Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  I reached for my glass but it was empty.

  ‘I’ll sort us out,’ Mawker said, placing a fat briefcase down by the sofa. ‘I’m spitting feathers myself. I could murder a cup of builder’s.’

  ‘I don’t drink tea,’ I said. ‘Not the sort you like at least.’

  ‘Coffee then. Anything soft?’

  ‘Corporation pop.’

  ‘Water it is,’ he said, clapping his hands together as if he was actually satisfied with that.

  I held mine at arm’s length when he got back. It looked like vodka, but it didn’t have its silky allure. No oily jags on the glass. It was… heavier. I sank it though, and to give him his due, it was good. I held the empty glass out for a refill.

  ‘Do I look like your H2O bitch?’ he asked, but he was smiling, and he fetched me another.

  ‘What are you here for?’ I asked. ‘I no longer own the key to your mother’s chastity belt. I raffled it off on some scuzzy MILF website.’

  Mawker shrugged, mimed something going in one ear and out the other. ‘When you open your mouth I think only of happy things. Gently blowing the seeds from a dandelion clock. Picking a tune out on my uke. Ethiopian coffee.’

  He stood up and riffled through the paperbacks lined up on the bookcase beneath the window. ‘I used to read a lot when I was younger. Before I joined up. Stopped not long after. Fiction didn’t cut it for me any more. It couldn’t… I don’t know… keep up.’

  I nodded and waited. A breath of burnt toast flew into the room. Somewhere a baby was crying. An image struck me of Sarah in her high chair, a wedge of peeled pear in one chubby fist.

  ‘What do you like to read?’ he asked.

  ‘Obituaries. Specifically, yours. It can’t be long now. Look, it’s great that you’ve come for a visit, but I’d rather have rabies. Haven’t you got a job to be getting on with?’

  He looked at me as if a job was some alien thing that he didn’t understand. Then he held up his forefinger. ‘I do. And so do you.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing on at the moment,’ I said.

  ‘You have, if you want it.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He opened his briefcase and dug out a wad of fat folders. The smell of age came with it. I guessed the last person to have leafed through these was now little more than a jumble of bones in an untended grave.

  ‘Fuck off with your cold cases,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you’ll come up with something,’ he said. We both had a laugh at that one. ‘At the least it’ll get your mind active. A way of keeping your hand in.’

  ‘Get my mind active. Like I’m losing my marbles.’

  ‘It’ll keep you distracted.’

  ‘From the drink?’

  ‘Mainly, yes.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not fine. Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately? You look like hammered shit.’

  ‘Five’ll give you ten I got my dick sucked more recently than you did,’ I said.

  ‘When was the last time you ate something?’

  ‘Ask your mother.’

  ‘Joel.’

  ‘Last night,’ I said. ‘I had a curry.’

  He strode to the fridge and pulled out the foil cartons. ‘This?’ he said. He showed me the fur on it. ‘This is a week old. At least.’

  ‘So much can change in just a week,’ I said. But that had rattled me. I was losing time. Great swathes of it.

  ‘Just pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘There are people out there who care for you. Or they would if you’d give them a chance.’

  ‘You need some opening-and-closing-door practice,’ I said. ‘Please… feel free to have a go on mine.’

  He left, closing the door so ridiculously quietly that I had to get up and open it and slam it hard enough to set off a car alarm in the street. That might have been a coincidence but don’t underestimate my powers as a door slammer. At least it would have given Mawker a start. If I was lucky it might have sent his syrup askew.

  I picked up the folder – hating the dry, desiccated feel of it under my fingertips – and tossed it into the paper recycling box under my kitchen sink. I found some olives in the cupboard and made myself a dirty martini and it was the perfect drink, the magical drink, the impossible drink – because IT DID NOT END. And then it was dark and I’d either pissed myself or dropped a drink and I’d rather the former than to have wasted a martini to be honest. And there was a godawful banging at the door or was it in my head? Was it Mawker back already with some more dead files he’d found down the back of his onanist love seat? I got up off the floor and stepped on the martini glass. It crunched and I thought, I’ll clear that up as soon as I’ve hurled Mawker out of the oriel. I didn’t want Mengele hurting himself. And then I skidded on the floorboards, slick with blood, and thought, Christ, he already did, but then I saw I was barefoot and… you get the picture. I didn’t, not immediately, because I was trousered beyond all reason. All I could think was, Nothing good can come of that: a scimitar of glass stuck out of the arch of my left sole.

  The banging intensified. Maybe it was Mr Amorous Pants next door, whose idea of lovemaking was trying to pound his conquests through the lath and plaster and into my flat. I yanked open the door and there were Lorraine Tokuzo and Romy Toussaint. I said something but the words just tumbled from my mouth like so many dead fledglings from a frozen nest. The pair of them looked impossibly scrubbed and pink and healthy: they glowed. And they smelled terrific too, or maybe it was just that next to me, a shit-crammed pig shed on fire would have smelled attractive. Credit to them, they came in despite the miasma. As a friendly gambit I meant to say ‘I suppose a threesome is out of the question’, only it came out: ‘Gaaah…’ and there might have been some sick involved. The both of them said ‘Joel’ in the same way. The kind of sad, defeated way you’d say something to someone who has caused you no end of epic disappointment. There are only two syllables in Joel but this pair made my name go on all day.

  I heard the bath filling; I hadn’t done that. Tokuzo barged past me carrying a large bag of ice cubes from my freezer from way back when. ‘They’re for my martinis,’ I said, only it came out: ‘Dzuuuh…’

  I was on the sofa and Romy had a piece of rare meat in her lap. She was assessing the blade of glass; whether it was safe to remove it. I thought: That should be hurting more than it actually is.

  Romy said: ‘Are there any major blood vessels at the bottom of the foot?’

  I tried to tell her about the large saphenous veins but it came out: ‘Sbmffff…’

  ‘That would only matter if the bastard had a heart,’ Tokuzo said. ‘Just whip it out. If he bleeds to death then that’s just lumpy gravy.’

  I looked down in time to see Romy pull the glass free. There was a queasy sucking sound and it did bleed more but at least I wasn’t hosing. Romy cleaned the wound and applied butterfly closures (‘you really ought to have this stitched’), a wad of gauze and a sock bandage.

  ‘It’s ready,’ Tokuzo said. I didn’t like the words or the way she said them. She and Romy hoisted me upright and led me to the bathroom. There was more ice in the bath than had been needed to down the Titanic.

  ‘Fuck that,’ I said, but it came out: ‘Krnnk…’

  They stripped the robe and the pyjama bottoms off me. I heard Romy’s breath hiss when she saw the map of vivid scars my body had been turned into.

  Tokuzo said: ‘I had no idea you were so far advanced with your sex-change plans.’

  Then they tipped me in.

  I thrashed about, convinced I was having a heart attack, making various noises never before heard in the animal kingdom. They pressed me back in when I scrabbled to get out. I heard a lot of ‘It’s for your own good’ and ‘You brought this upon yourself.’

  After the initial shock had receded (much like my generative ganglia… probably never to be seen again) I calmed down and just lay there, teeth chattering. My head was pounding. I saw the blood that
had rushed to Lorraine’s face (a view that startled me; it was usually what happened to her as she reached climax) drain away. I flinched at Romy’s hand on my shoulder, or rather the sudden realisation that her hand was on my shoulder; she flinched too – perhaps she’d been stroking me since I ‘got into’ the bath.

  I was coaxed out and given a fresh towel. Now I felt pain. Romy helped me hobble towards the sofa. The broken glass and the blood and the vomit had been cleared away. The lights had been turned down. A CD was playing, too low for me to identify it, but the soft, insistent beat and shiver of strings was soothing. I sat on the sofa and Romy changed the dressing on my foot.

  ‘You’ll be lucky if you’ve got away without severing any nerves,’ Lorraine said. ‘You dippy twat.’

  Romy passed me some clean clothes: jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt. I got into them in the bedroom and saw that the bed had been made with fresh sheets. What the fuck was going on? I wasn’t an invalid. Not a total one, anyway.

  ‘It’s called an intervention, Joel,’ Lorraine said, no doubt registering my befuddlement. ‘It’s what happens when idiots like you let themselves go to such staggering extremes. Friends step in and stop you maintaining levels of stupidity that ought to be criminal.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘It speaks,’ Lorraine said. Something was cooking in the kitchen. It smelled great. I felt my taste buds twitch and a huge wash of saliva flooded my mouth. When had I last eaten? I must have been gnawing on something while I was three sheets. Old cheese. Breadcrumbs. Fishbitz. She eventually emerged bearing a bacon sandwich. ‘You didn’t have any ketchup but I’ve put some of chef’s special sauce on there.’

  I laughed at that, despite the headache, and moments later I was staring at an empty plate. I felt suddenly something approaching human again. Romy and Tokuzo moved through the flat carrying two loaded bin bags. They chinked and clinked. It sounded like a recycling plant on collection day. Lorraine caught my gaze and raised an eyebrow as if to say, Just try to stop me.

  I sat with my empty plate until they returned.

  ‘That was a last-time rescue,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’m not getting elbow deep in shit to help you out again. It’s becoming a habit and I won’t have that.’

  She kissed me harshly on the cheek and walked to the door, giving Romy a loaded look as she did so. ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Then you make your own way home.’

  She turned to me. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us look like cunts.’ And then she was gone.

  Romy sat next to me. Mengele jumped up between us and started kneading her thighs, squinting up at her as if he was trying to see through fog. The slut.

  ‘Romy,’ I said.

  ‘Leave it,’ she told me. Her eyes were soft and blameless. She looked so sad. She pressed a small paper envelope into my hands. ‘I don’t think you should be taking these. Probably bad for you. But they’ll help you to sleep.’

  She gently pushed Mengele to one side and stood up. His ears went back, giving him a sudden wild look. Well, wilder look. It was as if he was saying, Aw, come on, Romy, don’t give me the brush-off in front of this prick.

  ‘You fancy going for lunch some time?’ I said, going through the motions. I barely had any energy for myself; how could I possibly exhibit any for her? She saw it too.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Just a bad few days. I’ll be better soon.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Papa says hi.’

  ‘Hi, Papa.’

  After she’d gone I opened the envelope. Two big white pills. Two small yellow. And a note:

  White = painkillers. Take now. Take the others (Valium) before bed. Rx

  I got the analgesics down me and stared out at the lowering afternoon. The sky was the colour of wet metal; it would rain soon, like a bastard.

  I went to my desk. There’s an old bank of index card containers I bought from a library in Friern Barnet when it closed down some years ago. I meant to use them to store the kind of things you need every day: stamps, coins, keys, travel passes, etc. But of course, I ended up filling them with shit. Receipts so old the ink had faded away. Bottle caps. Paper clips, for fuck’s sake. I haven’t used a paper clip in twenty years. I remembered that I also keep bottles of wine in there too. I’m not much of a wine drinker but people tend to like it with a meal so I make sure I keep some lying about. Lorraine had missed this one. A Malbec from Argentina. I set it on the table and admired its colour. In the drawer next to it was a piece of paper so creased and frayed I’d had to put it in a plastic sleeve before it disintegrated. This had been waiting for me in my PO box when I got out of hospital, along with the usual horrors (two pages from a 1999 diary with the words ‘BUSY FUCKING’ scribbled on each day; a small plastic ziplock bag of what looked like eyelashes; a blank cheque pinned to a note asking me to find ‘my misssing muther plz what died two weks ago plz’).

  No return address on this ragged scrap. No contact details of any kind. Written in a very attractive hand. I felt some pride in that, despite the stab of the words. I’d read them so many times I knew them by heart; knew every curlicue, jot and tittle. I’d invested in it the kind of attention a palaeontologist invests in a bone sticking out of a rock in the Jurassic coast. I could have handed it over to Romy to assess, but it didn’t need a genius to read between the lines. Plus, I’d already added a bunch of pathetic footnotes I didn’t particularly want anybody else to see. And the whole sad eyes thing was getting a bit old.

  Dear Joel,1

  Of course, I’m grateful to you for what you did. I guess you saved my life. I just wanted to say thank you and that I’m glad you’re getting better. Seeing you in hospital like that – unconscious, full of tubes and wires, it was horrible2. But I felt I owed you a visit. I think, maybe, we can be friends3. Someday. But not now. Not yet. I’m sorry. I know Mum4 died a long time ago but it’s still raw5 for me. And I can’t just forget what happened next. So, Joel, I will be in touch. Until then, take good care of yourself.

  Regards6,

  Sarah7

  1 Joel? Joel? What the fuck happened to DAD?

  2 It wasn’t exactly a bowl of peaches for me either, poppet.

  3 Friends? WTF?

  4 Mum is it? Not Rebecca?

  5 And my feelings are all so fucking well done, are they?

  6 Re-fucking-gards.

  7 And no fucking kisses. Fuck’s sake.

  But even though I knew it off by heart, I slid it out of the sleeve and held it like a primigravida with a newborn seconds old and I read it again, wanting to somehow feel her through the ink under my fingertips, trigger some unlikely connection. And all I could think about: the bit where there were no footnotes, no sarky comments, no snide asides.

  …I will be in touch.

  3

  I slept well that night, for the first night in months, and I did not have anything to drink. My head thumped, with the dregs of a hangover, with the pressure to return to the bottle. But I poured the wine down the toilet. The sound of it glugging and sluicing away was like some invidious brain worm beseeching me to reconsider in a voice rich with soft plums, blackcurrants and a touch of liquorice. I did some stretching to combat the stiffness in my body where the knife wounds had healed. My physiotherapist had urged me to do this every day, and now, sweating with effort and pain, I wished I had. I felt sure that the livid snakes wound around my flesh would peel away from my body and cause me to bleed to death, but somehow I remained whole.

  I showered under the hottest spray I could tolerate. I changed the dressing on my foot and was pleased to see that it wasn’t as bad as my pissed brain had initially feared. As well as feeding me the previous night, Romy and Lorraine had magicked other things into my fridge and cupboards: fresh eggs, wholemeal bread, yogurt and bananas. I made breakfast from all of that and sank two very strong cups of coffee. I felt my fingertips tingling. I felt something close to human aga
in.

  I switched on the radio and listened to the news. Everything was exactly that: new. I felt like Rip Van Winkle kipping up in the hills, out of it for years. Immigrants swarming into Europe to escape the nightmare of Syria, old-age pensioners going down for planning a diamond heist, a new skyscraper nicknamed the ‘Splinter’ nearing completion in the Square Mile’s den of architectural thuggery.

  I opened all the windows; chill, clean air swept through the flat, clearing away the ghosts. I stared out at the BT tower and imagined myself standing on the top. Somehow that didn’t freak me out as much as trundling around the busy, close streets in the immediate vicinity. I realised I’d been spending a lot of time thinking of height, of rare altitudes and of flying. Despite the cold air I felt sweat prickle in the lines on my forehead. I wasn’t ready to go outside. Not yet.

  I stalked around the flat, feeling panic thicken inside me. I had to go out. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life cooped up inside. I had to work. I had to find Sarah, no matter that I was now ‘Joel’ to her and on a par with some old acquaintance that she might or might not look up again depending on her mood. It was no solace to me that this was a much better situation than that in which she had left me. Back then it had been for good. A permanent arrangement. The letter, though disappointing in so many ways, showed some measure of progress. I had to cling on to that.

  Outside. Come on. Dip your toe. What’s the worst that could happen?

  Instead I went to the kitchen and retrieved the bunch of dead folders from the recycling bin. Keep your mind off. Keep your hand in. There were five folders – old manila jobs (none of this modern funky-coloured business) – stuffed to the point where the seams and folds were beginning to fail. The folders were littered with coffee rings and cigarette burns (they retained that 1980s office smell… a compost of Embassy No. 1, Shake ’n’ Vac, Kiwi shoe polish).