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.
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