You might think that Mr F’s dream would have left him in peace now, now that it had been broken (isn’t it odd, by the way, that people say that, Oh, you’ve just broken my dream, as if a dream could be a piece of china, or a knife-blade). But in fact, that Monday night, his dream returned.
It returned, you might say, with a vengeance.
thirteen
It started the same way as always. As he turned the corner of the stairs, the red light from the window stained his sleeve; but only for a moment. The key slid into the lock and turned without hindrance, despite the fact that the hand that held it was bandaged — that’s right; in his dream, it was now his right hand, the hand he made his living with, that had been cut and stitched. The front door clicked shut behind him, exactly as it always did. But then, once he had hung up the key on its hook by the door and hung up his jacket in the wardrobe, instead of continuing with his nightly ritual — the rolling up of his sleeves, the scrubbing of the hands — he somehow found himself already completely undressed for bed and standing stock still in the middle of his hallway. Just standing there, naked, and staring at the handle on the closed bathroom door. He knew what was in there, and he knew that he had to go in there and sort it out as soon as possible, but
That word again…
But what was he supposed to do, now that it has a name? What was he supposed to do with it, now that it belongs to someone he recognises?
Now that it has a face.
Now that he knows who to blame.
Standing there outside the bathroom door, Mr F looks down at his bandaged hand, his work hand, and he can hear his thoughts very clearly turning themselves into sentences again. He could even swear that in the stone cold silence of his flat he is standing there outside the closed bathroom door and talking to it, for all the world as if the dead body on the other side of it could hear him. Now look what you’ve made me do, he can hear himself saying. People will say to me, how did you do that to your hand then, Mr F? The man who sells me my paper in the morning, the man who sells me my ticket, the man who sells me my milk — they’ll all be at it.“How did you do that then?” they’ll say. And what am I supposed to tell them — that I made a mistake? That I slipped? That I wasn’t thinking — or I tell you what, how about this; “I was thinking about the back of somebody’s neck.” That’ll do the trick I’m sure. “I was thinking about the way the back of his neck — ”
Well, the way it what?
What?
Mr F wasn’t just talking now. He was shouting; shouting with his face pressed right up against the bathroom door. Staring at it, as if the wood wasn’t there and he could already see what was on the other side of it. The bloody cheek of it. Hanging there with a smile on its face… He pressed his forehead against the gloss magnolia paint and closed his eyes and groaned. He knew the body was in there — no changing that. He just needed time to think. Time to decide what he ought to do about it. He needed a moment’s peace… Hanging up there by its feet like a fox ready for flaying. Like some piece of meat on a hook in bloody Leadenhall Market — it made him wish he had his box of blades with him. That was it; that’s what he ought to do. He remembered the moment in the workroom when he’d been steadying himself to make the first cut, and he’d seen all that meat. He put his right hand up on his chest, feeling with the tips of his bandaged fingers for the exact spot just below the sternum where he thought the first incision would have to be made. Let’s get to the heart of the matter, shall we? he thought. What would be the best way — cut through the ribcage with a pair of trimming shears? Perhaps not; be hard work getting through all those bones, he thought, getting through all those bars. You could do the whole thing with just the knife, of course. That’s it; no need to go and get the shears at all, you can just use the knife, and cut upwards instead of down. Press firmly in with the blade to establish the entry at the navel — then rip up towards the sternum… He talked himself through the entire operation… feel your way in through the guts; reach up under the ribs… His right hand clenched and flexed — which hurt — as he imagined all that grabbing and twisting and pulling — all the grabbing and dragging required to pull that ugly little beast out of its cage by the scruff of its neck. That was it; drag it out and cull it just like all the others. There it was, still beating, right there in the palm of his hand. He could just see it.
Mr F decided what he was going to do. What he wanted to do.
Needed to do, but
Need. Want. He wasn’t quite sure. Couldn’t quite hear which was the right word to use in the sentence. But he wasn’t going to let that bother him. He went back into his bedroom. Avoiding catching sight of himself in the mirror, he pulled open the door of his wardrobe. It was empty, apart from a row of three suits hanging from the rail, each on a wooden coat-hanger. All three of them seemed to be cut from the same brown worsted cloth; he recognised them. Ignoring the question of how both of his old suits came to be hanging there in his wardrobe alongside his current one — which was impossible, obviously, because he’d thrown them away — he checked for which was the one he had worn to work that morning, the one least worn at the turn-ups and elbows. Finding it, he took it out and laid it, still on its hanger, on the bed. Then he stood and stared at it. He hated it — wished he had his knife again and could set to work on it right there and then. Hated it, because that brown suit lying there was really just about everything anyone might need to know about his life, wasn’t it, really — he said, out loud, to no one at all. Every single one of those thirty-three years. All the pay-slips, all the evenings, all of the weekends. Every single journey in to work on the twenty past seven. Says it all.
Still, it had its uses. He reached down onto the bed, and one by one undid the buttons of the jacket — not easy, with your right hand in bandages, but he managed — and then with one neat gesture slid the trousers from their hanger. Holding them up by the waistband in his right hand, he took hold of the buckle of the belt with his left, and tore the belt from its loops. Then he threw the trousers on the bedroom floor — he didn’t just drop them; he threw them, threw them against the bedroom wall so that they slid down onto the floor in a crumpled heap. They’d never be fit to wear in the morning now.
Then Mr F said, out loud again, in a voice thick with anger but oddly calm, and quite loudly — as if he wanted that young man to be able to hear him out there in the bathroom — Right, young man. Now you’re for it. He transferred the belt buckle to his right hand, and then with his left hand wound the leather of the belt tightly around his fist, like a boxer bandaging himself before the fight, ignoring the pain, and leaving just the last foot and a half of the leather belt hanging free. He did it quickly and easily, as if this was a familiar action.
Where had Mr F learnt to do that? Had he seen someone else do it?
Who, I wonder. His father? I don’t think so.
Now he did look at himself in the mirror. He raised his right hand for a moment, and stared at the picture that made; the wound was starting to hurt again now, to throb — but that didn’t worry him. In fact, it made him all the more determined to finish the job. For a moment it looked as though it was himself he was going to beat, as if he was going to slash at the image of himself standing naked in the glass with the belt. But if that had been his intention, he clearly thought better of it. He walked out of the bedroom, back across the hall, into the bathroom (the light was already on, so he didn’t have to stop for the light-switch) and without stopping to look at the face to check that it really was the boy, because he knew it was, who else could it be with that white skin — If I told you once, I told you a thousand times; the most important thing in this business is choice of skin, he muttered to himself as he drew back his arm — without taking any particular aim, he began to methodically slash with the belt across the legs, stomach and chest of the hanging body, once from the right, once from the left, then again from the right and again from the left, using the edge of the leather to cut at the flesh so hard he seemed determ
ined to make it bleed. He worked very calmly, putting the full force of his body behind each blow; each time the leather fell, he would stop and look, to see if it had split the skin. It hadn’t, so he would slash again, more furious still, pulling his arm right back in preparation before he landed the blow.
Mr F kept going until the pain in his hand became unbearable.
Although there seemed to be no blood in the hanging body that he could find, he himself had plenty. The pursed lips of the wound on his hand parted, and his blood began to seep through the bandage, staining it scarlet. Exhausted, he unwound the belt, and let it drop onto the bathroom lino. He stood there, breathing heavily, too tired to raise his arm even one more time. He stood, and watched, and waited. Waited to see the results of his patient handiwork. Waited for the moment when the first roses of bruising would begin to bloom beneath the boy’s skin.
And that’s where it ends, tonight’s dream. With him standing there and staring at the body, waiting for whatever happens next. This means that there is no screaming; not tonight. Nonetheless, Mr F is still breathing prettily heavily when he wakes up at ten past four that morning. He reaches out and puts the bedside light on and sees that the bandage has come unwound and that there is, as he feared, blood spotting his sheets. His left hand is throbbing savagely, and his right arm — as he lies there, he is not sure if he is imagining this or not — his right arm and wrist ache. They ache just as if he’d been
Suddenly, he can’t stand it. He can’t stand the nighttime smell of himself, and he can’t stand lying there and hearing the disgusting sound of himself panting like some foul-breathed animal. He makes himself sit up, and swings his legs out from under the covers. He sits there in his pyjamas for a bit, the sweat cooling in the small of his back, and gets his breath back. He checks (he can’t help it) to make sure that his suit trousers aren’t lying crumpled anywhere on the bedroom floor, but they aren’t; they’re still safely in the wardrobe, where he hung them last night. Of course they are. He steels himself to get up off the bed and go to the bathroom and turn on the light and get himself a drink of water.
When he gets there he just has time to stare briefly straight at his face in the bathroom mirror, and to notice that his blue eyes are more fiercely pale than they’ve ever been, before he leans over the basin and is violently sick.
If Mr F shocks or disgusts you at this point in the story, then all I would say is: forgive him. In fact, in all that we are going to be seeing this man go through, forgive him. He had to fight this battle on his own. This was, after all, in another time, almost in another country — and besides, don’t we all have to fight this battle on our own? When the knife strikes, none of us knows anything.
And don’t accuse him; no one can help what they see when their eyes are closed. No one can be blamed for that — not Leda with her swan, not Pasiphaë with her bull, not the Lapith bride, grappling slowly on the bed with her very own centaur. Every bestial wedding is preceded by its dream. Isn’t that why, at the circus, when the lion crouches and soaks the sawdust with its gushing piss, the children scream — because they long to see it leap? Long to see the man with the whip sent sprawling on his back; long to see the beast dine at leisure in the guts of its vanquished master. To see it lick his face, and take its pleasure.
So, as I say, don’t blame or accuse him. In fact, wish him well.
fourteen
The next morning, the first cigarette of the day sickened Mr F, and he stubbed it out after one drag. Then, suddenly, standing there at the kitchen table, steadying himself (and again, this sensation was one that he felt first in the pit of his stomach; it nearly made him vomit again), he was struck by a mad hope. Maybe he’d simply got this all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it wasn’t Beauty in the dream at all. The idea made him shiver.
He got dressed so fast that he tore the top button from his shirt (his fingers just wouldn’t work properly; they felt cold), and he had to jam the knot of his tie right up tight to hold his collar closed. He couldn’t find his hat, but for once that didn’t matter; slamming the door shut behind him, Mr F went down his stairs two and three at a time (he should have been more careful on that worn stair-carpet; he could have come to grief) and then ran, all the way, to Peckham Rye Station. There was no queue at the ticket office, thank God, and he just made the early train. Arriving breathless at Skin Lane at twenty-five to eight, he found the front door still locked, but fortunately, as Chief Cutter, he had his own key. Once inside and upstairs, he checked his watch, and tried to think sensibly about what he ought to do to get himself ready for the boy’s arrival. He went to the cupboard, and laid all his tools out in a row on his bench — but that only took a few minutes. He paced up and down the length of the window in his white coat, endlessly checking the buttons. Then he stood very still, and just concentrated on not letting his right hand shake. When he heard the first of his other colleagues coming up the stairs, he busied himself pretending to lay out his tools all over again; that way, no one had any reason to speak to him beyond a brief Good morning. He tried not to look at the empty doorway more than was strictly necessary. Then, at two minutes to eight, the boy arrived.
Somehow, Mr F managed to behave as if this was the start of a perfectly normal day. He even managed to say Much better, thank you, when the boy asked him how he was feeling this morning. They resumed their work on the pile of collars and cuffs.
Just occasionally, while he was working, Mr F had to pause and bite his lips, to force what felt like bile back down into his stomach.
That’s what hope feels like, sometimes.
Not for nothing had this man spent thirty-three years concentrating; he not only managed to get all of his own skins cut by dinnertime, he also managed to take every chance he got to stare at the boy while he worked on his pile. Luckily, he knew that no one else in the workroom would think that there was anything particularly odd about him doing this, not even the boy himself; after all, Mr F was surely meant to be watching him like a hawk, making sure there were no slip-ups like yesterday’s. This was the boy’s first full day with a knife, remember.
Mr F was nothing if not methodical in his scrutiny. He checked the hair first, obviously. Its colour hadn’t changed. The mysterious dark shadows were all still there, and when he saw this, his heart turned over in his chest. But then he told himself that he didn’t believe any of that old nonsense about things like this happening at first sight; you always had to check for flaws. Always check a skin thoroughly before proceeding, that’s what the book said. And so he did; glance by glance, he went on to inspect not just Beauty’s hair and neck, but his whole body. The way the sleeves of his white coat covered his arms, and what that told him about the arms underneath. Everything the cut of his trousers gave away when he hung his coat up at dinnertime. The backs of his hands, which still hadn’t got a single hair on them; the way he cupped his fingers when he smoked his cigarette at the tea-break.
Nothing.
Mr F was stubborn. He wouldn’t admit defeat. Not on the Tuesday, not on Wednesday and not even on the Thursday or late on Friday afternoon, when the boy wished him goodnight. Even on the train home, he was still checking, going through everything again, piece by piece: the hair, the skin, the arms, the hands. The curve of each one of the boy’s fingers. As he ran his Friday night bath, watching the steam from the hot water gradually obscure his staring face in the washbasin mirror, it occurred to him that the boy was probably running himself a bath at that very same moment —after all, cleaning up and putting on a fresh white shirt before going out on a Friday night, that was exactly what a young man of his age ought to be doing — and so he took this opportunity to check through everything again; he closed his eyes, and imagined being there to watch him get undressed. Imagined seeing everything. The flattened triangles of dark hair under his arms, left and right; the thin sheets of muscle across his upper ribs stretching like opening fans as he pulled his week-day shirt over his head. His stomach. His fine-boned shins and ankl
es as he stepped into the bath. The hairs on the inside of his thighs, each one waving gently under the hot water.
But there was still nothing.
What about after he’s got out and dried himself then — Mr F got round behind him, and checked the colour of the damp hair curling on the back of his neck before he combed it; checked the colour of the skin on the back of his neck as he turned down his tight white collar; watched his fingers as they did it.
Still, nothing.
It wasn’t working. No matter how hard he looked, no matter how hard he searched for the flaw — for that small, overlooked detail of skin or muscle or hair that was wrong, or was damaged, or that just didn’t fit, just didn’t match — he couldn’t find it. He turned off the gushing taps, and for just a moment the surface of the scalding water in the bath became still; another mirror. He stepped into it, his mind a blank.
Twenty minutes later, Mr F gets out of the bath, puts on his dressing-gown and walks dripping into the living-room.
He sits down in his chair.
He doesn’t bother with the tea or his tobacco and papers; he just needs to do this one last time. He has to be sure. He doesn’t even put the fire on.
He closes his eyes. In his dream, he sees himself come calmly up the stairs, open the door, and proceed into the bedroom. He undresses, then walks into the hallway and pauses for a moment with his hand on the bathroom door door-handle. Then, he takes a deep breath — and pauses again. He stands there, with his hand just resting on the door-handle, and is suddenly aware of a new feeling inside himself. There is an ache in his chest, and in his throat; it is the ache of unshed tears. Just before he opens the door and goes in, he promises himself that tonight, he is going to try very hard to change things. He wants to forget about the last time, the time with the belt — in fact he doesn’t want to ever go back there again, not ever — no; what he wants to do tonight is to cut the boy down. He wants to get him down and lay him out on the bed. It doesn’t seem right, leaving him hanging there right beside the open window like that.
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