Need

by Nik Cohn

  Outside the OTB, he paused and tried to whistle, but only dead air came out. So he made a stab at a ditty. We Are the World, he tried to sing. Forget it.

  Ten minutes to seven, five, he walked round the block, then round again. One word like a tin hammer kept jarring on the off-beat. Love, it sounded like. That could not be right.

  Kate Root at the moment she opened the door reminded him of someone he couldn’t place. Not Elvis, not George Washington. The Statue of Liberty, that was it. Which made no sense. Realistically, they didn’t look blood related, not even second cousins. But there was something in her attitude. Big shoulders squared, head high, a hint of a sneer. “You’re late,” she said.

  And Willie D was powerless. Straight back to square one. Scrub all that stuff about the Golden Gloves, and warriors ready to rumble, he was paralysed. Never laid a glove on her, no contest. Under that flat, dead stare of hers, he was done before he’d begun.

  At one glance, the night before was swept away. Maybe Osain’s feast had drugged his senses, or maybe it had been a trick of light. Whatever, he’d been fooled. There was no partnership here, there never would be. You’re in thrall, that’s all. Sandman Ames said that.

  Couldn’t get his breath. His feet trapped in the retro-Beatles felt limp and slimy as slugs, and when he held his hands out for Kate to inspect he had the sickest hunger to be found wanting. Have his knuckles rapped with a ruler, collect red weals on his sweating palms. Get his ass kicked even.

  Any excuse to weep.

  But one thing he hadn’t noticed before: the hollow at the pit of her throat. A smooth round like a shallow cup, and there was a smear of juice in it, looked like it would taste sweet. Snake out your tongue, take a lick, a man would be refreshed. “That hair’ll have to go,” Kate said, and he was laid sprawling in the barber’s chair, she had the freedom of his head. The Harvey McBurnettes in their wine-red morocco case were sitting snug on his lap, a weight warm as a fat cat, he could almost hear the purring. “Sublimity,” Kate Root said.

  Absolute surrender. In this place and time, it didn’t feel disgraceful; if anything, it felt like a reprieve. Then she took a step backwards and propped her foot on the wrought-iron rest, she scratched her leg like a ten-dollar whore. And there was only skin. A white patch raked by scratches. Dead ground, where no hairs grew.

  And after that? Willie couldn’t say exactly. Could not have sworn on oath. For the moment he was too stunned to compute. Just sat enthroned as if stuffed and mounted, until the woman shunted him to the floor. The old trout.

  Her hands were all over his body, moving him and turning him, kneading him like play-dough. Talking at him, words he heard clearly but had no power to obey. “Constructed and predicated,” she said, and a knife was in his right hand, she was positioning his fingers along the handle. “One elementary act,” she said, and she pushed his arm upside his head, the blade pointed straight ahead.

  Willie smelled Brasso.

  Half the night he’d sat up with these knives, cleansing them of rust and grime, scouring them with steel wool, shining, buffing, honing; and now the sharp, goatish tang of metal polish acted on him like smelling salts. His mind crept back to him, he felt himself start to tremble. Then a solitary thought, quite distinct, detached itself from his fog. I’ll kill him, it said.

  It calmed him right down.

  It gave him his sanity, a branch to cling to until the dark flood receded and he could think calmly, in rhythm, I’ll kill him, I will kill him, rehearsing it like a jingle, I will kill him, I’ll kill him, I will decease him dead.

  How did he know it was a man? Stood to reason. No woman would do such a thing to herself. Those hairs had been Kate Root’s uniqueness, she would never destroy them. But some man, spurned and jealous. Or no, not jealous, just possessive. The sort of dickless wonder who thought, if he couldn’t own beauty himself, beauty had no right to exist.

  And all this time Kate Root kept handling his body, she did not stop talking. “Grasp the handle firmly in the same natural manner as if you were picking up a household hammer, keeping the plane of the blade vertical with your thumb extended along the top edge, acting as a pointer,” she said, and he saw her stretched on a bed, you could call it a vision. It was night, a candle burned on the bedside table. Her face was buried in a pillow, her upper body covered by a sheet, but her left leg stuck out into the flickering light. Where the big thigh bulged, a man knelt by the bedside, his hands were fumbling with an open razor. The three red hairs looked bronze in the candlelight. A cross-draught ruffled them, and they swayed drowsily. The razor flicked, its blade glimmered, the three hairs vanished. Kate Root never stirred. Only mumbled in her sleep when the kneeling man rose, and revealed himself.

  He was the colour of jaundice.

  He wore a cutaway bartender’s jacket, a stained bow-tie, and he looked like someone had whacked his eye with a branding-iron, his mama probably.

  That rouge Irishman. The defective. JoJo, or whatever his name was. Sneaking in the shadows like creeping Jesus, never saying a word, you’d think he was a choirboy, a freaking eunuch. When all the time he’d been plotting, lying in wait. An unfaithful servant. “The thrower should remember to avoid any wrist snap. The blade should be released as if it was hot butter,” Kate Root said. But Willie had no heart to follow her, he’d lost his driving wheel.

  His first knife wobbled like a paper aeroplane, and his second rose almost vertically, stabbing at the barbershop ceiling. “Fucking Ada,” Kate Root said, and slapped him. Smacked him right in the face with her open palm. He felt the sting distinctly, and heard a thwack of impact, though this seemed a long way away, it could have been in another room. “Get a grip,” Kate Root said, and he did his best to obey her, he opened his eyes wide to concentrate. But all they saw was her shape stretched upon the bed, and this man JoJo hovering over her.

  It was a different angle this time, he was watching from above. A far better view, that gave him access to every detail. And right away he saw that his first sighting had been incorrect. Kate Root’s face was not buried in the pillow, after all, she was turned halfway to the light, looking down the length of the bed. Watching the razor glinting in the kneeling man’s hand. Waiting on his move with an expression half nervous, half expectant.

  In the shifting half-light her green eyes looked oceanic, and that gap between her front teeth seemed wide enough to snake a tongue through. Willie didn’t have to watch the man’s hands moving, he knew the moment that the razor flicked by the way Kate Root’s mouth went slack. Her eyes went cloudy then like underwater when a diver hits bottom. “Now try again. Now try again,” he was saying.

  “Stand to me,” Willie said.

  He didn’t mean to; it spoke itself. Spilled out of his mouth like a gaffed fish and lay there flopping while Kate Root gaped. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said.

  “Just one knife.”

  “You can’t hit a dead president with a dollar bill, and you want to throw at me live?”

  “One blade is all.”

  “Not on your life.” The face she turned towards him was flushed and lumpy, her lips were flecked white with spittle. “This is plain moronic,” she said. She brushed away the stray hairs that sweat had plastered to her cheeks, she wiped her wet mouth on the back of her hand. “This takes the biscuit,” she said.

  It was only when she had walked the length of the room and taken up position that Willie recognized the target he’d been aiming at so far and, when he did, he was glad that he had not laboured to hit it. That would not have been dignified, that would have been a travesty.

  But talk about travesties. Now that Kate Root’s hands were not fussing him, controlling his every move, and he was freestanding again, he felt something wrong with his hair. Put up his knifeless hand and found the massacre.

  Ruin.

  The spinning light from the barber’s pole hit only one side of Kate Root’s face, while the other was deep in shadow. “The trajectory should be fast a
nd flat, making sure that the plane of the knife remains vertical as it leaves the hand,” she said. The original target had been removed, and she now stood with her feet together and her arms held straight at her sides, her back pressed against the mattress that served as a backdrop. “The follow-through is the continuation of the throwing movement after the knife has been released and is spinning towards its goal,” she said, and she froze in position, fixed her eyes on Willie’s hand. “Don’t miss,” she said. “You really must try not to miss.”

  The fresh blade he selected from the leather case felt cool and grateful to his touch, slid into his hand as like home. So Willie wasted no time. Raising the knife to eye-level, he sighted along it like a gun barrel. Its coat of oil gleamed and dappled in his sight, and he looked at Kate Root direct.

  Her body in its green tweed skirt and starched blouse was shapeless, hopelessly baggy. Give it the benefit of the doubt and call it sturdy, still he could find no target there.

  Or in her face either, it seemed. The one half that was clearly visible, moving in and out of the spiralling light, looked all humps and potholes and ruts. You wouldn’t drive a Spyder on a surface like that, never mind bury a blade. Straining for a clearer sighting, Willie squinted. He closed first one eye, then the other. Then he tried the opposite, and opened them as wide as they would go. He felt his eyebrows arch and stretch, his pupils flood with light. He felt a stinging like chlorine. But his sight was clear.

  The face he saw then was quite close. In some place that didn’t concern him he was aware that Kate Root remained across the room, fifteen foot away, but she seemed close enough to touch. To study and explore in peace, without even aiming.

  The light spinning over her in waves lit up a different fragment at each turn. A broken vein at the temple, the wingtip of a nostril, two chickenpox pits. A jagged circle of discoloration, acorn-brown over pink, on the jaw’s curve beneath an ear. Freckles scattered at random, soiled confetti. A lower incisor with a steel filling. A bloodspot at the hairline.

  The ear was finely made, it surprised him. He would not have imagined the shell to be so delicate and cleave so closely to the skull, or the lobe to let the light filter through like a rose. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, he wouldn’t have credited that.

  Or the sweetness of the crescent line that skirted the corner of the mouth. It was a wrinkle, he guessed, but it looked like a sliver of moon. And the speck of matter that clung lopsided to her lower lip, caught in a vertical crack the same way that moss gets trapped in a crevice of rock. That would be grunge, some form of funk. It looked like spun glass.

  And the shadow beneath the nose, faintly blue. And the socket of the eye, its hollow almost purple. And the gap in the front teeth, a black hole.

  A man could drown here.

  A man could fall in and never come up. He could travel his mortal span and not be done. Travel his life away, and still not arrive at the eye.

  He should have been that man himself. If he’d had a lick of sense, he would have pitched his tent in some sheltered spot, the cleft of the chin maybe, or the soft fall beneath the mouth shaded by the overhang, and been satisfied. But not Willie D. No, not Willie. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, he had to keep on pushing and stirring. So he risked the eye, that green sea.

  It didn’t look right. It looked bruised and raddled, it looked fearful. As if it had been something hideous. A vision too sick to be endured. An abomination.

  But what was there to see? Only himself, and that made no sense. That could not be right, that was not possible. “Do it for God’s sake. Get it over with,” Kate Root cried, and Willie flung up his hand in self-defence. I’ll kill him, he thought, and threw the knife; he let it go.

  If only he hadn’t worn rimless glasses, why did they have to be rimless? Not that a puce balloon wearing shades or tortoiseshells or even wire frames was a fashion statement or dressed for success exactly, but rimless was plain degenerate, the thought of them had poxed and plagued her all night, she couldn’t close her eyes to take a nap in this room with the gilt mirrors and Chinese slippers without reliving them in living colour, how noxious, when all she asked was a little decorum, a touch of class, and what did she get? A rimless fuck.

  The only thing in Sheridan’s favour, he had concentrated her mind. Hangings did that to you, they put you on the spot, and ever since the Broadway Local the train rhythm in her mind had kept repeating No more, no more, no more, while the backbeat echoed Now what, now what, now what?

  She had not the faintest or foggiest notion. In a movie she would have gone home to her family and its soggy bosom, but family values had always made her think of discount stores, Ace is the Place for trashcans and school prayers, and besides, most of her relations were in Bonaventure Cemetery with Chief Wigwam, and the rest should have been. She couldn’t see herself handing out pamphlets for the Sun God with her brother Leon, or passing the tin cup for Cousin Driskill, and her sister Mignon had sworn to shoot her on sight, although that was honestly not Anna’s fault, just the nature of husbands, you couldn’t tell the difference once you got them in the dark. Or broad daylight, come to that.

  So that disposed of blood, and maybe Savannah wasn’t such a hot idea period, not after that little unpleasantness in Monterey Square with the drag queen and the gerbil, apart from anything else it would have smacked of defeat, hell no, she wouldn’t go.

  But what then? Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust, and Anna was choking on the stuff. Couldn’t make the rent or eat three squares, could hardly keep herself in clean nooses as it was, and here she was planning to deep-six the only lifelines left to her. Blow out Verse-o-Gram and Sheherazade, and what was she meant to fly on, a wing and a prayer, or go in the bucket like Stevie Smith’s tigress Flo, she fell, she whimpered, clawed in vain? Well, it was a thought.

  Make space in Bonaventure, always room for one more. But no. She did not have time for demise, not when Bani Badpa owed her a week’s wages plus benefits. Innocence might be caged, that didn’t make it half-witted, and besides, John Joe had bought her a brand-new veil, she hadn’t even worn it yet.

  The sensible plan was to do a Sarah Bernhardt, make one last, but positively my last and final appearance, virgin veil and all, then exit pursued by a bear.

  Well, sensible she was, if there was one thing she was, it was sensible, and she was never going to get her nap anyway, not if she counted all the sheep in Shepherd’s Bush. So she jumped out of bed, or propped herself on an elbow at least. And she would have got up at any moment she really would, the cheque was in the mail, only she was saved by a sudden hubbub on the stairs below, Kate Root shouting Useless! Bloody useless! in that blowsy barmaid’s singsong of hers like a tart with a heart in some old movie, more Australian it sounded than Texas or Louisiana or whatever dream state she claimed. Call yourself a blade, Ma Root yelled, and she sounded just roiling, Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t in it. Though she might be faking at that, she was a tricky number, you needed to keep an eye on the silver spoons. But then came a thud like doom or a split melon, a door slammed across the hall, and before its echo had faded a knuckle tapped code on Anna’s own door. “Sanctuary,” said Willie D.

  Or what was left of him, anyway. Which wasn’t much, he would never have passed for a person. Shaking like an alky, with his shirt hanging out behind, the top of one shiny black boot pierced as if he had been stabbed by a passing dachshund, and his hair, his poor hair, instead of that glossy black mane just bare rock strewn with clumps and tussocks, he looked like an outcropping.

  How could she refuse him? She couldn’t. What would be the point? After all it was Willie D she’d wanted sopranoed, not this train wreck with the cancelled eyes. “So come in if you’re coming,” she said.

  Her room was a mess, and what else was new, with stuffed pandas and Burmese scarves and one Charles Jourdan in the sink, Tarot cards scattered over the rug and that tattletale bottle of crème de cacao all too empty on the bedside table, well at leas
t it wasn’t Mother’s Ruin, that was one good thing, though Willie didn’t seem to notice or care, did not seem anything in fact but starved, driving her backwards across the floor to the bed, not touching her with his hands but angling her, nudging and encircling her like a sheepdog herding a stray, you couldn’t call it coercion, nothing so gross as assault, even if she could not get away, not a chance, you would hardly call it force.

  To begin with she was defenceless, and afterwards she put up no defence. Some fool in the street threw a firecracker, she saw its flare loop and spin, heard the report like a car backfiring, and a few lines from Mad Tom’s Song jumped out at her, “The moon’s my constant mistress And the lovely owl my marrow The flaming drake and the night-crow make Me music to my sorrow,” but Willie seemed not to hear her, he only kept her pushing back. “Sanctuary,” he said again.

  Anna heard him distinctly. Or not distinctly exactly, his mouth was pressed against her collarbone and elocution was never his strong suit, still she heard him. Mumbling, not quite moaning, and what other word could it be, sanguinary made no sense when his voice cried for mercy, not blood, and his fingers scrabbled at her breasts like Pepe LePew going off a cliff.

  Even blurred and mottled it was the loveliest word, she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t, and the force of it carried her in a dying fall, as if weightless, to the bed. Knowing well it was not correct, she shouldn’t go so easy, but she did anyway. And Willie came to her like a virgin. No, really. Like this was his first time and he was scared shitless, fumbling and thrusting blind, she had to help him enter, though she could have saved herself the bother, three strokes, a jerk, a strangled bleat like a sheep with its throat cut, and he never called her Mother.