The Cut

by Daniel Blythe

  She looks quickly away from me as she lights her cigarette. Smoke mixes with crisp breath. Her voice sounds clear and sharp, punching holes in the air. I start to realize again how much I hate her.

  ‘Well, we had these targets, right? For each week. And we had to fill in these self-cerstifficut forms to say we done it all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say uneasily. I do hope she isn’t going to give me a dull, first-hand account of shop-floor life. I can quite happily get through the rest of my days without knowing such things.

  ‘Well, supervisor came round, di’n’ she?’

  ‘Did she?’ I’m always amazed by the way people like Marcie shove in their belligerent question-tags as if they already expect me to know the fucking story off by heart.

  ‘Talkin’ about extra hours. Said if we didn’t meet our targets for the week, we’d have to make ’em up.’

  ‘And that was a problem?’ (Don’t tell me the little cow was sacked for refusing to do a bit of overtime?)

  ‘Well, I was quite relieved she knew about it. I told her I sometimes do make ’em up.’

  Her face is earnest, her eyes bright. It is obvious that she still hasn’t managed to work out the reason she was given the boot, and I have to bite the insides of my cheeks to stop myself from laughing.

  ‘What about you?’ she asks tentatively. ‘I heard about . . . I mean, I’m sorry they . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say quickly. ‘I’m sure you are.’

  Her curiosity gets the better of her, naturally. ‘Why . . . why did they . . . do it, d’you think?’

  I shrug, blow a cold jet of smoke and kick at the snow like an impatient horse. I don’t want to stand here arguing things with Marcie. I’ve left her kind behind now. I don’t need any of them any more. ‘Because they were complete bastards, Marcie. What other reason do you want?’

  She looks uncomfortable. That’s something, at least.

  ‘Are you . . . staying round here?’ she asks.

  ‘For the moment.’ I sigh. I want to get away from her. ‘What about you? Got enough money for your drugs these days, have you?’

  ‘It didn’t go on drugs,’ she snaps, and has to have an extra-long taste of her favourite drug, tobacco, to remind herself of the fact. ‘Not directly, anyway,’ she adds, under her breath.

  ‘Yeah, right . . . I’m sure a few good honest stereos and cars acted as middlemen. He was good at that, wasn’t he? Damien?’

  Her ciggie wobbles at her gnawed red mouth. She glances briefly at me, sees my face and looks away.

  ‘Yes, Marcie, I know lots of things I’m not supposed to know. I have a habit of finding them out. Sometimes later than I should – like with JJ and that incestuous bitch of an aunt of his. But even that was sooner than it should have been. They’d have carried on with me, wouldn’t they? Being my friend, getting JJ back together with me to hide the whole sordid truth from whoever might want to know it.’

  My teeth hurt, but I’ve stepped closer to Marcie now. My hand tightens over the handle of the knife in my pocket.

  ‘Look, Bel, I didn’t know nothin’ –’

  ‘Oh, I don’t find that hard to believe, surprisingly. I can go along with that, because I don’t think you’d have known it even if you’d found it out. But you knew where your money was going, that money you scammed off me all those times. Didn’t you?’

  She looks down. Ashamed. She nods. She drops her cigarette and it fizzes as its heat burrows through a tiny cylinder of snow.

  ‘I trusted him too,’ I murmur. ‘Don’t worry.’

  I suppose I’m quite embarrassed, especially knowing what I do about how Dreads and friends got the information from her. That bit makes me feel like wincing.

  I hoist my bag on to my shoulder and hurry away from her. I don’t look back.

  *

  The knife shines in the abrasive, white cold-heat of the snow. It would be easy.

  A few metres away, under one of the stripped trees in the park, a girl in a long green coat and a red scarf has her arms around the waist of a big blond guy. They are wrapped up in each other. There’s no one else around.

  *

  How it began. I know that much.

  Damien asked Marcie, some time before that first time we all went out together, if she would sleep with one of his mates, just as a kind of joke, and that he would reward her. He’d give her a hundred quid to do whatever the hell she wanted with. He hoped that she wouldn’t be clever enough to associate the activity with her past profession, and he was right.

  Then he asked her to do it a second time, when he knew she was gasping for a fix. Absolutely desperate. And then a third time, this time with a total stranger. That was just before Ashwell Heights, as far as I know. The tension between them, the meaningful looks – under all of that, he was her pimp. And he took the money and ran, because Damien loved money. Damien loved having as much money as possible to buy things and to hoard things and, naturally, to score a few times himself.

  Of course, he didn’t need to share any of this with me. As far as I was concerned, he was working in the record shop, and that was where all his money came from.

  And every time Marcie came back to me – shifty, begging, blackmailing – it was Damien who had sent her, and Damien who was using me, and Damien who didn’t care what he said as long as I kept giving him a hundred, and another hundred.

  I found all this out later. JJ knew, of course, and Imelda too. They just decided it was best not to say anything, hoping that the whole thing would blow over. And that if any of it ever came out, the blame would fall on me.

  They hadn’t banked on Dreads and his friends, though, and their dogged pursuit.

  Dreads and his bunch of thugs got Marcie in a club one night, I found out. Dragged her into the Gents. Barred the door. She told them who had been driving and where they lived.

  So they showed a kind of irony, I suppose, in calling Marcie – on my mobile – to tell her to get to Ferris Court and pick up a bleeding one-eyed victim.

  Of course, in the end, it didn’t happen like that. But still, it’s all come full circle. There is no one left to betray me.

  Only myself.

  *

  The girl and her boyfriend are hugging as they look up at the distant cathedral. He adjusts her thick, red scarf, pulling it up across her chin against the biting wind. They are paying little attention to me, here, on the park bench.

  The light of the world reflects in the blade as I touch my exposed arm, and the cathedral bells are sounding twelve. I’ve never been squeamish, never at all.

  Coldness above the coldness.

  Skin sinks and tautens.

  Surface tension –

  This will make people sit up and listen, make them realize what happens when they try to knock me down.

  – breaks.

  I slice.

  Is it more to see what happens than anything else? I see the Cut, here and now, before I feel it. A beautiful rush of red on the white snow. My God, it’s so clear and fresh.

  It’s dripping on the snow. The blade tumbles and falls, losing itself in the thick whiteness.

  The girl and her boyfriend are slo-mo t-u-r-n-ing to look at me. Her face is the face of a snow queen, sculpted long and thin below a crown of icicles. Or is it just that her jaw drops as she screams?

  Something is streaming out from her neck. It looks like a big thick bloodstreak against the sky. I laugh, try to lift my weakening arm, to point at her and tell her that her neck is opening and gushing blood. She seems to be running towards me over the snow, her long coat like batwings behind her.

  My calves are wet on the snow. I have fallen from the bench. I suddenly feel weak, and my wrist is still erupting. Unstoppable.

  Up in the skies, the rooks are laughing. Because they are closer to the sun than I am?

  I see my father’s face, and then everything is snow white, blood red.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight – Not So Manic Now

  It’s quiet in the church.r />
  I walk up the nave, breathing in the smells of wood and cloth. Hearing my footsteps resounding behind me, as if recorded, looped into headphones. I’m like a morsel in the whale’s belly, picking through the swallowed treasures – crosses and candles and colour-by-number pictures of saints and apostles. I walk alone through scatterings of colour.

  I stop at the altar, turn around to look behind me. There is no one here. The stone and glass are silent. The stone must be breathing, soaking up footsteps and memories. Not letting any of them out.

  I walk forward. I look at the big gold cross.

  I peer closely at the altar cloth. There is the smallest hint of a pinkish stain, the size and shape of an autumn leaf.

  With a rueful grin, I realize that they haven’t been able to get it out of the cloth. Fantastic. I’ve left my mark. Like a birthmark on the face of Christ.

  *

  A week ago. The radio plays ‘Wonderwall’, the gentle strumming of the original version, as the winter landscape hardens. It is December. In ten days it will be Christmas, and the ward is festooned with glittery patterns. I could do without them. Above my bed, there’s a string of cards – the usual mix of ridiculous badgers in Santa gear, pirouetting reindeers and pious-looking scenes in stables. Hideous. And around my wrist, in snowy Christmas white, my bandage.

  Just above the room, there must be a vent, because I can see the occasional cloud of steam gushing out and dispersing into the air. They look like bungee-jumping wraiths.

  I am back in the land of the living.

  *

  And this, from now. I sit at the brand-new table in the lounge and write a letter. My wrist is healing, and I will always have a big, ugly scar there to remind me of it all. There is another, a small one just above my eye, but that will fade in time, I’ve been told.

  Around me, an empire of wood, glass and elegant wallpaper has grown back, almost organically. The carpets, left scorched and ripped after the party, are soft and lush again.

  I hear Kate in the kitchen. These days, we hardly speak. Well, I don’t need to worry about that any more, as I shan’t be trapped here much longer. Before, I was condemned to hanging round here, but I’ve got plans now – Thailand and Malaysia, and then university and a whole new set of lives. One thing I know for certain. The knife won’t come with me when I go abroad. It’s tempting, but I have to leave it some time.

  I am trying to write to JJ, a letter that gets everything straight and tells him where we can go from here.

  My feelings towards Imelda have to come into it somewhere. She used me, all along. You can’t ever be a friend while you’re keeping something from someone, can you?

  They are bound together now. Bound on a tram trundling into a big white nowhere, kissing and shagging as it rattles away into no-man’s-land. Gasping and squelching. Passing friendly, family DNA back and forth and making something hideous.

  I don’t think I ever want to see either of them again.

  *

  I walk into town, wearing my thick coat and my favourite jeans with the purple stain which Kate finds impossible to get out in the wash. She’s always complaining about it. She doesn’t know where it comes from, of course. I imagine that one day she will read in the newspaper about the big London shop whose security tags are filled with an indelible purple dye, which stains if you try to de-tag the jeans illegally.

  People are carrying umbrellas loaded with slushy snow. The streets are clean of the stuff, stripped bare, exposed like big, glistening grey wounds, but the kerbs are clogged with the dark remnants of it, the underside of winter, the anti-snow that only the devil’s children play with. I wonder why no one ever makes an ugly, gun-black snowman out of the mush, stark and scarecrow-frightening against the brilliant white. Maybe it’s something I should do.

  *

  For some reason I find myself taking a tram, heading high above the town. As the machine groans, I look out over this scraggy patch of land and sea and think of the tortured souls who will never escape it. When I made the Cut, I thought I was escaping, but there must have been something there, deep down inside my black-blooded heart, which hauled me up into the chill of the snow, kicked me back to consciousness.

  I was never the type, not a Little Miss Suicide. Don’t know why I did it. Guilt?

  For everyone, it still goes on. Somewhere, down there, in the seething mass of the seaside town they forgot to bomb, there are still cars smashing into windows, and syringes pumping like blood, and monsters being made with incestuous genes. It’s a wilderness, a wasteland where entropy rules. Hey, entropy increases. Did you know that? Two indisputable little words. I like them. I like the certainty of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I like them because there’s fuck all anybody can do about them.

  The place hibernates when entropy takes over. In the summer, it’s different. In the summer the carousels, lurid in colour, are supple as flesh. Everything is a glossy, dripping organ of the town’s great stinking body, from the foaming ice-creams leaving trails on the pavement to the hot dogs with their gangrenous dribbles of mustard. Everything, from the sweaty handles of the fruit machines to the floors of the sharp-smelling bogs, gluey with piss and beer.

  In the summer, this town drowns in money, it’s flooded with honey. Sun-splodges uncover lovers on the beaches and cliffs. The night-walkers suck neon-bright lollies on the promenade. It smells of candyfloss, of pungent petrol and hot, angry curries. It all seems great, for a few weeks in July and August.

  But then the deep-frozen rains crash in, and it’s as if someone’s turned off the force-barriers out by the breakwater. The demons break through, crushing and crisping all in their path.

  Two months on and it’s worse still. The place is a splintered winter underworld. The great wheel of the fairground looks frozen still, an alien sculpture of black steel and white ice. And all around, nature gets on with the business of destroying herself. She does a better job than we could ever hope to do. Slicing, biting, snapping. Ponds become cracked mirrors, trees become charcoal, the beach is a moonscape. All ready to be crunched and smashed by her own hands. And the air itself is freezing. Tasting it is like licking cold glass.

  *

  I get off at the sub-urban zone, the pot-black heartland of Fallytown. In streets where shadows lurk. Devon Road. I know the name. Somewhere nearby is the infamous Towndale crossing, where the teenage thugs lurk at night. I’ve heard what they do. They press the button again and again, writing WAIT in orange against the night, and sending ghost warbles across the rooftops. And they do what the letters say. They wait, for the sharp slice of lights through the night, and they keep pressing the button, pressing the button, trapping the car at the crossing, and if it’s a lone woman, they get the crowbar out and shatter the windows, ignore her screams, get in the car. They shove her out, pocked with glass, shove her on to the pavement and take the car for a ride before stripping it of the radio and anything else they can sell. This happens just three streets from here.

  I can see down to the town. Beyond, the sea is almost visible, under its cloud of ghosts. Just past a passage filled with overflowing bins, I find myself on a patch of grass surrounded by high flats. Even in the snow, it smells of smoke and shit. Somewhere, deep in the Fally heartland, a dog is barking, echoing so that it sounds like it’s deep in a pit of corrugated iron. There’s clattering and shouting from the other side of the open space. Signs of life – two kids, dressed in bright jumpers, scamper down a fire escape, running after something I can’t see.

  A young mother struggles from the hallway of one of the flats. She’s pushing a buggy containing a toddler in a thick red coat. The pushchair is decorated with lurid carrier bags from Netto and Lidl.

  They stop on the grass and the woman crouches down beside the little girl, gets her to stand up so she can adjust her coat. She checks the girl’s top button, fusses with her scarf. The girl says something, which sounds shrill and incomprehensible to me, but the woman murmurs to her, ruffles her hair. Then she
checks the girl’s mittens.

  The mother starts redistributing the carrier bags while the girl scampers off to play in the snow. Her red coat is the brightest splash of colour in the whole place.

  I slide down the slope and head back the way I came. But in slipping past them across the grass, I have to catch her eye.

  ‘Cold day,’ she says, straightening up.

  Usually, anyone who states the suppurating obvious at me gets an earful. She intrigues me, though, ’cos up close, she doesn’t look or sound like a Fally. Sure, her clothes are the usual stuff – shabby greatcoat, tatty red pullover and rubbed jeans, with an awful pink woollen hat. But her face has a scrubbed, bright-eyed look. It’s a lean face, with high cheekbones, but quite smooth, rounded cheeks. The strands of hair which I can see look clean and cared-for. Her lipstick’s careful, a claret hue and not the lurid shade usually so beloved in these parts. When she smiles, I can see that she’s taken care of her teeth.

  I look over at the little girl, who’s happily piling snow up into heaps. I can only see her back view, and the hooded red coat makes her look like some busy pixie getting a grotto ready.

  ‘Entertains them, doesn’t it?’ says the woman.

  ‘What? Oh, yeah.’ I nod, rather too much, and I stop when I realize how stupid I look. I was just so taken aback by her voice. It’s gentle, educated, with an attractive Borders-sounding accent. Not your usual Fally whine.

  ‘Kirsty won’t have much for Christmas. Hope she realizes that.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I’m not quite sure what to say. I watch the little girl, who is standing back and admiring the lumpy beginnings of her snowman. ‘Do you . . . live up here, then?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ she says with a grin. And when I look into her face, her eyes haven’t lost any of their sparkle. There’s a sort of complicity there. ‘Kirsty,’ she says. ‘Come on.’ She holds out a hand, but the girl won’t be dragged away yet.

  ‘Looks like she’s busy,’ I suggest.