The Cut

by Daniel Blythe

  ‘Where you want dropping, love?’ asks the driver.

  ‘Just here,’ I tell him. He pulls in next to the Parade. Opposite, there’s a cliff-face of magnificent hotels, palaces carved from white stone, adorned with flags and rounded lawns. There’s about a five-metre run for me across the Parade to the rails above the beach.

  I leap out, and run for it, ignoring the invective – first in English, then in Gujarati – which skims down the Parade after me. I’m more worried about other pursuers. There are voices babbling. As I hoist myself over the rail above the beach – grateful I opted for leggings tonight – I risk a look over my shoulder.

  Dreads is racing along the Parade towards me, flanked by two thugs. He pushes aside a necking couple, but I haven’t stopped to see any more. Air is under my feet and I drop like a cat on to the sand. The first thing I do is take a minute to remove my shoes and fling them aside. Then I run. Fast, barefoot, the sand soft under my feet. Thud-thud, thud-thud.

  I get closer to the sounds of the all-night funfair, and I risk a look over my shoulder as I scramble up the slope. As I’d thought, they were stupid enough to follow me on to the beach, and they’re lolloping along in their ungainly DMs, but still gaining on me.

  There’s suddenly grass and earth beneath my feet, and the spaces around me have shrunk, become thronged with unnatural light and colour, bright gaudiness and whirls of movement, all permeated by a sweet toffee-and-cinnamon smell from a stall nearby.

  I’m up, running, losing myself in a crowd now. Some of them give my wild hair and bare feet a glance, but generally they’re too taken up with themselves. Mostly teenagers, some leather-jacketed twenty-somethings out for a last bit of fun before the winter sets in.

  On my left, a carousel spins, plastic horses undulating in mechanized rhythm to that Simply Red song with the crashing drums sampled from the Good Men. (Thanks, Damien.) People are queuing, waiting to get on.

  I push my way through denim, leather, velvet, hating the sight and the sound and the sweaty smell of people. The light smears behind me in the darkness.

  I keep looking over my shoulder. Dreads, Chewer and Grinner have just got to the entrance of the fairground. They’re looking round in all directions. Dreads points one way and Chewer slips off. He points the other way and Grinner moves into the crowd. Then he starts to move forward himself, scanning every face.

  I move as fast as I can. I almost crash into a pair of albino-blonde girls who are shooting at two-dimensional animals. I push past them, and find myself right up against a crowd of people thronging the dodgem cars. People all around me are laughing, joking. I’m frantically searching the crowd for signs of my pursuers. Behind me, the dodgems swish and collide to the sound of ‘She Drives Me Crazy’. Hysterical laughter echoes across the little arena.

  I push my way through the crowds. My eyes are watching the people on the other side. The music comes to an abrupt end as the dodgems all slide to a halt.

  Then, I just glance behind me for a second – and there’s Chewer, shoving people out of the way, his eyes just a fragment of a flick away from seeing me.

  I try to pull the cloak up round my face. People around me are jostling, pushing their way to the front of the dodgem queue. Couples, kids and teenagers are piling into the sleek little bubble cars, testing the steering-wheels.

  Before I know what’s happened, I’ve been carried right to the front of the queue. The bloke helping people on, a fat guy in an old leather jacket and a cap, holds out his hand for my money.

  I hesitate. Then I look across the arena and see Dreads.

  He tenses, shouts something. He’s seen me.

  I duck past the dodgem guy, slipping round him, but that’s no good as I’m heading towards Chewer. He stands there, feet apart in the mud, the sky behind him bright with the monstrous, swirling light of the helter-skelter. I gasp. He nods, silently, and smiles to himself as he starts to walk towards me. Behind me, the music has started up again and the whine of the dodgems is getting higher.

  Chewer lunges at me. I hop over the barrier, ignoring the shouts of the bloke in the cap.

  Someone screams, and an orange dodgem swerves to avoid me. Feeling as if I’m stuck in a pinball machine, I stagger forward, heading for the other side.

  Dreads has jumped in, too, and narrowly avoids being hit by a boy and girl in a yellow dodgem. They’re whirling round and round, because they can’t stop, they all have to go in the same direction, like an unending river of little plastic cars.

  I spin round, then round again. The man in the cap, furious, is standing on the barrier and yelling something.

  Dreads makes a lunge for a teenage boy in the nearest car, trying to haul him out of the vehicle. Another car skims past, and its front protective bars catch my knee. Knife-sharp pain sears my leg and I hit the floor of the arena. Someone screams, and it might be me.

  The music growls and stops, and the cars all gradually slow down, spinning out the last of their momentum.

  Dreads shouts, ‘Get her!’

  Chewer leaps over the barrier, then over two cars, heading for me. I pick myself up and run. With every step it feels like my kneecap’s grinding itself into a powder.

  I make it to the barrier on the other side and Dreads’ hand is there. He grabs at the velvet cloak, which rips off me. The clasp pings undone. I leave him staggering with it as I dodge through the stalls, hobbling, in agony.

  I reach the shooting range. A little girl is tottering away from it with her father, beaming happily as she clasps an enormous white teddy-bear. The bear blocks my line of vision for a second or two. When I can see again, Grinner is standing just two metres in front of me.

  I spin around, my breath like acid in my throat. I think some of the night’s alcohol is about to come back up.

  It’s no good. Behind me, Chewer and Dreads are pushing their way through the crowd. Under the artificial light, their faces are purple, livid with fury. Just then, my knee gives way and I flop on my right calf into the mud.

  Three lots of DMs surround me. Hands haul me up. Then, before I’ve even realized who is where, a fist slams into my stomach and I’m consumed with agony, nothing in this world but red-hot pain in my stomach, and trying to find a breath and it’s like it’s all been vacuum-pumped out of my body. Christ, my feet are floating. The mud’s rushing by underneath them.

  – dimly realize that I’m being carried somewhere, try to struggle, but one of them’s got my arm pinned right behind my back and starts to bend my fingers until I scream –

  Try to focus on the faces floating past. Try to open my mouth to shout something. Mouth dry and coarse. Nothing comes out.

  I hear one of them saying that I’ve had too much to drink and they’re taking me home.

  *

  The next five minutes are a blur of light and colour, and then the smells change, becoming saltier and harsher, and that’s how I know, when my lolling head is finally allowed to rest, that we’re down on the beach.

  They drop me. I hit the sand with a smack.

  Waves wash in, white and soft in the night, licking at my thighs. I can smell the salt and the seaweed, spunky in its sharp fishiness, and over it there’s the doggy, sweaty, veggie-curry odours of their disgusting bodies as they circle me, their boots sinking deep into the sand and the water.

  A memory flits across my mind, of seeing anti-bypass protesters on the telly a couple of years ago, and thinking – you want to clean up the environment, start by getting yourselves a wash and a haircut. And how did you get down to Newbury, anyway? Would it have been on the roads, by any chance?

  I lift my head. The pain in my stomach has started to recede a little, but my head is throbbing now, and I really wish I hadn’t drunk so much. Also, needless to say, I’m practically shitting myself with fear.

  For some reason, I can’t move my hands. Someone’s tied them behind my back with something. I don’t remember them doing it, but they seem to have done a pretty good job of it as there’s no gi
ve at all, and it’s horribly tight and numb around my wrists.

  It’s quiet down here. The beat of the fairground is distant. There’s nothing to hear except the gentle hiss of the sea, and their heavy breathing as they circle me in the sand. I’m crouched there like some animal, tensing myself for the kick.

  It doesn’t come. Instead, my hair is grabbed from behind, my face forced up with a pain like a thousand needles on my scalp. Dreads lowers his face to mine. His breath stinks like dog meat soaked in meths.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘You did something to Cassie, didn’t you, bitch? You and your nice little friends.’

  I meet Dreads’ gaze, trying not to gag on the stench. It must be ignorance of what he’s going to do that gives me my false bravura. I stare insolently into his unwashed, stinking, scrounging Fally face, thinking how I need to get my hands free, need to get to the knife and Cut right into his trendy, I’m-all-fucking-right-Jack, welfare-state world.

  JJ and his utopian, tolerant bollocks. He’s got no idea. These people are shit. They need to be treated like shit.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I tell him calmly.

  ‘That won’t do,’ he says quietly, and opens his animal eyes at me, shows his yellow teeth.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about, shit-face.’

  I’m expecting pain, but nothing quite like what I get. It’s a full, in-the-face punch, dislodging a tooth, whackinggreattidesofPAIN, hotredA G O N Y through my skull. My head’s held steady by Chewer from behind so I can’t even turn to absorb any of it.

  I will not cry out. I can feel the bruise growing on my face.

  Something’s got to stop me thinking about it. I picture my dad, and Jeff. I think of them screwing these bastards by blowing up their nice little squatty flats. That makes me start to smile. I think of the Criminal Justice Act, the only law stopping smelly acid-fried hippies and their scabby pooches from camping in my back garden and dropping shit and needles for kids to fall into. I get this mental picture of a police truncheon whacking Dreads right across his crusty skull, while another dozen coppers in riot gear up-end their rusting Transit into a ditch.

  Now I’m smiling broadly. And I don’t care. I really don’t care. Whatever they do to me, I’ve won. We’ve won. Society, civilization, call it what you will.

  Fix on that.

  Now, Chewer and Grinner hold my head back. One is tugging my hair, the other has a filthy hand clamped under my chin. Dreads gets a flask out of his pocket. It’s black and sleek and gives no indication of what might be in it. He uncorks it. I clamp my mouth shut but they try to prise it open. They try to force the bottle’s pungent neck between my teeth.

  Eventually I just cannot fight against the three hands pulling my jaw down and the cold bottle bursts into my mouth, scraping my teeth, sending a hot, harsh liquid down into my throat.

  Shit, I can’t gulp it fast enough to keep up. It’s hotter and headier than whisky. I try blowing it back. I splutter, gobbing treacly, alcoholic phlegm everywhere, and the bottle’s withdrawn.

  My body sways. The lights out on the breakwater are starting to smudge. And the cold sea water’s got deeper, too, rising around my thighs, wetting my knickers. I’m coughing uncontrollably, the stuff has turned to acidy bile and I feel it hurtling up my nose, spurting from my nostrils.

  Dreads is beside me. His face is spectral.

  ‘You’ll tell us,’ he says. ‘However long it takes.’

  The sea comes up to meet me. Cold, stinging, smelling of old salt. Without warning he’s shoved my face into it, and I fight, splutter, gag on the briny taste. I’m thrashing my head from side to side, trying to break out from under his hand, trying not to get submerged in the water.

  Then he pulls me up. My face is cold and soaking, and the salt stings. I can’t see a thing. The pungent smell and the cold glass return to my mouth and I try to force it away with my teeth, but Dreads just rams the bottle in and pours more of the stuff into me. It’s got to be stronger than Thunderbird. Vile, sticky aftertaste, like sherry. No more. Gulp, gulp, gag. No more.

  He pulls it out and I spit the mouthful into the sea. It describes its own path in phlegm, sticking in a long string between my mouth and the water, tensing and breaking only after a second or two. Detail. Got to keep on top of it. Got to know what I’m doing.

  Legs and arms going weak now. Getting drunk. Getting too drunk.

  ‘You little slut,’ his voice says from far, far above me. ‘Drink that.’ And my face is in the water again, this time right inside it and I can taste the sand and the seaweed and it’s cold in my mouth and I can’t hold my bre–

  Air. Coughing, choking, just have time to grab a breath out of nowhere and he’s yelling in my face again. Hot breath on my skin.

  ‘Where is she? I want to know!’

  The bottle. Nearly half empty now. Again and again the treacly stuff glugglugglugs into my throat, filling up, no air, no space to breathe, drowning in the stuff, drowning –

  This time, my coughing goes on for at least a minute, I think. I’m losing all sense of time.

  ‘Where is she?’ This time, it’s just a whisper.

  I try to speak. I can’t focus my mind properly. I’m struggling for a word and trying not to keel over on to the sand.

  I’m up again. Somehow, they have lifted me to my feet. Three faces, now no more than blobs. Harsh hands, clamping all over my numb body. They’re saying things to each other, laughing, and I can’t hear. Can’t hear.

  Legs won’t work. Being carried now. Carried away.

  *

  Time has passed, but I don’t know how long. They brought me here in a blindfold, and I think I must have been sick because my mouth and nostrils are full of a foul, acidy taste and smell. I’m kneeling, hands still tied, and there’s what feels like smooth stone or concrete under my feet.

  Someone rips the blindfold off. I get ready to blink against the light, but there’s hardly any. For a moment, I can’t see anything except the dark, stone floor that I’m kneeling on. Then I realize I am in a big, empty hall with a low ceiling, and no illumination apart from the street lamps glowing through a couple of old windows. It smells of shit, piss and decay.

  There is breathing in here other than mine, and I sense more odours. Wet clothes and mud. They must be here, and not too far away.

  As my eyes get used to the darkness, I can see their black outlines, standing a few metres away. Dreads’ face suddenly flares out of nowhere, disembodied and Halloween-orange, as he lights a cigarette.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ he asks. His voice echoes as if we’re in a church or something.

  ‘Tell me.’ My voice is cracked, shattered with booze and sick and salt water. I’m still drunk, and I’m so exhausted that I feel like crying. They’d be those hot, treacly tears that an alcoholic weakness always produces. I can feel them welling but I won’t let them come.

  He steps forward, each footstep crisp and precise in the dimness. ‘You’re where you never thought you’d be. The top floor of Ferris Court flats. Fallowdale.’

  He lets me take this in for a moment or two.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Dreads sneers, crouching down opposite me. I try to focus on him with exhausted eyes. My face feels as if there’s a football shoved into it and my throat feels lined with burning acid. What I really need is a drink of water. ‘Fallowdale. Not your favourite place, is it, Bel?’

  I look up at him, daring him to use my name again. No one uses it unless I let them. You don’t do that.

  ‘Oh, yeah, know your name, like. Friend Marcie told us . . . The very flats your precious daddy wants to blow up so he can build his lovely new shops. Well.’ Dreads straightens up. ‘We’re out of here. We loaded all the stuff up days ago. Nobody lives here any more. So your dad’ll be pleased to know he’s won, won’t he?’

  My mouth chews around some words, and eventually I manage to croak something out. ‘It isn’t a question . . . of winning.
It’s change. Things . . . change. You don’t belong here. It’s not your home. Is it?’

  ‘Nah,’ Dreads says. ‘To you, I don’t s’pose it seems that way. But then our home is everywhere. Don’t know where we’re supposed to go, like. Sure we’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, there must be some lovely fields around for you. Where your dogs can crap in peace.’

  Dreads half spits a laugh at me. ‘You people have no idea.’

  ‘Hey, if you take a few months over getting there, you can crash at Glastonbury. No doubt the Levellers will be playing. Again.’

  There are some worrying rustles from Chewer and Grinner, but I see Dreads’ palm, held up high and open and white.

  ‘What about Cassie?’ Chewer snarls.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ says Dreads. ‘Cassie. She’s dead, ain’t she, Bel?’

  I look up at them, trying to focus. This is obviously news to Chewer, whose pinched features have gone pale and angry.

  Behind them, Grinner steps forward and pushes Dreads hard, almost sending him staggering. ‘You knew all along, didn’ you? You fucker, you knew she w’s dead! How?’

  ‘How’d I know?’ He spits on to the floor, takes a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘I was told.’ He looks down at me. ‘Some people found her weeks ago. I just wanted to see if you’d admit it.’

  I meet his gaze, trying not to show any emotion. Especially not surprise. No way, not surprise.

  Dreads nods thoughtfully. ‘Found her in the forest, near where the bloke said. She’d been dead for days by then. We all buried her at night. Deep. Deep in the ground.’ He sighs.

  ‘Go on.’ My voice is alien, lizard-skin rough. It’s only now that it’s really starting to hit me. I’m under their control here. I’m in their power. They can do anything they want with me.

  ‘I’d seen before what happened whenever Cassie went mental. That night at Ashwell, she was out of it on acid. I watched her run out in front of your car with the fire extinguisher and I shouted at her. But she didn’t want to know. She wanted to die.’