Читать книгу Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017 - Jonathan Lyon, Jonathan Lyon - Страница 12

I strode through unfamiliar streets, my mind widening into the night’s intimacy. The space between the terraced houses had a presence I called ‘indisclosure’: the active sense of a city withholding its meanings. And as I said the word to myself, its sound gained the taste of cotton candy – a too-sweet taste, though I kept repeating it anyway – indisclosure, indisclosure, indisclosure.

The houses had put their wheelie-bins out in the street – for tomorrow’s collection – and they reminded me of a dream I used to have, of waking up inside a black plastic bag, in a dustbin – and feeling content there, waiting for the truck to come and take me away – from the pain I felt then, and still felt now.

Tonight that pain came as a nest of tarantulas – dressed in the smeared aprons of butchers, washing their cleavers in my blood, and promenading along my muscles like avenues in an orchard.

I walked down a bike path to a canal. The wind quickened in its confinement here, so I walked faster, fingering the key in my pocket.

I imagined the wind coming from the old Deptford dockyard, and carrying with it the sighs of sailors who’d left from there and died at sea, younger than me, as long as half a millennium ago – when the docks had been the cradle of a navy that plundered the whole world. And in this wind, in its ghosts, was a reminder that London was still growing from the profits of that plunder.

But also in this wind was an opposite reminder – that London had grown from an army’s camp – an invader’s camp – and the river that army had bivouacked beside was rising. The walls that defended it were invisible now – but they were still here – and they couldn’t hold back the water forever. All camps are temporary – this one would be washed away too.

Two figures approached from beneath the bridge. One was taller than me, but both, in the gloom, looked younger, perhaps sixteen years old. The taller wore a dark tracksuit, dark trainers, and a white snapback hat; his shorter partner had more flair, with a cyan sweatshirt over navy overalls speckled with paint, and cobalt-blue shoes. His cropped hair was shaven in whorls.

‘Mate can you lend us some money?’ the shorter one asked.

I ignored them, clenching the key, and tried to walk past. The taller stepped into my way. I tiredly lifted my eyes to his.

‘Got any money to lend us?’ he asked.

I stared without saying anything. A vein in my leg twitched, and my blood began to flush with anticipation.

The taller one stepped closer and shoved me at my hip. I moved in obedience to his fist, and inhaled, untensing myself, as if about speak – but said nothing. The other shoved my shoulder.

‘You speak English?’ he asked. ‘We need to borrow a bit of money. I need to buy a speedboat.’ He laughed.

I sighed, readying my best impersonation of an action hero, and took two steps backwards.

‘Which of you wants your leg broken first?’ I asked.

Their expressions paused, blank while processing a reaction to this bluff – and then, just as they were both deciding on sniggers, I twisted round to kick sideways at the taller one’s outer leg, my shoe flat in a right angle as its heel hit his knee socket. It dislocated but didn’t snap – he shrieked, hobbling back, rolling his upper body forwards – so I punched into his nose, upwards, and it easily broke. His blood dribbled onto my knuckles like honey and, as I skipped backwards, for a moment I wanted to lick it.

The shorter boy stared in shock. The wall beside us prevented most types of attack, so I span and ducked to kick up in a back-hook at his face – hitting his chin, but not hard enough. The jaw clattered but didn’t snap. I spun to face him again, in a low stance, my fists up. He swiped vaguely at me with his left hand – I blocked it, but saw too late it had been a feint, and with his stronger fist he struck my eye. The side of its socket splintered into steel light – and he jabbed again at my stomach. I was tensed enough not to be winded, but stumbled to the water’s edge. He knew how to box, and pushed his advantage, smacking me in the temple and then the neck – I choked, tasting thickening mango – and tried to weave out of his way on my back foot.

I let him punch my eye again. Verdigris-green shattered into my throat – but I spat it back out into his mouth, sweeping at his front foot, and ducked under his arm to tug him backwards over his other leg. As he fell, I span round to strike my elbow into his cheek. Something cracked – but it might have been me. My nerves were livid. The space around me was splitting, as though allowing a sharper air to replace it. I was more vivid now and, somehow, now – finally now – in my body properly. I gripped onto his arm and stamped on it where it met his shoulder until it broke. He screamed as I stamped. I imagined that I was crunching burnt pinecones – I could smell the smoke of a bonfire of fir and chestnuts – and then I kicked him in the jaw until it, too, broke.

I felt like I had just been born. The shivers of the wind around me harmonised with the waves of wind in my spine. I breathed further than I could formerly breathe. My eyes could see backwards and upwards – the present was balling out into a vibrating sphere. I reached to stroke the boy’s head: its shaved hair resembled velvet – the fringe of a dress I wanted to kiss, or the fur of a foxglove.

I wished to further my assault on his partner, but a punch to the side of my chest winded me – I staggered over his body and looked back. There was third boy, my age, my height, hooded, holding a knife tipped with my blood. My coat had stopped his stab penetrating far. I axe-kicked at his hand to knock it open – he dropped the knife, but the boy on the ground grabbed my heel to trip me. I stamped on him, and the third man lunged to grip me by the throat. I tasted nutmeg, a cloud in my windpipe – and kneed him in the groin, but he didn’t release me – so I stamped again on the other boy to prevent him pulling me down. The night brightened as I lost air – and I embraced my strangler, inhaling his sweatshirt’s tranquil reek of weed, bending his choking arm inwards, surprising him off balance. In my advantage, I twisted into the skin of his neck – in the shadow, it clotted like cream around a pair of freckles the width of my two front teeth – and I bit him there so sharply that I tore off every layer of skin – but not enough to make him bleed. His grip relaxed – I kneed him again in the crotch and spun round to find the knife.

But it was not on the ground; perhaps it had fallen into the canal. This quick search was a misjudgement – the two boys on the ground jerked to grab a foot each, nearly tripping me onto my back. As I squatted, I jabbed with three fingers joined in a screwing motion into his eye – it softened, though didn’t burst into the jelly I wanted; he dug his head into the tarmac to get away – and before I could complete his blinding, the third boy tackled me.

I writhed, excited by the firmness of his biceps, and bit at his wrist, my jaw so wide it nearly detached to reach his flesh with my cuspid teeth – chewing and grinding until I tasted gristle and his arm-hair on my tongue. Yelling, he punched at my head with his free hand – and with each hit, I became younger, larger, more precise; and my teeth kept to his wrist, hopeful of bone; with each hysterical hit, I was resurrected – until finally he knocked my jaw loose, but not without its prize of meat. With my left foot, I kicked against the ground to slide out from under him – and he screamed at his ripped wrist, the tendons exposed, his hand useless, a severed vein gushing onto its unresponsive index finger, pointed in some broken reflex as though in accusation.

I squirmed faster, but still he pinioned my thighs – until I dragged my left arm loose and reached to rip at his ear. My grip slipped in his sweat, but I dug my nail back into its helix and tore down again – his head jerked to follow it; and I twisted it backwards, desperate to part the skin from his skull – but skin is hard to rip.

I shoved him further sideways to roll out from underneath him – but as I tried to leap away, one of the other boys snatched at my coat. I stretched back my shoulders to lose it over my arms – and he fell as I shed it, and shrunk – now only in my polo-neck. But before I was fully upright, the shorter boy with the splintered chin slapped my foot – and my face smacked into the concrete. I bit my tongue, tasting its own blood – the third now on my palate – and this mixture had the tartness of pomegranate seeds.

The third attacker dived onto me, gripping me in a headlock – his armpit’s deodorant leaking into his sweat, the smell of a ripening peach, its case breaking to the yellow fruit beneath, but soured by detergent – I sniffed longer, until at the back of the aroma I found hyacinth. He heaved his body onto mine, his knee in the small of my back, shouting ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’

Then, my head was concussed into the stone – and I saw the cobalt shoe of the shorter boy at my face. As he stamped me with one foot, and the asphalt assumed the flavour of salt in my throat – I watched his own blood webbing across the tongue of his other trainer. I wanted to skewer this foot to the ground with a knife to stare at it for longer in various lights – but the knife was gone, and I couldn’t worm my head away.

As his partner beat me, my vision seemed to swell – the geometry of the canal and the towpath was altered, distending, the rules of perspective suddenly re-complicated, as my gravity increased, competing with the city’s. Sounds fawned to my ear – the boys’ screams and pants, but also from further, I fancied, I could hear exhausts and bar chatter – and these sounds were gathering around me almost in devotion.

In his fury, he stripped the shirt off my back, and re-opened the whip cuts made that morning – but under his blows, I grew more exuberant, like a whole world I had never participated in before was being revealed to me. My old ultramarine pain was gone – overruled for now by joyful shallower agony. I had known that my world was not the right one – I had known that I was not living as everyone else was living – but here, finally, I was being allowed to exist where they existed – here, finally, I was experiencing a correctness in being alive, a comfort in simply being, that felt not like a state or stasis but a curve. I finally understood it, and stood in it, and accepted it and was accepted by it – the land was no longer alien to me; my body was no longer merely half here – I was here, wholly; I was present, I was finally present! Perhaps this was what is called Stendhal syndrome – overwhelmed to nausea by aesthetic pleasure...

‘Stay on his legs! Who fucking kicks like that?’

‘There’s only two hundred pound here,’ the taller boy shouted, turning out my coat pockets. ‘Get his shoes.’

Hands tore at my boots, and then slowed to unlace them – as hands tore at my waist, reaching beneath me to unbutton the fly. I flailed under the weight of two bodies. My socks were pulled off – and the money within them found. Then the mass on my thighs lifted – I kicked faster, but hands were already at my waist, dragging down my jeans and boxer-briefs until I was naked – and the money within them found also.

‘Let me kill him.’

‘Pick that up – count it!’

‘Let me fucking kill him!’

‘You’re not allowed to.’

What? I thought. Who didn’t allow him? Was I the performer now – in someone else’s play?

The second weight stood, and the foot left my head. They twisted me onto my back, serrating my flesh against the cement. My gaze was pure exhilaration; they were shaking in terror.

‘Shit!’

‘He’s got a boner!’

They recoiled – I clutched for the oldest boy’s testicles and squeezed one with my thumb into my palm until it flattened – and as he screamed in an agony that must have felt like levitation, I rolled sideways into the canal.

The water vibrated with joy – and I felt keener, faster, staring at them, safely, from a few meters away.

‘Have you got it?’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘Let’s go.’

The taller boy threw my clothes and shoes into the water. The shorter one vomited, leaning on the third as he tried to stand. I treaded water, watching as they hobbled towards the bridge, groping at each other like drunken lovers.

A bicycle light skimmed through the darkness towards them – too late to witness our communion. Its strobes illuminated the boys’ retreat. They gave way.

But I could not long remain in this cold – my clarity was yielding to heaviness. The water coiled around my legs like a moray eel, deepening towards a mile-high dam it wished to suck me into. In the dark I could see only my coat, a few strokes away – so I swam over, and found by it my jeans, but could not see anything else.

Kicking with one leg, paddling with one arm, I strove for the opposite bank, my lungs clenched as though stuffed with sackcloth. The bank was further than it ought to have been; possibly a current I couldn’t feel was resisting me – but my will was stronger than my muscles, and I achieved the shore. I climbed onto the bank in a crawl, wheezing, and sat to drag on my jeans and coat. But I couldn’t let myself pause here – so I crawled to the steps towards street level, spitting blood over my hands, my vision a whirlpool.

At the pavement, I tried to stand under a streetlight, but instead fell into a flowerbed. Its briars revived me – enough to claw forwards, with fists of soil, across and out onto the road. Cars cruised by with interior musics. I collapsed under the folds of my coat, looking up at clouds purpled by London’s light pollution.

As my body began to understand itself again, its adrenaline dwindled, but was replaced by a more exquisite thrill – of realisation.

The robbers could have guessed to search my socks and boxers – but Dawn’s antic mode this evening suggested she had betrayed me. Perhaps they had followed me from her doorstep. And so my suspicions about my whipping weren’t just paranoia – Dawn was arranging my injuries. Our game was real – I loved her more, for this.

And now it was my turn to play.

A car was approaching along the lane I lay in. And as I blacked out, I ejaculated.