Slights

by Kaaron Warren

  He pulled out a photo to show the doctor. It was one Steve never saw. In it, Heather sat up stiffly, a pained expression on her face. Her eyes seemed dark-rimmed. Peter stood in front of her left knee. Her arms were raised; her hands clutched Peter's forearms from either side. Her fingers visibly sank into his flesh. Peter had his eyes squeezed shut; his mouth was slightly open.

  At their feet Steve played with a toy train. She didn't look at the camera.

  "Lovely family," Tom Sykes said. "I only had my wife, I'm afraid, and no photo, no photo at all."

  "Some women just don't like having their photo taken," Alex said. He thought, and some have no choice, because the doctor's wife had been photographed many times after her death.

  "Sometimes women don't know what's best, and they need helping along." Alex stared into his glass as if remembering.

  Tom's eyes glittered, yet he didn't seem to drink much. Alex guessed he enjoyed use of his own medicine cabinet.

  "So, here we are," Tom said. They had been on a short tour of the house, had reached the sauna.

  "Am I supposed to say, 'You have a lovely home?'" Alex said.

  Tom gave one tone of a laugh. "No, no, that's for the ladies. Ladies like trivialities."

  They smiled at each other. "I feel like I'm on an outing," Alex said.

  "No, no, just two men with similar interests, out to become acquainted."

  "And perhaps not just with each other," Alex said, and winked. Tom smiled, relaxed; he was not mistaken in Alex's intent. They ate a meal Tom had brought home with him from town, spent hours talking about war, politics, women and money. Alex refused to take his gloves off.

  "Are you cold? I can turn up the heating."

  "No, I'm fine," Alex said. Afterwards, he washed up the glasses and plates and put them away.

  "Now, you're a pleasant guest to have," Tom said.

  It was all very seamless, as it is when two people have the same motives, the same goal, and they are not anxious about achieving this. They talked, they ate, they took Alex's car. Tom settled himself, breathed deeply.

  "New car, ay? Nothing like it," he said.

  "My kids hate the smell. They insist on having their heads stuck out the windows," Alex said. They drove to the streets and they picked up a prostitute.

  Alex drove while Tom was in the back with her. There were giggles and low mutters and squeals of pain.

  "Not so rough," she said.

  "People say I've got soft, gentle hands," Tom said. "That's what I'm told."

  "Yeah, well, where are we going, anyway? I'm not interested in a back-seat job."

  "Won't be long," Alex said. He drove to a quiet beach. They pulled the girl out of the car, and they beat her, carefully. Alex could see how much Tom enjoyed it.

  "Here's a little something to ease your pain," said the doctor, and he injected her with the contents of a syringe Alex suggested he bring. No one would believe a girl with her blood mix.

  They left her stretched on the dry sand, safe from the tide, and she wouldn't be found until she stumbled on to the road.

  This major event in her life changed her,

  because she wasn't an automaton. She gained self-respect, oddly, because she had not wanted to be beaten, neither did she deserve it. She KNEW that. She could honestly say it.

  She accepted a job in a safe house, where the men came for sexual release in a safe environment. They didn't want danger. They wanted their regular, a shallow relationship, they paid well. She became involved with management and found she had a skill for it.

  She always bore the scars of her beating. They drew sympathy and kindness. She was reminded of the Somerset Maugham story, The Verger. Imagine if you hadn't been beaten, she said to herself. You would still be on the streets. Tom Sykes laughed, hopped in his seat,

  pulled at his seat belt. He made little popping noises with his mouth, noises which sounded so much like words Alex said, "Pardon?" twice. Sykes ignored him.

  "My place for a drink?" Alex said.

  Sykes said, "What about your family? Midnight visitors okay there?"

  Alex said, "They're at her mother's."

  Alex rolled the car into the garage. He said, "We'll go in the back door." The doctor climbed out of the car, pop pop and waited, rocking on his heels, staring at the moon.

  "Key's under the mat, believe it or not," Alex said. He shone the torch to the back door.

  "I don't believe it," said Sykes. He aped Alex's whispered tone.

  "Take a look."

  Sykes bent over, and Alex bent behind him and chopped him, pulling his body backwards in a jabjab movement. The body fell onto the dirt, where it twitched then rested. Alex cut the throat.

  There was no hint of a visitor by the time the family returned.

  He never killed a woman. There was one woman in his children's future who may have been deserving; he drove past her house every morning and night on his work travels. He noticed the neat garden and despised it for its prissiness, but he would never have guessed his children would be hurt by the woman inside.

  Alex would always say that it was the unplanned murders, the crimes of passion, which people get away with. It was the planned crimes, so meticulous, which would fail, because there was too much thought involved. Those killers thought of each possible contingent and had an answer ready for everything, the perfect emotion ready to go. They had answers down pat, always suspicious. The unplanned crime caused panic, and the human mind thinks better under stress.

  It was an opinion far from that held by almost everybody else at his police station (and of the world, but his scope of research wasn't broad).

  No one ever imagined he held this view because he had killed in passionate rage.

  He rarely joined his workmates for drinks and was teased as a Family Man. He always smiled at the nickname, genuinely unhurt by it – he couldn't see how it could possibly be an insult.

  He was always there for celebrations, though: the big bust, the retirement, the promotion. He was painstaking about these things. Some nights he would appear out of the blue, and shout the bar, scream at jokes, act with an hysteria the others found frightening.

  And Jessie wrote this in God's Little Acre by Taylor Caldwell:

  DS twenty-two fingernail:

  Detective Paul said, "Hey, Surly, your girlfriend's here to visit."

  Alex looked up, hearing a joke in his partner's voice, ready to laugh. Work was hard; he was acting chief. He saw a beautiful woman, a soft cinnamon tan, brown curls, bosoms, cleavage.

  "What's she reporting?" he said.

  "Oh, she's not a victim. She's a perp."

  "She's not a pro?"

  "She's not a she."

  Alex stood up to see better. God, she was lovely.

  And none of it was real.

  "Each to their own," he said. Detective Paul laughed. Alex was known for that; acceptance. Each to their own.

  Alex wrote furiously to conceal his excitement. He could not and would not hurt women – but that was not a woman.

  She was released, charges dropped, into

  the care of her parents, two silent, embarrassed people. They didn't know she'd been charged with cutting five children, teaching others to cut.

  "Come on, David," his mother whispered.

  "We don't want to see you back here,

  mate," said the desk sergeant. Alex tidied files, later, something he did to clear things in his mind. He filed David Sparrow's address and phone number.

  Jessie wrote this in Looking for Mr Goodbar, Judith Rossner:

  JB thirty-one cufflink:

  Joel Bennet was a dapper man, cufflink wearer, and seductive, people shouted his name in the streets to be seen with him. He liked the feel of a dead body dragging him down, liked to pretend he was a conjoined twin, with a dead twin.

  And this. She wrote this in Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy:

  Jessie was not a violent woman, but she was fascinated by violence. She read all the b
anned books, loved them in private. And she was fascinated to be so close to it. It sickened her as well, and she couldn't eat.

  Jessie didn't read all the books. Sometimes she read the book flap, or looked at the photo of the author, or thought about the title for her inspiration. This great romance writer never married, though she was the subject of gossip for many years, because it was known she had a lover. Was he a married man? Why didn't they marry?

  Jessie and the school teacher, Mr Bell, kept up a friendly relationship. She relied on him to keep her from dying of loneliness.

  Mr Bell did not read her novel in full. Only the first few chapters. It began on the end papers of "In the Wet" by Nevil Shute, which she gave him to read on a train journey.

  I knew I had to burn all of the books. I knew it.

  The Grannies didn't forget me:

  "Stevie, you're the sweetest one

  Life with you is so much fun."

  It wasn't enough. It didn't come close to being enough.

  I still can't picture my father angry. Not furious, anyway, not leap up and down, beat in heads, bury the body. I can't believe I was the only one who saw him as a gentle, kind man, always.

  I rang Peter, "Peter, can you come over, please come over, Peter, please let me have a go on your bike. Please come over. I've got something to show you."

  There is no one to save me. I stand alone in the kitchen. I string my rope up from the railings. And I let myself go.

  This moment is the worst, when I can't breathe. The discomfort is great. I survey my garden; am pleased by how neat and green it is.

  I see my twin in the window and I wave. The prophecy Mum read has not come true. I am only thirty-five. Nowhere near middle age. I have beaten fate; I am dying before fate decided I should.

  And then I am in the room. Oh God, take me back. They are all around me. There are straws between my toes, suck, suck, and a cock in my mouth, soaking up my saliva. Snip, snip, bandage scissors, rusty with blood, cut my hair off centimetre by centimetre. Someone grabs my hands and pulls me up. It's Granny Searle. I think she's going to lead me away but she ties my hands high in the air and plucks out my arm pit hairs. I laugh and they shrink away. I'm not supposed to be enjoying it. They have paper cut fingernails. They slice and cut until all the lines of my skin are filled with red. Someone has an apple peeler and little bits of my skin are taken away. Peter is there again. He was almost always there. For a brother who appeared unbothered by my actions, he was very slighted. The only time he wasn't in the room was when I was twenty-four, and hadn't seen him for months. I never saw Maria after I was twenty-one. Her hatred was too intense for her to be in my room.

  And then a neighbour cuts me down. I have never been so relieved. This time I will stick to my resolutions. I will change. I don't want to go back to the room, nor send anybody else there. I became a believer, in God, Heaven, Hell. I went to church, I donated all I had, I learnt floral arranging and I made the morning tea. I met someone nice. The cop, Laurie, that young cop from Mum's investigation, he tracked me down, I tracked him down. We set a date to be married, put a deposit on a house. We always held hands.

  Then I started to smell mothballs in strange places. I didn't tell anyone; didn't want them to think I was going mad.

  I saw a doctor, told her all. She had a good look at me. She said, "You're the sanest person I've ever seen."

  My clothes seemed tight around my neck, choking me. I was always cold. But at least I was alive.

  I sold my car and my house. I called Maria and met her in a restaurant, and I cried and told her how much I cared for her, how good she was for Peter.

  And then a neighbour cuts me down. I had a new life. A career, a career woman. I had three children, a lovely husband. We are gathered for our twentieth wedding anniversary. I eat a mothball, mistaking it for a kool-mint.

  And then a neighbour cuts me down.

  And then a neighbour cuts me down.

  That's what should have happened.

  This is what did happen:

  I forgot how much the Rat Trap neighbours hated me. How they ignored me.

  And it was Ruth who was dead, not Jessie. I had been dreaming all this time. I hadn't heard Ruth tell me never to ask a man for advice. Or to only wear vertical stripes.

  It was Jessie alive.

  We went for a picnic together, on a cliff facing the sea. The air smelt of jasmine and dirt but the ground was hard, rasping my skin.

  The air was thick. I breathed through the pores of my skin, great soakings of air, and I felt like I had bubbles in my blood.

  Jessie looked wonderful. She looked forty-five, hadn't aged in years. We were closer, now. I'd caught up. We ate a mother's feast: boiled eggs with little screws of salt, ham sandwiches cut thick and wrapped in flapping greaseproof paper; a thermos of hot chocolate; a piece of chocolate slice. Jessie laughed at the way I ate, gobbling like a turkey.

  "You haven't eaten like that since you were sixteen," she said. She held my hand and I shivered. "You know what's going to happen next, Stevie."

  "I have no idea. Could be anything."

  "Oh, no," she said, "Only this," and she lay down and began to rot.

  I thought I wanted to go back. I wasn't sure if they would still be waiting. It had been a long time. But the memory of all those faces focused on mine, all of them waiting for my whim, was exciting. I was addicted to them. There was the kid I saw every time, the little shit from primary school who I pissed on after showers, the teacher was Mrs Sammett, the one I had laughed at because she was fat, the friend I had stopped talking to when I figured he wouldn't get my jokes any longer. They leant over me, faces I knew. Something really hurt; there were faces there of people I had helped in the hospice. People whose lives I had changed; people who listened to my stories of death. They all believed they had been slighted. I began to cry with the hurt of it. And there was Darren, clutching his jumper, staring and waiting. He was no older in the room, though I was sure he danced in anticipation in hundreds of other rooms, just like mine. My counsellor, no counsel there, no help, just confusion and lust. He was a tree, a leaf, landing on earth to stab me with his paper knife. Strangers saying broom broom. All there. I heard that clicking noise, and I could raise my head and I saw their mouths flapping, their teeth clicking together, like those wind-up teeth everybody once had. Their hands were raised, their teeth clicking, their fingers beginning to reach for me. I remembered I had kicked the chair away too far; my legs could not reach it. I could see as I raised my head, they waited in circles about me, six or seven circles, I couldn't tell. I lowered my head and closed my eyes to think again.

  I could not reach the chair.

  I came here to feel the power, to watch their faces. But they are stronger this time. There are so many of them.

  I am naked on that bed, and I see they are too. They look at me as I draw my knees up to make a resting place for my elbows. They count my orifices with their fingers. I feel a moist rasping on my back. A stranger lolls her tongue out. She is lapping at my back, taking off the first layer of skin.

  Then a neighbour cuts me down.

  People couldn't believe my transformation. I was positive about life; loved it.

  "See?" they said. "All you needed was something to believe in." I told them what I believed in; when I died I would go to a place where everyone with a slight against me could bite, scratch, fuck, flay, keep me for all eternity. The noise and smell of the place sickened me.

  I gave up driving a car, smoking, and drinking. I gave up all drugs and meat. I quit my stressful job and took a low paying one which took nothing from me. All these things made me safe. I would not die.