Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  Ginansia’s worst fears were realised as the soup plates were efficiently replaced by steaming platters of grey stew. Nausea caressed her belly as she recalled uncaulking the steaming kitchen pots. Carapace, a lump of gristle already pendent from his fork, spoke out.

  ‘My Lord, Ladies, Your Grace, you might well be wondering how I come to be seated here at table with the princess.’ He lowered his fork in the ensuing uncomfortable silence. ‘The fact is that Ginansia agreed to my terms on the fulfilment of a certain condition. Namely, that I should enter the dungeons below us –’ a silence deeper and more horrible than the previous one ensued – ‘and free the prisoners held therein.’ He looked around the table, confronting a set of stony glares. ‘You all know the purpose of penning up those poor unfortunates, even if you prefer to turn a blind eye.’ He paused for dramatic effect before preparing to deliver his bombshell. Even now, those prisoners were presumably burrowing up toward the Dining Hall and were about to burst through the doors. He could not know that Fumblegut had successfully halted the mass escape by flooding a section of the dungeon passage. Carapace held the sweetness of the moment. ‘But,’ he was about to say, ‘there is one prisoner kept in a solitary cell whose flesh is not for the delectation of his betters.’ Indeed not, for at the far end of the dungeon he had discovered none other than Ginansia’s real father, the Pater Moribund himself. Carapace slid the meat-laden fork into his mouth, savouring the taste of victory.

  The earl was an ambitious man. He had affected to enjoy Scarabold’s company so that he might receive the attentions of his stepdaughter. But his discovery opened up another possibility; by revealing that the Great Wound had locked away his rival and lied to his family, he would earn Ginansia’s gratitude and Scarabold’s enmity, both of them desirable commodities. Better still, he would shatter the family Bayne forever, watching as it descended into a bitter web of hatred, suspicion and treachery.

  ‘Now I am able to reveal the truth,’ boasted Carapace, chewing slowly. He took a sip of cloudy water, enjoying the looks of puzzlement that surrounded him. Revenge was truly a dish best served cold.

  But not served as stew.

  For suddenly he began to cough, then to choke, and then to scream out. And thick dark blood started to stream from his ears. Everyone watched in horror except Leperdandy, who stared down at his plate. The powder he had removed from Fangle’s poison cabinet had been liberally shaken over Carapace’s dinner plate. Poison dusted his cutlery and glittered at the rim of his water glass. And what an awful poison it was, capable of causing epilepsy in a month-old corpse as it dissolved each internal organ. Leperdandy had won a terrible, bloody revenge for himself and Ginansia. Now there would be no dynastic alliance, no deflowering ceremony, no reconciliation with his elders. Scarabold would no longer see him as an ineffectual fop but as a powerful political force to be reckoned with.

  Things would have to change.

  He smiled to himself as the earl sprayed gouts of blood about the place before vanishing backwards beneath the table with a disgusting gurgle. Silence fell once more as Ginansia gingerly raised the tablecloth and stared slack mouthed at the cascading blood fountain that had been the Beetle Lord until a few seconds ago.

  Leperdandy had prepared a short speech to explain Carapace’s alarming demise. He caught Scarabold’s good eye and was momentarily shaken by the Great Wound’s odd reaction.

  The king was smiling.

  Then he lowered his fork once more, dug into a mound of streaky red meat and shovelled the lot into his mouth. ‘Well,’ he burbled, speaking through fat and gristle, ‘it’s a bloody shame the earl got took sick. I wouldn’t touch his portion if I were you. S’pose we’ll never know what he was going to talk to us about.’

  Leperdandy sat back, appalled. What had he missed? Where had he gone wrong? Scarabold was pleased to see the earl murdered and clearly wasn’t prepared to be bothered with details. Slowly the suspicion dawned on him that someone else’s plot had interfered with his own.

  The Great Wound sat back and chewed happily. His kingdom was safe and sound once more. Carapace had discovered the truth about the pater, but fate had lowered her ebony wings across his path, bearing him away into a land of eternal night. There was no need for the others to know that the old king still lived. He glanced absently about the table, wondering which of them had done the murderous deed. But what did it matter, so long as life continued without change?

  In Britannica Castle that terrible stormy night, Ginansia howled in rage and grief, Leperdandy was tangled in sheets of nightmare guilt, and the king slumbered peacefully on, his log-saw snores shattering the nerves of his two exhausted wives and just about everyone else within earshot.

  The Most Boring Woman In The World

  * * *

  There’s an advertisement for running shoes or sausages or something that reads, ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else.’ Surely most people are anyway. J G Ballard was once described thus: ‘He doesn’t care where he lives, because he lives inside his head.’ It’s impossible to know what others are thinking, or whether their self-evaluations are accurate. That gap in perception gave me this, which led in turn to my most recent novel, Psychoville.

  I CAN’T IMAGINE why you’d want to interview me, I’m the most boring woman in the world.

  I’m nobody. Nothing interesting ever happens in my life. I live in a house like thousands of others, in a banjo crescent called Wellington Close in a suburban part of South London, in a semidetached with three bedrooms and a garden filled with neatly pruned roses that have no scent and a lawn covered with broken plastic children’s toys. I have a labrador called Blackie, two children, Jason and Emma, and a husband called Derek. I keep my clothesline filled and my upstairs curtains closed (to protect the carpets from the sun – blue fades easily) and my days are all the same.

  Derek works for a company that supplies most of Southern England with nonflammable sofa kapok. I met him when I was a secretary at Mono Foods, where he was senior floor manager. One afternoon he came by my desk and asked me out to the pub. I’ll always remember it because he drank eight pints of lager to my three Babychams and I’d never met anyone with that much money before. Six weeks later he proposed. We were married the following June and spent two weeks on the Costa where I picked up a painful crimson rash on the beach and had to be hospitalised in a clinic for skin disorders.

  Before that? Well, nothing much to report. I was a happy child. People always say that, don’t they? My older brother, to whom I was devoted, died in a motorbike accident when a dog ran out in front of him, and at the funeral they muddled his cremation with someone else’s, an old lady’s, so that we got the wrong urns and her family were very upset. Also, the dog was put down. Things like that were always happening in our family. On Christmas Eve 1969, my father got completely drunk, fell down the coal-hole chute and landed in the cellar, and nobody found him until Boxing Day. His right leg didn’t knit properly so he had to walk with a stick. One day the stick got stuck in a drainage grating, and he had a heart attack trying to pull it out. My mother passed on a few weeks later. They say one often follows the other, don’t they? I lost a cousin around the same time, when a gas tap jammed in a Portuguese holiday villa.

  No such calamities ever occur now. Now my days are all the same.

  When I was young I was a pretty girl, with straight white teeth and hair that framed my face like curls of country butter, but I didn’t know I was pretty until I was thirteen, when John Percy from three doors down tried to rape me in exchange for a Chad Valley Give-A-Show projector. I told my mother and she went over to the Percy house. They moved away soon after. They had to. John came around and hit me when I opened the front door to him. He broke my nose, and I wasn’t so pretty after that.

  When I was sixteen I wanted to go to art college, I wanted to be an artist, but my father said there was no call for it and I would be better off in an office. So I went to work for Mono Foods, met Derek, got married. I didn’t have to or
anything, it just felt like the right tiling to do. He seemed interested in me, and nobody else was, so I said yes. My father joked about it being a relief to get me off his hands, but he wasn’t really joking.

  For a while we moved in with Derek’s mother, but that didn’t work out because she hated me for taking away her son and stood over me in the kitchen while I cooked, saying things like, ‘That isn’t how he likes his eggs,’ until I felt like strangling her. Then I fell pregnant and we moved here. We put her in a very nice old folks’ home, but the first night she was there she wrote and told me I was cursed for stealing her boy, that she was going to die and that it would be on my conscience forever.

  The awful thing was that she had a stroke that night and died, and I had to go into therapy. Derek took his mother’s side, and while he didn’t actually call me a murderer to my face, I knew that was what he was thinking.

  Since then I always joke that I’m not addicted to Valium, I just like the taste.

  My days are all the same.

  Here’s my routine:

  The white plastic radio alarm goes off at seven-fifteen. The DJ makes jokes about the day’s newspaper headlines as I rise and slip into a powder-blue dressing gown covered in little pink flowers. I’ll have been awake since five, lying on my back listening to the ticking of the pipes as the boiler thermostat comes on. Derek sleeps through the alarm. I wake him and he totters off to the bathroom moaning about his workload and complaining about people at the office I’ve never heard of because I’m just a silly housewife who can’t retain any information that isn’t about the price of fucking washing powder.

  I drag the children out of their beds and pack them off to wash and dress, make them breakfast (cereal and toast in the summer, porridge in the winter), check that they’re presentable and send them to school. Derek usually finds something to bitch about, like I’ve ironed his shirt with the creases going in the wrong direction or there’s a button missing from his braces, and tuts and fuffs until I sort out the problem. Then he takes the Vauxhall, leaves me the Renault and the house falls silent. And I sit down with a cigarette, a nice glass of Scotch and a Valium.

  They don’t know I smoke. I have to wash the ashtrays and open the windows before the kids get back.

  During the day all sorts of exciting things happen. Last Tuesday the knob came off the tumble dryer, on Thursday next door’s cat nearly got run over, and on Friday I found out that my husband was having an affair. Her name is Georgina. She works in his department. His pet name for her is ‘my little Gee Gee’, and she explains all of the awkward, stilted phone calls that take place here in the evenings. If you’re going to have an affair it’s a good idea to remember to empty the pockets of your trousers before you give them to me for dry-cleaning, that’s all I can say.

  I don’t get on with the neighbours. The stuck-up bitch next door won’t talk to me because I once got a little soused in the middle of the day and fell into her fishpond. Sometimes I sit in the car and rev the engine just to blow smoke over her washing.

  Jason and Emma come home and lie on the floor on their stomachs in that curiously impossible position children use for watching television. They remain glued to cartoons, space serials and Save The Fucking Zebra updates, all presented by some perky fresh-faced teenager I’d secretly like to ride naked.

  I cook. I make sausage, egg and beans with chips, and fishfingers with chips, and beefburgers with chips, and chop, chips and peas. Everything comes with chips at number 11 Wellington Close. I’m the only one who doesn’t like chips. I’d like to cook langoustine swimming in garlic, loup grillé with capers and shallots. But you can’t get langoustine around here, just doigts de poisson avec frites.

  I don’t eat with the others. After the smell of frying has permeated my clothes I’m no longer hungry. I have a brandy. I keep a bottle at the back of the sink. Sometimes Derek comes into the kitchen to refill the saltcellar and finds me on all fours with my head somewhere near the U-bend, and I tell him that the waste disposal is playing up again.

  Then I clear away the dinner things while Derek provides more news about the people he works with and who, for me, only exist as a series of names with personality quirks attached. The Byzantine intrigue of the sofa kapok world is such that if Lucrezia Borgia applied for a job she’d barely make a secretarial position.

  I don’t wash up very well. By now the kids are yelling and I’m getting jumpy. Anything I drop goes in the bin. Nobody notices. Nobody notices anything. My days are all the same. I listen to the pounding in my head and watch as the lounge fills up with blood. You can’t see the telly when there’s blood in the way.

  At the weekend I go shopping. Sometimes I go shopping in my mind, but I don’t come back with anything. Oh, how we love to shop! B&Q, M&S, Safeway, Tesco, Homebase, Knickerbox, Body Shop, we just wander around lost in amazement at the sheer choice and ready availability of luxury products at the end of the twentieth century. If the excitement was running any higher it would be leaking from our arseholes. Derek doesn’t come with us, of course; he stays behind at the house to creep around making furtive phone calls from the bedroom. He says he’s ‘doing the accounts’, presumably a coded phrase that means ‘telephoning the trollop’.

  On Sunday mornings we rise later than usual and I prepare a cooked breakfast before Derek heaves his flabby body from the chair and chooses between the pastimes of straightening up the garden and hoovering his floozie’s hairpins from the car. Do they still have hairpins? I can’t remember the last time I saw one. There are so many things you don’t see any more. Those little pieces of green string with metal rods at either end that used to hold bits of paper together. Animal-shaped Peak Freen biscuits. Jubblies, sherbet dabs and Jamboree Bags. You never see any of them any more. Instead I see the white plastic radio alarm clock and the powder-blue dressing gown and the hairs on Derek’s indifferently turned back.

  The first time I took speed I got all the housework done in under an hour. It was great. But I felt so tired afterwards that I couldn’t cook, and Derek had to go and buy us all fish and chips. Speed helped me to organise the household. Thanks to the speed, which I got in the form of prescription diet pills, I not only started collecting money-off coupons, I catalogued them all in little boxes according to date, value and type of offer. I just never got around to using any of them.

  I have never hit my children. Not even when I caught Jason smoking in the toilet and he was abusive. It would have been hypocritical of me. Is punching hitting? Sometimes I don’t remember things very well. I have lapses. Little bits of housewife downtime. Sometimes the children tell me I did something when I’m sure I didn’t. The dog won’t come near me any more, and I think it’s something to do with one of those vanished moments. I think I fed Blackie something bad.

  When we argue, which is quite often these days, Derek always tells me that I never learn. I try to learn, but it’s hard to get motivated when you’re alone all day and you know exactly what’s going to happen from the minute the white plastic radio alarm goes off until the time you set it again at night. I don’t like the nights. It’s when I feel most alone. We go to bed, read magazines and sleep, but we don’t speak. I lie there listening. Derek’s furry back is turned away from me, the children are unconscious, the streets outside are black and silent. It’s like being dead, or being buried alive, or some damned thing.

  Wait, here’s something new I learned. Cocaine, Valium and Lamb’s Navy Rum don’t mix at all well. I got the cocaine from a man at the shopping centre because I’d just had a huge fight with Derek and it seemed like a good angry response to his wheedling, wide-eyed denials. I’d already drunk half the bottle of rum to get my nerve up, and the Valium was a matter of habit. I opened the little paper packet of coke and chopped it finely on the breadboard with my M&S card, then snorted it up through a Ronald McDonald straw. The kids were in the lounge watching adults get green slime tipped over their heads on TV, and I was off my face in the kitchen. I threw a careless glanc
e at the lasagna filling the oven with dense grey smoke and thought, hey, it’s takeaways again tonight, kids!, chucked the burning lasagna in the dog’s bowl and crawled under the sink for another hit of rum. Derek was at the office ‘attending an extracurricular staff meeting’, which roughly translated as ‘bunging the bimbo one in the photocopying room’, and I no longer gave a toss about the world or anything in it.

  I love my children because they’re my flesh and blood. But I don’t really like them. Jason, without intending to, has learned to be sly and grasping and is already watching his father for tips at gaining a better foothold on the easy life. Emma is, well, bovine is too unkind a word. Slow to catch on, shall we say. She stares slackly with eyes like chips of glass and only becomes animated before certain TV programmes. These children are from me, but not of me. Each day they become a little more like Martians, shifting away from my embrace with each incomprehensible new habit learned in the school playground. And as their language grows more alien, as the cults and rituals they design to be misconstrued by adults grow more elaborate, I lose them a little more each day, meal time by meal time. Every mother knows that her children eventually leave. I just hadn’t expected the process to start so fucking early.

  Derek works on winning the kids over to his side, of course. He can only allow himself to be seen as a hero. He teams up with them against me. Fathers often do that. Nice habit.

  The house is quiet now. But then, it always was quiet. Our fights were conducted in a series of controlled explosions that wouldn’t wake the children, muted insults escaping like hisses of steam.

  It was important to Derek that we also presented a unified, peaceful front to the neighbours. It didn’t take them long to cotton on, of course. The bin bags filled with bottles were a giveaway. Well, Mr and Mrs Rodney Boreham-Stiff next door can go and fuck themselves as far as I’m concerned. They’re dead from the wallet up, like everyone else around here; you want to talk about politics or art, they want to ask you how you get your windows so clean. Everyone’s a Stepford Wife. We have television to thank for explaining to us the importance of germ-free, pine-fresh tiles in our lives.