the tenancy agreement: chapter 7

2005

November


Music was blaring out of the open windows and into the London street, flecked with shouted voices engaged in mostly mundane conversation, even routine small talk – meal cooking! alt. music trivia! drunk film theory! narc haze responses to evolutionary biology! – amplified to primal to be heard over the speakers. The noise engulfed the terrace – it bathed in it, swamped by its staccato sentences, its throwaway expletives, its certain sense of its own rightness. The knock at the door was drowned in it, but knocked again. The music didn’t stop but there was a near unnoticeable twitch of the net curtains in the front window. The same knock hit one of the glass panels of the front door another time, three raps one-two-THREE, struck hard at the endpoint, which shook the weak door in its frame, rattling like the cheap plastic it was. Greg pulled the door open. It was Lucas, wheelchair and all. He had a likeable face, level with the symmetry his body lacked, all tan and blonde and cheekbones, an athlete’s face, eyes blue like memory, a face betrayed by his injuries, his paraplegia, his bulbous stomach left distended in its stasis, his arms like a paradox, their stick thin forearms poked like the limbs of a snowman into thick strong upper, muscled by the wheelchair, his dead legs hung like anomalies beneath him, a perpetual reminder of all he had lost. He wore black leather fingerless gloves to stop the friction of the rubber tread of the chair wheel from cutting his palms up, but they made his hands look intimidating, like a terrible secret he had to keep from the world, or deformed, like pincers, some of his dexterity lost with his legs.

“Lucas,” said Greg.

“Come on come on,” said Lucas, wheeling himself past Greg and into the hall. “Into the house.”

Lucas wheeled himself towards the living room, trying to manoeuvre the chair past shoes and piles of coats. A beer can got snagged in the wheel and Greg helped him to reach it and get it out, his face dripping with silent apology. It was an awful moment. He got himself into the living room, winced at the music. Despite the volume there were only four guys, five with Greg. It wasn’t a party, they were just sipping at lager. Lucas wheeled himself to the stereo and turned it off, then over to the vacant armchair. He hoisted himself over to it, his legs dragged slightly behind him like an inconvenience, and shuffled into a regular position. Greg was still standing up in the doorway, noticed there were no seats left. He eyed the empty wheelchair and looked at Lucas.

“Do you mind if I...” he said, pointing at it. Lucas just looked at him, didn’t say a word, his smile gradually dispersing into his even face, slowly, like a balloon deflating. Greg sat down on the floor by the wheelchair and knocked a glass of red wine over. It sank into the cream carpet. Lucas watched. Greg watched. The other four watched. Greg moved a sheet of newspaper over the spillage. At least he hadn’t got the salt. There were dried scarlet salt piles all over the house, each a half-solution to an upset glass of cheap Italian, two for a fiver. If they were honest they had all expected this.

“Be quiet for God’s sake,” said Lucas, into the silence. No one said anything. He checked the room over, leaning forward in his chair because of the awkward layout of the furniture. It was a mess of food plates, overflowing ashtrays, encrusted teacups stained into permanence by endless cocktails of tannin and hard water, of piles of purposeless metal scraps and cardboard, retrieved from the street for reasons unknown. Joe collected things from the street. It was like a compulsion, an acceptable outlet for his chronic kleptomania. Days earlier he had brought back a huge brown cardboard cylinder as tall as the ceiling, which he had propped up like a load-bearing pillar just in front of the mantelpiece. He hadn’t said a word about why he had done it, and no one had asked, it just became another part of the room, appropriated into their ramshackle landscape, as unquestioned as the walls or the cornices. Although it looked absurd, those ten feet of unadorned cardboard, it was just left, a testament to laziness, to intoxication – London’s ugliest unnecessary pillar, a landmark of its own categorization. Lucas looked at it then like he’d been punched in the neck, even recoiled some at the impact of its inexplicability.

“What an awful house of people this has become,” he continued. He sounded disappointed. The silence felt physical, everyone too tense to move. “So. Why do you think I’m here?” Again: silence. “I said why do you think I’m here?”

“Lucas,” said Ezra, stubbing his cigarette out in a blue glass ashtray and holding up his other hand in some kind of pacifying gesture – he was a conscientious objector to life, set dead against good times – and edging his buttocks further forward on his armchair, closer to Lucas, as though – as though what? As though only then would the benefit of proximity be truly felt, in the closeness to his own long hair, his own certain gaze? “Please let us explain.”

“Ezra,” said Lucas, a pacifying gesture of his own, a silencing pacifying gesture, “I’ve appreciated your efforts with this place but for now, shut up. Shut up and tell me why I’m here.”

“I suppose,” started Ezra, not used to such frank dismissal. He studied philosophy, for God’s sake.

“Yes?”

“I suppose it’s something to do with the rent we owe you.”

“You suppose it’s something to do with the rent you owe me?” Lucas was shouting. His paraplegic athlete’s neck danced with tendons, his face the claret of apocalypse seas. “That sixteen-hundred pounds? There is that, yes.”

“Lucas,” said Tom, fingering his lighter. “I’m going to...”

“But that’s just money!” Lucas shouted over the unlikely declarations. “No big deal, not where friends are concerned, like us, eh, just a big old chunk of money, right boys? Lads? Fellas? Doesn’t mean much between good friends like us, does it now? And what’s money?” His shouting had reached some kind of level peak, a plateau of volume which made the room sound hollow, despite being full of stuff. “Hmm? What is money? Don’t answer me.” Then he was quieter. “It’s nothing, nothing much. But do you know what’s really starting to annoy me? To get on the tits of my Caribbean-style curry goat?” It was a reference to one of Lewisham’s signature dishes, a reference lost in the intimidating ferocity of his oratory. They just stared at him. Ezra’s lips were tightly puckered, reeling from the sarcasm. “It’s the constant string of complaints from your... bloody neighbours. Noise this, talking that, vomiting too loudly in the middle of the night the other. I’ve had it up to here!” He slapped his temple with his gloved palm. It sounded like slapping a wet swimming cap. “I took a chance on you lot because you seemed like fun guys, but you’ve let me down again and again, over and over.” He paused, a moment’s thought that felt like a lifetime. “I want you out.”

“You can’t just kick us out,” said Greg.

“I can. I am. This is my house.”

“You...” Greg shifted angrily on the floor. He knocked over an ashtray.

“Okay, okay,” said Jonathan, trying to calm Greg down. “Just give us some time to find something else.”

“Lucas,” said Greg again, checking his temper. “I admit it’s taken us a while to get used to being here, but the music can stop. We can stop the music. We have stopped it. Listen.” He cupped his hand to his ear. Skull face. “Stopped. And we’ll pay the rent. We like it here Lucas, and we respect you as a man who has achieved something, despite...”

“I don’t think any of you know a thing about respect. I want you out of here, out of here, out of here!”

There was a moment of stunned calm at Lucas’s almost childish outburst. Greg couldn’t help sniggering, which he stifled, sublimated into a derisive snort. Tension as thick as the cigarette smoke around it. Lucas’s mouth hung open from his anger, made him look like a stroke victim, and he was blinking a lot, all quiet except for his own heavy breathing. It was stalemate, nothing to be done but sit, wait, hope for the end.

The sound of the front door thrust open too hard shook the room to movement, the shit clatter of it hitting the wall, and Joe tore through the door, skipping and hopping into the room, with huge manic eyes, sniffing scores of little sniffs. Been at the coke. He bounded with weird energy, buzzing his cock off, felt that serotonin kiss right down to his meticulous perineum, whooped with the rush, his head jerking around the four corners of the room like a territorial animal. He had a half-drunk litre bottle of Spanish lager in one hand, tight sweat rings under his arms, the only human link to the soulless mass production of his designer shirt. He saw Lucas in the armchair, his face an impressionist portrait of disgust and propriety, and instead of curbing his mania, bringing himself down, something snapped in him, clicked into life with all the bad decision making the narcotic would allow him, which was a shitload. He threw the beer bottle at the wall over Lucas’s head, rained glass and tepid beer over the furniture, and in a fucked instinct hardwired deep inside his coked neurons – an instinct borne of some imaginary hallucinated delirious genetic heritage – he grabbed the nearest thing to hand, an old portable Olivetti typewriter, weighed a bunch, and smashed it down onto Lucas’s head without a word, without even a thought, as if it was just what was done, what had to be done, and he knew it, he fucking knew it, fucking Joe, Big Joe, he fucking knew. A jet of blood arced out of Lucas’s split head and he let out a scream, basal, from somewhere ugly and afraid. The primordial bellow. Joe’s features took sharp turns, twisting and twitching with the coke, and his cheeks and mouth looked rubbery, like a Halloween mask, a latex simulacra, and in that chemical truth without the smokescreen of daylight he looked cruel and wrong. Lucas shut up and slid from the armchair, onto the carpet, onto the newspaper that Greg had laid down over the spilt wine, and there with limp legs he convulsed a bit, a reflex or something, but out cold.

“Joe!” Tom and Ezra shouted it together.

Greg was on his feet and pulled Joe back, away from their unconscious landlord, gripping his arms tight.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he snapped into Joe’s ear.

Lucas came round a bit, churning hoarse groans out like a dying bull, gloved hands clutching at themselves, reaching out for help that wasn’t going to come. Joe dropped the typewriter on the floor, its typebars entangled but still in one piece, as indestructible as cockroaches. His malevolent angles had been replaced by a look of complete confusion and his eyes welled with tears. He didn’t know what the fuck he had done, what the fuck he was doing. Big Joe. Lost in his own desert of Self. Solipsism today. Fuck. His self-centred night time universe seared straight through real-life. Big Joe. Cocaine Joe. Jesus Fucking Kennedy. Jesus Henry Christ. He pulled a wrap of coke from his pocket, which Greg snatched and threw to the side.

“Oh shit,” said Joe. “Oh shit. What have I done?”?

They all looked at Lucas, desperately in need of some high-end medical intervention, and were all too afraid to try to help him or to even kneel down by him, poor fucker.

“You’ve just caved our fucking landlord’s head in!” shouted Ezra. “How the fuck are you going to explain this?”

“Tom, what are we going to do?” said Greg, the pitch of his voice risen to panic. “What are we going to do? Jonathan? Anyone have any fucking idea what to do about this? Lucas? Lucas, are you okay?”

“Is he okay?” Ezra. Sarcastic. “Is he okay? He’s just had a typewriter smashed into his head. I doubt if he’s feeling very okay. Is he okay? Jesus. He’s running the fucking marathon.”

“Joe you’re a fucking shithead,” said Tom, meaning it. Joe was wiping tears from his eyes.

“Hey fuck you. You said you wanted to kill him. You all said it.”

“But I didn’t mean it. I didn’t actually... I wouldn’t have done it.”

“But what if you had?” It was Joe’s logic that suffered the most from the coke.

“But-fucking-nothing you ignorant bastard. I didn’t. You fucking did.”

Lucas had stuffed a hand into the pockets of his oversized khakis, grey comfort wear, and pulled out a mobile phone, his grim fingers fumbling at the buttons, trying to dial a number. Only three digits in 999. Even a cripple could do it. Maybe he had it on speed dial. Lack of coordination slowed him down.

“He’s going for his phone,” said Conor.

Tom jumped forward and kicked Lucas in the head – must have been an instinct as well. Self-preservation this time. Sand coloured desert boot toe snapped the head back. Lucas grabbed at Tom’s ankles, half appealing for help and half trying to pull him over; off-balance, Tom screamed out and started desperately stamping on his face, apologising after every stamp, and they could all hear it cracking under the soft soles of his feet like hammered coconut or eggshell, his face a swollen horrible mess shitting blood but still very much alive with these violent soundscapes of dramatic destructive gastronomy. His hands were still clasped onto Tom’s ankles.

“What shall I do?” said Tom. He was sweating into his v-neck.

They didn’t know what else to do and so all joined in, those six, all punching, kicking, prying, spitting, stamping, smashing, cracking, doing everything they could to shut the bastard up, to make the whole fucking mess go away. Now they had to kill him. Fucking sonofabitch. The neighbours would love to have dying wails to add to their list of INAPPROPRIATE noise use, sandwiched clean between jubilant laughter and night time vomiting. Police would love to get a load of it: student-coke-romp-typewriter-head-cave-in-horror: “is this what we pay our taxes for?” pleads crying convenience store supervisor. Screams became wheezes then gurgles in the downpour of fast raining blows. Shut the fucker up. Panic can push anyone into terrible mistakes, split second decisions that can change a life. Six lives. He had to fucking die. For all of their sakes.

But Lucas was still moving, still breathing occasional blood bubble breaths, still blinking near-dead eyes with the negligible remains of eyelids.

“Jesus,” said Greg, panting, nearly in tears. “Why won’t he die?”

Joe’s eyes darted around the room. “Don’t worry,” he said, and ran to the mantelpiece, picked up this hunting knife he liked to carry around. He knelt down at Lucas’s head and looked up at the others. Greg nodded. Joe held Lucas’s brow still with one hand and pulled the knife slowly across his throat. They were swamped in blood, Lucas was choking on it, even that seemed to take a lifetime, Lucas was dead.

Silence again. Neighbour-friendly conscientious silence. Sporadic deep breaths. Panting. They looked at each other. They looked at Lucas. At least the blood hid the wine stain.