The Sacrificial Man (30 page)

I had something else in mind.

I was forced to be rough with him. I slapped him, once, across the face. He stopped laughing but his smile told me that he was enjoying it.

I lifted myself from his body, glancing at his erect penis. So vulnerable. “Robin, come back to me… ” I began to wish I’d thought of a gag.

I went to the bench, picked up a second rope, pausing to look at what remained, a veritable bag of tricks that made my breath catch in anticipation. I arrived at his feet, his ankles. When he felt the rope touch his foot he yelled, no longer laughing. I remembered Alex telling me how two drops of Gee made you the life and soul of the party but any more made you lethargic and affected the heart. Smith was becoming tense. He needed to calm down. Into his open mouth I dropped two more tears from the vial, telling him to be quiet. We didn’t want to disturb the neighbours. I pulled the rope tighter, and Smith’s legs were dead weights. The drug worked quickly, a miracle. It should be available on the National Health Service.

When the knot was tight I stood and admired the bound and blind man. With his arms above his head, ribs jutted sharp as knives and hipbones creating a cove for his abdomen, with the gentle line of brown hair from navel to pubis he looked like Jesus on the cross.

I knelt at his head, stroking his cheek. His breathing was shallow but even, like a relaxing cat and I knew that beneath the blindfold his eyes were closed. I leaned my head on his chest, listening to his speeded heart, the rise and fall of his life.

“My Lord,” I whispered, my eyes wet as I felt the truth of the words. “Just one more step now. Have faith. I have one more surprise.”

Just two things remained on the bench and I lifted the first, feeling the wooden handle in my palm. The thick blade caught a ray of early sun. It was a small knife, but it would do.

It was intricate work. Precision was important. I didn’t want to make a mess. It would be hard to explain.

I lifted the knife, pointing the sharp blade towards him. I touched the steel to his penis, now only half erect, and slid the blade under, to the soft testis where I pressed. The tip of the blade described a throbbing vein in his scrotum.

He took a sharp breath.

I removed the blade from Smith’s scrotum and slid it under the lip of the nail polish pot, loosening the dried rim, waiting for the release of red. Once loose I twisted the top off, revealing scarlet nail polish. Then, with the brush, I tested the red polish, painting a shiny drop on my fingernail. I went to where Smith was enjoying a peaceful daze, his bound body moving only slightly as he breathed, touched his flesh with my hand and stroked his body with the brush. I finger-painted shapes on his arms, his stomach, a moon and sun. I opened a second pot and painted the shapes I imagined on the cannibals as they danced under the lunar light, sated with human flesh. I paid special attention to his penis, drawing sun-like rays across his testicles.

“Do you remember,” I whispered, “the story you told me of the tribe in Papua New Guinea? This is our funeral rite, our Kuru.”

When my artwork was complete I adored the surrendered Jesus, marked with ancient ritual in red like blood. I knelt at his feet like Mary at the foot of the cross and worshiped him. By the time the nail polish was dry the sun was up. I untied Smith, as one would unswaddle a baby. I helped him into the house, and to the bedroom. He’d had only four drops of the drug but was disorientated, heavy. I laid him on the bed. Some still-wet nail polish made a bright smear on the white sheets, but I didn’t mind. The test had been a success.

An hour later I was seated on a wooden high-backed chair next to the bed, perched like a schoolgirl in a lesson, watching him. The colour had gone from his face, leaving white flesh taut over bones, shiny on his chin and cheeks. One arm was collapsed across the bed, the other close to his chest where he rested a sports-bottle of water. His head, propped by two pillows, was partly covered by a wet flannel, like a red flag across his brow. His eyes were closed.

Unbidden, the image returned. The memory I wanted to live in: I saw Mummy’s pale body, her cooling hand on her gentle stomach, the curling cheese sandwich on the plate. I remembered the softness of my lilac cardigan, how I placed it so carefully on her shoulder. I remembered kissing her, my head on her chest, my lips on her nipple like I was just a baby, and then her cold cheek. Smith’s drugged body released the memory of my mother. Two became one. I finally had that love, I was once again with Mummy and she was mine, just as she had been when I held her for those final hours. The outside world was forgotten, and her body was still warm. She didn’t belong to Mr Wilding then, or to the drugs. She belonged to me. I had that love again, thanks to Smith.

He was beautiful, like a marble figure in a crypt, the red marks telling stories, the smell of the polish taking me back. Like art, no longer flesh.

“I feel so tired,” he said, lifting his fingers slightly, dropping them to illustrate his lack of energy. He had no will to do anything but sleep. The drug had worked beautifully. My heart danced like a circus horse, knowing that we had created a perfect moment, a tableaux of love. Like all tableaux, all images, it had been beautiful to the eye. I worried about his scattered clothes, the jaunty angle of the chair. I itched to dust and polish, but forced myself to sit. I didn’t want to waste the moment, only to think afterwards that I squandered precious minutes because of my concern to set the scene. I didn’t want to miss the point.

“It’s like being drunk,” he slurred, “the room is spinning.” The window was open, and outside I heard a car passing, a woman calling to a child to mind the road. In my heart I held on to the feeling that Mummy was with me. I held on to love. “Tell me your real name,” he said, suddenly.

My racing heart lurched, missed a beat at the unexpected demand. “But we agreed. No details.” All the weekends that he had visited me I was careful to grab the post from the mat before he saw any envelope; I was meticulous in obliterating any signs of my name from my home.

“Please. I want to know.” He was weary, his voice quiet and slow.

“You do know. It’s Robin.”

“I don’t want to die without knowing your real name.”

How could I refuse? I would have done anything for him, anything at all, after what he had given me. “It’s Alice.”

“Alice,” he repeated, “in Wonderland,” and then he laughed, a straining wheeze that sounded painful and dissolved into a string of coughs, as he expelled the excessive air from his lungs.

“Can you help me to the toilet?”

I supported him as we slowly shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, his hands on my shoulders, and then helped lower him onto the toilet. Sick and pale, his naked body disgusted me. I thought of an old man at the nursing home where I worked as a teenager, who would sit on the edge of his bed every morning, saggy testicles hanging low as he ate his cereal. The degradation of age. Smith, even in his prime, had been brought to this same state by the imminence of death. It wasn’t the epic demise of a hero, he was no Hector, and this wasn’t the scene I wanted in my mind, especially as he opened his bowels with me still in the room. I made a hasty retreat, but he called me back, “Fetch a bucket! I’m going to be sick.”

I held the bucket under his head and, mercifully, he wasn’t sick, but the smell of faeces made me gag. I prayed he didn’t ask me to wipe him. I thought of Keats nursing his brother Tom, and steeled myself. I mustn’t be squeamish. I must remember the greater good we are achieving, and stop being pathetic about trivial details.

Once Smith was back in bed I felt easier. He closed his eyes and quietened, which was a relief. It was minutes, only minutes, before I realised that his breathing was shallow. I placed my head on his chest and listened for his heart. It was faint and slow. My own heart stepped up, over-compensating, and I shook his shoulders.

“Smith?” Oh God, I had given him too much. “Smith!” I slapped him, hard, around the face. His eyelids opened slightly and I saw the whites of his eyes, his head rolled away from me. I shook him violently, calling and shouting, knowing that it wasn’t right, not the way we planned it. He couldn’t die yet – June 16th was the agreed date.

He gasped, he gagged, and spewed his last meal all over my lap. “Alice?” he whimpered, an animal in pain.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that… I thought you’d gone.” I sounded furious, surprising myself.

“What if I change my mind?” He struggled to speak, and the sentence took an age to form. A tear slid down his cheek. “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to die.”

It still surprises me how I panicked when I thought Smith had overdosed. I’ve always been calm in the face of death. Both times I had witnessed it. Death didn’t scare me. My fear was growing old.

After Mummy died my second meeting with Death came when I was sixteen. I took my final GCSE exam on the last Friday in June, and walked out of the school gates knowing I’d never return to that school, not even for my exam results, which they would post on to me. In September I would start my A levels at the local sixth form college, but before then nine weeks stretched ahead of me, a blank sheet. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Time is only a luxury for a minority, those with funds and activities to keep themselves amused. I had neither and I was quickly despondent and agitated. I hung around the house mainly reading in my bedroom but occasionally disturbing Dad’s peace by demanding to watch the TV, or traipsing through Mum’s kitchen and raiding the cupboards, spilling fruit juice on the floor so she had to use even more bleach and kitchen scrub to keep the place immaculate. Although they wouldn’t ever say it, I was under their feet, disturbing the tentative balance of the house.

School holidays meant my father was also at home. The downside of him being a teacher was all that extra time for family life. All those weeks to kill. Eventually, annoyed by having to watch the Open University programmes I liked when speedway was on the other side, Dad asked, “Why don’t you get yourself a job?”

I looked at him, mouth agape. I didn’t think of myself as a worker. But Dad persisted, “It’ll do you good. When I was your age I was working a full day as a carpenter’s apprentice and then biking to technical college every evening to study. It wasn’t handed to me on a plate, y’know, my education. I had to work hard to get where I am.” He said it defiantly, knowing that his status as a woodwork teacher impressed no-one. “It’s about time you started earning your own money.”

This dig was a reference to my recent insistence that the pocket money they gave me each week was in no way enough. Just one lipstick and it was gone, no change for anything else. And what about going out?

Lee had left school for good, and was working as a lifeguard at the local swimming pools. It wasn’t well paid but considering she only had two GCSEs to her name (design & technology and physical education, both grade C) it would have to do. Anyway she loved the water, and when she swam she was no longer awkward or odd. No-one taunted her when she was at the pool, the kids stopped running when she blew her whistle and the mums were grateful for her presence. She liked to feel useful. She never admitted it but I knew she dreamed of saving somebody from drowning. Maybe it came from being the only girl in a large family of boys, that urge to protect, I don’t know. Lee was happy and didn’t mind smelling of chlorine or that her hair went frizzy from the humidity. She’d just cut it all off and it suited her. At the weekends she wanted to go to the cinema and Pizza Hut, but I couldn’t keep letting her foot my bill. Or rather, I could, but really I shouldn’t. She made me feel beholden to her as it was, with those puppyish glances and that pained expression. It was like having a lovesick boyfriend who didn’t get that he’d been dumped but who proved useful when you were at a loose end. Dad was right, I should get a job.

Working in a shop didn’t appeal to me. I just couldn’t bear to put on a phoney smile and sell to people I didn’t like, things they didn’t need. So I took a job in a nursing home for old people.

The nursing home was close, just a ten-minute walk away, and I got the night shift which suited me just fine. It was better pay and meant less work, as the old biddies were tucked up in bed, or should have been, although one woman, Beattie, who had dementia, often disturbed me, asking when it was time for the wedding. She was all beady eyes and saggy skin, and in her white nightdress she looked like a ghost, legs like sticks. She really got on my nerves but as long as I made sure she took her pills she slept heavily enough.