The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  But as he looked over the bookcase he realized how much the book of Nietzsche stood out in their new flat. It smelt of Susan. Some tiny part of her, a speck of skin or smear of oil, must surely still be on it somewhere. If he could sense that, then surely Chris could too. He walked across the room, took the book from the shelf, and walked downstairs to put it in the box on top of his filing cabinet in the study.

  On the way he diverted into the bathroom. As he absently opened his fly, he noticed an unexpected sensation at his fingertips.

  He brushed them around inside his trousers again, trying to work out what he’d felt. Then he slowly removed them, and held his hand up.

  His fingers were spotted with blood.

  Richard stared coldly at them for a while, and then calmly undid the button of his trousers. Carefully he lowered them, and then pushed down his boxer shorts.

  More cuts.

  A long red line ran from the middle of his right thigh around to within a couple of inches of his testicles. A similar one lay across the very bottom of his stomach. A much shorter but slightly deeper slit lay across the base of his penis, and it was from this that the majority of the blood was flowing. It wasn’t a bad cut, and hardly put one in mind of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but Richard would have much preferred it not to have been there.

  Looking up at the mirror above the toilet, he reached up and undid the buttons on his shirt. The scratches on his stomach now looked more like cuts, and a small thin line of blood rolled down from the cut on his chest.

  Like many people – men especially – Richard wasn’t fond of doctors. It wasn’t the sepulchral gloom of waiting rooms he minded, or the grim pleasure their receptionists took in patronizing you. It was the boredom and the sense of potential catastrophe, combined with a knowledge that there probably wasn’t a great deal they could do in any event. If you had something really bad, they sent you to a hospital. If it was trivial, it would go away of its own accord.

  It was partly for these reasons that Richard simply did his shirt and trousers back up again, after patting at some of the cuts with pieces of toilet tissue. It was partly also because he was afraid.

  He didn’t know where the scratches were coming from, but the fact that, far from healing, they seemed to be getting worse, was worrying. With his vague semi-understanding of such things, he wondered if it meant his blood had stopped clotting, and if so, what that meant in turn. He didn’t think you could suddenly develop haemophilia. It didn’t seem very likely. But what then? Perhaps he was tired, run-down after the move, and that was making a difference.

  In the end he resolved to just go on ignoring it a little longer, like that mole which keeps growing but which you don’t wish to believe might be malignant.

  He spent the afternoon sitting carefully at his desk, trying to work and resisting the urge to peek at parts of his body. It was almost certainly his imagination, he believed, which made it feel as if a warm, plump drop of blood had sweated from the cut on his chest and rolled slowly down beneath his shirt; and the dampness he felt around his crotch was the result of his having turned the heating up high.

  Absolutely.

  He took care to shower well before Chris was due back. The cuts were still there, and had been joined by another on his upper arm. When he was dry he took some surgical dressing and micropore tape from the bathroom cabinet and covered the ones which were bleeding most. He then chose his darkest shirt from the wardrobe and sat in the kitchen, waiting for Chris to come home. He would have gone upstairs, but didn’t really feel comfortable up there by himself yet. Although most of the objects in the room were his, Chris had arranged them, and the room seemed a little forlorn without her to fill in their underlying structure.

  That evening they went out to a pub in Soho, a birthday drink for one of Chris’s mates. Chris had several different groups of friends, Richard had discovered. He had also discovered that the ones she regarded as her closest were the ones he found hardest to like. It wasn’t because of anything intrinsically unpleasant, more an insufferable air of having known each other since before the dawn of time, like some heroic group, the Knights of the Pine Table. Unless you could remember the hilarious occasion when they all went down to the Dangling Cock in Mulchester and good old “Kipper” Philips sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” straight through while lying on the bar with a pint on his head before going on to amusingly prang his father’s car on the steps of the village church, you were clearly no more than one of life’s spear carriers – even after you’d been going out with one of them for nearly a year. In their terms, God was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, and the devil, even had he turned up to dinner with a small hostess gift and a bottle of very good wine, would have been treated with the cloying indulgence reserved for friends’ younger siblings.

  Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.

  “What’s that?” she asked bluntly.

  Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a “pint”, that it consisted of the liquid alcoholic byproducts of the soaking, boiling and fermenting of certain natural vegetative species, and that he had every intention – regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have – of drinking it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.

  “Been in a fight, have you?” she asked. Behind her Chris turned from the man she was talking to, and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.

  “No,” he said. “Just a bizarre flat relocation accident.”

  “Hmm,” Kate said, her mouth pursed into a moue of consideration. “Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.”

  Chris looked at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.

  “Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately . . .” he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.

  “I’m serious,” she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. “Someone tries to kill you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And so what happens is often the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.”

  Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.

  “Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,” Chris said.

  “I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,” he said. “After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of fossilized wood.”

  “What’s wrong with your ribs?” Kate asked, squinting at him closely.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just banged them.”

  “Does this hurt?” she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.

  “No,” he said, laughing.

  “Then you’re probably all right,” she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got to the bottom of Richard’s rib problem, and happiness at seeing him get on well with one of her friends.

  Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door, and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.

  Mid-evening he went to the Gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them, and realized he would have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.

  Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if s
omeone had come at him with a knife.

  They got home well after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was one of those rare people who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.

  Chris staggered straight into the bathroom, to do whatever the hell it was she spent all that time in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answerphone, gently banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t internalized yet.

  One message.

  Sitting heavily down on his chair, Richard pressed the play button. Without noticing he was doing it, he reached forward and turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. This was a habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling fairly regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, were not things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a programme of protection, now no longer needed.

  Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.

  He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually was from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down.

  She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.

  The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.

  “’ny messages?”

  “Just a wrong number,” he said.

  She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it, rather than in negation. “Coming to bed then?” she asked slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his “Sex life in ancient Rome” face, inspired by a book he’d read many years before.

  “Too right,” he said. “Be there in a minute.”

  But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have fallen asleep. Wearing pyjamas for the first time in years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.

  The bedroom seemed very small as he lay there, and whereas in Belsize Park the moonlight had sliced in, casting attractive shadows on the wall, in Kingsley Road the only visitors in the night were the curdled orange of a streetlight outside and the sound of a siren in the distance.

  As soon as Chris had dragged herself, groaning, out of the house, Richard got up and went through to the bathroom. He knew before he took his night clothes off what he was going to find. He could feel parts of the pyjama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.

  The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.

  He stood there for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched, he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted to a cut.

  Mid-morning he called Susan at her office number. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity – but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.

  Her tone mellowed when she realized who it was. She tried to pin him down to a date for a drink, but he avoided the issue. They’d seen each other twice since she’d left him for John Ayer; once while he’d been living with Chris. Chris had been relaxed about the meetings, but Richard hadn’t. On both occasions he and Susan had spent a good deal of time talking about Ayer; the first time focusing on why Susan had left Richard for him, the second on how unhappy she was about the fact that Ayer had in turn left her without even saying goodbye. Either she hadn’t realized how much the conversations would hurt Richard, or she hadn’t even thought about it. Most likely she had just taken comfort from talking to him in the way she always had.

  “You’re avoiding it, aren’t you?” Susan said eventually.

  “What?”

  “Naming a day. Why?”

  “I’m not,” he protested feebly. “I’m just busy, you know. I don’t want to say a date and then have to cancel.”

  “I really want to see you,” she said. “I miss you.”

  Don’t say that, thought Richard, miserably. Please don’t say that.

  “And there’s something else,” she added. “It was a year today when . . .”

  “When what?” Richard asked, confused. They’d split up about eighteen months ago.

  “The last time I saw John,” she said, and finally Richard understood.

  That afternoon he took a walk to kill time, trolling up and down the surrounding streets, trying to find something to like. He discovered another corner store, but it didn’t stock Parma ham either. Little dusty bags of fuses hung behind the counter, and the plastic strips of the cold cabinet were completely opaque. A little further afield he found a local video store, but he’d seen every thriller they had, most of them more than once. The storekeeper seemed to stare at him as he left, as if wondering what he was doing there.

  After a while he simply walked, not looking for anything. Slab-faced women clumped by, screaming at children already getting into method for their five minutes of fame on Crimewatch. Pipe-cleaner men stalked the streets in brown trousers and zip-up jackets, heads fizzing with racing results. The pavements seemed unnaturally grey, as if waiting for a second coat of reality, and hard green leaves spiralled down to join brown ashes already fallen.

  And yet as he started to head back towards Kingsley Road, he noticed a small dog standing on a corner, different to the one he’d seen before. White with a black head and lolling tongue, the dog stood still and looked at him, big brown eyes rolling with good humour. It didn’t bark, merely panted, ready to play some game he didn’t know.

  Richard stared at the dog, suddenly sensing that some other life was possible here, that he was occluding something from himself.

  The dog skittered on the spot slightly, keeping his eyes on Richard, and then abruptly sat down. Ready to wait. Ready to still be there.

  Richard looked at him a moment longer, and then set off for the tube station. On the way he called and left a message at the house phone on Kingsley Road, telling Chris he’d gone out, and might be back late.

  At eleven he left the George pub and walked down Belsize Avenue. He didn’t know how important the precise time was, and he couldn’t actually remember it, but it felt about right. Earlier in the evening he had walked past the old flat, establishing that the “For Let” sign was still outside. Probably the landlord had jacked the rent up so high he couldn’t find any takers.

  During the hours he had spent in the pub he had checked the cuts only twice. After that he’d ignored them, his only concession being to roll the sleeve of his shirt down to hide what was now a deep gash on his forearm. When he looked at himself in the mirror of the Gents his face seemed pale; whether from the lighting or blood loss he didn’t know. As he could now push his fingers deep enough into the slash on his chest to feel his sternum, he suspected it was probably the latter. When he used the toilet he did so with his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what it looked like down there: the sensation of his fingers on ragged and sliced flesh was more than enough. The pain in his side had continued to condense, and was now restricted to a circle about four inches in diameter.

  It was time to go.

  He slowed as he approached the flat, trying to time it so that he drew outside when there was no one else in sight. As he waited, he marvelled quietly at
how different the sounds were to those in Kentish Town. There was no shouting, no roar of maniac traffic or young bloods looking for damage. All you could hear was distant laughter, the sound of people having dinner, braving the cold and sitting outside Café Pasta or Pizza Express. This area was different, and it wasn’t his home any more. As he realized that, it was with relief. It was time to say goodbye.

  When the street was empty he walked quietly along the side of the building to the wall. Only about six feet tall, it held a gate through to the garden. Both sets of keys had been yielded, but Richard knew from experience that he could climb over. More than once he or Susan had forgotten their keys on the way out to get drunk, and he’d had to let them back in this way.

  He jumped up, arms extended, and grabbed the top of the wall. His side tore at him, but he ignored the pain and scrabbled up. He slid over the top without pausing and dropped silently on to the other side, leaving a few slithers of blood behind.

  The window to the kitchen was there in the wall, dark and cold. Chris had left a dishcloth neatly folded over the tap in the sink. Other than that the room looked as if it had been moulded in an alien’s mind. Richard turned away and walked out into the garden.

  He limped towards the middle of it, trying to recall how it had gone. In some ways it felt as if he could remember everything; in others it was as though it had never happened to him, but was a second-hand tale told by someone else.

  A phone call to an office number he’d copied from Susan’s Filofax before she left.

  An agreement to meet for a drink, on a night Richard knew that Susan would be out of town.

  Two men, meeting to sort things out in a gentlemanly fashion.

  The stalks of Susan’s abandoned plants nodded suddenly in a faint breeze, and an eddy of leaves chased each other slowly around the walls. Richard glanced towards the living-room window. Inside it was empty, a couple of pieces of furniture stark against walls painted with dark triangular shadows. It was too dark to see, and he was too far away, but he knew the dust was gone. Even that little part of the past had been sucked up and buried away.