Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017
Jonathan Lyon
He learnt a long time ago that nothing is as intoxicating as blood. But whether it’s his of someone else’s doesn’t matter any more. There’s a mysterious pain in every muscle of his body – and it’s got so bad that he’ll do anything to escape it.Up to now, it’s been his secret. But it’s hard to remain invisible when you leave a trail of destruction everywhere you do go. So, when he comes to the attention of one of London’s most infamous criminals, Leander decides to put his appetite for violence to the ultimate test.Let the villain win.
JONATHAN LYON was born in 1991 in London. He studied at Oxford University, graduating in 2013. He moved to Berlin the same year where he now works as a musician and writer. He has had a chronic illness for over a decade. Carnivore is his debut novel.
For anyone who’s been ill too long.
Contents
Cover (#udbee99bc-e356-56ea-8b7a-ee88eb977919)
About the Author (#u3a0502a6-f17d-5521-a14d-89dc8b904334)
Title Page (#u901f7ded-892c-5b78-8a65-92d0d28dba71)
Dedication (#u7e3d1611-ee23-5957-9bab-fd0f98e20a97)
ACT 1: The ordinary world (#ulink_f5c8e5e2-e802-517b-bb1e-59250718f9b0)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b73072b9-53b7-5706-bc3a-447679526d11)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a64f289e-b8e7-5987-b027-3c6642399ebb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_7742d7f1-b9f1-5773-9de3-3498e761185d)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_6da1c05a-ab66-55d1-8716-542d6f581817)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_10ba4ee2-85c4-5c45-ba60-3616ecaa36c0)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_9af33e1f-d247-5aa0-ac11-bca5850ac337)
ACT 2: The call to adventure
Chapter 1 (#ulink_456fdc0b-38a0-5aeb-8a75-10452b14714d)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a9e7d0d6-e74c-5bc7-9019-44a0333dbb9f)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9e7835e9-e08e-550f-ac5c-6fa8fe19f8f4)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_7b6b7f46-9cf9-5b1e-9980-deb6161f6575)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_a097ca5a-b881-544f-a85b-76c428df7e39)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_f86692f2-74e1-5e7b-a187-db3c167fe36e)
ACT 3: Crossing the border
Chapter 1 (#ulink_37fdf95f-8c6a-52dd-ada6-fe89405242bf)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_1114db57-3d68-521f-9ab5-4844c0314d7b)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_101274b3-ee2f-5f40-8b5d-63609d8ee833)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_761b8055-4746-5383-8a3f-802839598cab)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_bd1b0095-ea01-533b-8fa2-86891325e50a)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_3c260d26-2a66-5ec6-ae63-5e6750c1fcf6)
ACT 4: The resurrection
Chapter 1 (#ulink_ac6f799d-49a0-52d9-b570-c4bbb1ddd8ba)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_b532f44a-dead-5ee8-be49-897b3386925a)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_6a6ec1ce-ea9e-5251-aec4-5f9e233de869)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_8ab0b44b-221f-5a87-8b9e-ce4dea98c47f)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_8f5adb26-35d3-5208-b4ba-df7513e20153)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_43c8c0f9-7f36-570b-ab82-9e93538bf8dc)
ACT 5: The return
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b2688446-06b1-519a-b223-7df8f784c08a)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_b8c2688c-4604-51f4-9ebe-8ba9657127ba)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_cb262281-c54e-5b7e-a3ad-96e9ceee4c5f)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_aa122c48-e957-56c7-9ef3-3fc7b5706696)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b507130d-60bb-5ed4-b8e4-5a78d22545d7)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_5fbd07b9-e97f-5fd0-b265-5d53bd4b1a56)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_a9766f1b-4a67-570d-ab80-68c7397c781c)
Copyright (#ulink_2c73f842-3b4f-594e-9f5d-f989ea896df9)
ACT 1 (#ulink_420e0078-c83a-5a08-916c-bf86b7dcda12)
The ordinary world (#ulink_420e0078-c83a-5a08-916c-bf86b7dcda12)
1. (#ulink_ead7d42a-dfa7-59ab-a9db-058fdbd035c0)
‘What’s your fantasy?’
All sex and storytelling starts with this, of course. Sometimes the question’s self-directed, sometimes it’s only implied. But here, obviously, I was supposed to reply ‘being dominated,’ so that’s what I said.
I was actually fantasising about eating a satsuma, slowly, slice by slice, on the edge of a rooftop, or perhaps on a hilltop, watching a building below me burn in a fire I’d started. But this would be too long to say aloud, and probably wouldn’t arouse a man in the prime of his mid-life crisis as easily as a boy begging for a beating.
So now that my victim thought that I was his victim, he could breathe more heavily, and began struggling to unbutton his shirt.
‘No, no you should be doing this,’ he said, fluttering his fingers. ‘I mean, undress me, boy!’
Unsuited to the dominant role, he recoiled at his own orders. Clearly, he was a submissive – if I’d had the energy, I could’ve had him on all fours in a few minutes. But energy is not one of my vices.
‘Of course, sir,’ I said instead, my mouth twitching into a smile I had to hide by lowering my head.
Beneath his shirt was a paunch of greying hairs. As I removed the rest of his clothes, he hovered awkwardly between sitting and standing, his hands just above my back, not yet confident enough to touch me.
‘Now, now… you!’
I took off my tracksuit – the uniform he’d requested – delivered my finest doe-eyed simper, and knelt down. But he rejected this arrangement and instead dragged me upwards onto the bed.
‘No time for that… boy. Let’s get to the point.’
He forced my face into the pillow and I began to moan in a way that would make him hard. Perhaps he hoped I’d feel a kind of shame in this, but ‘this’ meant nothing.
‘This’ was merely boring, but it was worth a thousand pounds. And he wouldn’t last long. I was simply a blank page onto which he could write his desires. And what banal desires! There was no ambition in them, no real yearning, not even any real sadness. His mind was shut to himself – all he was semi-aware of were a few anxieties, a few humiliations, a few petulant disappointments. Perhaps he fancied himself a deviant for fucking a boy he believed to be nineteen while his wife wandered somewhere around the Mediterranean. But he was ordinary. To a true deviant, sex is much too straightforward.
I was aroused by making him think that I was afraid of him – extracting his desires like a vampire of fantasy, while giving him only falsehood in return.
My fiction was of the orphan desperate for money, slightly stupid, pleasingly unsophisticated beside the powerful newspaper-owner. I made him feel like his life – on the fifteenth floor of some glass and steel erection in central London – was beyond my understanding, and therefore more meaningful than it was.
He finished in about ten minutes. As he got off me, I assumed he was leaving for the bathroom – so I’d begun turning over, when he struck me with his belt. My body spasmed in delight – here, at least, at last, was a little more excitement, even if there was still no creativity in his lust. The pain made me laugh, but I hid it with a howl.
‘No, no, please,’ I begged, rolling my eyes at myself.
I could act more convincingly than this, but he wouldn’t want me to. Part of my charm was my innocence. I needed to seem out of my depth, ineptly play-acting at being a seasoned sexual plaything. He needed me to be a bad actor, so he could see through to the lost boy behind the performance.
Of course, the lost boy was the performance, and the bad acting was excellent acting. His metal buckle bit into my flesh with an eroticism his body could never have communicated. With each hit, a hunger in my muscles was being satisfied. And soon, my trembling was not an act – I was aroused. My senses began to mix: a blue the colour of a kingfisher’s back blurred the edges of my vision, and in my gums I tasted the squeezed juice of a lime.
He whipped me twenty or so times, until my pleading reached a satisfactory intensity, and he threw aside the belt – and left. As soon as he was in the bathroom, I sat up, rubbing my eyes so it would look like I’d been crying. Outside, October was white. I walked to the balcony and slid open its door.
Yesterday, I’d posed as an undergraduate for a calmer client – and quoted Nietzsche’s desire for music ‘to be as cheerful and profound as an October afternoon’. That had meant little then – but, following this violence, perhaps it could mean more to me. Nietzsche’s philosophy had, after all, come out of chronic illness – and so maybe mine could too. I’d call for a different music, though, since my illness was dominated by pain – a constant, meaningless, incurable pain at the core of my muscles, that weakened me into a fog without memories or focus – a pain that confined me to a parallel word, the world of the sick – where being whipped until my blood spilled out seemed like pleasure, or even like music.
So perhaps this October afternoon was cheerful and profound. Though now its music was the sound of a man washing off his semen in a hotel shower, transitioning from delight to shame at how he’d got there. The sky had a clarity that I could almost forget my body in – to be purely mind, racing into a new weather. But I had to put on my clothes before he returned, and resume the posture of a wounded adolescent – to maximise his regret, and so increase my price.
With my phone I photographed the credit cards and driving license in his wallet. He should have kicked me out before he showered, but his embarrassment had made him careless.
When he did return, he paid me £1,500 in £50 notes. My posture combined fear with gratitude. He couldn’t look me in the eye. I left him slumped on a chair in a towel, drained of his pedestrian ecstasy, shocked by himself and what he imagined I’d suffered.
The door closed slowly as I left along the corridor. By the time I’d got to the lift, I’d forgotten his face.
2. (#ulink_4d055674-114c-53b7-804b-8a2e4c43e143)
‘Life is about to happen to us babyboyyy
Ring me cunt
This is yr mother btw
Luvvvv u’
These texts were from an unknown number, which I saved in my contacts as ‘Dawn, Mother Errant’ before ringing back.
‘You fucking done yet?’ she shouted. ‘I told you he was easy. He was easy weren’t he? I’m coming where you are. Wait – where the fuck are you again? You’re at the Waire, yeah?’
‘What? Yeah. How are you coming to me? Are you drunk?’
‘Shut up. I’m amazing,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a woman of the world again. I’m a fucking miracle! I told you I still have my ways, don’t I? I’m a goddess! Give me your perjury!’
‘Perjury? What you talking about? Are you in a car?’
‘Perjury, homage, whatever it’s called. Gifts for goddesses. You know what I mean. And fuck yeah I’m in a car. The fastest car in the Milky Way, sweetheart, you’ve got a chauffeur today. I’m nearly there so don’t move. Don’t you move! You can’t run off from me now anyway. It’s got the worst art you ever seen, don’t it? I told you.’
‘You mean like a religious offering?’ I asked, trying to address the first of her non-sequiturs.
The lobby I was passing through was indeed decorated with bland attempts at pop art, which, despite their garish colours, somehow all seemed beige.
‘No it’s a fancier word than that, you fuckwit. One of your posh words. I only want your poshest words. The fanciest fucking words you’ve got, for the fanciest woman you know.’
‘A libation?’
‘That’s the fucking one, beautiful!’ she said. ‘You’re a gorgeous boy! Libation, invective, perjury – you know the words – only give me the good shit now.’
‘How did you get a car?’
‘No spoilers, bitch, you’re waiting for me. Don’t move!’ She hung up.
I stepped onto the pavement. Kensington was tensing itself for rush hour. Bicycles flirted past wing-mirrors towards the calmer cobbled side streets. The clouds above us were tensed too, as if plotting violence against the autumn.
London seemed to grow out of its weather, not out of the ground – the mood came first and then the body – and this mood followed the whims of the surrounding sea, which was as changeable as a child – and had a child’s fury and a child’s persistence.
In a precaution I’d been taught by Dawn, I redistributed the stack of fifties across my two pockets, my boxers-briefs, and my right sock. The pain dizzied me pleasantly. And as I replaced my shoe, a white car drove up beside me – blasting one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos through an open window.
‘Oi, your highness!’ Dawn shouted. ‘Get the fuck in, we’re going to the guillotine!’
‘Have you had your hair done?’ I asked, getting in.
It had been dyed the colour of honeycomb, and her skin seemed to have been pulled tighter over her face too – so that it was sharp and handsome in an untrusting way. She wore a black leather jacket over a black lace dress, on a petite frame thinned by years of addiction.
‘I done everything. I look like a hundred years younger, don’t I? I don’t even remember what age is after thirty-four. I shaved my legs above the knee. I’m even wearing heels.’
‘You’re not,’ I said, and tried to bend to see her feet under the dashboard, but she pushed my head away.
‘Maybe I’m not wearing heels, you cheeky shit, you’re not allowed to check. A woman is wearing heels if she tells you she’s wearing heels. Wait, what’s wrong with you?’
‘Just drive.’
‘You’re flinching, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you sit right? What he do?’
‘What? Nothing, it was fine.’
I adopted a tone of alluring evasion – to make her think that I wanted her to ask further, and was only pretending to be brave – since I played the lost boy for her just as much as I did for the clients she sometimes sent my way. This was partly because I took pleasure in manipulating for its own sake – and partly because it was the role Dawn wanted me to play anyway – as it let her be a more caring, protective mother to me, and so let her atone for failing her other son, from whom she was estranged.
She turned off the radio and gripped my wrist.
‘You’re telling me this fucking minute what just happened up there.’
‘I’m fine. He. I’m fine.’
Still gripping my wrist, she unzipped my tracksuit top. I twitched at her touch. She pulled the jacket over my shoulder, exposing the edge of a welt from the tongue of the belt.
‘What the fuck?’ She pushed me forwards to pull it down further, exposing the rest of his lashes.
I pretended to shiver, carefully, so as not to overplay it – and didn’t reply. I wanted her mind to spread multiple narratives across my silence.
‘Why’d he do this? That was never his game.’
‘It’s his game now,’ I said, attempting a half-laugh.
‘Fuck, babe, how’d I let this happen?’
But there was something so insincere about the way she said this that I began to wonder whether she was role-playing too. Dawn was as clever and as bored as me, after all – her other son refused to see her for a reason. Maybe she’d known her client would whip me, and wanted him to. He had acted as though it had been pre-arranged. Maybe she was playing a new game with me, then, a violent game – born of love and cruelty and love of cruelty, and love of games themselves – and in it we had to hurt each other, using people as our instruments. Or maybe I was being paranoid.
‘This had nothing to do with you, it’s not about you,’ I said, now hopeful that the opposite of this was true.
‘You need Savlon. It’s ok I’ve got Savlon in my bag – mummy can get you some painkillers – oh shit, you need some painkilling, I was wondering why you weren’t sitting right – look at you!’ There was no sympathy in her voice. ‘This is fucked up. How was you even standing out there? Who uses the belt end? You’re bleeding! Fuck. Lean over, let me fix this.’
‘Can we drive somewhere else first?’
‘No, lean over.’
She reached behind her seat for her handbag, rummaged awhile, and found the antiseptic cream. Her fingers drew its ointment across my wounds with a tenderness that seemed almost admiring of – or excited by – the violence she’d arranged for me.
‘Fuck men, fuck men, fuck men like that,’ she said, enjoying her own performance. ‘He better of given you extra for this. What the fuck? How much you get?’
‘Eight hundred.’
‘What? No! It was supposed to be a grand.’
‘No, it was supposed to be five hundred. Then he gave me a three hundred pound tip for this.’
‘Oh my god, baby, this is not how we start our new life. Life is about to happen to us, I’ve been telling you, we’ve got to be looking our best. Thank fuck he didn’t touch your beautiful face! You been crying?’
She kissed my shoulder. I shrugged her off and pulled my top back up. I wanted to believe she’d had me wounded on purpose. And if this was a game, then it was my turn to play.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Some painkilling would be good if we can get some though.’
‘Course we can darling, I’ve got you. I got you. We’re going to do something fun.’ Bored of her fake dismay, she’d become enthusiastic again. She jerked the car forward, away from the main road, towards the backstreets. ‘Mummy’s going to give you a driving lesson. We got to act like rich people now. So we got to drive where they drive. And I’ve got so much to say, you’ve been gone so fucking long.’
‘It’s been like ten days.’
‘Yeah and I made some changes. Cos I —’
There was a smack on the windscreen – we flinched. A bleeding lump rolled down the glass and slumped onto the bonnet. We peered forwards. It was an injured squirrel, perhaps fallen from a tree. It lay on its back, twitching, trying to right itself – as something black dived upon it: a crow as a big as a cat. The crow drove its beak into the squirrel’s skull. Dawn looked away. Between thrusts, the crow rotated its head to survey its surroundings – and eventually made eye contact with me. It knew it was being watched, but did not fear this audience. I smiled in encouragement. The crow hammered the squirrel into a mess of sinew, but ate nothing – seemingly intent only on the kill. And then it flew away.
‘What the fuck?’ Dawn said.
The squirrel’s innards rolled down the bonnet. She activated the windshield wipers, but dryly – smearing the blood in arcs across the glass before she worked out how to activate the wiper fluid – and the red was diluted towards orange. A strand of intestine got caught at the edge of the windshield. The carcass lay on the car like a wound in the steel itself – almost invitingly, like a portal you could put your hand through, into a future where muscle and metal were forgotten.
‘It’ll fall off when we drive,’ I said.
‘What the fuck? Is this what an omen is?’
I laughed. ‘It’s raining squirrels, that means fertility.’
‘I fucking hope not. I don’t need more sons.’
As we drove onward, the squirrel flopped slowly towards us, and then, with a last splatter, slid off the side onto the road.
‘What changes were you talking about?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘What were the changes you were going to tell me about?’
‘Oh yeah, fuck. No, no, no – we need to reset the mood first. I’m definitely not staying driving after that omen of yours.’
‘How was that my omen?’
‘It weren’t fucking raining dead squirrels till you got in here, was it? I’m marked for death now. Fuck. I’m getting the champagne out and you’re getting in my seat.’
She parked beside a terrace of improbably white five-storey houses.
‘You’ll be a natural babe,’ she said. ‘It’s automatic, it’s easy. Just pretend you are Kensington, ok?’
She got out and came round to my side. I let her lead me back past the squirrel streaks to the driver’s seat. But before I’d sat down, she began pointing out various buttons and levers, too quickly for a novice to remember. I wasn’t, however, quite a novice – five years ago, I’d spent two weeks sleeping in a car with a girl on a tobacco-manufacturing plant, and she’d taught me how to drive. Naturally, I wasn’t going to tell Dawn this – I needed her to believe that she was mothering me and, too, I needed to further the illusion I fed to her of myself as a prodigy, capable of adapting to any situation with astonishing rapidity.
So I turned the key, released the handbrake, and immediately lurched into the bumper of the car in front of us, setting off its alarm. Dawn shrieked and slapped me. I stamped the car to a stop, shaking, my confidence gone.
‘Let me get in my seat first you fucking psychopath!’ She slammed my door shut and sprinted to the passenger side. ‘The fuck is wrong with you? Get in reverse! Quick! Drive!’
I obeyed, trying to adapt to the vehicle’s rhythms, my mind narrowed, and backed out into the street – and then pushed the stick into ‘D’ and accelerated forward. Ashamed that I’d failed to maintain my performance, my cheeks flushed – and a taste like over-sweet strawberry jam came over my gums. I hadn’t been the master illusionist, I’d been clumsy. I was ashamed of feeling ashamed – of still having a pride that could be pricked. I tried to cough the taste away.
She reached behind my seat for her bag and retrieved a bottle of sparkling wine. The alarm of the parked car faded behind us as I familiarised myself with the controls, speeding up a little to turn the corner.
‘Don’t speed round a corner sweetheart, you got to go slow for a corner.’
‘Shit yeah,’ I said, flushing less as I regained command of my indifference.
I wondered whether she was humiliating me on purpose – in the same way she’d had me whipped on purpose – as part of some wider ploy to empower herself in a coming negotiation.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You got to go in the deep end. We’re big thinkers now, sweetheart. Take a sip of this –’ she lifted the bottle to my lips and I obediently sipped its lukewarm wine. ‘We’re going Wandsworth – go down there.’ She waved vaguely to our left. ‘Get over the river.’
‘Why?’ I moved into the lane she’d indicated.
‘Not telling you.’
‘So is this car stolen?’
Her face deflated into a sneer. ‘Don’t be such a fucking fun sponge.’ She punched me on the arm. ‘You think I know how to steal a fucking car? No. This car was an act of love. I’m in love now and I’ve got a man that’s in love with me.’
‘Who – that new guy? Is he rich?’
She laughed and drank again, shaking her head. ‘You know who he is, bitch – Kimber’s the man of my dreams, the love of my life! – I met him down the Rockway the same night you ran off sulking – cos you was jealous of him, weren’t you sweetheart? Ah my sweet sulking little gremlin, you got jealous, didn’t you?’
She lifted up her hand and waved it in front of my face until I noticed the silver band around her ring finger.
‘Is that an engagement ring?’
She cackled. ‘No, not telling you. My story needs to build. Talk to me about something else first. How you going to spend your money?’
‘I dunno… I need to buy a better edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems. I don’t want any editing. She had her own type of dash, and —’
‘You’re really talking to me about dashes? No. Sweetheart, we’re in a brand new car, we got champagne, we’re in the Royal Fucking Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Sweetheart, no. You got to think bigger now.’ She turned the radio on again and baroque orchestral music began shaking the metal beneath our feet. ‘You’re going to buy something stupid what won’t last. You’re going to buy expensive olives and expensive wine – cos we’ve got a new place to live! We’re out of the hostel forever – it’s done, we can’t go back – all our worldly possessions are in the boot of this car, and we’re moving in today.’
‘What?’ I braked in surprise. Car horns honked behind us. ‘Shit, what?’ I released the brake. ‘How?’
‘I know! Ah, but you’ve made me feel bad now – don’t feel bad about the dashes, sweetheart – I should be more supporting, sorry, sorry. Course you can buy your poems, tell me about them, I’m listening.’
‘What? Stop changing the subject.’
She laughed, tapping the side of the bottle in applause at her own performance. ‘This is how you build tension! But really babe, tell me why Emily should get your money. What’s her best line?’
‘I like “soundless as dots on a disk of snow”,’ I said, choosing to play along. ‘It’s about civilisation collapsing. She has a perfect verse about snow as well:
“This is the Hour of Lead —”’
‘Ok shut the fuck up, you win. No more poems, no dashes, I’ll tell you everything.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t last.’
‘Alright, have a drink first,’ she said, lifting the bottle up to my mouth. ‘But keep your eyes on the road. Oi! Breathe through your fucking nose you amateur. How many shit blowjobs you given with that technique? What the fuck? Breathe through your nose – there you go – I’m not taking this away till you drink all of it –’ I tried to lean my head back, groaning in protest. ‘No, drink it all,’ she laughed, and kept it there until I choked.
The alcohol could provide a little relief, perhaps – for the welts across my back – but these competed with the deeper pain a decade old – of my myalgia – which no alcohol could help. That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors – it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me – and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness.
I coughed up Dawn’s wine until the taste wove into the sound and scent of sycamore trees brushing each other’s branches – and she settled back into her chair, preparing her story.
In her silence, I wondered whether I belonged to an invisible epidemic – the greatest epidemic of the twenty-first century, perhaps – since my disease afflicted tens of millions of people, but most of them hadn’t even heard of it – a multi-system sickness of pain and exhaustion and immune dysfunction, a metabolic crisis – that left no signs on the body, yet depleted its victims more severely than late-stage cancer, and lasted for decades – and yet made no appearances in films or books, received almost no funding or research, and had no known cause and no known cure, and no fixed name – a sickness that afflicted colder countries more, and northern Europe and America the most, like it was somehow the repressed remorse of imperialism, or the rest of the world’s revenge…
I moved the car into a lane towards Wandsworth Bridge.
‘So,’ she said. ‘I get home last Tuesday – you’re still gone, so I’m still heartbroken – and the bitch with the ADHD kid has stole all our pasta so there’s nothing to eat except fucking instant coffee and I’m about to have a full-on breakdown – and then Sandra comes in and she says I’ve got some post, and its an envelope just saying ‘For Dawn’ on it – with a key inside. It’s a car key. And Sandra’s being so fucking nosey but she’s saying she can give me some rice so I’m humouring her and I’m chatting to her about Kimber and about how I met him down the Rockway a week earlier, and I’m saying you’re sulking cos I’ve met a new man – and how he’s very attentive to me – and how I fell asleep at his flat and that’s what made you jealous, weren’t it? But what I didn’t tell you was that his flat is fucking fancy so I knew he’s got money – and I didn’t even fuck him, and the next day I see him again after you’re gone and then the next day again and then I’m seeing him every day like we’re teenagers. I was saying to her, I was saying it was overwhelming, but it was something that he needed and that I needed, and it felt like very child-like, it was just nice, you know? Until there’s a night when he has to go to work, so I come back and you’re still gone, and then here’s this car key in our kitchen, and I’m thinking this can’t be him, but who else’s it going to be? So I just go into the street and Sandra’s behind me and I press the car-key button and this fucking white beauty flashes at us across the road. And it’s got petrol! And there’s this phone inside with a text from him saying ‘happy new year’, even though it’s autumn. Like, what the fuck?’
‘He sounds like a serial killer,’ I said. ‘What does he expect in return?’
‘Don’t you get bored being this cynical? It’s a gift. It’s love. He knows we’re stuck in a hostel – I told him I got a son, and I gave you a fucking five-star review sweetheart, even though you’re a little shit – and he speaks fancier than you and he’s attracted to me, so fuck you. Life is about to happen to us!’
‘Why do you keep saying that? You sound like a televangelist.’
Sunlight flashed from the Thames as we crossed it. Ahead of us rose the advert sculpture of Wandsworth Bridge roundabout – a model atom with electron paths of white steel and four billboards for a nucleus – a microcosm of all London now, perhaps – the nucleus sold for the sign.
‘So fucking what?’ she said. ‘It’s my motto now. And it’s true. You’re torturing me with this negativity! It’s not civilised!’
I imagined swerving into an oncoming car so that it crashed into Dawn’s door. Our soundtrack climaxed in a fanfare. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
‘Everyone knows civilisation comes from torture,’ I said, with the sun still in my eyes. ‘Millions of bodies maimed and broken. Cruelty is the agent of progress. Perhaps it didn’t need to be, but it was. Think of all the different kinds of labour, in war, in slavery, in revolution – in industry and agriculture – over the last three hundred years, or the last three thousand years, it doesn’t matter – from the mines of the bronze age to the skyscrapers now – temples, railways, harvests, factories – they were all worked on by bodies under torture, minds reduced to screams… Just so a few men, in comfort, could speak about iambic pentameter and the speed of light.’
‘Where’d that come from?’ she laughed, swigging from the bottle.
The traffic lights ahead went red. Thoughtlessly, I pressed on the accelerator. The sound of a flag flapped around my ears, as the wind sped up – and my muscles turned to gold – and then a trumpet blast, a punch – and the car was shunted sideways.
I snapped into my seatbelt, as metal hands clapped once beside me. There was a wail. But I drove on – into the wind, uphill, as the city split open and a sea spilled out of me – and in the mirror, the car that had hit us continued behind us, a little blackened – and the trumpets changed.
The sky was the hull of a ship – a whaler with sails of living lions – and as the lions roared, gems fell from their mouths, mingling with flowers – carnations and carbuncles – in a wave of red that washed over the car.
Dawn, dazed, lifted the bottle to her lips, and drank – though most of the wine had spilled out over her. Then she turned to me, slowly, in wonder – with a mask of blood on the far half of her head. I wanted to scream out of the window, ‘Nobody’s strong enough to be loved by me!’ But I laughed instead.
For a second, London seemed an unknown city – and I braked with my eyes closed, offering myself to the sun.
Dawn drank again from the bottle, still stiff with shock. The blood dribbled like sweat from her hairline, where it had hit the edge of the door – and I looked at it like it was mine, more than my own blood was mine – or rather, I looked at her wound like it was mine in the same way that the wounds on my back were hers.
‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.
‘We’re going to our new house,’ I said.
‘Oi, how d’you guess that?’ she asked, disorientated, dabbing at her cut in disbelief.
‘You just told me,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah, ok yeah – he’s got us somewhere to live, Kimber’s got us… it’s not a council flat, but we knew that dream weren’t coming true, sweetheart, this is as good as it’s going to get, it’s…’ She was speaking too quickly to keep up with herself. ‘It’s fucking good – we just need a… a five hundred pound deposit – and that’s insanely small, you got to admit, he’s in love with me – and then the contract’s legit, then, then, then that shows the contract’s legit.’
‘So we’re putting our entire lives in the hands of some guy you met a week ago?’
‘You want to be in a fucking homeless hostel forever?’ she shouted, at last reacting to the crash with anger. ‘It’s been two years, Leander! I can’t live like that anymore – and you weren’t even living.’
‘I could have found a —’
‘We’ve been fucking trying! You found us fuck all. Being pretty made you lazy, I told you – you’re stuck, and I don’t want you fucking stuck. I love you, alright?’ She was anxiously smearing her own blood across her face. ‘I done us a good thing, sweetheart, admit it – I got us out that fucking misery nest. Don’t try and get outraged at me, it’s too late, I signed the contract. It’s done.’
‘Ok, ok,’ I smiled, and drove on. ‘Ok. I can pay the deposit. I’ll give you the five hundred.’
‘Baby!’ Nearly weeping, she kissed me on the cheek, forcing an arm behind my back to wrap me in a hug, pressing her bleeding head into mine – aroused by the intensity of our shared shock. ‘Fuck,’ she said, as she shrank back in her seat. ‘Fuck… That cunt drove into us.’
‘He wasn’t looking,’ I said, knowing she hadn’t seen the traffic lights change.
She peered out of the open window, dripping blood onto her door. ‘He dented us!’ she shrieked. ‘That fucking cunt. My new fucking car. Fuck! Your fucking squirrel – I told you that was an omen. I fucking told you. Cunt!’ She fell back. ‘But still it didn’t get us good enough, did it? We’re still alive. Didn’t fucking work.’ She cackled. ‘Actually can I have six hundred pound please? For dinner as well.’
She reached distractedly into my tracksuit pocket and took out the stack. ‘All fifties! I love it.’ She counted. ‘This is only five hundred though? You said eight hundred.’
‘Wait.’ I took my right hand off the wheel and dug into my pocket, careful to take out only six more notes. ‘You can’t have all of it.’
‘Ok babe,’ she said, counting it and returning me four fifties, ‘I’m going to cook us a banquet, alright? You made money, I got us a place to live. We’re back on track! But I knew you’d try and sulk so I had to arrange it while you was away, didn’t I? And I could only tell you while you was busy driving for me, otherwise you might of got too angry and run off. I can be cunning when I need to be.’ She spoke with a nervous rapidity, like she was trying to deny the severity of her own injury – or perhaps because she was too drunk to understand it. ‘I know how to cook, you know – and turn down that road – yeah that one,’ she pointed. ‘And head to the right.’
‘Wait, where are you driving me to?’ I asked, as if I’d only just realised what she was doing.
‘You’re the one driving,’ she said innocently. ‘And not very fucking well.’
‘Didn’t Francis move around here?’ I stopped the car.
We’d reached the tip of Wandsworth Common. Beside us, the outlines of a football pitch had been painted white onto the grass – and this paint had been churned up by schoolchildren in the mud – into a Morse code that had stiffened overnight.
‘You fucking know he did,’ she slurred. ‘And you know you’re being an evil little shit to him. He came badgering me banging down our door when I was packing us up – so I had to tell him where we was going, so he’s going to find you anyway. And he’s got my number now and he’s been ringing me every fifteen fucking minutes even though he hates me – and I know he’s ringing you and you’re ignoring him. So fucking sort it out. I know you think you can hide your feelings from me but you can’t. So you’re going round his house and that’s that.’
She was wrong, of course, but I wanted her to believe that she knew what desires I was repressing. I had assumed that by ignoring Francis’ calls, he would contact her, since he knew I lived with her – and that she, in her sympathy for us both, would force me to see him. What I hadn’t predicted was that she would make me drive to his home, while gloating about her powers of manipulation. I turned to the window to hide my smile, sighed in cartoon exasperation, and drove on. Across my chest, a new welt grew from where the seatbelt had cut into me in the crash – a counterpoint to the lashes along my back.
‘Good boy!’ she said. ‘I’ll text you our new address. And get there for dinner, ok, cos I’m going all out. I’m going to go Kimber’s first and I’ll get us some of his painkilling, which is better than —’
‘What, is Gibbon a heroin dealer?’
‘Fuck off, his name is Kimber – who are you, trying to mock someone’s name?’
‘How dare you? There’s a long history of heroes named Leander.’
‘Shut up, you’re not a hero. Kimber’s a hero. And no, he’s not a dealer, or he’s not just a dealer. Either way, whatever, he has a link. And it’s good. Actually, can I have another twenty?’
‘No, I’ve only got fifties.’
‘Leander, please! Please. We’re here now anyway. Come on, I’m your fairy fucking godmother.’
I parked, gave her another fifty, mock-begrudgingly, and got out. Squirrel blood scarred the bonnet in four lines like giant claw-marks. Dawn staggered round to my side, unbalanced by concussion – and hugged me.
‘Be brave for mummy, alright? Ah, is this hurting your bruises? I’m sorry,’ she said, without much sorrow in her voice. ‘Fuck that man and his belt, babe – we’ll fix that later, alright? I’ll get us the heroin, just don’t lie down on it, yeah?’
‘You too,’ I smiled, touching the wound on her forehead with my thumb. ‘We’re matching almost.’
‘I know, we’re a right pair – but yours weren’t an accident and you don’t deserve nothing like that – so you go in there and you go be nice to that boy waiting for you – cos you can’t fucking throw it away like I did just cos you think you don’t deserve love. I’ll see you later, alright – don’t keep my banquet waiting.’
I withdrew from her embrace with my eyes to the ground. Dawn laughed at what she saw as a rare apprehensiveness on my part. Really, I was excited, and not for the reasons she supposed. She didn’t know that Francis still had a girlfriend – a girlfriend I’d been systematically goading towards breakdown.
‘Love you!’ she yelled, embarrassingly loudly, and tottered to the car, combing a hand back through bloodied hair.
Drunkenly she drove away, into the end of the afternoon. The crash had made me bold, and my new scars felt like an exoskeleton – a defence against any next attacker. So, boldly, I shivered towards Francis’ doorstep, hoping I was entering a fight.
3. (#ulink_b76b7e4f-5a8c-50fe-9b7c-65ab254ced9c)
Francis opened his door after two rings, topless and barefoot in black ripped jeans. A muscular model, used to being adored, he was attracted to me because only I could make him feel nervous, although he seemed now to be in a state more heightened than that. The delay suggested he’d been distracted – and his girlfriend’s voice from beyond the hall confirmed it.
‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ she shouted.
He smirked at me, squinting, his thick lips slightly parted into a pout. This was his default expression – cocky and confrontational – like he’d just told me to undress and earn his attention. But I wore my default expression too – the wounded lost boy, who had suffered too much to be affected by anyone’s charms. He half-leaned in for a kiss, but decided against it, with his girlfriend so close – and instead tugged me inside.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he said with mock-courtesy.
Eva appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her face was painted white, with false lashes and thinned violet lips beneath hair stacked in rolls, some of which had dislodged. Tears had leaked mascara around her eyes. She wore stilettoes and a stiff silk kimono, and, on her fingers, talons dangled chains that swayed as she clawed the air.
‘Don’t fucking come near me, you’re evil!’ she shouted, as we came nearer.
She backed into the kitchen. Francis’ clasp on my upper arm tightened, and his close breath on my neck transferred his arousal to me.
‘She got here straight from set,’ he said.
‘Yes I came from set!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t talk like I’m not here.’
‘And what character are you playing now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she spat, edging round the kitchen island. ‘You’re fucking evil. You were playing me yesterday. But you left your account on.’
Francis released me, confused by this statement. I leaned into the fridge, thinking of thickets of fly-eating flowers – snapping at her words and swallowing them until they dissolved. Her words were not really her own, anyway, they were mine – or rather, they were the words I’d hoped she’d say, in this play that she was performing for us – which I’d designed.
‘You left your account on – and I’ve read every message you’ve sent to each other.’
‘What’s she saying?’ Francis asked.
‘You’re so fucked up!’ she shouted. ‘I knew you were cheating and you knew I wasn’t going to let that go, so you sent me Leander, didn’t you? And I thought here’s my consolation prize, a bit of relief…’
She tore open a drawer and threw a fork at my head. I ducked.
‘You let me be the sad drunk girl,’ she shouted at me, ‘looking for a rebound fuck, crying about my cheating boyfriend. You made yourself available, all innocent, making no moves, letting me do the drinking, letting me do the talking. You let me wonder what girl he was cheating on me with. But it was you!’
‘You never asked,’ I said.
She screamed in frustration.
‘What’s she saying?’ Francis asked again, drooping in horror into the countertop. ‘You fucked her?’
‘Don’t pull that shit with me!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t pretend anymore – I can’t deal with more pretending. You’re a faggot and I’m a fucking joke. You wanted to humiliate me. And you did! You probably told him to leave his account on!’
I smiled at the accuracy of her analysis, which was only incorrect in presuming Francis’ complicity in my scheme.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Nobody is that scheming. You wanted to fuck me, and I’m not exclusive, so why would I tell you about me and Francis? Why would I leave my account on on purpose?’
Francis deflated in shock. I slid to his side. Eva was operating within a tedious genre, but her costume suggested other worlds – and I imagined ancient aristocrats, gathered on a mountain during some solstice – princesses in robes so heavy they could barely lift their legs, and princes weeping openly – as an astronomer-priest, interpreting the arrangement of the stars above them – commanded them to impale themselves on their own swords.
‘I’m just telling her what she needs to hear to get rid of her,’ I whispered.
‘But why did you…?’
‘This is the only way she was going to give up.’
He tried to smile like he understood, like he was playing this game on the same level as me – but his hands were trembling.
‘You’re fucking disgusting!’ she shouted. ‘You just wanted to… you just wanted to break me, didn’t you? And it – it worked!’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You chose to have sex with me.’
‘I know I fucking chose, but it wasn’t an informed choice! You’re evil. You’re… Am I that bad of a judge of character that I don’t… Look at me! When I found out,’ she turned back to Francis and started to cry. ‘I felt physically sick, because I still love you. I love you!’
I backed away from Francis to make him feel more exposed to Eva’s theatrics. Her voice had taken on a murky blue tone – and I thought of sea foam, lit by the kind of moon I’d only seen onscreen.
‘I’m not going to pretend,’ she said. ‘When you moved into this house, and… and I’m not putting all the blame on you, but when I asked if there was room for me and you said of course there was, I thought… I didn’t renew the contract on my flat – and I’m being thrown out next week. I’m going to be homeless and it’s because of… it’s because of me. It’s because, even when I knew you were cheating, part of me still thought you wanted to live with me and I was going to move in here… and… and now I have to find somewhere else and that’s so fucking stressful. Don’t you… Is this just funny to you?’
‘Eva,’ Francis said softly, moved by her anguish more than her anger. ‘This is – you’re over-acting.’
‘Yeah and I’m good at it! I’m good at it. And so are you. But somehow I’m the one who feels shit, I feel guilty, and why should I feel like this, why do you get to be happy and I don’t? Why do you —’
‘Eva, this ain’t how you talk,’ he said, exasperated by how effectively she was making him pity her. ‘You’re being like… a shit TV show.’
‘I’m a fucking amazing TV show. And you’re a faggot and I’m a fucking side-piece.’
‘I didn’t even know what —’
‘Oh you didn’t know?’ she shouted. ‘You didn’t know you were gay until… what? Until just now? I didn’t fucking know! And at the same time I’m scared, I’m scared you’ll never talk to me again – and I have this pattern of falling back to you even when you’ve fucked me over and I just… it’s pathetic! I know what I’m doing means we’ll never speak again, and that hurts me, because you made me happy. I loved you, even though you’re a bad person, I still love you, but I can’t keep wondering and worrying about what I am to you anymore!’
She laughed suddenly, as though enjoying her own B-movie performance – and then breathed in and reined her expression back to despair. I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror behind her and saw that pain had made me pallid. My body felt like a zoo in revolt – its animals twisting open their cages to rampage through the halls – killing the keepers, trying to find the main doors – but the main doors could never be unlocked – and so they were trapped still, under the vast dome of paraffin that I wore as my skin – and I remained silent. She turned to me.
‘And I liked you, Leander. I thought you were on my side, I thought you could get through to him – but you’ve already got through to him, further than me, and you have no remorse, no sympathy, nothing, you’re both just standing there laughing at me, and for some reason I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry I wasted a year on you, I’m fucking sorry that you were the only thing that made me happy, that when my friends said “Oh, you’re glowing” that it was you, and all the time you were just thinking about fucking other men. Every morning I woke up waiting to hear from you and every night I went to bed thinking about you. And it was a lie.’
‘No it weren’t,’ Francis said. ‘This ain’t you.’
‘Don’t fucking do that, don’t try to dismiss me. You saying this isn’t me?’
She fumbled desperately in the drawer before her for a knife.
‘You saying this isn’t real?’ she shouted, and stabbed the knife into her wrist, screeching more in fury than in pain.
I laughed. Francis leapt towards her.
‘Eva, Eva! You’re being ridiculous.’
‘Get the fuck away from me!’ she screamed, slicing the air.
She threw the knife at his feet, flecking us with blood. He jumped back, the muscles of his torso rippling leanly with adrenaline. She ran down the corridor, pulled open the door with a final pantomime screech, and stumbled out into the evening – leaving the wind to slam it shut.
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