Until It's Over (28 page)

To Rafi
,
Martin
,
Tommy
,
Vadilson
,
Arthur
,
Tilly and Dougie

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-five

Astrid was the last obstacle. Once she was dead I’d be free. And it wouldn’t be so hard. There wasn’t much to it. The trick was learning that there was no trick.

Killing the first time was like losing my virginity. I had broken through. I had stepped into a new world of adulthood and I expected people to be able to see it in me, a new glow in the eyes, a sense of power. But they couldn’t and that was good too. It was like losing my virginity in other ways as well: a messy, almost farcical fumbling, a struggle on a sofa, a sort of embarrassment and disbelief. A stickiness. She was called Jenny. The first I had sex with, I mean; not the first I killed. She was fifteen, she was folded up against me, half dressed, her cheek stained. Suddenly she felt heavy. I remember wishing that she would just go away. Which she couldn’t, because it was at her parents’ house. And it was like that with the killing as well, because after it had happened, after the spasm, after the thrill and the intimacy, my main thought was: Is that it? Is that all? Is it as easy as that?

I looked at Jenny, lying against me, one breast exposed, nuzzling into me. It was the first time for her as well. Really, she was the one who had started it, squeezing my hand at a party, even giving me a Valentine, inviting me to the house when her mum was out. I saw now that she really cared, cared about what had happened, cared about me. Now she leaned over to me and kissed my cheek and I was really quite fascinated. This was going to be the story of her first time, maybe even of her first love, and I had felt nothing at all. While it was taking its course, I had felt we were like two actors playing a scene and playing it badly. And then I realized that Jenny didn’t know she was an actress. She thought it was real.

It’s like the cat we had when I was little. We only had a postage stamp of a garden, with the railway embankment behind it. But when he wasn’t asleep, he spent his whole life out there, staring into a bush. I never saw him catch anything but we’d find the evidence under the kitchen table. Small birds without heads, a mole, the bottom half of a rat. He was a pathetic pet cat fed from a tin, he had been bred for hundreds of years just to be a sort of fluffy toy, but somewhere, deep down, he still thought he was a lion prowling through the jungle.

Sometimes, when I was growing up, I wanted to shout at people: ‘You don’t think any of this is real, do you?’ I hardly ever did, though, hardly more than just once. I was eleven years old and in my first year of secondary school. Some of us were sitting at the back of the class during a boring maths lesson and a boy called Daniel Benton was sticking the sharp end of a compass into his arm. Paul Leigh said he could make himself bleed and he pushed the point into his forearm. We leaned over and saw a little red full stop on his white skin.

I laughed and Paul Leigh whispered furiously at me that I wouldn’t dare do that. Immediately I felt a sense of power. ‘Give me the compass, then,’ I said. ‘Give me it and I’ll show you.’

It was a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated show. Things quickly got hazy but I remember someone started to cry and a desk got knocked over and there was a bustle and I was dragged out of the room, leaving a red smear behind me.

When you do something like that, you don’t even get into trouble. It’s too big. It doesn’t fit into the system of punishments. After the nurse and the day in Casualty, I was summoned to see my form teacher and the headmaster at the same time. They talked to me in subdued, sympathetic voices. When I came out of the office, my mum was sitting on the bench, crying. I hugged her while looking over her shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t be spotted by anybody I knew.

In the end, I was sent to see a doctor. He wore a sweater and had a room with brightly coloured posters on the wall and toys on the floor. He got me to look at pictures and talk about them, and then he asked me about my life. I was only eleven but I think I saw quickly what the rules were. He wasn’t a real doctor – he didn’t want to help me or to make me better. He wanted to test me to see if I’d give myself away, to show that I wasn’t like the others. It was like the bit in science-fiction films where you have someone who might be an android or might be a human being and you’ve got to ask them questions to see if you can tell the difference. That’s what he was doing with me. In the pictures there were two people or three people, and he wanted me to talk about the relationship between them. It was obvious that I was meant to see them as nice and normal. So I said about the first one that it looked like a mother and a child and that maybe she had just collected him from school. He asked where I thought the father was and I said he was probably at work. I looked at the doctor and he smiled and nodded.

What is strange, when I look back, is that I clearly knew what not to say to the doctor. I told him that the stuff with the compass had been a mistake. I didn’t know what had come over me. That wasn’t a total lie. It
had
been a mistake. For once, I had let the mask slip. I had done something real. I had broken through the pretend game that everyone was playing and showed them blood and bone and they hadn’t liked what they saw.

The doctor asked me about my father. He’d probably read my school file. I could see that the point was to seem sad but not too sad, to miss my father but not miss him too much. I said it had been a long time ago. That seemed good enough. One of the photographs showed a small child with a cat. He asked me if I had a cat. Even at that age, I knew what he was trying to get me to say. He wanted to know if I was cruel to my cat. I wasn’t, but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have told him. I just told him the truth, which was that I once had a cat and that I used to look after him and feed him and sometimes he would come and sleep on my bed. Then he changed the subject and starting asking me about other things, like hobbies and whether I had friends. I could see his interest gradually fading. He was looking for something juicy and I had to make sure he didn’t find anything. I needed to be normal and boring.

I was always good at hiding, especially from my mum – though as time went on I could never be quite sure what she saw and what she didn’t. Sometimes I thought she was stupid: a big-boned, slow-moving woman with a large lap, thick hair coarse and pale like straw, a round face and a soft voice that had a kind of drawl to it because she came from Somerset. But there were other times when I’d look at her and see in those grey eyes an expression that gave me an itchy, uncomfortable feeling, as if, all of a sudden, my clothes were too tight.

She was called Mary. She had left school when she met my dad and she had me before she was twenty, so she must have been young, really, but I always thought of her as old. Old and boring. So it was a shock when I heard Jerry Barker telling a mate of his outside the newsagent that she was a bit of all right. I remember that like yesterday: a bit of all right. I tried to see her through Jerry’s eyes, but it was no good. She was on the big side, she never wore makeup or had her hair done nicely, and she wore these clothes that hid her, like a tent. From what people said, my dad hadn’t been much of a catch, but she couldn’t even keep him for long. It was just her and me, day after day and week after week, and the dreary years went by. She worked at the florist’s during the day and at night she did other people’s ironing. She cooked meals with her coat still on but sat down with me to eat and tried to ask me about my day. I always told her what she wanted to hear, and then I could turn on the TV and pretend she wasn’t there, looking at me with her pale eyes. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she’d ask, in that soft voice of hers. And I’d always say, ‘I’m not thinking about anything at all, Mum,’ though I was, of course – I was thinking she had a face like a fish; I was thinking I’d like her to shut the fuck up and leave me in peace. She had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I could hear it when I lay in bed. Cough-cough-cough from downstairs where she was ironing; cough-cough-cough upstairs, in the little room opposite my bigger one.

I tried. I really tried to be who she wanted me to be. Of course I always remembered her birthday but I remembered other things as well. Her wedding anniversary, plus the date he had gone. The anniversary of her dad’s death. I wrote them down, although I didn’t really need to. I have a good memory. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie in my bed and go over things in my mind to make sure I’ve got them clear. Other people’s birthdays, where they were born, their phone numbers, their favourite food and songs and TV programmes, silly things they’re scared of, stories they’d told me or I’d overheard. You never know when you’ll need things. You have to be ready, all the time.

When I went to see the doctor, I had already stolen quite a bit of money but he didn’t know that. Not just money. I couldn’t leave a shop without putting a bar of chocolate into my pocket or slipping a magazine under my jacket. It wasn’t because I needed stuff or felt entitled to it. I took far more than I could get away with at home, but it didn’t stop me. Sometimes I’d dump a T-shirt in a bin outside the shop. I never got caught. I don’t know why. It’s not as if I was clever or had worked out a brilliant system. Maybe people just don’t notice me. Whatever it was, the buzz faded. I preferred it with people. Even then, the people I’d taken money from didn’t realize they had been robbed. That was the trick – to take just the right amount, so that they didn’t understand that anything was missing. Sometimes they would look a bit confused as they went through their pockets and wallets. ‘Where does it all go?’ they might say. But it was just a few coins here, a note there.

I started with my mother. The first time I took a fiver from her bag. It was like a test, to see what would happen. Nothing did. So I edged up, bit by bit. Once, when I wanted to buy a pair of trainers, I took twenty and that evening when I showed them to her, I said I’d got them from a market stall for a tenner. I moved on to other people, but I was always very careful. It was hard work. Like being a spy.

You decide what you’re going to do and then you do it. It can be that simple. I had a list of things I had to do. One was to have sex with a girl before I was seventeen. I did that. One was to be good at football. I used to take my ball to the bit of land by the railway and kick it against a wall and practise keeping the ball up in the air. Hour after hour. I was never going to be one of the best, but I was in the school team, which was good enough. It meant I belonged. I was one of the team. I was cool. I had gelled hair and scars on my legs and girls liked me, or said they did. Everyone’s faking it. The difference between them and me is that they don’t realize it. I do. That puts me ahead. I’m more honest than other people. I know who I am and I know that I’m alone.

I always had friends and I even had a best friend, Jonathan Whiteley. I still keep in touch with him. He still lives in Sheffield. We phone each other up and text each other, and when we meet, we reminisce about the good old days. How we used to play tennis against the wall of his house. How we got drunk on cider when we were twelve. How we used to play up in maths. The time we went camping and he got chased by a ram; the time we went to the pop festival and lived on beer, crisps and marshmallows for three days; the time we set off the fire extinguisher on the school trip. But not the time I nicked his sister’s credit card. Or the time I lobbed a stone through his window late one night after an argument that I can’t even remember now. Or the time I took his favourite T-shirt, balled up in my school bag between my physics and my art, and never let on. I’ve still got it. It’s one of my favourites. It doesn’t smell of Jonathan any more. It smells of me.

I get headaches sometimes. I didn’t have the first until I was thirteen, and I didn’t know then what was wrong with me. Later, of course, I came to recognize the feeling and would know an attack was coming by the prickling of my skin, a tenderness in my body that made it hurt if anyone touched me. But with the first one, it started with a waiting feeling – not a headache, exactly, but knowing that a headache was creeping up on me. Then a sick throbbing above my left eye, as if something was being screwed into my temple. A clammy, shivery sensation that thickened into feeling sick. Lights flashing on and off. The pain got thicker and I had to lie on my bed with the curtains closed and press my arm over my eyes, but even so I could feel my eyeballs hammering in their sockets. In the end I got to sleep and when I woke the pain had melted away and I felt powerful, clean, more alert than ever before.

For about three years, I used to have headaches once or twice a month and I looked forward to them because of the way I felt afterwards, like I was glowing. Bit by bit, they got less common. Now it’s only about twice a year that I get the pain and welcome the surge of energy it flushes round my body. I like having the headaches. I’m good at pain. That’s one of my secrets. I carry it with me and nobody knows. People are blind; they’re blind because they don’t want to see. People are fools; they’re fools because they don’t want to know. I like to be reborn.