by Michel Faber
He squinted into the cold. Besides his narrow torch beam, there was precious little light. The inhabitants of the ground floor flat had gone to bed, as had Gee, if her darkened window was anything to go by. His own window was a feeble square of light in a monumental edifice of gloom. At this upwards angle, he could see the lightbulb in his kitchen and the ceiling cornices, but nothing else. The block of flats on the opposite side of the gardens was almost totally lost in the blackness; just two windows had lights on, right near the bottom, as if the whole apartment block were a gigantic stack of electronic equipment on standby. He pointed his torch at it, wielding it like a remote control. The beam didn’t reach. It didn’t even get as far as the fences which he knew, from memory, kept one garden bordered off from the next.
The area of ground to be examined was maybe twenty foot square. Logically, if the mouse was dead it would be lying directly underneath where it had been tossed out. If it was horribly injured it might have dragged its broken body a few steps before perishing in agony. If it was OK, it would be nowhere to be found. He shone the torch into the grass, but could only see inside a small circumference, not the cinematic sweep he’d imagined. The batteries weren’t as robust as he’d thought. The beam of light had started off white, then turned pale yellow almost at once. He would have to be methodical, strafing the designated area in a strictly geometrical, non-overlapping pattern.
After a couple of minutes traipsing back and forth, his batteries were almost dead. He blinked hard and wide, willing his eyes to function better than they naturally wanted to. He should’ve started in the centre of the rectangle, not the edge. He should’ve had the guts to test out if Gee was just playing hard to get. He should have put a warmer jumper on. He should never have left home.
Stumbling in the dimness, he almost stepped on something small and grey. It was the mouse. He went down on his knees before it, and the fabric of his track pants was instantly soaked with moisture.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered. The torch beam illuminated the mouse quite neatly; the scant circle of light and the tiny rodent were just right for each other. The animal was alive, unconcerned, just sitting there in the grass.
‘What are you doing here, you dumb bastard?’ Manny whispered.
The mouse looked up at him, chewing on nothing. Manny wondered if a certain percentage of mice were born totally lacking a scamper reflex, or if this particular specimen was brain-damaged.
‘Get moving, you loser,’ he muttered, feinting an attack on the furry body with the tip of his torch. The mouse turned around, one leg at a time, and walked off into the darkness. Manny kept the torch beam on the tail, tracking the mouse’s progress. Within seconds he’d lost sight of it and was left with nothing but a few watts of battery-powered torchlight, a patch of damp grass and an invisible world.
Manny switched the torch off. Everything went black. He was shivering. He was blind. Then, tinge by tinge, the colours started coming through.
SOMEONE TO KISS IT BETTER
When Dougie got home, she was there, as per usual. Sitting on the sofa, as per usual, with no housework done. Watching television, as per usual. Except … Except this time there wasn’t a television for her to be watching.
‘Where’s the TV, then?’ he asked.
‘It’s gone,’ she said.
‘What do you mean it’s gone?’
‘It’s been stolen.’
‘Stolen? What the fuck you playin at?’ It was impossible the television had been stolen. She had sold it, broken it, lost it, lent it out, given it away to the fucken Red Cross.
‘I went out shoppin,’ she said. ‘When I got back, our stuff was gone.’
‘Stuff? What stuff?’ Christ! The way she never told him what he needed to know right away!
‘All the electronic gear, what do you think?’ she sighed. ‘TV. DVD player. CD player. Um … radio.’ She sighed again, in a shivery kind of way. ‘Is that everything?’ She looked him straight in the eyes, so he could see she’d been crying.
‘Ever thought of lockin the door behind you, you dumb cunt?’
‘I did lock it,’ she said, blinking hard as she looked down at her fingernails.
‘So how did they get in? It’s a fucken security flat, int it?’
‘They must have had keys. The keys you lost last week. When you were drunk and got carried home from the pub.’
She spoke without accusatory emphasis, as she had learned to, but she’d still not learned to not speak at all. Her words were like little spoonfuls of spinach going into Popeye the Sailor-Man; his temper pumped up like a cartoon muscle.
‘I told you I dint lose those fucken keys!’ he yelled, thrusting two fingers right near her face. She winced momentarily, but because he hadn’t hit her, she didn’t manage to bite her tongue.
‘So where are they, then?’
‘I told you before!’ he screamed, smacking her across the cheeks with alternating sides of his big right hand. ‘You bloody took them, dint you? Put them in your big fucken handbag and lost them, dint you?’ His left hand reined her in as she tried to struggle away from the blows. ‘That handbag of yours is like a fucken Black Hole! There’s a whole fucken universe gets sucked in there, and what the fuck happens to it then eh? What the fuck happens to it then?’
‘You’re totally fucken mad,’ she squealed through a whirl of hair and fingers as he kept the blows raining down. ‘You belong in a fucken home.’
She wrenched away the arm he was holding her by, so he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed hard. He hunched his shoulders up in case she tried to get at his eyes; instead she tried to punch him in the ribs, but couldn’t do much at such close range. Then, as he kept the pressure on, she tried to … to tickle him on the chest. Fuck! That’s where he was most ticklish, too – which nobody else would have known except his mother. That’s what happened when you let a woman get too intimate with your body: she found out about things no-one but your Mum should know.
Anyway, all of a sudden she seemed to get a surge of strength, and started tickling him so hard he had to take his hands off her throat. She even got an involuntary braying sound out of him, almost a laugh, which was her big mistake. ‘Fucken funny, is it?!’ he shrieked, and shoved her to the floor.
At least, most of her got shoved to the floor. Her head only went down as far as the little wooden table the TV used to stand on, and smashed right through the top of it with an explosive crack. It was the most spectacular thing, like a special effect in a movie. It gave Dougie the shock of his life, that was for sure.
Immediately he knelt down to get her out.
It was complicated, though, because the broken table had turned into a sort of cage around her head. The shards of wood were still bolted to the tubular frame, and the springiness of the metal had pulled the splintered edges back up into a V-shaped wedge which couldn’t be opened outwards. Only her nose and some hair were showing. He tried pushing the splintered wood inwards, but her face was stuck right underneath, stuck like in a vice. If he tried to drag her out sideways, that wouldn’t be any good either: her face would get all torn up. Maybe he’d even blind her.
So, he squatted, waiting for his rage to pass over so he could think what to do.
After a minute or two, he realized there was no point worrying about blinding her, no point trying to get her head out.
In fact, he’d probably interfered too much with her already, and now he had better leave her exactly where she was.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. At least not permanently. That is, he had meant to kill her, because what she’d done deserved killing, and nothing less than her death could have satisfied him, but if he could’ve had things just as he wanted them, he would have killed her, and then when she’d been lying there for a while, dead, she would have suddenly started coughing and gurgling and would be alive again. Then he would have said,
‘So just remember: that’s what you get.’
But she wasn’t dead like that. She was dead like a tray
of meat under cellophane.
He tried to remember if fingerprints got left on skin, or only on doorknobs and walls and guns and things like that. He’d watched a lot of crime shows, but not concentrating that hard, you know, not like there was going to be a fucken exam at the end.
Fucked if he could remember.
In the kitchen, the plastic bags of shopping were still standing around: fucked if he was going to put them away. Outside, it was dark already.
Back in the living room, Dougie snapped out of it and got serious. With a tea-towel he wiped the caved-in table-top where he’d tried to prise the broken pieces apart. Then, groping into the narrow space where her head was wedged between the splintered wood and the TV TIMES, he managed to wrap the tea-towel around her neck and rub it back and forth until he was satisfied.
The hardest part was already taken care of: if he’d tried to fake that, and make it look like the flat had been burgled, he’d have to’ve taken all the stuff out himself, and where would he have dumped it? Someplace where the police would find it in about two minutes, probably, and then he’d be fucked. But this way, it was all done for him: his flat really had been broken into, his stuff really was stolen, the cunts really had killed his girlfriend. His de facto.
His Gemma.
Dougie made a quick inspection of the flat to make sure he knew everything that was missing, and then tackled the final problem.
Too many people in this town knew he had a temper. Gemma’s parents for starters, Gemma’s GP no fucken doubt, Christ knows what other busybody. He couldn’t just walk into the police station and say he’d found his girlfriend murdered. If he’d been born the sort of middle-class ponce who could make a claim like that and expect tea and sympathy from the law instead of the fucken third degree, he wouldn’t have had a fucken temper to begin with, would he?
No, he’d stay right here, and this is how it would appear: burglars had done the place over, and they’d done Dougie’s girlfriend over, and they’d fucken done Dougie over, too. The police would find them both lying here next to each other, cart them both away in an ambulance, her dead, him a mess but alive.
All he had to do was inflict the injuries.
He held his fist up in front of his face, clenched it until it trembled. Tentatively he bounced his knuckles against his brow, softly then harder, but not hard enough to hurt much.
He punched himself in the stomach, doing it suddenly as if to catch himself unaware, but of course he wasn’t unaware at all and didn’t even get winded. Besides, being winded was fuck-all use, because an outsider couldn’t see it. He needed bruises, cuts, broken ribs maybe, teeth knocked out. Yes! –fucken teeth knocked out! What were a few fucken teeth in exchange for a lifetime of freedom? Shit, what was a month in hospital compared to twenty years in jail?
He looked at his fist again, and realised that even if he could bring himself to hit himself as hard as he was able, he still couldn’t do the sort of damage he needed to. Attached to himself, he couldn’t get enough swing into the punches – it was a simple case of leverage.
He had another idea, though, and this one might work.
He’d go out, drive to the housing estate at the edge of town, pick a fight with some drunk bastard in a back street, get done over, drive home, lie down next to Gemma on the floor.
As long as he didn’t get himself killed, he could manage all that no bother: he’d done it before, hadn’t he? Crawled in next to Gemma in the bed – ‘What happened to yow?’ ‘Got a beating, dint I?’ ‘Who did it?’ ‘Fucken hell – somebody – anybody – Who fucken cares? You want some yourself?’
‘Oi! Shithead!’ yelled Dougie. ‘Have a go if you’re hard enough!’
The stranger stopped, peered squinting into the darkness.
‘Who you talken to, pal?’
Dougie stepped forward, but not so far up the alley as to get in the lights of the High Street. Whoever was going to do the business would have to be motivated enough to step into the dark.
‘Scrape the shit out your ears, you might hear better!’
The youth hesitated, took a step closer. He was a suedehead, pale as a dollop of mash, dressed up in fleecy jogging gear like a fucken idiot.
‘Fucken idiot!’
But the youth didn’t bite.
‘Mad bastard,’ he snorted, and walked away.
Dougie considered going somewhere else, though this was the place most notorious for aggro. The cops left it alone, too, until much later at night when the rich people in the trendier parts of town had all safely found their cars and gone home.
‘Oi!’
Another fucken suedehead – no, it was the same one, coming back with a mate.
‘Who’s your boyfriend, shithead?’ called Dougie. ‘Has he got a big dick then?’
This did the trick, apart from a couple of feints and shoves to get things properly physical. The two lads weren’t heavyweights but they were wiry and vicious and not too drunk. Dougie landed a few good blows to their faces at the very start, but after that it was their game. They fucken murdered him — in a manner of speaking. He certainly went unconscious for a minute, and by the time they’d put the last boot (well, trainer) in before running away, he was coughing up blood and vomit.
All in all he felt his beating had gone on longer than necessary: he could probably have got by with less. Clasping his arms around his abdomen where he lay, he tried to raise himself up using his knees and left shoulder as a lever; succeeded. Breathing was painful: broken ribs, probably, but nothing that would stop him driving home. His nose was broken, maybe, his lips felt split wide open in a couple of places, his knuckles were already blue … Underneath his clothes, he must be all the colours of the fucken rainbow. He cackled hysterically, then retched again, his forehead bouncing off the ground.
‘Oh my God – what have they done to you?’
A female voice — female legs running over to him — female arms reaching down to him.
‘I’m all right — leave me alone,’ he barked, turning his face away, into the hunch of his shoulders as he struggled to stand.
‘Let me help you!’
‘I’m all right, really,’ he groaned, lurching on his knees, into the dark. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘I know it isn’t,’ she said. ‘Just let me help you up.’
She steadied him as he got to his feet, then grabbed him by the shoulders as he tried to walk away. ‘Listen: I’m a nurse. I saw them kicking you. You’ve had a lot of blows to the head. You need to go to a hospital for observation in case you have a brain haemorrhage. You can’t just go home.’
‘Let go of me.’
‘Listen: calm down. They’re gone. You’re safe now. You don’t need to run away.’
‘Fuck off!’ Again he tore free of her, again she grabbed him by the shoulders, and this time she pulled him around to face her.
‘You might still die, she announced six inches from his nose, a blonde woman in her late twenties, no lipstick, big blue eyes, quite shaggable. ‘Do you understand that?’
‘I’m fine,’ he sighed, shoulders slumping, as she looked him over.’If you’re a nurse, why don’t you go back to the hospital?’
‘I’m off duty,’ she said.
‘You don’t act like it.’
She smiled ruefully, as though he was pointing out something that everyone else pointed out too. ‘I’ve got a pencil-torch in my car,’ she said. ‘I want to look at your pupils.’
‘Got nice eyes, have I?’ he smirked, giving in, falling into step with her.
‘No comment,’ she said. ‘I’m just hoping they’re reacting to light still.’
She led him to her car, which was parked only fifty yards or so behind his, and opened both its front doors. He collapsed into the passenger’s seat, surprised at his own frailty. She swung into the driver’s seat like she was sailboarding, easily manoeuvring her long legs under the steering-wheel clamp.
‘You play sport?’ It would be best if she was
n’t too athletic.
‘I keep fit,’ she murmured, rummaging through the glove compartment. ‘I don’t drink … stay out of fights … ‘
‘Hey, I’m not drunk,’ he objected. ‘Smell my breath.’
She leaned close, took a sniff. Her own breath, or perhaps her skin, smelled of restaurant food: no particular dish, just stuff you don’t get at home or at the chip shop.
‘You’re right,’ she said, with new respect. ‘So why did they beat you up? Were you robbed?’
His first thought was to say yes, but then he thought she’d want to take him straight to the police. ‘I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he shrugged.
She’d found the pencil-torch and shone it into her lap to test the batteries. She told him to look up at the car’s ceiling. She pulled her door shut to kill the overhead light. Then with a deft motion she flicked the little torch beam at each of his pupils in turn.
‘No problems yet,’ she said. ‘But a bleed can happen fast. You should still go to hospital, get this done every fifteen minutes. I’m not joking.’
‘How ‘bout you take me home and I lie down?’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t fancy sitting in a Casualty ward half the fucken night waiting for a doctor to see me.’
She mistook him to mean that he wanted her to stay with him, at his place or hers, shining lights into his eyes until she was fully satisfied.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to go to a hospital, I can’t force you.’
‘No, no,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘I’ll go. It’s just … I’ve got my girlfriend waiting at home … ‘
She glanced skeptically at him, caught his eye, saw that it was true after all. After a flicker of misgiving, she made a decision.
‘I’ll drive you to the hospital I work at,’ she said. ‘You might get seen quicker there.’
She unlocked and unshackled the steering-wheel clamp and leaned down, her cheek pressed against the steering-wheel, as she shoved the clamp away under the seat. For an instant she closed her eyes with effort.