Читать книгу Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017 - Jonathan Lyon, Jonathan Lyon - Страница 11

I didn’t know which buzzer to ring so I rang them all. Dawn answered like she’d been waiting at the intercom.

‘Who’s that? Is that Leander? You’re early.’

‘No I’m not,’ I said.

‘Who is it then?’

‘This is Leander, but I’m not early.’

‘Oh shut the fuck up and get inside.’

She buzzed me in.

‘Wait, what floor is it?’ I asked, but she’d already hung up.

I climbed the stairs in darkness, listening to the suppertime clatter through the walls. My muscles felt like diseased clay in a kiln, unmoulding in defiance of the heat. A star orbited my brain. Between the banisters of the third floor, a light shone. Dawn was waiting in one of its doorways, wine bottle in hand. She’d cleaned the blood of the crash off her face, but its wound was visible still through her hair – the colour of boiling plums.

‘You seem… deflated,’ I said.

‘What a nice way to greet your mother, you cheeky shit,’ she said. ‘How about, “Oh I never seen you look so elegant, you look like an English rose!”’

‘I’ve never seen you look elegant…’

‘Oi!’ She raised her hand to slap me. ‘You can’t come in till you give me a compliment.’

‘Ok, you do look quite… roseate.’

‘I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s not a fucking compliment, you runt. You’re not getting in with that.’

She stepped back and began closing the door.

‘Ok, sorry…’ I said. ‘I mean you look like a blossom of damask, twined with eglantine beneath a nightingale singing threnodies into a well.’

‘Better... but that didn’t end right, did it? You can do better than a well.’

‘Ugh… I’m hungry, please. Ok, you look like Cleopatra under opal noon-light in her roof garden, riding a glass dildo full of bees.’

‘Better… one more compliment and you get to enter the roof-garden,’ she opened the door wider, but kept her palm up in prohibition.

‘Ok, you look like an apricot-soft eclipse watched from a yacht shipping laudanum and labdanum across the Levant.’

‘Perfffffect – there you are my darling, come in, come in – welcome to our new home!’

She stepped aside, unbalanced – and as I entered, she fell onto me into a hug.

‘What you doing strutting in like that?’ she said. ‘Hug your mother properly!’

I put my arms around her and she rose to kiss me on the mouth. Her tongue was stale from cigarettes. I twitched away in disgust.

‘Are you high?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be stupid, I just had some of the red!’ She lifted the bottle up to my chest. ‘It’s the posh stuff. It costs twenty-five pound! Try it!’

She fed it to me with her head turned away. I tried to drink, but it spilled over my chin – so she tried to lick it off.

‘Ok, thanks,’ I said, pushing her away. ‘Tastes great. I’m hungry…’

‘Yeah, yeah, course – let me give you the tour.’

She ignored this second prompt for food and instead yanked me into a cramped shower room.

‘This is the spa,’ she said, flicking the switch beside her.

A light strip above us hummed into a glare. Her pupils were pinpricks in the mirror. And her expression – still sharp and handsome and untrusting – had a gentleness to it that was only there when she was high, and made her look like she wanted to be told lies.

‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘You started without me.’

‘No, darling, course not.’ She turned off the light. ‘I could never start without you.’

‘But you got some heroin?’

She twirled in evasion and pulled me back out into the living area.

‘This is the Napoleonic suite.’ She gestured to a double bed, a dining table, and our two suitcases between them.

‘You can sleep with me if you want, but I thought you’d prefer your own wing. No need to share anymore, we’re living the high life!’ She pulled me towards a door beside the bed and opened it onto a tiny room with a single floor mattress and a lamp without a shade.

‘I actually love it,’ I said.

‘I knew you would, darling, you love that depressing garret shit. You can finally live your dream of being a consumptive Russian aristocrat in an attic. Isn’t that what you said? It’s almost an omelette. No – what’s worse than an omelette?’

‘Nothing, I hate omelettes. Unless you mean oubliette?’

‘Exactly sweetheart, it’s the perfect oubliette for you. I knew you’d love it. I done right didn’t I? I sorted us out! Just you and me, fucking finally… But let me finish the grand tour,’ she prodded me towards a small square kitchen through an arch beside the dining table. ‘And so – here is the Michelin-starred restaurant.’

‘And have you managed to create any Michelin-starred food?’

‘Not yet, we only just fucking moved in!’

‘But you promised me a banquet.’

‘Oh I know I did, didn’t I, darling, but there’s never enough time. Sorry sweetheart, I’ll make it another night.’

‘That’s not like you. You were so keen on proving your culinary abilities earlier.’

‘I was just showing off,’ she said, with mixture of sarcasm and self-pity. ‘I wanted you to be impressed. I was making it up! Can’t we focus on the positives – we got our own fucking palace! We can dance in our own living room. No more fucking noise restrictions. No more fascists. No more locked-in syndrome.’

‘This definitely used to be a council flat,’ I said, choosing to change the subject. ‘And now it’s being rented out by parasites like your boyfriend. Landlords should be outlawed and hunted down for sport and shot.’

She sashayed to a song that only she could hear, swigging from the bottle.

‘Aren’t you going to say that your boyfriend shouldn’t be hunted down for sport and shot?’ I asked. ‘You’re not defending him as vigorously as you were earlier.’

‘Oh leave it out, Leander. Can’t you just enjoy the view? Life is about to happen to us!’ But she said her catchphrase with no conviction.

‘There’ll be a revolution soon,’ I said.

‘And who’s going to control the houses?’

‘A computer.’

‘And then?’ she asked, still sashaying. ‘Are you going to be the emperor?’

I closed my eyes until I saw myself in a courtyard somewhere near the Earth’s meridian – cool under silk canopies, as a harem of men had their necks slit open by a harem of women. The men kissed me as they bled out, willingly giving themselves to my rejuvenation – and then the women, with their last screams, praised me as I set fire to their tents. My palace was overrun by beasts – boars and stags and wolves and crocodiles – in a havoc more beautiful than the havoc of the stars.

‘The earth has no way out other than to become invisible,’ I said, ‘in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible.’

‘The fuck does that mean? You doing a quote?’

‘Yeah, Rilke said that. He was a poet.’

‘Course he was. Fucking useless answer to “How are we going have houses?” You can’t put the earth inside you and start eating the invisible.’

‘I felt like saying it,’ I said. ‘And you seem pretty happy to be making me eat the invisible. Did you really not get any food with my money?’

‘Babe, the money ran out.’

‘First you say you didn’t have time to make food, and now you’re saying you didn’t have the money. Which is it?’

‘What’s this – a police interview? There weren’t neither. I said the wrong thing. Whatever, I been trying my best…’

‘You didn’t try anything.’

‘What the fuck do you know? I tried everything… I didn’t know everything. I never realised that…’ She stopped and looked out of the window.

My pain removed me from the room for a moment – and I imagined myself as an emperor again – again with a palace of beasts and slain lovers – and I wondered what would happen if one of my lovers survived, an accidental immortal, and came back to worship me with a whip, as I’d been worshiped earlier today. This immortal would promise me love, perhaps – a love like a warren of underground caves, in which stalactites had been broken off and arranged in rings by some inhuman tribe for the worship of some inhuman god – like me or my lover. But if our love could only end in death – how would we, as immortals, die? By becoming each other, of course – by seeking a desire that exceeds music, and so forces us out of the dance.

‘What happened?’ I asked, returning to the present. ‘You went to see Gibbon and…’

‘Stop calling him that!’

‘What did you do?’

‘I got you some bread,’ she laughed, amused again, and twirled towards the kitchen.

There, she retrieved a plastic-wrapped loaf of sliced bread. ‘You can make a toast sandwich!’ she said. ‘A slice of toast between two slices of bread. Dinner for champions! I used to eat it in the war.’

I laughed too, delighted by her erratic mood, its bleak imagery, and how casually she had betrayed my trust.

The walls of the apartment were painted two shades of cream, as though the painters had run out of one shade a third of the way along the wall and continued with another a few shades warmer – and as I stared at the line where the colours changed, my brain bent the contrast into a flavour – close to soy sauce – and I was hungry.

‘I might actually do that,’ I said.

I took the loaf from her hands, impatiently tore off its plastic, and slotted a slice into the toaster. There were no plates in the cupboard, so I placed the outer slices on the counter. I checked the fridge for butter, but it wasn’t switched on.

‘You’re avoiding all my questions,’ I said. ‘Did you get any heroin?’

‘Not yet, not yet, I’ve not managed to accomplish everything, I’m sorry,’ she giggled, drinking again from her bottle.

The diameter of her pupils belied her denials – she must have been high all afternoon.

‘You don’t look sorry.’

‘I’ll get it, I’ll get it baby, I promised you – and I don’t break my promises. Just sometimes I delay them. Kimber asked us to meet down the Rockway later. He wants to meet you. He’ll have some for us then, for sure.’

‘I’m going to a gallery tonight,’ I said.

‘Why? Is Francis going to be there? Ah are you going to a gallery with Francis? What happened with him – oh sweetheart I forgot to ask. How’d it all go? I’m sorry I was so caught up in my hectic business-orientated lifestyle,’ she cackled in self-derision. ‘I forgot your love woes. Did you say sorry to him? Did he forgive you?’

‘Stop changing the subject. Where’s my money? What’s wrong with Kimber? Why aren’t you rhapsodising about him like you were earlier? What happened?’

‘He was just busy. He was stressed. He weren’t as happy about everything as I thought he’d be.’

‘Everything?’

She sighed against the table, finally retiring her jovial façade. She held up her head and shook it – and drank again, swallowing emphatically as if to swallow words she didn’t want to say and tears she didn’t want to show.

‘I think he’s jealous of you,’ she said eventually.

‘So? I paid the deposit. Does he want to get rid of me?’

‘No, no, of course,’ she slurred. ‘I know you did, he knows you did. You’re my number one, sweetie, I can’t leave you, course I won’t, I promised to be your mother.’

The toast popped up. I placed it between the two untoasted slices and gazed awhile in satisfaction at this assault on the history of cuisine, contemplating the distance between the first makers of bread and me – and then bit into it. Though dry, the bread was sweet, and the toast between it a satisfying contrast. This sad meta-sandwich would suffice as a meal for now.

‘This is pretty good,’ I smiled, spilling crumbs.

She didn’t smile back. Instead, my display of positivity seemed to push her further into despondency.

‘What if I made a mistake, Leander? What if I done this wrong?’

‘You haven’t,’ I mumbled between chews, moving towards her in reassurance. ‘We couldn’t have continued in a hostel – you were right, you were looking out for me. Your impulsive uprooting was necessary. And you didn’t uproot us from much. A homeless hostel is never going to be a home. We can make this a home. I’m grateful.’

‘No,’ she began crying. ‘Don’t try to be nice to me, I can’t take it, I need you to sulk – I need to be the one reassuring you. When you try it, it sounds so fake. This was a mistake weren’t it? I’m a mistake. I’m bad for you.’

‘Is this about the money?’ I asked. ‘I don’t care, I made it in an hour. I can make it again. And I’ve still got some.’

‘It’s not just your money. I’m a bad mother. But it is the money – I lost your money.’

‘Did Kimber take it all?’ I began to understand. ‘Didn’t you tell him it was for our food?’

Her face became harsher.

‘Did he take the money from you?’ I repeated.

‘No, he’s not like that, he would never be like that to me – he’d been working, he was in a different mood, it was my fault.’

As my suspicions grew, the associations of my other senses were heightened: the taste of soil entered my mouth, and her words gained an orange echo.

‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Did he hit you?’

‘No, you’re getting the wrong end of everything. It’s not like that.’

‘What is it like then? Last week, you were outside his control. But now you’re in his car and in his flat, you’re in his power and you’ve glimpsed something in him that was hidden before?’

She cried quietly.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘He’s a man in a violent profession. He’s jealous. What did he say about me?’

‘Stop analysing, I don’t want to hear it. You’re just trying to sulk again. He’s said nothing about you.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘It was me, I was talking about you,’ she cried. ‘I was talking about you.’

‘And? You’re making it sound like you sold me to him.’

‘I just talk too much, don’t I? I hope too much. I believe people too much. I can’t –’ she pushed me away. ‘I can’t. Don’t look at this. Go and shower, you need to wash. At least you can wash your day off you. I tried to wash. Let me just – go away.’

She covered her eyes with her hands and began rocking herself towards despair.

I left for the bathroom. The shower had no curtain, so it wet all the walls as soon as I turned it on. The sound of the spraying water glittered with blotchy browns and reds, like a cloud of gatekeeper butterflies. As it warmed, I undressed and rinsed the toast from my mouth in the sink.

I stepped in. The water felt like hail on my flayed back – but I experienced this as light entertainment. My body hurt anyway, from my myalgia, so the whip wounds were really a relief. Chronic muscle pain has a dissociative effect – every day, for the past decade, my limbs have seemed severed from each other, hovering discretely in uncertain space. My sense of proprioception is in disarray – my nerves regard themselves as hostile. So bruises and gashes like the new ones on my back simply lift me out of my underlying condition. Flesh injuries are insignificant compared to a half-life spent inside a skeleton of barbed wire – of feeling half-disembodied and half-disembowelled – a cloud of phosgene and a soldier’s scream, at once in the same skin. That’s why being beaten feels like being cured.

The bathroom door opened as I was washing the soles of my feet. I wobbled in surprise. Dawn entered through the steam, staring with an inebriated intensity.

‘I remembered the Savlon,’ she said, holding up the tube of antiseptic.

Again I tasted soil in my spit – though now her voice sounded like it had become foreign to her too. She seemed to be speaking automatically.

‘You’re high,’ I said.

‘Let me look at your back.’

‘Can’t you do this when I’m out?’

‘I’ll do it now.’

I put the soap in the tray and turned around.

Crying, she traced her fingers along my welts, circling the metal buckle’s indents one by one. I rested my head on my arm against the tiles of the wall, letting the water hit the curve of my spine. Briefly she lifted away her hand – and returned it, thick with ointment, to smooth across my broken skin. I closed my eyes and forgot the specifics of the room.

But as she smoothed lower, I realised she was teasing me towards arousal. Her other hand joined the first in massaging towards my hips – and then she stepped into the shower with me, wetting her clothes.

‘No,’ I said.

She pushed her hands down my thighs, her soaked skirt rubbing against my back. Instead of earth, I tasted burnt coffee. I tried to swallow it away.

‘Just let me make you feel better,’ she said. ‘I’m scared I been a bad mother.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Then why you not pushing me away?’

She tried to turn me around but I resisted. She kissed my neck and forced her fingers through mine.

‘This is… unnecessary,’ I said.

‘Then why are you hard?’ She guided my hand in hers towards my erection.

I let her hold me there for moment, but then shook my shoulders.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting out.’

I turned off the water – she clutched to me, trying to kneel down. I pushed her away, and took up my clothes and hurried into the living room.

She followed slowly, drenched, her lips apart but no longer crying, her eyes unclear.

From my suitcase I removed black jeans, black socks, a black polo-neck, and her fake Dalmatian fur coat. With my back to her, I re-hid most of the money in my boxers and my sock. Then, turning so that she could see, I put the remaining £200 in my coat pocket.

‘Why don’t you leave that with me?’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous having so much money on you.’

‘It’s more dangerous to leave it with you. It would disappear.’

‘I taught you how to pleasure a woman!’ she said, as though this was somehow a retort. ‘I taught you! You never knew what you was doing until I taught you.’

‘You taught me nothing.’

‘I’m a bad mother, am I?’ She was weeping again. ‘I can remember how you was when we met. You trusted me, and you don’t trust nobody. Why’d you start trusting me?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘We’re moving on with life! Everything’s going right, now, ain’t it? I’ve got a man, you’ve got a man, we got a place of our own.’

‘Then why are you crying?’

‘Your wounds make me sad,’ she said – with something closer to remorse than she’d managed in the car earlier. ‘They’re a failing, if I’m your mother.’

‘Then don’t be my mother,’ I said, though I was pleased by her veiled confession –that she’d known in advance I’d be whipped by her client.

‘You asked me to be your mother!’ she shouted.

‘I asked because you needed me to ask.’

‘So you can have feelings! But they’re not enough – you never asked me why I needed it.’

‘It was obvious – you needed a substitute son, I needed a substitute mother.’

‘You don’t know it all,’ she sobbed. ‘I was too young. I was fifteen. Did you know that? Yeah – I ain’t even that old! I had him five years but then I… I weren’t up to it, was I? I failed. My mum hated me, just because she spent all her time thinking what life would be like without kids. And I didn’t want that for me. I tried it but I didn’t want it. I couldn’t take the tasks that never end. She said she felt destroyed – destroyed as a woman. And I felt like that till I got myself back. I couldn’t touch nobody for years. My mum said I made her feel like a nobody. And it was the same with me when I had my kid. My body weren’t for me and I hated it. So I ended it, didn’t I? I tried to put him in a fucking orphanage – but his dad got custody and they only let me see him twice a year. And I couldn’t bear it, so I saw him less. And now he hates me. Do you know what I mean? My son fucking hates me! That’s why I need you. I need a son that doesn’t hate me.’

She lurched forwards tearfully to stroke my face. I pulled away. A reddish flash – perhaps a silent ambulance passing through the street below – got caught in my eye, and I saw a huge fish leaping through the air between us, like a salmon up a waterfall – until it reached the window, and leapt out into the red of the night. Dawn sat back into the table with an expression of opiated wonder – perhaps having had the same vision as me.

‘It’s your turn,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to balance me out. What happened to your mother? Why’d you need me?’

‘I’ve told you. When I was eleven my dad shot my mum then shot himself. I found the bodies. I had an older sister, but she died when I was six.’

‘Maybe. Maybe I believe you. But you lie about who you want to be, don’t you? You lie so people show themselves to you. I know you think I’m stupid – and I am stupid compared to you, and even stupider now that you got me this bump on my head – but it’s fine, just because I don’t have an education to wear on my sleeve.’ She lifted her hands to stop me interrupting. ‘Even if you gave that education to yourself, sweetheart, but still, for all you want to twist me around – I understand you more than you think I do. And that’s why you like me. You like me because you can’t manipulate me.’

‘I can manipulate you.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah but you can’t control me completely. You can’t predict everything. That’s what you need me for.’

‘And why was now the time for this little soliloquy?’

‘Because life’s about to happen to us! I want you to know what I know. Maybe I like you because you like lies more than people.’

‘I like lies that get people to tell me their secrets,’ I said. ‘But also, my lies are confessions, in a way. Lies are fantasies – and fantasies reveal you much more nakedly than facts.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Stories that aren’t biographically true can still be true – if they reveal something about the teller’s psychology. They are psychologically true. They show what I want you to believe about me. Lies are not as simple as inaccuracies. A lie, as an evasion or a complication, is still a revelation of character – it’s a slanted truth. If I told you I was trampled by a horse when I was fifteen, and the trauma of that incident is the reason why I am now inert and deceitful and constantly in pain – you would learn something true about me. It may not have literally happened, but it gives you an image by which to understand me. Rather than listing diagnoses – like fibromyalgia or immune dysfunction or dysautonomia or insomnia or Lyme disease or myalgic encephalomyelitis or even just poverty – that all only speak to the surface of what I am, I give you instead a metaphor, of a trampling horse. And by that metaphor you comprehend me beyond facts. It wasn’t literally true – it was psychologically true. Lies are insights into the liar, if you read them right.’

‘So when you tell people about me, I’m going to be a horse?’

‘No, you’ll be a blue-ringed octopus. A many-limbed entanglement, overbearing, toxic, and drowning.’

‘You’re a charmer.’

‘I have to go,’ I said.

Worry resurfaced in her face. ‘Let me drive you there.’

‘You can’t drive like this. And I want to be cold for a while.’

‘Please don’t walk there.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘It’s dangerous,’ she said.

‘I’ll see you at the Rockway, ok? Do I get a key?’

‘Yeah, course you do sweetheart.’

She removed a key ring from her pocket and put it into mine. She hugged me, trembling as though suppressing an apology or a warning – and waved me away with defeat in her eyes.

I left, disorientated, but impressed – as though she’d managed some master manipulation that I could barely understand.