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His first knife wobbled like a paper aeroplane, and his second rose almost vertically, stabbing at the barbershop ceiling. “Fucking Ada,” Kate Root said, and slapped him. Smacked him right in the face with her open palm. He felt the sting distinctly, and heard a thwack of impact, though this seemed a long way away, it could have been in another room. “Get a grip,” Kate Root said, and he did his best to obey her, he opened his eyes wide to concentrate. But all they saw was her shape stretched upon the bed, and this man JoJo hovering over her.

It was a different angle this time, he was watching from above. A far better view, that gave him access to every detail. And right away he saw that his first sighting had been incorrect.
Kate Root’s face was not buried in the pillow, after all, she was turned halfway to the light, looking down the length of the bed. Watching the razor glinting in the kneeling man’s hand. Waiting on his move with an expression half nervous, half expectant.

In the shifting half-light her green eyes looked oceanic, and that gap between her front teeth seemed wide enough to snake a tongue through. Willie didn’t have to watch the man’s hands moving, he knew the moment that the razor flicked by the way Kate Root’s mouth went slack. Her eyes went cloudy then like underwater when a diver hits bottom. “Now try again. Now try again,” he was saying.

“Stand to me,” Willie said.

He didn’t mean to; it spoke itself. Spilled out of his mouth like a gaffed fish and lay there flopping while Kate Root gaped. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said.

“Just one knife.”

“You can’t hit a dead president with a dollar bill, and you want to throw at me live?”

“One blade is all.”

“Not on your life.” The face she turned towards him was flushed and lumpy, her lips were flecked white with spittle. “This is plain moronic,” she said. She brushed away the stray hairs that sweat had plastered to her cheeks, she wiped her wet mouth on the back of her hand. “This takes the biscuit,” she said.

It was only when she had walked the length of the room and taken up position that Willie recognized the target he’d been aiming at so far and, when he did, he was glad that he had not laboured to hit it. That would not have been dignified, that would have been a travesty.

But talk about travesties. Now that Kate Root’s hands were not fussing him, controlling his every move, and he was freestanding
again, he felt something wrong with his hair. Put up his knifeless hand and found the massacre.

Ruin.

The spinning light from the barber’s pole hit only one side of Kate Root’s face, while the other was deep in shadow. “The trajectory should be fast and flat, making sure that the plane of the knife remains vertical as it leaves the hand,” she said. The original target had been removed, and she now stood with her feet together and her arms held straight at her sides, her back pressed against the mattress that served as a backdrop. “The follow-through is the continuation of the throwing movement after the knife has been released and is spinning towards its goal,” she said, and she froze in position, fixed her eyes on Willie’s hand. “Don’t miss,” she said. “You really must try not to miss.”

The fresh blade he selected from the leather case felt cool and grateful to his touch, slid into his hand as like home. So Willie wasted no time. Raising the knife to eye-level, he sighted along it like a gun barrel. Its coat of oil gleamed and dappled in his sight, and he looked at Kate Root direct.

Her body in its green tweed skirt and starched blouse was shapeless, hopelessly baggy. Give it the benefit of the doubt and call it sturdy, still he could find no target there.

Or in her face either, it seemed. The one half that was clearly visible, moving in and out of the spiralling light, looked all humps and potholes and ruts. You wouldn’t drive a Spyder on a surface like that, never mind bury a blade. Straining for a clearer sighting, Willie squinted. He closed first one eye, then the other. Then he tried the opposite, and opened them as wide as they would go. He felt his eyebrows arch and stretch, his pupils flood with light. He felt a stinging like chlorine. But his sight was clear.

The face he saw then was quite close. In some place that didn’t concern him he was aware that Kate Root remained
across the room, fifteen foot away, but she seemed close enough to touch. To study and explore in peace, without even aiming.

The light spinning over her in waves lit up a different fragment at each turn. A broken vein at the temple, the wingtip of a nostril, two chickenpox pits. A jagged circle of discoloration, acorn-brown over pink, on the jaw’s curve beneath an ear. Freckles scattered at random, soiled confetti. A lower incisor with a steel filling. A bloodspot at the hairline.

The ear was finely made, it surprised him. He would not have imagined the shell to be so delicate and cleave so closely to the skull, or the lobe to let the light filter through like a rose. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, he wouldn’t have credited that.

Or the sweetness of the crescent line that skirted the corner of the mouth. It was a wrinkle, he guessed, but it looked like a sliver of moon. And the speck of matter that clung lopsided to her lower lip, caught in a vertical crack the same way that moss gets trapped in a crevice of rock. That would be grunge, some form of funk. It looked like spun glass.

And the shadow beneath the nose, faintly blue. And the socket of the eye, its hollow almost purple. And the gap in the front teeth, a black hole.

A man could drown here.

A man could fall in and never come up. He could travel his mortal span and not be done. Travel his life away, and still not arrive at the eye.

He should have been that man himself. If he’d had a lick of sense, he would have pitched his tent in some sheltered spot, the cleft of the chin maybe, or the soft fall beneath the mouth shaded by the overhang, and been satisfied. But not Willie D. No, not Willie. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, he had to keep on pushing and stirring. So he risked the eye, that green sea.

It didn’t look right. It looked bruised and raddled, it looked fearful. As if it had been something hideous. A vision too sick to be endured. An abomination.

But what was there to see? Only himself, and that made no sense. That could not be right, that was not possible. “Do it for God’s sake. Get it over with,” Kate Root cried, and Willie flung up his hand in self-defence.
I’ll kill him
, he thought, and threw the knife; he let it go.

I
f only he hadn’t worn rimless glasses, why did they have to be rimless? Not that a puce balloon wearing shades or tortoiseshells or even wire frames was a fashion statement or dressed for success exactly, but rimless was plain degenerate, the thought of them had poxed and plagued her all night, she couldn’t close her eyes to take a nap in this room with the gilt mirrors and Chinese slippers without reliving them in living colour, how noxious, when all she asked was a little decorum, a touch of class, and what did she get? A rimless fuck.

The only thing in Sheridan’s favour, he had concentrated her mind. Hangings did that to you, they put you on the spot, and ever since the Broadway Local the train rhythm in her mind had kept repeating
No more, no more, no more
, while the backbeat echoed
Now what, now what, now what?

She had not the faintest or foggiest notion. In a movie she would have gone home to her family and its soggy bosom, but family values had always made her think of discount stores, Ace is the Place for trashcans and school prayers, and besides, most of her relations were in Bonaventure Cemetery with Chief Wigwam, and the rest should have been. She couldn’t see herself handing out pamphlets for the Sun God with her brother Leon, or passing the tin cup for Cousin Driskill, and her sister Mignon had sworn to shoot her on sight, although that was honestly not Anna’s fault, just the nature of husbands,
you couldn’t tell the difference once you got them in the dark. Or broad daylight, come to that.

So that disposed of blood, and maybe Savannah wasn’t such a hot idea period, not after that little unpleasantness in Monterey Square with the drag queen and the gerbil, apart from anything else it would have smacked of defeat, hell no, she wouldn’t go.

But what then?
Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust
, and Anna was choking on the stuff. Couldn’t make the rent or eat three squares, could hardly keep herself in clean nooses as it was, and here she was planning to deep-six the only lifelines left to her. Blow out Verse-o-Gram and Sheherazade, and what was she meant to fly on, a wing and a prayer, or go in the bucket like Stevie Smith’s tigress Flo,
she fell, she whimpered, clawed in vain?
Well, it was a thought.

Make space in Bonaventure, always room for one more. But no. She did not have time for demise, not when Bani Badpa owed her a week’s wages plus benefits. Innocence might be caged, that didn’t make it half-witted, and besides, John Joe had bought her a brand-new veil, she hadn’t even worn it yet.

The sensible plan was to do a Sarah Bernhardt, make one last, but positively my last and final appearance, virgin veil and all, then exit pursued by a bear.

Well, sensible she was, if there was one thing she was, it was sensible, and she was never going to get her nap anyway, not if she counted all the sheep in Shepherd’s Bush. So she jumped out of bed, or propped herself on an elbow at least. And she would have got up at any moment she really would, the cheque was in the mail, only she was saved by a sudden hubbub on the stairs below, Kate Root shouting
Useless! Bloody useless!
in that blowsy barmaid’s singsong of hers like a tart with a heart in some old movie, more Australian it sounded than Texas or Louisiana or whatever dream state she claimed.
Call yourself a blade
, Ma Root yelled, and she sounded just roiling, Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t in it. Though she might be faking at that, she was a tricky number, you needed to keep an eye on the silver spoons. But then came a thud like doom or a split melon, a door slammed across the hall, and before its echo had faded a knuckle tapped code on Anna’s own door. “Sanctuary,” said Willie D.

Or what was left of him, anyway. Which wasn’t much, he would never have passed for a person. Shaking like an alky, with his shirt hanging out behind, the top of one shiny black boot pierced as if he had been stabbed by a passing dachshund, and his hair, his poor hair, instead of that glossy black mane just bare rock strewn with clumps and tussocks, he looked like an outcropping.

How could she refuse him? She couldn’t. What would be the point? After all it was Willie D she’d wanted sopranoed, not this train wreck with the cancelled eyes. “So come in if you’re coming,” she said.

Her room was a mess, and what else was new, with stuffed pandas and Burmese scarves and one Charles Jourdan in the sink, Tarot cards scattered over the rug and that tattletale bottle of crème de cacao all too empty on the bedside table, well at least it wasn’t Mother’s Ruin, that was one good thing, though Willie didn’t seem to notice or care, did not seem anything in fact but starved, driving her backwards across the floor to the bed, not touching her with his hands but angling her, nudging and encircling her like a sheepdog herding a stray, you couldn’t call it coercion, nothing so gross as assault, even if she could not get away, not a chance, you would hardly call it force.

To begin with she was defenceless, and afterwards she put up no defence. Some fool in the street threw a firecracker, she saw its flare loop and spin, heard the report like a car backfiring,
and a few lines from
Mad Tom’s Song
jumped out at her,
“The moon’s my constant mistress And the lovely owl my marrow The flaming drake and the night-crow make Me music to my sorrow,”
but Willie seemed not to hear her, he only kept her pushing back. “Sanctuary,” he said again.

Anna heard him distinctly. Or not distinctly exactly, his mouth was pressed against her collarbone and elocution was never his strong suit, still she heard him. Mumbling, not quite moaning, and what other word could it be,
sanguinary
made no sense when his voice cried for mercy, not blood, and his fingers scrabbled at her breasts like Pepe LePew going off a cliff.

Even blurred and mottled it was the loveliest word, she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t, and the force of it carried her in a dying fall, as if weightless, to the bed. Knowing well it was not correct, she shouldn’t go so easy, but she did anyway. And Willie came to her like a virgin. No, really. Like this was his first time and he was scared shitless, fumbling and thrusting blind, she had to help him enter, though she could have saved herself the bother, three strokes, a jerk, a strangled bleat like a sheep with its throat cut, and he never called her Mother.

Men and sex, how odd they were, how ill-matched, it never ceased to bewilder her. Like that restaurant in Augusta when she was travelling with Waycross Martin and the menu featured
bemused chicken
, she knew just how that chicken felt. Lying watching the firecrackers above the street while she stroked the rubble where Willie’s hair had been, softly scratching as if he was one more stray mutt and herself the last stop before the pound, and then he started to fuck her again, deep and slow this time, robotic, it was like nursing almost.

Maybe that was her true calling. Maybe when day was done she wasn’t intended for a wild child, not even a dirty dancer, but a starched angel of mercy in a white uniform with orthopaedic shoes, her heels flat as flat, and a thermometer in her
breast pocket like they had in Shalimar. Stranger truths had been recorded, look at Nostradamus. And she always had had a knack for healing. Waycross Martin when first they’d hooked up had seemed as good as corpsed, two ODs in the book already, his arms and legs and even the soles of his feet trackmarked like an outhouse with termites and diabetic to boot. Yet today twelve years on you couldn’t turn on the TV on Sunday mornings without hitting him all spruced and born-again, his hair trimmed solid as St. Augustine grass, singing
Dropkick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life
with that Barbie-doll blonde wife of his and their three kids, saints preserve us from saints, who ever would have thunk it?