The Killing Lessons (15 page)

There was no time in the basement. Time didn’t pass. Claudia was confined to an endlessly burgeoning present of the bare bulbs and the furnace’s exhalation. That was something, that there was warmth. She sat with her back to its radiant heat. Its comfort was a betrayal. It testified to her body, to her incarceration in her skin, to the reality of her flesh and blood and the impossibility of escaping the things that would happen to it. Care for her body wedded her to fear for its suffering. She’d read somewhere:
You don’t believe in the soul until you feel it struggling to escape the body
. She would have settled for that, to have her spirit or essence let loose. She’d go like a wisp across the Atlantic Ocean to her parents’ house in Bournemouth, spend her disembodied days moving around the solid lives of her family like a cat around its owners’ legs.

It had been, she supposed, hours. After they’d pulled down the security grille they’d left her and gone upstairs. At first, after she’d forced herself to stop crying (she could always, throughout her childhood, throughout her
life
, force herself to stop crying; it was one of the reasons, she’d assumed, she was unlikeable) there was only fear. Maximal fear. That every sound was the sound of them coming back. Her entire being devoted itself to listening. There was no room for anything else.

But she was human. After a while portions of consciousness were hived off for other business: seeing if she could lift the grille; searching her pockets for something to work the padlock (though her inner realist told her it was only in movies that locks were ever picked); scouring the cage for something – anything – of use, for defence, for escape. Not that the search turned anything up. She had a couple of quarters and a dime in her jeans pocket. Useless. Her cell phone and bag were gone. They must have taken them before they put her in the box. Her bag, anyway. She held on to the golden straw of possibility that she’d dropped her phone in the struggle and they’d missed it. Had a repeated vision of someone finding it, of Ryan calling, of the wretched dots of her disappearance beginning to join up. But even if she had dropped it (the realist again) who would be walking that stretch of road at this hour, whatever hour this was? She’d been there on a mild early evening and not seen a soul on foot. This was America: roads were for driving, not walking. Walking was Third World, unless you were doing it in the wilderness, with a backpack and a baseball cap, to burn carbs.

Only rape.

Just
rape.

It was obscene to be able to think that, to hope for that. It was also (there was nothing wrong with her brain, there was no stopping it) a measure of what there was beyond rape, in
addition
to rape. What there was when rape was merely the starting point. There was death, yes. But there was everything between rape and death. Between rape and death was torture. An indefinite landscape. A journey that could be made to seem endless. A journey – she had a confusion of unbearable images – so ugly and exhausting it could make you want death, crave death, beg for death. Which they wouldn’t give you. Not giving you death was the whole point of torture.

These were her thoughts. Her mind was her enemy.

She ran her fingertips around the grouting in the wall at her back. Crumbling mortar. A loose brick. The start of many loose bricks. A hole. Escape. Freedom.

But the mortar didn’t give. Her fingertips came away sore.

Floorboards then. Nails. A protruding rusty nail she could jab into the smaller one’s eye.

But there were no protruding nails, rusty or otherwise.

‘You’re lucky,’ Paulie said, appearing halfway down the basement stairs.

Claudia started. Involuntarily flattened her back against the wall, elbows tight to her ribs, fists clenched. Her own movements had distracted her, blocked out the sound of the door up there opening. Suddenly he was
there
– and all her powers of reason fell apart.

‘You’re so lucky. He’s sick.’

The space in the basement came alive, a bristling guarantee of his ability to move through it. To her. He was holding an iPad in his right hand. It made her imagine him in an Apple store, talking to a sales assistant. Stores. Malls. People. Life. Everything you’ll never see again.

He came down the remaining stairs.

‘It’s the flu,’ he said.

Claudia didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to look at him for fear of what else she’d see. The knife. The gun. Any of the innocent objects that would do what they did, what they were designed to do. To her.

Paulie was at the grille. She couldn’t press herself any harder against the wall. The furnace purred.

‘I did these,’ he said, touching the screen into life and beginning to finger-swipe through its files. ‘He forgets that. He doesn’t understand. How would he get these if it wasn’t for me?’

The screen lit his face. A fond smile had formed on his mouth. He might have been looking over photos of a favourite vacation. He stopped. The smile expanded into a grin. Small, nicotine-stained teeth. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I remember this one. This one was the best.’

He touched the screen.

Ugly sound bloomed. A woman’s half-strangled screams.

He turned the screen towards Claudia.

Claudia couldn’t move. The world drained away. There was nothing except her trying and failing not to look.

The footage was shaky. Of course it was. His compressed excitement. The naked dark-haired woman’s gagged face a wreck of tears and blood, her arms spread, ropes around her wrists. The men’s shadows over her bare flesh. Xander’s shoulder. His hands. The serrated knife. Their silence louder than her screams.

Claudia wasn’t aware of closing her eyes. Only of moments of blackness. When her entire being collapsed into nothingness.

But was forced back. Saw. Believed and disbelieved. Knew and refused the knowledge.

The screaming came tinnily from the iPad. Reached a crescendo.

Then silence. Xander on his knees over her, working something with dense concentration. Paulie’s voice off-camera saying, quietly, ‘That ain’t gonna fit, man.’

Xander sitting back on his heels, breathing through his nose.

The flesh of the woman’s midriff gone.

Something inside her, instead of her insides.

Something big, white, hard, shiny.

‘See that?’ Paulie asked Claudia. ‘See what that is? Can you make it out?’

He turned the screen back to himself, briefly, to double-check she was seeing what she needed to see.

‘It’s a goose!’ Paulie said, then laughed. ‘A goddamned… I mean where does he
get
this stuff?’

The camera pulled back.

Claudia recognised the room in the film.

It was the room she was in.

She found herself on her hands and knees. The world crowded back, put its whole weight on her.

‘I got all of them on here,’ Paulie said, finger-swiping again. ‘Here, take a look. Come on, look.’

Claudia remained where she was. She wanted to wrap her arms around her abdomen but she had no strength to move. Her mother and father and Alison and her utter aloneness and her whole life a beautiful mass of detail leading only to this. She wanted to die now, this instant go for ever into the blackness.
Go out, go out, quite go out
. She’d accept death if only it was immediate, if only it would spare her what would happen, what they’d do.

But the moments came and went – innocently, like children filing past – and here she still was, alive, and the facts of where she was and what had just happened and what
would
happen did not change. Could not change. The facts were innocent, too. If they tied you down and pushed the knife your body opened. The knife had no choice and your body had no choice. It was part of a universe of cause and effect. Morality was irrelevant.

‘And this one?’ Paulie continued, as if to himself. ‘Jesus. Wriggliest bitch I’ve ever seen. She was like a goddamned bag of
snakes
. Come on, you’re not looking.’

Shaking, Claudia crawled to the furnace. She put her back to its heat, drew up her knees, turned her face away from him, at last managed to wrap her arms around herself. It brought her childhood back, small traumas, the intimate warmth of tears on her cheeks, pity for herself.

‘Not playing, huh?’ Paulie said.

She didn’t answer. A remote part of herself wondered about the woman in the video. Who she’d been. Her life. Her family. The sadness and horror and disgust of what she’d been reduced to. In the churning sickness of her state Claudia imagined meeting her in a neutral afterlife, something like an infinite dull waiting room. They would know each other. What they’d shared.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Paulie said. ‘We got plenty of time.’ He chuckled to himself again. ‘We got all the time in the world.’

Xander hadn’t been ill for a long time. The odd cough or cold. That ingrown toenail that had gone septic, so it was like having a little volcano in his shoe. Diarrhoea from lousy takeout now and then. But nothing like this since he was Leon, at Mama Jean’s house.

He lay on the bed in the big damp room upstairs, shivering. His face ached. His head was warm. It was getting light outside.

The objects revolved and overlapped in his mind’s eye: balloon, goose, apple, hammer, clock, fork… jug. The goddamned jug. In Colorado Paulie had said to him: I’m gonna do one. Let me do one. And he, Xander – fucking
idiot
– had let him. Except of course when it had come to it Paulie
couldn’t
do it, chickenshit that he was. He couldn’t do it so Xander had to. Why in God’s name had Xander agreed to even let him try? What had he been thinking? It was no wonder he was sick. That could never happen again. You started letting things like that happen and the whole… You just… Things started drifting away from each other.

A wave of heat went over him, made him feel like the way the air buckled in the desert, that shimmer on the road. The jacket normally hanging over the wardrobe’s long mirror had fallen to the floor. His reflection, even though he wasn’t looking at it, was another ache. He’d never liked mirrors. A part of him didn’t believe it
was
a reflection. A part of him always thought the movements of the person in the mirror never quite matched his own. Like it was someone else who looked just like him, watching him from the world on the other side.

His mother had always covered mirrors up.

He was very small when she went away but he remembered her. He remembered her not being there. Long dreamlike stretches of time when he wandered around the two-room apartment in the hot afternoons. It smelled of drains and garbage. He was too small even to reach the light switches. Daylight leaked away. At night monsters had the run of the place and he’d shove himself into the cupboard under the sink until he heard her come back (with someone, different men, but always a man) by which time he would’ve pissed or shit himself and would know she was going to punish him for it. It was like a car crash in his head, seeing her when she came back, because she was glitterily beautiful. Her green eyes were like Christmas, her hair a fascinating gold tinselly mess. It was the beauty and the rage coming off her that crashed the cars in his head. It seemed impossible that they went together, but they did. If she and the man had already injected themselves he might get away with being locked in his room. If not, there was no telling. If not, even the monsters would draw back to watch.

The last clear memory he had of his mother was the day at the fairground. It had been a strange time when one man – Jimmy – had been around a lot. He barely spoke to Leon and Leon kept out of his way – but somehow the three of them were at a fairground and Leon was sensitised by the lights and the rides and the smells of cotton candy and hot dogs. It was evening, the sky beyond the neons dark silver blue with thin feathers of black cloud. Leon wanted to go on the carousel. Up and down horses with bulging eyes and saddles in thrilling colours. Some of their faces were frightening, but all the kids on them were laughing and waving and sometimes letting go of the reins and just gripping with their legs. It was a world to him, the horses and the riders. It seemed like an astonishing magic, that he could get up there and be one of them. If he got up there he
would
be one of them. They wouldn’t talk or anything, but they would look at each other and know that they were all riders together.

She said: You’re too small for that. I’ll have to go on with you. Jesus Christ – wait till it stops, will you?

She and Jimmy were drinking beer from plastic cups. She had her hair tied back and her face looked small and hard.

When it
stops
, for Christ’s sake. Get
off
me.

But when it stopped, she and Jimmy had moved away to a stall where Jimmy was firing a gun at playing cards pinned to a board.

Leon went through agony. The kids got off and other kids got on. There was one horse he wanted, white with a golden mane and a green saddle. In a minute someone else would get on it and the carousel would start again and again he wouldn’t be in the magical world. He went back to her and pulled at her hand. Not hard, but she was wobbly on her high heels and she lurched and nearly fell. She spilled some of her drink and bumped Jimmy and he missed his shot.

Leon didn’t fall when Jimmy hit him on the side of the head, but the blow felt huge and hot.

His mother was shaking beer from her fingertips, her bracelets clattering, saying Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking
Christ
.

Leon went back to the ride. It had started again. His horse didn’t have anyone on it. It was unbearable, his need to be on the white horse with the green saddle, to be in the world of the laughing riders.

He crawled under the guard rail. The speed and the rise and fall of the horses. But every time the white one came around its eyes invited him to grab hold and jump on.

Leon stepped closer. Two more steps. One more would take him up onto the carousel’s round wooden floor.

Someone’s voice shouted, Jesus, kid, hey – stop!

But Leon felt as if he were being moved forward by invisible hands. The sounds of the fairground dropped away. The white horse passed him again. Said:
Next time. Next time around.
Leon could feel the joy waiting.

He took another step. He could do this. He knew he could do this.

The girl was wearing white knee-socks and buckled leather sandals, and her outstretched leg hit Leon – harder than the blow from Jimmy – on the softly throbbing side of his head.

He didn’t remember much more after that. Just the fairground noises falling back onto him like an ocean wave and a few screams and the smell of the floor’s flaking paint and undersides of the horses’ hooves dropping down to within a couple of inches of his face, hundreds of them, it seemed, over and over, for hours or days – until someone’s hands grabbed his ankles and pulled him so that his shirt rode up and the boards scraped his bare back and he had a vivid image of a fat woman in a pink dress holding an ice cream, gawping at him from the guard rail, her mouth open, her face lit by the neons.

There were other, confused, memories after that, but glimpsed through a warm daze: the dirty vinyl smell of Jimmy’s car; road lights; his mother forcing him to eat potato chips; Mama Jean standing in her doorway smoking a cigarette, shaking her head.

It was at Mama Jean’s house that the lessons began.

Shuddering, he rolled to the edge of the bed and reached under it.

For the only possession he’d kept from his days at Mama Jean’s.