“Turn it off!”
He obeyed, rather touchingly.
“Come here.”
I was growing accustomed to the dark. The room was flooded with a blue glow from a light night sky, and I moved towards him to put my arm around his neck, the Thermos and cups clattering awkwardly at his side.
“Listen, Hamal, we have tonight. Go get the checkerboard and tell him you’ll be a while. Lock the door when you come back.” And I bit his ear lightly. Silly, but I realised then I’d never known the Troll’s name.
Hamal grinned and set down the Thermos. I’d wanted to tell him to bring his gun, but could think of nothing to make that sound plausibly like foreplay. I’d thought about how to get him on the bed and slipped my trousers off and slid under the single coarse cover.
I heard the lav flush, some words outside and the volume of the television rise slightly. Then he was in the door.
He paused again and I said, “Over here.”
He turned into the room, locking the door and palming the key, and a hunched shoulder revealed that he was carrying the weapon. There is a God.
“Come here,” I repeated.
He bought me ice cream, he bought me cake . . .
He stood by the bed, looking down at me, and I imagined his lip was high. I whispered further encouragement, swinging open the bedcover in invitation, but he didn’t move, just stood there. It occurred to me that I didn’t know Arabic form, what his father might have taught him to expect.
I swung out of bed and stood against him, ran my hand up his cheek and kissed him urgently. That lip, I noticed, was lowered, resting on his upper teeth, and I thought he wasn’t responding. But he dropped the gun against the wall and clutched my bare back with both hands, and we stood there for a moment, turning our heads like dancing birds to get fresh purchases on each other’s mouths.
“I want you now,” he murmured.
Perhaps he’d watched some Western porn. It was the last thing I heard him say.
I let out a short little breath of emulated hyperventilation, rested my forehead on his chest and started to rub his groin. Its hardening cargo took shape and I sat on the edge of the bed, unzipped him and he flopped out forward, like a salami from a carrier bag. He moaned and I left off for a mischievous “ssh”, my index finger across my lips. Perhaps that’s why he said no more. I resumed the salty work of preparation, but he pulled away and pushed me back on the bed, gripping my right leg behind the knee and pushing it aside.
“No, Hamal,” I hissed, “no, no, no,” but that only fired him up and he pushed into me and I gasped. This wasn’t going to last long and I had to move quickly. My head was pushed against the wall and I feigned an uncomfortable crick, crying out softly and arching my back, pushing my hips down and him out. Close to his head now, I nuzzled his ear and caught it roughly with my hand, making out that the throes of passion had made me lose all decorum. He moved to the side ever so slightly to extricate his ear, and I used the movement to swing his shoulders bedwards, down the wall, and laid his head on the pillow.
He brought me home with a bellyache . . .
Deargoddeargoddeargod . . .
I swung a hand in indication and he shifted his legs on to the bed and I straddled him. With one hand by his head on the pillow, I used the other to help him and he did the rest with a short upward thrust. I rocked my hips on him and guessed that he wanted the dignity of being serviced.
I needed him at his most vulnerable if I was to succeed and the moment I had only vaguely anticipated had arrived. He was offering himself up. The sacrificial lamb.
Mama Mama, I feel sick, call the doctor quick, quick, quick . . .
I delivered the usual verbal encouragements over his face and I felt an aggression well up in me.
“Show me, Hamal.” And he started to pump rapidly, as I pushed my fingers over his chest, running across the stubby pencil shapes in his top pocket, my quarry. I threw my head back and entreated him and, as the young do, he responded.
“Come on, Hamal,” I whispered and he quickened like a sewing-machine needle, his soft breaths growing staccato.
That meant I could place the palm of my left hand firmly across his mouth and I grimaced a further “ssh”. I could feel him expand in me and I pushed my hand forward as I cupped his mouth, as if lost to the moment, raising his chin and forcing his face away from his neck. He began to shimmer and shake and his thrusts became stabs. I reached into the gap beside the bed. The duct tape came away with a rasp and the wood block flipped up against my knee. I cupped the thick end in my palm, its fashioned point running down my wrist.
Doctor, doctor, will I die? Count to five and stay alive . . .
I wish I could say that I can watch myself in that act objectively now, rationalise it, tell myself I did what was necessary. But I still look through the same eyes and I see it. And I can feel the ungainly sex that set the stage for it. And I remember the crystal-clear concentration of making the cleanest cut, like a Halal butcher. Like the execution of a prince, there could only be one blow.
I raised the stake to shoulder height, in the fisted gesture of the revolutionary. I brought it down as one might the handle of a spade, just above the ball of his clavicle and below and to the right of his Adam’s apple.
The point of the thin blade entered his neck like a sheath and further and quicker than I could have imagined possible. His arms shot up my chest and grabbed at my face. He bucked as I rode him, pushing into him as he pushed into me.
So I leaned in hard with my left arm, swivelling the palm of my hand to push with all my body weight against his chin, I suppose in some frantic hope that his neck would break.
It meant too that I never saw his eyes. He convulsed under me, expelling an extended snort through flared and bloodied nostrils. His left arm suddenly flailed away to the right of the bed, hitting the wall with a thud that could have alerted the Troll.
In that twist, his neck moved aside and around on its axis as if pulling away from the impaling and that afforded a chance to yank on the butt end of the makeshift stock, pulling it to one side as if trying to free it. Something gave and a dark fountain splashed over my forearms, his second discharge.
Then he was still.
But still stiff, one arm straight out to the side, fingers cupped in supplication and his legs quivering as his manhood withered. I held him there for more than a moment, listening to the sounds of the room, a pounding silence, my ratcheting breaths, the gurgle in his throat accompanying the bubbling up of lifeblood, the stream a dark maroon in the moonlight, crude oil bubbling from a well.
I took my hand from the stock and it lay like a great goitre at the base of the neck. I dismounted and stood by the bed and tried to still my breathing to hear whether the door was being tested or banged on.
Nothing, so far as I could tell through a strange tinnitus that was crackling in my ears. I pulled a length of the candlewick bedspread from beneath his calf and wiped globules of thick blood from my arms, another to wipe the stickiness from my thigh.
One, two, three, four, five . . . I’m alive . . .
With a struggle, I began to focus forward again, on what must happen next, wiping each finger quickly, then with a fast and steady hand felt for his upper left pocket and tore back the felt fastening.
There was a lined second pocket and for a moment I could feel the shells through material but couldn’t reach them and, in an instant of frustration and revulsion, my upper legs filled with a soiling sensation of panic.
Steadying myself with a deep breath, I took my hand out and found the deeper rear pocket and felt the cool metal and removed the clip, dropping one of the bullets and having to wipe blood away again.
I took the gun from the wall and slumped cross-legged to the floor, the weapon across my lap. I found the loading flap and pushed a round through it.
The flap just swung lazily, no sprung resistance and the cartridge didn’t locate and just flopped out. Again, a nervous chorus in my thighs.
I forced concentration, lowering my forehead and breathing heavily. So I pulled back the cross-hatched thumb switch. There was a snap and I tried again. This time the chamber was alive with sprung resistance.
The first round clunked into place; the second harder to push, but then swallowed crisply into the maw. I laid it gingerly on the carpet, stood and glanced at the body of the Boy on the bed as if I feared it would move. I felt nothing at all. It was if it had nothing to do with me, as if I was observing the body from a distance. It was resolutely still and dark, but for the luminescence of the flaccid fish extending from the trouser zip.
Dragging myself back into the moment, I started to pull my trousers back on, hesitated, pulled them off again and grabbed one of the linen cloths on the bucket, wiping as much blood as I could from my legs.
Think, girl!
Then I pulled on the white Arab day-wear, standing away from the widening pool of blood and wiping my feet harshly on the rope carpet and a linen towel. The under-trousers and smock first, then the shawl at the shoulders.
Picked up the gun again, held it in both hands firmly, pulled back on the handle. Couldn’t remember if it was live with button forward or back.
Think, girl.
Forward, I think. Picked up the checkerboard with the other hand and stepped to the door. My legs felt loose and detached. I stood there, listening to the TV, trying to discern where he was sitting.
I rattled the pieces in the closed checkerboard and called something brightly, forcing what was meant to sound like a chuckle but came out as a light cry from my dry throat.
I turned the key, wincing as the door disengaged with a clunk. My right arm pinned the gun to the wall by the door jamb and I opened it, trying to delay shakes.
The Troll was sitting behind the table to the right, a wrap in his hand, some cans in front of him. Also, a pistol. I couldn’t see the other automatic weapon.
“How do I look?” I said, trying to be bright, but it came out as a tremulous quaver, like I was crying.
The Troll had his mouth open for a bite of wrap and looked dead-faced at me, trying to process the information before him.
I took one step into the room. No one else there – I couldn’t have been sure – and let my right arm with the weapon swing through to join me, still smiling a rictus grimace to maintain perhaps a second’s continued confusion in the Troll’s slow mind.
What must have been the familiar slap of its leather sling on the metal drew his eyes down to the gun and he started to rise.
I took two or three steps towards him – it’s as vivid as if I was making a witness statement – holding the weapon in front of me like a child offering it to him and curling my finger into the trigger guard.
There was a thud that seemed to reorder the air in the room and a piece of the Troll’s upper left breast to the shoulder flew away and a lump of plaster fell from the wall by the door.
As I looked through the mist, the Troll had disappeared backwards over his chair, but was rising to his feet again. I pointed it over the table and pulled the trigger again.
Nothing. I pulled at the cocking lever and the second live round ejected from the side.
The Troll was up, wide-eyed, slack-jawed and taking a step towards the table with an atavistic groan, the chair tangled between his fat legs.
I threw the rifle at him and grabbed for the pistol, fumbling it round at him in hands slippery from blood and sweat.
I hadn’t time to wonder if it was loaded. I just didn’t want him getting to it first if it was. But his expression confirmed that it was. He stopped on his front foot, shook his jowls and opened his mouth to cry out, pieces of wrap spilling out.
Holding it with both hands across the table, I pulled and turned my head away, as if pulling a cracker. A much louder bark this time that bounced off the walls and back into my head, kicking my arms up and throwing me back on my heels. When my forearms fell down in front of me, clearing my vision, the Troll wasn’t there any more, just a stippled pattern of crimson across the door and half the window beside it.
I moved crab-like, making whinnying sounds, round the table and his bulk lay motionless on its back. I threw the gun aside – stupid – and moved to the head of this island of flesh.
The eyes stared sightlessly in the way I’d seen in feeding stations and one side of his checked summer shirt was turning deep and dark and wet.
The neck sash suspending the door key hung into the dry armpit. I grabbed it, clearing the sash from the back of his head with a jerk.
The two bolts on the door came back easily enough, but the key in the mortice only seemed to turn one way and to no effect, the door remaining resolutely barred, until I paused, took a grip, took a step back from delirium and realised I was double-locking, so moved it to the middle and tried the handle.
The door moved back towards me and all I wanted in the world was to be the other side of it. Whatever was on the other side, whatever greeted me, hell or eternity, I’d shot my bolt, it was finished – so whatever I met, more guards, a hail of bullets, rabid dogs in searchlights, whatever, it was OK, if only I could be out.
A rush of cool air and I was at the top of a flight of stairs that doubled back on itself into a front yard. Of course, the stairs; I saw them as if from a dream.
An indoor light turned on in a window to my right, perhaps in response to the sound of gunfire, perhaps the door was alarmed, perhaps not.
I started down the stairs and into the yard. No lights on the ground floor, but I expected, kind of knew, that I’d be grabbed at any moment by unseen hands.
There was a baby crying somewhere, I remember.
A front gate, metal vertical bars. A combination spring-lock and a high, neatly painted corrugated fence on either side, framed with brick.
Back down the side of the house. High waste bins, maybe two metres high. Up on to the rim of the first one and I could see over the side fencing.
Some kind of vehicle port. I dropped over the fence into the forecourt, past some parked cars, and stepped over a low wall and into a tidy street, newly built, with security gates shielding the maisonettes similar to the one I’d just emerged from, with parking areas next to them.
Streetlamps and two figures walking my way on the pavement. But not running.
I couldn’t be found here.
I crossed the road and walked briskly away from them. I heard music from one house, saw a family eating in another.
Maybe five gates down, the unbroken line of housing gave way to an alley between the buildings. I took it, as this would be the direction my room’s window had faced and the sound of distant traffic. I also knew from the direction of the sun on that window that it faced west.
I had no particular desire for west, I suppose, but west would eventually mean sea and ports, east meant mountains and trouble.
The alley opened behind the houses on to a small, railed viewing bay, the backyards of the houses on either side. I’d been kept in a room that faced out to open country. Of course.
Away below, I could pick out the lights of vehicles on the road, but not many. I swung over the rail and on to the ground and picked my way carefully into the dark, aware that a torch would have easily picked me out in my white clothing. An easy shot.
The ground started to fall away fast, shale, or a slate outcrop. I started to glissade down, like a cartoon cat on marbles, then sitting to take the tide of the small stone avalanche I’d started.
Occasionally there was a large rock that I had to pick around. The ground levelled, a small brook, some barbed-wire fencing. The road was close now and I began to follow its line, staying in the dark on mushy and mossy grass; south, I reckoned.
But the soggy ground and the rocks slowed progress, and I had to make for the roadside, lying flat down its bankside when headlights appeared. It was an open, hedgeless highway and I could spot the lights of vehicles when they were still far off, long before they illuminated me.
Maybe a couple
of kilometres of this and the road rose on an escarpment, some larger rocks lower down to my side. I glided down and between them and rested my head, while lorries thundered by above.
It was only then that I started to shake, my whole body trembling, great swings of my forearms with no autonomic nervous control, as if in the trauma of a hospital admission after a road crash.
I gibbered in the cold, salivating down my chin, muttering like a drunk, speaking in tongues of men and angels. I knew I was in some kind of withdrawal, a detox from the intensity of a short window of absolute trauma, maybe no more than half an hour, in which I had changed the world. So I squatted there, dribbling and shaking, unable to address the enormity of what was happening. The rocks offered a kind of sanctuary; the headlights were like passing comets in the sky and from time to time a trance-like sleep wrapped me.
14
First light revealed mists on the meadows under the crags, between which I’d fallen from the scene of my crime. I could see from my rock sanctuary that the length of the road I’d walked formed a gradually falling left sweep around the little mountain I’d descended and it grew craggier as the road fell away – I’d been lucky to come down where I had.
I forced myself to concentrate, to put mental distance between the house way up beyond the crags and my rock of ages. I calculated I had about three or four hours of daylight, from dawn to around nine, before the shift changed at the house and the bodies were found, assuming that the gunshots hadn’t been investigated.
So I needed transport early, before anyone came looking for me. I heard dogs barking as soon as I could see across the sheep meadows and I imagined my trail being followed and shivered the great jaw-rattling shake of the dangerously exposed.
There was something else: I wasn’t just fully awake as soon as the sky turned mellow, but I felt real again, not the imagined creature of the night hours. I had woken from my dream.
One, two, three, four, five. . . Think, girl, get a grip.
A Dark Nativity Page 20