by Nevill, Adam
‘Stop!’
‘Do it for that reason. Leave here and go to a better place, with your mum and dad.’
‘There’s always a bug. This one will be like the others. They come, they go—’
‘Not this one. I’ve heard things. Been told things. We can’t assume it’s like the others. Please leave. No later than tomorrow. You have to tell me that you will go.’
‘I can’t. How can I tell you something like that?’
The father closed his eyes. ‘If I could . . . If there was a strong chance that I could find out what happened, or even find her, would you go then? Just for a while, until I called you?’
His wife stayed quiet for a while, then sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘I would go to hell and back just to know.’
He held her hand tight. ‘And I get that. But I’ll go to hell for both of us. For all of us. For even the slightest chance of knowing, I will go anywhere. Places that you cannot imagine that I will never let you see. Because she is worth it. Because we are worth it, our family.’ He stood up and continued with his packing.
‘Can you at least tell me where you are going?’
‘Somerset.’
‘Somerset!’
‘There is someone I need to speak to down there, who might know something. I can’t say any more. Get new idents, all of you, and let me have yours before I leave. And I will be in touch when it’s safe for you to come back here.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘If your parents won’t leave, then you have to go alone. I mean it.’ The father buckled his rucksack closed and walked to the door. ‘Gotta go now.’
Miranda climbed out of the bed and followed him to the door. When she touched his hand he turned and held her tightly. ‘Go,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll deal with my parents. What about your brother?’
‘I’m counting on George being safer in New Zealand.’
SEVENTEEN
‘On the bed.’ The father pointed the handgun at the biggest bed he had seen in his life. From the mirror that formed the entire rear wall of the master bedroom, back at him leapt his reflection: a caped horror show, his face defining itself pinkly through the sodden mask. Black with rain, the new hat drooped around his ears. About his bones, the army surplus poncho was seaweed-slick.
I am nothing but a thing soaked to its skin, in clothes two years ragged, holding a gun. I am shorn, bespattered, psychopathic, bestially liberated. And I am here for you.
Fear in the beautiful green eyes of the woman who should not have been here, transformed into something else that promised hysteria. Panic jittered along her arms like St Vitus’s Dance and made her hands flutter before she clutched them to her cheeks.
Minutes before, as the couple alighted from the Ferrari, the father’s dripping presence had appeared in the garage. The moment the soles of Yonah Abergil’s hand-stitched loafers found the cement floor, an aerosol of the evil shit had pattered over his jowly head. So noxious were the chemicals in the enclosed space, they had all barked like dogs to clear their airways.
Inside the expansive hall, where the father had first ushered them, the girlfriend’s confusion had turned to anger. ‘Do you know who we are? Do you fucking know who we are?’ she had screamed at the man she had found waiting at Yonah’s lavish home, wet to his underwear and socks and shivering with more than cold, but pointing a handgun at her face.
‘I know what you are,’ the father had said to the woman, as the gold and white opulence of the house seemed to vault like a Catholic shrine about them. And her threats helped him overcome the horror of seeing her alight from the car, and not long before he had realized there was a nurse on the premises too. He had not expected to find two women here. There should not have been two women here. There should not have been any women here.
If anyone is in that villa, with the exception of the old boy, you have to clip them . . . Think of your girl and do what you need to, yeah?
The couple had not seen him emerge from the ornamental trees growing inside the garden wall, or run so quickly across the rain-thrashed drive after the security gates opened. Nor had they seen him duck into the garage behind the slowing vehicle, where he had then hidden, crouching, behind their car; a creature from murky waters, its pincers gloved in surgical rubber and ready to bite. They had not seen him on account of the dark, or the rain that flogged the house; they had not even seen him when the security lights exploded yellow across the front of the property, because they were drunk. Through the wet gusts that gambolled and flapped in from the estuary, growing in power by the hour, Yonah Abergil had driven his rare and expensive car home intoxicated. Why so reckless, the father had wondered, when you have so much?
As the couple had swayed and wobbled out of the blood-red vehicle with flushed faces, their imported clothes had issued aromas from the best things remaining in this life. They had seemed to be of the past, abruptly alien to the father’s current existence and how it had been partitioned amongst bedsits, anodyne hotel rooms, and an old family car’s hot interior.
In all the hours of waiting, of being dissolved from the inside by the acids of anxiety and the agony of recollection which had filled the last two years of his life, where were these people? They had evaded all that. Fortunes stowed and unshared, they lived deep inside glittering palaces, glass and steel monoliths, or were caged within humming perimeters of electrified fence. And inside that swept garage and living room befitting a tyrant, the father found nothing but resentment inside his deeps. Evidence of a lifestyle he could only imagine had made his lava boil, gut low. All of this for stealing children . . . for putting women to work in brothels, the dispossessed into labour gangs. Legitimized barons and sanctioned exploiters, that’s what they were. They were the tax-loopholed, dirty-cash-laundered elite, replete and meateater-sheened. They made it too easy for him to think of them with such simplicity. And it was vital that he did hate them, or how else would he kill them all this night?
He ran back over the current situation: crying woman, man choking on the living-room floor, old man watching his screen, his nurse shackled in the kitchen . . . phones, panic buttons, cameras . . . what to do? Then forced his mind to return to this bedchamber fit for a spider king, where he had pushed the woman ahead of him.
Once the advantage of surprise was taken, then whatever followed was dependent upon his decisiveness. He was on his own, and more so than ever before. And now they were all inside and individual roles were being established by swift, brutal methods, and as every second ticked by, he was starting to hate himself. He loathed female grief because of how low it made him feel. Next to the woes of young children, he found the distress of women the hardest to endure, and as a man accustomed to disappointing women, familiarity was no defence before their tears. ‘No. I didn’t mean that,’ the father said, when he perceived that the woman thought she was going to be raped. ‘Get on the bed. I need to tie you . . . I need to restrain you . . . I mean . . .’ He was only making it worse. She began to shudder.
‘I’m not going to hurt you. Please.’ This assurance in his trembling voice didn’t do any good. She’d already stumbled backwards, away from him, in her high-heeled shoes, towards the wall beside the vast bed. And there might be a weapon in the cabinet drawers. This woman had already told him about the existence of two handguns in the kitchen. There would be others, concealed, ready to blaze away at trespassers and thieves come to partake of what had already been stolen from others, or purchased with blood money. But how could a woman so beautiful, who looked so frightened, be one of them?
Yonah Abergil was lying on the floor of the living room, blowing his nose tanks out and down a suit that seemed to have been tailored with magic. His fat hands and skinny ankles were bound with the steel cuffs, his greasy mouth was hampered by the kinky shit, his face swollen and wet with tears.
Abergil senior was inside a day room that resembled a North African warlord’s rumpus room; he was untethered but wheelchair-bound. The father knew that the elderly man
had dementia but didn’t rule out his attracting attention in some other way. A hidden phone, something like that. Panic button. You were going to check for them. The father’s chest tightened as the situation began to unravel. Who would come here? More of them, the Kings, or a private security patrol with shoot-to-kill permits, or maybe their friends in the police?
One thing at a time. Be systematic.
He would have to check on the old man again once this woman, the mistress, was secure. In the palatial distance, the nurse was still sobbing, her face reddened from the nerve agent he had sprayed her with after he’d stumble-marched Yonah Abergil and his woman into the house from the garage.
The nurse had already run for a phone, or she had been trying to reach one of the guns in the kitchen: the father didn’t know because the nurse didn’t speak English. She had been hard to communicate with, though his handgun had proven more effective than any muffled verbal efforts, grunted through the cotton clinging to his wet face. But there were too many people, too many rooms, too many phones, too many guns.
Cameras?
The nurse was secured with the cord from an apron in the type of kitchen the father would have expected to find in a restaurant frequented by the super-rich. The stainless steel, coppers, glass and dark flagstones had unsettled him with diffidence. And then the room’s opulence had made him angrier. This is what they have for being how they are.
A metal pole supporting a breakfast bar now stood between the nurse’s secured arms. It had looked sturdy when he tied her wrists. She’d thought the father was going to kill her. They all did. They all expected to be killed; clearly a rule in the world they inhabited, one that swarmed with the vengeful. A world they had refashioned to suit themselves. A world they never expected to turn against them. But they must have entertained doubts that their lives could just go on and on and on like this, while so many suffered . . . with ninety million people out there, fidgeting and restless with chronic stress about blackouts, food, flood water and the terrible sun.
‘Away from there!’ he bellowed at the girlfriend in the master bedroom. She stopped moving and started swallowing whatever was clogging her throat. ‘Forget the fucking bed!’ Anger was good. He needed more anger, but not too much until they were all secure. ‘Just kneel on the floor, now!’
Kneeling suggested execution in their world; he read this in her eyes. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I am here for information only. From your . . . your boyfriend, or whatever the fuck he is. Yes?’
The woman teetered a few feet away from the bedside cabinets, clearly uncertain whether she believed him. Reaching one hand down to the bed she eased herself to her knees.
‘Away from the bed. Here, on the rug. Move!’
She did so, on her hands and knees, and crawled towards him in a way he thought accidentally obscene. ‘Stop. There. Put your hands out.’
The father unthreaded the cord that was looped around a dressing gown hanging on the door, and bound her wrists, then strapped and tied her arms against her body with a leather belt. Her fingernails were immaculately painted red, something you rarely saw any more. One of her fingers glittered with diamonds, her wrists rattled with gold.
‘Good. Good,’ he whispered to her in encouragement. ‘This won’t take long. You won’t be hurt. I promise. Now stretch your legs out.’
‘No. Please, God.’
‘Just so I can tie them. I will not harm a hair on your head . . . if you do what I say.’ The ease with which the words were beginning to come to him made the father feel a combination of relief and disgust.
The woman stretched her long legs out and the father moved to her ankles. Looked about the room, frantic to find another bond with which to tie her legs as both sets of cuffs were already in use on Yonah Abergil. He didn’t want her moving to a concealed weapon, a phone, a button. Maybe one has already been pressed.
The father ran to the walk-in wardrobe, tore open the doors and chose one of at least a hundred handmade ties. He returned to the woman and knelt by her ankles, removed her shoes. The heels were long, patent black daggers. They brought to his mind quick, hot thoughts of other floors upon which other pairs of high-heeled shoes had once been discarded; memories from deep within his days in the logistics hierarchy when the ambitious looking to move upwards would use any tactic for elevation. Ambition he had taken advantage of, taken his share of. They had been irresistible to him, those girls in tailored suits and silky blouses, whose softness whispered beneath their clothes, whose perfume had intoxicated him as much as the alcohol he’d poured down his neck as he courted them at conventions, at functions, and in the offices where so many games were still played, as the climate raged and the world disintegrated.
He caught again a stronger, sudden sense of himself in the past, a near-forgotten man now. Was consumed by a sense of the tingling, tantalizing, heady excitement that came with a new face, pair of legs, uncovered breasts, a strange voice saying his name, encouraging him, flirting with him, a refreshingly alien mouth on his lips in some half-lit room, far away from home.
He’d often wondered if the state of emergency had added fuel to human desire. People said so. The opportunities for intense reminders of what it was to experience pleasure, to lose one’s mind in another’s body, were precious. The sense that the chances for such activities, like everything else, were falling into short supply for all but a very few people, may have been one of his motivations and his excuses in hindsight.
The legs of the girl on the floor shimmered under the spotlights in the ceiling. Her legs were coated in a fine second skin of sheer nylon. Stockings. Black to match her transparent panties. He’d seen nothing like it in years. He could see how her underwear clung to her pale buttocks like a dark smoke because her dress was hiked up. There had been so many times when he had not resisted his urges, and when he’d made promises and assurances to ransack the bodies of desirable women. He had been despicable. But this girl had dressed to please that thing out there – that people trafficker face down in the living room. With her beautiful legs she rewarded the sexual slavery that he engineered.
The father’s arousal was a neglected, confused beast, which tried to awaken its old heat and become an unruly engorgement. And yet he waved a loaded handgun through the exclusive air of the stranger’s house, with his face masked. People about him slobbered from the effects of a nerve agent.
Monstrous.
He shut his heat off. The sense that the top of his skull was lifting, his spirits rising, he closed, sickened at himself for feeling desire at a time like this, when he had frightened a woman half to death in her own home.
Lust had always distracted him. Two years ago, he had been asked to watch over his little girl and he had written a flirtatious mail to a woman instead while a stranger had lifted his daughter’s small feet from the soil of their garden, and taken her away. He’d once believed losing his little girl was a natural consequence of his behaviour, even a punishment. But there was no reckoning, there were no judgements other than the ones that were made by men like the one he was about to execute. On this, the theology of King Death was right.
He stood up. Collected a pair of clean socks from a drawer, pulled one taut, slipped it between the woman’s glossy lips, and knotted it behind her head.
She closed her eyes and wept.
With the woman’s lover he could not be so tolerant. The man was cuffed at wrist and ankle with penitentiary steel, and positioned in the middle of the vast living room, his knees strapped together with his own leather belt, his head engulfed by a pillow case, like a ready-made crime scene photograph.
As the father trotted down the three marble stairs and entered the vast lounge area, he tried to disassociate the figure from the evening’s inevitable conclusion. But when he stood beside the body on the floor, unbagged its head and removed the gag, the gravity of the impending execution became disorienting again.
‘You know you die for this,’ the man said quickly. ‘Your family, your frie
nds. Children. All of them. They die. Bastard. You are bastard.’
‘But not before you, unless you use that swine mouth for something other than making threats.’ The father kicked the man’s shoulder hard.
The blow only succeeded in making Yonah Abergil angrier. ‘Bastard! Everyone you know, they cease to exist. In one week, they all in hell. I assure—’
The father’s second kick met the man’s red face.
While Yonah blinked and coughed in shock and a momentary senselessness, the father regagged him and sprayed the nerve agent over the man’s entire head.
The father left the lounge and entered a large adjoining room with a full-size snooker table, a bar, walls covered in original paintings, and a sunken floor leading to what looked like a cinema. Beyond the large glass patio doors, the black surface of a swimming pool was riddled with rainfall.
All this from slavery and murder.
The father uncapped a bottle of whisky from behind the bar and began to gulp. He was wet through but burning alive. His legs were numb. He wiped tears from his eyes and noticed the painting above a fireplace that a fully grown man could walk inside.
The father checked on the old man again. He was still smiling at the large images that flickered around his chair. It was a holographic film, a Chinese action thriller about evil American imperialists with a plan to control the world’s fresh water. It had once been very popular. Perhaps the still-functioning fragments of the old gangster’s brain liked to be reminded of former glories, schemes in collaboration with corrupt authorities, gunfire, body counts, piles of cash, girls and rare wines on tap.
The dresser was full of blister packs and pharmaceutical boxes. No shortages here, but did the old man need medication now? The nurse . . .
Whisky bottle in one hand, gun in the other, the father walked across the house of plenty to where he had secured the nurse in the kitchen. The tea towel stuffed inside her mouth muffled her shrieks at the sight of him. The father held up his hands, palms outwards, to show he meant no harm. Then filled a jug with cold water at the sink. Returned to the lounge and doused the head of Yonah Abergil, who eagerly raised his swollen face into the stream and moved his head from side to side to direct the liquid onto his burning eyes.
