The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  “My house, my rules.” Pas stood over her, his voice gone flat, “If I say you’re a cunt, then you’re cunt. And you’d better accept it and like it, or you’re not getting any more of my stuff.”

  “Pas, what is it, man?” Jim asked.

  “Good shit, man. Good, good shit,” Pas said, the flatness of tone fading away, “Krokodil, boys and girls. Gets you higher than heroin and washes you straight up on the bright, black shores.”

  The man’s a proper poet when it comes to putting shit in someone’s veins, Jim thought. Not that he was going to do anything about it. There were too many fuck-ups in the house who wanted a taste of whatever was going. They were already beginning to stir from their make-shift beds and shuffle towards the sound of Pas’s voice. Jim returned to his spot on the settee and watched everyone getting sorted. The air became ripe and Jim recognised the bittersweet taste of nitrogen oxide as teaspoons were heated to blistering point and grubby needles slipped into worn-out veins and arteries.

  What the fuck’s in that stuff, he wondered, then thought better of it. He didn’t need to know. Wendy collapsed next to him with the used needle still dangling from her arm.

  “Christ almighty,” Jim whispered, “silly fucking bitch.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she breathed lightly, “don’t call me ... don’t call me cunt ... bitch ...”

  Jim eased the needle out of the vein and placed it on the coffee table amongst the tubes, burnt glass and other greying sculptures of drug paraphernalia.

  It was an art, he thought. The time, effort and whatnot that went into creating a high – good or bad – was a matter of skill, knowledge and talent. You couldn’t fake any of those things. You either had them, or you didn’t. He looked at Pas doling out his cheap condoms with their black magic tar inside and realised the man had it: a curse that others were eager for him to pass on. It was in the shine of his eyes as he pocketed the last of a skinny, pock-marked man’s dole money.

  One of the best businessmen this country’s ever had. Where there is harmony, may he bring discord. Where there is truth, may he bring error. Where there is faith, may he bring doubt. And where there is hope, may he bring despair. Amen.

  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Jim said, under his breath, “and no man cometh unto paradise but by me.”

  “What?” Wendy sighed, surfacing for a moment.

  “Nothing.”

  Wendy started to shuffle ‘round on the settee.

  “What’re you doing, Wends?”

  She grunted, rested her head on the fleshless arm of the settee, and plonked her feet in his lap. Jim winced at the smell coming from them. They were as bad as her breath.

  “What, Wends?”

  “Suck my toes.”

  Jim made a face.

  “Suck my toes,” she said, “or I’ll tell Pas you’ve been slagging him right off.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about, Wends.”

  Fuck. She was worried Pas was going to cut her off. She wanted to stay in his good books. Stupid fucking cow.

  “All that boffhead bollocks you were spouting a minute ago, I saw you looking right at him when you said it.”

  “Fucksake. You’re–”

  “Suck–”

  “All right, all right. Fucking hell.”

  He couldn’t afford to make a scene and get thrown outside. He just wanted to stay here, nod off and forget. Best get on with it, then. Jim peeled her socks off, exposing pale feet with lines of black grit showing under the nails. His nose wrinkled and he swallowed. Wendy’s toes tasted of sweat, cheap rubber and sour meat. He could hear her laughing at him between breaths of Krokodil-induced euphoria as he tried not to gag on the vinegary specimens she was pushing into his mouth. He thought for a moment of biting down on her toes, good and hard, doing something to make her scream. But he didn’t. He just waited for her to become lost completely in the rush washing through her veins, and then he spat her toes out. Disgusted. Sick. Rank. Foul.

  He let her damp feet fall back into his lap. They stayed there, occasionally twitching. He stayed there, unmoving, as Wendy muttered and whispered her way through the long day. He grew hungry. He grew thirsty. He ignored the pain. During the afternoon, he unzipped his jeans –jeans that once belonged to Pine’s father – and used Wendy’s limp feet to masturbate with. He came on them. He watched his white cum run into the dark places between her toes. It didn’t make him feel any better. He wiped his dick dry on her soles.

  Outside, the fog continued to flow through the streets of Sevengraves.

  *

  “Let’s get this party started. Come on, you lucky people.”

  The party was three days old and the house reeked of every single hour. The lucky people were dehydrated and wired from too many substances and not enough sleep. Pas wandered through the house, prodding at the fallen with the toe of his boot, stopping to lift the occasional eyelid and be greeted by the gaping blackness of dilation.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you lot? This is supposed to be a party, know what I mean?”

  No-one did by this point; meaning had departed and left chaos in its wake. Function was dead. Purpose was lost. Somewhere in the house, a body clenched and threw up violently until the toilet bowl was overflowing.

  “You prepare a table for me in the presence of mine enemies,” Jim said to himself, listening to Pas ranting, “you anoint my head with oil. My cup runneth over.”

  Pas entered the living room. “Come on, Jim. You up for some more? You don’t seem to have been getting into the spirit of things much, man. Just sitting there like that.”

  Jim looked at Pas, less guardedly than usual. “What’s the spirit, Pas? Go on, mate. Tell me. What’s the fucking spirit? Is it fucking Christmas, or what?”

  Pas’s neanderthal brow furrowed. “Don’t be a cunt, Jim. Don’t be a cunt. The spirit is you have a good fuckin’ time, or you get the fuck out of my gaffe. Plain and simple.”

  Pas stood over him, close enough to make sure Jim would have to push him away to stand up. He could see the crow’s feet in the corners of Pas’s eyes starting to pinch with deep lines.

  “I am having a good time, Pas.”

  Pas was not placated. His eyes were wild.

  “Are you, mate? You sure about that? You really fuckin’ sure?”

  Jim saw the knife as a flicker of light, a lustrous motion which ended with a cry.

  Wendy.

  The knife was in her chest. Blood was running freely; thick and heavy. Unthinking, Jim grabbed at it, couldn’t pull it free. It was stuck, in deep. His hands came away badged with blood – again. Like the woman in the car park. Like Mum. Like Pine. Wendy’s fingers fluttered over its edges. It cut her fingers. Her eyes found Jim. There were tears and so many questions. None of them answered. Her eyes were dead.

  Never came back with that milk, did you?

  Jim looked at Pas. The eyes of his host were glass – cold mirrors – as he spoke. “There we go, mate. Okay? See, it’s done. Done. See what I mean? Fuckin’ done.”

  It’s okay. It’s done.

  With those words, Jim understood.

  Pas stalked away. He didn’t look back. Wendy was nothing. No loss to him. Jim went after him. He tried to tackle the big man in the hallway, but he had been too weak for too long. Poor diet. Lack of protein. His muscles were gone. His body tired from the effort of getting up and being alone every day. Pas turned and landed a punch to the solar plexus. Pain radiated through Jim as a finely-spun web. He crashed to the ground with agony shouting as a wordless voice in his head. He bit down on his tongue and spat blood. There were other voices shouting, hands being laid upon him. He fought against them, tried to, but there were kicks to the gut and the head after that. The world came down around him, dying without a sound, and Jim dreamed of being washed up on bright, black shores where a raw white rain slowly falls.

  Chapter Seven

  The shop doorway invited Jim in; an uncomfortable, rectangu
lar womb that smelled of piss and the dead. He must be near to, if not on, the high street now. His stomach hurt a lot and his mouth was dry. He’d not eaten since being thrown out of Pas’s place yesterday – the day before? Longer than that?

  He had no money for food or drink. There was no-one he could call upon. He hadn’t seen the cat again. There was one thing left that he could do. He sat down in the shop doorway, cupped his hands and held them out to those that passed by.

  Nothing happened. No-one stopped.

  This is my place, he thought, the place of all people like me – where the world wants us, where its people put us. We are not even the damned, we are not thought enough of to be so.

  “No change, mate. Sorry.”

  The morning passed slowly and his hands remained empty as occasional ghosts wandered close, and then walked away. No-one seemed to really see him, or hear his parched requests for change.

  “Sorry, mate. I thought you were someone else.”

  He was as much a ghost to them as they were to him. Their lives did not touch each other. Dry and hurting, Jim got to his feet and began to walk some more. The cold of the fog had teeth. He felt it biting into him with every step; gnawing and tearing away at what was there, feeding the swallowing hole inside.

  There wasn’t much left of him, but he was all that he had left.

  He wasn’t sure how long he sat there for. It felt like pieces kept coming loose inside his head and drifting away, down into some dark place where he couldn’t reach them. If a man is the sum of his memories, what does he become when they are lost? Does he become an empty child, waiting to be filled and made whole again?

  Busting for a piss, he crossed the road to the Triangle. The rundown toilets there would have to do. The state he was in no pub would let him in, and neither would the Cineflex, or Whumpy’s. Jim pushed open the door to the Gents; the air inside was wet and ripe. He could feel old detritus crumbling underfoot as he crossed the floor to one of the urinals. Rust-water stains and mildew covered everything.

  He unzipped and began to piss.

  The kick caught him in the back of the knee. His leg gave away and he pissed all over the floor, his boots and his hands. He was on the floor and four small shapes, hooded and masked with scarves, stood over him. More kicks found his kidneys and made him cry out.

  “I don’t have,” he cried out, “don’t have ... nothing.”

  He felt the tip of a knife push against his cheek; a hard, smooth piece of ice, parting his skin. A little cut. A little blood. A little voice, barely familiar with puberty, whispering for him to be quiet. He curled on the filthy floor as they went through his pockets.

  “Nothing, mate. He’s right. He’s got fucking nothing.”

  “Well then, he can give us something. I didn’t get nothing from that cunt, Christine, last night. And I fuckin’ want some cunt. Now.”

  Jim felt his bowels open again at the boy’s words and he tried to get up. The knife went inside him. It slid out. It slid back in. It twisted there and scraped on bone. He fell and began to bleed. There was no escaping this. He banged his fists down on the corroded tiles. He gritted his teeth against cold and pain, locking his jaw, shaking violently. Tears came as they used the knife to cut away his combat trousers and underwear. Young, scabbed hands parted him, opening the way.

  Jim felt the first boy go in and tasted bile in the back of his throat. He couldn’t stop the scream. Some part of him had to get out, to escape from this. He felt himself fastening tight, clenching around the intruder, wanting to shit the little bastard out. It hurt so much, in so many unnamed ways, as each one of the boys took his turn. There was a shard of broken mirror on the ground; a cockroach scuttled over it. Jim watched what was happening to him in it. A bad reflection. There was blood everywhere – his blood – and the boys were laughing as they played with him.

  All the world’s cruelty can be heard, nascent, in the laughter of a child.

  One of the boys raised his head, lowered his hood and removed the scarf covering his mouth. Doughy pubescence smiled at Jim, and it had old teeth rotting in a grey mouth with eyes that were dark, deep and sunken.

  Jim felt something die inside him.

  *

  In a dream, he is a child running along Sevengraves beach, with Mum lagging behind. The air is brisk and tastes of salt. The crying rags of sea-gulls sweep through the blue sky above. And there’s the Bartlett atop its hill; a Victorian edifice with dark-wood windows for eyes, dominated by the shadowed brow of its gables. He looks and he sees it at one of the windows. A pale, thin face with empty eyes staring out, seeing nothing of the outside world – or, seeing the outside world as nothing. It is dressed in a grey overcoat over threadbare pyjamas, and its fingers stroke at the glass repeatedly. Jim the child is scolded by Mum; not to look like that, not to stare at the unfortunate. They head home, but Jim doesn’t leave the tall, thin man behind. He keeps on coming back, or so it seems.

  Is that where it’s from? When it started? Have I been marked for so long, since I was a child? Was there no chance for me? No, it can’t be. This isn’t a memory. It’s just a dream, just a dream, and dreams mean nothing.

  *

  Left for dead. Dead and cold; that’s how they must’ve found him. He couldn’t remember. There hadn’t been much of him left by the time the boys were done. It’s done. Fucking done. Guilty guilty guilty. Dead. Hands without faces on him again; lifting his body off the ground. Soft sheets under him; faces with eyes and mouths that were fresh, not rotten, looking down. Day passing into night. Night passing into day. Long hours of sleep and slight moments of wakefulness. How much time went by. How much did not. Everything and nothing. The beginning and the end. White darkness. Black light. Eclipse over the abyss.

  Jim came to.

  His eyes cleared, slowly focusing and he saw whiteness and the dark as a curtain surrounding the bed he was in. There were shadows going by; nurses, patients, and orderlies. He could tell by the sound of their voices, whether their shoes squeaked or not, and the way they moved. He tried to sit up but the pain made him stop. He let out a long, hard breath. There was a shadow coming closer to him, seeking definition, finding it in a feminine shape. An elegant hand parted the curtain, and she came in to sit down beside him. She was pretty, blonde and wearing a red short-sleeved cardigan over her nurse’s uniform.

  “How’re you feeling today, Mr Hendrice?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  He couldn’t think of much else to say – there was too much in his brain.

  “Where am I?”

  “The Bartlett.”

  “The hospital? ... I thought that’d been closed ages ago.”

  “We recently re-opened.”

  “Special job, eh? Just for me, was it?”

  She smiled, and he saw the left side of her face was scaled and blistered.

  “What happened there?”

  She stroked the rough skin of her cheek with her fingers, “It’s called staphylococcus aureus,” she said, “Ritter’s Disease. It’s not a burn and, don’t worry, it’s not contagious. I’ve had it since I was a little girl.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No, not at all; only when people look.”

  Jim tried to sit up again. Failed.

  “Please, try to take it easy, Mr Hendrice. You’re not well.”

  “I should say. What happened to the little cunts that,” – raped – “shanked me?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the police.”

  “Police?”

  “Yes, they said they had a few questions for you. I’ll call them and let them know you’re feeling better.”

  She got up to leave.

  Jim reached out to grab her by the wrist – and found the cold circle of a handcuff held him back. Shit. They know. He looked at her. “Please. Wait. Just give me a few more hours.”

  She paused.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lucy.”

  “
Please, Lucy. Give me a break.”

  Still she didn’t move, and it seemed to have become quieter outside. The shadows of nurses, patients, and orderlies; had they stopped dead? No, that couldn’t be right.

  “Please. Just a few hours, I beg you. That’s all I ask. And call me Jim.”

  Lucy smiled. “Okay, Jim.”

  She left him.

  He lay back down and slept.

  His dreams were of her: she was naked and her scar carried on down the left-hand side of her body; consuming her arm, inflaming her thigh and calf, stunting her foot into a bound club of dead skin and cartilage. Still, they fucked and still, it was beautiful.

  *

  Lucy took Jim out in a wheelchair so he could get some evening air before the police arrived. His stitches were burning in his side and stomach. I shouldn’t be alive, he thought, but I am. Those kids should’ve done for me, all told.

  She pushed him along the dusty path that trailed out from the grounds of the Bartlett to the cliffs and Jacob’s Ladder; a natural set of steps carved over time by the wind and sea that led down to the beach. Old screams dressed in tattered feathers and beaks turned overhead on cartilage wings. The sun was a bright hole in the sky. The wheels of Jim’s chair chattered away to themselves about many things as they went along. He kept thinking of his dreams and Lucy. They stopped at the top of Jacob’s Ladder.

  “Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “So simple. Beach. Sea. Cliffs. It all fits together, somehow, and that makes it perfect.”

  “I wish life fitted together like that,” Jim said.

  “Life’s different,” Lucy sighed, touching her scarred cheek.

  “It shouldn’t be,” he said.

  “Too true. You ever love someone, Jim? I mean, really love them. The proper way.”

  Pine. Mum.

  “No,” he said, “not yet.”

  “I did. He was gorgeous,” she said, taking a cigarette from the pocket of her red cardigan and lighting it. She drew hard on its bittersweet cancer before she went on.