I Was Dora Suarez (3 page)

Now the killer found that he was at an interior point in himself, looking down at the blood-puddled floor, at the girl’s body, where his self-image (of which he was immensely proud) bothered him vaguely; he felt that something inside him was hammering to get his attention from the wrong side of his steel door – some entity that was starving, excluded and ignored. It was himself, of course, though he had no means of realising that. He had always had very serious problems with himself indeed on practically every level and always would have, because he possessed no equipment whatever by means of which he could identify any problem. Problems manifested themselves with him, as they do with the residents in a lunatic asylum, as no problem, which is why they are in the asylum. The problem is themselves, and it is too great for them to solve – that lust, that vague unidentifiable sadness, the sudden lost feeling or the savage desire to kill or pick someone else’s nose, shit in a crowded train. Well, if you have no idea what a problem is, it is extremely unlikely that you will ever be able to solve it. In this case, the killer presented the classic bore’s syndrome that of literally clinging to existence through having no memory of it – in other words, by having an exact memory of the present and none whatever of the past. This provided him – but only him – with an illusion of living: everyone who detected that it in fact was nothing but an illusion had to go, and that was when the sports bag was unzipped. The only way he managed to fill this gap and exist at all was by his exact memory in the present, and none whatever of the past, which provided him with the illusion of living while he absently suffered and caused pain. By definition, however, there was no possibility whatever of his changing, let alone improving his position in any direction – for how can
anyone ever hope to be freed from a situation that he doesn’t understand?

Bores and killers are much the same; dullness and despair explains most murders. Killers kill because they spew out far too much energy on being polite in a way that normal people never do. Most killers are of bourgeois origin or, worse still, have been forced in a working-class atmosphere to making a copy of it. I have never met one single stimulating killer in all my time with A14; and if you’ve never met one there, then I very much doubt if you will meet one anywhere.

With this killer, there were very, very serious sexual problems of whose origins he had no idea, of course, since he was unable to analyse them. One form his trouble took (if it had just stopped there!) was the absolute, though unconscious hatred he bore towards the one part of himself over which, even though it was attached to him, he had no control: his prick. He had started to punish it on that account while he was still very young – ever since the first time, in fact, that it was challenged by a woman to do its stuff and failed. It let him down like a flat tyre the first time he ever tried it out when he was fifteen, at that first dread moment in a young man’s life when, thanks to its steadfast and utter refusal to come up, part of his body proved him not to be the superior being that the rest of him thought he was. Quite the contrary: this shrunken yet vital little portion of him lolled feebly, as it had done ever since, with a negative yet controlling insolence, given the situation, against his thigh like an old pisspot leaning on a bar, more or less winking at him as it were in a sly manner, daring him to do something about it. In the end he had given it such a stout slap that he screamed with his self-inflicted pain and the girl fled before the negative glory of his impotence, so that the first penal blood he ever shed was his own. The being that he had already thought he possessed very sensibly rushed out of the room and away from that cheap Caledonian Road hotel.

He made an error and wept with the next girl, having waited, psychically asleep, for nearly a year after that. May was on the fat
side and wore glasses that steamed up – she was known as Preshy to her very few friends, Fleshy to her numerous enemies, since she was a known grass and had already taken one heavy beating for playing out of her league. Her new error was to take this sport on because no one else would despite his good looks, and besides she was getting a bit desperate for a fuck. These looks of his, though, she gradually noticed, soon kind of vanished under inspection and she also found herself having to deal with other problems such as his spontaneous outbursts of maniacal fury; they were of an order she had never come across before. Her own problem was the twin one of both being sly so as to encourage trouble and then lying back to try and enjoy it; she was too stupid ever to realise that he was silent and well behaved in the boozers they went to only because he was trying to understand what natural behaviour meant through watching the people around him with exactly the same purpose and intensity as a bad actor, in an effort to make a copy of what he could never become.

Anyway, the first time they did both find themselves flat on a hotel bed at the end of an evening of half bitters, she expertly unsnapped her bra and black dotted clingers and knickers and kicked her flat heels into a corner. They started to cuddle, half-clothed; but the preliminaries seemed to her to last for an awfully long time, which depressed her. She was still sorry for him, but physically his efforts made her start to go off him; she thought, This is getting to look like the makings of a disaster area here if blokey doesn’t perform soon and he’s so sort of boring – only, being stupid, she was innocent and had no idea of what she was literally playing with, no idea how urgent it was with him that he should conquer her. Hers was a very dangerous ignorance indeed – indeed it was mortal, for when he broke out weeping to her after hours in the dark, complaining of not being able to make himself work in spite of hours of sweating effort, she committed a truly majestic error; she flung herself off the mattress and gave him the raspberry because she was exhausted, dissatisfied and fed up with struggling under him.

It was the last thing she ever did. As with all his past and future women – he was never sure right up to the end whether it was eleven or twelve – May died; and she died because what she had asked of him was not the extraordinary, but the impossible – a good, square, old-fashioned fuck. She had no idea at all what she was dealing with; it was as if you had asked a schoolteacher to defuse a rotting but live bomb. Indifferently, the killer still remembered her at times, sniffed the knickers he had worn on that occasion, which he kept at College Hill with his souvenirs, then shook his head and smiled at the idea as though she were just part of a story he had read in a book or seen on television, saying to himself, Just look at that now, will you? She must have been like that little mystery in that serial on Channel 4 that he watched silently in the pub, where the feller cut just a shade too deep, so that she bled too fast and was gone too quick. That was the trouble with nearly all of them, they were hardly any of them up to it, except just one or two little toughies in some kind of training who put up something like a battle; the rest of them just sliced up like wet fish, gave off that gargle of theirs and died before you were anywhere near your own climax, might you be so lucky, mazel tov.

So that’s how it was. He took no more precautions than the normal not to be caught, any more than a girl does going on and off the pill. He performed whenever he knew he had to perform, which was when he was unable to control himself, and then read about it next day in the press, casually, even with the attitude of a serious citizen, since, because he was now asleep again, there was no way, no way at all, that this creature folk were describing as a monster could possibly be him. Also, the reporting was really lousy, and the police work made you wonder how the fuzz ever nailed anyone for anything the stupid way they set about it.

And that was why he had never had his collar felt. As far as he was concerned the culprit was someone totally and absolutely unknown to him despite the shocking litter of relics, the smell, a head from time to time that stood around on an old plate for a while till the pong really got too fierce and it had to be junked.
There were even moments, when he read about the exploits of this person in the press, when he muttered to himself, You bet, this bastard’s got to be caught, he’s a fucking animal. True, he had fleeting feelings that whoever had gutted this poor little bat here on page one was some other geezer that he might know just vaguely; he wasn’t sure, but didn’t he go out with a very nice-looking dark feller that he met in the boozer from time to time and then they both went out on a dragging spree? He would have to have a word with this feller about it next time they met, whatever his name was, he probably had lots. Still, give the mate a bit of margin – after all, just like himself, he was only going for a stroll, ripping off a bit of bird, it was the kind of thing the whole world did the whole bleeding time, why be choked if a bit of vinegar gets upset?

All right, laddie had let his passions stray just a little bit too far; still he was certainly pretty terrific as an operator.

‘Your funny little thing really is tiny, isn’t it?’ May said to him, looking at it with interest the first and last night in her life she saw him naked. She bent down, doubled up in her fat clumsiness and tried to give it a kiss. He shrank away from her with the whiplash speed of a viper and she said: ‘It’s all right, don’t get your knickers in a knot, I was only just looking at it, love, it looks sort of bruised or something, doesn’t it hurt?’ She added: ‘I thought you would be huge, like Daddy’s, the way you came on in the pub.’ She was a working-class good-works vicar’s daughter, only oversexed. ‘I’ve seen all kinds, but yours is just sort of nothing, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘all sort of black and hurt looking, does it work? I can hardly even find it, see, I’m looking for it.’

She intended these remarks kindly – affectionately, as if he could ever have understood what that word meant. These words – her last – were only casually thrown off, like many a death warrant, and like every other death warrant, they worked. He remembered how the bulb her side of the bed at the cheap hotel – twenty-eight quid for two, cash, no questions – was too bright;
also, with detached affection, the way the back of her head had looked as her nose dived suddenly into the Schweppes ashtray on the night table as he cut her and she died. At the same time he dealt with that thick red crease across her stomach where her panties went which had always made him feel so ill; he also seriously rearranged the broadening line through the back parting of her hair which meant that May would have gone bald if she had lived long enough, which she really had no valid reason for doing. Even so, like a faded photograph of someone’s family that he had half known, the memory of her made him feel nostalgic from time to time – it was a shame, who on earth would have bothered to kill her, she must have been just a pickup in a pub. Well, anyway, she should have been glad to be spared all future indignity – only why should it be he who, as he thought of her, remembered wiping his knife off, putting it back in the black sports bag and leaving by a rusty fire escape?

Still, what could it matter? All these things were just some of those things, images from some second-rate film dug up from somewhere years ago that left you frankly cold – no starring roles.

Well, now the killer felt impelled to leave – not on safety grounds, but because he wanted to preserve the precious afterglow of his rich dinner and take its savoury memory back out into the cold with him – and yet that was the very minute when his vast banquet suddenly turned sour in him. It was just as he made up his mind to go that the great rich meal he had indulged in, its ponderous, heavy, bloody sauces, suddenly rose and boiled in his gut, bringing his stomach heaving up into his mouth. He managed to get to the jacks and spew up most of what he had just supped on and then, when he got back, he found that there was nothing left to gloat over but the revolting litter of an abandoned feast; all at once it was clearing-up time. The scent of the girl’s blood had lost its bouquet, its spicy, fresh fragrance, and all of her which, through fullness, he had not been able to enjoy of her, lay congealing on the floor, her blood now smelling sharp and acid,
like stale wine. Her sprawling limbs admitted only one image. They were what they could only be – joints of chilling, upset meat – and her bloodstained grin, the fixed, yet slack absence of her dark eyes were the worst of all sentences, the one that condemned a killer by looking past him. Yes, something had gone wrong this time. Now the place chilled him; it had acquired an intensity of its own. Since he was in no way equipped to face the appalling result of his butchery, raging, he blamed the room. While he was out of it, being sick, it must have found a subtle opportunity to plot against him, and that was why now the motionless air in there, the feeble electric light, had become thickened, slyly menacing him. That was also why the various smells in there, recalling cold food, gas and green peas all together, the sweetish stench of the old woman’s underwear, combined to bring the frightful scenario back into his throat again so that he instantly found more vomit on his tongue. He glanced into the mirror at which he had so lately smiled in triumph. He shouted: ‘I look pretty good!’ and flexed his muscles, but any third person would have registered nothing more there but a bent and hollow shadow, a seamed, yellow face and eyes that would have made even a trained nurse turn away in horror.

It was true he felt frustrated and cheated. All he had wanted to do was what he always did when he could – take the girl’s head off in one, bag it up and get straight back with it to College Hill. There he would have put it on the floor on a dinner plate facing him, just as he had done with the others, so that she could watch him while he punished himself. He would have kept her there as he went into training for as long as possible, but it was always the same in the end, of course – sooner or later it all started to go bad until in the end the lot had to be smashed up and junked, leaving an absence; it was like being thieved of an ornament, a memory, until there was a next time.