by Guy Ware
At a junction, where the lights are red, I overtake the police/fake police car again, plus two or three other cars and a small van. I can turn left or right. Right will take me south, back the way I came, back towards home, towards Gina’s home, towards Rodkin’s home. I cross the junction just before the lights turn green, something I never usually do, and pedal rapidly. After a couple of hundred yards the small van passes me, and then the police car. The shorter, bearded man, the passenger, has wound down his window and has his elbow resting on the door, his fingers tapping the roof. It does not look as though he is watching me. As the traffic backs up for the next junction I pull into the middle of the road and pass the police car again. I jump the lights, carry straight on and, soon enough, the police car passes me again. At the next lights, I guess a left and then straight across a roundabout and I’m right both times and when the traffic thins and the traffic lights get more spread out I lose the police car but I know it doesn’t matter, I know where they’re going and I go there too.
16
I AM STILL SITTING at the table when Kurt returns. As I had imagined, he brings lunch, including cheese, of a sort. From the quality of the light and of my hunger, however, it must be much later than lunchtime. He places a tray – the same tray as at breakfast – on the table before me, takes a step back and says, Well?
I don’t know what to say to this, and say nothing. He says, Have you decided yet, Mr Lopez?
I’m not Lopez.
So you say.
It is clear we have an impasse. Kurt has crossed his arms again. They rest on his substantial belly. I say, How do you know Lopez?
How do you?
It is a fair question. I say, I know of him. We’ve never met.
Is that right?
I say that it is.
I have given something. Surely he must now reciprocate? Isn’t that the way these things work? He lifts one meaty hand to his face and rubs his jaw, which looks abrasive. He has not shaved for a day or two.
He says, And you’ve never met Likker, either?
He says it in a way that shows he knows what I am going to say, and I needn’t think he’s going to believe it. It isn’t true, but I say it anyway: I’ve never even heard of Likker. Kurt snorts. He genuinely snorts. He leaves and I examine the food he has brought. The bread is white – the unnatural white of the teeth of young people in rich countries. I know that when I put it in my mouth it will offer no resistance, but will dissolve into a sticky gum against my teeth. Gary has explained to me why this is, and why it is so bad for me. The cheese is yellow and evidently sliced – or possibly extruded – by a machine. It has the glossy surface of expensive cars, but is not, I know expensive. I sniff it but both the cheese and the bread are odourless. They remind me nonetheless of lost times: the bread of sitting in my mother’s car while she was elsewhere, in conversation with a neighbour, perhaps, and digging a tunnel through a whole loaf; the cheese of burgers eaten at three in the morning in the careless invincibility of drunken youth. I have finished the sandwich before I remember that I was going to give some cheese to my rodent companion. I’m sorry, I say towards the gap in the skirting. Next time, I promise. A few minutes later Kurt returns. He takes the tray away, but says nothing. Kurt? I say, as he leaves, but he does not even pause. I hear the kitchen door click to and the sound of the lock turning. He still has my cigarette lighter, if it was he who took it. I need a cigarette.
Later I take a walk as far as the kitchen. Exercise is good. It can release endorphins and lighten the mood. I am told it can reduce the craving for nicotine, although it does not seem to do so now. From the kitchen I can see the garden out of the window. The little blue weed flowers have opened again. There are two or three flies on the glass, on the outside. I tap on the window and they disappear, but soon return. I open each of the drawers and cupboards. There is nothing there that wasn’t there yesterday, which was nothing. The knives are still stuck to the magnetic strip on the wall. Every thirty-six seconds somebody, somewhere, kills himself. Or herself. More probably a he. Four times as many men kill themselves as women, at least in countries where we have data. Of course, for every suicide who dies, nine or ten survive, and, amongst those who try, twice as many are women as men. Which tells us what? That women aren’t really trying? Or just don’t own as many guns? Men shoot themselves. Or drive their cars into oncoming traffic. They don’t care. Women prefer poison, which is slow and inefficient and has a high failure and/or intervention rate built in, but is more considerate of those who will discover the corpse, or at any rate it is less messy. And a knife? A knife is somewhere in the middle. Most people who slit their wrists don’t die. (I know, they all die, but not of that). Taking a breadknife to one’s own throat is different again. It is very hard; few people are capable of even trying it. But if you can hang on past the initial pain and shock and terror, and you’re not troubled by the mess you’re making and the likely trauma for whomever it is you think is going to find your bloodied corpse, then it is going to work. No interfering doctor will sew your carotid artery back together unless they happen to be there in the room with you at the time, which seems unlikely, and even then the serrated edge and the inevitably jerky, tugging, hacking motions you would need to get through your own throat would make the severed edges too irregular, too fibrous and rough-hewn for reconstructive surgery to stand much chance of success. It is the choice of someone who really, really wants to die.
Gary told me D found his father – Rada’s father; their father – in the woods a mile or so behind their house. We were in the kitchen and Rada had just left for work; D was leaving. I had been talking about how common suicide was. Is. Gary was angry with me. I could tell by the way the muscles tightened in his face and he breathed a little deeper before he spoke. Gary does not believe in shouting. His words became more precise. He said Rada’s father had taken thirty painkillers and slit his wrists. He said it as if he were reading a utility bill. There was blood on the leaves and grass all around him. I said, Why? Not meaning why was there blood on the leaves, but why did he do it? I knew so much less about the subject then. Also, you may recall, I was angry myself. I suppose that what I really meant was: Why hadn’t Rada told me this herself? Why had she told you? Gary ignored me. He said, There was an empty vodka bottle, a penknife and a smear of cold vomit. I asked how he knew it was cold. Gary sucked air through his teeth. He said D told Rada; Rada had told him. D was seven; Rada was fourteen. There were no pills in the vomit, Gary said. So D said he must have thrown up before he took them. Before he killed himself; which means he would have been drunk when he did it.
I said, You think he never meant to die?
Gary mistook my sarcasm for stupidity. He said that’s what D thought; Rada, too.
He turned away. He began carrying plates from the table to the sink. To Gary, the idea of wanting to die made no sense at all. There were always more people to help, things to make better. More books to read. But I sensed there might be more to it than that. At work, I checked the file. The autopsy report said there were no pills in the vomit because he had taken them a couple of hours earlier and they had been digested. He had set out to kill himself before he began drinking that day. The slit wrists may have been a gesture, an insurance policy, or a fuck-you to the world. As a method of suicide it is rare amongst middle-aged men, mainly because it so rarely works. Rada’s father knew what he was doing.
It occurs to me that I could use one of the heavier knives to break a window. Why would I do that? The bars would still be there. But I would have shards of broken glass I could hold to Kurt’s throat the next time he brings me a meal. I could wait behind the door and jump him as he carries the tray. Soup, or sausages, or whatever he has prepared for my supper will go flying all over the room, adding to the stains. He will struggle but I will have the strength of a man possessed. I will cling on to his back while he bucks and thrashes like an unbroken horse, all the while pressing
the jagged glass harder against his throat until, eventually, I am forced to draw blood and he calms down, panting. I will smell his sweat and fear as I whisper in his ear that I am going to leave and nothing he can do will stop me.
I shake my head. It will not happen like that. I look again at the knife rack: it is not a lack of weaponry that has held me back. Still. If I broke a window in the front, in the semi-basement bay, I could shout for help.
I have to consider this. I walk back to the bedroom and sit on the chair in the middle of the room. I notice that I have not brought a knife with me. I could shout: Help! I am being held captive! This is something I have always wanted to do. Not always, perhaps, but intermittently: you too, no doubt. It would be like saying Follow that cab! to a taxi driver, and meaning it. Such opportunities do not present themselves every day. In life, I find, the secret is to plan nothing, to want nothing, but just to see what happens. What is offered. Such a life requires strength and stealth and is harder than it looks. If I shout, who will hear me? Passers-by? Most likely, they will pass by; it’s what they do. If not worse. The Good Samaritan was not the first on the scene. The odds are not good. It is more likely that Kurt will hear. Or that the woman will hear. I don’t know her. I may be wrong. But I think she does not go far, if she leaves her flat at all. I have heard noises, from above. When I saw her yesterday – it was yesterday, I am sure, twenty-four hours ago – she had the dilated eyes and helpless, flayed appearance of a subterranean creature suddenly exposed to light. Kurt struck me as a man of more action, a man with things to do. He will not be upstairs all the time. He will not be there now, for instance, in the middle of the afternoon, if it is afternoon. He will have other fish to fry.
So, the woman, then.
If I smash the window and shout for help she will most likely hear me: what will she do? She will not call the police. That much is obvious. Will she come down to the semi-submerged bay and whisper to me through the broken glass? Will she return upstairs and take the key from the hook by the door in her kitchen where Kurt has left it, and slip it to me, or open the door herself and let me flee, after just an awkward, bony hug of gratitude and a single, hasty kiss, while she says I must not worry about her, she can look after herself? Run, Alex, run. I don’t think she has it in her. I am not sure I have it in me. I think, in fact, she would wait until Kurt returns from the things he has to do, from the deals he has to cut and the people he has to meet, and she will tell him. She will complain about the noise, and about having to cook an extra meal. Because it strikes me now that Kurt is not a man to make even a sandwich when there is a woman around. When this is all over perhaps I should introduce him to Gary? That might be an education for them both.
When this is all over? I am not sure what I mean by that.
Enough. I have to consider what Kurt will do if the woman – I decide I will call her Beatrice; I don’t imagine for a moment that it is her name, but I can’t keep calling her just “the woman”. I have to consider what Kurt might do if I shout for help and Beatrice hears, and tells him. Will he be angry? Would he take measures to enforce my future silence? Would he wonder how I could do this to him after he has treated me with nothing but courtesy? Might he become tearful and enraged, his judgment clouded by the bitterness of betrayal and might he take the knife that I have used to break the window and plunge it here, into my chest, between the fourth and the fifth rib just to the left of my sternum (to the right as he looks at it)? And as he feels the leathery, elastic resistance of my heart, the muscular repulsion before the tip of the knife pierces the left atrium and my blood begins to gout and spew in earnest, much as Rodkin’s must have done when he – Rodkin? Kurt? Likker? – hauled the breadknife across the artery in his throat, would he scream? Or cry with remorse? Strange as it may seem to you, I have not, before now, considered the possibility that Rodkin did not kill himself.
Rodkin is a suicide. Surely? There has to be some point of certainty from which we start. Rodkin killed himself, albeit in a statistically unusual manner. I am not here to question that. I am here to consider and assess the value of his life given the fact of his suicide, from a presumption of damnation. And what do the facts tell me? That Rodkin shared house space with a man who would not think twice about locking me in a basement flat. I realise it is possible, on the contrary, that he thought long and hard about it, but I do not think it likely. For one thing, he would not have known about my arrival before it happened. The quick do not know that we do what we do. That would rather spoil the point, not to mention opening the doors for all kinds of fraudulent malpractice. Imagine it, if you will. You are half way – you hope: the fraction could be greater – through a no more than averagely sinful life. There are things that weigh heavily on your heart – the spouse you deceived, the children whose ambitions you stifled, the parents you disappointed – but you believe, in spite of the evidence, that you are a good person, that you do not deserve to suffer. In this frame of mind you meet, let us say in a pub, or a coffee shop, a man like me – a man younger than you, of working age, and working. You exchange some pleasantry about the drink you have ordered, or about the sporting event being broadcast silently on the giant screen to your left, about which you know nothing at all. You fall into conversation and, in the way of these things, you ask me what it is that I do for a living. I say I am a loss adjuster. And when you ask what that might be, I tell you. Imagine it. You now know that I, or one of my colleagues – Rada, perhaps, or D – a person who does not know you, and, up to this point at least, has had no interest in you whatsoever, will, the moment you die, assess the value of your life. That I, or someone like me, will make a recommendation that, while not binding, will in all likelihood determine the future of your eternal soul, even if you don’t believe you have one. Imagine it. That moment would be strange, would it not? Unusual. An opportunity would have arisen. I think, in your shoes, I might be tempted to buy me a drink, and subtly to sound out what my predilections might be. I – that is, you – might be tempted to tempt me, to hint at gratifications that could flow from a commitment to a report that burnishes the better parts of my life until the glow outshines the neglected spouse, the resentful, stunted children and the bitterness of the long-dead parents. Don’t you? You would seek to influence me, to bribe me, to corrupt me if you thought you could get away with it. You would. You know you would. A cursory glance at the history of our species will tell you what I say is true. Which is precisely why you’ve never heard of us, never met us, and why the name we use is false. It would not be fair, on either party, if it were otherwise. That is why there is no sign on our office door, why our business cards give a false name, why you do not know who we are, or even that we are. But Kurt thought I was Lopez and Lopez is one of us, and Kurt should never have heard of him, much less have been expecting him to call at the scene of Rodkin’s suicide. Thinking I was Lopez he locked me in here and left me with a rack of knives, one of which I might use to smash the window and call for help although, if I do, the chances are that it will be Kurt himself who comes and, given that he has locked me here it seems unlikely that he would now help me to escape. I will not break the window.
There, that is decided.
I feel a sense of great relief. I feel as if, rather than simply locking the door and bringing me food, Kurt had strapped me to a press, to the sort of apparatus inquisitors use to extract confessions by placing heavy weights upon a board, and the board upon a person, and waiting idly by while the weight presses down upon the person’s lungs whenever he or she exhales and, as the muscles weaken, prevents him or her from inhaling until, eventually the suspect suffocates, I feel as if I had been in such a situation and Kurt had, for some reason of his own, relented and lifted the weight before it squeezed the last breath out of me and I have been given another chance to live. I have decided not to try to escape by any action of my own and I feel relieved, grateful even – to Kurt. I will not use a knife to break the window and I will not use a knife
to kill him or seek to overpower him or intimidate him into setting me free. I will wait and see what happens. I may try to find out what he knows about Lopez, or I may not.
There is of course another use to which I could put the knives. I could take one of them from the rack and press its point into my own flesh, at the wrist, or the heart or even, like Rodkin, at the throat, my throat, and slash and saw and hack through the pain and fear. I could escape that way.
I stand and walk into the kitchen. Outside the sun is low and the garden is in shade. I choose a knife, a cook’s knife with a dimpled metal handle and a faint pattern on the blade like watered silk. I pull up my shirtsleeve and press the flat of the blade to my wrist. My flesh bulges slightly around it. I feel the pressure rise. If I rotate the blade by ninety degrees and pull the edge back towards my body the skin will split and curl slowly back like the crust on a baguette. The blood will seep and well and spoil the beauty of the moment; if I continue, it will gout and spurt and after that I will not see what happens. Possibly. As I say, slashing one’s wrists is unreliable. I stand by the window in the kitchen, the knife lying more lightly now upon my arm, for a long time. To the west, to my right, in the tiny corner of the world that I can see, the city will rise up to blot out the sun. It is more probable that I will be bleeding, but alive, when Kurt brings whatever supper it is he intends to bring; I may be slumped to the floor, perhaps, but not dead and not beyond saving. The flowers in the garden will close their blue eyes. The sun will organise ranks of orange, then red, then purple clouds to defend itself, but it will do no good: the city will not be denied. Darkness is its natural state. I relax. I do not need to return to the bedroom, to look at the paper pinned to the cork tiles by the door to recall the words of Isaiah: I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. There will be no escape. There will be another sun tomorrow and I will watch it rise. Because even though I tell myself I don’t, that it doesn’t matter, that one day I won’t know and that day might as well be this day as any other, I want to know what happens. Despite myself, I want to see how this turns out.