Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  I’ll admit it now. At some point, I lost the plot. I could no longer remember my set routine. Housewifely duties became unfathomable to me. When the alarm went off I would rise and stand at the bedroom window, looking down into the deserted dawn streets, wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing. How to function as a mother and a wife. Was it get up, wash the kids and iron the breakfast, or make dinner, fry the dog and kill the husband? I asked the children, but they didn’t know. Just got frightened and ran to Daddy. Big brave Daddy.

  When Derek came home early one day and told me he was leaving for good, heading off into the sunset with his little Gee Gee, I was heating oil in a copper-bottomed omelette pan. Bad timing, big mistake. The pan left a series of concentric rings on the side of his face, and the oil badly burned his neck. The second time I hit him it dented the back of his head with a crunch, like putting a spoon through a soft-boiled egg. He dropped to his knees in complete surprise and pitched onto his back. I wanted to make sure he was dead, so I cut open a cushion and stuffed his mouth with kapok. I expected my civic-minded neighbours to call the police any minute, complaining of hearing ‘raised voices’, as if such indications of human life should never be given, and I began to panic. I imagined being led away through a crowd of gawping, tutting onlookers to a waiting car. But before agreeing to go with the police, I would tidy up the kitchen and tearfully say goodbye to the children. And I thought to myself, if only one of you could have met me halfway, just to show that you cared, I wouldn’t have had to murder someone. But I had, and he was lying on the kitchen floor, a halo of coagulating blood expanding on the diamond tiles, and I had to do something about it.

  So I put him in a bin bag.

  Well, not one, about three, but it wasn’t at all difficult. I did it without thinking, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Derek wasn’t a large man, and I was used to manhandling sacks of rubbish, and before the kids were back from school I had him trussed up by the back door ready for collection. I squeegeed up the blood, rinsed the mop and replaced it, then showered and changed and came back downstairs just as Jason walked in, asking what was for dinner.

  That night after the kids were in bed I entered the garage from the house, put the bin bags in the Renault and drove over to the edge of the estate, where there was a gravel pit that the council were landfilling so they could built yet another Tesco nobody needed but would soon be hypnotised into using. I dragged the bag across the back of the carpark and gave it a good shove down into the pit, then kicked a load of rubbish on top of it. Then I went home and watched ‘The Late Show’.

  I didn’t plan any of this, you understand. I simply acted without thinking about it. The police would turn up and arrest me and that would be that.

  But they didn’t. The next morning, Derek’s office called to find out where he was, and I told them I had no idea. The kids asked in a half-hearted way, and I told them the same thing.

  I didn’t go to the police and report him missing, because if they came calling I knew I could say he’d run off with his mistress. Instead I opened a fresh bottle of rum, got pissed watching ‘Pebble Mill’, and got away with murder.

  When I was a little girl, I believed that you got what you deserved. If you were very good, you were rewarded with a lovely house, a husband and children. If you were disobedient, you would never meet anyone and die a bitter, loveless death. Now I know that it’s the other way around; you get what you don’t deserve. And I didn’t deserve this frozen life where my days are all the same.

  Oh, but they are. You think they should be different since I murdered my husband? And you wonder why I chose to confess to you?

  Well, because I only just made the murder part up.

  I didn’t really kill Derek, even though I had the opportunity. He’s still alive. We did have a row about his fancy woman, but he promised to put an end to the relationship. He hasn’t, of course. And I missed my chance to conk him on the head.

  But it’s always there in the back of my mind, the knowledge that one day I might just go berserk with the Black & Decker. Hack his dick off, saw the dog in half, drink rat poison and set fire to the house while the children are in bed. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and watch them all sleeping, and I wonder if they realise how much danger they’re in. I stand above Derek as he snores lightly, his head buried deep in the pillow, and I want to pour lighted petrol into his mouth.

  Each day they bring themselves closer to a reckoning with me. And they have no idea, because our days are all the same. Soon there’ll be screams in the night, power knives, lamps being overturned, doors slamming, flames and madness.

  Or perhaps there won’t.

  I have to go, my husband will be home from work soon and the dinner isn’t on. I don’t know why you wanted to interview me, anyway. I’m just like everyone else around here – more so. I’m the most boring woman in the world.

  At the moment.

  The Unreliable History Of Plaster City

  * * *

  The history of a small American town may only span a couple of centuries, but it’s liable to be a colourful one. It may be peppered with those By-Jiminy tall tales beloved by settlers, marked for infamy by white supremacists or born-again fanatics – or steeped in the kind of supernatural shenanigans that seem so appropriate to wide, western spaces. This is my venture into Stephen King territory.

  WHEN OTIS DAGG decided to swat blackflies from the wall of his motel room he shouldn’t have used the butt of a loaded twelve-bore shotgun, because the damned thing went off and some of the pellets perforated the plasterboard room divider, rupturing the left eardrum of the woman next door. Her name was Betty Segal, and she’d been resting her head against the wall watching a game show, trying to think of a six-letter country beginning with M and waiting to see who’d won two weeks of amoebic dysentery in Mexico, when suddenly she found herself smothered in specks of blood, and buzzing in the ears like a nest of pissed-off hornets had been tipped over her head.

  It took Betty a while to figure out what had happened, but when she finally did she went even crazier, physically attacking poor confused Otis, who was still casting puzzled glances from the end of his gun to the ragged hole in the wall when she burst screaming into his room like a Valkyrie in a nylon housecoat. She managed to bite him on the face a couple of times before one of the porters pulled her off, and later successfully sued his ass in a brief but embarrassingly ugly court case.

  Naturally, Otis didn’t have too much to lose – he wouldn’t have been staying in a joint called the Forty Winks Motor Lodge if he had – but he skipped town at the first available opportunity just to get away from the Neanderthal brothers of the woman he had rendered deaf, both of whom looked like members of the World Wrestling Foundation and had threatened to tear his arms off if he failed to meet his payments. Since Otis Dagg didn’t hang around long enough to cough up any compensation money, the court took away the only piece of property he owned, a small clapboard building with a collapsed front porch that stood at a crossroads in the industrial end of a small town called Plaster City, 217 miles from Los Angeles, and they granted the deeds to Betty Segal.

  Betty had spent all her adult life in a trailer park and the prospect of living in something that didn’t have wheels appealed to her, so she moved in. She passed her time happily there, leaning out of the slanting porch window to watch the trucks roar by, and eventually compounded this pleasure by finding a man uglier, deafer and richer than herself to marry. Tony Marco sponsored the local basketball team and made his money in the furniture trade, so when he rebuilt the old Dagg property he turned it into the only furniture store in the area that had a full-sized basketball court in the car park. The parents of the players attending Plaster City Junior High could often be seen leaving after a game with armoires and dining chairs loaded into their station wagons, and pretty soon the old store sold anything you could name, provided there was a demand for the item and it could be turned around for
a profit.

  And so it was that, twenty-two years later, after a spectacular vein-ripping heart attack had slam-dunked Tony Marco out of life’s final quarter, his widow took to her room above the store and left the daily running of her business in the hands of an experienced manager who had recently relocated from San Diego.

  The manager was a tall, stooped man with narrow eyes and an uncomfortably furtive attitude that made his customers think he was in the Witness Protection Programme. His name was Taylor Hollings.

  By this time the property sported a large red and yellow plastic sign reading VALURAMA, which sounded more like a Hindu god than a discount furniture store, and until 1987 it functioned as the Plaster City equivalent of a shopping mall. Extensions had been added to the front and back in violation of every known zoning law, which was okay because the councillors all shopped at Taylor’s store and knew that if they complained about what he was doing with the property he’d accidentally cease to stock their favourite monthly magazines. Business was good and life went on, most of it bypassing Plaster City completely and barely bothering to call in at any other town before hitting the West Coast.

  Taylor met a widow called Barbara Stokely, who was driving through in a beat-up Oldsmobile Cutlass one summer and made the mistake of stopping for gas and directions. Something in the store window caught her eye, Taylor probably, and she married him and pretty soon had three kids, Big Joey, David and, with a sigh of relief, Julie. Shortly after this her biological clock threw a cog and she became tranquilliser-dependent. But in the meantime there were golden years, while her three children grew up in and around the old store.

  To an impressionable youngster the place was a spidery Xanadu, filled with corridors that led nowhere and storerooms full of forgotten end-of-line items, stuff that didn’t sell and hadn’t been returned. Behind the stacked boudoir chairs and plastic-covered vanity bureaux were all manner of hidden delights: X-ray goggles, Aurora model kits and packets of dried sea monkeys, BB guns and useless boxes of magnets, Hallowe’en masks, back issues of Aquaman and Famous Monsters Of Filmland, and giant weather balloons that no one knew how to inflate. The building even provided its own scary monster in the form of old Mrs Marco, still deaf, still crazy and still living in the room at the top of the house. Barbara fed her and changed the bed, and the children took turns to visit her in the evenings, but the room smelled of piss and lavender and she never did anything except complain about the weather and how terrible the TV shows were and what a lousy hand life had dealt her, so going upstairs to see her became something of a reverse lottery.

  David Hollings used the make-believe possibilities of the furniture store more than anyone else in the family. Although he hero worshipped his older brother, Big Joey was practical and unimaginative and spent his spare time helping their father with deliveries, and Julie was an asthmatic china doll who wasn’t allowed to play near dust, which ruled out all of the downstairs storerooms.

  It was a lucky thing David enjoyed staging complex battles in the labyrinthine depository, as Plaster City had little else to offer a hyperactive child. It wasn’t a proper country town with a summer creek you could jump into from a rope and winter hills designed for tobogganing. The only river ran past a factory that made rubber grommets for faucets, and nothing with a central nervous system could survive in it for long. There was a large, perpetually arid park, mainly used by Mexican families for barbeques, and a lookout point that didn’t look out over anything and should have been renamed Drop Point, considering the amount of dope that changed hands out there. This was where most of the town’s kids went to lose their virginity, and on Sunday mornings the grass around the car park was slick with knotted condoms.

  More than anything Plaster City was like a suburb, but there was no nearby metropolis to which it could attach itself. For many years the nearest place with a population of over five thousand was Bakersfield, and that was a damned long way off. Every August, choking grey dust blew in from the distant fields, and the furniture store became Flies-R-Us. Every January, shiny new snow-ploughs came out to clear the streets, only to return to their garages when the powder failed to settle. Still, there was always religion to keep idle souls occupied. Plaster City was a Baptist town with a vengeance. It seemed like there were more churches than any other kind of building and twice as many preachers as believers. Everyone could offer an explanation for the extreme zeal of the religious community, but no two explanations were the same. Some said the area had once been designated a holy ground, but if there was any evidence of this, it had long since been covered over.

  At some point in the early eighties the main street became notably more prosperous as the chain stores moved in and VALURAMA became as anachronistic as a tram token, a twilight zone of a store, in which you half expected to find old geezers playing checkers on a cracker barrel, now stranded between a pair of mammoth glass and chrome retail outlets staffed by relocated New Yorkers.

  Those were the bad years, when the old customers died and moved away, and business dried up like a high-season river bed. Taylor lost weight and developed a peptic ulcer. Barbara cried all the time. The store seemed to shrink in the shadow of its competition, and the children, now teenagers, grew claustrophobic and trapped and angry with each other.

  Two days after his eighteenth birthday David left home, but he didn’t leave town. Los Angeles was just too big a jump and there was nothing much else on either side of the freeway to interest him so he stayed on, renting an apartment with an old school friend over near the freight yard on the other side of town. He told himself that he hated the idea of not being near his brother, and Julie needed him to help her out with homework. But he also knew the truth, which was that he felt safe here, in a place he understood, in a town that underpinned his life.

  By this time, Plaster City was in danger of turning into a real one. It was nearly ready to be designated one of the new edge cities, racially integrated and classless, vaguely liberal, slowly replacing its farm hands with computer punchers. Property developers built a kind of yuppie Olympic village called Greymeadow at the edge of town, and then came a mall that had Tower Records and Sharper Image and Radio Shack and an ice rink, and soon the main street began to look just like everywhere else. David was nineteen years old and working in his father’s store when his life arrived at its purpose and conclusion.

  The most famous thing about Plaster City is that Ethel Merman once made a phone call from there when her car broke down. She probably couldn’t get out of town fast enough. Back in the sixties there was nothing to see but a main street composed of the usual mix, dry-cleaner’s, food store, garage, diner, and rows of neat ranch-style houses with carports, yapping hounds and lawn sprinklers. On the road out of town a crazy old guy called Elmer Boricswyn had spent his retirement years building the House Of Mud, a grotesque clay outhouse studded with thousands of crimped bottle tops that he charged people two bucks each to photograph. According to Elmer, whose conversational English was exactly like that of Mr Rogers, it was the only one of its kind in the entire state. When you saw it, you had to ask yourself if you were entirely surprised.

  The nearest thing Plaster City had to a nightclub was the Hot Spot, a joint appropriately situated down by the coach station in an area that boasted a lone Catholic mission run by Mexican nuns, an old wino called Stick who lived in an abandoned dumpster and spent his days outside the truck depot telling people he could talk to the devil, a couple of seventies time-warp topless bars, one of which was actually, honest to God, called the Boom-Boom Room, and a single adult book store populated by perspiring kids with poorly forged IDs.

  The neon sign outside the Hot Spot showed the profile of a woman poised with a phallic cigarette holder, and the name of the place uncurled as if she’d just blown it out in a puff of smoke – real sophisticated stuff. David had been there a couple of times with his roommate. Brett wasn’t a very social guy. He spent most of his time watching uncut horror videos and hardly ever went out, except to
go to the Safeway for beer and to hide when his creepy mother came by to leave him some money and see if he was okay. David had never been invited into his room, which was fine because he probably had a dead body in there or something. Brett was kind of involved in a romantic relationship. He dated a tiny blonde girl with a squeaky voice who lived outside Phoenix on the Gila Bend Indian Reservation, where she was studying anthropology, and as the Colorado Desert stood between her and Plaster City they didn’t get to see a whole lot of each other.

  Thinking about it later that night, David was careful to recall every detail of that freezing Saturday in late October. It was a couple of weeks before the bad weather settled in, and he and Brett had been drinking in a fake Western bar called the Twisted Wheel over on Third and University (typically there was no university on University, just like there was no plaster industry and it wasn’t a city). The Just Say No To Alcohol campaign hadn’t made its mark in town – everyone was still slamming the stuff back as though the end of the world had been scheduled for a midweek appearance. The two young men recognised everyone’s faces in the Twisted Wheel and, worse still, were recognised in turn, so they decided to head over to the Hot Spot, where there might just be someone from out of town on the dance floor.

  Brett was a year older and a foot taller than David, with the burnished complexion you get from using too much spot cleanser and the kind of thin sandy hair that leaves you semibald by the age of twenty-five. He could always be spotted across a crowded bar because his wardrobe consisted of fluorescent tour shirts advertising bands he had never heard of, let alone seen. He worked for a company that made portable office partitions, so if you rented floor space and didn’t want to sit looking at the guy next to you, you’d call up Brett and someone would come and construct these chipboard dividers to cut you off. The company motto was something like ‘Integrated Wall Systems For A Divided Environment’, but only David could see the sad side of it.