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 organize 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 glance at the lasagna filling the oven with dense grey smoke and thought, hey, it’s takeaways again tonight, kids!, chucked the burning lasagna into 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-Smith 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 keep your windows so smear-free. Everyone’s a Stepford Wife. We have television to thank for explaining to us the importance of germfree, pine-fresh tiles in our lives.
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 white plastic 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 the 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 on to 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 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 build yet another Tesco nobody needed but would soon be hypnotized 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 snooker.
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.
&nb
sp; 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 realize 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 middle of 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.
BRIAN HODGE
Extinctions in Paradise
BRIAN HODGE’S SIXTH novel, Prototype, was published in 1996 and was coincidentally described as “unbearably depressing” by both his editor and Fangoria magazine, although the latter hastened to add: “Prototype is a shattering, sobering novel that transcends the horror genre and provides a terrifying commentary on our own future.” The editor has since left publishing altogether.
Hodge has recently completed a crime novel, Miles to Go Before I Weep, and a dozen of his sixty-some published stories have been collected in The Convulsion Factory, themed around urban decay and offering no easy answers save that cities should perhaps brush after every meal.
Also on the way from Bovine Records (motto: “Destroying music’s future today”) is a chapbook-and-soundtrack combination titled Under the Grind in collaboration with “sludgecore” band Thug, who previously released a sonic version of the author’s 1991 story “Cancer Causes Rats”.
“Like most of my stories,” explains Hodge, “the way ‘Extinctions in Paradise’ came out was mostly a random synergy of where I happened to be personally and aesthetically at the time.
“When Ed Gorman invited me to do a story for Werewolves, I had no interest in approaching it from the standard Larry Talbot scenario. But I’d recently read a sad and wonderful novel called Imagining Argentina, and had been left with an itch to try something more within the magical-realism vein that’s pulsed through much South American literature.
“Maybe a year prior I’d been touched by an article about an elderly photographer who daily set up his antiquated gear near a fountain; in which South American city, I no longer remember. For years I’d read of death squads in Rio de Janeiro killing street kids. I was also in the midst of an ongoing editorial page debate with some Christian fundamentalists, seeing first-hand their mania for distortion of facts in service of their vision of the First Amendment. Then, too, I’d recently gotten Concrete Blonde’s Mexican Moon disc, and kept picturing Johnette Napolitano as Dona Mariana, with that earthy sensuality of hers. I wrote the last few pages listening to ‘Heal It Up’ on infinite repeat – it just seemed to help.
“Six months in either direction and a very different story may have been written. But I like what this one does, and I’m very glad that Ed called when he did.”
THEY KILL CHILDREN HERE. Let me make that clear from the beginning.
In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.
It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated, no one’s really interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades . . . except for a week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge, when the generales often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and, God knows, I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.
“Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the o might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”
“What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.
“El sol, today he is saddened by the newness of autumn, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but still he fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever tears the day called its own pooled only in the thickest of shadows.
I wasn’t the only norteamericano in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.
We talked for a while, then, when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”
“Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.
“One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or . . . how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy gringo.”
I pushed my greying ponytail off my shoulder and smiled for him. The camera resonated with a far more substantial clunk than did the Nikons and Polaroids at my apartment. Pedro straightened – a little – and grinned broadly, a dotty old wizard whom I feared might be the last of his kind.
When I stood at his side again, he patted my mottled arm just below the rolled shirtsleeve, the skin of his hand like a smooth leather glove, dry and comforting. I felt that effortless acceptance that seems to emanate only from the very old, who never feel the need to say anything simply because there is silence. Back in the States we’ve forgotten how to appreciate that.
Pedro and I took seats on a stone bench where we had already passed so many hours, the impressions of our rumps might have been worn into it.
“I saw something strange last night, Pedro,” I said at last. “Down in the alley outside my bedroom window.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding steadily. Waiting.
“Do animals from the jungle ever come this far into the city? I think it was a big cat, or . . . or something like that.”
“Why should it not happen, from time to time? Cunning beasts, they can survive easier in our world than most of us survive in theirs. They are like the children who roam the streets and have no
homes, they reduce life to its simplest term: survival.”
“I just saw it for a few seconds, it looked up at me in my window there. Then it ran.” I didn’t tell him it had been a bad night, that I’d spent two hours or more crying over a bottle of dark rum. “I swear it was holding a hand in its mouth. Severed right above the wrist.” I traced a line across my own to show him.
Pedro frowned. “Well, what can I say? Night can be a fearful time, still, even in the heart of the city. All the gold is gone from the sky, and the shadows have their way with all else. It is the way of night.”
“That wasn’t all. You know the way cat eyes glow green in a flash of light? These didn’t. These glowed red. Like . . .”
“Like a man’s? Ah, well.” Pedro shrugged, with the well-aged wisdom of those who have discovered that the longer they live, the less they’ve really seen. “For every law, something that breaks it. This is the way of the world.”
I came here an expatriot from the States. Never say never, they tell you. But I’m never going back.
You’d hardly recognize me these days from the tiny picture that used to accompany my column in the Chicago Tribune which was syndicated to nearly one hundred dailies. I’ve done a lot of living since that bland little picture was shot, much of it hard, and I see the world through eyes that aren’t necessarily different, just . . . wearier. I used to strike a comfortable balance between cynicism and idealism. But the balance has tilted out of whack since I wrote my last column almost three years ago.
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