Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017

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 (#ulink_bd8a951a-5abd-560d-9d38-b619391f4f9d) Chapter 1 (#ulink_456fdc0b-38a0-5aeb-8a75-10452b14714d) Chapter 2 (#ulink_a9e7d0d6-e74c-5bc7-9019-44a0333dbb9f) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) ACT 3: Crossing the border (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) ACT 4: The resurrection (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) ACT 5: The return Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) 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. 4. (#ulink_4a5306af-c7e5-59e6-a871-88fc78d7ec6a) I closed my eyes, exhaling, savouring the room’s tensions. In elevated states, my synaesthesia becomes more intrusive. And here, Eva’s half-fake hysteria lingered in the air with a taste like elderflower. I imagined licking the sugary rim of a bottle as cordial dribbled down my chin. When I opened my eyes, Francis was resting his elbows on the counter, his face in his hands. I was unsure of his response to what we’d just witnessed, until he raised his gaze to mine – and I read its desire. ‘Where’ve you been?’ He came to me. ‘You weren’t answering your phone...’ ‘I’ll tell you…’ I began to lie, but he kissed me, his hand behind my neck, keeping me against him. He pulled down his sweatpants and kicked them off over his feet. He tried to unzip my tracksuit top, but I didn’t want him to see the belt wounds beneath. ‘Forget that,’ I said. He tugged down my trousers and boxers instead in the same motion. The stack of ?50 notes fell out, scattering across the floor. I grinned. He grunted interrogatively. ‘I’ll tell you…’ I said, but he kissed me again, biting my lips until I tasted my blood on his tongue. I associated Francis with the colour of wheat – and this colour grew again to dominance as we kissed. Depending on the stimuli, my secondary senses sometimes associated Francis with wheat’s texture, too, and its taste, and its rustling sound. He turned me around. I lowered my face to the granite and he lowered with me, his chest pressed into the buckle welts along my back, his teeth at my ear, gasping nearly with laughter. His joy at my return was elevated by the evasion of his guilt for his girlfriend, and his jealousy at the revelation that I’d just slept with her. He was trying to repossess me, but the intensity of his arousal was due partly to the fear that I was beyond his control, even here. Repeatedly, he tried to unwrap his hands from my stomach to unzip my top and have full access to my back – but I gripped onto his wrists, preventing the reveal of the whip lines by keeping his arms beneath me, as if I couldn’t bear to be released. He came inside me, pushing me into the countertop edge, his mouth at my neck, sweat pricking where our thighs’ skin met. He untensed, reaching around to finish me off, and said ‘I love you,’ which made me come too. ‘I love you,’ I said. Obviously I didn’t love Francis, but these words marked the end of his seduction. I was aroused not so much by the fulfilment of my desire – to make the straight boy fall in love with me and admit he’s fallen in love with me, first, out loud, without prompting – but rather by the ease with which I had fulfilled that desire. I was aroused by the efficiency of my scheme – having premeditated every move that had led me here, and with no missteps! And now that his resistance was over, it was time to be cruel. We hugged, and for a moment my mind left our heat – into a quicksilver that felt as close as I could come to peace. He went to the sink to drink from the tap. I gathered my money from the floor and tucked it back into my boxers. The evening light tinted the granite the colour of elderberries. ‘Why you been ignoring me?’ he asked. He splashed himself with water, smoothing his hands through his hair, his face lifted to the ceiling. ‘I had no money,’ I said. ‘And I was depressed… about you not telling Eva. That’s why I went home with her… It’s the only way I could get the situation to an end.’ ‘You could of warned me.’ ‘That would have made it worse. It didn’t mean anything. It was for you. And it worked.’ He sat down against the cupboard, pulling his sweatpants on as he shook the water out of his hair. I pulled mine on too and joined him, resting my head on his wet upper arm. He was not capable of argument, so had to accept my claim that I’d been doing him a favour by fucking his girlfriend. He couldn’t really believe that, but he had to try. Much of my pleasure came from making him lie to himself in this way. ‘What’s that money for?’ he asked. ‘I need new poems.’ He wanted to ask further, but was afraid of being hurt by the answer, or of me seeing that he was afraid. ‘Dawn said you’re moving,’ he said instead. ‘Yeah.’ ‘So you don’t want to move in with me?’ he asked, with a playful indignity that failed to conceal his sincerity. ‘I got a big house now.’ ‘I noticed. Did you hope you could rescue me?’ I teased. He smiled, ashamed of his own affection. ‘Maybe. And we couldn’t do that in a hostel.’ ‘We can at my new place. I don’t know if it’s going to last – it’s always unstable with Dawn. You probably will still have to rescue me.’ ‘Why’d you want to live with her? I don’t get it. She’ll steal from you and lie about everything.’ ‘That’s what I like.’ In the pause, I admired the muscles I rested on – and thought of the thousands of pulls-ups that had formed them – the trapezius of his neck and the sphere of his shoulders, and the extra muscles of his upper arm that knotted around bicep and tricep, and the wide vascular forearm that ended in a tattoo – ‘SE5’ – his childhood postcode. He had another tattoo on his torso, under his arm, under me – ‘LET GO’, written in gothic script, in some early claim to masculinity that almost contradicted itself. I lifted my wrist to his in comparison – my veins were violet-blue, my skin ghostly and dotted with moles, and my hair was like feldspar in late afternoon light – while his veins were copper-green, his skin darker and unmarked and nearly hairless – smoothed by the coconut oil he lathered into it at night, and which made his hard muscles feel soft when I kissed them. I kissed them. ‘What happens with Eva then?’ he asked. ‘What you mean?’ I asked. ‘You’re a carnivore now, the kill is done. The more indifferent you are, the more she’ll love you.’ ‘A carnivore!’ he laughed. ‘Fuck off! What’s that again?’ ‘It’s from Latin – it means flesh-eater. The Greek version is sarcophagus – but that means coffin. So Greek flesh-eating tends towards death – while Latin flesh-eating goes the other way – towards life, towards sex.’ ‘And which way do you go?’ I smiled back. ‘Both ways – I want to be a Greek and Latin flesh-eater – the demon of Europe’s worst fever-dreams – the answering scream of a generation fucked over by a whole millennium.’ ‘And what about me?’ ‘Well you just started, you’re still an entry-level Latin carnivore. But look what you did to Eva – you were talking about love – love is an old carnivorous urge – but it isn’t positive, it’s destructive – it’s meant to rip you away from your old mate with enough force to overwhelm habit and convenience – so you choose a new one. Me. That’s all this was. Flesh feeding on flesh. But these urges can warp, in some of us – become more irresistible, more flattened out, and spread beyond the systems of love…’ ‘That’s not what love feels like to me.’ ‘That’s because you haven’t learned how to feel.’ He laughed. ‘If I hadn’t met you I’d be so bored.’ ‘Same.’ ‘No, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Before I met you I was stuck. I mean before I did modelling I was proper stuck in South London. It was like there was a border around me. I wouldn’t go past it. It felt like you had to get a visa and like vaccinations to go to North London – it was so far away to me. It was all local girls and boys, that was it – and I couldn’t leave, really – and then with modelling I got to travel the world, non-stop travelling the world, meeting new people every day – and it was good, really good, getting different people’s aspects on life. I really respect modelling for that, cos it opens my eyes. But I was still stuck before you.’ I nudged my head against his to keep him talking. ‘When I got scouted,’ he said, ‘I did my first job for a gay magazine – and I didn’t really know what to think. I get up, I go on the job, it’s pretty good – it’s just fashion really. But a few weeks after that, when it gets released, I ain’t got a clue it’s a gay magazine – and all my friends want to see it ’cos it’s my first time – and I’m telling them “Go out and get your own copy, go on, show your mum” – all that, you know. And they see it’s a gay magazine and I get ripped!’ He laughed. ‘I swear! But that’s life, you know… I became a bit of a gay icon, and I never knew I’d want to do that myself. I mean if a gay man didn’t like me, I’d feel bad about myself, like I weren’t wanted, you know, I should feel like I’m wanted by both sexes. All sexes. I get people coming right up to me saying I want to fuck you, that kind of thing happens all the time… But I never thought it would actually happen with men, until you… Your world is so much bigger than mine.’ ‘My world is tiny. I’ve never travelled, I’ve just read about it.’ He kissed me. ‘I ain’t got the focus for that,’ he said, leaning back. ‘You got the focus. You should tell me what to read. What should I read?’ ‘Poems. You don’t have to focus for long.’ ‘Tell me one.’ He shoved me off his shoulder so that he could lean against mine, pressing his cheek into my cheek. He was warmer than me – and at his touch I thought of sapphires cut in sunlight. ‘I don’t have a good memory,’ I said. ‘But in my head… there’s bits of a poem by Wallace Stevens, if you want. Called “Esth?tique du Mal”.’ ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘The art of evil.’ ‘Alright.’ I could feel his smile against my mouth. We breathed each other in, as I recited: ‘“The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination… The tragedy, however, may have begun, Again, in the imagination’s new beginning, In the yes of the realist spoken because he must Say yes, spoken because under every no Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken…”’ ‘What’s it mean?’ ‘There’s bits I’ve forgotten. But it means creativity is satanic because it is disobedient. Satan was the original artist. You aren’t satisfied with what’s already there, you add to it. Evil is necessary to living vividly. Tragedy is necessary to living vividly. But to develop an imagination, you must also be physical…’ ‘I can be physical,’ he said, shifting forwards to stand up. ‘I got a present for you.’ The odour of semen lifted in the air. He walked towards his fruit bowl – and from a mound of satsumas, he pulled out a necklace. I laughed. The whip wounds in my back were beginning to ache more finely – like filaments heating into a red ochre colour. I leaned into them with pleasure. They complimented the colour beneath them, that was always there – my ultramarine – the ultimate blue of my myalgia, the superlative blue – the deepest colour that’s still a colour before black. Francis squatted in front of me, tensing his abs into greater prominence, and swung the necklace before my eyes. ‘Since you’re not buying nothing nice for yourself… I got you this,’ he said. ‘I mean I got it in a shoot for free, but I wanted to keep it for you, as a present. It’s more your thing, I don’t do necklaces. Even though you got a bit of money now, don’t you?’ ‘It’s for the deposit on the flat,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it’s going to last. It’s Dawn’s money – that’s why I was keeping it safe.’ He caught the necklace at the top of its arc, closed it in his fist for a moment, and then released it again to lower it over my head. The pendant was a winged key. ‘I liked the little key,’ he said. ‘I felt like it had meaning, you know? And you don’t need to worry about your flat cos you can stay with me, can’t you? You don’t need to be worrying about money, even though I don’t get it, I don’t get why you don’t just go out and make money. You’re clever, why don’t you just get a job?’ ‘I’m too ill.’ ‘You don’t look ill,’ he smiled, assuming my answer was a joke. I wanted to say: You don’t see that part of me, I don’t show it – my brain misunderstands my muscles, so they ache like I’ve always got flu, or my mitochondria are fucked, so they can’t make enough energy, or I don’t know, I just know that I’m in pain, and I can hide it with heroin. But I need to hide it from you too, otherwise you’ll think differently of me. So I can’t tell you. I’ll never tell you. Instead I said: ‘Well I don’t believe in jobs. Most of us could be doing whatever we wanted, while machines did the rest. But jobs keep being invented because we’re supposed to be employed to justify our right to exist. It’s a scam. Money doesn’t work like people say it works, and we’re kept unhappy and exhausted.’ ‘But what would people do instead?’ he asked. ‘Evil,’ I said, standing up. ‘The vivid evil, of the imagination.’ ‘Where you going?’ ‘I have to go.’ ‘Where? Why?’ ‘We’re moving in today,’ I said. ‘I told you. I promised Dawn I’d be there for dinner.’ ‘Shit, ok, but you’ve got to come to Lars Vasari later.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘The exhibition, the photographs,’ he said. ‘I’m in most of the photos. I told you. You’re on the list.’ ‘Can you text me the details?’ I moved towards the door. He shadowed me uneasily, alarmed by the suddenness of my departure. ‘You’ve got to come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you to everyone. It’s in Mayfair.’ ‘Ok, maybe.’ ‘You’ve got to! You can’t wear that though.’ ‘Ok.’ I opened the door. Francis kissed me twice goodbye. The evening smelt of cold wrought iron and all the leaves that had fallen were stirring. I refused to reassure him with parting words. The sky was a deceitful blue, not far from ultramarine – but it wasn’t radiant enough, or resentful enough to be the same – and ultramarine’s pallor, like mine, required a pain that the evening didn’t have. I knew Francis was watching me walk away as the streetlights turned me amber. There was a nearby bus that would take me to my new address, and to the pain relief I’d been promised. As I turned the corner, I took off his necklace and threw it in a bin. 5. (#ulink_96f94068-c5e8-597e-b842-b54d2a137906) I didn’t know which buzzer to ring so I rang them all. Dawn answered like she’d been waiting at the intercom. ‘Who’s that? Is that Leander? You’re early.’ ‘No I’m not,’ I said. ‘Who is it then?’ ‘This is Leander, but I’m not early.’ ‘Oh shut the fuck up and get inside.’ She buzzed me in. ‘Wait, what floor is it?’ I asked, but she’d already hung up. I climbed the stairs in darkness, listening to the suppertime clatter through the walls. My muscles felt like diseased clay in a kiln, unmoulding in defiance of the heat. A star orbited my brain. Between the banisters of the third floor, a light shone. Dawn was waiting in one of its doorways, wine bottle in hand. She’d cleaned the blood of the crash off her face, but its wound was visible still through her hair – the colour of boiling plums. ‘You seem… deflated,’ I said. ‘What a nice way to greet your mother, you cheeky shit,’ she said. ‘How about, “Oh I never seen you look so elegant, you look like an English rose!”’ ‘I’ve never seen you look elegant…’ ‘Oi!’ She raised her hand to slap me. ‘You can’t come in till you give me a compliment.’ ‘Ok, you do look quite… roseate.’ ‘I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s not a fucking compliment, you runt. You’re not getting in with that.’ She stepped back and began closing the door. ‘Ok, sorry…’ I said. ‘I mean you look like a blossom of damask, twined with eglantine beneath a nightingale singing threnodies into a well.’ ‘Better... but that didn’t end right, did it? You can do better than a well.’ ‘Ugh… I’m hungry, please. Ok, you look like Cleopatra under opal noon-light in her roof garden, riding a glass dildo full of bees.’ ‘Better… one more compliment and you get to enter the roof-garden,’ she opened the door wider, but kept her palm up in prohibition. ‘Ok, you look like an apricot-soft eclipse watched from a yacht shipping laudanum and labdanum across the Levant.’ ‘Perfffffect – there you are my darling, come in, come in – welcome to our new home!’ She stepped aside, unbalanced – and as I entered, she fell onto me into a hug. ‘What you doing strutting in like that?’ she said. ‘Hug your mother properly!’ I put my arms around her and she rose to kiss me on the mouth. Her tongue was stale from cigarettes. I twitched away in disgust. ‘Are you high?’ I asked. ‘Don’t be stupid, I just had some of the red!’ She lifted the bottle up to my chest. ‘It’s the posh stuff. It costs twenty-five pound! Try it!’ She fed it to me with her head turned away. I tried to drink, but it spilled over my chin – so she tried to lick it off. ‘Ok, thanks,’ I said, pushing her away. ‘Tastes great. I’m hungry…’ ‘Yeah, yeah, course – let me give you the tour.’ She ignored this second prompt for food and instead yanked me into a cramped shower room. ‘This is the spa,’ she said, flicking the switch beside her. A light strip above us hummed into a glare. Her pupils were pinpricks in the mirror. And her expression – still sharp and handsome and untrusting – had a gentleness to it that was only there when she was high, and made her look like she wanted to be told lies. ‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘You started without me.’ ‘No, darling, course not.’ She turned off the light. ‘I could never start without you.’ ‘But you got some heroin?’ She twirled in evasion and pulled me back out into the living area. ‘This is the Napoleonic suite.’ She gestured to a double bed, a dining table, and our two suitcases between them. ‘You can sleep with me if you want, but I thought you’d prefer your own wing. No need to share anymore, we’re living the high life!’ She pulled me towards a door beside the bed and opened it onto a tiny room with a single floor mattress and a lamp without a shade. ‘I actually love it,’ I said. ‘I knew you would, darling, you love that depressing garret shit. You can finally live your dream of being a consumptive Russian aristocrat in an attic. Isn’t that what you said? It’s almost an omelette. No – what’s worse than an omelette?’ ‘Nothing, I hate omelettes. Unless you mean oubliette?’ ‘Exactly sweetheart, it’s the perfect oubliette for you. I knew you’d love it. I done right didn’t I? I sorted us out! Just you and me, fucking finally… But let me finish the grand tour,’ she prodded me towards a small square kitchen through an arch beside the dining table. ‘And so – here is the Michelin-starred restaurant.’ ‘And have you managed to create any Michelin-starred food?’ ‘Not yet, we only just fucking moved in!’ ‘But you promised me a banquet.’ ‘Oh I know I did, didn’t I, darling, but there’s never enough time. Sorry sweetheart, I’ll make it another night.’ ‘That’s not like you. You were so keen on proving your culinary abilities earlier.’ ‘I was just showing off,’ she said, with mixture of sarcasm and self-pity. ‘I wanted you to be impressed. I was making it up! Can’t we focus on the positives – we got our own fucking palace! We can dance in our own living room. No more fucking noise restrictions. No more fascists. No more locked-in syndrome.’ ‘This definitely used to be a council flat,’ I said, choosing to change the subject. ‘And now it’s being rented out by parasites like your boyfriend. Landlords should be outlawed and hunted down for sport and shot.’ She sashayed to a song that only she could hear, swigging from the bottle. ‘Aren’t you going to say that your boyfriend shouldn’t be hunted down for sport and shot?’ I asked. ‘You’re not defending him as vigorously as you were earlier.’ ‘Oh leave it out, Leander. Can’t you just enjoy the view? Life is about to happen to us!’ But she said her catchphrase with no conviction. ‘There’ll be a revolution soon,’ I said. ‘And who’s going to control the houses?’ ‘A computer.’ ‘And then?’ she asked, still sashaying. ‘Are you going to be the emperor?’ I closed my eyes until I saw myself in a courtyard somewhere near the Earth’s meridian – cool under silk canopies, as a harem of men had their necks slit open by a harem of women. The men kissed me as they bled out, willingly giving themselves to my rejuvenation – and then the women, with their last screams, praised me as I set fire to their tents. My palace was overrun by beasts – boars and stags and wolves and crocodiles – in a havoc more beautiful than the havoc of the stars. ‘The earth has no way out other than to become invisible,’ I said, ‘in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible.’ ‘The fuck does that mean? You doing a quote?’ ‘Yeah, Rilke said that. He was a poet.’ ‘Course he was. Fucking useless answer to “How are we going have houses?” You can’t put the earth inside you and start eating the invisible.’ ‘I felt like saying it,’ I said. ‘And you seem pretty happy to be making me eat the invisible. Did you really not get any food with my money?’ ‘Babe, the money ran out.’ ‘First you say you didn’t have time to make food, and now you’re saying you didn’t have the money. Which is it?’ ‘What’s this – a police interview? There weren’t neither. I said the wrong thing. Whatever, I been trying my best…’ ‘You didn’t try anything.’ ‘What the fuck do you know? I tried everything… I didn’t know everything. I never realised that…’ She stopped and looked out of the window. My pain removed me from the room for a moment – and I imagined myself as an emperor again – again with a palace of beasts and slain lovers – and I wondered what would happen if one of my lovers survived, an accidental immortal, and came back to worship me with a whip, as I’d been worshiped earlier today. This immortal would promise me love, perhaps – a love like a warren of underground caves, in which stalactites had been broken off and arranged in rings by some inhuman tribe for the worship of some inhuman god – like me or my lover. But if our love could only end in death – how would we, as immortals, die? By becoming each other, of course – by seeking a desire that exceeds music, and so forces us out of the dance. ‘What happened?’ I asked, returning to the present. ‘You went to see Gibbon and…’ ‘Stop calling him that!’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘I got you some bread,’ she laughed, amused again, and twirled towards the kitchen. There, she retrieved a plastic-wrapped loaf of sliced bread. ‘You can make a toast sandwich!’ she said. ‘A slice of toast between two slices of bread. Dinner for champions! I used to eat it in the war.’ I laughed too, delighted by her erratic mood, its bleak imagery, and how casually she had betrayed my trust. The walls of the apartment were painted two shades of cream, as though the painters had run out of one shade a third of the way along the wall and continued with another a few shades warmer – and as I stared at the line where the colours changed, my brain bent the contrast into a flavour – close to soy sauce – and I was hungry. ‘I might actually do that,’ I said. I took the loaf from her hands, impatiently tore off its plastic, and slotted a slice into the toaster. There were no plates in the cupboard, so I placed the outer slices on the counter. I checked the fridge for butter, but it wasn’t switched on. ‘You’re avoiding all my questions,’ I said. ‘Did you get any heroin?’ ‘Not yet, not yet, I’ve not managed to accomplish everything, I’m sorry,’ she giggled, drinking again from her bottle. The diameter of her pupils belied her denials – she must have been high all afternoon. ‘You don’t look sorry.’ ‘I’ll get it, I’ll get it baby, I promised you – and I don’t break my promises. Just sometimes I delay them. Kimber asked us to meet down the Rockway later. He wants to meet you. He’ll have some for us then, for sure.’ ‘I’m going to a gallery tonight,’ I said. ‘Why? Is Francis going to be there? Ah are you going to a gallery with Francis? What happened with him – oh sweetheart I forgot to ask. How’d it all go? I’m sorry I was so caught up in my hectic business-orientated lifestyle,’ she cackled in self-derision. ‘I forgot your love woes. Did you say sorry to him? Did he forgive you?’ ‘Stop changing the subject. Where’s my money? What’s wrong with Kimber? Why aren’t you rhapsodising about him like you were earlier? What happened?’ ‘He was just busy. He was stressed. He weren’t as happy about everything as I thought he’d be.’ ‘Everything?’ She sighed against the table, finally retiring her jovial fa?ade. She held up her head and shook it – and drank again, swallowing emphatically as if to swallow words she didn’t want to say and tears she didn’t want to show. ‘I think he’s jealous of you,’ she said eventually. ‘So? I paid the deposit. Does he want to get rid of me?’ ‘No, no, of course,’ she slurred. ‘I know you did, he knows you did. You’re my number one, sweetie, I can’t leave you, course I won’t, I promised to be your mother.’ The toast popped up. I placed it between the two untoasted slices and gazed awhile in satisfaction at this assault on the history of cuisine, contemplating the distance between the first makers of bread and me – and then bit into it. Though dry, the bread was sweet, and the toast between it a satisfying contrast. This sad meta-sandwich would suffice as a meal for now. ‘This is pretty good,’ I smiled, spilling crumbs. She didn’t smile back. Instead, my display of positivity seemed to push her further into despondency. ‘What if I made a mistake, Leander? What if I done this wrong?’ ‘You haven’t,’ I mumbled between chews, moving towards her in reassurance. ‘We couldn’t have continued in a hostel – you were right, you were looking out for me. Your impulsive uprooting was necessary. And you didn’t uproot us from much. A homeless hostel is never going to be a home. We can make this a home. I’m grateful.’ ‘No,’ she began crying. ‘Don’t try to be nice to me, I can’t take it, I need you to sulk – I need to be the one reassuring you. When you try it, it sounds so fake. This was a mistake weren’t it? I’m a mistake. I’m bad for you.’ ‘Is this about the money?’ I asked. ‘I don’t care, I made it in an hour. I can make it again. And I’ve still got some.’ ‘It’s not just your money. I’m a bad mother. But it is the money – I lost your money.’ ‘Did Kimber take it all?’ I began to understand. ‘Didn’t you tell him it was for our food?’ Her face became harsher. ‘Did he take the money from you?’ I repeated. ‘No, he’s not like that, he would never be like that to me – he’d been working, he was in a different mood, it was my fault.’ As my suspicions grew, the associations of my other senses were heightened: the taste of soil entered my mouth, and her words gained an orange echo. ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Did he hit you?’ ‘No, you’re getting the wrong end of everything. It’s not like that.’ ‘What is it like then? Last week, you were outside his control. But now you’re in his car and in his flat, you’re in his power and you’ve glimpsed something in him that was hidden before?’ She cried quietly. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘He’s a man in a violent profession. He’s jealous. What did he say about me?’ ‘Stop analysing, I don’t want to hear it. You’re just trying to sulk again. He’s said nothing about you.’ ‘You’re lying.’ ‘It was me, I was talking about you,’ she cried. ‘I was talking about you.’ ‘And? You’re making it sound like you sold me to him.’ ‘I just talk too much, don’t I? I hope too much. I believe people too much. I can’t –’ she pushed me away. ‘I can’t. Don’t look at this. Go and shower, you need to wash. At least you can wash your day off you. I tried to wash. Let me just – go away.’ She covered her eyes with her hands and began rocking herself towards despair. I left for the bathroom. The shower had no curtain, so it wet all the walls as soon as I turned it on. The sound of the spraying water glittered with blotchy browns and reds, like a cloud of gatekeeper butterflies. As it warmed, I undressed and rinsed the toast from my mouth in the sink. I stepped in. The water felt like hail on my flayed back – but I experienced this as light entertainment. My body hurt anyway, from my myalgia, so the whip wounds were really a relief. Chronic muscle pain has a dissociative effect – every day, for the past decade, my limbs have seemed severed from each other, hovering discretely in uncertain space. My sense of proprioception is in disarray – my nerves regard themselves as hostile. So bruises and gashes like the new ones on my back simply lift me out of my underlying condition. Flesh injuries are insignificant compared to a half-life spent inside a skeleton of barbed wire – of feeling half-disembodied and half-disembowelled – a cloud of phosgene and a soldier’s scream, at once in the same skin. That’s why being beaten feels like being cured. The bathroom door opened as I was washing the soles of my feet. I wobbled in surprise. Dawn entered through the steam, staring with an inebriated intensity. ‘I remembered the Savlon,’ she said, holding up the tube of antiseptic. Again I tasted soil in my spit – though now her voice sounded like it had become foreign to her too. She seemed to be speaking automatically. ‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘Let me look at your back.’ ‘Can’t you do this when I’m out?’ ‘I’ll do it now.’ I put the soap in the tray and turned around. Crying, she traced her fingers along my welts, circling the metal buckle’s indents one by one. I rested my head on my arm against the tiles of the wall, letting the water hit the curve of my spine. Briefly she lifted away her hand – and returned it, thick with ointment, to smooth across my broken skin. I closed my eyes and forgot the specifics of the room. But as she smoothed lower, I realised she was teasing me towards arousal. Her other hand joined the first in massaging towards my hips – and then she stepped into the shower with me, wetting her clothes. ‘No,’ I said. She pushed her hands down my thighs, her soaked skirt rubbing against my back. Instead of earth, I tasted burnt coffee. I tried to swallow it away. ‘Just let me make you feel better,’ she said. ‘I’m scared I been a bad mother.’ ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘Then why you not pushing me away?’ She tried to turn me around but I resisted. She kissed my neck and forced her fingers through mine. ‘This is… unnecessary,’ I said. ‘Then why are you hard?’ She guided my hand in hers towards my erection. I let her hold me there for moment, but then shook my shoulders. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’ I turned off the water – she clutched to me, trying to kneel down. I pushed her away, and took up my clothes and hurried into the living room. She followed slowly, drenched, her lips apart but no longer crying, her eyes unclear. From my suitcase I removed black jeans, black socks, a black polo-neck, and her fake Dalmatian fur coat. With my back to her, I re-hid most of the money in my boxers and my sock. Then, turning so that she could see, I put the remaining ?200 in my coat pocket. ‘Why don’t you leave that with me?’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous having so much money on you.’ ‘It’s more dangerous to leave it with you. It would disappear.’ ‘I taught you how to pleasure a woman!’ she said, as though this was somehow a retort. ‘I taught you! You never knew what you was doing until I taught you.’ ‘You taught me nothing.’ ‘I’m a bad mother, am I?’ She was weeping again. ‘I can remember how you was when we met. You trusted me, and you don’t trust nobody. Why’d you start trusting me?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘We’re moving on with life! Everything’s going right, now, ain’t it? I’ve got a man, you’ve got a man, we got a place of our own.’ ‘Then why are you crying?’ ‘Your wounds make me sad,’ she said – with something closer to remorse than she’d managed in the car earlier. ‘They’re a failing, if I’m your mother.’ ‘Then don’t be my mother,’ I said, though I was pleased by her veiled confession –that she’d known in advance I’d be whipped by her client. ‘You asked me to be your mother!’ she shouted. ‘I asked because you needed me to ask.’ ‘So you can have feelings! But they’re not enough – you never asked me why I needed it.’ ‘It was obvious – you needed a substitute son, I needed a substitute mother.’ ‘You don’t know it all,’ she sobbed. ‘I was too young. I was fifteen. Did you know that? Yeah – I ain’t even that old! I had him five years but then I… I weren’t up to it, was I? I failed. My mum hated me, just because she spent all her time thinking what life would be like without kids. And I didn’t want that for me. I tried it but I didn’t want it. I couldn’t take the tasks that never end. She said she felt destroyed – destroyed as a woman. And I felt like that till I got myself back. I couldn’t touch nobody for years. My mum said I made her feel like a nobody. And it was the same with me when I had my kid. My body weren’t for me and I hated it. So I ended it, didn’t I? I tried to put him in a fucking orphanage – but his dad got custody and they only let me see him twice a year. And I couldn’t bear it, so I saw him less. And now he hates me. Do you know what I mean? My son fucking hates me! That’s why I need you. I need a son that doesn’t hate me.’ She lurched forwards tearfully to stroke my face. I pulled away. A reddish flash – perhaps a silent ambulance passing through the street below – got caught in my eye, and I saw a huge fish leaping through the air between us, like a salmon up a waterfall – until it reached the window, and leapt out into the red of the night. Dawn sat back into the table with an expression of opiated wonder – perhaps having had the same vision as me. ‘It’s your turn,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to balance me out. What happened to your mother? Why’d you need me?’ ‘I’ve told you. When I was eleven my dad shot my mum then shot himself. I found the bodies. I had an older sister, but she died when I was six.’ ‘Maybe. Maybe I believe you. But you lie about who you want to be, don’t you? You lie so people show themselves to you. I know you think I’m stupid – and I am stupid compared to you, and even stupider now that you got me this bump on my head – but it’s fine, just because I don’t have an education to wear on my sleeve.’ She lifted her hands to stop me interrupting. ‘Even if you gave that education to yourself, sweetheart, but still, for all you want to twist me around – I understand you more than you think I do. And that’s why you like me. You like me because you can’t manipulate me.’ ‘I can manipulate you.’ She laughed. ‘Yeah but you can’t control me completely. You can’t predict everything. That’s what you need me for.’ ‘And why was now the time for this little soliloquy?’ ‘Because life’s about to happen to us! I want you to know what I know. Maybe I like you because you like lies more than people.’ ‘I like lies that get people to tell me their secrets,’ I said. ‘But also, my lies are confessions, in a way. Lies are fantasies – and fantasies reveal you much more nakedly than facts.’ ‘Go on then.’ ‘Stories that aren’t biographically true can still be true – if they reveal something about the teller’s psychology. They are psychologically true. They show what I want you to believe about me. Lies are not as simple as inaccuracies. A lie, as an evasion or a complication, is still a revelation of character – it’s a slanted truth. If I told you I was trampled by a horse when I was fifteen, and the trauma of that incident is the reason why I am now inert and deceitful and constantly in pain – you would learn something true about me. It may not have literally happened, but it gives you an image by which to understand me. Rather than listing diagnoses – like fibromyalgia or immune dysfunction or dysautonomia or insomnia or Lyme disease or myalgic encephalomyelitis or even just poverty – that all only speak to the surface of what I am, I give you instead a metaphor, of a trampling horse. And by that metaphor you comprehend me beyond facts. It wasn’t literally true – it was psychologically true. Lies are insights into the liar, if you read them right.’ ‘So when you tell people about me, I’m going to be a horse?’ ‘No, you’ll be a blue-ringed octopus. A many-limbed entanglement, overbearing, toxic, and drowning.’ ‘You’re a charmer.’ ‘I have to go,’ I said. Worry resurfaced in her face. ‘Let me drive you there.’ ‘You can’t drive like this. And I want to be cold for a while.’ ‘Please don’t walk there.’ ‘Fuck off.’ ‘It’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at the Rockway, ok? Do I get a key?’ ‘Yeah, course you do sweetheart.’ She removed a key ring from her pocket and put it into mine. She hugged me, trembling as though suppressing an apology or a warning – and waved me away with defeat in her eyes. I left, disorientated, but impressed – as though she’d managed some master manipulation that I could barely understand. 6. (#ulink_d60fb236-8922-5dd2-8942-943f8117bdbb) I strode through unfamiliar streets, my mind widening into the night’s intimacy. The space between the terraced houses had a presence I called ‘indisclosure’: the active sense of a city withholding its meanings. And as I said the word to myself, its sound gained the taste of cotton candy – a too-sweet taste, though I kept repeating it anyway – indisclosure, indisclosure, indisclosure. The houses had put their wheelie-bins out in the street – for tomorrow’s collection – and they reminded me of a dream I used to have, of waking up inside a black plastic bag, in a dustbin – and feeling content there, waiting for the truck to come and take me away – from the pain I felt then, and still felt now. Tonight that pain came as a nest of tarantulas – dressed in the smeared aprons of butchers, washing their cleavers in my blood, and promenading along my muscles like avenues in an orchard. I walked down a bike path to a canal. The wind quickened in its confinement here, so I walked faster, fingering the key in my pocket. I imagined the wind coming from the old Deptford dockyard, and carrying with it the sighs of sailors who’d left from there and died at sea, younger than me, as long as half a millennium ago – when the docks had been the cradle of a navy that plundered the whole world. And in this wind, in its ghosts, was a reminder that London was still growing from the profits of that plunder. But also in this wind was an opposite reminder – that London had grown from an army’s camp – an invader’s camp – and the river that army had bivouacked beside was rising. The walls that defended it were invisible now – but they were still here – and they couldn’t hold back the water forever. All camps are temporary – this one would be washed away too. Two figures approached from beneath the bridge. One was taller than me, but both, in the gloom, looked younger, perhaps sixteen years old. The taller wore a dark tracksuit, dark trainers, and a white snapback hat; his shorter partner had more flair, with a cyan sweatshirt over navy overalls speckled with paint, and cobalt-blue shoes. His cropped hair was shaven in whorls. ‘Mate can you lend us some money?’ the shorter one asked. I ignored them, clenching the key, and tried to walk past. The taller stepped into my way. I tiredly lifted my eyes to his. ‘Got any money to lend us?’ he asked. I stared without saying anything. A vein in my leg twitched, and my blood began to flush with anticipation. The taller one stepped closer and shoved me at my hip. I moved in obedience to his fist, and inhaled, untensing myself, as if about speak – but said nothing. The other shoved my shoulder. ‘You speak English?’ he asked. ‘We need to borrow a bit of money. I need to buy a speedboat.’ He laughed. I sighed, readying my best impersonation of an action hero, and took two steps backwards. ‘Which of you wants your leg broken first?’ I asked. Their expressions paused, blank while processing a reaction to this bluff – and then, just as they were both deciding on sniggers, I twisted round to kick sideways at the taller one’s outer leg, my shoe flat in a right angle as its heel hit his knee socket. It dislocated but didn’t snap – he shrieked, hobbling back, rolling his upper body forwards – so I punched into his nose, upwards, and it easily broke. His blood dribbled onto my knuckles like honey and, as I skipped backwards, for a moment I wanted to lick it. The shorter boy stared in shock. The wall beside us prevented most types of attack, so I span and ducked to kick up in a back-hook at his face – hitting his chin, but not hard enough. The jaw clattered but didn’t snap. I spun to face him again, in a low stance, my fists up. He swiped vaguely at me with his left hand – I blocked it, but saw too late it had been a feint, and with his stronger fist he struck my eye. The side of its socket splintered into steel light – and he jabbed again at my stomach. I was tensed enough not to be winded, but stumbled to the water’s edge. He knew how to box, and pushed his advantage, smacking me in the temple and then the neck – I choked, tasting thickening mango – and tried to weave out of his way on my back foot. I let him punch my eye again. Verdigris-green shattered into my throat – but I spat it back out into his mouth, sweeping at his front foot, and ducked under his arm to tug him backwards over his other leg. As he fell, I span round to strike my elbow into his cheek. Something cracked – but it might have been me. My nerves were livid. The space around me was splitting, as though allowing a sharper air to replace it. I was more vivid now and, somehow, now – finally now – in my body properly. I gripped onto his arm and stamped on it where it met his shoulder until it broke. He screamed as I stamped. I imagined that I was crunching burnt pinecones – I could smell the smoke of a bonfire of fir and chestnuts – and then I kicked him in the jaw until it, too, broke. I felt like I had just been born. The shivers of the wind around me harmonised with the waves of wind in my spine. I breathed further than I could formerly breathe. My eyes could see backwards and upwards – the present was balling out into a vibrating sphere. I reached to stroke the boy’s head: its shaved hair resembled velvet – the fringe of a dress I wanted to kiss, or the fur of a foxglove. I wished to further my assault on his partner, but a punch to the side of my chest winded me – I staggered over his body and looked back. There was third boy, my age, my height, hooded, holding a knife tipped with my blood. My coat had stopped his stab penetrating far. I axe-kicked at his hand to knock it open – he dropped the knife, but the boy on the ground grabbed my heel to trip me. I stamped on him, and the third man lunged to grip me by the throat. I tasted nutmeg, a cloud in my windpipe – and kneed him in the groin, but he didn’t release me – so I stamped again on the other boy to prevent him pulling me down. The night brightened as I lost air – and I embraced my strangler, inhaling his sweatshirt’s tranquil reek of weed, bending his choking arm inwards, surprising him off balance. In my advantage, I twisted into the skin of his neck – in the shadow, it clotted like cream around a pair of freckles the width of my two front teeth – and I bit him there so sharply that I tore off every layer of skin – but not enough to make him bleed. His grip relaxed – I kneed him again in the crotch and spun round to find the knife. But it was not on the ground; perhaps it had fallen into the canal. This quick search was a misjudgement – the two boys on the ground jerked to grab a foot each, nearly tripping me onto my back. As I squatted, I jabbed with three fingers joined in a screwing motion into his eye – it softened, though didn’t burst into the jelly I wanted; he dug his head into the tarmac to get away – and before I could complete his blinding, the third boy tackled me. I writhed, excited by the firmness of his biceps, and bit at his wrist, my jaw so wide it nearly detached to reach his flesh with my cuspid teeth – chewing and grinding until I tasted gristle and his arm-hair on my tongue. Yelling, he punched at my head with his free hand – and with each hit, I became younger, larger, more precise; and my teeth kept to his wrist, hopeful of bone; with each hysterical hit, I was resurrected – until finally he knocked my jaw loose, but not without its prize of meat. With my left foot, I kicked against the ground to slide out from under him – and he screamed at his ripped wrist, the tendons exposed, his hand useless, a severed vein gushing onto its unresponsive index finger, pointed in some broken reflex as though in accusation. I squirmed faster, but still he pinioned my thighs – until I dragged my left arm loose and reached to rip at his ear. My grip slipped in his sweat, but I dug my nail back into its helix and tore down again – his head jerked to follow it; and I twisted it backwards, desperate to part the skin from his skull – but skin is hard to rip. I shoved him further sideways to roll out from underneath him – but as I tried to leap away, one of the other boys snatched at my coat. I stretched back my shoulders to lose it over my arms – and he fell as I shed it, and shrunk – now only in my polo-neck. But before I was fully upright, the shorter boy with the splintered chin slapped my foot – and my face smacked into the concrete. I bit my tongue, tasting its own blood – the third now on my palate – and this mixture had the tartness of pomegranate seeds. The third attacker dived onto me, gripping me in a headlock – his armpit’s deodorant leaking into his sweat, the smell of a ripening peach, its case breaking to the yellow fruit beneath, but soured by detergent – I sniffed longer, until at the back of the aroma I found hyacinth. He heaved his body onto mine, his knee in the small of my back, shouting ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ Then, my head was concussed into the stone – and I saw the cobalt shoe of the shorter boy at my face. As he stamped me with one foot, and the asphalt assumed the flavour of salt in my throat – I watched his own blood webbing across the tongue of his other trainer. I wanted to skewer this foot to the ground with a knife to stare at it for longer in various lights – but the knife was gone, and I couldn’t worm my head away. As his partner beat me, my vision seemed to swell – the geometry of the canal and the towpath was altered, distending, the rules of perspective suddenly re-complicated, as my gravity increased, competing with the city’s. Sounds fawned to my ear – the boys’ screams and pants, but also from further, I fancied, I could hear exhausts and bar chatter – and these sounds were gathering around me almost in devotion. In his fury, he stripped the shirt off my back, and re-opened the whip cuts made that morning – but under his blows, I grew more exuberant, like a whole world I had never participated in before was being revealed to me. My old ultramarine pain was gone – overruled for now by joyful shallower agony. I had known that my world was not the right one – I had known that I was not living as everyone else was living – but here, finally, I was being allowed to exist where they existed – here, finally, I was experiencing a correctness in being alive, a comfort in simply being, that felt not like a state or stasis but a curve. I finally understood it, and stood in it, and accepted it and was accepted by it – the land was no longer alien to me; my body was no longer merely half here – I was here, wholly; I was present, I was finally present! Perhaps this was what is called Stendhal syndrome – overwhelmed to nausea by aesthetic pleasure... ‘Stay on his legs! Who fucking kicks like that?’ ‘There’s only two hundred pound here,’ the taller boy shouted, turning out my coat pockets. ‘Get his shoes.’ Hands tore at my boots, and then slowed to unlace them – as hands tore at my waist, reaching beneath me to unbutton the fly. I flailed under the weight of two bodies. My socks were pulled off – and the money within them found. Then the mass on my thighs lifted – I kicked faster, but hands were already at my waist, dragging down my jeans and boxer-briefs until I was naked – and the money within them found also. ‘Let me kill him.’ ‘Pick that up – count it!’ ‘Let me fucking kill him!’ ‘You’re not allowed to.’ What? I thought. Who didn’t allow him? Was I the performer now – in someone else’s play? The second weight stood, and the foot left my head. They twisted me onto my back, serrating my flesh against the cement. My gaze was pure exhilaration; they were shaking in terror. ‘Shit!’ ‘He’s got a boner!’ They recoiled – I clutched for the oldest boy’s testicles and squeezed one with my thumb into my palm until it flattened – and as he screamed in an agony that must have felt like levitation, I rolled sideways into the canal. The water vibrated with joy – and I felt keener, faster, staring at them, safely, from a few meters away. ‘Have you got it?’ ‘I’ve got it.’ ‘Let’s go.’ The taller boy threw my clothes and shoes into the water. The shorter one vomited, leaning on the third as he tried to stand. I treaded water, watching as they hobbled towards the bridge, groping at each other like drunken lovers. A bicycle light skimmed through the darkness towards them – too late to witness our communion. Its strobes illuminated the boys’ retreat. They gave way. But I could not long remain in this cold – my clarity was yielding to heaviness. The water coiled around my legs like a moray eel, deepening towards a mile-high dam it wished to suck me into. In the dark I could see only my coat, a few strokes away – so I swam over, and found by it my jeans, but could not see anything else. Kicking with one leg, paddling with one arm, I strove for the opposite bank, my lungs clenched as though stuffed with sackcloth. The bank was further than it ought to have been; possibly a current I couldn’t feel was resisting me – but my will was stronger than my muscles, and I achieved the shore. I climbed onto the bank in a crawl, wheezing, and sat to drag on my jeans and coat. But I couldn’t let myself pause here – so I crawled to the steps towards street level, spitting blood over my hands, my vision a whirlpool. At the pavement, I tried to stand under a streetlight, but instead fell into a flowerbed. Its briars revived me – enough to claw forwards, with fists of soil, across and out onto the road. Cars cruised by with interior musics. I collapsed under the folds of my coat, looking up at clouds purpled by London’s light pollution. As my body began to understand itself again, its adrenaline dwindled, but was replaced by a more exquisite thrill – of realisation. The robbers could have guessed to search my socks and boxers – but Dawn’s antic mode this evening suggested she had betrayed me. Perhaps they had followed me from her doorstep. And so my suspicions about my whipping weren’t just paranoia – Dawn was arranging my injuries. Our game was real – I loved her more, for this. And now it was my turn to play. A car was approaching along the lane I lay in. And as I blacked out, I ejaculated. ACT 2 (#ulink_e81a55ad-8bba-5d9e-90f4-a53b8fe6127f) The call to adventure (#ulink_e81a55ad-8bba-5d9e-90f4-a53b8fe6127f) 1. (#ulink_374573cc-31e4-5403-84fc-973e5c5802a6) I woke in a man’s arms. ‘No,’ I tried to say, but my teeth turned to brass and unscrewed me back into ultramarine. I woke as a car door closed on my face. I couldn’t differentiate between words and textures. But I knew that a man was in the driver’s seat beside me. ‘Not to hospital,’ I said. ‘You have to.’ ‘No… to 24 Orgrave Road, SE5… something. SE5.’ ‘Is someone there?’ ‘My… girlfriend,’ I managed, and blacked out again. I woke in a man’s arms. He was holding me against a column of names. ‘Ravel,’ I told him. The door buzzed open, he dragged me into the lift. As it rose, charcoal covered my eyes. I woke in a woman’s arms. ‘What happened to him?’ she asked. They carried me onto a sofa. ‘How much was the journey? Take it!’ she said. His protestations dissolved into glue. I woke as a woman pulled off my jeans. My wet coat was already gone. ‘Eva!’ I said. ‘What happened to you?’ ‘I’m… cold.’ ‘Not for much longer. Shit!’ She drew the jeans off over my feet and tucked me into a blanket. ‘You need to go to hospital.’ ‘I need whisky.’ ‘You need that treated.’ ‘Then treat it.’ ‘I’m not a nurse.’ ‘Please?’ ‘Ok, I probably have antiseptic, but you need more than that. Shit, you’re bleeding.’ ‘Surface wounds. Decorative.’ ‘Shit,’ she said, and left. Eva returned with a tray of three tall glasses – one gold, one white, one green. ‘Drink all of these. You can’t talk to me till you’ve drunk all of them.’ I obeyed, shifting onto my un-stabbed side to drink first the milk, and then the whisky, and then the juice. ‘What was in that?’ I asked, tipping the last glass’s leftover algae along its side. ‘Protein shake with spinach.’ ‘I’ve never felt so virtuous.’ I sat up a little. ‘Get back down.’ She took away the tray and lifted up the blanket to apply antiseptic to my cuts. ‘Turn over.’ I did so and she yelped. ‘Shit, were you whipped? You’ve been stabbed. What the fuck?’ ‘I went swimming,’ I said, warming to the attention of her hands. ‘The taxi guy said you’d been in a canal?’ ‘I went swimming,’ I said again. ‘Who did this?’ ‘A blue-ringed octopus.’ She sighed in irritation. ‘So you were attacked and thrown into a canal. Why? And why did you come to me?’ ‘You were the first person who came to mind. I remembered your address from last night. Were you not expecting me?’ ‘I’m supposed to hate you. Did you forget that when you drowned?’ ‘Do you hate me?’ ‘I don’t know. Maybe not. This afternoon I was… angry.’ ‘I remember.’ ‘Your eye is so fucked up.’ She squeezed more ointment onto her fingers. ‘Is that Savlon?’ I smiled. ‘What? Yeah. Why’s that funny?’ ‘Nothing. It’s a good parallel.’ ‘With what?’ ‘Nothing.’ She sighed. ‘I was crying all afternoon.’ ‘Same.’ ‘I don’t think you’ve cried for centuries.’ ‘My body cries in other ways.’ ‘I can see that. But why would you come to me?’ ‘I like you.’ Her hand twitched to her face, unsure of its response. In the shadows behind her I saw the outline of the taxi that had taken me here – and this shadow changed into a coach from a fairy tale – and then into a pumpkin – and then into a hearse – and I imagined myself inside the hearse, driving across a moor in the middle of England at night – and the moon was looming over me like a mother offering her breast to a child – and we sank. ‘I threw out Francis’ clothes,’ she said eventually. ‘I hate him. He lied to me. But I don’t know what to think about you. You didn’t actually lie to me. Or even if you did… yesterday, you were…’ ‘I like you,’ I said again. ‘I came back with you yesterday because I wanted to come back with you. Why does everything have to have an agenda?’ I thought of how slowly yesterday she’d pulled off my trousers and kissed the inside of my thighs – and of how, later, a helicopter had passed overhead and she’d woken and told me she was burying herself with her own hands and I’d said I was cutting open her stomach and pulling out a snail-coloured snake and taking it into my mouth – and then we’d fallen back asleep. ‘You like being confusing, don’t you?’ ‘Am I confusing you?’ I asked, lifting my head till my lips were at hers. ‘I wanted to see you.’ She did not move. I relaxed back, smiling, as her instincts wrestled with each other. With her long neck and loose black hair and long loose white dress, she looked like a goddess painted on the walls of a pyramid. ‘Your pockets are empty,’ she said. ‘No phone, no money, no shoes, no keys,’ I gestured at my naked body. ‘Just this.’ ‘Do you want to wear a dress?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to kiss me?’ Her gaze paused, I met it. She hesitated as I rose, but again did not pull away. Her lips parted, I kissed her. Briefly, the taste passed into the sound of a plucked string. I fell back. ‘You should have drunk the whisky last,’ she winced. ‘I’ll have some more.’ She retrieved the bottle, filled a third of my glass with whisky, and handed it to me. The contact of her finger on mine repeated the sound of a plucked string in my mind – but more clearly now – a viola treated with reverb. She filled the emptied milk glass with the same amount for herself and drank it in two gulps. ‘Do you have any water?’ I asked. She stood to fetch some, coughing from the whisky. My body was a muted growl. Her absence felt like an impression on a pillow – and I longed instantly for her return. She had less certainty than she’d had earlier today; out of costume, she could no longer simplify herself into a stock character, so she could not speak or think in the clich?s that had given her courage. My costume, meanwhile, had become more elaborate – these injuries had advanced my performance. She returned with a pitcher of water and a scarlet dress. As she set them down, I gripped her wrist with an urgency I had no words for and pulled her to me until she knelt either side of my hips, close enough to kiss. I pressed my fingers into her shoulders so that their blood turned white. She kissed me back almost in panic. I lifted her dress to lift myself into her – and we fucked, her nails cutting across my bruises, her knee against my stab wound. Each shock rose into pleasure as the endorphins and alcohol overruled the pains of my body’s surface and its deeper myalgia – until briefly she seemed like their antidote. Her eyes were closed, my eyes were covered by her hair. I slid my hands down her arms to her elbows, and came as she did. I untensed and let my head fall backwards. She lay across me, reaching over the side of the sofa to sip from the water jug. ‘Is there cum on my dress?’ she asked, smiling. ‘You can’t see anything, it’s white.’ ‘What about blood?’ ‘It’s quite stylish blood.’ ‘Shit.’ She stood up quickly, dabbing at the stains – confused by herself but not annoyed. ‘What was that?’ ‘It was quick,’ I said. ‘Do you have any painkillers?’ ‘I’ve got you paracetamol and ibuprofen. They’re just there.’ She reached to the table behind my head, and as her perfumed wrist passed my nose, it trailed lily of the valley. I listened to four foil pockets perforate. She fed me the tablets one by one, between sips of water. ‘Anything stronger?’ I asked. ‘Are you being ungrateful?’ ‘This is like… trying to mop up the ocean with a tea towel,’ I said. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, you’re not the ocean. You’re a paddling pool at best.’ ‘Alright, I’m a paddling pool, but I still need better means to mop it up.’ ‘Well sorry – I’ve run out of whale tranquiliser, or whatever class of chemical you’re accustomed to. Iris will have something stronger at the gallery.’ I sat up to repress a smile. ‘Are we going to the gallery?’ ‘If you won’t go to hospital.’ ‘Even though you hate Francis?’ ‘It’s not just photos of him. There’s photos of me as well.’ ‘Who’s Iris?’ ‘An ally.’ ‘Are you going to get revenge on Francis?’ I asked. ‘Maybe.’ ‘You should. The best revenge is always erotic.’ ‘I was thinking that.’ She drank again from the whisky. ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘I have an idea – but I’m not telling you. Aren’t you on his team? You can’t be trusted.’ ‘Obviously not,’ I said. ‘I don’t work well in teams. Do you have any shoes that could fit me?’ She laughed. ‘You’re most likely to fit into sling-backs. I’ve already chosen them.’ She pointed to a pair of black suede high heels whose straps curved behind the ankle. ‘But if we’re going down that route then we need to sort out your face.’ ‘How dare you? I’m beautiful.’ ‘But you can look more beautiful.’ She kissed me, tasting of whisky – her proximity again twisting in my mind into the sound of a reverberating string. ‘I haven’t done a boy’s make-up since I was a teenager.’ ‘Can you bring out the best in me?’ ‘I can’t perform miracles.’ She left for another room. I began to climb into the dress. My sense of space seemed to be stabilising as the fluids retrieved me to competence. But when I tried to stand, I wobbled, and dropped back onto the cushions. Eva saw me fall as she reentered, and cried ‘Ah!’ in pity. ‘Ah!’ I echoed, mockingly. From a quilted bag she took out a bottle, and from its dispenser she pumped a puddle of foundation onto the back of her hand. ‘This can hide tattoos,’ she said. ‘So it should hide your bruises.’ She dabbed some on her index finger – but then hesitated. ‘No – I’m doing this wrong. We should colour-correct first.’ ‘Yeah, I want a full actor’s mask,’ I said. ‘Don’t skip any steps.’ She took another pot from her bag – a wheel of five creams. And with her ring finger, she rubbed at the salmon cream – and then applied it over my bruises, cancelling out their bluish colour. Again I breathed in the scent of lily of the valley at her wrist. ‘Ok that’s better,’ she said. ‘Now we can do foundation.’ She returned to the beige puddle – and dotted it over my face, methodically, delicately. And then with an ovoid tickling sponge, she blended this into a mask. ‘I want to do more,’ she said. ‘Some eyeliner?’ I suggested. ‘A subtle cat eye,’ she said. ‘Some mascara.’ She held back my forehead with her thumb and lined my lids with thin black wings. ‘Blink,’ she instructed, holding up a stick of mascara. I closed my upper lashes over its brush, twice for each eye – and let her stroke the lower two until they too were dyed. ‘You’re ready.’ ‘Thank you.’ I kissed her – but she quickly retracted, to admire further the new artifice of my face. ‘You can be the red queen, and I’ll be the white,’ she said. ‘Did you bring out the best in me?’ ‘Check,’ she gave me a folded mirror. I looked at myself. My skin glistened oddly in this consistency – my eyes seemed more devious in their darkening, and the bruising of the left one was well concealed. ‘You bring out… something in me,’ she said. ‘Not the best… but you bring out the me in me. What just happened was… I don’t know. But it’s worked. And this afternoon I was… it was refreshing, to be able to let it out, you know? And I can even say I liked last night, however fucked up it was for you to not tell me about you and Francis.’ ‘How could I have told you? It had nothing to do with why I came back with you, or why I came to you now.’ ‘You’re lying but I don’t mind. I’m going to let you play on. At least you’re committed to your role,’ she laughed, indicating my hip wound as its blood blotched her gown towards a sicklier red. I tried to kiss her again but she stood up, taking out her phone. ‘The taxi’s here,’ she said. ‘And so you’re my date. The boy who stole my boyfriend. This makes no sense.’ ‘I didn’t steal anyone. And things don’t need to make sense, they just need to be charming.’ ‘I don’t know if I’m charmed, but I’m – still listening.’ She wrapped a cape of scarlet mink around my shoulders. I leaned against her as she escorted me into the lift and down into the waiting taxi. We shared the back seat. I fell asleep in her lap as she played with my hair. The viola plucks bled together into a single note. 2. (#ulink_e710b37b-e363-5fd3-b63b-0d3e470e8517) I woke being poked in my stab wound. ‘Get up, cunt,’ said a stranger. Mint nails were beckoning me out of the cab. I followed the sheen of a cream cocktail dress upwards to a throat bared beneath gaunt cheeks, green insolent eyes, and a bob of auburn hair. I rose as ordered. Eva stepped around this other woman to support me onto the curb. ‘How are you helping him?’ the stranger asked, unmoving as I tried to focus on the building behind her. The wall spelled out ‘Impluct’ in tall letters above a crowd of smoking attendees. A poster beneath announced this as the vernissage of Lars Vasari’s ‘DREAM TRAUMA’ exhibition. ‘My opinions have changed,’ Eva said. ‘He ruined your relationship.’ ‘Francis ruined our relationship.’ ‘Eva, Francis cheated on you – with him,’ the stranger insisted. ‘And I cheated on Francis with him too.’ ‘Good evening,’ I said with a bow, as though I’d been invited to introduce myself. ‘I presume you are… Iris?’ ‘Just… it’s different to how I thought,’ Eva continued. ‘Not completely different… Francis still needs to answer for himself. But maybe earlier I expressed my anger in a… homophobic way. Or bi-phobic, whatever. But that’s not how I’m going to express my anger anymore. And I’m not angry with Leander, he needs… Let’s just go inside. We both need a bit of numbing.’ ‘I can numb you,’ Iris said, though her stare was still hostile. ‘Do you need to be carried?’ ‘Yes please,’ I said, pretending not to understand her sarcasm. And so, my arms spread across the two women’s shoulders, I limped towards the gallery entrance. Iris was colder than Eva, perhaps having waited too long without a coat, and my skin in contrast seemed feverish. The crowd watched us with a reverence that we didn’t warrant. I had expected curiosity, but not this fascination. Possibly this was the effect of Eva’s fame. The two bouncers at the door parted without speaking or referring to a list. ‘Can you come unlock the kitchen, please?’ Iris asked the one on the left. ‘Does your guest need help?’ ‘Actually, can you take him?’ I was transferred to the studier grip of the guard. The women led us quickly into the foyer – and as our entrance rippled through the gallery-goers, they paused in their mingling to gaze at us, with a nervousness that suggested they desired to approach but dared not. The main exhibition began up three steps in a wide white room, but we instead walked down a side corridor, towards a dove-grey door. The guard shifted his support as he took a key from his pocket and unlocked it. ‘Thank you,’ Iris said, conclusively, and the guard understood this as a cue to leave. I was lowered onto a chrome stool beside a chrome table and gladly slumped into it, my head filling with sediment – which looped in a figure of eight. With my eyes closed, I could only hear some of what the women were saying. But I gathered that water was being boiled in a saucepan, and Francis had arrived half an hour ago. I let my thoughts lull into incomprehension. ‘Leander!’ Eva said, with an odd urgency, as though afraid I would not wake. ‘Leander!’ I lifted my head. Iris placed a white plate on the table. At its centre was a circle of fluffy, whiter shards. The plate’s underside was steaming still, from resting on the saucepan. She crushed the cooked ketamine with an Oyster card and divided it into three thin lines. With a twenty-pound note rolled up her nose, Eva bent daintily to the plate, and insufflated an outer line. As she jerked back up, she blinked tears towards the ceiling, and passed the note to Iris. Iris did the same and passed the note to me. I breathed out in preparation, securing the makeshift straw with trembling fingers, and snorted the remainder. It cut at my sinus with an enticing specificity – reducing the rest of my body’s aches to vagueness. The bitterness mixed scent and taste into a string that dripped into the back of my throat, which my mind saw inwardly as having the feathery blue-green of a mallard’s head. I sniffed again, able to sit more upright, my sense of self dispersing. ‘Can I have more than that? I asked. ‘Not right now,’ Iris said, her voice less severe, distracted by the loaded blood crossing her brain. ‘This is pure. We need to be able to talk still – we just want to be a little wonky so we can deal with the pretentious fucks outside. It’s human ketamine, not for horses – it’s from a hospital.’ ‘When do you get this in hospital?’ Eva asked. ‘When you’re giving birth.’ Eva laughed. ‘And so tonight you’re giving birth to —’ But I didn’t hear the rest. The slurry of melt-crystals behind my eyes slurred my vision, and a gossamer began to replace my skin. ‘What – and you’re giving birth to your… revenge?’ Iris smiled, entirely now in a lighter humour. ‘Yeah. And what are you giving birth to?’ Eva asked me. I cricked my neck as my nerves flowered into levity. ‘I’m giving birth to a baby swan called Winter, who can see ghosts, but he’ll never find a mate.’ ‘Lucky him,’ Eva said. ‘I think I need to leave… What’s your laptop password?’ ‘There’s no password,’ Iris said. ‘Just ask the guy at the door to let you into the studio.’ ‘What you doing?’ I asked, drifting my head against the wall, smiling at Eva in innocence. ‘I’m going to edit a film,’ she said. ‘Of what?’ ‘A video me and Francis made before he met you. You said the best revenge is erotic. So. I want to show it to everyone…’ ‘What, like a sex tape?’ I asked. ‘You know they aren’t usually that embarrassing for the man.’ ‘This one will be very special highlights.’ ‘And then what?’ I asked. ‘How are you going to show it?’ ‘Wait and see.’ Eva stood up, smiling. She kissed Iris on both cheeks and kissed me on the forehead, stroking her finger under my chin until I lifted my lips towards hers and kissed her back. The feathery green-blue of the ketamine rose again in my mind, and fell back into a low note plucked on a cello. ‘I decided you’re a paradox,’ Eva said, her nose against mine. ‘It’s your opacity that’s attractive. You’re an act inside an act. What are your motivations?’ ‘Motivations are for the artless,’ I said. She didn’t answer, but shook her hair in a tremor of pleasure, and left. As the door shut behind her, Iris stood – and fetched a bottle of water from the fridge. ‘I still can’t be nice to you,’ she said. ‘I know about you.’ ‘What do you know about me?’ I asked, delighted. ‘You can’t seduce me. I refuse to be seduced.’ ‘I can seduce you. I’ll be so honest that you’ll become invested in me against your will.’ ‘Is that your usual method?’ ‘No. But I know that’s the method that will work.’ I was surrounded by the scent of thunder, and the scents that come after summer rain – of bracken fronds releasing cyanide into the air, and the odours of wood and soaked flowers. ‘How?’ she asked. ‘You are already intrigued,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have said “you can’t seduce me”, unless it was a challenge.’ ‘Was it?’ ‘Let’s make it one.’ ‘Ok, then tell me the truth –’ Iris blinked as the dissociative drug fanned through her reflexes. ‘What are you doing? Why did you turn up at Eva’s door half beaten to death?’ ‘Because I knew that by appearing so vulnerable before her she would forgive me.’ ‘Ok, that’s quite a strong start.’ She sipped from the water bottle. ‘Honesty can be thrilling.’ ‘So you used being beaten up as an advantage?’ ‘I weaponised my suffering,’ I said. ‘I positioned her in the empowered role, so that she couldn’t feel like my victim anymore – she was the healer, I was the victim. Making people help you makes them care about you – or even makes them love you. Putting my health in her hands was a way of accelerating our intimacy, in the same way that being this honest with you accelerates our intimacy.’ ‘Why did you want her to forgive you?’ ‘She might be useful.’ ‘Then why not just befriend her? Why steal her boyfriend? Why the mind-fuck first?’ ‘I didn’t steal anything,’ I said. ‘And the mind-fuck is the befriending. How else can she know me properly unless I hurt her? And then come to her, having myself been hurt.’ ‘So, what – the proper you is hurting people?’ ‘Being hurt can be thrilling.’ ‘Did you get beaten up on purpose?’ ‘I’d have to really love being in this much pain to do that.’ ‘Has the ketamine helped?’ I smiled. ‘I’m nearly ready to give birth.’ We stood up. She took my arm. But her touch had too many premises in it – like mist over a pond at sunrise – and I saw a flotilla of lotus leaves, leaving the shore of the living, each burning a different stack of incense – cypress and cassia and styrax and myrrh, and so on – until I seemed inside a mayhem of futures. The aroma was too strong – and, quickly, I kissed her. She let me. ‘But I’m still not seduced,’ she said. I balanced on her as she opened the door. My movements had regained little focus. ‘I’m not finished yet,’ I said. ‘I have to seduce you with cruelty as well.’ We quit the chrome kitchen arm in arm, and glided down the corridor. ‘How will being cruel to me seduce me?’ she asked. ‘Not to you, to someone you’re attracted to. Francis.’ She didn’t reply. ‘I guessed in you a proprietary jealousy,’ I said, ‘that differed from simple sympathy for Eva.’ ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that? Most of the girls here have a crush on Francis. That wasn’t a hard guess.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jonathan-lyon/carnivore-the-most-controversial-debut-literary-thriller-of/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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