Friction (32 page)

Steve places the tip of the knife just under where his perfect jaw curves and heads up towards the childishly smooth skin around his ear. He pierces easily. He's amazed at the self-control he retains. He's able to cut a misplaced red smile across his neck while maintaining full consciousness. He feels the blade strike the corresponding bone on the other side of his face. Success. The blood flows and warms his chest.

‘I'm out of fashion,' he murmurs, as the blood dribbles down his sides and is absorbed by the shopping bags around
him. The up-to-the-minute designs soak up the rich brown muck.

As he bobs hopelessly on the surface of life, spurting blood pulling him down, he hears the sound of Carly screaming; a shriek of Darling, Darling. He reaches out and delves into the bags around him. He feels the fresh fabric. The distressed denims. The silks. The satins. The old skins; spilling on to them his blood.

‘I'm out of fashion,' he whispers, bobbing on the surface of life. He sinks perhaps, dies, of course. Is pulled down, or up; whatever.

SMILE. THERE ARE
things to live for. We'll list them together later. For now, there's one last end. Back to the bathroom. Everything important happens in bathrooms.

It was the unexpected desire to vomit up each of his vital organs that made Colin a little nervous. Now he's on his hands and knees, back looping and arching, tongue dangling above Rebecca's corpse, hacking and hacking. His Adam's apple is lurching up and down his neck. He suspects he's sweating his brain out through the pores of his forehead, that's why his thoughts are losing clarity and he's so nervous. He'd barely come to terms with the fact he'd murdered a mother and her unborn child, when he himself began to die. It seemed an unlikely coincidence.

But Rebecca isn't dead. She's listening to Colin's strange sounds in some quiet corner of her consciousness. It feels as if the pain and the blood loss have reduced her to a small individual who inhabits the innocuous nooks and crannies
of her body. Gone for her are the days of living in her head. She's convinced her consciousness and thoughts exist only in her kneecap, or her armpit perhaps. It's hard to tell. It's a fitting form for humanity to take, she thinks. We should never have been so big. We should never have used our heads. As her heartbeat becomes faint, she can still hear the strange groans and drillings of Colin's body. The sound of the rat poison taking control.

She's been pretending to be dead for so long she's anxious she might have indeed died. Certainly, she presumes her child is dead. She must. But her eyes won't cry, weighted as they are with exquisitely fresh and sundried tomato. When you think about it – which she does – life's a funny business. It is, isn't it? Particularly when you think about it while dying on a bathroom floor. Pretending to be dead and listening carefully to the slow death of a young man you've poisoned. Yes, life is brilliant and simple.

With an awful groan reminiscent of a birthing cow, Colin's head falls into Rebecca's stomach and the sounds and smells of him shitting himself drift through his legs towards the two young people. With his head still buried in Rebecca's stomach, Colin breathes a deep breath, then he throws up over the girl and over the floor. Little bits of Italian-style bread. Mauled chorizo. Styled and treated meats. Blood-red mozzarella. It's then that Colin notices the rat poison. The small turquoise pellets among the regurgitated food. Moments later he notices Rebecca's heartbeat.

. . . dudum . . . dudum . . . dudum . . . just a slight pulse – she's still alive. Before Colin can react he's dragged off into another disgusting cycle of shitting and
vomiting. It's colourful: red from his arse and turquoise from his lips.

Downstairs, through the door and down the street, Justin turns the steering wheel of his Peugeot. Justin, finally. He pulls up outside Colin's house and gets out of his car. He skips neatly around the bonnet and strides heroically to the front door, which he kicks down. He lets out a small blurt of laughter as the door swings open ahead of him. It was only on the latch. His leg bones jolted as the door opened with unexpected ease. He sniggers again, feeling embarrassed; a slight shame.

‘Colin!' he shouts, stepping into the hall and looking up the steep stairs which begin almost as soon as you enter the house. ‘Colin!' he shouts again, forcing anger into his voice. He feels strangely guilty about breaking down the door and trespassing. He steps to his right and glances into the living room; a foul brown three-piece on a thin brown carpet. On the far side of the room on the mantelpiece, Justin recognises the bright blue of a used and positive pregnancy test. He chuckles at the sight of it, covering his mouth with a sideways palm. Who keeps piss-stained paper on their mantelpiece? ‘Colin!' he screams, turning again to the staircase, his voice containing a slight smirk.

Sensing that the element of surprise is already lost on account of the giggling and the shouting, Justin runs up the stairs. He reaches the top, where again his confidence fails and a smile appears on his lips, keen to graduate to a laugh.

He's never been to Colin's house. It's disgusting. He thinks back to the Malmaison, to the jam-jarred foetus and the woman's scar: one of civilisation's smaller stories. What am I? he thinks. A twat, presumably. Another smaller story.
The experiment wasn't meant to include episodes like this. Where are the cheering Africans? The liberated call-centre staff? The keys to the city? I've made no one happy, Justin confirms, wiping yet another smile off his face.

It's nerves, naturally. He's only nervous. I'm not a hero, he thinks, I'm to blame. He recalls meeting Rebecca in the Nude Factory. There must have been a simpler way. We could have holidayed together. She could have chained me to the bed. We might have laughed. Been happy.

He composes himself and reaches for the fake porcelain doorknob on the bathroom door. He turns it and the latch gives with a click. He steps cautiously into the bathroom. More embarrassment: Colin's shit himself and it absolutely stinks. But then, Jesus, the blood. Justin watches as Colin squirms on top of Rebecca; his throat gurgling like a plughole.

Justin catches his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Staring into his own eyes, he identifies something he believes to be himself. A glint. A memory pool. But this self exists only in his eyes. He doesn't recognise his body at all; neither the head that surrounds his eyes nor the torso on which his head is perched. He feels he couldn't possibly manoeuvre his shoulders or his arms; he feels completely paralysed. He's distracted by a long and sudden burp from Colin. Justin's gaze lowers: all this bloodshed, all of it just for sex.

Colin crawls to Justin's feet. His head lifts up with a disturbing jolt, as if only flaps of skin are keeping it on his shoulders. He tries to speak but succeeds only in spewing a green gloop at Justin's feet.

Justin is motionless. He's waiting patiently for anger and shock to make him move. Where is my rage? he thinks. He
aids the process by staring at the blood, the unnatural curves of Rebecca's body. The coffees sit unsipped on the side of the bath. He wants to laugh out loud.

‘Well, it's gone too far,' says Justin, immediately shocked by the uselessness of his words, as if they hadn't come from his brain but had been lodged between his teeth and had suddenly come loose and fallen from his mouth.

‘Help,' barks Colin, his gob a gaping blue, the entrance to a cold computer game hell. Justin notices Rebecca's eyelids flicker, forcing a sundried tomato to fall on to the floor. But he can't look at her. This is cowardice, he thinks, his life fucked up all over his face and shaven crown. He sits on the bath and picks up a magazine.

‘I could do with some advice, you know, guys? I could do with writing off for some wisdom, you know? Guys?' says Justin, flicking through magazines as the guys die beneath him. He executes an enormous yawn, so big it almost sends him tumbling back into the bathtub. After completing the yawn with a rather camp cooing sound, he nonchalantly takes Colin by the hair and carefully brings his face smashing into a radiator. There, he thinks, a bit of anger, at last. There is a dull flesh-on-metal thud. A tingling sound reverberates around the acoustics of the radiator. Then pushing Colin's body to one side, Justin kneels over Rebecca and kindly removes the remaining tomato from her eye.

‘Rebecca, wake up.'

‘Justin?'

‘Yeah, it's me.'

Justin stares at Rebecca's stomach. My child? he thinks. I'm some sort of dad. There are tears in his eyes but they were put there by his yawn. He takes Rebecca by the
shoulders and turns her on to her side. She splutters approval.

Nature, thinks Justin, it gets you in the end. We thrash about like plastic fantastics, talking of romance and success. But nature gets you in the end. It arrives late at the house party with its two able wingmen, death and birth. Before you can strike a pose they have taken over. Death is on the decks, spinning records like a pro. Birth is on the dance floor, showing up our sorry moves. Nature is in the corner, chatting up your love, winning them completely. Justin can't think what to do. Nature has won. Against all odds. He looks at Rebecca. He wants to nurse her wounds with a warm sponge. Is this my fate?

He can't stop yawning. He has to turn away from Rebecca to unleash one of the windiest yawns he's ever done in the direction of Colin, whose nose is scattered all over his face like bird seed. Tired of pretending to be dead, Rebecca returns to the same spluttering sort of life she'd been leading an hour or so ago. She fires up her traction engine lungs in an attempt to prevent Justin from nodding off.

‘Justin . . . Come on.'

Justin shakes his head vigorously from side to side then stretches his eyes open. He expels a large lungful of air and with it the same cooing sound we heard a few moments ago.

‘I'm sorry, Rebecca. It's me, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' says Rebecca, her words brittle. ‘You're the idiot.'

Justin nods. Rebecca puts a hand on his knee. He can't feel any squeezing although her hand is clearly straining. He looks again at her uneven stomach. She never aborted my child, he recalls. It was all complete bullshit.

‘It's funny, isn't it?' says Justin.

‘What is?'

‘The way things work out.'

‘It's hilarious,' says Rebecca. ‘Were you going to call an ambulance or . . . or would you like me to do it?'

Rebecca's voice sounds barely human. That is to say, too human. She's in danger of dying of anger. What is Justin doing? With every wave of rage she's sure that the blood accelerates from her cuts and that her bruises darken.

‘Save me,' she croaks.

‘I am saving you.'

‘This is real life!'

Rebecca splutters and recoils deep into her consciousness, once again taking up residence in her kneecap or her elbow joint. Somewhere small. She barely notices as Justin lifts her head into his lap and begins to tuck the loose strands of her hair behind her ears.

Justin's thoughts are wordless as he massages her scalp. He drifts through his past. Its principle characters turn on him then freeze. Noises leap from mouths but desist just short of making sense. Episodes merge. His mother sits at the table in the restaurant, strippers faking it beyond her shoulder, celebrities falling to bits. He sighs. All of it just for sex.

It's minutes later when Rebecca feels her head being gently lowered to the floor and hears Justin dialling nine three times into his mobile phone. Her eyes open in time to see him place his hand over the receiver and stare at her with a beaten gaze.

‘I don't want a girlfriend, Rebecca,' he says, his lips exaggerating the shapes of the words. He grins. ‘And I do realise this is real life. Yes . . . this is real life.'

YOU NEED TO
know my name. That's what they've told me. And, like all prisoners, I have a grudging grasp of obedience. It seems that however much time passes, our species still gets wet at the prospect of revelation and truth. So yes, they've told me to write about myself. Me. Really me. I smirked at the idea. But Governor Gordon has had it with my story. Susan, too. It's a screw-up. Truly. It's a screw-up. And existence, it seems, boils down to little more than a selection of pronouns: my story wasn't
for you
or
about them
. It was about
me
. How disappointing.

I am called Theo. A stupid name, I'm sure you'll agree. To me it sounds like a process. A verb. To Theo. A word to describe a quick and hysterical slip into total despair. When I was younger, they used to take me out of here on day trips. I used to go to schools to see how I behaved around children my own age. I didn't do well. They suffered, the little girls and boys. Don't, Theo. Don't.

Other than that I've been here all my life. Writing silly made-up stories for Susan and for Gordon. Finally,
I discovered the truth thanks to the Evernet database. I served it to them sour, in chapters. Now the two of them are trapped and angry. They've requested I tell you about myself. Relax. I have very little to say.

The date. I know how society feels about dates – you're obsessed. I almost certainly can't share your enthusiasm for years or specific days. I've spent so much of my life in a kind of dateless sea. I've been aware of some form of duration but never really found myself in the wash of time itself. Only in recent years have I begun to understand the full significance of dates. Jesus, 1945: that's a big 'un, I've gathered that. 1789: woo hoo. 2001: it must have been extremely exciting.

It's not the same for me. Time, I mean. I recall having been alive in the past; certain lights and the odd feeling. But realistically, I remember bugger all. Just the odd sensation that I touchingly allow to masquerade as memory. Agewise, I reckon I'm twenty-odd. Yeh. I'm a jolly young twenty-something looking forward to the future.