair messy. Finger pressed to one ear, phone to the other while he shouts into the mouthpiece. Stephen.

  ‘Mate? Can you hear me? Yep – we went through already … In front of the sound booth … No, we’re waiting for you before we go to the bar, cop a spot and all that … What? I missed that. What did you say? … Wicked! That’s wicked news … OK, yep. Yep. Front of the sound booth … Yep. Laters, mate …’

  He hangs up. Leans down to the girl next to him to peck her on the lips and wrap her hair in his fist. ‘That was Alex … Tom’s coming! Rang him this morning apparently.’

  ‘Amazing! God, I’ve been so worried about him. Janey’s been filling me in, but sounded like he was in a pretty bad way.’

  Fran. Shiny brown hair waiting for a glossy pint of Guinness in a North London pub. Feet resting on brass rail as elbows are propped on polished wood.

  Alex. A daily vigil outside a North London flat. Tom.

  Fran. Alex. Tom.

  Sweat-slicked skin freezes to ice. Tom. My Tom. Coming here. To meet Stephen. My Stephen.

  I should have known. Should have seen this coming. This must have been His plan.

  ‘Mate! You came!’ Stephen spots Tom approaching through the crowd. Grabs him round the shoulders to pull him into a hug.

  Tom shrugs. Shy. Apologetic. ‘Yeah, well. It’s about time I reckon. And she’d bloody kill me if she knew I was moping about.’ His voice is thick, the words forced past a lump in his throat. But he’s there. He’s made it. And he’s proud. He clears his throat. Chokes back the wobble that threatens. ‘Right then. Pint? They’ll be on in a bit.’

  Fran and Stephen stay put, staking a claim on this small patch of grass and establishing a base for the boys to head for when the drinks are in. They don’t notice me, another body in an ever-growing crowd. Too entwined in each other to notice a stranger sitting only a stone’s throw away and watching their every move. I stay with them, close but not too close. A trio lined up against the fence, faces turned to catch the last warmth of the summer sun. I can’t risk losing him now, when he’s landed so easily in my lap, but the urge to follow Tom, to push him away, distract him, lose him in this billowing crowd is almost overwhelming. But, I know this is it. My last chance. My only chance to finish what I’ve started.

  And so here I stay. Lined up with Stephen, our backs to the wall.

  When Tom and Alex return, the sun is setting over the stage roof, smudging the heavens with pinks and purples, sliced through by the flaming orange streaks of high flying clouds. As the day draws to an end and the sun dips below an unseen horizon, the pinks and purples deepen to a violet bruise and anticipation within the bowl reaches fever pitch. Lights either side of the stage pulse and flare, sweeping over a bouncing crowd in blinding arcs. A burst of fire from the roof of the stage and the opening chords of a classic song vibrate beneath our feet. The crowd roars.

  It’s nearly time. It’s so very nearly time.

  Tom is grinning. For the first time in months, he has a smile on his face and his thoughts are not swallowed whole by the gaping hole in his life. Alex and Dan flank him on either side as the three of them leap to the music, arms around each other’s shoulders, voices roaring familiar lyrics at the tiny figures on stage. The crowd ahead is a sea of waving arms bathed in the blue, purple and red lights swooping from the stage. For the first time in months he feels like himself again, like he can live his life again. He’s swept up entirely in the tidal force of the crowd and for the first time in months he’s living. Properly living.

  Stephen and I push forward through the crowd, easing our way past bodies swaying in rapt homage to the riffs and refrains on stage, searching out Tom, Alex, Dan and Fran from where we left them half an hour ago. No one pays any attention to a tall messy-haired boy and his shadow weaving their way through the crowd. And for his part, Stephen still hasn’t noticed me. Why should he? Just another face in an overwhelmingly huge crowd. And as the pints flow, so the faceless crowd blurs into one swaying mass.

  With every jolt and shove I feel my cargo digging into me. Lumps and bumps that press on flesh and nip soft skin. But the dancing bodies around me are oblivious. Softened by the sun, blurred by the booze, none of them notice the bulk burrowing past them and deeper into the crowd. As one song finishes the crowd pauses, panting, giving us a chance to stop, look around. We’ve found them, swept from their original spot by the flow of bodies, but we’ve found them. And they leap on him – Tom, Alex and Dan. Like he’s been gone for years. Leap on him, throw arms around his shoulders and throw their heads back to howl the chorus of the band’s biggest hit.

  As I manoeuvre myself behind him, I feel a hand on my shoulder. ‘Little D!’ a voice yells in my ear. I can barely hear over the screaming of the electric guitar, but I would recognise that cold grip anywhere. I turn round to see Him looming above me, jogging from one foot to the other. ‘You didn’t think I’d let you go without saying goodbye, do you?’

  ‘What?’ It’s impossible to hear. I can’t believe He’s here. If there had been any lingering doubt in my mind, I can’t back out now, not when He’s standing right there.

  ‘I came to say goodbye! Goodbye!’ He motions with His hand, fingers curling to meet palm in a tiny wave. ‘And well done!’ This accompanied by a thumbs-up. ‘I wasn’t ever sure you’d do it!’

  ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ I yell back. ‘About Tom? And Stephen?’

  I’m shouting directly into His ear, but the words are getting lost in the lyrics that are being shouted over our heads. Jumbled into the stream of noise. If He can hear me, He makes no sign of having understood. His only concession is a smirk in the direction of where Tom stands, one arm thrown around Stephen, one fist pumping the night air, mouth wide in roared song.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it! Good luck, Little D! One more! Just the one!’ He pulls me into an awkward hug. I can’t pull myself away quickly enough. I glare at Him, but time’s running out and I can’t waste precious minutes with Him when I have to get to Stephen and get him away from Tom before our time is up. An argument with Him is always futile, and never was that more true than at this very moment.

  He steps back to merge into the crowd. Loops an arm around the waist of a tall, slim girl with long, blonde hair. Eyes closed, swaying hips in time with the melody, she waves one arm languidly above her head. As she reaches up, her top rides up to reveal a toned, tanned belly, marred only by the slim red slash of a birthmark running from hip to navel. How can she bear that proximity? I can only think that in the oppressive heat of the packed crowd the frigidity of His presence is undoubtedly a welcome, if unexplained relief. A breath of cool air in the sweat of the mosh pit.

  The opening bars of that familiar song pulse out across a sea of waving arms.

  It’s time.

  I can see Tom from where I’m standing, tucked in behind Stephen, trying to get close. Can see him falter. Where the rest of the crowd sways, leaps and whoops, he stands still. Mouth slack. Eyes fixed on the stage. A silent prayer muttered in the dark. Be safe, Tom. Keep clear of what’s about to unfold.

  Please, please don’t let the past few months have been in vain. I shift to Stephen’s other side, step forward to try and push him further from Tom, to create a gap between the two, to give him a fighting chance of steering away from the immediate blast. But Tom’s approaching, coming towards Stephen, towards me.

  I turn my head, tuck my head behind Stephen’s back. Pray that Tom can’t see my face, doesn’t recognise that girl he sees crossing the street ahead of him, in the shop, in the park. Not now, Tom. It’s not our time.

  Stephen’s lost in the song. Taken back to that lounge in Leeds, to ash hanging from an unsmoked cigarette and a scratchy LP being played again and again. His thoughts are interrupted by Tom, tugging on his arm. ‘Mate. Steve.’ He has to shout over the c
rowd, over the riffs.

  Stephen looks over. Tom’s eyes are hollow, black. The joy of the previous hour has plunged into a darkness that only Kate’s memory can cause. He leans in to make himself heard, leans so he’s speaking into Stephen’s ear, inches from the top of my head. ‘Steve. I’ll see you in a bit, yeah? I can’t … I thought I could, but …’

  ‘I’ll come with you. Come on, let’s get a pint. Get away from it.’ No.

  Stephen. No. Let him go.

  Tom smiles. A tired, small smile. ‘Thanks, mate. But I need to be by myself.’ We watch him walk away. Head bowed, slumped shoulders push their way through the crowd until he’s swallowed, lost. Fran reaches up to kiss Stephen. ‘I’m going to check on him,’ she says. ‘You wait here. Don’t move. We’ll need to find you!’

  The breath I’m holding releases with a rush. He has gone. We’re clear. And so we’re left: Stephen, Alex, Dan and me. With minutes to go of a classic song and only one thing left for me to do.

  I step forward to Stephen. Loop my arm around his waist. The crowd around us pitches and swells with every beat, forcing the full length of my body up against his back. With each surge I lose my footing, and it’s all I can do to cling on to him and stay upright. Squash up close, pressing the lumps and bumps of this stuffed vest into him. Taking his hand in mine, threading his fingers through my own. He looks down with a smile. Thinks Fran has decided not to bother, that she’d never find Tom in this crowd. But it’s not Fran, who threads his fingers through her own. Not Fran winding her body against him in the heat of the summer night. Eyes widen when he sees me. Tries to pull away, to wrench his hand from mine, to apologise. You must think I’m someone else. But I don’t. I know exactly who he is and why I’m there. And the trigger is cupped in the palm of my hand and that tug, that wrench is all it takes. To flip the smooth plastic button that is the only barrier between us and …

  Click.

  My body is ripped, torn. Flesh stripped from bone. The pain is immense – searing, aching, stabbing, tearing. All feelings, all sensations, all at once, all encompassing.

  I float.

  No longer feeling. The pain receding. Too much for my body to bear, for my mind to compute. So I switch off. To drift. To float. I can hear the screams issuing from my throat, but I cannot feel them leave. They are distant, detached. Mine, but no longer of me. Separated in space and time from the mouth that forms them.

  And yet simultaneously, I am on the ground. As I have lived my life as Death, so in my death I am everywhere and nowhere. While I float, I am grounded to live the moment in its full Technicolor horror.

  The noise is like nothing I’ve ever heard before, a crack that rips through the air above us. A blinding white light slices through the crowd, lighting it brighter than day as the tsunami from the blast floods out from Stephen’s epicentre. For the briefest millisecond the cries of 40,000 are sucked into a vacuum of silence and disbelief – words punched from gasping lungs with the force of the explosion.

  And then they come – the screams, the groans, the crying, the shouts. The band have stopped, the shriek of feedback piercing the night sky as electric guitars hang forgotten. They stand on stage, the four untouchables looking down on the crowd from on high, uncomprehending. Roadies bustle onto stage to hustle them to safety, but they can’t tear their eyes away from the carnage unfolding at their feet. Paramedics flood into the ground in their luminous jackets as fans stream out, running to put as much distance as they can between themselves and the death and the destruction and the desperate screams. I stand in the middle, standing over Stephen’s body lying ripped in two at my feet. Stand motionless as the streams of people flow around me, babbling and blurring into each other in the purple half-light.

  From where I float, people scurry below, bathed in the ubiquitous blue flashing lights that so haunt my life as I know it. But the scene dims.

  Flashing lights slow and darken. A twisting, shifting kaleidoscope of bodies and light swirl beneath me. Flashing lights slow and darken and far below me the unfolding bloodshed, the havoc I’ve unleashed, fades to black.

  Back on the ground huge arena lights switch on with a clunk and a buzz and a flash, flooding the place with a light as bright as day. Bodies lie strewn around me. From one to another I pass, morphing as I go, my life’s work continuing while my corporeal body fades and stutters. One last day to bid these final ones on their way while I straddle the hinterland between my own life and death.

  Faces choke at me from where they lie, their wounds healing and pain abating as life seeps away and they pass from the living to the dead. Bones knit and skin is sewn as we lie under the flashing blue lights for those final moments. I crouch beside a man lying at my feet. The full force of the blast had ripped flesh from half of his face, exposing his teeth in a rictus smile. As I bend to him, lips soften to cover the gritted grin. His arm, hanging by a single thread from his shoulder, twists back into position as skin smooths over exposed bone. Yet his clothes remain tattered, clinging in threads to fresh skin only recently burnt through to flesh. He looks up from where he lies into the eyes of his mother as I shush and hush and rock his ravaged body and he sobs into my arms. Time slows around me as I turn from one to another, to another, to another. And they fade to black, to black, to black, to black.

  With Mark I lie in silence, holding his hand in mine. The first silence he can recall from a four-year-old daughter who chatters to the cat, the fish, the rows of beans in the back garden. With James, a game of backgammon in this theatre of the macabre, played with a grandmother passed long before. Over to Helen for a hand of gin rummy and a small sweet sherry that causes her to shudder and suck her aching teeth. All around me they lie in wait, patient and still as my seconds expand and my hours contract to a pinprick. All around me they lie in wait as my appearance changes and I pass from one to the next. From a teenaged girl cradling her widowed father, to a young bride back in the wedding dress worn only a week before. From sisters clutched in a clenched embrace, to an aged mother gently picking curled iron shavings from my son’s scorched skin. A young boy, this his first gig, curls into a foetal ball to be embraced by his mother – ending his life where so relatively recently it had begun. I go to them, one by one. No need to rush, no need to hurry. They’ll wait, lying there in their final moments. As life expires, as painful final breaths are gasped from choked lungs, they’ll wait. And when I do get to them, I’ll take all the time they need. Sing their songs and paint memories in their minds’ eyes. Kiss away the sting of screws twisted into their bones. Massage bruised chests thumped and thwacked by the shockwaves chasing that initial blast.

  As I work, He watches. Standing tall and slim and rooted in a bed of twisted limbs, He watches. Looking down His hooked nose as I rush from one to the next, breathing deeply as their souls expire, unwittingly nourishing Him in their deaths. But it’s not only me He watches. Something else is catching His eye.

  Something else that prompts the occasional nod of approval, that smirk of satisfaction. I can’t make anything out through the melee of bodies and the thick smoke hanging heavy over our heads, but there’s something. Something or someone to tickle his fancy.

  On I scurry through the flurry of lives lived and lives lost. Get my head down and help smooth the way for this most horrid of endings. Gradually, minute by minute, hour by hour, the ground is clearing, leaving green grass dyed red with bloodshed. The physical bodies littering the grass are lifted on to stretchers and escorted from their resting place to more permanent lodgings, and their remaining souls fade to black under a navy-blue sky. The screams of fear have quietened to a gentle hum now. A soft whisper, the occasional terrified whimper.

  And as the space clears, as bodies are removed and their spirits dissolve, I take a moment in the whirl of confusion to breathe. A deep breath in. A long, slow exhale to the night sky above. With each breath a twinge in my chest, a sharp pain that stabs at my ribs. As the death around me is carried away, so life seeps into my being. And wi
th that life comes feeling. The pain in my chest. The hard ground beneath my feet and the stench of the acrid smoke that still hangs in the air. The nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of seeing Tom, at the thought that he may not have got far enough away, that he might be lying hurt out of sight unseen, as yet, by me. I turn full circle to take in this final scene. To see what I’ve done, what I’ve caused with this relentless desire of mine. The lives of so many torn apart, ripped asunder to facilitate the happiness of so few. Of me. And of Tom. If, indeed, happiness is what I will bring. He’s right, my friend the Devil. Selfish doesn’t even start to describe it.

  I scan the area for Stephen. My last task, before I can truly live, is to finish what I’ve started, and oversee the death of the final person I have killed.

  Two bodies lie left in this amphitheatre. Two bodies prone on the ground.

  The first. Chestnut hair matted with blood. Slashed through the torso, a gaping gash opens organs to the night air. Skin sliced and shredded. An arm, ripped from its socket lies tossed to one side. Abandoned. Forgotten. It’s not needed now. His mouth hangs ajar, teeth torn from their roots, tongue lolling and swollen. My presence does nothing to heal, nothing to close those lacerations, nothing to soothe that pain. He’s gone and I am no longer able to take him. A dark-haired girl, glossy locks softly sweeping a rigid cheek, crouches over him, leaning to kiss a blood-stained forehead. Fran.

  To the side, paramedics restrain a screaming girl who claws at them, runs at huge men who stand steady in the face of her onslaught. Her dark brown hair hangs lank and stringy, her face red, streaked with tears that flow unchecked. She screams his name again and again, her cries echoing in the cooling air. Fran.

  Two Frans, of which I am not one. Two Frans: one calm, the other frenzied. And if I am not one, then who, pray tell, is the other?

  A voice, behind me. ‘You abandoned me.’ He speaks clearly, without emotion. ‘And after years of having you there, of taking these souls and ushering them in my direction, I couldn’t imagine life without that. And so, a replacement. You’d like her, I’m sure.’