The Way Out (2 page)

The meat behind him on the griddle shrank and hissed.

The kebabs we served were lamb or chicken, sometimes beef. We didn't sell anything with pork in it. Donner meat, a complete mystery to me before this job, turned out to be minced lamb, threaded in fat rounds over a metal rod and shaped into a tower of packed meat, cooked by rotating it in front of an upright grill.

I looked at the knife.

The shop was empty. I looked at the door and wished for a customer, or for Ali to come back from his break but the door stayed closed. I walked towards Hamid. I'm no longer vegetarian but that doesn't make me keen to experiment with unidentified bits of animal. But on balance I reckoned it'd be more dangerous to refuse. I asked myself, how bad could it be?

Col snorts with laughter when I get to this point in the story. So far he's hardly been listening. It's 2am and he's stretched out flat on the sofa, watching something on cable that involves a lot of pink flesh and squealing. I try not to focus on it.

‘Worst case scenario?' he says.

I shrug. Typical Col to think it's up to him to supply the ending.

‘It's dog, or cat or something,' he says. ‘No, hang on, that's the Chinese, isn't it? What are that pair you work with?'

‘They're from Iran.'

Ali and Hamid are brothers, although you'd never guess it to look at them. Ali came over when he was a kid, went to school here, calls me
hen
and
pet
and laughs easily. Apart from his silky black hair and dark eyes, he's hardly exotic. Hamid was already middle-aged when he arrived a year or so ago. Since then a wiry white tuft has appeared at his hairline and the lines around his mouth have deepened. He describes himself as Persian, doesn't talk much but when he does, his English, though accented, is faultless.

‘Well then.'

‘Well what?'

‘You've no idea what he might be cooking up for you.'

‘I do know.'

Col acts like I haven't spoken, distracted by a more interesting thought of his own. ‘Oh! No.
Worst
case is it's human flesh.' He
grins and nods, leans forward and puts on a pantomime scary whisper. ‘He's killed someone and has the body stashed in the cellar and is using you to dispose of the evidence. Piece. By. Piece.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.' Col watches too much telly. He thinks everything's some kind of show.

‘It's not just anyone, either.' He stares at me and widens his eyes in a meaningful look. ‘It's his brother.'

I sigh. Why did I even bother trying to tell Col about this? Why do I bother trying to tell him anything? ‘Ali was on his break. He came back after.'

‘Oh right.' Col is deflated but that lasts about a second till he comes up with another theory. ‘Okay then. Even better. It's his wife.'

‘He's not married.'

Col grins at me like we're playing some kind of a game and I'm giving him clues to solve. Listening is not one of his strong points.

‘His mother!' He bounces on the sofa, sitting up now, pleased with himself. ‘Yeah. Like Omar Bates or something. Iranian Psycho.' He sniggers and swills a mouthful of beer from the bottle in his hand.

‘You're being childish.' Col isn't insulted, isn't listening anyway. I realise that being childish
is
one of his strong points, then wonder if it could really be described as such. I used to see it as playful and imaginative, liked his sense of fun. Now that feeling is being pushed out and something else is rushing in to fill up the empty space. I look at him, still in the same place I left him when I went to work, one hand down the front of his stained tracky bottoms, scratching his balls. I'm tired. My feet ache and I smell like kebabs. Maybe I'm hungry too. There's a half-eaten sausage roll on the table. I don't fancy it, although I've been eating meat again for some months, having slipped out of
vegetarianism like an inconvenient skin. One of many.

‘Oh god. No.' He slams the bottle down on the cluttered coffee table, wipes some foam from his lips. ‘I've got it! It's his own flesh. He's cut it out of his thigh or his chest or something and he's bleeding under his clothes the whole time he's talking to you. Yeah.' Col lies back down and sighs, pleased he's solved my story to everyone's satisfaction. It's like I'm not even in the room any more. I'm starting to wish I wasn't and am just getting up to leave when Col starts laughing and chokes on his beer, waving the bottle at the TV. Eventually he spits out, ‘It's the only way he can get his meat into your mouth!' before dissolving into helpless snorting giggles. I close my eyes, and the sound he's making merges with the muffled grunts from the television.

So weighing it all up, I took the piece of meat off the edge of the knife with my fingers.

‘Careful. Very sharp knife.'

It was about the size and shape of a strip of gum and that's what I focused on as I popped it into my mouth and chewed. It was rich and dense but not fibrous, like super-concentrated paté. It wasn't so bad. Just meat. I swallowed and tried a smile.

‘You going to tell me what it is now?'

‘Did you like it?' Hamid was staring at me, his eyes greedy, looking me up and down like he expected something to happen, some kind of transformation.

I shrug. ‘It was okay. What was it?'

‘Heart.'

Generally I try not to guess at what's going on behind Hamid's eyes but right then I'd say it was a type of triumph, mixed with disgust.

‘Really?' I ran my tongue over my teeth, picking up grains of ferric meaty residue.

‘Yes.' He poked the remaining pieces on the grill, scooped another up with the knife and offered it to me.

‘From what? What animal?'

He was looking at the meat, avoiding eye contact now. ‘Pig,' he said, spitting out the single syllable like it might contaminate his mouth if he let it linger.

‘No, thanks.' I try to keep my tone light, wondering all the same where Hamid got a pig's heart from. And why. ‘I'm not really hungry. Why don't you have it?'

‘I can't eat that.'

‘Why not?' I thought that as long as we concentrated on the reasons he wasn't eating it then maybe we could avoid discussing why he wanted me to.

‘If I eat this meat,' he hesitated, put the knife down. ‘If a man puts this meat into his body, the blood from it will mix with his own blood and when it travels to his heart it will transform his heart to the heart of a pig.'

‘What about a woman?'

He looked at me, his eyes glassy.

‘You said if a
man
puts this meat into
his
body. What happens to a woman?'

He shrugged, dismissive, like it hardly mattered in that case.

‘Where did you get it from?'

‘Kevin. The butcher. When I buy the shop meat from him, sometimes he gives me things he has spare. Today it was this. I can't eat it. But I thought, maybe you…,' he trailed off as if unsure himself what he thought, as if the urge to take and cook this thing for me, to have me consume it, was something beyond his conscious control.

At that moment a customer pushed through the door, making the bell ring. Hamid flicked the remaining blackened scraps of meat from the grill into a paper wrapper and dropped it into the bin.

The rest of the evening went by with a constant stream of customers. Ali came back from his break and the three of us worked steadily, the column of donner meat reducing as slice after slice was shaved off and deposited in dozens of pitta breads, topped with salad and chilli sauce. By the end of the night it was shaved down to the metal spit.

Tidying up in the cellar after closing time with Hamid, the small space felt claustrophobic. He asked when me and Col were getting married.

‘Not right now.'

‘But you plan to marry?'

I glanced over at him. He was standing gazing upwards, longingly through the hatch of the cellar, back into the bright light of the shop as if looking at sunshine from behind prison bars.

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Women here…' His face was sad and he looked at me with disappointment, his eyes asking how I could have let him down so badly.

‘People live together. It's normal,' I told him, bristling a little. ‘Gives them a chance to find out if they get on before having kids and all that. Even then, some couples never get married. It's no big deal.'

Hamid looked at me like I'd just told him the earth was flat. He reached one hand up towards the light. ‘In my country, a woman is like a flower.'

I concentrated on gathering up some onions that had spilled out of a torn sack. I cast around for something, maybe some tape, to repair the rip and realised Hamid was looking at me, expecting a response.

‘Oh?' The cellar walls contracted and I strained to hear the sound of Ali moving around upstairs, cleaning down the grills and mopping the floor.

‘Once she is plucked,' Hamid made a mid-air snatching
motion with his outstretched hand and stared into my eyes, ‘she dies.' He shrugged and turned away sorrowfully, started moving boxes around.

I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. Did he really believe I should just get on with it and die? My face grew hot. I felt my blood spewing through my veins, the pig blood working its way deeper in toward my centre, pushing fast in and out of my heart, the muscle swelling, coarsening, becoming an animal thing.

I undress and look at myself in the bedroom mirror. White flesh, raw on my bones. I drag an old t-shirt over my head and slide under the sheets. The sweaty soundtrack from the living room oozes through the crack in the door, punctuated by the tight pop of released air when Col opens another beer. The creak of the couch as he settles back down.

I can't sleep. The clock says 3.30am. I've been lying in bed for an hour, listening to the roar of blood in my ears. The blind pumping machinery of my heart, dense and dark, convulsing, the blood forced this way then that, under pressure from both sides.

I need to be moving. I throw off the sheets and pull my clothes back on, deciding to go for a walk. There's only an hour or so before dawn. In the living room, Col is sprawled with his mouth open, snoring. The TV is fuzzed with static, giving out a low whispering breath, like a never-ending exhalation.

Outside the sky is already lightening to the colour of a fading bruise, the air hanging cool and still, passive in the path of the coming day. I walk for maybe an hour through deserted streets, silent but for the drum of a thousand beating muscles behind stone walls, on and on, working while their owners sleep. I keep walking, my steps falling into rhythm with them, the world throbbing hypnotically under my feet.

There's an angry squeal of rubber on tarmac, followed by
the blast of a car horn and I realise I'm in the middle of the road. I raise my hands in apology to the driver. He's right up against his windscreen shouting, spit spraying from his mouth onto the glass. I back away, keeping an eye on him just in case he's thinking about getting out of his car. And that's when I make the same mistake again, jumping back onto the traffic island just in time. The truck stops right next to me, blocking my path and lets out a furious hiss like a red hot pan dropped into water.

The truck is huge with slatted sides. It smells of shit and something worse. The driver leans out of his window. ‘Wake up, doll. I nearly had you there!'

I mutter my apologies and he disappears back inside.

From the body of the truck comes the scrape of shuffling feet. Through a gap in the side I see movement in the dark and suddenly a snout is pressed to the gap, wet and trembling, desperately snuffling the free air. Asking: are we here? Is this the place? It's so close I could touch it, this breathing, questioning thing. The truck rumbles and shakes as the driver throws it back into gear. The snout disappears back into the gloom but in its place comes an eye the colour of blood, framed by white eyelashes and creased pink skin. The pig looks right at me. It sees me and it knows. It knows I don't have the answer either.

The truck moves away, huffing exhaust fumes into the early morning air.

I know the slaughterhouse is nearby. Before long that heart will be silenced. The taste of it rises to my mouth like betrayal. I walk in the opposite direction, cross the road and sink down onto the low wall outside a supermarket. Delivery vans trundle into the car park, past a trough of parched geraniums and round to the back doors. The weight in my chest grows heavier and I think of the pig, freed from the truck, skidding unsteadily down the ramp to the holding pens, blinded by the sudden light that lies between.

What Remains

Standing by the sink in his kitchen, Marvin ran his hand under the cold tap until his finger bones ached like the roots of bad teeth. Was this to be the next thing then? Reduced to making tepid cups of tea to save himself from injury at his own shaking hand. He dabbed it dry with a cloth and examined the damage. There was a red scald the shape of Africa on the back of his left hand and it was beginning to hurt.

He looked out at the other houses lit in a golden haze from the streetlights. In the small upstairs bedroom of the house opposite, the pacing silhouette of a woman with a baby circled in the muted yellow light, round and round, like a sleepy goldfish. He pushed the window open a crack and listened to the child's cries rising and falling; a tiny human siren protesting the night.

Some days Marvin passed the mother in the street, her hair unwashed, narrow shoulders hunched. She looked like the stroller was the only thing holding her up. He'd offered to help her with her groceries once but she'd looked at him as if he'd volunteered to tap dance naked, and hurried into her house. Perhaps she didn't speak English. Considering how rarely folks around here spoke to each other these days, for all he knew they could each be speaking their own private languages.

Marvin didn't sleep a whole lot anymore. The small hours often found him in the kitchen, making tea to take back to bed. He still lay on the left hand side. The right retained Kath's shape, and although she hadn't filled it for over a decade now, when he woke with the scent of her around his face, the taste of her on his
lips, he would reach into the empty space and find her gone all over again. After forty years together, what was left now but to miss her?