The Sacrificial Man (27 page)

The immortality of sustaining her, of living within her body.

I want her to eat me.

She needs to practice. I’m thinking about how.

Cate stopped reading. She understood now, why David Jenkins had kept his illness a secret… she will follow me… he wanted to infect Alice. Because, if she had known he had CJD, she never would have agreed to eat him. What a twisted ploy… Christ, what a sick bastard. Could Alice have had no idea? Surely Smith must have looked ill? Surely she would have wanted to know why he had asked to be eaten?

She felt sick, and breathed deep to calm her stomach, listened carefully to the silence in her home, glad that Amelia was fast asleep, as if dreams could safeguard her from the perversions written in the diary. She longed for sleep herself, or at least not to think about what she was reading.

When she first read about Jenkins’ terminal illness she felt sorry for him, and began to understand why he had wanted to die, to choose his own end. But now, reading that he wanted to take Alice with him, she wondered how someone could consider such a thing. Cate didn’t believe in Evil. She’d worked with enough criminals to know that even the most heinous acts are rooted in dysfunction, be it abuse, bereavement or addiction of some kind. Evil however was a fixed, permanent state and easy rhetoric for those who didn’t want to acknowledge their shared responsibility in the crimes around them. Cate knew that David Jenkins wasn’t evil, but his rationale, his decision to infect Alice, was so calculating, so horribly detached, that it was a very close imitation.

The right place for this memory stick was with the police. But first she must finish reading. She had to finish what she’d started.

1st April

My brain is playing a joke on me.

I can feel my recall losing ground, struggling for a good grip, but there’s a dusty filing cabinet that’s left in the dark corner of my brain, undisturbed, so what happened in the past can be retrieved. It’s only new data that’s flimsy.

I’m obsessed with my own death.

I romanticise it, like the writers and artists Robin talks about. I’m also obsessed with other people’s endings. Untimely suffering, tragic coincidences are my fixation. Now, instead of seeing the world through insurance facts and variables, the risk of a car crash or divorce, I look for the improbable, the freakish deaths. I want to read about shipwrecked boats where sailors threw passengers overboard into the icy sea, an orgy of murderous self-protection, a death-cull that took hours. I’m surprised that such stories aren’t more common. I read about men forced to eat human flesh to survive, who are then driven mad with gluttony.

When I visit Robin I insist that we go to the sea, just over an hour from Lavenham. She doesn’t like the coast, but I don’t care. The sea is a grey-brown sludge. I watch for most of an hour. The boats make me think of travel, of being somewhere else. Of escaping myself and my destiny. I cast my fears into the North Sea, and tell myself that Robin is my ticket. She is also my destination.

Krish, us actuaries think in numbers. Well, here are a few for you: in 1970, when figures first started, there were 21 deaths from sporadic CJD. In 2002 there were 67. This year there are already 80 cases in the UK. Me being one of them. 10% of patients have symptoms usually associated with Alzheimer’s. In younger people the average age for onset is 28, but it can happen at any age. And my favourite fact: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has been prolific in a tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Statistics are a great comfort. It’s only human to want to belong in the majority. When it comes to misfortunes, we escape by being in the norm. How many passengers at airports, hands clammy and heartbeats rapid, tell themselves that they are more likely to be killed crossing the road than flying in an airplane? Exactly! We don’t want to be exceptional, or stand out, and we believe our ordinariness is a charm. When something happens, like 9/11, it shakes this belief and we suddenly see that those on the edge of the statistics, the unlucky minority, are just like us. Suddenly a world of terrible possibilities opens up and we’re afraid to use the tube, step on a city bus.

Did you know, Krish, that in America the chance of being killed by a terrorist bomb is 1 in 2,200,000? In short, you have more chance of winning the lottery, which is a comfort, because everyone knows they’ll never win the lottery, they could never be that lucky. So if that is more likely than being blown up, they must be safe. It’s logic of a sort.

But what about other deaths, other ways?

The chances of being hit by lightning are 1 in 600,000. The chances of being killed in a fire are 1 in 70,900. Still feel safe?

You and I both know that one of the first laws of an actuary’s work is that human beings have a distorted view of risk. They don’t see the whole picture. Our perceptions are twisted by stories in the media, by films, by our own personalities and experiences. So, despite the unlikely odds, we still worry about being raped or murdered. We hear a sound in the night and think of burglars, not mice. We’re programmed to imagine bad things happening to us, as opposed to good things, even if the good are more likely. It’s a kind of protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door.

Likewise, people who are blessed, who are lucky, worry that their good fortune will ‘run out’, as if there is just one quota of happiness and they are using their store up and are destined for imminent tragedy. We believe in fate. Insurance companies exploit this, and I’ve always hated those adverts for life insurance, the bereft wife with her child, thinking back to when her husband told her insurance was a waste of money. The message is clear: protect yourself with anxiety. If you don’t worry, it will happen to you. Don’t walk under a ladder, don’t let a black cat cross your path. Be lucky.

Even before my luck ran out, I didn’t feel safe. But my fears, fire and lightning and train crashes, were more likely. Despite all my neuroses and obsessive tics, I never thought a disease had already found a home in my brain, maybe a decade ago. It was something I’d vaguely heard about but, like everyone else, I thought it was something that happened to other people. I couldn’t even spell it. The chances of being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are 1 in 12,000,000. In disease terms, I’ve won the lottery several times over.

I thought about telling Robin. In many ways it’d make it easier. She’s never shown any signs of doubt about helping me die, but any niggling worries would soon go if she knew I had a terminal illness.

Terminal, like an airport or train station. A final destination. To terminate: to end, to cease. My illness is my final stop. I shall be getting out there.

But any thoughts I might have about telling her, disappear when I’m in her home. You should see it, Krish. It’s like a show home! It’s so clean, so white. The surfaces sparkle. Nothing in the fridge is dripping or stained, as if the cartons and wrappers have been wiped and cleaned, like a show fridge. ‘This food is for display only. Please don’t attempt to eat it’. How can I tell Robin that I carry disease? It’d be like bringing a sick rat into her clean home. She’d shrink back, she wouldn’t be able to touch me. I understand her cleanliness; it’s an obsessiveness I recognise. I can’t bear the idea that she’d refuse to kiss me. I could reassure her, tell her that CJD is almost impossible to catch. Kissing and sex are not the way it travels but she wouldn’t be reassured, not totally. The idea would be in her head.

I’m not a fool. My illness would clear Robin of blame for her part in my death. It’d give a reason for my suicide and remove any suggestion that my death wasn’t euthanasia. If they discover the CJD, that is, which is unlikely. Even during autopsy, CJD is a hard thing to determine. It requires the removal of the brain, a special process that they’re unlikely to do. My medical records are with my old doctor: finding them would take a great deal of tracking down, when I no longer live in that area. The only written knowledge of my illness is this diary.

It’s why I’ll send this to you, Krish. I need someone to know the whole truth, and to understand what I’m doing.

The only person I need to persuade right now is Robin. There’s a deal to be made, and I don’t think she’ll find the price is too high. The sums, the numbers all equal the result. I’ve balanced both sides of the equation, and she has her own reasons, no doubt, for agreeing to help me. All she needs is faith.

But first she must prove that she can do it.

2nd May

I’ll die next month. I’ve settled on June 16th. I chose the day specially. It was the day of my parent’s car crash. The day I started to believe in God.

I needed to book annual leave for the Friday because we’ve decided on midnight. Krish, thank you for agreeing to cover for me. I told you I was taking a trip to Brighton. A mini-break. All Mr Filet needs to do is sign my leave card. This is a detail, I know, but I don’t want anyone to notice I’m gone until it’s too late. If I simply didn’t turn up to work on Friday you’d call the bungalow, or get HR to do it, and when they found no answer someone might suggest alerting the police. Unreliability isn’t in my nature. It’s easier to plan my absence and when I don’t turn up on Monday morning it will be too late.

Robin and I have talked about it. We’ve agreed that she’ll call the police, but only when I’m dead. She’ll have to be patient and wait until there’s no chance of resuscitation. She’ll have my suicide note, ready to hand over. I hope they won’t interview her, take her to some scummy cell, but I guess there are procedures to follow. She’s told me not to worry, that she’ll be fine. She tells me to think only of the moment, the instant of my death. She tells me it’ll be amazing.

I wrote my suicide note at work today. I like to be prepared. I was just finishing it when you decided to go to the machine for coffee and came to my side of the desk, to put the paper cup in front of me. I was conscious of the notepaper, the pen in my hand. You probably didn’t even notice but I bundled the letter into the drawer. Then you did something that surprised me. You put a hand on my shoulder and asked if I was okay.

You’d never touched me before, and your hand was warm. You removed the hand but not your gaze and I saw that you really cared. It embarrassed me, and I told you I was fine, but you didn’t believe me, did you?

Then you did something for me, gave me the dealer’s phone number. I needed it, Krish – I need cannabis to steady me. I know you didn’t want to hand the number over, that you’re worried about it but eventually you agreed. Thanks for that.

Cate looked away from the words on the screen, and rubbed her eyes. So the suicide note was written a month before David actually died. He was certainly organised. Her head hurt and jelly-like shapes were floating across her vision.

The diary was a testimony to his depravity, and Cate now felt that Alice was the victim. The disease may even now be growing inside her, slowly taking root. She had a right to know what she had risked in eating David, what he had subjected her to. Alice had a right to know why he had asked her to eat him. But first Cate had someone else she needed to speak with, someone who might be able to help.

1993

She was lying on the floor, naked and very still. Just as she should be. But Alice watched Lee, and thought that it would never be quite right. Lee fidgeted too much and moaned she was cold. This wasn’t working for either girl. The feeling Alice chased was a ghost memory, quickly gone after one sweet taste. All she wanted was to experience it again, that feeling of love, but each time she tried it slipped further away. Was she forgetting? It was twelve years ago and she had only been four. Sometimes she had to screw her face up, really concentrate, to get the feeling back. If she forgot what her real mother looked like, the smell of that room, the taste of the sandwich, she would be lost. She knew that. Lee tried her best, but just didn’t get it. And she’d become shy with her body, her sixteenth year had brought puppy fat and breasts and she needed soft words and caresses when Alice would have prefered to be silent. Alice sighed; it would have to do. She dropped onto the floor, next to her friend, and slid a hand across her waist, thicker than it was, skin was no longer clear. She was spotty. Poor Lee, no wonder the other girls at school ignored her. Alice felt a wave of protectiveness for her friend who never seems to notice what others said, who lay naked just for her. Wearing only the fresh nail varnish that Alice had carefully painted onto her toenails.

Alice put her head to her friend’s soft chest, and listened to her heart which quickened as she tightened her grip around her waist, and Lee turned her head, wanting a kiss. Alice could feel her warm mouth on her hair and whispered, “Lie still!” Lee always ruined it by moving.