Читать книгу Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017 - Jonathan Lyon, Jonathan Lyon - Страница 15

I woke being poked in my stab wound.

‘Get up, cunt,’ said a stranger.

Mint nails were beckoning me out of the cab. I followed the sheen of a cream cocktail dress upwards to a throat bared beneath gaunt cheeks, green insolent eyes, and a bob of auburn hair. I rose as ordered. Eva stepped around this other woman to support me onto the curb.

‘How are you helping him?’ the stranger asked, unmoving as I tried to focus on the building behind her.

The wall spelled out ‘Impluct’ in tall letters above a crowd of smoking attendees. A poster beneath announced this as the vernissage of Lars Vasari’s ‘DREAM TRAUMA’ exhibition.

‘My opinions have changed,’ Eva said.

‘He ruined your relationship.’

‘Francis ruined our relationship.’

‘Eva, Francis cheated on you – with him,’ the stranger insisted.

‘And I cheated on Francis with him too.’

‘Good evening,’ I said with a bow, as though I’d been invited to introduce myself. ‘I presume you are… Iris?’

‘Just… it’s different to how I thought,’ Eva continued. ‘Not completely different… Francis still needs to answer for himself. But maybe earlier I expressed my anger in a… homophobic way. Or bi-phobic, whatever. But that’s not how I’m going to express my anger anymore. And I’m not angry with Leander, he needs… Let’s just go inside. We both need a bit of numbing.’

‘I can numb you,’ Iris said, though her stare was still hostile. ‘Do you need to be carried?’

‘Yes please,’ I said, pretending not to understand her sarcasm.

And so, my arms spread across the two women’s shoulders, I limped towards the gallery entrance. Iris was colder than Eva, perhaps having waited too long without a coat, and my skin in contrast seemed feverish.

The crowd watched us with a reverence that we didn’t warrant. I had expected curiosity, but not this fascination. Possibly this was the effect of Eva’s fame. The two bouncers at the door parted without speaking or referring to a list.

‘Can you come unlock the kitchen, please?’ Iris asked the one on the left.

‘Does your guest need help?’

‘Actually, can you take him?’

I was transferred to the studier grip of the guard. The women led us quickly into the foyer – and as our entrance rippled through the gallery-goers, they paused in their mingling to gaze at us, with a nervousness that suggested they desired to approach but dared not. The main exhibition began up three steps in a wide white room, but we instead walked down a side corridor, towards a dove-grey door. The guard shifted his support as he took a key from his pocket and unlocked it.

‘Thank you,’ Iris said, conclusively, and the guard understood this as a cue to leave.

I was lowered onto a chrome stool beside a chrome table and gladly slumped into it, my head filling with sediment – which looped in a figure of eight. With my eyes closed, I could only hear some of what the women were saying. But I gathered that water was being boiled in a saucepan, and Francis had arrived half an hour ago. I let my thoughts lull into incomprehension.

‘Leander!’ Eva said, with an odd urgency, as though afraid I would not wake. ‘Leander!’

I lifted my head. Iris placed a white plate on the table. At its centre was a circle of fluffy, whiter shards. The plate’s underside was steaming still, from resting on the saucepan. She crushed the cooked ketamine with an Oyster card and divided it into three thin lines.

With a twenty-pound note rolled up her nose, Eva bent daintily to the plate, and insufflated an outer line. As she jerked back up, she blinked tears towards the ceiling, and passed the note to Iris. Iris did the same and passed the note to me. I breathed out in preparation, securing the makeshift straw with trembling fingers, and snorted the remainder.

It cut at my sinus with an enticing specificity – reducing the rest of my body’s aches to vagueness. The bitterness mixed scent and taste into a string that dripped into the back of my throat, which my mind saw inwardly as having the feathery blue-green of a mallard’s head. I sniffed again, able to sit more upright, my sense of self dispersing.

‘Can I have more than that? I asked.

‘Not right now,’ Iris said, her voice less severe, distracted by the loaded blood crossing her brain. ‘This is pure. We need to be able to talk still – we just want to be a little wonky so we can deal with the pretentious fucks outside. It’s human ketamine, not for horses – it’s from a hospital.’

‘When do you get this in hospital?’ Eva asked.

‘When you’re giving birth.’

Eva laughed. ‘And so tonight you’re giving birth to —’

But I didn’t hear the rest. The slurry of melt-crystals behind my eyes slurred my vision, and a gossamer began to replace my skin.

‘What – and you’re giving birth to your… revenge?’ Iris smiled, entirely now in a lighter humour.

‘Yeah. And what are you giving birth to?’ Eva asked me.

I cricked my neck as my nerves flowered into levity. ‘I’m giving birth to a baby swan called Winter, who can see ghosts, but he’ll never find a mate.’

‘Lucky him,’ Eva said. ‘I think I need to leave… What’s your laptop password?’

‘There’s no password,’ Iris said. ‘Just ask the guy at the door to let you into the studio.’

‘What you doing?’ I asked, drifting my head against the wall, smiling at Eva in innocence.

‘I’m going to edit a film,’ she said.

‘Of what?’

‘A video me and Francis made before he met you. You said the best revenge is erotic. So. I want to show it to everyone…’

‘What, like a sex tape?’ I asked. ‘You know they aren’t usually that embarrassing for the man.’

‘This one will be very special highlights.’

‘And then what?’ I asked. ‘How are you going to show it?’

‘Wait and see.’ Eva stood up, smiling.

She kissed Iris on both cheeks and kissed me on the forehead, stroking her finger under my chin until I lifted my lips towards hers and kissed her back. The feathery green-blue of the ketamine rose again in my mind, and fell back into a low note plucked on a cello.

‘I decided you’re a paradox,’ Eva said, her nose against mine. ‘It’s your opacity that’s attractive. You’re an act inside an act. What are your motivations?’

‘Motivations are for the artless,’ I said.

She didn’t answer, but shook her hair in a tremor of pleasure, and left. As the door shut behind her, Iris stood – and fetched a bottle of water from the fridge.

‘I still can’t be nice to you,’ she said. ‘I know about you.’

‘What do you know about me?’ I asked, delighted.

‘You can’t seduce me. I refuse to be seduced.’

‘I can seduce you. I’ll be so honest that you’ll become invested in me against your will.’

‘Is that your usual method?’

‘No. But I know that’s the method that will work.’

I was surrounded by the scent of thunder, and the scents that come after summer rain – of bracken fronds releasing cyanide into the air, and the odours of wood and soaked flowers.

‘How?’ she asked.

‘You are already intrigued,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have said “you can’t seduce me”, unless it was a challenge.’

‘Was it?’

‘Let’s make it one.’

‘Ok, then tell me the truth –’ Iris blinked as the dissociative drug fanned through her reflexes. ‘What are you doing? Why did you turn up at Eva’s door half beaten to death?’

‘Because I knew that by appearing so vulnerable before her she would forgive me.’

‘Ok, that’s quite a strong start.’ She sipped from the water bottle.

‘Honesty can be thrilling.’

‘So you used being beaten up as an advantage?’

‘I weaponised my suffering,’ I said. ‘I positioned her in the empowered role, so that she couldn’t feel like my victim anymore – she was the healer, I was the victim. Making people help you makes them care about you – or even makes them love you. Putting my health in her hands was a way of accelerating our intimacy, in the same way that being this honest with you accelerates our intimacy.’

‘Why did you want her to forgive you?’

‘She might be useful.’

‘Then why not just befriend her? Why steal her boyfriend? Why the mind-fuck first?’

‘I didn’t steal anything,’ I said. ‘And the mind-fuck is the befriending. How else can she know me properly unless I hurt her? And then come to her, having myself been hurt.’

‘So, what – the proper you is hurting people?’

‘Being hurt can be thrilling.’

‘Did you get beaten up on purpose?’

‘I’d have to really love being in this much pain to do that.’

‘Has the ketamine helped?’

I smiled. ‘I’m nearly ready to give birth.’

We stood up. She took my arm. But her touch had too many premises in it – like mist over a pond at sunrise – and I saw a flotilla of lotus leaves, leaving the shore of the living, each burning a different stack of incense – cypress and cassia and styrax and myrrh, and so on – until I seemed inside a mayhem of futures. The aroma was too strong – and, quickly, I kissed her. She let me.

‘But I’m still not seduced,’ she said.

I balanced on her as she opened the door. My movements had regained little focus.

‘I’m not finished yet,’ I said. ‘I have to seduce you with cruelty as well.’

We quit the chrome kitchen arm in arm, and glided down the corridor.

‘How will being cruel to me seduce me?’ she asked.

‘Not to you, to someone you’re attracted to. Francis.’

She didn’t reply.

‘I guessed in you a proprietary jealousy,’ I said, ‘that differed from simple sympathy for Eva.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that? Most of the girls here have a crush on Francis. That wasn’t a hard guess.’