Cows (4 page)

CHAPTER TEN

H
e had been to the fourth floor before. In the endless years of his growing it had been part of a route that led to a temporary escape from the mad bludgeonings of his mother. Up the stairs that were always unlit and creaked fear into a young boy’s legs, along a landing so thick with its own isolation that the shadows must, absolutely must, hide something hideous and fanged that drooled for the blood of a child, to a ladder at the end that you climbed to a square of meshed glass, then out on to the roof, panting and pushing the skylight open and gulping down the gritty air of the city that seemed back then to expand in your lungs and float you up and out into a world not shared by monsters or mother.

Beyond an immediate ring of desolation, lights glittered and flashed colors out across the world. And the colors were so significant then—each neon shade tugged at him with its promise of a different way to live, each glowing curl of tubeglass was an entire world that would close around you if you stared at it long enough and carry you off on warm purple nights to a place where there was music and people laughed.

To stand by the railing at the edge of the roof, kicking at loose bricks and dreaming of moving out into those lights, was payment enough for the shrieks and beatings that inevitably greeted his return to the flat.

But time clawed its way across the lights and they paled. They took on a new meaning that brought no gladness to Steven’s heart. Where they had once been the fuel of dreams, they now became a cankerous reminder that those dreams had not come true. So Steven stopped climbing the ladder at night and began to search instead the less fickle TV screen for ways to the worlds he had seen from the roof.

Now the fourth floor was different. Forty watts burned over a dusty gray carpet runner and the sepia light showed Steven only a duplicate of his own landing. The haunted infinite darkness he had imagined as a child had been exposed by a weak lightbulb and the passing of time as a deception. It was no longer the mystical, horrored passage to dream-time that had so attracted him in those early years.

But standing there, silently gathering his courage outside Lucy’s flat, he could not help hoping that it might again become a section on some road to happiness. Not the real happiness that TV so accurately threw across the bareness of his bedroom—he could not hope for that—but an approximation of this ideal, a stockaded copying, built with the only materials at hand, within which his loneliness could be shallowly buried.

Lucy opened the door, then drifted back and collapsed on a couch. Steven followed her in and sat at one end. The room looked like it had been picked up and shaken. A thousand small objects lay scattered over any surface that would hold them. Some of them were clothes and containers of food, but many were shiny steel and surgical in nature. Small lamps shone yellow in corners and a video played an abdominal operation—close-ups of blood on green medical cloth, tight angles on smeared rubber gloves probing inside a human, low-volume technical commentary.

“They sell these to people who want to be doctors, to teach them. But I don’t think they look for the right things.”

Lucy talked without taking her eyes off the screen. The surgeons manipulated organs and she started to shout, jerking forward, squinting. “Look! Did you see that, when he lifted the liver?”

“What?”

Lucy rewound with a remote. “There was something under it. Didn’t you see? It was black and shiny. Look.”

The tape played again and the black thing under the liver was only a cavity filled with blood.

“Shit.” Lucy slumped back, but she didn’t stop watching. “Why don’t they show it? One day it’ll be there. They’ll forget to hide it and I’ll know just where it is.” Then remembering, turning to face Steven: “Did you look in the cows?”

“There wasn’t anything.”

Lucy’s face set. “You didn’t look.”

“I did. I looked. I moved everything around and I couldn’t see anything except guts.”

“Did you look inside the organs?”

“Some of them.”

“What about the intestines?”

“How could I? They’re all clogged up with shit.”

Lucy was angry. “It could have been in there. You should have checked.”

“There wasn’t anything there.”

Lucy sucked her teeth in disgust and stopped the video. Steven was worried, he needed to make a connection. This room and its disarray, this girl with tits under her T-shirt and her legs sprawled apart, was the closest he was going to get to a wife and a ranch in the country. He tried to sound sympathetic.

“How do you know there’s anything there at all?”

“Because I know how much pus my body churns out. I’ve measured my shit and my piss and my snot and all the other slime that comes out of me. And it doesn’t add up to what being alive pumps into me every fucking day.”

“If you’re so sure, how come you have to find it in cows or see it on a video?”

“Because if I know exactly what it looks like and exactly where it is, I can find it in me and cut it out.”

Lucy pushed herself up from the couch and walked over to something on a table that looked like a computer. She fiddled with the console and picked up a thin black flexible rod that was connected to it by a length of wire.

“Help me look?”

She pressed a switch and the monitor came to life, showing an unfocused disc of shadows and light that shifted as she moved the black cane through the air. Steven could see a bright light at its tip.

“It’s an endoscope. It’ll show if there’s anything in my colon, but I need you to help me put it in.”

“Sure.”

Lucy pulled off her tights and bent forward, bracing herself against the table, in front of the monitor. Steven smelled shit as he worked lubricant into her ass. Her ring was tight like Dog’s. He couldn’t tell if there was anything sexual in it for her, but they’d got intimate awfully fast and pictures of a future he never expected to see were scrolling up into the present.

“Push it in slowly. I had a shit before, so it should be clear.”

Steven eased the probe in. The light glowed through her ass briefly, then it went deeper and the disc on the screen focused. A close tunnel of yellowish gut bulged fatly in from the edge of the picture, its center shadowed, beyond the reach of the light. The probe slid smoothly for a few inches then hit a bend. A head-on view of colon wall filled the disc, so brightly illuminated that the dark veins beneath the surface were visible. Lucy tensed and sucked air.

“Sorry.”

“You can steer it with those handles.”

Where the probe became a solid haft there were two steel loops like the rings on an old-fashioned syringe. By pulling back on one or the other of these, Steven found he could twist the head of the probe enough to guide it around the curve and into the next section of bowel. Here the gut lining was more corrugated and the folds were crusted with hard deposits of shit.

Lucy made a noise. “Jesus, that’s disgusting. Even dumping doesn’t get you clean.” She shook her head sadly. “My parents used to tell me to be happy. What a fucking joke. How can there be any happiness with filth like that rotting away inside? You’ve got to be clean to be happy. Go on, push it further.”

“Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”

Steven was more interested in watching the probe disappear into her hole than in the image on the screen.

“Fuck no, that stuff just comes from food. The real poison comes out of your head. All your fuck-ups and sadnesses and fears drop down like some sort of brainshit into your guts and build up there. That’s what really fucks you up. I told you before.”

Lucy had over a foot and a half of the probe in her now and her teeth were clenching against pain. Steven bent the endoscope through a particularly tricky twist of colon and slid it forward another few inches. The blunt head of a turd blocked the way, like an animal in its lair.

“Jesus fuck, not more already.”

“Do you want me to push it through?”

“Can’t. It’ll smear the lens and you won’t see anything. Leave it there, I want to look at it.”

Steven let go of the probe carefully and leaned back to get a better view of the rod sticking out of her. He stroked the skin around her cunt, she didn’t turn.

“We can look in you after, if you want.”

“Huh?”

“You’ll have poison inside you too. The only way to get normal is to find it and cut it out.”

He slid his middle finger into her cunt, she was wet and she pushed against him.

“It’s too late for normal.”

He got his cock out and stuck it in her. He had to bend the probe out of the way and the picture shifted slightly.

“Keep it where it was.”

She sounded urgent so he twisted the thing until the shit was center screen again, snouting blindly into the glare of the endoscope.

The picture vibrated as Steven pumped, but Lucy was locked in on it too tightly to complain. He watched his dick plough between red flaps of skin and thought he could feel the hard line of the probe pressing against him through a layer of internal meat. Near the end Lucy started to moan.

When it was over he pulled the probe out of her ass and she cleaned the streaks of shit and intestinal mucus off it with a handful of tissue. She held the stained paper to her nose.

“Fuck, it stinks.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
teven thought it might happen straightaway, that the fucking might magically bring into existence around him the world of his TV dreaming. But Lucy lay down on the floor, in a cold draft from an open window, and fell asleep without speaking to him. So he went back to his room and the TV and Dog in the corner with a dog smile so happy to see him, and lay naked under his torn blanket, lifting and lowering it, puffing out the fish stink of his recent sex in warm gusts of memory.

He was not worried at the delay. She would be what he wanted, Lucy upstairs. He knew it. There might be more steps to take, but she would be the mother, the lover, the hook on which to hang his plagiarized blueprint for living.

There had been no love there, upstairs tonight, but it would come—Lucy would force it into being. She had no choice. She would never find her black lumps of poison or cut them out, and like Steven she would never be part of the world. In time, when she realized this, she would need someone to cling to, someone to absorb and deaden the impacting horror of her sentence. And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love.

The Hagbeast would permit no such joining, of course. She would move swiftly to destroy any source of affection, any avenue of hope, that threatened her tyranny.

And so she must not find out.

But that was impossible. How could he hide from her a growing involvement with Lucy when she tracked the slightest of his movements with every sense she possessed? He was transparent to her and sooner or later she would know, despite any camouflage he might erect, that he was directing himself to more than his daily struggle against her.

She would know. She would home in and ruin his dream before he had a chance to use Lucy to make it real. She would expel him from the flat or she would kill him. There could be no middle ground.

Here, now, with Lucy’s cunt scum crusty on his dick, with the raw materials of his envisioned satellite world at last close enough to reach, the inference was obvious. And it did not surprise Steven that he found little horror in its contemplation—he had suffered too long.

Steven did not sleep.

How could it be done?

What would it feel like to kill, to actually extinguish the pile of meat that had shitted him into existence? If she had been a mother like mothers were meant to be, then he supposed it would be impossible. Or if possible, that it would trail such jellyfish tentacles of remorse his eyes would be forever clouded with the final stinging vision of thick white foam boiling past her swollen tongue and out over his wrists.

But she had never worn a blue-checked apron or baked sweet pies in a kitchen where the warm air made her cheeks rosy, never reached down with floured hands to lift him up onto the table and kiss his face and laugh at his giggles with her eyes so bright he thought he would never see anything else again, or want to, never shown him things or let him press the dough before she wrapped him up in herself and carried him off to bed. And because this was so, he knew the act would not bleed forward in time to harry him in small-hour awakenings. It would stop when she stopped.

The killing would bring him relief, but its doing would not be easy. He could imagine himself, head back and howling, in a suffusing glory of murder, gouting semen across her naked shoulders as he hauled back on her head and snapped her neck. But reality would be different. Reality would be a frightened rush to the finish with no time to linger over details, a headlong plunge to get it over with before his courage gave out, before a lifetime of conditioning reared up and robbed his arms of strength.

Steven squirmed in his bed. He had to do it, there was no other way. But in twenty-five years he had not lifted a hand against her, and thoughts of starting now with the ultimate hand-raising made him frightened enough to puke. His body felt boned and unequal to the task.

Much better to find some way less direct. Killing without the necessity of active throttling, stabbing, beating participation. She was old and immensely overweight, the systems of her body degenerating under an onslaught of filth and the mordant of age. There had to be a way to place a final, terminal strain on them. An iceberg method that kept the bulk of its guilt and purpose hidden from sight.

Steven watched the shifting reflections of streetlight on his ceiling until dawn.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Y
ou were out last night and you didn’t tell me.” The Hagbeast ladled an oily sludge into his breakfast bowl. Her eyes flicked blankly across the table and into the corners of the room, a false front running interference for her words.

“You know Mama needs to know where you are all the time.”

“Why?”

“So I can be sure you’re eating right.”

“You shouldn’t have pissed on Dog.”

“I should have pissed down its throat and drowned it. Where did you go?”

“The roof.”

She chuckled. It made her neck shake. “You moron. Staring at the people out there won’t change anything. You can’t be like them, don’t you know that? You’re part of me, you little fuck, part of this place, and you’ll die here.”

Steven tipped whatever it was she had served him out onto the table and threw the bowl across the room. He didn’t bother to stand.

“And when I do, it’ll be a long time after you and I’ll have someone to love me when I go.”

The Hagbeast snorted into the greasy early-morning air.

“Who’s going to love you, Steven? I used to live out there before you infected my cunt. I know what they like and what they love. And it isn’t you. Hear me, you piece of shit? It isn’t you.” She spat on the floor and caught her breath. “Clean up that mess, you fucker, and eat.”

Steven didn’t move. He looked into those empty eyes and decided it was time to test himself.

“I know what you’re doing with this food.”

The Hagbeast’s face went dark with blood and she shouted each word distinctly. “I am not trying to poison you!”

“Yes you are.”

“I’ve told you before, Steven, I eat what you eat. How can it be poison?”

“Because it is. I can feel it in me.”

“For the last time, cunt, it’s only food. Now eat it.”

“It’s shit.”

“If I eat it, you will as well.”

“Not anymore. From now on I’m going to make the food.”

“What?”

The Beast lurched upright, slavering and working her mouth incredulously. Fat slewed about her frame under the sudden acceleration. She planted her fists on the table and roared: “No!”

The stink from her throat wrapped itself around Steven’s head. He stood up, breathed it in, drew back his arm … and hit her. A single short hook to the side of the head. He felt the impact travel through his bones, the sandpaper crunch of his knuckles against the coarse skin of her face. For one wild moment he wanted to keep on hitting until she was a bleeding sack of shit, draped shapeless over the back of her chair. But he couldn’t do it. Instead he watched a white smear of disbelief shade out from the red mark on the side of her head.

She looked at him through eyes veiled with the calculation of shifting power balances. Her features held no trace of pain, only a drenching hate that boiled with the reassessment of options.

Steven held her gaze, but it was a war. The hard seconds thudded into him, working on his knees and stomach, searching, weakening, all the time getting closer to finding a path to that soft interior where reassertion of the dominances scattered by his blow might be possible.

It was time to go. Her scrutiny threatened the glory he felt burning about him like the cold fire in some picture of God. This first small act of defiance was too valuable to be risked here in the flat light of the kitchen. It must be gathered in, protected, allowed to grow and to extend into time, raising structures in its slipstream that would shelter him in the future.

He put his head close to hers and said into her face, “I make the food and you eat it.”

He left the room as she started to shriek.

“Fuck you, you fucking moron! I know what you’re doing. Anything you can make, I can eat. My guts held you for nine months, you can’t get worse than that. You think you can beat your mother? We’ll see. We’ll see about that, you dogshit.”

Her ranting followed Steven down the stairs like garbage tipped from a pail.