Kimberly's Capital Punishment

by Richard Milward

  Fortunately, I had the wet-wipes. Once we’d finished the Mini Milks, I spring-cleaned my fingers while Malcolm licked his, like five more fat ice lollies. Despite the temper on him, there were so many endearing things about Malcolm: for starters, he’d never accuse me of being ‘too good’; he held my hand like we’d been friends since birth; he was full of life (despite the short life expectancy); he had a beautiful, elastic smile; and Velcro on his shoes.

  I was relieved about the Velcro. I didn’t want to find him hanging from Tower Bridge by his shoelaces after one date with Kimberly Clark.

  ‘Do you like the Capital, then?’ I asked, though I regretted the ‘then’ bit. There was no need to threaten the lad.

  ‘Yes, I like the Wethouse, and the trains, and the gulls,’ Malcolm replied, playing with his hands. I couldn’t tell if he’d said ‘gulls’ or ‘girls’. Despite his directness, a lot of what Malcolm said was wide open to interpretation. I decided to play it safe, and replied, ‘Yeah.’

  I leaned over him to lob the dirty wet-wipes and lollysticks in the bin. Sometimes it’s difficult finding a bin in the Capital, since terrorists like to keep their bombs in them – and terrorists tend to favour the same hotspots as tourists. Fortunately, though, I came away with all my limbs intact.

  ‘See that boat?’ I said, for the sake of it, pointing to one.

  ‘Yes,’ Malcolm replied. ‘Can you squeeze me?’

  Malcolm was a man who knew what he wanted. Compared to Stevie – who always pussyfooted around the subject of sex and intimacy, despite wanting both desperately – Malcolm wasn’t afraid to cut to the chase. He would make an incredible businessman, if only he was allowed to wear a white collar.

  Malcolm’s collar was orange.

  Sliding my free arm under Malcolm’s armpit, I gave him an enthusiastic-but-platonic squeeze. Malcolm groaned, squeezing back. Malcolm’s arms were much bulkier than my limp lady-limbs, and I found myself gasping for breath the more he cuddled me, but they were joyful gasps. He was like a six-year-old on steroids. I grinned as he cushioned me then crushed me with his bosoms; my brain going all dreamy and soft.

  ‘Do you love me?’ Malcolm grunted, just as the grey river started running pink.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ I replied, just to be nice. I did love him, but more in the way someone loves a fluffy puppy or a strawberry Mini Milk – you don’t actually want to marry them. In general, men who say ‘I love you’ on a first date are dangerous. They will either cling to you like an insecure leech, or they will murder you in the most unimaginable manner.

  I glanced up at Malcolm with squashed eyes. His own eyes didn’t seem particularly murderous, but he was certainly clinging to my arm quite firmly. Then again, Malcolm wasn’t a leech – despite his ‘special needs’, he’d successfully avoided going into care his whole life. While he was lucky to have his dad at hand, apparently his mam upped and left after one too many nervous breakdowns – or one too many circulation-cutting squeezes. Or perhaps it was Malcolm’s dad’s fault.

  ‘Right, er, ha, that’s it for now,’ I wheezed, as nicely as possible. It was bad enough getting the daysnoring down my eardrum.

  Grudgingly, Malcolm stopped suffocating me. He left one arm round my shoulder as we turned towards the river again. In fairness, he seemed more interested in me than the gulls, though it was hard to tell exactly what he was looking at, with those crossed eyes. I shifted on the bench.

  ‘What do you fancy doing, love?’ I asked, regretting the word ‘love’ that time.

  ‘Take you somewhere,’ Malcolm stated. He pulled at his thumbs for a few seconds, then bullfrogged off the bench. I swung my handbag and Medicine Bag back onto my shoulder and followed him along the bank of the Thames, towards Bermondsey. If it was meant to be a romantic stroll, Malcolm’s idea of chivalry meant dragging me about by my left wrist: up steps, across roads with red men guarding them, and into an estate of sterile-looking prefabs. Each block was the colour of sour milk, and every window had shut net curtains.

  ‘You’ve got to meet someone,’ Malcolm snapped. By the looks of the estate, it was a series of care homes: slightly off-key-looking characters lurked about the gardens while sterner-looking adults paced about with ID badges and bunches of keys. The place had the feel of a psychiatric Center Parcs, only with fewer bicycles and restaurants and slightly more dribble.

  Before we got to the right door, Malcolm stopped to watch a lad with cerebral palsy struggling to get up the kerb in his electric wheelchair. The kerb must’ve been cut by cowboys – the lad couldn’t even get up the tapered lip. A wave of sickness swept over me. Even worse was Malcolm’s reaction:

  ‘Idiot,’ he cat-called, with a clowny grin. Instead of helping the lad, Malcolm did a kind of dance, sticking two fingers up and swinging his hips, like a drugged-up football hooligan.

  ‘Behave!’ I yelped as Malcolm picked up a handful of gravel from one of the gardens and chucked it at the boy. Thankfully, Malcolm was a bad shot. The gravel clashed off the tarmac, two or three metres short of the buzzing, churning wheelchair.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I shouted. The lad’s head spasmed from left to right – I couldn’t tell if that was a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

  Fortunately, one of the care workers was coming to his rescue. A youngish woman, resplendent in aquamarine nylon, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and manoeuvred him roughly back onto the pavement. She didn’t make eye contact with me, so I didn’t bother saying, ‘Sorry.’ I felt like clipping Malcolm round his glue-ear, but I didn’t fancy a faceful of gravel either.

  Malcolm kept grinning as we slipped past the halfhearted rhododendrons and dog-eared lawns. I wondered if he wanted me to laugh along with him, like any good girl on a first date. I followed him in silence down the path, just to make a point.

  ‘Malcolm, why did you do that?’ I asked eventually, feeling like his social worker.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ was Malcolm’s reply. And he left it at that.

  I stuck my bottom lip out and stared hard at the ground. And now for a confession:

  Rather than simply being nice to Malcolm, I’d positioned myself close to him with an ulterior motive, which had backfired. Foolishly, I’d assumed all disabled folk had great personalities (to compensate for their bargain-bin bodies), and I thought Malcolm’s good nature might rub off on me.

  As it turned out, Malcolm was a bit of a bastard. Or, rather, he was just the same as everyone else. I reluctantly held his hand as he led me up one of the driveways with doe eyes, just to be nice nice nice nice nice nice nice …

  ‘Squeeze me,’ Malcolm urged, after ringing number 25’s keypad. I slid my left arm under a fold of hip, just above his jean seam. We watched a blurry face materialise behind the frosted pane in the door, then become crystal clear as the whole thing swung open. The face looked like it’d been cheerful once upon a time, but had had the cheerfulness sucked out of it over the course of adulthood, leaving behind just empty laughter-lines and crows’ feet.

  ‘Alright, Malcolm,’ the face said, with a local accent.

  ‘Hello, Barbara. Get Jessie?’ Malcolm requested, leaving out his ‘please’s and ‘fankoo’s. When was his reign of terror going to end?

  ‘Two ticks,’ said Barbara, swanning off.

  I chewed my lip and asked, ‘Who’s this Jessie?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Malcolm.

  I waited. I rolled my eyes, for the benefit of no one.

  I listened to Malcolm daysnoring for half a minute or so before a young, plump girl finally emerged from the stairway and came down to greet us. She was the absolute spit of Malcolm. At first, I thought they must be brother and sister, but then I realised it was just that she had Down’s syndrome too.

  Jessie was ever so pleased to see Malcolm. Her face widened in hysterical bliss, and she flung her arms around his neck. Ever the gentleman, Malcolm just grunted, leaving his arms by his sides, while the girl kissed and smothered him. I felt uncomfortable, stepping to one side.
r />   It took a few more kisses before Jessie realised Malcolm wasn’t quite so pleased to see her. She loosened her grip; her face set in a lost, half-smiling expression.

  ‘We’re not getting married any more,’ Malcolm announced, deadpan. ‘She’s my new girlfriend.’

  My cheeks burned and my heart sank as Malcolm motioned at me, and flippantly at that. I tried to protest, ‘No, n—’

  ‘We’re in love,’ Malcolm added.

  ‘No, but w—’

  Jessie’s moon-eyes wettened. She made the sound of a dialling tone for a few seconds, before bursting into almighty bawling. She seemed almost too scared to look at me, instead firing her anger at Malcolm, screaming the contents of a shook-up Scrabble bag at him:

  ‘Akajskwjliksybakgwitfqaytfdtksafzajd!’ she screamed, scoring at least 115 points by my reckoning.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Malcolm stated, as charming as ever.

  I was speechless. Had I any history of care work – or any people skills whatsoever – I might’ve been able to calm the situation. As it stood, my brain drew blank after blank. I was welded to the spot.

  I realised, by being nice to Malcolm, I might have inadvertently ruined young Jessie’s short life. I backed away, down the driveway. I hugged myself sadly. Then again, perhaps I’d done Jessie a favour – she was too good for Malcolm, after all. And, all things considered, I guessed I was too good, too.

  Men, men, men. If you remember, the whole point of being cruel to Stevie was to allow me the freedom to date random men again, and to feel young and happy once more. I promise I’m not a tart, but perhaps it might not come as such a surprise that, by the end of the week, I was seeing seven different men from the restaurant: one for each day of the week.

  I was just trying to be friendly.

  To be both good-looking and amicable is a dangerous weapon. All around me, men were falling head over heels in lusty piles, as if I was wearing chloroform instead of the jasmine Japanese Spa stuff.

  I had seven new men drooling over me by Sunday, and I just didn’t have the heart to shake any of them off. I assigned each one a day to ravish me.† I saw it as doing them a favour. As far as I knew, they weren’t aware of each other’s existence – all they were probably bothered about was attaching a semi-pretty young girl to their arms. Most of these fellows seemed incapable of acquiring a ladyfriend, you see. That was the beauty of it: I was lending myself to boys in dire need of a woman’s company. A female philandering philanthropist.

  This was how the rest of the week panned out:

  Mr Tuesday was the violinist at the Ristorante di Fantasia, and he worked there Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. There were only four people dining when he turned up that first Tuesday, and they tried to ignore him as he came shuffling up to their tables, waggly-hipped, with the violin shrieking obscenities at them. I felt sorry for him. His eyes were always gloomy, with blue-grey irises that clashed with his Mediterranean complexion. Mr Tuesday’s violin was this battered old thing with one of the strings always out of tune and, while he could conjure up the odd appealing arpeggio, on the whole he was useless. The violin used to attack him, sawing at his neck with its splintered body and grating his fingers with its cheesewire. Paolo only let him play at the Ristorante because he was a friend of a friend of a second cousin. That Tuesday night, after all the customers had left and I was about to load the sink with the last few dishes, Mr Tuesday slumped down next to the cash desk, bubbling with affected woe and exhaustion. There was an awkward silence. It was obvious he wanted to talk, but I pretended not to be good at reading body language, busying myself with the pots. I put on the radio to kill the silence, but that just killed Mr Tuesday – the First Movement from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade sprang to life from the speakers, mocking Mr Tuesday with its swirling, sugar-spun strings. Rubbing his bald spot, he explained to me how he felt worthless and inferior whenever we listened to Classic FM. So, I switched it over to Heart, but it turned out he felt worthless and inferior to the strings on Westlife’s ‘Home’ as well. So, I switched it off at the socket. Usually, by the end of a shift, I’m in no mood to look at anyone, let alone talk to them, but there was something strangely soothing about listening to Mr Tuesday. His voice had a nicer tone than his violin, anyhow. While I carried on with the dishes, Mr Tuesday told me how he got married by the lakes of Lombardy, but it went tits-up and, when he moved to Britain, he took up the violin to fill the void left by the divorce. He named the violin after his ex-wife, Maria, but it couldn’t replace the embraces and caresses of a lover. In fact, all he got from the violin was callouses. He told me about the envy and exasperation he got from ruining couples’ nights at the Ristorante, and he reckoned the violin was cursed, causing him to play badly and be alone – just him and the instrument – the rest of his life. Mr Tuesday blinked his dewy blue-greys at me. ‘Maybe you just weren’t meant to be with her,’ I offered. After I finished the last of the plates, I took Maria by her neck and – in a fit of puckish, pugnacious clarity – smashed her crash-clung-clash against the kitchen wall. Maria screamed out in the key of C, weeping splinters. ‘Oh hell, hell, hell,’ Mr Tuesday murmured, a bit taken aback. I told him not to worry, and said I’d replace the violin. Not in the sense of buying him a new one, you understand, but in the sense of becoming Mr Tuesday’s inamorata. I gave him a full-bodied hug, and our hearts beat out a rhythm much more beautiful than anything on that radio.

  Mr Wednesday was a wanker. He was one of those people who wears expensive suits because it’s like the fabric’s made of actual banknotes, showing how much money you’ve got. He was good-looking, in his way, if you discounted the hair, the nose, the ears, and the chin. He also had a face full of freckles, which he tried to hide behind last season’s designer stubble. Mr Wednesday’s favourite dishes were the ones with the biggest price tags attached – for instance, the Lobster fra Diavolo £15.50. This particular Wednesday he arrived around eight o’clock, and proceeded to pester me between each of his courses to go on a date with him. I figured no one was likely to go out with such a creep, so I let him buy me some cocktails after work. He expected sex afterwards, mind you. I shrivelled inside. I figured no one was likely to go at it with such a creep, so I let him dry-hump me later on a park bench, sighing semi-erotically while he carved a tiny hole in the front of my work trousers. I felt sad and empty, like a hollowed-out lobster, except much, much, much, much cheaper.

  Mr Thursday never tipped, but I let him off because he had three daughters and no wife. I felt an affinity with him because his partner was dead, although it wasn’t Mr Thursday who killed her. He often came to the Ristorante to self-consciously say ‘Hello’ to Paolo and sip a cappuccino – usually around the half-six mark, when he finishes at Wickes. I was off that Thursday, but went in to collect my wages, and caught Mr Thursday gazing at me as I gathered up some dishes Nina had missed. ‘Hello,’ he said to me, self-consciously. I gave him a noncommittal, day-off smile. I didn’t want to reel in any more men (after all, my privates were still stinging after the previous night’s friction), but it seemed like Mr Thursday wanted some company. Or, rather, he wanted some advice. While I waited for Paolo to get out of the bathroom with Marilyn, Mr Thursday said to my back, ‘When did you start wearing make-up?’ I spun on my Primark flats. ‘I’ve always worn make-up,’ I replied curtly, not sure what he was getting at. ‘No, no,’ he went on, ‘I’m wondering about my daughter. She’s only seven, see.’ As soon as Mr Thursday mentioned he had three little girls, I felt a surge of soppy emotion. I squeezed myself into the fixed seat opposite Mr Thursday and listened as he poured his heart out about his little treasures. ‘I just don’t know anything about seven-year-old girls,’ was the gist of it. I didn’t know much about seven-year-old girls, either. I had no desire to wear make-up until I was fifteen, and even then it was jet-black lipstick and deadly-nightshade nail polish. Nevertheless, I agreed to pop round to Mr Thursday’s pad, to meet the girls and donate a few comedy-colour lipsticks from the bottom of my dress
er. I had such weak-kneed admiration for him raising three kids on his own, and such sympathy for him being so skint. His wife had died in a cycling accident – someone opened a car door on her, in rush-hour. I took extra-special care crossing the road, as me and Mr Thursday headed up to his. He lived up seven flights of stairs, in a not-very-spacious council flat. I had to admit, the Capital looked beautiful from afar, shining and whining at us beneath each balcony, then twinkling and winking at us for miles and miles across the horizon, once we got to the top. As we marched down the concrete corridor, one of the flat doors creaked open, and a woman’s face appeared. ‘Ah, Charlie!’ she said, grinning. ‘How are you? Ha ha! They’re just watching the Beebies. I gave them toast. But Number One’s saying she’s hungry. Ha ha! I tell her to wait.’ Mr Thursday laughed, patting his neighbour on her blouse shoulder. ‘Ah, ha, cheers, Mod,’ he said, carrying on down the corridor. Modupe Sowunmi was a buoyant, buxom black lady who seemed to laugh at absolutely anything. I wondered what her trick was. I giggled politely as we passed her door. It sounded manic inside Modupe’s flat – apparently, she had five kids of her own, but she didn’t mind keeping an eye on Mr Thursday’s while he worked. He paid her back by doing odd jobs round hers, like tarting up the young Sowunmis’ bedrooms, or donating things the youngest Thursday had grown out of. I couldn’t wait to meet the girls. ‘This is a treat,’ I cooed, as Mr Thursday undid his front door. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘we don’t get many visitors.’ We stepped into the hallway, which stank of baby lotion and custard. At first, I supposed they didn’t get many visitors because of the seven flights of stairs, but then I realised it was more likely because of the Thursday girls. There were spills and frilly frocks thrown willy-nilly about the flat, and three yapping voices coming from the other room. They all had brash, squeaky Tottenham accents, no doubt stolen from the Sowunmis. I cringed, privately. Mr Thursday was much more softly spoken, with one of those nondescript Northern accents even I couldn’t place. I wanted to hug him. I wondered how old he was. Mr Thursday had shiny white hair, which made you think he was a dinosaur, although his sperms certainly weren’t extinct. When we stepped into the living room, the girls became suddenly quiet, thanks to the strange lady standing in their house. They evil-eyed me from behind their toys. I tried not to evil-eye them back, though it was difficult, what with my permanently evil eyes. ‘Hellooo,’ I purred, realising I’d hardly spoken to anyone under the age of ten before, even when I was under the age of ten myself. It was like a miniature Mexican stand-off – the smallest of the girls even had a plastic pistol in her hand. I didn’t stay very long. ‘They’re just not that used to strangers,’ Mr Thursday explained afterwards, walking me back down the corridor while I picked the last of the Plasticine out of the Guillotine. ‘Ah, it’s fine, seriously,’ I said, even more in awe of him raising those three bastards on his own. For a bit, we stood on the balcony, peering down at the streetlights masquerading as stars the Thursday girls had probably never even seen before. We gave each other a modest squeeze goodnight, and Mr Thursday was too much of a gentleman to turn it into a proper kiss. ‘So, what do you want to do? Do you wanna do this again?’ he asked, shoegazing now. ‘Yeah, definitely,’ I replied, and not just to be nice. I did want to see him again. I just hoped Modupe was up for more babysitting. Or, even better: adoption.