The Killing Jar

by Nicola Monaghan

  He’d always looked out for me. Carrying me home after I’d got beat up that time. The state I was in, watching Mark breathe and thinking he might stop any second, in that state I kidded me-sen I could remember it. Being swept up in his arms and carried all the way home. Course, I couldn’t really recall this. I’d been out cold the whole way home and hadn’t woke up proper for days after, partly cause Frank’d pumped me up with heroin. I thought then how it were a miracle I hadn’t ended up like Mark, hooked on it.

  And I realised the memory of being swept up and looked after wasn’t owt to do with that time he brought me home. It were when he thought we were making a dirty video a few days before, and he’d took me upstairs and we’d had the only kind of sex he seemed to enjoy these days. I couldn’t get my head round all the different Marks what came into my head. It were like he was fifty different people.

  Then I did summat I wouldn’t ever of predicted. I needed peace, that was the problem. And I knew where to get peace, if I wanted to. Always had. I remembered vividly how it’d felt, after I’d got beat up, how the world melted into a happy shiny place and I had no more worries at all.

  I went to the ‘gram and took out some of Mark’s grade one stash. I went through the routine I’d seen him do, so many times, over and over till he didn’t even feel good when he did it no more. I used to wonder if it were the routine of taking smack what people loved so much, the rigmarole of melting the powder on a spoon, of sucking it up with the needle. Of strapping up your arm and pressing on the veins to find one what hadn’t collapsed with it all. The pinch of the needle and that cold rush down your vein, then the hot rush to your head. Course, I knew heroin was addictive as you like, second only to nicotine they reckon. But it struck me there were summat comforting about the mechanics of a fix an-all.

  I took a fresh set of needles Mark’d fetched from the exchange. He was clean living like that at least. He never shared his works. Wouldn’t of dreamed of it. I took a couple of pinches of white powder. It looked like icing sugar. I knew for a fact Mark sometimes used that to cut it with. I’d seen him do it. I wondered what effect that had, shooting up sugar. You’d get some kind of hit, I guessed. You only had to look at kids when they’d ate a lot of sweets to see that. I tied up my arm, looked for veins coming up to meet the headrush I’d soon have. I added a squeeze of lemon juice and some water to the spoon, like I’d seen Mark do so often, and heated it over one of the lights on the hob. The smack dissolved, then the mixture on the spoon rolled and bucked.

  I dipped in the tip of the needle and pulled back the syringe. I watched it fill with the hot liquid, then dumped the spoon on the worktop and smiled. I placed the needle beside my skin, next to the vein what was standing up to attention begging to be used.

  I pushed the syringe down. What’s supposed to happen next is you see your blood rush into the tube, streaking through the thick clear liquid like candy cane. And you push and all the blood and heroin and whatever other shit your dealers cut your stash with goes rushing back into you and you roll back your eyes. When you do it the first few times it’s like having an orgasm. As time wears on, and your veins get all cracked and used up, and your head gets used to the rush of it all, it’s not like cumming at all. It’s more like going to the toilet.

  What actually happened was the liquid rushed down my arm and onto the floor. I never put the needle tip anywhere near that blood vessel, never mind in it. Never really intended to. I wanted to see how close I’d come. I wanted to know if I’d do it.

  I walked back to the living room. There to greet me on the screen was another experiment, another way I was testing me-sen to see how far I could go. But this one wasn’t so cut and dried. I was much more serious about carrying it through.

  All these times Mark and me’d had together came into my head. That first time when we’d halved an E, and he’d said we were drug brothers. It does bond you, rolling together, specially when it’s summat you’ve not done before. We walked up Aspley Lane, into the sunset. And I thought, ‘This is the best feeling ever.’

  I looked at Mark, tried to work out if his breathing was more laboured. Was he going yet? Slipping away? I couldn’t tell. My eyes went all prickly and my mouth was loosening. I wanted to cry. I told me-sen not to feel sorry for the tosser. But that was it, see, I didn’t feel sorry. That wasn’t what I was feeling at all. Summat warm was running from my heart, through my veins. It were a little bit like how you got on ecstasy, loved up. I’d been wrong that my brother was the only person I’d loved proper. What they say about blood being thicker than water, maybes that’s true. Maybes there’s other stuff what’s thicker than the pair of them.

  My thoughts flew back to the day we’d took that E. To the last thing I remember before my brain was changed for good. Me and Mark, behind some bushes somewhere, him wanting to move our relationship on quicker than I did. Where’d we been before that?

  Romeo and Juliet in a school playground, that was it. So romantic. I’d wanted to shout and scream at Romeo when he thought Juliet was dead. She’s not, I would of screamed, if it’d of made any difference. She’s just pretending. But you can’t make no difference in a play. There’s been times I’ve thought the same about life, that it’s like that play and you can’t change owt. Course, that’s right about a play, and the past, but it’s not the same if you’re talking about the future. You can change next year, next week. You can make all the difference to the next few minutes.

  I went upstairs and ripped the clingfilm off the window frames. I flung the windows wide open. I picked up the bowl, then the bucket, and chucked the cyanide out onto the back garden. It wasn’t going to be no good for the plants and insects, but it were the quickest way to get rid on it. I couldn’t feel that bad about it, cause I felt great about not letting Mark die.

  I was still going to run off. I couldn’t stay. It were only a matter of time before I’d succumb to the same painkillers Mark used to make life bearable, and that were against everything I believed. I couldn’t stay and become another sad junkie, one of them wasted zombie people what worshipped Mark cause he sold them a mixture of opium with icing sugar and the odd load of washing powder. Brown, they called it, cause, depending what it were cut with that could be the colour it were.

  Mark’d kill his-sen sooner or later, I knew that. The way I saw it, he had no more chance of getting out alive than that beetle in Mrs I’s jar all them years back. He’d end up going OD on the smack, or get so wasted he choked on his own nasty vomit. But that was down to him. He had plenty of choices, just like I had. I couldn’t carry on screaming at Romeo from the crowd. Telling him not to take the poison. Not when he never took no notice.

  I stood at the door, watching Mark sleep. He shivered a bit, and pulled the quilt tighter round his-sen. He turned onto his back and started snoring. I knew I didn’t have long to sort my shit out then. He was coming up to the surface, a bit slower than usual thanks to what he’d been breathing in when he slept. On the dressing table was one of my rainforest books. I’d brought it up a few nights before to have a good look at. I took the book down off the dresser and jammed it under the door, made sure it wasn’t going to slip closed when I went out. I didn’t want to leave the book but I didn’t have room to take it with me. If I loaded the bag up too heavy I wouldn’t be able to run with it if I had to.

  I looked over at the bed again. Mark made some gargling noise in his sleep, then he snored again.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said. It didn’t seem a big enough word for what I was doing.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It were dark as mud outside, and cold. The kitchen window lit up the garden a bit so’s I could find the spot where my suitcase was buried. As I moved the plant pots, they felt heavier somehow, filled with the lead weight of what I was on with. Bile rose to my throat for about the fifth time in ten minutes, and I was sure I was going to be sick. I swallowed back the burning and dug with my hands. The soil was muddy and cloying. It were all compacted and I couldn’t move it qu
ick enough.

  I went to the outhouse to fetch a shovel, but when I pulled on the door it were locked. I swore, then went in the back door to fetch the key. It wasn’t hanging on the rack with the other keys where it were supposed to be. I looked round the kitchen, through the drawers and under the stuff on the table but it wasn’t nowhere to be found. I swore again, and clonked stuff about. I really felt like I was going to be sick, and my hands were shaking. I felt cold, clammy. And tired. I’d been up half the night watching Mark sleep. But I came to my senses and realised banging about wasn’t going to find me the key, and it might find me a load of trouble instead if Mark woke up.

  I went upstairs then, looked round mine and Mark’s room quick, then the other bedrooms. Even the bathroom, though there wasn’t no reason it’d be there. I couldn’t find it nowhere and could of screamed with frustration. It struck me then that it might of been hid somewhere. That there might of been summat in the shed Mark didn’t want me to see. Fear made its way down my neck and up my arms.

  I crept back into our room, searched through the drawers quiet as I could. I found the key, hiding among Mark’s boxer shorts. It were cold to the touch, and a right fear shot through me with the chill as I picked it up. It were all I could do not to fall right down the stairs in a dead faint, but I made it out to the garden again. I knew it’d be getting light soon, and I was shitting me-sen that Mark’d wake up and find me.

  I pushed the key into the lock, my hand shaking so hard I couldn’t hardly hold onto the bogger. I managed it, but had to push up hard on the handle to straighten it flush so’s the lock’d move. I pulled the door wide. The smell from inside hit me hard. It were rank, the dried blood smell of a butcher’s shop but worse. It were the stink of rotting flesh. I didn’t doubt it.

  I retched as I walked in. The smell was too strong, and I threw up on a rusted up old lawnmower what was sitting there. I pushed past all the junk so’s I could find what was causing the stench. It were one of them situations, the ones where you don’t want to know, you really don’t, but you have to find out. Maybes it went back to that closure bullshit.

  At the back of the outhouse, where the toilet used to be, I could see a black lump of stuff, but it were too dark to make out much more. I remembered we had a torch in there somewhere, and pulled it out from under some gardening tools. I fought my way past all the crap piled up in front, then shone the light over what was there. It were wrapped up in bin bags. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was pierce and rip them open. But I had to. I needed to know.

  As I shone my torch inside the bags and saw what was in them, I let out a yelp. I was sick again then, too quick to move out the way, and I got it all over my shoes. I tried to wipe it off with a bit of the bin bag, then realised what I was doing and threw the manky plastic down.

  In the bags were bits of cut-up dog. Fuck knows what Mark was playing at. Maybes it were practice, training for his stomach. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to go. To get out this shed, and this garden, and this estate, fucking Nottingham and this messed-up life where you could find a butchered dog in the back of your shed and be relieved.

  I grabbed the spade as I left, and didn’t bother locking the door. I dug hard into the ground where my suitcase was, shovelling mud at a rate. Behind me I could hear the outhouse door banging in the wind. I prayed this wouldn’t wake Mark up but I was too out on it to go back and shut it proper. Didn’t have the heart to go nowhere near that shed again if the truth be known. I dug and dug like it were some kind of race to empty the ground. I glanced up at the bedroom from time to time, checking there wasn’t no one watching me. One time, I thought I saw the shadow of a shaved head in the upstairs window and turned sharp to look. But it must of been some kind of hallucination cause when I stared hard, it’d gone.

  I slammed the shovel into the soil round the top of the suitcase. I pulled on the handle hard and the thing began to move. It stuck a third of the way up and I gave it another big tug. It flew out like the soil’d given birth to it. It were there, my way out. I opened up the case and took out the money belts. I strapped them to my body, all the way down from my chest to my hips, wrapping me-sen up like a mummy and pulling my clothes back over the top. I zipped up the bag. My heart was thumping in my chest, hard and scary like when you’ve overdone it with the speed. I felt frozen. I couldn’t go nowhere, I thought. I’d have to tell Mark what’d gone off and hope he’d forgive me. I needed to get out the garden, though, before he saw me and the mess I’d made and came to sort me out. I didn’t want to end up in bin bags at the back of the outhouse.

  The hole I’d used to get in and out Mrs Ivanovich’s garden when I was little was still there. I pushed the suitcase through it and followed. The garden was well different now. It used to be full of grass and wild flowers – Mrs I said it helped with her work, attracted the bugs and creepy crawlies. Now it were cropped as Mark’s head, with similar clumsy bald patches. There was a kids’ slide and swing set. It made me sad that. There was that park in the middle of the close, but I knew these things’d been bought so’s the neighbours’ kids didn’t have to use it. The park was always covered in broken glass, and the swings mashed up or pushed round and round the frame so’s you needed an adult to get them down. Then there were the needles, the discarded works of the people what put food on our table. I could of sicked all that food up, there and then, at the thought of it. It were so different when I was little, even though no time’d passed since in the scheme of things. I used to play on that park all the time, no worries. I virtually lived there that long hot summer before Jon was born, even slept overnight under the climbing frame and didn’t get no hassle.

  This estate wasn’t getting no better, that was for sure. I wanted kids of my own one day. That was one thing I’d learned from that abortion if nowt else. And I didn’t want them here. I didn’t want them to come out me half-Mark, part animal like what he was. I grabbed the handle of my suitcase. It surprised me how hard it were to pull and I thought about leaving it behind. I could do, if I had to, just dump the bogger and run for it. That was why I’d strapped the money bonds all over me-sen. I stood up and looked at the back of what used to be Mrs Ivanovich’s house. It were exactly the same as ourn. Just like all the other shithole houses on our shithole estate. The walls were mud brown and brought to mind pictures of English slums in history books. There was this bit of ground what was concreted right next to the house. Mark and me’d used ourn to have barbecues a couple of times when we were pretending to be a normal couple. There were this waste pipe shot out from the back of the kitchen. I could see our neighbours were up cause water was pouring out on it. Behind me was their outhouse, a place what used to be the property’s only toilet before they modernised us all. Some of the sheds still had the old toilets sitting in the back, not used in all them years. I didn’t know about Mrs Ivanovich’s, but it wasn’t the case with ourn. It might of been useful for Mark if it had of been. He could of used it to flush things away. I shuddered at the thought.

  I was woke up from my daydreams by a loud knock behind me. I jumped and turned. The man from next door was standing at his kitchen window, banging on the glass and making signs at me telling me to clear off.

  ‘I’m fucking going,’ I said, with an enthusiastic two-finger salute thrown in his direction. And I meant it too. I pulled my suitcase behind me. Its wheels snagged in the grass, but it moved more smooth when I got onto the concrete. I headed to the jitty what divided the two houses. This cat was licking its-sen clean in the alley, and I made it squeal and dash away as I trundled my way through at a rate of knots. The wheels of the suitcase made a hell of a racket on the concrete ground. It must of sounded louder to me being how I was dead aware Mark’d be close to waking up.

  The jittyway opened up to the circle of houses. My heart lurched at the thought I was going to walk away from the close when I’d spent my whole life there. It might not of been the best place in the world, but it were home, and about all I knew. As I head
ed up the right-hand curve, I saw that arsey cow from next door but one come out to get the milk. She gave me a dirty look, like she always did. But then she clocked my suitcase and did a double take. She stared at me. For a minute I thought she might shout Mark and tell him I was on my way off. Course, she didn’t. Why would she? She looked me in the eye, half friendly.

  ‘Good fer you, duck,’ she said. And we exchanged smiles for about the first time ever. I knew I was doing the right thing when someone like her confirmed it to me. I couldn’t feel it though. Not quite.

  I made my way round the close, up to the road at the end. That summer I’d been daydreaming about, this little gell’d got killed on that road. She’d got knocked over by a lorry. That was a memory almost as vivid as the ladybirds. They’d been a right fuss about it, and none of my friends were allowed out to play for weeks.

  I cut through the estate, pulling my suitcase behind me. I didn’t dare look back. It struck me how it were much easier than I’d thought it were going to be, leaving. You just had to put one foot in front of the other and keep doing it over and over, and resist the urge to run back where you’ve come from. I thought about places I might go, tried to take my mind off the idea I was going, and off the cold flush I felt on the back of my neck, put there by the thought Mark might grab me from behind any minute. Before I knew it I could see the houses on Strelley Road. Soon there were bus stops, and a supermarket, the nursery school, and a load of other signs of the real world beyond my estate.

  I stood at the thirty-five bus stop, outside Strelley Co-op. I did look back then, staring at the end of Lindfield Road expecting Mark’s screaming shaved head to appear there any second. I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I didn’t know much about the time cept it were early. There wasn’t no point checking the timetable. When you can’t keep a track like that, waiting seems longer, like for ever cause you aren’t there yet and that’s all you’ve got to measure against. I thought about where I’d go, to cheer me-sen up. The Amazon rainforest was a bit of a grand idea, I thought, and I wasn’t sure you could live there. I might have to find a town nearby to live in, somewhere close enough so’s I could walk or cycle to the edge of the forest. Perhaps I’d be able to see it from my window, and the same butterflies would fly past as nested in the trees. I could go round Brazil, travel a bit too. See Rio at carnival, look for the right place to live.