by Joe Stretch
Afterwards, at the clinic, it was the sound of wails that woke Rebecca. It was minutes before she recognised them as her own. The anaesthetic wore thin and a nurse smiled above her. Women lay in silence on each adjacent bed. Some stared at magazines; crisp, old and hardly held by their hands. One woman held a lipstick and seemed to contemplate applying a coat. But what was the point? Rebecca watched as the scarlet stick was wound down and discarded. It was then that she decided: never again. Nature was talking. Not dead after all. Rebecca pictured her womb, disgruntled and suddenly emptied, its contents sucked out and flushed to God knows where. Never again.
Things were already moving beyond the control of her and Justin. Antiporn protested at the clinic’s gates. Rebecca had to barge through placards and loud screams. Women with faces full of shadows grabbed her clothing. Women with colourless hair and old coats. Appalled at the concept of abortions carried out just for fun. Some placards even mentioned newsex.biz. Rebecca’s deceit began that day.
A month later she and Justin conceived. Justin had been identified as the boy behind the website. There were reporters outside the house. As the test turned blue, Justin talked of unseen life, of happiness, of answers, finally. After all the prostitutes, domination, dogging, Gandhi-shagging, celebrities, the various probes and gangbangs. Happiness, finally. He looked out of the window, prompting an explosion of bright camera flashes from the pavement below. Rebecca left, to abort it, she said. But instead she walked home and wept.
On the bathroom floor, Rebecca tries to turn on to her side. The rat poison is paddling now, encircled by her blood. She thinks of Justin. Was it love all along? He’s hounded constantly nowadays, by the media and by Frank. She sees him too rarely. She needs to see him. She needs him now because she is bleeding to death. Their child presumably dead inside her.
It was this afternoon that Colin discovered her secret. Rebecca had tried to remain clothed as he made his usual manic advances. The strange hoots and groans that always precede their sex. For Justin, all this for Justin? I’m an idiot, Rebecca thought. I’m a fucking idiot. She was surprised when Colin demanded that she took off all her clothes. ‘Get rid of them,’ he shouted, tugging at her blouse. To Rebecca it seemed antique to shrug her garments off. But it seems a fondness for nudity survives in this era of new sex. Colin began tearing at her clothing, pulling at it until the seams began to break. He couldn’t be stopped. It wasn’t long before he ripped off her blouse to reveal her round stomach. Their eyes met. Both hearts sank.
‘It’s Justin’s,’ Rebecca said immediately, gathering up her limbs and making naked for the door. ‘I love him,’ she added, turning back to Colin as she left. ‘I really love him.’
That’s when Colin turned blue. When the rats retreated. When the air suddenly dried. The screwed-up structures began to unfold; detritus came to life. Pizza boxes flexing into something like their original form. Beer cans unscrunching with loud scraping sounds. Colin’s shoulders hunched as if wings were sprouting from his back in an agonising but ecstatic metamorphosis. His lips curled and his mouth made a distant sound, as if his voice was coming from a gnarled recess at the bottom of his diaphragm, echoing up his throat, over his tongue and barely tapping at the sound barrier.
‘But I was becoming happy,’ he said.
‘It’s getting out of hand.’ Rebecca’s voice was an attempt at calm. It had an American inflection, as if by imitating a mainstream culture the situation could be diffused.
‘We’ve failed,’ said Colin, softly. ‘And it’s time to get extremely boring.’
At this point, he ran to Rebecca and punched her several times hard in the face. He knocked out a tooth, the blood on his knuckles confused itself with the blood that poured instantly from her soft face. She couldn’t struggle, she just fumbled amid the shock of painless punches. She hit the floor; the jigsaw was being dismantled, every piece separated and scattered.
In the course of the beating she was dragged here, to the bathroom, underneath the sink where she now lies. It is only now, having been beaten to the creosoted touchline of consciousness, that Rebecca realises that lately she’s been living in a trance. Her ear rests on the wet red of the bathroom floor. Below, Colin can be heard. How can he be stopped?
Down in the kitchen, Colin’s hands are full of bullshit. Full of many different panini: chorizo, mozzarella, pesto and Parma ham. He throws them into the microwave and sets the time. He’d bought them for the cruel-brained slut factory bleeding to death upstairs. Bought them because, until now, he cared for her. He wanted her to eat what she liked when she came to stay. He was willing to cede ground to her world of lifestyle and fucking crap.
Ping! The panini are done. He takes them out and replaces them with a series of coffees he’d bought for her. The bitch, he thinks, remembering the stomach, setting the time. The lie. How could she?
It killed Colin to buy these items. The coffees and the food. To shop around in the mud and the free and easy aisles for the dog shit that devours him. He holds a jar of sundried tomatoes up to the light. He watches them bob about in their oil, seasoned and packaged. Oh, the bastard betrayal and the word love.
He returns to the bathroom holding the food and the drink. The piping hot, Italian-inspired bollocks: cappuccinos, lattes, brain-rot, sundried tomatoes. Rebecca hasn’t moved, maybe squirmed a little, breathing like a breathing machine, dying because he’s fucked it up at last.
‘It’s a funeral,’ he shouts. ‘Because the world will never change.’ His lips are nibbling at each other, squabbling. He places the food and drink beside the bath, arranging them neatly like a buffet. Turning to look in the mirror he’s convinced that he’s invisible, that his reflection is just staring out at an empty room.
‘It’s a funeral,’ he says again, staring down at Rebecca before turning and leaving once again.
Rebecca hears the key turn in the bathroom lock. Moments later she hears the front door slam below. It’s a blessing. He’s gone. She turns and looks towards the bottles under the sink. Since she smelt the scent of pesto and saw Colin arranging the food beside the bath, her mind has been on the rat poison. She reaches for it.
Her breathing reminds her of a kettle in the middle phase of its boiling process. But it’s her blood that boils. Thick angry liquid drips from her face in red-hot drops. I should never have returned here, she reminds herself. I’m an idiot. She attempts to climb on to her hands and knees but is forced to give up. Body and mind are in moods with each other, back to back with folded arms, making her desire to poison the panini hard to realise.
Having recalled a series of popular films in which people perform complex physical tasks while teetering within inches of their lives, Rebecca falls and squirms in the direction of the bath. With one hand she holds her bloated abdomen, with the other she pushes the rat poison across the floor. She recalls Colin’s face as he’d arranged the food. His white light eyes. His entire face grinning like teeth in a vice.
The lid of the rat poison is a nightmare, not designed in the interests of girls with crooked, broken fingers and bloody, slippery hands. Eventually the lid’s off and, breathing like a building site, she’s able to lift the tops off the panini and sprinkle the turquoise pellets among the lukewarm ingredients. Rebecca looks at the tomatoes and the coffees and she wonders what the fuck? And where is Justin? She gasps. Where is Dostoevsky and where is my lovely life?
Using a towel to erase the skids of cranberry blood left by her journey, Rebecca works her way back to the sink, returning the rat poison to its home by the bleach.
Quite naturally, she’s dying. Her baby, too. She pats her stomach with her hand, like beating wet sand with a toy spade. Her knickers are horrifyingly red and her legs are streaked with blood, like dire, dated, patterned leggings. She settles under the sink using the bloody towel as a pillow. She believes that Justin will save her. It’s been love all along. He’ll track me down, she thinks. Somehow he will.
Her body looks like Mars. The mountain of he
r stomach is coated in a layer of dried brown blood. Beyond it lies a lake of deep red, where the Martians holiday, perhaps, where they sunbathe. But what of such description? Time is dripping like a tap into an empty sink. Din. Din. Din. Where has Colin gone?
I know where Colin’s gone. You can always rely on me. I’m.
Colin strides out into Withington. The weather looks more like a weather forecast; simple representation of clouds, suns, showers of rain. The culture of cool days has spread. Withington is a selection of warm colours; outlets selling a busy day, a chilled convo, a snatch of tradition, preoccupation, a bite on the run. Colin struggles to believe anyone has jobs any more. But if you stare through the colours and the freshly baked confectionery, you will notice faint signs of human industry, its yellow scaffolded grin.
Colin is going shopping because he needs more supplies for the funeral. On the wall of the One Stop convenience store an Antiporn protest is being advertised on a large poster. The poster has been made in haste with a marker pen and a photocopier. It reads: ANTIPORN. EMERGENCY PROTEST. 3 p.m. MALMAISON HOTEL. Below the poster is a sleeping tramp. A trickle of piss leaves his groin, bound for the gutter. But Colin doesn’t notice any of this. He strides into the shop and begins collecting magazines from the shelves. He gathers up all the celebrity magazines he can manage, which is nowhere near all of them, and takes them up to the counter.
‘Hello, mate,’ says the lad at the counter. He’s Chinese and seems unnecessarily intelligent.
‘Hello,’ says Colin, miserably, as if he’s been told his entire family has been set on fire and he’s demanding confirmation. Really? Are you sure no cousins survived?
‘OK, sir, would you like a bag?’ says the Chinese lad, tearing one from beneath the counter.
‘It’s probably about leading a good and useful life, isn’t it?’ says Colin, squinting, talking to his pelvis.
‘I don’t know, sir, but perhaps, yes.’
‘And, of course, I’m going to be a murderer.’
The Chinese lad smiles absently. Casual confessions of murder aren’t abnormal in Withington. And, in any case, behind Colin a queue of people is beginning to snake.
‘OK, could you type in your pin, mate?’
Colin types in his pin number, his eyes computer screens. He allows the carrier bag to be threaded on to his wrist like a weighty bracelet.
‘Ha . . . a good and useful life . . . ha.’
He takes one step out of the shop, then another to his left. His head feels like it’s got a lagoon inside it, like his brain’s a small island in the middle of a beautiful lagoon. He pictures Rebecca, waving from his lumpy brain, a red sarong around her waist. I’ve buggered it. He leans back against the wall, then scrapes his way to the pavement where the tramp sleeps. By beating up Rebecca I’ve buggered it. Bollocks.
Could I wake him, the tramp? wonders Colin. Could I wake him up and get him to help me? The tramp stirs, emitting odour as he does so: piss, shit, smoke, semen, soil. Life itself. Colin sits on his magazines, legs bent, hugging his knees to his chin with both arms.
It was wonderful the first time Rebecca came round seven months ago. She was angry for a while, but she was there, at least she came. He had shared his rice and peas with her, watched her as she ironed her clothes, straightened her hair and, yes, finally, watched as she undressed before they . . . how can I describe it? Did it? Had it? Made it? Fucked? Screwed? Loved? None fits quite right, not for Colin. ‘Schemed’ is perhaps the best word. He schemed a foetus into her, then destroyed it before it could be born and become incredibly disappointed. Yes, for even the womb is a source of disillusionment, believes Colin. All that warmth and bobbing about quickly becomes banal. ‘We must kill it quickly,’ he’d said, ‘before it realises.’
But none of this matters now because of Rebecca and her various deceits. Colin coughs into his fist, noticing, as he does so, the blood marks on his boots. Beside him the tramp’s eyes open, like barn doors, to reveal eyes the colour of haystacks.
‘All right, mate?’ asks the tramp, reaching for his crotch to confirm he’s pissed himself.
Colin nods, looking into the tramp’s ageless face with envy. Yes, envy. Better to have pissed yourself and have a face like a brimming ashtray than have a house with a sink and a dying pregnant girl beneath it. Colin knows this by now. He’s realised. But life’s a waterslide and we’re born with sunscreen on our backs, there’s no stopping us, we just slide to the end. He has to get back. He’s gathering his magazines and getting up from the ground when the tramp seems to cough half his face off, then speak.
‘What do you do, mate?’
What do I do? wonders Colin. What kind of a question is that? What do I do? He doesn’t reply. He begins to scurry away. What I do is I . . . I . . . well . . . I get them pregnant because . . . well . . . and then abort because . . . mate . . . I guess. What a weird question. Yes. I do things. I blame happiness. I blame happiness.
For the first time in a long time Colin thinks of his job at the university last year. What do I do? All the names he’d processed, the new students; their hobbies, desired living arrangements, study choices, all those fucking hobbies, all those fucking names. So much leisure. Colin begins to march along the pavement like a soldier parading on some nostalgic-looking street in China. He’s sending his legs firing out in front of him with military precision, clutching the celebrity magazines like he could massacre the whole street with them at any moment. He’s shouting orders like a general.
‘Table tennis! Polo! Orienteering! Gilbert and Sullivan! Snowboarding! Art! Travel!’
Shouting at the top of his voice, Colin is drawing attention to himself. It’s a bit of a laugh actually. A few lads in tracksuits are chuckling and even the elderly snigger, given the harmless nature of his words. People are cracking up as he walks down Wilmslow Road bellowing at the top of his voice.
‘Football! Theatre! Socialist politics! Drinking! Rock climbing! Ballet! Knitting! Rugby! Swimming! Monasteries! UFOs! Computer games! Sex! HAHA! Tudor architecture!’
‘Sounds like a busy day, son!’ shouts an old man, humorously, as Colin arrives home to check on the pregnant girl he’s been kicking to death. She’s fine, though, still gurgling away as he unlocks the bathroom door and sets down the magazines.
‘Rebecca?’
Rebecca’s eyelids lift to reveal a roadmap of intricate red lines sketched over the whites of her eyes. He notices she’s taken one of his towels from the rail and covered it in blood. Bit annoying.
‘It’s about leading a good and useful life, isn’t it, Rebecca?’ he says, prodding her cheeks with his fingers, forcing her awake.
‘Am . . . bu . . . lance . . . you’re . . . a . . . a . . . goodboy,’ gurgles Rebecca, eyes like gobstoppers.
‘Yeah,’ continues Colin. ‘It’s all about being busy during the day. I get it now.’
‘Ple . . . ase . . . C . . . olin.’
‘But bitches like you messed it up. You were more than just beautiful . . . and you know it.’
Colin perches himself on the side of the bath and begins to unpack the celebrity magazines.
‘And so this has to be a funeral. But I’ve bought you your food and your magazines.’ Colin’s voice is a cheerful scream. He’s bounding about now, preparing his party. When he’s happy that all is as it should be, he emits a satisfied sigh. Then he turns to face Rebecca, a panini in each of his hands.
‘Eat, Rebecca . . . it’s time to eat.’
30
Murderer
‘THERE MUST BE a back door!’
‘They’re covering every exit, sir. The police are on their way.’
Justin’s trapped inside the Malmaison; it’s entirely surrounded by Antiporn protesters. Justin assumes they were tipped off by one of the journalists, Franchesi perhaps, but more likely the woollen-skinned bitch from the Mail. He swings his car keys round his fingers, scratching at his shaved head. Rebecca. The voices of the crowd thunderclap all around the foyer:
/>
‘MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER! MUR DERER!’
And as the crowd shakes their fists, they howl. Through the hotel’s dark glass the faces of the protesters can’t be made out, only the dropping of their jaws and the craning of their necks. The flashes of the cameramen and the camerawomen. Justin stares at the young porter standing beside him. What does he make of all this? The porter avoids his gaze.
At the front door, the shadow of the crowd becomes disturbed; it begins to separate like a parting sea, like a tank’s being driven through the throng. The police, assumes Justin, hands dancing by his sides in the manner of an athlete preparing to sprint. But no, it’s not the police. An enormous figure jostles its way through the most devoted protesters at the front and bangs on the glass of the front door with a gammon hand.
‘Let him in,’ shouts Justin, shoulders hunching and relaxing, fists clenching and unclenching at speed. The security staff unlock the door and squeeze the colossus through, then slam the door in the frenzied faces of the mob, their fingers blistering at the glass, forks of lightning streaking from each extremity. While the door is open the voices amplify, screeching with a commitment and fanaticism of footballing proportions.
‘MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER!’
On entering, the gigantic man brushes down his suit and smiles that familiar smile; each cheek rising like calf corpses being winched.
‘Oh my boy, my dear, dear boy.’
‘Hello, Frank.’
‘What could they possibly have against a child like you?’
Justin ushers Frank under a spiral staircase. The fat bastard’s jittering about with excitement. He can’t wipe the smile off his face; it’d be too big a job.
‘Frank, I need your help. Rebecca’s in trouble. Colin’s got her down in Withington and I think he’s fucking flipped. He’s a lunatic.’
‘You’ve sent your beloved into the arms of a lunatic? Oh, Justin.’