The Unblemished (20 page)

Sarah hurried away from Market Place towards the pub. She
glanced back at the car before the edge of the buildings cut off her
view of her daughter but the windscreen was a white bar of reflected
light. Through the window of the pub she could see couples sitting
together, sipping drinks, staring into the middle distance as if infected
by Claire's malaise. The closer you get, the longer you spend, the less
you share. She shivered as an image, unbidden, unfolded in her mind:
her daughter withdrawing so far that any animation on her part
would destroy her; opening her mouth to speak, her cheeks cracking
and crumbling like casts of sand.

She burst through the door. The barman looked up, dishcloth fist
inside a pint glass. The light in here, amber shot through with the acid
primaries from the fruit machine, swirled in his spectacles. Claggy
warmth enveloped her. She felt sweat blister her forehead.

'Do you fer?' he asked. She shook her head. Ray wasn't here.
People picked up their glasses and set them down. They eyed her,
happy for a diversion. An old man's teeth rattled in a slack mouth.
Nausea hatched like a clutch of snake eggs in her guts. She pushed her
way out of the pub and turned left, needing the space, the fresh slap
of wind off the beach. A minute to gather her thoughts, to clear her
head, then back to Claire and away. She'd have to write to Ray and
apologise. She couldn't stay any longer. Something was gravitating.
The pressure of it was like the coming of a summer storm. She was
wilting, smothering. She scrambled for the door, and heads turned as
the afternoon drinkers watched her go. Sarah didn't care. The keys to
the car were in her hand and she couldn't remember digging in her
pocket for them. The beach huts stretching off into the distance had
never looked so scabrous and uninviting. Now she saw that there was
some movement at the rear of the nearest; shadows lengthened and
crumpled against the rise of the dunes abutting them. Sarah gazed
back towards the car. The light had vanished; she could see Claire's
head resting against the window. Cold salt air stung her lips where
she had been chewing them. She dabbed a finger to her mouth: red.

She heard noises. Gasps. Grunting. Was somebody getting fucked
behind there? She moved to see, despite the itch in her feet to be
away. A figure was thrusting; pockets of wet air came from another
positioned beneath it. Nothing good, she thought, and moved nearer.
It was a weird feeling of exultation, exhilaration. Whatever was being
done to this poor bastard couldn't be being done to Claire.
Everything was pink and frilly in the world. Birds singing. Pour me a
glass of bubbly.

But not shadow, after all, on those dunes. Every thrust of the fist
from this hunched man brought a whoop of air and more blood
splashing on to the sand. She could see from the limpness of the body
that he was dead. Yet still the man stabbed and punched. How could
he keep gasping if he was dead? The other man breathed evenly, if
thickly. Then he moved enough for her to see how he was working
the chest, the ribs imploded beneath his fists, the lungs massaged into
animation by the blows even if their owner was long gone.

'Ray?' she said, although there could be no hope for an answer.
His killer, though, turned to look at her with bleak, blurred eyes. He
was focused only on the physicality of violence. His mind was miles
away. He tried smiling at her, his face like something from a plastic
surgeon's portfolio. His face seemed crumpled on one side, like a tin
can with a hard-angled dent to it. There was a gleam, like remembered
joy in his expression, the look of someone who has been transported
back through time to a happier place at the scent of some
evocative perfume. He turned further; the suck of his hands as they
came free of Ray's chest made her legs fold beneath her. She put out
her hand and then retracted it, afraid that he would reach out to
steady her. She went down awkwardly on her knee; her shoe came
off.

'Here,' he might have said, but his mouth was busy with something.
She could think only of glistening red gloves as she hurried away, her
shoe forgotten, only now registering how shockingly cold, how
painfully bright the afternoon was. She ran hard along the main road,
her teeth gritted against the way the world kept wanting to spin in a
direction that threatened to spill her into the display windows of any
number of shops. Sarah was crying by the time she reached the car.
Claire was staring at her as if she were a complete stranger. She
dropped her keys as she tried to unlock the door of the Alfa Romeo.
She dropped them again and had to scrabble on the ground to pick
them up.

'Come on!' she chastised herself. 'Come
on
!'

The door unlocked, the key stabbed in the fascia, Sarah checked in
the direction of the beach and then her daughter in the rear-view
mirror. Claire had the window down. Her face was upturned to the
stream of air, her eyes closed. Her hand was tucked under her armpit.
Her nails were worrying the fabric over the bump. Sarah turned on
the radio loud to combat that awful skrit-skrit noise of her nails. The
way he moved. The speed of the fucker.

Sarah backed the car out of its parking space with enough violence
to bring people from the shops and on to the street to watch. She
thought she saw Nick at the main entrance of the hotel, but before
she could register his expression or whether he was trying to say
something to her, she had turned and was roaring out of the village.

She didn't look at her daughter, or the rear-view mirror until she
was back on the A14, speeding towards Ipswich. She had no idea
where she might go. Away was good enough, for now. Her daughter's
hair jerked in the blast of cold air coming through the window. Her
eyes were still closed.

Claire said:
I want to suck his fingers.

Sarah saw her daughter's nostrils flare: she was smelling the air for
him.

They sleep when he is awake. They are awake when he sleeps. A
kind of sleeping. A kind of wakefulness.

They are like us and not like us. They have differences, difficult to
see, but they are there. A bifid uvula. A silverish tongue. A perfection
in the skin that abides no scars or blemishes. Their limbs regenerate.
They have no gag reflex. The tips of their teeth are reinforced with zinc.

They hate him. They love him.

They are connected to him to the point where they feel his sadness,
any pain that he sustains. They know of his lonely midnight erections,
the way he masturbates over mental images of Keiko, the spike of
orgasm. The tears and the yearning. They experience it all, but understand
none of it.

Tiny flecks of magnetite in the thoracic cavity enable them to
navigate: an organic compass.

They abhor and desire him. They fear him and dream of slitting his
throat while he sleeps.

They like to kiss mouths, but not out of affection. It's a way of
tasting what might become the next meal. They can secrete oil at will,
enabling them to squeeze into places ordinary human beings cannot
reach. They glow under ultraviolet light.

They have forgotten the art of murder.

Until –

Bo is dreaming. His eyes are open. It is raining hard outside. Inside
too, in places. He is watching the water streaming down the walls.
His dream occurs within the dry interstices.

He dreams he does not run from his hideaway on Bernard Street.
He defends it doughtily, standing firm in the bookshop as the figure
approaches, the scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face like
bizarre armour. The man unhooks his blue-tinted sunglasses and
places them in a pocket, patting it daintily as if about to sit down to
a good book, or a cream tea. The man suddenly lurches for Bo and
Bo sidesteps him easily, bringing his arm down hard on the back of
his head. The man drops to the floor and Bo kneels on the small of
his back, takes his chin between both hands and wrenches an awful,
grinding crunch out of him. He flips the dead man on to his back and
slides the scarf free. He sees a large, gaping mouth, the jaws unable
to close properly because of the shocking array of weapons aligning
the gums: broken glass, razor blades, nails, rusting bottle tops. Blood
wells in the throat and spills over the brim of his lips.

He is dead, and he is not dead. The unseeing eyes lock with Bo's
and are filled with amusement.
This is how you entertain yourself,
Messiah?
they ask.
This is your wish fulfilment? Your dreamworld?
We'll lock horns before long. And then we'll see who ends the game
smiling.

Bo rises, awake now, properly awake, and rubs his eyes, careful
not to close them while facing a part of the building or a view from
the window that might give his position away. He checks the
barricade at the door is sound and returns to his task, stripping pages
out of the old copy of
Razzle
he has found in the bottom drawer of a
chest, the only piece of furniture in the room. These he applies to the
panes of the two windows that look out over south Tottenham, piece
by piece blocking out the light, the view, the outside world. The paper
clings to the condensation on the glass, becoming translucent after a
while, showing odd, superimposed images of women spreading
themselves, or touching themselves. Like double negatives, like the
duplicate worlds Bo inhabits when asleep. Before blotting out the last
fragment of window, Bo chances a look outside. He keeps his eyes
peeled wide, fighting the urge to blink. St Ann's Road moves off in
two directions. He can see anybody approaching this derelict,
partially burned block of flats from the front or behind, where a hole
in the wall looks out on a grassy area filled with shopping trolleys,
polythene bags filled with rubbish, spent fast-food containers and the
carcass of a Vauxhall Chevette, home to two tramps who drink red
biddy and fuck on the dented, guano-spattered bonnet.

This is not a busy pedestrian thoroughfare, although cars speed
down it often. Across the road is an Indian restaurant and a grocer's
shop. He watches a man stand in the doorway of the shop while he
smokes a cigarette. In a window above the restaurant he can see
another man talking to a woman while they wash dishes. He can hear
the soft clash of cutlery as it is dropped into a drawer. He can smell
the cigarette smoke. He can hear the smoulder of the paper as the
man takes a drag. He can see the smoke thicken in the deflated
balloons of his lungs. He can hear the clunk of a petrol hose being fed
into a tank at the station fifty metres away to his right. At these supersensitive
moments, coming to him more and more now, he feels as
though he is some kind of conduit for all sensations, a living filter for
experience.

He sits in the centre of the room. The fire affected this flat only
tangentially: blistered paint on the door, sooty fingers reaching
halfway across the magnolia walls. The smell of charred things is still
in the air, though the fire has been dead a full six months. Bo had to
come out at 4 a.m. with Col, one of the staff writers, to photograph
it. He watched a woman leap from one of the windows further along
this floor and fudged the shot of her, capturing only the mad dance
of her long black hair in the corner of the frame. She was fine, bar
the odd cut and bruise. She sat on the kerb and watched her home
burn while a neighbour put blankets around her and gave her hot
sweet tea to drink. She had the look of someone who had missed a
bus, or found the bottle of milk she bought from the supermarket to
have soured. It troubled Bo that her hair was straight and calm. In
the moment of falling, she had seemed alive. Now she appeared to
have been switched off, as if she had realised that moment would be
the pinnacle of what it meant to experience life. He did not see her
again, and did not know where she went, but it felt good to be living
in the same building as she had. Now the memory of her hair seems
important for another reason, but he cannot jolt its significance from
the tired mess of his mind.

He turns his attention to the interior, listening to the voice of the
tower block. He doesn't think there are any other unofficial residents,
but he never takes his time coming up the stairs, just in case. He
doesn't want to see, or be seen.

Water is sluicing in and around the building as if trying to rinse
away something bad. The chatter of wind in the bone-dry litter of
rooms unopened for months. The patter of mice feet, and their echo
in tiny, industrious hearts. What could be the wind see-sawing
through the keyholes and cracks might also be breath in resting, still
bodies. He turns himself off from what is beginning to unsettle him.

Now it is safe to close his eyes. In the instant he does so, he feels
the answering flicker of thousands of eyelids, and a massed curiosity,
a drinking in of detail that is limited to a few square feet of dusty,
varnished pine, all he is allowing them. He feels the usual combination
of filthy invadedness and heart-stopping excitement. And he
sees their development.

He sees:

the woman carrying shopping bags from the Waitrose on
Marylebone High Street. She looks up at a passenger jet making chalk
marks in the winter blue. On Knox Street she is hit by icy blasts of
wind and dips her head closer to her scarf. Tiny silver cats hang in her
pierced ears. At Paddington Gardens she can hear children laughing
in the attractive playground, but before she can draw level to see,
shapes move out of nowhere: two men, suddenly there, as if they
peeled themselves from the colour of the brickwork. She's shocked to
indecision. She keeps her head down, her hands tight on her bags, and
marches on. At the entrance to the Gardens, one of the men slips up
behind her and grabs her wrist

LIKE THIS, MAP READER?

while the other sweeps a straight leg out and folds her over it

MAP READER, DO YOU APPROVE?

and they drag her into the shadows within earshot of those
squealing children, jabbing her with their stings until she is still, her
muscles seizing, her face warping with the pain and the toxins. They
pull open her coat and blouse and with a horned, scalpel-sharp
fingernail one of the men slits her open. They ransack her abdomen
with a haste born of violent hunger. She's trying to scream but all that
pours forth is a dense ruby froth. Steam from her unveiled body
obscures his view

for a moment and then

a father and his son on Parliament Hill beneath a broad sky the
colour of overripe apple flesh. They're kicking a ball back and to with
the kind of easy skill that comes from long hours of practice. It's
getting colder. All of the kite fliers have gone home. London sits in its
basin away to the south beneath a caul of amber pollution.

Dad's asking him if he's serious about Jenny and he's shy from the
questioning, he just wants to have a kick around. Two women walk
out from the goal posts but he can see in the dad's eyes, and the son's
eyes, that neither is certain that they were ever there on the other side
of that thin barrier of wood.

'I don't fancy yours much,' says Dad, smiling at his boy. The smile
masks his uncertainty. He doesn't like the way the women are staring
at them. There's something too naked, too raw and bestial about it.
They're dressed almost formally, their hair short and, he thinks,
bookish; there's nothing lascivious about them, apart from the eyes,
which he can tell from here are drinking them in, almost watering
with the strain.

'C'mon, Jamie,' says Dad. 'Time to get home.'

THE SOLAR PLEXUS, MAP READER, FOR THE SWIFTEST
PARALYSIS, YES?

They swoop after the man and boy and catch up with them before
they reach the path that will take them to the park's exit. The Swiss
Re tower catches a last ray of sunshine and turns it into a closing
bracket; a car farts and belches along Savernake Road.

'Evening, ladies,' Dad says, and gives them his most winning
smile. It's a smile that says, no trouble here. No trouble from me or
my boy. We're good. We're on your side.

One of the women hits the boy so hard in the face with the heel of
her hand that a rupture flashes red across the centre of his throat as
his head snaps back.

TOO HARD, MAP READER. I THINK HE'S DEAD. SORRY.

Dad's shocked, gargled 'Hey' of protest doesn't make it past his
lips. The other woman pulls him in close, bending him to his knees,
peels back her skirt and sends the stinger at her groin powering into
the hollow beneath his breastbone. He goes down like something
shot. His eye is on that black, glossy ovipositor even as it snuggles
back into its sheath, even as the breath catches in his frozen chest and
his lips darken. They leave the boy. Dead meat is no good.

They drag the man to a hollowed tree and warehouse him, sealing
him into the gap with mucus coaxed from their mouths. It looks, to him,
as reality fades, that they are blowing him kisses.

Bo sees that opaque resin too, rising before his eyes. A blink and

five youths dressed in black leap from a window in Poland Street.
They clatter into a drunk weaving along the pavement trying to strike
a light from the wrong end of a match. Moments later, one of the
boys spins away, laughing, raising a bright red lung in his glistening
fist. Mouth open, he squeezes oxygen-rich blood into his throat as if
he were playing in the bath with a waterlogged sponge

and

at a school in Hammersmith, a loner pupil called Joe with
alopaecia sits on his own in the corner of the canteen, picking at his
sandwiches. The new girl comes to sit next to him. When the bell goes
for the first double lesson of the afternoon, he doesn't get up. The
shutters come down hard on the serving area. The girl reaches out a
hand that he takes. She leads him to the gym. Inside, to the rear of
the games teacher's office, is a storeroom filled with punctured
footballs awaiting repair and old framed certificates telling of
forgotten athletic achievements. She has trouble trying to sting him in
the right place, and she cups his head in her hands so that she can
look closely into his eyes.

WHERE AM I GOING WRONG, MAP READER?

She gently pushes him down to the floor and squats above him.
With one hand she peels aside the gusset of her white underwear. She
looks at herself with a detached fascination as she squeezes her
buttocks together and makes the sting extrude, slowly, its tip weeping
clear venom. She flicks it with her finger and it jounces and sways,
making little involuntary thrusts at the air. She sees how its curve is
causing her to slide ineffectually against him and repositions herself
so that her hips are tilted at a higher angle than before. He lies
beneath her breathing rapidly, his cheeks ashen, his shirt slashed, his
chest and belly a red game of noughts and crosses. The breath
tumbles out of him like someone stepping into an uncomfortably hot
bath as she buries herself to the hilt into his groin.

She pulls open a false wall at the back of the storeroom and places
the boy alongside the games teacher, who is bound in thick white
ropes of hardened organic glue. His eyes move dolefully, his jaw is
broken, more of the glue holding the mandibles tightly in place so
that they can neither crush nor prematurely release the wad of eggs
crammed behind his teeth.

The girl closes the partition and returns to the playground. There
are fewer children, fewer teachers now. A police car is positioned by
the headmaster's office. She turns her face to the sky and watches for
the dark cloud.

Hundreds more incidents like that. Hundreds more requests for
advice, for endorsement. It's not just a map that he carries, it's a
blueprint for survival. He goes to the window and peels back a
corner of a page devoted to the pros and cons of having sex in
the workplace. He too looks for the dark cloud. The map has altered
to accommodate it. Plenty of dark clouds. None that prick his
interest.