2005
November
Greg was running a bath in the clinical light. He heard the others go off to their rooms. The white tub had layered black rims like centuries of sediment, ancient dirt imprinting its memory on the physical world. Water fell so slowly from the taps, tepid at best. It felt like a bad lifetime just to get an inch. No bubbles. It looked murky in the discoloured tub. He felt sick when he pulled his clothes off. Piled them on the floor as far away as he could. The jeans, the shoes, the socks, the pants. Witnesses. Saw it all. His skinny body was grey in the bathroom. He climbed into the bath and the water only came up to his ankles. He sat down, clutched his knees up tight to his chest. There was blood under some of his fingernails. Dark like dirt but it washed out red. He scrubbed at his hands so hard that water showered out of the bath and onto the floor. The taps were still running slowly. He started screaming, screaming fuck fuck fuck, and his voice was hoarse. The words became sobs, heaves, tears. He cried and held his knees to his chest. His thin legs. His long feet. Why had she licked his cheek? Felt like her fucking tongue print was branded into his flesh. Her tits, dark blue veins like tattoos by the bumps of her areola. Her neck, her jeans running up to her amenable cunt. Her tongue flicking over his cheek, smooth like a teenager. Saw it in his eyelids. Why had it been him? His crying was muffled by the sound of the water falling.
*
The living room had an upright lamp switched on. The sky was half-light in the cracks, where the curtains hung down from the tops of the windows. Tom was hunched over the bloodstain, scrubbing it with a wet kitchen cloth. There was a part-drunk mug of instant coffee on the table next to him. He was in a vest with his jeans. The bucket he rinsed the cloth in was full of pinkish water. Blood-coloured bubbles foaming on the stain. Scrubbed up, rung out then scrubbed again. His arms were shaking with the effort. The bubbles reappeared with every scrub, oozed out of the stain. It got pinker, not any better. It was deep into the fibres. Irreversible, like the act itself. Fingerprint of an evening. Of an entire narrative.
“Fuck it,” said Tom. Pointless effort.
He stood up and threw the cloth back into the bucket. His vest was soaked in sweat in a circle on the chest and smeared with blood. He took a sip from the coffee, grimaced as it went down. He rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It left blood on his face from the cleaning. He walked out of the room but was back within seconds carrying a big pot of table salt. He poured it all over the stain and sat down in an armchair. Lit another cigarette. Then got up and opened the curtains. It looked even worse in the light.
*
The morning sun streamed rich sickly yellow through the tinted honey glass of the back door. Ezra walked into it from his bedroom. The yellow felt holy. He was wearing a thick grey dress that hung shapeless to his knees. Something Indian. It had become a part of his character, a token of life’s own absurdity, the remnant of a relationship. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened for movement. Nothing. They were asleep.
He crossed the hall and went into the living room. There was a layer of wet salt over the blood stain. It had turned grey not red. Looked like a skin condition. Fucking idiot must have tried to clean it first. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lit it with a match. Stepped over the salt and opened up the curtains. November sun only burns in silence. He turned back to the room and saw Lucas in the armchair –
“Jesus!” said Ezra. His body jumped.
It was him alright. Face tanned and asleep. He looked okay. Just there, resting – like he always had been. An esoteric twist to the magnolia decor. No cuts, no smashed features. Ezra remembered kicking his face and feeling bone give way. The way the windpipe whistled. The way the mouth gurgled like a sink or an alien life form. Remembered carrying the body down to the basement wrapped up in a rug, stripped of personality by their own thorough violence. He crept towards the armchair. He had smoke in his eyes. He reached out one hand to touch Lucas’s face, to feel the mass of reality, his fingertips on the warm flesh. It was there. It gave a little with his touch. He was in the armchair. Ezra smelt his shampoo. He was there.
“Ezra?” said Conor. He was in boxer shorts, stood in the doorway. Ezra pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“I was just...” He looked back at the armchair. Conor looked too. He knew it would be empty. “Nothing.”
“Okay. I’m going to try and get some more sleep. It’s early.”
“Sure,” said Ezra. He was still looking at the chair. He rubbed his fingertips together gently. He could feel the skin, the resistance he had felt pushing up against life. Conor left him alone. Ezra leant his hand out towards the armchair, groping at the emptiness, trying to reconstruct a person from the spaces they used to occupy. To sculpt them back into existence. To feel them back into life.
The room was so empty he couldn’t be sure that even he was in it.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 9
2005
November
The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.
“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.
“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.
Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.
“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.
“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.
The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.
“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”
“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”
He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.
“Can I help?” said Greg.
“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.
“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”
“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.
“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.
“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.
“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”
“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”
“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.
“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”
“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.
“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”
“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”
“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.
“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.
“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”
“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.
“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”
“No problem.”
He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.
“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.
“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.
“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”
“It’s the smart thing to do.”
Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”
Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.
They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.
“He’s gone,” said Greg.
“What did he want?” said Jonathan.
“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”
“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”
“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”
“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.
Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.
“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.
They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.
“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”
“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.
Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.
“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.
“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.
“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”
“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.
“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.
“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”
“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.
“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.
“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.
“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”
They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.
“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”
Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –
“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.
“Fuck,” said Greg.
He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.
“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.
“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”
“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”
“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”
Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.
“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.
“Lucas.”
“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”
“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”
“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.
“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”
“Right. No. Definitely no.”
“No?”
“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.
“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.
“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.
“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”
She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.
“Shit,” he said.
“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.
“It was nothing.”
“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.
“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.
“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”
“What did she want?” said Tom.
“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”
They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.
“She knows,” said Conor.
“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.
“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”
“But why would she suspect murder?”
“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“How did she look?” said Jonathan.
“What does that mean?” said Greg.
“Suspicious? Angry?”
“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”
Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.
“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.
“It’s fine.”
“Then why’s she coming here?”
“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”
“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”
“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”
“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”
“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”
“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”
“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”
The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.
“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.
Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.
“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.
Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.
“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”
“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.
Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.
November
The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.
“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.
“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.
Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.
“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.
“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.
The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.
“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”
“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”
He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.
“Can I help?” said Greg.
“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.
“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”
“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”
“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.
“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.
“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.
“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”
“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”
“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.
“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”
“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.
“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”
“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”
“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.
“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.
“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”
“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.
“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”
“No problem.”
He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.
“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.
“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.
“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”
“It’s the smart thing to do.”
Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”
Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.
They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.
“He’s gone,” said Greg.
“What did he want?” said Jonathan.
“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”
“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”
“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”
“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.
Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.
“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.
They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.
“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”
“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.
Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.
“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.
“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.
“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”
“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.
“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.
“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”
“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.
“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.
“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.
“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”
They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.
“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”
Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –
“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.
“Fuck,” said Greg.
He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.
“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.
“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”
“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”
“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”
Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.
“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.
“Lucas.”
“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”
“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”
“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.
“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”
“Right. No. Definitely no.”
“No?”
“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.
“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.
“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.
“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”
She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.
“Shit,” he said.
“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.
“It was nothing.”
“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.
“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.
“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”
“What did she want?” said Tom.
“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”
They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.
“She knows,” said Conor.
“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.
“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”
“But why would she suspect murder?”
“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“How did she look?” said Jonathan.
“What does that mean?” said Greg.
“Suspicious? Angry?”
“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”
Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.
“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.
“It’s fine.”
“Then why’s she coming here?”
“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”
“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”
“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”
“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”
“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”
“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”
“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”
The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.
“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.
Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.
“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.
Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.
“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”
“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.
Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 8
2005
November
They were sat on chairs around the body, flecks and spatters of blood like ink on their hands and arms and clothes, all over the carpet, already drying in, their own sweat evaporating on their skin. The cool of it felt intrusive in the heat of the room, left them racked with all the emptiness of a one night stand, eyes turned upwards to the secular ceiling, their silent drunk prayers screamed unheard to no one. Someone had pulled a rug over the body and left a human shaped mound piled in the centre of the room. Like last days prophesy there were pools of blood fingers deep in the creases of the rug. Tom shook his head, his movements quick and spasmodic.
“Fuck, we need to get that thing out of here,” he said. He inhaled hard through his nostrils. “I can smell it.”
“It doesn’t smell yet,” said Greg, cold behind the eyes. “It hasn’t been dead long enough.”
“It does, and I can smell it.” Voice pitched with hysteria. “And then the neighbours will smell it. Fuck. I can smell it. We need to get it out of here now.”
“Will you calm down?” said Jonathan.
“He’s right,” said Greg. “We need to do this properly.”
They had been friends for what seemed like forever.
Tom looked at the blood on his hands and rubbed it onto the thighs of his jeans. It left red stained smears on his fingers like he had been chopping beetroot or pomegranate. An indelible reminder, a verbose witness, a scarlet letter.
“Properly?” said Conor. “What do any of us know about properly? I mean properly dealing with a dead body?”
Tom stood up, scratching the side of his head.
“We need to get the fucking thing out of here, that’s what we need to do,” he said.
“Well perhaps if you hadn’t killed him he wouldn’t be in here in the first place,” said Ezra, his only white shirt ruined. They used to drive parents’ cars all night and scream on the streets. Once Joe got over the counter ether from a French pharmacy and they took it all night and woke up on the floor smelling of hospitals. They must have been different people. Committing the pubic hair of every girl they ever fucked to memory as though it were the exact information that would save them.
“Me?” said Tom. “It was Joe that killed him.” Joe’s eyes were red rimmed but the tears – instinctive tears – were gone, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his abdomen. He still felt the coke in his heartbeat, his dry mouth, and he spurned culpability. He felt himself majestic. Far outside the wrongs of the world he happened without it. There was a lifetime between them. “Why the fuck did you kill him Joe?”
“I seem to remember you kicking him in the face,” said Joe.
“But you finished him.” All good narratives need an antagonist. “He was still alive.”
“Someone had to finish him” – Joe’s mouth moved as though behind strobe lights – “the way you fucked it up.”
“Please shut up and get it out of here.” Tom was shouting. Guilt hits everybody different. So does the need for self-preservation.
“Both of you need to shut up,” said Jonathan. “We all did this, we did it together. You too Ezra. It’s a mess we all need to take responsibility for.”
Ezra sneered as he smoked. The room was quiet. They could hear the blood.
“I can smell it,” said Tom eventually.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“We’ve got to get him out.”
“Where to exactly?” said Greg. He had stood up too, all the better to point. “The shops? The park? Where? Where the fuck are we supposed to take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then shut up until you’ve got a useful suggestion. Jonathan. What do you think?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
“Oh God,” said Ezra, groaning with impatience.
“Oh God nothing,” said Greg. “We’re not just dumping a piece of rubbish. None of us know what to do here.”
“Maybe we should call the police?” said Conor.
The terrible stillness of the body was the worst thing. Nothing was ever that still. It was oppressive like a supercell. It left the room taut with unspoken expectation. Tom thought back to the party. Remembered the sand dry cunt of the friend he couldn’t get hard enough to fuck. Remembered the squat block of dark hair that sang with promise and pointed like an arrow like a command, pointed down to large fleshy labia like strips of meat. His teeth had chattered from pills and he dropped cigarette ash into his chest hair. He got her to jerk off while he watched. The sun coming up through the curtains that didn’t fit across the windows lit her discomfort like a beacon. They lay down next to each other but inches apart. Sexual failure on flannel sheets. Now there was blood on the floor. Now there was a body under the rug. Why was it so still? Death the logistical nightmare.
“And say what?” said Greg. “’Sorry officer – got a bit carried away at a house party and smashed our landlords head in. No harm done.’ That’s bullshit. This” – he pointed at the rug, at the typewriter – “is way past the police.”
“The police’ll have us,” said Tom. He spoke it in a whisper, in visions of pubis, acutely aware of the inappropriateness of his own reminiscences.
“This has got to stay between us,” said Jonathan.
“You know I can’t condone lies. Morally speaking.” Ezra had studied ethics at school, and was doing it again at university. Thought it gave him a real kind of moral superiority, despite having had at least one adulterous tryst that he didn’t like to talk about. He fixated on honesty because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. They all looked at him, disbelief wrung on their faces like smallpox. “Unless they benefit me, of course,” he said, smirking.
“Right,” said Greg. “So now what?”
“Could just stick it in the basement,” said Joe, matter-of-factly. He was picking at his long fingernails.
“Ha,” said Ezra, pronouncing it as a word and not a sound. He was that kind of a person. “That is the most stupid, absurd thing I have ever heard you say. Even out of the countless stupid and absurd things you’ve said in the past.”
But it was an idea. It had that much going for it.
November
They were sat on chairs around the body, flecks and spatters of blood like ink on their hands and arms and clothes, all over the carpet, already drying in, their own sweat evaporating on their skin. The cool of it felt intrusive in the heat of the room, left them racked with all the emptiness of a one night stand, eyes turned upwards to the secular ceiling, their silent drunk prayers screamed unheard to no one. Someone had pulled a rug over the body and left a human shaped mound piled in the centre of the room. Like last days prophesy there were pools of blood fingers deep in the creases of the rug. Tom shook his head, his movements quick and spasmodic.
“Fuck, we need to get that thing out of here,” he said. He inhaled hard through his nostrils. “I can smell it.”
“It doesn’t smell yet,” said Greg, cold behind the eyes. “It hasn’t been dead long enough.”
“It does, and I can smell it.” Voice pitched with hysteria. “And then the neighbours will smell it. Fuck. I can smell it. We need to get it out of here now.”
“Will you calm down?” said Jonathan.
“He’s right,” said Greg. “We need to do this properly.”
They had been friends for what seemed like forever.
Tom looked at the blood on his hands and rubbed it onto the thighs of his jeans. It left red stained smears on his fingers like he had been chopping beetroot or pomegranate. An indelible reminder, a verbose witness, a scarlet letter.
“Properly?” said Conor. “What do any of us know about properly? I mean properly dealing with a dead body?”
Tom stood up, scratching the side of his head.
“We need to get the fucking thing out of here, that’s what we need to do,” he said.
“Well perhaps if you hadn’t killed him he wouldn’t be in here in the first place,” said Ezra, his only white shirt ruined. They used to drive parents’ cars all night and scream on the streets. Once Joe got over the counter ether from a French pharmacy and they took it all night and woke up on the floor smelling of hospitals. They must have been different people. Committing the pubic hair of every girl they ever fucked to memory as though it were the exact information that would save them.
“Me?” said Tom. “It was Joe that killed him.” Joe’s eyes were red rimmed but the tears – instinctive tears – were gone, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his abdomen. He still felt the coke in his heartbeat, his dry mouth, and he spurned culpability. He felt himself majestic. Far outside the wrongs of the world he happened without it. There was a lifetime between them. “Why the fuck did you kill him Joe?”
“I seem to remember you kicking him in the face,” said Joe.
“But you finished him.” All good narratives need an antagonist. “He was still alive.”
“Someone had to finish him” – Joe’s mouth moved as though behind strobe lights – “the way you fucked it up.”
“Please shut up and get it out of here.” Tom was shouting. Guilt hits everybody different. So does the need for self-preservation.
“Both of you need to shut up,” said Jonathan. “We all did this, we did it together. You too Ezra. It’s a mess we all need to take responsibility for.”
Ezra sneered as he smoked. The room was quiet. They could hear the blood.
“I can smell it,” said Tom eventually.
“Shut up,” said Ezra.
“We’ve got to get him out.”
“Where to exactly?” said Greg. He had stood up too, all the better to point. “The shops? The park? Where? Where the fuck are we supposed to take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then shut up until you’ve got a useful suggestion. Jonathan. What do you think?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
“Oh God,” said Ezra, groaning with impatience.
“Oh God nothing,” said Greg. “We’re not just dumping a piece of rubbish. None of us know what to do here.”
“Maybe we should call the police?” said Conor.
The terrible stillness of the body was the worst thing. Nothing was ever that still. It was oppressive like a supercell. It left the room taut with unspoken expectation. Tom thought back to the party. Remembered the sand dry cunt of the friend he couldn’t get hard enough to fuck. Remembered the squat block of dark hair that sang with promise and pointed like an arrow like a command, pointed down to large fleshy labia like strips of meat. His teeth had chattered from pills and he dropped cigarette ash into his chest hair. He got her to jerk off while he watched. The sun coming up through the curtains that didn’t fit across the windows lit her discomfort like a beacon. They lay down next to each other but inches apart. Sexual failure on flannel sheets. Now there was blood on the floor. Now there was a body under the rug. Why was it so still? Death the logistical nightmare.
“And say what?” said Greg. “’Sorry officer – got a bit carried away at a house party and smashed our landlords head in. No harm done.’ That’s bullshit. This” – he pointed at the rug, at the typewriter – “is way past the police.”
“The police’ll have us,” said Tom. He spoke it in a whisper, in visions of pubis, acutely aware of the inappropriateness of his own reminiscences.
“This has got to stay between us,” said Jonathan.
“You know I can’t condone lies. Morally speaking.” Ezra had studied ethics at school, and was doing it again at university. Thought it gave him a real kind of moral superiority, despite having had at least one adulterous tryst that he didn’t like to talk about. He fixated on honesty because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. They all looked at him, disbelief wrung on their faces like smallpox. “Unless they benefit me, of course,” he said, smirking.
“Right,” said Greg. “So now what?”
“Could just stick it in the basement,” said Joe, matter-of-factly. He was picking at his long fingernails.
“Ha,” said Ezra, pronouncing it as a word and not a sound. He was that kind of a person. “That is the most stupid, absurd thing I have ever heard you say. Even out of the countless stupid and absurd things you’ve said in the past.”
But it was an idea. It had that much going for it.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, August 13, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 6
1974
November
Exhausted, Lucas is asleep, entwined around his sister on a bare single mattress, stuck together like a single person, hiding their victim souls behind skinny limbs and bruises, behind eyelids too determined to keep up. Their skin is crusted with dirt, mottled like tiger pattern, like poorly applied tanning sauce, flecked with the alt brown of dried blood rich against the cracking dust lines. Across the room their mother sits, her hollow eyes locked vacant in space, her body so still like an artefact, a Vesuvian unearthing, life sucked out of this inadequate shell, this paean to the tangible earth, and leaving only the unmoving, the burnt out tissues behind, statued on the ancient furniture. The silence beats an oppressive rhythm, fizzing into its own existence, the unimaginable orchestra of particles and molecules and atoms blaring their noiseless movements, like dust mites and hair bits and the sound of the turning earth creaking, the skirting boards groaning into life. Burst by hoarse laughter the door opens up. Mother doesn’t move a fraction. Lucas and Tanya still asleep. Dad and his pub friend, reeling slightly on their feet, they reek of pints – of best – and chasers, house scotch, the shit stuff. The local’s over the road – The Rising Sun, a wallpapered den of barely concealed violence, a pivotal point in some cycle of hate, its beer pumps and optics perpetually reinforcing the decay, the breakdown, the permanence of it all, this horror, its fixed misery dripping off the walls like damp, the bright electric light bulbs bringing every vein and scar and memory vividly to life. Every day the same punters, same handful of domestic abusers, consoling each other for their busted knuckles, idolising each other for their tales each more grotesque – and true – than the last. Like veterans of an ageless war against familial responsibility and tender feeling they bond tightly among the dart boards and ashtrays, finding approval and justification both in the gammon face of the landlord; they virulently condone each other’s cruelty, baptise themselves in booze and bar snacks, apostles of their own patriarchal church of unchecked testosterone. Every day the same two women peddling their very genitals for loose change, done up quickly, thickly, the buttery make-up not hiding their screams so loud inside, their fleshy thighs mottled with cellulite tributaries, nails smoke yellow, dry hand-jobs conducted on bar stools (landlord doesn’t mind – he WATCHES), blow jobs in toilet cubicles – or a fiver a fuck but the car park for that, standing pressed up against the wire fence, hammered joylessly with the breathy violence that breeds in these men’s homes, left with knickers round knees picking coins – all silver – off the floor in the weak light from the frosted toilet window, and they’re laughing about it in the pub, and another one’ll be out in a minute for his turn, wipe yourself up and start over.
Dad ignores mother, rubs his hand together, stops in his tracks when he sees the kids. His hands stop rubbing, his face turns, his mate – say Steve – is grinning, gormless, everything about his presence just a lewd blot, pulsing with crude sexualized gesture – unfiltered by the acceptable, the decent.
“What the fuck is this?” says Dad, his arms by his sides like ornaments, fists clenched at the bottom of them.
“Better not be her,” says Steve through a sighed belch, revelling in his own recycled beer stench. “Tol’ me she were young – s’how I want her. Not like this fackin mess.”
Snapped: “Does that look like my fucking daughter?”
“Thass it then?” he says, gesturing to the mattress with a perceptible grind of his pelvis. “Tell me thass it. I’ll ‘ave a slice a that.” His face contorts in the delight of potential intercourse. Dad is looking at the mattress, the sleeping kids, features angry, eyes distracted.
“Show me the money first you filthy bastard.”
Steve pulls a scrunched five pound note out from his grimy jeans, the denim torn below the pockets, the blue-white of their insides hanging out over the leg. He holds it up so Dad can see it but doesn’t hand it over.
“Thass it,” he says again, smiling like a shit. He’d done some time for sex offences but carried on all the same. Women didn’t get his sense of humour. The blokes in the pub called him Injunction Steve. He was always the last to fuck the pub hooker, felt the sperm of five other men drip down his balls while she impatiently coaxed him along to finish. When he closed his eyes he saw disembodied vaginas – no respite – depersonalized female genitals, parts otherwise absent from the whole, just endless vulvas without the need for consent, conversation, apology. His perceptual inability to humanise female sex organs made him dangerous long before ViSOR and Injunction Steve was a free man. The more things change the more they stay the same. “Sweet little cunt,” he goes on. “Taste like sugar. You’ve had a taste? Tell me it tastes sweet.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“You dirty bastard, you ‘ave. Don’t blame you, neither. Lovely thing like that – I’d fuck it if it was me own grandchild.”
“Didn’t I tell you to show me the money?” Dad is still looking at the mattress, his face purpling up, neck all tendon and stretched skin.
“I shown you the money, five sheets, right here.” He holds the note up like the grail. “It’s yours. And you can watch if you like.” He’s idly thumbing the end of his dick through his jeans.
“Five.” He still hasn’t turned to see the money, hasn’t moved.
“This is alright, is it? You don’t mind?”
“What?” says Dad, shaking his head from his reverie, looking at Steve. Mother’s just sat there. Always is. “No.” Her eyes point onwards but she doesn’t see a thing. “Give me that money.” He takes the fiver and pockets it.
“Righto. You gonna wake it up then?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s that it’s with then? Boyfriend?”
“No.” Frowning like his face will cave in. “Brother.”
“Her brother?” Steve’s laughing in pub tones, overplayed disbelief. “Fuck me, what kinda house is this? Brothers fackin sisters? Jesus wept. You wanna keep an eye on them two mate. They’ll be growing up like a couple a them perverts, keep on fackin each other like this.”
“You what?” His dead voice pierces the life of Steve’s oratory. Injunction Steve. Oblivious Steve.
“They’re at it – right under your fackin nose. In your house. Broad fackin daylight. Yeah, you wanna watch it alright mate. Knock it right on the ‘ead.”
Dad’s face twitches a bit. Joke’d a been fine in the pub but not here. Not in his house. His red face is so red it looks like paint against his moon-white chest. Best of British.
“Perverts,” says Steve in a conspiratorial half-whisper, dumbly relishing his little fuckabout.
Quick smart Dad yanks Steve forward by one shoulder and throws a fist into the middle of his face. Bone pops and he lumbers backwards.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Dad says.
“You mad cunt you broke my – “
Dad hit him again, kicked him when he hit the floor, pulls him back up to his feet and drags him out of the room. He pulls the front door open.
“Filthy sonofabitch,” says Bloodyface Steve, Injunction Steve. “I know what you are.”
“Get out.”
“Least I do it to other people’s daughters.”
“Get. Out.”
“What about my money?”
Dad slams the cheap door to rattling. It’s woken up Tanya and Lucas, their eyes locked tight frightened in recognition, bodies frozen to the mattress by the inevitable. Dad’s footsteps are rushing back to the room and his shoulder drunkenly reels into the doorframe as he tries to get through it.
“Y’bastards.” He growls the words out in one drawn out syllable, like his tongue’s been slashed.
He rushes over to the mattress and grabs Lucas, Tanya screaming for him to stop it, and pulls him up off the floor, cut arms pinned by his sides. The boy can only kick his legs. The futility of it makes him want to scream. Tanya is punching Dad in the back but he doesn’t let go.
“What do you think you were doing to her?” he shouts in Lucas’s ear, his breath like hot poison condensing against his face. “You don’t fucking touch her.”
“I didn’t. We were just sleeping.” Resigned to the certain destiny of the present. No pleading, no apology. It was all already happening.
“Don’t you tell me what you were doing.”
“I wasn’t, I was...”
“You’re perverts. Perverts showing me up.”
Tanya’s still punching him, although too weak to hit him hard. She feels like a kid. Under her limp fists his back is like something out of an abattoir, just a fleshy memorial – ancient! forgotten! – to his own distant humanity, linked only in genes, and form, and bone structure, and muscle definition, only in the most physical ways. Not a man by any other account. Not alive. Being. He was, nothing more – with all the meaninglessness that went with it.
“Put him down,” she screams.
Mother is rocking slightly, back and forth, metronomic, counting time with the dull beat of Tanya’s fists, her eyes unmoving and fixed blind in their sockets, face caught in a weird grin that might just be a muscle reflex. Dad is trembling with rage.
“You don’t fucking touch her,” he says. “You need to learn some manners. Some respect.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“Don’t you hurt him,” says Tanya, her dark hair plastered to her forehead in sweaty strands. Her voice is weary too, accepting. She accepted what she knew would come.
“You’re both disgusting, the pair of you. Pair of fucking animals. You enjoy it did you?” He shakes Lucas like a doll, snapping his neck back. “Putting it in her? Enjoy it?”
“I didn’t put it in her.”
“Fucking liar! Did you enjoy it?”
“I didn’t...”
“Didn’t think so. Isn’t much fucking good for nothing is she. Dry like a desert, little slut, fucking whore, bitch cunt.” He’s crying and pouring sweat. “Dishing herself out like she’s a fucking public convenience.”
Tanya jumps a foot or so off the ground and punches her father in the back of the head, which stops his tirade short and leaves the room hollow with the empty silence of domesticity, punctuated only by mothers rocking. The room aches with it. Dad smiles at Lucas. There’s blood on his teeth. Must have bit his tongue when she punched him. Without even looking at her he swings Lucas’s whole body into the sharp corner of the wall which protrudes out for the fireplace, the very house conspiring against them – a double-fronted accessory to violence, revelling in its collusion, the awful finality of its assaultive involvement. Then crack, or snap like a piece of wood. His spine takes the force of the collision. Inside he screams thunder but nothing leaves his lips. Dad let’s go and he falls face down to the carpet and feels nothing but his brain. Why does he feel nothing? Brain keeps asking, like a deranged quizmaster. Dad swings his fist behind him and hits Tanya’s face hard, hits her over. She feels a tooth loose.
“Tanya,” says Lucas. “I can’t move. Oh Jesus. I can’t feel anything.”
“It’ll be okay,” she says.
“Why won’t my brain shut up?”
Dad picks a small length of wood up from the floor, piled with other rubbish. Tanya rushes out of the door.
“You need discipline,” says Dad. He’s standing over Lucas, whose brain keeps feeling. Why my brain why my brain? Dad swings the wood down onto Lucas’s back, six seven nine times, laughing too. Lucas watches the wood hit his flesh but doesn’t feel it. Feels nothing. Just his brain. Like a spectator. Like he’s left his body behind. Like one of those out of body experiences. He realises he is screaming, seconds after he does it, but it’s because it’s so odd. He can’t feel anything. Nothing.
Dad doesn’t hear Tanya come back into the living room. Why would he, engrossed, spent, drained like he shot his load, looking down at Lucas with triumph drawn all over his face, drawn right into its lines and wrinkles? Doesn’t hear her footsteps over his own deep breaths. She’s carrying a long Phillips head screwdriver. Sticks it into his back, in right up to the yellow plastic handle. His face contorts with it, agonized rubber, she thinks. She pulls it back out slowly. He clutches at his stomach ineffectually and turns slowly around, blood on his lips. Lucas looks up at them, his eyes don’t blink, he doesn’t speak a word. Mother rocks some. The wound is bleeding heavily, bits of flesh or something are stuck to the tip of the screwdriver, and he drops the wood and tries to put his hand on it. Compress! He lunges at Tanya and she sticks him again, in the chest, sounds like slicing meat as it goes through, grinding on a rib. Fucking pork. He goes down like a felled tree, nothing big or impressive. The tumble is an anticlimax after sixteen years, she thinks. More blood out of his mouth but he’s still trying to kick his legs and flap his arms. She sits slowly on his chest, her thighs restraining his weakened arms, and she stabs him in a frenzy, over and over, tens of tens of times, through the chest, the gut, completely silent as she does it. Mother starts rocking faster with the tempo of the stabbing. Lucas looks on, acutely aware of his brain, that he can feel his brain. That’s not normal, he thinks. Dad’s breathing is whistling through fucked pipes, Tanya’s hands are dripping with his blood. She lifts the screwdriver over her head and drives it into his neck. It crunches through his windpipe like teeth through breakfast cereal. There’s a lot of blood, red with certainty.
Tanya gets up without a word and leaves the room again. Lucas is still. Mother’s stopped rocking and is gazing at nothing. Tanya comes back – holding a claw hammer, slender metal. She stands in front of her mother’s chair, puts a hand on her cheek.
“Mum,” she says. “Look at me, mum.” The cheek is cold under her bloody hand. Mother’s eyes don’t move. She doesn’t speak. “Mum,” says Tanya again. “Just fucking look at me.” She doesn’t. Tanya looks at Dad’s body and feels peace. She looks at Lucas and knows he is paralysed. Paraplegic. She looks at the hammer in her hand. She rests the flat side of the hammer’s head against the peak of mother’s brow, lines it up, ever the perfectionist, then lifts it to arm’s length and cracks it down heavy into the centre of her head. Mother falls off of the chair to the right and Tanya starts a little, starts at this or any other life ending so much more quickly than it could ever begin, starts at the sound of skull-bone cracking. Eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. She lays the hammer down by the body and goes over to Lucas.
“I can’t feel myself,” he says. She strokes his hair and comforts him, dark red streaks left down the side of his face like war paint. She kisses his cheek, then they kiss again, each other, with mouths, two mouths, heads spinning, properly kissing, mouth on mouth, multi-lipped, his and hers, passionately – is this what passion feels like? like a massive relief? – like out of the cinema, like the lovers they never were. She rolls him onto his back and he flops over, his body flaccid and malleable, stripped of feeling, and she rubs her hand over the lifeless crotch – injustice itself speaks through the eternally static genital of the paralysed youth – of his jeans, sits straddling him, kids older than their years, kisses him again on the mouth, moves her hand up his chest.
“I can’t feel anything,” he says.
“I know.” She whispers it for fear of disturbing the strange intimacy. He has bloody handprints on the chest she kisses from neck to waistband.
November
Exhausted, Lucas is asleep, entwined around his sister on a bare single mattress, stuck together like a single person, hiding their victim souls behind skinny limbs and bruises, behind eyelids too determined to keep up. Their skin is crusted with dirt, mottled like tiger pattern, like poorly applied tanning sauce, flecked with the alt brown of dried blood rich against the cracking dust lines. Across the room their mother sits, her hollow eyes locked vacant in space, her body so still like an artefact, a Vesuvian unearthing, life sucked out of this inadequate shell, this paean to the tangible earth, and leaving only the unmoving, the burnt out tissues behind, statued on the ancient furniture. The silence beats an oppressive rhythm, fizzing into its own existence, the unimaginable orchestra of particles and molecules and atoms blaring their noiseless movements, like dust mites and hair bits and the sound of the turning earth creaking, the skirting boards groaning into life. Burst by hoarse laughter the door opens up. Mother doesn’t move a fraction. Lucas and Tanya still asleep. Dad and his pub friend, reeling slightly on their feet, they reek of pints – of best – and chasers, house scotch, the shit stuff. The local’s over the road – The Rising Sun, a wallpapered den of barely concealed violence, a pivotal point in some cycle of hate, its beer pumps and optics perpetually reinforcing the decay, the breakdown, the permanence of it all, this horror, its fixed misery dripping off the walls like damp, the bright electric light bulbs bringing every vein and scar and memory vividly to life. Every day the same punters, same handful of domestic abusers, consoling each other for their busted knuckles, idolising each other for their tales each more grotesque – and true – than the last. Like veterans of an ageless war against familial responsibility and tender feeling they bond tightly among the dart boards and ashtrays, finding approval and justification both in the gammon face of the landlord; they virulently condone each other’s cruelty, baptise themselves in booze and bar snacks, apostles of their own patriarchal church of unchecked testosterone. Every day the same two women peddling their very genitals for loose change, done up quickly, thickly, the buttery make-up not hiding their screams so loud inside, their fleshy thighs mottled with cellulite tributaries, nails smoke yellow, dry hand-jobs conducted on bar stools (landlord doesn’t mind – he WATCHES), blow jobs in toilet cubicles – or a fiver a fuck but the car park for that, standing pressed up against the wire fence, hammered joylessly with the breathy violence that breeds in these men’s homes, left with knickers round knees picking coins – all silver – off the floor in the weak light from the frosted toilet window, and they’re laughing about it in the pub, and another one’ll be out in a minute for his turn, wipe yourself up and start over.
Dad ignores mother, rubs his hand together, stops in his tracks when he sees the kids. His hands stop rubbing, his face turns, his mate – say Steve – is grinning, gormless, everything about his presence just a lewd blot, pulsing with crude sexualized gesture – unfiltered by the acceptable, the decent.
“What the fuck is this?” says Dad, his arms by his sides like ornaments, fists clenched at the bottom of them.
“Better not be her,” says Steve through a sighed belch, revelling in his own recycled beer stench. “Tol’ me she were young – s’how I want her. Not like this fackin mess.”
Snapped: “Does that look like my fucking daughter?”
“Thass it then?” he says, gesturing to the mattress with a perceptible grind of his pelvis. “Tell me thass it. I’ll ‘ave a slice a that.” His face contorts in the delight of potential intercourse. Dad is looking at the mattress, the sleeping kids, features angry, eyes distracted.
“Show me the money first you filthy bastard.”
Steve pulls a scrunched five pound note out from his grimy jeans, the denim torn below the pockets, the blue-white of their insides hanging out over the leg. He holds it up so Dad can see it but doesn’t hand it over.
“Thass it,” he says again, smiling like a shit. He’d done some time for sex offences but carried on all the same. Women didn’t get his sense of humour. The blokes in the pub called him Injunction Steve. He was always the last to fuck the pub hooker, felt the sperm of five other men drip down his balls while she impatiently coaxed him along to finish. When he closed his eyes he saw disembodied vaginas – no respite – depersonalized female genitals, parts otherwise absent from the whole, just endless vulvas without the need for consent, conversation, apology. His perceptual inability to humanise female sex organs made him dangerous long before ViSOR and Injunction Steve was a free man. The more things change the more they stay the same. “Sweet little cunt,” he goes on. “Taste like sugar. You’ve had a taste? Tell me it tastes sweet.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“You dirty bastard, you ‘ave. Don’t blame you, neither. Lovely thing like that – I’d fuck it if it was me own grandchild.”
“Didn’t I tell you to show me the money?” Dad is still looking at the mattress, his face purpling up, neck all tendon and stretched skin.
“I shown you the money, five sheets, right here.” He holds the note up like the grail. “It’s yours. And you can watch if you like.” He’s idly thumbing the end of his dick through his jeans.
“Five.” He still hasn’t turned to see the money, hasn’t moved.
“This is alright, is it? You don’t mind?”
“What?” says Dad, shaking his head from his reverie, looking at Steve. Mother’s just sat there. Always is. “No.” Her eyes point onwards but she doesn’t see a thing. “Give me that money.” He takes the fiver and pockets it.
“Righto. You gonna wake it up then?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s that it’s with then? Boyfriend?”
“No.” Frowning like his face will cave in. “Brother.”
“Her brother?” Steve’s laughing in pub tones, overplayed disbelief. “Fuck me, what kinda house is this? Brothers fackin sisters? Jesus wept. You wanna keep an eye on them two mate. They’ll be growing up like a couple a them perverts, keep on fackin each other like this.”
“You what?” His dead voice pierces the life of Steve’s oratory. Injunction Steve. Oblivious Steve.
“They’re at it – right under your fackin nose. In your house. Broad fackin daylight. Yeah, you wanna watch it alright mate. Knock it right on the ‘ead.”
Dad’s face twitches a bit. Joke’d a been fine in the pub but not here. Not in his house. His red face is so red it looks like paint against his moon-white chest. Best of British.
“Perverts,” says Steve in a conspiratorial half-whisper, dumbly relishing his little fuckabout.
Quick smart Dad yanks Steve forward by one shoulder and throws a fist into the middle of his face. Bone pops and he lumbers backwards.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Dad says.
“You mad cunt you broke my – “
Dad hit him again, kicked him when he hit the floor, pulls him back up to his feet and drags him out of the room. He pulls the front door open.
“Filthy sonofabitch,” says Bloodyface Steve, Injunction Steve. “I know what you are.”
“Get out.”
“Least I do it to other people’s daughters.”
“Get. Out.”
“What about my money?”
Dad slams the cheap door to rattling. It’s woken up Tanya and Lucas, their eyes locked tight frightened in recognition, bodies frozen to the mattress by the inevitable. Dad’s footsteps are rushing back to the room and his shoulder drunkenly reels into the doorframe as he tries to get through it.
“Y’bastards.” He growls the words out in one drawn out syllable, like his tongue’s been slashed.
He rushes over to the mattress and grabs Lucas, Tanya screaming for him to stop it, and pulls him up off the floor, cut arms pinned by his sides. The boy can only kick his legs. The futility of it makes him want to scream. Tanya is punching Dad in the back but he doesn’t let go.
“What do you think you were doing to her?” he shouts in Lucas’s ear, his breath like hot poison condensing against his face. “You don’t fucking touch her.”
“I didn’t. We were just sleeping.” Resigned to the certain destiny of the present. No pleading, no apology. It was all already happening.
“Don’t you tell me what you were doing.”
“I wasn’t, I was...”
“You’re perverts. Perverts showing me up.”
Tanya’s still punching him, although too weak to hit him hard. She feels like a kid. Under her limp fists his back is like something out of an abattoir, just a fleshy memorial – ancient! forgotten! – to his own distant humanity, linked only in genes, and form, and bone structure, and muscle definition, only in the most physical ways. Not a man by any other account. Not alive. Being. He was, nothing more – with all the meaninglessness that went with it.
“Put him down,” she screams.
Mother is rocking slightly, back and forth, metronomic, counting time with the dull beat of Tanya’s fists, her eyes unmoving and fixed blind in their sockets, face caught in a weird grin that might just be a muscle reflex. Dad is trembling with rage.
“You don’t fucking touch her,” he says. “You need to learn some manners. Some respect.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“Don’t you hurt him,” says Tanya, her dark hair plastered to her forehead in sweaty strands. Her voice is weary too, accepting. She accepted what she knew would come.
“You’re both disgusting, the pair of you. Pair of fucking animals. You enjoy it did you?” He shakes Lucas like a doll, snapping his neck back. “Putting it in her? Enjoy it?”
“I didn’t put it in her.”
“Fucking liar! Did you enjoy it?”
“I didn’t...”
“Didn’t think so. Isn’t much fucking good for nothing is she. Dry like a desert, little slut, fucking whore, bitch cunt.” He’s crying and pouring sweat. “Dishing herself out like she’s a fucking public convenience.”
Tanya jumps a foot or so off the ground and punches her father in the back of the head, which stops his tirade short and leaves the room hollow with the empty silence of domesticity, punctuated only by mothers rocking. The room aches with it. Dad smiles at Lucas. There’s blood on his teeth. Must have bit his tongue when she punched him. Without even looking at her he swings Lucas’s whole body into the sharp corner of the wall which protrudes out for the fireplace, the very house conspiring against them – a double-fronted accessory to violence, revelling in its collusion, the awful finality of its assaultive involvement. Then crack, or snap like a piece of wood. His spine takes the force of the collision. Inside he screams thunder but nothing leaves his lips. Dad let’s go and he falls face down to the carpet and feels nothing but his brain. Why does he feel nothing? Brain keeps asking, like a deranged quizmaster. Dad swings his fist behind him and hits Tanya’s face hard, hits her over. She feels a tooth loose.
“Tanya,” says Lucas. “I can’t move. Oh Jesus. I can’t feel anything.”
“It’ll be okay,” she says.
“Why won’t my brain shut up?”
Dad picks a small length of wood up from the floor, piled with other rubbish. Tanya rushes out of the door.
“You need discipline,” says Dad. He’s standing over Lucas, whose brain keeps feeling. Why my brain why my brain? Dad swings the wood down onto Lucas’s back, six seven nine times, laughing too. Lucas watches the wood hit his flesh but doesn’t feel it. Feels nothing. Just his brain. Like a spectator. Like he’s left his body behind. Like one of those out of body experiences. He realises he is screaming, seconds after he does it, but it’s because it’s so odd. He can’t feel anything. Nothing.
Dad doesn’t hear Tanya come back into the living room. Why would he, engrossed, spent, drained like he shot his load, looking down at Lucas with triumph drawn all over his face, drawn right into its lines and wrinkles? Doesn’t hear her footsteps over his own deep breaths. She’s carrying a long Phillips head screwdriver. Sticks it into his back, in right up to the yellow plastic handle. His face contorts with it, agonized rubber, she thinks. She pulls it back out slowly. He clutches at his stomach ineffectually and turns slowly around, blood on his lips. Lucas looks up at them, his eyes don’t blink, he doesn’t speak a word. Mother rocks some. The wound is bleeding heavily, bits of flesh or something are stuck to the tip of the screwdriver, and he drops the wood and tries to put his hand on it. Compress! He lunges at Tanya and she sticks him again, in the chest, sounds like slicing meat as it goes through, grinding on a rib. Fucking pork. He goes down like a felled tree, nothing big or impressive. The tumble is an anticlimax after sixteen years, she thinks. More blood out of his mouth but he’s still trying to kick his legs and flap his arms. She sits slowly on his chest, her thighs restraining his weakened arms, and she stabs him in a frenzy, over and over, tens of tens of times, through the chest, the gut, completely silent as she does it. Mother starts rocking faster with the tempo of the stabbing. Lucas looks on, acutely aware of his brain, that he can feel his brain. That’s not normal, he thinks. Dad’s breathing is whistling through fucked pipes, Tanya’s hands are dripping with his blood. She lifts the screwdriver over her head and drives it into his neck. It crunches through his windpipe like teeth through breakfast cereal. There’s a lot of blood, red with certainty.
Tanya gets up without a word and leaves the room again. Lucas is still. Mother’s stopped rocking and is gazing at nothing. Tanya comes back – holding a claw hammer, slender metal. She stands in front of her mother’s chair, puts a hand on her cheek.
“Mum,” she says. “Look at me, mum.” The cheek is cold under her bloody hand. Mother’s eyes don’t move. She doesn’t speak. “Mum,” says Tanya again. “Just fucking look at me.” She doesn’t. Tanya looks at Dad’s body and feels peace. She looks at Lucas and knows he is paralysed. Paraplegic. She looks at the hammer in her hand. She rests the flat side of the hammer’s head against the peak of mother’s brow, lines it up, ever the perfectionist, then lifts it to arm’s length and cracks it down heavy into the centre of her head. Mother falls off of the chair to the right and Tanya starts a little, starts at this or any other life ending so much more quickly than it could ever begin, starts at the sound of skull-bone cracking. Eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. She lays the hammer down by the body and goes over to Lucas.
“I can’t feel myself,” he says. She strokes his hair and comforts him, dark red streaks left down the side of his face like war paint. She kisses his cheek, then they kiss again, each other, with mouths, two mouths, heads spinning, properly kissing, mouth on mouth, multi-lipped, his and hers, passionately – is this what passion feels like? like a massive relief? – like out of the cinema, like the lovers they never were. She rolls him onto his back and he flops over, his body flaccid and malleable, stripped of feeling, and she rubs her hand over the lifeless crotch – injustice itself speaks through the eternally static genital of the paralysed youth – of his jeans, sits straddling him, kids older than their years, kisses him again on the mouth, moves her hand up his chest.
“I can’t feel anything,” he says.
“I know.” She whispers it for fear of disturbing the strange intimacy. He has bloody handprints on the chest she kisses from neck to waistband.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 5
2005
October
Greg dropped the needle down. Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Fripp’s guitar was loud, majestic in the dull morning. A huge canvas was half-propped up against the wall and torn down the middle. They had taken a knife to it the night before in a drunken bacchanal, showered it with ceremonial lager and destroyed it, kicked in the frame and shredded the painting. They assured themselves it was the death of art by mass participation. Conceptually astute, it had represented the climax of a hideous night, teeming with the violence of their collaborative futility in the face of the finite world. They wanted to change something, but no one of them knew what. Call it some shit fight for their own real experience! Shared and alone! They talk in paradox! A stilted party that never got started, its guests had all been possessed within the walls, burning with the rage of meaning. Earlier in the night Tom had been cajoled drunk into demonstrating his favourite sex positions on the people in the room, not actually locking with them in communal spectator congress for hypothetical appraisal but – for informational purposes – holding them where he’d hold them and thrusting at them where he’d thrust at them, his cock left limp in its pants from the coke and looking into their six dark eyes with the palpable tension of all of those genitals that fit together. There was Joe and a female guest and Ezra’s girlfriend, a short rich girl of Jewish heritage with a small head and hair long to her buttocks. Tom had swapped clothes with her, and stretched into stockings and skirt he got her on all fours and held her hips and pushed himself against her arse and her cunt that was covered by his own Levis, and she looked back at him over her shoulder while he did it. It was missionary with Joe and cowgirl with the other girl, the coke numbing the humiliation and turning it into a bizarre kind of attentiveness, or gravity, like the whole affair was in some way a crucial experiment. The weird energy all fed into this unspoken Situationist bacchanal, which unfolded with resigned inevitability and left them spent and empty like orgasm, hoarse-voiced and sweating to Elgar. It was hard to tell if they had gone too far when they were all so fucked. Besides that: never regret revelry. Joe had painted it above the front door like scripture, like a consensual group maxim. Greg walked away from the stereo in a blue dressing gown, worn down to almost nothing in all the key places. He knocked over a half full beer can and left it spilling on the carpet.
Ezra was spread out on the sofa, which had been broken during the night. Greg had jumped on it and the weak wooden frame crunched to the floor like a haemorrhage of cheap furniture stuffing and spring parts and ripped blue fabric. It had left one seat about twelve inches lower down than the other two seats, and Ezra’s head was at that end, lower than his legs, and he was completely still apart from occasional, very slow and considered blinks. Greg looked down at him and smiled like he was going to puke, clutching a mug of tea that he couldn’t bear to bring to his lips. He wandered out of the room and Ezra rubbed his eyes as Bowie got louder. A black woman of about thirty walked into the living room, frowning at the noise and carrying a brightly painted wooden octopus. She was wearing hot pink and a skirt so short that Ezra thought he imagined the shape of her vulva. Her tits moved under her smile that broadened when she saw Ezra.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He said I could have this if I left now.”
“It’s not his room,” Ezra snapped. “I told you that last night.”
“What?”
“It’s my room.”
“Okay. Can I still keep this?”
She held up the octopus. Her name was Yaa. “As in: Yaa,” she had clarified, when she had turned up late with Joe, another someone he had met just wandering around the streets. She talked about herself incessantly, as though by doing so she would be immortalised with a self-professed celebrity status that extended all around the Lewisham area. She often slipped into doing it in the third person, but no one was sure whether this was part of a constructed vapid affect informed by tabloid culture and celebrity idolatry, some attempt at self-aggrandisement, or whether it was simple grammatical inconsistency. She had sucked Joe off on the stairs down to the back garden even though he couldn’t come, and they were well suited in that respect. They wouldn’t have felt as though enough people had seen them, really seen them, had the act occurred within the privacy of a bedroom.
“No,” said Ezra firmly, gesturing to the door with a limp flick of the hand. “Now piss off out of this house that isn’t yours.”
Yaa placed the octopus down on the table amidst the cans.
“Read it yeah,” she said to Ezra, giving him the finger. “Yaa knows you’re a motherfucker.” She turned around and left. Ezra heard the front door opening and closing.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said and rolled off the sofa.
*
Later all six of them were sitting in the living room, which hadn’t been cleaned up. Someone had bought more beers, and they sang heavenly in plain blue carrier bags, the polythene stuck to the cool condensation of the aluminium cans. They were listening to Suicide, turned up loud.
“Any complaints last night?” said Ezra.
“Of course,” said Jonathan, lighting a joint. “I stopped counting after the third. There’s not much is going to make her happy.”
“I’m starting to think she doesn’t really like us,” said Tom. “What’s her name?”
“Yasmin,” said Ezra.
“Jewish?”
Ezra nodded. He had tried to make friends with her, or at least pacify her, the day before the party. He took her bottle of wine and told her about the party and that his girlfriend was Jewish too, but she had threatened to call the police. He had sounded odd. Joe grabbed another beer from the bag.
“Great party, though,” he said.
“Yeah, great party,” snapped Greg, loudly breathing out smoke through tightly pursed lips. “Except fucking Lucas is going to give us some serious shit if she starts emailing him again. He doesn’t need it and we don’t need it. She emails him again and it’s us who gets the ball end of Lucas. He already told us: final final warning. And that was last time.”
“Fuck him, Greg. He’s just lonely,” said Joe.
“He owns the house, Joe,” said Ezra.
“It’s just a house. Who gives a shit?”
“I do,” said Tom. “I live here, all my stuff is here. We’ve got to not fuck this up.”
“I tried to remind you of that yesterday while your eyes rolled back in your head and you danced to ‘Common People’ on your now broken bed with half the fucking party.” Ezra hadn’t seen him in his girlfriend’s clothes, simulating fucking her from behind. Probably for the best.
“But that’s exactly it,” said Joe. “Fuck it. If he keeps on threatening us I’ll sort it out.”
“What are you going to do Joe? Get a fake passport for him? Sell him some coke? He’s well within his rights to kick us out already.” Ezra took a long swig on his can, a thin stream of the tepid lager trickling out the corner of his lips and down over his chin.
“I’ll sort it.”
“Don’t be a dickhead,” said Greg. “No one’s sorting out anything, least of all our fucking landlord.” Joe’s mind seemed to be wandering and he opened another beer, despite not having finished the last. Ezra shot a frown at Tom, who felt a bad taste in his mouth. “He can throw us out Joe.”
“Agreed,” said Jonathan, passing the joint to Greg and nodding at the stereo. “So shall we turn it down?”
They all smiled. Nobody moved. The music blasted onward.
October
Greg dropped the needle down. Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Fripp’s guitar was loud, majestic in the dull morning. A huge canvas was half-propped up against the wall and torn down the middle. They had taken a knife to it the night before in a drunken bacchanal, showered it with ceremonial lager and destroyed it, kicked in the frame and shredded the painting. They assured themselves it was the death of art by mass participation. Conceptually astute, it had represented the climax of a hideous night, teeming with the violence of their collaborative futility in the face of the finite world. They wanted to change something, but no one of them knew what. Call it some shit fight for their own real experience! Shared and alone! They talk in paradox! A stilted party that never got started, its guests had all been possessed within the walls, burning with the rage of meaning. Earlier in the night Tom had been cajoled drunk into demonstrating his favourite sex positions on the people in the room, not actually locking with them in communal spectator congress for hypothetical appraisal but – for informational purposes – holding them where he’d hold them and thrusting at them where he’d thrust at them, his cock left limp in its pants from the coke and looking into their six dark eyes with the palpable tension of all of those genitals that fit together. There was Joe and a female guest and Ezra’s girlfriend, a short rich girl of Jewish heritage with a small head and hair long to her buttocks. Tom had swapped clothes with her, and stretched into stockings and skirt he got her on all fours and held her hips and pushed himself against her arse and her cunt that was covered by his own Levis, and she looked back at him over her shoulder while he did it. It was missionary with Joe and cowgirl with the other girl, the coke numbing the humiliation and turning it into a bizarre kind of attentiveness, or gravity, like the whole affair was in some way a crucial experiment. The weird energy all fed into this unspoken Situationist bacchanal, which unfolded with resigned inevitability and left them spent and empty like orgasm, hoarse-voiced and sweating to Elgar. It was hard to tell if they had gone too far when they were all so fucked. Besides that: never regret revelry. Joe had painted it above the front door like scripture, like a consensual group maxim. Greg walked away from the stereo in a blue dressing gown, worn down to almost nothing in all the key places. He knocked over a half full beer can and left it spilling on the carpet.
Ezra was spread out on the sofa, which had been broken during the night. Greg had jumped on it and the weak wooden frame crunched to the floor like a haemorrhage of cheap furniture stuffing and spring parts and ripped blue fabric. It had left one seat about twelve inches lower down than the other two seats, and Ezra’s head was at that end, lower than his legs, and he was completely still apart from occasional, very slow and considered blinks. Greg looked down at him and smiled like he was going to puke, clutching a mug of tea that he couldn’t bear to bring to his lips. He wandered out of the room and Ezra rubbed his eyes as Bowie got louder. A black woman of about thirty walked into the living room, frowning at the noise and carrying a brightly painted wooden octopus. She was wearing hot pink and a skirt so short that Ezra thought he imagined the shape of her vulva. Her tits moved under her smile that broadened when she saw Ezra.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He said I could have this if I left now.”
“It’s not his room,” Ezra snapped. “I told you that last night.”
“What?”
“It’s my room.”
“Okay. Can I still keep this?”
She held up the octopus. Her name was Yaa. “As in: Yaa,” she had clarified, when she had turned up late with Joe, another someone he had met just wandering around the streets. She talked about herself incessantly, as though by doing so she would be immortalised with a self-professed celebrity status that extended all around the Lewisham area. She often slipped into doing it in the third person, but no one was sure whether this was part of a constructed vapid affect informed by tabloid culture and celebrity idolatry, some attempt at self-aggrandisement, or whether it was simple grammatical inconsistency. She had sucked Joe off on the stairs down to the back garden even though he couldn’t come, and they were well suited in that respect. They wouldn’t have felt as though enough people had seen them, really seen them, had the act occurred within the privacy of a bedroom.
“No,” said Ezra firmly, gesturing to the door with a limp flick of the hand. “Now piss off out of this house that isn’t yours.”
Yaa placed the octopus down on the table amidst the cans.
“Read it yeah,” she said to Ezra, giving him the finger. “Yaa knows you’re a motherfucker.” She turned around and left. Ezra heard the front door opening and closing.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said and rolled off the sofa.
*
Later all six of them were sitting in the living room, which hadn’t been cleaned up. Someone had bought more beers, and they sang heavenly in plain blue carrier bags, the polythene stuck to the cool condensation of the aluminium cans. They were listening to Suicide, turned up loud.
“Any complaints last night?” said Ezra.
“Of course,” said Jonathan, lighting a joint. “I stopped counting after the third. There’s not much is going to make her happy.”
“I’m starting to think she doesn’t really like us,” said Tom. “What’s her name?”
“Yasmin,” said Ezra.
“Jewish?”
Ezra nodded. He had tried to make friends with her, or at least pacify her, the day before the party. He took her bottle of wine and told her about the party and that his girlfriend was Jewish too, but she had threatened to call the police. He had sounded odd. Joe grabbed another beer from the bag.
“Great party, though,” he said.
“Yeah, great party,” snapped Greg, loudly breathing out smoke through tightly pursed lips. “Except fucking Lucas is going to give us some serious shit if she starts emailing him again. He doesn’t need it and we don’t need it. She emails him again and it’s us who gets the ball end of Lucas. He already told us: final final warning. And that was last time.”
“Fuck him, Greg. He’s just lonely,” said Joe.
“He owns the house, Joe,” said Ezra.
“It’s just a house. Who gives a shit?”
“I do,” said Tom. “I live here, all my stuff is here. We’ve got to not fuck this up.”
“I tried to remind you of that yesterday while your eyes rolled back in your head and you danced to ‘Common People’ on your now broken bed with half the fucking party.” Ezra hadn’t seen him in his girlfriend’s clothes, simulating fucking her from behind. Probably for the best.
“But that’s exactly it,” said Joe. “Fuck it. If he keeps on threatening us I’ll sort it out.”
“What are you going to do Joe? Get a fake passport for him? Sell him some coke? He’s well within his rights to kick us out already.” Ezra took a long swig on his can, a thin stream of the tepid lager trickling out the corner of his lips and down over his chin.
“I’ll sort it.”
“Don’t be a dickhead,” said Greg. “No one’s sorting out anything, least of all our fucking landlord.” Joe’s mind seemed to be wandering and he opened another beer, despite not having finished the last. Ezra shot a frown at Tom, who felt a bad taste in his mouth. “He can throw us out Joe.”
“Agreed,” said Jonathan, passing the joint to Greg and nodding at the stereo. “So shall we turn it down?”
They all smiled. Nobody moved. The music blasted onward.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 4
2005
October
Greg had moved into the front bedroom, the biggest, because he'd been left with the box room in the previous house. It had always seemed to suit his rather Spartan lifestyle, but this time he insisted that he wanted to spread his stuff out, to feel his personality among the empty space and reclaimed furniture. He had pulled a tatty armchair up from the basement and was sitting on it seriously, flanked by Jonathan and Ezra. Joe was sitting on the bed, his eyes wandering around the peripheries of the room and his fingers drumming absentmindedly on the thighs of his blue jeans. The other three watched him like a TV, smoking cigarettes.
“Joe,” said Greg. “Are you listening?”
“What?” said Joe, shaking his head, like he was trying to wake up from a vision far more interesting than Greg’s moving mouthparts and sober tone. Greg had had an epiphany during the summer, the result of LSD and a middle aged South African man called Keith, who was into sodomy and conspiracies and played Terence McKenna recordings while smiling into his beard. During this epiphany he had felt the force of righteousness in his blood, had seen the right path, and like an acid evangelist he was keen to lead Joe – whose cocaine city lifestyle was antithetical to Greg’s half-hearted neo-hippy ethos – onto it. They were increasingly at odds, their aggressive disagreements borne entirely of narcotic influence. While Greg discriminated between psychedelics and stimulants, moulded their effects into his own interior value hierarchy, Joe made no such discrimination. He took anything and was still using coke, despite Greg’s insistence of empty promises. It had been a pretty heavy year for all of them.
“Joe?” he said.
“I’m listening,” said Joe.
“You have to pay rent, okay?” Greg looked at him with disappointment in his eyes, paternalized by his drug experiences. “I don’t know if you realise that, but that’s how we get to live here, we pay rent. It’s about respect. You have to respect us because you’re sharing this house with us.”
“Fuck you, Greg.”
Greg stood up fast and knocked the armchair backwards; its wooden insides chimed against the radiator.
“Don’t tell me to fuck me.” He shouted the words like a chanted catchphrase from a strange TV gameshow. Then stormed from the bedroom, tugging the door hard behind him. It was hung badly in the jamb and scraped slowly along the carpet. Came to a stop before it slammed shut. The wood panelling secreted embarrassment. Smiling oblivious Joe looked at Ezra and Jonathan and shrugged. He pulled open one of Greg’s bedside drawers and took out a bag of weed and some papers and started to roll a joint.
*
Tom was in the kitchen, shaking his head at the mountain of washing up piled on the surfaces, stained mild yellow in patches by turmeric. Pans were charred with tarry burnt lentils and thin black spaghetti pasta stuck fast to their worn Teflon bases. Plates congealed with food scraps or lines of tasteless sauces, missed by the tongues that grimly licked the crockery clean, using body organs like bread to mop the juices. Cutlery was at a premium, all thick with bits. There were hundreds of dead wine bottles lined up like notches on a bedpost along the top of the kitchen cupboards, a proud public declaration of consumption. It had been left by the previous tenants and they had kept it as a green glass spectacle. Beer the stench that held the kitchen together, not wine or red hot dhal. Stale lager that was sticky on the floor, mounded tea towels left by the washing machine that had mopped spillage after spillage and sat unwashed, sodden with the drink. The whole house smelt like hangover in blue light caught coiled in the sun. Their own collection of empty beer cans – ring pulls twisted off and left rattling inside, flecked around the mouthpiece with cooked tobacco, the empty can reborn as a makeshift ashtray – engulfed the hob like a virus, a low-grade homage to the wine bottles above. He took the last clean glass from an empty cupboard, a shot glass really, and filled it with water from the tap, not even daring to look in the sink. Greg stormed into the room and he looked up.
“Fucking cunt,” said Greg.
“What?”
“Joe.”
“Right.”
“He told me to fuck me.”
“To fuck you?”
“Yeah.”
Greg pushed some of the washing up onto the floor. It landed noisily but didn’t break, just left a worse mess behind. It was frustrating for both of them. They both looked down at the pile and Tom winced. Sighing, Greg bent down and started picking the plates back up, one by one.
“This isn’t really about Joe,” he said.
“Then what is it about? It’s getting pretty fucking unbearable to live with.”
“I don’t know. Something feels wrong.”
“It always feels like that in a new house. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, it’s something else.”
“Fuck,” said Tom. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Something just feels wrong.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Visitors. Girls. Talking about the vibes of the house. They said the vibes were wrong.”
They looked at each other.
“Maybe it’s the vibes that stop Joe paying the rent,” said Tom.
“Yeah. We can remind him of the fucking vibes when we get thrown out.”
Tom snorted a reluctant laughed response.
“Fuck it,” Greg says. “Vibes. It’s bullshit.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. “Bullshit.”
Greg pulled himself up from the floor with the surface as a stabiliser and said shit, his fingers sunk in week-old mayonnaise. He dumped the washing up in the sink and didn’t turn the tap on, then wandered off. Tom refilled his glass, looked around the kitchen and lit a cigarette. What a shithouse. He turned on the hot tap and watched the water fall into the sink. The plug wasn’t in. It spiralled down, away into its own pointlessness.
October
Greg had moved into the front bedroom, the biggest, because he'd been left with the box room in the previous house. It had always seemed to suit his rather Spartan lifestyle, but this time he insisted that he wanted to spread his stuff out, to feel his personality among the empty space and reclaimed furniture. He had pulled a tatty armchair up from the basement and was sitting on it seriously, flanked by Jonathan and Ezra. Joe was sitting on the bed, his eyes wandering around the peripheries of the room and his fingers drumming absentmindedly on the thighs of his blue jeans. The other three watched him like a TV, smoking cigarettes.
“Joe,” said Greg. “Are you listening?”
“What?” said Joe, shaking his head, like he was trying to wake up from a vision far more interesting than Greg’s moving mouthparts and sober tone. Greg had had an epiphany during the summer, the result of LSD and a middle aged South African man called Keith, who was into sodomy and conspiracies and played Terence McKenna recordings while smiling into his beard. During this epiphany he had felt the force of righteousness in his blood, had seen the right path, and like an acid evangelist he was keen to lead Joe – whose cocaine city lifestyle was antithetical to Greg’s half-hearted neo-hippy ethos – onto it. They were increasingly at odds, their aggressive disagreements borne entirely of narcotic influence. While Greg discriminated between psychedelics and stimulants, moulded their effects into his own interior value hierarchy, Joe made no such discrimination. He took anything and was still using coke, despite Greg’s insistence of empty promises. It had been a pretty heavy year for all of them.
“Joe?” he said.
“I’m listening,” said Joe.
“You have to pay rent, okay?” Greg looked at him with disappointment in his eyes, paternalized by his drug experiences. “I don’t know if you realise that, but that’s how we get to live here, we pay rent. It’s about respect. You have to respect us because you’re sharing this house with us.”
“Fuck you, Greg.”
Greg stood up fast and knocked the armchair backwards; its wooden insides chimed against the radiator.
“Don’t tell me to fuck me.” He shouted the words like a chanted catchphrase from a strange TV gameshow. Then stormed from the bedroom, tugging the door hard behind him. It was hung badly in the jamb and scraped slowly along the carpet. Came to a stop before it slammed shut. The wood panelling secreted embarrassment. Smiling oblivious Joe looked at Ezra and Jonathan and shrugged. He pulled open one of Greg’s bedside drawers and took out a bag of weed and some papers and started to roll a joint.
*
Tom was in the kitchen, shaking his head at the mountain of washing up piled on the surfaces, stained mild yellow in patches by turmeric. Pans were charred with tarry burnt lentils and thin black spaghetti pasta stuck fast to their worn Teflon bases. Plates congealed with food scraps or lines of tasteless sauces, missed by the tongues that grimly licked the crockery clean, using body organs like bread to mop the juices. Cutlery was at a premium, all thick with bits. There were hundreds of dead wine bottles lined up like notches on a bedpost along the top of the kitchen cupboards, a proud public declaration of consumption. It had been left by the previous tenants and they had kept it as a green glass spectacle. Beer the stench that held the kitchen together, not wine or red hot dhal. Stale lager that was sticky on the floor, mounded tea towels left by the washing machine that had mopped spillage after spillage and sat unwashed, sodden with the drink. The whole house smelt like hangover in blue light caught coiled in the sun. Their own collection of empty beer cans – ring pulls twisted off and left rattling inside, flecked around the mouthpiece with cooked tobacco, the empty can reborn as a makeshift ashtray – engulfed the hob like a virus, a low-grade homage to the wine bottles above. He took the last clean glass from an empty cupboard, a shot glass really, and filled it with water from the tap, not even daring to look in the sink. Greg stormed into the room and he looked up.
“Fucking cunt,” said Greg.
“What?”
“Joe.”
“Right.”
“He told me to fuck me.”
“To fuck you?”
“Yeah.”
Greg pushed some of the washing up onto the floor. It landed noisily but didn’t break, just left a worse mess behind. It was frustrating for both of them. They both looked down at the pile and Tom winced. Sighing, Greg bent down and started picking the plates back up, one by one.
“This isn’t really about Joe,” he said.
“Then what is it about? It’s getting pretty fucking unbearable to live with.”
“I don’t know. Something feels wrong.”
“It always feels like that in a new house. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, it’s something else.”
“Fuck,” said Tom. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Something just feels wrong.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Visitors. Girls. Talking about the vibes of the house. They said the vibes were wrong.”
They looked at each other.
“Maybe it’s the vibes that stop Joe paying the rent,” said Tom.
“Yeah. We can remind him of the fucking vibes when we get thrown out.”
Tom snorted a reluctant laughed response.
“Fuck it,” Greg says. “Vibes. It’s bullshit.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. “Bullshit.”
Greg pulled himself up from the floor with the surface as a stabiliser and said shit, his fingers sunk in week-old mayonnaise. He dumped the washing up in the sink and didn’t turn the tap on, then wandered off. Tom refilled his glass, looked around the kitchen and lit a cigarette. What a shithouse. He turned on the hot tap and watched the water fall into the sink. The plug wasn’t in. It spiralled down, away into its own pointlessness.
Friday, August 06, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 3
1974
August
Lucas is bare-chested, gaunt like a mummified Audrey Hepburn, his button nose beaded with sweat beneath his uncut thick hair, ribs like road markings on his concave chest. He’s cut and bruised old and new, knife wounds centimetres deep and shiny cigarette burns and knuckle marks, his skin a twilight hue of purples, clarets, twisted green yellow sunsets. Swollen eyes from crying he can’t stop, he looks through the open bedroom door, heaving silently inside himself.
She is bound from the ceiling. His sister. Tanya. Long electrical flex tied through a metal ring and to her raw wrists cut bare to flesh by the friction and the pressure, the heels of her feet just reaching the floor. Her face has been badly battered and both eyes are swollen shut, popped like meat beneath the force of blows thrown repeated and methodical. She sobs drily and it sounds to Lucas like puking an empty stomach but worse. Left stripped from the waist down Lucas feels embarrassed at the sight of her pubic hair and wants to save her from it all but his chest is too thin and his arms are too weak and he can’t stop crying, fucking idiot, fucking idiot. He presses his nails hard into the back of his hand which turns white and then red when the skin breaks. White shirt dowsed blood red it clings like a wet t-shirt to her pregnant stomach – and she barely sixteen and never had a boyfriend, not a real one. Their father is pacing around the unfurnished room smoking cheap cigarettes erratically, his movements jerk like pairs of insect wings – a dragonfly! – and become nearly unnoticeable in the haze of the stifling room, his licked lips leave the butt end wet and flat, sodden together by his heavy draws. It’s always so hot. He punches Tanya again in the face and she moans a bit out of torn lips, then three more times quickly, like one movement. Won’t be long before her face gives in. She tries to recoil but doesn’t have the energy. It’s the hopelessness that makes Lucas cry more and he puts his hands over his eyes but peers through the bloody nail-bitten fingers. The humiliation nauseates. Dad brings the flat sole of his heavy boot into the centre of her stomach; she lurches backwards on the flex, its polymers squeaking like new trainers on the metal ring with the movement, and she screams but it sounds inhuman, he face so swollen that such glottal reflexive noises are the loudest she can make. Lucas runs into the room, grabs weakly at his father’s arm.
“Dad,” he says. “Please don’t.”
“What’s that?” he shouts, and shakes his arms free of Lucas’s grip. “You want to help her? Fuckin slut.”
“Please don’t hurt her again. She’s not a slut. She’s my sister. Please.”
“You want to help the little fucking slut?” He jabs Lucas in the face, the nose of constant breakage, which knocks him backwards and out the door. “Slut wants to get her own fucking daddy in shit, having his fucking babies.”
Tanya screams, a bit louder, but blood bubbles out with it.
“It hurts,” she says to a godless sky.
Lucas edges back towards the door frame, his eyes stinging from the punch. Was she in labour, forced into birth by the trauma, the hatred?
“Get the fuck out of here,” shouts dad.
*
Lucas runs down the stairs, his feet slip on the threadbare carpet. Into the living room, as bleak as the bedroom, a soul of shit. Three broken chairs line the walls, mouldy and peeling, the table an orange crate lined with drained beer cans and cigarette butts in a depraved symmetry, a skewed homage to Warhol’s surface.
“Mum,” says Lucas, running up to a woman who sits in a tatty armchair in the middle of the room, upholstery torn apart and spewing spring guts and flammable stuffing like a violent crime. She must only be in her forties but looks twenty years older, her skin greying and her eyes empty holes of irredeemable void, her face scarred if not bloody; she stares into space and her hands tremble as she brings a cigarette to her lips but doesn’t draw on it, just holds it, combusting. Dad is shouting at Tanya, his insults coming down the stairs, killers of their own.
“Mum,” says Lucas again, trying to rouse the fossil of familial past. “He’s going to kill her, mum. Please do something. He’s going to kill the baby mum. Please stop him.” He shakes her like a corpse but her gaze is fixed somewhere away from the earth. He wants to punch her, to make her feel what he feels, but he can’t do it. “Please come and help me.”
Lucas runs back up the stairs, about halfway, then back down and into the kitchen. He pulls a dirty knife from the dirty surface. There are maggots on dead meat hunks. The drifting dust given visual life in the filtered sunlight makes him feel claustrophobic. Tanya screams again. He hears the gurgles of a baby.
*
Dad looks around at Lucas, out of breath at the doorframe, his face taut with disgust, and pushes past him, a bloody heap of flesh clasped in his hands, half-wrapped in a ragged oily cloth. Two words are tattooed on his fingers. ‘Fuck Love’. The heap glistens fresh.
“Dad?” says Lucas. He stops in his tracks and looks at the boy, can’t stop himself from smiling.
“You want to see it? Your little brother?”
He thrusts the baby towards Lucas. It’s awful, a misshapen mess of flesh and underdeveloped bone fragments. He can see one lidless eye and stunted arms capped with anomalous fingers. A gurgling sound comes from its face, like a plughole draining. It’s trying to breathe, to cling on to its pointless short life. Lucas trembles so hard he thinks his heart will stop; he reaches a tentative hand towards the baby, and swears it reaches back. It doesn’t. He touches it with his fingers and the tissue pulses beneath his hand. A reflex thing. Dad laughs, pulls the window open, throws the baby out of it, gurgling as it falls.
Tanya is still hanging from the ceiling, her thin legs like chicken and covered with blood that’s piled on the floor at her feet. Lucas runs into her and tries to hug her, to untie the flex bound so tight around her wrists, but he can’t reach it, his hugs hurt her broken ribs. Behind him his father blocking the doorway.
“He didn’t make it,” said dad, grin spread across his shit face.
Lucas ran at him, knife clutched outwards like an extension of himself. Dad takes the knife and pushes Lucas hard into the wall. He gets up, runs at him again, punched down this time. He gets up again.
“Don’t fucking push me boy. It’s your turn tonight.”
Lucas charges again. This time his father picks him up off the floor. He kicks his legs pointlessly.
“Mum,” he shouts out. The man laughs.
“You’re calling for that cunt? Boy, she’s not going to help you with nothing because she is fucking nothing. She’s a fucking lunatic.”
He carries Lucas into the front bedroom.
*
Mother’s in the armchair. She’s humming and in a soft voice starts to sing. Dream Lover. It doesn’t drown out Lucas’s cries.
“Because I want...”
*
He drops Lucas face down onto the mattress, pushes the back of his head down and holds him in place with one knee in the small of his back. He ties his wrists and ankles with shredded linen. Lucas’s screams have become desperate heaves. He pulls the boys trousers off.
*
Tanya is hanging from her wrists. She hangs and listens to her brother.
*
Mother’s cigarette has burnt away untouched. The ash falls to the floor in one piece.
*
In the street a dog runs up to the blood soaked cloth, to the mangled baby. It sniffs at it. It runs away.
August
Lucas is bare-chested, gaunt like a mummified Audrey Hepburn, his button nose beaded with sweat beneath his uncut thick hair, ribs like road markings on his concave chest. He’s cut and bruised old and new, knife wounds centimetres deep and shiny cigarette burns and knuckle marks, his skin a twilight hue of purples, clarets, twisted green yellow sunsets. Swollen eyes from crying he can’t stop, he looks through the open bedroom door, heaving silently inside himself.
She is bound from the ceiling. His sister. Tanya. Long electrical flex tied through a metal ring and to her raw wrists cut bare to flesh by the friction and the pressure, the heels of her feet just reaching the floor. Her face has been badly battered and both eyes are swollen shut, popped like meat beneath the force of blows thrown repeated and methodical. She sobs drily and it sounds to Lucas like puking an empty stomach but worse. Left stripped from the waist down Lucas feels embarrassed at the sight of her pubic hair and wants to save her from it all but his chest is too thin and his arms are too weak and he can’t stop crying, fucking idiot, fucking idiot. He presses his nails hard into the back of his hand which turns white and then red when the skin breaks. White shirt dowsed blood red it clings like a wet t-shirt to her pregnant stomach – and she barely sixteen and never had a boyfriend, not a real one. Their father is pacing around the unfurnished room smoking cheap cigarettes erratically, his movements jerk like pairs of insect wings – a dragonfly! – and become nearly unnoticeable in the haze of the stifling room, his licked lips leave the butt end wet and flat, sodden together by his heavy draws. It’s always so hot. He punches Tanya again in the face and she moans a bit out of torn lips, then three more times quickly, like one movement. Won’t be long before her face gives in. She tries to recoil but doesn’t have the energy. It’s the hopelessness that makes Lucas cry more and he puts his hands over his eyes but peers through the bloody nail-bitten fingers. The humiliation nauseates. Dad brings the flat sole of his heavy boot into the centre of her stomach; she lurches backwards on the flex, its polymers squeaking like new trainers on the metal ring with the movement, and she screams but it sounds inhuman, he face so swollen that such glottal reflexive noises are the loudest she can make. Lucas runs into the room, grabs weakly at his father’s arm.
“Dad,” he says. “Please don’t.”
“What’s that?” he shouts, and shakes his arms free of Lucas’s grip. “You want to help her? Fuckin slut.”
“Please don’t hurt her again. She’s not a slut. She’s my sister. Please.”
“You want to help the little fucking slut?” He jabs Lucas in the face, the nose of constant breakage, which knocks him backwards and out the door. “Slut wants to get her own fucking daddy in shit, having his fucking babies.”
Tanya screams, a bit louder, but blood bubbles out with it.
“It hurts,” she says to a godless sky.
Lucas edges back towards the door frame, his eyes stinging from the punch. Was she in labour, forced into birth by the trauma, the hatred?
“Get the fuck out of here,” shouts dad.
*
Lucas runs down the stairs, his feet slip on the threadbare carpet. Into the living room, as bleak as the bedroom, a soul of shit. Three broken chairs line the walls, mouldy and peeling, the table an orange crate lined with drained beer cans and cigarette butts in a depraved symmetry, a skewed homage to Warhol’s surface.
“Mum,” says Lucas, running up to a woman who sits in a tatty armchair in the middle of the room, upholstery torn apart and spewing spring guts and flammable stuffing like a violent crime. She must only be in her forties but looks twenty years older, her skin greying and her eyes empty holes of irredeemable void, her face scarred if not bloody; she stares into space and her hands tremble as she brings a cigarette to her lips but doesn’t draw on it, just holds it, combusting. Dad is shouting at Tanya, his insults coming down the stairs, killers of their own.
“Mum,” says Lucas again, trying to rouse the fossil of familial past. “He’s going to kill her, mum. Please do something. He’s going to kill the baby mum. Please stop him.” He shakes her like a corpse but her gaze is fixed somewhere away from the earth. He wants to punch her, to make her feel what he feels, but he can’t do it. “Please come and help me.”
Lucas runs back up the stairs, about halfway, then back down and into the kitchen. He pulls a dirty knife from the dirty surface. There are maggots on dead meat hunks. The drifting dust given visual life in the filtered sunlight makes him feel claustrophobic. Tanya screams again. He hears the gurgles of a baby.
*
Dad looks around at Lucas, out of breath at the doorframe, his face taut with disgust, and pushes past him, a bloody heap of flesh clasped in his hands, half-wrapped in a ragged oily cloth. Two words are tattooed on his fingers. ‘Fuck Love’. The heap glistens fresh.
“Dad?” says Lucas. He stops in his tracks and looks at the boy, can’t stop himself from smiling.
“You want to see it? Your little brother?”
He thrusts the baby towards Lucas. It’s awful, a misshapen mess of flesh and underdeveloped bone fragments. He can see one lidless eye and stunted arms capped with anomalous fingers. A gurgling sound comes from its face, like a plughole draining. It’s trying to breathe, to cling on to its pointless short life. Lucas trembles so hard he thinks his heart will stop; he reaches a tentative hand towards the baby, and swears it reaches back. It doesn’t. He touches it with his fingers and the tissue pulses beneath his hand. A reflex thing. Dad laughs, pulls the window open, throws the baby out of it, gurgling as it falls.
Tanya is still hanging from the ceiling, her thin legs like chicken and covered with blood that’s piled on the floor at her feet. Lucas runs into her and tries to hug her, to untie the flex bound so tight around her wrists, but he can’t reach it, his hugs hurt her broken ribs. Behind him his father blocking the doorway.
“He didn’t make it,” said dad, grin spread across his shit face.
Lucas ran at him, knife clutched outwards like an extension of himself. Dad takes the knife and pushes Lucas hard into the wall. He gets up, runs at him again, punched down this time. He gets up again.
“Don’t fucking push me boy. It’s your turn tonight.”
Lucas charges again. This time his father picks him up off the floor. He kicks his legs pointlessly.
“Mum,” he shouts out. The man laughs.
“You’re calling for that cunt? Boy, she’s not going to help you with nothing because she is fucking nothing. She’s a fucking lunatic.”
He carries Lucas into the front bedroom.
*
Mother’s in the armchair. She’s humming and in a soft voice starts to sing. Dream Lover. It doesn’t drown out Lucas’s cries.
“Because I want...”
*
He drops Lucas face down onto the mattress, pushes the back of his head down and holds him in place with one knee in the small of his back. He ties his wrists and ankles with shredded linen. Lucas’s screams have become desperate heaves. He pulls the boys trousers off.
*
Tanya is hanging from her wrists. She hangs and listens to her brother.
*
Mother’s cigarette has burnt away untouched. The ash falls to the floor in one piece.
*
In the street a dog runs up to the blood soaked cloth, to the mangled baby. It sniffs at it. It runs away.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
the tenancy agreement: chapter 2
2005
September
On hot day they waited beneath still grey London skies, six friends of male genital. Waited before their new rented house, whose adjoining terrace rolled uphill like an ancient vein, awkwardly adorned with bike parts or potted palms, anomalous even in the terrible mugginess of late summer, their thick stringy leaves left flaccid by the climate. The pitiless streets of the city’s South East hung limp around their boredoms and their personalities, the old telegraph hill rose away from them carrying with it their unknown futures, overseeing the dirge of the urban sprawl, the desperate vertical reach of their swollen London. There was fried chicken in the air, like sick in the morning, bathing them all in thick grease and reconstituted stench and Halal slaughter and penetrating through pores. The house was number sixteen. At their feet were piled black refuse sacks full of clothes, boxes of books and crockery, endless guitars whose strings hummed in the heat, and they passed a litre bottle of lager around the six of them, drunk piss warm in large swallows.
“He’s late,” said Tom. Short for Thompson, weirdly. That was his first name. He had long hair and paced nervously around the shingled front garden and spoke to himself alone.
“What’s his name?” asked Jonathan, never Jon and Jonny even less. He was Jonathan on paper and Jonathan in his head.
“Lucas,” said Ezra, named from the Bible and tormented by his own agnosticism.
“Lucas. Landlord Lucas.”
“Well where is he?” said Tom.
“Who?” said Greg, distracted by his own long fingers and the cigarette between them. Lovingly they call him skull face. Tom had a dream where Greg’s face existed without skin or tissue or musculature, just a bright white skull with eyes in the hollow sockets. He had dreadlocks too (in the dream), but it was never made clear where the hair was growing from. It had only been a dream.
“Who do you think?”
“Stop worrying.”
Tom sighed. Rolled his eyes.
“Stop worrying he says. I have more than a thousand pounds in my pocket.”
“Put it in your wallet,” said Greg.
“It doesn’t fit in my wallet.”
“That’s not something to worry about,” said Joe. A small time coke dealer, Joe wore sunglasses in the house and stole expensive shirts and went between shitting money and crushing poverty, often within the space of a few hours. He always got things done.
“He’ll be here,” added Greg.
“He’s already an hour and” – Tom checked the time – “four minutes late.”
“Tom,” said Ezra, inimitably patronising. “He wants us to move in. He wants us to rent this house.”
“I know, I know. I just find it very easy to imagine things going generally wrong.” He thought for a second. “In life.”
The silence was punctuated by smirks, distant sirens. Drum ‘n’ bass played behind upstairs windows and the street throbbed with its futility. ‘kunt!’ has been etched into the dusty back doors of a parked van, made good humoured by the punctuation. Ezra gently laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder.
“It’s not your fault you know,” he said. “That she left. If it counts for anything I never knew how to talk to her.”
Earlier that summer she had walked out on him. Their nine months together had felt like a decent lifetime, even though the whole period had been tainted with anguish and the expectation of failure. After she had left Tom she had fucked these two other guys, both guys he knew even if he wasn’t friends with them. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. The fact that they had broken up when she did it made it worse rather than better. When she told him he had smashed a mirror with the leg of a metal chair. It might have felt liberating if it hadn’t been so crushing.
“Listen to the dickhead,” said Conor, who made tonelessness sarcastic, who smoked himself into Buddhism, drank himself into hedonism but ended up theorising himself into involuntary celibacy. He had worn a chin beard for years that never grew, and his weird intelligence was turning his hair white.
“You don’t know how to talk to anyone, Ezra,” said Joe.
“Fuck off Joe. No one knows how to talk to me.”
“16 SHELL ROAD,” Jonathan shouted loudly. Volume was his non-confrontational way of diffusing confrontational situations. He often shouted addresses for the purpose.
“Is that supposed to be a toast?” said Tom, holding the last foamy swig of lager to his lips.
“No. A realization.”
“Good,” said Tom, and swallowed, wincing when the drink hit his tongue. In collective impatience they all turned down the road. The house looked great. Double fronted terrace, decent garden, basement, cheap. There was a woman walking up the road alone, dressed in paint flecked jeans and a shirt. She was quite heavy but had an attractive face. She smiled at them as she got closer and they could see the outline of her tits.
“Hi,” she said. Joe glanced at Jonathan, his darting eyes overtly sexual.
“Lucas?” said Tom. Laughter, perhaps too hard.
“No,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Seemed friendly enough.
“Right,” said Tom. “I just meant...”
“Ignore him,” said Greg. “His girlfriend left him.”
“Did she have a man’s name?”
“Actually quite funny.”
“O Jesus ignore him too. Madam,” said Ezra, puffing his chest as though its tissues were a sought-after relic or an incredible aphrodisiac. He bowed a little, playing the skewed role of ill-groomed gentleman. He became archaic in his seductions, a throwback to his own weird constructed sense of historical romance and chivalry. Or plague and suffering. Pre-Reformation dating methods. “You’ll forgive my acquaintances I’m sure, but we are today moving into this property and currently awaiting our new landlord – who is running slightly late – so he might provide us with the keys and thereby grant us formal entry into our new year of... this. Your friendly gait as you approached our standpoint suggested some familiarity with the situation and so, almost understandably, my friend here must have assumed...”
“That I was him?”
“Most so.”
“I’m his sister,” she said.
“Wonderful to meet you Mrs...” said Ezra.
“Tanya. Lucas apologises for not being here but he isn’t feeling too well today.” They all stared at her expectantly. “You do know about Lucas?”
“What about him?” said Greg. Tom had picked up his bags and was standing next to the front door.
“He’s in a wheelchair.”
“A wheelchair?” said Tom.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“God,” said Greg. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” said Tom.
“Not to you.”
“What for?” said Tanya.
“The wheelchair. I mean.”
“It’s not a problem,” she said,
“Of course it isn’t,” said Greg quickly, betrayed by his own words. “What does it matter? Wheelchair’s a wheelchair. A symbol or something.”
“Something for society to label,” said Joe.
“Or a means of motion,” said Tanya.
“Motion.”
“He broke his back as a child,” she said, disrupting the bullshit. “He’s fine with it. He’s healthy and gets around more than I do. He just does it in a wheelchair. He thought he might come round in a couple of days to catch up with you. Didn’t he tell you I’d be letting you in and sorting out the paperwork?”
They all looked at Tom, who shook his head. Weak breeze broke the silence but it stopped almost instantly, no momentum to keep it going. In the blinking quiet Tom lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and up. It was empty. He awkwardly lowered it to the pavement. Ezra cleared his throat.
“Excuse me. Tanya?” He gestured with an open palm to the mound of luggage on the floor.
“Oh I’m so sorry,” she laughed. “Let’s get you in.”
They all picked up their bags and boxes and Tanya took a small brown envelope full of keys from her bag. She pulled out one set and opened the two front doors and made her way across the threshold, followed by Tom and the others.
“We used to live here as kids,” she said. Slow with memory. “Before we inherited it.”
“Really?” said Ezra.
“Yeah. Lucas and Me.”
September
On hot day they waited beneath still grey London skies, six friends of male genital. Waited before their new rented house, whose adjoining terrace rolled uphill like an ancient vein, awkwardly adorned with bike parts or potted palms, anomalous even in the terrible mugginess of late summer, their thick stringy leaves left flaccid by the climate. The pitiless streets of the city’s South East hung limp around their boredoms and their personalities, the old telegraph hill rose away from them carrying with it their unknown futures, overseeing the dirge of the urban sprawl, the desperate vertical reach of their swollen London. There was fried chicken in the air, like sick in the morning, bathing them all in thick grease and reconstituted stench and Halal slaughter and penetrating through pores. The house was number sixteen. At their feet were piled black refuse sacks full of clothes, boxes of books and crockery, endless guitars whose strings hummed in the heat, and they passed a litre bottle of lager around the six of them, drunk piss warm in large swallows.
“He’s late,” said Tom. Short for Thompson, weirdly. That was his first name. He had long hair and paced nervously around the shingled front garden and spoke to himself alone.
“What’s his name?” asked Jonathan, never Jon and Jonny even less. He was Jonathan on paper and Jonathan in his head.
“Lucas,” said Ezra, named from the Bible and tormented by his own agnosticism.
“Lucas. Landlord Lucas.”
“Well where is he?” said Tom.
“Who?” said Greg, distracted by his own long fingers and the cigarette between them. Lovingly they call him skull face. Tom had a dream where Greg’s face existed without skin or tissue or musculature, just a bright white skull with eyes in the hollow sockets. He had dreadlocks too (in the dream), but it was never made clear where the hair was growing from. It had only been a dream.
“Who do you think?”
“Stop worrying.”
Tom sighed. Rolled his eyes.
“Stop worrying he says. I have more than a thousand pounds in my pocket.”
“Put it in your wallet,” said Greg.
“It doesn’t fit in my wallet.”
“That’s not something to worry about,” said Joe. A small time coke dealer, Joe wore sunglasses in the house and stole expensive shirts and went between shitting money and crushing poverty, often within the space of a few hours. He always got things done.
“He’ll be here,” added Greg.
“He’s already an hour and” – Tom checked the time – “four minutes late.”
“Tom,” said Ezra, inimitably patronising. “He wants us to move in. He wants us to rent this house.”
“I know, I know. I just find it very easy to imagine things going generally wrong.” He thought for a second. “In life.”
The silence was punctuated by smirks, distant sirens. Drum ‘n’ bass played behind upstairs windows and the street throbbed with its futility. ‘kunt!’ has been etched into the dusty back doors of a parked van, made good humoured by the punctuation. Ezra gently laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder.
“It’s not your fault you know,” he said. “That she left. If it counts for anything I never knew how to talk to her.”
Earlier that summer she had walked out on him. Their nine months together had felt like a decent lifetime, even though the whole period had been tainted with anguish and the expectation of failure. After she had left Tom she had fucked these two other guys, both guys he knew even if he wasn’t friends with them. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. The fact that they had broken up when she did it made it worse rather than better. When she told him he had smashed a mirror with the leg of a metal chair. It might have felt liberating if it hadn’t been so crushing.
“Listen to the dickhead,” said Conor, who made tonelessness sarcastic, who smoked himself into Buddhism, drank himself into hedonism but ended up theorising himself into involuntary celibacy. He had worn a chin beard for years that never grew, and his weird intelligence was turning his hair white.
“You don’t know how to talk to anyone, Ezra,” said Joe.
“Fuck off Joe. No one knows how to talk to me.”
“16 SHELL ROAD,” Jonathan shouted loudly. Volume was his non-confrontational way of diffusing confrontational situations. He often shouted addresses for the purpose.
“Is that supposed to be a toast?” said Tom, holding the last foamy swig of lager to his lips.
“No. A realization.”
“Good,” said Tom, and swallowed, wincing when the drink hit his tongue. In collective impatience they all turned down the road. The house looked great. Double fronted terrace, decent garden, basement, cheap. There was a woman walking up the road alone, dressed in paint flecked jeans and a shirt. She was quite heavy but had an attractive face. She smiled at them as she got closer and they could see the outline of her tits.
“Hi,” she said. Joe glanced at Jonathan, his darting eyes overtly sexual.
“Lucas?” said Tom. Laughter, perhaps too hard.
“No,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Seemed friendly enough.
“Right,” said Tom. “I just meant...”
“Ignore him,” said Greg. “His girlfriend left him.”
“Did she have a man’s name?”
“Actually quite funny.”
“O Jesus ignore him too. Madam,” said Ezra, puffing his chest as though its tissues were a sought-after relic or an incredible aphrodisiac. He bowed a little, playing the skewed role of ill-groomed gentleman. He became archaic in his seductions, a throwback to his own weird constructed sense of historical romance and chivalry. Or plague and suffering. Pre-Reformation dating methods. “You’ll forgive my acquaintances I’m sure, but we are today moving into this property and currently awaiting our new landlord – who is running slightly late – so he might provide us with the keys and thereby grant us formal entry into our new year of... this. Your friendly gait as you approached our standpoint suggested some familiarity with the situation and so, almost understandably, my friend here must have assumed...”
“That I was him?”
“Most so.”
“I’m his sister,” she said.
“Wonderful to meet you Mrs...” said Ezra.
“Tanya. Lucas apologises for not being here but he isn’t feeling too well today.” They all stared at her expectantly. “You do know about Lucas?”
“What about him?” said Greg. Tom had picked up his bags and was standing next to the front door.
“He’s in a wheelchair.”
“A wheelchair?” said Tom.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“God,” said Greg. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” said Tom.
“Not to you.”
“What for?” said Tanya.
“The wheelchair. I mean.”
“It’s not a problem,” she said,
“Of course it isn’t,” said Greg quickly, betrayed by his own words. “What does it matter? Wheelchair’s a wheelchair. A symbol or something.”
“Something for society to label,” said Joe.
“Or a means of motion,” said Tanya.
“Motion.”
“He broke his back as a child,” she said, disrupting the bullshit. “He’s fine with it. He’s healthy and gets around more than I do. He just does it in a wheelchair. He thought he might come round in a couple of days to catch up with you. Didn’t he tell you I’d be letting you in and sorting out the paperwork?”
They all looked at Tom, who shook his head. Weak breeze broke the silence but it stopped almost instantly, no momentum to keep it going. In the blinking quiet Tom lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and up. It was empty. He awkwardly lowered it to the pavement. Ezra cleared his throat.
“Excuse me. Tanya?” He gestured with an open palm to the mound of luggage on the floor.
“Oh I’m so sorry,” she laughed. “Let’s get you in.”
They all picked up their bags and boxes and Tanya took a small brown envelope full of keys from her bag. She pulled out one set and opened the two front doors and made her way across the threshold, followed by Tom and the others.
“We used to live here as kids,” she said. Slow with memory. “Before we inherited it.”
“Really?” said Ezra.
“Yeah. Lucas and Me.”
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