‘I don’t want peace.’
‘Stimulation, then. It’s the same.’
I had no reply to this. So I leaned sideways into my window and gazed out at the amorphous landscapes around us – until I realised where we were.
‘Can you take the second left?’ I asked. ‘That road – that one.’
She turned the car towards the road I was pointing at.
‘I don’t really believe you, by the way,’ she said. ‘I think you’ve already allowed yourself vulnerability. I think Francis means more to you than you want to admit.’
I smiled till my lips touched the glass. ‘Sometimes the person you’re manipulating gives in so easily that you begin to feel affection for them. That’s all he was to me.’
‘You mean “I don’t love you but you make me cum”?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you are in love with him. I think all this shit about having no psychological equal is just a defence because he hurt you. You were wounded by his rejection yesterday. Which means you were beaten. What you’ve been claiming you long for – has already happened. I don’t think you care about finding a double. You’ve found Francis. And you’re vulnerable to him. That’s stimulating. And you’re trying to convince me – and really more trying to convince yourself – that you’re the lonely villain and he means nothing. But this whole process, everything you’ve said out of denial, is a symptom of your failure – he means something. And you were beaten by him. Accept it.’
I laughed. ‘Fine, I’m just trying to fend off Francis. I’m vulnerable to him. I accept it. He beat me.’ I pointed to a parking space ahead. ‘Can you stop here? You’re actually right. Nothing I’ve said convinces me either.’
She parked the car in silence, annoyed by the readiness of my admission.
‘But… we can fix that,’ she said eventually. ‘He’s waiting for you. So why are we here?’
‘I need to finish something. But you have to stay in the car.’
‘No, I’m coming with you.’
‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘They’ll only allow me in. You can do whatever you want with me afterwards.’
‘How long will you take?’
‘I dunno. Not that long. How long is an ending?’
I kissed her – and remembered our kiss in the kitchen, days ago, in the gallery, when there had still been a mayhem of futures before me. Again I saw a pond under mist – and lotus leaves, leaving, burning stacks of myrrh – but there was no more mayhem now, my future was simple.
I climbed out of the car in a drunken blood-rush, clutching the keys through the plastic bag. A street lamp walked into me. I felt oddly destabilised by Iris’s perceptiveness. Not only had she persuaded me that I’d been beaten by Francis, but really, she’d beaten me herself. I shook my head. Perhaps she could have been my double – but it was too late for that now. I ran on towards the back entrance of the Rockway – ignoring my body, ignoring my affections – rousing my mind towards climax.
5.
My senses attuned to the dusk. Slowing my breathing, I sprinted past stacks of wet crates towards the Rockway’s back door. It took three tries of Kimber’s keys before it was unlocked. My skin felt like scum on a dead lake – but I loved the intoxication still – not just because it disguised me from myself, and not just because it took my thoughts down strange detours – but because I loved the feeling of being poisoned. Anything that betrays my body is my friend.
The emergency exit swung outwards and I stepped in. The kitchen hummed in a gloom illumined bluely by six strips of a fly-killing light. I would be an assassin too.
I ran past Kimber’s cupboard of masks, past clean shelves and clean countertops – towards the interior door. Beyond it, I could hear the hubbub of waiting men. Their anxiety seemed to stretch beyond their social world, and out across the years behind them – until the sound of their speech seemed to me the sound of an entire millennium chastising itself. After two tests, I found the key that fitted this second door – and so locked myself into privacy, to cook undisturbed. This kitchen would always be mine.
The faces of Francis and Dawn floated towards me, with compassionate eyes – but I blinked them away. I would have no memories. I would have no music. Or, I would have only the music of fancy. My nerves could not risk kindness.
The steel surfaces implied themselves in the twilight. I paced around them, considering my ending. The fridges were empty and the larder’s stock was low, but I did not need food. I needed fuel – so, first, I approached the propane canisters.
This scene could serve too as the climax of a coming-of-age arc, I supposed, since I was building a bomb out of the space my father owned and my mother had died in – although they were my parents only through the surrogacy of metaphor. I could also, then, call this a tomb, couldn’t I? And as I carried the four canisters to the fan oven, I thought – hey, why not, let’s call this a womb as well. A womb-tomb-bomb. I removed the oven’s middle shelf and set its target heat to 240° Celsius.
I had, I supposed, fucked my father and killed my mother – and also, less interestingly, killed my father and fucked my mother. So what was there left for me to do, except become myself? Well, kill my brother too, of course – although perhaps Francis had been sufficiently transformed already. I untwisted the canisters’ bleeder valves until their gas hissed softly out – and placed three of them on top of the oven – and one inside.
My body was unbalanced, long since past the last of its strength. I dialled all five of the hob’s gas rings to maximum, lighting five automatic fires. But I did not want fire yet, so with the fire-blanket on the wall, I smothered their flames – until just the gas hissed out, unlit, to interfuse with the canisters’ propane in the air – together waiting for a future spark. The oven felt like another body, a healthy body – a body I could climb on at night, threateningly, pressing and restricting, whispering ‘Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up,’ too quietly for the parents sleeping down the hall to hear – until a voice dissociated from the body, whispering ‘Please, please, please,’ and I felt strong. I poured three bottles of oil into the chip fryer beside the hob, and switched it on.
I stepped back to admire my work. Soon, the chip oil would be hot enough to combust and so ignite the cloud of gases above it. The canisters’ security valves would become fuses – and under the encouragement of heat, flame, and pressure, they would rupture. And their rupture would be a rapture. A fire would have been too slow – if I was to destroy my inheritance properly, then I required an explosion to claim whoever was gathered in the room on the other side of the wall. I doubted my text to Kimber’s dozen contacts had summoned them all, but a few would be sufficient for an ending. And perhaps among them were my canal-side attackers – or the men they answered to.
I gazed around. There are no seasons in kitchens like this, I thought – here, men unyoke themselves from nature. This unyoking is only temporary, of course – the ice will melt and waves will cover London – and like every civilisation across the universe, we will make ourselves extinct before we find other life.
The scent of sunflower oil coiled around me, merging with the gases in my throat. The three formed a helmet of air, lowering over me, weighing my shoulders down. I sat. Soon too I crossed my legs and leant back my head. The vapours were leaking out faster than I’d anticipated. Or perhaps I’d hoped they would be this fast. I’d been a liar too long to know whether I was lying to myself or not anymore.
‘Yes,’ the gas whispered. ‘You wished for this so your tricked yourself into staying here, here, yes, and yes this fire is for you.’
As I inhaled, the room softened. My eyes were drugged shut. The oil thickened into the smell of bubbling pig lard – and behind it was a history of other foods: the acorns of the oaks that the pig had been fattened on, the figs and groundnuts, the potatoes and sweet potatoes, the cabbages, the carrot peelings, the stale bread and stale butter, the turnips, the celeriac, the apples. The pig had been fattened until the moon was in the right q
uarter, in late October, four hundred years ago to the day. I was there.
At sunrise, we rose for his slaughter. The pig had been kept in a sty. I held him between my thighs. With a knife as long as my forearm, I slit his throat. The spurts of the carotid artery were caught in an iron pail and the blood was stirred before it cooled so that it would not coagulate. It was then thickened with breadcrumbs, chopped pork, pork fat, garlic, and cloves. Next – according to this fantasia my mind was tracing as it drifted further from the kitchen – this mixture was stuffed into the pig’s washed intestines and boiled. Some of it would accompany beer; some would be poached in vegetable soup; some would be served with lentils, at New Year, for prosperity.
After the blood was drained, the pig was cooked in straw until his skin was hard and turned ivory with scrubbing. The joints and sides were carried to the loft to be smoked. Some cuts, I smelt, were salted into ham, others spiced into sausage. A few were stirred in with millet seed. The kidneys and liver were fried in sherry. But shouldn’t that be madeira?
My body was fading into the gas – enhancing my dream-body’s senses, so that soon inside my dream I began to see as well as smell. I ran out from the pig loft into fields. I was among sweating teenagers, centuries ago, gathered at the end of a day drilling winter wheat. They were tired, muscular, tanned – and happy, because they were together. And together, they walked back home between fields of rapeseed flowers. I and another boy parted from this pack, for a different track, across a river to the woods. There, we shared our first kiss. He was taller than me, and stronger, and better fed – and his lips tasted of red leaves.
‘Kun-unun Nuogah!’ a pheasant cried as we climbed the slope. ‘Koo-unun Nuogu!’
In the woods, the boy found a pheasant feather – and poked it into my hair. We sat under a chestnut tree. As the gas thickened in the kitchen, the sky above my dream-body changed – from blue to lovat. The tops of the dream-trees were tweed – the air was shutting down. The peasant boy hugged me, with the same tightness as Francis did, nearly bruising me.
Among the tree roots there were conkers. The boy picked up two and handed me one. The sky vanished. I leaned towards his mouth as if to kiss him, but then tacked away. His words were encrypting into the call of the pheasant, and the tree-trunks were disappearing, so that soon only the underbrush of fern and bramble would remain. As the dream-world dimmed, the scent of its soil brightened into a taste.
We had no strings to play the game, but we pretended. Holding the conkers between thumb and forefinger, we swung them at each other until they kissed. We both declared ourselves the loser; I insisted that his larger conker, if it had been on a string, would have shattered mine – and he insisted the same. But I threw my conker over his shoulder first, so forced him into victory. To confirm my defeat, he tapped his conker on the middle of my forehead.
The ferns left. We were alone on a circle of dirt. The conker in his hand shrivelled into a chestnut.
‘Eat it, brother, eat it,’ he whispered – and lifted it to my lips.
But as I ate it, I closed my dream-body’s eyes – and lost the boy, and lost the woods. The call of the pheasant became the slur of a helicopter. Then, a lightning bolt returned me to the edge of the rapeseed fields. The workers had been replaced by tractors.
The bolt repeated into a flame and I was released more fully from the dream – into my body’s present tense. I saw the kitchen, wavering in the gases’ susurrating haze, but there was no flame. The sole illumination was still the blue of the fly-killing light. The oil had not yet heated itself alight.
The bolt repeated once more, and I realised I’d confused vision with sound – the bolt was a knock – someone knocking on the back door.
A fourth knock shocked me into movement. I crawled away from the oven. My breathing was shallow and my thoughts were in scraps – but I knew that I was changing my mind.
My movements became faster the further I crawled from the envelope of gas. Its poison clotted my limbs into mindlessness, but something of myself persevered – outside of words – obeying a different plot. I stopped in front of Kimber’s cupboard. The air around me looked like black whipped cream.
I took the riot cop uniform out of the cupboard and dressed in it. The heavy suit and flack jacket – both labelled ‘POLICE’ – fitted loosely over my clothes. I put on the balaclava, put on the helmet, put on the gloves, and took up the truncheon. I was suffocating into something cruder than a man – but inside this armour, I was re-energised.
And so I swam towards the back door – my sight limited by the misting visor – and before I could push it open, there was another knock. I fell out into Iris.
‘No,’ I slammed the door behind me. ‘Get back in the car.’
The air snapped in half, the street’s surfaces shrank.
‘Why are you wearing that?’ she asked. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing yet,’ I said.
The gases’ hiss was still in my blood – and the balaclava impeded my breathing – but I began to run. I ran through memories of tastes and touches: the stamp of cobalt trainers on my head, the canal’s weary coolness, the jab of Kimber’s gun into my wound, the wetness of the sink in Kimber’s kitchen, the sangria-scent of my vomit this morning and the furriness of it in my throat as I threw it up. Francis hovered beside me as a perfume, of wheatgrass and coconut – and stupidly I smiled at it. I was running over a quilt of black and yellow squares, as though the pavement had closed its own eyes and was kneading them with its knuckles – externalising the interior landscape of a pressured optic nerve. The streetlamps glided by in bubbles.
As I rounded the corner, I split into four Leanders, in relay with myself, with the truncheon as our baton. We were racing each other towards the Rockway’s front entrance, exchanging the baton at every step – finally as lithe and agile and nubile as I’d always longed to be, passing through myself towards myself beyond myself. There was nobody outside the bar except the steroidal doorman I’d confronted twice already. But I was no longer a lad – to him, now, I was a policeman.
So he backed inside, shutting the door before the four of me could reach him. I pulled off my glove with my teeth – barging into the other versions of myself – and retrieved the Rockway keys from the bag. With them, I double-locked the door from the outside – and so condemned all inside to the coming fire.
Iris’s car drove up beside me – and the four Leanders simplified again into one. I climbed alone into the passenger side.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Just drive,’ I said.
She drove. I removed the other glove and the helmet and the balaclava. With my freed hands, I ripped open the string-bag of satsumas.
‘Wait – can you just stop at the top of the hill?’ I asked, unpeeling the ripest fruit.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Just please?’
She stopped the car. We were floating above South London like a pirate radio signal – crackling and spectral and degraded – a song for lonely bedrooms. I bit slowly into my first segment of satsuma, watching the Rockway in the wing-mirror. And before I had swallowed it – the kitchen exploded.
A belly of flame howled upwards towards us – and my signature was written across the sky.
‘Fuck!’ Iris shouted, and jerked the car forwards.
The fire kicked like a child forcing itself out of its mother – the brick façade imploded and scattered back upwards, borne by eager crimson cords. Smoke rose around it. The blaze’s edges matched exactly the orange of my satsuma, though where the flame met smoke there were glimmers of viridian – like the neck of a pheasant whose plumage was the fire.
And as the Rockway shrunk in the mirror, the fire swelled – a roof collapsed, delighting the air with its dust – and I ate my satsuma, piece by piece, imagining the fists shrieking against the bar’s locked doors. With each hit, I felt the keys in my pocket become vaguer, their teeth eroding into nubs that could unlock nothing now – un
til at last, I heard doors that had been locked all across my childhood burst open and open and open – as hundreds of younger Leanders walked out into sunlight.
To my intoxicated gaze, the building burning behind me seemed an image of my own body – so the ruined plasma of my blood was now copied by this ruin of lit stone, goaded by flames towards that other kind of plasma – the most universal state of matter, to which we all return.
The car came to a corner – and the fire left the mirror. I finished my satsuma. Nothing solid behind me remained.
6.
Iris yelled as I drifted along the borders of consciousness. The propane I’d inhaled mingled with the memory of paint thinner and heroin in my lungs. I let her yell until she exhausted herself. As we entered Francis’ borough, she quietened, and I slipped lower into sleep.
She prodded my wound to wake me. We were parked by Francis’ house, a few paces from where I’d crashed the police car. Its wreck had been towed away, but fragments of a shattered headlight glittered on the pavement still. Serenely I stepped into the evening – and was greeted by a weather equally serene. The storms of the week were spent, and now there hung instead a gibbous moon – alone, since London’s light pollution had cancelled every star.
Iris walked me to Francis’ door. At the ringing of his bell, I flinched – recalling my collapse here two days before and, with a curious anger, recalling the resolutions I’d offered up to the snow. Perhaps I was only now overhearing what I’d said then – and so was only now able to act upon those resolutions. I was angered by my old conception of myself, but this anger felt also like a longing – a longing to retire an ontology on a doorstep, so that when I was let indoors, my notion of selfhood would not come in with me, and I could begin to forge a new one.
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