Cull

by Tanvir Bush

  Gunter takes another glug of vodka. ‘Yes, how many people died again? Let’s ask Henri. He knows all the statistics about that, don’t you, Henri?’

  Henri is very still.

  ‘Enough! Gunter, you will not bait my guests.’ Stella’s face is white and tiny red spots glow hot on her neck.

  ‘Another drink perhaps, Gunter?’ says Dr Binding. ‘Or perhaps you have had enough?’

  Stella nods to Gina and announces the main course.

  Lamb.

  Plates are replaced with bigger ones; glasses now glisten with red wine and mouths drip with jus. Apart from Krystal’s, of course. She licks her fork and then panics slightly. The grease!

  ‘OK,’ says Amelia. She is still a little unsettled by her husband’s outburst. She had no idea he knew so much about her involvement in the offshore asylum rig initiative, let alone cared. She wants to change the subject. ‘Say Stella’s producers were here. What would they want us to talk about?’

  ‘Stella? Give us a subject.’ Gloria thinks this will be fun.

  Stella, feeling things are back under control, manages a terse smile. ‘Well, in one of the latest polls it would seem that people are worrying about food banks again.’

  ‘Too many or too few?’ asks her mother.

  ‘Both, funnily enough. On the one hand there are not enough food banks to deal with the need, and on the other hand it is possible that food banks are encouraging people to be lazy about finding work. It does seem possible that food banks have become a … how should we put it …’

  ‘A free supermarket?’ Amelia grins. ‘Another show, Stell? How about the title Free Food for Freeloaders?’

  ‘You are fucking kidding?’ Gunter splutters, knocking his fork to the floor. ‘You think by starving people – families with kids – you will encourage them to find work?’

  No one seems rattled by Gunter any more. They are beginning to realise he is performing the role of drunken devil’s advocate.

  ‘Oui.’ Henri takes a glug of the ruby-red Rioja and swirls it around his mouth, swallows. ‘Such delicious food, Stella. However, your husband, he has a point. Surely they will just turn to crime?’

  ‘You see, Krystal,’ Dr Binding smiles benignly down the table. ‘This is the kind of discussion people watching might find interesting.’

  Krystal simpers. ‘I don’t think young people would be interested, though. Food banks are pretty boring, aren’t they? I think we are more into music and that, you know, celebrities and fashion, and anyway, I mean really, what could we do about it all? It’s not up to us to make these kinds of decisions.’ That she includes herself with ‘young people’ is rather a stretch, thinks Gunter. Under all that foundation he suspects Krystal is almost as old as Stella.

  The booze is beginning to short out his neurons. The faces around the table distort, bubble like boiling plastic, form again. Obfuscate. What would the Polish equivalent be? Ukryć? Cover-up?

  ‘Why starve them when you can just put them to sleep?’ Did he really say that? Shit. Gunter looks up through the blur. The table is still lively, people are chatting, eating. Perhaps he just thought it.

  But then, in a moment of upended clarity, he sees The Good Doctor Binding looking right at him. The doctor is smiling but, without a word, he moves his hand slowly, ever so slowly, up to his collar and makes a long, cutting, sweeping gesture across his throat.

  Gunter pushes back his chair, excuses himself, or tries to, and barely makes it to the bathroom before he vomits up lamb and beetroot, wine and vodka. Minutes later, in the clear bright bathroom mirror, he washes his face and knows himself to be a dead man.

  Static Clouds and Sore Hearts

  There has been no rain for weeks, and the ground is iron-hard. Alex has taken off her trainers, and under her bare feet the dusty top layer of the path feels warm and chalky. She steps onto the cool of the grass tussocks by the sluggish riverbank and wiggles her toes while Chris flops down on his stomach, panting. They have just walked along the river path in an eight-mile loop, four miles to the weir, across the bridge and back down through the shadow of the woods, across the dry mud knuckles of the ploughed fields, through the village and back to the riverbank. They are both hot, sore-footed and happy.

  Alex pulls Chris’s plastic bowl from her backpack and fills it from a bottle of water. He doesn’t bother to get up, just plonks his muzzle in and slurps. Alex drinks from the bottle, folding herself down into a cross-legged position beside him. There is no one else around, and the sound of the shooshing river, the panting dog and the gentle rustling, as the mildest breeze moves through the tall grass in the field alongside them, brings a deep peace. Alex sighs and lifts her face to the sky, rubbing the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. After a while she slips onto her back, takes off her sunglasses and closes her eyes, deliberately refusing to allow thoughts of the Ladies’ Defective Agency, of Boudicca, of the traumatised and injured teenagers, of Binding, or any of it, filter into her sun-dazzled brain.

  A crow caws loudly close by and startles her. Chris too sits up, ear cocked.

  ‘What is it, boy?’ she asks. Chris has tilted his head up to the left and then, through Alex’s damaged retinas and the sun prisms, she sees it too. An Everest-sized thunderhead in the sky.

  Wow! she is thinking, when her phone rings. Alex wouldn’t usually answer while she is out on a walk, but for some reason the huge cloud sitting so menacing and still on the horizon has unsettled her, and she finds herself pressing the answer button.

  The line is distorted, messy with static and something else, a background pounding noise.

  ‘Hello?’ comes a voice. ‘Hello, is that Alexandra?’

  Alex freezes. The hot sun doesn’t stop the sweat on the back of her neck going clammy.

  ‘Hey,’ the voice continues. ‘Do you remember me? From … you know … that night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex whispers.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m in London and it’s pouring with rain here. A storm. Alex. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Alex more loudly. ‘Hi Gunter. How’s it hanging?’

  Not so good, as it turns out. Alex can barely take in what the poet Gunter Gorski is saying, not just because his voice is hard to discern over the noise of static, pouring rain and occasional peals of thunder, but also because what he is saying is so unbelievable.

  ‘Where are you calling from? You sound like you’re in a tin hut.’

  ‘Ha … yes! I am in a shed. In the garden. I don’t want anyone else to hear me.’

  Alex isn’t surprised. Gunter has just told her that his father-in-law is a murderer.

  ‘I saw the CDD file, Alex. At first I was disgusted but not so afraid … now it is different … something has changed … I am scared.’

  ‘What? Slow down, Gunter …’

  ‘That file – it stands for Clearance, Disinfection and Disposal. It was full of photos … I am telling you, it was like an execution room, not a hospital.’

  ‘You should go to the police.’

  ‘No! They wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘But you thought I would?’

  ‘Alex, I didn’t know who else to tell. If I go to any other journalist this will come back to Stella, my wife. But you … you and me have … had something. And … I read up about you, looked at some of your articles. You are an honourable person. You will see to it that the doctor is stopped. That what he is doing is exposed … but my wife and I stay out of all the trouble.’

  ‘Gunter, I don’t know who you think I am, but I can’t keep anyone out of trouble.’

  ‘Please, Alex. I am afraid – I think they … the people with Binding, the people behind all this … they will hurt me and Stella if they find out I know. Maybe even my daughter. I took pictures on my phone and then I panicked. But … I think the doctor knows I saw the file.’

  ‘Gunter, what did you do with the pictures?’

  ‘I … I … I put them on a memory stick and delete
d them from my phone. But now I have the memory stick. I must get rid of it … Can I give it to you?’

  He sounds a little deranged, maybe drunk. Could he be telling the truth? Alex is furious, frightened and excited. She can’t believe he is on the phone to her in the first place. She has secretly fantasised that he would ring her and tell her how he made a mistake, wanted to be with her. She is furious with herself, knowing that it would never happen and wanting it anyway. She is even angrier with him.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy? You want me, the woman you picked up on a train, slept with, a woman you know nothing at all about, to leak a story that could expose state-sponsored euthanasia at the highest level? While telling no one who my source was? Are you insane?’

  ‘I am sorry. I am sorry, Alex. Help me.’

  Is he sobbing? There is crackling, and his voice distorts and disappears into the thunder on the phone.

  ‘Gunter?’

  His voice returns, tired, a mere croak. ‘Please … Alex.’

  For a short moment Alex listens to the rain in London. It is so hot here. She longs for that rain … and the man in that rain … and if she helps him, maybe they can spend some time together? ‘OK, Gunter. Where? I need to see the pictures on the memory stick.’

  They arrange to meet in the café at Petertown station.

  ‘But not tomorrow,’ says Alex. ‘I have to finish an article for my paper first, or I’ll be fired. Let’s say Thursday morning. 10 a.m.?’

  ‘OK. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. I think you will be saving my life.’ There is another quiet, a lull in the static. ‘You know I am so sorry about how things ended that night. I didn’t ever want that, you must believe me. You and I … it was incredible.’

  Please, pleads Alex’s sore heart. Please say it might work out … together, but he doesn’t.

  ‘The pantie thing … on the doorknob … that was quite something.’

  ‘Oh, oh … yes.’ Alex reddens, she can’t help it. ‘Did you get in trouble with your wife?’

  ‘I should have done. I deserved to, after how I treated you. I am just lucky that my wife prefers breakfast. She went straight into the hotel restaurant.’

  ‘Yeah, well then … you got away with it.’

  ‘I didn’t get away with you, though. It was a good night, Alex.’ She can hear him smile. ‘I have kept them.’

  Alex smiles too. ‘You bloody poets are all the same.’

  As Alex ends the call, the wind picks up, a short furious blast of hot air that knocks Chris’s ears back. Alex shades her poor eyes and looks up. The sky to her left is now entirely blue again, not even a stray woolly puffball in range. The storm cloud, it seems, has scarpered. She pulls on her trainers and picks up the water bowl. She is disappointed with the disappearance of that magnificent, maleficent cloud.

  ‘Ach,’ she stretches. ‘We could really do with a decent storm.’ Her stomach growls, and Chris sits back on his rump and tries to dislodge a grass stalk from his ear with his hind leg. Gunter. Alex tries not to think about his lips, his hands. He wants to protect his wife. Alex, you are a bloody fool.

  Andre Watches Alex in a

  Creepy Manner

  His metal lattice in tray is piled high with files marked ‘Urgent’. He has weighted them down with a banana, but when the phone cheeps, Andre has to push through the paperwork to find the buried handset and the banana doesn’t hold. Files and paperwork crash floorwards. Kicking at the paper in irritation, Andre, all booted and suited, snatches up the phone.

  ‘Yeah what? I’m busy.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Watson. It is just, you told me to let you know if that blind woman turned up again.’

  At first Andre found it freaky having his own secretary. Well, sharing a secretary with his boss, that is. She wasn’t fit or anything like the ones he saw on adverts. She was chunky and old, at least forty, and she wore ‘mum’ clothes but she wasn’t mum-like. Not like Andre’s mum anyway. Andre’s mum had always been a tough old bird, fag in her gob at all times, even when breastfeeding. This secretary, Pat, she was timid as a rabbit. She would flinch and jump when the phone went, take ages to get the courage to knock on a door and never asked for any help whatsoever. Which was fine, as far as Andre was concerned, as he barely knew what he was doing and couldn’t have advised her anyway.

  She pretty much did all his administration and organised his calendar. He was still under probation, so he was trying his damnedest to keep up with all the training. His new title was assistant supervisor, but in reality he was more like … well … more like an overpaid security guard. He was in charge of organising the security shifts and ensuring that all the security and cleaning staff were in the right place at the right time, didn’t blab about their work or cause any trouble. This was a big deal, which meant he was a big deal, even though the work was dead easy most of the time. He didn’t mind getting in early and leaving late now that he had a stonking salary. He was earning more than his stuck-up brother with his car dealership in Royceston. Loads more. Andre had his own place now, even though his mum had begged him to stay on at home because she wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the flat if they found out she had a spare bedroom. Andre had promised to pay the extra room tax for her, but there was no way he was hanging around that place. No way.

  ‘Where is she?’ Andre asks Pat. That blind bitch had been causing trouble over the last few weeks. There had been all the phone calls and questions and requests to look around the wards again and again. Eventually his supervisor had called TOSA head office, but not before the bitch had written an article in the local paper about Grassybanks’ refusal to ‘come clean about the underground extension and the connection to the Homeless Action! initiative’.

  She had even hinted at irregular medical practices, and that had brought the TOSA bigwigs dashing over in their Jaguars to convene a meeting with the nursing staff, Dr Binding and some flash gits from the communications department. Andre had been told the press were ‘being handled’ and that if he was to see the pig-ugly-crip-journo sniffing around he was to take no action but report directly to TOSA head office. No action? What’s wrong with giving the bitch a bit of a slap? It’s not like she’s going to see anyone coming, is it? Andre scratches at his shaving rash.

  ‘Ronnie on security says she is heading across to Riverside. Looks like she’s meeting someone.’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll deal with it.’

  Andre is about to dial through to TOSA security offices when he pauses. So she is heading across the common? It may just be a footie field’s worth of bog but that is Grassybanks land now.

  ‘Pat!’ he yells through the door. ‘Call Ronnie. Tell him to meet me downstairs with the dog.’

  No reason why we can’t sort out our own backyard. It’s my fucking job after all, he is thinking as he picks up his radio.

  Dog!

  For her final ‘Why Work Works’ interview, Alex is meeting the Paralympian superstar Rory Mortensen. She rings first thing to check if he is still up to it, given his insane training schedule. ‘That’s cool,’ he says. ‘Had a track session at 5 a.m., so will have the rest of the morning off.’

  Alex hasn’t seen 5 a.m. for quite some time. Not in a good way, that is. She grimaces.

  Rory and Alex discuss wheelchairs and guide dogs, and decide on the top end of the common, where there is one of the few accessible walks alongside the River Bright. The path there is only a little stony and in decent shape, smooth enough to allow Rory’s wheelchair to keep a grip on the asphalt, and Alex can let Chris off safely for a run.

  ‘It will be good to wander beneath the trees, given the heat,’ says Alex. ‘Chris, my dog, is already panting and we haven’t left the flat yet.’

  She hears Rory chuckle down the line. He says that he got stuck in some sun-melted road tar only a few days ago. A group of French exchange students had helped him out of the road, but only after they had taken several photos on their phones. ‘Cheeky fuckers. Righto, Alex. See you shortly.’

  Alex i
s a little nervous. Nervousness always releases her inner crap comedienne. If she had a schizophrenic personality it would be this one, a fat trout making cheap gags at the most inappropriate times. Like now, for instance. She keeps thinking that this interview could be a bit of a minefield.

  It was a minefield that took Rory’s legs. In just five years, though, the man has picked himself up from the dust, quite literally, and gone from poster-boy soldier to crip-on-the-edge, to Paralympian hand cyclist. Along the way he has plucked up every gold medal possible. He is a phenomenon of physicality, courage and, let’s be honest here, he is incredibly handsome. ‘Devastatingly’ was the adverb used in Geezer magazine, and that had been written by a bloke. Rory now works as one of the most sought-after coaches at one of the most snotty university colleges. In a way he was lucky his previous career bombed, quips Alex’s inner trout.

  The sun is pouring down, and the dead grass crackles beneath Chris’s paws as they crunch across to the river. Alex, in a vest top, can feel her shoulders burning. She has, as usual in the rush to get out the door, forgotten her sun cream. She shades her eyes and aligns herself with the distant line of waterside trees.

  ‘Thataway, boy,’ she says to Chris, who nods, jaws slightly open and tongue lolling. He isn’t really at his best in the heat, but he doesn’t have a choice. Work for supper. That is the talking monkey deal.

  A grasshopper blings up in front of him, almost hitting him in the snout. ‘Kazam! Almost got him!’ it rasps to its mate. Immediately another grasshopper springs and whacks Chris above his eyebrow. ‘Shazam! Contact!’ He snaps at it but only half-heartedly. He can hear the insects tizzing with grasshopper giggles and still feels the vibration of the creatures through his whiskers. Their happy makes him happy. And at least he is outside of the concrete flat, and above him the wide good sky, and below him the ancient old earth. Like the insects, little smells skitter joyfully past in the dry wind. Coconut sun cream, earthworms, pee from a dog who thinks its name is ‘Oi!’, grass oil and dark soil minerals. Little puffs of delicious life essence. And one in particular … Chris lunges sideways.